The other thing people often forget is that the 'land value' is also a measure of the city's well-being.
Those big spikes you see in the center? They cost very little for the city to maintain, and generate oodles of tax money.
Those big, wide areas out towards the fringes? They generate next to no tax income and cost a lot to maintain.
The urban subsidizes the sub-urban. The sub-urban lifestyle would be completely impossible without the ultra-dense urban centers. If planners and citizens don't keep that in mind, you can easily end up with an insolvent city budget that is bleeding from maintaining all the utilities and roads stretching out to the exterior.
Utilities and roads out into the suburban may be underpriced, but there’s a dark side to cities too. The suburbs and rural areas are often where people can afford homes.
I’ve had this hypotheses for a long time that the car is, at least economically, only incidentally about mobility. In reality it’s a tool for obtaining leverage in the real estate market.
Without sprawl urban landlords would have a captive audience and would extract all surplus. See: the law of rent.
I have a related hypothesis that the car drove the mid century middle class explosion in the US and some other countries, not by providing car jobs or any of the other conventional mechanisms but by allowing people to escape the law of rent.
Telework does this today for those who can use it, allowing people to leave high cost cities where good jobs are concentrated. The car did that until we reached the scaling limits of sprawl.
Also why I am a huge fan of Georgist taxation. Unfortunately we are moving in the opposite direction, taxing productivity and investment and wealth instead of taxing land and rent.
Most true suburbs aren't within the big city limits, so I'm not sure your point is well-founded. For example, in the DC area, the suburbs aren't even in the same state as the city and yet the suburbs seem to be thriving.
The Bronx is sub-urban? As someone else noted, Manhattan and The Bronx are totally different in ways that probably has little to do with population differently.
"Those big spikes you see in the center? They cost very little for the city to maintain, and generate oodles of tax money."
This is just false. The biggest cost in the suburbs is education. In the city cores, education costs exactly the same or more (per capita) but police services are the biggest expense. You are confusing the expenses of commercial property (where nobody lives) with residential property. But people still live in those urban cores and the expenses they generate are substantial.
But I'm not a fan of these particular maps because the use of 3d makes them harder to read. The isometric view and rotation away from north at the top break conventions that people use to orient themselves in the map and connect it to their lived experiences on the ground. I'm reasonably familiar with NYC geography, and I could not immediately recognize the landscape I was looking at in these maps. Ironically, it was only because I already knew the answer to the question that I could do so: "oh that huge green spike must be Manhattan".
I think a 2d choropleth map with a diverging color scale centered on the mean value would work better.
> "1. People have wildly incorrect intuitions about where land value is concentrated"
Fwiw this sort of land value gradient has been studied in economics for ages. See papers on monocentric city model, going back to Alonso (1964), Muth (1969), and Mills (1967). Or even further back, von Thünen was talking back in 1826 about how land values spike as you get closer to the marketplace.
This is mostly a result of zoning, isn't it? The high land value areas are the ones where you're less prohibited from building taller buildings. If the thing people actually want is indoor space then the piece of land where you can build a skyscraper is worth a lot more than the one which is limited to a single family home.
Someone should probably tell the homeowners with a high ratio of land to house who like to see their property values increase.
This is great, and it also feels like a great way to answer the question "Where should I buy a house if I want to be close to the center but not in the expensive area?".
> Let’s play a guessing game. How much more valuable is land in Manhattan than in the Bronx? Take a guess, then scroll down for the answer.
As someone who has never been in New York and doesn't live in the US, I knew beforehand that I would fail this test very hard, haha.
Is "land value" the right term here? The NYC example uses assessed property value, which I think is a function of both the land under a property and the building itself. In that case, these "taller means more valuable" graphics are at least partially reflecting the fact that a tall building is probably more valuable than the short one next to it?
Municipal costs per resident are effectively the inverse of these maps because the more spread out people are the more roads, pipes, etc are required to reach them.
How much the land is worth is only one of the parameters.
Notoriously, the maintenance cost for suburbs and their infrastructure is significantly lower than the tax they bring. Shouldn't that be a major point un tax decisions?
The writer mentioned that people's intuitions about the distribution of land and where it's most valuable are wildly off, what exactly are people's intuitions that run counter to the data presented? It seems fairly intuitive to me that property values, as you get closer to an urban center
Note that the site that generated these does not support any San Francisco Bay Area cities. I learned this only after being forced to "Sign in with Google".
88 comments
Those big spikes you see in the center? They cost very little for the city to maintain, and generate oodles of tax money.
Those big, wide areas out towards the fringes? They generate next to no tax income and cost a lot to maintain.
The urban subsidizes the sub-urban. The sub-urban lifestyle would be completely impossible without the ultra-dense urban centers. If planners and citizens don't keep that in mind, you can easily end up with an insolvent city budget that is bleeding from maintaining all the utilities and roads stretching out to the exterior.
I’ve had this hypotheses for a long time that the car is, at least economically, only incidentally about mobility. In reality it’s a tool for obtaining leverage in the real estate market.
Without sprawl urban landlords would have a captive audience and would extract all surplus. See: the law of rent.
I have a related hypothesis that the car drove the mid century middle class explosion in the US and some other countries, not by providing car jobs or any of the other conventional mechanisms but by allowing people to escape the law of rent.
Telework does this today for those who can use it, allowing people to leave high cost cities where good jobs are concentrated. The car did that until we reached the scaling limits of sprawl.
Also why I am a huge fan of Georgist taxation. Unfortunately we are moving in the opposite direction, taxing productivity and investment and wealth instead of taxing land and rent.
> Those big spikes you see in the center? They cost very little for the city to maintain, and generate oodles of tax money.
May I introduce you to the budget for the MTA that is larger than the GDP of several countries?
Cities are _expensive_. Especially dense cities like NYC.
> Those big, wide areas out towards the fringes? They generate next to no tax income and cost a lot to maintain.
And this is the biggest lie.
These suburbs? They generate most of the wealth in the US because the most affluent people live there. Buildings don't produce value, _people_ do.
This is just false. The biggest cost in the suburbs is education. In the city cores, education costs exactly the same or more (per capita) but police services are the biggest expense. You are confusing the expenses of commercial property (where nobody lives) with residential property. But people still live in those urban cores and the expenses they generate are substantial.
But I'm not a fan of these particular maps because the use of 3d makes them harder to read. The isometric view and rotation away from north at the top break conventions that people use to orient themselves in the map and connect it to their lived experiences on the ground. I'm reasonably familiar with NYC geography, and I could not immediately recognize the landscape I was looking at in these maps. Ironically, it was only because I already knew the answer to the question that I could do so: "oh that huge green spike must be Manhattan".
I think a 2d choropleth map with a diverging color scale centered on the mean value would work better.
> "1. People have wildly incorrect intuitions about where land value is concentrated"
Fwiw this sort of land value gradient has been studied in economics for ages. See papers on monocentric city model, going back to Alonso (1964), Muth (1969), and Mills (1967). Or even further back, von Thünen was talking back in 1826 about how land values spike as you get closer to the marketplace.
Someone should probably tell the homeowners with a high ratio of land to house who like to see their property values increase.
> Let’s play a guessing game. How much more valuable is land in Manhattan than in the Bronx? Take a guess, then scroll down for the answer.
As someone who has never been in New York and doesn't live in the US, I knew beforehand that I would fail this test very hard, haha.
Municipal costs per resident are effectively the inverse of these maps because the more spread out people are the more roads, pipes, etc are required to reach them.
> Show an elected official
What is the problem this visualization seeks to make obvious? Is it just neat to think about and make?
Notoriously, the maintenance cost for suburbs and their infrastructure is significantly lower than the tax they bring. Shouldn't that be a major point un tax decisions?