Quote:
Originally Posted by transistor
It still doesn't adress the issue that single family homes will continue to take more tax dollars than they bring in. While the initial infrastructure may be built using special purpose tax districts, these homes will still end up draining the budget in the long term.
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That is true of residential development everywhere, in every city. Unless you want the strategy of only allowing childless wealthy people, and you still need their retail spending to break even. But every city can't do that. If you think you're criticizing sprawl, you're not. What you're criticizing is our taxing structure, which intentionally relies heavily on taxing commercial development as a subsidy to residential development (of all shapes and sizes). I don't disagree that creates some perverse incentives, but that's an entirely different discussion.
I'm not sure you can become a great city. If we were just looking at fifty Stapletons, NOBODY would be saying Denver was great. The stuff that makes Denver great was built and baked in long before any of us was born. And is extremely difficult to replicate today. There are some cities doing a decent enough job of making new development trend toward the great, without old bones to support it. But very, very few. Denver isn't doing new in a great way, that's for sure. 2020 Lawrence and the sea of EIFS ocean liners? So very Vladivostok. 35 mph light rail speed limits? What exactly makes us great that wasn't built by God or cowboys?
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