this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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In this image I can't help but notice how much infrastructure cost there is here. Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure. Keep in mind that failure rate increases with each house and by length of these runs that you are adding and fire hydrants being added every so many feet, shut off valves. Don't forget that we now have significantly bigger demand for water as we now have a lot more vegetation to manage and a higher reliance on emergency services as we are spread out over a larger area so we now have to increase ems, fire, and police spending. Then you add the costs for electrical infrastructure with your sub stations and transformers and all the costs set to maintain that especially since these are underground lines apparently and ofcourse we have increased risk of failure again per service and foot run and higher demand on those services which will require more workers which turns into money being spent outside of the community. You then add the cost of data lines and phone lines including the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading those which are also apparently underground which means your upgrades may be significantly more expensive and will take much longer to deploy. Now that we have all these houses separated we will now have a population that will be more dependent on vehicles so now we have to factor in all of our road maintenance costs and our public services will not require far more vehicles as well which means we will also need mechanics to repair and maintain these vehicles. Now with roads alone when we consider the costs involved things get rather expensive quickly. Cost to maintain roads, even roads that are seldom used, is surprisingly expensive and require a lot of workers to build and maintain as well as vehicles, machinery, and land to store, recycle, and create materials needed to repair and build the roads. On top of that there is also an often missed statistic of vehicles which is public safety as they are a leading cause for injury which is another stressor on our little community.
This is far from all the possibly missed costs of our suburban/rural neighborhood but I feel these are some of the important ones people live to overlook.
You're absolutely correct. Suburbia is subsidized. sprawling, car-dependent suburbs are almost universally financially insolvent on their own, as they literally don't produce enough tax revenue to cover the colossal cost of infrastructure needed to serve it. They require the financial backing of denser communities to prop themselves up.
The scale of money needed for car-centric development is astounding. Consider Massachusetts:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/01/massachusetts-car-economy-costs-64-billion-study-finds/
Using the numbers from the article, Massachusetts literally spends over 10% of their GDP on cars, more than half of that being public subsidy. Absolute insanity.
Someone has never heard of "well and septic".
Out in the country, you have enough biological diversity around you that sewage is just fertilizer for your lawn. You don't need the extensive network of sewers to concentrate it, the chemicals to treat it, and the sufficiently large body of water necessary to dilute it back down to something that nature can tolerate.
Much the same with potable water: there's no need for an extensive system of water treatment plants, chlorination, the network of underground piping when you are just pulling water up out of the aquifer. It has been filtered through hundreds of feet of sand and gravel, in the absence of oxygen. All the biological material has been filtered out, leaving just water and some trace minerals.
Electrical infrastructure is moving away from centralized fossil fuel plants to distributed solar and wind power. Spreading the load out allows generation to be moved closer to the point of consumption, which reduces the total load at any point on the grid, and increases redundancy and resiliency.
Spreading homes apart introduces a natural firebreak between them, reducing the demand on fire services. A single kitchen fire in an apartment complex can put hundreds of people out of their homes. High-rise fires are especially dangerous. It's much easier to attack a house fire than an apartment fire.
Roads are not reduced: food and raw materials used by humanity come from the countryside. Transportation infrastructure must stretch out to the farms and mines. Housing farmers and miners in the cities just increases their commutes on top of their long work days.
Wireless data can be much more feasible in the country than the city. Less building interference; less RF interference.
No, I'm afraid you've overblown the cost difference considerably.
I started to respond to this but it's so full of obvious bullshit it's not worth the time. Dump raw sewage into the ground in suburbia? What the fuck kind of capitalism hellscape do you live in?
Septic tanks aren't raw sewage, where are you getting your info from? Where do you think treated city sewage from a big plant goes?
Well and septic are viable options down to as little as half-acre lots, yes. Raw sewage is dumped into the first of 2-3 tanks, where it is biologically processed with virtually no intervention, before the nutrient-rich effluent eventually flows into a leach field and soaks into the topsoil.
Municipal sewage processing does it much the same way. The problem is that the cities don't have sufficient biomass, so they have to discharge their effluent over a very large area. A city typically converts a nearby river into a massive leachfield.
You have a problem with individuals processing their own sewage and discharge it to vegetation on their own lands, but you support massively upscaling that process and dumping the effluent directly into waterways.
"Capitalism hellscape" accurately describes one of these scenarios, but not the one you're thinking of.
you obviously need to come up with misinfo to justify your "correct" way of living
I don't even know where to start in explaining all the things wrong here
When I left home this afternoon, I briefly disturbed two doe and four fawns eating ground ivy in my front yard. When I get home, I'm going to hear crickets in the woods behind my house, and bullfrogs in the pond. I'll probably hear the big owl in my neighbor's tree, talking to his girlfriend down the road.
While I was last in the city, I saw a homeless guy pissing on the sidewalk, dozens of boarded buildings, and hundreds of broken windows. I heard four sets of gunshots. The local "park" has nothing growing in it; it has an asphalt basketball court and a gravel playground with busted equipment. An industrial site has a methane flare burning overhead 24/7.
The reason you are having a rough time explaining what's wrong with my argument is that you are accustomed to the dystopian nightmare of urban living, and expect everyone to accept and tolerate that nightmare.
Sorry dawg I grew up in a rural area. I have to return to rural areas frequently to visit family and I currently live in a suburban area so... sorry? But your anecdote is pretty awful
I didn't have a difficult time explaining anything, where did you get that from lol
Hmm. I must have misunderstood when you said:
Obviously lol