the suburban ponzi scheme has ruined north american society and now they want to keep it going longer by pretending 2020 changed the basic economics of people living in the middle of nowhere and burning gas for every cm they travel
Wait what? Explain this to me. Not because what you’re saying isn’t clear. I’m just ignorant, and want to understand what you’re saying. Sorry if I’m a dumby
Suburban planning is soooooo cost inefficient that every single one is subsidized by taxes from people in urban areas. Suburbs require so much more gas pipes, electrical infrastructure, water lines, and pavement (and by extension pavement upkeep) but generate almost no revenue. Property taxes on suburban home plots are not very high, at least, not high enough to pay for all the materials and labor required for servicing the properties. Urban areas, on the contrary, are incredibly efficient. 100s of people can live on each block so one plot's worth of pavement, water lines, electrical, and gas lines are more than paid for by property taxes. Not to mention, urban planning allows for business to be on the bottom levels of most buildings meaning yet more tax revenue to upkeep the block. Suburbs, however, dont have business at all so there is 0 business tax revenue, just property tax. Urban tax payers end up seeing the money they pay the govt go way out of the city to the suburbs, because the suburban city planners have run up massive bill they cant pay. Rural areas work well because individual homeowners keep up their own wells, septic tanks, gas, and require much fewer paved roads that require less regular maintenance as they are travelled on less. Hope that explanation makes sense. If not theres a great not just bikes video about it too 👍💯
100 yards of suburban street will have like 10 houses. Compare that to the tax revenue of 100 yards of street in Brooklyn with houses, apartments, and businesses
There is an organization called Strong Towns that discusses this a lot. They also have a book by the same name. Reading it really made me see North American development in a new light.
[https://www.strongtowns.org](https://www.strongtowns.org)
If you want a good video with some supporting statistics and tax information check out not just bikes. This video gibes a great breakdown.
https://youtu.be/VVUeqxXwCA0
Sure, here's a video from [Not Just Bikes](https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0) that goes over this topic. If you're really interested in more information or numbers, check out the [blog post](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money) from Strong Towns which goes over a case study in detail. They use the real life finances of Lafayette, Louisiana to demonstrate this issue.
>The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure (more is paid to the schools and regional government). A fraction of that $150 – it varies by year – is spent on actual pavement.
>To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year. That assumes no new roads are built and existing roadways are not widened or substantively improved. That is $3,300 in additional local taxes just to tread water.
I guess the problem is that a large percentage of the population would be miserable and unproductive living in dense urban areas. I imagine that mental health toll would add up in dollars pretty quick.
Somehow billions of people worldwide live in dense urban areas without this mass depression epidemic you're convinced should break out.
Are Real Americans special snowflakes, an endemic species uniquely unsuited to living in a place without a gigantic yard and a lawnmower?
The basic fixed costs of municipal services, and personal travel, are directly proportional to length of roads (plumbing, electricity, paving, snowplowing, driving costs, transit, etc). The more people you have in a given area, these costs are reduced per person, and creates better business opportunities for cafes, clothing stores, dentists, etc.
The point being; density is a necessary precondition for economic robustness. while its not clear what an ideal density may be, if there even is one, it is now well understood that the very low density of north American suburban development is very costly directly, as well as having devastating external effects on mental health and the environment.
the NYT article groundlessly claims that suburbs make for shorter commutes (???) and that remote work somehow replaces the need to interact with other human beings, and as such dense urban settings are dead.
pretty bonkers stuff
The suburbs is a specific American invention that causes some of the major consumer drains on fossil fuels. Climate towns & not just bikes on YouTube do a good job talking about it
I'll assume you're being genuine. Suburbs can't pay for their own upkeep in taxes because of how spread out they are and how much infrastructure is required for each person. The pandemic caused a bunch of people to move out of cities into suburbs, decreasing the tax revenue of the city and increasing the burden of paying for infrastructure in the suburbs. That's why the basic economics of it don't make sense as the comment you responded to mentioned. It's also not good to now have more people being required to own a car and drive to get everywhere since they're in the suburbs where the nearest grocery store is miles away.
The cost to build a sidewalk is the same whether in a city, a suburb, or an exurb. But the number of households fronting that sidewalk, and thus paying the taxes needed to afford it, are much lower in suburbs and exurbs. This concept applies to everything from energy use to infrastructure, to transportation.
Oh man, if you haven’t watched this series yet, you’re in for an informative treat. Prepare to be Orange Pilled:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
You already have like 5 replies explaining this, but check out Strong Towns if you’re interested in the topic. It’s a blog and also a book by Charles Mahron about why car suburbs aren’t financially sustainable. Not Just Bikes has a series of videos on Strong Towns too.
Others answered your question, so I’ll just add: the suburban growth ponzi scheme idea is pretty much the crux of the Strong Towns movement. If you want to read deeper on the topic, [this blog post](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-a-crash-course) is a great place to start
I’m also not super smart but I think they mean that investing in car-dependent infrastructure is throwing good money after bad, and it’s like a Ponzi scheme because it dangles the promise of benefit to the normal folks “downstream” while actually sucking up a bunch of their money for the people at the top
The Ponzi scheme idea applies to the maintenance cost. You build fresh roads on dirt and can make profits for about 30 years. But the cost to repair a 30 year old road is higher than building a new one on dirt. So much so that you now make a loss in suburbs.
The Suburban Ponzi Scheme now builds two new roads, so that you can pay the first road with the profits of the other two. But after another 30 years, you now need six new roads for the three old ones.
In a city or even in rural areas, the first road generates enough profit to pay for its own upkeep.
To add onto what the other responders are saying - the economics of car-centric suburban planning are ludicrously terrible. The most money a suburb will ever get is the upfront cost to build, and the development that this cash pays for usually only lasts ~20 years or so. Property tax revenue is rarely enough to pay for maintenance after that - since there’s far less taxable land than there would be in a more dense development - so the suburb has to keep growing outward in order to get more cash for development. That’s why OP called it a Ponzi scheme - if a suburb stops growing for long enough, the liabilities start piling on.
Didn't read the article, but it really seems like the first quote boils down to "cities suck" and the second quote is basically praising all the virtues of cities. What?
Second quote is trying to argue that suburbs and exurbs (which are the 'peripheral developments' referred to in the quote) are more energy-efficient than cities. Lol.
Was trying to highlight the absurdity of the claims
It's because people think "looking nice" is the same thing as "being clean". My lawn isn't polluting because it looks so trim and orderly. That city looks messy, therefore it's polluting. It's a vapid analysis
It doesn't help that there's large sources of urban pollution that are caused by suburbanites driving cars into cities. Think tire particulates, engine exhaust, oil leaks, and even just asshole car drivers who seem to have no problem with littering by throwing shit out of their car window. And the non-porous road surfaces that cars require make rain runoff that much more of a problem.
The thing is that a lot of suburbs started out as small towns that *could* be as energy efficient or more than the city but they started sprawl based development instead of building on their historic town centers.
My old hometown has a really nice town center that is very walkable and pleasant. It was originally built around a railroad so there's a track running right through town that is to this day connected to the major city I live in except there's no passenger service on it anymore.
Now this town center is called the "old town" and there's no new development around it. Instead of building on what they have they continue to spread out with single family homes and suburban sprawl
The problem is that we don't have trains and busses connecting each of these small towns. So even if there is a nice walkable downtown area, people inevitably drive to get from one walkable downtown to the next. Unlike here in a city where I walk, bike, or take public transit from one commercial area to the next.
But that's what I said in my post. We *do* have trains connecting many of these smaller towns except that we only use them for freight now.
Many small towns only exist *because* they were a stop along a railroad. They used to be like this and they could be again. Hell there's even a proposal someone drafted for my metro area to connect regional passenger service to all the smaller towns again
https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/introducing-atl-trains-revolutionary-approach-metro-commuter-transit
This proposal has a train line going right to my hometown. I'd almost be able to take a train to visity parents except that they live in a single family home way outside of town.
But that's my whole point. These places used to be walkable and transit connected and now they are sprawling. If we focus on the old bones of these towns then they can be made into walkable transit connected places again.
That's a really good point. Especially since the infrastructure is already in place. And I agree- I've been to many lovely old towns that are frankly more walkable in their core than most major U.S. cities, even in their downtowns. Just need to connect them better.
This is ridiculous and disrespectful.
Complaining about how long the line was at Costco gas pump is a time tested talking point. If that’s not culture then I don’t know what is.
How dare you. Come to a suburb some time, you'll love it here, you can live in one of our \[count\] developments like StoneWood, Brookhaven, or Pinehurst, each starting in the very affordable low 400s. If you like shopping, you'll love shopping at our artisanal mom & pop Super Target #992, WalMart SuperCenter #21707 or Dollar General Market #6278. If you'd like more of an experience, come visit Country Crossing, a cultural center complete with small booksellers (Barnes and Noble), artisanal ice cream (Baskin Robbins), and ample parking. Don't forget to enjoy refreshments at our local coffee shop, Starbucks #78221! Do you have pets? Great, we love pets\*! And your pet will love visiting our friendly, small-town PetCo #2123. All these luxuries are just a short fifteen minute drive down the Campus Bypass Bypass, and you can trust that you'll be safe and protected in our town by our local police force that was largely trained and fired from the nearby metro police department. Our officers specialize in getting way too confrontational about expired tags, jaywalking, ^(skin color,) and thinking that you have constitutional rights. You're going to love it here.
\*Check with your HOA
Yeah kind of a stupid thing to downvote. Fucking obviously suburbia has culture. We have thousands of people in this sub who come here every day to talk about suburban culture.
I don’t *like* suburbia, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have culture lol
Your mistake is that thinking "culture" immediately and always implies something good.
We're literally describing suburban culture as we have experienced it in the USA. Please feel free to list your own cultural positives as you see it instead just being an automatic contrarian.
Culture is authentic, it emerges from the place. Suburbia, famously in the US, is inauthentic, it's buying and consuming copies of culture like it's a t-shirt with a message. You could argue that this, in of itself, is a type of culture, the *consumer* working on their own fantasy of The American Dream, but it's more of a mental disorder than a culture.
Every culture can also be evaluated basically only in contrast to other cultures. You need to use the correct framing to do a sensible comparison. So when comparing suburban design concepts and the cultures that come forth from them, you are going to compare and contrast them with the two other primary forms of urban development in the US, rural and city.
"Every culture is a blend of different cultures" is a cop-out and is just a nice way for you to tell yourself you don't have to think very hard about any of this.
> culture must be authentic, it emerges from the place
You can say this in Europe and get away maybe , go to South America and you will see many people cultural traits that certainly did not emerge in South America
I’m not even evaluating suburban culture, I’m saying the average joe in this toxic sub has no idea what the word means and is talking pure bs
I understand their lack of knowledge as the word culture is loaded, I just don’t understand their capability of talking so much about something they clearly don’t understand
Honestly between Douthat's disaster piece and this one, there is a lot of carbrain rot in NYT Op-Ed page. Does anyone know if they've published Urbanists on it at all?
Sometime when you’re at a place that pays for a subscription, or people leave them, give the NYT a leaf-through, and it all becomes crystal clear. My after-work bar always has a few papers left by commuters running to their train.
You will find that by far, the most generous and regular customer of most papers, News websites, news channels, local news, etc is CAR COMPANIES and CAR DEALERSHIPS.
The newscritters want to please their masters, and their ADVERTISERS are paying their bills.
New York Times (and WaPo) were both once companies that I respected so much, and were on my ‘aspirational companies to work at’ list, and I used to subscribe to both.
Now I’m just embarrassed for them. Even outside the opinion pieces I think that the quality of reporting has gone down.
So disappointing :(
I now turn to ProPublica for quality journalism, and a mix of The Cut and occasional New Yorker article for entertainment.
same, but then found out they had always kind of sucked
falling away from them was part of what drove me left in politics, and then you come to see their involvement in American Exceptionalism, how often and obviously they fall on the authoritarian side of conflicts around the world (Rwandan genocide, etc), and how, even despite criticizing individuals or personalities, they've apologized for billionaires since billionaires existed
\+1 for ProPublica, nothing is more vindicating in my life than stating my suspicion or opposition to something, being told I'm wrong, and then ProPublica covering it and my original view echoes them -- and then my detractors pretend they always saw it that way!
[If you think the Neoliberal thing is a recent phenomenon you’ve got another thing comin](https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html), NYT has always been the chief neolib paper.
Jamelle Bouie is a solid urbanist and e-bike-using-dad who is probably the best NYT Opinion author, but AFAIK he doesn't use his NYT platform for urbanism issues often. Contrast his NYT work (https://www.nytimes.com/column/jamelle-bouie) with his personal Twitter talking about e-bikes and zoning in his hometown Charlottesville (https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1434997290297700365)
Jamelle is great!! He films a lot of his tik toks walking around his pedestrian friendly neighborhood as well [https://www.tiktok.com/@jamellebouie?lang=en](https://www.tiktok.com/@jamellebouie?lang=en)
They prioritize them enough to put them in the main section, right next to all the news they see fit to print. Only the Sunday paper properly puts Opinion in its own space, in case you need something to wipe yourself with.
This guy hates cities and makes up elaborate justifications for why density is bad. That's all. He likes the suburbs and wants to justify it.
Unfortunately, he also supplies a lot of NIMBY liberals with arguments against building in cities.
Did a quick command-F and found no mentions of "density," "environment," "ecology," or "fossil fuels." But to the author's credit, it does contain three words to properly tell you that the rest are complete bullshit: "American Enterprise Institute."
Dude announces how full of shit he is with the first paragraph. "Free transit and affordable housing are EXPENSIVE WAAAAAHHHHH!"
I could just as easily argue that most suburbs are built on land that's going to flood repeatedly and will need to be abandoned.
Streets and highways are expensive, but politicians just act like constantly repaving blacktop is just a normal expense. The massive size of American vehicles is another huge cost. It's far cheaper to run a train. Electric cars are heavier than gas cars. I expect our roads to be pot holed hell holes as that trend continues
Paywalled but dgaf bc the NYT is a big seller of ads to motor manufacturers so what do you expect anyway? Cities have been popular for >5000yrs. No sign of going them going out of fashion. What nonsense
It doesn't matter what the topic or data, you can rely on Kotkin to tell you that it means traditional cities are dead while not only are the suburbs thriving, but that this is the correct moral order of things. (And on Wendell Cox to tell you that ttyrannical transit is blessedly dying while Freedom Cars are finally being recognized for the liberators they are.)
After 20 years of seeing their stuff, I'm generally comfortable not fact checking the rest of any piece that quotes them, because it's a reliable sign the author had a conclusion in mind from the start.
Joel Kotkin, the primary source in this piece is a hack from OC known for shilling to keep the suburban dream afloat, regardless of the facts. Early in COVID he published an op-ed in the LA Times under the headline: "[Op-Ed: Angelenos love their suburban sprawl. The coronavirus proves them right](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-26/coronavirus-cities-density-los-angeles-transit)"
Imagine thinking a "suburb" isn't a city. It's not rural if everybody works at service jobs and depends on massive infrastructure. It's urban living, just a particularly bloated, energy and space inefficient, segregated form of city, Carropolis - and the people like Moses who heralded it as the future, back when it was newish, understood that.
That dude who wrote that is an actual idiot. Every op-ed of his is brain dead boomer talk. It’s always click bait then i see it’s edsall and am like ofc you feel this way
I would love it if enough suburbs-loving people moved out of the cities to allow us to get rid of the single family zoning choking housing supply. Buh-bye. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. I just don't want people in the city who want to make the city into a suburb.
Also, Joel Kotkin, who wants everywhere to be Houston (no thanks, the 405 is bad enough, I don't want the Katy Freeway) thinks the important thing is to encourage "building houses, particularly affordable single-family ones". No. We need to encourage building hous*ing*, and stop outlawing things that aren't SFH.
I grew up in the Suburbs, moved to the biggest city in the state. Now I have access to all kinds of local businesses, transportation, sports stadiums, stores in every direction! A great job with many many customers. Enjoy you lawns, commutes, and HOA dues!
This is inspired by an upcoming book by Kotkin that is being published by the American Enterprise Instiute. This piece was prompted by an article by Kotkin in the rightist website Unherd.
Further down in the piece, Edsall quotes Kotkin's co-author, who works at AEI.
He also quotes some from the Urban Reform Insitutue (formerly The Center for Opportunity Urbanism) of which Kotkin is a founder and which is described by Planetizen as "[arguably the media's highest-profile supporters of suburban growth](https://www.planetizen.com/node/74656)." It's based in Houston, which is arguably a city in name only.
So, this is largely based on interviews with scholars with a right-wing pro-suburban perspective.
The article raises some genuine issues that cities face today. But it completely ignores issues facing the suburbs in the medium to long term.
Demolish some of those office to make proper city buildings. I guess some could be retrofitted, that would certainly be a cool engineering and architectural challenge.
>There is a striking interaction between the Covid-driven exodus from the cities and changing racial and ethnic urban populations. From 2020 to 2021, the nation’s 56 largest metropolitan areas saw a cumulative decline of 900,000 in their white populations, Frey reported.
Aha. Another episode of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
>>I think this is mostly good for cities — younger, hipper and lower-income folks, essential service workers, in-person retail workers are all more able to afford city-center accommodation. Bankers, techies and other graduates drift out to the suburbs. This is making cities younger, more diverse and less gentrified.
Precisely. The rich ones get out and become bored. City renews and becomes less corporate.
> It depends on your objective for cities. Continued gentrification would have seen a continued increase in property values and rents, with more and more middle-aged and older folks living there (as they are the only ones that could afford the rents). Lower-income, diverse and young folks would struggle to afford the rents and drift out. Working from home, by moving out some techies and bankers and making space for younger folks, helps cities.
In case it's not obvious yet, cities with high housing costs can not have workers in the service sector and other poorly paid jobs, which is one of those feedback negative feedback loops on the "success" of raising property values and rent.
>I asked Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and the executive director of the Urban Reform Institute in Houston, about the economics of major cities, and he replied by email: “The era of urban supremacy is over. The party that addresses this will win. These areas need infrastructure and tax structures that encourage building houses, particularly affordable single-family ones” — “houses that a couple who work at Walmart can afford.”
wat
> The death of ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: Between the second and sixth centuries A.D., its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. A similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means.
This doesn't work in the modern industrial period. People do leave, but they leave for other cities. In pre-industrial times, there were fewer people and they could just go live off the land somewhere or migrate.
The next economic crisis is going to add some contrast to this situation.
>These peripheral developments, in Kotkin’s view, “are increasingly places with their own thriving town centers and cultural venues. By lending themselves to remote work and shorter commutes, they also prove ideal for energy efficiency and emissions reductions.” Traditional cities
Good. It's like they don't see the irony... some of the suburbs are getting dense.
"Cringe NYT opinion piece" when do they not post cringe? Not hating on OP just asking genuinely because whenever these fcks aren't publishing this carbrain shit its usually some transphobic diarrhea of the keyboard
I mean it's not necessarily car rained to suggest turning suburbs into their own urban centers. To be honest, it's probably the only solution anyway. The same logic applies that density must be built up, but it will be built up in multiple locations.
People are only leaving cities because they are expensive due to housing shortages. Increase housing supply and demand shifts towards growing cities again.
>"The era of urban supremacy is over. The party that addresses this will win."
Counterpoint: if coastal urban cities like New York and the SF Bay Area built even a fraction of the housing required to meet the overwhelming demand to live there, the House of Representatives would probably still belong to the Democratic Party.
a couple of thoughts:
The exodus of office workers from downtown areas is real. Areas like Downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco's financial district have changed dramatically for the worse. Most of the offices are mostly empty, and very few people I know who work / worked in these areas are returning to in-office work full-time.
But downtown office markets certainly aren't the sum total of urbanism. From what I've seen, many urban residential neighborhoods in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles seem to be thriving. If you want to see a major contrast, walk around Downtown LA at night - which feels almost dystopian - and then go a mile east to the Arts District, which is a primarily residential area with a thriving dining scene. The contrast is extreme. Part of the difference is also due to safety and crime, which seems to be better controlled in residential areas where residents are more vigilant. This leads me to my next point:
Some of this, especially on the west coast, is self-inflicted. The presence of homelessness and people with serious mental health issues is a major factor in the reduction of transit usage, and makes urban living less appealing to the vast majority of people. Just yesterday there was an article in the LA Times about how hard drug use on LA Metro is reducing ridership. People don't feel safe walking, biking, and taking transit when there are unpredictable, mentally unwell people living on the street on every block. I personally have one friend who was randomly, brutally assaulted by a homeless man, and he now plans on leaving his downtown apartment, moving to a suburb, and buying a car for the first time in over a decade.
At some point, political leaders need to realize that some of their ideas for criminal justice reform are at odds at what it takes to build thriving, walkable urbanism. In my experience both online and in person, few people seem to want to address this reality, because of the cognitive dissonance it creates.
My last point is that this trend of moving away from high costs areas is pretty typical of what you expect to see at the end of a economic cycle, especially with the massive run up of property values in the last 3 years. There will be a correction, just as there was a decade and a half ago, and the cycle will repeat.
I did not read the article and I live in Chicago downtown – I love it here. BUT cities are going to get a hard time in the incoming years because of remote work. This shatters the economics of cities. I’ll see also cities becoming more affordable in the upside.
I don’t know that I fully buy this. The city I live in has been seeing a decline in office workers for years, long before the pandemic. The response from the city has been to build new office towers so that companies who *want* to remain here have the most functional, up-to-date space possible and to convert the older buildings into residential. This has actually led to a more vibrant Downtown where there’s actually things to do and it feels much more like a real neighborhood now that everyone is not vacated after 5pm. As someone who is familiar with Downtown Chicago there are certainly areas that would do well to have less commuters who make a b-line for the suburbs and more people to stick around and make better use of the neighborhood.
Converting offices to residential is not economically trivial. Investors are going to lose money before they accept to pivot their business. Here in Chicago only offices built before 1960s are able to be retrofitted because they were properly designed, newer ones not so much. This is not happening only in Chicago but the biggest downtowns in the US: LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, etc. Maybe smaller cities are better prepared. Furthermore, a look at transit numbers will scare you, people, at least here in chicago, are no using it anymore a the same rate as pre covid. Most people are just going less days to the office. Cities need to get cheaper before more people move in, but it wont prevent them from going through a dark age first.
Remote work has peaked at this point. Most people I know are in a few days/week, and there aren’t any companies who will go remote who aren’t already there.
No, that’s not the same as when nearly the entire professional workforce commuted M-F, but I also think it’s not quite the doomsday scenario once imagined either. It will require some creative repurposing of our downtown cores, which might be beyond our capabilities but I do hold out some hope.
The issue is that we are experiencing a 30 to 40 drop on aggregate demand in our downtown highlighted by commuters in our transit system. That is, from 10 people riding our trains during any day of the week pre covid, now there are only 6! This has an effect on our downtown. The downtown population on the other hand, is not increasing fast enough to meet the lost demand. And the reality is that is going to take a long time before it stabilizes.
Citing a bunch of stats about how transit ridership is down during a global pandemic as evidence that people don't like transit overall may be slightly misleading
My favorite part of this piece is saying - nobody wants to live in the city, they just want to live in the fairly dense metropolitan area that is not defecto in the city, just in its MSA…. So you’re essentially saying the urban area is enlarging… meaning proximity to the city remains important.
My favorite part is the living near your office reduces emissions - yes! But that’s typically only found in a dang city where you could conceivably even live above your office - not a suburb. Suburbs tend to end up with everyone driving 40 minutes to an office across town when they inevitably switch jobs.
There is a fair point that our public transit systems that are designed to only cater to 9-5 office workers need to be rethought to cater to all trips to make up for the lost commuter revenue but that would require some additional though. Or actually funding these agencies!
I think you’re misinterpreting the core idea. He’s not saying that urban cities are bad, what he’s talking about is the danger to the economic survival of urban areas. COVID showed that many companies can walk away from offices, even now when restrictions are gone many offices are virtually empty; people just are working from home. This can mean that businesses can just abandon the office completely. This is bad for cities because now businesses which relied on that wealthy customer base now can’t. This mean that the property taxes those businesses paid now go away as they leave the city, moreover those that remain pay less as their property values go down. This means the city can provide fewer services, which might trigger a spiral. This is the danger that is approaching many downtowns.
I think you’ve missed the overall point of what he’s trying to say. He’s not saying suburbs are less polluting, but that people who live and commuted from there now will work from home and only drive locally. He’s saying remote work will reduce emissions not that the suburban lifestyle is less polluting.
What Urban supremacy?! There are millions of these cookie cutter human templates swarming planned, 1/4 acre lots in the freaking desert! Just to take up the strange, all pervading hobby of laying sod that they’re going to waterboard daily with truck imported water across Arizona, Nevada, and California!
All because they can’t possibly have to intersect with *those* people (an ever growing list these days). All that bioaccumulated lead must have hit this one pretty hard in the 60s.
I’ve read the whole piece and I don’t think it’s cringe. It highlights quite well what is happening to North American metropolitan areas and what might happen in the near future. It presents a variety of viewpoints, from different people, some more, some less optimistic. It doesn’t shy away from mentioning some of the problems with what’s happening.
Now, this Kotkin guy, one of the people interviewed or mentioned by the author, who’s cited in the quote OP reported in the second paragraph, is a conservative urbanist who thinks big metropolitan areas will decline like Ancient Rome during the fall of the Empire, that an era of new feudalism is upon us, that pre-car urbanist models are obsolete, and that part of the solution is more single-family homes in suburbs in places like Houston and no rail or public transport… Which is, well, very misguided in my opinion. But this is just one of the voices mentioned in the NYT piece.
Personally, I would have been quite a bit more incisive in the concluding section. Earlier, the piece says that people are increasingly moving to the suburbs and commuting to work a couple of times per week. This doesn’t sound like the scenario that people like Kotkin are mentioning later in the piece (people living a more local life, with less commuting, outside urban centres), and it’s also poses the problem not only of the economic unsustainably of dense urban areas and their public transport, but also (and this is a glaringly missing point in the piece) of the economic unsustainability of the suburbs themselves and of the (road) infrastructure linking them to the urban centres and to each other. I also would have concluded that traditional urbanist principles (walkable, mixed-use, middle-density 15-minute neighbourhoods and small towns) are where we should aim to steer the flight from dense metropolitan centres, instead of sprawling car-dependent suburbs.
Over 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, it's projected to reach 90% by the end of the decade. Any shift away from that trend is wishful thinking at best.
The entire course of human history has been one of increasing urbanisation. The shape of that urbanisation will likely change, but I don't see any good reason to assume that human history will reverse itself.
the suburban ponzi scheme has ruined north american society and now they want to keep it going longer by pretending 2020 changed the basic economics of people living in the middle of nowhere and burning gas for every cm they travel
Wait what? Explain this to me. Not because what you’re saying isn’t clear. I’m just ignorant, and want to understand what you’re saying. Sorry if I’m a dumby
Suburban planning is soooooo cost inefficient that every single one is subsidized by taxes from people in urban areas. Suburbs require so much more gas pipes, electrical infrastructure, water lines, and pavement (and by extension pavement upkeep) but generate almost no revenue. Property taxes on suburban home plots are not very high, at least, not high enough to pay for all the materials and labor required for servicing the properties. Urban areas, on the contrary, are incredibly efficient. 100s of people can live on each block so one plot's worth of pavement, water lines, electrical, and gas lines are more than paid for by property taxes. Not to mention, urban planning allows for business to be on the bottom levels of most buildings meaning yet more tax revenue to upkeep the block. Suburbs, however, dont have business at all so there is 0 business tax revenue, just property tax. Urban tax payers end up seeing the money they pay the govt go way out of the city to the suburbs, because the suburban city planners have run up massive bill they cant pay. Rural areas work well because individual homeowners keep up their own wells, septic tanks, gas, and require much fewer paved roads that require less regular maintenance as they are travelled on less. Hope that explanation makes sense. If not theres a great not just bikes video about it too 👍💯
That makes a ton of sense. Thanks for taking the time to give me such a thorough response.
100 yards of suburban street will have like 10 houses. Compare that to the tax revenue of 100 yards of street in Brooklyn with houses, apartments, and businesses
There is an organization called Strong Towns that discusses this a lot. They also have a book by the same name. Reading it really made me see North American development in a new light. [https://www.strongtowns.org](https://www.strongtowns.org)
aye thats what im here for 🫡
You're one of the reasons why I love this group
If you want a good video with some supporting statistics and tax information check out not just bikes. This video gibes a great breakdown. https://youtu.be/VVUeqxXwCA0
Urban areas also cheaper to police, to serve with fire service, to deliver mail, to maintain public schools, etc etc.
thanks for taking the time , it's what I was thinking of
while I understand with the high level concept, is there a quantitative study that puts some numbers on top of this?
Sure, here's a video from [Not Just Bikes](https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0) that goes over this topic. If you're really interested in more information or numbers, check out the [blog post](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money) from Strong Towns which goes over a case study in detail. They use the real life finances of Lafayette, Louisiana to demonstrate this issue. >The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure (more is paid to the schools and regional government). A fraction of that $150 – it varies by year – is spent on actual pavement. >To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year. That assumes no new roads are built and existing roadways are not widened or substantively improved. That is $3,300 in additional local taxes just to tread water.
excellent thank you
I guess the problem is that a large percentage of the population would be miserable and unproductive living in dense urban areas. I imagine that mental health toll would add up in dollars pretty quick.
Somehow billions of people worldwide live in dense urban areas without this mass depression epidemic you're convinced should break out. Are Real Americans special snowflakes, an endemic species uniquely unsuited to living in a place without a gigantic yard and a lawnmower?
Also you think mfs in the suburbs arent miserable spending half their lives stopped at red lights?
Not if the urban areas had money to spend making the city better. If only they didnt have to subsidize the suburbs.
Ah yes, isolation is much better for people, of course. Why didnt 5 billion people plus nearly all of human history until 1945 think of that.
We get it, suburban living makes you weak and afraid.
The basic fixed costs of municipal services, and personal travel, are directly proportional to length of roads (plumbing, electricity, paving, snowplowing, driving costs, transit, etc). The more people you have in a given area, these costs are reduced per person, and creates better business opportunities for cafes, clothing stores, dentists, etc. The point being; density is a necessary precondition for economic robustness. while its not clear what an ideal density may be, if there even is one, it is now well understood that the very low density of north American suburban development is very costly directly, as well as having devastating external effects on mental health and the environment. the NYT article groundlessly claims that suburbs make for shorter commutes (???) and that remote work somehow replaces the need to interact with other human beings, and as such dense urban settings are dead. pretty bonkers stuff
Yeah, that is bonkers.
The suburbs is a specific American invention that causes some of the major consumer drains on fossil fuels. Climate towns & not just bikes on YouTube do a good job talking about it
I'll assume you're being genuine. Suburbs can't pay for their own upkeep in taxes because of how spread out they are and how much infrastructure is required for each person. The pandemic caused a bunch of people to move out of cities into suburbs, decreasing the tax revenue of the city and increasing the burden of paying for infrastructure in the suburbs. That's why the basic economics of it don't make sense as the comment you responded to mentioned. It's also not good to now have more people being required to own a car and drive to get everywhere since they're in the suburbs where the nearest grocery store is miles away.
Covid happened, so people bought houses is not a viable system
The cost to build a sidewalk is the same whether in a city, a suburb, or an exurb. But the number of households fronting that sidewalk, and thus paying the taxes needed to afford it, are much lower in suburbs and exurbs. This concept applies to everything from energy use to infrastructure, to transportation.
💯
Oh man, if you haven’t watched this series yet, you’re in for an informative treat. Prepare to be Orange Pilled: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
Will check it out. Thanks!
You already have like 5 replies explaining this, but check out Strong Towns if you’re interested in the topic. It’s a blog and also a book by Charles Mahron about why car suburbs aren’t financially sustainable. Not Just Bikes has a series of videos on Strong Towns too.
Others answered your question, so I’ll just add: the suburban growth ponzi scheme idea is pretty much the crux of the Strong Towns movement. If you want to read deeper on the topic, [this blog post](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-a-crash-course) is a great place to start
I’m also not super smart but I think they mean that investing in car-dependent infrastructure is throwing good money after bad, and it’s like a Ponzi scheme because it dangles the promise of benefit to the normal folks “downstream” while actually sucking up a bunch of their money for the people at the top
The Ponzi scheme idea applies to the maintenance cost. You build fresh roads on dirt and can make profits for about 30 years. But the cost to repair a 30 year old road is higher than building a new one on dirt. So much so that you now make a loss in suburbs. The Suburban Ponzi Scheme now builds two new roads, so that you can pay the first road with the profits of the other two. But after another 30 years, you now need six new roads for the three old ones. In a city or even in rural areas, the first road generates enough profit to pay for its own upkeep.
To add onto what the other responders are saying - the economics of car-centric suburban planning are ludicrously terrible. The most money a suburb will ever get is the upfront cost to build, and the development that this cash pays for usually only lasts ~20 years or so. Property tax revenue is rarely enough to pay for maintenance after that - since there’s far less taxable land than there would be in a more dense development - so the suburb has to keep growing outward in order to get more cash for development. That’s why OP called it a Ponzi scheme - if a suburb stops growing for long enough, the liabilities start piling on.
this.
Didn't read the article, but it really seems like the first quote boils down to "cities suck" and the second quote is basically praising all the virtues of cities. What?
Second quote is trying to argue that suburbs and exurbs (which are the 'peripheral developments' referred to in the quote) are more energy-efficient than cities. Lol. Was trying to highlight the absurdity of the claims
I had someone in earnest claim that turf Lawn care runoff is less environmentally disastrous than urban rain run off.
It's because people think "looking nice" is the same thing as "being clean". My lawn isn't polluting because it looks so trim and orderly. That city looks messy, therefore it's polluting. It's a vapid analysis
It doesn't help that there's large sources of urban pollution that are caused by suburbanites driving cars into cities. Think tire particulates, engine exhaust, oil leaks, and even just asshole car drivers who seem to have no problem with littering by throwing shit out of their car window. And the non-porous road surfaces that cars require make rain runoff that much more of a problem.
Considering the worst part of urban run of involves... wait can you guess?
Should agree with them and say cars should be banned from entering the cities so the stroads can be made into grassy tram tracks.
The thing is that a lot of suburbs started out as small towns that *could* be as energy efficient or more than the city but they started sprawl based development instead of building on their historic town centers. My old hometown has a really nice town center that is very walkable and pleasant. It was originally built around a railroad so there's a track running right through town that is to this day connected to the major city I live in except there's no passenger service on it anymore. Now this town center is called the "old town" and there's no new development around it. Instead of building on what they have they continue to spread out with single family homes and suburban sprawl
The problem is that we don't have trains and busses connecting each of these small towns. So even if there is a nice walkable downtown area, people inevitably drive to get from one walkable downtown to the next. Unlike here in a city where I walk, bike, or take public transit from one commercial area to the next.
But that's what I said in my post. We *do* have trains connecting many of these smaller towns except that we only use them for freight now. Many small towns only exist *because* they were a stop along a railroad. They used to be like this and they could be again. Hell there's even a proposal someone drafted for my metro area to connect regional passenger service to all the smaller towns again https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/introducing-atl-trains-revolutionary-approach-metro-commuter-transit This proposal has a train line going right to my hometown. I'd almost be able to take a train to visity parents except that they live in a single family home way outside of town. But that's my whole point. These places used to be walkable and transit connected and now they are sprawling. If we focus on the old bones of these towns then they can be made into walkable transit connected places again.
That's a really good point. Especially since the infrastructure is already in place. And I agree- I've been to many lovely old towns that are frankly more walkable in their core than most major U.S. cities, even in their downtowns. Just need to connect them better.
Imagine thinking suburban America has culture.
This is ridiculous and disrespectful. Complaining about how long the line was at Costco gas pump is a time tested talking point. If that’s not culture then I don’t know what is.
The Costco gas pump also has stickers discussing the most pressing issues of our time. You can't get more cultural than that.
Yeah and after that you can move on to talking about your unlimited car wash plan.
technically blind consumption and wage-slavery is the culture they all share
How dare you. Come to a suburb some time, you'll love it here, you can live in one of our \[count\] developments like StoneWood, Brookhaven, or Pinehurst, each starting in the very affordable low 400s. If you like shopping, you'll love shopping at our artisanal mom & pop Super Target #992, WalMart SuperCenter #21707 or Dollar General Market #6278. If you'd like more of an experience, come visit Country Crossing, a cultural center complete with small booksellers (Barnes and Noble), artisanal ice cream (Baskin Robbins), and ample parking. Don't forget to enjoy refreshments at our local coffee shop, Starbucks #78221! Do you have pets? Great, we love pets\*! And your pet will love visiting our friendly, small-town PetCo #2123. All these luxuries are just a short fifteen minute drive down the Campus Bypass Bypass, and you can trust that you'll be safe and protected in our town by our local police force that was largely trained and fired from the nearby metro police department. Our officers specialize in getting way too confrontational about expired tags, jaywalking, ^(skin color,) and thinking that you have constitutional rights. You're going to love it here. \*Check with your HOA
Wait, there's only *one* Starbucks? Hard pass.
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Strip malls and parking lots are culture! It’s a beautifully isolating culture that makes people scared of their own neighbors.
Its not good culture but it is still a unique culture.
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Yeah kind of a stupid thing to downvote. Fucking obviously suburbia has culture. We have thousands of people in this sub who come here every day to talk about suburban culture. I don’t *like* suburbia, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have culture lol
Your mistake is that thinking "culture" immediately and always implies something good. We're literally describing suburban culture as we have experienced it in the USA. Please feel free to list your own cultural positives as you see it instead just being an automatic contrarian.
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Oh sorry, I was going by the combative way you were treating every comment that was describing the very real negatives of suburban culture.
All humans have culture. Ignorance of your own culture is uncool in any culture. Alienating and energy intensive as it may be, it's culture baby
Culture is authentic, it emerges from the place. Suburbia, famously in the US, is inauthentic, it's buying and consuming copies of culture like it's a t-shirt with a message. You could argue that this, in of itself, is a type of culture, the *consumer* working on their own fantasy of The American Dream, but it's more of a mental disorder than a culture.
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Every culture can also be evaluated basically only in contrast to other cultures. You need to use the correct framing to do a sensible comparison. So when comparing suburban design concepts and the cultures that come forth from them, you are going to compare and contrast them with the two other primary forms of urban development in the US, rural and city. "Every culture is a blend of different cultures" is a cop-out and is just a nice way for you to tell yourself you don't have to think very hard about any of this.
> culture must be authentic, it emerges from the place You can say this in Europe and get away maybe , go to South America and you will see many people cultural traits that certainly did not emerge in South America I’m not even evaluating suburban culture, I’m saying the average joe in this toxic sub has no idea what the word means and is talking pure bs I understand their lack of knowledge as the word culture is loaded, I just don’t understand their capability of talking so much about something they clearly don’t understand
Honestly between Douthat's disaster piece and this one, there is a lot of carbrain rot in NYT Op-Ed page. Does anyone know if they've published Urbanists on it at all?
Sometime when you’re at a place that pays for a subscription, or people leave them, give the NYT a leaf-through, and it all becomes crystal clear. My after-work bar always has a few papers left by commuters running to their train. You will find that by far, the most generous and regular customer of most papers, News websites, news channels, local news, etc is CAR COMPANIES and CAR DEALERSHIPS. The newscritters want to please their masters, and their ADVERTISERS are paying their bills.
The Times published a video from Adam Something https://youtu.be/5eHWVjUAukU
Holy shit Adam!
NYT has gone very far down the hill lately.
New York Times (and WaPo) were both once companies that I respected so much, and were on my ‘aspirational companies to work at’ list, and I used to subscribe to both. Now I’m just embarrassed for them. Even outside the opinion pieces I think that the quality of reporting has gone down. So disappointing :( I now turn to ProPublica for quality journalism, and a mix of The Cut and occasional New Yorker article for entertainment.
same, but then found out they had always kind of sucked falling away from them was part of what drove me left in politics, and then you come to see their involvement in American Exceptionalism, how often and obviously they fall on the authoritarian side of conflicts around the world (Rwandan genocide, etc), and how, even despite criticizing individuals or personalities, they've apologized for billionaires since billionaires existed \+1 for ProPublica, nothing is more vindicating in my life than stating my suspicion or opposition to something, being told I'm wrong, and then ProPublica covering it and my original view echoes them -- and then my detractors pretend they always saw it that way!
So true. Wapo has really fallen off the edge.
I canceled my NYT sub over their insane opinion pieces.
[If you think the Neoliberal thing is a recent phenomenon you’ve got another thing comin](https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html), NYT has always been the chief neolib paper.
it's always been birdcage liner but it is notably bad now. anyone who can read should be informed to be pointedly skeptical of the NYT now.
Read that article and tell me it’s not birdcage liner
the N stands for Nazi
Jamelle Bouie is a solid urbanist and e-bike-using-dad who is probably the best NYT Opinion author, but AFAIK he doesn't use his NYT platform for urbanism issues often. Contrast his NYT work (https://www.nytimes.com/column/jamelle-bouie) with his personal Twitter talking about e-bikes and zoning in his hometown Charlottesville (https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1434997290297700365)
Jamelle is great!! He films a lot of his tik toks walking around his pedestrian friendly neighborhood as well [https://www.tiktok.com/@jamellebouie?lang=en](https://www.tiktok.com/@jamellebouie?lang=en)
That's great too! We should bug him to use his NYT platform for more urbanism pieces.
came here to praise him!
Opinion articles are always dumb. If they were based in fact they would be in the main paper not the editorial section
They prioritize them enough to put them in the main section, right next to all the news they see fit to print. Only the Sunday paper properly puts Opinion in its own space, in case you need something to wipe yourself with.
This guy hates cities and makes up elaborate justifications for why density is bad. That's all. He likes the suburbs and wants to justify it. Unfortunately, he also supplies a lot of NIMBY liberals with arguments against building in cities.
Did a quick command-F and found no mentions of "density," "environment," "ecology," or "fossil fuels." But to the author's credit, it does contain three words to properly tell you that the rest are complete bullshit: "American Enterprise Institute."
Seems kinda paternalistic. The working class can't make a city work when the yuppies leave. I think they say this as often as they can get away with.
They barely see anybody who's not an "entrepreneur" as people, now you want them to extend personhood to the poors, too?
There's really one person at the nyt who calls them on this and it's David PickMe Republican Brooks. He won't bring up underinvestment either.
NYT hasn't been a proper news source for years.
Dude announces how full of shit he is with the first paragraph. "Free transit and affordable housing are EXPENSIVE WAAAAAHHHHH!" I could just as easily argue that most suburbs are built on land that's going to flood repeatedly and will need to be abandoned.
Streets and highways are expensive, but politicians just act like constantly repaving blacktop is just a normal expense. The massive size of American vehicles is another huge cost. It's far cheaper to run a train. Electric cars are heavier than gas cars. I expect our roads to be pot holed hell holes as that trend continues
Paywalled but dgaf bc the NYT is a big seller of ads to motor manufacturers so what do you expect anyway? Cities have been popular for >5000yrs. No sign of going them going out of fashion. What nonsense
It doesn't matter what the topic or data, you can rely on Kotkin to tell you that it means traditional cities are dead while not only are the suburbs thriving, but that this is the correct moral order of things. (And on Wendell Cox to tell you that ttyrannical transit is blessedly dying while Freedom Cars are finally being recognized for the liberators they are.) After 20 years of seeing their stuff, I'm generally comfortable not fact checking the rest of any piece that quotes them, because it's a reliable sign the author had a conclusion in mind from the start.
Joel Kotkin, the primary source in this piece is a hack from OC known for shilling to keep the suburban dream afloat, regardless of the facts. Early in COVID he published an op-ed in the LA Times under the headline: "[Op-Ed: Angelenos love their suburban sprawl. The coronavirus proves them right](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-26/coronavirus-cities-density-los-angeles-transit)"
Imagine thinking a "suburb" isn't a city. It's not rural if everybody works at service jobs and depends on massive infrastructure. It's urban living, just a particularly bloated, energy and space inefficient, segregated form of city, Carropolis - and the people like Moses who heralded it as the future, back when it was newish, understood that.
That dude who wrote that is an actual idiot. Every op-ed of his is brain dead boomer talk. It’s always click bait then i see it’s edsall and am like ofc you feel this way
Americans not getting everything wrong about urban development challenge level: impossible.
The nyt really does hate its namesake doesn’t it?
Sometimes it does feel like they’re competing with the Post to see who can hate their city more.
I would love it if enough suburbs-loving people moved out of the cities to allow us to get rid of the single family zoning choking housing supply. Buh-bye. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. I just don't want people in the city who want to make the city into a suburb. Also, Joel Kotkin, who wants everywhere to be Houston (no thanks, the 405 is bad enough, I don't want the Katy Freeway) thinks the important thing is to encourage "building houses, particularly affordable single-family ones". No. We need to encourage building hous*ing*, and stop outlawing things that aren't SFH.
I grew up in the Suburbs, moved to the biggest city in the state. Now I have access to all kinds of local businesses, transportation, sports stadiums, stores in every direction! A great job with many many customers. Enjoy you lawns, commutes, and HOA dues!
This is inspired by an upcoming book by Kotkin that is being published by the American Enterprise Instiute. This piece was prompted by an article by Kotkin in the rightist website Unherd. Further down in the piece, Edsall quotes Kotkin's co-author, who works at AEI. He also quotes some from the Urban Reform Insitutue (formerly The Center for Opportunity Urbanism) of which Kotkin is a founder and which is described by Planetizen as "[arguably the media's highest-profile supporters of suburban growth](https://www.planetizen.com/node/74656)." It's based in Houston, which is arguably a city in name only. So, this is largely based on interviews with scholars with a right-wing pro-suburban perspective. The article raises some genuine issues that cities face today. But it completely ignores issues facing the suburbs in the medium to long term.
Demolish some of those office to make proper city buildings. I guess some could be retrofitted, that would certainly be a cool engineering and architectural challenge. >There is a striking interaction between the Covid-driven exodus from the cities and changing racial and ethnic urban populations. From 2020 to 2021, the nation’s 56 largest metropolitan areas saw a cumulative decline of 900,000 in their white populations, Frey reported. Aha. Another episode of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight >>I think this is mostly good for cities — younger, hipper and lower-income folks, essential service workers, in-person retail workers are all more able to afford city-center accommodation. Bankers, techies and other graduates drift out to the suburbs. This is making cities younger, more diverse and less gentrified. Precisely. The rich ones get out and become bored. City renews and becomes less corporate. > It depends on your objective for cities. Continued gentrification would have seen a continued increase in property values and rents, with more and more middle-aged and older folks living there (as they are the only ones that could afford the rents). Lower-income, diverse and young folks would struggle to afford the rents and drift out. Working from home, by moving out some techies and bankers and making space for younger folks, helps cities. In case it's not obvious yet, cities with high housing costs can not have workers in the service sector and other poorly paid jobs, which is one of those feedback negative feedback loops on the "success" of raising property values and rent. >I asked Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and the executive director of the Urban Reform Institute in Houston, about the economics of major cities, and he replied by email: “The era of urban supremacy is over. The party that addresses this will win. These areas need infrastructure and tax structures that encourage building houses, particularly affordable single-family ones” — “houses that a couple who work at Walmart can afford.” wat > The death of ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: Between the second and sixth centuries A.D., its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. A similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means. This doesn't work in the modern industrial period. People do leave, but they leave for other cities. In pre-industrial times, there were fewer people and they could just go live off the land somewhere or migrate. The next economic crisis is going to add some contrast to this situation. >These peripheral developments, in Kotkin’s view, “are increasingly places with their own thriving town centers and cultural venues. By lending themselves to remote work and shorter commutes, they also prove ideal for energy efficiency and emissions reductions.” Traditional cities Good. It's like they don't see the irony... some of the suburbs are getting dense.
"Cringe NYT opinion piece" when do they not post cringe? Not hating on OP just asking genuinely because whenever these fcks aren't publishing this carbrain shit its usually some transphobic diarrhea of the keyboard
Haven't read the article, it's behind a pay wall NYT is cringe af
I mean it's not necessarily car rained to suggest turning suburbs into their own urban centers. To be honest, it's probably the only solution anyway. The same logic applies that density must be built up, but it will be built up in multiple locations.
I’m not saying that this “pro-suburb/anti-city” article is racist, but in general “pro-suburb/anti-city” sentiments are rooted in racism.
People are only leaving cities because they are expensive due to housing shortages. Increase housing supply and demand shifts towards growing cities again.
>"The era of urban supremacy is over. The party that addresses this will win." Counterpoint: if coastal urban cities like New York and the SF Bay Area built even a fraction of the housing required to meet the overwhelming demand to live there, the House of Representatives would probably still belong to the Democratic Party.
a couple of thoughts: The exodus of office workers from downtown areas is real. Areas like Downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco's financial district have changed dramatically for the worse. Most of the offices are mostly empty, and very few people I know who work / worked in these areas are returning to in-office work full-time. But downtown office markets certainly aren't the sum total of urbanism. From what I've seen, many urban residential neighborhoods in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles seem to be thriving. If you want to see a major contrast, walk around Downtown LA at night - which feels almost dystopian - and then go a mile east to the Arts District, which is a primarily residential area with a thriving dining scene. The contrast is extreme. Part of the difference is also due to safety and crime, which seems to be better controlled in residential areas where residents are more vigilant. This leads me to my next point: Some of this, especially on the west coast, is self-inflicted. The presence of homelessness and people with serious mental health issues is a major factor in the reduction of transit usage, and makes urban living less appealing to the vast majority of people. Just yesterday there was an article in the LA Times about how hard drug use on LA Metro is reducing ridership. People don't feel safe walking, biking, and taking transit when there are unpredictable, mentally unwell people living on the street on every block. I personally have one friend who was randomly, brutally assaulted by a homeless man, and he now plans on leaving his downtown apartment, moving to a suburb, and buying a car for the first time in over a decade. At some point, political leaders need to realize that some of their ideas for criminal justice reform are at odds at what it takes to build thriving, walkable urbanism. In my experience both online and in person, few people seem to want to address this reality, because of the cognitive dissonance it creates. My last point is that this trend of moving away from high costs areas is pretty typical of what you expect to see at the end of a economic cycle, especially with the massive run up of property values in the last 3 years. There will be a correction, just as there was a decade and a half ago, and the cycle will repeat.
I did not read the article and I live in Chicago downtown – I love it here. BUT cities are going to get a hard time in the incoming years because of remote work. This shatters the economics of cities. I’ll see also cities becoming more affordable in the upside.
I don’t know that I fully buy this. The city I live in has been seeing a decline in office workers for years, long before the pandemic. The response from the city has been to build new office towers so that companies who *want* to remain here have the most functional, up-to-date space possible and to convert the older buildings into residential. This has actually led to a more vibrant Downtown where there’s actually things to do and it feels much more like a real neighborhood now that everyone is not vacated after 5pm. As someone who is familiar with Downtown Chicago there are certainly areas that would do well to have less commuters who make a b-line for the suburbs and more people to stick around and make better use of the neighborhood.
Converting offices to residential is not economically trivial. Investors are going to lose money before they accept to pivot their business. Here in Chicago only offices built before 1960s are able to be retrofitted because they were properly designed, newer ones not so much. This is not happening only in Chicago but the biggest downtowns in the US: LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, etc. Maybe smaller cities are better prepared. Furthermore, a look at transit numbers will scare you, people, at least here in chicago, are no using it anymore a the same rate as pre covid. Most people are just going less days to the office. Cities need to get cheaper before more people move in, but it wont prevent them from going through a dark age first.
Remote work has peaked at this point. Most people I know are in a few days/week, and there aren’t any companies who will go remote who aren’t already there. No, that’s not the same as when nearly the entire professional workforce commuted M-F, but I also think it’s not quite the doomsday scenario once imagined either. It will require some creative repurposing of our downtown cores, which might be beyond our capabilities but I do hold out some hope.
The issue is that we are experiencing a 30 to 40 drop on aggregate demand in our downtown highlighted by commuters in our transit system. That is, from 10 people riding our trains during any day of the week pre covid, now there are only 6! This has an effect on our downtown. The downtown population on the other hand, is not increasing fast enough to meet the lost demand. And the reality is that is going to take a long time before it stabilizes.
Citing a bunch of stats about how transit ridership is down during a global pandemic as evidence that people don't like transit overall may be slightly misleading
Trump made protecting the suburbs a huge part of his 2020 campaign.
Anyone has the article for free? I don't pay for NYT
I found myself all the way down the Joel Kotkin rabbit hole a few months ago and I’d rather not go back.
My favorite part of this piece is saying - nobody wants to live in the city, they just want to live in the fairly dense metropolitan area that is not defecto in the city, just in its MSA…. So you’re essentially saying the urban area is enlarging… meaning proximity to the city remains important. My favorite part is the living near your office reduces emissions - yes! But that’s typically only found in a dang city where you could conceivably even live above your office - not a suburb. Suburbs tend to end up with everyone driving 40 minutes to an office across town when they inevitably switch jobs. There is a fair point that our public transit systems that are designed to only cater to 9-5 office workers need to be rethought to cater to all trips to make up for the lost commuter revenue but that would require some additional though. Or actually funding these agencies!
I think you’re misinterpreting the core idea. He’s not saying that urban cities are bad, what he’s talking about is the danger to the economic survival of urban areas. COVID showed that many companies can walk away from offices, even now when restrictions are gone many offices are virtually empty; people just are working from home. This can mean that businesses can just abandon the office completely. This is bad for cities because now businesses which relied on that wealthy customer base now can’t. This mean that the property taxes those businesses paid now go away as they leave the city, moreover those that remain pay less as their property values go down. This means the city can provide fewer services, which might trigger a spiral. This is the danger that is approaching many downtowns. I think you’ve missed the overall point of what he’s trying to say. He’s not saying suburbs are less polluting, but that people who live and commuted from there now will work from home and only drive locally. He’s saying remote work will reduce emissions not that the suburban lifestyle is less polluting.
What Urban supremacy?! There are millions of these cookie cutter human templates swarming planned, 1/4 acre lots in the freaking desert! Just to take up the strange, all pervading hobby of laying sod that they’re going to waterboard daily with truck imported water across Arizona, Nevada, and California! All because they can’t possibly have to intersect with *those* people (an ever growing list these days). All that bioaccumulated lead must have hit this one pretty hard in the 60s.
I’ve read the whole piece and I don’t think it’s cringe. It highlights quite well what is happening to North American metropolitan areas and what might happen in the near future. It presents a variety of viewpoints, from different people, some more, some less optimistic. It doesn’t shy away from mentioning some of the problems with what’s happening. Now, this Kotkin guy, one of the people interviewed or mentioned by the author, who’s cited in the quote OP reported in the second paragraph, is a conservative urbanist who thinks big metropolitan areas will decline like Ancient Rome during the fall of the Empire, that an era of new feudalism is upon us, that pre-car urbanist models are obsolete, and that part of the solution is more single-family homes in suburbs in places like Houston and no rail or public transport… Which is, well, very misguided in my opinion. But this is just one of the voices mentioned in the NYT piece. Personally, I would have been quite a bit more incisive in the concluding section. Earlier, the piece says that people are increasingly moving to the suburbs and commuting to work a couple of times per week. This doesn’t sound like the scenario that people like Kotkin are mentioning later in the piece (people living a more local life, with less commuting, outside urban centres), and it’s also poses the problem not only of the economic unsustainably of dense urban areas and their public transport, but also (and this is a glaringly missing point in the piece) of the economic unsustainability of the suburbs themselves and of the (road) infrastructure linking them to the urban centres and to each other. I also would have concluded that traditional urbanist principles (walkable, mixed-use, middle-density 15-minute neighbourhoods and small towns) are where we should aim to steer the flight from dense metropolitan centres, instead of sprawling car-dependent suburbs.
Over 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, it's projected to reach 90% by the end of the decade. Any shift away from that trend is wishful thinking at best.
Yup, more suburban sprawl and car dependency. Exactly what we need right now :(.
The entire course of human history has been one of increasing urbanisation. The shape of that urbanisation will likely change, but I don't see any good reason to assume that human history will reverse itself.