Infrastructure like water pipes and roads are expensive to build and maintain. Lower density areas like malls increase these costs. That's fine in boom times, but from pure economics such areas can easily fail. You can say subsidy or situation normal, but the costs are the same either way.

Resilience is just a simplification, online retail among other things is killing malls and that's ok. It's trying to fight that trend that's a losing strategy.

There is an article someone wrote which roughly titled 'why your city is poor'. There answer was that the tax and service revenue needed to support the long infrastructure is about 20% of needed. And it's a big deal because families are paying $1000/yr when they need to be paying $5000/yr.

So suburban cities are living off depreciation of those long term public assets.

Is this what you're referring to: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... ? "All of the programs and incentives put in place by the federal and state governments to induce higher levels of growth by building more infrastructure has made the city of Lafayette functionally insolvent. Lafayette has collectively made more promises than it can keep and it's not even close. If they operated on accrual accounting -- where you account for your long term liabilities -- instead of a cash basis -- where you don't -- they would have been bankrupt decades ago."

That's absolutely it.

One of my observations living in SF. And having watched northern California sprawl for 50 years is this.

There are real downsides to living in a dense city. Probably 20,000 people per square mile. That is made far far worse by the surrounding sprawl. And the people living in the low density suburbs aren't having it that much better. Oh you can go from place to place fast, but the places are farther away. And it it cancels unless you're on the edge.

Is high density really costs less then why are tax rates always higher in large dense cities than they are in the near by suburbs?

Tax rates are generally a reflection of current priorities and not long term obligations.

Cities tend to build and replace infrastructure bit by bit; when first built out, they built infrastructure piecemeal, and as they upgrade to cope with higher populations they also do it piece by piece. So they have to replace things often, but usually only small amounts of infrastructure. To reflect this, tax rates stay at a slightly higher rate.

Suburbs, on the other hand, generally explosively grow in spurts, and put in all the infrastructure in spurts. So for 30 years they don't have to worry about replacing things and have low tax rates, but when you start getting to EOL people start getting higher and higher assessments to pay to replace all this high-quality infrastructure at the same time. This causes people to leave for that newer suburb that hasn't reached that point, which shrinks the tax base of the older suburb, which then has to raise assessments higher, which starts off a deadly tax spiral. On top of that they are often raising taxes to replace infrastructure on a much smaller tax base to begin with since their density is so low.

As a case in point, Nassau County in Long Island had the original suburbs, but now the taxes are so expensive because of all this infrastructure replacement that everybody is leaving. You are starting to see this in a lot of the first-generation suburbs; not only in Long Island, but also in New Jersey, and other infamous examples include places like Ferguson, MO.

Taxes don't pay the same thing in dense cities as in the suburbs. Public transport for example: in a dense city taxes pay for bus, subways, tramways, bike lanes, sometimes subsidized bike sharing. In a lot of suburbs none of this make sense because everyone has to have a car anyway, so people only pay for roads. In the end, what you pay for your car could very well be higher than the differential in taxes. That's how the dense city is more "efficient".

More over, people living in a suburb only pay for a part of the roads they use in their daily commute. My (dense) borough actually did a study that showed 80% of the traffic going through our streets were people who would not stop there, for example because they are commuting between a suburb and the city center nearby. So city dwellers pay for roads that are mostly used by other people. And since the traffic we get this way is quite intense, there's a good amount of road repair each year.

Has your community looked into a toll system, with reduced cost or free passes for residents?

Regarding public transportation, I wish this was an issue that more people understood. Yes, it takes higher taxes to build public transportation infrastructure (although buses have pretty low upfront costs), but that public transportation could replace your need for a car, saving you a lot of money. Even if you personally don't use public transportation, it has a lot of external benefits: less traffic, less air pollution, brings in workers who may have been priced out of working in a certain area.

People pay the property taxes wherever they go. If you rent a home, your landlord pays property tax. If you work for an employer, your employer pays property tax. If you go out to eat, the restaurant pays property tax. I suppose some federal and religious things may be exempt, but that is also the case with non-commuters.

So a person who lives in the suburb but works and shops in the city will be paying most of their property taxes in the city, via their employer and the shopkeepers.

It's taxation without representation. Perhaps they should also get a pro-rated vote. :-) It could be based on time spent in each location, or economic activity in each location, or simply 1 part for each kind of activity spent in each place.

Unless your personal office is 1000+sf the property taxes on workplaces and restaurants are relatively tiny. A shop that has 1 customer per minute over 10 hour days sees 18,000 people a month who each pay for about a square inch of property tax.

PS: They also do vote based on who they work for and what shops they do business with.

In the small suburban town I grew up in they had bus, train, and bike lanes. No different than a large city really.

Well they could do a 1% earnings tax like Kansas City, MO; crooks.

Property taxes in NYC, for example, are drastically lower than the suburbs, precisely because of the economies provided by density.

Some other forms of tax are much higher in the city, for example income taxes on higher earners, and some corporate taxes in the case of NYC, but there are also an incredible array of services provided.

Your premise that city taxes are "always higher" isn't something you can assert without offering evidence. The reality is that taxes in dense cities are usually different than in less dense areas, and reflect different priorities. Higher or lower depends a lot on who you are and what you're measuring.

Look at total tax bite and I think you'll generally find that taxes in cities are higher than in suburbs. I've lived in lots of cities and suburbs. I always get more for my dollar in suburbs. In cities, there are more legacy costs in pensions and there is more corruption.

The tri-state area is far more complicated than you seem to make it out to be. For one you can't make sweeping generalizations like "property taxes in NYC ... are drastically lower than the suburbs".

What are "the suburbs" here? Westchester? Nassau? Which parts of Long Island? Which parts of New Jersey? Each has different characteristics. Likewise, NYC property taxes have characteristics all of their own.

NJ is known as a high property tax state. That's true but you need to understand why. Why is because so many NJ residents work in NYC and pay NYS income taxes rather than NJS income taxes.

As for the high-tax NY suburbs like Westchester... it's complicated but the tl;dr version is school spending, inefficiencies and state-mandated defined benefit pension plans [1].

As a general rule though, NY state single family home ("SFH") owners pay disproportionately low property tax rates compared to those in multi-dwelling units ("MDUs") ie apartments, which is NY state's (fortunately tamer) equivalent of CA's Prop 13. Upstate SFH dwellers have voted themselves tax breaks in the form of caps on property taxes. Apartment dwellers however have to property taxes based on Assessed Rental Value ("ARV").

A $3m brownstone in Prospect Park might have property taxes of ~$700/month. A $3m condo in Midtown Manhattan will likely pay $1300-2000/month in property taxes (so ignoring common charges). And that's AFTER the condo and coop tax abatement, which is a "temporary" decrease that's been continually passed by the NYS legislature every few years continually since 1996. Without that, those apartment rates would be up to 50% higher.

But it gets worse. Those who pay the lowest taxes of all (as a portion of their property values) are... foreign billionaires who buy ultra-luxury condos on 57th Street, CPW, Park Avenue and 5th Avenue.

I applaud your effort to correct the GP's misconceptions but you've also made some sweeping generalizations yourself.

[1] http://www.westchestermagazine.com/Westchester-Magazine/June...

You can't just look at property taxes. You need to consider the trifecta of Property, Sales, and Income taxes to get at the ground truth.

Because people in the burbs vote against taxes and people in the cities vote for taxes? Or one of a thousand other compex set of interactions. Also many suburbs have higher tax rates if they want better infrastructure and they can keep the rif-raff out.

> Or one of a thousand other compex set of interactions.

That's a very handwavey response to a serious question.

If it's true that dense cities are more efficient then it follows that dense cities should be cheaper, when all evidence points to the opposite effect. By the original reasoning Boise and Boulder should have very expensive tax burdens and New York should be nearly free.

First, cities often can't tax the burbs. Commuters often use city services without paying for them. So, local taxes are only a tiny part of the story you need to look at the state and federal level.

At the federal spending it's major metro areas that are funding much of the country. Delaware get's back 1/2 what it puts in and South Carolina get's back almost 8x what it puts in. Those are absolutely massive tax flows which fund things like rural hospitals. But also a lot of infrastructure like new roads.

Even within states if you look at Virginia the DC area provides most of the revenue which is then spread around the state.

But, this ends up far more complex than just the local property tax situation.

They DO pay for city services — if they buy something within the city or work within the city, the costs of the city are reflected in the cost of goods or the compensation from employment.

They don't directly pay to use local roads etc. They may indirectly contribute to the tax base, but it's far from 1:1. Otherwise their would be little need for local property taxes on homes and apartments.

And really, your argument implies that people in Japan pay US taxes when they buy Coca Cola. At some point things are indirect enough it's a meaningless connection.

And of course this "efficiency" doesn't put, into reckoning, the stress of population density on cognition. Especially "diverse density".

Coming back from the military, I kept the same "look around at all times for threats" and it was absolutely exhausting.

"hyper-vigilance" I think is the term. Still have some of it but it's easier to live with in Norcal than the concrete jungles of the Los Angeles sprawl. Can focus on trees and the tweets of birds instead of innumerable pedestrians and cars and noise...

The thing is that a lot of suburban areas are much younger than high-density areas. So they have borrowed for capital projects such as infrastructure and new buildings. They aren't paying the true costs of maintaining those things yet.

Cities on the other hand have to pay for the upkeep on their existing infrastructure, as well as replacing that infrastructure.

Replacing infrastructure is much more expensive than building it out in the first place. A lot of suburbs will fail when it comes time to replace their infrastructure. It just hasn't happened yet because in the United States you can keep building out forever. Furthermore people move away from areas burdened by the costs of replacing infrastructure.

The entire rust belt is being brutalized by the fact that formerly suburban areas have collapsed. The urban areas were already brutalized in the 50s, 60s and 70s by white flight.

Roads and sewers aren't a big cost for a suburb if they put them out to competitive bid. My town publishes all the data. Who did the work and how much it cost. Those costs are tiny compared to running the schools.

Tax rates in England are often lower in cities.

Map: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/1206...

AIUI: the argument is that high density has less per capita costs. Tax rate should basically be a function of costs and citizen income. You can have lower per capita costs and need a higher tax rate if your revenue is not high enough relative to costs.

But — if you converted the wealth located in the suburbs, into high density, costs would go down, the revenue base is the same, so taxes could fall.

To me the argument seems backwards, people live where they want, they incur certain relative higher or lower costs due to it, but so what. The amount of money we are talking about here is relatively benign, if you were upfront with people about the choices being made with tax revenue, you could easily finance (with people’s own existing tax revenue) their own decisions on where to live. Where’s the fire.

There's more legacy costs (pensions) and there's more corruption.

I wouldn’t say that’s a rule at all. In NYC there’s a city income tax but property tax is actually incredibly reasonable compared to the surrounding suburbs.

Property taxes in the northeast US are absolutely insane.

They aren’t? In Chicago at least the opposite is mostly true.

That is only true for property tax which is slightly lower in the city than the suburbs. If you include Sales tax Chicago is higher.

Property taxes are fairly variable in the Chicagoland area, but there are many places where Chicago is not slightly less, it’s dramatically less.

The sales tax is floored by the state sales tax which makes up more than half of the total.

The Cook County minimum sales tax is 8% with lots of localities matching Chicago’s 11%.

All told I imagine tax rate in the Chicagoland area largely depends on a whole equation of property value/tax & consumption. But I’d be shocked if Chicago was universally more expensive than its suburbs.

Chicago's share of the sales tax is 1.25 percent. It's really not any higher than anywhere else in Chicagoland.

That's exactly wrong.

The figures are presented: even now, post dis-investment, the downtown generates $344k tax and the mall $120k tax, and the latter (1) required the city to pay for all the aforementioned services; (2) reduced the taxes produced by the core. The mall probably couldn't have been built without the subsidies from the town, and they never made sense. Good subsidies have a return greater than one; mall subsidies have a return less than one plus make you dependent on retailers that can disappear overnight even if they have an operating profit.

The figures aren't remotely presented, and if you think they are you went in looking for a narrative.

The "mall" in question is in the middle of a suburb. The "subsidy" of infrastructure that was required regardless seems spurious. Further, both areas "required the city to pay for all the aforementioned services". For that matter, maintaining roads and water/sewage in dense areas is dramatically more expensive than less dense areas.

"even now, post dis-investment, the downtown generates $344k tax and the mall $120k tax"

The article quotes current, failed mall taxes. After most tenants have moved out and the mall is in disarray. Secondly, saying that a 9 block area of mixed retail/commerce pays more taxes than a single mall seems outrageously laughable.

The word "subsidy" almost always appears in articles fomenting nonsense to pander to prejudices. The correlation between it and articles of little actual value is about 1.0.

> The article quotes current, failed mall taxes.

It does not: "... produce 287% more property tax than the entire mall property. And that's before the Herberger's goes away"

> Secondly, saying that a 9 block area of mixed retail/commerce pays more taxes than a single mall seems outrageously laughable.

Not if that single mall takes up more space than those 9 blocks (which it does)

My wife was a finance director for a municipal water utility. The cost of goods sold for water and sewer delivery was driving up based on the aging post-war infrastructure, which is failing faster and is 3-5x more expensive to replace on a unit basis.

It would be great if they had examples of these failures. These suburban centers anchored large surrounding residential areas that have not failed themselves, and in fact, appear to be growing due to city center housing costs.