johna.clements
Established Member
The US appears to be a Ponzi scheme. Too many places borrow money to build developments then do not tax people to enough to pay for the future maintenance costs of the development in which they live. When they move in there are not many bills for the new development. But they do tax them enough to pay the bills that are starting to come due on the previous development. They can only keep taxes low by building more developments to bring in more tax pay for the costs of the previous development. When the all the land is built on there are no new taxpayers so tax must go up and people leave to the next new town.moving neighborhood streets is a problem. By moving, I mean what is a vibrant neighborhood will generally become out of style and will be inhabited by poor and retirees. but nobody wants to figure out how to prevent that from occurring and the relatively abundant land here creates a donut of increasing size. Outside the donut, not so great. In the center, not so great. But over time the donut's lines change, new development is done at the outer side and the group near the center ages.
I don't have a great answer for it.
it also has a lot to do with our enormous energy consumption. I live a whopping 6 miles from downtown and ride the bus, and am not green by any means, but I don't see the draw in doubling the house size and moving 3 -5 times as far away. It's just selling away too much of my future time.
The way schools are allocated for around here also creates some oddness - like a recent TIF proposal where I grew up, where nearly the entire cost of infrastructure was going to be taken up by the public in "increment financing" (issuing a bond and then using property taxes of the new development to pay off the bond). Very little net improvement in revenue would occur for a very long time, but the school would've gotten a little bit in taxes and the new development was 55+, so they expected few students. So they lobbied for it hard. For the community itself, it would've have amount to much and the risk of cost overruns was on everyone else.
I saw people I thought I had some respect for quickly figuring out how to change that. I guess they stood to gain financially somehow in it.
There's too much of that because there's also a huge aversion to increasing local taxes.
That's what it looks like to me, here in the UK.