One of the things that isn't talked about, my guess is because urbanists also tend to be liberals, is reforming welfare policy. States have largely succeeded in, and the federal government has condoned, treating cities as the primary welfare distribution organ. Public housing is mostly built in the cities, most federal school aid goes into the cities, etc. This concentrates the social problems which welfare attempts to remedy in the cities, and has the impact of driving families out of the city when they have kids.
For example, until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments. The idea was to limit the economic segregation of schools. Such policies are ultimately counter productive, because all they do is drive wealthier families, and their tax dollars, out into the suburbs. Peoples' egalitarian ideas tend to come crashing down when their kids are involved.
> until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments
San Francisco still does and middle class families continue to move away (not just due to public schools but housing prices) -- the others spend $25k-40k per year per kid on private schools. SFUSD uses a lottery approach and at one elementary school, 1210 children applied for 22 open slots -- a 1.8% acceptance rate. One of the major critiques of the city is how many of the tech workers in the city wouldn't be there today if they had gone through the SF public school system.
Until the US has a tiered system like Germany which allows high-achieving students to be challenged for the university and regular students to go through an extensive apprenticeship program guaranteeing well-paid jobs, people will continue to move to the suburbs for better schools.
I'm dubious. Urban centers suck down huge welfare dollars, but that's what you'd expect because they have huge populations.
If you read a list of all the federal welfare programs, the only one that sticks out as predominantly "urban" is Section 8. Section 8 is a big program, but it's a rounding error compared to Medicaid, SSDI, and the EITC, which all flow equally to rural areas. Even the food stamp program, which benefits rural households, eclipses HUD and Section 8.
As for education benefits: if you break Title 1 grants down per pupil, it's not the case that the urban states uniformly get more money than the rural ones. North Dakota, for instance, appears to get almost twice as much per pupil as California.
The data is hard to analyze on this point, because the government has a very different definition of "urban" than I think we're using in this thread. In particular, it tends to lump what we think of as urban areas and suburban areas into one "urban" category.
Traditional, walkable development on a grid with narrower streets, smaller lots, and less emphasis in the zoning code on unlimited free parking and huge setbacks on the lots.
The article mentions that property taxes only cover between 4 and 65% of the costs of the suburban infrastructure. Raising property taxes 50% to 2000%(!) would simultaneously cover that revenue shortfall, discourage suburban sprawl and encourage infill.
Obviously such a large tax increase could not happen overnight, but it does seem the obvious solution, or at least part of it.
Massive authoritarianism via social engineering and taxpayer funded government coercion to force people to live the right way, at least as defined by certain people, rather than being permitted by big brother (oh the irony) to live freely, the way they want to live.
I don't know if the ends are all that bad. The means being proposed is just horrific.
To some extent its inevitable, if decades of persuasion and experimentation have had little effect and prove very few people want to live that way, you're going to have to send in cops and lawyers, bankrupt some people, destroy some healthy and stable communities. Otherwise you'll never get the rush of "fixing" them.
I believe a lot of it is jealousy and/or corrupt real estate churn proposals. A couple blocks from company HQ there's a nice slum where I could buy an entire city block of crack houses for the cost of my one suburban house. There's people who aren't happy about that and want to make money off some real estate churn. Have .gov force the sales price of my house down to 10K and they can buy it, while I forcing me to move into the slum and pay $250K to them to buy their $10K house from them. I'm not interested in participating in that business model.
If real estate transaction volume is low and declining, and the purpose of .gov is to enforce the continuation of all dead/dying business models, and people are pretty much living where they want to right now, it makes sense to have .gov start forcing them to move, get some commissions, bust some blocks and redevelop some others (all with .gov funds funneled to the right people of course), etc.
Most of the issues discussed in the article don't really apply to true 'small towns', but instead they're applicable to sprawled, growing suburban/exurban development near-ish larger cities. Small towns far from big cities don't tend to have growth in the form of housing developments, and have smaller infrastructure overhead.
In my hometown of 3,000 people, people living in the center of town have public water and sewer services, but everyone living farther out has wells and septic tanks. In a low density, low growth environment like this, the town doesn't need to be responsible for those things, and therefore stays out of debt and doesn't develop massive, unsustainable infrastructure.
>everyone moves to the big city
Sustainable infrastructure can exist at smaller scales as well. There is certainly boom in big cities right now, but smaller cities (25-100k people?), that had a bustling 'urban' core 100 years ago, are starting to come back. I think that these cities (many of which fell into decay after WWII) with walkable 'streetcar suburbs' and dense downtown areas, will become much more popular in the near future.
Small towns can be fine if they have a compact walkable downtown, and are suitably close to job centers. Rural small towns and old rust belt towns are likely to die slow deaths regardless.
Precisely. My general theory is that you could significantly improve most suburbs by knocking down a block (or even just half a block) near the center of the suburb and building a mini "downtown" - a commercial area interspersed with a few modestly-sized apartment buildings.
That's far from the optimal design if you're starting from scratch, but it solves a lot of problems without massive changes.
I grew up in American suburbia and hated it. It wasn't even one of the worst examples, but you still literally could not walk to the local LIRR station or to the park, which were just 1-2 miles away. Absurd. Build commercial areas and some more sidewalks, and it would've been much less terrible.
