Why Galesburg has no money | Hacker News Reader

Why Galesburg has no money

inlandnobody.substack.com

383 pointsingve431 comments

This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much 'stuff' you're building the infrastructure for.

Initially it's not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs/maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don't...it's not pretty.

The problem boils down to this: we've vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We've paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt/gravel, but they got paved because it's a sign your neighborhood has "made it." It's a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50's, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that.

Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes?

If we hadn't allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we'd have neighborhoods with dirt/gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc.

Instead we have a country where we're slaves to cars.

Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.

The Roman roads that last a long time are outliers. Most Roman roads are long gone.

Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it dangerous? There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.

Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature.

It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot faster!

Indeed, that's the core of the argument made in this article here (from 2009) which is arguing for a return to cobbles / bricks for Georgetown: https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-...

The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones. Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.

I'm with you on the speed reduction. An urban planner friend talks about how you're best motivating a speed limit by the environment (tighter road, bends, etc) rather than a literal limit and threat of fine.

But how would cyclists fare on cobblestones, especially if you were talking about suburban streets with kids playing, bikes going around, etc?

It's not great, but if it gets cars to go slower I think it's still worth it.

Really painful and annoying to ride on with a kick scooter though.

I'm assuming you're speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn't.

I don't know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven't) and they were not affected as much by freeze/thaw cycles as North American roads are.

My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I've seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there's physically less roads.

Yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's an interesting thought exercise. For the high traffic streets where there is high speed and also lots of heavy traffic, for sure, asphalt dominates for many good reasons.

But for the problems this article discusses for smaller cities where their population has moved to suburbs and exurbs and where the commercial centers have similarly moved out of city core, perhaps the more durable approach to cobbles (or brick) might be an interesting way to address ongoing maintenance challenges. It's mostly a thought exercise, but an interesting one.

The roman roads didn't have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.

Roman roads were built with extremely robust foundations below which required very large amounts of labor to put in place.

We have excavators, bulldozers, graders, etc, we don't need to use slaves to hand-dig road foundations.

The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like condos have something of a “hasn’t made it” stigma for a lot of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of inefficient land use.

Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.

Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state.

I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only exacerbates the problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surfac...

> Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state.

Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that I did not restrict it to commuting — designing around car-only transportation means that almost every common activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people famously underestimate the amount of time they spend driving, looking for parking, etc. — usually “a 20 minute drive” means “25 minutes if you exceed the speed limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and parking right in front”. If you start measuring that, you realize how much time people spend on things like unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single purpose errands in addition to commuting.

> So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built

Definitely — and one big factor for this is that single-occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to “defeat” traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage so conditions usually only improve for a few months after opening.

Commuting to Davenport is pretty common, isn't it?

Perhaps, but stacking houses into condos in Galesburg isn't going to change that. It seems like OP is suggesting that traffic is a problem (causing 2 hours in a car) that can be remedied by building up instead of out. The point I am making is that traffic is not a problem in Galesburg.

Yeah, you aren't going to take 2 hours to get to downtown Galesburg unless you're riding a tricycle.

"Brown" people love single family detached houses with large lawns. My Bangladeshi family members who immigrated to Queens moved to Long Island as soon as they were able to afford to do so. One of the major demographic shifts in this country is upwardly mobile Black people leaving cities to move to the suburbs: https://calmatters.org/projects/california-black-population-...; https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/07/chicago-bl...

I like "walkable, high-density environments" myself, but most people who care about that are highly educated white people and white-adjacent minorities. Which is fine! Urbanism is compelling on its own merits. You don't have to "brown wash" it.

I interpreted the parent's comment as a reference to post-war deurbanization and "white flight," further fueled by openly discriminatory lending and occupation policies (redlining, etc.) at all levels of government and business.

Reurbanization by wealthy whites (and deurbanization by some minority groups) are part and parcel with the earlier trend, and don't entirely subvert it.

You’ll note that I was talking about how things are popularly portrayed, especially in the past — think about how “urban” became a popular euphemism when its literal meaning says nothing about about race. It’s not a coincidence that those images shifted notably after desegregation became the law of the land and that was enshrined as the way to know you’d made it for decades, and it’s certainly not a coincidence that almost everyone picked it up given how pervasive it was in mainstream discourse.

Once that became established, a lot of inefficiency was baked in: single-family rather than shared housing, driving yourself in a car rather than sharing a bus with strangers, not building things like sidewalks or favoring cul de sac designs to discourage non-residents traveling through a neighborhood, etc. You don’t need to know or care about the history half a century ago to think of those as the default when they’re what a lot of us were raised in and saw on TV/movies.

I still don’t understand the point of the race angle. Insofar as “urban” is undesirable because it’s a euphemism for “brown,” why would “brown” people be striving to move out of urban areas themselves? Bangladeshi immigrants don’t mind that Queens is full of other Bangladeshis. They mind that it’s crowded, you don’t have a big back yard, you have to walk everywhere, etc. The things you mention—shared housing, non-residents traveling though, aren’t things that “brown” people like any more than white people.

I think you’ve got the causality reversed. Most people, regardless of race, find suburban living more pleasant and more convenient. Urban areas tend to be more “brown” because that’s often where immigrants start out, because “brown” people tend to be younger and lower income, etc. Thus, whites are more able to attain the goal of suburban living. But it’s misleading to make it sound like the suburban preference arises out of white dislike for “brown” people, because the preference seems pretty uniform between races. (If anything, affluent people who prefer urban living are more likely to be white, judging from the demographics of gentrification.)

Urbanists have a good point that the suburban preference might be different if people in the suburbs were forced to bear the externalities of their lifestyle. But that has nothing to do with race.

The point is why there’s resistance to dense urban living. You seem intent on having a different argument entirely. It’s ok, no one’s saying people of color are supposed to inherently dislike the suburbs.

That some hipsters have found renewed value in density (mainly access to “culture”) is a separate, parallel development.

> The point is why there’s resistance to dense urban living.

Right—and OP theorized it was driven by associating “urban” living with “brown people.” My point is that this isn’t the reason, because “brown people” resist dense urban living as well and avoid it when they can afford suburban living.

(Mostly white) hipsters finding renewed value in density is fine. My objection is them working the “brown people” angle to make their cause more politically sympathetic.

To follow-up in that: as affluent urban professionals have become more progressive, “brown washing” of political issues has become a real problem. I think they realize that mostly white upper middle class professionals aren’t politically sympathetic blocs. So they project issues they disproportionately care about (urbanism, student loan debt relief, climate change) onto “brown people.”

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign did this extensively. Her voters on Super Tuesday were almost 80% white, out of an electorate (mostly southern and southwestern) that’s majority minority. But Warren tried to insert a racial angle into every issue.

Of course it’s the reason. It doesn’t matter if brown people do or don’t want to be in urban areas, the fact is they are there in greater numbers, and that keeps white folks away.

So I get it now, your angle here is the unfair presumption that POC are politically liberal. Which is fine, but the issue is tangential to the conversation about suburban density and urban renewal.

> Most people, regardless of race, find suburban living more pleasant and more convenient.

This is very easy to disprove: houses and apartments in urban areas cost more than in the suburbs.

Most people are not able to afford a large enough apartment downtown because there is not enough supply, and so they prefer to pay the same for a larger place in the suburbs, but this is not the same as preferring the suburbs.

It’s simply easier to manage problems in suburbia because smaller cities are more efficient and have lower overhead.

You can create semi private public schools through high property prices and zoning.

You can kick homeless people out.

You can mostly manage a 5-10 person police force

And really you can create zones where people are mostly like you what ever that likeness may be.

Some would say that shouldn’t be allowed but you can see the appeal.

> This is very easy to disprove: houses and apartments in urban areas cost more than in the suburbs.

No. Prices are a function of both supply and demand. Demand for housing in cities is high relative to the supply of housing in cities. That doesn’t mean that the demand for urban housing is more than the demand for suburban housing—because the supply of the latter is vastly larger.

Do you really think it’s a just a random coincidence that suburbanization dramatically accelerated after the key civil rights era cases prevented cities from segregating city services? A ton of the suburbs had racial covenants, there was explicit imagery around who your kids would be going to school with, realtors and mortgages tried hard to steer people into certain areas, police departments were famous for following black or Latino drivers around if they entered a white suburb, etc. That lasted for decades — Palm Beach police did ID checks on black motorists to learn which resident hired them into the 1980s! — and one of the big things keeping it alive was this constant narrative that there were lawless hordes ready to leave the inner city and rampage through your neighborhood.

I don’t think it’s the only factor but I find it very hard to believe that decades of that imagery, often openly embraced by the political candidates those neighborhoods voted for, was coming from nowhere. Absent that, I think there would have been a very different arc for American cities between WWII and the turn of the century.

Suburbanization happened all over the world around that time. E.g. Amsterdam: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic.... It happened more in the US than Europe because we had big swaths of empty land while Europe was much more developed already. And it happened as well in American cities that had no segregation to begin with, or non-whites to flee from.

“White flight” happened, but I think urbanists misunderstand the causality. The 1960s economic and technological revolution allowed people to enjoy comfortable suburban lives. Black people were prevented from doing so by economic circumstances and discrimination. But the impulse to leave to city wasn’t caused by that.

Over here in Sweden there was a massive investment in public transport and I think it's called transportation driviven development. So we did not get the same amount of dettached housing. The view of suburbs as comfortable has always been away to exploit the commons of cities like Galesburg. It's not only Galesburg that pays for this, it's the surrounding towns. People live in the suburbs of Galesburg travel to another town making it impossible to use public transport unless everyone works in a star network topology.

We are seeing that develooment in Stockholm now work is much more organic so and the rays of the star are over burdened by suburb transportation (public true, but mostly private).

Black folks, too, as you can see from the phenomenon of the South Side of Chicago hemorrhaging residents to south suburbs like Olympia Fields. It's also, as I understand it, the story of the ringed suburbs of St. Louis.

The highest rates of population decline in the City of St. Louis are indeed on the mostly-black Northside, as those residents move to the North St. Louis County suburbs. See here:

https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/planning/r...

It's been like this for almost two decades now (north is to the right on this map):

https://nextcity.org/images/made/5529440117_600_350_80.jpeg

Do you mean there is some conspiracy that made people believe that not sharing walls and ceilings with others is somehow better than being always up to date on your neighbors business including their music preferences and substances they like to consume?

I find this very implausible. I grew up in Soviet block and all my friends and relatives grew in very dense small apartments yet all of them who could afford moved to houses as soon as they could.

Millions of people make that work and there are many advantages: it’s cheaper, more energy efficient, and if you drive less it’s healthier and safer for you and your neighbors. If you want to be social, like music, want a variety of healthy local businesses, etc. having considerably more people makes that work better.

My point was that when one style of living was picked as the goal and heavily promoted by policy it locked in a lot of negative outcomes like traffic jams and challenging local government finances.

This style existed since antiquity. Even Roman patricians lived in villas, which were standalone houses.

I’m aware. Note how I specifically highlighted the imbalance caused by pretending it was the best option which most of the country was told to aspire to.

So who told Roman nobility to pretend they liked to live in their own houses and forced them out of lovely insulae with all the people living nearby and music and social life? I am guessing the "corporate media" is telling this to the people now, but who had been doing this all through the history before the printing press had been invented?

Sure, lots of people want to live like nobility but that doesn’t make it practical. Consider that when I wrote “the ideal” I was referring to the practicality of having a single style pushed as the goal for everyone. I don’t think suburbs should be banned but I do think they should be sustainably self-funding and that cities should reverse course and favor their own residents over car commuters.

I am not arguing practicality, I was just curious about the whole idea that people don't actually like to live separately and had been tricked into liking that by some unnamed forces. Obviously many people cannot afford the lifestyle they desire, I dare say nobody can. Even Elon Musk probably wants to live in a flying castle on Mars yet he has to make do with various mansions on Earth, such is life.

Yes, patricians. That's a hint this kind of thing isn't sustainable when everyone is doing it.

This is also a hint that people were not told to pretend they like it, is not it? Rich and powerful all through the history do not shun low density living and personal transport yet the message that I've replied to asserts that people only want these things because they are told to pretend they are desirable but without external influence people would rather live in apartments and have no personal transport.

At this point even out "patricians" shouldn't really be living in low density housing either.

So you are not even arguing practicality, it's just straight up class conflict for you? Color me unsurprised.

WTF are you even talking about?

You were contrasting a world that had about 150,000,000 people living it with today where we have about 7,800,000,000.

It's nothing to do with "class conflict", and all to do with load bearing. As things stand, we only just have the resources to support a fraction of those at Western living standards, and we damned well can't support the billions who haven't achieved them yet as things stand.

So yes, it's all about practicality.

And you and I are amongst the "patricians" already.

Also, don't pretend you know me at all.

If it had nothing to do with the class conflict then you would not care how rich people live because rich accommodations do not create any noticeable load. And as for practicality - somebody living in a big house would not make your apartment any less practical yet you think everybody has to live like you.

I don't know if you are fooling yourself into thinking you are being rational and caring for environment and practicality but you are not fooling me.

It sure seems like you're trying to force a perspective without taking some fundamental human nature factors into account. Or deliberately ignoring them. But I'll go with just not realizing one thing... there's a lot of things about close quarters residency that a great many people ACTIVELY F'ING DESPISE. Noise, smells, and just... well, meet enough people and you may develop slightly less positive opinions of them as a whole and choose to live with some degree of space/separation that's not "ideal" from an efficiency standpoint.

Sure, the numbers say living like a meat popsicle is absolutely more 'cost effective' but that's a hard-pass from me.

Great - if you read my comment more carefully, note that I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to live in suburb, but that that lifestyle choice should not be subsidized by everyone else.

To be fair, the "SUVs" that are being sold are effectively the same as station wagons of the past (but smaller and with better gas mileage).

Hopefully self-driving cars will get us out of this pit of car-centric infrastructure, but that's a solution that's been a few years out for the past decade.

Can you outline how this is supposed to free us from car-centric infrastructure? Unless it's coupled with style kind of Uber-subscription dystopia we would still need room to park all of these vehicles. While downtown parking can be a problem, garages aren't, and neither of these problems is on there scale of the larger infrastructure problems.

The biggest problems with car-centric infrastructure are that they require a huge amount of ever-larger roads to funnel people (in cars) often tens of miles to do anything. Even in the rent-a-taxi scenario you would still need these roads, which would probably need more maintenance, not less. And all of that sprawl has knock-on effects as roads create divisions in communities, and low-density housing, enabled by car infrastructure, means you have and know fewer neighbors.

At least the Uber-style infrastructure doesn't require oversizing everything. Even if my car is used 90% of the time for commuting by myself, it has to be big enough for the other 10% of the time when I'm taking the family and our luggage.

This might be ideal for side roads leading to a few houses but if it's major parts of a town aren't you just move the cost of roads somewhere else?

i.e. "I hope you can afford a truck, SUV, or constant repairs to your suspensions/tires"

I'm pretty sure that if a bridge collapses underneath you, you're just as likely to die in a SUV as in a sedan.

For anyone who thinks I might be being facetious, I live in Minneapolis where there was an actual bridge collapse that killed people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...

I think it's fine roads are paved. It's just that said roads are wider and effectively longer to service the same number of people, and this is due to zoning and the way property tax is handled.

Strongtowns is an internet phenomenon (ask a normal person if they’ve heard of Strongtowns).

Small towns are shrinking (and large ones, see Detroit). No surprise here.

It’s a trend that started 20 years ago and seems to be reversing due to housing prices and WFH. Strongtowns is a day late and a dollar short.

Downstate Illinois has been in decline for fifty years. The climate is harsh, agriculture requires far fewer workers, light industry departed, and like upstate New York the region is given short shrift by a metro-dominated state government.

Urban planning may be a factor but smart planning could not have overcome the headwinds.

> The climate is harsh

Doesn't this seem like a fatal issue right there? Given that Americans are free to move anywhere in the US, I would expect a general trend towards places that are more comfortable to live. Population growth can cover up a lot emigration, but the era of large families is over. Cities can still draw people with cultural significance, but what is the draw of Galesburg IL? Even for people that like small towns, there are plenty of small towns farther south with better weather.

And farther north. Greetings from wisconsin.

> what is the draw of Galesburg IL?

There are two liberal arts colleges in the Galesburg “metro” area that draw both students and faculty from elsewhere (ps - the big one has a special 5-year 2-campus 2-diploma engineering program gives you a BA from them as well as, for example, a CS degree from UIUC [1]). The student population and their locations support a “downtown” that no city of that size and location would otherwise be able to support and therefore likely draws a lot of the rural population for entertainment.

We pass through there a few times a year on the way to our favorite camping spot. I’d say their biggest problem and much of the cause of the sprawl-style development is that there is a bypass road on the north side of the city built nearly to interstate standards, complete with on-ramps and off-ramps. But it is flagged as both a US highway and a state highway so the chance that Galesburg has any control over it at all is pretty close to 0.

[1] https://www.knox.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/engineering

> like upstate New York the region is given short shrift by a metro-dominated state government.

My reading has usually indicated that if anything the more rural counties get more from the state government than they pay in. It's usually the major metros subsidizing the others.

Then when you look at how the feds treat highway spending, things become even more lopsided in favor of rural counties. There's just an inherent disadvantage against specialization in small metros by virtue of a smaller population, and the way they're laid out in the states makes this difference even larger (young educated professionals don't want to live in a super low density suburban environment that demands they drive everywhere).

> Urban planning may be a factor but smart planning could not have overcome the headwinds.

The German engineering firm that Tesla bought is in a town of just a few thousand (or it was just a few thousand at the time anyway). A cutting edge engineering firm being in such a small town is basically unthinkable to me in the states. Clearly there's some difference, and I do think better urban design plays some part, though yeah it's not the only factor.

> Initially it’s not so bad

This assumes it’s significantly cheaper to build new roads than to rebuild them which seems false on the surface. It could be that replacing more roads at the same time would drive down costs. If replacing ~600’ of roads is 600$/foot how about replacing 10 miles of roads?

Most of the time the roads are built with grants from the state or federal government.

Or by developers

This is also a problem if they don’t have good oversight: the developers often cut corners or build something which will look good when they’re selling units but costs more to maintain.

The issue isn’t that the developers cut corners though. The best designed roads just aren’t going to last long enough to change the math.

It’s also not the developers job to consider the long term maintenance and tax implications of these developments. That’s the responsibility of the city itself through plan approval and zoning.

I was assuming based on the age of the town they where continuously paying for roads, grants make this much easier.

If they didn’t have to pay for the roads to begin with they have 30 years to set aside money for the replacement. Even minimal interest would drastically reduce their out of pocket costs. Grants turn this into a question of bad fiscal management, which is definitely an issue but says little about how much infrastructure they have.

Maybe it is caused by rising standards and rising human labor costs?

There are many stories where rebuilding or just renovation of a bridge was vastly more expensive than constructing it 50 or 100 years ago (yes, obviously after adjusting for inflation).

No, that is only true when focusing on large infrastructure items like bridges and the really scary numbers only show up when bizarre outliers like the NYC Second Avenue subway are included.

Also include the "management/administrative tax" - these days mid-management is much thicker and consumes and wastes tremendously more resources.

Not just “mid-management” but subcontracting. This is especially bad in government projects because you have challenges around selecting bidders fairly and if you don’t have enough civil servants doing the same jobs at similar pay it can be hard to have people on the government side who are capable of adequately overseeing a project of that scale. If you end up hiring multiple contractors, you’re guaranteeing a lot of overhead even if it goes well and plenty of chances for a 3+ way blame-shifting exercise if it doesn’t.

Construction is the only sector where real productivity decreased.

https://www.curt.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Productivity...

Roads are initially built with the promise of future returns in mind. These estimates of future returns tend to be affected by developers, who are acting to encourage the approval of development projects.

Rebuilding projects are contemplated in the shadow of actual returns, which are harder to lie about.

> Roads are initially built with the promise of future returns in mind.

Roads are like startups! We should get VCs in on the action.

If a road could get a cut of all attached business's revenue, and revenues shifted back towards small businesses (i.e. away from mega corps), I could see private roads being a boon and lawsuits forcing regular, quality maintenance. In practice, though, I'm sure it would get muddy quick.

> I'm sure it would get muddy quick.

I see what you did there...

You get money from the initial sale of the lot. This convers the cost of initial construction.

After the sale, the town only gets tax revenue which is a lot less.

Why not do a traffic study and determine what percentage of the traffic on a road is using the road to get to adjacent properties, and what percentage is transiting through the area. Tax those adjacent properties that percentage of maintenance costs of the road. So a large mall presumably would be taxed for a fairly large share of the costs of maintaing roads that feed customers into the mall. In cases where there are roads that don't really go anywhere else, they would pay 100% of the costs of maintaining those roads. If 50% of the traffic enters the mall, they pay 50% of the costs of those roads and the city is responsible for the other 50%.

It’s a good idea but tricky to do at scale: the catchment area of a mall is measured in miles, some people would scream about big brother, and places like the mall would argue that their jobs and tax revenue mean they shouldn’t get taxed at the same rate.

If I had to do this, I’d try to figure out a privacy-preserving way to record Bluetooth IDs since most cars have Bluetooth beacons those now and try to do it regionally so you could address questions of fairness (e.g. I go to 4 places doing errands. How much does each one get assessed?). You’d also need to do this regularly to avoid sampling skew (how much does peak holiday demand at the mall count for?) and that really means you’d need to have a robust privacy policy with teeth.

Actually the cost of initial construction and future reconstruction is about the same. The problem is the initial construction is heavily subsidized either by State or Federal "growth" grants, or by developers who financialize the whole thing through the sale of federally subsidized development loans.

In theory what should happen is the resulting development pays enough taxes to pay for all the infrastructure it depends on to be rebuilt as needed (typically every 15-30 years depending on which kind of infra we're talking about). But in practice the taxes are not actually linked to the cost of infrastructure (they are much too low) and not enough funds are collected to maintain the infra.

This is managed by a shell game where fees from new developments (who just financialized their new infra) are used to pay the maintenance on old projects that are losing money, and where federal subsidies for growth and expansion are contorted to uses like widening a scarcely used road that is falling part (bc. the feds will pay to expand but not to maintain) - which solves the problem for now by making it even worse for the next generation.

> The problem is the initial construction is heavily subsidized either by State or Federal "growth" grants, or by developers who financialize the whole thing through the sale of federally subsidized development loans.

Cities also "financialize" the whole thing by selling bonds. The real difference is that when the developers originally build roads at their own expense (recouping it by the sale of the properties they developed), they pay much less than what the city then pays later to repave them. If you frame the question instead "why does the government pay so much more than private companies for the same products and services", it pretty much answers itself.

this also exposes the fantasy of the private sector doing all the work at a lesser rate, versus having many infrastructure things like this done at a governmental level.

Roads aren't just roads. They are sewer pipes, water pipes, gas pipes, telecommunication lines, and power lines. These items age and also need replaced. Not sure how much remodeling you've ever done, but refits are more expensive than having something built in a new structure. It gets even more expensive when this infrastructure is in use while you're upgrading it.

What Strong Towns hasn't figured out, but which is obvious to everyone else, is that cities have really bad failure modes. Unfixable failure modes.

The people running the cities run them into the ground by applying more and more gold plating to the services they provide, making sure to lard the contracts for their friends who keep them elected, and pursuing their luxury beliefs through unworkable policies. Eventually it all collapses and is irretrievable. Then they whine about being underfunded. If only they had more money, they could make their luxury beliefs work.

People move out of cities because they do not feel safe, and the services suck.

It's really the only option they have, since the people running the cities are completely unaccountable.

I think this is an insightful comment and I'm sorry to see it get downvoted.

I live in a large condo building. It has its pros and cons. It's great, in theory--750-1000 people pooling their expertise and funds to tackle infrastructure issues. Great recent example: we fixed a sewer lateral (the pipe that connects to the sewer under the building). Three of them, total cost 200k. Sounds a lot until you realize we spread it across ~350 units (600/unit), which is roughly 1/10th what a typical suburban homeowner would pay for the same thing.

The other side of the coin is that, in larger political structures, governance REALLY matters. You can end up with a relatively well-run condo like mine, or a large, wasteful organization that squanders obscene sums on pet projects and outright corruption.

Many people don't even know this, but SF has been under federal investigation for high-level corruption in the public works department for over a year [1]. The thrust of your comment is correct. Large cities attract large amounts of money, much of which gets wasted, or ends up lining pockets in hard, or even "soft" corruption, with jobs and contracts steered to friends (qualified or not) via patronage networks.

What I think you miss though, is that there's a middle ground. You don't have to be either extreme drive-everywhere suburbia, or a giant mega-city like Beijing or New York. My home town, Homewood, IL, is a nice, walkable city of about 20,000, with a nice downtown, plenty to do, and relatively honest (if not always saintly) government.

The mid-size towns and suburbs can do a lot more to encourage the kind of urbanism the author calls for. Getting explicit about cultivating nice, walkable downtowns is a start. Many, including Homewood, don't, because "development" and "jobs" are seen as unqualified goods, without thinking about the cost side of the equation (roads, plumbing, etc required to service this stuff).

I've written for Strong Towns. What they get most right is that (1) LAND is the scare resource in a town, and (2) cities should explicitly encourage uses that lead to the highest taxable value of that land. Big box retail isn't this. Denser housing and retail districts (I own one of these buildings), is. The numbers on this are simple and don't lie.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Mohammed-Nuru-to-sett...

I agree that it would be great if we could get to that, but I've lived near cities that are in aggressive decline for more than 30 years as an adult. Prior to that, they were in decline for 20 or more years. One nearby city lost an average of 20k people a year for decades.

I once talked to a guy who had been a 3 star general in the army. He was a logistics guy. He had gone to a school in that city that had been prestigious back when he was a kid. He wanted to give back and maybe bring back what had been there, so went through Gate's program, and became the superintendant of schools there. He left after a year. Said it was the hardest job he ever did, and didn't think he made one bit of difference.

He wasn't hopeful that anything would make any difference. Money was not the problem. Per pupil spending was high. Assistance from the state was high. The elites in control of the politics were the problem. Probably too much money was the problem.

If you don't have the ability to make your schools perform basic functions and keep kids safe while they're doing it, then who will live there?

I'm guessing governance is an issue at almost any scale. You hear of painful HOAs, of strata corporations (our equivalent), councils/towns, cities, etc. Where I live (in Australia) there are constant issues with council staff running up legal bills (at taxpayer expense) over petty personality squabbles (e.g., someone said something abuse at a meeting and started a multi-year drama). It's idiotic, and seems to happen in more councils than not.

My argument against the GP comment would be that regional areas would surely have the same problems of maintenance, just without the efficiencies of density. Maintaining longer roads, pipes and cables, still dealing with bridges, etc.

Surely part of the solution is working out what level of 'polish' you want in your area (paved road vs gravel, as one example) and deciding honestly what scale of funding will pay for it now and in the future?

The quality of roads, footpaths and services in my suburb are generally very good. My council rates (AU$2900/yr) scale with the valuation of my property. Concessions for pensioners, but no rate pausing or whatever some parts of the US have.

Separately, we have a fuel excise (40-50c per litre of fuel) which is used to fund federal road projects. Obviously that has a limited shelf life with a shift to EVs and has already been in decline through the fuel efficiency of modern cars.

> I think this is an insightful comment and I'm sorry to see it get downvoted.

The comment was written with clearly flamebait-level phrasing: "lard", "gold plating", "luxury beliefs", "whine about being underfunded", etc. so it's actually good if it got downvoted.

Additionally, it's flatly wrong about the facts: people have been moving into cities, out of rural areas, for decades now. There's little to recommend in a comment that's grossly incorrect and also written in a way seemingly intended to rile people up.

What even are you talking about? The trend for the past several decades is people moving out of rural areas, into urban ones.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this. It's enough to respectfully provide correct information.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"What even are you talking about?" is too aggro? Okay. I guess I responded that way because of the clearly flamebait/trolling phrasing in the comment I responded to, but I'll try to do better.

Can you name one city that did not escape it, and was drowned in infrastructure costs? Galesburg is certainly not one of them, given how roads constitute a small fraction of its spending.

That's not really how this works. If you don't have enough money to adequately maintain your infrastructure, you'll just inadequately maintain it instead. You won't plow ahead and spend the ideal amount of money anyway, you just let things kind of go to crap.

So the failure state to look for isn't a city going into massive debt as it drastically outspends its revenues year after year, it's a city with infrastructure that's decaying and falling apart because they don't have enough money to take care of it. Then that's the thing that can have ripple effects on the local economy and population.

Many suburban cities in Canada like Mississauga are also experiencing this. They've finally ran out of land to sell so they started raising property taxes and instituted levies

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mississauga-a...

Mississauga has a density of 2467 people per square kilometer. Mississauga neighbourhoods look like this-

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5675623,-79.740886,916m/data=...

That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get.

Mississauga had to raise property taxes somewhat -- still extremely competitive -- as a revenue source dried up. But those new neighbourhoods all easily pay for themselves in property taxes. Nonetheless, loads of really silly narrative comes out of Toronto writers, still foreboding this dire scenario that they've been pitching for well over a decade. It's a bit farcical at this point.

> That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get.

You can get a little bit denser by going full street grid--Chicago's single family home districts look to mostly be rocking ~6-9k people/km².

I might be the only one but I strongly prefer grid-layout cities to these winding suburb road layouts anyhow. When your city is a grid you can make street names mean something and a person can navigate from place to place easily and have an intuitive idea of how far away something is, both without a cellphone.

you’re definitely not the only one. grids make much more sense. and not only for ease of navigation.

I think you are the only one.

I grew up in Chicago on a perfect grid. Now I live on a street that I picked precisely because you only drive down it if you live there. I don't like the sound of cars driving past. That's a personal preference that seems pretty generalized, even among people without kids.

And on a street like that, you don't need speed bumps, because people aren't speeding down the street.

He's definitely not the only person who prefers cities to suburbs. What?

Now, I think almost everyone would prefer if their one street were not integrated into the grid. That would be the ideal. You live in a grid, but with none of the downsides. But failing that, many people opt to live in denser areas rather than the burbs, even if the cost is that folks sometimes drive down their street who are going someplace else..

But that’s the thing. The street’s utility is exclusively to the houses that are on it. Those houses are very unlikely to be paying enough property tax to cover its existence. This luxury of yours is paid for by other people’s productive activity in the future. Great deal for you! But we the (net) taxpayers ought to think about how many more of these sweetheart deals we offer to cul de sac homeowners in the future, before we bankrupt ourselves.

I’m not a libertarian, I think it’s fine for government to tap rich people to provide nice things for everyone, but this particular nice thing (way more roadway than you pay for) has a pretty bad cost:benefit, and its beneficiaries are not exactly the neediest or most deserving of aid.

or if not 'tap the rich', better structure the payouts so there isn't such an imbalance. wage stagnation is a BIG problem.

I find it hard to believe that building a road is so expensive. Some random website I found claims the cost of a two-lane undivided road costs $3 million per mile in an urban setting. Looking at the satellite imagery of Mississauga linked elsewhere, the frontage of each house is around 50 ft. So there are about 211 houses per mile. That comes out to $14,000 per house to build the road. The approximate lifespan of an asphalt road is 18 years, leading to a per year cost of ~800 dollars. Of course, this doesn't include maintenance of the road (fixing pot holes, plowing, etc.), but $800 per year seems like a pretty manageable sum of money.

In Galesburg (the town in the article), it wasn’t a manageable amount. That town has extremely low property values compared to any towns I’m familiar with, though. The author’s single-family home is worth about $60k. The median home in Mississauga is $900k (CAD), so I assume they can afford to maintain their roads.

We’re talking about pretty different things, though. Suburbs of ultra high-cost-of-living cities have their taxes buoyed up their proximity to the big economic engines, while small towns like Galesburg have to figure out how to be self-sufficient without that constant influx of wealth.

But would more density really solve the problem? An inability to produce $800 per household will make anything hard.

The property tax bill in TFA is $1700, but roads are only one of the things property taxes buy.

I was thinking this as well. I wonder how much this is just a consequence of per capita city productivity being so many times greater than small towns.

More density means more people per road and less road in general. Done right, and households are not the only entities paying into the coffers

The median home price in Galesburg is $90k.

Makes sense for a declining city in far-out rural Illinois.

It’s an interesting question to me what these towns will do going forward. If participation in the global economy is required to maintain a first-world standard of living, what will these towns produce that the rest of the world wants?

Some will farm or extract natural resources, but these operations require fewer people than they used to, so fewer towns. Some will be holiday destinations for city-dwellers. But we will probably sustain far fewer of these towns than we have historically.

What do towns full of software developers produce? There are developers that like living out in the country.

> What do towns full of software developers produce?

Software? Sure there are software developers living out in small towns, but obviously not many in this town.

I think having some residential that's offset is fine, the problem is that almost inevitably these places are designed to be impermeable to walk/bike traffic as well, and with the long distances required to go anywhere, you do have to drive everywhere.

A positive counter-example would be Houten. Winding street layout that's not good for through traffic, but very nice for walking and especially biking: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.033207,5.1474598,3a,75y,4.09...

A big problem is this sort of design makes it hard to walk between places. All travel involves going to the main road, going some distance down that and then following a new branch. Queue route map that requires 10 minute drive to get to the "next block".

Not too bad in you car but it means that you can't walk or bike anywhere unless they have put in paths between blocks. Means that if a 15-year-old kids wants an ice-cream their parent has to drive them to the corner store.

You can have both, if you have a grid of main through-roads for transporting people around and then inside each "square" of the grid you have a continued fractal of sub-grids which aren't for through-traffic (slower speed limits, narrower streets, traffic calming measures, difference in material to make clear the difference from through-roads and local streets etc.). People traveling past won't use the inner streets because they aren't efficient for that, but people living in the neighbourhood will use the inner streets.

In Berkeley, CA they purposefully break up the grid for cars. So a street will be passable to pedestrians and bikes but blocked by bollards for cars. This gives the cul-de-sac effect without causing terrible walkability. Of course, traditional winding suburbs can accomplish something similar by adding pedestrian walkways through cul-de-sacs.

There's a good video explaining how urban and suburban residents alike want less traffic in their neighborhoods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E

Are American cardboard walls and windows actually that bad that you can hear cars through them?

Cars? Probably not. Loud trucks/motorcycles? Absolutely.

As someone who lives in a recently built American house in a dense urban area: yes, definitely. It’s quiet enough that I can tune them out, mostly.

Most of Chicago has adapted against that problem: streets are now artificially cul-de-sac'd to cap them near arteries, so neighborhoods have explicitly designed traffic flows. It works reasonably well (I'm in Oak Park, not Chicago, but same deal). Obviously, you'd get less traffic in Glenview or whatever.

> I grew up in Chicago on a perfect grid. Now I live on a street that I picked precisely because you only drive down it if you live there. I don't like the sound of cars driving past. That's a personal preference that seems pretty generalized, even among people without kids.

Well, you could still get this, more or less, with a grid, like Barcelona's superblocks.

Yeah - Phoenix has a basically 1 mile grid, with lil side streets in-between the major intersections.

I hate it, because if you miss a turn, you basically have to go another full mile to hit another 'cross street'.

> about as dense as single family homes can get

These traditional north american houses are still not very space efficient at all (large unused garden + lawn + double parking spot + garage).

“Suburban” neighborhoods in Europe easily have double or triple the density of this. I also see zero townhouses or anything with 2+ floors in that area.

> I also see zero townhouses or anything with 2+ floors in that area.

Maybe you meant 2+ units? 'Cause almost all of them have 2+ floors, and many will have livable basements as well.

>>(large unused garden + lawn + double parking spot + garage)

I don't know about you, but I actively use and enjoy every one of those things.

Perhaps you enjoy apartment living and consider anything not active indoors a waste.

If so, good for you, I wouldn't want to impose a garden or a parking spot on you. By the same token, calling these out as if they could possibly not be useful, simply because you do not think them useful, is at best, a fallacy.

You can enjoy active outdoors without wasting space on concrete car desert. It's called "parks".

Lawns and gardens are not concrete (at least not mine). Also,kind of hard to grow your lunch greens in a public park. Not much solitude there either. Nothing says that you need to even need to have concrete/asphalt driveways & parking; gravel drives can be quite nice.

It's been well documented that the large set back front yards and loads of anti-pedestrian designed neighborhoods and towns have largely been the cause for issues relating to poor public transportation, heat island effects, and less affordable housing.

You can have nice gardens, double parking spots & a garage without the same designed towns and neighborhoods. Most often is done by limiting street parking, narrower streets, and using the rear-entrance drives and lots as done in many cities.

Those designs also enable more pedestrian friendliness vs. the suburban sprawl that is effectively carpeting the U.S. and Canada since the 40's.

>>heat island effects are not caused by yards and vegetation, but by expanses of dark asphalt and dark roofs. More vegetation vs roads/lots, and roof area is the cure, not the cause.

>>Most often is done by limiting street parking, narrower streets, and using the rear-entrance drives and lots as done in many cities.

YES, limiting on-street parking is huge.

If there are trees on both sides of a residential street it will not be a heat island even with on-street parking. But it seems to me many Americans don’t like trees and prefer open spaces (which inevitably work as heat islands).

I didn’t say they are useless or not enjoyable (except for front lawns which are, in fact, useless). And no I don’t live in an apartment, or would like to, though some people do.

It’s just not really necessary for every single house to have these amenities. You can have parks, public parking, and a decent sized backyard in a townhouse / attached buildings. The space gained can then be used to sustain actual life in the neighborhood such as stores, restaurants, schools, libraries and small businesses. Once you have this, you don’t need two cars, or to drive everywhere, you don’t need a large private garden to enjoy the outdoors.

Of course I’d love to live in a huge house surrounded by green. But it’s not a sustainable model for urban development.

> I don't know about you, but I actively use and enjoy every one of those things.

That's fine, as long as you pay the costs associated with those things. However, in most cities suburbs are revenue negative, and subsidized by the dense downtown areas (that don't have these).

> I wouldn't want to impose a garden or a parking spot on you.

The entire problem is that this is exactly what is done though. Zoning forces a very specific type of housing in most of the city (single family house with large lot size, garage, driveway and backyard), even for those who would be okay with or prefer something else.

>>Zoning forces a very specific type of housing in most of the city (single family house with large lot size, garage, driveway and backyard), even for those who would be okay with or prefer something else.

Are you conflating city and suburbs here? While this is obviously dependent on each city/town which has their own zoning rules, most of the locales with which I'm familiar have quite the dense-pack throughout the city, and the suburbs are out in separate towns.

>>However, in most cities suburbs are revenue negative. Again, if the suburbs are separate towns, I don't see how this affects the city budget. If the suburbs are within the city and on the same budget, I'd look at the balance of costs and revenue, and if a particular zoning district is substantially more costly, i.e., being subsidized, then it seems a rate adjustment for that zoning type would be in order...

As it is, for where I live, the town is essentially all rural/residential, with 2-acre minimums (some exceptions), 35mi from the major city, and I can say that yes, we REALLY do pay for those associated things - one of the highest tax rates in the state, and increased ~50% since moving in 15 years ago. Yes, we occasionally grumble, but I am much more happy to pay for the zoning rules that maintain an healthy ecosystem where I can see over a dozen types of birds out the window at breakfast and many other healthy populations, than I'd be even slightly interested to see densepack developments reducing my rates (I can find densepack & lower rates elsewhere, and if I wanted it, I'd have gone there)

> If so, good for you, I wouldn't want to impose a garden or a parking spot on you. By the same token, calling these out as if they could possibly not be useful, simply because you do not think them useful, is at best, a fallacy.

This is grossly out of touch with how most of these features end up existing. Most of the time, there's a minimum setback for the front yard, minimum parking, etc. specified by local zoning ordinances.

This isn't bottom-up market-driven demand, it's top-down requirements specified by the local government for that area. So they are, in fact, imposed on whoever wants to live there.

>>This is grossly out of touch with how most of these features end up existing ... this isn't bottom-up market-driven demand, it's top-down requirements specified by the local government for that area.

Wrong. Of course it is always implemented by a local govt, but it is very much a result of demand.

I very well understand how such regs end up existing, and changing. It is very much related to demand. People are generally against zoning until they realize what it is like to live without zoning, and then it is DEMANDED by the people, and of course implemented by the govt. I've lived in a locale where zoning was first brought in, then developers managed to build a coalition against it and it was abolished, then people realized that that was shi*y, and now it is zoned again.

I've also seen and helped organize opposition to new development that would trash both neighborhoods and wetlands and endangered species habitat - when 100 neighbors come out to oppose the proposed variance, that is not some govt imposing it, it is the residents supporting their own zoning.

It may be different in larger cities with heavier corporate development influence, but I doubt it, since e.g., I'm sure there are plenty of developers who'd love to develop in San Francisco, but all I hear about is NIMBY opposition to changing neighborhood zoning holding it back. Guess what? That's not some top-down govt, it's locals supporting their own zoning.

What is out of touch is your comment inaccurately characterizing it as some faceless govt imposition.

> That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get.

Roughly the equivalent of pointing to IBM as the most high paying and prestigious tech companies can get.

It would be trivial to increase the density there by reducing setback requirements, narrowing the roads, removing minimum parking requirements.

Critically the initial cost is born by developers and higher levels of government, either out of profits or general tax receipts. It’s when the maintenance comes due that the problems start, as the local municipalities have less ability to levy the taxes needed to maintain this infrastructure. This is particularly rough because money is extremely moveable at the local level as people move to nearby towns for lower taxes, and big box stores pit municipalities against each other for tax breaks.

It seems like the root problem is that the way property taxes are assessed doesn’t actually line up with how much demand a given development puts on the city for services/infrastructure. Property taxes are based on, “how much would someone else pay for this”, which isn’t the relevant metric from the city’s perspective, it should be, “approximately how expensive is this property to service year by year, including eventual replacement of infrastructure?”

If you did it that way, low density developments would pay their true costs, and would become more expensive to the ‘end user’ and thus less popular. And if they didn’t, well, they're paying their true costs anyway, so problem solved.

Partially, but only partially if you take this sentence literally:

"our town is essentially a corporation where the citizens are the investors and stakeholders.. We are a real estate development company that also provides services... with holdings totaling $1.29 billion,"

Apple is essentially the stakeholder in the Apple ecosystem. Some decisions are made as you suggest. Apple price phones and laptops such that costs are covered and profits are made.

Some decisions are "strategic." There's no direct revenue from their photo app, but a photo app helps sell phones and (more importantly) if Apple doesn't provide one then FB or Google will. A lot of Apple's decisions are like this.

Some, currently very important decisions are all about leveraging power to extract revenue. Apple charge Google $15bn to be safari's default search option. They apply similar logic to all activity on iphones. As in-app purchases emerge, subscriptions, digital goods, physical goods or any other category emerges... Apple study that market and determine how much they can charge. It has nothing to do with how much these cost apple to support.

IDK if this applies to Galesburg, but I think most towns/governments/municipalities have the power to generate a lot more revenue than they do... certainly during a building boom. What Apple would be doing in this position is (a) determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue. I'm not saying they should do this, but the point of difference is worth noting.

Maybe banning the import of anything from the outside and charging a 30% sales tax is the answer?

Possibly, depending on what the question is.

My point wasn't that an analogy to commercial businesses should be made, but that since an analogy is being made...

Please, this idea that business is universally better at producing value than any other form of social organization has to die.

I'm pro business. I founded my first money-making venture when I was 4 years old (selling "art" to strangers on the street-- the business was quickly closed by the regulators-- Mom).

But business is best when the value created by an investment can be (mostly) captured by a single entity, and also generally when the ROI is short term.

Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education? Because, unless every single student goes to work for the company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you cannot align the interests of the business with providing quality education.

NOTING that the diffuse value created by government is often many orders of magnitude greater than the value which can be captured by a single organization.

Another example: value of the internet vs value of Google. Google is an insanely valuable organization, but a) it wouldn't exist without the internet, and b) the other FANGS also derive their value from the internet. So clearly the internet's value is many times greater than that of any internet-based company.

> Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education? Because, unless every single student goes to work for the company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you cannot align the interests of the business with providing quality education.

The charter school industry is the textbook example of this: what usually happens is that some school will have a good couple of years, and we’ll get some Slate piece about how they’ve discovered the secret of cost-effective education. Unfortunately, over time regression to the mean usually sets in and results start to look statistically similar to public school students of similar socioeconomic status while the few which maintain a performance edge inevitably turn out to have found a way to cherry-pick higher SES students and exclude the most expensive students because that’s what they’re incentivized to do.

I think they often skip the first step of even bothering to outperform after correcting for socioeconomic differences. If you can cherry-pick students, education can be both more effective and cheaper for those whom you decide to serve.

Often, yes, but sometimes it does happen because they got the most enthusiastic staff (not yet worn down) and attracted the most prepared poor kids with the most motivated parents (the ones who’ll take a chance on a new school pledging higher academic standards).

The one I really wish the United States was better at accounting for is assistance for students with special needs. That hammers public school budgets and also means that those kids are discouraged from trying a new school because that’ll reset their support plan even if the new school offers services.

It's very simple, just attach the money to the child and then let the parents determine what school they go to.

That helps a lot but there are some challenges: e.g. you have therapists at a big school with lots of students and they’re all reasonably fully booked but a small charter needs 15% of a person in three different specialties.

Or worse, the charter school interview and disciplinary practices ensure that these kids are not admitted or are expelled and the small charter school then takes the full payment but needs 0% of a specialist.

The schools, can share a specialist on different days of the week, or if there is an economy of scale then parents will choose it.

Sure there may be schools that handle kids with disciplinary issues, like they do today in the public school system.

I think the point is that, like a lot of cost problems, a relatively small proportion of users end up accounting for a relatively large share of costs. Just excluding those expensive users (implicitly or explicitly) is a ‘neat’ way to reduce costs and improve outcomes at a particular school. Unfortunately under a funding-follows-kids system that leaves a small population with $X in funding that costs $10X to serve. Maybe grouping all of those users provides enough economy of scale, but that’s not obvious, and sounds a bit like an asylum to boot.

It's not a market. There's no way for parents to make an informed choice, no way to opt out, no way for the state to opt out of serving as a backup.

Also, massively inefficient in terms of minivan miles per pupil per day.

This is not the idea that I expressed.

First, apologies, yes, I was clearly over-generalizing from what you wrote.

And to be very clear, I am addressing a deep pet peeve of mine, which is related to the topic but not necessarily a direct descendant.

Your post uses Apple as an example of how a company prioritizes cost/pricing decisions, and suggests that this, if applied to Galesburg, might allow them to fix their budget.

Which is not exactly what I was responding to.

But this ignores the fact that private schools do exist and are successful in many countries. The incentives are aligned in some cases - if the education is bad, the parents will take their kids to a different school, or never go to the bad school in the first place. If it's good, they'll be willing to pay higher fees.

I'm not sure what is meant by "unless every single student goes to work for the company, then the value they create is lost to them" - (some of) the value they create is captured by the school by charging fees. Isn't that the whole point of private education? This is the idea of markets in general: when a voluntary transaction takes place, both sides believe they benefit. If fees are $10,000, the parent will only pay this if they value the education at more than $10,000, although they may not think about it in these terms. Some parents will make gigantic sacrifices in the millions of dollars (in lost earning potential if nothing else) for their kids.

You are right that private schools don't always have an incentive to provide good education. The schools have that incentive if and only if the parents care about the child's education and have the ability to choose schools. In many cases they don't care, and the children are the innocent victims in that case. In many cases parents care, but cannot afford to move and the school effectively has a local monopoly on poor people forced to go there. No market system can really work with a monopoly.

Agreed that universal private education wouldn't be the best, but I think it's because the buyer of the service and the beneficiary are different, and there is an element of monopoly. I don't think it's because the schools lack a mechanism to capture value, they can just charge fees.

You're ignoring the possibility that the value of the private school is in network effects via filtering out poorer people. That would be beneficial to the students who attend, but neutral or even negative for society as a whole.

>>>>>>You are right that private schools don't always have an incentive to provide good education. The schools have that incentive if and only if the parents care about the child's education and have the ability to choose schools. In many cases they don't care, and the children are the innocent victims in that case.

You are missing out on a key feature of the free market.

I know someone that is very well off but is very specific when buying grocieries. This person will resort to going to a supermarket 10min farther away.

Supermarket chains know this and offer prices for such people. Now, this person may reflect 5% of the population. However, note the positive externality:

Thanks to this person, we dont have to worry about prices, yet we benefit from the penny pincher's efforts.

This is why a free market works in education. Parents may not care, but schools will cater to all parents including those that do and everyone benefits.

Of course, for this to work, there cannot be public (or private) monopolies

Tying property tax to market value is a form of this, I think. The town doesn’t realize substantially more costs when property values go up, but wants to participate in the growth of ‘its’ property. So it structures its relationship with its users to capture some of the growth in value.

Unfortunately the leverage of a small town is relatively low, so they don’t have much power to capture their users growth

> What Apple would be doing in this position is (a) determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue.

In the real world it's just the opposite. Apple has a monopoly on the Apple ecosystem, but nobody has a monopoly on land. Corporations will play one city against another to see which will give them the biggest subsidies and tax breaks.

I've always found it weird and funny that in many parts of Europe taxes used to be based on the width of the front of houses. That's why you'll find extremely narrow houses in some older downtown areas. Cologne is an example of this.

As soon as the author started doing the math on street maintenance per lot, this medieval taxation system made instant sense to me (although I believe there also were taxes on windows...). Maybe something like this would be more beneficial. In general zoning that encourages density rather than discouraged it is definitely more in the interest of cities. Yet, most people get angry with me when I mention this.

Historic taxes like the window tax etc. were as much a result of the government having very limited access to economic data at the time as anything. You couldn't say how much someone was earning, but the size of their domicile was a pretty good indicator, and one they couldn't hide. Well, until the unexpected consequences, like fake windows, kicked in, anyway.

That's an interesting point! I just listened to an interview with the founder of Give Directly on the Rationally Speaking podcast where he explained that they used to look at houses to identify if someone should get the direct cash donations. So again proxy for wealth

In my area all new housing developments have their own “metro tax district” that residents pay. It funds the infrastructure for their neighborhood. Some people don’t pay attention to it when budgeting for and buying a new house. I know that has caused many families to lose their homes. Usually those districts have a sunset built in though once they have covered the building costs.

An issue with the present system is that the status quo is virtually immutable. How cities can tax is rigidly constrained by state laws. Attempts to change those laws run into every possible obstacle, especially if it's perceived that someone is getting more goodies, and someone else less. Often, divided along urban / rural lines.

Now, it's not entirely rigid. In my state, each city sets its budget, then your tax bill is simply the budget weighted by the value of your property. Some kinds of extra expenditures such as bond issues can be approved through referendum. Others can be tacked onto the homeowners whose goodies are getting fixed, through special assessments. When the street in front of my house was rebuilt, I got a bill from the city for X amount based on Y feet of frontage.

It's a tiny bit complex because you also live in a county which is doing the same thing.

But the fundamental of assessing real estate and using it as the foundation of your tax bill is practically carved into stone. And it does have the advantage of being relatively straightforward to compute. In a town with a relatively brisk market, your assessment is going to be pretty close to what you paid for the house plus an inflation factor based on your neighborhood. And you know that your neighbor isn't somehow wriggling out of their tax obligation. That's overlooking the exceptions of course, but it captures the gist of it.

I saw a few articles like that on Strongtown. They make for a good story but frankly economically they do not make sense for me. In my surburban town with pretty big lots, school taxes are 2/3 of property tax and things that are more expensive in surburban setting than in the city (roads, sewer, electric, gas hookups) are something like 10% of taxes.

Even in this story, city currently spends 3.2M/year maintaining the roads. City has 15k housing units so city currently spends roughly $200/house on roads. It's $16/month. Author thinks city actually need to spend 4.2M - this is $280/year per house which is only $23/month. That's really not much even if cost need to be doubled. Hardly unaffordable. This is per dwelling - not even per person and does not count that commercial buildings pay more so residential rate is even lower.

Electric/water/sewers generally pay for themselves thru user fee - I think average is $20-60/month/house for sewer/water in US and electric is thru usage fee. School busing in rural setting is probably a bit more expensive but is still rounding error in overall school budget.

Everything else - school, governance, police, fire are probably about the same in rural areas and in the dense city. SF is a shit city with 15k/year spending per person and most rural/suburban areas are much nicer on a fraction of that spending.

Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city in infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's not.

US cities has a lot of problems but frankly cost of maintaining roads is not the thing that will bankrupt them.

Yeah I saw his property tax of $1,600 per year and how it was already too high to raise.

Tax rates of $8,000 to $20,000 are common around me.

Galesburg is a declining city in the middle of nowhere. People who live there probably drive to work ~50 miles away to Peoria or Davenport/Moline every day if they don't have a (probably) low paying job in town.

And if that's the case, they'd probably be better off moving closer to those cities, there's probably even cheaper homes within a shorter commute.

Also it's in Illinois, which is #2 in the country for highest overall property taxes[1].

Keep in mind he said a reasonable house value just north of their downtown is $75k, where the national average price for a home is $374k (as of Q2 2021), which is 5x the price. $1600 * 5 = $8000, which brings it up to what's near you.

And considering Illinois' property tax is higher than every other state other than New Jersey, I'm guessing the homes appraised value near you is likely a lot higher than $374k, even.

That being said, I don't understand why the government wouldn't be able to up just the city's percentage (as opposed to all line items on the property tax bill) by about $100-200/yr per person and use that to help close the gap. The percent going to the city of Galesburg is currently a tiny percentage of the overall tax.

[1]: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-again-ranks-no-2-in-...

People will fight against any tax raises regardless of the amount.

Well yes, that's one reason it probably isn't being raised. But if you could let the people know that "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.

It would be helpful if you could just go to a website, enter in a code from your property tax bill and see exactly how every dollar of the taxes you paid were used. This is one of the valid uses of a public ledger I can think of. In my opinion, all tax funded spending should be traceable like this with each transfer recorded and reported to the tax payer.

Doesn't checking the city's budget do the same thing? The only thing that site would add is multiply the budget amounts by your tax bill.

I don't feel like that addresses the part of the comment I was speaking to:

> "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.

At a minimum, you could create a system that takes the budget and shows a percent breakdown of where your money goes. If you packaged it nicely so that you could understand it at a glance it would go a long way towards what the comment I was responding to was talking about. After looking at my city's budget, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. For my municipality at least, it seems to be a mix of specific and extremely nebulous items. I can see that the fire department purchased several new vehicles and even the type of vehicle but the road works department just lists additions to their "fleet" and the sanitation department just lists "new vehicles". I see items for sidewalk and street repairs along with the name of the street but no indication of how much pavement was repaired or what the breakdown of labor vs materials was. I think knowing all of the details would help the public assist their representatives to correct overages and would be a bulwark against corruption. e.g. If I run a business that sells fasteners and I see that the city government is overpaying by 30% for the bolts they use to put up new street signs I could bid on the contract next time around or maybe tip off the newspaper if it's more like 200% over retail.

Money is fungible so it doesn't really make sense to ask where your specific dollars went. But in most if not all places in the US you can see the city or town budget and see where money came from and went in general. (It's mostly to schools in the majority of places with the per student expenditure actually often higher in more urban populations.)

While you cannot trace the money all the way through the economy, you can definitely trace the funds allocation by the articles of the budget, and pro-rate the amounts to the sum of the taxes paid by a person.

It's similar to the way you see amounts that went to taxes, insurance, etc on your payroll.

Technically, there are methods that would allow you to trace money all the way through the economy.

On a property tax bill, it tells you which entity is paid what from the bill. It’s broken down to the entity (city, pensions, schools, parks, cemeteries, libraries). If you want to dig deeper, you can go to the budget for each one of those entities

It's possible that the city is currently in equilibrium between tax rate and quality of roads. You can check the road that it getting fixed on and it's ok [1]. There are potholes here and there but otherwise it's perfectly drivable. There are roads of similar quality in much wealthier places in Bay Area. It's possible that reaction from poor people in town to increased taxes for roads will be - why? it's ok as is now.

I also checked a few random streets in the town and pavement is actually pretty good with few if any potholes. Random street as a point [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9371624,-90.3942909,3a,75y,2...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.93875,-90.3599034,3a,75y,346...

#1 is pretty rough especially as this is the summer w/o frost heaves. That is also from Aug 2019 and it's now 2022.

Separately, but related, I have always found it interesting that no one tries to calculate the wear on vehicles for things like bad roads, salt use, etc. Bending a wheel, accelerating suspension breakdown, and other issues from bad roads could easily outweigh some arguable savings of waiting longer. I'd rather push for adding less roads, allowing some paved roads to become dirt roads where low traffic weights & #s exist, and better maintenance of the remaining ones.

It’s likely hard to quantify and would require an in-depth survey of people over the course of 5-10 years with extreme diligence.

There is another quality that is missed out in these discussions too - which is the quality of life improvement. If you’ve ever driven on a nice road - you know it and you feel it. It’s pure bliss compared to most of the roads out there. Your car might go from feeling cheap and unbearable to luxurious - and if you have a nice car already then it feels sublime.

That aspect is one part where I’d gladly pay more for roads. The other aspect is prevention. I see very little emphasis put on the prevention of deterioration of roads. I think road quality could be improved if there were crews working all the time to keep the roads in shape and if people felt like their city would listen when they issue a complaint about the road. I figure this might save money and improve QOL over the long run.

"The Democrats claim for just the cost of Pizza each month we'll save our roads but we know what's really going on (pause) (dramatic music) and this is just the beginning.

Next it will be a Chinese takeout meal to help a library (show red Chinese flag to increase fear slightly), then the cost of a new refrigerator to pay teachers more (stock footage of a liberal looking nerdy professor), when will it end?

The tax and spend Democrats have an agenda and all they are looking for is an opening. (stock footage of snake slithering into nursery during the night)

We have to be vigilant to protect our families future (stock footage of 60-70 year old man, slightly overweight, wearing a red plaid shirt, jeans, and standing in front of an American flag) vote no on proposition 205 and say no to big government

(paid for by the committee of republicans and their rich supporters who need to convince poor people to vote for them)

> And considering Illinois' property tax is higher than every other state other than New Jersey, I'm guessing the homes appraised value near you is likely a lot higher than $374k, even.

It is the opposite. Illinois homes’ sale prices are kept down due to the higher (and always increasing) property taxes.

NJ is also the same outside the regions that get buoyed by the higher incomes of NYC/Philadelphia.

It is the same as any business with a lot of debt that gets valued lower than a comparable business with less debt. And NJ/IL and a few other jurisdictions have debt that is multiple standard deviation from the mean.

>It is the opposite. Illinois homes’ sale prices are kept down due to the higher (and always increasing) property taxes.

So true. I used to live in the Quad Cities, which holds Bettendorf and Davenport in Iowa and Rock Island and Moline in Illinois. When looking at houses, there might be a 25% difference in prices for similar houses in Iowa vs Illinois. Many of my coworkers on the Illinois side were looking to move to Iowa, but were going to walk out with very little equity by the time they took a hit on the sale price and pay transaction costs.

The consensus among locals was "Illinois state government may implode at some point, and pretty well the only way to avoid that is by significantly increasing taxes".

I'm not from the US and barely familiar with how properties are taxed, but would it be fair to guess that the range of road maintenance costs across the country are narrower than the range of housing prices? Labour would vary, but materials less so, right? So if suburban maintenance is funded by property taxes and people resist a certain level of taxation, then some level of increased density is the only alternative? Someone wanting small-town rural living would need to accept some adjusted balance of poorer roads, higher taxes or increased density?

Start charging $20k property tax and you'll probably accelerate the decline of Galesburg as people scramble to relocate to more affordable areas.

Absolute numbers aren't a tax rate. 1% of $2M home gets you to $20k/year easily. But the article talks about $100-200k homes; there is no way this town can have a 10-20% property tax rate.

That $1600 is based a 10% tax rate, if you look at the chart. That means the whole property is only worth $16,000. Are you really suggesting they charge more every year in taxes than the house is worth?

At the very low end there is a minimum tax regardless of property value. If you fall below a certain value you end up dragging down the community

If you live in Galesburg IL, or Jackson MI, Altoona PA, Rome NY or similar places if the property taxes were raised to 10x as much the homes would be worth literally zero. The rental income wouldn't cover the property taxes. And that is the underlying problem, when the costs are so high, collecting a "fair" or actually necessary amount of taxes has a debilitating effect on the economy

You are mistaking "what Cities spend on maintenance" for what it would cost to fully maintain the system. The author does a good job spelling this out:

> If we convert 177 miles into feet it’s 934,560 feet of road. At $20 per foot per year, we would need to spend on average $18,691,200 a year on road maintenance just to keep all of our roads properly maintained.

Note his actual estimate is ~$18.6M not the ~$4M you quoted - that was his hypothetical "even if I'm wrong by 4x too high" number.

> According to the capital improvement plan from earlier we are planning to spend an average of $3,220,000 per year.

Note that the author's cost figure is just for roads and does not include other similarly expensive infrastructure like water lines that are included in the city's Capital Improvements budget.

The reason for this gap in infra funding is they don't have the money, so they let most of the infrastructure decay, and use the money they have to patch the worst problems as best they can.

Every city in America is doing this. We just so used to it we don't think anything of driving on roads that are full of cracks and potholes and generally falling apart.

This gap is why the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the US a C- on infrastructure. (https://infrastructurereportcard.org)

Not that I disagree with your sentiment but the comment you're responding to observes that water lines --- the extra infrastructure beyond roads not included in the article's estimate but sort of implied as being significant --- are generally paid for by user fees, not property taxes.

I think this varies widely so any generalization needs many caveats… but I don’t think you can assume that. What I’ve usually seen is that water service, ie the cost of filtration and sewage treatment and maintaining pumps, is paid by user fees. Water infrastructure - the actual pipes - are usually considered capital projects and maintained out of different funds. But again the details vary on a subdivision by subdivision level not to mention state to state.

That sounds right to me, too.

Water service maintenance is often a different kind of pyramid scheme. In my area, for example, the user fees don't even remotely cover the maintenances, so the utility district relies very heavily on new service surcharges on new construction. These fees are completely outrageous, a minimum of $6000 for a tiny efficiency apartment less than 50 square meters. This obviously raises the prices of new construction. It also has the unfortunate result that the utility district budget waxes and wanes with the local construction market, and is subject to the whims of every local zoning board, so one town that never permits new construction still enjoys the flow of funds from the charges collected in other cities that do build.

I am billed by units of water used, not how far the water travels.

I don't buy the $18 million number. If the city has been only doing one sixth of the required maintenance, the roads would already be degraded to a point where it was obvious.

How do you know it’s not obvious? Road quality is a pretty standard complaint in small town America.

I mean like undriveable obvious.

Why do you think this is impossible? My city has been under-funding road repair for fifty years, is now believed to be about $300 million behind, and owns 50 centerline miles, 22% of the total streets in the city, with a pavement condition of "failed".

Can you tell me which city is that? I’d like to take a stroll using Street View, to see what failed infrastructure looks like.

Berkeley, California.

For a typical but also amazing example, see the photo at the top of https://mtc.ca.gov/operations/programs-projects/streets-road...

ETA: Street View to get you started https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8675561,-122.2930415,3a,75y,...

It’s more likely that the authors napkin math is wrong. He says that maybe he’s 50% off but it’s more likely that he’s 10x off.

The number includes replacement cost at end of life. Nobody calculates for that because it’s something you kick the can down the road for until you have catastrophic failure then you ask for state and federal funds

Did you see the posted photos of that road? It's as obvious as you describe.

I can't seem to edit my comment but it's here https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9373005,-90.3943558,3a,75y,3...

Maybe “fully maintained” is too high a standard for most roads in most towns? Maybe we are ok with doing minimal maintenance on most roads because road quality is just not worth the cost?

Well, they've done research on the cost of preventing potholes versus the costs to repair vehicle damage caused by potholes and maintenance is cheaper than repair. I don't know how that speaks to water mains, except that there are other Flint Michigans waiting to happen because many municipalities still have sections of lead pipe in their water network. They're working, and they've already oxidized so they can't afford to fix that when the storm water system is falling apart or the dam is failing or there's a recession.

Does full maintenance just mean filling potholes? Or is it more than just that?

The author thinks the city needs to spend a little over $18M per year just on roads. That would be about $1200 per year per house or $100 per month. Considering that their total property taxes are currently around $1700 per year in total property taxes that's a huge increase.

To get to 18M number, author approximated that cost of repair 3.5 lane medium use road in industrial area (aka heavy trucks) to all roads in the town which just not make sense. Cost of repair low use residential 2 lane road which is majority of roads in the city is much lower and frankly nobody repaves local roads every 30 years - it just not needed.

In addition $100 per month per house is significant but if it's the only thing that make small town more expensive than dense city it's still does not make city that much attractive.

I think there is a flaw in the author's analysis: It's based on a fixed cost-per-length model. Not all roads cost the same to maintain. A downtown city street that gets heavy, continuous use will have to be repaired much more frequently than a sidewalk-less rural road that gets ten cars per day on its busiest day. City streets are also more complicated to repair, often having sewer pipes and electrical lines buried in close proximity, so are likely more costly to repair each time, too.

Did you read what they wrote? They clearly outline the flaws and limitations of the analysis. They say it’s just an estimate.

Right, but it doesn't seem like a very good estimate and their whole argument hinges on it.

The author obviously put a lot of thought and effort into this article. I’m surprised he let that rough calculation be the basis for so much of it. I haven’t looked, but I suspect it isn’t hard to find expected maintenance costs for various types of roads.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the calculation is actually hard to come by because no one wants to acknowledge the issue. They all know the number is going to be fantastically large and unable to be voted in. So, they just ignore it and let the town deteriorate slowly like most of the USA.

My guess is that you live in a newer suburb where the infrastructure isn’t 100-150 years old. When your sewers, water lines, roads, municipal buildings, etc. are over a century old, you can no longer delay maintenance without cutting service levels. This is why older rural areas of the country like Appalachia are dotted with so many ghost towns; it stopped making sense to invest in those places decades ago because the infrastructure was so far gone it was just cheaper to build a new town somewhere else.

Many rust belt towns are going through this right now; my mom grew up in a rural factory town in southern NY that once had a population of nearly 10,000 — 50 years later, that population is closer to 500. And still dropping because most of the lots in town are unoccupied, rotting homes left behind when previous owners died that would be torn down if there was the money to do so, but there isn’t and it drags down property values of everything in the area.

Pittsburgh — a city big enough to have 3 professional sports teams — has entire neighborhoods that have been abandoned and fenced off after the population dropped by over 50% since the 1970s. Mostly so that the city doesn’t have to maintain power, sewer, water and roads in those areas because there just isn’t the money to rebuild them. There is an entire subway system under the city that has simply been abandoned due to lack of upkeep. The city is on an upward trajectory again, but property values in the city are still astonishingly low (10 years ago you could buy a livable-if-dated house in a good location for $50,000) and taxes are high.

Pittsburgher here. What are you talking about? There is no abandoned subway system under Pittsburgh. What we call the 'T' is alive and well. There are also not "entire neighborhoods that have been abandoned and fenced off".

Perhaps they were thinking of Rochester, New York: https://rocwiki.org/abandoned_subway

New Orleans could only afford to start fixing its streets and sewers with the FEMA money after Katrina.

>Many rust belt towns are going through this right now; my mom grew up in a rural factory town in southern NY that once had a population of nearly 10,000 — 50 years later, that population is closer to 500. And still dropping because most of the lots in town are unoccupied, rotting homes left behind when previous owners died that would be torn down if there was the money to do so, but there isn’t and it drags down property values of everything in the area.

I do not think any city whether dense or not can survive 20X drop of population and remain livable. If anything surburban locations are easier to clean up - it takes only a few days to a couple of weeks to clean up single store house and lot.

Imagine the mess if New York population dropped to 400k people? There is no way to maintain subway, road network and all other infrastructure with such small population. Skyscrapers and high risers require constant maintenance and will be danger to others if left unmaintained. Decaying rural home is danger only if you are in it or on purpose right next to it. Blast radius of falling high rise is quite a bit bigger.

>Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city in infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's not.

Who pays the cost to connect these rural areas to other regions?

In my inner ring suburb, the largest category of expense is policing. We spend more on police than we do on parks and roads.

Retail isn't coming back like it was. Downtowns in the past centered almost entirely around retail businesses. The author spends a lot of time bemoaning Walmart and other big box stores, but even the box stores themselves are facing more pressure than ever from Amazon. A small retail store in a run-down third rate city doesn't stand a chance at success against the economies of scale and expectations of consumers that exist today. If a town can draw in boutique retail and bars and restaurants, it can sometimes be revitalized to an extent, but that seems to be the extent of what's possible with old downtowns.

I live in the country near a couple of small cities about an hour outside of a major city. The small cities are probably best described as "hanging on." I basically frequent businesses that aren't food oriented once in a blue moon--and never walk around the downtowns. I do shop in the city limits but it's mostly either a supermarket or the Walmart. The travel agency downtown sure isn't going to pull in a lot of traffic.

I read a story in the last couple of years about small towns that shot themselves in the foot by keeping out the big box stores - I wish I could find it again. The theory was that the traditional small downtown couldn't meet 100% of everybody's needs, so they started shopping at places like Amazon. And once you start shopping at Amazon, it just becomes convenient to do more and more of your shopping there. Suddenly instead of your downtown being killed by the big boxes a mile out of town, they're being killed by someone much bigger and farther away and harder to fight back against.

Yeah small retail is basically done. All that’s left if restaurants and services. And those are getting destroyed by Covid.

Great, thorough read. As someone that doesn’t have any life experience of what towns/suburban development was like prior to the 1990s, what was interesting is the part where the article brought up the types of big changes happening after WWII. Building roads everywhere, zoning houses with big yards, building big new commercial complexes on the outskirts because they needed more land.

It seems like there was a ton of exuberance and pride post-WWII, but terrible investment strategizing. All these “developments of the future” saddle so much cost over time that it makes the financial balancing act to stay long-term sustainable very precarious. (Of course, this is all retrospective looking after the fact).

What seems like a crazy takeaway is: with these towns like Galesburg that have been around over 150 years, it seems like the town planners in the 1870s had better judgement than the ones post-WWII.

Despite the conventional thinking of the last 60 years across these towns being all those bad investment decisions were believed to be the pinnacle of American real estate development and bonafide testaments of greatness.

> It seems like there was a ton of exuberance and pride post-WWII, but terrible investment strategizing. All these “developments of the future” saddle so much cost over time that it makes the financial balancing act to stay long-term sustainable very precarious. (Of course, this is all retrospective looking after the fact).

Do note that it was not just "exuberance and pride", it was also a way to get white families out of inner-city mixed-race neighbourhoods, and to enforce segregation.

This was not a secret either e.g. William Levitt refused to sell levittown homes to racial minorities, and deeds came with a racial covenant.

How does this matter to how we tackle the financial problems of cities in 2022?

…

I was specifically replying to a segment about the reasoning behind the creation of those places, to indicate that financial viability far from the only input into their design.

If these cities were not created with financial viability at the forefront, it’s unlikely you can magically make them financially viable.

But I guess you’re more of the “ignoring inconvenient history” persuasion. I’ve had bosses like that, always asking for solutions to the problems they’d created (against advice) and oddly enough never interested in riot cause analysis when there was any chance it would not be favorable to them.

I’m glad we’re talking about the finances of towns here. Almost every town in America is bankrupt.

I disagree somewhat with the author here around the issues. For instance, he uses the $20/ft/road and points out they need roughly double the tax base to support their current roads.

Sure, that’s a way to look at it. Alternatively, they can cut back the roads, fill with gravel and honestly it might be cheaper to just build and maintain a concrete facility. If you can cut the price of laying concrete by 50% thatd also be a solution. Alternatively, pre-purchase X tons per year and reduce costs that way letting the concrete makers in the area expand and reduce overhead.

Regarding city planning, yes totally agree. I’d argue the major issue is that we lost manufacturing here in the United States. Factories paid relatively well, and were running at 20% fewer people per capita in the workforce than in the 60s. This means less wealth generated across the board, less wealth in these towns, etc.

Finally, IMO as a town the best investments are those that attract more jobs and wealth. So make fresh paint available for free to any businesses. Hire better police. Cut back on road quality. Cut back on taxes for businesses that bring net jobs. Invest in community activities, particularly for kids. Advertise.

It’s a difficult spot to be in, the reality is that smalls towns across the country were decimated between the 1990s - 2020s. Most of it was policies sending stuff over seas and reducing wealth creation in rural towns (where factories used to run). To fix that will require some national solutions and scaling back the towns which haven’t seen growth (and many declined) in 30 years

> It’s a difficult spot to be in, the reality is that smalls towns across the country were decimated between the 1990s - 2020s. Most of it was policies sending stuff over seas and reducing wealth creation in rural towns (where factories used to run).

I’d put this further back. Manufacturing is part of it but not everyone worked in factories before and the post-WWII white flight was part of the setup. There are two related parts to that:

On the city side, that took on a lot of unfavorable trade offs – reducing tax revenues, converting neighborhoods into unproductive freeways and parking, greater expense and demand for roads, etc.

On the personal side, cars lock in a lot of personal expense both up front and ongoing (how many people are one expensive repair away from potentially losing their job?), and force other choices like needing to live somewhere with storage space, deal with the health impacts, etc.

I think that combination left things quite brittle and a lot of it is time-delayed by a decade or two, at which point it’s much harder to reverse. Losing a factory hurts but so did losing most of the workers a generation earlier, and the resulting economic climate from both makes finding replacements harder.

Imagine you are trying to get businesses to invest in your town, build a factory, whatever. Much of that is about image, right? If you only have gravel roads it gives off the impression that you are failing/backwards.

Businesses will often invest in their own roads. The issue is the town over expanded and then their base shrank. Unfortunately, you have to cut items — roads to dead businesses are the easiest way.

If manufacturing comes back they will often invest in their own roads anyway. City can then cut a deal to rebuild and maintain roads with company splitting cost

> The last paragraph sounds like something we’ve all heard before. Anti-progress and looking at the past with rose colored glasses.

Building cities around cars is not progress, and arguing for making them pedestrian-friendly isn't "anti-progress". Suburbanization is just one possible development path and one that's not particularly smart.

To fight suburbanization the only thing that will work is taxing external costs. So you want to live 30 km away from the city but enjoy all the benefits - work there, have access to culture, entertainment and services on demand? Pay for the infrastructure that city needs to maintain to let you do it. This would make suburban lifestyle very expansive and would stop suburbanization. But people won't vote for this, because they want the profits and someone else to pay for the costs.

Plenty of people want to live in the suburbs precisely because they want nothing to do with the city center. They live outside it; they work outside it (often on a ring road built specifically to avoid the city); they shop outside it; they view any requirement to go into the city as a schlep.

If the only “new” penalty is they can’t go see the pro sports team in person without paying a lot of taxes, that seems like a fair trade. (Or they’ll go see the NE Patriots at the stadium a little over 25 miles from the city.)

> often on a ring road built specifically to avoid the city

I wonder who financed the ring road. Curious that we don't build ring roads where there's no cities.

> If the only “new” penalty is they can’t go see the pro sports team in person without paying a lot of taxes

The new penalty should be "you want to live in 100 km radius of a city - you chip in for infrastructure it builds the more the further you are". It's no accident that suburbanization doesn't happen in areas where there are no big cities nearby.

> Plenty of people want to live in the suburbs precisely because they want nothing to do with the city center.

Sadly you can't have suburbs without a city center somewhere nearby.

> I wonder who financed the ring road.

In the US, that’s overwhelmingly the federal government, not local property or state sales/income taxes.

> Curious that we don't build ring roads where there's no cities.

Indeed. Perhaps the city residents should chip in more because of the need to build a ring road to avoid them? Or maybe, just maybe, different choices have different cost pros and cons and taking a simple, single-variable view isn’t rich enough to capture the whole situation. (pun intended).

> The new penalty should be "you want to live in 100 km radius of a city - you chip in for infrastructure it builds the more the further you are".

I’d wager that suburbs, villages, and small towns 101-125km away would boom under such a plan.

> In the US, that’s overwhelmingly the federal government, not local property or state sales/income taxes.

With the way internal US wealth transfers work, that's basically a way of saying "dense city livers somewhere else" rather than it being suburbs US-wide paying for each other.

This comment gets to the crux of the issue which the author isn't touching on either. The author points out that we need more downtown area and density because that pays for more than the cost of maintaining infrastructure it consumes. From a city budget perspective it makes sense to then want more density.

However, why do we have one lifestyle finance another one? Why should people who live in a downtown apartment pay for maintaining infrastructure for people who base their choices on getting away from others? This is even more crazy given that the environmental impact per capita is also much lower in denser areas. I'm not even saying that we should have a taxation system encourages density, but let's at least have one that doesn't exploit density to subsidize the suburbs!

As far as I can tell, the city I live in isn’t substantially subsidizing the towns and suburbs nearby, isn’t paying for their roads, bridges, and snow removal, and surely isn’t doing that for the ones 30 miles away in another state entirely.

Within the limits of the same city or town we do see this transfer though, as very clearly laid out in the article.

You also have people (like GP) advocating for a 100km from the city taxation zone, which is far more than “within the same city/town”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955707

I trust city voters can address intra-city financing needs, particularly if the more numerous would benefit.

"I trust city voters can address intra-city financing needs, particularly if the more numerous would benefit."

Well, I read the article and Strong Towns to say that most cities can't.

According to the preferences and opinions of the StrongTowns group. If the preferences of the actual voters/taxpayers in the city differ from that group, I’m inclined to go with the city residents over the StrongTowns not-residents.

If people outside the city are forced to pay for city things, surely they'll also get to elect and control the actions of the city too?

Who wants to actively avoid city centers? The Unabomber? I live on the outskirts of a small city in a small state and happily drive to Boston an hour away for culture, sports, etc. I would love it to be closer. I don’t know too many people nowadays who are afraid of or resistant to going to cities.

Me, for example. In the last five years living in north Austin, I've been downtown less than 10 times. That's on purpose. I've declined interviews for companies because their offices are downtown (and they required some portion of regular in-office presence). I'm not afraid of downtown, but certainly resistant to being there. I don't want to go down for dinner, much less live there.

I don't understand why they divide the appraised value by three, then compute 1.5% property tax from it and say they can't raise it any higher. Where I live, our property tax rate is higher even with a homestead exemption AND we don't divide by three. Simply removing the division would fix the revenue problem according to the article's math.

More specifically, right now I just checked and I pay 1.6% of my home's appraised market value each year as property tax. Galesburg pays 0.5%. So there's an easy fix.

Don't people think it's just crazy having to pay the overlords a wealth tax? One thing is to pay for capital gains or new income, but you already paid taxes when you bought the house/property.

There are people (free market people, not communists) who'd argue the idea of owning land as a private person and extracting rent/speculation is folly itself and who'd argue you should either pay much higher taxes (Georgism) or they you should only be able to lease land from the community around you.

Free market capitalism doesn't work well (in terms of social welfare) with natural monopolies, and land could be called the ultimate natural monopoly.

Eh, that's an extreme position. Mostly we say that property taxes should be around half the land rent value, i.e. around half the value the property generates without taking into account what's built on it.

This has the rather obvious difficulty of having to estimate the yearly value generated by the land itself, which is a topic too large for me (but solvable), while having a large number of advantages. It aligns incentives very very well, and that's hella important. If a municipality develops an area with proper regulation, infrastructure and various services, the land value grows which gives them extra income. It has a much more direct invest->income dynamic.

It also incentivizes owners to be a lot more aligned to the interests of the community around them. You want to have a home with a large yard in the middle of the city, instead of developing it more in line with the location? You can, but you'll pay for it.

It also forces owners to align to the community around them continuously. If currently you own a piece of land which is way underdeveloped, the only moment when anybody even cares about this is when it's being sold. As opposed to having to adjust each year to current land value and land taxes - you're not forced to do something about it, but it's surely on your mind a lot more when you see taxes grow.

Ah, and it fixes NIMBY, and dramatically lowers rent. Apartment buildings are very efficient, so they'll be favored exactly where they make sense - in crowded, high-value land areas.

Why half? Is that just an arbitrary number?

Theory says 100%, half is just a realistic target.

Baden Würtemberg doesn't give a damn about the complexity of the assessment, they already have to assess land value for estate taxes. The assessment argument is actually complete rubbish. The assessment rules for the rest of Germany are significantly more bureaucratic. Assessing building value is an even bigger nightmare because you cannot automate the majority of assessment work. You also don't have to asess every single building. You can asess the value of bigger plots of land spanning multiple properties and allow an appeal process for special circumstances.

> There are people (free market people, not communists) who'd argue [...] you should only be able to lease land from the community around you.

At first this sounded like an extreme point of view to me - then I realised how often I've heard people saying there's nothing wrong or exploitative about being a landlord. We, as a society, see nothing wrong with people spending their entire lives living on rented property.

The landlord can't exploit you, only the land owner can. It just turns out that they are usually the same person. In the case of the homeowner they are not.

Also, if we consider taxation exploitative then we should limit it to resource based taxes like land value tax.

But isn't it that you also need repair stuff with your house? The same for public property - it's never "finished" and needs repairing, etc.

Money spent on taxes doesn't go to fix your own property.

No it goes to fix the shared infrastructure. People would definitely like it less if they were billed for the infrastructure costs directly. For example it’s clear here that the downtown subsidises the sprawl.

But why take it out of property tax?

Are you going to tax income so landowners become richer at the expense of others?

Do you want landlords to charge for public services that they did not provide?

I don't know. I don't like paying any tax. Maybe you could have the government start companies to make money instead of taxing others.

>Do you want landlords to charge for public services that they did not provide

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this, but it's not legal to sell an item or service and then not give them that item / service.

Do you think that it costs the government more to protect a homeless person or a person with a house? Do you think it costs the government more to protect a person with a house, or a person with a mansion?

Piles of wealth require protection. Without government protection, they would be expropriated without considerable expenses on private security.

Income tax is the tax that is hard to justify. Wealth taxes are taxes to protect wealth, and sales/transaction taxes are taxes to enforce sales and transaction agreements.

Libertarians believe those should be the only functions of government. If you don't even believe in those, you're an anarchist, or maybe even a Mad Maxist.

edit: imagine the absurdity of people sharing a rented shed paying as much for fire and police protection as a person in a mansion.

Yeah, income tax is the real evil.

I live in Scandinavia, and the high income tax (and no property or inheritance tax) keeps the class system intact for generations. You can't work your way up when the government is taking almost 60% of your income.

That said, I'd still prioritise abolishing sales tax on groceries and electricity here. Both are incredibly expensive and make life a struggle for a lot of working people.

Most countries have more of a scaled income tax, but Sweden has 57% if you earn 1.5x the average. Why is that?

To keep the class system intact. The ultra-wealthy don't pay much more tax (and don't pay property or inheritance tax, and capital gains tax is also lower than income tax (wtf?)). It's a far less progressive country than the marketing would have you believe.

And unfortunately all the political parties are just focussed on giving more money to the boomers or liberalising the housing market, so it won't change any time soon.

I think inheritance tax differs across Scandinavia, just a small point really not detracting from your message. In Denmark there's definitely one, Sweden it's none or much lower, not sure.

You can even chose to pay 0.375% on your assets p/a, instead of the capital gains tax. Pretty good. But you’re exaggerating the income tax situation. ~60% is the marginal tax rate, you only pay that for a part of your income over a certain level.

Can you choose year by year? I’d think most years 37.5bps on assets would be way cheaper than capital gains, but in a down year, you might choose to pay capital gains. (Or you could “bunch” realized gains into every other or every third year and take the wealth tax option only that year.)

It’s a special kind of account, you can sell everything and withdraw the proceeds, then buy new assets outside that account. So you can choose, but not retroactively (unfortunately!)

Consumption taxes are regressive and bad, but at least they're justifiable. Without government protection, the poor/weak have no rights that the rich/strong have to respect; they end up enslaved, serfs. So they pay a poverty/weakness tax.

Imagine the effort that a government has to put in to offset racist discrimination, as an example. While we might say that racism is a problem caused by the racist, we can't say that racism is a problem for the racist. It's a problem for the race being discriminated against. Levying a tax to pay for that expense makes sense in a purely payment-for-services model of government. Lots of Europe used to charge Jewish taxes, and the Islamic world both Jewish and Christian taxes.

I see it more as a reasonable way of shaping behaviour. Like taxing diesel, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. is fair enough if it helps create a better society.

Taxing electricity whilst trying to encourage people to switch their homes from gas and their cars from diesel, is just crazy.

You then run into the question of whose vision of a better society you're enforcing. But aside from that you can really look at those taxes as something to offset the additional costs of commerce in those things. We've agreed that emissions are a danger, cigarettes raise health care expenditure, and alcohol raises police expenditure. We use those to justify the specific amounts of the taxes.

If this weren't the justification, there's no reason not to just ban the things you don't approve of altogether, rather than just taxing them.

"Without government protection, the poor/weak have no rights"

Without government protection the poor start cutting off heads, see the French revolution. Every time there is civil unrest, from peasant uprising in medieval Russia, to Occupy Wallstreet to Anonymous DDOSing websites, the government is out in force to out it down.

Having a few limits on power, like "you cant discriminate by race, but discriminating by class is cool" does not mean thay the state is suddenly protecting the poor.

>Do you think it costs the government more to protect a person with a house, or a person with a mansion?

These are the same. If someone were to trespass onto your property it's going to be up to you to defend it. The police are too far away to come save you. There's no difference from the police's perspective since the size of your property doesn't matter to them. Whatever work they do upstream to protect you does not depend on the size of your property.

If the police were close to you, the value of that plot would be higher, or at least its associated costs would be.

> Do you think that it costs the government more to...

These are trick questions, it costs the same amount. The cost to arrest a criminal is the same no matter who they are robbing. Ditto the fire & police protection - those emergency services protect lives that are equally valuable.

And it is obviously cheaper if wealthy people take on private protection - they already pay the vast bulk of government services which are mostly rich -> poor transfer payments. If it were a reasonable option, the billionaires of a country would take their own private army over a government funded one. It would cost them half as much as the taxes they pay if they live in the US (because transfer payments make up around half of US government spending).

If there is something of higher value to steal, thieves are willing to take larger risks to get it, so you have to expend more effort if you want to prevent that.

Plus supervillains. They're notoriously expensive to arrest.

"If it were a reasonable option, the billionaires of a country would take their own private army over a government funded one"

We already ran this experiment, it was called Feudalism. We don't have Barons and Lords because they got obliterated by unified nation states in wars, every time.

There are people who'd give their life for America/Freedom/ etc, have you ever met anyone who would for Mark Zukerberg?

Under current system police enjoys mahor privilidges - qualified immunity, resisting arrest is a crime, etc. Since such multiple private army/police's might come into conflict, those privilidges have to go. We'll be back at feudal warfare

> We don't have Barons and Lords because they got obliterated by unified nation states in wars, every time.

Arguably the most militarily successful empire in history [0] has Barons and Lords and is nearly contemporary with this conversation (Elizabeth II isn't even dead yet). I agree democracy is better, but "we're better organised and we'll whack you if you don't pay protection money" is a weak justification for taxes. The counterargument is that bullying is a decent tactic but a bad strategy - it is hard to get people to seriously buy in to bullying and relatively unstable when the situation changes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire

I don't think British Empire is considered feudal society, the English civil war probably marks the end of anything you could call feudalism.

The argument is diffetent - feudalism gives you multiple warring rackets, its even worse and more expensive

Houses need roads and plumbing and a fire dept and electrical and all kinds of stuff, dog catchers and such.

These things aren't a buy once product, they require maintenance fees.

Civilization costs money, and its worth it.

No, because the services you expect from living there do need to be paid some way or other.

> One thing is to pay for capital gains or new income, but you already paid taxes when you bought the house/property.

Servicing the property obviously costs ongoing money, so why wouldn't the taxes be ongoing?

> Take for example the taxes I pay on my home. I pay $260.17 to the city every year in property taxes. I live on a 60 ft wide lot. If you take the $20/ft/year road maintenance metric, cut it in half because I’m just on one side of the street, and then multiply it by the width of my lot you get $600. I would need to contribute $600 a year through my property taxes to just pay for the maintenance of the portion of the street in front of my house. But I’m not, I’m contributing less than half. Almost no single family houses are contributing enough in property tax to support basic necessary maintenance of the street in front of their house.

> The smallest lot width you can have in Galesburg with the current zoning code is 50ft in R3 districts. With that 50 ft lot you would need a house worth $98,500 just for the city to break even on the maintenance of your portion of the street. If you have a 100ft wide lot you need an assessed value of $197,000 to break even. While wide lots may be nice to have and historically how we’ve built housing, they have a tough time paying the city back for the services they consume.

> Is every house and building going to pay for all the infrastructure it uses? No. There will be plenty that do not. Does that mean that corner lots have to be twice as valuable to pay for both the streets? Also no. Another way to look at properties in an apples to apples comparison is to use the metric of total property taxes paid per acre. Why is that? The greater the area the further road and water infrastructure needs to extend and the further away police and fire services need to travel. So comparing on a per acre basis is a good proxy for how productive it is for the city.

I pay over $4,000, for a 75-foot-square lot. People marvel at how low my taxes are. The average around here, is three times as much.

It doesn't bother me that much. I live in a fairly affluent area, with good services and infrastructure. The schools are also excellent.

No, I think property (or better, land value) taxes are probably the most justifiable of all taxes.

You are occupying land, which is scarce. Noone else can use it, but except for some accident of history or geography you have no more right to one there than anyone else. It makes total sense that you compensate society for your use of the land.

There is a lot to like about Georgism.

It is crazy to have private ownership over publicly funded services. The government built the infrastructure that made your plot of land valuable so it is only fair to pay a land value tax. If you don't do that then the rich will become your overlord instead and they charge as much as they can get away with.

It would let the revenues pay for the cost of the roads in the city, but not the rest.

Yeah... I'm in the UK and my council tax (nearest equivalent) is currently about 1.7% of my house's value p/a, although council tax is fairly regressive and has a hard cap. Whenever I hear Americans complaining about how terrible their infrastructure is (and it is compared to every other developed country I've ever been to) I can't help but wonder why you don't do the obvious thing and just pay to fix it.

edit 1.7% not 2.7%!

Interesting, our council tax here in Fife in Scotland is about 1% of our house valuation and that includes water supply and waste water.

Should have been 1.7% not 2.7%! Fat fingers. Combination of being in band C while living in a small flat that's not worth much.

UK has population density of 280 people per km2, most of Europe has over 100, USA has 36. It's ok if you put everybody in densely populated areas, but when you spread them around you either pay 10 times the taxes or get 10 times worse infrastructure. There's no cheating math.

Most Americans live in areas far more dense, though. Even the least dense US states have far higher density in the areas housing the vast majority of their populations.

Averaging over a country the size of the US is not particularly useful for variables like population density that most likely follow an exponential distribution.

In the context of this article, the difference is not as much as you’d think. Basically every road in the UK is paved. That isn’t true of the sparsely populated parts of the US.

The US has 4.3m km of paved road for a population of 331m. That's $287bn per year upkeep (at the $20/ft rate), so each resident needs to pay $864/year for road upkeep.

The UK has 0.4m km of paved road for a population of 67m. That's $28bn per year, so each resident needs to pay $421/year for road upkeep.

In other words, Americans should only need to pay 2x the tax, not 10x the tax.

This analysis is worthless. A good place to start would be with comparison of road design standards which would show that American roads are built much wider and with more additional features, which is stuff like curbs and not necessarily sidewalks or bike paths. If Americans started building roads to British standards then there would be an uproar.

Unless you are paving the Nevada Desert, that comparison is basically useless - it includes areas where nobody lives so they need no maintenance.

There are such areas in every country. USA might have more of them but not so much more that it cancels out the low population density entirely. You still have to have a road going through these areas.

There aren't - look at slovakia, Czechia, Germany, France. In fact, where EU is one such area?

The other post here has done a total length of road network, which is actually a good metric.

Mountains are one example. There are still people living there, but not nearly as much as in the densely populated parts. That's how it looks in Slovakia: https://govisity.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Jahnaci_stit...

North of UK is almost empty. North-Eastern Germany has population density similar to USA which is pretty low compared to the rest of the country. France and Spain especially are sparsely populated outside of the big metro areas.

That road comes out of state or federal taxes though. It's still a coat but not relevant to the math about city budgets. And yes, there is so much more space in the US even without leaving populated areas.

The lower density in urban areas is still real though.

A substantial fraction of the US's land area is locked up in Alaska, where there isn't "a road going through [the low-density] areas." What little long-distance infrastructure exists there is almost entirely driven by the existence of extractive industries (notably, but not exclusively, oil) that are lucrative enough to put in that infrastructure.

Rural Europe tends to be as lightly populated as, say, rural eastern US, not rural High Plains, let alone rural Alaska.

I suspect it's not as bad as that as it's not like people are spread evenly across the USA, they're concentrated in the coastal States and then further concentrated in urban areas. I agree the USA's low housing density makes some infrastructure more expensive to maintain though. One of the other differences is that in the UK taxation raised by central government pays for services that in the USA are paid for out of local taxation. Education is the most obvious one - schools are paid for largely out of the main pool in the UK rather than being paid for via council tax. There are also various redistribution mechanisms intended to move money from richer to poorer areas, urban to rural and England to the other nations to compensate for geographic inequalities.

The city tax isn't the only tax, they also pay county (and other?) taxes raising the total well beyond 0.5%?

Yes, but that's also an argument why "tripling the tax" isn't something impossible, since tripling the tax that goes to the city would mean a relatively small increase to the total property tax someone is paying.

See the pie chart in the post again -- citizens of Galesburg are paying 9.89% property tax on their home, not 0.5%. There are a lot of other taxes that make up the total property tax. Your 1.6% is incredibly low, in my experience.

I don't believe their property taxes are 10%. $50,000 per year on a $500,000 home? Come on

According to the article, most houses are more like $50-$100k, but 10% would still be a very high property tax rate.

You’re right, I looked it up— it’s only 1.41%, I must have misread that chart myself.

My state, they can go up to 7.5% so I didn’t really think too hard about it, but I think I’m desensitized to how crazy high that is…

Doesn't Illinois have pretty high taxes to begin with? I'm not a tax expert but I've heard this repeatedly stated while living in Chicago.

Yeah just charge the working families just scraping by that make up a town like this 3 times more. Jobs done! /s

I don’t get that part either. OTOH, an effective property tax rate of 3.2% or so seems much more reasonable that the 9.8% percent implied by his table. Assuming people but anywhere close to as much house as they can afford, the city taking 10% per year seems just confiscatory.

Illinois calculates property taxes off of 1/3 assessed value. Apparently it allows the rates to not have to go out to an insane number of digits.

But it gets weirder. The city/county/ whatever determines their budget and uses property taxes to determine how that cost is allocated across residents. What happens when housing prices fall? Simple! They take a multiplier, and increase all assessments by some factor.

People think property taxes set the budget, when in fact the budget sets properly taxes

I live in a "strong town". On my modest home, I pay $8000/yr in property taxes. In addition I pay over $10,000 in local income tax to the town. The housing market is strong. Houses sell within days. The schools are excellent. The roads are well-maintained. The community center is awesome. Taxes are too high for sure, but we get outstanding services and facilities for those taxes.

Galesburg is a city not a town. It can't benefit from the wealth effects of a town within 20 minute commuting distance (car and bus and light rail) of a major city. Small cities like Galesburgh can only thrive if they bring in significant outside money - usually in the form of tourism and tourist who decide to stay. I think of Bend OR as an example.

$10,000 in local income tax? That’s something like double what the median U.S. household pays in Federal income tax!

If that’s the kind of tax base required for a “strong town”, we’re really tilting at windmills here.

Unless intrasight makes 1M$/year or more, that truly is an incredible income tax rate for a town.

Opps - that included state 3% income tax. Local income tax rate is 1.3% 0.3% of that goes to school - which is on top of the $5K from property tax that goes to school (the other $3k of property tax goes to both town and county)

That is a questionable calculation because the street in front of their house is not just used by them. For example, consider a dead end street with 100 houses on one side and a forest on the other, with each house having the same length of street in front of them. Assume each house uses the street once a day to leave the neighborhood and once a day to return.

The house at the open end of street, call it house 1, uses the segment in front of their house (call it segment 1) 2 times each day.

The house next next to house 1, house 2, uses its segment (segment 2) 2 times each day and it uses segment 1 2 times each day.

In general, house N uses each of segments 1 through N 2 times a day and does not use segments N+1 through 100.

Looking at it from the point of view of the segments, segment 1 is used equally by 100 houses, segment 1 is used equally by 99 houses, and so on.

Figuring fair share by width of lots is even more questionable. A wide but shallow lot and a narrow but deep lot of the same area with similar occupancy aren't going to inherently have different street usage (or different water, sewer, police/fire, or other tax funded service usage).

I’m sure the author would be the first to agree that this isn’t a detailed analysis - they had various comments to that effect - but it doesn’t change the point by anywhere near enough to invalidate it. Most roads are not long dead end streets and especially now that people use navigation apps there’s a lot more traffic on neighborhood roads than there used to be, too.

The big problems are low density and how much most cities end up subsidizing non-taxpayers who drive a significant fraction of road demand with only minimal economic contribution. Those subsidies are doubly expensive because they hurt the city and discourage use of more sustainable transportation.

"Fair share" is irrelevant, they're now designing an actual taxation policy. Instead they're trying to apportion costs to describe how high the expenses are, based on maintenance costs.

> Looking at it from the point of view of the segments, segment 1 is used equally by 100 houses, segment 1 is used equally by 99 houses, and so on.

It doesn't matter.

If a dead end street with 100 houses costs $120000 to maintain, those 100 houses must contribute a total of $120000.

You can price that as every house contributing $1200; or as the first house contributing $24 for access to one segment, the second $48 for access to two segments and so on until the 100th house pays $2400.

But no matter how you rearrange things, the houses' contributions must sum to $120,000 meaning the mean contribution must be $1200.

Indeed, as soon as you get into “I don’t use that so why should I pay for it”, you’re being consumer and not a taxpayer.

Does your analysis change if it is not a dead end street?

If it's not a dead-end street, the idea of charging different houses different amounts makes even less sense, because the resident of the first house might drive past the 100th house just as often as the resident of the 100th house drives past the first house.

But if it is not a dead end street then there will be through traffic. Why should the people who happen to live next to that street be covering the maintenance costs that are due to that traffic? And why should they get a free ride--no pun intended--for the traffic they cause when they drive outside of their neighborhood?

The point I've been trying to implicitly make is that the road system is best viewed as a whole. Neither the benefits one gains from the road system nor the maintenance costs to repair the wear from one's use of the road system are in general related to how much of the road system is in front of one's house, and so the maintenance costs of that segment of the road system are a poor way to estimate what you should be paying in taxes to support the road system.

That’s how shared sewer works in my area. The person on the end pays the most and the person right at the hook up the least.

Now this leads to question that it only solves problem for that road.

What about all the other roads you use? Maybe solution would be to mandate tracking on all traffic? So you would pay what you use, with pedestrians being billed for maintenance of sidewalk, the motorist, heavy traffic and bicyclist the road with some reasonable multiplier.

I don't live there anymore, but it so weird to see my hometown on the front page of Hacker News. Some of my friends still live there and it is depressing to hear them talk about what's going on. When I have gone back and visited, nothing seems to be the same anymore, save for the few restaurants I liked.

Small world, it's my hometown too! I had to do a double take when I saw the headline. My parents are still there but they're looking to leave. It's so different there than it was 20-30 years ago.

Not quite my hometown, but in the same Central Illinois area. (Farmington. Go Farmers.) And yeah, I had to do a heck of a double-take when I saw “Galesburg” on the page here.

At least some of the towns/cities in Central Illinois have had a little success in revamping their economies. Canton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton,_Illinois) comes to mind.

What a great deep dive into a fascinating subject I have never seen the actual math on.

> This section of road is approximately 584 feet long and is going to cost around $350,000

This is the cornerstone of the article he uses for all other calculations. Is this number reasonable? It seems ridiculously expensive but maybe that is just how things are.

This article claims costs of $2-3m for a mile of two-lane road in a rural area. 584 feet is a bit over a tenth of a mile, so that cost would make sense for building a new road. Not sure whether the cost to major repairs or replacements would be higher or lower. Also gotta factor in that this article is from 2016 and right now costs for building anything seem substantially up.

https://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road/

And the road is in a really bad shape, ee Google StreetView: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9373005,-90.3943558,3a,75y,3...

Yeah. Fundamentally, roads are really costly. The whole notion of designing a city around cars is horribly expensive and we keep pretending that's not the case.

I don't know much about American taxes (not even much about German taxes) but I think roads should be funded through some tax which is connected to cars or fuel.

In Germany you have the KFZ Steuer which brings in about €9.4b every year. You pay KFZ when you have a car.

[0] https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Downloads/...

In Germany, landlords have to pay a percentage of the cost of roads built around it. In some cases this might be a huge percentage, depending on how much the road is used by the public.

Only once, when the road is built, ongoing maintenance is paid from general taxes.

Actually, no, when the road is being overhauled, the town can come back with you with another invoice. See "Straßenbaubeiträge" [1]. Sometimes, these are prohibitively expensive, forcing homeowners to abandon their property, often amounting to several 10k Euros [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stra%C3%9Fenbaubeitrag [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPdigJ6dOL8

That’s a tax that goes to the federal government only. It pays for federal roads (Autobahn and Bundesstraße) and badly at that - the latest numbers I could find are for 2018 and there, expenses were above 10 billion euros. (1) State roads and roads in cities are paid from the states and the cities budget, the KFZ-Steuer does nothing to offset those - it’s all financed from other taxes and fees.

(1) https://www.deutschlandinzahlen.de/tab/deutschland/infrastru...

> It pays for federal roads (Autobahn and Bundesstraße) and badly at that

If the tax brings in €9.4B and the expenses are €10B per year, that seems pretty balanced to me.

The expenses for federal roads are about 1/2 or 1/3 of all road costs. City roads costs are a bit hard to come by, but are in the same ballpark as the Autobahn, and I could not find a good number for Landstraßen, which would be paid for by the states. It’s not balanced at all.

In Germany, there is no direct link of a tax and where that income is being used to - it all goes into a big tax pot, and everything is being paid out of that. What you mean is a "Gebühr" (roughly translated to "a fee"), which can be linked to a particular expense, but vehicle taxes and gas taxes are specifically NOT a Gebühr.

I very much meant what I said: Taxes do not go into the same huge pot from which they are distributed some taxes go to the federal governments pot, others to the states, yet others to the city/local council (Einkommenssteuer and Gewerbesteuer for example). There is some redistribution happening, but it’s pretty specific (Länderfinanzausgleich, the federal government pays for some costs which are handled by the local governments). So while taxes are not bound to a purpose, but they are bound to the part of the government they go to: Federal taxes go to the Bundeshaushalt, which pays for the Bundesstraßen and Bundesautobahnen (hence the name) and since all other roads are not paid by the federal government - this they can’t be paid for by federal taxes (among them the KFZ-Steuer)

In America we have state and federal fuel taxes (per gallon) collected at the pump. Almost all of the federal tax is sent back to the states in the form of interstate highway money (and is used as a carrot/whip to impose federal regulations on states). In Illinois' case the fuel tax is supposed to go to maintaining and improving roads but, like any big pot of money, it is frequently diverted to the general fund and/or maintaining Chicago's transit system (much to the chagrin of the rest of the citizens of the state).

At this point unmaintained roads are the least of Illinois' concerns. The state has massively underfunded state pensions combined with a fleeing and aging population that probably means some for of bankruptcy protection in the not so distant future. Before that happens all available money will be used to fund pension payouts due to how politics works in Illinois and the roads will start looking like a set of a Mad Max movie.

Source: I was born and raised in Illinois (~40 miles from Galesburg) and most of my family still lives there.

> it is frequently diverted to the general fund and/or maintaining Chicago's transit system (much to the chagrin of the rest of the citizens of the state)

I don't know for sure but if it is anything like New York and upstate, I suspect you will find Chicago pays for you guys much more than you think. I think it is almost guaranteed that overa Chicago pays for you and not the other way around, the only question is magnitude.

In any case, diverting money from road construction to public transit is a good thing.

In the United States there is a gas tax but it hasn’t been adjusted for a long time and pays less than half of the cost of the roads. EVs are also becoming a factor so what I’d like would be an annual tax based on the combination of vehicle weight & pollution, especially since the comically large vehicles a lot of solo office commuters use take up enough space to prevent many roads from handling two lanes of traffic without someone pulling over to the side.

The other big factor we have is that there’s a lot of soft subsidy built in with things like minimum parking requirements, and a lot of both road and parking infrastructure is paid for by developers when first constructed but falls back to the city or private owners for maintenance. That will only make the current imbalance worse over time.

A very interesting thing I learned once is that road damage occurs at the 4th power of the weight. Every doubling of weight is 16 times more road damage. This drove home how much the road damage is probably almost all large trucks.

> The math works out that an empty 18-wheeler causes 80,000 times more damage than my plug-in. When it’s fully loaded, it causes 208,000 time more damage. Both reports conclude that heavy trucks cause over 99 percent of the road and bridge damage, yet the trucking industry contributes only 35 percent of the road taxes.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Wear-and-tear-on-the-roads-23...

Buttigieg was pushing a vehicle mileage tax (VMT) based on how much you drive.

Eliminate the gas tax, just charge directly based on the amount of road use.

Saying it is funded through some tax misses the point. Yes, of course it is, but that's a bunch of resources diverted to maintaining roads.

I wonder if this is due to the cost of materials, or the cost of local labour.

Others have said that the $350,000 is reasonable - but let me point out that there can be a wide range of "2-line roads", even in a small area (so same cost of labor, gravel, concrete or asphalt, etc.).

Some rural "2-lane roads" are two barely-wide-enough lanes for vehicles, with no shoulders, no curbs, and drainage ditches (so no buried storm sewers or anything). Curves can be sharp, grades steep, and blind summits frequent. Bridges may be 1 lane wide, or have weight limits.

Vs. "2-lane road" in even a modest little city often implies pavement wide enough to park on one or both sides of the 2 traffic lanes, and a load of other expensive upgrades. I'd not be a bit surprised if the cost per mile of that was 2x to 5x the cost of a bare-minimum rural 2-lane (paved) road.

> As a town we are essentially a fixed plot of land cultivating a crop of buildings which we tax to fund our corporation

This is a very interesting point of view that I have not seen anywhere else. However it omits side-effects that buildings have on citizens other than taxes, e.g. hospitals improve health, universities improve human capital of citizens, factories create network effects with respect to suppliers and retailers, etc. A healthier and more educated workforce will be more productive and a healthier business network will add more value generating more sales taxes and increasing property value.

The analogy has limits, but it's a useful framing when you're dealing with finances like this.

Yeah I was just thinking about that. Basically, using business terms, those things you mentioned should be thought of as liabilities. Maybe it's not the perfect analogy, but if everything can somewhat be captured or at least get within the right order of magnitude, I think it could maybe help guide decisions towards creating the optimal density.

You can charge for the presence of the hospital through a land value tax.

It's a good strategy when you're playing SimCity but the real world doesn't work that way. The major costs of government, as the article's pie chart clearly shows, are services to people. And in the real world dense cities spend more on services per person than rural areas.

It's just the fundamental misconception that underlies all these sorts of articles. Land doesn't pay taxes and land doesn't really consume resources. People do.

And it's usually even simpler than that. Most property taxes go to education, which is usually a higher cost per student in cities (for often worse outcomes). And a decent chunk of the balance is police and fire.

Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

Thank you. It does have a touch of "Practical Engineering" by Grady Hillhouse, but just focused on Cities and without the Engineering part. In terms of information quality and tone.

The damage inflicted onto roads by vehicles goes up by the fourth power of the vehicles weight. So, should average citizens be on the hook for most road repairs, or should those who utilize extremely heavy trucks?

Furthermore, as society progresses, we're not going to need so many roads. Either we'll technologically eclipse them, or sociologically we'll reorient our society towards walking and biking. I don't see us having nearly the amount of road maintenance in future as we do now.

> So, should average citizens be on the hook for most road repairs, or should those who utilize extremely heavy trucks?

You can scapegoat the trucks, but average citizens are utilizing heavy trucks (indirectly) by buying stuff on Amazon or Walmart (to name a few examples).

People who don't drive any vehicle take advantage of that. So it's small vehicle drivers subsidizing [via fuel tax] those who don't drive at all, yet take advantage of shipping via heavy truck.

Why preserve the opacity of that relationship? Tax trucks higher, and it will reflect in the prices of the products those trucks are hauling, fairly distributing the cost increase of their operation across the consumers of those products.

We absolutely should tax goods and services based on the negative externalities they impose. Taxing vehicles by weight is a fair tax, much more fair than doing the _exact_ opposite right now, work trucks being taxed less. Heavy vehicles used productively will remain, but spending on heavy vehicles for recreation will be less attractive, since that kind of use consumers balance against other discriminatory spending.

True, but average citizens don't _choose_ to use heavy trucks. I'm not sure of the relative costs of road repair v. fuel, but if you funded roads entirely through a tax on the fourth power of vehicle weight (if that's the right proxy for repair costs incurred), Walmart might find they could reduce total costs in the system by using fewer large trucks and shift their logistics mix.

It is pretty easy to exhibit residential streets that do not take truck traffic, and yet are in dire need of repair.

Even an unused or barely used street suffers from a freeze thaw cycle.

In Amsterdam, the tax laws were based on the number of feet (or meters) of street frontage. Hence even long ago houses in Amsterdam tended to go up rather than out. (I don't have a reference for this so it may not be completely correct). Clearly tax laws should focus on frontage, but even more they should focus on the long term costs of the city to provide the infrastructure.

Quick question: who collects the taxes? Is it the local government or the central government?

I suspect we need to take property taxes away from the local government to the federal government in the US so businesses cannot pressure local governments to give them a handout for opening their business there.

>>Clearly tax laws should focus on frontage,

That really doesn't make any sense at all imo; if you have a flag lot, i.e. a small amount of frontage with a 100 acres behind it accessed by the 200'ft of road frontage, shouldn't that be taxed higher than someone with a 1/4 lot also with 200' of frontage?

I object to the current state of property taxes altogether - seen too many people (in some areas) that buy a house live in in for 30 years, pay off their mortgage and are forced to sell it because all of a sudden the property taxes are $40K/year. Doesn't seem right to me.

IMO, taxing people on income is much fairer - by definition as you income goes up, you can afford to pay more - but having a house that you live in go up in value really doesn't give you more ability to pay the tax bill, and we shouldn't be in the business of taxing people out of their houses.

2nd, 3rd, 4th houses - ok in that cases, but a person living in their only house shouldn't be forced to sell it just because it went up in value.

> taxing people on income is much fairer - by definition as you income goes up, you can afford to pay more

It's fairer in that sense, but it's not fairer in the sense of who gets the benefits from the taxes. Suppose the government constructs a transit line from income taxes. Then, the property values (and rents) near the transit line go up. So the renters in that neighbourhood essentially end up paying twice: once through their income taxes, and once through the increase in the rents they pay. On the other hand, the landowners (both landlords and owner-occupiers) essentially get "free" wealth. That doesn't seem very fair to me.

Fundamentally, property values go up when the neighbourhood becomes more desirable. But the desirability comes from the actions of the community as a whole, not just the landowner. Property tax is a way for the community as a whole to reclaim (some of) the wealth that comes from that desirability.

> but a person living in their only house shouldn't be forced to sell it just because it went up in value.

There's a relatively easy fix for that: allow them to defer the property tax to death or when they sell the property. So they still get to live there, but when they leave, they can pay for the taxes from the profits from the sale.

If we think that it's unacceptable for people to have to pay extra for when their house goes up in value, why do we think it's acceptable for them to profit from it?

That seems way more sensible than what we have the US and is more akin to the “land tax” system that’s talked about a lot here. The property tax scheme we use in the US only “works” as long as the city is growing. The moment the population stagnates or starts declining, the city rapidly becomes unsustainable and must rely on funds from the state or federal government to pay for basic maintenance and services.

IMO, land tax usually refers to a Georgist land value tax. That certainly would increase taxes for underdeveloped, large plots.

I do wonder though if it's fair to expect people who live in high-density areas to pay for the lifestyle of people who want to get away from society. I wish we could have a true land tax that's fairly high and identical regardless where the land is. Sprawl has a lot of negative externalities; financial for city and states as well as environmental.

In some countries you have to pay for the road maintenance and development along your plots.

That can lead to other absurdities, that a field owner along an agricultural road has suddenly to pay for make over and street lights that add zero value to their field.

A solution could be a more federal approach. Residents of the neighborhood have to decide how their taxes are used for maintenance. And they would directly feel the lack of taxes for maintenance.

That solution feels like it needs refinement...

- In a commercial / industrial district (taxpaying companies, but no residents), do those taxpayers decide?

- Is the "Residents...have to decide" voting weighed by how much each one is paying? It seems reasonable for Walmart to have a bigger say than any of the little stores & restaurants across the street from Walmart.

- Is there some "I don't need" opt-out? A farmer growing 640 acres of corn across the road from Walmart probably doesn't even need the road to exist - the dirt roads along the other 3 sides of his field are good enough for tractors.

Other than a hospital, schools and big box retail, what is the economic "engine" attracting new homeowners? Big box retail was the place to spend the cash, but what is the source of "earn the cash"? Illinois is a top state for "fleeing" citizens.

Maytag used to have a refrigerator manufacturing facility in Galesburg, which moved to Mexico around the turn of the aughts, and incurred a loss of thousands of jobs. Usual NAFTA hollowing out of middle America story.

Can’t be a strong town when you’re a dying town.

https://www.peoriamagazines.com/ibi/2015/mar/galesburg-after...

A private liberal arts college, 1200 students:

https://www.knox.edu/about-knox/fast-facts

Festivals in the historic district downtown:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galesburg_Historic_District

Doesn't seem like enough.

And note this:

> Walmart builds their buildings to last only 15-20 years and then builds a new facility. We are in year 15 of our Walmart, so they are exploring their next rebuild. If Walmart leaves its current location ...

BNSF Railway has a major classification yard in Galesburg. Just like other railroads, they use their Chicago yard for intermodal traffic (loading containers from the trains onto trucks and vice versa), and use a nearby yard outside of Chicago to manage general traffic.

According to the Knox County Area Partnership [1], the largest employers in Knox County (of which Galesburg is the urban center) are BNSF, the hospital, the schools, Knox College, Blick Art Materials, Gates Corporation, the local government, and the prison.

It's fairly common for small US towns to have the local health system, local school system, and Walmart (or the local grocery store) as the largest employers. Galesburg is more fortunate and is more like a typical midwest town, with a handful of manufacturers and warehousing-type jobs that exceed the standard rural fare, and a college also.

[1] https://www.knoxpartnership.com/top-employers/

Agrigulture and federally funded/entitled raikroads built the patchwork of dmall towns in the early/mid 1800s. Starting in the 1940s those things began disappearing.

New homeowners are either local kids or retired people bringing their retirement money to lower cost of living areas.

Forgot about terraforming Mars; we need to terraform Illinois. The weather makes it a great place to be from. The scenery is also seriously lacking, except maybe on the western borders and the southern part, where hardly anyone lives.

Aside from that, you have the permanently toxic politics.

Don't come at me; I used to live there.

This is a general statement about smaller towns in general: I also think that the fact that the US birth rate is falling (for a myriad of reasons) is partly to blame. Not that the author can do anything in particular about it but it's a problem we must face as a society

Yeah, the author's video shows a hustling bustling main street with children running around. Today, the children are half as numerous, and they're all inside to be sheltered from the lethal traffic that they could run into.

I have many acquaintances who won't procreate for economic or climate reasons. I totally get that, however if everyone chose that path, there'd be no more human race, other than the occasional accidental child. That would lead to demographic collapse, the aging populace wouldn't have anyone to support their wants and needs. Not a good outcome.

An easy solution is to just not build roads for new developments. If a private interest wants to establish a new development they should pay for it all. The market will magically include all the costs in the final product (buildings/homes) and no one will be out a dime involuntarily. Things will cost what they actually cost.

Some would counter that this isn’t how economic development works. Arguments would be things like businesses need incentives or the city is responsible for common infrastructure.

The problem is that roads just become a form of corporate welfare. If a enterprise or business doesn’t want to fully invest in its new location, IMHO, it is not worth it and you need to face the fact that your town just isn’t ready for it yet.

I have never heard of Galesburg but I found this analysis riveting. Somehow it was more informative to me than the Strong Towns posts.

I suspect you can extend this analysis to the country at large. The national budget suffers from the same imbalance.

"Why Galesburg has no money" never even suggests that Galesburg has no money. Not only that, but it never tells us anything about the actual financial shape of this town. Is Galesburg running in the red? It's not easy to tell from searching. It's a 30k person town, so that doesn't really surprise me.

I don't really understand why road maintenance is the huge problem Strong Towns thinks it is. The Urban Institute says that roads and highways account for about 5% of spending by state and local governments [1].

I agree that development in an urban core is way better than sprawl, but I don't think road costs are the big issue. Quality of life and being able to walk to stuff seems a lot more important, and honestly if you want to save some money in a municipality, you should start looking at stuff like correction expenditures which have increased by over 350% since the late 70s [2].

[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

[2] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Roads don’t have to be the biggest infrastructure cost in order for the argument to hold. You can say “this proposed development is financially unsustainable, it can’t even pay for its own roads, let alone all the other services it uses!” It’s helpful to have a simple heuristic like that to explain to non-experts why a project doesn’t make sense.

I remember about 8 years ago I read a very interesting report (Bloomberg?) that said basically over 50% of American cities have overbuilt highly inefficient infrastructure and cannot even by greatly raising taxes continue to maintain them. I think it called them zombie cities or something like that.

The only choice for the distant suburbs will be to come up with some sort of self sustaining infrastructure (old farmhouse style) or abandon the suburbs and move closer to the city.

The prime example of overbuilt highly inefficient (and unsafe) infrastructure that comes to mind for me is the "Stroad"[0]; it's somewhat like a comment that Elon Musk made about optimising something that shouldn't be there.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

This is very clearly laid out writing - props!

Only suggestion is to add 1 more option for the town: pass the cost of excess road maintenance to the owner of the land where the road goes. At the end of the day, I don't particularly mind if Walmart/the mall want wastefully gigantic lots, so long as they pay for their privilege. The issue is not enjoying the luxury of space, but saddling other people will the bill for it.

If these large plots were required to pay extra taxes (much like your "downtown special tax") their property values would be lower, and the corporations would take that extra cost into mind before setting up business. That might result in them concluding "people really like driving to the mall because it's so much easier to haul back a bunch of stuff... we'll pay for the extra roads!", or "gee we really should condense into that old building downtown."

Both would be sustainable for the city, and the free giveaway to rural / low density areas would end. That's all that's required... no extra subsidies, no extra penalties. Just aim for neutrality.

"So, what do we do? Can we just pay 3x the property tax to the city and fund our roads? Our city already has pretty high property tax rates for a city in a state that already has pretty high property taxes. We can’t raise our property taxes, and we can’t raise any of the other taxes to make up for the difference. What is causing this and what do we do going forward?"

I'd love to have property taxes this "high" - I live in a village outside a small rural city in PA and my property taxes are about four times as much as the author's taxes. The author states that they'd need to assess property taxes at 3x in order to fund their infrastructure so we'd (in theory) be ahead of our infrastructure maintenance. (Clearly this comparison isn't apples-to-apples since our properties aren't directly comparable.) I think the real answer is that if we're going to restore communities, we're going to have to pay more than we're accustomed to.

My understanding is that Illinois is in a economic death spiral wherein taxes are high enough given the quality of life that people leave the state thereby increasing the burden on those who remain l, perpetuating the cycle. Pensions are the enormous, underfunded obligation that can’t be shed outside of bankruptcy. Increasing taxes only accelerates the problem, no? Even if you could stabilize your particular city, the looming crisis for the rest of the state will still destroy you eventually as proportionally more state money goes to paying pensioners who live out of state instead of maintaining infra.

Eventually they will realize that the zoning laws are the culprit.

Until then most US urban planning will stay the sh*t show it is.

I grew up in Forgottonia, about an hour from here.

I have to say... A lot of the problem is brain drain, lack of nature and recreational activities... And the factories did leave.

Forgottonia gets its name because it missed out on a lot of economic development and was essentially bypasses by the highway system, which lead to factories moving away and the region becoming impoverished.

I am sure there are many beautiful and wonderful small communities out there, but the people have left this area and they are not coming back. The jobs are not coming back, they are not going to build more infrastructure, there is nothing notable except for cornfields and flat forest land to bring people in.

I'm sure the poor infrastructure planning did not help, but my opinion is that the problem with Burlington is that it has nothing to offer anyone anymore.

The fallacy here is fixed costs. A capital project to repair just 584 ft. of road is insane. The author then projects these outsized fixed costs as the variable cost of fixing all roads in the town.

This kind of small job is either something you petition the state dept. of transit to do in a special division they have for these things, or you find some temporary workaround until a more comprehensive road repair plan is warranted. Yes, even in big well funded cities sometimes roads are just detoured for months if not longer.

The budgetary breakdown of the towns I've lived in simply do not support this thesis. The major cost is always schools and to a lesser but noticeable extent the police, specifically the labor and pensions. Not roads.

The argument is that the cost cities are paying for the roads is less than they need to. Underfund a school by 50% and there are immediate consequences - class sizes go up, more consumable supplies like photocopying, art or gym equipment run out. Student satisfaction goes way down, if they can't heat/AC the building as appropriate, they have less personal space in classrooms and less time with teachers.

Underfund a road by 50% and in the first year and nothing happens. Over a few years, you get potholes. With the standards these roads are being built to, in 30 years the road is unusable. But there's no money to rebuild it. It was built the first time with revenue from new developments, but there's no such revenue now. People aren't going to sell their houses and give a comparable amount to the city as it took the developer in building it to setup that infrastructure (i.e. probably a net loss for the home owner, even with property price inflation ahead of general inflation) just because the road needs replacing.

The NotJustBikes YouTube video series on Strong Towns addresses this. One thing to look at is the collective cost of state tax, federal tax, and private debt. What’s true of all Ponzi schemes: eventually, someone has to pay. You can move the money around to different budgets all you want but it doesn’t change the fundamentals.

This seems to be largely focused on road maintenance and property taxes.

Are those really the only factors in that area?

I know plenty of spread out small towns that do fine with such scattered developments.

I’m also a little skeptical of “our population is shrinking, let’s build tiny houses “.

The Kensington looks to be 7 stories, .44 acres; that gives it about 134,000 sq ft. There are 171 1-bed, 1-bath units, (and apparently 2-bed units) so ~800 sq ft per apartment. Its total property tax bill is $82,000, or about $480 per apartment, or about $1.60 per sq ft. (That's a little odd, since apartments.com shows a "similar rentals nearby" 1-bed, 1-bath apartment as $450 per mo. (But it's 250 sq ft. (OTOH, The Kensington is unlikely to be entirely devoted to apartments. YMMV.)) In comparison, the author's property (.18 ac, $1693.14 per year) is about 22¢ per sq ft.

So here's my question for the author: Would you be willing to live in an 800 sq ft apartment paying 7 times more property taxes, per sq ft, or roughly 1/4 total?

(Oh, by the way, The Kensington is an assisted living facility, meaning that the residents are likely paying somewhat more than $480 per month (or at least Medicare is), which is likely why they can afford $82,000 per year in property taxes rather the Kensington being an empty building. (Trying to fill downtown with assisted living facilities is an exercise for the reader.)

"You could build 3 of these 18 foot wide houses and people would want to live in them and they’d be profitable for the city per the infrastructure needed."

Here's a collection of 18 foot wide house plans: https://houseplans.co/house-plans/search/results/?q=&am=&ax=...

And here's realtor.com on Galesburg: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Galesburg_...

* https://www.apartments.com/the-kensington-galesburg-il/qyk39...

* https://thekensington.net/index.htm

In Minnesota when improvements or repairs like roadwork are done, directly effected property owners are billed above their normal property tax.

This story explains it better than I can: https://www.twincities.com/2020/02/25/15700-street-assessmen...

work on a street with only local traffic will have a higher percentage of the project cost paid by the property owners on that street.

This seems like a way to make sure nice neighborhoods have the best maintained streets. Oddly regressive for Minnesota.

I had not thought about it from that perspective. That’s a great point.

My thinking was that it puts real costs in front of people. You see more directly what that street to your house costs.

I’ve always thought about advertising the cost of the section road you’re in costs to build, maintain, and push the snow off.

I'd agree that putting real costs in front of people is important because what people will pay for something is critical to understanding the relative value of that thing. People don't like toll roads but given there is no free lunch, the toll of other roads is just hidden.

On the other hand, I once chatted with a person who performed a large wintertime bicycle give-away in low income neighborhoods. The operation was so large that they ordered bikes directly from factories. I asked something like "why don't you put your branding on the bikes then" or something like that. The person's reply was that they didn't want the bikes to be seen as the free ones--that the bikes could be ridden without the stigma of poverty. Maybe the roads, sidewalks, bikelanes and parks in any city are likewise and the cost of them should be abstracted somewhat from the adjacent properties so that any person biking along them feels a sense of belonging.

One obvious problem is that the roads are too expensive to maintain, primarily because they are only built to last 20-30 years. Government expenditure favors employment over long lived infrastructure. Legislators favor distributing funds to contractors who may reciprocate with campaign funding.

There's no technical reason why these roads could not be put in to last far longer than 20-30 years without major repairs. Source: family member was a civil engineer specializing in road pavement and construction for many decadeds.

"With a crime rate of 40 per one thousand residents, Galesburg has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 25."

Yeah OK, Strongtowns, let's scrutinize the road budgets (~5% of the property taxes). Who wants to live in these hypothetical high density developments when you can't even be safe?

Their argument is that road budgets are a consequence of the same poor designs that lead to conditions that promote crime as well. Busy streets tend to be safer. Additionally, places that aren't economically self-sustaining drive people to property crime. All of this is addressed in the first pages of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities".

> Walmart builds their buildings to last only 15-20 years and then builds a new facility.

I'm really curious about the 15-20 year statistic that the author mentions and I was disappointed not to see a source on that claim. I couldn't find much from official sources after a quick search. That seems like an incredibly short lifespan, especially for buildings so large.

Great article nonetheless.

The claim is correct, but incomplete.

It's true that many commercial real estate developers design buildings to roughly match depreciation lifetimes, reason being, depreciation reduces tax and once your basis hits zero (the item is fully depreciated), you can't use depreciation to shield any more taxable income. The base depreciation lifetime of US commercial real estate is 39 years though, not 15-20.

The other elephant in the room is that building to last is really expensive, at least upfront. So it isn't, and perhaps shouldn't, be something we do for everything.

Every town has "forever buildings": schools, village halls, religious institutions. Places that cater to basic needs that aren't going to change. Imagine a typical "old" American school: a giant brick building, with a steam boiler, well-made doors, and thick walls. This is what "built to last" looks like. There are often ornamental features like murals on the outside walls. Ditto for churches: thick, heavy buildings with materials like marble or other stone. Old, well-made houses are the same way.

This isn't how big box stores are made. They have way more drywall, polished concrete floors (definitely not tile), cheapo sliding doors, thin walls with stucco or other flimsy materials, standardized designs that don't change based on where they are (vs. something designed specifically for the area), and giant parking lots. The entire mentality is different. These are built to last a couple decades, then get taken down, or demolished. It's actually the same with McMansions, giant 4000 square foot houses in deep suburban areas.

One other thing, read patio11's "Mortgages are a manufactured product" [1] -- CRE (buildings) is also a "manufactured" product for a lot of the same reasons, namely, there are buyers in the economy that structurally desire regular income streams (rental payments) from these buildings, and the fact that they're a Walgreens, or a Wal-Mart, or whatever else, barely even registers. The "customer" of a lot of this stuff is the pension fund / endowment that ends up holding the debt on the property, not the people or businesses that actually, you know, occupy the place day-to-day.

Source: husband of an architect, and commercial real estate owner/manager

[1] https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manufactur...

Thanks for the response, that does make more sense!

What puzzles me: if you focus on tax revenue per plot area/width, dense cities have a huge advantage - not even considering economies of scale and stuff like savings for heating/AC. And yet dense cities tend to have much higher cost of living and run huge deficits. How can this be explained?

This will sound off-topic. Not being snarky, but genuinely curious about answers:

How do you ensure equality of opportunity to all students everywhere if the quality of education they receive is tied to how wealthy their town is?

Surely, there can be a better answer for small towns.

Controlling funding for education is extremely tempting for state and national politicians. It's better handled at a local level because this way you give parents a chance at choosing the type of education students receive

The drawback is the inequality in funding

But just to give you an example of what can happen when education is funded at a state level: majority of voters could elect an oppressive regime that targets minorities, and impose a certain type of education that is detrimental to them (i.e. not in their mother tongue)

I do not see how you can replace the benefits of network effects of growing up in and around wealthy and knowledgeable people and their families. It is human nature to trust people more in your own network or close to your own network than outside of it.

If schools take most of the tax then reduce school funding. Is that crazy?

We have a similar case in my town. Schools get most of the property tax. We're paying for laptops for all the kids. Subs are making 12/hr.

Perhaps small town and exurban governments will at some point find it cheaper to purchase lifted pickup trucks for all three families in their community who don’t already have one.

There are a couple good ideas in the article my favorite is:

"As a town we are essentially a fixed plot of land cultivating a crop of buildings which we tax to fund our [town]."

But myopic statements like "We can’t raise our property taxes, and we can’t raise any of the other taxes to make up for the difference." just strike at the heart of American self defeating ideologies.

Also the statement "By being incorporated, our town is essentially a corporation where the citizens are the investors and stakeholders in the business that is Galesburg Inc." is deeply misinformed. It's like saying "We have some strawberry jam so we should us it to hold open this door because it's a jam."

The real answer is that young people move to Peoria so they can get a job.

It's not just that people took advantage of cars to build houses with bigger yards further from where they did their shopping on Main Street, or even that they switched to doing their shopping at the Walmart out on the fringes; it's also that they took advantage of cars to leave their houses where they were and do their shopping in Peoria. They mostly couldn't do that in 01912, even if they did have a Ford. In 01912 nearby farmers would go to Galesburg to do their shopping and ship their corn by rail; now the farmers have mostly been replaced by tractors, and the remaining farmers can just as well drive their pickup to Davenport, an hour away on I-74, for the wider selection. Or order from Amazon.

The article focuses a bit on property tax rates and tax assessments, but those are sort of a distraction, because they just have to do with how the paying of the costs is distributed. The problem is not that Galesburg is full of fat cats not paying their fair share to maintain common infrastructure, or that it's some kind of tax haven where everything well-maintained is privatized. (To be fair, the article does explain this.) The problem is that people in Galesburg are poor, because the economy left, so they can't afford to maintain the infrastructure they're using. An extra US$1200 per family per year to maintain the roads wouldn't be a significant burden in a place with a prosperous economy.

Shrinking that infrastructure by redirecting development to downtown is one way to accommodate that reality, but it will probably just accelerate Galesburg's decline. The reason kids aren't playing in Main Street anymore is that it's US Highway 150, full of cars, truck exhaust, truck noise, and speeding trucks. In 01912 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgucvsVEigA it was full of horse-drawn carriages with the occasional Ford or streetcar, and no trucks. If you give up your "big houses with big yards out on the edge of town" to move to downtown Galesburg, you aren't going to get a street where you can have a pleasant stroll down the middle of Main Street for relaxation. You're going to get semis honking air horns at you if you try it.

Downtown business districts are primarily about information delivery. The reason that commercial real estate is valued by "location, location, location" is that people will buy from your store if they see it when they walk by, and they won't if they don't. If you're selling your stuff on Amazon, MercadoLibre, Etsy, or eBay, there's no benefit to having big plate glass windows in a high-pedestrian-traffic area; you might as well be in a warehouse out on the edge of town or on the 7th floor of an apartment building. But if you're near FedEx's national air distribution hub, you might have a significant advantage.

In the particular case of roads, Galesburg would be able to afford road maintenance if the roads were used by pedestrians, bicycles, four-wheelers, or maybe even cars, but when they're used by SUVs and semis, they get potholes pretty quickly. But truck driving is one of the few decent jobs left in Galesburg, so you can't just ban it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galesburg,_Illinois#Demographi... shows how Galesburg has been slowly shrinking since 01970.

Apparently fire codes don’t exist in this dudes mind.

I don't know in what kind of fantasy world you live in.

Pretty much everywhere the dominating trend is people moving to cities in droves while the countryside degrades, because it cannot provide the services people want.

Can you name any city that has "irretrievably collapsed" in that way? Just one?

> Pretty much everywhere

Um, no. If you mean "moving to blue cities" no, that is not the trend. Just the opposite, in fact.

As for "can you name any city": Sure. How about Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Camden, Baltimore, Akron, Hartford, Flint, Cairo, St. Louis, East St. Louis for starters?

Newark and the adjacent Jersey City and Kearny have seen a lot of development in the past decade, new high rises, and new shops.

> If you mean "moving to blue cities" no,

I mean "moving to cities", period.

> that is not the trend. Just the opposite, in fact.

Source, please.

> Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Camden, Baltimore, Akron, Hartford, Flint, Cairo, St. Louis, East St. Louis for starters?

Don't have the time to debunk every single one of those, but the first three are absolutely not examples of the claims "The people running the cities run them into the ground by applying more and more gold plating to the services they provide" or even "People move out of cities because they do not feel safe, and the services suck."

Those cities experienced decline due to deindustrialization: the over-reliance on certain manufacturing industries like steel and automotive to provide jobs, which were lost to international competition. People moved away because they could not find work.

Nor are those cities examples of "it all collapses and is irretrievable" - the population of Newark and Cleveland has plateaued since the 1990s and is now seeing slight increases. And even Detroit has seen a continuous decrease of poverty and crime rates in the last 10 years.

> Source, please.

> Pretty much everywhere...

I don't really want to get into it, but I felt compelled to point out that the crux of your point is entirely anecdotal and source free and you're demanding sources from the rebuttal.

I can tell you about St Louis. The metro area keeps growing, albeit slowly. The city isn't, and it's been in trouble for decades. The main secret here, and what makes St Louis top lists of crime, is that the city itself is quite small compared to the metro area itself, which makes comparisons with unified metros be anything but apples to apples. This separation is also key when it comes to the failure of the city's government.

St Louis city was separated from the county in 1876. Describing the full details would take forever, but even back then, the issues were clear: The issue is the city carrying costs, while suburbs get the benefits. This is still true today: The metro area is now made of dozens of municipalities, each of trying to have lower property taxes than their neighbors, while trying to beef up their economics via sales taxes, which are paid by people that are often outside of that municipality. No suburb has property taxes that cover their costs: This is why we have unincorporated land, as absorbing it would be negative to the bottom line. This is also why there's such a high pressure on police as a form of revenue: As highways were built in ways that gave small sections to many municipalities, so they could raise money from people that just pass through.

The city has been badly mismanaged: Its redevelopment, not unlike that of most US cities, has been mostly for the pleasure of suburbanites that might work there. Wide, fast streets that are about as pedestrian unfriendly as you can get, over 30% of downtown space dedicated to surface parking or buildings solely dedicated to parking, green areas that are overly large, and office buildings with no commercial real estate in the first floor, there's really no reason to spend a second walking the streets, barring a few very narrow bar areas. Every single thing that makes the suburbanite worker's life easier also makes living near downtown worse, which is why few people live downtown.

There are a couple of areas, further from downtown but still within the city limits, that are doing relatively well: They are the ones that have narrow, streets, relatively well mixed zoning by US standards, and where real estate prices are moving up. Decent dense urbanism leads to working businesses. Still, everyone needs a car, because outside of said small enclaves, it's really hard to move without one. There's also the schooling problem: In practice the affluent in St louis have abandoned the public school system, and just have private schools for whatever preferences you wish. High academic standards, diversity-focused, aiming at ivy league universities? Yep! Traditional, gender segregated religious schools, teaching "traditional values", no problem. Your school can be 95% white, 70% asian, 99% black... just don't expect a usable public education unless the average house in your district is $400k.

I've lived here for over 20 years, and compared to even declining cities in Europe, what is so amazing is how fragile the economic network is, how little you can access if you walk a mile from your house. Even today, it sure seems that development decisions are made thinking of the people that live in a neighboring municipality, instead of local residents.

So what is killing St Louis City, other than mismanagement? That a small army of little suburbs are doing their best to capture its tax dollars, while taking advantage of its services.

Would you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Comments like this are not ok on HN—name-calling ("fantasy world") and cross-examination ("Can you? Just one?") are explicitly against the site guidelines.

We've had to ask you not to do this before. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957522.

I listened to their radio station for a while, it was all Jesus and God. This is why they have no money.

bigoted much?

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