My personal opinion is that we will never see widespread telecommunting. It will be offered to more and more government employees, and to the rest of us on a alternating schedule basis. For example, employees will be grouped by codes and will work from home on a rotation system – perhaps one or two days per week.

This should really heat up again when gas creaps back up to $4 a gallon.

What’s I find a little strange is the leading role finance and insurance have played in decentralization, given their tendency to benefit from agglomeration economies.

It will be interesting to see how the current economic crisis will impact this trend moving forward. How sustainably attractive are pre-fab suburbs in the context of boarded up big-box stores and ghettoized faux-communities? Will city living enjoy a renaissance spurred by notions of sustainability and negative suburban stigma? If so, jobs will certainly follow course and reverse the decentralization trend.

To what extent has Philly benefited from NYC, Boston, and DC simply pricing people right out of town?

Same goes for Jersey in general. My brother was priced out of Manhattan, he moved to Jersey City.

These statistical studies have trouble “controling” for such things.

After all, a 2.6% income tax surcharge looks cheap compared to Manhattan’s income tax. What’s it up to, 10%?

http://www.princeton.edu/prior/PRIOReconomy-Final-(2).pdf

In September, 2008 Princeton University’s Policy Research Institute for the Region released “Trends in New Jersey Migration: Housing, Employment, and Taxation” to discover the impact of a 2.6% income tax on everyone making over $500,000 in 2004.

The study found that:

The tax is “an effective and efficient revenue generation mechanism, having little effect on migration patterns among half-millionaire households.”

Since the tax increase, the “number of New Jersey half-millionaires also increased sharply, from about 26,000 in 2002 to 44,000 in 2006 – an increase of 70%.”

In fact, the study found that most people who move away from New Jersey move to states that impose even higher income taxes.

If Philadelphia was located in Missouri or Tennessee, it would be a monster in its own right.

Buzzcut: Only to a degree does Philly scares businesses away from locating there. Philadelphia does offer tax incentives, such as the 10-year tax abatement, which allows anyone who qualifies for a building permit to be exempt from paying taxes for 10 years. Taxes not withstanding, the city of Philadelphia has made significant strides over the past 10-15 years. We have just halted the deterioration that was caused by suburbanization and deindustrialization. More and more neighborhoods have seen rises in their population. There is a drop in crime, of course that drop could always be bigger. Philly does offer benefits that make paying taxes worth it, like the knowledge spillover effect, home to universities, a key node in the Bos-Wash megapolis, many of the cultural and recreational activities offered in other big cities, but at a cheaper price. Philadelphia still has its work cut out, but it could be the next big city.

I think the authors nail the potential impacts of the increasing suburbanization of jobs on the prospects for economic development:

“The decentralization of employment, by lowering density and interaction among proximate firms and workers, may also lower the rate of innovation. Carlino and colleagues find that across metro areas patenting rates are strongly associated with employment densities in the urbanized portion of those metro areas.7″

I don’t believe this bodes well for environmental sustainability, either.

A shift to nodal development, where there are centres of development outside of the city centre that act as clusters for employment, day-to-day needs, etc., that provide increased accessibility without dependence on private transport, could mitigate the environmental impact of the suburbanization of work. But would that be considered the creation of new city centres? Overall, this appears to be a worrying trend.

Those that are against taxes should keep in mind that services need to be paid for somehow. Creative taxation solutions might work better, though. This, however, doesn’t seem like the right forum to discuss taxation solutions to encourage the return to urban centres (and I don’t have the expertise to discuss taxation, either!).

Thanks, Richard, for your excellent work. My brother is doing a Ph.D. with a colleague of yours at U of T, Chris Kennedy, and I am doing similar work on the sustainability of cities.

I really had my eyes opened regarding business and taxes when our local assessor mis-assessed US Steel’s mill. They entered the assessment twice, and charged the mill twice what it was supposed to pay. They had to refund the overage.

It was $10M dollars.

Where does any city get off charging any business that amount of money? Other than damage to roads done by trucks hauling steel coils, the company doesn’t deserve to pay anywhere near that much. They city isn’t providing it any services to speak of.

The same would go for offices downtown. Like I said, they’re being treated like the golden goose. They don’t deserve that.