kbshapiro wrote: ↑Jun 20, 2023
Very good points. So the best path forward is combining the City and County? Get rid of the 93 municipalities?
_nomad_ wrote: ↑Jun 19, 2023
kbshapiro wrote: ↑Jun 19, 2023
If you're asking for an honest answer, the problem is that in our current financial setup urban areas largely subsidize suburban areas both in terms of proportional share of infrastructure costs and in terms of the amount of infrastructure, mainly in the form of roads, that detracts from the urban environment and primarily services the needs of suburbanites commuting in, out, and through rather than city residents themselves. I do not want to dictate how people choose to live, but I object to being asked to subsidize those who choose to live outside the city but still heavily make use of city amenities without contributing to their upkeep and I object to the numerous highways cut through our neighborhoods for the primary use of people who do not live here.
I think the St Louis region also has an issue of people wanting to complain about various issues without taking any ownership of those issues acting as if the county is a completely independent area that has no effect on the city and derives no impacts from the city rather than recognizing that city and county are codependent on each other.
Combining municipalities might help to address some redundancies, but I'm not really sure it's the magic bullet some make it out to be. It doesn't magically change how we fund roads, sewers, or water lines. It wouldn't necessarily mean the end to single use zoning, minimum lot sizes, or parking minimums. It wouldn't have any impact on transportation funding at the state and federal levels, which is where a lot of the money is earmarked.
To my thinking the problem with suburbs is essentially that they're a form of soft segregation backed by a quiet tax inequity that favors the comparatively well to do. The single use zoning and lot size requirements basically mean that all the houses in a given area will be fairly similar in size and price, which means you'll only have people there who can afford that single sort of structure. Which means all those people will be pretty broadly similar. It's technically economic segregation, not racial, but that's probably 90% of what people wanted anyway. And 9 of the other 10 we'll do ourselves since we tend to like to live near friends and family.
On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with living near people like you. On the other hand, if you don't interact with people who are different you're a lot less likely to spend a lot of time thinking about their problems. It can make people invisible to one another.
When you top that off with the funding disparities inherent in the development patterns that nomad was hinting it can really feel like a tax grab from a fairly well off set at the expense of some pretty poor people. Take sewers as an example. MSD has a base charge for every user, and adds to that based on how many rooms you have and how many toilets, showers, and bathtubs. They don't, however, bill by the square feet of your property or the distance from the treatment plant. Big houses on bit lots are kind of a double whammy in combined storm/sanitary sewer land. You have many fewer houses per foot of sewer line, but the pipe cost doesn't go down any. And when your storm sewer drains through the plant you have quite a lot more runoff per capita too. More hard surface road per person. More roof on a big suburban house, even if it has the same number of rooms. More driveway. More garage. Even lawns aren't really all that good at absorbing runoff. Which means MSD spends many dollars more to provide service to my suburban parents, who have comparatively nice new sewer lines, than they do for my city house where my neighbors keep getting flooded because the sewer behind them has collapsed. (There but by the grace of being on a different line go I.)
And so many other things work out similarly. Roads, water, even emergency services really. It's just a lot cheaper per person to provide them in a denser area. But all our infrastructure providers are busy spending their budget on expansion into places that will never provide a return on investment, while all the old places that already did are left to fall apart. It's fundamentally unfair.
But it's an unfairness that works in the favor of people who have more time and inclination to vote, so it will probably long remain that way. It's not even something you're likely to see from out in the suburbs. I don't think suburbs have to be terrible. Some are quite nice. I don't think they need to be a segregationist tax grab. Not all of them are. But in North America enough of them are that the characterization sticks. The rhetoric might not always be helpful, but in the heat of the moment, when you get frustrated, it can be hard to keep it under control.
