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Comment by WaxProlix | Hacker News Reader

Whose job is it/should it be to get that infrastructure built, and on what timeline? Obviously it's not reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block (or is it?), but if the people haven't moved in yet then there's no data to show the city so that they can project tax/levy money and scale schooling, transit, and other infrastructure appropriately.

If we let the circular dependencies stymie us at all turns, we'll never get anywhere. Gotta start somewhere, and having people to clamor for services seems like a good place to do so as any to me.

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This isn't really a circular dependency because the developers can't build without the city's permission. If a developer plans to add N units of housing to an area that means there is need for NxM of various kinds of resources in the area, and you need them before NxY people move into the area and need them.

You can't just suddenly have 10,000 more people and no sewer system for them until you find out exactly how much poop they produce.

It's not even like questions like "If you add this many 3 bedroom homes to an area how many schools do you need" aren't unstudied questions, either. Civil engineering is a thing and should be able to answer questions like that pretty darn well.

Who is responsible for actually building it is a fair and open question with several different answers, but as long as city planning is a thing, the city that approves construction is responsible for ensuring that that construction will not overload resources somehow, and I don't even see how that can be under dispute.

> It's not even like questions like "If you add this many 3 bedroom homes to an area how many schools do you need" aren't unstudied questions, either. Civil engineering is a thing and should be able to answer questions like that pretty darn well.

That's not the kind of question civil engineering answers. That's more urban planning.

That's fair. The point still stands.

10,000 people sounds like a lot, but in terms of a large city’s sewer system it’s not that meaningful. In terms of traffic etc you are talking about 10k people in a 3,870k people population area. That less than 1/3 of one percent.

PS: Simply from the overall US population growth rate the metro area should expect to add ~27,000 people every year.

The exact number is not particularly relevant and is deliberately vague since it doesn't say in what area or what kind of city I'm talking about.

This is because the point is to illustrate the ridiculousness of suggesting that infrastructure should only be meted out once demand is known in the concrete with people living there by pointing out that until you build the sewer system, N people still need to poop, not to talk about what kind of population growth is normal for a large city.

I was assuming you where being approximate and continuing to talk about the Seattle area.

Anyway, my point is more the US population is growing so just about every Metro area needs to deal with continuous growth. And 10k homes are generally not going to fill up in a single day it’s going to relate to the areas migration pattern. City’s can’t just stay static while continuing to be viable.

That said, OP seemed more concerned with Developers not paying for infrastructure which is a reasonable concern, growth on the other hand is not optional long term.

Cities “can’t just stay static while continuing to be viable.”

I have to wonder what you mean by static and viable. Seems like the cities most derided for being static are also quite viable: San Francisco, San Jose, etc...

From 2000 to 2017 San Francisco grew 13.5% and San Jose grew 14.5%.

Going back San Francisco county grew from 680k in 1980 to 884k in 2017 that’s significant growth which tracks fairly well with overall US population growth. https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/san-francisco-californi... So, it was ranked 13 in 1980 and is ranked 13th in 2017.

San Jose grew faster than the national average from 1960 to 2017. https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/san-jose-california

Thus, perception does not match reality in these cases. On the other hand overall US population does not grow that fast. So, things can feel static in the short term.

For large-scale development, it is reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block. I've seen it in Flowermound, TX. The developer built a really nice elementary school and donated it to the city. Perhaps it was required by the town. Perhaps the developer got a tax break. Either way, the nice school surely contributed to higher selling prices for the homes the developer was selling.

> Obviously it's not reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block (or is it?)

In the UK there have been various methods to get residential developers to pay for infrastructure.

They're fairly recent, and I'm not too familiar with them.

Even if the developer isn't to pay the full cost, there are efficiencies by the local government working with the developer to build relevant infrastructure at the same time.

Example: https://www.telfordhomes-ir.london/media/press-releases/2017...

I wonder to what point some of these methods just increase housing prices.

For example, having the developer plant trees along the street means the price of the new build goes up (of course the developer will pass along costs), and existing residents get an improved neighbourhood without increased taxation. But is this not something the council should be paying for? After all the new homeowners will be paying council tax, why must the also pay a fee to join the community?

> Whose job is it/should it be to get that infrastructure built, and on what timeline?

The new residents, so, by proxy, the developer putting the apartment block in.

Of course, the developer immediately starts grousing about regulation, and excessive fees, and apparently, this is the reason for why we can't have sub-$400,000 apartment units.

> Obviously it's not reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block (or is it?)

It is reasonable for them to pay the city enough money to construct the infrastructure necessary to serve the new density they are adding.

infrastructure in sprawl costs more per capita than in dense urban developments. If these people will move to the same city anyways, maybe the city should be subsidizing the cost of the infrastructure because it’s cheaper to provide it to a big building on an existing street than it is to a new subdivision down the road

> infrastructure in sprawl costs more per capita than in dense urban developments. (snip) it’s cheaper to provide it to a big building on an existing street than it is to a new subdivision down the road

Unfortunately, even if you divide the costs per person, it's still often cheaper to get 40 people new water lines in say 20 average suburban homes, than it is to get 40 people new water lines in say, one building in Manhattan.

Infrastructure costs do not scale evenly per mile. The capital costs in infrastructure are rarely the actual wires or pipes, it's the installation and maintenance labour. Which are considerably more complex and more expensive in dense urban environments, than it is in the sprawl.

There are plenty of downsides to sprawl (it's a waste of land, for instance). But sprawl is nearly always cheaper (even after removing all subsidies), that's kind of the whole reason sprawl exists in the first place.

The problem is, you're comparing a Manhattan high-rise to 20 single-family homes. Price/performance tends to be mid-rise apartments, which look like duplexes for the most part. These mid-rise apartments are cheaper per-capita both capital wise and maintenance wise than sprawly single-family homes.

Sprawl exists because of zoning codes, not because of a market equilibrium.

If you're interested in the phenomenon, read https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ about the Growth Ponzi Scheme.

> you're comparing a Manhattan high-rise to 20 single-family homes.

That's generally what people mean by "Dense Urban" vs "sprawl", yes? You could replace "Manhattan" with "Chicago Loop" and it would be the roughly identical.

> These mid-rise apartments are cheaper per-capita both capital wise and maintenance wise than sprawly single-family homes.

They aren't, sprawly apartments (like duplexes, or low-mid-rise apartments) are roughly equivalent to costs as sprawly single family homes, and dense apartments are more expensive.

This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive).

> Read Strong Towns

I have, many many times. They get promoted on HN on a literally daily basis.

Strong Towns is a fun blog to read, but unfortunately, Strong Towns is simply wrong sometimes. Their understanding of suburban finances is one thing they are semi-routinely incorrect on, they assume most suburbs are only financially viable if they continiously grow -- and while this is true for some, it is not common for most. The Growth Ponzi scheme they mention, while true for a handful of suburbs, does not apply in any way to 75% or more of suburbs across the US.

Don't take my word for it. Most municipalities budgets are public record (they should all be, really). Look up one near you, and see this for yourself.

I'll break this down another way.

I'm going to pick a random suburb that happens to be near me. They are about a 33% even split of old suburbs (1940-1960s), middle suburbs (1970s-1990s) and new suburbs (2000s+), with maybe 15% of that new suburb land still totally empty. There are a few duplexes and apartment buildings in there, but nothing dense. No buildings higher than 3 stories, it's like 95% low density stuff.

Their budget for 2017 includes $7,143,000 towards "Major Streets and Local Streets". That's costs for basically every road except the freeways (those are maintained by the state). This suburbs spends that, every year, on roads alone.

"OH MY GOD THATS SO EXPENSIVE" says StrongTowns, "OBVIOUSLY SUBURBS ARE DOOMED!"

There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden).

Even ignoring all business revenue, for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription per person, this suburbs maintains every single street in the entire suburb.

An average house in this Midwestern Michigan suburb, costs about $150-200k. A single family home pays a couple hundred dollars per month in property taxes. It costs just $8 of those couple hundred dollars per month, to maintain every single street in the suburb.

Is it possible the municipality mis-counted something? Sure! Is it possible they aren't fully accounting for every possible road cost? Perhaps! Let's pretend they mis-counted by something extreme, let's assume they are a full 50% under-estimating on literally every street in the sububrb.

That doomsday scenario means a citizen might have to pay $16/month for roads, instead of $8. Oh no, what a terrible world that would be

I'm not pretending every suburb is identical. I'm sure there are suburbs that spend more than $8/per person per month on roads. Some suburbs are more sprawled out than others. But generally speaking, there is no great infrastructure apocalypse coming down upon us. It's just not happening, unless some major disaster wipes everything out all at once (like a hurricane, or a tornado, or a screwup like Flint's Water crisis).

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The Growth Ponzi scheme makes a great headline for StrongTowns. But for most people, it's completely fanfaction. It is not grounded in any reality whatsoever, for the vast majority of people who are reading it.

> There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden).

Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people owns property and pays property tax? That is a pretty inaccurate statement.

Moreover I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA [1]. Rather than guestimating property taxes based on some weird anecdotal extension of my own property tax, I'm going to take a look at the city budget [2]. The city earned $10,370,327 in property taxes in the 2017 FY. The city paid $1,258,730 to maintain its streets in the same FY. That's 12.1% of property taxes devoted just to street maintenance. In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paso_Robles,_California

[2]: https://www.prcity.com/DocumentCenter/View/23619/Two-Year-Ad...

> Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people pays property tax?

Yes, because effectively, they are. Renters pay for it through their rent (landlords don't just eat costs for free) and obviously children don't pay for their own, and homeless folks don't and such. But effectively, most every resident is paying property taxes (or someone is paying their share for them) in some way or another.

> I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA

So, using your approach for the suburb I picked, all road construction + maintenance + repair costs are about 20% of the total suburban budget. Approximately $8/person/month. (This is in Michigan, where we have snow+ice+flooding for 6 months straight each year, so that seems totally reasonable to me.)

Using your own link for Paso Robles to the budget they provided, they're devoting 12.1% of property taxes to street maintenance. With ~29k people, that's ~$4/person/month.

So, your suburb spends even less to maintain their roads (per capita) than mine does. Isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that just further reinforce the fact that there is no coming "infrastructure apocalypse" for roads? If Paso Robles needed to double their entire road budget for some magical reason, you'd still be paying less than what folks up here already pay every single year.

> In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments.

Isn't that also a good thing? In a perfect world, the total taxes collected would pay for all the services provided, with a little set aside for a rainy day and nothing more left over.

> Yes, because effectively, they are. Renters pay for it through their rent (landlords don't just eat costs for free) and obviously children don't pay for their own, and homeless folks don't and such. But effectively, most every resident is paying property taxes (or someone is paying their share for them) in some way or another.

I think this is a weak argument you're using to make the price per capita seem low. If your income is $10 / mo, and you pay $4 in property tax, then you are spending 40% of your income in property tax.

> Using your own link for Paso Robles to the budget they provided, they're devoting 12.1% of property taxes to street maintenance. With ~29k people, that's ~$4/person/month.

That's still 12.1%. Whether it's $4/person/month or $1/person/month, it's 12.1% of property tax.

> If Paso Robles needed to double their entire road budget for some magical reason, you'd still be paying less than what folks up here already pay every single year

Again, how does that matter? The city will now be paying 24.2% of their property tax on road maintenance, leaving a shortfall.

> Isn't that also a good thing? In a perfect world, the total taxes collected would pay for all the services provided, with a little set aside for a rainy day and nothing more left over.

Right but what about emergency services, and city vehicle fleet maintenance, and sewage, and parks... The property tax cannot pay for all services associated with the sprawl. Oh and building new infrastructure. The city relies on a bevy of other taxes and entitlements to pay their budget, including various State transportation subsidies.

“If your income is $10 / mo, and you pay $4 in property tax, then you are spending 40% of your income in property tax.”

Those numbers don’t seem very realistic?

The obvious reason that property tax collections 'just barely' manage to pay for public works is that citizens set the rate of both taxation and expenditures (taking into account the availability of state and federal funds). They're not broke, they could raise the tax rate, they just don't want to.

Asserting that "sprawly apartments" have the same cost as SFH is not compelling unless backed up by TCO figures, since it runs up against the metric of "geometric efficiency". If I have more destinations nearby, I spend less on all forms of transit, which compensates for rent and utilities costs. And if my neighborhood is denser on average, then I have more walkable destinations, subject to zoning law, and each destination in turn sees a better return on infrastructural investment.

Urban streets in Japan tend to blend together because they allow commercial uses throughout - you can wander a single neighborhood for days and not see every storefront. It's not just the transit. There's a built-in bias towards density there that is not present in US suburbs, which are largely motivated to build big box retail and office parks instead of houses because they are bigger moneymakers. We are setting a market equilibrium by law.

> This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive).

Without TCO figures, I can't agree or disagree with you. Moreover I feel like this is permeated with a pretty common American bias, namely that homeowners maintain their property better than landlords (the myth of the yeoman property owner).

> But sprawl is nearly always cheaper

Spawl is cheaper to build new. However, sprawl is more expensive to maintain.

Suburbs run into this problem quite dramatically when they start contracting and suddenly their infrastructure costs start soaring relative to their budgets.

If it is taking people from actual rural areas (and not just suburbs), rural areas can grow much of their own food, heat their homes with renewable wood, draw their water from a well, shit into a drain field. The only infrastructure is power and roads and the roads are needed regardless because rural areas produce resources that cities require to exist. Be it crops, milk, meat, coal, iron, copper, sand/glass, stone, concrete, ect.

  heat their homes with renewable wood

This is increasingly regulated against, and we wouldn't want more if that even if unregulated.

>> Whose job is it/should it be to get that infrastructure built?

> The new residents

Surely it's not their sole responsibility. New residents boost the local economy, so the old residents benefit.

Those apartment buildings are paying the same property taxes as everyone else.

That I'd what property taxes are for. To pay for stuff like this.

  paying the same property taxes as everyone else

Not per capita, they aren't.

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