7 ms·

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

by ebg13 6y ago

I think you're misinterpreting both the numbers and the argument and then taking away a backwards conclusion from that misinterpretation. > If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%. The article says exactly this. > There isn't one out there that spends a majority of their budget on infrastructure. So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. Unless you think that the city is pocketing billions in profits from unspent tax money (they aren't), it's hard to see how they could possibly spend more on infrastructure without majorly cutting other services and/or taxing more than the people can afford, which is the premise of the article. > The expensive things are cops and schools and fire and other labor intensive services. These costs scale most directly with population, not land area. You'd have these same expenses if the city were built such that the road infrastructure cost less to maintain, so pointing at them makes no sense. > Like this one pegs Lafayette's infrastructure replacement at 32 billion. Yet Lafayette's entire budget is only 0.6 billion. The article is about how Lafayette cannot keep up with maintenance because it would cost too much. Literally exactly the same thing as what you just said, and yet your conclusion is that they have it wrong? Why?

treis 6y ago
>So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. We've had sprawling suburbs in this country since at least the 50s. In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt from infrastructure or have infrastructure costs come to dominate the budget. And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. The only conclusion from those set of facts is that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed. And indeed it is. For all their case studies and imaginative math they have one glaring and fatal flaw. They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure.
- ebg13 6y ago
  > And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. > They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure. Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies using state and federal emergency grants. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. > In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt Only half of states even allow municipal bankruptcy by law, and _many_ cities require more money to come in from outside than they are able to generate themselves.
  - treis 6y ago
    >Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. Show me potholes for miles in Lafayette, LA. Show me all the people poisoned there from heavy rains. Or all those people flooded out of their houses. >Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. Pick one and let's break it down.
    - novok 6y ago
      Let's do Berkeley, CA, a very wealth city by most measures with really bad roads. Or most of California for that matter, where PG&E can't even bother to do maintenance properly on +100 year old transmission towers and cause wildfires. Or the san bruno gas explosion which was another case of cheaping out on the maintenance.
      - edoceo 6y ago
        https://hoodline.com/2016/12/why-sf-oakland-have-america-s-worst-maintained-streets https://hoodline.com/2016/12/why-sf-oakland-have-america-s-w... Why SF and Oakland have bad streets (2016) Edit: remove that AMP bullshit
      - frankharv 6y ago
        I think the California Public Utilities Commission deserves some of the blame here. They dictate the rates and profit margins. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Another-villain-in-the-PG-E-tale-California-13560014.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Anothe...
        novok 6y ago
        Most utilities and governments are very intertwined.
- Arainach 6y ago
  >We've had sprawling suburbs in this country since at least the 50s. In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt from infrastructure or have infrastructure costs come to dominate the budget. Most infrastructure is designed to last decades, and many cities have stretched infrastructure - from bridges to sewers to more - decades beyond its original expected lifespan. The bills are starting to come due now.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    > The bills are starting to come due now. Who paid for building them in the first place then? Were people in the 50s so much wealthier than now, that paying for the roads and sewers was peanuts for them, but we cannot afford it anymore? The whole Strong Towns theory of infrastructure costs bankrupting cities does sound plausible, until you start doing the math. Then, it becomes totally absurd.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      We can't afford doing it anymore. The Highway Trust Fund is not self-funding anymore. No one wants to raise gas taxes or put tolls on roads because it's political suicide. ASCE says we have a $836B backlog.
      - barney54 6y ago
        It’s not that ASCE is a disinterested source since they their members make money when money on infrastructure.
        mixmastamyk 6y ago
        Perhaps, but our crumbling roads say they have a point even though the absolute number may be off.
    - jcrawfordor 6y ago
      Yes? The postwar economy of the 1950s was one of the most prosperous the US has ever seen. Large swaths of the population and the economy were moved pretty directly from the war machine to infrastructure and homebuilding. The scale of the nation, in terms of population, urban area, and commerce rapidly expanded in the late '40s through the '50s. Entire cities were basically born in that decade. This didn't entirely trail off until the '70s and especially in the West it is very common to see that nearly everything in terms of infrastructure was built between 1945 and 1975 or so. The US population shows a trend of "aging out" right now due to the population boom of the mid-century... infrastructure shows the same effect much more strongly.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  This isn’t really true. Nassau County, one of the first generation of suburbs and one of the wealthiest counties in the country, has been under NYS fiscal control since 2000.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    And how much is Nassau County spending on infrastructure maintenance? https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/28135/final-book-1-final?bidId= https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/28135/fin... > GENERAL EXPENSES > General Expenses include a wide range of products and services required by departments to support service delivery. They include office, maintenance, medical, postage, recreational, automotive supplies, and gasoline. This category also captures the expense associated with road maintenance projects, sewage, and drainage supplies. And how much is their general expenses fund? $38M. That's just above 1% of their $3.5B budget. Clearly, infrastructure maintenance is killing them.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Infrastructure maintenance isn't the only way infrastructure is costed. Generally speaking infrastructure replacement is capex and not included in these budgets, and certainly infrastructure asset depreciation is not accounted for. In the 2020-23 capital plan, $978M is budgeted for sewers and stormwater, $100M for roads, $30M for traffic and $31M for general infrastructure. This will mostly be funded by debt. https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/27186/2020-Capital-Plan https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/27186/202... In your link, on page 2, $180M is spent on transportation and $397M on debt service.
      - xyzzyz 6y ago
        Okay, that's still less than 15% of their budget. This is not going to kill their finances like Strong Towns says it will.
        bobthepanda 6y ago
- toast0 6y ago
  Sewers tend to have a design lifetime of 50 years, although things usually last longer. Expect to see a lot of sewer replacement projects in suburbs in the coming years. The good news is most of that can be done in pieces. The bad news is some municipalies don't have a good inventory of sewage infrastructure or a good plan to catalog it, so they don't do much proactive replacement, and reactive replacement of sewage infrastructure usually involves spills or backflows and is pretty gross. It's a lot easier to find new money to build infrastructure to new residents than to find new money to rebuild aging infrastructure, of course. But, it's also easy to scale up or down infrastrucure maintenance to fit your budget for the most part. If you have a small budget, you clear problem pipes regularly, rather than replace them; if you have a large budget, you identify pipes that are becoming problematic before they cause problems and replace them, and build in redundancies when possible; somewhere in the middle, you replace the worst pipes when you can afford to, and clear the others. Few systems will outright fail and the city needs to be abandoned (but there was a story of one in the suburbs of St Louis in recent months... Although, again that was a long decline, not a sudden issue.)
- specialist 6y ago
  After decades of looting, NYC in 1975 was all but bankrupt. Then the very parties responsible for the mess bailed out NYC on very unfavorable terms. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saved-itself-from-bankruptcy https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker This is a story repeated nationwide. Exfiltrate money from urban areas to finance sprawl. Use inevitable debt crisis to smash pensions, contracts, services, etc. Most recently: You've heard of Detroit? "...that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed." Sure. Nicotine ain't addictive. HFCS is healthy. Human activity isn't responsible for climate crisis. Tax cuts for the richest creates jobs. We've always been at war with Eastasian. Pull my other leg, it plays jiggle bells.
  - treis 6y ago
    How does the bankruptcy of NYC, the densest city in the US, support Strongtowns argument that sprawl bankrupts cities?
    - specialist 6y ago
      Bankrupting cities is the story of sprawl. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saved-itself-from-bankruptcy https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
      - ls612 6y ago
        Phrased another way, people don’t like living in grimy and dangerous cities so they are free to leave. Those with means do so and those places go bankrupt. Obviously the solution would be to forbid people to leave. (/s)
        specialist 6y ago
        That's too clever for me to parse. One of the first ways Bob Moses (cite The Power Broker) exfiltrated money out of the city was jacking up the subway fees to finance his Long Island parkways, creating the original auto centric suburbs. Once he figured out how to continuously roll over the debts financed by the bridge tolls, things really took off. The burden of the tolls and tokens were mostly borne by the middle and working classes. Everyone today moans about how terrible mass transit became. But no one reports that those services were looted, denied investment, and those resources diverted to highways. At the same time, the working class neighborhoods went without many other needful things which those monies could have paid for. Hospitals, schools, police, fire stations, and so forth. In an alternate universe, today's level of urbanization would have happened decades earlier, by simply building more urban housing, and using city revenues to pay for city amenities. Sure, some sprawl would have happened. But in addition to, not at the expense of, city development.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  Cities don't go bankrupt because they can't afford to fix their roads, they just keep driving on shittier and shittier roads. Bridges and tunnels are the kind of infrastructure where you really notice failure - and big fixes can be funded by the federal government. Seattle has multiple bridges they are hoping to replace but can't even afford to replace the one that's been emergency closed without fed money and a new tax. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/city-of-seattle-seeks-help-for-west-seattle-bridge-costs/281-a20b6ae7-7c06-43e6-9181-9a5b51d23ceb https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/city-of-sea...

by ebg13 6y ago

treis 6y ago

>So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. We've had sprawling suburbs in this country since at least the 50s. In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt from infrastructure or have infrastructure costs come to dominate the budget. And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. The only conclusion from those set of facts is that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed. And indeed it is. For all their case studies and imaginative math they have one glaring and fatal flaw. They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure.

ebg13 6y ago
> And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. > They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure. Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies using state and federal emergency grants. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. > In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt Only half of states even allow municipal bankruptcy by law, and _many_ cities require more money to come in from outside than they are able to generate themselves.
- treis 6y ago
  >Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. Show me potholes for miles in Lafayette, LA. Show me all the people poisoned there from heavy rains. Or all those people flooded out of their houses. >Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. Pick one and let's break it down.
  - novok 6y ago
    Let's do Berkeley, CA, a very wealth city by most measures with really bad roads. Or most of California for that matter, where PG&E can't even bother to do maintenance properly on +100 year old transmission towers and cause wildfires. Or the san bruno gas explosion which was another case of cheaping out on the maintenance.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      https://hoodline.com/2016/12/why-sf-oakland-have-america-s-worst-maintained-streets https://hoodline.com/2016/12/why-sf-oakland-have-america-s-w... Why SF and Oakland have bad streets (2016) Edit: remove that AMP bullshit
    - frankharv 6y ago
      I think the California Public Utilities Commission deserves some of the blame here. They dictate the rates and profit margins. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Another-villain-in-the-PG-E-tale-California-13560014.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Anothe...
      - novok 6y ago
        Most utilities and governments are very intertwined.
Arainach 6y ago
>We've had sprawling suburbs in this country since at least the 50s. In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt from infrastructure or have infrastructure costs come to dominate the budget. Most infrastructure is designed to last decades, and many cities have stretched infrastructure - from bridges to sewers to more - decades beyond its original expected lifespan. The bills are starting to come due now.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  > The bills are starting to come due now. Who paid for building them in the first place then? Were people in the 50s so much wealthier than now, that paying for the roads and sewers was peanuts for them, but we cannot afford it anymore? The whole Strong Towns theory of infrastructure costs bankrupting cities does sound plausible, until you start doing the math. Then, it becomes totally absurd.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    We can't afford doing it anymore. The Highway Trust Fund is not self-funding anymore. No one wants to raise gas taxes or put tolls on roads because it's political suicide. ASCE says we have a $836B backlog.
    - barney54 6y ago
      It’s not that ASCE is a disinterested source since they their members make money when money on infrastructure.
      - mixmastamyk 6y ago
        Perhaps, but our crumbling roads say they have a point even though the absolute number may be off.
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    Yes? The postwar economy of the 1950s was one of the most prosperous the US has ever seen. Large swaths of the population and the economy were moved pretty directly from the war machine to infrastructure and homebuilding. The scale of the nation, in terms of population, urban area, and commerce rapidly expanded in the late '40s through the '50s. Entire cities were basically born in that decade. This didn't entirely trail off until the '70s and especially in the West it is very common to see that nearly everything in terms of infrastructure was built between 1945 and 1975 or so. The US population shows a trend of "aging out" right now due to the population boom of the mid-century... infrastructure shows the same effect much more strongly.
bobthepanda 6y ago
This isn’t really true. Nassau County, one of the first generation of suburbs and one of the wealthiest counties in the country, has been under NYS fiscal control since 2000.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  And how much is Nassau County spending on infrastructure maintenance? https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/28135/final-book-1-final?bidId= https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/28135/fin... > GENERAL EXPENSES > General Expenses include a wide range of products and services required by departments to support service delivery. They include office, maintenance, medical, postage, recreational, automotive supplies, and gasoline. This category also captures the expense associated with road maintenance projects, sewage, and drainage supplies. And how much is their general expenses fund? $38M. That's just above 1% of their $3.5B budget. Clearly, infrastructure maintenance is killing them.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Infrastructure maintenance isn't the only way infrastructure is costed. Generally speaking infrastructure replacement is capex and not included in these budgets, and certainly infrastructure asset depreciation is not accounted for. In the 2020-23 capital plan, $978M is budgeted for sewers and stormwater, $100M for roads, $30M for traffic and $31M for general infrastructure. This will mostly be funded by debt. https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/27186/2020-Capital-Plan https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/27186/202... In your link, on page 2, $180M is spent on transportation and $397M on debt service.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      Okay, that's still less than 15% of their budget. This is not going to kill their finances like Strong Towns says it will.
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
toast0 6y ago
Sewers tend to have a design lifetime of 50 years, although things usually last longer. Expect to see a lot of sewer replacement projects in suburbs in the coming years. The good news is most of that can be done in pieces. The bad news is some municipalies don't have a good inventory of sewage infrastructure or a good plan to catalog it, so they don't do much proactive replacement, and reactive replacement of sewage infrastructure usually involves spills or backflows and is pretty gross. It's a lot easier to find new money to build infrastructure to new residents than to find new money to rebuild aging infrastructure, of course. But, it's also easy to scale up or down infrastrucure maintenance to fit your budget for the most part. If you have a small budget, you clear problem pipes regularly, rather than replace them; if you have a large budget, you identify pipes that are becoming problematic before they cause problems and replace them, and build in redundancies when possible; somewhere in the middle, you replace the worst pipes when you can afford to, and clear the others. Few systems will outright fail and the city needs to be abandoned (but there was a story of one in the suburbs of St Louis in recent months... Although, again that was a long decline, not a sudden issue.)
specialist 6y ago
After decades of looting, NYC in 1975 was all but bankrupt. Then the very parties responsible for the mess bailed out NYC on very unfavorable terms. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saved-itself-from-bankruptcy https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker This is a story repeated nationwide. Exfiltrate money from urban areas to finance sprawl. Use inevitable debt crisis to smash pensions, contracts, services, etc. Most recently: You've heard of Detroit? "...that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed." Sure. Nicotine ain't addictive. HFCS is healthy. Human activity isn't responsible for climate crisis. Tax cuts for the richest creates jobs. We've always been at war with Eastasian. Pull my other leg, it plays jiggle bells.
- treis 6y ago
  How does the bankruptcy of NYC, the densest city in the US, support Strongtowns argument that sprawl bankrupts cities?
  - specialist 6y ago
    Bankrupting cities is the story of sprawl. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saved-itself-from-bankruptcy https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
    - ls612 6y ago
      Phrased another way, people don’t like living in grimy and dangerous cities so they are free to leave. Those with means do so and those places go bankrupt. Obviously the solution would be to forbid people to leave. (/s)
      - specialist 6y ago
        That's too clever for me to parse. One of the first ways Bob Moses (cite The Power Broker) exfiltrated money out of the city was jacking up the subway fees to finance his Long Island parkways, creating the original auto centric suburbs. Once he figured out how to continuously roll over the debts financed by the bridge tolls, things really took off. The burden of the tolls and tokens were mostly borne by the middle and working classes. Everyone today moans about how terrible mass transit became. But no one reports that those services were looted, denied investment, and those resources diverted to highways. At the same time, the working class neighborhoods went without many other needful things which those monies could have paid for. Hospitals, schools, police, fire stations, and so forth. In an alternate universe, today's level of urbanization would have happened decades earlier, by simply building more urban housing, and using city revenues to pay for city amenities. Sure, some sprawl would have happened. But in addition to, not at the expense of, city development.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lazyasciiart 6y ago
Cities don't go bankrupt because they can't afford to fix their roads, they just keep driving on shittier and shittier roads. Bridges and tunnels are the kind of infrastructure where you really notice failure - and big fixes can be funded by the federal government. Seattle has multiple bridges they are hoping to replace but can't even afford to replace the one that's been emergency closed without fed money and a new tax. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/city-of-seattle-seeks-help-for-west-seattle-bridge-costs/281-a20b6ae7-7c06-43e6-9181-9a5b51d23ceb https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/city-of-sea...