There is plenty of room for more people if more buildings are allowed to be built. Tokyo, London, Barcelona, Moscow and Tel Aviv all have more than twice the density of San Francisco. Singapore has over 3 times the density of New York. You could add 13 million people to the population of New York before it was as dense as Paris.
Explain how raising the gas tax would ruin suburban living. And while you’re attempting that, explain why cities are shitholes.
People think living in suburbia is better than living in cities. You want people to think living in cities is better than living in suburbia. There are two ways to do this: make living in cities better, or make living in suburbia worse. You chose the latter.
Sure, but who wants to live somewhere with 3x the population density of New York? What’s it buy me, a guy who lives in a house in a suburb from the 1970s? I’d lose my garden, my driveway, my yard, my ability to barbecue/grill, and I’d replace it with having to put up with a bunch of crowded grubby public infrastructure like public transit, elevators, etc… Plus, urban schools by and large suck.
No thanks. It’s much more pleasant to live where I do and drive the 20-30 minutes to and from where I work (in another suburb), than to live all up in several thousand other people’s business, just because some knuckleheads think it’s the wave of the future and more efficient.
At the very least, the people in
You’d gain a fair few positive things too.
Public infrastructure and school need not be scrubby.
In any case, incentivizing urban sprawl reversal doesn’t require everyone to leave the suburbs. They just might have to pay a lot to live there.
Aww, come on. Cities have a lot of things rural areas and suburbs don’t offer us: higher rates of all manners of crime, more homelessness, and three times the amount of schizophrenia as anywhere else, fewer places to buy fresh food, a lack of privacy, higher costs of living, less green space, and nightmarish traffic and all its smog.
We are clearly just crazy for not to want to be part of something like this.
Relax dude. No one here is saying you’re crazy to want to live a little out of town. Personally, I don’t like spending 5-9 hours commuting every week but that’s a trade off people willingly choose.
Making road users pay for roads (through tolls or gas taxes) is not incentivizing cities or disincentivizing suburbs. It is stopping incentivizing suburbs. What is called the war on suburbs is the end of the war on cities.
Start by recognizing that “urban sprawl” goes back as far as people were able to get out of the city. The four great periods of suburbanization came from the development of railroads (1840s), streetcars (1880s), automobiles (1920s) and highways (1950s).
So you want to look back to the pioneering suburbs in each of those periods and figure out what drew people to them. For the most part you’ll find a business district centered around the transit stop. Even in the 1950s suburbs there were neighborhood shopping centers at major intersections.
A truly urban model should have clusters of businesses on a walkable (or at least a single parking space) scale that can satisfy most of the needs of the people in the immediate area. That means grocery stores, physicians, hardware, appliance, schools, clothing, hair salons – the whole bit.
That, unfortunately, flies in the face of a trend of consolidation and mass marketing that started even before World War II. You’ll need to incentivize businesses to adopt that model, and then you’ll need to induce consumers to shop in their neighborhoods rather than hopping in their cars and going back out to the suburbs where they can get everything they need in one stop at a Target.
Repeating your post is not explaining your post. How does raising the gas tax make living in suburbia worse?
Raising the gas tax makes traveling more expensive. Are you saying that a certain amount of traveling is a necessary part of enjoying life in suburbia? If that’s the case then how can suburbia be a nice play to live if it’s necessary to go to other places to have a livable existence?
You said “People think living in suburbia is better than living in cities.” Why do you think that? More people live in cities than in suburbs. If people think suburbs are better, wouldn’t more people be living in them?
And you haven’t explained your remark about cities being shitholes. What did you mean by that?
Let’s not overlook an obvious possibility: cost of living.
Cities are high population areas. With lots of customers, there’s lots of collective customer demand and that keeps prices high. Things cost more in a city.
Communities that are isolated from cities have lower populations and are cheaper to live in.
But what happens when a new technology comes along that makes it possible to travel between the city and the small town? People in the city seek to take advantage of this possibility by moving to where it’s cheaper.
The first people that do this get the benefits. But as people keep doing it, they create large populations in these areas that used to be isolated. And as the populations of these areas grow, the cost of living grows with it. People seeking cheaper places to live make those places more expensive. And every time new development makes some new area accessible, the cycle repeats.
Seattle tries to do this by adding tolls, reducing the number of lanes for single-person traffic, and by adding better public transportation, but it doesn’t really work. It just causes a lot of congestion, bus routes that are crazy long, and most people living driving distance away from bus stops. Raising gas prices, adding tolls, etc. doesn’t do anything because you still have to have a car unless you’re lucky enough to be by one of the bus stops. Once sprawl has already occurred, it’s a bit late, since there isn’t a high enough density of people to support all the bus and train stops that would be necessary.
Public transportation is a great thing if you have the population density such that it is viable to put stops within walking distance of everything. But in order for that to happen, you need the population density. Using assholery, like gas taxes and whatnot, may work over the course of decades to bring the people into town but if you’re going to embark on a process that takes decades to succeed (if it will succeed), making everyone miserable doesn’t seem like a very good way to go about it.
Cities/counties/states would do better to zone the land so that a city can’t expand its outer border until it has hit a particular density. Work on making transportation - by any means, personal or public - reasonable and build it up to support everything as the population density grows. People will switch to public transportation once it’s reasonable for them to do so.
But even with very high population density, private transportation doesn’t go away. In Tokyo, for example, buses, trains, bicycles, walking, and cars are all equally common modes of transportation. You couldn’t ask for any more public transportation to be put into place and yet you still have people in cars. And if you got those people out of the cars, the trains would overflow. So there’s no really no harm in building up the road system, when you want a high population density. It will certainly get used.
Cities are economic and innovation engines. More people, more networking, more cross cultural pollination, more progress both social and technological.
Downside: when you pack all the rats in a cage they go insane.
Make living in the urban center as attractive as the suburbs WRT costs, schools, safety, and convenience, and people will go there. There is really no attraction for families downtown when you have to compromise on one or more of those things. Free markets and all that.
Political consolidation of cities with their suburbs might help somewhat. The high-value 'burbs contribute to the city’s tax base – OTOH, suburbanite votes are now a factor in city politics.
I believe that this is critical. And the way to do it is to change the municipal tax structure so that instead of being based on property value as is done in Canada, it is based on resource usage. So right now I live in what is a “used” house, on “used” land in an already existing 60-some year old grid of streets. Yet I and my neighbours are subsidizing the people of Crestfallen Estates for which new roads and utilities have to be constructed, in addition to costs for other services (snow removal, emergency services etc) which are less efficient because of the low density. With provinces forcing municipal amalgamations this actually forces public transit into rural areas in some cases (in Ottawa there is bus service out to small towns that are not contiguous with the physical Ottawa, for example). If people want to live that way, then they should pay for it.
Even in an infill development, which I’ve experienced in two different cities, everything is already there, ready to go, except for the townhouse, though the connection (maybe about 20 feet instead of several kilometers) is still required.
That only really works when you have a political divide between the built-up, high population density urban core and the suburbs.
Cities like Houston and Dallas (ones I’m most familiar with) already have huge areas of suburbs that are completely within the city limits and are part of the political process. In both cities, it seems that in general the suburbs that were created up through about the late 1970s are the ones that were annexed/built within city limits, and anything after that is part of a different town/city, or are unincorporated.
and velomont, around here, the typical growth plan is for new developments to be built outside the cities, and have the municipal services provided on a private basis, or by a municipal utility district (MUD) (a state-regulated entity that provides water and sewer service to an area).
If at some point, the nearby big city sees this development as a positive thing, they can annex it into themselves, provided that the area isn’t already incorporated as a town or village or something. The usual MO is for the city to wait and see which ones have high property values, and let the MUD pay off their infrastructure bonds, and then annex the area to basically rake in their cut of the property taxes, without assuming someone else’s debt or incurring large infrastructure costs.
Look up Kingwood in Houston as an example of what I describe.
Of course, we could always address tax/revenue issues without a consolidation. There are plenty of ways in which a city can get money out of commuters from the suburbs or the businesses that hire them.
For example, here in Washington, cities get only a small amount of property tax shared with them. Their revenue comes primarily from their share of sales tax, which is often about a third or a quarter of the total sales tax revenue. (Some goes to the county or state). But cities like Seattle also raise a lot of money through a gross receipts tax on businesses and an “hours tax” based on the number of employees.
On the other coast, New York City has its own income tax.
Since Paris is only the 69th densest city in the world and approximately 300 million people live in cities as dense as Paris or denser, so there apparently are people who disagree with you. The key is to realize that the existence of inframarginal cases does not mean there are no marginal cases.
I just moved out of Washington DC, and while the crime rate was higher, I had more places that were easier to get to buy fresh food than my somewhat close in suburb. I had three supermarkets within a mile, with a Whole Foods on the way, I had a farmer’s market on Saturdays, about a block from my house, and more restaurants than I could keep track of. We also had quite a few parks nearby.
I moved out of the cities because of schools and costs. We couldn’t find anything in a decent school zone with four bedrooms in our budget that didn’t need a lot of work.
In some cases, the cities are coming back. DC has hit a sprawl point and traffic congestion point where it doesn’t make sense to live in the outer suburbs. Commuting to DC from Loudoun County will take over an hour each way.