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I'm OK so far but I'd broaden this from individuals to neighborhoods.
Fair enough, it's really the same thing. When I was referring to individuals, I mean the mythical average individual. People vary, but in aggregate or group, trends definitely emerge.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
Sure. It is also not a stretch to assume that there are several advantages from a city services point of view of population density. There is simply 'less stuff' between the city and the resident if in going from A to B you can reach 200 residents rather than 20. But this is still a generalization: the 200 residents you reach in upper Manhattan may be assumed to be cash cows for New York City, while the 200 UT students in a dorm are not.
Certainly all things are relative, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the UT population as being a net cost. On campus students may be a bit of a special case (since UT gets exempted from paying property taxes), but
1. The vast majority of UT students are off campus.
2. The CoA gets way more of it's budget from property taxes (which those off campus students will pay, at least transitively) than sales taxes.
3. The costs to the city for those students may be lower than average, especially in regards to providing transportation infrastructure. (increased costs to APD _may_ offset those some, though on the other hand UTPD is would be covering those as well).
4. You've also got the money those students are bringing into the local economy (money from parents, etc.). They may be spending (and paying taxes on) way more than they're making.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
Similarly, not all sprawl is created equal. Just like mass transit or urban planning, no matter what your strategy is, there are good ways and bad ways of achieving that strategy as far as efficiency is concerned.
Of course, not all things are the same. But again, you can't fight physics. Providing services to a widely dispersed population can't help but be more inefficient.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
Per capita, we certainly use more water and electricity than your condo or apartment dweller because we have more space that needs to be watered or cooled - but we pay out of pocket to do that, and respond to market forces in terms of the HOA changing the rules to not only permit but encourage xeriscaping. So to the extent that we're consuming more of those resources, we're paying for the privilege - that seems to me the two biggest areas of inefficiency, but nobody is subsidizing that.
You pay for _part_ of the privilege. The problem is the pricing structure still doesn't expose true costs.
Most months my water bill is dominated by the fixed customer charge portion. That fixed charge is applied universally, even though the actual costs to provide minimum services aren't fixed within the geographic area. Cutting back and introducing xeriscaping (which I'm all for, don't get me wrong) actually exposes that subsidy even more.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
Here in my part of Circle C, we don't have Austin energy at all, so we can't take advantage of things like subsidies for solar panels and they have no support burden for us.
Agreed. The difference between the CoA and Austin Energy are great enough that for most analysis its better to treat that as a separate budget.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
That leaves the general fund as what we're looking at for typical city expenses: Police, Fire, EMS, Library, Parks and Recreation. So for 1/5 of the city budget, the question here is how many of those services do we consume relative to our tax base?
Mostly agreed, though I'd add on the debt service portion (as most of that is for stuff that benefits the entire population, including surburban residents).
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
If we can assume that, because they live downtown, they never have to leave, then they surely spend less on gas. But they also live in smaller houses and are less likely to have families, or if they do, those families are smaller. How do we compare your hypothetical gas savings against sales tax revenue from an extra person over their life in the city?
We should already be comparing per-capita.
And per-capita, those larger families _increase_ suburban costs, without commensurate increases in city revenues.
Each extra person in the family is an additional person that needs city services. But how much extra revenue to they provide? As you said, the person without the family lives in a smaller house, but that smaller house closer in is taxed almost as much as the larger house in the suburbs. If you then divide that property tax among more people, it's less per-capita.
And larger families probably are spending more on untaxed goods (such as groceries) so I wouldn't expect them to be a huge source of sales taxes.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
Your beat cop can reach many more people in a shorter time, but he also has to reach many more people in a shorter time because the type and frequency of crime is much higher.
When making this comparison, you have to be very careful to separate out crime concerning urban residences and crime concerning commercial in those same areas/zip codes. You also have to separate out the socio-economic conditions (e.g. crime in single family residences in Rundberg suburbs vs. expensive downtown condos).
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
The nearest police station is 15-20 minutes east of here and our lack of crime is one of the big draws to the area.
That distance is the problem, not a benefit. It means cruisers doing long patrols through the neighborhood (and spending extra time getting from the station to the neighborhood).
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
I don't see a lot of Circle C catching fire and houses out here have to be built to code just as they do anywhere else - just not multifamily code, so okay, no sprinkler systems. Maybe there's an argument here for Steiner, but it doesn't come up much here.
Not to get sidetracked from this sidetracked conversation
But this touches a bit on the separate issue of fire protection. With better and better building codes and technology, the need for fire protection has gone down a lot from decades ago. But we still pay a huge amount for the fire department (in part I think because of the entrenched power which is the fire fighters union).
Okay, side track over.
Even if Circle C houses don't catch fire often, we're still paying to prepare for the unlikely case they do.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
I can see this configuration being different elsewhere where the sprawl is much larger, but at least in our case, the extent to which we use more stuff is offset by the fact that we pay a lot more per capita for that stuff.
Again, per capita you're not paying all that much, compared to an urban resident (if you divide out that house payment among the larger family).
And again, these are all spectrums. I could very well believe that there are high-value suburban developments that aren't hugely subsidized (in comparison to other lower value suburban developments). Though they will be somewhat.
But high-value dense urban development is subsidizing everybody.
Providing services to a widely dispersed population can't help but be more inefficient.
And providing police and fire services to an area with less crime and less fire can't help but cost less.
I think we've got the relevant variables described, but without real numbers on any of this, we'll just go in circles. "Each additional person in a suburban house" is not necessarily an additional person that needs services; in fact that seems counter to the rest of your argument, because each additional person in a single family home is a person whose marginal energy use will be lower since heating and cooling will heat and cool everybody. They'll use more water, but I don't think your added people - mostly kids in this case - are adding much in the way of police and fire.
They're certainly adding to the education burden but we're only talking CoA here anyway and not AISD.
The city must know, and the individual agencies must know, what they spend every year to provide protection to each area, even if not as specifically as each neighborhood. I suspect you could find someone at APD with access to their books who could tell you, even if just off-the-cuff, in terms of cost burden, how is Circle C compared to other areas?
Even then, there seem to be enough variables that what is true of APD may not be true of Austin Water. As far as amortizing the fixed cost, it's true that you're paying the same fixed cost that I am, but remember that the fee per gallon increases as you pass certain usage thresholds - so your residential users are not just paying more because they're using more water, they're paying more for each gallon used. Sometimes a lot more!
The city must know, and the individual agencies must know, what they spend every year to provide protection to each area, even if not as specifically as each neighborhood. I suspect you could find someone at APD with access to their books who could tell you, even if just off-the-cuff, in terms of cost burden, how is Circle C compared to other areas?
I was a utility cut inspector in Kansas City. My district was an area about 30 square miles in the dense, downtown area. We had two other inspectors. One was EVERYTHING north of the river (around 120ish square miles). The other was from 47th street to the southern borders (around 170ish square miles).
Now here's the kicker: my district had A) more permits than the entire rest of the city and B) far more complex repairs because the utilities were almost universally under streets and not in other right of ways. So do the math; my area was under 10 percent of the city's land area but accounted for a third of our costs.
Edit: the same ratio, by the way, held for street inspection and resurfacing projects.
.They're certainly adding to the education burden but we're only talking CoA here anyway and not AISD.
And remember, AISD's own stats will show that suburban kids cost SUBSTANTIALLY less than the district average.
The problem with this whole Third Commandment from the Urbanist Bible is that is says nothing about how development is funded in AUSTIN, TEXAS. The prophet du jour takes whatever urban mecca they live in, and extrapolates that across the country. But in Austin, suburban development arrives with a gift wrapped package of infrastructure - streets, sidewalks, open space, sewer, water, you name it. (Yes -- at some point, it will have to be repaired or replaced). Compare that to 1000 new residents on Rainey Street. Yes, it will be cheaper to bring their sewerage to a collection main. But once you've done that (which the MUD paid for in Austin, not Austin taxpayers), the costs of transportation and processing are identical. So who pays for the added transportation and processing capacity required by urban infill? Because until last year, tap fees in the suburbs were 3X higher than in the city -- up to $3,900 vs. $1,300. Maybe suburban tap fee payers were the real subsidizers?
And that also ignores the reality of Austin's budget. 62% of the general fund is public safety. It dwarfs everything else -- parks, libraries, you name it. Out here in the burbs, how far it is to a police station is immaterial, because we don't ever see one. The fact it takes longer to get here, and we aren't as close together, is meaningless, a triviality. THEY DON'T SPEND TIME IN OUR AREA. If you don't believe that, look at any crime map. Why would they spend time out here?
So unless someone can come up with something germane to Austin, my skeptical side will ignore any ideologically driven drivel from the Atlantic, Richard Florida, you name it. May be interesting, may be applicable someplace else. Not here.
And as I previously described, police isn't urban vs. suburban, it's socioeconomic and residential vs. commercial (e.g. Circle C has lower crime in part because almost everyone leaves it 12 hours a day).
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
"Each additional person in a suburban house" is not necessarily an additional person that needs services;
Of course they are. Both people in a couple get police protection, both at home and when out working or shopping. As do minor children. Each person in a dwelling can go to libraries and parks if they wish.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquitaine
in fact that seems counter to the rest of your argument, because each additional person in a single family home is a person whose marginal energy use will be lower since heating and cooling will heat and cool everybody.
While still being larger (per-capita) than even a _single_ person in an apartment or condo. It's a question of surface area exposed to the outside environment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquitaine
They'll use more water, but I don't think your added people - mostly kids in this case - are adding much in the way of police and fire.
If everyone (kids and adults) spent all their time at home, then maybe. But that's just not the case. Kids in schools during the day get police protection. Two adults at work and a child in school require more police protection than two adults.
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Originally Posted by Aquitaine
They're certainly adding to the education burden but we're only talking CoA here anyway and not AISD.
And that also ignores the reality of Austin's budget. 62% of the general fund is public safety. It dwarfs everything else -- parks, libraries, you name it.
I'm not ignoring it, it's the linchpin of my argument.
That Austin taxpayers are paying for the public safety of suburbanites that come into the city.
Thousands of people come into the city for half of the day, and pay basically 0 taxes to the city (sales tax on lunch, maybe).
That's why annexation of suburban land is fair. Its CoA getting back at least a part of what it expends on their part.
It's a question of surface area exposed to the outside environment.
Nope. That's simplification to the point of trivialization.
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