The Zoned Life--exacerbating our dependence on petroleum?

Exactly–I commute in from the suburbs.

Downtown Hartford is fairly safe, especially in the day. If you stay out of the bad areas, especially at night, you’re pretty safe.

Man, I get tired of people whining about suburban living and how it doesn’t ‘make sense’. Guess what? People LIKE IT. They vote with their dollars to live in the suburbs. It has nothing to do with subsidies of roads or gasoline. House prices have doubled in the last 10 years, and people STILL build in the suburbs. Clearly there’s a strong attraction to it.

I hate living in the city. Sorry. I don’t like living in apartments. I don’t like having people jammed up around me. I like privacy. I like having a nice yard with a view and birds chirping in the trees. I like having wide roads, lots of parking space for friends, green boulevards, and owning a dog that needs a large yard. The majority of people feel that way. They’re willing to put up with long commutes and extra expense to live this way.

If you don’t like it, fine. There’s nothing wrong with living in the city if that’s what floats your boat. But ask yourself how you’d like it if suburb dwellers kept demanding that cities be de-funded and kept going on about how stupid it was to live in the city and how there was something wrong with people who do it, and how we need to force society to change to get those people out of the cities and into the suburbs where they belong.

Nobody is saying that suburbia should be abolished. Indeed, there are some very nice, walkable, places with wide tree lined streets and big yards.

But as a society, we cannot afford to do stuff like build a huge suburban development in a field somewhere with no connection to the outside world. Just like drinking hard liquor at lunch and smoking, this needs to be a controlled vice.

Luckly, it takes very little to make an area walkable and accessable to public transit- usually all the elements are there. They just need some common sense re-arrangment.

“We as Society?” That kind of talk has always struck me as being a little Orwellian. “Society” didn’t build the suburb I live in. Thousands of people cooperatively got together and spent their own resources to build their own property. And they continue to spend their own resources through property taxes, maintenance, transportation costs, and other expenses required of living where they do. But it’s their money. “Society” doesn’t get to tell them how they must spend their own resources.

And of course, “Society” never bothers to consider the benefits of suburban living - lower crime rates, lower health care costs, and most importantly, the happiness of the people who are living the way they want to live.

And on practical grounds, there are plenty of good reasons to have a more distributed population. One is that it is less vulnerable to pandemics, mass terrorist attacks, nuclear attacks, etc. Another is that it’s flexible - it can restructure eaily to meet demand (re-zoning for higher density or commercial). And the march of technology is making it easier to live in the burbs, not harder. The internet allows people to work from home or telecommute on certain days. The efficiency with which we consume energy has doubled since the 1980’s. You can buy cars today that get incredible gas mileage, and plug-in hybrids are just around the corner and will make many suburban commutes pure electric. Companies like Fed Ex have made shipping to the distributed population much more efficient than it ever was. Online shopping means fewer trips to the mall.

Our development patterns should definitely be changed to encourage people to live closer to where they work & shop.

However, one basic premise of zoning that is good is that you want to separate industrial areas from residential areas, for example.

How do you propose to ‘change our development patterns’? Make it illegal to live X miles from where you work? Forcibly remove people’s cars from them? Institute zoning laws that prohibit suburban construction?

People don’t seem to realize that the size and shape of our cities is determined by the aggregate desires of the people who live in them. You can futz about on the margins with zoning laws, but you can’t turn a culture of suburbia into a culture of urban living with the stroke of a pen.

If idiotic city managers attempt to ‘scientifically design’ their cities in a way which seriously conflicts with what the residents actually want, they’ll just see population flight. It won’t happen overnight, but over decades.

If my city started to ‘punish’ me for my suburban ways by taxing me heavily and transferring the money to people who lived in the inner city, I would simply pack up my family and move to a city more hospitable to my lifestyle. Or I’d move to an acreage or a bedroom community. In other words, they’d push me farther from my job - not closer.

Social planners and meddlers give me heartburn.

If those who could conceivably telecommute were allowed to do so, then it wouldn’t matter as much how far they live from work. They could have the big house, the big yard, the big dog, and all of that, but could cut their fuel consumption in half. I’m not saying that employers can or should be forced to allow it, although in some of my bitter moments I may have suggested it. They could be encouraged though, through carbon credits, rebates on fleet vehicle taxes, and so on.

Ya think?! Look at your average suburban PUD. The winding streets might or might not have sidewalks; certainly they are a design afterthought. Walking from one end of the neighborhood to the other might take 30 minutes, past nothing but other peoples’ houses. The population is not enough to economically justify a mass transit stop right out your gate; maybe one stop for yours and four other PUDs, at a guess; and that stop will be within easy walking distance for very few residents. And “re-arranging” any of this is problematic. The houses are where they are. There is, perhaps, enough space between any two to fit another building, but not a building on the predominant local house plan, and nobody’s willing to sacrifice their lawn anyway. I can’t think of any “re-arrangement” that would turn a suburb into something like a walkable town and would not involve demolishing most of the existing structures.

hell, i have cut my gas by $350 a month by telecommuting and only going in 1 day per month [i guess they need to see that I havent trained my cat to do my work and run off to tobago or something]

I agree that more people need to be allowed to telecommute. I think my company has something like 25 people in telephone customer service telecommuting with some sort of VOIP phone deal.

Portland, Oregon, has been able to accomplish a great deal simply through land use planning controls and an urban growth boundary.

The shape of modern American suburbia was determined partly by market forces, partly by government policies.

There are still big problems with telecommuting. One is that it’s hard to communicate with your employees. This is getting better - when I work at home, I’m connected full time with Lotus Sametime, plus I can join in teleconferences and such. But it’s still not the same as being able to just walk down the hall and have an impromptu discussion with someone on a difficult issue. We probably have 5-10% of our engineering staff working from home on any given day, and those people tend to fall out of the loop and have to be brought back up to speed the day after when they are back in the office.

The other problem is monitoring and work environment. I’d like to think that I’m just as efficient working from home as I am working in the office, but I know this isn’t the case. I have far more distractions here. Cold callers phone. I am surrounded by my various toys. My daughter gets home from school 2 hours before the workday ends, and generally needs my attention for something or other. The dog bugs me.

At work I’m only surrounded by things that help me do my job. I can close my office door and be completely unbothered by anyone or anything. I know I’m more productive at work than I am at home, and therefore even though I could probably get away with working from home one day a week or more, I generally don’t do it.

And of course, many people who are ‘working at home’ are often at home doing something completely unrelated to work. So it’s still a difficult problem, and only applies to small percentages of the work force.

This will change over time. More and better telecommuting tools are becoming available constantly. Internet bandwidth will continue to improve.

But you don’t need subsidies and penalties to make this happen. Businesses will do it themselves in response to market forces. It currently costs me $120/mo to park at my office. Plus another $100 or so in gas to get back and forth to work. Plus an hour of my time a day. If the problem gets worse, these costs will rise, and there will be a serious incentive for companies to allow more telecommuting and restructure the way they work to make it efficient, because doing so will give them a competitive advantage. This is already happening.

Sure, you can arbitrarily set anything you want. You can pass a law preventing suburban growth, for sure. The question is, what effect will that have, and are there unintended consequences? Can you really manipulate society like this and expect it to work out for the better?

For example, Portland has extremely high property taxes (40% higher than Vancouver!). And it has a declining population of school-age children. In other words, the population is aging. It looks to me like a lot of people who want to live the suburban lifestyle (predominantly families with children) are voting with their feet and going elsewhere. Perhaps as a result (or perhaps as part of the problem), Portland schools are not generally ranked very well as compared to the national average, with a couple of exceptions.

Oregon also has the third highest income taxes in the country.

It also seems to me that this strict land-use planning is going to really tie the hands of business and limit the flexibility of Portland’s economy. You had better hope that whatever mix of business activity you’ve locked in now remains viable.

True. And I don’t actually mind zoning laws, so long as they are locally confined. I think residents of a city have a right to control the way in which it develops to some extent. And it’s far easier for me to vote with my feet and move to a city more in keeping with my philosophy. For example, I would never move to Portland Oregon, because I have no desire to live in a city full of liberal yuppies who value mass transit more than they do schools and playgrounds and suburbs. But if you like it, go for it. Just don’t expect me to pay for it, and don’t try to take your personal desires and universalize them by demanding that government promote your type of lifestyle at the state/provincial level or worse, at the federal level.

We lived in the country,we did live in Chicago until our 2d child was born. I loved the city, but I could not let my children out to play. We moved to a small farm had 7 children and raised all our food. But I can see the reason for some zoneing laws,although all may not be for the good of the community.

I miss the trains that I used to take to Michigan and different towns, now the way the train stations and bus stations are schedueled it is next to impossibe to get any where unless you drive and that has become a hassel as well.

What amazes me and a lot of other peole in my age group, is why they are building such large houses with high ceilings and then the heat and air cost is so much they keep their houses at 58 to 60 degrees and still pay as much as$500.00 a month to heat and cool, taxes are outrages, and It is no wonder people are in such debt.

In our day it was you only bought what you could pay for, and to get ahead you lived under what you earned. If you live on what you earn you will break even, more then you earn you get into deep debt. Even a so called millionaire needs to live uner what he or she earns, and I so often wonder why they play up the “Donald” so much when he let one of his businesses go bankerupt. To me that is a way of stealing unless you pay it back, as someone is losing out and the public pays for it.

Monavis

How would you feel about a policy designed to revitalize the inner city by taxing property more heavily the nearer it is to the city center (regardless of what buildings are on the land)?

See here.

I think that property taxes should be set such that the people who own the property pay for their share of the costs of maintaining it, the surrounding neighborhood and schools, and roads. I would oppose any property taxes that are designed to punish one lifestyle over another without regard for the actual costs they impose.

Read more closely. The tax idea in question is intended to encourage urban development; lifestyles are an afterthought. But, your tax bill might go down . . .

I understand the Land Value Tax. It’s an intriguing idea in that it would certainly change the mix of incentives that apply in the inner city. But it also has many, many drawbacks, which its proponents rarely seem to address.

For example, if this tax is to be a revenue neutral change, then the tax on the land itself will increase dramatically. That will force people to build only very high-value buildings on that property. More skyscrapers, BMW dealerships instead of used car lots, etc. This means you won’t have much of an economic mixture in the population. It will stratify into zones where the land rents are affordable. Today, at least a person of modest income can build a modest home in a nice neighborhood. In a land value tax world, that won’t happen, because the tax would be too high for a home for someone in that income level.

It’s regressive. If I build a house that’s worth $200,000 more than my neighbor, I pay more taxes. If the land itself is the only thing taxed, my neighbor has to pay more tax than I do. I’m wealthier, but my taxes go down and his go up (remember, we’re staying revenue neutral).

For that matter, you’ll find people trading land value for house value, so you’ll find big mansions out in the cheap rent areas. In fact, it seems to me that a scale of lowering taxation as you move away from the city center would act as a pretty big incentive to move as far away as you can.

Implementing it would cause a huge economic shock, because land values would plummet. Kind of like the current real-estate meltdown, only far worse, Also, the change in the mix of distortions going from one tax to the other would make our economy less efficient until it adapted, and maybe even then.
A land value tax is a rent. The implicit assumption is that the government, acting as an agent for society, owns all the land and rents it out to people to use. The theory says that if your business is profitable, it’s because of your close access to other people because you’re squatting on their valuable land. So they have a right to charge you rent for it. The problem is, this just makes society a rent-taker, and there’s nothing stopping them from doing what other rent-takers do, which is to raise the rent to the maximum level, leaving only enough marginal profit to make it slightly more cost-effective to maintain the business than to shut it down. I don’t believe in that form of government.

A tax is a payment to the government for services rendered. I own my property, I don’t rent it from ‘society’. But building my home means paying for my share of the roads that service it, of the city water and waste facilities, etc. This is fair. It’s also fair in that if I build larger facilities on the land, I’ll use more services and should be taxed more. Under a land-value tax, I have an incentive to use more of the city’s services. In that sense, a land value tax is less fair.

The Land Value Tax is an interesting idea, but I think there’s a reason why it’s rarely been implemented.
It may actually have the unintended consequence of preventing development in the inner city. If that becomes the highest taxed region,

So my city is the product of meddlsome planners and your suburb is the bastion of free-market forces? I know you can’t really believe this. Some beareaucrat in city hall put his stamp on both.

If you look at who is giving money to city government, it is the developers. In any region, the devleopers are some of the richest folks around and are very active in city politics. Suburbia, urban areas, farmland…it’s all a political construct at this point. The truth is we have no idea where people would choose to live if the real free market was at work. Note that I’m not saying developers are evil, just that they influence the government. I’m not asking to create all kinds of new controls, I’m asking to modify the ones that are already there. Sadly, people who favor walkable communties don’t usually have the kind of money developers have to influence local government with.

For stuff that is already built, there is no much to be done. But in California at least new subdivisions are being built every day. And just like we demand that subdivisions have a plan for schools, traffic flow, waste removal, etc. we can demand that they have a plan for transit. It’s just as easy and pleasing to build a subdivision with the streets arranged so that a few transit stops could be served (even if this does not happen until some time in the futures) as it is to build one with the “one long windy street” method.

Or, for example, they built a new supermarket near where my mom lives. It is only a few hundred meters from the street, but it is accessed by a long windy road that snakes through a few upscale strip malls and the like. On the street side it is blocked off by a large lawn with an impassable ditch running through it. Even if you live next door, you cannot walk to this supermarket.

Stuff like that is planned, and it shouldn’t be allowed. Somebody put their stamp on that, and they can just as easily put their stamp on something that doesn’t discourage walkable communities.

Who said anything about that?

From the linked article:

Quite the reverse.

:confused: It would be the same form of government we have now, tax rates being fixed through a democratic political process, not just whatever the bureaucrats want to charge.

In philosophical terms, this kind of “rent” is arguably preferable to forms of taxation that penalize productive activity, as Henry George perceived back in the 19th Century?

You might be surprised.

The article goes on to describe how some cities – including some in Australia and Canada – historically have experimented with this tax policy.

Yes, I read the article and his assertions. I’ve heard these arguments before - I just don’t buy them. I think he has the economics of it backwards… That’s not to say that in some places it might make sense to change the mix of land to building taxes, however.

I can respond more fully later. I’ve got to get to work.