Strongtowns has had the same shtick for years now, predicting that the cities are are going to collapse under cost of maintaining infrastructure. For years though, the numbers just refuse to add up in Strongtowns favor.
If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that went bankrupt because of it? Strongtowns argues that early on, it’s covered by the developers, but after its useful life, it must be replaced by municipality. Ignoring the whole issue of the original residents actually covering the cost instead of the developer (clearly, the developer didn’t just donate the roads and sewers, it’s all priced in), how long do we actually have to wait for chicken to come home to roost? I live in a suburban development in Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will finally kill our budget?
If you look at the city budgets, there is no mystery: road maintenance is simply a very small part of municipality budget. It simply doesn’t cost as much as Strongtowns keeps implying. The infrastructure maintenance budget is dwarfed by everything else.
Just look at the numbers: http://www.seattle.gov/city-budget/2020-proposed-budget#/sdo... Road maintenance is what, $150M-200M counting generously and adding some overhead? Even if you apportion all of that to suburbia, compared to total budget of over $6B, it’s not going to make a serious dent.
That the road costs are low in suburbia can even be seen with a simple back of the napkin calculation: assuming cost to repave a mile of suburban road to be $1M, house frontage of 100 feet, and useful life of road at 30 years, you’re looking at $20 000 per house over 30 years, or less than $700 per house per year. Sure, that’s not nothing, but how much do you already pay in property taxes?
In short, while I think many suggestions of Strongtowns are good in their own right, and would indeed improve many places in America, the infrastructure costs story simply doesn’t add up.
What you're quoting is the money that was allocated to maintenance (the budget), not the actual amount required to maintain quality and level of service comparable to when things were originally built. But also, Seattle is a bad example, as the city of Seattle is largely pre-war and has an exceptionally valuable Downtown, and Seattle is booming off the charts compared to the rest of the US.
If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling around metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and take a hard look at their maintenance costs versus income. Unfortunately, Seattle's economy isn't the norm.
Seattle does not seem to be skimping on maintenance of its infrastructure. City roads do not have potholes and are generally of good quality.
Anywhere I look, municipalities don't spend too much on road maintenance. If the argument is that it's below what's actually necessary to spend to maintain it, and in near future it will come and bite us, clearly some places must already be ahead of the curve and already have significant pains due to falling behind with maintenance and having no budget to pay for it. Where are those places?
> If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling around metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and take a hard look at their maintenance costs versus income.
Can you name one of those places around Chicago so that we can look at its budget? Memphis budgets around 10% of its revenues for infrastructure. Is it significant? Yes. Will it bankrupt the city? No.
What about the west Seattle bridge, a huge chuck of Seattle just got cut off for many years due to failing infrastructure. That’s probably the first of many infrastructure debts coming due
I live near Seattle. The bridge you're talking about is actually a modern replacement that has failed well before reasonable expectations. I don't recall hearing a root cause, but I don't believe anyone was expecting this or that it's a results of lack of maintenance.
From what I understand, the West Seattle bridge is not failing due to lack of maintenance, but rather due to constructions defects. No amount of maintenance could have prevent the current problems.
> That’s probably the first of many infrastructure debts coming due
The problem isn't related to infrastructure alone. US debt is already above $24 trillion [1]. The Federal Reserve just put $6 trillion on its balance sheet [2] that is unlikely to ever be unwound. We've already spent far into the future. It's important to allocate capital intelligently in the near term to ensure disaster is averted when defaults occur en masse decades from now. I'd rather fix all of our existing infrastructure that gets a D+ rating [3] and then default on that debt in the future; we still get to keep what has already been built. The debt is "funny money".
A better title, with more weight towards the financial situation, would've been "We've Built A Civilization We Can't Afford." We have to stop kicking the can, but you need leaders with the fortitude to tackle these painful issues, and an electorate that will support them. Is that likely? I wouldn't bet my own money on that.
> just got cut off for many years due to failing infrastructure
But not because Seattle hasn't paid its dues, but due to an engineering fault / design problem. The bridge was expected to last another 40 years and was being regularly inspected (which is how the issue was found). The bridge was built in '84 and inspected multiple times a year.
Seattle also has very, very mild weather. go look at the Midwest. Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, etc. places that have hard freezes, frost heaves, and road salt. when I lived in WI, they had crews to fill potholes with 'hot patch' and after a few years, it's more patch' than concrete
Ok. So does that mean suburbs with mild weather are fine, but those without are screwed? Are suburbs sustainable in California but not Cleveland? This doesn't appear to be the message of Strongtowns.
All else being equal, I would bet on people migrating from places with less desirable weather to more desirable weather. More importantly, people with disposal income who can afford to migrate will migrate.
Seattle is a boom town like most of the towns out west. It booms and then the busts are especially hard. My dad remembered the “will the last person leaving Seattle please turn off the lights” sign after working for Boeing in the late sixties. Much of the Seattle suburbs is post war, heck, it’s even post 90s from what I remember growing up.
The answer is always “it depends”. Infrastructure in declining industrial suburbs is declining because... they are in decline and wealth has been shipped off.
Strong towns gives a single answer to all problems with a smarty pants tone. They have a point worth hearing, but it gets old the 59th time you read it.
You also have to account for federal funding. NYC in particular depends on it for infrastructure maintenance, and important maintenance goes neglected without that funding (cf. Hudson Gateway).
Even in Detroit where we have notoriously crippling roads and no public transportation we have constant large strips of highway shut down for replacement. At our lowest point the poor infrastructure cause wear on vehicles, that can probably be curbed with public transportation.
Detroit has a lot of suburbs that are doing very well. The problem with Detroit was basically white flight away from the city and into the suburbs: those people didn’t leave and take their money to California or Texas. The result was a very lopsided tax base in the region.
As someone who lives in a suburb of Detroit, this is an oft-repeated fact that, while true, doesn't capture much of what's wrong with the Detroit Metro area
This argument is it, but it says something different than you realize. The bigger problem is that as cities become less financially and culturally relevant/desirable their revenues decline at faster clip than their investment and spending. Its not infrastructure or anything in particular it's just a problem of congruency.
Infrastructure is a fixed cost. On paper. But of course quality can be always traded off for cost. And that's what happens usually if revenue dries up.
Potholes, cracked asphalt, insufficient storm drainage, and so eventually a lot of damage to property (floods, cars, etc.).
But you're talking about Seattle, one of the largest cities in the USA. It's experiencing growth.
Strongtowns isn't worried (as much) about large metro areas. His "shtick" is that the rest of the country, where populations are shrinking or stagnating, can't continue to run ponzi-like growth plans anymore that presume the population will continue to increase. They're not going to.
Go find yourself a town of 10,000 people that has a massively over-budge roads and water department. You won't have to look far- just leave the big cities, driving in any direction for an hour or two. Those same towns have low incomes, generally, meaning your "only $700/year" is enough to bankrupt people.
In short: I think you're living in a bubble and haven't ventured outside of it very far in a while.
Yes, that. But even cities experiencing growth aren't likely to get a pass in the short term.
Austin has had massive growth but what happens when sales tax, hotel taxes, fuel taxes, local income taxes (not in Austin but other places), etc all take a massive hit all at once?
With canceling SXSW this year, they're projecting there was an immediate $30-50M tax revenue hit and hotel occupancy is still ~4% when it's normally 70%. Sure, there's less wear and tear on infrastructure but they don't cancel out.
Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US..
> Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US..
Governments in general (and the departments/agencies thereof) tend to live "paycheck to paycheck" specifically because they're typically discouraged from saving a whole lot of money; there's almost always a "spend it or lose it" mentality (whether informal or actually codified in budget policies) that instead encourages spending every last penny of funding received lest whoever's in charge of the budget decide "well they're running leaner than expected so let's slash the budget to what they're actually spending and turn that into a tax break".
When you look at abandoned towns over the last century, it wasn’t due to overbuilding of roads but from some local employer moving away. In this case it doesn’t matter if you have 6 lane highways or dirt roads if no one is being payed to live there anymore.
There is a middle ground between a growing city and an abandoned town. I run a very small startup in this space and we work with towns who have a growing population but a shrinking downtown business core. Some people can't afford to live in the big cities, some want a lifestyle that they can't get in the city, some have other reasons, but there's a growing problem in the Midwest of bedroom communities. People move into small cities outside of Madison, Detroit, Indianapolis, etc and don't spend a single minute in the central business district. They don't spend a single dollar in the town they live in.
These people wake up in the morning and drive into the big city for work, which needs huge roads running through otherwise small residential areas. Now those roads are too dangerous to cross, so pedestrian traffic plummets. When the people come home, they get their family together and drive back to the big city to go to a concert, visit a museum, or get dinner. We've talked to so many people who live biking distance to their town's central business district but have never been there. They only live in Ada or Lowell, but they spend all their time and money in Grand Rapids. And Fulton Street isn't a road you'd want to walk across, because of all that traffic.
The way it works: a town was thriving with an engaged population spending time and money in the central business district. One person moves away, and someone else moves into their house. This new person is fleeing the big city, but is still economically tied to the big city (not the small town). Now imagine 20 or 30 houses go for sale in this town every year. After a few years, that's a major hit to the small town's economic prospects. Businesses start to close, which accelerates the problem. And many of the newcomers want to live in subdivisions rather than city limits, so houses in city limits are sitting just as vacant as the businesses, and the town has less tax revenue to fix any of the problems. So it gets worse year over year until the town dries up. The only thing left is the major road, the McDonalds, and the gas station. But the people living in those subdivisons just outside of city limits still need to get to the freeway, so the town has to maintain massive roads used mostly by people who aren't paying them any taxes.
This is the story of hundreds of towns in every Midwestern state, tens of thousands of towns across the country. We're building a network of four lane roads through the ruins of small towns and leaving the city council to pay for infrastructure no one is using anymore, with tax income they don't have anymore, for citizens who don't spend any time or money in those towns.
Small town business districts aren't losing business to the Big City, they're losing it to Amazon and big box stores (and the latter avoid being within Big City limits, anyway).
You may have missed the part where I talked about subdivisions right outside of city limits. The towns only get tax revenue from people who live inside of city limits.
> But you're talking about Seattle, one of the largest cities in the USA. It's experiencing growth.
It is growing because people want to live there. They don't want to live in the communities idealized by the "strong town" people. They want to live in suburbs around a downtown core, which is what Seattle is.
>Go find yourself a town of 10,000 people that has a massively over-budge roads and water department.
Maybe, but the city mentioned in the article spends 10% of it's budget on infrastructure. That might be more than it should but it's not bankrupting them anytime soon.
Yep, in a lot of cities (and states) very generous pensions are what really bleeds their budget dry. Infrastructure cost is marginal and lot more infrastructure maintenance could be done without those gigantic pension expenses.
That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now. At the time most of the budgets could be allocated to direct city spending instead of starting with half of your budget already gone before you even have it.
Of course you could argue that it still means that we built cities that we couldn't afford since employee benefits are part of the normal expenses. But imo, it means more that , at the time, a few took advantage of local politicians unwillingness to go against more and more generous and unaffordable pension schemes that ended up crippling future generations with perpetual debt and underfunded services when they themselves never had such a burden to carry. If it wasnt for that borderline intergenerational theft , the infrastructure of our cities is not only something we could easily afford to maintain but could even be tremendously expanded.
Edit: I'm not arguing that pensions should not exist or that unions are bad. It's just that in the public sector specifically, ridiculous and unfair payouts were negotiated where the public sometimes ends up paying for far more than what the employees contributed themselves.
I argue defined benefit pensions should not exist. There is clearly a conflict of interest between voters (100% of government employees who will want to increase their benefits) and politicians (who need the vote of all of those government employees because so many non government employees do not vote). You even wrote it yourself:
>That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now.
They didn't have the financial burden because their ancestors didn't punt labor costs decades into the future. And given the opportunity to punt labor costs decades into the future and provide lower taxes now, how is a politician who is prudent and wishes to account for today's costs today going to win an election?
The only solution is to ban defined benefit pensions (and all deferred compensation schemes) so there no longer exists one less avenue for future taxpayers to get taken for a ride.
> The only solution is to ban defined benefit pensions (and all deferred compensation schemes) so there no longer exists one less avenue for future taxpayers to get taken for a ride.
Then you'll have to raise wages for government jobs dramatically. The decent pension is one of the perks that attracts people to those careers.
I think the main problem is that governments never want to pay into the pension pot during boomtimes, and then they cry poverty when the economy is in a downturn. In principle, an "immortal" entity like a state pension fund should be much better positioned to manage risk over time than a single individual with only one lifetime and one 401(k).
> Then you'll have to raise wages for government jobs dramatically.
I don’t see the problem with paying market wages to people to avoid screwing future taxpayers.
And there is no such thing as an immortal entity. My kids and I will be paying for benefits enjoyed by my parents and grandparents. (I know there are things my ancestors have done that I have and will benefit from, but I’m strictly speaking in context of payment/benefits for defined benefit pensions).
Something that kills me is how roads are paved and then within a few months they're torn up to do work on pipes underneath like clockwork. They say it's because the utility companies and the town don't have good communication, but think we all know it's because of kickbacks from the paving companies. I've rarely ever seen work done under roads that weren't just paved over. And no, it's not just because I only notice it when the road is new because every since I've had this realization about 10-15 years ago I've been paying attention to it and it's still the case.
Aside from that, a big issue is that cities aren't designed for maintenance. Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs. It'd be faster and cheaper b/c no more repavements, you don't need super heavy equipment (simple forklift with chains can move them), and it'd cut down on job completion time, not to mention it's much easier to plan. For anything that crosses a street, do it at intersections and you can just make intersections a composition of concrete slabs that again can be moved.
Another issue is not utilizing technology. It'd be incredibly simple to create a web portal where citizens can report maintenance issues like potholes, broken street lights or traffic lights, tree limbs that need cutting to keep away from power lines, a sewer drain that's clogged, a fire hydrant that's leaking, etc. The list goes on and on. All these things being reported would make it much easier for the city to plan the maintenance so you could bang out a bunch of things at once early on rather than waiting for it to build up so much that it becomes obvious without the reporting and by that time it's usually late and has lead to other issues.
> Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs.
This isn't a bad idea for maybe a single utility but I dont think you are considering how many utilities are under the ground: water, sewer, street runoff, natural gas, electricity, telecommunications. Each of these may have multiple lines for each of service, distribution, and transmission. One of the reasons streets get torn up a lot is that there is a low of equipment underground!
No city goes bankrupt because of road maintenance. They just choose not to do it. There are plenty of towns and cities across the USA that have just been left to decay.
Correct. If you could look at one city budget and derive from that budget what it costs to sufficiently maintain infrastructure, then you would never see a bridge collapse, or a water main break, or a pension fund crisis. Look around at how often those things happen.
That someone would look at a city budget, which is a primarily political document, and believe that document reflects actual costs to sufficiently maintain anything, is simply naive.
Yes, when you read that St. Louis, say, "lost" 600,000 people over the last 60 years, everybody should understand why that's a ridiculous fiction. Those people didn't leave St. Louis. They moved slightly west across invisible and arbitrary 150-year-old political borders that have no relation to the built environment of the region today. They still live in "St. Louis" by any commonsense definition.
It's the same all over the Rust Belt.
So what really happened? We built new subdivisions for the exact same set of people and the old parts of town just fell apart entirely. The maintenance was completely ignored.
Nobody left St. Louis. They just took developer and federal money and built new housing in St. Louis County (the original suburbs). And then when those old suburbs started to decay, they did it again by moving out to St. Charles (the new exurbs).
The latest wave of this is the "return to the city" movement in which the same set of people continue the cycle by abandoning the housing that was built to replace the housing they're returning to.
I'm using St. Louis as an example here, because it's the city I know the most about, but it's the same everywhere.
lol some socal cities are kinda like that. The streets are maintained just fine but the business owners/landlords are trying to squeeze every last drop out of their 1960s pieces of junk and refuse to maintain/update/rebuild them.
Seattle is one of the most prosperous regions of the US. Even so, your suburban lifestyle is probably subsidized by people who live in more urbanized parts of the metro.
There is not much urbanized part of the metro to speak of. It’s all suburbia, even in the city itself, 75% is zoned for single family houses. Given that my property taxes are 10 times what Strongtowns thinks it costs to maintain the streets, I seriously doubt I’m being subsidized by anyone when it comes to infrastructure.
A lot of people assume that urbanized metros imply a lot of high-rise residential. But take a place like Somerville in MA. It's one of densest cities in the country outside of the environs of NYC and there's not much high rise construction generally and a lot of the city is standalone houses.
> I live in a suburban development in Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will finally kill our budget?
"Packed row to row" and "50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old" isn't nearly descriptive enough to say whether it is financially sustainable. How packed? How dependent on long highway commutes? And importantly, how prosperous are the residents (the suburban Seattle area is pretty prosperous)? All of that matters a lot for how soon the financial pictures turns unsustainable.
> the infrastructure costs story simply doesn’t add up.
Roads aren't the only bit of infrastructure. Water lines, electricity distribution, land maintenance, and more. The unit costs of all these thing scale up rapidly with decreased density. The leading edge of the failures will be in places where the property tax base has already collapsed and the government is forced to make infrastructure maintenance trade-offs with bad consequences (i.e. Flint, MI), but the fragility is there in lots of cities, just perhaps not yours at this time.
I think Strongtowns would argue that cities are taking on infrastructure debt — that Seattle should be spending far more than $150-200m. The cost could be somewhat visible in the short term with more potholes or whatever, but probably becomes most striking when there are major infrastructure failures like the I-35W bridge or the Genoa Bridge.
If you take your assumptions on face (and I think some might be off, but I'm not expert), we're saying that homeowners should think of the cost of repaving roads as on par with replacing a roof. I don't think most people think this way.
Last I looked Strongtown calculations seem to be based on areas in the Midwest. It's plausible that more expensive places to live are making enough to maintain infrastructure.
For example I live in a 50 year old 1.5k square foot house in a suburb and pay around 12k/year in property taxes. Which was far above the calculations one of the blog posts said that the town would have to collect.
The I-35W bridge collapse had nothing to do with insufficient maintenance, in fact maintenance materials and vehicles on the bridge were a contributing factor. The primary cause was weak gusset plates, incorrectly specified when the bridge was first built 40 years earlier.
> If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that went bankrupt because of it?
There's often a reduction of services. Some US towns / counties can no longer afford pavement so they're letting roads become gravel:
Others have made good comments so I'll just summarize; the author is not worried about Seattle. However, if you visit some declining suburbs in the Midwest you'll immediately realize what he's talking about.
I picked a town of Grandview, MO, because it was far on the south side of Kansas City metro, and its population stayed completely flat for last 40 years. Seems like a perfect candidate for Strongtowns argument: residential areas are all sprawl, industrial areas are packed together, and looking at its Main Street, it's a stroad[1], which Strongtowns says is "enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive". No population growth means that there is no new development to pay for the old ones, which is what Strongtowns calls a Ponzi scheme[2]
Let's take a look at the budget[3]. Grandview intends to spend $37M, only $1M of which is budgeted for street maintenance, which is more than average in previous years. Are the streets deteriorated and decayed due to lack of maintenance? I spent 5 minutes on Google Streetview, and while the residential streets are far from pristine, I couldn't find a single pothole. I did, however, find road work, repaving a street[4]. This[5] is a representative example.
Is Grandview a bad example? Is it somehow better than average? Is there some magic that makes Grandview work quite fine? No, I don't think so: for all I know, Grandview looks exactly like hundreds of others suburban towns in America that I've seen. This is what bugs me about Strongtowns: for all of its doom prophesying, I haven't yet seen a single town struggling to maintain suburban infrastructure. Failing to meet pension obligations, sure. Overblown salaries for city employees, yep. Large police department with lots of new toys in a town with almost no crime? Sadly, too common. But residential street maintenance killing a budget? Hardly.
Modeling rural communities as remotely self-sustaining economically is a fantasy. They "manage" to maintain these roads through heavy subsidization by more economically-productive cities.
Obviously dense cities (in their current form) aren't completely self-sustaining either, given that they need food. But this is universally-understood, while for some reason many people seem to be unaware how much of a closed-loop rural communities _aren't_ when they talk about the sustainability of sparse living patterns at modern standards of living.
Luxuries like what? Roads? Fire departments? Police? Schools? There’s a floor, and often they don’t generate it, instead relying on state and county funds.
The economics at the state level, play out just like how they do at the national level. The high population, economically vibrant parts generate tax revenue, which is redistributed to the sparsely populated, economically depressed areas, of which are not self sustaining, no matter how much the net receivers think they are.
Compared to food and water those things are luxuries.
Obviously both types of regions need each other to maintain the modern style of living as mentioned, but in some kind of societal collapse situation you'd probably rather be on some isolated farm that could theoretically sustain itself. And I feel like if those areas chose to go on with less subsidy money they could do so, but it's not a bad trade for food and everything else that comes from them. If one really wanted to hold the other hostage the one with the food would win.
When did we go from 'self-sustaining' to societal collapse? It seems to be some weird fantasy where these isolated towns are somehow more self-sustaining because they could vaguely survive in the case of a societal collapse.
That doesn't make them self-sustaining in modern society. And saying that roads are a luxury seems to be incredibly ignorant of how society evolved and how important trade routes (as well as ocean access, something cities generally have) for getting resources you otherwise don't have access to. Such as materials, spices and meds. Something that, you know, an isolated farm wouldn't readily have access to.
Especially since salt is kind of a big deal for food preservation.
Many rural areas don't have fire departments in the same way that cities have fire departments. They have "volunteer" fire departments, who do receive public funding but who are not expected to put out any particular fire. There aren't enough fires to justify anything more.
Your "state level" explanation seems to ignore states that don't have major metropolitan areas.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion from either my comment or contact with the real world. I chose my words pretty precisely to avoid my point getting buried by a tangential conversation about the other direction of dependency: "dense cities in their current form" depend on rural areas. It's pretty easy to imagine an almost-fully urbanized society that grows food without having to sustain a significant amount of population spread sparsely.
On top of that, the idea that rural areas' standard of living without urban subsidization would amount to losing "some luxuries" is so out of touch with reality that I don't even know where to start (though the sibling comments do a good job).
Ruralites can (and often already do) drive 4WD vehicles and run generators (or nowadays solar + batteries) for power. In an extreme case, they'd be at least somewhat willing to revert to horses and candles (hell, quite a few might even consider that fun). It'll take adjustment, but it ain't an insurmountable problem.
The far bigger concern is that very few (if any) rural towns in the US have self-sustaining food supplies. Cut off their access to the outside world, and there's a very high probability that they'll starve just as quickly as a larger city will. American agriculture has shifted hard from diversified/robust subsistence farming to large-scale industrialized monocrop farming, so you'd have to rewind a century or so of "progress" in order for a rural town to be able to feed itself. This is also not an insurmountable problem, but the effects are quite a bit more dire.
This narrative always seemed remarkably short-sighted because cities have enough economic bargaining power that they can just import the goods they need. Farm towns would quickly fall apart the moment they had to pay for all of their infrastructure (meaning power, internet, gas, transportation) because all of that is heavily subsidized.
The unrealistic hypothetical seemed to be essentially that a city or a farm town was moved to an island on its own or otherwise barricaded. The city would suffer a big population loss and have trouble making the land usable for growing food again, while the farm area would have an easier transition to a frontier-town-like lifestyle.
Yea, my original comment implied this unrealistic hypothetical because I wanted to avoid the conversation getting derailed by the inevitable rural fetishists pretending that cities are irredeemable cesspits instead of "what makes modern standards of living possible, for both urban and rural areas".
Don't get me wrong, as much as I prefer dense urbanism, there are plenty of things about sparse living that appeal to me, and I fully understand how many people would choose suburban or rural life. Hell, I'm not even supposed to some degree of subsidization from more efficient communities, just on grounds of diversity and anti-fragility. It just gets frustrating how committed sparsity advocates are to pretending that these lifestyles aren't heavily subsidized. A self-sustaining rural community (despite having its charms) would be appealing to far fewer people than one that gets to have its cake and eat it too, by redistributing some of the societal advantages of urban living (like economic efficiency).
Just importing the goods they need works fine until there's some global crisis that disrupts food supply chains so much that you can't anymore. Say, a pandemic so disruptive to global trade and economic activity that a bunch of less wealthy countries just decide to say they're going to keep their food to themselves so their people don't starve. You know, like the one happening right now.
Anti-fragility of supply chains is (mostly) orthogonal to the urban/rural question.
Some big parts of why we subsidize rural areas is 1) an emergent property of allowing people to live where they choose and providing a base standard of living for every community, and 2) romanticism for our pastoral past, and an implicit belief that societies should provide the opportunity sparser living with more exposure to nature.
I don't want to brush off these aesthetic concerns as "wrong": the 100% urban megalopolises of science fiction always carry at least a tinge of dystopia, because a desire for nature and open spaces is to some degree hardwired in us. But they have nothing to do with what we're talking about, which is sustainability.
The kind of robustness you're talking about doesn't have a whole lot to do with the urban/rural divide. It's entirely possible to have an almost-universally urban population and still maintain domestic food production, either by changing agricultural practices to fit cities better or at worst by having a "skeleton crew" instead of entire communities (the number of people living in sparse communities right now is _far_ below the minimum number of people we'd need to grow food).
Again, I'm not suggesting we do this, or that there's a clear path from point A to point B. I'm just illustrating how your point is a non sequitur.
Yes, and you're saying that smaller towns would be immune to this effect?
Because again, despite what people seem to think, smaller towns rely a lot on cities as part of their supply chain for things such as medical supplies, gasoline and infrastructure. Isolated farms are not self-sufficient no matter how much you may believe it to be so, because once the power runs out, once the water stops flowing and the supplies stop coming in, said isolated farm is far and away from other natural resources that are rather important for farming and survival.
I'm wondering if people have ever been to the midwest?
To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government. The sparsely used road users aren’t bearing the full cost.
When people look at the tax base and where federal dollars are spent, the Red areas usually end up getting anywhere from $103 to $110 in federal dollars for every $100 collected in federal taxes, and much of that comes down to roads and highways.
Without the highways most of these areas wouldn't be able to buy or sell goods to the outside world.
(Aren't trains cheaper? Maybe we should be building more track and fewer lanes)
the assumptions going on here are all about costs.
when in reality current transportation infra funding from federal government is about military defense.
its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space. there is no reason they couldn't and would reduce costs overall. but it also means a single strike can disable all 3 systems.
in today's world I think its a pointless effort and we should resolve those issues to reduce the overall costs. but here we are.
> its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space.
They sometimes do, though. Namely: if you're going through the mountains, there are only so many mountain passes, and therefore only so many places where these things can get through the mountains. I-80 in the Sierra Nevada mountains is a perfect example of this; between Colfax and the 80/20 interchange (if not all the way to Truckee) they're very much occupying the same space because there's nowhere else to go (thankfully that power line's pretty minor compared to the one following 49 to the north, but the one following 49 also happens to be colocated with rail).
The more viable solution - and indeed, if you look at a map of our energy infrastructure¹, the one that we use - is to make the connections as redundant as possible. This has plenty of peacetime benefits, too (for example, if I-80 and the adjacent railway both shut down because of a blizzard or avalanche, trains and trucks can route around it, albeit with delays).
I live in rural KS. We afford our roads in rural areas by purposely not paving them. Maintenance of gravel roads in the East and dirt roads in the West is accomplished by running a road grader down them every few months. There are paved county roads every 5 to 10 miles. These are generally only chip and sealed every 3 to 5 years, not repaved, and are not smooth. Every 15 to 25 miles there is a paved state road. Even many of them lack shoulders, leaving nowhere to stop in emergencies and causing semis to roll when they catch the edge of the road. Even for those of us in town, UPS and FedEx packages are generally coated in dirt upon arrival. The one benefit is the low cost of maintenance.
Long term, the cheapest roads are in older towns that still have brick streets. Some are a 100 years old and have nearly zero maintenance. They are slick and noisy.
On a side note, we have hundreds of miles of gravel roads to bike. We even have an internationally attended event called the Dirty Kanza.
Seattle is urban and has 50% higher population than KC in 25% of the area. Strongtowns (despite its ironic name), is pro-city and anti-town. The OP article is quite clear about this, as it argues against KC spreading into suburban sprawl.
You'd need an example of a suburb or exurb to prove your point.
You haven’t seen Seattle, have you? 75% of total area of the city is zoned for single family houses. Sure, it might not literally be “suburban”, but the development pattern is just the same.
Of course, the same thing is true in the actual suburbs. Consider Lynnwood, a town of 35 000. It’s annual revenues are around $300M, and road maintenance is around $6-8M. It spends around 7 times as much on its police force as it does on roads. When does it go bankrupt?
Those SFH zones are getting infilled by apartment buildings and townhouses and ADUs and people selling their backyards to create a new lot. It's nothing like vast surburban tracts.
Lynnwood has 35K people in 8 square miles, 5 Kpeople/sqmi.
KC has 500K people 310 square miles, 1.4 Kpeople/sqmi.
In most towns, education is a huge chunk of the budget. In my semi-rural Massachusetts town of about 7,000, 62% of the budget goes to the town's elementary school and its share of the regional high school. Public works is only about 8% and public safely is a bit under twice that.
As far as I know that's pretty common--in fact, I expected the educational spend to be higher, which it probably is in some places. (Per student spend for the regional high school is about half the spending in Cambridge for example.)
I don't know what we've built in the US but it certainly doesn't feel like we've built cities for people. In California, most of the outside real estate is dedicated to roads with the monotony occasionally interrupted by a parking lot with the same cookie cutter businesses. It's very rare that I'll see a mom and pop shop here and for the most part the outside world with billboards, malls and fast food chains is a distribution channel for big businesses.
I cannot imagine what living in downtown Chicago is like. On top of being prohibitively expensive, where would you shop for groceries or other domestic services? Its like a double whammy of expensive living and poor access.
I live in downtown Chicago. I'm one block away from Trader Joe's and Osco Jewel. Cost of living in downtown Chicago is cheaper than NYC/SF and maybe even LA.
Within 20 minutes of walking, I can get to two separate Targets, Whole Foods and even a Home Depot.
It's been a while since I visited Chicago, but I stayed in a hotel downtown. Not only was public transit excellent and easy to use, but walking was a delight. I don't remember there being a grocery story anywhere, but Google Maps shows quite a few. Chicago's downtown may have a lot of problems including being expensive and a high crime rate, but poor access seems inaccurate.
I live in downtown Chicago with a Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and a Jewel Osco all within 3 blocks of me. I'm not sure what makes you think there is a lack of access in this area. I live here because I love how accessible everything I want to do is.
Chicago has a large area that can be considered "downtown". There's the Loop at the center, which didn't have a lot of living amenities except restaurants and entertainment when I was there but is not very large either, then there is the whole outer downtown area from the South Loop to Lincoln Park. That's about 6-8 square miles. In that area there's everything you need and very little is more than 3/4 mile walk from you. There are buses and trains everywhere. I never wanted a car while living there, but rented a pickup truck or moving van for a day every now and again, and I actually lived a little further north in Lakeview.
Decade-long Chicago resident here: used public transit, biking, and walking exclusively and never needed a car the entire time. Wish Chicago's density would be legal in more American cities.
This really is the most ridiculous thing about America. The Loop and River North are really nice! And yet most of the country has decided that this should be simply forbidden from occurring anywhere else.
>where would you shop for groceries or other domestic services?
What kind of weird question is this? "Downtowns" are _more_ accessible for people, not less. That's why they are more expensive by the foot.
Are you under the belief that there are no markets or services in cities? This seems like a perspective you can get from only living in the suburban non-sense that America has constructed.
You'd be surprised. Maybe not Chicago, but there are a lot of cities with zero grocery stores. It was big news in my Midwestern city when a Meijer went in downtown because people living downtown used to have to drive or take the bus outside of the city to do their grocery shopping.
It's always a big question in my city, "can you live here without a car?" and most of it has historically hinged on grocery shopping.
I think we're from the same city. However I was fortunate enough to live within walking distance of a market a few miles outside of downtown before moving.
Why presume what I believe? I live in the city and the closer I get to the core of the city the fewer venues there are for domestic living and everything turns into restaurants and offices.
It was a question. You asked the question, and it can only be asked as a non-rhetorical question if it is predicated on ignorance and some a priori perspective.
>I live in the city
Are you talking about an "actual" city, or an urban sprawl?
If a city is going to go bankrupt, it will be because of pension and healthcare costs and not infrastructure maintenance costs. If all else fails infrastructure can be abandoned but pensions and health plans will be politically untouchable, and in some places they are legally untouchable. Detroit abandoned swathes of the city for decades, but in the end it was the pensions that did them in.
However having driven through the Kansas City metro I was impressed, and not necessarily in a good way, by the massive amount of paved roads. It was nice in a way; there was very little traffic. However it seemed to have the most roads of a city of its size that I have every seen. I have never been to Houston or Dallas however.
> If a city is going to go bankrupt, it will be because of pension and healthcare costs and not infrastructure maintenance costs. If all else fails infrastructure can be abandoned but pensions and health plans will be politically untouchable, and in some places they are legally untouchable.
There are two issues here: bankruptcy, which is a crappy legal and financial situation to be in, and which you may or may not avoid, and city decline, which can happen even if you avoid bankruptcy. Leaving swaths of the city to rot is the latter, and does not strike me as necessarily better (and certainly not for the residents of those swaths).
Moreover, the infrastructure problems compound any issues with pensions, since if people leave, it will be harder to have the tax base to fulfill previous obligations. Saying that the last expenditure left standing in a financial Armageddon was the one that “did them in” sounds like an oversimplification.
There is no way americans would accept their infrastructure failing.
The average American just doesn't believe this is a possibility in a way which meaningfully affects them because they've never seen it or they believe ive some exceptionllalism nonsense.
Infrastructure has definitely failed and the general public has shown very little passion for doing something about it. Take a drive through South East Michigan some time.
Sometimes I ponder the fact that so much of the US lifestyle is utterly terrible only because single family homes, individual automobiles, strip malls, lack of mixed-use, and parking minimums are a “this is the way we’ve always done it” meme. Many people there literally can’t imagine any other way of doing it.
There are few or no options for cheap, walkable, high-density city living in the US, and not because people don’t want it, because of what the TLS people call “ossification”: it’s illegal to build it in most places, even if it’s cleaner, easier, cheaper, and more desired by citizenry, simply due to (bad) tradition.
(That and that fact that the upper classes really don’t seem to like living within walking distance of poor people.)
I wonder if it’s possible to build new actual cities in the US. I know that due to things like restrictive covenants, much of the housing in the western half of the country makes it legally impossible to ever increase the density of existing cities. Subdivisions in master planned areas can’t individually decide to allow duplexes or mid-rises or corner stores, as they are sub-sub-subdivisions that are governed by decades-old associations. To build another New York or Hong Kong (in addition to needing 50-100 years) you’d probably need to start fresh; it couldn’t be grafted into an existing sprawl town.
>(That and that fact that the upper classes really don’t seem to like living within walking distance of poor people.)
More importantly, you want your children to go to a school in the district with the most affluent parents that you can afford to live near. That's why 20 somethings don't mind living near poorer people in NYC or SF, but unless they can afford to pay for very, very expensive private schools, they will move out to the most expensive suburb they can afford (i.e. the best school district they can afford) when they have kids.
I hadn’t thought of that, it’s a great point. I wonder what sort of workable solutions exist to this problem.
Would eliminating all public schools and making a voucher-based system (with oversight/standardization for redeeming organizations) work to solve this?
How do we overall reduce the number of everyday routine life person-meters travelled in large percentages of society?
No, the opposite is likely a better solution. Instead of local funding for schools change it so that all funding for schools goes to a single pool, in the U.S. it would need to be a State pool, and then split it out based on school population. That way we eliminate the "ghetto schools" problem of being underfunded while the "Beverly Hills" type schools are awash in funds. Any donations to schools, also go to the general fund.
It totally unfair that where you live literally down to what side of the street can mean the difference between a good or terribly funded school you must attend.
No real solutions I can see other than reducing the wealth/income gap (i.e. wealth redistribution which means higher taxes).
Anything else is papering over the root cause, which is the opportunity gap between different socioeconomic classes. Even if people deserve to be in lower socioeconomic classes due to their laziness, it hurts society as a whole in the long run if equal opportunity is a goal for children.
I'd like to see an actual example of such a city for better context. What city do people think we can't build today better and faster? Who are the people that are poorer? Like the US is richer, but detroit got wrecked over time.
Some of it is true, but that's because we paid in lives and human suffering. Safety and environmental restrictions multiply the cost of building infrastructure.
Compare older architectural styles such as colorful and elaborate Victorian or Renaissance, with newer ones like big gray concrete Brutalism or Functionalism. Why can't we build good looking and interesting buildings again, despite our better tools?
Now there are modern glass buildings that can look really sleek also, but honestly they are a bit repetitive and featureless and don't really match those older ornate styles.
"make the city stronger and more financially resilient"
"target productive development patterns"
"incentivize productive development"
It's hard to read Strong Towns articles because they write almost entirely in euphemism. What they're really advocating is smaller homes, more density, and less driving. They would really sound much less Orwellian if they stopped using so many weasel words.
I'd say these are more handles than they are euphemisms. They make it pretty clear in their site that "stronger and financially resilient" means not having unfunded liabilities, "target productive development patterns" means density and mixed-use zoning, and "incentivize productive development" means getting rid of zoning laws with mandatory setbacks, single-dwelling rules, parking minimums, etc.
OK, so if this is true that towns and suburbs had subsidized construction and that now the cost of full infrastructure maintenance can't be supported locally...
...then what happens? Do roads just get a lot more potholes but we deal just fine in the end? Or would it get so bad that people wind up just leaving somehow?
It's almost impossible for me to imagine that road etc. maintenance is that expensive that it could mean shutting down entire neighborhoods because there's no other choice. ("Everybody who owns a house, goodbye it's worthless now.")
Is there more likely to be a supply-and-demand thing where a town is forced to massively increase property taxes, people who can't afford it are forced to leave for a cheaper locale, and people with more money come in? (Attracted by the now lower price of the houses which compensates for the higher property taxes.) In other words, existing homeowners will get the shaft, because the deferred maintenance will essentially be paid for in the end by their loss in home equity?
I lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our whole state has infrastructure problems. For the highways, it's because we're connected to a lot of logistical hubs. But a lot of our towns, including our capital, have big problems with big potholes.
It doesn't happen in a single decision or even a single year. It's a slow spiral: people move out, crumbling streets go on the "cons" list of house hunters, the city has a smaller income base, so non-urgent roadwork is less urgent. Repeat.
I'm not saying people will flee neighborhoods with bad streets. But they will move out for the usual reasons: family, new jobs, marriage. The problem is new people are less likely to move in.
The theory is that as the infra crumbles, it becomes unattractive and the affluent move elsewhere. Or, property taxes are raised to fix the roads- and the affluent move elsewhere. Either way it starts a downward spiral of decreasing appeal & property value, and increasing cost. Which leads in to inexorable decay.
People still live there, but it becomes a trap for the people who can't afford to get out. Strongtowns argues this fate was inevitable given certain initial conditions- subsidized infrastructure, underfunded maintenance liability, etc.
I don't know, why no one mentioned remote work as a solution, at least for businesses who can afford it. I clearly know from my friends in HR industry, positions which never assumed remote options, now opened and filled without significant problems for business and new employee. Businesses are working in (almost) normal mode, apocalypse is postponed. So why pour money in expensive offices, require from you employees to rent apartments near your work, which cost like lux-class, or repeatedly spend hours of their lifes that accumulate in months in public transport or traffic jams?
When business people talk about remote job in the team, it's usually outsourcing to India. Why not to let your employees present at the office, say, 1 time a week, to deal with the customer or attend weekly meeting for those who miss socialization.
Which is why counties should tie property taxes to infrastructure costs.
You want to live in a sprawled out suburb where there's a low ratio of taxpayer/mile of infrastructure? You're free to do so, but expect to pay a higher share of the infrastructure costs to do so.
Also, the budget set aside for infrastructure projects should do a much better job of allocating future tax revenue towards maintaining it over time. Right now, the cost analysis of these projects is way too focused on what it'll cost to build it, and then maintaining it is left up to future planners to figure out.
Every project must have a guaranteed tax revenue percentage exclusively set aside towards maintaining it going forward.
Isn't this one of those sites that advocate getting rid of "sprawl" and having everyone move to high density apartments near the train station? And they want to replace cars with government run mass transit so everyone gets to work and back in trams, busses and subways filled shoulder-to-shoulder with 800 strangers?
Thats really going to be a tough sell over the next few years. I got to say I live in exactly the kind of suburbs they hate with a house big enough for everyone to spread out and enough square footage to store a months worth of food. And when I do get out its alone in my car to curbside pickup or a drive through. I couldn't be more pleased.
I think they try to stay pretty explicitly neutral about advocating a particular density, it's just that they want people to be realistic about how much a particular kind of development costs. Suburbs are perfectly fine -- but if they were taxed to a degree that reflects their actual infrastructure cost, it would be much more expensive to live in them. There's currently a bizarre pattern where poorer, older, higher-density urban neighborhoods end up subsidizing richer suburbs.
Likewise, it's fine if you want to live out on a farm well away from other people -- but the town shouldn't pay a million dollars to run a paved road and water supply out to your house, when a dirt road and a well is good enough.
The problem is that we all want something for nothing. We all want to live in low-density suburbs like you love, but since charging enough in taxes to pay for them would not be very politically popular, instead we've run up massive infrastructure liabilities, depending on unsustainable exponential growth for funding to fix the old infrastructure.
Would you still love the suburbs as much if your property taxes were 2x or 4x what they are now? If you would still want to live in a suburb, great, no problem. But many people would probably rather choose to move to a denser area and pay a more reasonable tax rate.
Of course, the costs won't be paid by you. Pushing mass all that extra distance consumes exponentially more energy. Fortunately, the effects of climate change won't be so bad until I'm in old age (I think).
They are not for everyone moving into a compact city. There have been a lot of articles recently about the pleasures of living in a walkable rural town as opposed to a sprawling four-lane highway with no discernable border between rural and town.
Why is it that these “economic development” non-profits and city planning think tanks all sing a similar tune and have no money? Why don’t developers and land (home) owners align with the (supposed) best thinking in city planning? Why aren’t the cities planning themselves like these outsiders want?
It seems to me if you really want to design a city, I mean really care you’d be better off becoming a real estate investor or developer and then building things how you think they should be built.
The Strong Cities folks and the like don’t seem to have good answers for how you actually implement their ideas without wealth destruction and dislocation of communities that have built up in ways that don’t meet the standards of urban planning high ideals.
The Haussmannisation of Paris 2.0 is not going to happen in a US city full of middle class land owners.
Maybe we’d take these people seriously if they had a reasonable PLAN for implementing their grand ideals
Why is it that these "nutritionists" spend all their time talking about clean eating with no results? Clearly regular people can't eat more vegetables and less Doritos. Maybe we'd take them more seriously if they had a reasonable plan to thin America down.
I'm a strong town proponent and advocate (though I live in Portugal where many of these problems never surfaced on the same scale). I'm also a real estate investor.
The crux of it is that the priority for urban planning enthusiasts must be education, not mass rebuilding. A large, large majority of people would still rather take out buy a horrible McMansion in a soulless development than buy a smaller, well-built home closer to their neighbours. Showing off wealth and ticking off features is valued over long-term enjoyment of your home and betterment of the community.
Is it such a surprise that it's hard to get a large number of folks to do what's best in the long term instead of what they want right now?
I don't know if I'm one of "these people", but you're singing my tune.
I want to start a kind of real estate development company to buy distressed land (as opposed to raw wilderness) and develop "living neighborhoods"[1] (like Village Homes[2] in Davis, CA) combining Pattern Language and Permaculture (applied ecology), and sell sell them. "Rinse and repeat".
I don't know of anybody else doing something like this, and yeah, it puzzles me too.
Developers do want to get involved, but you're right that homeowners often fight changes to zoning. Not all homeowners, but enough. People who live in single family homes often think that multifamily dwellings are going to destroy the value of their property somehow. Since the zoning laws are on the books, changing them is much harder than maintaining the status quo, which is on the side of NIMBYs.
I think it's the airline food problem. If you poll people on what the airline should serve in flight, everyone says healthy. When you serve healthy, everyone complains, demanding a cheeseburger or pizza.
This is an interesting read, but it's a bit insider. If you're having a hard time grokking what they mean by "growth that makes the city _less_ prosperous," you should start with the Growth Ponzi Scheme series: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
I'll attempt to briefly summarize:
The post WW2 development pattern across North America (and many other places around the world) is characterized by car-oriented development, where large collector roads fan out to support tree-like trunk-and-branches local streets full of houses, with commercial box stores and strip malls often located where the major collectors cross.
This infrastructure pattern (road, sewer, power) is much more expensive than most people realize, and (to most people's surprise), the local taxes (property, sales, and sometimes income) collected by all the properties that depend on that infrastructure are rarely sufficient to pay for it.
This means that as municipalities expand in this way they are increasing their cost of maintenance faster than they are increasing their revenue, and thus becoming poorer.
The reason this continues is that the majority of the initial capital cost (which, again, is substantially more than most people realize) is heavily subsidized by federal and state "growth" programs. Thus, in the range of the first 5-10 years, local places often get a short-term influx of cash as new development pays local taxes spurred by infrastructure the city didn't have to pay for. But it's a bad deal, because the city is on the hook to maintain that infrastructure forever, and again, the long-term tax base is rarely adequate to pay for it.
This leads to a vicious cycle - which probably sounds familiar - where city officials are desperately chasing more "growth programs" from the state and federal level because they need the income to cover budget shortfalls -- but they aren't stepping back to recognize that the budget shortfalls were actually caused by this same pattern played out over the last 50 years.
It's a fascinating, slow-moving train wreck, one of those things that is all around us, and once you see it, you can't un-see.
Strong Towns exists to spread awareness of this situation. The organization's theory of change is that if the general public were well-educated on this phenomenon, then it would change, as people in each local area would stop making the problem worse then start iterating and innovating on ways to make it better. You can see some examples of places where this is playing out on the organization's "success stories" page: https://www.strongtowns.org/success
I have long maintained that suburban sprawl has be America's worst problem and also worst export.
Everything about the American suburban dream and low-density housing is unsustainable.
High density pockets with shared public spaces is not only more efficient, but IMO, also a lot more effective at building community and giving character to an area.
The worst part is the wealthy in developing nations also gravitate towards US style urban plans, because that is what is sold as 'high class', often with hilariously depressing effects. On the other hand, every single peer that works in urban design has found consensus in a collective dislike for US suburbs as both inefficient and lifeless.
>The worst part is the wealthy in developing nations also gravitate towards US style urban plans, because that is what is sold as 'high class'
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The urban cores of developing countries are really, really unsafe places (like, homicide rates of 5-50x of the worst US ghettos). Anyone who gets a bit of money & financial security wants to establish physical distance between themselves, their families and a Mad Max-type situation. I can't speak for every developing country, but having a bit of familiarity with Brazil- they have exclusive suburban neighborhoods physically separate from the favelas for a reason. And then they tend to have a private security force for the neighborhood, etc. I don't mean to stereotype people in the favelas as all bad (every one the 50+ Brazilians I've met through BJJ grew up on one!), but I can be sympathetic to families who just want basic security along with a middle class life.
I basically agree with the Strong Towns thesis that Suburbia Is Bad, but what I think most people here are missing is that when suburbs were planned in the US, inner cities were much less safe and people wanted to put physical space between them. Was there a massive element of racism in that? Yes, but.... it's also true that inner cities used to be way, way more dangerous than they are now. Ask any boomer what chic, expensive parts of New York were like in the 60s, 70s, 80s, etc.
Nothing about that requires an American-style sprawling suburb. You could copy the Eastern European model of 10+ story apartment buildings surrounded by large amounts of green space, with businesses in the first floor, and perhaps glass skyscrapers instead of ugly brutalist concrete buildings. Those estates could be just as easily protected by a private security force as an American-style community.
But if you ever venture outside of the 10+ story apartment building.... Especially if the favela is, like, two doors down. People want to live in a neighborhood that's safe, not just a home enclosure- you're missing the 'neighborhood' concept. A safe neighborhood requires x amount of physical distance from the ghetto that muggers, kidnappers etc. cannot easily surmount. The whole concept of safety means that you can walk outside your front door and not be attacked. A building that's the functional equivalent of a panic room, in the middle of bedlam- people don't want that, you still have to travel to the grocery store, take your kids to school, etc.
I'm not talking about a 10+ story apartment building in the middle of the city, I'm talking about replacing the low-density 4 bedroom houses in your safe suburban neighbourhood with high-rises, allowing for a much denser community which would enable you to walk to your grocery store, school, etc. instead of having to drive everywhere.
You could just as well surround the high-rise neighbourhood with a 5-metre high gate and have armed security guards patrolling everywhere if you'd like.
I've lived in both an American-style suburb and a development described above (minus the gates and security guard, Eastern Europe being exceptionally safe) and I much preferred the latter.
Bit of a sidetrack but you did say BJJ so I had to say something. Also, did you see "Cidade De Deus"[1]? The planned suburbs in that film were... what you described, I think. Also, I watched that goofy movie "Suburbia"[2] back in the day as well. There's a sort of similar gestalt the both share that I can't quite quantify in words or graphs but it's there.
I have seen City of God, but it was a long time ago and before I was seriously into BJJ. Have not seen Suburbia. The 'safety in planned suburbs' concept is utilized in so many countries though, literally all of South & Central America, Africa, the US in the past.... I just couldn't believe this whole discussion thread was going to pass by without someone talking about safety
Pension shortfalls are a problem - but consider that many of the pensions were designed in an era where the cities and towns were built very differently and where wealth was accumulating at a steady pace, so cities believed these obligations were prudent and would be affordable to future generations.
The pension story is more complicated than just development patterns, but cities gradually losing more and more wealth to bad infrastructure patterns over multiple generations is a significant contributor to why pensions are out of funding (along with everything else).
The pension story is that people think they can predict economic conditions decades into the future. Which they can't. And they think they can predict human lifespan statistics decades into the future. Which the can't.
More importantly, the pension story is that there's a built in conflict of interest. The politician and union bosses on the board of the pension plan get to choose the actuary that provides them with the rosiest numbers. The politician needs the union member's votes because they all vote, and the union members are incentivized to maximize benefits and show the lowest costs.
This is all too complicated for normal to understand, and they don't vote for anything other than lower taxes anyway. No one gets elected promising to save future taxpayers money by properly funding pensions by raising taxes now.
That infrastructure is necessary for small towns. It would be much worse if they had to maintain expensive public transport in addition to all the roads, and it's not realistic to have density at that level I think. The only solution is to make the small town a large town.
Like you always will have a minimum level of sprawl, period. Density means you just have a lot of people packed into that minimum area. But you need to have services and things that can't be packed together, and they can't always be dense enough to work with limited transport relative to the town size.
Small towns and villages were pedestrian-scale for thousands of years.
The new thing in suburbanization is the ability to live in a (poor imitation of a) small town and also commute to the city. Small towns themselves existed long before the automobile.
You can also have less infrastructure. Even the tiniest town could work fine on gravel roads with well and septic systems. The problem is usually when small towns try to build city-grade roads... which is pretty much what all of them do.
Or we could put the buildings closer together and not separate them by purpose. A mile of road goes much further if there's housing AND commercial that doesn't require an expensive, large automobile just to get from A to B.
People who live in small towns don’t want to be huddled together. They buy houses in these towns because they want a large property with lots of space between them and their neighbours.
Interesting summary and topic in general. I sensed things were off in my old (home) town but never could put my finger on it and found that asking questions in this direction was frowned upon.
That's when I decided to vote with my feet and relocate.
Thanks to whoever subbed this and comments here for opening my eyes to a shared perspective and organization that seems to represent that contrarian & data backed view towards what's happening in a lot of these places (especially the insecure rust belt cities) across America.
Where have we seen this before? Attract a larger audience, more users, more customers then expect everything to scale wonderfully?
I feel there is something romantic about keeping things a predefined size. The corner store, the closed discussion group, the small town, the limited edition FOO. It tends to get some things right in a magical way.
No, we've built cities whose residents can't afford to live in them because their taxation isn't used to provide services at optimal cost but instead funneled to private interests and various rackets under the auspices of urban development paradigm du jour.
You're being downvoted, but you're not wrong. Under the guise of things like public-private partnerships, public money is increasingly funneled to private interests. Look at the humble TIF. Does your city need a big-ass stadium that won't actually help development or build community? Cool! Let's draw a border around several blocks and capture all of the tax increases for 20 years and then give it to a private company. Once that's over, the company can collect on the next boondoggle while everyone wonders why their city is a decaying, boring place to be, ultimately resulting in demolition of the stadium.
Tax Increment Financing. A city designates a geographic zone and all property tax money collected in that zone above a certain baseline amount goes into an account that is separate from the city budget account. The city then spends that money on development as they so choose. Some places allow it and some don't. Some places abuse it and some don't. But in general you can expect TIF money to be given directly to a developer to encourage them to build something within that zone.
One of the big problems is that that extra money is diverted away from the city budget for 20-30 years. The area I live in used to be inside a TIF (it expired). During that time, only about 10% of my property tax money went to the city. We had overcrowded schools getting 10% of the money they normally would have received. The library got 10% of the money it normally would have. Some of that TIF money went to build a basketball stadium. In a final gesture of goodwill (I guess), when the TIF expired they spent the final ~$40 million in the TIF account on an elementary school.
The whole economy as it stands is a clever puzzle of guessing a half rigged race to the bottom (or the top) game. Now we have the computational and technological resources to track almost anything down to the single item, we should use this power to assure an even and fair distribution of goods and resources and nothing much more. Work to generate income is a destructive and obsolete concept; money as a construct has nearly finished its useful lifespan together with the egotistical concept of accumulation of wealth, a thought that should cease to exist for the greater good of everyone, sweat and pride should be taken for the achievement, not for the reward, but this is something very hard to swallow in certain circles that achieve nothing and produce mostly unfairness.
This is really naive. Money is just an idea and it lets the mega connected world of today operate with some semblance of sanity. What do you propose we use instead of money and how is that different from money? Who gets what and how much of it? Who decides all this?
Value per acre seems like a better metric than just value per lot, but it seems like the metric you'd really want to maximize is value per infrastructure cost, which isn't quite the same thing.
For instance, narrow, deep lots would have less street frontage than square lots and therefore have lower infrastructure cost and be more efficient. Similarly, having large areas of undeveloped forest or park land don't necessarily increase costs much if they don't require major infrastructure. (One could reasonably debate whether undeveloped space significantly increases the need for roads elsewhere to compensate for reduced density.)
An urban exploration channel I like watching for potential places to go to did a dive through an abandoned Chinese ghost city recently [0]. It's honestly pretty shocking, almost like a set to some kind of dystopian horror movie. Perfect for urban exploration, but perhaps not the best for healthy long-term sustainable economies.
It really makes you think about the potential house of cards everything must be built on, and what's going to happen when it all catches up to us.
Obviously this is super hard/impossible to calculate, but everybody should be paying in a certain fraction of what they are getting out of the system.
ex. The entrepreneur that gets access to the road system, educated workforce, police/legal system protection... if they didn't have that then they couldn't profit from their widget. So pay something significant back to the system, or you can't participate in the system.
There are plenty of cities you can afford. It's just that if you want walkable and world class network effects, eventually the demand will drive us prices so that only the wealthy can afford to live there.
I don't think that "walkable" and "world-class network effects" are actually required to go together. The majority of walkable places around the world are just ordinary towns you've never heard of.
In North America this tends to be true mostly because just about everything was walkable before WW2, and after WW2 the almost the only places that were left that way were the places too wealthy and expensive to demolish and rebuild around the car. Not too much of a surprise, the places that had that much wealth 70 years ago are still the major hubs of the economy today.
If it were just walkable, you could pick a smaller city or downtown area and live there, especially with a class that does intellectual or remote work. The issue of "too expensive" is usually that everyone wants to crowd into a few cities because of those network effects and social life features, walkability is one of them.
For all the love of decentralization HN has, in practice they very much want to centralize where wealth and power is.
When most people say "walkable," what they generally really mean is walkable + good transit + tons of places they'd actually want to walk to like parks, bars, restaurants, and shops.
The suburban development plan becomes really onerous when cities sprawled once and then sprawled again a couple more times. The first round of widely-spaced single-family homes with no retail or commercial space causes a buffer that can't be expanded into by the inner metro without a herculean effort or complete failure of the neighborhood. The second ring usually becomes poor because the third ring is where the wealthy are moving into the big houses. That third ring looks great, now, but eventually it will look run down as well and will either be abandoned or will need a ton of money to replace it.
The post-war American development plan is what it is. Nevertheless, we need to strategize to continue developing our cities into places that are worth living in. I think Atlanta has been doing a good job, but it bumps against these zoning constraints a lot. With more people understanding the overall strategy, and with some projects like the BeltLine showing how desirable new approaches can be, we will hopefully see substantial improvement in our lifetime. And by that, I mean that people will really appreciate where they live, and have healthier and happier lives, not that it meets some goal of urbanization or what not.
This is mostly SanFran and NYC. Other cities can build housing and apartments. Seattle has built tons of apartments. Costs are a bit high, but that is the fuel to kick growing the supply into overdrive.
I think it starts to make sense when you add in subways and the personal cost of car ownership (1 car vs 3 car families) then density makes complete sense.
This site/magazine/think-tank/whatever has told the same story for years ... certainly there are case studies that they would cite as following their ideas if those were succeeding somewhere? Barring evidence and scientific trials, aren't these ravings from a group of malcontents?
It takes a long time to do the experiment. A few years isn't enough. The suburban pattern experiment was enacted without any control group and now we're finally recognizing that it didn't work out as we hoped. Now that people are realizing that Jane Jacobs was on to something, we have to experiment to go forward.
The default in America is going to be what we're familiar with. Continue building the next subdivision on the nearest farmland or forest. Run more roads to it, widen the current ones to handle the new traffic, watch as the people pull up stakes in their current suburbs and move out, leaving the existing ones to decay.
Towns that follow a different approach will be able to see results in different timescales, but hopefully we will relearn how to build towns that can last generations.
Private development funds public infrastructure though. So if you build really expensive public infrastructure, you need a corresponding amount of private development in order to pay for it. Really dense and valuable development like in downtown Manhattan can support much more expensive public infrastructure than a smaller town could.
Funding sources and project direction for municipal government are a lot more diverse and complicated than the picture you're painting. Yes, everything kind of feeds into everything else; you could broadly call this "the local economy." Development is one piece of that, but not the only piece.
>What’s the endgame? Cities default on their Muni bonds? Then what? Giving up pension obligations?
First what'll happen is that they cut back on maintenance of infrastructure like roads. Then the bond defaults will happen, followed by bankruptcy and haircuts to pensions. Detroit is a better example to look at than rural Japan because it actually went through bankruptcy.
Higher tax rates that more accurately reflect fixed costs? This site seems to think that if we aren’t spending enough to maintain our infrastructure then it is impossible to maintain and we should radically redesign our entire society.
The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth, infinite leverage, and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example). It works, until it doesn't.
I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.
> The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth
Yes, because total factor productivity[0] always grows.
> infinite leverage
None of us can raise an infinite bank loan, so this isn't really true. There are many, many, many limits to leverage.
> and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example).
Also not true... if the value of living in SF increases, it makes perfect sense that land in SF is also more valuable
> It works, until it doesn't.
That's not really a falsifiable assertion.
> I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.
Notwithstanding all the faults in the arguments above, how does distributing wealth arbitrarily at a single point in time ("real correction") solve any of the issues you present?
Your "rebuttals" are a prime example of normalcy bias.
Not surprising though, pretty much everyone born in the past 60 years has become accustomed to a ridiculous "normal" that has been built on a fossil fuel house of cards.
GC mentioned "total factor productivity", which is not just an assumption that things will stay the same. It's a measure that value (productivity) actually is increasing, all the time.
And the other rebuttals were pointing out flaws with GGC's arguments, none of which relied on "the status quo works".
"None of us can raise an infinite bank loan, so this isn't really true. There are many, many, many limits to leverage."
Yes, of course that is true, but there appears to be no general limit on notional value of derivatives of debt - and when there are limits, they are local to some very particular asset class.
I encourage you to re-watch "The Big Short", or at least the scene where one of the protagonists discovers the 10x or 20x notional value of total housing credit derivatives (and derivatives of derivatives ...).
Although that particular asset class is no longer encumbered in that way, I predict that there is some asset class hiding somewhere that has been levered up in creative ways, just waiting to collapse ...
Why does TFP always grow? Is the fundamental reasoning that new technologies and efficiency improvements in existing technologies will always occur over time and therefore guarantees this growth?
Essentially yes. Technology improvements (for a very, very broad definition of technology that includes things like Rights) are the only way that wealth is actually created. Everything else is just assets moving along a value curve in time.
Eventually, all the clever innovations will either have smaller and smaller impacts, or will be impossible to implement due to material restrictions. Exponential, infinite growth can not be sustainable.
Sure, but even beforethen growth will slow down very very significantly, and might go to zero for some for significant periods. Just building a Dyson sphere would probably take a few millenia.
You're assuming we don't make any fundamental discoveries in various fields that allow for an exponential number of new technologies based on those discoveries.
This seems short-sighted, as we've been doing that for most of human history, and honestly I don't think we're very close to unveiling all the mysteries of the universe.
We could start building a Dyson sphere right now. It would just take a long, long, long time given our current understanding of physics and technology. Imagine all the things we might be able to achieve with our understanding of physics in 300 years. Imagine the thing we will discover that will have their own Dyson-sphere equivalents. i.e. things we discover that we know (hypothetically) how do do, they are just not quite in our grasp.
No, I'm projecting it would take millenia even if we start multiple hundreds of years in the future. We absolutely could not even start building a Dyson sphere today, the material constraints are far beyond anything we are capable of.
The reason why I'm saying it would take in the thousands of years, is because of this tautology: If we want to build a Dyson sphere, it means that we are still limited to the energy we can get from Earth. Given the issues that come with extracting a large percentage of the energy received by the Earth, even if we used fusion (due to thermodynamic constraints), the limit of energy used can be placed around 5-10% of the energy Earth receives from the Sun (And that would require extensive geo-engineering). With that sort of energy output, the energy alone required in order to move the material needed for a Dyson sphere from Earth orbit to Sun orbit would take literally millenia, and that's with a combined effort from all of Mankind, which politically completely impossible for the next centuries unless China or some other superpower was able to magically establish true utopic statless communism and win away the rest of the world to establish a world cooperation of sunshine and rainbows magically.
A Dyson sphere would weight around the mass of the Earth. The Hohmann transfer from Earth to Mercury (fly-bys cannot work due the sheer mass knocking out other planets from their orbits, this is actually the magnitude of energy we're talking about). If we could magically make the material necessary appear from Earth gradually, d/v from earth surface to LEO then from LEO to Mercury's orbit or thereabouts via a Hohmann transfer is of around 15 000 m/s. If you take the good old kinetic energy formula, 1/2mv^2, you find that this would require a staggering amount of energy that would take millenia to amass.
So the actual logistics of starting work on a Dyson sphere wasn't really the point of my comment. My only point was that we could make a start, because we grasp the principles – surround the sun with a structure that can capture most of its energy output.
Contrast with the plentitude of natural things we presumably don't understand / know about (unlike the sun) and there is a lot of potential for the future.
That being said, for the construction of a sphere you would presumably not be shipping matter from earth. You'd be towing in matter from asteroid belts and such.
Towing materials from asteroid belts would require almost as much energy, and you would need some sort of megastructure for processing.
What I'm telling you is that there are hard limits that mean that our growth must slow down. There is a hard limit to how much energy we can harness from the earth, and a hard limit for how fast we can avoid this. Progress will have to slow down, a society based on endless exponential growth at short-term significant rates is untenable.
They might run out of things to be clever about, for example (that's assuming your belief in the people actually being clever holds - I have my doubts here.)
When I said "infinite leverage", what I meant was that there is no upper limit to the amount of leverage (debt, or credit) that any one entity can have. There's also no limit on the total amount globally. The US government, for example, can print infinite money and create infinite debt.
I think the point is that you are developing, it all works. If you are not improving, it clearly doesn't, but that is true regardless of "what the economy is geared for".
If you have a complete meltdown, that's not the growth economy's fault.
The distribution of wealth creates a distribution of incentives that behave dynamically. "fixing it at a single point in time" does more than you're saying.
Also, there are a number of asymptotic features of "total factor productivity" that are not favorable. The more oil you burn, the more expensive it is to burn oil.
The most 'always' things I know, are axioms we've agreed upon, such as 1 + 1 = 2 in arithmetic. They are only 'always' so because we've agreed on it, for now.
What incredible discovery enables you to make 'always' claims about the world we're living in?
Fine, change it to "has always" if that makes you feel better. I don't think we've reached the apex of our technological prowess so I assume our productivity will continue to improve, but if you want to make a different assumption feel free to do so
It really bothers me to hear this, because the truth is people have unlimited wants, and there will always be rich and poor, whether by context or by deed. Growth is the only way I see where we can hope to lift all boats. An anti-growth mentality kicks the ladder from underneath those who might benefit from increased material wealth.
In this context, I'm really proud of my ancestral homeland (mainland China), who in 40 years lifted a billion people from abject poverty through economic growth. Yes, there's significant problems magnified by that, but to paraphrase a popular saying, a full person has a million problems and a starving person has one.
Sure, growth with negative externalities have negative side effects and we definitely should talk about that, but that's a separate discussion and focus than "don't grow".
I totally agree with your leverage aspect and aligning value to utility, and I think that's a very positive avenue of discussion. Let's talk about that instead.
Exponential growth literally cannot continue indefinitely on a planet with finite land, finite energy reserves, and finite resources. This should be uncontroversial.
We can disagree about where, when, and how to stop growth. We cannot disagree that it must stop at some point, and that the tyranny of exponential growth means that you will hit this moment frighteningly fast even when you appeared to have plenty of legroom. With a growth rate of even 1.5%, you can be using less than 10% of the resources available to you, and yet you will hit a hard wall at a minimum within 200 years. And even this is a fantasy, as resources, land, and energy are always utilized in decreasing order of ease of access.
You're misdefining growth. Growth in no way has to be dependent on physical resources, and in fact isn't.
Growth is just as much about increasing efficiency. If you continue to chop down the same amount of sustainable wood year after year, but figure out how to do it at half the price (e.g. because robots), that's 100% growth.
Indeed, look at the huge growth in the services industry over the past several decades. That's not using up extra land, energy, etc.
Now growth can involve using up more resources, or it can not, or it can be a mix. But the problem you seem to have is with resource consumption, not with economic growth generally.
I am emphatically not doing that. Efficiency gains and “services” simply cannot fuel unlimited exponential economic growth, end of story. You can chop your tree for half the energy use tomorrow, but not the next day and the next and the next and the next. And unfortunately, we’re way closer to optimal efficiency for the tasks that we want to accomplish than you may want to believe. There simply aren’t many more 100% efficiency gains to be had anywhere economically meaningful.
At the end of the day, our access to energy is finite. And not simply from a perspective of resources. We are literally a few hundred years shy[1] of heating the Earth to uninhabitable levels from a pure thermodynamics perspective (e.g., entirely ignoring global warming from greenhouse gases, and considering Earth as a simple blackbody radiator).
If you somehow believe that we can have unlimited economic output from finite energy and finite resources on this planet I’m not sure there’s any point in me continuing to debate an argument rooted in magical thinking.
> You can chop your tree for half the energy use tomorrow, but not the next day and the next and the next and the next.
Why not? If we're talking decades rather than days, a combination of AI and solar power will eventually get us to the point where virtually no human effort is required at all.
Economic efficiency has nothing to do with energy efficiency, it's entirely about the efficiency of human inputs.
In fact, a significant amount of economic growth comes from learning how to accomplish the same tasks with less energy -- more fuel-efficient cars, lightbulbs, and so on.
Energy and thermodynamics have absolutely nothing to do with it.
There's no magical thinking here. You're just confused that you think economic growth requires greater energy usage. It doesn't. And I don't know where you've gotten the idea that it does.
And your link is misleading -- just because energy production has accompanied economic growth doesn't mean it always will, or that it does in every sector. It just means it's been the pattern so far, because energy is cheap. As soon as energy becomes more expensive, growth consists in using it even more efficiently and renewably.
> If we're talking decades rather than days, a combination of AI and solar power will eventually get us to the point where virtually no human effort is required at all.
I'm not talking about human effort. Price is related to energy input. And there's only so efficient you can get at chopping down that tree.
> And your link is misleading -- just because energy production has accompanied economic growth doesn't mean it always will, or that it does in every sector. It just means it's been the pattern so far, because energy is cheap. As soon as energy becomes more expensive, growth consists in using it even more efficiently and renewably.
It is not misleading, you simply misunderstand the impact. Again, there's only so efficient you can become in any system. And we're already shockingly close to optimum in many of our systems. Getting closer and closer to those optimums is obviously possible, but it's ever-diminishing returns.
It is controversial, because the assumption of exponential growth is flawed. For one, your model underfits population growth, it's a logistic curve and not a purely exponential one. Wealthier countries on average produce less children than poorer countries, and assuming no global shakeup occurs, most will end up in the crisis like the one Japan is beginning to see with a lot of older people and not enough younger people to support them. We can talk about what happens after that cliff, but how can you have exponential usage in natural resources when the population _doesn't even exist_?
Not to mention human ingenuity when people get desperate. WWI / WWII saw Germany produce coffee from acorns, oil from coal, and Fanta from vegetable scraps, ensuring a rise in industrial production during 1944 under arduous circumstances. We don't operate at 100% efficiency and we can most definitely increase that number by double digit, maybe even triple digit percentages. Take meat, a horrible source of energy inefficiency. Lab grown meats, meat substitutes grown from vertical farms, even eating different kinds of meats (cricket powder protein bars aren't bad and have a more or less 1:1 energy input:output ratio) result in increased efficiency savings. This is a matter of economics.
Anti-growth simply isn't feasible from a domestic or foreign policy standpoint. There is no way you will convince any significant politician, and by extension his/her voting bloc, that there must be an end to growth. You can't religion or dictator your way out of this either, since it goes against the very essence of human nature.
Nothing I said is rooted in a belief that population growth will continue unabated. You yourself asserted that people’s wants are unlimited. That may be true, but people’s wants are never going to override the cold reality of finite supply.
Finite supply exists even if population growth declines. Finite supply exists even if population declines. Finite supply exists even if it’s untenable from a policy perspective. The expectation of continued unending exponential growth baked into our economic system will run up against the actual limits of what the Earth is capable of providing.
Again, this should not be controversial. Playing games about population growth is simply dodging the fact that even given a population of two humans, any greater-than-one exponent on economic activity will end. The logistic curve exists precisely because of this fact.
There's a whole universe out there. Europe had "finite land" until it got to the point where the demand for new territorial acquisitions became so high that governments financed colonization of 2 whole new continents. Why wouldn't this be the case with space exploration?
It’s hard to come up with a succinct reply to highlight how utterly absurd this argument is. From virtually any physics-based perspective, any kind of space travel or space-faring economy outside of very, very near Earth is unavoidably an net-negative venture[1]. Shipping energy from anywhere outside of Earth’s gravity well costs more energy, even at theoretical optimum efficiency, than it has any chance of gaining.
It’s not just that it’s difficult, from any meaningful angle it requires us to have completely misunderstood the relevant physics. If your argument relies on us discovering that all of known physics isn’t just off a bit or needing of refinement, but is completely misguided… well, that’s your prerogative I suppose.
Even if you hypothesize a space-colonizing human race, that does nothing for the people who are still stuck on Earth with Earth’s finite resources.
Some people have unlimited wants. I just want to do interesting work, work with interesting people, and take walks with my dog. I'm pretty basic, I don't enjoy or have any interest in fancy automobiles, big houses, vacations, air travel, etc.
> I just want to do interesting work, work with interesting people, and take walks with my dog.
You've fulfilled all of your material needs and now you're in the self-actualization phase of the hierarchy of needs. It took decades of economic growth driven by other people to get your society to the point where people like you care more about fulfillment in their profession rather than food security.
Some people are still subsistence farmers and they need a lot of economic growth to get to the point where they can worry about fulfillment in their professions and taking their pets for a recreational walk.
Why should you get to benefit from the economic growth in your own society while telling others they don't get to have that?
No serious antigrowth argument is saying China ought to stay at it's 20th low point.
The problem is there is growth that solely exists to feed the capitalist Leviathan vs growth that is actually giving people what they want, and they are hard to disentangle under capitalism. You could the first is trying to disguse itself.
> No serious antigrowth argument is saying China ought to stay at it's 20th low point.
Nobody says that outright, but that is what would have happened if their arguments had been translated into policy in the 1970s. And it is what would happen to poor countries today, if anti-growth arguments were adopted today.
And yet... growth will end. It will end because we choose for it to end, or because we've over-mortgaged the resources we have available to us and experience a collapse.
Bacteria in a sealed jar will continue to multiply until they've consumed all the available nutrients, at which point their population collapses. If you constantly add a trickle of nutrients to the jar, this behavior still happens, just with violent yo-yo'ing between collapse and growth until an eventual steady-state is reached.
We can argue whether or not we've exceeded the replenishment rate We can argue how far it's reasonable to go past this point if effects won't be felt for thousands of years. But there is simply no argument to be made that we can continue growing endlessly and exponentially past the replenishment rate of the ecosystem we live in.
Personally, I think we're well past the replenishment rate. Our ecological impact is causing systemic collapse in multiple areas: our climate is warming past dangerous thresholds, our oceans are acidifying and being depleted at an alarming rate, our oceans are rising at an accelerating rate, and we're experiencing unprecedented rates of of extinction of both animal and plant life. We're running out of sand (to make concrete with) for fuck's sake.
On top of this, at current rates of energy growth, we'll literally cook the Earth within two or three hundred years[1]. And I'm not talking about greenhouse gases: just from a raw thermodynamics perspective. Put enough energy capacity on Earth and it will eventually take the form of waste heat. Even in the complete absence of carbon dioxide, the only way for that heat to escape Earth is by being radiated into space. And there's only so fast a perfect blackbody with the surface area of the Earth can get rid of that heat. Even if the Earth were a perfect radiator (it isn't), this[2] is what our future looks like.
I posed that question of the reality of that infinite growth to my econ professor back in the day, and their response was that technological advancements have allowed it in the past and likely will through the future. The plan appears to be to throw money at problems as they come up and coast into the sunset on the current economic system without a serious long-term plan for when things break down.
Unfortunately as most people here are probably aware, throwing money at a problem doesn't always result in a viable solution. As more and more of the low hanging fruit of technological advancement gets picked we may be in for some interesting times.
I think technology is only one way of expanding markets indefinitely, albeit one of the most beneficial when it happens.
Unfortunately capitalism's need for infinite growth is nigh unstoppable and it always finds a path. If there aren't enough startups, technological advances, or similar we see things like private militaries, Banana Wars, buying elections, private prisons, over leveraging, etc. Capitalism has to have an outlet and we are at its mercy in that sense.
It keeps going until people are unwilling or unable to put themselves into more debt for the same thing.
The government seems dead set on making sure the "unable" part never happens. And people are dead set on always willing.
If the government would stop trying to manipulate every market, this maybe wouldn't happen. The Islamic empire was insanely successful for a longer period of time than the US empire has been around, and the Islamic Empire had truly free markets.
For anyone interested, Debt: The First 5000 Years is a fascinating examination of this topic.
If the government doesn't manipulate the market then corporations will swoop in and manipulate it themselves. Which they have. Which is why government stepped in.
I /think/ it's possible to regulate without egregious manipulation.
I do agree that some regulation is necessary, which is a form of manipulation.
If you're referring to monopolies, for example, the government could regulate anti-trust without -- say -- artificially setting treasury yields (interest rates) and corporate bond yields.
Islamic empires did not have a truly free market. Islam imposes quite a few financial and economical restrictions (I'd say, rightfully in many instances)
I do not in anyway claim to be an expert on the Islamic Empire. But Islam (today or even in the past) does not equal the early Islamic Empire.
The religion seems to have evolved considerably from the early Islamic Empire. Which is common. Every major religion seems to have undergone several major metamorphoses.
Not really, no. The Coranic prescriptions have been relatively unchanged since a thousand years. Given the combination of textual and oral traditions, and the low divergence of historic Qurans over a wide area, we can conclude that the Quran did not significantly change.
The Coranic prescriptions about usury and other economic activities are incredibly clearly written.
The only conclusion is that there is no reason to believe that it was in any way different to today, and a lot of reasons to believe the restrictions on free trade are even higher than in the modern Islamic world.
The book says that the original Islamic Empire was highly favorable of merchants.
One of the main ideas (of the Empire, not necessarily the religion) was that gold coinage came from God so that people could easily trade. Instead of everyone acquiring all the skills necessary for sustenance (farming, tool building, carpentry, etc) -- they could become masters of a few skills and trade the fruits of their skills in the open market. The idea was that doing so, humans could advance much faster. This was sort of God's secret sauce. So interfering with the market was like interfering with God. It was a no no.
One could argue that they manipulated the market by banning usury (interest bearing loans). However, before the Islamic Empire, interest was usually VERY high -- 60%+ per year was common. Debt was so cost prohibitive that the constant need for debt Jubilees was its own problem.
It's unclear how the Islamic Empire financed all these merchants without interest bearing loans. I'd love to learn more about how that worked.
Only if you don't understand anything about economics...
> Homelessness grew noticeably more widespread in Japanese society since the collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble across the 1990s, and the resulting "Lost Decade" of economic stagnation. This has resulted in higher unemployment, a contributing factor towards potential homelessness.[1]
National economies are complicated, and the connection between high (or continually-appreciating) housing prices and homelessness doesn't always run the direction that a naive model assumes it does.
Wait, the latest stats read that there are fewer homeless people in Japan than all of San Francisco (and definitely all of LA). That can't be right. It has to be a definition difference or they're doing something remarkably right.
No, you just misunderstood my comment. I'm not disputing that Japan has a far lower homeless rate than we do, there's likely things we can learn from them (and things we can't easily transplant), and I've always been pretty radical when it comes to land economics (the notion of owning land as an asset is absurd to me, vs having a stable claim over it but no entitlement to its increase in value). I was narrowly disputing your comment's claim that depreciating housing prices is a significant driver of low homelessness rates, using an example of a big drop in housing prices causing a spike in homelessness. The example isn't perfect, since steady-state low prices have different effects from a large shock, but my point was that the connection obviously isn't this straightforward.
Oh I see. Thanks for the elaboration. I definitely agree that large shocks are best avoided, but I do think that ceteris paribus, bringing housing prices down relative to wages would decrease homelessness.
On the other hand, there's a lot of Americans on their nth mortgage, though so any policy aimed at driving housing prices down would have to factor that in.
> > The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth
> I hear this a lot. As far as i know it's not actually true. Is there anything specific in orthodox economic theory that requires never-ending growth?
I think a charitable interpretation of this claim is: people's planning (which is usually limited to the short term, when it happens at all) typically assumes the optimistic case.
This is certainly true for everyone who lives paycheck to paycheck.
It's also true for companies who survive on a revolving line of credit to fund longterm operations.
There are many macroeconomic models with the assumption that populations will keep growing and worker productivity will not shrink. That alone should yield never-ending growth.
Yes. Without viable debt being possible, barriers to entry to all markets skyrocket. When barriers to entry increase, competition breaks down. Thus, viable debt must be possible. For viable debt must be possible, there must be an opportunity for the lender to realize real interests. In order for the lender to be able to expect real interest on average, there must be growth.
Thus, growth must always exist for the current system to continue.
> In order for the lender to be able to expect real interest on average, there must be growth.
Why?
This doesn't sound obviously true to me. Imagine an economy in perpetual long-term stasis, with zero inflation. There's a company which has a factory which turns a profit, because it makes useful stuff. Every ten years, they need to replace the factory. So they take out a loan, and pay it off, with interest, over ten years. The lender earns interest with positive real value from this. Is there anything in this story which is impossible? Is there a theoretical reason a world like that couldn't exist?
On average, if there is no growth in the economy, then the average debtor can not expect a positive return on investment (obviously). As a collateral, on average, a bank can not expect that the debtor will be able to pay interest on the loan. So selling loans honestly becomes impossible. This is not a theoretical concept, this is the reason why in pre-industrial times lending with interest was all but forbidden.
Let's expand on the example of your factory. Say that you have a factory, that needs to be replaced in ten years. Why would you take out a loan over ten years with substantial interest, when you can simply save up over ten years to buy another factory? Since there is zero inflation, this is incredibly better for you. And so, there is no reason for you to take a loan; and you won't take out a loan. For an economic transaction to happen, it needs to be in the interest of both party, and in a no-growth economy taking out a loan is either in the interest of the lender or the debtor, but never both, on average, for a given lending policy. This is not the case when there is growth, which is why we have banks, whereas we didn't really have any kind of lending infrastructure in times were growth was of or near zero.
The only people that might want a loan are people that don't have enough capital to get started, but in a zero-growth economy you cannot expect that they will be able to repay you, so you won't lend to them, and if you do lend to them expecting that they will not pay you back that will be at astronomical interest rates and will essentially be usury.
It's a relatively natural consequence of the fact that doing work creates value. One of the things you can work towards is creating more workers (by creating more humans, or better efficiency, or robots). Because these processes are basically exponential, you expect to see constant neverending growth.
The only real physical limit to productivity is our energy input. When we create things, we use energy and time to turn raw materials into useful stuff. Today most of our energy comes from the plants we eat (ie the sun) and from the ground. But we are not close to using even a small fraction of the energy that the sun gives us, so there is still lots of room to grow.
I always hear that there's inflation targets, and deflation and stagflation are both worse than inflation. In this sense, the price of things always goes up, but so should wages. I don't know if economists plan on purchasing power always going up.
I don't think this is relevant. Prices and wages going up aren't growth. In fact, inflation represents a _devaluation_ of a unit of held currency. There's a reason everything is measured in real prices instead of nominal.
The problem is the wealth in concentrated in the few, who do not want to give it up, and needed by the many, who do not have (or know) the leverage needed. Of course this has always been the case since cities were first invented. All civilizations come to some kind of end, and new ones arise.
Yup, precisely this. Obviously this is super hard/impossible to calculate, but everybody should be paying in a certain fraction of what they are getting out of the system.
ex. The entrepreneur that gets access to the road system, educated workforce, police/legal system protection... if they didn't have that then they couldn't profit from their widget. So pay something significant back to the system, or you can't participate in the system.
City populations are some of the most unequal in all society. Extremes in close proximity. I've read research on this in the past, although I don't have any links at the moment.
Total wealth is not important as long as everyone is paying for shared infrastructure based reasonably closely to the value they derive from it. That’s the social contract that’s being broken as for example developers depend on good local schools but they pay nothing for them. Building a new house is inherently different from selling an existing one, but zoning changes are handed out for free.
You don’t speak for me. I would rather pay my taxes than have the money if I know every one else is in the same situation as me in being obligated to pay taxes. That is not the current status quo. Tax shelters and tax minimization strategies generally are tools that are not beneficial to market participants equally. It’s simply not worth the trouble unless you are offsetting a substantial tax liabilities. It’s not always the case that tax liabilities increase as wealth increases. Taxes don’t always go up with your income either. The fact that these variations and exclusions and deductions exist show intent to tax fairly and a desire to not double tax if not a reality. Yet the clear evidence that in real world examples, very high net worth individuals pay less than those in the upper middle class. Taxing proportional ability to pay seems fairer than the current system. That this is not the natural order of the tax system is itself curious. The governments of the world already deficit spend in excess of tax revenues. The tax system isn’t any more about fairness than it is about the money. If the government was able to choose to forgive your tax liability due to an exclusion or deduction, it could choose to do so for the entire tax base. It is not necessary to tax system to exist in its current state. It is the way it is because it benefits those who have money and power for it to be this way. Maybe this is why Fukuyama foresaw the end of history. We just ran out of ideas so this is the closest thing we got to a steady state society.
If real estate were a depreciating asset rather than an appreciating one, this would not be a problem. Imagine if we had a surplus of housing in major cities (certainly possible with modern technology if you put politics aside) and homes had to compete in the manner of consumer goods such as automobiles.
> This is stupid. You have this marxist idea that conflates wealth and value.
I just want to point out that to philosophers and economists interested in Marx, that's not a solid point. Marx rarely uses the term 'wealth' and his definition of 'value' is very specific. Marx's point was that wealth always takes a specific form, there is no 'wealth' in abstract just as there is no 'production' or 'population' or even 'value' in the transhistorical always-the-case sense.
>In reality, there is no real problem with wealth inequality as long as people don't all work for one person, which never happens because of dynamics of demand and offer for labor.
This seems to be deriving an 'ought' from an 'is'. You may find no problem with wealth inequality, but a wide variety of esteemed economists, sociologists and philosophers do. You need to consider the question of to whom wealth inequality isn't an issue, on the basis of which facts, and which model of wealth and value.
It's beyond me how you can think this makes even an ounce of sense. Contrary to your assertion, owning a home in a city isn't the same thing as working in one (I can't believe I have to say that), as should be made obvious by the fact that there are tons of employed renters and retired homeowners in cities. There are plenty of situations where the dynamic runs precisely counter to your claim: the obvious example being assetholders of real estate in a booming city extracting rents from the newly-arriving people whose work is "highly rewarded".
Work in cities is "highly rewarded" through high salaries (obviously). High house prices is (part of) how work in cities is _taxed_, which is pretty much the exact opposite of rewarding.
I think the parent is objecting more to the fact that today's economy allows those with wealth to earn income from that wealth. (E.g. they own the property, they can earn income from rent. They own the factory, they can extract excess value from the labor. etc.)
Automation vs working is a different axis than rewarding capital vs working. They are both good discussions to have, though.
Ideally we wouldn’t have to work but we are very far away from that.
In the meantime it seems society is getting skewed towards benefiting owners over people who work. The news celebrates rising stock markets and rising housing prices. We celebrate “job creators”. The Fed responds when the stock market goes down but just shrugs when real wages for most people are stagnating or even going down . Investment income is taxed favorably over income from work.
Companies claim they are run solely for the owners (shareholders). Why not make workers also stakeholders that need to considered?
clearly the rewards from owning things vs actual work is a bit out of whack in our current society. but owning things is itself the reward for surplus work.
Inventions and new technologies increases wealth, think about the digital revolution in the past few decades.
In order to keep growing, society must invest in research and innovation.
'Redistribution' is inherently unfair, and in a global world it will only cause capital flight.
> Inventions and new technologies increases wealth
Increases wealth for a few. Studies have shown that technology is not actually making us more productive in the past 10+ years.
> In order to keep growing
Who says we need to keep growing? We have enough mouths to feed on this planet already.
> 'Redistribution' is inherently unfair
There is no such thing as “inherently” fair or unfair. Did anyone “earn” a wealthy upbringing? Did anyone “earn” their genetic advantages? Outcomes are a result of one’s nature and nurture, neither of which are under one’s control. Anything you have is a gift from the universe, and you will either share your gifts or not.
“If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today” - Mark Zuckerberg
“I think about the amount of human potential that is being wasted by people that are not doing what they want to do. I think about how great it would be to undo that. And that’s really powerful to me.” - Sam Altman
“People who fall by the wayside, through no fault of their own, as the goose lays more golden eggs, should still get a chance to participate in that prosperity.” - Warren Buffett
> and in a global world it will only cause capital flight
“Only” would imply that everyone with capital has the same opinion as you, but it doesn’t sound like you understand how people with capital actually think.
This is a peculiar, and unsubstantiated assertion. I certainly wouldn't consider this an axiom in any discussion about economic policy. Can you explain a little more?
Or are you just saying that you believe that redistribution is unfair?
The world is inherently unfair - people can’t control what family they are born into. It’s unfair that some of those families may have be subject to generations of marginalization.
So if redistribution is “unfair” it’s only to counteract the inherent unfairness of the current system.
And this is why I’ve been saying for years that all children should be taken at birth and put into centrally managed government daycares where all babies can be raised in equal environments. It’s completely absurd and unfair that a rich baby gets so much more than a poor baby. Until we stop letting parents raise their own children and let society do it, there will always be inequality at birth which cannot be overcome.
Frankly, fairness is irrelevant. There's nothing fair about the distribution of wealth. There is a natural tendancy for the wealthy to grow more wealthy, and the poor to grow more poor. Hence the power-law distribution of wealth observed in every society throughout the history of man, not to mention in the other natural systems.
All forms of redistribution, of any kind or at any level?
Here in the UK we have a bit of a different history on this that has pushed British conservatism in a more centrist direction. The first and second world wars were existential crises for us that stretched our economies and society to near breaking point. Millions of Britons were called up, worked in munitions factories, or volunteered in public services and the Land Army. It was a concerted effort across all levels of society. A major problem in the first war was so many draftees were unfit for service due to poor health and nutrition, this created a consensus that a coordinated system of social support and health care was essential for national security if nothing else.
So over here, it’s not really about redistribution. Sure there are plenty of socialists over here who are committed redistributionists, sure. Socialism is entrenched in Europe in a way it really isn’t in the US. But even among the majority of conservatives over here, history has shown us the its in the national interest to have a population that is well nourished, healthy and has a basic education that makes them fit to work, and serve if it comes to that.
I'm not talking about a definition. Just that, for example, if one child gets born in a rich country to a rich family and one child to a poor family in a third world country, their starting conditions are unfair. This doesn't help much with a definition of unfair, but I think it's still objective.
“Never ending growth” is what drives improvements in the standard of living. And by standard of living I don’t mean a bigger TV or faster computer but better healthcare, improved education, fewer living in poverty and clean energy.
> The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth, infinite leverage, and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example). It works, until it doesn't.
Humans want better lives. More living space, more free time, faster cars, whatever. Humans will not stop wanting this for as long as there are humans. There are two ways to get it.
One is creating more stuff. This is growth.
The other is taking somebody else's stuff. This is war.
Growth is better.
But zoning restrictions that inflate housing prices? That's not growth, it constrains growth, which implies...
I hope you will consider - both from a biological perspective and an economic one - that catabolism is also possible.
Which is to say, depending on your environment, you can create a "better life" (by your definitions) by catabolizing existing resources.
You can't catabolize forever, of course, but it's an immediate and obvious refutation to your claim that "better lives" can only be pursued through growth or war.
There isn't a separate thing called catabolism which can increase available value by neither creating nor transferring it.
Converting one resource to another at an overall net gain is growth. Converting one resource to another when the original resource was equally or more valuable net doesn't improve lives, it's either completely neutral or net harmful.
Note that there are a lot of growth metrics out there that inappropriately fail to account for this, e.g. they measure sale price but not consumer or producer surplus (which are harder to measure because there is no market pricing information available). If someone invents a cheap way to turn farm waste into motor fuel and then suddenly gas is $1/gallon, that's growth -- there is a surplus being created -- even if there is a net reduction in GDP because oil companies are making less money while most of the surplus goes to the consumer. (Though in most cases the reduction in GDP doesn't happen anyway because then consumers have more money in their pockets and spend it on something else.)
> Humans want better lives. More living space, more free time, faster cars, whatever
More free time implies translating productivity gains into less time working, rather than the current economic policy of pushing everyone into working full time such that productivity gains just create more waste.
I'm not sure "pushing everyone into working full time" is an existing economic policy goal so much as what happens as a result of artificial scarcity.
If Alice and Bob want to buy the same house as Carol and Dave and nobody works full time but Alice and Bob currently have more money, Alice and Bob get the house. But Carol and Dave can get the house by each taking a full time job. Until Alice and Bob do the same thing, and then you're back to square one except that now everybody has to work full time.
The solution is obviously to build a second house so they can each have one instead of being locked into a bidding war that requires everybody to run faster just to stay where they were. Which is growth. Elimination of artificial scarcity enables growth. Artificial scarcity is a method of war/theft and its prevalence is the source of the trouble.
Your thought experiment assumes cheap credit. Imagine with no credit - Carol and Dave could still start working more to close the gap in their funding, and Alice and Bob could still follow suit to stay ahead. But as soon as the houses were sold, the competition would end and all of them could stop working extra. Only with cheap credit are the four put into the situation of bidding away their futures. Moderate interest rates are on the continuum between the two extremes wherein parties would be disincentivized from bidding far beyond their current means, by a significant down payment and resulting compound interest.
Cheap credit matters more as to how much of the money goes to the bank vs. the original property owner. When interest rates are higher more of the money goes to the bank, because the monthly mortgage payment each household can afford is the same but now more of it is interest.
Even eliminating banks entirely wouldn't fix it, because if Carol and Dave could pay the equivalent of the higher mortgage payment in rent every month by taking full time jobs, a rich landlord would pay the higher price for the house and then rent it to them, which means they would still get to live in the house by both working full time, until Alice and Bob do the same.
The only real way out of it is to have two houses for two households so they don't both have to bid on the same one.
That's the main difference for fixed monthly payments. But higher interest rates cause lower asset valuations, which increases the marginal utility of paying more than the minimum payment each month. Paying off a mortgage ahead of time used to be a common goal. Now you hear people talk about how it's smart to pay the bare minimum and gamble their surplus in a brokerage account.
And sure any individual loan done by a bank can also be done by a well capitalized landlord, but the difference is in the quantity of money being newly created and funneled into housing. You can't take out a securitized loan to buy groceries, but everything that can be financialized shoots up. Even non-scarce manufactured goods like cars.
I agree that increasing the supply of housing is a good thing. But you're never going to get rid of positional goods - few want to live in a tiny apartment their entire life. So our solutions aren't a matter of either/or.
> But higher interest rates cause lower asset valuations, which increases the marginal utility of paying more than the minimum payment each month.
That requires having enough income to pay more than the minimum payment each month, which isn't really compatible with working less. And to the extent that this is helpful in allowing people to work less after the house is paid off, it would just tend to increase housing prices by a corresponding amount as long as there are still constraints on increasing the housing supply, because people would just bid them up by the amount that it's worth it to be able to do that.
> You can't take out a securitized loan to buy groceries, but everything that can be financialized shoots up. Even non-scarce manufactured goods like cars.
That's not necessarily the same thing though.
Suppose you can afford a $300 car payment and interest rates are such that a $300 payment translates to a $20,000 car. Then interest rates go down such that you can get the same car for a lower payment or a $30,000 car for the same payment.
Some people are going to choose the better car over the lower payment. That kind of looks like the same cars getting more expensive even if it's really people buying better, more expensive cars. Especially confusing when they're the same vehicle models but the later model years had a bunch of premium features added to them because the manufacturers noticed hardly anybody was buying the ones without them.
> I agree that increasing the supply of housing is a good thing. But you're never going to get rid of positional goods - few want to live in a tiny apartment their entire life.
You can't get rid of positional goods but you can move them up-market so they aren't necessities anymore.
Living in a tiny apartment with a long commute is terrible. People will be willing to work full time for many years to avoid it. But if you build a large number of normal sized houses or condos a reasonable distance from where people work, so that they cost the same as tiny far away apartments currently do, would people be so willing to give up years of their lives just to avoid living there instead of the giant mansion you could then get with two full time salaries?
Affluent people would then live in the giant mansions because they can afford it, and it would still be a positional good in that respect, but that doesn't detract from the dramatic improvement it would be over the status quo.
By contrast, it really doesn't matter what you to do interest rates, if building new housing is prohibited then the number of people who get to live in satisfactory housing is dictated by the amount of such housing that currently exists. Which makes everybody a lot more inclined to do whatever it takes not to be the ones stuck in the crappy housing.
And what do you think would happen if we decide to hike taxes on the uber wealthy once this is all over? The same thing they always do - go stash it in some tax haven, never to be seen again. For all intents and purposes, it has evaporated.
It ends in the next 8-14 years. First time event where retiring class > working class. Population growth assumed to be equal or higher for every subsequent generation back 50 years ago.
Wait until those surplus programs stop becoming surplus. If you look now and think inequality is bad now, wait, it gets a lot worst.
This book does better justice than I could ever: Sleeping on a Volcano: The Worldwide Demographic Decline and the Economic and Geopolitical Implications
> I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.
How would a correction lead to redistribution?
Corrections hurt the poor more than the rich. For the rich, a correction is a great time to invest. For the poor, it is a time of unemployment and despair.
The correction you describe has been perpetually postponed in the form of bailouts - whether that's to wall street or main street. A true reset would be quite painful and catastrophic - but only then can we rebuild a foundation on a different set of values and orientation.
Aspects of human nature are not evenly distributed throughout the population. For example, psychopaths have a very different value system compared to other people. Societies with psychopaths in charge of things reflect the values of the psychopath (a pathocracy). We can put people in charge who have a more even distribution of human emotions.
All of these City Lab and Strong Towns articles boil down to complaining about how every city isn't exactly like San Francisco. Some people have lifestyle preferences that are not as common in the bay area. Some people want good infrastructure so that they can commute from affordable housing. This is an example of SV hubris.
The founder of Strong Towns lives in Brainerd, Minnesota, and the entire organization was for many years exclusively focused on problems in small towns in rural America. It's very different from City Lab.
You have the causality mixed up. Housing isn't inherently expensive in cities. Building housing costs about the same everywhere, but land is expensive because of artificial scarcity. It's amazing how much America has and yet there are only a small handful of places where you can walk to a grocery store, and the privilege will cost you $2,500 per month. Every single state could easily support walkable cities (Europe manages), but they don't because of a pathological pattern of development pioneered after WWII.
I don't know how to help people who live in sparse suburbs. Not everyone needs to live in Manhattan, but exurban sprawl is alienating (and unsustainable to boot). It just doesn't build community.
If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that went bankrupt because of it? Strongtowns argues that early on, it’s covered by the developers, but after its useful life, it must be replaced by municipality. Ignoring the whole issue of the original residents actually covering the cost instead of the developer (clearly, the developer didn’t just donate the roads and sewers, it’s all priced in), how long do we actually have to wait for chicken to come home to roost? I live in a suburban development in Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will finally kill our budget?
If you look at the city budgets, there is no mystery: road maintenance is simply a very small part of municipality budget. It simply doesn’t cost as much as Strongtowns keeps implying. The infrastructure maintenance budget is dwarfed by everything else.
Just look at the numbers: http://www.seattle.gov/city-budget/2020-proposed-budget#/sdo... Road maintenance is what, $150M-200M counting generously and adding some overhead? Even if you apportion all of that to suburbia, compared to total budget of over $6B, it’s not going to make a serious dent.
That the road costs are low in suburbia can even be seen with a simple back of the napkin calculation: assuming cost to repave a mile of suburban road to be $1M, house frontage of 100 feet, and useful life of road at 30 years, you’re looking at $20 000 per house over 30 years, or less than $700 per house per year. Sure, that’s not nothing, but how much do you already pay in property taxes?
In short, while I think many suggestions of Strongtowns are good in their own right, and would indeed improve many places in America, the infrastructure costs story simply doesn’t add up.