Quote:
Originally Posted by burn_this_city
Prove it. I highly doubt the completed suburban community maintenance costs are higher than they pay in taxes year to year. When you mentioned inflation I didn't think you meant on the initial investment, which of course you are correct on. I don't care if they end the subsidies on new communities, obviously the city felt to maintain growth they had to give incentive to developers.
Like 4x4 said, this whole argument is a joke. Everyone complaining made a conscious decision to live in the inner city, pay more for homes and consequently more taxes. Thats the cost of convenience and the lifestyle you desire. It also happens to have its benefits when your home prices climbed more rapidly during the boom than the exterior of the city.
|
Proportionally higher costs to maintain suburban communities is pretty much a fact.
This is because:
1) Water and Sewer. Costs to pump both from/to central facilities gets more and more expensive the further you get from city center. Entire system upgrades are necessary to create sufficient pressure to reach extremities.
2) Roads. The road use of suburbanites commuting to the CBD is proportionally higher than inner city residents. Cost to plow, and maintain is also higher as staff and materials have to be transported further to reach outer communities. Also the stress on interior roads is increased. This also says nothing about traffic upgrades to major corridors to handle increases in car commuters.
3) Transit also is incrementally more expensive the larger the system grows.
4) Education, Police, Fire, etc.. All cost incrementally more to bring to a suburban community. New infrastructure and increased time/cost to deploy and service relative to inner city are the reasons.
5) Debt maintenance costs. Debt financing is required to install infrastructure because city taxation doesn't collect and save surplusses to fund growth. This added interest expense magnifies the impacts of all the other factors. Half of the cities 3+ billion in debt comes directly from the capital cost of installing depreciating infrastructure to service new suburban communities over the past 10 years.
(Source:
http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/ne...g-sprawl-6361/)
These are all costs that are shared equally amongst all property owners in the city. The ratio of subsidization increases the further out a suburb is from the core of city services. Eventually a line is crossed where a suburb will never, ever repay its cost.
Case in point. A study from Edmonton on the lack of tax recovery from their own, similar, subsidized suburban growth program:
Quote:
|
... analysis conducted for the City of Edmonton shows that the lack of cost-recovery for new subdivisions places a substantial burden on other taxpayers. Of Edmonton’s seventeen developing or future neighborhoods examined, only one – an area with a very high proportion of commercial/industrial development – will generate sufficient revenue to cover its costs. For the remaining neighborhoods, costs will be 41% higher than the revenue generated by those neighborhoods during the first thirty years and 78% higher after that.
|
(Source:
http://www.civiccamp.org/wp-content/...wth-Report.pdf)