15-minute cities

[coati]

After living on a remote farm for the past 20 years, I would have a difficult time living in a city again.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

Similarly, we resent our tax dollars being thrown to the big cities as federal grants to prop up corrupt Democrat fiefdoms whose main activity seems to be providing crumbling infrastructure and whose main hobby seems to be looking down their noses at everyone else...

You have direction of money flow exactly backwards. City dwellers tend to pay higher taxes in exchange for fewer services. Rural and suburban dwellers get more back from the government than they pay. Sparsely populated areas have alway needed subsidized infrastructure. For example, rural electrification was a big part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

 

[BabyBoomer50s]

You have direction of money flow exactly backwards. City dwellers tend to pay higher taxes in exchange for fewer services. Rural and suburban dwellers get more back from the government than they pay. Sparsely populated areas have alway needed subsidized infrastructure. For example, rural electrification was a big part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This is true. I’ve seen a lot of data from various municipalities in CA showing that the property taxes paid on single family residents doesn’t cover the full cost of delivering services such as roads, water and sewer, public safety, parks and libraries. There’s obviously some variation among cities but in general, the residential break even point is about 50 units per acre. Sales taxes and business taxes subsidize residential services.

 

[HisArpy]

^Temporarily. Walmart, Amazon, and all the rest of those big chains with global supply lines will be wiped out by the same lack of oil that shuts down most of the car traffic. An intermediate step is dollar stores replacing the big stores, on their way to becoming the new general stores that survive the return to locally owned retail.

What a stupid fool you are.

Do you really believe that the Waltons and the rest of big money won't just switch to electric powered vehicles, sucking up all the power in the grid for their "public necessities" at the same time, and then get the state to give them priority to tap the grid FIRST and leave the rest of us with the resulting brownouts and blackouts afterward?

 

[Lazaran]

You have direction of money flow exactly backwards. City dwellers tend to pay higher taxes in exchange for fewer services. Rural and suburban dwellers get more back from the government than they pay. Sparsely populated areas have alway needed subsidized infrastructure. For example, rural electrification was a big part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Exactly.

And there’s a fair bit of evidence that supports your position.

https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/

“VinnyVeritas” is a really poor name for someone who consistently lies / is wrong.

 

[coati]

You have direction of money flow exactly backwards. City dwellers tend to pay higher taxes in exchange for fewer services. Rural and suburban dwellers get more back from the government than they pay. Sparsely populated areas have alway needed subsidized infrastructure. For example, rural electrification was a big part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Well, that's part of the story. I live on the outskirts of the Apache Nation, where population growth in the urban areas has exploited every last water and mineral resource available from the Earth, and has left a wake of ghost towns, toxic piles of mine tailings, polluted groundwater, and abject poverty.

A similar scenario unfolded in the Owens Valley of California when it was raided by LA for water to fill swimming pools and irrigate urban lawns.

The flow of resources follows the path of what an insightful 16-year-old Swedish girl called "Fairy tales of eternal economic growth". That flow of resources is obviously not unidirectional from cities to rural areas.

 

[Chernosoth]

What a stupid fool you are.

Do you really believe that the Waltons and the rest of big money won't just switch to electric powered vehicles, sucking up all the power in the grid for their "public necessities" at the same time, and then get the state to give them priority to tap the grid FIRST and leave the rest of us with the resulting brownouts and blackouts afterward?

They could try, but electric vehicles cost more energy than fuel burning vehicles. Electric trucks don't have the range to cross the continent. Electric cargo ships can't cross oceans. Stores can't sell if customers don't have the energy to live and buy. Even in America, stupidity has limits.

 

[HectorBidon]

We got to spend a couple months in a medium-sized city in western Netherlands. We lived in a three-story "brownstone," on a quiet, tree-lined street. Our house had a stoop in front for visiting with neighbors, a ramp for rolling your bike down into the cellar, and a pleasant little garden in back. There was a grocery, a bakery, a pizza place, and a drugstore all within a couple blocks. It was a fifteen minute walk in one direction to the University where I was working and a ten minute walk in the other direction to the historic old part of town, which is now a vibrant pedestrian-only outdoor mall with shops and restaurants and bars and flower stalls. Fifteen minutes by bike would take you out into the countryside with bucolic pastures and woods and dikes along the river. Amsterdam was a little over an hour away by train, and we could go in for the day and be home in time for dinner.

We had a car and used it to go to the supermarket or to visit friends who lived in another part of town, but there were many days when we got by just fine without it. I really enjoyed living there. It harkened back to the old-time, small-town America of the Disney movies, but in a modern, up-to-date, sophisticated setting. It's nice to hear that some places in America are getting back to this less hectic, more-humanly-scaled style of living,

 

[Chernosoth]

Most of the pushback is against the hamfisted attempts to control and mandate how and where walkable communities are revived. Communities are living organisms.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

Robert Silverberg wrote a SciFi novel, the name of it escapes me, but the premise was that eventually, most of mankind came to live in very big, tall self-contained buildings and never strayed from them to venture into the wild because inside was hermetically sanitized and outside was a death sentence.

The part that most Litizens would enjoy is that doors were not locked, you could enter any domicile you wished and it was considered rude, if not criminal, to turn down sex. I thought I would just throw that in, but I could see something like that occurring after having witnessed the supercilious pandemic lockdowns.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

You have direction of money flow exactly backwards. City dwellers tend to pay higher taxes in exchange for fewer services. Rural and suburban dwellers get more back from the government than they pay. Sparsely populated areas have alway needed subsidized infrastructure. For example, rural electrification was a big part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Have you even visited out here?

 

[Chobham]

It's all about taxes and tax base. From what I can see so far a lot of cities administrations are pissing the money away on projects related to Federal grant monies involving transportation. Transportation that goes from one nowhere to another. And the same can be said for many of the states. If you want small business to grow and thrive you have to put taxes in place to encourage same and in most communities/states that's a serious obstacle. Lawmakers and tax authorities would rather get checks from a few large concerns rather than have to deal with a multitude of small concerns. It's the taxing side of the 'Big Box' mentality.

Chernosoth has hit on a truism. Communities are organic and go through natural life cycles. They are born, mature, and then decline. A new generation takes advantage of the declining property prices and rebuilds the community. This occurs on a 40 year cycle. The trick for the various cities is to identify those neighborhoods that are near the end of their life cycle and to implement the "15 minute" program there. The down side is that this necessarily requires that the low income owners/renters be displaced. There is NO alternative to that. Low income properties are generally dirty, poorly maintained, and attract crime. NO ONE wants to invest in those areas.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

My plan would include identifying every decade, the worst 10% of a city, condemning it, evacuating it, razing it and then reselling the property(ies) for new development.

Everyone who has experienced an orchard knows that the unproductive, rotten and diseased must be pruned to ensure the health of the grove.

 

[Chobham]

There's an goodly portion of a generation out there that think the rot is desirable.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

There's an goodly portion of a generation out there that think the rot is desirable.

Pretty much the same great thinkers of a woke generation who think that it is Racist and Xenophobic culture-hate/fear to elucidate the drugs, violence and blatant misogyny of Rap Music/Lyrics.

You know, the champions of women.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

My plan would include identifying every decade, the worst 10% of a city, condemning it, evacuating it, razing it and then reselling the property(ies) for new development.

Everyone who has experienced an orchard knows that the unproductive, rotten and diseased must be pruned to ensure the health of the grove.

So, urban renewal. It was very popular in the 1960s. Many American cities still bear its scars.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

It was never carried out to scale, so, no, not the same thing.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

It was never carried out to scale, so, no, not the same thing.

Are you envisioning something on the scale of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin?

 

[VinnyVeritas]

No, I was thinking more, The Fountainhead.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

BTW, where was that built? I might like to visit.

 

[Chobham]

BTW, where was that built? I might like to visit.

Looks like a Chinese project. Essentially the same layout anyway.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

BTW, where was that built? I might like to visit.

Fortunately it was rejected, so we still have Paris.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

They wore grey...

 

[Chobham]

Ghost cities.

Wait for Ordos.

 

[VinnyVeritas]

That's one of the weird things about driving around in China. You're in modern city with modern (unused) interstate-quality roads and you hit the city limit and it immediately turns into rutted dirt road and shanties...