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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

> The last paragraph sounds like something we’ve all heard before. Anti-progress and looking at the past with rose colored glasses.

Building cities around cars is not progress, and arguing for making them pedestrian-friendly isn't "anti-progress". Suburbanization is just one possible development path and one that's not particularly smart.

To fight suburbanization the only thing that will work is taxing external costs. So you want to live 30 km away from the city but enjoy all the benefits - work there, have access to culture, entertainment and services on demand? Pay for the infrastructure that city needs to maintain to let you do it. This would make suburban lifestyle very expansive and would stop suburbanization. But people won't vote for this, because they want the profits and someone else to pay for the costs.

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Plenty of people want to live in the suburbs precisely because they want nothing to do with the city center. They live outside it; they work outside it (often on a ring road built specifically to avoid the city); they shop outside it; they view any requirement to go into the city as a schlep.

If the only “new” penalty is they can’t go see the pro sports team in person without paying a lot of taxes, that seems like a fair trade. (Or they’ll go see the NE Patriots at the stadium a little over 25 miles from the city.)

> often on a ring road built specifically to avoid the city

I wonder who financed the ring road. Curious that we don't build ring roads where there's no cities.

> If the only “new” penalty is they can’t go see the pro sports team in person without paying a lot of taxes

The new penalty should be "you want to live in 100 km radius of a city - you chip in for infrastructure it builds the more the further you are". It's no accident that suburbanization doesn't happen in areas where there are no big cities nearby.

> Plenty of people want to live in the suburbs precisely because they want nothing to do with the city center.

Sadly you can't have suburbs without a city center somewhere nearby.

> I wonder who financed the ring road.

In the US, that’s overwhelmingly the federal government, not local property or state sales/income taxes.

> Curious that we don't build ring roads where there's no cities.

Indeed. Perhaps the city residents should chip in more because of the need to build a ring road to avoid them? Or maybe, just maybe, different choices have different cost pros and cons and taking a simple, single-variable view isn’t rich enough to capture the whole situation. (pun intended).

> The new penalty should be "you want to live in 100 km radius of a city - you chip in for infrastructure it builds the more the further you are".

I’d wager that suburbs, villages, and small towns 101-125km away would boom under such a plan.

> In the US, that’s overwhelmingly the federal government, not local property or state sales/income taxes.

With the way internal US wealth transfers work, that's basically a way of saying "dense city livers somewhere else" rather than it being suburbs US-wide paying for each other.

This comment gets to the crux of the issue which the author isn't touching on either. The author points out that we need more downtown area and density because that pays for more than the cost of maintaining infrastructure it consumes. From a city budget perspective it makes sense to then want more density.

However, why do we have one lifestyle finance another one? Why should people who live in a downtown apartment pay for maintaining infrastructure for people who base their choices on getting away from others? This is even more crazy given that the environmental impact per capita is also much lower in denser areas. I'm not even saying that we should have a taxation system encourages density, but let's at least have one that doesn't exploit density to subsidize the suburbs!

As far as I can tell, the city I live in isn’t substantially subsidizing the towns and suburbs nearby, isn’t paying for their roads, bridges, and snow removal, and surely isn’t doing that for the ones 30 miles away in another state entirely.

Within the limits of the same city or town we do see this transfer though, as very clearly laid out in the article.

You also have people (like GP) advocating for a 100km from the city taxation zone, which is far more than “within the same city/town”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955707

I trust city voters can address intra-city financing needs, particularly if the more numerous would benefit.

"I trust city voters can address intra-city financing needs, particularly if the more numerous would benefit."

Well, I read the article and Strong Towns to say that most cities can't.

According to the preferences and opinions of the StrongTowns group. If the preferences of the actual voters/taxpayers in the city differ from that group, I’m inclined to go with the city residents over the StrongTowns not-residents.

If people outside the city are forced to pay for city things, surely they'll also get to elect and control the actions of the city too?

Who wants to actively avoid city centers? The Unabomber? I live on the outskirts of a small city in a small state and happily drive to Boston an hour away for culture, sports, etc. I would love it to be closer. I don’t know too many people nowadays who are afraid of or resistant to going to cities.

Me, for example. In the last five years living in north Austin, I've been downtown less than 10 times. That's on purpose. I've declined interviews for companies because their offices are downtown (and they required some portion of regular in-office presence). I'm not afraid of downtown, but certainly resistant to being there. I don't want to go down for dinner, much less live there.

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