You could tell it about any efficient business. If there's no Wallmart in town and all that profit goes to small store owners then everytime they shop outside of town or go on a vacation they "suck" the profit out of the town.
Each time a customer needs to travel to big city or order remotely because town shops don't carry what they need they suck profit out of town.
If Wallmart can come to town and employ enough people it might help keep profit in town rather than suck it out.
I think this is blissfully ignorant. Walmart's model is built on creating prices and selection that are so attractive that it is very difficult to compete. Part of the way they do that is by extracting profits out and leaving only low paid employees locally.
They still might extract less than bunch of small business they replace does. Just because they can do many things more optimally. Think of all the fuel, wear and tear and driving time (labor) if everybody in town had to shop in the nearest city, compared to a handful of large trucks supplying Wallmart.
How much money stays when Walmart is there relies on bargaining strength of employees. With weak labor laws it may suck out more. With strong labor laws they could suck out less.
Wallmart being net negative for community as this research seems to indicate is clear evidence that labor laws are too weak.
Way more. First, a small business is not just a "family". Their employees are other members in the community. And there's the cascading effect because those folks are using their pay to go to local restaurants, the bowling alley, the hairdressers. When business like WM push prices down and make it so other businesses aren't able to compete, all you get locally is the ~minimum wage salary and the tax revenue. This might be "more efficient", but it comes at a cost to community.
Indeed; this is capitalism in its purest form. The linked article about 'Blowback' features user comments containing gems like ‘Grooming little kids to be “trans” or “queer” has outraged many and made things worse’. Advertisers generally do not want their ads seen alongside such polarized and extremist statements, because it could harm their brand (unless they are only targetting that demographic). They pay their advertisement platform to manage that.
I converted my small (~1400 sqft) MA log cabin house at 1500' elevation to a heat pump as main heat source in 2017. We also added a 8kW PV system at the same time.
It was a great choice, and we've been net negative since installation.
We also get a lot of passive solar via low angle sun through large windows. I think passive solar in winter is a completely under-appreciated benefit. On sunny days in winter we do not need heat for ~10 hours of the day.
We supplement our heat with a wood stove in very cold weather (< 20ºF). It's not necessary, but brings a cozy warmth.
Having been a selectboard member in a small town in MA, I can put forth that rigorous enforcement of contracts, bylaws and laws is the best way to avoid issues spiraling out of control to becoming bigger costlier time-sucks affecting more and more people and wasting more of everybody's time.
With many people who push the boundaries, one thing often leads to another, which leads to more costly measures of getting violators back into compliance.
Yes, often the first violation doesn't seem too big, but those violations are often indications of more to come.
Punish them for their future crimes, oh wise precog!
HOA mentality is cult like or a mini police state and the comment here is a perfect example of that. Nothing happening in that HOA is that important, and ultimately does not matter. In other parts of the world people are dying of hunger and being slaughtered, in America there are tent cities, and people in HOA are so isolated and safe that they take to freaking out about Betty 2 streets down not getting approval before putting a sign in her front yard. Spend your lives worried about more important shit, both HOA and zoning (who will roll up on properties snapping pictures too), because the things you are losing your minds over are things that do not matter. At all.
It's human nature. Same reason republics decline into democracies, or why Europe spent centuries on crusades. It's not enough to live your life the way you want to live it, humans need the validation that their neighbors (or people across the country, or even people in other countries) are forced to live that way too.
No, it's actually not at all about forcing people to live the way I (or the townsfolk) want to live, it's actually about making it so that the way you live your life is in harmony with the rules the municipality set. In Massaschusetts towns, zoning laws require a 2/3 vote at town meeting to be enacted - but I'm not sure how it works in MI.
It seems like you folks have never read zoning bylaws which a municipalities use to say what can and can't be done in certain areas. Believe it or not, city planning is incredibly important to ensure that a town can efficiently tax its inhabitants to fund the services that have become an expectation of normal life.
If you don't like your zoning laws, you should get involved in local politics and try to change the things you don't like.
In fact Long Lake Township has a 238 page document that lays this out.
Ok, so, you put stuff in your backyard where it's out of the way. Your stuff, on your property, not even visible to other people. The city zoning workers use a drone to gain access to your backyard because walking back there would be a criminal activity, trespassing, and possible breaking and entering if a fence gate is involved, so they find a way to circumvent privacy and private property laws to illegally surveil you. You have broken no laws and they are not law enforcement, they themselves are likely breaking the law, and now, you have to comply with their orders and make your back yard be in line with something written in a TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY EIGHT page book of zoning rules about how you are not allowed to live your life on your property that you own.
And your recommending that the solution is to become an expert in a 238 book, which is larger than some of the worlds most infamous novels, then, spend the rest of your life doing the recommended "If you don't like your zoning laws, you should get involved in local politics and try to change the things you don't like." fighting for years to get any attention on your issue, mostly being ignored because they already talk shit about you in the entire zoning department (I used to date a woman who worked zoning and they have nicknames for people, call them trashy, etc), then maybe one day, years down the road, you might get some compromised version of what you wanted, that still doesn't allow you to do as you wish on your property so long as it's legal and out of sight, and you've wasted a bunch of your life's free time, spent most of it frustrated, and ultimately don't get what you want and just say fuck it and go back to doing what you want and saying screw the zoning rules anyway.
The "if you don't like it, get involved and change it from the inside" solution doesn't work well in individual issues (or large issues honestly), and shouldn't be needed in cases like this anyway.
No, not at all punishing for future crimes - just acknowledging issues and making sure they get attention to prevent them from getting worse. Local government has very little power to actually undo things that go wrong - it can often takes years, if it can happen at all. The time spent dealing with stupid shit that goes wrong is incredibly wasteful and means time and money is spent on that instead of actually moving the municipality forward. Therefore, the best medicine is equal and rigorous enforcement.
HOA is a whole different ballgame, not the same as zoning.
I've been thinking about local taxes a lot recently (I've been a locally elected selectman for a tiny town in MA) and realized that the automobile ruined the way we value land, which ultimate ruined the way that municipalities are able to control costs and spend their taxes to add value.
I'd write more, but only if someone responds to this.
I come from Western Massachusetts, which is characterized by smaller populations and lower budgetary allocations. The most significant budget item in most municipalities here is education, followed by road maintenance, which is often extremely costly. In Massachusetts, the basic cost estimate for repaving a standard road is approximately $1 million per mile, and this investment typically only lasts about a decade before it requires another round of expensive repairs.
Bridges are even more financially burdensome. Recently, we replaced a culvert that was so small I could easily jump over it, and yet it set us back $700,000. Keep in mind; we're talking about a town with a population of around 1,000 people, and we have over 30 of these culverts and bridges scattered across our approximately 80 miles of road within a 55-square-mile area. If you're familiar with the region, you might even be able to pinpoint which town I'm referring to.
To add to the challenge, not only do we have to repave our roads every 7-10 years to prevent them from falling into disrepair, but we also have to maintain them for safety, plow them, and salt them for safe travel. Over the past three decades, the expectations for maintaining these infrastructures have significantly increased.
The problem lies in the way taxes are structured, which is based on the combined value of land and improvements (buildings). Particularly in smaller towns and cities, most people are trying to get the most affordable option. This approach encourages sprawl, resulting in substantial infrastructure construction and maintenance costs. In larger cities (unlike mine), the upkeep of water and sewer lines are another considerable addition.
In more suburban communities, we're witnessing the aging of infrastructure that was originally constructed during the early days of the automobile era. The cost of replacing this aging infrastructure is substantial, but growth expectations, which used to help fund these projects, are dwindling. Many people who moved a few miles outside the city center still expect the same level of services without understanding the financial implications. This situation places a significant strain on tax funds, leaving us with limited resources to invest in valuable critical community needs and values.
We now live in a small city in multi-unit building that has ~60 ft of road frontage, and is right in downtown. The building has 6 apartments so has considerable value. But our _infrastructure_ costs are tiny compared to those that live in suburbia. Why are we paying more taxes for helping the city be efficient?
MA GL says you have to tax everyone on their property value - so someone in a 250K house out in suburbia that costs the town huge amounts to maintain their roads, sewers and water, actually costs the town money -- while a downtown 6-unit $1.5M building next to others that use the same services, is a boon.
And what made that possible? The proliferation of the automobile.
We need our tax system to promote density - which means you can spend more tax money on things that matter.
The Strong Towns YouTube channel makes many similar points. Suburban construction in the US is terribly inefficient and wasteful in the long run by maximizing the convenience auto accessibility at the expense of everything else. If infrastructure had a technical debt equivalent, it would be suburban planning.
One thing I think Strong Towns would do better to emphasize is that their argument that suburbs are financially unsustainable applies more to those suburbs of struggling towns or small cities. I don't believe suburbs of large, economically healthy cities are running into unsustainable infrastructure costs nearly as much. They may run into funding difficulties if the suburb becomes an undesirable area, or if the pension fund bankrupts the city, but they don't seem to be running into the issue that their property taxes can't fund them.
Exactly. ST seems to want to conflate areas that would probably be considered 'rural' with actual suburbs of large metro areas. Look at some of the towns mentioned in their 'suburbs bad' articles and you'll note they are usually quite far from a city, and usually that city is 2nd or 3rd tier (and likely facing its own financial issues.)
If anything, many of these rural/exurb communities are already at the minimum population needed to support the industries that must exist outside of dense/expensive cities. These aren't the overpriced McMansions full of entitled upper class folks, those tend to be located near the city, and are quite healthy financially due to outsized local tax revenues.
> [1] The Lafayette metropolitan area was Louisiana's third largest metropolitan statistical area with a population of 478,384 at the 2020 census.
I haven't really looked at Lafayette so it might count as rural but if the 3rd largest metro area of a state is the size ST says is unsustainable [2] then that bodes pretty poorly for all but 2 of it's metro areas.
I bet a lot of say New Jersey is close enough to either Philly or NYC to avoid being "3rd tier" but there's a whole lot of the country that isn't near a top-10 metro area.
Eastern Mass resident here. Thanks for sharing this. I wish our elected officials were so transparent with these basic facts when they discuss road improvement projects.
In my city we pay a negligible “excise tax” on our vehicles. It’s like $100 for 2 older cars. If it were doubled or even tripled in think most people could afford it. This would seem to be the logical way to pay for road improvements, or a municipal gas tax.
Yes, people would skirt it (there already is a problem with people’s registering their cars in New Hampshire to avoid the excise tax, or driving over state lines to buy gasoline). But if even 80% of residents paid the taxes, it would make a real difference to municipal budgets for fixing roads.
> Bridges are even more financially burdensome. Recently, we replaced a culvert that was so small I could easily jump over it, and yet it set us back $700,000.
Why? Why didn't you all agree to go down to Home Depot and load up on one big short metal pipe and some cement if that's the case? How was 700K spent?
Then it seems to be more of a problem with excessive regulation then suburbs themselves.
As a thought experiment, even the wealthiest city in the world couldn't afford a single bridge if regulations required bridges to be made out of stainless steel.
In case you're not joking, government entities in the US are not allowed to build road structures that will collapse the first time a farmer drives a loaded grain hauler over them.
In the ideal world we would be able to compare a privately built and insured road to a public road with tax payer liability for mishaps. I suspect the reality of a privately maintained road is still subject to regulatory overhead.
I built a new house on a newly built road in a semi-urban area. The parcel of land that I bought on the road came with an agreement to pay back the 30 year bond the city took out for the construction of the road and related infrastructure. This amounted to about ~$4MM (in addition to village & city property taxes), so it's a hefty fee even thought its divided among 50 other households.
After I moved here, the people in the village decided to drastically hike income taxes to pay for improvements of other village roads. People saw 50 nice new houses being built and decided those people are responsible for paying for everything the village needs.
This is what will happen all over the USA. People want their infrastructure, but they will find ways to make anyone else pay for it.
I've been saying this in relation to all the paving that is done throughout my Eastern-European country with EU money, that is that at some point having that many paved roads around becomes economically unproductive, especially when it comes to communities that are getting older and smaller (in terms of numbers).
I've been answered something on the lines of "but all those paved roads will create economic activity and we will all become richer and we will be able to afford their maintenance going forward", which is reportedly not true anymore (also because of demographics and of the ageing population). It might have been true some decades ago, when the demographics were different and the age pyramid was more "normal", but not anymore.
Great explanation. Seems like the Cliff's Notes version is that values are based on supply and demand, ignoring costs, and car culture has distorted both. I've been a Georgist since forever, but I'd never looked at things from that angle before. Thank you.
Underfunded pensions are a problem only because tax revenue must be spent on maintaining unsustainable infrastructure that was originally built on an expectation of never-ending growth.
If that infrastructure costs were not so high, there would be sufficient money to pay people what they deserved.
Yeah, that's not the point. The point is that taxpayers receiving services should pay for what it costs to pay people what they deserve, not saddle the future with those costs.
But the issue has been that municipal taxes are a zero-sum game. People expect taxes to stay at a constant level unless they are getting additional services. So allocating more taxes in one place pulls taxes from another.
By not funding retirement immediately, you can keep taxes constant and not diminish current services.
But most importantly, the single-most-explanative reason why we services have gotten more expensive is because of this ignored tsunami of additional costs caused by the proliferation of the automobile.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the recommendation.
When you're just getting started on something new where the ROI is going to be minimal, it makes sense to not put a ton of effort on perfecting when you do not have a clear understanding what people want/need.
After you have a sense of what people are consuming, and therefore have some measure of an ROI, it may make sense to focus on repeating what worked.
With big retail, you get the smallest possible wages and all the profit sucked out to somewhere else.