As for living costs, it’s baffeling to see how anyone making $50k a year would be better off in the city. Housing is usually more expensive. Not only in terms of being smaller but also in being old. An old house is like an old car. It’s going to require a lot of ongoing repairs just to keep it running. In my neighborhood, I see 1500 sq ft. 1890s Victorian houses going for $300k and more. What do you get beside a house the size of a modern two or three bedroom apartment in the suburbs? A house where you have to go downstairs to shower, hardly an closet space, electrical and plumbing systems that dates back to WWII, a bazillion hoops to jump through just to do minor work on the hours and other “features”. Throw into that higher taxes. For example, this city’s school district, despite still having over 1/2 it’s schools failing and far below capacity, has gotten 3 property tax increases passed during the last decade.

I’ve lived almost all of my adult life in central cities. I constantly see my fellow citizens fighting increased density. Seeing the polling numbers and being part of the dinner party conversations, I know a lot of these people say they want more density, that strip malls kill children and that we need to fight sprawl. Yet nearly any redevelopment projects outside of a very few select areas are fought with great vigor. They constantly complain about tear downs, even though they bring density. They fight any sort of high rise, claiming that it doesn’t fit with the neighborhood and it’ll bring too much traffic (yes, so they say density is needed to increase transit use and reduce congestion yet their actions show they actually believe that more density will result in more traffic). Yet these projects are often near and on prime transit routes and roadways. Instead of taking the bus to their job downtown, they drive to the light rail station 2 miles away and take it and then are baffled when I point out that light rail gets a “premium” in trips over buses because it mostly leaches traffic off those routes. Or if they work in the suburbs they’re surprised to hear downtown doesn’t have any more jobs than it had 25 years ago and that future projected growth by large is in the suburbs. The same with pointing out the sort of HUD funding that goes on to help give developers cheap financing for those fancy new condos and at that the amount of new households in them over the last decade doesn’t even add up to the number of new housing units in just one suburb during the last 3.

That is to say, they talk about smart growth a lot but don’t support it, at least not if it’s in their back yard. That’s why I have a hard time seeing how it’s possible for enough redevelopment to occur in inner ring suburbs and central cities over the next couple of decades to put any sort of meaningful dent in suburban growth.