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Old 02-26-2016, 09:00 PM
 
2,552 posts, read 2,449,817 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by boxus View Post
I think the point was that the city would not be collecting anything if they did not build the super center there. An empty lot is an empty lot, is someone builds a super center, that is more than what was offered by anyone before.

There was likely no demand for the type of development you are comparing the super center to.

Also, if tax efficiency is so great in density areas, then why are my taxes always so much damn higher when living in a dense, urban area versus a rural area? My dense, DC area neighborhood was and still is always aiming for the need for more money, not enough for schools, county programs, fire fighters, etc. Yet my rural area never had any issue with over crowding in school, fire fighting services, etc. Seems the more the density, the higher the taxes, the more social problems there are that need yet more money. If density means better tax collecting efficiency, I have not ever seen it.
Rural areas are something outside of suburban/urban discussion; they operate on a different model.

Many retail center developments are greenfield developments, requiring new infrastructure. Even if the developer pays for the install, the city is burdened with the upkeep, the lifetime cost of which can be quite high. That lifetime cost is why there's trillions of dollars unfunded deferred maintenance taken across every level of government. Even for brownfield development, streets are often widened, intersections upgraded. According to our city's DOT, those large intersection signals run past a quarter million a pop.

As to your question about high taxes, it depends on the city, but it can mean the city is paying for more services, that various levels of government are taking bigger cuts (as in California), or that the CoL makes government services more expensive to provide (also as in CA). It's a fair question, one a lot of people here in San Jose have failed to ask, but really gets outside of the bounds of this thread.
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Old 02-26-2016, 09:41 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,259,082 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by darkeconomist View Post
I've posted numbers on several occasions, and they're freely available online.



As to your other point, in highly walkable areas at least two things can happen: less parking is required overall (like in traffic, there's such a thing as "induced parking demand"); parking can be shared between businesses, so that less parking is needed for every business to accommodate their particular peak hours.
One needs to know what words to put in a search engine. Could you guide me to the information since you said it?

Most businesses have very similar peak hours. Only restaurants and entertainment venues have peak hours in the evening. No business has peak hours late at night, not even bars.
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Old 02-26-2016, 09:49 PM
 
Location: Centre Wellington, ON
5,740 posts, read 5,962,368 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by boxus View Post
I think the point was that the city would not be collecting anything if they did not build the super center there. An empty lot is an empty lot, is someone builds a super center, that is more than what was offered by anyone before.

There was likely no demand for the type of development you are comparing the super center to.

Also, if tax efficiency is so great in density areas, then why are my taxes always so much damn higher when living in a dense, urban area versus a rural area? My dense, DC area neighborhood was and still is always aiming for the need for more money, not enough for schools, county programs, fire fighters, etc. Yet my rural area never had any issue with over crowding in school, fire fighting services, etc. Seems the more the density, the higher the taxes, the more social problems there are that need yet more money. If density means better tax collecting efficiency, I have not ever seen it.
Toronto residential taxes are almost half as high as in its suburbs, despite Toronto having lower incomes overall.

Anyways, there's a few points about rural areas.

1) In rural areas, certain expenses are paid for directly by residents instead of indirectly through taxes. Ex if you have your own well and septic tank instead of being connected to municipal water and sewer.

2) Also rural areas do have lower quality services in some regards. Emergency services response time, and the time it takes for the ambulance to get you to a hospital will be longer.

3) I'm pretty sure many rural areas get a disproportionate amount of funding from higher levels of government relative to their total population. For example, higher percentage of roads are state roads, plus there's interstates for retail and manufacturing centres to piggy-back off.

Now suburban areas, they have different things going on.

1) In the United States, they are generally higher income than either rural areas or urban cores.

2) They're also faster growing than either rural areas or urban cores for the most part.
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Old 02-26-2016, 09:50 PM
 
Location: Centre Wellington, ON
5,740 posts, read 5,962,368 times
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Regarding incomes in urban cores vs suburban areas.

First point is, will it necessarily always be this way? Urban cores are increasingly becoming more desirable causing the working poor to be priced out while many suburbs are declining. The general trend is that the gap in income between urban cores and suburbs is shrinking. If you look at countries outside the United States, the urban core is often wealthier and highly desirable and the poorest areas are in the suburbs (not all suburbs are poor, but some of them at least). I would say that Canadian cities are a preview of what many American cities will look like in a few decades since their cores are in more advanced stages of revitalization. In Toronto, the urban core is wealthier than the suburbs. The lowest incomes are in suburban style (auto-oriented, lower density) neighbourhoods built in the 60s and 70s in the outer parts of the city. But even the outer suburbs are not quite as wealthy as the core at this point (although they were wealthier 1-2 decades ago).

Whether the urban core has more people living in subsidized housing depends on where the city decided to put its subsidized housing, although with project housing continuing to get demolished and replaced with Section 8 housing that's probably going to shift more and more towards the suburbs in the United States. That leaves the homeless which don't have housing costs... well there will likely be more homeless in the cores since it's easier to provide services to them in denser areas. BUT

That brings me to my second point. Even if the poor do tend to gravitate towards the denser parts of a city, whether it's the urban core or at least inner suburbs, due to proximity of social services, better transit or whatever... Doesn't mean making a place more dense will increase poverty, in fact you could even make the opposite case. The two densest metropolitan areas in the United States, New York and the Bay Area, are also the two wealthiest. The two poorest metropolitan areas are McAllen and Brownsville on the Mexican border which are full of impoverished semi-rural "colonias". After that you've got some college towns, a few more border towns, and then some small low density Southern and Appalachian cities.

If walkability and density can provide benefits to the poor, then that ought to be an argument in favour of those, not against. If anything suburban residents should be grateful that cities are providing places to live and providing services for the people serving their coffee and cleaning their office buildings or their drug addicted relative... so that their suburbs don't have to shoulder that burden instead.
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Old 02-26-2016, 10:07 PM
 
Location: Centre Wellington, ON
5,740 posts, read 5,962,368 times
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And then there's the fact that suburban areas are growing faster than urban cores in almost every city. There are some rare exceptions, like New York where the urban core is in high demand and *relatively* permissive towards infill, while much of its suburbs limit intensification and have sprawled out as far as they can sprawl. But in most cities, there's still a lot more space for growth in the suburbs and the urban core isn't so much more desirable that it can overcome the somewhat higher construction costs for infill.

Why do growth rates matter? Local governments generally don't spend much on building infrastructure to support growth. That's often paid for by the developers (ex local streets and other local infrastructure), impact fees, as well as higher levels of governments for the increased regional infrastructure required. However, once all of that infrastructure is built, much of it will be the responsibility of the local government to maintain and replace.

So lets make a simple example.

Lets say that a suburb's population has been doubling every 30 years, and that all of the suburb's infrastructure needs to be replaced every 30 years.

So lets say the population in 2016 is 20,000. That means that for the 2016 budget, the suburb will have to replace 1/30th of the infrastructure it had when it had 10,000 people, but will have the revenue of a town of 20,000 people to pay for it.

Now lets say the suburb finally became fully built out in 2016 and stops growing. That means that in 2046, the suburb will have to pay for 1/30th of the infrastructure it had when it had 20,000 people but still have only the revenue of a town of 20,000 people to pay for it. So it's infrastructure replacement costs per capita in 2046 will be double what they were in 2016. So now you have to raise taxes, some residents get upset and leave, and at the same time, an increasing proportion of the housing stock is reaching the point of being old and dated, and the suburb declines.

Is it possible to avoid this? Not really, fast growing places will always be at an advantage but the advantage is only temporary. First of all, you can't grow at the same rate forever, which is what you would need to do to avoid an increase in infrastructure replacement costs per resident (unless that rate is 0%).

For example, the suburb of McKinney, TX. It grew 141.2% between 2000 and 2010 with a 2010 population of 131,000. In order to maintain that growth rate, it would have to have a population of 881,000,000 by 2110, approximately equal to the entire population of North and South America... so obviously not going to happen.

How about Denton, TX? 113,000 people in 2010 with a 40.8% increase from the previous decade. Maintaining that growth rate through to 2110 would lead to a population of 3,460,000... very doubtful. More likely it will top out at 200,000-300,000. That's because suburbs will run out of land to annex, and eventually build up all the undeveloped land. And then suburbs also tend to resist densification, and even if they didn't, they generally aren't designed to handle much density, and even if they were, even density has its limits.


I suspect that many governments also have similar problems not just with infrastructure maintenance but also with pensions. IE if you have governments that don't pre-fund their pension obligations, doing that might be easy while the population is growing but then get a lot more difficult of growth stops (or worse, population declines). So governments of slow growing jurisdictions are much more likely to have problems with unfunded pension liabilities.
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Old 02-26-2016, 10:25 PM
 
Location: Centre Wellington, ON
5,740 posts, read 5,962,368 times
Reputation: 3089
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katarina Witt View Post
One needs to know what words to put in a search engine. Could you guide me to the information since you said it?

Most businesses have very similar peak hours. Only restaurants and entertainment venues have peak hours in the evening. No business has peak hours late at night, not even bars.
Night-clubs have late night peak hours. And there's still variation among the other businesses.

Generally, the greater the diversity of uses at a given location, the more efficiently parking can be used. When you think about it, peak parking use is in the middle of the night, because the only time a car isn't parked is when it's being driven, and peak driving is at rush-hour and reaches a low point sometime around 3-4 am. However, that would require pooling parking not just between different retail establishment, but also offices and residences.

Which to a large extent is what happens in mixed use cities where most parking is publicly accessible (ex pay parking lots, on-street parking and municipal parking lots). Lower car ownership rates help too of course. As well as being able to keep your car at home (i.e. non-publicly accessible parking) most of the time.
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Old 02-26-2016, 10:40 PM
 
Location: Planet Earth
3,921 posts, read 9,095,073 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffD View Post
I'm not so sure about public transportation. I think self-driving cars using a ZipCar/Uber kind of model will be much more economical for many lower income people than owning an automobile outright. Nobody is going to use public transportation if you can launch a smartphone application and have a car waiting for you in seconds to bring you to your destination. There will be demand-based pricing. It will be cheap to get a ride somewhere off-hours when there is low demand for the cars so people with infinite time but limited money like retirees can pick the cheapest times to run errands.
The thing is it's still pretty expensive. I know Uber sometimes does $5 UberPool specials (carpooling, basically). So that means the regular price is probably something like $8-10, and maybe $15-20 for a regular ride of comparable distance. Meanwhile, transit fares are usually around $2-3.

If the quality of the transit is good, it's a reasonable alternative. For example, in Rockland County, the population density back in 2010 was 1,796 people per square mile. The autoless household rate is around 15%, and the bus service runs past midnight on the major routes (which connect the population centers where most of those households reside, like Haverstraw and Spring Valley).

Quote:
Originally Posted by memph View Post
So lets make a simple example.

Lets say that a suburb's population has been doubling every 30 years, and that all of the suburb's infrastructure needs to be replaced every 30 years.

So lets say the population in 2016 is 20,000. That means that for the 2016 budget, the suburb will have to replace 1/30th of the infrastructure it had when it had 10,000 people, but will have the revenue of a town of 20,000 people to pay for it.

Now lets say the suburb finally became fully built out in 2016 and stops growing. That means that in 2046, the suburb will have to pay for 1/30th of the infrastructure it had when it had 20,000 people but still have only the revenue of a town of 20,000 people to pay for it. So it's infrastructure replacement costs per capita in 2046 will be double what they were in 2016. So now you have to raise taxes, some residents get upset and leave, and at the same time, an increasing proportion of the housing stock is reaching the point of being old and dated, and the suburb declines.
I had a similar discussion on another forum. I generally agree, and I know you're oversimplifying it to make your point, but one thing to consider is that if the growth is done efficiently, the amount of infrastructure required doesn't increase linearly with the number of residents in the area. For example, if you built a grid system of roads rather than cul-de-sacs, you have a much easier time handling overflow traffic by spreading it out through the grid, rather than forcing it onto the major roads and so it takes much longer for the road system to reach its full capacity.
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Old 02-26-2016, 10:43 PM
 
Location: Los Angeles
783 posts, read 688,061 times
Reputation: 961
Quote:
Originally Posted by boxus View Post
Of course it is realistic to some extent. Look at a London, UK suburb; nothing higher than four stories, a high street as they call it with a lot of stuff people need from bars to groceries.

Of course the further from the high streets, the less the rent but more the inconvenience if walkability is the factor. The high streets are also located on the Tube stops. Bus service is also an important factor.

You will never have the perfect, utopia version of a walkable area. When you make a place desirable, more people will want to go there, and the prices will increase, that is just a fact. Also, businesses are less likely to invest in areas that are not desirable. That all so evil term "gentrifing" is just making a place more desirable for business to invest in, which in turn attracts more people to the area causing an increase in the cost of housing.

This walkbale thing is almost impossible for SFH. The area is just too large for the number of people for businesses to have this kind of service. Some neighborhoods are huge and would take a considerable amount of time just to walk to the closest business. Add that to the fact of the number of customers in the neighborhood, having a walkable area for each neighborhood would be difficult.
I cannot comment on the suburbs of London from here in the US. London I know is a very walkable city. However I think that walkability is a constant tension for the reasons that you mentioned. If a place becomes desirable, then demand increases and of course the rent. The only way to keep rents from skyrocketing is continuing to build more room. Not many places have found a way to grow organically in a way that accommodates a balance between QOL and COL. It's all too rare here in the US. It seems that it takes a certain mentality that is pro-growth, and pro-quality. Most places seem to be too far to one side.
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Old 02-26-2016, 11:44 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,259,082 times
Reputation: 35920
Quote:
Originally Posted by memph View Post
Night-clubs have late night peak hours. And there's still variation among the other businesses.

Generally, the greater the diversity of uses at a given location, the more efficiently parking can be used. When you think about it, peak parking use is in the middle of the night, because the only time a car isn't parked is when it's being driven, and peak driving is at rush-hour and reaches a low point sometime around 3-4 am. However, that would require pooling parking not just between different retail establishment, but also offices and residences.

Which to a large extent is what happens in mixed use cities where most parking is publicly accessible (ex pay parking lots, on-street parking and municipal parking lots). Lower car ownership rates help too of course. As well as being able to keep your car at home (i.e. non-publicly accessible parking) most of the time.
I did refer to entertainment venues. And yeah, a coffee shop may open at 5 AM and close at 2 PM, but its hours of operation will overlap with those of the grocery store, department stores, day care centers (which also open early but tend to close later), doctor's offices, office buildings, and the like. Peak parking use in a business area is during the daytime hours. Most people actually live in residential areas, even the hipsters. Businesses there are limited to a few main streets, the rest are homes. At least that's how it is in Denver, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Omaha and other cities with which I am familiar.
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Old 02-27-2016, 12:20 AM
 
Location: Oakland, CA
28,226 posts, read 36,719,617 times
Reputation: 28561
Quote:
Originally Posted by memph View Post
And then there's the fact that suburban areas are growing faster than urban cores in almost every city. There are some rare exceptions, like New York where the urban core is in high demand and *relatively* permissive towards infill, while much of its suburbs limit intensification and have sprawled out as far as they can sprawl. But in most cities, there's still a lot more space for growth in the suburbs and the urban core isn't so much more desirable that it can overcome the somewhat higher construction costs for infill.

Why do growth rates matter? Local governments generally don't spend much on building infrastructure to support growth. That's often paid for by the developers (ex local streets and other local infrastructure), impact fees, as well as higher levels of governments for the increased regional infrastructure required. However, once all of that infrastructure is built, much of it will be the responsibility of the local government to maintain and replace.

So lets make a simple example.

Lets say that a suburb's population has been doubling every 30 years, and that all of the suburb's infrastructure needs to be replaced every 30 years.

So lets say the population in 2016 is 20,000. That means that for the 2016 budget, the suburb will have to replace 1/30th of the infrastructure it had when it had 10,000 people, but will have the revenue of a town of 20,000 people to pay for it.

Now lets say the suburb finally became fully built out in 2016 and stops growing. That means that in 2046, the suburb will have to pay for 1/30th of the infrastructure it had when it had 20,000 people but still have only the revenue of a town of 20,000 people to pay for it. So it's infrastructure replacement costs per capita in 2046 will be double what they were in 2016. So now you have to raise taxes, some residents get upset and leave, and at the same time, an increasing proportion of the housing stock is reaching the point of being old and dated, and the suburb declines.

Is it possible to avoid this? Not really, fast growing places will always be at an advantage but the advantage is only temporary. First of all, you can't grow at the same rate forever, which is what you would need to do to avoid an increase in infrastructure replacement costs per resident (unless that rate is 0%).

For example, the suburb of McKinney, TX. It grew 141.2% between 2000 and 2010 with a 2010 population of 131,000. In order to maintain that growth rate, it would have to have a population of 881,000,000 by 2110, approximately equal to the entire population of North and South America... so obviously not going to happen.

How about Denton, TX? 113,000 people in 2010 with a 40.8% increase from the previous decade. Maintaining that growth rate through to 2110 would lead to a population of 3,460,000... very doubtful. More likely it will top out at 200,000-300,000. That's because suburbs will run out of land to annex, and eventually build up all the undeveloped land. And then suburbs also tend to resist densification, and even if they didn't, they generally aren't designed to handle much density, and even if they were, even density has its limits.


I suspect that many governments also have similar problems not just with infrastructure maintenance but also with pensions. IE if you have governments that don't pre-fund their pension obligations, doing that might be easy while the population is growing but then get a lot more difficult of growth stops (or worse, population declines). So governments of slow growing jurisdictions are much more likely to have problems with unfunded pension liabilities.
Is that suburban growth honest growth or growth by design. We have develop,net rules that prioritize limiting the amount of traffic (level of service in planner speak) so this makes it impossible to build anything somewhere that is developed, forcing "sprawl."

Secondly you don't need to be urban to be walkable. One of the most popular neighborhoods in my city has a main commercial street with mostly 3 story buildings and some housing on top. Maybe 1 building adjacent will be a multi family place. The vast majority of the near by streets are residential single family. But it is walkable. The train station is in the middle of the neighborhood and has surface parking. It is not a very urban neighborhood, or that dense. But it is wall served by transit and very walkable. It is very popular with younger more affluent families (the price has essentially doubled in the past 6 years). There are some empty lots nearby and denser development is planned within 1/2 mile of this Main Street.
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