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Comment by knappe | Hacker News Reader

I too want to find this article (I'm certain it was linked from HN). It isn't a strong towns article, but it had some great diagrams showing how the city centers are the only economically viable places for utilities because of density. The suburbs were just not cost effective and thus were going to go bankrupt because of the lack of efficiency. I've tried to find this article in the past and it has been long enough that I'm not really sure what to google for at this point.

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https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh... ?

> What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.

> This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.

This is the article I was thinking of, thanks for finding it!

I have strong suspicions that the data doesn't hold up if examined closely, because "suburbs" are just low density towns, and small towns continue to exist nearly everywhere.

Sure maintenance comes around, but it always seems to work out, somehow.

There are lots of small towns across the US where it has not worked out.

I spent a couple years in Macomb, IL when I was a kid. Take a look at that place on Street View.

Overall population growth is mostly what has allowed for things to “work out” previously, but as the rate of growth slows down or even goes negative for the first time in recent history, the necessary conditions may not hold anymore for things to “work out”.

Urban centers don't survive well under declining population either, so it's kind of an orthogonal question.

No, (North American) suburbs are fundamentally different to small towns. They don't have their own retail or small businesses, they're just places where people live and commute into the city.

Well a counterpoint would be the northern suburbs of Dallas like Plano, Richardson, and Frisco. They have so much economic activity that I would not be surprised if more people commuted from Dallas to those suburbs for work than vice versa. Also, I bet the people living in the far north exurbs are commuting to the suburbs and not all the way to Dallas proper.

I’m not sure that “true suburbs” actually exist anywhere - because if there’s large swathes of houses, you’ll find at least some retail in the area.

However if it’s more than a mile it may not be walkable but that’s not the same thing as unsustainable.

They're not small towns. Suburban homes very often have no commercial activity in close proximity. You have to drive somewhere else to do just about anything.

Small towns haven't historically been built like that.

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