Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> the economy diversifies, and services improve

Pure wishful thinking. Is there any empirical reason to believe this would be more true with everyone living in a couple of dozen large cities (as if that can even happen - see later) instead of in a greater number of more self-sufficient smaller cities and towns within a region? It's not like every company even in your own metropolitan area wants to be in "Seattle proper" is it? I used to work at a large one that basically moved out and they're not the only one. Investors didn't seem to mind one bit.

> Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all

I never said that they should. They need to be rebuilt, not built anew. More precisely, they need to be reconfigured to avoid the waste and ecological damage of tearing down one place and then building somewhere else.

> Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space.

Fix the suburbs and you'll have plenty of space too. Consolidation can happen as easily in each town as in the central city, and without some of the downsides - increased prices and decreasing affordability (already a major problem in Seattle), power distribution, waste disposal, what traffic still (and necessarily) remains, etc. I've been to Seattle. Consolidating most of the region's population into Seattle city limits would not be a utopia; it would be a nightmare even from a new-urbanist perspective. Ditto for the many other cities I've been to. A certain level of geographic expansion is inevitable, but not all such expansion is sprawl.

More importantly, restructuring suburbs in place is the only way this can happen. People just won't move to the cities en masse. The current milieu of property values, school funding, etc. won't allow it. Changing those realities would be even harder than adopting a strong towns[1] or missing middle[2] approach in the places where people are and will remain. And that requires people voting where they are instead of running away.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/

[2] https://missingmiddlehousing.com/



Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: