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The real problem is that people don't realize how expensive all that infrastructure actually is: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-yo

The real problem is that people don't realize how expensive all that infrastructure actually is: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... The suburban lifestyle needs to be subsidized in order to be sustainable, but good luck getting people to keep up with proper infrastructure investment. Even cities are failing at it (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...), but suburbs have even more infrastructure to maintain with a much smaller tax base.

davidw 9y ago
Hah, nice work with the ST links of Joe Minicozzi's work! I sent mine a few minutes after yours. That guy is a good speaker if you ever get the chance.
Turing_Machine 9y ago
> The suburban lifestyle needs to be subsidized All infrastructure is subsidized, including the lifestyle so beloved by young urban hipsters with no children. So? Lafayette, Louisiana is in trouble because it had an oil boom followed by an oil bust. And the idea of dividing up regions of the city by whether they "make a profit" or not is, to be blunt, just goofy. Yeah, revenue is generated in the industrial and business regions of town rather than in the residential regions. That's...unsurprising. To expand a bit, imagine a block that has a branch of Bank of America, five apartment buildings, a small park, and a clinic operated by a non-profit. Using the exact technique shown in your article (but on a smaller scale), the BofA branch would have a huge green spike, while all of the others would be red. By the "reasoning" in the article, everyone except BofA should have their taxes raised. Umm... no.
eecc 9y ago
Thanks for spelling it out... wouldn’t love if people took the time to think like you did before knee-jerking “well if YOU don’t like it, just go somewhere else” ;)

davidw 9y ago

Hah, nice work with the ST links of Joe Minicozzi's work! I sent mine a few minutes after yours. That guy is a good speaker if you ever get the chance.

Turing_Machine 9y ago

> The suburban lifestyle needs to be subsidized All infrastructure is subsidized, including the lifestyle so beloved by young urban hipsters with no children. So? Lafayette, Louisiana is in trouble because it had an oil boom followed by an oil bust. And the idea of dividing up regions of the city by whether they "make a profit" or not is, to be blunt, just goofy. Yeah, revenue is generated in the industrial and business regions of town rather than in the residential regions. That's...unsurprising. To expand a bit, imagine a block that has a branch of Bank of America, five apartment buildings, a small park, and a clinic operated by a non-profit. Using the exact technique shown in your article (but on a smaller scale), the BofA branch would have a huge green spike, while all of the others would be red. By the "reasoning" in the article, everyone except BofA should have their taxes raised. Umm... no.

eecc 9y ago

Thanks for spelling it out... wouldn’t love if people took the time to think like you did before knee-jerking “well if YOU don’t like it, just go somewhere else” ;)