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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments.

The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).

All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.

American housing is a Ponzi scheme and this only helps perpetuate it. We need to reverse this trend with significant investments in public transportation and other alternative forms of transportation which can scale to meet the needs of the future. We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design (ie, highways, parking lots, parking garages, roads, street parking) and re-allocate it for more housing, businesses, and public transportation. Entities that can generate new income for the municipality and city.

In parallel, can work to preserve our existing natural green spaces and hopefully over time expand those green spaces which give us breathable air, drinkable water, protection from natural elements (ie, floods or long periods of torrential rain), and help keep viruses and other bad elements out of human populations.

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I'm no expert in this field, but I think that changing zoning in current suburbs to mixed use would go a long way towards fixing them. The central wards of Tokyo are surrounded by such mixed use residential areas and it works extremely well, with most necessities being within walking distance or at worst biking distance.

It wouldn't fix the suburbs' lack of density, but it'd still be a marked improvement. It'd theoretically lighten the burden suburbs place on cities too, since there'd be a lot more corner shops and the like paying taxes.

If you can find a way to convince Americans they don't all need a yard that can easily fit 6 (japanese) houses, we'll be well on our way.

Why do we need to convince someone they don't "need" anything? Each person has the best information about their own situation to decide what they need (or even want - you don't have to _need_ something to have to justify _wanting_ it)

Convince them not to want it

Stop convincing them to want it

My somewhat libertarian take is that they themselves are best suited to judge what they should or shouldn't want.

Not that there isn't a time for trying to bring a different perspective. But we should do it with humility, rather than assuming they're just wrong or misguided.

So... yes "stop convincing them" is a valid argument. "convince them not to" is slightly shakier moral ground.

"What they should or shouldn't want" is already deeply influenced by housing policy. Cheap suburban homes which don't fully pay for their externalities are one result of this housing policy, and children grow up accustomed to this bizarro-world reality where increasingly tank-sized cars (this is—astonishingly—not even hyperbole) are the only practical means by which one can go from Point A to Point B.

Meanwhile people in Europe live in denser areas with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars or where they can do most of their commuting by foot, bike, or rail. That is the norm for people from those cultures, and so they—like us—largely choose to continue living in a world similar to that in which they grew up.

Given that one of these modes of living reliably produces a happier population and is significantly more environmentally and economically sustainable, that we're already in the business of promoting one style over another via housing policy, and that one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest… what on earth is the problem?

> Given that one of these modes of living reliably produces a happier population

Is that really a "given"?

> Given that ... one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest

As I see it, government promotes outcomes that benefit "everyone" only by protecting individuals' self-interest.

Everyone already actively works at protecting their own self interest. We don’t need help promoting good societal outcomes when those are a natural result of people looking out for themselves. Government exists for us to collectively agree that there exist goals that require us to set aside self-interest for the better of everyone.

It’s in my self-interest to take everything you own and to dump my waste in the nearest available yard that isn’t mine. Nobody wants to live in a world where people act like that, so we collectively agree that things are better off for everyone if we respect one another’s property rights and pay someone to take our trash and sewage somewhere else to be dealt with.

I see what you're saying .. and yes, it's (obviously) true that in order to protect individuals' rights we necessarily have to restrict some: to protect individuals' property rights means we have to restrict what non-owners are allowed to do with that property.

But to say that Government exists to promote outcomes that benefit everyone against individuals' self-interest is like saying that pit-mines exist because we enjoy creating giant pits. Or that cars exist so that we can burn a bunch of fuel. The restrictions on individuals' rights are necessary evils, which need to be carefully considered and minimized.

Hearing it framed the way you did does help me understand many peoples' points of view better though.

That would be like saying government exists because we enjoy bureaucracies.

We accept bureaucracies because it helps us achieve common good that wouldn’t exist if everyone only looked out for themselves.

Roads and other infrastructure. Plumbing and water treatment. Sewers. Building codes. Schools for everyone. On and on and on these are things we’ve decided we’re better if everyone has access to or has to abide by, even if individually nobody would make it happen.

If you think about it, younger market participants are being effectively priced out with just about every expense set against that generation. Even if they feel/think ( depending on philosophical bent in that area ) they need X, they may not simply be in a position to do that.

I am obviously biased given that I currently exist in a suburb.

As already stated, young people are not allowed to build what they can afford.

What's best for them might not be best when everyone does the same. Suburbia is not sustainable.

If it's a want rather than a need then you can pay your fair share of what it costs.

I've got no objection to people who want to live a particular lifestyle doing so. But they should pay the costs that it inflicts on the rest of us.

That level of space-hungriness isn't universal amongst American suburbs. In the neighborhood I live for example, houses have only around 6'-8' between them and their "yards" are a small patch of dirt in the front and back.

Where's your nearest coffee shop?

About a 12m walk away. Where I live shops are somewhat intermixed with the neighborhoods, albeit not to the degree that they are in Japan or parts of Europe. Not all American suburbs are composed solely of houses.

Perhaps since the US is something like 26 times larger than Japan while only having less than 3 times the population, we can avoid making comparisons that don't make sense.

It's non sequitur argument since this 26x land does not magically spawn in middle of land starved urban areas. The fact that Wyoming or Idaho exist does not matter there.

The idea that the US has land starved urban areas is mostly a myth. Or more accurately, it is mostly a self-inflicted problem. Drop the urban growth boundary nonsense and embrace multi-core urban areas instead of trying to build supercities.

Well in the city where I live (Minneapolis) they've been tearing down houses in several areas of the cities where post-world war II architecture was abundant. Small houses (under 1,500 sq ft) with a small front yard and back yard. The very typical "American Dream" kind of a starter house.

Now they're getting bought up and the people are literally building houses from every end of the lot, often time getting variances for setbacks. They've decided that yards and green space are no longer important. They want wedge a three story 5K sq ft house on the same lot where a much smaller home fit.

So, I would agree and say to an extent, people are already there in terms of dealing with no lawns, now its just getting them to accept several houses on the same lot instead of their massive mcmansion.

That increased demand for extra space I’m sure was bolstered by the pandemic and ongoing wave of WFH. The downsides and annoyances of small houses/apartments become much more evident when you’re staying home all of the time instead of only being there at nights and on weekends.

At least in my corner of South Minneapolis, the houses being built that match your description almost all appear to be built by investors, not owners (and the design incentives for investors are clearly to maximize square footage). They are also being listed at about 2x the neighboring house values.

And if you accepted 5 or seven store apartments you'd have enough space for actual parks.

If you can find a way to convince Americans they don't all need a yard that can easily fit 6 (japanese) houses, we'll be well on our way.

I think we are on our way there, most new developments around here have houses that are nearly the size of the lot, with a tiny back yard and smaller front yard, and little room between houses. Developers get more money by making lots small and houses big, so there’s little incentive to have the large suburban d yards that wises to be common.

Of course, the houses are much larger than their Japanese counterparts. My Japanese mother in law thinks we are wealthy based on the size of our house, but we’re one of the smallest homes in the neighborhood,

Most people don't use their yard. They don't have more than a few flowers in the garden. 20 minutes with a push mower is enjoyable exercise but they wouldn't want it to take longer.

The yard isn't necessarily there to be used in the way you mean. Often the yard is a buffer between you and your neighbor. Your noisy neighbor who smokes, swears, and plays the most disagreeable music at the highest volume late into the night. Any distance is helpful.

My big problem with cities is the people.

I don't mind city life for the most part, except for the whole thing with most apartment complexes being built of cardboard, which means that every single thing your upstairs neighbor and many of the things your adjacent neighbors are doing can be heard loud and clear, and this problem plagues even newer construction. And then you have people on the street yelling, vehicles modified to be as loud as possible driving by, etc.

If these buildings were properly soundproofed, in many ways I'd prefer living in the city, but as things stand the only people who get to enjoy that in cities are those at the tops of skyscrapers renting penthouse suites, all of whom reside in a plane of existence entirely separate from my own.

The number one thing I've enjoyed about suburb life, particularly as a remote worker, is how much more dramatically quiet it is, primarily thanks to not sharing a wall with anybody.

This. I see so many people say, build vertical, density. Then when 80% of the people explain that everyone is fucking noisy, the vertical people don't reply.

It is possible to build apartments that are not noisy. It costs more though.

I live in a house with a large yard for the exact reason you point out :).

I do enjoy walking on the grass and taking care of some plants, but I didn't really need so much land if not to keep neighbours away (I used to live in an apartment where a neighbour made my life hell, never again).

I enjoy my yard, and my house. I do not like "city living". To each their own

Eh. How people use their property is really their own business. I might disagree. I might despair. I might even tell them it is a bad idea, but how and whether a person uses the thing they buy is not up to your neighbor ( or non-neighbor for that matter ) to decide ( within reason, you will hear complaints about practicing on electric guitar or repairing your muscle car at midnight ). It is just a bad argument to use.

My family member just bought a ridiculous gas-guzzler to drive even more ridiculous distance to their job and still manage to muster up courage to complain about gas prices to me. It is not the use ( or lack thereof ). It is the lack basic sense.

I don't have a mega yard, because I can't afford the upkeep. If I could, I would consider it.

The issue with the megalawn is that it wastes water, a shared resource, create weed killer runoff issues and generally bad for the local flora/fauna, which again, are shared in ways which aren't obvious, and costs more carbon to sustain. It's an embarrassment of riches. To dispair and disagree is human, if you think you can't change people's minds then that's a self fulfilling prophecy.

In the case of your family member sure they lack sense, but I've found for lawns at least, to lean into that and use arguments like, 'hey clovers are better because you don't need to mow and barely need to water, this means you can sit on your ass more!' (something like that).

In large parts of the US you do not need to water you lawn as rain will provide all the water you need. You never need to put weed killer on a lawn, just a regular mowing (ideally with a reel push mower) will be enough. Most of what people call weeds are harmless biodiversity. In some parts of the US lawns are native grass, though that isn't common.

Understand that most people over manage their lawns. You can get your lawn a little more green (the color, not the environmental green) with excess water and chemicals. They are not needed at all though.

Agreed, though stopping excess is no easy feat

Many many single family lots are turning into 6 townhouses in Seattle and selling quite well.

Forget that let’s go all the way and force everybody to live in capsule hotels.

People keep bringing up Tokyo but it's not really relevant. Yes, Tokyo has mixed zoning. But it was developed the way it is because the people who live there want it to be that way. It's also only livable because the people there have a culture that makes it possible to live in high density without high levels of crime, noise, and filth.

Americans in the same situation would not have built something like Tokyo.

If you're going to bring up Tokyo you should also bring up Houston. Houston is what most American cities would look like if the people who lived there were able to build what they wanted. Most Americans want to live in detached homes that they own, and they prefer cars to public transit.

> Most Americans want to live in detached homes that they own, and they prefer cars to public transit.

Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.

We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."

This isn't some immutable law of the damned universe.

> We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."

That's quite a strawman there.

Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.

I'm seeing a ton of strawman arguments, totally inaccurate descriptions of suburbs, unsourced hyperbole about "subsidies" and "externalities", and conflation of "suburb" and "rural" in this thread which certainly does not apply to any suburbs I've ever lived in.

> Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.

I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure. Strong towns talks about this in great detail.

> I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure.

Again, that is something that might be true for some places but not others.

I know of suburbs that definitely pay for themselves. And it's not hard to see why -- the property taxes are high and many of the residents are paying high income taxes too. Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.

I also know that some of the new subdivisions outside of Sacramento have paid for all of their infrastructure via their HOA, so that all of the money to build and maintain the roads, sewers, and power lines was 100% paid for by the homeowners. That's also apparently a common model for new housing in Nevada.

These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.

> Taxes are redistribution.

Why should they be redistributed to the recreationally remote? Are they especially in need?

Easy answer, my environmentally terrible huge monoculture lawn is not just my problem, but everyones!

> Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.

But often not by enough to balance the amount of publicly-funded road space and parking they use.

> These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.

We absolutely get these arguments on other topics when public money is being spent on luxuries for the wealthy, which is what suburban living is. Police, fire departments, and schools are necessities. Zillion-square-foot homes and lawns are not.

> Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.

People with more resources and more power have taken larger living spaces for centuries, the idea of wanting more space isn't some creation of post-WWII America.

Nowdays we talk about trains in the US as a "let's get away from suburban development" but the train itself was a driver of suburbanization from London, historically - people opted for more space and a train commute when they got the option.

> Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.

Do they really?

My country is a textbook case of the opposite, where the general population suddenly decided they don't really want to live in apartment blocks in the city - especially the type which was built in the communist second half of the XXth century.

What happened next was intense proliferation of sprawl. It actually was seen as a status symbol back then to be able to afford a detached house.

So much so that the urbanization rate actually slightly fell in the past 20 years.

People gravitate towards comfort and apparently needing to drive everywhere but having enormous living space is preferable to living in a relatively small apartment and walking/cycling.

And Houston has more diversity and better affordability than most other top tier American cities.

And it has much lower overall population density, so diversity and affordability clearly aren't automatically driven by density.

Houston has space to expand so it can easily keep building outwards without bulldozing shit (which requires people wanting to sell their land, etc, etc). Development is easy if there's nothing to displace. NY? LA? SF? Not so much. No coincidence that Chicago is much cheaper than those geography-bound places too.

Compare Houston to other cities in Texas *that have plenty of zoning of the sort that would be immediately recognizable in the Bay Area) and it no longer looks like any YIMBY miracle of affordability. Just... basically the same...

Hard to make this claim when govt bureaucrats enforced this type of city design with zoning laws a road/highway subsidies

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it.

The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers, but instead they choose to suffer long commutes and expensive transportation in order to enjoy a different lifestyle.

I think it's naive to suggest that "American housing" is a Ponzi scheme.

Ponzi's are very attractive too, for a while. People get a lot out of Ponzis.

"the revenue collected over time does not come near to covering the costs of meeting these long-term obligations. Development spread out over a broad area is very expensive to maintain. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability... Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that's just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes. Every mature city has a backlog of deferred maintenance, a growing list of promises with no discernible path to make good on them."

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...

I'm a fan of strongtowns too. To the degree that that analysis is true, it will sort itself out. We don't need to do anything to save our neighbor from themself. We can make a lifetime of difference solving our own problems.

You need to quit reading strongtowns and start thinking.

Every city has deferred maintenance and unmeetable promises, most of it is maintenance that it is more cost effective to defer. We don't need perfectly smooth streets, so defer minor maintenance makes sense. Most unmeetable promisees are things they never intended to meet.

Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.

> Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.

"We've been throwing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for hundreds of years. If this was a problem we'd be seeing the consequences of it by now."

Anyone who's looking does see the problem. Meanwhile there's a critical mass of people whose lives and identity revolve around the status quo and who simply prefer not to see it. The people who see the problem have been trying to tell you (and everyone else) about it, and it continues to fall on deaf ears.

There is a problem i agree, but strongtowns does not see the real problems and so is not helpful in solving them.

Sure, when we subsidize all expensive bits of suburban living it artificially decreases the cost to the home owner of all the negative externalities.

I appreciate this argument - and there is some truth to it, but certainly not to the point of (paraphrasing here) "anyone who doesn't want to live in the city is participating in a Ponzi scheme"

No one is questioning that people want to live in suburbs. People object to the government power preventing any additional development in these low density areas. These areas are desirable, but economically uncompetitive.

I agree with your take.

Desirable to who? It's not like folks have much of a choice in the density of housing and transportation.

> economically uncompetitive

How can you say that? Usually nice suburbs pay huge amount in taxes that subsidize urban cores.

Citation needed. Everything I have seen shows that suburbs are a net drain in contrast to dense urban areas. Infrastructure has very high fixed costs that require more people to net even.

Citation needed on what you have read as well. I too have read the same, but it conflicts with the reality that suburbs have existed for more than 100 years now, and those old ones have added and replaced infrastructure many times over their history.

That nothing i've read acknowledges that fact suggests they are cherry picking evidence instead of giving an unbiased analysis .

I think this is incorrect. One way to think about it is that usually infrastructure costs scale with distance. So you need much less infrastructure per person in dense places. However, everyone pays the same tax rate (or more in dense areas because the property values are higher) which means that in reality the dense areas usually subsidize the suburbs.

There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.

https://www.urbanthree.com/services/revenue-modeling/

> that subsidize urban cores

Subsidized by urban cores.

Who do you think is paying for those $50M highway exits and overpasses so everyone can quickly get to their strip malls? Its not the local residents.

Well in my state generally the wealthiest people live in suburbs and pay all the taxes. The poorest areas are in cities and get the subsidies. So the suburbs are subsidising the cities. And that was before everyone started WFH so downtowns are now really empty.

What subsidies? What about businesses and their taxes? Wealthier people don’t always pay more in taxes, even at a localized level, and businesses tend to be based out of the cities.

When people talk about the “subsidy of the suburbs” they usually talk about the cost of maintaining suburban life, vs the tax base that supports it. Eg property tax usually goes to the town to pay for the town’s infra, while income tax goes to the state to pay for other thing. When the town can’t cover its cost and depends on the state’s money or when the state pays to build things in the town, that’s where the “subsidy” comes in. Often towns just can’t cover the cost of their basic infrastructure maintenance, but even when they can, the state usually still build highways and other big projects which can cost $10s to $100s of millions, and rarely can be affordable by the actual tax base of the town.

Re: "economically uncompetitive"

Here's a list of US counties by per capita income:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties...

Lots of suburban countries here— Arlington, Fairfax County, Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Westchester, from the ones I know at least. The only two that seem quite urban in the top 15 to me are New York County and San Francisco County.

I disagree that it’s naive. Here is a video talking about why that term is being used: https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0

And the Strong Towns write up that has links to more reading that I believe informed that video: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...

I called it naive because I believe it is an oversimplification.

Strong Towns has an agenda (which I mostly agree with), and in order to promote their agenda they have a straw man argument that broadly categorizes _all_ suburban development as an unsustainable venture that is borrowing against the future.

I agree that there is (in many cases, but not all) some deferred costs and externalities that are not being fully accounted for in new development.

However, I'm not nearly so pessimistic as to think that the people living in those developments won't make changes to account for those deferred costs and even possibly some of the externalities.

I think it's naive to cry "the sky is falling".

They are able to make that choice because we pretty heavily subsidize it for them. Rural communities receive a disproportionately large amount of federal aid per capita in order to build and maintain the infrastructure that makes that lifestyle possible.

If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.

> pretty heavily subsidize

Is a pretty general term that's hard to respond to.

Yes there are rural subsidies, but I'm unconvinced that the per-capita subsidization of rural and suburban dwellers is so much greater than their urban counterparts.

You may have a very good argument, but I don't know the numbers, and I haven't seen anyone provide the numbers for this yet either.

Rural areas have such a tiny population that the subsidy going to them is mostly used by urban folks.

If your food goes over a subsidized road that counts against you.

> If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.

I don't buy that subsidization is what makes buying a house "in the sticks" so much cheaper.

It is partially supply and demand, and partially the sticks have much less services. Gravel roads are cheap. Libraries cost money, so rural areas do without

It's important not to conflate "suburbs" and "rural."

For example, most of the Santa Clara Valley is suburban, consisting of subdivisions of detached homes with front yards, driveways, garages etc. But the area is definitely not rural: millions of people live here and 4 of the 5 FAANG companies are headquartered here.

You could say similar things about LA, or the areas outside Chicago and NYC, etc. They are definitely suburban, and definitely not rural.

> The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there.

A major reason for the preference is the lower price per square foot in the suburbs than in higher density areas. They can't afford that much space in the city, which in turn is so expensive because the amount of high density housing is artificially limited by zoning.

You have to let the market decide how much high density housing there should be before you can score "the market has decided" as a point.

The market has decided. High-density is better. If it weren't, then it wouldn't be so much more expensive.

That argument doesn't work either. If you pass a law restricting the supply of A and then notice that A costs more than B, it could as easily be because of lower supply as higher demand.

If you want to know what happens in a free market you have to let a free market happen.

> A major reason for the preference is the lower price per square foot in the suburbs than in higher density areas.

I think that's a big part of it, but also people choose suburbs and rural living for reasons more to do with quality of life rather than cost.

Which is fine. The proposal isn't a law against low density housing, it's to remove the laws against high density housing.

I think the original comment proposal was (my, slightly sarcastic, paraphrase) "stop incentivizing anything but urban infrastructure and living, everything else is a ponzi scheme"

I agree with your proposal.

I have no objection to removing laws against high density housing.

I agree the original comment was ambiguous. It's widely discussed that the incentives for suburban housing are the laws prohibiting high density, e.g. minimum parking requirements or zoning rules that just expressly ban tall buildings. But in theory you could get there by e.g. prohibiting parking areas, which is silly and pointless because the reason for the existing laws requiring them is that a free market would produce less of them than there are now.

"Happy City" by Charles Montgomery brings an interesting angle on the typical urban planning story by focusing largely on how we can plan cities and communities to maximize happiness. In the book, he discusses that people have this "ideal" of moving to the suburbs, owning their own house, etc, but then the long commutes, isolation of living in a car-dependent neighborhood, dangers of living among high-speed cars, etc. all lead many people to actually be less happy overall after moving to the suburbs.

So I think that some of this fact that the suburbs are desirable is not necessarily completely rational, and may instead be heavily influenced by the idea that moving to suburbs is what they grew up seeing as their future (due, of course, to federal programs that incentivized suburbanization) and by auto-industry lobbying and marketing that idealizes a car-dependent lifestyle.

Obviously there will be variability and I'm sure many people enjoy a suburban/rural lifestyle more than they would a city lifestyle. But I don't know if a preference for suburban living is really part of our human nature, and I think assuming that it is can be detrimental as it can take effort away from recreating the peace and quiet and nature access in a way that is accessible to all in a more efficient urban setting.

Well said - I don't fully agree, but I agree that an automobile centered world is sub-optimal, and fuels our feelings of disconnection.

I'm fully on-board with working to make suburbs more self-contained and walkable. As others have said, the issue may be zoning and regulations.

Agreed - this is a really great book

>The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there.

Many people I know would rather live in the city, but the upfront cost of a house in the suburbs are much lower.

Agreed. Although I think it has to do with more than location. For a childless couple, the cost of a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs might be the same as for a one room apartment in the city. If they choose the suburbs, maybe they're choosing more than location, they're also choosing quality of life.

The point of producing dramatically more urban housing would be to stop having to ration our consumption of it so stringently.

That's on an individual basis, but it can have collective side effects. For example, most would rather a personal car rather than the bus, but that makes bus stops less frequent due to less ridership which then makes cars even more desireable.

Or flight from urban crime to the suburbs then makes urban crime more likely for the remaining people, who then have more reasons to flee.

Would they prefer the car, or is it just that the bus with poor routing and infrequent service is not a viable alternative and those in charge waste a ton of money which makes useful expansions not affordable.

Why the hell would I live in an American city? I live in Colorado. Denver is our 'city', there is no parking, no room for my 2 dogs and my kid would not have a giant backyard to play in.

Instead, I have a 3400 sq ft house on 10,000 sq ft of land with giant trees everywhere. I'm within 2 miles of lightrail, that I will never use.

I work from home, I have a home office with a indoor, led powered garden with fresh fruit and flowers year round.

My wife works 30 minutes from home, she's a school teacher. We wanted to live closer to her school but we'd get a much smaller house with no parking and no room for the kids and dogs to play.

Again, why would I buy near or in any city? 15 minutes from downtown Denver is to close for my taste.

I love theatre, I love restaurants but honestly, I hate driving in Denver. The traffic sucks. I love driving. I love craft coffee, my house is 1 mile from the coffee factory that makes the coffee whole foods uses; I enjoy a craft coffee from that place once in a while.

Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.

Denver banned the scooters and other options from lyft and bird, so I have to lug my giant body from location to location? No thanks, I'll take my 4000 pound car to the restaurant instead.

Then I'll go home, enjoy my big beautiful yard and not worry about living in the city.

I don't go to the gym, instead I have a treadmill and a bike in my basement. If I want to do something, I just get in my car and go. I want to get a solar system and buy an electric car but so far no one will install on my style of roof

> Denver banned the scooters and other options from lyft and bird, so I have to lug my giant body from location to location? No thanks, I'll take my 4000 pound car to the restaurant instead.

Is there a source for this? I live in Denver and am currently staring at a dozen Lyft scooters and a few bikes parked on the corner next to my apartment. Lime also operates scooters and bikes, which I usually see parked across the street at the apartments next door.

There are a few places that are geofenced (e.g. along 16th St Mall), but judging by how many people I see riding them on e.g. Cherry Creek trail as I'm biking, I don't think they're generally banned.

I was in Denver yesterday and rode two scooters and a Lyft e-bike…

> I hate driving in Denver. The traffic sucks.

> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.

This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.

Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.

All the ‘walkable’ cities still seem to be congested with cars.

However much or little road space you build in cities, it will always be congested with cars (unless you charge or ban them). So the trick is to waste as little space as possible on that.

I wonder what effect the bunker life has on children... Since this kind of distance is relatively new in our typically communal existence

"If one simply becomes wealthier than the Earth can even potentially sustain for more than a tiny portion of the population at once, living within visual distance of any other person becomes undesirable."

Where's that quote from?

Cities are terrible to get around in by car, that’s for sure. But why you feel you need to, and why there aren’t better options, ultimately trace back to the city’s concessions to suburban auto-centric attitudes. In cities whose populations actually embrace their being cities (vs. centers of suburban agglomerations), you find destinations close enough to walk, safe and plowed bike paths, fast and frequent buses, and extensive train networks.

> The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there.

The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course! The problem is externalities.

I think your comment is a bit misleading.

Dumping sewage into a creek is an externality that is bad.

Someone preferring to live in a suburb does not mean they're generating externalities at that level.

The very reason I pushed back on the comment was because of this black and white thinking.

Saying

> The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course!

seems condescending to me. As though "those" people don't have the character or moral rectitude to live in the city. Maybe I'm reading in more than you intended.

Suburban development, as it stands in America today, has enormous levels of externalities. The roads and sewers of suburban developments are subsidized by downtown areas which are more tax-dense. Suburban development requires cars which are always the least efficient way to get around vs. walking/transit, regardless of electrification. Suburban homes are large and freestanding both of which detract from building energy efficiency. Most suburban homes today are built with only a 50 year expected lifespan making them incredibly wasteful compared to construction in other parts of the world.

People keep talking about the "subsidies" as if they apply to all suburbs. It seems to be an article of faith. It really needs some evidence (preferably from an unbiased source).

There are probably exceptions, of course, but surely the basics are not controversial, e.g. that public infrastructure spending per capita tends to be much higher in suburbs than in urban areas, carbon emissions per capita are much higher in suburbs, etc. Not to mention that political representation in the United States favors lower density areas.

This is false. The tax districts are independent in the suburbs in many locations. Sewers and water are local city taxes are paid for out of the suburb property taxes. The only “city tax” subsidizing suburbs would be state taxes and that’s if and only if more people lived downtown than in the suburbs, which is not true in California.

> Someone preferring to live in a suburb does not mean they're generating externalities at that level.

They are, but those externalities are simply not as straightforwardly obvious.

Do you have any references for this statement.

I'm not arguing there are no externalities (there are externalities in just about every choice we make). I just haven't been convinced that there are common egregious externalities at the level of dumping raw sewage into the creek.

How many sources would you like?

Of course it’s not going to be on the same order as literally dumping raw sewage into the surrounding area. But there is an enormous body of research demonstrating the overall drain of resources from economically-productive urban areas out to costly suburban ones.

Then there’s the carbon cost of enormous, congested highways and stroads where people idle in traffic for hours of their day. Or the overall inefficiency of providing general city services (water, power, sewer) to people in comparatively sparse areas (which ties back into the resource drain imposed on denser areas).

I would, personally, love to read at least one source. Which you didn’t even provide for some reason. And I mean that, I would happily read any source you provide, with a preference for more academic sources.

One it is. Link to original academic source is in the first sentence.

https://cayimby.org/sprawl-costs-the-u-s-1-trillion-every-ye...

Actually I’m an overachiever. Let’s do two! Direct academic reference.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3325575

From the first link:

"reduce the productivity of nearby lands, for example, by [...] driving up land prices beyond what local residents can afford."

What nonsense is this?

Are you looking for references that dense population areas subsidize the less dense areas? Strong towns has lots of examples, here's one: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

Driving is straightforwardly bad for everyone around you. Carbon emissions, particulate emissions, traffic congestion, noise, safety, you name it. The more of it you do, the worse it is. Suburbia is built around lots and lots of driving. It’s not complicated.

Do people prefer to dump sewage in creeks? The GP said people live as close to their ideal as they can within their means. Generally, people with the means to afford sewers or septic tanks choose to use them.

Generally, we've enacted laws that prohibit people from dumping their waste into the surrounding area.

GP is suggesting that we start to perceive extremely damaging low-utilization, ponzi-style suburban development in a similar manner.

Aren’t laws passed democratically, or are we being subjugated by a sewer-preferential minority?

The point is that the premise of the counter-example is flawed. People do prefer to have their waste carried away cleanly when they can afford it.

> the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers

Have you seen what condos cost? This is not true. Homeownership in walkable neighborhoods is basically reserved for plutocrats.

This is the strange/sad truth.

Clearly walkable neighbourhoods are highly desirable, and in the US people pay a massive premium to get them because they are so scarce. Yet, for some reason, new construction in the suburbs is all disconnected and almost never walkable.

There's a huge disconnect between what people want and what developers are actually building. The kind of density that leads to walkability seems to only occur in older and already expensive areas with infill development, never green field construction further from an existing city center.

Maybe it's impossible to build new walkable areas in the US.

Almost all actually-existing cities replaced less intense uses on the same land. They simply had the foresight to get this done before we recognized a community’s right to veto such changes. The next ones will not come until we have stopped recognizing it.

> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.

That's not generally how this works. There aren't necessarily highways and new paved roads going to rural properties. Electrical service isn't only downtown in cities but for miles outside of them or from solar, propane, or any one of the many other technologies.

As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety. Water almost always comes from a well on the property, and sewage tanks are how the sewage are handled.

Later, if Frank & Martha's property gets annexed into the city, they will pay taxes and will be just as entitled to city services as others. They already pay county, state and other taxes, which means they are entitled to whatever their taxes pay for.

"In general, rural areas in the United States have higher homeownership rates than urban areas. Compared with urban areas, where the homeownership rate was 59.8 percent, rural areas had a homeownership rate of 81.1 percent." [1]

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...

> As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety.

I've read recently that as of right now, if you're more than 1000 yards from the branch point the electrical company would run wire from, it is already cheaper to go fully off-grid. Not 100% true that this is true or at least universally applicable, but the curves all point in that direction.

That makes a lot of sense to me. I'm pretty sure there has been some cutoff like that for as long as there have been utilities.

I don't know exactly how many yards the breakeven point is. However, from what I've seen it is almost always monetarily cheaper to create your own services when possible - unless a neighbor has paid for services to get really close. It might make sense for neighbors to pool money for pulling services out. It all depends on the specifics, right?

> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure.

If you're 20 miles outside a town, you almost certainly have electrical service, but are on a well and septic system. City water and sewer doesn't make sense at those sort of densities. You also probably have the land to easily put a nice ground mount PV array in, and grow a good bit of your own food, should you care to.

I don't think this is the case for suburbs, at least for water. Septic tanks are used I think

Suburbs aren't generally described as the "sticks." That would be exurbs or lower.

A typical suburban subdivision will have city water and sewage, though depending on the details, you might have a couple community wells and individual septic fields (or a link to city sewage).

Suburbs are often on city utilities. And they pay for the infrastructure. You won't generally find septic systems on properties under about an acre. Not that it never happens, obviously, but a septic field has geographic requirements that means you won't often see it in a suburban neighborhood.

It depends. We have a lot of small water coops around here and water lines ran nearly everywhere a road goes, even if the nearest city is 50 miles away.

It’s not precedented, wise, or even realistic to expect all of civilization to live in cities surrounded by unspoiled wilderness.

Highly efficient low density housing has a place. So does high density housing.

Everything you say about improving urban development practices is valid, but doesn’t mean that efforts to improve suburban/exurband/rural development are problematic. They’re all inextricably part of the future and they all have their own development needs.

You can roughly double the volume of a single story building by adding a floor. Taken to extreme, we could make sure a square kilometer is at least two stories tall, but we don't do that. We live mostly a in 2.5d environment.

The skyscrappers that we see in our skylines are not even the majority of what we see. A lot of place will benefit from being 3-4 stories tall.

A lot of space that is developed is hugely wasted, devoted to storing cars, or roads to facilitate car movement. Meanwhile, a human being is very compact in comparison.

I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying, but those slightly denser and taller districts are historically called villages and they died, tragically, with the rise of national retail chains.

Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead.

At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage.

If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists!

Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.

> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure.

What if this was done this brownfield development in areas with existing infrastructure? New development doesn't need to be coupled with sprawl. There is a significant amount of multifamily development that looks exactly like that. The IRA also included large incentives for the retrofit of the existing housing stock.

Not to interrupt a good rant, but the program includes duplexes, townhomes, multifamily projects, and mixed use buildings with residential less than 6 stories. It's a sensible plan that was passed by sensible people who actually do have climate goals in mind.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/DOE%20ZER...

> American housing is a Ponzi scheme

This is shockingly dumb. Please lookup the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

First, you do know that when you get a house you actually get the house, right? That’s the value residents extract from the house. Whether my parents could resell their house was only relevant when they needed to, big shocker, move to a different house in another area. Apart from leaving something for inheritance the re-sale value was irrelevant to the utility. That’s antithetical to a Ponzi scheme.

Second, anyone can build more housing and there is tons of land to keep building in 90% of the country. That doesn’t work in a Ponzi scheme if the real value that sets the price is margin that can be captured by builders.

People are going to build new homes outside of dense urban cores and suburbs either way; may as well build them 'green'. We need to be more flexible and realistic with our environmentalism--people just aren't going to give up meat, cars, or houses overnight so we need to allow progress where we can actually get it.

We already have solutions in place being implemented in the next 10 - 15 years for electric cars and car-based carbon emissions. So carbon based commuting is going to get fixed.

People in the U.S. won't be living in dystopian China-style 40 floor housing anytime soon, in ways that is sounds like you're hoping for with dense city living.

> We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design

There are many small towns in Europe surrounded by networks of even smaller towns and one or two house farms. There is nothing to claim back there: they've been like that since well before any European moved to the Americas. That was a way to be close to fields, when economy was mostly farmers and herders and people mostly walked or at best moved in animal powered carts.

Some people move from there to big cities now, some people move from big cities to there. Everybody has a car, it can't be helped. I think that people in big cities will end up with public transport and few cars, but people in small towns and in the fields or in the hills or mountains will keep having a car, maybe just use it less if it costs too much.

I live in one of these small European towns. It is honestly mind boggling how far some people drive to go to work here. I'm in The Netherlands around Eindhoven. We have colleagues in Den Bosch, Utrecht and Maastricht driving to work every week. Eindhoven is full of commuters.

Some people take the train, but that isn't always convenient, especially with strikes! Your boss doesn't care that you were 3 hours late due to a bus skipping out on work. Your paycheck cares a lot though.

Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem owing to the size of the country, but I don't see how they can reduce car usage without significantly more investment in public transportation. By the looks of the current state of the government, that's not going to happen anytime soon.

> Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem

This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned:

Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km)

isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle:

Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km)

New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km)

These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist.

In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car).

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

In 2003, 8% of 1-way commutes were over 56 km.

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf

Sorry, I should have clarified. I'm American and grew up in the DFW area. I know long commutes are not unheard of in the US, but like you mentioned, it is pretty rare for someone to commute that far long term. Generally, I think most people might commute for a year or two and then tend to relocate closer unless they only need to visit the office every so often instead of every single day.

The Northeast US is also an outlier because they have commuter rail that can reliably connect places like DC to Baltimore or NYC to Philly.

>(in some cases >20 miles away)

what a privileged life style one must have. you realize that there are entire metro areas where you can drive in 20 miles in any direction and still be in urban environment, yeah?

also, thinking 20 miles is just oh so far away is so outside of my world experience that I just don't easily understand your situation of think that it is so far away. clearly, you and I have grown up in totally different situations, and it is interesting to me that one can be so restricted in their movement and consider that normal just as you clearly think anyone traveling > 20 miles is just from Neptune or something.

i'll chalk this up to a nature vs nurture kind of experience

It's a culture problem. Suburb dwellers, at best, are indifferent towards their neighbours.

As someone who lives in a city, I see it being no different for neighbors who share the same front door.

> Suburb dwellers, at best, are indifferent towards their neighbours.

Huh? Where did you get this nugget of wisdom from? We have great relationships with almost all of the neighbors I can see from my porch. It's called community. I've lived in urban high rises and known fewer neighbors.

s/sticks/Styx

Fwiw, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx

“'In the sticks' is just a reference to an area where there are lots of twigs, that is, the countryside.”

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/in-the-sticks.html

I suspect that's just a historic instance of the same error playing out. But, I'll take that on advisement.

It doesn't make sense as a description of where people live, but [English] language rarely makes sense.

Thanks for your reply.

I agree but good effing luck.

> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.

Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.

If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too.

It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home...

Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...

According to some quick googling, about 26% of roads are financed by gasoline tax, another 11% from tolls, and the rest from federal and state general funds:

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

> roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.

Do you have any sources for that? I'm in Australia, where fuel costs about twice what it does in the US. A decent portion of that is taxes/duties, but road spending is taken from consolidated revenue, and fuel taxes ultimately contribute a minority of the spending on roads. So unless the cost of fuel production is massively lower in the US, something doesn't add up.

GP is likely talking about US federal gas taxes -> Highway Trust Fund -> Federal highway spending.

Notably, though, the HTF spends more than it earns in gas tax revenue; the shortfall comes from the general fund. And also Federal highway spending does not cover all highway spending; the rest comes from the states[1][3]. Federal highway spending also does not cover local roads at all.

[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/...

[2]: (Above image from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 )

[3]: https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/

They are not wholly funded by gas taxes. At best, federal roads are half-funded by gas taxes, and local roads are not at all.

> roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.

This is a common misunderstanding of how roads are funded. Roads are not solely funded by gas taxes and are predominantly paid for by funds raised from sources other than gas taxes.

> Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.

I don't think that's true. Gasoline taxes aren't high enough to pay for roads.

https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/

It seems as of 2015, 50% of road related costs came out of general taxes. And as gas taxes have remained fairly constant, while roads have become more expensive to repair as they get worse, I can only think that number has gone up since then.

> It seems as of 2015, 50% of road related costs came out of general taxes.

Note that in the context of the "half came from gas taxes," the article is only talking about highway funding. Local road funding isn't covered by Fed gas taxes at all.

Roads are absolutely not financed by gasoline taxes. They are massively subsidized by the federal government. Watch some videos about Strong Towns to learn about the problems that is causing in regions that are not experiencing constant growth.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...

> Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone

Why would you hate the only kind of housing worth living in?

I would end up in a mental institution if forced to live in a multi family home.

Indeed. Time to break out the omnitool Hackernews favors for solving very large scale problems: government regulation. Nationalize zoning laws, ban home ownership, and herd the population into bughive arcologies in major cities, where they'll be fed vegan or insect-protein-fortified food brought by Amazon delivery drones.

If Hackernews believed in god, surely this would be their idea of heaven.

What's your point?

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