Cities stand to lose billions in taxes thanks to work-from-home, analysts sound alarm

[JamesBlond]

Start laying off useless Career politicians, and save millions in Tax payer's money.
Tax is not to make the rich richer, its to create infrastructure and build businesses in local communities and provide services, not employ people who can raise their own salary when they feel like it

 

[trieste1s]

Remove the burdensome car-friendly road infrastructure and save on a lot of cost of road maintenance. Watch, listen and learn from Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes.

Cities don't need tons of cars and parking and traffic lights. Cities need public transport to make commuting cost efficient and better mixed-used zoning to minimise commuting in the first place. Transport is demand driven: build them and build them well, and people will use them.

Learn to re-zone suburbia so that there can be mixed-usage within these neighbourhoods, so that kids are not prisoners in their own homes and there's no need to take the car out for every single little outdoor chore.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Remove the burdensome car-friendly road infrastructure and save on a lot of cost of road maintenance. Watch, listen and learn from Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes.

Cities don't need tons of cars and parking and traffic lights. Cities need public transport to make commuting cost efficient and better mixed-used zoning to minimise commuting in the first place. Transport is demand driven: build them and build them well, and people will use them.

Learn to re-zone suburbia so that there can be mixed-usage within these neighbourhoods, so that kids are not prisoners in their own homes and there's no need to take the car out for every single little outdoor chore.

If you think suburbia wants mixed traffic, you've totally lost the plot.

Public transport? So the gang members can come and ruin our shopping centers and I can sit on a bus with a mask on next to the local homeless bum that takes knives everywhere? Or sit next to the 500lb man who smells of rotten cheese?

Requiring a car to get anywhere is not a bug, its a feature, both to keep out the crime and homelessness and to keep out thee young 20 something dreamers who think the whole world would be a utopia if only every suburb and small town was built like new york city.

Very astute, except he was talking about democracy not capitalism.

He was right on both. Democracy and capitalism both have horrible downsides but nothing else works better then them.

What a surprise ! When some "conspiracists" said : lock-downs are very bad, most people answered : we're all gonna die. Now we realize that the poverty and debt these lock-downs brought will kill much more than the virus that should have been called the "great reset virus".

So far it seems every single thing the "evil not-see rascist conspiracy theorists" said about the virus has turned out to be true. It DID come from a poorly managed lab in Wuhan, that had ties to US politicians, it WASNT the be all end all disease that would wipe us out, the jab was rushed and did have unforeseen consequences, particularly in young men, and the disease WAS, and still is, being used as an excuse for anything, from jacking up prices to taking away freedoms to restricting movement, now its being blamed for the decline of these expensive, crime ridden, garbage covered concrete jungles.

 

[mrtraver]

I believe this is a primary reason that my state's governor forced all state employees back into the office after 14 months of SUCCESSFULLY working from home. Local businesses in the state capitol, especially restaurants, lost their captive audience that increased the population by 50% from 8-5 M-F. So they allegedly cried to their lobbyists, who allegedly got the governor's attention (because dollars matter more than voters), who factually said state employees were not doing their jobs and had to return to the office.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Don’t forget people leaving those cities due to tyrannical cover restrictions to live elsewhere. Bye bye all city taxes -wham

 

[Tams80]

So, why are cities not demanding to convert empty office buildings into apartment blocks?
Lowers the need for housing in cities and maybe even the price of real estate (rental & buying).
Stupid offices are not needed anymore; turn them into living areas, with shops and apartments and green areas and/or even green roofs with vegetables, etc.

Part of the problem there is that many office buildings are not built to residential standards.

The outer shell is fine, and electricity and networking may be fine, but the plumbing (especially sewage), heating, and perhaps gas, simply are not. And to convert those buildings can be very expensive.

And due to the layout of flats/apartments, the fire exits and prevention measures also need to be improved as there are more enclosed spaces.

 

[axiomatic13]

Pay your employees properly and maybe you can get them back into an office. But barring that, nothing else will work. It seems that big business is finally getting their comeuppance.

 

[punctualturn]

If the greedy landlords were smart, they would repurpose the now vacant office spaces into livable properties and ideally at reasonable prices.

 

[Sir Sparkles]

Must be the most unpopular article I've ever read on TechSpot.

 

[Endymio]

If the greedy landlords were smart, they would repurpose the now vacant office spaces into livable properties and ideally at reasonable prices.

You can't turn a commercial office into residential quarters without a zoning change. Nor do most people wish to live in an apartment with no baths, no showers, and the only restroom access down the hall and shared by 100 others.

All problems correctable with time and money. But far, far more time and money than you would suspect. So give the "greedy landlord" trope a rest, eh?

 

[punctualturn]

You can't turn a commercial office into residential quarters without a zoning change. Nor do most people wish to live in an apartment with no baths, no showers, and the only restroom access down the hall and shared by 100 others.

All problems correctable with time and money. But far, far more time and money than you would suspect. So give the "greedy landlord" trope a rest, eh?

Your answer was spot on, until you decided to show your true color, Mr Landlord.

 

[trieste1s]

If you think suburbia wants mixed traffic, you've totally lost the plot.

Public transport? So the gang members can come and ruin our shopping centers and I can sit on a bus with a mask on next to the local homeless bum that takes knives everywhere? Or sit next to the 500lb man who smells of rotten cheese?

Requiring a car to get anywhere is not a bug, its a feature, both to keep out the crime and homelessness and to keep out thee young 20 something dreamers who think the whole world would be a utopia if only every suburb and small town was built like new york city.

Re your first paragraph, it's clear you've not been travelling around in places like Japan, Singapore, Amsterdam. Widen your world. Also don't diss research data just like that. Strong Towns is your fellow July 4th man who has put in actual work, very unlike your armchair philosophising in this topic.

Re your second paragraph, public transport is not responsible for gangsters and crime rates. Lax policing, lousy education, nonexistent support among the community and dirtpoor family upbringing, likely due to having no anchor in right religion, are the reasons for gangsters and crime rates.

I would say I couldn't care less about the growing mess in Great Murica, except that the ubiquity of the greenback means that Murica can dump its costs upon the whole world. So these exceptionally poor, short-sighted, anti-community city planning that Murica is capable of, like deficient public transport, inferior car-centric traffic design (pedestrian-centric is always superior anywhere), cookie-cutter zoned suburbia, are raising untenable costs that are being subsidised by the middle and lower classes of Murica and the rest of the world to keep a few upper classes happy.

Walled cities within cities and walled vehicles within cities. This privatisation of socioeconomic activity further degrades cities.

With each passing year, more of Murica is looking back at past glories instead of being able to improve upon and adapt to the present.

 

[Inthenstus]

City tax revenue is necessary to do stuff like… manage sewers? Repair roads… run schools? Massive citywide deficits are a massive problem to everyone, and slashing budgets cannot be a replacement for a functioning system of taxation and good planning and strategy of city development, both of which the pandemic has hit with massive paradigm shifts. The US is particularly vulnerable because city planning has tended to be **** (pardon my French, but as a civil engineer specialising in planning that’s my hot take), with a model heavily dependant on subsidising non functioning suburban developments by building more of them (aka pissing in your pants to keep warm), and subsidising them through a heavy dependence on large tax revenues from the city centre, including earning more on low income neighbourhoods than they spend maintaining and developing them. Take away the city centre and most American cities have about 0 net positive things in them from a tax revenue standpoint, meaning they’re… well even more ****ed than they already were. ‘Fiscal responsibility’ (a term I’ve never heard used in conjunction with actually useful policy suggestions) will not help here except to deprive cities of resources they need to actually change their malfunctioning systems, which will be quite expensive (not that most of them are currently trying in the US, but well)…

Also eh… you might want to not call everyone sitting in government rapists and compare them to communists if you want to be taken seriously most of them probably aren’t rapists, as it’s hard to keep secrets like that when entering politics, and even the ones who have some semi-communist views, such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, are mostly just mislabelling social democracy, one of the most common and successful approaches to governing in Europe, as democratic socialism… which is communism where you’re allowed to vote. So yea they’re not communists either lol. In fact many American democrats are neo-libs, which is pretty much the opposite of being communist x) much more so than conservatism is.

doesn’t matter if everyone leaves the city

 

[PanfiloTexas]

Great..now the government is going to figure out a way to tax our home for if we work out of it. The government is to big. I know, I work for it on the education side. Do you know we have people that get checks who don't even come to work cause the job is not needed but they don't want to lose the spot? so they pay people to sit at home. Many have other jobs while still drawing checks from the government. My old boss got into some trouble and they sent him to an office in the middle of nowhere. Nobody checked on him, or asked him to do anything. After 8 weeks of it, he went and found a new job and stopped showing up, it took 19 months before they realized this and let him go.

 

[Gezzer]

Anyone ever hear about the Luddites?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

They cried over the fact that their jobs were becoming obsolete, and even went so far to sabotage the machinery replacing them. So how'd that turn out? When major shifts happen you have two choices, pivot to take advantage of the change, or try to stall/prevent the change with your efforts ultimately failing. It's really that simple...