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The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme

174 points by hammerdr 15y ago

jseliger 15y ago
By this definition, any real estate is a "giant Ponzi scheme," since it depends on people after you buying the asset. Cities are great, but suburbs have their place (in large part because of a) building codes that prevent tall buildings and b) how schools are funded), which the author gets to some extent. If you're interested in the issue, try Edward Glaeser's book The Triumph of the City: http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/159420277X?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health... .
- jfruh 15y ago
  Bulding codes that prevent tall buildings are an asset particulary if you make money from selling petroleum, as they make it difficult to build walkable neighborhoods.
  - wallflower 15y ago
    As someone who lived in a suburb and tried going without a car for a (short) while, it is near impossible to get around. Biking on busy 35mph four lane streets where bored suburbanites go 50mph with no median is a prescription for death by invisibility. I had to double my short-lived bike commute to take advantage of back roads (which was even scarier because bored high schoolers barreling down the hill don't expect you). Taking the bus to a destination (if it is even possible) can be a maddening version of real-life Candy Land in which you loop around and around and double-back and eventually reach point B. Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis style layout of suburban enclaves make public transportation a virtual no-go as the shortest-path distance from point A to point B is impossible as it would require jumping fences or at the least, going through people's sacrosant backyards. Bottom line, in the suburbs you need a car to live - to go grocery shopping, to go to Applebee's to meet your friends and carry that annoying table buzzer around like an embarassing vibrator while you wait for your table, to go to the Multiplex, to go park in the deadly silent except for lawn mowers parking lot of your rental apartment megaplex, and (most importantly) to go to the closest major city to escape the burbs for real nightlife. But, witness the explosion in mega corporate office parks, and realize that the growth was because not everyone wants to live in a city - especially once you have kids. Companies built office parks because that is where their employees wanted to live. Or was it a chicken-before-the-egg issue?
    - pnathan 15y ago
      Yeah, what is up with that "Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis" layout going on? It's maddening!
      - tkaemming 15y ago
        It's easier to ensure that you live on a "quiet street" when the street doesn't go anywhere.
        qjz 15y ago
        Although I can't cite any offhand, studies indicated that there was significantly less crime in such areas, as well.
      - techsupporter 15y ago
        It's because the market (that is, home buyers) don't want to live on streets that can be used as cut-throughs to get to other places. As traffic density increases, drivers will try to find shorter or less-congested routes to get where they want to go. The street on which I live (in an area built approximately 30 years ago) is an example of this: it is a wide two-lane street that connects two major roadways. There are other, non-residential streets that connect these same roadways but those routes are clogged most of the time. Therefore, people use my street with all of its attendant problems such as speeding, extremely loud exhaust and/or sound systems, not watching for people walking or biking, etc. So, non-connecting streets became the popular thing to do, along with curving streets to force drivers to slow down.
        tptacek 15y ago
        This design, by the way, isn't just some evil plot by the Robert Moses's and Henry Fords of the world; it's an idiom endorsed by Christopher Alexander in _A Pattern Language_.
        qjz 15y ago
cantbecool 15y ago
Why didn't you link to the original source? http://www.grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are-a-giant-ponzi-scheme http://www.grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-...
- hammerdr 15y ago
  Because the attribution in the article wasn't nearly visible enough. Sorry about that!
  - cantbecool 15y ago
    Good point, the contrast between link and text was subtle at best.
pnathan 15y ago
I expected this article to be much more inflammatory and generally wharrgharbl than it turned out to be. But I hate suburbs, personally, so my opinion might be biased. edit: a few more thoughts. I live in a fairly 'typical' US smaller town (not a small town). Here, new houses are jammed on their 1/2 acre with a minimal back yard, row after row after row of them. They are made poorly and there are no trees lining the streets. Streets curve round and round, making it difficult to travel from place to place. New apartment buildings follow a similar fashion, but are very small: suitable for student roommates in size, not suitable for more than two-three single people living together (or a married couple). Contrast this with the older downtown, where houses are somewhat original, trees are planted (leading to shady sidewalks), and the streets are straight, leading to easy travel. I was thinking about this on a recent trip to Seattle's downtown. There, not only are there trees and original buildings, but the businesses as housing are intermingled, plus they go up, allowing a much greater compaction of space. I would believe there is quite a nice economy of infrastructure scale going on there. Further, it is not like you have to travel between Zones to go shopping or go out to eat: you wander on down half a block, and you're there. Both my town's downtown and downtown Seattle present a much nicer experience than the row housing suburban monotony.
- aaronbrethorst 15y ago
  I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, a fairly dense neighborhood just east of downtown. I can walk to no less than two supermarkets, one Trader Joe's, and one food co-op. My job is a ten minute walk on foot. I am surrounded by terrific restaurants and bars. I actually get irritated when I'm required to get into my car to go somewhere now. When I first moved to the Seattle area, I lived in Microsoft corporate housing in Redmond, a smaller suburb about 12 miles east of Seattle. The area felt depressing, isolated and uninhabited most weekends.
  - wooster 15y ago
    I spent a month in Seattle this spring (coming back in July for a bit), and I can confirm this. Queen Anne Hill is also really walkable. Two grocery stores, loads of coffee shops, restaurants, etc within a 5 minute walk on Queen Anne, plus an easy walk to downtown, Fremont, or Capitol Hill. Such a wonderful city. Of course, if you tell most Seattle-ites that you walked from, say, Queen Anne to Paseo in Fremont, you'll get weird looks.
qjz 15y ago
Buried in the hyperbole is this nugget of truth: It is only the last two generations that we have scaled places to the automobile. City, suburb, whatever the residential setting, this is the true enemy of creating a network of livable communities. Any jogger, cyclist or volksmarcher can tell you that a continuous green ribbon connecting communities enhances the quality of life many times over. It's a crime that road/highway development rarely takes this into consideration, especially when some of the nicest trails I ride go alongside or beneath some of the busiest roads in my metropolitan area. A well-planned paved trail can can offer a cycling commute comparable to that of an automobile (sometimes even shorter), only far more pleasant and healthier. Unfortunately, sharing the road with cars in any metropolitan or suburban area is a life-threatening experience.
- necubi 15y ago
  I have trouble believing that simply making cycling more attractive will be enough to deal with the massive transportation problems that suburbs (and more so exurbs) create. No matter how nice the trails are, most people will not communicate by bike or walking. The solution is to pack people more densely in mixed-use communities. Ideally most people would have their necessities within walking distance (grocery store, drug store, restaurants, movie theatre, bank, etc.) and public transportation to everything else, including work. Both of these goals can only be implemented affordably if population densities are high.
  - qjz 15y ago
    Experience tells me you're wrong. I know people who walked one block to work every day of their lives, only to be critically injured by passing cars or trucks. I know plenty of of cyclists injured by buses pulling over to pick up passengers, or even by parked cars suddenly opening doors. Population density does not protect you from motor vehicle traffic density. Even bike lanes are dangerous when the only barrier is a line of paint. There is no reason pedestrians or cyclists need to be anywhere near motor vehicle traffic. Once this becomes a principle of residential planning, communities become far more liveable.
    - 15y ago
gnubardt 15y ago
The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a fantastic biography of Robert Moses, the person who set the template for this kind of development. Though in power in New York, the projects he built (highways, parks, bridges, public housing) was at a scale never seem before him. He figured out how to cut through municipal red tape to build at a large scale using public money. Not that he wasn't a terrible person. But he wrote the rules that allowed a lot of this kind of development to happen.
athst 15y ago
We really need to stop calling everything a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a very specific thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme Adding that label to everything you think is bad cheapens both the meaning and the point you're trying to get across.
- near_acorn 15y ago
  It isn't being applied to "everything [people] think is bad"; it is being applied to situations where the form "bad" takes is a reliance on continuous growth/investment/new-rubes to prevent collapse/disaster. It may cheapen the technical use of the term, but it most certainly conveys "the point [people are] trying to get across". Apparently, people find that of more general use than preserving a term-of-art of limited audience.
  - bonzoesc 15y ago
    Why not use "unsustainable" instead of "Ponzi scheme?"
    - near_acorn 15y ago
      I think people are emphasizing the peculiar relationship between investment/growth and staving off disaster. Oil is "unsustainable" it is not a Ponzi scheme (in the popular sense) because if people doubled the amount of oil they bought this year this would, in general, bring the endgame closer and not further.
grandalf 15y ago
In a sense, America is a giant Ponzi scheme. We're in the middle of a long, slow currency bubble and drenched in the spoils of centuries of imperial expansion... at present, the average American adult works less than four hours per day and has inferior work ethic and basic education than an increasing percentage of the citizens of the third world, most of whom are ruled by corrupt despots installed by the US.
- william42 15y ago
  Where'd you get this «less than four hours per day» thing?
  - grandalf 15y ago
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/americans-work-less-than-four-hours_n_884037.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/americans-work-less...
    - mmatants 15y ago
      The "four hours a day" figure cannot be construed as evidence of laziness. The article states that that average includes the unemployed or part-time workers. In fact, same article mentions a 7.5 hour average when only working days are counted.
    - m3koval 15y ago
      That's four hours per day averaged over the entire study. These statistics are more telling: "Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More hours were worked, on average, on weekdays than on weekend days--7.9 hours compared with 5.5 hours." This about matches what you would expect for full-time employees. I'm not sure how this can be construed as laziness. In fact, there are several studies that show the exact opposite: Americans working more hours than most other first-world countries. I do not have links handy, but I believe one was posted on HN a few months ago. Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
mkelly 15y ago
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but I'd be much more interested to read some research on this topic than a bunch of unsourced opinion. To make a claim like this you need some hard numbers, in my opinion.
angdis 15y ago
The damming problem is that not very many Americans are aware that there are other ways to live besides suburbs where all work-commutes require driving, every trip to the grocery store-- driving, everytime you take your kid to school-- driving, soccer practice-- driving, shopping/sports/gym/entertainment/socializing-- driving, civic participation (if you even have time left)-- driving. All these different destinations have been spread-out, miles apart, often because of zoning requirements. This has been going on for so long that people have forgotten that in the past, many families didn't even have cars and all these destinations were within WALKING DISTANCE (or a street-car trip away). And yet, people had lives that were just as fulfilling, perhaps more so than they are today. As the "New Urbanist" movement has been painstakingly re-discovering, communities do need to have "a center" to them. In America, these were called "main street" in Europe it is "the square". Whatever it is called, the idea is to have worthwhile destinations that are short distances away from where many people actually live. This creates environments that people care about and grow to love and that serve their needs much better than forgettable box stores surrounded by oceans of asphalt parking lots,
- sumeetjain 15y ago
  If you liked that comment, you'll love this TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
- qjz 15y ago
  Traffic density is the real problem. Main street still exists, but crossing it is a game of Frogger.
- ianb 15y ago
  First, there is no confirmation that people's lives were just as fulfilling before the development of now-modern US communities. There is evidence that people did not like their living situation, and pursued other living situations. That's how this all happened. There are storylines that assume that all those people are stupid rubes conned into something they didn't really want, but I find those offensive to my democratic sensibilities. Well... it'd be okay if they were offensive, but they also are far-fetched. But more important right now: we can't just undo this. Metropolitan areas have become much larger than they were before, and you can't squeeze all that development into old boundaries or even old forms. There can't be one center to a metropolitan area. And even the idea of local centers supposes that there are no useful decisions to make, that all providers of a service are equivalent except for their location. There will be a Catholic church in your neighborhood, but will there be a Baha'i temple? Can you get your kid to the daycare you want, then get yourself to the job you want, and get home, and have your partner do much the same, all within your local center or the limited mass transit connections you might find between centers? Is the entire concept of Costco wrong? Because there can't be Costco without decentralized multi-use transportation methods. There's lots of smaller (single-center) towns with a nice downtown, and a crappy strip area elsewhere. In those towns everyone shops in the crappy strip, because they want a nice big grocery store with good prices, and you just don't get that with a local/small grocery store. And businesses that provide real value want to build new buildings, and it's damn hard to build the right building in built-up cores. Maybe resolvable, but it's hard, and regressing to older forms won't do it.
cageface 15y ago
I'm beginning to think that the term "Ponzi scheme" is a semantic Ponzi scheme.
aj700 15y ago
I already knew this. This is why Europe will continue to do well whatever the oil price. Most cities are still built around public transport. The UK and some others are not. When nobody can afford to commute from their homes to their work, and there is no alternative, Roger Rabbit will seem bitterly unfunny.
- arethuza 15y ago
  There are certainly cities in the UK that still depend on public transport far more than cars - I live in one: Edinburgh. I work in an office right in the center of Edinburgh and of the thirty odd people here nobody drives to the office - most take the train, some take the bus and a few (including me) walk.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    And London too, which manages half the bus trips in the UK, among other things.
raganwald 15y ago
The End of Suburbia is a rabidly biased documentary that takes another perspective on why the suburbs will fail, the cost of oil: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/ And in free as in beer, glorious 240p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug It's entertaining and, IMO, well worth watching even if you disagree with some of the people they interview or prefer your documentaries balanced and dispassionate. You're sure to come away from the movie feeling you know more about the history of the relationship between the automobile and the suburbs.
- jseliger 15y ago
  "The End of Suburbia is a rabidly biased documentary that takes another perspective on why the suburbs will fail, the cost of oil:" I dislike the suburbs as much as the next wannabe new urbanist type, but a) given development patterns of the last 70 years, it's hard to see anything happening to suburbs save on the same timescale and b) hybrid and/or electric cars will replace gas-powered ones if the price of oil rises high enough. Sure, the (current) higher stick price of hybrid / electric cars means that cities will become more attractive at the margin, but given how easy the substitutes are, I think electric cars (and the infrastructure necessary to run them) are now advanced enough to ensure that oil prices alone won't damn suburbs.
  - raganwald 15y ago
    There's actually a section in the movie on the subject of electricity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&t=16m15s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&t=16m15s And later on they discuss hybrids and electric cars specifically. But to be clear, I don't recommend the movie because it's right, but because it asks interesting questions and leads you to think about interesting possibilities. We use a lot of energy. If we're going to replace the energy from fossil fuels with energy from electricity, we are going to need a lot more capacity than we have today. And as you can see from recent news, doubling or trebling our capacity is no small feat.
xxpor 15y ago
There is no better place to see this than Cleveland. Especially because it's all starting to bite them in the behind. People in the suburbs depend on the main city to be the heart of the region. But, almost everyone with a family who possibly could has moved out to the suburbs, even ones that are only marginally better (Warrensville Heights, North Randell). This has caused a HUGE loss of tax base, even larger than the numbers would suggest (Cleveland has 50% of the population it did in 1960), because the populace is significantly poorer. Now, there are water mains breaking all the time, gas lines that are leaking, the roads that are down to the brick under layer that they were built on, many, many abandoned buildings that are a concentrator of crime and cost. For example, a former clothing factory on E 55th caught fire this past week. It's been abandoned since 1992, so the city hasn't gotten any tax from it since then. Crime is really bad, especially on the east side. People in the suburbs resent giving the city any money, because everyone in the city to them is stupid and lazy, and their taxes are really high already. And now the people are starting to move even farther out to Medina, Geauga and Lorain counties, and complain the taxes are even higher. It's ridiculous. Unfortunately, I really don't see this changing anytime soon, due to the way schools are funded though local property taxes.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  Why would Cleveland be the best place to see this? Wouldn't Detroit be better? Detroit has already collapsed, and is well into a long contractionary period. Local government (sans Kwame) have basically said "well we gotta get used to a smaller tax base and scale back". Oh, and i absolutely agree on Ohio's school system being totally batshit (Michigan's too). The fact that state funding for the Ohio public schools was declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, and then the state government just simply did nothing is a fucking outrage. To this day, nothing has been done to fix the fundamental injustices of Ohio's schools (rich suburbs can afford rich public schools, and poor towns get nothing. Not even intact school buildings).
  - xxpor 15y ago
    You're right Detroit might be better. I'm just more familiar with Cleveland, and was using it more as a figure of speech. And too be fair, Cleveland is collapsing almost as fast as Detroit, save for Downtown, Tremont, and the Gordon Sq. area. Edit: And possibly UC, but that's still debatable. It's certainly not falling as fast as the surrounding neighborhoods, that's for sure. But there are also 5+ police departments patrolling to try and keep the riff raff out.
daemin 15y ago
There was an awesome talk by an architect Jan Gehl that I managed to catch (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/06/21/3248796.htm http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/06/21/3248796...) talking about how new development projects have been built to look good from the Plane and Helicopter perspectives (from 5000feet/metres and rooftop/helicopter) while completely ignoring the street level at which most people operate on. While the talk was more about large building projects, in the second half he does talk about how Copenhagen has transformed itself into a more bike and people friendly environment. More specifically he details how people's behaviour has changed in response to the different environmen, where walking and riding has been made more accessible and safer (for instance bike lanes on the inside of parked cars, so the cars protect the bike lane from the street), more people end up walking and riding. Now suburbia has pretty much been designed for cars rather than people, and as such it is no real wonder that you have to drive everywhere rather than cycling or walking. It should be possible to change this suburbia to something less car friendly, perhaps in cities like Detroit and others, which are in the process of removing suburbs entirely (or so I have read), so that people's behaviour changes. However I don't see this happening easily in the USA. People will relinquish their suburbs, cars, SUV's only when pried from their cold dead hands.
StephenFalken 15y ago
I guess some people have found more sustainable healthier ways of living inside a city: "Bicycle Rush Hour Utrecht (Netherlands) III" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M
- usaar333 15y ago
  Flat land helps; see Davis, CA. Now try that in wide swaths of San Francisco: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22nd+st+and+rhode+island+&hl=en&ll=37.75426,-122.401578&spn=0.009857,0.01929&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=40.052282,79.013672&z=16&layer=c&cbll=37.753334,-122.401107&panoid=mCWNoN_KpD5p3WE9NygDDQ&cbp=12,339.65,,0,0.5 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22nd+st+and+rhode+island+&...
pash 15y ago
The author's vague assertions that suburban development in America represents an enormous unfunded liability are supported in part by a considerable body of recent research suggesting that suburban lifestyles are far less efficient than their urban analogues. To get you started, Geoffrey West, one of those physicists at the Santa Fe Institute who stick their noses into everything but physics, does a schtick introducing the idea of power-law scaling in urban agglomerations that you can find in various versions on YouTube [1]. An easy-reading overview of the same idea is Luis Bettencourt's paper with West, recently published in Nature, which points out that "doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations. This systematic 15% savings happens because, in general, creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places." The already classic reference is their 2007 paper in PNAS [3]. But the power-law approach ignores the true city-suburb distinction by focusing solely on size. (Suburbs are not small cities.) Edward Glaeser, a top urban economist, and Matthew Kahn recently did a panel study of geographic greenhouse gas emissions that includes a direct comparison of cities to their suburbs [4]. They found that suburban household emissions are higher than those of city households, usually substantially, in 48 of the 50 largest American metros. (See Table 5 for the money-stats.) The methodology reveals a wide urban-suburban disparity in energy-efficiency that I imagine is mirrored in the efficiency of use of many other resources. (Next up, someone needs to integrate these approaches by comparing urban and suburban power-law residuals [5].) None of this bears directly on the author's point in the linked article, but it does suggests that suburban development is a poor investment if an urban option exists. 1. A recent (and short) version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA 2. http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%202010/Nature_Cities.pdf http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%2020... [PDF] 3. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html [embedded PDF] 4. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/file/pdfs/centers-programs/centers/taubman/working_papers/glaeser_08_greencities.pdf http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/fi... [PDF] 5. The residual approach is presented in another recent paper by Bettencourt, West, and crew: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013541 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
skybrian 15y ago
There must be a corrolary to Godwin's law that says any financial system will eventually be compared to a giant Ponzi scheme. New metaphor, please!
alanh 15y ago
Off-topic, but what is up with the font size changing seemingly at random?
- swaits 15y ago
  Bugged me too. I quickly gave up trying to read it.
awakeasleep 15y ago
Hacker News Memes: _________ Considered Harmful _________ Is a Ponzi Scheme I don't know why those phrases resonate here, but throw in some nouns and half an hour writing, and you can say hi to the front page.
- zacharypinter 15y ago
  Don't forget this one :) _________ Bitcoin _________
yason 15y ago
It's not really a problem as far as suburbs go: those who want can certainly live there as long as they consider them fit. If suburbia is a bubble, it'll come down crashing eventually. If there's something to change with regard to the suburbs is that we should distribute the costs of living in a suburbs vs cities fairly. That is suburbanites should be paying much larger portion of the costs of public infrastructure and roads that stretch dozens of miles out to the countryside and are of no use except for suburbanites themselves. However, there's a much more serious problem related to the effects of suburbia. The fundamentals of current city planning and urban design, largely borrowed from the Garden City utopia, for the suburbia are so detached from the reality of urban development in cities that the greatest danger is in blindly applying these incompatible principles to the urban environment and, in effect of doing so, crippling the real fundamentals that actually govern a vibrant city life. We are killing the whatever health our cities might still possess by making them more fit for automobiles, segregating different uses into different zones, and doing huge disruptive redevelopment projects that wipe out and reset to zero big parts of city neighbourhoods. The result from this is be the devastation of cities by applying governance and design principles incompatible with city development--which has already been going on for decades--which effectively leaves people only the suburbia. Such a monotonous development is bad for the survival in general as is anything that lacks diversity. Think of Windows viruses versus virii for other platforms. Such a big disruption that could wipe out suburbia for anybody but the richest of the people is the rising of the price of oil. The oil price has already reached levels where daily automobile commuting from the farthest backwaters of suburbia becomes an actual economic obstacle. If, or when, suburbia fails, I'd like that we would still have cities where to retreat.
api 15y ago
Ponzi scheme is wrong-- a Ponzi scheme is a specific thing. But it is true that the suburbs are unsustainable, barring the invention of Mr. Fusion or similar. When cheap oil is gone, the suburbs are gone. Oh there are replacements, but none of the replacements can deliver at scale at a cost cheap enough to keep the suburbs going. The suburbs don't just require oil... they require very very cheap oil. Otherwise they are simply not economical. Electric cars are feasible, but they're going to need a lot of extra grid capacity. Keep in mind that after oil peaks gas and coal will peak too, and keeping the grid up and growing capacity in the post-fossil-fuel age is going to be a major undertaking requiring the full development of pretty much every post-fossil-fuel energy source: gen-IV nuclear, wind, solar, etc. All that adds up to cost... which brings us back around to the original point: it's not going to be cheap. Thus, the suburbs won't be economical. It will be cheaper to just abandon the suburbs and save the energy than to support them. The suburbs will be the slums of the future. You can already see this happening.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  "But it is true that the suburbs are unsustainable, barring the invention of Mr. Fusion or similar." Nuclear should be pretty cheap once we are forced to stop building reactors as unique works of art, and stop powering them with one-time-use fuel elements.
synnik 15y ago
But suburbs are also taking themselves back. Many suburbs have been working to bring the jobs (and taxes) back into themselves. They also have their own utilities and water supplies, and clearly the shopping is there. The biggest gap is food, and cities aren't going to fare any better than suburbs if our transportation industry gets disrupted.
joshuaheard 15y ago
Governments don't have money for infrastructure any more because, since the '60s, they have been spending this money on social programs.
0xB33F 15y ago
Can I get a raise of hands from those people who have a mortgage and actually support this?

174 points by hammerdr 15y ago

By this definition, any real estate is a "giant Ponzi scheme," since it depends on people after you buying the asset. Cities are great, but suburbs have their place (in large part because of a) building codes that prevent tall buildings and b) how schools are funded), which the author gets to some extent. If you're interested in the issue, try Edward Glaeser's book The Triumph of the City: http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/159420277X?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health... .

jfruh 15y ago
Bulding codes that prevent tall buildings are an asset particulary if you make money from selling petroleum, as they make it difficult to build walkable neighborhoods.
- wallflower 15y ago
  As someone who lived in a suburb and tried going without a car for a (short) while, it is near impossible to get around. Biking on busy 35mph four lane streets where bored suburbanites go 50mph with no median is a prescription for death by invisibility. I had to double my short-lived bike commute to take advantage of back roads (which was even scarier because bored high schoolers barreling down the hill don't expect you). Taking the bus to a destination (if it is even possible) can be a maddening version of real-life Candy Land in which you loop around and around and double-back and eventually reach point B. Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis style layout of suburban enclaves make public transportation a virtual no-go as the shortest-path distance from point A to point B is impossible as it would require jumping fences or at the least, going through people's sacrosant backyards. Bottom line, in the suburbs you need a car to live - to go grocery shopping, to go to Applebee's to meet your friends and carry that annoying table buzzer around like an embarassing vibrator while you wait for your table, to go to the Multiplex, to go park in the deadly silent except for lawn mowers parking lot of your rental apartment megaplex, and (most importantly) to go to the closest major city to escape the burbs for real nightlife. But, witness the explosion in mega corporate office parks, and realize that the growth was because not everyone wants to live in a city - especially once you have kids. Companies built office parks because that is where their employees wanted to live. Or was it a chicken-before-the-egg issue?
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Yeah, what is up with that "Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis" layout going on? It's maddening!
    - tkaemming 15y ago
      It's easier to ensure that you live on a "quiet street" when the street doesn't go anywhere.
      - qjz 15y ago
        Although I can't cite any offhand, studies indicated that there was significantly less crime in such areas, as well.
    - techsupporter 15y ago
      It's because the market (that is, home buyers) don't want to live on streets that can be used as cut-throughs to get to other places. As traffic density increases, drivers will try to find shorter or less-congested routes to get where they want to go. The street on which I live (in an area built approximately 30 years ago) is an example of this: it is a wide two-lane street that connects two major roadways. There are other, non-residential streets that connect these same roadways but those routes are clogged most of the time. Therefore, people use my street with all of its attendant problems such as speeding, extremely loud exhaust and/or sound systems, not watching for people walking or biking, etc. So, non-connecting streets became the popular thing to do, along with curving streets to force drivers to slow down.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        This design, by the way, isn't just some evil plot by the Robert Moses's and Henry Fords of the world; it's an idiom endorsed by Christopher Alexander in _A Pattern Language_.
        qjz 15y ago

cantbecool 15y ago

Why didn't you link to the original source? http://www.grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are-a-giant-ponzi-scheme http://www.grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-...

hammerdr 15y ago
Because the attribution in the article wasn't nearly visible enough. Sorry about that!
- cantbecool 15y ago
  Good point, the contrast between link and text was subtle at best.

pnathan 15y ago

I expected this article to be much more inflammatory and generally wharrgharbl than it turned out to be. But I hate suburbs, personally, so my opinion might be biased. edit: a few more thoughts. I live in a fairly 'typical' US smaller town (not a small town). Here, new houses are jammed on their 1/2 acre with a minimal back yard, row after row after row of them. They are made poorly and there are no trees lining the streets. Streets curve round and round, making it difficult to travel from place to place. New apartment buildings follow a similar fashion, but are very small: suitable for student roommates in size, not suitable for more than two-three single people living together (or a married couple). Contrast this with the older downtown, where houses are somewhat original, trees are planted (leading to shady sidewalks), and the streets are straight, leading to easy travel. I was thinking about this on a recent trip to Seattle's downtown. There, not only are there trees and original buildings, but the businesses as housing are intermingled, plus they go up, allowing a much greater compaction of space. I would believe there is quite a nice economy of infrastructure scale going on there. Further, it is not like you have to travel between Zones to go shopping or go out to eat: you wander on down half a block, and you're there. Both my town's downtown and downtown Seattle present a much nicer experience than the row housing suburban monotony.

aaronbrethorst 15y ago
I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, a fairly dense neighborhood just east of downtown. I can walk to no less than two supermarkets, one Trader Joe's, and one food co-op. My job is a ten minute walk on foot. I am surrounded by terrific restaurants and bars. I actually get irritated when I'm required to get into my car to go somewhere now. When I first moved to the Seattle area, I lived in Microsoft corporate housing in Redmond, a smaller suburb about 12 miles east of Seattle. The area felt depressing, isolated and uninhabited most weekends.
- wooster 15y ago
  I spent a month in Seattle this spring (coming back in July for a bit), and I can confirm this. Queen Anne Hill is also really walkable. Two grocery stores, loads of coffee shops, restaurants, etc within a 5 minute walk on Queen Anne, plus an easy walk to downtown, Fremont, or Capitol Hill. Such a wonderful city. Of course, if you tell most Seattle-ites that you walked from, say, Queen Anne to Paseo in Fremont, you'll get weird looks.

qjz 15y ago

Buried in the hyperbole is this nugget of truth: It is only the last two generations that we have scaled places to the automobile. City, suburb, whatever the residential setting, this is the true enemy of creating a network of livable communities. Any jogger, cyclist or volksmarcher can tell you that a continuous green ribbon connecting communities enhances the quality of life many times over. It's a crime that road/highway development rarely takes this into consideration, especially when some of the nicest trails I ride go alongside or beneath some of the busiest roads in my metropolitan area. A well-planned paved trail can can offer a cycling commute comparable to that of an automobile (sometimes even shorter), only far more pleasant and healthier. Unfortunately, sharing the road with cars in any metropolitan or suburban area is a life-threatening experience.

necubi 15y ago
I have trouble believing that simply making cycling more attractive will be enough to deal with the massive transportation problems that suburbs (and more so exurbs) create. No matter how nice the trails are, most people will not communicate by bike or walking. The solution is to pack people more densely in mixed-use communities. Ideally most people would have their necessities within walking distance (grocery store, drug store, restaurants, movie theatre, bank, etc.) and public transportation to everything else, including work. Both of these goals can only be implemented affordably if population densities are high.
- qjz 15y ago
  Experience tells me you're wrong. I know people who walked one block to work every day of their lives, only to be critically injured by passing cars or trucks. I know plenty of of cyclists injured by buses pulling over to pick up passengers, or even by parked cars suddenly opening doors. Population density does not protect you from motor vehicle traffic density. Even bike lanes are dangerous when the only barrier is a line of paint. There is no reason pedestrians or cyclists need to be anywhere near motor vehicle traffic. Once this becomes a principle of residential planning, communities become far more liveable.
  - 15y ago

gnubardt 15y ago

The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a fantastic biography of Robert Moses, the person who set the template for this kind of development. Though in power in New York, the projects he built (highways, parks, bridges, public housing) was at a scale never seem before him. He figured out how to cut through municipal red tape to build at a large scale using public money. Not that he wasn't a terrible person. But he wrote the rules that allowed a lot of this kind of development to happen.

athst 15y ago

We really need to stop calling everything a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a very specific thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme Adding that label to everything you think is bad cheapens both the meaning and the point you're trying to get across.

near_acorn 15y ago
It isn't being applied to "everything [people] think is bad"; it is being applied to situations where the form "bad" takes is a reliance on continuous growth/investment/new-rubes to prevent collapse/disaster. It may cheapen the technical use of the term, but it most certainly conveys "the point [people are] trying to get across". Apparently, people find that of more general use than preserving a term-of-art of limited audience.
- bonzoesc 15y ago
  Why not use "unsustainable" instead of "Ponzi scheme?"
  - near_acorn 15y ago
    I think people are emphasizing the peculiar relationship between investment/growth and staving off disaster. Oil is "unsustainable" it is not a Ponzi scheme (in the popular sense) because if people doubled the amount of oil they bought this year this would, in general, bring the endgame closer and not further.

grandalf 15y ago

In a sense, America is a giant Ponzi scheme. We're in the middle of a long, slow currency bubble and drenched in the spoils of centuries of imperial expansion... at present, the average American adult works less than four hours per day and has inferior work ethic and basic education than an increasing percentage of the citizens of the third world, most of whom are ruled by corrupt despots installed by the US.

william42 15y ago
Where'd you get this «less than four hours per day» thing?
- grandalf 15y ago
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/americans-work-less-than-four-hours_n_884037.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/americans-work-less...
  - mmatants 15y ago
    The "four hours a day" figure cannot be construed as evidence of laziness. The article states that that average includes the unemployed or part-time workers. In fact, same article mentions a 7.5 hour average when only working days are counted.
  - m3koval 15y ago
    That's four hours per day averaged over the entire study. These statistics are more telling: "Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More hours were worked, on average, on weekdays than on weekend days--7.9 hours compared with 5.5 hours." This about matches what you would expect for full-time employees. I'm not sure how this can be construed as laziness. In fact, there are several studies that show the exact opposite: Americans working more hours than most other first-world countries. I do not have links handy, but I believe one was posted on HN a few months ago. Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

mkelly 15y ago

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but I'd be much more interested to read some research on this topic than a bunch of unsourced opinion. To make a claim like this you need some hard numbers, in my opinion.

angdis 15y ago

The damming problem is that not very many Americans are aware that there are other ways to live besides suburbs where all work-commutes require driving, every trip to the grocery store-- driving, everytime you take your kid to school-- driving, soccer practice-- driving, shopping/sports/gym/entertainment/socializing-- driving, civic participation (if you even have time left)-- driving. All these different destinations have been spread-out, miles apart, often because of zoning requirements. This has been going on for so long that people have forgotten that in the past, many families didn't even have cars and all these destinations were within WALKING DISTANCE (or a street-car trip away). And yet, people had lives that were just as fulfilling, perhaps more so than they are today. As the "New Urbanist" movement has been painstakingly re-discovering, communities do need to have "a center" to them. In America, these were called "main street" in Europe it is "the square". Whatever it is called, the idea is to have worthwhile destinations that are short distances away from where many people actually live. This creates environments that people care about and grow to love and that serve their needs much better than forgettable box stores surrounded by oceans of asphalt parking lots,

sumeetjain 15y ago
If you liked that comment, you'll love this TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
qjz 15y ago
Traffic density is the real problem. Main street still exists, but crossing it is a game of Frogger.
ianb 15y ago
First, there is no confirmation that people's lives were just as fulfilling before the development of now-modern US communities. There is evidence that people did not like their living situation, and pursued other living situations. That's how this all happened. There are storylines that assume that all those people are stupid rubes conned into something they didn't really want, but I find those offensive to my democratic sensibilities. Well... it'd be okay if they were offensive, but they also are far-fetched. But more important right now: we can't just undo this. Metropolitan areas have become much larger than they were before, and you can't squeeze all that development into old boundaries or even old forms. There can't be one center to a metropolitan area. And even the idea of local centers supposes that there are no useful decisions to make, that all providers of a service are equivalent except for their location. There will be a Catholic church in your neighborhood, but will there be a Baha'i temple? Can you get your kid to the daycare you want, then get yourself to the job you want, and get home, and have your partner do much the same, all within your local center or the limited mass transit connections you might find between centers? Is the entire concept of Costco wrong? Because there can't be Costco without decentralized multi-use transportation methods. There's lots of smaller (single-center) towns with a nice downtown, and a crappy strip area elsewhere. In those towns everyone shops in the crappy strip, because they want a nice big grocery store with good prices, and you just don't get that with a local/small grocery store. And businesses that provide real value want to build new buildings, and it's damn hard to build the right building in built-up cores. Maybe resolvable, but it's hard, and regressing to older forms won't do it.

cageface 15y ago

I'm beginning to think that the term "Ponzi scheme" is a semantic Ponzi scheme.

aj700 15y ago

I already knew this. This is why Europe will continue to do well whatever the oil price. Most cities are still built around public transport. The UK and some others are not. When nobody can afford to commute from their homes to their work, and there is no alternative, Roger Rabbit will seem bitterly unfunny.

arethuza 15y ago
There are certainly cities in the UK that still depend on public transport far more than cars - I live in one: Edinburgh. I work in an office right in the center of Edinburgh and of the thirty odd people here nobody drives to the office - most take the train, some take the bus and a few (including me) walk.
- justincormack 15y ago
  And London too, which manages half the bus trips in the UK, among other things.

raganwald 15y ago

The End of Suburbia is a rabidly biased documentary that takes another perspective on why the suburbs will fail, the cost of oil: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/ And in free as in beer, glorious 240p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug It's entertaining and, IMO, well worth watching even if you disagree with some of the people they interview or prefer your documentaries balanced and dispassionate. You're sure to come away from the movie feeling you know more about the history of the relationship between the automobile and the suburbs.

jseliger 15y ago
"The End of Suburbia is a rabidly biased documentary that takes another perspective on why the suburbs will fail, the cost of oil:" I dislike the suburbs as much as the next wannabe new urbanist type, but a) given development patterns of the last 70 years, it's hard to see anything happening to suburbs save on the same timescale and b) hybrid and/or electric cars will replace gas-powered ones if the price of oil rises high enough. Sure, the (current) higher stick price of hybrid / electric cars means that cities will become more attractive at the margin, but given how easy the substitutes are, I think electric cars (and the infrastructure necessary to run them) are now advanced enough to ensure that oil prices alone won't damn suburbs.
- raganwald 15y ago
  There's actually a section in the movie on the subject of electricity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&t=16m15s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&t=16m15s And later on they discuss hybrids and electric cars specifically. But to be clear, I don't recommend the movie because it's right, but because it asks interesting questions and leads you to think about interesting possibilities. We use a lot of energy. If we're going to replace the energy from fossil fuels with energy from electricity, we are going to need a lot more capacity than we have today. And as you can see from recent news, doubling or trebling our capacity is no small feat.

xxpor 15y ago

There is no better place to see this than Cleveland. Especially because it's all starting to bite them in the behind. People in the suburbs depend on the main city to be the heart of the region. But, almost everyone with a family who possibly could has moved out to the suburbs, even ones that are only marginally better (Warrensville Heights, North Randell). This has caused a HUGE loss of tax base, even larger than the numbers would suggest (Cleveland has 50% of the population it did in 1960), because the populace is significantly poorer. Now, there are water mains breaking all the time, gas lines that are leaking, the roads that are down to the brick under layer that they were built on, many, many abandoned buildings that are a concentrator of crime and cost. For example, a former clothing factory on E 55th caught fire this past week. It's been abandoned since 1992, so the city hasn't gotten any tax from it since then. Crime is really bad, especially on the east side. People in the suburbs resent giving the city any money, because everyone in the city to them is stupid and lazy, and their taxes are really high already. And now the people are starting to move even farther out to Medina, Geauga and Lorain counties, and complain the taxes are even higher. It's ridiculous. Unfortunately, I really don't see this changing anytime soon, due to the way schools are funded though local property taxes.

knowtheory 15y ago
Why would Cleveland be the best place to see this? Wouldn't Detroit be better? Detroit has already collapsed, and is well into a long contractionary period. Local government (sans Kwame) have basically said "well we gotta get used to a smaller tax base and scale back". Oh, and i absolutely agree on Ohio's school system being totally batshit (Michigan's too). The fact that state funding for the Ohio public schools was declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, and then the state government just simply did nothing is a fucking outrage. To this day, nothing has been done to fix the fundamental injustices of Ohio's schools (rich suburbs can afford rich public schools, and poor towns get nothing. Not even intact school buildings).
- xxpor 15y ago
  You're right Detroit might be better. I'm just more familiar with Cleveland, and was using it more as a figure of speech. And too be fair, Cleveland is collapsing almost as fast as Detroit, save for Downtown, Tremont, and the Gordon Sq. area. Edit: And possibly UC, but that's still debatable. It's certainly not falling as fast as the surrounding neighborhoods, that's for sure. But there are also 5+ police departments patrolling to try and keep the riff raff out.

daemin 15y ago

There was an awesome talk by an architect Jan Gehl that I managed to catch (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/06/21/3248796.htm http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/06/21/3248796...) talking about how new development projects have been built to look good from the Plane and Helicopter perspectives (from 5000feet/metres and rooftop/helicopter) while completely ignoring the street level at which most people operate on. While the talk was more about large building projects, in the second half he does talk about how Copenhagen has transformed itself into a more bike and people friendly environment. More specifically he details how people's behaviour has changed in response to the different environmen, where walking and riding has been made more accessible and safer (for instance bike lanes on the inside of parked cars, so the cars protect the bike lane from the street), more people end up walking and riding. Now suburbia has pretty much been designed for cars rather than people, and as such it is no real wonder that you have to drive everywhere rather than cycling or walking. It should be possible to change this suburbia to something less car friendly, perhaps in cities like Detroit and others, which are in the process of removing suburbs entirely (or so I have read), so that people's behaviour changes. However I don't see this happening easily in the USA. People will relinquish their suburbs, cars, SUV's only when pried from their cold dead hands.

StephenFalken 15y ago

I guess some people have found more sustainable healthier ways of living inside a city: "Bicycle Rush Hour Utrecht (Netherlands) III" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M

usaar333 15y ago
Flat land helps; see Davis, CA. Now try that in wide swaths of San Francisco: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22nd+st+and+rhode+island+&hl=en&ll=37.75426,-122.401578&spn=0.009857,0.01929&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=40.052282,79.013672&z=16&layer=c&cbll=37.753334,-122.401107&panoid=mCWNoN_KpD5p3WE9NygDDQ&cbp=12,339.65,,0,0.5 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22nd+st+and+rhode+island+&...

pash 15y ago

The author's vague assertions that suburban development in America represents an enormous unfunded liability are supported in part by a considerable body of recent research suggesting that suburban lifestyles are far less efficient than their urban analogues. To get you started, Geoffrey West, one of those physicists at the Santa Fe Institute who stick their noses into everything but physics, does a schtick introducing the idea of power-law scaling in urban agglomerations that you can find in various versions on YouTube [1]. An easy-reading overview of the same idea is Luis Bettencourt's paper with West, recently published in Nature, which points out that "doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations. This systematic 15% savings happens because, in general, creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places." The already classic reference is their 2007 paper in PNAS [3]. But the power-law approach ignores the true city-suburb distinction by focusing solely on size. (Suburbs are not small cities.) Edward Glaeser, a top urban economist, and Matthew Kahn recently did a panel study of geographic greenhouse gas emissions that includes a direct comparison of cities to their suburbs [4]. They found that suburban household emissions are higher than those of city households, usually substantially, in 48 of the 50 largest American metros. (See Table 5 for the money-stats.) The methodology reveals a wide urban-suburban disparity in energy-efficiency that I imagine is mirrored in the efficiency of use of many other resources. (Next up, someone needs to integrate these approaches by comparing urban and suburban power-law residuals [5].) None of this bears directly on the author's point in the linked article, but it does suggests that suburban development is a poor investment if an urban option exists. 1. A recent (and short) version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA 2. http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%202010/Nature_Cities.pdf http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%2020... [PDF] 3. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html [embedded PDF] 4. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/file/pdfs/centers-programs/centers/taubman/working_papers/glaeser_08_greencities.pdf http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/fi... [PDF] 5. The residual approach is presented in another recent paper by Bettencourt, West, and crew: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013541 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

skybrian 15y ago

There must be a corrolary to Godwin's law that says any financial system will eventually be compared to a giant Ponzi scheme. New metaphor, please!

alanh 15y ago

Off-topic, but what is up with the font size changing seemingly at random?

swaits 15y ago
Bugged me too. I quickly gave up trying to read it.

awakeasleep 15y ago

Hacker News Memes: _________ Considered Harmful _________ Is a Ponzi Scheme I don't know why those phrases resonate here, but throw in some nouns and half an hour writing, and you can say hi to the front page.

zacharypinter 15y ago
Don't forget this one :) _________ Bitcoin _________

yason 15y ago

It's not really a problem as far as suburbs go: those who want can certainly live there as long as they consider them fit. If suburbia is a bubble, it'll come down crashing eventually. If there's something to change with regard to the suburbs is that we should distribute the costs of living in a suburbs vs cities fairly. That is suburbanites should be paying much larger portion of the costs of public infrastructure and roads that stretch dozens of miles out to the countryside and are of no use except for suburbanites themselves. However, there's a much more serious problem related to the effects of suburbia. The fundamentals of current city planning and urban design, largely borrowed from the Garden City utopia, for the suburbia are so detached from the reality of urban development in cities that the greatest danger is in blindly applying these incompatible principles to the urban environment and, in effect of doing so, crippling the real fundamentals that actually govern a vibrant city life. We are killing the whatever health our cities might still possess by making them more fit for automobiles, segregating different uses into different zones, and doing huge disruptive redevelopment projects that wipe out and reset to zero big parts of city neighbourhoods. The result from this is be the devastation of cities by applying governance and design principles incompatible with city development--which has already been going on for decades--which effectively leaves people only the suburbia. Such a monotonous development is bad for the survival in general as is anything that lacks diversity. Think of Windows viruses versus virii for other platforms. Such a big disruption that could wipe out suburbia for anybody but the richest of the people is the rising of the price of oil. The oil price has already reached levels where daily automobile commuting from the farthest backwaters of suburbia becomes an actual economic obstacle. If, or when, suburbia fails, I'd like that we would still have cities where to retreat.

api 15y ago

Ponzi scheme is wrong-- a Ponzi scheme is a specific thing. But it is true that the suburbs are unsustainable, barring the invention of Mr. Fusion or similar. When cheap oil is gone, the suburbs are gone. Oh there are replacements, but none of the replacements can deliver at scale at a cost cheap enough to keep the suburbs going. The suburbs don't just require oil... they require very very cheap oil. Otherwise they are simply not economical. Electric cars are feasible, but they're going to need a lot of extra grid capacity. Keep in mind that after oil peaks gas and coal will peak too, and keeping the grid up and growing capacity in the post-fossil-fuel age is going to be a major undertaking requiring the full development of pretty much every post-fossil-fuel energy source: gen-IV nuclear, wind, solar, etc. All that adds up to cost... which brings us back around to the original point: it's not going to be cheap. Thus, the suburbs won't be economical. It will be cheaper to just abandon the suburbs and save the energy than to support them. The suburbs will be the slums of the future. You can already see this happening.

Daniel_Newby 15y ago
"But it is true that the suburbs are unsustainable, barring the invention of Mr. Fusion or similar." Nuclear should be pretty cheap once we are forced to stop building reactors as unique works of art, and stop powering them with one-time-use fuel elements.

synnik 15y ago

But suburbs are also taking themselves back. Many suburbs have been working to bring the jobs (and taxes) back into themselves. They also have their own utilities and water supplies, and clearly the shopping is there. The biggest gap is food, and cities aren't going to fare any better than suburbs if our transportation industry gets disrupted.

joshuaheard 15y ago

Governments don't have money for infrastructure any more because, since the '60s, they have been spending this money on social programs.

0xB33F 15y ago

Can I get a raise of hands from those people who have a mortgage and actually support this?