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Comment by germinalphrase | Hacker News Reader

The argument is that suburbs are incapable of affording the infrastructure required for their own existence. These costs are either subsidized or require persistent (perhaps unrealistic) growth to cover without dramatically increasing suburban taxes.

"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?

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Isn't this an infinite regress?

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.

There seems to be a naive belief that if everyone just lived in dense urban cores there would be no need to pay for infrastructure beyond the city limits.

The argument is that suburban residents should carry the true cost of their infrastructure, not that they shouldn't exist.

Question really is the mechanism of pay. Maybe those costs on outside should be included in price of products and materials they buy. So for food the cost that goes to farmers and via them to local taxes should increase. As that would reflect what it really costs to produce for example food.

The average farm needs a single, nearby access road and power; water and septic is local (that's changing).

A suburb needs that nearby road, lots of streets, water lines, sewage, significant power, often street lights, etc. etc.

And the city needs transport networks and power grids that reach far beyond the city limits.

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.

We’re talking suburbs. My city block contains literally thousands of homes and commercial properties in a zone that would contain, at most a few hundred McMansions. The cost to deliver services needed are within an order of magnitude of a suburb but the tax base is significantly higher.

It cost more to maintain infrastructure that experiences an order of magnitude more usage than an infrequently used set of infrastructure.

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.

I'm trying to figure out if you are agreeing with me or arguing with me.

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 ...

I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that property tax on suburban property is quite high.

Yes, but it's still not close to the total aggregated costs of delivery of services. Suburbs are REALLY inefficient and expensive.

Infrastructure outside the city is normally paid by a combination of County Taxes and State Taxes, and roads are also financed by the Federal Gas Tax, tolls and other forms of government income.

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.

My town pays for sewer (which I don't have) and water (which I do) out of property taxes, assessments, and a quarterly water bill. I pay Comcast for my own Internet and I pay for private trash. Property taxes also pay for education (a big chunk), snow plowing, police/fire/library, etc. There's some money to roads but, yes, that's mostly from the state and gas taxes which residents also pay of course. So it's not like cities are picking up the whole bill; while they have more people paying taxes, a lot of costs are much higher as well.

The residents of city centers need farms, so it is logical that they would subsidize some amount of rural infrastructure. Residents of cities require materials from elsewhere, so it is logical they would pay the cost of acquiring those resources.

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?

The city resident needs the labor of the residents of the suburbs in order for the city to function.

Which doesn't necessitate the presence of the suburban environment. If suburban residents want a lifestyle distinct from living in the city, that is absolutely fine - but they should pay the costs of that lifestyle as it is a choice (just as living in a single family home versus an apartment is a choice urban residents make and should pay the corresponding costs to support).

Why shouldn't the city pay the costs necessary to attract the labor they need?

Asserting that the cost is necessary is a _big_ assumption. It's subsidized, sure, but that doesn't imply that it needs to be. If the subsidy ends, maybe wages will rise to close the gap, or maybe they won't, and suburban residents will move into denser accommodations nearer the city.

Or the suburban residents will move to a city that pays for them to live they way they want to live.

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.

Right, I am suggesting that a city can play out this competition by paying higher wages, i.e. paying suburban workers directly, rather than indirectly via subsidy. The experiment here is in wondering what those same workers would do given a net zero change to their income through a larger paycheck and higher housing costs. The subsidy doesn't allow efficient price discovery.

> Why shouldn't the city pay the costs necessary to attract the labor they need?

Because they don't need the specifically-suburban labor? They can get the labor from their 'fellow' urban dwellers?

Presumably, the suburban residents work at businesses in the city. The city has attracted the businesses. It is the business that directly demands and compensates labor not the city.

> And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns?

Towns still typically need to manage their own utilities while suburbs don't.

Suburbs are towns (or small cities) in many parts of the US. I'm not sure it's even especially common in the US for cities to expand to engulf the whole surrounding area with a single central government. Although there are certainly examples such as Houston, I believe.

Annexation happened a lot in the U.S. but it didn't happen everywhere. Some places, like my hometown of St. Louis, are practically defined by the lack of annexation (although, even in that most famous case, St. Louis did annex several suburbs in the 19th Century, before its Great Divorce). Other places, like Chicago or NYC, pretty famously annexed practically everything around them. (Brooklyn was even once its own city.)

It's probably more common out West. In New England, while Boston did annex some neighboring communities, Cambridge and Somerville are still separate cities. And get just a little bit further out and you have a bunch of clumps of a few thousand people that are independent towns. I used to work with someone from Australia who could never get over all the 5,000 person towns with their own school system, various boards, etc.

But towns that manage their own utilities do exist. That suggests that suburbs are not fundamentally unsustainable, they just need to adjust their calculations and expectations.

Exactly. I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas.

I suspect there are bad suburbs somewhere, but here ain't it.

> I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas

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.

Not sure, is there a list of "net contributor" states? And I suspect those look at federal budgets only, and ignore the other methods of "contributing".

> is there a list of "net contributor" states?

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-...

That's not really how funding works though. Say a company bids to build or refurbish a new street, the money paid to the company comes from a variety of pools, local, state, federal and utilities, to get funding from the different organizations the contract usually have multiple requirements like 'must build pipes for sewage, power, internet, ect' and the funding percentages of the project will depend on whats being built and where. That said, the people living in those houses will likely also pay state/federal taxes and utilities so its more complex. You also can't expect local towns or cities to foot the complete for big projects like highway overpasses and bridges and stuff, so how much a city contributes to infrastructure and gets back is harder to say.

Yeah, I would agree with that. It's not that towns shouldn't exist, they should, it's that the weird no-man's land suburbs probably shouldn't.

But my point is: Why not?

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.

Because right now most don't and instead become cancerous growths on a city rather than their own financially independent communities. Where I live the suburbs aren't their own towns and that's where the problem is.

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