4 ms·

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

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.

marindez 9y ago
>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. A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes? Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture. There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of. It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    The suburb won't go away but we don't care about the suburb anyway. The most important thing is the people in them. Can't they move somewhere else? They can't because it costs money. Why can't their government just give them the money? It might be cheaper than their infrastructure costs.
    - d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
      Which government? The city government is broke. If they merge, the larger city could pay for transitioning costs, but that would be a massive cost (worth it, possibly!) and politically difficult.
      - saint_fiasco 9y ago
        I don't think it would be fair if the city paid for it. The direct cost would go to them and the direct benefit to others. In that situation, the problem has to be solved on the level above. The State as a whole should pay the cost, since it is the State as a whole that would benefit.
    - richardknop 9y ago
      Because then it becomes moral hazard (like every bailout or free handout). Let’s say I live in centre of big city and pay crazy high rent and make sacrifices to save much bigger cash pile required to be able to afford to get on a property ladder. And people in suburbs will just get free cheque from government to move? That is incredibly unfair to people living in cities hence it creates moral issue.
      - saint_fiasco 9y ago
        Why? Was the death of the suburb something that they should have foreseen? An irresponsible risk they chose to ignore? If not, it is not more unfair than when health insurance uses the money of healthy people to pay for treatment of sick people. Or when the Federal Government uses the money of people who live in the mainland to pay for hurricane relief for people who live near the coast.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  The only way that no one lives in it is if there is such a huge housing surplus elsewhere that no one needs to. This will not happen in the US, because it puts the rent-seeker class at a disadvantage, and they give money to political campaigns. There is no suburb so rotten that someone won't buy up pieces of it to extract as much money as they can from its local economy, and then not spend that money back in.
pjc50 9y ago
(also a non-american) Unfortunately it seems that the macro politics is very important here - it affects the issue of whether people outside the area care about what happens in the area.
KGIII 9y ago
> I don't understand this conversation at all. Welcome to America! Seriously, we don't understand it either - but we sure will fight about it. No matter how tenuous, we can blame anything on our favorite causes. Everyone seems to want to spend time blaming and fighting instead of actually picking up a broom and cleaning. Our journalism competes with reality television and our political parties are treated like sports teams. I don't understand it either, and I live here.
twobyfour 9y ago
Discussing the cause of a problem does help us avoid repeating it. I think there's also an American tendency to place responsibility for fixing a problem at the feet of those who caused it in the first place, regardless of whether those people are still involved with the subject, or even alive.
Buttes 9y ago
> There is no creative destruction option Know how I know you're not an American...?
L_Rahman 9y ago
Yes, the more grandiose idea is to be open to shutting down unsustainable towns and suburbs. This does not mean abandoning the people who live there, but the opposite. It requires us to take seriously the people who find themselves living in a dying place, to know their lives, to build different and better places for them to live in and plan a gradual transition and eventual shutdown. But for any of this to happen, the government needs to admit the problem at hand and the people need to trust their government. After decades of racist real estate policy and constant neglect of the needs of the working poor, and entrenched self-interested careerist local politicians neither are likely to happen.
eldavido 9y ago
I find this comment frustrating because the "macro-politics and big concepts" end up mattering a lot. This is politics. It's about what's right, what's fair, and notions of equality/fairness. You can't talk about politics without contrasting notions of "right". The way I see it, this whole conversation is just a proxy for money. The suburb doesn't have enough; it has no tax base and can't afford its municipal services. What they want to do is attach to a city and use the city's services. Now, there might be efficiencies of scale with service delivery to a larger population. But if you look at the history of many large cities in the US, many suburbs made the conscious choice not to be part of the city precisely because they didn't want the higher taxes, on sales, on property, on income, etc. that living in a city requires. You say "renew the infrastructure". Are you writing the check? Your comment seems to assume we can just invent money out of thin air. I'll be honest, I'm pretty fed up with this entire bailout mentality. I live in a high-tax, high-expense city. Meanwhile, I pay the federal universal service fee so that someone in Nowhere, USA can have a phone. I see low taxes on carbon emission, mortgage interest deductions on huge suburban palaces, a massive expressway system, agricultural subsidies, a postal service that charges the same rate to deliver mail across town as to Nowhere, USA, and I'm just tired of it. And I'm also tired of last generation passing the cost of their bad decisions on to us, in the form of underfunded pensions, a major housing crisis engineered by the Boomer generation, and 100% of GDP federal debt. So yeah, guilty as charged re: "macro-politics and big concepts", but, enough is enough. If these people couldn't be bothered to move as their city crumbled over the last, I don't know, 30 years, I'm just not crying, as I pay through the nose for rent in a big city.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Hey... I think we might be more on the same page than not. Money problems is exactly the level that we should be talking about it. What I was reacting to and labelling “macro politics” is trying to relate this to the most abstract (relative to the issue at hand) political viewpoints. On one side, calling for a Misesian creative destruction. On the other hand, insisting that the root of the problem is racism in the 70s and that’s what needs to be addressed. To me, it seems like a problem of financing localities that have particularly bad balance sheets. That’s what I mean by practical and I think we agree on it mostly. This is a very common problem. Every country that has locally financed authorities runs into it. Maybe a locality is poor (like this one). Poor people still have the same sewage needs as rich people, but they pay less tax. Maybe a local real estate is cheap or low turnover, and tax is tied to property values or real estate sales. Maybe the commercial-residential split is important? I’m not particularly in any camp about how to fix it. It’ll depend on whatever the norms of the place are. I don’t know American norms so well, but there are an ultimately finite set of options. Maybe merging/gerrymandering is the right idea. I’m not unsympathetic to your gripes either. I also think my country (ireland) has had (and still has) bad financial management, morally questionable bailouts, official public debt and a scarier unofficial stack of liabilities like pensions and other hand-me-downs. But, are you really going to draw a line in this sand? A poor suburb that can’t afford police or sewage, because the way a map was drawn left it with more liabilities than income?

marindez 9y ago

>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. A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.

dalbasal 9y ago
This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes? Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture. There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of. It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  The suburb won't go away but we don't care about the suburb anyway. The most important thing is the people in them. Can't they move somewhere else? They can't because it costs money. Why can't their government just give them the money? It might be cheaper than their infrastructure costs.
  - d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
    Which government? The city government is broke. If they merge, the larger city could pay for transitioning costs, but that would be a massive cost (worth it, possibly!) and politically difficult.
    - saint_fiasco 9y ago
      I don't think it would be fair if the city paid for it. The direct cost would go to them and the direct benefit to others. In that situation, the problem has to be solved on the level above. The State as a whole should pay the cost, since it is the State as a whole that would benefit.
  - richardknop 9y ago
    Because then it becomes moral hazard (like every bailout or free handout). Let’s say I live in centre of big city and pay crazy high rent and make sacrifices to save much bigger cash pile required to be able to afford to get on a property ladder. And people in suburbs will just get free cheque from government to move? That is incredibly unfair to people living in cities hence it creates moral issue.
    - saint_fiasco 9y ago
      Why? Was the death of the suburb something that they should have foreseen? An irresponsible risk they chose to ignore? If not, it is not more unfair than when health insurance uses the money of healthy people to pay for treatment of sick people. Or when the Federal Government uses the money of people who live in the mainland to pay for hurricane relief for people who live near the coast.
logfromblammo 9y ago
The only way that no one lives in it is if there is such a huge housing surplus elsewhere that no one needs to. This will not happen in the US, because it puts the rent-seeker class at a disadvantage, and they give money to political campaigns. There is no suburb so rotten that someone won't buy up pieces of it to extract as much money as they can from its local economy, and then not spend that money back in.

pjc50 9y ago

(also a non-american) Unfortunately it seems that the macro politics is very important here - it affects the issue of whether people outside the area care about what happens in the area.

KGIII 9y ago

> I don't understand this conversation at all. Welcome to America! Seriously, we don't understand it either - but we sure will fight about it. No matter how tenuous, we can blame anything on our favorite causes. Everyone seems to want to spend time blaming and fighting instead of actually picking up a broom and cleaning. Our journalism competes with reality television and our political parties are treated like sports teams. I don't understand it either, and I live here.

twobyfour 9y ago

Discussing the cause of a problem does help us avoid repeating it. I think there's also an American tendency to place responsibility for fixing a problem at the feet of those who caused it in the first place, regardless of whether those people are still involved with the subject, or even alive.

Buttes 9y ago

> There is no creative destruction option Know how I know you're not an American...?

L_Rahman 9y ago

Yes, the more grandiose idea is to be open to shutting down unsustainable towns and suburbs. This does not mean abandoning the people who live there, but the opposite. It requires us to take seriously the people who find themselves living in a dying place, to know their lives, to build different and better places for them to live in and plan a gradual transition and eventual shutdown. But for any of this to happen, the government needs to admit the problem at hand and the people need to trust their government. After decades of racist real estate policy and constant neglect of the needs of the working poor, and entrenched self-interested careerist local politicians neither are likely to happen.

eldavido 9y ago

I find this comment frustrating because the "macro-politics and big concepts" end up mattering a lot. This is politics. It's about what's right, what's fair, and notions of equality/fairness. You can't talk about politics without contrasting notions of "right". The way I see it, this whole conversation is just a proxy for money. The suburb doesn't have enough; it has no tax base and can't afford its municipal services. What they want to do is attach to a city and use the city's services. Now, there might be efficiencies of scale with service delivery to a larger population. But if you look at the history of many large cities in the US, many suburbs made the conscious choice not to be part of the city precisely because they didn't want the higher taxes, on sales, on property, on income, etc. that living in a city requires. You say "renew the infrastructure". Are you writing the check? Your comment seems to assume we can just invent money out of thin air. I'll be honest, I'm pretty fed up with this entire bailout mentality. I live in a high-tax, high-expense city. Meanwhile, I pay the federal universal service fee so that someone in Nowhere, USA can have a phone. I see low taxes on carbon emission, mortgage interest deductions on huge suburban palaces, a massive expressway system, agricultural subsidies, a postal service that charges the same rate to deliver mail across town as to Nowhere, USA, and I'm just tired of it. And I'm also tired of last generation passing the cost of their bad decisions on to us, in the form of underfunded pensions, a major housing crisis engineered by the Boomer generation, and 100% of GDP federal debt. So yeah, guilty as charged re: "macro-politics and big concepts", but, enough is enough. If these people couldn't be bothered to move as their city crumbled over the last, I don't know, 30 years, I'm just not crying, as I pay through the nose for rent in a big city.

dalbasal 9y ago
Hey... I think we might be more on the same page than not. Money problems is exactly the level that we should be talking about it. What I was reacting to and labelling “macro politics” is trying to relate this to the most abstract (relative to the issue at hand) political viewpoints. On one side, calling for a Misesian creative destruction. On the other hand, insisting that the root of the problem is racism in the 70s and that’s what needs to be addressed. To me, it seems like a problem of financing localities that have particularly bad balance sheets. That’s what I mean by practical and I think we agree on it mostly. This is a very common problem. Every country that has locally financed authorities runs into it. Maybe a locality is poor (like this one). Poor people still have the same sewage needs as rich people, but they pay less tax. Maybe a local real estate is cheap or low turnover, and tax is tied to property values or real estate sales. Maybe the commercial-residential split is important? I’m not particularly in any camp about how to fix it. It’ll depend on whatever the norms of the place are. I don’t know American norms so well, but there are an ultimately finite set of options. Maybe merging/gerrymandering is the right idea. I’m not unsympathetic to your gripes either. I also think my country (ireland) has had (and still has) bad financial management, morally questionable bailouts, official public debt and a scarier unofficial stack of liabilities like pensions and other hand-me-downs. But, are you really going to draw a line in this sand? A poor suburb that can’t afford police or sewage, because the way a map was drawn left it with more liabilities than income?