Anonymous #1 22h

Here’s a paper from 1964 (they knew this back then) that did that study on the twin cities. https://citizensleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/PolicyReportFiscalDec-64.pdf

1

Anonymous OP 22h

Here’s one from 2001 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5040696_Central_city_and_suburban_development_who_pays_and_who_benefits

1

Anonymous OP 22h

And one from 2025 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5434299 Again, this is something that’s just kinda obvious- big stroads don’t make tax revenue they just take up a lot of space compared to the urban core

3

Anonymous #1 21h

maybe this is easier to visualize

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

more density = more taxable units = less tax waste trying to keep suburban sprawl and car dependent infrastructure afloat

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

so the solution is to abolish use-based zoning and parking minimums, and to begin backfilling development

1

Anonymous #3 21h

maybe don’t build suburbs? we kinda need roads…

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

Now you’re even more confusing. Don’t build suburbs? Where tf do you want people to live then?

1

Anonymous #3 21h

in towns and cities, where they have lived for thousands of years. the suburbs were invented postwar to encourage car demand and segregation

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

I think the difference between a town and a suburb is kinda negligible. But that aside I’m still genuinely just lost at what your point is. Do you want all of humanity to just live in massive cities? What about farmers or other professions which require you to live outside of cities?

1

Anonymous #3 21h

well, no. a town generally has all of the things people need within them. housing, amenities, services etc. the suburbs move housing away from the cities and segregate zoning, encouraging the usage of cars to get from place to place. humans have lived in towns and cities for a thousands of years. rural towns are exactly that. they don’t exactly live in suburbs in the countryside lol. you’d know this if you lived there

1

Anonymous #3 21h

and tell me, how many people work on the farms today? less than 1% of the population. most people live in the cities suburbs, not rural settings. backfilling development to make suburbs more sustainable benefits all people

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

First of all I lived in a suburb my entire childhood and now I go to university in a city and live in the country when I go home lmao so I’d say I have experience living in all three. I’d actually, genuinely like you to convince me that there’s a difference between a suburb and a town because I’m actually receptive to hearing it. As of right now though you haven’t listed anything that makes a suburb distinct from a town. Suburbs have amenities and services just like towns do even though you

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

claim they don’t. Also not all towns are walkable and lots of them require cars.

1

Anonymous #3 21h

suburbs contain only single-family homes. there isn’t a grocery store in your neighborhood. you probably have to drive a couple of miles to get to one. towns traditionally have housing and amenities next to each other, all within the town itself. i’ve explained the difference three times now, you just keep projecting your worldview over what i’ve already clarified

1

Anonymous #3 21h

lots of towns NOW require cars. the car is maybe 60 years older than your grandparents. wtf do you think people did to get around before the car? the cities used to be built for people before we bulldozed the housing for parking and freeways and forced people out of the cities and into the suburbs

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

Well no, in my suburb growing up there was a grocery store close by, within a mile. And that’s the case in most of the suburbs I’ve visited. Again I’m actually quite receptive here and would like to learn the distinction if there is one.

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

Also to your other point didn’t you clarify in the beginning that you think urbanization and cities are a GOOD thing? If that’s what you believe you should support parking and freeways being built so we can travel easily.

1

Anonymous #3 21h

close by, not in your neighborhood. did you walk to the store, or have to drive?

1

Anonymous _orangutan 21h

I drove. Alright I see what you’re saying, a suburb is like a town but on a city scale while a town is just a smaller suburb?

1

Anonymous #3 21h

no, because parking and freeways only make it easier for cars to travel, not people. cars bloat the size of our cities with their excessive infrastructure. devoting 80% of the usable land to temporarily house cars is land waste, land that could be better used to permanently house people instead.

1

Anonymous #3 21h

well and suburbs are generally ONLY zoned for single-family homes. they’re the least dense form of urban planning, and this is intentional, to encourage car demand. suburbs are car dependent, whereas towns and cities do not have to be. they are currently, that’s because American urban planning practices in the 1930s onwards placed emphasis on cars and planning around them, rather than people

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Well I don’t necessarily know if the solution is to bulldoze all our highways and build apartments. Idk if you know this (you probably do seeing how knowledgeable you are on these issues) but there are about 30 vacant housing units for every one homeless person in the US. Thats the problem. That’s a very actionable and preventable problem we can solve in a matter of months as opposed to years of construction and billions in labor.

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

and also, a parking lot generates dramatically less taxable units than an apartment block, townhomes, or any other multi-family or single-family dwelling. they’re tax sinks

1

Anonymous #3 20h

i have solution to that too. banning speculation and limiting the total number of units that landlords and banks can hold onto. forcing those people to sell their assets would flood the market with affordable housing. it’s all connected, and the root issue is capitalism

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

I think the problem with your ideology is that you think we can just pump the brakes and reverse 100 years of car centric infrastructure on the drop of a dime. That’s just not possible. We COULD slowly walk back car centrism over the course of decades but we need to focus on actionable solutions imo.

1

Anonymous #3 20h

i’m not saying this has to happen overnight. it took decades for urban planners to bulldoze our cities and transform them from the people oriented spaces they once were into the car dependent spaces they presently are. like i said, these practices began in the 1930s, and since then it has been a continuation of those policies

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

I’ve actually never heard the proposal of limiting housing units at all. That’s a great idea. I think we could go further and outright ban private firms from owning single family homes or any residential property outside of cities. The other problem you’d have to solve though is the human one. Boomers have absolutely zero problem selling the home they bought for $20k in 1960 for millions. And just because blackrock the entity can’t pay it, doesn’t mean one of the 50 c-suite executives AT

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

this is also why i said to ban use-based zoning and parking minimums, never to bulldoze the infrastructure people presently need. it will take time, but i assure you we can phase the car out over time. it just takes guidance and commitment to people oriented planning

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

blackrock can’t. Thats the complex issue you’d have to solve.

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Also idek if it’s necessary to outright BAN the car overall. There’s something to be said about the freedom of travel. If your only methods of transportation are controlled by the government that could be a problem. I think the way South Korea handled car infrastructure was great. Almost no roads in downtown Seoul. Underground parking garages that are safer and take up less space. Even culturally, if you park your car above ground it’s proper etiquette to literally cram as many cars into the

4

Anonymous #3 20h

Above ground lots as possible and leave them in neutral so other people can push them out of the way if they need to get out. They can fit 100 cars into what we Americans would consider a 25 car lot.

1

Anonymous #3 20h

cars provide us with negative freedom, that is the freedom from mobility. cars and their infrastructure are ONLY accessible to drivers. that is not freedom, that is dependency. you live in America, where public transit is nonexistent in most communities, and the towns have been so bloated to accommodate cars that it is unfeasible for one to walk to anywhere they need. is that truly freedom? freedom to drive and only drive?

1

Anonymous #3 20h

i didn’t touch the SK bit because i don’t know the first thing about SK urban planning. i do know a great deal about American practices though. underground parking is cool, DC has a lot of it, but it’s also costly to develop and is only necessary because cars are required in many cases

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Yeah man I agree that car centric infrastructure and our joke of a public transportation system is a big issue but the solution isn’t to go nuclear on cars. Again. If the government knows exactly where you are at all times because they control the only means of long distance travel THAT IS OVERREACH😭 we should at LEAST maintain our long distance freeway infrastructure, as it’s usually the least harmful and generates the most revenue through tolls.

1

Anonymous #3 20h

i mean we live in the reality where automotive manufacturers put tracking and telemetry in all of their products. not to mention the flock cameras that law enforcement are building everywhere. the mass surveillance is here for cars, and it’s privately and publicly owned. i don’t think that having the ability to walk to all of the places you need enables the government to spy on you. idk this seems like an absurd position to me, yk?

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

You don’t have to buy a car with all that tracking technology on it though. You are right I guess it is hard to avoid surveillance.

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

as for long distance, sure keep the freeways. i have a means of alleviating traffic along them: bring back the passenger rail lines. more people on trains means less people in cars, which means the people who actually enjoy driving have less traffic to deal with. we seem to forget, this country was built for the train before it was ever built for the car

1

Anonymous #3 20h

it’s getting very difficult to find cars without those stupid ass tablets in the middle. bring back knobs and levers, fuck the tracking and touchscreens lol

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

I mean, honestly even without any technology in the car, you’re still being tracked

4

Anonymous #1 20h

yeah, my phone is likely with me. biggest opp fr

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

If America had 100 more years before we invented the car, we’d have like 20 of the most beautiful cities in the world We unfortunately just tore up all the nice parts of the country to make more highways and parking lots.

4

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Or flock cameras. They’re the big one

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Oh my god YES bring back long distance rail. I studied in Italy last summer and traveled from end to end of the country. Literally. I used a car 2 times. Once to go to the hotel from the airport in the city I was staying in. And once to go to the airport from the hotel. Every other time I traveled was from the bus which stopped right outside my hotel to go to the train station and then the train to go to whatever city I wanted to go to. And it would cost less than $50. That’s a wet dream here.

6

Anonymous #3 20h

the thing is, it doesn’t just have to be a dream. unfortunately both parties are lobbied by the automotive and fossil fuel industries to keep us paying for cars and their infrastructure

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

I know, and we are making progress. Amtrak launched their high speed route from NYC to DC last year. We’re making progress. The infrastructure exists it just needs to be updated.

1

Anonymous #3 20h

Isn’t the equivalent of that like going from Boston to Chicago?

1

Anonymous #3 20h

and it also needs to not be owned by rail monopolies. we busted them up over a century ago for them to come crawling back. presently, four rail companies own almost all of our rails. they make more money shipping freight, which is why the passenger lines were killed

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Idk I think somethings going right if Amtrak is interested in building out their passenger rail line. Monopolies are bad and we should bust them but the bigger problem is lobbying.

1

Anonymous #3 20h

i mean Amtrak is nice, but it would be much better if it charged freight lines to use its rails and prioritized passenger trains over freight. the monopolies and lobbies are a part of the same issue though: capitalism

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Capitalism is just gonna be the necessary evil. Any other system would crush public infrastructure under its boot in an instant.

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

i say Amtrak is nice, we only have one station here in iirc SC, and it’s about 20 minutes from me in Columbia. the train comes through at 4 or 5 in the morning though 😭💀

1

Anonymous #3 20h

i’m not sure. China has built over 35,000 miles of high speed rail in just over two decades. in the same amount of time, the California HSR project is still begging the federal government to provide its portion of the funding. in total the U.S. has like 357 miles of high speed rail

1

Anonymous _orangutan 20h

Bruh China is a capitalist country in everything but name💀

1

Anonymous #3 20h

a capitalist country headed by a communist party. interesting. there has been significant revision in the Chinese project, but the presence of some capitalists does not necessarily make an entire economic system capitalist, much like the presence of state owned firms does not make a state socialist. SC owns all of its roads, they’re public utilities, yet it’s the furthest thing from socialism you will find

1