Quote:
Originally Posted by comrade
A 50 year old neighbourhood has pretty much the same profile as new neighbourhoods. If anything new neighbourhoods are more space efficient than anything built in the 1970s. And you are drastically underselling the amount of money maintaining old pipes and resurfacing old streets. To get to neighbourhoods that may break even you have to look at 100 years back.
My points are that 1) your examples are pulled from your ass and 2) that the difference between new neighbourhoods and anything post WW2 is not nearly as large as you make it out to be. Sprawl needs to be contained and existing neighbourhoods that your granny lives in needs more densification to come close to paying for their services and infrastructure.
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I still don't know what your points are? Are you saying higher-valued, inner city single family homes don't pay more taxes than (near-universally) lower-valued, new suburban SFHs?
Or are you saying that a new community needing EMS services, new roads, parks, interchanges, etc costs less than repairing sidewalks and replacing some sewer pipes in an established area?
Or is it that you're suggesting the taxes raised in the suburbs cover a greater percentage of their financial burden to the city than their inner city equivalent?
Is the goal to curb sprawl?
Or do you want to raise property taxes to the point that it makes single family homes unaffordable? To what end? To force people from their homes? Are they supposed to sell for redevelopment?
Or is it to cause downward pressure on property values, making the properties more affordable... but then that results in decreasing the tax revenue (a point made about Calgary's downtown commercial properties in that atrociously written article you cited).
Is there supposed to be some mechanism that prevents someone undeterred by the increased taxes from buying the home from the displaced granny? Especially at the presumably depressed price (you know, brought on by the now-unaffordable property taxed)...
If this tax increase is supposed to somehow spark this inner city redevelopment, is it not going to also cause housing to be even more unaffordable for more marginal buyers?
It seems like you're just against single family homes... Is that right, comrade?