[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) (HTM) web link (inlandnobody.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (inlandnobody.substack.com) | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-16 23:00 UTC)