8 ms·

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 thou

by 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
[deleted]
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.
- loteck 7y ago
  Correct. If you could look at one city budget and derive from that budget what it costs to sufficiently maintain infrastructure, then you would never see a bridge collapse, or a water main break, or a pension fund crisis. Look around at how often those things happen. That someone would look at a city budget, which is a primarily political document, and believe that document reflects actual costs to sufficiently maintain anything, is simply naive.
- WWLink 7y ago
  lol some socal cities are kinda like that. The streets are maintained just fine but the business owners/landlords are trying to squeeze every last drop out of their 1960s pieces of junk and refuse to maintain/update/rebuild them.
- dionidium 7y ago
  Yes, when you read that St. Louis, say, "lost" 600,000 people over the last 60 years, everybody should understand why that's a ridiculous fiction. Those people didn't leave St. Louis. They moved slightly west across invisible and arbitrary 150-year-old political borders that have no relation to the built environment of the region today. They still live in "St. Louis" by any commonsense definition. It's the same all over the Rust Belt. So what really happened? We built new subdivisions for the exact same set of people and the old parts of town just fell apart entirely. The maintenance was completely ignored. Nobody left St. Louis. They just took developer and federal money and built new housing in St. Louis County (the original suburbs). And then when those old suburbs started to decay, they did it again by moving out to St. Charles (the new exurbs). The latest wave of this is the "return to the city" movement in which the same set of people continue the cycle by abandoning the housing that was built to replace the housing they're returning to. I'm using St. Louis as an example here, because it's the city I know the most about, but it's the same everywhere.
londons_explore 7y ago
Also, look at rural communities... They manage to maintain a mile or more of roads to most isolated houses.
- hylaride 7y ago
  To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government. The sparsely used road users aren’t bearing the full cost.
  - rsync 7y ago
    "To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government." This is generally true - typically, paved rural roads in the US are county roads. Nicely maintained gravel roads are typically county roads as well.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 7y ago
    When people look at the tax base and where federal dollars are spent, the Red areas usually end up getting anywhere from $103 to $110 in federal dollars for every $100 collected in federal taxes, and much of that comes down to roads and highways. Without the highways most of these areas wouldn't be able to buy or sell goods to the outside world. (Aren't trains cheaper? Maybe we should be building more track and fewer lanes)
    - jatone 7y ago
      the assumptions going on here are all about costs. when in reality current transportation infra funding from federal government is about military defense. its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space. there is no reason they couldn't and would reduce costs overall. but it also means a single strike can disable all 3 systems. in today's world I think its a pointless effort and we should resolve those issues to reduce the overall costs. but here we are.
keithly 7y ago
There is also generally less traffic and buried utilities under suburban and rural roads, which decreases maintenance costs.
milesskorpen 7y ago
I think Strongtowns would argue that cities are taking on infrastructure debt — that Seattle should be spending far more than $150-200m. The cost could be somewhat visible in the short term with more potholes or whatever, but probably becomes most striking when there are major infrastructure failures like the I-35W bridge or the Genoa Bridge. If you take your assumptions on face (and I think some might be off, but I'm not expert), we're saying that homeowners should think of the cost of repaving roads as on par with replacing a roof. I don't think most people think this way.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Last I looked Strongtown calculations seem to be based on areas in the Midwest. It's plausible that more expensive places to live are making enough to maintain infrastructure. For example I live in a 50 year old 1.5k square foot house in a suburb and pay around 12k/year in property taxes. Which was far above the calculations one of the blog posts said that the town would have to collect.
- mark-r 7y ago
  The I-35W bridge collapse had nothing to do with insufficient maintenance, in fact maintenance materials and vehicles on the bridge were a contributing factor. The primary cause was weak gusset plates, incorrectly specified when the bridge was first built 40 years earlier.
gowld 7y ago
Seattle is urban and has 50% higher population than KC in 25% of the area. Strongtowns (despite its ironic name), is pro-city and anti-town. The OP article is quite clear about this, as it argues against KC spreading into suburban sprawl. You'd need an example of a suburb or exurb to prove your point.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  You haven’t seen Seattle, have you? 75% of total area of the city is zoned for single family houses. Sure, it might not literally be “suburban”, but the development pattern is just the same. Of course, the same thing is true in the actual suburbs. Consider Lynnwood, a town of 35 000. It’s annual revenues are around $300M, and road maintenance is around $6-8M. It spends around 7 times as much on its police force as it does on roads. When does it go bankrupt?
  - gowld 7y ago
    Those SFH zones are getting infilled by apartment buildings and townhouses and ADUs and people selling their backyards to create a new lot. It's nothing like vast surburban tracts. Lynnwood has 35K people in 8 square miles, 5 Kpeople/sqmi. KC has 500K people 310 square miles, 1.4 Kpeople/sqmi.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    In most towns, education is a huge chunk of the budget. In my semi-rural Massachusetts town of about 7,000, 62% of the budget goes to the town's elementary school and its share of the regional high school. Public works is only about 8% and public safely is a bit under twice that. As far as I know that's pretty common--in fact, I expected the educational spend to be higher, which it probably is in some places. (Per student spend for the regional high school is about half the spending in Cambridge for example.)
  - sk5t 7y ago
    How does a town of 35K people raise $300MM in annual tax? $8,500 per capita seems very, very high.
burlesona 7y ago
What you're quoting is the money that was allocated to maintenance (the budget), not the actual amount required to maintain quality and level of service comparable to when things were originally built. But also, Seattle is a bad example, as the city of Seattle is largely pre-war and has an exceptionally valuable Downtown, and Seattle is booming off the charts compared to the rest of the US. If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling around metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and take a hard look at their maintenance costs versus income. Unfortunately, Seattle's economy isn't the norm.
- CerealFounder 7y ago
  This argument is it, but it says something different than you realize. The bigger problem is that as cities become less financially and culturally relevant/desirable their revenues decline at faster clip than their investment and spending. Its not infrastructure or anything in particular it's just a problem of congruency.
  - pas 7y ago
    Infrastructure is a fixed cost. On paper. But of course quality can be always traded off for cost. And that's what happens usually if revenue dries up. Potholes, cracked asphalt, insufficient storm drainage, and so eventually a lot of damage to property (floods, cars, etc.).
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- nerdponx 7y ago
  You also have to account for federal funding. NYC in particular depends on it for infrastructure maintenance, and important maintenance goes neglected without that funding (cf. Hudson Gateway).
  - 7y ago
yaacov 7y ago
Seattle is one of the most prosperous regions of the US. Even so, your suburban lifestyle is probably subsidized by people who live in more urbanized parts of the metro. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment-dwellers-subsidize-suburban-homeowners https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment... That said, I agree that total collapse of municipal finances is unlikely outside of particularly poor exurban areas.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  There is not much urbanized part of the metro to speak of. It’s all suburbia, even in the city itself, 75% is zoned for single family houses. Given that my property taxes are 10 times what Strongtowns thinks it costs to maintain the streets, I seriously doubt I’m being subsidized by anyone when it comes to infrastructure.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    A lot of people assume that urbanized metros imply a lot of high-rise residential. But take a place like Somerville in MA. It's one of densest cities in the country outside of the environs of NYC and there's not much high rise construction generally and a lot of the city is standalone houses.
  - katbyte 7y ago
    What about the fact there are two of the largest tech companies in the world headquartered nearby? The downtown most definitely subsidizes suburbia.
    - xyzzyz 7y ago
      Microsoft practically built a whole suburban town far from Seattle and made it its headquarters. It subsidizes suburbia because it is suburbia.
      - Aloha 7y ago
        Workers from Boeing 'built' the suburbia that Microsoft moved to, most of the housing in Redmond predates Microsoft.
danans 7y ago
> I live in a suburban development in Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will finally kill our budget? "Packed row to row" and "50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old" isn't nearly descriptive enough to say whether it is financially sustainable. How packed? How dependent on long highway commutes? And importantly, how prosperous are the residents (the suburban Seattle area is pretty prosperous)? All of that matters a lot for how soon the financial pictures turns unsustainable. > the infrastructure costs story simply doesn’t add up. Roads aren't the only bit of infrastructure. Water lines, electricity distribution, land maintenance, and more. The unit costs of all these thing scale up rapidly with decreased density. The leading edge of the failures will be in places where the property tax base has already collapsed and the government is forced to make infrastructure maintenance trade-offs with bad consequences (i.e. Flint, MI), but the fragility is there in lots of cities, just perhaps not yours at this time.
mabbo 7y ago
But you're talking about Seattle, one of the largest cities in the USA. It's experiencing growth. Strongtowns isn't worried (as much) about large metro areas. His "shtick" is that the rest of the country, where populations are shrinking or stagnating, can't continue to run ponzi-like growth plans anymore that presume the population will continue to increase. They're not going to. Go find yourself a town of 10,000 people that has a massively over-budge roads and water department. You won't have to look far- just leave the big cities, driving in any direction for an hour or two. Those same towns have low incomes, generally, meaning your "only $700/year" is enough to bankrupt people. In short: I think you're living in a bubble and haven't ventured outside of it very far in a while.
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  Yes, that. But even cities experiencing growth aren't likely to get a pass in the short term. Austin has had massive growth but what happens when sales tax, hotel taxes, fuel taxes, local income taxes (not in Austin but other places), etc all take a massive hit all at once? With canceling SXSW this year, they're projecting there was an immediate $30-50M tax revenue hit and hotel occupancy is still ~4% when it's normally 70%. Sure, there's less wear and tear on infrastructure but they don't cancel out. Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US..
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    > Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US.. Governments in general (and the departments/agencies thereof) tend to live "paycheck to paycheck" specifically because they're typically discouraged from saving a whole lot of money; there's almost always a "spend it or lose it" mentality (whether informal or actually codified in budget policies) that instead encourages spending every last penny of funding received lest whoever's in charge of the budget decide "well they're running leaner than expected so let's slash the budget to what they're actually spending and turn that into a tax break".
- wasdfff 7y ago
  When you look at abandoned towns over the last century, it wasn’t due to overbuilding of roads but from some local employer moving away. In this case it doesn’t matter if you have 6 lane highways or dirt roads if no one is being payed to live there anymore.
hanniabu 7y ago
Something that kills me is how roads are paved and then within a few months they're torn up to do work on pipes underneath like clockwork. They say it's because the utility companies and the town don't have good communication, but think we all know it's because of kickbacks from the paving companies. I've rarely ever seen work done under roads that weren't just paved over. And no, it's not just because I only notice it when the road is new because every since I've had this realization about 10-15 years ago I've been paying attention to it and it's still the case. Aside from that, a big issue is that cities aren't designed for maintenance. Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs. It'd be faster and cheaper b/c no more repavements, you don't need super heavy equipment (simple forklift with chains can move them), and it'd cut down on job completion time, not to mention it's much easier to plan. For anything that crosses a street, do it at intersections and you can just make intersections a composition of concrete slabs that again can be moved. Another issue is not utilizing technology. It'd be incredibly simple to create a web portal where citizens can report maintenance issues like potholes, broken street lights or traffic lights, tree limbs that need cutting to keep away from power lines, a sewer drain that's clogged, a fire hydrant that's leaking, etc. The list goes on and on. All these things being reported would make it much easier for the city to plan the maintenance so you could bang out a bunch of things at once early on rather than waiting for it to build up so much that it becomes obvious without the reporting and by that time it's usually late and has lead to other issues.
- katbyte 7y ago
  My city has an app you can report things like that with so it exists.
- pwrsysengineer 7y ago
  > Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs. This isn't a bad idea for maybe a single utility but I dont think you are considering how many utilities are under the ground: water, sewer, street runoff, natural gas, electricity, telecommunications. Each of these may have multiple lines for each of service, distribution, and transmission. One of the reasons streets get torn up a lot is that there is a low of equipment underground!
mardifoufs 7y ago
Yep, in a lot of cities (and states) very generous pensions are what really bleeds their budget dry. Infrastructure cost is marginal and lot more infrastructure maintenance could be done without those gigantic pension expenses. That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now. At the time most of the budgets could be allocated to direct city spending instead of starting with half of your budget already gone before you even have it. Of course you could argue that it still means that we built cities that we couldn't afford since employee benefits are part of the normal expenses. But imo, it means more that , at the time, a few took advantage of local politicians unwillingness to go against more and more generous and unaffordable pension schemes that ended up crippling future generations with perpetual debt and underfunded services when they themselves never had such a burden to carry. If it wasnt for that borderline intergenerational theft , the infrastructure of our cities is not only something we could easily afford to maintain but could even be tremendously expanded. Edit: I'm not arguing that pensions should not exist or that unions are bad. It's just that in the public sector specifically, ridiculous and unfair payouts were negotiated where the public sometimes ends up paying for far more than what the employees contributed themselves.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  I argue defined benefit pensions should not exist. There is clearly a conflict of interest between voters (100% of government employees who will want to increase their benefits) and politicians (who need the vote of all of those government employees because so many non government employees do not vote). You even wrote it yourself: >That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now. They didn't have the financial burden because their ancestors didn't punt labor costs decades into the future. And given the opportunity to punt labor costs decades into the future and provide lower taxes now, how is a politician who is prudent and wishes to account for today's costs today going to win an election? The only solution is to ban defined benefit pensions (and all deferred compensation schemes) so there no longer exists one less avenue for future taxpayers to get taken for a ride.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ip26 7y ago
Others have made good comments so I'll just summarize; the author is not worried about Seattle. However, if you visit some declining suburbs in the Midwest you'll immediately realize what he's talking about.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Can you name one or two of the Midwest places, so that we can look into their budgets and see how much of them are infrastructure maintenance costs?
  - ip26 7y ago
    Some of the older suburbs in the southern Kansas City metro area strike me as examples. (I don't really know names) I'm not sure you'll find a lot of maintenance on their budget- the problem is precisely that nothing is being maintained.
    - xyzzyz 7y ago
      I picked a town of Grandview, MO, because it was far on the south side of Kansas City metro, and its population stayed completely flat for last 40 years. Seems like a perfect candidate for Strongtowns argument: residential areas are all sprawl, industrial areas are packed together, and looking at its Main Street, it's a stroad[1], which Strongtowns says is "enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive". No population growth means that there is no new development to pay for the old ones, which is what Strongtowns calls a Ponzi scheme[2] Let's take a look at the budget[3]. Grandview intends to spend $37M, only $1M of which is budgeted for street maintenance, which is more than average in previous years. Are the streets deteriorated and decayed due to lack of maintenance? I spent 5 minutes on Google Streetview, and while the residential streets are far from pristine, I couldn't find a single pothole. I did, however, find road work, repaving a street[4]. This[5] is a representative example. Is Grandview a bad example? Is it somehow better than average? Is there some magic that makes Grandview work quite fine? No, I don't think so: for all I know, Grandview looks exactly like hundreds of others suburban towns in America that I've seen. This is what bugs me about Strongtowns: for all of its doom prophesying, I haven't yet seen a single town struggling to maintain suburban infrastructure. Failing to meet pension obligations, sure. Overblown salaries for city employees, yep. Large police department with lots of new toys in a town with almost no crime? Sadly, too common. But residential street maintenance killing a budget? Hardly. [1] - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-... [2] - https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [3] - https://www.grandview.org/home/showdocument?id=9346 https://www.grandview.org/home/showdocument?id=9346 [4] - https://goo.gl/maps/6DFjmEVoueoQwD7H9 https://goo.gl/maps/6DFjmEVoueoQwD7H9 [5] - https://goo.gl/maps/HWkWMT3GGK8WnNpX8 https://goo.gl/maps/HWkWMT3GGK8WnNpX8
throw0101a 7y ago
> If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that went bankrupt because of it? There's often a reduction of services. Some US towns / counties can no longer afford pavement so they're letting roads become gravel: * https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/ https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-... * https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2009/counties-weigh-whether-going-back-to-gravel-roads-is-worth-the-short-term-savings/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2009/counties-weig...
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  These articles are about rural roads, this has nothing to do with suburban development patterns that Strongtowns rails against.

by xyzzyz 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

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.

loteck 7y ago
Correct. If you could look at one city budget and derive from that budget what it costs to sufficiently maintain infrastructure, then you would never see a bridge collapse, or a water main break, or a pension fund crisis. Look around at how often those things happen. That someone would look at a city budget, which is a primarily political document, and believe that document reflects actual costs to sufficiently maintain anything, is simply naive.
WWLink 7y ago
lol some socal cities are kinda like that. The streets are maintained just fine but the business owners/landlords are trying to squeeze every last drop out of their 1960s pieces of junk and refuse to maintain/update/rebuild them.
dionidium 7y ago
Yes, when you read that St. Louis, say, "lost" 600,000 people over the last 60 years, everybody should understand why that's a ridiculous fiction. Those people didn't leave St. Louis. They moved slightly west across invisible and arbitrary 150-year-old political borders that have no relation to the built environment of the region today. They still live in "St. Louis" by any commonsense definition. It's the same all over the Rust Belt. So what really happened? We built new subdivisions for the exact same set of people and the old parts of town just fell apart entirely. The maintenance was completely ignored. Nobody left St. Louis. They just took developer and federal money and built new housing in St. Louis County (the original suburbs). And then when those old suburbs started to decay, they did it again by moving out to St. Charles (the new exurbs). The latest wave of this is the "return to the city" movement in which the same set of people continue the cycle by abandoning the housing that was built to replace the housing they're returning to. I'm using St. Louis as an example here, because it's the city I know the most about, but it's the same everywhere.

londons_explore 7y ago

Also, look at rural communities... They manage to maintain a mile or more of roads to most isolated houses.

hylaride 7y ago
To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government. The sparsely used road users aren’t bearing the full cost.
- rsync 7y ago
  "To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government." This is generally true - typically, paved rural roads in the US are county roads. Nicely maintained gravel roads are typically county roads as well.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 7y ago
  When people look at the tax base and where federal dollars are spent, the Red areas usually end up getting anywhere from $103 to $110 in federal dollars for every $100 collected in federal taxes, and much of that comes down to roads and highways. Without the highways most of these areas wouldn't be able to buy or sell goods to the outside world. (Aren't trains cheaper? Maybe we should be building more track and fewer lanes)
  - jatone 7y ago
    the assumptions going on here are all about costs. when in reality current transportation infra funding from federal government is about military defense. its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space. there is no reason they couldn't and would reduce costs overall. but it also means a single strike can disable all 3 systems. in today's world I think its a pointless effort and we should resolve those issues to reduce the overall costs. but here we are.

keithly 7y ago

There is also generally less traffic and buried utilities under suburban and rural roads, which decreases maintenance costs.

milesskorpen 7y ago

I think Strongtowns would argue that cities are taking on infrastructure debt — that Seattle should be spending far more than $150-200m. The cost could be somewhat visible in the short term with more potholes or whatever, but probably becomes most striking when there are major infrastructure failures like the I-35W bridge or the Genoa Bridge. If you take your assumptions on face (and I think some might be off, but I'm not expert), we're saying that homeowners should think of the cost of repaving roads as on par with replacing a roof. I don't think most people think this way.

bcrosby95 7y ago
Last I looked Strongtown calculations seem to be based on areas in the Midwest. It's plausible that more expensive places to live are making enough to maintain infrastructure. For example I live in a 50 year old 1.5k square foot house in a suburb and pay around 12k/year in property taxes. Which was far above the calculations one of the blog posts said that the town would have to collect.
mark-r 7y ago
The I-35W bridge collapse had nothing to do with insufficient maintenance, in fact maintenance materials and vehicles on the bridge were a contributing factor. The primary cause was weak gusset plates, incorrectly specified when the bridge was first built 40 years earlier.

gowld 7y ago

Seattle is urban and has 50% higher population than KC in 25% of the area. Strongtowns (despite its ironic name), is pro-city and anti-town. The OP article is quite clear about this, as it argues against KC spreading into suburban sprawl. You'd need an example of a suburb or exurb to prove your point.

xyzzyz 7y ago
You haven’t seen Seattle, have you? 75% of total area of the city is zoned for single family houses. Sure, it might not literally be “suburban”, but the development pattern is just the same. Of course, the same thing is true in the actual suburbs. Consider Lynnwood, a town of 35 000. It’s annual revenues are around $300M, and road maintenance is around $6-8M. It spends around 7 times as much on its police force as it does on roads. When does it go bankrupt?
- gowld 7y ago
  Those SFH zones are getting infilled by apartment buildings and townhouses and ADUs and people selling their backyards to create a new lot. It's nothing like vast surburban tracts. Lynnwood has 35K people in 8 square miles, 5 Kpeople/sqmi. KC has 500K people 310 square miles, 1.4 Kpeople/sqmi.
- ghaff 7y ago
  In most towns, education is a huge chunk of the budget. In my semi-rural Massachusetts town of about 7,000, 62% of the budget goes to the town's elementary school and its share of the regional high school. Public works is only about 8% and public safely is a bit under twice that. As far as I know that's pretty common--in fact, I expected the educational spend to be higher, which it probably is in some places. (Per student spend for the regional high school is about half the spending in Cambridge for example.)
- sk5t 7y ago
  How does a town of 35K people raise $300MM in annual tax? $8,500 per capita seems very, very high.

burlesona 7y ago

What you're quoting is the money that was allocated to maintenance (the budget), not the actual amount required to maintain quality and level of service comparable to when things were originally built. But also, Seattle is a bad example, as the city of Seattle is largely pre-war and has an exceptionally valuable Downtown, and Seattle is booming off the charts compared to the rest of the US. If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling around metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and take a hard look at their maintenance costs versus income. Unfortunately, Seattle's economy isn't the norm.

CerealFounder 7y ago
This argument is it, but it says something different than you realize. The bigger problem is that as cities become less financially and culturally relevant/desirable their revenues decline at faster clip than their investment and spending. Its not infrastructure or anything in particular it's just a problem of congruency.
- pas 7y ago
  Infrastructure is a fixed cost. On paper. But of course quality can be always traded off for cost. And that's what happens usually if revenue dries up. Potholes, cracked asphalt, insufficient storm drainage, and so eventually a lot of damage to property (floods, cars, etc.).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
nerdponx 7y ago
You also have to account for federal funding. NYC in particular depends on it for infrastructure maintenance, and important maintenance goes neglected without that funding (cf. Hudson Gateway).
- 7y ago

yaacov 7y ago

Seattle is one of the most prosperous regions of the US. Even so, your suburban lifestyle is probably subsidized by people who live in more urbanized parts of the metro. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment-dwellers-subsidize-suburban-homeowners https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment... That said, I agree that total collapse of municipal finances is unlikely outside of particularly poor exurban areas.

xyzzyz 7y ago
There is not much urbanized part of the metro to speak of. It’s all suburbia, even in the city itself, 75% is zoned for single family houses. Given that my property taxes are 10 times what Strongtowns thinks it costs to maintain the streets, I seriously doubt I’m being subsidized by anyone when it comes to infrastructure.
- ghaff 7y ago
  A lot of people assume that urbanized metros imply a lot of high-rise residential. But take a place like Somerville in MA. It's one of densest cities in the country outside of the environs of NYC and there's not much high rise construction generally and a lot of the city is standalone houses.
- katbyte 7y ago
  What about the fact there are two of the largest tech companies in the world headquartered nearby? The downtown most definitely subsidizes suburbia.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Microsoft practically built a whole suburban town far from Seattle and made it its headquarters. It subsidizes suburbia because it is suburbia.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      Workers from Boeing 'built' the suburbia that Microsoft moved to, most of the housing in Redmond predates Microsoft.

danans 7y ago

> I live in a suburban development in Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will finally kill our budget? "Packed row to row" and "50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old" isn't nearly descriptive enough to say whether it is financially sustainable. How packed? How dependent on long highway commutes? And importantly, how prosperous are the residents (the suburban Seattle area is pretty prosperous)? All of that matters a lot for how soon the financial pictures turns unsustainable. > the infrastructure costs story simply doesn’t add up. Roads aren't the only bit of infrastructure. Water lines, electricity distribution, land maintenance, and more. The unit costs of all these thing scale up rapidly with decreased density. The leading edge of the failures will be in places where the property tax base has already collapsed and the government is forced to make infrastructure maintenance trade-offs with bad consequences (i.e. Flint, MI), but the fragility is there in lots of cities, just perhaps not yours at this time.

mabbo 7y ago

But you're talking about Seattle, one of the largest cities in the USA. It's experiencing growth. Strongtowns isn't worried (as much) about large metro areas. His "shtick" is that the rest of the country, where populations are shrinking or stagnating, can't continue to run ponzi-like growth plans anymore that presume the population will continue to increase. They're not going to. Go find yourself a town of 10,000 people that has a massively over-budge roads and water department. You won't have to look far- just leave the big cities, driving in any direction for an hour or two. Those same towns have low incomes, generally, meaning your "only $700/year" is enough to bankrupt people. In short: I think you're living in a bubble and haven't ventured outside of it very far in a while.

caseysoftware 7y ago
Yes, that. But even cities experiencing growth aren't likely to get a pass in the short term. Austin has had massive growth but what happens when sales tax, hotel taxes, fuel taxes, local income taxes (not in Austin but other places), etc all take a massive hit all at once? With canceling SXSW this year, they're projecting there was an immediate $30-50M tax revenue hit and hotel occupancy is still ~4% when it's normally 70%. Sure, there's less wear and tear on infrastructure but they don't cancel out. Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US..
- yellowapple 7y ago
  > Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US.. Governments in general (and the departments/agencies thereof) tend to live "paycheck to paycheck" specifically because they're typically discouraged from saving a whole lot of money; there's almost always a "spend it or lose it" mentality (whether informal or actually codified in budget policies) that instead encourages spending every last penny of funding received lest whoever's in charge of the budget decide "well they're running leaner than expected so let's slash the budget to what they're actually spending and turn that into a tax break".
wasdfff 7y ago
When you look at abandoned towns over the last century, it wasn’t due to overbuilding of roads but from some local employer moving away. In this case it doesn’t matter if you have 6 lane highways or dirt roads if no one is being payed to live there anymore.

hanniabu 7y ago

Something that kills me is how roads are paved and then within a few months they're torn up to do work on pipes underneath like clockwork. They say it's because the utility companies and the town don't have good communication, but think we all know it's because of kickbacks from the paving companies. I've rarely ever seen work done under roads that weren't just paved over. And no, it's not just because I only notice it when the road is new because every since I've had this realization about 10-15 years ago I've been paying attention to it and it's still the case. Aside from that, a big issue is that cities aren't designed for maintenance. Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs. It'd be faster and cheaper b/c no more repavements, you don't need super heavy equipment (simple forklift with chains can move them), and it'd cut down on job completion time, not to mention it's much easier to plan. For anything that crosses a street, do it at intersections and you can just make intersections a composition of concrete slabs that again can be moved. Another issue is not utilizing technology. It'd be incredibly simple to create a web portal where citizens can report maintenance issues like potholes, broken street lights or traffic lights, tree limbs that need cutting to keep away from power lines, a sewer drain that's clogged, a fire hydrant that's leaking, etc. The list goes on and on. All these things being reported would make it much easier for the city to plan the maintenance so you could bang out a bunch of things at once early on rather than waiting for it to build up so much that it becomes obvious without the reporting and by that time it's usually late and has lead to other issues.

katbyte 7y ago
My city has an app you can report things like that with so it exists.
pwrsysengineer 7y ago
> Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs. This isn't a bad idea for maybe a single utility but I dont think you are considering how many utilities are under the ground: water, sewer, street runoff, natural gas, electricity, telecommunications. Each of these may have multiple lines for each of service, distribution, and transmission. One of the reasons streets get torn up a lot is that there is a low of equipment underground!

mardifoufs 7y ago

Yep, in a lot of cities (and states) very generous pensions are what really bleeds their budget dry. Infrastructure cost is marginal and lot more infrastructure maintenance could be done without those gigantic pension expenses. That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now. At the time most of the budgets could be allocated to direct city spending instead of starting with half of your budget already gone before you even have it. Of course you could argue that it still means that we built cities that we couldn't afford since employee benefits are part of the normal expenses. But imo, it means more that , at the time, a few took advantage of local politicians unwillingness to go against more and more generous and unaffordable pension schemes that ended up crippling future generations with perpetual debt and underfunded services when they themselves never had such a burden to carry. If it wasnt for that borderline intergenerational theft , the infrastructure of our cities is not only something we could easily afford to maintain but could even be tremendously expanded. Edit: I'm not arguing that pensions should not exist or that unions are bad. It's just that in the public sector specifically, ridiculous and unfair payouts were negotiated where the public sometimes ends up paying for far more than what the employees contributed themselves.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
I argue defined benefit pensions should not exist. There is clearly a conflict of interest between voters (100% of government employees who will want to increase their benefits) and politicians (who need the vote of all of those government employees because so many non government employees do not vote). You even wrote it yourself: >That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now. They didn't have the financial burden because their ancestors didn't punt labor costs decades into the future. And given the opportunity to punt labor costs decades into the future and provide lower taxes now, how is a politician who is prudent and wishes to account for today's costs today going to win an election? The only solution is to ban defined benefit pensions (and all deferred compensation schemes) so there no longer exists one less avenue for future taxpayers to get taken for a ride.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ip26 7y ago

Others have made good comments so I'll just summarize; the author is not worried about Seattle. However, if you visit some declining suburbs in the Midwest you'll immediately realize what he's talking about.

xyzzyz 7y ago
Can you name one or two of the Midwest places, so that we can look into their budgets and see how much of them are infrastructure maintenance costs?
- ip26 7y ago
  Some of the older suburbs in the southern Kansas City metro area strike me as examples. (I don't really know names) I'm not sure you'll find a lot of maintenance on their budget- the problem is precisely that nothing is being maintained.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    I picked a town of Grandview, MO, because it was far on the south side of Kansas City metro, and its population stayed completely flat for last 40 years. Seems like a perfect candidate for Strongtowns argument: residential areas are all sprawl, industrial areas are packed together, and looking at its Main Street, it's a stroad[1], which Strongtowns says is "enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive". No population growth means that there is no new development to pay for the old ones, which is what Strongtowns calls a Ponzi scheme[2] Let's take a look at the budget[3]. Grandview intends to spend $37M, only $1M of which is budgeted for street maintenance, which is more than average in previous years. Are the streets deteriorated and decayed due to lack of maintenance? I spent 5 minutes on Google Streetview, and while the residential streets are far from pristine, I couldn't find a single pothole. I did, however, find road work, repaving a street[4]. This[5] is a representative example. Is Grandview a bad example? Is it somehow better than average? Is there some magic that makes Grandview work quite fine? No, I don't think so: for all I know, Grandview looks exactly like hundreds of others suburban towns in America that I've seen. This is what bugs me about Strongtowns: for all of its doom prophesying, I haven't yet seen a single town struggling to maintain suburban infrastructure. Failing to meet pension obligations, sure. Overblown salaries for city employees, yep. Large police department with lots of new toys in a town with almost no crime? Sadly, too common. But residential street maintenance killing a budget? Hardly. [1] - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-... [2] - https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [3] - https://www.grandview.org/home/showdocument?id=9346 https://www.grandview.org/home/showdocument?id=9346 [4] - https://goo.gl/maps/6DFjmEVoueoQwD7H9 https://goo.gl/maps/6DFjmEVoueoQwD7H9 [5] - https://goo.gl/maps/HWkWMT3GGK8WnNpX8 https://goo.gl/maps/HWkWMT3GGK8WnNpX8

throw0101a 7y ago

> If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that went bankrupt because of it? There's often a reduction of services. Some US towns / counties can no longer afford pavement so they're letting roads become gravel: * https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/ https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-... * https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2009/counties-weigh-whether-going-back-to-gravel-roads-is-worth-the-short-term-savings/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2009/counties-weig...

xyzzyz 7y ago
These articles are about rural roads, this has nothing to do with suburban development patterns that Strongtowns rails against.