Ask HN: How doomed are sprawling cities?
As I think about it more though, it seems like the interplay between different facets of municipal/regional finances is tricky to model.
Has anyone done something like the analyses Strong Towns' has talked about, but within the context of predicting when/how things will truly start to fall apart in dramatic fashion for any city over 600k people aside from the obvious examples of Detroit or others that were extremely reliant on one particular industry?
For example, you have sprawl which requires massive road networks that require massive amounts of capital to keep maintained, along with other bits of infrastructure to support them, social services spread very thin over a physically large distance, and cultures of driving, money tied up in cars, obesity probably being more than it might be otherwise, widespread social isolation, and the lie of suburbs having stronger communities.
But then I consider that most suburban places also have massive franchises that make up the majority of the commercial landscape, which has the effect of making those places rather dull, but also of trading space for concrete parking lots, and the tertiary effect in some cases of narrowing the possible choices and availability to pursue "free market capitalism" (in the sense that there is more commercial real estate concentrated in just a few hands that end up leasing to other hugely profitable mega retailers), along with destroying more wetlands than necessary.
So the cities haven't really had the money to support the infrastructure for decades and just keep rolling the problem forward, without really making changes to how the urban landscape is allowed to easily develop and making it even more difficult to reverse, hoping that maybe immigration will save them while young high-earning people with options don't even bother sticking around, along with boomers probably holding onto their ever-appreciating single-family-homes for longer and petitioning municipal governments to keep it that way, and in more socialist countries soon to be straining pension funds (that are often real estate investment funds) and healthcare systems.
In one of these cities, I can see clearly that infrastructure is crumbling, but it feels like the problems are going to get dramatically worse, and the only job local politicians are doing is to obscure how bad it's going to get; using language like "We need to start opening the conversation with older generations and getting them on board with some changes" instead of a more serious tone that might scare people away more rapidly.