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Cities do scale though, they have scaled for thousands of years and will continue to scale. The history of human life has seen the median human living in a dens
by 0xB31B1B 6y ago
Cities do scale though, they have scaled for thousands of years and will continue to scale. The history of human life has seen the median human living in a denser and denser living situation. People are priced out of US cities because the current cohort of property owners wants to treat cities like suburbs (slow growth, restrictions) not cities. Look at any major US city excluding NYC and the vast majority of land in the city is zoned for single family homes.
- woah 6y agoIt’s incredible how many people forget that we invented the apartment building before we invented the wheel.
- bollu 6y agoI'd love to read more about this, could you elaborate!
- _huayra_ 6y agoCities do scale, but the low-density "Suburb City" that describes large parts of the US doesn't scale feasibly because the property tax / sales tax per square foot of property is insufficient to cover the city infrastructure to maintain it. The answer, unfortunately, is more growth, in an almost ponzi-scheme like fashion; new property tax revenue covers the cost of replacing roads and sewers from much older districts of the city and so forth. You can see this in how cities tend to go full blight very quickly after the jig is up (e.g. Detroit, probably the largest example, but many midwest rust belt towns too). I live in a "semi-rural" part of a European country between two major cities and I'm surprised at how immaculate the arterial road is that I live on, between the cities (kind of a "country road" that parallels the highway). Where I lived in the US before, similar roads were full of wheel-eating potholes. But then again, property prices here are through the roof because the government heavily regulates growth, so that's where they get the revenue.