[darksaints]

Nobody needs, or can even afford for that matter, infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. That's why that process never works. It is nothing more than a giant concern troll: you get to look like the smart one who insists on planning ahead for more development, knowing full well that nobody will seriously propose adding more infrastructure for people that don't exist yet.

Luckily, you can build infrastructure as it's needed. If traffic gets bad because 100k people moved in and it's straining the transit system, you've got an additional 100k people who will help pay for it. We've been doing it this way for thousands of years, so it's pretty hard to argue that it doesn't work.

[Retric]

It's a question of collecting money not building infrastructure.

When 100k people move in and you need a new water treatment plant. Those 100k people should pay for the water treatment plant not everyone that lives in the area who also paid for the last water treatment plant.

Further, you need to start building infrastructure now, not in 20 years when the new people have paid enough in taxes to pay for it. It's not like you need a new police station and a new school from a single new home but you do need them after X new homes.

Debt seems like the obvious solution to time shifting infrastructure, but that increases costs, adds risks, and still forces everyone to pay for new infrastructure. When a tiny home is worth 3x what would be somewhere else that value is from the existing infrastructure not the cost of building the house so adding a tax to capture that surplus is completely reasonable.

[darksaints]

That's exactly the point, nobody is gonna pay to build infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Especially if they don't want those people to exist. That's what's so ridiculously obvious about the concern troll. When a developer wants to build housing, it's always "no, we don't have the infrastructure to support it", yet a few days later when new infrastructure gets proposed, it's "we can't afford that!". Well shit, wouldn't it be nice if there were more people in the city that could help share that cost? But you blocked them out.

Requiring infrastructure to be built beforehand is nothing more than a way for incumbents to win in their quest to never let anything new get built.

[Retric]

In my new system local government can't say no. Making that objection meaningless.

They simply collect money from new people to pay for it, because it's very much needed.

[saosebastiao]

Maybe theoretically that works. But it's still not fair in the way that you think it is.

100k people move in and several things happen: you need a new sewage treatment plant, new some more transit capacity, new schools, etc. You are proposing that the new people pay for this expansion. But you are neglecting the ways in which you benefit.

By building more schools, each school serves a geographically smaller area, meaning school buses drive a lot less. You can also have higher student-to-administrative ratios (even if student to teacher ratios stay the same). By having more transit riders, your transit system might need additional capacity, but it will be using that transit capacity much more efficiently, because transit system is a step-fixed cost business, and more riders means more profitability (or less subsidy). You aren't getting any benefits to scale on the sewage treatment plant, but you will get benefits on the water provision: smaller and higher density housing uses far less water per person than single family homes with yards, etc.

So yeah, if new people move in, you're gonna need a new sewage treatment plant. If you charge the new residents for the new sewage treatment plant, are you gonna credit them for the improved efficiency of the transit system, school system, and water system? Or are you gonna try to keep those benefits to yourself?

Somehow I think its all just a bit easier to treat every person as the same whether they're new to the area or not.

[Retric]

That's an agreement around what the tax should be not that it should not exist.

[saosebastiao]

Complexity with undefined or difficult to determine benefits is definitely a case against itself.

If you want to charge a newcomer more because the city had to build a sewer treatment plant to accommodate him, you should at least credit him back the ways in which he also made the city more efficient, such as by taking public transit or reducing school costs. And if you are willing to take on the burden of an extensive economic analysis of the marginal cost and benefit of every new housing unit, by all means go ahead. For most of us, a single property tax rate works fine.