The tense is wrong in the title. The process is still going on, and many currently financially thriving cities are still buying into the false promise of unchecked growth without consideration for infrastructure, services, and overall quality of life.
I also take exception to the use of the gestalt 'America' as if there were some central force orchestrating this phenomena - there isn't, just the same incentives that push developer's voices in city governments louder and louder.
> I also take exception to the use of the gestalt 'America'
These things start at the top - based on what the US govt decides or does not decide to regulate. With a lack of regulation, we all know the "free markets" reign to a point where they are no longer free and instead enhance divisions in society and further monopolies.
Amazon, Facebook, Google are too big. They've provided great benefits to society to date - but govt needs to step in and control them now.
No, it doesn't. Not in a country where constitutionally such power by default is devolved to the states to regulate or not. One could make the argument it starts at the state level, but most states have left such matters to the municipalities in turn.
So, these municipalities, acting independently and without coordination, and have arrived at the same state. Because they are all currently incentivized to.
There are state and federal dollars that are used by these municipalities to widen their roads and such. It is not something that happened without coordination. A federal policy in which 10x more money is available for roads vs transit is an incentive for more of the same.
Reading the actual book that this video is based on, those pushing the "Strong Towns" theme are pretty agnostic to free markets, so it's kind of besides the point. The point is - we spend $X/year on infrastructure, but people only seem to think that infrastructure is worth <$X/year, so there will forever be a deficit.
The Strong Town books also discusses what happened with a lack of regulation throughout almost all of human history: everyone lived in rural areas to work a farm, or else lived and worked in dense urban areas. American suburbia happened in large part not due to a lack of regulation at the top, but federal money being spent on roads, highways and infrastructure at the top.
Is it true the $5T that ASCE estimated is being held by the 1% (or whatever you want to call them)? This would imply the funds exist but are locked up for thousands of different reasons.
One might argue infrastructure funds are being held by the wealthiest in their investment assets that otherwise would've been taxed at a higher rate in other developed nations. This doesn't mean we should grow for growth's sake using that wealth, but based on on the nation's infrastructure report card [1], we are very much not investing in infrastructure upkeep. How do we pay for infrastructure? Taxes (or perhaps by printing fiat based on modern monetary theory). Do we need infrastructure to support a civilization? Of course.
Simple version is today’s voters will always vote for low taxes and elect to have future generations pay for today’s services/labor.
This works as long as you have economic growth (usually as a result of population growth).
Doesn’t work so well when automation and cheaper labor from other places in the world are taking away the economic growth, and simultaneously people are having 0, 1, or at most 2 kids.
>Doesn’t work so well when automation and cheaper labor from other places in the world are taking away the economic growth, and simultaneously people are having 0, 1, or at most 2 kids.
I think you are misunderstanding something. It works just fine. The problem is that there are these "waste" humans that nobody knows what to do with.
There is also a glaring flaw in your comment. Automation increases economic growth. If a single worker is 10 times more productive he can ask for 10 times the salary. A lot of low income jobs pay badly precisely because there is not enough automation to turn them into productive high income jobs.
Ok, back to the waste humans. The default answer to a surplus with no buyers is to just let the wealthy hand out a loan so that those with no possessions can buy the surplus and use it productively and earn money. For obvious reasons interest rates are down to 0% so this is not a viable strategy. However in principle it works the same with automation. Humans with zero net worth cannot work because robots are doing their job can instead borrow robots and use those robots productively. Debt is just a way to convince people to work today so that their productive output doesn't get lost.
The borrowing strategy works out if there is enough demand for the robot labor, but what if there is no demand at all? You can just create demand out of thin air. Let the government print money and use it to buy consumer goods and services or let the government invest into domestic jobs that would otherwise not be done. Again, it's just a trick to make people work today so that their productive output doesn't get lost. The benefit from working is higher than letting the money sit around.
Why? Because that's the policy. 2% inflation is a target. Your money gets increasingly less valuable so you cannot sit on it. You will have to do something with it. If you put your money in gold you are doing so with the expectation that society as a whole is doing productive work. If you put your money into stocks you are doing so with the expectation that this individual company is doing productive work. Yes, these assets are inflation proof, but only because someone is actually working. If everyone put their money into gold the assets would just become worthless eventually because society as a whole is not doing productive work.
If CPI inflation is driving asset inflation then you simply cannot sit around and do nothing. Unfortunately the Fed is driving asset inflation directly and completely skipping over CPI inflation. At that point the system is built on circular logic without any connection to productive work. Capitalism without the capitalism.
> If a single worker is 10 times more productive he can ask for 10 times the salary.
This is only true if very few workers are 10 times more productive. If many workers are 10 times more productive, then the supply of labor has increased 10x and unless there is a corresponding increase in the buyers of labor, the price of the labor will go down. Which is what has happened in real life.
Low income jobs pay low income because the buyers of that labor are not willing to pay much and the supply of labor is high for that type of work.
I believe the rest of your comment does not apply to state and city governments in the US, since only the federal government can print money. For state and city governments, their tax base and therefore potential economic growth/future tax income can move away.
This isn’t entirely true. In Colorado, we vote on all tax increases. In the short time I have been here Coloradoans have voted to increase taxes on themselves quite a few times for roads and schools. If you make a good argument, even conservatives will commonly vote to increase taxes since many see the value that comes from it.
The issue is that many people, like myself, want a say. I don’t mind paying more in taxes if the money is used well and I feel like I actually had a say in the process.
The issue is the taxes voted on aren’t enough to pay for the item being voted on. The pensions aren’t getting properly funded, and the amortized cost of the road and accompanying infrastructure isn’t being saved for with taxes collected today.
Also, Colorado is expecting one of the biggest economic and population booms in America, so people’s incomes are going up and thinks are looking pretty good. Try the same in states with stagnant economies and job markets, and even schools won’t get the votes for tax increases.
And the nuance of the statement, of course, is people won’t vote for tax increases for things that won’t benefit them. Roads benefit all car owners, so car owners don’t mind voting for roads. But taxes for public transportation won’t be voted in. And people will vote to increase taxes for their own school district. But not to help subsidize other cities’ schools.
Through my lifetime I've only heard about tax cuts, I find this mysterious as presumably the taxes must have once risen to now be cut. Why have we seemingly lost the ability to say that we need new taxes?
In Boston we constantly complain about the state of our public transit system which has been in debt for decades. Being proximate to a train station has a 20-50% positive benefit to home prices. The transit system can't raise fairs as those punish lower income workers who most need it, and they are even prohibited from raising fairs at more than 2%/yr by state law. Why can't we tax the property owners (I am one) benefiting from proximity to the train stations? Why are we building stations with 100 year growth horizons if it means we only build 1 new station?
> Why have we seemingly lost the ability to say that we need new taxes?
Decades of Republican propaganda have led the average right-of-center voter to believe that higher taxes, for any reason, are a) stealing their hard-earned money, and/or b) a socialist plot to turn America into either the USSR or Venezuela.
I believe that is definitely part of it, but it's also a lifetime of hearing about government waste, bills passed with tons of "pork" spending, witnessing government mismanagement of resources, and concern that the government is not necessarily the best way to solve every problem. And then once you decide that a particular issue is best addressed by the government, there's a valid debate over which level of government (e.g. in the U.S. stuff done at the federal level often has a reputation for being bloated, slow-moving, and less effective than it could be).
Decades of Democratic propaganda have led the average left-of-center voter to believe higher taxes, for any reason are a) taking money from greedy Republicans to redistribute wealth, and/or b) going to turn America into a socialist state.
See how that works.
Because then you would get NIMBYism against train stations. While the asset value might go up, that could hurt cashflow for a lot of people. Anyone who wants to live there for a long time should oppose the higher tax or the train station as they don't benefit from the asset appreciation.
The majority of new stations get built in purpose designed "transit oriented development" e.g. where housing and amenities for 10k+ residents are built at one point in time.
Major Boston examples include the Seaport District and Assembly Square.
In Maryland property tax rates can increase without a vote as long as the county deems it necessary. Usually the county doesn't need to deem it necessary because property value increases (which has the effect of increasing tax revenue)
So basically what I'm saying is... the POTUS doesn't need to do song and a dance in order for taxes to increase for people. For a lot of states, as long as the value of the property keeps increasing, the residents are paying more and more taxes every year. And if the income from your job doesn't increase at the same rate as your property taxes... it can put a lot of financial strain on you (my relatives in NY moved to a different state because the property taxes in Albany were eating them alive)
My FIL moved to FL from MD because of taxes. He is well-to-do due to high responsibility positions and shrewd investments. He used to donate to local environment orgs, the arts, scholarship funds, etc. He told MD to find someone else as they bled him for the last time.
It's true that property taxes are based on the assessment of a home, but it's also not necessarily true that the assessment does a good enough approximation to consider that any house within 1mi of the train is worth 20% more than one 1.5mi away. From my hobby of looking at home appraisals in Boston towns it seems the biggest factor in most towns is square footage.
Another point to consider is that most towns in Massachusetts seem to use replacement cost as the main method of appraisal versus potential income/value. Meaning, 2 families appraise for nearly the same as a single family when they are in reality worth 1.5-2x more in potential income via rent or selling.
Either it adds value or it doesn't, if square footage is the main thing then it doesn't add as much value you as think.
This is the beautiful thing about prices - we let individuals decide what something is worth. Perhaps we don't need new taxes but just better assessors and planning.
It does add value in the real market. It doesn't add value according to the town property assessor. There's a disconnect between reality and property taxes.
So the argument against dedicated infrastructure taxes like this, is that it takes tax money away from other things that also need it.
Generally speaking, increased development will also require not just roads and transit, but investments in water, electric, sewer, schools, police, fire, etc. If you dedicate funding for one thing it takes away from something else, and you really don’t want to turn a general funds tax bill into dozens of line-items that get nitpicked and fought over constantly.
Boston property taxes are low at a ~1% rate, and as others have noted the assessed price is not the price I would sell the home for. In Massachusetts you also get a ~1500 dollar tax credit for your primary residence.
"Through my lifetime I've only heard about tax cuts, I find this mysterious as presumably the taxes must have once risen to now be cut. Why have we seemingly lost the ability to say that we need new taxes?"
At the local level, we see pretty regular tax increases here in the midwest. There's a lot of resistance to increases in federal and state-wide taxes largely because federal and state spending is really hard to directly connect to a benefit to the payer (i.e. home value increases, better commutes, a fun local park). On the other hand, a ballot initiative to fund an improvement in roads or sewers is pretty easy to get through.
Where I live (one of the most liberal cities in the US), it seems that most taxes get passed - even the poorly structured or regressive ones. It's frankly frustrating to see our profoundly mismanaged school district get yet another 10 million dollar bond (generated from property tax) passed every 4 years.
School districts spend an insane amount of money. The budget of our local school district is 10x that of the city and they mismanage the hell out of it. They just spent 100M building a new middle school when the old one was only ~40 years old, solid brick, and just needed roof repairs.
the school district in my parents town is one of the smallest in the area and they built one of the largest football stadiums in the area they passed a levey to pay for it, but while this was going on they had a roof that needed replaced on the highschool, they knew this it was leaking already but they figured they wouldn't get the stadium built if they had to do it second, they waited until the next year to demand money to fix the roof.
>In Boston we constantly complain about the state of our public transit system
Have you seen the Big Dig? Look at the size of the check we wrote for that one. Now look at the kind of houses all the people who got to work on that project (whether in the office or in the field) in their mid and late careers (when you can make real money rather than be schlepping supplies around a job site for a "you haven't put in your time yet" size check) are living in.
Waste like that is why nobody wants to increase taxes. Pretty much anything more than the bare minimum seems to just slowly evaporate. The money goes poof before it trickles down into programs, infrastructure and services that actually provide benefit to the taxpayer. People would rather ride on a crappy T and pay marginally less tax than pay more tax to ride on a crappy T that has a handful more spots in the org chart for politicians to fill with people who won't show up.
Look at the semi-annual (well, let's be fair and give them credit, it's more like 3yr) state police "fraudulent overtime" scandal. It goes way, way back. Remember when the Probation Department got caught paying salaries to political appointees who didn't show up and didn't have any job duties? Remember when there was that enforcement/compliance arm of the Dept. of Elder Affairs that didn't actually exist like it was supposed to because the money was redirected to pay for more (politically appointed) middle managers who just forwarded emails all day? This is what "raising taxes" looks like in Massachusetts. For every $10 spent you'll be lucky to have a buck actually be used to run a bus, patch a pothole pay for healthcare, etc. etc. It's no surprise that people don't wanna pay for that.
People will pay for public services. Nobody really cares whether the garbage truck driver gets his pay stub on private letterhead or government letterhead. Nobody really cares whether they have public or private EMT services so long as they show up with equal promptness. What people won't pay for is public leeches and Massachusetts has done a very good job cultivating the perception that you can't buy one of the former without getting ten of the latter in the deal. No surprise that people don't wanna take that deal.
The big dig is likely to be around for 200+ years. It’s exactly the kind of useful government spending everyone wants and nobody wants to pay for.
Could efficiency improve? Yes! But note that waste was private companies padding out the contract not government employees. People want to outsource government functions, blame government when that fails, and use it to justify increased outsourcing. Clearly there is a failure in that logical reasoning.
> private companies padding out the contract not government employees
I have no references to back this theory up, but I feel like this is where most of the waste happens.
[Gov spend public money] -> [pay private company]
The government isn't incentivized to get the best deal for our money which results in overpaying or just flat out corruption. eg. I'll overpay my friend's company and they will kick me back some money for choosing their contract.
Actually, urban freeways around the world are getting ripped out. They are even looking at doing it to one in Detroit. I would be surprised if the freeways for the big dig are still around in 50 years let alone 200.
I sometimes wonder if the apparent endemic corruption of government in the US is due in part to a miss-perception of how much government employees should be paid. In Singapore and Japan government jobs were often viewed as jobs for the elite. In Massachusetts we pay many government employees less than they'd make doing literally anything else. A biology teacher's pay starts at ~600/week.
Is it that wrong that the people who ran one of the largest infrastructure programs in the US live in nice homes? The project was horrendously over budget and late, but it did do what proponents wanted it to do. Private firms taking over the commuter rail like Keolis don't seem to be achieving any quality or cost benefits.
We may be in a strange situation where fundamentally underpaid workers find ways to game the system to make about what they could in the private sector, would higher wages help eliminate the "wasteful" practices?
This is a fact many take for granted: the association between government jobs and inefficiency is not an inherent part of government as much as a reflection of the fact that nobody with options is going to choose a job which pays far less.
The MBTA needs local permission to build stations, even on existing rights of way.
The Red Line was going to extend out to Arlington and then 128... but Arlington blocked it. You'll see several rationales listed, but the big one was racism: Arlington (now a liberal bastion like Cambridge) was afraid that "those people" would come to their town.
What Massachusetts needs is a coherent state-wide plan that handles transit on a public-first rather than car-first strategy. What we've got is a set of non-cooperating agencies all trying to deal with local problems.
In New Jersey there is an abandoned commuter line that already has stations and the tracks are still in place. The residents shutdown efforts to revitalize it because it would raise property taxes.
> You must be very young to not have seen tax increases. Being near the train station only has benefit to those that use the train.
Reduced congestion on the road benefits everyone.
As does the reduction in air pollution, and pm2.5 from break and tire dust.
If proper rezoning takes place around train stations, then everyone benefits from denser housing available for those who desire it, reducing upwards pressure on housing elsewhere in the city.
Businesses all along the entire train line benefit from an increase in customer volume that doesn't require a corresponding increase in parking requirements.
The decrease in parking means land is more efficiently used, actual buildings can be constructed which increase tax revenue for the city, and provide more jobs.
The great depression was really the trigger for massive tax increases. We've generally been cutting them since.
Personally, I think tax increases would be much more popular if the government showed the money would be spent efficiently. Cost+ contracting and endless cost overruns have eroded public support for government projects.
- And what if we cut taxes to the big players? At the end they are the ones giving jobs to people and someone needs to keep paying the taxes for the streets and schools they are using
Not really, I think roads are a convenient example but the same dynamic described (cities getting out over their skis through cheap-in-the-short term development and debt) can be seen playing out for other types of expenses. The next highest costs up that list, hospitals and education, are often also financed through debt, expensive to maintain over a long time horizon, and essential to growing the tax base. This seems totally cromulent with the basic "growth addiction" framework to me.
More roads means more sewage, power, water, gas, waste removal, snow removal, and fiber internet lines. Living spaced out also probably adds other costs like more administrative staff.
It mentions in the video that most money for road initial construction comes from State/Federal. Thus the true ongoing costs are masked and so it continues.
Yes, a lot of road money comes from state/federal budgets, not local. It actually causes many problems. Residents don't want a freeway through their town but guess who makes those decision?
It was always hard to understand to me, the more buildings they build, the more expensive they get. Like in SF or NYC, they build more condos, but each new condo is more expensive. I think America[real estate] as a whole is an ongoing Ponzi scheme :shrug:
We’ve made cheap buildings illegal, and most community input meetings are held in bad faith with continually moving goalposts. It’s amazing things get built at all.
I can’t find the exact link right now that breaks this down, but basically the ONLY profitable new construction to build is luxury buildings, which by definition are at the top end of the market (and even with a premium, because they’re new!). There was a case study about this in LA.
Over time, older buildings become cheaper until they’re either renovated or razed and replaced with new construction. But it’s a cyclic process: new construction is expensive, and gets less expensive relative to other newer units over time until it is renewed.
Now, there’s still a ton of unmet demand from people moving into cities: this pushes all prices in the market up. And unfortunately, (covid era excluded) there’s just so, so, so much demand from people moving to SF/NYC/LA/Seattle/etc that even if we removed all zoning restrictions and started building at a furious pace, cities probably wouldn’t be able to meet demand across the economic spectrum for another few decades. Covid may affect this in some way in the short term, and other trends may affect this in the mid-long term (we did have suburban exodus once before in US history).
One way to address this problem is to massively fund public transit infrastructure projects inside the city and in surrounding metro areas. Tokyo has ~30 million residents is relatively expensive for Japan, but living even a 20-30min subway/train ride from the city center is actually surprisingly affordable compared to other international cities. Seoul is similar. Chinese cities have similar infrastructure systems, but I can’t speak to how that affects affordability because there are other economic/political factors at play. But that seems tragically unlikely to happen in the US.
Right, luxury is what makes money, and in 30 years, they will be qualified as section 8 or low income. This is just how that process works. The massive problem we really have is no one in the 70's or 80's built for the massive population growth we have experienced, so less housing is available than demand. We're near 8 billion people, 70's was only 3.6, 80's 4.4 then boom 8.
The basic social problem is that the absence of economic growth turns economies into zero-sum operations. In order for anyone to get ahead, someone, somewhere else must lose. Historically, zero-sum economies make for some pretty shitty living standards for most folks.
Growth, at least in the short term (the 50-100 year timescale), makes it possible to have an economy where gains can be had without necessarily making other folks lose. The downside here is that growth can only go for so long before resource constraints of one form or another bite everyone in the butt.
A country can still improve wealth and health of the citizens without an increasing GDP. If work is spent on impactful areas that make people's lives better. Motion is not necessarily progress. "Growth" where we spend loads of money building out unused infrastructure is empty growth.
The problem is that you need a certain population density to pay for maintenance of infrastructure. It's like running a business. If you can break even, you can expand your business endlessly. If you are even just a single dollar short it just doesn't work out. Suburbia is not just a dollar short. It's making substantial losses while providing very little to show for it.
You can bring back cities by making apartments more affordable. Perhaps making more micro apartments. There's probably a large marker for people that would still keep their suburban home, but if they could afford it would get an apartment to stay in for fun over some weekends, or overnight during the workweek. Living in the Suburbs has many benefits. Larger homes, backyards and is safer for kids to run around. All valid reasons to chose them. Lets not try and change people, but work with their preferences.
> Living in the Suburbs has many benefits. Larger homes, backyards and is safer for kids to run around. All valid reasons to chose them. Lets not try and change people, but work with their preferences.
No one will need to try and change people, they will be forced to change once the budget deficits force their hand. The ones that can may move to a new jurisdiction and start the game over.
I also would not say kids are safer in suburbs. Lots of car traffic, lots of big roads to cross, lots of big cars since why not buy an SUV/pickup.
This was confusing. The narrator leads by saying that cities are ponzi schemes and supports this by showing a cash flow graph, but that graph doesn't seem to be grounded with any examples. I find it surprising that long term maintenance costs more than the long term tax revenue growth. I would've liked to see more evidence that these cities really are unsustainable.
its not just cities. this is the issue with academia and many other aspects of life. everything has an embedded growth expectation, and when that growth stops, its no longer sustainable.
(IE each professor cant train 10 grad students in their field to be professors because academia is simply not growing that fast anymore)
And not every lawyer can become a partner anymore etc. (not every google engineer can become senior)
unfortunately its not only about growth. everything in our life is based on short term benefits. officials are elected for a few year and just want to push for new development to show growth. No one wants to be the one saying lets hold onto growth and fix what we have first. that is valid for cities, companies, governments.
It won't bankrupt a city, they simply won't do the required infrastructure maintenance. Check out the city of Los Angeles and its water piping system. Under the current pipe replacement schedule, it would take 100 years to replace pipes that are 100 years old. They instead just fix the pipes as they break. Usually the pipe breaks are small enough where no damage is done, but a few years back a large pipe ruptured and flooded an expensive part of UCLA.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadI also take exception to the use of the gestalt 'America' as if there were some central force orchestrating this phenomena - there isn't, just the same incentives that push developer's voices in city governments louder and louder.
These things start at the top - based on what the US govt decides or does not decide to regulate. With a lack of regulation, we all know the "free markets" reign to a point where they are no longer free and instead enhance divisions in society and further monopolies.
Amazon, Facebook, Google are too big. They've provided great benefits to society to date - but govt needs to step in and control them now.
So, these municipalities, acting independently and without coordination, and have arrived at the same state. Because they are all currently incentivized to.
The Strong Town books also discusses what happened with a lack of regulation throughout almost all of human history: everyone lived in rural areas to work a farm, or else lived and worked in dense urban areas. American suburbia happened in large part not due to a lack of regulation at the top, but federal money being spent on roads, highways and infrastructure at the top.
Agreed. This reductionist mindset bugs me to no end
Channeling the late comedian Mitch Hedberg: I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Hedberg#Quotations
[1] https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
This works as long as you have economic growth (usually as a result of population growth).
Doesn’t work so well when automation and cheaper labor from other places in the world are taking away the economic growth, and simultaneously people are having 0, 1, or at most 2 kids.
I think you are misunderstanding something. It works just fine. The problem is that there are these "waste" humans that nobody knows what to do with.
There is also a glaring flaw in your comment. Automation increases economic growth. If a single worker is 10 times more productive he can ask for 10 times the salary. A lot of low income jobs pay badly precisely because there is not enough automation to turn them into productive high income jobs.
Ok, back to the waste humans. The default answer to a surplus with no buyers is to just let the wealthy hand out a loan so that those with no possessions can buy the surplus and use it productively and earn money. For obvious reasons interest rates are down to 0% so this is not a viable strategy. However in principle it works the same with automation. Humans with zero net worth cannot work because robots are doing their job can instead borrow robots and use those robots productively. Debt is just a way to convince people to work today so that their productive output doesn't get lost.
The borrowing strategy works out if there is enough demand for the robot labor, but what if there is no demand at all? You can just create demand out of thin air. Let the government print money and use it to buy consumer goods and services or let the government invest into domestic jobs that would otherwise not be done. Again, it's just a trick to make people work today so that their productive output doesn't get lost. The benefit from working is higher than letting the money sit around.
Why? Because that's the policy. 2% inflation is a target. Your money gets increasingly less valuable so you cannot sit on it. You will have to do something with it. If you put your money in gold you are doing so with the expectation that society as a whole is doing productive work. If you put your money into stocks you are doing so with the expectation that this individual company is doing productive work. Yes, these assets are inflation proof, but only because someone is actually working. If everyone put their money into gold the assets would just become worthless eventually because society as a whole is not doing productive work.
If CPI inflation is driving asset inflation then you simply cannot sit around and do nothing. Unfortunately the Fed is driving asset inflation directly and completely skipping over CPI inflation. At that point the system is built on circular logic without any connection to productive work. Capitalism without the capitalism.
This is only true if very few workers are 10 times more productive. If many workers are 10 times more productive, then the supply of labor has increased 10x and unless there is a corresponding increase in the buyers of labor, the price of the labor will go down. Which is what has happened in real life.
Low income jobs pay low income because the buyers of that labor are not willing to pay much and the supply of labor is high for that type of work.
I believe the rest of your comment does not apply to state and city governments in the US, since only the federal government can print money. For state and city governments, their tax base and therefore potential economic growth/future tax income can move away.
- What if we waive impact fees so new construction doesn't pay for its impact on transportation and other services? Wow look at all that construction!
- Oh no, we don't have enough money to pay for increases to transportation and police and fire and libraries and schools!
- Try to pass increased property taxes on existing residents, who vote "No" because they always vote no on any tax increases.
The issue is that many people, like myself, want a say. I don’t mind paying more in taxes if the money is used well and I feel like I actually had a say in the process.
Also, Colorado is expecting one of the biggest economic and population booms in America, so people’s incomes are going up and thinks are looking pretty good. Try the same in states with stagnant economies and job markets, and even schools won’t get the votes for tax increases.
And the nuance of the statement, of course, is people won’t vote for tax increases for things that won’t benefit them. Roads benefit all car owners, so car owners don’t mind voting for roads. But taxes for public transportation won’t be voted in. And people will vote to increase taxes for their own school district. But not to help subsidize other cities’ schools.
In Boston we constantly complain about the state of our public transit system which has been in debt for decades. Being proximate to a train station has a 20-50% positive benefit to home prices. The transit system can't raise fairs as those punish lower income workers who most need it, and they are even prohibited from raising fairs at more than 2%/yr by state law. Why can't we tax the property owners (I am one) benefiting from proximity to the train stations? Why are we building stations with 100 year growth horizons if it means we only build 1 new station?
Decades of Republican propaganda have led the average right-of-center voter to believe that higher taxes, for any reason, are a) stealing their hard-earned money, and/or b) a socialist plot to turn America into either the USSR or Venezuela.
Major Boston examples include the Seaport District and Assembly Square.
Seaport: http://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/sea...
Assembly Square: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_Square#Marketplace_hi...
So basically what I'm saying is... the POTUS doesn't need to do song and a dance in order for taxes to increase for people. For a lot of states, as long as the value of the property keeps increasing, the residents are paying more and more taxes every year. And if the income from your job doesn't increase at the same rate as your property taxes... it can put a lot of financial strain on you (my relatives in NY moved to a different state because the property taxes in Albany were eating them alive)
Example:
https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/real-estate/bs-bz-tax-...
> Why can't we tax the property owners (I am one) benefiting from proximity to the train stations?
don't you pay property tax based on the value of your home? if so, this is already happening.
Another point to consider is that most towns in Massachusetts seem to use replacement cost as the main method of appraisal versus potential income/value. Meaning, 2 families appraise for nearly the same as a single family when they are in reality worth 1.5-2x more in potential income via rent or selling.
This is the beautiful thing about prices - we let individuals decide what something is worth. Perhaps we don't need new taxes but just better assessors and planning.
Generally speaking, increased development will also require not just roads and transit, but investments in water, electric, sewer, schools, police, fire, etc. If you dedicate funding for one thing it takes away from something else, and you really don’t want to turn a general funds tax bill into dozens of line-items that get nitpicked and fought over constantly.
Which leads to comedy like this: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1265719788875272192
At the local level, we see pretty regular tax increases here in the midwest. There's a lot of resistance to increases in federal and state-wide taxes largely because federal and state spending is really hard to directly connect to a benefit to the payer (i.e. home value increases, better commutes, a fun local park). On the other hand, a ballot initiative to fund an improvement in roads or sewers is pretty easy to get through.
Have you seen the Big Dig? Look at the size of the check we wrote for that one. Now look at the kind of houses all the people who got to work on that project (whether in the office or in the field) in their mid and late careers (when you can make real money rather than be schlepping supplies around a job site for a "you haven't put in your time yet" size check) are living in.
Waste like that is why nobody wants to increase taxes. Pretty much anything more than the bare minimum seems to just slowly evaporate. The money goes poof before it trickles down into programs, infrastructure and services that actually provide benefit to the taxpayer. People would rather ride on a crappy T and pay marginally less tax than pay more tax to ride on a crappy T that has a handful more spots in the org chart for politicians to fill with people who won't show up.
Look at the semi-annual (well, let's be fair and give them credit, it's more like 3yr) state police "fraudulent overtime" scandal. It goes way, way back. Remember when the Probation Department got caught paying salaries to political appointees who didn't show up and didn't have any job duties? Remember when there was that enforcement/compliance arm of the Dept. of Elder Affairs that didn't actually exist like it was supposed to because the money was redirected to pay for more (politically appointed) middle managers who just forwarded emails all day? This is what "raising taxes" looks like in Massachusetts. For every $10 spent you'll be lucky to have a buck actually be used to run a bus, patch a pothole pay for healthcare, etc. etc. It's no surprise that people don't wanna pay for that.
People will pay for public services. Nobody really cares whether the garbage truck driver gets his pay stub on private letterhead or government letterhead. Nobody really cares whether they have public or private EMT services so long as they show up with equal promptness. What people won't pay for is public leeches and Massachusetts has done a very good job cultivating the perception that you can't buy one of the former without getting ten of the latter in the deal. No surprise that people don't wanna take that deal.
Could efficiency improve? Yes! But note that waste was private companies padding out the contract not government employees. People want to outsource government functions, blame government when that fails, and use it to justify increased outsourcing. Clearly there is a failure in that logical reasoning.
I have no references to back this theory up, but I feel like this is where most of the waste happens.
[Gov spend public money] -> [pay private company]
The government isn't incentivized to get the best deal for our money which results in overpaying or just flat out corruption. eg. I'll overpay my friend's company and they will kick me back some money for choosing their contract.
Is it that wrong that the people who ran one of the largest infrastructure programs in the US live in nice homes? The project was horrendously over budget and late, but it did do what proponents wanted it to do. Private firms taking over the commuter rail like Keolis don't seem to be achieving any quality or cost benefits.
We may be in a strange situation where fundamentally underpaid workers find ways to game the system to make about what they could in the private sector, would higher wages help eliminate the "wasteful" practices?
The Red Line was going to extend out to Arlington and then 128... but Arlington blocked it. You'll see several rationales listed, but the big one was racism: Arlington (now a liberal bastion like Cambridge) was afraid that "those people" would come to their town.
What Massachusetts needs is a coherent state-wide plan that handles transit on a public-first rather than car-first strategy. What we've got is a set of non-cooperating agencies all trying to deal with local problems.
There is nothing that stops the government from increasing property tax surrounding train stations.
Reduced congestion on the road benefits everyone.
As does the reduction in air pollution, and pm2.5 from break and tire dust.
If proper rezoning takes place around train stations, then everyone benefits from denser housing available for those who desire it, reducing upwards pressure on housing elsewhere in the city.
Businesses all along the entire train line benefit from an increase in customer volume that doesn't require a corresponding increase in parking requirements.
The decrease in parking means land is more efficiently used, actual buildings can be constructed which increase tax revenue for the city, and provide more jobs.
Mass transit is awesome.
Personally, I think tax increases would be much more popular if the government showed the money would be spent efficiently. Cost+ contracting and endless cost overruns have eroded public support for government projects.
[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
Over time, older buildings become cheaper until they’re either renovated or razed and replaced with new construction. But it’s a cyclic process: new construction is expensive, and gets less expensive relative to other newer units over time until it is renewed.
Now, there’s still a ton of unmet demand from people moving into cities: this pushes all prices in the market up. And unfortunately, (covid era excluded) there’s just so, so, so much demand from people moving to SF/NYC/LA/Seattle/etc that even if we removed all zoning restrictions and started building at a furious pace, cities probably wouldn’t be able to meet demand across the economic spectrum for another few decades. Covid may affect this in some way in the short term, and other trends may affect this in the mid-long term (we did have suburban exodus once before in US history).
One way to address this problem is to massively fund public transit infrastructure projects inside the city and in surrounding metro areas. Tokyo has ~30 million residents is relatively expensive for Japan, but living even a 20-30min subway/train ride from the city center is actually surprisingly affordable compared to other international cities. Seoul is similar. Chinese cities have similar infrastructure systems, but I can’t speak to how that affects affordability because there are other economic/political factors at play. But that seems tragically unlikely to happen in the US.
Growth, at least in the short term (the 50-100 year timescale), makes it possible to have an economy where gains can be had without necessarily making other folks lose. The downside here is that growth can only go for so long before resource constraints of one form or another bite everyone in the butt.
GDP, or counting how many buildings and streets and strip malls were built is a totally seperate axis from quality of life.
A town could shrink while every single person's life in that town increases because it changes the structure and quality of their of lives.
With a ponzi scheme things get worse over time, not better.
No one will need to try and change people, they will be forced to change once the budget deficits force their hand. The ones that can may move to a new jurisdiction and start the game over.
I also would not say kids are safer in suburbs. Lots of car traffic, lots of big roads to cross, lots of big cars since why not buy an SUV/pickup.
https://youtu.be/ul_xzyCDT98
How far the setback from the sidewalk is, how much green space is required, parking requirements, all contribute to a lack of density.
And certain types of housing, e.g. boarding houses, aren't even legal anymore (moral crusaders shut them down long ago!)
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/14/the-growth-pon...
(IE each professor cant train 10 grad students in their field to be professors because academia is simply not growing that fast anymore)
And not every lawyer can become a partner anymore etc. (not every google engineer can become senior)