1) The US is really big. Seriously. Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states. Add to that most of the US is more temperate than most of Europe and therefore we have even more desirable land (Barcelona is north of New York City).
That is to say, we have less need for it. Houston and Phoenix, our 4th and 5th biggest cities, just keep expanding out as opposed to up. This has long term costs, but certainly is cheaper.
1a) Gas is also a lot cheaper in the US than the EU. Two car families are plentiful. So spreading out costs less. And all our infrastructure (outside NYC, DC and maybe Boston/Chicago) is based around cars, not mass transit, so you need a spot to park your cars.
2) Local taxes are (in general) done based on the value of a house. If new houses in less desirable places are cheaper to originally buy, they are often also cheaper to hold. They have fewer established tax costs as well for maintenance of public transit or school because those come later (or not at all). What he's talking about is greenfield on the other side of a legal boundary, so there are different (usually fewer) governments to levy taxes. In the US, you may pay taxes to your city, county, state and the country (a lot of caveats there I'm skipping). If you buy a house outside the city, that's one fewer entity that can tax you.
3) There's a huge anti-urban political component. Literally, there are people who want rural areas to thrive and cities to fail. In some states (see Texas and Arizona, where Houston and Phoenix are), these people control the state.
4) Amazingly, for some reason (possibly holding offshore dollars), it's far more profitable to use the same square footage for luxury condos that sell out right away compared to many smaller cheaper houses/apartments in desirable cities.
5) It's literally been sold to generations of Americans that owing a lawn is a sign of having succeeded. That's where the "white picket fence" comes in. There is a huge market demand for suburbs.
I love density and urban living. I've lived in lots of apartments over the years. I currently live in a single family home. Having a house and a yard is absolutely awesome:
1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.
2. I have green space that I have autonomy over. Shared parks are nice for being a passive consumer of green space. But a personal yard means I get to be an active participant in its horticulture. I can garden, which has shown repeatedly over the years to be good for mental health.
3. I have more windows that let in more natural light when I'm inside. My living space is more seamlessly connected to the outdoors. I get natural light on all sides of the structure.
4. It's easier and more efficient to let my dog out in my own fenced yard.
I don't think people need huge sprawling yards to get most of this benefit. The UK model where everyone has a little garden behind the house is probably sufficient. But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.
- In high-density, you share everything. Therefore, everything is closed for public access during Covid, but also when there is wind, rain, hot weather or risks of terrorist attacks (talking from experience of my life in cities). The rulers of the city have effective control on your ability to see the sun.
- Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization. And when you’re over with your youth ideas that everyone will fit together and do peace and love, you start starting at the poster in the hall of the building that says “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble). Given cities gather people who lean towards collectivization, you yearn to get your own lawns with friends who will understand this.
- Also, the costs.
So, it’s not cultural love for lawns, it’s a cycle of people moving by necessity.
So are suburbs, but they just represent a more exclusive collectivism. Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools. In prosperous suburbs, it's just collectivism with a minimum net worth or income requirement.
> “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble).
Sounds like you had a bad urban experience with people "different" than you. That sucks, but it doesn't speak for everyone's urban experience.
Sure. But depending on where you land, you can avoid HOAs, architectural design review boards, neighbor comment periods, 24-month permit delays, EIRs, etc. The red tape ("community involvement", if you prefer) involved in living in a city like SF is nothing like what it is in the suburbs, not even the crazy Stepford ones like Irvine.
This part is so hard to overstate! I will never voluntarily move into shared-wall or shared-ceiling housing. Unless I was so broke that I had to do it or become homeless. The neighbors' TV. The neighbors' arguments. The neighbors' partying. The neighbors having sex. The neighbors clomp-clomp-clomping up the stairs directly outside my door. The cops making loud visits to the neighbors when they misbehaved again. This has been pretty much a constant for me in apartment living, no matter the town. I knew I "made it" as a grown-up when I finally moved to a single family house where I couldn't hear a neighbor. Never again!
The other things you mentioned are great bonuses of suburban living, but the major benefit is acoustic distance from neighbors--and stepping back a bit--in general not being forced by proximity to be a part of your neighbors' wild lives.
American construction is shoddy, which is why American homes are relatively cheap, even at the mid-luxury end. High-end luxury is pretty good. My cousin pays some $12k/month for his home and it's really quiet.
I like fresh air. So did my neighbor with the shrieking parrot.
A lot of people move from apartment to home and at the same time take a huge jump in the value of the residence. They assume the quality of life improvement is attributable to the SFH aspect, rather than the increase in construction quality.
Noise sometimes is more a question of build quality than living situation.
Probably a lot of "well the noise" "benefits" of SFH are post hoc in this way. In those more permissive areas, it just takes one family with poorly trained/exercised dogs to make you long for the relative tameness of upstairs stomping. But it makes sense as a benefit people can explain in the thing that they want regardless.
Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.
The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed. So, you need a garage. And probably enough space for two cars, not one.
You want to walk? Great! Except that you have to cross several 4 lane highways because we have to accommodate all those cars. And, that's assuming you have somewhere you want to walk to within a reasonable distance.
You don't have a car so you want some big thing delivered? Hope you can wait 2 months and can take off an entire day from work.
etc.
It's definitely hard to untangle the affects of cars on city planning from single family homes, but I don't think the two are inextricably intertwined. There are many places and have been many time periods with plenty of both single family homes and public transit use.
> The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed.
I live in a single family home in a very walkable city with plenty of public transit. I park on the street and have never been towed or had my truck broken into. These days because of COVID, I rarely drive more than once a month. Even before the pandemic, I usually biked to work and left my truck parked on the street for weeks without using it.
I think you're exaggerating to say that single family homes push towards giant two-car garages. There are lots and lots of single family homes that are not in sprawling suburbia.
Is not the ultimate goal of society to enable people to pursue and hopefully attain what they love?
> They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country.
Efficiency is not a first-order goal of society. The maximally efficient society would kill all of its citizens. Everyone walks into the oceans. Plenty of free food for the fish and no human consumption whatsoever.
The goal of society is to provide meaningful happiness to its members efficiently. It doesn't strictly increase efficiency to simply take away things people want.
That's not what I would consider the ultimate goal, if for no other reason than I don't see how that allows us to forbid drunk driving or heroin use.
If heroin use leads to crime then maybe it could be forbidden for similar reasons. Or if the government can determine that people don't love heroin and instead only use it as an escape or due to addiction, then forbidding it might help those people to attain what they actually love.
Our inefficiency is unsustainable and is on pace to destroy the climate, how can that possibly be construed as providing maximal happiness? Short-term happiness for lucky US citizens, maybe.
People have agency over their preferences? Then why do people ever have trouble dieting? Wouldn't it be easier to just want to eat canned beans/spam/nutritious mush to keep you healthy? Why are they sad when they cannot afford something? Why don't they just stop wanting it?
So when you get densification in US cities, it happens in districts that were formerly industrial/commercial only - where people aren't giving up the form of their existing neighborhoods - or in poor areas with little political organization.
(There's also a TON of underutilized land in industrial/commerical only districts in most US cities, so the focus on single family home zoning when all those lots are already there and similarly "underutilized" is foolish. Even if you abolished zoning overnight, a big industrial or commercial property is going to be much easier to acquire than a bunch of individual home lots.)
This doesn't make sense to me. If single-family homes are what most people want, why would a developer bother to buy up land and build something denser if people don't want to live somewhere denser? That sounds like a dumb business decision.
Nearly the entire country is zoned for single-family housing. Someone who wants to live in a SFH has no shortage of options. Meanwhile, someone who wants to live somewhere denser has very few options; we've almost entirely banned building new ones, so what dense places do exist are mostly the ones built prior to modern zoning codes.
As a result, people who do want to live somewhere denser often aren't able to, despite the demand. The data backs this up: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...
This is why there are so few cities (in the European sense) in the US, and many of the largest 'cities' are just small downtowns in an ocean of suburban neighborhoods.
In Europe cities like this would be planned much more, and as this kind of city development would be seen as undesirable, the plans just wouldn't allow it. In the US it just sort of happens because of a mass of choices by individuals.
Most areas have zoning that only allow single family houses and requires a minimum lot size that is quite large.
USA 36 per Km2
Sweden 22
Latvia 30
Finland 16
Estonia 29
Norway 16
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Europe#Populat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_U...
Finland 16.3 Sweden 22.2 Estonia 29.1 Latvia 30.2
Not all of europe :). Just off by two. I think the point still greatly stands as the EU average is 105.3.
Also (6) higher level/quality of municipal services, because those are (mostly) funded from local taxes. This is most obvious in schools but you can also see it in the personnel, equipment, and training of the local police and fire departments, the number and maintenance level of parks, etc.
These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp. Some guy bought the swamp, and started to build offices on it, a ton of them. The construction workers then started to build their homes on the farm, back then intended to be temporary homes while they built the offices, but today the ex-farm is a full blown dense residential neighbourhood in the middle of downtown, and the swamp is a place full of towering glassy high-rises. Meanwhile in another area, a neighbourhood that was USA suburb-style full of big houses, that formerly belonged to wealthy farmers of the region, people realized that place was very easy to reach compared to some others, so perfect for offices, slowly the houses became offices, then torn down to have proper office buildings, then those got torn down and turned into towers, and then some towers had residential apartments built on them so people could live closer to work.
None of that would been possible in US model.
This style of zoning allows a good middle ground where the player has input into the usage of the city without having to micromanage every building.
A city builder that lacked that concept entirely would be interesting, but you'd have to come up with some other abstraction that feels vaguely reminiscent of city planning and also is engaging from a gameplay perspective.
Mind you, this is a boatload of work.
There are some people who just love to be up in everybody's business.
The neighborhood I grew up in in Louisiana used to be a swamp before it was landfilled. My current neighborhood used to be a public dump. Most of Silicon Valley used to be farmland.
I'm not sure where the claim that changing zoning or use is completely impossible in the US comes from.
Deed restrictions to a lot of the work. There are also density restrictions.The city steers where it wants things with tax policy, a big chunk of the city is governed by airport (federal) rules, and then add in historic preservation, buffering ordinances, lot size restrictions and so on, and there is little surprise Houston looks just like everywhere else in the US.
(Also I find the conversation-framing interesting here - when discussing a U.S. neighbourhood a "diverse profile" is presented as self-evidently ideal, whereas when discussing a Japanese neighbourhood it's never mentioned.)
Houses were large and separated by lawns. They also required financing to purchase. Financing which was usually denied to non-whites by red-lining. In addition these neighborhoods were usually walled off and mazed to prevent people from walking through them. This made families depend on expensive cars to get where they were going, further increasing the burden on those living within and excluding poor and lower middle class Americans.
Now we have these pointless laws that are slowly strangling us to death with expensive car infrastructure that is insanely expensive and deteriorating fast. Small businesses can't survive because of poor walkability, parking minimums and outside investors jacking up rent costs. People can't find homes because they are all too expensive.
The legacy of racism is a death pact for America. I hope we can escape it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#:~:text=White%20f....
There are knock on effects such as dimmer prospects for those left than in the more integrated communities that proceeded as investment flees. People rightfully don't want to invest in areas deemed unsafe, where those investments would be at risk.
To be clear, where such barriers manifest in ways where people are judged or treated differently based on immutable characteristics or group identity instead of their individual character, this is wrong.
This is a pretty good take on the ramifications of race riots: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/racism-riots-economics-...
> People rightfully don't want to invest in areas deemed unsafe, where those investments would be at risk.
That's exactly the rationale behind redlining, food deserts, infrastructure funding (especially schools) and other kinds of systemic racism. I suggest you read up on what that term means. It does not mean that everyone participating in the system is racist. It means that our institutions and economy themselves perpetuate racial injustice even without further racist intent. Framing this entirely in terms of "rational" choices by those who flee, as if those who stay don't exist or don't matter, is perpetuating a false narrative. So, again, why?
White flight and red lining tend to get thrown around without any attempt to tackle reasons why these things happened beyond some surface level talk of not liking people that are different.
I think this sentence is much closer to the mark if you say: "the true motivation which is perceived safety of person and property."
I think you are right that people seek out less density and more personal space when they feel insecure or under threat. But in the modern journalistic landscape that sensation can be quite decoupled from the reality of their actual risk of harm.
The usual perspective is that white people fleeing during white flight are racist themselves.
What you are saying is that racism causes violence, and rich white people who are victims of violence flee that violence. So they're not racist themselves but rather second-order victims of racism.
I think a major part of why people built mazes and fences around their neighborhoods is a bit of mild xenophobia. The idea of never having to meet anyone other than your immediate neighbors and chosen associates makes a great deal of sense. If your neighborhood is walkable then you could have unsavory elements on the sidewalks. Outsiders in your neighborhood!
If you can only travel by car, you can isolate yourself and your family and choose who you associate with. You are protected from the general public by your car until you arrive at a "Safe" place like a soccer meetup, church, or a Boy Scout meeting. This is much harder to do in a walk-up apartment where you may meet someone who threatens you physically, racially, or ideologically.
https://www.fontana.org/DocumentCenter/View/28163/General-Pl...
A little less egricious is Costa Mesa which serves as a commercial center.
https://www.avenzamaps.com/maps/489436/city-of-costa-mesa-zo...
Were they fleeing minorities or were they fleeing violence and landlords?
In addition, propaganda from racist organizations was running wild. Stuff like "White Genocide" and "Race Riots" were predicted by racist organizations who still profit from this fear today.
But naturally the answer is that they were fleeing minorities, violence, AND landlords. In most people's minds all three were mixed up. In the end, the makeup of the neighborhoods they fled to were built around isolation enabled by cars.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes [2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
Once you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense. Depressing, self-destructive, short-sighted, awful, but logical.
The majority of Americans live in an area they describe as suburban.
I'm in the Dallas "metroplex," and it understood here that you get more value for your money the farther out you go. There's the inner loop (Loop 12) and outer loop (I-635) inside Dallas city limits, and then there are suburbs which again can be described (at least in the north) as "inside TX-121" and "inside US-380." As you cross each "boundary," your choices provde more value--defined as less money for more space, or newer construction, or both.
I grew up in San Diego, which is naturally constrained by mountains, ocean, an international border, and a military base, even before you add state and local laws. The Dallas area has no such constraints anywhere, nothing to keep it from sprawling until it reaches the state border to the north--and really, nothing to keep it from sprawling beyond that, either.
1. Hmm, I can get 2000 sqft inside the loop and 5000 sqft in the outer suburbs. Outer suburb for me!
2. Everyone else does the same thing and the area grows
3. The people in the outer suburbs starts loudly complaining about how horrible traffic has become (because they moved there when relatively few other people lived at and beyond the edge)
4. Roads are widened and new roads are built to ease traffic.
5. Now that there's road capacity, developers start building out even further.
6. Repeat step one with different people another layer out and the cycle continues.
There's a second problem where people who might have good intentions and try to revitalize the inner city are instead considered to be gentrifiers. Basically in an attempt to break the cycle of poverty they cause the rents to increase and end up pushing out the poor people instead of uplifting them.
Edit: it was the Chicago Defender.
>Chicago's African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, made the city well known to southerners. It sent bundles of papers south on the Illinois Central trains, and African-American Pullman Porters would drop them off in Black towns. "Chicago was the most accessible northern city for African Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas." They took the trains north. "Then between 1916 and 1919, 50,000 blacks came to crowd into the burgeoning black belt, to make new demands upon the institutional structure of the South Side."
If a recall correctly, they also circulated imagery and content about the Black experience abroad; for example, in Paris. Arguing that if the condition for Black people was comparatively better abroad, then there was no reason for conditions to remain so dire in the US. This sort of content was particularly enlightening.
How do you do that?
The US has the luxury of space that other countries don't and that space mostly is owned by the public and not federal, state, or local governments.
- In the US, zoning and land use are typically managed at the micro level, not the macro level (city < county < state < country).
- There's also a persistent threat of competition both at the state and county level. So most policy is about attracting residents and jobs, maintaining property values, etc.
- Proximity to a major city impacts price so the further away you travel, the more home you get for the same price.
- When people don't like how the local government is behaving, they'll hold a referendum and form a new city to escape regulation.
If you look at a city like Atlanta, you see that upper middle class have moved further outward from the metro area with each decade to larger more expensive homes (e.g. Brookhaven -> Sandy Springs -> Roswell -> Alpharetta -> Cumming). They did this because as undeveloped property decreased it drove property values up so they were able to sell their homes and purchase larger but cheaper homes in undeveloped neighborhoods. The cycle repeats itself every 10 years or so.
In areas where there is high demand for a particular reason (ex. NYC or the Bay Area because of the job market) I think it makes sense to intensify. But in cities where it isn't important for a lot of people to live close to the center, I don't really see a problem with just building more houses. Having a backyard is nice.
If you ever go to Phoenix, all you see is miles of suburbs. And then you drive out of the city, and all you see is miles of open land that they can expand into. I say just keep building them, clearly they are pretty popular.
1. The main complaint you hear is R1 zoning, which doesn't just permit single family homes but MANDATES single family homes. This is wasteful lunacy.
2. If single family homes can pay for their requisite infrastructure without external subsidy, then by all means. If they can't pay and expect others to pay for them, then we need to have a conversation on the topic.
...and they basically don't, over time. The initial boost in property-tax revenue is eventually overwhelmed by the maintenance costs for all that sprawling infrastructure. It's one of the drivers behind the churn that OP is all about. A fuller exposition was discussed here recently.
Any time the housing values in an area significantly drop or the population largely leaves, what gets left behind is a poor and poorly maintained neighborhood that creates a ton of negative externalities for surrounding areas. When you build an entirely new development on undeveloped land this is almost guaranteed to happen as all of the buildings and infrastructure will need to be replaced at the same time.
Because the federal government often foots the bill for new suburban expansion. If the suburbs will foot the bill for road, sewer, and electricity expansion then they should be left to do so.
but in small cities, there’s just too much empty space available. people just build further and further out from the old city center, so they can have their giant houses and enormous yards.
my state, Oregon, has a concept of an “Urban Growth Boundary” which is a zoning rule meant to reduce sprawl, and it helps somewhat. But generally people in the smaller cities vote to keep density very low.
If I could live in an environment like Berlin, I might consider it, although I'd still get itchy at having that many people around. But that's not a reality anywhere in the US that you have that kind of density.
You made me chuckle. Berlin is heavily associated with crime. There's multiple better and safer cities to live in Germany.
Don’t get me wrong, when I was in a tiny quiet village in the UK I once came back from the local grocery shop to find my front door had bounced open instead of locking itself when I’d left and absolutely nothing happened as a result of this mistake, and I don’t expect the same here; and sure, Berlin has a lot of graffiti, but I don’t feel fundamentally unsafe in even the most loudly afearing places like Görlitzer Park or Alexanderplatz — I don’t even get why the latter is on the list of places people talk about when suggesting danger.
Really, the worst I experience here is the fire brigade and ambulance sirens (and, confusingly, one time where the sirens were on a van marked “Netzgesellschaft entstörungsdienst”, which both Google and my own limited German think is something close to “Network company anti-jamming service”, which feels implausible).
1: https://www.nbb-netzgesellschaft.de/ueber-die-nbb/entstoerun...
(What felt implausible was my translation rather than anything else, and indeed you showed that it was an error on my part).
Can't find 2020 numbers, but all of Germany had 720 murders in 2019. Last year Chicago, which is the main city in one metro area of one state in the US had 774.
Chicago is around 2.5 million people, Germany is 84 million people. From an inner-city US perspective, violent crime in Germany basically does not exist.
It's true that people think this, but it's not true in reality. Many people who don't live in cities believe in the 1980s TV and movie version of cities because they're afraid of anything new or diverse.
Living there was gentrification and leaving was flight… kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It’s like COVID-19- there’s no use in pretending it doesn’t exist because I nor anyone I know well has had it.
Have you actually experienced any of this random violence and crime? Or does the city just have more news coverage.
This article is really describing the failures of suburbia, that soulless monstrosity. By all rights, no matter what is legally true, this 'Appleton' is not a city, or a town or a village, it's just the vestigial growth of people who all want to live in suburbia.
More houses = more taxes. Development is promoted in less dense areas because it creates jobs and brings in money. New constructions are profitable, and the industry is basically dictated by builders that throw up cheap houses on plots of land they bought for 10k.
The cities with dense middle class inner city neighborhoods mostly developed without cars.
You'd have to ban cars to achieve it.
It's very hard take an area developed around a car (everywhere in America since 1920s) and make it bike preferable.
You basically need for the area to be so run down that you can start from scratch. Like a taking a formerly industrial area and then only zoning it for mixed use, high density residential/commercial use.
You also need flat ground. Soccer-moms do not do hills.
Nope! Not sure who said it first, but...
If you don't know why some fucked up thing in America is the way it is, the answer is probably racism.
In this case, it's white flight from city centers -> suburbs and racist real-estate practices.
You can see it in what the author was told about Appleton, if you read between the lines:
> he schools are much better in the newer areas, and people shop for school districts more than they shop for a house itself. While Appleton is a very safe little city, crime is always a bigger problem at the core compared to the edges. You have to think of the children.
"Safer" == "whiter"
They do promote it. Every city in the US is promoting inner-city neighborhood development (commonly called "gentrification" here). It's just not usually a great for actual citizens.
Dense construction is always more expensive, so anytime density goes up, your immediately paying a lot more money for a lot less housing. And property in the US is valued exclusively by it's density (what realtors will call "location, location, location", but really just means "how much stuff is around it -- how dense is the area"). Living near density (even if your own property is not dense) always costs a lot more money, which means your again paying a lot more cash for a lot less housing. Alternative public transit options are poor in most places, but simultaneously, most inner-cities are actively hostile to our current universal public transit (cars), so the closer you live to the center of town, the harder it will be for you as a resident to get anywhere regularly, and you'll be transportation-disadvantaged compared to any of your friends in the suburbs. And because it's more expensive to live there, the taxes there are almost always much higher (since the tax you pay is based in large part on the value of your home, and houses near the city cost more, so you also get to pay more in taxes).
And, since families generally don't have lots of money to spend, they are in the same boat as you, and almost entirely pick suburbs (to save lots of cash and get better transport), so their kids all enroll in schools out there, so the quality of the schools out there is a lot higher, which makes future families more likely to make the same decision.
And if you have anything "tricky" happen to you (perhaps a elderly family member needs support, or you get divorced, or your kid becomes disabled, or similar), any and all of the assistance you might want or need to help deal with that, is also easier to get out in the suburbs. And since your cost of living is lower out there, if you need extra cash to handle a problem, it's easier to financially float that in the suburbs.
The model is crazy, but it's not crazy at the person-level. It's mostly crazy at the federal level. The government could let properties actually depreciate, so that renovating old properties inside the city is cheaper than building new out in the suburbs. But that would require them to let property values fall in urban areas so that housing can become affordable, and cities as well as all rich people are always 100% against that idea. So instead, federal policies prop up artificially high property values in urban areas, with the net effect being a semi-explicit policy that cities are not for most people. The goal is that anyone not single/20-something/wealthy, should not ever actually live there, and these policies are mostly successful at doing that.
> If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it help
Probably not. The problem with local taxes is not usually that the rate is much higher, it's that the cost of living in a city is much higher, so your property itself costs way more, and that means you pay way more in taxes (even if the rate were hypothetically exactly identical in both, you'd still be paying way more in taxes city-vs-suburbs, because urban housing tends to cost way more to buy, and the taxes you pay are based on the sale price of the property itself)
> Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable
This is a good idea, but it would actually help the suburban sprawl far more than it would help the city (since lower density is more affordable), it would encourage people to stay in suburban sprawl longer, since those properties would still always be cheaper, but now (under this new rule) would also would be better built and last longer.
In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.
Combine that with a tax prep lobby whose incentives are to sell you a solution.
The IRS could have made things as easy for most Americans as places like New Zealand did two decades ago.
The IRS is also a lot more helpful than commonly advertised - I once had a several thousand dollar expense reimbursement from work that my employer wrongly classified a miscellaneous untaxed payment to me. They didn’t attach any penalties, just sent a letter essentially saying “we think you forgot to include this in your income for YEAR, we think you owe $X + $Y interest.”(and the interest amount was very reasonable, like 3-4%)
I just emailed them a copy of the receipts and email I had sent to my employer when claiming reimbursement, and noted that I had not claimed those expenses on my tax return, if I had done , then it would have exactly matched the tax owed.
They replied a few weeks later telling me thanks and that I owed nothing extra.
I do worry about arbitrary abuse of government power in the US, particularly against those guilty of WRONGTHINK, but my personal experience was exactly what I would hope for as a citizen, professional, clear and timely.
I still would still like taxes to be lower - but if you told me I had to make a mandatory charitable donation of the same amount every year to a real charity, I would be fine with that. So in my case at least, it’s that I expect the unionized middle class government workers to get most of the benefit of my extra tax, not the poorest people in society who need it most (and who are usually presented as the need for such increased taxes)
Don't you think that paying 10-40 percentage points more (like in Europe) of your wage each month has something to do with it?
The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat. That makes the take home to be around 18k.
Sales tax is around 20% throughout Europe. That takes it from 18k to 16k.
Gas is double the price solely because of taxes
Property tax can increase the housing cost by 10%
Automobile property taxes are outrageous compared to the US. New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark (if the car costs 30k, pay 45k to the state), but are pretty high everywhere. In Romania, to register a 10 year old car with a 2.4 liter engine you have to pay 6000 euros. In a country with the average wage 1000 a month.
I find it so amusing that people think taxes are just an inconvenience.
By the way, if you want to pay more, you can just donate your money to charities: you have a higher impact than giving it to government, much better directed at what you care about, very easy to do. Donate 10-20% of your raw income to an ngo, then talk about doing that for everyone, compulsory.
Donating my income is besides the point, as it's the top income brackets that really need to be taxed. I would and do happily vote for higher taxes on myself when the option is available.
The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020 [1]; France and Italy did about 25%, Germany 11.5%. (Switzerland and "communist" China clock in below 10%.)
There is sufficient variation in tax policy across the EU, let alone Europe, to make broad-based comparisons meaningless.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?most_... a more-expansive definition from the Fed raises this to 16% [a]
Overall it's 38%: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-germany.pdf
For the US you're missing some taxes, too because the overall is somewhere near 30%, 10 percentage points lower than Germany. I think your US link does not include state and local taxes etc
This is incorrect (despite the citation).
Federal tax collection in 2020 was about 16% of GDP
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The OECD reports "The tax-to-GDP ratio in the United States has decreased from 28.3% in 2000 to 24.5% in 2019."
https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...
For comparison, the weighted average in other OECD countries is about 34%.
Drivel.
Here in Norway (widely reputed to be heavily taxed) a single person earning 30 kUSD and having neither debts nor savings would pay 4752 USD in tax, about 15%. You would then pay up to 25% VAT on things you buy (less on food and rent).
See https://skattekalkulator2018.app.skatteetaten.no/?aar=2020&a...
Pretty much nowhere in Europe you're paying (effective) 40% on a 30k/yr salary. Nowhere. You're most likely not even reaching that tax level.
> New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark
> Private cars: 25% of DKK 65,000, 85% of DKK 65,000-202,200 and 150% of the rest. https://skat.dk/skat.aspx?oid=2244599
So again you don't know how tax bands work (and Denmark is kinda of an exception)
Sure, it's "VAT" - but it's essentially the same thing. You pay it for almost everything you buy. There are some lower rates for food in some places. But guess what, US has that too.
> Nowhere
(it's also possible that social security is deductible before income tax is levied as per this site but I'm not looking too deeply into it: https://expatcenter.ro/tax-guide/ )
Also, if I get the linked calculator right, then it expects you to put MONTHLY salary, in RONs, not EUR. So, just putting 30000 there you get a monthly salary of over 6000 EUR, or 72k per year. And that's taxed at 41%.
In other countries you might have tax brackets, but I know from experience that it's very easy to reach 45% total tax rate (not marginal).
e.g. try Belgium, at 100k the state gets 50% https://www.belgiumtaxcalculator.com/?salary=100000&average=...
Try UK. At 50k you pay "only" 26%, but then in the US you pay almost nothing, if you have a family with kids and use the deductions smartly.
> but then in the US you pay almost nothing
Well, not really. In NY that would be 27% (converted). And you pay 31% at $100k in NY (or 34% in 150k ) https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-tax-calculator
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Which is precisely why the party that is ideologically opposed to taxes will never let that happen.
Local taxes mainly go to the domestic military and schools. You only see the main benefit if you have kids in public school.
State taxes are the most useful - large enough scale to accomplish things, but small enough scale to remain somewhat accountable. But since people can easily move between states, these become subject to intense politicking. For example, "Taxachusetts" even though its overall income tax rate is only 1.2x that of New Hampshire (32% vs 27%, for incomes $22k-$52k).
I'd personally love to see a flip of the magnitude of state and federal tax rates, money flowing between the two in the opposite direction, and a way for individuals to earmark what their tax money goes to. Some ability to steer taxes towards things they value would go a long way to making people feel enfranchised.
edit: lots of downvotes, but no counterpoints. While there are many things government does that I do value, I don't think their costs add up to anywhere near what is being paid in. What value do you feel you personally get from your taxes, apart from longing for some sort of social contract?
OTOH, I think that taxation is important, and I'm happy that my taxes go to health services, something that Canada does relatively well, even though I don't necessarily benefit in the same way compared to people less fortunate than I am. Same for social services, for example.
My point is that I don't think such feelings can be boiled down to "my money is going to people who don't deserve it". It's a complex topic and complex feelings which should be treated as such
It’s not a bad thing to pool money for common causes, but to claim it isn’t their or our money is kind of odd.
Everything in modern society is part of a social contract that includes thousands of people working to keep it from devolving into anarchist chaos of violence and subjugation.
But I have as much right to my money as I have a right not to be raped. Society provides for all this in our social contract. We can choose to include income taxes in that, but we don't have to. We didn't have them initially as a republic.
As expat returning to the US after 7 years, it's clear that US is headed in the wrong direction because it has made decades of poor choices, particularly w.r.t. taxation and long-term investments, and is sliding rapidly into dysfunction. And the confusion that has led to those poor choices seems pretty well-summarized in your first comment.
What I am against is the notion that it's not mine. That by default it belongs to the government and it's only out of the goodness of their heart they allow me to keep some.
It's the other way around. We form a government and we decide what we want to contribute to it with taxes.
We decide we need a school, a road, engage in war, etc., and we contribute to those efforts via tax contributions.
I don't want to contribute to never ending wars, I don't want to contribute to subsidizing companies that export jobs, etc. I want money to train inner city kids, rural kids, not some reconstruction in some place that has much less immediate effect on us.
Did you attend school at any point? Do you use any civil infrastructure? Does the public fund or buy your work? Do you use any tools made by others?
The Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman worker who creates value solely through individual effort is a harmful one, because it ignores the importance of society in shaping the individual and it ignores all of the invisible inputs into the work of every individual. Nobody's salary is entirely "theirs" because nobody creates value without the involvement of others.
We pay taxes. It's our money, then we pay some of it to the government to support the government, and pay for the myriad of ways in which the government supports us.
It is not possible to live in this country and not be supported by government services in a dizzying variety of ways, visible and invisible. Those services cost money. Therefore, we pay taxes for them.
"In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving".
I'm saying it is indeed our money. Not the government's; we choose to part with some, but the taxed money was never the government's. It was always ours.
It's like giving a kid an allowance, and then one day you say you don't have enough to give them that week/month, whatever, and they say, but it's "my" money. No it's not.
As for it being "your money"....sure, one can say it's "your money", but you owe it to the government for services they provide on an ongoing and pervasive basis. It's like a subscription fee for civilized living.
It's as if in lawless lands with tribal warfare suddenly people don't earn a living.
Money is only a token within this game - it has no reality other than the rules. The rules are whatever society decides they are. There is not a “real” ownership that the rules are interfering with.
If you're in a Western nation and you "make" money, it is very much a partnership with the state, and your ability to "make" money would very likely disappear without the state. For someone to go on about "their" money has no correlation with actual reality, and I'd encourage them to ply their trade in Somalia. I'm sure the income tax rates are great.
It's my life as much as money is my money. Yes, they can be taken away.
But generic economic resources: yes. Ownership of pretty much anything including houses relies on social acceptance of the rules of private property ownership and market value. And that social acceptance can be conditional on things like taxes to fund social goods. If you don't want to play by the democratically determined rules, then you shouldn't expect the state to defend your property.
Saying you only own your money or house because we allow you to is like saying the only reason you don't get raped or killed is because we have a structure of laws against it. Yes?
Never the less, you can go to any other place which didn't have slaves and they still got on without income taxes.
And, if you go to parts of the middle east where slavery exists today, income taxes have not prevented it, so it's beside the point.
I'm also pretty miffed at how much money has been wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The federal government gives heaps of money to other nations to spend on frivolous projects while our own infrastructure decays. My frustration at taxes and spending goes beyond the trope of Americans not liking the idea of giving money to the poor.
How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
Is it entirely driven by the fact that local taxes decline on the outskirts? If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps? Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable, and owners have to build for 100 years in greenfields?