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Comment by beowulfey | Hacker News Reader

What kind of resources do you mean? They still have to heat and power their homes, so it still “consumes resources”. Unless you are talking about buying local groceries or something.

Propery taxes are the same in NH whether someone lives there full time or not, so it doesn’t matter that they aren’t there and would be equally valuable if they did live full time. The traffic argument is the only one I can see being true, except that traffic in the seacoast is awful already anyway with tourists driving back and forth to Maine.

Personally, I think having permanent residents is far better for a town than a graveyard of empty soulless homes, but I’m just a regular human being and I’m sure its just a matter of opinion at that point.

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Utilities are paid for by use, so that's not really relevant to municipal finances. Even still, the power and water use of an unoccupied residence is obviously much lower than an occupied one.

Property taxes pay for municipal services like parks, schools, and police. The rest of the town's residents get better versions of those than they could afford otherwise. This isn't a very complex idea, regardless of whether you think the town would be better off with more people living within it full-time.

Yes but my point is that for an equally valuable house the property tax contributes equally to those resources whether they live there or not, but I can’t imagine the burden of someone living full time in a house of that value is very high on such resources. I understand what you are suggesting conceptually, but I disagree on the impact. If there are any numbers on such a resource burden maybe I’ll change my mind! I’m not sure if there is data out there for this kind of thing.

Unless you are suggesting replacing such a home with higher numbers of lower value homes. Obviously that would be a different story.

In my town schools are about 60-70% of property taxes and, with a new regional high school being built, that number will probably go up. That's pretty typical situation in Massachusetts towns around where I live.

We're certainly a year-round town. But it's a reality of a lot of coastal communities as you get up the coast further that, if they're not commercial fishing ports, they do largely close down in the winter. If there weren't summer homes and a tourist industry, not many people would live there.

Resources that are shared across taxpayers... They have to pay to heat and power their homes. They are also paying property taxes that support local schools, but they are not sending their kids to school, therefore benefitting everyone else with the tax dollars. They add a lot to tax base without adding to the cost. Even things such as sewage treatment and the roads of which they contribute to they use less of.

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