16 ms·

What Happens When a Suburb Begins to Die?

137 points by fern12 9y ago

ucaetano 9y ago
> Once part of the central city, the suburb gains a high-profile mayor in the public spotlight who is now responsible for what happens there. It becomes part of a city with diverse neighborhoods and housing types that will rise and fall on different cycles. And there are the assets of a big city downtown to draw on to help finance services. Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? There is no solution for these suburbs: they aren't economically sustainable, their income and household density is too small to support the vast infrastructure they require. The lower the density, the more miles of roads, pipes, wires are needed per capita, and more policing, fire services, etc. Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city. If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. You can’t just walk away from cities or towns because they no longer fit with our ideas for how cities and towns should be. Cities and towns already are. They need to function, well. Creative destruction is not an acceptable solution. This is the kind of view that gives idealism a bad name.
  - stevenleeg 9y ago
    > A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - ComputerGuru 9y ago
      I am a staunch opponent of racism (as if anyone would say otherwise) but I don't think that the answer is that simple. White flight is only part of it. The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. White flight was a reason why people wanted to take advantage of these new possibilities but was not the only reason. Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute, which was then portrayed as simply a part of the "suburbian experience" (see the car ads of the time and their romanticization of the commute). I don't think there is consensus that white flight gave birth to suburbs in the first place. Rather, white flight is often used to explain the birth of future and farther suburbs as whites (being by and large the original inhabitants of the first suburbs) fought to keep that status quo and moved to newer suburbs and set up HOAs and zoning laws specifically designed to prevent poorer (and, directly, "more colored") persons from moving into their newly minted neighborhoods.
      - dalbasal 9y ago
        Maybe as a non-americas I should stay out of this. But.. Not everything is best viewed through the lens of macro-politics and big concepts. Ucaetano is willing to “Let them fail and wipe them out” based on their balance sheets and (I assume) a distaste for whatever model was used to set them up in previous generations. stevenleeg wants to put the problem at the feet of discriminatory and racist policies from days past (and their modern consequences). This is a terrible (IMO) approach to politics. There is a practical problem at hand. The solution cannot be to not have created the problem in the first place. If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. The solutions needs to be practical ones. If the infrastructure is decrepit, renew the infrastructure. If the munincipal funding model that works for wealthy suburbs can’t work in poor suburbs, it can’t be the funding model for poor suburbs. Maybe there are some more grandiose ideas, like preventing the rich/poor suburb dichotomy from existing but those are unlikely to work unless the practical problems are first solved. I don’t understand this conversation at all.
  - m0llusk 9y ago
    Combinations are possible. It is easy to imagine that in an area with three bedroom communities one might commit to a bus, rail, boat, or air link to a metro area and grow its downtown while the other two fade.
  - forkandwait 9y ago
    > A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. Civilization has flourished in cities as long as there has been civilization. In the U.S. (uniquely), we ruined cities post WW2 by subsidizing highways and cars and low density suburban mortgages, due to said cultural fetish. Plus a whole lot of racism. In France, to my knowledge, there was never a time when the central city was considered lower class than the suburbs (ahem, Paris, ahem). And I think this is generally true.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      > Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. We're talking about the US, so those "memes" are relevant.
      - dalbasal 9y ago
        Well… it’s me he quoted and I’m Irish, not american. I wasn’t talking about the US only. Anyway, it’s not an american meme. In Dublin, there was a massive (and disastrous) effort to move the urban underclass from inner city tenements to what is now inner suburbs. Two generations before that, the upper middle class migrated from the inner city to (different) inner city suburbs. The idea that cities are decrepit and suburbs are the future is a recurring one. Charles Dickens’ soot covered cities (in england, so I guess anglo-american?) existed and the middle class moved to the suburbs, much like americans. The trend back into city centres today is wider than the US too.
        notfromhere 9y ago
        Middle and upper class wants to move away from industrial spaces. This is why migration patterns have changed from cities to cities based on manufacturing shifting from urban to suburban to rural
  - kijin 9y ago
    Ever been to rural parts of the West? Lots of abandoned towns all over the place, some swallowed up by trees, others preserved by dry desert climate. Many of them are barely 100 years old. Cities and towns might look like permanent fixtures of civilization if you place them on a scale of mere decades; but they come and go, grow and shrink, appear and disappear, and are eventually reclaimed by nature on a scale of centuries and millennia. They are man-made machines just like steam engines and web services, and should be treated as such. There's nothing sacred about them! The only question is how to care for the people who are affected when a machine they've been relying on goes down. Creative destruction is not a panacea, but it should be on the table as a legitimate option to be weighed against other options. This isn't idealism, it's being realistic. Speaking of being realistic, I suspect that there are many cases where relocating residents and shutting down the town in an orderly manner would be far less costly, more humane, and perhaps even environmentally better than maintaining the decaying infrastructure indefinitely and making yet another generation of an already disadvantaged population grow up in a place without hope.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    "A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish." Read: "Non-white people were living there." Seriously, don't try to whitewash what happened. White people fled the cities because non-white people were starting to live in those areas too.
- blfr 9y ago
  There is no solution for these suburbs: they aren't economically sustainable If the outer suburbs manage all the services you mention with an even lower density then of course the inner ring suburbs could do the same and should in fact do better. This is not an insurmountable obstacle. However, OP doesn't diagnose the failure and therefore has no answer other than having the cities throw money at these suburbs.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    The outer suburbs are full of richer people and are newer, which means they have more money and fewer financial obligations. New development is also often subsidized in various ways. But as poor people move into them (e.g. after explicitly discriminatory policies were outlawed), the rich whites keep moving further away (because they don’t want their tax dollars paying for services for poor brown people). In some cases like the St. Louis area the leapfrog game is pathological at this point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_County,_Missouri#Communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_County,_Missouri#Com... http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/ http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/...
    - blfr 9y ago
      Why do the rich keep moving farther away? Is the new Tesla so great they enjoy spending two hours in it every day? EDIT: I see your ninja edit but it's inconsistent. Either poor people are a drain on resources that the middle class wants to avoid or they're a great profit centre for the municipality.
      - ComputerGuru 9y ago
        It's not either or. Poorer people are essential to the operation of the city economy but simultaneously undesirable on an individual level. It's classic NIMBY. It's not about them being a drain on the _city_ resources, but undesirable beneficiaries of the wealthier denizens' "resource pool". I'm not arguing in favor of the OP's point or against yours: it's much less economics driven and much more socioeconomic status driven. People don't want to share their neighborhoods with those less well off than them because they want to feel metrically superior wherever possible ("I can afford to live here and they can't") and they don't want to "bring down property values" because there's someone that doesn't meet their vision of "minimum acceptable wealth" living withing a stone's throw of themselves.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with your premise or the economic/logical rationale behind it. But to nitpick: > If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it. They did, though. I mean, suburbs are rarely directly financed by larger cities and initially, inhabitants of suburbs are, on average and in the United States, wealthier than their counterparts in the city (and nearer suburbs). The problem is that a certain class of people is only willing to foot that bill provided certain discriminatory characteristics are present. When those characteristics (such as racial segregation by means of socioeconomic discrimination via HOAs and zoning laws) fail to accomplish their purpose (the top-earning percentiles of those "undesired" classes of persons gain enough to love in, decreasing the desirability of the suburbs in the eyes of the people that initially wanted it, driving its prices down, allowing more diverse population groups to move in, rinse and repeat), those inhabitants that could moved on to other, wealthier and more exclusive suburbs even farther out. The problem now is the suburbs in between, comprised of people "willing to pay" for the "status" of not living in the city but not able to afford it. You're essentially arguing to _increase_ segregation between the wealthiest and poorest striations of society, which would effectively redefine what it means to be middle class in America and possible wipe out the concept of lower middle class entirely.
  - specialist 9y ago
    "rarely directly financed" Suburbs, sprawl are subsidized by urban areas. By zip code, county, state, region.
    - AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
      Not typically. Unless you're claiming that by working in the city and commuting home to the suburbs, people are being subsidized by the city. But that would be silly.
      - specialist 9y ago
        In the USA, wealth transfer from urban areas to every where else is official policy. Not a claim. Merely a statement of fact.
- DickingAround 9y ago
  There is no such thing as progress without failure and abandoning things. People are just too afraid of letting go. Not everything grows forever without end. It's ok if the world decided a place wasn't really useful anymore. 'What about the people there?' you might say. They're not literally rooted to the spot. If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move. If we were all cavemen hunting the local game and it moved we wouldn't say "but the game was always here, it should stay here forever". It didn't stay there forever. It moved. If you want to catch some of that game, you move. That's emotionally difficult in a world where we all think we're post-economies. But we aren't and it's a simple concept; things that aren't working need to fail and be abandoned.
  - zerebubuth 9y ago
    > If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move. A possible problem might be that a failing area is likely to be undesirable and therefore have low property prices and concomitant taxes. Moving to a more desirable area might be unaffordable. Many people have a strong emotional connection to their home, and would find it difficult to sell it (perhaps at a considerably lower price than they think it is worth) and move somewhere smaller. Further, there may be people who are "post-economy" in the sense that they have retired. From their point of view, they've paid their dues and have no need to follow the jobs any more. They may have built up local social ties that they don't want to sever by moving. My point isn't that failing places need to be propped up indefinitely, but that there's a middle ground between "successful, valuable" things and "failing, worthless" things. And there are infrastructure projects (e.g: rural broadband) which can help retain jobs and communities in "failing" places relatively cheaply.
    - cvsh 9y ago
      >My point isn't that failing places need to be propped up indefinitely, but that there's a middle ground between "successful, valuable" things and "failing, worthless" things. True, but right now we are erring so far on the side of preserving the status quo that it's almost a moral axiom that the character of neighborhoods should be preserved forever and people should never be forced to move for financial reasons. The debates over gentrification are rife with this philosophy. Ultimately it does much more harm than good for all except a lucky grandfathered-in few.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  One solution is to upzone. Successful cities have trouble building housing affordable to lower earners when the land becomes too expensive for developers to target low to mid-range apartments. The increased capacity relieves the city of the burden of subsidizing housing on expensive land, and justifies greater infrastructure expenditures. Of course, you'll have some old timer NIMBY holdouts who will resist, but when the situation gets bad enough and losing their house to a ghost town is an imminent and the only alternative, many will probably change their tune.
- tomcam 9y ago
  > If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it. Excellent! Same with urban mass transit, then.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    That typically comes from taxes on low-occupancy vehicles, which works out because mass transit also does a little bit to offset the massive emissions toll of those vehicles, as well as all the associated congestion/parking/etc issues. I mean, we aren't putting the costs of hurricane relief efforts on people's car tabs yet, but give it a few years.
  - claudiulodro 9y ago
    They already do? Last I checked the bus wasn't free . . .
    - lotsofpulp 9y ago
      I haven't read of a public transit system where the fares covered the costs of building and operating it. I have read that MTA (NYC), BART(SF), Amtrak, NJTransit, and other US ones definitely are in the red year after year. It's probably super difficult to exactly quantify how much something costs, but I think it should be provable that public transit is cheaper per person than the maintaining the network of roads we have. Of course, it's also hard to quantify the worth of those roads when we have a natural disaster and public transit stops working...
      - Cerium 9y ago
        I agree it is difficult to quantify the costs, but I wanted to get an idea. A quick analysis shows that while a system like BART may operate at a loss of about one dollar per trip, that is not far off from the costs of operating our car and road network. Based on average fuel economy, and road expenses the state of California subsidies driving at a rate of about 6.2 cents per mile. I didn't find any hard sources, but a few references that the average commute may be about 12 miles. That would make the average subsidy for a commute to be about $0.75. - BART looses about a dollar per trip: (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/06/how-much-money-us-transit-systems-lose-per-trip-in-1-chart/395189/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/06/how-much-mone...) - California gas tax covers 22.7% of road costs: (https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pay-only-third-state-local-road-spending/ https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pay-only-...) - Average fuel economy is 23.6 miles / gallon in the USA: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/13/cars-in-the-u-s-are-more-fuel-efficient-than-ever-heres-how-it-happened/?utm_term=.11eedf94c1db https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/13/cars-...) - The gas tax is 48.6 cents per gallon. Math: - Total road expense per gallon of gas sold: 0.486/0.227 = $2.14 - Subsidy: 2.14-0.486 = $1.65 - Per mile $1.65/26.6 = $0.062
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bpyne 9y ago
  Perhaps the goal is to purchase the homes, which are too low-valued for the homeowner to get a fair price, and turn them over to commercial development - i.e. bulldoze them - for new office space, for example. Then the tax base goes up when businesses move in. Perhaps new high-rises as well so that they have higher-density habitation. Again, the tax base could go up. It's pure speculation on my part, but it's the only rational reason I can find.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    > bulldoze them - for new office space, for example Not even that, just wipe it out, disincorporate and let nature retake it, or hand it over to agriculture. That's what Detroit is doing.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  > Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? From a purely self-interested perspective, it would increase their control of what happens in distressed cities. They could rezone the suburbs and build transit there to increase supply in case the city does not have enough. They may be able to help enforce law and order in areas that were outside of their jurisdiction. They may have friends and family living in the distressed city. They may have some basic compassion for their fellow humans.
- brudgers 9y ago
  Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? Perhaps neighborliness. Perhaps a sense of community. Perhaps because neither city can move and arbitrary political borders are permeable to hard problems, i.e. if the roads in one city are impassible then people cannot get to the other. The other city owns the problems whether it acknowledges it or not.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    Perhaps, just as perhaps you would buy your bankrupt neighbor's home and let them live in it for free. Not happening.
- lazerpants 9y ago
  >There is no solution for these suburbs Despite how trite universal basic income is to bring up in threads these days, UBI could do a lot to help failing communities throughout the US. Much of the demand for housing in urban areas comes from people who may choose to live a less prosperous/expensive life elsewhere, if it were an option. This could change the dynamic of urban/suburban/rural life in the US. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable, but I think with UBI a lot of people would leave expensive CoL areas.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    Space unicorns with lasers would also do a lot to help failing communities throughout the US. Probably even more than UBI.
- closeparen 9y ago
  City governments are accountable to their residents, who almost never want to be gentrified and displaced by their suburban counterparts. If anything, they’re trying to do the opposite of what you propose. No city views the existence of its suburbs as a serious problem. Most cities are in crisis re: gentrification and affordability in the urban core, a problem that suburbs directly solve by providing substitutes for urban apartments.
  - jeffdavis 9y ago
    Why do we need to substitute an urban apartment for one further away (causing long commutes)? Is the city "full" or something?
    - MikeTheGreat 9y ago
      I can't speak for all cities, and clearly Detroit is different from New York, but at least here in Seattle the problem isn't the lack of space but the cost. Putting aside the reasons (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc, all being willing to pay well, people wanting to live in an urban area, etc etc) the ground truth is that developers can charge a ton of money for a residence in Seattle now. So they do. No one's building anything affordable because hey - why not get paid a ton more for doing basically the same work by developing a luxury apartment/condo/etc. So it's not that the city's full, it's that most people can't afford to live here anymore.
      - closeparen 9y ago
        The nature of the apartment determining its price is not a very good model. A luxury apartment goes for $1200 in Chicago or $3800 in San Francisco. This is not because the San Francisco apartment has better finishes, but because San Francisco has a tighter supply/demand balance. The suburbs contribute supply and absorb demand. If developers built similar quantities of “affordable” units, we would have just as much trouble getting them, but due to waiting lists/lotteries/bribes/whatever instead of rental prices. Given the sorry state of the apartments left after urban decay, “luxury” apartments are the only kind that won’t be a huge decrease in quality of life to middle class former homeowners.
- Danihan 9y ago
  This seems like such a strange comment, since generally it's the cities that are failing in the US while the suburbs do pretty well. Suburbs, by definition, are already medium density, by the way.
  - azemetre 9y ago
    I've never heard of a single suburb being an economic center, what would be examples of it in the US(?) because when I think of economic centers I think of NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, or Los Angeles. What do you also consider as failing?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      In many of those places you list, much of the economic activity--maybe most of it--is actually spread out over the suburbs associated with the city rather than being within the city limits. And this was certainly true prior to a lot of large businesses moving into places like San Francisco and Boston over the past 10-20 years. [ADD: And if you do go back a few decades, there were lots of examples of prosperous suburbs and cities which, if not failing, weren't in great shape.]
      - cannonedhamster 9y ago
        Boston that people talk about is really Boston and surrounding cities, much like New York City is made up of the 5 boroughs with Manhatten being New York County, Boston proper includes a few different cities inside of it like Mattapan, South Boston, Roxbury and the Greater Boston area includes Somerville and Cambridge. Many people outside of NYC would easily confuse Long Island as being part of NYC since it's part of the metro area. Ironically, part of the reason traffic in Boston is so poor is due to not wanting to destroy poorer areas when roads were being built.
        lakkal 9y ago
        Route 128, "America's Technology Highway", is at the edge of the Greater Boston area. It would certainly have qualified as an 'economic center' back in its prime (through the 1980s at least). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128#.22America.27s_Technology_Highway.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128#.22Ame...
- nunez 9y ago
  So if you let those suburbs fail and wipe out, then what happens to the people living within them?
  - jeffdavis 9y ago
    They move?
    - nunez 9y ago
      Right, so there are two reasons why suburbs would die in the first place: 1. Businesses evict themselves from it, usually due to: 2. People being unable to afford anything else. So what happens when you have hundreds of thousands of people who literally can't afford to move?
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    From my comment: > Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city.
- conductr 9y ago
  > Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? I thought this too while reading. Only thing I can think is due to proximity, the suburb is a risk to the city. If the plight continues, it will eventually leak into the city in the form of crime, etc.
theyregreat 9y ago
Two of the terrible things that increase: crime and grocery stores closing.
blfr 9y ago
By not merging, those black residents are cut off from the tax base being created by the technology and medical industry booms happening in the city of Pittsburgh next door. Black control in many of these suburbs has meant inheriting a community where previous generations of residents did the equivalent of running up 250,000 miles on the odometer, then handed over the keys to what's now used-up jalopy and walked away. That's not how real estate works. It's not a car. Usually, when a city experiences a boom, its suburbs benefit by housing workers from the booming industries. If people choose to extend their commute or pay higher prices for residences in the city just to avoid you, I'm guessing you gave them a very good reason to avoid you. Why did the original middle class residents leave?
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Why did original middle class residents leave? Because American suburbs are built unsustainably. Because maintaining or replacing infrastructure built 30 years ago and designed to last 25 years costs more (prohibitively so) than new greenfield development. Because they're moving into the city to shorten their commutes rather than further out to lengthen them.
  - blfr 9y ago
    Why does it cost prohibitively more to raze a house and build a new one? Or repave a road over building a new one? At least some infrastructure is reusable and you get residences closer to the city therefore much more valuable than outer suburbs which are doing better. You beat the city by offering a real backyard. There, sold. Some people will still live farther out and others will remain in the city but you should have no trouble finding younger families happy to live there. This is not the issue.
    - exelius 9y ago
      Sewer and water are the big tent poles there because you really can’t put it off for too long (see Flint, MI). Which usually requires tearing up roads.
    - 9y ago
averagewall 9y ago
It seems like the problems are from low density so I wonder if there's a way to set up an economic incentive for residents of suburbs to congregate in naturally growing/shrinking high density clusters so empty areas remain completely empty instead of sparsely populated and can have their services shut down. Perhaps property tax grows the fewer property tax-paying people are in a street/small area. Ulitimately making the one guy at the end of a deserted street pay for the sewer pipe and road going all the way up the street.
- akoncius 9y ago
  so in that case real estate prices in suburbs will drop to zero because nobody would want to have house with sky-high taxes for services and poor people will become poorer and be forced to move out of suburbs. And given that they already have little or no money, they would not have where to go, and they would need to purchase new apartments in city which will be expensive and they would need to take a loan for it, which most likely would not be granted because of a low income.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    They should be able to purchase/rent inexpensive apartments in the city. Because the apartments are higher density, they ought to be cheaper. It must be a result of inefficient and damaging market forces, poorly planned maintenance expenses, and selfish political manipulations that make it cheaper for one person to live at the end of a culdesac than to live in an apartment building. Think about it. Individual electric, sewer, water, roads, foundations, roofs, garages, exteriors, etc. on each house, with services and businesses like groceries, trash pickup, police/fire/ambulance, and transport spread over a broad area, should not be able to compete with a system in which these costs are shared and services are concentrated between many residents. Yes, there are downsides to apartment living. I personally own my house, and enjoy that. But it's absurd that I can buy 2300 square feet of house and 2 acres of land for $1200/mo in mortgage, taxes, bills and maintenance when a 2-bedroom apartment outside my small Midwestern city rents for $1100/mo. And I paid extra for a newer house, larger lot, and nicer neighborhoods - you can buy less desirable spots for $800/mo, less than renting in less desirable apartments (assuming you have decent credit and a small down payment)! I should be paying way more, or they should be paying way less, if we're going to have balanced costs on the local economy.
yardie 9y ago
If this inner ring suburb is dying then the city is also dying. Inner ring suburbs are usually one of the first to benefit as city workers, looking for a shorter commute, buy housing nearby. My city, Miami, dilapidated shacks are being snatched up for 300-500k, cash. And they are <20 minutes from the city core. That is what a ring suburb in a thriving city looks like. If they aren’t getting developers sniffing around driving up the tax base then merging with the city won’t fix it.
- notfromhere 9y ago
  Not necessarily. Chicago is experiencing a trend where the city center and north/west side are booming but the inner suburbs are slowly dying while the outer suburbs are booming.
  - yardie 9y ago
    I remain to be convinced. The last figures I could find was for 2015, 2010-2015 population grew 0.9% [0]. Not necessarily booming. [0] http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/chicago-population/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/chicago-populatio...
    - notfromhere 9y ago
      It's more of the poor are leaving and the middle/upper class is arriving.
euroclydon 9y ago
China could deal with this problem pretty easily. They don’t have that pesky strong property rights issue like the US does. They could just relocate everyone and bulldoze the suburb.
- justinph 9y ago
  Where exactly would the money come from to do that? Bulldozers don't drive and fuel themselves.
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    Without pesky property rights it is not that expensive. It's probably less money than the maintenance budget of the suburb's inefficient infrastructure.
  - baursak 9y ago
    Read the thread: https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton/status/906614466711883776 https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton/status/90661446671188377...
- tantalor 9y ago
  We forget history so easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bottom,_Detroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bottom,_Detroit Although it was home to one of the most prominent African-American business districts, the highways that were created through the Federal Highway Act of 1956 destroyed Hastings Street, home to many of the thriving businesses. Because of this Paradise Valley can not be found today. In the early 1960s, the City of Detroit demolished much of the Black Bottom district as part of an urban renewal project. It constructed major freeways through this area: the Chrysler Freeway (Interstate 75 and Interstate 375).
bryanlarsen 9y ago
In Canada, the provinces often force cities to amalgamate. Is this not possible in the US?
pjc50 9y ago
I thought British local government was a mess, but it seems US local government is much worse. One thing that jumps out as soon as you look at a map is that East Cleveland isn't a geographically distinct built-up-area. It's not really a city of its own, I suspect much of its employment comes from Cleveland proper. It seems to me that a lot of these urban sprawls should be merged into what the UK would call "unitary authorities", which could then better make area-wide planning decisions.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Yes, every time I hear calls from politicians to devolve more powers to regions in the UK I wonder what the outcome will be. It seems like an invitation for them to become fiscally irresponsible.
todorstoyanov 9y ago
Good relation with a blog post i read recently: https://econimica.blogspot.bg/2017/10/the-tale-of-two-americasurban-rise.html https://econimica.blogspot.bg/2017/10/the-tale-of-two-americ...
thearn4 9y ago
Annexation was a strategy used by Columbus OH some years ago to continue growth past the limits of its suburban sprawl (and officially past the size of Cleveland, making it defacto the largest city in Ohio). Cleveland has been talking about doing the same for some time now, but I don't think the state government has been very supportive. Cleveland proper isn't large in itself, but the metro area is about the size of Austin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic... A negotiation for merger between Cleveland and East Cleveland was shot down last year because of some pretty ridiculous demands by the EC leadership: http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/08/east_cleveland_wants_to_keep_r.html#incart_m-rpt-1 http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/08/east_clevel... Some discussion at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/comments/4zeubq/east_cleveland_has_conditions_for_cleveland_merger/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/comments/4zeubq/east_clev...
- ChrisBland 9y ago
  I'm glad someone pointed this out. There were many offers to get EC to join CLE proper, EC was negotiating like they had some form of power; for fans of Parks and Rec it reminds me of the Eagleton Pawnee merger scenes where the Eagleton people are shocked they must give up their precious amenities when they can't pay for them.
- teenagewangst 9y ago
  Very helpful context. While a lot of comments here have brought up points regarding the density of suburbs, I'm not sure they are familiar with East Cleveland or the sort of inner ring suburbs that exist in a less-sprawly city that includes street car suburbs like Shaker Heights and what I think is the densest city between Chicago and NYC in Lakewood.
- penguinUzer 9y ago
  As a resident of the Columbus Ohio area for many years the equivalent to East Cleveland would be Whitehall. Whitehall is an inner-belt suburb that has nothing but [now] dirt cheap housing with a high crime rate. Meanwhile a 20 minute drive to the north is one of the fastest growing areas in the country, Delaware County. All suburb with upper six figure homes, retail, medical, and a near zero crime rate. One can use Columbus as the perfect example of what happens when affluent people keep moving further away from the city core. Far flung suburbs are building like crazy, like Dublin and Westerville in Deleware County. Gahanna is getting swallowed by Columbus annexing, New Albany's aggressive annexing may save part of the city from going "ghetto" in 25-30 years. Reynoldsburg, Pickerington, and Pataskala all annexed to block Columbus from swallowing them whole too. Inner suburbia like Whitehall is not coming back. Highway infrastructue shuffles more traffic between suburbs around Columbus and many other citys rather than traffic into the city core. Poor people displaced from hip new downtown building are moving into these abandoned inner burbs and bringing all the crime with them.
gerbilly 9y ago
It's funny, we created communities that are too low density, and which contain almost no commercial or industrial development to support the tax base, and then we act surprised that they can't sustain themselves. These communities seem to me like unsustainable resorts built for the upper middle class of fifty years ago.
- dublinben 9y ago
  There's a reason why many of these places are called "bedroom communities" or "commuter towns." They exist solely to house the people working in nearest city, and provide a 'safe' place to raise their children. They have no other sustainable reason to exist.
  - wmccullough 9y ago
    What do you think a good alternative is? Cities are too dense to house all the people.
    - SirZimzim 9y ago
      The argument is generally that American cities are not dense enough. Build taller, build better public transport, the rest of the world has been doing this for a long time. Our best example is NYC which has done a poor job keeping up with modern developments. There is a fundamental national issue with how things are done in the US that will bite us in the ass as we get even less competitive over the years.
- peatmoss 9y ago
  This is my feeling as well. The marginal cost of expensive infrastructure such as sewer, water, transportation, etc. is intrinsically higher the further out you go. When you were building on greenfields during suburban expansion, you overlooked that because relatively affluent people were getting a bargain on the land and thus the development costs looked more reasonable. Now the deferred maintenance on those bits of infrastructure is catching up and they want the central cities—the places where the marginal cost of infrastructure is low—to subsidize repairs to the infrastructure that allows for low density sprawl. To be fair, the article is talking about relatively close-in suburbs. Things will look worse when the even more farflung exurbs start having a lot of deferred maintenance catch up to them.
mabbo 9y ago
One only needs to fly over Detroit to see what happens when suburbs die. At night, huge areas of houses with only 1 or 2 having lights on. In the day, you see giant areas where there are no people, houses are falling apart, and some areas where they've simply torn down the buildings and left the land empty. How many more cities will see this fate happen to their outer edges?
justinph 9y ago
It is almost as if the US has been promoting unsustainable development and poor land use for decades and it is starting to bite cities and states in the ass.
- lolsal 9y ago
  Do you really think the US was 'promoting unsustainable development and poor land use', or do you think maybe it was more the case that things may have changed in the last 50-100 years, and we may have gotten a little wiser? It's utterly silly to think that building suburbs in the 50s and 60s was malignant, purposeful behavior. Things change, our population has increased and our understanding about economics, technology and our resources has evolved.
Animats 9y ago
East Cleveland went down with the incandescent lightbulb. It's home to Nela Park, the first industrial park, built in 1901 by the National Electric Lamp Association and later acquired by General Electric. For most of a century, the East Cleveland Lamp Works source of incandescent light bulbs. There were R&D facilities; the compact fluorescent lamp was invented there, but not produced there. Now Nela Park is down to about 300 people and GE is looking at exiting the lighting business completely.
cannonedhamster 9y ago
I'm always genuinely surprised that we don't build down instead of building up, especially when it comes to cities. Sure there are drainage issues but the difference in heating and cooling needs would prove beneficial. The only real reason I can think of is the risk of collapse, which we already have with above ground buildings. This would provide more affordable housing to those in cities themselves. While it wouldn't solve the immediate issue it might mitigate some of the issues that cause the flight to suburbs in the first place.
- atomi 9y ago
  I got claustrophobic just reading this.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  I feel the same way sometimes, especially about parking garages (which IMO are an urban blight) but I believe the real reason is just cost. It's expensive to dig first, far cheaper to just build right there on the ground. Even if the long term HVAC savings would make it cost-effective, we already know humans are all about that quick buck, save money now and beggar thy future.
- CalRobert 9y ago
  Light, and you gotta move all that dirt, and the view out the window is less than inspiring.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    Though probably not what the OP had in mind, your rebuttal is moot if one considers what we (humans) do with deep pit mining. Essentially, we make a huge tapering hole in the ground, with each "tier" being part of the roadway for trucks and other mining equipment. Light isn't really an issue, except at the very bottom, but even it receives some light during the day. Moving the dirt isn't a problem either - I'm not sure where it goes, but the tailings end up somewhere (it isn't all consumed in the mining operation). As far as a view? Well - if such a construction was done for housing, the tiers could be rows and rows of buildings hugging the sides of the pit, potentially looking out and over at other buildings across a large expanse - like looking out over a valley (if you've never been to a deep pit mine, take a trip to one sometime - it's quite amazing). With trees, plants, etc - perhaps water features and maybe a lake at the bottom - I think (in theory) it could be quite lovely to look at and live in. It would be nice if the deep pit mines we already have dug could be repurposed, but the problem with many are the amount of contamination caused by the mining and other activities during the operation of the mine; I doubt it would or could ever be fit to live in. Some of these mines are backfilled with the tailings afterward, but not all.
rhapsodic 9y ago
These suburbs are "dying" because the majority of their population are low-skilled, low-educated people who have fewer and fewer opportunities to prosper in an economy that is becoming more and more automated and skills-oriented. The blight and decay is just a symptom of the actual problem, which is decreasing opportunity for these people. That's one of the reasons I oppose opening our borders to a flood of additional low-skilled, low-educated people. It hurts the ones who are already here. I'm sure this will attract a lot of downvotes, and I'm perfectly fine with that, but I'd appreciate it if the downvoters would also point out the flaws they perceive in my logic.

137 points by fern12 9y ago

> Once part of the central city, the suburb gains a high-profile mayor in the public spotlight who is now responsible for what happens there. It becomes part of a city with diverse neighborhoods and housing types that will rise and fall on different cycles. And there are the assets of a big city downtown to draw on to help finance services. Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? There is no solution for these suburbs: they aren't economically sustainable, their income and household density is too small to support the vast infrastructure they require. The lower the density, the more miles of roads, pipes, wires are needed per capita, and more policing, fire services, etc. Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city. If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it.

dalbasal 9y ago
A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. You can’t just walk away from cities or towns because they no longer fit with our ideas for how cities and towns should be. Cities and towns already are. They need to function, well. Creative destruction is not an acceptable solution. This is the kind of view that gives idealism a bad name.
- stevenleeg 9y ago
  > A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ComputerGuru 9y ago
    I am a staunch opponent of racism (as if anyone would say otherwise) but I don't think that the answer is that simple. White flight is only part of it. The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. White flight was a reason why people wanted to take advantage of these new possibilities but was not the only reason. Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute, which was then portrayed as simply a part of the "suburbian experience" (see the car ads of the time and their romanticization of the commute). I don't think there is consensus that white flight gave birth to suburbs in the first place. Rather, white flight is often used to explain the birth of future and farther suburbs as whites (being by and large the original inhabitants of the first suburbs) fought to keep that status quo and moved to newer suburbs and set up HOAs and zoning laws specifically designed to prevent poorer (and, directly, "more colored") persons from moving into their newly minted neighborhoods.
    - dalbasal 9y ago
      Maybe as a non-americas I should stay out of this. But.. Not everything is best viewed through the lens of macro-politics and big concepts. Ucaetano is willing to “Let them fail and wipe them out” based on their balance sheets and (I assume) a distaste for whatever model was used to set them up in previous generations. stevenleeg wants to put the problem at the feet of discriminatory and racist policies from days past (and their modern consequences). This is a terrible (IMO) approach to politics. There is a practical problem at hand. The solution cannot be to not have created the problem in the first place. If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. The solutions needs to be practical ones. If the infrastructure is decrepit, renew the infrastructure. If the munincipal funding model that works for wealthy suburbs can’t work in poor suburbs, it can’t be the funding model for poor suburbs. Maybe there are some more grandiose ideas, like preventing the rich/poor suburb dichotomy from existing but those are unlikely to work unless the practical problems are first solved. I don’t understand this conversation at all.
- m0llusk 9y ago
  Combinations are possible. It is easy to imagine that in an area with three bedroom communities one might commit to a bus, rail, boat, or air link to a metro area and grow its downtown while the other two fade.
- forkandwait 9y ago
  > A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. Civilization has flourished in cities as long as there has been civilization. In the U.S. (uniquely), we ruined cities post WW2 by subsidizing highways and cars and low density suburban mortgages, due to said cultural fetish. Plus a whole lot of racism. In France, to my knowledge, there was never a time when the central city was considered lower class than the suburbs (ahem, Paris, ahem). And I think this is generally true.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    > Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. We're talking about the US, so those "memes" are relevant.
    - dalbasal 9y ago
      Well… it’s me he quoted and I’m Irish, not american. I wasn’t talking about the US only. Anyway, it’s not an american meme. In Dublin, there was a massive (and disastrous) effort to move the urban underclass from inner city tenements to what is now inner suburbs. Two generations before that, the upper middle class migrated from the inner city to (different) inner city suburbs. The idea that cities are decrepit and suburbs are the future is a recurring one. Charles Dickens’ soot covered cities (in england, so I guess anglo-american?) existed and the middle class moved to the suburbs, much like americans. The trend back into city centres today is wider than the US too.
      - notfromhere 9y ago
        Middle and upper class wants to move away from industrial spaces. This is why migration patterns have changed from cities to cities based on manufacturing shifting from urban to suburban to rural
- kijin 9y ago
  Ever been to rural parts of the West? Lots of abandoned towns all over the place, some swallowed up by trees, others preserved by dry desert climate. Many of them are barely 100 years old. Cities and towns might look like permanent fixtures of civilization if you place them on a scale of mere decades; but they come and go, grow and shrink, appear and disappear, and are eventually reclaimed by nature on a scale of centuries and millennia. They are man-made machines just like steam engines and web services, and should be treated as such. There's nothing sacred about them! The only question is how to care for the people who are affected when a machine they've been relying on goes down. Creative destruction is not a panacea, but it should be on the table as a legitimate option to be weighed against other options. This isn't idealism, it's being realistic. Speaking of being realistic, I suspect that there are many cases where relocating residents and shutting down the town in an orderly manner would be far less costly, more humane, and perhaps even environmentally better than maintaining the decaying infrastructure indefinitely and making yet another generation of an already disadvantaged population grow up in a place without hope.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  "A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish." Read: "Non-white people were living there." Seriously, don't try to whitewash what happened. White people fled the cities because non-white people were starting to live in those areas too.
blfr 9y ago
There is no solution for these suburbs: they aren't economically sustainable If the outer suburbs manage all the services you mention with an even lower density then of course the inner ring suburbs could do the same and should in fact do better. This is not an insurmountable obstacle. However, OP doesn't diagnose the failure and therefore has no answer other than having the cities throw money at these suburbs.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  The outer suburbs are full of richer people and are newer, which means they have more money and fewer financial obligations. New development is also often subsidized in various ways. But as poor people move into them (e.g. after explicitly discriminatory policies were outlawed), the rich whites keep moving further away (because they don’t want their tax dollars paying for services for poor brown people). In some cases like the St. Louis area the leapfrog game is pathological at this point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_County,_Missouri#Communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_County,_Missouri#Com... http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/ http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/...
  - blfr 9y ago
    Why do the rich keep moving farther away? Is the new Tesla so great they enjoy spending two hours in it every day? EDIT: I see your ninja edit but it's inconsistent. Either poor people are a drain on resources that the middle class wants to avoid or they're a great profit centre for the municipality.
    - ComputerGuru 9y ago
      It's not either or. Poorer people are essential to the operation of the city economy but simultaneously undesirable on an individual level. It's classic NIMBY. It's not about them being a drain on the _city_ resources, but undesirable beneficiaries of the wealthier denizens' "resource pool". I'm not arguing in favor of the OP's point or against yours: it's much less economics driven and much more socioeconomic status driven. People don't want to share their neighborhoods with those less well off than them because they want to feel metrically superior wherever possible ("I can afford to live here and they can't") and they don't want to "bring down property values" because there's someone that doesn't meet their vision of "minimum acceptable wealth" living withing a stone's throw of themselves.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I'm not disagreeing with your premise or the economic/logical rationale behind it. But to nitpick: > If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it. They did, though. I mean, suburbs are rarely directly financed by larger cities and initially, inhabitants of suburbs are, on average and in the United States, wealthier than their counterparts in the city (and nearer suburbs). The problem is that a certain class of people is only willing to foot that bill provided certain discriminatory characteristics are present. When those characteristics (such as racial segregation by means of socioeconomic discrimination via HOAs and zoning laws) fail to accomplish their purpose (the top-earning percentiles of those "undesired" classes of persons gain enough to love in, decreasing the desirability of the suburbs in the eyes of the people that initially wanted it, driving its prices down, allowing more diverse population groups to move in, rinse and repeat), those inhabitants that could moved on to other, wealthier and more exclusive suburbs even farther out. The problem now is the suburbs in between, comprised of people "willing to pay" for the "status" of not living in the city but not able to afford it. You're essentially arguing to _increase_ segregation between the wealthiest and poorest striations of society, which would effectively redefine what it means to be middle class in America and possible wipe out the concept of lower middle class entirely.
- specialist 9y ago
  "rarely directly financed" Suburbs, sprawl are subsidized by urban areas. By zip code, county, state, region.
  - AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
    Not typically. Unless you're claiming that by working in the city and commuting home to the suburbs, people are being subsidized by the city. But that would be silly.
    - specialist 9y ago
      In the USA, wealth transfer from urban areas to every where else is official policy. Not a claim. Merely a statement of fact.
DickingAround 9y ago
There is no such thing as progress without failure and abandoning things. People are just too afraid of letting go. Not everything grows forever without end. It's ok if the world decided a place wasn't really useful anymore. 'What about the people there?' you might say. They're not literally rooted to the spot. If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move. If we were all cavemen hunting the local game and it moved we wouldn't say "but the game was always here, it should stay here forever". It didn't stay there forever. It moved. If you want to catch some of that game, you move. That's emotionally difficult in a world where we all think we're post-economies. But we aren't and it's a simple concept; things that aren't working need to fail and be abandoned.
- zerebubuth 9y ago
  > If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move. A possible problem might be that a failing area is likely to be undesirable and therefore have low property prices and concomitant taxes. Moving to a more desirable area might be unaffordable. Many people have a strong emotional connection to their home, and would find it difficult to sell it (perhaps at a considerably lower price than they think it is worth) and move somewhere smaller. Further, there may be people who are "post-economy" in the sense that they have retired. From their point of view, they've paid their dues and have no need to follow the jobs any more. They may have built up local social ties that they don't want to sever by moving. My point isn't that failing places need to be propped up indefinitely, but that there's a middle ground between "successful, valuable" things and "failing, worthless" things. And there are infrastructure projects (e.g: rural broadband) which can help retain jobs and communities in "failing" places relatively cheaply.
  - cvsh 9y ago
    >My point isn't that failing places need to be propped up indefinitely, but that there's a middle ground between "successful, valuable" things and "failing, worthless" things. True, but right now we are erring so far on the side of preserving the status quo that it's almost a moral axiom that the character of neighborhoods should be preserved forever and people should never be forced to move for financial reasons. The debates over gentrification are rife with this philosophy. Ultimately it does much more harm than good for all except a lucky grandfathered-in few.
lr4444lr 9y ago
One solution is to upzone. Successful cities have trouble building housing affordable to lower earners when the land becomes too expensive for developers to target low to mid-range apartments. The increased capacity relieves the city of the burden of subsidizing housing on expensive land, and justifies greater infrastructure expenditures. Of course, you'll have some old timer NIMBY holdouts who will resist, but when the situation gets bad enough and losing their house to a ghost town is an imminent and the only alternative, many will probably change their tune.
tomcam 9y ago
> If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it. Excellent! Same with urban mass transit, then.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  That typically comes from taxes on low-occupancy vehicles, which works out because mass transit also does a little bit to offset the massive emissions toll of those vehicles, as well as all the associated congestion/parking/etc issues. I mean, we aren't putting the costs of hurricane relief efforts on people's car tabs yet, but give it a few years.
- claudiulodro 9y ago
  They already do? Last I checked the bus wasn't free . . .
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    I haven't read of a public transit system where the fares covered the costs of building and operating it. I have read that MTA (NYC), BART(SF), Amtrak, NJTransit, and other US ones definitely are in the red year after year. It's probably super difficult to exactly quantify how much something costs, but I think it should be provable that public transit is cheaper per person than the maintaining the network of roads we have. Of course, it's also hard to quantify the worth of those roads when we have a natural disaster and public transit stops working...
    - Cerium 9y ago
      I agree it is difficult to quantify the costs, but I wanted to get an idea. A quick analysis shows that while a system like BART may operate at a loss of about one dollar per trip, that is not far off from the costs of operating our car and road network. Based on average fuel economy, and road expenses the state of California subsidies driving at a rate of about 6.2 cents per mile. I didn't find any hard sources, but a few references that the average commute may be about 12 miles. That would make the average subsidy for a commute to be about $0.75. - BART looses about a dollar per trip: (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/06/how-much-money-us-transit-systems-lose-per-trip-in-1-chart/395189/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/06/how-much-mone...) - California gas tax covers 22.7% of road costs: (https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pay-only-third-state-local-road-spending/ https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pay-only-...) - Average fuel economy is 23.6 miles / gallon in the USA: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/13/cars-in-the-u-s-are-more-fuel-efficient-than-ever-heres-how-it-happened/?utm_term=.11eedf94c1db https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/13/cars-...) - The gas tax is 48.6 cents per gallon. Math: - Total road expense per gallon of gas sold: 0.486/0.227 = $2.14 - Subsidy: 2.14-0.486 = $1.65 - Per mile $1.65/26.6 = $0.062
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bpyne 9y ago
Perhaps the goal is to purchase the homes, which are too low-valued for the homeowner to get a fair price, and turn them over to commercial development - i.e. bulldoze them - for new office space, for example. Then the tax base goes up when businesses move in. Perhaps new high-rises as well so that they have higher-density habitation. Again, the tax base could go up. It's pure speculation on my part, but it's the only rational reason I can find.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  > bulldoze them - for new office space, for example Not even that, just wipe it out, disincorporate and let nature retake it, or hand it over to agriculture. That's what Detroit is doing.
Eridrus 9y ago
> Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? From a purely self-interested perspective, it would increase their control of what happens in distressed cities. They could rezone the suburbs and build transit there to increase supply in case the city does not have enough. They may be able to help enforce law and order in areas that were outside of their jurisdiction. They may have friends and family living in the distressed city. They may have some basic compassion for their fellow humans.
brudgers 9y ago
Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? Perhaps neighborliness. Perhaps a sense of community. Perhaps because neither city can move and arbitrary political borders are permeable to hard problems, i.e. if the roads in one city are impassible then people cannot get to the other. The other city owns the problems whether it acknowledges it or not.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  Perhaps, just as perhaps you would buy your bankrupt neighbor's home and let them live in it for free. Not happening.
lazerpants 9y ago
>There is no solution for these suburbs Despite how trite universal basic income is to bring up in threads these days, UBI could do a lot to help failing communities throughout the US. Much of the demand for housing in urban areas comes from people who may choose to live a less prosperous/expensive life elsewhere, if it were an option. This could change the dynamic of urban/suburban/rural life in the US. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable, but I think with UBI a lot of people would leave expensive CoL areas.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  Space unicorns with lasers would also do a lot to help failing communities throughout the US. Probably even more than UBI.
closeparen 9y ago
City governments are accountable to their residents, who almost never want to be gentrified and displaced by their suburban counterparts. If anything, they’re trying to do the opposite of what you propose. No city views the existence of its suburbs as a serious problem. Most cities are in crisis re: gentrification and affordability in the urban core, a problem that suburbs directly solve by providing substitutes for urban apartments.
- jeffdavis 9y ago
  Why do we need to substitute an urban apartment for one further away (causing long commutes)? Is the city "full" or something?
  - MikeTheGreat 9y ago
    I can't speak for all cities, and clearly Detroit is different from New York, but at least here in Seattle the problem isn't the lack of space but the cost. Putting aside the reasons (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc, all being willing to pay well, people wanting to live in an urban area, etc etc) the ground truth is that developers can charge a ton of money for a residence in Seattle now. So they do. No one's building anything affordable because hey - why not get paid a ton more for doing basically the same work by developing a luxury apartment/condo/etc. So it's not that the city's full, it's that most people can't afford to live here anymore.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      The nature of the apartment determining its price is not a very good model. A luxury apartment goes for $1200 in Chicago or $3800 in San Francisco. This is not because the San Francisco apartment has better finishes, but because San Francisco has a tighter supply/demand balance. The suburbs contribute supply and absorb demand. If developers built similar quantities of “affordable” units, we would have just as much trouble getting them, but due to waiting lists/lotteries/bribes/whatever instead of rental prices. Given the sorry state of the apartments left after urban decay, “luxury” apartments are the only kind that won’t be a huge decrease in quality of life to middle class former homeowners.
Danihan 9y ago
This seems like such a strange comment, since generally it's the cities that are failing in the US while the suburbs do pretty well. Suburbs, by definition, are already medium density, by the way.
- azemetre 9y ago
  I've never heard of a single suburb being an economic center, what would be examples of it in the US(?) because when I think of economic centers I think of NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, or Los Angeles. What do you also consider as failing?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    In many of those places you list, much of the economic activity--maybe most of it--is actually spread out over the suburbs associated with the city rather than being within the city limits. And this was certainly true prior to a lot of large businesses moving into places like San Francisco and Boston over the past 10-20 years. [ADD: And if you do go back a few decades, there were lots of examples of prosperous suburbs and cities which, if not failing, weren't in great shape.]
    - cannonedhamster 9y ago
      Boston that people talk about is really Boston and surrounding cities, much like New York City is made up of the 5 boroughs with Manhatten being New York County, Boston proper includes a few different cities inside of it like Mattapan, South Boston, Roxbury and the Greater Boston area includes Somerville and Cambridge. Many people outside of NYC would easily confuse Long Island as being part of NYC since it's part of the metro area. Ironically, part of the reason traffic in Boston is so poor is due to not wanting to destroy poorer areas when roads were being built.
      - lakkal 9y ago
        Route 128, "America's Technology Highway", is at the edge of the Greater Boston area. It would certainly have qualified as an 'economic center' back in its prime (through the 1980s at least). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128#.22America.27s_Technology_Highway.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128#.22Ame...
nunez 9y ago
So if you let those suburbs fail and wipe out, then what happens to the people living within them?
- jeffdavis 9y ago
  They move?
  - nunez 9y ago
    Right, so there are two reasons why suburbs would die in the first place: 1. Businesses evict themselves from it, usually due to: 2. People being unable to afford anything else. So what happens when you have hundreds of thousands of people who literally can't afford to move?
- ucaetano 9y ago
  From my comment: > Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city.
conductr 9y ago
> Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb? I thought this too while reading. Only thing I can think is due to proximity, the suburb is a risk to the city. If the plight continues, it will eventually leak into the city in the form of crime, etc.

theyregreat 9y ago

Two of the terrible things that increase: crime and grocery stores closing.

blfr 9y ago

By not merging, those black residents are cut off from the tax base being created by the technology and medical industry booms happening in the city of Pittsburgh next door. Black control in many of these suburbs has meant inheriting a community where previous generations of residents did the equivalent of running up 250,000 miles on the odometer, then handed over the keys to what's now used-up jalopy and walked away. That's not how real estate works. It's not a car. Usually, when a city experiences a boom, its suburbs benefit by housing workers from the booming industries. If people choose to extend their commute or pay higher prices for residences in the city just to avoid you, I'm guessing you gave them a very good reason to avoid you. Why did the original middle class residents leave?

twobyfour 9y ago
Why did original middle class residents leave? Because American suburbs are built unsustainably. Because maintaining or replacing infrastructure built 30 years ago and designed to last 25 years costs more (prohibitively so) than new greenfield development. Because they're moving into the city to shorten their commutes rather than further out to lengthen them.
- blfr 9y ago
  Why does it cost prohibitively more to raze a house and build a new one? Or repave a road over building a new one? At least some infrastructure is reusable and you get residences closer to the city therefore much more valuable than outer suburbs which are doing better. You beat the city by offering a real backyard. There, sold. Some people will still live farther out and others will remain in the city but you should have no trouble finding younger families happy to live there. This is not the issue.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Sewer and water are the big tent poles there because you really can’t put it off for too long (see Flint, MI). Which usually requires tearing up roads.
  - 9y ago

averagewall 9y ago

It seems like the problems are from low density so I wonder if there's a way to set up an economic incentive for residents of suburbs to congregate in naturally growing/shrinking high density clusters so empty areas remain completely empty instead of sparsely populated and can have their services shut down. Perhaps property tax grows the fewer property tax-paying people are in a street/small area. Ulitimately making the one guy at the end of a deserted street pay for the sewer pipe and road going all the way up the street.

akoncius 9y ago
so in that case real estate prices in suburbs will drop to zero because nobody would want to have house with sky-high taxes for services and poor people will become poorer and be forced to move out of suburbs. And given that they already have little or no money, they would not have where to go, and they would need to purchase new apartments in city which will be expensive and they would need to take a loan for it, which most likely would not be granted because of a low income.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  They should be able to purchase/rent inexpensive apartments in the city. Because the apartments are higher density, they ought to be cheaper. It must be a result of inefficient and damaging market forces, poorly planned maintenance expenses, and selfish political manipulations that make it cheaper for one person to live at the end of a culdesac than to live in an apartment building. Think about it. Individual electric, sewer, water, roads, foundations, roofs, garages, exteriors, etc. on each house, with services and businesses like groceries, trash pickup, police/fire/ambulance, and transport spread over a broad area, should not be able to compete with a system in which these costs are shared and services are concentrated between many residents. Yes, there are downsides to apartment living. I personally own my house, and enjoy that. But it's absurd that I can buy 2300 square feet of house and 2 acres of land for $1200/mo in mortgage, taxes, bills and maintenance when a 2-bedroom apartment outside my small Midwestern city rents for $1100/mo. And I paid extra for a newer house, larger lot, and nicer neighborhoods - you can buy less desirable spots for $800/mo, less than renting in less desirable apartments (assuming you have decent credit and a small down payment)! I should be paying way more, or they should be paying way less, if we're going to have balanced costs on the local economy.

yardie 9y ago

If this inner ring suburb is dying then the city is also dying. Inner ring suburbs are usually one of the first to benefit as city workers, looking for a shorter commute, buy housing nearby. My city, Miami, dilapidated shacks are being snatched up for 300-500k, cash. And they are <20 minutes from the city core. That is what a ring suburb in a thriving city looks like. If they aren’t getting developers sniffing around driving up the tax base then merging with the city won’t fix it.

notfromhere 9y ago
Not necessarily. Chicago is experiencing a trend where the city center and north/west side are booming but the inner suburbs are slowly dying while the outer suburbs are booming.
- yardie 9y ago
  I remain to be convinced. The last figures I could find was for 2015, 2010-2015 population grew 0.9% [0]. Not necessarily booming. [0] http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/chicago-population/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/chicago-populatio...
  - notfromhere 9y ago
    It's more of the poor are leaving and the middle/upper class is arriving.

euroclydon 9y ago

China could deal with this problem pretty easily. They don’t have that pesky strong property rights issue like the US does. They could just relocate everyone and bulldoze the suburb.

justinph 9y ago
Where exactly would the money come from to do that? Bulldozers don't drive and fuel themselves.
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  Without pesky property rights it is not that expensive. It's probably less money than the maintenance budget of the suburb's inefficient infrastructure.
- baursak 9y ago
  Read the thread: https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton/status/906614466711883776 https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton/status/90661446671188377...
tantalor 9y ago
We forget history so easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bottom,_Detroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bottom,_Detroit Although it was home to one of the most prominent African-American business districts, the highways that were created through the Federal Highway Act of 1956 destroyed Hastings Street, home to many of the thriving businesses. Because of this Paradise Valley can not be found today. In the early 1960s, the City of Detroit demolished much of the Black Bottom district as part of an urban renewal project. It constructed major freeways through this area: the Chrysler Freeway (Interstate 75 and Interstate 375).

bryanlarsen 9y ago

In Canada, the provinces often force cities to amalgamate. Is this not possible in the US?

pjc50 9y ago

I thought British local government was a mess, but it seems US local government is much worse. One thing that jumps out as soon as you look at a map is that East Cleveland isn't a geographically distinct built-up-area. It's not really a city of its own, I suspect much of its employment comes from Cleveland proper. It seems to me that a lot of these urban sprawls should be merged into what the UK would call "unitary authorities", which could then better make area-wide planning decisions.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Yes, every time I hear calls from politicians to devolve more powers to regions in the UK I wonder what the outcome will be. It seems like an invitation for them to become fiscally irresponsible.

todorstoyanov 9y ago

Good relation with a blog post i read recently: https://econimica.blogspot.bg/2017/10/the-tale-of-two-americasurban-rise.html https://econimica.blogspot.bg/2017/10/the-tale-of-two-americ...

thearn4 9y ago

Annexation was a strategy used by Columbus OH some years ago to continue growth past the limits of its suburban sprawl (and officially past the size of Cleveland, making it defacto the largest city in Ohio). Cleveland has been talking about doing the same for some time now, but I don't think the state government has been very supportive. Cleveland proper isn't large in itself, but the metro area is about the size of Austin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic... A negotiation for merger between Cleveland and East Cleveland was shot down last year because of some pretty ridiculous demands by the EC leadership: http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/08/east_cleveland_wants_to_keep_r.html#incart_m-rpt-1 http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/08/east_clevel... Some discussion at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/comments/4zeubq/east_cleveland_has_conditions_for_cleveland_merger/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/comments/4zeubq/east_clev...

ChrisBland 9y ago
I'm glad someone pointed this out. There were many offers to get EC to join CLE proper, EC was negotiating like they had some form of power; for fans of Parks and Rec it reminds me of the Eagleton Pawnee merger scenes where the Eagleton people are shocked they must give up their precious amenities when they can't pay for them.
teenagewangst 9y ago
Very helpful context. While a lot of comments here have brought up points regarding the density of suburbs, I'm not sure they are familiar with East Cleveland or the sort of inner ring suburbs that exist in a less-sprawly city that includes street car suburbs like Shaker Heights and what I think is the densest city between Chicago and NYC in Lakewood.
penguinUzer 9y ago
As a resident of the Columbus Ohio area for many years the equivalent to East Cleveland would be Whitehall. Whitehall is an inner-belt suburb that has nothing but [now] dirt cheap housing with a high crime rate. Meanwhile a 20 minute drive to the north is one of the fastest growing areas in the country, Delaware County. All suburb with upper six figure homes, retail, medical, and a near zero crime rate. One can use Columbus as the perfect example of what happens when affluent people keep moving further away from the city core. Far flung suburbs are building like crazy, like Dublin and Westerville in Deleware County. Gahanna is getting swallowed by Columbus annexing, New Albany's aggressive annexing may save part of the city from going "ghetto" in 25-30 years. Reynoldsburg, Pickerington, and Pataskala all annexed to block Columbus from swallowing them whole too. Inner suburbia like Whitehall is not coming back. Highway infrastructue shuffles more traffic between suburbs around Columbus and many other citys rather than traffic into the city core. Poor people displaced from hip new downtown building are moving into these abandoned inner burbs and bringing all the crime with them.

gerbilly 9y ago

It's funny, we created communities that are too low density, and which contain almost no commercial or industrial development to support the tax base, and then we act surprised that they can't sustain themselves. These communities seem to me like unsustainable resorts built for the upper middle class of fifty years ago.

dublinben 9y ago
There's a reason why many of these places are called "bedroom communities" or "commuter towns." They exist solely to house the people working in nearest city, and provide a 'safe' place to raise their children. They have no other sustainable reason to exist.
- wmccullough 9y ago
  What do you think a good alternative is? Cities are too dense to house all the people.
  - SirZimzim 9y ago
    The argument is generally that American cities are not dense enough. Build taller, build better public transport, the rest of the world has been doing this for a long time. Our best example is NYC which has done a poor job keeping up with modern developments. There is a fundamental national issue with how things are done in the US that will bite us in the ass as we get even less competitive over the years.
peatmoss 9y ago
This is my feeling as well. The marginal cost of expensive infrastructure such as sewer, water, transportation, etc. is intrinsically higher the further out you go. When you were building on greenfields during suburban expansion, you overlooked that because relatively affluent people were getting a bargain on the land and thus the development costs looked more reasonable. Now the deferred maintenance on those bits of infrastructure is catching up and they want the central cities—the places where the marginal cost of infrastructure is low—to subsidize repairs to the infrastructure that allows for low density sprawl. To be fair, the article is talking about relatively close-in suburbs. Things will look worse when the even more farflung exurbs start having a lot of deferred maintenance catch up to them.

mabbo 9y ago

One only needs to fly over Detroit to see what happens when suburbs die. At night, huge areas of houses with only 1 or 2 having lights on. In the day, you see giant areas where there are no people, houses are falling apart, and some areas where they've simply torn down the buildings and left the land empty. How many more cities will see this fate happen to their outer edges?

justinph 9y ago

It is almost as if the US has been promoting unsustainable development and poor land use for decades and it is starting to bite cities and states in the ass.

lolsal 9y ago
Do you really think the US was 'promoting unsustainable development and poor land use', or do you think maybe it was more the case that things may have changed in the last 50-100 years, and we may have gotten a little wiser? It's utterly silly to think that building suburbs in the 50s and 60s was malignant, purposeful behavior. Things change, our population has increased and our understanding about economics, technology and our resources has evolved.

Animats 9y ago

East Cleveland went down with the incandescent lightbulb. It's home to Nela Park, the first industrial park, built in 1901 by the National Electric Lamp Association and later acquired by General Electric. For most of a century, the East Cleveland Lamp Works source of incandescent light bulbs. There were R&D facilities; the compact fluorescent lamp was invented there, but not produced there. Now Nela Park is down to about 300 people and GE is looking at exiting the lighting business completely.

cannonedhamster 9y ago

I'm always genuinely surprised that we don't build down instead of building up, especially when it comes to cities. Sure there are drainage issues but the difference in heating and cooling needs would prove beneficial. The only real reason I can think of is the risk of collapse, which we already have with above ground buildings. This would provide more affordable housing to those in cities themselves. While it wouldn't solve the immediate issue it might mitigate some of the issues that cause the flight to suburbs in the first place.

atomi 9y ago
I got claustrophobic just reading this.
sliverstorm 9y ago
I feel the same way sometimes, especially about parking garages (which IMO are an urban blight) but I believe the real reason is just cost. It's expensive to dig first, far cheaper to just build right there on the ground. Even if the long term HVAC savings would make it cost-effective, we already know humans are all about that quick buck, save money now and beggar thy future.
CalRobert 9y ago
Light, and you gotta move all that dirt, and the view out the window is less than inspiring.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  Though probably not what the OP had in mind, your rebuttal is moot if one considers what we (humans) do with deep pit mining. Essentially, we make a huge tapering hole in the ground, with each "tier" being part of the roadway for trucks and other mining equipment. Light isn't really an issue, except at the very bottom, but even it receives some light during the day. Moving the dirt isn't a problem either - I'm not sure where it goes, but the tailings end up somewhere (it isn't all consumed in the mining operation). As far as a view? Well - if such a construction was done for housing, the tiers could be rows and rows of buildings hugging the sides of the pit, potentially looking out and over at other buildings across a large expanse - like looking out over a valley (if you've never been to a deep pit mine, take a trip to one sometime - it's quite amazing). With trees, plants, etc - perhaps water features and maybe a lake at the bottom - I think (in theory) it could be quite lovely to look at and live in. It would be nice if the deep pit mines we already have dug could be repurposed, but the problem with many are the amount of contamination caused by the mining and other activities during the operation of the mine; I doubt it would or could ever be fit to live in. Some of these mines are backfilled with the tailings afterward, but not all.

rhapsodic 9y ago

These suburbs are "dying" because the majority of their population are low-skilled, low-educated people who have fewer and fewer opportunities to prosper in an economy that is becoming more and more automated and skills-oriented. The blight and decay is just a symptom of the actual problem, which is decreasing opportunity for these people. That's one of the reasons I oppose opening our borders to a flood of additional low-skilled, low-educated people. It hurts the ones who are already here. I'm sure this will attract a lot of downvotes, and I'm perfectly fine with that, but I'd appreciate it if the downvoters would also point out the flaws they perceive in my logic.