Do Cities Subsidize Rural Lifestyles?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- Do rural and exurban areas feed at the trough of all the wealth and innovation cities create? Turns out the answer isn't so simple.
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Not gonna lie, this video kinda sucks. It doesn't attempt to answer the question in the title or thumbnail at all, doesn't dig into what the number it's looking at actually represents at all, conflates rural and suburban areas even though they are two totally different things (which I know you understand well because you just recently made a video on exactly that topic), and the dig at 4:00 straight-up implying that people who stay in small towns are inferior human beings compared to people who move to bigger cities is ridiculously petty and uncalled for. Normally your videos are interesting, but this one is a total miss.
It would be great to see this sort of analysis but separating finance out. Finance is really a lower order benefit to the economy (think lubricant instead of fuel) but has come to dominate so much numbers wise. Frankly, there's a lot of "economic activity" which isn't so much real
ALIENS ferme lab
Gdp per capita is a crap metric. Income, property and sales tax are what generates tax income to states. That's why baltimore in your example you highlighted as having a high gdp per capita never has enough money and needs revenue generated from the suburban counties to bail it out periodically.
@@wsollers1 The city is bailed out continuously by receiving more than 15% of state aid while having less than 10% of the state's population: dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/StateAid/Overview-of-State-Aid-to-Local-Governments-Fiscal-2025-Allowance.pdf However, I'm not sure that is a bad deal for the state. Much of the city's economic activity can't be taxed by the city because it is in the form of wages earned by county residents or sales taxes that go directly to the state's general fund. Efforts to punish the city for being unable to tax a large part of its economic activity might harm the state's economy as a whole more than it costs other Marylander in above average state aid ($675 million.) Nine counties also receive above average per capita state aid.
So, basically, the really rural counties that do resource extraction are profitable, the really dense counties that make things and have tech hubs are profitable, and all of the sort of rural counties that expect easy lives but don't want the density and economies of scale of a city are drains on the economy? who would have guessed.
Profitable for who? Only the owners and corporations I see
Unless you have between .5 and 5 acres of arable land for every member of your household, those "drains on the economy" are what provide the food you eat and the cotton you wear. If you think you can live without them, you'd better stop typing and start plowing. Good luck!
Just out of curiosity, is the plan to eat oil?
The reality is, the urban areas are a gain, the rural areas are a gain, the suburbs are a drain.
The oil areas would be a drain too if negative externalities were priced in
@@colormedubious4747you guys will say this but the only ones working on most of the farms are undocumented people (which you hate) and the average American born person is addicted to opioids, an unhealthy weight and depends on welfare.
@@colormedubious4747 This isn't about farmers, of course we all need them, but far flung suburbs.
so, for my money: suburbs are almost always being subsidized by cities, but the same is not true for actual rural areas. notably, suburban areas are doing the same things cities are, but less efficiently, while actual (not just self-identified) rural areas tend to have different economic drivers that are much harder to replicate in cities
No, you're wrong. If cities were all that efficient, why is NYC all that indebted, why is there such comical amounts of garbage on the streets, why is MTA a clustrf and why are taxes there still horrendous?
@ireminmon almost all governments are in debt, litter doesn't really correlate with economic efficiency, chronic underfunding, and taxes are critical to having a society. you are actually looking for the answers, yeah?
@@robynkolozsvari So you're just making stuff up as you go now? Why wouldn't NYC solve the garbage issue if garbage collection is so much more efficient in NYC compared to Martha's Vineyard? What does "efficiency" even mean to you? Normal people have to live like rabbits stacked on top of each other so you people can have comfortable office jobs in publicly financed NGOs? Is that your idea of efficiency?
@@ireminmon “you people”? lol you make a lot of assumptions about a random TH-cam commenter
@@ireminmonthere's a million different statistics showing cities are economic drivers that subsidize suburbs, but I guess that doesn't matter since you saw garbage on the street, which must mean that they can't have a good economy since that doesn't fit your feelings. Never mind the fact that a dense place with millions of people is going to have some that aren't respectful of their surroundings. Do you expect them to employ someone to constantly walk back and forth on every street picking up garbage? At some point you have to balance feasibility with what's actually reasonable.
Plus if you've ever gone in a ditch or park in a suburban area you'd know there's also a ton of trash there too, it's just not as visible
Funny enough, "Far too much local color" is a common platform that the top officials run on in those 10 counties
nudgenudgewinkwink,knowwhatimean
Funny enough, the US is a horrible place.
holy crap
Most if not all of those counties are either majority Hispanic or very nearly so.
Sure thing Sean
Having been interested in calculations such as this for four decades I can immediately point out a potential flaw.
GDP is calculated using a workplace basis, where the work is done (or where the company is headquartered for SME's) whereas Population is based on where people live.
This even affects international comparisons, lots of people commute into Luxembourg and contribute to it's GDP whilst not actually living there.
For smaller geographical units where commuting is significant using income statistics rather than production statistics would be more accurate.
GDP is also a function of government spending, the more money you have to spend on a location means it makes a higher impact on the GDP. Guess where most of that government spending is? Yup.
@Triaxx2
Yes that's true. Checking the amount spent per person would be a good way of checking who gets the most benefit.
This can also be presented in different ways.
I have looked at my own country (UK) in this way and saw that government spending was slightly higher per person in the richer south of the country and the share of income paid in taxes is slightly lower than in the north (the dividing line between them is from the Bristol Channel to The Wash).
This looks massively unfair until you know that the average incomes in the South are 50% higher than in the North which changes the perspective a bit.
@@jonchedgy6654 Which does lead to the interesting question, is the standard of living 50% better in the south? Or are they paying that extra in cost of living and utilities?
@Triaxx2
No actual studies have been made (The US has actually compiled inter-state purchasing power parities) but my gut feeling is that whilst it is richer than the north it's probably closer to 1/3rd above it rather than 1/2
The disconnect between where people sleep and where they generate economic activity (at work or by spending) and the inadequacy of single-occupancy vehicles in facilitating movement between those places, is the core problem that urbanism seeks to solve. For high-population areas with a diverse economy, I think it adequately backs up the assertion of suburbanites as welfare queens. I wanted to see if this held true in Colorado, which wasn't mentioned in the video, and the top three counties mirror three other examples from the video:
1. Cheyenne County, pop. 1,727, $189,207/capita. Rural Resource Extraction--one of only 14 Helium plants in the world. Per capita income $17,850, 11% poverty rate.
2. Pitkin County, pop. 16,640, $169,677/capita. Rural Tourism--Aspen. Per capita income $40,811, 6% poverty rate.
3. City and County of Denver, pop. 716,577, $138,095.capita. Urban Core. Per capita income $24,101, 19% poverty rate.
Also interesting that they are, respectively, deep red, purple, and deep blue counties.
One of the interesting things about St. Louis is that, because it seceded prior to the advent of the car, St. Louis County actually has a fair amount of very urban neighborhoods and cities. You actually get quite a lot of older urban areas outside the city, especially west in the central corridor where most of the higher density development occurred
The city itself hollowed out it's density by creating tons of stroads. It has great bones though
LOL for St. Louis b-roll I was actually going to use the Delmar Loop and then thought, wait...isn't that in University City??
@@ViciousTurduckenagreed. St. Louis is definitely a “neighborhood level” city. We still have plenty of dense neighborhoods with good walkability (Soulard and Benton Park come to mind), it’s just the areas in between that have been hollowed out (and downtown, but even that is re-densifying in some regards)
@@CityNerd Delmar Loop is both STL and Ucity. :)
@@CityNerdBonus points if you're familiar with the "Delmar Divide"
This is basically just a ratio of "things that create revenue" over "people who sleep there overnight". The first category is jobs or resource production like cattle, an oil rig, a mine, or a solar panel.
Nailed it.
And it's completely ignoring people's satisfaction of life.
I grew up in California Suburbia, didn't like it, but it could be tolerable.
Being an adult now, I find downtown st louis a complete urban hellescape, and the "affluent suburbs" I still find overwhelming and wasteful.
I like my cows, and will move more rural if I have to.
@@A_barrel Satisfaction doesn’t relate to subsidization at all. If I get a ton of satisfaction living in suburban lifestyle that more people can’t live in because I’ve supported zoning restrictions and I rely on others to still subsidize my infrastructure and transportation, I might be perfectly satisfied with that relationship. But I’d still be subsidized by others.
The biggest lie people living in suburbs tell themselves is that they aren’t subsidized and that they “earned” their lifestyle. If the lifestyle was truly earned, they wouldn’t be afraid of more people earning said lifestyle. They wouldn’t be afraid of having to pay the true cost of their lifestyle. It really just shows that even those who are subsidized don’t want to admit it.
Also cattle farming is massively subsidized as is lmao
yeah those New York figures made that obvious and Ray should probably have stopped there and thought "should I really make this video"
As someone who grew up in the St. Louis area and has spent the largest portion of her life in the area of Maryland in and around Baltimore, I love that you picked out the ways Baltimore and St. Louis are similar. Their similar histories and demographics have led to similar outcomes and I think there's a reason I really like them both despite both getting a bad rap.
Jackson, WY has very extreme wealth inequality. The school district there is a mix of the kids of the über wealthy and the kids of the public sector employees who have to get subsidized housing to live there. The rich parents there are regularly flummoxed that taking their kid on a month and a half long trip might hurt their grade.
Jackson Hole is no doubt the most extreme, but neighboring states also have similar wealth inequality in mountain resort towns. In Idaho, we had several like McCall in central part of the state where the local hospital had to buy one of the few apartment buildings in town to guarantee housing for new staff (who kept rejected job offers because no housing was available). In the winter, local workers just slept in their RVs in a random campground for $1000/mo. It's not like there isn't suburban housing, but it's like 70% of the housing is just second homes by outsiders or airbnbs.
Props for the correct spelling of über.
Why live in an expensive skitown if you are broke though?
@@ZackScrivenbecause some people are from this part of the country and would prefer not to leave. I like cities, but plenty of people don’t. People from Wyoming or the surrounding region usually want to stay close to family as they live their lives. Sometimes, the best job you can find in the region is a sorta high paying job in a very expensive ski town. Everyone’s lives are different.
They should be in private schools or homeschooling, American public schools are ridiculous.
The reason why the Triangle in NC is so dynamic is because its 3 core counties are all large research university counties, plus one of them also houses the state government.
Oak Brook Center IS where everyone in the western Chicago suburbs go. I'd recommend jumping on the BNSF and heading to Brookfield to spend an afternoon at Galloping Ghost Arcade, and then jump back on the train and spend the rest of your time in Chicago proper.
Had to Google that arcade, holy crap. The game list is insane
OAK BROOK CENTER MENTIONED 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
@CityNerd I second galloping ghost. currently live in one of the suburbs in dupage county. let me know what you're looking to do.
Local who grew up in DuPage County: It's worth checking out downtown Naperville. Walkable, wonderful riverwalk, good variety of restaurants and bars, can catch different types of shows at the local theaters, Naper Settlement is worth at least 1 visit, a direct connection to the Metra to downtown Chicago (but I'm guessing the transit is otherwise abysmal).
Teton county is likely getting a lot of the tourism dollars from Yellowstone. With such a low population and such a high level destination, there are likely 10X people coming in for tourism every year than people living there.
It truly is sad over there at season end. We visited by season end and it looks like a deserted town 😢
Trust me, people in Wyoming aren’t sad when tourists leave. (And Teton County isn’t really Wyoming anyway, it’s a weird bubble world).
People might think the rest of the state is “so desolate.”
And we’d respond - yeah, that’s the point.
I read the comments section before I watched the video, and I noticed that a lot of people were complaining about methodology and conclusions. Being who I am, I was totally prepared to write these complaints off as "whiners" and be done with it. However...
After watching the video, I actually agree with the whiners here.
I think this topic is very important to the conversation about urbanism as a whole. Here in the US at least, I feel like most conversations about city planning and tax funded transportation spending are not being had in good faith. There's way more "truthiness" and politics involved without actual data driven decision making than there really should be, considering how much of our shared resources are devoted to addressing these issues. Having a more definitive, yet easier to digest, set of data would be very useful to the conversation.
Unfortunately, this video didn't actually answer the question it asked. A discussion of GDP per capita as the sole metric is not a discussion of whether and to what extent urban areas subsidize suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. I would argue that the name of the video should change to reflect this.
The video was still interesting though.
Happy New Year, CityNerd and community! I'm excited to attend the event in NYC!
Agree. I don't know how to actually measure value, but at least fot things consumed locally it would be better to measure them in some sort of national average value. I.E. if someone spends $10 on a latte in Manhattan or spends $3 on a latte in a rural area, both cases should count as $5 or whatever the average is. This would make it much harder to collect data, but on the other hand the data would actually be useful.
I feel like GDP per capita is kind of a cargo cult exercise in that you correctly count something with correct input data, but the result is relatively useless.
This also ties in to the "can't afford to live in the 15 minute city they work in" narrative. While I dislike that narrative in general as it's mostly used by anti-urbanists, it's actually a good indicator that the GDP value of a product don't match it's actual "use value".
GDP per Capita is OK on a large scale like a whole country. If you want, there is even purchasing power parity versions of GDP per capita. But things are different on a small scale and this list shows it. Commuters seriously affect GDP per capita and resource extraction gives large numbers but rarely does not benefit residents of the small area of extraction but someone else.
Also to consider: there are aspects of "production" and "what is useful to the population" which aren't counted in GDP because they don't produce money or anything useful to a capitalist, but instead some other product or service which is useful to the people who live there. It's not all about money!
@@ikelom Like all those stay at house wives in the suburbs doing child rearing, household budgeting, meal planning, etc.
Agreed. Apart from GDP per capita as a blunt tool (which a lot of people are pointing out), another issue is that by just presenting the top counties means that we are only looking at the most extreme outliers in the data. This tells us nothing about the average city, average suburb and average rural county which is the relevant bit. There will always be statistical outliers in both directions, which is exactly what this video shows
If you ever wonder why a town around you has much lower property taxes, look at the infrastructure in said town. Infrastructure goes well beyond roads/sidewalks, and bridges. They almost always have no water/sewer, gas, and maybe not even fiber. You need to provide your own well/septic, oil if you want it, and probably a satellite for internet.
Fiber internet coverage is actually much more available in rural areas. Utility Co-Ops have stepped up and invested in the infrastructure when corporations didn't. Take a look at the FCC broadband map and you'll see that there's a noticeable gap in coverage around many cities.
@mattgoeckel3337
Psshh, don't talk about coops, the city folks are going to convince themselves we are commies, despite coops having nothing to do with communism
@@mattgoeckel3337 Yeah, the FCC grants over the past decade have done wonders for upgrading the internet highway in rural towns.
And then what happens when the federal government creates a fund for rural internet? Kinda makes it easier to have near identical services with less taxes when the federal government pays for some of the services.
This is often true with transportation as well. Look at how much a city receives in federal funding for transportation vs rural areas (per capita obviously).
I'm in a "true" rural area, think livestock & mixed ag, and the only bit of "civilization" is electricity, city water & cell towers. We're responsible for everything else. Living at the junction of 2 counties, means neither one wants to be the first to salt border roads and you can forget about fiber internet.
Yoooooo Downers Grove mentioned!!! We’re actually pretty cool here the downtown has slowly been getting a lot more urbanized over the years with a lot more dense housing, road narrowing and a new bike path every couple months or so. They’re definitely not great bike paths globally speaking but by American standards it’s definitely heading in the right direction!
Big mistake here that people don’t necessarily produce gdp per capita where they live. Someone that commutes to the city to work will add to the city’s gdp, but not to its population. High gdp per capita for the city, even though that person will live and spend their income in the suburbs. It’s more interesting to look at median or average income by county.
Another way to see it is: if you have a town where people sleep eat and live, and a second one where there is just the factory, you might conclude that the empty factory town town has an insane production while the living town is super broke. You have to consider them as a whole otherwise it doesn’t make sense. If you want to use gdp per capita you need to make sure that you set the boundaries at the extended metro area level
Good stuff, but it depends on what you are trying to measure. Here he is definitely trying to look at where the value is explicitly being generated, so GDP makes sense. The real question is what is the correct denominator? Dividing by population will remove a lot of basic ‘cost of living’ related economic activity but it will ignore the same activity for working people. Dividing by total area will give too much credit to dense regions. Maybe the best method would be to average these two scores.
I think this is census data, which is reflecting population in the sense that people are counted where they live rather than where they work. But the business profit is probably still in the work location.
Yes. A place of business without laborers produces nothing (unless we're talking about an automated facility). You can't count the value of the production of goods without somehow including the value of the laborer. The production of the good may be affixed to an area, but the laborer is not affixed to an area. Some laborers will labor at more than one locale.
The people who watch this video aren't looking for an honest debate, they're looking for a reason to get mad at people living differently than them.
Any reason to get mad at people living in the suburbs will do
@@SnobbyRobotMultimedia I keep thinking income is going to be the best proxy if you want to be hyper local. Especially in a country with strong zoning like the us, where work and residential neighborhoods are very often separated. Measuring GDP for counties makes sense, but GDP per capita is a bit more hazardous because of these issues. It might give insights but they will be a lot more nuanced than “CBD very productive, suburbs not, if suburbs were CBD too then we’d be super rich”. That would be misunderstanding the artificially low denominator of the CBD and the reason for the high productivity compared to residential neighborhoods
I never would have thought that densely populated urban areas would have a higher GDP, and be able to provide goods and services more efficiently due to a more condensed service area. This is some groundbreaking stuff.
When I look at the NYC areas, the wealth may be produced in Manhattan but the people who work in Manhattan live in the other boroughs, NJ, southern upstate NY and Connecticut. In a real sense the people working in Manhattan are subsidizing themselves.
Those jobs wouldn't exist without manhattan
In Japan there are similar things happening in prefectures like Saitama, Chiba, Nara, and Shiga, smaller more regional cities where people commute to the big metropolis.
@@yungrichnbroke5199 Those jobs wouldn't exist without the laborers either, who don't live there. Most people don't live where they work.
@@linuxman7777 That is one reason why suburbs are popular in the USA. People don't live where they work. They travel to their workplaces from much further away. If you have a couple (husband and wife) who both work in cities in different locations, then the best thing to do is to live somewhere in the middle.
@@laurie7689 When I hear people say the cities are subsidizing the suburbs, they miss the points that places like Manhattan have been difficult places to raise children for generations. So, people move to the outer boroughs or surrounding bedroom communities.
I feel like this is the wrong question. Cities may not "subsidize" rural areas per se, but while most of us don't live in rural communities, we do pay taxes which allow them to exist. For example, in my area we have a non-profit called BiCap which provides weatherization for (low income) people on MN state energy assistance. BiCap is funded by a federal grant which is renewed every year. Without that federal subsidy, many of us would not be able to continue living at such low densities where we have to plow our own driveways and drive down county roads into town for work and groceries.
Knowing the data I knew the results would be screwy! We cannot make any generalizations with this. We are all interconnected. I’m a progressive. Let’s move away from the left-right or the urban-rural division. GDP at a granular level is pretty meaningless
Based.
Dang dude, as a Virginian, I didn't expect to catch strays but here I am
Yeah, i was looking forward to seeing where Fairfax or VAB ended up in the list.
seriously, why it be like that w/VA?
@@colinstu Because it isn't a state, it is a commonwealth!
@@colinstubasically Virginia has a lot of independent cities that aren’t part of any county, making the “county-level” statistics confusing for them
Also ironic that he gave up on VA but mentioned Baltimore, which is the largest independent city in the nation.
I've seen an alternative approach to the question of are the suburbs subsidized. In that calculation they took the tax revenue generated from the suburbs and compared it with the cost to make and maintain basic infrastructure. In most cases, the tax revenue generated from the urban core compared to the cost for maintaining roads, electricity, water and sewage is much higher than in the suburbs/ rural areas.
Water and sewage systems are urban places phenomena
Wells and septic tanks is where it's at.
Yeah, I'm a little confused by this video and have to watch again. A top ten list of GDP per capita has little to do with the question he's asking in the title.
I think the problem is that he's attempting to de-politicize the question by using objective data, but did not anticipate the politics of "what constitutes 'GDP'?"
@@MarcillaSmith I'm generally a fan of this guy's channel, but this really shows just how superficial his analyses tend to be. That doesn't really matter when it's applied to unserious questions like "what's the best college town for riding a bike", but it's wildly irresponsible to then apply such superficiality to the question of "Do Cities Subsidize Rural Lifestyles?" and leverage the viewership you earned through fluff pieces to disseminate consequential misinformation.
@@nodnarb125what can you expect this creator is a woke liberal. He always presents whatever his democrat corporatist media tells him and presents his biases. He's not an objective person.He ended the video by making fun of a town that had a corrupt politician as if that politician represents the common sense values that people talk about.
I’m gonna assume the common denominator for all those Texas counties is oil - I’m basing this entirely on Reeves County and Loving County. That’s one massive oil field and I live about 2-3 hours from that region.
Loving county has hardly any permanent population but from Pecos, TX up to Orla, TX and Mentone, TX is oil well after oil well after oil well, sprinkle in a windmill here and there and yeah, it all makes sense.
I live in Arbutus Maryland, next to UMBC, and I frequently take walks around that college, and the area actually has a lot of hills that provide some amazing views, especially in the colder months.
Unfortunately, finding a conveniently located job is incredibly difficult for someone like me who doesn’t have a driver’s license, since the only transit we get here are the buses that take you through sketchy neighborhoods.
"sketchy neighborhoods" 😒
@@Mike_1nce_More Well, yes. Baltimore has a high crime rate, and many of its neighborhoods are riddled with crime, drugs, and houses in poor condition. And many of the busses pass through those neighborhoods. Even the light rail line has stops in neighborhoods like Cherry Hill.
@@DanielP-jq4dj you're from Arbutus. You continuing to spread the "big city with Black people in it is automatically bad" false narrative is predictable and very telling.
Is this bob ehrlich's burner account?
@@Mike_1nce_More No I'm not. It doesn't matter if a city is mostly white or black, Baltimore is still a city with high crime and poverty. You really have to look at things objectively, and forget about race. All in all, it's nothing more than a coincidence.
I feel like the year is off to a good start when I open TH-cam and the top of my feed is this video, 2 minutes old. Hope you're having a great one.
I grew up in Dupage County and live in Chicago now. On a nice summer day, one of my favorite things to do is ride my bike on the Prairie Path trail. Take your bike on the Metra Train to Villa Park and ride west to Aurora (29 miles). You'll go through a ton of downtowns along the way. Once in Aurora, I like Two Brother's brewing which is attached to the train station (Metra service to Chicago). You could also go north on the Fox river Trail which will connect to Batavia (Sturdy Shelter Brewing), Geneva (Burger Local & train to Chicago), St Charles (Alter Brewing) and Elgin (train to Chicago). Also Fermi lab has a nice bike path that goes through it (Real ID required for entry and building are only open on weekdays). You can get to Fermi lab from the Prairie Path Trail by taking the bike path on Batavia Road from the East. After exiting Fermi Lab from the West, you can take the bike path on Kirk road to get back to the Prairie Path and Fox River Trail.
The outer boroughs of NYC aren’t being treated sensibly by this measure. Manhattan couldn’t be the economic engine it is without the workers who live in the outer boroughs. Much more sensible to look at the commuter-shed for various cities and adjust for things like infrastructure efficiency separately. But maybe the data just isn’t powerful for that kind of fine-grained analysis.
This is the same argument as "cities couldn't be cities without the workers who live in the suburbs." I'm not saying it's a terrible argument, but it leads to lots of strange places
@@CityNerd More that it is the natural order of things, and has been for 100 years. When cities prove incapable of providing for their residents, many of them move to the suburbs. It is as simple as that. Urban stewardship is obviously hard but we're not going to get the results you're looking for until that improves.
@jyutzler I'd argue that part of the problem of that logic is what counts as "providing for" means different things to different people, and we don't have universal standards by which to decide whether urban governance is better or worse from year to year. Nor do suburbs actually provide anything essential that we can't now provide better with better models for living spaces.
My father's side of the family came from rural ranching and farming, and those members of the family who got "city jobs" tended to move to suburbs to try and get both proximity to work without having to put up with "city folk issues" of noise and crowding. Meanwhile, my mother's side of the family came entirely out of dense urban areas and the poor folk rowhouses adjacent to city centers. They never had an issue with living in "the city", and my grandma often opines about missing walking to a rail car to get to the grocer instead of a 5-10 minute drive, but when suburbs popped up a lot of them moved because they promised to be similar to the neighborhoods of the city but with more space and luxury. It wasn't that they hated the city life, it's that the suburbs promised city life but with none of the downsides, in the same way that to rural folks they promised a good compromise between their city job and their preference for privacy and quiet.
So why am I saying that's a problem? Because it's not sustainable, and not necessary. The suburbs may have intended to be the best of both worlds, but as generations and studies have borne out, they end up being a drain on *everyone else* in order to provide that ideal. We could and should build out more affordable and livable housing closer to cities, building the city itself out, but the suburbs now stand in the way of that. Where once they might have provided housing at an affordable cost to folks hoping to get the best of both worlds, now they stand as direct obstacles to what we know are better housing models, and occupy space that could better serve as agriculture, green, or community park space. They do not provide any life-essential services, do not allow for industry or agriculture, and are wasteful in space and traffic for housing.
I can understand and respect the choices of families that move to suburbs for better educational opportunities for their kids and for peace of mind in a quiet isolated house as opposed to an apartment. But neither of those things are truly essential, and the first especially only lends itself to economic and educational divides between wealthier suburbanites and the city folks who are now subsidizing their luxury with taxes. Putting the onus on city leadership to "be better if the want people to stay in the city" when the suburbs are now provably leeches sucking lifeblood out of the economy is like suggesting that someone with actual leeches should work on their cardio and diet if they want better bloodflow. We can work to improve city governance and living standards while also passing rules and regulations preventing incredibly inefficient and wasteful uses of land like suburbs currently are, and we should do both
@@theroadstopshere "with better models for living spaces". That's what I mean by providing for residents. If cities really did that then more people would live in them and fewer people would settle for the suburbs.
@jyutzler that's absolutely true, but it's tough to get community consensus on what should be built and where, and all the moreso when the funds available are constrained by having heavy drains on the tax income to upkeep suburb areas and those areas having disproportionate power to nimby proposals. Not saying the cities would otherwise be perfect if only those evil suburbs didn't exist, but until either everyone living in suburbs recognizes the burden they're creating and/or the government stops allowing them to be built and maintained on other people's taxes, we're going to have a much harder time actually building good urban ecosystems. It's the same cycle as good govt or private initiatives being brutally underfunded and then people claiming it's the civil servants' and employees' fault for not working a miracle. The lack of accountability towards those who want the best of both worlds and refuse to move until they get it *is* a major root cause
I grew up in DuPage County and can say that it has the most car-centric suburban sprawl in the entire Chicago Metropolitan area.
The time most residents think about taking transit is taking Metra Commuter Rail into city for their commute and driving to the station. Almost all of the Pace Suburban Bus service in the county was Metra feeder routes that have now all been terminated. Now only 11 bus routes provide service to the entire county, with half of them being routes that start in Cook County and extend into DuPage.
Bicycle infrastructure isn't much better as it has pretty much been relegated to recreational use and not for transportation. Most of the trail are gravel trails instead of paved which is used as an excuse to not clear them of snow them in the winter. Outside of trails you will hardly find a painted bike lane, let alone protected with much of the "network" being signed bike routes along stroads or overly wide residential streets.
While it may have had a hold on the suburban office park market, that is quickly starting to change. My dad actually worked at the former Bell Labs in Naperville and couldn't believe that they tore down half of the complex, specifically the extension they built just a couple decades ago. The county is quickly becoming more warehouses than office space as they scrounge to find a way to keep the "growth" going.
Luckily, it's not all doom and gloom as there are cities that are trying to rebuild their urban core like Downers Grove as you had mentioned but also Lombard and Wheaton. But if there was on city that has been making the most change would be Glen Ellyn who has spent the last few years building up their town center. They are rapidly enhancing their streetscape and making it a place you want to take the train or ride your bike to. My friend and I visit there often and the small business and have been very vocal about how much business has boosted since.
Rural farm communities grow and produce things. Dense cities design and produce things.
Suburbia does not produce anything, other than remote work which is a recent and questionably sustainable thing. They feed off of cities and farmland. The problem with the US is, we have moved our core middle/working class into the most inefficient residential format, when such inefficient space usage should be for a minority. This is basically how most countries outside the US are. Suburbia is not, and should not be, the norm.
":Suburbia does not produce anything":
They produce places people want to live and shop. Most manufacturing is also in the suburbs.
"Cities" have nothing akin to that, that cant exist in suburbs....that is why WFH is so popular.
Yep. Right on.
@@WillmobilePlus I'm pretty sure by any metric cities are better at building places people want to live and shop. I'd also be surprised about the suburban manufacturing thing. Where I live the manufacturing is usually near large road and water ways with a bunch of other larger commercial and industrial buildings
@@KyleJCustodio "I'm pretty sure by any metric cities are better at building places people want to live and shop."
Except for objective reality where people gladly still go out from the city to avoid the real issues plaguing many major cities (crime, open air drug use), that people like you pretend arent a thing.
Let's just say that there will be fewer people making a day of walking around the French Quarter of NOLA for a while...
"Where I live the manufacturing is usually near large road and water ways with a bunch of other larger commercial and industrial buildings"
Almost never built anywhere near the "city"' as understood by these types of videos
@@WillmobilePlus Both of these comments make me wonder if you've ever spent time in any cities.
i was expecting a video more like the strong towns economic analysis WITHIN a city since the city limits have to share the same funds and contain both suburban and urban development. ie, denser parts within a city subsidized the less dense parts.
while this is still an interesting video, i feel like it’s limited by the fact that most of these counties don’t share funds in any significant, direct ways at all. sure maybe there’s some city-maintained roads in the urban county that a lot of suburban workers use, but i don’t think that’s a very significant example. good video as always though, just my two cents.
At the state and county level, the residents of the high-GDP areas still pay taxes that get spread around to civic improvements (highways/stroads, etc) and help fund the political decisions of these "hinterland" types of places. I would think GDP has a strong correlation with the contribution to the tax pool in these places.
I think it makes sense to look beyond city limits, but a county-by-county per capita gdp analysis is useless for a lot of reasons. The Strong towns analysis of tax revenue vs. costs is what you want and doing it by municipality would make more sense, since some counties include urban, suburban and rural areas.
@@ekulio Agreed. In fact, it kinda showed in the video that the “best” examples were ones where the city itself had left the broader county. But an area like Minneapolis + Hennepin County (and many others) would likely show a similar trend if the data wasn’t just combined into 1 county with urban, suburban, and rural altogether. I bring Minneapolis up because some of the rural townships had wanted to leave the county because they claimed the county was subsidizing Minneapolis but then when people actually looked into the data, it was the areas trying to leave and complaining that were actually being subsidized.
Agreed. The topic is interesting, but the format doesn't really fit. By doing a Top-10 list you're just extracting the outliers, which guarantees that you cannot draw any meaningful conclusions about an average city, suburb or county. Top-lists work much better for things like "Outrageous downtown parking lots" and similar
Yeah the "west" as a rural entity has been grossly miscalculated. A huge amount, around 80-90%, of the West's population live in an urban environment with agricultural outliers who produce a massive amount of fiscal capital, but also need to invest a majority of that capital in the products they are producing. The Urban West at the End of the Frontier is a fun book for a deeper dive in Western urban development!
I live in dupage county and i actually went to oakbrook center yesterday. I can confirm that they did not have enough parking, or enough lanes in the roads around it
Dupage County native here, Morton Arboretum in Lisle, BNSF train barcrawl through the rail connected downtowns.
A recent analysis of gdp had data that may suggest that up to 30% of americas gdp is wasted on transportation (cars, car maintenance)
Well, that might be the case in the real world.
But we live in a parody of the real world.
Sadly, about 9/10ths of the economy work like:
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by
your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated
general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island
Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven
cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows,
with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States,
leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public then
buys your bull.
What im trying to say is, while the average person might be worse off, gdp number go up, and thats all that matters in the eyes of a particularly non sane faction of society
I thought travel shaming was going to end in 2025? Liberals have every right to board a flying bird and the extreme associated greenhouse gases so the can ingratiate Europeans by how much better Nords truly live.
The Texas-shenanigans part of the script was pure gold...I imagine it took several takes to get through that with only mild chuckling. 😂
Yes, indeed. It's frustrating that red states and rural people in general have so much hate for cities, yet discount, ignore, or are otherwise ignorant the bulk of their tax revenue comes from those cities.
Couldn't tell the difference anyways none of that money ends up in the rural part it goes straight into the city.
@@54032ZepolWrong, these areas are massive for revenues necessary for social security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
@@54032Zepolrural parts gets more money per capita tho, red states are such a burden on the us except Texas
Should money be spent where it didn't come from?
It's equally frustrating that people in blue cities in general harbor so much hate for the people who grow and raise the food that keeps us all ALIVE. What do YOU do for a living that provides a basic requirement for mere survival? Asking for a friend.
I am a little miffed that Your Hunter College event is sold out already and I can't get tickets, but I'm glad I'm not the only one in NYC who likes your work
As anyone who commutes to work knows, the suburbs tend to be simply the outskirts of a city... it is where a good proportion of the people who work in the city live. Housing, affordability, and green spaces are harder to find in the center part of a city... so think of the city as your living room and kitchen, and the suburb as the bedroom.
It’s the same dynamics as Ray’s talking about here though. The suburbs are far less productive than similar land in the central city, and would be unable to sustain themselves without significant subsidy. Strong Towns gives a great breakdown of why this is and how the math works out.
@ our definition of suburbs must be different… maybe a difference between the UK and US. Most large cities and the county they are in have simply become a singular metro. We pay the same property taxes to the city, use the same utilities, etc… most suburbs are considered simply the outer skirt of the city.
@ so it’s not about paying a different tax rate it’s about the relative productivity to the city based on the tax revenue per amount of services. e.g. a single family home might have the same tax rate as a e.g. every unit in a multi-family apartment building, but the latter will generally far outperform the former, since there are so many more units with a similar service delivery cost from the perspective of the municipality. This applies as long as “suburb” is understood as “low density outskirts”, which I take to be your meaning.
Again google Strong Towns, they explain this much better than I could in a comment.
@ The suburbs are jammed packed with apartment complexes in addition to single family homes and multiplex homes. More people live in apartments in the suburbs than in homes, and much more in the suburbs than in the city.
@@labcat647 then it is a definitional issue; that is not the case in U.S.
I've visited Fermilab before! They were doing tours in like July or Aug... yearss ago. Lot of fun things to see and take pics of. And a lot to take in.
I think the lesson here is that county-level analysis is too noisy to draw useful conclusions from. I'm guessing it'd be better to aggregate rural counties into units with a million or more residents, preferably with the assistance of people who are knowledgeable about geography at that level, to more accurately test the proposition. Or maybe that wouldn't work, either, lol.
I wouldn't go with a million, since I think there's a state or two that don't have that many people.
Data as per 10,000 or 100,000 are common in some datasets.
Not in Downers Grove but do live in Wheaton. Sadly neither Downers nor Oak Brook are very public transit accessible, at least compared to the city. You’ll want to stay somewhere close to a Metra stop or at least the Illinois Prairie Path, if you want to bike. Happy to take you around DuPage county next time you’re here.
Voters in unincorporated areas demanding that their suburban lifestyles continue to be subsidized explains a lot about my local and state politics (Florida)
How are they directly subsidized by city residents?
@@kodacres7820 City residents pay county, state, and federal taxes that often is more than what they receive in funding. Suburban residents often get more county, state, and federal funding than they pay in taxes.
Florida not mentioned but Orange Co (Orlando) was #1
@citynerd I grew up in Orlando-Admittedly makes me a bit biased probably, lol
@@CityNerdOrlando was #1 on what?
6:15 there it is! My old work place! I couldn’t take transit there so I had to buy a car. Just wonderful
I'm not an urban planner so I don't have any kind of expertise in this, but what does it mean when an area has a certain GDP per capita? I'm assuming it's because of the businesses in that geographical area that cause the GDP per capita to be so high. You made a comparison about how Queens was less economically productive than Manhatten, but I think a lot of people live in Queens because they can't live closer to the heart of New York, but they commute and work there. How is this accounted for?
I agree, his methods and therefore analysis makes little sense. GDP itself has been long criticised as a not useful metric...this is just another top ten list I think?
Yeah, I still found it to be an interesting video but I don't think it really answered the original question. I think Strong Towns already did an analysis (covered by NJB) of that more specifically though, so you could argue that this video would be redundant if it took the same approach.
Yes, the way the GDP is calculated is deeply flawed.
Theoretically if there was a 1 person county and the person in there had the intellectual property right to e.g. Windows, that county would have a GDP of billions per capita, even if the guy is in coma.
Short answer, it's not. Nor are things like property value or remote employment. The fact that my mortgage can be bought and sold in financial markets, and that counts towards GDP somewhere without changing the taxes I pay to the local government makes the whole thing irrelevant. This video also seems to assume (since it's not mentioned) that the cost of infrastructure is spread evenly between counties, which is obviously not the case. I don't know if cost of living adjustments would be relevant here, but I suspect that higher costs of living would actually benefit the GDP numbers of cities over that of more rural places. Either way, this entire presentation is meaningless, and I'm a little worried that this guy gets paid to consult for municipalities on city planning if this is his best effort.
Topic idea:
Where airports ought to be located. Are coastal locations good? How far out is best? Freeway access? Locate on existing rail line or build a new rail line?
And based on these criteria: which is the bast major & minor airports in the country? And how could Newark get even better?
Happy New Year City Nerd!
On the first weekday of congestion pricing in NYC we are hearing endless coverage of people hollering about how unfair it is with reports of greatly reduced traffic.
It's wild just how much of NYC's economy is concentrated in Manhattan.
Even crazier how much impact even small changes to the public transit infrastructure could have on the U.S. economy as a whole. And yet they refuse to fund it.
That is also why his statistics are dubious. A huge portion of the workforce commutes into Manhattan from the other 4 boroughs. It is similar where people commute into urban centers from more rural suburbs. These stats apply the revenue to the county where the jobs are and charges the costs to the location of the workforce. Draw a bigger circle to include the entire area and it paints a different picture. And since counties borders are largely arbitrary in this context, the stats don't mean much.
Many people in rural counties have many low income retired, and disabled who moved there for lower rents. If these people lived in cities, many would need housing subsidies, However, in the rural counties, these people don't require housing subsidies. Wages are lower, but the cost of housing helps compensate for low wages.
4:30 this is such a massive problem that legitimately started because of slavery politics in the 1800s. You could probably draw a connection to 95% of the region’s problem to the “Great Divorce”
another issue is the hundred municipalities that make up the County, but that’s another story
So many problems in the US can be traced back to racism.
As always, your subtle sarcasm belies an ocean of contempt for the corruption of wealth politics. How can you keep yourself so well restrained?
since when suburbs are "rural"???
Yoo Downers Grove mentioned. As many have stated, the downtown has been building up nicely over the last couple of years. Access to the BNSF is really convenient and more bike lanes seem to pop up every time I come back to visit family. Most things I'd recommend to a visitor would be outside of town, though, such as Lilacia Park in Lombard, the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, and Waterfall Glen in Darien/Lemont. Waterfall Glen houses Aragon National Laboratory, which I'm surprised you didn't mention when bringing up Fermilab. Someone else also mentioned Galloping Ghost in Bolingbrook which is always worth a visit.
Hey that ring is new in the past year. Congrats!
Rural areas always feel looked down on by urban areas. There is some truth to this. However, it is also true that people in rural areas dislike cities and people from cities. Texas is a great example of this. The Texas state legislature is controlled by conservatives that dislike the more liberal cities. This results in legislation that interferes with urban self-rule and opposes things, such as mass transit, that would benefit cities, but are not seen as a benefit to rural areas.🤔
DuPage also includes Argonne National Lab
I'd like to see an analysis of GDP versus new infrastructure spending and upkeep. My hypothesis is that low-density areas still need to be serviced by long roads and long sewer lines despite a smaller tax base and that the infrastructure per capita requirements are lower in a city just due to how many people use shared infrastructure there. I'd love to see that tested with statistics, though.
You don't need NGO funding in rural areas, which more than makes up for the somewhat larger infrastructure costs.
Most rural areas don't have sewer. At least up here in Pennsylvania. if you live outside of a town, or city, you likely only have a power line to your house. As for the roads, those should be paid by towns and cities to connect eachother together, so that both achieve mutual benefit.
@@linuxman7777 Rural roads also go approximately forever before any real money is spent on their upkeep (Pennsylvania being a more extreme example than some other places!). If they were truly paved in the first place.
@@linuxman7777 Correct. My previous home was mostly rural. We were in an unincorporated area. We got our electricity and water from the closest small town/city. Our phone and internet service was very poor. I had no cell service from my home, but could go down the street about half a mile and pick up service. Sewage was a septic system. We did not have natural gas, but they were starting to add lines for hookup down my street shortly before we left there. We paid the city for garbage pickup, which was very expensive because of the distance the truck had to travel. Many folk in the area just burned their garbage in trash pits they built in their yards. The roads were poorly maintained. Mail was delivered, but the boxes were all set up together in a row and not at the end of each driveway, but on the street, so that you had to walk a bit on the road to pick up your mail.
I am in DuPage county! I grew up in Wheaton IL. We used to ride our bikes to downtown Wheaton via the prairie path as kids and go to the popcorn shop. It’s a little hole in the wall candy store that has been around since 1890 I believe.
I moved away when I went to college and came back after I had been Orange pilled. Downtown Wheaton isn’t very big but they have been doing some pretty great stuff post covid. They have widened the sidewalk in a lot of areas and close down Hale St during the warm months for out door dining. It is so popular I wish they would just make it permanent so they don’t have to do temporary infrastructure. If people can go around it in the summer they can go around it in winter. They also have a walk your wheels law which is ridiculous. You aren’t supposed to bike, skateboard or roller skate/blade downtown.
In high school we used to go to downtown Naperville which has a nice river walk but everything else about the downtown is awful. Curb tight sidewalks with traffic jammed right through the center. We were walking on gravel filler on the side walk and my girlfriend rolled her ankle. It was such a stark difference. I am really excited to see if Wheaton keeps improving over the next 10 years! I think one thing that is going for it is that the downtown is right along the train line so it’s good for commuters.
Ray, I’m an urban planning student and would like to know your thoughts - video or otherwise, on the efficacy of GDP as a metric for actual quality of life.
I understand in this case we’re specifically talking about how and where the money flows so it’s pertinent.
However I find myself hitting a wall in conversations with folks expecting a rise in GDP to result in an equal rise in so called “quality of life” often spurred on by conservative trickle down ideals.
We see more everyday that high GDP yielding countries and cities alike become more the playground of the wealthy to then generate more wealth - technically leaving us with more GDP but with disastrous outcomes for anyone other than the “economically empowered.”
I'm not Ray, but I think it's just diminishing returns. A higher GDP means a more active economy, which benefits everyone. But at some point, all that extra money starts concentrating at the top and has no further benefits to the general population.
Pretty simple: GDP includes government spending. As more things exist that require the government to oversee or regulate them, the GDP goes up as the government has to spend more. And those who can afford to meet the regulations or pay for the government oversight, succeed and smaller businesses that can't, are forced into failure due to excessive expenses.
The meat industry is a good example of this. We see occasional listeria or E.Coli outbreaks, and they're frequently traced back to large meat packing operations. There's a two fold reason for this. The plants are large enough to affect large numbers of people. And they're large enough that it's possible for things to be missed, even in the most careful inspections. Which tends to lead to more stringent regulations in an attempt to prevent repeats. However, while larger packing plants are more capable of swallowing the overhead, the same regulations end up applying regardless of size. So while MEAT CO INTL LTD, might find 3 million dollars a drop in the financial bucket, with 50 continuous processing lines running... Bubba Deans butcher shop with two cutters and one meat slicer probably isn't doing enough business to foot the bill for a hundred thousand dollar refit when the entire place can be cleaned to spec out of two five gallon buckets.
7:34 I think nuclear power is part of the solution to mitigate climate change.
Nuclear power is just the next way to time-shift yet another ecological catastrophe. Humans don’t have a way to store nuclear waste that is both safe and permanent. The technology doesn’t exist.
Every decade or so, we are deluged with an expensive PR campaign that amounts to “it’s safe this time, we promise!” And it never is and pretty soon thousands more people have cancer.
"Virginia may be for lovers, but it's not for team players." As a Virginian, can confirm.
Put quotes around the rural in the title. Obviously, farms are funded by the largest population bubbles but that's inflammatory framing.
"Rural" lifestyles is more clearly referring to random moms riding deathmachine trucks in suburbs.
The other half of the coin is "the largest population bubbles are dependent on said farms"
But that is equally inflammatory framing.
Those same folks routinely vote for tax policies that hurt cities in order to benefit themselves. If the rural folks wouldn't be so parasitic, we wouldn't have that sort of a framing. They require the cities both for the stuff they used to engage in agriculture and for people to buy what they're selling.
@SmallSpoonBrigade
We can just as easily twist that into a narrative where the evil imperial core(aka cities) prevents the formation of local capital by parasitically sucking up the population growth and brain power of rural areas.
Also, as a rule of thumb, the countryside can very well financially support itself, by avoiding capital intensive forms of agriculture in favour of shit like dog and stick farming.
But dog and stick farming won't feed megacities with hundreds of thousands of people.
It isn't as optional. Unless cities produce their own food, they are dependants. No food no city. Let's be more inflammatory, let's put an air tax on the city and towns because those two are just a burden in that. We could put the money into rural infrastructure with an emphasis on environmental protection.
@@mrbloodmuffins Exactly. We need this kind of nuance to make 2025 a productive year for discourse.
So, I live in DuPage County, IL, having recently moved here from Chicago and I was completely prepared to hate it. What I found was a lot of sprawl, but also a lot of nice, walkable downtowns with Metra stations in some of the suburbs. There's a lot of bland suburbia but there are also places like Glen Ellyn and Elmhurst, with a few square blocks walkability, restaurants etc. and a 30-40 minute trip to Union Station on Metra. It's not perfect but it's better than I expected.
Unless you want your food grown by people living in rural ghettos, rural areas need services and especially transit.
Pre-car-like villages that are internally walkable, connected to their surrounding countryside by bicycle/wheelchair networks and connected to other villages and larger urban developments via bus and train. This is pretty doable, materially if not politically.
Yes, rural areas (particularly farmers) need transit, but not public transit. US farm homes aren't located within the town or village. They exist on the plots of land, maybe several hundred acres or more, surrounded by the fields they work. Their only connection to the towns/villages are usually long empty roads that they travel via car or truck. The farmers make their needed purchases from the town/village, however, because they aren't self-sufficient. They also get their needed services from there, too (such as electricity). Trains in the USA are either cargo or passenger with cargo being the most common and profitable. Tracks are single tracks mostly laid long ago. Farm goods go overland by truck from the farm and then are shipped by cargo train or they use the highway/interstate system to get to their destinations. Even those goods shipped by cargo train still have to use roadways to get to processing plants, wholesalers, warehouses, and/or stores.
The location of farmhouses and their fields has varied wildly with time and place.
Transit? lol what's that
Darkwoodmovies,
Search engines are your friend.
Checking in from Dupage County! My husband and I have been watching for a while, so this was an exciting video for us! Also, my dad just retired from his 30+ year career at Fermilab. Recommendations if you ever find yourself around here again: Five & Hoek coffee in Wheaton, Common Good Cocktails House in Glen Ellyn, and Babcock’s Grove House in Lombard (all in historic downtowns next to train stations).
Good news: it’s DuPage county…
Bad news: it’s Illinois.
Rural lifestyles? Yes.
Rural areas in general? I'd argue otherwise, primarily because of agriculture. I see it more as a trade in that case, but those who are "rural" living in suburbs obviously aren't included in that.
Federal subsidies largely support rural industry. Those federal subsidies come from "blue" areas.
@@ricardoconqueso Which subsidies?
Yeah the rural areas that are dedicated to farming (or any other industries) absolutely deserve government assistance and the distribution of wealth. But at least half of these deep red counties have no industry to speak of, and they mostly rely on the mercy of some corporation that decided to build a factory in the middle of nowhere because it was cheaper.
Federal subsidies to agriculture are just the modern day dole. Every functional society has had them to keep food supplies stable, so areas which do agriculture receiving them isn't exactly the great revelation you think it is.
Over 90% of agricultural operations are still operated by families, sometimes multiple working on one larger plot of land, but that's not a particularly novel thing either. You don't really see corporations enter the picture until logistics or high margin cash crops come into play.
Yeah it's a difficult comparison when you get down into it. Rural sprawl is less efficient but at the same time the country needs food and other resources. Not all of which are 'profitable' but usually quite necessary.
There's a reason 'cost modelling' for entire regions is a specialized and difficult task it turns out!
STL 💪💪
you should release all of your spreadsheets!
My takeaway is that GDP is a meaningless metric when trying to identify local benefits. And if you can't track where the money goes and how it's then spent, you'll never know who subsidizes whom.
While it is true urban workers make more income and the products they make are value added, one element to consider is that rural workers are often more exploited and the products they produce sell in more competitive. They may not have as much income because they have less bargaining power and urban areas are the beneficiaries of that.
For example an Indian cotton farmer has to compete with all the cotton farmers in the world. But the factory that buys his cotton has a whole world to sell to and not much competiton.
Your logic generally is true in that cities generally have more political power and the development of democracy in the west can be directly tied together with the growth of cities. But your example doesn't really make sense, most industrial goods and services are also fungible however the way states approach them is different. Most states see agriculture as strategically vital and so massively subsidize agriculture, which creates overproduction that drives down prices and removes competitiveness, this means that the only economically viable way to produce agriculture is through economies of scale so this leads to monopolization and gives the individual urban worker less influence. Meanwhile the products cities produce generally aren't seen as strategically vital on their own so you don't get the same incentives. The exceptions would be things like ship building and some forms of heavy industry and those are generally industries famed for their terrible working conditions.
@@hedgehog3180 Agricultural products tend to be considerably more fungible than the products of factories.
St. Louis city is up there since you have WashU- Undergrad, WashU- medical school & med campus, BJC Hospital and its subsidiaries, and SLU all clustered in the city. Thousands of people from St. Louis County work in the city and the GDP they account for stays in the city. Also St. Louis City has been gradually depopulating as more people move to the surrounding county and North St. Louis generally falls into disrepair.
Also Boeing and many other large companies are either based in St. Louis or produce products within the city. Income that STL County residents earn is then taxed by the County & by a lesser extent STL City. STL City also has the Cardinals, Blues, and STL FC which add to the GDP while taking up a lot of space. Furthermore, you also have Forest Park taking up a lot of space as it is one of the largest public parks in the US. Then there is STL Zoo which is free, but does produce some goods & services.
**I know you’ve done a few videos on St. Louis, but an idea for another video would be a deep dive into the economy, infrastructure, and revitalization of the city. It really is a great place to live.**
I mean looking at educational centers or government centers for GDP is weird. That’s actually the production from other places taxed and funneling there.
One of your most interesting videos. Incredible work :)
Economies of scale might not mean bigger is cheaper per. Look at NYC, with a 3% property tax rate on big property values and a city income tax, vs. Chicago with a 2% property tax rate in Cook county, vs. Minneapolis, with a property tax rate of 1% All these cities are going to provide similar services, education, policing, fire departments, and streets but seem to be more per capita than smaller institutions. NYC has a lot less street per person than Minneapolis. At a certain scale, the per cost becomes higher for increased middle management, and infrastructure needing to be more expensive. A bus is cheaper to run on roads that exist anyway than is a light rail that needs a special road built on high value land. That county with 42 people, might have one part time person driving a road grader for the gravel roads vs. NYC will have a streets department with its own IT staff.
What is wealth creation? Cities seem to have a lot of jobs in corporate headquarters but almost everything in manufacturing is done in suburbs and small towns.
I literally go to Hunter College, I can't believe these tickets are sold out😭
apparently they're holding extra tix for hunter alums but not current students?? make it make sense lol (also hi! i go to nyu!)
@@rubyfoxall1656 Hey👋That auditorium is huge. I wonder if it's actually fully sold out or they didn't put every seat up for sale.
Elmhurst is just north of Downers Grove and is the best (place I have ever lived). It is a weird and beautiful combination of "wow, this is a really progressive, walkable downtown with mixed-use, high and medium density housing over businesses, great public amenities, and all next to high availability transit" and "That McMansion is listed for $2mil, just like all the other McMansions on this street. They tore down all the smaller houses to used 90% of their lot so they could have 2k sqft per person"
If somebody has the money to do that, then why not? I live in a small suburban city about a 30 minute drive from a large city. People have been doing that for decades around here. Small homes are a thing of the past. Nobody wants to live in them anymore. The small homes aren't really saleable as they are, so they are sold cheap, mostly for the land. It is the land that has value, not the home. The buyers then put a large home on the combined lots. That is what happens when zoning laws don't prevent it. I wouldn't call them McMansions so much as new-style Plantation homes. It is a home in which you can have several generations of the same family living under one roof. There may even be separate kitchens.
@@laurie7689 (hyperbole to make a point) If someone has the money to buy all the houses in a neighborhood, demolish them, and build one mega house, then why not? They and their kids could live there. Maybe even their parents and their grandkids?... It's because hoarding land (and wealth) and building unaffordable housing is a recipe for massive wealth differences. Which leads to an incredibly unstable society. Which makes everyone miserable.
@@CrzyMan_Personal I'd still rather hoard the land. I don't live for the sake of society, but for myself and family. I'm fine with wealth disparity. I don't have complaints about it. I consider it to be a natural part of existence. It also has to do with the definition of "wealth". It is not defined the same by everybody. Family IS my definition of wealth. Having family live in close proximity means I'm wealthy. If a tornado were to come through and destroy everything I own, so long as my family remains safe, I haven't lost anything of value. Society will always be unstable. We as individuals share concepts, such as wealth, but we don't define them the same. If you count resources as wealth, then it becomes a matter of location and which resources matter to you. There is no resource that is equally spread across this World - not even sunlight. In essence the planet, itself, hoards resources. Humanity will always be miserable because we're always butting heads trying to be/become wealthy per our own definition of it. So, I'll take the land and build a huge house for my family if it so pleases me.
@@laurie7689 If you don't care about the rest of society why are you even participating in this argument, it literally goes against your stated values.
@@hedgehog3180 Like it or not, I'm a part of society and my point of view is just as valid.
Cities are by nature a centralization of everything. From services to infrastructure to education to government to production. It's like comparing how much sunlight a massive tree towering over sapling gets in comparison to a sapling.
I don't even like living rurally currently. But it's the closest thing I can get to feeling free. I am still absolutely reliant on people who hate me and often I am reliant by force. I don't want to take my truck into town to work just like urbanists don't want me there. But I have too to make money so I can buy goods and services. I am caught in a world I don't want to be in. Suburbs are just as bad with few upsides. And cities themselves just feel like a terrible mix if crowded and lonely. Where I will never own property and have little privacy.
You mention Downers Grove, the village where I was born and raised. It's a nice town, and there is absolutely nothing in Oak Brook that you can't find in most other parts of the country, just a generic upscale shopping mall. If you want actual interesting places, take Metra to most any of the older towns that grew up around the railways. You're certain to find interesting restaurants, shops, even movie theaters.
Yes, yes they do. That last county’s shenanigans were just absurd. Real small-town values right there 😂
it is in part the income difference between Manhattan County and Kings County, where I live, that gives me the ability to afford living ANYWHERE in the five boroughs of NYC!
True rural areas (not suburbs) produce food, which some would argue is important despite lagging behind the GDP produced by tech startups in San Francisco and finance in Manhattan.
Those farmers get government subsidies which are paid for by tax revenue from high earners in cities. Additionally, rural areas are usually full of poor people who get government welfare benefits, paid for by city taxpayers
@ Those subsidies are likely a good investment, since most high earners in cities like to eat. Perhaps the full value of primary food production isn’t fully reflected in GDP per capita.
@@dylanluhowy sure but just pointing out that even food production is really being paid for by cities
@@i_like_beer-o2f Personally, I'd prefer to have local investment into farm production to secure food for my locality than to have overseas investment in local farm production and have the produce sent overseas.
Do you think anyone doesn't know that?
Absolutely. The city subsidize real areas. Further, many states pay more into the federal treasury than other states. Majority of the southern states are the poorest states with least access to quality medical care and education. They pay less into the federal treasury.
Biggest open air mall just to be it surrounded by parking lots is hilarious and sad
Urbanists need ruralists and ruralists need urbanists. It’s suburbs that nobody needs.
GDP is not necessarily an indication of value. Like the resource extraction, with those hugely high GDP per capita in Texas, one might look at that big light blue swath of like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, and think they don't have value, but the resource extraction those counties is food, which is maybe more valuable than oil. I can live without oil, nuclear accelerators, or rich people skiing, but I can't live without food. A lot of those low GDP counties, with their gravel roads, provide value to us for feeding us.
Oil and petroleum products are the basis for lots of economic activity. You probably can't have the life you have now without oil even if you don't directly use any yourself.
I mean, those counties should have a higher GDP than other rural counties. Their wages are often too low, especially when factoring in the exploited illegal immigrants.
Happy New Year, Ray! 🥰
Big fan of your channel, I watch every new video you upload with my girlfriend, but what you said at 4:04 really rubbed me the wrong way.
People don't just decide to stay in their "declining hometowns," they CAN'T LEAVE. It's exactly the same way in depressed urban neighbourhoods, where the cycle of poverty prevents you from achieving any of the steps that would allow you to achieve any kind of social mobility.
My immediate guess is that you're referring to wealthy people who choose to live in rural areas, but regardless this was an extremely out of touch and gross mischaracterization of people who are stuck living in declining small towns.
A good friend of mine was a trans woman who lived in rural Florida and was unable to leave due to not being able to afford education and due to all kinds of other factors. She took her own life after the election results.
This video was really sloppy, and the script should've been reviewed again before you uploaded it. I'm sure the point you were trying to make was different, but this was not communicated effectively whatsoever.
Happy new year Ray!
This went a weird way, but the whole concept is based on a fallacy that you can break up dependent geographies and make actual judgments on who’s pulling the cart.
Cities cannot exist without the infrastructure to get food and other products from rural areas. Those areas could not be nearly as productive or have demand for their goods without the urban areas and their innovations and products and wealth that helps pay for the infrastructure.
And rural areas can’t get the equipment and infrastructure to get those products in n the market without the taxation of urban class
With the existence of monoculture farming you can't even say that a city is dependent upon a rural county per se; a lot of that produce is bound for export, not going to sustain the local community/city. IMO transport infrastucture is really the backbone of all of the interdependencies so whoever is paying for the roads and such is the real subsidizer.
@@mazterlith Infrastructure spending is like 10, 15% of total government spending. Sure, in US fuel taxes are small, but elsewhere in the world they generate comparable amount of government revenue. On the other hand, a lot of infrastructure spending is financed by other sources of revenue rather than taxation, such as fees.
What you're forgetting on the other hand is that urban areas depend on imports of human capital from hinterlands. Higher fertility consistently correlates with lower population density around the world.
Regardless of details, in case you fear you're subsidizing rural lifestyle, secession is the obvious solution. You might think rural populations will have trouble funding the infrastructure (I don't think they will), but you're probably not thinking about the fact that countryside is then free to set monopolistic rents on access to natural resources, such as fresh water and airspace, to the city dwellers. I believe city dwellers, on the other hand, might have serious issues working around this.
@@mazterlith If there’s no rural roads, then the cost of simply rises and the supply drops.
Believe what you want, but there’s no one producing food within 30 minutes of my home in the middle of Houston. No rural agriculture means no city at all. No city just means less income and other goods for the farmers, but they won’t starve. The rest is all illogical and useless word play.
@@williamerazo3921 You mean the people who will starve without the roads and infrastructure? Seriously?
I’m pretty sure most of the roads in Texas were paid for by oil money actually. There were roads around rural Texas when there wasn’t a lot of people in the cities yet. The other big revenue source in Texas is property tax. Farms and ranches pay plenty of that.
The cities now generate a ton of wealth, but one group can survive without the other, and it’s not us city folks. 😉
And here I thought your name is City. Happy New Year, best wishes, and thanks for helping us look at cities and numbers together with Cat.
I love the repeated "fine dining" bit with The Cheesecake Factory.
Durham County is also home to Research Triangle Park.
Teton County/Jackson Hole benefits from Wyoming's very hands-off approach to taxing income of all kinds. Lots of super wealthy folks claim residence there.
If the US reduces the federal budget significantly, lowers federal taxes, and turns over the finances to state/local, my guess is that we would see cities thrive and rural areas suffer. If that happens a lot of people would be hurt, but we might get to see it.
We can only hope.
@@nnkk7742 You hope rural areas suffer?
@@noelvalenzarroif suburbs suffer but farmland doesn't then sure
One thing that skews the numbers is that food production is vital but doesn't bring in much income compared to most other jobs.
dupage county sucks. it's car dependant hell scape, limited opportunity, & just purely surbanized. those technology companies you listed surprised me, & I never seen them in any career fair in college and even in high school. fermilab is 'cool' but like... i never seen them actively recruit.
well, you been to naperville, oakbrook, downers grove, lombard & etc., and you know you need a rental car to get around those cities. but, there's bars and grills in downers grover lol. but 10000% you're going to be right back at the oak brook mall lol. there's literally nothing to do in downergrove. but if you like hole-in-the-wall bars than yea!
It really is the worst. If the plastic storage aisle at Walmart was a municipality, it would be Downers Grove.
I have a lot I could say here, but I have less than 15 minutes to say it, so…
I am really glad the channel is getting hooked by the whole notion of economic geography. As you are finding, it is a very rich topic (no pun intended). But the notion of cross-subsidies and trade are hugely important. So although it might be true that many rural areas receive direct state and federal subsidies to do what they do, if those were cut off, one predictable outcome is that if those were cut off, these areas would support even fewer people producing whatever it is that this imaginary rural county produces, which would mean less of it would be produced, so prices would go up if supply did end up going down as a result of removing the subsidy.
A point related to this is that resource extraction (and factory production also) get more get more efficient as their scale increases, and gold/oil/wheat/whatever producers are competing with each other, so most of the investment in these areas will go towards increasing the efficiency of extraction (and little else) so if (or when?) either demand for a resource decreases or new sources are found or exploited, the economic viability of those places that had all of their chips put in the one basket decreases.
But going back to subsidization, every member of this channel knows that places that are densely populated with people who know lots of complementary things are economic power houses, but highly resourced individuals or governments can create prosperity in an area by just injecting large amounts of cash. That could be federal money going to a large national laboratory, state and federal money going to a research university, or private money that flows to a super picturesque area like Jackson, WY or Bar Harbor, Maine. It can take some time, and there are no guarantees, but if a decades-long investment is made in a place by outsiders, that county that once grew only corn will find its resident state university has attracted enough residents so that the inflow of residents will create its own inflow effects…and you’re not going to end up with Manhattan, but you may end up with a place that people in the left behind rural areas can commute to. You might want to see this happen differently or more efficiently, but until we can produce housing much more cheaply than we apparently can today, people will often live where they can afford to and work wherever they can get the highest (net of transportation costs) pay.
Uploaded one minute ago and no views. Rough start to this new year, man
Don't trust the counter. I often see views on the backend on channels I manage, but the public view count takes a while to catch up sometimes. The TH-cam gods work in mysterious ways.
@@EricaGametI’m pretty sure he’s joking, but yeah
Hey Ray, I grew up in Downers Grove, and the one thing we have going for us is the Tivoli Theatre downtown! (One of the first sound theaters in the US, I believe). Aside from that, I'd recommend checking out Lemont (technically not in Dupage County, but right on the border). Lemont has a pretty interesting downtown, and some cool history too (The Illinois and Michigan canal passes through the town, which now has a trail running along it, as well as a bikeshare system that allows you to ride the canal trail!). Both Downers Grove and Lemont also have Metra stations, so getting to/from Chicago isn't too bad