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We've Built Cities We Can't Afford

• brenden2 7y ago
  The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth, infinite leverage, and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example). It works, until it doesn't. I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.
  • coldcode 7y ago
    The problem is the wealth in concentrated in the few, who do not want to give it up, and needed by the many, who do not have (or know) the leverage needed. Of course this has always been the case since cities were first invented. All civilizations come to some kind of end, and new ones arise.
    • weirdstuff 7y ago
      City populations are some of the most unequal in all society. Extremes in close proximity. I've read research on this in the past, although I don't have any links at the moment.
      • WWLink 7y ago
        That can lead to better mobility though, can't it? Instead of living in a town full of poor people who you can't sell anything to. lol.
    • Retric 7y ago
      Total wealth is not important as long as everyone is paying for shared infrastructure based reasonably closely to the value they derive from it. That’s the social contract that’s being broken as for example developers depend on good local schools but they pay nothing for them. Building a new house is inherently different from selling an existing one, but zoning changes are handed out for free.
    • devcpp 7y ago
      This is stupid. You have this marxist idea that conflates wealth and value. In reality, there is no real problem with wealth inequality as long as people don't all work for one person, which never happens because of dynamics of demand and offer for labor. In fact, inequality is responsible for our prosperity, which is much more important than equality unless you have an unhealthy jealousy problem. Gini/Atkinson to HDI correlation is not that great.
      • sfkdjf9j3j 7y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
      • claudiawerner 7y ago
        > This is stupid. You have this marxist idea that conflates wealth and value. I just want to point out that to philosophers and economists interested in Marx, that's not a solid point. Marx rarely uses the term 'wealth' and his definition of 'value' is very specific. Marx's point was that wealth always takes a specific form, there is no 'wealth' in abstract just as there is no 'production' or 'population' or even 'value' in the transhistorical always-the-case sense. >In reality, there is no real problem with wealth inequality as long as people don't all work for one person, which never happens because of dynamics of demand and offer for labor. This seems to be deriving an 'ought' from an 'is'. You may find no problem with wealth inequality, but a wide variety of esteemed economists, sociologists and philosophers do. You need to consider the question of to whom wealth inequality isn't an issue, on the basis of which facts, and which model of wealth and value.
      • sudosysgen 7y ago
        You should read Marx. In general, he explicitly separates accumulated capital (wealth) and value.
    • airstrike 7y ago
      > concentrated in the few, who do not want to give it up This bit is true, but we should remember that no one wants to give up anything, rich or poor. That's human nature.
      • aspenmayer 7y ago
        You don’t speak for me. I would rather pay my taxes than have the money if I know every one else is in the same situation as me in being obligated to pay taxes. That is not the current status quo. Tax shelters and tax minimization strategies generally are tools that are not beneficial to market participants equally. It’s simply not worth the trouble unless you are offsetting a substantial tax liabilities. It’s not always the case that tax liabilities increase as wealth increases. Taxes don’t always go up with your income either. The fact that these variations and exclusions and deductions exist show intent to tax fairly and a desire to not double tax if not a reality. Yet the clear evidence that in real world examples, very high net worth individuals pay less than those in the upper middle class. Taxing proportional ability to pay seems fairer than the current system. That this is not the natural order of the tax system is itself curious. The governments of the world already deficit spend in excess of tax revenues. The tax system isn’t any more about fairness than it is about the money. If the government was able to choose to forgive your tax liability due to an exclusion or deduction, it could choose to do so for the entire tax base. It is not necessary to tax system to exist in its current state. It is the way it is because it benefits those who have money and power for it to be this way. Maybe this is why Fukuyama foresaw the end of history. We just ran out of ideas so this is the closest thing we got to a steady state society.
    • joefourier 7y ago
      If real estate were a depreciating asset rather than an appreciating one, this would not be a problem. Imagine if we had a surplus of housing in major cities (certainly possible with modern technology if you put politics aside) and homes had to compete in the manner of consumer goods such as automobiles.
    • throw_this_one 7y ago
      Yup, precisely this. Obviously this is super hard/impossible to calculate, but everybody should be paying in a certain fraction of what they are getting out of the system. ex. The entrepreneur that gets access to the road system, educated workforce, police/legal system protection... if they didn't have that then they couldn't profit from their widget. So pay something significant back to the system, or you can't participate in the system.
  • twic 7y ago
    > The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth I hear this a lot. As far as i know it's not actually true. Is there anything specific in orthodox economic theory that requires never-ending growth?
    • fullshark 7y ago
      There are many macroeconomic models with the assumption that populations will keep growing and worker productivity will not shrink. That alone should yield never-ending growth.
    • cagenut 7y ago
      I mean, you clearly know the answer, you just want to label it "unorthodox" and dismiss it.
    • nordsieck 7y ago
      > > The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth > I hear this a lot. As far as i know it's not actually true. Is there anything specific in orthodox economic theory that requires never-ending growth? I think a charitable interpretation of this claim is: people's planning (which is usually limited to the short term, when it happens at all) typically assumes the optimistic case. This is certainly true for everyone who lives paycheck to paycheck. It's also true for companies who survive on a revolving line of credit to fund longterm operations.
    • bsanr2 7y ago
      The existence of debt and interest coupled with lack of practical planning for the eventuality of economic decline or stagnation.
    • vsareto 7y ago
      I always hear that there's inflation targets, and deflation and stagflation are both worse than inflation. In this sense, the price of things always goes up, but so should wages. I don't know if economists plan on purchasing power always going up.
      • 7y ago
  • drstewart 7y ago
    How does redistributing wealth fix a problem based on never ending growth? I don't see how your two statements follow from one another. In Japan, house prices commonly depreciate. I don't see any evidence their economy is unaffected by that fact.
    • jdc 7y ago
      In Japan, house prices commonly depreciate. Maybe that's why their homelessness per capita is almost 57 times lower than the States'.
      • wutbrodo 7y ago
        Only if you don't understand anything about economics... > Homelessness grew noticeably more widespread in Japanese society since the collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble across the 1990s, and the resulting "Lost Decade" of economic stagnation. This has resulted in higher unemployment, a contributing factor towards potential homelessness.[1] National economies are complicated, and the connection between high (or continually-appreciating) housing prices and homelessness doesn't always run the direction that a naive model assumes it does. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan
        • renewiltord 7y ago
          Wait, the latest stats read that there are fewer homeless people in Japan than all of San Francisco (and definitely all of LA). That can't be right. It has to be a definition difference or they're doing something remarkably right.
          • jdc 7y ago
            It's because GP cherry-picked a paragraph from the History section of that article and ignored the actual present per-capita homelessness rates.
            • 7y ago
  • Ididntdothis 7y ago
    “assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example)” I think that’s the real problem. Work should be rewarded and not just owning things.
    • njharman 7y ago
      Really? Work should be disincentivized. Automation and innovation rewarded. The goal of human existence is not and should not be "gainful employment".
      • Pfhreak 7y ago
        I think the parent is objecting more to the fact that today's economy allows those with wealth to earn income from that wealth. (E.g. they own the property, they can earn income from rent. They own the factory, they can extract excess value from the labor. etc.) Automation vs working is a different axis than rewarding capital vs working. They are both good discussions to have, though.
        • Ididntdothis 7y ago
          Ideally we wouldn’t have to work but we are very far away from that. In the meantime it seems society is getting skewed towards benefiting owners over people who work. The news celebrates rising stock markets and rising housing prices. We celebrate “job creators”. The Fed responds when the stock market goes down but just shrugs when real wages for most people are stagnating or even going down . Investment income is taxed favorably over income from work. Companies claim they are run solely for the owners (shareholders). Why not make workers also stakeholders that need to considered?
    • leetcrew 7y ago
      clearly the rewards from owning things vs actual work is a bit out of whack in our current society. but owning things is itself the reward for surplus work.
      • 7y ago
  • katmannthree 7y ago
    I posed that question of the reality of that infinite growth to my econ professor back in the day, and their response was that technological advancements have allowed it in the past and likely will through the future. The plan appears to be to throw money at problems as they come up and coast into the sunset on the current economic system without a serious long-term plan for when things break down. Unfortunately as most people here are probably aware, throwing money at a problem doesn't always result in a viable solution. As more and more of the low hanging fruit of technological advancement gets picked we may be in for some interesting times.
    • meroes 7y ago
      I think technology is only one way of expanding markets indefinitely, albeit one of the most beneficial when it happens. Unfortunately capitalism's need for infinite growth is nigh unstoppable and it always finds a path. If there aren't enough startups, technological advances, or similar we see things like private militaries, Banana Wars, buying elections, private prisons, over leveraging, etc. Capitalism has to have an outlet and we are at its mercy in that sense.
      • sudosysgen 7y ago
        Or, eventually, capitalism has to end.
  • leptoniscool 7y ago
    Inventions and new technologies increases wealth, think about the digital revolution in the past few decades. In order to keep growing, society must invest in research and innovation. 'Redistribution' is inherently unfair, and in a global world it will only cause capital flight.
    • Pfhreak 7y ago
      > 'Redistribution' is inherently unfair This is a peculiar, and unsubstantiated assertion. I certainly wouldn't consider this an axiom in any discussion about economic policy. Can you explain a little more? Or are you just saying that you believe that redistribution is unfair?
    • toiletfuneral 7y ago
      You're right. To be fair we need to bring out the guillotines
    • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      Fair is inherently subjective.
      • pvorb 7y ago
        Sure, but you can objectively tell if something is unfair. Defining fairness is more difficult.
        • matz1 7y ago
          How ? The definition of fairness itself subjective.
        • gowld 7y ago
          What's the objective definition of unfair?
          • pvorb 7y ago
            I'm not talking about a definition. Just that, for example, if one child gets born in a rich country to a rich family and one child to a poor family in a third world country, their starting conditions are unfair. This doesn't help much with a definition of unfair, but I think it's still objective.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    It keeps going until people are unwilling or unable to put themselves into more debt for the same thing. The government seems dead set on making sure the "unable" part never happens. And people are dead set on always willing. If the government would stop trying to manipulate every market, this maybe wouldn't happen. The Islamic empire was insanely successful for a longer period of time than the US empire has been around, and the Islamic Empire had truly free markets. For anyone interested, Debt: The First 5000 Years is a fascinating examination of this topic.
    • cheez 7y ago
      First time I've seen this discussion of Islamic empire in a favorable light here. What makes you say the Islamic empire had free markets? From the book?
      • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
        The book says that the original Islamic Empire was highly favorable of merchants. One of the main ideas (of the Empire, not necessarily the religion) was that gold coinage came from God so that people could easily trade. Instead of everyone acquiring all the skills necessary for sustenance (farming, tool building, carpentry, etc) -- they could become masters of a few skills and trade the fruits of their skills in the open market. The idea was that doing so, humans could advance much faster. This was sort of God's secret sauce. So interfering with the market was like interfering with God. It was a no no. One could argue that they manipulated the market by banning usury (interest bearing loans). However, before the Islamic Empire, interest was usually VERY high -- 60%+ per year was common. Debt was so cost prohibitive that the constant need for debt Jubilees was its own problem. It's unclear how the Islamic Empire financed all these merchants without interest bearing loans. I'd love to learn more about how that worked.
    • ntsplnkv2 7y ago
      If the government doesn't manipulate the market then corporations will swoop in and manipulate it themselves. Which they have. Which is why government stepped in.
  • _curious_ 7y ago
    The correction you describe has been perpetually postponed in the form of bailouts - whether that's to wall street or main street. A true reset would be quite painful and catastrophic - but only then can we rebuild a foundation on a different set of values and orientation.
    • airstrike 7y ago
      > but only then can we rebuild a foundation on a different set of values and orientation. [Citation needed]. That's a pipe dream. Human nature remains constant.
      • ModernMech 7y ago
        Aspects of human nature are not evenly distributed throughout the population. For example, psychopaths have a very different value system compared to other people. Societies with psychopaths in charge of things reflect the values of the psychopath (a pathocracy). We can put people in charge who have a more even distribution of human emotions.
  • ckdarby 7y ago
    > I don't know how long it will keep going It ends in the next 8-14 years. First time event where retiring class > working class. Population growth assumed to be equal or higher for every subsequent generation back 50 years ago. Wait until those surplus programs stop becoming surplus. If you look now and think inequality is bad now, wait, it gets a lot worst.
    • arbitrary_name 7y ago
      Do you have good demographic data to share? Would love to dive deeper.
      • ckdarby 7y ago
        This book does better justice than I could ever: Sleeping on a Volcano: The Worldwide Demographic Decline and the Economic and Geopolitical Implications
  • airstrike 7y ago
    > The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth Yes, because total factor productivity[0] always grows. > infinite leverage None of us can raise an infinite bank loan, so this isn't really true. There are many, many, many limits to leverage. > and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example). Also not true... if the value of living in SF increases, it makes perfect sense that land in SF is also more valuable > It works, until it doesn't. That's not really a falsifiable assertion. > I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth. Notwithstanding all the faults in the arguments above, how does distributing wealth arbitrarily at a single point in time ("real correction") solve any of the issues you present? __________ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity
    • ahnick 7y ago
      Why does TFP always grow? Is the fundamental reasoning that new technologies and efficiency improvements in existing technologies will always occur over time and therefore guarantees this growth?
      • nerfhammer 7y ago
        people are smart and slowly inevitably figure out ways to do things more efficiently
        • stouset 7y ago
          And this does not and cannot continue indefinitely.
          • nerfhammer 7y ago
            what do you mean, do you think over time people are going to stop being clever?
            • 7y ago
  • megavolcano 7y ago
    > we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth. There will be no redistribution, that's a fairy tale. There will only be evaporation.
    • dsr_ 7y ago
      Taxes are a redistribution mechanism.
      • megavolcano 7y ago
        And what do you think would happen if we decide to hike taxes on the uber wealthy once this is all over? The same thing they always do - go stash it in some tax haven, never to be seen again. For all intents and purposes, it has evaporated.
  • refurb 7y ago
    “Never ending growth” is what drives improvements in the standard of living. And by standard of living I don’t mean a bigger TV or faster computer but better healthcare, improved education, fewer living in poverty and clean energy. Seems like a noble goal, no?
  • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth, infinite leverage, and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for example). It works, until it doesn't. Humans want better lives. More living space, more free time, faster cars, whatever. Humans will not stop wanting this for as long as there are humans. There are two ways to get it. One is creating more stuff. This is growth. The other is taking somebody else's stuff. This is war. Growth is better. But zoning restrictions that inflate housing prices? That's not growth, it constrains growth, which implies...
    • gowld 7y ago
      There's a third way: Living better, not bigger. Engaging in social, intellectual, and aesthetic activities, not ever-increasing consumerism.
      • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        This is what people say when their basic needs are met and they have enough free time to engage in "social, intellectual, and aesthetic activities." Tell the people who don't that growth isn't necessary and see if they're happy for you to have that but not them.
    • rsync 7y ago
      I hope you will consider - both from a biological perspective and an economic one - that catabolism is also possible. Which is to say, depending on your environment, you can create a "better life" (by your definitions) by catabolizing existing resources. You can't catabolize forever, of course, but it's an immediate and obvious refutation to your claim that "better lives" can only be pursued through growth or war.
      • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        There isn't a separate thing called catabolism which can increase available value by neither creating nor transferring it. Converting one resource to another at an overall net gain is growth. Converting one resource to another when the original resource was equally or more valuable net doesn't improve lives, it's either completely neutral or net harmful. Note that there are a lot of growth metrics out there that inappropriately fail to account for this, e.g. they measure sale price but not consumer or producer surplus (which are harder to measure because there is no market pricing information available). If someone invents a cheap way to turn farm waste into motor fuel and then suddenly gas is $1/gallon, that's growth -- there is a surplus being created -- even if there is a net reduction in GDP because oil companies are making less money while most of the surplus goes to the consumer. (Though in most cases the reduction in GDP doesn't happen anyway because then consumers have more money in their pockets and spend it on something else.)
  • yingw787 7y ago
    It really bothers me to hear this, because the truth is people have unlimited wants, and there will always be rich and poor, whether by context or by deed. Growth is the only way I see where we can hope to lift all boats. An anti-growth mentality kicks the ladder from underneath those who might benefit from increased material wealth. In this context, I'm really proud of my ancestral homeland (mainland China), who in 40 years lifted a billion people from abject poverty through economic growth. Yes, there's significant problems magnified by that, but to paraphrase a popular saying, a full person has a million problems and a starving person has one. Sure, growth with negative externalities have negative side effects and we definitely should talk about that, but that's a separate discussion and focus than "don't grow". I totally agree with your leverage aspect and aligning value to utility, and I think that's a very positive avenue of discussion. Let's talk about that instead.
    • stouset 7y ago
      Exponential growth literally cannot continue indefinitely on a planet with finite land, finite energy reserves, and finite resources. This should be uncontroversial. We can disagree about where, when, and how to stop growth. We cannot disagree that it must stop at some point, and that the tyranny of exponential growth means that you will hit this moment frighteningly fast even when you appeared to have plenty of legroom. With a growth rate of even 1.5%, you can be using less than 10% of the resources available to you, and yet you will hit a hard wall at a minimum within 200 years. And even this is a fantasy, as resources, land, and energy are always utilized in decreasing order of ease of access.
      • yingw787 7y ago
        It is controversial, because the assumption of exponential growth is flawed. For one, your model underfits population growth, it's a logistic curve and not a purely exponential one. Wealthier countries on average produce less children than poorer countries, and assuming no global shakeup occurs, most will end up in the crisis like the one Japan is beginning to see with a lot of older people and not enough younger people to support them. We can talk about what happens after that cliff, but how can you have exponential usage in natural resources when the population _doesn't even exist_? Not to mention human ingenuity when people get desperate. WWI / WWII saw Germany produce coffee from acorns, oil from coal, and Fanta from vegetable scraps, ensuring a rise in industrial production during 1944 under arduous circumstances. We don't operate at 100% efficiency and we can most definitely increase that number by double digit, maybe even triple digit percentages. Take meat, a horrible source of energy inefficiency. Lab grown meats, meat substitutes grown from vertical farms, even eating different kinds of meats (cricket powder protein bars aren't bad and have a more or less 1:1 energy input:output ratio) result in increased efficiency savings. This is a matter of economics. Anti-growth simply isn't feasible from a domestic or foreign policy standpoint. There is no way you will convince any significant politician, and by extension his/her voting bloc, that there must be an end to growth. You can't religion or dictator your way out of this either, since it goes against the very essence of human nature.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • twblalock 7y ago
    > I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth. How would a correction lead to redistribution? Corrections hurt the poor more than the rich. For the rich, a correction is a great time to invest. For the poor, it is a time of unemployment and despair.
• seemslegit 7y ago
  No, we've built cities whose residents can't afford to live in them because their taxation isn't used to provide services at optimal cost but instead funneled to private interests and various rackets under the auspices of urban development paradigm du jour.
  • rezonetheburbs 7y ago
    You're being downvoted, but you're not wrong. Under the guise of things like public-private partnerships, public money is increasingly funneled to private interests. Look at the humble TIF. Does your city need a big-ass stadium that won't actually help development or build community? Cool! Let's draw a border around several blocks and capture all of the tax increases for 20 years and then give it to a private company. Once that's over, the company can collect on the next boondoggle while everyone wonders why their city is a decaying, boring place to be, ultimately resulting in demolition of the stadium. This cycle repeats forever.
    • carapace 7y ago
      "humble TIF"? What's that?
      • OrangeMango 7y ago
        Tax Increment Financing. A city designates a geographic zone and all property tax money collected in that zone above a certain baseline amount goes into an account that is separate from the city budget account. The city then spends that money on development as they so choose. Some places allow it and some don't. Some places abuse it and some don't. But in general you can expect TIF money to be given directly to a developer to encourage them to build something within that zone. One of the big problems is that that extra money is diverted away from the city budget for 20-30 years. The area I live in used to be inside a TIF (it expired). During that time, only about 10% of my property tax money went to the city. We had overcrowded schools getting 10% of the money they normally would have received. The library got 10% of the money it normally would have. Some of that TIF money went to build a basketball stadium. In a final gesture of goodwill (I guess), when the TIF expired they spent the final ~$40 million in the TIF account on an elementary school.
• fheudjdjw 7y ago
  All of these City Lab and Strong Towns articles boil down to complaining about how every city isn't exactly like San Francisco. Some people have lifestyle preferences that are not as common in the bay area. Some people want good infrastructure so that they can commute from affordable housing. This is an example of SV hubris.
  • burlesona 7y ago
    The founder of Strong Towns lives in Brainerd, Minnesota, and the entire organization was for many years exclusively focused on problems in small towns in rural America. It's very different from City Lab.
  • rezonetheburbs 7y ago
    You have the causality mixed up. Housing isn't inherently expensive in cities. Building housing costs about the same everywhere, but land is expensive because of artificial scarcity. It's amazing how much America has and yet there are only a small handful of places where you can walk to a grocery store, and the privilege will cost you $2,500 per month. Every single state could easily support walkable cities (Europe manages), but they don't because of a pathological pattern of development pioneered after WWII. I don't know how to help people who live in sparse suburbs. Not everyone needs to live in Manhattan, but exurban sprawl is alienating (and unsustainable to boot). It just doesn't build community.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• lambdasquirrel 7y ago
  Shrugs... when you don't want to build, and then the only developers are the folks that can push through all the NIMBY, then this is what you get.
  • loeg 7y ago
    The article is talking about public infrastructure — freeways, suburban development — all things planned by local government. Not private development.
    • timerol 7y ago
      Private development funds public infrastructure though. So if you build really expensive public infrastructure, you need a corresponding amount of private development in order to pay for it. Really dense and valuable development like in downtown Manhattan can support much more expensive public infrastructure than a smaller town could.
      • loeg 7y ago
        Funding sources and project direction for municipal government are a lot more diverse and complicated than the picture you're painting. Yes, everything kind of feeds into everything else; you could broadly call this "the local economy." Development is one piece of that, but not the only piece.
• formalsystem 7y ago
  I don't know what we've built in the US but it certainly doesn't feel like we've built cities for people. In California, most of the outside real estate is dedicated to roads with the monotony occasionally interrupted by a parking lot with the same cookie cutter businesses. It's very rare that I'll see a mom and pop shop here and for the most part the outside world with billboards, malls and fast food chains is a distribution channel for big businesses.
  • chapium 7y ago
    I cannot imagine what living in downtown Chicago is like. On top of being prohibitively expensive, where would you shop for groceries or other domestic services? Its like a double whammy of expensive living and poor access.
    • l33r 7y ago
      I live in downtown Chicago. I'm one block away from Trader Joe's and Osco Jewel. Cost of living in downtown Chicago is cheaper than NYC/SF and maybe even LA. Within 20 minutes of walking, I can get to two separate Targets, Whole Foods and even a Home Depot.
      • chapium 7y ago
        River North is insanely expensive even with NYC/SF to compare to.
    • Javantea_ 7y ago
      It's been a while since I visited Chicago, but I stayed in a hotel downtown. Not only was public transit excellent and easy to use, but walking was a delight. I don't remember there being a grocery story anywhere, but Google Maps shows quite a few. Chicago's downtown may have a lot of problems including being expensive and a high crime rate, but poor access seems inaccurate.
    • jakemal 7y ago
      I live in downtown Chicago with a Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and a Jewel Osco all within 3 blocks of me. I'm not sure what makes you think there is a lack of access in this area. I live here because I love how accessible everything I want to do is.
• burlesona 7y ago
  This is an interesting read, but it's a bit insider. If you're having a hard time grokking what they mean by "growth that makes the city _less_ prosperous," you should start with the Growth Ponzi Scheme series: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme I'll attempt to briefly summarize: The post WW2 development pattern across North America (and many other places around the world) is characterized by car-oriented development, where large collector roads fan out to support tree-like trunk-and-branches local streets full of houses, with commercial box stores and strip malls often located where the major collectors cross. This infrastructure pattern (road, sewer, power) is much more expensive than most people realize, and (to most people's surprise), the local taxes (property, sales, and sometimes income) collected by all the properties that depend on that infrastructure are rarely sufficient to pay for it. This means that as municipalities expand in this way they are increasing their cost of maintenance faster than they are increasing their revenue, and thus becoming poorer. The reason this continues is that the majority of the initial capital cost (which, again, is substantially more than most people realize) is heavily subsidized by federal and state "growth" programs. Thus, in the range of the first 5-10 years, local places often get a short-term influx of cash as new development pays local taxes spurred by infrastructure the city didn't have to pay for. But it's a bad deal, because the city is on the hook to maintain that infrastructure forever, and again, the long-term tax base is rarely adequate to pay for it. This leads to a vicious cycle - which probably sounds familiar - where city officials are desperately chasing more "growth programs" from the state and federal level because they need the income to cover budget shortfalls -- but they aren't stepping back to recognize that the budget shortfalls were actually caused by this same pattern played out over the last 50 years. It's a fascinating, slow-moving train wreck, one of those things that is all around us, and once you see it, you can't un-see. Strong Towns exists to spread awareness of this situation. The organization's theory of change is that if the general public were well-educated on this phenomenon, then it would change, as people in each local area would stop making the problem worse then start iterating and innovating on ways to make it better. You can see some examples of places where this is playing out on the organization's "success stories" page: https://www.strongtowns.org/success https://www.strongtowns.org/success
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• Noos 7y ago
  There are plenty of cities you can afford. It's just that if you want walkable and world class network effects, eventually the demand will drive us prices so that only the wealthy can afford to live there.
  • burlesona 7y ago
    I don't think that "walkable" and "world-class network effects" are actually required to go together. The majority of walkable places around the world are just ordinary towns you've never heard of. In North America this tends to be true mostly because just about everything was walkable before WW2, and after WW2 the almost the only places that were left that way were the places too wealthy and expensive to demolish and rebuild around the car. Not too much of a surprise, the places that had that much wealth 70 years ago are still the major hubs of the economy today.
    • Noos 7y ago
      If it were just walkable, you could pick a smaller city or downtown area and live there, especially with a class that does intellectual or remote work. The issue of "too expensive" is usually that everyone wants to crowd into a few cities because of those network effects and social life features, walkability is one of them. For all the love of decentralization HN has, in practice they very much want to centralize where wealth and power is.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        When most people say "walkable," what they generally really mean is walkable + good transit + tons of places they'd actually want to walk to like parks, bars, restaurants, and shops.
      • Redoubts 7y ago
        > If it were just walkable, you could pick a smaller city or downtown area and live there No you couldn't, because most American downtowns completely close down outside of 9-5 M-F.
  • 7y ago
• tehjoker 7y ago
  The rich have built cities they can afford.
• gok 7y ago
  "make the city stronger and more financially resilient" "target productive development patterns" "incentivize productive development" It's hard to read Strong Towns articles because they write almost entirely in euphemism. What they're really advocating is smaller homes, more density, and less driving. They would really sound much less Orwellian if they stopped using so many weasel words.
  • MattGaiser 7y ago
    They realize that few people will accept the trade off of having less house.
    • username90 7y ago
      That isn't true, people pay a lot more to live in the denser part of towns even when they are at equal distance from the city center.
  • zaroth 7y ago
    See the famous George Carlin routine on "soft language". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
  • projektfu 7y ago
    I'd say these are more handles than they are euphemisms. They make it pretty clear in their site that "stronger and financially resilient" means not having unfunded liabilities, "target productive development patterns" means density and mixed-use zoning, and "incentivize productive development" means getting rid of zoning laws with mandatory setbacks, single-dwelling rules, parking minimums, etc.
• lawrenceyan 7y ago
  An urban exploration channel I like watching for potential places to go to did a dive through an abandoned Chinese ghost city recently [0]. It's honestly pretty shocking, almost like a set to some kind of dystopian horror movie. Perfect for urban exploration, but perhaps not the best for healthy long-term sustainable economies. It really makes you think about the potential house of cards everything must be built on, and what's going to happen when it all catches up to us. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE-Oa7mAyDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE-Oa7mAyDU
• throw_this_one 7y ago
  Obviously this is super hard/impossible to calculate, but everybody should be paying in a certain fraction of what they are getting out of the system. ex. The entrepreneur that gets access to the road system, educated workforce, police/legal system protection... if they didn't have that then they couldn't profit from their widget. So pay something significant back to the system, or you can't participate in the system.
• xyzzyz 7y ago
  Strongtowns has had the same shtick for years now, predicting that the cities are are going to collapse under cost of maintaining infrastructure. For years though, the numbers just refuse to add up in Strongtowns favor. If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that went bankrupt because of it? Strongtowns argues that early on, it’s covered by the developers, but after its useful life, it must be replaced by municipality. Ignoring the whole issue of the original residents actually covering the cost instead of the developer (clearly, the developer didn’t just donate the roads and sewers, it’s all priced in), how long do we actually have to wait for chicken to come home to roost? I live in a suburban development in Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will finally kill our budget? If you look at the city budgets, there is no mystery: road maintenance is simply a very small part of municipality budget. It simply doesn’t cost as much as Strongtowns keeps implying. The infrastructure maintenance budget is dwarfed by everything else. Just look at the numbers: http://www.seattle.gov/city-budget/2020-proposed-budget#/sdot http://www.seattle.gov/city-budget/2020-proposed-budget#/sdo... Road maintenance is what, $150M-200M counting generously and adding some overhead? Even if you apportion all of that to suburbia, compared to total budget of over $6B, it’s not going to make a serious dent. That the road costs are low in suburbia can even be seen with a simple back of the napkin calculation: assuming cost to repave a mile of suburban road to be $1M, house frontage of 100 feet, and useful life of road at 30 years, you’re looking at $20 000 per house over 30 years, or less than $700 per house per year. Sure, that’s not nothing, but how much do you already pay in property taxes? In short, while I think many suggestions of Strongtowns are good in their own right, and would indeed improve many places in America, the infrastructure costs story simply doesn’t add up.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • Lammy 7y ago
    No city goes bankrupt because of road maintenance. They just choose not to do it. There are plenty of towns and cities across the USA that have just been left to decay.
• mathattack 7y ago
  What’s the endgame? Cities default on their Muni bonds? Then what? Giving up pension obligations? What should we be looking at for precedent? Detroit? Rural Japan?
  • jandrese 7y ago
    Higher tax rates that more accurately reflect fixed costs? This site seems to think that if we aren’t spending enough to maintain our infrastructure then it is impossible to maintain and we should radically redesign our entire society.
    • projektfu 7y ago
      This site is incrementalist. There's a vision for the future but it is not radical.
  • jdhn 7y ago
    >What’s the endgame? Cities default on their Muni bonds? Then what? Giving up pension obligations? First what'll happen is that they cut back on maintenance of infrastructure like roads. Then the bond defaults will happen, followed by bankruptcy and haircuts to pensions. Detroit is a better example to look at than rural Japan because it actually went through bankruptcy.
• strategarius 7y ago
  I don't know, why no one mentioned remote work as a solution, at least for businesses who can afford it. I clearly know from my friends in HR industry, positions which never assumed remote options, now opened and filled without significant problems for business and new employee. Businesses are working in (almost) normal mode, apocalypse is postponed. So why pour money in expensive offices, require from you employees to rent apartments near your work, which cost like lux-class, or repeatedly spend hours of their lifes that accumulate in months in public transport or traffic jams? When business people talk about remote job in the team, it's usually outsourcing to India. Why not to let your employees present at the office, say, 1 time a week, to deal with the customer or attend weekly meeting for those who miss socialization.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• janvdberg 7y ago
  Made me think of this paulg tweet/quote: "Cities that we think of as marvels from the past that we could not match were built by people much poorer than us." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1199278650652286977 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1199278650652286977
  • preommr 7y ago
    What does this even mean? I'd like to see an actual example of such a city for better context. What city do people think we can't build today better and faster? Who are the people that are poorer? Like the US is richer, but detroit got wrecked over time.
    • carapace 7y ago
      > I'd like to see an actual example of such a city for better context. Rome? Athens? Merv was considered the most beautiful city in the world for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merv We have sent men to walk on the Moon but we suck at beautiful architecture.
    • rhino369 7y ago
      Some of it is true, but that's because we paid in lives and human suffering. Safety and environmental restrictions multiply the cost of building infrastructure.
    • Too 7y ago
      Compare older architectural styles such as colorful and elaborate Victorian or Renaissance, with newer ones like big gray concrete Brutalism or Functionalism. Why can't we build good looking and interesting buildings again, despite our better tools? Now there are modern glass buildings that can look really sleek also, but honestly they are a bit repetitive and featureless and don't really match those older ornate styles.
  • sneak 7y ago
    Sometimes I ponder the fact that so much of the US lifestyle is utterly terrible only because single family homes, individual automobiles, strip malls, lack of mixed-use, and parking minimums are a “this is the way we’ve always done it” meme. Many people there literally can’t imagine any other way of doing it. There are few or no options for cheap, walkable, high-density city living in the US, and not because people don’t want it, because of what the TLS people call “ossification”: it’s illegal to build it in most places, even if it’s cleaner, easier, cheaper, and more desired by citizenry, simply due to (bad) tradition. (That and that fact that the upper classes really don’t seem to like living within walking distance of poor people.) I wonder if it’s possible to build new actual cities in the US. I know that due to things like restrictive covenants, much of the housing in the western half of the country makes it legally impossible to ever increase the density of existing cities. Subdivisions in master planned areas can’t individually decide to allow duplexes or mid-rises or corner stores, as they are sub-sub-subdivisions that are governed by decades-old associations. To build another New York or Hong Kong (in addition to needing 50-100 years) you’d probably need to start fresh; it couldn’t be grafted into an existing sprawl town.
• KoftaBob 7y ago
  Which is why counties should tie property taxes to infrastructure costs. You want to live in a sprawled out suburb where there's a low ratio of taxpayer/mile of infrastructure? You're free to do so, but expect to pay a higher share of the infrastructure costs to do so. Also, the budget set aside for infrastructure projects should do a much better job of allocating future tax revenue towards maintaining it over time. Right now, the cost analysis of these projects is way too focused on what it'll cost to build it, and then maintaining it is left up to future planners to figure out. Every project must have a guaranteed tax revenue percentage exclusively set aside towards maintaining it going forward.
• smoyer 7y ago
  This site/magazine/think-tank/whatever has told the same story for years ... certainly there are case studies that they would cite as following their ideas if those were succeeding somewhere? Barring evidence and scientific trials, aren't these ravings from a group of malcontents?
  • projektfu 7y ago
    It takes a long time to do the experiment. A few years isn't enough. The suburban pattern experiment was enacted without any control group and now we're finally recognizing that it didn't work out as we hoped. Now that people are realizing that Jane Jacobs was on to something, we have to experiment to go forward. The default in America is going to be what we're familiar with. Continue building the next subdivision on the nearest farmland or forest. Run more roads to it, widen the current ones to handle the new traffic, watch as the people pull up stakes in their current suburbs and move out, leaving the existing ones to decay. Towns that follow a different approach will be able to see results in different timescales, but hopefully we will relearn how to build towns that can last generations.
• siliconunit 7y ago
  The whole economy as it stands is a clever puzzle of guessing a half rigged race to the bottom (or the top) game. Now we have the computational and technological resources to track almost anything down to the single item, we should use this power to assure an even and fair distribution of goods and resources and nothing much more. Work to generate income is a destructive and obsolete concept; money as a construct has nearly finished its useful lifespan together with the egotistical concept of accumulation of wealth, a thought that should cease to exist for the greater good of everyone, sweat and pride should be taken for the achievement, not for the reward, but this is something very hard to swallow in certain circles that achieve nothing and produce mostly unfairness.
  • eklavya 7y ago
    This is really naive. Money is just an idea and it lets the mega connected world of today operate with some semblance of sanity. What do you propose we use instead of money and how is that different from money? Who gets what and how much of it? Who decides all this?
• ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Why is it that these “economic development” non-profits and city planning think tanks all sing a similar tune and have no money? Why don’t developers and land (home) owners align with the (supposed) best thinking in city planning? Why aren’t the cities planning themselves like these outsiders want? It seems to me if you really want to design a city, I mean really care you’d be better off becoming a real estate investor or developer and then building things how you think they should be built. The Strong Cities folks and the like don’t seem to have good answers for how you actually implement their ideas without wealth destruction and dislocation of communities that have built up in ways that don’t meet the standards of urban planning high ideals. The Haussmannisation of Paris 2.0 is not going to happen in a US city full of middle class land owners. Maybe we’d take these people seriously if they had a reasonable PLAN for implementing their grand ideals
  • carapace 7y ago
    I don't know if I'm one of "these people", but you're singing my tune. I want to start a kind of real estate development company to buy distressed land (as opposed to raw wilderness) and develop "living neighborhoods"[1] (like Village Homes[2] in Davis, CA) combining Pattern Language and Permaculture (applied ecology), and sell sell them. "Rinse and repeat". I don't know of anybody else doing something like this, and yeah, it puzzles me too. [1] https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm Christopher Alexander's site. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes
  • zemvpferreira 7y ago
    Why is it that these "nutritionists" spend all their time talking about clean eating with no results? Clearly regular people can't eat more vegetables and less Doritos. Maybe we'd take them more seriously if they had a reasonable plan to thin America down. I'm a strong town proponent and advocate (though I live in Portugal where many of these problems never surfaced on the same scale). I'm also a real estate investor. The crux of it is that the priority for urban planning enthusiasts must be education, not mass rebuilding. A large, large majority of people would still rather take out buy a horrible McMansion in a soulless development than buy a smaller, well-built home closer to their neighbours. Showing off wealth and ticking off features is valued over long-term enjoyment of your home and betterment of the community. Is it such a surprise that it's hard to get a large number of folks to do what's best in the long term instead of what they want right now?
• HashThis 7y ago
  This is mostly SanFran and NYC. Other cities can build housing and apartments. Seattle has built tons of apartments. Costs are a bit high, but that is the fuel to kick growing the supply into overdrive.
• deleted 7y ago
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• crazygringo 7y ago
  OK, so if this is true that towns and suburbs had subsidized construction and that now the cost of full infrastructure maintenance can't be supported locally... ...then what happens? Do roads just get a lot more potholes but we deal just fine in the end? Or would it get so bad that people wind up just leaving somehow? It's almost impossible for me to imagine that road etc. maintenance is that expensive that it could mean shutting down entire neighborhoods because there's no other choice. ("Everybody who owns a house, goodbye it's worthless now.") Is there more likely to be a supply-and-demand thing where a town is forced to massively increase property taxes, people who can't afford it are forced to leave for a cheaper locale, and people with more money come in? (Attracted by the now lower price of the houses which compensates for the higher property taxes.) In other words, existing homeowners will get the shaft, because the deferred maintenance will essentially be paid for in the end by their loss in home equity?
  • vharuck 7y ago
    I lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our whole state has infrastructure problems. For the highways, it's because we're connected to a lot of logistical hubs. But a lot of our towns, including our capital, have big problems with big potholes. It doesn't happen in a single decision or even a single year. It's a slow spiral: people move out, crumbling streets go on the "cons" list of house hunters, the city has a smaller income base, so non-urgent roadwork is less urgent. Repeat. I'm not saying people will flee neighborhoods with bad streets. But they will move out for the usual reasons: family, new jobs, marriage. The problem is new people are less likely to move in.
  • ip26 7y ago
    The theory is that as the infra crumbles, it becomes unattractive and the affluent move elsewhere. Or, property taxes are raised to fix the roads- and the affluent move elsewhere. Either way it starts a downward spiral of decreasing appeal & property value, and increasing cost. Which leads in to inexorable decay. People still live there, but it becomes a trap for the people who can't afford to get out. Strongtowns argues this fate was inevitable given certain initial conditions- subsidized infrastructure, underfunded maintenance liability, etc.
• deleted 7y ago
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• reddog 7y ago
  Isn't this one of those sites that advocate getting rid of "sprawl" and having everyone move to high density apartments near the train station? And they want to replace cars with government run mass transit so everyone gets to work and back in trams, busses and subways filled shoulder-to-shoulder with 800 strangers? Thats really going to be a tough sell over the next few years. I got to say I live in exactly the kind of suburbs they hate with a house big enough for everyone to spread out and enough square footage to store a months worth of food. And when I do get out its alone in my car to curbside pickup or a drive through. I couldn't be more pleased.
  • lotsofpulp 7y ago
    >I couldn't be more pleased. Of course, the costs won't be paid by you. Pushing mass all that extra distance consumes exponentially more energy. Fortunately, the effects of climate change won't be so bad until I'm in old age (I think).
  • projektfu 7y ago
    They are not for everyone moving into a compact city. There have been a lot of articles recently about the pleasures of living in a walkable rural town as opposed to a sprawling four-lane highway with no discernable border between rural and town.
  • amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    Of course you are pleased. The folks in the inner city are subsidizing your lifestyle. If you had to pay the full cost you might not be so pleased.
  • asokoloski 7y ago
    I think they try to stay pretty explicitly neutral about advocating a particular density, it's just that they want people to be realistic about how much a particular kind of development costs. Suburbs are perfectly fine -- but if they were taxed to a degree that reflects their actual infrastructure cost, it would be much more expensive to live in them. There's currently a bizarre pattern where poorer, older, higher-density urban neighborhoods end up subsidizing richer suburbs. Likewise, it's fine if you want to live out on a farm well away from other people -- but the town shouldn't pay a million dollars to run a paved road and water supply out to your house, when a dirt road and a well is good enough. The problem is that we all want something for nothing. We all want to live in low-density suburbs like you love, but since charging enough in taxes to pay for them would not be very politically popular, instead we've run up massive infrastructure liabilities, depending on unsustainable exponential growth for funding to fix the old infrastructure. Would you still love the suburbs as much if your property taxes were 2x or 4x what they are now? If you would still want to live in a suburb, great, no problem. But many people would probably rather choose to move to a denser area and pay a more reasonable tax rate.
• elihu 7y ago
  Value per acre seems like a better metric than just value per lot, but it seems like the metric you'd really want to maximize is value per infrastructure cost, which isn't quite the same thing. For instance, narrow, deep lots would have less street frontage than square lots and therefore have lower infrastructure cost and be more efficient. Similarly, having large areas of undeveloped forest or park land don't necessarily increase costs much if they don't require major infrastructure. (One could reasonably debate whether undeveloped space significantly increases the need for roads elsewhere to compensate for reduced density.)
• jackcosgrove 7y ago
  If a city is going to go bankrupt, it will be because of pension and healthcare costs and not infrastructure maintenance costs. If all else fails infrastructure can be abandoned but pensions and health plans will be politically untouchable, and in some places they are legally untouchable. Detroit abandoned swathes of the city for decades, but in the end it was the pensions that did them in. However having driven through the Kansas City metro I was impressed, and not necessarily in a good way, by the massive amount of paved roads. It was nice in a way; there was very little traffic. However it seemed to have the most roads of a city of its size that I have every seen. I have never been to Houston or Dallas however.
  • afthonos 7y ago
    > If a city is going to go bankrupt, it will be because of pension and healthcare costs and not infrastructure maintenance costs. If all else fails infrastructure can be abandoned but pensions and health plans will be politically untouchable, and in some places they are legally untouchable. There are two issues here: bankruptcy, which is a crappy legal and financial situation to be in, and which you may or may not avoid, and city decline, which can happen even if you avoid bankruptcy. Leaving swaths of the city to rot is the latter, and does not strike me as necessarily better (and certainly not for the residents of those swaths). Moreover, the infrastructure problems compound any issues with pensions, since if people leave, it will be harder to have the tax base to fulfill previous obligations. Saying that the last expenditure left standing in a financial Armageddon was the one that “did them in” sounds like an oversimplification.
  • anm89 7y ago
    There is no way americans would accept their infrastructure failing. The average American just doesn't believe this is a possibility in a way which meaningfully affects them because they've never seen it or they believe ive some exceptionllalism nonsense.
    • beart 7y ago
      Infrastructure has definitely failed and the general public has shown very little passion for doing something about it. Take a drive through South East Michigan some time.
• 6510 7y ago
  Where have we seen this before? Attract a larger audience, more users, more customers then expect everything to scale wonderfully? I feel there is something romantic about keeping things a predefined size. The corner store, the closed discussion group, the small town, the limited edition FOO. It tends to get some things right in a magical way.
• question11 7y ago
  I think it starts to make sense when you add in subways and the personal cost of car ownership (1 car vs 3 car families) then density makes complete sense.