Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

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Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Mon Jul 18, 2016 7:53 pm

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016 ... edestrians
Really Narrow Streets

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016 ... le-to-keep
"What is going on in the doughnut of despair surrounding downtown Detroit is not a policy choice. It is a consequence of policy choice. There is no bringing back the illusion of wealth or, to paraphrase Tomas Sedlacek, Detroit can not get back its unsustainability. Now what?"

Donut of despair.

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016 ... in-in-game
More RNS.

"Clarence was a professional photographer. His job was to photograph the existing deplorable state of the place so as to record and justify the demolition. Fast forward 108 years later and his photographs have survived. They are heartbreaking to look at. They show small streets and ‘laneways’ full of people talking together, kids playing together, men in business attire seemingly doing business together. They show urban density with dignity. They show how people naturally chose to build and how they chose to live. Hardly a building setback to be seen."
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by flyingpylon » Tue Jul 19, 2016 5:43 am

Thanks for sharing this, interesting stuff at Strongtowns.org. Some of the issues described in The Growth Ponzi series may be contributing factors to issues between Baby Boomers and generations that came after them.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Jul 19, 2016 9:54 am

Agreed, that is an interesting series. This is a quote:
If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth. Our development pattern -- the American style of building our places -- is simply not productive enough to sustain itself. It creates modest short-term benefits and massive long-term costs. We're now sixty years into this experiment, basically through two complete life cycles. We've reached the "long-term", and you can clearly see we've run out of options for keeping this Ponzi scheme going.
Lots of parallels here with what Really Narrow Streets guy and PointedStick riff on. I think it was on RNS that he talks about how Chinese workers "take" our jobs because they're willing to work for much less. Yet they're still able to save a substantial part of their income, and it's because the places they live and work don't extract too much wealth from them.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Jul 19, 2016 10:08 am

Whoops, and I wanted to also mention that this was one of the themes in John Michael Greer's "Retrotopia" series on his website. In the Lakeland Republic, counties could vote on what level of infrastructure they wanted to have. So if you wanted to have very low taxes, your county would maintain 1840s level infrastructure of dirt roads. Or you could have higher taxes and gravel roads on par with 1865. Or even higher, and have paved roads, or even higher and get paved roads + streetcars.

Oh hell, here it is:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... habit.html
“Restos?”

“You don’t have those out your way, do you? Here the two political blocs are Conservatives and Restorationists; Conservatives want to keep things pretty much the way they are, Restos want to take things back to the way they used to be. Okay, lay your head back.” I did, and he draped a hot damp towel over the lower half of my face, then went back to trimming. “Used to be about half and half, but these days the Restos have the bigger half—all the rural counties going to lower tiers, and so on.”

“Hmm?” I managed to say.

“Oh, that’s right. You probably don’t know about the tiers.”

“Mm-mh.”

“It works like this. There are five tiers, and counties vote on what tier they want to be in. The lower the tier, the lower your taxes, but the less you get in terms of infrastructure and stuff. Toledo’s tier five—we got electricity, we got phones in every house, good paving on the streets so you can drive a car if you can afford one, but we pay for it through the nose when it comes to tax time.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He took off the towel, started brushing hot lather onto my face. “So tier five has a base date of 1950—that means we got about the same sort of services they had here that year. The other tiers go down from there—tier four’s base date is 1920, for tier three it’s 1890, tier two’s 1860, and tier one’s 1830. You live in a tier one county, you got police, you got dirt roads, not a lot else. Of course your taxes are way, way down, too.” He put away the brush, snapped open an old-fashioned straight razor, and went to work on my stubble. “That’s the thing. Nobody’s technology gets a subsidy—that’s in the constitution. You want it, you pay all the costs, cradle to grave. You don’t get to dump ‘em on anybody else. That’s what the Restos are all up in arms about. They think something in the budget is a hidden subsidy for I forget what high-tier technology, and that’s a red line for them.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said again.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Tue Jul 19, 2016 1:00 pm

I've been loving this series. Great stuff.

The problem is cars and houses.

Cars are horrendously expensive for families earning less than like $50k a year, because probably both parents are working and need their own vehicles, which together cost $7-20k a year depending on how far they drive and how badly they botched their choice of vehicle (lots of poor people driving SUVs and trucks). In some families kids get their own cars and it become an even bigger slice of the family budget.

Housing is also horrendously expensive because most of the housing stock consists of free-standing houses that are too large for the average American family of today. I think the average size is like 2,800 square feet. At $100/sf (flyover country price), that's almost 300k, which is incredibly expensive. The bigger the house, the bigger the repair bills with anything breaks. Large lots compound the problem because you need to take care of that land, which is either time-consuming or expensive (usually expensive because nobody has time to do yard work anymore it seems). And the large lots further separate the houses from anything you can walk to, so you need to drive more, so you get closer and closer to everyone needing their own car.

Add in high health insurance costs and tuition at private schools and colleges and you get a pretty good picture of why people who live in this way are financially sinking while people who avoid it are doing okay.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by clacy » Tue Jul 19, 2016 1:26 pm

Pointedstick wrote:I've been loving this series. Great stuff.

The problem is cars and houses.

Cars are horrendously expensive for families earning less than like $50k a year, because probably both parents are working and need their own vehicles, which together cost $7-20k a year depending on how far they drive and how badly they botched their choice of vehicle (lots of poor people driving SUVs and trucks). In some families kids get their own cars and it become an even bigger slice of the family budget.

Housing is also horrendously expensive because most of the housing stock consists of free-standing houses that are too large for the average American family of today. I think the average size is like 2,800 square feet. At $100/sf (flyover country price), that's almost 300k, which is incredibly expensive. The bigger the house, the bigger the repair bills with anything breaks. Large lots compound the problem because you need to take care of that land, which is either time-consuming or expensive (usually expensive because nobody has time to do yard work anymore it seems). And the large lots further separate the houses from anything you can walk to, so you need to drive more, so you get closer and closer to everyone needing their own car.

Add in high health insurance costs and tuition at private schools and colleges and you get a pretty good picture of why people who live in this way are financially sinking while people who avoid it are doing okay.
I love my bubble in suburbia with big houses and SUV's. To each their own I guess. I can't think of anything worse than raising my kids in a small urban dwelling and walking everywhere, but that option exists too for those that want it.

The nice thing about this country is that you get to chose where and how you live for the most part.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Tue Jul 19, 2016 2:35 pm

Pointedstick wrote:Add in high health insurance costs and tuition at private schools and colleges and you get a pretty good picture of why people who live in this way are financially sinking while people who avoid it are doing okay.
Really? Do you think such people as below are financially sinking? They are the epitome of high living standards. Why should they have any right to whine or complain?

Image

Lets see, they're saving away an amazing $36K a year, taking $18K worth of freakin' vacations all over the world, only the best private schools for their kids as well as a wide array of college-entrance pleasing extracurricular activities for them. No doubt preparatory school and an Ivy League college is in their future only for them to repeat this high level of success all over again for an entirely new generation all the while getting a continuous wealth transfer from their parents.

I'm somehow not supposed to be feeling envious? It just seems to me if you can't compete and succeed with what the definition of social signaling success is under capitalism, you wind up rationalizing your decisions on being a loser. If that is just doing "okay", its not for me.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by dualstow » Tue Jul 19, 2016 3:03 pm

Good stuff.
I live on a small street & have been reading 'Antfragile' here and there. Had never heard of strongtowns before.

I'm also fascinated with Detroit. The documentary 'Detropia' on Netflix is pretty interesting.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Jul 19, 2016 4:21 pm

MachineGhost wrote:
Pointedstick wrote:Add in high health insurance costs and tuition at private schools and colleges and you get a pretty good picture of why people who live in this way are financially sinking while people who avoid it are doing okay.
Really? Do you think such people as below are financially sinking? They are the epitome of high living standards. Why should they have any right to whine or complain?

snip

Lets see, they're saving away an amazing $36K a year, taking $18K worth of freakin' vacations all over the world, only the best private schools for their kids as well as a wide array of college-entrance pleasing extracurricular activities for them. No doubt preparatory school and an Ivy League college is in their future only for them to repeat this high level of success all over again for an entirely new generation all the while getting a continuous wealth transfer from their parents.

I'm somehow not supposed to be feeling envious? It just seems to me if you can't compete and succeed with what the definition of social signaling success is under capitalism, you wind up rationalizing your decisions on being a loser. If that is just doing "okay", its not for me.
I think PS was talking about normal people, not the richest people in the history of the planet.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Tue Jul 19, 2016 4:42 pm

clacy wrote: I love my bubble in suburbia with big houses and SUV's. To each their own I guess. I can't think of anything worse than raising my kids in a small urban dwelling and walking everywhere, but that option exists too for those that want it.

The nice thing about this country is that you get to chose where and how you live for the most part.
Sort of. There are a lot more opportunities to live in suburbia than there are to live somewhere pleasantly walkable, and that's a problem. I agree that more options are better than fewer. I like my current living situation which is basically right on the edge of suburbia, within walking distance to nearly everything I want. Granted, it's a walk that anecdotally only seems to appeal to men, not women, bolstering Mr. Really Narrow Streets' argument that car-dependent settlement patterns are hostile to women (and children) and one of the best way to see more sexy women on a regular basis is to live somewhere where walking is pleasant. Cars make you fat and ugly, not sexy and beautiful (this goes for men too!).

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archiv ... 22108.html
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archiv ... 21311.html

MachineGhost wrote:
Pointedstick wrote:Add in high health insurance costs and tuition at private schools and colleges and you get a pretty good picture of why people who live in this way are financially sinking while people who avoid it are doing okay.
Really? Do you think such people as below are financially sinking? They are the epitome of high living standards. Why should they have any right to whine or complain?
Is your brain broken? You're talking about the extravagant luxury spending of people making half a million bucks a year. I'm talking about the lower middle class. If you make $500k a year you can realistically afford whatever you want with even the tiniest attempt at financial efficiency. This has nothing to do with urban design patterns that encourage car and single family home ownership that is financially challenging for people with more normal incomes.

The absolute lowest I've managed to get my car costs down to is about $2,500 a year. That's 16% of a minimum wage full time job's yearly take-home pay. Maybe without car ownership, a minimum wage job would actually be close to a livable income, hmm?
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by dragoncar » Tue Jul 19, 2016 11:31 pm

Not to mention their effective tax rate will be nowhere near 40%. Maybe marginal.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Tue Jul 19, 2016 11:37 pm

Kriegsspiel wrote:I think PS was talking about normal people, not the richest people in the history of the planet.
Thank you for proving my point. The example given is pretty normal for SF, NYC, etc.. Are they the "richest people"? Are they failing? Seriously doubtful.
Last edited by MachineGhost on Tue Jul 19, 2016 11:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Tue Jul 19, 2016 11:56 pm

Pointedstick wrote:Is your brain broken? You're talking about the extravagant luxury spending of people making half a million bucks a year. I'm talking about the lower middle class. If you make $500k a year you can realistically afford whatever you want with even the tiniest attempt at financial efficiency. This has nothing to do with urban design patterns that encourage car and single family home ownership that is financially challenging for people with more normal incomes.
Is yours? That's not what you said:
Add in high health insurance costs and tuition at private schools and colleges and you get a pretty good picture of why people who live in this way are financially sinking while people who avoid it are doing okay.
Lower middle class people don't have high health insurance costs nor send their kids to private schools and colleges. I'm just refuting your claim here that "rich people" are "financially failiing" because you're perhaps subconsciously trying to rationalize your own lower middle class lifestyle.

Financially failing, my ass... and yet they think they're only average! ::)
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Jul 20, 2016 8:06 am

MachineGhost wrote:
Kriegsspiel wrote:I think PS was talking about normal people, not the richest people in the history of the planet.
Thank you for proving my point. The example given is pretty normal for SF, NYC, etc.. Are they the "richest people"? Are they failing? Seriously doubtful.
Yes, you were describing rich people. The richest in the history of the planet.

I'm assuming you didn't have a point other than rich people are rich? And that a lot of them live in SF and NY?
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by dualstow » Wed Jul 20, 2016 8:08 am

I don't think there's anything wrong with suburbia. I grew up in a fairly small town and while I got to the mall by bicycle, anything else required a car. If I had kids, I'd want to have a car or at least access to Car Share whether we needed it on a daily basis or not.

As a childless couple, we find it convenient that we can roll out of bed and make it to a movie theater, a bookstore, or a burger place in 8-12 minutes on foot. Train station 15 minutes. Chinatown, maybe 35 minutes. A park, under 1 minute.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Wed Jul 20, 2016 8:20 am

MachineGhost wrote:
Pointedstick wrote:Is your brain broken? You're talking about the extravagant luxury spending of people making half a million bucks a year. I'm talking about the lower middle class. If you make $500k a year you can realistically afford whatever you want with even the tiniest attempt at financial efficiency. This has nothing to do with urban design patterns that encourage car and single family home ownership that is financially challenging for people with more normal incomes.
Is yours? That's not what you said:
Add in high health insurance costs and tuition at private schools and colleges and you get a pretty good picture of why people who live in this way are financially sinking while people who avoid it are doing okay.
Lower middle class people don't have high health insurance costs nor send their kids to private schools and colleges. I'm just refuting your claim here that "rich people" are "financially failiing" because you're perhaps subconsciously trying to rationalize your own lower middle class lifestyle.

Financially failing, my ass... and yet they think they're only average! ::)
Do you actually know any lower middle class people? I do. Quite a few of them do things like buy expensive health insurance, commute to work in SUVs, and send their kids to private schools and liberal arts colleges. It's all aspirational; they believe that those are the kinds of things that upper middle-class people do and want to emulate them, no different from truly poor people wearing outrageous jewelry because that's what rich people do, right? My point was that these are the sorts of poor decisions that keep poor people poor. The car-dependency-inducing built environment is a big part of it, but it's only one slice of the pie.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Wed Jul 20, 2016 8:39 am

dualstow wrote:As a childless couple, we find it convenient that we can roll out of bed and make it to a movie theater, a bookstore, or a burger place in 8-12 minutes on foot. Train station 15 minutes. Chinatown, maybe 35 minutes. A park, under 1 minute.
Where exactly do you live? I'm on the prowl.

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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by dualstow » Wed Jul 20, 2016 8:52 am

MachineGhost wrote:Where exactly do you live?
Well, that's private information :) as Harry Browne used to say.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by clacy » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:02 am

In my high-income bubble (nice suburb), half or more wage earners work from home. With the advent of more flexible work schedules and home offices due to recent technology, it seems like the days of long commutes and slower productivity due to distance are over.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:16 am

clacy and dualstow, I don't think the issue is whether suburbs/exurbs are aesthetically pleasing. Or that people like living there. The Ponzi scheme series argues that they are inherently unsustainable whether one likes them or not, because people who live there aren't taxed enough. I am curious as to how broadly his street-cost example can be applied to different regions.

His model does seem, at first glance, to apply to the interstate highways though. I followed a trail of links from strongtowns to a Congressional Budget Office report. The basic gist looked to be that the nation's highways expenses are exceeding the tax revenues used to support them. One of the "fixes" vaguely reminded me of the tier system JMG wrote about, and the private toll road that libertarians seem to write about quite a bit (and that fans of government roads usually don't like)... having people pay for the roads they travel on.
Charging drivers specifically for using roads would increase economic output by
allowing highly valued transportation to move more quickly and more reliably. Such
pricing could take the form of per-mile charges (also known as vehicle-miles traveled,
or VMT, charges), congestion charges, or tolls on Interstate highways. When faster
travel and avoiding delays were a priority, drivers could opt to pay for the use of a less
congested road, and when travel speed was less important, they could use a road with
a lower fee or avoid paying a fee by using a road without one. Charges that varied by
time of day or that differed by road would also affect economic activity by limiting
congestion.
Besides affecting travel, such pricing would raise revenues, which could be used to make
repairs, expand capacity, or substantially renovate the Interstate System or could be put
to other purposes. It would also provide important information for spending decisions
by showing how much drivers value the use of a road, helping to set priorities for future
improvements. Over time, with more use of pricing, spending could shift from less
productive to more productive uses of highways. Such shifts could boost economic
growth—or they could allow spending to be reduced without affecting overall growth.
According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), widespread use of
congestion pricing, for example, could reduce the amount of capital investment
needed to meet a given set of goals for performance of the highway system by roughly
30 percent.
So there you go. You'd pay to get the level of service you want. If you want to pay less, you have to travel on shittier roads. I do like how this would "increase growth" though.
However, that approach would raise several concerns: Charging drivers to use roads
could raise concerns about privacy, depending on the methods used. The approach
could also place a proportionately greater burden on low-income households.
Moreover, highway users could resent paying tolls if they believed that they had already
paid for the roads through gasoline taxes over the years. And technological hurdles
may exist: Although the costs of charging drivers are declining with improvements in
technology, the costs remain higher than those for collecting revenues through the
gasoline tax.
I read this as: pro-government people don't like to feel like they're on a private toll road. When they find out that their taxes don't fully pay for the road, they want more money to magically appear instead of paying more themselves. Poor people who probably shouldn't even be driving a car on the highway, as PS said, would need to be subsidized somehow. Oh, and highways would become permanently more expensive, since they'd now include means to make people pay for them when they use them.

I'm not saying all this in the mood of "Yeaaaa buddy! DIE HIGHWAYS! DIE!" In the same spirit as suburbs/exurbs, maybe the interstate is something that's really nice and definitely more convenient than the system of roads before it, but someone's gotta pay for it if it doesn't fund itself.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:40 am

The cost of infrastructure vs tax productivity is a real one. My city was heavily overbuilt with road and utility infrastructure in the 70s, the result of over-exuberant growth projections that were never realized. Now we have thousands of miles of roads that literally nobody drives on, because they're in the middle of nowhere and the land on both sides is empty. There's nowhere to go to. The roads and infrastructure are hugely expensive, yet our property taxes are low. I pay about $1,400 a year for my house on half an acre. The tax productivity of these kinds of residential lots is incredibly poor. As a result, my city is constantly appealing to the state and even federal government for infrastructure money. The mayor just recently won local accolades for successfully extracting $2 million from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that they promised for a new water treatment plant but never delivered. These kinds of places are not financially self-sufficient, always begging other levels of government for money or outside corporations to move and bring jobs and tax revenue.

Denser development would increase tax productivity and local financial self-sufficiency. A lot of small-government types complain about higher levels of government oppressing smaller more local ones, but one of the biggest ways they do this is by simply threatening to cut off the supply of subsidies if their terms aren't met. Cities and states that were more financially self-sufficient could much more easily resist this. But doing so requires higher-density development with relaxed zoning, smaller or no setback requirements, and less financially unproductive private transit infrastructure, which those same people tend to be allergic to. A great irony is those libertarians and off-gridders who live in isolated rural properties, whose access to private markets is totally dependent on government-provided roads that they are not even remotely coming close to paying their fair share of. They don't approve of course, but nonetheless they chose to live there and are proportionally the biggest recipients of government infrastructure subsidies.

Thus we are left with the extremely silly status quo in which people who resent and distrust broader levels of government favor patterns of development that permanently tie them to those very institutions. :P
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:43 am

I can't help but think of the Net Neutrality debate in regards to privatizing "unfair" highways.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by dualstow » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:56 am

Kriegsspiel wrote:clacy and dualstow, I don't think the issue is whether suburbs/exurbs are aesthetically pleasing. Or that people like living there. The Ponzi scheme series argues that they are inherently unsustainable whether one likes them or not, because people who live there aren't taxed enough.
Indeed. Raise taxes.

I really appreciate PS's thoughts on this. I used to visit your town, PS, in the 70s and 80s. Needless to say, it was a lot smaller back then.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Wed Jul 20, 2016 12:49 pm

Thanks Dualstow!

You actually don't need to raise taxes in most cases. What what you need to raise is density and then taxes can stay the same or even fall. It's all tied into the concept of tax productivity.

I pay $1,400 a year in property taxes. Pretty low. Back in the 60s, my current half acre parcel could easily have been subdivided into four 1/8 acre lots each with its own single-story single-family house of the same size. Doing this, if the total property bill remained the same, each household would personally pay a bill of $350, or only one fourth as much as I pay now! If the city decided to raise a lot more money and doubled the total tax bill, each house would still only pay $700--half of what I pay. A broader but shallower tax base that results from higher density can raise more money in total while actually reducing each individual property's bill. Everybody wins. And you could probably put six or more two-store houses in the same place. They could even have nice big backyards if they weren't set back 20 feet from the street, and there's no reason for that anyway since vehicle traffic in these kinds of neighborhoods rarely goes faster than 15 MPH and any desired separation from the street can easily be accomplished with a little 5-foot front garden and a low wall which are nicer anyway than a sterile, unused patch of grass.

In these cases, not only would the city get more tax money and each family pay less, each family would also have to spend substantially less time and money on landscaping and land maintenance. This stuff is actually not very fun, especially if you have a huge area to take care of. Who like mowing lawns? Lawn area is unused 99.99% of the time. And green thumbs and gardeners don't actually need a huge area to be happy.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Jul 20, 2016 2:36 pm

Pointedstick wrote:Thanks Dualstow!

You actually don't need to raise taxes in most cases. What what you need to raise is density and then taxes can stay the same or even fall. It's all tied into the concept of tax productivity.
Ok, yes, or that. I meant, to get what they seem to want (the low density suburbia they moved to), they need to pay more in taxes. Don't want to be bait-and-switching people, now do we? Incidentally, I just watched his talk in the "What are you doing, Maine" article, which shows this with real numbers. He's a very personable speaker, so even non-nerds might enjoy it.
I pay $1,400 a year in property taxes. Pretty low. Back in the 60s, my current half acre parcel could easily have been subdivided into four 1/8 acre lots each with its own single-story single-family house of the same size. Doing this, if the total property bill remained the same, each household would personally pay a bill of $350, or only one fourth as much as I pay now! If the city decided to raise a lot more money and doubled the total tax bill, each house would still only pay $700--half of what I pay. A broader but shallower tax base that results from higher density can raise more money in total while actually reducing each individual property's bill. Everybody wins. And you could probably put six or more two-store houses in the same place.
In his talk, he does this same trick with commercial properties. A block of "blighted" businesses generates more tax revenue and is more resilient than the same footprint when it's taken up by, say, a new restaurant, with attendant parking and green space around it.
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