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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

Most suburbs are already net negative funding sinks for the cities nearest them. I wonder how much worse it's going to be in the aftermath of this trend.

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I don’t know where people get this notion. It’s obviously not true except for a handful of cities. Most cities, like Baltimore or Newark, are fighting to annex the affluent suburbs around them.

Yes. The affluent ones. But most suburbs are not affluent.

Many of those suburbs mostly exist as a way to hoard wealth; high earners depend upon the city in order to gain their income and wealth, but use small enclaves to make sure their taxes do not get shared evenly.

So in that sense, they are net negatives in that they cause greater inequality. And inequality lessens the economic efficiency of capitalism and markets.

Just like any business if you want a kid to get a good education, live in a school district that is growing.

Exactly. In Austin, there are the "cities" of Westlake Hills, Rollingwood and Sunset Valley, each with a couple hundred to a few thousand people, that exist just so their residents can take advantage of all Austin has to offer without actually paying for it. Sunset Valley is a neighborhood of just over a square mile that is completely enclosed by Austin.

Wow I just looked up Sunset Valley, population 700 and a median household income almost double that of Austin. They get fire, EMT and education services from the larger Austin area, but provide their own municipal police. Obviously all this requires a mayor and 5 city council members to manage.

There is even an enclave within the enclave that carves out a single medium density housing complex. Can't have the unwashed masses using any of THEIR community resources.

They outsource and pay for the Fire and EMT services they receive, not sure on education but would stand to reason that it is passed through as well.

https://www.sunsetvalley.org/home/showpublisheddocument/8/63...

Take Silicon Valley as an example. What exactly does San Francisco offer to the valley? The tech industry developed in the suburbs and the city later got the benefits. Northern VA and DC have a similar relationship. Virginia did all the investment to attract tech companies to the area; DC is getting the benefits because young people enjoy living in the city. In the DC metro area, most of the GDP base is outside the city. Same for Atlanta.

Some cities, typically pre-war ones, are an exception, like New York or Chicago. But many pre-war cities (Baltimore, Philly, etc.) are carried by their surrounding suburbs.

>Virginia did all the investment to attract tech companies to the area

Aren't these tech companies all there to do government services contracting? Seems more like DC is providing industry / jobs to Virginia

No. And you can’t credit the federal government to DC, as the federal tax base and governance is almost wholly distinct from the municipal one. Say Rockwell builds an office in Reston because of good Virginia schools and the availability of Virginia Tech and UVA grads. Virginia builds the roads that get workers there, and the schools for the workers kids. If the office works on a federal contract, the Pentagon awards it (which is in Virginia) and the taxes that pay for it come from Michigan and California. DC doesn’t have any involvement, other than being the metaphysical locus of the federal government.

Silicon Valley was founded on defense contracts, so you are correct that the peninsula suburbs is not exist as ways to hoard wealth gained from a larger city. But Silicon Valley is very unique in that regard compared to the rest of the US.

Don't worry. I'm sure even the people hoarding wealth in affluent cities are still paying 40% of their income to fund rent seekers and their mandatory services.

They're fighting to annex them because they consume disproportionate resources, by concentrating the tax base in places that aren't required to pay into the city school system. It's not a subtle effect.

If they don’t send their kids to the city school system, why should they be expected to send their school tax dollars there?

The answer to this question is the same as "if parents in Lincoln Park (wealthy neighborhood) don't send their kids to school in Lawndale (poor neighborhood), why should they have to send their tax dollars there". The cities would make the argument that Oak Park and Evanston (wealthy suburbs adjacent to Chicago) are really just de facto private school systems, and should be folded into the city's school system.

The answer to the question boils down, deeper, to the question "if parents pay (taxes) for education, do they get to receive quality education in return", and even more controversial "and if they choose different education, do they get to to use those dollars".

I have 3 kids. I am pretty wealthy, even though people richer than me complain on this site about money. I do not have enough dollars to give my kids private schooling. At that point it is very disappointing to read schools consume 42000 per kid on average, per year. With that money, I could give all 3 kids a full private education, easy.

Meanwhile I have regular conflicts with teachers, that tend to boil down to 3 things: the kids have been seriously unfairly treated and eventually reacted strongly (although all 3 are girls, they do fighting sport for a long time), they were confronted with drugs (this is when I get mad at schools. Yes, we're talking primary school), or what the teachers are telling them is obvious bullshit, clear even to them (for example, one conflict was about Madagascar being in Italy). The teachers and the school treat us as enemies (with a few, very nice, much older, exceptions). They have called youth services on us, because of what we eventually found out are financial reasons (for them).

Meanwhile it is getting worse every year, by a lot. Most recently, parent teacher conferences are now only in group (meaning all parents that care to come at once), ONCE a year.

I am half tempted to ask my kids to beat up some random kid just so we'd actually be able to have a talk with a teacher ABOUT OUR KID. JUST ONCE. (again, with 2 very big exceptions that are individual teachers doing better)

Point is, the education in this school is bad ... and getting worse all the time. Homeschooling, of course, is not allowed here.

So I, as a parent, have a huge problem: 1) I cannot give my kids quality education, just don't have the money 2) I pay MORE for the bad education they get than I would pay for private education 3) There is an extreme discrepancy in the quality of education for my kids (one of those positive individual exceptional teachers is the teacher of ONE of my daughters) 4) I am treated as the enemy for bringing up very reasonable problems 5) I am treaded as the enemy by school management since I suggested one of our daughters be changed classes because she has the worst teacher 6) one teacher hates my daughter ... because I demand she get some real education after hours (mostly Khan academy)

FIVE, I have a dilemma. The private school has offered a scholarship for my eldest daughter, which the other ones probably won't get (doesn't make it free). Do I give her this opportunity, knowing I can't replicate it for my other kids, or do I deny it to her?

Baltimore is unique in that it is the largest independent city. It is not part of the county and therefore the city lines are very firm. Right across the city line is Towson a city of approximately 60,000. In any other area it would be part of the city.

Because of that by living outside of the zone they cannot attend those schools so they are not consuming local education dollars.

The whole point of being outside of the district is not having to attend the district's schools.

Literally turned down a job/relocation to Baltimore area because best proximity to the office meant my kids would likely have to be part of the Baltimore city school district and folks I knew from the area warned me about it’s challenges.

I could have moved outward and away into more rural Maryland, but then that would create a 90+ minute commute each way.

Sure. And this situation, repeated tens of thousands of times a year, is why the Baltimore city schools are so problematic. I'm not high-horsing you; I did the same thing with my kids. It was an amoral thing to do, but I did it anyways.

I feel like we’re talking past each other in what OP’s term “negative funding sinks” means. I took that to mean cities where the residents pay more than their share for infrastructure and services that benefit the larger metro region. So NYC would qualify, but Sam Francisco wouldn’t.

They are parroting the Strongtown opinion pieces.

Shouldn't cities subsidize suburbs? I genuinely don't know the breakdown but when I was a kid and living in the suburbs I remember most of the adults around me commuting into the cities. I live in NY right now and rent prices are basically unlivable for most people so I find it hard to believe most workers don't commute in now as well. At that point subsidizing suburbs is basically required to support the workers who generate all the money for the city, it strikes me as symbiotic.

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