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Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. That’s one major reason American infrastr

Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructure to be maintained.

echelon 5y ago
> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development. Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems. Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative. You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city. With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Why should cities be expected subsidize rural and suburban living? Those higher infrastructure costs are rural and suburban problems, no need for states to transfer tax revenue simply because cities make more money for less infrastructure costs.
- freshpots 5y ago
  Suburban land is cheaper to buy but far more expensive to service (water, electricity, roads, etc.) and maintain. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-the-new-suburban-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th... Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.
  - echelon 5y ago
    > Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around. You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities. Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes. Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community. Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.
    - embedder 5y ago
      With wind and solar, everything grows cheaper. Single family homes are irrefutably less efficient than denser multi-family homes. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/location_efficiency_btu.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo... I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.
      - truffdog 5y ago
        Single family sprawl is more cost efficient than dense development when you include regulatory compliance.
        freshpots 5y ago
        What regulatory compliance? Got any studies? Just from a logical perspective, companies don't build skyscrapers/increase density in cities to lose money.
        truffdog 5y ago
        This is a reference to the NIMBY/YIMBY fight, where the YIMBY position is that most non-single-family-home developments, other than the super high end, have been effectively been made illegal through a combination of zoning laws, neighborhood review processes that add extraordinary costs, unreasonable requirements and delays, and other arbitrary veto points. The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America/dp/0525560211 https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.
- embedder 5y ago
  You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entirely dependent on new growth. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme We need to place more emphasis on the efficiency of transportation and infrastructure in new developments, and density is a major factor there.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.
    - embedder 5y ago
      Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that point. I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  "Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes." Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents. Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities. If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.
  - danielrpa 5y ago
    Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.
treis 5y ago
>Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.
- syki 5y ago
  Paying workers for upkeep and construction of infrastructure is part of the cost of having said infrastructure.
thehappypm 5y ago
I don’t think this makes much sense. It’s mostly big cities like Chicago or Boston (still dealing with Big Dig debt) with trouble financing themselves, suburbia seems to do very well financing itself with its property tax base.
danielrpa 5y ago
This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density. The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though. Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things. Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).

echelon 5y ago

> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development. Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems. Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative. You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city. With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Why should cities be expected subsidize rural and suburban living? Those higher infrastructure costs are rural and suburban problems, no need for states to transfer tax revenue simply because cities make more money for less infrastructure costs.
freshpots 5y ago
Suburban land is cheaper to buy but far more expensive to service (water, electricity, roads, etc.) and maintain. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-the-new-suburban-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th... Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.
- echelon 5y ago
  > Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around. You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities. Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes. Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community. Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.
  - embedder 5y ago
    With wind and solar, everything grows cheaper. Single family homes are irrefutably less efficient than denser multi-family homes. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/location_efficiency_btu.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo... I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.
    - truffdog 5y ago
      Single family sprawl is more cost efficient than dense development when you include regulatory compliance.
      - freshpots 5y ago
        What regulatory compliance? Got any studies? Just from a logical perspective, companies don't build skyscrapers/increase density in cities to lose money.
        truffdog 5y ago
        This is a reference to the NIMBY/YIMBY fight, where the YIMBY position is that most non-single-family-home developments, other than the super high end, have been effectively been made illegal through a combination of zoning laws, neighborhood review processes that add extraordinary costs, unreasonable requirements and delays, and other arbitrary veto points. The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America/dp/0525560211 https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.
embedder 5y ago
You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entirely dependent on new growth. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme We need to place more emphasis on the efficiency of transportation and infrastructure in new developments, and density is a major factor there.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.
  - embedder 5y ago
    Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that point. I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.
betterunix2 5y ago
"Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes." Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents. Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities. If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.
- danielrpa 5y ago
  Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.

treis 5y ago

>Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.

syki 5y ago
Paying workers for upkeep and construction of infrastructure is part of the cost of having said infrastructure.

thehappypm 5y ago

I don’t think this makes much sense. It’s mostly big cities like Chicago or Boston (still dealing with Big Dig debt) with trouble financing themselves, suburbia seems to do very well financing itself with its property tax base.

danielrpa 5y ago

This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density. The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though. Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things. Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).