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Comment by bitcurious | Hacker News Reader

I’ll admit that I merely skimmed the study, but as I read it states that local/municipal property taxes in many cases don’t cover the road infrastructure required to support those homes. To make the argument that they are subsidized you’d also have to factor in municipal and state income taxes.

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Subsidies are about relative costs. Tax collection is an interesting thing to look at in addition, but ultimately if we are to determine whether the suburbs are subsidized, it would require analyzing cost to deliver city services per capita.

They don't cover them to the tune of many tens of percentage points where I live. It's to the degree that the state basically has to redistribute wealth from the cities to the counties where the roads are built.

If the communities served by a road had to pay the full price of the road you'd see a lot of little 8-10 house hamlets with 10 million dollar bridges pack up and leave.

long ago in the netherlands the road in front of your house was your responsibility. You could agree with your neighbors to a crappy road but with loss of status and probably the value of the home. (The last remnant was the requirement to remove weeds. That was how I found out.)

I keep reading that claim. Then I look at old streetcar suburbs which have successfully a repaired thier roads over decades (including removing the old tracks). They have also added water, sewer, electric, phone, catv since being built.

which is to say it doesn't pass the smell test. I don't know where the studies go wrong but something isn'c adding up.

Old streetcar suburbs are much denser than typical American suburb today due to increased setbacks, lot coverage rates and other factors. But yes, even streetcar suburbs get subsidized back then. The subsidy is just more productive in it opening economic mobility with cheap, carbon neutral transport, depending on your views on rail transport.

lots are the same size today, or maybe slightly smaller. back then everone had a garden which took up space.

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