It seems like there would be a tipping range where it would be a toss-up whether it was more efficient to handle these things individually or in bulk, and I wonder how cities make the decision. Like, it would be wildly impractical to run pipes to every house at one density, but equally impractical to drill wells for every occupant at another density.
I'm now curious how places decide when it's time to make the switch, and how they do it!
A single large park inside a dense city is far more nature-rich than acres upon acres of suburban lawns are.
The front of the house near the road has the lawn, but there's a LOT more to suburbs than that.
2 minute walk from where I lived in a suburb was a "forest" as I called it as a child, so large you could get lost. In the suburbs where my relatives live there's more forest with bears, and a there's a creek behind their house.
Yet from the front it's a road with lawns. There's a lot more to suburbs than that road.
Not to mention kids love playing in that road since there's barely any cars. All those car-free threads, about how cars ruin things? Suburban kids already have that: They have barely any cars to contend with.
Indeed, some suburbs have a lot of nature. I've encountered suburbs where individual houses are in the middle of the woods, off the main road, and yet not 10 miles away are developments where all the houses all look identical because they were built by the same developer and have a lawn in front, a backyard, and no wilderness whatsoever; right outside that development are busy streets on all sides.
I've lived in suburbs that are incorporated cities with population above a hundred thousand, and are eminently as pedestrian-friendly as some larger cities, but are tiny in comparison to the city that they're suburbs of (with more than a million people within that city's limits). And there are suburbs where you cannot get to the nearest grocery store without getting in a car and driving on the highway for 5 minutes.
You can't paint all suburbs as having lots of nature and being devoid of cars, just as you can't say all cities are identical.
The largest city in that state was one of those large city hell-holes with too many people crowded in too small a space. But the second largest city was quite nice once you were not too near the downtown.
The issue with lovely semirural living is that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that. It's a privilage to live in house surrounded by woods with grocery store a 15 minutes drive away. Many people (not you, congrats) need to live very close to one another, and the best, happiest, most sustainable way for them to do that is in a dense city with good transit, good sidewalks, and limited auto traffic.
That is all not to mention the economics of suburban and semirural living. Those nice roads with little traffic? They are crushingly expensive. Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
> that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that.
That's really not true. Half of the US lives in cities, half don't. You really think the US is so completely full there's no room for those city dwellers to have more space?
According to my quick math there enough room for 40 times the population of the US to each person (not each family - each person) to have a huge suburban lot.
> They are crushingly expensive.
No, they are not. That's an urban (ha!) myth. Roads are really not that expensive once you move out of dense cities. Rural roads cost around half or less of urban ones, and they last around 4 times as long since traffic is much lower (5-10 years vs 25-40 years). So a rural road costs like 1/10 an urban one.
And since according to http://demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm suburbs have around 1/3 the population density, suburban roads are actually 3 times cheaper per person!
Hardly "crushingly expensive".
> Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
And cities would not exist if not for all the goods made in non-urban areas. Cities have tons of high-revenue, high-tax services, but they don't actually make anything. That's all done outside the city.
If everyone moved to the city everyone would die - there would be no food or anything else.
There's a balance in the world between cities and rural and suburban area, and you mess with that balance at your peril! You can end up with terrible imbalances and very expensive food and other goods.
And don't forget you need all those rural roads, or nobody could get any goods to cities. So be doubly cautious about suggesting fewer rural areas because of "road costs".
Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud.
Also, construction sites, and road works.
Nearly constant noise.
This thread has been an interesting read, city and non-city people literally like what the other sides loathes.