Comment by Arainach
8 days ago
Property taxes basically never pay for privately owned things, be that landscaping in common spaces, maintenance of private neighborhood roads, etc.
8 days ago
Property taxes basically never pay for privately owned things, be that landscaping in common spaces, maintenance of private neighborhood roads, etc.
The alternative is public space and public roads.
These don't work because suburbs are a ponzi scheme that is collapsing.
People are grudgingly willing to pay to put in a brand new sewer once. No one wants to fund maintenance or pay millions to replace it in 60 years and cities are literally going bankrupt because the population density isn't enough to maintain the infrastructure.
Cities realized this decades ago which is why many are reluctant to add more unsustainable public roads/sewers/etc. and insist new development owns and funds them privately....which tends to require a HOA to fund maintenance from communal contributions/reserves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/benjamin-h...
My back yard neighbors live on a private street with an HOA. When the city water pressure went high for a brief period of time, they were one of the few places to have water lines burst. Their private supply lines were not of the same rating as the city lines that supply similar neighborhoods. Since this was private, this HOA was on the hook for ripping up the street, repairing water lines, and fixing their street. Being a customer that doesn’t normally need such services, the fix was done a couple months after the water lines break. They had a week or so with no water and many weeks of water being fed to their homes via hoses connecting a fire hydrant and the spigots they would normally use to get water outside.
They were so lucky this happened in the summer. In the winter, the hoses would have frozen solid.
These folks were very sad the city’s water utility couldn’t do the work. They fix water main breaks within a couple days, usually the same day.