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That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 15

That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity. Seems like empathy should work both ways?

ajuc 1y ago
Because people in suburbs are subsidized at the cost of and prioritized over everybody else.
- skybrian 1y ago
  How do you know? Seems like cities have expensive infrastructure too?
  - rglullis 1y ago
    No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
    - skybrian 1y ago
      I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local. For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country. > Financial problems are local. There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
        skybrian 1y ago
        Could you link to the study? It sounds interesting.
        rglullis 1y ago
        I don't know if there is any published study. The video is relaying the work from https://www.urbanthree.com/services/ https://www.urbanthree.com/services/
        bpt3 1y ago
        There is no formal study. It's all handwaving by urbanists with an irrational hatred for people who don't want to live like them. The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise. Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
    - bpt3 1y ago
      You seriously point people to one of the most biased and obnoxious sources for public transit info and expect people to accept his conclusions? The first minute is nothing but conjecture and personal opinion full of misinformation, and it just continues from there. Strong Towns is a good source, but they don't make or support most of the claims in this video because they have no basis in fact.
rglullis 1y ago
> why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege. Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
- skybrian 1y ago
  Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know? I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - prasadjoglekar 1y ago
      I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography. The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
    - lupusreal 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - rglullis 1y ago
        > because of style of community they want to own their home in? No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center. Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
tastyfreeze 1y ago
Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential. Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
cogman10 1y ago
The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there. What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development. Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
CalRobert 1y ago
Where do you see a lack of empathy?
mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
- skybrian 1y ago
  This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
- bpt3 1y ago
  In my area (Washington DC), fares pay about 10% of the budget for the subway each year. Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
  - bombcar 1y ago
    The “cars get subsidized” arguments almost always fail to take into account that the entire capital and maintenance cost of the vehicle is borne by the driver. You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).

ajuc 1y ago

Because people in suburbs are subsidized at the cost of and prioritized over everybody else.

skybrian 1y ago
How do you know? Seems like cities have expensive infrastructure too?
- rglullis 1y ago
  No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
  - skybrian 1y ago
    I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local. For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
    - rglullis 1y ago
      You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country. > Financial problems are local. There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
      - skybrian 1y ago
        Could you link to the study? It sounds interesting.
        rglullis 1y ago
        I don't know if there is any published study. The video is relaying the work from https://www.urbanthree.com/services/ https://www.urbanthree.com/services/
        bpt3 1y ago
        There is no formal study. It's all handwaving by urbanists with an irrational hatred for people who don't want to live like them. The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise. Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
  - bpt3 1y ago
    You seriously point people to one of the most biased and obnoxious sources for public transit info and expect people to accept his conclusions? The first minute is nothing but conjecture and personal opinion full of misinformation, and it just continues from there. Strong Towns is a good source, but they don't make or support most of the claims in this video because they have no basis in fact.

rglullis 1y ago

> why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege. Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.

skybrian 1y ago
Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know? I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
- rglullis 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - prasadjoglekar 1y ago
    I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography. The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
  - lupusreal 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - rglullis 1y ago
      > because of style of community they want to own their home in? No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center. Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.

tastyfreeze 1y ago

Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential. Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.

cogman10 1y ago

The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there. What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development. Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.

CalRobert 1y ago

Where do you see a lack of empathy?

mrgoldenbrown 1y ago

The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.

skybrian 1y ago
This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
throwaway2037 1y ago
I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
bpt3 1y ago
In my area (Washington DC), fares pay about 10% of the budget for the subway each year. Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
- bombcar 1y ago
  The “cars get subsidized” arguments almost always fail to take into account that the entire capital and maintenance cost of the vehicle is borne by the driver. You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).