Deacon923
Scooter Banks
If you are comparing tax revenues on a per acre basis, then you must also compare the water, electrical, street and other usages not for one condo but for all the condos in the per acre structure.
If you build 300 condos on the same acreage as one McMansion, those 300 dwellings will use many, many times more services.
If taxes are on a per acre basis, to make it apples to apples, then the above must be considered.
Let's consider them, then.
Water: paid for on a per-gallon basis by the user. Condos built as infill development or reuse of a historic structure re-use existing downtown water mains. New sprawl development uses miles and miles of brand new pipe plus pump station to get it out there. Water use at a Wal Mart per acre (and thus, revenue from per gallon payments) may well be significantly less per acre than a condo development. Also, the city has to maintain those new water mains in perpetuity, so it has added a new liability to its books - not the case in reusing the downtown mains. Greater expense, less revenue - how do you think the pay-back periods compare for those two use cases if both are paying for water on the same per-gallon basis?
Electrical: essentially the same analysis as water, except that here it's a utility building it so it has really nothing to do with property tax productivity at all. Nice try though.
Road usage: here again, in our example, the condos are built alongside already-existing streets in a downtown infill environment. The city is already maintaining those streets. Little new construction needed by the municipality, no new maintenance obligation, many multiples of tax revenue per acre. To build the Wal-Mart, the city often has to build a big new road and a big new intersection. Even if the city makes the developer pay for it, the city still takes on the obligation to maintain this big new road in perpetuity. So again, much more liability per acre, much less tax revenue per acre. Plus, the actual usage of road associated with residential development is far less intense than a commercial development.
Other uses: Let's talk fire and police protection. It takes a long time to get anywhere in sprawl compared to dense development. To maintain the same response time in less dense suburbia, you have to employ many more police and firefighters, and build more stations, on a per-taxpayer basis. The number of police and firemen it takes to protect our condo example, on a per acre basis, is therefore less than it takes to protect the Wal-mart in the sprawl.
Are there other items we should consider that might make a Wal-mart a more productive use of land than a downtown condominium structure? I suppose you could argue that it produces jobs. Well, let's make our downtown condominium a mixed-use development with retail and commercial on the street level (the historic manner of development). As the linked article suggests, this will generally produce a higher number of jobs per acre. Most likely, those jobs will be higher paying than Wal-mart, and those business owners will spend their money locally instead of sending it back to remote shareholders.
ETA: I just noticed you responded to my post highlighting a Walmart use by pulling in McMansions. Most of the items addressed above apply exactly the same if you substitute McMansion for Walmart. Except McMansions don't produce any jobs, so they are definitely a less productive use than a mixed-use infill development.
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