Not if the wages are higher where it is being produced. A joule is a joule whether it is produced by a worker or by a power plant. It doesn’t suddenly become more energy simply because it costs more. If an employee of a power plant in the New York Metro area is paid 20% more than one in your town, that doesn’t mean the plant is less efficient only that the cost of living is higher. The cost of living is higher irrespective of the amount of work that goes in to attaining a livelihood in that area. What determines the cost of living is a perception of value which doesn’t use more energy. A more expensive home does not require more energy to build than a cheap one of the same size. I could build a Mansion in Thailand or Mexico for a fraction of the cost of most of your homes, that doesn’t make your homes less efficient than my mansion. Financial efficiency and production efficiency are two different animals, they are related in a sense yes, but they are not the same.
It costs me nothing to heat my apartment because it is on one big boiler that heats the entire building and sends steam heat through radiators. Next to your oil or gas heater in your home the output is negligible. My apartment costs more because where I live has a greater demand for real estate thus the price is higher.
In 2001 I lived in NYC and was making $ 40k/yr +401k/Medical and all that. I moved to Albuquerque and took a job that paid me 1/3 of what I was making in New York, but my rent was not 1/3 the price, plus I had to buy a car.
I do understand, but this is digressing. You are still talking about the ‘potential’ for suburbs to be more efficient. They are more cost efficient if of course you are making more money, but you might have to take a pay cut to do so. As I have said, if I were to move to New Jersey it would not reduce my expenses appreciably because I would have to buy a car. Yes I’d get more space but that would be about the only perk.
Totally a separate issue.
It doesn’t cost $ 40,000 a more per year to live in Manhattan than to live in New Jersey. And yes, that is a reasonable argument toward the topic of the OP. IE, what COULD be done. But you are still making an argument for potential. I could take the money I saved and theoretically use it to make my home in New Jersey more efficient.
You can separate the high cost of real-estate from efficiency because they are unrelated issues. I understand what you are saying as it relates to the bottom line of a business, but I am talking about energy efficiency. Does your office require less heat/AC in the suburbs? Do people commute more or less because of this move?
Economics and environmental concerns are related but you are trying to argue that they are the same, and that’s just wrong. And no, more money doesn’t solve anything. We could print more money and it might just cause inflation. Who is talking about raising your living costs by $ 40,000? That’s a wholly made up figure that comes from nowhere.
I think Al Gore is a moron and carbon offsets are kind of a stupid idea leading to people snatching up farmland and leaving it fallow so that they can be producing less carbon per acre of property. That’s not the answer either. Really the reality is that we are working on these issues. I don’t know where you get this environmentalist gestapo fantasy where people are going to come and force you to live in an urban environment but it’s way off base and it doesn’t make poorly planned suburban sprawl any better of an idea.
God has bestowed upon you free energy? Sweet. Lucky for you your building was built over a geothermal hot spring. Most of the other people in New York get it from coal fired steam plants and pay for it as part of their rent.
In 2001 I was making $40,000 in Ohio and had already paid a house off. It took me 10 years to do it. I did it while working my way through college. I had a nice sports car but it’s sitting in the garage in parts (don’t ask). I have a parnership in an airplane. When I drove to the grocery store I stocked up on food to cook for a month. I don’t have a deep freezer so I can’t buy a whole cow but some of my friends do. The savings is tremendous. One of the things I’ll be making on the grill this week is teriyaki shish kabob which cost me about $4 a serving. My sister has a sail boat and a speed boat that we take out to the many lakes around us. she stores them on her property. The kids go canoeing and biking and play tennis or whatever sport they feel like. We’re not remotely rich but we leverage our skills with the savings suburban life affords. I can afford to fly because I helped restore the plane I’m a partner in. I did this because I have a garage full of tools. These are the things we do in the suburbs because we have the space and the extra cash to do them. I couldn’t begin to match my lifestyle living in a large city.
I didn’t have a college degree. If I HAD a college degree I probably would have been making a lot more than $ 40k per year when I was living in New York.
No I don’t. It’s aggregated over the whole of the building like so many city expenses that are diffused across the entire populace, you know, like that of a pipeline to a reservoir upstate.
From this thread, it seems as though we have the exact opposite problem. It’s the suburb advocates who are refusing to acknowledge that the amenities of a city really do matter to many people.
Just because it’s more important to you personally to have, say, a yard and a garage than to have ten or twenty ethnic restaurants within a three-blocks’ walk from you doesn’t mean that you get to dismiss the city’s lifestyle advantages for everybody else.
snerk The fact that it doesn’t even occur to you that (as RickJay pointed out) the word “theater” can mean anything besides a movie theater kind of undermines your attempted point about suburban life being just as culturally diverse as urban life.
Mind you, I personally don’t mind at all if you personally like suburban life better than city life. I’m just not letting you get away with saying “I personally like suburban life better than city life, and therefore there must not be any lifestyle advantages in city life.”
I didn’t have one either when I paid off the house. That’s what I made while working my way through college. The point is that my standard of living could not be duplicated in a large city. there is no way in hell I could afford a 3 bedroom condo with a 630 sf garage, 2 cars and an airplane.
One of the things I did to save money was to drive older cars. I bought multiple cars so I had one to drive while I worked on the other. I could do this because I have a garage. I have a garage because I built it. I built it because I have a house and the land. I bought a house because I sold a used mobile home for the down payment. I bought the mobile home because it was cheaper than an apartment and provided a return of the principle.
Suburbs provide a more efficient environment to live in. That translates into more money to spend and a place to develop projects. I have a friend who is building a drilling rig so he can make a geothermal well. He’s making the parts for the rig in his shop which he built (along with his home). When he gets done with it, he’s going to install a geothermal heatpump. I suspect that our houses will eventually be energy independent between that technology and the advances in thin-film solar panels. by the time I need to replace my shingles, I will have solar panels on my house and garage. I’m also looking into a passive air cooling system that would naturally pulls hot air out of my house and cold air through my yard (underground). It would turn my attic into a heat pump that draws air through an underground radiator. I’ve seen this design in rudimentary form in houses that are 150 years old.
To translate efficiencies into real numbers take the $735/person difference in my earlier water cost example and apply it to a 4-bedroom house. That’s $2,950 that can be used to add insulation or solar cells… When you add up other costs lost to inefficient city utilities that is money that can be continually applied to homes to make them more energy independent. Note the word “continually”. Every dollar saved in a suburb can be reinvested. It’s just a matter of time before technology so completely changes the living and efficiency discrepancies between city and suburban locations that large cities will collapse under their own weight.
Kimstu Not only that but he is limiting his MOVIE theater options to movies that only show the mega-conglomerate fare out of Hollywood. Not much of a selection. I have a theater that is about 5 minutes from here by train/bus or 10 minutes walking that has top blockbuster films as well as Indies, and it’s not even the only option, just the closest one.
There are theaters that show art films and foreign movies in the suburbs, too. And there are live theaters in the suburbs as well. At least around here.
Numerous studies have borne out the common-sense notion that uniform pricing for utilities means that higher-density consumers are paying part of the costs for lower-density ones. Here’s a summary of one such study analyzed in Metropolitics by Myron Orfield:
So, as I said, all these arguments purporting to show that low-density developments must be more efficient than high-density cities just because they’re cheaper to live in are essentially meaningless. You need to take into account the fact that the low-density areas are cheaper partly because the high-density areas are subsidizing them.
Now, if you want to argue that people should be able to live in suburbs anyway if they want to, I certainly wouldn’t disagree. I just think that sprawling developments should stop externalizing the costs of their low-density structure onto their neighbors. For instance, if you live in a more spread-out community that scatters fewer residents over longer extents of utility lines, you should pay a higher per-unit price for utilities than people who live in denser communities.
Lets look at this logically. How often does someone go to a museum? How often does someone in NY eat out? If the cost of living is higher in a city, that means you have less money to spend on these amenities (which cost more to boot).
Now look at how much time you spend at home. While not working, our homes represent the majority of where we spend our time. In the suburbs we can walk outside and grill any cuisine we want while lounging on a deck surrounded by flowers and trees. We can eat on the deck or go into the house and watch a movie on a large screen TV with surround sound. I literally just did this at a friend’s house the other day. We then went over to the airport and played with our toys.
If we WANT to go into the city to a fancy restaurant, there is nothing stopping us. In my city, we have districts that specialize in entertainment and food. The parking is free. So on those rare instances that I’m willing to shell out $$30 to $60 for a meal it’s a short drive. I don’t really see the great advantage of doing this often as I can cook better meals for a fraction of the cost. $30 buys a fresh lobster meal with a nice bottle of wine and dessert at home. I don’t see the advantage of living on a noisy exhaust filled street. I don’t see the advantage of walking in crappy weather. I don’t see the advantage of panhandlers.
So while I can admit it is convenient living within walking distance of a variety of businesses I don’t see the advantage if I don’t frequent them versus a short drive. When my buddy use to live in Chicago I flew up to visit him. His apartment was smaller than my house and cost 3 times as much (with no equity). We went out for an evening’s entertainment. HOLY COW was it expensive. I shot through a month of fine living in one night. He’s the friend I mentioned above who now lives in the suburbs.
If you want to eliminate subsidies I’m behind you 5000 percent. That will include the apartment subsidies cities are paying. Who’s paying the taxes now?
The reality is that housing devolopments NOT connected to cities are cheaper to live in then city suburbs. It’s the city dragging itself down, not the other way around.
I live within a 10 minute drive of an “art” movie theater. I got to see an old cinerama movie with the actual projector/screen set up. People came from all over the country to see it. I’m also near one of the finest air museums in the world. People come form all over the world to see it. I live near an art museum that gets some of the larger rotating exhibits in the country. I’m less than a mile from a bike bath that connects hundreds of miles of converted railroad beds. We have a large selection of ethnic restaurants in the metro area.
What we don’t have is large selection of broadway theaters or opera houses.