Why should every small sub-section of geographies "pay-out" for themselves. The whole point of higher level organizing constructs (company, conglomerate, state, country) is we take systemically better decisions - which at a nation level will involve keeping people with different preferences united under the nation's big idea by supporting the diversity of preferences.

If to take an example Google insisted every development be independently paying out immediately, there wouldn't be any Maps, Docs, Drive...

If there was a similar insistance by Xerox, probably no personal computing.

Amd even at a state level, even in the US, there are states that pay more to the nation and there are states that get more. In the rest of the world - particularly in Asia, we just consider this support costs for maintaining nationhood.

Imagine if Xerox allocated its budget to 90% PARC, and 10% everything else - without adjusting any staffing. There'd be some really cool, really fun stuff going on, and the people at PARC would love it. But without people making and selling copiers, the whole company would be out of business before long.

The difference with suburbs/cities is the awareness, the expectation, and societal cost.

People living in the suburbs are generally unaware that they're being subsidized by the cities they live adjacent to, and have the expectation that their infrastructure and services be prioritized - generally to the detriment of the entire geographic region.

Going beyond that, the car-centric suburbia mindset has become the legal defacto design pattern, increasing costs and reducing livability for everyone.

So it's less that they should "pay-out" for themselves, and more that they should stop forcing their lifestyle choices on the rest of the population, and understand the costs associated with their lifestyle.

If state and federal governments didn't subsidize suburban infrastructure, cities would directly. The broader infrastructure network is vitally important for urban areas, and the suburbs especially are essential to retain the workers needed for productivity. Framing this as cities being exploited by greedy suburbanites is just wrong.

Cities would certainly naturally expand in a suburb-ish type of way. The issue with the current American style of suburbia is how expensive it is, and the extreme subsidies (both monetary and political pressure/force) what were implemented to set up the system in the first place.

Without that, America would have much denser "European style" urban hubs, and likely more active small cities than currently exist.

Subsidized in a way that they get a disproportionate amount of services perhaps. But I would argue that is almost irrelevant. Costly services like schooling and transport infrastructure scales mostly by the amount of people.

You could of course calculate business taxes proportionally to the work suburbs deliver, but that would be quite dishonest.

You can always say that only the most densely populated place carries its own... but that isn't convincing. I am not from the US, but we have similar discussions here. That people have to live in the city if they want to live efficient. Problem is that few want to and I think at that point the discussion should be almost ended.

Maybe they shouldn't pay out for themselves, but we should at least be aware of the costs so we can collectively plan and prioritize accordingly.

The same groups/organizations you named will often end activities or sub-groups that have a cost above a certain threshold.

I believe the overall intent here is to show the true cost of suburbs and evaluate if it's a pattern that cities can keep supporting. Ie, is the desire to live in the conditions suburbs create worth the cost of those arrangements?

The problem with that analogy is, suburbs doesn't benefit anyone besides the people living in them. So, by that logic, they should sustain themselves. Maps, Docs, and etc provide value to people outside themselves.

This is incorrect on a political and economic level. Fwiw I live in lower Manhattan, so I’m not saying this because I benefit from suburban subsidies. But if the country as whole subsidizes roads and services for a suburb of net positive income tax payers with otherwise low usage of welfare services, there is an economic logic to that. And obviously it gets votes.

As much as I like living in a dense area and riding my bike, the rise of the YouTube educated urban planner has led to a lot conclusions that aren’t particularly sound. Doing a flaw P&L on a small town and deciding, in so many words, that it shouldn’t exist is peak smugness.

I'm not an urban planner expert, but the logic makes sense to me. I look up my downtown condo vs a suburb home of comparable value, and I pay twice as much in property taxes. It's not hard to understand how density is inherently more efficient.

Wouldn't that mean that density in your case is less efficient since you pay more by a supposedly less valuable property?

Depends on your perspective. Yes, it's less efficient for me (individually) because I'm subsidizing suburbs and paying more taxes.

But, I was talking about the city, society, or the greater good. Whatever you call it. Higher density is more efficient and uses less resources per capita. Period. Same reason private planes are so bad for the environment.

That might be true that higher density is more efficient, but efficiency isn't a sufficient metric for living overall. Putting everyone in camps would be more efficient too.

But do you really pay for suburbs? As I said, the cost intensive positions scale with the number of people. Schools, utilities, ...

Suburbs provides housing. Housing on its own doesn't benefit anyone but those who live in them regardless of the density.

> Suburbs provides housing. […] regardless of the density.

At what cost, especially relative to other options. Lower density may end up costing more over the long term:

* https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/environment...

Urban living ≠ Manhattan:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E

Cost is a separate topic, though an important one.

But ultimately in these threads, the elephant in the room is that the suburbs are subsidized† by the cities they don't pay taxes into.

So why don't the cities expand their boundaries to include the suburbs, instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?

† Side note: I have not found to be true, personally. Suburbs are paid for by the people who live there and the county, into whom we pay our taxes. In truth, a lot of our money goes into businesses in the city (who will in turn pay taxes to the city), since that's where we all go for our goods.

> So why don't the cities expand their boundaries to include the suburbs […]

Why would anyone want to absorb something that costs more to run to provide the same services?

* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

> […] instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?

Perhaps they want to kill them because they are wasteful of area (often paving over perfectly good agricultural land), and cause climate change due to their reliance on cars.

Further, how much "choice" did suburban dwellers actually have? Post-WW2 most zoning has forced the creation of car-centric, low-density sprawl. Perhaps there are folks in the suburbs that want higher density neighbourhoods but because of the limited supply (due to lack of new build) the prices have gone up and they're priced out. Whose to say that walkable neighbourhoods wouldn't be popular if purchased in the "suburbs:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

> † Side note: I have not found to be true, personally.

I think this depends on the municipal boundaries involved. Depending on where the border is, on one side it could be that things built in the "old" / pre-WW2 way and on the other the "new" / post-WW2 way, and the taxes go to each municipality appropriately. In other places there could be the pre-WW2 Old Downtown and is walkable, but everything new is non-walkable. In those latter situations the more walkable parts are probably subsidizing the less walkable ones:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

I don't think his conclusions are great if you're working based off his examples. Like he brings up an example of a small neighborhood that, if it paid for its own road maintenance, would have to raise property taxes by 46% like that would be more than a mild inconvenience for the privilege of not living in a human hive.

If it paid for its own road maintenance, and no other services such as water or sewer, they would need a 46% property tax increase just to cover that one thing.

I'd be willing and able to pay quintuple my current property tax to keep the number of times I hear a car horn on my commute at one or two a week instead of one every ten seconds. Lots of other people are the same. An increase in cost of living in suburbs would be annoying but far from the "suburbs are a grotesque impossibility" stance of Charles Marohn.

I think an article you may be referring to is the in-depth Strong Towns series that analyzes Galesburg, Illinois. Galesburg is by no means a suburb, and in many ways it's more comparable to a big city since it dominates its county and has little suburbs of its own. I think the assessment was that Galesburg officials are making incredibly unfortunate and wasteful decisions, but the good news is that there are examples of better financial choices they can make going forward.

However, if another article on this subject comes to mind I'd appreciate to know what it is, once you're off the train of course.

I think it's difficult for someone to have much perspective on how much their own lifestyle is subsidized when the same can be said for the vast majority of people who enjoy benefits from the government, regardless of where they choose to live. Most people take more than they contribute, I don't think someone making $120,000 and paying $40,000 in taxes should feel any guilt for living in the suburbs when so many others can pay almost nothing in taxes and still enjoy huge amounts of government benefit.

The person making $120,000 is heavily benefiting from a public infrastructure that makes $120k/yr jobs possible. A ditch digger needs almost no infrastructure besides a shovel to do his job. An engineer needs schools and universities to educate his colleagues, roads and railways to deliver parts required for the product he's working on, and police services that deter theft of those products once they're built. Not to mention a consumer base with enough money to afford the product in question.

And the ditch digger requires the engineer to tell him where to dig. Digging a hole for no reason isn't very beneficial.

Even if you take away this public infrastructure you would get private infrastructure in its stead.

There is no more ditch digger of old. They now use $1M excavators that are probably leased from a mega-corp that purchased it from another mega-corp.

Of course there are ditch diggers. You can't dig everything with a machine.

This is right. The suburbanite wants the benefits of agglomeration, but they want to define their existence within it so that they aren't exposed to any of its downsides. It’s a neat trick.

There are downsides to living a suburban lifestyle as it is typically designed. They just don't care or unaware.

No one who pays "almost nothing in taxes" enjoys huge amounts of anything. Except maybe the actual rich with their tax avoidance games, but actual poverty fucking sucks and whatever meager benefits you manage to access don't change that.

The people we call rich pay the majority of taxes.

>In 2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $612 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $461 billion in income taxes. [1]

You're right though, poverty does absolutely suck and realistically nobody's 'enjoying' EBT or assisted housing or whatever benefit they receive. The point I was trying to make is that poor people shouldn't feel badly for contributing less to the pie any more than 1%ers should feel righteous for contributing more.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...

So you admit that living in the suburbs is like being on welfare?

If you want to look at that way, sure. The point I'm making is that it's not a particularly interesting or descriptive way to look at society.

the american individualism is showing.

I'm not American.