Comment by cwp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwp | Hacker News Reader

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From the author's follow-up article [1]:

  How is this possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density, but I've long rejected that simplistic 
  explanation. There is a lot more to it than a simple division problem.

He goes on to explain that the poorer areas tend to have smaller houses and narrower streets built on higher ground, all of which leads to lower maintenance costs. They were built with more frugality and risk aversion than the more affluent areas. This supports the thesis that Lafayette's predicament stems from extravagant infrastructure in affluent areas that wouldn't have been built without subsidies.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...

>What we're really talking about is taking a neighborhood of $50,000 homes and making them $55,000 homes. That's a solid 10% increase in the tax base.

This is just such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. Land doesn't pay tax. People do. And they pay it out of the things that they produce. Planting trees or painting crosswalks doesn't increase their productivity and therefore does not grow the tax base. Increased property values simply represent an increase in the tax rate. You can get this same "return" by cutting out the beautification and simply raising the millage.

Sure, if you make your city more attractive rich people from other areas may move there. But nationally that is a zero sum game. If a rich person moving to the beautified city from an ugly one the net change is 0 as the ugly city loses as much as the rich one gains. The only way for cities to actually get richer is to increase the productivity of their citizens. This means spending on education, infrastructure, and public health.

Wow. That new graph of “poor neighborhood vs rich neighborhood” was not at all what I expected it to be.

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