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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers and huge investments in public infrastructure by the federal government.

> People ... couldn’t imagine returning to the city which continued to decline.

I begin to wonder whether the demise of the city was really caused by the government subsidies of the suburban lifestyle. It's not that Levittown isn't sustainable anymore, it's that it never was, not on a long term scale. Low density living should be expensive because it is expensive. The government chose to invest in suburbs instead of the city. The city rotted without investment, exacerbating the problem.

It's only the last couple decades as governments tightened their coffers that the suburbs have had to carry their own load- and they can't.

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“It’s not that Levittown isn’t sustainable anymore, it’s that it never was.”

I think this is a key point, really well expanded upon here: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

To expand a bit more here, the Strong Towns folks argue that city infrastructure project costs do not factor in long-term maintenance. Growth is the driver of revenue in the short term (building permit fees, more expensive single-family homes paying property taxes). Once growth slows or stops, the party is over. Maintenance costs kick in, and the errors made during the boom time are revealed in the form of broken streets, abandonment, blight, etc.

They consult with cities to target a 20-to-1 "return on investment" when taking on infrastructure projects. That means that the costs to build street or water pipes should result in 20x that cost in economic activity.

I think demise of cities was due to being starved for capital, redlining, automobiles, and crime due to lead pollution.

Post war capital was invested in suburbs instead of urban cores which then decayed.

Redlining also meant urban areas inhabited by minorities were cut off from capital. Not only couldn't minorities get loans, but even their often white landlords couldn't.

Automobiles allowed workers to locate their families in cheap suburbs while sucking at the corporate teat in Urban Cities. At least until too many people spoiled a good thing as auto congestion built up.

Leaded gasoline caused brain damage which effected dense urban areas the most, resulting in high crime rates.

The last 40 years has seen a reversal of that at least for some urban cities. Capital is being invested in cities. Hard redlining is gone. Replaced by jacking minorities with exploitative loan products. Suburban congestion has made suburbs much less attractive. The decline of lead pollution means urban cities are again 'safe'.

Lead pollution hypothesis is one of many plausible explanations and shouldn’t be presented as fact.

True, but there is recent evidence that is pretty much the gold standard for a perfect randomized experiment where they tracked children with high blood levels who did and did not receive interventions to lower it. Those receiving treatment committed violent crimes at a far lower rate than those who were exposed but had no intervention. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20160056

Are you saying that inner city crime is by brain damage, rather than by living in desperate circumstances?

Yes. Read the paper. All confounding factors are controlled. It is the holy grail of causality.

What about possible unknown unknown confounding factors?

Yes. Desperate circumstances contributed (and still do) but there is ample evidence that the huge uptick in urban crime in the 60s and 70s was due to leaded gasoline.

Are you saying the rectangle’s area is caused by its length, rather than its width?

Vaguely relevant: there's reason to believe that the current Central American gang violence epidemic, which is driving the migrant crisis at the US/Mexico border is also due to leaded gasoline. Central America didnt' eliminate leaded gasoline until the 2000s.

Many european countries eliminated unleaded gasoline during the same time. And crime rates dropped much sooner.

I'd say unleaded gasoline is not the most important factor. For Europe, I think it was drug use.

Can you elaborate?

Leaded gasoline was banned around the year 2000 in both the EU and Mexico. At that time, crime rates were dropping significantly in Europe, without elapsing 18-25 years.

Also, European countries have some of the lowest crime rates in the world. If the young of the 2000s were under its influence, the effect is not large(not larger than 1-2 homicides per 100K people).

I believe that drug abuse during the 80s and 90s was the culprit of high crime rates in Europe. People addicted to drugs(heroin, crack, cocaine, etc.) committed lots of crimes. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Europe managed to lower drug abuse and then crimes dropped. For Mexico, there is likely another explanation. Like drug trafficking for instance.

Having said this, I think leaded gasoline has adverse effects on public health. I believe it can create mental problems on people.

However, not everyone exposed to leaded gasoline will develop those problems. And among those affected, not all of them will become criminals only because of lead poisoning. Therefore, I don't think that the majority of criminals during the 90s were so because of leaded gasoline. I think that other factors were more important, like drug abuse.

That seems like a weird analysis. Leaded fuel was available but not exactly widespread in EU in 1999. Their timeline was similar to the American timeline: 1973-1996 phaseout for US, 1976-2000 phaseout for Europe.

Can you talk about how increasing crime (prior to the drop you talked about) is related to increasing drug use, any numbers behind that?

I think the lead hypothesis suggests that lead exposure inhibits impulse control, which can manifest as higher rates of violent crime but can also manifest in other ways.

Presumably, desperate circumstances will make it manifest as violent/property crime. But there are probably other manifestations that slide under the criminal justice radar too, like domestic violence and general aggression/bullying among communities in less desperate circumstances.

During the 2001 recession, 2008 financial crisis there were dire predictions that violent crime would go up. Misc property crime went up a bit and violent crime didn't. Violent crime perpetrated by young urban males continued to decline as well. In the face of high rates of unemployment.

Personally I think cultural normalization of violence and quality of policing plays a role in the level of violence. But socio-economic factors really don't.

Maybe it makes more sense to say losing population brings about viability issues. If people for whatever reason started to leave Oakland, I’m sure it would implode as much as a Vallejo would if they suddenly had an exodus.

Whether cities or suburbs, viability is pretty much driven by whether people want to live/work there or not. Some cities are more viable than others. Some suburbs are more viable than others.

I agree with you but disagree with parent who seems to claim suburbs were never viable. They are and so are cities but their viability rests on having a large enough tax base to be self sustaining.

As suburbs reached their apex many cities risked insolvency. As cities begin syphoning people from suburbs some of them too will experience insolvency issues.

Certainly. Plenty of suburbs (and even exurban towns) do quite well. As do many cities. One can argue about who is paying their "fair share" of infrastructure etc. but it's hard to buy the argument that the vast suburbs of elite cities today aren't "viable." Especially given that there actually isn't room for all those people (and companies) to locate in the city even if they wanted to.

But, yes, as housing preferences shift it affects pricing and viability of different neighborhoods, at least at the margin.

I agree that demand is there but one interesting challenge is tax revenue: many people moved to suburbs because the taxes are lower, and many will move again if they’re raised to the level needed to maintain city services & infrastructure. Toss in an aging population with many people unwilling to pay for services such as schools which their grown children no longer need (or climate change hardening which they won’t live long enough to need) and it’ll be an interesting fight in many suburbs across the country, with some finding a viable balance and others falling apart.

The "suburbs were never viable" claim is built upon a few facts about most US suburbs: 1) They are advertised partially based on the low property taxes in their municipalities. 2) They have restrictive building codes that prevent additional development from occurring. In other words, they are built all at once, to a finished state.

Then you run the math on property taxes vs. maintenance costs. If repairing the road, pipes, etc to one additional house costs more money than that house contributes via property tax (over a period of 25 years or so), then the suburb is considered insolvent. It could raise property taxes, or allow additional development, but without those actions the suburb remains insolvent.

Low density, low-rise areas also offer much higher survivability in a case of nuclear bombing. Thankfully, not a pressing concern at the moment, but 1950s were a different world.

There certainly appears to be some sort of sub-urbanity trap. Low density living isn't necessarily more expensive than living in a high density area, but that relies on certain economic modes that do not include much infrastructure. But those economic modes are not the ones that fit the needs of a modern office worker. Modern suburban living requires roads, water, electrical, police, and other services, where the cost tends to scale with area. When the tax base doesn't experience growth, the required services must funded through something like ballooning debt, which quickly leads to insolvency, or be curtailed. Both of which seem to form a feedback cycle.

> I begin to wonder whether the demise of the city was really caused by the government subsidies of the suburban lifestyle.

To be frank, I think nothing has been as destructive as zoning. Here in Hamilton, Ontario, I'm in a single-family zoned area, and the two closest consumer businesses are a brewery (with outlet), about 200m away, and a couple convenience stores, 600m away. The brewery is only there because of a specific zoning bylaw. Most everything else is more than 1.2km away or farther.

What are you referring to that changed in government over the last couple decades?

In fact, if the suburbs were going to be sustainable without extra government funding in the long run, they would have been developed without the government's helping hand in the first place.

This is exactly the problem that finance exists to solve.

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