3 ms·

> you're comparing a Manhattan high-rise to 20 single-family homes. That's generally what people mean by "Dense Urban" vs "sprawl", yes? You could replace "Man

> you're comparing a Manhattan high-rise to 20 single-family homes. That's generally what people mean by "Dense Urban" vs "sprawl", yes? You could replace "Manhattan" with "Chicago Loop" and it would be the roughly identical. > These mid-rise apartments are cheaper per-capita both capital wise and maintenance wise than sprawly single-family homes. They aren't, sprawly apartments (like duplexes, or low-mid-rise apartments) are roughly equivalent to costs as sprawly single family homes, and dense apartments are more expensive. This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive). > Read Strong Towns I have, many many times. They get promoted on HN on a literally daily basis. Strong Towns is a fun blog to read, but unfortunately, Strong Towns is simply wrong sometimes. Their understanding of suburban finances is one thing they are semi-routinely incorrect on, they assume most suburbs are only financially viable if they continiously grow -- and while this is true for some, it is not common for most. The Growth Ponzi scheme they mention, while true for a handful of suburbs, does not apply in any way to 75% or more of suburbs across the US. Don't take my word for it. Most municipalities budgets are public record (they should all be, really). Look up one near you, and see this for yourself.

maxsilver 8y ago
I'll break this down another way. I'm going to pick a random suburb that happens to be near me. They are about a 33% even split of old suburbs (1940-1960s), middle suburbs (1970s-1990s) and new suburbs (2000s+), with maybe 15% of that new suburb land still totally empty. There are a few duplexes and apartment buildings in there, but nothing dense. No buildings higher than 3 stories, it's like 95% low density stuff. Their budget for 2017 includes $7,143,000 towards "Major Streets and Local Streets". That's costs for basically every road except the freeways (those are maintained by the state). This suburbs spends that, every year, on roads alone. "OH MY GOD THATS SO EXPENSIVE" says StrongTowns, "OBVIOUSLY SUBURBS ARE DOOMED!" There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden). Even ignoring all business revenue, for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription per person, this suburbs maintains every single street in the entire suburb. An average house in this Midwestern Michigan suburb, costs about $150-200k. A single family home pays a couple hundred dollars per month in property taxes. It costs just $8 of those couple hundred dollars per month, to maintain every single street in the suburb. Is it possible the municipality mis-counted something? Sure! Is it possible they aren't fully accounting for every possible road cost? Perhaps! Let's pretend they mis-counted by something extreme, let's assume they are a full 50% under-estimating on literally every street in the sububrb. That doomsday scenario means a citizen might have to pay $16/month for roads, instead of $8. Oh no, what a terrible world that would be I'm not pretending every suburb is identical. I'm sure there are suburbs that spend more than $8/per person per month on roads. Some suburbs are more sprawled out than others. But generally speaking, there is no great infrastructure apocalypse coming down upon us. It's just not happening, unless some major disaster wipes everything out all at once (like a hurricane, or a tornado, or a screwup like Flint's Water crisis). ----- The Growth Ponzi scheme makes a great headline for StrongTowns. But for most people, it's completely fanfaction. It is not grounded in any reality whatsoever, for the vast majority of people who are reading it.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  > There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden). Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people owns property and pays property tax? That is a pretty inaccurate statement. Moreover I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA [1]. Rather than guestimating property taxes based on some weird anecdotal extension of my own property tax, I'm going to take a look at the city budget [2]. The city earned $10,370,327 in property taxes in the 2017 FY. The city paid $1,258,730 to maintain its streets in the same FY. That's 12.1% of property taxes devoted just to street maintenance. In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paso_Robles,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paso_Robles,_California [2]: https://www.prcity.com/DocumentCenter/View/23619/Two-Year-Adopted-Budget-FY-2018-19-and-2019-20-PDF https://www.prcity.com/DocumentCenter/View/23619/Two-Year-Ad...
  - maxsilver 8y ago
    > Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people pays property tax? Yes, because effectively, they are. Renters pay for it through their rent (landlords don't just eat costs for free) and obviously children don't pay for their own, and homeless folks don't and such. But effectively, most every resident is paying property taxes (or someone is paying their share for them) in some way or another. > I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA So, using your approach for the suburb I picked, all road construction + maintenance + repair costs are about 20% of the total suburban budget. Approximately $8/person/month. (This is in Michigan, where we have snow+ice+flooding for 6 months straight each year, so that seems totally reasonable to me.) Using your own link for Paso Robles to the budget they provided, they're devoting 12.1% of property taxes to street maintenance. With ~29k people, that's ~$4/person/month. So, your suburb spends even less to maintain their roads (per capita) than mine does. Isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that just further reinforce the fact that there is no coming "infrastructure apocalypse" for roads? If Paso Robles needed to double their entire road budget for some magical reason, you'd still be paying less than what folks up here already pay every single year. > In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments. Isn't that also a good thing? In a perfect world, the total taxes collected would pay for all the services provided, with a little set aside for a rainy day and nothing more left over.
jungler 8y ago
Asserting that "sprawly apartments" have the same cost as SFH is not compelling unless backed up by TCO figures, since it runs up against the metric of "geometric efficiency". If I have more destinations nearby, I spend less on all forms of transit, which compensates for rent and utilities costs. And if my neighborhood is denser on average, then I have more walkable destinations, subject to zoning law, and each destination in turn sees a better return on infrastructural investment. Urban streets in Japan tend to blend together because they allow commercial uses throughout - you can wander a single neighborhood for days and not see every storefront. It's not just the transit. There's a built-in bias towards density there that is not present in US suburbs, which are largely motivated to build big box retail and office parks instead of houses because they are bigger moneymakers. We are setting a market equilibrium by law.
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
> This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive). Without TCO figures, I can't agree or disagree with you. Moreover I feel like this is permeated with a pretty common American bias, namely that homeowners maintain their property better than landlords (the myth of the yeoman property owner).

maxsilver 8y ago

I'll break this down another way. I'm going to pick a random suburb that happens to be near me. They are about a 33% even split of old suburbs (1940-1960s), middle suburbs (1970s-1990s) and new suburbs (2000s+), with maybe 15% of that new suburb land still totally empty. There are a few duplexes and apartment buildings in there, but nothing dense. No buildings higher than 3 stories, it's like 95% low density stuff. Their budget for 2017 includes $7,143,000 towards "Major Streets and Local Streets". That's costs for basically every road except the freeways (those are maintained by the state). This suburbs spends that, every year, on roads alone. "OH MY GOD THATS SO EXPENSIVE" says StrongTowns, "OBVIOUSLY SUBURBS ARE DOOMED!" There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden). Even ignoring all business revenue, for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription per person, this suburbs maintains every single street in the entire suburb. An average house in this Midwestern Michigan suburb, costs about $150-200k. A single family home pays a couple hundred dollars per month in property taxes. It costs just $8 of those couple hundred dollars per month, to maintain every single street in the suburb. Is it possible the municipality mis-counted something? Sure! Is it possible they aren't fully accounting for every possible road cost? Perhaps! Let's pretend they mis-counted by something extreme, let's assume they are a full 50% under-estimating on literally every street in the sububrb. That doomsday scenario means a citizen might have to pay $16/month for roads, instead of $8. Oh no, what a terrible world that would be I'm not pretending every suburb is identical. I'm sure there are suburbs that spend more than $8/per person per month on roads. Some suburbs are more sprawled out than others. But generally speaking, there is no great infrastructure apocalypse coming down upon us. It's just not happening, unless some major disaster wipes everything out all at once (like a hurricane, or a tornado, or a screwup like Flint's Water crisis). ----- The Growth Ponzi scheme makes a great headline for StrongTowns. But for most people, it's completely fanfaction. It is not grounded in any reality whatsoever, for the vast majority of people who are reading it.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago
> There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden). Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people owns property and pays property tax? That is a pretty inaccurate statement. Moreover I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA [1]. Rather than guestimating property taxes based on some weird anecdotal extension of my own property tax, I'm going to take a look at the city budget [2]. The city earned $10,370,327 in property taxes in the 2017 FY. The city paid $1,258,730 to maintain its streets in the same FY. That's 12.1% of property taxes devoted just to street maintenance. In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paso_Robles,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paso_Robles,_California [2]: https://www.prcity.com/DocumentCenter/View/23619/Two-Year-Adopted-Budget-FY-2018-19-and-2019-20-PDF https://www.prcity.com/DocumentCenter/View/23619/Two-Year-Ad...
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people pays property tax? Yes, because effectively, they are. Renters pay for it through their rent (landlords don't just eat costs for free) and obviously children don't pay for their own, and homeless folks don't and such. But effectively, most every resident is paying property taxes (or someone is paying their share for them) in some way or another. > I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA So, using your approach for the suburb I picked, all road construction + maintenance + repair costs are about 20% of the total suburban budget. Approximately $8/person/month. (This is in Michigan, where we have snow+ice+flooding for 6 months straight each year, so that seems totally reasonable to me.) Using your own link for Paso Robles to the budget they provided, they're devoting 12.1% of property taxes to street maintenance. With ~29k people, that's ~$4/person/month. So, your suburb spends even less to maintain their roads (per capita) than mine does. Isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that just further reinforce the fact that there is no coming "infrastructure apocalypse" for roads? If Paso Robles needed to double their entire road budget for some magical reason, you'd still be paying less than what folks up here already pay every single year. > In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments. Isn't that also a good thing? In a perfect world, the total taxes collected would pay for all the services provided, with a little set aside for a rainy day and nothing more left over.

jungler 8y ago

Asserting that "sprawly apartments" have the same cost as SFH is not compelling unless backed up by TCO figures, since it runs up against the metric of "geometric efficiency". If I have more destinations nearby, I spend less on all forms of transit, which compensates for rent and utilities costs. And if my neighborhood is denser on average, then I have more walkable destinations, subject to zoning law, and each destination in turn sees a better return on infrastructural investment. Urban streets in Japan tend to blend together because they allow commercial uses throughout - you can wander a single neighborhood for days and not see every storefront. It's not just the transit. There's a built-in bias towards density there that is not present in US suburbs, which are largely motivated to build big box retail and office parks instead of houses because they are bigger moneymakers. We are setting a market equilibrium by law.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago

> This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive). Without TCO figures, I can't agree or disagree with you. Moreover I feel like this is permeated with a pretty common American bias, namely that homeowners maintain their property better than landlords (the myth of the yeoman property owner).