Do Suburbanites Get a Free Pass?

Ed Glaeser says city residents are treated unfairly:

A level playing field for cities, by Edward L. Glaeser, Commentary, Boston Globe: From Athenian philosophers to Florentine painters to Chicago architects, cities have long been wellsprings of collaborative invention. In the past, urban creativity was an interesting sideshow, not the main economic event, but today, the rebirth of Boston and New York and London has been built on the increasingly important urban edge in connecting innovative people. The same economic forces that did so much to harm industrial cities in the 1970s - globalization and technological progress - also increased the returns to being smart and you become smart by being around other smart people. We are in a great urban age, because urban connections forge human capital and create innovation.

Does the special role that cities play in the economy and society mean that cities need special treatment from state and national governments? No. ... However, cities shouldn't have to face a policy deck stacked against urban living. Urban firms and residents shouldn't have to pay a disproportionate share of the taxes needed to care for disadvantaged Americans. Suburbanites shouldn't get a free pass on the environmental damage created by a car-based lifestyle.

How are city residents unfairly taxed? For centuries, cities have disproportionately attracted the poor. In the 2000 Census, 19.9 percent of city residents were poor; only 7.5 percent of suburban residents lived in poverty.

Urban poverty does not reflect urban failure, but rather the enduring appeal of cities to the less fortunate. Poor people come to cities because urban areas offer economic opportunity, better social services, and the chance to get by without an automobile. Yet the sheer numbers of urban poor make it more costly to provide basic city services, like education and safety, and those costs are borne by the city's more prosperous residents. Taking care of America's poor should be the responsibility of all Americans. When we ask urban residents to pick up the tab for educating the urban poor, then we are imposing an unfair tax on those residents. That tax artificially restricts the growth of our dynamic cities.

Cities also face an uneven playing field because suburban residents do not pay for the full environmental costs of low-density living. ... People who live surrounded by green space often do much more harm to that green space than people who live in dense cities. ...

As we face the prospect of climate change encouraged by vast quantities of man-made greenhouse gases, we should rethink those decisions that lead to more energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Is it wise for American development to be so concentrated in low-density, car-oriented, energy-intensive suburbs? ...

While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty. Just think of how the 1974 Supreme Court decision that limited busing to within city boundaries encouraged mass suburbanization to get beyond those city borders.

No region should receive special favors from the federal government; no city should get special treatment... But our cities deserve a level playing field. A level playing field requires that urbanites should not bear an undue burden of caring for the poor and that suburbanites should pay for the environmental costs of energy-intensive lifestyles.

I wrote up several responses to this, but I didn't like any of them. Now it's sorta late, so I guess I'll hand it off to you. If you feel like responding, please do.

Update: Richard Green comments on how we might respond to these problems.

Update: Tyler Cowen responds as well. His questions about positive externalities for wealthy residents living in cities was part of what I was going to say in the responses I couldn't quite get right, so I am sympathetic to this argument I also wondered about the distribution of benefits, i.e. access to museums, plays, concerts, sports events, zoos, airports, and so on. Since many of these are government supported, the question is whether there is any cross-subsidization from suburban/rural residents to city dwellers that offsets other types of inequities.

Update: More from Ryan Avent at The Bellows.

Comments

[reason]

I wonder what is to disagree here. What is says is pretty much correct. Particularly the localisation of education expenses is a big problem in the USA. We should be building more dense mixed use communities and less sprawl. (Large houses can still be planned on the fringes of such communities without destroying walkability). We ignore externalities too much, simply because they are impossible for individuals to control. In housing externalities are a big part of the story, remember "location, location, location".

[reason]

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007800.html

[save_the_rustbelt]

This is a complex question with multi-layered answers, but let me toss out one idea.

I have watched several cities deteriorate over the past 30 years, and one common thread is corrupt, incompetent leadership. Toss is one party control (usually Democrats) and overly powerful government unions it is a recipe for disaster.

But, see sentence #1. More later.

[IdahoSpud]

Haha rusty, enjoy this one:

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe." (Thomas Jefferson)

[Noni Mausa]

I think we will have to "get piled upon one another in large cities" as the default living pattern for most human beings, if we intend to continue to support the size of world population we have today.

The article above was correct in saying, "People who live surrounded by green space often do much more harm to that green space than people who live in dense cities. ..."

Obviously, the strain of collecting resources from rural areas sufficient to support the cities, carries its own damage. But perhaps out damage to the land can best be minimized by urbanization together with a small but vital minority living in rural areas. Much like we have now, actually.

Noni

[ken melvin]

'Tis a common responsibility for what we've done wrong, for what we didn't do and for those things that happen and aren't anyone's fault that's being avoided. In many cases and many ways, suburbia was a flight from responsibility. In the sixties, when the displaced poor started to fill America's cities, as they would later do in Rio, Mexico City, etc., white/the middle class fled to the suburbs rather deal with the attending problems. For the last forty, .... or so years, this failure to address the real issues (or, doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons) has been our biggest failure.

[ken melvin]

Politicians who tell people what they want to hear isn't helping any.

[odograph]

I've noticed a trend to "hate the place and not the practices."

Suburbs have become a whipping-boy (for city would-be elites?).

Question: how does the evil-ness of a suburb change with increased organic vegetable gardening? with local jobs and short (or "tele") commutes? with future innovations like electric cars and solar roofs?

[Blissex]

«Urban firms and residents shouldn't have to pay a disproportionate share of the taxes needed to care for disadvantaged Americans. Suburbanites shouldn't get a free pass on the environmental damage created by a car-based lifestyle.»

But that's just ridiculous dreaming -- suburbanites are suburbanites precisely because they want that state of affairs. And suburbanites determine election outcomes. The underlying logic is "f*ck you, I am fully vested".

Anyhow this state of affairs is exactly consonant to the "plantation economy" model which the one currently in vogue in the USA or the UK etc.: the poor to fester in high density barracks, the overseers in little cottages surrounding them, and the lords in their country manors, or the splendid owner's quarters at the center of the plantations. It is the 18th century revived, down to the plantations overseas generating profits for distant lords.

[lonesome moderate]

Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty. Just think of how the 1974 Supreme Court decision that limited busing to within city boundaries encouraged mass suburbanization to get beyond those city borders.

Historical note, for those who don't remember what "busing" meant in the seventies: the author is referring to the court ordered practice of forcing your children to attend a distant, unfamiliar, often dangerous school, because they happened to be of the wrong race. Fortunately, there is little chance of resurrecting this nonsense on a large scale--today there are too many "mixed" children like my own, who cannot be pigeonholed so easily.

Still, as a suburban parent myself, people like this scare the crap out of me. My local suburban district is not really very good, unfortunately, but it is better than most of the Bay Area's more urban school districts, partly because we voted to impose a local parcel tax a few years ago. I wonder what new ways the educrats in Sacramento and Washington will come up with to punish us for that, once they have control of the system.

[Rohan Swee]

Hmmm. "Complex question with multi-layered answers" indeed. I'll also just toss out a thought or two:

Would city-dwellers be mollified if all the putatively mooching suburbanites poured back into the cities? There's urban density, and then there's urban density.

Also, there are probably many, many people who appreciate the joys and advantages of urban living, but who leave the cities when they start families because they can no longer afford to maintain a decent life on a modest income there. (Contrary to the author's claim, the truly "prosperous parents" don't have to flee cities for the sake of their children, only the less well-heeled do.) They have no desire to join the ranks of the urban poor themselves, and a move to the suburb represents a choice to invest their limited means in a family of their own, rather than curtail reproduction to subsidize services for other people's families.

However this complex, multi-layered analysis actually shakes out, I suspect suburbanites would view a move to redistribute a chunk of their incomes to the cities as a forced subsidy of a preferred urban lifestyle that they themselves had to abjure for economic reasons. (Actually, I don't "suspect". I know plenty of people who would've been delighted not to have been priced out of cities they loved.) If cities are glorious - and they are - why shouldn't one pay a premium for the privilege of living there? And why should the people who don't get to enjoy them have to pay for them?

Also, what lonesome moderate said. Lord deliver us from blank-brained freaky freakin' social-engineerin' control freaks who think that forced busing didn't go far enough.

[John]

Suburban bedroom communities were little more than parasites that lived off the central city, using a good part of its services without returning anything or paying. They caused heavy pollution from their long commutes, and the system of freeways tore up city communities.

In the Boston area in the 70s, an interstate freeway was proposed through Cambridge. What damage would that have done to Harvard and MIT? I don't know, but it would have seriously damaged Cambridge. A section of south Boston was dug up for another freeway (I95), but some good resulted when they changed it to the new Orange line and railroads.

Certain city services -- police, for example -- served primarily the suburbanites, viewing the city residents as animals to be corralled and controlled.

What damage was done to the lungs of children growing up in the cities damaged by commuter pollution? I recall a twenty-percent average reduction in lung capacity for children in Los Angeles.

Lonesome Moderate: Busing was ordered to remedy decades of intentionally segregated educational systems, and hopefully to enforce improvement of the bad schools for blacks. Unfortunately, it turned out counterproductive, but that's no reason to accuse them of bad faith.

[Peter Schaeffer]

“As we face the prospect of climate change encouraged by vast quantities of man-made greenhouse gases, we should rethink those decisions that lead to more energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Is it wise for American development to be so concentrated in low-density, car-oriented, energy-intensive suburbs? ..."

Yes, Vox Populi.

In a democracy, the will of the people is supposed to count for something... Perhaps not much, but something.

The American people have voted with their feet to the suburbs. Take a look at where most of the new housing is built. If you need data, read Ed Glaeser's papers on the subject.

In real life, cities recieve vast subsidies from state and local governments. Of course, the money is miserably wasted...

Note that this is a very strong global trend. People have been fleeing congested urban areas in Europe since at least 1800.

Just in case, anyone was inclined to take these ideas seriously, Ed Glaeser lives on a 6.5 acre lot in Weston, Mass… Next to a 600 acre conservation area… So much for the alleged virtues of high-density urban living.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Lonesome moderate,

Thank you for saying what everyone believes, but usually never dares to say. Middle-class parents will never send their children to dangerous urban schools. It simply won’t happen. They will either move or use private schools if they can afford them.

Liberals pay lip service to urban schools, but make sure that their own children go elsewhere. Even Bill and Hillary cared enough for their own daughter to keep her out of DC’s awful (and lavishly funded) public schools.

See “Losing School Choice” by Mark Thoma (http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/oregon/) for another example.

[Blissex]

«The American people have voted with their feet to the suburbs. Take a look at where most of the new housing is built.»

The American plantation foremen have voted with their *wallets* for the suburbs, using every trick in the book (zoning laws, whatever) to prevent the American people from escaping the plantation serf barracks and polluting the cottage areas reserved for plantation foremen.

«Ed Glaeser lives on a 6.5 acre lot in Weston, Mass… Next to a 600 acre conservation area. So much for the alleged virtues of high-density urban living.»

The lords live far away from both the plantation barracks and the gangmaster cottages in an arcadia-style rural idyll, but of course. Like many other lords he may well have a master's lodgings near the plantation barracks.

«They have no desire to join the ranks of the urban poor themselves, and a move to the suburb represents a choice to invest their limited means in a family of their own, rather than curtail reproduction to subsidize services for other people's families.»

Foremen choosing saying to the serfs "f*ck you, I am fully vested".
Problem is, the lords are saying the same to an increasing number of foremen. They are getting much cheaper and eager to please foremen (and large numbers of new serfs) in far away islands and subcontinents.

[anne]

"Historical note, for those who don't remember what 'busing' meant in the seventies: the author is referring to the court ordered practice of forcing your children to attend a distant, unfamiliar, often dangerous school, because they happened to be of the wrong race."

Historical note; this is notably historically false. The attemp to integrate schools overwhelmingly involved allowing children of color to attend schhols beyond their immediate neighborhood and providing the means to attend attend school beyond their neighborhood.

[anne]

"In real life, cities recieve vast subsidies from state and local governments. Of course, the money is miserably wasted..."

What is important in real life is always to vilify, personally and collectively, and always distort and always deceive.

[Blissex]

«Middle-class parents will never send their children to dangerous urban schools.»

But curiously enough they also do their damnedest to prevent urban children to attend their schools. Because in the 70s busing was mostly about minority children getting permission to attend suburban schools rather than viceversa (which did happen in a few cases). The idea was *integration*, and that means distributing minority children to majority schools, not viceversa.

«It simply won’t happen. They will either move or use private schools if they can afford them.»

Which has been for decades exactly the plan to segregate the children of plantation foremen from those of plantation serfs in a part of the USA that knows well the logic of plantations:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/09/can-we-please-s.html?cid=84306142
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/09/can-we-please-s.html#comment-84268942

«Sure poorer districts tend to pay less than richer ones, but why are the districts poorer just because the families whose children attend are poorer? Because most school revenue comes from local real estate taxes. Why do we have this arrangement and not the same thing for many other services (like state or county roads)? Because the better off don't want to see their money being spent on the poor.
When racism is factored in the distortion is even greater. In the South white parents were so unwilling to see their kids mingle with blacks they set up a parallel system of private, segregated schools. They then proceeded to do everything possible to defund public education. Things have gotten so bad that even the Republican governor of Alabama was forced to ask for a rise in taxes to fund education. His proposal was defeated. Now look up Alabama's ranking in educational performance (and standard of living).»

[Blissex]

«represents a choice to invest their limited means in a family of their own, rather than curtail reproduction to subsidize services for other people's families.»

Well, then I am pretty sure that you will then forbid your children from applying for any university scholarship, you will not take advantage of any tax breaks for university fee tax exempt accounts, and you will start repaying immediately any tax breaks you received on the interest for your home and you will pay capital gains taxes on your home.

Because all those juicy and lucrative subsidies are at least partly paid for by the taxes (including sales taxes, payroll taxes, ...) of people who cannot afford a home, cannot afford to send their children to university, often cannot afford a family, and often pay a fortune in non-deductible interest to pay load sharks.

[Sociologist Manque]

The only large city I know of (I'm not particularly knowledgeable in this area) that doesn't have parasitic suburbs is Columbus, Ohio. This happened because right after WWII someone saw the problem coming and imposed a requirement that anyone wanting to hook up to the city water system had to become part of the city. Since prospective suburbs lacked the resources to build their own water supplies they had little option.

The result is a city that covers a huge area relative to its population. I don't know how it's done in other respects. Any comments?

[Peter Schaeffer]

All,

Newark, NJ is a relatively poor city. I don't think I need to post any statistics to support this statement. Newark, NJ has a poor and dangerous (nationally ranked no less) public school system. Back in 2004-05 Newark spent $20K+ per student. I rather doubt that all of this money was raised locally.

The reality is that the rest of the US is subsidizing urban education and on a very large scale. No great results of course...

[odograph]

I'm guessing most of you have never had avocado trees in your back yard.

And I'd guess you've got a uniform model of the suburb in your minds, one that impacts all city types in the same way. Never mind that neither cities nor suburbs are the same. Never mind that in some places jobs flow to suburbs and they become more matrix cities than bedroom communities. I work in an office in a suburb.

Why aren't matrix cities (or villages) a workable model?

I think, as I said above, people are hating the places and not the bad practices. A more practical (and less elitist) route would be to hate the bad practices and give people a break wherever they can make good things work.

[save_the_rustbelt]

The Detroit Public Schools get a new superintendent about every three years (due to frustration and exhaustion) and each of the past three have had a corruption crackdown, and the corruption continues.

The black middle class is fleeing Detroit because of poor schools and poor services. School spending is extremely high, but students do not have textbooks.

Google "Mayor of Detroit" and look what pops up. Indictments any day now.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Sociologist:

Columbus and Franklin County is a great place, but is starting to change as people sprawl away from the central city, which is developing some problems not formerly seen in Columbus (I just spent a few days there with my smart and cute grandsons).

Still a solid city, but with problems, including high priced low quality public schools (repeat theme).

[SanFranciscoJim]

Suburbs are subsidized in all sorts of ways, not just through transportation and planning policies. Electricity is much cheaper to deliver in a dense area, since you do not have to run as much wire and maintain as much infrastructure to do so, but suburbanites pay the same cost per kilowatt.

The whole point of suburban living is to push the cost of ones externalities on others, but the pendulum is finally swinging back. There is no particular reason why suburbs should be allowed to ignore their responsibility to the mentally ill, for example, and simply dump them onto other communities. Better regional, state and federal planning for this, along with nationalized health care, will help correct this inequity.

In the long run, this is all moot, as the suburban lifestyle was built on the premise of a source of cheap, inexhaustible energy. This energy is now running out. How many will commute 50 miles/day when gasoline is $10/gallon? We can help encourage responsible land use planning by adding a carbon tax, to help pay for the cost of pollution caused by automobiles and we can encourage the cities and inner ring suburbs to higher density, but the exurbs are doomed to failure, especially in areas like Las Vegas and Phoenix, where the energy costs of living there are already high.

An excellent article on this is in the Atlantic this month:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

[dug]

Isn't it funny? Glaeser's work on zoning has been cited by so many people as evidence that those nasty "Smart Growth" advocates have taken over and are preventing decent people from living in brand new McMansions, thereby raising housing prices. But it turns out that he was really criticising the policies that enforced suburban sprawl, not the ones that discouraged it.

[SanFranciscoJim]

Middle-class parents will never send their children to dangerous urban schools.

This is easy enough to fix, just make the city schools better. The schools in San Francisco are already better than the average California school (I know, a pretty low bar) and improving all the time. They are certainly safe and some of the schools are amongst the best in the area. Google for "Lowell High School" if you don't believe me.

More and more families are choosing to stay in the cities, mostly because the cities are the place where vital, intelligent economic activity takes place, but also because of the commute, the improving quality of life in the urban core, etc. This just returns America to the kind of life we enjoyed before the advent of the freeway. Remember, in 1950, there wasn't really such a thing as a commuter suburb.

It is true that families were larger and houses smaller then, but our parents and grandparents "survived" just fine, I am sure we will be able to manage putting two children in a shared bedroom just fine.

[Peter Schaeffer]

"Suburbs are subsidized in all sorts of ways, not just through transportation and planning policies. Electricity is much cheaper to deliver in a dense area, since you do not have to run as much wire and maintain as much infrastructure to do so, but suburbanites pay the same cost per kilowatt."

Really? Any data to support this claim? What I have seen is that urban power systems require enormously expensive buried power cables. Suburban power grids don't.

Truly rural power networks are move expensive. Power wasn’t available in many farm areas until the government subsidized it or delivered it directly. See the history of rural electrification.

Reading the posts in this thread you would think that all public services are provided by local governments and paid for by property tases. Hasn’t anyone heard of the federal income tax? State income taxes? Sales taxes?

All of these taxes are disproportionately paid by suburbanites. The reality is that the dependent poor are supported by higher income groups. That means that the suburbs net subsidize the cities.

[SanFranciscoJim]

All of these taxes are disproportionately paid by suburbanites.

Do you have any evidence to support *this* claim? I know that in the San Francisco area, average incomes in San Francisco are higher than in the surrounding region, so the truth is the exact opposite of your claim. I can dig up the data if you doubt me.

[odograph]

Heh, is SF and the surrounding (very affluent) suburbs (and sprawling tech jobs) really a valid national (let alone global) model for "the city versus the suburb?"

You want to remove the commuting evil just get a gas (carbon) tax and let it fall where it may.

Don't be like those folks I asked once "with perfectly non-polluting cars, would suburbs still be bad?" I got the answer yes.

That probably wasn't from a gardener or someone with a backyard chicken coop. heh, why is it exactly that a 100 mile diet is good but a suburban garden is bad?

Tribal prejudice perhaps?

[odograph]

BTW, I think minimum lot-line McMansions are stupid, but that is a practice rather than a place.

[anne]

"The reality is that the rest of the US is subsidizing urban education and on a very large scale. No great results of course..."

What is interesting beyond the perpetual prejudice-fostering rubbish, is that there have always been and are exceptional urban schools all through America. Great results of course.

[SanFranciscoJim]

Heh, is SF and the surrounding (very affluent) suburbs (and sprawling tech jobs) really a valid national (let alone global) model for "the city versus the suburb?"

You mean San Francisco, and Manhattan and Seattle and Portland and Paris and London and Milan and Tokyo and Mexico City and Cairo and Moscow and Hong Kong and Singapore and Amsterdam and ...

Yes, I do think that a dense urban mixed-use core, well served by transit, is a sustainable model for world-wide development. It is the car-first cities that are the aberration world-wide, not the other way around.

Yes, if we discover a source of non-polluting perpetual energy, I can see your point, but since that violates the laws of physics, it is unlikely.

I can imagine a future where we use lots of renewable energy, have smart cars that give people privacy, but operate much like trains on smart roadways, and allow people to disperse without the horrific environment costs that the suburbs have today, but we are long ways away from anything like that.

[anne]

What is also interesting is how just as the national political model is highly protective of less urban states, so state political models so often have Senate-like institutions that protect and even favor less urban regions. Even Rhode Islands which is the most urban of states, has a Senate protective of non-urban Rhode Island. Kansas will be fine, as long as there is a Senate.

I do not know, but I would be surprised if cities are being inordinately subsidized, and I would comfortably suggest the reverse.

[Blissex]

«Newark, NJ has a poor and dangerous (nationally ranked no less) public school system. Back in 2004-05 Newark spent $20K+ per student. I rather doubt that all of this money was raised locally.
The reality is that the rest of the US is subsidizing urban education and on a very large scale.»

To me looks like that this is fantastic imagination talking on a large scale.

It does not take a lot of time to find the Newer School board budget for 2007 on page 23 of:

http://www.nps.k12.nj.us/ar07.pdf

and a citizen guide to the City of Newark budget (a bit old though):

http://www.njisj.org/reports/citizenguide_newark.html

As the photographs in the school board report shows the school system has mostly minority students.

Of $936m of alleged revenue, $120m come from local sources, $763 from the state, $54m from federal sources.

How does the State of New Jersey raise money? This is detailed on page 53 here:

http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/omb/publications/07bib/pdf/bib.pdf

That is around $11.6b for income tax (rates between 1.4% and 9%), $8.4b for sales tax, $2.5b for business tax, and $8b for "other" which is clearly a set of excise tax category.

72% of the NJ budget goes to transfers to lower levels of government, as usual.

So the reportedly very expensive and poorly performing Newark school system is a scheme for the middle classes to enjoy safe comfortable jobs at the expense of the poorer citizens who have to send their children to that same system. On page 62 of the state budget summary the biggest increase in costs is the Teachers pension fund.

Look at the splendid numbers on page 66 for more of the same.

Those documents BTW have lots and lots of very funny details. For example on page 45 of the state budget summary:

«Jersey Total Income, which is the tax base,
increased 9.5% in 2004. In 2005 and 2006, the tax
base is projected to grow at 8.9% and 8.3%,
respectively, reflecting the strong anticipated
personal income outlook for 2005 and 2006. The
growth in income for households reporting over
$100,000 in total income, who account for 80% of
the tax, is expected to grow at a 13% average
annual rate (2004-2006). This is slightly below the
14.6% rate experienced in the 1994-96 period
when economic conditions were similar.»

Way to go over $100,000! :-)

[Peter Schaeffer]

Blissex,

I wrote

"I rather doubt that all of this money was raised locally. The reality is that the rest of the US is subsidizing urban education and on a very large scale"

Based on your numbers, 87.2% of Newark's public education costs were paid for by state and federal taxpayers. Looks like a massive external subidy to me and little to show for it to boot.

Last time I checked, teacher salaries and pension costs were part of public education.

Are you suggesting that teachers are overpaid? Shouldn't recieve pensions? That $20K+ per-student isn't enough? That an 87.2% subsidy isn't high enough?

[Blissex]

Anyhow a lot of this discussion about plantation foremen trying to isolate themselves in suburbia is missing a couple of important details.

* Think tanks have discovered that people who own a suburban home and one or more cars (and stock and a gun) are far more likely to vote Republican than otherwise.

* In the USA the spread of suburban home ownership and car ownership has been a government policy for decades and has resulted in exceptionally low petrol taxes, tax exemptions for house purchasing and sale, lots of publicly funded road construction, and in general a massive public subsidy for urban sprawl and commuting.

* Unfortunately even the best laid plans can have problems, and the increasing price of petrol and so on may be reversing the trend in the next decades, despite the best efforts of governments to shift the burden from the fully vested middle classes to the working poor and immigrants.

An interesting film (which can be freely downloaded, and a short version is on YouTube) about the consequences of the end of nearly free petrol is:

http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Suburbia

How will the plantation foremen react to having to go back to live among the plantation workers? Ah well, that's going to be a problem.

[odograph]

SF, I was heh'ing about the city-to-suburb relationship in each of those places. What, Hong Kong and Cairo are same-mode cities with same-mode suburbs?

[donna]

Ah, of course he has a nice spread himself. Thought that all sounded a might hypocritical.

Funny how those who think they have all the answers aren't the ones actually dealing with the problems.

[odograph]

I missed this:

"Yes, if we discover a source of non-polluting perpetual energy, I can see your point, but since that violates the laws of physics, it is unlikely."

Do you think it was sly to slip in "perpetual energy?" I hope you didn't think it would win you respect.

We are possibly on the verge of electric cars matched to solar roofs. It's possible but not a sure thing. So as I said above, the best thing to do now is to tax carbon emissions and let the chips fall where they may.

Oh, and build more bicycle infrastructure.

(I'm a member of the League of American Bicyclists, are you?)

[Peter Schaeffer]

blissex,

Your ideas suffer from a certain cognitive dissonance. On a plantation, slaves vastly outnumber foremen and overseers..

In America, working suburbanites outnumber employed city dwellers.

Seems like you have your roles reversed. Suburbanites are the exploited workers and the foremen live in the cities.

Your Newark school funding data supports this model rather well.

[Blissex]

«"I rather doubt that all of this money was raised locally. The reality is that the rest of the US is subsidizing urban education and on a very large scale"

"Of $936m of alleged revenue, $120m come from local sources, $763 from the state, $54m from federal sources."

Based on your numbers, 87.2% of Newark's public education costs were paid for by state and federal taxpayers. Looks like a massive external subidy to me and little to show for it to boot.»

It is not the rest of the US -- the rest of the US pays a small percentage of the costs of the Newark school system.

Perhaps it is the rest of the *state* that is paying for Newark's schools -- but wait, we don't know. Because Newark state taxes are paid by New Jersey's cities too. And they are paid for by sales and property taxes in the majority, and sales and property taxes of course are collected most in the cities.

I would rather argue that over 90% of Newark's schools resources are from local sources, well over 2/3s of that 90% comes from indirect taxes which are highly regressive and the incidence is mostly on the poor and proportional to population density. It also happens that a very large percentage of the school board expenses go on expensive salaries and pensions for their middle class bureaucrats and teachers.

The end result seems to me that the poor of New Jersey pay a lot of indirect taxes to fund the lifestyles of a segment of NJ's suburban middle class, who then provide poor quality education for their taxpayers. Way to go dudes.

How regressive are state taxes? Well, the papers I linked to say that $9b of income tax is paid by people with incomes over $100,000, and various indirect taxes that hits mostly the poor are twice that. This has some interesting statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey#Economy

The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that New Jersey's total state product in 2004 was $416 billion. [ ... ] Its median household income is the highest in the nation with $55,146. [ ... ] New Jersey has seven tax brackets for determining income tax rates. The rates range from 1.4 to 8.97%. The standard sales tax rate is 7%,

«New Jersey has the highest imbalance of any state in the United States between what it gives to the federal government and what it receives. In fiscal year 2005, New Jersey taxpayers gave the federal government $77 billion dollars but only received $55 billion dollars back. This difference is higher than any other state and means that for every $1.00 New Jersey taxpayers send to Washington, the state only receives $0.61 dollars back. »

Interestingly New Jersey is fairly urbanized but with small towns rather than large cities. Newark itself is sort of small:

«As of the United States 2000 Census, only four municipalities had populations in excess of 100,000. With the 2004 Census estimate, Woodbridge has surpassed Edison in population, as both joined the 100,000 club. The 2006 Census estimate states that both Edison and Woodbridge Township have dropped below the 100,000 mark.
Newark: 273,546 (Census Estimate 2006: 281,402)
Jersey City: 240,055 (Census Estimate 2006: 241,791)
Paterson: 149,222 (Census Estimate 2006: 148,708)
Elizabeth: 120,568 (Census Estimate 2006: 126,179)»

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark,_New_Jersey#Poverty_and_lack_of_investment

«The 1967 riots resulted in a significant population loss — attributed to white flight — which continued from the 1970s through to the 1990s. The city lost over 100,000 residents between 1960 and 1990.
The median income for a household in the city was $26,913, and the median income for a family was $30,781. Males had a median income of $29,748 versus $25,734 for females. The per capita income for the city was $13,009. 28.4% of the population and 25.5% of families were below the poverty line. 36.6% of those under the age of 18 and 24.1% of those 65 and older were living below the poverty line. In 2003, the city's unemployment rate was 12%.»

"F*ck them, I am fully vested" may seem a very good line after seeing those numbers. To let those welfare queens and strapping young bucks rot sounds like a good idea to those who are tired of being brutally exploited by such parasites.

[Rohan Swee]

Blissex wrote: "Well, then I am pretty sure that you will then forbid your children from applying for any university scholarship, you will not take advantage of any tax breaks for university fee tax exempt accounts, and you will start repaying immediately any tax breaks you received on the interest for your home and you will pay capital gains taxes on your home.

Because all those juicy and lucrative subsidies are at least partly paid for by the taxes (including sales taxes, payroll taxes, ...) of people who cannot afford a home, cannot afford to send their children to university, often cannot afford a family, and often pay a fortune in non-deductible interest to pay load sharks.

Well, I wouldn't actually qualify for any of those things, since I'm a childless non-home-owning type who pays sales and payroll taxes, and probably couldn't afford to shell out for a university education for kids if I had 'em. (I have, however, managed to avoid the loan sharks so far.)

Now, if you want to argue for the amelioration of regressive taxation and rescinding the various middle-class tax breaks you mention, fine, though I'm not sure what your point is re my comment. That people can afford to have children in the suburbs that they cannot afford to have if they stay in the city is, I believe, a statement of fact. Are you arguing that the middle-class subsidies you enumerate are evidence for Glaeser's thesis? It's possible that the numbers may fall out that way, but you don't provide any. These "juicy and lucrative" subsidies aren't suburb specific, nor do they exhaust the categories that need to be examined to settle the issue. (Btw, there are people in the suburbs who can't afford a home, can't afford to send their children to universities, and who, from what I hear, have loads of non-deductible debt.)

[david]

"The American people have voted with their feet to the suburbs. Take a look at where most of the new housing is built. If you need data, read Ed Glaeser's papers on the subject."

Silly stuff like this, markets no costs at all, has led the whole conversation into a ditch. Fact free bitching about cities sucking up subsidies no better.

Christopher Leinberger would have us believe pent up demand for walkability, thanks to regulatory barriers to walkability, is quite high. Decent article in the current Atlantic by him on potential for suburban collapse.

What I really want to say is Glaeser for once is making sense. Now if he can only be prevented from claptrap libertarian nonsense about how all we need is no coordinated planning for the built environment, we might take a tiny step closer to the very small chance that climate change doesn't wipe away the build environment and the societies that built it.

[Peter Schaeffer]

blissex,

Thanks for all of the numbers. However, they only prove my point. Newark is too poor to be generating more than a fraction of what is being spent on Newark's public schools.

As you point out, the New Jersey income tax is highly progressive. Obviously, the vast majority of income tax revenue is coming from high income taxpayers who aren't living in Newark or any other poor urban area.

The burden of the sales tax is a function of spending. Obviously, suburbanites making $100K+ are paying a lot more sales tax than folks in Newark with a median household income of $26,913. Ditto the property tax.

All of these numbers simply reinforce my point

"The reality is that the rest of the US is subsidizing urban education and on a very large scale"

I find your comment that

"It also happens that a very large percentage of the school board expenses go on expensive salaries and pensions for their middle class bureaucrats and teachers."

quite contradictory. Who do you think runs Newark's schools? Who is on the school board? These are locally controlled schools. If you have a problem with the policies of Newark's schools, you need to take it up with the (local) folks in charge and stop pointing fingers at suburbanites who pay 87.2% of the bills (roughly).

[Peter Schaeffer]

David,

"Fact free bitching about cities sucking up subsidies no better."

Not really. Check out Blissex's number on Newark's public schools.

[anne]

Actually, the article is fine and suggests what is obvious simply by undertstanding the structures of the national and state governments, that urban centers will be relatively less favored in per capita spending from tax revenues. Alaska is going to be relatively more favored than Illinois, and rural Illinois will be more favorded than urban Illinois of Chicago in particular.

The best that could be hoped for is not less attention to Alaska or rural Illinois but relatively more attention to Chicago.

[Peter Schaeffer]

I have one more note for you folks. Check out "As Developer Heads to Trial, Questions Linger Over a Deal With Obama" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/us/politics/02rezko.html?adxnnl=1&ref=politics&adxnnlx=1204485010-PC8dU6e5CVO3moNphznSXg).

Skip the political stuff. Check out the picture of sweet home Obama. Nice place. So much for high-density urban living. I could post a few satellite pictures of the Maison de Edwards, but what would be the point?

[anne]

There are wonderful cities through America, with wonderful public facilities, including wonerful schools, that can be yet improved. There are problems in cities, but a focus on a particular troubled city is simply another subversive hate-ridden game that is being played.

[Blissex]

«Your ideas suffer from a certain cognitive dissonance. On a
plantation, slaves vastly outnumber foremen and overseers...»

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdoc.cfm?index=8885&type=2 table 1C
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/12-11-HistoricalTaxRates.pdf

The serfs vastly outnumber the overseers in the USA too -- the
unproductive, parasitical lazy serfs in the bottomost 80% of the
taxpayer range that earn less than $67k a year (2005).

These are not all in the rundown urban areas areas -- they are
also in rural cesspits, or in the worst, dilapidated parts of the
suburbs abandoned by the middle class.

Who belongs to the middle class (the top 20% of taxpayers,
roughly)?:

«The minimum adjusted income is the lower income boundary for each
quintile. Because incomes are adjusted by dividing income by the
square root of household size, an adjusted income range implies
different unadjusted income for different size households.

To compute the unadjusted income range for a particular size
household, the adjusted income must be multiplied by the square
root of the household size: 1.414 for a two-person household,
1.732 for a three-person household; 2.0 for a four-person
household, 2.236 for a five-person household.

For example, in 2005, the highest quintile had adjusted income
above $67,400. A two-person household would need income above
$95,300 to fall in that quintile, while a four-person household
would need income in excess of $134,800.»

That's the sliver of population between roughly $70k and $300k
"adjusted income", which are those who can *afford* to live the
suburban dream (maybe if house prices come down). These are the
gang masters, the supervisors, the overseers.

«In America, working suburbanites outnumber employed city
dwellers. Seems like you have your roles reversed. Suburbanites
are the exploited workers and the foremen live in the cities.»

The 80% of usians that earn less than $70k can afford the dream of
suburbia? Not so likely. The 60% who make less than $45k? Hahaha.

«Your Newark school funding data supports this model rather well.»

I doubt somehow very much that the school headteachers or even
teachers or the school board bureaucrats would live in Newark, an
area with a median family income of $30k. The cleaners and perhaps
some of the newer junior teachers would.

[anne]

"Check out the picture of sweet home -----. Nice place. So much for high-density urban living. I could post a few satellite pictures of the Maison de -------, but what would be the point?"

There is a hatred, that is beyond all hatred, a hatred that is surpassingly hate-filled.

[anne]

"Just in case, anyone was inclined to take these ideas seriously, -- ------- lives on a 6.5 acre lot in Weston, Mass… Next to a 600 acre conservation area…"

"Check out the picture of sweet home -----. Nice place. So much for high-density urban living. I could post a few satellite pictures of the Maison de -------, but what would be the point?"

The exercise was an exercise in hatred, hatred beyond all self-control of shame, hatred meant to spread hatred. We know who you are and we know where you live and we have clubs sort of hatred.

[anne]

We come finally to a typically crazed attempt to slander a wonderful Presidential candidate. There is what surpassing hatred is about.

[cm]

"I know that in the San Francisco area, average incomes in San Francisco are higher than in the surrounding region"

OK, if this is so (of which I'm not quite sure but I'm not going to dispute it), how does this square with the case that the disproportionate "burden" is on city dwellers? Looks like they may be "compensated" for it (which again hinges on the above income claim).

Somebody, I forgot who, recently pointed out I believe on this blog that much of your situation, and life's "choices", is determined by when (and perhaps which place) you are born.

I believe too many suburbanites are vilified undeservedly.

[Michael Cain]

We are possibly on the verge of electric cars matched to solar roofs. It's possible but not a sure thing. So as I said above, the best thing to do now is to tax carbon emissions and let the chips fall where they may.

The energy costs of building and maintaining roads makes it more difficult, but still possible: at 0.25 kWh/mile, 50 miles/day, and 20% efficiency, Denver's suburbs would only need about nine square meters of PV panels to cover the direct energy for transportation. Double that and it may well cover the energy inputs for the roads as well.

No one has questioned what an optimal capital solution might look like. What is the capital cost of 1,000 square feet of new urban-style housing? What is the capital cost of bringing current suburban housing to a point of acceptable energy consumption?

I suspect that the answers are different in different regions of the US. Denver's suburbs have a reasonable chance of evolving to a sustainable energy solution based on relatively local sources; just an opinion, but I don't see New Jersey (for example) as having any chance of achieving one.

[Worker]

"You get smart by being around other smart people"

Good way of describing the agglomeration economies that built cities in the first place.

Cities retain a natural advantage over suburbs due to their inherent ability to foster greater choice and competition in education. Distance costs matter greatly in education.

What is amazing is how cities has turned what should be their greatest asset- (a wide variety of educational opportunity within a shorter radius) into their greatest liability (a disfunctional centrally controlled public school system that repels middle class residents).

This is a failure of political leadership, abbetted by the role of interest-group driven political machines in urban politics.

[dissent]

Suburbs will become much less attractive to the middle class when gas is $10/gallon. I give that 10 years.

The problem is we let anti-tax emotion(anti gas tax in this case) rule our actions. By the time the environmental cost is passed through to the consumer, we are in crisis.

[Worker]

"You get smart by being around other smart people"

As a counterpoint to my generalities:

Sadly, the city of Baltimore's public school system does not allow the few charter schools that were allowed here to "discrimate" based on academic qualifications. All slots are assigned via a "fair" lottery system.

It is politically incorrect to allow smart people to learn from other smart people, unless you move to the suburbs.

[reason]

By the way, while urban sprawl is not uniquely American, the death (or rather near death) of inner cities is almost uniquely American, caused by a combination of tax policy and racial politics.

But it doesn't happen everywhere in the US either.

I grew up in Sydney, and apart from Redfern (aboriginal ghetto) most of the really poor areas where in the West, on the outskirts of the metropolitan area.

[anne]

"It is politically incorrect to allow smart people to learn from other smart people, unless you move to the suburbs."

This is absurdly false. There are academically selective schools and selective schools within schools and selective classes in every city I know. I imagine there may be some cities in which there are few or possibly erven no programs for select stufents, but I know of none.

What is the point of belittling outstanding schools?

[anne]

"In the 2000 Census, 19.9 percent of city residents were poor; only 7.5 percent of suburban residents lived in poverty."

Possibly I am wrong, but I thought that urban poverty was about equal to non-urban poverty. I think I have such a finding, but where?

[Mark Thoma]

Something else I wanted to comment on - and may at some point - is not to forget rural counties as they have some of the same troubles as cities. For example, here are the poverty rates in the county I grew up in:

As of the census of 2000, there were 18,804 people ... and 4,578 families residing in the county. ... 46.54% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 58.7% spoke English and 40.4% Spanish as their first language. ...

The median income for a household in the county was $35,062... The per capita income for the county was $14,730. About 13.0% of families and 16.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 19.5% of those under age 18 and 8.2% of those age 65 or over.

So rural is different than suburban and policy will need to recognize this (e.g., these households have few transportation alternatives if taxes are increased). The comparison in the article is just urban versus suburban, rural is left out.

[anne]

http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2006/12poverty_berube.aspx

December, 2006

Two Steps Back: City and Suburban Poverty Trends 1999-2005: U.S. Poverty, U.S. Census, Cities, Cities
By Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone

Findings

An analysis of poverty in cities and suburbs of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, based on data from the 2005 American Community Survey and Census 2000, indicates that:

In 1999 large cities and their suburbs had nearly equal numbers of poor individuals, but by 2005 the suburban poor outnumbered their city counterparts by at least 1 million. Still, the percentage of all people in poverty rose in both cities and suburbs between 1999 and 2005, following the national trend. In 2005, the poverty rate in large cities (18.8 percent) was twice as high as in suburbs (9.4 percent).

Poverty rates rose significantly in Midwestern and Southern metropolitan areas, but remained steady in the West and Northeast. In the Midwest, where job losses were concentrated in the first half of the decade, poverty rates rose in 18 of 20 metropolitan areas. In the West, by contrast, only seven of 23 metro areas experienced poverty rate increases, and poverty actually fell in five.

Nearly half of large cities nationwide saw a significant rise in their poverty rates, versus about one-third of their suburbs. Six of the ten cities with the largest povertyrate increases were located in the Midwest, including Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and Columbus. New York City and the Greater Los Angeles area actually experienced small poverty-rate declines over this period.

In cities and suburbs where overall poverty rates rose from 1999 to 2005, child poverty rates rose faster. In Midwestern and Southern cities, child poverty rates were up by at least 3 percentage points on average. The cities and suburbs of Houston, Dallas, and Cleveland ranked among those experiencing the greatest increases in child poverty during this period....

[Worker]

Anne,

Not absurdly false, but clearly true per link below.

http://www.hha47.org/parents/docs/HHA%20Lottery%20policy%200607.pdf

"According to Maryland Charter School Legislation (Statute § 9-102(1-13)), enrollment in public charter schools is open to all students on a space available basis and admits students on a lottery basis if more students apply than can be accommodated."

There are some good city schools, but very few if any good city systems. A good system would allow for a wide variety of competitive options, giving power to parents and schools rather than bureaucrats. What we have here is faux competition between a Ford and a Mercury.

Alas it is easier for city pols to divide the spoils and round up the rents from a monopoly system.

[anne]

Thank you for the reference, since we can collect these, and I always trust your judgement on Baltimore schools with which you are directly familiar. I am only objecting to generalizing. I have a sense that I would criticize almost any school system while almost always finding pockets of excellence as entire schools or schools in schools an always classrooms in a system.

I am wildly in favor of every experiment to improve schooling, but there are wonderful things even if unexpected that happen in schools all the time and wonderful city schools.

So teach about Baltimore, but Baltimore is singular as is each district.

[anne]

Oh, by the way, watch the progress of the perspective crusading Congresswoman about to be elected in Baltimore. What is her name, darn I forgot and I recently heard her speak and speak impressively?

[mrrunangun]

If one considers only the large bankingand finance centers such as NYC, Boston, Chicago, SF, and London the claim that the cities are doing great makes sense. Few people from there get out to the midwestern industrial cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis. Those cities are not doing so great. As Prof. Thoma pointed out, the ungentrified rural areas are badly distressed. The uneven distribution of the prosperity of the past twenty years has been geographically as well as class-based. The people working in finance have done fabulously well. The people who used to manufacture have seen their prospects evaporate.

[anne]

Donna Edwards!

[anne]

Mr Runangun

"The uneven distribution of the prosperity of the past twenty years has been geographically as well as class-based."

Agreed, which is why generalizing is so tricky.

[Michael Cain]

Suburbs will become much less attractive to the middle class when gas is $10/gallon. I give that 10 years.

But where would the middle class go? They're not all going to move into urban-style high-density housing; the suburbs are a bit over 50% of the population in the US, and we're not going to build that much new housing in that time.

Using Denver and its suburbs as an example, it's also entirely possible that the suburbs can cut their gasoline usage in half over that same period. In that ten years, the Denver area will have added >120 miles of commuter rail, most of it electrified. At that price for gasoline, telecommuting, 4x10 work weeks, and car pooling all become attractive (and employers who don't adapt will find it increasingly more difficult to attract employees). Cars for teenagers disappear. SUVs and minivans disappear. Driving 20 miles to try the hot new restaurant will disappear. It becomes much more attractive to relocate across town if your job changes -- I expect realty fees to decrease sharply.

That gasoline price hits rural areas much harder, as few of the adaptations possible in the suburbs will work there.

[Linda Margaret]

The EU has a similar problem--in channeling funds to the EU institutions in Brussels, integration is seen to be encouraged. However (and at the same time) a lot of money is lost and not used in the way in which it is needed at the local level. Towns along the border in Texas are discovering this with the proposal to build a wall between the US and Mexico. The money is not being used effectively, either for the local communities, or for significant overall federal gains. Policy makers at the local and federal level are overloaded--there must be a better system put in place to facilitate communication and make more sensible (local and federal) decisions.

[Peter Schaeffer]

"Check out the picture of sweet home -----. Nice place. So much for high-density urban living. I could post a few satellite pictures of the Maison de -------, but what would be the point?"

So now the last names of the Democratic presidential candidates are unmentionable?

Weird to the max.

[PeonInChief]

I think this argument may be about a world that hasn't existed for about 20 years. Urban redevelopment and rehabilitation has been pushing poorer people (particularly minorities) to suburban regions for quite some time. What's interesting is that there are two kinds of suburbs--those where poor and near-poor are becoming the majority of the population and those that are mostly white and have very few (if any) poor/near-poor living there. White suburbanites "leapfrog" over the inner-ring suburbs to create enclaves of the rich. That's why, for instance, the former hill country of San Diego County has wildfires that destroy megaMcMansions.

[Peter Schaeffer]

10 a gallon is $420 per barrel. That's 4X the current price which is a historic high in real terms. Don't hold your breath. Plently of alternative fuels are highly profitable at much lower prices.

Gasoline in Europe is around $5 gallon (with variations between countries). Suburbanization continues apace.

What I do find interesting is the hatred of suburban middle-class America and the vengeful lust to punish Americans via higher energy prices.

[Peter Schaeffer]

"Just in case, anyone was inclined to take these ideas seriously, -- ------- lives on a 6.5 acre lot in Weston, Mass… Next to a 600 acre conservation area…"

Wow, I guess Mark Thoma made a mistake publishing Ed Glaeser' name.

Weird to the max.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Linda Margaret,

The "Good Neighbor" fence between the US and Mexico has already proven its worth.

From the Houston Chronicle

"An update from the Houston Chronicle, which notes the impact on a once-booming smuggling haven in Palomas, Mexico:

"The fence has destroyed the economy here," said Fabiola Cuellar, a hardware-store clerk on the main street of Palomas who used to sell supplies to the throngs heading north from here. "Things are going back to the way they were before."

Where the fence has been completed, "it tends to elicit satisfied nods from Americans and resigned shrugs from Mexicans," says reporter Dudley Althaus. Then there's this anecdote, from the principal of a Mexican elementary school that abuts the fence:"

[bakho]

When Senator Richard Lugar was Mayor of Indianapolis, the city and county governments merged into a single "unigov" unit. This kept the flight from core urban areas from destroying the tax base. If the taxing unit is expanded, then many of these issues disappear.

[Urban Woes]

The main reason collecting property taxes from urban residents to support the public school system is such a high burden is that the system itself is just too expensive. Even a draconian income tax rate of 70% on the "rich" would only collect about $100 billion extra. The public school system takes about $600 billion per year to operate. Thus regressive taxes are levied on the less well to do, reducing their already low standard of living.

There is no competition with the public school system to keep costs low. To make matters worse, parents don't directly pay anything for it, so they don't pay any attention to costs. Thus costs spiral out of control as lobby groups demand ever more from politicians. Unless some way is found to reign in spiraling costs, the burden on the urban middle class to support this expensive system will continue to grow. Cities will continue to decay because inadequate resources are left to control violent and property crime. The well to do will continue to flee the high crime, and the downward spiral will continue.

The federal gov can't take over paying for the current system, because there is no way to raise enough money from the "rich" to pay for it. The costs dwarf any possible increase in revenues that can be extracted from the rich. Some way must be found to increase quality, and decrease costs. Some way must also be found for the education system to teach sound moral values to children, so that crime in the cities can finally be gotten under control.

[SanFranciscoJim]

The cities will continue to decay...

Whaaat? The cities in America are going through their finest renaissance since the Industrial Revolution. Crime is down, home values are up, schools are improving and more and more upper middle class professionals are deciding to stay put and raise their children in the cities. We are talking about cities in the United States of America, right?

10 a gallon is $420 per barrel. That's 4X the current price which is a historic high in real terms. Don't hold your breath.

Perhaps you had not noticed, but crude oil requires processing and transportation before it can be used as gasoline. It is not possible to burn crude oil in an internal combustion engine. Right now gasoline is ~$3.50/gallon and crude oil is ~$100/barrel. So, roughly, crude oil prices would have to triple. And in my memory, I have watched gasoline go from 29 cents/gallon to over 10X that. I am not really that old either. And prove your claim that suburbanization is occurring apace in Europe.

What amazes me is the unbridled hatred of urban living that I see on these message boards and the vengeful desire to see the Americans who live there punished in any way possible.

See, I can do it to.

[Icarus]

I'm not quite sure what the ideological battle is here.

A few facts...

In 2007, the top quintile of income earners paid 72% of federal taxes. 73%...that's quite progessive, in my opinion; for 1/5th of the population to pay almost 3/4 of the federal income tax. Other taxes are much more regressive, like the payroll tax.

But, the breakdown of total tax rates are pretty clear: (this average includes income, payroll, estate taxes, etc)

Bottom Quintile - 3.4%
2nd Quintile - 7.3%
Middle Quintile - 14.4%
4th Quintile - 18.8%
Top Qunitile - 25.9%

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/currentdistribution.cfm

The total taxes collected reflect a very progressive attitude towards national spending. All arguments about tax cuts and programs benefiting the wealthy don't impress me, as the overall numbers are strikingly clear - The vast majority of the taxes are paid for by the top 2 quintiles. They, in effect, subsidize everything.

To demarcate between city and suburb on a national scale isn't all that important, I'd argue.
Cities do often collect more in taxes, in order to pay for the infrastructure required to maintain a city. This is part of the rational calculus in taking a job in a city..."what is my take home"...that ever pressing bottom line question.
Salaries in expensive cities are usually higher, in order to compensate for the extra cost.

But, one thing is clear, and, it may be sociologically painful...people do flee to the suburbs to get away from the effects of poverty. No parent wants their children influenced by children from undisciplined homes and environments.
We have all sorts of metaphors to avoid saying something quite unpalatable to most. The liberal elite may vilify this process in print, but, when it comes to their own children (aka bill and hillary), the action is the same...separate, and nurture.

Reverse segregation may help, but, it's not a total solution.
The solution also isn't about money, or the salaries of educators (whether teachers or superintendents). The US over-funds education, and, the salaries aren't the real issue.

The issue is the parenting behind these children. Parents who are involved in their children's lives in a progressive, disciplined, and nurturing way, tend to raise productive children.
Parents who are too busy to really raise their children, and expect schools, television, or 'society' to do it for them, will tend to raise problem-children.

Our narrative must start with parenting. That's the root cause, and the only place real change can be effective. All the programs in the world can't/won't substitute.

Fleeing to the suburbs is often part of fleeing the social effects of this undisciplined sector of society, and embracing a 'planned' lifestyle. Planned communities abound...

[SanFranciscoJim]

Sorry, Icarus you are simply wrong that the top two quartiles pay an overwhelming majority of all taxes. From the numbers you gave, it looks like they pay 25.9 + 18.8 = 44.7% of all taxes. Come back with some real numbers and we can have that discussion.

At least you agree that poverty is a problem in America that needs to be addressed. Back when we had a "War on Poverty" and more progressive tax rates, we had a lower poverty rate than today. I think we should go back to those times. With luck, President Obama and a Democratic Congress will undo some of the damage that 20 years of neoliberalism has wrought.

[SanFranciscoJim]

What percentage of total income does the top quintile take in?

[Icarus]

SFJim....

Your math is a bit off. You can't just add these numbers. The top quintile pays 25.9% of their income in taxes. The next quintile pays 18.8%. You can't add these numbers to get the % of overall taxes they pay.

How about those real numbers and the discussion we're having?

Sorry, SFJim.

[Icarus]

SFJim...If anything, we're seeing an overall push to further Neo-liberalism. While I like the idea of a president obama, I predict he'll have a difficult time improving social conditions through increased tax rates on the top quintile.

I think the "War on Poverty" needs to be combatted not with more redistribution per se, but, instead with greater focus on family planning and reproductive responsibility. The social coffers will never keep up with irresponsible child rearing.

[cm]

Peter Schaeffer: You cannot just equate pump price to crude price by nominal volume. Not all of the crude oil becomes gasoline, and also prices are marked up along the supply chain. In addition, a substantial portion of pump price is various taxes.

[SanFranciscoJim]

Your numbers, not mine!

What percentage of the overall tax burden is paid by the top quintile, including income, payroll, state, sales, local and property tax? You can't just look at income tax.

[SanFranciscoJim]

Gasoline is between $7.50 and $8.50/gallon in Europe, btw, not the $5/gallon that Peter claims:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/gas1.html

[cm]

SF Jim: "What amazes me is the unbridled hatred of urban living that I see on these message boards and the vengeful desire to see the Americans who live there punished in any way possible."

That's how divide-and-conquer works. But the vilification is certainly mutual. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see that many calls for punishment.

[cm]

SF Jim: According to what I'm hearing from family, gasoline in Germany costs about what you quote, considering current exchange rates.

[SanFranciscoJim]

Nah, I don't actually believe that cm, I was just making fun of Peter's debate tactics. A simple prediction about what commodity prices are likely to be in ten years turned into a "vengeful lust to punish Americans" in his book.

Though I do personally think that Americans consume too large a share of the worlds energy, to the detriment of all of us. It is nice to see energy consumption world-wide move into a more equitable distribution. Those who bet on the unlimited availability of cheap energy are likely to be hurt, but them's the breaks.

[reason]

I wonder if the Americans in this discussion know that almost everywhere else, schools are a state level (or equivalent) responsibility. Local funding and management of schools is a disaster.

[gordon]

I must drop in on Mr Glaeser next time I'm in Massachusetts! We can discuss the desirability of high-density living in civilised comfort.

But more seriously; Sydney (Australia) is an overwhelmingly suburbanised place, and it would appear that about 20% of the inhabitants hate it: "ONE in five Sydneysiders are so sick of traffic and the high cost of living they are considering moving to another city..."

The city and suburbs are just too big. Infrastructure is inadequate, air quality is poor, costs are high, commuting time is excessive, you name it, it's broken. Frankly, I was surprised that only 20% wanted to leave.

[reason]

Gordon,
imagine Sydney as a sort of Rhein-Main Gebiet - smaller denser (walkable) communities linked by rapid transit lanes and sorrounded by forest/fields. Public space is valuable because it is public. It is usually undervalued.

[Urban Woes]

"...almost everywhere else, schools are a state level (or equivalent) responsibility. Local funding and management of schools is a disaster."

It produces wildly uneven results. There are excellent schools, but there are also terrible schools. Considering the performance of the D.C. school system, which is directly under Congressional control, I am not sure federalizing education would work as well as it has overseas. Lobby groups tend to dominate our political system, which usually drives cost out of control. Since so many resources are used up on low priority mandates, there are not enough resources left to accomplish high priority items. At least not very well.

One major problem is the lack of a consensus on basic value systems. Since Americans cannot agree on which values to teach, none at all are taught. At least in an organized fashion. Children learn a bit of math, but no moral virtue. Some neighborhoods are not safe, and the situation is not getting any better. The lack of safety is despite a very high incarceration rate, by comparison to the rest of the world. A serious problem exists in many areas, but the public school system is not attempting to help solve it.

It can actually make matters worse in high crime districts, by subjecting meek children to violent intimidation by their peers. This scars their impressionable young minds for life. When they graduate (if they graduate), they carry the values the violent predators taught them into the neighborhoods. Hatred and crime proliferate. High property taxes due to excessive school system cost then drives down the standard of living, making things even worse.

cm says...

SF Jim: Just for my reference, would you consider the Santa Clara "cities" suburbs for the purpose of this discussion? They are rather spread out, but they do have (attempts at) semi-urban cores. For that