I noticed this pattern of development in my town of Livingston, in Scotland. it's a "new town" i.e. was planned and built in the 50s to support the postwar boom. It is one of the few places in Scotland that were designed as suburbs around a big shopping mall, which makes it a distinctly soulless and culture-lite town.<p>The channel this video is from is out of this world. It redefined how I think about the cities and towns we live in and what is the objectively correct way to build them - with waaaaay more mixed use walkable residential.
How does this work for areas like Texas where most of the suburbs are not in the cities that are supposedly subsidizing them? An example would be the outskirts of Houston where the residents pay for their own utilities through MUDs: <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Municipal-Utility-Districts-in-Texas-have-9175418.php?t=ed730e9c63438d9cbb" rel="nofollow">https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...</a><p>It may not be sustainable for them, but it doesn't seem to be subsidized by the larger city tens of miles away.
I'd like to see if any of these results and conclusions change if you take into account the total tax basis for suburbanites (income tax, sales tax spent in the cities they don't live in, etc.) versus the relatively less well off inner city urbanites. Not all areas are the same, but in places like the Bay Area, a lot of the high income earners move out to the suburbs (think Palo Alto, Pleasanton, Walnut Creek, etc.).<p>To add, a lot of the economic activities in downtown areas are by workers and customers who live in the suburbs and commute into town. I don't believe that was taken into account.
Of course it is. Now let's discuss the Chesterton Fence: When did they start subsidizing it, and why? In the US, remember that Eisenhower sold the interstate highway system as a defense item. After the firebombing of European cities, after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and with the potential of the cold war turning hot, doesn't it make sense to "nudge" people out of the cities--to de-densify the population centers? And with the current geopolitical situation, such considerations are pertinent as ever.