August 11, 2014

“The Suburbs Will Die” – A Profile of Charles Marohn

Kind of a deathly theme today …

Further to dead malls noted in The Daily Scot below, here’s a profile from Time on Charles Marohn, “a proud Republican … who’s trying to upend the suburbs as we know them.”

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The Suburbs Will Die: One Man’s Fight to Fix the American Dream

The “suburban experiment,” as he calls it, has been a fiscal failure. On top of the issues of low-density tax collection, sprawling development is more expensive to build. Roads are wider and require more paving. Water and sewage service costs are higher. It costs more to maintain emergency services since more fire stations and police stations are needed per capita to keep response times down. Children need to be bused farther distances to school. …

Marohn thinks this is all just too gluttonous. “The fact that I can drive to work on paved roads where I can drive fifty-five miles an hour the minute I leave my driveway despite the fact that I won’t see another car for five miles,” he says, “is living beyond our means on a grand, grand scale.”

 

Here he is live, at a lecture for the SFU City Program: “Original Thinking from the American Midwest” 

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Comments

  1. Perhaps it will just have to be repriced ie higher, perhaps far higher property taxes and/or road use fees.

    A good example is MetroVan as single house taxes are far too low and parking on the roads is free as is driving on them. Yesterday I walked by the free electric charge station on Granville Island, charging a $100,000 Tesla. Clearly mis pricing : free power and no gasoline taxes, no road toll driving to the leafy under-taxed suburb with free parking.

    The Achilles heel of democracy: vote yourself benefits at someone else’s expense, for example the yet unborn ( ie debt ) or from the non-majority group !

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