Why is "per acre" the relevant measure? Actually seems quite irrelevant.
Because taxing authorities have a finite amount of land ?
As Tony Soprano said, "God ain't making any more of it."
Why is "per acre" the relevant measure? Actually seems quite irrelevant.
Because taxing authorities have a finite amount of land ?
As Tony Soprano said, "God ain't making any more of it."
Plenty of it in the burbs.
Why is "per acre" the relevant measure? Actually seems quite irrelevant.
Glad you asked. It's because the land inside a city's limits is, essentially, it's inventory, or perhaps its capital resource base. When a city is making decisions on how to allocate taxpayer dollars, it should try to maximize return on those dollars by (a) knowing which acres are the most productive, and making sure they stay that way, and (b) knowing what kinds of uses of those acres are likely to produce high returns vs. low returns. If a city is choosing whether to spend $1,000,000 upgrading an intersection for a Wal-Mart or improving downtown infrastructure, they should know how long it will take to get a return on their investment.
I love this stuff. When you look at it like this it becomes so obvious.
Glad you asked. It's because the land inside a city's limits is, essentially, it's inventory, or perhaps its capital resource base. When a city is making decisions on how to allocate taxpayer dollars, it should try to maximize return on those dollars by (a) knowing which acres are the most productive, and making sure they stay that way, and (b) knowing what kinds of uses of those acres are likely to produce high returns vs. low returns. If a city is choosing whether to spend $1,000,000 upgrading an intersection for a Wal-Mart or improving downtown infrastructure, they should know how long it will take to get a return on their investment.
In my neck of the woods, the cities just annex more of the burbs and get more tax revenue so that there piece of that pie grows as people spread out.
I can't believe someone doesn't understand why it's important for cities to get a higher return on their investment.
923, you're so good at this thread, it makes me guilty to live in my suburban home. But not guilty enough to move.
There are some remarkable things to note right off the top. When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city's infrastructure -- an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation -- it came to $32 billion. When we added up the entire tax base of the city, all of the private wealth sustained by that infrastructure, it came to just $16 billion. This is fatal.
It's obvious to me why this is fatal, but for those of you for whom it is less clear, let me elaborate.
The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure (more is paid to the schools and regional government). A fraction of that $150 – it varies by year – is spent on actual pavement.
To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year. That assumes no new roads are built and existing roadways are not widened or substantively improved. That is $3,300 in additional local taxes just to tread water....
The median household income in Lafayette is $41,000. With the wealth that has been created by all this infrastructure investment, a median family living in the median house would need to have their city taxes go from $1,500 per year to $9,200 per year. To just take care of what they now have, one out of every five dollars this family makes would need to go to fixing roads, ditches and pipes. That will never happen.
What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.
This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.
Before I get too far into this, let me give a disclaimer of sorts. While I'm going to show you, in a three part series, how the conclusions of this report are nothing but propaganda -- outright fiction that should outrage everyone -- I'm going to point out that this isn't the fault of the report's authors. They are merely following standard industry practice which, in this case, is largely determined by the federal government.
You can look at federally funded projects from around the country and they are going to contain the same fictions spun into a seemingly-rigorous narrative for project proponents to use. It's an industry problem, so direct your outrage accordingly.
The next time you hear someone say that we need hundreds of billions, even trillions, more federal dollars for infrastructure just know that we're all Shreveport. As you read this, a document just like the Economic Impacts of I-49 Completion is being circulated in your community to justify some crazy project that should never see the light of day. This needs to end.
It is insane that most traffic engineers don’t understand this! And their prejudice against safer design is cooked right into their standards: The AASHTO Geometric Design of Highways and Streets (the "Green Book,” which is the bible of traffic engineering), uses the Level of Service (LOS) system where streets are rated from A to F with A being best and F being worst, like grades in school.
Here’s the problem: LOS A is the free flow of traffic at the highest speeds (most deadly), while LOS F is a slow-moving traffic jam (safest). Speed kills… especially if you’re walking or biking. Higher speed is OK if you’re driving on an expressway through the countryside, but it’s decidedly not OK if you’re driving in a city or town.
To be blunt, the Green Book standards have probably killed hundreds of thousands of people in towns and cities. It’s deadly. Put a less dramatic way, the Green Book is great for highways in the country, but not for in-town streets. For that, you need Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares, a design manual jointly created by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). Sadly, many traffic engineers have apparently never heard of it, even though it reduces deaths and injuries in town, while the Green Book increases deaths and injuries in town by speeding up traffic. Higher speed = more deaths and injuries.
Suburban development gets preferential tax treatment in the US. As a result, it is cheaper to spend a dollar on housing than on something else, so it encourages people to spend more money on housing. The tax code also favors new construction over renovation and infill development.
These protections are pervasive throughout federal and state tax codes, but a few rules stand out:
homeowners can deduct their property and mortgage interest,
profits on home sales are not taxed,
and new construction is a tax shelter.
In America, the freedom of movement comes with an asterisk: the obligation to drive. This truism has been echoed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has pronounced car ownership a “virtual necessity.” The court’s pronouncement is telling: Yes, in a sense, America is car-dependent by choice—but it is also car-dependent by law.
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As I detail in a forthcoming journal article, over the course of several generations lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving one-percenters of the Roaring Twenties. They gave legal force to a mindset—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year and seriously injures more than 4 million more. Include all those harmed by emissions and climate change, and the damage is even greater. As a teenager growing up in the shadow of Detroit, I had no reason to feel this was unjust, much less encouraged by law. It is both.
Just as telling as what activities the law regulates is whose interests it seeks to protect. Dozens of our peer nations require carmakers to mitigate harm from their products to pedestrians. U.S. design regulations, however, only require measures that enhance the safety of car occupants. Just as SUVs are becoming taller, heavier, and more prevalent—and pedestrian fatalities are surging—U.S. regulators have not required carmakers to embrace those more comprehensive design standards. Instead, they’ve launched campaigns baselessly blaming pedestrians for their own deaths.