Can you find a citation for this claim? Strong Towns did a blog about this and found that downtown areas produce far more tax revenue per acre than suburbs. Source : https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/7/growing-lasting...
Another effect given is that suburbs and rural areas require far more investment in infrastructure per capita. In short, rural areas and suburbs require way more roads than downtown, and fewer people live there per mile of road to boot. So fewer people are paying taxes to support even more roads.
I would be very curious to see a study that showed the opposite effect, and how it could be possible.
Yes, but maintaining roads isn't a fixed cost by road length (or even surface area), its determined by volume and size of vehicle traffic, with heavier vehicles doing more damage, far out of proportion to their weight; a single heavy truck doing damage equivalent to 5-10,000 cars in some estimates.
Cities may have less road area per capita, but they have a lot higher utilization and a lot more heavier vehicles than on most suburban roads that have low density traffic composed almost entirely of passenger cars and light trucks.
Basically dealing with infrastructure in rural areas you can't pretend that the earth is stable & inactive and no rural place can afford the most durable materials.
I've worked in low density rural areas, though I've only lived in urban and low-density suburban areas, mostly the latter.
And, yes, if you have very little traffic and very little of that is heavy vehicle traffic, weathering becomes the dominant factor.
If you have signficant traffic, it becomes the dominant wear factor, even though you still have the full impact of weathering. High population density doesn't eliminate the freeze/thaw cycle.
> Basically dealing with infrastructure in rural areas you can't pretend that the earth is stable & inactive and no rural place can afford the most durable materials.
You can't pretend that in urban areas, either, which (among other factors) tend to be next to major waterways which have substantial impacts on stability.
> and no rural place can afford the most durable materials.
What you mean is “no rural place finds it cost effective to pay for the most expensive materials that are needed for heavily trafficked urban roads, because the maintenance cost with cheaper materials to keep roads in conditions suitable for the actual demands placed on them in those areas is lower than if the more expensive materials were used.”
Which gets back to my point that, sure, low-density areas have more linear distance of road per person, but also lower build and maintenance costs per unit of linear distance of road.
> In short, rural areas and suburbs require way more roads than downtown, and fewer people live there per mile of road to boot. So fewer people are paying taxes to support even more roads.
I know it can read like common sense (I won't ask for a study from you or anything), but it also reads like common sense that a more traveled road requires significantly more maintenance costs. These are just not binary things that you can answer this way.
> I would be very curious to see a study that showed the opposite effect, and how it could be possible.
Opposite effect of which part? Do I really have to provide a study to show some suburbs incur a financially heavier burden due to their neighboring city than vice versa?
Strong towns at least has numbers. So while you may disagree with the methodology at least there is one.
> This is the way these goal-driven ideologues muster support.
It sounds like you're equally biased, at least until you provide some competing numbers. Fine, use per capita. What did you come up with?
Strongtowns is not some hotbed of liberalism. They guy who started it grew up on a farm in a small town in Minnesota. He is anything but a "liberal."
In some cases, you may be right.
It is much more the norm that new development gets sweetheart deals waiving all sorts of taxes and fees (which would ordinarily fund the infrastructure costs the local government is about to be on the hook for because of the new development), on a mentality that it's the only way to attract development.
Which then means somebody else has to pay more to cover those infrastructure costs, because the people using the infrastructure aren't paying for it.
This same pattern repeats with both business and residential development, all over the country.
Here is an article with some actual numbers from Halifax, Nova Scotia:https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
Some of the tables are pretty revealing in there.
Expanding the suburban sprawl means going to places where that infrastructure isn't already there, which means adding all of it and adding the burden of maintaining it. And when you then waive the taxes that are meant to pay for the infrastructure, where does the money come from? Out of somebody else's pocket.
People from New York might have some further input here.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-10/nobody-kn...
I am not convinced this is accurate, at least in some cases. In some cases, suburbs raise much more capital in taxes per person, are often required by the state to give some back for redistribution (e.g. education), attract business much more these days than city centers, provide much needed infrastructure for city-based businesses to house their employees, and provide many services that are leveraged by urbanites unable to attain similar quality locally (e.g. hospitalization). The unfortunate realization is that many inner cities suffer due to government-based mismanagement and often lean on thriving surburban areas and state handouts to help. It goes both ways.
> If people want to reduce the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by, the way to accomplish that is by increasing taxes
Others believe to reduce the tax burden, you need to reduce expenditures, especially waste. The classist redistribution argument is a great way to let budget makers off the hook for mismanagement while blaming your peers.