Part of it, as well, is that a lot of these regions that people moved out of are the suburbs. Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.
If the suburbs aren't sustainable, then what about rural? What about seaside? Where everything is super spread. It sounds to me that the "because roads" is an argument constantly made by those who levy taxes and by those who wants ever more taxes to be levied on others.
I live in a super-spread out rural/seaside area where I drive across vineyards to drive my kid to school. Businesses here aren't making a lot of money and yet there are roads. I somehow don't buy that very hard that sell that the suburbs aren't sustainable "because roads".
Do I really need to pay huge income taxes (France BTW) then 21% value added tax on everything I buy then 30% on any profit I'd make in the stock market, placing there money that's already been taxed? And paying four different (yup, four) taxes on real estate (land tax, "living tax", yearly tax on real estate wealth and now, the new, to me, one: "real estate tax for micro entrepreneurs")?
The tax never stops. And then, in addition to that, I've got to listen telling me that my area is too spread out "because roads and sewers" and I should pack my stuff and go live in a city?
Just FUCK THAT.
Having lived in urban, suburban, and rural areas, I would say that rural areas can sustain themselves because they have significantly less infrastructure.
People have wells for water, septic for sewage, poorer (or satellite only) internet, and less reliable/resilient electricity. The roads are narrower, sometimes without lane markers, sometimes unpaved. Fewer cars on the roads means less maintenance.
This lowers costs.
Suburbs typically have none of these options due to density. They have city-like amenities but have to run them greater distances.
There are ways to improve suburbs. One is consolidate housing but keep the same overall density with greenspace (less wire and pipe to rowhouses). Also, mixed use development with small businesses can reduce roads needed and generate tax revenue.
Rural areas are also heavily subsidized by urban areas. This is necessary because we need rural areas to make food. Suburbs are also subsidized, but without the benefits.
> The tax never stops. And then, in addition to that, I've got to listen telling me that my area is too spread out "because roads and sewers" and I should pack my stuff and go live in a city?
It seems like you are agreeing with the parent poster but are also mad at them because they are right? Unsustainable suburban development leads to crushing taxes is exactly what most folks are saying in this thread. That's how infrastructure like "roads and sewers" are funded.
You can move to the city. You could also move to a more rural area, if you like. If you want suburbs with urban amenties, it's going to be expensive.
Your France taxes though are not far off US taxes either (30% capital gains)... The USA has property tax with multiple levies on them and they are a function of real estate wealth in most places. And you don't have the crazy healthcare premiums.
Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don't cite a source.
Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.
The gist is that we've funded the construction of our infrastructure nationwide without accounting for the cost of maintenance. Now after decades of neglect, the cost of fixing all of our infrastructure is astronomical, far worse than if we had been doing it correctly from the beginning.
That doesn't seem workable.
The suburbs take a huge amount of land. If everyone lived in NYC-level of density, we could all fit in New Jersey. If we all lived in middle-missing housing level density, that amount of land is still far less than the total area of all the suburbs.
Upzoning does not mean you automatically get a building at maximum allowed density, it means you increase what is allowed and let the market decide what makes sense where. It would play out exactly as you describe.
Music. Street racing. 24/7 dog barking. Density is hell.
Sure it’s not like living next to Times Square but it’s far noisier than a neighborhood of single family homes.
That and the crushing car dependency.
But a lot of people like it, so hey, good for them too!
To each his/her own.
If it were legal to build low-rise, medium-density housing throughout the cities, more people would choose to live there, rather than the suburbs, because commuting sucks and city amenities are great.
Instead, restrictive zoning codes set aside large swaths of the city for single-family homes; the large plots of land they occupy mean that only rich people can afford them, which forces everyone else to compete for a limited number of apartments. Land for apartments being artificially limited means that construction cannot keep up with demand, so apartment prices rise too. The working class get forced out to the suburbs; eventually the middle-class have to go, too, whether they like it or not.
We should repeal these zoning codes and let people build dense housing wherever it's economically justified. Then, the choice really could be "to each his/her own": people who genuinely prefer to live in the suburbs could still go there, while people who would rather live in the city could do that instead.
We have suburbs because people want them.
The best example is when I lived in Singapore. Great public transit and high density housing. No need for a car.
When I talked to Singaporeans, most dreamed of owning a single family home (a landed home) with its own yard and a car. And we’re talking 90% preference.
When we all have windows open in summer we can hear one of our neighbors' TVs a bit though, and there can be noise between floors of multifamilies.
I’d assume one needs a bit broader set of data than that that comes from a clearly anti-suburb position.
It’s like only looking at NRA sources on the need for gun control.
Just need a willing city mayor to be re-investing into infrastructure.
Some of it had to do with the murder of brick and mortar retail in tightly packed downtowns in favor of the big box stores on the edge of town. That creates an enormous waste in municipal resources, doubly so if the store got property/sales tax subsidies.
This is less of an issue in the denser near suburbs where populations and revenues have been consistently rising the last few years.
Walmart is particularly good at this. Search for Walmart property tax lawsuit and you'll find hundreds of examples of Walmart filing lawsuits to get their property taxes lowered. The latest ploy for these big retailers is to push to have their property taxes valued as if the store was empty and shut down and had no inventory.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/to-cut-ta...
This is not to say there aren't real benefits to life in the burbs and serious disadvantages to city life, but it's fairly evident by now that American suburbia is not the utopian dream it was sold as.
San Francisco is a great example. The once bustling downtown is losing business at a rapid click not only because residents have left, but also office workers aren't coming in anywhere near as often.
I predict it'll be a positive feedback loop. As more businesses close, QOL issues become worse, it'll accelerate the exodus. It's like a repeat of the 60's.
Cities are the lifeblood of any culture and economy, after all.
Once they become “hot” they tend to lose a lot of what makes them unique.
Until suddenly it’s trendy to live their again.
Not being able to walk everywhere is literally not even a factor I look for when moving to a new area. I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability.
I have yet to see the metropolis that checks all of those boxes, or any of them for the matter.
Affordability for a lot of suburbs is when you allow for degrading infrastructure and moving more and more towards bankruptcy of cities. Budget analysis for a lot of suburbs show very troubling trends. In essence, living in a properly maintained suburbia is not affordable. Too much street, pipe and wire per capita.
Cleanliness - it's only in appearance. The dirtiness is externalized to the environment by means of CO2 and other emissions due to personal transport. A lot of concrete and asphalt being poured require massive excavations and destruction of nature elsewhere. More than cities.
Quiet is also externalized - cars are extremely noisy and suburbia basically requires a lot of 4000 lbs metal hunks with mostly a single person inside.
Privacy is there, but it costs quite a lot in total societal costs.
Do you have real examples of this? The past few suburbs I've lived in have been very prosperous, as a counter-example anecdote. I don't doubt some towns/suburbs are having financial troubles... but so are mega-cities too. Recall all the city bailout money that got spread around during the pandemic? How much of it went to small suburbs vs. mega-cities?
> The dirtiness is externalized to the environment by means of CO2 and other emissions due to personal transport.
I disagree here. A lot of hand-waving has been done about commuter cars - but somehow we ignore the miles of idling cars stuck in traffic every day for hours in these mega-cities. Fewer individuals may own vehicles in a mega-city, but the pollution is still there.
> Quiet is also externalized - cars are extremely noisy
On a freeway maybe. Inside a neighborhood? You can't hear any traffic noises.
There's been this movement to villainize suburbs and push everyone into mega-cities. It's rather misguided at best.
A US problem, created by the very suburbia that forces people to buy cars. All those suburbans are going to go downtown to work. Naturally you get congestion.
The argument for cities is that you can build no-car-required infrastructure that is both cheaper and easier for humans. Like in Europe etc.
Kind of weird to talk about "living on a bunch of credit cards" when it's the cities who seem to burn cash with little to show for it.
Cities generate the tax base and subsidize the rest. This is shown in every case. It's not good or bad, just a reality of how density works.
It's one big cycle, people moved to cities during WW2, then out to the suburbs during the 60's. Then back into cities in the 90's, now back out in the 2020's.
SF will be fine.
But with plunging tax revenue the city is going to be faced with some tough choices.
We can have moderately dense, highly walkable, transit-connected, safe, clean, private, quiet, socially vibrant, affordable towns and suburbs all over the country.
We just choose not to in large part because many Americans, brainwashed by The Automobile, can't even imagine such a state of affairs.
This means things can be, and are, very spread out. It is not unusual for a person in the US to live 20-60+ miles from their work - by choice.
It is simply not possible for everyone in the US to live in or near these mega-cities. Nor do most people (by the numbers) want to live in or near these mega-cities.
When I visit mega-cities, I see overt drug usage on the streets, trash everywhere, homeless camps everywhere, parts of the city a visitor is unsafe being in... and worse. That doesn't mean these things don't exist in a suburb - but clearly they are more readily evident in a mega-city.
We can go on about externalized things like carbon emissions from the commuter cars... but every time I visit a mega-city, there's miles of idling cars just spewing emissions while in traffic.
If you like living in a mega-city - good for you. Enjoy it, as is your right. That, however, also means I get to enjoy my suburbs. We don't get to tell each other how to live.
It simply does not track that because our country is huge, we must either live in uncomfortable mega-cities or in car-dependent and socially/economically/environmentally unworkable SFH sprawl. Americans overwhelmingly live in one of these two. They both have significant downsides that we truly don’t have to accept!
Americans have multiple health disasters on our hands - physical, emotional, and social - due at least in large part to the way we’ve built our living situation. It’s frankly sad that you think we have to accept it because… errr… mega cities are a bit dirty? You really think we ought to condemn generation after generation after generation of American to deteriorating quality of life because we couldn’t pull our heads out of our asses enough to build moderately sized cities with the physical infrastructure necessary to support strong communities? Good grief, what a low opinion of our country!
> tiny town in rural Arizona
I don't think most of us would say a tiny rural town is anything like a suburban area surrounding a moderate/mega city.
My suburb is near one of these moderately sized cities (less than 1 million population). None of these fantasies are working well for this moderately sized city. All of the same problems exist... drugs, crime, safety, privacy, homeless, trash, exceedingly expensive... plus public transit isn't sufficient to rely on either. It's literally the worst qualities of both combined into one special dump.
And... if you truly believe suburbs are a deterioration of quality of life in America, you really need to try living in one. I can just as easily wave my hand and exclaim mega-cities are the root of all problems in this nation. In fact, I'd have a lot more evidence to support condemnation of mega-cities, including how they doom people into permanently impoverished lives.
Yes, the fact that your nearby city is the worst of both worlds is my point. This is a condemnation of the way we build cities. Note that you are still near a city due to the amenities and opportunities that only cities can provide. This effect appears only to get stronger, not weaker, with time. So how can we not condemn later generations to abysmal living conditions?
It doesn’t look like either of the options on the menu in the US today.
Half of the names of cities you have lived in are definitely mega-cities, or very close to being a mega-city. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Seattle, Palo Alto - none of these are even remotely similar to typical modern-day suburbs.
What exactly do you consider a "city" as opposed to a mega city?
I’m clearly having difficulty speaking a language you understand, so have a good rest of your evening!
I'm curious what you mean by this, given the unusually high incarceration rate in the US.
Seems pretty evident GP lacks both historical and geographical context.
Every time Americans use that argument to defend anything that is wrong with the US policy, it looks crazy to people who are looking at the situation from another place around the world.
Neither size nor population are arguments for anything. There are gigantic countries on the planet that do not have America's suburb/car problem. They not only have well-run cities, but they also build fast trains and whatnot. The main trick is in not setting up entire urbanization and infrastructure to maximize profit for real estate, automotive and oil industries by spreading out people to immense areas like in the US. So, in that regard, the people who say that the 'suburban American dream' was a scam, they are right: It can be sustained in a few very rich regions. It is unsustainable for anywhere else. Even in those rich regions it causes many problems ranging from inefficiency to traffic congestion in the cities where the suburbanites have to go to work.
> When I visit mega-cities, I see overt drug usage on the streets, trash everywhere, homeless camps everywhere
Those have nothing to do with the concept of cities but everything to do with the US policies that prevent social services with public spending in order to maximize the tax breaks for the corporations and the rich.
> We don't get to tell each other how to live.
Actually, they do - you are spending their tax money for your inefficient suburb in a much higher rate than your tax money that they are spending for their city. An inefficient system is inefficient, even if those who run that system can afford to run it - like your local prosperous suburb. For the regional infrastructure in your own locale to be affordable by your suburb, a lot of taxpayer money will have to be spent for the society-wide infrastructure. So that the costs of being integrated to the larger infrastructure can even be affordable in your region regardless of its prosperity. From the larger power network to the transportation and communication networks, from production & supply chains to judiciary, police, even defense & military.
There is no small region that can afford the modern local amenities that they have without having a much larger society making those possible through society's aggregated spending regardless of how rich the region is.
You are also making the mistake of using gpd as a measure of productivity. It's not, it's just a measure of nickel and diming.
It's not really debated that the carbon emissions of suburban life is an order of magnitude more than urban life. They just aren't comparable.
Probably less common, but it is not that unusual to meet someone in Europe who commutes long distance by train. Probably it will become even more common as WFH or partial WFH becomes the norm in many industries.
Assuming such a future comes to pass (And that’s obviously a big question mark), desirability and property values in suburban-like neighborhoods would go up, since suburbs are no longer at a disadvantage for all those things you are arguing, like walkability, socially vibrancy, etc. A quick tap on your phone and 15 minutes later you can be at the bar or the shops or whatever else. Combine that with the remote work revolution and the future is looking great for suburbs and terrible for cities.
If anything, I’d argue Americans are ahead of the curve. In a society where self driving cars are cheap, environmentally sustainable, and always available people would naturally fan out into suburban living, with mixed-use development falling out of favor.
I hate beating this drum because it's borderline stereotypical at this point, but Tokyo really should be studied because for an incredibly dense city of nearly 14 million people they manage to achieve quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy, and affordability
>I want quiet
Visit the residential neighborhoods of the largest city in the world, Tokyo, and discover that you can get quiet with density. These are not mutually exclusive items, we as American society have somehow decided that noise pollution was an acceptable feature of urban landscapes. Japan decided, as a society, that anti-social noise activities in residential areas were bad and makes sure it stays that way.
>safety
A controversial topic pre-loaded with mountains of baggage, but IMO this is a result of policy and philosophical decisions. Japanese cities are incredibly safe at all times of the day -- you can leave a phone out in the open and no one will steal it. A lot of theories as to why that is, but the end result is clear: Japan, a city of 14million residents, is safe.
>cleanliness
Interestingly enough, 1960s and 70s Tokyo was a bit infamous for its litter/trash problem. I am a little fuzzy on how they turned that around, but they did and today it's one of the cleanest cities in the world. Again, a societal decision that has enforcement with teeth. And mind you, there aren't a lot of trash cans on the street. You have to carry around your trash with you if you generate any until you find a suitable trashcan or take it home with you. Yet the streets stay really clean.
>privacy
I will hand it to you, a big city can be a lot less private. But there are ways to create that sense of privacy within a more dense urban residential area without sacrificing density. Also, as density rises, you can get a weird counter-intuitive effect where the crowd affords you even greater privacy.
>affordability
The average house in Japan costs around $400,000 to build from scratch. Yes. You heard me right. When you buy a house in Japan you buy the lot it sits on, demolish the previous house, and build a house customized to your liking (designed and built by one of many competing housing companies). All for around $400,000.
Now, is it smaller than the current average American 2-story house? Yes. Is such a house size necessary? As it turns out, that's also a philosophical question and society over there has decided that in a trade off between smaller house + more urban density vs bigger house + less density, the density was worth the trade. You can definitely spend a million dollars and get yourself a proper sized mansion. But at least you get a proper sized mansion.
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This isn't direct at you specifically, but one thing that frustrates me in the debates between urbanization vs non-urbanization in the USA is the lack of imagination everyone possess. So much possibility, so much possibility that IS ALREADY PROVEN and yet we circle back around the same things. American cities aren't the only way cities are. Our cities can be so much better, they HAVE been better, and we can make them better again if we collectively as a society choose to.
Most of these are pretty cliche. New York City is one of the safest cities in the country per capita. But as with “cleanliness” is usually trotted out in a dog whistly kind of way that really is about something else. And affordability: yep. You’ve got that for a couple reasons: 1. People LIKE living in cities. Good old supply/demand. 2. As this thread is discussing, suburbs are massively subsidized to the detriment of the cities they neighbor.
Having lived in other big cities that manage to collect garbage in containers, NYC's continued practice of dumping uncontained garbage on the sidewalk for collection gives it a very real non-dog-whistly feeling(/sight/odor) of dirtyness.
Calling someone's preferences cliches and dog whistles is a really lazy way to have a discussion and degrades this forum.
Pipes break. Schools wear out. Roads wear out. Houses and fencing wear out, etc.
Many cities don't budget in perpetuity and (further) can't maintain existing infrastructure as a population bulge dissipates or as young people move away.
Or you can move out if the mayor does not bother to reinvest into its community.
All hell breaks loose when the population sinks. Its hard to justify higher taxes now to pay for things 10 years away.
I am reminded of some cities having "weak mayor" government structure. And it is painfully self-evident by looking at the unmaintained roads and sidewalks.
Also I noticed unchecked huge retirement benefits used as an award for "good" governance toward token administrators, and disproportionate sapping of local taxation by its state government (one such tax example, Robin Hood school funding).
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI [3] https://www.urbanthree.com/
I am by no means an expert on this topic and just poorly summarized the contents of this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
It turns out that core infrastructure should be built to be inexpensive to maintain, and density helps greatly with that goal.
Can't be crushing that too after what we did to our beleaguered housing industry.