Fwd: Is suburban development subsidized?

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: [email protected]
> Date: November 20, 2015 at 11:55:02 AM PST
> To: "Kyriazi, Nicholas" <[email protected]>
> Subject: Is suburban development subsidized?
> 
> I attended a presentation and panel discussion on Wednesday put on by CMU and the federal Dept. of Transportation entitled 'Beyond Traffic 2045'.  It was to enlist the input of college students in solving our present and future transportation problems.  During the question and comment period, I ventured to assert that we would have no transportation problems if we had no suburbs.  The two responses I got implied that suburban development is a given and it is a waste of time to talk about changing that reality.  I should have followed it up with the suggestion that if the federal government stopped subsidizing the suburbs, we would not have suburbs.  In a free market, it would be too expensive for most people to live far apart from each other.
> 
> I did a search last night worded 'Is suburban development subsidized?'.  I found many interesting essays and discussions.  Here is an excerpt from the American Conservative in October of 2014 (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-conservative-case-against-the-suburbs/ <http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-conservative-case-against-the-suburbs/>):  
> 
> America’s suburban experiment is a radical, government-led re-engineering of society, one that artificially inverted millennia of accumulated wisdom and practice in building human habitats. We can excuse modern Americans for not immediately grasping the revolutionary ways in which we restructured this continent over the past three generations–at this point, the auto-dominated pattern of development is all most Americans have ever experienced–but today we live in a country where our neighborhoods are shaped, and distorted, by centralized government policy.
> 

--
Richard Risemberg
http://www.bicyclefixation.com
http://www.SustainableCityNews.com
http://gridlogisticsinc.com
http://www.rickrise.com