The Suburb of the Future, Almost Here

Sure, but you could buy something that isn't a detached, single family house.

When I moved from my apartment I bought a house (no mortgage). When I add up extra utilities costs, taxes, insurance, and maintenance it comes up to about 75% of what I was paying for rent.

> how does anyone expect to build this stuff, when we can't even build regular housing, anywhere near the amount that is required to match demand.

You can't in SF, NY, LA... other areas don't have this problem.

If your biggest desire is to have your housing not cost more than 60% of your paycheck, move to the suburbs of somewhere like Dallas. You'll be shocked at how many millennials can afford to have nice apartments or even buy homes without spending close to that, percentage-wise. Sure, they're doing it on a later schedule than the baby boomers, but in a lot of places that's a separate discussion of higher education requirements, student loan situations, etc, not terribly inflated housing costs.

But long-term-wealth-wise it might be better to land a top-tier job in an expensive city making $100K more a year in some combo of cash and equity and plowing that back into some of that expensive housing. Bit of a gamble, though. But if you aren't making more than (rough first guess, I feel on the too-low side with what I'm seeing rent-wise these days) $120K early in your career in one of the super-expensive cities, or have a clear path to well eclipsing that, you'd probably be much more comfortable making $70-100K in one of the cheaper, more southern, booming-yet-still-building-housing regions.

I strongly disagree with the core claim that the reason is "unproductive growth". That's not the reason. The reason is municipal debt and gross mismanagement of the townships at every level. The municipalities are taking on debt by the truckload because they have failed to 1) manage their resources and personnel properly and 2) tax accordingly to what they need to actually maintain all services, which is why they take on the debt.

If they instead were unable to take on the debt they would be forced to either raise taxes, cut services, or some combination thereof. The past ~40 years have seen an ever decreasing interest rate environment, which allows municipalities to borrow money by issuing bonds, pay only the interest, then when the principal comes due, they roll it into a new bond that borrows even more. That new bond pays the old one off and then they have some more borrowed money to work with. And because interest rates have gone down more in the years since the previous bond issuance, they can pay the same interest. Basically, they just keep rolling debt over so that the principal is never paid down. Example - in 2000, bond rates were around 6%. In 2010 they were around 4%. In 2000, if a municipality took out $100M to build schools or whatever, they need to pay $6M a year in interest. Ten years later it comes due. Uh oh, they now need $106M this year but only budgeted for 6 of it. Our bureaucrats spend every penny of tax revenue over the last decade and never made allotments of $10M a year to pay back this loan. So what do they do? Thankfully the rate is 4%, so they can borrow a whopping $150M and still pay the same interest! So that's exactly what they do. Now they get to pay the same $6M every year and also have an additional $50M to spend on "growth" and "sustainability". This has happened across the board in nearly every municipality (city, suburb, etc.) across the nation. This is why the Fed hasn't raised rates. It's the same reason why Japan is in the situation they are in...for 30+ years.

Is it that hard to believe, especially with other articles[0] discussing how much millenials love pets even before having kids, that there's a significant number of people who prefer yards and quiet and peace and all those other suburban perks over living in dense environments? I don't deny that a lot of people prefer living in the city, but it's not only price that can make people choose the alternative. (But due to the nature of density and surface area, you'd have to seriously large majority prefering the suburbs to really drive the city prices down.)

There's also a definitions thing hiding in here: much of San Fransisco is pretty damn suburban, with houses, one or two story buildings, etc. Still expensive as hell, though. And then look at all the towns on the peninsula. I'd argue that the affordability differences are regional much more than urban/suburban driven.

Worth also looking at the costs within those regions of city vs certain suburbs, like SF vs Palo Alto, or LA vs Santa Monica.

[0] such as https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m... http://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-pets-have-the-potential-...

The future of the suburbs depends greatly on renewable, clean sources of energy. Reuse and recycling of resources is also important, but for things like power lines or water pipes, seems less so (more for things like those self-driving-electric-cars everyone's waiting for to give them suburbs + not having to drive in stop and go traffic).

Of course, so does the future of the city, just in a denser package, so it has better per-capita figures in many ways - but is there a scenario where we can get enough of it to power cities but not cities + suburbs? That seems unlikely to me.