As simple as that sounds, some of these SFH neighborhoods cost as much or more to maintain than their owners bring in annually. You can’t just tax someone their entire income. There is no simple solution to this as the problem has been slowly brewing since the initial development of the suburbs 70 years ago. Raising SFH taxes is a good idea but that alone will not dig the suburbs out of the hole they dug.
Oh, I agree, and I should have been clearer: this is why the tax rates should have gone up in general, not just property taxes on SFHs.
Of course, what we actually did–at least in Ontario–was eliminate the fees developers pay. Sounds great, right? It would mean markets would make low-density housing unprofitable, right? Nope, because it didn’t come with any incentive to build higher-density housing at all, just a stick to beat municipalities with in hopes that they’d cut other services to make up the budget shortfall required to service these lands.
Again, this is a market failure, and we’re continuing to look for market solutions for it.
We stopped building cities the way they were built for centuries in favor of rural style living with city amenities while simultaneously promoting car centric design to service that development. We started building cities for cars and not for people while ignoring the overall costs of that. There is no one single or simple solution to such a complex problem. Removing or reducing housing as a market force would be a step in the right direction. Housing isn’t some luxury service someone can stop using if they can’t afford it.
As simple as that sounds, some of these SFH neighborhoods cost as much or more to maintain than their owners bring in annually. You can’t just tax someone their entire income. There is no simple solution to this as the problem has been slowly brewing since the initial development of the suburbs 70 years ago. Raising SFH taxes is a good idea but that alone will not dig the suburbs out of the hole they dug.
Oh, I agree, and I should have been clearer: this is why the tax rates should have gone up in general, not just property taxes on SFHs.
Of course, what we actually did–at least in Ontario–was eliminate the fees developers pay. Sounds great, right? It would mean markets would make low-density housing unprofitable, right? Nope, because it didn’t come with any incentive to build higher-density housing at all, just a stick to beat municipalities with in hopes that they’d cut other services to make up the budget shortfall required to service these lands.
Again, this is a market failure, and we’re continuing to look for market solutions for it.
We stopped building cities the way they were built for centuries in favor of rural style living with city amenities while simultaneously promoting car centric design to service that development. We started building cities for cars and not for people while ignoring the overall costs of that. There is no one single or simple solution to such a complex problem. Removing or reducing housing as a market force would be a step in the right direction. Housing isn’t some luxury service someone can stop using if they can’t afford it.