[marindez]

>If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb.

A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.

[dalbasal]

This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes?

Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture.

There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of.

It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.

[saint_fiasco]

The suburb won't go away but we don't care about the suburb anyway. The most important thing is the people in them.

Can't they move somewhere else? They can't because it costs money. Why can't their government just give them the money? It might be cheaper than their infrastructure costs.

[d3ad1ysp0rk]

Which government? The city government is broke. If they merge, the larger city could pay for transitioning costs, but that would be a massive cost (worth it, possibly!) and politically difficult.

[saint_fiasco]

I don't think it would be fair if the city paid for it. The direct cost would go to them and the direct benefit to others.

In that situation, the problem has to be solved on the level above. The State as a whole should pay the cost, since it is the State as a whole that would benefit.

[richardknop]

Because then it becomes moral hazard (like every bailout or free handout). Let’s say I live in centre of big city and pay crazy high rent and make sacrifices to save much bigger cash pile required to be able to afford to get on a property ladder.

And people in suburbs will just get free cheque from government to move? That is incredibly unfair to people living in cities hence it creates moral issue.

[saint_fiasco]

Why? Was the death of the suburb something that they should have foreseen? An irresponsible risk they chose to ignore?

If not, it is not more unfair than when health insurance uses the money of healthy people to pay for treatment of sick people. Or when the Federal Government uses the money of people who live in the mainland to pay for hurricane relief for people who live near the coast.

[richardknop]

Then why not write government cheque for all millennials to buy their own property so they don’t have to rent? Would you support that?

Where do you stop? Should a family of four (two young children) that lives in a 1 bedroom apartment in city be given a 2 bedroom apartment by the city government? They obviously need it.

I agree with socialised healthcare and education. First one because health is not some thing you choose but is affected heavily by genetic lottery (yes unhealthy lifestyle is a problem but it’s hard to objectively quantify) and second one because it means levelling of the opportunity field for young people not born to wealthy parents (again this is related to lottery of birth, what kind of family you are born into).

But housing is very different from healthcare and education.

[saint_fiasco]

My concern is not a moral one about birth lotteries and socialism. It's a pragmatic one about infrastructure costs.

Sick people are less productive. Uneducated people are less productive. People who are stuck on a dying suburb where there is no business and there are no jobs are less productive.

[phil21]

Of course there is a walking away option. In fact you will see this happen much more in 20-30 years as the absolutely monumental scale of the unsustainability of suburban infrastructure truly rears it's head.

There simply won't be enough money around to renew "infrastructure" in these areas. I use the term loosely. We're just talking roads/sewer/water/etc. lines, nothing most europeans would actually consider civil infrastructure like public transit.

You can say walking away is not an option, but continuing to just keep these communities on life support isn't either. There is no option for "make all of suburbia great again" simply due to mathematics.

[maxsilver]

> Of course there is a walking away option. In fact you will see this happen much more in 20-30 years as the absolutely monumental scale of the unsustainability of suburban infrastructure truly rears it's head.

First, most suburban infrastructure is not unsustainable, despite how many armchair urbanists wish otherwise.

But even if were, people don't have the option to leave anyway, so it doesn't matter. If your poor, and live in a poor area, you don't have a 'walking away option'. Even if you sold your shitty house in a shitty suburb, it wouldn't net you enough money to live anywhere else anyway. Or if you rent, you already live in the cheapest place possible, so how will you afford the higher rent anywhere else?

Detroit is pointed at as an example of people walking away ... but Detroit still has over 600,000 people. East Cleveland is mentioned in the article, but 17,000 people still live there. Flint had poisoned drinking water for more than a year straight, and 97,000 people still live there today. You can literally poison every citizen with bad infrastructure, and the place will still exist.

When you say "walking away is an option", you are speaking only theoretically. When /u/dalbasal says "Cities and towns do not go away. People live there, even if the population declines a bit.", that's a simple realistic truth. Barring a few extremely rare exceptions, places don't go away.

> You can say walking away is not an option, but continuing to just keep these communities on life support isn't either. There is no option for "make all of suburbia great again" simply due to mathematics.

Sure it is. We just need to pay for it. Which we will eventually be forced to do, and then will do so because it's the cheapest and easiest option.

We have plenty of money to support every suburb. We have enough money to build 2x more suburbs, support all of those, and double the entire freeway system and support that too. We just choose not to spend it. We waste our infrastructure funding on not-infrastructure. At some point, we'll be forced to support the people or the people will die.

Roads are cheap. Pipes are cheap. Powerlines are cheap. Freeways are cheap. Urban Planners will insist it's not true because of their political desires. But if you actually do the mathematics you mention, these things don't really cost much. Compared to the benefits they provide, infrastructure is dirt cheap.

[dalbasal]

Apart from some exceptional circumstances, towns and cities stay where they are.

Exceptions are frontier towns, mining booms, war torn cities.

In 99% of cases, cities stay where they are, bankrupt local authorities or not. Populations decline a little. Quality of life declines a lot, but the problem doesn’t just go away.

And anyway, what does unsustainable mean? What can’t be sustained exactly? It sounds like what can’t be sustained is the financing model for poor localities. Why not walk away from that?

[logfromblammo]

The only way that no one lives in it is if there is such a huge housing surplus elsewhere that no one needs to. This will not happen in the US, because it puts the rent-seeker class at a disadvantage, and they give money to political campaigns.

There is no suburb so rotten that someone won't buy up pieces of it to extract as much money as they can from its local economy, and then not spend that money back in.