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For years, legislation was pushed and successfully passed to "coerce" people to live a suburban lifestyle. From FHA to single-family home zoning, there are man
by karmelapple 5y ago
For years, legislation was pushed and successfully passed to "coerce" people to live a suburban lifestyle.
From FHA to single-family home zoning, there are many laws that specifically encouraged sprawl into what were, at the time, rural areas. That became the suburbs.
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera/postwar-era/a/the-growth-of-suburbia https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera...
I've lived in both "sardines in a can" and "sardines scattered all around the room" (less dense) levels of density for significant portions of my life, and I've experienced firsthand the many benefits and downsides of each. I imagine you have, too.
One thing I've only recently learned is suburbs are subsidized by the people living in the denser areas that you seem to strongly dislike.
This video gets into the math behind why that is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
- AvocadoPanic 5y agoWouldn't an alternative be to have these lower density areas spun off into their own towns? In my low density town of ~4,300 lots of us pay > $9,000 a year in property taxes.
- karmelapple 5y agoAbsolutely! But can a city “un-annex” land? I imagine the residents in the lower density area would not want to spin off, both because of the schools and other civic institutions they use, but also because of the higher taxes.
- AvocadoPanic 5y agoNot infrequently these areas want to go, Buckhead GA, is an example.
- ThunderSizzle 5y agoOne point to make is that suburban is not the same as rural, but suburbia wants to pretend to be both while being neither.