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api | on: Just Put It on a Map
Utilities and roads out into the suburban may be underpriced, but there’s a dark side to cities too. The suburbs and rural areas are often where people can afford homes.

I’ve had this hypotheses for a long time that the car is, at least economically, only incidentally about mobility. In reality it’s a tool for obtaining leverage in the real estate market.

Without sprawl urban landlords would have a captive audience and would extract all surplus. See: the law of rent.

I have a related hypothesis that the car drove the mid century middle class explosion in the US and some other countries, not by providing car jobs or any of the other conventional mechanisms but by allowing people to escape the law of rent.

Telework does this today for those who can use it, allowing people to leave high cost cities where good jobs are concentrated. The car did that until we reached the scaling limits of sprawl.

Also why I am a huge fan of Georgist taxation. Unfortunately we are moving in the opposite direction, taxing productivity and investment and wealth instead of taxing land and rent.

jeffbee | parent
Yeah well the problem is that after a moderately prosperous person buys a car and a house out in the suburb, the act of having spent half a million dollars makes them believe that they are entitled to drive their car into the city and enjoy the commerce and culture that the city fosters, plus free parking and toll-free roads and subsidized gas. None of those are great! In my town this manifests as people who live just over the county line in unincorporated places who nevertheless feel entitled to participate in city deliberations over road design and parking policies.