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[quote=Anonymous]I think you're confusing two things:  one descriptive, the other prescriptive.

In other words, there's first the question of what is "good"--where people should live.  Secondly, there's the question of what's going to be happening over the next ten or twenty years as there's a demographic change, and consumer tastes shift.

To address the first question, obviously tastes vary, and people should be able to live where they want.  But it's pretty clear that folks who live in suburban cul-de-sacs have been heavily subsidized for decades now, while more traditional forms of housing have been shortchanged.  (Note, I'm not talking about private investment, I'm talking about massive federal subsidies in transportation, infrastructure, etc, etc...)

No one's asking to eliminate the suburbs--just to eliminate the massive subsidies, and to modify the zoning laws that make it illegal to build denser, more walkable communities.

The second question--one which goes to the heart of this discussion--is the "descriptive" question.  What's happening, or is likely to happen over the next few decades.  Its pretty clear that poverty is becoming more and more a suburban phenomenon (google "suburbanization of poverty")  Competition for dense, urban, middle-class neighborhoods is fierce, and it's only going to get worse in DC and inside the Beltway as tastes change, baby boomers downsize, and area population grows.

More wealthy people in DC is going to mean better schools; more poor people in the suburbs is going to mean worse schools.  As suburbia ages, the infrastructure is also aging, that costs money to fix.  But the sprawling nature of most exurban developments means that the upkeep on infrastructure is crushingly expensive--so things  tend to decay.  Which leads to greater blight, leading to falling housing prices and rents, leading to more poor folks moving in.  Poor people vote, and poverty is expensive--both monetarily and in social costs--as we've seen in DC over the last 30 or 40 years.

There will obviously be pockets of prosperity in the suburbs, but disparities of wealth will be distributed more evenly across the city and the suburbs.  [/quote]

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