You’ll find a whole lot more of it in the cities.
Better than it is now, certainly.
Of course, its auto industry would still be in trouble – city planning and suburban annexation can do nothing about global economic forces or corporate-management decisionmaking.
One of the biggest complaints about suburban sprawl is that it is not good capitalism, it relies heavily on state subsidies to be viable and that the tax base it creates is no where nere sufficient to pay for its costs.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/quantifying-cost-sprawl/5664/
If you want to live in sprawl, quit expecting the rest of us to pay for it, what are you, some kind of socialist?
Yes, if there’s one thing that Levittowns are known for, it’s the lack of strict planning.
(The others make even less sense than that, and point 3 in particular is not-even-wrong)
Rereading this to cut down the quote, I had something occur to me: you do realize that, um, some people like city ;living, right? Because I get the sense you think anyone who can will flee the cities for suburbia, which, if it were true, would make parts of this marginally more coherent.
Even if he doesn’t express it well, he does echo how I feel about it as well. I know there are people that prefer different types of lifestyles ranging from urban to suburban to rural to completely isolated. It is only the first group that is a direct threat to the rest. I have lived in real cities ranging New Orleans to Boston proper plus rural, isolated, and now suburban areas and it is astounding at the amount of close-mindedness many city people towards the people that don’t want to live not only in the city, but in many cases, their specific neighborhood.
There are people that live in Manhattan or Boston proper that practically never go further than 10 miles away from home unless there are exceptional circumstances for example and that is little different from a 19th century farmer in terms of overall community or world experience.
I don’t want them deciding anything about my kid’s schools anymore than I want someone who never leaves their farm community helping to make decisions about inner-city public transportation. The difference is that suburban or rural people don’t assume that they know what is best for their city brethren nor do they care. Some people, especially liberal or progressive types in the city, on the other hand seem to have no problem espousing at length on grand plans for everyone and everything just because they are used to that type of central planning in their local environment,
It isn’t welcome or wise especially given the (lack of) information available to the average person no matter how well intended. Let the people who live in each particular environment decide what is best for their needs.
Why do people think that suburbs are something new (post WWII)? The fact is, as soon as street cars came along (1860’s), people started moving away from city centers. the reasons were the same as today-more room, less noise, less crowding.
The only way that city living can be made tolerable was by building high rise housing-which required that elevators be available (they came in in the 1880’s).
LeCorbusier thought that cities should demolish all their low rise housing and replace them by giant high rise buildings…this worked well in the case of luxury housing, not so well in the case of public housing (see "Cabrini Green housing complex).
How are other people paying for it, though? If Suburbtown has to provide these services, it’s their budget this stuff’s coming out of. My suburban city of Burlington, ON doesn’t get municipal transfers from Toronto; the presumably higher costs for fire protection, sewers et al. have to come out of Burlington’s (or Halton Region’s - which includes two other suburban cities) revenue. It’s a big revenue pool, about 400,000 people, but it hardly compares with Toronto’s 2.7 million. Yet it’s self-funding, so clearly we ARE paying for it - and, indeed, almost every suburban municipality has a higher property tax rate than Toronto. So people are paying for it, and seem willing to.
Where the falldown is is in things at the intermunicipal level. Services shared between municipalities, like mass regional transit, are either underfunded or don’t exist at all because no one municipality will build them.
Really? Including the highways, which are plentiful and wide and heavily travelled in suburbia? I don’t think so. I believe it is the state collectively, including a very high proportion of whose population that lives in the most densely populated urban areas, that is paying for that.
What is new post-WWII is the suburb designed around the automobile, to the point where it is impractical to live there without one. I hope you can recognize that as a problem; why it is a problem has been covered extensively in this thread.
Another thing very nearly new post-WWII is the mass-produced tract-house suburb, every house the same. That is not just an esthetic problem, it produces residential segregation by income. If every house in the neighborhood is more or less the same then it costs more or less the same, and only people whose income falls within a certain range will live there – the richer will not and the poorer cannot. I hope you can recognize that as a problem.
I’m reminded of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, depicting an ultra-collectivist city-state in the far future. It had long ago been made a crime to live outside the “Green Wall”, and a tiny population of people in the wilderness had gone without fire to avoid detection for so long that they’d re-evolved fur.
I missed it. Can you summarize why automobile dependent cities are a problem?
This is only true if you assume that everyone will utilize their purchasing power in the proportion for housing relative to all other spending in the same way. In reality, you’ll get a mix of folks who are willing to spend as a proportion more or less of their income on housing. There will be a floor of course, but that is true anywhere. You’ll have to explain why it is a problem for a person to choose to live in a place that self selects those above a certain income. This is a feature, not a problem.
A lot of sprawl in unincorporated, so it is paid for by taxpayers elsewhere in the state. Virginia put a moratorium on building cul de sacs because this kind of sprawl was too much of a burden, cul de sacs push everyone onto a few through streets and overwhelmed servies like fire, police, water and sewage without paying their share.
I find it odd that some people seem to think that cities are these oppressive planned societies when it is the suburbs that have the reputation for stultifying conformity. Every few months someone starts a thread about how upset they are that someone has parked in front of their house, and it always leaves me scratching my head. Who cares? He parked there because he wanted to.
Aside from the fact that it leads to greater obesity (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/07/how-sprawl-makes-fighting-childhood-obesity-so-much-harder/6321/) and causes us to fight wars in the Middle East for access to oil?
- Cars burn petroleum. This presents the problems of a) resource depletion and b) greenhouse-gas emission.
- Cars are expensive, a) placing a financial burden on the owner – cost of purchase, maintenance, fuel – and the more you drive, the more you drive the more you have to spend on fuel and maintenance; and b) placing a financial burden on society – it costs a lot to build and maintain all those streets and roads and signs and traffic signals, and have LEOs patrol the highways for speeders and drunk drivers when they could be actually fighting crime, and to have specialized courts for traffic offenses, and state Departments of Motor Vehicles – all expenses our society will have to bear in any case, but, they are roughly proportional to the amount of driving that gets done – the more traffic, the more wear and tear on the roads, the more traffic violations, etc. It also costs a lot to have the Navy patrol the sea-lanes, etc., to make sure our supply of imported petroleum is never interrupted.
- Suburbs were designed for raising children, but it is not good for kids to grow up where they can’t go anywhere unless Mom drives them. See post #161 and #271.
- Adults can’t go for a walk either, not even to the corner store for a jug of milk.
Monoculture is a problem. If you grow up in a neighborhood where no family has much less than $50,000/year income nor much more than $150k/yr, you grow up thinking those are the normal people, the real people, and the others don’t matter, and you won’t know much about the others but what you see on TV. That is not good for any society and especially not for a democratic-republican society. It is better to have a wide range of home prices in a neighborhood because it is better to have a wide range of kinds of people in a neighborhood.
There was a time, pre-WWII, when most suburbs were at least built with low-income housing for the upper-income homeowners’ servants. Nowadays, if you have any, they probably have to commute from the city or from a lower-income suburb; not in any way efficient.
I’d need a cite for both the causal effect of automobile dependent cities on obesity and wars in the middle east.
Back to the McMansion hijack: I guess I hear what you guys are saying, but I still think most people’s use of the term boils down to “house more expensive than mine”. Tony Soprano’s house isn’t on a small lot. It’s not garish architecturally. It’s well furnished and not cheap inside. It’s just a nice, large, suburban house.
Of course it was built at the same time as the other houses in the neighborhood. That’s how developers build neighborhoods. That doesn’t make it a McMansion.
It’s a very overused term.
Yes, cars cost money, and depletable resources. People choose to pay it because they value the utility they receive from that ownership. Infrastructure costs and externalities associated with automobiles are covered by various surcharges and taxes. This is not a problem.
Regarding raising kids - I think parents are probably the best judge of what’s the best environment to raise their kids in. Many choose the suburbs. Are you saying you know better than them?
Can I just state that monoculture is not a problem? (not that I subscribe to that, but it is as supported a statement of fact as the opposite view) 50-150K is a pretty big range, and is actually what I would call a normal household in some regions of the country. It doesn’t follow that others don’t matter so you’ll have to explain how you draw that conclusion. What would you consider to be a wide range of home prices to satisfy your premise that you need this in order to know about folks in other income brackets? 10k - 2M? Make a suggestion.
I mentioned neither, but the causal effect in each case is too obvious to need a cite, isn’t it? We don’t eat much more than our ancestors, do we? But we walk less, in our daily lives; that causes obesity. As for the Iraq War, yes, it was about the oil, but not the way you think. Still, the oil would not have been so politically salient if America’s demand for it were less.
This is pretty much the longest and most slippery slope anyone has ever tossed into a debate.
Maybe there is a better way of building a society than the one we have, which is based on things like cars and gasoline. But it’s hardly fair to describe it as a “problem”. It’s like the old joke about capitalism: It’s the worst system, except for all the others. I’m sure in your imagination you can come up with a better system where everyone jogs to work every morning, but that’s just not reality.
Meh. I don’t see this as a big problem. Just like people tend to marry someone with about the same IQ and income potential as themselves, people want to live around them as well. I’d much rather live in a middle class suburb with people who work for a living than in an inner city with thugs and welfare recipients. I don’t think that’s anything I should apologize for.
Read “The Big Sort” if you haven’t already. It makes a lot of long arguments as to the problems caused by people voluntarily segregating themselves. But it’s a bit underwhelming.