Dive summary:

• An urban-planning professor says cities should be allowed to collect fairly from the people who use their services, including people who live and pay taxes only in the suburbs.
• Michael A. Pagano of the University of Chicago wonders what it would do to choices about where to live – and thus what to build – if cities' revenues depended less on taxing property inside their boundaries and more on something like Ohio's system of letting cities tax incomes where people live and where they make the money.
• The property tax was devised in an agricultural society in which land equaled wealth, and the model clearly does not work any more, Pagano argues, especially in a recession that has sucked down property values and decreased cities' incomes.

From the article:

Cities must be given the ability to develop tax and revenue systems that match the unique characteristics of their local economies, and that allow them to diversify revenues in ways that protect them from fiscal crises. ...