Quote Originally Posted by Ross MacLochness View Post
Totally agree, I'd love to see that as well. And I agree that since OKC is a sales tax city, it's not a one to one comparison. However, the principles are still similar in that we still need to be doing the math to see if how and what we are building is sustainable long (and short) term. We still need to be building efficiently enough so that we can pay for services, roads, plumbing, sewer, etc and their long term maintenance costs with the amount of tax revenue we bring in no matter if it's property or sales tax. A wal mart does indeed bring in a **** ton of sales tax revenue, but think about all the land a wal mart uses. When you add up all the parking, roads, and other externalities that make wal marts in their current form viable, how much surplus do we get compared to the same sized parcel filled with fine grained, multi story development with a mix of uses and little to no parking. I don't have the answer, (but I believe I know what it would be) but these are the types of questions we need to asking. We don't have to choose one extreme, (i.e. land of wal-marts), or the other (i.e. Manhattan). We can move along that continuum how we want and what works best for our city, we just need to be sure we have enough intensity to pay for what we've built.
A Walmart downtown that could rely on traffic from our public transit and downtown residents in close(r) proximity (ie reduced infrastructure costs) would be a boon to the coffers, even though your idea is better.