As a non-American... this model is crazy in my mind.
How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
Is it entirely driven by the fact that local taxes decline on the outskirts? If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps? Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable, and owners have to build for 100 years in greenfields?
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
1) The US is really big. Seriously. Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states. Add to that most of the US is more temperate than most of Europe and therefore we have even more desirable land (Barcelona is north of New York City).
That is to say, we have less need for it. Houston and Phoenix, our 4th and 5th biggest cities, just keep expanding out as opposed to up. This has long term costs, but certainly is cheaper.
1a) Gas is also a lot cheaper in the US than the EU. Two car families are plentiful. So spreading out costs less. And all our infrastructure (outside NYC, DC and maybe Boston/Chicago) is based around cars, not mass transit, so you need a spot to park your cars.
2) Local taxes are (in general) done based on the value of a house. If new houses in less desirable places are cheaper to originally buy, they are often also cheaper to hold. They have fewer established tax costs as well for maintenance of public transit or school because those come later (or not at all). What he's talking about is greenfield on the other side of a legal boundary, so there are different (usually fewer) governments to levy taxes. In the US, you may pay taxes to your city, county, state and the country (a lot of caveats there I'm skipping). If you buy a house outside the city, that's one fewer entity that can tax you.
3) There's a huge anti-urban political component. Literally, there are people who want rural areas to thrive and cities to fail. In some states (see Texas and Arizona, where Houston and Phoenix are), these people control the state.
4) Amazingly, for some reason (possibly holding offshore dollars), it's far more profitable to use the same square footage for luxury condos that sell out right away compared to many smaller cheaper houses/apartments in desirable cities.
5) It's literally been sold to generations of Americans that owing a lawn is a sign of having succeeded. That's where the "white picket fence" comes in. There is a huge market demand for suburbs.
I agree with all of your points in general, but I hate the framing of 5) because it presumes a narrative where people don't have agency over their own preferences.
I love density and urban living. I've lived in lots of apartments over the years. I currently live in a single family home. Having a house and a yard is absolutely awesome:
1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.
2. I have green space that I have autonomy over. Shared parks are nice for being a passive consumer of green space. But a personal yard means I get to be an active participant in its horticulture. I can garden, which has shown repeatedly over the years to be good for mental health.
3. I have more windows that let in more natural light when I'm inside. My living space is more seamlessly connected to the outdoors. I get natural light on all sides of the structure.
4. It's easier and more efficient to let my dog out in my own fenced yard.
I don't think people need huge sprawling yards to get most of this benefit. The UK model where everyone has a little garden behind the house is probably sufficient. But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.
Having loved high-density cosmopolitan places, I confirm it’s not baked in American values but it’s based on actual benefits:
- In high-density, you share everything. Therefore, everything is closed for public access during Covid, but also when there is wind, rain, hot weather or risks of terrorist attacks (talking from experience of my life in cities). The rulers of the city have effective control on your ability to see the sun.
- Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization. And when you’re over with your youth ideas that everyone will fit together and do peace and love, you start starting at the poster in the hall of the building that says “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble). Given cities gather people who lean towards collectivization, you yearn to get your own lawns with friends who will understand this.
- Also, the costs.
So, it’s not cultural love for lawns, it’s a cycle of people moving by necessity.
> Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization.
So are suburbs, but they just represent a more exclusive collectivism. Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools. In prosperous suburbs, it's just collectivism with a minimum net worth or income requirement.
> “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble).
Sounds like you had a bad urban experience with people "different" than you. That sucks, but it doesn't speak for everyone's urban experience.
> Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools.
Sure. But depending on where you land, you can avoid HOAs, architectural design review boards, neighbor comment periods, 24-month permit delays, EIRs, etc. The red tape ("community involvement", if you prefer) involved in living in a city like SF is nothing like what it is in the suburbs, not even the crazy Stepford ones like Irvine.
> 1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.
This part is so hard to overstate! I will never voluntarily move into shared-wall or shared-ceiling housing. Unless I was so broke that I had to do it or become homeless. The neighbors' TV. The neighbors' arguments. The neighbors' partying. The neighbors having sex. The neighbors clomp-clomp-clomping up the stairs directly outside my door. The cops making loud visits to the neighbors when they misbehaved again. This has been pretty much a constant for me in apartment living, no matter the town. I knew I "made it" as a grown-up when I finally moved to a single family house where I couldn't hear a neighbor. Never again!
The other things you mentioned are great bonuses of suburban living, but the major benefit is acoustic distance from neighbors--and stepping back a bit--in general not being forced by proximity to be a part of your neighbors' wild lives.
Oh, I like SFHs too, but my new-build home in London was sound-proofed to the gills. I ran into the neighbours at the lifts one day and they apologized for their kids shrieking "they've been awful this weekend, I'm sorry". I hadn't heard a thing. I could hear the river boats and everything with my window open (faced the Thames) but I never heard a peep out of a neighbour.
American construction is shoddy, which is why American homes are relatively cheap, even at the mid-luxury end. High-end luxury is pretty good. My cousin pays some $12k/month for his home and it's really quiet.
Of course. But having done multiple iterations of both, I will never, ever share walls again. With neighbors I can plant a hedge or close the facing windows. It’s not even close.
I noticed the same thing moving from an apartment to a condo. It turns out moving from wood construction to concrete slab gets you a lot of the same noise isolation in an urban environment.
A lot of people move from apartment to home and at the same time take a huge jump in the value of the residence. They assume the quality of life improvement is attributable to the SFH aspect, rather than the increase in construction quality.
Noise sometimes is more a question of build quality than living situation.
I think people state a lot of reasons for their preferences that aren't actually the origins. We were looking at real estate and I realized that emotionally I am not willing to commit to our region's bloated housing costs without getting to feel like I am insulated from neighbors by a lot of trees. This is not sensible in any way for my lifestyle. I can construct a lot of post hoc justifications, and oh boy I do when people ask, but fundamentally I just have this sense (from growing up on 5 acres) of what's satisfying. I have a friend who feels this way about lawn ("how can you have a dog without a yard"), which strikes me as completely untethered from the objective value of lawn, and probably comes from his suburban upbringing.
Probably a lot of "well the noise" "benefits" of SFH are post hoc in this way. In those more permissive areas, it just takes one family with poorly trained/exercised dogs to make you long for the relative tameness of upstairs stomping. But it makes sense as a benefit people can explain in the thing that they want regardless.
> But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.
Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.
The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed. So, you need a garage. And probably enough space for two cars, not one.
You want to walk? Great! Except that you have to cross several 4 lane highways because we have to accommodate all those cars. And, that's assuming you have somewhere you want to walk to within a reasonable distance.
You don't have a car so you want some big thing delivered? Hope you can wait 2 months and can take off an entire day from work.
> Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.
It's definitely hard to untangle the affects of cars on city planning from single family homes, but I don't think the two are inextricably intertwined. There are many places and have been many time periods with plenty of both single family homes and public transit use.
> The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed.
I live in a single family home in a very walkable city with plenty of public transit. I park on the street and have never been towed or had my truck broken into. These days because of COVID, I rarely drive more than once a month. Even before the pandemic, I usually biked to work and left my truck parked on the street for weeks without using it.
I think you're exaggerating to say that single family homes push towards giant two-car garages. There are lots and lots of single family homes that are not in sprawling suburbia.
of course Americans like single family homes. I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. They are appealing by definition. But are single family homes good for society? They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country. It's not that some "nefarious organization" hoodwinked people - they are a devil's bargain that nobody had the foreknowledge to contain.
> I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. ... But are single family homes good for society?
Is not the ultimate goal of society to enable people to pursue and hopefully attain what they love?
> They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country.
Efficiency is not a first-order goal of society. The maximally efficient society would kill all of its citizens. Everyone walks into the oceans. Plenty of free food for the fish and no human consumption whatsoever.
The goal of society is to provide meaningful happiness to its members efficiently. It doesn't strictly increase efficiency to simply take away things people want.
Drunk driving hurts innocent people, thus preventing them from attaining what they love.
If heroin use leads to crime then maybe it could be forbidden for similar reasons. Or if the government can determine that people don't love heroin and instead only use it as an escape or due to addiction, then forbidding it might help those people to attain what they actually love.
if everyone in the world was living in a single family home, American style, we'd be completely doomed. There's no justifying the waste of our lifestyles. Is there any evidence people in Asia or Europe, where single family homes were not allowed to run rampant, are less "meaningfully happy" than Americans?
Our inefficiency is unsustainable and is on pace to destroy the climate, how can that possibly be construed as providing maximal happiness? Short-term happiness for lucky US citizens, maybe.
> I hate the framing of 5) because it presumes a narrative where people don't have agency over their own preferences.
People have agency over their preferences? Then why do people ever have trouble dieting? Wouldn't it be easier to just want to eat canned beans/spam/nutritious mush to keep you healthy? Why are they sad when they cannot afford something? Why don't they just stop wanting it?
I think there's one other major factor you're entirely overlooking here: cost. NIMBYism and bad zoning lead to that a lot of US cities with housing far, far more expensive than similar places in many other countries.
Mostly agree, but disagree slightly with number 5. In most places, it is illegal to build any denser. Town zoning laws are notoriously slow to change such that they do not keep up with the market and actually codify a lot of these problems in their regulations.
The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.
So when you get densification in US cities, it happens in districts that were formerly industrial/commercial only - where people aren't giving up the form of their existing neighborhoods - or in poor areas with little political organization.
(There's also a TON of underutilized land in industrial/commerical only districts in most US cities, so the focus on single family home zoning when all those lots are already there and similarly "underutilized" is foolish. Even if you abolished zoning overnight, a big industrial or commercial property is going to be much easier to acquire than a bunch of individual home lots.)
> The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.
This doesn't make sense to me. If single-family homes are what most people want, why would a developer bother to buy up land and build something denser if people don't want to live somewhere denser? That sounds like a dumb business decision.
Nearly the entire country is zoned for single-family housing. Someone who wants to live in a SFH has no shortage of options. Meanwhile, someone who wants to live somewhere denser has very few options; we've almost entirely banned building new ones, so what dense places do exist are mostly the ones built prior to modern zoning codes.
Not sure where you're living, but here in central NC we've got a record number of huge apartment complexes being built left and right over the last 4-6 years. Cheap too. It's never been easier to live "somewhere denser".
I think this is covered by (3), the anti-city sentiment.
This is why there are so few cities (in the European sense) in the US, and many of the largest 'cities' are just small downtowns in an ocean of suburban neighborhoods.
In Europe cities like this would be planned much more, and as this kind of city development would be seen as undesirable, the plans just wouldn't allow it. In the US it just sort of happens because of a mass of choices by individuals.
The best cities I've visited in America have been planned, ironically. New York City follows century-old grids. Savannah maintains park squares first laid out in the early 18th century. Washington DC was designed and built from nothing. Perhaps these don't match the definition of Euro-style central planning however.
I don't think it's ironic at all. I think the poster you are responding to is making the point that better city planning leads to better cities, but that America is opposed to central planning. You're pointing out the planned cities that made it in are great.
> Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states.
Overall a great answer, but I'm not so sure of #3. Yes, there are people who want big cities to fail, but AFAICT not many of them are rural themselves. They're in smaller cities or outer suburbs ("exurbs") of big ones. They play to a rural image or ethos, but typically neither know nor care about anyone truly living a rural life.
Also (6) higher level/quality of municipal services, because those are (mostly) funded from local taxes. This is most obvious in schools but you can also see it in the personnel, equipment, and training of the local police and fire departments, the number and maintenance level of parks, etc.
It's worth noting that Japan also has a depreciation-based model of housing construction, but in Japan they don't endlessly sprawl outwards - isntead they knock down the old depreciated homes and rebuild in-place. Their permissive zoning model allows this to provide intensification naturally without the kind of protracted legal and PR battles required for intensification redevelopment here we have here in North America.
I am a fan of city building games, and one thing that greatly annoys me is the fact that all of them use the USA-only model of "Euclidean" zoning (named after Euclid, Ohio, that sued on the supreme court to be allowed to implement that kind of zoning now popular in USA).
These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp. Some guy bought the swamp, and started to build offices on it, a ton of them. The construction workers then started to build their homes on the farm, back then intended to be temporary homes while they built the offices, but today the ex-farm is a full blown dense residential neighbourhood in the middle of downtown, and the swamp is a place full of towering glassy high-rises. Meanwhile in another area, a neighbourhood that was USA suburb-style full of big houses, that formerly belonged to wealthy farmers of the region, people realized that place was very easy to reach compared to some others, so perfect for offices, slowly the houses became offices, then torn down to have proper office buildings, then those got torn down and turned into towers, and then some towers had residential apartments built on them so people could live closer to work.
This probably has more to do with gameplay mechanics and the influence of the original sim city than anything else.
This style of zoning allows a good middle ground where the player has input into the usage of the city without having to micromanage every building.
A city builder that lacked that concept entirely would be interesting, but you'd have to come up with some other abstraction that feels vaguely reminiscent of city planning and also is engaging from a gameplay perspective.
If I ever retire early to build city building games, I think it’d be nice to step back from the “series of rectangular lots” model and instead model the house, garage, driveways, and the like, as objects that a constraint solver can place. Then zoning becomes a series of specific rules: setbacks, fire codes, parking, accessibility, and the like. Bundle up zoning rules and apply them as you will. Make your agents look for a place that meets their needs, or renovate their own property. Have actual landlords, offer rent control if you dare… build civic capital with community organizations so that displacing people or gentrifying the neighborhood too quickly means a loss of stability, and urban conflict …
I would absolutely love to work on building a simulation at this level of fidelity, but I feel like making it actually fun to play would be the largest challenge. Maybe if the scale of it was at a neighborhood scope it would be possible to make it engaging - somewhere between The Sims and Sim City in scale and granularity
> These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp.
The neighborhood I grew up in in Louisiana used to be a swamp before it was landfilled. My current neighborhood used to be a public dump. Most of Silicon Valley used to be farmland.
I'm not sure where the claim that changing zoning or use is completely impossible in the US comes from.
That's more Texas-marketing than anything else. It has a lot of things that smell a lot like zoning, they just don't call it that.
Deed restrictions to a lot of the work. There are also density restrictions.The city steers where it wants things with tax policy, a big chunk of the city is governed by airport (federal) rules, and then add in historic preservation, buffering ordinances, lot size restrictions and so on, and there is little surprise Houston looks just like everywhere else in the US.
In some parts of the country - dunno about Houston specifically - a high percentage of the housing stock is governed by HOAs which make zoning boards look like anarchists by comparison.
The attitude to homes there makes an interesting contrast with Western perceptions of a home as an appreciating asset. As I understand it they treat houses more like cars - a valuable but depreciating purchase that will be replaced within 2-3 decades.
(Also I find the conversation-framing interesting here - when discussing a U.S. neighbourhood a "diverse profile" is presented as self-evidently ideal, whereas when discussing a Japanese neighbourhood it's never mentioned.)
In the United States, 75-90% of all land is zoned for single family residences with maximum densities of 4-5 households per acre. This is a legacy from the era of integration of non-white Americans called "White Flight." White Americans, seeking to avoid living next to non-whites left urban centers and populated suburban centers which had been engineered to be unaffordable or inaccessible to black and non-white Americans.
Houses were large and separated by lawns. They also required financing to purchase. Financing which was usually denied to non-whites by red-lining. In addition these neighborhoods were usually walled off and mazed to prevent people from walking through them. This made families depend on expensive cars to get where they were going, further increasing the burden on those living within and excluding poor and lower middle class Americans.
Now we have these pointless laws that are slowly strangling us to death with expensive car infrastructure that is insanely expensive and deteriorating fast. Small businesses can't survive because of poor walkability, parking minimums and outside investors jacking up rent costs. People can't find homes because they are all too expensive.
The legacy of racism is a death pact for America. I hope we can escape it.
To blame this all on racism is to miss the true motivation which is safety of person and property. It is something I never truly understood until last year's protests/riots, which I think are also at least a factor in people moving out of urban areas again (though few will admit it). When there's unrest which results in arson, looting, and vandalism, those with means will seek safer locales and erect physical and institutional barriers to keep out potential threats. Venice is a historical example of this, built on the water for protection from barbarians.
There are knock on effects such as dimmer prospects for those left than in the more integrated communities that proceeded as investment flees. People rightfully don't want to invest in areas deemed unsafe, where those investments would be at risk.
To be clear, where such barriers manifest in ways where people are judged or treated differently based on immutable characteristics or group identity instead of their individual character, this is wrong.
You portray this as a one-way relationship, but it's a cycle. Yes, perceptions of safety are part of the reason why people flee to the suburbs, but that flight is itself part of the reason so many inner cities are destitute and unsafe. Why put all of the blame on the people most negatively affected by this dynamic and least able to change it?
> People rightfully don't want to invest in areas deemed unsafe, where those investments would be at risk.
That's exactly the rationale behind redlining, food deserts, infrastructure funding (especially schools) and other kinds of systemic racism. I suggest you read up on what that term means. It does not mean that everyone participating in the system is racist. It means that our institutions and economy themselves perpetuate racial injustice even without further racist intent. Framing this entirely in terms of "rational" choices by those who flee, as if those who stay don't exist or don't matter, is perpetuating a false narrative. So, again, why?
The proper name for "perpetuate injustice without racist intent" is "classism". It can happen in homogeneous countries just as well.. in fact, I grew up in Russia surrounded 99% by other white slavs, and I'm super culture-classist based on that experience. I've also heard from other Eastern European immigrants how it's awesome that in America (compared to at home) it's easy to live not being surrounded by gopniks (chavs in Britain), bydlo (lit. cattle - kinda like urban white trash), and alcoholics, and how they wish Moscow/Warsaw/whatever had more class segregation accessible to an average person, instead of just the very rich. It's a bummer that in America class is so tied to race.
I agree that there's absolutely a cycle and don't intend to diminish that or imply that those left behind don't matter or are to blame for their situation. There's clearly reasons why people decide to riot or protest, even if it doesn't necessarily bring about the desired outcomes.
White flight and red lining tend to get thrown around without any attempt to tackle reasons why these things happened beyond some surface level talk of not liking people that are different.
> To blame this all on racism is to miss the true motivation which is safety of person and property.
I think this sentence is much closer to the mark if you say: "the true motivation which is perceived safety of person and property."
I think you are right that people seek out less density and more personal space when they feel insecure or under threat. But in the modern journalistic landscape that sensation can be quite decoupled from the reality of their actual risk of harm.
Sure, racism could be an/the underlying cause. But this perspective is very different from the normal perspective (which foxyv seemed to be promoting).
The usual perspective is that white people fleeing during white flight are racist themselves.
What you are saying is that racism causes violence, and rich white people who are victims of violence flee that violence. So they're not racist themselves but rather second-order victims of racism.
To add to this, in 1950s the low density was seen as a protective measure against bombing, including nuclear. Dense cities like Dresden or Nagasaki were famously destroyed by firestorms from powerful bombing. Population of areas with semi-rural density had much better chances to survive a nuclear blast, hiding in a basement shelter.
It is possible to decentralize without making a population car dependent. Just add walking paths, alleys, and local shopping.
I think a major part of why people built mazes and fences around their neighborhoods is a bit of mild xenophobia. The idea of never having to meet anyone other than your immediate neighbors and chosen associates makes a great deal of sense. If your neighborhood is walkable then you could have unsavory elements on the sidewalks. Outsiders in your neighborhood!
If you can only travel by car, you can isolate yourself and your family and choose who you associate with. You are protected from the general public by your car until you arrive at a "Safe" place like a soccer meetup, church, or a Boy Scout meeting. This is much harder to do in a walk-up apartment where you may meet someone who threatens you physically, racially, or ideologically.
75-90% of what land? the federal government owns 28% of the entire land area in the US, and that land is not "zoned" for any type of private residence.
The answer to that varies from person to person, and it has varied in aggregate over time, but the effect on those who remain has been the same. It doesn't matter whether those who left were/are fleeing actual danger, race-based perception of danger, or pure economic rationality. If you tip a marble on to a sloped ramp, it will continue rolling down even without further impulse. The fact that at one time race and racism were significant drivers of this effect is sufficient to justify their consideration in any present discussion of causes and/or remedies.
I think a lot of white Americans feared retribution and competition from minorities. Before integration, they had treated minorities very poorly to say the LEAST. I think it's pretty normal to be afraid when someone you beat with a horse whip last tuesday suddenly gets to own guns and businesses in your neighborhood.
In addition, propaganda from racist organizations was running wild. Stuff like "White Genocide" and "Race Riots" were predicted by racist organizations who still profit from this fear today.
But naturally the answer is that they were fleeing minorities, violence, AND landlords. In most people's minds all three were mixed up. In the end, the makeup of the neighborhoods they fled to were built around isolation enabled by cars.
The YouTube channel Not Just Bikes [1] explores this in a short series [2]. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but what he discusses rings true for my city at least.
The episode that mentions the experience of walking 800m in Houston from a hotel to a shop reminds me of an experience where a group of us (drunken Europeans) were trying to get from a bar in one hotel to another bar in another hotel in that city... I'm surprised we weren't arrested.
A good book to read on the subject is Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's 60 years old now, and is concentrating on cities rather than towns, but you can see the points she is making play out in scenes like the article mentions.
Because the driving philosophy is to make a profit. Not to build a liveable place or a sustainable community, not to improve the standard of living for people, not even to build something great. Only to squeeze most dollars out of an invested sum.
Once you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense. Depressing, self-destructive, short-sighted, awful, but logical.
Now let's think about ways to make sustainable communities and higher standards of living a better investment! They are valuable, we just need to be able to share some of that value with the investors who decide what to build and how.
Because nobody wants to live there. Americans by and large come in two types: the urbanists who want to live in a big city, and everyone else who wants a cottage in the woods that's file miles from a McDonald's. Sanphillippo wants a return to this 1940s idea of dense small towns, walkable towns with a population of ten thousand. He doesn't get that those towns weren't that way because everyone liked it; they were like that because they had to be. People were too poor to have a personal vehicle. Everybody either farmed and only came into town when they had to, or worked in the same factory, or worked in a store where the factory workers spent their money. Then when the industry changed the factory closed and the town died almost overnight.
>> Americans by and large come in two types: the urbanists who want to live in a big city, and everyone else who wants a cottage in the woods that's file miles from a McDonald's
The majority of Americans live in an area they describe as suburban.
Then don't. Live somewhere with good public transportation. Just don't think that you're ever going to live in a small town and be completely satisfied with not having one. Most people who don't want to live in a concrete jungle simply don't like having everything crammed together like that. I certainly don't.
I'm in the Dallas "metroplex," and it understood here that you get more value for your money the farther out you go. There's the inner loop (Loop 12) and outer loop (I-635) inside Dallas city limits, and then there are suburbs which again can be described (at least in the north) as "inside TX-121" and "inside US-380." As you cross each "boundary," your choices provde more value--defined as less money for more space, or newer construction, or both.
I grew up in San Diego, which is naturally constrained by mountains, ocean, an international border, and a military base, even before you add state and local laws. The Dallas area has no such constraints anywhere, nothing to keep it from sprawling until it reaches the state border to the north--and really, nothing to keep it from sprawling beyond that, either.
Americans tend to value square footage over their commute time. So the cycle goes:
1. Hmm, I can get 2000 sqft inside the loop and 5000 sqft in the outer suburbs. Outer suburb for me!
2. Everyone else does the same thing and the area grows
3. The people in the outer suburbs starts loudly complaining about how horrible traffic has become (because they moved there when relatively few other people lived at and beyond the edge)
4. Roads are widened and new roads are built to ease traffic.
5. Now that there's road capacity, developers start building out even further.
6. Repeat step one with different people another layer out and the cycle continues.
It is a relic of slavery. As former slaves moved into the cities to find work in the reconstruction era and beyond the white residents fled to the suburbs and took their money with them. This lead to a decay of the inner cities which sets up a viscous cycle of poverty and neglect.
There's a second problem where people who might have good intentions and try to revitalize the inner city are instead considered to be gentrifiers. Basically in an attempt to break the cycle of poverty they cause the rents to increase and end up pushing out the poor people instead of uplifting them.
Good keywords and historical moments to Google here are "The Great Northward Migration" and anything related to the founding, population, and history of 19th/20th century Chicago. I believe there was a Chicago newspaper (Tribune, maybe?) that circulated special edition pamphlets to the Deep South with instructions and guidance on how to successfully migrate North. Black supporters caught circulating documents like this could be killed in retaliation -- it was a wild time.
Edit: it was the Chicago Defender.
>Chicago's African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, made the city well known to southerners. It sent bundles of papers south on the Illinois Central trains, and African-American Pullman Porters would drop them off in Black towns. "Chicago was the most accessible northern city for African Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas." They took the trains north. "Then between 1916 and 1919, 50,000 blacks came to crowd into the burgeoning black belt, to make new demands upon the institutional structure of the South Side."
If a recall correctly, they also circulated imagery and content about the Black experience abroad; for example, in Paris. Arguing that if the condition for Black people was comparatively better abroad, then there was no reason for conditions to remain so dire in the US. This sort of content was particularly enlightening.
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
How do you do that?
The US has the luxury of space that other countries don't and that space mostly is owned by the public and not federal, state, or local governments.
- In the US, zoning and land use are typically managed at the micro level, not the macro level (city < county < state < country).
- There's also a persistent threat of competition both at the state and county level. So most policy is about attracting residents and jobs, maintaining property values, etc.
- Proximity to a major city impacts price so the further away you travel, the more home you get for the same price.
- When people don't like how the local government is behaving, they'll hold a referendum and form a new city to escape regulation.
If you look at a city like Atlanta, you see that upper middle class have moved further outward from the metro area with each decade to larger more expensive homes (e.g. Brookhaven -> Sandy Springs -> Roswell -> Alpharetta -> Cumming). They did this because as undeveloped property decreased it drove property values up so they were able to sell their homes and purchase larger but cheaper homes in undeveloped neighborhoods. The cycle repeats itself every 10 years or so.
It is subsidizing inefficient cities and land use, causes massive environmental harm, and the people that benefit the least from subsidized driving are the poorest people. If it is such a universal good that benefits everyone and people are already paying for it through their taxes, then why would people be upset about not having to pay for it through their taxes and just pay for it directly?
If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space.
In areas where there is high demand for a particular reason (ex. NYC or the Bay Area because of the job market) I think it makes sense to intensify. But in cities where it isn't important for a lot of people to live close to the center, I don't really see a problem with just building more houses. Having a backyard is nice.
If you ever go to Phoenix, all you see is miles of suburbs. And then you drive out of the city, and all you see is miles of open land that they can expand into. I say just keep building them, clearly they are pretty popular.
>If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space.
1. The main complaint you hear is R1 zoning, which doesn't just permit single family homes but MANDATES single family homes. This is wasteful lunacy.
2. If single family homes can pay for their requisite infrastructure without external subsidy, then by all means. If they can't pay and expect others to pay for them, then we need to have a conversation on the topic.
> If single family homes can pay for their requisite infrastructure without external subsidy
...and they basically don't, over time. The initial boost in property-tax revenue is eventually overwhelmed by the maintenance costs for all that sprawling infrastructure. It's one of the drivers behind the churn that OP is all about. A fuller exposition was discussed here recently.
In principle I agree, but I think that in many cases these developments are not well thought out.
Any time the housing values in an area significantly drop or the population largely leaves, what gets left behind is a poor and poorly maintained neighborhood that creates a ton of negative externalities for surrounding areas. When you build an entirely new development on undeveloped land this is almost guaranteed to happen as all of the buildings and infrastructure will need to be replaced at the same time.
> If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space.
Because the federal government often foots the bill for new suburban expansion. If the suburbs will foot the bill for road, sewer, and electricity expansion then they should be left to do so.
the larger cities have been on a trajectory like what you describe - it’s difficult to increase density, home owners are resistant to it, but it happens gradually anyway.
but in small cities, there’s just too much empty space available. people just build further and further out from the old city center, so they can have their giant houses and enormous yards.
my state, Oregon, has a concept of an “Urban Growth Boundary” which is a zoning rule meant to reduce sprawl, and it helps somewhat. But generally people in the smaller cities vote to keep density very low.
It's probably difficult for a non-American to understand just how deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime.
If I could live in an environment like Berlin, I might consider it, although I'd still get itchy at having that many people around. But that's not a reality anywhere in the US that you have that kind of density.
> how deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime.
> If I could live in an environment like Berlin, I might consider it
You made me chuckle. Berlin is heavily associated with crime. There's multiple better and safer cities to live in Germany.
Associated I can believe, but it doesn’t feel bad to be in it.
Don’t get me wrong, when I was in a tiny quiet village in the UK I once came back from the local grocery shop to find my front door had bounced open instead of locking itself when I’d left and absolutely nothing happened as a result of this mistake, and I don’t expect the same here; and sure, Berlin has a lot of graffiti, but I don’t feel fundamentally unsafe in even the most loudly afearing places like Görlitzer Park or Alexanderplatz — I don’t even get why the latter is on the list of places people talk about when suggesting danger.
Really, the worst I experience here is the fire brigade and ambulance sirens (and, confusingly, one time where the sirens were on a van marked “Netzgesellschaft entstörungsdienst”, which both Google and my own limited German think is something close to “Network company anti-jamming service”, which feels implausible).
Netzgesellschaft Entstörungsdienst: It's an emergency service for gas leaks[1] - it may feel implausible but it's totally common in Germany to have a "Netzgesellschaft" or some other very generic name like "Wasserverband" (water organization).
Can't find 2020 numbers, but all of Germany had 720 murders in 2019. Last year Chicago, which is the main city in one metro area of one state in the US had 774.
Chicago is around 2.5 million people, Germany is 84 million people. From an inner-city US perspective, violent crime in Germany basically does not exist.
>deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime
It's true that people think this, but it's not true in reality. Many people who don't live in cities believe in the 1980s TV and movie version of cities because they're afraid of anything new or diverse.
I moved from a semi rural area about 30 miles outside of Medford OR to an apartment in a reasonably nice area inside the city about 2 years ago while I am developing and building a house on a piece of property. Compared to the area that I moved from and will be moving back to the level of random violence and crime in this area is much worse and completely offsets any other benefits such as being close to work, city infrastructure (water sewer power and fast internet) and easier access to shopping and dining. Crime and violence thrives in densely populated areas because there is more opportunities for such per square mile. So yeah people think this because unless you live in a dream world that’s reality.
The thing to look for is evidence of protections against crime - barred windows and high walls, locked garages vs street parking, hotels and businesses with security vs everything just open, having to get a key for the bathroom vs it just being there, etc.
It’s like COVID-19- there’s no use in pretending it doesn’t exist because I nor anyone I know well has had it.
You do wonder about all these walled communities in places like Richardson and Plano, TX. What are they defending against? When you walk around the area there was no evidence of crime or disorderly behaviour, yet they still had that strange architecture. So what are they defending against?
Yes. Aside from what I consider nuisance encounters I was walking my dog by my apartment one evening and I had a very close encounter with someone who was vandalizing a neighbors vehicle. I was able to get enough video evidence of the act in progress to assist the Police with identifying and charge the perp. I had to testify in Grand Jury for my troubles.
We do in some places! Actual cities have exactly that profile, and have the opposite problem of this article; a dense city core that is so expensive that it can be hard to live in.
This article is really describing the failures of suburbia, that soulless monstrosity. By all rights, no matter what is legally true, this 'Appleton' is not a city, or a town or a village, it's just the vestigial growth of people who all want to live in suburbia.
>How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
More houses = more taxes. Development is promoted in less dense areas because it creates jobs and brings in money. New constructions are profitable, and the industry is basically dictated by builders that throw up cheap houses on plots of land they bought for 10k.
Has any western nation achieved dense middle class inner city neighborhoods post WWII? The anglosphere cities that rose after the ubiquity of the automobile are all sprawling. The outer run suburbs of all western major cities are sprawling.
The cities with dense middle class inner city neighborhoods mostly developed without cars.
Check out Amsterdam. You don't need to ban cars, you just need to make bikes a preferable alternative. And as has been mentioned all over this thread, check out the YouTube channel called Not Just Bikes, for a ton of good videos on the subject.
Amsterdam is my point. If it were founded in 1906 instead of 1306 it would look more Los Angles.
It's very hard take an area developed around a car (everywhere in America since 1920s) and make it bike preferable.
You basically need for the area to be so run down that you can start from scratch. Like a taking a formerly industrial area and then only zoning it for mixed use, high density residential/commercial use.
From scratch? What starting point are you looking for? I don't think enough time has passed for a classical organic urban core to have developed from nothing. I guess for walkable postwar communities, I would look at college towns.
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
Nope! Not sure who said it first, but...
If you don't know why some fucked up thing in America is the way it is, the answer is probably racism.
In this case, it's white flight from city centers -> suburbs and racist real-estate practices.
You can see it in what the author was told about Appleton, if you read between the lines:
> he schools are much better in the newer areas, and people shop for school districts more than they shop for a house itself. While Appleton is a very safe little city, crime is always a bigger problem at the core compared to the edges. You have to think of the children.
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
They do promote it. Every city in the US is promoting inner-city neighborhood development (commonly called "gentrification" here). It's just not usually a great for actual citizens.
Dense construction is always more expensive, so anytime density goes up, your immediately paying a lot more money for a lot less housing. And property in the US is valued exclusively by it's density (what realtors will call "location, location, location", but really just means "how much stuff is around it -- how dense is the area"). Living near density (even if your own property is not dense) always costs a lot more money, which means your again paying a lot more cash for a lot less housing. Alternative public transit options are poor in most places, but simultaneously, most inner-cities are actively hostile to our current universal public transit (cars), so the closer you live to the center of town, the harder it will be for you as a resident to get anywhere regularly, and you'll be transportation-disadvantaged compared to any of your friends in the suburbs. And because it's more expensive to live there, the taxes there are almost always much higher (since the tax you pay is based in large part on the value of your home, and houses near the city cost more, so you also get to pay more in taxes).
And, since families generally don't have lots of money to spend, they are in the same boat as you, and almost entirely pick suburbs (to save lots of cash and get better transport), so their kids all enroll in schools out there, so the quality of the schools out there is a lot higher, which makes future families more likely to make the same decision.
And if you have anything "tricky" happen to you (perhaps a elderly family member needs support, or you get divorced, or your kid becomes disabled, or similar), any and all of the assistance you might want or need to help deal with that, is also easier to get out in the suburbs. And since your cost of living is lower out there, if you need extra cash to handle a problem, it's easier to financially float that in the suburbs.
The model is crazy, but it's not crazy at the person-level. It's mostly crazy at the federal level. The government could let properties actually depreciate, so that renovating old properties inside the city is cheaper than building new out in the suburbs. But that would require them to let property values fall in urban areas so that housing can become affordable, and cities as well as all rich people are always 100% against that idea. So instead, federal policies prop up artificially high property values in urban areas, with the net effect being a semi-explicit policy that cities are not for most people. The goal is that anyone not single/20-something/wealthy, should not ever actually live there, and these policies are mostly successful at doing that.
> If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it help
Probably not. The problem with local taxes is not usually that the rate is much higher, it's that the cost of living in a city is much higher, so your property itself costs way more, and that means you pay way more in taxes (even if the rate were hypothetically exactly identical in both, you'd still be paying way more in taxes city-vs-suburbs, because urban housing tends to cost way more to buy, and the taxes you pay are based on the sale price of the property itself)
> Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable
This is a good idea, but it would actually help the suburban sprawl far more than it would help the city (since lower density is more affordable), it would encourage people to stay in suburban sprawl longer, since those properties would still always be cheaper, but now (under this new rule) would also would be better built and last longer.
It's just a theory, but I'm somewhat convinced that half the reason Americans hate taxes is because of how inconvenient and in your face they are in the US: IRS requires you to fill in a complex form with no help and punishes you if you get it wrong, and sales tax is not part of the advertised price of goods. I reckon if you got rid of that then people would care about taxes a lot less.
There are certain actors in the US political system who definitely believe the complexity/pain of filing is a feature, not a bug, as it leads people to associate taxes with pain instead of the benefits of living in a successful modern industrial democratic state.
Combine that with a tax prep lobby whose incentives are to sell you a solution.
The IRS could have made things as easy for most Americans as places like New Zealand did two decades ago.
Property tax payment is very easy in the US, because it is usually done as part of your regular mortgage payment - people still dislike paying it.
The IRS is also a lot more helpful than commonly advertised - I once had a several thousand dollar expense reimbursement from work that my employer wrongly classified a miscellaneous untaxed payment to me. They didn’t attach any penalties, just sent a letter essentially saying “we think you forgot to include this in your income for YEAR, we think you owe $X + $Y interest.”(and the interest amount was very reasonable, like 3-4%)
I just emailed them a copy of the receipts and email I had sent to my employer when claiming reimbursement, and noted that I had not claimed those expenses on my tax return, if I had done , then it would have exactly matched the tax owed.
They replied a few weeks later telling me thanks and that I owed nothing extra.
I do worry about arbitrary abuse of government power in the US, particularly against those guilty of WRONGTHINK, but my personal experience was exactly what I would hope for as a citizen, professional, clear and timely.
I still would still like taxes to be lower - but if you told me I had to make a mandatory charitable donation of the same amount every year to a real charity, I would be fine with that. So in my case at least, it’s that I expect the unionized middle class government workers to get most of the benefit of my extra tax, not the poorest people in society who need it most (and who are usually presented as the need for such increased taxes)
Absolutely, and it's set up this way on purpose by people who believe that filing taxes should be as painful and difficult as possible so people associate the idea of taxes with the artificially difficult process. It doesn't have to be this way, the rest of us are just held hostage by anti-tax zealots.
You seriously think that people want less taxes just because they are difficult to file?
Don't you think that paying 10-40 percentage points more (like in Europe) of your wage each month has something to do with it?
The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat. That makes the take home to be around 18k.
Sales tax is around 20% throughout Europe. That takes it from 18k to 16k.
Gas is double the price solely because of taxes
Property tax can increase the housing cost by 10%
Automobile property taxes are outrageous compared to the US. New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark (if the car costs 30k, pay 45k to the state), but are pretty high everywhere. In Romania, to register a 10 year old car with a 2.4 liter engine you have to pay 6000 euros. In a country with the average wage 1000 a month.
I find it so amusing that people think taxes are just an inconvenience.
By the way, if you want to pay more, you can just donate your money to charities: you have a higher impact than giving it to government, much better directed at what you care about, very easy to do. Donate 10-20% of your raw income to an ngo, then talk about doing that for everyone, compulsory.
From what I've read, US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs, you just get less for it. Property prices are the main thing that seems much worse in Europe, but that doesn't have anything to do with taxes.
Donating my income is besides the point, as it's the top income brackets that really need to be taxed. I would and do happily vote for higher taxes on myself when the option is available.
> US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs
The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020 [1]; France and Italy did about 25%, Germany 11.5%. (Switzerland and "communist" China clock in below 10%.)
There is sufficient variation in tax policy across the EU, let alone Europe, to make broad-based comparisons meaningless.
For the US you're missing some taxes, too because the overall is somewhere near 30%, 10 percentage points lower than Germany. I think your US link does not include state and local taxes etc
> The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat.
Drivel.
Here in Norway (widely reputed to be heavily taxed) a single person earning 30 kUSD and having neither debts nor savings would pay 4752 USD in tax, about 15%. You would then pay up to 25% VAT on things you buy (less on food and rent).
Sure, it's "VAT" - but it's essentially the same thing. You pay it for almost everything you buy. There are some lower rates for food in some places. But guess what, US has that too.
Thanks for the link, but again you're taking the exception as the rule. Most countries don't work like that.
(it's also possible that social security is deductible before income tax is levied as per this site but I'm not looking too deeply into it: https://expatcenter.ro/tax-guide/ )
Romania also don't work like that, in principle. They are simply much poorer country than Norway. 30k EUR salary in Romania is upper middle class income, so it is heavily taxed. People making average wage pay much lower taxes.
Also, if I get the linked calculator right, then it expects you to put MONTHLY salary, in RONs, not EUR. So, just putting 30000 there you get a monthly salary of over 6000 EUR, or 72k per year. And that's taxed at 41%.
Romania is much poorer than Norway, but the tax is the same - it's a flat tax rate. Play with the calculator and you'll see. The numbers are in RON - which is 5 times smaller than the dollar, and the value is implied to be monthly - but it makes no difference because of the flat rate.
In other countries you might have tax brackets, but I know from experience that it's very easy to reach 45% total tax rate (not marginal).
Tax hate didn't really begin in it's current form till Reagan as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. When black Americans were excluded from the programs that taxes paid for, resistance was minimal.
The Boston Tea Party happened because the British got rid of a tax, I wouldn't call that tax hate. Some locals were ticked off because the British screwed up their smuggling operation.
That's the point, every year you are aware of how much the government is taking from you. If citizens weren't aware of exactly how much taxes they paid they would be more inclined to want more tax increases
People should care about taxes a lot more. I want to know exactly how much money the government is taking from me by force. It's a good reminder that we need to be vigilant against uncontrolled government growth, and vote accordingly.
Americans hate taxes because we see little benefit from them. Federal taxes make up the brunt, and they mainly go to the military and corporate welfare. The biggest federal benefit is social security, and people don't see that until they retire. Even the benefits that do trickle back locally (eg highways, schools) are more of an end-run around state sovereignty rather than a respected benefit.
Local taxes mainly go to the domestic military and schools. You only see the main benefit if you have kids in public school.
State taxes are the most useful - large enough scale to accomplish things, but small enough scale to remain somewhat accountable. But since people can easily move between states, these become subject to intense politicking. For example, "Taxachusetts" even though its overall income tax rate is only 1.2x that of New Hampshire (32% vs 27%, for incomes $22k-$52k).
I'd personally love to see a flip of the magnitude of state and federal tax rates, money flowing between the two in the opposite direction, and a way for individuals to earmark what their tax money goes to. Some ability to steer taxes towards things they value would go a long way to making people feel enfranchised.
edit: lots of downvotes, but no counterpoints. While there are many things government does that I do value, I don't think their costs add up to anywhere near what is being paid in. What value do you feel you personally get from your taxes, apart from longing for some sort of social contract?
Is that really the general consensus? If anything, so much of taxation goes to waste on bureaucracy and inane or downright criminal nonsense in the US. I live in Canada, and I basically consider it to be theft that my taxes that are taken from me forcefully go to places such as giant corporations, and military applications that I do not want to happen.
OTOH, I think that taxation is important, and I'm happy that my taxes go to health services, something that Canada does relatively well, even though I don't necessarily benefit in the same way compared to people less fortunate than I am. Same for social services, for example.
My point is that I don't think such feelings can be boiled down to "my money is going to people who don't deserve it". It's a complex topic and complex feelings which should be treated as such
It's your money like it's your water and your oxygen. Build some big tanks on your "property" and put machine gun nests around it to defend it.
Everything in modern society is part of a social contract that includes thousands of people working to keep it from devolving into anarchist chaos of violence and subjugation.
But I have as much right to my money as I have a right not to be raped. Society provides for all this in our social contract. We can choose to include income taxes in that, but we don't have to. We didn't have them initially as a republic.
We can "choose to include them" until we discover that it is unviable to fund the necessary services and find out society is completely dysfunctional without them.
As expat returning to the US after 7 years, it's clear that US is headed in the wrong direction because it has made decades of poor choices, particularly w.r.t. taxation and long-term investments, and is sliding rapidly into dysfunction. And the confusion that has led to those poor choices seems pretty well-summarized in your first comment.
I'm not against taxes. There are things that can only be executed as a group.
What I am against is the notion that it's not mine. That by default it belongs to the government and it's only out of the goodness of their heart they allow me to keep some.
It's the other way around. We form a government and we decide what we want to contribute to it with taxes.
We decide we need a school, a road, engage in war, etc., and we contribute to those efforts via tax contributions.
I don't want to contribute to never ending wars, I don't want to contribute to subsidizing companies that export jobs, etc. I want money to train inner city kids, rural kids, not some reconstruction in some place that has much less immediate effect on us.
>What I am against is the notion that it's not mine.
Did you attend school at any point? Do you use any civil infrastructure? Does the public fund or buy your work? Do you use any tools made by others?
The Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman worker who creates value solely through individual effort is a harmful one, because it ignores the importance of society in shaping the individual and it ignores all of the invisible inputs into the work of every individual. Nobody's salary is entirely "theirs" because nobody creates value without the involvement of others.
I don't think any reasonable philosophy of taxes tries to claim that your money "belongs to the government" and "they let you keep some".
We pay taxes. It's our money, then we pay some of it to the government to support the government, and pay for the myriad of ways in which the government supports us.
It is not possible to live in this country and not be supported by government services in a dizzying variety of ways, visible and invisible. Those services cost money. Therefore, we pay taxes for them.
"In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving".
I'm saying it is indeed our money. Not the government's; we choose to part with some, but the taxed money was never the government's. It was always ours.
It's like giving a kid an allowance, and then one day you say you don't have enough to give them that week/month, whatever, and they say, but it's "my" money. No it's not.
If you don't have enough to pay your taxes, then you're in a very unusual position, because the average American gets their taxes withheld from their paycheck regularly. It must mean that you own your own business, or are doing something fairly unusual, and have failed to properly budget with taxes in mind. No one "doesn't have enough to pay taxes" just because they don't make enough money, because income tax is progressive specifically to avoid that type of problem.
As for it being "your money"....sure, one can say it's "your money", but you owe it to the government for services they provide on an ongoing and pervasive basis. It's like a subscription fee for civilized living.
That's like saying it's only their house because we allow them to own a house. Or, those are their children because we allow them to keep their children and not assign them to the state.
It's as if in lawless lands with tribal warfare suddenly people don't earn a living.
yes true. property, especially real estate, is a legal construct created by the state. In older eras this was more explicit, property existed “at the pleasure of the Queen” or whatever. Now we rely on a nebulous social consensus reinforced by the courts and legislature.
Money is only a token within this game - it has no reality other than the rules. The rules are whatever society decides they are. There is not a “real” ownership that the rules are interfering with.
But that's true for any rights. The right to feel safe, the right to safety and not be harmed, raped or killed. Without society, sure, real-estate, personal safety are out the window and we could expect expropriation, rape and death.
You have "Castle doctrine" because it was deemed politically beneficial to a politician at some point. That same politician that would happily turn your neighborhood into a strip mall through eminent domain if that was beneficial for them. You have banks literally foreclosing on the wrong homes, or through simple errors, making people homeless in the process, and those same politicians are "so sad".
If you're in a Western nation and you "make" money, it is very much a partnership with the state, and your ability to "make" money would very likely disappear without the state. For someone to go on about "their" money has no correlation with actual reality, and I'd encourage them to ply their trade in Somalia. I'm sure the income tax rates are great.
Children are a bit different because they are actually created by the parents (and the personal relationship is of course super-important for the child's development).
But generic economic resources: yes. Ownership of pretty much anything including houses relies on social acceptance of the rules of private property ownership and market value. And that social acceptance can be conditional on things like taxes to fund social goods. If you don't want to play by the democratically determined rules, then you shouldn't expect the state to defend your property.
I think that property-children is on a continuum. When you have raiding parties and tribal warfare, children were taken as slaves. From that PoV then children are in the same basket where they are protected by the norms of society, same as property.
Saying you only own your money or house because we allow you to is like saying the only reason you don't get raped or killed is because we have a structure of laws against it. Yes?
Maybe a lot of people are struggling to get by? "Their money" represents the ability to pay for food and housing so I'm not sure it's only about wanting others to suffer, as you imply. I think it's at least partially about their own sense of security.
>the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.
I'm also pretty miffed at how much money has been wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The federal government gives heaps of money to other nations to spend on frivolous projects while our own infrastructure decays. My frustration at taxes and spending goes beyond the trope of Americans not liking the idea of giving money to the poor.
How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
Is it entirely driven by the fact that local taxes decline on the outskirts? If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps? Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable, and owners have to build for 100 years in greenfields?