Deferred in the ‘Burbs
mikethemadbiologist.com
mikethemadbiologist.com
There are more unicorns than middle-class families in urban areas with more than 2 children. Whereas in suburbs larger families are both plausible and not uncommon.
This won't show up in your tax revenues when children are in school or college, but the 25-year-old yuppie GDP powerhouses who then move downtown will indeed make up their tax revenue.
Hint -- think about the really good (US-born) software engineers in SF you know. How many grew up in dense urban areas? Barely any, I'm willing to bet. Most are from the middle-class 'burbs, and didn't go to decrepit urban schools.
Maybe someday US cities will be effective at raising families, but it's not today. And ignoring this contribution to future tax revenue is an existential mistake.
This might miss the larger trend. Most 20-30 somethings in the US grew up in the suburbs because there was a larger movement to the suburbs at that time. The fact that things worked out well then, doesn't mean that's always the optimal strategy. It only tells us what a potentially successful path was in the 80s and 90s.
As cities become more desirable, and as housing prices there increase, the reasons for moving to the burbs shrink. Ignoring the demographic shift back to cities is a mistake. Correlation from what seemed to work in the 80s and 90s isn't necessarily causation or correlation in a world that has changed.
Except that rising housing prices are the number one driver of people to the suburbs. Any urban area nice enough to want to raise kids in, is too expensive for most families to actually do so.
And that's the situation today -- I can't imagine how much harder it will be in the future, when cities have even higher property values.
Cities are awesome until you have kids.
My son is 4, we're faced with sending our kids to an ok public elementary school, followed by a middle school where stabbings in the hallway are not unknown. Or pay for a private school. Or buy a house 6 miles away in the burbs and go to a nationally recognized school district.
Cities are great fun, and have a whole lot to offer a childless person/couple.
But they are also (typically) more expensive, dirty, dangerous, crowded, and loud than the typical suburb. A home large enough to comfortably raise 2 kids in a safe neighborhood and with good schools is financially impossible for us in the city, but not in the suburbs.
While the parent poster is wise to note that demographic correlation does not imply causation, I do think that suburbs are much better for raising a family. They seem designed for it, compared to cities.
Of course, if someone reading this is raising a family in a city, then more power to you. I'm only speaking from my own experience.
Unconvinced this is a special "suburb problem". Urbanists would be ill-advised to get to triumphalist about how they don't have an unfunded obligation problem until they're sure they don't.
As you point out, there might be other governance-related problems that offset the advantages density confers.
Which effect dominates - revenue vs. cost? I don't know. But that article certainly doesn't do anything to illuminate the issue.
Infrastructure is a huge issue, suburbs are not alone in this issue, but I'm not convinced the problem there is worse or more pressing than in the inner city (or anywhere else) I'd also point out in places like California, the infrastructure in the suburbs is upward of 20-30 years older then the 70's without substantial problems (save for the City of Los Angeles, and unprepared sidewalk backlog).
It's not a ra-ra-cities-good-burbs-bad book. It explains why the infrastructure in suburbs is not financially sustainable without reference to speculations of higher energy prices (like a Kunstler would) and how political leadership often goes awry in how it pursues development.
The tl;dr which I'll do in three paragraphs is that suburbs tend to overestimate how much tax revenue they're going to get from the development pattern that involves a lot of corporate brand name stores popping up off of main roads. The taxes don't pay for the roads so the towns have to lean on the Federal government for funding.
The suggestion is that towns and businesses need to redevelop downtown areas which have more efficient infrastructure costs because they will no longer be able to externalize those infrastructure costs onto large state governments or the federal government.
Also, across the board, politicians and developers tend to emphasize the benefits of new developments while minimizing the presentations of the costs of maintenance. The book also kills some new-urbanist sacred cows like bike lanes because they are usually both insane from a financial perspective and extremely dangerous for both cyclists and drivers.
So the thrust of it is that if you thought the cities were bad, the suburbs are often worse. It will also make you rethink a lot of the media hoopla over urban development in countries like China which make supersized versions of these kinds of errors. A $100 million infrastructure project sounds awesome until you realize that it will cost $500 million without generating that much in taxes to prevent it from collapsing into a blighted ruin in less than a decade.