Local government law focuses its gaze on certain fault lines: city and state, urban and suburban, insider and outsider, rich and poor, Black and white. A new fault line deserves increased attention. Local government law has a senior citizen problem. To be crystal-clear, the problem isn’t with senior citizens themselves. Older Americans are terrific participants in local government; indeed, they are the foundation of this entire level of government. They vote, they serve, and they volunteer. But therein lies the problem.

Our system of local government, in its very design, privileges older residents’ interests even as local government has been assigned responsibility for a set of issues where age is particularly salient. In an aging country, this interplay of structure and function threatens to distort and destabilize the local democratic process.

Local government is an arena where many of the central political issues – most pointedly public education – feature inherent generational conflict. Education, by far the top-ticket item for local budgets, pits those with children under eighteen against those without. Senior citizens, of course, rarely have school-age children.Footnote ¹ Other quintessentially local issues, like infrastructure development and land use regulation, likewise center conflict between today’s residents and future generations who might need a new road or more housing. Inasmuch as self-interest enters people’s calculations, older people calculate that self-interest on a different time horizon.

Now, local government law offers many tools for managing political conflict; such is the nature of democracy. If anything, local government offers additional tools for satisfying heterogeneous preferences compared to higher levels of government. There are more opportunities for dissenters to protect their interests with both voice (through richer forms of public participation) and exit (through voting with one’s feet). But conflicts across age groups already strain the efficacy of those tools, as they are available unequally. For reasons that appear structural, not contingent, seniors vote disproportionately more than nonseniors in local elections and participate more in local community processes.

Putting these features together, seniors are not just another set of citizens in the democratic mix. They are a group whose political power at the local level can far exceed their numbers. This distribution of power offers advantages, to be sure. Long-time residents may bring deeper local knowledge to bear, for example, and such local knowledge is often what justifies otherwise less-expert local governance in the first place. But it brings costs too, and those costs may rise quickly if the demographic predictions of The 100-Year Life play out. What is currently a difficult undercurrent of local politics may rush to the fore. This points to the importance of law in mediating, structuring, and restructuring those coming conflicts. This chapter asks whether our current system of local government can adequately and equitably serve an aging nation. In doing so, it focuses on uniquely local functions of service provision rather than on functions shared with states and the federal government, whether those be the exercise of regulatory powers or the administration of Medicaid and public hospital systems.Footnote ²

This is of course a speculative endeavor. Divining just how politics evolve in a future where half of all babies live to be 100 seems a thankless task.Footnote ³ Will advances in fertility treatment simultaneously shift the age at which parenthood turns to empty nesting? Will eighty be the new sixty, such that longer lives are spent in active retirement (and most importantly for local politics, as homeowners), or will large populations move to assisted living? Will growing ranks of seniors identify as a coherent group, even as being a senior becomes a more common trait? I would not hazard a guess, especially since this volume makes clear that the answers depend on the legal and policy choices we make along the way. To be conservative, I assume only that a growing share of people will exhibit political behavior approximating that of today’s older citizens: those whose children, if they had them, have left the home.

This chapter proceeds in five parts. First, it explains how some of local government’s central functions – education and infrastructure, especially – divide voters by age. Second, it describes how the institutions of local democracy – its low-turnout elections and rich participatory processes – disproportionately represent older residents’ interests. Third, it reviews the empirical literature on how these features of local government play out on the ground, which confirms the risks of an aging population for investments in the future. Fourth, it highlights the ill effects of local governments’ existing mechanisms for managing age-based conflicts, which rely on (and generate) exclusion and an overly market-based approach to providing public goods. Finally, it schematizes the alternative options for resolving these tensions: aligning voters’ preferences, equalizing voters’ political power, or reassigning responsibilities away from local governments.

19.1 Age and the Functions of Local Government

Local governments are the country’s public service providers. They do much else besides, of course. Local governments are often at the forefront of public policy, innovating on everything from civil rights and employment law to climate change. But what makes local governments truly unique is that they employ the actual people who carry out the work of government. Nearly two-thirds of public employees, not counting the armed forces, work for local governments.Footnote ⁴

And more than anything else, service provision means public education. There are over 8 million local employees working in elementary and secondary education, almost three-fifths of total local public employment.Footnote ⁵ K–12 education is almost as dominant in local finances as it is in local employment. Elementary and secondary education made up 40 percent of local spending in 2020, far more than anything else.Footnote ⁶ It is an exaggeration, but only a small one, to say that the politics of local taxation is the politics of public education.

After education, the next largest categories of local spending relate to health and public welfare, followed by infrastructure. Local health spending overwhelmingly reflects local administration of the state/federal Medicaid program, over which local governments play a distinctly secondary policymaking role. Infrastructure spending, in contrast, is a quintessentially local function, the interstate highway system notwithstanding. State and local governments pay for about 60 percent of capital spending on infrastructure and 90 percent of operational costs; they split these costs roughly evenly, with states taking more responsibility for highways and other regional infrastructure.Footnote ⁷ These investments go toward roads, in particular, but also water, sewer, and solid waste infrastructure and, importantly, debt service on past capital expenditures.Footnote ⁸ The centrality of education and infrastructure to local budgets makes age a fault line in local politics. They divide parents from nonparents and pit current spending against long-term investments.

Moreover, unlike at the federal level, age may not be just one fault line among many. Most local governments are substantially more homogeneous than the nation at large: inside a given city’s or suburb’s limits, there aren’t the urban/rural or north/south divides that typify national politics, and persistent segregation makes many localities racially and economically uniform as well. Local governments also deal with a smaller set of issues: There are fewer independent political axes like foreign policy or international trade to cross-pressure voters. Nor can local governments use deficit spending to finesse intergenerational fiscal conflict. Thus, when demographic divides emerge at the local level, they may loom large.

19.2 Age and the Governance of Local Government

Even as the three-tier system of American federalism assigns certain age-related services to local governments,Footnote ⁹ the structures of local democracy dramatically overrepresent older residents. Older residents’ voices are elevated through both electoral and participatory channels.

First, while older Americans are generally better voters than younger people, the nature of local elections widens that gap considerably. Local elections often take place off the presidential (or even midterm) cycle. At the same time, they frequently lack political parties or popular media coverage to inform and mobilize voters. This leaves elections shockingly low-turnout, limited to the most dedicated voters and, more importantly, to those connected to local politics through their social networks. This favors long-time residents and those with more time – and therefore seniors.

The age divide in local voting behavior is overwhelming. Political scientist Sarah Anzia calculated that California residents aged sixty-five to ninety registered to vote at rates 17.7 percentage points higher than those aged twenty to forty-five.Footnote ¹⁰ Of those already unequally registered voters, the older group then voted in city elections at a rate 26.6 percentage points higher than their younger neighbors.Footnote ¹¹ That gap in voting rates rises to as high as 46.4 percentage points in the most unusually timed elections.Footnote ¹² Notably, off-cycle elections empower seniors even more than they do other groups – like unionized teachers – who are thought to benefit from low-turnout elections.Footnote ¹³

Just as importantly, local politics distinctively centers face-to-face self-government, whether through public hearings or conversations at the grocery store. The ballot box is relatively less central to local democracy – and, in smaller municipalities, sometimes a distinctly peripheral mechanism for years at a time. Again, this gives older Americans a distinct advantage. Deep community roots again matter here, but so does a flexible schedule.

In their path-breaking study of local public participation, political scientists Katherine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer found that 75 percent of those who spoke at public land use meetings in Massachusetts were older than fifty. This is 22 percentage points higher than the share of voters over fifty (and higher still than the share of the general population over fifty).Footnote ¹⁴ A thirty-year-old, they found, is 20 percent as likely to comment as a seventy-year-old.Footnote ¹⁵ The volunteer advisory boards so common at the local level display similar bias. Among community board members in Queens, New York, 47 percent are aged sixty or older (compared to 24.7 percent of the population), and 70 percent are fifty or older (compared to 38.4 percent of the population).Footnote ¹⁶

Perhaps most strikingly, the median age of a school board member in 2017 was fifty-nine,Footnote ¹⁷ well past the age when people are likely to have a child in the home.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, this is older than the median age in the US House of Representatives.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet one imagines school boards to be institutions where parents take a particular interest. If so, the rest of local government likely skews older still.Footnote ²⁰

Thus, local government features a potentially uncomfortable combination of responsibilities and governance institutions. These first make age especially salient and then make older people especially well represented. The next question, then, is how local government manages this political pressure.

19.3 How Local Politics Responds to an Older Population: Empirical Evidence

Spurred by the property tax revolts of the 1970s, social scientists have worked for decades to discern the actual effects of population age on local political economy.Footnote ²¹ The conventional wisdom is that older residents, all other things equal, demand lower taxes, especially where those taxes fund education. Most empirical research on local education politics supports this conventional wisdom, at least to some extent, though this literature has been notably inconsistent.Footnote ²² Political scientist Arnaud Maurel has extended this literature from education spending by school districts to the other programs funded by municipalities. Maurel finds limited effects on total spending, but a dramatic shift away from capital investments and long-term debt – in other words, a shift from spending on the future to spending on the present.Footnote ²³

Even taking older voters’ opposition to education spending as given, the net effect of an older population on that spending remains ambiguous. While seniors are less supportive of spending on schools or infrastructure, they also consume less in services. Thus, the presence of seniors in a jurisdiction can increase the per-capita resources available for school spending; many jurisdictions chase seniors as a lucrative boon to the tax base. Seniors’ immediate effect on the tax base increases per-capita school spending, even as their political behavior can decrease it.Footnote ²⁴ Which effect dominates depends on the number of seniors and their political organization.

What is particularly interesting for local government law, though, is not how much age affects political behavior but what legal mechanisms regulate that relationship. The empirical literature identifies two mechanisms as particularly important in mitigating the effects of older residents’ opposition to education spending: Tiebout sorting across jurisdictions and the capitalization of services into home prices.

First, Tiebout mobility ostensibly lets those with different preferences sort into separate communities, allowing all to better meet their needs. The famous Tiebout model imagines mobile households shopping for bundles of taxes and services by “voting with their feet” and moving to localities whose bundles match their preferences. In theory, those with children can move to higher-tax locations with better schools while the elderly select into retirement havens where education is not prioritized. In reality, of course, there are any number of limitations to Tiebout sorting: households may not want or be able to move, and there may be no jurisdiction offering households the particular package they prefer.

With respect to the elderly, there is some evidence of Tiebout sorting. Some research suggests that when local governments raise property taxes, older residents move to new homes with lower property taxes.Footnote ²⁵ More tellingly, this sorting occurs only under certain conditions. In one study, people who moved upon becoming empty nesters generally didn’t secure any change in their fiscal bundle.Footnote ²⁶ The conditions weren’t right. Many empty nesters still worked and were tied to their commute patterns; others lived in regions with school districts too large to easily leave; and still others lived in states where school finance equalization meant that crossing local boundaries still wouldn’t get them out of paying for schools. When the researchers narrowed in on those whose conditions were most Tiebout-amenable – retirees in regions with fragmented local governments and no school finance equalization – they found substantial sorting into places with less school spending and lower taxes.Footnote ²⁷

At the same time, capitalization provides residents a self-interested reason to invest in services they don’t personally use: the value of their home. A homebuyer purchases not only land and a structure but also the amenities connected to the location of that land, many of which are provided by local governments. They buy access to the neighborhood school and proximity to the neighborhood park. That access is priced into the sale of the house, along with the accompanying taxes. Accordingly, nonparents still care about school quality: Worse schools would mean losses on their largest financial asset. The tighter the link between service quality and home prices, the more those who don’t use local services will still work to maintain their quality. This mechanism helps minimize conflict between older and younger residents. Economists have found that the extent of capitalization, as determined by differences in the housing market, mediates whether the elderly support public education.Footnote ²⁸

19.4 The High Costs of Existing Mechanisms for Mitigating Age-Based Conflict

As mechanisms for navigating the politics of age, Tiebout sorting and capitalization are both rooted in the market for public services purchased through residency. Current political dynamics, therefore, point to two models for managing the local political economy: one based on democratic and participatory mechanisms, and the other based on these markets. In the first, an older populace leverages the mechanisms of local government to reduce investment in the future, potentially well beyond what the median voter might choose. In the second, public investment is preserved by letting people sort into different communities and capitalizing service quality into home prices. For many, this is an unappealing set of options.

First, the market model carries an initial drawback when applied to aging: It relies on mobility when many seniors hope to age in place. Surveys suggest that seniors overwhelmingly prefer to age in place for as long as possible.Footnote ²⁹ While some households are excited to move to retirement communities designed for a new phase in life, many more wish to maintain their community roots. Those who need assistance generally rely on informal care from friends and family, which may be harder to obtain after a move. Not all people want to, or ought to, trade those connections for an age-appropriate mix of taxes and services. Society should be careful about using prices to push seniors to move.

The larger issue, though, is that for many those market mechanisms offer a decidedly unattractive vision of local government: if not for senior citizens, then for everyone else. This model treats local government as a product to be consumed by those with the means to pay. As scholars like Gerald Frug and Richard Schragger have argued, this violates basic tenets of distributive justice, allocating fundamentally public services like a child’s education based on their parents’ wealth.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, this model creates its own self-reinforcing politics, forcing households into a position that is “explicitly defensive and separationist.”Footnote ³¹ This market incentivizes local voters to demand homogeneity, to exclude anyone who might need more services than they pay in taxes, and to block any redistribution of local taxes. Even if it protects education from underfunding based on age, it might increase underfunding based on wealth, impeding efforts to fairly fund schools in districts with low property values.Footnote ³²

Leaning into these mechanisms further results in ever-tightening exclusionary zoning as voters strive to maintain exclusivity by any means available.Footnote ³³ Indeed, this market model relies on walls of exclusion, which must be maintained to divide those who bought public services at the “right price” from those who did not.Footnote ³⁴ Neither capitalization nor sorting is possible otherwise. Such exclusionary land use policies, however, come at enormous cost, driving an affordable housing crisis, entrenching racial segregation, costing the economy trillions of dollars, and spurring environmentally disastrous development patterns.Footnote ³⁵

The country’s most successful retirement communities paint a picture of this world’s highs and lows, as applied to aging. Florida’s The Villages, for example, is the country’s fastest-growing community, with over 145,000 residents. It has thrived by offering seniors a residential experience designed for them, with everything from social clubs to a golf cart-friendly transportation network. The community has its own hospital, but as a childless community, the only area school serves The Villages’ employees rather than its residents. From the perspective of its self-selected residents, this targeted experience provides a vindication of the Tiebout model; 90.8 percent of residents report high satisfaction with The Villages.Footnote ³⁶ Sun City, Arizona, the original active retirement community, receives similar raves: “I have some apprehension about dying, because to go to heaven won’t be as good as this,” reported one resident.Footnote ³⁷

But The Villages, Sun City, and their peers vindicate the Tiebout critics’ fears as well. As Lior Strahilevitz has observed, these are some of the most segregated places in the country, not just by age but also by race.Footnote ³⁸ Of the country’s five largest age-restricted communities, four have a population less than 1 percent Black; the fifth is 2.6 percent Black.Footnote ³⁹ Sun City and the other Arizona retirement communities notably rejected the state’s referendum to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a holiday by ratios from 2:1 to 4:1, espousing what close observers called a “fortress mentality” manifest in the communities themselves.Footnote ⁴⁰ These physically and demographically closed-off communities became politically closed-off, as they “feel that they have nothing in common with outsiders and that they and the state owe these outsiders nothing.”Footnote ⁴¹ In creating places limited to people “just like them,” developers have offered seniors homogeneity in more ways than one – and perhaps built that segregation into residents’ political identity.

These purpose-built communities also blur the line between public and private governance. In The Villages, the developer owns the local newspaper and radio station, spends heavily on local elections, and even had a senior executive serving as a state legislator.Footnote ⁴² Just as the detractors of a Tiebout world predicted, these are places where private values and private power can, even more than usual, invade public policymaking.Footnote ⁴³

Finally, this solution still leaves education and infrastructure spending vulnerable. Sorting residents by age places the full cost of education and other long-term investments on middle-aged families with children. That increases the effective price of these services for those families, presumably requiring them to spend less. Some economists might like this outcome – it moves the property tax toward being a true benefit tax – but it would impose a sudden negative shock to current spending levels. Depending on how jurisdictional lines are drawn – a question of law – the withdrawal of funds might be considerable. Sun City, for example, eventually seceded from the local school district after years of conflict.Footnote ⁴⁴

Taken as a whole, then, the challenge posed by an aging population appears even starker. Voice and exit are always imperfect tools for informing and constraining government. But to manage local conflicts along the lines of age, they perform especially badly. Voice is distorted by the unrepresentative qualities of local politics. Exit relies on mobility that many seniors lack and requires entrenching some of the more troubling features of local governance.

19.5 The Three Paths to Managing Local Age-Based Politics

Conceptually the challenges that age poses to the local political economy can only be solved in three ways: reducing the generational gap in political preferences, reducing the generational gap in political influence, or reallocating functions to a level of government where politics work differently. The market mechanisms described earlier are examples of the first strategy, albeit costly ones. This section offers an additional example of each strategy to begin mapping what paths forward are available.

First, many places may be attempting to defuse conflict between seniors and nonseniors through targeted property tax relief. As of 2018, twenty states gave seniors a property tax exemption or credit, another ten gave localities the option to extend such exemptions, and thirty-nine states offered at least one program granting seniors property tax deferrals, circuit breakers, or assessment freezes.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such programs remain popular. In 2023, New Jersey cut most seniors’ property taxes in half, one of the largest tax cuts in state history.

These benefits are not usually pitched as political interventions. Instead, they are conceptualized as responding to seniors’ liquidity constraints. Seniors may be house-rich but income-poor, in which case rising property taxes can strain household budgets and force residents to leave their homes. But, as economist Randall Reback has observed, this tax relief can be understood as price discrimination for the Tiebout marketplace.Footnote ⁴⁶ Seniors are essentially offered a discount on their public services. This strategy manages the risks of both exit and voice. For mobile households, property tax relief offers a more attractive fiscal package. For those likely to stay, it is an inducement – some would say a “bribe” – to keep them from voting down school taxes.Footnote ⁴⁷ Empirical results confirm that property tax limits for seniors significantly reduce the negative effect of age on school funding.Footnote ⁴⁸ Under certain conditions, property tax relief might be a fiscal positive for local governments, if it buys tolerance for spending.

Such relief carries its own risks, of course. Many programs are economically regressive, offering the biggest benefits to those with the most valuable homes. Indeed, if programs are designed to prop up support for spending, this regressivity might be unavoidable. Oversubsidizing seniors also risks incentivizing people to stay in large homes they don’t need (and whose maintenance demands or age-unfriendly designs they might not want), freezing the housing market. Moreover, these programs risk intergenerational equity issues. Today’s seniors received help paying for schools from their elders but will not pay it forward to the next generation. And if the senior population grows enough, tax exemptions may prove unsustainable: The young will provide too narrow a tax base. But given the empirical uncertainties about the world of the 100-year life, the point is not to evaluate how well tax relief can smooth frictions over local finances. Rather, these programs show the potential of law to realign voters’ preferences.

A second strategy would rebalance local politics to account for younger voices. Moving local elections onto the presidential cycle is probably the lowest-hanging fruit here. At least for contested elections, this alone could help significantly. However, many local elections are not meaningfully contested.Footnote ⁴⁹ For these localities – for smaller jurisdictions in particular – elections are not usually where politics takes place and, therefore, are not a promising lever for reform.

Also important, therefore, is empowering younger residents in the rich participatory processes that occur between elections. This challenge has received some attention in the land use context, but proven tricky to solve. For example, one often-cited obstacle to including parents (and especially lower-income parents) in public hearings is the need for childcare. Thus, the COVID-19-era switch to online meetings hoped to reduce inequalities in participation.Footnote ⁵⁰ But it was a bust. In person, there was a 22.4 percentage point gap between the share of commenters over fifty and the share of voters over fifty. Online, that gap was 22.3 percentage points: identical.Footnote ⁵¹ Simply reducing barriers to participation appears insufficient. Bringing in diverse voices may require affirmatively soliciting input from residents separately by age and other demographics, a strategy that is effective but labor-intensive, hard to scale, and politically sensitive.Footnote ⁵² Avoiding the domination of unrepresentative voices, then, may require eliminating some participatory forums, especially where the additional process provides little probative value. But how to do so – what is best practice and what is feasible politics – is highly controversial.

If the local politics of age-skewed services cannot be improved, the third option is to avoid local politics altogether. Local responsibility for education and infrastructure emerged in one era. In a demographically different future, local governments might be the wrong stewards of these responsibilities. In state and national politics, older Americans are one interest group among many. Moreover, politics are more ideological, potentially cross-pressuring the effect of age on spending. While local government has many virtues, it may be a bad fit for managing these issues.

The effects of such a significant shift, though, are especially unclear. First, it’s uncertain whether such a shift would even succeed at protecting spending on long-term investments. William Fischel has argued that when California reduced local control over education spending, the immediate result was the state’s property tax revolt. Voters who couldn’t ensure that their taxes would be spent locally (and capitalized into their home value) wouldn’t let those dollars be spent at all.Footnote ⁵³ There is similar age-specific evidence that older households oppose state spending on education far more than they oppose local spending.Footnote ⁵⁴ If these results generalize (including to federal politics), shifting issues to higher levels of government is no solution. Even if that shift worked, it would let localism wither. Take away education, infrastructure, and probably land use as well, and outside big cities, there’s not much left for local governments to do.Footnote ⁵⁵ Local government could not function as a site for political empowerment, policy innovation, and meeting the disparate demands of a diverse polity. Such a trade-off raises profound questions about the purpose of local government.

19.6 Conclusion

As this brief discussion indicates, there are no easy answers here. There is too much uncertainty even about how aging affects the current local political economy, much less how future aging patterns (of a different generation, decades from now) change those politics again. Yet even as reforms addressing the local politics of age seem uncertain to work, they are guaranteed to implicate a host of fraught competing concerns. Age cuts too deeply, across too many core issues of local government, to be treated in isolation.

But, for the same reason, states and cities cannot ignore the aging of their populations. Doing so risks pitched fiscal conflict at best and potentially serious disinvestment in our future. Scholars and practitioners of local government law must, for at least some discussions, add age to race, class, and geography as a lens through which we view our subject. Then, at least, the effects of aging on local politics can be managed and, inevitably, muddled through.