Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme [ST03]

Oh but you can! Paris, London, and I'm sure countless other cities in Europe have pedestrianized or reduced traffic in large areas. The Netherlands has done this in most cities. 99.99% of suburbanites couldn't afford their lifestyle if it weren't for obsurd gov subsidies of infrastructure / petrol industry. [VIDEO]

This argument is commonly thrown around, but makes no sense in practice. The denser the place, the more efficient the infrastructure use. 50 families in a single apartment building use massively fewer pipes & power lines than 50 families in single family homes. But the tax revenue for the city can still be the same. In a denser area, those families are less likely to own or need cars, and if they do, they drive less. On the other hand, low-density suburban neighborhoods are often so inefficient that the maintenance cost of their infrastructure is more than the tax revenue the residents bring in. (Here's a good overview of that: [VIDEO] ) It's more true to say that "we don't have the infrastructure for single family homes" than it is to say that we don't have the infrastructure for apartment buildings.

One comment on this is that less dense areas make it very hard to build infrastructure. For example, if there are 10 families living on a mile stretch of road, think of how much it costs to build a mile of road, along with (possibly) water and sewer there. And then the annual maintenance cost. And then the other road networks require to connect that one road, etc. Those 10 families don’t pay nearly enough in taxes to cover the cost of infrastructure maintenance. It relies on grants from state and federal governments, paid for by taxes in dense cities, to cover the expense. My point: sparse is not objectively better. I think the quality of life we have come to expect in suburbs and rural areas is not possible without the taxes gained from also having dense places. More info, and a very interesting video series here: [VIDEO]

Americans seems to abhor car/fuel/etc. taxes to the point that they vote out any politician who dares suggesting anything even approximating that, and as a result they have a huge infrastructure maintenance backlog waiting to pop. Not helped by the fact that suburban sprawl is incredibly expensive to maintain (per the tax revenue the municipality gets) compared to more densely built environments. The "Not Just Bikes" youtube channel has a series of videos on the strongtowns, uh, thingy, that goes into more details. In particular this one describes the financing of suburban infrastructure: [VIDEO]

> It would significantly expand taxes How exactly? Do you have any examples? Also, have you ever seen the price of car infrastructure? I would be willing to bet that denser walkable urban infrastructure projects are waaaaay cheaper than building and maintaining sprawling road, sewage, and power transmission networks. Sprawl is seriously draining the finances of many small cities and towns in the US. There's a whole book about it: [LINK] You could also just watch this smug video [VIDEO]

I don't think you understand how much it costs to maintain the infrastructure to your house. Not Just Bikes did an excellent series on this specific problem. [VIDEO]

They don't charge you the full cost of providing those services. There is a whole playlist about this: [VIDEO]

It will be interesting how the American suburbs will fare in the upcoming years. With interests rising and home buyers getting more careful, the Ponzi-esque scheme of buying a house in a suburb might collapse [1, 2]. American culture is partly unthinkable without cars because of planning and zoning failures made decades ago. Why don't have suburbs a lot of small super markets and other stores? Why does everybody need to drive miles and miles to get a gallon of milk? 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]

I feel like this video on city growth is relevant, and was pretty interesting: [VIDEO] It suggests that a lot of the construction/repair needs of major cities could be reduced significantly, but it's a flaw inherent to their design that needs correcting first.

Large networks of large roads are not financially sustainable [1]. I can only assume this is more the case the more rural you get. Asking for more of the current American style of car infrastructure may not even work, depending on the specifics. [1] [VIDEO]

The Strong Town series by Not Just Bikes on YouTube is often linked on HN but the third video[0] in the series covers your question. Take a look if you are curious about where the "making ourselves poor" point of view is hatched. [0] [VIDEO]

Suburbia is TERRIBLE from long-term efficiency and sustainability point of view. They create car-centric living style which is very hard to get rid off after it settles in. Here is a really good video about it: [VIDEO]

> […] why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for? Suburbs are slowing falling into a state of disrepair, or at least more and more budget being taken away form other things: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] * [LINK]

> Do you have a citation for this? I don't have a citation for construction costs, and I will concede that there are many factors that may make some low density developments cheaper per unit then some higher density development. However, construction is only part of the picture. Low density development imposes terrible financial costs for cities that contain them. That's because the taxable value per square mile is much lower, but infrastructure (sewer, roads, etc) has the same per-mile maintenance and replacement costs. The infrastructure maintenance costs in many low density developments is often greater then the amount of tax revenue the development generates. For more information on the hidden costs of low density development, I can't recommend this video [1] by Not Just Bikes enough. [1] [VIDEO]

> Likewise, most places are completely car-dependent. This too is intentionally exclusionary. Which also results in unsustainable neighbourhoods. [VIDEO]

Yes, but, the actual math matters. There are a lot of banal public infrastructure projects that cost much more than the value they create, and there are also theoretically productive public investments that are double-dipping into the same “surplus value.” To illustrate there are many roads that were built in hopes of spurring development and development never occurred, but the roads are maintained anyway at a substantial loss of taxes. And to make a simple hypothetical as you did, suppose the train subsidy creates some surplus, but then the city also runs a bus and a ferry and installs bike lanes all on the same route and all of these are gloriously uncrowded… at this point we’ve probably eaten up all the surplus value and then some. This is hopefully obvious, and yet the excess road building problem is ubiquitous in the US and costing us fortunes.[1] So we can’t just hand-wave and suggest that all infrastructure and all subsidies always create more value than they cost, we have to be critical and especially careful not to pretend that non-financial benefits can pay for real financial costs. 1: [VIDEO]

I disagree that it’s naive. Here is a video talking about why that term is being used: [VIDEO] And the Strong Towns write up that has links to more reading that I believe informed that video: [LINK]

It is indeed the system, and you (to no fault of your own, probably) are part of that system. NotJustBikes, while a little anti-car-propogandaey for my tast, does a good just explaining why it'd be basically impossible for suburbia to ever pay for itself: [VIDEO]

> Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings, repairs, goods and services. He's talking about infrastructure cost (how much it costs your municipality to provide the services that you use, like the roads) while you are talking about cost of life (how much it costs you to pay for other things that you need, like food or getting your car serviced). On the infrastructure front, suburbia simply cannot compete with cities. Infrastructure cost is bound to be more efficient where people live in more densely populated areas. The length of pipes that a municipality needs to lay down in order to serve a single family home in the suburbs is the same as a whole 6-story building in the city (the diameters of the pipes might differ). On a per-capita basis, there's no contest. A particular factor in the funding of suburban streets is that the initial paving is often subsidized by the federal government. Once the streets start crumbling down after ~20 years of usage, then the real cost hits. Here's an explanation by Not Just Bikes: [VIDEO]

In large parts of the United States it should affect single-family homes. A lot of cities constructed their suburbs with one-term fees and subsidies, but are charging extremely low taxes on the houses once constructed. In fact, the taxes are so low that they don't pay for the upkeep of the infrastructure required to service those houses. They are losing money on every house and are trying to make up for it in volume! The sole reason they have been able to continue is because the dense urban core is subsidizing the suburbs. But it'll inevitably end up with decrepit and neglected infrastructure, and cities going bankrupt. The only way to solve this is to increase the revenue per land area, which means a higher land tax, which in turn means a bigger tax increase per-person for single-family homes than for multi-family dwellings. If you want to know more, the following NotJustBikes videos are a good introduction of the subject: [VIDEO] [LINK]