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You are probably thinking of The Growth Ponzi Scheme[0], which was adapted into a video series by Not Just Bikes[1]. [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth

You are probably thinking of The Growth Ponzi Scheme[0], which was adapted into a video series by Not Just Bikes[1]. [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...

nostromo 4y ago
Strong Towns starts with the conclusion and then creates arguments to support it. It's interesting writing, but I wouldn't take it too seriously.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Normally we call that "forming and substantiating a hypothesis." Is there a specific reason why we shouldn't take it seriously?
- imtringued 4y ago
  The current implementation of market economy i.e. capitalism is growth dependent. It is entirely plausible that cities follow the same growth dependence strategy the rest of the economy follows.
legitster 4y ago
I would take this with a huge grain of salt - Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns. - The ASCE number is a bit of a joke - this is a marketing number for the purposes of pushing investment in engineering firms. In reality, your city doesn't need to pay to rebuild every suburban road it has when filling potholes is cheap. - Furthermore, this article does nothing to actually link these liabilities to where the revenues occur. The giant cost of replacing an aging power plant completely dwarfs the cost of suburban power lines. But a new subdivision is a huge tax boon to a community.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  All of this is true, but you’ve missed the biggest issue with the above argument, which is implying that we cannot afford to replace what our much poorer ancestors afforded to build.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Those poorer ancestors built denser housing and commercial real estate. What they built back in the day is often illegal today and has been grandfathered in while outperforming modern real estate in property taxes. Old "blighted" buildings can pay more taxes than fancy new commercial real estate that is designed for car dependency and suburbia.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      No, I mean the suburbia. The entire shtick of Strongtowns is that suburbia is unsustainable, because it requires infrastructure that we cannot now afford to replace, despite being able to afford to build it in the first place.
      - csnover 4y ago
        The Growth Ponzi Scheme is the thing that explains this. The cost of building out infrastructure the first time is covered by the sale of the newly constructed properties (and sometimes state or federal grant money) which is all one-time income. Taxes are supposed to cover the eventual replacement cost, but they can’t because the level of taxation required to actually do this would make suburbs unaffordable. Instead, they primarily use debt and tax revenue from newer properties that are supposed to be paying for their own eventual infrastructure replacement to make up the deficit. This is why Strong Towns calls it the growth ponzi scheme: the city can only outrun the cost of infrastructure replacement by taking money from new properties to pay for old ones until they run out of land to build or assets to leverage for debt, at which point the whole scheme fails.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  > - Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns. At least in my travels, the suburbs I've seen outside the US have only borne a very surface-level similarity to their US counterparts. There are lawns and the houses are detached, but the suburbs themselves tend to be much denser and connected to city centers via rail. These combine to make European suburbs more sustainable than their American counterparts. (There are other factors as well: most of Continental Europe has much more consistent rainfall than the Continental US, and there's no particular evidence that their suburban constructions are ultimately sustainable either -- they may just be more than our ludicrously unsustainable ones.)

nostromo 4y ago

Strong Towns starts with the conclusion and then creates arguments to support it. It's interesting writing, but I wouldn't take it too seriously.

woodruffw 4y ago
Normally we call that "forming and substantiating a hypothesis." Is there a specific reason why we shouldn't take it seriously?
imtringued 4y ago
The current implementation of market economy i.e. capitalism is growth dependent. It is entirely plausible that cities follow the same growth dependence strategy the rest of the economy follows.

legitster 4y ago

I would take this with a huge grain of salt - Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns. - The ASCE number is a bit of a joke - this is a marketing number for the purposes of pushing investment in engineering firms. In reality, your city doesn't need to pay to rebuild every suburban road it has when filling potholes is cheap. - Furthermore, this article does nothing to actually link these liabilities to where the revenues occur. The giant cost of replacing an aging power plant completely dwarfs the cost of suburban power lines. But a new subdivision is a huge tax boon to a community.

xyzzyz 4y ago
All of this is true, but you’ve missed the biggest issue with the above argument, which is implying that we cannot afford to replace what our much poorer ancestors afforded to build.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Those poorer ancestors built denser housing and commercial real estate. What they built back in the day is often illegal today and has been grandfathered in while outperforming modern real estate in property taxes. Old "blighted" buildings can pay more taxes than fancy new commercial real estate that is designed for car dependency and suburbia.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    No, I mean the suburbia. The entire shtick of Strongtowns is that suburbia is unsustainable, because it requires infrastructure that we cannot now afford to replace, despite being able to afford to build it in the first place.
    - csnover 4y ago
      The Growth Ponzi Scheme is the thing that explains this. The cost of building out infrastructure the first time is covered by the sale of the newly constructed properties (and sometimes state or federal grant money) which is all one-time income. Taxes are supposed to cover the eventual replacement cost, but they can’t because the level of taxation required to actually do this would make suburbs unaffordable. Instead, they primarily use debt and tax revenue from newer properties that are supposed to be paying for their own eventual infrastructure replacement to make up the deficit. This is why Strong Towns calls it the growth ponzi scheme: the city can only outrun the cost of infrastructure replacement by taking money from new properties to pay for old ones until they run out of land to build or assets to leverage for debt, at which point the whole scheme fails.
woodruffw 4y ago
> - Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns. At least in my travels, the suburbs I've seen outside the US have only borne a very surface-level similarity to their US counterparts. There are lawns and the houses are detached, but the suburbs themselves tend to be much denser and connected to city centers via rail. These combine to make European suburbs more sustainable than their American counterparts. (There are other factors as well: most of Continental Europe has much more consistent rainfall than the Continental US, and there's no particular evidence that their suburban constructions are ultimately sustainable either -- they may just be more than our ludicrously unsustainable ones.)