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Funny because cities are more efficient from an energy and carbon footprint perspective. The only thing that makes it unsustainable is that some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

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It's not that complicated. Build more housing and better transportation options. If particular kinds of businesses have a hard time thriving (like grocers), actually pay attention to what kills those businesses and fix it. It's often some sort of overboard regulation like zoning.

>It's not that complicated.

On paper.

How dare you make housing affordable. I just spent 20x the median annual American salary on this house, and now you want to make it affordable?

One day the fed will do the unbelievable, it will raise interest rates and all those mortgages will be underwater.

It really isn't all that complicated though, and just takes money to fix the urban planning mistakes that have been made in many metropolitan cities.

Montreal is probably the most livable "big" city in North America, and it's mostly because of three things:

1. Excellent transportation. The metro is for the most part consistent, extremely affordable (it's ~$85/month, and about half that for students and youth), safe, and works as a great mainline transport. Busses are also very frequent - most coming at most 15 minutes apart during regular hours, and usually every half hour or so past 1am. You can get almost anywhere in the city in an hour or less using public transit.

2. Renters are protected. The Regie Du Logement heavily favours renters in housing related disputes, and as such, the prices also favour renters. Most individuals pay $1000 or less in rent, for entirely adequate housing, and if they want to move, it's almost certainly an option.

3. Permissive zoning. With the exception of the downtown core, there are grocery stores and pharmacies everywhere. Combined with depanneurs (corner stores) being within 500m of just about any point in the city, you are never far from milk, eggs, bread, beer, wine, and other necessities. Combined with businesses themselves being able to set up shop nearly anywhere as well. Ground floor business with residential above is the norm for nearly all "main" streets.

Yes, there are difficult things for existing cities to recreate, but it is almost entirely due to poor urban planning choices being made by the municipal (or state/provincial) powers that be.

I have to point out here the co-existence of permissive zoning AND rent protection. This is the way.

I'm not sure if rent control exists in Montreal, but advocacy organizations in US metros often push rent control as a standalone solution to various housing crises. But rent control requires the existence of a decently functional housing market to do its job correctly.

Yes, I have seen a lot of US cities that used rent control to do nothing except reduce accountability. You can build a decently functional housing market without rent control. But with rent control you don't need to build a functional housing market so the suffering continues.

All true, but don't underestimate the impact of the FLQ/PQ crisis. Several hundred thousand people moved from Montreal in the 90s, and immigration and money shifted to Toronto and Vancouver. Montreal was a renters market for 2 decades as a result, and Toronto experienced a boom that hasn't stopped since.

You’re forgetting - there just aren’t that many people who want to live in Montreal. That keeps costs down significantly.

That is only true in a non-remote work environment where people would have to commute into office building for work

if everyone is commuting 5 feet to a home office then the efficiency of rural vs urban becomes less disparate

Add in Solar power and it becomes even less so

of course there still is some in the delivery of supplies, but even these can be some what mitigated to where the differences are minor

Utilities, deliveries, etc... Urban areas are way better in many ways.

Heck just roads. At a certain level of rural you are paving and patching 10 miles of road per person. In the city you are paving like a few feet per person.

But add on top of that the cost of public transit infrastructure. 1 mile of underground BART line cost $1,500 per person. And that ignores maintenance.

Pro-tip, most US cities don't have anything like that. Midwest are all buses except Chicago. I can't think of a single Southern city with a rail transit system.

Per capita, rural and suburban are much less efficient and more costly. Infrastructure is orders of magnitude more expensive and resource demanding to build as distances spread. Water, sewer, electricity, internet, roads, etc. That’s without even looking at the supplies and movement of people.

Sure, if you can afford to build yourself a self sufficient off grid home, you may perceive it as more efficient in day to day costs.

Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.

We're not talking about taxes, but environmental cost. San Francisco provides a bunch of (human) services walnut creek does not.

As one example, muni costs money and sf pays more for BART than WC does. These are still cheaper and more environmentally efficient than everyone owning cars.

If Walnut Creek paid an extra $9000/year for each resident then they could easily offset whatever extra environmental cost. Carbon offsets etc are not all that expensive.

1. Carbon offsets do not reduce emissions

2. Bart and muni are not the majority of the $9000 difference. The majority of the cost is various social services. The actual cost of muni per sf resident is something like $500, which is still significant (muni is not a great rapid transit system), but that's far less than the cost of carbon offsets for every resident.

What are these numbers comparing? Property taxes?

Don’t discount the many sources of funding in America. The state and federal governments can and do pay for infrastructure, along with long term bonds paid using sales and other taxes. The suburbs benefit from the highways to the suburbs, but the suburbs don’t fund them.

Can you point out for me then where the order of magnitude suburban inefficiencies are accounted for?

Sure, here’s an analysis from Australia:

https://www.crcsi.com.au/assets/Resources/b6e1625f-d90b-433d...

Orders of magnitude may be hyperbolic, but costs alone are twice as much from that study. Note that some of those costs are directly paid by households and not through taxes. For example, you need a car and drive further distances increasing fuel and maintenance costs.

You’re ignoring the fact that people take up space.

Every single cabin in the woods running off solar used to be an area with trees.

EDIT: And don’t even get me started on those cabin dwellers buying cats and letting them roam the forest like the invasive bird and mammal eating machine that they are.

There's not enough tax base to support infrastructure like installing broadband, repairing and winter upkeep of roads and electric grid, fire stations, hospitals. Even businesses like nursing homes which one expects would benefit from lower property costs do not prosper due to lack of population and supportive medical services. Lower COL areas are net users of tax revenue from the country due to inefficiency, cities are net generators to the country.

That's only a result of the resources made available by the inhabitation of rural lands being under-valued on the market due to subsidies. Say goodbye to affordable food prices if we don't subsidize rural locales.

If you have to subsidize something, you only want to subsidize as much as necessary. Farmers can get their subsidies. A remote worker moving out of SF with a fat paycheck doesn't need the subsidy.

They're already more efficient though, and there's no benefit to the current residents (tech rich or not) from massive incoming population growth.

There won't be equivalent investment in services, recreation, leisure facilities to cope, so they'll degrade.

The scope of what I'm talking about is bigger than yours. Cities are more efficient, and we need to move more people into them (not just the ones that are big right now, just to cities in general) to give ourselves a better shot at keeping our planet habitable in the long run.

To your second point - degradation of infrastructure is not an issues with cities, it's an issue with management and investment. On a practical level, with additional people should come additional industry and tax revenue which should in turn allow metropolitan areas to keep pace infra-wise.

>There won't be equivalent investment in services, recreation, leisure facilities to cope, so they'll degrade.

That's what happens in suburbia. You build a lot of infrastructure for very few people. That infrastructure was partly funded by private companies or federal government incentives. Once you have to collect property taxes and maintain the infrastructure you've overburdened yourself and can no longer meet your obligations precisely because there are not enough people living in that area.

> some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

Barcelona comes close. Perhaps not so much these days, but its a city that was really built with that in mind. And some of that persists.

Japan doesn't do too badly either. Some brief research is showing me that the configuration of apartment we would recognize as a 2BR would rent for something like $1200 or less in a lot of the Tokyo metro.

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