Granola Shotgun reads like an old conscientious hippie; ideas from his blog include:

Detroit as harbinger -- Many suburbs have the same utilities (power, water, sewage, roads) as cities, however the amount recovered from them only covers the operational expenditures and not the capital expenditures. The cap-ex was provided by some combination of: the property developer, the utility, the city, and the federal government.

When the infrastructure need replacing, the developer will be long gone, the utility will have to borrow from the market and raise residential rates, the already cash-strapped city will have to raise taxes, and the federal government will be beset by thousands of these suburbs that are financial replicas of Detroit.

the money just isn't there - your town is a financial time bomb - lessons learned in zoning hell - authoritarian planning regimes

Resilient Households and Communities -- Due to the expected financial problems, a good retirement place is an off-grid house with a small working farm and with neighbors also producing local goods. A bad retirement local is locked into a consumption-only commune.

For non-retirees, fill in the city and create red-tape-avoiding rehabs.

what actually works - mind the gap - suburban homesteading - the death of household productivity