Hacker News Reader

Comment by amanaplanacanal | Hacker News Reader

They can only afford to live in those single family houses in the suburbs because they don't have to pay the full cost of the infrastructure to run miles and miles all the way out to their house. It's being subsidized by the taxes paid by folks in the inner cities.

View on HN

Then why do cities keep annexing suburbs? If they are such a resource sink you would think the opposite would be true - cities would shrink their borders.

The people doing the annexing gain power and influence by extending their reach and base of constituents, but they don't (as individuals) pay the price of supporting those neighborhoods.

In our cities history, it was EXPLICITLY to maintain republican control of local government. The city, it's like 200 years history, has REPEATEDLY split and consumed neighboring locals full of rich white guys to maintain a rich white republican control.

The is a strong towns talking point, but it is completely wrong. The first suburbs were built in the 1880s, 140 years latter they have built and rebuilt all their infrastructure.

Most of a city budget isn't even the infrastructure costs you claim they are not paying. If you expand out to the state where the highways are paid for the cost of infrastructure is even smaller as a percentage of the budget.

Densities have changed quite a bit across American suburbs over time—Brooklyn Heights, considered to be one of the first commuter "suburbs" in the 1800s is like 75k/people per square mile, Levittown, perhaps the first real planned cul-de-sac community in the late 40s: 7.5k, whereas a modern single family subdivision suburb is more like 2.5k.

That is mostly about birthrates. The number of houses is similear.

Either that or your are cherry-picking your examples. Where I live the suburbs from the 1920s are slightly less dense than the developments they are building right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com