Why should we increase gas taxes, or any other taxes to make cities more viable? The problem with the whole concept is that cities can’t support themselves, they depend on state and federal money to survive. Without sprawling taxpayers they’d all go broke.
I’m in agreement with those who say to incentivize city living rather than dis-incentivize the suburbs. Cost of living in metro areas is exhorbitant. I don’t know why, it shouldn’t have to be that way. Sure, land costs more because it’s a limited resource, but we can build up rather than out. I think also the developers in city centers focus too much on profit and need to think more about social good. Here’s what I mean: in the Washington D.C. area we’re adding some new segments to the Metro Rail subway system. As each new station is completed, apartment buildings get built near by. The developers (rightly) understand that living near a metro station is a huge benefit. So what do they do? They charge higher prices for those apartments. Sure, they can do that because they sell - the market can clearly bear those higher prices. But it does drive lots of people away to suburban apartments where they have to drive to work or drive to the nearest Metro parking lot*. I wonder what would happen if they built much larger apartment buildings (more units) next to the Metro stop, and charge LESS for them?
Another silly thing they do is charge high prices for the apartments next to the Metro stop and build a too-small parking lot for the Metro stop. They say the tiny parking lot is to dis-incentive people driving to the Metro, but… whut? Seems to me they’re giving contradictory incentives. Either build enough living space so people don’t have to drive, or build sufficient parking.
It seems like one possible outcome if you raise gas prices is that you make the suburbs more expensive and exasperate the level of class stratification.
It’s fine for governments to do this, but private companies really can’t. Their job is to make profit for the owners of the company, if they spend someone else’s money on their own personal interests, they aren’t doing their job. Now, if the owners want to do this, then good for them. They’ll get a nice pat on the back from me. But most companies won’t be in this situation.
They are being incentivized to move where housing is cheaper, and out of the suburbs. That’s a feature, not a bug. Unless the idea is to get poorer people to stay where they are, and only the middle and upper classes to move to the cities.
Well, apart from higher prices on everything that needs to be transported by trucks. And no particular reason to replace older gas-guzzlers with vehicles that get better MPG.
If you completely offset the increases, then poor people have no incentive to reduce their driving, or move. Sort of a reverse ghettoization.
Good luck selling the idea of “you have to move, but don’t worry - your taxes will go to keeping your poor neighbors where they are.” Housing prices in the city will tend to rise as demand rises, so the middle to upper clases get more taxes, less mobility, and less housing for more money. A win-win-win.
Regards,
Shodan
Change zoning laws. Strict zoning laws, green space initiatives, rent control, and limits on building heights all make real estate more expensive. Houston has very few zoning laws and as a results rents are much lower than in other big cities.
Hire more police. Much of the rise in suburban living was caused by people moving to escape crime ridden neighborhoods. Crime has been going down in the last twenty years but it could come back, cities with more and better policing have lower crimes rates and are more attractive to new residents.
School choice. One of the reasons parents don’t want to move to cities is they face a choice in most cities between expensive private schools or failing public schools. School choice would give them the assurance that they would not have to make that choice.
Pigouvian taxes. Raise taxes on gas and lower them on payrolls. This would lower overall demand for gas, make suburbs less attractive, make cities more attractive, stimulate hiring, and could be set to be revenue neutral.
This especially. Re-gentrification of urban schools, more or less.
Many of the suggestions have been how to punish people for living in the suburbs. Try rewarding them for moving back to the cities instead.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s just human nature. People change their behavior more to avoid a difficulty than they do to take advantage of an opportunity. A million dollars of disincentives have more effect than ten million dollars of incentives.
http://http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2015/03/01
More of this might help.
Well, it’s not necessarily punishment so much as making people getting cheaper property bear more of the communal costs. When you make a development on cheap land further out, it really depends on the jurisdiction how much of the infrastructure cost is borne by the developers/home buyers. Even if the developers take on the entire cost of the expansion of city services (not likely) still land owners in the burbs pay lower property taxes per acre but the maintenance of their spread out infrastructure is higher.
My 2 cents would be to require cities to have a public comprehensive 5, 10, and 20-year growth plan available online that is annually published in the local paper and highlighted on local news stations. (maybe they all do already, but the transparency is a bit poor)
Just having a holistic plan would increase local discipline and the transparency would highlight any major issues.
Onesy-twosey fixes seem highly likely to create unintended consequences.
And where do all those sprawling taxpayers work?
Who pays for the highways and trains that get them from the suburbs to the central business districts where they work?
The “city” is often not just the area within the official city limits. Take New York City for example. The real “city”, as in the vast integrated region where people actually commute daily, consists of a vast sprawl of suburbs that spreads beyond the 5 Boroughs through Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, Hudson and Bergen Counties in New Jersey, Westchester County in New York and Fairfield County in Connecticut.
So maybe one approach is to start taking a more regional approach to city planning and management.
Houston also has nothing but space out there in Texas. Compare that to cities like Manhattan or San Francisco that are trapped on islands or peninsulas.
It’s a “bad thing” for several reasons:
- Inefficient use of resources. Gas for driving obviously, but also other resources like energy used for pumping water long distances, heating a dozen smaller homes rather than a large energy efficient condo towers.
-Suburbs often have an isolating effect. People tend to stay in their homes and cars and have few interactions with other people. - Land use - Some might argue that the millions of acres occupied by housing subdivisions, office parks, strip malls and golf courses might be better served as farmland or returned to nature.
- Traffic - The more spread out people are, the more cars on the road for longer distances.
- Unsustainable growth patterns - As developments of newer and larger homes spread further out, they leave a decaying core of older less desirable neighborhoods.
These are the points to consider. Businesses locate in cities because they are central and provide a wide range of locations for their employees to live. But businesses also locate in cities based on an outdated notion of proximity to other businesses. Bike couriers are disappearing, supplies arrive by truck from a warehouse outside the city, high-rise corner offices are an executive perk with little actual benefit to the business. The furthest reaches of the world are no more than 24 hours away for material goods, and communications and access to information are instantaneous.
Apportioning the costs of suburban transportation to cities is difficult to work out. The cities receive the benefit of employees who commute in and spend money in the city, pay city taxes, and pay their income taxes to the state and federal government which returns it in greater shares to the cities than the suburbs receive. The suburbs benefit from the employment, but what is the necessity for the employers to locate in the city?
In this country more people lived in rural areas than urban areas until after WWII. The change was only created by the expansion of suburbs to provide the necessary housing. Can you imagine New York City if everyone who worked there in the day had to live there also?
I don’t see that the advantage to having cities as they are now in the modern world. The costs of city infrastructure is much higher than in the suburbs due to the density of the population, and the added cost of providing for the commuters is focused in small area, allegedly providing benefit of consolidation, but I don’t see it working out that way. With the same costs spread across the surrounding areas may actually be higher because of the distances between the residents, both home and business, and their may be additional duplication of infrastructure, but the maintenance costs also get spread out over time in the suburbs from the lighter usage and can be better managed through diverse approaches. It’s already pointed out in this thread that the cities face problems of efficiency in using their resources, and I believe the suburbs have been more efficient in their spending because of their smaller voting population’s ability to focus on the actual costs and the effects on their real estate taxes.
In the end this is just an argument between the city mouse and the country mouse about who has the better life. I don’t believe it’s really about any proven benefit of urbanization vs. sprawl.
Moving into the nearest city wouldn’t help me. It’s Lowell (about 1/4 mile from my condo), and there is no direct public transit between Lowell and where I work (Waltham, a suburb of Boston west of Cambridge). Basically, it’s really difficult and takes hours to get from point A to point B if you’re going from metro west to another point in metro west. You have to go from “suburb” to Boston to “suburb”.
I really don’t want to live in the city. I tend to support telecommuting as an answer to a lot of these issues. If 2/3 of office drones worked at home 2-3 days a week, we’d see reduced need for roads and so on.
I would be interested in the economic level of the folks living further out vs. those in the city, and each group’s respective tax burdens.
*** How would you incentivize urban sprawl reversal?
Assuming urban sprawl is a bad thing, how would you incentivize its reversal? Downtown real estate tends to be either expensive or undesirable.***
Arguably 51+% of the US military budget goes to maintaining cheap oil, errrr defending freedom of navigation on the high seas. That’s an implicit subsidy of $300 billion to the oil industry and car drivers.
I have to agree that suburbs are energy inefficient, both in gasoline and heating oil costs.
Why stop there? A thousand dollars of gasoline and a box of matches would also do more to encourage people to move out of the suburbs than ten million dollars of incentives.
You want to ruin suburban living so that shithole cities don’t look so bad in comparison. That is a terrible plan, even if it is cheap and easy to implement.
Nah, we already tried that.
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As said above, reduce rules that prevent developers from building residential buildings in higher density like height limits or parking requirements.
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Transform existing taxes or introduce a new one which taxes properties according to the square footage. Purely as an illustrative example: 1$/square foot/year. The guy whose home is on a 100’X100’ piece of land has to pay 10 000$/year. The 20 people living in an apartment building on land of the same size get 500$/year passed on to them by the landlord.