[jlmendezbonini]

>- suburban sprawl has low up-front costs with real costs coming in decades later, as North American suburbs are starting to experience today

Would you mind elaborating more on this? More specifically about the cost the North American suburbs are starting to experience.

thanks

[martythemaniak]

I am talking primarily about property tax rates, though as siblings have said, there are other effects, like worse health and lifestyle outcomes which are a bit harder to quantify.

As the article mentions, suburban municipalities made money primarily by selling land, however the price almost never accounted for the true, high cost of servicing low-density communities. This is usually made much worse by developer lobbying. Eventually the land runs out and the municipality has to either stop growing and start raising property taxes to make up for lost sales, or start densifying to keep growth going, neither of which are popular with people who though were getting a certain deal. For a lot of suburbs densifying is not even an option (no one wants to go there), so sometimes they spiral downwards.

Calgary makes a good example. Prior to 2010 it had the image of "redneck sprawlville", but it elected an urbane, muslim, gay-welcoming mayor. One of his major issues was tax savings via ending public subsidies for suburbs. Turns out when you did the math, each mcmansion received a hefty public subsidy because the cost of servicing that house exceeded what developers paid the city. Similar patters can be seen throughout North America.

[waps]

All these things come down to that everyone should give up most of the things they want, and listen to "what's best".

I've yet to see someone make the point that there are solutions, such as using electric self-driving cars as public transport, will work. Assuming of course, the price can be made low enough.

Maybe I'm a horrible human being, but I have a family, and I want space (incl. a garden), NOT living in a big city, and a car. I do not think this is too much to ask. Solutions (and politics) should focus on how to make that possible, not on how to prevent it.

[snowwrestler]

It's not too much to ask, but there are better and worse ways of getting it. My mom and I live in similar sized houses on similar sized plots of land.

I live in a suburb that is constructed like a small town. The streets are a grid, and there is a "main street" that puts the essentials within walking distance of many of the houses--groceries, restaurants, hardware, even elementary and middle schools--and a few smaller shop areas sprinkled on a few other blocks.

My mom lives in a suburb that was constructed by a suburban developer in the 1970s. The streets are all curved and hierarchical (i.e. connect like branches on a tree), and all the shopping is concentrated in a big strip mall at a major intersection.

The result is that the traffic is far worse for my mom. Everything requires driving, and the street layout extends travel times, while concentrating all drivers into a smaller and smaller set of roads. They also have a worse time in winter. They are totally dependent on plows when it snows; whereas in my neighborhood most folks can walk to a store if they need something.

Edit to add: I can't prove it, but my subjective perception is that average health is lower in my mom's neighborhood, with more fat people. There's no reason to walk besides exercise (i.e. walking in circles just to walk). In my neighborhood it is often more convenient to walk, so people do it a lot more.

[peatmoss]

> All these things come down to that everyone should give up most of the things they want, and listen to "what's best".

I don't think so. The parent was pointing out that suburban living requires a subsidy from elsewhere to support business as usual. This is more a question of equity than of someone imposing their will about some idealized way of living.

> I've yet to see someone make the point that there are solutions, such as using electric self-driving cars as public transport, will work. Assuming of course, the price can be made low enough.

First, transportation is relatively small potatoes compared to the costs of sewer and water systems. The marginal cost of bringing sewer and water to a suburban / exurban home tends to be quite a lot more than the average cost of supplying those services.

Second, I'm a huge proponent of self-driving cars, but they will not solve land use inefficiency. The biggest gains from self-driving cars will be from higher fleet utilization (think car share), and those gains will be best realized in higher density areas. If everyone in the suburbs still has their own car servicing their single-occupant commute, self driving cars really do nothing from an efficiency perspective.

> Maybe I'm a horrible human being, but I have a family, and I want space (incl. a garden), NOT living in a big city, and a car. I do not think this is too much to ask. Solutions (and politics) should focus on how to make that possible, not on how to prevent it.

Nobody has said this, and you're lapsing into victimhood thinking. But here's a couple of other things to keep in mind. First, the US didn't really have a taste for suburbs the way we do now until WWII. And this was very much the result of government planners stepping in and telling people how they should live. We (planners) poured money into a freeway system that in many places primarily displaced minority and poor residents to ferry predominantly middle-class white people from new suburbs, through formerly integral neighborhoods, to central business districts. We (the country by way of our politicians) backed this up with home mortgage lending programs that basically required returning GIs to live a suburban lifestyle.

We already have a solution on how to make widespread suburban living possible--it requires money and energy, just like any other relatively inefficient system. I don't think people who have a taste for it are bad people. However, neither do I think the societal benefits of suburban living are so intrinsically great that we should continue a wealth transfer. Put another way, the externalities of suburban living should be better internalized.

Finally, far be it for curmudgeonly me to suggest to anyone how to raise children, but I'll just point out that the desire to isolate children from society in a suburban enclave is not a value universally shared throughout the world. Here are some young men describing their experiences growing up in the suburbs of Toronto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU

[jarek]

> Would you mind elaborating more on this? More specifically about the cost the North American suburbs are starting to experience.

Infrastructure to serve the new developments is paid for by the developer, more or less directly ("development charges", etc). That keeps local taxes nice and low for existing residents, until 50 years down the road the watermain needs replacing, there's lots of it because of low density sprawl, it's more complex now that construction will disturb existing traffic and business, and no one wants to pay more.

As an example, here's a story about Mississauga, a green-field suburb that proudly ran a balanced budget for decades... until they ran out of empty land to build on recently. Now they're joining denser cities in asking for more money from senior governments: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/the-maturation-o...

[chipsy]

In sprawl, the city is bearing most of the risk: all the developer has to do is throw up some more cookie-cutter detached homes and sell them, while the city has to keep all of the grid infrastructure and services to those homes running for decades to come; low density sucks up the budget that could otherwise be used to create big-ticket service improvements like transit. At the bottom end, this can send suburbs into a Detroit-esque downward spiral where they are no longer viable.

Developers are much more grudging in taking on the economic risks of infill projects with higher densities, but even low-rise, 3-4 story buildings are sufficiently dense to push this equation in the other direction and make city services more sustainable and cost-effective.

[w1ntermute]

This EconTalk podcast does a good job of explaining how the infrastructure costs American suburbs are experiencing now weren't something that was anticipated when they were constructed: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

[hueving]

Difficult to implement any kind of useful public transit that would obviate the need to drive everywhere.

[jrapdx3]

Well, of course not. I mean public transportation couldn't cover every section of a region, but it could serve major hubs well enough to reduce automotive use and reduce its downsides.

For almost 40 years Portland Oregon has been developing light rail all over the metro region. Rail has been extended to the major districts within a 10 to 15 mile radius of downtown. (Which is a good share of the "spread" that the regional urban growth boundary allows.)

MAX and street-car lines are heavily used but there are still many cars and traffic can be terrible. So I guess light rail/public transit are never the whole solution by themselves. Then again, what single modality is ever the "magic bullet" answer to enormously complex problems?

[Retric]

Edit: Used wrong numbers for Portland, it's metro area is over 2Million people. That's close to the ~5M population for a metro area which really starts causing major issues.

Portland Oregon is a vary low population city .6M in the middle of no where. It would have been fine without any form of public transit. The real issues show up at around 10x the population where sprawl is to low density to support office buildings and people at the edge can't reasonably commute to the center of the city even with public transport.

[gphil]

Not really. Portland is the 19th largest MSA and 29th largest city in US. There is only one city in the US that is 10x Portland in population (NY) and there are no MSAs that are 10x the size of Portland's (not even NY's.)

You don't need to be NY for transit to make a huge difference. Portland is a squarely mid-size American city and its quality transit is a key selling point.

[Retric]

OPS, used wrong numbers for Portland. It's the metro area that's important not the nominal city lines.

Any way. Nominally DC has a population of 646,449, however the DC metro area is 5.8 million. The Baltimore Metropolitan Area has grown steadily to approximately 2.7 million and has fewer issues with transit, but it's getting steadily worse.

And the NY metro area is 23.5 Million people.

[CalRobert]

If you build transportation it can define what the "region" is. Units can sell for more near transit, so people build there.

[venomsnake]

First that comes to mind - obesity.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/blame-the-...