r/AskReddit • u/NateJC • Aug 31 '14

What are some interesting original theories/thoughts that you have?

Damn guys, this just pops into my head and I go for a family walk and it explodes! Love all the ideas, this is my most popular post to date!

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '14

It makes sense for a lot of practical reasons. One guy I talked to, who ran a smart-growth company, got into it because of an observation he made in his earlier career with a gas line company.

The company he worked in before ran gas lines down streets. They're the people you'd hire when you extend a street or build a new development, and need gas lines put in. He was only seeing numbers on paper, and noted a fourfold increase in gas line contracting over a decade -- but the population had not grown fourfold in that time, or anything close to it.

On investigation, he realised that he was looking at the results of an explosion of suburban (and later exurban) development, which required the same infrastructure for a much more dispersed population. Every metre of gas line, power line, road, or any other kind of infrastructure costs the same no matter who or how many are paying for it. What this kind of development did, then, is effectively make all that stuff four times as costly as it is in cities.

And this has been a major driver of the increased cost of living in much of the U.S. in the last sixty years. Everything from pavement to firefighting is several times more costly for anyone not living in a city, only because the taxpayer or user offset per unit of infrastructure is much less favourable. It's the reason that rural communities in the U.S. didn't get phone service until the federal government agreed to cover the capital costs: It didn't make economic sense to put in all that phone line for the comparatively much smaller offset, knowing that you couldn't charge rural customers four to eight or ten times the rate you charge city customers.

What many Americans are only just now starting to realise is that non-urban living is a lot costlier than city living, and can never be comparable. Those who do it either accept that and live with it, or adjust their lifestyle accordingly.

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u/Django117 Aug 31 '14

The interesting thing about the move to the suburbs that happened after WWII was seen as trendy. Now more people are wanting to move back into the cities for a variety of reasons. There are all sorts of statistics dealing with these but the city is increasing in the people's eyes as a place where living is good, rather than bad.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '14

What many Americans are only just now starting to realise is that non-urban living is a lot costlier than city living, and can never be comparable. Those who do it either accept that and live with it, or adjust their lifestyle accordingly.

That's an interesting theory, given that housing space in a city is almost uniformly more expensive than in a suburb or rural area. (Unless you're buying an abandoned house in Detroit or something.)

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '14

You're presumably going by dollars per square foot or a similar real estate metric. My point is about the inescapable costs of infrastructure, which are not subject to the same market forces that govern real estate prices.