> The way this happened is pretty simple. At Strong Towns, we call it the Growth Ponzi Scheme. Through a combination of federal incentives, state programs and private capital, cities were able to rapidly grow by expanding horizontally. This provided the local government with the immediate revenues that come from new growth -- permit fees, utility fees, property tax increases, sales tax -- and, in exchange, the city takes on the long term responsibility of servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure. The money comes in handy in the present while the future obligation is, well....a long time in the future.
This is the lens through which Strong Towns views the country's cities. It's a useful model that explains a great deal. It's also falsifiable.
The growth Ponzi scheme hypothesis says that the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure. The outcome is always the same: infrastructure that can't be maintained because its costs were never accounted for.
The Strong Towns website is chock full of examples, and Lafayette LA is just one. At this point if you live in any US city it seems pretty likely that you'll find a Growth Ponzi at work.
Also, that 3D map should scare the liver out of local politicians.
> subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure
The same thing is happening right now with EU grant money given for "development" to some of its Eastern European members. Lots of mayors and local officials use that money for grand local infrastructure projects for which they won't have any reasonable money to maintain even in the near future (let alone 30 to 50 years from now), because we have a numerically declining tax-base that is getting older and older (I live in one of those Eastern European countries).
But mentioning that issue gets you labeled as a person "against progress" or an anti-European (or worse, a Russian shill who doesn't trust the European project). We have a saying in Romanian that roughly translates as: "you should stretch out only as much as your blanket allows you to", i.e. one should only consume the resources he/she thinks are reasonably available to him/her, but right at this moment we are "stretching out" further than the bed itself and getting out of the bedroom altogether.
My wife is Estonian and she would disagree with you strongly.
How your government allocated the funds was your governments doing, but the money that was sent to Estonia has been invested and that’s what it has been... an investment.
Any investment that does not yield returns that cover its costs is failed.
Infrastructure facilitates so much of what makes up society that -not- having it can be much more costly than having it.
But in those cases it doesn’t it’s because government corruption or ineptitude has eaten you from the inside.
All I'm saying is that for the next few decades all the roads being built now with EU money will need to be maintained, and that will cost money, money that won't come from the EU anymore but will need to be provided locally, presumably from taxes.
Yes, that national or regional road that was modernised or enlarged using European money will most probably prove to be an worthy investment and money will be found to keep it in shape, but what about all the secondary roads or even smaller inner-village streets that have now been modernised and which will not bring any extra economic value whatsoever? Because using a gravel-road to connect 5 or 10 village houses is as as good as any asphalt-road, and, more importantly, is a lot cheaper to maintain in the long run. And when asphalt roads go bad they go really bad, with craters instead of the actual road, I've not witnessed the same phenomenon with gravel roads (they do get sort of bad but not on the same magnitude).
Where are you living in Romania that minor village roads get paved? I have a lot of cycling around Transylvania adding road-surface data for OpenStreetMap, and I have found that usually only the village’s main thoroughfare gets paved while the side streets remain unpaved.
Still, even the paving of village ways may have positive economic value. Throughout Cluj county one finds that once asphalt is laid in a village, that village becomes an attractive place to buy a home for commuters who are now priced out of Cluj itself.
Lots of villages in Teleorman, this part of Constanta county [1] (an area which is really, really beautiful), or, across the Danube, in villages like this one [2], just as the Baragan plain ends. I have a personal side-project where I'm photographing old village mills and posting those photos online [3], and as such I've visited lots of villages in Southern and Southern-Eastern Romania (plus a few in Southern Transylvania).
One could argue that roads have a lot less value in Europe than in the US, where trains just have to go much longer distance and have very little ability to get to even second stage towns, whereas in Europe the towns are more dense and better served by rail.
Honestly, I claim no expertise here at all, just my experiences driving around Northern Europe have informed this idea that there are far fewer suburbs and sprawl. Maybe it’s not at all close to reality
Romania’s rail infrastructure is notoriously outdated, and journeys across the country are often faster by road (bus or your own car) than even the “express” trains.
"Twenty EU-financed airports in Estonia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain have misspent large sums of EU taxpayers' money for well over a decade. A report out Tuesday (16 December) by the European Court of Auditors found that €255 million - more than half of the EU funds audited - went into unnecessary expansion projects."
People who actually measure EU ROI usually report extremely high levels of failed investment. In fact EU spending is notoriously corrupt and famous for yielding negative ROI. Here's some stories about Cornwall, one of the poorest parts of the UK and one of the poorer regions in the EU.
EU "invested" 465 million pounds to create jobs. It was meant to create 10,000 new jobs for a cost of £46,500 per job, but actually only created 3,557 jobs. "You've got some absolutely damning statistics, for example in the research and development fund, the cost per job was £160,000 per person."
It would literally have been a better use of money to pay people an average wage to do nothing whatsoever - UBI for real. Instead it was spent on things they called "investments" that would never have worked if you'd pitched them to a bank and tried to get a normal loan.
And he suggested that there had been a lack of analysis of whether individual programmes had achieved what they set out to do. He said that the impact of schemes was “rarely considered” and said that there was little attempt to explain how EU funding would provide a financial benefit and no consideration of “how are we going to turn 10million into 60m”. Mr Parkins said that while most organisations would have to demonstrate that there would be “more money coming out than they are putting in” that had been lacking with the EU funding.
He also claims a lot of the funds go to public sector agencies or NGOs that are optimised for receiving grant funding.
The auditors reported 22 cases of suspected fraud to OLAF, the EU’s fraud investigators. They included suspected conflicts of interest and “the artificial creation of conditions to receive subsidy” .... In Greece, an EU-funded sewerage network project has remained unused nearly a decade after it was launched after the local government failed to connect it to private homes.
To be fair, in many cases the point of building the infrastructure is not to have the infrastructure in the end, but rather to give that EU money to the ruling elite.
Routing it through a company that pours a bunch of concrete is just the cost of keeping Brussels off your back and thus keeping the tap open.
Yes, for example, it is much harder to rebuild a bridge in the middle of a city than it was to build anew. Maybe that bridge was constructed in the open field and now the area around is built up. There are a lot of traffic and it should go somewhere while the bridge is closed. A lot of communication lines could go through this bridge and you have to account for it, plan for it and somehow move it while you’re rebuilding the bridge.
Can you just leave it as it is? I’m not sure, it’s a Soviet-build bridge, lots of cement was stolen during construction and now some pieces of concrete are raining down.
This exact problem happened in Montréal with the Champlain bridge, cheaply built in the 60s. A new bridge had to be built at the same place (inaugurated last year) and connected to existing infrastructure.
It seems counterintuitive to conclude "we can't afford to build this bridge in the first place, because it would be too expensive to temporarily close it". But based on your sibling's post, maybe you're right?
Often economies run on star cities, and if your country's economy is disconnected from those star cities because of a breakup, your country's economy will also suffer.
There was also the entire communist central planning thing that made resources misallocated.
What kind of logic is that? I'm not trying to defend the USSR here, just understand how infrastructure spending works. But if that's how you conduct your reasoning, wouldn't you also believe that Abraham Lincoln must have been wrong about everything, seeing as how things ended for him?
The Roman Empire isn't around either, but I don't blame their infrastructure projects for that. More likely that those helped them last as long as they did.
The USSR collapsed because it overspend on pointless projects. Bridges to nowhere or military bases in Afghanistan add nothing for the economy. Just because it's infrastructure doesn't mean it's good.
So this seems like a roundabout way of answering the GGP's (my) question by saying that the post-Soviet countries are only declining to pay for maintaining those bridges that happen to go nowhere, which is presumably fine, because nobody needs them. The Soviet-era bridges that do see frequent use, they can afford to maintain/rebuild just fine? Are you answering this from an epistemic position of particular knowledge and experience about Eastern European economics and infrastructure, or are you just speculating that this is the way it probably is, based on your opinions of how the world works?
When I did industrial stuff I dealt a lot with engineers and techs that were happy doing maintenance. That's probably not something Vonnegut as a writer had any experience with.
Engineers and technicians are a minority group. Your positive experience of that group doesn't necessarily invalidate Vonnegut's observation about people in general.
All post-Communist nations tend to struggle with the idea of diligent upkeep / maintenance of publicly owned things. In fact, I would say that visibly older, but well maintained infrastructure is a great indicator of good governance.
The attitude is slowly getting better, but aging of our countries will probably exacerbate the problem again. It is not just disappearing tax-base, but disappearing skill-base that comes with the common job market. Like, finding a competent tradesman is visibly becoming harder. Why should they even stay in the country when they can earn more in Germany or the UK.
+1 to upkeep/maintenance, this really is what separates developed countries from developing, not just in Europe but anywhere in the world. Any third-world country can build a shiny new showpiece airport, the real test is what it looks like 10 or 20 years down the line.
That said, if finding a competent tradesman is becoming harder (demand exceeds supply), their income will eventually increase to an equilibrium point where it starts making sense for them not to move to Germany/UK.
Sometimes all it takes is for people like you to make this issue heard by all before it is understand and appreciated. There are many competing issues taking attention.
Without these funds the infrastructure would either be poor or non-existent, making it expensive or unrealistic to move goods and people around within a country like Poland.
When I emigrated to Poland in 2005 (from the US) driving between Krakow and Gdynia at never more than 15% over the speed limit of 90 km/h (the average speed everyone else is travelling at) (but often under 90 km/h due to many lorries on the road, tractors, accidents, people in elderly Fiats, elderly people in Peugeots/Fiats/Polonez/etc) with three 15 minute stops the driving time was about 10.5 to 11 hours. Now it's about 7 to 7.5 hours (two stops, not three, and usually driving right at the speed limit).
The change is because of the introduction of the proper A1 motorway. Two lanes each direction and, most places, rated for 140 km/h.
I should note that the "proper" A1 isn't yet complete. There's no A-class motorway between Krakow and Czestochowa though it's being built and should be complete in a few years.
Maintenance on the thousands of kilometers of motorways (and highways and smaller roads) will undoubtedly be a significant expense in the future. But those roads allow for a staggering quantity of goods (and people) to be moved about quickly, safely, and inexpensively (even accounting for tolls). I doubt that our current government is setting aside money for maintenance for all of that but the potential incompetence of today's government shouldn't be a reason not to do something that will have ripple effects for decades.
One of my thoughts is building infrastructure is a speculative bet. You hope that it generates enough economic benefit to pay for it's construction, maintenance, and eventual replacement. A thought is sometimes that bet fails. You end up with infrastructure that doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for it's maintenance or eventual replacement.
I feel like post war the US made a lot of extravagant speculative bets on infrastructure, particularly related to suburban housing development.
And the world does prove it false. If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%. There isn't one out there that spends a majority of their budget on infrastructure. The expensive things are cops and schools and fire and other labor intensive services.
The municipalities that have gone bankrupt the issue has almost always been an inability to pay pensions. With the other ones caused by financial fraud and/or mismanagement.
For the life of me I can't understand why people keep posting this Strongtowns nonsense. Their core hypothesis is easily probable wrong and they post the silliest numbers. Like this one pegs Lafayette's infrastructure replacement at 32 billion. Yet Lafayette's entire budget is only 0.6 billion. Since they haven't spent the entire budget for last 50+ years on infrastructure that 32 billion is obviously nonsense.
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?
>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.
>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.
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.
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.
Yes? The postwar economy of the 1950s was one of the most prosperous the US has ever seen.
This is simply false. US GDP per capita in the 50s was less than a third than what it is right now. Growth in the 50s was sluggish compared to the 60s, 80s or 90s. US is by any means more prosperous today than it was in the 50s, both on individual level and also as a whole.
GDP doesn't explain whether infrastructure projects are sustainable or not. You have to at least look at debt to GDP ratio.
The thing about the 50's prosperity is that it derives from the federal and international theaters: The US won the war, and it went into debt to do so, but in exchange got willing borrowers. This was the formation of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower spoke of: Infrastructure projects with military application got a lot of support from both government and business. Among these was the interstate highway system, one of the landmark projects of the 50's, and one with military application.
As a result of the new highways, municipalities all of a sudden had this form of growth driven into them through infrastructure that wasn't on their balance sheets, and a lot of pent-up demand for housing from the Depression and war years. Automobiles were ready for widespread use. All they had to do was approve more housing starts and millions of people suddenly could afford homeownership. That is the unique new thing that happened, and it can't be reflected just in GDP.
But...if the whole premise of the highway system is based on borrowing, it's a house of cards waiting to fall. People can get their homes in the 50's, become bigger consumers in the following decades...debt to GDP falls sharply as the gains of building are reaped, and then the infrastructure bill starts coming due in the late 70's. At that point debt to GDP starts climbing again, but now the emphasis is on kicking the can down the road, not on renewing national infrastructure. "No more pork barrel spending" is a mantra of the Reagan era and beyond, as is an emphasis on outsourcing and lower taxes over long-term investments in the domestic workforce. It remains easier to build new than to maintain old. And all the while the debt ratio - at the national level - is climbing and climbing. There is still a lot of federal money going to those highways. But just borrowing and kicking the can down the road ain't enough to keep them.
So Strongtowns can still be correct, if you zoom out a little!
And? The graphs show costs growing exponentially as area expands in two dimensions. A few times productivity improvements can't keep up forever, and they aren't.
Federal deficit spending and cost-disease are also things. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to think forward a decade or two.
Our GDP today is largely based on intangible services. GDP could have been (and was) lower in the past and still stronger in terms of delivering tangible infrastructure projects.
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.
For a lot of complex reasons large infrastructure projects are much more expensive than they used to be. Plus, replacing infrastructure is generally more expensive than building it new.
Right. Cost of building a new road on empty land: somewhat high. Cost of re-building it: really high. Road building didn't get wildly more efficient in the intervening years, now you have to pay both to build the new road but also demolish the pre-existing road, you have to do something about the hugely increased traffic loads which probably means you have to rebuild it whilst the road is live, which makes it far slower which increases your manpower costs, and lots more pipes and cables were laid below the road in the intervening years which have to be rerouted or handled in some way.
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.)
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
This is a 2019 study. For Lafayette, the numbers read: the yearly cost of bad roads for the average motorist is $2.133. The pavement conditions of 53% of the roads are described as 'poor' and an additional 19% as 'mediocre'.
> The pavement data in this report, which is for all arterial and collector roads and highways, is provided by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), based on data submitted annually by the Louisiana Department of Transportation & Development on the condition of major state and locally maintained roads and highways. Pavement data for Interstate highways and other principal arterials is collected for all system mileage, whereas pavement data for minor arterial and all collector roads and highways is based on sampling portions of roadways as prescribed by FHWA to insure the data collected is adequate to provide an accurate assessment of pavement conditions on these roads and highways.
So, yeah, potholes.
There's also research for plenty of other areas. Which isn't surprising since this organisation has been doing this for the past 50 years.
> Founded in 1971, TRIP is a private nonprofit organization that researches, evaluates and distributes economic and technical data on surface transportation issues. TRIP promotes transportation policies that help relieve traffic congestion and its impact on air quality, improve road and bridge conditions, make surface travel safer, and enhance economic productivity. TRIP is sponsored by insurance companies, equipment manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers, businesses involved in highway and transit engineering and construction, labor unions, and organizations concerned with an efficient and safe surface transportation network that promotes economic development and quality of life.
Okay. The story surrounding the 2016 floods is more complex then simply "needs more maintenance". You're looking at a flooding prone area where housing development ballooned in a few short years. So, what happened? As always, a combination of factors and the dilution of responsibility across many actors. This ranges from the population not having flooding insurance, over private contractors cutting corners, to building permits being issued based on outdated information and so on and so on.
Even so, engineering infrastructure at scale requires a different approach which can't be implemented on a municipal level. And even then, infrastructure isn't a silver bullet. You need a layered approach across administrative levels which requires cooperation, continuity and forward thinking strategies. Which is a tall order when economic and political circumstances aren't favourable.
>The pavement conditions of 53% of the roads are described as 'poor' and an additional 19% as 'mediocre'.
The problem with this report is that they define "poor" as less than 25% usable life left. Which may be useful for budgeting but it doesn't paint an accurate picture of road quality. I've spent five minutes or so clicking around Google Street and I didn't come across a problematic road in Lafayette. Lots that had patches and are probably due for a total resurfacing but no potholes and nothing that I would have concerns driving down.
As noted in my other reply, even if we ignore the above objections the backlog is ~15% of the annual budget. It's not going to bankrupt the city.
>Okay. The story surrounding the 2016 floods is more complex then simply "needs more maintenance". You're looking at a flooding prone area where housing development ballooned in a few short years. So, what happened? As always, a combination of factors and the dilution of responsibility across many actors. This ranges from the population not having flooding insurance, over private contractors cutting corners, to building permits being issued based on outdated information and so on and so on.
You can't drop 30 inches of water anywhere without seeing localized flooding. It's not physically possible to move that much water no matter how good your infrastructure is.
Setting aside how you didn't show "potholes for miles", your own cite proves my point. The entire backlog of road projects is 90 million dollars which is ~15% of the annual budget. That's not a sum that is going to bankrupt the city.
A category 4 hurricane impacting water quality for some weeks is not evidence of poor infrastructure. I don't understand how you can make an argument like that in good faith.
A storm that dropped 32 inches of water, three times as much as Katrina, causing flooding is not evidence of poor infrastructure. I don't understand how you can make an argument like that in good faith.
> Setting aside how you didn't show "potholes for miles"
I'm not entirely sure what you think causing each motorist $888 in additional vehicle operating costs annually means, because that's exactly what it means. Potholes, cracks, and other physical deterioriation is part of their definition for poor condition.
Even going by your (I say extremely disingenuous) "usable lifespan" definition posted elsewhere, that is a gigantic bill about to come due that isn't part of the current repair backlog with no plan for paying it off.
> The entire backlog of road projects is 90 million dollars which is ~15% of the annual budget. That's not a sum that is going to bankrupt the city.
So we've established that the city spends 1/20 of what is necessary to clear the current road maintenance backlog, that the backlog, as backlogs do, continues to grow as time goes on, that clearing the current backlog would take a substantial percentage of the entire city budget, that there are other costs that aren't going anywhere that have to be paid regardless of how the city is arranged, that there's much _much_ more to infrastructure than just paving roads, and that in order to pay for needed maintenance they'd have to increase taxes beyond what people can afford to pay and/or cut other services.
And "Making matters worse, in the next four years of the parish’s five-year capital outlay budget, the budget for any kind of roadwork — fixing existing roads or building new ones — is, quite literally, $0."
> A category 4 hurricane impacting water quality for some weeks is not evidence of poor infrastructure.
It absolutely is when hurricanes are expected, common, and known to be getting both more frequent and worse in the region. It's quite well studied that development can make flooding better or worse. It's why after Harvey there were so many "Houston could and should have prevented this" articles.
"But each time it’s rained over the past year, the untreated sewage spills into the backyards and creates a mucky lake over the grass that blocks the pathway and causes a serious stench, Hornung said. The contaminated sludge spills into the coulee that drains into the Vermilion River.
Although the families alerted the city about the problem, its patchwork attempts to fix it — first, by extending the manhole covers above ground to relieve some of the pressure, and second, by bolting the manholes shut — only pushed the eruptions further down the sewer lines to neighboring properties, Hornung said."
"Some downtown Lafayette employees also were recently requesting relief after the same downpours that caused the sewage overflows near Girard Park caused some downtown storm water drains — which flow into different pipelines than those that carry sewage beneath the city — to overflow above the sidewalks and into their businesses near the corner of Jefferson and Convent streets."
"Here, we show that health-based drinking water quality violations are widespread, with 9–45 million people possibly affected during each of the past 34 years."
"in a given year, about 7–8% of [community water systems] report at least one health-based violation."
"In 2015, 9% of CWSs in our study sample violated health-based water quality standards, affecting nearly 21 million people. During each of the past 34 y, 9–45 million people were affected, representing 4–28% of US population."
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-sea...
> 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.
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.
There have been crises over budget swings of a smaller amount. Nassau is a high-tax jurisdiction in a high-tax state, I'm sure residents aren't thrilled to be paying very high property tax. Nassau has a declining population without considering foreign immigration.
Yeah - I own a consulting company helping suppliers navigate the procurement process of state, local and federal procurement. None of these numbers check out and since it's municipal data it's all subject to a FOIA request.
This is my first article i've read by this company and it didn't really seem to have a conclusion besides spreading obviously false data.
Chuck Marohn is a well-respected planner with decades of municipal experience. He’s written books on this topic. You can watch him give his usual anti-suburb talk on YouTube. He’s especially good at reaching tough, conservative audiences, I think.
In his broader body of work he does a good job of talking actual numbers and why they’re a lot higher than you’d think.
Assume Lafayette's share of road miles is proportional to population, and you get around 3500 miles of roadway around Lafayette. Minimum paved road construction cost is ~$2M/mile, according to https://www.artba.org/about/faq/#:~:text=Construct%20a%20new....
So a very conservative road replacement estimate for Lafayette is about $7B, and that's just the roads. The Strongtowns figure may be off, but it's likely the right order of magnitude.
No, it's obviously wrong. 7 billion is spending the entire city budget on just roads for 12 years. Stretching that to a 40 year timeline means that Lafayette would have had to spend ~25% of their budget on building roads alone for your figure to be accurate. They didn't so your number is wrong.
You're assuming that the city had to pay for the roads entirely themselves, which of course they didn't. My intent was not to explain how Lafayette paid for their roads, it was only to say that the $32B replacement figure was plausible.
For existing roads, you will not be reconstructing them from scratch. Instead, you will be repaving them, leaving subgrade as is. This brings a cost down order of magnitude below what Strong Towns claims.
> The way this happened is pretty simple. At Strong Towns, we call it the Growth Ponzi Scheme. Through a combination of federal incentives, state programs and private capital, cities were able to rapidly grow by expanding horizontally. This provided the local government with the immediate revenues that come from new growth -- permit fees, utility fees, property tax increases, sales tax -- and, in exchange, the city takes on the long term responsibility of servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure. The money comes in handy in the present while the future obligation is, well....a long time in the future.
Believe me or not, this to an even bigger extend plagues China.
I think more than half of major cities in China are fully consciously running a Ponzi scheme with their own land leases, as they have really no other revenue source to sustain them long term, and this is why they are ready to go to any extremes to do this.
Effectively, private loans are financing municipalities through overpriced land leases. Everybody who ever dealt with real estate in China will tell that land auctions are rigged using every trick imaginable.
Isn’t the reason those few districts have big “profits” because they are the central business district where all the people from the outlying areas with big “losses” come in to work and shop?
This feels like looking at a company by division and deciding that R&D and HR a make huge losses and all the profits are in sales.
The article discusses this in some detail. Some of the districts with high profits are “downtown” areas as you say. Some are “poor” or “bad” neighborhoods, contrary to your (and I suspect most people’s) intuition.
The article’s main thesis is that these poor areas have the best ROI for development.
In traditional cities people usually also live in the downtown.
The main issue is that free parking lots associated with big box stores are incredibly unproductive uses of land, and the tax value of the property reflects that.
the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure
That doesn't follow from your quote. The quote says that the problem is that those subsidies were used for horizontal development (i.e. sprawl), which rapidly expanded the infrastructure. You are correct that future maintenance wasn't budgeted, but if the city had expanded vertically (i.e. denser urban cores), the infrastructure costs wouldn't have risen quite so dramatically.
How is this possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density, but I've long rejected that simplistic
explanation. There is a lot more to it than a simple division problem.
He goes on to explain that the poorer areas tend to have smaller houses and narrower streets built on higher ground, all of which leads to lower maintenance costs. They were built with more frugality and risk aversion than the more affluent areas. This supports the thesis that Lafayette's predicament stems from extravagant infrastructure in affluent areas that wouldn't have been built without subsidies.
>What we're really talking about is taking a neighborhood of $50,000 homes and making them $55,000 homes. That's a solid 10% increase in the tax base.
This is just such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. Land doesn't pay tax. People do. And they pay it out of the things that they produce. Planting trees or painting crosswalks doesn't increase their productivity and therefore does not grow the tax base. Increased property values simply represent an increase in the tax rate. You can get this same "return" by cutting out the beautification and simply raising the millage.
Sure, if you make your city more attractive rich people from other areas may move there. But nationally that is a zero sum game. If a rich person moving to the beautified city from an ugly one the net change is 0 as the ugly city loses as much as the rich one gains. The only way for cities to actually get richer is to increase the productivity of their citizens. This means spending on education, infrastructure, and public health.
You are the only commenter quoting the horizontal development. So maybe my idea relates to you.
Are you familar with the concept of the Big O notation [1], which computer scientists use to (more or less) describe the "growth" of their algorithms? E.g. when you compare something that growth quadratically O(n²) to something that only growth linear O(n) you will see, that at some point the quadratically growth will grow faster as the linear growth. Forever! The linear growth will never win.
Comparing this to the horizontal sprawl of a city is easy. The area of a city is planar which is mathematically described as quadratic O(n²) but the average growth of the domestic product is just linear O(n). Assuming the maintainance cost of a planar sprawling city growth quadratic while the domestic product only growth linear then the costs will win over the income. Forever!
The conclusion is to limit the horizontal sprawl of a city to linear growth. This means every new house, street, rail road, pipe system, power line and so on must be build inside a diameter to the city's center with a distance which is logaritmic O(lg(n)) on average. The rest must growth vertically.
I think Manhattan provides a strong counterexample. The 2nd Ave subway line cost $2.5 billion per mile. The cost to add elevators at 70 stations is expected to be $5.5 billion. A lot of signaling equipment is from the 1930s.
While I agree with the strong towns assesment overrall, I think this analysis may rely on some assumptions on the distribution of wealth and tax revenue within a population. Ultimately the "once per generation expense" in all of these towns was funded once per generation in the past. This money came from the federal government, and not the local tax payer - ultimately with the federal government taking on long-term debt to fund it.
While this seems like a ponzi scheme of perpetual growth, there is nothing that would prevent the federal government ( or the local government ) from repeating this exercise to rebuild the infrastructure. If we can't redo this exercise it means that
- The balance of payments in the economy is not well calibrated on a generational scale, profitable economic activity is not attributed on a local scale with free cash flows diverted elsewhere by rentiers/global financial flows e.g. a factory in annaheim california sees all profits recognized in Delaware/Ireland. The federal government/central bank may have more capability to provide local governments with finances than we would expect in such a scenario by rebalancing payments.
- The current US city landscape has real long-term economic costs that drain capital on unprofitable activities, immediate pivots in city planning are required to avoid economic fallout.
I suspect a little bit of all three options are at play, but I would be curious for more exploration on items 1&2. A great irony of the modern world is that the City of Flynn borders several pipe manufacturers.
> This money came from the federal government, and not the local tax payer - ultimately with the federal government taking on long-term debt to fund it.
It did not, this is completely false. Federal government by and large didn't fund local roads and sewers. Federal government did often help with interstate highways and large water works, but those would be built just the same even with the Strong Towns preferred high density development model.
By the way, the money that federal government spends is not created out of thin air. It comes mostly from federal income tax, which is overwhelmingly paid by the people living in exactly the kind of suburbs Strong Towns hates.
I don't know how one would miss it, but the national debt is stupefying and increasing. The Federal Reserve has indeed been creating money out of thin air for decades, by the trillions. Sooner or later it adds up to real money.
The infrastructure spending of federal government is trivial compared to its entitlement spending. That’s where the real cost is, not in bridges or interstates.
which further implies that the federal govt could have the money to rebuild the infrastructure. Consider that the entitlement spending is primarily distributed to the individuals living in the too expensive to maintain cities and towns.
Building new stuff while never taking into account maintenance costs happens in computer programming, too. At least in some places I've worked, they have more to maintain than people or time to maintain it, but there's always someone with a budget and an idea.
I saw a road in my neighborhood go from trenches along the road to full storm drains and sidewalks, for seemingly zero reason but to let the existing owners appraise their homes for $10k more. The trenches were fine in practice and never spilled over even in the worst storms. This suburb of 15 thousand people is currently millions of dollars in the hole doling out shortsighted handouts like this, and there are thousands of suburbs just like this one.
I’m not sure where you are, but I can’t imagine anywhere where sidewalks don’t make sense. Upkeep is orders of magnitudes cheaper than maintaining a street, and provides incentives for people to leave their cars behind, especially for shorter trips, further reducing wear and tear on roads.
Keeping roads in shape for multi-ton vehicles to barrel down them is expensive. Keeping them in shape for humans, not so much.
The thought process of your post forms a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course if you build with only a single mode of transport in mind, the majority of people will opt towards that mode of transportation. Unfortunately, many suburbs and small cities have made that mistake and also chose the most expensive mode, hence the article.
> Infrastructure that can't be maintained because its costs were never accounted for.
I like that you used the phrase "accounted for". It implies in my mind that the politicians doling out the cash did not monitor how that cash was used.
In management-speak, it's the classic phrase "delegation without follow-up to abdictation"
I initially thought about it in terms of accountability "the lower levels should have wrote down their expenses, their decisions, and sent it upward for review" but then I thought "why would most people do that if the people at top aren't mandating the record-keeping, let alone looking at it?" The higher levels didn't attach real strings to the funds and only kept abreast of developments by looking at the end results. Which were positive and attractive, but camouflaged very real deficiencies in the system that produced it.
This has been understood since at least the 1950s, when the Interstate system was 90% subsidized by the Federal government, but maintenance was a local responsibility.
> The growth Ponzi scheme hypothesis says that the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure.
This is pretty clearly false; the main cause of infrastructure maintenance neglect is that politicians, like many leaders in other fields, get more career boost from new projects than making sure existing things are maintained. That's true from top to bottom.
There's policy contributions (e.g., California Prop. 13 makes local jurisdictions dependent on development fees and other growth-related revenue because property taxes are limited to a low nominal level and decline in real terms as property is held because of the limitations on assessed value increases to significantly below the historical average rate of inflation), but new-project subsidies aren't a root cause but a symptom of the cause which would exist even without the subsidies.
Isn't it ironic that people constantly charge corporations with short-term thinking as some failure of capitalism, when the real disaster is the local government?
Here's another one. In Seattle, the city has seen enormous growth in tax revenue, far outpacing population growth. But the money just seems to disappear. Where it's going are public employee pensions, which were enacted long ago by politicians to garner the support of the unions. But the math on these is unsustainable and a looming crisis, but the politicians couldn't care less as the bill was far into the future and the election was just around the corner.
I think the “public vs private” take is a false dichotomy. I think there is a decent amount of evidence to show this short-term biases are a general human problem
> I think there is a decent amount of evidence to show this short-term biases are a general human problem
The fundamental difference with corporations is their finances are regularly examined by professional investors and if they're playing the short term game, their stocks get dumped.
There are people who are aware of the looming fiscal catastrophes of local government, but there's no way to "dump" the stock of them, while efforts are made to obfuscate these liabilities and the heavy influence of public unions pretty much ensure there's no accountability.
Furthermore, it's illegal for corporations to hide this stuff on their accounts, stuff that governments do routinely.
If you can identify a corporation that artificially boosts quarterly profits with short term thinking, and still has a rising stock price year after year, I'd like to hear about it. The ones I know of that did this went right down the sewer shortly after the professional investors discovered it.
>If you can identify a corporation that artificially boosts quarterly profits with short term thinking, and still has a rising stock price year after year, I'd like to hear about it.
The classic example is Enron. They took credit for VOD sales that hadn’t happened but were just optimistic projections. Your point still holds though that there are different checks and balances between public and private organizations. Public checks are at the voting booth, private (publicly traded) companies checks are at the stock exchange. Your claim is no different for public orgs, the time-scale is just different. It’s like challenging for an example of an unsustainable govt keeping its prominence for centuries. Unsustainable practices eventually have their reckoning regardless if they are public or private.
Are there examples of governments hiding account details that are illegal yet allowed to continue once uncovered?
> Unsustainable practices eventually have their reckoning regardless if they are public or private.
The looming crisis of local government is known, but nobody does a thing about it. Unlike with stocks.
> Public checks are at the voting booth, private (publicly traded) companies checks are at the stock exchange.
There's a huge difference. To change things in government requires a 51% majority vote once every several years. But if you don't like a stock, you can sell it in a millisecond (literally). You don't have to convince anyone else. A vote is not the same thing as a choice.
>Enron went to zero after their fraud went public.
And when governments become irrevocably insolvent, they fail (as does their fiat currency). It's still very much the same principle just at a more grand scale. Your claim that accounting transparency fixes the issue in private companies is undercut by the fact that the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was essentially defunct because of fraud in the Enron scandal. The watchers weren't doing their job ethically.
>The looming crisis of local government is known, but nobody does a thing about it. Unlike with stocks.
I disagree. You speak as if everyone is on the same page but that's not the case. Take social security in the U.S. as an example. Some will say it's a completely broken system and needs to be done away with. Others think it's solvent by simply modifying the tax base, or by raising the entitlement age, or any combination of factors. The same goes with stocks; sides will argue about whether a specific strategy or earnings result is a death knell or a temporary inconvenience until everybody can finally agree. Both scenarios are systems of human convention and thus solvable by modifying those conventions. Public pensions will follow suit just like private company pensions; when the burden gets too big to bear, the convention will be modified. Some civil servants will be on the short end of the stick, or tax-payers will be overly burdened, or something in between because it's totally a problem of human creation and not beholden to natural laws that can be bent. I've literally witnessed this happen both in private company and public pensions. When tax-payers start to disagree with policies en masse, they can elect the right politicians to fix it. If that's not happening, apparently enough people don't feel it's enough of a problem.
>You don't have to convince anyone else
You absolutely have to find a buyer at the level you want to get out at. Just because the system is fast and automated doesn't mean you can act as a single party. A vote is certainly different because it has the nuances of living in a society (so you can't just get your way because you decided it), but that doesn't negate the intended point that the root of short-term thinking is in human psychology, not the nature of an organization being public or private.
I’m not equating the two. I’m getting the impression that you’re drawing false equivalencies and missing the broader point that it’s not a public vs private problem but a human psychology problem as evidenced by the fact it exists in both arenas. I’ve literally said from the onset that while it exists in both, each system is different in terms of scale and correction mechanism. In other words, I admit they are not equal in manifestation while thinking they share the same underlying cause rooted in human nature.
I think there is another article about a road being constructed for $30 mil or something absolutely crazy when it’s not needed at all (and the road would fall apart before they could repay the loan). The basic gist I got was: when loans become more available, things start getting constructed when they aren’t needed at all and costs balloon fast.
Like student loans, easier access means they can charge more.
This is the lens through which Strong Towns views the country's cities. It's a useful model that explains a great deal. It's also falsifiable.
The growth Ponzi scheme hypothesis says that the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure. The outcome is always the same: infrastructure that can't be maintained because its costs were never accounted for.
The Strong Towns website is chock full of examples, and Lafayette LA is just one. At this point if you live in any US city it seems pretty likely that you'll find a Growth Ponzi at work.
Also, that 3D map should scare the liver out of local politicians.