I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.

How does that square with their place in the timeline Strong Towns documents?

They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.

Rich suburbs do fine. Many suburbs of Boston have high income earners and high property values resulting in sane levels of property tax that actually fund those regions adequately. Most of the suburbs Strong Towns criticizes have $250k homes with household incomes between 40-50k and it’s impossible to tax those residents enough to pay for their infrastructure.

These are towns that were founded in the 1800s at the latest and some in the 1600s...

Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development?

From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development.

"In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."

I would describe Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) as being substantially car-centric with respect to the majority of adult residents of those towns/cities owning a car today and using a car or car service more than 250 days out of the year. Arlington would be feasible to get by without a car in many of its areas. Others would be much more difficult in the majority of the land.

Looking at satellite images I would predict they would not do well financially with the infrastructure costs.

But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.

Speaking as an Arlington resident, I would not describe it as "car centric", although cars are accommodated far more than I would like. It's still a classical streetcar suburb. The majority of Arlington's housing stock is from multifamily buildings within a couple of minutes walk to high frequency bus service (~5 minute wait).

Can you name some of these communities?

Sure: Arlington, Belmont, Lincoln, Newton, Waltham, Watertown, Wellesley.

Arlington and Watertown are higher density than Lowellor Quincy. Newton and Waltham are not far behind. You're relying on intuition rather than data and it's showing.

I would really only categorize Lincoln and Wellesley "low density suburb". The rest certainly have car centric qualities but they're too built up to be called the exception to the rule.

http://www.usa.com/rank/massachusetts-state--population-dens...

https://www.towncharts.com/Massachusetts/Top-25-Cities-in-Ma...

Strong Towns are picking the outliers that are not doing well and trying to extrapolate to all suburbs. I quit reading them a few years ago when I realized the place they using as an example was a rural town an hour drive from anyplace that could be considered a city - yet somehow this was supposed to show why suburbs were insolvent.

Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, start with thee streetcar suburbs (which often feature lots larger than what the new suburbs around me are building). They have already added sewer, water, telephone, eclectic, cable TV, internet, and some of those have been replaced as well. They have already replaced their roads many times over the years.

Sure there are some suburbs that have been badly managed and so haven't kept up. However that is a reflection on the short sighted voters, and not suburbs.

Your response makes me think you are not as familiar with Strong Towns' advocacy as you may wish to indicate. Their focus is not on density vs sprawl, and they are very careful to qualify that dichotomy against other dichotomies along which one may proceed with analysis. Their focus is rather on walkability and the accessibility of all kinds of services -- open public spaces a la parks, grocery and shopping stores, healthcare, schools, cultural offerings and nightlife, etc. To pretend that anything to which is attached the label "suburb", unqualified, is the target of their ire, is lazy.

I quit reading several years ago. Thier focus on walkabilty is good, but they also talk about how suburbs are not sustainable (or did then, and others seem to imply still do), and that position does not add up.

Same. I binge watched and binge read piles of related content on the topic several years ago and the overall message resonated quite a bit (in the “hell yeah, why don’t we do that?!” way).

Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.

> If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs.

If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?

Because suburbs, despite lower taxes - often generate more tax income. Where I live the city itself has a large part of the downtown owned by the county, state and federal government (it is the state capital, plus various federal offices that all cities have). Half of the valuable downtown pays zero tax to the city, yet the city is still maintaining infrastructure for those lots. That is in addition to a few churches that pay no tax in the US, and a bunch of parks. Thus the city has the high value core which isn't paying for itself, and then the lower value ring around the core that has lower property values to generate tax income from. If they can annex a suburb just outside that with higher values the city gets more money (with their higher taxes), and probably can reduce the tax rates for everyone (still a tax increase for the annexed suburb!)

Doesn't that go against the Strong Towns narrative that the 'burbs are a net drain on cities?

Strong Towns is talking about tax income vs tax expenditure efficiency (dollars received vs benefits realized). It is easily possible that receiving more money does not necessarily correspond to improved quality of life, if those funds are spent on projects that don't enable local prosperity.

The evidence strong towns presents is not convincing. They take rural towns far from cities and claim that towns issues represent suburbs. They cherry pick suburbs that have issues and claim it represents all. Nowhere do they apply statistical or scientific rigor.

Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.

Would the suburbs be forced to pay city rates for their roads/water/etc departments? Plenty of low-middle income low density small towns with suburbia densities survive just fine, have great services, AND are affordable all on their own. My town had Gb fiber before the big cities rolled theirs out in scale, and we now have the choice of more than 2 providers. My water rates are cheap even though our waste water is held to much higher standards than big cities (last I knew coastal cities still got to pump a ton of sewage out to sea). My roads are plowed day of while the nearest big cities can take a week to get theirs under control. All with a much smaller tax base (but a much more accountable local government). The California everyone wants to go to survived this way with positive local budgets, and enough money that all of the roads were landscaped, back before hyper growth. I remember when highway 1 through Santa Cruz didn't look dystopian but was full of colorful flowers even into the 80s. And it was actually affordable to live there then too.

I'm not going to argue if this is generally true or not, but in my N=1, I don't see how this applies at all to something like sunnyvale or santa clara (where I live).

Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.

The metro area in the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier as regards things like commute-sheds, etc. The problem with bandying about a one-size-fits-all label like "suburb" should be obvious.

If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.

At least from what I've personally seen, suburbs are not a drain. Do they cost more per person - yes. However, you have to look at the income side as well.

The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income.

A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.