Hacker News Reader

It is perfectly valid for you to write this:

"contain large majorities of their residents who couldn't stand city life and far prefer the openness of the suburbs, sprawl and all"

but you can not combine it with this:

"In a free society, however, such aesthetics are always balanced against utility and, when people have a choice, they will often choose utility."

Suburbs require gigantic subsidies to be made to work, so you need to be careful how you use the phrase "free society". Because the population is relatively sparse in the suburbs (compared to a dense city), the cost of procurement of infrastructure tends to go up on a per capita basis. Just think of the energy loss carrying electricity, kilometer after kilometer, in the suburbs, and compare that to carrying the same amount of energy in the city, where the power does not need to travel as much of a distance (per capita). For any given 100,000 people a dense city allows the cheaper availability of roads and sewers and power and transport. Such density is economically rational.

Think carefully about some of the things that people love most about the suburbs. One thing people love is the wide open spaces, and the lack of crowds (especially compared to a dense urban core). And yet, the crowds in the city are usually economically rational, especially compared to the expense of provisioning the suburbs. Think about the wide open highways of Texas - "wide open" means "used less than a road in New York City" and the greater use that the road gets in New York City means the money spent on it is more wisely spent.

The suburbs need to be seen as a luxury item. Since the USA is wealthy, it can afford many luxuries, and the suburbs are one of them. But the suburbs are more luxurious than the cities, and the cities are more economically rational.

And of course, in the suburbs, one has to use a car to get anywhere. This is, of course, a tremendous use of resources, on a per capita basis. In a dense urban core, such as New York City, you can travel by mass transit, which uses less resources per capita. And you can even travel by foot or by bicycle. The suburbs depend on the use of automobiles, and automobiles, too, need to be seen as luxury items. Again, because the USA is wealthy, it can afford many luxuries, but again, the heavy dependence on the automobiles makes the life in the suburbs more resource intensive, per capita, than life in the city.

Where you use the phrase "free society" I would prefer the use of the phrase "subsidized society".

Where you use the word "utility" I would use the word "subsidy." And yes, of course, everyone would like to live in a heavily subsidized society, so long as you can get the subsidies from someone else.

Why is this being downvoted? Does someone want to make the argument that life in suburbs in less resource intensive per capita than life in a dense urban core? If so, they should make that argument and I'll make my counter-argument. But my point is fairly obvious: people living close together can share be provided with infrastructure with less resources per capita, or to put it another way, the denser the population the more intensely used any given piece of infrastructure is likely to be used (the same point, stated the other way round). Think of a road in New York City, and then think of a road west of Washington DC, in the suburbs of Virginia. Which gets more use?

I suspect that anyone wanting to downvote my comment is someone who themselves lives in the suburbs, and they are downvoting my comment because my post makes them uncomfortable. But just because an idea makes you uncomfortable doesn't make it untrue. My point is entirely valid, and it is correct.

I didn't downvote, but I am not convinced infrastructure cost is that much higher in the suburbs.

In a dense core, maintenance and development are vastly much costlier than in the suburbs Acquiring land for any project is going to be harder and pricier. If you close a road in a suburb to do work on it or do other construction, no big deal; in a city, you create horrible traffic problems. Politically you have to deal with 3-4x as many people per mile work of anything in a city. In an urban environment, sure fuel costs per person drop drastically, but when other costs are taken into account, I remain unconvinced it is so much cheaper. Just look how expensive it is to live in a big city in the US relative to a suburb.

You do not understand what I've written. No where did I mention absolute price. I am talking strictly about resources used per capita. Let me emphasize that:

PER CAPITA

You write:

"Acquiring land for any project is going to be harder and pricier. "

Yes, obviously. Of course the land is pricier in the big urban cities. This has nothing to do with what I wrote.

The resources used PER CAPITA in suburbs will be greater than the resources used PER CAPITA in a dense urban core, other things being equal. This is a simple matter of space and resource use. Resources will tend to be more heavily used in a dense urban core, therefore society gains more benefit from that those resources, assuming the point of the resource is to be used.

Compare the use of fuel in the city, and fuel in suburbs. Much fuel in the suburb is spent on automobiles, which are well known to be inefficient. In a city you will have mass transit, which offers a more efficient use of fuel, per capita.

You write:

"In an urban environment, sure fuel costs per person drop drastically, but when other costs are taken into account, I remain unconvinced it is so much cheaper."

Nowhere did I say the city was cheaper than the suburbs. I suggest the opposite - the suburbs are cheaper than the cities. And I suggest the reason why - it is because the suburbs are subsidized to a greater extent than the cities.

There is a large literature on this subject in the field of urban planning.

When you talk about "subsidies" for abstract "resources" and then try to decouple them from the available market in these resources (through such terms as "other things being equal") you are engaging in a bit of sophistry. Yes, resource usage may be greater per capita in the suburbs, but the most expensive resource in most cases is space/land and it is very, very expensive in urban cores. Urban space is so expensive that it often washes out the more efficient usage of other resources that density can offer.

You can claim that in a city people will have mass transit available, but with only a few exceptions in the US that mass transit is underutilized and really only serves to get a small fraction of the urban residents to work and back; it does not serve other daily needs quite as well, so after taking mass transit back from work you will hop into your car to go get groceries or go out for some entertainment in the evening.

If these magical subsidies truly existed at the level you are suggesting they would be both obvious and a source of growing political friction given the re-urbanization of the American population. Could you point out some examples of these subsidies? [And before you start, "fuel" does not really count since it cuts both ways in this argument and urban residents to not lead significantly more fuel efficient lives than their suburban counterparts.]

"Urban space is so expensive that it often washes out the more efficient usage of other resources that density can offer."

Err... He capitalized "PER CAPITA".

In cities, a piece of land the size of 6 suburban homes (counting backyard) can be home to several thousand people, that's why land is expensive.

Go to Hong Kong, you'll see apartment buildings with 40 floors. On each floor there are 20 units. In each unit there are 2 rooms, a living room, a kitchen and a toilet. Each room is 2.5 metres by 2.5 metres, the living room 3 times that. Anywhere from 2 to 6 people can live in a single unit, but usually 4; The government doesn't hand out public housing with 2 rooms to only 2 people. 4 * 20 * 40 is over 3200 residents.

In the suburbs the same land is home to only around two dozen people. Thus it would make sense that in Hong Kong land could be a hundred times more expensive than in a suburb anywhere else.

I understand what PER CAPITA means and I was stating explicitly that the claims being made were, on a PER CAPITA basis, erroneous.

A plot of land can only be home to several thousand people if you are willing to pay a lot of money to build it in that fashion. Building up is not a cost saving measure, it is a demand placed upon a plot of land as a consequence of population density. Building suburban homes for several thousand people will occupy more land than a dense urban apartment tower, but it will be an order of magnitude cheaper to build in the first place.

You write:

"Building up is not a cost saving measure"

There has been a consistent misreading in this thread, focusing on cost. My focus was not on cost, but on resource use. Nowhere did I suggest that cities were cheaper than the suburbs. I stated above that building in a city is pricier than building in the suburbs.

However, my point was, the suburbs use more resources. The biggest resource that is used in the suburbs is land. Per capita, the suburbs use up much more land than the cities do. The geographical dispersion leads to more resource use in the suburbs.

Consider electricity being carried over a wire. Some energy is lost for every kilometer the energy needs to be carried. In a city, you might have 100,000 people living in just a few blocks - the energy does not need to travel far, per capita. In the suburbs, the same 100,000 people might be spread out over many kilometers.

I have not mentioned the environmental impact, but we could discuss that too. The suburbs use up a lot of land. The suburbs have a major impact on forests and lakes and rivers, and the wildlife that depends on those forests and lakes and rivers.

It might help to engage in a thought experiment about how much land you could free up if all people clumped together in an urban area as dense as New York City. In the USA, the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts have a combined population a little over 9 million. New York City has a population a bit more than 8 million. Basically, if you wanted to pack all these people into another New York, you would have a city smaller than Massachusetts, and Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire would be pure, untouched, pristine forest. Mind you, I am not suggesting this is a practical idea, I'm simply offering this as a thought experiment, as a way of imagining some of the environmental benefits of density.

Several points:

1) It feels like you are exaggerating population densities. Outside of some ultra high density areas in Manhattan, you aren't going to have 100,000 people in a few blocks. The density of most cities is about 3 to 4x that of suburbs, not orders of magnitude greater. (Note: I'm going off Bay Area data here).

2) Agreed on environmental costs not being accounted for. Developing suburbs would cost more if they were; how much I can't say.

3) On your thought experiment, here's something to think about: The entire world's population can fit in Texas (270,000 sq miles) at density levels found in SF neighborhoods. You'd need just over 3 Texases (or a Texas + Alaska) to do suburban density levels (~900,000 sq miles). But you would need about 19+ million sq miles for farming (russia + canada + us + china + brazil); in other words, the land use savings gained from going fully urban is a rounding error.

3a) On top of that, you already have to build out roads, wires, etc. to get to the farmland. When also given that the land everywhere can absorb some waste with little effect (septic tanks), it actually is efficient to spread the population more evenly throughout this hypothetical world.

4) Again the cost does matter. The interstate highway system has a lower cost per person and higher average utilization per person (defined as US residents) than San Francisco's Central subway does per person (SF residents). Ongoing maintenance still looks the same; San Francisco needs to spend about $51M a year on road maintenance. Sunnyvale is at $4.7M with a 6th of the population and a 3rd the density. There might be some resources saved in higher density, but something is dragging the per capita costs higher in highly dense areas.

You write:

"Yes, resource usage may be greater per capita in the suburbs, but the most expensive resource in most cases is space/land and it is very, very expensive in urban cores."

As I have said repeatedly, my focus was not on cost but on resource use. Cities use land more efficiently than suburbs. Nowhere did I say that cities were cheaper than the suburbs. I said that the cities were pricier than the suburbs. The cost and the resource use are 2 different things. In fact, you could argue that land in a city is more expensive precisely because the land is being used more efficiently.

Per capita, a city uses less land than the suburbs. This is almost definitional. A city is efficient in its use of land. Land is an important resource. This is an example of how cities are more efficient in their use of resources.

Many low density towns get away without a sewer system, houses can use a septic system instead. In low density towns you can build horizontally, which uses less human, energy, material resources than building upwards. In a low density town, parks and fields have low enough usage that the grass can be maintained on its own, in cities the fields need to re-sodded often and require extra fertilizer. In cities you end up building roads on multiple levels, railways underground, etc, all of which adds enormous resource costs to construction. Cities have so much pavement they are noticeably hotter in the summer, which requires more air conditioning.

On the flip side, low density towns require more asphalt per capita and more day-to-day gasoline usage.

Overall though, it's not on the face of it obvious to me that low density is more resource intensive. I'd be interested if you have links to detailed research on the matter.

It's also not obvious to me that small towns are more subsidized. Bridges, highways, subways, etc, going into a city are all government funded. And cities like Washington D.C. and New York are basically imperial cities - they make most of their income from politically connected agencies, banks, contractors, etc.

You write:

"Many low density towns get away without a sewer system, houses can use a septic system instead."

A septic system still uses resources. In fact, per capita, a septic system is one of the most wasteful kinds of systems for handling sewage. Think of the land that a septic system needs.

> In fact, per capita, a septic system is one of the most wasteful kinds of systems for handling sewage. Think of the land that a septic system needs.

Yes, think of the land, specifically the marginal cost of using said land for a septic system.

A septic system in the country can easily cost less than the comparable amount of NYC's sewer system.

> The resources used PER CAPITA in suburbs will be greater than the resources used PER CAPITA in a dense urban core, other things being equal.

True, but the question is not resources used, but cost of resources and the value of the benefits received.

I've lived in a city, I've lived in a suburb. I like the city far better. I disagree with your point on resources.

Energy wise, the people in the city use far less. But that is mostly becuase they have smaller apartments and use less heat. Give everyone in the suburbs 800 sq ft and then run the comparison again.

You definition of "resource" is a little strange. Would the pebbles in the asphalt on a street in NYC see more tires run over them per year than the pebbles in the asphalt in the suburbs. Probably true. When you look at the cost of maitaining a mile of road in NYC and compare it to a mile of road in the suburbs, the difference is striking. You are spending 10x+ for everything in the city because it is a logistics nightmare.

Even something as simple as a dedicated fiber line for a business, in the suburbs they can just run a line underground easily. In the city, it is a major problem becuase everything underground is already filled, so it comes down to getting a permit to run a line through the underground manholes (an existing, and very limited, resource) and it can be difficult if not impossible.

Not to mention compare a house made of 2x4s, plywood, to one made of steel and brick. Wood grows back. Steel doesn't. Steel also uses an insane amount of energy. And construction in the city is very time consuming, energy consuming, and expensive.

I assume you were being downvoted because your comment claims to be specifically rebutting a claim in the parent, but doesn't do that, and instead just sets up a soap box for you to pontificate from.

I'm not going to waste the time dissecting it in detail, but your comment is full of not-quite-sensical comparisons ("[S]ubsidized society" vs. "free society"? Intercity highways are "unwise"--where do cities get food?) and provocative language ("Suburbs require gigantic subsidies"--so do cities, right, even if smaller per capita? Suburbs are "luxuries"?).

> Suburbs require gigantic subsidies to be made to work, so you need to be careful how you use the phrase "free society".

I think that you're confusing "costs more" with "is subsidized".

> Such density is economically rational.

Ah yes, another cost-benefit analysis that ignores benefits.

Here's another one.

Going to Fiji to scuba dive is economically stupid because travel from San Jose to Fiji costs money.

Whether going to Fiji to dive is economically stupid depends on the price, and the relevant prices are different for different people.

It doesn't sound like you lived in a place all that bad. The problem with the sprawl that I've lived in is that there is no chance for the community to develop. For a community to form there has to be some place where members of the community gather and see each other enough times to form relationships. That doesn't exist in my hometown, everybody gets in their car and drives to some place miles away then drives home. Even if you get to know people at these places the sprawl is so massive the odds are that they live miles and miles away from you. The closest (geographically) friend I had in high school lived 7 miles away; and I didn't live in a rural area, that was 7 miles of sub-divisions and strip malls.

I was going to say much the same thing.

The NJ town I live in has something like 4K residents. It's almost entirely zoned residential or residential/agricultural [1], but for a tiny corner where there's a single strip mall having a Chinese restaurant, a video store, and an auto parts store.

Because the laws so thoroughly prevent non-residential uses, the people of the town have nothing to bring them together. I think this is the reason that, of my 4 neighbors, I've never met 2 of them although they've both lived there for about 2 years.

Really, the only way in my town for people to meet is when they've got children sharing classes in the schools. I don't have kids, so I'm effectively not a part of whatever community there is.

I wish that there was a nearby little grocery, or something. For practical purposes I'd like it, because I have to actually travel two towns away for anything I need to buy. But also for community purposes: if there were some place that I could bump into my neighbors occasionally, they'd be alot more like ... neighbors.

But as the article notes, this is forbidden.

[1] "Agricultural" doesn't mean a farm in this case, it means somebody who can pull off the fake farming requirement of generating >$500 of income from agricultural activities. I have one friend with a big lot that sells some firewood every year in order to lower his property tax by being agricultural.

It's an....odd article, though given its 1996 byline I suppose it felt like some sort of millenialist manifesto. Some parts of it make perfect sense to me, and some none at all.

I do empathize with his basic point about sprawl - I don't enjoy driving and neither does my wife, so the fact that San Francisco has fairly decent public transit and is generally walkable is a big plus. We'd have to make a lot of adjustments if I moved to a suburb, and Mrs. Browl (who grew up in SF) likes being near a high-density urban environment. It's an awesome city, and the rich architectural and cultural heritage play a big part in that. I also like that there are a lot of skyscrapers, because when I was growing up in Europe they were something I saw only in movies :-)

However, you're quite right that the economics of it don't make sense for most people. We've been looking for a house over the last year and staying inside the SF city limit comes at enormous cost. Besides the up-front expense, another city problem is the relatively poor quality of the available choices. San Francisco buildings are either old (expensive to maintain, quirky) or if new, very expensive and either tiny, badly constructed, or both. Coming from a slightly cooler area in Europe, it astonishes me that such a wealthy city is full of houses with such cheap windows and building materials. When my parents visited us earlier this year the very first thing my mother asked about on the way in from the airport was why so many of the houses looked like they were built out of cheap wood. Every place I've ever lived in Europe feels like a bomb shelter by comparison; indeed, visiting some friends who bought a 5-year old suburban house a couple of hours' drive from SF gives me major house envy. It's not going to win any design awards, but the house is large, well constructed, fairly efficient, and the community it's in is nice. The same money in SF will buy only an undersized firetrap in a chronically dysfunctional neighborhood - on paper it seems like a good investment, in reality anything but.

The sad fact is that land prices dominate all else here, and so most of us live in terrible buildings, which are shockingly bad value for money. I've been in some very, very expensive homes here that are still terrible; the people who built them would probably be shaking their heads at our failure to capitalize on a century of architectural and other knowledge in regard to most of our own dwelling conditions. We have some wonderful, historic civic architecture, and some fantastic commercial buildings (in a few places, both at once), but apart from a few genuinely unique/historical neighborhoods most of the city would be better torn down and rebuilt with a minimum of 6 floors, which might allow sensible use of the space at ground level. Sad to say, I think it's going to take a large earthquake to get everyone back on the same page and recalibrate perceptions about the long-term development of the city.

(It's not all gloom and doom - there's 2 or maybe 3 huge redevelopment projects taking place over the next decade, on Treasure Island, Hunter's Point, and maybe the old Port district. But for smaller development projects, the planning/review process is a nightmare beyond parody.)

It's weird; on the one hand I have a great quality of life, one which epitomizes a great deal of what is cool about a world city like San Francisco: if my 20 or 30 year old self took a time machine into the present, he/I would be amazed at how lucky I am. On the other hand, I keep daydreaming about moving to...Sacramento. It's cheap, it's pleasant, it's small enough to get around on foot or by bicycle. Immediate proximity to the fount/drain of state government also make for a more interesting environment than most people suspect.

>When my parents visited us earlier this year the very first thing my mother asked about on the way in from the airport was why so many of the houses looked like they were built out of cheap wood. Every place I've ever lived in Europe feels like a bomb shelter by comparison;

Houses in California are going to look less "solid" than houses elsewhere because houses elsewhere are often built out of brick or stone, materials that are vastly more likely to fail in an earthquake. Wood-frame, wood- or stucco-sided homes are common in California because they are much more likely to withstand earthquakes.

Well, I did point this out - and having rebuilt a few houses in the city when I was younger, I admit the wood frame approach is economical and affordable too. On the other hand, concrete and steel are equally viable but seem relatively unpopular for residential buildings.

The problem with concrete and structural steel is that they don't scale downward well. For a single family home, or even a small commercial building, they are much more expensive than masonry or wood frame construction.

Sure. That's why I was saying 'minimum 6 floors'. Single family homes in San Francisco are mostly a terrible use of the limited available space. Since we're bounded on 3 sides by water, I feel we should be building up to a much greater extent.

> We have some wonderful, historic civic architecture, and some fantastic commercial buildings (in a few places, both at once), but apart from a few genuinely unique/historical neighborhoods most of the city would be better torn down and rebuilt with a minimum of 6 floors, which might allow sensible use of the space at ground level.

I'm curious: why isn't it? On the face of it, this sounds like a great opportunity for some investors to make a lot of money. Buy some land in SF, rebuild with taller, better-constructed buildings, and then collect the increased rent money. Is there some Kafka-style government bureaucracy prohibiting this, or weird tax disincentives?

A bunch of things. Planning is hard, real estate is so expensive that people fight anything which might obstruct their view or lower their hard-bought property values (understandably), rental laws are skewed heavily in favor of tenants, and the whole process is hyper-politicized at the neighborhood level. I'm surprised the planning commissioners get anything done sometimes. Public hearings sometimes go on until 2 or 3 in the morning if it's something contentious.

Any large building requires several million and several years before it can even break ground; last year a developer who had already dug a foundation ended up filling it in again and selling the land after a 3-year delay. Also environmental law is used obstructively in a great many cases. I'm generally in favor of public consultation, regulations etc., but sometimes the big projects suck up all the political oxygen and that makes it harder for smaller developers to move forward. The recession hasn't helped either of course.

I'm not in real estate or anything, just a bit bummed that our city government hasn't been running well in recent years.

The reason you will never see any six-story buildings built is the building code. Four stories is the tallest you can legally build with wood framing; higher than that, you effectively need steel framing, and the code requirements for those don't make any economic sense until you get to 10 stories. In between is a dead zone where it is uneconomic to build.

Interesting to know! I'm OK with 10-storey buildings, I think we could build a ton of those in areas like SoMa without injuring the character of the city any.

On the point of cost of housing, I believe the author's intent is that, if we built new places as he describes, they needn't cost any more than current suburbs.

To add my own point, I am sure that house prices in San Francisco are high because of high demand and limited supply, not because they are intrinsically more expensive to create.

The problem is that the "utility" of suburban sprawl is in no small part due to the historical price of energy.

If and when energy prices go higher (and there are good reasons to believe they will) I think we'll see a necessary shift.

Aside #1: I think of "walkable neighborhoods" as an interesting counterpoint to "sprawl." The health benefits of living in walkable neighborhoods are well established. Aside from health, the folks at walkscore.com recently highlighted research that suggests home values retain better in walkable neighborhoods: http://blog.walkscore.com/2009/08/new-study-shows-one-point-...

Aside #2: Kunstler often makes entertaining points about the aesthetic of sprawl, be he's also a bit of an overwrought doomsayer -- I take his work with several grains of salt.

As a counterpoint, I think that it is possible to have Wal-Mart, privacy, consistency, etc. without the isolating effects of sprawl. For example, imagine if stores were forced to internalize the true environmental and traffic costs of large outdoor parking lots, such that they could only build parking on top of their stores. Imagine a park the size of an average shopping center lot -- it's huge! Or imagine houses there.

Tokyo is about as close as any city comes to accomplishing this. Aesthetics aren't the greatest, but communities, local businesses, etc. seem much stronger than in some other large cities. It's worth noting that Tokyo's population density is actually lower than New York's.

In my experience you can find good people anywhere (even LA), but I wouldn't trade a mortgage and a car for the tiny studio I live in in Seattle. I feel more alive, connected, inspired, healthy, happy and ready to experience new things on a daily or semi-weekly basis.