If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small suburb a small suburb isn't maximizing investor value.
edit: to responders, yes I'm aware houses have other value. My comment is in response the parent comment that specifically addresses investment value protection aspect.
If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate.
So its not necessarily illogical.
First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell.
Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments.
You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.
Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.
edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.
These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime.
You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all.
How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore.
I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.
The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. Build up that first ring, and the next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring. Meanwhile that inner ring 15 mile radius can have easily ten or more times the population.
PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.
NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.
I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.
“New York residents were using an average of 572 kWh a month in 2017.” NYC is so efficient that: “New York ranks 50th out of the 51 states and the District of Columbia. The only state with a lower per capita consumption is Rohde Island at 176 million Btu (MMBtu) or 51.6 MWh. The total 2016 U.S. consumption per capita was 301 million Btu (88.2 MWh).”
It’s consistent across different countries, here’s UK’s data: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49639003
Second that article makes it really unclear what is being included in "energy expenditures". In the earlier paragraphs it talks about electricity which makes sense given a.) it's extremely expensive in NY and b.) I'd imagine more heating comes from natural gas as opposed to AC in southern climates which comes from electricity.
It lacks a lot of critical information to measure environmental impact vs. other cities.
Lastly who is being included? Inner city residents only? Or metro area?
Using electricity has an environmental impact. As does burning fossil fuels for heat etc, which is where the BTU numbers show up.
The biggest benefit is land use it’s self has an environmental impact. The ability to leave land for nature requires people not to be living on it. We don’t want wolves and buffalo walking through suburbs. Rabbits etc can’t graze on a paved roads, and drained swamps stop being swamps.
The problem isn't about land - there's plenty of that elsewhere. The problem is people all wanting to live in the same area and having high standards. You have a visous cycle where the denser places have the most jobs or the highest paying jobs, while the cost of living goes way up and the standard of living goes down.
It would be nice to have smaller cities. The real problem is how to convince businesses to reinvigorate the dying cities, or for people to change their preferences (either for locality or property type/size). These are being largely ignored in these conversations.
If you look at the actual population vs land available it needs a far higher density than I am talking about. 1k people per square mile is really low density. That’s single family homes with 1/2 acre back yard territory.
> We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL
So do you or do you not have a big city nearby?
> our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's
As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.
Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, start with thee streetcar suburbs (which often feature lots larger than what the new suburbs around me are building). They have already added sewer, water, telephone, eclectic, cable TV, internet, and some of those have been replaced as well. They have already replaced their roads many times over the years.
Sure there are some suburbs that have been badly managed and so haven't kept up. However that is a reflection on the short sighted voters, and not suburbs.
Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.
They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.
From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development.
"In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.
I would really only categorize Lincoln and Wellesley "low density suburb". The rest certainly have car centric qualities but they're too built up to be called the exception to the rule.
http://www.usa.com/rank/massachusetts-state--population-dens...
https://www.towncharts.com/Massachusetts/Top-25-Cities-in-Ma...
If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.
The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income.
A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.
Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.
If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.
But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.
But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.
61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1]
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
Most of these, you wouldn't know you were in a separate city if you didn't pay close attention to roadside signs, and I suspect the same is true of a large percentage of that 61% figure.
That says something, since those people didn't choose to live closer to the central of the metro area, but it doesn't say as much as you're implying it does, because they're all examples of places for which, if someone outside of Texas asks where they live, they're going to say "Austin" or "Dallas" or "San Antonio," and only if asked where in Dallas will they respond Little Elm, just as they might otherwise respond Lakewood or Hamilton Park, which are neighborhoods but not separate cities.
So uh, apparently the answer is "it doesn't.'
If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment
E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years.
Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people.
As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.