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03/03/12(Sat)23:50 No.1941730>>1941553
This is another one of our weird paradoxes, but it's not unique to us.
Cities
in other parts of the world, especially South Asia, revolve around
their facilities and services. China and South Korea are great examples,
they're both urbanizing fast because not only are economic
opportunities concentrated in the cities, the cost of living there for a
given lifestyle is lower. Transportation is cheaper, goods are
frequently cheaper, you don't need to own land to have a home, and so
on.
In America, our biggest cities are expelling the poor and
gentrifying fast. Opportunities are closed except to the established and
well connected. Instead of growing from the bottom up, our cities grow
from the top down, and basically on an invite-only basis. The poor can't
afford the urban lifestyle here, so they flee into the suburbs, which
were previously the more expensive option. The suburbs aren't the home
of the middle class anymore; they're the home of the lower class,
because they don't have anywhere else to go now.
Now, commuting
isn't cheap, and neither is taking care of all those extra miles of
roads, pipes, and power lines that suburbs have. The cost of living in a
city should, at least in theory, be lower - and it used to be this way
in practice until land values skyrocketed. What happened? |
