[smaryjerry]

I would take it a step further and say that it isn’t the community services that has value at all. It is the production of the community that has value. Detroit stopped producing things so it could not trade/earn money for all those public benefits. You could raise property taxes as much as you want but if people can’t pay then because they haven’t earned money the city will just go bankrupt, like the Detroit did. A community doesn’t have to produce physical goods, it can produce services for those that do produce physical goods, or digital services. But when the community can’t produce even enough to cover your food costs, community services don’t matter. To increase value in an area there must be a surplus somewhere. San Francisco area is a perfect example of the opposite. The myriad of tech companies are able to scale on a massive level because software scaling has practically zero cost and end up with a surplus.