Comment by tomrod
5 hours ago
The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.
That has some not-fun generational aspects.
(1) If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced. That in turn leads to lower home values since the school quality factor is reduced.
(2) If munis are unable to collect a sufficient tax base, they must reduce services. There will be hemming and hawing about things like cutting the pensions promised decades ago to attract competent service workers, but those are harder to reduce rather than not fixing the fire trucks, the water pipes, and other hidden taxes citizens pay for by reduced services. So your property values will also be reduced in the long term. Small towns are prime examples of this happening, when towns fail.
Trying to build a community out of one socioeconomic class works about as well as trying to redline. It leads to a less vibrant community, less adaptable community, and people are poorer in life and in their finances for it.
> If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced.
"Good schools" are mostly about avoiding bad kids and bad parents. Expensive homes (without Section 8 or equivalent in the neighbourhood) is a feature, as it keeps most of them away. It's not a good way of doing it -- it excludes lots of perfectly good kids and parents and it is really expensive. It's just the best way available to most people in the West.
While it may be common, it certainly isn't universal. I've worked in schools in poor communities that have pushed for good educators. In one of those schools, the push for better teachers was by the students themselves. There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities.
I'm not sure the opposite is true either, i.e. that expensive homes are a proxy for good schools. I've also worked in schools where the families were affluent, but the environment was toxic due to the behaviour of students and parents.
> There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities.
I went to school in a poor district. Pretty much all the students at my elementary school were poverty adjacent. Most of them were good kids, but that didnt really matter because the 10% who werent often ruined it for everyone else. This is a one bad apple spoils the bunch scenario, so the incentive is to make it as hard as possible for even 1 bad apple to be in the school. Of course there are plenty of bad apples among rich kids too, but as you can imagine the politics is different there.
No, good schools are also a function of $ spend per pupil, which is correlated with school quality and opportunities for students. A really interesting place to study this is San Antonio v Rodriguez (1973) where in my opinion they laid the groundwork for such inequality in the US. The argument being made in that case (which the Supreme Court ruled against 5 4) is that funding schools via property taxes leads to this prolonged entrenched inequality.
The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).
In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
Spend per pupil is a factor, but I have to agree with the parent poster, if you remove bad, disruptive, or underperforming kids from a school, and replaced them with disciplined, over-achieving students, the rest of the student body benefits. This is independent of school funding.
Private schools, even ones that receive less tuition per student than public schools of the same district prove this point because they can set a higher bar and more readily kick out disruptive students.
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Yea this is a not a good take imo. I went to school in a district where every school got the same funding per student, but the schools in the wealthy neighborhoods were way more successful than the ones in bad neighborhoods. You can point to fundraising efforts, but after looking at the balance sheet the students with a high percentage of poor students actually ended up with more funding per student because of federal grants to schools that had students under the poverty line. The only real difference was that parents were more involved at the rich school and all of them punished their kids when the teacher said they needed discipline. In this district at least all the schools had the baseline level of funding they needed and past that more money didnt seem to make a huge difference.
I think the effect is twofold - spend/pupil tends to benefit poorer students more (diminishing returns), so a good school in a poor neighborhood needs more $$ to achieve equivalent outcomes. And then the lower property tax revenue in the poorer neighborhood makes it harder to sustain that higher spend
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Even "bad" schools use this strategy to move some of the "good" kids into special programs, etc. to raise their average scores. Which makes the remaining classes even worse. It's an eternal struggle between raising the floor vs raising the ceiling
It's also a feedback loop, once you're known for "good schools" then the homes become more expensive. If you don't care about moving then it's often cheaper to buy a home to send your kid to a good public school vs. sending them to private school.
Imagine a town with a number of wealthy homeowners, most of them old enough that their kids have grown up. Their municipality is already flush with cash. They already only need few schools for their kids and grandkids. They just want to pressure the less wealthy undesirables away, and use tax (dis)incentives to do that.
Are pensions still an effective way to attract workers? I feel like there’ve been enough cases where workers get screwed out of them, that this isn’t much of an incentive. Similar to offering engineers equity in a startup.
Anything past the paycheck is a gamble.
They were for a substantial portion of time, such that today's pension obligations remain relevant.
In California, most cities are behind on funding pensions. There is a de facto assumption/delusion that there will be some large scale bailout at some point.
>The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.
This is likely very intentional in some of these places.
Growing up in suburban TX decades ago, people FREAKED out at talk of potential apartment building development nearby. The duplexes a mile away were 'bad enough.'
Why did they freak out? What was their threat model, so to say? (I can imagine several lines of reasoning, but as a hardcore urbanite, can miss the mark entirely.)
Also grew up in suburban Texas, saw similar freak outs, and can tell you it's thinly veiled racism and distaste towards being forced to be around people who are part of perceived lower socioeconomic classes.
The threat model is "been indoctrinated by years of propaganda to be fearful of a vague nebulous threat of being around people who don't look and act like me"
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Falling home prices, increased crime, decreased social status, long term political shift resulting in suboptimal and even counter-interest local policy.
That really depends on the state. Some states have different public school district funding mechanisms that don't depend as much on local property tax collections.
Fire trucks are far more expensive to acquire and maintain than necessary due to monopolistic actions by manufacturers, plus local governments buying fancier apparatus than they really need. There's a lot of room to trim those particular expenses.
https://www.iaff.org/news/fire-apparatus-crisis-sparks-inves...
> Fire trucks are far more expensive to acquire and maintain than necessary due to monopolistic actions by manufacturers, plus local governments buying fancier apparatus than they really need. There's a lot of room to trim those particular expenses.
The real problem with fire equipment is that it will sit there in an emergency unless you have the staff on hand to operate it. Small, remote, or cheap towns get to burn while they wait for volunteer #2 to make it to the station.
I appreciate this knowledge tidbit. Firetrucks aren't the only relevant example, and perhaps it is less fit to purpose than I assessed originally.
theres also (3) those single family home neighborhoods require much more government maintained infrastructure for water and roads