Cunninghams_right t1_isulat1 wrote
more separated bike lanes.
one problem with a lot of initiatives is that ideas often sound good, like "more transit", but people forget that transit costs money. even if there is no infrastructure built but just more buses added, buses cost nearly a million each and hundreds of thousands each to operate per year. so the response to "more transit" is "ok, what program do you want to cut, then" and it descends into arguing and does not get traction.
bike lanes, on the other hand, require very little ongoing cost and initial cost of 1/10,000th that of adding a train line, and less than 1/100th of the cost of a BRT route. thus, separated bike lanes can actually dramatically improve the city without having to get into the "well what program do we cut" argument.
also, per passenger-mile, the various rental scooters/bikes cost less than our buses (if you account for the subsidy that buses get). so maybe we aught to consider subsidizing bikes in addition to buses, trains, and cars.
also, 3-wheel rental scooters can get many more people moving around the city efficiently and quickly without the need for the physical fitness and balance needed for traditional bikes/scooters
smallteam t1_isum22z wrote
> also, 3-wheel rental scooters
TIL those exist!
Cunninghams_right t1_isunv59 wrote
they are only in a couple of cities. I don't think baltimore has them yet, but if we offered to subsidize rides like transit, I'm sure companies would be willing to offer those to get the deal done.
Xanny t1_isw8ugp wrote
The city would have plenty of money if it:
- abolished and reformed the PD, preferably into separate, smaller departments. Its so corrupt its unsalvagable as it is. Give neighborhoods their own local PDs with officers that have to actually give a shit about their neighborhood.
- with non-shit law enforcement enforce traffic law. Like, that alone will be like a hundred million bucks. People ignore red lights, speed limits, hazard lights in the middle of the road, ignore pedestrian right of way, etc.
- yeet the property tax and replace it with a land value tax, and have an underutilization penalty on parking lots and vacants. This long term isn't a huge revenue source, but having this kind of tax code will get vacants turned over to people to redevelop and see wasted parking space rebuilt into usable real estate. People being able and wanting to live here makes the city more money.
- local gas tax. The gas in this city is grotesquely cheap compared to like any other city in the country. Gas stations get mad, but gas being more expensive in cities one disincentivzes driving in them and two disincentivizes gas stations being built in the city which eat up a lot of infrastructure. But in the meantime its, again, a ton of revenue cities like Philly, DC, and NY enjoy.
Also the state needs to legalize and tax drugs. This isn't directly for the city, but again, huge revenue stream the state is just ignoring. Put the money in the MTA and build the damn metro.
But there you go, saving hundreds of millions a year, plus hundreds of millions in new revenue, at least. We could totally build a few bike lanes with that or hell maybe even have the circulator run with 5 minute headways and expanded service. I'd love to see the circulator run from Pigtown / Fed Hill in the south west to Westide / around Druid Hill Park up to Hampden and over to Canton, just because having regular free busses will get a ton of people more mobile and have more cars off the road so cyclists don't have to fear for their lives.
Cunninghams_right t1_iswi5r0 wrote
- abolishing the BPD would have to be done incredibly carefully or everyone with a good paying job would leave the city (more than they already are) if they perceive the transition as being rocky/dangerous. the city would likely have to increase police budget during the transition. this could certainly pay dividends in the long term, though.
- not enforcing traffic laws isn't an issue of resources, it's an issue of it being politically unpopular to fine poor people
- land value tax is stupid and never going to happen.
- I guess cities can put their own gas tax in place (either directly or indirectly). that might actually help with the budget. not enough to build substantial transit, but maybe it can build some bike lanes since they're orders of magnitude cheaper. the lost tax revenue from stations moving out of the city or closing may or may not be made up for by the extra tax rate.
yeah, more frequent buses, especially for central-city routes like the circulator, will draw more riders. it still won't be as fast or as green as bikes/scooters/tricycles, but better than cars.
Xanny t1_iswm0k2 wrote
> land value tax is stupid and never going to happen.
Wanna actually justify this instead of just saying its stupid? As it is people are penalized for actually developing in the city, while their neighbor can be a vacant derelict lot in downtown paying nothing in taxes. This creates tons of perverse incentives all over, including the usage of vacants as credit lines where the mortgages can be refinanced at the initial appraisal while the property taxes drop year over year as the property falls into disrepair. LVT both punishes underutilization of valuable land and incentivzes development to create new, desirable areas. As long as its paired with vacancy penalties to avoid overdevelopment, it could possibly single-handedly fix the vacants nightmare.
Cunninghams_right t1_iswpedm wrote
sorry for being so flippant with my dismissal.
taxes aren't the reason we have vacants. shifting the tax burden away from the higher value properties and onto the lower value properties would have a worse effect. say you own a 3-story rowhouse in some neighborhood... awesome, your tax bill drops, the value of your house skyrockets. but what if you're the person who owns the 2-story house next door?... your taxes suddenly go up dramatically, meaning you cannot sell your house for what you paid for it... now you're WAY under water on your mortgage. may as well file for bankruptcy and walk away. over time, all of the historic houses in the city that are 2-story can be bulldozed, I suppose, if you can get the historical society to agree to that. in the mean time, you'll have a lot more vacants and a much smaller tax base because you gave all of the wealthiest owners a huge tax break. you can raise the overall rate, but that will disproportionately harm the properties with lower value structures, exacerbating the problem.
in sim-city, such a system could work. in the real world, it's trading one distorted incentive for another, and the only way out is the destruction of historic properties. if the goal is to encourage development, other methods can be used.
Xanny t1_isynz59 wrote
Maryland and Baltimore have homestead tax exemptions that prevent your property taxes from going up more than 4% per year. That means the neighbors house would only see 4% more taxes per year if owner occupied. I shoulda mentioned that in the first post, but that law is what makes a switch to LVT work.
And your taxes wouldn't go up dramatically. A 3 story rowhouse is not appraising for double a two story. I'm not sure of anywhere in the city where the 3k+ square foot mansion houses with hvac and 4 bathrooms are next to 1000 sq ft single bathroom radiator heated ones. Like they are often blocks away, but LVT is cumulative against your neighbors rather than just flat, so rich areas would have much higher land values than poor, and the betwen has a gradated tax drop.
As it is now, the tax code says if you don't improve your land, you pay less in tax, and thats enabling people to hoard derelict property that has extremely low tax rates. Its not a pancea for the vacancies, but it reverses a trend that incentivizes them.
You seem to think that with an LVT two story blocks like, say, Pigtown would suddenly double or triple their property taxes, but the whole point is to average the taxes out so that vacants get punished more and developers have more incentive to build up.
I will admit, I don't think the historic townhouses in most of the city are sacred. They are, ultimately, just brick when their interiors rot and get burned out from arson. If historic preservation keeps places vacant and unlivable, the question becomes do we want Baltimore to be a mausoleum to 19th century brickwork or a livable city.
And nothing stops you from just adding a third, fourth, or fifth story to existing brick, or just requiring replacement construction adhere to those 19th century design standards of brick face. The real threat to preservation is things like Heritage Crossing, where entire neighborhoods are flattened and replaced with single family detached sprawl that plagues the rest of the country, and that is more a zoning thing than anything - and yeah, single family yarded properties should definitely be banned for new development within Bmore city limits.
Cunninghams_right t1_isz119b wrote
>That means the neighbors house would only see 4% more taxes per year if owner occupied.
the taxes have to come from somewhere
> A 3 story rowhouse is not appraising for double a two story.
not true. 4br row houses (3-story) are often right next to 2br (2-story) and the price difference is often hundreds of thousands of dollars (30-50%) (just look at federal hill/south baltimore). that is enough to put someone's mortgage underwater to a degree that they will likely walk away.
>so rich areas would have much higher land values than poor
how would you even appraise this?
>As it is now, the tax code says if you don't improve your land, you pay less in tax, and thats enabling people to hoard derelict property that has extremely low tax rates
but there are already mechanisms that can be used to charge fines, fees, and taxes to people who aren't developing property. the #1 reason the city does not take over the bulk of vacant properties in this city is because they have no value to anyone and they cost money to maintain. if the properties were valuable to develop, the city would slap fines and fees on vacants for being attractive nuisances or fire hazards or whatever. the city does not want the properties, so they don't do that. land/property is undeveloped because of public safety, which causes people to not want to live in a place.
> but the whole point is to average the taxes out so that vacants get punished more and developers have more incentive to build up
average between whom, though? bigger houses with richer people get a break while smaller houses with poorer people pay more... yes, after they go bankrupt and the house sits vacant, maybe a developer would have more incentive to bulldoze the old row house and build a high density slum triplex... not sure that's what we want....
>I will admit, I don't think the historic townhouses in most of the city are sacred. They are, ultimately, just brick when their interiors rot and get burned out from arson. If historic preservation keeps places vacant and unlivable, the question becomes do we want Baltimore to be a mausoleum to 19th century brickwork or a livable city.
if LVT was applied only to neighborhoods with high vacancy rates, you might have a point. but there absolutely ARE many neighborhoods with very cool historic properties that would then be under very strong incentive to bulldoze and build higher.
​
>And nothing stops you from just adding a third, fourth, or fifth story to existing brick, or just requiring replacement construction adhere to those 19th century design standards of brick face
that's not how that actually happens, though. first, that does damage the history of the building. second, 12ft wide row houses make little sense to build up, but rather buy 2+ units, or whole blocks, and build very high up from that one location. LVT incentivizes knocking down whole blocks rather than adding 1 additional story to existing structures (which is all you can add due to the limits of existing construction.
there are also tons of things you're not accounting for, like: how do you set the land values? if it's not based on the structures that are there and their condition, then what is it? can such valuations be gamed? like, could a landlord intentionally buy a few houses and let them fall into disrepair so that the neighborhood's land value drops, thus lowering the tax burden on the rental units?
Xanny t1_it01uxe wrote
> the taxes have to come from somewhere
Mostly from vacant and underutilized property (and there is a lot of it) now having greater outstanding tax burden. Most of the vacants in Bmore are actually paying their taxes, or they would go to tax sale. There are a lot of properties that have been tax delinquent for so long its not worth buying the tax lien anymore, but they are pretty rare. Basically any property that can be got for under its appraisal value gets its tax leans bought at the annual tax sales.
This happens because these properties represent perverse equity. The city habitually appraises everything below its market rate valuation, largely because the property tax rate is so high, and this means that property you obtain can be mortgaged in the private market for more than the city thinks its worth. Especially if you roll that mortgage, or just use the depreciation from the city against your purchase as a business loss, which a lot of the fake pseudo LLCs in Bmore do all the time with derelect vacants getting lower and lower city appraisals.
I only suggest LVT because 1. these properties would still pay their taxes, but there would be pressure on the owners to offload them to be developed for use rather than just hoarded for their depreciated improvement value. 2. there are a lot of them. 3. current home owners are protected by the homestead tax exemption. 4. the city is awful at actually enforcing fines, penalties, etc and state equity of taxation laws might prevent entirely the levying of fines against certain things (like say, vacant notices). They also put the pressure where you want it - vacants in downtown or well off areas should cost a fortune to keep derelict.
I think we want different things is part of the problem. Baltmore is poised to be a place for milennials seeking urbanism - there are entire blocks of downtown vacant that can be redeveloped, state center has to be replaced, the city should look to rip out 83 past Penn Station in the next decade, MLK needs to stop being a scar cutting off half the city, the road to nowhere needs to go away, etc. The red line should be built, hopefully the green extension and yellow lines too. All these things and more can make Baltimore desirable to live in for a generation that can't afford New York, LA, DC, etc prices but can still have a walkable, bikable, transit oriented city. The complete streets ordinance maybe gives me too much hope.
Does that mean 120 year old 2 story brick townhouses might get leveled for 5+ story apartment buildings? Probably. Does it displace people? Urban renewal has to, and if the city saw that kind of growth it would have the kind of incoming revenues to catch people before they get lost in the wave. The alternative is continued population decline, more vacancy, worse roads, more violence and poverty and desperation. The city got gutted by white flight and the state for a century and Wes Moore ain't great but hes the best shot Bmore has had in a while at turning things around.
But incentives matter. There are reasons Baltimore is unique in the Northeast Corridor for its degree of abandoned property. There are structural things the city can do like an LVT to both grow revenue and promote growth that have proven results around the world. I'm not suggesting an LVT like nobody has done it before. Places like Australia have had it for decades with proven results.
Cunninghams_right t1_it0qfzq wrote
>Most of the vacants in Bmore are actually paying their taxes
source?
also, how many are going to keep paying when their tax bill goes up 100x? I would wager none, so the city would have to spend years in court and tax sale to take the properties, meanwhile have a fraction of the tax revenue. THEN you have to convince someone to buy it with the super-high taxes and build something... except developers already get tax deals in the city and they are still not developing most of those parcels of land anyway... what is someone's motivation to buy and build on a site when the only difference with LVT vs now is that LVT gives them a higher tax bill?
> the city is awful at actually enforcing fines, penalties, etc
that's because they know most won't pay it and it will cost the city a fortune to take over the property and they will never recoup their costs.
>There are reasons Baltimore is unique in the Northeast Corridor for its degree of abandoned property
yeah, crime. it's not the tax structure that is stopping development. property values in neighborhoods that are perceived to be safe. when I first moved the the city, a friend lived next to an abandoned hardware store in fed hill. it sat vacant for at least a decade... then... fed hill/SOBO became known as safe neighborhoods that property values doubled, which caused that hardware store to be replaced with brand new nice houses. it didn't require any special tax structure change, just a perception of safety.
Xanny t1_it122vz wrote
> so the city would have to spend years in court and tax sale
The city doesn't "spend" a lot on tax sales, its mostly an automated system. The courts only get involved if the owner of a tax lien takes their lien to court after 9 months of non-payment, and then its procedural - nobody will show up on the other side, so the lienholder gets title rights.
Like I said, right now every new property that goes to tax sale gets bid on without fail. Investors are losing a lot of money on tax lien buys, even. There were tax liens on two houses on my block in 2021 that both got bid up to the property appraisal rather than the lien value, and then both liens were paid, so those buying the liens were out tens of thousands each (which are just a business tax expense writeoff for them).
Now to be fair, there is a reason those tax liens are bought at inflated prices, its because someone who can get that 9 month court hearing for title rights doesn't actually become owner of the property, they obtain title rights to it. Which means they can sit on assignment of title forever without ever being responsible for the taxes. They own it, but they aren't responsible for it. This is another broken system that needs revision, but for now investors are definitely buying tax lien property in Baltimore if the lien amount is less than the appraisal.
> it's not the tax structure that is stopping development
There are 10 year old vacant notices still in effect in Downtown. Some of these lots pay hundreds of dollars in property tax in the heart of the city. For damn sure they are being floated in perpetuity thanks to the tax code. Investors love hoarding, and property in Baltmore is cheap and taxes favor them letting it sit and rot, so that is what they do. Yes, there are neighborhoods where violence keeps investment out, but plenty of the city is not that bad yet still is plagued by persistent vacancy.
Some of my favorites are 37-41 W Preston St. Huge commercial office zoned buildings, one vacant since the 90s and the other for a decade, and the church across the street owns and pays their taxes. But the windows are rotted and the buildings have gone unused for forever. The church probably holds them in trust, but the fact thats even happening despite them being prime commercial real estate in the middle of Midtown right by Penn Station highlights the problem.
Cunninghams_right t1_it13y4o wrote
you're focusing on the microcosm of problem that are solved by LVT and ignoring the problems created. meanwhile, the city could absolutely pass ordinances so places like 37-41W Preston get fined up the wazoo and could solve that problem if they wanted.
Xanny t1_it15uuf wrote
What problems are created, again? As we already discussed the homestead tax exemption in MD already protects current residents from seeing huge upswings in property tax, and you already claimed and I rebutted that vacants don't pay taxes or that nobody buys tax defunct property
The city could pass a piecemeal of ordinances to address this, or it could just reform the tax code - something people have been hankering for for years, anyway - in a way that adds revenue and creates positive rather than perverse incentives (atm, improving your property makes you pay more in taxes, and at such high property tax rates as Bmore city has, it means you are pressured to make your property minimally functional for your needs to avoid paying more taxes).
Cunninghams_right t1_it2uomt wrote
you rebutted that people buy tax defunct property but have not shown that they would do so if such properties were required to bare the majority of the city's tax burden.
it is also not true that people stop improving houses to avoid taxes. look at the renovated houses in wealthier neighborhoods like roland park or bolton hill. people renovate those and make them amazing.
you're hand waving away all the problems.
0fft33mp0 t1_it25jkh wrote
>abolished and reformed the PD, preferably into separate, smaller departments. Its so corrupt its unsalvagable as it is. Give neighborhoods their own local PDs with officers that have to actually give a shit about their neighborhood.
I recommend voting yes on question h to give control over BPD back to Baltimore. Currently the city can't oversee their own police department or make any changes without state approval.
For more info: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wU6_fqw6GsbmCpcXjo7q1g2kBJ3ZL_xX/view
geonerd04 t1_isvnapf wrote
Improved transit between thriving (and regional) residential and job centers would make this either/or scenario irrelevant. As in, viable alternatives to driving between places like Hunt Valley - Towson -Downtown - Columbia - Owings Mills, etc. While it’s an admittedly powerful lobby (especially on Reddit), the bike lobby would lose horribly on such a ballot initiative. The executive living in Timonium and working in Harbor East will throw money at the opponent of any politician supporting this. The CNA commuting across town from West Baltimore to Hopkins via the MTA will certainly vote against such an initiative.
I know I’m generalizing, but think it’s safe to say that the majority of folks in the region, whether they’re voting with their wallets or at the ballot box, would vote against their own interests for the convenience of a handful of transplanted 20-something cyclists that want to shave a few minutes off their cycling ‘commute’ from Mt. Vernon or Patterson Park to Harbor East. But stranger things have happened…
Cunninghams_right t1_iswgkwb wrote
I started typing but I'm just deleting that message. it's so pointless arguing with someone who has no idea why it's impossible to run transit all over the county and also thinks that the only people who bike or would bike are 20-somethings. it's just so far out of touch that I would have assumed you were from towson or Timonium without you even having flair.
MixmasterMatt t1_iswkug8 wrote
I live in the district with the most bike infrastructure, and no one uses it. You can count on one hand the number of bicycles I see in a year. Bikemore is very loud and that helps them get a lot of money for their hobby, but 99.9999% of people in Baltimore have no plans to commute via bicycle. We need rail, subways, and busses. Transportation for taxpaying adults with families and jobs that need to be able to work in the summer and winter, travel with their children, and get groceries. Baltimore neither has the climate nor the terrain nor the density for bicycles to be a legitimate option. As bad as Bikemore wants this to be Amsterdam, this isn’t Amsterdam and it never will be.
Cunninghams_right t1_iswnvqh wrote
>I live in the district with the most bike infrastructure, and no one uses it. You can count on one hand the number of bicycles I see in a year
- that's just false.
- networks of bike lanes grow ridership exponentially. think about if we swapped so that the streets with fully separated, protected bike lanes were the only streets on which you could use a car... nobody would drive because a single street does not get you anywhere.
>but 99.9999% of people in Baltimore have no plans to commute via bicycle.
with no bike lanes and no subsidy of bikes or scooters and no 3-wheel scooters, I wouldn't expect huge numbers of people to commute by bike. that's the fucking point. lots of people actually do commute using the lime/spin/etc. scooters already instead of taking buses. you make those options free, you give every route within the city the option of a protected lane, you make many of the lanes covered, and you distribute 3-wheel scooters and you will see lots of people using bikes.
it costs $2-$3 per passenger mile to operate buses in Baltimore city, but the ride is 75% subsidized so people still ride the buses (in low numbers). if you did the opposite, and subsidized rental bikes/scooters/trikes $1.5-$2.25 per mile and took the monthly bus pass from $75 to $308 and you would see skyrocketing bike-lane use (and plummeting bus use), and it would be faster and more environmentally friendly. but we can actually do one better than that, we can not just subsidize the rentals, but we can subsidize employers to lease bikes/scooters/trikes to employees. a new entry-level bike costs the same amount as a single month of bus pass if it wasn't subsidized. an e-bike costs as much as 3 monthly bus passes. except, the bikes will last 10x-100x longer than the bus pass for the same amount of money. other organizations can provide the same role of unemployed folks.
>We need rail, subways, and busses. Transportation for taxpaying adults with families and jobs that need to be able to work in the summer and winter, travel with their children, and get groceries
again, more boomer stupidity. educate yourself. and here.
>As bad as Bikemore wants this to be Amsterdam, this isn’t Amsterdam and it never will be
you're probably right, but not for any legitimate reason, just the pure ignorance you've already shown, which is all too common. people think they'll die if they're outside in the rain with full rain gear on, but the only thing that is killing people is car-centrism.
MixmasterMatt t1_iswqf02 wrote
How do you get to work in the winter or summer? Or when you have to bring supplies? Or when you have to commute a few dozen miles? Or when you can’t get to work covered in sweat? How do you take your kids to soccer practice? How do you get groceries? What about old people? What about people with physical disabilities? Bicycling only works under certain weather conditions for a very narrow set of people that has everything they need within 5 miles of their house and never has to transport anything bigger than a backpack. It is a recreational hobby, not a means of viable transportation for the vast majority. Bikemore hipsters want their private parade lanes so everyone can see how hip they are as they fixed gear towards the latest craft brewery. But most of us are getting fed up with the resources this city pours into your hobby while real solutions like busses, rail, subways, and even electric ride shares get ignored and the streets that 99.9999% of people use to get to work and pay taxes crumble. It’s a great way for the city to say they did something without doing anything useful though.
Cunninghams_right t1_isyb1lz wrote
>How do you get to work in the winter or summer? Or when you have to bring supplies? Or when you have to commute a few dozen miles? Or when you can’t get to work covered in sweat? How do you take your kids to soccer practice? How do you get groceries? What about old people? What about people with physical disabilities? Bicycling only works under certain weather conditions for a very narrow set of people that has everything they need within 5 miles of their house and never has to transport anything bigger than a backpack.
I asked that you inform yourself and gave you links.
but I can give you the TL;DR: the advent of cargo ebikes and 3-wheel e-scooters remove all of the issues you've just mentioned.
> But most of us are getting fed up with the resources this city pours into
the city puts less money into bike lanes than into a single bus on a single bus route. you just don't know the cost of transit and the cost of infrastructure. if metros cost the same as bike lanes, then I would be saying we should build metros everywhere. bike lanes cost 1/60,000th the cost of a the average metro line in the US, per mile. but you don't know that because you drive a car everywhere because you have the mind of a boomer and haven't questioned whether there are ways that the city itself can improve things.
too_technical t1_isvbpof wrote
DC has those lanes everywhere. Crossing them is actually riskier than crosser than street most of the time, because the cars come slower!
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