[1] Your State may vary.
Each and every City in California is its own legal monopoly on land use, all of them, how it’s working out for them isn’t pertinent to whether or not that’s how it works. Don’t mistake my position for advocacy, it’s a relaying of facts. By and large, this is more or less how it works across the States, but that can vary since the States can basically do anything as far as how they organize local government so long as it falls within some kind of democratic principles and norms.
So effecting regional transit policy basically has three paths in the Bay Area: setup a special cross-county district government like BART, or get buy-in between the relevant jurisdictions you want to run a train through. If that’s a dozen cities and three counties, you’re going to need to talk to all of them. The third path is for the State to implement something directly, but in practice that’s subject to local politics as well, and the State Government per its own laws does not actually have carte blanche to do as it likes with the land over the wishes of local government.
Your healthy community is experiencing homelessness and a housing affordability problem along with every "themed" community around you. Does it make sense to stick with the original theme? No. It doesn't.
The problem here is that by owning property you buy into that theme. Any divergence from that theme is harmful to what you bought.
The only way forward is eminent domain.
But at the scale of current property ownership there's going to be huge backlash from property owners. If people who don't own property organize in numbers that dwarf the total amount of property owners then that could generate enough conflict towards social change.
But that level of organization won't happen until the desperateness hits a sort of criticality. We're still far from that so I'm safe. But make no mistake I know the moral action that we must take, and me sitting on my property is not it.
In California, it's about 56%. You gave to get San Francisco proper to get a minority and then it's still 38% (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocou...)
Among older people and in small towns and villages the housing problems, are of course, much milder.
I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't move somewhere else and replicate that.
https://edsource.org/2022/californias-prop-13s-unjust-legacy...
It also happens to be an issue that I am facing, move for more closer alignment to my ideals and abandon my established community, or stay and try to change where I am.
I'd be happy to move right now, but interest rates effectively prohibit that as if I had the same amount burrowed my mortgage payment would be over twice what it is now.
So, not a good solution. Got another idea?
The situation prior to Proposition 13 was also a fiasco with rapid increases in wasteful government spending. I would be happy to vote for reasonable reforms but only if they keep effective spending caps in place.
As it stands, for one-off spend and in general there are other means of taxation that can be utilized. It doesn't need to be property taxes.
This completely eliminates the social upside of property taxes compared to other forms of taxes
It seems like the use of property tax as a major local finding mechanism has a lot of negative effects, from poor school performance to inflated housing costs.
Regardless, it’s besides the point. The point is there are different potential mechanisms for raising money that don’t have the same second and third order effects of property taxes.
The current system is a mix, however.
Property taxes are the way local municipalities raise funds. Tax liens are just the same property tax. I’m suggesting there can be other funding mechanisms, from VAT to income or even automation taxes that raise that money without the same tradeoffs.
Want school? Pay for school tuition. Want roads? Pay the toll. Want fire service? Pay for fire subscription.
etc.
I'd be happy to live in such community but others want men with guns to come toss them out of their house if they don't have the money for the extra services. To me that sounds worse but to each their own.
Fire subscription seems like it would only be workable in a barely suburban or actually rural environment, where your house burning down won't also catch your neighbor's house on fire. Anything more dense and the whole block would go up in flames, including your house, if one of your neighbors didn't pay and the fire department didn't immediately extinguish the fire in their house.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Massachusetts_Propositi...
It’s as very expensive state but the taxes are limited. And every time a community needs a school or some infrastructure it becomes an old (fixed income) vs young battle.
We recently went through a couple of very contentious town meetings about doing a rezone in one of the two parts of town that has some commercial development basically so distribution centers can be built there. But make no mistake. The town as a whole would be perfectly happy to have near zero non-farm commercial activity if that were financially feasible.
I feel like people need to understand this.
I'm currently living in Nashville, TN, which you may as well have been referring to in the second half of your comment (not mentioned: the focus exclusively on tourism while ignoring needs of actual residents). I did not appreciate how different values could lead to such wildly different outcomes in quality of life.
The situation with the government at both the state and city levels is absolutely dire here (for different reasons) and there's really no hope in changing anything.
"Vote with your feet" is the smart approach.
Many are here because of the lack of income tax, the country music industry, and the extremely culturally conservative government. They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits.
A common refrain I here when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke."
Nashville also, until recently, had a low COL compared to similarly sized non-Southern metros.
Personally I am here for work, and realistically many others would do the same. Nashville has more employment opportunities than the deep south and is a logical place for such people to end up.
> A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke."
What’s wrong with people sorting into places that are culturally compatible? After all plenty of people move to Paris for the culture.
> They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits.
Aside from schools, most people either don’t use those things or it doesn’t make a difference. Oftentimes it’s an upgrade from the utterly dysfunctional alternative where they came from. (The efficiency of my traditionally red county’s limited public services was a nice change of pace from DC.)
This was literally the gp's thesis, that it's easier to just leave than to try and improve things (for whatever your value of improve is).
I agree it's the logical thing to do, but when definitions of what services a government should provide vary greatly and people sort where they live based on them, it's going to lead to strange results.
The article is about government, which is a shit show here by almost any definition. The city has a massive council that is at war with the state, to the extent that the state just passed a law to cap the council size out of sheer spite. They're handing over billions to buy a stadium for a rich sports franchise. They handed out tax credits to Amazon for jobs in an office building that they're never going to fill.
There are reasons people would want to live here despite this, my list isn't exhaustive. But I can't see any world in which "good governance" appears anywhere on the list, unless you measure it only by how low your taxes are and how lax regulation is (I'm aware some do).
Maybe the extremely pro business, pro developer, pro tourism Nashville considers itself to be a success, but I can't get on board. There has to be a metric other than growth when making decisions, and I'll personally never willingly live in another city that is so blindly focused on it.
It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a handful of other reasons, you may be locked to specific areas for a really long time.
Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had.
Within reason, supporting the people you wish you had, instead of the people you have, is called leadership. It is how we progress as a species.
"thanks for your vote, for your taxes, for your contributions to the community, now fuck off"
I'm living in a district subject to heavy gentrification at the moment. (And as I'm transitioning from student to Yuppie, I'm part of it) The conflicts between newly moved in rich people and the entrenched working class are intense, and looking at other places it is incredibly obvious who is going to win.
The process of moving to a place, then expecting that place to cater to you needs over the people who originally lived there seems deeply problematic to me: Considering the power dynamics at place, the process as a whole is a really mean way of punching down.
Just to give one concrete example, there was a bar close by that basically served as a living room for many of the neighbors. The people living above me are 5 in 2 rooms, obviously they need the space. But there were noise complains, the police came (never used to even come out 10y ago, and lawyers were used). The bar closed, a fashion store moved in, there are of course other bars but they are much more expensive, the staff doesn't speak german and the community largely consists of academics and expats.
This notion sounds right, but observationally it is incorrect in practice. In Chicago the neighborhoods cycle between bustling, vibrant - when filled with new, young singles who move in and bring business with them; and eventually evolving over a decade or so into a bougie DINK family-oriented community, before completing the lifecycle as a sleepy, economically depressed place with miserably stable/flat real estate values that you just pass over.
Seen this exact cycle happen with a dozen different neighborhoods in Chicago.
If people were instead moving to a different area, this wouldn't happen. Well, some are moving to different areas (the suburbs, etc) but not entirely.
It's quite neo-liberal to tell people to just vote with their feet. When rents in your neighborhoo skyrocket because the local leadership has decided to gentrify the area to improve tax revenue, many would agree that's not entirely just to the long term residents.
There are endless rhetorical questions to ask yourself: Where are you in your life and how do you define yourself? Do you prefer cafes or clubs; care about schools and parks? Safety or autonomy? How do you want to commute? Do you want small shops or shopping centers? Small town monoculture or big city diversity? Do you want to your city to attract tourists or be hostile to them?
A city government has a lot of levers to pull to build a city around each of these things, and some do it poorly and some it well.
Don't move to Moline, Illinois or Cupertino, CA and not expect to find a city that bends to the will of John Deere/ Apple respectively. Some cities exist to serve a large corporation above all else (since the entire population works for them). Others exist to serve the local University or the tourist board, and others the soccer moms. None are wrong, they are all trying to find a local maximum to serve the people that live there.
One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community"
The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300 years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses.
You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. Also, democracies can shift over time but generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older.