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Comment by davidsawyer | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that is it still in everyone's best interest to curb sprawl. Taxpayers are still paying for highways and infrastructure to go out into suburbs where we could instead be spending it in a more efficient manner: in an urban environment. I could go on and on about the negative externalities of sprawl (pollution, obesity, etc.), but money is typically at the top of the list of motivating factors for the voting public.

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"Taxpayers are still paying for highways and infrastructure to go out into suburbs"

You mean highways that go to where they want to go?

"could instead be spending it in a more efficient manner: in an urban environment"

Well, we could be spending it all on barracks where we all sleep in bunks and eat in military-style chow halls. That would be even more efficient, right?

"Efficiency" is not the primary purpose of human life. It's probably not even in the top ten.

The real problem is that people don't realize how expensive all that infrastructure actually is: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

The suburban lifestyle needs to be subsidized in order to be sustainable, but good luck getting people to keep up with proper infrastructure investment. Even cities are failing at it (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...), but suburbs have even more infrastructure to maintain with a much smaller tax base.

Hah, nice work with the ST links of Joe Minicozzi's work! I sent mine a few minutes after yours.

That guy is a good speaker if you ever get the chance.

> The suburban lifestyle needs to be subsidized

All infrastructure is subsidized, including the lifestyle so beloved by young urban hipsters with no children. So?

Lafayette, Louisiana is in trouble because it had an oil boom followed by an oil bust.

And the idea of dividing up regions of the city by whether they "make a profit" or not is, to be blunt, just goofy. Yeah, revenue is generated in the industrial and business regions of town rather than in the residential regions. That's...unsurprising.

To expand a bit, imagine a block that has a branch of Bank of America, five apartment buildings, a small park, and a clinic operated by a non-profit.

Using the exact technique shown in your article (but on a smaller scale), the BofA branch would have a huge green spike, while all of the others would be red.

By the "reasoning" in the article, everyone except BofA should have their taxes raised.

Umm... no.

Thanks for spelling it out... wouldn’t love if people took the time to think like you did before knee-jerking “well if YOU don’t like it, just go somewhere else” ;)

It's the denser urban cores that pretty much pay for everything else. People have studied this stuff:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/20/mapping-the-e...

Industrial and business areas make money. Residential areas don't make money.

You'd see exactly the same pattern if you divided the "dense urban core" up into smaller regions made up of businesses and apartment buildings. The business buildings would make money, and the apartment buildings would not.

And?

The 3D map indicates that places with the highest density of people pay enough for utilities to make it worthwhile to provide and maintain and that infrastructure for far flung folks is a fiscal mistake that will probably cause most cities of signficant size in the USA to fail to maintain their infrastructure or go bankrupt trying.

You missed the point I made where I suggested to beware of certain European urbanistic mistakes such as the Banlieues, satellite neighborhoods an so on, which are in line with the straw man you built...

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