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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

This seems tautological.

Those areas are "profitable" because they are using fewer services.

If you invest more there, they would no longer be "profitable" -- and increased investment may not increase future "profits."

I think this essay falls down in part because it's nonsensical to use these private industry terms when discussing municipal governance. I want my city to concern itself with equity and quality of life - not which citizens are most profitable.

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That's not quite true. The profitability comes from increased density. Instead of one business with a huge parking lot generating 1,000,000/year in revenue, you get three businesses with sidewalk traffic and street parking only generating 400,000/year each for a net gain of 200,000. Investing in the neighborhood - eg, with streetlights so that people will feel safe coming out after dark, thus effectively increasing the businesses hours of operation - might push up revenue for those three businesses to $600,000/year each, and the increased taxes will pay for the improvements.

However, a more usual pattern is for the three existing businesses to be torn out and replaced with a single retail space that's up to code, beautiful, clean, modern, and a financial drain on the city.

This is certainly a factor with any investment, because they may only be able to effectively utilize a certain amount of assets. With that being said, I think that it is a reasonable expectation that investing into the area would inflate the values of the property in that area, which directly translates into increased tax revenue (profit). Obviously too much too quickly and you might run into the aforementioned limit of effective asset utilization, but that isn't what the author was suggesting.

Increasing the value of land without increasing the incomes of the people who live on that land leads to displacement and gentrification.

The goal of a city shouldn't be to increase land values -- it should be to increase the affluence of residents.

I don't think that displacement alone is a reason to avoid an action necessarily. I say this because while it may not be increasing their income, even if they were displaced they would get more money for being displaced (when selling the property). I'd also argue that the status quo of letting the area languish is hardly a better alternative for your stated goal (increasing the affluence of it's residents). It seems to be a dichotomy, but I don't think it's a decision between displace everyone or do nothing and displace nobody. Given the tools that a municipality actually has to increase the affluence of it's residents, I think making their living area nicer probably has the best shot at doing so because it might attract better opportunities than might normally frequent the area.

Last thought, what do you think these municipalities should do instead of minor QoL improvements that might modestly increase average property value (as stated in the article)?

> they would get more money for being displaced (when selling the property)

and for displaced renters?

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