[hermannj314]

There is a great YouTuber [1] that talks about city planning. They have a lot of content, but a theme is tax revenue per square foot, and the mathematical reality of a sustainable city being unattainable because collective expectations regarding road infrastructure are so expensive.

[1] - Not Just Bikes

[jodrellblank]

If that's what you've taken away from it, you need to rewatch it; the financial theme is not "sustainable cities are impossible" the theme is "American sprawling car dependent suburbia is insolvent because it doesn't generate enough tax revenue to pay for the sprawling roads/water/sewage/garbage disposal/other services that it uses", and it's like a Ponzi scheme where the construction and sale of a new chunk of suburbs pays for the maintenance work on the previous one.

Denser inner-city areas generate much more tax revenue with less cost of services because they have to cover a smaller area, and this can be solvent and subsidises the suburbs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI "Suburbs are subsidized: Here's the Math"

NB. the last time I linked this on HN someone dismissed it as "Strong towns propaganda" claiming that if suburbs didn't exist, everyone would starve. They completely failed to respond to followup questions about cities which are not sprawling suburbs and are not starving. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238666

[sokoloff]

There is a vast majority of suburban towns around Boston which are both quite old and quite solvent, contrary to the Strong Towns predictions.

I’ve written about them before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599508

For convenience, they include: Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) among others.

[jodrellblank]

Arlington, Mass.[1] has 46k people in 5.5 square miles, population density of 9.1k people per square mile, 9.1k taxpayers paying for a square mile of services.

Lafayette, Louisiana[2] (the city from the video I linked) has 121k people in an area of 56 square miles for a density of 2.1k people per square mile, but a metro area population of 478k people over a metro area of 3,400 square miles with a density of 140 people per square mile of services.

Arlington has a median family income of $131k, Lafayette has a median family income of $54k (both from the same Wikipedia pages). Just the urban parts - roads covering 5.5 square miles in Arlington vs 56 square miles in Lafayette, but they've got a quarter of the population density who are less than half as wealthy paying taxes to maintain them. I don't know how it's funded for roads in the 3,400 square miles of suburban area.

Watertown has 35k people in 4 square miles, Lincoln has 7k people over 15 square miles with a median family income of $202,704 - these hardly seem to fit "sprawling car dependent suburbia"? I haven't looked very hard because internet argument, but I'd be surprised if the 7k people in Lincoln have their own dedicated fire service, hospital, ambulances, sewage works, dump, salt gritters, dual carriageway highways for moving cities worth of vehicles, and so on public services that a big city with 20x the population would need, which Lincoln likely shares with other places or just doesn't have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington,_Massachusetts

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette,_Louisiana

[sokoloff]

I checked the "walk score" for several of my friends' addresses in Lincoln. They were in the range of 3 to 7; Lincoln is absolutely a car-dependent suburb, as is Wellesley, Newton and the rest of that list (with the exception of the center of Arlington and select parts of Watertown).

[hermannj314]

I 100% agree with you and that was my takeaway as well from watching the series, I clearly was not very good at communicating my point.

[treis]

> about city planning. They have a lot of content, but a theme is tax revenue per square foot

Sounds more like SimCity metric than what a real life city should care about.