[HN Gopher] Why Galesburg has no money
___________________________________________________________________
Why Galesburg has no money
Author : ingve
Score : 320 points
Date : 2022-01-16 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
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| lr4444lr wrote:
| The fallacy here is fixed costs. A capital project to repair just
| 584 ft. of road is insane. The author then projects these
| outsized fixed costs as the variable cost of fixing all roads in
| the town.
|
| This kind of small job is either something you petition the state
| dept. of transit to do in a special division they have for these
| things, or you find some temporary workaround until a more
| comprehensive road repair plan is warranted. Yes, even in big
| well funded cities sometimes roads are just detoured for months
| if not longer.
|
| The budgetary breakdown of the towns I've lived in simply do not
| support this thesis. The major cost is always schools and to a
| lesser but noticeable extent the police, specifically the labor
| and pensions. Not roads.
| Macha wrote:
| The argument is that the cost cities are paying for the roads
| is less than they need to. Underfund a school by 50% and there
| are immediate consequences - class sizes go up, more consumable
| supplies like photocopying, art or gym equipment run out.
| Student satisfaction goes way down, if they can't heat/AC the
| building as appropriate, they have less personal space in
| classrooms and less time with teachers.
|
| Underfund a road by 50% and in the first year and nothing
| happens. Over a few years, you get potholes. With the standards
| these roads are being built to, in 30 years the road is
| unusable. But there's no money to rebuild it. It was built the
| first time with revenue from new developments, but there's no
| such revenue now. People aren't going to sell their houses and
| give a comparable amount to the city as it took the developer
| in building it to setup that infrastructure (i.e. probably a
| net loss for the home owner, even with property price inflation
| ahead of general inflation) just because the road needs
| replacing.
| talkingtab wrote:
| In Amsterdam, the tax laws were based on the number of feet (or
| meters) of street frontage. Hence even long ago houses in
| Amsterdam tended to go up rather than out. (I don't have a
| reference for this so it may not be completely correct). Clearly
| tax laws should focus on frontage, but even more they should
| focus on the long term costs of the city to provide the
| infrastructure.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>Clearly tax laws should focus on frontage,
|
| That really doesn't make any sense at all imo; if you have a
| flag lot, i.e. a small amount of frontage with a 100 acres
| behind it accessed by the 200'ft of road frontage, shouldn't
| that be taxed higher than someone with a 1/4 lot also with 200'
| of frontage?
|
| I object to the current state of property taxes altogether -
| seen too many people (in some areas) that buy a house live in
| in for 30 years, pay off their mortgage and are forced to sell
| it because all of a sudden the property taxes are $40K/year.
| Doesn't seem right to me.
|
| IMO, taxing people on income is much fairer - by definition as
| you income goes up, you can afford to pay more - but having a
| house that you live in go up in value really doesn't give you
| more ability to pay the tax bill, and we shouldn't be in the
| business of taxing people out of their houses.
|
| 2nd, 3rd, 4th houses - ok in that cases, but a person living in
| their only house shouldn't be forced to sell it just because it
| went up in value.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| That seems way more sensible than what we have the US and is
| more akin to the "land tax" system that's talked about a lot
| here. The property tax scheme we use in the US only "works" as
| long as the city is growing. The moment the population
| stagnates or starts declining, the city rapidly becomes
| unsustainable and must rely on funds from the state or federal
| government to pay for basic maintenance and services.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| IMO, land tax usually refers to a Georgist land value tax.
| That certainly would increase taxes for underdeveloped, large
| plots.
|
| I do wonder though if it's fair to expect people who live in
| high-density areas to pay for the lifestyle of people who
| want to get away from society. I wish we could have a true
| land tax that's fairly high and identical regardless where
| the land is. Sprawl has a lot of negative externalities;
| financial for city and states as well as environmental.
| pooper wrote:
| Quick question: who collects the taxes? Is it the local
| government or the central government?
|
| I suspect we need to take property taxes away from the local
| government to the federal government in the US so businesses
| cannot pressure local governments to give them a handout for
| opening their business there.
| swayvil wrote:
| If schools take most of the tax then reduce school funding. Is
| that crazy?
|
| We have a similar case in my town. Schools get most of the
| property tax. We're paying for laptops for all the kids. Subs are
| making 12/hr.
| tomohawk wrote:
| One obvious problem is that the roads are too expensive to
| maintain, primarily because they are only built to last 20-30
| years. Government expenditure favors employment over long lived
| infrastructure. Legislators favor distributing funds to
| contractors who may reciprocate with campaign funding.
|
| There's no technical reason why these roads could not be put in
| to last far longer than 20-30 years without major repairs.
| Source: family member was a civil engineer specializing in road
| pavement and construction for many decadeds.
| closeparen wrote:
| Perhaps small town and exurban governments will at some point
| find it cheaper to purchase lifted pickup trucks for all three
| families in their community who don't already have one.
| runxel wrote:
| Eventually they will realize that the zoning laws are the
| culprit.
|
| Until then most US urban planning will stay the sh*t show it is.
| gumby wrote:
| I have never heard of Galesburg but I found this analysis
| riveting. Somehow it was more informative to me than the Strong
| Towns posts.
|
| I suspect you can extend this analysis to the country at large.
| The national budget suffers from the same imbalance.
| tzs wrote:
| > Take for example the taxes I pay on my home. I pay $260.17 to
| the city every year in property taxes. I live on a 60 ft wide
| lot. If you take the $20/ft/year road maintenance metric, cut it
| in half because I'm just on one side of the street, and then
| multiply it by the width of my lot you get $600. I would need to
| contribute $600 a year through my property taxes to just pay for
| the maintenance of the portion of the street in front of my
| house.
|
| That is a questionable calculation because the street in front of
| their house is not just used by them. For example, consider a
| dead end street with 100 houses on one side and a forest on the
| other, with each house having the same length of street in front
| of them. Assume each house uses the street once a day to leave
| the neighborhood and once a day to return.
|
| The house at the open end of street, call it house 1, uses the
| segment in front of their house (call it segment 1) 2 times each
| day.
|
| The house next next to house 1, house 2, uses its segment
| (segment 2) 2 times each day and it uses segment 1 2 times each
| day.
|
| In general, house N uses each of segments 1 through N 2 times a
| day and does not use segments N+1 through 100.
|
| Looking at it from the point of view of the segments, segment 1
| is used equally by 100 houses, segment 1 is used equally by 99
| houses, and so on.
|
| Figuring fair share by width of lots is even more questionable. A
| wide but shallow lot and a narrow but deep lot of the same area
| with similar occupancy aren't going to inherently have different
| street usage (or different water, sewer, police/fire, or other
| tax funded service usage).
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Looking at it from the point of view of the segments,
| segment 1 is used equally by 100 houses, segment 1 is used
| equally by 99 houses, and so on._
|
| It doesn't matter.
|
| If a dead end street with 100 houses costs $120000 to maintain,
| those 100 houses must contribute a total of $120000.
|
| You can price that as every house contributing $1200; or as the
| first house contributing $24 for access to one segment, the
| second $48 for access to two segments and so on until the 100th
| house pays $2400.
|
| But no matter how you rearrange things, the houses'
| contributions must sum to $120,000 meaning the mean
| contribution must be $1200.
| rdtwo wrote:
| That's how shared sewer works in my area. The person on the
| end pays the most and the person right at the hook up the
| least.
| tzs wrote:
| Does your analysis change if it is not a dead end street?
| michaelt wrote:
| If it's not a dead-end street, the idea of charging
| different houses different amounts makes even less sense,
| because the resident of the first house might drive past
| the 100th house just as often as the resident of the 100th
| house drives past the first house.
| tzs wrote:
| But if it is not a dead end street then there will be
| through traffic. Why should the people who happen to live
| next to that street be covering the maintenance costs
| that are due to that traffic? And why should they get a
| free ride--no pun intended--for the traffic they cause
| when they drive outside of their neighborhood?
|
| The point I've been trying to implicitly make is that the
| road system is best viewed as a whole. Neither the
| benefits one gains from the road system nor the
| maintenance costs to repair the wear from one's use of
| the road system are in general related to how much of the
| road system is in front of one's house, and so the
| maintenance costs of that segment of the road system are
| a poor way to estimate what you should be paying in taxes
| to support the road system.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Indeed, as soon as you get into "I don't use that so why
| should I pay for it", you're being consumer and not a
| taxpayer.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm sure the author would be the first to agree that this isn't
| a detailed analysis - they had various comments to that effect
| - but it doesn't change the point by anywhere near enough to
| invalidate it. Most roads are not long dead end streets and
| especially now that people use navigation apps there's a lot
| more traffic on neighborhood roads than there used to be, too.
|
| The big problems are low density and how much most cities end
| up subsidizing non-taxpayers who drive a significant fraction
| of road demand with only minimal economic contribution. Those
| subsidies are doubly expensive because they hurt the city and
| discourage use of more sustainable transportation.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| "Fair share" is irrelevant, they're now designing an actual
| taxation policy. Instead they're trying to apportion costs to
| describe how high the expenses are, based on maintenance costs.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Now this leads to question that it only solves problem for that
| road.
|
| What about all the other roads you use? Maybe solution would be
| to mandate tracking on all traffic? So you would pay what you
| use, with pedestrians being billed for maintenance of sidewalk,
| the motorist, heavy traffic and bicyclist the road with some
| reasonable multiplier.
| muth02446 wrote:
| What puzzles me: if you focus on tax revenue per plot area/width,
| dense cities have a huge advantage - not even considering
| economies of scale and stuff like savings for heating/AC. And yet
| dense cities tend to have much higher cost of living and run huge
| deficits. How can this be explained?
| lixtra wrote:
| In some countries you have to pay for the road maintenance and
| development along your plots.
|
| That can lead to other absurdities, that a field owner along an
| agricultural road has suddenly to pay for make over and street
| lights that add zero value to their field.
|
| A solution could be a more federal approach. Residents of the
| neighborhood have to decide how their taxes are used for
| maintenance. And they would directly feel the lack of taxes for
| maintenance.
| bell-cot wrote:
| That solution feels like it needs refinement...
|
| - In a commercial / industrial district (taxpaying companies,
| but no _residents_ ), do those taxpayers decide?
|
| - Is the "Residents...have to decide" voting weighed by how
| much each one is paying? It seems reasonable for Walmart to
| have a bigger say than any of the little stores & restaurants
| across the street from Walmart.
|
| - Is there some "I don't need" opt-out? A farmer growing 640
| acres of corn across the road from Walmart probably doesn't
| even need the road to _exist_ - the dirt roads along the other
| 3 sides of his field are good enough for tractors.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I remember about 8 years ago I read a very interesting report
| (Bloomberg?) that said basically over 50% of American cities have
| overbuilt highly inefficient infrastructure and cannot even by
| greatly raising taxes continue to maintain them. I think it
| called them zombie cities or something like that.
|
| The only choice for the distant suburbs will be to come up with
| some sort of self sustaining infrastructure (old farmhouse style)
| or abandon the suburbs and move closer to the city.
| tankenmate wrote:
| The prime example of overbuilt highly inefficient (and unsafe)
| infrastructure that comes to mind for me is the "Stroad"[0];
| it's somewhat like a comment that Elon Musk made about
| optimising something that shouldn't be there.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
| jSully24 wrote:
| In Minnesota when improvements or repairs like roadwork are done,
| directly effected property owners are billed above their normal
| property tax.
|
| This story explains it better than I can:
| https://www.twincities.com/2020/02/25/15700-street-assessmen...
|
| work on a street with only local traffic will have a higher
| percentage of the project cost paid by the property owners on
| that street.
| adolph wrote:
| This seems like a way to make sure nice neighborhoods have the
| best maintained streets. Oddly regressive for Minnesota.
| jSully24 wrote:
| I had not thought about it from that perspective. That's a
| great point.
|
| My thinking was that it puts real costs in front of people.
| You see more directly what that street to your house costs.
|
| I've always thought about advertising the cost of the section
| road you're in costs to build, maintain, and push the snow
| off.
| adolph wrote:
| I'd agree that putting real costs in front of people is
| important because what people will pay for something is
| critical to understanding the relative value of that thing.
| People don't like toll roads but given there is no free
| lunch, the toll of other roads is just hidden.
|
| On the other hand, I once chatted with a person who
| performed a large wintertime bicycle give-away in low
| income neighborhoods. The operation was so large that they
| ordered bikes directly from factories. I asked something
| like "why don't you put your branding on the bikes then" or
| something like that. The person's reply was that they
| didn't want the bikes to be seen as the free ones--that the
| bikes could be ridden without the stigma of poverty. Maybe
| the roads, sidewalks, bikelanes and parks in any city are
| likewise and the cost of them should be abstracted somewhat
| from the adjacent properties so that any person biking
| along them feels a sense of belonging.
| [deleted]
| rceDia wrote:
| Other than a hospital, schools and big box retail, what is the
| economic "engine" attracting new homeowners? Big box retail was
| the place to spend the cash, but what is the source of "earn the
| cash"? Illinois is a top state for "fleeing" citizens.
| arcbyte wrote:
| Agrigulture and federally funded/entitled raikroads built the
| patchwork of dmall towns in the early/mid 1800s. Starting in
| the 1940s those things began disappearing.
|
| New homeowners are either local kids or retired people bringing
| their retirement money to lower cost of living areas.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Forgot about terraforming Mars; we need to terraform Illinois.
| The weather makes it a great place to be from. The scenery is
| also seriously lacking, except maybe on the western borders and
| the southern part, where hardly anyone lives.
|
| Aside from that, you have the permanently toxic politics.
|
| Don't come at me; I used to live there.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Maytag used to have a refrigerator manufacturing facility in
| Galesburg, which moved to Mexico around the turn of the aughts,
| and incurred a loss of thousands of jobs. Usual NAFTA hollowing
| out of middle America story.
|
| Can't be a strong town when you're a dying town.
|
| https://www.peoriamagazines.com/ibi/2015/mar/galesburg-after...
| everybodyknows wrote:
| A private liberal arts college, 1200 students:
|
| https://www.knox.edu/about-knox/fast-facts
|
| Festivals in the historic district downtown:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galesburg_Historic_District
|
| Doesn't seem like enough.
|
| And note this:
|
| > Walmart builds their buildings to last only 15-20 years and
| then builds a new facility. We are in year 15 of our Walmart,
| so they are exploring their next rebuild. If Walmart leaves its
| current location ...
| niftich wrote:
| BNSF Railway has a major classification yard in Galesburg. Just
| like other railroads, they use their Chicago yard for
| intermodal traffic (loading containers from the trains onto
| trucks and vice versa), and use a nearby yard outside of
| Chicago to manage general traffic.
|
| According to the Knox County Area Partnership [1], the largest
| employers in Knox County (of which Galesburg is the urban
| center) are BNSF, the hospital, the schools, Knox College,
| Blick Art Materials, Gates Corporation, the local government,
| and the prison.
|
| It's fairly common for small US towns to have the local health
| system, local school system, and Walmart (or the local grocery
| store) as the largest employers. Galesburg is more fortunate
| and is more like a typical midwest town, with a handful of
| manufacturers and warehousing-type jobs that exceed the
| standard rural fare, and a college also.
|
| [1] https://www.knoxpartnership.com/top-employers/
| smoyer wrote:
| " _So, what do we do? Can we just pay 3x the property tax to the
| city and fund our roads? Our city already has pretty high
| property tax rates for a city in a state that already has pretty
| high property taxes. We can't raise our property taxes, and we
| can't raise any of the other taxes to make up for the difference.
| What is causing this and what do we do going forward?_ "
|
| I'd love to have property taxes this "high" - I live in a village
| outside a small rural city in PA and my property taxes are about
| four times as much as the author's taxes. The author states that
| they'd need to assess property taxes at 3x in order to fund their
| infrastructure so we'd (in theory) be ahead of our infrastructure
| maintenance. (Clearly this comparison isn't apples-to-apples
| since our properties aren't directly comparable.) I think the
| real answer is that if we're going to restore communities, we're
| going to have to pay more than we're accustomed to.
| kansface wrote:
| My understanding is that Illinois is in a economic death spiral
| wherein taxes are high enough given the quality of life that
| people leave the state thereby increasing the burden on those
| who remain l, perpetuating the cycle. Pensions are the
| enormous, underfunded obligation that can't be shed outside of
| bankruptcy. Increasing taxes only accelerates the problem, no?
| Even if you could stabilize your particular city, the looming
| crisis for the rest of the state will still destroy you
| eventually as proportionally more state money goes to paying
| pensioners who live out of state instead of maintaining infra.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| What a great deep dive into a fascinating subject I have never
| seen the actual math on.
|
| > This section of road is approximately 584 feet long and is
| going to cost around $350,000
|
| This is the cornerstone of the article he uses for all other
| calculations. Is this number reasonable? It seems ridiculously
| expensive but maybe that is just how things are.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Others have said that the $350,000 is reasonable - but let me
| point out that there can be a _wide_ range of "2-line roads",
| even in a small area (so same cost of labor, gravel, concrete
| or asphalt, etc.).
|
| Some rural "2-lane roads" are two barely-wide-enough lanes for
| vehicles, with no shoulders, no curbs, and drainage ditches (so
| no buried storm sewers or anything). Curves can be sharp,
| grades steep, and blind summits frequent. Bridges may be 1 lane
| wide, or have weight limits.
|
| Vs. "2-lane road" in even a modest little city often implies
| pavement wide enough to park on one or both sides of the 2
| traffic lanes, and a _load_ of other expensive upgrades. I 'd
| not be a bit surprised if the cost per mile of that was 2x to
| 5x the cost of a bare-minimum rural 2-lane (paved) road.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This article claims costs of $2-3m for a mile of two-lane road
| in a rural area. 584 feet is a bit over a tenth of a mile, so
| that cost would make sense for building a new road. Not sure
| whether the cost to major repairs or replacements would be
| higher or lower. Also gotta factor in that this article is from
| 2016 and right now costs for building anything seem
| substantially up.
|
| https://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road/
| silvestrov wrote:
| And the road is in a really bad shape, ee Google StreetView:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9373005,-90.3943558,3a,75y,3.
| ..
| pyb wrote:
| I wonder if this is due to the cost of materials, or the cost
| of local labour.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yeah. Fundamentally, roads are really costly. The whole notion
| of designing a city around cars is horribly expensive and we
| keep pretending that's not the case.
| rmetzler wrote:
| I don't know much about American taxes (not even much about
| German taxes) but I think roads should be funded through some
| tax which is connected to cars or fuel.
| dugmartin wrote:
| In America we have state and federal fuel taxes (per
| gallon) collected at the pump. Almost all of the federal
| tax is sent back to the states in the form of interstate
| highway money (and is used as a carrot/whip to impose
| federal regulations on states). In Illinois' case the fuel
| tax is supposed to go to maintaining and improving roads
| but, like any big pot of money, it is frequently diverted
| to the general fund and/or maintaining Chicago's transit
| system (much to the chagrin of the rest of the citizens of
| the state).
|
| At this point unmaintained roads are the least of Illinois'
| concerns. The state has massively underfunded state
| pensions combined with a fleeing and aging population that
| probably means some for of bankruptcy protection in the not
| so distant future. Before that happens all available money
| will be used to fund pension payouts due to how politics
| works in Illinois and the roads will start looking like a
| set of a Mad Max movie.
|
| Source: I was born and raised in Illinois (~40 miles from
| Galesburg) and most of my family still lives there.
| pooper wrote:
| > it is frequently diverted to the general fund and/or
| maintaining Chicago's transit system (much to the chagrin
| of the rest of the citizens of the state)
|
| I don't know for sure but if it is anything like New York
| and upstate, I suspect you will find Chicago pays for you
| guys much more than you think. I think it is almost
| guaranteed that overa Chicago pays for you and not the
| other way around, the only question is magnitude.
|
| In any case, diverting money from road construction to
| public transit is a good thing.
| acdha wrote:
| In the United States there is a gas tax but it hasn't been
| adjusted for a long time and pays less than half of the
| cost of the roads. EVs are also becoming a factor so what
| I'd like would be an annual tax based on the combination of
| vehicle weight & pollution, especially since the comically
| large vehicles a lot of solo office commuters use take up
| enough space to prevent many roads from handling two lanes
| of traffic without someone pulling over to the side.
|
| The other big factor we have is that there's a lot of soft
| subsidy built in with things like minimum parking
| requirements, and a lot of both road and parking
| infrastructure is paid for by developers when first
| constructed but falls back to the city or private owners
| for maintenance. That will only make the current imbalance
| worse over time.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| A very interesting thing I learned once is that road
| damage occurs at the 4th power of the weight. Every
| doubling of weight is 16 times more road damage. This
| drove home how much the road damage is probably almost
| all large trucks.
|
| > The math works out that an empty 18-wheeler causes
| 80,000 times more damage than my plug-in. When it's fully
| loaded, it causes 208,000 time more damage. Both reports
| conclude that heavy trucks cause over 99 percent of the
| road and bridge damage, yet the trucking industry
| contributes only 35 percent of the road taxes.
|
| https://www.concordmonitor.com/Wear-and-tear-on-the-
| roads-23...
| eldavido wrote:
| Buttigieg was pushing a vehicle mileage tax (VMT) based
| on how much you drive.
|
| Eliminate the gas tax, just charge directly based on the
| amount of road use.
| mschild wrote:
| In Germany you have the KFZ Steuer which brings in about
| EUR9.4b every year. You pay KFZ when you have a car.
|
| [0] https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Downl
| oads/...
| Xylakant wrote:
| That's a tax that goes to the federal government only. It
| pays for federal roads (Autobahn and Bundesstrasse) and
| badly at that - the latest numbers I could find are for
| 2018 and there, expenses were above 10 billion euros. (1)
| State roads and roads in cities are paid from the states
| and the cities budget, the KFZ-Steuer does nothing to
| offset those - it's all financed from other taxes and
| fees.
|
| (1) https://www.deutschlandinzahlen.de/tab/deutschland/in
| frastru...
| DocTomoe wrote:
| In Germany, there is no direct link of a tax and where
| that income is being used to - it all goes into a big tax
| pot, and everything is being paid out of that. What you
| mean is a "Gebuhr" (roughly translated to "a fee"), which
| can be linked to a particular expense, but vehicle taxes
| and gas taxes are specifically NOT a Gebuhr.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I very much meant what I said: Taxes do not go into the
| same huge pot from which they are distributed some taxes
| go to the federal governments pot, others to the states,
| yet others to the city/local council (Einkommenssteuer
| and Gewerbesteuer for example). There is some
| redistribution happening, but it's pretty specific
| (Landerfinanzausgleich, the federal government pays for
| some costs which are handled by the local governments).
| So while taxes are not bound to a purpose, but they are
| bound to the part of the government they go to: Federal
| taxes go to the Bundeshaushalt, which pays for the
| Bundesstrassen and Bundesautobahnen (hence the name) and
| since all other roads are not paid by the federal
| government - this they can't be paid for by federal taxes
| (among them the KFZ-Steuer)
| sokoloff wrote:
| > It pays for federal roads (Autobahn and Bundesstrasse)
| and badly at that
|
| If the tax brings in EUR9.4B and the expenses are EUR10B
| per year, that seems pretty balanced to me.
| Xylakant wrote:
| The expenses for federal roads are about 1/2 or 1/3 of
| all road costs. City roads costs are a bit hard to come
| by, but are in the same ballpark as the Autobahn, and I
| could not find a good number for Landstrassen, which
| would be paid for by the states. It's not balanced at
| all.
| sva_ wrote:
| In Germany, landlords have to pay a percentage of the
| cost of roads built around it. In some cases this might
| be a huge percentage, depending on how much the road is
| used by the public.
| Xylakant wrote:
| Only once, when the road is built, ongoing maintenance is
| paid from general taxes.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Actually, no, when the road is being overhauled, the town
| can come back with you with another invoice. See
| "Strassenbaubeitrage" [1]. Sometimes, these are
| prohibitively expensive, forcing homeowners to abandon
| their property, often amounting to several 10k Euros [2].
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stra%C3%9Fenbaubeitrag
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPdigJ6dOL8
| ajuc wrote:
| > The last paragraph sounds like something we've all heard
| before. Anti-progress and looking at the past with rose colored
| glasses.
|
| Building cities around cars is not progress, and arguing for
| making them pedestrian-friendly isn't "anti-progress".
| Suburbanization is just one possible development path and one
| that's not particularly smart.
|
| To fight suburbanization the only thing that will work is taxing
| external costs. So you want to live 30 km away from the city but
| enjoy all the benefits - work there, have access to culture,
| entertainment and services on demand? Pay for the infrastructure
| that city needs to maintain to let you do it. This would make
| suburban lifestyle very expansive and would stop suburbanization.
| But people won't vote for this, because they want the profits and
| someone else to pay for the costs.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Plenty of people want to live in the suburbs precisely because
| they want nothing to do with the city center. They live outside
| it; they work outside it (often on a ring road built
| specifically to avoid the city); they shop outside it; they
| view any requirement to go into the city as a schlep.
|
| If the only "new" penalty is they can't go see the pro sports
| team in person without paying a lot of taxes, that seems like a
| fair trade. (Or they'll go see the NE Patriots at the stadium a
| little over 25 miles from the city.)
| ajuc wrote:
| > often on a ring road built specifically to avoid the city
|
| I wonder who financed the ring road. Curious that we don't
| build ring roads where there's no cities.
|
| > If the only "new" penalty is they can't go see the pro
| sports team in person without paying a lot of taxes
|
| The new penalty should be "you want to live in 100 km radius
| of a city - you chip in for infrastructure it builds the more
| the further you are". It's no accident that suburbanization
| doesn't happen in areas where there are no big cities nearby.
|
| > Plenty of people want to live in the suburbs precisely
| because they want nothing to do with the city center.
|
| Sadly you can't have suburbs without a city center somewhere
| nearby.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > I wonder who financed the ring road.
|
| In the US, that's overwhelmingly the federal government,
| not local property or state sales/income taxes.
|
| > Curious that we don't build ring roads where there's no
| cities.
|
| Indeed. Perhaps the city residents should chip in more
| because of the need to build a ring road to avoid them? Or
| maybe, just maybe, different choices have different cost
| pros and cons and taking a simple, single-variable view
| isn't rich enough to capture the whole situation. (pun
| intended).
|
| > The new penalty should be "you want to live in 100 km
| radius of a city - you chip in for infrastructure it builds
| the more the further you are".
|
| I'd wager that suburbs, villages, and small towns 101-125km
| away would boom under such a plan.
| Macha wrote:
| > In the US, that's overwhelmingly the federal
| government, not local property or state sales/income
| taxes.
|
| With the way internal US wealth transfers work, that's
| basically a way of saying "dense city livers somewhere
| else" rather than it being suburbs US-wide paying for
| each other.
| tclancy wrote:
| Who wants to actively avoid city centers? The Unabomber? I
| live on the outskirts of a small city in a small state and
| happily drive to Boston an hour away for culture, sports,
| etc. I would love it to be closer. I don't know too many
| people nowadays who are afraid of or resistant to going to
| cities.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This comment gets to the crux of the issue which the author
| isn't touching on either. The author points out that we need
| more downtown area and density because that pays for more
| than the cost of maintaining infrastructure it consumes. From
| a city budget perspective it makes sense to then want more
| density.
|
| However, why do we have one lifestyle finance another one?
| Why should people who live in a downtown apartment pay for
| maintaining infrastructure for people who base their choices
| on getting away from others? This is even more crazy given
| that the environmental impact per capita is also much lower
| in denser areas. I'm not even saying that we should have a
| taxation system encourages density, but let's at least have
| one that doesn't exploit density to subsidize the suburbs!
| sokoloff wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the city I live in isn't
| substantially subsidizing the towns and suburbs nearby,
| isn't paying for their roads, bridges, and snow removal,
| and surely isn't doing that for the ones 30 miles away in
| another state entirely.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Within the limits of the same city or town we do see this
| transfer though, as very clearly laid out in the article.
| sokoloff wrote:
| You also have people (like GP) advocating for a 100km
| from the city taxation zone, which is far more than
| "within the same city/town":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955707
|
| I trust city voters can address intra-city financing
| needs, particularly if the more numerous would benefit.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "I trust city voters can address intra-city financing
| needs, particularly if the more numerous would benefit."
|
| Well, I read the article and Strong Towns to say that
| most cities can't.
| sokoloff wrote:
| According to the preferences and opinions of the
| StrongTowns group. If the preferences of the actual
| voters/taxpayers in the city differ from that group, I'm
| inclined to go with the city residents over the
| StrongTowns not-residents.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure
| for super low density development is extremely costly relative to
| how much 'stuff' you're building the infrastructure for.
|
| Initially it's not so bad, because it takes decades before you
| need to do replacement-level repairs/maintenance, but eventually
| it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a
| while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic
| economy, but the ones that don't...it's not pretty.
| Retric wrote:
| > Initially it's not so bad
|
| This assumes it's significantly cheaper to build new roads than
| to rebuild them which seems false on the surface. It could be
| that replacing more roads at the same time would drive down
| costs. If replacing ~600' of roads is 600$/foot how about
| replacing 10 miles of roads?
| burlesona wrote:
| Actually the cost of initial construction and future
| reconstruction is about the same. The problem is the initial
| construction is heavily subsidized either by State or Federal
| "growth" grants, or by developers who financialize the whole
| thing through the sale of federally subsidized development
| loans.
|
| In _theory_ what should happen is the resulting development
| pays enough taxes to pay for all the infrastructure it
| depends on to be rebuilt as needed (typically every 15-30
| years depending on which kind of infra we 're talking about).
| But in practice the taxes are not actually linked to the cost
| of infrastructure (they are much too low) and not enough
| funds are collected to maintain the infra.
|
| This is managed by a shell game where fees from new
| developments (who just financialized their new infra) are
| used to pay the maintenance on old projects that are losing
| money, and where federal subsidies for growth and expansion
| are contorted to uses like widening a scarcely used road that
| is falling part (bc. the feds will pay to expand but not to
| maintain) - which solves the problem for now by making it
| even worse for the next generation.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > The problem is the initial construction is heavily
| subsidized either by State or Federal "growth" grants, or
| by developers who financialize the whole thing through the
| sale of federally subsidized development loans.
|
| Cities also "financialize" the whole thing by selling
| bonds. The real difference is that when the developers
| originally build roads at their own expense (recouping it
| by the sale of the properties they developed), they pay
| much less than what the city then pays later to repave
| them. If you frame the question instead "why does the
| government pay so much more than private companies for the
| same products and services", it pretty much answers itself.
| dantheman wrote:
| Most of the time the roads are built with grants from the
| state or federal government.
| yellowbeard wrote:
| Or by developers
| acdha wrote:
| This is also a problem if they don't have good oversight:
| the developers often cut corners or build something which
| will look good when they're selling units but costs more
| to maintain.
| Retric wrote:
| I was assuming based on the age of the town they where
| continuously paying for roads, grants make this much
| easier.
|
| If they didn't have to pay for the roads to begin with they
| have 30 years to set aside money for the replacement. Even
| minimal interest would drastically reduce their out of
| pocket costs. Grants turn this into a question of bad
| fiscal management, which is definitely an issue but says
| little about how much infrastructure they have.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Roads are initially built with the promise of future returns
| in mind. These estimates of future returns tend to be
| affected by developers, who are acting to encourage the
| approval of development projects.
|
| Rebuilding projects are contemplated in the shadow of actual
| returns, which are harder to lie about.
| pstoll wrote:
| > Roads are initially built with the promise of future
| returns in mind.
|
| Roads are like startups! We should get VCs in on the
| action.
| iratewizard wrote:
| If a road could get a cut of all attached business's
| revenue, and revenues shifted back towards small
| businesses (i.e. away from mega corps), I could see
| private roads being a boon and lawsuits forcing regular,
| quality maintenance. In practice, though, I'm sure it
| would get muddy quick.
| kbenson wrote:
| > I'm sure it would get muddy quick.
|
| I see what you did there...
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Maybe it is caused by rising standards and rising human labor
| costs?
|
| There are many stories where rebuilding or just renovation of
| a bridge was vastly more expensive than constructing it 50 or
| 100 years ago (yes, obviously after adjusting for inflation).
| trhway wrote:
| Also include the "management/administrative tax" - these
| days mid-management is much thicker and consumes and wastes
| tremendously more resources.
| m0llusk wrote:
| No, that is only true when focusing on large infrastructure
| items like bridges and the really scary numbers only show
| up when bizarre outliers like the NYC Second Avenue subway
| are included.
| silvestrov wrote:
| You get money from the initial sale of the lot. This convers
| the cost of initial construction.
|
| After the sale, the town only gets tax revenue which is a lot
| less.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Why not do a traffic study and determine what percentage of
| the traffic on a road is using the road to get to adjacent
| properties, and what percentage is transiting through the
| area. Tax those adjacent properties that percentage of
| maintenance costs of the road. So a large mall presumably
| would be taxed for a fairly large share of the costs of
| maintaing roads that feed customers into the mall. In cases
| where there are roads that don't really go anywhere else,
| they would pay 100% of the costs of maintaining those
| roads. If 50% of the traffic enters the mall, they pay 50%
| of the costs of those roads and the city is responsible for
| the other 50%.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Roads aren't just roads. They are sewer pipes, water pipes,
| gas pipes, telecommunication lines, and power lines. These
| items age and also need replaced. Not sure how much
| remodeling you've ever done, but refits are more expensive
| than having something built in a new structure. It gets even
| more expensive when this infrastructure is in use while
| you're upgrading it.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Can you name one city that did not escape it, and was drowned
| in infrastructure costs? Galesburg is certainly not one of
| them, given how roads constitute a small fraction of its
| spending.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| That's not really how this works. If you don't have enough
| money to adequately maintain your infrastructure, you'll just
| inadequately maintain it instead. You won't plow ahead and
| spend the ideal amount of money anyway, you just let things
| kind of go to crap.
|
| So the failure state to look for isn't a city going into
| massive debt as it drastically outspends its revenues year
| after year, it's a city with infrastructure that's decaying
| and falling apart because they don't have enough money to
| take care of it. Then that's the thing that can have ripple
| effects on the local economy and population.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The problem boils down to this: we've vastly over-paved and in
| general overbuilt our road network. We've paved all sorts of
| roads we should have left as dirt/gravel, but they got paved
| because it's a sign your neighborhood has "made it." It's a
| pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges
| starting around the 50's, without anyone thinking about how we
| were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to
| crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive
| hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that.
|
| Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs
| and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans
| entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes?
|
| If we hadn't allowed the automotive industry to essentially
| dominate american society, we'd have neighborhoods with
| dirt/gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and
| bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars,
| functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc.
|
| Instead we have a country where we're slaves to cars.
| mark-r wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that if a bridge collapses underneath you,
| you're just as likely to die in a SUV as in a sedan.
| aperson_hello wrote:
| To be fair, the "SUVs" that are being sold are effectively
| the same as station wagons of the past (but smaller and with
| better gas mileage).
|
| Hopefully self-driving cars will get us out of this pit of
| car-centric infrastructure, but that's a solution that's been
| a few years out for the past decade.
| plorg wrote:
| Can you outline how this is supposed to free us from car-
| centric infrastructure? Unless it's coupled with style kind
| of Uber-subscription dystopia we would still need room to
| park all of these vehicles. While downtown parking can be a
| problem, garages aren't, and neither of these problems is
| on there scale of the larger infrastructure problems.
|
| The biggest problems with car-centric infrastructure are
| that they require a huge amount of ever-larger roads to
| funnel people (in cars) often tens of miles to do anything.
| Even in the rent-a-taxi scenario you would still need these
| roads, which would probably need more maintenance, not
| less. And all of that sprawl has knock-on effects as roads
| create divisions in communities, and low-density housing,
| enabled by car infrastructure, means you have and know
| fewer neighbors.
| mark-r wrote:
| At least the Uber-style infrastructure doesn't require
| oversizing everything. Even if my car is used 90% of the
| time for commuting by myself, it has to be big enough for
| the other 10% of the time when I'm taking the family and
| our luggage.
| mitigating wrote:
| This might be ideal for side roads leading to a few houses
| but if it's major parts of a town aren't you just move the
| cost of roads somewhere else?
|
| i.e. "I hope you can afford a truck, SUV, or constant repairs
| to your suspensions/tires"
| rexreed wrote:
| Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should
| move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and
| replace and open up for underground utilities.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Roman roads were built with extremely robust foundations
| below which required very large amounts of labor to put in
| place.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| We have excavators, bulldozers, graders, etc, we don't
| need to use slaves to hand-dig road foundations.
| Naga wrote:
| I'm assuming you're speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought
| about why we have problems that the Romans didn't.
|
| I don't know about ease of maintenance and access to
| utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed
| the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on
| the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept
| of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are
| also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that
| survived, not 90% of the roads that haven't) and they were
| not affected as much by freeze/thaw cycles as North
| American roads are.
|
| My intutition says that they also probably were not
| generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here
| have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds
| without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures
| I've seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less
| road width means less maintenance since there's physically
| less roads.
| rexreed wrote:
| Yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's an interesting
| thought exercise. For the high traffic streets where
| there is high speed and also lots of heavy traffic, for
| sure, asphalt dominates for many good reasons.
|
| But for the problems this article discusses for smaller
| cities where their population has moved to suburbs and
| exurbs and where the commercial centers have similarly
| moved out of city core, perhaps the more durable approach
| to cobbles (or brick) might be an interesting way to
| address ongoing maintenance challenges. It's mostly a
| thought exercise, but an interesting one.
| mitigating wrote:
| Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it
| dangerous? There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still
| cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.
| warning26 wrote:
| Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature.
|
| It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight
| asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build
| it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot
| faster!
| rexreed wrote:
| Indeed, that's the core of the argument made in this
| article here (from 2009) which is arguing for a return to
| cobbles / bricks for Georgetown:
| https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-
| allow-...
| mark-r wrote:
| The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale
| imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as
| long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years
| ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and
| made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones.
| Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much
| weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.
| op00to wrote:
| The Roman roads that last a long time are outliers. Most
| Roman roads are long gone.
| occz wrote:
| The roman roads didn't have to bear the load that modern
| roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning
| that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation
| are trucks.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I think it's fine roads are paved. It's just that said roads
| are wider and effectively longer to service the same number
| of people, and this is due to zoning and the way property tax
| is handled.
| acdha wrote:
| The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached
| single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as
| mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions
| for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like
| condos have something of a "hasn't made it" stigma for a lot
| of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of
| inefficient land use.
|
| Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me
| questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for
| college is due to that being the closest many Americans come
| to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most
| people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car
| travel soaks up.
| subroutine wrote:
| Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so
| nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless
| they're commuting to another state.
|
| I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the
| same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of
| downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt
| concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly
| not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to
| maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting
| re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd
| connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced
| since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally
| think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns)
| is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new
| infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over
| maintaining the infrastructure they've already built
| (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just
| filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only
| exacerbates the problem.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_s
| urfac...
| acdha wrote:
| > Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k
| people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a
| car unless they're commuting to another state.
|
| Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that
| I did not restrict it to commuting -- designing around
| car-only transportation means that almost every common
| activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people
| famously underestimate the amount of time they spend
| driving, looking for parking, etc. -- usually "a 20
| minute drive" means "25 minutes if you exceed the speed
| limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and
| parking right in front". If you start measuring that, you
| realize how much time people spend on things like
| unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going
| shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single
| purpose errands in addition to commuting.
|
| > So I personally think the problem (at least for small-
| ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards
| creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways /
| bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've
| already built
|
| Definitely -- and one big factor for this is that single-
| occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's
| always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to
| "defeat" traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage
| so conditions usually only improve for a few months after
| opening.
| rayiner wrote:
| "Brown" people love single family detached houses with
| large lawns. My Bangladeshi family members who immigrated
| to Queens moved to Long Island as soon as they were able to
| afford to do so. One of the major demographic shifts in
| this country is upwardly mobile Black people leaving cities
| to move to the suburbs:
| https://calmatters.org/projects/california-black-
| population-...
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/07/chicago-
| bl...
|
| I like "walkable, high-density environments" myself, but
| most people who care about that are highly educated white
| people and white-adjacent minorities. Which is fine!
| Urbanism is compelling on its own merits. You don't have to
| "brown wash" it.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I interpreted the parent's comment as a reference to
| post-war deurbanization and "white flight," further
| fueled by openly discriminatory lending and occupation
| policies (redlining, etc.) at all levels of government
| and business.
|
| Reurbanization by wealthy whites (and deurbanization by
| some minority groups) are part and parcel with the
| earlier trend, and don't entirely subvert it.
| acdha wrote:
| You'll note that I was talking about how things are
| popularly portrayed, especially in the past -- think
| about how "urban" became a popular euphemism when its
| literal meaning says nothing about about race. It's not a
| coincidence that those images shifted notably after
| desegregation became the law of the land and that was
| enshrined as the way to know you'd made it for decades,
| and it's certainly not a coincidence that almost everyone
| picked it up given how pervasive it was in mainstream
| discourse.
|
| Once that became established, a lot of inefficiency was
| baked in: single-family rather than shared housing,
| driving yourself in a car rather than sharing a bus with
| strangers, not building things like sidewalks or favoring
| cul de sac designs to discourage non-residents traveling
| through a neighborhood, etc. You don't need to know or
| care about the history half a century ago to think of
| those as the default when they're what a lot of us were
| raised in and saw on TV/movies.
| rayiner wrote:
| I still don't understand the point of the race angle.
| Insofar as "urban" is undesirable because it's a
| euphemism for "brown," why would "brown" people be
| striving to move out of urban areas themselves?
| Bangladeshi immigrants don't mind that Queens is full of
| other Bangladeshis. They mind that it's crowded, you
| don't have a big back yard, you have to walk everywhere,
| etc. The things you mention--shared housing, non-
| residents traveling though, aren't things that "brown"
| people like any more than white people.
|
| I think you've got the causality reversed. Most people,
| regardless of race, find suburban living more pleasant
| and more convenient. Urban areas tend to be more "brown"
| because that's often where immigrants start out, because
| "brown" people tend to be younger and lower income, etc.
| Thus, whites are more able to attain the goal of suburban
| living. But it's misleading to make it sound like the
| suburban preference arises out of white dislike for
| "brown" people, because the preference seems pretty
| uniform between races. (If anything, affluent people who
| prefer urban living are more likely to be white, judging
| from the demographics of gentrification.)
|
| Urbanists have a good point that the suburban preference
| might be different if people in the suburbs were forced
| to bear the externalities of their lifestyle. But that
| has nothing to do with race.
| relaxing wrote:
| The point is why there's resistance to dense urban
| living. You seem intent on having a different argument
| entirely. It's ok, no one's saying people of color are
| supposed to inherently dislike the suburbs.
|
| That some hipsters have found renewed value in density
| (mainly access to "culture") is a separate, parallel
| development.
| acdha wrote:
| Do you really think it's a just a random coincidence that
| suburbanization dramatically accelerated after the key
| civil rights era cases prevented cities from segregating
| city services? A ton of the suburbs had racial covenants,
| there was explicit imagery around who your kids would be
| going to school with, realtors and mortgages tried hard
| to steer people into certain areas, police departments
| were famous for following black or Latino drivers around
| if they entered a white suburb, etc. That lasted for
| decades -- Palm Beach police did ID checks on black
| motorists to learn which resident hired them into the
| 1980s! -- and one of the big things keeping it alive was
| this constant narrative that there were lawless hordes
| ready to leave the inner city and rampage through your
| neighborhood.
|
| I don't think it's the only factor but I find it very
| hard to believe that decades of that imagery, often
| openly embraced by the political candidates those
| neighborhoods voted for, was coming from nowhere. Absent
| that, I think there would have been a very different arc
| for American cities between WWII and the turn of the
| century.
| woah wrote:
| > Most people, regardless of race, find suburban living
| more pleasant and more convenient.
|
| This is very easy to disprove: houses and apartments in
| urban areas cost more than in the suburbs.
|
| Most people are not able to afford a large enough
| apartment downtown because there is not enough supply,
| and so they prefer to pay the same for a larger place in
| the suburbs, but this is not the same as preferring the
| suburbs.
| pandaman wrote:
| Do you mean there is some conspiracy that made people
| believe that not sharing walls and ceilings with others is
| somehow better than being always up to date on your
| neighbors business including their music preferences and
| substances they like to consume?
|
| I find this very implausible. I grew up in Soviet block and
| all my friends and relatives grew in very dense small
| apartments yet all of them who could afford moved to houses
| as soon as they could.
| acdha wrote:
| Millions of people make that work and there are many
| advantages: it's cheaper, more energy efficient, and if
| you drive less it's healthier and safer for you and your
| neighbors. If you want to be social, like music, want a
| variety of healthy local businesses, etc. having
| considerably more people makes that work better.
|
| My point was that when one style of living was picked as
| the goal and heavily promoted by policy it locked in a
| lot of negative outcomes like traffic jams and
| challenging local government finances.
| pandaman wrote:
| This style existed since antiquity. Even Roman patricians
| lived in villas, which were standalone houses.
| trinovantes wrote:
| Many suburban cities in Canada like Mississauga are also
| experiencing this. They've finally ran out of land to sell so
| they started raising property taxes and instituted levies
|
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mississauga-a...
| defaultname wrote:
| Mississauga has a density of 2467 people per square
| kilometer. Mississauga neighbourhoods look like this-
|
| https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5675623,-79.740886,916m/data=.
| ..
|
| That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as
| dense as single family homes can get.
|
| Mississauga had to raise property taxes somewhat -- still
| extremely competitive -- as a revenue source dried up. But
| those new neighbourhoods all _easily_ pay for themselves in
| property taxes. Nonetheless, loads of really silly narrative
| comes out of Toronto writers, still foreboding this dire
| scenario that they 've been pitching for well over a decade.
| It's a bit farcical at this point.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > That isn't apartment building density, but that's about
| as dense as single family homes can get.
|
| Roughly the equivalent of pointing to IBM as the most high
| paying and prestigious tech companies can get.
|
| It would be trivial to increase the density there by
| reducing setback requirements, narrowing the roads,
| removing minimum parking requirements.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > That isn't apartment building density, but that's about
| as dense as single family homes can get.
|
| You can get a little bit denser by going full street grid--
| Chicago's single family home districts look to mostly be
| rocking ~6-9k people/km2.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I might be the only one but I strongly prefer grid-layout
| cities to these winding suburb road layouts anyhow. When
| your city is a grid you can make street names mean
| something and a person can navigate from place to place
| easily and have an intuitive idea of how far away
| something is, both without a cellphone.
| toofy wrote:
| you're definitely not the only one. grids make much more
| sense. and not only for ease of navigation.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I think you _are_ the only one.
|
| I grew up in Chicago on a perfect grid. Now I live on a
| street that I picked _precisely_ because you only drive
| down it if you live there. I don 't like the sound of
| cars driving past. That's a personal preference that
| seems pretty generalized, even among people without kids.
|
| And on a street like that, you don't need speed bumps,
| because people aren't speeding down the street.
| slyall wrote:
| A big problem is this sort of design makes it hard to
| walk between places. All travel involves going to the
| main road, going some distance down that and then
| following a new branch. Queue route map that requires 10
| minute drive or get to the "next block".
|
| Not too bad in you car but it means that you can't walk
| or bike anywhere unless they have put in paths between
| blocks. Means that if a 15-year-old kids wants an ice-
| cream their parent has to drive them to the corner store.
| closeparen wrote:
| But that's the thing. The street's utility is exclusively
| to the houses that are on it. Those houses are very
| unlikely to be paying enough property tax to cover its
| existence. This luxury of yours is paid for by other
| people's productive activity in the future. Great deal
| for you! But we the (net) taxpayers ought to think about
| how many more of these sweetheart deals we offer to cul
| de sac homeowners in the future, before we bankrupt
| ourselves.
|
| I'm not a libertarian, I think it's fine for government
| to tap rich people to provide nice things for everyone,
| but this particular nice thing (way more roadway than you
| pay for) has a pretty bad cost:benefit, and its
| beneficiaries are not exactly the neediest or most
| deserving of aid.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| He's definitely not the only person who prefers cities to
| suburbs. What?
|
| Now, I think almost everyone would prefer if their one
| street were not integrated into the grid. That would be
| the ideal. You live in a grid, but with none of the
| downsides. But failing that, _many_ people opt to live in
| denser areas rather than the burbs, even if the cost is
| that folks sometimes drive down their street who are
| going someplace else..
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > about as dense as single family homes can get
|
| These traditional north american houses are still not very
| space efficient at all (large unused garden + lawn + double
| parking spot + garage).
|
| "Suburban" neighborhoods in Europe easily have double or
| triple the density of this. I also see zero townhouses or
| anything with 2+ floors in that area.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _I also see zero townhouses or anything with 2+ floors
| in that area._
|
| Maybe you meant 2+ units? 'Cause almost all of them have
| 2+ floors, and many will have livable basements as well.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>(large unused garden + lawn + double parking spot +
| garage)
|
| I don't know about you, but I actively use and enjoy
| every one of those things.
|
| Perhaps you enjoy apartment living and consider anything
| not active indoors a waste.
|
| If so, good for you, I wouldn't want to impose a garden
| or a parking spot on you. By the same token, calling
| these out as if they could possibly not be useful, simply
| because you do not think them useful, is at best, a
| fallacy.
| tomohawk wrote:
| What Strong Towns hasn't figured out, but which is obvious to
| everyone else, is that cities have really bad failure modes.
| Unfixable failure modes.
|
| The people running the cities run them into the ground by
| applying more and more gold plating to the services they
| provide, making sure to lard the contracts for their friends
| who keep them elected, and pursuing their luxury beliefs
| through unworkable policies. Eventually it all collapses and is
| irretrievable. Then they whine about being underfunded. If only
| they had more money, they could make their luxury beliefs work.
|
| People move out of cities because they do not feel safe, and
| the services suck.
|
| It's really the only option they have, since the people running
| the cities are completely unaccountable.
| brazzy wrote:
| I don't know in what kind of fantasy world you live in.
|
| Pretty much everywhere the dominating trend is people moving
| to cities in droves while the countryside degrades, because
| it cannot provide the services people want.
|
| Can you name any city that has "irretrievably collapsed" in
| that way? Just one?
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > Pretty much everywhere
|
| Um, no. If you mean "moving to blue cities" no, that is not
| the trend. Just the opposite, in fact.
|
| As for "can you name any city": Sure. How about Detroit,
| Cleveland, Newark, Camden, Baltimore, Akron, Hartford,
| Flint, Cairo, St. Louis, East St. Louis for starters?
| hibikir wrote:
| I can tell you about St Louis. The metro area keeps
| growing, albeit slowly. The city isn't, and it's been in
| trouble for decades. The main secret here, and what makes
| St Louis top lists of crime, is that the city itself is
| quite small compared to the metro area itself, which
| makes comparisons with unified metros be anything but
| apples to apples. This separation is also key when it
| comes to the failure of the city's government.
|
| St Louis city was separated from the county in 1876.
| Describing the full details would take forever, but even
| back then, the issues were clear: The issue is the city
| carrying costs, while suburbs get the benefits. This is
| still true today: The metro area is now made of dozens of
| municipalities, each of trying to have lower property
| taxes than their neighbors, while trying to beef up their
| economics via sales taxes, which are paid by people that
| are often outside of that municipality. No suburb has
| property taxes that cover their costs: This is why we
| have unincorporated land, as absorbing it would be
| negative to the bottom line. This is also why there's
| such a high pressure on police as a form of revenue: As
| highways were built in ways that gave small sections to
| many municipalities, so they could raise money from
| people that just pass through.
|
| The city has been badly mismanaged: Its redevelopment,
| not unlike that of most US cities, has been mostly for
| the pleasure of suburbanites that might work there. Wide,
| fast streets that are about as pedestrian unfriendly as
| you can get, over 30% of downtown space dedicated to
| surface parking or buildings solely dedicated to parking,
| green areas that are overly large, and office buildings
| with no commercial real estate in the first floor,
| there's really no reason to spend a second walking the
| streets, barring a few very narrow bar areas. Every
| single thing that makes the suburbanite worker's life
| easier also makes living near downtown worse, which is
| why few people live downtown.
|
| There are a couple of areas, further from downtown but
| still within the city limits, that are doing relatively
| well: They are the ones that have narrow, streets,
| relatively well mixed zoning by US standards, and where
| real estate prices are moving up. Decent dense urbanism
| leads to working businesses. Still, everyone needs a car,
| because outside of said small enclaves, it's really hard
| to move without one. There's also the schooling problem:
| In practice the affluent in St louis have abandoned the
| public school system, and just have private schools for
| whatever preferences you wish. High academic standards,
| diversity-focused, aiming at ivy league universities?
| Yep! Traditional, gender segregated religious schools,
| teaching "traditional values", no problem. Your school
| can be 95% white, 70% asian, 99% black... just don't
| expect a usable public education unless the average house
| in your district is $400k.
|
| I've lived here for over 20 years, and compared to even
| declining cities in Europe, what is so amazing is how
| fragile the economic network is, how little you can
| access if you walk a mile from your house. Even today, it
| sure seems that development decisions are made thinking
| of the people that live in a neighboring municipality,
| instead of local residents.
|
| So what is killing St Louis City, other than
| mismanagement? That a small army of little suburbs are
| doing their best to capture its tax dollars, while taking
| advantage of its services.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Newark and the adjacent Jersey City and Kearny have seen
| _a lot_ of development in the past decade, new high
| rises, and new shops.
| brazzy wrote:
| > If you mean "moving to blue cities" no,
|
| I mean "moving to cities", period.
|
| > that is not the trend. Just the opposite, in fact.
|
| Source, please.
|
| > Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Camden, Baltimore, Akron,
| Hartford, Flint, Cairo, St. Louis, East St. Louis for
| starters?
|
| Don't have the time to debunk every single one of those,
| but the first three are absolutely not examples of the
| claims "The people running the cities run them into the
| ground by applying more and more gold plating to the
| services they provide" or even "People move out of cities
| because they do not feel safe, and the services suck."
|
| Those cities experienced decline due to
| deindustrialization: the over-reliance on certain
| manufacturing industries like steel and automotive to
| provide jobs, which were lost to international
| competition. People moved away because they could not
| find work.
|
| Nor are those cities examples of "it all collapses and is
| irretrievable" - the population of Newark and Cleveland
| has plateaued since the 1990s and is now seeing slight
| increases. And even Detroit has seen a continuous
| decrease of poverty and crime rates in the last 10 years.
| eldavido wrote:
| I think this is an insightful comment and I'm sorry to see it
| get downvoted.
|
| I live in a large condo building. It has its pros and cons.
| It's great, in theory--750-1000 people pooling their
| expertise and funds to tackle infrastructure issues. Great
| recent example: we fixed a sewer lateral (the pipe that
| connects to the sewer under the building). Three of them,
| total cost 200k. Sounds a lot until you realize we spread it
| across ~350 units (600/unit), which is roughly 1/10th what a
| typical suburban homeowner would pay for the same thing.
|
| The other side of the coin is that, in larger political
| structures, governance REALLY matters. You can end up with a
| relatively well-run condo like mine, or a large, wasteful
| organization that squanders obscene sums on pet projects and
| outright corruption.
|
| Many people don't even know this, but SF has been under
| federal investigation for high-level corruption in the public
| works department for over a year [1]. The thrust of your
| comment is correct. Large cities attract large amounts of
| money, much of which gets wasted, or ends up lining pockets
| in hard, or even "soft" corruption, with jobs and contracts
| steered to friends (qualified or not) via patronage networks.
|
| What I think you miss though, is that there's a middle
| ground. You don't have to be either extreme drive-everywhere
| suburbia, or a giant mega-city like Beijing or New York. My
| home town, Homewood, IL, is a nice, walkable city of about
| 20,000, with a nice downtown, plenty to do, and relatively
| honest (if not always saintly) government.
|
| The mid-size towns and suburbs can do a lot more to encourage
| the kind of urbanism the author calls for. Getting explicit
| about cultivating nice, walkable downtowns is a start. Many,
| including Homewood, don't, because "development" and "jobs"
| are seen as unqualified goods, without thinking about the
| cost side of the equation (roads, plumbing, etc required to
| service this stuff).
|
| I've written for Strong Towns. What they get most right is
| that (1) LAND is the scare resource in a town, and (2) cities
| should explicitly encourage uses that lead to the highest
| taxable value of that land. Big box retail isn't this. Denser
| housing and retail districts (I own one of these buildings),
| is. The numbers on this are simple and don't lie.
|
| [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Mohammed-Nuru-to-
| sett...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| What even are you talking about? The trend for the past
| several decades is people moving out of rural areas, into
| urban ones.
| Kye wrote:
| It's driven by ideology, at least in the US. Ideology rarely
| cares for a cost:benefit analysis. If you believe cities are
| dangerous, you'll pay any social or economic price to get away.
| And you'll explain away all the huge drug and weapon busts on
| the Sherriff's office page as outliers rather than seeing that
| it's the same thing that happens in cities. I've witnessed this
| in real time on the local Sherriff's office page. It's
| _bizarre_ , but it's reality, and understanding that reality is
| step 0 to actually changing it.
| refurb wrote:
| Strongtowns is an internet phenomenon (ask a normal person if
| they've heard of Strongtowns).
|
| Small towns are shrinking (and large ones, see Detroit). No
| surprise here.
|
| It's a trend that started 20 years ago and seems to be
| reversing due to housing prices and WFH. Strongtowns is a day
| late and a dollar short.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Downstate Illinois has been in decline for fifty years. The
| climate is harsh, agriculture requires far fewer workers,
| light industry departed, and like upstate New York the region
| is given short shrift by a metro-dominated state government.
|
| Urban planning may be a factor but smart planning could not
| have overcome the headwinds.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > The climate is harsh
|
| Doesn't this seem like a fatal issue right there? Given
| that Americans are free to move anywhere in the US, I would
| expect a general trend towards places that are more
| comfortable to live. Population growth can cover up a lot
| emigration, but the era of large families is over. Cities
| can still draw people with cultural significance, but what
| is the draw of Galesburg IL? Even for people that like
| small towns, there are plenty of small towns farther south
| with better weather.
| analog31 wrote:
| And farther north. Greetings from wisconsin.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > what is the draw of Galesburg IL?
|
| There are two liberal arts colleges in the Galesburg
| "metro" area that draw both students and faculty from
| elsewhere (ps - the big one has a special 5-year 2-campus
| 2-diploma engineering program gives you a BA from them as
| well as, for example, a CS degree from UIUC [1]). The
| student population and their locations support a
| "downtown" that no city of that size and location would
| otherwise be able to support and therefore likely draws a
| lot of the rural population for entertainment.
|
| We pass through there a few times a year on the way to
| our favorite camping spot. I'd say their biggest problem
| and much of the cause of the sprawl-style development is
| that there is a bypass road on the north side of the city
| built nearly to interstate standards, complete with on-
| ramps and off-ramps. But it is flagged as both a US
| highway and a state highway so the chance that Galesburg
| has any control over it at all is pretty close to 0.
|
| [1] https://www.knox.edu/academics/majors-and-
| minors/engineering
| iandanforth wrote:
| There are a couple good ideas in the article my favorite is:
|
| "As a town we are essentially a fixed plot of land cultivating a
| crop of buildings which we tax to fund our [town]."
|
| But myopic statements like "We can't raise our property taxes,
| and we can't raise any of the other taxes to make up for the
| difference." just strike at the heart of American self defeating
| ideologies.
|
| Also the statement "By being incorporated, our town is
| essentially a corporation where the citizens are the investors
| and stakeholders in the business that is Galesburg Inc." is
| deeply misinformed. It's like saying "We have some strawberry jam
| so we should us it to hold open this door because it's a jam."
| honkycat wrote:
| I grew up in Forgottonia, about an hour from here.
|
| I have to say... A lot of the problem is brain drain, lack of
| nature and recreational activities... And the factories did
| leave.
|
| Forgottonia gets its name because it missed out on a lot of
| economic development and was essentially bypasses by the highway
| system, which lead to factories moving away and the region
| becoming impoverished.
|
| I am sure there are many beautiful and wonderful small
| communities out there, but the people have left this area and
| they are not coming back. The jobs are not coming back, they are
| not going to build more infrastructure, there is nothing notable
| except for cornfields and flat forest land to bring people in.
|
| I'm sure the poor infrastructure planning did not help, but my
| opinion is that the problem with Burlington is that it has
| nothing to offer anyone anymore.
| siruncledrew wrote:
| Great, thorough read. As someone that doesn't have any life
| experience of what towns/suburban development was like prior to
| the 1990s, what was interesting is the part where the article
| brought up the types of big changes happening after WWII.
| Building roads everywhere, zoning houses with big yards, building
| big new commercial complexes on the outskirts because they needed
| more land.
|
| It seems like there was a ton of exuberance and pride post-WWII,
| but terrible investment strategizing. All these "developments of
| the future" saddle so much cost over time that it makes the
| financial balancing act to stay long-term sustainable very
| precarious. (Of course, this is all retrospective looking after
| the fact).
|
| What seems like a crazy takeaway is: with these towns like
| Galesburg that have been around over 150 years, it seems like the
| town planners in the 1870s had better judgement than the ones
| post-WWII.
|
| Despite the conventional thinking of the last 60 years across
| these towns being all those bad investment decisions were
| believed to be the pinnacle of American real estate development
| and bonafide testaments of greatness.
| masklinn wrote:
| > It seems like there was a ton of exuberance and pride post-
| WWII, but terrible investment strategizing. All these
| "developments of the future" saddle so much cost over time that
| it makes the financial balancing act to stay long-term
| sustainable very precarious. (Of course, this is all
| retrospective looking after the fact).
|
| Do note that it was not just "exuberance and pride", it was
| also a way to get white families out of inner-city mixed-race
| neighbourhoods, and to enforce segregation.
|
| This was not a secret either e.g. William Levitt refused to
| sell levittown homes to racial minorities, and deeds came with
| a racial covenant.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| How does this matter to how we tackle the financial problems
| of cities in 2022?
| masklinn wrote:
| ...
|
| I was specifically replying to a segment about the
| reasoning behind the creation of those places, to indicate
| that financial viability far from the only input into their
| design.
|
| If these cities were not created with financial viability
| at the forefront, it's unlikely you can magically make them
| financially viable.
|
| But I guess you're more of the "ignoring inconvenient
| history" persuasion. I've had bosses like that, always
| asking for solutions to the problems they'd created
| (against advice) and oddly enough never interested in riot
| cause analysis when there was any chance it would not be
| favorable to them.
| mcguire wrote:
| The Kensington looks to be 7 stories, .44 acres; that gives it
| about 134,000 sq ft. There are 171 1-bed, 1-bath units, (and
| apparently 2-bed units) so ~800 sq ft per apartment. Its total
| property tax bill is $82,000, or about $480 per apartment, or
| about $1.60 per sq ft. (That's a little odd, since apartments.com
| shows a "similar rentals nearby" 1-bed, 1-bath apartment as $450
| per mo. (But it's 250 sq ft. (OTOH, The Kensington is unlikely to
| be entirely devoted to apartments. YMMV.)) In comparison, the
| author's property (.18 ac, $1693.14 per year) is about 22C/ per
| sq ft.
|
| So here's my question for the author: Would you be willing to
| live in an 800 sq ft apartment paying 7 times more property
| taxes, per sq ft, or roughly 1/4 total?
|
| (Oh, by the way, The Kensington is an assisted living facility,
| meaning that the residents are likely paying somewhat more than
| $480 per month (or at least Medicare is), which is likely why
| they can afford $82,000 per year in property taxes rather the
| Kensington being an empty building. (Trying to fill downtown with
| assisted living facilities is an exercise for the reader.)
|
| " _You could build 3 of these 18 foot wide houses and people
| would want to live in them and they'd be profitable for the city
| per the infrastructure needed._ "
|
| Here's a collection of 18 foot wide house plans:
| https://houseplans.co/house-plans/search/results/?q=&am=&ax=...
|
| And here's realtor.com on Galesburg:
| https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Galesburg_...
|
| * https://www.apartments.com/the-kensington-galesburg-il/qyk39...
|
| * https://thekensington.net/index.htm
| sackofmugs wrote:
| I don't understand why they divide the appraised value by three,
| then compute 1.5% property tax from it and say they can't raise
| it any higher. Where I live, our property tax rate is higher even
| with a homestead exemption AND we don't divide by three. Simply
| removing the division would fix the revenue problem according to
| the article's math.
|
| More specifically, right now I just checked and I pay 1.6% of my
| home's appraised market value each year as property tax.
| Galesburg pays 0.5%. So there's an easy fix.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Doesn't Illinois have pretty high taxes to begin with? I'm not
| a tax expert but I've heard this repeatedly stated while living
| in Chicago.
| airza wrote:
| It would let the revenues pay for the cost of the roads in the
| city, but not the rest.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| Yeah... I'm in the UK and my council tax (nearest equivalent)
| is currently about 1.7% of my house's value p/a, although
| council tax is fairly regressive and has a hard cap. Whenever I
| hear Americans complaining about how terrible their
| infrastructure is (and it is compared to every other developed
| country I've ever been to) I can't help but wonder why you
| don't do the obvious thing and just pay to fix it.
|
| edit 1.7% not 2.7%!
| [deleted]
| arethuza wrote:
| Interesting, our council tax here in Fife in Scotland is
| about 1% of our house valuation and that includes water
| supply and waste water.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| Should have been 1.7% not 2.7%! Fat fingers. Combination of
| being in band C while living in a small flat that's not
| worth much.
| ajuc wrote:
| UK has population density of 280 people per km2, most of
| Europe has over 100, USA has 36. It's ok if you put everybody
| in densely populated areas, but when you spread them around
| you either pay 10 times the taxes or get 10 times worse
| infrastructure. There's no cheating math.
| adrianN wrote:
| Averaging over a country the size of the US is not
| particularly useful for variables like population density
| that most likely follow an exponential distribution.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Unless you are paving the Nevada Desert, that comparison is
| basically useless - it includes areas where nobody lives so
| they need no maintenance.
| ajuc wrote:
| There are such areas in every country. USA might have
| more of them but not so much more that it cancels out the
| low population density entirely. You still have to have a
| road going through these areas.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| That road comes out of state or federal taxes though.
| It's still a coat but not relevant to the math about city
| budgets. And yes, there is so much more space in the US
| even without leaving populated areas.
|
| The lower density in urban areas is still real though.
| jcranmer wrote:
| A substantial fraction of the US's land area is locked up
| in Alaska, where there _isn 't_ "a road going through
| [the low-density] areas." What little long-distance
| infrastructure exists there is almost entirely driven by
| the existence of extractive industries (notably, but not
| exclusively, oil) that are lucrative enough to put in
| that infrastructure.
|
| Rural Europe tends to be as lightly populated as, say,
| rural eastern US, not rural High Plains, let alone rural
| Alaska.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There aren't - look at slovakia, Czechia, Germany,
| France. In fact, where EU is one such area?
|
| The other post here has done a total length of road
| network, which is actually a good metric.
| ajuc wrote:
| Mountains are one example. There are still people living
| there, but not nearly as much as in the densely populated
| parts. That's how it looks in Slovakia:
| https://govisity.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/04/Jahnaci_stit...
|
| North of UK is almost empty. North-Eastern Germany has
| population density similar to USA which is pretty low
| compared to the rest of the country. France and Spain
| especially are sparsely populated outside of the big
| metro areas.
| vidarh wrote:
| Most Americans live in areas far more dense, though. Even
| the least dense US states have far higher density in the
| areas housing the vast majority of their populations.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| In the context of this article, the difference is not as
| much as you'd think. Basically every road in the UK is
| paved. That isn't true of the sparsely populated parts of
| the US.
|
| The US has 4.3m km of paved road for a population of 331m.
| That's $287bn per year upkeep (at the $20/ft rate), so each
| resident needs to pay $864/year for road upkeep.
|
| The UK has 0.4m km of paved road for a population of 67m.
| That's $28bn per year, so each resident needs to pay
| $421/year for road upkeep.
|
| In other words, Americans should only need to pay 2x the
| tax, not 10x the tax.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This analysis is worthless. A good place to start would
| be with comparison of road design standards which would
| show that American roads are built much wider and with
| more additional features, which is stuff like curbs and
| not necessarily sidewalks or bike paths. If Americans
| started building roads to British standards then there
| would be an uproar.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| I suspect it's not as bad as that as it's not like people
| are spread evenly across the USA, they're concentrated in
| the coastal States and then further concentrated in urban
| areas. I agree the USA's low housing density makes some
| infrastructure more expensive to maintain though. One of
| the other differences is that in the UK taxation raised by
| central government pays for services that in the USA are
| paid for out of local taxation. Education is the most
| obvious one - schools are paid for largely out of the main
| pool in the UK rather than being paid for via council tax.
| There are also various redistribution mechanisms intended
| to move money from richer to poorer areas, urban to rural
| and England to the other nations to compensate for
| geographic inequalities.
| beowulfey wrote:
| See the pie chart in the post again -- citizens of Galesburg
| are paying 9.89% property tax on their home, not 0.5%. There
| are a lot of other taxes that make up the total property tax.
| Your 1.6% is incredibly low, in my experience.
| sackofmugs wrote:
| I don't believe their property taxes are 10%. $50,000 per
| year on a $500,000 home? Come on
| macinjosh wrote:
| Yeah just charge the working families just scraping by that
| make up a town like this 3 times more. Jobs done! /s
| PostOnce wrote:
| The city tax isn't the only tax, they also pay county (and
| other?) taxes raising the total well beyond 0.5%?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Yes, but that's also an argument why "tripling the tax" isn't
| something impossible, since tripling the tax that goes to the
| city would mean a relatively small increase to the total
| property tax someone is paying.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Illinois calculates property taxes off of 1/3 assessed value.
| Apparently it allows the rates to not have to go out to an
| insane number of digits.
|
| But it gets weirder. The city/county/ whatever determines their
| budget and uses property taxes to determine how that cost is
| allocated across residents. What happens when housing prices
| fall? Simple! They take a multiplier, and increase all
| assessments by some factor.
|
| People think property taxes set the budget, when in fact the
| budget sets properly taxes
| kristjansson wrote:
| I don't get that part either. OTOH, an effective property tax
| rate of 3.2% or so seems much more reasonable that the 9.8%
| percent implied by his table. Assuming people but anywhere
| close to as much house as they can afford, the city taking 10%
| per year seems just confiscatory.
| Findeton wrote:
| Don't people think it's just crazy having to pay the overlords
| a wealth tax? One thing is to pay for capital gains or new
| income, but you already paid taxes when you bought the
| house/property.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| But isn't it that you also need repair stuff with your house?
| The same for public property - it's never "finished" and
| needs repairing, etc.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Money spent on taxes doesn't go to fix your own property.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| No it goes to fix the shared infrastructure. People would
| definitely like it less if they were billed for the
| infrastructure costs directly. For example it's clear
| here that the downtown subsidises the sprawl.
| charcircuit wrote:
| But why take it out of property tax?
| imtringued wrote:
| Are you going to tax income so landowners become richer
| at the expense of others?
|
| Do you want landlords to charge for public services that
| they did not provide?
| charcircuit wrote:
| I don't know. I don't like paying any tax. Maybe you
| could have the government start companies to make money
| instead of taxing others.
|
| >Do you want landlords to charge for public services that
| they did not provide
|
| I'm not quite sure what you mean by this, but it's not
| legal to sell an item or service and then not give them
| that item / service.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Do you think that it costs the government more to protect a
| homeless person or a person with a house? Do you think it
| costs the government more to protect a person with a house,
| or a person with a mansion?
|
| Piles of wealth require protection. Without government
| protection, they would be expropriated without considerable
| expenses on private security.
|
| Income tax is the tax that is hard to justify. Wealth taxes
| are taxes to protect wealth, and sales/transaction taxes are
| taxes to enforce sales and transaction agreements.
|
| Libertarians believe those should be the only functions of
| government. If you don't even believe in those, you're an
| anarchist, or maybe even a Mad Maxist.
|
| edit: imagine the absurdity of people sharing a rented shed
| paying as much for fire and police protection as a person in
| a mansion.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Yeah, income tax is the real evil.
|
| I live in Scandinavia, and the high income tax (and no
| property or inheritance tax) keeps the class system intact
| for generations. You can't work your way up when the
| government is taking almost 60% of your income.
|
| That said, I'd still prioritise abolishing sales tax on
| groceries and electricity here. Both are incredibly
| expensive and make life a struggle for a lot of working
| people.
| mavhc wrote:
| Most countries have more of a scaled income tax, but
| Sweden has 57% if you earn 1.5x the average. Why is that?
| nivenkos wrote:
| To keep the class system intact. The ultra-wealthy don't
| pay much more tax (and don't pay property or inheritance
| tax, and capital gains tax is also lower than income tax
| (wtf?)). It's a far less progressive country than the
| marketing would have you believe.
|
| And unfortunately all the political parties are just
| focussed on giving more money to the boomers or
| liberalising the housing market, so it won't change any
| time soon.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I think inheritance tax differs across Scandinavia, just
| a small point really not detracting from your message. In
| Denmark there's definitely one, Sweden it's none or much
| lower, not sure.
| ptr wrote:
| You can even chose to pay 0.375% on your assets p/a,
| instead of the capital gains tax. Pretty good. But you're
| exaggerating the income tax situation. ~60% is the
| marginal tax rate, you only pay that for a part of your
| income over a certain level.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Can you choose year by year? I'd think most years 37.5bps
| on assets would be way cheaper than capital gains, but in
| a down year, you might choose to pay capital gains. (Or
| you could "bunch" realized gains into every other or
| every third year and take the wealth tax option only that
| year.)
| ptr wrote:
| It's a special kind of account, you can sell everything
| and withdraw the proceeds, then buy new assets outside
| that account. So you can choose, but not retroactively
| (unfortunately!)
| pessimizer wrote:
| Consumption taxes are regressive and bad, but at least
| they're justifiable. Without government protection, the
| poor/weak have no rights that the rich/strong have to
| respect; they end up enslaved, serfs. So they pay a
| poverty/weakness tax.
|
| Imagine the effort that a government has to put in to
| offset racist discrimination, as an example. While we
| might say that racism is a problem caused _by_ the
| racist, we can 't say that racism is a problem _for_ the
| racist. It 's a problem for the race being discriminated
| against. Levying a tax to pay for that expense makes
| sense in a purely payment-for-services model of
| government. Lots of Europe used to charge Jewish taxes,
| and the Islamic world both Jewish and Christian taxes.
| nivenkos wrote:
| I see it more as a reasonable way of shaping behaviour.
| Like taxing diesel, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. is fair
| enough if it helps create a better society.
|
| Taxing electricity whilst trying to encourage people to
| switch their homes from gas and their cars from diesel,
| is just crazy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You then run into the question of _whose vision_ of a
| better society you 're enforcing. But aside from that you
| can really look at those taxes as something to _offset_
| the additional costs of commerce in those things. We 've
| agreed that emissions are a danger, cigarettes raise
| health care expenditure, and alcohol raises police
| expenditure. We use those to justify the specific amounts
| of the taxes.
|
| If this weren't the justification, there's no reason not
| to just ban the things you don't approve of altogether,
| rather than just taxing them.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Without government protection, the poor/weak have no
| rights"
|
| Without government protection the poor start cutting off
| heads, see the French revolution. Every time there is
| civil unrest, from peasant uprising in medieval Russia,
| to Occupy Wallstreet to Anonymous DDOSing websites, the
| government is out in force to out it down.
|
| Having a few limits on power, like "you cant discriminate
| by race, but discriminating by class is cool" does not
| mean thay the state is suddenly protecting the poor.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Do you think it costs the government more to protect a
| person with a house, or a person with a mansion?
|
| These are the same. If someone were to trespass onto your
| property it's going to be up to you to defend it. The
| police are too far away to come save you. There's no
| difference from the police's perspective since the size of
| your property doesn't matter to them. Whatever work they do
| upstream to protect you does not depend on the size of your
| property.
| imtringued wrote:
| If the police were close to you, the value of that plot
| would be higher, or at least its associated costs would
| be.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Do you think that it costs the government more to...
|
| These are trick questions, it costs the same amount. The
| cost to arrest a criminal is the same no matter who they
| are robbing. Ditto the fire & police protection - those
| emergency services protect lives that are equally valuable.
|
| And it is obviously cheaper if wealthy people take on
| private protection - they already pay the vast bulk of
| government services which are mostly rich -> poor transfer
| payments. If it were a reasonable option, the billionaires
| of a country would take their own private army over a
| government funded one. It would cost them half as much as
| the taxes they pay if they live in the US (because transfer
| payments make up around half of US government spending).
| adrianN wrote:
| If there is something of higher value to steal, thieves
| are willing to take larger risks to get it, so you have
| to expend more effort if you want to prevent that.
| pnut wrote:
| Plus supervillains. They're notoriously expensive to
| arrest.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "If it were a reasonable option, the billionaires of a
| country would take their own private army over a
| government funded one"
|
| We already ran this experiment, it was called Feudalism.
| We don't have Barons and Lords because they got
| obliterated by unified nation states in wars, every time.
|
| There are people who'd give their life for
| America/Freedom/ etc, have you ever met anyone who would
| for Mark Zukerberg?
|
| Under current system police enjoys mahor privilidges -
| qualified immunity, resisting arrest is a crime, etc.
| Since such multiple private army/police's might come into
| conflict, those privilidges have to go. We'll be back at
| feudal warfare
| roenxi wrote:
| > We don't have Barons and Lords because they got
| obliterated by unified nation states in wars, every time.
|
| Arguably the most militarily successful empire in history
| [0] has Barons and Lords and is nearly contemporary with
| this conversation (Elizabeth II isn't even dead yet). I
| agree democracy is better, but "we're better organised
| and we'll whack you if you don't pay protection money" is
| a weak justification for taxes. The counterargument is
| that bullying is a decent tactic but a bad strategy - it
| is hard to get people to seriously buy in to bullying and
| relatively unstable when the situation changes.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire
| PostOnce wrote:
| Houses need roads and plumbing and a fire dept and electrical
| and all kinds of stuff, dog catchers and such.
|
| These things aren't a buy once product, they require
| maintenance fees.
|
| Civilization costs money, and its worth it.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| No, because the services you expect from living there do need
| to be paid some way or other.
|
| > One thing is to pay for capital gains or new income, but
| you already paid taxes when you bought the house/property.
|
| Servicing the property obviously costs ongoing money, so why
| wouldn't the taxes be ongoing?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Take for example the taxes I pay on my home. I pay $260.17
| to the city every year in property taxes. I live on a 60 ft
| wide lot. If you take the $20/ft/year road maintenance
| metric, cut it in half because I'm just on one side of the
| street, and then multiply it by the width of my lot you get
| $600. I would need to contribute $600 a year through my
| property taxes to just pay for the maintenance of the portion
| of the street in front of my house. But I'm not, I'm
| contributing less than half. Almost no single family houses
| are contributing enough in property tax to support basic
| necessary maintenance of the street in front of their house.
|
| > The smallest lot width you can have in Galesburg with the
| current zoning code is 50ft in R3 districts. With that 50 ft
| lot you would need a house worth $98,500 just for the city to
| break even on the maintenance of your portion of the street.
| If you have a 100ft wide lot you need an assessed value of
| $197,000 to break even. While wide lots may be nice to have
| and historically how we've built housing, they have a tough
| time paying the city back for the services they consume.
|
| > Is every house and building going to pay for all the
| infrastructure it uses? No. There will be plenty that do not.
| Does that mean that corner lots have to be twice as valuable
| to pay for both the streets? Also no. Another way to look at
| properties in an apples to apples comparison is to use the
| metric of total property taxes paid per acre. Why is that?
| The greater the area the further road and water
| infrastructure needs to extend and the further away police
| and fire services need to travel. So comparing on a per acre
| basis is a good proxy for how productive it is for the city.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I pay over $4,000, for a 75-foot-square lot. People marvel
| at how low my taxes are. The average around here, is three
| times as much.
|
| It doesn't bother me that much. I live in a fairly affluent
| area, with good services and infrastructure. The schools
| are also excellent.
| imtringued wrote:
| It is crazy to have private ownership over publicly funded
| services. The government built the infrastructure that made
| your plot of land valuable so it is only fair to pay a land
| value tax. If you don't do that then the rich will become
| your overlord instead and they charge as much as they can get
| away with.
| barnabee wrote:
| No, I think property (or better, land value) taxes are
| probably the _most_ justifiable of all taxes.
|
| You are occupying land, which is scarce. Noone else can use
| it, but except for some accident of history or geography you
| have no more right to one there than anyone else. It makes
| total sense that you compensate society for your use of the
| land.
|
| There is a lot to like about Georgism.
| Proven wrote:
| igorkraw wrote:
| There are people (free market people, not communists) who'd
| argue the idea of owning land as a private person and
| extracting rent/speculation is folly itself and who'd argue
| you should either pay much higher taxes (Georgism) or they
| you should only be able to lease land from the community
| around you.
|
| Free market capitalism doesn't work well (in terms of social
| welfare) with natural monopolies, and land could be called
| the ultimate natural monopoly.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> There are people (free market people, not communists)
| who 'd argue [...] you should only be able to lease land
| from the community around you._
|
| At first this sounded like an extreme point of view to me -
| then I realised how often I've heard people saying there's
| nothing wrong or exploitative about being a landlord. We,
| as a society, see nothing wrong with people spending their
| entire lives living on rented property.
| imtringued wrote:
| The landlord can't exploit you, only the land owner can.
| It just turns out that they are usually the same person.
| In the case of the homeowner they are not.
|
| Also, if we consider taxation exploitative then we should
| limit it to resource based taxes like land value tax.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Eh, that's an extreme position. Mostly we say that property
| taxes should be around half the land rent value, i.e.
| around half the value the property generates without taking
| into account what's built on it.
|
| This has the rather obvious difficulty of having to
| estimate the yearly value generated by the land itself,
| which is a topic too large for me (but solvable), while
| having a large number of advantages. It aligns incentives
| very very well, and that's hella important. If a
| municipality develops an area with proper regulation,
| infrastructure and various services, the land value grows
| which gives them extra income. It has a much more direct
| invest->income dynamic.
|
| It also incentivizes owners to be a lot more aligned to the
| interests of the community around them. You want to have a
| home with a large yard in the middle of the city, instead
| of developing it more in line with the location? You can,
| but you'll pay for it.
|
| It also forces owners to align to the community around them
| continuously. If currently you own a piece of land which is
| way underdeveloped, the only moment when anybody even cares
| about this is when it's being sold. As opposed to having to
| adjust each year to current land value and land taxes -
| you're not forced to do something about it, but it's surely
| on your mind a lot more when you see taxes grow.
|
| Ah, and it fixes NIMBY, and dramatically lowers rent.
| Apartment buildings are very efficient, so they'll be
| favored exactly where they make sense - in crowded, high-
| value land areas.
| imtringued wrote:
| Baden Wurtemberg doesn't give a damn about the complexity
| of the assessment, they already have to assess land value
| for estate taxes. The assessment argument is actually
| complete rubbish. The assessment rules for the rest of
| Germany are significantly more bureaucratic. Assessing
| building value is an even bigger nightmare because you
| cannot automate the majority of assessment work. You also
| don't have to asess every single building. You can asess
| the value of bigger plots of land spanning multiple
| properties and allow an appeal process for special
| circumstances.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why half? Is that just an arbitrary number?
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Theory says 100%, half is just a realistic target.
| tr33house wrote:
| This is a general statement about smaller towns in general: I
| also think that the fact that the US birth rate is falling (for a
| myriad of reasons) is partly to blame. Not that the author can do
| anything in particular about it but it's a problem we must face
| as a society
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Yeah, the author's video shows a hustling bustling main street
| with children running around. Today, the children are half as
| numerous, and they're all inside to be sheltered from the
| lethal traffic that they could run into.
|
| I have many acquaintances who won't procreate for economic or
| climate reasons. I totally get that, however if everyone chose
| that path, there'd be no more human race, other than the
| occasional accidental child. That would lead to demographic
| collapse, the aging populace wouldn't have anyone to support
| their wants and needs. Not a good outcome.
| intrasight wrote:
| I live in a "strong town". On my modest home, I pay $8000/yr in
| property taxes. In addition I pay over $10,000 in local income
| tax to the town. The housing market is strong. Houses sell within
| days. The schools are excellent. The roads are well-maintained.
| The community center is awesome. Taxes are too high for sure, but
| we get outstanding services and facilities for those taxes.
|
| Galesburg is a city not a town. It can't benefit from the wealth
| effects of a town within 20 minute commuting distance (car and
| bus and light rail) of a major city. Small cities like Galesburgh
| can only thrive if they bring in significant outside money -
| usually in the form of tourism and tourist who decide to stay. I
| think of Bend OR as an example.
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| I don't live there anymore, but it so weird to see my hometown on
| the front page of Hacker News. Some of my friends still live
| there and it is depressing to hear them talk about what's going
| on. When I have gone back and visited, nothing seems to be the
| same anymore, save for the few restaurants I liked.
| stephaniepier wrote:
| Small world, it's my hometown too! I had to do a double take
| when I saw the headline. My parents are still there but they're
| looking to leave. It's so different there than it was 20-30
| years ago.
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| This will sound off-topic. Not being snarky, but genuinely
| curious about answers:
|
| How do you ensure equality of opportunity to all students
| everywhere if the quality of education they receive is tied to
| how wealthy their town is?
|
| Surely, there can be a better answer for small towns.
| collaborative wrote:
| Controlling funding for education is extremely tempting for
| state and national politicians. It's better handled at a local
| level because this way you give parents a chance at choosing
| the type of education students receive
|
| The drawback is the inequality in funding
|
| But just to give you an example of what can happen when
| education is funded at a state level: majority of voters could
| elect an oppressive regime that targets minorities, and impose
| a certain type of education that is detrimental to them (i.e.
| not in their mother tongue)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I do not see how you can replace the benefits of network
| effects of growing up in and around wealthy and knowledgeable
| people and their families. It is human nature to trust people
| more in your own network or close to your own network than
| outside of it.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Retail isn't coming back like it was. Downtowns in the past
| centered almost entirely around retail businesses. The author
| spends a lot of time bemoaning Walmart and other big box stores,
| but even the box stores themselves are facing more pressure than
| ever from Amazon. A small retail store in a run-down third rate
| city doesn't stand a chance at success against the economies of
| scale and expectations of consumers that exist today. If a town
| can draw in boutique retail and bars and restaurants, it can
| sometimes be revitalized to an extent, but that seems to be the
| extent of what's possible with old downtowns.
| mark-r wrote:
| I read a story in the last couple of years about small towns
| that shot themselves in the foot by keeping out the big box
| stores - I wish I could find it again. The theory was that the
| traditional small downtown couldn't meet 100% of everybody's
| needs, so they started shopping at places like Amazon. And once
| you start shopping at Amazon, it just becomes convenient to do
| more and more of your shopping there. Suddenly instead of your
| downtown being killed by the big boxes a mile out of town,
| they're being killed by someone much bigger and farther away
| and harder to fight back against.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yeah small retail is basically done. All that's left if
| restaurants and services. And those are getting destroyed by
| Covid.
| ghaff wrote:
| I live in the country near a couple of small cities about an
| hour outside of a major city. The small cities are probably
| best described as "hanging on." I basically frequent businesses
| that aren't food oriented once in a blue moon--and never walk
| around the downtowns. I do shop in the city limits but it's
| mostly either a supermarket or the Walmart. The travel agency
| downtown sure isn't going to pull in a lot of traffic.
| javitury wrote:
| > As a town we are essentially a fixed plot of land cultivating a
| crop of buildings which we tax to fund our corporation
|
| This is a very interesting point of view that I have not seen
| anywhere else. However it omits side-effects that buildings have
| on citizens other than taxes, e.g. hospitals improve health,
| universities improve human capital of citizens, factories create
| network effects with respect to suppliers and retailers, etc. A
| healthier and more educated workforce will be more productive and
| a healthier business network will add more value generating more
| sales taxes and increasing property value.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The analogy has limits, but it's a useful framing when you're
| dealing with finances like this.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Yeah I was just thinking about that. Basically, using business
| terms, those things you mentioned should be thought of as
| liabilities. Maybe it's not the perfect analogy, but if
| everything can somewhat be captured or at least get within the
| right order of magnitude, I think it could maybe help guide
| decisions towards creating the optimal density.
| treis wrote:
| It's a good strategy when you're playing SimCity but the real
| world doesn't work that way. The major costs of government, as
| the article's pie chart clearly shows, are services to people.
| And in the real world dense cities spend more on services per
| person than rural areas.
|
| It's just the fundamental misconception that underlies all
| these sorts of articles. Land doesn't pay taxes and land
| doesn't really consume resources. People do.
| ghaff wrote:
| And it's usually even simpler than that. Most property taxes
| go to education, which is usually a higher cost per student
| in cities (for often worse outcomes). And a decent chunk of
| the balance is police and fire.
| imtringued wrote:
| You can charge for the presence of the hospital through a land
| value tax.
| op00to wrote:
| Apparently fire codes don't exist in this dudes mind.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| I saw a few articles like that on Strongtown. They make for a
| good story but frankly economically they do not make sense for
| me. In my surburban town with pretty big lots, school taxes are
| 2/3 of property tax and things that are more expensive in
| surburban setting than in the city (roads, sewer, electric, gas
| hookups) are something like 10% of taxes.
|
| Even in this story, city currently spends 3.2M/year maintaining
| the roads. City has 15k housing units so city currently spends
| roughly $200/house on roads. It's $16/month. Author thinks city
| actually need to spend 4.2M - this is $280/year per house which
| is only $23/month. That's really not much even if cost need to be
| doubled. Hardly unaffordable. This is per dwelling - not even per
| person and does not count that commercial buildings pay more so
| residential rate is even lower.
|
| Electric/water/sewers generally pay for themselves thru user fee
| - I think average is $20-60/month/house for sewer/water in US and
| electric is thru usage fee. School busing in rural setting is
| probably a bit more expensive but is still rounding error in
| overall school budget.
|
| Everything else - school, governance, police, fire are probably
| about the same in rural areas and in the dense city. SF is a shit
| city with 15k/year spending per person and most rural/suburban
| areas are much nicer on a fraction of that spending.
|
| Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city in
| infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for
| previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense
| that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's
| not.
|
| US cities has a lot of problems but frankly cost of maintaining
| roads is not the thing that will bankrupt them.
| burlesona wrote:
| You are mistaking "what Cities spend on maintenance" for what
| it would cost to _fully maintain_ the system. The author does a
| good job spelling this out:
|
| > If we convert 177 miles into feet it's 934,560 feet of road.
| At $20 per foot per year, we would need to spend on average
| $18,691,200 a year on road maintenance just to keep all of our
| roads properly maintained.
|
| _Note his actual estimate is ~$18.6M not the ~$4M you quoted -
| that was his hypothetical "even if I'm wrong by 4x too high"
| number._
|
| > According to the capital improvement plan from earlier we are
| planning to spend an average of $3,220,000 per year.
|
| Note that the author's cost figure is _just for roads_ and does
| not include other similarly expensive infrastructure like water
| lines that _are_ included in the city 's Capital Improvements
| budget.
|
| The reason for this gap in infra funding is they don't have the
| money, so they let most of the infrastructure decay, and use
| the money they have to patch the worst problems as best they
| can.
|
| Every city in America is doing this. We just so used to it we
| don't think anything of driving on roads that are full of
| cracks and potholes and generally falling apart.
|
| This gap is why the American Society of Civil Engineers gives
| the US a C- on infrastructure.
| (https://infrastructurereportcard.org)
| fallingknife wrote:
| I don't buy the $18 million number. If the city has been only
| doing one sixth of the required maintenance, the roads would
| already be degraded to a point where it was obvious.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Did you see the posted photos of that road? It's as obvious
| as you describe.
| prepend wrote:
| It's more likely that the authors napkin math is wrong. He
| says that maybe he's 50% off but it's more likely that he's
| 10x off.
| ethanbond wrote:
| How do you know it's not obvious? Road quality is a pretty
| standard complaint in small town America.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I mean like undriveable obvious.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why do you think this is impossible? My city has been
| under-funding road repair for fifty years, is now
| believed to be about $300 million behind, and owns 50
| centerline miles, 22% of the total streets in the city,
| with a pavement condition of "failed".
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Can you tell me which city is that? I'd like to take a
| stroll using Street View, to see what failed
| infrastructure looks like.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Berkeley, California.
|
| For a typical but also amazing example, see the photo at
| the top of https://mtc.ca.gov/operations/programs-
| projects/streets-road...
|
| ETA: Street View to get you started https://www.google.co
| m/maps/@37.8675561,-122.2930415,3a,75y,...
| rdtwo wrote:
| The number includes replacement cost at end of life. Nobody
| calculates for that because it's something you kick the can
| down the road for until you have catastrophic failure then
| you ask for state and federal funds
| cortesoft wrote:
| Maybe "fully maintained" is too high a standard for most
| roads in most towns? Maybe we are ok with doing minimal
| maintenance on most roads because road quality is just not
| worth the cost?
| tptacek wrote:
| Not that I disagree with your sentiment but the comment
| you're responding to observes that water lines --- the extra
| infrastructure beyond roads not included in the article's
| estimate but sort of implied as being significant --- are
| generally paid for by user fees, not property taxes.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Water service maintenance is often a different kind of
| pyramid scheme. In my area, for example, the user fees
| don't even remotely cover the maintenances, so the utility
| district relies very heavily on new service surcharges on
| new construction. These fees are completely outrageous, a
| minimum of $6000 for a tiny efficiency apartment less than
| 50 square meters. This obviously raises the prices of new
| construction. It also has the unfortunate result that the
| utility district budget waxes and wanes with the local
| construction market, and is subject to the whims of every
| local zoning board, so one town that never permits new
| construction still enjoys the flow of funds from the
| charges collected in other cities that do build.
| burlesona wrote:
| I think this varies widely so any generalization needs many
| caveats... but I don't think you can assume that. What I've
| usually seen is that water _service_ , ie the cost of
| filtration and sewage treatment and maintaining pumps, is
| paid by user fees. Water infrastructure - the actual pipes
| - are usually considered capital projects and maintained
| out of different funds. But again the details vary on a
| subdivision by subdivision level not to mention state to
| state.
| tptacek wrote:
| That sounds right to me, too.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| >Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city
| in infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for
| previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense
| that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's
| not.
|
| Who pays the cost to connect these rural areas to other
| regions?
| fredophile wrote:
| The author thinks the city needs to spend a little over $18M
| per year just on roads. That would be about $1200 per year per
| house or $100 per month. Considering that their total property
| taxes are currently around $1700 per year in total property
| taxes that's a huge increase.
| [deleted]
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| To get to 18M number, author approximated that cost of repair
| 3.5 lane medium use road in industrial area (aka heavy
| trucks) to all roads in the town which just not make sense.
| Cost of repair low use residential 2 lane road which is
| majority of roads in the city is much lower and frankly
| nobody repaves local roads every 30 years - it just not
| needed.
|
| In addition $100 per month per house is significant but if
| it's the only thing that make small town more expensive than
| dense city it's still does not make city that much
| attractive.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think there is a flaw in the author's analysis: It's
| based on a fixed cost-per-length model. Not all roads cost
| the same to maintain. A downtown city street that gets
| heavy, continuous use will have to be repaired much more
| frequently than a sidewalk-less rural road that gets ten
| cars per day on its busiest day. City streets are also more
| complicated to repair, often having sewer pipes and
| electrical lines buried in close proximity, so are likely
| more costly to repair each time, too.
| bradlys wrote:
| Did you read what they wrote? They clearly outline the
| flaws and limitations of the analysis. They say it's just
| an estimate.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| The author obviously put a lot of thought and effort into
| this article. I'm surprised he let that rough calculation
| be the basis for so much of it. I haven't looked, but I
| suspect it isn't hard to find expected maintenance costs
| for various types of roads.
| bradlys wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the calculation is actually
| hard to come by because no one wants to acknowledge the
| issue. They all know the number is going to be
| fantastically large and unable to be voted in. So, they
| just ignore it and let the town deteriorate slowly like
| most of the USA.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| My guess is that you live in a newer suburb where the
| infrastructure isn't 100-150 years old. When your sewers, water
| lines, roads, municipal buildings, etc. are over a century old,
| you can no longer delay maintenance without cutting service
| levels. This is why older rural areas of the country like
| Appalachia are dotted with so many ghost towns; it stopped
| making sense to invest in those places decades ago because the
| infrastructure was so far gone it was just cheaper to build a
| new town somewhere else.
|
| Many rust belt towns are going through this right now; my mom
| grew up in a rural factory town in southern NY that once had a
| population of nearly 10,000 -- 50 years later, that population
| is closer to 500. And still dropping because most of the lots
| in town are unoccupied, rotting homes left behind when previous
| owners died that would be torn down if there was the money to
| do so, but there isn't and it drags down property values of
| everything in the area.
|
| Pittsburgh -- a city big enough to have 3 professional sports
| teams -- has entire neighborhoods that have been abandoned and
| fenced off after the population dropped by over 50% since the
| 1970s. Mostly so that the city doesn't have to maintain power,
| sewer, water and roads in those areas because there just isn't
| the money to rebuild them. There is an entire subway system
| under the city that has simply been abandoned due to lack of
| upkeep. The city is on an upward trajectory again, but property
| values in the city are still astonishingly low (10 years ago
| you could buy a livable-if-dated house in a good location for
| $50,000) and taxes are high.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| New Orleans could only afford to start fixing its streets and
| sewers with the FEMA money after Katrina.
| dougdonohoe wrote:
| Pittsburgher here. What are you talking about? There is no
| abandoned subway system under Pittsburgh. What we call the
| 'T' is alive and well. There are also not "entire
| neighborhoods that have been abandoned and fenced off".
| jeffbarr wrote:
| Perhaps they were thinking of Rochester, New York:
| https://rocwiki.org/abandoned_subway
| 300bps wrote:
| Yeah I saw his property tax of $1,600 per year and how it was
| already too high to raise.
|
| Tax rates of $8,000 to $20,000 are common around me.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| Absolute numbers aren't a tax rate. 1% of $2M home gets you
| to $20k/year easily. But the article talks about $100-200k
| homes; there is no way this town can have a 10-20% property
| tax rate.
| umvi wrote:
| Start charging $20k property tax and you'll probably
| accelerate the decline of Galesburg as people scramble to
| relocate to more affordable areas.
| cortesoft wrote:
| That $1600 is based a 10% tax rate, if you look at the chart.
| That means the whole property is only worth $16,000. Are you
| really suggesting they charge more every year in taxes than
| the house is worth?
| rdtwo wrote:
| At the very low end there is a minimum tax regardless of
| property value. If you fall below a certain value you end
| up dragging down the community
| gnopgnip wrote:
| If you live in Galesburg IL, or Jackson MI, Altoona PA, Rome
| NY or similar places if the property taxes were raised to 10x
| as much the homes would be worth literally zero. The rental
| income wouldn't cover the property taxes. And that is the
| underlying problem, when the costs are so high, collecting a
| "fair" or actually necessary amount of taxes has a
| debilitating effect on the economy
| cableshaft wrote:
| Galesburg is a declining city in the middle of nowhere.
| People who live there probably drive to work ~50 miles away
| to Peoria or Davenport/Moline every day if they don't have a
| (probably) low paying job in town.
|
| And if that's the case, they'd probably be better off moving
| closer to those cities, there's probably even cheaper homes
| within a shorter commute.
|
| Also it's in Illinois, which is #2 in the country for highest
| overall property taxes[1].
|
| Keep in mind he said a reasonable house value just north of
| their downtown is $75k, where the national average price for
| a home is $374k (as of Q2 2021), which is 5x the price. $1600
| * 5 = $8000, which brings it up to what's near you.
|
| And considering Illinois' property tax is higher than every
| other state other than New Jersey, I'm guessing the homes
| appraised value near you is likely a lot higher than $374k,
| even.
|
| That being said, I don't understand why the government
| wouldn't be able to up just the city's percentage (as opposed
| to all line items on the property tax bill) by about
| $100-200/yr per person and use that to help close the gap.
| The percent going to the city of Galesburg is currently a
| tiny percentage of the overall tax.
|
| [1]: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-again-ranks-
| no-2-in-...
| mitigating wrote:
| People will fight against any tax raises regardless of the
| amount.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Well yes, that's one reason it probably isn't being
| raised. But if you could let the people know that "hey,
| this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your
| property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it,
| otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most
| people could be convinced to go along with it.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| It's possible that the city is currently in equilibrium
| between tax rate and quality of roads. You can check the
| road that it getting fixed on and it's ok [1]. There are
| potholes here and there but otherwise it's perfectly
| drivable. There are roads of similar quality in much
| wealthier places in Bay Area. It's possible that reaction
| from poor people in town to increased taxes for roads
| will be - why? it's ok as is now.
|
| I also checked a few random streets in the town and
| pavement is actually pretty good with few if any
| potholes. Random street as a point [2]
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9371624,-90.3942909,3
| a,75y,2...
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.93875,-90.3599034,3a,
| 75y,346...
| d3ad1ysp0rk wrote:
| #1 is pretty rough especially as this is the summer w/o
| frost heaves. That is also from Aug 2019 and it's now
| 2022.
|
| Separately, but related, I have always found it
| interesting that no one tries to calculate the wear on
| vehicles for things like bad roads, salt use, etc.
| Bending a wheel, accelerating suspension breakdown, and
| other issues from bad roads could easily outweigh some
| arguable savings of waiting longer. I'd rather push for
| adding less roads, allowing some paved roads to become
| dirt roads where low traffic weights & #s exist, and
| better maintenance of the remaining ones.
| bradlys wrote:
| It's likely hard to quantify and would require an in-
| depth survey of people over the course of 5-10 years with
| extreme diligence.
|
| There is another quality that is missed out in these
| discussions too - which is the quality of life
| improvement. If you've ever driven on a nice road - you
| know it and you feel it. It's pure bliss compared to most
| of the roads out there. Your car might go from feeling
| cheap and unbearable to luxurious - and if you have a
| nice car already then it feels sublime.
|
| That aspect is one part where I'd gladly pay more for
| roads. The other aspect is prevention. I see very little
| emphasis put on the prevention of deterioration of roads.
| I think road quality could be improved if there were
| crews working all the time to keep the roads in shape and
| if people felt like their city would listen when they
| issue a complaint about the road. I figure this might
| save money and improve QOL over the long run.
| mitigating wrote:
| "The Democrats claim for just the cost of Pizza each
| month we'll save our roads but we know what's really
| going on (pause) (dramatic music) and this is just the
| beginning.
|
| Next it will be a Chinese takeout meal to help a library
| (show red Chinese flag to increase fear slightly), then
| the cost of a new refrigerator to pay teachers more
| (stock footage of a liberal looking nerdy professor),
| when will it end?
|
| The tax and spend Democrats have an agenda and all they
| are looking for is an opening. (stock footage of snake
| slithering into nursery during the night)
|
| We have to be vigilant to protect our families future
| (stock footage of 60-70 year old man, slightly
| overweight, wearing a red plaid shirt, jeans, and
| standing in front of an American flag) vote no on
| proposition 205 and say no to big government
|
| (paid for by the committee of republicans and their rich
| supporters who need to convince poor people to vote for
| them)
| pharke wrote:
| It would be helpful if you could just go to a website,
| enter in a code from your property tax bill and see
| exactly how every dollar of the taxes you paid were used.
| This is one of the valid uses of a public ledger I can
| think of. In my opinion, all tax funded spending should
| be traceable like this with each transfer recorded and
| reported to the tax payer.
| gruez wrote:
| Doesn't checking the city's budget do the same thing? The
| only thing that site would add is multiply the budget
| amounts by your tax bill.
| pharke wrote:
| I don't feel like that addresses the part of the comment
| I was speaking to:
|
| > "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and
| your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford
| it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most
| people could be convinced to go along with it.
|
| At a minimum, you could create a system that takes the
| budget and shows a percent breakdown of where your money
| goes. If you packaged it nicely so that you could
| understand it at a glance it would go a long way towards
| what the comment I was responding to was talking about.
| After looking at my city's budget, I think there is still
| a lot of room for improvement. For my municipality at
| least, it seems to be a mix of specific and extremely
| nebulous items. I can see that the fire department
| purchased several new vehicles and even the type of
| vehicle but the road works department just lists
| additions to their "fleet" and the sanitation department
| just lists "new vehicles". I see items for sidewalk and
| street repairs along with the name of the street but no
| indication of how much pavement was repaired or what the
| breakdown of labor vs materials was. I think knowing all
| of the details would help the public assist their
| representatives to correct overages and would be a
| bulwark against corruption. e.g. If I run a business that
| sells fasteners and I see that the city government is
| overpaying by 30% for the bolts they use to put up new
| street signs I could bid on the contract next time around
| or maybe tip off the newspaper if it's more like 200%
| over retail.
| ghaff wrote:
| Money is fungible so it doesn't really make sense to ask
| where your specific dollars went. But in most if not all
| places in the US you can see the city or town budget and
| see where money came from and went in general. (It's
| mostly to schools in the majority of places with the per
| student expenditure actually often higher in more urban
| populations.)
| nine_k wrote:
| While you cannot trace the money all the way through the
| economy, you can definitely trace the funds allocation by
| the articles of the budget, and pro-rate the amounts to
| the sum of the taxes paid by a person.
|
| It's similar to the way you see amounts that went to
| taxes, insurance, etc on your payroll.
| pharke wrote:
| Technically, there are methods that would allow you to
| trace money all the way through the economy.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > And considering Illinois' property tax is higher than
| every other state other than New Jersey, I'm guessing the
| homes appraised value near you is likely a lot higher than
| $374k, even.
|
| It is the opposite. Illinois homes' sale prices are kept
| down due to the higher (and always increasing) property
| taxes.
|
| NJ is also the same outside the regions that get buoyed by
| the higher incomes of NYC/Philadelphia.
|
| It is the same as any business with a lot of debt that gets
| valued lower than a comparable business with less debt. And
| NJ/IL and a few other jurisdictions have debt that is
| multiple standard deviation from the mean.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| >It is the opposite. Illinois homes' sale prices are kept
| down due to the higher (and always increasing) property
| taxes.
|
| So true. I used to live in the Quad Cities, which holds
| Bettendorf and Davenport in Iowa and Rock Island and
| Moline in Illinois. When looking at houses, there might
| be a 25% difference in prices for similar houses in Iowa
| vs Illinois. Many of my coworkers on the Illinois side
| were looking to move to Iowa, but were going to walk out
| with very little equity by the time they took a hit on
| the sale price and pay transaction costs.
|
| The consensus among locals was "Illinois state government
| may implode at some point, and pretty well the only way
| to avoid that is by significantly increasing taxes".
| macinjosh wrote:
| An easy solution is to just not build roads for new developments.
| If a private interest wants to establish a new development they
| should pay for it all. The market will magically include all the
| costs in the final product (buildings/homes) and no one will be
| out a dime involuntarily. Things will cost what they actually
| cost.
|
| Some would counter that this isn't how economic development
| works. Arguments would be things like businesses need incentives
| or the city is responsible for common infrastructure.
|
| The problem is that roads just become a form of corporate
| welfare. If a enterprise or business doesn't want to fully invest
| in its new location, IMHO, it is not worth it and you need to
| face the fact that your town just isn't ready for it yet.
| khanan wrote:
| I listened to their radio station for a while, it was all Jesus
| and God. This is why they have no money.
| ejb999 wrote:
| bigoted much?
| [deleted]
| lettergram wrote:
| I'm glad we're talking about the finances of towns here. Almost
| every town in America is bankrupt.
|
| I disagree somewhat with the author here around the issues. For
| instance, he uses the $20/ft/road and points out they need
| roughly double the tax base to support their current roads.
|
| Sure, that's a way to look at it. Alternatively, they can cut
| back the roads, fill with gravel and honestly it might be cheaper
| to just build and maintain a concrete facility. If you can cut
| the price of laying concrete by 50% thatd also be a solution.
| Alternatively, pre-purchase X tons per year and reduce costs that
| way letting the concrete makers in the area expand and reduce
| overhead.
|
| Regarding city planning, yes totally agree. I'd argue the major
| issue is that we lost manufacturing here in the United States.
| Factories paid relatively well, and were running at 20% fewer
| people per capita in the workforce than in the 60s. This means
| less wealth generated across the board, less wealth in these
| towns, etc.
|
| Finally, IMO as a town the best investments are those that
| attract more jobs and wealth. So make fresh paint available for
| free to any businesses. Hire better police. Cut back on road
| quality. Cut back on taxes for businesses that bring net jobs.
| Invest in community activities, particularly for kids. Advertise.
|
| It's a difficult spot to be in, the reality is that smalls towns
| across the country were decimated between the 1990s - 2020s. Most
| of it was policies sending stuff over seas and reducing wealth
| creation in rural towns (where factories used to run). To fix
| that will require some national solutions and scaling back the
| towns which haven't seen growth (and many declined) in 30 years
| mitigating wrote:
| Imagine you are trying to get businesses to invest in your
| town, build a factory, whatever. Much of that is about image,
| right? If you only have gravel roads it gives off the
| impression that you are failing/backwards.
| lettergram wrote:
| Businesses will often invest in their own roads. The issue is
| the town over expanded and then their base shrank.
| Unfortunately, you have to cut items -- roads to dead
| businesses are the easiest way.
|
| If manufacturing comes back they will often invest in their
| own roads anyway. City can then cut a deal to rebuild and
| maintain roads with company splitting cost
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| > It's a difficult spot to be in, the reality is that smalls
| towns across the country were decimated between the 1990s -
| 2020s. Most of it was policies sending stuff over seas and
| reducing wealth creation in rural towns (where factories used
| to run).
|
| I'd put this further back. Manufacturing is part of it but not
| everyone worked in factories before and the post-WWII white
| flight was part of the setup. There are two related parts to
| that:
|
| On the city side, that took on a lot of unfavorable trade offs
| - reducing tax revenues, converting neighborhoods into
| unproductive freeways and parking, greater expense and demand
| for roads, etc.
|
| On the personal side, cars lock in a lot of personal expense
| both up front and ongoing (how many people are one expensive
| repair away from potentially losing their job?), and force
| other choices like needing to live somewhere with storage
| space, deal with the health impacts, etc.
|
| I think that combination left things quite brittle and a lot of
| it is time-delayed by a decade or two, at which point it's much
| harder to reverse. Losing a factory hurts but so did losing
| most of the workers a generation earlier, and the resulting
| economic climate from both makes finding replacements harder.
| [deleted]
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| The damage inflicted onto roads by vehicles goes up by _the
| fourth power_ of the vehicles weight. So, should average citizens
| be on the hook for most road repairs, or should those who utilize
| extremely heavy trucks?
|
| Furthermore, as society progresses, we're not going to need so
| many roads. Either we'll technologically eclipse them, or
| sociologically we'll reorient our society towards walking and
| biking. I don't see us having nearly the amount of road
| maintenance in future as we do now.
| umvi wrote:
| > So, should average citizens be on the hook for most road
| repairs, or should those who utilize extremely heavy trucks?
|
| You can scapegoat the trucks, but average citizens _are_
| utilizing heavy trucks (indirectly) by buying stuff on Amazon
| or Walmart (to name a few examples).
| perpetualpatzer wrote:
| True, but average citizens don't _choose_ to use heavy
| trucks. I'm not sure of the relative costs of road repair v.
| fuel, but if you funded roads entirely through a tax on the
| fourth power of vehicle weight (if that's the right proxy for
| repair costs incurred), Walmart might find they could reduce
| total costs in the system by using fewer large trucks and
| shift their logistics mix.
| notch656a wrote:
| People who don't drive any vehicle take advantage of that. So
| it's small vehicle drivers subsidizing [via fuel tax] those
| who don't drive at all, yet take advantage of shipping via
| heavy truck.
| trgn wrote:
| Why preserve the opacity of that relationship? Tax trucks
| higher, and it will reflect in the prices of the products
| those trucks are hauling, fairly distributing the cost
| increase of their operation across the consumers of those
| products.
|
| We absolutely should tax goods and services based on the
| negative externalities they impose. Taxing vehicles by weight
| is a fair tax, much more fair than doing the _exact_ opposite
| right now, work trucks being taxed less. Heavy vehicles used
| productively will remain, but spending on heavy vehicles for
| recreation will be less attractive, since that kind of use
| consumers balance against other discriminatory spending.
| closeparen wrote:
| It is pretty easy to exhibit residential streets that do not
| take truck traffic, and yet are in dire need of repair.
|
| Even an unused or barely used street suffers from a freeze thaw
| cycle.
| stillsut wrote:
| "With a crime rate of 40 per one thousand residents, Galesburg
| has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all
| communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very
| largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either
| violent or property crime here is one in 25."
|
| Yeah OK, Strongtowns, let's scrutinize the road budgets (~5% of
| the property taxes). Who wants to live in these hypothetical high
| density developments when you can't even be safe?
| duxup wrote:
| This seems to be largely focused on road maintenance and property
| taxes.
|
| Are those really the only factors in that area?
|
| I know plenty of spread out small towns that do fine with such
| scattered developments.
|
| I'm also a little skeptical of "our population is shrinking,
| let's build tiny houses ".
| _keats wrote:
| > Walmart builds their buildings to last only 15-20 years and
| then builds a new facility.
|
| I'm really curious about the 15-20 year statistic that the author
| mentions and I was disappointed not to see a source on that
| claim. I couldn't find much from official sources after a quick
| search. That seems like an incredibly short lifespan, especially
| for buildings so large.
|
| Great article nonetheless.
| eldavido wrote:
| The claim is correct, but incomplete.
|
| It's true that many commercial real estate developers design
| buildings to roughly match depreciation lifetimes, reason
| being, depreciation reduces tax and once your basis hits zero
| (the item is fully depreciated), you can't use depreciation to
| shield any more taxable income. The base depreciation lifetime
| of US commercial real estate is 39 years though, not 15-20.
|
| The other elephant in the room is that building to last is
| _really_ expensive, at least upfront. So it isn 't, and perhaps
| shouldn't, be something we do for everything.
|
| Every town has "forever buildings": schools, village halls,
| religious institutions. Places that cater to basic needs that
| aren't going to change. Imagine a typical "old" American
| school: a giant brick building, with a steam boiler, well-made
| doors, and thick walls. This is what "built to last" looks
| like. There are often ornamental features like murals on the
| outside walls. Ditto for churches: thick, heavy buildings with
| materials like marble or other stone. Old, well-made houses are
| the same way.
|
| This isn't how big box stores are made. They have way more
| drywall, polished concrete floors (definitely not tile), cheapo
| sliding doors, thin walls with stucco or other flimsy
| materials, standardized designs that don't change based on
| where they are (vs. something designed specifically for the
| area), and giant parking lots. The entire mentality is
| different. These are built to last a couple decades, then get
| taken down, or demolished. It's actually the same with
| McMansions, giant 4000 square foot houses in deep suburban
| areas.
|
| One other thing, read patio11's "Mortgages are a manufactured
| product" [1] -- CRE (buildings) is also a "manufactured"
| product for a lot of the same reasons, namely, there are buyers
| in the economy that structurally desire regular income streams
| (rental payments) from these buildings, and the fact that
| they're a Walgreens, or a Wal-Mart, or whatever else, barely
| even registers. The "customer" of a lot of this stuff is the
| pension fund / endowment that ends up holding the debt on the
| property, not the people or businesses that actually, you know,
| _occupy_ the place day-to-day.
|
| Source: husband of an architect, and commercial real estate
| owner/manager
|
| [1] https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-
| manufactur...
| _keats wrote:
| Thanks for the response, that does make more sense!
| otikik wrote:
| Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
| qwertox wrote:
| Thank you. It does have a touch of "Practical Engineering" by
| Grady Hillhouse, but just focused on Cities and without the
| Engineering part. In terms of information quality and tone.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It seems like the root problem is that the way property taxes are
| assessed doesn't actually line up with how much demand a given
| development puts on the city for services/infrastructure.
| Property taxes are based on, "how much would someone else pay for
| this", which isn't the relevant metric from the city's
| perspective, it should be, "approximately how expensive is this
| property to service year by year, including eventual replacement
| of infrastructure?"
|
| If you did it that way, low density developments would pay their
| true costs, and would become more expensive to the 'end user' and
| thus less popular. And if they didn't, well, they're paying their
| true costs anyway, so problem solved.
| macinjosh wrote:
| In my area all new housing developments have their own "metro
| tax district" that residents pay. It funds the infrastructure
| for their neighborhood. Some people don't pay attention to it
| when budgeting for and buying a new house. I know that has
| caused many families to lose their homes. Usually those
| districts have a sunset built in though once they have covered
| the building costs.
| analog31 wrote:
| An issue with the present system is that the status quo is
| virtually immutable. How cities can tax is rigidly constrained
| by state laws. Attempts to change those laws run into every
| possible obstacle, especially if it's perceived that someone is
| getting more goodies, and someone else less. Often, divided
| along urban / rural lines.
|
| Now, it's not entirely rigid. In my state, each city sets its
| budget, then your tax bill is simply the budget weighted by the
| value of your property. Some kinds of extra expenditures such
| as bond issues can be approved through referendum. Others can
| be tacked onto the homeowners whose goodies are getting fixed,
| through special assessments. When the street in front of my
| house was rebuilt, I got a bill from the city for X amount
| based on Y feet of frontage.
|
| It's a tiny bit complex because you also live in a county which
| is doing the same thing.
|
| But the fundamental of assessing real estate and using it as
| the foundation of your tax bill is practically carved into
| stone. And it does have the advantage of being relatively
| straightforward to compute. In a town with a relatively brisk
| market, your assessment is going to be pretty close to what you
| paid for the house plus an inflation factor based on your
| neighborhood. And you know that your neighbor isn't somehow
| wriggling out of their tax obligation. That's overlooking the
| exceptions of course, but it captures the gist of it.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I've always found it weird and funny that in many parts of
| Europe taxes used to be based on the width of the front of
| houses. That's why you'll find extremely narrow houses in some
| older downtown areas. Cologne is an example of this.
|
| As soon as the author started doing the math on street
| maintenance per lot, this medieval taxation system made instant
| sense to me (although I believe there also were taxes on
| windows...). Maybe something like this would be more
| beneficial. In general zoning that encourages density rather
| than discouraged it is definitely more in the interest of
| cities. Yet, most people get angry with me when I mention this.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Historic taxes like the window tax etc. were as much a result
| of the government having very limited access to economic data
| at the time as anything. You couldn't say how much someone
| was earning, but the size of their domicile was a pretty good
| indicator, and one they couldn't hide. Well, until the
| unexpected consequences, like fake windows, kicked in,
| anyway.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| That's an interesting point! I just listened to an
| interview with the founder of Give Directly on the
| Rationally Speaking podcast where he explained that they
| used to look at houses to identify if someone should get
| the direct cash donations. So again proxy for wealth
| netcan wrote:
| Partially, but only partially if you take this sentence
| literally:
|
| _" our town is essentially a corporation where the citizens
| are the investors and stakeholders.. We are a real estate
| development company that also provides services... with
| holdings totaling $1.29 billion,"_
|
| Apple is essentially the stakeholder in the Apple ecosystem.
| Some decisions are made as you suggest. Apple price phones and
| laptops such that costs are covered and profits are made.
|
| Some decisions are "strategic." There's no direct revenue from
| their photo app, but a photo app helps sell phones and (more
| importantly) if Apple doesn't provide one then FB or Google
| will. A lot of Apple's decisions are like this.
|
| Some, currently very important decisions are all about
| leveraging power to extract revenue. Apple charge Google $15bn
| to be safari's default search option. They apply similar logic
| to all activity on iphones. As in-app purchases emerge,
| subscriptions, digital goods, physical goods or any other
| category emerges... Apple study that market and determine how
| much they can charge. It has nothing to do with how much these
| cost apple to support.
|
| IDK if this applies to Galesburg, but I think most
| towns/governments/municipalities have the power to generate a
| lot more revenue than they do... certainly during a building
| boom. What Apple would be doing in this position is (a)
| determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving
| to claim the majority of those profits as revenue. I'm not
| saying they should do this, but the point of difference is
| worth noting.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Maybe banning the import of anything from the outside and
| charging a 30% sales tax is the answer?
| netcan wrote:
| Possibly, depending on what the question is.
|
| My point wasn't that an analogy to commercial businesses
| should be made, but that since an analogy is being made...
| kristjansson wrote:
| Tying property tax to market value is a form of this, I
| think. The town doesn't realize substantially more costs when
| property values go up, but wants to participate in the growth
| of 'its' property. So it structures its relationship with its
| users to capture some of the growth in value.
|
| Unfortunately the leverage of a small town is relatively low,
| so they don't have much power to capture their users growth
| mark-r wrote:
| > What Apple would be doing in this position is (a)
| determining where real estate profits are being made (b)
| moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue.
|
| In the real world it's just the opposite. Apple has a
| monopoly on the Apple ecosystem, but nobody has a monopoly on
| land. Corporations will play one city against another to see
| which will give them the biggest subsidies and tax breaks.
| mellavora wrote:
| Please, this idea that business is universally better at
| producing value than any other form of social organization
| has to die.
|
| I'm pro business. I founded my first money-making venture
| when I was 4 years old (selling "art" to strangers on the
| street-- the business was quickly closed by the regulators--
| Mom).
|
| But business is best when the value created by an investment
| can be (mostly) captured by a single entity, and also
| generally when the ROI is short term.
|
| Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education?
| Because, unless every single student goes to work for the
| company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you
| cannot align the interests of the business with providing
| quality education.
|
| NOTING that the diffuse value created by government is often
| many orders of magnitude greater than the value which can be
| captured by a single organization.
|
| Another example: value of the internet vs value of Google.
| Google is an insanely valuable organization, but a) it
| wouldn't exist without the internet, and b) the other FANGS
| also derive their value from the internet. So clearly the
| internet's value is many times greater than that of any
| internet-based company.
| acdha wrote:
| > Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education?
| Because, unless every single student goes to work for the
| company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you
| cannot align the interests of the business with providing
| quality education.
|
| The charter school industry is the textbook example of
| this: what usually happens is that some school will have a
| good couple of years, and we'll get some Slate piece about
| how they've discovered the secret of cost-effective
| education. Unfortunately, over time regression to the mean
| usually sets in and results start to look statistically
| similar to public school students of similar socioeconomic
| status while the few which maintain a performance edge
| inevitably turn out to have found a way to cherry-pick
| higher SES students and exclude the most expensive students
| because that's what they're incentivized to do.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think they often skip the first step of even bothering
| to outperform after correcting for socioeconomic
| differences. If you can cherry-pick students, education
| can be both more effective and cheaper for those whom you
| decide to serve.
| acdha wrote:
| Often, yes, but sometimes it does happen because they got
| the most enthusiastic staff (not yet worn down) and
| attracted the most prepared poor kids with the most
| motivated parents (the ones who'll take a chance on a new
| school pledging higher academic standards).
|
| The one I really wish the United States was better at
| accounting for is assistance for students with special
| needs. That hammers public school budgets and also means
| that those kids are discouraged from trying a new school
| because that'll reset their support plan even if the new
| school offers services.
| dantheman wrote:
| It's very simple, just attach the money to the child and
| then let the parents determine what school they go to.
| analog31 wrote:
| It's not a market. There's no way for parents to make an
| informed choice, no way to opt out, no way for the state
| to opt out of serving as a backup.
|
| Also, massively inefficient in terms of minivan miles per
| pupil per day.
| acdha wrote:
| That helps a lot but there are some challenges: e.g. you
| have therapists at a big school with lots of students and
| they're all reasonably fully booked but a small charter
| needs 15% of a person in three different specialties.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Or worse, the charter school interview and disciplinary
| practices ensure that these kids are not admitted or are
| expelled and the small charter school then takes the full
| payment but needs 0% of a specialist.
| dantheman wrote:
| The schools, can share a specialist on different days of
| the week, or if there is an economy of scale then parents
| will choose it.
|
| Sure there may be schools that handle kids with
| disciplinary issues, like they do today in the public
| school system.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I think the point is that, like a lot of cost problems, a
| relatively small proportion of users end up accounting
| for a relatively large share of costs. Just excluding
| those expensive users (implicitly or explicitly) is a
| 'neat' way to reduce costs and improve outcomes at a
| particular school. Unfortunately under a funding-follows-
| kids system that leaves a small population with $X in
| funding that costs $10X to serve. Maybe grouping all of
| those users provides enough economy of scale, but that's
| not obvious, and sounds a bit like an asylum to boot.
| kaashif wrote:
| > Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education?
| Because, unless every single student goes to work for the
| company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you
| cannot align the interests of the business with providing
| quality education.
|
| But this ignores the fact that private schools do exist and
| are successful in many countries. The incentives are
| aligned in some cases - if the education is bad, the
| parents will take their kids to a different school, or
| never go to the bad school in the first place. If it's
| good, they'll be willing to pay higher fees.
|
| I'm not sure what is meant by "unless every single student
| goes to work for the company, then the value they create is
| lost to them" - (some of) the value they create is captured
| by the school by charging fees. Isn't that the whole point
| of private education? This is the idea of markets in
| general: when a voluntary transaction takes place, both
| sides believe they benefit. If fees are $10,000, the parent
| will only pay this if they value the education at more than
| $10,000, although they may not think about it in these
| terms. Some parents will make gigantic sacrifices in the
| millions of dollars (in lost earning potential if nothing
| else) for their kids.
|
| You are right that private schools don't always have an
| incentive to provide good education. The schools have that
| incentive if and only if the parents care about the child's
| education and have the ability to choose schools. In many
| cases they don't care, and the children are the innocent
| victims in that case. In many cases parents care, but
| cannot afford to move and the school effectively has a
| local monopoly on poor people forced to go there. No market
| system can really work with a monopoly.
|
| Agreed that universal private education wouldn't be the
| best, but I think it's because the buyer of the service and
| the beneficiary are different, and there is an element of
| monopoly. I don't think it's because the schools lack a
| mechanism to capture value, they can just charge fees.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| You're ignoring the possibility that the value of the
| private school is in network effects via filtering out
| poorer people. That would be beneficial to the students
| who attend, but neutral or even negative for society as a
| whole.
| netcan wrote:
| This is not the idea that I expressed.
| mellavora wrote:
| First, apologies, yes, I was clearly over-generalizing
| from what you wrote.
|
| And to be very clear, I am addressing a deep pet peeve of
| mine, which is related to the topic but not necessarily a
| direct descendant.
|
| Your post uses Apple as an example of how a company
| prioritizes cost/pricing decisions, and suggests that
| this, if applied to Galesburg, might allow them to fix
| their budget.
|
| Which is not exactly what I was responding to.
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