Seems like empathy should work both ways?
My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege.
Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
Berlin does things to people.
The argument is intra-municipalities, not intra-country. The argument is that people that live in the suburbs of a city end up costing more and paying less than the city-center counterparts. The richer people in the city do not pay proportionally to the cost they incur in the city's expenses, but when push comes to shove it's the poor people who are left with poor infrastructure, unmaintained roads, etc.
(As for the discussion regarding Berlin getting subsidies from the south: I can not argue there, but I am pretty sure that what I am paying in taxes is vastly more than what I am getting in benefits and public services. Just like I am pretty sure that the 1000€/month I am sending to TK is to cover the cost of others. There isn't much more than I am supposed to do, is there?)
Property tax eh? kind of depends on cost of the things that are paid for by property tax. Sometimes that'll be higher in urban and sometimes higher in rural.
I don't know why I should pay extra fees to keep my many cars on my property... that's why I have my property. I don't mind license fees, and I grumble but don't mind that they're higher for my PHEV even though I don't drive it much or plug it in. If I was parking on public right of way, it might make sense to charge me per car, but my cars don't use shared resources when they sit at home, and I can only drive one at a time.
Where can I live where I don't have to pay full price for extended infrastructure? That'd be great. Where I am, I have to pay my own way for my well and septic; if I wanted municipal of either, I'd have to pay for the build out to get it to my house, just like I did for muni fiber. The owners before me that had electricity hooked up must have paid the utility to extend it, and enhancements would be at my cost.
Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).
What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development.
Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
> Financial problems are local.
There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise.
Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
The first minute is nothing but conjecture and personal opinion full of misinformation, and it just continues from there.
Strong Towns is a good source, but they don't make or support most of the claims in this video because they have no basis in fact.