Suburban Inefficiency

A few months ago, I was talking to two friends on a group chat and as always with me the conversation eventually went on to talk about cities vs. suburbs. One of the friends eventually said “the good thing about the suburbs is that they’re cheaper”. I heard that statement and it went back to a lot of things I’d been thinking about how it doesn’t make too much sense that suburbs are cheaper than cities. It makes sense in the sense that land is cheaper, so putting up relatively cheap housing isn’t hard, but just about everything else should hypothetically be cheaper.

Hypothesis

Building more things in a smaller amount of space should be cheaper by the very nature of the fact that you have more in the same piece of land. For taller buildings, it makes sense that the cost is a bit higher since a 20 story building will likely have different structural requirements than a 5 story building, but the per unit cost should still overall be cheaper since there are more units in each building. Much of the municipality’s/locality’s costs should also be lower by being able to use infrastructure in more ways than one.

Infrastructure

Putting up infrastructure required to power homes and connect millions of people is definitely not an easy task. Each time an area is developed, utilities are built out for the area. I would imagine that creating more wires and tunneling for individual Single Family Homes (SFH) isn’t particularly easy. If you build out a new suburban subdivision, each house will need to be wired/piped to. In somewhere like Manhattan or much of Chicago, it’s probably relatively simple for a utility company to add piping/wiring for a single building with many units vs. stringing it up for SFHs, assuming that the building developer coordinated it well. For internet service providers (ISP), this cost saving is probably even more noticeable. I would imagine this is one of the reasons why NYC and DC relatively have a plethora of ISPs available whereas you’d be hard pressed to find a suburban area with more than one option for ISPs.

In a given segment of rowhouses/brownstones (esentially townhomes) in a city will have far more people than a similarly sized (in terms of area) suburban neighbourhood yet will have much less asphalt needed for the roads; less in terms of electricity for a few reasons: less heat being wasted to the outdoors and less distance for electricity to travel; less telecom infrastructure to wire and easier to resolve issues since it’s fewer points of failure.

Schools

People often think of going to the suburbs for schools and in the U.S. I can’t blame them. Cities schools have been neglected for a long time and with the way schools are funded in most states (property taxes within a district), this leads to a self fulfilling prophecy of schools in the suburbs being good because they have the best funding and attracting more wealthy residents due to this. Urban schools, however, often benefit from multi-use infrastructure. With more people living in an area, students/parents could walk with their kids to school or take the regular train or bus instead of the school board having to dedicate a massive department for that purpose. Granted, school buses would still be present and useful, but it would drastically be decreased by an increased number of students with an ability fo walk or take public transit to school.

Retail

Having a plethora of options nearby is much easier in denser environments. In dense urban areas, oen can easily just walk outside and take a stroll around the block and find stores. The general magastore that serves every purpose seems to have been a primarily suburban creation but have made their ways into cities. I actually enjoy having a variety of different stores each serving their own purpose, but I can understand why that would make shopping for items a bigger pain since there could be a maze of stores to go to.

Restaurants

I’ve noticed since moving to a city that I only go to local restaurants since there is a large amount from which to choose. That has to be one of my favourite things about it. If someone made a bet to not step foot into a restuarant with more than one location, it would be trivial with only minimal thought.

Outdoor Activities

This was ooe area I thought the butbs would win in and I still think they do, but I’ve realized after visiting some other countries that it’s not to the same extent in other countries as it is in the United States. I enjoy the large urban park, but I often find myself wishing there was more green space in east coast cities. The large urban parks in cities are amazing and should remain, but I think there should be far more in the middle. In Manhattan, you can go for blocks without seeing a single tree. It would be nice to have more random whole block parks scattered around the island. DC does a better job of this with parks in the circles at the intersections of multiple state avenues and a lettered and numbered street. It would be even nicer if they made them much larger, but that’s a very hard thing to retroactively change.

I’ve always thought that it would be nice to have the inside of a block be a mini park/courtyard area.

Currnet Summary

There’s a lot of things that are extremely efficient abou cities. I can understand the allure of the suburbs, but I also think that a lot of things could be done to make cities far more desirable for families and people of all ages in general. In addition, the massive subsidies to make inefficient suburban living could be better used to make more efficient city living better for people.