> Once part of the central city, the suburb gains a high-profile mayor in the public spotlight who is now responsible for what happens there. It becomes part of a city with diverse neighborhoods and housing types that will rise and fall on different cycles. And there are the assets of a big city downtown to draw on to help finance services.
Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb?
There is no solution for these suburbs: they aren't economically sustainable, their income and household density is too small to support the vast infrastructure they require. The lower the density, the more miles of roads, pipes, wires are needed per capita, and more policing, fire services, etc.
Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city.
If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it.
There is no such thing as progress without failure and abandoning things. People are just too afraid of letting go. Not everything grows forever without end. It's ok if the world decided a place wasn't really useful anymore.
'What about the people there?' you might say. They're not literally rooted to the spot. If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move. If we were all cavemen hunting the local game and it moved we wouldn't say "but the game was always here, it should stay here forever". It didn't stay there forever. It moved. If you want to catch some of that game, you move.
That's emotionally difficult in a world where we all think we're post-economies. But we aren't and it's a simple concept; things that aren't working need to fail and be abandoned.
That's easy to say, but packing up and moving simply isn't a viable option for many, many people. They're not staying because leaving is "emotionally difficult". They're staying because leaving is financially impossible.
If a homeowner's neighborhood is dying, then their home value is practically zero. And even if their house had some market value, the potential number of buyers is so small that the home could sit on the market for years, all the while incurring maintenance costs.
And as the neighborhood dies, the pool of available work shrinks. Wages shrink and job opportunities dry up. Economic diversity plummets, leaving the region more exposed to sudden shocks. Towns become increasingly reliant on parasitic industries -- payday loans, gambling, furniture leasing, etc -- that further depress wealth and prey disproportionately on the structurally impoverished.
Even a relatively well-off resident of a dying suburb -- someone with savings, a paid-off house, and no attachments to the area --
would be hard-pressed to finance a move to a healthier locale.
And most residents of these areas -- for obvious reasons -- don't fit this profile. Most don't leave because they can't afford to leave. They don't have savings. They live paycheck to paycheck. They're underwater on their house. They're on a tiny fixed income and can't afford the cost of living elsewhere. They're a public employee two years away from a pension and, if they move now, they forfeit a liveable retirement. They're the sole caregiver for disabled family members. Their skills aren't valuable in another market.
Et cetera.
Too often, we assume that poor people make poor choices, without considering that they might actually be making the best of the shitty slate of options available to them.
I think most reasonable people are in agreement that the suburbs -- especially industrial suburbs -- were and are an unsustainable model for development. They will need to be abandoned. But the process of that abandonment matters.
If we go about it the wrong way, as we are in the Rust Belt, then we condemn the people stuck in those areas to a lifetime of poverty. And those people don't just go away when we turn out backs on them. Their problems will become our problems. So, for economic and humanitarian reasons, we need to find a responsible way to decommission post-industrial towns and relocate their residents.
> If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move.
A possible problem might be that a failing area is likely to be undesirable and therefore have low property prices and concomitant taxes. Moving to a more desirable area might be unaffordable. Many people have a strong emotional connection to their home, and would find it difficult to sell it (perhaps at a considerably lower price than they think it is worth) and move somewhere smaller.
Further, there may be people who are "post-economy" in the sense that they have retired. From their point of view, they've paid their dues and have no need to follow the jobs any more. They may have built up local social ties that they don't want to sever by moving.
My point isn't that failing places need to be propped up indefinitely, but that there's a middle ground between "successful, valuable" things and "failing, worthless" things. And there are infrastructure projects (e.g: rural broadband) which can help retain jobs and communities in "failing" places relatively cheaply.
A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened.
You can’t just walk away from cities or towns because they no longer fit with our ideas for how cities and towns should be. Cities and towns already are. They need to function, well. Creative destruction is not an acceptable solution. This is the kind of view that gives idealism a bad name.
> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish.
Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. Civilization has flourished in cities as long as there has been civilization. In the U.S. (uniquely), we ruined cities post WW2 by subsidizing highways and cars and low density suburban mortgages, due to said cultural fetish. Plus a whole lot of racism.
In France, to my knowledge, there was never a time when the central city was considered lower class than the suburbs (ahem, Paris, ahem). And I think this is generally true.
> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened.
Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot.
Ever been to rural parts of the West? Lots of abandoned towns all over the place, some swallowed up by trees, others preserved by dry desert climate. Many of them are barely 100 years old.
Cities and towns might look like permanent fixtures of civilization if you place them on a scale of mere decades; but they come and go, grow and shrink, appear and disappear, and are eventually reclaimed by nature on a scale of centuries and millennia. They are man-made machines just like steam engines and web services, and should be treated as such. There's nothing sacred about them! The only question is how to care for the people who are affected when a machine they've been relying on goes down.
Creative destruction is not a panacea, but it should be on the table as a legitimate option to be weighed against other options. This isn't idealism, it's being realistic.
Speaking of being realistic, I suspect that there are many cases where relocating residents and shutting down the town in an orderly manner would be far less costly, more humane, and perhaps even environmentally better than maintaining the decaying infrastructure indefinitely and making yet another generation of an already disadvantaged population grow up in a place without hope.
Combinations are possible. It is easy to imagine that in an area with three bedroom communities one might commit to a bus, rail, boat, or air link to a metro area and grow its downtown while the other two fade.
You know that mass transit to/from the suburbs costs far more per boarding than in-city transit, right? More deadhead trips for commuters, longer distances.
Except that when you take into account the externalities, mass transit pays for itself, while suburbs don't.
So mass transit should be partially publicly-funded. Suburbs should not.
Mass transit reduces congestion, reduces land usage, reduces environmental damage, reduces poverty, reduces pollution, increases quality of life and is usable by the vast majority of the population.
Suburbia infrastructure only serves those living in suburbs and has the opposite effect of each metric listed above.
That typically comes from taxes on low-occupancy vehicles, which works out because mass transit also does a little bit to offset the massive emissions toll of those vehicles, as well as all the associated congestion/parking/etc issues.
I mean, we aren't putting the costs of hurricane relief efforts on people's car tabs yet, but give it a few years.
Nonsense. Mass transit is a necessity of city traffic fluid dynamics. That has zero comparison to fed funded roads and mortgage deductions for nasty white flight perpetrators. Let them suffer. Let kids inherit their parent debts. Speak in big paragraphs of wordy words. Quips are not funny.
There is no solution for these suburbs: they aren't economically sustainable
If the outer suburbs manage all the services you mention with an even lower density then of course the inner ring suburbs could do the same and should in fact do better. This is not an insurmountable obstacle.
However, OP doesn't diagnose the failure and therefore has no answer other than having the cities throw money at these suburbs.
The outer suburbs aren't economically sustainable either, they are just new enough that the maintenance burden of old infrastructure hasn't hit them[1].
The outer suburbs are full of richer people and are newer, which means they have more money and fewer financial obligations. New development is also often subsidized in various ways. But as poor people move into them (e.g. after explicitly discriminatory policies were outlawed), the rich whites keep moving further away (because they don’t want their tax dollars paying for services for poor brown people). In some cases like the St. Louis area the leapfrog game is pathological at this point.
City governments are accountable to their residents, who almost never want to be gentrified and displaced by their suburban counterparts. If anything, they’re trying to do the opposite of what you propose.
No city views the existence of its suburbs as a serious problem. Most cities are in crisis re: gentrification and affordability in the urban core, a problem that suburbs directly solve by providing substitutes for urban apartments.
I'm not disagreeing with your premise or the economic/logical rationale behind it. But to nitpick:
> If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it.
They did, though. I mean, suburbs are rarely directly financed by larger cities and initially, inhabitants of suburbs are, on average and in the United States, wealthier than their counterparts in the city (and nearer suburbs). The problem is that a certain class of people is only willing to foot that bill provided certain discriminatory characteristics are present. When those characteristics (such as racial segregation by means of socioeconomic discrimination via HOAs and zoning laws) fail to accomplish their purpose (the top-earning percentiles of those "undesired" classes of persons gain enough to love in, decreasing the desirability of the suburbs in the eyes of the people that initially wanted it, driving its prices down, allowing more diverse population groups to move in, rinse and repeat), those inhabitants that could moved on to other, wealthier and more exclusive suburbs even farther out.
The problem now is the suburbs in between, comprised of people "willing to pay" for the "status" of not living in the city but not able to afford it. You're essentially arguing to _increase_ segregation between the wealthiest and poorest striations of society, which would effectively redefine what it means to be middle class in America and possible wipe out the concept of lower middle class entirely.
>They did, though. I mean, suburbs are rarely directly financed by larger cities and initially, inhabitants of suburbs are, on average and in the United States, wealthier than their counterparts in the city (and nearer suburbs).
You're missing in your equation:
1. Population density. If the population density is lower, the cost to maintain the infrastructure per resident is higher. The claim is that even though suburbanites are richer, they are not rich enough to offset the extra cost per resident.
2. A lot more businesses (and big businesses) in the city vs the suburb. This is a significant revenue stream.
I've seen maps and claims where even in the city, it is usually the downtown area that subsidizes the rest of the city (let alone suburbs).
> You're essentially arguing to _increase_ segregation between the wealthiest and poorest striations of society, which would effectively redefine what it means to be middle class in America and possible wipe out the concept of lower middle class entirely.
No, I'm arguing in favor of higher-density cities with a mix of low, mid and high income under a larger governmental entity.
Despite how trite universal basic income is to bring up in threads these days, UBI could do a lot to help failing communities throughout the US. Much of the demand for housing in urban areas comes from people who may choose to live a less prosperous/expensive life elsewhere, if it were an option. This could change the dynamic of urban/suburban/rural life in the US. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable, but I think with UBI a lot of people would leave expensive CoL areas.
Perhaps the goal is to purchase the homes, which are too low-valued for the homeowner to get a fair price, and turn them over to commercial development - i.e. bulldoze them - for new office space, for example. Then the tax base goes up when businesses move in. Perhaps new high-rises as well so that they have higher-density habitation. Again, the tax base could go up.
It's pure speculation on my part, but it's the only rational reason I can find.
Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb?
Perhaps neighborliness. Perhaps a sense of community. Perhaps because neither city can move and arbitrary political borders are permeable to hard problems, i.e. if the roads in one city are impassible then people cannot get to the other. The other city owns the problems whether it acknowledges it or not.
> Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb?
I thought this too while reading. Only thing I can think is due to proximity, the suburb is a risk to the city. If the plight continues, it will eventually leak into the city in the form of crime, etc.
One solution is to upzone. Successful cities have trouble building housing affordable to lower earners when the land becomes too expensive for developers to target low to mid-range apartments. The increased capacity relieves the city of the burden of subsidizing housing on expensive land, and justifies greater infrastructure expenditures. Of course, you'll have some old timer NIMBY holdouts who will resist, but when the situation gets bad enough and losing their house to a ghost town is an imminent and the only alternative, many will probably change their tune.
> Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb?
From a purely self-interested perspective, it would increase their control of what happens in distressed cities. They could rezone the suburbs and build transit there to increase supply in case the city does not have enough. They may be able to help enforce law and order in areas that were outside of their jurisdiction. They may have friends and family living in the distressed city. They may have some basic compassion for their fellow humans.
I've never heard of a single suburb being an economic center, what would be examples of it in the US(?) because when I think of economic centers I think of NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, or Los Angeles.
> Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city.
Annexation was a strategy used by Columbus OH some years ago to continue growth past the limits of its suburban sprawl (and officially past the size of Cleveland, making it defacto the largest city in Ohio). Cleveland has been talking about doing the same for some time now, but I don't think the state government has been very supportive. Cleveland proper isn't large in itself, but the metro area is about the size of Austin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...
A negotiation for merger between Cleveland and East Cleveland was shot down last year because of some pretty ridiculous demands by the EC leadership:
As a resident of the Columbus Ohio area for many years the equivalent to East Cleveland would be Whitehall. Whitehall is an inner-belt suburb that has nothing but [now] dirt cheap housing with a high crime rate. Meanwhile a 20 minute drive to the north is one of the fastest growing areas in the country, Delaware County. All suburb with upper six figure homes, retail, medical, and a near zero crime rate. One can use Columbus as the perfect example of what happens when affluent people keep moving further away from the city core. Far flung suburbs are building like crazy, like Dublin and Westerville in Deleware County. Gahanna is getting swallowed by Columbus annexing, New Albany's aggressive annexing may save part of the city from going "ghetto" in 25-30 years. Reynoldsburg, Pickerington, and Pataskala all annexed to block Columbus from swallowing them whole too.
Inner suburbia like Whitehall is not coming back. Highway infrastructue shuffles more traffic between suburbs around Columbus and many other citys rather than traffic into the city core. Poor people displaced from hip new downtown building are moving into these abandoned inner burbs and bringing all the crime with them.
Very helpful context. While a lot of comments here have brought up points regarding the density of suburbs, I'm not sure they are familiar with East Cleveland or the sort of inner ring suburbs that exist in a less-sprawly city that includes street car suburbs like Shaker Heights and what I think is the densest city between Chicago and NYC in Lakewood.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. There were many offers to get EC to join CLE proper, EC was negotiating like they had some form of power; for fans of Parks and Rec it reminds me of the Eagleton Pawnee merger scenes where the Eagleton people are shocked they must give up their precious amenities when they can't pay for them.
By not merging, those black residents are cut off from the tax base being created by the technology and medical industry booms happening in the city of Pittsburgh next door. Black control in many of these suburbs has meant inheriting a community where previous generations of residents did the equivalent of running up 250,000 miles on the odometer, then handed over the keys to what's now used-up jalopy and walked away.
That's not how real estate works. It's not a car. Usually, when a city experiences a boom, its suburbs benefit by housing workers from the booming industries.
If people choose to extend their commute or pay higher prices for residences in the city just to avoid you, I'm guessing you gave them a very good reason to avoid you. Why did the original middle class residents leave?
Why did original middle class residents leave? Because American suburbs are built unsustainably. Because maintaining or replacing infrastructure built 30 years ago and designed to last 25 years costs more (prohibitively so) than new greenfield development. Because they're moving into the city to shorten their commutes rather than further out to lengthen them.
Why does it cost prohibitively more to raze a house and build a new one? Or repave a road over building a new one?
At least some infrastructure is reusable and you get residences closer to the city therefore much more valuable than outer suburbs which are doing better. You beat the city by offering a real backyard. There, sold.
Some people will still live farther out and others will remain in the city but you should have no trouble finding younger families happy to live there. This is not the issue.
It's funny, we created communities that are too low density, and which contain almost no commercial or industrial development to support the tax base, and then we act surprised that they can't sustain themselves.
These communities seem to me like unsustainable resorts built for the upper middle class of fifty years ago.
As with most American history, it makes no sense without discussing the role of racism. The exodus really got started when school integration became mandatory. Where I live now in DC that era’s suburbs are obviously designed to be unwelcoming to outsiders: no sidewalks, tangled street layouts which make walking/cycling difficult and driving confusing for anyone who doesn’t live there (more modern neighborhoods at least have easily visible street signs), public transit was either halfhearted or actively opposed (this is still ongoing: opposition to a subway expansion has included thinly-veiled references to “the wrong sorts of people”), etc.
Combine that with redlining and so many of the weird patterns make sense: a suburb wasn’t designed to be a viable community as much as a de-facto private school district which only has students like your kids.
This is my feeling as well. The marginal cost of expensive infrastructure such as sewer, water, transportation, etc. is intrinsically higher the further out you go. When you were building on greenfields during suburban expansion, you overlooked that because relatively affluent people were getting a bargain on the land and thus the development costs looked more reasonable. Now the deferred maintenance on those bits of infrastructure is catching up and they want the central cities—the places where the marginal cost of infrastructure is low—to subsidize repairs to the infrastructure that allows for low density sprawl.
To be fair, the article is talking about relatively close-in suburbs. Things will look worse when the even more farflung exurbs start having a lot of deferred maintenance catch up to them.
In many areas, far flung "exurbs" long predate many of the closer-in suburbs. The town I'm in was founded in 1653 or something like that. So this narrative that infrastructure for living outside of cities only exists because of subsidized greenfield development. Yes, many people in those outlying towns commute to work elsewhere but many of those jobs aren't actually in the major nearby cities. They're in other suburbs.
There's a reason why many of these places are called "bedroom communities" or "commuter towns." They exist solely to house the people working in nearest city, and provide a 'safe' place to raise their children. They have no other sustainable reason to exist.
seems to me counties do just fine, it is only when integrated within a city construct that issues arise. many counties are low density and doing splendid.
I guess it all comes down to which view you wish to support. people who favor city living tend to ignore crime, noise, and pollution, while harping on suburbs as all being gate communities that consume taxes provided by cities.
whereas those in the country, which is different than city subburbs tend to see it all in the reverse
If this inner ring suburb is dying then the city is also dying. Inner ring suburbs are usually one of the first to benefit as city workers, looking for a shorter commute, buy housing nearby.
My city, Miami, dilapidated shacks are being snatched up for 300-500k, cash. And they are <20 minutes from the city core. That is what a ring suburb in a thriving city looks like.
If they aren’t getting developers sniffing around driving up the tax base then merging with the city won’t fix it.
Not necessarily. Chicago is experiencing a trend where the city center and north/west side are booming but the inner suburbs are slowly dying while the outer suburbs are booming.
I thought British local government was a mess, but it seems US local government is much worse.
One thing that jumps out as soon as you look at a map is that East Cleveland isn't a geographically distinct built-up-area. It's not really a city of its own, I suspect much of its employment comes from Cleveland proper.
It seems to me that a lot of these urban sprawls should be merged into what the UK would call "unitary authorities", which could then better make area-wide planning decisions.
Yes, every time I hear calls from politicians to devolve more powers to regions in the UK I wonder what the outcome will be. It seems like an invitation for them to become fiscally irresponsible.
It seems like the problems are from low density so I wonder if there's a way to set up an economic incentive for residents of suburbs to congregate in naturally growing/shrinking high density clusters so empty areas remain completely empty instead of sparsely populated and can have their services shut down.
Perhaps property tax grows the fewer property tax-paying people are in a street/small area. Ulitimately making the one guy at the end of a deserted street pay for the sewer pipe and road going all the way up the street.
so in that case real estate prices in suburbs will drop to zero because nobody would want to have house with sky-high taxes for services and poor people will become poorer and be forced to move out of suburbs. And given that they already have little or no money, they would not have where to go, and they would need to purchase new apartments in city which will be expensive and they would need to take a loan for it, which most likely would not be granted because of a low income.
They should be able to purchase/rent inexpensive apartments in the city. Because the apartments are higher density, they ought to be cheaper.
It must be a result of inefficient and damaging market forces, poorly planned maintenance expenses, and selfish political manipulations that make it cheaper for one person to live at the end of a culdesac than to live in an apartment building.
Think about it. Individual electric, sewer, water, roads, foundations, roofs, garages, exteriors, etc. on each house, with services and businesses like groceries, trash pickup, police/fire/ambulance, and transport spread over a broad area, should not be able to compete with a system in which these costs are shared and services are concentrated between many residents.
Yes, there are downsides to apartment living. I personally own my house, and enjoy that. But it's absurd that I can buy 2300 square feet of house and 2 acres of land for $1200/mo in mortgage, taxes, bills and maintenance when a 2-bedroom apartment outside my small Midwestern city rents for $1100/mo. And I paid extra for a newer house, larger lot, and nicer neighborhoods - you can buy less desirable spots for $800/mo, less than renting in less desirable apartments (assuming you have decent credit and a small down payment)! I should be paying way more, or they should be paying way less, if we're going to have balanced costs on the local economy.
These suburbs are "dying" because the majority of their population are low-skilled, low-educated people who have fewer and fewer opportunities to prosper in an economy that is becoming more and more automated and skills-oriented. The blight and decay is just a symptom of the actual problem, which is decreasing opportunity for these people.
That's one of the reasons I oppose opening our borders to a flood of additional low-skilled, low-educated people. It hurts the ones who are already here.
I'm sure this will attract a lot of downvotes, and I'm perfectly fine with that, but I'd appreciate it if the downvoters would also point out the flaws they perceive in my logic.
Readit News
Why would a city agree to merge with a distressed, money-draining suburb?
There is no solution for these suburbs: they aren't economically sustainable, their income and household density is too small to support the vast infrastructure they require. The lower the density, the more miles of roads, pipes, wires are needed per capita, and more policing, fire services, etc.
Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city.
If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it.
'What about the people there?' you might say. They're not literally rooted to the spot. If there is no way to be productive there (aka jobs) they can and should move. If we were all cavemen hunting the local game and it moved we wouldn't say "but the game was always here, it should stay here forever". It didn't stay there forever. It moved. If you want to catch some of that game, you move.
That's emotionally difficult in a world where we all think we're post-economies. But we aren't and it's a simple concept; things that aren't working need to fail and be abandoned.
If a homeowner's neighborhood is dying, then their home value is practically zero. And even if their house had some market value, the potential number of buyers is so small that the home could sit on the market for years, all the while incurring maintenance costs.
And as the neighborhood dies, the pool of available work shrinks. Wages shrink and job opportunities dry up. Economic diversity plummets, leaving the region more exposed to sudden shocks. Towns become increasingly reliant on parasitic industries -- payday loans, gambling, furniture leasing, etc -- that further depress wealth and prey disproportionately on the structurally impoverished.
Even a relatively well-off resident of a dying suburb -- someone with savings, a paid-off house, and no attachments to the area -- would be hard-pressed to finance a move to a healthier locale.
And most residents of these areas -- for obvious reasons -- don't fit this profile. Most don't leave because they can't afford to leave. They don't have savings. They live paycheck to paycheck. They're underwater on their house. They're on a tiny fixed income and can't afford the cost of living elsewhere. They're a public employee two years away from a pension and, if they move now, they forfeit a liveable retirement. They're the sole caregiver for disabled family members. Their skills aren't valuable in another market.
Et cetera.
Too often, we assume that poor people make poor choices, without considering that they might actually be making the best of the shitty slate of options available to them.
I think most reasonable people are in agreement that the suburbs -- especially industrial suburbs -- were and are an unsustainable model for development. They will need to be abandoned. But the process of that abandonment matters.
If we go about it the wrong way, as we are in the Rust Belt, then we condemn the people stuck in those areas to a lifetime of poverty. And those people don't just go away when we turn out backs on them. Their problems will become our problems. So, for economic and humanitarian reasons, we need to find a responsible way to decommission post-industrial towns and relocate their residents.
A possible problem might be that a failing area is likely to be undesirable and therefore have low property prices and concomitant taxes. Moving to a more desirable area might be unaffordable. Many people have a strong emotional connection to their home, and would find it difficult to sell it (perhaps at a considerably lower price than they think it is worth) and move somewhere smaller.
Further, there may be people who are "post-economy" in the sense that they have retired. From their point of view, they've paid their dues and have no need to follow the jobs any more. They may have built up local social ties that they don't want to sever by moving.
My point isn't that failing places need to be propped up indefinitely, but that there's a middle ground between "successful, valuable" things and "failing, worthless" things. And there are infrastructure projects (e.g: rural broadband) which can help retain jobs and communities in "failing" places relatively cheaply.
Dead Comment
You can’t just walk away from cities or towns because they no longer fit with our ideas for how cities and towns should be. Cities and towns already are. They need to function, well. Creative destruction is not an acceptable solution. This is the kind of view that gives idealism a bad name.
Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. Civilization has flourished in cities as long as there has been civilization. In the U.S. (uniquely), we ruined cities post WW2 by subsidizing highways and cars and low density suburban mortgages, due to said cultural fetish. Plus a whole lot of racism.
In France, to my knowledge, there was never a time when the central city was considered lower class than the suburbs (ahem, Paris, ahem). And I think this is generally true.
Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
Cities and towns might look like permanent fixtures of civilization if you place them on a scale of mere decades; but they come and go, grow and shrink, appear and disappear, and are eventually reclaimed by nature on a scale of centuries and millennia. They are man-made machines just like steam engines and web services, and should be treated as such. There's nothing sacred about them! The only question is how to care for the people who are affected when a machine they've been relying on goes down.
Creative destruction is not a panacea, but it should be on the table as a legitimate option to be weighed against other options. This isn't idealism, it's being realistic.
Speaking of being realistic, I suspect that there are many cases where relocating residents and shutting down the town in an orderly manner would be far less costly, more humane, and perhaps even environmentally better than maintaining the decaying infrastructure indefinitely and making yet another generation of an already disadvantaged population grow up in a place without hope.
Read: "Non-white people were living there."
Seriously, don't try to whitewash what happened. White people fled the cities because non-white people were starting to live in those areas too.
Excellent! Same with urban mass transit, then.
So mass transit should be partially publicly-funded. Suburbs should not.
Mass transit reduces congestion, reduces land usage, reduces environmental damage, reduces poverty, reduces pollution, increases quality of life and is usable by the vast majority of the population.
Suburbia infrastructure only serves those living in suburbs and has the opposite effect of each metric listed above.
I mean, we aren't putting the costs of hurricane relief efforts on people's car tabs yet, but give it a few years.
If the outer suburbs manage all the services you mention with an even lower density then of course the inner ring suburbs could do the same and should in fact do better. This is not an insurmountable obstacle.
However, OP doesn't diagnose the failure and therefore has no answer other than having the cities throw money at these suburbs.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_County,_Missouri#Com...
http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/...
Nearby South Euclid has a population of 22,295. In 2010 the median household income was $59,423.
And due to progressive taxation, South Euclid's relative tax revenue is probably even higher than those household income figures imply.
No city views the existence of its suburbs as a serious problem. Most cities are in crisis re: gentrification and affordability in the urban core, a problem that suburbs directly solve by providing substitutes for urban apartments.
Is the city "full" or something?
> If people still want to live in large houses in low-density areas, let them pay for it.
They did, though. I mean, suburbs are rarely directly financed by larger cities and initially, inhabitants of suburbs are, on average and in the United States, wealthier than their counterparts in the city (and nearer suburbs). The problem is that a certain class of people is only willing to foot that bill provided certain discriminatory characteristics are present. When those characteristics (such as racial segregation by means of socioeconomic discrimination via HOAs and zoning laws) fail to accomplish their purpose (the top-earning percentiles of those "undesired" classes of persons gain enough to love in, decreasing the desirability of the suburbs in the eyes of the people that initially wanted it, driving its prices down, allowing more diverse population groups to move in, rinse and repeat), those inhabitants that could moved on to other, wealthier and more exclusive suburbs even farther out.
The problem now is the suburbs in between, comprised of people "willing to pay" for the "status" of not living in the city but not able to afford it. You're essentially arguing to _increase_ segregation between the wealthiest and poorest striations of society, which would effectively redefine what it means to be middle class in America and possible wipe out the concept of lower middle class entirely.
Suburbs, sprawl are subsidized by urban areas. By zip code, county, state, region.
You're missing in your equation:
1. Population density. If the population density is lower, the cost to maintain the infrastructure per resident is higher. The claim is that even though suburbanites are richer, they are not rich enough to offset the extra cost per resident.
2. A lot more businesses (and big businesses) in the city vs the suburb. This is a significant revenue stream.
I've seen maps and claims where even in the city, it is usually the downtown area that subsidizes the rest of the city (let alone suburbs).
No, I'm arguing in favor of higher-density cities with a mix of low, mid and high income under a larger governmental entity.
Despite how trite universal basic income is to bring up in threads these days, UBI could do a lot to help failing communities throughout the US. Much of the demand for housing in urban areas comes from people who may choose to live a less prosperous/expensive life elsewhere, if it were an option. This could change the dynamic of urban/suburban/rural life in the US. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable, but I think with UBI a lot of people would leave expensive CoL areas.
It's pure speculation on my part, but it's the only rational reason I can find.
Not even that, just wipe it out, disincorporate and let nature retake it, or hand it over to agriculture. That's what Detroit is doing.
Perhaps neighborliness. Perhaps a sense of community. Perhaps because neither city can move and arbitrary political borders are permeable to hard problems, i.e. if the roads in one city are impassible then people cannot get to the other. The other city owns the problems whether it acknowledges it or not.
Not happening.
I thought this too while reading. Only thing I can think is due to proximity, the suburb is a risk to the city. If the plight continues, it will eventually leak into the city in the form of crime, etc.
From a purely self-interested perspective, it would increase their control of what happens in distressed cities. They could rezone the suburbs and build transit there to increase supply in case the city does not have enough. They may be able to help enforce law and order in areas that were outside of their jurisdiction. They may have friends and family living in the distressed city. They may have some basic compassion for their fellow humans.
Suburbs, by definition, are already medium density, by the way.
Also, there's suburbs and there's suburbs. There's a huge gulf between a town like Elizabeth NJ or Newton, Mass, and a Temecula housing development.
What do you also consider as failing?
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> Let them fail and wipe them out. Instead of wasting money trying to sustain a broken system, provide resources to facilitate moving to mid and high-density housing in the central city.
A negotiation for merger between Cleveland and East Cleveland was shot down last year because of some pretty ridiculous demands by the EC leadership:
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/08/east_clevel...
Some discussion at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/comments/4zeubq/east_clev...
Inner suburbia like Whitehall is not coming back. Highway infrastructue shuffles more traffic between suburbs around Columbus and many other citys rather than traffic into the city core. Poor people displaced from hip new downtown building are moving into these abandoned inner burbs and bringing all the crime with them.
That's not how real estate works. It's not a car. Usually, when a city experiences a boom, its suburbs benefit by housing workers from the booming industries.
If people choose to extend their commute or pay higher prices for residences in the city just to avoid you, I'm guessing you gave them a very good reason to avoid you. Why did the original middle class residents leave?
At least some infrastructure is reusable and you get residences closer to the city therefore much more valuable than outer suburbs which are doing better. You beat the city by offering a real backyard. There, sold.
Some people will still live farther out and others will remain in the city but you should have no trouble finding younger families happy to live there. This is not the issue.
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These communities seem to me like unsustainable resorts built for the upper middle class of fifty years ago.
Combine that with redlining and so many of the weird patterns make sense: a suburb wasn’t designed to be a viable community as much as a de-facto private school district which only has students like your kids.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/09/25/p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-rac...
To be fair, the article is talking about relatively close-in suburbs. Things will look worse when the even more farflung exurbs start having a lot of deferred maintenance catch up to them.
I guess it all comes down to which view you wish to support. people who favor city living tend to ignore crime, noise, and pollution, while harping on suburbs as all being gate communities that consume taxes provided by cities.
whereas those in the country, which is different than city subburbs tend to see it all in the reverse
My city, Miami, dilapidated shacks are being snatched up for 300-500k, cash. And they are <20 minutes from the city core. That is what a ring suburb in a thriving city looks like.
If they aren’t getting developers sniffing around driving up the tax base then merging with the city won’t fix it.
[0] http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/chicago-populatio...
One thing that jumps out as soon as you look at a map is that East Cleveland isn't a geographically distinct built-up-area. It's not really a city of its own, I suspect much of its employment comes from Cleveland proper.
It seems to me that a lot of these urban sprawls should be merged into what the UK would call "unitary authorities", which could then better make area-wide planning decisions.
Perhaps property tax grows the fewer property tax-paying people are in a street/small area. Ulitimately making the one guy at the end of a deserted street pay for the sewer pipe and road going all the way up the street.
It must be a result of inefficient and damaging market forces, poorly planned maintenance expenses, and selfish political manipulations that make it cheaper for one person to live at the end of a culdesac than to live in an apartment building.
Think about it. Individual electric, sewer, water, roads, foundations, roofs, garages, exteriors, etc. on each house, with services and businesses like groceries, trash pickup, police/fire/ambulance, and transport spread over a broad area, should not be able to compete with a system in which these costs are shared and services are concentrated between many residents.
Yes, there are downsides to apartment living. I personally own my house, and enjoy that. But it's absurd that I can buy 2300 square feet of house and 2 acres of land for $1200/mo in mortgage, taxes, bills and maintenance when a 2-bedroom apartment outside my small Midwestern city rents for $1100/mo. And I paid extra for a newer house, larger lot, and nicer neighborhoods - you can buy less desirable spots for $800/mo, less than renting in less desirable apartments (assuming you have decent credit and a small down payment)! I should be paying way more, or they should be paying way less, if we're going to have balanced costs on the local economy.
That's one of the reasons I oppose opening our borders to a flood of additional low-skilled, low-educated people. It hurts the ones who are already here.
I'm sure this will attract a lot of downvotes, and I'm perfectly fine with that, but I'd appreciate it if the downvoters would also point out the flaws they perceive in my logic.