Strongtowns does all their calculation on the worth of a city/town etc based on how much tax revenue it produces. Cities are expensive places to live and mostl

Strongtowns does all their calculation on the worth of a city/town etc based on how much tax revenue it produces. Cities are expensive places to live and mostly produce services with high taxes. The city costs a lot, but also generates a lot. And cities are necessary, because we do need those services. (Programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors.) But it completely ignores that a suburb where the locals commute to a warehouse or a factory also provides value. The tax value is lower - so in strongtowns' mind it's worthless. But I hope it's obvious that without those employees all the cities would have nothing to eat (all those packaged foods are made somewhere after all) and nothing to buy (cities for the most part manufacture nothing). You need both types of places in the world, and I think people should be allowed to live where they chose without people pressuring them to move to a city. They make an "exception" for rural areas because farms are an obvious need, but they want the farms to exist without any cities nearby. The farmers are expected to travel to the nearest large city when they need city services (obviously not something they can do very often). They also have a goal of less interstates - they don't want people driving around a lot. How they expect to ship things I'm not sure (trains maybe?) But also how they expect people to get any enjoyment out of life I'm also not sure. Just stay put in your area and do your job I suppose? There's so much more to criticize: He's the usual city growth plan: The edge of a city becomes those "hated" suburbs. As the suburb fills up with people it becomes worth it to subdivide lots and build more houses, over time it becomes dense like a city. They instead want to skip the suburb step and just directly build very densely on the edge of the city. Their calculations on roads: Suburbs need way more roads per person. But suburban roads cost a lot less per mile - like way less. Suburban roads also last much much longer (far less traffic). The net result is that the cost per person is basically a wash. They ignore that though. They don't like having to run long water pipes to the houses, but the costs of those water pipes is minimal over time, they last 100 years. It's just not an expensive enough problem to worry about. Police have a larger area to deal with, but there's also less crime to deal with. Anyway I'll stop here.