That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity.
> why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs?
My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege.
Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
Property tax eh? kind of depends on cost of the things that are paid for by property tax. Sometimes that'll be higher in urban and sometimes higher in rural.
I don't know why I should pay extra fees to keep my many cars on my property... that's why I have my property. I don't mind license fees, and I grumble but don't mind that they're higher for my PHEV even though I don't drive it much or plug it in. If I was parking on public right of way, it might make sense to charge me per car, but my cars don't use shared resources when they sit at home, and I can only drive one at a time.
Where can I live where I don't have to pay full price for extended infrastructure? That'd be great. Where I am, I have to pay my own way for my well and septic; if I wanted municipal of either, I'd have to pay for the build out to get it to my house, just like I did for muni fiber. The owners before me that had electricity hooked up must have paid the utility to extend it, and enhancements would be at my cost.
Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know?
I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography.
The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell like this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Your comment would be (mostly) fine without that bit.
> because of style of community they want to own their home in?
No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center.
Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
The laws that maintain roads for personal car use? Those are genuinely popular laws, not some sort of spooky corporate conspiracy. You anti-car cycle fascists can't seem to comprehend that your cause is unpopular.
You're living in Berlin, the city that is subsidized to the sum of 3.8bn Euros by the much more rural southern states. And yet somehow _they_ are the ones who don't want to pay their share?
Berlin is essentially a micro-/city-state within Germany. It doesn't have any rural area, but it is surrounded by Brandenburg which has large rural areas. "[M]uch more rural southern states" - Do you mean Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg? Those are some of the richest states in Germany due to their enormous manufacturing industry. AFAIK: The provincial capital cities of Munich and Stuttgart both have decent public transport.
Way to miss the point, or are you trying to strawman the discussion?
The argument is intra-municipalities, not intra-country. The argument is that people that live in the suburbs of a city end up costing more and paying less than the city-center counterparts. The richer people in the city do not pay proportionally to the cost they incur in the city's expenses, but when push comes to shove it's the poor people who are left with poor infrastructure, unmaintained roads, etc.
(As for the discussion regarding Berlin getting subsidies from the south: I can not argue there, but I am pretty sure that what I am paying in taxes is vastly more than what I am getting in benefits and public services. Just like I am pretty sure that the 1000€/month I am sending to TK is to cover the cost of others. There isn't much more than I am supposed to do, is there?)
Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential.
Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
In my area (Washington DC), fares pay about 10% of the budget for the subway each year.
Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
The “cars get subsidized” arguments almost always fail to take into account that the entire capital and maintenance cost of the vehicle is borne by the driver.
You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).
The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there.
What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development.
Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local.
For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country.
> Financial problems are local.
There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
There is no formal study. It's all handwaving by urbanists with an irrational hatred for people who don't want to live like them.
The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise.
Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
Seems like empathy should work both ways?