#i know north of Tacoma there's a large pacific islander community that my friends gf is part of

[grenade-maid]

I've been interested in gentrification and urban planning and economics for a long time, after living in Seattle and seeing how these things impact daily living. The progression of events is often understood as such:

In the beginning of the 20th century American cities had a diverse population, with cities hosting both white people and people of color, with a lot of segregation between neighborhoods.

Post WWII due to a large number of factors suburban development boomed, white people fled cities in droves, city tax revenue suffered, jobs disappeared, upkeep suffered, life in cities got worse, life in suburbs got better, segregation between these two was still high.

Due to a number of factors including rural and suburban jobs disappearing, college education becoming more common, rising tech industry jobs in cities, changing values, etc, younger generations of people who grew up in suburbs wanted to move into cities. Cities got an influx of white residents, cost of living increases to the point that many people of color who had lived there before are priced out and move to the suburbs.

This is typically where the story ends because it's where we currently stand, with a variety of interpretations about how this should be understood and what should be done about it. One thing I see often, though, is a sense that hey, gentrification sucks of course, but at least the suburbs have gotten more diverse and the services in both cities and suburbs have improved so it kind of sort of works out, right?

Well, I've been reading some stuff recently that makes it seem like we're hurtling towards a repeat of what happened with urban decay in the 20th century, except potentially even worse.

See, American suburbs are wildly hilariously inefficient, economically speaking. Having such a low density of housing in residential areas and low density of businesses in economic areas means that the suburbs bring in a pretty small revenue per mile. With long winding roads through neighborhoods and massive multi lane thoroughfares and highways punctuated by enormous parking lots, all connected by sprawling power and water lines, the latter of which also require tons of pumps and treatment plants, all of this area also requiring disproportionately expensive trash, fire, and police services to cover it all, means the maintenance cost of suburbs is ENORMOUS compared to the revenue they actually bring in. Many suburbs have survived up until now basically as a Ponzi scheme, where the city gets a lot of money from the government and from developers to build infrastructure which brings in money for a while, but once that infrastructure wears out and needs to be fixed or replaced there's nowhere near enough money to do so. So suburbs have just kept sprawling out and out to keep the money coming in, but it's just kicking the can down the road.

As well, the things that have been getting built--big box stores, huge parking lots, multi lane roads, are very difficult to repurpose into something more economically productive. Those winding suburban neighborhoods, too, are very hard to adapt because doing so would require building denser housing which will be lobbied against by homeowners, allowing multi use zoning in neighborhoods, which will be lobbied against, and making those roads more accessible by bus, bike, and on foot, which would likely require bulldozing some of those houses which will be lobbied against.

In our current climate this is often chalked up to purely a matter of cutting funding to unnecessary things like schools and libraries and street lights or raising taxes to account for the difference, but often times the upkeep costs are so large that doing these things will barely put a dent in them. It comes down to a fundamentally flawed model of city planning and funding. As cities become unable to pay for these things, increasingly the burden of debt is put on individual residents.

What all of this together means is that as people of color have been priced out of the cities and pushed into suburbs, those suburbs are reaching a straining point where pretty soon the roads and sewers and power lines and schools and so on that look fine now are going to expire. And with little revenue to fix them, the quality of life is going to tank. Which puts us right back to where we were in the post WWII boom except with the locations reversed: well off white people in the cities with nice services and jobs, people of color stuck in decaying suburbs with increasingly poor services and jobs prospects. Which is bad enough on its own, but cities are far more modular than suburbs in terms of development. With money flowing back into cities it's been pretty straightforward making them turn a high revenue. It is much harder to pull the same trick with suburbs.