Aaron M. Renn

All Things Aaron

Homeowners Should Have Skin in the Game For Sidewalk Costs

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Image via Shutterstock

Image via Shutterstock

Someone over at City Lab is complaining that he had to pay to fix the sidewalk in front of his house, which is the standard practice in much of America.   He thinks it is wrong, subsidizes cars, etc.

If a homeowner can’t pay to fix the sidewalk in front of his house, how in the world can he believe that the taxes his house generates will pay for schools, libraries, police, fire, streets, and all the other public services he is consuming?

If a homeowner doesn’t want to pay for a minor repair that benefits him personally more than anybody else, and which raises his property values, why should we expect such a person to truly be interested in the public interest, or in the interests of citizens on the other side of town he barely knows?

Sites like City Lab complain endlessly about sprawl. One reason we get so much of it is that these suburban homeowners are able to push the cost of their infrastructure onto the “government”, which is to say somebody else. They can get other people and businesses in the community (or outside of it, in the form of state or federal aid) to subsidize things that benefit almost entirely just them or the residents of their particular subdivision.

The best way to curb sprawl is to make these developments start internalizing their infrastructure cost. A lot of this has happened with requirements to developers to pay for a lot of infrastructure up front, impact fees, etc. But there’s more than can be done.

Somebody said to me that if I think people should be responsible for the sidewalk in front of their house, why not the road too?   Great idea.   For new subdivisions, there’s no reason not to require them to retain the roads as private streets, like a gated community. That’s particularly true since they often aren’t through streets anyway.

Of course that has potential downsides, such as when these subdivisions end up failing anyway.   That’s why I’ve previously suggested requiring developers to insure their subdivisions against bailouts.

Now the author of this piece lives in Jenkintown, PA. This is an older suburb – 4400 people, 94% white, median household income of $73,000 –   but it’s still a suburb or town, not a city neighborhood. So its a kind of sprawl too. In fact, even most “city” neighborhoods are mostly single family sprawl of an earlier era. Like today’s new fringe suburbs, these also require big subsidies because they don’t generate enough in taxes to pay for the services they consume.

People who want “the city” to pay for the sidewalk in front of their house are basically angling for a subsidy. After all, if the city were simply the implementing mechanism, collecting taxes proportional to each person’s sidewalk frontage, what would be the difference financially? Only, perhaps, the ability to spread the payments out more.

The great thing about requiring homeowners to pay for and shovel their sidewalks is that it surfaces the very real costs of urban infrastructure, ones that homeowners don’t want to think about.

Once these costs start becoming visible, change is possible. One person noted that if these properties had to foot the real cost of services, the homeowners might start becoming more open to higher density development real quick.   It’s easy to be a NIMBY when you’re able to transfer costs to commercial property owners, municipal debt, etc.

A lot of older communities do have large accumulated infrastructure needs. To fix up the streets and sidewalks is going to require an injection of funds.

My idea has been for the city to use the carrot of city funding to leverage a contribution from neighborhoods that can afford it. There’s no reason that streets full of expensive homes can’t be paying into a residential BID (business improvement district) type structure to help finance ongoing maintenance of their infrastructure (street sweeping, plowing, potholes, sidewalks, etc). This also provides a mechanism for both internalizing costs and evening them out over time.

Given that there are always going to be more needs than funds, why not align with neighborhoods that are willing to put skin in the game? Today we do just the opposite. We focus infrastructure improvements into select high quality older districts, then as soon as the wealthier folks move in we hand them a historic district designation to keep out higher destiny infill to boot. It’s Robin Hood in reverse, and produces perverse anti-development incentives.

You don’t want to fully privatize the streets in these wealthier older areas, because then the people who live there become disconnected from the public services of the city. They should have skin in the game both for the street in front of their house, and the overall infrastructure of the city.

In any event, having to pay for and shovel the sidewalk in front of your house is one of the few tangible infrastructure costs we’ve actually forced homeowners to directly bear. Yet the appetite for subsidy for single family homes is so high, even that comparatively minor cost is too much for many.

Comments

  1. I disagreed with you in the tweet but but do see your point. The problem where I live (Toronto) is that nobody in the suburbs wants to pay for anything, saying that the libraries and most of the social services benefited the downtowners while the suburbanites wanted low taxes and to be left alone. Meanwhile, they all get their driveways shovelled because pre-amalgamation they always did while as a downtown urbanite supposedly getting all the services, I have to shovel my own snow. The line between one and the other is totally arbitrary.

    If the sidewalk was actually on my property, I could see the rationale. but the sidewalk is in the right-of-way, city property. It would seem to me that the property line is the fair divider, if it is on my property I pay for it, if it is on city’s, then the taxpayer is responsible.

    As a baby boomer seeing that in the not too distant future I might have to give up my keys, I want to be sure that I can walk to the store in safety, year round. That’s why I believe they are as much a municipal responsibility as the road.

    Homeowners have lots of skin in the game already by paying property taxes. My take on this here: http://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/sidewalks-are-critical-infrastructure-not-frill.html

  2. A few points worth noting:
    1. Jenkintown is only 0.6 square miles in size and it has a population density of 7,844 people per sq mi. While it’s not Chicago-level density, it’s higher than either Detroit or Cleveland.
    2. In more densely developed areas, sidewalks aren’t just an amenity, they are an integral part of the local transportation network. Why should road maintenance be covered by the city but not sidewalks?
    3. The cost to homeowners to repair sidewalks is often higher because there’s no economy of scale that can be achieved by a local municipality bidding out numerous segments under a single contract. That also should ensure a more consistent design versus one-off repairs all over the city.
    The author of the original piece highlighted some of the reasons why the patchwork approach doesn’t work. The points that Aaron makes may have some validity in more suburban communities but Jenkintown doesn’t seem to fit that caricature that was painted of it.

  3. I think Native Mich makes a good point, but the guys at Strong Towns focus on the bigger issue, which is that suburbs don’t pay their own way.

  4. First, let’s dispense with the idea that property owners are the people who benefit most from having a sidewalk in front of their house. Sidewalks are part of the right-of-way, and it is the network of right-of-way connections as a whole that offers value; being able to get from any point A to any point B in a community. Who benefits most from sidewalks? Pedestrians, which is all of us about 90% of the time; kids, senior citizens, people with disabilities, dog walkers, joggers, tourists, shoppers, businesses, Trick-or-Treaters–need I go on? Sidewalks are a necessity, not a private benefit.

    Now let’s look at how offloading sidewalk maintenance onto adjacent property owners works in legacy cities in the Northeast, especially those almost fully designed and built out before the automobile became firmly established.

    My hometown of Buffalo, founded ca. 1804, has lost 50% of its population since 1950. While many of our neighborhoods are experiencing population growth, strong private investment, and soaring property values, a few miles away, other neighborhoods are so decimated that on some blocks, only 10% of the houses are still standing. The rest is urban prairie, acquired none too eagerly by the city in tax forfeiture. In several census tracts, the city itself is the single largest property owner.

    So, in these depopulated neighborhoods, who shall the city fine for failing to maintain the city’s own sidewalks? Maybe the Public Works Department can sue the Real Estate Division?

    Then there is the larger question: why are cities entitled to appropriate the labor or earnings of private citizens under threat of fines when it comes to publicly-owned sidewalks when all other public property (streets, roads, schools, parks, libraries, hospitals, etc.) is maintained at taxpayer expense? This looks like grounds for an equal protection lawsuit to me.

    If it is “skin in the game” to require property owners to fix broken sidewalks in front of their houses, then it should be “skin in the game” to fine adjacent property owners for failing to rake leaves and mow grass in the parks that they live next to. It should be “skin in the game” to fine adjacent property owners when they do not personally shovel out the streets in front of their houses or fill the potholes. (Plus, calculate the tax savings and even new revenue streams when we can cancel snowplowing contracts or lay off unionized workers and start fining homeowners for not shoveling roads & streets!) It should be “skin in the game” to fine adjacent property owners when the public school needs a new roof. It should be “skin the game” to fine the people who live next to public libraries when the shelves are not replenished.

    The point of paying city taxes for city services is that we all immediately have skin in the game when it comes to city property and city services.

    • What Cynthia said. Both sidewalks and road benefit people who are *not* the neighboring homeowners. They should be paid for out of local property tax.

      This allows for rational thinking. If property taxes are too high to support all the roads and sidewalks, the city can rationally decide which ones are least used, and downgrade the roads to gravel or sell them off.

      It is complete insanity to charge the neighboring homeowner for the road or sidewalk which happens to front his house. In fact, the only stretch of sidewalk I DON’T need is the one on my property, where I have the right to walk anywhere anyway — I benefit entirely from the sidewalks on OTHER people’s property, where I would otherwise be trespassing.

  5. Historically, in Indiana, “right of way” was just that: the municipality had a right of way over property owners’ property, not fee simple ownership, and deeds showed that the real property ran to the centerline of the ROW. It was once widely presumed that improvements (paving, curbing, storm and sanitary sewers, sidewalks, tree lawns) were benefits that accrued to the property owner…so the municipality was able to assess each owner for his/her share of the cost of installing those public way improvements, to be paid over 10 years. This was called the Barrett Law, and it was much despised. When I owned an early 20th-century house, I had the title abstract and could see when the various improvements had been charged to the previous owners in the decades after the house was built.

    I do not know when “right of way” became “municipal ownership of streets”. But the concept always was that the property owners paid for the first round of improvements, and had to do their part to keep them up, including shoveling the walks in winter.

    In the 1990s suburban subdivision where I live now, we have to repair/replace our own sidewalks, which mostly happens as the neighborhood-mandated street trees’ roots push up the walk.

  6. The author seems to have missed a big part of the point of the CityLab piece. The problem, or at least a big part of it, isn’t so much homeowners having to pay for their stretch of sidewalk–it’s the inefficiency (both in terms of costs and in terms of ultimate quality) of having thousands of individual homeowners, most of them completely unaccustomed to dealing with contractors, each pursuing their own uncoordinated sidewalk improvement projects in front of their houses. It’s much more efficient and the results will be far superior for the purposes of a functional transportation system if a single public agency coordinates, plans, and executes sidewalk improvements. You know, like the road system in any city.

    As far as having homeowners (and other property owners) pay for it, well, sure–I don’t have a problem with that. But why not have homeowners pay a monthly property tax surcharge that goes into a dedicated fund that is managed by a city agency exclusively responsible for maintaining sidewalks, or building them where they don’t already exist? That has the added benefit of spreading the payments out rather than having homeowners get walloped with a $3,000 bill all at once (which, to add insult to injury, may be higher than it needs to be because of homeowners’ lack of experience dealing with contractors).

    If a given city took walking infrastructure as seriously as it takes driving infrastructure, it would implement some version of that.

    • You’re absolutely right, and *that is what the City of Ithaca, NY did a few years ago*. There’s now a “sidewalk fund” on the property tax bill along with the “road fund”.

      The Town of Ithaca, where I live (next door to the city) funds its sidewalks out of the road fund directly.

  7. The thing that scares me about this whole idea is that it incentivizes homeowners to oppose building sidewalks in the first place where they may not exist already. One could also argue that it’s unfair to require a homeowner to maintain something while not also allowing them to remove it entirely if they so choose.

    Since the sidewalk is just another part of the municipal right-of-way then singling it out for maintenance by the adjacent homeowner while leaving the roadway itself under the purview of the municipal government is unfair. Either it should all be the responsibility of the municipality or all the homeowner, but not this mixed bag.

    The point about inefficiency and added expense of having multiple individuals trying to negotiate small contracts for repair work is also a good one. In the days of hand-laid brick paving that the homeowner himself could install it wasn’t such a big deal, but that doesn’t fly in a world of ADA accessibility requirements and excessive liability concerns.

    This makes the idea of a frontage tax appealing, in that it directly represents costs for built infrastructure like the roadway, sidewalks, sewer pipes, and the like. It wouldn’t be a replacement for property taxes, but something to augment a lower property tax assessment. There’s some good analysis of it here: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/07/city-taxes-as-urban-growth-policies.html