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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

Some people just want to live in a small suburb

I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue.

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.

If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed...

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.

I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.

How does that square with their place in the timeline Strong Towns documents?

They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.

These are towns that were founded in the 1800s at the latest and some in the 1600s...

Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development?

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."

I would describe Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) as being substantially car-centric with respect to the majority of 21-65 year old residents of those towns/cities owning a car and using a car or car service more than 250 days out of the year. Arlington would be feasible to get by without a car in many of its areas. Others would be much more difficult in the majority of the land.

Looking at satellite images I would guess they would not do well financially with the infrastructure costs.

But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.

Speaking as an Arlington resident, I would not describe it as "car centric", although cars are accommodated far more than I would like. It's still a classical streetcar suburb. The majority of Arlington's housing stock is from multifamily buildings within a couple of minutes walk to high frequency bus service (~5 minute wait).

Rich suburbs do fine. Many suburbs of Boston have high income earners and high property values resulting in sane levels of property tax that actually fund those regions adequately. Most of the suburbs Strong Towns criticizes have $250k homes with household incomes between 40-50k and it’s impossible to tax those residents enough to pay for their infrastructure.

Can you name some of these communities?

Sure: Arlington, Belmont, Lincoln, Newton, Waltham, Watertown, Wellesley.

Arlington and Watertown are higher density than Lowellor Quincy. Newton and Waltham are not far behind. You're relying on intuition rather than data and it's showing.

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...

Strong Towns are picking the outliers that are not doing well and trying to extrapolate to all suburbs. I quit reading them a few years ago when I realized the place they using as an example was a rural town an hour drive from anyplace that could be considered a city - yet somehow this was supposed to show why suburbs were insolvent.

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.

Your response makes me think you are not as familiar with Strong Towns' advocacy as you may wish to indicate. Their focus is not on density vs sprawl, and they are very careful to qualify that dichotomy against other dichotomies along which one may proceed with analysis. Their focus is rather on walkability and the accessibility of all kinds of services -- open public spaces a la parks, grocery and shopping stores, healthcare, schools, cultural offerings and nightlife, etc. To pretend that anything to which is attached the label "suburb", unqualified, is the target of their ire, is lazy.

I quit reading several years ago. Thier focus on walkabilty is good, but they also talk about how suburbs are not sustainable (or did then, and others seem to imply still do), and that position does not add up.

Same. I binge watched and binge read piles of related content on the topic several years ago and the overall message resonated quite a bit (in the “hell yeah, why don’t we do that?!” way).

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.

> If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs.

If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?

Because suburbs, despite lower taxes - often generate more tax income. Where I live the city itself has a large part of the downtown owned by the county, state and federal government (it is the state capital, plus various federal offices that all cities have). Half of the valuable downtown pays zero tax to the city, yet the city is still maintaining infrastructure for those lots. That is in addition to a few churches that pay no tax in the US, and a bunch of parks. Thus the city has the high value core which isn't paying for itself, and then the lower value ring around the core that has lower property values to generate tax income from. If they can annex a suburb just outside that with higher values the city gets more money (with their higher taxes), and probably can reduce the tax rates for everyone (still a tax increase for the annexed suburb!)

Doesn't that go against the Strong Towns narrative that the 'burbs are a net drain on cities?

Strong Towns is talking about tax income vs tax expenditure efficiency (dollars received vs benefits realized). It is easily possible that receiving more money does not necessarily correspond to improved quality of life, if those funds are spent on projects that don't enable local prosperity.

The evidence strong towns presents is not convincing. They take rural towns far from cities and claim that towns issues represent suburbs. They cherry pick suburbs that have issues and claim it represents all. Nowhere do they apply statistical or scientific rigor.

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.

Would the suburbs be forced to pay city rates for their roads/water/etc departments? Plenty of low-middle income low density small towns with suburbia densities survive just fine, have great services, AND are affordable all on their own. My town had Gb fiber before the big cities rolled theirs out in scale, and we now have the choice of more than 2 providers. My water rates are cheap even though our waste water is held to much higher standards than big cities (last I knew coastal cities still got to pump a ton of sewage out to sea). My roads are plowed day of while the nearest big cities can take a week to get theirs under control. All with a much smaller tax base (but a much more accountable local government). The California everyone wants to go to survived this way with positive local budgets, and enough money that all of the roads were landscaped, back before hyper growth. I remember when highway 1 through Santa Cruz didn't look dystopian but was full of colorful flowers even into the 80s. And it was actually affordable to live there then too.

I'm not going to argue if this is generally true or not, but in my N=1, I don't see how this applies at all to something like sunnyvale or santa clara (where I live).

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.

The metro area in the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier as regards things like commute-sheds, etc. The problem with bandying about a one-size-fits-all label like "suburb" should be obvious.

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.

At least from what I've personally seen, suburbs are not a drain. Do they cost more per person - yes. However, you have to look at the income side as well.

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.

As a suburban homeowner/parent, house prices have little bearing for me. I hope to live in my house for decades, so the sell price in the distant future doesn’t matter. It’s the “quiet and peaceful” part that I care about. West coast cities have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean, so I will continue fighting to my last breath to prevent my suburb from becoming like that.

> unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean

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.

I understand, and if this policy ends up affecting you, I'm sorry.

Small suburbs can work fine around small cities. Hypothetically, a ring starting 5 miles from the city center extending out another 10 miles = Pi * (15^2 - 5^2) = 628 square miles. At even 1k people per square mile you’re up to 600,000 people reasonably close to the urban core. People can easily commute into the core because the distance and traffic levels are reasonable.

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.

I agree with you. Also to me it's the larger cities that are environmentally unfriendly and hostile places like the parent described, not these smaller cities with suburbs. Just look at the 405 on a weekday. I live in a city of about 300k and it is perfect. Under 15 minutes anywhere in the city and I work from home so personally I don't even commute.

It definitely feels that way, unfortunately high rises are extremely energy, materials, and space efficient. Public transportation similarly reduces the needs for roads and fossil fuels.

NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.

High rises are, but not very many people desire to live in a high rise. Hence the inefficiency. I mean if everyone lived in a 5x5 box it would be super efficient. But yeah, I think people would rather die first.

I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.

I don’t know what you consider unbiased but for stuff like energy use the numbers are very evident. https://financeguru.com/news/new-york-energy-rates-consumpti...

“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

First you said environmental impact, not electricity usage which is very different.

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?

Edit: Feel free to do whatever research or literature review you want I don’t feel like trying to convince you.

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.

Even a look at current population densities destroys this argument as cities like San Francisco need far more density from this sort of inner ring. Keep in mind the actual core in this model is only 25 square miles so even if the core of San Francisco has 20 times the density of the suburbs it fits only 500,000 people. Your 5-15 mile ring fits only 600,000 people so you’ve gone 15 miles out from the centre of San Francisco and you’ve only fit 1,100,000 or so people of the 1.8 million that live in SF proper to say nothing of any of the people living in nearby cities or suburbs you’ve also hit.

San Francisco is extremely space constrained due to the Ocean, Bay, and Parks.

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.

The thing that you and many prior comments mention is proximity, city size, density, and living in a specific place.

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.

Funny, I live in a small suburbia style town in the mountains, our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's, we have no big city we parasite off of, and everything here is much cheaper/affordable including housing, with a much smaller property tax base. We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL (if you were close enough to the DSLAM or whatever it was). We now have multiple Gb fiber options in our neighborhoods. Housing prices are affordable.

Could you speak more about why your suburbia-style town in the mountains maintains its infrastructure prices? How is food, medicine, or construction goods delivered to you, and how do you pay for that transportation? I'm not asking out of skepticism: my understanding is that more remote locations are expensive partially because of logistical deliveries and maintenance costs, and I'd love to know how this is managed in well-maintained suburbia-style towns!

It would make sense if this town was in the proximity of major trucking/rail lines. Many towns in the foothills of the Sierras can be considered such. But then of course to pretend that the town is somehow "isolated" yet successful is certainly not accurate.

> we have no big city we parasite off of

> 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.

Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit.

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.

I live in what you would probably call a sprawl hellscape, and I love it.

Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs.

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.

Except when that small suburb is in a not-small town (Eg: many parts of SF, Berkeley Sunnyvale, etc.)

Well some other people have decided that that's not allowed.

And many more would like to be able to afford a place to live

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Why? It works pretty much everywhere in America except CA.

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...

How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.

If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.

That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.

Yeah, my city totally surrounds several sub-50k "towns", plus has several others glommed on to the side of it that you'd be forgiven for not realizing are separate from the city, and it's not even an extreme case (see St. Louis for that)

A sibling comment of yours mentions Leander; there's only one train in Austin, and it goes from downtown to Leander. So you could even get there without a car. Good luck once you get there, though.

So uh, apparently the answer is "it doesn't.'

This is an incredibly misleading statistic. When you describe "a town of less than 50,000 people," what comes to mind most easily is some sort of rural town. But at your link, I recognize several of the places on that "fastest-growing" list. Leander is a suburb of Austin, Little Elm and Forney are both suburbs of Dallas, as are (scrolling down) Frisco and Farmers Branch, while Boerne is a suburb of San Antonio, and Georgetown is a suburb of Austin again.

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.

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