Why Tax Base Fragmentation Is a Serious Problem

In planning, you'll often hear that having a variety of suburbs with diverse approaches to taxation and service provision is good — that it lets people "vote with their feet" for their preferred approach to governance. Well, I'm skeptical.

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The primary resource and jumping-off point for this video is the following paper and web tool, and thanks so much to the authors for being generous with their expertise!

Robert Manduca, Brian Highsmith, Jacob Waggoner, Tax base fragmentation as a dimension of metropolitan inequality, Socio-Economic Review, Volume 24, Issue 1, January 2026, Pages 331–362, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf055

Explore the Tax Base Fragmentation website here: https://www.taxbasefragmentation.net/

Other Resources:

• Citizens United (crying emoji) https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep558/usrep558310/usrep558310.pdf

Images, mostly mine as usual, BUT:

• Thumbnail via Getty — Credit: Wei Fang,Creative #: 2179506119

• NYPD By Jason Lawrence - https://www.flickr.com/photos/27665395@N05/37580678874/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64973230

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