Also even though you get less room, the cost of living inside a city is insane. The trade offs don't make any sense. You can often live a much better QoL, for half as much anywhere else. Address the cost of living issues, then more people might be interested in the city lifestyle. The truth is even those that live in suburbs or rural areas that are interested living in the city simply can't afford it. If they work there they're paid just enough that they have to commute an hour or more to afford to live somewhere.
It really wouldn't. I don't think there is a mechanism for making the above infrastructure sustainable short of tearing it down.
In some places, the debt payments exceed total annual incomes for residents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQUOHlAocY&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
I think this does need to change, but I'm the minority here. Most people "need" to drive because of the weather.
https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...
Note that 2020 is an outlier year due to COVID, so probably best to look at 2019 or before.
In 2019, 9 states paid more than they got back. And wow do some states make a lot of money: Virginia and Kentucky both have a per capita "more money than they take in" that's 3X that of Montana. But Montana still is raking in ~$4000 per capita than they pay out, whereas each Massachusetts resident sent out ~$2100.
I grew up in North Dakota, so can I get a free day ski pass next time I come out west and swing by Montana? :)
Perhaps in your exact individual case this is true, but statistically speaking it is not.
Rural areas as a general rule receive (in many cases far) more federal tax dollars than their residents remit. Many rural areas would simply not be tenable much less solvent if they did not receive these dollars to assist with infrastructure.
This is one of the most pervasive myths my rural family members believe in.
This is is opposite of how things actually work.
Generally, rural areas are fairly heavily subsidized by urban ones. The more taxes become localized, the less money from urban areas gets funneled to rural ones and the poorer the rural areas become.
So you've got the rural 1/3rd of the population depending on 7x more roads and 20x more bridges than the urban population. If those folks actually bore the full cost of maintaining their own roads, I'd be willing to bet many of them would decide their rural lifestyle wasn't worth quite as much as they claimed.
I assume if it's vital infrastructure to a couple mega-farms they'll happily take over maintenance. They're not gonna just shut down operations because some rural bridges on their preferred routes aren't maintained anymore. They'll either accept longer routes using a smaller set of still-publicly-maintained bridges, or solve the problem some other way, maybe by maintaining the roads themselves. Public spending drops, and one or both of food prices go up slightly and profits go down slightly. Seems fine. May well be cheaper, overall—forcing companies to choose between longer routes and maintaining their own roads seems like a good way to weed out routes that are being maintained at a net loss.
Why do folks act like farmers are doing what they do out of altruism or something? "You owe farmers! They feed you!" Yeah, I do owe them. I owe them what I paid for the food. Right? If they decide I'm not sufficiently grateful they can stop. I'm not a "the market solves all problems" sort but I'm pretty sure it'd solve that one, no problem. Others will happily increase production to make up for the loss, because it's a market. Throw a fit that urbanites aren't subsidizing rural living & businesses enough, and stop producing, and someone with more sense will gladly take that market share.
If that wasn't the case, I am not sure the US would be a competitive position to grow staples compared with much of the rest of the world, which in itself is a whole topic of discussion.
Given that it already is being subsidized, I think thought needs to be done for handling the topic of broad agricultural good distribution and subsidies. Frankly I think corn, bioethanol, meat etc... should lose their subsidies but that in itself would be quite a vote loser.
E.G. How about canals, barges, railways instead of roadways
I just object to framing things like urbanites must subsidize rural living because "that's where their food comes from". Sure, of course... but that's why there's a food market. We're not propitiating the farm-gods to shower food upon us, but, instead, paying for food. Subsidies might make sense for several other reasons, but, as someone who spend much of his childhood in the country and sometimes living on small farms, the defensive "but you owe us" attitudes from some people when this topic comes up seem downright bizarre.
This would make subsidization more transparent to the general public, while also enabling free-market competition and innovation rather than free-money stagnation.
The vast majority of people don't live like that.
Paved roads and sewage are probably least important to me. What's wrong with a septic system?
I am getting older. I was born in 1987 so I am already 30+. With my sedentary lifestyle, I am pretty much guaranteed to have health problems well before I am eligible for Medicare and there is no sign that we will have medicare for all in my lifetime. Therefore, I can only afford healthcare as long as I work. Long story short, I cannot afford to be airlifted out of the middle of nowhere when (not if) I have a major health crisis in the next thirty years.
If we can use a septic tank for sewage, we can also use solar (and batteries) for electricity, a state of the art in-ground heat pump for heating (and cooling) the house, satellite Internet for remote work. We can do all that but we still need paved roads.
I think (please don't quote me on this) this is the thing that the stronger towns dude keeps saying. We can probably afford to build sparsely populated suburbia and rural utopia ONCE where everyone has half an acre of backyard and where you aren't woken up in the middle of the night because your neighbor decided to do laundry at 3 AM on a Tuesday. However, who is paying to keep up all these roads?
> for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of [...] a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
I wonder if building out railroads would be cheaper than building out paved roads to everywhere. Thoughts?
I don't see any issue with state tax subsidizing roads a little anyway, especially for the farmers we depend on. Not sure about railroad costs but it would be great if passenger rail was invested in more again.
The reason people cluster together in cities is so that they can trade with each other and have sex with each other and learn from each other and attend gatherings with each other and look at each other's art and so on. And even most sexless, joyless, introvert-art-haters need to sell their labor or their wares. So, sure, everybody would like more space, more privacy, etc, but the way the world actually works is that you have to make tradeoffs.
That's the beauty of technology though. I really don't have to make these tradeoffs anymore.
I can work from home which means I'm no longer limited to the job market in my immediate geography.
I can order practically any product I want online so it really doesn't matter if I live close to a city with great stores or not.
I can use a plethora of apps to meet people and date.
And of course, I have my car (and uber as a backup) so I don't need to be cramped into some terrible apartment in order to make the world accessible.
We love to romanticize these crowded industrial era cities, but when given the choice, most people would rather not live in dense cities at all.
Not Just Bikes did an excellent series on this specific problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
I sure do understand it, but I also understand that when it comes to comparing the environmental impact of upper middle class urbanites and suburbanites, we're splitting hairs. Neither of these lifestyles as they exist now are sustainable, so what this really boils down to is a bunch of rich folks living in cities looking down their noses at us middle class plebs in the burbs, simply because they find suburbs aesthetically distasteful rather than out of any genuine concern for the environment.
Yea that is not at all true. You can literally compare the CO2 per capita for an average American/Canadian and someone from Europe and in general they produce 1/3 of the CO2. It is not a negligible difference.
This is largely caused because of the urban designs which don't focus on gas dependent suburbia. Or the benefits from efficiency at scale which can only be achieved in high density living accommodations.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
It is also a plain fact that downtown urban blocks are the profit generators for cities whilst suburbia is largely a financial hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
You looking at a classist angle is I think an internal bias. There are poor/rich in both areas. It's just a straight fact though that suburban design is not sustainable both economically and ecologically.
I've never disputed this fact. It's true, the American suburban model is not sustainable. However, the urban lifestyle common in North America or Europe is likewise not sustainable either. So it does become a class/political issue since neither lifestyle actually address the issue at hand. It's just a bunch of people judging each other for their unsustainable lifestyles.
What do you mean by this? There is a large gulf of difference between the two, and I feel you are more commenting on the consumerist patterns of the above. That pattern is a lot more sustainable model in high density urban environments from a logistics, CO2 perspective.
From a modern quality of living perspective, it is vastly more sustainable both economically and ecologically to have people in high density housing. Hence why it was the traditional form of infrastructure for huge portions of history up until the failed US suburban experiment.
It's much easier to hook up good quality and efficient infrastructure to a high density block than to a suburban neighborhood. The above infrastructure would be better utilization rates, cheaper to install, and easier to offset than what you propose.
Ruralia and Suburbia are not financially or environmentally sustainable, not as modern society.
And even in rural areas, you expect all that technology to come to you.
So yeah, it works for you, because a lot of people think like you and you're a big voting bloc, but ultimately, you're increasing debt levels for everyone and burning the planet down.
But hey, you got yours, so we're cool...
That's fine, but cities like New York are not sustainable either. Ditto for commercial air travel, so the entire conversation is unproductive and pointless. It just degenerates into wealthy urbanites saying something along the lines of "You terrible suburb dwellers need to give up your unsustainable lifestyle and embrace our unsustainable lifestyle instead".
I'll take all of this more seriously when I start seeing environmentalists swear off things like commercial flight or eating food and wine that's been shipped halfway around the world. Until then, I'll enjoy my suburb and my car and my lawn with the picket fence.
CO2 emissions for households living in cities are noticeably lower (just goggle it).
> I'll take all of this more seriously when I start seeing environmentalists swear off things like commercial flight or eating food and wine that's been shipped halfway around the world
This is pure whataboutism and you know it. Just look at the co2 emissions of your lifestyle versus those of wine shipped from across the world.
This kind of network of mutually codependent systems is just the way things are.
You think your city is sustainable? Just two simple questions to put that lie to rest:
1. Where does your food come from?
2. Where does your water come from?
It's all about money. More people have more money.
The fact that we've pulled people out of agriculture and we can grow food for 100 with just 1-2 actually growing it is great for the planet, for the economy, for human development.
“Ruralia” is already entirely ecologically sustainable.
If you don’t want to subsidize rural infrastructure through your tax dollars, then frankly, we should just charge you exorbitant rates for our food and water, and then — by your metric — we’ll be entirely financially sustainable, too.
If you live largely "off the grid", grow much of your own food, don't go out much (since any going out means a lot of driving, if you're in the country), and rarely order goods delivery... sure.
Do you have your own paved road infrastructure, or are you relying on others to pay for that? Road infrastructure for low-density housing is a net drain on the public purse (unlike e.g. free healthcare, space exploration, etc. which are a net win, economically)
I'm a big fan of space exploration, but I seriously doubt that it's an economic net win.
> With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances.
What is this nonsense? "[T]he apartment house is a mere parasite." So the Court prefers suburbs to apartment living? Who cares? This is no basis for overturning fundamental property rights.
The Court in Euclid did what NIMBYs often do, which is to listen to all the arguments and then say, ultimately, "yeah, yeah, productivity, property rights, freedom, etc, I get it, I get it, but I don't want more density near me and isn't the intensity of my preferences on this issue what really matters?"
Largely because traditional suburban/rural designs are not climate conscious, nor economically solvent. Your tax receipts wouldn't cover the maintenance costs of infrastructure.
If the actual economic costs of maintaining the above weren't subsidized by people living in apartment blocks, you would probably change your tune.