>Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.

This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.

Paying workers for upkeep and construction of infrastructure is part of the cost of having said infrastructure.

I don’t think this makes much sense. It’s mostly big cities like Chicago or Boston (still dealing with Big Dig debt) with trouble financing themselves, suburbia seems to do very well financing itself with its property tax base.

> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.

These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development.

Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems.

Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative.

You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city.

With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.

"Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes."

Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents.

Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities.

If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.

Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.

Suburban land is cheaper to buy but far more expensive to service (water, electricity, roads, etc.) and maintain.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th...

Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.

Is this really true though? Every infrastructure project in cities seems to cost billions of dollars (Boston’s Green Line Extension, New York’s 2nd Avenue Subway). It would take quite a lot of suburban road, gas, electric etc infrastructure to add up to anything close to that.

The infrastructure costs in cities are more expensive but service many more people and economic activity, they are amortized much more efficiently than a suburban bridge to nowhere.

Is this true? As a case study, Boston’s population is about 700k, call it a million people living in a genuinely urban environment in greater Boston, of a metro area of 3 million. I think there’s more suburbanites than urbanites in most American metros.

Where do the suburbanites work? That tunnel, rail, or subway is allowing who to get into and out of the city easier?

> The Green Line Extension (GLX) project will extend the existing MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.

GLX is primarily about serving the urban community better.

From wiki:

> The Green Line Extension (GLX) is a construction project to extend the light rail Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line northwest into Somerville and Medford, two inner suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.

I’m not familiar with the Boston area, are Medford and Somerville mainly urban extensions of Boston?

Somerville is the main beneficiary of GLX and is basically part of the urban core of Boston, yes.

They cost billion of dollars but they are also supporting places that also pays a lot more taxes.

With suburbia, you get low cost infrastructure, but also low tax revenue. You better hope that your tax revenue exceeds the costs of supporting suburbia.

> Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.

You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities.

Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes.

Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community.

Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.

I didn't intend to, I meant cities are subsidizing suburbia.

You sure went off on a tangent and didn't address a single point, correctly - but mostly at all, I or the article made. Pipes are expensive, underground utilities are expensive, roads are expensive. All of those things scale much better within a city and its population & density. Servicing suburbs IS expensive compared to cities. Water is typically metered and paid for as a user rate not from the general tax fund.

Sense of community is on you, not where you live. Either you're not getting involved or people don't want to be around you.

You are talking right past me to be heard, with subjective facts, not to have a discussion.

With wind and solar, everything grows cheaper. Single family homes are irrefutably less efficient than denser multi-family homes.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo...

I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.

Where is pollution coming from? Cars generate lot of noise and pollution when they through city streets or on highways. Motorcycles can be especially loud if nobody bother to muffle them.

Single family sprawl is more cost efficient than dense development when you include regulatory compliance.

What regulatory compliance? Got any studies?

Just from a logical perspective, companies don't build skyscrapers/increase density in cities to lose money.

This is a reference to the NIMBY/YIMBY fight, where the YIMBY position is that most non-single-family-home developments, other than the super high end, have been effectively been made illegal through a combination of zoning laws, neighborhood review processes that add extraordinary costs, unreasonable requirements and delays, and other arbitrary veto points.

The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.

Cities don't "have" pollution. The pollution is brought there by suburbanites driving their cars into the city, and by car-centric city design.

Um, there are other sources of pollution besides cars...

Cars are the main source of noise pollution and air pollution in cities, nothing else comes to mind. Factories and such were either moved to other continents, or zoning was updated to ban them in population centers. I guess fossil fuel combustion contributes as well, but that's on its way to becoming less of a problem.

Why should cities be expected subsidize rural and suburban living? Those higher infrastructure costs are rural and suburban problems, no need for states to transfer tax revenue simply because cities make more money for less infrastructure costs.

You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entirely dependent on new growth.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

We need to place more emphasis on the efficiency of transportation and infrastructure in new developments, and density is a major factor there.

I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.

Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that point.

I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.

This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density.

The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.

Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.

Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).