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The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry | Climate Town (feat. @NotJustBikes)

Climate Town · 3.3M views · 2022-02-07 · 20:59

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Overview

A snarky, comedic video essay from Climate Town, with a guest appearance by Not Just Bikes, arguing that American suburban sprawl and single-family zoning are financially and environmentally unsustainable. It covers how zoning rules shape housing and what viewers can do locally, such as attending zoning meetings.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it as an entertaining but well-sourced explainer on US zoning and housing costs whenever those topics come up.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2022–2025

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What people said

kelvin0 · 2022-04 · Strong recommendation

A funny, yet very well researched video on that exact same topic of Zoning nonsense. Entertaining AND informative. [VIDEO]

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fayten · 2025-09 · Recommendation

This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums [LINK] Noise pollution [LINK] Infrastructure strain [LINK] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [VIDEO] Articles: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [LINK] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.

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fayten · 2022-03 · Recommendation

There are quite a few factors, I'd encourage checking out the following videos by Not Just Bikes and Climate Towns that cover a broad range of city planning and zoning in the US. Strong Towns Play List by Not Just Bikes (This heavily covers city planning issues in the US): [LINK] The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry by Climate Towns (This covers zoning): [VIDEO] How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (This covers the auto industries impact on US cities.): [LINK] Dutch Cities are Better for the Climate (and my sanity) by Not Just Bikes (Not super relevant to zoning, but it's part 1 of The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry so I figured I'd link it.): [LINK] These are pretty snarky, but fun videos and the authors list their sources. Their video descriptions are worth checking out just to find a ton of reading material on each topic.

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Sources

Video by Climate Town, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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