Odesio inquired about whether the cities in the United States currently having a really hard time with their budgets?
The smart cities have been able to balance their current (fiscal) needs with their current income.
The Twin Cities and surrounding area city managers are attempting to reach a willing compromise that most residents can live with.
Chicago city managers sold off a few assets (like city street parking), increased tax rates, created new taxes, and worked to make Chicago a place that attracted employers and visitors.
Detroit city managers watched the tax payers leave and blamed the tax payers for leaving a city they didn’t want to live or work in.
Muggings, and fires, and heart attacks, and schoolchildren are all part of managing a city and constantly require a balancing of city finances. Cities that can’t properly address their fianances probably can’t handle crime, fires, heart attacks, or public schools, either.
Or you could not really care about much of that at all and just leave. That is the real alternative to people like me and we vote with our feet. It isn’t an idle threat (or even a threat at all in my case; it is simply a promise). I have lived all over and will move again to the place that offers the best deal.
Why don’t some of you realize that people are not and have never been trapped in any particular American city, suburb or rural area? You don’t have to support it if you don’t like it. Only an insane person wouldn’t pack up their stuff and leave a place like Detroit and Chicago isn’t running far behind. One thing the U.S. has is an almost infinite amount of land and choices and they compete against one another. Once the balance gets shifted towards totalitarianism in one area, there is plenty of more that can offer better lives. That is the American way.
No I did not. My apologies if I have been criticizing a proposal which is different from what you had in mind.
If consolidation were done in such a way so as to maintain peoples’ political power, and to minimize the influence of corrupt incompetent big city governments, I would have less of an objection to it.
But I would still object on the grounds that suburban voluntary self-segregation is a good thing.
By the way, you didn’t answer my question from before:
Suppose that Israel starts annexing parts of Judea and Samaria in the same way that some cities annex surround suburbs. i.e. they do it slowly but surely over time in such a way as to enhance their territory without affecting the political balance. Would you support such an annexation plan?
My objection is simple. What you are advocating isn’t democracy. People chose to live separately from the city. You do not have the right to force them. What you are talking about is just colonialism. You’re saying that the big cities should conquer the smaller suburbs. It doesn’t matter that the suburbian people don’t want that. You should be able to take them by force.
Colonialism of this kind is the type of thing we’ve spent years getting rid of. You don’t get to impose your will on people just because you think it’s a good idea. If city people feel that suburbanites are mooching off of them, they can stop hiring them. They can move their businesses away from roads so that they are still just as accessible to city walkers but not to suburban drivers. They can pass laws making city sales and income taxes greater on people from outside the city.
But the one thing they do not have the right to do is to try and control people that are not in their jurisdiction. You don’t get to force other people to do what you want. Like I said, that’s democracy, and it’s been working pretty well for a while now.
Alright, let me get down to brass tacks, because I think you’re dancing around the issue, BrainGlutton: What, specifically, do you want to see happen as a result of this massive forced change?
You seem to have several ulterior ideas you’re a bit coy about, so just tell us. I suspect the aesthetic value of cleanly-colored maps isn’t the great motivating factor here, so lay it out in the clearest terms.
(1) What are the actual end changes you want to happen and, apparently, believe will happen?
(2) You still haven’t explained to anyone why you think those changes will happen?
(3) Assuming you got your way and forced people to do this, what would you do if they immediately voted the “Screw BrainGlutton” bill to do everything exactly the opposite of the way you want?
(4) As the above, except they vote the “Screw BrainGlutton Even More” bill to disassemble the metro government they don’t seem to want?
(5) If you got your way, and it simply didn’t work very well, would you change your opinion?
I was inarticulate. I meant “no local government” in the sense of no substantive local government. I live in an unincorporated part of the county. Yes, there is a county government, but it does almost nothing: it assesses no taxes and hardly any regulations. I can build a house without a building permit. I can burn a fire without a burning permit.
In return, it would take forever and a day if I had an emergency to get help out here.
That’s sort of what I’m talking about. Can’t these suburbs decide that they want a limited local government instead of the mammoth that the city would bring?
You say no, but where would it stop? Anywhere? The city annexes the suburb and I move 5 miles further away. Can they keep going until the city annexes some guy’s unabomber-style shack in the middle of the wilderness?
What I am “advocating” is actually just applauding what is being done in Minnesota. And that is not annexation but the state government (a 17 member board appointed by the governor) making rules that govern a metro area within its jurisdiction. If some people in the metro area do not like those rules, they can seek a change in state government. If that change does not happen, though, how is that any different from what more commonly happens in states, which is that the rural areas feel they are being pushed around by people from the big metro areas?
Just from the territories which Israel is currently occupying and which are not annexed. i.e. what used to be known as “Judea and Samaria” and which nowadays is referred to as the “West Bank.”
Right. A suburb would want a more substantive local government, but not the one from the city with higher taxes and more regulation than necessary. That’s not acceptable under your plan.
I’m going to piggy back off of smiling bandit and ask why? What is the bottom line here that you believe needs to be solved? You seem to imply that these suburbs get the “benefit” of the city without paying enough taxes. What benefit? Being close to the city?
By using the roads, paying tolls, parking fees, eating at restaurants, shopping, going to events, etc. these people pay taxes relative to what they use in the city. I do the same thing if I fly in once a year.
I’m just not seeing the problem that this draconian solution would solve.
Then it’s simple: occupying any percentage of them without allowing all the residents (of whatever religion or ethnicity) to vote is apartheid. And expelling the Arab residents and taking (more of) their land would be a war crime. Kind of off topic for this thread though, no?
Furthermore, I wonder how to apply that kind of thinking to my neck of the woods. I live in an area where the two most significant towns (or small cities) are on opposite sides of a state line, and surrounded by pastureland. It’s not clear how you could ever draw a border around the “metropolitan area.” At some point, it just bleeds into some other city’s hinterland.
That said, while it’s not a general solution, it might be a solution in some cases.
Or alternatively, the opposite solution. Take the City of St. Louis, say, and break it free from the State of Missouri and from its own suburbs. That might be better for local sovereignty. Then again, a State of St. Louis might somehow be forcibly bankrupted by the “white” states to each side, much as the European powers bankrupted Haiti once it was independent. I don’t know.
So you would support the 30-year annexation plan I described?
No, I don’t think so. There is a difference between wanting to combine people in one political entity because of some fundamental fairness in the situation and wanting to do so because of an expected political outcome.
I strongly suspect that people who support a “one-state solution” do so primarily because they want a particular political outcome – the creation of an Arab majority in Israel (or at least bolstering of Left-wing parties there.)
Similarly, I suspect that those who advocate expanded cities are primarily aiming for a transfer of wealth and other assets from suburban residents to city residents.
So do you support the annexation plan I described or not?
I thought I made it clear that they need to be given the vote immediately or it is apartheid. So no, I don’t support waiting thirty years and I don’t really even see your point.
I also don’t see what is so inherently sinister about wanting Arabs and/or the Jewish left to have more power, and for the Jewish right to have less.
So just so we are clear, you prefer the status quo - in which the Arabs living in Judea and Samaria get no Israeli citizenship indefinitely, to a plan where the area is annexed and they are integrated in over time?
Also, so we are clear, any time a country occupies territory, it must immediately offer full citizenship and voting to anyone who is living there otherwise it is engaged in “apartheid” which is categorically unacceptable?
Well maybe it’s sinister and maybe it’s not, but if we are debating a proposal it’s better to be clear about the actual agenda – what one is actually trying to accomplish.
In the case of consolidated cities, it looks to me like the actual agenda is to transfer wealth and other assets away from suburbanites into the hands of city dwellers.
I see a few problems with this:
First of all, there is already a mechanism in place to redistribute wealth – state governments and federal governments. The sort of city governments which suburbanites try to flee have a tendency to be incompetent and corrupt so it doesn’t make sense to use them as a wealth redistribution mechanism.
Second, some of the assets of suburbs can’t really be redistributed. For example, if a suburb has a good school system, that system is good in large part because it is full of children from families which care a good deal about their childrens’ education. If you open up that good school to children from non-good schools, you will just end up with another non-good school. Eventually the families which made the school good will exit the school system and send their children elsewhere.
Last, as a practical matter, city consolidation would likely be done in such a way as to deprive suburbanites of meaningful political power over the consolidated city.
You mean they have the time, money, opportunity, and education that makes them able to act on their care for their children’s education. The idea that poor people don’t care about education is false.
This is historically false. After all, historical consolidations like the creation of the five-borough New York City were done in order to preserve the political power of affluent whites who were moving to Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.
I keep trying to remind people of what the Met Council actually does, but keep seeing distortions or misunderestimations like this. So let’s quote from the article in the OP, which is–let’s recall–written by a right-wing opponent of the plan:
So you see, what is really going on here is not about taking from the suburbs and giving to the city, but refusing to continue to subsidise sprawl that is for the benefit only of the affluent. If those suburbs wanted to pay that cost themselves rather than seeking grants, they could pay for it themselves. Perhaps you rugged individualist types are shocked that they are not already doing so. Maybe you need to check your facts and your assumptions.
Second.
I have already been arguing in another thread that having low income kids sprinkled throughout schools that now have mostly middle-class and affluent families will not somehow destroy those schools. There is undoubtedly a tipping point, but I don’t foresee that being approached, much less reached.
Furthermore, we keep hearing these blithe remarks about the affluent families picking up and moving. But outstate Minnesota just does not have a large enough economic base to employ these people in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Are they going to commute 100 miles a day? If a lot of people start doing that, the state can take action to deal with that as well. (I suppose people could go to Wisconsin and be free of Dayton’s reach. If that became highly prevalent, we could look at ways to deal with it such as charging some sort of special tax on employees who live out of state.)
That could work out. The majority of the 1 million residents of Big City vote to combine with Little Village. The majority of the 50,000 residents of Little Village vote to join with Big City. It’s a done deal.
On the other hand, the majority of the 1 million residents of Big City vote to combine with Little Village while the majority of the 50,000 residents of Little Village vote NOT to join with Big City. Does the deal still go thru? Big City still needs the tax money and better city managment.
Big City still has to make itself desireable to it’s neighbors. Big City wouldn’t need to consolidate if there were jobs available in Big City that drew drew workers to Big City. Workers who would want to live in Big City. People who would pay taxes to Big City.
I will try to dig up a cite, or at least some examples, if you tell me that you are seriously skeptical of my assertion. Are you?
It looks like you are attacking a bit of a strawman here. The question is not whether poor people care about their childrens’ education; the question is about the intensity of caring – and perhaps time money and opportunity factor into it. But for purposes of my point, the reasons do not matter.
If you open up that good school to children from non-good schools, you will just end up with another non-good school. Eventually the families which made the school good will exit the school system and send their children elsewhere.
And you are saying that generally speaking, city annexations have been done like this – not just in New York but pretty much everywhere?