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Money talks. We need to shift the tax burden to encourage higher density land use. We need high enough land taxes on the highest value land to encourage high d

Money talks. We need to shift the tax burden to encourage higher density land use. We need high enough land taxes on the highest value land to encourage high density buildings on that land.

themartorana 10y ago
Do we, though? I agree encouraging density in the places people want to live densely is a Good Idea - think SF, NYC, etc. People and entrenched interests working to prevent density where appropriate are worth defeating. That said, some people want to live in sprawling suburbs, and taxing them unnecessarily for the inconvenience seems like a Bad Idea.
- djrobstep 10y ago
  Shifting more of the tax burden onto expensive land shifts it off cheaper land.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Making the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure is not “taxing them unnecessarily”. Currently suburban infrastructure and the automobile commuter pattern of life is heavily subsidized, while other development patterns are penalized or banned outright.
  - raldi 10y ago
    And let's not forget their carbon footprint.
  - Agustus 10y ago
    How is suburban infrastructure heavily subsidized?
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      Everyone pays the same for infrastructure regardless if you live in a low or high density part of town. However, you require more infrastructure living in the suburbs. Only two other families ever use the piece of street in front of my house. At best a hundred families ever use the small park across the street.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        >Everyone pays the same for infrastructure regardless if you live in a low or high density part of town. No actually. A heavily subsidized project like the Big Dig cost vastly more per mile than a suburban side street. Furthermore, you can't just assume that cities could exist in isolation. The inhabitants wouldn't last long without numerous inputs (food, water, power, etc.) that they can't provide for themselves and that require areas with less density to produce for them. It's very hard to come up with numbers because everything is effectively a large interconnected system. Some patterns are probably more efficient than others but you can't just assume everyone into urban living.
        jacobolus 10y ago
        The Big Dig is part of a transportation system designed to help people who live in the suburbs commute by car into the city to work. If everyone who worked in the city could also live there, there would be much less need for massive highways. As local transportation, the subway and buses are much more scalable and efficient. (Not to mention just walking.) Residential sprawl in the suburbs is not producing food, etc. Nobody is advocating turning all cropland into city, that wouldn’t make any sense. The advocacy is for changing tax/zoning/planning policy to encourage residential density and mixed residential-commercial use neighborhoods. Even in towns of, say, 30k people, having a denser town center full of low-rise apartment buildings and walkable neighborhoods is a big advantage for economic efficiency, for human health, and for the environment. Having people commute one-person-per-car for 1–2 hours per day, drive cars to school, to shops, to restaurants, to the post office and the library, ... is ridiculously destructive at a societal scale. All the public infrastructure and public services cost several times as much per capita as life at higher density, not even to mention the economic/environmental cost of the cars themselves, or the massive time opportunity cost of the commuting. > you can't just assume everyone into urban living. Nope. But people who want to live somewhere very economically wasteful should be prepared to pay for it.
    - raldi 10y ago
      For starters, by spending trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East to keep fuel prices low. We also set the gas tax far too low to account for all the negative externalities of driving.
- jimlawruk 10y ago
  I grew up thinking I wanted to live in the suburbs with a large lot/house, etc. Then after living in a small place where you can walk everywhere, I realized smaller is actually better. I suspect many like me could come to that realization. Also, many people "wish" they could live in a city, but are forced to the suburbs due practical reasons: lower cost housing and better schools.
  - lettergram 10y ago
    Interesting, I grew up in the suburbs and hate living in cities. I live in the bay area at the moment, and even that is a bit crammed for me. The suburbs give you space to do stuff. I grew up on the out skirts of the Chicago suburbs and I could play soccer, go mountain biking, off road, and in the same day go to any store or restaurant you can think of. More in less space might be great, for some, but you still can't fit everything in one place. The suburbs may require a bit of driving, but it's less dense and thus you have less traffic (easy to drive 10 miles in 15 minutes) so you get a lot more in a given area you have access to.
    - hx87 10y ago
      Timewise, cities aren't that much further from the wilderness than suburbs are. There are certainly advantages to living in suburbs, space being the primary one, but time isn't one of them.
      - lettergram 10y ago
        I am 100% sure people in Boston, NYC, the Bay Area, downtown Chicago, etc. would strongly disagree that it takes 15 minutes or less to get to a place to hike, horse back ride, and/or fish. Having lived in the Chicago suburbs, downtown Chicago, Champaign, IL and the Bay Area; assuming you live in a suburb (as opposed to Champaign, IL) you'll have access to a much larger variety of places to go in the suburbs. I will however agree that going out to bars, or traveling via foot/public transit would be difficult.
        10y ago
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  We are currently subsidizing living in low density areas. The per capita cost of streets, sewer, etc. is much, much higher in the suburbs. We should at least stop the subsidies.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Show me the line item on a bedroom community city's budget that says "subsidy from self-righteous city dwellers who don't realize the employees of the companies that pay taxes to the city commute from suburbs".
    - pm90 10y ago
      This kind of attitude is not welcome on HN. We are a friendly community that welcomes different opinions/views which are debated in a professional way. Even so, here [0] is a recent HN article which does a very good job of explaining how suburbs are predicated on an (unsustainable) model of growth. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11638849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11638849
      - nitrogen 10y ago
        Do you not see how the constant accusations against suburbanites of leeching off the cities is equally antagonistic? It happens frequently on HN -- someone might post about inefficiencies of suburbs for transportation (often, but not always true) or the use of water for growing food in rural areas, then a bunch of others will pile on with escalating disdain for non-city life. But because the escalation is gradual and the disdain is so popular here, nobody notices that they've slid into an endless pit of belittling the roots of millions of people.
        pm90 10y ago
        I was referring to the way you made your point rather than your point itself. I apologize if I was not clear.

Money talks. We need to shift the tax burden to encourage higher density land use. We need high enough land taxes on the highest value land to encourage high density buildings on that land.

themartorana 10y ago

Do we, though? I agree encouraging density in the places people want to live densely is a Good Idea - think SF, NYC, etc. People and entrenched interests working to prevent density where appropriate are worth defeating. That said, some people want to live in sprawling suburbs, and taxing them unnecessarily for the inconvenience seems like a Bad Idea.

djrobstep 10y ago
Shifting more of the tax burden onto expensive land shifts it off cheaper land.
jacobolus 10y ago
Making the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure is not “taxing them unnecessarily”. Currently suburban infrastructure and the automobile commuter pattern of life is heavily subsidized, while other development patterns are penalized or banned outright.
- raldi 10y ago
  And let's not forget their carbon footprint.
- Agustus 10y ago
  How is suburban infrastructure heavily subsidized?
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    Everyone pays the same for infrastructure regardless if you live in a low or high density part of town. However, you require more infrastructure living in the suburbs. Only two other families ever use the piece of street in front of my house. At best a hundred families ever use the small park across the street.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      >Everyone pays the same for infrastructure regardless if you live in a low or high density part of town. No actually. A heavily subsidized project like the Big Dig cost vastly more per mile than a suburban side street. Furthermore, you can't just assume that cities could exist in isolation. The inhabitants wouldn't last long without numerous inputs (food, water, power, etc.) that they can't provide for themselves and that require areas with less density to produce for them. It's very hard to come up with numbers because everything is effectively a large interconnected system. Some patterns are probably more efficient than others but you can't just assume everyone into urban living.
      - jacobolus 10y ago
        The Big Dig is part of a transportation system designed to help people who live in the suburbs commute by car into the city to work. If everyone who worked in the city could also live there, there would be much less need for massive highways. As local transportation, the subway and buses are much more scalable and efficient. (Not to mention just walking.) Residential sprawl in the suburbs is not producing food, etc. Nobody is advocating turning all cropland into city, that wouldn’t make any sense. The advocacy is for changing tax/zoning/planning policy to encourage residential density and mixed residential-commercial use neighborhoods. Even in towns of, say, 30k people, having a denser town center full of low-rise apartment buildings and walkable neighborhoods is a big advantage for economic efficiency, for human health, and for the environment. Having people commute one-person-per-car for 1–2 hours per day, drive cars to school, to shops, to restaurants, to the post office and the library, ... is ridiculously destructive at a societal scale. All the public infrastructure and public services cost several times as much per capita as life at higher density, not even to mention the economic/environmental cost of the cars themselves, or the massive time opportunity cost of the commuting. > you can't just assume everyone into urban living. Nope. But people who want to live somewhere very economically wasteful should be prepared to pay for it.
  - raldi 10y ago
    For starters, by spending trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East to keep fuel prices low. We also set the gas tax far too low to account for all the negative externalities of driving.
jimlawruk 10y ago
I grew up thinking I wanted to live in the suburbs with a large lot/house, etc. Then after living in a small place where you can walk everywhere, I realized smaller is actually better. I suspect many like me could come to that realization. Also, many people "wish" they could live in a city, but are forced to the suburbs due practical reasons: lower cost housing and better schools.
- lettergram 10y ago
  Interesting, I grew up in the suburbs and hate living in cities. I live in the bay area at the moment, and even that is a bit crammed for me. The suburbs give you space to do stuff. I grew up on the out skirts of the Chicago suburbs and I could play soccer, go mountain biking, off road, and in the same day go to any store or restaurant you can think of. More in less space might be great, for some, but you still can't fit everything in one place. The suburbs may require a bit of driving, but it's less dense and thus you have less traffic (easy to drive 10 miles in 15 minutes) so you get a lot more in a given area you have access to.
  - hx87 10y ago
    Timewise, cities aren't that much further from the wilderness than suburbs are. There are certainly advantages to living in suburbs, space being the primary one, but time isn't one of them.
    - lettergram 10y ago
      I am 100% sure people in Boston, NYC, the Bay Area, downtown Chicago, etc. would strongly disagree that it takes 15 minutes or less to get to a place to hike, horse back ride, and/or fish. Having lived in the Chicago suburbs, downtown Chicago, Champaign, IL and the Bay Area; assuming you live in a suburb (as opposed to Champaign, IL) you'll have access to a much larger variety of places to go in the suburbs. I will however agree that going out to bars, or traveling via foot/public transit would be difficult.
      - 10y ago
ajmurmann 10y ago
We are currently subsidizing living in low density areas. The per capita cost of streets, sewer, etc. is much, much higher in the suburbs. We should at least stop the subsidies.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Show me the line item on a bedroom community city's budget that says "subsidy from self-righteous city dwellers who don't realize the employees of the companies that pay taxes to the city commute from suburbs".
  - pm90 10y ago
    This kind of attitude is not welcome on HN. We are a friendly community that welcomes different opinions/views which are debated in a professional way. Even so, here [0] is a recent HN article which does a very good job of explaining how suburbs are predicated on an (unsustainable) model of growth. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11638849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11638849
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      Do you not see how the constant accusations against suburbanites of leeching off the cities is equally antagonistic? It happens frequently on HN -- someone might post about inefficiencies of suburbs for transportation (often, but not always true) or the use of water for growing food in rural areas, then a bunch of others will pile on with escalating disdain for non-city life. But because the escalation is gradual and the disdain is so popular here, nobody notices that they've slid into an endless pit of belittling the roots of millions of people.
      - pm90 10y ago
        I was referring to the way you made your point rather than your point itself. I apologize if I was not clear.