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With the change in work culture, More and more economic dependence on service and knowledge based work industries. Some settlement changes have been seen in mega cities with exponential spatial spread.
Yep - I personally have nothing against the suburbs and can totally see the appeal of living there! (I personally live in a inner ring suburb myself in the city I live in). I think that people need to put personal opinions aside and figure out what the math is to sustain either an urban lifestyle or a suburban lifestyle or rural lifestyle and have appropriate taxes to adequately fund each area both short-term and long-term. If after that, the suburbs are still appealing and lower cost, that's awesome! I just don't think government should be in the business of subsidizing one style of living versus another.
I personally work as a transportation engineer so I can only speak to transportation but I agree with Chuck that while taxes/cost of living is cheaper in the suburbs, a great deal of transportation money from the state/federal government goes to projects in suburban areas as opposed to urban areas. So at least in transportation, suburban areas are getting much more service for what their taxes are paying for in comparison to urban areas.
Let me see if I have you right:
I think what you're saying in the end is that, for the total amount of taxes they pay, the suburbs are net recipients of tax money to maintain them (they get more back in services and maintenance than they pay in taxes) while the cities are net donors (they get less back in services and maintenance than they pay in taxes).
I imagine, however, that I could find many urbanites who take a look at the bumpy streets they drive down and the trash overflowing in the trash cans and then say, "Yup, you're right," if I have you right.
I think what you're saying in the end is that, for the total amount of taxes they pay, the suburbs are net recipients of tax money to maintain them (they get more back in services and maintenance than they pay in taxes) while the cities are net donors (they get less back in services and maintenance than they pay in taxes).
I imagine, however, that I could find many urbanites who take a look at the bumpy streets they drive down and the trash overflowing in the trash cans and then say, "Yup, you're right," if I have you right.
Does your example contradict anything that I said? Haha
I think what you're saying in the end is that, for the total amount of taxes they pay, the suburbs are net recipients of tax money to maintain them (they get more back in services and maintenance than they pay in taxes) while the cities are net donors (they get less back in services and maintenance than they pay in taxes).
I think it's more accurate to say that businesses, especially big ones are massive net donors to local governments. While they are often located towers in the central business district, they can also be suburban campuses.
When talking about residential taxes and services, I doubt this is the case. The four biggest operating expenses of almost every decent size city/metro are policing, transit, fire and roads. Policing and fire costs scale more with population and if anything, increase with density as incident rates are usually higher there. Roads will be higher in the suburbs but roads are extraordinarily cheap to maintain on a passenger-km basis. Allocating transit costs will depend on the transit ridership patterns and configuration; a new development with little to no service should be considered as having very low transit cost. And an inner city development with expensive LRT service should be considered as having very high transit cost (given the typical terrible fare recovery ratio of an American rail system outside of NYC and a few other places and the exploding costs of rail construction).
The idea that cities "lose money" in suburbs likely comes from the fact that many cities in the US don't control all of their the metro area. The suburbs are revenue positive but that revenue stays in their local government because they are a municipality or county in their own right, even if their residents are working and using services and amenities in the central city.
Yep - I personally have nothing against the suburbs and can totally see the appeal of living there! (I personally live in a inner ring suburb myself in the city I live in). I think that people need to put personal opinions aside and figure out what the math is to sustain either an urban lifestyle or a suburban lifestyle or rural lifestyle and have appropriate taxes to adequately fund each area both short-term and long-term. If after that, the suburbs are still appealing and lower cost, that's awesome! I just don't think government should be in the business of subsidizing one style of living versus another.
I personally work as a transportation engineer so I can only speak to transportation but I agree with Chuck that while taxes/cost of living is cheaper in the suburbs,
While the cost of living is cheaper in the suburbs (mostly due to housing) the same is not always true with taxes. The suburbs that surround NYC generally pay 2-4 times more property taxes than similar homes in The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Most of the suburbs surrounding NYC do generate enough tax revenue to pay for their own infrastructure. In NJ, it is the cities like Paterson, Passaic, and Newark that need funds from Federal and State government.
Chuck Marohn lives 120 miles northwest of Minneapolis in Brainerd, MN, population 13,300 spread over 13 miles. He seems confused about what is happening in the dense suburbs that surround cities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pierretong1991
a great deal of transportation money from the state/federal government goes to projects in suburban areas as opposed to urban areas. So at least in transportation, suburban areas are getting much more service for what their taxes are paying for in comparison to urban areas.
I disagree that the suburbs get the bulk of the transportation money. In the NYC metro area it is the opposite. The Federal gov just plowed billions into the NYC metro area mass transit (it was needed).
How much money does it cost the MTA to just operate operate the mass transit in NYC? Tell me were any suburban spending looks like NYC's 2nd ave subway costs: section 1 cost $2.7 billion per mile and section 2 is projected to cost $3.8 billion per mile.
My property taxes in NJ pay for my local schools, police, town administration, roads, services, and county funding. My town is 3 times the density of Brainerd, MN. Maybe Chuck needs to step out of his bubble and visit NNJ and the rest of the suburbs that surround NYC.
I disagree that the suburbs get the bulk of the transportation money. In the NYC metro area it is the opposite. The Federal gov just plowed billions into the NYC metro area mass transit (it was needed).
How much money does it cost the MTA to just operate operate the mass transit in NYC? Tell me were any suburban spending looks like NYC's 2nd ave subway costs: section 1 cost $2.7 billion per mile and section 2 is projected to cost $3.8 billion per mile.
My property taxes in NJ pay for my local schools, police, town administration, roads, services, and county funding. My town is 3 times the density of Brainerd, MN. Maybe Chuck needs to step out of his bubble and visit NNJ and the rest of the suburbs that surround NYC.
I'm not familiar with NY State transportation funding but NYC is almost half the population of NYS.....I can't speak for NYS but my observation is mostly relevant for newer sun belt cities that rely almost entirely on commutes/trips via motor vehicles so I can definitely see where we see things differently in different situations.
I think it's more accurate to say that businesses, especially big ones are massive net donors to local governments. While they are often located towers in the central business district, they can also be suburban campuses.
When talking about residential taxes and services, I doubt this is the case. The four biggest operating expenses of almost every decent size city/metro are policing, transit, fire and roads. Policing and fire costs scale more with population and if anything, increase with density as incident rates are usually higher there. Roads will be higher in the suburbs but roads are extraordinarily cheap to maintain on a passenger-km basis. Allocating transit costs will depend on the transit ridership patterns and configuration; a new development with little to no service should be considered as having very low transit cost. And an inner city development with expensive LRT service should be considered as having very high transit cost (given the typical terrible fare recovery ratio of an American rail system outside of NYC and a few other places and the exploding costs of rail construction).
The idea that cities "lose money" in suburbs likely comes from the fact that many cities in the US don't control all of their the metro area. The suburbs are revenue positive but that revenue stays in their local government because they are a municipality or county in their own right, even if their residents are working and using services and amenities in the central city.
46H: The suburbs of Northern New Jersey, just like the Pennsylvania suburbs of Philadelphia and those around Boston, were largely built before the Second World War and are often centered around railroad stations. Those are more densely built than the post-World War II suburbs of most U.S. cities — including the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. A contrast between Montclair up your way and Cherry Hill in Southern New Jersey would be instructive here. Marohn isn't criticizing the denser railroad suburbs of the pre-WW2 era; he is criticizing the totally autocentric, more spread-out ones of the post-WW2 era.
accord1999: Granted, the cost of constructing rail transit in this country is quite high (astronomically so in New York City) — about twice the per-mile cost of constructing subways or tram/LRT lines elsewhere in the world. That's one reason we have less of it than we should. But we aren't even building robust bus rapid transit on the scale needed for it to be useful. And our postwar suburban development patterns make any mass transit less useful than it could be.
But as for your point about the problem being cities not controlling all of their suburban territory, you might want to read Strong Towns' case study of an American city that did move to annex as much of its post-World War II suburban growth as it could — the one I was born and raised in:
One of the essays points out that the city's population in 1996 was about the same as it was in 1946, the year before it began its nearly 40-year annexation spree, but those 440,000-odd inhabitants occupied only 60 square miles of land as opposed to the 316 they did in the 1990s. The KC of 1946 was more productive overall than the one of 1996, and as the essays point out, the cost of carrying all that extra land weighs on the city treasury.
Something to consider about that company office: Its low-slung, five-acre office campus with parking lots in the 'burbs is about as valuable — or even less valuable — than the 15-story building on a 1/8-acre lot with no parking lot (or a garage underneath) in a city downtown. Yet it needs the same amount (or even more) of water lines, sewer pipes and streets to serve it (definitely more road space, given its footprint and how many cars will be parked on it), and it generates the same amount of trash as the city office building. This is the point Marohn makes. As he pointed out in his early "Curbside Chats", the quarter-acre lot in downtown Brainerd with four rundown one-story buildings on it had a higher assessment than the quarter-acre lot with a brand-new fast-food restaurant on its outskirts. The more intensely land is used, the more it's worth and the more taxes a municipality can collect from it.
And dense development doesn't mean the end of the detached single-family residence. The east-side Kansas City neighborhood I grew up in consists entirely of freestanding SFRs on their own lots. But the houses are closer together than they would be in a modern suburb outside California (whose suburbs are actually quite densely built in most cases), and the lots they sit on smaller. Given that we build bigger houses now, we probably couldn't shrink the lots to the size of those on the 4100 block of Bellefontaine Avenue, but we could get more density in other ways, like permitting accessory apartments inside or on the grounds of freestanding SFRs or changing the zoning to allow duplexes and small apartment buildings of four to six units along with the houses. Minneapolis has a number of mixed neighborhoods like this one, and it will probably get more now that the city council there has abolished exclusive detached SFR zoning.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 08-30-2021 at 03:53 AM..
One of the essays points out that the city's population in 1996 was about the same as it was in 1946, the year before it began its nearly 40-year annexation spree, but those 440,000-odd inhabitants occupied only 60 square miles of land as opposed to the 316 they did in the 1990s. The KC of 1946 was more productive overall than the one of 1996, and as the essays point out, the cost of carrying all that extra land weighs on the city treasury.
But the entire KC metro area is far more productive with population tripling from the 1940s. KC's problem is that it can't annex the entire metro area.
And the question of productivity doesn't ask whether the current inhabitants of the KC metro area would be happier if the suburbs did not exist and another million or more people were crammed into the 1946 footprint. Most of the big central cities like Manhattan, the City of London and Paris, are less populated today then they were 100 years ago, because the cost of density in terms of housing cost and negative quality of life is too high for most people.
In order to house 2.3 million people in 1910 Manhattan, the density in certain neighborhoods were extreme because that's all the poor could afford and had to live in, in order to work near where they live.
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The more intensely land is used, the more it's worth and the more taxes a municipality can collect from it.
If it can't annex its surrounding area. But if it can, then your taxes scale more with the number of people, households and businesses. And normally, a well-run local government should base its tax revenues on what it needs to operate all of its services and to build and replace infrastructure as needed, not on its absolute value of land. Even if all of the real estate under its jurisdiction doubled in value in a year, the local government wouldn't be collecting double the property tax revenue as the mill rates would be adjusted down.
On the other hand, based on recent Netherlands data (who are the most cycling developed country), bicycle culture is also dangerous for kids.
Their finding is that 64% of emergency visits related to road incidents are from cyclists. And you can't blame cars, most of those accidents only involved the cyclist. While there is an image of cars hitting cyclists, bicycle-on-bicycle accidents are almost as common as those involving bicycles and cars.
Nonsense, bicycle culture is not dangerous for kids. Overall the Netherlands has far less traffic deaths than the US, which has a car culture. The reason for that is simple.
Infrastructure in the US is built to let cars drive as fast as possible, with lots of wide streets, few tight curves and almost no physical traffic calming. This makes driving a car dangerous for drivers, pedestrians, cyclists and children. The infrastructure in the Netherlands does the exact opposite. If the Netherlands had the level of car use like the US, then the Netherlands would also have to build the infrastructure like the US to allow car traffic to flow effectively. As a result, however, the total number of road deaths would increase more than if they continued to cycle as much in their current infrastructure, even if bicycles had more accidents overall than drivers.
NJB made a video about the traffic calming built into the Dutch infrastructure.
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