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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

The Strong Towns YouTube channel makes many similar points. Suburban construction in the US is terribly inefficient and wasteful in the long run by maximizing the convenience auto accessibility at the expense of everything else. If infrastructure had a technical debt equivalent, it would be suburban planning.

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One thing I think Strong Towns would do better to emphasize is that their argument that suburbs are financially unsustainable applies more to those suburbs of struggling towns or small cities. I don't believe suburbs of large, economically healthy cities are running into unsustainable infrastructure costs nearly as much. They may run into funding difficulties if the suburb becomes an undesirable area, or if the pension fund bankrupts the city, but they don't seem to be running into the issue that their property taxes can't fund them.

Exactly. ST seems to want to conflate areas that would probably be considered 'rural' with actual suburbs of large metro areas. Look at some of the towns mentioned in their 'suburbs bad' articles and you'll note they are usually quite far from a city, and usually that city is 2nd or 3rd tier (and likely facing its own financial issues.)

If anything, many of these rural/exurb communities are already at the minimum population needed to support the industries that must exist outside of dense/expensive cities. These aren't the overpriced McMansions full of entitled upper class folks, those tend to be located near the city, and are quite healthy financially due to outsized local tax revenues.

> [1] The Lafayette metropolitan area was Louisiana's third largest metropolitan statistical area with a population of 478,384 at the 2020 census.

I haven't really looked at Lafayette so it might count as rural but if the 3rd largest metro area of a state is the size ST says is unsustainable [2] then that bodes pretty poorly for all but 2 of it's metro areas.

I bet a lot of say New Jersey is close enough to either Philly or NYC to avoid being "3rd tier" but there's a whole lot of the country that isn't near a top-10 metro area.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette,_Louisiana

[2]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/27/this-is-the-en...

I haven't watched many of their YouTube, but I concur that Strong Towns knows what's up.

For anyone that doesn't know what a "stroad" is, I hope you look into it. You'll never see the world the same again.

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