How could cities survive without farm land?
How could cities survive without outsourced materials?
We live in an interdependent interconnected global society where everything and everyone subsidizes everyone else.
A suburb needs that nearby road, lots of streets, water lines, sewage, significant power, often street lights, etc. etc.
The only logical difference is a matter of scale and limits.
The same rules apply to any region that has dependencies outside of its own borders.
The only way to not be subsidized in some fashion is to live directly off of the land in the form of some nomadic tribe.
The hinges of a door used once a day will last longer than the hinges of a door used one thousand.
A road that sees one delivery truck a month will last longer than one that sees thousands.
Rural: Low usage, low maintenance low services (road,power,internet), low tax base
Urban: High usage, high maintenance, high services (water, sewer, road, power, internet, transit), high tax base
Suburban: High usage, high maintenance, high services (water, sewer, road, power, internet, transit), low tax base
Only one of these, by necessity needs subsidizing ...
Of course we should pay for infrastructure outside the city, but if you expect to live outside city centers and have costly infrastructure such as a sewage system, high speed fiber internet and so on, you should pay accordingly.
What happens now is that this infrastructure is either financed by those living in city centers or by debt.
So I don't buy your Straw Man argument that people believe that dense urban cores are better. What was explicitly discussed is that people who live in the suburbs don't pay what they should.
What is the benefit to the city resident in subsiding the infrastructure of a suburb? Why shouldn't suburban residents pay the cost of their own infrastructure?
Cities are in competition for talent and labor. Those that provide more of what the people who provide that labor want will do better than those that do not.
Because they don't need the specifically-suburban labor? They can get the labor from their 'fellow' urban dwellers?
Towns still typically need to manage their own utilities while suburbs don't.
I suspect there are bad suburbs somewhere, but here ain't it.
Are you in a net contributor state as well? I live in a similar town, but it's in Wyoming, a state which benefits from federal transfers from urban centers.
Yup [1].
> ignore the other methods of "contributing"
Nobody is arguing we write off New Mexico, Mississippi or West Virginia. But their lifestyles are subsidized by Delaware (special case), Minnesota, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut and New York. (Scaling the net contribution to GDP removes much of the partisan slant introduced by urban centers having more people, and thus bigger numbers, as well as leaning blue.)
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2011/08/01/the-red-...
I have yet to see anything that points to them being fundamentally worse than towns: if you just treat them as Towns Next To Cities, it seems like you solve the vast majority of the problems.
"Are cities necessary given the modern conditions?"
How many suburbs would exist without the corresponding city center? And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns?