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There’s a lot of over-summarizing going on in the comments here. The context you need to understand the Strong Towns argument is that this isn’t an appeal to no

There’s a lot of over-summarizing going on in the comments here. The context you need to understand the Strong Towns argument is that this isn’t an appeal to nostalgia. Rather the author is trying to point out that the transition to the suburban centralized retail model was heavily subsidized by local and state governments, and that it actually hurt the local economy in the end. The problem is that same public infrastructure subsidy program remains the principal model of “economic development” across the US. The main case Strong Towns is trying to make is that the model does not produce returns (ie local tax income less infrastructure maintenance and public service liabilities) that justify the investment, and thus we need to stop using it.

ourmandave 9y ago
Just land yourself an Amazon Headquarters and you'll be fine. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/koch-group-big-tax-breaks-to-lure-amazon-hq2-will-not-pay-off.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/koch-group-big-tax-breaks-to...
endorphone 9y ago
The "subsidy" argument is usually based on absolutely nothing credible beyond someone saying "money was spent on something that I don't think/no longer think is worthwhile...therefore, subsidy". If that's the basis of this thought piece, minus any credible analysis (and no, saying "a whole retail/business downtown produces more tax income than a single failed mall" is not an analysis), it isn't worth considering. "the model does not produce returns (ie local tax income less infrastructure maintenance and public service liabilities) that justify the investment" It doesn't make this case at all. It alludes to it, as if decades of tax revenue and benefits were imaginary, but it doesn't make a credible case.
- Retric 9y ago
  Infrastructure like water pipes and roads are expensive to build and maintain. Lower density areas like malls increase these costs. That's fine in boom times, but from pure economics such areas can easily fail. You can say subsidy or situation normal, but the costs are the same either way. Resilience is just a simplification, online retail among other things is killing malls and that's ok. It's trying to fight that trend that's a losing strategy.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    Is high density really costs less then why are tax rates always higher in large dense cities than they are in the near by suburbs?
    - grogenaut 9y ago
      Because people in the burbs vote against taxes and people in the cities vote for taxes? Or one of a thousand other compex set of interactions. Also many suburbs have higher tax rates if they want better infrastructure and they can keep the rif-raff out.
      - nostromo 9y ago
        > Or one of a thousand other compex set of interactions. That's a very handwavey response to a serious question. If it's true that dense cities are more efficient then it follows that dense cities should be cheaper, when all evidence points to the opposite effect. By the original reasoning Boise and Boulder should have very expensive tax burdens and New York should be nearly free.
        UrukParthian 9y ago
        And of course this "efficiency" doesn't put, into reckoning, the stress of population density on cognition. Especially "diverse density". Coming back from the military, I kept the same "look around at all times for threats" and it was absolutely exhausting. "hyper-vigilance" I think is the term. Still have some of it but it's easier to live with in Norcal than the concrete jungles of the Los Angeles sprawl. Can focus on trees and the tweets of birds instead of innumerable pedestrians and cars and noise...
        Retric 9y ago
        First, cities often can't tax the burbs. Commuters often use city services without paying for them. So, local taxes are only a tiny part of the story you need to look at the state and federal level. At the federal spending it's major metro areas that are funding much of the country. Delaware get's back 1/2 what it puts in and South Carolina get's back almost 8x what it puts in. Those are absolutely massive tax flows which fund things like rural hospitals. But also a lot of infrastructure like new roads. Even within states if you look at Virginia the DC area provides most of the revenue which is then spread around the state. But, this ends up far more complex than just the local property tax situation.
- x0x0 9y ago
  That's exactly wrong. The figures are presented: even now, post dis-investment, the downtown generates $344k tax and the mall $120k tax, and the latter (1) required the city to pay for all the aforementioned services; (2) reduced the taxes produced by the core. The mall probably couldn't have been built without the subsidies from the town, and they never made sense. Good subsidies have a return greater than one; mall subsidies have a return less than one plus make you dependent on retailers that can disappear overnight even if they have an operating profit.
  - endorphone 9y ago
    The figures aren't remotely presented, and if you think they are you went in looking for a narrative. The "mall" in question is in the middle of a suburb. The "subsidy" of infrastructure that was required regardless seems spurious. Further, both areas "required the city to pay for all the aforementioned services". For that matter, maintaining roads and water/sewage in dense areas is dramatically more expensive than less dense areas. "even now, post dis-investment, the downtown generates $344k tax and the mall $120k tax" The article quotes current, failed mall taxes. After most tenants have moved out and the mall is in disarray. Secondly, saying that a 9 block area of mixed retail/commerce pays more taxes than a single mall seems outrageously laughable. The word "subsidy" almost always appears in articles fomenting nonsense to pander to prejudices. The correlation between it and articles of little actual value is about 1.0.
    - Maarten88 9y ago
      > The article quotes current, failed mall taxes. It does not: "... produce 287% more property tax than the entire mall property. And that's before the Herberger's goes away" > Secondly, saying that a 9 block area of mixed retail/commerce pays more taxes than a single mall seems outrageously laughable. Not if that single mall takes up more space than those 9 blocks (which it does)
- dahdum 9y ago
  It would be great if they had examples of these failures. These suburban centers anchored large surrounding residential areas that have not failed themselves, and in fact, appear to be growing due to city center housing costs.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  My wife was a finance director for a municipal water utility. The cost of goods sold for water and sewer delivery was driving up based on the aging post-war infrastructure, which is failing faster and is 3-5x more expensive to replace on a unit basis.
dba7dba 9y ago
The original author provided hard numbers in dollar to back up his argument well. How can anyone say this is about nostalgia?
abalone 9y ago
That is itself an over-summarization. Strong Towns is absolutely not against public infrastructure investment. It even concludes recommending investment in the downtown area. It is against the big box national retailer model. It is in favor of smaller businesses with local interconnections in denser areas, which creates are more resilient economy (which is where the "nostalgia" comes in). It's not against public investment, it just thinks it should be spent on a different model. Money quote: > In the pursuit of the shiny and new, the efficient and the low-priced, we turned our backs on decades of small business wealth creation. We walked away from all of these stores — all these families and their local bank deposits, local newspaper ads, local insurance brokers, local accountants, softball team sponsorships, Fourth of July floats, Crazy Day sales and after school jobs — and, as the old saying goes, put all our eggs into one basket.
- opportune 9y ago
  It's basically an argument in favor of trade protectionism at the local level. To be fair, it's not a bad idea, nor is trade protectionism as dirty a word as economists make it seem. The unfortunate truth is that free trade naturally results in income/wealth inequality, on individual and geographic levels, because it highly incentivizes economies of scale. Rather than 30 different widget makers selling widgets at $5 each, you get one widget maker selling widgets at $4.80 each, because it's more efficient (less overhead per widget). Everybody gets more/cheaper widgets, but the communities containing those other 29 widget makers may lose significant portions of the money coming into their communities - while the community with the remaining widget maker becomes wealthier than ever. And instead of 30 small business owners becoming wealthy, you may get one extremely wealthy widget business owner along with slightly wealthier stockholders. When this happens to all industries all at once, it increases mean economic wellbeing, but decreases median economic wellbeing - and because goods become more efficient to produce due to economies of scale, it also puts downward pressure on wage labor, increases public spending on social assistance, etc. That mostly applies to industry as opposed to retail, but to me that's the other half of the story: most communities aren't able to keep bringing as much into their community because of the consolidation/outsourcing of industry. And then the corporate retailer model increases the rate at which money leaves the community too. I know someone who took a couple introductory economics courses will want to chime in "but trade makes everybody better off on average, because it allows economic participants to specialize at what they're already good at". But in the real world, when someone loses their job or small business due to big-industry consolidation/competition, they may no longer be able to get a job doing what they used to do, because now less people are needed to do that job, as it was made more efficient. So now they need retraining, or they go on social assistance - and the cost of that retraining or social assistance may not outweigh the economic benefits of consolidation. Perhaps the solution to an individual is to move, but that can cause a community to enter a death spiral if enough people leave and the cost-per-person of public services increase. The community needs investment so that a new industry can bring in money, but if all the small businesses died, there may not be local investors with capital to invest, and bigger investors may not see investment in a new industry in small community as optimal because there aren't enough people able to work in that industry - a chicken/egg problem. I'm not arguing that trade itself is bad, but it's not the unequivocal good that many perceive it to be. There are externalized costs and negative butterfly effects that can come from the type of consolidation that free trade enables - and those are harshest at the local level. Sure, widgets may be cheaper, and on average (mean) the economy improves (assuming the externalized costs are less than the improvement in efficiency - which they may not be). But that improvement means little if the resulting wealth/income go to a small number of people, with many more people losing their smaller amounts of wealth/income, all so people could save $0.20 on a widget.

ourmandave 9y ago

Just land yourself an Amazon Headquarters and you'll be fine. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/koch-group-big-tax-breaks-to-lure-amazon-hq2-will-not-pay-off.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/koch-group-big-tax-breaks-to...

endorphone 9y ago

The "subsidy" argument is usually based on absolutely nothing credible beyond someone saying "money was spent on something that I don't think/no longer think is worthwhile...therefore, subsidy". If that's the basis of this thought piece, minus any credible analysis (and no, saying "a whole retail/business downtown produces more tax income than a single failed mall" is not an analysis), it isn't worth considering. "the model does not produce returns (ie local tax income less infrastructure maintenance and public service liabilities) that justify the investment" It doesn't make this case at all. It alludes to it, as if decades of tax revenue and benefits were imaginary, but it doesn't make a credible case.

Retric 9y ago
Infrastructure like water pipes and roads are expensive to build and maintain. Lower density areas like malls increase these costs. That's fine in boom times, but from pure economics such areas can easily fail. You can say subsidy or situation normal, but the costs are the same either way. Resilience is just a simplification, online retail among other things is killing malls and that's ok. It's trying to fight that trend that's a losing strategy.
- pmorici 9y ago
  Is high density really costs less then why are tax rates always higher in large dense cities than they are in the near by suburbs?
  - grogenaut 9y ago
    Because people in the burbs vote against taxes and people in the cities vote for taxes? Or one of a thousand other compex set of interactions. Also many suburbs have higher tax rates if they want better infrastructure and they can keep the rif-raff out.
    - nostromo 9y ago
      > Or one of a thousand other compex set of interactions. That's a very handwavey response to a serious question. If it's true that dense cities are more efficient then it follows that dense cities should be cheaper, when all evidence points to the opposite effect. By the original reasoning Boise and Boulder should have very expensive tax burdens and New York should be nearly free.
      - UrukParthian 9y ago
        And of course this "efficiency" doesn't put, into reckoning, the stress of population density on cognition. Especially "diverse density". Coming back from the military, I kept the same "look around at all times for threats" and it was absolutely exhausting. "hyper-vigilance" I think is the term. Still have some of it but it's easier to live with in Norcal than the concrete jungles of the Los Angeles sprawl. Can focus on trees and the tweets of birds instead of innumerable pedestrians and cars and noise...
      - Retric 9y ago
        First, cities often can't tax the burbs. Commuters often use city services without paying for them. So, local taxes are only a tiny part of the story you need to look at the state and federal level. At the federal spending it's major metro areas that are funding much of the country. Delaware get's back 1/2 what it puts in and South Carolina get's back almost 8x what it puts in. Those are absolutely massive tax flows which fund things like rural hospitals. But also a lot of infrastructure like new roads. Even within states if you look at Virginia the DC area provides most of the revenue which is then spread around the state. But, this ends up far more complex than just the local property tax situation.
x0x0 9y ago
That's exactly wrong. The figures are presented: even now, post dis-investment, the downtown generates $344k tax and the mall $120k tax, and the latter (1) required the city to pay for all the aforementioned services; (2) reduced the taxes produced by the core. The mall probably couldn't have been built without the subsidies from the town, and they never made sense. Good subsidies have a return greater than one; mall subsidies have a return less than one plus make you dependent on retailers that can disappear overnight even if they have an operating profit.
- endorphone 9y ago
  The figures aren't remotely presented, and if you think they are you went in looking for a narrative. The "mall" in question is in the middle of a suburb. The "subsidy" of infrastructure that was required regardless seems spurious. Further, both areas "required the city to pay for all the aforementioned services". For that matter, maintaining roads and water/sewage in dense areas is dramatically more expensive than less dense areas. "even now, post dis-investment, the downtown generates $344k tax and the mall $120k tax" The article quotes current, failed mall taxes. After most tenants have moved out and the mall is in disarray. Secondly, saying that a 9 block area of mixed retail/commerce pays more taxes than a single mall seems outrageously laughable. The word "subsidy" almost always appears in articles fomenting nonsense to pander to prejudices. The correlation between it and articles of little actual value is about 1.0.
  - Maarten88 9y ago
    > The article quotes current, failed mall taxes. It does not: "... produce 287% more property tax than the entire mall property. And that's before the Herberger's goes away" > Secondly, saying that a 9 block area of mixed retail/commerce pays more taxes than a single mall seems outrageously laughable. Not if that single mall takes up more space than those 9 blocks (which it does)
dahdum 9y ago
It would be great if they had examples of these failures. These suburban centers anchored large surrounding residential areas that have not failed themselves, and in fact, appear to be growing due to city center housing costs.
Spooky23 9y ago
My wife was a finance director for a municipal water utility. The cost of goods sold for water and sewer delivery was driving up based on the aging post-war infrastructure, which is failing faster and is 3-5x more expensive to replace on a unit basis.

dba7dba 9y ago

The original author provided hard numbers in dollar to back up his argument well. How can anyone say this is about nostalgia?

abalone 9y ago

That is itself an over-summarization. Strong Towns is absolutely not against public infrastructure investment. It even concludes recommending investment in the downtown area. It is against the big box national retailer model. It is in favor of smaller businesses with local interconnections in denser areas, which creates are more resilient economy (which is where the "nostalgia" comes in). It's not against public investment, it just thinks it should be spent on a different model. Money quote: > In the pursuit of the shiny and new, the efficient and the low-priced, we turned our backs on decades of small business wealth creation. We walked away from all of these stores — all these families and their local bank deposits, local newspaper ads, local insurance brokers, local accountants, softball team sponsorships, Fourth of July floats, Crazy Day sales and after school jobs — and, as the old saying goes, put all our eggs into one basket.

opportune 9y ago
It's basically an argument in favor of trade protectionism at the local level. To be fair, it's not a bad idea, nor is trade protectionism as dirty a word as economists make it seem. The unfortunate truth is that free trade naturally results in income/wealth inequality, on individual and geographic levels, because it highly incentivizes economies of scale. Rather than 30 different widget makers selling widgets at $5 each, you get one widget maker selling widgets at $4.80 each, because it's more efficient (less overhead per widget). Everybody gets more/cheaper widgets, but the communities containing those other 29 widget makers may lose significant portions of the money coming into their communities - while the community with the remaining widget maker becomes wealthier than ever. And instead of 30 small business owners becoming wealthy, you may get one extremely wealthy widget business owner along with slightly wealthier stockholders. When this happens to all industries all at once, it increases mean economic wellbeing, but decreases median economic wellbeing - and because goods become more efficient to produce due to economies of scale, it also puts downward pressure on wage labor, increases public spending on social assistance, etc. That mostly applies to industry as opposed to retail, but to me that's the other half of the story: most communities aren't able to keep bringing as much into their community because of the consolidation/outsourcing of industry. And then the corporate retailer model increases the rate at which money leaves the community too. I know someone who took a couple introductory economics courses will want to chime in "but trade makes everybody better off on average, because it allows economic participants to specialize at what they're already good at". But in the real world, when someone loses their job or small business due to big-industry consolidation/competition, they may no longer be able to get a job doing what they used to do, because now less people are needed to do that job, as it was made more efficient. So now they need retraining, or they go on social assistance - and the cost of that retraining or social assistance may not outweigh the economic benefits of consolidation. Perhaps the solution to an individual is to move, but that can cause a community to enter a death spiral if enough people leave and the cost-per-person of public services increase. The community needs investment so that a new industry can bring in money, but if all the small businesses died, there may not be local investors with capital to invest, and bigger investors may not see investment in a new industry in small community as optimal because there aren't enough people able to work in that industry - a chicken/egg problem. I'm not arguing that trade itself is bad, but it's not the unequivocal good that many perceive it to be. There are externalized costs and negative butterfly effects that can come from the type of consolidation that free trade enables - and those are harshest at the local level. Sure, widgets may be cheaper, and on average (mean) the economy improves (assuming the externalized costs are less than the improvement in efficiency - which they may not be). But that improvement means little if the resulting wealth/income go to a small number of people, with many more people losing their smaller amounts of wealth/income, all so people could save $0.20 on a widget.