Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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Residents of American suburbs should have to pay for their full costs (infrastructure and maintenance, environmental, healthcare, services, ...), and if many people can't afford it, we should do a universal cash subsidy to every resident at the federal level to make up the difference so the transition is not so damaging, then let people decide if they really want to spend that whole amount on paying the actual costs of their lifestyle or if they would prefer to move to a more efficient living arrangement and keep the cash to do something more productive with it.

The USA subsidizes the suburbs to an absurd degree, pushing most of the costs into the future and making city dwellers pay more than their share for the rest.

Living in a relatively large house in the suburbs should in principle cost several times more than living in a flat in the city, because it requires vastly more infrastructure and the amortized cost of services is much higher. But our broken economic system has flipped this around and made suburbs extremely artificially cheap, while making most of the building practices that make denser walkable neighborhoods possible illegal under building codes and local ordinances.

A first step might be allowing people to build something other than single family homes in locations where there is demand for housing.

I don't think it's broken. I think it's working as intended, but what it's optimizing for (people raising families) is perhaps not what you'd like for it to optimize for. Whether it's the right or wrong thing to optimize for is another conversation, but you may be surprised about what the collective political will of the US expresses. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a voting majority support for the idea that "American suburbs should have to pay for themselves."

American style suburbs are worse for raising a family than living in a city. Long commutes practically remove one or more parents from the equation 5 days a week. Long bus rides compromise sleep and exercise etc.

All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park.

What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can afford to live in them. You can imitate such buildings cheaply, what you can’t do is build or maintain the support structures which made such places so appealing.

From the perspective of the child, it's much worse. You are basically arrested until you are 16-18. No independence whatsoever. Want to meet a friend? Ask your parents to drive. They're busy? Too bad.

My children love it. There are so many friends within walking & biking distance of my house. The roads are slow, traffic sparse, with wide open spaces to play and ride bikes, etc. None of the kids seemed bored, there's so much to do. And little of the unpleasant stuff that makes living in the city more exciting.

Parents and society can be unreasonably restrictive in any environment. People call social services on parents for letting kids walk around alone in suburbs. The freedom you can get as a young teen without a car is however vastly higher in cities due to public transportation.

Social norms also vary widely, first graders in Tokyo take public transportation to school alone. This isn’t inherently unsafe or unreasonable.

Why can't they just walk or bike to their friends? 2-3 km walking distance is perfectly fine, bike extends that range significantly (10 km at least). This was the case for me.

Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.

Because your friends can easily be 10-30 miles away and only accessible via shared roadways with 55mph road traffic. There are no cross country bike routes here.

Building around roads results in everything being pushed farther away and that includes other people’s homes too.

Fair point about shared roadways that probably split communities.

Do kids attending the same school really live that far apart? Seems like a very long distance, especially in a suburbian neighbourhood.

That is my experience in the East coast US. Here, the suburbs are very spread out, with amenities 15-20 minutes away by car. There are older suburbs where that is not true, but that's more of an exception. Housing in those older suburbs costs more than the newer more spread out developments and there are fewer of them than the newer more spread out ones.

Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.

it's incredibly ironic but I've lucked into a very bikeable community in a rust-belt state, we have extensive rails-to-trails here and in this situation the rails followed the main state (2-lane) highway, or vice versa. so I actually can bike to some things specifically thanks to rails to trails.

I see, thank you for explaining!

My superior air quality, lower crime rate, and better schools disagree with your assessment.

Don’t confuse socioeconomics for inherent advantages. Adjusted for income people live longer in cities, they are thus objectively safer.

Wealthy parts of cities have vastly better schools and less crime than the average suburbs, but the American middle class abandoned cities. Air pollution again can go either way, suburbs often have surprisingly terrible air quality made worse by long commutes.

Suburbs are not the only place to raise kids though. Probably not the best place for it either.

This is an interesting theory, but I'm not sure you can prove it. What's a way in which the USA "subsidizes" suburbs?

Roads, utilities, emergency services…

Per mile, small urban roads were millions of usd a mile (see department of transports annual report and it varies by region). Maintenance is even worse. It’s the 5th highest expense for most cities (US census survey of local and state governments 2020).

Of course the suburbs don’t make sense, you have a half mile of road out to a neighborhood and another half mile of street in the neighborhood itself. The percentage of property taxes going to the road is probably just a few percent points. With only a few hundred houses, it would take decades to raise the 1-3 million to replace the road.

And without use from heavy trucks and huge volumes from city traffic, the roads in suburbs last for decades, what's your point?

Already have this problem with our subdivision lol. Private road, and replacing the road is going to be $20k a house even over 20 years or something even with a bond lol, and that’s a normal, reasonable-density subdivision. People don’t realize how much rural and suburban roads are getting subsidized.

That we pay for with our taxes? How much property tax does one in a high rise apartment pay?

My suburban neighborhood also has a metro tax district that funds the roads sewers etc.

Initial infrastructure is often paid for with up-front cash transfers from the federal/state government and long-term loans, then the long-term maintenance is supposed to be funded by local taxes but in many cases is set up to be more expensive than the long-term available tax base, so infrastructure just starts falling apart and then either taxes go up or maintenance is put off and people left holding the bag are screwed, or external cash bailouts make up the difference.

In either case, the suburbanites (especially near the beginning of the construction cycle) and initial construction companies are getting a huge subsidy from everyone else (and from future generations) to promote an inherently unsustainable and destructive living arrangement.

It's a kind of Ponzi scheme, and like any other Ponzi scheme, at some point the music stops and then the whole system is in an extremely precarious place.

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