[jarrodtaylor]

One of the most important reasons I choose to live in the suburbs is because it's scaled to the automobile. Owning and driving a fun sports car is one of the great joys in life, and making it part of my daily routine is not something that can be replaced by biking or walking. I get to own my own property for a relatively low price, which in the long run has significantly lowered my cost of living. I'm close enough to drive into the city anytime I want, yet I don't have to deal with the overcrowding when I don't feel like it. With the internet, I get to work from home. And I'd much rather go jogging through a quiet neighborhood than a city greenway any day.

My point isn't that cities or suburbs are better, just that there's a place for both. Having lived in both and now getting to enjoy the best of both has allowed me a life I couldn't possibly have if I was stuck in one or the other. Scaling for automobiles works out really well for people who enjoy automobiles and the communities they create, which are not only livable, but enjoyable, for the people who want that kind of life.

[natrius]

Suburbs are fine as long as we make people pay for the externalities that living there costs other people. Each extra car on the freeway is a cost to everyone else in congestion. If that car burns carbon, there's extra pollution in the air. Culs-de-sac cost neighborhoods travel time, congestion and pollution.

Living anywhere leads to costs for other people, but it's significantly higher in the suburbs. It'd be nice if governments would make people pay each other for those costs. Instead, they usually subsidize suburban living via roads, universal service fees, expenditures to ensure cheap fuel, etc.

[encoderer]

How would you have any idea if it's "significantly higher in the suburbs" ?

Subway and mass transit systems cost billions of dollars to build and maintain. Power, water and sewer infrastructure; policing and fire protection; subsidized insurance and natural disaster response; parking, health and sanitation -- These and others are the massive costs of high density urban living. This is a scalability issue. And my understanding is that it's difficult and expensive to build these things to scale to urban densities.

I think you're being myopic about the costs of cul de sacs and interstate congestion.

[anonymous246]

Which of these "costs" do not exist in suburbs? (except subway, the analog of which is highways to the suburbs). All of those are present in suburbs too.

[encoderer]

Cost in "scare quotes"?

Beside, you've already got your answer. Read the last sentence: This is a scalability issue. And my understanding is that it's difficult and expensive to build these things to scale to urban densities.

Density is the issue.

[anonymous246]

So your point being that to the service the same population it costs more if the population is concentrated in a smaller area like in a city, rather than dispersed in suburbs? I hope I am reading you correctly.

I'd submit that the experience with broadband/cell phone costs+coverage in the US vs. other countries shows that it's cheaper to provide services if population density is higher.

[encoderer]

I believe you'll find that's also incorrect. The trouble there is that you can put only so much radio transmission power in a given "cell" on the network. In order to provide proper service to high density urban areas, you have to build more towers (more overlapping "cells") than in rural and suburban areas.

Now, you may end up having no higher a ratio of towers to subscribers than in the suburbs. But what you do have, is a lot higher costs to rent an easement for the tower. Renting antenna space from a building is a lot more expensive than an easement in some back yard.

[jarrodtaylor]

The cost isn't fair to the local suburb government, but that's because most of their economy runs through the city (hence the commute). Since the economy is shared, so should the cost.

[fleitz]

Honestly, the externalities of suburban living pale in comparison to the externalities of centralized banking and the military-industrial complex. Lets start cutting gov't funding to multi-billion dollar companies before we start cutting funding to our fellow citizens.

http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/farming_park_a...

Maybe we can start with this and move from there.

[thingie]

Couldn't you, for example, cut some funding from the "military-industrial complex", if it wasn't needed to secure the resources (oil) to sustain the suburbs? Don't you need huge central banks to provide cheap loans to devastate large portions of countryside with yet another suburban sprawl?

I'm not saying it's the case. But maybe, could it be the other way around? What if these were in fact just another externality of suburban life?

[fleitz]

Oil in the ground is useless to most nations. Most nations want to sell you their oil, especially poor ones with unruly populations.

US policy with regard to the sale of oil is mostly on the prevention side. (eg. Iran, Libya, Iraq). At $100 bbl there is no shortage of oil outside the middle east. Did you happen to notice that once the US got involved in Libya the price of oil went up? See also wars in Iraq / Afganistan, now lets say you owned an oil field in Saudi Arabia, if it costs $2 bbl to extract and $1 to the Saudi's in royalties would you prefer to sell your oil at $30 bbl or $100 bbl?

The idea that the US has the military industrial complex to provide cheap oil to the suburbs is a fantasy dreamed up by environmentalists designed to appeal to urban pseudo-intellectuals (who are their primary base of support after the coal industry stopped funding them after they took care of the nuclear industry in the 70s). As a side benefit it makes suburban people think their gov't gives a shit about them. If you're a republican it's a win-win situation. This is like thinking that the protestant reformation was allowed to happen because the King of Prussia? was a liberty lover and not because it massively undermined the power of the catholic church.

Dick Cheney was not thinking about how to provide cheap oil to the suburbs, he was thinking how to make the energy industry rich. Starting wars on top of oil fields does not make oil cheap, it makes it expensive. If environmentalists think it makes it cheaper then all the better.

The US has a friendly neighbor to the north which has more oil than Saudi Arabia (especially at $100 bbl prices)

Even if what you were saying was true (it may be, I personally doubt it) all increased oil prices would do is fuel the conversion to coal powered cars (via the electric grid). Don't fight the future embrace it.

Regarding suburban sprawl in flood plains well, if your stupid enough to buy a house there you pretty much got what's coming to you. Why do we need central banking to rebuild suburbs in flood plains? It sounded like a bad idea in the first place, lets not do it again.

If the revenue generated from building in a flood plain is sufficient to recover the costs it should be easy to secure loans from the private sector. How about we just let the Mississippi take its natural course now that the area it flows through is filled with silt and will continually cause flooding because of this.

[thingie]

Last time, high oil prices and cheap loans to build and rent anything anywhere caused a major world economic crisis. That's the future. Well. I'm afraid it is. Something nice to embrace, indeed.

[natrius]

Those issues are unrelated to this discussion. There are plenty of things that the government should change. The order doesn't really matter.

[techdmn]

I enjoy automobiles. I love to drive, and work at it: toe heel, left foot brake, etc. I moved and started walking to work last year, and was worried I would miss driving every day. Not at all, not even a little. My commute was not quality driving time, even if I did find a few moments of excitement each day. It means a LOT more to me to have extra free time, not worry about traffic, and (surprisingly to me) feel in touch with nature. I've grown to feel that living inside your house, your car, your office, it's very isolating. Spending a few minutes outside, every day, definitely good for my mental health.

[jarrodtaylor]

Absolutely agreed. Rush hour sucks. I work remotely, but I do end up working from coffee shops around town a lot. I enjoy getting out and being part of society. Best of both worlds.

Edit: I know that won't work for everyone, but that's why we have choices.

[dasil003]

Well I think the point of the article is that you're not paying the true cost of the lifestyle you enjoy. It claims only 10% of the actual cost is covered by taxes. I'm not saying that's true, but it's an interesting thought experiment, how would you feel about it if your property taxes went up 10x?

[jarrodtaylor]

I'm only not paying the cost of living if you isolate the suburbs from the city.

Example:

In Atlanta (my home town) there are about half a million people living in the city. Though there are poor areas, the economy as a whole is much bigger than that, but the infrastructure isn't - even if you removed the cars. Here's where it gets tricky. Add in the population of the surrounding suburbs and the number jumps from half a million of over 6 million. If all of us lived in the city, not only would it be even more overcrowded, but it would collapse. If we somehow managed to make it work, it would cease to be small connected communities and become one giant urban sprawl. Look at NYC or LA for example. Riding a bike from one end to the other doesn't work so well.

At the same time, if you removed the city from the suburbs they would go broke. Suburbs without cities are just small towns, which don't usually have bustling economies and are often poor (relative to a city).

Suburbs are the natural growth/overflow of cities. When a city gets too big to sustain itself it either spreads the population out with suburbs or becomes an overpopulated, overcrowded urban area that's big enough to need to drive everywhere anyway (or take a cab). All those people have to go somewhere.

If my cost of living went up 10x, I couldn't afford to live this way. If it happened to everyone in the suburbs here and we all had to live in the city, the city would fall apart.

Instead of the historically traditional city with surrounding small towns, we connected the towns to each other and to the city with cars. It's one big culture, and one big economy.

What I think will be the most interesting, long term, is what will happen when the need to commute starts to drop. Remote working already has a lot of growing traction in the tech industry, but I can see it spreading to lots of other industries as well. Most jobs that aren't transportation or retail can be done, at least most of the time, from a home office. A 20% increase in remote working would have a huge impact on how everything fits together.

[adrianN]

"overcrowded urban area that's big enough to need to drive everywhere anyway (or take a cab). All those people have to go somewhere."

I don't think that conclusion is true. First of all there doesn't have to be a reason to drive to the other side of the city, if urban planning was done properly and everything you need for your daily life is within walking distance. Secondly, high population density makes public transport highly efficient, so instead of taking a taxi, you can take a train or a bus.

[jarrodtaylor]

Most of our cities (maybe all?) haven't been planned that way though. They usually start out as a small town, then they get a large influx of people and businesses who all want different things, and the city ends up growing by leaps and bounds with very little planning. Then it happens again and again, in waves of growth. Even if the expansion was somehow planned well, the existing part of the city won't be prepared.

Also, there are plenty of reasons to travel around town that don't involve what you need in your daily life. What about when your friends want to meet at a bar on the other side of town? If that's 5 blocks, no big deal. If that's 15 miles it becomes a problem.

High population density doesn't make public transportation efficient, good planning does. If the public transportation system is designed for a city of 2 million, and the city grows to 7 million, the public transportation system won't be effifcient, or pleasant to use, at all. The unpleasantness and eneffieciency is one of the reasons so many people have cars to begin with. Private transportation takes you where you want to go, when you want to go there, in an environment of your choosing. As is mentioned in other comments here, walking when the weather is bad (cold north, too humid south) is very unpleasant no matter what.

[jarek]

"As is mentioned in other comments here, walking when the weather is bad (cold north, too humid south) is very unpleasant no matter what."

Sure, but the alternatives can be more unpleasant still. Last winter I had a walking commute of 12 minutes in Toronto. You'd have a difficult time finding someone who found a 45-60 minute drive through congested and frankly miserable GTA winter roads less unpleasant.

[asynchronous13]

"Add in the population of the surrounding suburbs and the number jumps from half a million of over 6 million. If all of us lived in the city, not only would it be even more overcrowded, but it would collapse."

Not at all! If everyone in metro Atlanta moved into the city proper, the population density would still be less than that of Paris, France.

Paris Population: 2.2 million, Paris Land Area: 40 sq mi, Paris Density: 55,000 per sq mi,

Atlanta Metro Population: 6 million [wikipedia says 5.3 mil], Atlanta City Land Area: 130 sq mi, Hypothetical Density: 43,000 per sq mi, (Actual Density: 720 per sq mi)

[rayiner]

As they say, you can fit the whole population of the world onto Manhattan. That is, of course, besides the point.

Atlanta is completely unequiped to handle that population (infrastructure-wise). It's not even clear that building out that infrastructure at that density would be wise. It's costly to build infrastructure for a city as dense as NYC. The cost of the subway system dwarfs the cost of running water and sewage piping to suburb. It makes economic sense in NYC, because space is at a huge premium. That doesn't necessarily make sense for Atlanta, a city with no natural boundaries and surrounded by cheap land.

[Bud]

What if realistic and sustainable property taxes had to be figured into the sale price of homes?

I would presume we'd see much cheaper home prices. But I doubt the real estate industry will allow this to occur.

[jarrodtaylor]

Take a look at Florida. They kill you with taxes when you sell your house. Still, location is the biggest factor in price.

[thingie]

Now, perhaps, if there were cities that were not raped for the automobile. I don't know any. Looted by insatiable suburbian parking needs, there is two meter wide sidewalk in the street where I live, yet barely a single person can pass, the rest is for parking. I just can't get anywhere out of the town. Because there is no end to it. And if it was, it'd be beyond a freeway that I can't cross safely.

(And I live in Europe. It's that bad here too. Really.)

[regularfry]

Oxford is going the other way. The last few councils have taken it upon themselves to make the city centre more painful for cars, and generally better for bikes and pedestrians.

[clobber]

Yikes.