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Comment by cpitman | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't this be covered by property taxes and the additional income tax of the new residents?

Property tax comes after the fact. You move to a new area with kids now. You pay your property tax at the end of the year. But the kids need school right now and the district has to: find property to build a new school, raise bonds to fund it, build the damn thing, hire staff.

A modern tract home can be built in as little as 2 weeks with modern prefab construction. Schools take much longer.

The students escaping the ghetto will still be getting a measurably better education on the strained suburban school than they will at the ghetto school they're currently stuck in.

Does "escaping" imply segregating one's child from the "ghetto school"?

All parents who love their children would "segregate" them from awful schools if they could. The whole point of thread originator was that geographical restrictions are more unfair to the poor than they are to anyone else.

What about the kids who go to the suburban school? Kids from the ghettos can simultaneously be the victims and causes of the state of their school.

Just an anecdote, I went to an upper middle class suburban high school. The poorest kids in my school were the biggest bullies and class disruptors.

A modern school can be built in a couple days with modern portable classrooms: http://www.modulargenius.com/portable-classroom.html

If you have somewhere to put it.

And can find and afford a whole set of qualified staff to teach and administer it.

Is there a warehouse where you can order a bunch of portables like you can USB cables off of Amazon? No, prefab doesn't mean prebuilt. And that still doesn't cover funding, staff, and all the various local, state, and federal rules that make a school. Buildings, the US has plenty of.

Not all states have income tax, and why should all existing real property owners subsidize the new developer's impact on the existing shared infrastructure?

Because the impact is not that of the developer; it's not the developer's kids that will be going to the local school, it's not the developer who will be using the local infrastructure to commute to work everyday. It's the homeowner. The cost of the homeowner's burden on the public infrastructure should rest firmly on the homeowner's shoulders, not on the person who happened to build and sell a home to him.

That's why people are proposing to dramatically increase the fees on new residential building permits above: precisely so that the homeowner bears the cost of those infrastructure investments. (Don't confuse that the developer pays the permit fee in the first place from who actually pays it. Obviously, the new homeowner will be the one ultimately paying for that permit fee.) I'm not saying I agree with it (I see problems both ways); I'm just trying to explain it.

yep, my comment was directly responding to the notion (in the above comment) that this fee being passed on to the homeowner was somehow unfair because the developer is the one using the local infrastructure, which is obviously incorrect on so many different levels.

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