Deacon923
Scooter Banks
From Chuck Marohn, one of my favorite writers on urban development issues:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-conservative-case-against-the-suburbs/?utm_content=buffer2180a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-conservative-case-against-the-suburbs/?utm_content=buffer2180a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
The sad reality is that, despite the marketing, the suburbs were never about creating household wealth; they were about creating growth on the cheap. They were born under a Keynesian regime that counted growth from government spending as equivalent to that coming from private investment. Aggressive horizontal expansion of our cities allowed us to consistently hit federal GDP and unemployment targets with little sophistication and few difficult choices.
That we were pawning off the enormous long-term liabilities for serving and maintaining all of these widely dispersed systems onto local taxpayers–after plying municipalities with all the subsidies, pork spending, and ribbon cuttings needed to make it happen–didn’t seem to enter our collective consciousness. When all those miles of frontage roads, sewer and water pipes, and sidewalks fall into disrepair–as they inevitably will in every suburb–very little of it will be fixed. The wealth necessary to do so just isn’t there.