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> 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

> 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
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  - 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.
  - 0x4f3759df 9y ago
    Also Blockbusting and the policy of destroying ethnic Catholic neighborhoods by running a couple of highways through them.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    White flight wasn’t just hysteria or racism at the individual level. It was driven by federal policy back in the New Deal era. In most cases, it was very dumb on any metric to stay in the city if you had the means to move.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    White Flight hit Allentown, PA very late. It wasn't till a new Interstate was finished I-78 and it was the mid to late 1980s. I live in Center City Allentown and it has now gotten over $1,000,000,000 in investment but the racism from the suburbs talking about how the city isn't what it was is infuriating. Look at any comment on the local newspaper and it is nothing but racist anti-city comments, www.mcall.com. Even mayors from suburbs even wrote opt pieces on how their economy doesn't need a city, which is completely insane. People just hate cities and it does come from a emotional and non-rational mindset.
    - Buttes 9y ago
      You weren't kidding about those comments. First story I clicked on: >Well buddy, They have been shooting each other here since they opened I78 and they started moving here. 20+ years now. They have ruined a once great all American city with this BS and it is true. When it gets cold they go back inside.
    - ForRealsies 9y ago
      While it's fun to get emotional, I'm more interested in statistics. Has crime increased in Allentown since the 80s?
      - baldfat 9y ago
        Actually the crime rate is fairly low for a city our size and the crime rate has had a consistent drop for the past 10 years. There are people who refuse to drive through Allentown due to fear of being a victim. http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015/02/how_safe_are_pennsylvania_citi.html http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015...
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      Comments on almost every website I have visited that are not moderated are a toxic stew of conservative trolls. It would be one thing if it was breitbart or infowars or r/the_donald, but when we are talking about newspapers for the bluest urban areas, there's something else going on where the actual residents can't or wont participate in the online discourse in this manner because we know the majority of voters in those areas don't think like the online trolls.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    undrivable That's the key word. Not "white flight". The mass production of the automobile is what historians generally agree enabled the suburbs - not critical mass racism.
  - simonsarris 9y ago
    > Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight That's reductionist and possibly even causally reversed, like saying bad yelp reviews are the reason a restaurant closed. Rates of crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's enormous. The increase in crime was mostly in urban areas, not rural, so there was even more than an 600% increase in some areas. This was well before Reagan's and Clinton's strategy of mass incarceration. It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - was due to "a good amount of racism" as the primary reason. If your neighborhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else, no? [1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
    - deong 9y ago
      I think that's conflating different forms of racism. There's no denying that the modern suburbs was in very large part a racist development. That doesn't mean anyone who took part in that development had racist intents. As you say, it's a perfectly logical decision to move one's family to the suburbs. That doesn't contradict the fact that the opportunity for you to do so was the product of racism, even if it was someone else's racism. The Levittown/redlining/white flight/whatever was already well underway by the 60s. Yes, crime increased in urban areas up through the 80s, but some of that is best explained by those urban areas being essentially economically abandoned by that time. Crime follows poverty, and when the tax money leaves, the result is fairly predictable.
      - deleted 9y ago
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    - liveoneggs 9y ago
      I have spoken directly with a few people who left their southern in town neighborhood (still houses with yards etc) in the early 70's because they did not like the way black people behaved after civil rights in the 60's. Not sure if that counts for you as racism but there it is.
  - graeme 9y ago
    We had a similar phenomenon in Canada, without the same racial dynamics. My bet is that the car was the main cause. We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east. We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas. I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases? My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits. Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north. But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.
    - lazerpants 9y ago
      There's a demographic aspect to this I try to bring up every time these discussions arise. Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35. What are the age demographics of Canada?
      - ghaff 9y ago
        And, more specifically, it's mostly college-educated people in that age range who want to live in the core of a relatively small number of cities, generally on the costs.
      - kashprime 9y ago
        Very similar, but one crucial difference: the provinces control funding to cities and equalize spending across county lines. So you don't end up with bankrupt cities, or super wealthy ones, and everyone tends to get the same services. Instead, at least in Toronto, you have "priority neighbourhoods".. poor communities that get extra funding and resources.
- 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
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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.

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
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- 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.
- 0x4f3759df 9y ago
  Also Blockbusting and the policy of destroying ethnic Catholic neighborhoods by running a couple of highways through them.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  White flight wasn’t just hysteria or racism at the individual level. It was driven by federal policy back in the New Deal era. In most cases, it was very dumb on any metric to stay in the city if you had the means to move.
- baldfat 9y ago
  White Flight hit Allentown, PA very late. It wasn't till a new Interstate was finished I-78 and it was the mid to late 1980s. I live in Center City Allentown and it has now gotten over $1,000,000,000 in investment but the racism from the suburbs talking about how the city isn't what it was is infuriating. Look at any comment on the local newspaper and it is nothing but racist anti-city comments, www.mcall.com. Even mayors from suburbs even wrote opt pieces on how their economy doesn't need a city, which is completely insane. People just hate cities and it does come from a emotional and non-rational mindset.
  - Buttes 9y ago
    You weren't kidding about those comments. First story I clicked on: >Well buddy, They have been shooting each other here since they opened I78 and they started moving here. 20+ years now. They have ruined a once great all American city with this BS and it is true. When it gets cold they go back inside.
  - ForRealsies 9y ago
    While it's fun to get emotional, I'm more interested in statistics. Has crime increased in Allentown since the 80s?
    - baldfat 9y ago
      Actually the crime rate is fairly low for a city our size and the crime rate has had a consistent drop for the past 10 years. There are people who refuse to drive through Allentown due to fear of being a victim. http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015/02/how_safe_are_pennsylvania_citi.html http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015...
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Comments on almost every website I have visited that are not moderated are a toxic stew of conservative trolls. It would be one thing if it was breitbart or infowars or r/the_donald, but when we are talking about newspapers for the bluest urban areas, there's something else going on where the actual residents can't or wont participate in the online discourse in this manner because we know the majority of voters in those areas don't think like the online trolls.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  undrivable That's the key word. Not "white flight". The mass production of the automobile is what historians generally agree enabled the suburbs - not critical mass racism.
- simonsarris 9y ago
  > Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight That's reductionist and possibly even causally reversed, like saying bad yelp reviews are the reason a restaurant closed. Rates of crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's enormous. The increase in crime was mostly in urban areas, not rural, so there was even more than an 600% increase in some areas. This was well before Reagan's and Clinton's strategy of mass incarceration. It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - was due to "a good amount of racism" as the primary reason. If your neighborhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else, no? [1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
  - deong 9y ago
    I think that's conflating different forms of racism. There's no denying that the modern suburbs was in very large part a racist development. That doesn't mean anyone who took part in that development had racist intents. As you say, it's a perfectly logical decision to move one's family to the suburbs. That doesn't contradict the fact that the opportunity for you to do so was the product of racism, even if it was someone else's racism. The Levittown/redlining/white flight/whatever was already well underway by the 60s. Yes, crime increased in urban areas up through the 80s, but some of that is best explained by those urban areas being essentially economically abandoned by that time. Crime follows poverty, and when the tax money leaves, the result is fairly predictable.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - liveoneggs 9y ago
    I have spoken directly with a few people who left their southern in town neighborhood (still houses with yards etc) in the early 70's because they did not like the way black people behaved after civil rights in the 60's. Not sure if that counts for you as racism but there it is.
- graeme 9y ago
  We had a similar phenomenon in Canada, without the same racial dynamics. My bet is that the car was the main cause. We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east. We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas. I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases? My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits. Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north. But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    There's a demographic aspect to this I try to bring up every time these discussions arise. Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35. What are the age demographics of Canada?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      And, more specifically, it's mostly college-educated people in that age range who want to live in the core of a relatively small number of cities, generally on the costs.
    - kashprime 9y ago
      Very similar, but one crucial difference: the provinces control funding to cities and equalize spending across county lines. So you don't end up with bankrupt cities, or super wealthy ones, and everyone tends to get the same services. Instead, at least in Toronto, you have "priority neighbourhoods".. poor communities that get extra funding and resources.
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

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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.