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I used to be all about the Strong Towns ethos, but now that I’m older I’ve run to the type of suburb they decry. A nice SFH, big yard, garage filled with tools

• burlesona 6y ago
  I'm glad that you enjoy your heavily subsidized new lifestyle. It's really hard to argue against receiving far more in public benefits than you pay in taxes. That's the point of Strong Towns: not that there's anything wrong with single family houses in and of themselves, but that the way our economy is structured right now, they usually don't pay for themselves.
  • ls612 6y ago
    But that’s not true really. It only appears true because many people who live in a suburb work in a city center and thus count towards that city center’s output and tax revenue.
    • burlesona 6y ago
      In almost every part of the US and almost every situation, the taxes you pay are based on the place you live, not where you work. For most cities, commuters who drive into the city just to work and then drive out are a terrible liability, because they wear out the roads driving in and out every day, then pay their property taxes (which is typically the large majority of local revenue) to a different city. I believe NYC may be a partial exception to this as I know it has local income tax (which is very rare), but I'm not sure if they charge that to people who don't also live in the city. Other exceptions are some towns that have almost no residential and a lot of commercial, and collect almost all their income from sales tax. But, again, those are the few exceptions, not the norm.
      • bluedino 6y ago
        Plenty of cities collect income tax from workers who do not reside in the city. Our is half the amount collected from city residents.
      • mattbuilds 6y ago
        As a former NYC resident who now lives in it’s burbs, you only pay the city tax when living in the five boroughs.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > In almost every part of the US and almost every situation, the taxes you pay are based on the place you live, not where you work. Income tax is typically based on both where you live and where you work. Property tax is based on where you own property. Payroll taxes (state unemployment, etc.) is mostly based on where you work. Sales/use tax is based on where you physically shop or where you live for other shopping.
      • slt2021 6y ago
        1. aren't highway/interstate maintenance (which are used by commuters) funded at a federal and state level? so there should be much difference. 2. property taxes go to fund schools/utilities/services - and it makes sense to send taxes to where you live, not work. I want to fund schools where my kids go to, this seems perfectly logical to me. It would be a huge waste of resources to do otherwise.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • zizee 6y ago
        > commuters who drive into the city just to work and then drive out are a terrible liability, because they wear out the roads driving in and out every day Heavy trucks actually do the majority of damage to road infrastructure. From the linked article: The registration fee seems steep. However,a B-Double can cause, per kilometre travelled, 20,000 times the road wear and tear that a family car does https://theconversation.com/trucks-are-destroying-our-roads-and-not-picking-up-the-repair-cost-79670 https://theconversation.com/trucks-are-destroying-our-roads-...
    • lwansbrough 6y ago
      That’s not what that means. It has nothing to do where income is earned. Suburbs are expensive to maintain (and incredibly harmful for the environment), and so of two people working in the city centre, the one living in the burbs receives far more subsidies than the one living in the city. The taxes of the city dweller (which are higher than those in suburbia) are used to subsidize suburban infrastructure.
      • refurb 6y ago
        If it’s so much more efficient to live in a city then why are city budgets so much higher than suburban budgets? And, it’s not like the people that live in the burbs are the only ones that benefit. Those roads and highways are the same ones used to ship food to cities.
        • wahern 6y ago
          Cities provide more services, like museums and transit; and also tend to have wealthier tax bases (because of positive externalities cities create), meaning they can spend more and often do so. Though the additional spending isn't linear, which is why residents in so-called "tax and spend" jurisdictions still tend to have greater than average post-tax income. (The real problem is wealth distribution.) But for basic services such as schools, fire, and sewer, what matters is geographic (horizontal) compactness. The more compact the area, the better the economies of scale, reducing per capita costs. However, at some point vertical density (i.e. building up) can overcome economies of scale provided by compactness by increasing infrastructure costs. Thus the per capita cost curve can end up being U-shaped within a fixed geographic area. See https://www.cgoodman.com/files/papers/national-sprawl-expenditures.pdf https://www.cgoodman.com/files/papers/national-sprawl-expend... Housing has a similar U-shaped cost curve: skyscrapers have very high per unit construction and maintenance costs because of the need to switch to steel and other more expensive techniques. AFAIU, the most efficient form of housing in the U.S. is mid-rise developments, approx. 3 to 6 stories, though it varies according to available materials and allowed construction techniques. See https://urbanize.city/la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-perspective-fix-california-housing-crisis https://urbanize.city/la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s... (EDIT: Actually, that article describes the "missing middle" as 2-3 story developments, not 3-6. 3-6 is probably closer to what older, denser cities like San Francisco need more of, as most single-family homes are already tightly spaced 2-3 story buildings.) Advocates of density from industry and academia are often misunderstood as demanding the type of developments you see in the inner core of large cities, such as skyscrapers. (As opposed to cityphile advocates who want live above French bakeries and near subway stations.[1]) But small rural and suburban towns can also be dense, and historically they were dense, even in the United States. If you've traveled enough around the U.S., especially on the old U.S. Highway system and away from the U.S. Interstate system (because Interstates were built to avoid small towns and thus in the present day most any town near an Interstates was likely developed after the 1950s), you'll see that most U.S. towns were built with relatively compact neighborhoods hugging dense commercial areas. (Especially true in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Patterns of development in the American South seemed to have been historically distinct, a direct and indirect consequence of plantation culture.) And this was the pattern even after the U.S. became a car culture, though before white flight, enabled by the Interstate system, fundamentally changed expectations regarding geographic proximity to work and commercial services. Perhaps the better term to use when promoting more cost efficient development is "compact", not "density". Too much density isn't cheap, though often desirable nonetheless. But when it comes to RoI, the characteristic to strive for is compactness. Having two skyscrapers a quarter mile apart with nothing in between is stupid. What you want is compactness, which in addition to providing economies of scale also, politically, minimizes the ability for developers and owners to externalize inefficient infrastructure costs; and then let the market decide vertical density. [1] OTOH, this describes Paris, a city of mostly mid-rises. I think it's just that Americans in general, even urbanites, have a skewed perception of density informed by our culture, such as the prominence of major cities like New York and Chicago, and especially their downtowns, in depicting urbanity.
    • ABeeSea 6y ago
      The subsidies come in the form of infrastructure spending per capita when the spending source is at the state or national level: Roads that serve few cars. Electricity infrastructure from the power plant to the suburbs. Water infrastructure (pipes need to bring clean water in and sewage out) Not to mention the racist history of the reasons for subsidizing suburbs. White flight followed by redlining and deeds that prevented suburban housing from being sold to African-Americans. Followed by a neglect of city infrastructure as black residents moved in. Edit: Since I’m being downvoted for daring to suggest that suburbs have a racist history, I’ll leave a recent stratchery article to explain. https://stratechery.com/2020/dust-in-the-light/ https://stratechery.com/2020/dust-in-the-light/
  • Causality1 6y ago
    Subsidized in what way? If he's a mile from commercial buildings he doesn't live in one of those gentrification bubbles fifteen minutes from downtown, he's in a small town. The kind with more undeveloped than developed land.
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      The lack of tax on fossil fuels to offset fossil fuels’ externalities is the biggest subsidy.
      • whatshisface 6y ago
        No, the biggest subsidy is the $1,000,000/year I'm not charging them for reading my comment. After all, the null policy is not the reference policy. ;)
    • SECProto 6y ago
      Municipalities pay for their infrastructure {1} from land taxes. The per-unit costs of suburban maintenance {2} vastly outweigh the per-unit taxes colleected. The inverse is true for dense urban units: per-unit costs for urban units are far lower than the per-unit taxes. {1} (roads, sewers, water treatment and distribution, waste collection...) {2} (repaving once every 20 years, repainting once a year, repairing sewer pipes every 40-60 years, water pipes every 80 (unless they were installed in the 50s-80s, in which case every 30), etc)
      • Retric 6y ago
        1/2 of US local government spending is education and healthcare, infrastructure is a long way down the list. That almost completely destroys the small town argument because cities don’t need to pay for the education or healthcare of their suburban workers. An office building is a net gain where a the same space devoted to housing often costs the local government more in services.
        • SECProto 6y ago
  • echelon 6y ago
    > I'm glad that you enjoy your heavily subsidized new lifestyle. It's really hard to argue against receiving far more in public benefits than you pay in taxes. > That's the point of Strong Towns: not that there's anything wrong with single family houses in and of themselves, but that the way our economy is structured right now, they usually don't pay for themselves. You know what else is subsidized? Farms. Should we stop paying for them? Sports facilities, community centers for youth and elderly, hospitals, homeless shelters. Lots of subsidization to go around. There are 50 states, and most of them have single family dwellings. Some not even near a city. It turns out a lot of people like to live this way. They're not leeching off of the economy - they're contributing to it. Single family homes are a pattern of American life. They're not going away anytime soon. Don't force everyone to live in a city. It's not unlike the bicyclists trying to tell everyone they should bike instead of drive, which simply isn't going to work for most of the people in this country. Edit: I was downvoted faster than it was even possible to read my comment. I spotted a typo as I submitted and immediately went to edit it, "0 points by echelon 0 minutes ago" Wow, HN.
    • burlesona 6y ago
      Nobody is talking about forcing anyone to do anything. You know something I really like? Lobster. You know what would be great for me? If the government made a program to subsidize lobster farming and distribution, so that lobster cost $3/meal instead of $20. If it cost that I would probably have Lobster 5 times a week! But, it doesn't, so... I don't eat that much Lobster. I still love it though, and there's nothing wrong with that! Nobody should force me to stop eating Lobster.
      • covidthrow 6y ago
        When you stop subsidizing suburbs, will you also stop subsidizing the flyover states? How about the impoverished? Medicare for unhealthy people? Education? Fire departments? Like, what is your "I don't care for subsidies" threshold?
        • GeneralMayhem 6y ago
  • Retric 6y ago
    You’re assuming there is some city near by. Most small towns in the US are on their own well outside of commute range for any cities. The US only has 310 cities, if you’re using 100,000+, people as a city and they largely cluster near each other Further, Education and it’s associated pension and healthcare costs are by far local governments biggest expense so office buildings are a much better deal for local governments than housing. This gets reflected in zoning where many local governments actively discourage people moving into them.
    • alanbernstein 6y ago
      Those 310 cities "only" include 90+ million people, not counting wider metropolitan areas. What's your point?
      • Retric 6y ago
        Generalization across 332 million people in the US is always going to oversimplify things. Thinking in terms of funding for schools is generally vastly more costly than water and sewerage, but in a few communities that’s a major issue. Local governments are responding to local issues. Some cities are actively zoning to discourage people living in them because they don’t want to fund more schools. Office buildings are in effect more profitable than condos when a state and local government is primarily funded via property taxes. And guess what Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming have no income taxes.
  • david38 6y ago
    How smug to know how much he receives in benefits and how much he pays in taxes. Please share your superpower.
  • dang 6y ago
    Please don't attack another user like that. It's aggressive and against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). You can make your substantive points without stooping to that. Indeed, you did do so in your second paragraph and your comment would have been fine with just that.
    • burlesona 6y ago
      Sorry, Dang, didn’t mean for it to come across as a personal attack. I see how I could have worded it better. My apologies to the OP.
      • dang 6y ago
        Appreciated! Btw, one little-understood aspect of this is how much of the problem is created by upvoters. A comment like the GP reads very differently when it is upvoted to the top of the thread than when it's floating somewhere in the middle. I've occasionally had this happen to my own posts in the past (not so much with the dang account, but an older one) and was shocked to see how my own comment came across in a way that I hadn't intended. The onus is still on commenters to omit things that can come across that way, but the problems in threads are at least as much caused by upvoters. It's a co-creation, and the worse outcomes are usually not one that any individual intends.
      • dahdum 6y ago
        I could have added more context to my initial comment. I meant to convey that the Strong Towns movement has a much steeper uphill battle than I realized when I was younger and living in high density settings, not that it was wrong outright.
        • burlesona 6y ago
          Totally fair. And all I really meant to say is that it’s not about what “lifestyle” people live, it’s about the economics and whether we can sustain this. I get a little frustrated when people dismiss the Strong Towns ideas as being “anti single-family homes,” which is not the case and missing the point. I’m sure that frustration contributed to my reply being snarky when it didn’t need to be. Sorry again.
• ocschwar 6y ago
  That's all well and good. But is the maintenance tab for the roads, water, sewer, power, and telecom that you need actually paid for? Probably not. But you won't know until it falls apart.
  • bigth 6y ago
    I don't understand this argument. I live just outside a city, and all of these utilities are handled by entities that exist to serve outside of the city. What am I missing?
    • ocschwar 6y ago
      The sheer cost of maintaining all that stuff. If you don't keep up with maintenance cost, it wears out, but it can be 20 years before the deferred maintenance becomes obvious. Do you know where the leaks are in your water line? Do you know how bad they are? Until the line bursts, city hall can stay in denial about it. And they do.
      • bigth 6y ago
        There is no city hall, I live outside city limits. The water where I live is supplied by a municipal utility district, and this particular one is involved in a lot of projects. They have regular meetings which are public and recorded, and everything is well maintained.
  • RickJWagner 6y ago
    I've lived all my life (over 50 years) outside of big cities. I've never seen a small or mid-sized town go broke. From what I hear, bigger cities do have financial problems, especially when the population decreases. (I think Detroit's had a pretty rough time of it.) What do you mean?
• bsder 6y ago
  The biggest problem in the US is that you need to simply shut down places below a certain size. We don't need a town near every shuttered coal mine, for example. However, until strongtowns can figure out a politically palatable way to convince the denizens of these kinds of towns to shut down and move, it's just ranting into the breeze. I mean, look at what it took to get people out of Centralia, PA where you could die suddenly and miserably. Good luck with anything less draconian.
• imgabe 6y ago
  I don't think anyone claimed that wasn't nice. It certainly is. The problem is that it's fundamentally unsustainable.
  • akvadrako 6y ago
    Lots of people claim it isn't nice. What he's describing is sprawl. Ton's of land taken up by yards, (slow) roads and parking; most of it is unusable for anything else. Depressing.
• refurb 6y ago
  Of course. People like to think the internet represents a cross section of the population, but it doesn’t. It heavily leans young, urban, childless. So no surprise everyone online raves about living in a tiny apartment in a big city.
• aiisjustanif 6y ago
  I think it’s less about “strong towns” and more about not making towns and cities that scale well for people and sustainable. More public use infrastructure options than just larger highways. According to the article. I’ve been around the global block and having a sfh, good schools (always subjective), quiet streets, and a yard are all possible with less scale while being more interconnected. Communities in the US just have to want it. Mid-level density can exist.
• throw0101a 6y ago
  > A nice SFH, big yard, garage filled with tools, good schools, and quiet […] streets […] Sounds like the neighbourhood I grew up in… in the middle of a major city: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+... You can live in a decently dense city, which can sustain transit and have schools and parts with-in walking distance and big offices with-in cycling distance, without having to live in Manhattan-like densities.
  • vecinu 6y ago
    I used to live in the GTA previously and after seeing what kind of houses "nice" suburbs offer you in the US, I think the GP meant something more extravagant than the one showed above in Roncesvalles. Americans are used to SFHs having large front yards, more space around their property and very large, landscaped backyards with pools, fountains and other adornments. 2 car garages are standard with 3 car ones being more common than you'll find in the GTA. It's also more likely you'll find bungalows which command a higher premium due to the amount of physical land they take up. It's hard not to think you've made it when you're living in a 2k+ sq. ft bungalow with a 3 car garage, pool and a view of the ocean or a canyon.
• roenxi 6y ago
  > I’ve run to the type of suburb they decry. Sounds like you've read a bit of Strong Towns. Why do you see that as inconsistent with their message? I had them pegged as an anti-debt pro-accrual-accounting lobby. It seems reasonable to me that the places they decry are great places to live - if the argument is against neighbourhoods where more money was spent on them than was justified then those neighbourhoods would be in high demand.