Wow. Is Bloomberg actually a credible business publication?
Barring a serious housing surplus, or similar major economic problems, there are ~no upsides for political leaders who actually work to attract more residents to an area. (Attracting more & higher bidders, for the limited housing stock, is a different story.)
Vs. "attracting new business"? That attracts plenty of favorable press, bragging rights, etc. And for local governments - which live on property taxes and have to fund the schools & local services - every dollar worth of business properties is a money farm, and every dollar worth of residential housing is a money pit.
That depends. Factory work is often attracted to a dieing town in the middle of nowhere they can scoup up cheap labor that is just skilled enough. You can only get your factory so large doing this though, but there are towns of 5-10k people that fit the bill just fine for manufacturing cheap in the US.
Yes, I’m just saying that I don’t see how that is a generalizable mode outside of that narrow circumstance.
There may be a large number of small towns, but most people and most economic activity happens in larger urban areas, and that’s what is germane to the article’s argument.
> there are ~no upsides for political leaders who actually work to attract more residents to an area.
The article is about attracting more wealthy residents to an area. It doesn't say it that directly, but it does directly reference the new work-from-home upper-middle-class, and how they can live anywhere now.
I don't think the indirectness is being sneaky, it's more trying to be polite.
> If Amazon stiffs Northern Virginia, future politicians elsewhere may be less eager to promise tax breaks and infrastructure investments, not to mention spend their reputational capital. Politically speaking, it will be harder for urban and suburban leaders to rise to the top by attracting a new major corporate tenants. “Pro-business” local governments may be less common in the years to come.
If anything, the politicians who blocked Amazon from coming to Queens actually got more bragging rights.
This seems like a false dichotomy. Politicians try to attract new businesses because those businesses, if nothing else, attract these things called employees. The advantage of the approach is that you can try to attract more of the kinds of residents you want instead of just "anybody". Most places have plenty of "anybody" already.
What else does better as a medium of attraction for worthwhile people? Walkability? Save that for the Europeans who pretend like boasting Paris and (formerly) London qualifies them to talk about managing large cities. Civil services? I'm salaried and I've got a car, the only reason I'd use most common civil services is either because my ride is in the shop or I was literally stabbed and needed the ER. Otherwise you couldn't /pay/ me to deal with the kinds of people who take the bus. Meanwhile parks and libraries are for the homeless and parents in denial about the times.
> and every dollar worth of residential housing is a money pit.
This can't possibly be true in any of the municipalities I've ever lived in. Property taxes are insane, like fancy private school tuition insane and it's definitely not going into the roads. Actually lets break it down:
Power, water, and sewer are paid for by their consumption. My local utilities actually have the problem that they _make_ too much money.
Roads are paid for by fuel/registration taxes/insane vehicle sales tax.
Schools are paid by property tax, but every public school in every jurisdiction I've ever lived in has been inferior to private while costing me almost as much via property tax.
Then there's Fire and Police, but those costs should be minimal and distributed over the huge number of residents.
Then there's the mail, oh wait that's again funded by usage.
Zoning and code compliance? Again, absolutely minimal costs there. Permits cost $... so again funded by usage!
Central planning for development? _What_ planning? lol.
I know where this is coming from, poorly researched and often-dishonest narrative from "not just bikes" and their ilk. In reality residential communities are huge tax farms. Every watt of power, gallon of water, etc is *paid for* (including a healthy markup). The damn roads don't cost $15k/year.
Second, you're seriously underestimating the cost of roads. As https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193... pointed out, the bit of road your car is parked on usually costs more than the car. Now walk around your neighborhood and look at how much road there is. ALL of it costs that much. Most of us don't think about it, but it has to be paid for somehow. And it really isn't cheap.
>First, commercial property taxes in California are generally higher than residential.
Sure, but businesses making _more_ for an area doesn't mean residential areas aren't profitable.
>the bit of road your car is parked on usually costs more than the car.
Sensational nonsense. ~100sq ft of black tar asphalt, barring some kind of bananna republic corruption scheme, could never cost _more_ than an average automobile. Think about how absurd that statement is, and reevaluate why your internal filters allowed that statement through.
>Now walk around your neighborhood and look at how much road there is. ALL of it costs that much. Most of us don't think about it, but it has to be paid for somehow. And it really isn't cheap.
The premise is absurd, so the conclusion from it is invalid.
> Schools are paid by property tax, but every public school in every jurisdiction I've ever lived in has been inferior to private while costing me almost as much via property tax.
Former educator: This mostly comes down to being able to select for students from house holds that have large disposable income and care enough about their child's education to send them to a private school.
This usually gets you a lot of benefits:
1. Less disruptive kids (get too disruptive and they kick you out)
2. More engaged kids
3. Parents with leisure time to volunteer
4. Easier fundraising (private school in my area rakes in ~$1ml/yr in fundraising, vs $500k for the public school).
I really want to re-iterate how powerful the effect of being able to kick people out of the school is. Like in most things 20% of the families generate 80% of disruptions in public schools and private schools basically get to elide that by not being a public service.
Seems like this could be improved by mandating no more than 2x disparity between spending on kids in the same grade level. Disruptors can be kicked into the gladiator camps or emancipated if they think they're so independent on what they can do.
Actual measurement for most disruptions is really hard because it usually manifests in things like "Timmy was really distracting in class during the Math lesson". Quantifying that is difficult.
Capping spending ratios would also be horrific for the US specifically because we implement many of our social welfare programs for kids through the schools: school lunches, speech therapy, etc. (incidentally, this overinflates our spending on students relative to peer nations). You'd be relegating poor kids to even worse outcomes than they already face which would have some seriously negative downstream effects once they become adults.
My thought process is the rich kids are already going to private school, where by your own admission various factors present advantages to them.
The poorer left competing at the public schools all have their various challenges and struggles. IMO the best we can do for them is afford them equality of OPPORTUNITY for use of numerical amount of public funds. Johnny gets 10k Billy gets 10k, maybe 20k at most. There's no guarantee you'll get equality of outcome, but at least you got equal shot at the public funds and one poor kid doesn't lose out a huge amount so the other kid gets 5x the money. At some point sure more money is almost always better than less, but we have to remember that comes at the cost of other poor kids.
As for lunches... I don't know why those aren't just given to all kids in public school by default. That would make it equal and satisfy the criteria.
>Quantifying that is difficult
This sounds accurate but I have to point out you've expressed the private schools are finding effective ways to identify disruptors.
Last I heard, average American per-student public school spending was ~$10K per pupil per year. Do free school lunches and a few hours per week with a speech therapist (or whatever a kid needs) actually add $10K to the annual cost of a pupil?
(And if "yes", could the problem mostly be fixed by (say) changing "2x" to "3x"?)
IIR, the biggest barrier to that idea is the kids with special needs, and either the ADA or similar laws. And at least in some states, "Chris has really special medical needs" can be a license to bleed the school district to financial ruin.
To answer your opening question: no, Bloomberg has not been a credible business publication for some time. They’re one of the legacy publications that used their name recognition and reputation as a springboard to essentially a paid op-Ed publication - authors pay them to have their opinion pieces published. See also: Newsweek.
Bloomberg is actually a good publication - especially their print edition. But most people's exposure only comes from the op-eds - people who only read the op-eds are not reading the boring but competent reporting on the pages in between.
Barring a serious housing surplus, or similar major economic problems, there are ~no upsides for political leaders who actually work to attract more residents to an area. (Attracting more & higher bidders, for the limited housing stock, is a different story.)
Vs. "attracting new business"? That attracts plenty of favorable press, bragging rights, etc. And for local governments - which live on property taxes and have to fund the schools & local services - every dollar worth of business properties is a money farm, and every dollar worth of residential housing is a money pit.