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Why should home owners give up their way of life just because a particular city is now hip and everyone pushes into the new hyper-dense zones? I demand space fo

Why should home owners give up their way of life just because a particular city is now hip and everyone pushes into the new hyper-dense zones? I demand space for living, a little bit of nature, and privacy. So go build some effing infrastructure instead of pushing everyone to live like a chicken in an egg factory, ffs.

Retric 7y ago
IMO, apply a flat 1% property tax on the value of a property ignoring zoning restrictions and as long as you pay it feel free. However, understand that tax actually represents paying for physical infrastructure and actual costs people are paying so nobody gets a tax break on it. Because what’s valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes. However, I realize everyone loves a hand out, especially when they can pretend it’s not a handout. So, I don’t see this changing any time soon.
- choeger 7y ago
  Bullshit. Infrastructure and transportation have generally always been paid by the owners. There may be cases where residents have successfully lobbied their community to build something for them, but that's not how things work where I live. But even if there was such a support for honeowners, a property tax would be nothing else but theft. Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace.
  - baq 7y ago
    Please. Tax is not theft by definition.
  - yardie 7y ago
    > Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace. And thats the problem. Infrastructure has not been priced correctly. A lot of towns are still paying the bond on initial construction. Leaving very little for maintenance and replacement. And then when the road/sewer/water system needs to be replaced voters don’t have the appetite to pay for it. You see this in older towns in the northeast. Water and sewer mains are corroding. taxes go up to cover it. And the residents flee for newer, cheaper developments. The town eventually becomes insolvent.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    A distinction I think should be made is that the value of land before you build on it is entirely due to the community and natural characteristics. So why not tax only on that value and not the value of any structure or improvements? The wisest thing I every heard from a libertarian or conservative was "if you tax something you get less of it". It therefore follows, not that we should eliminate taxes, but that we should tax something which is immune to the effect and only that.
- maxsilver 7y ago
  > Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes. This does not appear true in the real world. Low density housing requires more mileage of infrastructure, yes, but it's drastically cheaper miles. (You can wire 200 low density suburban houses with electricity across a dozen square miles, for less than the cost to wire up a single building in Manhattan) Density makes infrastructure exponentially more expensive, because the largest costs of infrastructure is in labour and complexity, not the literal length of wire or piping or whatever. > Because what’s valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes. This seems to contradict your own point. If low density housing needed more infrastructure, and houses were valued by the amount of infrastructure they needed, then low density housing would be the most valuable housing. But it's not. In the real world, low density houses are the cheapest housing, and have the cheapest infrastructure costs. High density housing has the highest construction cost, highest land cost, highest infrastructure costs (despite less per-mile infrastructure use), and the highest transportation costs per person (when including total personal+government spending)
  - Retric 7y ago
    The cost of electrical infrastructure is peanuts in comparison to roads or rail. Yes, the cost of a road in front of a 1,000 apartment skyscraper is more than that if in front of a suburban condo, but not 1,000x as much. Most importantly the commute past time even at walking speed is dramatically less. On top of this the most valuable infrastructure is things like hospitals, restaurants, etc where proximity is a huge deal. NYC has 2,581,170 apartments picture replacing them with single family homes on one acre and the city dies as that’s over 3,900 square miles excluding roads. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons where everyone wants more space, but that does not result in a city.
    - maxsilver 7y ago
      Even that's not really the whole picture. Sure, a road, completely standalone, can cost similarly between a 1k skyscraper and a suburban house. But the road in front of a 1k skyscraper alone will never be enough to transport those people, unless you bump it's price up (make it wide, tack on a parking garage, etc). To prevent that, you'll need something extra (Subway, LRT, a bus line), and that cost will immediately be way higher per-person than the suburban road ever would be. This is something urbanists / StrongTowns types routinely misunderstand. Roads aren't cheap, but they are almost always the cheapest form of public transportation possible in nearly every situation. (Yes, even in total cost of ownership. Yes, even when including the public funding in their cost. And yes, even when including personal vehicle costs). The minute you put even the lightest form of alternative public transit on that road, the cost spikes exponentially. Even the cost to run just a basic busline, with a driver on a timetable, costs more in one year than the entire construction + maintenance budget of that road will cost over 6+ years. (This is not an argument against alt. public transit. I support alt public transit. We should have more trains, subways, and buses, everywhere. It just isn't cheap -- it would require us to spend way more per rider on transit than we are used to, which is why most places are built with public roads only -- it's the absolute cheapest TCO option in nearly every situation)
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I'm used to the value of the land vs. the structure being listed separately on a property tax bill. The value that is attributable to the community is the value of the land before building. Obviously that's far higher in the middle of NYC or SF or something. So I'm not sure what you are saying about low density housing. There is/was a political movement to finance everything with a tax on the unimproved value of land. The advantage is that with almost everything you can tax, you get less of it, which is usually bad, and besides leads to avoidance and lower revenue. But unimproved land cannot be "discouraged" by taxes, and owners cannot pass the taxes on - their incentive is then to not leave it vacant, which is a very good thing in a dense city.
matteuan 7y ago
What if some people prefer to live in nice "hip" cities (that for them means culturally interesting) even at the cost of living without a private garden in a detached house?
- choeger 7y ago
  Then these people should explain how all the Starbucks employees, the janitors, and the delivery guys that make their "culturally interesting" living possible should live and travel to work. Just because you can effort a nice 2room apartment 20min from downtown does not mean that a single mom can afford a 3 room one for herself and her two childre. Instead these people are forced to either travel ever longer with ever worse public transport or live in ever worse conditions, usually both. Gentrification is the downside of densification. And now the hip class wants to get rid of cars in their hip inner cities, because they don't need them. Again totally ignoring everyone that is both forced to live outside of the centre and work inside of it. Actually, I think the minimum wage should be coupled to the typical rent around the working place. Good luck getting your new smartphone delivered then.
  - cowsandmilk 7y ago
    > Gentrification is the downside of densification. You’re smoking some strong stuff if you think densifications causes gentrification. Reality has always been gentrification leads to investment leads to densification.
    - choeger 7y ago
      Yeah right, all these "culturally interesting" places just happen to be the dense run-down areas of cities by pure chance... Gentrification starts with some Avantgarde subculture(s) rallying in parts of a city that are cheap and dense enough to find enough followers. Later, followers with many expulse the old residents and push the prices. This does never happen in some rural area.
  - allendoerfer 7y ago
    > Then these people should explain how all the Starbucks employees, the janitors, and the delivery guys that make their "culturally interesting" living possible should live and travel to work. They could simply argue, that these jobs would not exist without densification. Take the other extreme: I don't think Starbucks employees would earn more if everyone would live on firms miles apart from each other. Starbucks would be gone in this scenario. Everyone would be poorer, albeit equally poorer. So I would argue, you need to invest in public transportation and housing of different price ranges, possibly even built by the city itself, so threre are less incentives to defend legislation hindering new buildings, the actual reason why those workers are getting squeezed out. If you additionally try to focus on education and upward mobility you get a fair society.
conanbatt 7y ago
I think this is a fair preference. But if the tax structure weighted properly on by land, you would most likely pay as much as rent being a homeowner. For example, in San Francisco, de city spends about 2000U$S per household. And if you adjusted that amount of the amount of space used, single family homes would end up paying 3~4k a month of taxes alone.
- choeger 7y ago
  > But if the tax structure weighted properly on by land, you would most likely pay as much as rent being a homeowner. Huh? So the rent covers the infrastructure cost? Last time I checked, both renters and owners pay infrastructure directly. That includes waste water, garbage disposal, and pretty much everything else. None of this scales with the space I use, at most it scales with the square root of space due to larger distances.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Renters pay twice, because they pay for the infrastructure that increases the homeowners property value. Its an uneven tax structure for a renter to pay for the bart station that increases the prop value and thus their own rent.
lazyjones 7y ago
Agreed. Why did we stop building new cities? There's plenty of space and we have all the technology to build even in inhospitable areas and make them more liveable and accessible than current crowded cities.
- maxsilver 7y ago
  We haven't stopped. We build new cities all the time, we just build them on the closest empty land next to a job, and named them "suburbs". We don't build new cities way far away in the middle of nowhere, because building new cities is expensive and there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    > We don't build new cities way far away in the middle of nowhere, because building new cities is expensive At some point it has to be cheaper than upgrading infrastructure for ever-growing cities and implementing all kinds of harmful artificial restrictions e.g. on traffic just to support increasing population numbers in exiting metro areas. > there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere. Many factories are in the middle of nowhere and I don't see why one couldn't build and fill office space when cheap attractive housing and well-planned infrastructure is available nearby. The reason why don't do it is more likely because most western countries have become stagnant and inefficient at large projects.
hurricanetc 7y ago
Pay more in local property taxes and your local government just might build that infrastructure. Or were you wanting city dwellers to fund it for you?
- thrower123 7y ago
  I would like those city dwellers to fix their own problems before castigating my whole way of life. If you need more housing in the Bay area, cut your red tape and build it. We're good out here in the rest of the country; in fact, if people could tolerate wotking remotely better, there are places where four-bedroom houses are selling for $80k.
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    Castigate your way of life? Please. OP wants infrastructure. If you want infrastructure build it and pay for it yourself. Cities have their own problems but we aren’t looking for a handout from rural residents to solve those problems.
    - choeger 7y ago
      No. You just suck up every qualified work and spit out the poor souls that cannot afford your way of life anymore.
      - hurricanetc 7y ago
        And you enjoy a subsidized way of life with below value housing because the city workers fund it for you. Your cheap house is cheap because city residents subsidize it. In New York the city residents pay 45% of the taxes but receive 40% of the expenditures. How about we balance it out and let you rural residents make up the shortfall. In NY that’s about $8 billion per year. Good luck and have fun. Don’t bite the hand that feeds.
    - jebrial 7y ago
      It is also true that richer cities like NYC are paying way more in taxes and rural areas benefit from this?
CuriouslyC 7y ago
If you are a home owner paying depressed property taxes, that shortfall from what someone else potentially would have paid has to be made up somewhere, and frankly if you own a home in a major coastal California city, the people footing your bill are probably going to be less well off than you. Seems pretty scummy and greedy to me. If you think being somewhere first gives you inalienable rights, I'm sure there are some native Americans that would like to talk to you about the deed to your house.

Retric 7y ago

IMO, apply a flat 1% property tax on the value of a property ignoring zoning restrictions and as long as you pay it feel free. However, understand that tax actually represents paying for physical infrastructure and actual costs people are paying so nobody gets a tax break on it. Because what’s valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes. However, I realize everyone loves a hand out, especially when they can pretend it’s not a handout. So, I don’t see this changing any time soon.

choeger 7y ago
Bullshit. Infrastructure and transportation have generally always been paid by the owners. There may be cases where residents have successfully lobbied their community to build something for them, but that's not how things work where I live. But even if there was such a support for honeowners, a property tax would be nothing else but theft. Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace.
- baq 7y ago
  Please. Tax is not theft by definition.
- yardie 7y ago
  > Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace. And thats the problem. Infrastructure has not been priced correctly. A lot of towns are still paying the bond on initial construction. Leaving very little for maintenance and replacement. And then when the road/sewer/water system needs to be replaced voters don’t have the appetite to pay for it. You see this in older towns in the northeast. Water and sewer mains are corroding. taxes go up to cover it. And the residents flee for newer, cheaper developments. The town eventually becomes insolvent.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  A distinction I think should be made is that the value of land before you build on it is entirely due to the community and natural characteristics. So why not tax only on that value and not the value of any structure or improvements? The wisest thing I every heard from a libertarian or conservative was "if you tax something you get less of it". It therefore follows, not that we should eliminate taxes, but that we should tax something which is immune to the effect and only that.
maxsilver 7y ago
> Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes. This does not appear true in the real world. Low density housing requires more mileage of infrastructure, yes, but it's drastically cheaper miles. (You can wire 200 low density suburban houses with electricity across a dozen square miles, for less than the cost to wire up a single building in Manhattan) Density makes infrastructure exponentially more expensive, because the largest costs of infrastructure is in labour and complexity, not the literal length of wire or piping or whatever. > Because what’s valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes. This seems to contradict your own point. If low density housing needed more infrastructure, and houses were valued by the amount of infrastructure they needed, then low density housing would be the most valuable housing. But it's not. In the real world, low density houses are the cheapest housing, and have the cheapest infrastructure costs. High density housing has the highest construction cost, highest land cost, highest infrastructure costs (despite less per-mile infrastructure use), and the highest transportation costs per person (when including total personal+government spending)
- Retric 7y ago
  The cost of electrical infrastructure is peanuts in comparison to roads or rail. Yes, the cost of a road in front of a 1,000 apartment skyscraper is more than that if in front of a suburban condo, but not 1,000x as much. Most importantly the commute past time even at walking speed is dramatically less. On top of this the most valuable infrastructure is things like hospitals, restaurants, etc where proximity is a huge deal. NYC has 2,581,170 apartments picture replacing them with single family homes on one acre and the city dies as that’s over 3,900 square miles excluding roads. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons where everyone wants more space, but that does not result in a city.
  - maxsilver 7y ago
    Even that's not really the whole picture. Sure, a road, completely standalone, can cost similarly between a 1k skyscraper and a suburban house. But the road in front of a 1k skyscraper alone will never be enough to transport those people, unless you bump it's price up (make it wide, tack on a parking garage, etc). To prevent that, you'll need something extra (Subway, LRT, a bus line), and that cost will immediately be way higher per-person than the suburban road ever would be. This is something urbanists / StrongTowns types routinely misunderstand. Roads aren't cheap, but they are almost always the cheapest form of public transportation possible in nearly every situation. (Yes, even in total cost of ownership. Yes, even when including the public funding in their cost. And yes, even when including personal vehicle costs). The minute you put even the lightest form of alternative public transit on that road, the cost spikes exponentially. Even the cost to run just a basic busline, with a driver on a timetable, costs more in one year than the entire construction + maintenance budget of that road will cost over 6+ years. (This is not an argument against alt. public transit. I support alt public transit. We should have more trains, subways, and buses, everywhere. It just isn't cheap -- it would require us to spend way more per rider on transit than we are used to, which is why most places are built with public roads only -- it's the absolute cheapest TCO option in nearly every situation)
perl4ever 7y ago
I'm used to the value of the land vs. the structure being listed separately on a property tax bill. The value that is attributable to the community is the value of the land before building. Obviously that's far higher in the middle of NYC or SF or something. So I'm not sure what you are saying about low density housing. There is/was a political movement to finance everything with a tax on the unimproved value of land. The advantage is that with almost everything you can tax, you get less of it, which is usually bad, and besides leads to avoidance and lower revenue. But unimproved land cannot be "discouraged" by taxes, and owners cannot pass the taxes on - their incentive is then to not leave it vacant, which is a very good thing in a dense city.

matteuan 7y ago

What if some people prefer to live in nice "hip" cities (that for them means culturally interesting) even at the cost of living without a private garden in a detached house?

choeger 7y ago
Then these people should explain how all the Starbucks employees, the janitors, and the delivery guys that make their "culturally interesting" living possible should live and travel to work. Just because you can effort a nice 2room apartment 20min from downtown does not mean that a single mom can afford a 3 room one for herself and her two childre. Instead these people are forced to either travel ever longer with ever worse public transport or live in ever worse conditions, usually both. Gentrification is the downside of densification. And now the hip class wants to get rid of cars in their hip inner cities, because they don't need them. Again totally ignoring everyone that is both forced to live outside of the centre and work inside of it. Actually, I think the minimum wage should be coupled to the typical rent around the working place. Good luck getting your new smartphone delivered then.
- cowsandmilk 7y ago
  > Gentrification is the downside of densification. You’re smoking some strong stuff if you think densifications causes gentrification. Reality has always been gentrification leads to investment leads to densification.
  - choeger 7y ago
    Yeah right, all these "culturally interesting" places just happen to be the dense run-down areas of cities by pure chance... Gentrification starts with some Avantgarde subculture(s) rallying in parts of a city that are cheap and dense enough to find enough followers. Later, followers with many expulse the old residents and push the prices. This does never happen in some rural area.
- allendoerfer 7y ago
  > Then these people should explain how all the Starbucks employees, the janitors, and the delivery guys that make their "culturally interesting" living possible should live and travel to work. They could simply argue, that these jobs would not exist without densification. Take the other extreme: I don't think Starbucks employees would earn more if everyone would live on firms miles apart from each other. Starbucks would be gone in this scenario. Everyone would be poorer, albeit equally poorer. So I would argue, you need to invest in public transportation and housing of different price ranges, possibly even built by the city itself, so threre are less incentives to defend legislation hindering new buildings, the actual reason why those workers are getting squeezed out. If you additionally try to focus on education and upward mobility you get a fair society.

conanbatt 7y ago

I think this is a fair preference. But if the tax structure weighted properly on by land, you would most likely pay as much as rent being a homeowner. For example, in San Francisco, de city spends about 2000U$S per household. And if you adjusted that amount of the amount of space used, single family homes would end up paying 3~4k a month of taxes alone.

choeger 7y ago
> But if the tax structure weighted properly on by land, you would most likely pay as much as rent being a homeowner. Huh? So the rent covers the infrastructure cost? Last time I checked, both renters and owners pay infrastructure directly. That includes waste water, garbage disposal, and pretty much everything else. None of this scales with the space I use, at most it scales with the square root of space due to larger distances.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Renters pay twice, because they pay for the infrastructure that increases the homeowners property value. Its an uneven tax structure for a renter to pay for the bart station that increases the prop value and thus their own rent.

lazyjones 7y ago

Agreed. Why did we stop building new cities? There's plenty of space and we have all the technology to build even in inhospitable areas and make them more liveable and accessible than current crowded cities.

maxsilver 7y ago
We haven't stopped. We build new cities all the time, we just build them on the closest empty land next to a job, and named them "suburbs". We don't build new cities way far away in the middle of nowhere, because building new cities is expensive and there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > We don't build new cities way far away in the middle of nowhere, because building new cities is expensive At some point it has to be cheaper than upgrading infrastructure for ever-growing cities and implementing all kinds of harmful artificial restrictions e.g. on traffic just to support increasing population numbers in exiting metro areas. > there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere. Many factories are in the middle of nowhere and I don't see why one couldn't build and fill office space when cheap attractive housing and well-planned infrastructure is available nearby. The reason why don't do it is more likely because most western countries have become stagnant and inefficient at large projects.

hurricanetc 7y ago

Pay more in local property taxes and your local government just might build that infrastructure. Or were you wanting city dwellers to fund it for you?

thrower123 7y ago
I would like those city dwellers to fix their own problems before castigating my whole way of life. If you need more housing in the Bay area, cut your red tape and build it. We're good out here in the rest of the country; in fact, if people could tolerate wotking remotely better, there are places where four-bedroom houses are selling for $80k.
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  Castigate your way of life? Please. OP wants infrastructure. If you want infrastructure build it and pay for it yourself. Cities have their own problems but we aren’t looking for a handout from rural residents to solve those problems.
  - choeger 7y ago
    No. You just suck up every qualified work and spit out the poor souls that cannot afford your way of life anymore.
    - hurricanetc 7y ago
      And you enjoy a subsidized way of life with below value housing because the city workers fund it for you. Your cheap house is cheap because city residents subsidize it. In New York the city residents pay 45% of the taxes but receive 40% of the expenditures. How about we balance it out and let you rural residents make up the shortfall. In NY that’s about $8 billion per year. Good luck and have fun. Don’t bite the hand that feeds.
  - jebrial 7y ago
    It is also true that richer cities like NYC are paying way more in taxes and rural areas benefit from this?

CuriouslyC 7y ago

If you are a home owner paying depressed property taxes, that shortfall from what someone else potentially would have paid has to be made up somewhere, and frankly if you own a home in a major coastal California city, the people footing your bill are probably going to be less well off than you. Seems pretty scummy and greedy to me. If you think being somewhere first gives you inalienable rights, I'm sure there are some native Americans that would like to talk to you about the deed to your house.