Urban Fiscal Woes

Image is a photograph, taken at dusk on October 2, 2026, by James Lyons Walsh, of a stretch of interstate highway I-90, just west of Albany, New York, USA. High-speed roads enabled suburbanization in the United States during the latter half of the 20th century.

October 22, 2026

I am a huge fan of Chris Churchill, the Albany, New York, USA Times Union columnist, in part because I vehemently disagree with him on a couple of issues, one being taxation. I enjoy the challenge his writing constitutes to my ideas on these topics as much as I like the support he gives some of my other ideas. I haven’t advocated any particular solution to the fiscal crisis of my birthplace, but looking at Mr. Churchill’s column today helps me get perspective on the problem Albany faces (Commuter tax is an absurdity from Albany lawmakers).

Mr. Churchill mentions that he and his colleagues work in Colonie. Why is the Albany Times Union headquartered in Colonie, to which it presumably pays its property taxes, supporting relatively affluent communities instead of needier ones in Albany?

The Times Union gives a heroic account of its 1970 move out of Albany, casting it as a defiance of the local political machine, though we learn from the story that multimillion dollar presses had been ordered before the politicos had agreed to sell a "sliver of land" needed to build an addition to house the presses (Albany NY News - Times Union - 150th Anniversary Edition). It sounds to this reader as if the Hearst family set up a no-lose situation for itself: Either the machine would submit by selling the land to them, or the Hearsts would be able to blame the machine for forcing them to move to the suburbs. The more I learn about their history, the more I come to suspect that the Hearst family today is as conniving as its famous ancestor William Randolph, after whom a building wound up named at a local college, as if the family liked to remind people of the origins in cutthroat capitalism of the family wealth. Why might the Hearsts have been interested in moving the Times Union out of Albany in 1970? 

Several trends from the latter half of the 20th century drove many residents and businesses out of United States cities. One was white flight from newly empowered Black people, in short, racism.

Another was land speculation and development. Construction of high-speed roads enabled people to live further from urban workplaces, creating an opportunity to profit from, and thus an incentive to promote, suburbanization. From kindergarten through eighth grade, I attended what was then known as St. Gregory’s School for [Privileged] Boys (motto: The privilege is silent) with some of the scions of the wealth generated in this process.

Another trend was the quest for lower taxes. St. Gregory’s School was in Loudonville (motto: The privilege is invisible), just across the railroad tracks from the Arbor Hill neighborhood of Albany. The racial and economic gulf constituted by the gorge along which the railroad tracks run is appalling, and Loudonville residents are taxed in Colonie, not Albany. Get it?

One resident of Loudonville is liberal state legislator Phil Steck, a partner in a white-shoe downtown Albany law firm that, in recent years, incorporated in its logo a pictograph, taken from the firm’s early history, with which a native American chief in 1787 “signed” away part of his people’s land on a deed that he obviously could not read (About Our Logo -). The professional managerial class in the United States has lost even the good sense to pretend not to be evil. I am full up with Phil Steck and his liberal ilk.

I think I understand why the Albany Common Council is pressing forward with its commuter tax idea, despite widespread condemnation from powerful folk.

Another reason for suburbanization in the latter half of the last century was the perceived need to disperse population in response to the threat of global thermonuclear war. This effort may have helped make nuclear war less appealing to generals and politicians, perhaps saving our civilization. Of course, by 1983, we knew that nuclear winter would kill the vast majority of survivors of any large-scale nuclear war, so subsequent dispersal was not justified by military strategy.

Today, as I believe Mr. Churchill knows, suburbs are becoming financially unsustainable. The wide dispersal of population causes infrastructure costs to balloon. So far, as Strong Towns has documented on YouTube, new development has financed infrastructure installation and replacement, but the amount of land is finite. Growth is tapering off, and the full bill for suburban lifestyles will come due. Re-urbanization is a trend expected to intensify with time and should eventually solve the fiscal problems of cities like Albany by restoring their tax base.

As I’ve told Chris Churchill and his boss, George R. Hearst III, scion of a scion of a scion of William Randolph Hearst, who took a newspaper his daddy bought with money from gold mining and parlayed it into a media empire that eventually monopolized the Albany, New York, newspaper market, Mr. Churchill and the rest of the editorial board have contributed to the urban fiscal woes in the region by reporting nominal tax and budget increases, values not adjusted for inflation. The stigmatization of attempts to adjust taxation to account for inflation, including the especially rapid inflation in healthcare and pension costs, to which municipalities are especially liable, has inhibited such adjustment and contributed to the current fiscal crisis in Albany, Schenectady, and other cities. Manipulation of public opinion with deceptive statistics to promote antitax fervor may seem to advance the interests of baronial wealth, like that of the Hearst family, but hastens arrival of the day when wealth will be taxed directly, as California is poised to do.

Hey! How about that? To tide cities over until their tax bases are restored through re-urbanization, let’s institute a California-style wealth tax. A haircut for baronial wealth could save lives and redress wrongs, both ancient and relatively recent.