51–60 of 208 posts
Does the tone put anyone else off? I feel like I should be his perfect target audience (I cycle everywhere and prefer living in cities with good bike infrastructure) but I find the way he makes his arguments leaves me wanting to disagree with him.
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Isn't this an infinite regress? How could cities survive without farm land? How could cities survive without outsourced materials? We live in an interdependent interconnected global society where everything and everyone subsidizes everyone else.
There seems to be a naive belief that if everyone just lived in dense urban cores there would be no need to pay for infrastructure beyond the city limits.
Ponzi Scheme: a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.
We need a word that is not intentionally a fraud but is pretty much an example of an unsustainable pyramid.
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> And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns? Towns still typically need to manage their own utilities while suburbs don't.
But towns that manage their own utilities do exist . That suggests that suburbs are not fundamentally unsustainable, they just need to adjust their calculations and expectations.
I suspect there are bad suburbs somewhere, but here ain't it.
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I think that’s a rather unfair question as cities should be resilient to significant population shifts. The world isn’t constant so the inability to handle change means you already have issues. Population shifts don’t just happen in an afternoon if a city can’t deal with a 10% population decline over a decade it was already in dire straits. Pensions for example are’t inherently an issue, it’s just a debt that should…
Trouble is poor don’t pay taxes but consume a lot of services. If the middle class and rich who do pay the bills leave them a city can have a huge decline in coke from a small population decline.
This seems like an odd complaint considering SF appears to have out of control spending and poor infrastructure. Methinks author is conflating two separate issues.
I am biased because I quite like living in the suburbs, and get quite suspicious when some manifesto comes up that dictates I should feel bad for it. Why is the solution to live in better designed cities instead of better designed suburbs? Are cities still necessary given the modern conditions?
You shouldn't feel bad but it's more of a matter that your lifestyle is likely heavily subsidized because your town doesn't have the tax base (nor will they raise your taxes) to support the infrastructure that's required to make suburbs function. If you were paying the true costs of living in the suburbs this wouldn't be an issue, but there's a high likelihood you don't. Cities will always be necessary because they a…
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A great many US cities were losing population in the post-WWII era including some that are now regarded as "elite" coastal cities. Boston, for example, was losing population well into the nineties and, lots of universities notwithstanding, had no real major tech industry left by the time Teradyne moved out. (All the local computer companies and defense contractors were out in the suburbs/exurbs.) So some cities did w…
Wouldn't these be good examples? Boston is a pre-car city that weathered population decline well. Detroit was a city that rebuilt itself around the car and experienced decline.
Boston/Cambridge long had a major research university base as well as a fair bit of industry especially in East Cambridge and what's now the Seaport area. Also a significant financial/legal/etc. district. A lot of the industry did have significant declines maybe a couple of times in the 20th century. East Cambridge was really only revitalized in a major way when Pharma/biotech came in during the 80s/90s--and the Seaport redevelopment is ongoing.
There certainly have been efforts in Detroit and apparently the riverfront gentrification has progressed considerably but the city as a whole still is in generally poor shape and for a variety of reasons is probably less attractive overall than coastal cities are.
ADDED: And Boston may be a "pre-car city" and does have a decent public transit system but most adults still own cars because a lot of their friends and activities will be outside the city.
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> And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns? Towns still typically need to manage their own utilities while suburbs don't.
But towns that manage their own utilities do exist . That suggests that suburbs are not fundamentally unsustainable, they just need to adjust their calculations and expectations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this an infinite regress? How could cities survive without farm land? How could cities survive without outsourced materials? We live in an interdependent interconnected global society where everything and everyone subsidizes everyone else.
There seems to be a naive belief that if everyone just lived in dense urban cores there would be no need to pay for infrastructure beyond the city limits.
A suburb needs that nearby road, lots of streets, water lines, sewage, significant power, often street lights, etc. etc.