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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder why these articles about growing infrastructure costs and shrinking tax bases are about cities and not the suburbs. You would think the issues would be worse in the suburbs because the lower density would drive up the amount of required infrastructure per house.

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Citylab, strongtowns etc. Often discuss the tyranny of the suburbs and how city residents subsidize their infrastructure.

Infrastructure costs don't scale up linearly with distance, they scale up exponentially with complexity.

Suburban infrastructure, while spread further apart than city infrastructure, is usually far simpler to build and simpler to maintain and simpler to replace.

Costs go up a little bit in raw resources (longer wires, longer pipes, etc). But costs drop dramatically in amount of labour, length of time, installation costs, and so on. So usually, it's net-cheaper overall.

But it externalizes its costs: it requires people to have cars, which not only costs a lot of money in direct costs (car payments, maintenance/repairs, fuel), but also has a steep environmental penalty, plus a cost in lives lost due to crashes.

This particular article was about rust belt cities, but most Strong Towns stuff focuses on the suburbs, specifically inner-ring suburbs which are now facing rust-belt like problems all over the country, even in fast-growing metros.

And you’re right, in those places the infrastructure cost per-capita is much worse and the problems are more acute.

Probably because people have been leaving the city and flocking to the suburbs for a few generations now. People leaving the cities plus all the new people means the suburbs are (probably) absorbing all that growth.

> all the new people

What do you mean by this - population growth? Younger generations coming of age and such.

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