The problem with that analogy is, suburbs doesn't benefit anyone besides the people living in them. So, by that logic, they should sustain themselves. Maps, Docs, and etc provide value to people outside themselves.
This is incorrect on a political and economic level. Fwiw I live in lower Manhattan, so I’m not saying this because I benefit from suburban subsidies. But if the country as whole subsidizes roads and services for a suburb of net positive income tax payers with otherwise low usage of welfare services, there is an economic logic to that. And obviously it gets votes.
As much as I like living in a dense area and riding my bike, the rise of the YouTube educated urban planner has led to a lot conclusions that aren’t particularly sound. Doing a flaw P&L on a small town and deciding, in so many words, that it shouldn’t exist is peak smugness.
I'm not an urban planner expert, but the logic makes sense to me. I look up my downtown condo vs a suburb home of comparable value, and I pay twice as much in property taxes. It's not hard to understand how density is inherently more efficient.
Depends on your perspective. Yes, it's less efficient for me (individually) because I'm subsidizing suburbs and paying more taxes.
But, I was talking about the city, society, or the greater good. Whatever you call it. Higher density is more efficient and uses less resources per capita. Period. Same reason private planes are so bad for the environment.
That might be true that higher density is more efficient, but efficiency isn't a sufficient metric for living overall. Putting everyone in camps would be more efficient too.
But do you really pay for suburbs? As I said, the cost intensive positions scale with the number of people. Schools, utilities, ...
Cost is a separate topic, though an important one.
But ultimately in these threads, the elephant in the room is that the suburbs are subsidized† by the cities they don't pay taxes into.
So why don't the cities expand their boundaries to include the suburbs, instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
† Side note: I have not found to be true, personally. Suburbs are paid for by the people who live there and the county, into whom we pay our taxes. In truth, a lot of our money goes into businesses in the city (who will in turn pay taxes to the city), since that's where we all go for our goods.
> […] instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
Perhaps they want to kill them because they are wasteful of area (often paving over perfectly good agricultural land), and cause climate change due to their reliance on cars.
Further, how much "choice" did suburban dwellers actually have? Post-WW2 most zoning has forced the creation of car-centric, low-density sprawl. Perhaps there are folks in the suburbs that want higher density neighbourhoods but because of the limited supply (due to lack of new build) the prices have gone up and they're priced out. Whose to say that walkable neighbourhoods wouldn't be popular if purchased in the "suburbs:
> † Side note: I have not found to be true, personally.
I think this depends on the municipal boundaries involved. Depending on where the border is, on one side it could be that things built in the "old" / pre-WW2 way and on the other the "new" / post-WW2 way, and the taxes go to each municipality appropriately. In other places there could be the pre-WW2 Old Downtown and is walkable, but everything new is non-walkable. In those latter situations the more walkable parts are probably subsidizing the less walkable ones:
As much as I like living in a dense area and riding my bike, the rise of the YouTube educated urban planner has led to a lot conclusions that aren’t particularly sound. Doing a flaw P&L on a small town and deciding, in so many words, that it shouldn’t exist is peak smugness.