This american system of paying for city services via property taxes instead of consumption or equal share is very strange when looking from abroad. If the city needs policemen, firefighters and teachers, as the article describes, then the city should split the bill to the number of citizens and not to how much they can rip off them. The property is not a city investment, so the city does not deserve any revenue from it. If the city did some investment, that is a cost to reimburse, of course, but not milking the property.
If 8 people live in a 1500 ft^2 house and 1 person lives in a 10,000 ft^2 mansion, is the city really providing 8x the value to the former for police and fire protection?
I heard that in real estate it is location, location and location. In most cases a bad neighborhood requires more police force and still has a worse value, so the correlation of services provided versus tax raised is inverse. Still does not make sense.
It's not the cloud that'll save theses 8, there's no on demand scaling for the fire department. On both situation, there'll be enough staff there to save at least 8 peoples, thus incurring the same cost. It's probably much quicker too to secure a 1500 ft house than a 10 000 one. I remember once we got a fire alarm at my job once and it took quite a bit of time for them to make sure everything was alright.
It is incredibly naive to think any major retail center exists without substantial investment by local and state governments. In many places Walmart made money just building their supercenters in many dying towns across the country.
