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United Taxpayers |
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Test Your Tax Knowledge about Growing Cities*
1. The bigger cities get the lower taxes are. T or F?
2. The faster cities grow, the lower local taxes are. Tor F?
3. Police protection costs(per capita) are less in big cities. T or F?
4. Crime rates are higher in big cities. T or F?
5. The more cities grow, the more people are unemployed. T or F?
6. Bigger cities tend to have lower costs of living and housing? T or F?
7. Growth creates costs, but new tax revenue more than offset the added expenses? T or F?
8. More business subsidies mean greater prosperity for local residents. T or F?
9. Environmental regulation is bad for the economy? T or F?
10. Developed land usually produces more net revenues for the city (tax revenues minus cost of public services) than undeveloped land? T or F?
Answers:1)F; 2)F; 3)F; 4)F; 5)T; 6)F; 7)F; 8)F; 9)F; 10)F
*Eben Fodor; "Better Not Bigger - How to Take Control of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community" |
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G. Thomas Walters, Chair
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Discovering the Real Costs of Growth
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Better Not Bigger* Book Review
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Better not Bigger
Book Review by Carolyn Chase
In the new book "Better NOT Bigger: how to take control of urban growth and improve your community," author and city planner Eben Fodor tackles "The Twelve Big Myths of Growth." His main focus is in untangling the web around paradoxes of jobs, housing, the economy and environmental protection.
He sums up our growth spiral conundrum as: "increasing development leads to increasing population creates a demand for public services and infrastructure that is likely to offset the tax revenue gains."
Fodor cites study after study demonstrating how growth raises taxes. There are dozens of these studies that all come to the same conclusion. New growth reaches into the pockets of established residents to finance additional infrastructure and services - or the infrastructure or services are allowed to degrade.
Commercial and industrial developments sometimes pay more in taxes than they require in services, but the traffic and pollution they generate reduces nearby property values. New employees don't want to live near the plant, so they commute, adding both to the pollution, traffic and to the tax burden in other jurisdictions.
Fodor quotes Oregon environmentalist Andy Kerr, who calls urban growth, "a pyramid scheme in which a relatively few make a killing, some others make a living, but most [of us] pay for it." In her column "The Global Citizen," scientist Donella Meadows points out: "As long as there is a killing to be made, no tepid "smart-growth" measures are going to stop sprawl. We will go on having strips and malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions and traffic jams and rising taxes as long as someone makes money from them."
Fodor identifies the driving force behind the status quo as the "urban growth machine." "The benefits flow to a few while the costs (congestion, decreased quality of life, higher taxes) are spread among the many." Growth does benefit some people: landowners, real estate developers, mortgage bankers, realtors, construction companies and contractors and building suppliers - to name a few. While these players may disagree on some issues, they all have a common economic interest in promoting local growth, offloading costs, and working the political system to maintain their benefits.
Meadows further observes: "We can't blame those who make the money. They're playing the game according to the rules, which reward whomever is clever enough to put any cost of doing business onto someone else. They get the profits, we build the roads. They hire the workers (paying as little as they can get away with, because the market requires them to cut costs), we sit in traffic jams and breathe the exhaust. They get jobs building the subdivision, we lose open lands, clean water, and wildlife. Then we subsidize them with our taxes. That, the tax subsidy, is not the market, it's local politics.
Collectively we set out pots of subsidized honey at which they dip. We can't expect them not to dip; we can only expect them to howl if the subsidy is taken away."
Fodor identifies the growth subsidies that are ultimately borne by taxpayers and suggests growth-neutral policies "to get local government out of the business of stimulating growth" and to establish policies for development to pay its own way." He also reports on a survey of growth measures in all of California's 443 cities and counties which showed that "cities that enacted growth controls also enacted more affordable housing incentives than cities without growth controls" and that these cities also showed "no racial or income class pattern in the enactment of the many growth controls. . . .A good growth policy should result in broadly distributed, long-term benefits to the community."
Available from New Society Publishers, Better NOT Bigger is an important primer explaining and exploding the myths of our more is better political culture and provides basic tools for those seeking to deal fairly and - yes, smartly - with growth.
*Eben Fodor; "Better Not Bigger - How to Take Control of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community"
Read More
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| The Twelve Big Myths of Growth |
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"The issue of urban growth is permeated with stereotyping, platitudes, cliches, rhetoric, questionable assumptions, and outright myths."
Read More |
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