[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?