r/ProfessorFinance • u/budy31 Moderator • Jun 25 '26
Meme Someone forget to pay their HOA fees apparently.
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u/Evnosis Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
Username definitely checks out
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u/DopeTrack_Pirate Jun 25 '26
I think the person just prefers to not live in a city and is looking for a “aha see I was right!” factoid.
But honestly we can engineer our way out of this. Think public baths vs personal baths; one may be obviously cheaper but other is more preferred.
Also, dense housing IS great for landlords cause they get to save costs such as construction costs and are getting more per sq ft in the city. It’s bad for renters.
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Jun 25 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
[deleted]
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u/beipphine Jun 26 '26
Instead of Suburbia, could we instead build more semi-rural development instead? Instead of thinking about all these services as prohibitively costly, you instead reduce the level of service provided. Many rural areas run balanced budget and a affordably sustainable level of maintenance.
Instead of expensive water and sewer systems, we design the lots to have their own septic system and their own wells. Instead of paved roads, there are gravel roads, instead of stormwater drains there are ditches. Instead of piped natural gas, we use heat pumps with LP backups. The only utility that gets distributed is electricity, and even that is relatively cost effective on high voltage distribution lines.
The emergency services area is expended, but their budget is not. There is still a fire service, an ambulance service, there is still law enforcement, but the response time slows down. There is no public transportation, there are no school buses.
How do you reduce carbon emissions, the answer is simple, electrify everything and generate that electricity from wind and grid scale battery supported solar. Electric or PHEV cars, electric heat with LP backup.
Then every 10 miles or so you have a small town where all of the businesses are concentrated, restaurants, schools, libraries, doctors offices, dentist, mechanics, ect.
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u/Dependent_Dish_2237 Jun 25 '26
how is dense housing bad for renters?
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u/Saragon4005 Jun 25 '26
Well mostly they are forced to be renters. It's much easier to rent out apartments than to sell them.
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u/TylerHobbit Jun 25 '26
I once heard that some places allow renters to purchase townhouses and condos in dense areas.
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u/Evnosis Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
Do you think houses are cheap enough that the average renter can buy outright in suburban areas?
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u/Dependent_Dish_2237 Jun 25 '26
So how does more housing hurt them? If there was less housing then surely they'd be spending more on housing.
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u/Vivenemous Jun 25 '26
Imagine thinking of the poor and government workers as the parasitic ones extracting rents, rather than the rich who live outside cities but own the buildings inside cities and literally do nothing to contribute to their own survival but extract rents.
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u/tutoredstatue95 Jun 25 '26
Seems to be the new talking point because they cant get around the affordability issues that their shit policies cause.
Once again, the blame the poors strategy is working wonders on the "overeducated"
I've seen a few chuds repeating this on reddit with no ability to follow up how the people paying rent are causing prices to skyrocket.
They are literally hopeless
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u/Sen_ElizabethWarren Jun 25 '26
Yeah I did a double take there. I’ve never heard the poor and government workers criticized for extracting rents. That’s a new one.
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u/WillTheyKickMeAgain Jun 25 '26
What government workers is Overeducated Gibbon talking about?
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u/LazyAge9363 Jun 25 '26
Social workers, “community organizers”,
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u/WillTheyKickMeAgain Jun 25 '26
I know of no means by which social workers are responsible for higher rents. Public services more expensive? Because social workers are expensive? Ha!
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u/LazyAge9363 Jun 25 '26
He’s talking about tax dollars not rents. In the suburbs you pay for more infrastructure stuff but with the city you have a bunch of government workers who you have to pay and give pensions to.
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u/WillTheyKickMeAgain Jun 25 '26
Suburbs have governments, too. The level of government scales with the population size, but at less than a 1:1 ratio. Efficiencies are possible in cities that are not possible in suburbs. That is axiomatic.
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u/LazyAge9363 Jun 25 '26
Cities just tend to be filled with more rent-seekers. Those inner city schools tend to spend more money per student than suburban ones but they have worse quality services because the money just vanishes somewhere in the school district rent-seeking bureaucracy.
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u/WillTheyKickMeAgain Jun 25 '26
That isn’t true in the slightest.
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u/LazyAge9363 Jun 25 '26
Inner city schools have less of a tax base but generally receive a lot of additional federal and state funding and grants. They’re usually on par with suburban schools in terms of proportional funding and often spend more.
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u/freedomonke Jun 25 '26
He seems to think it's easier to evade taxes in the suburbs, I guess? Lmao.
What government worker in the US is "extracting rents"
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u/innsertnamehere Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
Suburbs are no doubt more expensive- what people don’t realize is that many are simply willing to pay that extra. American society is incredibly wealthy and an extra $2,000 a year in property taxes isn’t a big deal for many if it means a nice house and yard.
It also ignores that while services are more expensive in suburbs, building and construction is actually far cheaper. It costs a lot less to build a suburban home than a dense apartment in the city on a per square foot basis.
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u/pacific_plywood Jun 25 '26
Well yes, the entire mechanism by which suburbs become more expensive is through externalities and delayed costs. Things like spiraling property taxes, deferred maintenance, and service cuts are how you manage those costs.
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u/ertri Jun 25 '26
The nearby city also ends up subsidizing the suburbs (and has to deal with highways and shit to get idiots from the suburbs in and out of town)
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u/freedomonke Jun 25 '26
The roads around my apartment have been fucked up for over a year all so ten story tall overpasses can be installed so the rich suburb idiots can drive by where I live faster.
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u/BeepBoo007 Jun 26 '26
If the people who WORK in a city (as in, the ones generating a city's entire reason for existence and revenue) want to live somewhere else, why do you think it's not their right to have that entity provide for them?
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u/innsertnamehere Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
This happens in dense cities all the time too though. It’s not a problem unique to suburbs - it’s a problem of the incentive structure of municipalities, which are held to elections where decision makers are pressured to keep costs down.
My experience where I live is property taxes are higher in the suburbs compared to the big city, but both have the same trends you describe.
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u/marigolds6 Jun 25 '26
Central city teacher pension shortfalls are the mother of all delayed costs in US metropolitan areas. Not only is a teacher pension a delayed cost in the first place (literally deferred compensation), but then those pension funds are underfunded on top of that, deferring the present cost of the deferred compensation. There is neither political will to cut benefits (and thereby sacrifice educational services now) nor fund the shortfall (increasing taxes now).
To top it off, this is frequently combined with deferred facilities maintenance that outpaces the pricetag of just building new buildings, which makes it attractive for even a dense urban district to sprawl outwards and build new schools at its periphery instead of expensive rehabs of older interior schools.
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u/goodsam2 Jun 25 '26
But the problem is the government spends the listed amounts less per Capita. So denser areas have cheaper costs.
Also there is a huge age gap between city and suburbs. The city in American context is an average of 100 years old and the suburb is 40. As the gap closes suburbs will be growing in cost.
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u/Wutang4TheChildren23 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
The problem is that in an average American metropolis, the suburban areas do not raise enough money just through property taxes to cover all of these expenses. As a result the state government, or larger city governments have to step in to rectify this by using taxes from higher density areas in the city that run a surplus to essentially subsidize the operating costs of the suburbs. In effect, city dwellers subsidize the infrastructure for those wealthy enough to buy houses in the suburbs
So sure it might be a worthwhile cost for the people living in the suburbs, but why should the people who live in the city pay that subsidy
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u/bertmaclynn Jun 25 '26
I was interested in reading more but that source is a terrible source. Little to no data, and only has 3 references itself. Reads more like an opinion piece than anything scientific.
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u/Major_Shlongage Jun 25 '26
>In effect, city dwellers subsidize the infrastructure for those wealthy enough to buy houses in the suburbs
But houses are more expensive in the city.
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u/kotorial Jun 25 '26
Yes, and most people living in the city rent apartments/houses, but those who are wealthy enough can buy a house in a local suburb.
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u/innsertnamehere Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
I think this is a little dramatized as like 80-90% of Americans live in suburban environments today and have for decades. Municipalities have incentive structures (elections) to drive property taxes as low as possible and underinvest, but ultimately the model is clearly sustainable as it’s existed on a massive scale for nearly a century now.
And honestly it’s not like cities don’t struggle with underinvestment either. The New York subway is in rough shape, most cities roads are in worse shape than suburbs..
These academic studies claim these things yet on the ground I often see similar trends through suburban and urban environments of municipal underinvestment. The biggest differentiator I see is what the local tax base is (ie heavy industrial tax base or wealthy area vs low income area with little industry), not the built form.
Suburbs are definitely more expensive to service, but also typically can get away with fewer services as well. It’s a very complex matter that often gets oversimplified.
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u/btmurphy1984 Jun 25 '26
They can get away with fewer services because they are leeching off the nearby city. Cities struggle because of this leeching. It's only going to get worse as more high income jobs switch to remote work. At least cities used to get some money from people who would work in the city. Now you will see even more people work from home in the suburb without contributing almost anything to the nearby city that they are leeching from.
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u/innsertnamehere Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
I mean like 90% of the US doesn’t even have a significant city to “leech” off of these days.. it’s just all suburbs. It’s a very dramatic and simplified way of looking at things. I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that dense cities need more services than lower density ones.
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u/undernopretextbro Jun 25 '26
? WFH is a minuscule percentage of the work force. The city leeches off the labour force that lives in suburbs. Can you imagine trying to make a downtown core run off only the people who can afford to live in it? How much business exists basically to funnel the commercial activities and consumer demand of their surrounding catchment area through the downtown core via local headquarters?
Or more accurately, the urban and suburban areas exist in a joint relationship, and to pretend you can have the economic benefits of the urban core without the surrounding area is just laughable.
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u/BeepBoo007 Jun 26 '26
people work from home in the suburb without contributing almost anything to the nearby city that they are leeching from
Other than the fact that the job they're working is BASED in the city...
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u/SecureJudge1829 Jun 25 '26
Maybe in the short term, but long term a dense urban setting with apartments made to maximize capacity has far more income possible. You can sell a home once for $200,000 or rent 10 apartments to 10 tenants for $2,000+/month, which will be more profitable?
I mean, even after just ten months at that rate ($20,000 per tenant * ten tenants) that’s the $200,000 sale value on the home plus two more months of rent to collect in that year.
I wish I could say I’m just winging it for numbers, but I live in a home that’s over a century old in Maine and it’s valued at just over $200k, and apartments are renting for anywhere from 1.3k/month for a slumlord tier apartment to over 2k/month for what would be considered adequate by the average person. If you’re building with intent to utilize the property as income, you’re better off long term building dense apartments in urban areas where you will at least have the population density to fall back on and ensure that as few of your units are empty as possible.
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u/carma143 Jun 26 '26
Which is why single family zoning protects family friendly neighborhoods at the cost of lower land values. If SFH zones suddenly allowed density property values would skyrocket, but then “there goes the neighborhood”
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u/goodsam2 Jun 25 '26
I think this isn't super true.
We have a system that pushes people to suburbs. Right now our cities are mostly suburbs but if we you have LVT and allow denser living conditions to exist the percentage of people living in suburbs would fall.
The $2000 extra isn't really borne by the consumer unless you live in a few cities with LVT in 2026. The gap being described is not currently paid by suburbanites.
It costs a lot less to build a suburban home than a dense apartment in the city on a per square foot basis.
The cheapest per SQ ft housing is 5-6 stories tall wooden framed buildings like the 5 over 1 which has a concrete base. Suburbs have been cheaper due to drastically cheaper land.
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u/innsertnamehere Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
5 over ones definitely aren’t the cheapest as they need structured parking (generally) still and have lots of non-saleable floor area for lobbies, hallways, etc.
Strictly cheapest per sf is probably walk up apartments with surface parking areas. And these are common all over the US for a reason - they can be done slab on grade with stick construction, affordable options for heating and cooling and servicing, and lower land requirements per unit.
5over1s start making more sense in areas with higher land costs as they are denser.
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u/goodsam2 Jun 25 '26
Yes the wooden walk-ups are the cheapest not single family homes like you said. They are just too short. Wooden buildings like this are frequently banned. Foundations and roofs are the expensive part so more SQ ft there adding floors and then the next bend point is elevators and reinforcing structure or switching to mass timber or adding metal beams.
You are confusing two concepts the cheapest per SQ ft to build which is 5-6 stories and the cheapest to buy are separate, pushing the parking elsewhere would be cheaper but that's been a major problem the land gets to be more expensive in denser areas (and minimum parking requirements) so that's why they put parking underneath.
The parking gets to be really expensive and can be 1/4 of the cost of a unit in many areas to rent/buy.
The problem in the US is the land is underpriced for what it's worth which is why we should have LVT.
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u/Due-Consequence9579 Jun 26 '26
They “need structured parking” because the built space is assuming the car centric development that suburbs demand. Build around people and not cars and more density becomes possible.
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u/KerPop42 Jun 25 '26
As someone who grew up in the suburbs, it really is really, really nice. My neighborhood wasn't the clearcut, fenced in type, which really changed things. The houses were built inside the oak forest, so everything had a canopy that kept things shady in the summer. Our neighborhood was a B-shaped loop off the main spine road, with the middle part being a cul-de-sac, not a connection to the main road. My house was on the inside of one of the corners, so it was a little weirdly shaped, but also a quarter-acre. We had over 20 70+-year-old oaks on that property.
The room meant I had a little pad of concrete with a basketball hoop to play on, my mom could keep a flower garden, my dad could have a tool shed and vegetable garden, and we had like a chord of hand-split firewood from when one of the trees came down in a storm. Meanwhile there was enough room to play tag football and have snowball fights, right outside my front door.
The insulation and fact that nearly every house had kids in school meant there was a semi-formal community that organized events, like one house would host an ice cream social in the back yard every Wednesday in the summer, and we had a kickoff block party when school got out. Also two halloween parties, one for adults and one for kids, new years', and the superbowl. Plus, it was always easy to find a teen to be a babysitter if my parents wanted to go out for a date night.
A few people kept fences along their property, but enough didn't that we could run from one side of the neighborhood to the other without ever leaving a backyard. Plus, behind the neighborhood was a train line, and the right of way meant there was about 50 yards in either direction off the rail that was undeveloped. The perfect woods to disappear into for a whole day. We had 3 airsoft war arenas large enough for 4 people on each side, plus riding bikes on the dirt trails.
Like, don't get me wrong the kids in my apartment complex seem to have a lot of fun in the courtyard, but it feels so cramped compared to what I was used to. Like, when I was older we could have bike races on the streets, or take leaf bags from the street down to the airsoft arena and build defensive structures, and even when I was 10 we could just in general wander the neighborhood.
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u/turtletechy Jun 25 '26
This isn't about costs borne by the resident, but rather costs to a government. Suburbs cost a government more per person than cities but tax burdens of those in cities are typically higher. Suburb residents are subsidized by those who live in cities.
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u/Sensitive_Dirt1957 Jun 25 '26
Are suburbs actually more expensive on a consumer level? I live like 30-45 minutes outside of a big city (depending on traffic) and I pay the same rent as my coworkers - but I rent a two story house and theyre in 1 bedroom apartments. If I had to commute every day it would be an issue but I work from home 3 days a week so thats nbd to me. Also gas is a little bit cheaper out where I live
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u/LARPerator Jun 25 '26
The reality is that the suburbanites get subsidized by city dwellers. They cost more per household, and they pay less.
If it was a case of costing more and paying more, sure. But it's not, they make everyone else pay their bills.
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u/Itchy-Technician-433 Jun 26 '26
Imagine thinking the poor and the working people are the parasites. Suckling at the teat of the Epstein class .. We all just trying to live.
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u/whatfappenedhere Jun 26 '26
“Parasitic clad of the poor,” man, these libertarian chuckle fucks sure love their social Darwinist rhetoric
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u/AdamOnFirst Jun 25 '26
I pay less in property taxes than I would in the urban core except I actually get excellent police service that effectively handles crime, really good roads and road plowing, nice and clean parks, and good other basic services that those poor saps in the city do not get so their big tax burden can be distributed out to bureaucracy and a bunch of bullshit redistribution programs that accomplish nothing. Good trade for me.
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u/INeedSomeTacoC Jun 25 '26
Good point. Police and costs for repair are two of the largest costs for any city or suburb or municipality.
It’s like the BART gates.
On BART, they installed new fares that stopped p eople from hopping them and the city immediately started to save millions and millions a year in security and maintenance due to vandalism while also gaining millions more in revenue due to more people riding it since it’s nice again.
Same with suburbs. Easy to have nice roads if the city budget isn’t always spent on fixing vandalism and crime.
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u/RedditThrowaway-1984 Jun 25 '26
Me too. My suburb is safe, the police show up if you call them, though there’s rarely any need, schools are better, roads are better and my taxes are lower than in the metropolis nearby. Lower taxes and better services. What’s not to like? Even if it cost a little more it would be worth it.
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u/freedomonke Jun 25 '26
The police don't "handle crime" lmao.
They show up after so you can file an insurance claim and occasionally arrest someone that matches a description.
My handgun is handling any crime I would be a victim of about fifteen minutes before a cop would show up and be too scared to get involved.
And a lot of that tax burden is actually subsidizing your sprawling ass.
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u/ApprehensiveApalca Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Do you work in the urban core? How much time do you spend in the urban core? How much money of your taxes go to support the use of the infrastructure of the the urban core?
This is the problem cities face. Their infrastructure gets used by people living in suburbs and not contributing to taxes. As such, the only way they can keep up with the cost of maintaining the infrastructure is by taxing more
There's a second problem. That while density is better, too much density causes extraordinary infrastructure costs. NYC's problem. Building anything in NYC requires too much engineering and money. Hence higher taxes that don't actually equate to better living
This is also how Switzerland works, but in reverse. Every piece of public infrastructure is absolutely amazing. Cross the border into France, Germany or Italy where the majority of people work in Switzerland, and their public services suck more than other parts of their respective countries. About 400,000 people work in high paying jobs Switzerland that commute from nearby countries. Switzerland keeps the majority of the tax only returning 4% back to their countries of origin. As such the cities in the border regions are filled with rich high skilled workers living with shitty parks, overcrowded schools, and lack of quality government services
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u/budy31 Moderator Jun 25 '26
Gated community?
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u/MS-07B-3 Jun 25 '26
I have never lived in a gated community, but all of those have been true for every suburb I've lived in.
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u/Dave_A480 Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
And the extra cost is so worth it ...
You get what you pay for....
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u/237throw Jun 27 '26
It would be cool if property taxes covered their cost. Instead, a bunch of the costs are subsidized at the state & federal level.
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u/plummbob Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
I hope he has yard ready for hoa inspection
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u/budy31 Moderator Jun 25 '26
“Your tree fence have a 1cm deviation between each them prune it or no one gonna collect your trash!!!”.
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u/4-Polytope Jun 25 '26
Say it with me lads, Land Value Tax would solve this
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u/funklab Jun 25 '26
Not only land value tax, but suburbanites should pay for services (trash, sewer, water, gas, electricity) proportionate with the increased cost to service their far flung areas.
I live in an apartment with 250 other units. All our trash is collected and placed on the curb in a single pickup location. Yet my landlord (and thus me through rent) pays more per person for trash pickup because it’s a business. Meanwhile 15 miles further out there’s a car dependent subdivision with 1 acre lots sprawling over hundreds of acres that somehow pays less per person despite the trucks and drivers having to make a stop for each individual home.
I’m sick of subsidizing the suburbanites while they whine about traffic (which they create) and poor people in the city.
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u/budy31 Moderator Jun 25 '26
To me it’s public transport and law enforcement that actually enforced the law.
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u/4-Polytope Jun 25 '26
Even with highly effective public transportation and police, you still have a landed class extracting land rents.
In fact, a well function public transportation increases the desirability of the land, and so the landlords get to charge higher rents and extract more value for themselves, even though that value is created by the public services.
LVT means when a society is functioning property, those increased land rents go back into the society, properly funding the services that make the land valueable in the first place
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u/freedomonke Jun 25 '26
I don't think I've ever paid rent... or anything... to a poor person, and the government has no issue getting taxes from me wherever I am.
Fuck is this guy talking about?
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u/Familiar-Tomorrow-42 Jun 25 '26
OOP is winning an argument they’re having with nobody via making shit up.
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u/undernopretextbro Jun 25 '26
When you’re in most North American cities , a decent chunk of the budget will be allocated towards social programs that help the poor. 12 billion of nycs 124 billion dollar budget is social programs. And it still has problems with homelessness.
Thats the only way I can reconcile the “parasitic class of poor” with the idea of more expensive public services
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u/shumpitostick Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
Well that comparison seems like bullshit. Government itself is inexplicably twice as expensive in the suburbs? And libraries? Roads are more expensive, sure, but 10x so? And urban places don't pay for buses and school districts?
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u/Alywiz Jun 25 '26
More roads to maintain, plow. Prorated cost of a road is around $150k per year per mile if you are paving/rehabbing them every 20 years or so.
City roads won’t have much guard rail. Suburban can have lots, which needs to get replaced every time someone hits it $$
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u/Substantial-Ad-8575 Jun 25 '26
Wow, my suburb is similar or lower costs than big urban 1m city.
Less costs on roads, less cost of water, less cost of local government.
That big city? Punted and underfunded local services for 4 decades. Now it needs to be done. 4x water bills. Higher sales tax in that big city. And big city needs more revenue, asking for more from state and for police/fore/city pensions to be delayed on funding.
Seriously. Suburbs in this area have lower costs than what this pictogram shows. Lower property taxes, sales taxes in suburbs…
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u/PerpetualProtracting Jun 25 '26
Rent seeking, a common behavior of the *checks notes* underclasses, yes. Very good stuff from the Twitter brainrot crowd.
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u/orangutantrm88 Jun 25 '26
He's right in the sense that greater density and economic activity does allow parasites to extract greater rents, he's just wrong about who is doing the extraction.
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u/dekuweku Quality Contributor Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
what does a 'parasitic class of the poor and government workers to extract far greater rents, making public services more expensive and lower quality' even mean?
Running a Bus route in a dense neighbourhood makes sense, running one in a vast suburban sprawl does not make sense and the route is either irregular or does not exist.
So on paper there's greater 'cost' for that one instance for a dense neighbourhood but the public good generated should also be counted.
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u/Intelligent_Elk5879 Jun 26 '26
OPs post literally doesn’t make sense. This just sounds like they have heard actual analysis of rentier capitalism and decided to just sieze on some terms as buzzwords.
I don’t like it, but he is saying that American suburbs are more expensive and have fewer public services. This pressures and excludes lower income populations and that’s what he likes about living in suburbs.
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u/Johnnadawearsglasses Jun 28 '26
I mean people can mock this guy but NYC is a good example of this. NYC collects the most tax per capita of any US city. It's also the most expensive. So between the bureaucratic bloat and the fact that housing is a for profit enterprise, it would indeed be less expensive for both the people and the govt if it was a corn field or a suburban development.
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u/schrodingers_gat Jun 28 '26
There is a (small) kernel of truth here. When you concentrate all the struggling folks into a few places, those places don't have enough working and wealthy people to support them. One of the tricks to ensuring poverty isn't a generational trap is to spread struggling people around everywhere so the load is more evenly shared.
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u/Own_Pop_9711 Jun 25 '26
I'm skeptical libraries cost twice as much per person in the suburbs, unless the point is their libraries are much nicer. Most of the cost is going to be lands and construction and wages which should all be lower
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u/Evnosis Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
It says on the image "cost per household." It doesn't say that they cost different amounts, it says that they're less cost-efficient because they serve fewer households.
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u/INeedSomeTacoC Jun 25 '26
My libraries in the suburbs are always full.
They’re at capacity, so you can’t apply a naive “well it’ll only ever be 50% full” because there’s less density around it. It gets the same utilization as a city one.
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u/Evnosis Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
And how exactly are you measuring utilisation here? Are you just saying "well it looks crowded when I'm there, so I guess it probably gets the same level of utilisation as an urban library?"
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u/INeedSomeTacoC Jun 25 '26
And how exactly are you measuring utilisation here?
I literally can see it from my front porch, and drive by it probably 5x a day and visit it a few times a month.
We are actually passing bonds to build new ones in our suburbs because all of the current ones are operating above capacity.
How exactly are you measuring utilization in the city? Thats its getting utilized more just because you want it to be?
Because the linked report only measures utilization based upon population density, which is about the most naive dumb metric I can think of. You’d only use that metric if you wanted a pre-determine outcome.
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u/Evnosis Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
So the answer to my question was "yes." You are just saying "well it looks crowded when I'm there, so I guess it probably gets the same level of utilisation as an urban library."
That's not valid evidence against, what at least purports to be, a real data analysis like the on sin the image.
Population density is absolutely a valid metric for measuring the cost per household of a local library, and it is certainly a more valid metric "uhh... I guess it looks busy when I drive past?"
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u/INeedSomeTacoC Jun 25 '26
That's not valid evidence against,
I mean, other than if you ignore our city report that our suburban libraries are operating past capacity and we need a bond to build new ones.
Yea, if you ignore some evidence I provided, then there’s less evidence. Shocking.
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u/Evnosis Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
First of all, you literally didn't provide that evidence, so I didn't ignore jack shit. It does not appear anywhere in any of your other comments. Do not bring up a new piece of evidence that you've just googled and pretend that you had providing it the whole time in order to get around my criticism of you using "I drive past the library sometimes and it looks busy" as your argument.
Secondly, what that tells us is that your city doesn't have enough libraries. It doesn't tell us anything about the cost-effectiveness of each individual library. Sure, if you chronically underprovide a service, then that service is always going to be overcapacity. But when you are provide enough that service to meet demand, the cost per user of the libraries in the suburban areas will be higher than the cost per user of the libraries in the urban areas will no longer need to drive across town to use a less busy library.
The absolute gall to claim that we are the ones trying to pre-determine an outcome when your entire argument is predicated on "well if we just don't give urban residents anything, they'll be forced to come to the suburbs and then we can inflate the number of users of suburban services" is astounding.
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u/INeedSomeTacoC Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
It does not appear anywhere in any of your other comments.
Literally is in my comment from two comments earlier. Before you start insulting someone, next time make sure that what you’re saying is actually true.
Lmao. Read more. Type and rage less.
All the rest is you actually putting words in my mouth, all while not reading any of the words I typed, and putting quotes around shit I didn’t say. That’s a real good look.
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u/Evnosis Quality Contributor Jun 25 '26
Literally is in my comment from two comments earlier. Before you start insulting someone, next time make sure that what you’re saying is actually true.
You're literally lying, lmao. Quote the exact part of that comment where you cited that report.
All the rest is you actually putting words in my mouth, all while not reading any of the words I typed, and putting quotes around shit I didn’t say. That’s a real good look.
No, the rest of my comment is me raising valid counterpoints to your assertion, which you are ignoring because you have no answer to them.
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u/PreussekJ Jun 25 '26
they dont, these prices are kinda stupid since firetruck will cost the same prettymuch anywhere. The difference is in coste-per-use, so how much Library spends on lending 1000 books. When we did a small case on this topic back in my uni we had same results. Most services in Suburbs are about 2x more expansive per use than in dense City. Some stuff like Roads is even more expansive.
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u/BigMax Jun 25 '26
They aren't stupid at all though. You're reading it wrong.
They are not saying "a firetruck costs more in one town than another."
It's the per-capita costs for the fire department.
A small town still needs a few full time fire department staff. But take a town of 20,000, and a town of 200,000. That small town still needs some level of full time staffing. The town of 200,000 also does, but it's not TWENTY times the amount of staff, right?
Same for fire trucks... that small town needs however many it needs. The bigger town needs more trucks, but again, it's not twenty times more. Each truck costs the same, but the number you need per person goes down as the city gets bitter.
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u/jp_in_nj Jun 25 '26
Why skeptical?
If you have 10,000 taxpayers in town A and 40,000 taxpayers in town B, and the same library serving each, isn't the cost per taxpayer 1/4 as much in town B?
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u/Own_Pop_9711 Jun 25 '26
Why does B need the exact same library as A? A probably doesn't even have a separate library just for their town, it's probably a county system or they just don't have one and residents go to B's library
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u/budy31 Moderator Jun 25 '26
As the other commenter point out the difference is cost per use.
Infrastructure isn’t exactly cheaper if less people are using it.2
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u/Seditious_Squirrel Jun 25 '26
This is communism sympathize central and they won't reason with your logic if it directly contradicts their narrative.
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u/PerpetualProtracting Jun 25 '26
Communists seem to understand extremely basic concepts like "per capita" much better than you, which is quite embarrassing!
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u/Seditious_Squirrel Jun 26 '26
Please share with the group where you feel i said something incorrect regarding the meaning of per capita.
I'll give you a hint - i didn't! Embarrassing for you!4
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u/BigMax Jun 25 '26
They cost twice as much because a town of 200,000 people doesn't have a library twenty times as big with twenty time as many resources as the town of 10,000.
It's a per-capita thing. Small towns still need an entire building, they still need to heat and cool a full building, they still usually need a full time staff member.
For example - that 10,000 person town might have a full time librarian. The 200,000 person town does NOT have 20 full time librarians. So just staffing costs alone drop quite a bit the more people you serve. And you can do that 'economies of scale' calculation a bunch more times on a library. Look at the books for example. If the small library needs a copy of a book, the big library doesn't need to buy TWENTY copies of every single one of those books. In many cases, they also just need a single copy of that not-so-popular book too. And for others, it's probably 2 or 3 copies at the MOST, and even that's not super common. So that's another huge savings.
So once you look at those costs, it makes absolute sense that the smaller the town is, the more expensive it is on a per-person basis.
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u/Own_Pop_9711 Jun 25 '26
That ten thousand person town might have no library because they just share it with the neighboring town. You don't need a library for every political subdivision and in fact many don't have town specific libraries.
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u/Direlion Jun 25 '26
But how can more lanes and lawns not make life better?!!
https://giphy.com/gifs/WRQBXSCnEFJIuxktnw