Suburbia Is Subsidized: Here's the Math
youtube.comI noticed this pattern of development in my town of Livingston, in Scotland. it's a "new town" i.e. was planned and built in the 50s to support the postwar boom. It is one of the few places in Scotland that were designed as suburbs around a big shopping mall, which makes it a distinctly soulless and culture-lite town.
The channel this video is from is out of this world. It redefined how I think about the cities and towns we live in and what is the objectively correct way to build them - with waaaaay more mixed use walkable residential.
Most of the remaining walkable neighborhoods in the states were built before that time period too. It’s unfortunate that we let automakers and fossil fuel interests take our cities hostage with car dependent designs.
The Not Just Bikes YT channel recently observed that building new walkable neighborhoods in the US and Canada is not legal.
The existing pre-war walkable neighborhoods are all we are going to get and they are expensive. We made walking to school a thing for rich kids.
How does this work for areas like Texas where most of the suburbs are not in the cities that are supposedly subsidizing them? An example would be the outskirts of Houston where the residents pay for their own utilities through MUDs: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
It may not be sustainable for them, but it doesn't seem to be subsidized by the larger city tens of miles away.
Via counties and states
But the MUDs are outside of the cities and pay for the utilities in their defined area... The cities and counties aren't paying for what the MUDs provide, unless I'm mistaken...
I'd like to see if any of these results and conclusions change if you take into account the total tax basis for suburbanites (income tax, sales tax spent in the cities they don't live in, etc.) versus the relatively less well off inner city urbanites. Not all areas are the same, but in places like the Bay Area, a lot of the high income earners move out to the suburbs (think Palo Alto, Pleasanton, Walnut Creek, etc.).
To add, a lot of the economic activities in downtown areas are by workers and customers who live in the suburbs and commute into town. I don't believe that was taken into account.
Strongtowns.org has some research on this. It points toward most suburbs being indirectly subsidized by the tax base of nearby urban areas after costs are accounted for.
The basic problem is density and scaling of infrastructure and utilities. The cost of many utilities (power, water, roads) is dominated by the distance from the source to the hookup. When buildings only scale laterally (single story) then comparatively more utilities are needed than when they can scale vertically into the 3rd dimension. This gets exaggerated because the population of a volume tends to scale much faster vertically than laterally (apartments are much closer together than single family dwellings) so most of the utility cost ends up being the lateral footprint of a neighborhood.
Looking at this another way, the taxes of lateral neighborhoods would need to grow exponentially faster than those in vertical neighborhoods to maintain the same unit of infrastructure.
Of course it is. Now let's discuss the Chesterton Fence: When did they start subsidizing it, and why? In the US, remember that Eisenhower sold the interstate highway system as a defense item. After the firebombing of European cities, after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and with the potential of the cold war turning hot, doesn't it make sense to "nudge" people out of the cities--to de-densify the population centers? And with the current geopolitical situation, such considerations are pertinent as ever.
There's no need for such an policy even if it were a strategic goal. Urban environments have been "nudging" people towards greener pastures since the 1960's.
Interstate highway system, FHA/VA, Fannie/Freddie, desegregation/civil rights passed by otherwise racist deep-south representatives, and the most disruptive civic changes coinciding with the touch-and-go moments of the cold war... Necessary or not, it happened.
Is there a textual summary somewhere?
Here is an article that was referenced in the video: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
Read that before. It’s amazing how it just lays out how an entire way of life is not sustainable.
Of course, I live in a walkable neighbourhood in Europe, so it’s easy for me to say that.
Not even sustainable on a simple medium term economical basis, regardless of externalities (environmental/human health impacts). But that's arguably a good thing, as long as we don't run out of money before making the necessary changes...
Thanks! Good read, hopefully will have time to read the whole series (and watch the video!) eventually.