If you were paying the true costs of living in the suburbs this wouldn't be an issue, but there's a high likelihood you don't.
Cities will always be necessary because they are one of the most efficient ways (cheaper to build, maintain, and support) to account/house large amounts of people. If you want to live in other types of areas you should, ideally, be willing to pay the true costs.
I can't link the article since I'm on a subway but Strong Towns is a good resource explaining how suburbs bankrupt themselves in the future since they won't be able to pay for the costly maintenance of their infrastructure (water, electric, roads, etc):
If to take an example Google insisted every development be independently paying out immediately, there wouldn't be any Maps, Docs, Drive...
If there was a similar insistance by Xerox, probably no personal computing.
Amd even at a state level, even in the US, there are states that pay more to the nation and there are states that get more. In the rest of the world - particularly in Asia, we just consider this support costs for maintaining nationhood.
The difference with suburbs/cities is the awareness, the expectation, and societal cost.
People living in the suburbs are generally unaware that they're being subsidized by the cities they live adjacent to, and have the expectation that their infrastructure and services be prioritized - generally to the detriment of the entire geographic region.
Going beyond that, the car-centric suburbia mindset has become the legal defacto design pattern, increasing costs and reducing livability for everyone.
So it's less that they should "pay-out" for themselves, and more that they should stop forcing their lifestyle choices on the rest of the population, and understand the costs associated with their lifestyle.
Without that, America would have much denser "European style" urban hubs, and likely more active small cities than currently exist.
You could of course calculate business taxes proportionally to the work suburbs deliver, but that would be quite dishonest.
You can always say that only the most densely populated place carries its own... but that isn't convincing. I am not from the US, but we have similar discussions here. That people have to live in the city if they want to live efficient. Problem is that few want to and I think at that point the discussion should be almost ended.
The same groups/organizations you named will often end activities or sub-groups that have a cost above a certain threshold.
I believe the overall intent here is to show the true cost of suburbs and evaluate if it's a pattern that cities can keep supporting. Ie, is the desire to live in the conditions suburbs create worth the cost of those arrangements?
As much as I like living in a dense area and riding my bike, the rise of the YouTube educated urban planner has led to a lot conclusions that aren’t particularly sound. Doing a flaw P&L on a small town and deciding, in so many words, that it shouldn’t exist is peak smugness.
But, I was talking about the city, society, or the greater good. Whatever you call it. Higher density is more efficient and uses less resources per capita. Period. Same reason private planes are so bad for the environment.
But do you really pay for suburbs? As I said, the cost intensive positions scale with the number of people. Schools, utilities, ...
At what cost, especially relative to other options. Lower density may end up costing more over the long term:
* https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/environment...
Urban living ≠ Manhattan:
But ultimately in these threads, the elephant in the room is that the suburbs are subsidized† by the cities they don't pay taxes into.
So why don't the cities expand their boundaries to include the suburbs, instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
† Side note: I have not found to be true, personally. Suburbs are paid for by the people who live there and the county, into whom we pay our taxes. In truth, a lot of our money goes into businesses in the city (who will in turn pay taxes to the city), since that's where we all go for our goods.
Why would anyone want to absorb something that costs more to run to provide the same services?
* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
> […] instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
Perhaps they want to kill them because they are wasteful of area (often paving over perfectly good agricultural land), and cause climate change due to their reliance on cars.
Further, how much "choice" did suburban dwellers actually have? Post-WW2 most zoning has forced the creation of car-centric, low-density sprawl. Perhaps there are folks in the suburbs that want higher density neighbourhoods but because of the limited supply (due to lack of new build) the prices have gone up and they're priced out. Whose to say that walkable neighbourhoods wouldn't be popular if purchased in the "suburbs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
> † Side note: I have not found to be true, personally.
I think this depends on the municipal boundaries involved. Depending on where the border is, on one side it could be that things built in the "old" / pre-WW2 way and on the other the "new" / post-WW2 way, and the taxes go to each municipality appropriately. In other places there could be the pre-WW2 Old Downtown and is walkable, but everything new is non-walkable. In those latter situations the more walkable parts are probably subsidizing the less walkable ones:
However, if another article on this subject comes to mind I'd appreciate to know what it is, once you're off the train of course.
Even if you take away this public infrastructure you would get private infrastructure in its stead.
>In 2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $612 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $461 billion in income taxes. [1]
You're right though, poverty does absolutely suck and realistically nobody's 'enjoying' EBT or assisted housing or whatever benefit they receive. The point I was trying to make is that poor people shouldn't feel badly for contributing less to the pie any more than 1%ers should feel righteous for contributing more.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...
"Are cities necessary given the modern conditions?"
How many suburbs would exist without the corresponding city center? And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns?
How could cities survive without farm land?
How could cities survive without outsourced materials?
We live in an interdependent interconnected global society where everything and everyone subsidizes everyone else.
A suburb needs that nearby road, lots of streets, water lines, sewage, significant power, often street lights, etc. etc.
The only logical difference is a matter of scale and limits.
The same rules apply to any region that has dependencies outside of its own borders.
The only way to not be subsidized in some fashion is to live directly off of the land in the form of some nomadic tribe.
The hinges of a door used once a day will last longer than the hinges of a door used one thousand.
A road that sees one delivery truck a month will last longer than one that sees thousands.
Rural: Low usage, low maintenance low services (road,power,internet), low tax base
Urban: High usage, high maintenance, high services (water, sewer, road, power, internet, transit), high tax base
Suburban: High usage, high maintenance, high services (water, sewer, road, power, internet, transit), low tax base
Only one of these, by necessity needs subsidizing ...
Of course we should pay for infrastructure outside the city, but if you expect to live outside city centers and have costly infrastructure such as a sewage system, high speed fiber internet and so on, you should pay accordingly.
What happens now is that this infrastructure is either financed by those living in city centers or by debt.
So I don't buy your Straw Man argument that people believe that dense urban cores are better. What was explicitly discussed is that people who live in the suburbs don't pay what they should.
What is the benefit to the city resident in subsiding the infrastructure of a suburb? Why shouldn't suburban residents pay the cost of their own infrastructure?
Cities are in competition for talent and labor. Those that provide more of what the people who provide that labor want will do better than those that do not.
Because they don't need the specifically-suburban labor? They can get the labor from their 'fellow' urban dwellers?
Towns still typically need to manage their own utilities while suburbs don't.
I suspect there are bad suburbs somewhere, but here ain't it.
Are you in a net contributor state as well? I live in a similar town, but it's in Wyoming, a state which benefits from federal transfers from urban centers.
Yup [1].
> ignore the other methods of "contributing"
Nobody is arguing we write off New Mexico, Mississippi or West Virginia. But their lifestyles are subsidized by Delaware (special case), Minnesota, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut and New York. (Scaling the net contribution to GDP removes much of the partisan slant introduced by urban centers having more people, and thus bigger numbers, as well as leaning blue.)
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2011/08/01/the-red-...
I have yet to see anything that points to them being fundamentally worse than towns: if you just treat them as Towns Next To Cities, it seems like you solve the vast majority of the problems.
It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement.
What suburbanites want is to be close enough to the city to enjoy all the benefits of being in a major metro area, without the hassle of supporting the project of urbanity. They want all the upsides without participating in addressing the (very real) downsides.
A suburb is in physical reality little more than just another neighborhood that has declared itself to be something else entirely in order to shirk its responsibility to the whole (sort of like if I declared my bedroom to be a separate apartment, so that I didn't have to acknowledge my roommate's chore list). Declaring yourself independent of your metro's core city doesn't magically make it so. It's just sticking your head in the sand.
You have this backwards: the higher density folks do not need support from the lower density folks. It is the opposite:
>It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement.
Except that those "riff raff" aren't footing much if any of the tax bill for the high density city. That bill is paid by the wealthier people, many of whom are living in those suberbs, subsidizing the city costs. Who is parasitizing whom here?
Rich people and poor people alike live in cities. It is basically insane to separate them physically and declare them independent. You can't define away the problems of urbanization through economic segregation.
I mean, it would be one thing to enforce physical separation while still acknowledging that both halves are part of the same city (and the same tax base), but to go so far as to say, "no, we're actually not even part of the city, despite all commonsense physical reality; we're actually just a whole separate thing over here" is really an awe-inspiring level of audacity and chutzpah.
This was done pretty much the entire history of civilization. Communist revolutions tried to ignore the human nature that leads to it and we all know how that turned out.
Your position is that the state should use central planning to determine which kinds of economic activity are allowed on which parcels and then restrict property rights accordingly. The call is coming from inside the house.
* Note that the way we are using this word is pretty vague and may be contributing extra crosstalk
Yeah, it's an awful term, because it refers to hundred-year-old densely-populated urbanized areas that directly abut core cities whose borders were artificially locked into place in the 19th Century, and to greenfield interstate-offramp developments, and just about everything in between.
But, just to address your "way on the other side" scenario: forbidding zoning is exactly what the state should do. You don't get to have democracy for core rights. It doesn't matter if everybody in the neighborhood votes to restrict property rights. They're not up to a vote, just like you can't vote to restrict freedom of speech. It's not subject to a vote.
The right to build housing on my own private property is very clearly, in my view, protected by the U.S. Constitution and restricting that right is plainly a taking. I don't care what Euclid says. It was wrongly decided.
Suburbs are a compromise.
Of course there are tradeoffs, usually in the form of a longer commute.
> In this zone it is illegal to make urban housing.
So you'd propose forcefully building your preferred style of housing everywhere, even if the local residents don't want it?
Short of declaring a dictatorship, it won't succeed to force everyone to live in the same style of building. A very large part of the population has no interest in living in a high-rise apartment.
Forcefully? When someone builds an apartment building on their own private property and voluntarily rents the units to other free actors, then obviously nobody was forced to do anything. The neighbors, on the other hand, would like to force the property owner to do something else with their land.
It's very important that we get this part clear in our minds. Zoning is coercion, not the other way around.
You'll sometimes see headlines about a "single-family home ban" whenever a city does zoning reform. No such thing exists. When we allow more uses on a city lot, we obviously have banned nothing.
And, I care about as much what the neighbors want me to do with my private property as I care what they think about my right to free expression. It's not subject to a vote. These rights are codified in our Constitution. They are not subject to a popularity contest. Some things are fundamental. We wrote those things down in a special document and put it in a folder titled, "things you don't get to vote on."
> Short of declaring a dictatorship, it won't succeed to force everyone to live in the same style of building. A very large part of the population has no interest in living in a high-rise apartment.
It's an enormous country and those people should feel free to hit the bricks (they can move, in other words). Or, hey, this is America. If you want to control what happens on a piece of private property, then buy it.
Those two sentences are contradictory.
If someone owns a plot of land with a single family home, they do get to control it by staying put living in the house they like. They don't have to "hit the bricks" just because you'd prefer to tear it down to build a highrise.
Do you think I'm talking about eminent domain, or something? I am not. I can't build a highrise on their property unless they let me. They're going to have to voluntarily sell me the land before I can do anything with it. I'm not proposing anything except that they be allowed to do that, if they wish to. They don't have to do anything.
City/property is expensive because it is desirable. The US stopped building that kind of thing post-WW2, so the supply is finite and generally not growing anymore. Zoning is such that only car-centric, low-density developments are generally allowed.
There is nothing to prevent a policy change to allow "city" building like used to happen pre-WW2:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
> Suburbs are a compromise.
No, they are bad design that devours land like a locust which causes unnecessarily high energy use and has made climate change worse:
* https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/environment...
There is no good reason for car-centric suburbs, especially when the residents do not pay the externalities of their life style.
Sure some suburbs exist in the outskirts of major city centers, but across the country the vast majority do not.
Why should they pay to support that density?
If my wife declared the kitchen to be a separate part of our apartment that she's not responsible for but then came into the kitchen every single day -- worked there, ate there, met friends there -- without ever participating in the maintenance of the kitchen, then I would think she's shirking her responsibility to the whole (and I'd be right).
"What's the problem? I have defined the area where I sleep to be independent of the kitchen! What part of that don't you get?" is not a compelling argument.
But basically suburbs can be designed well too.
It needs to have strong public transit that connects to the city (or wherever most people work).
And you still need good walkable and bikable paths everywhere. Because driving cars just sucks for everyone.
I live in what I suppose you could call a better-designed suburb (or small city; it's all semantics). My suburb of DC has a dense downtown with metro rail and bus access. It has plenty of walkability and apartments/condos for people who want that. It also has townhouses and single-family homes within walking distance of downtown. As you get further from the downtown, it becomes more and more traditionally suburban.
The core issue with this is cost. There are so few places like this in the U.S. that it's expensive to live here. Retrofitting a lot of suburbs with more of a core would help a lot.
The other big issue is what is called missing middle housing. There is a lot of apartments/condos and single-family housing. There aren't many townhouses or duplexes. This creates a situation where many people are either buying more house than they need or living in a space smaller than their needs/desires. This also causes single-family housing prices to be higher than they should be.
Ultimately, retrofitting the suburbs is the great challenge of the 21st century. We need more walkability and density in their cores. Basically, we need to bring back streetcar suburbs (which is what my town is, and after going through decades of losing density, it has been transformed).
And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees.
> And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees.
Ultimately, it all boils down to work. Walkability is great, being able to bike is great, but if you don't have industry in your walkable suburb, it's just there and nice and everyone still has to drive or take a train to work in the city. As long as work centralizes in cities, we will have problems like this.
You can have well designed attached houses-or-appartment suburbs, and they exist, but in the US they’re $$$ for obvious reasons.
North American stopped building "better designed suburbs" post-WW2 when everything went car centric. Before that we had:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Anything car-centric is worse designed. That does not mean we have to ban cars 100%, but simply design things so the car is an option rather than a necessity.
So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done.
In my suburban neighborhood a 6 minute drive to the nearest grocery store becomes a 50 minute walk along 3 lane highways.
But it's not like that is the distinguishing factor between a suburb and a city center.
From my suburb house I can walk to one supermarket in 5 minutes and to another one in maybe 6-7 minutes. Yet it's definitely a suburb.
Everyone leaves at the same time like clockwork to go to work with their immense SUV, alone of course, driving through a congested interstate to the nearest city to their office. Then the spouse leaves on their SUV to take the kids to school, queueing to drop them off.
If someone sees anyone walking in the evening or at night, they call the cops and the walker is arrested first, then investigated later. The unlucky ones get shot.
But for discussions like this you probably can assume that people mean the less-dense, residential-only types
Honestly my take is that we need Rivieras witch means a bit dense BUT not more than a bit suburbs that are NOT only residential but mixed. As a result we can have "near enough" services/people without failing in the density trap.
The big issue is that human settlements never worked well when centrally planned and when they are not if they work more people want to be there, so the initial low density became right and than too much dense. After that density issue start to bite, people to flee and the cycle restart. No recipe to fix it, it's more a social issue than a mere architectural one.
Some, like McKinsey think we can solve some complexity issue with flying vehicles and I agree, but I do not think we are as near as they state https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and we still have an enormous isse: making VTOLs/STOLs it's relatively easy (behind the BEV part) but they can just move people and little volume/weigh goods so we can't build a home moving raw materials without roads and if we need them we need to build and maintain them...
Keep following the "in medio stat virtus" principle about the density and diversity described above I think we also need to came back to a moderately distributed economy: some activities need big factories, so far we can't do anything different, BUT only some. Many others can be done in smaller settlements witch for instance that instead of build mega-factories for anything we should try to achieve economy of scale with standards and standard tools in many smaller factories. Easy to say, hard to built but... In the end internet was a free scale network of networks and prove to scale well enough. I think the same principle can be generally valid. The VERY COMPLEX and very expensive game is try it in the real word because social experiments can't be done and destroy as software projects. They demand very long time just to build them. Enormous resources etc and simulations can't really help more than a bit. Since in the past we have build many-centuries longs projects I think we can achieve such result anyway, but not in the modern mind settlement of something quick and done. Convincing people to embrace such revolution and remain engaged for few decades is however... Well... In the past we used religion to push people to such efforts...