Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. Civilization has flourished in cities as long as there has been civilization. In the U.S. (uniquely), we ruined cities post WW2 by subsidizing highways and cars and low density suburban mortgages, due to said cultural fetish. Plus a whole lot of racism.

In France, to my knowledge, there was never a time when the central city was considered lower class than the suburbs (ahem, Paris, ahem). And I think this is generally true.

We're talking about the US, so those "memes" are relevant.

The idea that cities are decrepit and suburbs are the future is a recurring one. Charles Dickens’ soot covered cities (in england, so I guess anglo-american?) existed and the middle class moved to the suburbs, much like americans.

The trend back into city centres today is wider than the US too.

Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

That's reductionist and possibly even causally reversed, like saying bad yelp reviews are the reason a restaurant closed.

Rates of crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's enormous. The increase in crime was mostly in urban areas, not rural, so there was even more than an 600% increase in some areas. This was well before Reagan's and Clinton's strategy of mass incarceration.

It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - was due to "a good amount of racism" as the primary reason.

If your neighborhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else, no?

[1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

The Levittown/redlining/white flight/whatever was already well underway by the 60s. Yes, crime increased in urban areas up through the 80s, but some of that is best explained by those urban areas being essentially economically abandoned by that time. Crime follows poverty, and when the tax money leaves, the result is fairly predictable.

Not sure if that counts for you as racism but there it is.

White flight was a reason why people wanted to take advantage of these new possibilities but was not the only reason. Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute, which was then portrayed as simply a part of the "suburbian experience" (see the car ads of the time and their romanticization of the commute).

I don't think there is consensus that white flight gave birth to suburbs in the first place. Rather, white flight is often used to explain the birth of future and farther suburbs as whites (being by and large the original inhabitants of the first suburbs) fought to keep that status quo and moved to newer suburbs and set up HOAs and zoning laws specifically designed to prevent poorer (and, directly, "more colored") persons from moving into their newly minted neighborhoods.

The same thing (i.e. the creation of suburbs) is now happening in Eastern Europe, at least it's happening in the country from where I'm from (Romania) without racism playing that much of a part in it. Yeah, some of the middle-class people who chose to move to the suburbs mentioned as motives "wanting to get away from the gipsies", but most of said middle-class people used to live in communist apartment-blocks where there were almost no gipsies (the latter mostly inhabit the oldish houses from the downtown area, formerly owned by the local Jewish community).

The main reason for people moving out to the suburbs are those that you underlined: it has now become economically feasible for many families to own 2 cars and to buy a piece of land and to build a house on it. That's it. It's nevertheless pretty interesting seeing us repeating the same urbanism mistakes that the US did in the 1950s-1960s and the Western European countries started doing from the 1970s. We're now at the phase where we like to invest money into building road-bridges over everything, in order to reduce commute times, as the saying goes. There are very few people (myself included) who still say that this is not the good way going forward and that we should learn from others' mistakes, but we're seen as either nostalgics ("why we would still invest in obsolete things like tramways? tramways are communist!") or as "know-nothings".

And it's true that at least there it has nothing to do with racism, it comes I wanting a bigger house, a yard, a fence, a safe place for kids to play in and so on. Now, sure those things have been there in the country-side in the villages, but unfortunately the jobs are all in the city center. Some villages less than an hour drive from the city have seen new development, but beyond that it is the suburbs - the American Dream right in the heart of Eastern Europe.

The downside is that now the roads are swamped in cars. Unlike some American cities, those cities were not designed to have that many cars so there is no place to park them, they are driven and parked on sidewalks, they clog streets and public transport can't move during rush hour. But what to do, they have more money, they can buy cars, there is land around the city. Maybe tax cars more, add a luxury property tax? The thing is the people who live in those suburbs are also the one running everything (either through corruption or just simple economic power).

The problem is that is quite expensive to build attractive apartment buildings that either have enough underground parking space for cars or you have to convince people to give up on having a car.

Not everything is best viewed through the lens of macro-politics and big concepts. Ucaetano is willing to “Let them fail and wipe them out” based on their balance sheets and (I assume) a distaste for whatever model was used to set them up in previous generations. stevenleeg wants to put the problem at the feet of discriminatory and racist policies from days past (and their modern consequences).

This is a terrible (IMO) approach to politics. There is a practical problem at hand. The solution cannot be to not have created the problem in the first place. If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb.

The solutions needs to be practical ones. If the infrastructure is decrepit, renew the infrastructure. If the munincipal funding model that works for wealthy suburbs can’t work in poor suburbs, it can’t be the funding model for poor suburbs. Maybe there are some more grandiose ideas, like preventing the rich/poor suburb dichotomy from existing but those are unlikely to work unless the practical problems are first solved.

I don’t understand this conversation at all.

Welcome to America!

Seriously, we don't understand it either - but we sure will fight about it. No matter how tenuous, we can blame anything on our favorite causes.

Everyone seems to want to spend time blaming and fighting instead of actually picking up a broom and cleaning. Our journalism competes with reality television and our political parties are treated like sports teams.

I don't understand it either, and I live here.

The way I see it, this whole conversation is just a proxy for money. The suburb doesn't have enough; it has no tax base and can't afford its municipal services. What they want to do is attach to a city and use the city's services. Now, there might be efficiencies of scale with service delivery to a larger population. But if you look at the history of many large cities in the US, many suburbs made the conscious choice not to be part of the city precisely because they didn't want the higher taxes, on sales, on property, on income, etc. that living in a city requires.

You say "renew the infrastructure". Are you writing the check? Your comment seems to assume we can just invent money out of thin air.

I'll be honest, I'm pretty fed up with this entire bailout mentality. I live in a high-tax, high-expense city. Meanwhile, I pay the federal universal service fee so that someone in Nowhere, USA can have a phone. I see low taxes on carbon emission, mortgage interest deductions on huge suburban palaces, a massive expressway system, agricultural subsidies, a postal service that charges the same rate to deliver mail across town as to Nowhere, USA, and I'm just tired of it. And I'm also tired of last generation passing the cost of their bad decisions on to us, in the form of underfunded pensions, a major housing crisis engineered by the Boomer generation, and 100% of GDP federal debt.

So yeah, guilty as charged re: "macro-politics and big concepts", but, enough is enough. If these people couldn't be bothered to move as their city crumbled over the last, I don't know, 30 years, I'm just not crying, as I pay through the nose for rent in a big city.

I think we might be more on the same page than not. Money problems is exactly the level that we should be talking about it.

What I was reacting to and labelling “macro politics” is trying to relate this to the most abstract (relative to the issue at hand) political viewpoints. On one side, calling for a Misesian creative destruction. On the other hand, insisting that the root of the problem is racism in the 70s and that’s what needs to be addressed.

To me, it seems like a problem of financing localities that have particularly bad balance sheets. That’s what I mean by practical and I think we agree on it mostly.

This is a very common problem. Every country that has locally financed authorities runs into it. Maybe a locality is poor (like this one). Poor people still have the same sewage needs as rich people, but they pay less tax. Maybe a local real estate is cheap or low turnover, and tax is tied to property values or real estate sales. Maybe the commercial-residential split is important?

I’m not particularly in any camp about how to fix it. It’ll depend on whatever the norms of the place are. I don’t know American norms so well, but there are an ultimately finite set of options. Maybe merging/gerrymandering is the right idea.

I’m not unsympathetic to your gripes either. I also think my country (ireland) has had (and still has) bad financial management, morally questionable bailouts, official public debt and a scarier unofficial stack of liabilities like pensions and other hand-me-downs.

But, are you really going to draw a line in this sand? A poor suburb that can’t afford police or sewage, because the way a map was drawn left it with more liabilities than income?

On a slightly more charitable note than my last post, I'd be interested to see the actual balance sheets of these municipalities. I wouldn't be surprised if the root issue is underfunded pensions, because frankly, even a relatively poor city of people making 15k/year could probably afford sewer and garbage. I think people are just pissed because they bought into the American dream of a house, didn't save enough for retirement, and were planning to use their home equity as their retirement account. Otherwise, there just isn't a great reason not to move. I look at the hardships endured by generation after generation in this country (the US), from the pioneers putting it all in a wagon, the hard labor of homesteaders moving one-ton rocks in their backyard, to the smuggling of slaves out of the south during the civil war, and just wonder, what's happened to us? When did we become such a nation of entitled whiners?

I am sympathetic to pensions. Nobody saw the declines in interest rates we've had in the last ten years and in my mind, that's essentially an unforeseeable eventuality that might call for a special tax. In the overwhelming majority of cases I've seen, the underlying problem is crowding out of municipal budgets by pensions. We need to get this under control and I'm happy we're starting to talk about it.

Over here, we're mostly hoping the French will come out of left field, surprise everyone and figure something out. Chances seem good, you know what they get like when they're stirred up.

Homesteaders heading west to get away from whingers were being replaced with irish people getting away from their own whingers. Both Ireland and New York still exist. Whingers too. Many localities set accounting books on fire along the routes. Maybe it's more a matter of perspective. You describe the past in terms of people doing things. The present, in much more numerical terms. But, crazy finances aren't new. People doing things isn't new.

This does not mean abandoning the people who live there, but the opposite. It requires us to take seriously the people who find themselves living in a dying place, to know their lives, to build different and better places for them to live in and plan a gradual transition and eventual shutdown.

But for any of this to happen, the government needs to admit the problem at hand and the people need to trust their government. After decades of racist real estate policy and constant neglect of the needs of the working poor, and entrenched self-interested careerist local politicians neither are likely to happen.

Unfortunately it seems that the macro politics is very important here - it affects the issue of whether people outside the area care about what happens in the area.

I think there's also an American tendency to place responsibility for fixing a problem at the feet of those who caused it in the first place, regardless of whether those people are still involved with the subject, or even alive.

Know how I know you're not an American...?

A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.

Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture.

There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of.

It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.

Can't they move somewhere else? They can't because it costs money. Why can't their government just give them the money? It might be cheaper than their infrastructure costs.

In that situation, the problem has to be solved on the level above. The State as a whole should pay the cost, since it is the State as a whole that would benefit.

And people in suburbs will just get free cheque from government to move? That is incredibly unfair to people living in cities hence it creates moral issue.

If not, it is not more unfair than when health insurance uses the money of healthy people to pay for treatment of sick people. Or when the Federal Government uses the money of people who live in the mainland to pay for hurricane relief for people who live near the coast.

Where do you stop? Should a family of four (two young children) that lives in a 1 bedroom apartment in city be given a 2 bedroom apartment by the city government? They obviously need it.

I agree with socialised healthcare and education. First one because health is not some thing you choose but is affected heavily by genetic lottery (yes unhealthy lifestyle is a problem but it’s hard to objectively quantify) and second one because it means levelling of the opportunity field for young people not born to wealthy parents (again this is related to lottery of birth, what kind of family you are born into).

But housing is very different from healthcare and education.

Sick people are less productive. Uneducated people are less productive. People who are stuck on a dying suburb where there is no business and there are no jobs are less productive.

There simply won't be enough money around to renew "infrastructure" in these areas. I use the term loosely. We're just talking roads/sewer/water/etc. lines, nothing most europeans would actually consider civil infrastructure like public transit.

You can say walking away is not an option, but continuing to just keep these communities on life support isn't either. There is no option for "make all of suburbia great again" simply due to mathematics.

First, most suburban infrastructure is not unsustainable, despite how many armchair urbanists wish otherwise.

But even if were, people don't have the option to leave anyway, so it doesn't matter. If your poor, and live in a poor area, you don't have a 'walking away option'. Even if you sold your shitty house in a shitty suburb, it wouldn't net you enough money to live anywhere else anyway. Or if you rent, you already live in the cheapest place possible, so how will you afford the higher rent anywhere else?

Detroit is pointed at as an example of people walking away ... but Detroit still has over 600,000 people. East Cleveland is mentioned in the article, but 17,000 people still live there. Flint had poisoned drinking water for more than a year straight, and 97,000 people still live there today. You can literally poison every citizen with bad infrastructure, and the place will still exist.

When you say "walking away is an option", you are speaking only theoretically. When /u/dalbasal says "Cities and towns do not go away. People live there, even if the population declines a bit.", that's a simple realistic truth. Barring a few extremely rare exceptions, places don't go away.

> You can say walking away is not an option, but continuing to just keep these communities on life support isn't either. There is no option for "make all of suburbia great again" simply due to mathematics.

Sure it is. We just need to pay for it. Which we will eventually be forced to do, and then will do so because it's the cheapest and easiest option.

We have plenty of money to support every suburb. We have enough money to build 2x more suburbs, support all of those, and double the entire freeway system and support that too. We just choose not to spend it. We waste our infrastructure funding on not-infrastructure. At some point, we'll be forced to support the people or the people will die.

Roads are cheap. Pipes are cheap. Powerlines are cheap. Freeways are cheap. Urban Planners will insist it's not true because of their political desires. But if you actually do the mathematics you mention, these things don't really cost much. Compared to the benefits they provide, infrastructure is dirt cheap.

Exceptions are frontier towns, mining booms, war torn cities.

In 99% of cases, cities stay where they are, bankrupt local authorities or not. Populations decline a little. Quality of life declines a lot, but the problem doesn’t just go away.

And anyway, what does unsustainable mean? What can’t be sustained exactly? It sounds like what can’t be sustained is the financing model for poor localities. Why not walk away from that?

There is no suburb so rotten that someone won't buy up pieces of it to extract as much money as they can from its local economy, and then not spend that money back in.

It's more complicated than that.

First, there's the history of red-lining[1], and no requirement that housing be "integrated" (which meant non-discriminatory back then), so you had people like Levitt only allow whites to buy home.

Second, the government financed most of the critical infrastructure necessary to "bootstrap" beyond just highway and roads. So if your water, sewer, electric, and school infrastructure was all built wholly or partially funded via federal or state grants or "pork", you could keep your taxes low because you have lots of shiny-new infrastructure that's cheap to maintain that you didn't need to finance yourself through municipal bonds. This allowed your tax money to be poured directly into hiring the best teachers, building parks, etc. Getting all that infrastructure for free greatly masked the inefficiencies of the suburbs and why, today at least, suburbs often carry huge property taxes burdens or offer very limited services (like not even curbs or sidewalks) and rely on a county/township to cover the essentials.

The Suburbs are basically a public housing project for the middle class. If you actually required the average American to pay for their suburb with little or no help from the federal government it never would have gotten off the ground.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east.

We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas.

I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases?

My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits.

Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north.

But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.

Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35.

What are the age demographics of Canada?

As millennials stop being poor, they start behaving more like the generations of before. College grads are starting to buy houses in the suburbs: http://www.npr.org/2017/09/15/551232392/as-millennials-get-o...

You end up with lots of fodder to spin tales that can reinforce just about any narrative you like.

In most cases, it was very dumb on any metric to stay in the city if you had the means to move.

Look at any comment on the local newspaper and it is nothing but racist anti-city comments, www.mcall.com. Even mayors from suburbs even wrote opt pieces on how their economy doesn't need a city, which is completely insane. People just hate cities and it does come from a emotional and non-rational mindset.

Allentown's demographic shift was huge to where 75%+ of the students are of Latino heritage and 90% qualify for free Federal Lunch Program in Allentown School District. The hate is real against everything Allentown.

Allentown's decline has many factors, from my limited knowledge. The is the decline and departure of the steel industry. There are opiods.

If a billion in investment hasn't significantly helped (or has it?), what do you think is the solution to "fixing" Allentown?

>Well buddy, They have been shooting each other here since they opened I78 and they started moving here. 20+ years now. They have ruined a once great all American city with this BS and it is true. When it gets cold they go back inside.

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015...

That's the key word. Not "white flight". The mass production of the automobile is what historians generally agree enabled the suburbs - not critical mass racism.

Cities and towns might look like permanent fixtures of civilization if you place them on a scale of mere decades; but they come and go, grow and shrink, appear and disappear, and are eventually reclaimed by nature on a scale of centuries and millennia. They are man-made machines just like steam engines and web services, and should be treated as such. There's nothing sacred about them! The only question is how to care for the people who are affected when a machine they've been relying on goes down.

Creative destruction is not a panacea, but it should be on the table as a legitimate option to be weighed against other options. This isn't idealism, it's being realistic.

Speaking of being realistic, I suspect that there are many cases where relocating residents and shutting down the town in an orderly manner would be far less costly, more humane, and perhaps even environmentally better than maintaining the decaying infrastructure indefinitely and making yet another generation of an already disadvantaged population grow up in a place without hope.

Read: "Non-white people were living there."

Seriously, don't try to whitewash what happened. White people fled the cities because non-white people were starting to live in those areas too.