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Comment by etiennebausson | Hacker News Reader

How much the land is worth is only one of the parameters.

Notoriously, the maintenance cost for suburbs and their infrastructure is significantly lower than the tax they bring. Shouldn't that be a major point un tax decisions?

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IIUC the maintenance costs of suburbs is higher. Not sure if you meant that.

I've seen it argued both ways and I've yet to see real evidence, especially considering many suburbs are themselves actually cities/towns, and that cities seem to fight tooth-and-nail to prevent suburbs from leaving.

Have you ... looked for evidence? I guess I always felt that it was self-evident that horizontal development costs way more in terms of roads, pipes, and wires, and at the same time raises almost nothing in terms of revenues. Residential-only development patterns never pay their own way. https://resources.environment.yale.edu/kotchen/pubs/COCS.pdf

I've looked a few times, and it quickly (at least to me) appeared to depend on what you bucket and where you can torture the data and make it confess.

Single buildings can cost as much as my entire "city" - one World Trade Center alone cost $4 billion.

An example of how you can bucket things is do you look at property tax, income tax (and if you do, is it where the "nexus of generation" is done, where the worker lives, where he works, where she's headquartered, etc). Around here basically none of what we would call "support" is paid for by property tax except schools (95% or so) and sewer (which is billed as a property "tax" though it's actually per connection/size).

That's exactly the point. On big vertical building covers 1 acre of land but it has 80 acres of interior space. There's one honking water pipe in the basement that will never need to be replaced, instead of mile after mile of water pipes with leaky fittings every 50 feet.

$3.9 billion pays for a lot of leaky pipes - and the pipe has to source water from somewhere - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...

In my town schools aren’t 95% of property taxes but they are the majority. Add emergency services, water (though that’s a separate bill), same for electricity. Less familiar with road and bridge maintenance. Assume some comes from the state and feds but at least some is local.

It's the part that flows through the feds that lets you get whatever answer you want - is a local bridge being 80% federal and state-funded the cities supporting the town? Or is that less than the income tax taken from the local town?

I agree and you’d have to do a lot of study and the answer is still probably it depends. Presumably nuking some distressed Midwest cities isn’t the answer, and a lot of these cities are somewhat spread out. But it’s hard to argue with they’re not bringing in tax revenue because in aggregate they’re pretty poor. Some luxury high rises to replace some of the many single-family homes is not going to help Detroit absent a big influx of jobs.

Yes. And it’s not like you can tear up all the roads leading out of a large city (or just let them decay).

I mean higher yeah, my bad, and too late to edit now.

You have it backwards. Suburb infrastructure is expensive and the land pulls in little tax money by comparison. They're almost always a net loss on the city's budget.

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