6 ms·

I have been a Strong Towns follower/member for about 6 years. I really don't think people realize the world of pain we're signing up for by not actually fixing

• throwpoaster 8mo ago
  Once I became a Dad, getting socks for Christmas suddenly turned into one of the most thoughtful gifts possible. A self-care item. The flip was very sudden and surprising.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    I actually chose "socks for Christmas" as a metaphor because the types of people who like socks for Christmas are grown-ups, and grown-ups tend to actually view municipal finance as important and interesting.
• BariumBlue 8mo ago
  To add to what the central city budget problem is - each new piece of street and road in LA has, on average, not paid for itself in terms of increased revenue from taxes or otherwise. So for each new street widening, new road, and piece of highway capacity, LA was increasing it's financial liability to revenue ratio. Add over decades all of the street and road construction that LA has done, and it now has a unsustainable amount of road maintenance it's responsible for compared to the amount of revenue it pulls in. I'm having a hard time finding numbers though so please correct me or add numbers if you can find them.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    Strong Towns has already done the financial analysis for Los Angeles. It's not looking very good: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025-10-27-ground-zero-los-angeles-and-the-endgame-of-the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025-10-27-ground-zero-l...
  • strictnein 8mo ago
    Unless things are really different in California from where I'm at, I find it unlikely that the city is responsible for maintaining state and federal highways.
    • amanaplanacanal 8mo ago
      At least in my state, state and federal highways are all the responsibility of the state DOT, which is massively subsidized out of general fund tax dollars and federal grants. There have been recent attempts to increase fuel taxes, but they get regularly shut down by the electorate. It's not looking good for highway maintenance, either.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• tonymet 8mo ago
  so the story is about a silly law requiring bike lanes and handicap curbs and your proposal is to kick everyone out of their homes and remigrate them into the cities? ADA code is insanely expensive. We did a couple blocks of those silly dimple ramps for $250,000 . You could hire every blind person in town a personal guide for less than it would be to ADA all the side walks.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    I suspect you don't understand how serious the problem is. The problem isn't "we need to add bike lanes." The problem is that the streets have to be repaved anyway and if the city can't afford to simply bring them up to code in the short run, then they can't afford to keep repaving them at all in the long run. The sidewalks are going to have to be completely replaced eventually... not just the sections that need ramps. Right now the city can't afford to replaces just the ramp sections.
    • tonymet 8mo ago
      "the code" is the issue. This isn't building code like protecting earthquakes, electrical, fire safety. When people hear "the code" -- they think critical safety measures. Activists came up with a doorjamb law to require bike lanes, ADA and road diets on every block that receives repair. That's just not practical in LA. You can't punish drivers into riding a bike to work. this is coming from someone who biked and bussed to work in LA for 10+ years. It's reckless policy that will only undermine your efforts and never reach the desired outcome.
      • ak217 8mo ago
        As someone who has biked and rode trains to work for the past 30 years and continues to do so, I think requiring bike lanes whenever streets are repaved is a pretty awesome idea. ADA ramps are pretty great too, they are not just for disabled people, though the ADA lawsuit regime where private companies get sued needs to stop. Yes I understand there is a funding issue, it needs to be solved by making the design and approval process more flexible and efficient, not by perpetuating the insane car-only design that kills pedestrians and cyclists.
• Teever 8mo ago
  I've been thinking recently about how with the impending demographics crunch hitting a lot of countries soonish you're going to see a sort of day of reckoning for municipalities that were run poorly in the past because people will just move to ones that that don't have horrible budget and infrastructure deficits and the one sthat do will just shrivel up and die. Tha perpetually increasing population growth is no more and that means no more growing tax base to paper over terrible decisions to pass them onto another generation. For the first time in a long while we're looking at actual, real selection pressures on municiptalities.
• dccoolgai 8mo ago
  50 years ago, the U.S. was a nation that _made things_ whereas today it's primarily people conference calling and making slide decks for each other (perhaps not for long, given the progress of LLMs). What if that's the real underlying problem and not how many layers of people we can stack on top of each other in a small space?
  • davidw 8mo ago
    Ironically, "how to stack dwelling units vertically in high-demand areas" is one of those things we seem to not be so good at _making_ these days.
• csdreamer7 8mo ago
  > California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density, but it seems they are determined to do nothing until the wheels finally fall off, and the city's budget crisis spirals out of control. The state of California already mandated certain density improvements: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/10/newsom-signs-massive-california-housing-overhaul/ https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/10/newsom-signs-massive-... There is another law that mandated local communities plan to manage housing to accommodate population growth or the local community loses it's ability to deny permits. Struggling to find that but it was well before 2025 I believe. The more likely reasons is corruption and paying off rising CalPERS costs: https://californiapolicycenter.org/repeat-pension-history/ https://californiapolicycenter.org/repeat-pension-history/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/public-pensions-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/public-pensions-in-californ...
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    I live in CA. My state senator is Scott Wiener. We are making some progress. Your argument might be plausible if it weren't for the fact that this issue is happening -- predictably -- in every major sprawling city in America. Strong Towns has literally built a tool to effectively convert cities' cash-accounting budgets into accrual-accounting budgets. You can see it happening over time... you just need to account for the future liabilities in the way you look at your budget instead of ignoring them until it's time to replace the infrastructure. https://www.strongtowns.org/decoder https://www.strongtowns.org/decoder
    • GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
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      • hn_acc1 8mo ago
        I think CA has bigger issues to tackle than repealing Prop 65 (IIRC, that's the one about carcinogen warnings). The other, may be happening in some places, but having lived here 20+ years in the Bay, I haven't seen even one example of either.
• GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
  I think Chuck Marone and his group make good points but their admonition by ASCE is also deserved. He really went too far with disparaging the profession because of differences in purely value judgments. Furthermore, the type of infrastructure you get is a political decision. Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built. The “what” is never a designers decision. Now I think this is a problem with reflecting on. Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities? I did. I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct. Everyone hates Nassim Taleb and he can be an asshole, but his math is impeccable. When your concern is with someone's personality because you don't like their math, then you've lost the plot.
    • saghm 8mo ago
      Personality is not relevant when determining if someone is correct or not, but it does empirically matter in terms of how likely someone is to get something done based on that. If you think being right is the only thing that should matter, you've achieved your goal already once you reach that step, so congrats! If you agree that it's not the success criteria, it makes sense to start paying attention to those other factors, or else you'll end up only being right and not successful. I'd argue that if these issues are important to you, and you want to convince people, you'll be more effective if you find a more compelling argument than "you aren't allowed to care about what you just told me you care about".
  • xxpor 8mo ago
    >I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning. I am willing to guess they probably did, even if it doesn't seem directly related.
  • ak217 8mo ago
• doug_durham 8mo ago
  You use the phrase "trivially fix". If your definition of "trivially" means several decades with the investment of billions of dollars, then perhaps. There are no "trivial fixes" in city infrastructure. Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land. For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move. This drives the price of any development up making it unprofitable in most cases. I'm sorry but I can't take you seriously.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    When I say "trivially fix" I mean that, if the City/State wanted to fix the problem, they could. >Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land. Developers very obviously want to redevelop the vast majority of LA. The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit. To raise long-term tax revenues, LA could not just legalize redevelopment. They could actually incentivize it. >For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move. The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat (mostly due to Prop 13). Eventually the city will start having to raise taxes very dramatically or declare bankruptcy. That's the entire message from Strong Towns. The more we put it off, the bigger the impact will be. When your city is effectively long-run insolvent, but you have the ability to change that even if it's politically unpopular (and LA does), then it's "trivially" doable, it's just that people don't want to. That's not the case in many other cities. In other cities demand isn't there. People will just leave when taxes go up, and the town will declare bankruptcy. At that point, they will effectively lose most of their population, or people will just live without things like clean water. An example of this happening is Jackson Mississippi, where the water system failed, and the city didn't have the money to fix it. The ultimate solution was just a federal bailout, which is not sustainable if these types of crises become endemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_cri...
    • amluto 8mo ago
      > The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit. The cost of building a housing unit is rather out of control in LA right now, due to a number of factors. Some of those factors involve permitting, but some involve complexities of complying with building regulation, and there is also insufficient availability of contractors and insufficient availability of labor.
• outside1234 8mo ago
  A number of cities in Northern California are doing just this. We have at least 12 high density projects being built in Santa Cruz and we are a small city.
• harrall 8mo ago
  Not true. California is doing a ton of things to create housing — just look at the many state bills that have passed in a span of 2-3 years: https://cayimby.org/legislation/?_filter_by_status=signed https://cayimby.org/legislation/?_filter_by_status=signed Sure, some cities are resisting or having trouble but even the state is overriding them with state policies. It’s just going to take time between passing bills, incentives lining up, and getting money for building homes. That’s also why the state has focused on ADUs too — because individuals can get through a whole decision process to develop housing quicker than a big developer can. ADUs have a lot of problems but the state knows this and is attacking the issue on both short and long term scales. You don’t just steer the 4th largest economy in the world. It’s built like a steakhouse and steers like one.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    Scott Wiener is my state senator. My point is exactly that many California cities are being forced to allow density, instead of just coming to that conclusion because it's a responsible one. They don't want it, even if they need it. They're kicking and screaming and doing anything they can to stop it, while at the same time their city budgets are in the toilet. The only thing that's actually driving this reform is that housing prices are out of control, so you have a large demographics of people fighting to increase density. Where this is not happening is everywhere else (think: Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Arizona). Those areas don't have the same demand for density, but they still have the same long-term structural deficit problems.
  • throwaway-11-1 8mo ago
    I've been shocked by how much my rural / politically red city (pop ~80k) here in California has moved on this issue over the last 5 years. Doubled the allowed meters per lot, super relaxed ADU rules and city + developer funded 5 over 1's in the renovated city center for some impressive density. Also all the new construction for restaurants or whatever in the area requires adding apartments above. Not to mention a massive initiative for safe bike paths from the commercial areas to the park trails. They also bought some longtime closed hotels and converted them to housing for homeless. Really big stuff and huge quality of life improvements.
• amluto 8mo ago
  > lack of density One interesting question: what is "density"? Is it number of people per road-mile? Number of households? Structures? Sales tax revenue? Property tax revenue? Property value per road mile? LA has somewhat insane property values right now, and by the metric of millions of dollars of residential value per road-mile, I think one might imagine the density to be sufficient to afford decent streets. Of course, that does not translate to municipal budgets or even to disposable income of the owners or the residents in those properties.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    The Strong Towns argument is effectively talking about density as tax-revenue per road mile liability, and trying to keep that positive. Areas with high liabilities (sewer, water, buried electric, fiber, etc.) need to have higher tax-revenue per mile (more people, more businesses, etc) to support that infrastructure. There are other ways around this though. If you force your citizens to maintain their own septic and well water (or even small-pipe potable water), and have unsurfaced roads, then you can do with much less revenue-per-road mile. The point is that the federal government usually pays for the infrastructure up from (as an "investment"), but when that subsidized infrastructure is a net money-loser in the long run, cities growing actually makes the problem worse.
  • skrtskrt 8mo ago
    Tax revenue per area is generally a good metric in terms of the sustainability of a municipal budget. Very few suburbs in the world have enough people density to clear that bar, no matter how much they tax them. More people density lets you clear the bar so much easier even when the incomes are drastically lower.
  • bradchris 8mo ago
    Fundamentally the issue, aside from lack of density, is Prop 13. In LA, and every other part of California, your tax rate will get frozen (forever, essentially) at what you buy your home for. So you have some people who now have a $7m home paying taxes as if it were $300k, because they bought it in 1978. With a setup like that, of course SFHs, no matter how high they’re valued, will not provide enough tax revenue on their own
• socalgal2 8mo ago
  I'm of multiple minds about this. I like high density. I like a car-less lifestyle of the last 30 years I lived without a car. That said, currently I live in West LA. Traffic is atrocious! Doubling or tripling density will make it even worse, probably exponentially worse. Adding non-car transit options just isn't in the cards in any reasonable time frame because of all the people that block construction and because the USA, like most countries, refuses to setup a win-win situation for transit (like Japan) and instead continues to insist it be government based and therefore most likely to go over budget during construction and then under budgeted during operation. At the same time, I wish our entire coast was 30-50 story high-rises. It's ridiculous to me that only a few elites get to view the ocean from their homes on the coast and everyone else is shut out because no one is allowed to build the high-rises.
• toast0 8mo ago
  > replacing your wastewater system costs money... lots of money. The fact that they only have to be replaced every 30-50 years doesn't mean the costs go away... they just disappear temporarily. Deferring that maintenance doesn't actually do anything except make the problem worse tomorrow. I kind of disagree. Deferring maintenance does make emergency repairs more likely, but if you need to replace your sewer piping (for example) every 30-50 years, doing it at 33 year intervals means three installs in 100 years, and doing at 50 years means two installs in 100 years. As long as you don't push the deferral so long that you end up having emergency repairs and remediation of significant leaks, deferring maintenance reduces the burdens of maintenance. You do need to invest more in surveillance if you want to run your installed infrastructure longer, but surveillance is a good practice regardless, because sometimes 30-50 year infrastructure fails early. For sewers, the idea is camera inspections of all the municipal lines every 3-5 years to generate a prioritized list of maintenance/replacement projects; do the work as budget allows, rinse and repeat. Older sewer systems will benefit from more frequent inspections and newer systems can get by with less. You really shouldn't fully eliminate inspections on new systems, because earth movement and early material failure due to manufacturing error don't always happen on your schedule. That said, a lot of sewers were initially installed in the post war boom times of the 1950s and deferred maintenance is coming due -- many portions may have been replaced as needed, but a lot of original pipes are hitting 70+ years of service life and are likely nearing the end of their life. There's an argument to be made that if they had been replaced at their forecast service life, things would be better now ... but that really just brings forward the next replacement. IMHO, The City of Los Angeles really should be multiple municipalities. The boundary is pretty wonky, in part to capture the port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles International Airport, but also downtown vs San Fernando Valley; and that has got to make a lot of administration stuff significantly harder than if it were multiple geographically focused municipalities. > California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density I agree that density is likely the right way forward, but I don't think it's trivial. Especially since organic density increases have been suppressed for so long, it's helpful to coordinate rapid increases in density so that dense housing lands in places with appropriate transit and other services; but coordination is difficult.
• marbro 8mo ago
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• deleted 8mo ago
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• lokar 8mo ago
  The city of Los Angeles is pretty dense. Also, in 2025 they spent 3 times as much dealing with legal fallout from police misconduct compared to street maintenance.
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• doctorpangloss 8mo ago
  this is coming from someone who lives in san francisco like you and has a 2 kid, 4 adult family with no car. it's been like 80 years of USA = cars. people seem to really like SFH + cars, they vote for it, they pay for it, and seem to accept even longer commutes than ever. consider why. it's not so simple. > Strong Towns thesis is correct... slow moving crisis... The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane see, this tells me you're not getting it at all. it is an insult to process, yes. But there's no crisis. Strong Towns is kind of obviously wrong.
  • imtringued 8mo ago
    The entire point by Strong Towns is that people don't pay for it.
    • doctorpangloss 8mo ago
      i like their positions. but. i don't know what the point of strong towns is. people feel very strongly (haha) about it. i can advocate for all sorts of stuff that is unpopular. it's meaningless. this is the hard thing about advocacy! strong towns spends a lot of words on stuff, but none of it on why someone who is happy with SFH cars lifestyle do, whatever it is they are asking that person to do. > The entire point by Strong Towns is that people don't pay for it. okay, people aren't paying for the ADA stuff. that's bad. but it's not a crisis. SFH cars people are living in that status quo every day. and it's not because they don't care and or because they are not disabled. i don't know how much the ramp codes really matter, i am not an expert, i understand that some experts in some narrow sense say they matter, but the real problem is a lack of leadership on holistic, bigger-picture issues like how to balance the costs and benefits of these sorts of requirements. we arrive at that cost-benefit organically right now, over and over again, in the absence of leadership, and most people seem pretty happy with it, which is a huge refutation of what strong towns is saying. do you get it? strong towns says, "paying for this shit that doesn't matter does matter", which is wrong!
• b112 8mo ago
  This always grinds my gears (pun intended). Forcing everyone to live in a horribly dense, stifling, unhealthy situation isn't the issue. And the concept of saying LA isn't dense enough is beyond mind boggling, the number of people living there is beyond absurd. And yes, I know it's spread out, but the numbers don't lie, there's already more density than many places. What this really is, is backdoor environmentalism. And I say that as someone that wants emissions down, reduced carbon, but a cat is a cat. And focusing on density to remove cars, because certain segments of the population rail against cars, isn't the problem people claim they are trying to solve. For the roads? The easy way to pay for the roads, is to tax gas appropriately, and then ensure that tax only pays for roads. Nothing else, roads. The second? Very clear end of year municipal budgets, showing how those funds were used. Eventually, you'll reach a situation where the gas tax is the cost of road maintenance. And that's how it should be. Back to the overall question? Well, I suppose you have quakes in LA, but outside of that concept, the US south is just about the easiest place to maintain roads. In Canadaland, we have road damage due to freezing and thawing. Frost greaves for example, are where water gets under the pavement, freezes, and breaks it upward as the ice expands. No amount of drainage can fully protect from this, it just happens. And the cost for daily snow removal, ice mitigation(salt, etc), dirt being spread, the same for all the sidewalks isn't free. LA has none of that. The US south doesn't, generally speaking. LA doesn't have a road problem. It doesn't have a revenue problem. It has absurd infighting, like the entire rest of the US, with team politics and an inability to act as a result. It also has poor fiscal constraint. Smaller LA side roads should last decades with proper maintenance. But that's part of the problem too. A tiny crack can be sealed, but leave it a year and it becomes a pothole.
  • ibejoeb 8mo ago
    All true. There's also a perverse incentive in getting involved in LA. It's a major market where overly ambitious people go to make bigger names for themselves. Their goals are not aligned with operating the city; it's a stepping stone to CA and the national stage. Most major markets have this problem, of course, but LA is at the top.
  • laurencerowe 8mo ago
    LA is much less dense than Canadian cities. Taking the central municipalities which seem fairly comparable: Toronto: 3.271M in 631 km2 = 5184/km2 Los Angeles: 3.879M in 1215 km2 = 3192/km2 Toronto's population is growing, up 17% 2021 to 2025, while Los Angeles is marginally down 0.5% 2020 to 2024. Even smaller cities in Canada seem much more dense than their Californian equivalents, and they are more pleasant and walkable/cycleable because of that.
• KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  In one word: Neoliberalism. (and too much cars, of course)
• learingsci 8mo ago
  > California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density I just wonder if that isn’t a totally naive, laughably unthinking remark to be making?
• enaaem 8mo ago
  And people expect trains and metros to pay for themselves. Car infrastructure maintenance is bankrupting the government. And on top of that you have the opportunity cost of all the road and parking space.