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Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

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Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#81

Post by stevep001 »

City policies on this vary so much that it's impossible to generalize. That said, newer cities often end up forgetting that they need to pay for street reconstruction. The original cost of the street is usually included in the initial price of the house.

Sophisticated cities maintain a model (commonly called a pavement management program) that lets them predict future maintenance cost across the city.

He misses the fact that Ames does get tax money for street maintenance [1] and reconstruction [2]. His estimate for a properly maintained street is quite low -- other Midwestern US cities are able to get 60-70 years from their streets.

He also misses out on special assessments as a source of revenue -- which is very common for residential street projects.

[1] http://www.cityofames.org/home/showdocument?id=22486 page 178 shows state taxes as a revenue source

[2] http://www.cityofames.org/home/showdocument?id=8045 page 91/92 shows a variety of sources, including state taxes

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#82

Post by asmithmd1 »

ecopoesis wrote: post #78
rayiner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that some of the most charming neighborhoods in the country (e.g. Chelsea in New York, DuPont in D.C.) were built before all that crap. You'd never build a "modern city" like Philadelphia, with its narrow one-way streets, lack of parking, and commercial and retail mish-mashed together. But most of the rest of the country feels dead in comparison.

Some places are building this. Assembly Row in Somerville is a prime example. Usually it's called transit oriented planning.

I have walked around assembly row and it isn't terrible but it certainly doesn't feel like downtown Boston.

Check out what standing at the intersection of Grand Union Blvd and Artisan Way feels like:

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3948862,-71.081131,3a,75y,11...

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#83

Post by lubesGordi »

massysett wrote: post #31

The author never made the case that a property owner is SUPPOSED to pay for the cost of the street, so I'm not even motivated to figure out whether the analysis is correct or not. The government is not a bank. You're not supposed to "get out what you put in" or "pay for what you use." The government provides things for the public good: roads, education, police, military, etc. Of course some government is a Ponzi sche…

That taxes go to pay for things the gov't provides is clearly presupposed. You seem to be saying things that the gov't provides don't have costs associated with them.

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#84

Post by bufordsharkley »

massysett wrote: post #31

The author never made the case that a property owner is SUPPOSED to pay for the cost of the street, so I'm not even motivated to figure out whether the analysis is correct or not. The government is not a bank. You're not supposed to "get out what you put in" or "pay for what you use." The government provides things for the public good: roads, education, police, military, etc. Of course some government is a Ponzi sche…

> The author never made the case that a property owner is SUPPOSED to pay for the cost of the street, so I'm not even motivated to figure out whether the analysis is correct or not.

It's worth reading up on Joseph Stiglitz's work in the 1970s that demonstrated how government spending in public goods is transformed exactly into land rents under many conditions.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#85

Post by jws »

dionidium wrote: post #46
massysett wrote: post #31

The author never made the case that a property owner is SUPPOSED to pay for the cost of the street, so I'm not even motivated to figure out whether the analysis is correct or not. The government is not a bank. You're not supposed to "get out what you put in" or "pay for what you use." The government provides things for the public good: roads, education, police, military, etc. Of course some government is a Ponzi sche…

So if the evil sprawlsters are subsidizing the older roads...so what? The evil sprawlsters can afford it. I think you (and probably the author) have got this exactly backwards. Sprawl creates blight when the rate of building outpaces the needs of population growth. The evil sprawlsters are creating new costs, but they aren't subsidizing old roads. The sprawl usually happens outside of long-ago drawn city borders, any…

St. Louis City also has a problem with its beloved "earnings tax".

At one point as our office space lease renewal was approaching I plotted all of our 100+ employees at the time on a map, almost all software engineers, about 2/3 of them lived west of the city and 1/3 lived east, and only a single one lived in the city, and he was in a temporary apartment immediately post divorce, didn't get the house. To me that says 99+% of professionals don't want to live in the city. Our first office plan had been to put one in the city, but the earnings tax on our side and the employee's side was a deal breaker for a business with payroll as its predominant expense. So instead we got an office on each side of the river and teleported across the city as needed with the interstate highway system.

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#86

Post by jchrisa »

HighPlainsDrftr wrote: post #37

I've always wondered why we pave our streets to begin with. Yes, I know that dirt and gravel kick up alot of dust, but the expense of the street itself seems a bit extreme as well. I can't think of how many times I've seen a new street go in, and just a few weeks later they cut it up and dig up a water line to replace it. There has to be a better material besides concrete or asphalt that would provide similar benefit…

I live on an unpaved street surrounded by paved streets. I think it means we have more foot traffic and less car traffic.

Portland Oregon has a fun policy to encourage neighbors to turn unpaved roads into linear parks. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/63612

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#87

Post by djrogers »

asmithmd1 wrote: post #82
ecopoesis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some places are building this. Assembly Row in Somerville is a prime example. Usually it's called transit oriented planning.

I have walked around assembly row and it isn't terrible but it certainly doesn't feel like downtown Boston. Check out what standing at the intersection of Grand Union Blvd and Artisan Way feels like: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3948862,-71.081131,3a,75y,11...

>I have walked around assembly row and it isn't terrible but it certainly doesn't feel like downtown Boston.

A new development shouldn't feel like the downtown from one of the oldest cities in the country. Age, architecture, construction materials, land and building re-use, and about a thousand other things can't be faked.

That doesn't mean they didn't build with these principles in mind.

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#88

Post by msellout »

mattmanser wrote: post #68
msellout wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some people "pay for more than they use." The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for. > It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school" A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their life…

Not the working population, simply the tax revenue. You could theoretically have one robot producing trillions of $ and tax that one robot and pay for everything. That's one of the reasons why everyone's obsessed with growth, if the economy grows, the tax budget goes up without tax rates going up so the country can afford to pay for more stuff.

Good point. That's why it's likely the youth and the not-yet-born will pay a higher percent of their lifetime incomes in taxes while probably receiving less benefit. Americans have a history of voting wealth transfers to themselves from their grandchildren.

Re: Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

#89

Post by r00fus »

jws wrote: post #85
dionidium wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if the evil sprawlsters are subsidizing the older roads...so what? The evil sprawlsters can afford it. I think you (and probably the author) have got this exactly backwards. Sprawl creates blight when the rate of building outpaces the needs of population growth. The evil sprawlsters are creating new costs, but they aren't subsidizing old roads. The sprawl usually happens outside of long-ago drawn city borders, any…

St. Louis City also has a problem with its beloved "earnings tax". At one point as our office space lease renewal was approaching I plotted all of our 100+ employees at the time on a map, almost all software engineers, about 2/3 of them lived west of the city and 1/3 lived east, and only a single one lived in the city, and he was in a temporary apartment immediately post divorce, didn't get the house. To me that says…

First time I've ever heard the highways fawned over as "teleporting"...
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