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> I don't understand this conversation at all.

Welcome to America!

Seriously, we don't understand it either - but we sure will fight about it. No matter how tenuous, we can blame anything on our favorite causes.

Everyone seems to want to spend time blaming and fighting instead of actually picking up a broom and cleaning. Our journalism competes with reality television and our political parties are treated like sports teams.

I don't understand it either, and I live here.

I find this comment frustrating because the "macro-politics and big concepts" end up mattering a lot. This is politics. It's about what's right, what's fair, and notions of equality/fairness. You can't talk about politics without contrasting notions of "right".

The way I see it, this whole conversation is just a proxy for money. The suburb doesn't have enough; it has no tax base and can't afford its municipal services. What they want to do is attach to a city and use the city's services. Now, there might be efficiencies of scale with service delivery to a larger population. But if you look at the history of many large cities in the US, many suburbs made the conscious choice not to be part of the city precisely because they didn't want the higher taxes, on sales, on property, on income, etc. that living in a city requires.

You say "renew the infrastructure". Are you writing the check? Your comment seems to assume we can just invent money out of thin air.

I'll be honest, I'm pretty fed up with this entire bailout mentality. I live in a high-tax, high-expense city. Meanwhile, I pay the federal universal service fee so that someone in Nowhere, USA can have a phone. I see low taxes on carbon emission, mortgage interest deductions on huge suburban palaces, a massive expressway system, agricultural subsidies, a postal service that charges the same rate to deliver mail across town as to Nowhere, USA, and I'm just tired of it. And I'm also tired of last generation passing the cost of their bad decisions on to us, in the form of underfunded pensions, a major housing crisis engineered by the Boomer generation, and 100% of GDP federal debt.

So yeah, guilty as charged re: "macro-politics and big concepts", but, enough is enough. If these people couldn't be bothered to move as their city crumbled over the last, I don't know, 30 years, I'm just not crying, as I pay through the nose for rent in a big city.

Hey...

I think we might be more on the same page than not. Money problems is exactly the level that we should be talking about it.

What I was reacting to and labelling “macro politics” is trying to relate this to the most abstract (relative to the issue at hand) political viewpoints. On one side, calling for a Misesian creative destruction. On the other hand, insisting that the root of the problem is racism in the 70s and that’s what needs to be addressed.

To me, it seems like a problem of financing localities that have particularly bad balance sheets. That’s what I mean by practical and I think we agree on it mostly.

This is a very common problem. Every country that has locally financed authorities runs into it. Maybe a locality is poor (like this one). Poor people still have the same sewage needs as rich people, but they pay less tax. Maybe a local real estate is cheap or low turnover, and tax is tied to property values or real estate sales. Maybe the commercial-residential split is important?

I’m not particularly in any camp about how to fix it. It’ll depend on whatever the norms of the place are. I don’t know American norms so well, but there are an ultimately finite set of options. Maybe merging/gerrymandering is the right idea.

I’m not unsympathetic to your gripes either. I also think my country (ireland) has had (and still has) bad financial management, morally questionable bailouts, official public debt and a scarier unofficial stack of liabilities like pensions and other hand-me-downs.

But, are you really going to draw a line in this sand? A poor suburb that can’t afford police or sewage, because the way a map was drawn left it with more liabilities than income?

This is a great discussion. Thank you. Agree 100% on the whole creative destruction/racism/etc. point, it's impractical and leads the conversation nowhere.

On a slightly more charitable note than my last post, I'd be interested to see the actual balance sheets of these municipalities. I wouldn't be surprised if the root issue is underfunded pensions, because frankly, even a relatively poor city of people making 15k/year could probably afford sewer and garbage. I think people are just pissed because they bought into the American dream of a house, didn't save enough for retirement, and were planning to use their home equity as their retirement account. Otherwise, there just isn't a great reason not to move. I look at the hardships endured by generation after generation in this country (the US), from the pioneers putting it all in a wagon, the hard labor of homesteaders moving one-ton rocks in their backyard, to the smuggling of slaves out of the south during the civil war, and just wonder, what's happened to us? When did we become such a nation of entitled whiners?

I am sympathetic to pensions. Nobody saw the declines in interest rates we've had in the last ten years and in my mind, that's essentially an unforeseeable eventuality that might call for a special tax. In the overwhelming majority of cases I've seen, the underlying problem is crowding out of municipal budgets by pensions. We need to get this under control and I'm happy we're starting to talk about it.

Hmmm. I'm not sure. Trying to guess at a long term picture of economics is tricky, especially something as ethereal as a pension. Demographics seem to have taken most of the world by surprise, nevermind economics, and nevermind the politics of it all.

Over here, we're mostly hoping the French will come out of left field, surprise everyone and figure something out. Chances seem good, you know what they get like when they're stirred up.

Homesteaders heading west to get away from whingers were being replaced with irish people getting away from their own whingers. Both Ireland and New York still exist. Whingers too. Many localities set accounting books on fire along the routes. Maybe it's more a matter of perspective. You describe the past in terms of people doing things. The present, in much more numerical terms. But, crazy finances aren't new. People doing things isn't new.

Yes, the more grandiose idea is to be open to shutting down unsustainable towns and suburbs.

This does not mean abandoning the people who live there, but the opposite. It requires us to take seriously the people who find themselves living in a dying place, to know their lives, to build different and better places for them to live in and plan a gradual transition and eventual shutdown.

But for any of this to happen, the government needs to admit the problem at hand and the people need to trust their government. After decades of racist real estate policy and constant neglect of the needs of the working poor, and entrenched self-interested careerist local politicians neither are likely to happen.

(also a non-american)

Unfortunately it seems that the macro politics is very important here - it affects the issue of whether people outside the area care about what happens in the area.

Discussing the cause of a problem does help us avoid repeating it.

I think there's also an American tendency to place responsibility for fixing a problem at the feet of those who caused it in the first place, regardless of whether those people are still involved with the subject, or even alive.

> There is no creative destruction option

Know how I know you're not an American...?

>If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb.

A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.

This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes?

Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture.

There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of.

It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.

The suburb won't go away but we don't care about the suburb anyway. The most important thing is the people in them.

Can't they move somewhere else? They can't because it costs money. Why can't their government just give them the money? It might be cheaper than their infrastructure costs.

Which government? The city government is broke. If they merge, the larger city could pay for transitioning costs, but that would be a massive cost (worth it, possibly!) and politically difficult.

I don't think it would be fair if the city paid for it. The direct cost would go to them and the direct benefit to others.

In that situation, the problem has to be solved on the level above. The State as a whole should pay the cost, since it is the State as a whole that would benefit.

Because then it becomes moral hazard (like every bailout or free handout). Let’s say I live in centre of big city and pay crazy high rent and make sacrifices to save much bigger cash pile required to be able to afford to get on a property ladder.

And people in suburbs will just get free cheque from government to move? That is incredibly unfair to people living in cities hence it creates moral issue.

Why? Was the death of the suburb something that they should have foreseen? An irresponsible risk they chose to ignore?

If not, it is not more unfair than when health insurance uses the money of healthy people to pay for treatment of sick people. Or when the Federal Government uses the money of people who live in the mainland to pay for hurricane relief for people who live near the coast.

Then why not write government cheque for all millennials to buy their own property so they don’t have to rent? Would you support that?

Where do you stop? Should a family of four (two young children) that lives in a 1 bedroom apartment in city be given a 2 bedroom apartment by the city government? They obviously need it.

I agree with socialised healthcare and education. First one because health is not some thing you choose but is affected heavily by genetic lottery (yes unhealthy lifestyle is a problem but it’s hard to objectively quantify) and second one because it means levelling of the opportunity field for young people not born to wealthy parents (again this is related to lottery of birth, what kind of family you are born into).

But housing is very different from healthcare and education.

My concern is not a moral one about birth lotteries and socialism. It's a pragmatic one about infrastructure costs.

Sick people are less productive. Uneducated people are less productive. People who are stuck on a dying suburb where there is no business and there are no jobs are less productive.

Of course there is a walking away option. In fact you will see this happen much more in 20-30 years as the absolutely monumental scale of the unsustainability of suburban infrastructure truly rears it's head.

There simply won't be enough money around to renew "infrastructure" in these areas. I use the term loosely. We're just talking roads/sewer/water/etc. lines, nothing most europeans would actually consider civil infrastructure like public transit.

You can say walking away is not an option, but continuing to just keep these communities on life support isn't either. There is no option for "make all of suburbia great again" simply due to mathematics.

> Of course there is a walking away option. In fact you will see this happen much more in 20-30 years as the absolutely monumental scale of the unsustainability of suburban infrastructure truly rears it's head.

First, most suburban infrastructure is not unsustainable, despite how many armchair urbanists wish otherwise.

But even if were, people don't have the option to leave anyway, so it doesn't matter. If your poor, and live in a poor area, you don't have a 'walking away option'. Even if you sold your shitty house in a shitty suburb, it wouldn't net you enough money to live anywhere else anyway. Or if you rent, you already live in the cheapest place possible, so how will you afford the higher rent anywhere else?

Detroit is pointed at as an example of people walking away ... but Detroit still has over 600,000 people. East Cleveland is mentioned in the article, but 17,000 people still live there. Flint had poisoned drinking water for more than a year straight, and 97,000 people still live there today. You can literally poison every citizen with bad infrastructure, and the place will still exist.

When you say "walking away is an option", you are speaking only theoretically. When /u/dalbasal says "Cities and towns do not go away. People live there, even if the population declines a bit.", that's a simple realistic truth. Barring a few extremely rare exceptions, places don't go away.

> You can say walking away is not an option, but continuing to just keep these communities on life support isn't either. There is no option for "make all of suburbia great again" simply due to mathematics.

Sure it is. We just need to pay for it. Which we will eventually be forced to do, and then will do so because it's the cheapest and easiest option.

We have plenty of money to support every suburb. We have enough money to build 2x more suburbs, support all of those, and double the entire freeway system and support that too. We just choose not to spend it. We waste our infrastructure funding on not-infrastructure. At some point, we'll be forced to support the people or the people will die.

Roads are cheap. Pipes are cheap. Powerlines are cheap. Freeways are cheap. Urban Planners will insist it's not true because of their political desires. But if you actually do the mathematics you mention, these things don't really cost much. Compared to the benefits they provide, infrastructure is dirt cheap.

Apart from some exceptional circumstances, towns and cities stay where they are.

Exceptions are frontier towns, mining booms, war torn cities.

In 99% of cases, cities stay where they are, bankrupt local authorities or not. Populations decline a little. Quality of life declines a lot, but the problem doesn’t just go away.

And anyway, what does unsustainable mean? What can’t be sustained exactly? It sounds like what can’t be sustained is the financing model for poor localities. Why not walk away from that?

The only way that no one lives in it is if there is such a huge housing surplus elsewhere that no one needs to. This will not happen in the US, because it puts the rent-seeker class at a disadvantage, and they give money to political campaigns.

There is no suburb so rotten that someone won't buy up pieces of it to extract as much money as they can from its local economy, and then not spend that money back in.