Hacker News Reader

That's what it sounded like to me. He said they'd take a block of 50k houses to turn into 55k houses which will pay more taxes (and since the area is poor it requires less funds to service). So it's a better investment than affluent areas from a direct profitability metric.

Of course, the bump in those home's property tax revenue wouldn't drive other revenue like investing in making a downtown more upscale would: more local homeowner values (and property tax revenue), corporate business tax revenue, sales tax and tourist revenue. He brushes off simplistic arguments but his argument is simplistic as well - and he advocates for squeezing the poor! The poor would rather have lower taxes than a bump in home value.

> We see this trend everywhere we've done a model. On a per acre basis, neighborhoods that tend to be poor also tend to pay more taxes and cost less to provide services to than their more affluent counterparts. How is this possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density..

Then he goes into how it's cheaper to service but really offers no argument about the density especially as it relates to the 2 photos he proposes as evidence (the 1.1M poor block vs the 618k affluent block - it's actually 803k on his other article). Clearly there are more structures and less parking on the poor block. The poor picture has this: "two liquor stores, a pawn shop, a barber shop, a bankruptcy attorney, a campaign headquarters, a retail establishment, a cafe and a vacant building." How can he shrug off density?

> Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.

Bold claim with no evidence. Perhaps he meant to say "poor neighborhoods are more profitable on a property tax basis than affluent neighborhoods"

For background, I read his article [1] on why density, so he argues, doesn't matter. Instead, he proposes a different metric - the ratio of private (i.e. productive, main property) investment to public (infrastructure/supporting) investment, which should be high; 20:1 or ideally much higher.

However, most arguments for dense development are EXTREMELY relevant to this ratio - the idea being that dense development is cheaper, per unit population/economic activity, to build infrastructure for. Maybe it shouldn't be viewed as an end in itself, but it is a good heuristic.

[1] http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/12/16/best-of-2015-d...

Perhaps his ratio makes sense but density is why that poor block example has a higher appraised land value than the single taco joint in the affluent area which is mostly parking.

So his argument doesn't stand up in that case. Sure the poor block has a higher assessment and more property taxes unless those businesses got tax rebates for operating there. But that's just one revenue metric for the block.

Another problem with the author's assertions is that Louisiana in general has some of the lowest property taxes in the country. To the degree that this limits municipal revenue is the degree that a city can't spend a lot on infrastructure.

Please don't take this comment as advocacy for a higher tax rate, simply recognition of the financial structure; you get what you pay for, or in the case of muni bonds what other people think future residents will pay for.

> Are they stadiums or large government facilities that aren't taxable?

Usually not. Low population density and far from city center is usually enough to make it very "red". See also, suburbs.

I wasn't able to orient the map to align with Google maps, but Lafayette does have a medium sized university and I didn't see an obvious blank place where it's facilities would be located on the article's map. Were you able to spatially correlate the large red blocks with actual suburban developments?

> "What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not."

I didn't understand the argument either. I've lived all over the country and doubt the poor neighborhoods in Chicago (where I'm from) and Detroit (where I once lived) do their respective cities much good from an investment point of view (whatever that means). Another thing to consider is that poor people use social services, and anyone who has been to Oakland will tell you a lot of those services live downtown. As a former resident of downtown Oakland, I'd say this rule wouldn't hold up there either.

Still, we should invest in poor neighborhoods because it's the right thing to do for the environment as well as the residents of said neighborhoods.

I'd argue the government should start the process by cleaning up brownfield and greyfield (obsolete shopping centers) sites and consolidated land for ease of development. The initial costs are certain to be higher but the returns are larger (in many cases).

> I've lived all over the country and doubt the poor neighborhoods in Chicago (where I'm from) and Detroit (where I once lived) do their respective cities much good from an investment point of view (whatever that means).

Well, check the data, don't just "doubt it". It means that neighborhoods on the bad side of town tend to generate enough tax revenue to pay for their road, electric, and sewer maintenance, whereas neighborhoods on the good side of town tend not to.

The town he's using as a case study is Lafayette, Louisiana. You can just pull it up on Google Maps to see what he's talking about. From what I can see, the largest building in the town is a Wal-mart.

The argument is that improving neighborhood infrastructure will tend to improve housing values; that's noncontroversial. Increased housing values implies increased property tax; that's axiomatic. Poorer neighborhoods are denser, so a single neighborhood intervention has more impact on a larger number of properties. The poorer neighborhoods tend to be cheaper to improve. And the poorer neighborhoods have more upside: it's difficult to improve the value of properties that were recently designed and built to maximize real estate value.

Ok, so you read it as "spiff up the 'poor' neighborhoods so the inhabitants will pay more property taxes" too.

I did pull it up on Google maps and visited a few random addresses on the Sherrif's property tax lookup page, etc. The orientation of the red-green graphic doesn't seem to be north-south and it isn't clear what is driving the large red areas.

It's more like, increase the value of those areas so the inhabitants will be prosperous so they can afford to pay more taxes.

Which is the pro-gentrification argument, right?

Increasing the valuation of a property doesn't magically change a resident's ability to pay taxes. Best case scenario is that the areas where low wage earners live shift around a bit. Worst case scenario is that people are pointlessly taxed out of their homes and the city gets a reputation of being unaffordable.