This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much 'stuff' you're building the infrastructure for.
Initially it's not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs/maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don't...it's not pretty.
It seems like the root problem is that the way property taxes are assessed doesn’t actually line up with how much demand a given development puts on the city for services/infrastructure. Property taxes are based on, “how much would someone else pay for this”, which isn’t the relevant metric from the city’s perspective, it should be, “approximately how expensive is this property to service year by year, including eventual replacement of infrastructure?”
If you did it that way, low density developments would pay their true costs, and would become more expensive to the ‘end user’ and thus less popular. And if they didn’t, well, they're paying their true costs anyway, so problem solved.
I've always found it weird and funny that in many parts of Europe taxes used to be based on the width of the front of houses. That's why you'll find extremely narrow houses in some older downtown areas. Cologne is an example of this.
As soon as the author started doing the math on street maintenance per lot, this medieval taxation system made instant sense to me (although I believe there also were taxes on windows...). Maybe something like this would be more beneficial. In general zoning that encourages density rather than discouraged it is definitely more in the interest of cities. Yet, most people get angry with me when I mention this.
An issue with the present system is that the status quo is virtually immutable. How cities can tax is rigidly constrained by state laws. Attempts to change those laws run into every possible obstacle, especially if it's perceived that someone is getting more goodies, and someone else less. Often, divided along urban / rural lines.
Now, it's not entirely rigid. In my state, each city sets its budget, then your tax bill is simply the budget weighted by the value of your property. Some kinds of extra expenditures such as bond issues can be approved through referendum. Others can be tacked onto the homeowners whose goodies are getting fixed, through special assessments. When the street in front of my house was rebuilt, I got a bill from the city for X amount based on Y feet of frontage.
It's a tiny bit complex because you also live in a county which is doing the same thing.
But the fundamental of assessing real estate and using it as the foundation of your tax bill is practically carved into stone. And it does have the advantage of being relatively straightforward to compute. In a town with a relatively brisk market, your assessment is going to be pretty close to what you paid for the house plus an inflation factor based on your neighborhood. And you know that your neighbor isn't somehow wriggling out of their tax obligation. That's overlooking the exceptions of course, but it captures the gist of it.
Partially, but only partially if you take this sentence literally:
"our town is essentially a corporation where the citizens are the investors and stakeholders.. We are a real estate development company that also provides services... with holdings totaling $1.29 billion,"
Apple is essentially the stakeholder in the Apple ecosystem. Some decisions are made as you suggest. Apple price phones and laptops such that costs are covered and profits are made.
Some decisions are "strategic." There's no direct revenue from their photo app, but a photo app helps sell phones and (more importantly) if Apple doesn't provide one then FB or Google will. A lot of Apple's decisions are like this.
Some, currently very important decisions are all about leveraging power to extract revenue. Apple charge Google $15bn to be safari's default search option. They apply similar logic to all activity on iphones. As in-app purchases emerge, subscriptions, digital goods, physical goods or any other category emerges... Apple study that market and determine how much they can charge. It has nothing to do with how much these cost apple to support.
IDK if this applies to Galesburg, but I think most towns/governments/municipalities have the power to generate a lot more revenue than they do... certainly during a building boom. What Apple would be doing in this position is (a) determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue. I'm not saying they should do this, but the point of difference is worth noting.
In my area all new housing developments have their own “metro tax district” that residents pay. It funds the infrastructure for their neighborhood. Some people don’t pay attention to it when budgeting for and buying a new house. I know that has caused many families to lose their homes. Usually those districts have a sunset built in though once they have covered the building costs.
I saw a few articles like that on Strongtown. They make for a good story but frankly economically they do not make sense for me. In my surburban town with pretty big lots, school taxes are 2/3 of property tax and things that are more expensive in surburban setting than in the city (roads, sewer, electric, gas hookups) are something like 10% of taxes.
Even in this story, city currently spends 3.2M/year maintaining the roads. City has 15k housing units so city currently spends roughly $200/house on roads. It's $16/month. Author thinks city actually need to spend 4.2M - this is $280/year per house which is only $23/month. That's really not much even if cost need to be doubled. Hardly unaffordable. This is per dwelling - not even per person and does not count that commercial buildings pay more so residential rate is even lower.
Electric/water/sewers generally pay for themselves thru user fee - I think average is $20-60/month/house for sewer/water in US and electric is thru usage fee. School busing in rural setting is probably a bit more expensive but is still rounding error in overall school budget.
Everything else - school, governance, police, fire are probably about the same in rural areas and in the dense city. SF is a shit city with 15k/year spending per person and most rural/suburban areas are much nicer on a fraction of that spending.
Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city in infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's not.
US cities has a lot of problems but frankly cost of maintaining roads is not the thing that will bankrupt them.
You are mistaking "what Cities spend on maintenance" for what it would cost to fully maintain the system. The author does a good job spelling this out:
> If we convert 177 miles into feet it’s 934,560 feet of road. At $20 per foot per year, we would need to spend on average $18,691,200 a year on road maintenance just to keep all of our roads properly maintained.
Note his actual estimate is ~$18.6M not the ~$4M you quoted - that was his hypothetical "even if I'm wrong by 4x too high" number.
> According to the capital improvement plan from earlier we are planning to spend an average of $3,220,000 per year.
Note that the author's cost figure is just for roads and does not include other similarly expensive infrastructure like water lines that are included in the city's Capital Improvements budget.
The reason for this gap in infra funding is they don't have the money, so they let most of the infrastructure decay, and use the money they have to patch the worst problems as best they can.
Every city in America is doing this. We just so used to it we don't think anything of driving on roads that are full of cracks and potholes and generally falling apart.
>Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city in infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's not.
Who pays the cost to connect these rural areas to other regions?
Retail isn't coming back like it was. Downtowns in the past centered almost entirely around retail businesses. The author spends a lot of time bemoaning Walmart and other big box stores, but even the box stores themselves are facing more pressure than ever from Amazon. A small retail store in a run-down third rate city doesn't stand a chance at success against the economies of scale and expectations of consumers that exist today. If a town can draw in boutique retail and bars and restaurants, it can sometimes be revitalized to an extent, but that seems to be the extent of what's possible with old downtowns.
I read a story in the last couple of years about small towns that shot themselves in the foot by keeping out the big box stores - I wish I could find it again. The theory was that the traditional small downtown couldn't meet 100% of everybody's needs, so they started shopping at places like Amazon. And once you start shopping at Amazon, it just becomes convenient to do more and more of your shopping there. Suddenly instead of your downtown being killed by the big boxes a mile out of town, they're being killed by someone much bigger and farther away and harder to fight back against.
I live in the country near a couple of small cities about an hour outside of a major city. The small cities are probably best described as "hanging on." I basically frequent businesses that aren't food oriented once in a blue moon--and never walk around the downtowns. I do shop in the city limits but it's mostly either a supermarket or the Walmart. The travel agency downtown sure isn't going to pull in a lot of traffic.
Great, thorough read. As someone that doesn’t have any life experience of what towns/suburban development was like prior to the 1990s, what was interesting is the part where the article brought up the types of big changes happening after WWII. Building roads everywhere, zoning houses with big yards, building big new commercial complexes on the outskirts because they needed more land.
It seems like there was a ton of exuberance and pride post-WWII, but terrible investment strategizing. All these “developments of the future” saddle so much cost over time that it makes the financial balancing act to stay long-term sustainable very precarious. (Of course, this is all retrospective looking after the fact).
What seems like a crazy takeaway is: with these towns like Galesburg that have been around over 150 years, it seems like the town planners in the 1870s had better judgement than the ones post-WWII.
Despite the conventional thinking of the last 60 years across these towns being all those bad investment decisions were believed to be the pinnacle of American real estate development and bonafide testaments of greatness.
> It seems like there was a ton of exuberance and pride post-WWII, but terrible investment strategizing. All these “developments of the future” saddle so much cost over time that it makes the financial balancing act to stay long-term sustainable very precarious. (Of course, this is all retrospective looking after the fact).
Do note that it was not just "exuberance and pride", it was also a way to get white families out of inner-city mixed-race neighbourhoods, and to enforce segregation.
This was not a secret either e.g. William Levitt refused to sell levittown homes to racial minorities, and deeds came with a racial covenant.
I’m glad we’re talking about the finances of towns here. Almost every town in America is bankrupt.
I disagree somewhat with the author here around the issues. For instance, he uses the $20/ft/road and points out they need roughly double the tax base to support their current roads.
Sure, that’s a way to look at it. Alternatively, they can cut back the roads, fill with gravel and honestly it might be cheaper to just build and maintain a concrete facility. If you can cut the price of laying concrete by 50% thatd also be a solution. Alternatively, pre-purchase X tons per year and reduce costs that way letting the concrete makers in the area expand and reduce overhead.
Regarding city planning, yes totally agree. I’d argue the major issue is that we lost manufacturing here in the United States. Factories paid relatively well, and were running at 20% fewer people per capita in the workforce than in the 60s. This means less wealth generated across the board, less wealth in these towns, etc.
Finally, IMO as a town the best investments are those that attract more jobs and wealth. So make fresh paint available for free to any businesses. Hire better police. Cut back on road quality. Cut back on taxes for businesses that bring net jobs. Invest in community activities, particularly for kids. Advertise.
It’s a difficult spot to be in, the reality is that smalls towns across the country were decimated between the 1990s - 2020s. Most of it was policies sending stuff over seas and reducing wealth creation in rural towns (where factories used to run). To fix that will require some national solutions and scaling back the towns which haven’t seen growth (and many declined) in 30 years
> The last paragraph sounds like something we’ve all heard before. Anti-progress and looking at the past with rose colored glasses.
Building cities around cars is not progress, and arguing for making them pedestrian-friendly isn't "anti-progress". Suburbanization is just one possible development path and one that's not particularly smart.
To fight suburbanization the only thing that will work is taxing external costs. So you want to live 30 km away from the city but enjoy all the benefits - work there, have access to culture, entertainment and services on demand? Pay for the infrastructure that city needs to maintain to let you do it. This would make suburban lifestyle very expansive and would stop suburbanization. But people won't vote for this, because they want the profits and someone else to pay for the costs.
I don't understand why they divide the appraised value by three, then compute 1.5% property tax from it and say they can't raise it any higher. Where I live, our property tax rate is higher even with a homestead exemption AND we don't divide by three. Simply removing the division would fix the revenue problem according to the article's math.
More specifically, right now I just checked and I pay 1.6% of my home's appraised market value each year as property tax. Galesburg pays 0.5%. So there's an easy fix.
I live in a "strong town". On my modest home, I pay $8000/yr in property taxes. In addition I pay over $10,000 in local income tax to the town. The housing market is strong. Houses sell within days. The schools are excellent. The roads are well-maintained. The community center is awesome. Taxes are too high for sure, but we get outstanding services and facilities for those taxes.
Galesburg is a city not a town. It can't benefit from the wealth effects of a town within 20 minute commuting distance (car and bus and light rail) of a major city. Small cities like Galesburgh can only thrive if they bring in significant outside money - usually in the form of tourism and tourist who decide to stay. I think of Bend OR as an example.
> Take for example the taxes I pay on my home. I pay $260.17 to the city every year in property taxes. I live on a 60 ft wide lot. If you take the $20/ft/year road maintenance metric, cut it in half because I’m just on one side of the street, and then multiply it by the width of my lot you get $600. I would need to contribute $600 a year through my property taxes to just pay for the maintenance of the portion of the street in front of my house.
That is a questionable calculation because the street in front of their house is not just used by them. For example, consider a dead end street with 100 houses on one side and a forest on the other, with each house having the same length of street in front of them. Assume each house uses the street once a day to leave the neighborhood and once a day to return.
The house at the open end of street, call it house 1, uses the segment in front of their house (call it segment 1) 2 times each day.
The house next next to house 1, house 2, uses its segment (segment 2) 2 times each day and it uses segment 1 2 times each day.
In general, house N uses each of segments 1 through N 2 times a day and does not use segments N+1 through 100.
Looking at it from the point of view of the segments, segment 1 is used equally by 100 houses, segment 1 is used equally by 99 houses, and so on.
Figuring fair share by width of lots is even more questionable. A wide but shallow lot and a narrow but deep lot of the same area with similar occupancy aren't going to inherently have different street usage (or different water, sewer, police/fire, or other tax funded service usage).
I don't live there anymore, but it so weird to see my hometown on the front page of Hacker News. Some of my friends still live there and it is depressing to hear them talk about what's going on. When I have gone back and visited, nothing seems to be the same anymore, save for the few restaurants I liked.
What a great deep dive into a fascinating subject I have never seen the actual math on.
> This section of road is approximately 584 feet long and is going to cost around $350,000
This is the cornerstone of the article he uses for all other calculations. Is this number reasonable? It seems ridiculously expensive but maybe that is just how things are.
Yeah. Fundamentally, roads are really costly. The whole notion of designing a city around cars is horribly expensive and we keep pretending that's not the case.
Others have said that the $350,000 is reasonable - but let me point out that there can be a wide range of "2-line roads", even in a small area (so same cost of labor, gravel, concrete or asphalt, etc.).
Some rural "2-lane roads" are two barely-wide-enough lanes for vehicles, with no shoulders, no curbs, and drainage ditches (so no buried storm sewers or anything). Curves can be sharp, grades steep, and blind summits frequent. Bridges may be 1 lane wide, or have weight limits.
Vs. "2-lane road" in even a modest little city often implies pavement wide enough to park on one or both sides of the 2 traffic lanes, and a load of other expensive upgrades. I'd not be a bit surprised if the cost per mile of that was 2x to 5x the cost of a bare-minimum rural 2-lane (paved) road.
This article claims costs of $2-3m for a mile of two-lane road in a rural area. 584 feet is a bit over a tenth of a mile, so that cost would make sense for building a new road. Not sure whether the cost to major repairs or replacements would be higher or lower. Also gotta factor in that this article is from 2016 and right now costs for building anything seem substantially up.
> As a town we are essentially a fixed plot of land cultivating a crop of buildings which we tax to fund our corporation
This is a very interesting point of view that I have not seen anywhere else. However it omits side-effects that buildings have on citizens other than taxes, e.g. hospitals improve health, universities improve human capital of citizens, factories create network effects with respect to suppliers and retailers, etc. A healthier and more educated workforce will be more productive and a healthier business network will add more value generating more sales taxes and increasing property value.
It's a good strategy when you're playing SimCity but the real world doesn't work that way. The major costs of government, as the article's pie chart clearly shows, are services to people. And in the real world dense cities spend more on services per person than rural areas.
It's just the fundamental misconception that underlies all these sorts of articles. Land doesn't pay taxes and land doesn't really consume resources. People do.
Yeah I was just thinking about that. Basically, using business terms, those things you mentioned should be thought of as liabilities. Maybe it's not the perfect analogy, but if everything can somewhat be captured or at least get within the right order of magnitude, I think it could maybe help guide decisions towards creating the optimal density.
The damage inflicted onto roads by vehicles goes up by the fourth power of the vehicles weight. So, should average citizens be on the hook for most road repairs, or should those who utilize extremely heavy trucks?
Furthermore, as society progresses, we're not going to need so many roads. Either we'll technologically eclipse them, or sociologically we'll reorient our society towards walking and biking. I don't see us having nearly the amount of road maintenance in future as we do now.
> So, should average citizens be on the hook for most road repairs, or should those who utilize extremely heavy trucks?
You can scapegoat the trucks, but average citizens are utilizing heavy trucks (indirectly) by buying stuff on Amazon or Walmart (to name a few examples).
In Amsterdam, the tax laws were based on the number of feet (or meters) of street frontage. Hence even long ago houses in Amsterdam tended to go up rather than out. (I don't have a reference for this so it may not be completely correct). Clearly tax laws should focus on frontage, but even more they should focus on the long term costs of the city to provide the infrastructure.
That really doesn't make any sense at all imo; if you have a flag lot, i.e. a small amount of frontage with a 100 acres behind it accessed by the 200'ft of road frontage, shouldn't that be taxed higher than someone with a 1/4 lot also with 200' of frontage?
I object to the current state of property taxes altogether - seen too many people (in some areas) that buy a house live in in for 30 years, pay off their mortgage and are forced to sell it because all of a sudden the property taxes are $40K/year. Doesn't seem right to me.
IMO, taxing people on income is much fairer - by definition as you income goes up, you can afford to pay more - but having a house that you live in go up in value really doesn't give you more ability to pay the tax bill, and we shouldn't be in the business of taxing people out of their houses.
2nd, 3rd, 4th houses - ok in that cases, but a person living in their only house shouldn't be forced to sell it just because it went up in value.
That seems way more sensible than what we have the US and is more akin to the “land tax” system that’s talked about a lot here. The property tax scheme we use in the US only “works” as long as the city is growing. The moment the population stagnates or starts declining, the city rapidly becomes unsustainable and must rely on funds from the state or federal government to pay for basic maintenance and services.
Quick question: who collects the taxes? Is it the local government or the central government?
I suspect we need to take property taxes away from the local government to the federal government in the US so businesses cannot pressure local governments to give them a handout for opening their business there.
In some countries you have to pay for the road maintenance and development along your plots.
That can lead to other absurdities, that a field owner along an agricultural road has suddenly to pay for make over and street lights that add zero value to their field.
A solution could be a more federal approach. Residents of the neighborhood have to decide how their taxes are used for maintenance. And they would directly feel the lack of taxes for maintenance.
- In a commercial / industrial district (taxpaying companies, but no residents), do those taxpayers decide?
- Is the "Residents...have to decide" voting weighed by how much each one is paying? It seems reasonable for Walmart to have a bigger say than any of the little stores & restaurants across the street from Walmart.
- Is there some "I don't need" opt-out? A farmer growing 640 acres of corn across the road from Walmart probably doesn't even need the road to exist - the dirt roads along the other 3 sides of his field are good enough for tractors.
Other than a hospital, schools and big box retail, what is the economic "engine" attracting new homeowners? Big box retail was the place to spend the cash, but what is the source of "earn the cash"? Illinois is a top state for "fleeing" citizens.
Maytag used to have a refrigerator manufacturing facility in Galesburg, which moved to Mexico around the turn of the aughts, and incurred a loss of thousands of jobs. Usual NAFTA hollowing out of middle America story.
BNSF Railway has a major classification yard in Galesburg. Just like other railroads, they use their Chicago yard for intermodal traffic (loading containers from the trains onto trucks and vice versa), and use a nearby yard outside of Chicago to manage general traffic.
According to the Knox County Area Partnership [1], the largest employers in Knox County (of which Galesburg is the urban center) are BNSF, the hospital, the schools, Knox College, Blick Art Materials, Gates Corporation, the local government, and the prison.
It's fairly common for small US towns to have the local health system, local school system, and Walmart (or the local grocery store) as the largest employers. Galesburg is more fortunate and is more like a typical midwest town, with a handful of manufacturers and warehousing-type jobs that exceed the standard rural fare, and a college also.
> Walmart builds their buildings to last only 15-20 years and then builds a new facility. We are in year 15 of our Walmart, so they are exploring their next rebuild. If Walmart leaves its current location ...
Forgot about terraforming Mars; we need to terraform Illinois. The weather makes it a great place to be from. The scenery is also seriously lacking, except maybe on the western borders and the southern part, where hardly anyone lives.
Aside from that, you have the permanently toxic politics.
Agrigulture and federally funded/entitled raikroads built the patchwork of dmall towns in the early/mid 1800s. Starting in the 1940s those things began disappearing.
New homeowners are either local kids or retired people bringing their retirement money to lower cost of living areas.
This is a general statement about smaller towns in general: I also think that the fact that the US birth rate is falling (for a myriad of reasons) is partly to blame. Not that the author can do anything in particular about it but it's a problem we must face as a society
An easy solution is to just not build roads for new developments. If a private interest wants to establish a new development they should pay for it all. The market will magically include all the costs in the final product (buildings/homes) and no one will be out a dime involuntarily. Things will cost what they actually cost.
Some would counter that this isn’t how economic development works. Arguments would be things like businesses need incentives or the city is responsible for common infrastructure.
The problem is that roads just become a form of corporate welfare. If a enterprise or business doesn’t want to fully invest in its new location, IMHO, it is not worth it and you need to face the fact that your town just isn’t ready for it yet.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|4 years ago|reply
Initially it's not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs/maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don't...it's not pretty.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|4 years ago|reply
If you did it that way, low density developments would pay their true costs, and would become more expensive to the ‘end user’ and thus less popular. And if they didn’t, well, they're paying their true costs anyway, so problem solved.
[+] [-] ajmurmann|4 years ago|reply
As soon as the author started doing the math on street maintenance per lot, this medieval taxation system made instant sense to me (although I believe there also were taxes on windows...). Maybe something like this would be more beneficial. In general zoning that encourages density rather than discouraged it is definitely more in the interest of cities. Yet, most people get angry with me when I mention this.
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
Now, it's not entirely rigid. In my state, each city sets its budget, then your tax bill is simply the budget weighted by the value of your property. Some kinds of extra expenditures such as bond issues can be approved through referendum. Others can be tacked onto the homeowners whose goodies are getting fixed, through special assessments. When the street in front of my house was rebuilt, I got a bill from the city for X amount based on Y feet of frontage.
It's a tiny bit complex because you also live in a county which is doing the same thing.
But the fundamental of assessing real estate and using it as the foundation of your tax bill is practically carved into stone. And it does have the advantage of being relatively straightforward to compute. In a town with a relatively brisk market, your assessment is going to be pretty close to what you paid for the house plus an inflation factor based on your neighborhood. And you know that your neighbor isn't somehow wriggling out of their tax obligation. That's overlooking the exceptions of course, but it captures the gist of it.
[+] [-] netcan|4 years ago|reply
"our town is essentially a corporation where the citizens are the investors and stakeholders.. We are a real estate development company that also provides services... with holdings totaling $1.29 billion,"
Apple is essentially the stakeholder in the Apple ecosystem. Some decisions are made as you suggest. Apple price phones and laptops such that costs are covered and profits are made.
Some decisions are "strategic." There's no direct revenue from their photo app, but a photo app helps sell phones and (more importantly) if Apple doesn't provide one then FB or Google will. A lot of Apple's decisions are like this.
Some, currently very important decisions are all about leveraging power to extract revenue. Apple charge Google $15bn to be safari's default search option. They apply similar logic to all activity on iphones. As in-app purchases emerge, subscriptions, digital goods, physical goods or any other category emerges... Apple study that market and determine how much they can charge. It has nothing to do with how much these cost apple to support.
IDK if this applies to Galesburg, but I think most towns/governments/municipalities have the power to generate a lot more revenue than they do... certainly during a building boom. What Apple would be doing in this position is (a) determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue. I'm not saying they should do this, but the point of difference is worth noting.
[+] [-] macinjosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfadsadsf|4 years ago|reply
Even in this story, city currently spends 3.2M/year maintaining the roads. City has 15k housing units so city currently spends roughly $200/house on roads. It's $16/month. Author thinks city actually need to spend 4.2M - this is $280/year per house which is only $23/month. That's really not much even if cost need to be doubled. Hardly unaffordable. This is per dwelling - not even per person and does not count that commercial buildings pay more so residential rate is even lower.
Electric/water/sewers generally pay for themselves thru user fee - I think average is $20-60/month/house for sewer/water in US and electric is thru usage fee. School busing in rural setting is probably a bit more expensive but is still rounding error in overall school budget.
Everything else - school, governance, police, fire are probably about the same in rural areas and in the dense city. SF is a shit city with 15k/year spending per person and most rural/suburban areas are much nicer on a fraction of that spending.
Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city in infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's not.
US cities has a lot of problems but frankly cost of maintaining roads is not the thing that will bankrupt them.
[+] [-] burlesona|4 years ago|reply
> If we convert 177 miles into feet it’s 934,560 feet of road. At $20 per foot per year, we would need to spend on average $18,691,200 a year on road maintenance just to keep all of our roads properly maintained.
Note his actual estimate is ~$18.6M not the ~$4M you quoted - that was his hypothetical "even if I'm wrong by 4x too high" number.
> According to the capital improvement plan from earlier we are planning to spend an average of $3,220,000 per year.
Note that the author's cost figure is just for roads and does not include other similarly expensive infrastructure like water lines that are included in the city's Capital Improvements budget.
The reason for this gap in infra funding is they don't have the money, so they let most of the infrastructure decay, and use the money they have to patch the worst problems as best they can.
Every city in America is doing this. We just so used to it we don't think anything of driving on roads that are full of cracks and potholes and generally falling apart.
This gap is why the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the US a C- on infrastructure. (https://infrastructurereportcard.org)
[+] [-] throwaway6734|4 years ago|reply
Who pays the cost to connect these rural areas to other regions?
[+] [-] chrisco255|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark-r|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siruncledrew|4 years ago|reply
It seems like there was a ton of exuberance and pride post-WWII, but terrible investment strategizing. All these “developments of the future” saddle so much cost over time that it makes the financial balancing act to stay long-term sustainable very precarious. (Of course, this is all retrospective looking after the fact).
What seems like a crazy takeaway is: with these towns like Galesburg that have been around over 150 years, it seems like the town planners in the 1870s had better judgement than the ones post-WWII.
Despite the conventional thinking of the last 60 years across these towns being all those bad investment decisions were believed to be the pinnacle of American real estate development and bonafide testaments of greatness.
[+] [-] masklinn|4 years ago|reply
Do note that it was not just "exuberance and pride", it was also a way to get white families out of inner-city mixed-race neighbourhoods, and to enforce segregation.
This was not a secret either e.g. William Levitt refused to sell levittown homes to racial minorities, and deeds came with a racial covenant.
[+] [-] lettergram|4 years ago|reply
I disagree somewhat with the author here around the issues. For instance, he uses the $20/ft/road and points out they need roughly double the tax base to support their current roads.
Sure, that’s a way to look at it. Alternatively, they can cut back the roads, fill with gravel and honestly it might be cheaper to just build and maintain a concrete facility. If you can cut the price of laying concrete by 50% thatd also be a solution. Alternatively, pre-purchase X tons per year and reduce costs that way letting the concrete makers in the area expand and reduce overhead.
Regarding city planning, yes totally agree. I’d argue the major issue is that we lost manufacturing here in the United States. Factories paid relatively well, and were running at 20% fewer people per capita in the workforce than in the 60s. This means less wealth generated across the board, less wealth in these towns, etc.
Finally, IMO as a town the best investments are those that attract more jobs and wealth. So make fresh paint available for free to any businesses. Hire better police. Cut back on road quality. Cut back on taxes for businesses that bring net jobs. Invest in community activities, particularly for kids. Advertise.
It’s a difficult spot to be in, the reality is that smalls towns across the country were decimated between the 1990s - 2020s. Most of it was policies sending stuff over seas and reducing wealth creation in rural towns (where factories used to run). To fix that will require some national solutions and scaling back the towns which haven’t seen growth (and many declined) in 30 years
[+] [-] ajuc|4 years ago|reply
Building cities around cars is not progress, and arguing for making them pedestrian-friendly isn't "anti-progress". Suburbanization is just one possible development path and one that's not particularly smart.
To fight suburbanization the only thing that will work is taxing external costs. So you want to live 30 km away from the city but enjoy all the benefits - work there, have access to culture, entertainment and services on demand? Pay for the infrastructure that city needs to maintain to let you do it. This would make suburban lifestyle very expansive and would stop suburbanization. But people won't vote for this, because they want the profits and someone else to pay for the costs.
[+] [-] sackofmugs|4 years ago|reply
More specifically, right now I just checked and I pay 1.6% of my home's appraised market value each year as property tax. Galesburg pays 0.5%. So there's an easy fix.
[+] [-] intrasight|4 years ago|reply
Galesburg is a city not a town. It can't benefit from the wealth effects of a town within 20 minute commuting distance (car and bus and light rail) of a major city. Small cities like Galesburgh can only thrive if they bring in significant outside money - usually in the form of tourism and tourist who decide to stay. I think of Bend OR as an example.
[+] [-] twoodfin|4 years ago|reply
If that’s the kind of tax base required for a “strong town”, we’re really tilting at windmills here.
[+] [-] tzs|4 years ago|reply
That is a questionable calculation because the street in front of their house is not just used by them. For example, consider a dead end street with 100 houses on one side and a forest on the other, with each house having the same length of street in front of them. Assume each house uses the street once a day to leave the neighborhood and once a day to return.
The house at the open end of street, call it house 1, uses the segment in front of their house (call it segment 1) 2 times each day.
The house next next to house 1, house 2, uses its segment (segment 2) 2 times each day and it uses segment 1 2 times each day.
In general, house N uses each of segments 1 through N 2 times a day and does not use segments N+1 through 100.
Looking at it from the point of view of the segments, segment 1 is used equally by 100 houses, segment 1 is used equally by 99 houses, and so on.
Figuring fair share by width of lots is even more questionable. A wide but shallow lot and a narrow but deep lot of the same area with similar occupancy aren't going to inherently have different street usage (or different water, sewer, police/fire, or other tax funded service usage).
[+] [-] AndroidKitKat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
> This section of road is approximately 584 feet long and is going to cost around $350,000
This is the cornerstone of the article he uses for all other calculations. Is this number reasonable? It seems ridiculously expensive but maybe that is just how things are.
[+] [-] cbsmith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bell-cot|4 years ago|reply
Some rural "2-lane roads" are two barely-wide-enough lanes for vehicles, with no shoulders, no curbs, and drainage ditches (so no buried storm sewers or anything). Curves can be sharp, grades steep, and blind summits frequent. Bridges may be 1 lane wide, or have weight limits.
Vs. "2-lane road" in even a modest little city often implies pavement wide enough to park on one or both sides of the 2 traffic lanes, and a load of other expensive upgrades. I'd not be a bit surprised if the cost per mile of that was 2x to 5x the cost of a bare-minimum rural 2-lane (paved) road.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|4 years ago|reply
https://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road/
[+] [-] pyb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javitury|4 years ago|reply
This is a very interesting point of view that I have not seen anywhere else. However it omits side-effects that buildings have on citizens other than taxes, e.g. hospitals improve health, universities improve human capital of citizens, factories create network effects with respect to suppliers and retailers, etc. A healthier and more educated workforce will be more productive and a healthier business network will add more value generating more sales taxes and increasing property value.
[+] [-] treis|4 years ago|reply
It's just the fundamental misconception that underlies all these sorts of articles. Land doesn't pay taxes and land doesn't really consume resources. People do.
[+] [-] asimpletune|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otikik|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|4 years ago|reply
Furthermore, as society progresses, we're not going to need so many roads. Either we'll technologically eclipse them, or sociologically we'll reorient our society towards walking and biking. I don't see us having nearly the amount of road maintenance in future as we do now.
[+] [-] umvi|4 years ago|reply
You can scapegoat the trucks, but average citizens are utilizing heavy trucks (indirectly) by buying stuff on Amazon or Walmart (to name a few examples).
[+] [-] closeparen|4 years ago|reply
Even an unused or barely used street suffers from a freeze thaw cycle.
[+] [-] talkingtab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ejb999|4 years ago|reply
That really doesn't make any sense at all imo; if you have a flag lot, i.e. a small amount of frontage with a 100 acres behind it accessed by the 200'ft of road frontage, shouldn't that be taxed higher than someone with a 1/4 lot also with 200' of frontage?
I object to the current state of property taxes altogether - seen too many people (in some areas) that buy a house live in in for 30 years, pay off their mortgage and are forced to sell it because all of a sudden the property taxes are $40K/year. Doesn't seem right to me.
IMO, taxing people on income is much fairer - by definition as you income goes up, you can afford to pay more - but having a house that you live in go up in value really doesn't give you more ability to pay the tax bill, and we shouldn't be in the business of taxing people out of their houses.
2nd, 3rd, 4th houses - ok in that cases, but a person living in their only house shouldn't be forced to sell it just because it went up in value.
[+] [-] hnuser847|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pooper|4 years ago|reply
I suspect we need to take property taxes away from the local government to the federal government in the US so businesses cannot pressure local governments to give them a handout for opening their business there.
[+] [-] lixtra|4 years ago|reply
That can lead to other absurdities, that a field owner along an agricultural road has suddenly to pay for make over and street lights that add zero value to their field.
A solution could be a more federal approach. Residents of the neighborhood have to decide how their taxes are used for maintenance. And they would directly feel the lack of taxes for maintenance.
[+] [-] bell-cot|4 years ago|reply
- In a commercial / industrial district (taxpaying companies, but no residents), do those taxpayers decide?
- Is the "Residents...have to decide" voting weighed by how much each one is paying? It seems reasonable for Walmart to have a bigger say than any of the little stores & restaurants across the street from Walmart.
- Is there some "I don't need" opt-out? A farmer growing 640 acres of corn across the road from Walmart probably doesn't even need the road to exist - the dirt roads along the other 3 sides of his field are good enough for tractors.
[+] [-] rceDia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
Can’t be a strong town when you’re a dying town.
https://www.peoriamagazines.com/ibi/2015/mar/galesburg-after...
[+] [-] niftich|4 years ago|reply
According to the Knox County Area Partnership [1], the largest employers in Knox County (of which Galesburg is the urban center) are BNSF, the hospital, the schools, Knox College, Blick Art Materials, Gates Corporation, the local government, and the prison.
It's fairly common for small US towns to have the local health system, local school system, and Walmart (or the local grocery store) as the largest employers. Galesburg is more fortunate and is more like a typical midwest town, with a handful of manufacturers and warehousing-type jobs that exceed the standard rural fare, and a college also.
[1] https://www.knoxpartnership.com/top-employers/
[+] [-] everybodyknows|4 years ago|reply
https://www.knox.edu/about-knox/fast-facts
Festivals in the historic district downtown:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galesburg_Historic_District
Doesn't seem like enough.
And note this:
> Walmart builds their buildings to last only 15-20 years and then builds a new facility. We are in year 15 of our Walmart, so they are exploring their next rebuild. If Walmart leaves its current location ...
[+] [-] Cupertino95014|4 years ago|reply
Aside from that, you have the permanently toxic politics.
Don't come at me; I used to live there.
[+] [-] arcbyte|4 years ago|reply
New homeowners are either local kids or retired people bringing their retirement money to lower cost of living areas.
[+] [-] tr33house|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macinjosh|4 years ago|reply
Some would counter that this isn’t how economic development works. Arguments would be things like businesses need incentives or the city is responsible for common infrastructure.
The problem is that roads just become a form of corporate welfare. If a enterprise or business doesn’t want to fully invest in its new location, IMHO, it is not worth it and you need to face the fact that your town just isn’t ready for it yet.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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