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Night_Thastus | parent | next
The other thing people often forget is that the 'land value' is also a measure of the city's well-being.

Those big spikes you see in the center? They cost very little for the city to maintain, and generate oodles of tax money.

Those big, wide areas out towards the fringes? They generate next to no tax income and cost a lot to maintain.

The urban subsidizes the sub-urban. The sub-urban lifestyle would be completely impossible without the ultra-dense urban centers. If planners and citizens don't keep that in mind, you can easily end up with an insolvent city budget that is bleeding from maintaining all the utilities and roads stretching out to the exterior.

munchler | parent | next
Most true suburbs aren't within the big city limits, so I'm not sure your point is well-founded. For example, in the DC area, the suburbs aren't even in the same state as the city and yet the suburbs seem to be thriving.
ghaff | parent | next
The Bronx is sub-urban? As someone else noted, Manhattan and The Bronx are totally different in ways that probably has little to do with population differently.
api | parent
Utilities and roads out into the suburban may be underpriced, but there’s a dark side to cities too. The suburbs and rural areas are often where people can afford homes.

I’ve had this hypotheses for a long time that the car is, at least economically, only incidentally about mobility. In reality it’s a tool for obtaining leverage in the real estate market.

Without sprawl urban landlords would have a captive audience and would extract all surplus. See: the law of rent.

I have a related hypothesis that the car drove the mid century middle class explosion in the US and some other countries, not by providing car jobs or any of the other conventional mechanisms but by allowing people to escape the law of rent.

Telework does this today for those who can use it, allowing people to leave high cost cities where good jobs are concentrated. The car did that until we reached the scaling limits of sprawl.

Also why I am a huge fan of Georgist taxation. Unfortunately we are moving in the opposite direction, taxing productivity and investment and wealth instead of taxing land and rent.

jeffbee | root | parent
Yeah well the problem is that after a moderately prosperous person buys a car and a house out in the suburb, the act of having spent half a million dollars makes them believe that they are entitled to drive their car into the city and enjoy the commerce and culture that the city fosters, plus free parking and toll-free roads and subsidized gas. None of those are great! In my town this manifests as people who live just over the county line in unincorporated places who nevertheless feel entitled to participate in city deliberations over road design and parking policies.
korkoros | parent | next
The overall claim is true - yes put it on a map.

But I'm not a fan of these particular maps because the use of 3d makes them harder to read. The isometric view and rotation away from north at the top break conventions that people use to orient themselves in the map and connect it to their lived experiences on the ground. I'm reasonably familiar with NYC geography, and I could not immediately recognize the landscape I was looking at in these maps. Ironically, it was only because I already knew the answer to the question that I could do so: "oh that huge green spike must be Manhattan".

I think a 2d choropleth map with a diverging color scale centered on the mean value would work better.

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AnthonyMouse | parent | next
This is mostly a result of zoning, isn't it? The high land value areas are the ones where you're less prohibited from building taller buildings. If the thing people actually want is indoor space then the piece of land where you can build a skyscraper is worth a lot more than the one which is limited to a single family home.

Someone should probably tell the homeowners with a high ratio of land to house who like to see their property values increase.

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svcphr | parent | next
> "1. People have wildly incorrect intuitions about where land value is concentrated"

Fwiw this sort of land value gradient has been studied in economics for ages. See papers on monocentric city model, going back to Alonso (1964), Muth (1969), and Mills (1967). Or even further back, von Thünen was talking back in 1826 about how land values spike as you get closer to the marketplace.

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paulluuk | parent | next
This is great, and it also feels like a great way to answer the question "Where should I buy a house if I want to be close to the center but not in the expensive area?".

> Let’s play a guessing game. How much more valuable is land in Manhattan than in the Bronx? Take a guess, then scroll down for the answer.

As someone who has never been in New York and doesn't live in the US, I knew beforehand that I would fail this test very hard, haha.

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ancillary | parent | next
Is "land value" the right term here? The NYC example uses assessed property value, which I think is a function of both the land under a property and the building itself. In that case, these "taller means more valuable" graphics are at least partially reflecting the fact that a tall building is probably more valuable than the short one next to it?
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Drunk_Engineer | parent | next
Nice idea, except the actual mapper site requires a google login to view.
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the_sleaze_ | parent | next
> Show an elected official

What is the problem this visualization seeks to make obvious? Is it just neat to think about and make?

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etiennebausson | parent | next
How much the land is worth is only one of the parameters.

Notoriously, the maintenance cost for suburbs and their infrastructure is significantly lower than the tax they bring. Shouldn't that be a major point un tax decisions?

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Night_Thastus | parent
You have it backwards. Suburb infrastructure is expensive and the land pulls in little tax money by comparison. They're almost always a net loss on the city's budget.
AlfredBarnes | parent | next
Was cool to see a few of the cities, and then cross reference with some searches on pricing to get a better understanding of the actual cost.
xnx | parent | next
Probably fun to make but harder to read compared to a bar chart.
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jonathanberger | parent
Note that the site that generated these does not support any San Francisco Bay Area cities. I learned this only after being forced to "Sign in with Google".