If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't have any parking for your cars, so you're forced onto public transportation more, which you might think stinks, so you now care more about voting for infrastructure improvement.

With regards to who should build infrastructure developer fees and property taxes are there to fund public construction of infrastructure; roads, schools, hospitals, etc. Why do you think requiring developers of individual buildings to build these is reasonable or even a workable solution?

Not because I have a particular interest in my house price, or want to interfere with other people, but because the plans are doing absolutely sweet FA to improve the infrastructure to cope with the additions. In general, I'd be happy for the extra apartments if they came with extra infrastructure. We'd all benefit from it.

In one case, they started planning to add hundreds of apartment blocks specifically targetting young families, and yet the way it was being done there would be zero money going towards local schools to deal with the extra influx. Usual construction requires money towards schools, but there are loopholes, and the developer was using them, and the city seemed happy to let them.

Nor were there any plans to deal with the additional cars being added. Even with good transit links to Seattle, the roads leading to the proposed site.

Nor were there plans to deal with increased sanitation or power demand on an already flaky power grid.

The list literally goes on and on. What we keep seeing around here is developers interested in doing the absolute bare minimum to build apartment blocks, and a city content to just let them overload an stretched resources.

But hey, at least it'll be idyllic. Good luck keeping your kids around after they graduate high school.

What it has meant so far is additional traffic congestion, increased commute times for everyone, more demand for government education and emergency services and more air pollution.

I'm not quite seeing how the government can be taking enough money in to make up for the reduction in service levels and overburdened infrastructure. Based on the broken roads and sidewalks around my neighborhood and LA generally, it doesn't seem like it is doing that.

Long term planning that is set in stone would solve this problem, but doubt it's politically feasible in many places.

This becomes really obvious when you look at where cities like Kansas City receive the most taxes vs where they spend the most: suburbs cost Kansas City huge amounts of money that the inner walkable city neighborhoods subsidize, despite the per-capita tax returns being lower in the more dense neighborhoods.

> We're talking about things like putting in street trees, painting crosswalks, patching sidewalks, and making changes to zoning regulations to provide more flexibility for neighborhood businesses, accessory apartments and parking.

His argument is that small civic investments in infrastructure in poor neighborhoods have a good chance of increasing the average property value of the whole neighborhood and thus increasing the tax base. Not all 'investments' will work, but they are relatively inexpensive so you can experiment and replicate the ones that do work across the whole city.

1. Considering that some of the apartment dwellers will become homeowners and their place will be taken by new apartment dwellers, how will the overcrowded schools support the influx?

2. Considering people will take public transit to go to work, they still would use cars to move around locally in the area on evenings and weekends. How will the current streets support the greater density of cars? e.g. Central Expressway used to be an expressway now it is a parking lot.

3. Overburdened police and firemen will be exposed to further strain.

4. Parking is a nightmare not just on residential streets but even at local establishments. Space needed for parking is used to build more housing.

Unless you live here and face these issues it's easy to downvote rather than come up with solutions that are at pace with the housing construction boom.

If I paid over a million dollars to buy a house in a school district that has a good score what would you suggest I do when suddenly the student to teacher ratio is so skewed that the education of my children suffers?

Yeah. It's not a property freedom issue, it's a cost ecosystem issue. As time goes on and life changes, owning property is going to have fluid costs, and tax assessments on people who come in to develop land is one way to defray those costs from disproportionately hitting people who have lived in an area for a long time. Frankly, those people would never really plan for that kind of thing to happen, so you're avoiding a lot of nasty repercussions by taxing the person upsetting the ecosystem, rather than the members of the ecosystem itself.

The thing is that in order to expand infrastructure, you need

- public pressure and demonstrated need for that expansion

- tax dollars to fund the expansion

and the quickest way to get both of those is... to build more homes and put people in them. I don't think there's any magic involved, just time and necessity.

The developers are (probably) paying off politicians to get permits, but there is no money (due to low taxes) for the necessary projects.

EDIT: roads are being built, but slowly.