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Comment by arberx | Hacker News Reader

Curious how this scales; I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't.

People want quality public infra, but don't want to pay taxes. Sounds like a losing battle to me.

What usually happens is taxes are shoved into other areas of your life (property, sales).

You know what Florida has besides taxes? User fees. You can take a brand-new highway here and it'll be a toll road, which means you're the one paying for it, not unrelated taxpayers around the state. You can even finance the construction with private-public partnerships tied to the specific project's success. And because people pay for this infrastructure, it discourages frivolous uses, like the induced demand of overbuilding in the exurbs.

It also means poor people can’t use the infrastructure

That was likely used as a selling point :/

That's just a regressive tax that disproportionately hurts lower-income folks the most.

I'm so tired of this "I got mine, so fuck you" attitude many people have. If you're wealthy, you probably got there via inheritance, luck, or on the backs and shoulders of the hard work of others. And yet "I won't do my part to pay for basic infrastructure where I live" is the attitude.

If that’s a regressive tax on the poor, then so are “groceries” and “housing”.

Yes, increasing costs of necessities is regressive. Charging everyone the same fee costs poor people a larger percentage of their income.

> A regressive tax is a tax applied uniformly, taking a larger percentage of income from low-income earners than from high-income earners.

> You can even finance the construction with private-public partnerships tied to the specific project's success. And because people pay for this infrastructure, it discourages frivolous uses, like the induced demand of overbuilding in the exurbs.

This is a tangent, but I want to note the irony of listing this as a "pro": when the topic of public transport comes up on HN, a standard observation is that exactly this model failed and left local governments saddled with expensive, debt-laden streetcars and subways. The end result: we spent 50 years tearing up useful pieces of civic infrastructure because the root financing was fundamentally unsound.

Private financing schemes have an uncanny ability to sniff out the government's ability and willingness to catch the falling knife.

Any good references I could use to read more about this?

The General Motors streetcar conspiracy page on Wikipedia has some references to other factors[1].

Note: I'm linking this not to claim that the conspiracy is real, only because it has useful references.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Sounds like that will work for something things but not for others.

Public libraries and schools would not benefit from this as more affluent areas can support better education. This is already the case in many places in the US. Local property taxes support school funding.

> People want quality public infra, but don't want to pay taxes. Sounds like a losing battle to me.

A lot of people don't really want quality public infra. If they can pay for their own needs themselves, in their gated communities etc., they would rather do that than pay taxes. The people described in this article are wealthy. They want quality private infra.

> If they can pay for their own needs themselves, in their gated communities etc.

That kind of sounds like California. Crime is so rampant that when I was searching for apartments, these large complexes resemble castles. Heavily fortified and there is a courtyard inside where children can play and families can hang out.

Not sure where in CA you were looking, but I very rarely see anything like that in SF or the bay area (outside of weird enclaves like Atherton, but I wouldn't go there if you paid me). Courtyards, sure, but I think you're imagining a weird, nefarious spin to them when there isn't any.

In SF Bay Area. East bay (Oakland), South bay (Fremont, SJC) and San Mateo Area.

When I was searching for a place, basically every single apartment complex felt like a castle.

Not being nefarious, have no interest in it. You’re more than welcome to check for yourself.

Those courtyard-style apartments don't exist because of crime. They exist because it's nice to have a courtyard.

Most apartments in the Bay Area have no outdoor space other than a balcony or a small piece of land on the ground floor about the size of the balconies above. Many don't even have that.

Florida does indeed lean on property and sales taxes. You can even build good infrastructure that way.

>You can even build good infrastructure that way.

Yeah, but Florida doesn't, really.

I don't live there, and don't really have a particular ax to grind here but it looks like Miami is building a lot of flood control infrastructure pretty quickly.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're leveraging federal funds for that, or at least for a big part of it.

It looks like a lot of those projects are split in funding between the state and federal government for initial build and the counties are issuing bonds to fund maintenance.

I live here. Miami is not building a lot of flood control infrastructure. Just a few diesel water pumps in tonier parts of town to keep the king tides at bay. The lifted truck/SUV is almost a requirement in the long term. After watching a row of cards flood out on our main street, Biscayne, you want something that drives high and dry.

It seems like there's a bunch of coastline restoration and mangrove planting happening as well. Has that not started in earnest?

Miami Beach is making a valiant attempt. That city has been working on massive climate change projects for some time. We’ll see if it pays off.

Miami is a basket case. The city commission held a vote to remove mangroves from the park because they were blocking the view. LOL. Just massive political incompetence.

A rising tide drowns all cooks

The flood control infrastructure in Miami Beach is to keep the plates spinning a little while longer. Long term, it's underwater.

I don't see why it couldn't be protected like Amsterdam which is ~6.5' below sea level. Miami for trade and finance purposes is the Amsterdam of the Caribbean and northern chunk of South America and Central America.

Amsterdam has the famous dykes, but Miami is built on limestone so sea walls do not work.

Yeah I didn't mean using the exact same approach. They'll probably have to do things like building artificial reefs, planting mangroves, raising buildings/roads, and maybe something like Tokyo's giant cisterns. In the end it may not work but it seems like it's worth trying for a few decades.

Roads are nice in my experience

The roads in Florida are freaking fantastic and pristine almost everywhere. I moved to Seattle ~5 years ago and I still can't get over the fact that the roads are pot holed pieces of crap in a constant state of disrepair. We can't even get white divider lines painted reliably in the downtown core. I don't know where all the tax money goes.

However, the downside of those glorious Florida roads is that, well, you need them at all. Everything is sooooooo spread out and flat. I forget until I go back and visit just how far away everything is from everything else. Going to something "just up the road" is a 15-20 minute drive.

The roads in Florida are nice because they don't go through the freeze thaw cycle in winter.

Why they are not nice in California then?

One imagines there are differences in the abilities of various governments to deliver projects. I’ve read that most of California’s projects go to a handful of contractors with poor records.

So could it be the reason roads are nice in Florida is not the lack of winter freeze but the ability of its government to govern?

The American Society of Civil Engineers rates Florida's infrastructure as a C. Compare that to California at a C-, New York at C, and America as a whole at C-.

https://infrastructurereportcard.org/state-by-state-infrastr...

They seem to be a lobby group for more infrastructure investment, but they don't see Florida as worse than other states.

How useful of a metric is this if, literally, a majority of states have a C grade?

It could be interesting to look at tax burden including HOA fees. With enough HNW residents, gated communities can support good private infrastructure.

It's not mutually exclusive. Tax money is being wasted left and right, people don't want to pay even more taxes to account for the incompetence that's happening.

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