[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