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Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

I respectfully disagree.

It is not just a commentary on what's happening, as you describe in your first sentence. There's also a distinct assertion on what must happen going forward, to the opinion of the speakers.

Suburbs don't scale. Yet, cities don't scale either. This is why people get priced out or want to move out and most cities have been low growth modes for years.

I find it interesting that recognizing that the path of least resistance (suburbs) may be slowly and haphazardly changing (true), is ccheered by all academics.

Yet I don't see any expert opinion about about having cities be more receptive to change to accommodate growth....

Sure sounds like a NIMBY from academics about their cities, no?

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Cities do scale though, they have scaled for thousands of years and will continue to scale. The history of human life has seen the median human living in a denser and denser living situation. People are priced out of US cities because the current cohort of property owners wants to treat cities like suburbs (slow growth, restrictions) not cities. Look at any major US city excluding NYC and the vast majority of land in the city is zoned for single family homes.

Cities do scale, but the low-density "Suburb City" that describes large parts of the US doesn't scale feasibly because the property tax / sales tax per square foot of property is insufficient to cover the city infrastructure to maintain it. The answer, unfortunately, is more growth, in an almost ponzi-scheme like fashion; new property tax revenue covers the cost of replacing roads and sewers from much older districts of the city and so forth.

You can see this in how cities tend to go full blight very quickly after the jig is up (e.g. Detroit, probably the largest example, but many midwest rust belt towns too).

I live in a "semi-rural" part of a European country between two major cities and I'm surprised at how immaculate the arterial road is that I live on, between the cities (kind of a "country road" that parallels the highway). Where I lived in the US before, similar roads were full of wheel-eating potholes. But then again, property prices here are through the roof because the government heavily regulates growth, so that's where they get the revenue.

It’s incredible how many people forget that we invented the apartment building before we invented the wheel.

I'd love to read more about this, could you elaborate!

> There's also a distinct assertion on what must happen going forward, to the opinion of the speakers.

I just went back and re-read the article. And... no, I don't see that at all. The tenor of the thing is almost 100% empirical, describing change without advocating for it. (To be fair this is largely a "book review" kind of thing and I haven't read the book itself.)

Politics really has infused everything now. Is it really not possible for you to read a straightforward description of urban growth patterns without seeing a... I dunno, I guess agenda-driven plot against your way of life? You do realize you can't vote your way back to unrestricted suburban growth, right? There just isn't the space for it.

Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Is it possible that there's a possibility that in fact, your assumptions could be wrong ? For an article that is 100% empirical as you say, i hardly see any citations, like user theNJR OP said.

Take for example my "way of life". How would you react if i told you that I am a resident of a major urban center of +2M people ? And I have lived in such a city all my life ,including my formative years ?

Would you still hold on to your truth ?

> Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

It literally is not.

> For an article that is 100% empirical as you say, i hardly see any citations

... it's an INTERVIEW. With the AUTHORS. Literally almost the whole thing, beyond the 3-4 paragraph introduction, is a "citation" of expert evidence.

cities scale pretty well...we can build in a third dimension

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