All the museums around me have free and plentiful parking so you’re comparing city museums to suburban museums. Except for broadway shows there is nothing in a city that can’t be found in the suburbs. OK, East Coast deli’s and the similar city ambience. But as a suburbanite I fall in the crowd that likes to cook so we probably eat more of our high-end meals at home. I literally had barbecued shrimp with friends today. It was a restaurant quality meal that cost little to make. The corn was .17 cents an ear and even with wine, the whole meal was probably $6 a person.
I’ll have to disagree with your cite at this time because it’s the opinion of the author (without support). IMO, it’s cheaper to wire and maintain a suburban area because everything is open and accessable. We had a major storm that tore power lines down over a multi-state area and we had power back in a week. I had it back in hours and in my neighborhood we ran power lines across the street to our neighbors.
You can’t just compare the costs of establishing a city in the first place with the costs of establishing a suburb, as though they were both starting from scratch. The suburb’s existence is dependent on the prior existence of the city; that’s part of the definition of what a suburb is.
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I think I’ve posted enough examples in support of why city costs are so high. Even if you started from scratch I think you would find it difficult to make large apartments as efficient as houses and smaller apartments, regardless of where you build them. It is possible to build a house that is 100% utility independent. That will never happen in an apartment. With recent advancements in batteries I think you’ll see fully electric cars move rapidly down from the $75,000 level to econobox level within the next 15 years. At that point, the idea of how roads are paid for will change radically. Personally, I’d rather own a diesel car and pay a fuel tax.
Wow. He’s using numbers and math. He must be a freaking genius.:rolleyes:
What are you talking about? Where do you think your suburban resources come from? Are there cows grazing in Morristown, NJ? Are there there litterally saw mills on the Saw Mill River Parkway in this day and age? Where is the nearest coal mine to NY? For that matter, what resources does Phoenix, AZ; Atlanta, GA; Dallas, TX; Jacksonville, FL or any other modern sprawlopolis find locally?
Or do you think they just create them out of thin air at the local Lowe’s?
Regardless if you live in a suburb or a city, chances are all of your resources have to be shipped to you from somewhere else.
What does that make the people who don’t support their position with numbers?
If you research Ohio you’ll find that we export a lot of chicken, beef, and pork as well as other food staples. I buy a lot of locally grown food. We also have coal mines and harvest trees although I suspect generic lumber comes from Canada and western states. I purchase finished items such as roof trusses locally. My electricity comes from a plant 15 miles away that is supported by peak-use generators that are 5 miles away. My water comes from a tower 3 miles away that pulls from local wells.
There’s a dairy farm in Newark. That count?
The Saw Mill Parkway is actually named after a river… named after a saw mill owned by a man who died a century before the country was founded. Great man. Same guy Yonkers is named after, mind you.
There’s a small boatload of lumberyards around, though.
Wolfram Alpha borks on the coal mine question. I’d say it’s in PA, which is really barely a distance away. Why do you ask?
It doesn’t mean anything if you just throw out some numbers without taking into account their context. All you have convinced me of is that large cities require big, expensive public works projects to support them. That in and of itself does not mean less efficient.
What I would like to see from you are cites from articles providing examples how a more distributed arrangement (AKA suburban sprawl) is more efficient. I’m not arguing that one is better than the other because there are pros and cons to either environment.
I’ve asked several times and I’ve actually provided one supporting my case.
Well, you are kinda being a dick. No one likes a grammar cop or a wordsmith.
I’m not sure why you need studies and cites to prove that cities are less efficient. You have the simple fact that cities cost much more to live in than do rural and suburban areas. Isn’t that a pretty good measure of efficiency?
The suburbs don’t lack those things. When I lived in the city, I found it no easier to get to a theater than I do now. Unless you happen to live within walking distance of the theater or museum (and few people do, even in the city), I don’t see the advantage. I didn’t even shop locally - It’s much cheaper and more efficient to drive to a big box grocery store and load up on a few hundred dollars worth of food at a time than it is to stop at the local grocer that’s within walking distance and pick up a bag of groceries. If I need milk or eggs, I have two 7-11’s within walking distance of my house right now.
Theaters? I’ve got a 10-theater multiplex five minutes from my house by car. And of course, it has a nice big parking lot. And ten minutes from here is a state-of-the-art theater with awesome picture and sound. It is much more convenient for me to go to a theater now than it was when I lived in the city.
For me, I really can’t think of any lifestyle advantages living in the city core brings to the table.
Big City living brings you MORE STUFF than you could possibly in the time that you have.
Its like the lifestyle version of a big ass gas guzzling 4WD SUV. Its way more than you need and more than you will ever use. But you get to point at it and proclaim how great it is.
I don’t care if city people like city life. Good for them. But statistically speaking, they seem to have a hard time understanding the concept that other people can find other ways to be happy.
Because it would help to prove your point. Otherwise everyone is just handwaving and tossing out made up stats and back of the napkin analysis.
No, and here is why. A casual search on Zillow.com shows that real estate prices in Manhattan are about 4-5x the price per square foot of space compared to a suburb like Fairfield, CT. Ignoring all other factors, that tells me that people are paying a premium to live in Manhattan. Their homes don’t use more resources per square foot than their suburban equivalents. It’s the desirability to live in Manhattan that drives the prices up. So IOW, it’s not tied to resource usage.
I think I understand your point though. Cities require huge, expensive infrastructure to opperate - highways, public transit, The Big Dig, the John McClain Memorial Aquaduct as seen in Die Hard With A Vengence. So how are they more efficient? They are more efficient because that infrastructure supports many times the number of people as their suburban equivalents. The higher costs mean people have to spend more money on infrastructure that benefits the entire city, instead of their own living space.
Because you just invalidated **Magiver’s **point that cities need to bring everything from far away.
It was kind of a silly point anyway. Cities generally form because they are near resources or transportation hubs in the first place.
Vis a vis theatre, I’m pretty sure they were discussing theatre as in stage productions, not cinema.
I don’t think there’s a lot of doubt that live theatre is, in most cases, much more prevalent in big cities than anywhere else, though there are exceptions. Toronto has a lot of live entertainment Burlington would never have.
Of course, unless theatre is actually one’s profession, I think the great majority of people don’t see so many shows that they need to be just minutes away.
How can you go from admitting large cities require large expensive public works projects to not understanding that this is less efficient? What is efficient about spending $6 billions dollars to drill a 60 mile tunnel? I’ve broken it down to cost per person to give it context. $750 for every single person in NYC. It was a 5000 percent difference. When you apply that money to environmental issues that’s a lot of money to throw down a well. It’s not efficient to build water towers for each apartment building. It’s not efficient to dig and maintain tunnels to run electrical wire. It’s not efficient for Los Angeles to build 500 miles of road to service 133 miles of water pipes. All those inefficiencies add up to the higher city costs in Sam Stone’s post.
Bubbe? Large expensive public works are kind of the definition of economy of scale here. Only $750 to get water to a person? Hell, you don’t want to know what it cost to get a sewer to my house in a suburb. (New subdivision going in a half mile away.) I think it was something like fifteen grand.
Note, by the way, that my town is a suburb… and it’s been around since before the American Revolution. It’s not cookie-cutter by any means.
That 750 is JUST the money to get some (not even all by any means) of the WATER to the city. It aint the distribution cost and sewer is a whole nother ball of wax.
I don’t buy your entire thesis that money and energy are intrinsically linked. I think it’s hogwash. A 1000 square foot apartment in midtown Manhattan costs say 3m. A 3000 square foot home in Sheboygan costs 150,000. That doesn’t mean that the midtown apartment uses more energy, that’s just illogical.
No because money =/= energy. Price is relative to demand, not relative to joules. If money = energy than gas at 4.25 a gallon would get you farther than it would if it costs you 1.50. A gallon of gas goes just as far regardless of how much it costs.
One dollar of money does not equal exactly one dollars worth of gas, that is true.
On the other hand, some small, but significant fraction of every dollar in the economy IS representative of energy/gas used.
To use an extreme example, the astronauts on the ISS arent using very many resources to “live”, but I am pretty damn sure a bunch of energy was used to get them there and support them while they are there.
You don’t understand. Our energy problem is a financial problem, not strictly a technical problem. We know how to make almost limitless amounts of clean energy. The problem is cost. Physically, we could make enough solar panels or windmills or geothermal systems or solar power satellites or whatever. But we can’t make them and still deliver power at prices competitive with current sources.
For example, we know we can make power with wind for roughly twice the cost of current sources. If we go to four times the cost, we can make a lot of it. But we can’t afford to do that and still remain competitive with the rest of the world.
So in that sense, money == energy. If it costs $40,000 more per year to live in Manhattan than to live in New Jersey, and your only concern is the energy efficiency of living in New Jersey, then you could take a fraction of that $40,000 and subsidize alternative forms of clean energy to make up the difference so that the carbon footprints are equal.
As for your other argument - that the high cost of living in the city is not a lack of efficiency but the high cost of real estate - again, you’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. You can’t separate the high cost of real-estate from efficiency. Real estate cost is absolutely a major factor in the efficiency of cities, or lack thereof. As you pack more people into the same area, demand for real estate goes up. If you want to have shops and recreational facilities within walking distance of those people, the cost of those activities goes up. These are real costs, and every bit as much a factor in calculating the efficiency of providing a service as is raw energy cost. My company just moved to the suburbs because it cost us more to make our product in the city. It doesn’t matter if the cost came from higher real estate prices or higher shipping costs or higher energy usage. All that matters is aggregate production cost. Locating an R&D facility in the city has simply become too inefficient to make sense.
You have to stop separating economics from environmental concerns. They are one and the same. With enough money, we can turn the earth into a park no matter how many people are on it. Clean environments and environmentalism are by-products of wealthy societies. Environmental measures that destroy wealth are counter-productive in the long run. Raising my living costs by $40,000 per year so that I’ll use $1000 less in energy is a wealth-destroying activity. You’d be much better off letting me live where I want to and taxing me 1/10 that amount and using it to create clean energy to offset my increased usage.