Infrastructure costs from Immigration

Where you choose to live is your choice. Whatever your costs are today, you can find other places to live with the same costs.

If local crime is an issue, or illegals are an issue, then form a neighborhood co-op, and using the law, do everything you can safely do to change the culture of the neighborhood.

About 1/2 mile from where I live, up the same road where I live, someone was murdered about two weeks ago...associated with drugs. Crime IS NOT reserved only for your neighborhood and socio-economic levels; crime happens in every square inch of the USA.

 

I tend to agree with you so what happens if all the illegals are rounded up and sent home? Where will the workers come from to do hard farm work? Will the White boys show up at the labor halls begging for this type of work?

I think in very rare cases is an illegal paid less than a legal worker and there is documentation for this. Politics and ignorance (they're actually synonyms) believe all illegals are stealing jobs from Americans because they'll work for 'slave wages' and this is simply not true.

So...what will it take for the White American people to get out and compete for all these jobs which are currently held by illegals?

 

Yes, but we wouldn't need that "efficient" transportation system if it wasn't for all these people. Some of these proposed transportation systems sound nice, but can be quite expensive, and are not as convenient for getting around as idealists may think.

What you don't realize is that, in many cases, these suburbs exist because of all the immigration that has happened. All the crime, poverty, and bad schools in the inner city areas. So everyone else has fled into surrounding suburbs to escape these problems, even if it means long commutes to work every day. Overcrowding also makes housing less affordable, another reason for the growth of the suburbs.

 

Suburbs have nothing to do with immigration? Suburbs have been around for decades! Inter-city housing is old, smaller, and becomes ridiculously expensive for the average wage earner so 'bedroom' communities pop up and this creates the suburbs where people can afford to buy/rent albeit they have the commutes. If there was affordable housing in the inter-city areas average wage earners would be interested...but this rarely exists.

Lastly, there is little to no infrastructure in which the costs are not shared by legal and illegal immigrants. These people pay all the excise taxes plus property taxes which is where most of infrastructure is funded. And all of them are consumers, spending billion$, which energizes the economy, which is great for everyone...

 

No, suburban development was a deliberate policy choice made during the cold war when it was expected that central urban areas would be obliterated in the coming nuclear war. These changes in public policy redirected investment from the inner city to suburban development with the idea that a more distributed population and industry would make nuclear war survivable. People did not leave the city because of crime, poverty and bad schools, they left because they were living in cramped and crowded conditions due to a severe shortage of housing for families after WW2 and the only place where new housing was being built was out in the suburbs.

The urban crime and poverty and decline of the schools came only after they had largely moved out. The banks had redirected all the savings of city residents into the suburbs while refusing to lend in the city, which caused property values to plummet. This made it it impossible for city governments to maintain spending since revenues were almost entirely dependent on property taxes. The inability of people to obtain mortgages for homes within the city limits left the middle class with no choice but to move to the suburbs, that the city would fill with impoverished migrants cannot be an unexpected result. Your position is exactly backwards, urban crime and poverty did not create the suburbs, the suburbs created urban crime and poverty.

The interstate highway system came from the same thinking and together they succeeded in dispersing the population to the suburbs. You can see this in the many ring highways that surround cities, their radius calculated on the blast area of a nuclear weapon landing on the city centre. Urban development of the time consisted almost entirely of ramming highways through dense urban neighbourhoods to facilitate the commute of workers from the suburbs. By the 1960s entire urban districts, mostly working class, were being levelled under the rubric of "urban renewal". Many cities never recovered from this decades long onslaught and many still bear the scars in incongruous neighbourhoods of low density low slung industrial buildings abutting their downtowns, previously dense vibrant working class neighbourhoods that were bulldozed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal.

By the 1970s a considerable popular movement had developed across much of the nation which brought the insane dismantling of many cities to a halt, stopping highways and the wholesale obliteration of purposely dis-invested neighbourhoods. For some, like Boston and New York it led to renewal but for others, like Detroit the damage was fatal.

The experiment has failed. Suburbia now holds more poor people than the cities. The new mantra in development is oriented towards high density building around public transit, which is proving highly successful in places as disparate as LA, Charlotte, NC and the suburbs of northern Virginia were expanding transit systems are spurring more lucrative and sustainable development as commute times from the ever far flung suburbs have become so expensive and time consuming that many people are seriously questioning the whole concept and are beginning to move to better alternatives.

 

Mass transit doesn't work in an area like Los Angeles where things are spread so far apart. You could own 2 cars, one at each end of the transit line, or the mass transit could carry the car instead of just the person (double decker freeway ferry).

Much of the problem in big cities is the cost of housing causes people to live far from their place of employment. For many businesses, high speed internet could link satellite offices with phone, video conferencing and networking.

 

Here is the actual "study"

http://immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/unauthorized-immigrants-pay-taxes-too
The breakdown

The study says there are 11.2 million illegals

Lets look at the math:

$107 in income tax each

$143 in property tax (as part of their rent) each

$750 a year in sales tax - at 7%, that requires each illegal spends $10.7K on items that require sales tax, $43K for a family of 4 (yet, the family is paying only $430 in income tax). In CA, rent and food don't have sales tax applied - you would need an income well over $100K to spend $43K on taxable items.

 

Los Angeles was originally laid out and built on streetcar lines, which stretched from Santa Monica to far beyond Pasadena, from Orange county to the valley. The many wide boulevards that stretch for miles are the original street car routes. The old town centres are still hubs of activity. The people there just voted to continue the 1% sales tax to fund rapid transit. There is a huge investment boom in building up areas around transit stations and routes in LA. Many businesses a planning to relocate to these hubs as a way to attract employees and customers and reduce their environmental impact. There is also a huge increase in lobbying by business interests to route new transit lines close to their businesses.

There is a paradigm shift underway, as the price of gas continues to rise the outer suburbs become increasingly less attractive while the massive investment along transit lines makes the long neglected outer urban and inner suburban areas even more attractive as widening new development creates new enclaves for the middle class by pricing the poor out of those areas. Cities invested in rapid transit are growing not only their cores but all along new transit lines while cities that have not are growing only beyond the city limits while experiencing continued decline within. Shopping mall owners, historically against having transit to their doors are now furiously lobbying for it.

Housing is relative to expectations and you can see the history of that when you drive from any city centre to its outer suburbs along surface streets. In older cities there is a gradual reduction in height as apartment buildings become lower and the streets behind them are filled with large homes. A little further out and the brick apartments are replaced by wooden three deckers along major streets while the neighbourhoods behind them are filled with modest homes on small lots. Travel further out and the lots become bigger and the homes larger all the way to the exurbs. Along the way you will pass though towns where the exact same scenario is repeated in miniature.

Take a different route from the city centre and you are likely to pass through close in neighbourhoods that look like they have been through or are in the midst of a war, full of empty lots, decrepit buildings and neglected housing. New transit stations in these areas are centres of frantic activity in the building of new high rise mixed use buildings, shopping centres, condominiums, apartments, and the establishment of new commercial centres.

Much of the problem today is that many people are making choices for the wrong reasons because their expectations are inherited from a previous generation, expectations which have become increasingly unrealistic in the present, much changed circumstance of economic prospects.

 

Just curious, you speak of America as if you are an American, yet only the English use the word petrol.
As for the rest, yes there will be future strains on the infrastucture, but immigration is not the reason, hence the OP is pure nonsense.

 

The greater Los Angles are is approximately 4850 square miles. What kind of mass transit system do you envision?

What if you took that 1% sales tax and used it to move companies close to their employees, and employees close to their companies? Much faster it implement, and it is a one time expense.

I'll take you word on the gentrification of the war zone cities - The last time I drove through Watts was 1971.

 

The companies are moving at their own expense. The 1% is to keep building the system.

In the 1930 greater Los Angeles had over 1,000 miles of trolley tracks, by 1960 it had zero. The freeways moved people faster than the trolleys but only for a few decades, and only for people who could afford cars. By the 1970s the freeways moved people slower than the trolleys used to and ate up over 500 square miles of productive land in the process.

My family has some long held property in Boyle Heights, a very close in neighbourhood that was long associated with gangsters, East LA, Eagle Street. The Metro came and the entire area is undergoing a metamorphosis. Property values are rising and there is a lot of commerce moving in. Ordinary people are out and about after dark and there is more police presence. The Metro stop is two blocks away and only five stops from Union Station. Chinese are now moving into this neighbourhood, which was heavily settled by Japanese Americans in the years after WW2, who were replaced by Chicanos as the Japanese moved away to the suburbs in the 1960s and 70s as the neighbourhood was diced up by five freeways and forgotten.

It is like a decades long siege coming to a close. It could easily return to its past of a really good place to live and raise a family right above downtown LA, and it will become that again now that the city has invested some effort in pushing the gangs out and connecting this cut up and neglected neighbourhood back into the city fabric. The fashion district, Little Tokyo and all of Downtown is five minutes away without going on a freeway, or you can take the Metro, which takes ten minutes.

 

All large cities have the same issues as LA...hundreds of square miles, industrial areas, bedroom communities, inadequate freeway/road systems.

And because of how our communities are designed or have evolved, seems like the facts point to Kaboom! Population growth continues. It's impossible to literally double the size of all roads and freeways. Fossil fuels will become more expensive with less supply and create nasty emissions. We have reached critical mass in terms of vehicle to road ratios. And, public transit will not solve all the problems but unless we find other options, public transit needs to be the primary focus.

Why don't we have two-way trains running down the center of all freeways, elevated above the vehicles? Why can't we have feeder lines from our neighborhoods, perhaps elevated monorail, connecting with the freeway trains? Beyond this there needs to be bus and taxi systems. And if we're going to move people without their personal cars, then we also need pedestrian and bicycle paths integral to the public transit system.

I live 4 miles from everything I need on a daily basis but the only option is to use a personal vehicle. Many times I wished we had a monorail system that made a large loop through the small city then around the rural areas, maybe service is 1/2 to 1 hour intervals. If I only used this service 1/2 of the time, what a huge benefit to the roads and emissions, etc.

BUT...and this is a big Oprah butt, but...we don't have the money or the will to consider such changes in our society...like I said above...Kaboom!!

 

A large and efficient public transit system.

You can't align employees to employers...impossible unless people work for one employer their entire lives. Plus people like to travel to things other than the workplace.

I also drove, accidentally, into Watts in 1971...

 

Sounds like an oxymoron to me

That is why it is easier to relocate employees. Reducing traffic by 10 to 20% can make a significant difference, done by relocating people with the biggest impact on traffic.

No accident, I was dropping a friend off in Compton

 

I suggest when we talk about how to solve our problems that we assume we can do an efficient job. It's not really possible to suggest solutions under the assumption that everything we do is half-assed...even if it is. The root problem IMO of designing such a transit system, other than the obvious of funding the endeavor, is most people refuse change and sacrifice and don't want any personal impacts. For example, the moment someone learns a monorail system will be near their property, they will take steps to block it...this is the me-me-me society we have today.

You can never match anyone to any location or desire to move around; what we can do is make it as efficient as possible for all transportation....

 

I live within a quarter mile of everything I need. I do not use my truck except to get me and my tools to work and back. I live in an old compact town with an active town centre, actually two centres about a five minute walk apart. In about half the town, the oldest part, the houses are all crammed together on narrow and crooked streets with tiny to non-existent yards, many houses do not even come with parking. The house next door, which has a tiny back yard and no parking just sold without even being advertised. The entire town, two miles wide and four miles long, contains a population of 23,000, almost entirely single family dwellings, with over half of it crammed into the two square miles built before zoning. The outer town was filled in from the 1950s-70s with the usual suburban development except that it included sidewalks, parks, playgrounds and elementary schools. There is no shortage of people wanting to live here because it is an extremely convenient place to live and raise a family. There is little need to drive, or drive your kids, they can walk to the schools, even in kindergarten since the six elementary schools are small and scattered.

I have lived in a few cities, big and small towns and rural areas from the bucolic to the wild frontier. I moved back here, to my hometown for family reasons but I stay because it has all the convenience of living in a big city without the hassles of city life and without all that driving that living outside a city required.

The biggest problem today that prevents this sort of quality living is zoning regulations. There have been many attempts to replicate this sort of organic medium density development, and many battles over zoning to allow it but even a 15 foot side yard setback can make it impossible, forcing high density developers to build rows of ugly townhouses with first floor garages facing the street instead of building single family houses separated by eight foot driveways. A thirty foot front yard setback and a sixty foot back yard setback creates grids of streets that are more than half a football field apart, not a human scale.

Much of the new development around transit is stymied by ignorant zoning. In many cases a tiny circle is drawn around the transit station to allow a few high rise mixed use and apartment buildings while zoning for the surrounding area maintains uber-suburuban 1/4 acre lots with 30 foot setbacks and no commercial use. There is also very little land set aside for parks, playgrounds, schools, or even any money for sidewalks. People will not walk to transit if there is no sidewalks.

Instead of drawing a line of demarcation around transit development there needs to be zoning that encourages a wide area of transition, single family zoning for small lots with sidewalks and close by schools and parks and playgrounds with corridors of commercial and retail space leading to the station from all directions. That is how the old cities were built and still function at a lower rate of resource use and consumption while providing a diverse range of living opportunities, from condominiums and apartments to single family homes for everyone from blue collar workers to zillionaires.

The big problem today is the long concerted propaganda political campaign that has convinced many people that taxes are theft and all government endeavours are, by nature, impossibly inefficient and wasteful so one party has taken an intransigent position that there is no point in supporting government endeavours that may improve the quality of your life because the taxes to pay for it will just be stolen and wasted by uncaring distant bureaucrats.

The reality is that when people are given the choice they choose to pay taxes to fund public endeavours that they perceive will improve the quality of life, even where many have no intention of ever availing themselves of it.

 

Articulate comments...thanks

I suppose one of the problems with public transit is too many people are not interested if they need to walk more than the distance from their TV to the refrigerator...and public transit can never solve this issue. If we consider places like Paris or Amsterdam, etc. in which public transit works great, part of it's success must be attributed to citizens who walk and ride bicycles. In the USA where most people have been spoiled with their personal cars since age 16, it's difficult for most of them to consider other forms of transportation. I've noticed it's even rare that car pools work because people make too many excuses why it won't work. So in the grand scheme of things, there will only be some percentage of people who will easily adopt a life of walking and public transit...but I'm guessing this number of people supports the goals of public transit.

One problem with private property, from an economic perspective, is most property owners want to maximize the potential of that property. For example, why place four single family homes on a city lot when they can build a 100 unit multi-story apartment or condo building? Why maintain open spaces like parks and yards, etc. unless forced by zoning? The City seems to go through the process of reviewing new development, regarding traffic, yet I don't know of a single development that was ever turned down, while many of them create horrific traffic issues for years to come. It's sort of a conflict of interest in which the City wants the development and subsequent tax revenue, while the property owner wants to maximize the property potential, and those who show up to speak about parks and open spaces are hissed out of the review meetings.

Sort of like how many cities locate next to rivers, it seems that the first issue should be to decide and locate the public transit systems, understanding how many users there can be, then create zoning to stay within some level of growth, then allow the development to proceed around the transit system. However, to achieve this in cities which have been around for 100-200 years, with high-density development, and very expensive property values, most people simply won't allow public transit development near their homes. And most governments don't have the balls to stand up to citizens to explain why public transit must be considered...

 

Cities cannot grow horizontally forever, or continue building highways to accommodate more and more cars. At some point further growth must come through increasing density and the only way to maintain mobility as cities become more densely occupied is through transit. The biggest problem with transit in the US is a widely held perception of people who do not live in cities that public transit is for poor people who cannot afford cars and more money for transit means less money for highways. This goes a long way towards fuelling rural legislators objections to funding transit projects and has resulted in a severe underfunding of US transit for over half a century.

In Europe the state takes on the debt of transit capital projects and subsidize some of their operations. In the US local transit authorities take on that debt and use operating income to pay it, which leaves them with massive deficits and shortfalls in funding that they must beg the legislatures every year to relieve. This has put transit systems in the US in a state of perpetual crises, deferring maintenance and cutting service to pay their debt load. Over the past decade every large transit system in the US has seen increased ridership, even those who have been forced to cut service.

The demand is there, the funding mechanism to meet it is completely broken by the whims of legislators. In Boston the legislature voted a few years ago to saddle the local transit authority with $400Million in debt to build a commuter rail line that carries less than 400 commuters a day but has refused to spend the same amount of money to fund an extension of a subway line to a centre that now carries 30,000 people a day to its current terminus on buses. It is quite insane since the MBTA has accumulated huge debts over the years from capital projects and the legislature, instead of working to permanently relieve that debt so the MBTA has just piled more on and made it even more impossible to maintain service or expand it to meet a demonstrated growing demand.

Many transit systems in the US would be profitable and able to self fund expansion if it wasn't for the massive debt they have accumulated through decades of underfunded legislative mandates. A simple solution would be for the states or Feds to take on this legacy debt and directly fund legislative mandates for capital projects, which would end the perpetual funding crises, reduce legislative meddling and allow the systems to operate without subsidies.

Further development in the outskirts of many cities has already gone beyond the crises point. The days of developers plopping down a few hundred houses without paying anything for the impact on everyone else are waning as neighbours organize resistance to more crowded schools, the lack of sidewalks, parks and other amenities, but mostly the traffic. Local officials are feeling the heat, decades of development without the road capacity to support it has created nightmarish suburban commutes where it takes an hour after you get off the freeway to get home because the local roads are so congested.

There are metropolitan areas that have moved to stop this. Portland established an urban limit decades ago, the Seattle area adopted a regional zoning plan to reduce development in the outer suburbs to combat increased congestion on the few major roads through them while adopting a long term plan to reduce congestion, increase density, and bring transit to already built up areas.

The perceptions of private property owners create a number of issues. For the suburban property owner faced with the prospect of a transit station coming near their home they see confusion and calamity. Their racist neighbours shout "The Negros will be moving in and our houses will be worth nothing, we need to oppose this with all our might.!" Others will proclaim that their homes will be taken over by eminent domain to allow the big developers to build their highrises and those left behind will be unable to sell their houses because they are in the shadow and the train will bring strangers and crime.

The property developer encourages this so he can get the land more cheaply.

This is how all the old cities and their inner suburbs were built out. A developer would buy up a bunch of land, lay out streets and lots, pave a few of them, and then build a wide street with a trolley line through it and sell lots, commercial and apartments along the main line and small residential lots on the side streets. Streetcar development is the defining character of many cities and their surrounding inner suburbs, which except for the absence of streetcars remain largely unchanged.

They are not unpopular places to live and people who live there now are seriously contemplating bringing the old trolleys back. Along the few trolley lines that have survived property values are generally higher than along the long abandoned lines even though they are otherwise indistinguishable. Portland is reviving its old streetcar lines due to popular demand despite Federal resistance to funding it as transit because the streetcars do not run down the streets at 35 miles an hour, which seems to be a requirement for Federal funding of transit projects and may explain why so many new transit projects are way more expensive light rail that does not run on the street but in separate dedicated rights of way.

 

Despite all the crimes in the inner cities, many of those areas are being gentrified (examples: Harlem in NYC, Bedford-Stuyvesant & Fort Greene in Brooklyn). Thus people are voluntarily re-entering the cities to escape the hassles of suburban living.

 

Compared to the 1960s and 70s almost all inner cities have improved. I remember in the late 1960s looking south from the top of the Prudential Building in Boston, what I saw, starting just two blocks away was a vast wasteland of abandoned, burnt out and boarded up brownstones, blocks and blocks and blocks of them, an entire district sparsely inhabited by junkies and squatters. The city started giving the buildings away to anyone who would live there and hardy pioneers began moving in in the 1970s. Now the South End is fashionable and exclusive and those free brownstones now sell for over $1Million without parking.

When I was living in Seattle there was a little neighbourhood that was singlehandedly rebuilt by one guy, who bought a building and fixed it up, then bought the one next door and the one next to that and a few across the street, all with his own money and money from family and friends because all the banks had refused to lend him, or anyone else any money to buy properties in that neighbourhood for decades. The people who did own houses in that neighbourhood were all old timers who bought their homes before the banks red lined the neighbourhood and became trapped there, unable to sell because no prospective buyer could get a mortgage. After about five years this one person had created a busy little corner that was full of small businesses and thriving with commerce. The banks suddenly took an interest and tried to move in but since he owned all the commercially zoned space they had to negotiate with him. As part of the lease agreement he required the two banks that moved in to lend all their local depositors money in the neighbouring 20 block area. The entire neighbourhood moved their deposits to the banks, property values shot up and the trapped homeowners suddenly could sell if they wanted to, or get a home improvement or a home equity loan.

Personally, I never saw the sense of what the banks were doing with their red lining, particularly in that neighbourhood in Seattle, which was a pretty nice place to begin with, abutting the country club and Arboretum on one side with a steep ridge setting it apart from the other "bad neighbourhoods" further south.

Red lining is what brought the cities to their knees. Refusing to lend inside cities while taking the city dwellers money to build suburbia has resulted in the direct destruction of $Trillions in invested wealth. One only need to look at Detroit to see the truth of that. If it was not for people who used their own resources, local politicians and public agitation for legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act that forced banks to lend in areas they took deposits, every city in the US would look like Detroit now, with its vast areas that had been heavily invested in for a century bulldozed clean. Instead many cities were left with entire abandoned neighbourhoods still standing by a quirk of history. Neighbourhoods that became the bones that made a lot of Urban revival possible.

The quirk was the Vietnam War, which became so expensive so quickly that Federal funds for "Urban Renewal" evaporated just as the stage was set for a complete modern makeover of US cities. The banks had done their job, forcing the middle class abandonment of the city for suburbia which created vast areas of abandoned property close in to city centres. All that was needed was an injection of money to bulldoze these areas, build highways through them, and rearrange the streets to transform them into urban versions of suburban commercial parks.

It is extremely fortunate for the US that the Vietnam War came about because without it there is a large possibility that few cities in the US would have retained their urban character.

 

As long as there is available land, cities will grow horizontally. When little additional land is available they begin vertical growth. But it is not viable or affordable to expect to double all of our existing roads and bridges in order to handle more vehicles. So we have some people who don't mind living inter-city in vertical housing while others don't mind the arduous 1+ hour commutes to live in the suburbs. I suspect in the near future the high cost and availability of gasoline will impact the daily long distance commuters but without public transit they will have few options.

Seems no matter who funds these projects, either the taxpayers must be okay with the expenditures or the users must be okay with user fees. I gotta wonder how much duplication and additional costs exist in which we have the city roads connected to the county roads...the county roads connected to the state roads...the state roads connected to the federal roads? Design, management, maintenance, funding, policing...duplicated efforts from each jurisdiction.

In CA the governor and Obama are pushing for a $100 billion bullet train between LA and SF, separate tracks, tunnels, highly secured areas...total political BS IMO. We don't hear how much it will cost to travel, but we can guess it's not cheap, which means average people won't use it, and others can fly faster and maybe cheaper...so who are the users? It's called a bullet train yet in the short distance between the two cities it makes at least 10 stops...I thought a bullet train would go from Point A to Point M and not service B...L?

Cost...a huge obstacle to expand our infrastructure! In my area we have I101 that heads south to the Golden Gate bridge, then after the bridge it's all surface streets for a few miles, then we can pick up the freeway again. The bridge is a bottleneck both directions. I'm guessing there's not enough money in all of CA to build an adjacent bridge and another one for trains? So in cases like this one, the costs to build are so astronomical it is not feasible. A simple bridge today might cost $250-$500 million. It would be interesting to know our average cost per mile to build roads in the USA?

Cities need to grow so suburban development must continue. People can protest traffic and other issues, and can get some compromises, but eventually the land will be developed. And how much it costs to develop that land will determine what types of people can live in that area.

Expanding infrastructure into already developed areas is painful. A wider freeway, or new road, or train tracks, or public transit systems, all need land and the only way to acquire this land is to take it from current land owners...and I can understand why some are ready to kill government officials and developers. This entire issue is extremely complex and costly which I suppose are the primary reasons why our road system and the concept of efficient public transit is about 30 years behind today's critical needs...

 

If you go to Atlanta or Dallas you can see the limits of horizontal growth for yourself. The inner ring highways built to get around city congestion and ease travel are now packed solid all day long with traffic. The outer ring highways built to get around that are rapidly getting the same way as more and more development feeds more and more commuters who must travel further and further to their ever more distant jobs. The problem facing these cities is that continued horizontal growth will just make traffic worse, building more highways is impossible, and population and workplaces are so dispersed now that any transit system that could possibly reduce traffic on the ring roads would be ridiculously expensive and likely to attract few riders.

Crazily enough Atlanta has a pretty good transit system but few white people will use it. MARTA means Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta to most people in Atlanta, a particularly twisted racist view of transit that is common in the south, and a big reason why so many southern cities have no transit.

I gotta wonder why you left the developers out of your equation. They are the ones who build the homes that create all the congestion, why should they get to walk away with all their profits and leave the mess for everyone else to pay for?

California is probably the least likely place for high speed trains, which would operate best in the Northeast and Midwest, where cities are within 200 miles of each other, a sweet spot where high speed rail can compete on price, and out compete air travel on convenience.

I have driven that way many times, both before and after the earthquake and the removal of the elevated 101 from the waterfront. I believe that stretch of surface streets is the only thing that prevented Marin from becoming another Richmond or Vallejo. If you live in Marin you should thank your God every day for those streets.

What is that new Oakland Bay Bridge costing?
Where I live now we will be paying off the Big Dig for a generation. Personally, I think it is worth the $14Billion. Boston is far more beautiful and it is a lot easier to get into and through the city and will be for a hundred years. Tearing down the 101 in San Francisco did the same for that city but did not replace it with a tunnel because the 101 did not carry a third of the cities commuters because it petered out into city streets that made most commuters decide to not live in Marin.

No, the limits of suburban development have been reached. If populations and economic growth is to continue it has to be through increasing density within the already built areas. The costs of employee time spent on roads crowded with commuters is a serious impediment to efficiency and profitability of many businesses.

Northern Virginia is building out entire new town centres of high density commercial retail and residential properties along expanding Metro lines. They are bringing huge new economic growth to established suburbs. They are extremely popular with commercial retail and most of all residential customers who are buying them up before they are built. The biggest attraction is that they can walk to everything they need and the Metro station is right there.

The thing about modern suburbia is that thanks to zoning there is a plethora of large spaces where no one lives, commercial, industrial and warehouse areas close to highways and along railroad rights of way. What they are doing in northern Virginia is planning the Metro expansion along these rights of way, plopping the stations in places where no one lives and changing the zoning for high density mixed use with requirements for things like street facing retail, wide sidewalks and lots of public amenities. Development is in a frenzy. One economic study suggests that the increased tax revenues will pay back the cost of Metro expansion and other government infrastructure investments within ten years, others put it at five.

Meanwhile a few developers are seriously considering how they can pay for Metro expansion to their own proposed developments. If this takes off suburban transit will have come full circle and developers will once again be the ones who fund the build out of the transit system. After all, it is still in their best interest.

 

I'd say McKinney is a good example of horizontal growth in Dallas...they are two separate cities but McKinney is a bedroom community and as long as population increases and cost of living is too high in the inner-city areas, and for those who don't wish to live in high-rises, I can't see how you can stop horizontal growth? I personally don't care if people live 30-50 miles out as long as they are not required to commute in personal vehicles. If I could wave my magic wand, I would actually focus on horizontal growth, creating a few million more farmers, developing rural America, bringing water and energy all across the nation.

If you wish to blame developers for anything then you must also give equal blame to the consumers. If people did not buy and rent and shop then development would not happen. Developers are only satisfying a perceived demand.

My whole life is in the North Bay, Marin and Sonoma counties, and it just keeps expanding no matter the traffic limitations.

I don't know the cost of the Oakland Bay Bridge expansion but it's taking twice the time, several material and workmanship issues, maybe costing $6-$10 billion. Makes no difference what they do with the bridge since the roads exiting from the bridge remain the same.

Even if high density housing was proliferated in the inner-city areas, the cost of this housing is too expensive for average working people...of which about 50% of our 145 million workers earn less than $55K. Developers will not buy land and build high-density housing unless they can earn a profit which means they know up front they can sell out the project...which again means a higher cost of living. IMO for about 70 million of US workers, they will be economically required to find affordable housing which almost never exists in the inner-city areas.

 

Horizontal growth pushes farmers further and further out by pricing them off their land, especially those who grow for the local market. If you want more farmers horizontal development is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

No, they are manipulating consumers towards what profits them the most.

What are they building out there?
I have my doubts that it is affordable housing.

Inner cities are the only place where there is affordable housing. Houses in Oakland are far cheaper than anywhere else in the bay area.

 

It doesn't always push farmers out because there is limited agricultural land in which there is the right mix of soil, water and weather...once we develop or abuse these finite agricultural lands, the farms and produce simply disappear.

Whatever happened to the novel concept of farming and residential mixed use? Why must it be one or the other? As long as land is used for agricultural purposes the property taxes remain very low.

I want more farming in the USA...like 100% more farming, but I want this achieved by distributing potable water all across the USA.

You've got it backwards about consumers? Without consumers there is no development, no business, no economy. A developer is not going to develop 100 acres of property without upfront believing there is demand for the products and services of that development. If a developer and bank could possibly afford to develop a property solely on the merits of 'if we build it they will come', if the development turns out to be a success this is totally attributed to consumers.

There is great demand in Marin and Sonoma counties...from affordable housing to mansions to business development. George Lucas who owns lots of property is trying to develop affordable housing. My little town won't allow further development without affordable housing in the mix.

It would be rare that on average housing in the inner city will be cheaper than bedroom communities...