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Re: BART, Sales Taxes, and the Fiscalization of Land Uses, and Free Transit?
Author: BOB2
Date: 12-08-2019 - 14:19
It's not new "news", about the situation of retail vacancy and consolidation. It's just D Nile (oh, not that river in Egypt?), I meant to say "denial" by many local governments that saw sales tax growth (infinitely one would assume...)in an ultimately constrained geographic or demographic time space continuum as the "fix all" public finance "flavor of the week" to all of their fiscal woes.
Many a City has even increased these deals, in the face of this reality. And many, despite the quite often very real and "current" taxpayer costs of all of the improvements these developments needed to supposedly "compete" with other Cities for that long term "sales tax" from these developments.
In many cases and for a number of years, this "front end" public infrastructure costs, to build these projects, was paid for by schemes such as redevelopment, who just stole the tax increment to pay for such improvements, from our school children.
This is what has precipitated the fight over the collection and distribution of on-line sales tax. I've worried for a while about the "backward bending" impacts of too high of retail sales taxes on retail business. It is a concern also because we saw a lot of sales tax instability with the 2008 recession, affecting such things as funding for the Perris line, because we depend on Sales taxes too much for rail and transit funding.
The conversion of some of this excess retail space into housing by "re-use" at a BART station location like this, with a likely "Transit Oriented Development" (TOD) housing density bonus of some kind, with the neighborhood housing rents this high, is likely to be way more profitable, than the lease income from Walgreens in that market.
Now, if we could just get a lost more of these TOD residents to use the T in TOD? Free transit passes for TOD residents as a required condition in such developments should be considered. This should absolutely be a condition, only at locations "on" top of transit (1/4 mile or less) where parking requirements are lowered as a result of a "TOD" designation.
I've done several reviews of "free transit" (and/or lowering fares, by increasing fare subsidies) as a public "policy" option. And, there are actually some good arguments, that for urban transit systems (local bus and rail systems) it may be more efficient, to give the service away free, which would attract more riders, at least from the perspective of the positive "time cost" savings on local urban traffic. On the other hand, many such schemes would also result in overloaded, overcrowded, trains and buses. And thus, slower and more costly transit systems to operate, which would offset much of that benefit.
Many a City has even increased these deals, in the face of this reality. And many, despite the quite often very real and "current" taxpayer costs of all of the improvements these developments needed to supposedly "compete" with other Cities for that long term "sales tax" from these developments.
In many cases and for a number of years, this "front end" public infrastructure costs, to build these projects, was paid for by schemes such as redevelopment, who just stole the tax increment to pay for such improvements, from our school children.
This is what has precipitated the fight over the collection and distribution of on-line sales tax. I've worried for a while about the "backward bending" impacts of too high of retail sales taxes on retail business. It is a concern also because we saw a lot of sales tax instability with the 2008 recession, affecting such things as funding for the Perris line, because we depend on Sales taxes too much for rail and transit funding.
The conversion of some of this excess retail space into housing by "re-use" at a BART station location like this, with a likely "Transit Oriented Development" (TOD) housing density bonus of some kind, with the neighborhood housing rents this high, is likely to be way more profitable, than the lease income from Walgreens in that market.
Now, if we could just get a lost more of these TOD residents to use the T in TOD? Free transit passes for TOD residents as a required condition in such developments should be considered. This should absolutely be a condition, only at locations "on" top of transit (1/4 mile or less) where parking requirements are lowered as a result of a "TOD" designation.
I've done several reviews of "free transit" (and/or lowering fares, by increasing fare subsidies) as a public "policy" option. And, there are actually some good arguments, that for urban transit systems (local bus and rail systems) it may be more efficient, to give the service away free, which would attract more riders, at least from the perspective of the positive "time cost" savings on local urban traffic. On the other hand, many such schemes would also result in overloaded, overcrowded, trains and buses. And thus, slower and more costly transit systems to operate, which would offset much of that benefit.
