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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

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.
        ackfoobar 4y ago
        Looking at satellite images I would guess they would not do well financially with the infrastructure costs. But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.
        4y ago
- criddell 4y ago
  > If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Because suburbs, despite lower taxes - often generate more tax income. Where I live the city itself has a large part of the downtown owned by the county, state and federal government (it is the state capital, plus various federal offices that all cities have). Half of the valuable downtown pays zero tax to the city, yet the city is still maintaining infrastructure for those lots. That is in addition to a few churches that pay no tax in the US, and a bunch of parks. Thus the city has the high value core which isn't paying for itself, and then the lower value ring around the core that has lower property values to generate tax income from. If they can annex a suburb just outside that with higher values the city gets more money (with their higher taxes), and probably can reduce the tax rates for everyone (still a tax increase for the annexed suburb!)
    - criddell 4y ago
      Doesn't that go against the Strong Towns narrative that the 'burbs are a net drain on cities?
      - uoaei 4y ago
        Strong Towns is talking about tax income vs tax expenditure efficiency (dollars received vs benefits realized). It is easily possible that receiving more money does not necessarily correspond to improved quality of life, if those funds are spent on projects that don't enable local prosperity.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        The evidence strong towns presents is not convincing. They take rural towns far from cities and claim that towns issues represent suburbs. They cherry pick suburbs that have issues and claim it represents all. Nowhere do they apply statistical or scientific rigor. Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Would the suburbs be forced to pay city rates for their roads/water/etc departments? Plenty of low-middle income low density small towns with suburbia densities survive just fine, have great services, AND are affordable all on their own. My town had Gb fiber before the big cities rolled theirs out in scale, and we now have the choice of more than 2 providers. My water rates are cheap even though our waste water is held to much higher standards than big cities (last I knew coastal cities still got to pump a ton of sewage out to sea). My roads are plowed day of while the nearest big cities can take a week to get theirs under control. All with a much smaller tax base (but a much more accountable local government). The California everyone wants to go to survived this way with positive local budgets, and enough money that all of the roads were landscaped, back before hyper growth. I remember when highway 1 through Santa Cruz didn't look dystopian but was full of colorful flowers even into the 80s. And it was actually affordable to live there then too.
- gretch 4y ago
  I'm not going to argue if this is generally true or not, but in my N=1, I don't see how this applies at all to something like sunnyvale or santa clara (where I live). Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    The metro area in the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier as regards things like commute-sheds, etc. The problem with bandying about a one-size-fits-all label like "suburb" should be obvious. If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.
- giantg2 4y ago
  At least from what I've personally seen, suburbs are not a drain. Do they cost more per person - yes. However, you have to look at the income side as well. The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income. A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.
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.

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.
        ackfoobar 4y ago
        Looking at satellite images I would guess they would not do well financially with the infrastructure costs. But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.
        4y ago
criddell 4y ago
> If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?
- bluGill 4y ago
  Because suburbs, despite lower taxes - often generate more tax income. Where I live the city itself has a large part of the downtown owned by the county, state and federal government (it is the state capital, plus various federal offices that all cities have). Half of the valuable downtown pays zero tax to the city, yet the city is still maintaining infrastructure for those lots. That is in addition to a few churches that pay no tax in the US, and a bunch of parks. Thus the city has the high value core which isn't paying for itself, and then the lower value ring around the core that has lower property values to generate tax income from. If they can annex a suburb just outside that with higher values the city gets more money (with their higher taxes), and probably can reduce the tax rates for everyone (still a tax increase for the annexed suburb!)
  - criddell 4y ago
    Doesn't that go against the Strong Towns narrative that the 'burbs are a net drain on cities?
    - uoaei 4y ago
      Strong Towns is talking about tax income vs tax expenditure efficiency (dollars received vs benefits realized). It is easily possible that receiving more money does not necessarily correspond to improved quality of life, if those funds are spent on projects that don't enable local prosperity.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      The evidence strong towns presents is not convincing. They take rural towns far from cities and claim that towns issues represent suburbs. They cherry pick suburbs that have issues and claim it represents all. Nowhere do they apply statistical or scientific rigor. Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Would the suburbs be forced to pay city rates for their roads/water/etc departments? Plenty of low-middle income low density small towns with suburbia densities survive just fine, have great services, AND are affordable all on their own. My town had Gb fiber before the big cities rolled theirs out in scale, and we now have the choice of more than 2 providers. My water rates are cheap even though our waste water is held to much higher standards than big cities (last I knew coastal cities still got to pump a ton of sewage out to sea). My roads are plowed day of while the nearest big cities can take a week to get theirs under control. All with a much smaller tax base (but a much more accountable local government). The California everyone wants to go to survived this way with positive local budgets, and enough money that all of the roads were landscaped, back before hyper growth. I remember when highway 1 through Santa Cruz didn't look dystopian but was full of colorful flowers even into the 80s. And it was actually affordable to live there then too.
gretch 4y ago
I'm not going to argue if this is generally true or not, but in my N=1, I don't see how this applies at all to something like sunnyvale or santa clara (where I live). Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.
- uoaei 4y ago
  The metro area in the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier as regards things like commute-sheds, etc. The problem with bandying about a one-size-fits-all label like "suburb" should be obvious. If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.
giantg2 4y ago
At least from what I've personally seen, suburbs are not a drain. Do they cost more per person - yes. However, you have to look at the income side as well. The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income. A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.

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.