7 ms·

Some people just want to live in a small suburb

by dahfizz 4y ago

Ar-Curunir 4y ago
Except when that small suburb is in a not-small town (Eg: many parts of SF, Berkeley Sunnyvale, etc.)
jaywalk 4y ago
Well some other people have decided that that's not allowed.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue. edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.
- uoaei 4y ago
  If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed... Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      How does that square with their place in the timeline Strong Towns documents? They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        These are towns that were founded in the 1800s at the latest and some in the 1600s...
        ackfoobar 4y ago
        Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development? From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development. "In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
        sokoloff 4y ago
        I would describe Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) as being substantially car-centric with respect to the majority of 21-65 year old residents of those towns/cities owning a car and using a car or car service more than 250 days out of the year. Arlington would be feasible to get by without a car in many of its areas. Others would be much more difficult in the majority of the land.
- qwerpy 4y ago
  As a suburban homeowner/parent, house prices have little bearing for me. I hope to live in my house for decades, so the sell price in the distant future doesn’t matter. It’s the “quiet and peaceful” part that I care about. West coast cities have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean, so I will continue fighting to my last breath to prevent my suburb from becoming like that.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    I understand, and if this policy ends up affecting you, I'm sorry.
  - MSFT_Edging 4y ago
    > unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime. You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all. How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore. I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.
- Retric 4y ago
  Small suburbs can work fine around small cities. Hypothetically, a ring starting 5 miles from the city center extending out another 10 miles = Pi * (15^2 - 5^2) = 628 square miles. At even 1k people per square mile you’re up to 600,000 people reasonably close to the urban core. People can easily commute into the core because the distance and traffic levels are reasonable. The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. Build up that first ring, and the next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring. Meanwhile that inner ring 15 mile radius can have easily ten or more times the population. PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.
  - nightski 4y ago
    I agree with you. Also to me it's the larger cities that are environmentally unfriendly and hostile places like the parent described, not these smaller cities with suburbs. Just look at the 405 on a weekday. I live in a city of about 300k and it is perfect. Under 15 minutes anywhere in the city and I work from home so personally I don't even commute.
    - Retric 4y ago
      It definitely feels that way, unfortunately high rises are extremely energy, materials, and space efficient. Public transportation similarly reduces the needs for roads and fossil fuels. NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.
      - nightski 4y ago
        High rises are, but not very many people desire to live in a high rise. Hence the inefficiency. I mean if everyone lived in a 5x5 box it would be super efficient. But yeah, I think people would rather die first. I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Funny, I live in a small suburbia style town in the mountains, our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's, we have no big city we parasite off of, and everything here is much cheaper/affordable including housing, with a much smaller property tax base. We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL (if you were close enough to the DSLAM or whatever it was). We now have multiple Gb fiber options in our neighborhoods. Housing prices are affordable.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Could you speak more about why your suburbia-style town in the mountains maintains its infrastructure prices? How is food, medicine, or construction goods delivered to you, and how do you pay for that transportation? I'm not asking out of skepticism: my understanding is that more remote locations are expensive partially because of logistical deliveries and maintenance costs, and I'd love to know how this is managed in well-maintained suburbia-style towns!
    - uoaei 4y ago
      It would make sense if this town was in the proximity of major trucking/rail lines. Many towns in the foothills of the Sierras can be considered such. But then of course to pretend that the town is somehow "isolated" yet successful is certainly not accurate.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > we have no big city we parasite off of > We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL So do you or do you not have a big city nearby? > our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.
GalenErso 4y ago
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Why? It works pretty much everywhere in America except CA. 61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nation-of-small-towns.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.
      - pwinnski 4y ago
        That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit. But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  I live in what you would probably call a sprawl hellscape, and I love it.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs. But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.
eli 4y ago
And many more would like to be able to afford a place to live

Some people just want to live in a small suburb

Ar-Curunir 4y ago

Except when that small suburb is in a not-small town (Eg: many parts of SF, Berkeley Sunnyvale, etc.)

jaywalk 4y ago

Well some other people have decided that that's not allowed.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue. edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.

uoaei 4y ago
If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed... Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    How does that square with their place in the timeline Strong Towns documents? They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      These are towns that were founded in the 1800s at the latest and some in the 1600s...
      - ackfoobar 4y ago
        Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development? From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development. "In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
        sokoloff 4y ago
        I would describe Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) as being substantially car-centric with respect to the majority of 21-65 year old residents of those towns/cities owning a car and using a car or car service more than 250 days out of the year. Arlington would be feasible to get by without a car in many of its areas. Others would be much more difficult in the majority of the land.
qwerpy 4y ago
As a suburban homeowner/parent, house prices have little bearing for me. I hope to live in my house for decades, so the sell price in the distant future doesn’t matter. It’s the “quiet and peaceful” part that I care about. West coast cities have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean, so I will continue fighting to my last breath to prevent my suburb from becoming like that.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I understand, and if this policy ends up affecting you, I'm sorry.
- MSFT_Edging 4y ago
  > unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime. You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all. How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore. I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.
Retric 4y ago
Small suburbs can work fine around small cities. Hypothetically, a ring starting 5 miles from the city center extending out another 10 miles = Pi * (15^2 - 5^2) = 628 square miles. At even 1k people per square mile you’re up to 600,000 people reasonably close to the urban core. People can easily commute into the core because the distance and traffic levels are reasonable. The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. Build up that first ring, and the next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring. Meanwhile that inner ring 15 mile radius can have easily ten or more times the population. PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.
- nightski 4y ago
  I agree with you. Also to me it's the larger cities that are environmentally unfriendly and hostile places like the parent described, not these smaller cities with suburbs. Just look at the 405 on a weekday. I live in a city of about 300k and it is perfect. Under 15 minutes anywhere in the city and I work from home so personally I don't even commute.
  - Retric 4y ago
    It definitely feels that way, unfortunately high rises are extremely energy, materials, and space efficient. Public transportation similarly reduces the needs for roads and fossil fuels. NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.
    - nightski 4y ago
      High rises are, but not very many people desire to live in a high rise. Hence the inefficiency. I mean if everyone lived in a 5x5 box it would be super efficient. But yeah, I think people would rather die first. I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Funny, I live in a small suburbia style town in the mountains, our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's, we have no big city we parasite off of, and everything here is much cheaper/affordable including housing, with a much smaller property tax base. We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL (if you were close enough to the DSLAM or whatever it was). We now have multiple Gb fiber options in our neighborhoods. Housing prices are affordable.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Could you speak more about why your suburbia-style town in the mountains maintains its infrastructure prices? How is food, medicine, or construction goods delivered to you, and how do you pay for that transportation? I'm not asking out of skepticism: my understanding is that more remote locations are expensive partially because of logistical deliveries and maintenance costs, and I'd love to know how this is managed in well-maintained suburbia-style towns!
  - uoaei 4y ago
    It would make sense if this town was in the proximity of major trucking/rail lines. Many towns in the foothills of the Sierras can be considered such. But then of course to pretend that the town is somehow "isolated" yet successful is certainly not accurate.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > we have no big city we parasite off of > We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL So do you or do you not have a big city nearby? > our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.

GalenErso 4y ago

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

dahfizz 4y ago
Why? It works pretty much everywhere in America except CA. 61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nation-of-small-towns.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yamtaddle 4y ago

Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit. But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.

nsxwolf 4y ago
I live in what you would probably call a sprawl hellscape, and I love it.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs. But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.

eli 4y ago

And many more would like to be able to afford a place to live