Americans can’t afford to live in America

by philg

In How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure? I wondered if we could afford to have immigrants living in America.

Looking at the materials that we got in advance of a recent “town meeting” (non-anonymous mob democracy, New England-style), I’m wondering if Americans can afford to live in America.

Town elites want to spend $100 million on a new school (see Why wouldn’t a Massachusetts town set up a school for gifted and talented students? for the numbers; on a per-student basis, it is more than the endowment for most of America’s better colleges and universities). To show us that everyone else is doing it too, we are shown a $65 million elementary school in Lexington, Massachusetts for 423 students ($153,664 per student; $593 per square foot; the Hastings School).

What else are we supposed to approve? We need a new fire engine… $600,000. Our library needs a replacement air conditioner… for $305,000. How big is this library? About the size of two serious McMansions: 18,600 square feet. How can it possibly cost $305,000 if they don’t have to run any new ducts or power lines? Asking this question at the meeting would be about as socially acceptable as putting a TRUMP sign on one’s lawn or painting an 8′-wide Confederate flag on the street side of one’s house.

The town will spend $16,000 on an Internet firewall and $26,000 on “email migration to cloud”.

Thanks to the Millionaires for Obama preventing the placement of any cell towers in our bucolic hamlet, our heroic first responders cannot communicate via mobile telephone. They need five new portable radios for $13,785. What kind of radios should they buy? A “Radio Communications Consultant Public Safety” will help them shop… for $14,000 additional.

Circling back to the main topic… given that our buildings and other infrastructure don’t last forever, how can Americans afford to live in America? Consider a family that moves to Lexington and has three children. The town will eventually have to build or rebuild elementary, middle, and high school capacity for those three children. That will cost roughly 3 times $153,664 or roughly $460,992, well above the median price of a house in the U.S. (about $350,000). No doubt some other towns can build cheaper than Lexington can, but the trend is for higher cost everywhere.

 

7 thoughts on “Americans can’t afford to live in America”

  1. I guess some of this is a status competition with other wealthy suburbs… I mean who wants to buy a $4m mansion in a community that can only afford a $50m dollar school? Lord knows what kind of riff-raff their schoolmates would be.

    Part of the cost might also be the long commute the workers have to do each day to reach the suburbs from wherever they can afford to live.

    That being said i’m sure there’s a fair bit of inefficiency and graft as well.

  2. philg, you may be surprised at how many people in your town will be sympathetic to your point of view. It looks like Cambridge has a local election system where one can easily get get elected to the town council with less than 10% of the total vote, and that is just on the first round of ballots. The final councilor selected in the 19th round, garnered only 1092 in the first round.

    http://www.cambridgema.gov/election2017/Council%20Round.htm

  3. Uh… I’ll setup a GREAT firewall for half that, and in a quarter of the time…

  4. Commercial AC isn’t cheap, and guessing that they will need 45 ton capacity for that space with the typical numbers of windows and personnel and average visitors present. Still, $305,000 for a chiller/compressor and air handler, that is a lot. How many bids did they get? Is there any participation from your local power company?

    How much additional tax revenue will be required for all of this expenditure? Have there been any discussions about increasing property taxes to pay for all of this, or does that come only after they approve the spending?

  5. David K: Do you have certified payroll? I recommend looking at the rules before making those promises.

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