Quote:
Originally posted by Bend it like Bourgeois@Feb 14 2005, 12:08 PM
New communities do pay the largest taxes, and by a lot. The alleged cost of a growing city is a crutch the city uses to justify tax hikes and nonsense spending.
New communites have way higher densities than old. Something like 4 times - though that's only what I've heard, not what I know.
Thats' roughly 4 times the tax base - say 2 times for agruments sake.
So the city gets twice the taxes (or more) out of an acre in say McKenzie Town than it does in a community like Bridgeland.
That's after its all built.
Plus:
- the city charges for each acre of land to be developed, and makes a killing on it
- the local roads are built and paid for by the developer , eventually the consumer
- water, sewer, and utilities run as profit centres - new communties pay an extra rider for those services and pay for the installation
- boulevards, landscaping and greenspace maintenance fees are (mostly) covered by community levies in new areas, not the city. In older communities the city does all that.
- water and energy use is way lower (per house) in new communities.
I'm not saying anyone has to like urban sprawl, but the cost argument doesn't wash.
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Not sure about this... since property tax is a function of your assessed value, the average inner city resident pays more than your average suburbanite. We've already established that it costs more to buy a house in the inner city.
Your housing density thought is holds some water but it's not nearly as much as 4 times, especially with something like Bridgeland where the density from 6 story condos would greatly exceed annything from Somerset.
How much of the "nonsense spending" in the City's budget is directed to appease citizens of the new burbs? Since roads, roads, roads is Bronco's mantra, I'd say most of it.