Governments, Cities, and Suburbs
I was going to chime in on Bryan Caplan's post on whether government policies have encouraged or discouraged more suburbanization when I noticed a commenter had already stated all of my counterpoints. Two additional obvious points regarding federal policies are the home mortgage tax deduction (encourages more house consumption) and the Interstate Highway System (encourages more driving and decentralization).
One thing missing that I'd like to see is the geographic distribution of government funding. My assumption is that cities get the lion's share of research grants (via universities) and transportation dollars (via public transit authorities), but remember that they also represent the lion's share of population, jobs, and economic activity. Can anyone point me to a fair, reasoned exposition of where the money goes, to see if cities are underfunded or overfunded compared to suburbs?
Comments
I'd also like to see multiple maps of all the school districts in the Philadelphia MSA, with different color codings for each district, showing things like:
- Amount of local tax money spent per enrolled student
- Amount of state tax money spent per enrolled student
- Amount of federal tax money spent per enrolled student
- Percent of all school-age children enrolled in district schools
Lower Merion has its 2009-2010 budget available online, so the first three numbers are pretty easy to calculate. (The answer for the local tax question: about $24,000. The amounts from state and federal taxes are much smaller.) I don't know the total number of K-12 age kids in LM, so I can't answer the fourth question.
Compulsory K-12 schooling, plus public school districts funded mainly by local property taxes, is a social disaster.
But you didn't write a post about education political economy, so I'll shut up for now. :-)
FHA finance policy plays a greater role than we give credit. Here, detached housing is seen as less "risky" to finance than a condominium and attached product, so mortgage lending favors single-family. Just that extra effort to get condominium projects FHA-approved discourages developers to provide that, even in the face of mounting demand for such urban choices. The mortgage lending industry is geared to think this way. A lot of this is cultural (you don't have this way of thinking about condos in Britain, for example). But a subdivision is nothing more than a spread out condo building in terms of risk...Look at all the half-built, foreclosure hemorrhaging subdivisions now littering the landscape. The cultural (and spiritual?) obstacles we are facing are great indeed...
On a related note, one of my bosses, who is very left-leaning, wondered aloud the other day if you did a similar exercise by Democrat vs. Republican parts of the country, say by party registration by county. D's stereotypically seek more income redistribution than R's, and yet my boss ventured a guess that there's currently probably a net positive distribution from D counties to R counties, when you factor in taxes paid and services rendered.