I haven’t read the thread yet, but the obvious answer is an aggressive large mammal of some kind. Lions maybe. Plus they would need to be armed. Yeah. Lions with machine guns.
Or we could just go with bears with flamethrowers.
I don’t know why we want to encourage people to move back to the cities. How about we encourage the jobs to move out of the cities to where the people are?
Get rid of tolls and raise the gas tax. Do it with Krauthammer’s proposal so it’s revenue neutral. This would help discourage people from doing long commutes and telecommute.
Stop putting things in cities. There’s no reason for an airport or a sports stadium to be located in an area that’s already got lots of traffic. Put them 30 miles away to spread things out.
Limit new construction in cities. Instead of adding more and taller buildings downtown, encourage new office parks out in the suburbs near where people already live.
You’re also presupposing that there’s a viable suburban option for all these people to live in within these various cities, and that’s not necessarily the case. For example, some of the Paris suburbs (Levallois-Perret and Le Pre-St. Gervais in particular) are drastically higher than Paris proper in terms of population density.
And most of the really dense cities tend to be in developing countries like India and the Phillipines. I don’t know if the people there have an option to live anywhere else or in any other way.
You can’t look at those cities and claim that those people are necessarily living there by choice; a lot of it is a combination of poverty and lack of other options.
I kinda agree with this line of thinking, actually. ISTM, however, that numerous mayors and city councils have undertaken “redevelopment” projects that promise to “revitalize” their downtowns. It’s probably politics, but there appears to be a lot of city envy for places like NYC and SF where the urban core is a bustling place where people WANT to live, work, and play. I always question the purpose and motive of such revitalization projects.
Here in Sacramento, they are building a brand new basketball and “entertainment” complex downtown, with the idea it will revitalize the area. Keep in mind there are few people living in that district, and most of the government workers vacate the area in the evenings. I don’t entirely get why there is this need to get people downtown - most of the population is stretched-out toward the suburbs to the east - downtown is not even centrally-located any more. Office buildings have sprouted in every suburb now so there is no center of commerce - it is spread all over the metro area. This is a case for a lot of cities.
New York City has 10,756 people per square kilometer, Singapore has 7,615, per Wikipedia.
This is also one of those comparisons where the city boundaries, which in the case of large cities often have little to do with the CITY, has a lot to do with it. The City of Paris is a very small part of Paris and covers only the inner, densest part of it; New York City incorporates Manhattan, which is much more analogous to the City of Paris, with the physically much more massive but les densely populated boroughs of Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx. Manhattan has a higher population density than Paris.
Please explain how you think this would work. Will both spouses always be employed in the same edge city? Will people never change jobs, or will they move to another house when they do?
There’s a sort of naïve appeal to the idea that, in a polycentric metropolis, commutes would be reduced because people could work close to where they live. But this assumes a single breadwinner who will stay forever at a single job close to home or move when he takes another job. In fact, what actually happens is that people choose home locations based on things like school districts or big yards and then two workers drive long distances in opposite directions to work. Much better to put the jobs in the middle/transit-served CBD, so people can live wherever they want, and employers can draw from the entire metropolitan area.
And even attempts to not look at city boundaries are complicated by nobody doing it the same way. In the US it’s always done by adding up whole counties, so you have things like a Massachusetts-sized desert attached to the Los Angeles “combined statistical area.”
While this looks good on paper, in reality employment centers are already dispersed as suburban cities encourage development of office parks on cheap land to expand their own tax base. If you were to encourage large employers to relocate their offices back to the downtown area, you’d have to heavily incentivize them to do so - they would need some sort of advantage ($$). The problem now is how to get the horse back in the barn - are you going to tell suburban cities they cannot build offices because those office jobs are needed downtown?
Yes and no. While it isn’t as necessary for businesses to be physically close to each other, concentrations of businesses attract talent. And concentrations of talent attracts businesses. That’s why you have places like Silicon Valley and Wall Street rather than see tech companies and banks uniformly dispersed all over the country.
The main problem with cities, especially older ones, is that they are very slow and expensive to radically change their structure and layout as technology changes over time. Cities also must accommodate a variety of scales, based on transportation modes.
For example, Boston was formed in the 1600s. I assume its insane maze of streets downtown largely follow the original footpaths and wagon trails. Built to the scale of pedestrians, it’s a very walkable city, but unfortunately that also makes driving into Boston a congested nightmare.
Newer cities like Dallas or Phoenix are designed around the automobile. They are much more spread out, making them easier to drive in, but you also don’t have a lot of self-contained mix-use neighborhoods like you do in New York or Boston.
There certainly are advantages to living in suburbs of single-family homes. It takes a lot of money to live in New York and even money doesn’t buy you a ton of apartment space, let alone green space.
Depends what part. Manhattan is way denser than Paris, but when you include Staten Island, it brings the average way down.
I didn’t realize this, but the Guttenberg / Union City / West New York / Hoboken area of New Jersey where I live are actually the densest cities in the US.
I don’t know why you think people would have to work in the same suburb. If a job is basically anywhere else but in a large city then it’s commutable in ways that a city never would be.
Let’s compare Boston to say, Lowell. If you have a job in Boston that will be an ugly commute from just about any suburb. Even a ten or fifteen mile commute will often take an hour. If you locate that same job in Lowell, which is an “edge city” about 40 miles away, you can have a good commute into that from just about anywhere in a 30 or 40 mile radius. From the North or East there would be light traffic because you aren’t near Boston yet. From the South or West you’d be reverse commuting. You could easily have a 30 minute commute in dozens of communities.
The choice for a married couple isn’t what city for them both to work in or what suburb for them both to work in. It should be more of a “North of Boston” vs “South of Boston” vs “MetroWest” that they need to agree on.
This is true, but it also pushes aside the original argument a little too easily. Dispersing the jobs more uniformly over the suburbs will still result in a given household having relatively less jobs accessible and lower overall job mobility. To drag the example we’re using to its ridiculous endpoint, if I live in MetroWest and can get on the commuter rail, I currently have access to all of the jobs in Boston and the MetroWest region. If we disperse everything in Boston to the suburbs, there are more jobs within MetroWest, but I can still get to fewer jobs overall since proportionally more of the jobs are now in places I can’t conveniently commute to. Not to mention we’re probably adding more traffic on the ring roads/beltways (128 and 495, here) by doing this, which further decreases my effective commute radius.
As for the thread itself, most of it is location dependant and you’d want to address it on the state or municipal level. There are a lot of cities that are doing really well, and where the solution would be to add more housing stock to push down rents/mortgages and make it affordable for the young and the middle class to stay in the city. There are a lot of cities that are doing less well, and where the focus needs to be on jobs, safe neighborhoods, and public services.
Fixing the way we tax transportation to support the road network is something that needs to be fixed independent of this entire discussion, though it’s certainly possible that the solution might be somewhat more pro-urban than what we currently have. Pretty much every serious transportation policy expert, for example, favors basing long-term road maintenance funds on a per-mile-traveled tax rather than the gas tax.
For many types of businesses, the tide has already turned. Millennials, especially anyone connected with tech or marketing, increasingly eschew jobs located in the suburbs. So to get the best talent, companies are moving back downtown. Chicago has had several big moves announced just this year, including Kraft, which had been in the suburbs since the early 1970s. Much of (what’s left of) Motorola has already come back; Walgreens is rumored to be next.
The suburban office park is largely an artifact of the era when companies needed lots of clerical workers, and found suburban women to be a well-educated, low-cost, and docile workforce.
Pondered this for a bit, and really hate the ideas of punishment I saw (raise gas taxes, etc). And raising fees I don’t feel would work as there is a desire to be there, and it is that desire we need to look at.
Many people move to the burbs for their families and better schools, many cities have poorer, more overcrowded less funded school systems. That has to be reversed so the cities have the best schools and the best teachers desire to teach in the cities.
Sacramento is unique in that it has the most spectacularly uncomprehending city planners on the planet, all of which are firmly in the pocket of a few robber-baron developers.
There is a lot of potential to downtown Sacramento (beautiful river, some small tourist attractions, gorgeous houses, a small bit lively hipster scene, the world’s largest piece of lucite) but for some reason the planners seen terrified of the people who actually live downtown (some of which are “urban”, which I suspect is part of why they see them as a problem) and instead of trying to build an urban ecosystem keep dropping unwanted “anchors” that have nothing to do with anything (Hard Rock Cafe? Seriously?) in hopes that somehow drawing suburbanites into downtown for…I don’t know.
Urban renewal can work- I live in DC now, which underwent a spectacular transformation. But it has to be done with commitment to the city center.
I’ve been to Oregon. Can’t remember a single street that wasn’t beautiful. Mt Hood (I’m pretty sure it was Hood; you could see it for miles & miles & miles) was one darn pretty view on the horizon.
Bad school systems don’t come from lack of funding. It’s been proven time & again that increasing the funding of bad schools does not make them better.
Inner-city schools do poorly because inner-city residents do not support them. The sad fact is that too many people simply do not value education. School is where you send the kids during the day to keep them out of trouble while you go to work. Whether they actually learn anything while they’re there is of little concern. That is why most inner-city schools are terrible.
Stop subsidizing the suburbs. It’s cheaper to provide city services to dense areas, so scale tax and utility rates according to the cost of serving the area the person lives in. Similarly, take money out of freeway construction and put it into mass transit. If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere, why should the rest of us pay for it?
This is the point that all the people calling the gas tax punitive are missing. Fuel and user taxes are already failing to fully fund road construction, which is coming out of the general fund instead.[1] Modern suburbs require an awful lot of state subsidies to survive, both because of increased transportation costs and because of increased everything else costs (there is at least some amount of per-square-mile cost involved in electricity delivery, water delivery, police, fire, EMT, etc.) If you want to incentivize urban sprawl reversal, the first step is to stop subsidizing the very urban sprawl you’re attempting to avoid. Governments should not be transferring money from cities to their (relatively) inefficient suburbs.
I would also argue that the way we fund transportation projects is totally broken, and that these funds (whether for highway, local roads, or mass transit) shouldn’t be coming from a remote federal bureaucracy that doesn’t really know what the local priorities and preferences are. There doesn’t seem to be any political will to fix this, though, so the federal grant process for transportation will continue apace.
Urban Sprawl was pretty much the perfect answer to Nuclear Weapons. When everything is packed into a small area, it’s very easy to destroy it. When millions sprawl across a thousand square miles or so, it’s almost impossible to nuke it all.
As we saw when gasoline temporarily skyrocketed, people started having second thoughts about spending 3 hours in a car every day going to and from work just so they could afford a larger house.
I tend to think it will work itself out over time.
Why do you think cities are subsidizing the suburbs? Yes, things cost more outside of cities, but what does that have to do with the cities paying towards it? I live in a rural area, in a state that’s mostly rural areas, and one of the costs of that choice is a higher cost of living. Property taxes are higher here, utilities costs are a great deal more expensive, medical costs are much higher than the US average, houses and apartments both cost more, building materials and labor cost more due to the cost to ship them and so on across the board with costs all together being 16% higher than the US average.
Because it’s very common for some areas to pay more in state taxes and fees than they receive back and for others to receive more than they pay - and no doubt there are many areas where the divide is between cities and suburbs. It isn’t always- the divide in NY seems to be between NYC and its immediate suburbs vs the rest of the state. This is five years old, and the numbers may have changed but the general trend still holds.
Now, none of that means that there is anything wrong with subsidies - but it is where the idea comes from.