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I am biased because I quite like living in the suburbs, and get quite suspicious when some manifesto comes up that dictates I should feel bad for it. Why is th

I am biased because I quite like living in the suburbs, and get quite suspicious when some manifesto comes up that dictates I should feel bad for it. Why is the solution to live in better designed cities instead of better designed suburbs? Are cities still necessary given the modern conditions?

germinalphrase 4y ago
The argument is that suburbs are incapable of affording the infrastructure required for their own existence. These costs are either subsidized or require persistent (perhaps unrealistic) growth to cover without dramatically increasing suburban taxes. "Are cities necessary given the modern conditions?" How many suburbs would exist without the corresponding city center? And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns?
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  > And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns? Towns still typically need to manage their own utilities while suburbs don't.
  - danaris 4y ago
    But towns that manage their own utilities do exist. That suggests that suburbs are not fundamentally unsustainable, they just need to adjust their calculations and expectations.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Exactly. I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas. I suspect there are bad suburbs somewhere, but here ain't it.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas Are you in a net contributor state as well? I live in a similar town, but it's in Wyoming, a state which benefits from federal transfers from urban centers.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Not sure, is there a list of "net contributor" states? And I suspect those look at federal budgets only, and ignore the other methods of "contributing".
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > is there a list of "net contributor" states? Yup [1]. > ignore the other methods of "contributing" Nobody is arguing we write off New Mexico, Mississippi or West Virginia. But their lifestyles are subsidized by Delaware (special case), Minnesota, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut and New York. (Scaling the net contribution to GDP removes much of the partisan slant introduced by urban centers having more people, and thus bigger numbers, as well as leaning blue.) [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2011/08/01/the-red-and-the-black https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2011/08/01/the-red-...
        HelpfulLinkp 4y ago
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        deleted 4y ago
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      - heyda 4y ago
        That's not really how funding works though. Say a company bids to build or refurbish a new street, the money paid to the company comes from a variety of pools, local, state, federal and utilities, to get funding from the different organizations the contract usually have multiple requirements like 'must build pipes for sewage, power, internet, ect' and the funding percentages of the project will depend on whats being built and where. That said, the people living in those houses will likely also pay state/federal taxes and utilities so its more complex. You also can't expect local towns or cities to foot the complete for big projects like highway overpasses and bridges and stuff, so how much a city contributes to infrastructure and gets back is harder to say.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      Yeah, I would agree with that. It's not that towns shouldn't exist, they should, it's that the weird no-man's land suburbs probably shouldn't.
      - danaris 4y ago
        But my point is: Why not? I have yet to see anything that points to them being fundamentally worse than towns: if you just treat them as Towns Next To Cities, it seems like you solve the vast majority of the problems.
        SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        Because right now most don't and instead become cancerous growths on a city rather than their own financially independent communities. Where I live the suburbs aren't their own towns and that's where the problem is.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Suburbs are towns (or small cities) in many parts of the US. I'm not sure it's even especially common in the US for cities to expand to engulf the whole surrounding area with a single central government. Although there are certainly examples such as Houston, I believe.
    - dionidium 4y ago
      Annexation happened a lot in the U.S. but it didn't happen everywhere. Some places, like my hometown of St. Louis, are practically defined by the lack of annexation (although, even in that most famous case, St. Louis did annex several suburbs in the 19th Century, before its Great Divorce). Other places, like Chicago or NYC, pretty famously annexed practically everything around them. (Brooklyn was even once its own city.)
      - ghaff 4y ago
        It's probably more common out West. In New England, while Boston did annex some neighboring communities, Cambridge and Somerville are still separate cities. And get just a little bit further out and you have a bunch of clumps of a few thousand people that are independent towns. I used to work with someone from Australia who could never get over all the 5,000 person towns with their own school system, various boards, etc.
- TrispusAttucks 4y ago
  Isn't this an infinite regress? How could cities survive without farm land? How could cities survive without outsourced materials? We live in an interdependent interconnected global society where everything and everyone subsidizes everyone else.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    There seems to be a naive belief that if everyone just lived in dense urban cores there would be no need to pay for infrastructure beyond the city limits.
    - germinalphrase 4y ago
      The argument is that suburban residents should carry the true cost of their infrastructure, not that they shouldn't exist.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      The average farm needs a single, nearby access road and power; water and septic is local (that's changing). A suburb needs that nearby road, lots of streets, water lines, sewage, significant power, often street lights, etc. etc.
      - TrispusAttucks 4y ago
        And the city needs transport networks and power grids that reach far beyond the city limits. The only logical difference is a matter of scale and limits. The same rules apply to any region that has dependencies outside of its own borders. The only way to not be subsidized in some fashion is to live directly off of the land in the form of some nomadic tribe.
        Ensorceled 4y ago
        We’re talking suburbs. My city block contains literally thousands of homes and commercial properties in a zone that would contain, at most a few hundred McMansions. The cost to deliver services needed are within an order of magnitude of a suburb but the tax base is significantly higher.
mulmen 4y ago
A ”better designed suburb” is a city. Suburbs are unsustainable because they waste so much space.
dionidium 4y ago
There's a reason suburbs are located directly adjacent to density and not islands of development in the middle of nowhere. Suburbs survive by proximity to density and, in most cases, pay no taxes to support that density. Further, they use the state (via zoning laws) to prevent the natural development of more housing within their borders, guaranteeing a perpetual state of dependence, and ensuring that prices stay high enough to keep out the riffraff. It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement. What suburbanites want is to be close enough to the city to enjoy all the benefits of being in a major metro area, without the hassle of supporting the project of urbanity. They want all the upsides without participating in addressing the (very real) downsides. A suburb is in physical reality little more than just another neighborhood that has declared itself to be something else entirely in order to shirk its responsibility to the whole (sort of like if I declared my bedroom to be a separate apartment, so that I didn't have to acknowledge my roommate's chore list). Declaring yourself independent of your metro's core city doesn't magically make it so. It's just sticking your head in the sand.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  >Further, they use the state (via zoning laws) to prevent the natural development of more housing within their borders, guaranteeing a perpetual state of dependence, and ensuring that prices stay high enough to keep out the riffraff. >It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement. Except that those "riff raff" aren't footing much if any of the tax bill for the high density city. That bill is paid by the wealthier people, many of whom are living in those suberbs, subsidizing the city costs. Who is parasitizing whom here?
  - dionidium 4y ago
    This is like trying to define a garden to include only the tomatoes and none of the weeds. My commonsense opinion is that both the tomatoes and the weeds are part of the garden and if you setup a system where you say, "look, I only take care of the tomatoes, I'm not responsible for those awful weeds" then you're going to end up with a shitty garden. Rich people and poor people alike live in cities. It is basically insane to separate them physically and declare them independent. You can't define away the problems of urbanization through economic segregation. I mean, it would be one thing to enforce physical separation while still acknowledging that both halves are part of the same city (and the same tax base), but to go so far as to say, "no, we're actually not even part of the city, despite all commonsense physical reality; we're actually just a whole separate thing over here" is really an awe-inspiring level of audacity and chutzpah.
azemetre 4y ago
You shouldn't feel bad but it's more of a matter that your lifestyle is likely heavily subsidized because your town doesn't have the tax base (nor will they raise your taxes) to support the infrastructure that's required to make suburbs function. If you were paying the true costs of living in the suburbs this wouldn't be an issue, but there's a high likelihood you don't. Cities will always be necessary because they are one of the most efficient ways (cheaper to build, maintain, and support) to account/house large amounts of people. If you want to live in other types of areas you should, ideally, be willing to pay the true costs. I can't link the article since I'm on a subway but Strong Towns is a good resource explaining how suburbs bankrupt themselves in the future since they won't be able to pay for the costly maintenance of their infrastructure (water, electric, roads, etc): https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/
- honkdaddy 4y ago
  I think it's difficult for someone to have much perspective on how much their own lifestyle is subsidized when the same can be said for the vast majority of people who enjoy benefits from the government, regardless of where they choose to live. Most people take more than they contribute, I don't think someone making $120,000 and paying $40,000 in taxes should feel any guilt for living in the suburbs when so many others can pay almost nothing in taxes and still enjoy huge amounts of government benefit.
  - nishs 4y ago
    the american individualism is showing.
    - honkdaddy 4y ago
      I'm not American.
  - arrow7000 4y ago
    So you admit that living in the suburbs is like being on welfare?
technovader 4y ago
This is addressed in another video by the same person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 But basically suburbs can be designed well too. It needs to have strong public transit that connects to the city (or wherever most people work). And you still need good walkable and bikable paths everywhere. Because driving cars just sucks for everyone.
pwthornton 4y ago
We need both to be better designed. I live in what I suppose you could call a better-designed suburb (or small city; it's all semantics). My suburb of DC has a dense downtown with metro rail and bus access. It has plenty of walkability and apartments/condos for people who want that. It also has townhouses and single-family homes within walking distance of downtown. As you get further from the downtown, it becomes more and more traditionally suburban. The core issue with this is cost. There are so few places like this in the U.S. that it's expensive to live here. Retrofitting a lot of suburbs with more of a core would help a lot. The other big issue is what is called missing middle housing. There is a lot of apartments/condos and single-family housing. There aren't many townhouses or duplexes. This creates a situation where many people are either buying more house than they need or living in a space smaller than their needs/desires. This also causes single-family housing prices to be higher than they should be. Ultimately, retrofitting the suburbs is the great challenge of the 21st century. We need more walkability and density in their cores. Basically, we need to bring back streetcar suburbs (which is what my town is, and after going through decades of losing density, it has been transformed). And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees.
- bbarn 4y ago
  > Ultimately, retrofitting the suburbs is the great challenge of the 21st century. We need more walkability and density in their cores. Basically, we need to bring back streetcar suburbs (which is what my town is, and after going through decades of losing density, it has been transformed). > And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees. Ultimately, it all boils down to work. Walkability is great, being able to bike is great, but if you don't have industry in your walkable suburb, it's just there and nice and everyone still has to drive or take a train to work in the city. As long as work centralizes in cities, we will have problems like this.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    But that was always the intent of suburbs, live here and work elsewhere. Public Transportation is the issue, not jobs in suburbs.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
Yes, detached house suburbs are terrible for the environment: you take too much space, cars emit way too much CO2 per mile and you use them to go everywhere, even for small errands. You can have well designed attached houses-or-appartment suburbs, and they exist, but in the US they’re $$$ for obvious reasons.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
IMO, the solution to voluntarily increasing density are larger apartments and strictly-enforced soundproofing requirements in the building code.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also 7-12 storey building isn't really that high. Even if I see building denser it seems still to be very low for what should be pretty dense area.
adamsmith143 4y ago
It's because a lot of the problem has to do with how Car centric the US is and Suburbs in particular are extremely car dependent. It's not super clear you can change that without massively rebuilding them. So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done. In my suburban neighborhood a 6 minute drive to the nearest grocery store becomes a 50 minute walk along 3 lane highways.
- jjav 4y ago
  > So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done. But it's not like that is the distinguishing factor between a suburb and a city center. From my suburb house I can walk to one supermarket in 5 minutes and to another one in maybe 6-7 minutes. Yet it's definitely a suburb.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    Obviously some people in my vicinity live right next to the store but the average distance is substantially larger for the majority of people in the area.
PakG1 4y ago
OK, now this makes me feel weird. I just realized that I must have no idea what a suburb is. I've only lived in Canadian cities, and I've spent extensive time living in Shenzhen and was stuck in Busan for almost a year due to COVID. I am now realizing that I must have never seen a suburb before because everything I imagined as a suburb must actually qualify as a city. What am I missing here, or is the US really just that abnormal in the world?
- ghaff 4y ago
  "Suburb" covers a lot of ground. There's the classical US cul-de-sac development of course. But people also use the term to encompass small cities and the periphery of larger cities that are mostly spread-out single family homes often generally lacking the ability to easily walk to stores, etc. Or largely exurban towns that may have a center but with homes often spread over a number of acres. (Which are still often considered urban by the US Census because they're basically within an hour or so of a larger city.)
  - detaro 4y ago
    wikipedia struggles a bit with the definition, but the pictures at the right show very clearly how large the range of what at least sometimes is called a "suburb" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb But for discussions like this you probably can assume that people mean the less-dense, residential-only types
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Yes, people think about characteristics like needing a car, mostly segregated (strip malls, industrial parks) commercial development, primarily single family homes, etc. but not truly rural (although that's a matter of degree). Whether or not it's actually a suburb of a city, an outlying town, or part of an outlying smaller city.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  "Suburb" is usually the bit of America where every house is made from the same McMansion catalog, all roads are paved and there's not a shop, store or office in sight. Everyone leaves at the same time like clockwork to go to work with their immense SUV, alone of course, driving through a congested interstate to the nearest city to their office. Then the spouse leaves on their SUV to take the kids to school, queueing to drop them off. If someone sees anyone walking in the evening or at night, they call the cops and the walker is arrested first, then investigated later. The unlucky ones get shot.
bobthechef 4y ago
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Most far leftists would like us all to live in concrete towers, in small apartments, sharing a common bathroom area for maximum efficiency and density. Probably with mixed in sources of food and drink but not much in the way of consumerist "excess". It doesn't account for ideas of freedom or individuality or needing to see the sunlight. The problem with this is that it doesn't account for the rebellion that happens when you cause people to finally break from this unnatural condition and a million years of evolution.
- danielrpa 4y ago
  The far leftists would, however, reserve for themselves a nice piece of suburbia as the rulers need good living conditions to properly plan people's lives.
Sharlin 4y ago
Cities are more necessary than ever. Sustainable infrastructure is more necessary than ever. Unsustainable ways of living (ie. car-dependent suburbs) are one of the primary reasons it is so hard to effectively fight climate change.
throw0101a 4y ago
> Why is the solution to live in better designed cities instead of better designed suburbs? Are cities still necessary given the modern conditions? North American stopped building "better designed suburbs" post-WW2 when everything went car centric. Before that we had: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 Anything car-centric is worse designed. That does not mean we have to ban cars 100%, but simply design things so the car is an option rather than a necessity.
kkfx 4y ago
IMVHO (and personal experience) a certain level of density is needed, just because even if traveling is cheap it's not as cheap as such and we are social animals needing each others BUT more than a certain level of density issues surpass much the proximity needs. Honestly my take is that we need Rivieras witch means a bit dense BUT not more than a bit suburbs that are NOT only residential but mixed. As a result we can have "near enough" services/people without failing in the density trap. The big issue is that human settlements never worked well when centrally planned and when they are not if they work more people want to be there, so the initial low density became right and than too much dense. After that density issue start to bite, people to flee and the cycle restart. No recipe to fix it, it's more a social issue than a mere architectural one. Some, like McKinsey think we can solve some complexity issue with flying vehicles and I agree, but I do not think we are as near as they state https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-report.pdf https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and we still have an enormous isse: making VTOLs/STOLs it's relatively easy (behind the BEV part) but they can just move people and little volume/weigh goods so we can't build a home moving raw materials without roads and if we need them we need to build and maintain them... Keep following the "in medio stat virtus" principle about the density and diversity described above I think we also need to came back to a moderately distributed economy: some activities need big factories, so far we can't do anything different, BUT only some. Many others can be done in smaller settlements witch for instance that instead of build mega-factories for anything we should try to achieve economy of scale with standards and standard tools in many smaller factories. Easy to say, hard to built but... In the end internet was a free scale network of networks and prove to scale well enough. I think the same principle can be generally valid. The VERY COMPLEX and very expensive game is try it in the real word because social experiments can't be done and destroy as software projects. They demand very long time just to build them. Enormous resources etc and simulations can't really help more than a bit. Since in the past we have build many-centuries longs projects I think we can achieve such result anyway, but not in the modern mind settlement of something quick and done. Convincing people to embrace such revolution and remain engaged for few decades is however... Well... In the past we used religion to push people to such efforts...

germinalphrase 4y ago

The argument is that suburbs are incapable of affording the infrastructure required for their own existence. These costs are either subsidized or require persistent (perhaps unrealistic) growth to cover without dramatically increasing suburban taxes. "Are cities necessary given the modern conditions?" How many suburbs would exist without the corresponding city center? And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns?

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
> And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns? Towns still typically need to manage their own utilities while suburbs don't.
- danaris 4y ago
  But towns that manage their own utilities do exist. That suggests that suburbs are not fundamentally unsustainable, they just need to adjust their calculations and expectations.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Exactly. I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas. I suspect there are bad suburbs somewhere, but here ain't it.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas Are you in a net contributor state as well? I live in a similar town, but it's in Wyoming, a state which benefits from federal transfers from urban centers.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Not sure, is there a list of "net contributor" states? And I suspect those look at federal budgets only, and ignore the other methods of "contributing".
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > is there a list of "net contributor" states? Yup [1]. > ignore the other methods of "contributing" Nobody is arguing we write off New Mexico, Mississippi or West Virginia. But their lifestyles are subsidized by Delaware (special case), Minnesota, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut and New York. (Scaling the net contribution to GDP removes much of the partisan slant introduced by urban centers having more people, and thus bigger numbers, as well as leaning blue.) [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2011/08/01/the-red-and-the-black https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2011/08/01/the-red-...
        HelpfulLinkp 4y ago
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    - heyda 4y ago
      That's not really how funding works though. Say a company bids to build or refurbish a new street, the money paid to the company comes from a variety of pools, local, state, federal and utilities, to get funding from the different organizations the contract usually have multiple requirements like 'must build pipes for sewage, power, internet, ect' and the funding percentages of the project will depend on whats being built and where. That said, the people living in those houses will likely also pay state/federal taxes and utilities so its more complex. You also can't expect local towns or cities to foot the complete for big projects like highway overpasses and bridges and stuff, so how much a city contributes to infrastructure and gets back is harder to say.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Yeah, I would agree with that. It's not that towns shouldn't exist, they should, it's that the weird no-man's land suburbs probably shouldn't.
    - danaris 4y ago
      But my point is: Why not? I have yet to see anything that points to them being fundamentally worse than towns: if you just treat them as Towns Next To Cities, it seems like you solve the vast majority of the problems.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        Because right now most don't and instead become cancerous growths on a city rather than their own financially independent communities. Where I live the suburbs aren't their own towns and that's where the problem is.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Suburbs are towns (or small cities) in many parts of the US. I'm not sure it's even especially common in the US for cities to expand to engulf the whole surrounding area with a single central government. Although there are certainly examples such as Houston, I believe.
  - dionidium 4y ago
    Annexation happened a lot in the U.S. but it didn't happen everywhere. Some places, like my hometown of St. Louis, are practically defined by the lack of annexation (although, even in that most famous case, St. Louis did annex several suburbs in the 19th Century, before its Great Divorce). Other places, like Chicago or NYC, pretty famously annexed practically everything around them. (Brooklyn was even once its own city.)
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It's probably more common out West. In New England, while Boston did annex some neighboring communities, Cambridge and Somerville are still separate cities. And get just a little bit further out and you have a bunch of clumps of a few thousand people that are independent towns. I used to work with someone from Australia who could never get over all the 5,000 person towns with their own school system, various boards, etc.
TrispusAttucks 4y ago
Isn't this an infinite regress? How could cities survive without farm land? How could cities survive without outsourced materials? We live in an interdependent interconnected global society where everything and everyone subsidizes everyone else.
- ghaff 4y ago
  There seems to be a naive belief that if everyone just lived in dense urban cores there would be no need to pay for infrastructure beyond the city limits.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    The argument is that suburban residents should carry the true cost of their infrastructure, not that they shouldn't exist.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    The average farm needs a single, nearby access road and power; water and septic is local (that's changing). A suburb needs that nearby road, lots of streets, water lines, sewage, significant power, often street lights, etc. etc.
    - TrispusAttucks 4y ago
      And the city needs transport networks and power grids that reach far beyond the city limits. The only logical difference is a matter of scale and limits. The same rules apply to any region that has dependencies outside of its own borders. The only way to not be subsidized in some fashion is to live directly off of the land in the form of some nomadic tribe.
      - Ensorceled 4y ago
        We’re talking suburbs. My city block contains literally thousands of homes and commercial properties in a zone that would contain, at most a few hundred McMansions. The cost to deliver services needed are within an order of magnitude of a suburb but the tax base is significantly higher.

mulmen 4y ago

A ”better designed suburb” is a city. Suburbs are unsustainable because they waste so much space.

dionidium 4y ago

There's a reason suburbs are located directly adjacent to density and not islands of development in the middle of nowhere. Suburbs survive by proximity to density and, in most cases, pay no taxes to support that density. Further, they use the state (via zoning laws) to prevent the natural development of more housing within their borders, guaranteeing a perpetual state of dependence, and ensuring that prices stay high enough to keep out the riffraff. It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement. What suburbanites want is to be close enough to the city to enjoy all the benefits of being in a major metro area, without the hassle of supporting the project of urbanity. They want all the upsides without participating in addressing the (very real) downsides. A suburb is in physical reality little more than just another neighborhood that has declared itself to be something else entirely in order to shirk its responsibility to the whole (sort of like if I declared my bedroom to be a separate apartment, so that I didn't have to acknowledge my roommate's chore list). Declaring yourself independent of your metro's core city doesn't magically make it so. It's just sticking your head in the sand.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
>Further, they use the state (via zoning laws) to prevent the natural development of more housing within their borders, guaranteeing a perpetual state of dependence, and ensuring that prices stay high enough to keep out the riffraff. >It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement. Except that those "riff raff" aren't footing much if any of the tax bill for the high density city. That bill is paid by the wealthier people, many of whom are living in those suberbs, subsidizing the city costs. Who is parasitizing whom here?
- dionidium 4y ago
  This is like trying to define a garden to include only the tomatoes and none of the weeds. My commonsense opinion is that both the tomatoes and the weeds are part of the garden and if you setup a system where you say, "look, I only take care of the tomatoes, I'm not responsible for those awful weeds" then you're going to end up with a shitty garden. Rich people and poor people alike live in cities. It is basically insane to separate them physically and declare them independent. You can't define away the problems of urbanization through economic segregation. I mean, it would be one thing to enforce physical separation while still acknowledging that both halves are part of the same city (and the same tax base), but to go so far as to say, "no, we're actually not even part of the city, despite all commonsense physical reality; we're actually just a whole separate thing over here" is really an awe-inspiring level of audacity and chutzpah.

azemetre 4y ago

You shouldn't feel bad but it's more of a matter that your lifestyle is likely heavily subsidized because your town doesn't have the tax base (nor will they raise your taxes) to support the infrastructure that's required to make suburbs function. If you were paying the true costs of living in the suburbs this wouldn't be an issue, but there's a high likelihood you don't. Cities will always be necessary because they are one of the most efficient ways (cheaper to build, maintain, and support) to account/house large amounts of people. If you want to live in other types of areas you should, ideally, be willing to pay the true costs. I can't link the article since I'm on a subway but Strong Towns is a good resource explaining how suburbs bankrupt themselves in the future since they won't be able to pay for the costly maintenance of their infrastructure (water, electric, roads, etc): https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/

honkdaddy 4y ago
I think it's difficult for someone to have much perspective on how much their own lifestyle is subsidized when the same can be said for the vast majority of people who enjoy benefits from the government, regardless of where they choose to live. Most people take more than they contribute, I don't think someone making $120,000 and paying $40,000 in taxes should feel any guilt for living in the suburbs when so many others can pay almost nothing in taxes and still enjoy huge amounts of government benefit.
- nishs 4y ago
  the american individualism is showing.
  - honkdaddy 4y ago
    I'm not American.
- arrow7000 4y ago
  So you admit that living in the suburbs is like being on welfare?

technovader 4y ago

This is addressed in another video by the same person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 But basically suburbs can be designed well too. It needs to have strong public transit that connects to the city (or wherever most people work). And you still need good walkable and bikable paths everywhere. Because driving cars just sucks for everyone.

pwthornton 4y ago

We need both to be better designed. I live in what I suppose you could call a better-designed suburb (or small city; it's all semantics). My suburb of DC has a dense downtown with metro rail and bus access. It has plenty of walkability and apartments/condos for people who want that. It also has townhouses and single-family homes within walking distance of downtown. As you get further from the downtown, it becomes more and more traditionally suburban. The core issue with this is cost. There are so few places like this in the U.S. that it's expensive to live here. Retrofitting a lot of suburbs with more of a core would help a lot. The other big issue is what is called missing middle housing. There is a lot of apartments/condos and single-family housing. There aren't many townhouses or duplexes. This creates a situation where many people are either buying more house than they need or living in a space smaller than their needs/desires. This also causes single-family housing prices to be higher than they should be. Ultimately, retrofitting the suburbs is the great challenge of the 21st century. We need more walkability and density in their cores. Basically, we need to bring back streetcar suburbs (which is what my town is, and after going through decades of losing density, it has been transformed). And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees.

bbarn 4y ago
> Ultimately, retrofitting the suburbs is the great challenge of the 21st century. We need more walkability and density in their cores. Basically, we need to bring back streetcar suburbs (which is what my town is, and after going through decades of losing density, it has been transformed). > And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees. Ultimately, it all boils down to work. Walkability is great, being able to bike is great, but if you don't have industry in your walkable suburb, it's just there and nice and everyone still has to drive or take a train to work in the city. As long as work centralizes in cities, we will have problems like this.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  But that was always the intent of suburbs, live here and work elsewhere. Public Transportation is the issue, not jobs in suburbs.

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

Yes, detached house suburbs are terrible for the environment: you take too much space, cars emit way too much CO2 per mile and you use them to go everywhere, even for small errands. You can have well designed attached houses-or-appartment suburbs, and they exist, but in the US they’re $$$ for obvious reasons.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

IMO, the solution to voluntarily increasing density are larger apartments and strictly-enforced soundproofing requirements in the building code.

Ekaros 4y ago
Also 7-12 storey building isn't really that high. Even if I see building denser it seems still to be very low for what should be pretty dense area.

adamsmith143 4y ago

It's because a lot of the problem has to do with how Car centric the US is and Suburbs in particular are extremely car dependent. It's not super clear you can change that without massively rebuilding them. So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done. In my suburban neighborhood a 6 minute drive to the nearest grocery store becomes a 50 minute walk along 3 lane highways.

jjav 4y ago
> So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done. But it's not like that is the distinguishing factor between a suburb and a city center. From my suburb house I can walk to one supermarket in 5 minutes and to another one in maybe 6-7 minutes. Yet it's definitely a suburb.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Obviously some people in my vicinity live right next to the store but the average distance is substantially larger for the majority of people in the area.

PakG1 4y ago

OK, now this makes me feel weird. I just realized that I must have no idea what a suburb is. I've only lived in Canadian cities, and I've spent extensive time living in Shenzhen and was stuck in Busan for almost a year due to COVID. I am now realizing that I must have never seen a suburb before because everything I imagined as a suburb must actually qualify as a city. What am I missing here, or is the US really just that abnormal in the world?

ghaff 4y ago
"Suburb" covers a lot of ground. There's the classical US cul-de-sac development of course. But people also use the term to encompass small cities and the periphery of larger cities that are mostly spread-out single family homes often generally lacking the ability to easily walk to stores, etc. Or largely exurban towns that may have a center but with homes often spread over a number of acres. (Which are still often considered urban by the US Census because they're basically within an hour or so of a larger city.)
- detaro 4y ago
  wikipedia struggles a bit with the definition, but the pictures at the right show very clearly how large the range of what at least sometimes is called a "suburb" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb But for discussions like this you probably can assume that people mean the less-dense, residential-only types
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yes, people think about characteristics like needing a car, mostly segregated (strip malls, industrial parks) commercial development, primarily single family homes, etc. but not truly rural (although that's a matter of degree). Whether or not it's actually a suburb of a city, an outlying town, or part of an outlying smaller city.
theshrike79 4y ago
"Suburb" is usually the bit of America where every house is made from the same McMansion catalog, all roads are paved and there's not a shop, store or office in sight. Everyone leaves at the same time like clockwork to go to work with their immense SUV, alone of course, driving through a congested interstate to the nearest city to their office. Then the spouse leaves on their SUV to take the kids to school, queueing to drop them off. If someone sees anyone walking in the evening or at night, they call the cops and the walker is arrested first, then investigated later. The unlucky ones get shot.

bobthechef 4y ago

stjohnswarts 4y ago

Most far leftists would like us all to live in concrete towers, in small apartments, sharing a common bathroom area for maximum efficiency and density. Probably with mixed in sources of food and drink but not much in the way of consumerist "excess". It doesn't account for ideas of freedom or individuality or needing to see the sunlight. The problem with this is that it doesn't account for the rebellion that happens when you cause people to finally break from this unnatural condition and a million years of evolution.

danielrpa 4y ago
The far leftists would, however, reserve for themselves a nice piece of suburbia as the rulers need good living conditions to properly plan people's lives.

Sharlin 4y ago

Cities are more necessary than ever. Sustainable infrastructure is more necessary than ever. Unsustainable ways of living (ie. car-dependent suburbs) are one of the primary reasons it is so hard to effectively fight climate change.

throw0101a 4y ago

> Why is the solution to live in better designed cities instead of better designed suburbs? Are cities still necessary given the modern conditions? North American stopped building "better designed suburbs" post-WW2 when everything went car centric. Before that we had: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 Anything car-centric is worse designed. That does not mean we have to ban cars 100%, but simply design things so the car is an option rather than a necessity.

kkfx 4y ago

IMVHO (and personal experience) a certain level of density is needed, just because even if traveling is cheap it's not as cheap as such and we are social animals needing each others BUT more than a certain level of density issues surpass much the proximity needs. Honestly my take is that we need Rivieras witch means a bit dense BUT not more than a bit suburbs that are NOT only residential but mixed. As a result we can have "near enough" services/people without failing in the density trap. The big issue is that human settlements never worked well when centrally planned and when they are not if they work more people want to be there, so the initial low density became right and than too much dense. After that density issue start to bite, people to flee and the cycle restart. No recipe to fix it, it's more a social issue than a mere architectural one. Some, like McKinsey think we can solve some complexity issue with flying vehicles and I agree, but I do not think we are as near as they state https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-report.pdf https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and we still have an enormous isse: making VTOLs/STOLs it's relatively easy (behind the BEV part) but they can just move people and little volume/weigh goods so we can't build a home moving raw materials without roads and if we need them we need to build and maintain them... Keep following the "in medio stat virtus" principle about the density and diversity described above I think we also need to came back to a moderately distributed economy: some activities need big factories, so far we can't do anything different, BUT only some. Many others can be done in smaller settlements witch for instance that instead of build mega-factories for anything we should try to achieve economy of scale with standards and standard tools in many smaller factories. Easy to say, hard to built but... In the end internet was a free scale network of networks and prove to scale well enough. I think the same principle can be generally valid. The VERY COMPLEX and very expensive game is try it in the real word because social experiments can't be done and destroy as software projects. They demand very long time just to build them. Enormous resources etc and simulations can't really help more than a bit. Since in the past we have build many-centuries longs projects I think we can achieve such result anyway, but not in the modern mind settlement of something quick and done. Convincing people to embrace such revolution and remain engaged for few decades is however... Well... In the past we used religion to push people to such efforts...