Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

Why is Portland Different?

I was thinking the other day, as I was suffering on a disastrous American subway: Why are there no American cities with European levels of public service provision? I mean, I could understand if most Americans didn’t want their city to be nice, but surely this country has room for at least one city with decent infrastructure, where the streets and subways aren’t covered in grime.

And then I realized there is one: Portland.

I don’t think this is an accident. Portland also happens to be the only major American city with an urban growth boundary. Everywhere else in America, wealthy taxpayers flee to houses in the suburbs where they incorporate as separate political jurisdictions. They do this partly for zoning reasons—as a separate political jurisdiction, they can pass a law making it illegal to build any more houses in their neighborhood, thereby (they think) increasing the value of their own house—but it has this other consequence too: they’re no longer part of the city’s tax base. Even if the city wanted to tax them to support infrastructure, it simply couldn’t.