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Comment by gnaritas | Hacker News Reader

Whenever you see conservatives complaining about anything related to the Keynesian regime, you can bet you're reading a bunch of horse-shit with little if any basis in fact.

Government policies didn't create suburbs, people trying to get out of cities did, not everyone likes city life and it's cheaper to live further out than it is in the city. Suburbs are the natural result of a car culture and plentiful land to build on. No Keynesian conspiracies required.

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Gotta disagree. The easiest example to look at is the Interstate Highway System. They busted up downtowns and put giant highways through them so people could get to and from the suburbs and the cities. Baltimore, Atlanta, LA, DC, Boston, DFW, NO, etc. all have peculiarly similar interstate structures.

I think you're confusing highways and freeways, the Interstate Highway System has nothing to do with suburbs, it connects cities to each other. And cities build freeways because locals demand them, because they don't want to live in the city. That's not government creating suburbs, that's government responding to the desire for suburbs. Suburban sprawl tends to happen first, and then freeways are built to connect them to the city faster.

Cities don't build freeways, the feds build freeways (sometimes the state will build a highway, but it's mostly feds).

Correction noted, but the funding source doesn't change my point. Demand drives the building of city freeways, the freeways don't create the sprawl, the sprawl creates the demand for freeways.

>Government policies didn't create suburbs

It is exactly the opposite. American suburbs were created by goverment policies (specifically, by certain tax breaks for development industry and by tax breaks for home owners, not to mention housing subsidies)

...To give whites a place to go to git away from them coloreds.

Racism, or more broadly classism -- the refusal to come together in community and the tendency to draw bright lines between self and other, and order society so as to only have to deal with people like self while avoiding other -- is at the very heart of American social structure, at all levels.

Minimum parking mandates are the law most forceful in mandating suburbs. National finance regulations contribute. Concentration on freeway funding is part of it. Setback requirements and floor area ratios require suburbia also. Single use zoning adds up, too.

It's only cheaper because it's heavily subsidized by the rest of us. Imagine if you only had toll roads, and there was no subsidy on gas. If you like suburban living, more power to you, but don't pretend that it's inherently cheaper when your lifestyle is being subsidized.

Where exactly did I say anything about my preferences? Nor did I say anything about subsidies. Of course cities subsidize suburbs, so what, not in the least bit relevant to any point being made. Subsidies or not, land/house outside a city will always be cheaper than land/house inside the city, that's the cheaper being referred to and that applies with or without subsidies and with or without mortgage deductions.

Beyond that, we live in an age of remote work, don't assume suburban living requires commuting to the city, it doesn't.

I'm not assuming it's inherently cheaper, it is inherently cheaper and always has been. City living always costs more than living more remotely and that's unlikely to change.

You say that it is inherently cheaper, then acknowledge that it is heavily subsidized.

And remote work is nowhere near the level where you could bring that up. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of jobs still require you to go to the office.

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