9 ms·

We’re a Suburban Nation. We Need to Get Used to It

pope_meat 5y ago
The suburbs are economically unsustainable. Nobody wants to pay to redo the roads and pipes, but everybody wants to live with a private backyard. Perhaps we should make it so that you have to make it self sustainable, dirt roads, septic tanks, wells, and producing your own electricity.
- nickff 5y ago
  The USA has been a suburban nation for quite a while now, and previous generations paid to lay down the roads and pipes. The interesting question is why poorer people with relatively crude technology were able to create this infrastructure, but we can no longer afford to maintain it. Infrastructure budgets have increased (in per-capita and inflation-adjusted terms), but our maintenance capacity has decreased; the question is why?
  - alamortsubite 5y ago
    https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
    - nickff 5y ago
      That makes sense if you only look at the municipal level, but it seems like citizens are not getting much per their 'transportation buck'; i.e. they pay a lot of money to multiple levels of government, and those governments are not able to deliver much value per dollar.
      - lumost 5y ago
        A useful term is “endemic corruption”. We like to think of corruption as illegal activity like kickbacks, and bribes. However there is also corruption where everyone pads the estimates a bit, everyone makes things a bit harder than they should be, and tons of “make work” to keep all the jobs created for forgotten purposes busy. Real reform will be hard.
    - not-my-account 5y ago
      Or for a video version, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
  - wishinghand 5y ago
    Policy makers don’t raise enough taxes for pay for it.
    - nickff 5y ago
      But taxes were lower in the past! That's the interesting part; everyone is paying more, but we can't afford as much.
      - solarmist 5y ago
        Were they? I'm pretty sure taxes have been going down for decades.
        nickff 5y ago
        Rates have gone up and down (down overall at the federal level), but inflation-adjusted revenue is way up, and spending has increased even more than that.[1] [1] https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax-revenue-capita-increased-54-1980-adjusting-inflation https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax...
        hcurtiss 5y ago
        And property taxes and fuel taxes, which pay for most of the stuff under consideration, have only gone up. In some cases, way up.
        acdha 5y ago
        I grew up in California. You could see when Prop 13 capped property taxes in things like schools or libraries: everything built before it was nice but falling apart, everything built after it was designed to be cheap to build. They could try to bridge the gap with bonds but that was unreliable.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    Isn't maintenance capacity linked to taxes, which have been decreasing in the US for decades (or so I hear) ? Also: manufacturing moved out of the US so everyone can buy off-the-shelf Asian parts and products so more money is left in people's pocket but that money ultimately goes to landlords who can raise prices ? I am really stupid with economy stuff but I have the strong feeling that we - in the west - are living off of cheap credits and cheap debt and it gives the illusion of being rich because we can buy obligations and financial products and balance spreadsheets between tax-payer's money and private sectors and welfare states and debt payments, etc. but at the end of the day when we need to work on our infrastructure our money is not worth the paper it's printed on since our workers and our tools are not up to the task or we need to pay a huge premium to get some quality work ? Something like that... Edit:grammar, spelling
    - nickff 5y ago
      >" Isn't maintenance capacity linked to taxes, which have been decreasing in the US for decades (or so I hear) ? Also: manufacturing moved out of the US so everyone can buy off shelf Asian parts and products so more money is left in people's pocket and that money ultimately go to landlords who can raise prices ?" From another of my comments: Rates have gone up and down (down overall at the federal level), but inflation-adjusted revenue is way up, and spending has increased even more than that.[1] >"I am really stupid with economy stuff but I have the strong feeling that we - in the west - are living off of cheap credits and cheap debt and it gives the illusion of being rich because we can buy obligations and financial products and balance spreadsheets between tax-payer's money and private sectors and welfare states and debt payments etc. but at the end of the day when we need to work on our infrastructure our money is not worth the paper it's written with since our workers and our tools are not up to the task or we need to pay a huge premium to get some quality work ? Something like that. " I don't think you're stupid at all; the reduction in purchasing power are complex and hard to measure. [1] https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax...
    - clove 5y ago
      The US dollar is in high demand internationally. The fact that it is the world's reserve currency will ensure that "our money is not worth the paper it's written with" remains false. The US trade deficit allows for nations with trade surpluses (e.g., China, Russia, Holland) to acquire USD while Americans acquire products and services. Landlords raising prices has less to do with the issue of forex and more to do with the housing market and inflation.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Income inequality squeezing the bottom of the tax base? The money was much more evenly distributed then.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Don't think of it as our maintenance capacity decreasing. Think of it as many more maintenance "requirements" having been added.
  - syntheweave 5y ago
    Demographics + relative labor costs account for infrastructure's cost suddenly rising in the developed world. "Baumol's Cost Disease" plays some role, but I believe a full narrative is in order. With a rapidly rising population and high immigration, the early 20th century US had a pool of cheap labor at the ready. The "cost/benefit of a life" was assumed lower because mortality was higher, i.e. assumed optimal societal use was to break a body with labor before disease took them. Grooming them for the professions would be a waste. Cities were relatively smaller but more crowded, with lower standards of living. This changed by mid-century. Mortality was now down to historic lows which made the post-war baby boom have a uniquely lasting impact. A generation with expectations of long life now faces the prospect of "retiring well", which pushes them to focus on education and career and demand higher margins of safety in their everyday lives. This creates an inflection in the early 1970's - the same one everyone has remarked upon in finance, culture, and politics - as the boom generation reaches working age and floods into the markets, looking for jobs and assets. This allows the suburbs to continue to boom: the marginal cost of adding another subdivision is low, and the technical foundation is established. Then fast forward 30 years, and you have a new large generation of working age, but the world isn't being built out to accommodate them. Cities have gone from disinvested to overpriced. The trades are now in neglect because of a new bias towards academics. They graduate into job and asset markets that are locked up by older cohorts who enjoy the benefits of still being alive and able to work at advanced age. This is the Millennial's dilemma: They have been groomed for jobs they can't access, and there's no war or other crisis that would let them be utilized. Infrastructure is something they could work on, but the political system biases towards pleasing earlier cohorts, who will interfere with any change to the arrangement, which they are now fully invested in (in all senses of the word). The costs of changing anything spiral out of control, the politics compounded by the fact that there's been a lot of productivity improvement in information and finance, but little in physical assets. If 20 guys slinging code contain more speculative value than 20 guys swinging hammers, you'll see a lot of investment in code and not hammers - and that gives you cost disease. The high price of infrastructure is in part reflective of an uncorrected disinterest. It's irrational exuberance, but the other way around: nobody wants to pay for quality when there is "something better to do," so every project that needs it is a special case deserving a high price tag. Thus, deferred maintenance becomes the norm and stays that way until - just recently - mortality finally starts taking its course, the grip of the Boomers starts to slip, and the bills come due. The "Great Resignation" is in large part a reshuffling of jobs and assets preceded by the demographic changes and then catalyzed by the pandemic crisis, which is going to change the infrastructure investment climate towards a new equilibrium going forwards - even though the Biden infrastructure package has been cut, the trend of disinvestment has reversed. There is a lot of interest in the future of construction right now, and in new technologies that don't just change the products, but also make construction jobs better, safer, and more productive - e.g. two people building a house rather than a crew of 10. And there is a market that will still likely bias suburban, but is ready to see a slightly denser built environment with lower car dependency. Our ideal goal is "denser yet less crowded" - crowds are a combination of people needing to travel to destinations (suddenly in decline with WFH) and the travel being space-and-time inefficient(big cars travelling long distances versus short walks). Do some "road diets", allow some fourplex lots and ADUs, and install some walkable retail - and you'll have the suburbs of the future.
- starkd 5y ago
  City life quickly becomes mundane and tiresome. People need suburbs for a place to go to get away from the craziness in the city.
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    How can city life be both mundane and craziness?
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      Really loud white noise.
      - jehb 5y ago
        I can't tell if you're joking, but your name kind of checks out.
  - II2II 5y ago
    Different people have different expectations of their environment and those expectations are likely to change throughout their life, but blanket statements like "people need suburbs" is a bit much. Personally, I think they're the worse of all worlds. Suburbs combine the worse aspects of urban life and the worse aspects of rural life, then try to present themselves as some sort of idyllic compromise. I'm going to make a claim that you'll probably think is absurd: there is far more in common between a small town and a big city than there is between a small town and the suburbs. A small town and a big city are places where people live. People know each other because they see each other on the street as they go to work or get groceries. They meet each other in local businesses or community centres. Suburbs are simply places where people have their homes. Everything else takes place elsewhere. People are unlikely to know someone a block or two over, unless their kids go to the same school, simply because they never encounter each other on the streets and their lives are completely divergent outside of their (so called) community.
- mr_cyborg 5y ago
  Counterpoint: The town I grew up in just turned 400 years old. Things haven’t always been perfect but it seems pretty self-sustaining at this point.
  - alamortsubite 5y ago
    Your hometown is probably a pretty cool place. The article, though, discusses car-centric sprawling American suburbia, which post-dates WWII and society's mass adoption of the automobile. It's not cool.
    - nsxwolf 5y ago
      In not very long WWII will be a century behind us.
- true_religion 5y ago
  > Perhaps we should make it so that you have to make it self sustainable, dirt roads, septic tanks, wells, and producing your own electricity. With the exception of producing your own electricity and roads, that's how many (most?) of the suburbs in Virginia are. However, if you do that then the average plot size usually goes up since septic installations need unused field space for drainage, and wells need a separate arera to draw from. Roads can be private, but it mostly doesn't make sense to me since USPS and county services need to use the road as well. I'm not really sure why some roads are private and some aren't, but many neighborhoods with private roads will just use gravel or dirt to save costs. Electricity, at least in my area, is hydro so that's as sustainable as the water cycle and since the river is within spitting distance, I doubt the cost of the powerlines is a real burden.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Not just that, but the towns where every house is an AirBNB or rental won’t even have voices that care to speak about the problems until it’s too late.
- flomo 5y ago
  I believe this to be complete bullshit, and the infrastructure deficit is far worse in large cities which supposedly have the population density to pay for it. Look at NYC: everything outside of central Manhattan seems like it's about to collapse. San Francisco is billions in the hole for maintaining the water system and so on. It seems to be mostly wishful thinking that the suburbs will go bankrupt to due to routine maintenance. (It is a problem in more sprawled-out exurbs to be sure.)
  - menomatter 5y ago
    I wonder if this has to do with they way taxes are spend. Does NYC generated taxes get spent on NYC? Or at least a decent percentage of it?
    - flomo 5y ago
      I can say that San Francisco has an enormous tax base and budget, but most money goes to social services (and corruption) because piers and pipes don't vote.
  - onecommentman 5y ago
    Just a note: NYC + San Francisco <<< the United States. Most Expansive Definition of Population (TriState + Bay Area) — 28M Just the Population (USA) — 330M Most Expansive Definition of Land area (TriState + Bay Area) — 11K sq mi Just the Land area (USA) — 4000K sq mi A common bias for non-US folks is to put too much focus on “the biggest” US urban center. For England, 20% of the population lives in “greater London”. For France, 15% live in the Paris unité urbaine. It’s different in the US. The population of NYC is almost a rounding error in the total US population (~3%). The population of the NYC “Tri-State” area, in its most expansive definition, is ~6%. They are also the only folks who think NYC is any sort of unique cultural lead for the US. The population of San Francisco actually is a rounding error for the total US population. The whole Bay Area is bigger, but only at about ~2% of the US population. And again, they are the only folks who think San Francisco is a unique cultural lead. Both urban regions are actual rounding errors when it comes to US land area. And divide by a factor of 10 when discussing the dense urban core of NYC or San Francisco, which is what some folks rant about. Just move the decimal point over one to the left. Yes, they are that small. So don’t read too much into these sorts of (NYC+SF) discussions as a barometric reading on the entire US.
gfxgirl 5y ago
I've started to drink the kool-aide watching YouTube channels like "Not Just Bikes". But then I start watching other YouTube channels like Veratsium, ElectricBoom, Xyla Fox, Physics Girl, and others where it's clear they live in large house (may or may not be the suburbs). This large house gives them room for the workshop, garage for machinery, etc.... space that I would not have living in the city. Maybe that's ok but it's hard to give up that dream
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  There are shared garage/workshop areas that make way more sense in equipment utilization than building a shop for every person.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    Everyone owning their own car or bike doesn't make much sense either from a resource utilization standpoint either, but given the choice...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      Sharing would be _preferable_ by choice, since you could make one-way trips, but given the coordination problem...
  - driscoll42 5y ago
    Sure... but then you also need to make sure you are close to them. I used to belong to a hackerspace, but it was a 30-45 minute bus/bike ride from my place and eventually quit. It was and is a great resource, but nothing beats just walking into your garage/basement to do the work you want.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
eatonphil 5y ago
Great point that it's unlikely for the US to become significantly more urban such that public transportation takes over car reliance (although that would be great). More walkable small cities/towns would be extremely welcome! I don't enjoy living where I can't walk for coffee and groceries. But I'd love a cheaper cost of living.
elzbardico 5y ago
The American suburb is not that different from the Latin American barrio. The lack of commerce and services is the biggest difference
- t-writescode 5y ago
  That’s … basically the defining feature of why I personally hate suburbs and want mixed residential / commercial. I want to walk to the grocery store and diners.
- AuthorizedCust 5y ago
  In the US, commerce and services are easily available to those with cars.
_peeley 5y ago
The article mentions electric vehicles several times as a panacea for suburbanism, but I think a lot of people fail to realize just how _miserable_ owning and commuting in a car is. I spend half an hour every morning and evening alternating between white-knuckling the steering wheel on the freeway while fearing for my life and being stuck in traffic on some God-forsaken stroad[0]. My daily routine would be unimaginably more enjoyable if I could step out of my front door and simply walk to the places I need to go, or take (reliable) public transportation. Because the only affordable housing in my area is in single-family housing developments accessible only via the nearest freeway exit, walking would be suicide and there's not enough density for actual public transportation to be efficient/financially feasible. [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-...
- syki 5y ago
  When I first came to the U.S. it was shocking how spread out everything is. Each store is an island surround by a concrete lake of parking. It’s absurd. Americans mostly don’t understand what they are missing. We have criminalized aspects of walking. Congregating in groups outside is frowned upon and likely to garner harassment by police. We are a nation of people using cars to go from one building to another while spending as little time as possible outside. https://www.illinoislawreview.org/print/vol-2017-no-3/the-criminalization-of-walking/ https://www.illinoislawreview.org/print/vol-2017-no-3/the-cr...
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    > Congregating in groups outside is frowned upon and likely to garner harassment by police Making it that much worse -- there are no public indoor spaces but libraries.
- rektide 5y ago
  a town that runs it's own automated ride share would be my suburban near-sci-fi go to. personally i love cities & biking, but a safe, coordinated, available, municipal, semi-personal/pooled or personal ride hail system operated as a not-for-profit utility would be such a neat virtue, such a way to make the distance not count for as much.
halpert 5y ago
It can be valuable to take a step back sometimes and evaluate whether or not you’re strategy is appropriate for the army you have or the army you want. Yes, old world metropolitan areas are wonderful, but it’s not realistic to assume the US has the political will to build like that. A better strategy would be to figure out how to make suburbs work in a better, more efficient and convenient manner.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  I like the spirit implied here, but I think endless suburbs are fundamentally broken and I don't think they can be made "more efficient / convenient" in a meaningful way - and, when they do become "more efficient / convenient", they just become mixed commercial / residential, which I find to be the best format, personally.
  - AuthorizedCust 5y ago
    “fundamentally broken”? How?
    - t-writescode 5y ago
      Commuting. Suburbs are, generally, huge collections of roads that are ready for children to play on, so they're going to be relatively narrow roads, like 2-2.5 cars wide. You have that kind of roadwork for multiple square miles. All those people need to go to and from work, and so that's increased traffic. The larger the suburb, the further people need to go to get food, the longer they'll be on the road, the more cars will be on the road concurrently (most traffic in long commute times is going the whole length of the slow commute time because everyone lives further away)
    - sofixa 5y ago
      Check out Strong Towns or NotJustBikes's YouTube playlist on Strong Towns. They're unsustainable financially and have a myriad of serious problems.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
jeffbee 5y ago
Just on a superficial analysis it's clearly easier to increase the density of existing very suburban/exurban places than it would be to increase the density of nearby real urban centers. Think of suburbs that already have all the streets, highways, railroads, water and sewer they need. Think of a place like Orinda, CA. It could easily be ten times more populous in its existing boundaries and with infrastructure already built. It makes way more sense than trying to grow a city like Berkeley by the same factor. Berkeley could easily double, but there's no way it could be a city of a million people without ripping up and replacing a lot of expensive stuff.
vmception 5y ago
I agree with the premise that the suburbs won't be radically transformed ever, but I do expect them to be or remain compromises instead of the lifestyle dream they were sold as and failed as. I will continue to pay a premium for space in a city (relative to the local population). I'd go as far to have a less comfortable shitty place in another part of the city just to be more relatable to some people.
nsxwolf 5y ago
As a suburbanite I always look on in horrid fascination when this topic comes up on HN. If I wanted to live in the city I would. I don’t want to bring these “urban values” to my neighborhood. I want to put all my groceries in the trunk of my minivan, not make 10 bike rides back and forth. I’m in my mid 40s and my knees can’t handle that. I don’t want to step over puddles of vomit and hypodermic needles. I like my functioning police department. I have no interest in the way you live.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- arrakis2021 5y ago
  This. Many People in urban centers don’t understand any of this.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > Many People in urban centers don’t understand any of this. Many people in urban centers read impressions like this and think the person that holds/writes them is describing something from another planet.
  - menomatter 5y ago
    A large number of people in urban center are coming from suburban places. So I think they know the drill.
- a_shovel 5y ago
  Why would you make ten bike trips back and forth to the grocery store that you pass every day on your way home from work?
  - anthonygd 5y ago
    Is this something you have any firsthand experience with?
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
Since we have shown that a "work from home" model is an available model for a majority of white collar jobs, is there a reason why city planners and civil engineers can't do a better job of placing markets/small business centers within biking and walking distance of a radial area of a suburban center? As far as driving is concerned, why not push for electric and end gas subsidies over a time period to allow for adjustment. Yes, I understand that we're in a desperate situation, but I also understand that too much change too quickly tends to have the opposite effect of what the original intention was in the first place. By setting up small, suburban "communities" that have many of their shopping needs met (a grocery, an open air market, a couple of whatever strip malls are called now, a school, an urgent care), proper bike paths and incentives on even plug in hybrids and work from home programs for jobs that didn't need to go into the office, we could focus on clean energy solutions for the grid - all of which are current technology and current lifestyles without much forced change, just rezoning and a continuation of what we learned during Cov19.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Why not throw some office space and light industry in the mix as well. Having lived in near sub-burb and walked or bike through yard to school everyday I never saw or heard any issues with it. Proper mix would overall lower the load on roads as travel distances would be much shorter for some.
eweise 5y ago
Just got back from my annual trip to the city. Paid $20 to park my car. Not eager to go back.
RickJWagner 5y ago
It seems to me that several powerful entities are working right now to convince people to get rid of their gas-burners and buy electric cars. That's quite a bit different than what the article describes (eliminating cars). I think even the push to get people to move to electric cars is difficult enough. I'd love to have a fast electric car, but I know a lot of people that don't want one.

The suburbs are economically unsustainable. Nobody wants to pay to redo the roads and pipes, but everybody wants to live with a private backyard. Perhaps we should make it so that you have to make it self sustainable, dirt roads, septic tanks, wells, and producing your own electricity.

nickff 5y ago
The USA has been a suburban nation for quite a while now, and previous generations paid to lay down the roads and pipes. The interesting question is why poorer people with relatively crude technology were able to create this infrastructure, but we can no longer afford to maintain it. Infrastructure budgets have increased (in per-capita and inflation-adjusted terms), but our maintenance capacity has decreased; the question is why?
- alamortsubite 5y ago
  https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
  - nickff 5y ago
    That makes sense if you only look at the municipal level, but it seems like citizens are not getting much per their 'transportation buck'; i.e. they pay a lot of money to multiple levels of government, and those governments are not able to deliver much value per dollar.
    - lumost 5y ago
      A useful term is “endemic corruption”. We like to think of corruption as illegal activity like kickbacks, and bribes. However there is also corruption where everyone pads the estimates a bit, everyone makes things a bit harder than they should be, and tons of “make work” to keep all the jobs created for forgotten purposes busy. Real reform will be hard.
  - not-my-account 5y ago
    Or for a video version, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
- wishinghand 5y ago
  Policy makers don’t raise enough taxes for pay for it.
  - nickff 5y ago
    But taxes were lower in the past! That's the interesting part; everyone is paying more, but we can't afford as much.
    - solarmist 5y ago
      Were they? I'm pretty sure taxes have been going down for decades.
      - nickff 5y ago
        Rates have gone up and down (down overall at the federal level), but inflation-adjusted revenue is way up, and spending has increased even more than that.[1] [1] https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax-revenue-capita-increased-54-1980-adjusting-inflation https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax...
        hcurtiss 5y ago
        And property taxes and fuel taxes, which pay for most of the stuff under consideration, have only gone up. In some cases, way up.
        acdha 5y ago
        I grew up in California. You could see when Prop 13 capped property taxes in things like schools or libraries: everything built before it was nice but falling apart, everything built after it was designed to be cheap to build. They could try to bridge the gap with bonds but that was unreliable.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Isn't maintenance capacity linked to taxes, which have been decreasing in the US for decades (or so I hear) ? Also: manufacturing moved out of the US so everyone can buy off-the-shelf Asian parts and products so more money is left in people's pocket but that money ultimately goes to landlords who can raise prices ? I am really stupid with economy stuff but I have the strong feeling that we - in the west - are living off of cheap credits and cheap debt and it gives the illusion of being rich because we can buy obligations and financial products and balance spreadsheets between tax-payer's money and private sectors and welfare states and debt payments, etc. but at the end of the day when we need to work on our infrastructure our money is not worth the paper it's printed on since our workers and our tools are not up to the task or we need to pay a huge premium to get some quality work ? Something like that... Edit:grammar, spelling
  - nickff 5y ago
    >" Isn't maintenance capacity linked to taxes, which have been decreasing in the US for decades (or so I hear) ? Also: manufacturing moved out of the US so everyone can buy off shelf Asian parts and products so more money is left in people's pocket and that money ultimately go to landlords who can raise prices ?" From another of my comments: Rates have gone up and down (down overall at the federal level), but inflation-adjusted revenue is way up, and spending has increased even more than that.[1] >"I am really stupid with economy stuff but I have the strong feeling that we - in the west - are living off of cheap credits and cheap debt and it gives the illusion of being rich because we can buy obligations and financial products and balance spreadsheets between tax-payer's money and private sectors and welfare states and debt payments etc. but at the end of the day when we need to work on our infrastructure our money is not worth the paper it's written with since our workers and our tools are not up to the task or we need to pay a huge premium to get some quality work ? Something like that. " I don't think you're stupid at all; the reduction in purchasing power are complex and hard to measure. [1] https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax...
  - clove 5y ago
    The US dollar is in high demand internationally. The fact that it is the world's reserve currency will ensure that "our money is not worth the paper it's written with" remains false. The US trade deficit allows for nations with trade surpluses (e.g., China, Russia, Holland) to acquire USD while Americans acquire products and services. Landlords raising prices has less to do with the issue of forex and more to do with the housing market and inflation.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Income inequality squeezing the bottom of the tax base? The money was much more evenly distributed then.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Don't think of it as our maintenance capacity decreasing. Think of it as many more maintenance "requirements" having been added.
- syntheweave 5y ago
  Demographics + relative labor costs account for infrastructure's cost suddenly rising in the developed world. "Baumol's Cost Disease" plays some role, but I believe a full narrative is in order. With a rapidly rising population and high immigration, the early 20th century US had a pool of cheap labor at the ready. The "cost/benefit of a life" was assumed lower because mortality was higher, i.e. assumed optimal societal use was to break a body with labor before disease took them. Grooming them for the professions would be a waste. Cities were relatively smaller but more crowded, with lower standards of living. This changed by mid-century. Mortality was now down to historic lows which made the post-war baby boom have a uniquely lasting impact. A generation with expectations of long life now faces the prospect of "retiring well", which pushes them to focus on education and career and demand higher margins of safety in their everyday lives. This creates an inflection in the early 1970's - the same one everyone has remarked upon in finance, culture, and politics - as the boom generation reaches working age and floods into the markets, looking for jobs and assets. This allows the suburbs to continue to boom: the marginal cost of adding another subdivision is low, and the technical foundation is established. Then fast forward 30 years, and you have a new large generation of working age, but the world isn't being built out to accommodate them. Cities have gone from disinvested to overpriced. The trades are now in neglect because of a new bias towards academics. They graduate into job and asset markets that are locked up by older cohorts who enjoy the benefits of still being alive and able to work at advanced age. This is the Millennial's dilemma: They have been groomed for jobs they can't access, and there's no war or other crisis that would let them be utilized. Infrastructure is something they could work on, but the political system biases towards pleasing earlier cohorts, who will interfere with any change to the arrangement, which they are now fully invested in (in all senses of the word). The costs of changing anything spiral out of control, the politics compounded by the fact that there's been a lot of productivity improvement in information and finance, but little in physical assets. If 20 guys slinging code contain more speculative value than 20 guys swinging hammers, you'll see a lot of investment in code and not hammers - and that gives you cost disease. The high price of infrastructure is in part reflective of an uncorrected disinterest. It's irrational exuberance, but the other way around: nobody wants to pay for quality when there is "something better to do," so every project that needs it is a special case deserving a high price tag. Thus, deferred maintenance becomes the norm and stays that way until - just recently - mortality finally starts taking its course, the grip of the Boomers starts to slip, and the bills come due. The "Great Resignation" is in large part a reshuffling of jobs and assets preceded by the demographic changes and then catalyzed by the pandemic crisis, which is going to change the infrastructure investment climate towards a new equilibrium going forwards - even though the Biden infrastructure package has been cut, the trend of disinvestment has reversed. There is a lot of interest in the future of construction right now, and in new technologies that don't just change the products, but also make construction jobs better, safer, and more productive - e.g. two people building a house rather than a crew of 10. And there is a market that will still likely bias suburban, but is ready to see a slightly denser built environment with lower car dependency. Our ideal goal is "denser yet less crowded" - crowds are a combination of people needing to travel to destinations (suddenly in decline with WFH) and the travel being space-and-time inefficient(big cars travelling long distances versus short walks). Do some "road diets", allow some fourplex lots and ADUs, and install some walkable retail - and you'll have the suburbs of the future.
starkd 5y ago
City life quickly becomes mundane and tiresome. People need suburbs for a place to go to get away from the craziness in the city.
- eatonphil 5y ago
  How can city life be both mundane and craziness?
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Really loud white noise.
    - jehb 5y ago
      I can't tell if you're joking, but your name kind of checks out.
- II2II 5y ago
  Different people have different expectations of their environment and those expectations are likely to change throughout their life, but blanket statements like "people need suburbs" is a bit much. Personally, I think they're the worse of all worlds. Suburbs combine the worse aspects of urban life and the worse aspects of rural life, then try to present themselves as some sort of idyllic compromise. I'm going to make a claim that you'll probably think is absurd: there is far more in common between a small town and a big city than there is between a small town and the suburbs. A small town and a big city are places where people live. People know each other because they see each other on the street as they go to work or get groceries. They meet each other in local businesses or community centres. Suburbs are simply places where people have their homes. Everything else takes place elsewhere. People are unlikely to know someone a block or two over, unless their kids go to the same school, simply because they never encounter each other on the streets and their lives are completely divergent outside of their (so called) community.
mr_cyborg 5y ago
Counterpoint: The town I grew up in just turned 400 years old. Things haven’t always been perfect but it seems pretty self-sustaining at this point.
- alamortsubite 5y ago
  Your hometown is probably a pretty cool place. The article, though, discusses car-centric sprawling American suburbia, which post-dates WWII and society's mass adoption of the automobile. It's not cool.
  - nsxwolf 5y ago
    In not very long WWII will be a century behind us.
true_religion 5y ago
> Perhaps we should make it so that you have to make it self sustainable, dirt roads, septic tanks, wells, and producing your own electricity. With the exception of producing your own electricity and roads, that's how many (most?) of the suburbs in Virginia are. However, if you do that then the average plot size usually goes up since septic installations need unused field space for drainage, and wells need a separate arera to draw from. Roads can be private, but it mostly doesn't make sense to me since USPS and county services need to use the road as well. I'm not really sure why some roads are private and some aren't, but many neighborhoods with private roads will just use gravel or dirt to save costs. Electricity, at least in my area, is hydro so that's as sustainable as the water cycle and since the river is within spitting distance, I doubt the cost of the powerlines is a real burden.
jimbob45 5y ago
Not just that, but the towns where every house is an AirBNB or rental won’t even have voices that care to speak about the problems until it’s too late.
flomo 5y ago
I believe this to be complete bullshit, and the infrastructure deficit is far worse in large cities which supposedly have the population density to pay for it. Look at NYC: everything outside of central Manhattan seems like it's about to collapse. San Francisco is billions in the hole for maintaining the water system and so on. It seems to be mostly wishful thinking that the suburbs will go bankrupt to due to routine maintenance. (It is a problem in more sprawled-out exurbs to be sure.)
- menomatter 5y ago
  I wonder if this has to do with they way taxes are spend. Does NYC generated taxes get spent on NYC? Or at least a decent percentage of it?
  - flomo 5y ago
    I can say that San Francisco has an enormous tax base and budget, but most money goes to social services (and corruption) because piers and pipes don't vote.
- onecommentman 5y ago
  Just a note: NYC + San Francisco <<< the United States. Most Expansive Definition of Population (TriState + Bay Area) — 28M Just the Population (USA) — 330M Most Expansive Definition of Land area (TriState + Bay Area) — 11K sq mi Just the Land area (USA) — 4000K sq mi A common bias for non-US folks is to put too much focus on “the biggest” US urban center. For England, 20% of the population lives in “greater London”. For France, 15% live in the Paris unité urbaine. It’s different in the US. The population of NYC is almost a rounding error in the total US population (~3%). The population of the NYC “Tri-State” area, in its most expansive definition, is ~6%. They are also the only folks who think NYC is any sort of unique cultural lead for the US. The population of San Francisco actually is a rounding error for the total US population. The whole Bay Area is bigger, but only at about ~2% of the US population. And again, they are the only folks who think San Francisco is a unique cultural lead. Both urban regions are actual rounding errors when it comes to US land area. And divide by a factor of 10 when discussing the dense urban core of NYC or San Francisco, which is what some folks rant about. Just move the decimal point over one to the left. Yes, they are that small. So don’t read too much into these sorts of (NYC+SF) discussions as a barometric reading on the entire US.

gfxgirl 5y ago

I've started to drink the kool-aide watching YouTube channels like "Not Just Bikes". But then I start watching other YouTube channels like Veratsium, ElectricBoom, Xyla Fox, Physics Girl, and others where it's clear they live in large house (may or may not be the suburbs). This large house gives them room for the workshop, garage for machinery, etc.... space that I would not have living in the city. Maybe that's ok but it's hard to give up that dream

kasey_junk 5y ago
There are shared garage/workshop areas that make way more sense in equipment utilization than building a shop for every person.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  Everyone owning their own car or bike doesn't make much sense either from a resource utilization standpoint either, but given the choice...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Sharing would be _preferable_ by choice, since you could make one-way trips, but given the coordination problem...
- driscoll42 5y ago
  Sure... but then you also need to make sure you are close to them. I used to belong to a hackerspace, but it was a 30-45 minute bus/bike ride from my place and eventually quit. It was and is a great resource, but nothing beats just walking into your garage/basement to do the work you want.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

eatonphil 5y ago

Great point that it's unlikely for the US to become significantly more urban such that public transportation takes over car reliance (although that would be great). More walkable small cities/towns would be extremely welcome! I don't enjoy living where I can't walk for coffee and groceries. But I'd love a cheaper cost of living.

elzbardico 5y ago

The American suburb is not that different from the Latin American barrio. The lack of commerce and services is the biggest difference

t-writescode 5y ago
That’s … basically the defining feature of why I personally hate suburbs and want mixed residential / commercial. I want to walk to the grocery store and diners.
AuthorizedCust 5y ago
In the US, commerce and services are easily available to those with cars.

_peeley 5y ago

The article mentions electric vehicles several times as a panacea for suburbanism, but I think a lot of people fail to realize just how _miserable_ owning and commuting in a car is. I spend half an hour every morning and evening alternating between white-knuckling the steering wheel on the freeway while fearing for my life and being stuck in traffic on some God-forsaken stroad[0]. My daily routine would be unimaginably more enjoyable if I could step out of my front door and simply walk to the places I need to go, or take (reliable) public transportation. Because the only affordable housing in my area is in single-family housing developments accessible only via the nearest freeway exit, walking would be suicide and there's not enough density for actual public transportation to be efficient/financially feasible. [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-...

syki 5y ago
When I first came to the U.S. it was shocking how spread out everything is. Each store is an island surround by a concrete lake of parking. It’s absurd. Americans mostly don’t understand what they are missing. We have criminalized aspects of walking. Congregating in groups outside is frowned upon and likely to garner harassment by police. We are a nation of people using cars to go from one building to another while spending as little time as possible outside. https://www.illinoislawreview.org/print/vol-2017-no-3/the-criminalization-of-walking/ https://www.illinoislawreview.org/print/vol-2017-no-3/the-cr...
- DarylZero 5y ago
  > Congregating in groups outside is frowned upon and likely to garner harassment by police Making it that much worse -- there are no public indoor spaces but libraries.
rektide 5y ago
a town that runs it's own automated ride share would be my suburban near-sci-fi go to. personally i love cities & biking, but a safe, coordinated, available, municipal, semi-personal/pooled or personal ride hail system operated as a not-for-profit utility would be such a neat virtue, such a way to make the distance not count for as much.

halpert 5y ago

It can be valuable to take a step back sometimes and evaluate whether or not you’re strategy is appropriate for the army you have or the army you want. Yes, old world metropolitan areas are wonderful, but it’s not realistic to assume the US has the political will to build like that. A better strategy would be to figure out how to make suburbs work in a better, more efficient and convenient manner.

t-writescode 5y ago
I like the spirit implied here, but I think endless suburbs are fundamentally broken and I don't think they can be made "more efficient / convenient" in a meaningful way - and, when they do become "more efficient / convenient", they just become mixed commercial / residential, which I find to be the best format, personally.
- AuthorizedCust 5y ago
  “fundamentally broken”? How?
  - t-writescode 5y ago
    Commuting. Suburbs are, generally, huge collections of roads that are ready for children to play on, so they're going to be relatively narrow roads, like 2-2.5 cars wide. You have that kind of roadwork for multiple square miles. All those people need to go to and from work, and so that's increased traffic. The larger the suburb, the further people need to go to get food, the longer they'll be on the road, the more cars will be on the road concurrently (most traffic in long commute times is going the whole length of the slow commute time because everyone lives further away)
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Check out Strong Towns or NotJustBikes's YouTube playlist on Strong Towns. They're unsustainable financially and have a myriad of serious problems.
- Ekaros 5y ago

jeffbee 5y ago

Just on a superficial analysis it's clearly easier to increase the density of existing very suburban/exurban places than it would be to increase the density of nearby real urban centers. Think of suburbs that already have all the streets, highways, railroads, water and sewer they need. Think of a place like Orinda, CA. It could easily be ten times more populous in its existing boundaries and with infrastructure already built. It makes way more sense than trying to grow a city like Berkeley by the same factor. Berkeley could easily double, but there's no way it could be a city of a million people without ripping up and replacing a lot of expensive stuff.

vmception 5y ago

I agree with the premise that the suburbs won't be radically transformed ever, but I do expect them to be or remain compromises instead of the lifestyle dream they were sold as and failed as. I will continue to pay a premium for space in a city (relative to the local population). I'd go as far to have a less comfortable shitty place in another part of the city just to be more relatable to some people.

nsxwolf 5y ago

As a suburbanite I always look on in horrid fascination when this topic comes up on HN. If I wanted to live in the city I would. I don’t want to bring these “urban values” to my neighborhood. I want to put all my groceries in the trunk of my minivan, not make 10 bike rides back and forth. I’m in my mid 40s and my knees can’t handle that. I don’t want to step over puddles of vomit and hypodermic needles. I like my functioning police department. I have no interest in the way you live.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
arrakis2021 5y ago
This. Many People in urban centers don’t understand any of this.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Many People in urban centers don’t understand any of this. Many people in urban centers read impressions like this and think the person that holds/writes them is describing something from another planet.
- menomatter 5y ago
  A large number of people in urban center are coming from suburban places. So I think they know the drill.
a_shovel 5y ago
Why would you make ten bike trips back and forth to the grocery store that you pass every day on your way home from work?
- anthonygd 5y ago
  Is this something you have any firsthand experience with?

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

Since we have shown that a "work from home" model is an available model for a majority of white collar jobs, is there a reason why city planners and civil engineers can't do a better job of placing markets/small business centers within biking and walking distance of a radial area of a suburban center? As far as driving is concerned, why not push for electric and end gas subsidies over a time period to allow for adjustment. Yes, I understand that we're in a desperate situation, but I also understand that too much change too quickly tends to have the opposite effect of what the original intention was in the first place. By setting up small, suburban "communities" that have many of their shopping needs met (a grocery, an open air market, a couple of whatever strip malls are called now, a school, an urgent care), proper bike paths and incentives on even plug in hybrids and work from home programs for jobs that didn't need to go into the office, we could focus on clean energy solutions for the grid - all of which are current technology and current lifestyles without much forced change, just rezoning and a continuation of what we learned during Cov19.

Ekaros 5y ago
Why not throw some office space and light industry in the mix as well. Having lived in near sub-burb and walked or bike through yard to school everyday I never saw or heard any issues with it. Proper mix would overall lower the load on roads as travel distances would be much shorter for some.

eweise 5y ago

Just got back from my annual trip to the city. Paid $20 to park my car. Not eager to go back.

RickJWagner 5y ago

It seems to me that several powerful entities are working right now to convince people to get rid of their gas-burners and buy electric cars. That's quite a bit different than what the article describes (eliminating cars). I think even the push to get people to move to electric cars is difficult enough. I'd love to have a fast electric car, but I know a lot of people that don't want one.