[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.