America’s racist housing rules can be fixed
My wife and I lived in a large densely populated city. The kind of place that in addition to property and school taxes also required a city wage tax. Despite that, the services sucked particularly the public school system. When we had kids, we had the mobility (luckily thanks to our affluence) to move someplace that offered a set of services (an outstanding public school) that was a new priority for us.<p>Now, we live in exactly the kind of community this article abhors. My neighborhood has a minimum lot size of at least 5 acres it might even be more. Property values in the community are high but so are the taxes, particularly the school taxes. You can buy a new car for what we pay in school taxes alone. Each of our neighbors pays the same or more. Our community will zone for affordable senior and special needs housing projects but typically not for high density affordable family housing though there is one small set of affordable town&#x2F;row houses.<p>I guess, that makes me a racist. Before you condemn me though, let me share my side of the argument.<p>Education funding in the USA is a community decision. Sure there is support from the State and the Feds, but that accounts for a very small portion of our school funding. The overwhelming majority comes from local school taxes, more than 93% in our case. My community has agreed schooling is a priority for us. There are small class sizes, typically with both a teacher and an aid per class. There are art programs, music programs, theater programs, and multiple language programs as well as competitive athletics and academic teams.<p>It would be fantastic if we could offer this opportunity to every kid in the county, but we simply can&#x27;t afford that. We don&#x27;t zone for, nor permit affordable higher density housing (other than senior and special needs). It is already the case that we have to police the affordable senior housing we do have as there have been cases of seniors attempting to proxy their grand kids into our school system.<p>Each grade in our system has at most two &quot;classes&quot;. Every new child entering the system has a very real and tangible cost to a community that already asks our members to pay $20k a year in school taxes. Every new student needs to be accounted for and we don&#x27;t have a hand wave budget that simply absorbs new students without consequences. A single hypothetical 50 unit affordable housing project with families like the one showcased in the Vox article could double the number of children in the school system.<p>The family in Vox article certainly can&#x27;t pay $20k in school taxes and that would leave our community with two choices. Either we would keep the services at their current level and everyone who actually pays would pay double (over $40k a year) or we manage the cost by reducing the services to those offered by a &quot;good&quot; rather than an &quot;outstanding&quot; system. Both are unsatisfactory to me. This hypothetical would fundamentally change the nature of the community. If we wanted a &quot;good&quot; public school, we could move 15 miles and pay half the tax and if we were willing to pay double, we could move 5 miles and drop our taxes by 90% then send our kids to a private school. Even a few paying families making a decision to move like this coupled with a doubling the student body could be financially catastrophic.<p>This is not just an issue about public school funding, it grows beyond that. Our community pays more than two million dollars a year to maintain the lake our town sits on. We maintain miles of walking, riding and skiing trails. The town plows the sidewalks when it snows and closes the roads for parades when a local sports team wins. We have a town library that would rival many city libraries and a large collection of public natural and artificial turf around town including a town indoor sports facility with a hockey rink and full size soccer turf.<p>In many respects this is an idyllic community and I often feel as if I have landed in some sort of fairy tail setting. If you knew where I lived and had kids, I&#x27;m guessing you would probably want to live here as well. During the pandemic, every seasonal home has been rented by families desperate to get their kids into our full-time in-person small outstanding school system and we are now technically beyond capacity in the school having to use one of the gyms in each building as class room space.<p>All these things are great. They are why we moved here and why so many want to move here, but they all have costs. This in my opinion is not racist (you are free to feel otherwise). I see it as an unfortunate financial reality that not every family can drive the newest car or go on the nicest vacations. A Ford Expedition is not racist because it is expensive to drive, Bermuda is not racist because it is expensive to live there. A Disney Cruise is not racist because it is expensive.<p>The economic reality is that not every family can afford to live where I live and I guess that makes me a racist now.