[cwyers]

> I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch

I read that differently than you, I think. I read it not as "we don't need roads" but as "we don't need all of the roads we currently have, we can get rid of some of them." I don't know if that's true, even with reduced demand, there are a lot of small towns that only have one main road going in or out of them. (I also am from Iowa.)

[maxerickson]

A related question is whether (and how) you make the people in those towns bear the cost of the town existing.

Lots of small towns are nice and scenic. Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.

[jff]

> Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.

In a big city with rising rents, people who already live somewhere ~have a right to be there~ and shouldn't have to go. In a small town, apparently, there's no possible reason people would want to stay.

[mapt]

It's merely a question of how heavily we subsidize their lifestyle with infrastructure & other spending from the state/federal purse, which ultimately comes from economically productive cities.

One of the things we currently do, through differential housing prices, is send retirees to small towns with dead economies. They get a pension, Social Security, and Medicare, and that income is often the sole thing keeping the town afloat. In more distant reaches (I'm thinking Appalachia and parts of the South), generous welfare policies have enabled people to stay in this excess housing capacity despite the lack of jobs.

But here's the thing - there are costs to this strategy, like greenhouse gasses and children/grandchildren that have to move away and human capital going to waste, and these people could just as easily have public services provided in a metropolitan area where it's much cheaper to reach them all and provide a good quality of life.

The phenomena shows up even at the state level - https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://... but it's much more stark when you start at an older town in the Eastern half of the country and make your way to a productive population center.

Hey, we have a fiscal union, unlike the EU; These places aren't Greece because of all those payments, and I don't support turning them into Greece, but because we have that union it's also on us to make deliberate decisions that concentrate less of the population in Stavrodromi and more in Berlin. The game-theoretically natural strategy of utilizing the entirety of the existing housing stock (stratified by income) no matter how decrepit the location, is a bit of a local optima, and better arrangements are not difficult.

[scarmig]

Isn't Berlin a net-taker compared to other major German cities?

[perfTerm]

Even if it is I think the relevant question here is more: does an elderly person on social security, pension, and medicaide have a greater aggregate cost to federal, state, and local governments in Berlin or in Stravadova (I'm not sure if I got that right)?

It'd be interesting to see if perhaps it's better for the feds if they're in rural towns but not the states.

In Albany, NY where I'm from I used to live right near a major hospital and college Albany Medical Center. And there were helicopters flying to it three or four times a day. I'm sure some of those helicopter rides out to taxi those requiring medical assistance are being borne by tax payers. It's a pretty complex question to wrap your head around when there are so many variables. Does an elderly person living in NYC produce a small drag on the economy because they're not contributing as much as the average young professional and increase the cost of rent for those people?

[maxerickson]

Yeah, your first paragraph is what I was getting at there (but why be clear about it when there is an opportunity to be hackneyed?).

[pekk]

You don't have a right to unlimited quantities of other people's money to support you being there. If we could pull all support for communities which are a persistent drain then maybe you could argue you had a "right to be there" (without subsidies).

We really have much bigger social problems than insufficient subsidies to people who choose of their own volition to live in places which are expensive for everyone else to maintain.

[eli_gottlieb]

I don't think I heard him saying that incumbent renters in a city have a legally-enforceable right of any kind to their apartments.

[fennecfoxen]

Maybe he didn't say that, but the War Emergency Tenant Protection act does say otherwise, at least in the Empire state. (Which war emergency? Why, World War II, of course.) San Francisco's pretty similar.

Not that this has too much direct impact on roads, though :P

[superuser2]

>~have a right to be there~

Rent control causes landlords to fail to realize hypothetical profits; government-subsidized sprawl wastes everyone's money.

[protomyth]

and a lot of those small towns are still active and are gathering centers for a large area producing product to be shipped to urban areas - towns disappear on their own, no need to be forced

[cwyers]

Well, I went ahead and read up on Charles Marohn a bit, and... I think your reading of him is a lot closer to what he believes than mine was.