In my opinion, suburbs are worse than cities because there’s so much more expense involved with all that extra distance, longer power, water, communications, and transportation links, everyone having to own and operate a car and buy lots of gas, giant houses to be built and maintained, lawns to be mowed, etc, and there’s no particular payoff for all that extra expense, except that you can make more noise without bothering the neighbors, which is a tiny problem that well-built apartments and condos with thick insulation do a pretty good job of fixing.

Victorville is an exurb, even more remote and recently invented than the suburbs, and even worse about wasting gasoline and driving time.

Almost any job that could be filled by a telecommuter can be filled better either in India or by a computer program on a server in a basement somewhere.

A few people love the big, harsh, empty stark beauty of the desert, and will want to live there, but that beauty is ruined when people build entire cities or suburbs or exurbs out there, and you tend to run out of water if more than a few people live there.

Carlos,

The trick would have been to build dense suburban ghettos for the poor people, instead of sprawl, so that the ghettos didn’t waste a lot of money on useless extra infrastructure, and public transportation could work there.

Urban planning is the kind of government master plan that always makes Americans nervous, but you have to decide how to build roads, water, power, and telecom links somehow. Public transportation too if you have any. So far, an elected government drawing up plans and forcibly buying right-of-way by eminent domain as needed is the least bad method anyone has come up with.

Population doesn’t have to keep growing. It could also be held at about a constant level, with births at about the same rate as deaths.

But there is a fair point that suburban misery is nothing compared to the urban misery that the rest of the modern world lives in. Check out new neighborhoods in Shanghai, the label Soviet-style doesn’t even apply anymore. And those are the lucky ones. Elsewhere people live in shantytowns with no water or sewers.

Mowing grass sucks but the Victorville-style suburbs don’t even have grass anymore. And sure, you can get a house with your own ball room for 1$ in Detroit built back when American capitalism still had some pride, but then you have to live in a gangster-regime.

I am a thorn in your side.

“the suburbs serve to make money for the developers.” Imagine that. People want to make money building houses. How crass.

Actually, you did bring up a good point about the ghettoization of the suburbs. What’s happened in many U.S. suburbs mirrors what happened in Europe, especially Paris. Suburbs are cheap, people with less money eventually move there, bamm–ghetto. But part of the reason is your bugaboo–developers. They saw urban centers as something that may be attractive to people with money, bought land an buildings, redevolped (in conjuction with their political cronies who rebuilt infrastructure), and priced the poor out of the urban center. So it’s more like ghetto displacement rather than ghettoization.

But I don’t know if “urban planning” solves the problem. What I just described above is considered “urban planning.” And I don’t know if I trust the idea of an urban mastermind telling me where I can or cannot live.

By the way, bonds do defer debt, but how do you think governments get money? It’s either taxes or debt (bonds, treasury bills, etc.). Any urban development would need to be funded by bonds, just like suburban development, but as you pointed out (not that I agree), bonds are the slow road to hell. So if all development is bond funded, the conclusion is we’re all going to hell?

Also, as the population grows, it has to live somewhere and you can’t just keep packing everyone into a finite “urban” space. In fact much of what is considered the urban core of today’s cities was the suburbia of yesteryear. My point is it’s inevitable that the population grows, and it’s inevitable that areas surrounding cities also develop, so suburbs are inevitable. Hell, suburb is a very pure Latin word that Romans from the Roman Empire used because they experienced the same thing we are experiencing–population growth centered around cities.

Another top article, it cracked me up. I couldn’t help thinking, these schmucks manage to make Tom Friedman look competent and wise! No small achievement, that…

even if cars (cause low density urban areas are not conducive to public transit) could run purely on electricity, the other costs of suburbia (higher costs for pipes, electricity grids, maintenance, fire, police, etc.) would still be too high. add in the fact that much of suburban development is funded with municipal bonds, which only serve to defer the actual expense to later generations, we see that the suburbs are on the slow road to hell.

the articles about the ghetto-ization of the burbs, along with the greaseball pseudo-academics involved in perpetrating the fraud, are just the icing on the cake.

academics have long known about these problems. but unfortunately public discourse about urban planning has long been dominated by the development community and their big bux.

I mean, clearly Victorville is quite bad, but after reading this article I’m not sure whether it is a prime example of how suburbs are awful, the crap end of a broad spectrum of suburb quality, or maybe even not really a suburb at all? Can someone help me with my reading comprehension here?

Whatever the answer, if telecommuting takes over, as Kotkin enthuses, no one is going to choose to live in the desert.