[uoaei]

If we taxed suburbs what they actually cost us as a society, no one would want to live in suburbs. The land use is abysmal compared to cities. Suburbs are effectively subsidized by the cities they are near, and those living in suburbs get off way too easy. That's a good thing if you have an extractivist, individualist mindset, but if we are to continue functioning as a whole society, something needs to give.

We love our farmers. Keep the fields going. But this business with allocating half-acre lots per 4 people (lots which are empty for literally 1/3 of the day) has got to end, or else local utilities should stop servicing those far-flung places. You want to be without the burdens of living in a society -- fine! Figure out water and power for yourself. It's easier than ever and there's still federal- and state-level rebate programs for renewables.

[ars]

If we actually tax them, it would be a negative tax.

So many people don't seem to realize that without suburbs you don't have farms.

Suburbs and farms produce all the things that cities rely on. You don't see heavy industry in the middle of a city.

So we actually wanted to do your plan then cities should cough up way more money than they currently do.

[tfourb]

Farmlands and suburbs are completely different things, especially in the context of urban development.

Industrial zones are also a completely different category entirely.

Living in Germany, most German cities do not have anything that is comparable to a U.S. "suburb". Building codes demand a quite high density, even for single family homes for new developments and older developments have the tendency to get denser as the demand for housing in a city rises.

German planning law specifically aims to concentrate development as much as possible, to limit encroachment on agricultural lands and nature. Doesn't always work out, but we have very little of the "urban sprawl" that is so characteristic of U.S. urban planning.

[ars]

And Germany is tiny compared to the US.

A farm in Germany is how far of a drive from the nearest city?

In the US you could drive 10 hours from a farm to get to the nearest large city. Suburbs and tiny cities are what farms need to survive.

[tfourb]

Yes, farms need market access. But that market does not have to be a sprawling suburb, it can be a decently dense town or city. Also, market access is relative depending on product. Farmers concentrating on crops like wheat and corn don't care about the distance to cities, as their product is traded globally. For fresh produce, distance is a real concern, but on the other hand you don't need a lot of land to fulfill the need of even large cities. You could conceivably provide most fresh produce from inside city limits if urban planning would see this as necessary. Production/acre for something like tomatoes is really huge, depending on the methods used.

[lavela]

I get your point about small cities, but suburbs? They are attached to larger cities, so they may take the drive down from 10 hours to maybe 9.5. How does that make that much of a difference?

[wolverine876]

Tiny overstates it. I think ~30% of the size.

[pjmlp]

Except that in most German towns outside the tiny center where almost everything closes between 4 and 6 pm with exception of supermarkets, everything else seems to require a car or at least 30 minute cycling, with most buses ending at 8pm.

[amalcon]

Nonsense. Farms obviously predate suburbs, for one thing: nothing resembling the modern suburb could exist without steam power or something newer than that. There's never really been heavy industry in the suburbs: the modern suburb exists because people didn't want to live near the heavy industry in the cities.

The North American suburb, which is what we're discussing here unless I misunderstand, more or less came about in the post-war era. It would really be an extraordinary claim that farms and heavy industry couldn't exist in North America until the 1950s...

[jodrellblank]

The poorer denser city centers (in America) subsidise the wealthier, less dense suburbs. "Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

[ars]

I knew before watching it that it was Strong Towns propaganda.

They keep ignoring that without those suburbs you won't have rural farms. Without those suburbs those "productive" cities will have nothing to eat, and nothing to buy.

They measure productivity in terms of dollars - but all cities do is services, they don't produce goods. That's left to those places Strong Towns hates.

If people actually implemented what Strong Towns wants, people would starve.

Try the math again, but completely exclude services and let's see where you end up.

[jodrellblank]

The video points out cities which aren't bankrupt, do you think the people in them are starving and the farms near them are gone?

The video says that Canada has laws which stop cities paying more than 25% of revenue on debt payments, so they are much less bakrupt than USA cities. Do you think all Canadian cities have starving people with nothing to buy, and failed farms?

What about European cities which aren't suburban car dependent sprawl and still have food?

What about the explanations in the video (and the related ones on the channel) on why the suburbs are so expensive - you can't handwave away thirty six billion dollars of due road maintenance in a single city with "rural farms need it", even if true it's unsustainable.

> "all cities do is services, they don't produce goods."

All that needs is one counterexample: London has the largest diesel engine manufacturing site in the world - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_London#Manufacturin...

Yes, fintech nonsense has eaten London, and services are its most profitable sectors these days, but that's not /because it's a city/, it was a major manufacturing center and a city.

[bregma]

Suburbs are the places where what used to be productive farms are paved over with asphalt. Few cities rely on them for anything except maybe cheap labour.

[ars]

> anything except maybe cheap labour.

Hmmmmm. And that labor does?

Please think about this a big more - cities do not have industry or agriculture in them. They need those suburbs to provide that. You can't just dismiss it as "cheap labor" - what exactly do you plan to eat or buy?

[jodrellblank]

Farms aren't sub-urbs, farms are rural. Suburbia "lesser-urban" is housing estates. Nothing productive happens there.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/suburbia - "the outer parts of a town, where there are houses, but no large shops, places of work, or places of entertainment"

[ars]

People live there. And they create business nearby.

And those business are closer to the rural areas than the cities are.

And also, there aren't really any places with just houses and no places of work, that doesn't really exist.

[Karrot_Kream]

Most American incorporated cities are subject to zoning. In the US, most zoning codes define the following: minimum setbacks (how far from the edge of the lot the building line begins at, aka the buffer between the home and the street for residential zones), minimum lot sizes (what's the minimum size a lot can be parceled out into), and maximum FARs (Floor-to-Area ratios, the maximum amount of floor space buildable in a given area.) This is true in most zoning codes across Residential, Industrial, Agricultural, Commercial, and other zones.

The "suburbs" are generally Single Family Home (SFH) zoned areas (the name of the zone differs per-city) defined by a requirement to have a single dwelling, a large minimum lot size, large setbacks, and low maximum FARs. Nothing mandates that SFH zones need to be adjacent to agricultural areas. In fact most zoning codes detail a long list of uses allowed within the zone and a buffer between zones. For example, most zoning codes require a larger buffer between industrial or agricultural zones and residential zones. By definition how much "closer to the rural area" suburbs are is defined purely by how much SFH housing there is, nothing more.

The reason why most US suburbs abut dense inner cities is that historical US city development occurred densely before the automobile and then postwar development happened according to zoning codes which carved most new residential areas into SFH zoned areas. Cities were grandfathered into the new zoning codes. The codes themselves developed slowly and only started mandating huge minimum lot sizes in the last 30 years or so. This is why suburban development tends to form around a city.

[kitkat_new]

> And also, there aren't really any places with just houses and no places of work, that doesn't really exist.

this is exactly what suburbs are.

You live there, nothing else. You wake up then you drive to work somewhere else

[femiagbabiaka]

You haven't seen the Central Valley of California I guess LOL.

[adambard]

> So many people don't seem to realize that without suburbs you don't have farms.

This strikes me as a bizarre take. What do you consider a "suburb"?

[ars]

A place outside dense cities, somewhere not too far from farms. A place where a farmer can go for services without having to travel far.

[uoaei]

You're describing "rural" living. Suburbs entail something else.