If you're 20 miles outside a town, you almost certainly have electrical service, but are on a well and septic system. City water and sewer doesn't make sense at those sort of densities. You also probably have the land to easily put a nice ground mount PV array in, and grow a good bit of your own food, should you care to.
A typical suburban subdivision will have city water and sewage, though depending on the details, you might have a couple community wells and individual septic fields (or a link to city sewage).
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/DOE%20ZER...
What if this was done this brownfield development in areas with existing infrastructure? New development doesn't need to be coupled with sprawl. There is a significant amount of multifamily development that looks exactly like that. The IRA also included large incentives for the retrofit of the existing housing stock.
Infrastructure only lasts 30 years. We should be sunsetting suburbs, not expanding them.
The free market will sort it out in short order.
We're self-sustaining primarily through property taxes and have been that way for more than a century.
From the tone of other commenters here, I sense a malicious undercurrent intent on extinguishing rural ways of life - any excuse will suffice.
Like how the residents of New York City are able to get the food and water it needs all produced within the five boroughs? Or is that a different kind of "subsidy" from the hinterlands.
It's nonsensical to say that just because the tax receipts of a suburb doesn't pay in full its roads and bridges, its existence is necessarily subsidized by the rest. Does a city pay in full for its share of the US Navy whose protection of global commerce it depends on to survive? Are cities subsidized by the blood of those in the armed forces, who primarily come from the hinterlands?
Yet.
"In every region of the country, recruitment rates were higher in rural and exurban counties than in urban counties. Only urban counties in the South had recruitment rates above the national average. Cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West all had rates well below the national average." [1]
[1] https://dailyyonder.com/largest-share-army-recruits-come-rur...
Or were you planning on creating isolated servants in rural area who only work all day and never go anywhere?
You missed a very good option in between: incrementally densify them, which also has the effect of increasing the tax revenue per unit of infrastructure.
Of course new suburbs rarely are built with transit in mind while the oldest were built around the long gone streetcars. This build form doesn't have any affect on solvency though.
It's the opposite in my 1920s streetcar neighborhood (alas without streetcars today). The average lot size is 1/10 acre. That's enough for some small scale gardening (tomatoes, potatoes, broccoli), but nothing that is going to produce a significant amount of food. Walking distance grocery stores (and even street produce vendors) were a big thing in those days. Cars were shoehorned in during the 1950s.
Our lots are tiny compared to the typical suburban California lot, which is more like 1/4 acre, and dwarfed by typical American suburban lot sizes.
I live in a suburban area that has been around since the early 1900s and we're not suffering infrastructure collapse. Your number smells like BS.
Right now you're forcing me to pay for your fetishes.
Popular claim made without sourcing any facts.
But the discussion was about suburbs. The number of people living in rural areas is by definition low enough to not be a meaningful concern.
That's not generally how this works. There aren't necessarily highways and new paved roads going to rural properties. Electrical service isn't only downtown in cities but for miles outside of them or from solar, propane, or any one of the many other technologies.
As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety. Water almost always comes from a well on the property, and sewage tanks are how the sewage are handled.
Later, if Frank & Martha's property gets annexed into the city, they will pay taxes and will be just as entitled to city services as others. They already pay county, state and other taxes, which means they are entitled to whatever their taxes pay for.
"In general, rural areas in the United States have higher homeownership rates than urban areas. Compared with urban areas, where the homeownership rate was 59.8 percent, rural areas had a homeownership rate of 81.1 percent." [1]
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...
Add to that minimum lot sizes, setback laws, exclusionary zoning and minimum parking requirements and it's no wonder that young people cannot buy a home these days.
> But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).
I'm not a fan of suburbs but I'm tired of people holding up the worst possible examples and saying "SEE, SUBURBS SUCK!"
Of course there are exceptions. They are not common, and they are not the norm. They are endemic.
Is there data to back this up, particularly the "usually" part?
Having nearly always lived in suburban areas (a few times rural), food shopping is nearly always within an easy walk. I'm sure there are some cases where this might not be so, but I doubt it's the norm. For rural areas, sure.
And 5 lane 40mph arterial roads (two each way and 1 turn lane), seems to be a standard feature of all suburbs all around the country, on which most grocery stores and shopping are located.
Ok, but that's a quite radical limitation to the definition of walkable. What is the reason to put up self-imposed limitations like that?
I mean, by that definition even most of Manhattan wouldn't be called walkable even thought it's the most walkable city in the US!
In my very suburban neighborhood, I can very easily walk to a 24hr supermarket in about 5-6 minutes, so I often do (except when it's super cold/raining).
Yes, I do have to cross a 4 lane road (two this way, two that way). I press the pedestrian crossing button, wait a handful of seconds and once it's my turn I cross the road with cars traveling at 0mph since they all have a red light.
Because I have seen how risky it is to cross due to speeding drivers in large vehicles looking at their phones. It is a large distance to cross, and if someone is mobility impaired like an old person or handicapped or child, it can be quite harrowing.
Also, NYC is completely different because the speed cars travel at is actually 25mph. A world of difference in being able to stop or avoid a collision at 50mph.
And this is a best case scenario in many suburbs. I come across 7 to 9 lane wide arterial roads all the time. 3 lanes in each direction, 1 to 2 turn lanes and shoulder. Even as a healthy young guy, I feel intimidated walking across 80ft+ of vehicles that can be traveling at high speeds.
Unless there's traffic jam, driving speeds in the 4+ lane avenues in Manhattan is certainly higher than 25mph. (Source: used to spend all my weekends in Manhattan so I've done a lot of walking and cycling all over it.)
> Even as a healthy young guy, I feel intimidated walking across 80ft+ of vehicles that can be traveling at high speeds.
You should not be crossing when cars are traveling at any speed other than zero, that's what the pedestrian crossing lights are for.
In any case, you're right in that if you set a personal limitation on what is walkable that excludes nearly every part of the country (including Manhattan), then you won't find any walkable areas.
Personally I don't mind crossing a street (with a red-light protected crossing) so I find suburban areas to very walkable since I can (and do) get to any stores I want within an easy walk.
You would never finish crossing then. Lots of times there are cars traveling in the lanes that are approaching the intersection, and you have no way of knowing if they are paying attention or not to the traffic lights.
At low speeds, you can eyeball them sufficiently decreasing their speed and confirm they are stopping, but at high speeds, it is impossible to tell.
> You would never finish crossing then.
Well I don't know what to say, it is quite the wild west wherever you live.
Around here (California) and everywhere else I've happened to live, all kinds of people (including the very old with mobility problems) finish crossing safely all day long without any trouble.
And when someone particularly slow is crossing and doesn't get to the other side before the pedestrian light goes red, cars just wait. Nobody's going to run them over just because the light changed.
You missed the high speed requirement. A low-speed road is radically safer than a high speed road for a pedestrian.
> once it's my turn I cross the road with cars traveling at 0mph since they all have a red light
You hope. Cars in the 'burbs are notorious for not actually stopping and for hitting pedestrians.
some anecdata as a counterpoint to the "everything being super close to you in urban areas" narrative: i live in a pretty damn urban neighourhood ("old" or "core" Hollywood, CA), and it takes me ~15 minutes to walk to the nearest supermarket (just under 1 mile).
historically, there were a number of closer supermarkets but those large buildings & their parking lots tend to be eventually razed and replaced with luxury apartment buildings.
huh, actually i just checked and it looks like there is not a single 24-hour supermarket within any kind of reasonable walking distance of my home (2-3 miles). i am pretty sure the local VONS was 24hr before COVID, i wonder if that is why? now all the local VONS or Ralphs or what have you all close between 11pm and 1am.
I also think suburban areas are nicer for bikes because there is no theft. Biking in SF is pretty rough for example. Here I don’t even have to lock my bike.
And what about out west of there? Beaverton, is that city? Hillsboro? These places are suburban cities with public transit.
Could also look north, to Seattle. Larger than Portland for sure, but fundamentally similar concept.
So this is where I see the goalposts getting moved. Lots of people say 'suburban' and only think of the endless tracts of housing with no commercial or retail space. That's just one kind of suburbia. Common in some regions (midwest comes to mind), less so in others.
I've read recently that as of right now, if you're more than 1000 yards from the branch point the electrical company would run wire from, it is already cheaper to go fully off-grid. Not 100% true that this is true or at least universally applicable, but the curves all point in that direction.
I don't know exactly how many yards the breakeven point is. However, from what I've seen it is almost always monetarily cheaper to create your own services when possible - unless a neighbor has paid for services to get really close. It might make sense for neighbors to pool money for pulling services out. It all depends on the specifics, right?
Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.
If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too.
It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home...
Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...
This is a common misunderstanding of how roads are funded. Roads are not solely funded by gas taxes and are predominantly paid for by funds raised from sources other than gas taxes.
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...
Do you have any sources for that? I'm in Australia, where fuel costs about twice what it does in the US. A decent portion of that is taxes/duties, but road spending is taken from consolidated revenue, and fuel taxes ultimately contribute a minority of the spending on roads. So unless the cost of fuel production is massively lower in the US, something doesn't add up.
Notably, though, the HTF spends more than it earns in gas tax revenue; the shortfall comes from the general fund. And also Federal highway spending does not cover all highway spending; the rest comes from the states[1][3]. Federal highway spending also does not cover local roads at all.
[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/...
[2]: (Above image from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 )
I don't think that's true. Gasoline taxes aren't high enough to pay for roads.
https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
It seems as of 2015, 50% of road related costs came out of general taxes. And as gas taxes have remained fairly constant, while roads have become more expensive to repair as they get worse, I can only think that number has gone up since then.
Note that in the context of the "half came from gas taxes," the article is only talking about highway funding. Local road funding isn't covered by Fed gas taxes at all.
Why would you hate the only kind of housing worth living in?
I would end up in a mental institution if forced to live in a multi family home.
If Hackernews believed in god, surely this would be their idea of heaven.
Thank you. This is what notjustbikes and climate town agitate against in their youtube channels.
Highly efficient low density housing has a place. So does high density housing.
Everything you say about improving urban development practices is valid, but doesn’t mean that efforts to improve suburban/exurband/rural development are problematic. They’re all inextricably part of the future and they all have their own development needs.
The skyscrappers that we see in our skylines are not even the majority of what we see. A lot of place will benefit from being 3-4 stories tall.
A lot of space that is developed is hugely wasted, devoted to storing cars, or roads to facilitate car movement. Meanwhile, a human being is very compact in comparison.
Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead.
At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage.
If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists!
Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.
People in the U.S. won't be living in dystopian China-style 40 floor housing anytime soon, in ways that is sounds like you're hoping for with dense city living.
It wouldn't fix the suburbs' lack of density, but it'd still be a marked improvement. It'd theoretically lighten the burden suburbs place on cities too, since there'd be a lot more corner shops and the like paying taxes.
Not that there isn't a time for trying to bring a different perspective. But we should do it with humility, rather than assuming they're just wrong or misguided.
So... yes "stop convincing them" is a valid argument. "convince them not to" is slightly shakier moral ground.
Meanwhile people in Europe live in denser areas with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars or where they can do most of their commuting by foot, bike, or rail. That is the norm for people from those cultures, and so they—like us—largely choose to continue living in a world similar to that in which they grew up.
Given that one of these modes of living reliably produces a happier population and is significantly more environmentally and economically sustainable, that we're already in the business of promoting one style over another via housing policy, and that one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest… what on earth is the problem?
Is that really a "given"?
> Given that ... one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest
As I see it, government promotes outcomes that benefit "everyone" only by protecting individuals' self-interest.
It’s in my self-interest to take everything you own and to dump my waste in the nearest available yard that isn’t mine. Nobody wants to live in a world where people act like that, so we collectively agree that things are better off for everyone if we respect one another’s property rights and pay someone to take our trash and sewage somewhere else to be dealt with.
But to say that Government exists to promote outcomes that benefit everyone against individuals' self-interest is like saying that pit-mines exist because we enjoy creating giant pits. Or that cars exist so that we can burn a bunch of fuel. The restrictions on individuals' rights are necessary evils, which need to be carefully considered and minimized.
Hearing it framed the way you did does help me understand many peoples' points of view better though.
We accept bureaucracies because it helps us achieve common good that wouldn’t exist if everyone only looked out for themselves.
Roads and other infrastructure. Plumbing and water treatment. Sewers. Building codes. Schools for everyone. On and on and on these are things we’ve decided we’re better if everyone has access to or has to abide by, even if individually nobody would make it happen.
I am obviously biased given that I currently exist in a suburb.
I've got no objection to people who want to live a particular lifestyle doing so. But they should pay the costs that it inflicts on the rest of us.
Now they're getting bought up and the people are literally building houses from every end of the lot, often time getting variances for setbacks. They've decided that yards and green space are no longer important. They want wedge a three story 5K sq ft house on the same lot where a much smaller home fit.
So, I would agree and say to an extent, people are already there in terms of dealing with no lawns, now its just getting them to accept several houses on the same lot instead of their massive mcmansion.
I think we are on our way there, most new developments around here have houses that are nearly the size of the lot, with a tiny back yard and smaller front yard, and little room between houses. Developers get more money by making lots small and houses big, so there’s little incentive to have the large suburban d yards that wises to be common.
Of course, the houses are much larger than their Japanese counterparts. My Japanese mother in law thinks we are wealthy based on the size of our house, but we’re one of the smallest homes in the neighborhood,
My big problem with cities is the people.
If these buildings were properly soundproofed, in many ways I'd prefer living in the city, but as things stand the only people who get to enjoy that in cities are those at the tops of skyscrapers renting penthouse suites, all of whom reside in a plane of existence entirely separate from my own.
The number one thing I've enjoyed about suburb life, particularly as a remote worker, is how much more dramatically quiet it is, primarily thanks to not sharing a wall with anybody.
I do enjoy walking on the grass and taking care of some plants, but I didn't really need so much land if not to keep neighbours away (I used to live in an apartment where a neighbour made my life hell, never again).
My family member just bought a ridiculous gas-guzzler to drive even more ridiculous distance to their job and still manage to muster up courage to complain about gas prices to me. It is not the use ( or lack thereof ). It is the lack basic sense.
I don't have a mega yard, because I can't afford the upkeep. If I could, I would consider it.
In the case of your family member sure they lack sense, but I've found for lawns at least, to lean into that and use arguments like, 'hey clovers are better because you don't need to mow and barely need to water, this means you can sit on your ass more!' (something like that).
Understand that most people over manage their lawns. You can get your lawn a little more green (the color, not the environmental green) with excess water and chemicals. They are not needed at all though.
Americans in the same situation would not have built something like Tokyo.
If you're going to bring up Tokyo you should also bring up Houston. Houston is what most American cities would look like if the people who lived there were able to build what they wanted. Most Americans want to live in detached homes that they own, and they prefer cars to public transit.
Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.
We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."
This isn't some immutable law of the damned universe.
That's quite a strawman there.
Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.
I'm seeing a ton of strawman arguments, totally inaccurate descriptions of suburbs, unsourced hyperbole about "subsidies" and "externalities", and conflation of "suburb" and "rural" in this thread which certainly does not apply to any suburbs I've ever lived in.
I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure. Strong towns talks about this in great detail.
Again, that is something that might be true for some places but not others.
I know of suburbs that definitely pay for themselves. And it's not hard to see why -- the property taxes are high and many of the residents are paying high income taxes too. Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.
I also know that some of the new subdivisions outside of Sacramento have paid for all of their infrastructure via their HOA, so that all of the money to build and maintain the roads, sewers, and power lines was 100% paid for by the homeowners. That's also apparently a common model for new housing in Nevada.
These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.
Why should they be redistributed to the recreationally remote? Are they especially in need?
But often not by enough to balance the amount of publicly-funded road space and parking they use.
> These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.
We absolutely get these arguments on other topics when public money is being spent on luxuries for the wealthy, which is what suburban living is. Police, fire departments, and schools are necessities. Zillion-square-foot homes and lawns are not.
People with more resources and more power have taken larger living spaces for centuries, the idea of wanting more space isn't some creation of post-WWII America.
Nowdays we talk about trains in the US as a "let's get away from suburban development" but the train itself was a driver of suburbanization from London, historically - people opted for more space and a train commute when they got the option.
Do they really?
My country is a textbook case of the opposite, where the general population suddenly decided they don't really want to live in apartment blocks in the city - especially the type which was built in the communist second half of the XXth century.
What happened next was intense proliferation of sprawl. It actually was seen as a status symbol back then to be able to afford a detached house.
So much so that the urbanization rate actually slightly fell in the past 20 years.
People gravitate towards comfort and apparently needing to drive everywhere but having enormous living space is preferable to living in a relatively small apartment and walking/cycling.
Houston has space to expand so it can easily keep building outwards without bulldozing shit (which requires people wanting to sell their land, etc, etc). Development is easy if there's nothing to displace. NY? LA? SF? Not so much. No coincidence that Chicago is much cheaper than those geography-bound places too.
Compare Houston to other cities in Texas *that have plenty of zoning of the sort that would be immediately recognizable in the Bay Area) and it no longer looks like any YIMBY miracle of affordability. Just... basically the same...
The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers, but instead they choose to suffer long commutes and expensive transportation in order to enjoy a different lifestyle.
I think it's naive to suggest that "American housing" is a Ponzi scheme.
And the Strong Towns write up that has links to more reading that I believe informed that video: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...
Strong Towns has an agenda (which I mostly agree with), and in order to promote their agenda they have a straw man argument that broadly categorizes _all_ suburban development as an unsustainable venture that is borrowing against the future.
I agree that there is (in many cases, but not all) some deferred costs and externalities that are not being fully accounted for in new development.
However, I'm not nearly so pessimistic as to think that the people living in those developments won't make changes to account for those deferred costs and even possibly some of the externalities.
I think it's naive to cry "the sky is falling".
How can you say that? Usually nice suburbs pay huge amount in taxes that subsidize urban cores.
That nothing i've read acknowledges that fact suggests they are cherry picking evidence instead of giving an unbiased analysis .
There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.
Subsidized by urban cores.
Who do you think is paying for those $50M highway exits and overpasses so everyone can quickly get to their strip malls? Its not the local residents.
When people talk about the “subsidy of the suburbs” they usually talk about the cost of maintaining suburban life, vs the tax base that supports it. Eg property tax usually goes to the town to pay for the town’s infra, while income tax goes to the state to pay for other thing. When the town can’t cover its cost and depends on the state’s money or when the state pays to build things in the town, that’s where the “subsidy” comes in. Often towns just can’t cover the cost of their basic infrastructure maintenance, but even when they can, the state usually still build highways and other big projects which can cost $10s to $100s of millions, and rarely can be affordable by the actual tax base of the town.
Here's a list of US counties by per capita income:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties...
Lots of suburban countries here— Arlington, Fairfax County, Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Westchester, from the ones I know at least. The only two that seem quite urban in the top 15 to me are New York County and San Francisco County.
"the revenue collected over time does not come near to covering the costs of meeting these long-term obligations. Development spread out over a broad area is very expensive to maintain. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability... Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that's just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes. Every mature city has a backlog of deferred maintenance, a growing list of promises with no discernible path to make good on them."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
Every city has deferred maintenance and unmeetable promises, most of it is maintenance that it is more cost effective to defer. We don't need perfectly smooth streets, so defer minor maintenance makes sense. Most unmeetable promisees are things they never intended to meet.
Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.
"We've been throwing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for hundreds of years. If this was a problem we'd be seeing the consequences of it by now."
Anyone who's looking does see the problem. Meanwhile there's a critical mass of people whose lives and identity revolve around the status quo and who simply prefer not to see it. The people who see the problem have been trying to tell you (and everyone else) about it, and it continues to fall on deaf ears.
If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.
Is a pretty general term that's hard to respond to.
Yes there are rural subsidies, but I'm unconvinced that the per-capita subsidization of rural and suburban dwellers is so much greater than their urban counterparts.
You may have a very good argument, but I don't know the numbers, and I haven't seen anyone provide the numbers for this yet either.
If your food goes over a subsidized road that counts against you.
I don't buy that subsidization is what makes buying a house "in the sticks" so much cheaper.
For example, most of the Santa Clara Valley is suburban, consisting of subdivisions of detached homes with front yards, driveways, garages etc. But the area is definitely not rural: millions of people live here and 4 of the 5 FAANG companies are headquartered here.
You could say similar things about LA, or the areas outside Chicago and NYC, etc. They are definitely suburban, and definitely not rural.
A major reason for the preference is the lower price per square foot in the suburbs than in higher density areas. They can't afford that much space in the city, which in turn is so expensive because the amount of high density housing is artificially limited by zoning.
You have to let the market decide how much high density housing there should be before you can score "the market has decided" as a point.
If you want to know what happens in a free market you have to let a free market happen.
I think that's a big part of it, but also people choose suburbs and rural living for reasons more to do with quality of life rather than cost.
I agree with your proposal.
I have no objection to removing laws against high density housing.
So I think that some of this fact that the suburbs are desirable is not necessarily completely rational, and may instead be heavily influenced by the idea that moving to suburbs is what they grew up seeing as their future (due, of course, to federal programs that incentivized suburbanization) and by auto-industry lobbying and marketing that idealizes a car-dependent lifestyle.
Obviously there will be variability and I'm sure many people enjoy a suburban/rural lifestyle more than they would a city lifestyle. But I don't know if a preference for suburban living is really part of our human nature, and I think assuming that it is can be detrimental as it can take effort away from recreating the peace and quiet and nature access in a way that is accessible to all in a more efficient urban setting.
I'm fully on-board with working to make suburbs more self-contained and walkable. As others have said, the issue may be zoning and regulations.
Many people I know would rather live in the city, but the upfront cost of a house in the suburbs are much lower.
Or flight from urban crime to the suburbs then makes urban crime more likely for the remaining people, who then have more reasons to flee.
Instead, I have a 3400 sq ft house on 10,000 sq ft of land with giant trees everywhere. I'm within 2 miles of lightrail, that I will never use.
I work from home, I have a home office with a indoor, led powered garden with fresh fruit and flowers year round.
My wife works 30 minutes from home, she's a school teacher. We wanted to live closer to her school but we'd get a much smaller house with no parking and no room for the kids and dogs to play.
Again, why would I buy near or in any city? 15 minutes from downtown Denver is to close for my taste.
I love theatre, I love restaurants but honestly, I hate driving in Denver. The traffic sucks. I love driving. I love craft coffee, my house is 1 mile from the coffee factory that makes the coffee whole foods uses; I enjoy a craft coffee from that place once in a while.
Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.
Denver banned the scooters and other options from lyft and bird, so I have to lug my giant body from location to location? No thanks, I'll take my 4000 pound car to the restaurant instead.
Then I'll go home, enjoy my big beautiful yard and not worry about living in the city.
I don't go to the gym, instead I have a treadmill and a bike in my basement. If I want to do something, I just get in my car and go. I want to get a solar system and buy an electric car but so far no one will install on my style of roof
Is there a source for this? I live in Denver and am currently staring at a dozen Lyft scooters and a few bikes parked on the corner next to my apartment. Lime also operates scooters and bikes, which I usually see parked across the street at the apartments next door.
There are a few places that are geofenced (e.g. along 16th St Mall), but judging by how many people I see riding them on e.g. Cherry Creek trail as I'm biking, I don't think they're generally banned.
> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.
This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.
Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.
The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course! The problem is externalities.
Dumping sewage into a creek is an externality that is bad.
Someone preferring to live in a suburb does not mean they're generating externalities at that level.
The very reason I pushed back on the comment was because of this black and white thinking.
Saying
> The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course!
seems condescending to me. As though "those" people don't have the character or moral rectitude to live in the city. Maybe I'm reading in more than you intended.
They are, but those externalities are simply not as straightforwardly obvious.
I'm not arguing there are no externalities (there are externalities in just about every choice we make). I just haven't been convinced that there are common egregious externalities at the level of dumping raw sewage into the creek.
Of course it’s not going to be on the same order as literally dumping raw sewage into the surrounding area. But there is an enormous body of research demonstrating the overall drain of resources from economically-productive urban areas out to costly suburban ones.
Then there’s the carbon cost of enormous, congested highways and stroads where people idle in traffic for hours of their day. Or the overall inefficiency of providing general city services (water, power, sewer) to people in comparatively sparse areas (which ties back into the resource drain imposed on denser areas).
https://cayimby.org/sprawl-costs-the-u-s-1-trillion-every-ye...
Actually I’m an overachiever. Let’s do two! Direct academic reference.
"reduce the productivity of nearby lands, for example, by [...] driving up land prices beyond what local residents can afford."
What nonsense is this?
GP is suggesting that we start to perceive extremely damaging low-utilization, ponzi-style suburban development in a similar manner.
The point is that the premise of the counter-example is flawed. People do prefer to have their waste carried away cleanly when they can afford it.
Have you seen what condos cost? This is not true. Homeownership in walkable neighborhoods is basically reserved for plutocrats.
Clearly walkable neighbourhoods are highly desirable, and in the US people pay a massive premium to get them because they are so scarce. Yet, for some reason, new construction in the suburbs is all disconnected and almost never walkable.
There's a huge disconnect between what people want and what developers are actually building. The kind of density that leads to walkability seems to only occur in older and already expensive areas with infill development, never green field construction further from an existing city center.
Maybe it's impossible to build new walkable areas in the US.
Huh? Where did you get this nugget of wisdom from? We have great relationships with almost all of the neighbors I can see from my porch. It's called community. I've lived in urban high rises and known fewer neighbors.
what a privileged life style one must have. you realize that there are entire metro areas where you can drive in 20 miles in any direction and still be in urban environment, yeah?
also, thinking 20 miles is just oh so far away is so outside of my world experience that I just don't easily understand your situation of think that it is so far away. clearly, you and I have grown up in totally different situations, and it is interesting to me that one can be so restricted in their movement and consider that normal just as you clearly think anyone traveling > 20 miles is just from Neptune or something.
i'll chalk this up to a nature vs nurture kind of experience
This is shockingly dumb. Please lookup the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
First, you do know that when you get a house you actually get the house, right? That’s the value residents extract from the house. Whether my parents could resell their house was only relevant when they needed to, big shocker, move to a different house in another area. Apart from leaving something for inheritance the re-sale value was irrelevant to the utility. That’s antithetical to a Ponzi scheme.
Second, anyone can build more housing and there is tons of land to keep building in 90% of the country. That doesn’t work in a Ponzi scheme if the real value that sets the price is margin that can be captured by builders.
There are many small towns in Europe surrounded by networks of even smaller towns and one or two house farms. There is nothing to claim back there: they've been like that since well before any European moved to the Americas. That was a way to be close to fields, when economy was mostly farmers and herders and people mostly walked or at best moved in animal powered carts.
Some people move from there to big cities now, some people move from big cities to there. Everybody has a car, it can't be helped. I think that people in big cities will end up with public transport and few cars, but people in small towns and in the fields or in the hills or mountains will keep having a car, maybe just use it less if it costs too much.
This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned:
Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km)
isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle:
Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km)
New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km)
These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist.
In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car).
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
In 2003, 8% of 1-way commutes were over 56 km.
The Northeast US is also an outlier because they have commuter rail that can reliably connect places like DC to Baltimore or NYC to Philly.
It doesn't make sense as a description of where people live, but [English] language rarely makes sense.
Thanks for your reply.
The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).
All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.
American housing is a Ponzi scheme and this only helps perpetuate it. We need to reverse this trend with significant investments in public transportation and other alternative forms of transportation which can scale to meet the needs of the future. We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design (ie, highways, parking lots, parking garages, roads, street parking) and re-allocate it for more housing, businesses, and public transportation. Entities that can generate new income for the municipality and city.
In parallel, can work to preserve our existing natural green spaces and hopefully over time expand those green spaces which give us breathable air, drinkable water, protection from natural elements (ie, floods or long periods of torrential rain), and help keep viruses and other bad elements out of human populations.