City Life

NotJustBikes is honestly a force of nature I think. His content is so awesome he's basically created a new generation of urbanists. We need people like him because his content can actually change the world.

Of you don't know where to start on his channel, the Strong Towns 4 part series is essential viewing. It's a summary of the Strong Towns research project/community and it basically presents decades of expert research as a tidy little series. Everything else is window dressing to the core messaging of that - crappy spread out suburbs are financially insolvent and cannot sustain themselves. Towns and cities die without a reliable tax base. Everything boils down to that. There is a 30 year cycle where new suburbs pay for the old ones and in 30 years they become a net negative to city budgets.

Mississauga in Ontario recently ran out of municipal land... Their strategy has been suburban expansion for decades. Now they're out of room. It wouldn't have been a very exciting headline except now we know that new suburbs must be built to pay for the financial drain the old ones place on the city... So they MUST become more dense or else the city will become bankrupt.

There is also a video on the channel about how Guelph did a financial analysis on what parts of the city are financially productive and which are net negatives on the budget. I'm sure you can guess the results! Really cool 3D bar graphs of the city divided up into blocks/sections. it's just interesting because politicians always always pander to suburban voters and people think suburban tax money pays for inner city programming or whatever and the reverse is the truth. The inner cities are the ones subsidizing the suburbs. Density = people = economy. Population density = productivity = money.

Imagine if politicians ignored homeowners and focused on the people actually funding the budgets? Suburbs are a financial drain only kept alive by the Ponzi scheme of creating new suburbs to find the old ones. Until you run out of land like Mississauga. Then you get slashing of budgets and lack of programs, decaying infrastructure, etc... Then cities just die like so many have across north America.