Quote:
Originally Posted by accord1999
I don't think they do; the three biggest City expenditures are policing, transit and fire. New neighborhoods don't have much transit services (even the Green Line's billions of dollars in new spending will primarily help the inner city in the medium term), and the inner city are much better covered by police and fire stations. The City's crime and fire maps also show that the inner city typically has higher per-capita incidents that require fire or police response (ie the Beltline with roughly the same population as Panorama Hills has 9059 crime incidents vs 795).
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Sure, but it doesn’t really work like that, right? I mean as a city we pay for those things and the costs are shared across the city. The service provided is virtually identical, and it all evens out. It’s just that for some strange reason, some people pay more for that than others. There’s nothing factual. There’s no real reason that a few houses on a street are paying more than others, or that particular communities are paying more.
And yeah, I get that it’s based on property values, but I question that. Personally, I think that’s a poor way to make these decisions. There’s no evidence that someone with a million dollar home uses twice the services of someone with a half million dollar home. It’s just silly. Secondly, I question the accuracy of this program in the first place. People are talking about significant jumps in their tax payments, and while some of that is attributed to an increase to begin with, a chunk is due to property values. We know the market hasn’t spiked here though, so pretty clearly it’s not accurate.
I know I’m just bitter and irritated with this whole thing at this point, so I’m probably wrong about some of this. But I still (even if it’s not rational!) think that this system is ridiculous.