Of all the expenses that go into paying for housing each month, sewer lines aren’t usually top of mind. (Unless you’ve had the unpleasant experience, like I have, of recently having to deal with a broken one.) It turns out, though, that the cost of building and maintaining every mile of this sort of infrastructure is likely adding to your property tax bill or rent cost.
This is why, Vox senior reporter Marina Bolotnikova points out, all of us should be paying more attention to our cities’ and towns’ basic shapes.
As she explains in her smart piece, “A simple way to lower everyone’s property taxes”: When new homes are built in farther flung locations, each one costs municipalities tens of thousands of dollars more — just for basics like sewers and roads — than when they are built closer into city centers, where a lot of the infrastructure is already built in.
Seems logical, right? But, as Marina finds, these laws of simple geometry and economics haven’t been adding up for residents.
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—Katherine Courage, deputy editor Future Perfect
