The Oil Drum

Ayup - spittin' distance from where I live. Come on down - there's lots more of 'em too.

The crane accident in Miami last week? Still building those high six and seven digit condos on the shoreline. Mayeb we can use them to start the seawall we're gonna be needing.

Too lazy to grab the link, but a few weeks ago there was an article about how the population was declining in Broward County (one county North of Miami) and the same in general in Florida. Couple that with talk about - ahem - property tax reform (FOR THE THIRD TIME) only this time it's really about moving some tax sources from property tax to sales tax. Now population decline is not necessarily a bad thing to a Peak Everythinger - like me - 'casue after all we aren't exactly swimming in potabale water down here (we pump good rainfall - when it happens - into the freaking ocean. But the impact on (sales) taxes...

And we ain't even started to hurt...wait until the cruise line industry collapses. Airlines are already cutting back. Long time "bigger" industry like Motorola will shrink even more if not disappear all together.

Even Shaq left!

Pete

Once most municipalities have gone bankrupt, they might be restructured to continue operations, but it will have to be at a much lower level than previously. They just possibly might be able to maintain a minimal building inspection department at best (re-engineered from a "nit-pick mode" to a "what really matters mode", i.e., just keep the structure from collapsing or catching on fire, otherwise pretty much anything goes), but zoning will have to go by the wayside. Regardless of whether the ordinances remain on the books or not, they will be unenforced and increasingly unenforceable.

Municipalities might very well shrink and de-annex territories that they can no longer economically service. If there are large swaths of depopulated land around their periphery that they are not actually managing to collect any property taxes on, then why bother keeping it in the city limits? Many municipalities might have to limit themselves to that extent of territory that their police force can patrol on foot - fuel for police cars being too expensive to use except for calls for backup, and certainly too expensive for drives way out into the boonies. The same considerations apply with fire departments.

Water utilities will be increasingly expensive to operate and maintain, and cities will only be able to afford to supply water to their densely populated centers, not the sparsely populated peripheries (which could, after all, supply their own water with wells).

We all know that the private passenger automobile and commutes in it from the suburbs is unsustainable, and that people are going to eventually have to go to urban mass transit (or bicycles, or feet). The trouble, though, is that in many metro areas we are talking about multiple municipal jurisdictions that mostly don't like to cooperate with each other. In only a few areas has this tendency been overcome and regional transit systems successfully established. For many places, this regional cooperation will not happen quickly enough, and once most municipalities are under severe fiscal stress, the window of opportunity to develop regional transit systems will have closed. Shrinking municipalities will look only toward serving their own citizenry, and very much on the cheap at that. The last thing they will want to do is to extend a bus or tram line out into the sparsely populated periphery. If anything, what little service already exists out into the suburbs will probably be cut back, effectively stranding the people left out there, and hastening their abandonment of the suburbs. It would actually be to the advantage of shrinking municipalities to provoke and encourage this trend, as this would create more denser (and more economically serviceable) populations within the shrunken city limits, and would likely increase the economic activity within the city limits (thus increasing tax revenues). (I wonder if Kunstler has anticipated this side of things?)

In this manner will the suburban periphery eventually become abandoned, untaxed, and suitable for restoration to small-scale agricultural use.