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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

I live in Montreal. It’s like this. The key is the zoning doesn’t require a ton of setbacks, parking spaces, single use neighborhoods, etc

My brother was visiting, and I showed him a broken book. He mentioned it would be nice to repair. I said I’d check if there was a bookbinder in walking distance. He was skeptical. Google maps showed three within a 20 minute walk, in different directions.

Pick any service and it’s like that. The area is dense, quiet, leafy, unpolluted, full of parks, small yards, three stories high, but full of commercial arteries such that anything you want is a quick walk away. Whole swaths of the city are like that.

The areas are enormously popular and tourists love them. Yet such neighbourhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of north america.

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You described the key issue: "such neighborhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of North America."

I don't think it's productive to think of the suburbs as "bad" or "wrong," because that just turns into an angry debate about whose lifestyle is better.

What I think is productive is to recognize that we shouldn't be legislating that there can only be one way to live, and we especially shouldn't be prohibiting that the traditional neighborhood development patterns that have worked for thousands of years. If we actually had a free market, there would be both a fair amount of auto-oriented suburban development, and massively more traditional, walkable neighborhood development.

Would your "free market" also mean that the people living in the suburbs pay the true cost of living in suburbs? Including higher taxes to offset the higher infrastructure costs and the higher impact on the environment?

The net direction of subsidy from rural to suburban to urban is complex to calculate and subject to dispute.

For example, urban centers are net importers (of food, processed goods, building materials, etc.), and benefit disproportionately from heavy freight on roads.

An example of a serious but less obvious negative externality imposed by urban centers is the bulk import of population, since urban centers always reproduce below replacement rate. The urban centers basically take most of the intelligent people from non-urban areas and then ensure they don't reproduce.

More road space means people living further from one another. People living further from one another means exponentially more energy consumed to move mass further distances. Hence roads cause a huge externality of pollution.

That's not what exponential means.

Cities also rely on roads, just in a different way; they require road networks to bring them food and manufactured goods, transported at greater distances than similar products in rural areas.

You need less road space to distribute resources to more people in dense areas. For example, the resources to deliver everything people need in Manhattan is less than if you took all those people out of Manhattan and spread them around in detached houses.

By exponential, I meant when you increase the distance between them, you multiply everything consumed by an extra factor. More pipe for water and sewer and gas, more wire for electricity, more road for more intersections and wider roads, more miles driven for garbage trucks, more schools, it has a knock on effect of all consumption.

And it’s just as simple as that - the more you consume, the more you pollute. The more you consume space, the more you consume everything since the further everything has to get pushed (assuming you’re still expecting all the trappings of modern life). I am guessing that the extra space I am consuming now is probably a luxury that future generations won’t have, assuming population levels of people who live an American lifestyle hold steady or rise.

"Expecting all the trappings of modern life" is key.

Isn't it mainly tied to "density"? All other parameters being equal consuming only local resources at a rate which doesn't extinguish them solves the equation. On the pollution side of this: even if is is strictly the same (quantitatively and qualitatively) aren't natural surroundings more able to cope with it ("digest") if produced on a larger area, more sparsely, somehow diffusing the load?

We may, however, be unable or unwilling to adequately reduce our expectations.

Why are these things transported further to get to cities than rural areas? I could see the argument if most of these things came from most rural areas but that largely isn't the case. Many manufactured goods are imported from other countries. Very few rural areas grow all the food they need. Instead they will specialize in a few areas, sell there surplus and buy goods from other areas. For historic reasons many large cities are located at places where these types of trade goods had to go through already to get from one rural area to another.

Of course, if it didn't, it wouldn't be free market. The government would still have their finger on the scale.

Sure, as long as people living in dense areas pay the true cost of living there. No more free or subsidized fares that only pay a fraction of the operating costs and zero of the capital costs of transit. Be ready to pay carbon tax on the steel and concrete used to construct tall buildings that the wooden suburban house doesn't have to pay. Maybe move some jobs out of the city to the suburbs; it's not fair that suburban commuters subsidize city people's lifestyles with the goods they buy while there for work and the taxes their employers pay on the property they work in.

You can't just make up "externalities" for something you dislike; I guarantee you, anything you like has lots of "externalities" as well that may cancel out whatever you're trying to charge someone else for things they like.

Gas taxes, tolls, and other user fees pay far more of the total expenditure on roads than transit fares pay for their infrastructure and operating costs. Be careful what you wish for, you may not like what you get.

Yeah that’s not even close to realistic. Almost all wealth in modern USA comes from services with are mostly in or close to the cities. Slightly suburban yes, what’s called suburban in the U.S. nope. Almost all wealth transfer is from cities to rural and coast states to inland.

Why are you changing the topic to rural areas? We’re discussing whether suburban living (defined as car dependent urban design rather than literal suburb) is subsidized by people living in the denser, transit dependent areas or vice versa. Farm subsidies and military bases and whatever other rural subsidies you had in mind aren’t relevant for this discussion and suburban (and low density urban) people work in the services you claim almost all wealth in the modern USA is generated from.

OK, It depends what you meant with suburban. If you mean the suburbs close to the big cities, sure they are part of the wealth generation. A large part of people living in those suburbs are using public transport to commute to work.

The issue with cars is that it is impossible to build enough roads. The more you build the more convenient it becomes so more people drive etc. And of course the other externality of carbon pollution.

I think you're forgetting that house foundations are enormous slabs of concrete, especially on a per-resident basis.

Not really, a 1000 sq ft apartment with concrete floors and ceilings has the same amount of concrete used as a two story 2000 sq ft house in an area that uses slab foundations. The house also has no steel and did not require extremely heavy equipment to build.

I live in Montreal too and we'll have to work hard for it not to become just like everywhere else in North America.

New construction projects are totally different from the places that were built a long time ago, like around Masson, Ontario, St-Laurent, etc...

Griffintown makes me sad.

Yes! I remember when they started building around the ÉTS (Griffintown?) There was no life there, just a sea of condos with no services. Verdun was a much more lively place.

I love Montreal, but it seems you are describing the Plateau/Mile-End rather than Montreal as a whole.

But I agree, from the North American cities I visited, Montreal has the nicest, livable higher-density housing areas.

High taxes, but surprisingly low cost of living.

"hard to be a consumer but easier to be a human" was what I've heard about the city.

I'd take that tradeoff.

Nice platitude but I’m not sure what it means.

Fair though it’s more than the plateau. Mile end, rosemont, little Italy, mcgill ghetto, outremont are all like this. And then while other areas don’t have quite as many criss crossing streets, they are still very walkable and mixed. (Cote des neiges, st henri, ndg, westmount etc)

I’m sure I’m forgetting some neighbourhoods too. Mostly describing those I personally walked around a lot. The mountain gets a way a bit for those in the second list, whereas the areas around the plateau are a square grid of similar neighbourhoods in all directions.

That’s the reason I truly adore and love Montreal. It’s the best city in Canada in my mind. If it wasn’t for the brutal winter, I think it’d be the best city in Canada by everyone’s view too.

Paris ... even paris suburbs and French small towns are like this.

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