Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money

333 470 6 years ago

One difference between here and the States is that most of our tax money goes to the equivalent of city and state, and only a small percentage to the national government.

mcny2• 6 years ago

Here means Germany? Or EU in general?

tannhaeuser• 6 years ago

GP can't possibly mean Germany with chronic communal underfinancing (yet being hit by federal law creating entitlements all the time such as for eg kindergardens, energy efficient housing, etc),

0823498723498723• 6 years ago

Switzerland.

(and for the cousin comment: PfP yes, NATO no.)

jacobwilliamroy3• 6 years ago

The Department of Defense gets the lion's share of U.S. tax dollars, but we're not supposed to talk about that.

At this point I can't tell if the politicians fund the DOD because they want to, or because they're afraid of the lengths it might go to protect its cashflow.

mrep• 6 years ago

us defense spending is 3.2% of gdp, less than a third of social security, medicare and medicaid at 9.8%: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget...

refurb2• 6 years ago

2020 US federal budget $3.863T

2020 US defense spending $0.636B or 16%.

That’s the lion’s share?

koheripbal3• 6 years ago

Because other nations secure your defense.

pasabagi4• 6 years ago

I find this idea totally weird. Can you look at the last decade of US military actions and say this has increased European security? I think most people would say no, of course not.

Sure, the US pays a lot for defense, but is that money well spent? Did the EU benefit from the US invasion of Korea? Probably not. Vietnam? Also no. Iraq? Afghanistan? In all these cases, certainly no.

brazzy• 6 years ago

"defense"

rbg2464• 6 years ago

US has never done anything in foreign affairs for free.

yardie2• 6 years ago

I pay an equal amount in federal and local property tax. Property taxes also pay for public schools.

Ironically, while people get in arms about how the federal budget is being spent almost no one knows what’s going on in their city or county budget. And that determines your quality of life just as much.

jbullock35• 6 years ago

The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure [...] To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year.

As best I can tell, the author was saying that Lafayette is spending only $150 / ($3300 + $150) =~ 4% of what it needs to spend to maintain its roads and drainage systems. That seems implausible. I wonder whether he has made an odd assumption: "currently, 10% of taxes go to maintenance of infrastructure; thus, if we increase taxes by $3,300, only 10% of the increase will go to maintenance of infrastructure." That odd reasoning might account for his "need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year" claim.

chii• 6 years ago

if you assume tax revenue is spread amongst all the things that are needed, then this makes sense. Instead of X number of things getting fully funded, and then roads/sewer maintenance getting a pittance, everything is under funded to the same degree, but everything still gets a little bit of funding.

silvestrov• 6 years ago

It can happend when towns grow quickly and the city sell the parcels for a significant amount of money.

In Denmark parcels are often sold for $50-100.000 in popular areas. This gives the town a significant amount of one-shot money.

If they use that one-shot money for running expenses rather than investments (in e.g. subways), then the town will go bankrupt when there are no new buyers of parcels.

It's somewhat like a ponzi scheme.

throw0101a3• 6 years ago

If they use that one-shot money for running expenses rather than investments (in e.g. subways), then the town will go bankrupt when there are no new buyers of parcels.

This is what happened to Mississauga, Canada (a suburb of Toronto): for the last fifty years builders had to pay developer charges which was used to build the initial infrastructure.

However things were constructed in a typical North American, car-centric fashion. Now that most of the available land is covered in large-plot, low-density housing, they kind of realized the money train has reached its destination and they now have to maintain all of this infrastructure.

The same mayor (Hazel McCallion) was re-elected over and over for forty years, and so the same kind of thinking was perpetuated over that time period because no fresh thinking was introduced and things basically ran on inertia. She is often labelled the "Queen of Sprawl".

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/how-hazel-mccal...

* https://archive.is/DpKKp

There are of course some plots left, and over the past few years they've been building medium-density townhomes, as well as more and more mid- and high-rise towers.

* https://www.insauga.com/is-hazel-mccallion-wrong-on-this-hug...

* https://torontostoreys.com/issue-of-the-year-mississauga/

legulere4• 6 years ago

I'm from Germany, 50k seems pretty low for a plot of land. You already pay more like 100k already in the countryside. And then the commune doesn't really make a profit (if they didn't own the land beforehand).

IncRnd2• 6 years ago

The article said about 10% of taxes goes to maintenance of infrastructure. I'm fairly sure that percentage is fixed. That would be $150 + $330=$480 not $3,450.

That would make the current percentage 150/(330+150) = ~31% not ~4%.

rightbyte3• 6 years ago

10% can be changed by the counsil. Eg. to tenfold infrastructure spending taxes would double.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

He's talking about accruals based accounting. I'm no accountant, but memory suggests that means adding something similar to [cost of asset / life of asset] to the annual maintenance cost.

Although it is still implausible, it is certainly possible to miss 95% of the cost if they spend very little on monthly maintenance (ie, under-maintain). Then at some point in the near future, the road will need to be ripped up and replaced. Not cheap.

Replacedfixy• 6 years ago

A lot worser. Years long the mobile-posse shouted: 'The roads are runned-down, off! We want you (the Gov) to repair'em!'. And the time came when the government started some infrastructure-programs repairing bridges and -roads (also railroads), but the people were 'unthankful' shouting: 'Now it takes a lot more time to [Insert:Object]-[1]. Under construction...everywhere! we do not like it!', 'Do something!' And a lot more happend to "home" (-;

[1]-[Object.List]: get home; to work, to the shopping center, the Kindergarden, bring the kids to school, find a parking lot... get our everyday stuff done. ^^

daniellarusso7• 6 years ago

This was a good explanation of why US cities will never be able to cover their infrastructure maintenance costs.

The town I live in recently completed a $20mil sewer treatment plant and is in the process of beginning a $2mil+ project to replace the water lines.

It has approx. 1,600 residents, although the neighboring town is a customer of our sewer plant and they supply our drinking water (even though we are on the river).

I believe, as an investor of municipal bonds, the tax liability is eliminated, so this may be a reason this type of investment is ‘pushed’.

Retric2• 6 years ago

Municipal bonds are barely above the inflation rate. Split what 1,600 x2 = 3,200 ways a 6,250$ per person investment at those rates really isn’t that expensive. It’s roughly what everyone building a septic system would cost. Especially, if it’s sized with the expectation of any kind of growth.

daniellarusso7• 6 years ago

It is not built with expectations of growth and its useful life will end at approx the time the debt has been paid off (about 20 years)

Typically when building a septic system, it is one per household, not one per family member, though.

A family of four does not need 4 septic tanks.

user5994461• 6 years ago

>> Especially, if it’s sized with the expectation of any kind of growth.

I don't think that most villages are growing. They're usually shrinking slowly as the old inhabitants die and the young leave to cities to find work. It's quite risky to go big and plan for growth when the taxpayer base is likely to shrink 10 years from now.

jimmygrapes• 6 years ago

Yet again an article about how it costs $X to do something with infrastructure but no explanation for why it costs $X. Until everyone starts asking "why?" and then addressing the resulting answers (commonly: kickbacks, overregulation, collusion in bidding, and simple "match the budget" bids) this issue will continue with every aspect of government-run service.

haram_masala• 6 years ago

Thank you. This was my first thought too, and then for some reason I felt like a jerk for going there.

koheripbal3• 6 years ago

Why is the high cost of western labor not in your list. Labor is the main cost.

We need construction robots.

rightbyte3• 6 years ago

That is not a problem if you got "high cost labor" taxpayers.

yardie2• 6 years ago

Same projects in Western Europe are coming in significantly lower. Labor is cited as the main cost but it’s easy to hide corruption in labor costs.

DarthGhandi• 6 years ago

We have "construction robots" already. It's called foreign labour and no one in the West would dare suggest bringing them in for one-off large infrastructure projects regardless of how many cost-benefit-analyses you can get the smartest economists on Earth to produce, nor the willingness of the laborers to do it.

pchristensen2• 6 years ago

It’s much more complicated than that. If you’re interested, Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations compares transit construction costs across countries, for example why some countries like Spain and South Korea can build subways for 1/10 the cost per mile of USA construction projects. It basically comes down to “no one tried to make this cheaper”. Culture and history seem to be the primary drivers, more than labor costs, unions, corruption, environmental regulations, NIMBYs, etc.

ItsJason• 6 years ago

Don't forget no incentive to be efficient or innovate better techniques / technologies on the part of both the city as a whole and individual employees. Government is the least accountable of all organizations and therefore the least effective at any given task.

chasd00• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what DFW and TXDOT do right but they routinely bring projects in on time and on budget (if not under). Two large projects that come to mind is the HighFive and Grapevine Connector. Both were huge and the High Five made headlines for some new bridge making machine the contractor invented. Whatever they're doing it seems to be working.

mnd9992• 6 years ago

Nobody doing critical infrastructure, public or private will be allowed to go under. Look at the privatised rail companies in the UK or the banks in 2008 for examples of this. Competition and markets definitely do raise standards where that competition is fair and genuine and well regulated. Usually though, privatisation results in state awarded monopolies where little more gets done than before and costs rise because of the need to show a profit or bail out accrued losses because at the end of the day, the infrastructure has to keep running.

Maybe we can create a marketplace for bidding on infrastructure work job by job and maybe, it could be profitable for everyone. I’m not so sure though.

RhodoYolo3• 6 years ago

They have the opposite incentive. At a company (A good one), if you try something risky (New technology) and it doesn't 100% pan out, you can cut your losses. In a system with low level buyers managing the contract and alot of higher ups able to say 'no' you get this self defeating cycle. However, Elon was able to bully his way into contracts with his solution (Boring Company) cause: A.) he's famous, B.) He's protested to the GAO a number of times when he didn't get his way. (SpaceX, and original chicago build)

Spooky234• 6 years ago

Strongtowns always starts with their answer and works backward to find questions. Your approach is similar... ie “it must be corruption”.

The answer is always the same for local governments. ~70% of expenditure is for operations, and 60% of that is for cops and fire.

netcan10• 6 years ago

This is the problem of politics in a nutshell. We tend to have strong opinions, as is out democratic duty. It's impossible (or very hard) to form opinions based on specifics. So we fall into tragically cliched thinking.

"The problem" is whatever the problem always is. Maybe its Capitalism. Maybe its "kickbacks, overregulation, collusion in bidding, and simple "match the budget" bids" It's probably whatever your worldview always points to.

lotsofpulp4• 6 years ago

And that 60% does not include defined benefit pension and retiree healthcare benefits that are understated or unstated because the government can use extra rosy assumptions and/or just skip saving money and then dump those expenses on future taxpayers.

specialist5• 6 years ago

City budgets aren't the only balance sheets.

Counties, corporations, charters, port authorities, states. I couldn't guess at all the structures and financing schemes that have been concocted.

For instance, Port Authority of NY and NJ builds, owns, and operates a massive amount of infrastructure. Completely apart from NYC. The Port Authority in my own region is its own separate nominally democratic fiefdom with its own powers to raise taxes, fees, etc.

rbg2464• 6 years ago

I see the same thing with private enterprise everyday.

bhupy13• 6 years ago

Key difference being that there’s actually some mechanism for private enterprises to fail and go out of business.

refurb2• 6 years ago

Sure, but if they screw up it’s some poor investors money, not my tax money.

hourislate2• 6 years ago

In Toronto, Canada a simple renovation of a subway stations entrance (painting, tile, basic refresh) can take several years. All the while they will rope off large sections or shut down escalators for months while there is ZERO work being done.

There was a Subway station called Runnymede that took about 5-7 years and when completely you couldn't tell they did anything. I am sure it cost 10's of millions of dollars and could have been completely started and finished by a private contractor in a couple months.

The city has never been manage properly because there are no consequences to the ineptness of the Politicians and bureaucracy that run it. You could complain (a lawyer friend did) and they basically either ignore or make up some story how difficult it is to lay 200 sq/ft of tile and clean an escalator...These things take years of hard work and planning....

Surprised the city doesn't come crashing down under it's own weight of dysfunction but they seem to prop it up by the endless tax or fee increases.

CydeWeys2• 6 years ago

Private contractors aren't a solution to the problem; that's orthogonal. Lots of work goes to private contractors here, with the same results.

Waterluvian2• 6 years ago

I don’t know your qualifications, but I doubt you were involved in the project. When I hear people upset about infrastructure giving armchair estimates of how long it should take or how expensive it should be, I just hear the uninformed project manager being outraged at the software engineers’ estimates. “And when their work was done I toured the station/software and it looked exactly the same!”

I’m sure there’s bureaucratic inefficiency. But there’s always so much nonsense that gets appended to the criticism.

legulere4• 6 years ago

Failures and inefficiency is just as common in private companies. It's just not as visible usually.

jungletime• 6 years ago

Canada is seriously declining. Have you seen grocery store prices lately?

Most of the housing in smaller cities is getting very old, built to very poor standards. Requiring constant maintenance. The owners often still stuck in 25 year mortgages, fixing houses that will fall apart in less time than that.

Many of Schools haven't been updated in decades, despite having asbestos insulation.

I visited a former Eastern Block country this past summer. New roads, infrastructure and buildings everywhere. Built to a much higher standard too. Much better food in Restaurants too. Thinking of moving back to Europe.

Considering the 300 billion deficit this year alone, declining credit ratting, higher taxes. The money for infrastructure will be hard to come by in the next decade.

snowwrestler• 6 years ago

In Toronto, Canada a simple renovation of a subway stations entrance (painting, tile, basic refresh) can take several years. All the while they will rope off large sections or shut down escalators for months while there is ZERO work being done.

This most likely happens because of insufficient government funding for maintenance.

Government budgets reset every year; governments can't take unspent program money at the end on one fiscal year and bank it for next year. There is no way to "save up" for big expenses aside from directly allocating sufficient funds in the funding legislation.

That sort of lump allocation is a lot easier to get for new work. The main reason is, new work has better optics--you go from nothing to something. Maintenance, unless it changes the cosmetics, looks about the same at the end as it did in the beginning. Boring! "What did we get for all that money??" citizens ask.

And maintenance is harder to budget for in a lump sum because you don't know how bad things are until you actually start the work. This is generally true of maintenance--anyone who has renovated an old home knows this. Until you open the wall, you don't know how much work needs to be done.

So what you do in government is start the maintenance projects you have at highest priority, find out how bad things are, and then do as much as you can with the budget you have. It it's not enough to complete an atomic unit of work, you just sit on partially-done work until more money becomes available.

And ironically, the irritation caused by unfinished work can help get you the money to finish the work.

If maintenance was properly budgeted, then the subway system could afford to do a full refresh all in one continuous go. Usually it's not, so usually they can't.

throw0101a3• 6 years ago

There was a Subway station called Runnymede that took about 5-7 years and when completely you couldn't tell they did anything.

Drilling shafts and installing new elevator is a bit more than a "simple renovation" IMHO.

https://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA....

And that assumes that they're not doing structural fixes for a station that was built >50 years ago (Line 2, B-D, opened in 1966).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_2_Bloor–Danforth

bleepblorp3• 6 years ago

Escalator and elevator refurbishment projects are extremely lengthy because most of the replacement parts needed to overhaul old escalators/elevators are no longer stock items and need to be custom made. In the worst case, parts may need to be reverse-engineered, re-designed to be compatible with current materials and manufacturing processes, prototyped, tested, and made through limited-run production.

If an escalator/elevator is shut down for a few months (or years) due to refurbishment, it's because worn, but vital, parts of it have been removed for use as reference materials so replacements can be made. It is also possible that vital parts could be too worn for the escalator/elevator to operate safely until new parts have been made and installed.

I'll also point out that published information on the Runnymede project indicates that the current round of construction started at the end of 2018, involved the addition of three underground elevator shafts, and is expected to be completed at the end of 2020[0]. Unless you are referring to earlier work, your '5-7 year' timeline to 'clean an escalator' is a vast exaggeration.

[0] http://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA.j...

wang_li3• 6 years ago

There’s plenty of reasons beyond corruption. Repaving a mile of third avenue in Seattle costs a lot more than a mile of downtown Wendell, Idaho which will cost a lot more than chip sealing a mile of dirt road just two miles away from the center of Wendell. Salaries are more expensive in big cities. The job is more complex as the amount of infrastructure beneath the road surface, which requires ongoing access, so lots of man holes. Repaving in a dense urban center requires removing the old pavement, in a rural setting it’ll just be piled on top until it’s been layered four or five times.

specialist5• 6 years ago

There's an explainer (in the aether) comparing the cost of 1 mile of subway in misc locations.

Cost of land is a surprisingly high factor.

I'm generally against eminent domain. Because it's abused so easily and so often. But I would also like the option to build our way out of our messes.

Failing to make the real estate more affordable, maybe we'll innovate our way out. Some combination of telework, The Boring Company, and cheap personal transportation options.

KingOfCoders• 6 years ago

I thought the main point of the article was that cities spend $X in infrastructure to get $Y in short term profit with $Z in long term costs.

Sum($Z) >> Sum($Y) with $X paid for my subsidies.

RivieraKid3• 6 years ago

The general principle is that we haven't figured out yet how to deal with monopolist markets (in other words, situations where there is no market). Competitive markets lead to high efficiency but there are many situations, often public projects, where there's no competition.

Mountain_Skies• 6 years ago

It's interesting that so many of the responses mention the high costs of infrastructure upkeep is due to the density and complexity of the built environment in which is exists. The article however is pushing for denser development so there is less infrastructure to maintain. Interesting balance between the two opposing development patterns, both of which appear to lead to high maintenance costs.

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

The classic example of this is the 580/880 intersection replacement in Oakland/Alameda. It's a crucial intersection for the East Bay so when a tank truck caused a fire that collapsed it, the tender issued provided a massive bonus for each day ahead of projected schedule you achieved.

The winner completed it far faster than similar projects, and under projected budget, taking it all in from the bonus. Every day he was slow, he lost money. So the incentives were great, and the winning contractor did a great job. So we have the construction technology and we have the policy technology.

But similar projects frequently take forever. Why is that? We know how to make them fast, cheap, and good, clearly. We know how to set up the incentives on a per-task basis so we will do that as well. So I suspect it is because they actually aren't crucial. So you sell the buyer (the populace) on the price tag based on the supposed importance, but you actually do the work on the real importance. The gap between the two allows for profit for politically connected contractors like Tutor Perini and also for make-work for powerful groups like construction unions. What we don't know is how to set up the incentives such that good per-task incentives will be put in place.

In fact, I'd say that the true importance of any slow project is likely very low. In California, the following projects should not have started:

* CA HSR

* SF Central Line

During their lifetimes they will not yield positive economic utility.

spicybright• 6 years ago

Wouldn't an incentive to get it done quick encourage cutting corners? It's critical infrastructure, sure, but all the more reason it should be fixed properly AND quickly.

fuzzfactor• 6 years ago

They're spending other people's money.

But how they get the money and from who is a factor too.

This always happens when real property is taxed rather than commerce, and the amount of land available for development is limited or fixed.

To start with all land is taxed according to its initial assessment, after that revenues can not increase without raising rates and/or further developing parcels to increase their taxable value.

Both of which are unsustainable in the face of any inflation at all.

Each of which have their staunch supporters at odds with the other.

If only rate increases are considered, rate increases will have to outpace inflation or the taxing authority will go bankrupt.

The taxing authority can not be allowed to fail especially since the original purpose of this type tax is for the taxpayer to go bankrupt before the nobility does.

Eventually the _landowner_ will be assessed more tax than the land itself brings in, and will require _owners_ having outsized wealth from other sources, often only multigenerational prosperity will be sufficient.

At the other extreme where revenue growth comes only from further property development, pressure is greatest on undeveloped properties having the biggest upside potential.

New infrastructure is built at the expense of the old, spread more widely, and naturally not yet having future inflated maintenance costs incurred.

Little hand-waving is needed when a tax payer & collector are all prospering over the deal in the short term and there is some plausibility to behave as if future prosperity for all taxpayers will increase at the rate enjoyed by those involved with the development. Surely making costly things easier by then.

Inflation makes it impossible to know for sure anyway.

Mix and match these growing costs across citizenry which is not becoming more prosperous, and eventually there is no discretionary wealth except among the few who overcame the inflationary toll.

Taxing commerce instead of property allows revenue to grow at the rate of real prosperity unlimited. With the risk that revenue will drop when prosperity drops, or the authority will go bankrupt at the same time as the general citizenry in such a case.

Not a realistic risk since the authority will have enough credit to delay its own bankruptcy until after the majority of the citizens are ruined.

I guess the point of view about what kind of tax could ideally fund infrastructure indefinitely depends on whether you are a lowly taxable subject or a high-born guv'nor.

arijun2• 6 years ago

Man, it's too bad this author didn't read the other post on the front page about colorblindness; I can barely understand anything from his graph.

(Yes this post is from a few years ago, but it does provide a good example of the principles from the colorblindness post.)

el_oni• 6 years ago

Theres a blue-green version in the caption of the graph. Does that help at all?

arijun2• 6 years ago

Immensely, thank you. I guess I should have read more carefully. I'll leave my unwarranted snark so others can laugh at me.

guidedlight• 6 years ago

Capital is so cheap these days, Lafayette should:

(1) borrow to fund infrastructure spending; and focus that into new local jobs and economic activity

(2) A boosted economy will allow higher taxes to be collected

(3) Better infrastructure will attract investment

But in this scenario, politicians will skip step 2 because it's unpopular; and the cycle will continue in a future generation.

Xylakant4• 6 years ago

How will that help? The fundamental problem is sprawl - the density is too low to support the infrastructure to maintain it. Effectively, the city is making a loss on every square meter of land it builds infrastructure on. Using a loan to build more infrastructure will make the problem worse - unless you can raise the tax base around (ballpark estimate from the numbers given in the article) factor 10 or higher just to maintain that infrastructure. So the answer is to build less - make quarters denser, smaller footprint per person, less garden space per house, higher houses. This all goes counter the dream many people have - a suburb house with a garden, driveway, lawn and porch.

rightbyte3• 6 years ago

High density infrastructure like subways and trains is way more expensive than roads and pipes. It is a 100k town in the example not LA.

MisterBastahrd• 6 years ago

LOL. Most cities aren't New York and Los Angeles. Lafayette is a town that grew into a city. You will NEEEEEVER EVER get that particular populace into the idea that they should all huddle in miserable, adjacent caves around the city center.

erdos4d• 6 years ago

I've often heard arguments like this for infrastructure spending, but I've also often heard that point 2 doesn't ever happen. You get a short term boost in jobs while the project is underway, but you don't get enough economic boost out of new roads and such to actually raise the tax base appreciably. It's basically just city maintenance work and businesses don't reward it as much as people think. Mind you, businesses will move out if you don't do it, but you won't see 2X tax revenue or whatever from that new waste plant, regardless of how it got sold to the locals.

reddog• 6 years ago

I noticed the author is a civil engineer. Asking a civil engineer if you need more infrastructure spending is a lot like asking a barber if you need a haircut or asking an orthodontist if your kid needs braces.

PeterisP• 6 years ago

If that's the case, then the author's conclusion (that we need much less infrastructure because we have so much that it's absolutely impossible to maintain it) is even more interesting.

smarks• 6 years ago

Indeed, Marohn (the author of TFA) has been attacked by other members of the civil engineering profession for his criticisms of it (going against established "dogma" as he puts it).

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/18/what-happens-w...

newsbinator• 6 years ago

Who is more qualified than an orthodontist to suggest whether a kid needs braces?

spaceribs• 6 years ago

It's a classic straw-man, "Well of course a civil engineer says there are civil engineering problems! It's their job on the line!"

lr4444lr• 6 years ago

It's the conflict of interest we're worried about. Not competence to make the assessment.

willcipriano• 6 years ago

You know when a mechanic has a sign out front that says "free brake inspection", how often do you think he says "brakes look great, no work needed"? You should only take advantage of a offer like that if you already suspect something is wrong or in the case of a orthodontist when you think your kid needs braces to begin with.

bananamerica2• 6 years ago

Or asking a doctor if you need medical treatment... OH WAIT.

mmm_grayons2• 6 years ago

No, it's more like if you go to a surgeon, he may suggest a surgical remedy because that's where his expertise is focused. Same here: a guy writing for this site is likely to focus his research on denser urban planning as a solution, and we should bear that in mind.

narag• 6 years ago

In the article there is a link to a follow-up article:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...

And in this one, a link to another interesting explanation:

https://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/ameri...

blurbleblurble• 6 years ago

And every month in Lafayette, how much money goes to the interest on mortgage debt?

And how many human-hours a month do people in Lafayette twiddle away on corporate busywork so they can pay that interest?

justanotherc10• 6 years ago

Why don't we just stop building all this infrastructure, and move to a micro-community or individual model?

My parents' farm is on a well and septic, and a dirt road. Water purification is done with a UV filter. The infrastructure costs are almost nil.

We are in an age now where houses don't even need to be on the power grid -- a set of solar panels and a lithium battery makes traditional power distribution obsolete.

If it costs a typical suburban house $10k a year to maintain infrastructure, that's outrageous. Move to individually or community based infrastructure.

Jgrubb• 6 years ago

I'm sorry, it's not obvious to me why this would be downvoted. Would anyone care to elaborate?

necheffa• 6 years ago

The claim that any of this has zero infrastructure cost is laudable. Either OP is extremely naive or being very disingenuous in there bias.

The farmer is notoriously running around the farm fixing shit in between tending to the crop because living off the grid is hard.

cycomanic• 6 years ago

Because it's completely orthogonal to the original arguments. Infrastructure is more than sewer systems, roads for example. Moreover everyone moving to septic tanks is a non environmentally friendly solution, and where are you going to bring the waste when the tanks have to be emptied (they need to be pumped out regularly), who is going to pay for that infrastructure?

Let's not even start on the argument that not everyone can and wants to live on a farm. Also rural living is probably the most inefficient when it comes to infrastructure.

tehwebguy• 6 years ago

Probably because people simply don’t want to move to places with zero jobs, dirt roads, nowhere to shop, no power grid and no UPS deliveries.

justanotherc10• 6 years ago

I'm not talking about everyone moving to the country. I'm talking about localizing power/sewer/water infrastructure in medium density areas like suburbs. If you read the article you understand that its the suburban sprawl that is the expensive areas to maintain. High density downtown cores fund themselves just fine.

aw16211074• 6 years ago

My parents' farm is on a well and septic, and a dirt road. Water purification is done with a UV filter. The infrastructure costs are almost nil.

How well would such a thing scale, though, especially in a suburban/urban setting? IIRC sceptic systems need a certain amount/type of land to drain correctly, so that wouldn't work particularly well outside of relatively rural areas. Wells might not work beyond a certain population density due to insufficient groundwater recharge rate. And dirt roads still would require maintenance, especially if you want to support nontrivial traffic levels, not to mention relatively high-speed travel.

justanotherc10• 6 years ago

Yeah that's what I'm wondering... could decentralised water/power/sewer distribution scale? Like maybe not EVERYBODY has their own well/septic, but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?

war10253• 6 years ago

Wells might not work beyond a certain population density due to insufficient groundwater recharge rate.

Isn't agricultural irrigation the largest source of groundwater depletion in places where it's an issue?

I believe basically all water here in Iowa is pulled from groundwater wells. I've never heard of it being something anyone was worried, but we also don't irrigate fields like they do in the Western states.

The main issue I hear about is people worrying about farm chemical runoff getting into the aquifers.

netcan10• 6 years ago

I'm not sure this is practical. You can't have wells and septics at high density, though you could probably localize certain things more than they are now.

Cities, small towns and rural locals have different costs. Rural areas maintain more kms of road per home, for example. Power/Data lines also cost more per home. Maybe these won't be necessary in the future, but they are for now. Obsolete is a strong word, still.

Like you though, the $10k price tag seems high to me. Is it really this high for the right reasons?

justanotherc10• 6 years ago

But its not the high density that's expensive (the downtown core is actually the profit areas), its the medium density with sprawling suburbs that is what us so expensive to maintain for the very reason that localized infrastructure may work -- space between homes.

morley• 6 years ago

This is addressed in the article: federal programs promoting infrastructure growth provided the funds. Building new infrastructure generates lots of short-term income to a city in the form of sales tax, permit fees, etc. It's harder to plan for the ongoing maintenance for these projects.

Of course we should build less of it, but we can't unbuild what's already been built, and we can't account for city managers who aren't aware of this future problem.

If someone can solve the problem of the future being here, but being unevenly distributed...

icegreentea2• 6 years ago

Is well water available at sufficient quantity and distribution for this to work? Lots of large population centers get their water from lakes or large rivers. If you disperse the population to the surrounding areas, is there enough ground water or small rivers nearby to sustain an ultra dispersed model? Or would you still need small scale infrastructure?

Similar question with dirt road - how long is the dirt road before it reaches a non-dirt road? How much traffic is on it? If you dispersed a major population center this way and still needed to deliver groceries and ship out garbage and septic, how quickly would any given segment go between needing to be regraded?

The 10k amount doesn't come about because they built a large community and infrastructure. It came because they built their large community in an unwise manner resulting in high infrastructure cost. While moving to individual or smaller communities reduces to possible scope of screwing up your planning, it doesn't reduce your ability to screw it up.

smileysteve• 6 years ago

We already have Americans not maintaining septic systems leading to outbreaks of hookworm.

animal_spirits• 6 years ago

Article for the curious: https://yellowhammernews.com/life-threatening-hookworm-resur...

RivieraKid3• 6 years ago

Because it's inefficient, aka more expensive per person. Internet, canalization, public transport, etc., gets cheaper with higher population density.

PaulDavisThe1st13• 6 years ago

330 million people living with their own well, septic, dirt road and water purifying UV filter.

Seriously?

justanotherc10• 6 years ago

No. Re-read my comment. Suburban areas only. Try to keep up before you get all salty and make yourself look dumb.

nickthemagicman• 6 years ago

Can anyone confirm if this is accurate or not? It sounds pretty dire if so.

netcan10• 6 years ago

A lot of the initial taxation and allocation discussion seems likes somewhat of a red herring. The starting point is near the end, IMO: The cost of infrastructure maintenance is $8k-$10k per home.

Is this true? How variable is this between cities? How determined is it? Could it be less, how, etc.?

IDK if this number is normal or out of line, but I think this needs to be the starting point. My uneducated opinion is that it seems high.

VLM2• 6 years ago

Per google, $10K/yr is one median income per 2.8 houses. The concept of having one person for every three houses doing nothing but infrastructure maintenance is laughable.

The problem with wide spread innumeracy is random numbers can be printed for propaganda or other purposes and the vast majority of people will simply accept them. Combined with sophistry techniques such as anecdote proves the general rule, etc.

netcan10• 6 years ago

Are you accusing this article of innumeracy and/or propaganda or is this just a general comment?

rtx2• 6 years ago

We all need to move to cities, and leave more land for nature.

mmm_grayons2• 6 years ago

No, I don't think I'd ever want to do that. I've lived for a short time in a dense urban environment and I hated it. I've seen pictures of European cities and they seen way too cramped for my taste as well. Like it or not, you will have to deal with the fact that most people don't want to live cramped up.

Also, do you think the people will just abandon their land if no one else buys it? "Nature" won't pay for it. They bought it from someone else and will therefore expect to be paid before relinquishing it.

02020202• 6 years ago

don't even need to read the article. the answer has been, is and will be always the same - welfare aka communism.

aazaa• 6 years ago

The way this happened is pretty simple. At Strong Towns, we call it the Growth Ponzi Scheme. Through a combination of federal incentives, state programs and private capital, cities were able to rapidly grow by expanding horizontally. This provided the local government with the immediate revenues that come from new growth -- permit fees, utility fees, property tax increases, sales tax -- and, in exchange, the city takes on the long term responsibility of servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure. The money comes in handy in the present while the future obligation is, well....a long time in the future.

This is the lens through which Strong Towns views the country's cities. It's a useful model that explains a great deal. It's also falsifiable.

The growth Ponzi scheme hypothesis says that the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure. The outcome is always the same: infrastructure that can't be maintained because its costs were never accounted for.

The Strong Towns website is chock full of examples, and Lafayette LA is just one. At this point if you live in any US city it seems pretty likely that you'll find a Growth Ponzi at work.

Also, that 3D map should scare the liver out of local politicians.

rayiner5• 6 years ago

The federal new starts transit programs are an example of this.

hmahncke• 6 years ago

Isn’t the reason those few districts have big “profits” because they are the central business district where all the people from the outlying areas with big “losses” come in to work and shop?

This feels like looking at a company by division and deciding that R&D and HR a make huge losses and all the profits are in sales.

CydeWeys2• 6 years ago

In this analogy the entire company as a whole is still making a large loss overall. So it will go bankrupt just like the city.

theptip2• 6 years ago

The article discusses this in some detail. Some of the districts with high profits are “downtown” areas as you say. Some are “poor” or “bad” neighborhoods, contrary to your (and I suspect most people’s) intuition.

The article’s main thesis is that these poor areas have the best ROI for development.

bobthepanda5• 6 years ago

In traditional cities people usually also live in the downtown.

The main issue is that free parking lots associated with big box stores are incredibly unproductive uses of land, and the tax value of the property reflects that.

paganel3• 6 years ago

subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure

The same thing is happening right now with EU grant money given for "development" to some of its Eastern European members. Lots of mayors and local officials use that money for grand local infrastructure projects for which they won't have any reasonable money to maintain even in the near future (let alone 30 to 50 years from now), because we have a numerically declining tax-base that is getting older and older (I live in one of those Eastern European countries).

But mentioning that issue gets you labeled as a person "against progress" or an anti-European (or worse, a Russian shill who doesn't trust the European project). We have a saying in Romanian that roughly translates as: "you should stretch out only as much as your blanket allows you to", i.e. one should only consume the resources he/she thinks are reasonably available to him/her, but right at this moment we are "stretching out" further than the bed itself and getting out of the bedroom altogether.

pram• 6 years ago

Doesn't seem dissimilar from all the rotting Soviet prestige projects/infrastructure sitting around eastern Europe lol.

inglor_cz6• 6 years ago

Czech here.

All post-Communist nations tend to struggle with the idea of diligent upkeep / maintenance of publicly owned things. In fact, I would say that visibly older, but well maintained infrastructure is a great indicator of good governance.

The attitude is slowly getting better, but aging of our countries will probably exacerbate the problem again. It is not just disappearing tax-base, but disappearing skill-base that comes with the common job market. Like, finding a competent tradesman is visibly becoming harder. Why should they even stay in the country when they can earn more in Germany or the UK.

Gibbon13• 6 years ago

One of my thoughts is building infrastructure is a speculative bet. You hope that it generates enough economic benefit to pay for it's construction, maintenance, and eventual replacement. A thought is sometimes that bet fails. You end up with infrastructure that doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for it's maintenance or eventual replacement.

I feel like post war the US made a lot of extravagant speculative bets on infrastructure, particularly related to suburban housing development.

jdkee• 6 years ago

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

biztos• 6 years ago

To be fair, in many cases the point of building the infrastructure is not to have the infrastructure in the end, but rather to give that EU money to the ruling elite.

Routing it through a company that pours a bunch of concrete is just the cost of keeping Brussels off your back and thus keeping the tap open.

dijit• 6 years ago

My wife is Estonian and she would disagree with you strongly.

How your government allocated the funds was your governments doing, but the money that was sent to Estonia has been invested and that’s what it has been... an investment.

Any investment that does not yield returns that cover its costs is failed.

Infrastructure facilitates so much of what makes up society that -not- having it can be much more costly than having it.

But in those cases it doesn’t it’s because government corruption or ineptitude has eaten you from the inside.

dzhiurgis• 6 years ago

Do you have examples of such projects?

murrayhenson• 6 years ago

Without these funds the infrastructure would either be poor or non-existent, making it expensive or unrealistic to move goods and people around within a country like Poland.

When I emigrated to Poland in 2005 (from the US) driving between Krakow and Gdynia at never more than 15% over the speed limit of 90 km/h (the average speed everyone else is travelling at) (but often under 90 km/h due to many lorries on the road, tractors, accidents, people in elderly Fiats, elderly people in Peugeots/Fiats/Polonez/etc) with three 15 minute stops the driving time was about 10.5 to 11 hours. Now it's about 7 to 7.5 hours (two stops, not three, and usually driving right at the speed limit).

The change is because of the introduction of the proper A1 motorway. Two lanes each direction and, most places, rated for 140 km/h.

I should note that the "proper" A1 isn't yet complete. There's no A-class motorway between Krakow and Czestochowa though it's being built and should be complete in a few years.

Maintenance on the thousands of kilometers of motorways (and highways and smaller roads) will undoubtedly be a significant expense in the future. But those roads allow for a staggering quantity of goods (and people) to be moved about quickly, safely, and inexpensively (even accounting for tolls). I doubt that our current government is setting aside money for maintenance for all of that but the potential incompetence of today's government shouldn't be a reason not to do something that will have ripple effects for decades.

tremon• 6 years ago

the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure

That doesn't follow from your quote. The quote says that the problem is that those subsidies were used for horizontal development (i.e. sprawl), which rapidly expanded the infrastructure. You are correct that future maintenance wasn't budgeted, but if the city had expanded vertically (i.e. denser urban cores), the infrastructure costs wouldn't have risen quite so dramatically.

cle• 6 years ago

This is an interesting claim, do you know of anything I can read for more info?

cwp• 6 years ago

From the author's follow-up article [1]:

  How is this possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density, but I've long rejected that simplistic 
  explanation. There is a lot more to it than a simple division problem.

He goes on to explain that the poorer areas tend to have smaller houses and narrower streets built on higher ground, all of which leads to lower maintenance costs. They were built with more frugality and risk aversion than the more affluent areas. This supports the thesis that Lafayette's predicament stems from extravagant infrastructure in affluent areas that wouldn't have been built without subsidies.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...

in3d• 6 years ago

I think Manhattan provides a strong counterexample. The 2nd Ave subway line cost $2.5 billion per mile. The cost to add elevators at 70 stations is expected to be $5.5 billion. A lot of signaling equipment is from the 1930s.

doomjunky• 6 years ago

You are the only commenter quoting the horizontal development. So maybe my idea relates to you.

Are you familar with the concept of the Big O notation [1], which computer scientists use to (more or less) describe the "growth" of their algorithms? E.g. when you compare something that growth quadratically O(n²) to something that only growth linear O(n) you will see, that at some point the quadratically growth will grow faster as the linear growth. Forever! The linear growth will never win.

Comparing this to the horizontal sprawl of a city is easy. The area of a city is planar which is mathematically described as quadratic O(n²) but the average growth of the domestic product is just linear O(n). Assuming the maintainance cost of a planar sprawling city growth quadratic while the domestic product only growth linear then the costs will win over the income. Forever!

The conclusion is to limit the horizontal sprawl of a city to linear growth. This means every new house, street, rail road, pipe system, power line and so on must be build inside a diameter to the city's center with a distance which is logaritmic O(lg(n)) on average. The rest must growth vertically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation [2] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/268750/global-gross-domes...

redtexture• 6 years ago

Joy of less costly is the measure.

Wake up to the developer perspective.

treis8• 6 years ago

It's also falsifiable.

And the world does prove it false. If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%. There isn't one out there that spends a majority of their budget on infrastructure. The expensive things are cops and schools and fire and other labor intensive services.

The municipalities that have gone bankrupt the issue has almost always been an inability to pay pensions. With the other ones caused by financial fraud and/or mismanagement.

For the life of me I can't understand why people keep posting this Strongtowns nonsense. Their core hypothesis is easily probable wrong and they post the silliest numbers. Like this one pegs Lafayette's infrastructure replacement at 32 billion. Yet Lafayette's entire budget is only 0.6 billion. Since they haven't spent the entire budget for last 50+ years on infrastructure that 32 billion is obviously nonsense.

ebg135• 6 years ago

I think you're misinterpreting both the numbers and the argument and then taking away a backwards conclusion from that misinterpretation.

If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%.

The article says exactly this.

There isn't one out there that spends a majority of their budget on infrastructure.

So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. Unless you think that the city is pocketing billions in profits from unspent tax money (they aren't), it's hard to see how they could possibly spend more on infrastructure without majorly cutting other services and/or taxing more than the people can afford, which is the premise of the article.

The expensive things are cops and schools and fire and other labor intensive services.

These costs scale most directly with population, not land area. You'd have these same expenses if the city were built such that the road infrastructure cost less to maintain, so pointing at them makes no sense.

Like this one pegs Lafayette's infrastructure replacement at 32 billion. Yet Lafayette's entire budget is only 0.6 billion.

The article is about how Lafayette cannot keep up with maintenance because it would cost too much. Literally exactly the same thing as what you just said, and yet your conclusion is that they have it wrong? Why?

RhodoYolo3• 6 years ago

Yeah - I own a consulting company helping suppliers navigate the procurement process of state, local and federal procurement. None of these numbers check out and since it's municipal data it's all subject to a FOIA request.

This is my first article i've read by this company and it didn't really seem to have a conclusion besides spreading obviously false data.

vannevar2• 6 years ago

Just some back-of-the-envelope calculations:

Louisiana population 4.65M

Lafayette population 126k

Miles of road in Lousiana: 130k (https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/)

Assume Lafayette's share of road miles is proportional to population, and you get around 3500 miles of roadway around Lafayette. Minimum paved road construction cost is ~$2M/mile, according to https://www.artba.org/about/faq/#:~:text=Construct%20a%20new....

So a very conservative road replacement estimate for Lafayette is about $7B, and that's just the roads. The Strongtowns figure may be off, but it's likely the right order of magnitude.

daniellarusso7• 6 years ago

How different things could be if municipalities could run deficits?

Municipal bonds are almost like student loans in the US.

bradlys• 6 years ago

I think there is another article about a road being constructed for $30 mil or something absolutely crazy when it’s not needed at all (and the road would fall apart before they could repay the loan). The basic gist I got was: when loans become more available, things start getting constructed when they aren’t needed at all and costs balloon fast.

Like student loans, easier access means they can charge more.

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

The growth Ponzi scheme hypothesis says that the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure.

This is pretty clearly false; the main cause of infrastructure maintenance neglect is that politicians, like many leaders in other fields, get more career boost from new projects than making sure existing things are maintained. That's true from top to bottom.

There's policy contributions (e.g., California Prop. 13 makes local jurisdictions dependent on development fees and other growth-related revenue because property taxes are limited to a low nominal level and decline in real terms as property is held because of the limitations on assessed value increases to significantly below the historical average rate of inflation), but new-project subsidies aren't a root cause but a symptom of the cause which would exist even without the subsidies.

lumost2• 6 years ago

While I agree with the strong towns assesment overrall, I think this analysis may rely on some assumptions on the distribution of wealth and tax revenue within a population. Ultimately the "once per generation expense" in all of these towns was funded once per generation in the past. This money came from the federal government, and not the local tax payer - ultimately with the federal government taking on long-term debt to fund it.

While this seems like a ponzi scheme of perpetual growth, there is nothing that would prevent the federal government ( or the local government ) from repeating this exercise to rebuild the infrastructure. If we can't redo this exercise it means that

- Despite economic growth, the cost of replacing existing infrastructure is higher than it was a generation ago e.g. Cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

- The balance of payments in the economy is not well calibrated on a generational scale, profitable economic activity is not attributed on a local scale with free cash flows diverted elsewhere by rentiers/global financial flows e.g. a factory in annaheim california sees all profits recognized in Delaware/Ireland. The federal government/central bank may have more capability to provide local governments with finances than we would expect in such a scenario by rebalancing payments.

- The current US city landscape has real long-term economic costs that drain capital on unprofitable activities, immediate pivots in city planning are required to avoid economic fallout.

I suspect a little bit of all three options are at play, but I would be curious for more exploration on items 1&2. A great irony of the modern world is that the City of Flynn borders several pipe manufacturers.

xyzzyz14• 6 years ago

This money came from the federal government, and not the local tax payer - ultimately with the federal government taking on long-term debt to fund it.

It did not, this is completely false. Federal government by and large didn't fund local roads and sewers. Federal government did often help with interstate highways and large water works, but those would be built just the same even with the Strong Towns preferred high density development model.

By the way, the money that federal government spends is not created out of thin air. It comes mostly from federal income tax, which is overwhelmingly paid by the people living in exactly the kind of suburbs Strong Towns hates.

JJMcJ• 6 years ago

This has been understood since at least the 1950s, when the Interstate system was 90% subsidized by the Federal government, but maintenance was a local responsibility.

cratermoon• 6 years ago

Building new stuff while never taking into account maintenance costs happens in computer programming, too. At least in some places I've worked, they have more to maintain than people or time to maintain it, but there's always someone with a budget and an idea.

WalterBright4• 6 years ago

Isn't it ironic that people constantly charge corporations with short-term thinking as some failure of capitalism, when the real disaster is the local government?

Here's another one. In Seattle, the city has seen enormous growth in tax revenue, far outpacing population growth. But the money just seems to disappear. Where it's going are public employee pensions, which were enacted long ago by politicians to garner the support of the unions. But the math on these is unsustainable and a looming crisis, but the politicians couldn't care less as the bill was far into the future and the election was just around the corner.

bumby4• 6 years ago

when the real disaster is the local government

I think the “public vs private” take is a false dichotomy. I think there is a decent amount of evidence to show this short-term biases are a general human problem

baybal2• 6 years ago

The way this happened is pretty simple. At Strong Towns, we call it the Growth Ponzi Scheme. Through a combination of federal incentives, state programs and private capital, cities were able to rapidly grow by expanding horizontally. This provided the local government with the immediate revenues that come from new growth -- permit fees, utility fees, property tax increases, sales tax -- and, in exchange, the city takes on the long term responsibility of servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure. The money comes in handy in the present while the future obligation is, well....a long time in the future.

Believe me or not, this to an even bigger extend plagues China.

I think more than half of major cities in China are fully consciously running a Ponzi scheme with their own land leases, as they have really no other revenue source to sustain them long term, and this is why they are ready to go to any extremes to do this.

Effectively, private loans are financing municipalities through overpriced land leases. Everybody who ever dealt with real estate in China will tell that land auctions are rigged using every trick imaginable.

hitekker• 6 years ago

Infrastructure that can't be maintained because its costs were never accounted for.

I like that you used the phrase "accounted for". It implies in my mind that the politicians doling out the cash did not monitor how that cash was used.

In management-speak, it's the classic phrase "delegation without follow-up to abdictation"

I initially thought about it in terms of accountability "the lower levels should have wrote down their expenses, their decisions, and sent it upward for review" but then I thought "why would most people do that if the people at top aren't mandating the record-keeping, let alone looking at it?" The higher levels didn't attach real strings to the funds and only kept abreast of developments by looking at the end results. Which were positive and attractive, but camouflaged very real deficiencies in the system that produced it.

It's plain irresponsibility.

wasdfff• 6 years ago

I saw a road in my neighborhood go from trenches along the road to full storm drains and sidewalks, for seemingly zero reason but to let the existing owners appraise their homes for $10k more. The trenches were fine in practice and never spilled over even in the worst storms. This suburb of 15 thousand people is currently millions of dollars in the hole doling out shortsighted handouts like this, and there are thousands of suburbs just like this one.

scrose2• 6 years ago

I’m not sure where you are, but I can’t imagine anywhere where sidewalks don’t make sense. Upkeep is orders of magnitudes cheaper than maintaining a street, and provides incentives for people to leave their cars behind, especially for shorter trips, further reducing wear and tear on roads.

Keeping roads in shape for multi-ton vehicles to barrel down them is expensive. Keeping them in shape for humans, not so much.

dzdt• 6 years ago

Does anyone know of data tools that could help (say) a city council understand the position of their own municipality? I think a lot of people are flying blind, not asking the right questions.

NumberWangMan2• 6 years ago

Hey, they have some info on this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/10/19/value-per-acr...

Usually the tax values of properties are available to the public, as well as digital maps of plots. You can combine the two to do a coarse analysis of how much each property is worth per acre.

Urban 3, the firm that did the analysis in the article, goes much further and includes things like where people take trips and which roads are the most valuable, that sort of thing. But even a basic analysis can be quite telling.

anovikov• 6 years ago

Maybe because middle class left to suburbs leaving mostly ghettos in the cities thus depriving them of them main source of income, the property tax?

In this case, the problem will fix itself, because suburbs are the Cold War creation, they can be seen as a compulsory wartime measure. Provided that relationship with China will not reach Cold War standoff levels, they will cease to exist by themselves, because modern people really don't want to live in them.

michaelcampbell• 6 years ago

because modern people really don't want to live in them.

At least in the US, I doubt this is true, by and large. Given the sheer number of people in them, it seems to strain credulity that most don't want to.

jtdev• 6 years ago

Beg to differ... many people find city life to be completely antithetical to a life of happiness.

zach_garwood• 6 years ago

I dunno about that. Here in Chicago we've been seeing a massive migration out of the city to the suburbs for the past several years. In all of the reporting on the topic, no one has mentioned cold war fears as a motivation. It's always high taxes & failing infrastructure given as the reason.

trident1000• 6 years ago

Thats such an absurd opinion. People live in suburbs because you can raise a family at an affordable price point and not have your children see people shitting on the sidewalk. People also dont want to live around millions of people in close proximity if they can afford it. I lived in NYC for 10 years and its a complete trap that you can't escape because you dont have the logistics or financial means to move out (and I had a white collar job in finance). I had to get very well off before I could move out. Thats the primary reason cities become over-crowded. Its a one way street especially if you're single. Not because they're so great.

rayiner5• 6 years ago

The suburbs are more popular than ever: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/millennials-l....

It's to even really true in cities that people perceive to be growing and vital. New York City, for example, would be shrinking if it wasn't for the influx of foreign immigrants: https://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/....

The City of New York grew by over 362,000 residents between 2010 and 2016, a growth rate of 4.4% (Table 1). City officials consider this to be among the strongest periods of growth in the last half century (NYC Planning, 2017a). The population grew by 402,000 people through natural increase, and net foreign migration added an additional 500,000 residents. Net domestic migration was -524,000, as more people moved out of the city than moved in.

VLM2• 6 years ago

Blind support of new urbanism used to be a pledge of allegiance on this site; support seems to be shifting to something else, although I don't know what.

mwkaufma• 6 years ago

A critique from Bay Area planner Asher Kohn, also from 2017: https://www.asherjkohn.com/blog/2017/10/30/the-weak-logic-in...

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

I'm not sure there's is actual disagreement here?

Strong towns I'm pretty sure intentionally chooses it's rhetoric to try to be more Republican compatible. (Strength, budgets, irresponsibility, etc.) But ultimately they are asking for a big pile of federal dollars, to rebuild cities/towns to be more compact and efficient, just like most everyone left of center.

I think it's good to point out we shouldn't just densify everything --- we already use too much land area. Some places need to densified, and others need to de-densified (remove housing and use for other purpose).

205guy• 6 years ago

I’ve been reading strongtowns off and on for a few years. You’re correct that they try to have a left-leaning approach (densification) based on right-leaning principles (fiscal responsibility). But I haven’t seen them “asking for a big pile of federal dollars.” They seem so be saying that the pile of federal dollars that the towns and cities are already getting should be spent more responsibly, ie on projects that can be sustained by the tax value they create.

ip26• 6 years ago

But ultimately they are asking for a big pile of federal dollars

No, not really. They focus a lot on "try things out" at small scale, see what works, and improving a city's cash inflow vs outflow.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/19/the-strong-tow...

https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2020/04/29/coronavirus-studer...

A strong line of critique has been, "City A" knocks down a "blighted" business zone and replaces it with a single business w/ large parking lot & grass everywhere- but when you examine the financials, the new business brings less revenues to the city than the old "blighted" corner mall.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/2/the-cost-of-aut...

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/22/the-more-we-gr...

nathcd• 6 years ago

Except for a small handful of North American cities -- literally five or less -- Lafayette provides an insight into why your city has no money.

...

It's a predicament that nearly every American city, with very few exceptions, finds itself in.

Does anyone know some of the American cities that don't follow this pattern?

xyzzyz14• 6 years ago

Contrary to what he says, pretty much none of the cities follow this pattern. Infrastructure maintenance is not a significant cost in most cities budgets, and the only cities that really have any significant problems with it are the ones that are decaying altogether for non-infrastructure related reasons (eg. main employer left, and people are leaving too).

sfblah• 6 years ago

Do you have anything I can read which contradicts his point on the cost of infrastructure spending? I'd like to see the counterpoint to his thesis.

adrianN4• 6 years ago

Is maintenance not a significant cost because the infrastructure doesn't need maintenance, or is it not a significant cost because the infrastructure is left to decay?

seattle_spring2• 6 years ago

In my experience, it's because people in the middle of nowhere are allowed to vote on infrastructure projects. They claim they don't want "their tax dollars" to pay for "them city slickers." The important bit they conveniently leave out is that cities majorly subsidize rural living through taxes.

dominotw2• 6 years ago

Not sure if that explains potholes all over chicago.

lotsofpulp4• 6 years ago

Freezing temperatures, salt, snow plow usage, heavy vehicles and more road usage, and inability to fix properly due to heavy road usage would explain that.

omosubi• 6 years ago

Is Chicago really that much worse than other similar cities like milwaukee or minneapolis? whenever I go to those (which, to be honest, isn't often) the streets don't seem _that_ much better.

cscurmudgeon• 6 years ago

There is also rampant corruption (at least for cities in CA).

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-corruption-scan...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Edito...

https://www.kqed.org/news/11839531/report-corrupt-sf-officia...

https://la.curbed.com/2020/6/18/21279345/los-angeles-corrupt...

trynumber92• 6 years ago

It's my understanding that relatively few people live out in the boondocks. Is that an incorrect understanding? In a democratic system, how could such a small population be at fault for preventing infrastructure spending in population centers?

murgindrag2• 6 years ago

Electoral college. Boondock states get two senators each. Urban states get two senators each.

California's 40 million people have the same representation in the senate as Wyoming's 580 thousand people.

mitch3x32• 6 years ago

Rural/suburban folks tend to own homes, and property owners vote more than renters do.

ebg135• 6 years ago

It's my understanding that relatively few people live out in the boondocks. Is that an incorrect understanding?

The majority of Americans live in suburbs. The majority of counties are rural. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...

pnw_hazor4• 6 years ago

Local and State elections in the US are usually overwhelming dominated by larger cities and counties.

There is local representation but in many states legislative districts are allocated by population not geography so often areas with higher population density have more control.

And, State-wide elections, such as, Governor, Attorney General, state supreme court justices (where elected, such as, WA), initiatives, referendums, and so on, are often dominated by the high population centers.

textman2• 6 years ago

Cities could procure significant funds by assessing developers for long term maintenance costs. For example, it should be possible to estimate how many new housing units would require an additional fire station and the cost to build it. Then prorate that cost to each house. Same applies to libraries, parks, court houses and so on. Developers would tack the additional assessment on to the price of the house and that in turn might slow demand and growth.

Corruption is most definitely a factor, maybe not universal, but I have seen it. In my city a developer got approval for the first stage of new houses, about 130, and the county planning agency gave approval for the second stage conditional upon the developer building a bridge to allevate traffic. After the first stage was complete the county commissioners voted to pick up the cost of the bridge and the only explanation was the developer did not have the funds and the commissioners thought the second stage housing would be be an economic benefit to the community.

kevindong2• 6 years ago

You're describing property taxes in your first paragraph.

textman2• 6 years ago

Then I was not clear. The prorated cost should be added to the fees charged to the developer. Developers would likely tack that onto the price of the house, so not a tax, but a develop fee.

timthorn• 6 years ago

That's effectively how it works in the UK. Look up "Section 106 agreements" if you want details.

mlang23• 6 years ago

I still remember the title of this article before it was edited. It felt more honest before the edit.

tomohawk• 6 years ago

This does not explain long established cities such as Baltimore. They have driven all the high earners out through a combination of high taxes and lack of services. The high earners pay most of the taxes, so now they're just stuck.

From what I can tell, cities have very poor cost control, and regularly pay platinum prices for lead. And they end up not even getting lead.

coliveira2• 6 years ago

Forty years ago, countries like the USA decided that it was good to stop investing in the country and giving increasing tax breaks to corporations because that would be enough to create progress. Now even economists finally realize that these companies have done nothing to grow the economy and that all the money given to them was diverted to increased dividends and buy-backs, CEO compensation, and investments abroad. The problems with infrastructure are not isolated, it is just an aspect of the malaise that it the ideology that more money should be given to the already rich. Now the country doesn't have the fiscal basis to invest anymore and the people are getting the results of this irresponsible behavior.

PaulDavisThe1st13• 6 years ago

TFA has a more nuanced position than this. It's central point is that cities/towns/communities expanded by adding large amounts of infrastructure without any possible means to pay for its maintainance in the future. They did so because they gained short term revenue from the expansion, but failed to have any model whatsoever of how the infrastructure would be maintained.

coliveira2• 6 years ago

That is a myopic position because cities are not independent and don't live in a vacuum. Cities exist because it is in the interest of the country to develop areas with high industrial or services growth. The investments in infrastructure are a shared concern that benefits the whole country, not just the cities. This TFA theory is just another facet of neoliberal ideology that tries to compartmentalize profits and evade public investments in a large scale.

vondur• 6 years ago

I remember after the Northridge earthquake in 94 destroyed a section of Interstate 10 in Los Angeles. The state awarded the repair contract to a company with the stipulation of penalties of 200k/day after a certain amount of time, or a bonus a 200k/day if they finished before scheduled. https://www.planacademy.com/construction-project-acceleratio...

RivieraKid3• 6 years ago

Can someone please give a tl;dr of the main argument?

gumby• 6 years ago

The article talked about a “big pot of money” at the federal level but it seems that even if it addressed the backlog the problem would remain.

Why does infrastructure seem to work in Western Europe? Even little towns in Germany have good roads, water, electricity etc.

justinzollars• 6 years ago

Could be a myriad of issues. In 10 years the People's Republic of China was able to construct, at a fraction of the cost per km, 16,000 miles of fully connected high speed rail compared to the California High Speed rail project that completed 100 miles in the same period of time.

I think its a total institutional failure - and neither Republican or Democrat have a solution.

From my personal perspective, China seems to be much more capitalist than the United States. And we have embraced extreme regulation preventing us from doing anything at all.

RhodoYolo3• 6 years ago

Just read the article and the follow on article. His answer to the problem? Paint crosswalks, and put in street trees in poor neighborhoods.

dang• 6 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310

cwhiz• 6 years ago

How does this strong towns crap keep finding its way to the top of HN? This site is just nonsense unsourced propaganda.

flurben• 6 years ago

The idea that cities must rebuild their infrastructure every generation is completely absurd.

timwaagh• 6 years ago

So basically these cities need to reduce their infrastructure to the point it's maintainable again. That could work for roads. It's not much fun, but in Russia often houses don't have an asphalted roads next to them. but perhaps it wouldn't work for pipes, because of hygiene reasons. Perhaps owners can be made to pay for at least some of those pipes through fees for the homeowners association rather than taxes. That way the excess is off the city balance sheet. Houses that are too far away from central infrastructure would just be vacated eventually. Maybe in time more efficient cost sharing appartments would replace these.

mixmastamyk4• 6 years ago

Georgism might be an answer to the problem of sprawling cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

    The concept of gaining public revenues mainly from land and natural
    resource privileges was widely popularized by Henry George through his
    first book, Progress and Poverty (1879)...

    Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have observed that a public
    levy on land value does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other
    taxes. A land value tax also has progressive tax effects.  Advocates of
    land value taxes argue that they would reduce economic inequality, increase
    economic efficiency, *remove incentives to underutilize urban land* and
    reduce property speculation.

Unfortunately most Americans have not heard of it, and it would probably be labeled socialism by elites if it was brought up seriously.

x87678r• 6 years ago

I suspect they can keep up and they just will have to in the future. Right now you can see it in taxes for old established cities in the NE have higher taxes than growing states in the South. I saw that NY pays more for retired cops than it does for those working today - that isn't true for Miami/Phoenix/Dallas or other fast growing cities, but will be.

Consultant324522• 6 years ago

All of our major systems: from infrastructure to employment to graduate work, is built on the assumption of eternal exponential growth. All of these past infrastructure decisions would've been fine if we continued to have exponential economic and population growth. More taxes/funding would come in and there'd be new money to continue to grow forever. Except it can't grow forever. Eric Weinstein coined the phrase "Embedded Growth Obligation" (EGO) to describe this phenomenon.

"An embedded growth obligation is how fast a structure has to grow in order to maintain its honest positions," Weinstein says. "If you have a situation in which you have trial lawyers and they're supported by various associates, and the associates all want to become partners and trial lawyers themselves, then what you have is a situation where the law firm has to grow at a very fast clip if all those people are going to be satisfied with their job decisions. Well, very quickly that ability to grow runs out, and then people want to know, "Why am I stuck in a position going nowhere?"

https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/eric-weinstein-intelle...

mywittyname• 6 years ago

I really don't think this is the case here. Cities like Lafayette are just plain inefficient, and the inefficiency scales with growth: the more growth you have, the more sprawl you have, which means the more expensive things are, which leads to more inefficiency. This is probably one of the forces constraining the growth of cities like this.

The problem with most of suburban America is that it's completely unsustainable. Almost all suburban cities in the US require a constant injection of Federal funds to maintain infrastructure. Most people don't realize this because it's really something politicians score brownie points for, hence the accounting subterfuge they engage in (as mentioned in the article), as do most small cities in the USA.

We have no idea how long this Federal subsidy will be maintain, making it difficult to plan for. So many Americans want this idyllic, unsustainable suburban life-style that no politician will keep their job if they try to "take it away" (read: address the issue). But the longer we wait to build more sustainable cities, the worse things will be during the inevitable implosion.

America needs to be building medium-density, car-adverse cities now. The country can't afford to continue subsidizing driving to the degree that it has post-WWII. If this doesn't happen, most of the country is going to enter a serious depression.

Consultant324522• 6 years ago

The trick here is the federal government invests in this infrastructure using debt/bonds. The expectation is that there will be a return on this investment. Jobs are created or whatever, there's future increased tax revenue. Now you have more money to maintain the old infrastructure and/or build new. The fact that in this case the debt is incurred is at the federal level doesn't change the system. It's expected to result in greater federal taxes in the future.

ohples• 6 years ago

Hot take: Its mostly just car infrastructure thats the cause of the problem. We spent way too much money for a large car-centric transport network that doesn't scale. Stop subsidizing and prioritizing cars as a primary form of transit and you fix most of the issues.

cashewchoo• 6 years ago

I worry that, culturally, we're too far gone. I, personally, hate driving in any place that's "downtown" by any measure. It's stressful, slow, the streets are never laid out in a sane way, etc. Kansas City, MO has a streetcar that runs north-south through a lot of the downtown area so that I can park in what city-dwellers assure me is "not downtown" right next to the northmost stop, then ride the streetcar to all of the attractions that are in the main night life district.

It definitely takes ~10-15 mins longer than if I just drove, but goodness it's just so much more enjoyable. I get to sit and look around at the city I'm in instead of focusing on driving.

I've dragged quite a few friends and family along and most people don't like it because: 1. it takes longer (have to wait for transport to arrive, it makes stops you don't need) 2. "iffy people" are on the streetcar

I laugh a bit at #2 because compared to almost any other non-car transport in the US I've ever seen, the occupants of the streetcar are just comically gentrified. Yeah there's one guy who's probably homeless, but everyone else is clearly out for a business dinner or a bunch of yuppies all dressed up to take the family out to dinner, and so on.

Thanks for bearing through me with this anecdote. But I hope it demonstrates two issues: 1. americans will put up with a lot if it makes their trip any amount shorter 2. americans vastly prefer to be annoyed and in control, versus less annoyed but not in control. e.g. they prefer car traffic where they're "in control" (can honk/drive aggressively?) vs waiting for public transport to arrive or waiting at stops they don't need 3. americans associate public transport with lower classes, the poor and homeless.

It'll take a lot of work to flip these around.

colpabar• 6 years ago

In my (US) city, they put in a bike lane along a street downtown with a lot of restaurants. It used to be a two-way street, now it's a one-way with a two-way bike lane taking up the rest.

People I work with argued that it was a bad idea because the restaurants would lose business because now there is less parking, and it just blows my mind that not being able to park directly in front of a restaurant is a deal breaker. Isn't the whole appeal of a city's downtown area to walk around a bit and look up at all the skyscrapers?

Bubbadoo2• 6 years ago

Your anecdote reminds me of my experience in Salt Lake City. When I lived and worked in SLC back during the mid and late 90s, light rail was being proposed, especially with 2002 Olympic Games bearing down. Politicians proposed a simple north-south grid with some east-west connections. Well, the residents were up in arms! How dare you take away our right to driving in heavy traffic on i15. Fast forward 18 years and light rail has been such a huge success in SLC, people have fought for a spur to come to their neighborhood. This is another example of an infrastructure project that was good for all, not just a few profiteering politicians and contractors. Say what you will, but those Mormons know how to manage their municipalities (no offense to people of the LDS Church).

Bubbadoo2• 6 years ago

This hits the proverbial nail right on the head. In many towns and cities (of various sizes) across the US, pro-growth agendas are enriching a handful at the expense of residents. Take Metro NY for example, where the latest development craze is market-rate, high-density housing. Gone are the projects building McMansions on an acre or more, as you can pack in hordes of people in thise apartment and condos. Of course, the politicians promise 'affordable' housing as a way to get public approval, but what always happens is a minor number of affordable units are given away in a lottery and the bulk of the project is market rate. Market in Metro NY suburbs is around $3200/mo for a two bedroom. Add to this many developers in this region are experts at getting local and state IDA funding, tax abatements and utility credits, it becomes clear the taxpayers are funding this development. To this post's credit, these projects all require some degree of infrastructure expansion and yes, much of the maintenance of this infrastructure occurs at the detriment of existing infrastructure. Roads, rails, airports,and the electric grid in this region has suffered to the point of being 3rd world or less. Yet, taxes are sky high. Consider a 1500 sq ft, 50 year old home in suburban NJ or NY already has property taxes of $10k-15k in any commutable town/city. And adding insult to injury is the labor costs, which in Metro-NY are among the highest in the world (yes, higher than Singapore).

Metro NY may be an easy target, but like the author of this post, I believe this is happening in many towns and cities across the US. We need to get smart about our growth and take politicians who promise grand infrastructure programs to task. Just look at Trump's Infrastructure Week boon dogle or Biden's now non-existent promise of national high-speed rail. Now these hollow promises would have been growth for the public good, not just the local pols and developers.

alanlovestea• 6 years ago

the author did not take zoning in consideration. Public housing usually get built near transit centers where there are lots of business. The mix use zoning contribute to the higher revenue number.

Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)

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