Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnweldon | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

"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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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".

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.

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"

> 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.

>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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com