[foxyv]

It will make homes, 25 miles from the city center, nearly worthless. People will want to live into the denser, walkable neighborhoods. They limit the amount of mixed use, medium density housing because it would crash the market for new car dependent suburbs which provide the funding for road maintenance and construction.

[mikem170]

> They limit the amount of mixed use, medium density housing because it would crash the market for new car dependent suburbs which provide the funding for road maintenance and construction.

It is my understanding that many car dependent suburbs got subsidies from higher levels of government to build new roads [0], which allowed them to expand their tax base, but that the density of their taxpayers, per mile of infrastructure, is not enough for longer term expensive maintenance after several decades. This applies not just to roads, but also water and sewer infrastructure. Cities with ten times the density of suburbs have an easier time paying the fixed per-mile portion of infrastructure costs.

The infrastructure in suburbs has already been subsidized, and may need more subsidies. Or services will degrade.

I don't know that anything you said above conflicts with what you said about mixed use, I wasn't sure about the funding part though.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/

[foxyv]

Yeah, the new houses are what pay the bills. Once the music stops playing though the game is over. Medium density, mixed use housing would stop the music by making demand for crappy new R1 housing plummet. No one wants to rip the bandaid off though so it just gets worse and worse until they turn into Detroit.

[SauciestGNU]

Part of the problem is that the suburbs already externalize their maintenance costs. Nearly none of them generate enough tax revenue to maintain their sprawling infrastructure, so repairs get subsidized by the tax base in denser areas, or the maintenance is just not done at all.

If suburban drivers and homeowners weren't benefitting from urban success and externalizing all their costs then those properties would already be close to worthless.