Because what’s valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes.
However, I realize everyone loves a hand out, especially when they can pretend it’s not a handout. So, I don’t see this changing any time soon.
But even if there was such a support for honeowners, a property tax would be nothing else but theft. Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace.
And thats the problem. Infrastructure has not been priced correctly. A lot of towns are still paying the bond on initial construction. Leaving very little for maintenance and replacement. And then when the road/sewer/water system needs to be replaced voters don’t have the appetite to pay for it. You see this in older towns in the northeast. Water and sewer mains are corroding. taxes go up to cover it. And the residents flee for newer, cheaper developments. The town eventually becomes insolvent.
So why not tax only on that value and not the value of any structure or improvements?
The wisest thing I every heard from a libertarian or conservative was "if you tax something you get less of it". It therefore follows, not that we should eliminate taxes, but that we should tax something which is immune to the effect and only that.
This does not appear true in the real world. Low density housing requires more mileage of infrastructure, yes, but it's drastically cheaper miles. (You can wire 200 low density suburban houses with electricity across a dozen square miles, for less than the cost to wire up a single building in Manhattan)
Density makes infrastructure exponentially more expensive, because the largest costs of infrastructure is in labour and complexity, not the literal length of wire or piping or whatever.
> Because what’s valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes.
This seems to contradict your own point. If low density housing needed more infrastructure, and houses were valued by the amount of infrastructure they needed, then low density housing would be the most valuable housing.
But it's not. In the real world, low density houses are the cheapest housing, and have the cheapest infrastructure costs. High density housing has the highest construction cost, highest land cost, highest infrastructure costs (despite less per-mile infrastructure use), and the highest transportation costs per person (when including total personal+government spending)
On top of this the most valuable infrastructure is things like hospitals, restaurants, etc where proximity is a huge deal. NYC has 2,581,170 apartments picture replacing them with single family homes on one acre and the city dies as that’s over 3,900 square miles excluding roads. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons where everyone wants more space, but that does not result in a city.
But the road in front of a 1k skyscraper alone will never be enough to transport those people, unless you bump it's price up (make it wide, tack on a parking garage, etc). To prevent that, you'll need something extra (Subway, LRT, a bus line), and that cost will immediately be way higher per-person than the suburban road ever would be.
This is something urbanists / StrongTowns types routinely misunderstand. Roads aren't cheap, but they are almost always the cheapest form of public transportation possible in nearly every situation. (Yes, even in total cost of ownership. Yes, even when including the public funding in their cost. And yes, even when including personal vehicle costs).
The minute you put even the lightest form of alternative public transit on that road, the cost spikes exponentially. Even the cost to run just a basic busline, with a driver on a timetable, costs more in one year than the entire construction + maintenance budget of that road will cost over 6+ years.
(This is not an argument against alt. public transit. I support alt public transit. We should have more trains, subways, and buses, everywhere. It just isn't cheap -- it would require us to spend way more per rider on transit than we are used to, which is why most places are built with public roads only -- it's the absolute cheapest TCO option in nearly every situation)
So try that comparison of a bus vs 100+x as much roads. Because, Manhattan has infrastructure for 1.6 million residents and 1.5 million commuters. That includes stuff like like office space and schools so your talking about a full state in under 23 square miles with 1.3 square miles of that being parks. Try doing that in the suburbs where most buildings have ground level parking lots and you need massive amounts of granted relatively inexpensive roads.
Claiming walking as "transportation infrastructure" is like saying a homeless man's sleeping bag is "housing infrastructure".
> Manhattan has infrastructure for 1.6 million residents and 1.5 million commuters.
Except it doesn't quite, though, does it? Despite Manhattan being one of the wealthiest places in America, and despite it having the highest funded transit agency in the nation, Manhattan is critically short on transportation infrastructure for it's residents. It has the second-worst commute times in the nation (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-top-20-worst...) and its transit agency is notorious for delays and problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_New_York_City_transit_cri...) . NYC transportation is so bad that chartering a private helicopter is a viable alternative - https://www.uber.com/blog/new-york-city/uber-copter/
(Again, I support alternative public transit and despite NYC's issues, we should still be building more subways and trains across the US. But the idea that they are some sort of panacea is a lie, the idea that "save money" is not true, and the idea that they are cheaper for individual persons to use is only true if they are subsidized to an exceptionally higher dollar amount, far above any that public car transport ever has been).
> Try doing that (housing 1.6 million residents in 23 square miles) in the suburbs
Wait, no one is arguing that density isn't dense -- obviously Manhattan is one of the densest places in the US, far denser than any suburb. I agree entirely.
But also, almost no one can afford to live in Manhattan, and most municipalities could never handle the cost nor the complexity of building/maintaining another Manhattan. (Arguably, NYC itself sometimes can't handle the cost/complexity of maintaining Manhattan).
Only 0.3% of Americans live in Manhattan. ~99% of the 1+ million residents of my hometown here in Michigan will never be able to afford to live in Manhattan or any place like it. Every single adult here would need a 200-400% raise before we could afford to live a dense urban lifestyle anything like how Manhattanites do.
No one is arguing that density isn't dense. The argument is that density is inherently more complicated, inherently more expensive, and requires massive amounts of extra money to pull off.
And sidewalks etc, are very much infrastructure. Subway stations are generally 5 blocks apart rather than every block because people are expected to walk up to 2.5 blocks without issue. The absolute maximum distance from a residential address to a subway station is 0.8 miles that’s only a 10.5 minute walk + time waiting at crosswalks. The average is closer to 1/4 that distance. I have had longer walks from my parking garage to the office.
PS: I am saying low density makes things worse not that the largest city in the US will have short commute times. That’s never going to happen. Filling 50+ story office buildings from the surrounding area requires people moving increasing distances as the urban center gets larger. Optimally, a new office building is effectively filled by a new ring of people at the furthest edge of the city commuting in, though in practice it’s less efficient than that.
What? That's nowhere near affordable! There is no valid metric by which that cost is affordable to that income, that's a insane figure!
Using the standard federal housing guidelines, a single person making $40k/yr should spend about $810/month on rent. And a $40k/yr person spending at-or-above $1290/month is considered dangerously house-poor (by that same metric).
I wish people would stop trying to normalize housing crisis financials. No person should ever have to spend $1300/month+ on a studio apartment, and people should stop pretending that's OK.
It’s clearly a huge cost, but you need consider it as part of a larger lifestyle. A 30 day unlimited subway ticket only costs 127$. By comparison it’s difficult to spend that much under 500$/ month on a car including taxes, insurance, financing, maintenance, fuel, maintenance, and depreciation (aka the actual cost of a car every n years).
Which makes it comparable to ~950$ a month rent + car which is still around 100$ over your suggestion, but not the insanity it may seem like. After graduation I was in a roughly similar situation at my first job with a 1050$/month apartment with a car in Fairfax VA on a 38,000$/year salary that included heath insurance for 150/month. This was 2003, but I also had student loans to pay back.
This is not really accurate, the majority of the population spends approximately ~$250 per month or so on their car (full TCO -- including all taxes, insurance, financing, fuel, and maintenance). The average car on the road is ten years old, and the average person has never bought a new car in their entire life -- car costs are significantly cheaper than you claim.
This is yet another thing most Urbanists / StrongTowns types do -- just artificially invent an extra $200 to $400+/month in fake costs to "cars", to try to make crisis-level housing costs look artificially reasonable.
It get’s 26/34 mpg new which tends to be reduced over time, but let’s be optimistic and call it 30. At 2.70$/gallon and an average 13,500 miles per year driven that’s 100$ a month for gas.
Insurance is tricky as it varies by state, age, and driving record, but the average is clearly above the lowest possible price. Further, if you lack full coverage on average you add a new car or repair costs. I am going to call it 80$ a month though it can be a lot higher than that if you have say a DUI, but also a little lower.
Looking here: https://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2015/cost-to-own/ a 10 year old Civic is running ~180$ a month in repair and maintained costs with a general upward trend. But let’s stick with 180$ out to year 20.
Now that’s ~420$/month excluding interest (paid or opportunity cost), parking, taxes, tolls, tickets, etc. It’s clearly possible to pay less by driving less or doing your own repairs, but it’s also really common to pay far more.
The value that is attributable to the community is the value of the land before building. Obviously that's far higher in the middle of NYC or SF or something. So I'm not sure what you are saying about low density housing.
There is/was a political movement to finance everything with a tax on the unimproved value of land. The advantage is that with almost everything you can tax, you get less of it, which is usually bad, and besides leads to avoidance and lower revenue. But unimproved land cannot be "discouraged" by taxes, and owners cannot pass the taxes on - their incentive is then to not leave it vacant, which is a very good thing in a dense city.
We don't build new cities way far away in the middle of nowhere, because building new cities is expensive and there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere.
At some point it has to be cheaper than upgrading infrastructure for ever-growing cities and implementing all kinds of harmful artificial restrictions e.g. on traffic just to support increasing population numbers in exiting metro areas.
> there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere.
Many factories are in the middle of nowhere and I don't see why one couldn't build and fill office space when cheap attractive housing and well-planned infrastructure is available nearby.
The reason why don't do it is more likely because most western countries have become stagnant and inefficient at large projects.
And now the hip class wants to get rid of cars in their hip inner cities, because they don't need them. Again totally ignoring everyone that is both forced to live outside of the centre and work inside of it.
Actually, I think the minimum wage should be coupled to the typical rent around the working place. Good luck getting your new smartphone delivered then.
You’re smoking some strong stuff if you think densifications causes gentrification. Reality has always been gentrification leads to investment leads to densification.
Gentrification starts with some Avantgarde subculture(s) rallying in parts of a city that are cheap and dense enough to find enough followers. Later, followers with many expulse the old residents and push the prices. This does never happen in some rural area.
They could simply argue, that these jobs would not exist without densification. Take the other extreme: I don't think Starbucks employees would earn more if everyone would live on firms miles apart from each other. Starbucks would be gone in this scenario. Everyone would be poorer, albeit equally poorer.
So I would argue, you need to invest in public transportation and housing of different price ranges, possibly even built by the city itself, so threre are less incentives to defend legislation hindering new buildings, the actual reason why those workers are getting squeezed out. If you additionally try to focus on education and upward mobility you get a fair society.
If you think being somewhere first gives you inalienable rights, I'm sure there are some native Americans that would like to talk to you about the deed to your house.
For example, in San Francisco, de city spends about 2000U$S per household. And if you adjusted that amount of the amount of space used, single family homes would end up paying 3~4k a month of taxes alone.
Huh? So the rent covers the infrastructure cost? Last time I checked, both renters and owners pay infrastructure directly. That includes waste water, garbage disposal, and pretty much everything else. None of this scales with the space I use, at most it scales with the square root of space due to larger distances.
Or were you wanting city dwellers to fund it for you?
We're good out here in the rest of the country; in fact, if people could tolerate wotking remotely better, there are places where four-bedroom houses are selling for $80k.
Cities have their own problems but we aren’t looking for a handout from rural residents to solve those problems.
Your cheap house is cheap because city residents subsidize it. In New York the city residents pay 45% of the taxes but receive 40% of the expenditures. How about we balance it out and let you rural residents make up the shortfall. In NY that’s about $8 billion per year.
Good luck and have fun. Don’t bite the hand that feeds.