What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create Affordable Cities?

Re:What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create ... by TulliusCicero on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @03:25PM (#12500406)

If the condo twenty miles out is in the middle of nowhere, it may not be any cheaper, once you factor in the cost of building out infrastructure there and providing public services further out. Often times these things are subsidized though, so Americans don't realize how expensive things actually are.

A good example is when someone in a rural area is outraged when the cable company says it'll cost a couple grand to wire up their house that's a ways off from any main road. Like, did you think that stuff was just free?

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Re:What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create ... by antisthenes on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @04:11PM (#12500819)

> If the condo twenty miles out is in the middle of nowhere, it may not be any cheaper, once you factor in the cost of building out infrastructure there and providing public services further out. Often times these things are subsidized though, so Americans don't realize how expensive things actually are.

That's the textbook case of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. The infrastructure you're talking about will be built by the city/state and the costs borne by everyone who lives up to the point of that condo 20 miles out.

When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right now.

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Re:What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create ... by TulliusCicero on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @05:45PM (#12501464)

> That's the textbook case of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

Yes, agreed. And I'm not completely against socialization, but I see little reason to encourage it for this case. If infrastructure and services cost more further out, property taxes for those areas should reflect that.

> When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right now.

This tends to be true because SFH-zoned areas are held as sacred cows, and what increased density is allowed is constrained into small areas. This both keeps land prices high, so developers need to target the high end of the market, and it means that cheaper forms of increased density (say, building duplexes/triplexes/granny flats in existing low-density areas) are literally illegal.

I swear, people want developers to build huge towers and then offer up the units for cheap. Do you think it's cheap to build those towers? Hint: it is not. Brand new, inherently-expensive-to-build housing is always going to be expensive to rent. The solution is to a) permit cheaper forms of housing where possible, b) allowed increased density across a wide swathe of residential area (which can be done the same way as (a), really), and c) accept that new things always cost more than old things. The luxury units of today are the upper-middle class units of twenty years from now, the middle-class units of forty years from now, the working-units of sixty years from now, etc.

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Re:What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create ... by ghaff on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @03:31PM (#12500451)

Not outraged at all. Plus I have my own septic, I pay for trash service, I pay for plowing, I pay for a propane tank and oil.

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