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Comment by JAlexoid | Hacker News Reader

Suburban sprawl is literally a result of policy, not just "what people want". Most people would love to live in a gigantic castle in the Loire valley with a helicopter taking them to the office - should we subsidize that as well?

Enabling people's wants by subsidizing it from other people's pockets - makes for a very bad result.

Start removing tax breaks for home ownership, rationally spreading the burden of maintaining infrastructure and other fun things that are subsidized today - you'll quickly learn that most people will weigh their options and think twice about McMansions.

The reality is - many people would love to live in a small town, with a train station to take a reliable ride to work in the city. Look at what happened in England, when already subsidized train tickets from satellite towns rose in prices.

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The 'we' subsidizing the middle class is the middle class. "We" are paying for it. What 'we' are also forced to subsidize is the everyone else on top of our choice of accommodations.

I can compare old houses at the edge of a city which cost four times as much to new builds at the far edges of that city's metro area which cost significantly less. The more expensive houses require significantly less infrastructure and cost the government less to support because of their location.

A huge undercurrent in urban planning discourse right now (e.g., Strong Towns), is that if all subsidies and taxes were removed both the poor and rich living closer to the city (or in older, denser suburbs) would have more money at the end of the day, while most living in significantly less dense housing would not be able to afford to pay for their lifestyle.

I'm certain this logic only applies to mega cities. The vast majority of smaller cities and towns are like one or two streets of high density and the rest is suburban or rural. There's not actually anyone in the 'city' to subsidize those around it.

There are a lot of cities in the Rust Belt and Midwest like I described, with the regional population around 1-2 million which are far away from being mega cities.

In the few examples I've personally visited, the residential density in the older "upscale" neighborhoods tends to come from duplexes and single family houses on small lots (or larger lots with a comparatively small amount of street frontage). There's some large buildings mixed in along with some very upscale condos and row houses.

Outside of extreme cases, infrastructure costs tend to become dominated by how long the road or pipes are, rather than the number of people using them.

Those are not suburban.

You're equating rural areas, with suburban.

And no, it's not about mega-cities. Detroit is not a mega city.

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