The town he's using as a case study is Lafayette, Louisiana. You can just pull it up on Google Maps to see what he's talking about. From what I can see, the largest building in the town is a Wal-mart.
The argument is that improving neighborhood infrastructure will tend to improve housing values; that's noncontroversial. Increased housing values implies increased property tax; that's axiomatic. Poorer neighborhoods are denser, so a single neighborhood intervention has more impact on a larger number of properties. The poorer neighborhoods tend to be cheaper to improve. And the poorer neighborhoods have more upside: it's difficult to improve the value of properties that were recently designed and built to maximize real estate value.
Ok, so you read it as "spiff up the 'poor' neighborhoods so the inhabitants will pay more property taxes" too.
I did pull it up on Google maps and visited a few random addresses on the Sherrif's property tax lookup page, etc. The orientation of the red-green graphic doesn't seem to be north-south and it isn't clear what is driving the large red areas.
The argument is that improving neighborhood infrastructure will tend to improve housing values; that's noncontroversial. Increased housing values implies increased property tax; that's axiomatic. Poorer neighborhoods are denser, so a single neighborhood intervention has more impact on a larger number of properties. The poorer neighborhoods tend to be cheaper to improve. And the poorer neighborhoods have more upside: it's difficult to improve the value of properties that were recently designed and built to maximize real estate value.