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Why Many Cities Have No Money

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Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#221

Post by slfnflctd »

dagw wrote: post #201
jimmaswell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeowners associations are abominations. They put "property value" above everything else to the point that you're not allowed to have the wrong brand of car or put your garbage out before midnight the night before it's collected. They should honestly be illegal.

"They" aren't som abstract entity, they're you and your neighbors. If you don't like the direction your homeowners association is going, why not join it and propose changes?

Making changes to an HOA, once it's established, is functionally impossible in many places due to the way they are set up. They require a certain percentage of homeowners to approve a change, which ends up being far more of them than you can get to respond to mailers or doorbells. The meetings of the HOAs themselves tend too often to devolve into wasting everyone's time on minor, petty differences about how to spend the dues.

This is at least partly intentional, I suspect, because it allows the city to make certain assumptions about newer neighborhoods which have these boilerplate HOAs that are essentially the same across a whole region. This type of thing may or may not be better in some situations than no HOA at all, but it undermines what I would consider true property ownership while also preventing any kind of effective adaptation to new information or circumstances over time. For example, I know of a neighborhood where they are required to put a certain color of asphalt shingles on their roofs when they need a new one (about every 10-15 years). Roof mounted solar panels or tiles will never be allowed in this neighborhood, which I find utterly insane.

If I was in a position to buy property, I would strongly favor a location unburdened by this kind of albatross.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#222

Post by randomdata »

Salgat wrote: post #123
flukus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still 10K per person per year (assuming a 25 years generation), which seems on the high side. I wonder how much of that is roads alone?

Doesn't business taxes come into play?

Doesn't business tax still get paid by people?

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#223

Post by jdsemrau »

yason wrote: post #216
csydas wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Russia at the moment and probably the most startling thing is how well planned many of the cities and towns are and how very clearly these cities were not made for cars. While it's a hassle for vehicle traffic because the roads were never designed to handle everyone owning a car, the benefit is that no matter where you live there is a shop nearby for essentials (groceries, clothing stores, repairs, cafe's,…

Any city planned and developed before cars is generally considered very friendly, walkable, and desirable. Europe is full of such cities and they're loved for it. If only planners, politicians and citizens would realise what they have given up just to make it convenient to drive.

Just came back from Tokyo and realized how much I miss riding my bicycle in Singapore. The city is just not made for bicycles. It would increase the quality of living by a wide margin since Singapore is so small.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#224

Post by CalRobert »

davidw wrote: post #96
aaron-lebo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Houston actually has relatively lax zoning laws. This makes for some interesting stuff: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Weir...

Yeah, Houston gets trotted out a lot by the Market Urbanism folks: http://marketurbanism.com/2016/06/02/houston-beautiful-yet-p... But that city also has massive sprawl, so it's kind of tough to point at as an example for more coastal folks. Certain areas may showcase how things could be, but it's still a very car-centric city.

An interesting view of how parking affects Houston is at http://www.citymetric.com/transport/what-bombs-did-rotterdam...

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#225

Post by richmarr »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #208
richmarr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "fix" is important here. When you fix something it starts broken and ends up working how it should. Since space in cities is fiercely constrained any change is always a trade-off with repurcussions. Cities plan transport infrastructure years or decades in advance, and spend vast sums of money, with very different incentives to the market. Leaving parts of that plan (like parking) up to the whims of the marke…

>very different incentives to the market. They are concerned about being elected, that's it. Hence why we have huge infrastructure bills coming to haunt us, pensions that are out of control (though dwarfed by infrastructure costs), and other passing the buck behavior. That's not to say they're bad, do no good, etc. Just that their incentives are such that they can't enact good policy oftentimes or possibly even tell…

> They are concerned about being elected, that's it.

Politicians are clearly incentivised by election, but saying its their only concern is generalising and reductionist.

The rest of your comment makes a lot of points, but broadly seems to assume that I'm claiming that private companies have no place in transport infrastructure, which is not the case. My point was that "the market" meaning an unmanaged build-it-and-they-will-come approach would not be optimal, in response to my parent commenter's "an easy thing for a market to fix".

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#226

Post by slfnflctd »

goda90 wrote: post #98
Daishiman wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone still has to pay for education, law enforcement, and firefighter. There's not way around it; people are paying much less for infrastructure than they should be. Sorry to you but that's the price of civilization.

Does law enforcement really need that military equipment though? And the training for that stuff can't be cheap.

I live in a city I would consider fairly low-crime. The police hand out a lot of traffic tickets. My fellow citizens recently voted in a measure to hugely increase the police budget (in part for some of that shiny military equipment) while denying one to expand our small library. This seems like a pretty big waste of money to me, since the police don't add much to quality of life past a certain point while a library definitely does. Too many voters seem to act against their own interests too often these days.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#227

Post by kasey_junk »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #129
gedy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't this what public housing projects in the US did, and are now considered massive failures?

Public housing in the US was poorly implemented. It was strictly low-income, rather than mixed-income, and the housing was largely soulless large complexes far from amenities. Other countries, like Austria, have public housing that works perfectly fine.

I found "Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing" very educational about why the US had such poorly implemented public housing (at least in Chicago).

Early efforts were mixed income, small and in desirable locations. They were also by many measures very successful. That model was moved away from because it eroded the power base of the political leaders of the day and for straight up racist reasons.

Its also largely a myth that the large block, low income model was ever seen as likely to succeed. Public housing experts and advocates at the time anticipated the disastrous results that came about.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#228

Post by En_gr_Student »

This suggests that China has an amazing infrastructure time-bomb waiting perhaps a generation to mow it from the pinnacle of the world to the ground. As a nation that is "in it for the long game" I am going to watch and see what they do there.

-EngrStudent

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#229

Post by princeb »

csydas wrote: post #144
vvpan wrote: post #18

I can't say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it's city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store,…

I live in Russia at the moment and probably the most startling thing is how well planned many of the cities and towns are and how very clearly these cities were not made for cars. While it's a hassle for vehicle traffic because the roads were never designed to handle everyone owning a car, the benefit is that no matter where you live there is a shop nearby for essentials (groceries, clothing stores, repairs, cafe's,…

i think the auto is a red herring. i think what it is is that these cities have a level of lifestyle that happened to be commiserate with the revenue that they can generate, because the more expensive infrastructure- fibre, 4g, or undergrounds, tram lines, auto traffic control, or even a large network of roads, have not or cannot be built in.

when i travel to the cities in the developing countries in asia, and speak to the locals, there's always a sense that they look forward to building their city into something like sydney or singapore. the people elect mayors and governors that promise development towards that goal. most of time, it doesn't go anywhere. what i thought, but did not say, is that these smaller cities don't generate the same kind of revenue that pays for the kind of infrastructure, modern buildings, and diversity in imports that you see in the major cities. To try and pursue that without finding a way to increase the value and productivity of their economy is going to get you in the kind of trouble that you see a lot of these bankrupt towns in the US in.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#230

Post by kasey_junk »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #155
taneq wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for the US public housing projects' failure is wealth inequality. When your population has a mix of well-off people and very poor people, and you provide super-cheap housing, the very poor people gravitate to it, among them those who are desperate, have nothing to lose, involved in drugs and crime, etc. Once this happens the crime rate goes up, the area feels unsafe to 'normal' people, and anyone who can d…

How would having fewer rich people prevent the poor from committing crimes against the middle class (or just publicly engaging in victimless crimes[1]) and engaging in other behaviors that make an area feel unsafe? As a counterpoint, consider India and most of Asia. Poor areas are dirty and have little infrastructure, but they don't feel unsafe. I occasionally shop in Dharavi and don't feel unsafe at all. [1] I belie…

In Chicago at least, it was a vicious circle. The rich (who by extension are the powerful) moved poor (or maybe more inline to their thought process at the time, black) people to specific areas so that they would be away from the rich (or again, really more relevant at the time, white) people.

This concentration of people required more services both because of the sheer higher concentration of people and because of the lack of private money to backstop gaps. At the same time, those areas received less services/investment precisely because the people who lived there were not powerful. This gap of services lead to increased crime due to factors such as lack of opportunity, increased drug abuse due to hopelessness, worse education options, etc.

The gap widened and got worse until it became untenable to maintain (and in some cases the land became too valuable) and political power was used to disperse the public housing population.

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