> but it decreases social segregation. That alone is critical to keep a city alive.
So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive?
Maybe they should start charging for that ...
So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive?
Maybe they should start charging for that ...
So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works.
It should work.
That's a good characterization of what's happening. But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?
Wait, that's actually what we have now.
Given that each of us is allotted exactly 8,760 hours in a year: Is it good public policy to force non-wealthy people to spend so many more of those hours in commuting than those who can afford to live closer to their jobs?
I live in a small, separately-incorporated city, a few minutes from downtown Houston, that has become increasingly wealthy. For several decades, the affordable bungalows built in the years following 1930s have been torn down and replaced by big houses. (Yes, my wife and I did that to build our house, more than 35 years ago.) Nowadays, though, many really big single-family homes are being put up on what used to be two-, three-, and four single-house lots. I get disgruntled every time we walk by one of those giant houses, because every one of them is, in effect, forcing two or more less-wealthy families to live further away — they're hoarding the space.
(My own thought is that for big, space-hoarding houses like that, property taxes should be progressive, so that such a house might be taxed at 2X, 3X, 4X, 10X the per-foot rate of houses on smaller lots.)
Wouldn't it be better to direct public policy and funding to helping create jobs elsewhere and leave the wealthy urban people make their own coffee?
That’s certainly worth exploring too. But there’s a reason I no longer mow my own lawn nor do my own auto maintenance: I flatter myself that I’m now more productive for the larger community when I do work that uses the skills I’ve spent years developing.
The cost of the necessary subsidy is calibrated to fall on grubby new-money high earners, so it is effectively free for the long-established propertied class who don't need much taxable income & locked in their property taxes long ago.
Liberalizing the market doesn't always work, even in the most dense economic liberal cities, the best environment for sustainable affordable housing is depopulation or some sort of recession or economic stagnation.
Note, by the way, that this inflicts real psychological damage, and perhaps we could also make the case that this should be financially compensated.
It's much easier to make sure middle and upper middle class people interact with the poor and such, but once you're rich enough to hire an assistant, you're rich enough to avoid most anything you don't want to deal with.
Let's call it "taxes".