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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

The property taxes don't anywhere near cover its costs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

That's not true for Texas. In Texas, the entire costs of suburbs are paid for in property taxes and utility district fees and bonds. Texas is one of the few states where the majority of taxes collected by the state are property taxes. Or so I was told by a coworker living in Texas when I brought this up.

Thanks. This is why I brought up Texas. Only the schools funding are from a pool of property taxes due to the ‘Robin Hood plan’ from the 90s. Local roads are country or city maintained from taxes. And the state roads are from state taxes. It’s all logically laid out.

That’s a link to a video. Just summarize in text what you mean

Summary: it cannot pay for itself in taxes because the income is too spread out.

To the downvoter: I don't know what more you want. That's the synopsis. The density is too low, so they don't get enough money to sustain themselves with all the infrastructure that is required to have suburbia

(Not parent poster) Suburbs generally need more money for their sprawling infrastructure than they can supply with tax revenue from the suburbs.

This means that they exist because they're being subsidized by revenue collected from elsewhere, such as from cities.

Whether that is fair or exploitative depends on how you figure the math for "how much of the tax collected in the city is actually because-of or from the suburbanites who commute."

> In Texas, the entire costs of suburbs are paid for in property taxes and utility district fees and bonds.

The question is how long they can keep taking out more and more debt against the promise of never-ending growth and income from one-time development sales. The answer probably isn't "forever".

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/11/21/choose-your-f...

This is a predicament everywhere in the US, the suburbs are not alone in this issue of debt financing for... everything...

When housing is spread out, each house is responsible for so much infrastructure, taxes by the one property can’t hope to cover it.

I mean with a six-figure income instead of 41k like the video has it becomes pretty sustainable to pay $9200/yr in property taxes.

I also bet a lot of people in suburbs of Bay Area / NYC wish they only payed $9200/yr.

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