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Re:Governor Brown's housing proposal could mean sweeping Bay... by jcranmer on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @09:50PM (#11727386)
It turns out that there's a long-established financial mechanism for paying upfront for something when you'll get the income to pay for it later--bonds. Major capital projects (such as building new schools) are usually financed via bonds, so timelines aren't that much of an issue.
Re:Governor Brown's housing proposal could mean sweeping Bay... by jedberg on Thursday May 19, 2016 @01:07AM (#11728129)
Except practicality gets in the way. "Dear voters, please approve a bond that will increase your taxes to help pay for all the new people who are moving in, who will increase your traffic and suck away resources from your children."

Those don't usually go very well.

Re:Governor Brown's housing proposal could mean sweeping Bay... by davmre on Thursday May 19, 2016 @04:51AM (#11728875)
Why would you need to raise taxes to pay off bonds? Why isn't the increased revenue from the new residents' taxes sufficient?

If your population doubles, sure you need to sell enough bonds to double your infrastructure, so the annualized cost (labor + amortized capital) of providing Government Services will double. But your tax base also doubles, so as long as the new residents pay at least the average tax rate (and wealthy gentrifiers usually pay higher rates), you'll collect double the revenue and everything balances out.

Re:Governor Brown's housing proposal could mean sweeping Bay... by jedberg on Thursday May 19, 2016 @12:58PM (#11731622)
> Why would you need to raise taxes to pay off bonds?

To make the interest payments? A bond is a loan and it has to be paid off. The taxes from the future residents will only cover the current costs, not the interest.

Re:Governor Brown's housing proposal could mean sweeping Bay... by davmre on Thursday May 19, 2016 @02:15PM (#11732341)
Again that's a wash, though, as long as interest rates on new bonds are not significantly higher than those the city is already paying on its existing infrastructure bonds (or on future bonds that will be sold when necessary to repair/replace the current infrastructure as it falls apart). Sure, high interest rates would provide an incentive against new infrastructure investments, but rates over the past few years have been historically low.

(Also, the effect of interest rates is at most a small single digit percentage, so even if it's not exactly a wash, those costs could be cancelled out by other effects, e.g., the returns to scale on denser infrastructure - you can generally serve 2x the population at less than 2x the cost, but you still get to collect 2x taxes).