Downtown Parking Tax

[ndavies]

Currently, There is no other way to get downtown. There won't be any other way to get downtown in my lifetime. Look at how long it's taking just to get that little starter line up and running. This is with non-goverment funding.

How are you going to pay for that light rail? With higher taxes? What happens when you try to get a tax passed to pay for light rail?

Detroit should be afraid of more taxes. They have already proven that once a certain tax rate is hit it becomes counter productive. The people with money and choices will leave and find somewhere cheaper. High taxes in the city made sense when there was an extra benefit recieved from those taxes. Now the higher tax rates in Detroit just get you less police and fire protection and a goverment that is vitually non-functional. If you are going to charge a premium for something, you better make sure it returns a premium level of service.

[ghettopalmetto]

Detroit should be afraid of more taxes. They have already proven that once a certain tax rate is hit it becomes counter productive. The people with money and choices will leave and find somewhere cheaper.

Have you been paying any attention at all? People with money and choices have been leaving for decades--for other states!

[ndavies]

Have you been paying any attention at all? People with money and choices have been leaving for decades--for other states!

Exactly my point. We have made the Detroit area completely non competitive. The taxes are too high and the services delivered for those High taxes are pathetic. We need to downsize government and make Detroit and Michigan competitive again.

The areas of the country with the highest traxes are shedding the most jobs. The areas with the lowest costs are recruiting new businesses and growing.

[Detroitnerd]

The areas of the country with the highest traxes are shedding the most jobs. The areas with the lowest costs are recruiting new businesses and growing.

So, this wasn't going to be a debate about taxes in general? Sigh ...

Let me get this straight: The places with the highest taxes are suffering, while the places with the lowest taxes are prosperous?

Among the top 20 highest taxed U.S. cities are [[2007):

Charleston [[Charleston is becoming a prime location for information technology jobs and corporations)
Portland [[Model American city is drawing residents and businesses)
New York City [[Growing past 8 million residents)
Atlanta [[ranks fourth in the number of Fortune 500 companies)
Charlotte [[ a major U.S. financial center and is now the second largest banking center in the United States)
Philadelphia [[home to the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and several Fortune 500 companies, also enjoying a real-estate boom from spillover commuters who can't afford New York)

Among the cities with the lowest taxes are:

Cheyenne, Wyoming [[major industry? U.S. air force base)
Jacksonville, Florida [[in foreclosure meltdown)
Las Vegas, Nevada [[socked with subprime crisis, budgets strained)
Memphis, Tennessee [[Tennessee's anus)

So, I presume it's more complicated a picture than you paint.

[ghettopalmetto]

Exactly my point. We have made the Detroit area completely non competitive. The taxes are too high and the services delivered for those High taxes are pathetic. We need to downsize government and make Detroit and Michigan competitive again.

The people who are leaving Michigan are, in many cases, relocating to places with even higher taxes. Something tells me that your singular focus on taxes is misplaced. Otherwise, Mississippi would be an economic powerhouse [[It isn't.).

The areas of the country with the highest traxes are shedding the most jobs. The areas with the lowest costs are recruiting new businesses and growing.

According to BLS, the following are the states with unemployment rates at or above 10% [[May 21, 2010):

In order of increasing unemployment:

Indiana - 10.0%
Georgia - 10.4%
Tennessee - 10.5%
Kentucky - 10.6%
Oregon - 10.6%
North Carolina - 10.8%
Ohio - 10.9%
Alabama - 11.0%
District of Columbia - 11.2%
Illinois - 11.2%
Mississippi - 11.5%
South Carolina - 11.6%
Florida - 12.0%
Rhode Island - 12.5%
California - 12.6%
Nevada - 13.7%
Michigan - 14.0%

http://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm

Certainly, these high rates of unemployment are not strictly attributed to taxation or costs. If your claim was true, we would expect to see New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts near the bottom end of this list instead of EVERY SINGLE SOUTHEASTERN STATE.

[fryar]

Exactly my point. We have made the Detroit area completely non competitive. The taxes are too high and the services delivered for those High taxes are pathetic. We need to downsize government and make Detroit and Michigan competitive again.

I fundamentally disagree. Detroit is the reason the Detroit area is noncompetitive. People graduate from the many high-profile universities in the area and see either blight or suburbia, both populated by a bunch of depressed people who have spent the last 30 years losing their shirts, as their local options, so they leave. Not all of them, but structurally, that's the big issue, not the tax environment. Young, upwardly mobile, creative class, various-buzzwords-you-know-what-I'm-talking-about people choose where they want to live, and then find a job in that city. They do not do a tax projection, they look at being able to walk home from bars, the cultural scene, diversity, so on.

The areas of the country with the highest traxes are shedding the most jobs. The areas with the lowest costs are recruiting new businesses and growing.

The coolest cities and urban areas are recruiting new business and growing. Low-tax bottom feeders are attracting crappy jobs.

The tax environment is an important factor, sure, but it's not the only one, and it can be outweighed by other factors. New York and California have punitiviley high state & local income taxes, as does DC. [[Metro) Detroit has a huge untapped menial labor pool because it has been tied, structurally, to manufacturing. Its pool of knowledge workers is perpetually being siphoned off by a brain drain to cool cities [[not, mind you, to low-tax jurisdictions). Lowering taxes alone is not a sustainable forward-looking approach; what are you going to to bet the local economy on, cardboard box assembly? Meatpacking? If you want to assemble cars from foreign components like they do in Alabama, by all means, compete with Alabama. If you want thinkers who develop the newest methods of diagnosing some kind of heart disease, who invent new ways of structuring the purchasing of aircraft, who develop new and lasting uses for technology, then you've got to improve the city.

You've got to make Detroit attractive in order to keep more of those smart, well educated people from Michigan's universities here in order to bring in and keep thriving businesses that go where they need to go in order to find the talent they need to innovate and drive progress.

Off the top of my head, and nothing more than that, was my idea to announce an impending 20% tax on surface lot parking, maybe to be instituted in 2.5 years. By raising the price of monthly commuter surface lot parking above $150, do you raise the incentive for new garages to supplant the surface lots, and provide enough time to actually invest in the garages? Again, the downtown detroit partnership/business improvement district/what-have-you could invest in large, intuitive signs located in strategic places that convey the information that you can go straight for a municipal underground garage or left for a privately-held above-ground garage that's open 24 hours and has additional services like a police station. This idea may be flawed in some ways, but it does try to attack the issues you referenced.

[Hermod]

Young, upwardly mobile, creative class, various-buzzwords-you-know-what-I'm-talking-about people choose where they want to live, and then find a job in that city. They do not do a tax projection, they look at being able to walk home from bars, the cultural scene, diversity, so on.

Diversity???? Detroit is not diverse and loses more diversity by the day.

Here are the racial breakdowns of two cities:

City One: 82.3%--13.3%--2.1%--1.5%--0.2%

City Two: 81.6%--12.3%--5.0%--1.0%--0.3%


Does their diversity seem about the same to you?

City One is Troy and City Two is Detroit

The tax environment is an important factor, sure, but it's not the only one, and it can be outweighed by other factors. New York and California have punitiviley high state & local income taxes, as does DC.

And the best and the brightest and the most creative do not live in DC, they live across the river in Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, Vienna, Springfield, McLean, Dunn Loring, etc. Most of their offices are along the beltway and not in DC either.

Troy is not something Detroit should try to be.

Not sure of the measurement metrics, but Wiki says Troy is the 5th safest city in the US and the safest in Michigan. Maybe Detroit should try to be that.

[Detroitnerd]

Diversity???? Detroit is not diverse and loses more diversity by the day.

Confusing the point. I don't believe the poster was saying that Detroit was diverse, but that young creative people value diversity. I should point out, however, the diversity along Woodward between I-94 and downtown ...

And the best and the brightest and the most creative do not live in DC, they live across the river in Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, Vienna, Springfield, McLean, Dunn Loring, etc. Most of their offices are along the beltway and not in DC either.

Not as true as it was 10 or 20 years ago. Washington DC is all built out now, having filled in its last vacant parcel and posting a surplus. On the other side of the river, they're beginning to see shortfalls. Tysons Corners is in a last-ditch effort to become more pedestrian- and transit-oriented. This has been discussed before on the forum.

Not sure of the measurement metrics, but Wiki says Troy is the 5th safest city in the US and the safest in Michigan. Maybe Detroit should try to be that.

The point, Hermod, as you well know, that Detroit should not try to emulate a car-oriented, freeway-crossed, parking-lot-infested, strip-mall-having, park-in-front, mid-20th-century ideal. It should try to be, you know, a city. Quality of life indicators are important, yes, but we ain't gonna get there by trying to turn Detroit into the beet fields Troy was in 1950.

[Detroitnerd]

See? You're just turning this into a tax argument, even as somebody puts forward a serious proposal.

Currently, There is no other way to get downtown. There won't be any other way to get downtown in my lifetime. Look at how long it's taking just to get that little starter line up and running. This is with non-goverment funding.

First of all, there are other ways to get downtown. I have several colleagues at my downtown place of business who don't drive. One of them bikes almost every day, and a few other [[me included) bike in from time to time. Another colleague rides the bus. So, um, respectfully, that statement isn't really true. There are several ways to get downtown. We should be providing more, putting in bike lanes, improving bus service and installing light rail.

There won't be any other way to get downtown in your lifetime? Are you very old? Or is it that, since you don't think you'll ever get to use it, we should only begin restoring transit service after you're gone? This statement might be true; it also might be hyperbole.

It took a long, long time to remove Detroit's transit. It won't take as long to restore it, though. What we have to do is have a serious regional vision, an authority to deal with the feds, and a change to the state constitution that adds a provision so taxes can be levied for transit funding. That way, the feds will know we're serious. With growing understanding of what urban environments do well, I think it's sensible to say that we'll have a line out to Eight Mile within a 10 years. And expect ridership statistics to be off the charts.

How are you going to pay for that light rail? With higher taxes? What happens when you try to get a tax passed to pay for light rail?

Yes, ndavies. See, governments use taxes to provide services. Then, in turn, the system of free enterprise gets to step in, as does the general public, and avail themselves of those services to turn a profit. The alternative is to provide fewer services, lower taxes, and end up, with a little time and luck, like Guatemala. Which, unsurprisingly, even businesspeople don't seem to look forward to.

Detroit should be afraid of more taxes.

I can't help but notice you bring up the emotion of fear. Perhaps you are projecting. I think this should be a sensible debate about the merits or demerits of taxes, not about emotions, and certainly not about "fear."

[Taxes] have already proven that once a certain tax rate is hit it becomes counter productive. The people with money and choices will leave and find somewhere cheaper. High taxes in the city made sense when there was an extra benefit recieved from those taxes. Now the higher tax rates in Detroit just get you less police and fire protection and a goverment that is vitually non-functional. If you are going to charge a premium for something, you better make sure it returns a premium level of service.

So you are saying that the taxes are so high that businesses leave and then there is less revenue so the city services suffer? That's interesting. Where'd you learn that? Sim City?

The truth of the matter is that when cities offer services, residents and businesses don't balk so much at paying the taxes that fund them. That's kind of a novel idea, isn't it?

Unfortunately, we have a few problems in Detroit that are somewhat unusual:

1) The vision for Detroit, since the mid-1920s, has been that the city will be a place where people who cannot afford to leave the city will live.

2) The regional vision has been that suburbs will be places where we won't need government services because urban ills will be safely confined to the city, and people will just drive everywhere and have pockets full of money from their unskilled jobs.

3) Deprived of the right to annex surrounding cities, the central city will have to raise taxes to pay for increasingly expensive services. No way will they ever get any revenue from the people who have the most! The state constitution is very firm about home rule and no taxes for transit.

4) And so you have sky-high taxes in the city and questionable, at best, services.

Are taxes a problem in the city? You bet your sweet ass they are. I know tavern owners who complain that they need almost a dozen inspections a year, at more than $100 an hour. It feels like harassment, a shakedown. It probably drives a lot of people out of business.

But what we need, as a region, is to develop ways for us all to pay into creating a region that works together. And that involves things like taxes for transit. [[We here in metro Detroit pay about a third of what the rest of the metroplexes int he United States pay for transit, and, frankly, that's why our service sucks.) And it involves talking about revenue-sharing, and, hopefully, down the road, annexation and a greater Detroit that will be able to harness the revenues to build a real, integrated city.

See, that's what other metroplexes are doing right now. While we sit here talking, other cities are growing geographically, enhancing the amount of revenue they can collect, pouring it into services that knit the region together, sharing a collective vision, putting in greenbelts to encourage density, etc.

Are taxes a part of the picture? Yes they are. But "fear" of taxes to the exclusion of all else is a recipe for failure.

[Hermod]

See, that's what other metroplexes are doing right now. While we sit here talking, other cities are growing geographically, enhancing the amount of revenue they can collect, pouring it into services that knit the region together, sharing a collective vision, putting in greenbelts to encourage density, etc.

Among the places that I have lived

1. Ft Lauderdale and Miami in Florida

2. Richmond, Norfolk, Arlington, and Alexandria in Virginia

All of these cities are hemmed in by non-annexable political entities None are "growing geographically".

Washington, DC is completely hemmed in by state lines.

I believe that San Francisco is in the same fix.

When was the last time that New York expanded its borders?

[Detroitnerd]

Among the places that I have lived

1. Ft Lauderdale and Miami in Florida

2. Richmond, Norfolk, Arlington, and Alexandria in Virginia

All of these cities are hemmed in by non-annexable political entities None are "growing geographically".

Washington, DC is completely hemmed in by state lines.

I believe that San Francisco is in the same fix.

When was the last time that New York expanded its borders?

Ah, Hermod. What a talent you have for taking a fine point and running with it. My hat's off to you, kind sir. Enjoy the thread.