All your usecases could be served with a rental. Where I live I can rent cars on hour basis with an app. Need to haul something big? Rent a van for a few hours. Want to visit family in a remote city? Rent a sedan for a day or two. Need to get a cat to the vet? Rent a small city car for two hours.
For me a good life means dark skies, green trees, a chance of dying every time I go for a hike, and a garden in my backyard.
If you are a city person, that's great, fantastic and I hope that you can stay there but if you have to move out to suburban/rural spaces, don't bring the city with you. Leave the light pollution, the noise, and all those urban attributes in the city.
"The noise"... are you advocating for a rural setting without cars here? Most of light pollution and noise in the cities comes from cars and car infrastructure.
While I love cities, I think that's not really the story. Cities would light up their streets with or without cars. Could you imagine if New York, somehow sans cars, with pitch black streets at night? The crime fear is way overdone - cities are very safe these says. But I think I still prefer streetlights.
Sold where did you go
What does that refer to?
Or relatively, you live in a suburban bubble? Different lifestyles, different modes of transport.
We love our farmers. Keep the fields going. But this business with allocating half-acre lots per 4 people (lots which are empty for literally 1/3 of the day) has got to end, or else local utilities should stop servicing those far-flung places. You want to be without the burdens of living in a society -- fine! Figure out water and power for yourself. It's easier than ever and there's still federal- and state-level rebate programs for renewables.
So many people don't seem to realize that without suburbs you don't have farms.
Suburbs and farms produce all the things that cities rely on. You don't see heavy industry in the middle of a city.
So we actually wanted to do your plan then cities should cough up way more money than they currently do.
This strikes me as a bizarre take. What do you consider a "suburb"?
Industrial zones are also a completely different category entirely.
Living in Germany, most German cities do not have anything that is comparable to a U.S. "suburb". Building codes demand a quite high density, even for single family homes for new developments and older developments have the tendency to get denser as the demand for housing in a city rises.
German planning law specifically aims to concentrate development as much as possible, to limit encroachment on agricultural lands and nature. Doesn't always work out, but we have very little of the "urban sprawl" that is so characteristic of U.S. urban planning.
A farm in Germany is how far of a drive from the nearest city?
In the US you could drive 10 hours from a farm to get to the nearest large city. Suburbs and tiny cities are what farms need to survive.
Hmmmmm. And that labor does?
Please think about this a big more - cities do not have industry or agriculture in them. They need those suburbs to provide that. You can't just dismiss it as "cheap labor" - what exactly do you plan to eat or buy?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/suburbia - "the outer parts of a town, where there are houses, but no large shops, places of work, or places of entertainment"
And those business are closer to the rural areas than the cities are.
And also, there aren't really any places with just houses and no places of work, that doesn't really exist.
this is exactly what suburbs are.
You live there, nothing else. You wake up then you drive to work somewhere else
The "suburbs" are generally Single Family Home (SFH) zoned areas (the name of the zone differs per-city) defined by a requirement to have a single dwelling, a large minimum lot size, large setbacks, and low maximum FARs. Nothing mandates that SFH zones need to be adjacent to agricultural areas. In fact most zoning codes detail a long list of uses allowed within the zone and a buffer between zones. For example, most zoning codes require a larger buffer between industrial or agricultural zones and residential zones. By definition how much "closer to the rural area" suburbs are is defined purely by how much SFH housing there is, nothing more.
The reason why most US suburbs abut dense inner cities is that historical US city development occurred densely before the automobile and then postwar development happened according to zoning codes which carved most new residential areas into SFH zoned areas. Cities were grandfathered into the new zoning codes. The codes themselves developed slowly and only started mandating huge minimum lot sizes in the last 30 years or so. This is why suburban development tends to form around a city.
They keep ignoring that without those suburbs you won't have rural farms. Without those suburbs those "productive" cities will have nothing to eat, and nothing to buy.
They measure productivity in terms of dollars - but all cities do is services, they don't produce goods. That's left to those places Strong Towns hates.
If people actually implemented what Strong Towns wants, people would starve.
Try the math again, but completely exclude services and let's see where you end up.
The video says that Canada has laws which stop cities paying more than 25% of revenue on debt payments, so they are much less bakrupt than USA cities. Do you think all Canadian cities have starving people with nothing to buy, and failed farms?
What about European cities which aren't suburban car dependent sprawl and still have food?
What about the explanations in the video (and the related ones on the channel) on why the suburbs are so expensive - you can't handwave away thirty six billion dollars of due road maintenance in a single city with "rural farms need it", even if true it's unsustainable.
> "all cities do is services, they don't produce goods."
All that needs is one counterexample: London has the largest diesel engine manufacturing site in the world - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_London#Manufacturin...
Yes, fintech nonsense has eaten London, and services are its most profitable sectors these days, but that's not /because it's a city/, it was a major manufacturing center and a city.
The North American suburb, which is what we're discussing here unless I misunderstand, more or less came about in the post-war era. It would really be an extraordinary claim that farms and heavy industry couldn't exist in North America until the 1950s...
I'm pretty sure it was discussed long before the Internet.
That distance is more than the radius of the largest city in Europe -> it's 25km from Heathrow airport to the Buckingham palace.
I don't think having a car is a big problem, I think we could hand out free e-bikes to every family and reduce amount of cars of the roads, because for ~50% of journeys, they make sence.
Now if they mean they go 40km to take the kids to school every day, that's a different matter.
Consider the cost of ownership with maintenance, depreciation, loan interest (if applicable), and insurance compared to renting. Depending on the frequency and distance of your long trips you may actually save money by renting.