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Notes -
I think I need to urbanism-pill you.
Suburban vigour is essentially illusory. The per-capita cost of providing infrastructure and services is higher in suburban and rural areas, which makes annexing suburbs fundamentally a drag on urban economies. New, fashionable suburbs often look well-run-- providing a good balance of services to taxes, but that's often a product of debt-financed ponzi schemes.
And-- car-centric infrastructure (highways, parking lots) designed to serve suburbs have turned out to be dramatically negative for cities.
What you say here:
... may accurately reflect the perception of these outlying areas, but does capture the truth. Because what you say here:
Is definitely wrong. These areas appear well run, but that's a consequence of an unusually beneficial status quo. It's a consequence of-- and I hate to use this term-- "white supremacy." No, seriously. Politicians during the era of suburbanization and white flight prioritized structuring their cities to benefit their ingroup-- which turned out to be the white people living in the suburbs, rather than the black people living in the inner cities. Those people are gone now, but infrastructure lasts for a long time, and second-order effects last for even longer. You can still see the traces of roman city planning in modern european city centers. Their roads have disappeared but their grid patterns have not.
The reason businesses are dependent on commuters is because commuter-friendly infrastructure made it feasible for people to move outside the cities in the first place. That's not an argument for cities continuing to cater to commuters, it's an argument for cities incentivising people to move into the city limits, boosting the city's tax base, economy, and political power all at once.
And-- at least in the cities where NIMBY's don't hold sway-- we're seeing exactly that happen. The 15 minute city concept is infuriating for suburbanites, and it should be. But as an urbanite, I'm very pleased at all the new apartment complexes with integrated shops on their bottom floors, the traffic calming measures, the expansion of public transit, the proliferation of parking meters, and so on and so forth. And all those things are happening despite the fact that I live in a very red state.
So wrapping around to your original point-- that non-urbanites don't trust cities... well, I won't say they're wrong to do so. But their reasons for mistrusting cities are the wrong ones entirely.
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