Unfortunately, even if you divide the costs per person, it's still often cheaper to get 40 people new water lines in say 20 average suburban homes, than it is to get 40 people new water lines in say, one building in Manhattan.
Infrastructure costs do not scale evenly per mile. The capital costs in infrastructure are rarely the actual wires or pipes, it's the installation and maintenance labour. Which are considerably more complex and more expensive in dense urban environments, than it is in the sprawl.
There are plenty of downsides to sprawl (it's a waste of land, for instance). But sprawl is nearly always cheaper (even after removing all subsidies), that's kind of the whole reason sprawl exists in the first place.
Sprawl exists because of zoning codes, not because of a market equilibrium.
If you're interested in the phenomenon, read https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ about the Growth Ponzi Scheme.
That's generally what people mean by "Dense Urban" vs "sprawl", yes? You could replace "Manhattan" with "Chicago Loop" and it would be the roughly identical.
> These mid-rise apartments are cheaper per-capita both capital wise and maintenance wise than sprawly single-family homes.
They aren't, sprawly apartments (like duplexes, or low-mid-rise apartments) are roughly equivalent to costs as sprawly single family homes, and dense apartments are more expensive.
This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive).
> Read Strong Towns
I have, many many times. They get promoted on HN on a literally daily basis.
Strong Towns is a fun blog to read, but unfortunately, Strong Towns is simply wrong sometimes. Their understanding of suburban finances is one thing they are semi-routinely incorrect on, they assume most suburbs are only financially viable if they continiously grow -- and while this is true for some, it is not common for most. The Growth Ponzi scheme they mention, while true for a handful of suburbs, does not apply in any way to 75% or more of suburbs across the US.
Don't take my word for it. Most municipalities budgets are public record (they should all be, really). Look up one near you, and see this for yourself.
Urban streets in Japan tend to blend together because they allow commercial uses throughout - you can wander a single neighborhood for days and not see every storefront. It's not just the transit. There's a built-in bias towards density there that is not present in US suburbs, which are largely motivated to build big box retail and office parks instead of houses because they are bigger moneymakers. We are setting a market equilibrium by law.
Without TCO figures, I can't agree or disagree with you. Moreover I feel like this is permeated with a pretty common American bias, namely that homeowners maintain their property better than landlords (the myth of the yeoman property owner).
I'm going to pick a random suburb that happens to be near me. They are about a 33% even split of old suburbs (1940-1960s), middle suburbs (1970s-1990s) and new suburbs (2000s+), with maybe 15% of that new suburb land still totally empty. There are a few duplexes and apartment buildings in there, but nothing dense. No buildings higher than 3 stories, it's like 95% low density stuff.
Their budget for 2017 includes $7,143,000 towards "Major Streets and Local Streets". That's costs for basically every road except the freeways (those are maintained by the state). This suburbs spends that, every year, on roads alone.
"OH MY GOD THATS SO EXPENSIVE" says StrongTowns, "OBVIOUSLY SUBURBS ARE DOOMED!"
There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden).
Even ignoring all business revenue, for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription per person, this suburbs maintains every single street in the entire suburb.
An average house in this Midwestern Michigan suburb, costs about $150-200k. A single family home pays a couple hundred dollars per month in property taxes. It costs just $8 of those couple hundred dollars per month, to maintain every single street in the suburb.
Is it possible the municipality mis-counted something? Sure! Is it possible they aren't fully accounting for every possible road cost? Perhaps! Let's pretend they mis-counted by something extreme, let's assume they are a full 50% under-estimating on literally every street in the sububrb.
That doomsday scenario means a citizen might have to pay $16/month for roads, instead of $8. Oh no, what a terrible world that would be
I'm not pretending every suburb is identical. I'm sure there are suburbs that spend more than $8/per person per month on roads. Some suburbs are more sprawled out than others. But generally speaking, there is no great infrastructure apocalypse coming down upon us. It's just not happening, unless some major disaster wipes everything out all at once (like a hurricane, or a tornado, or a screwup like Flint's Water crisis).
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The Growth Ponzi scheme makes a great headline for StrongTowns. But for most people, it's completely fanfaction. It is not grounded in any reality whatsoever, for the vast majority of people who are reading it.
Spawl is cheaper to build new. However, sprawl is more expensive to maintain.
Suburbs run into this problem quite dramatically when they start contracting and suddenly their infrastructure costs start soaring relative to their budgets.
