Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)(strongtowns.org)
strongtowns.org
Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money
472 comments
> 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.
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.
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.
Am Estonian and agree with that. The investments via EU have yielded awesome results over the years.
Estonia has one of the best governments in Europe if not the world. Romania does not.
Measured how? In normal terms, as in, a clear profit that would pass regular accountancy rules?
https://euobserver.com/justice/126948
"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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-33360841
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.
The reason is explained by this guy:
https://cornishstuff.com/2020/05/21/eu-funding-failed-to-ach...
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.
More on ghost infrastructure:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/1198576...
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.
https://euobserver.com/justice/126948
"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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-33360841
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.
The reason is explained by this guy:
https://cornishstuff.com/2020/05/21/eu-funding-failed-to-ach...
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.
More on ghost infrastructure:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/1198576...
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.
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).
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.
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).
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0999208,27.6257843,15378m/da...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.2123091,27.4520726,3a,75y,35...
[3] https://mori-din-romania.blogspot.com/
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0999208,27.6257843,15378m/da...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.2123091,27.4520726,3a,75y,35...
[3] https://mori-din-romania.blogspot.com/
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.
Where does this idea that in Europe somehow all villages are connected with railways comes from? Europe depends on roads as much as the USA.
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
Unless you are talking about big cities like district capitals, or train paradises like Switzerland, better have a car handy.
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.
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.
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.
It's not really that many cases. The ruling elite is small and there is a lot of money.
Doesn't seem dissimilar from all the rotting Soviet prestige projects/infrastructure sitting around eastern Europe lol.
If the Soviets could afford to build it, shouldn't the presumably wealthier post-Soviet governments be able to afford maintaining it?
A lot of them are not maintainable - eg, there's no economical way to "fix" reinforced concrete with an incorrect blend or incorrect reinforcement.
Is the cost of demolishing and rebuilding it so much higher than building it from scratch?
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.
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.
But wait, doesn't that depend on whether you view the money not made during the shutdown of the bridge as "lost" or as "not made"?
The time spent rebuilding and not getting value out of the thing should be included
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?
Yes, especially if it was made with materials which need to be abated
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.
There was also the entire communist central planning thing that made resources misallocated.
Thank you for an explanation that makes sense!
What happened to the Soviets in the end?
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 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?
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
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.
Individuals can be. Systems with bad rewards for doing so rarely are.
For a tech example, see how reliably Google rewards teams for making new stuff and not for keeping it running.
For a tech example, see how reliably Google rewards teams for making new stuff and not for keeping it running.
Engineers and technicians are a minority group. Your positive experience of that group doesn't necessarily invalidate Vonnegut's observation about people in general.
you don't know much about Kurt Vonnegut's background.
Czech here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like post war the US made a lot of extravagant speculative bets on infrastructure, particularly related to suburban housing development.
Do you have examples of such projects?
>It's also falsifiable.
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.
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?
> 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. 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It’s not that ASCE is a disinterested source since they their members make money when money on infrastructure.
Perhaps, but our crumbling roads say they have a point even though the absolute number may be off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Federal deficit spending and cost-disease are also things. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to think forward a decade or two.
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!
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!
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.
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.)
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.)
After decades of looting, NYC in 1975 was all but bankrupt. Then the very parties responsible for the mess bailed out NYC on very unfavorable terms.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
This is a story repeated nationwide. Exfiltrate money from urban areas to finance sprawl. Use inevitable debt crisis to smash pensions, contracts, services, etc.
Most recently: You've heard of Detroit?
"...that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed."
Sure. Nicotine ain't addictive. HFCS is healthy. Human activity isn't responsible for climate crisis. Tax cuts for the richest creates jobs. We've always been at war with Eastasian.
Pull my other leg, it plays jiggle bells.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
This is a story repeated nationwide. Exfiltrate money from urban areas to finance sprawl. Use inevitable debt crisis to smash pensions, contracts, services, etc.
Most recently: You've heard of Detroit?
"...that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed."
Sure. Nicotine ain't addictive. HFCS is healthy. Human activity isn't responsible for climate crisis. Tax cuts for the richest creates jobs. We've always been at war with Eastasian.
Pull my other leg, it plays jiggle bells.
How does the bankruptcy of NYC, the densest city in the US, support Strongtowns argument that sprawl bankrupts cities?
Bankrupting cities is the story of sprawl.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
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)
That's too clever for me to parse.
One of the first ways Bob Moses (cite The Power Broker) exfiltrated money out of the city was jacking up the subway fees to finance his Long Island parkways, creating the original auto centric suburbs. Once he figured out how to continuously roll over the debts financed by the bridge tolls, things really took off.
The burden of the tolls and tokens were mostly borne by the middle and working classes.
Everyone today moans about how terrible mass transit became. But no one reports that those services were looted, denied investment, and those resources diverted to highways.
At the same time, the working class neighborhoods went without many other needful things which those monies could have paid for. Hospitals, schools, police, fire stations, and so forth.
In an alternate universe, today's level of urbanization would have happened decades earlier, by simply building more urban housing, and using city revenues to pay for city amenities. Sure, some sprawl would have happened. But in addition to, not at the expense of, city development.
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.
> 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.
Pick one and let's break it down.
Show me potholes for miles in Lafayette, LA. Show me all the people poisoned there from heavy rains. Or all those people flooded out of their houses.
>Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy.
Pick one and let's break it down.
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.
https://hoodline.com/2016/12/why-sf-oakland-have-america-s-w...
Why SF and Oakland have bad streets (2016)
Edit: remove that AMP bullshit
Why SF and Oakland have bad streets (2016)
Edit: remove that AMP bullshit
I think the California Public Utilities Commission deserves some of the blame here. They dictate the rates and profit margins.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Anothe...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Anothe...
Most utilities and governments are very intertwined.
> Show me potholes for miles in Lafayette, LA
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'.
[1] https://tripnet.org/reports/louisiana-baton-rouge-transporta...
[2] https://tripnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/LA_Transporta...
> 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.
[3] https://tripnet.org/about-trip/
> Or all those people flooded out of their houses.
I'll pick the 2016 Louisiana flooding as an example. 146.000 homes damaged, 11.000 people ended taking refuge in shelters.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Louisiana_floods
> Pick one and let's break it down.
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.
[5] https://eu.theadvertiser.com/story/news/2016/09/23/did-flood...
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'.
[1] https://tripnet.org/reports/louisiana-baton-rouge-transporta...
[2] https://tripnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/LA_Transporta...
> 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.
[3] https://tripnet.org/about-trip/
> Or all those people flooded out of their houses.
I'll pick the 2016 Louisiana flooding as an example. 146.000 homes damaged, 11.000 people ended taking refuge in shelters.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Louisiana_floods
> Pick one and let's break it down.
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.
[5] https://eu.theadvertiser.com/story/news/2016/09/23/did-flood...
>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.
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.
[deleted]
> Show me potholes for miles in Lafayette, LA.
All you have to do is look.
https://tripnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/LA_Transporta...
53% of Lafayette roads are in "poor condition". 19% more are "mediocre". 12% of bridges are structurally deficient.
https://thecurrentla.com/2020/if-we-want-to-fix-lafayettes-r...
https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/article_430cb640-e...
> Show me all the people poisoned there from heavy rains.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/09/01/arou...
> Or all those people flooded out of their houses.
Really? Have you ever seen Louisiana? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Louisiana_floods
> Pick one and let's break it down.
We just did.
All you have to do is look.
https://tripnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/LA_Transporta...
53% of Lafayette roads are in "poor condition". 19% more are "mediocre". 12% of bridges are structurally deficient.
https://thecurrentla.com/2020/if-we-want-to-fix-lafayettes-r...
https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/article_430cb640-e...
> Show me all the people poisoned there from heavy rains.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/09/01/arou...
> Or all those people flooded out of their houses.
Really? Have you ever seen Louisiana? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Louisiana_floods
> Pick one and let's break it down.
We just did.
>All you have to do is look.
>https://tripnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/LA_Transporta...
>53% of Lafayette roads are in "poor condition". 12% of Lafayette bridges are structurally deficient.
>https://thecurrentla.com/2020/if-we-want-to-fix-lafayettes-r...
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.
>https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/09/01/arou...
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.
>Really? Have you ever seen Louisiana? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Louisiana_floods
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.
>https://tripnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/LA_Transporta...
>53% of Lafayette roads are in "poor condition". 12% of Lafayette bridges are structurally deficient.
>https://thecurrentla.com/2020/if-we-want-to-fix-lafayettes-r...
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.
>https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/09/01/arou...
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.
>Really? Have you ever seen Louisiana? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Louisiana_floods
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 here, no hurricane needed: https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/article_701ae113-a...
"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."
And here, no hurricane needed: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/9/2078
"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."
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 here, no hurricane needed: https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/article_701ae113-a...
"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."
And here, no hurricane needed: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/9/2078
"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."
Really, human? You're going to latch on to "potholes for miles" and keep on using a turn of phrase as the basis for your argument?
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...
This isn’t really true.
Nassau County, one of the first generation of suburbs and one of the wealthiest counties in the country, has been under NYS fiscal control since 2000.
Nassau County, one of the first generation of suburbs and one of the wealthiest counties in the country, has been under NYS fiscal control since 2000.
And how much is Nassau County spending on infrastructure maintenance?
https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/28135/fin...
> GENERAL EXPENSES
> General Expenses include a wide range of products and services required by departments to support service delivery. They include office, maintenance, medical, postage, recreational, automotive supplies, and gasoline. This category also captures the expense associated with road maintenance projects, sewage, and drainage supplies.
And how much is their general expenses fund? $38M. That's just above 1% of their $3.5B budget. Clearly, infrastructure maintenance is killing them.
https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/28135/fin...
> GENERAL EXPENSES
> General Expenses include a wide range of products and services required by departments to support service delivery. They include office, maintenance, medical, postage, recreational, automotive supplies, and gasoline. This category also captures the expense associated with road maintenance projects, sewage, and drainage supplies.
And how much is their general expenses fund? $38M. That's just above 1% of their $3.5B budget. Clearly, infrastructure maintenance is killing them.
Infrastructure maintenance isn't the only way infrastructure is costed. Generally speaking infrastructure replacement is capex and not included in these budgets, and certainly infrastructure asset depreciation is not accounted for.
In the 2020-23 capital plan, $978M is budgeted for sewers and stormwater, $100M for roads, $30M for traffic and $31M for general infrastructure. This will mostly be funded by debt. https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/27186/202...
In your link, on page 2, $180M is spent on transportation and $397M on debt service.
In the 2020-23 capital plan, $978M is budgeted for sewers and stormwater, $100M for roads, $30M for traffic and $31M for general infrastructure. This will mostly be funded by debt. https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/27186/202...
In your link, on page 2, $180M is spent on transportation and $397M on debt service.
Okay, that's still less than 15% of their budget. This is not going to kill their finances like Strong Towns says it will.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
The only Strongtowns article I've read that was about an area I know personally was factually and historically inaccurate.
Can you provide the actual numbers for comparison
Just some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
Louisiana population 4.65M
Lafayette population 126k
Miles of road in Lousiana: 130k (https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/)
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.
Louisiana population 4.65M
Lafayette population 126k
Miles of road in Lousiana: 130k (https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
The article’s main thesis is that these poor areas have the best ROI for development.
In this analogy the entire company as a whole is still making a large loss overall. So it will go bankrupt just like the city.
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 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.
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.
From the author's follow-up article [1]:
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...
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.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...
>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.
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.
Wow. That new graph of “poor neighborhood vs rich neighborhood” was not at all what I expected it to be.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation [2] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/268750/global-gross-domes...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation [2] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/268750/global-gross-domes...
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.
This is an interesting claim, do you know of anything I can read for more info?
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
- Despite economic growth, the cost of replacing existing infrastructure is higher than it was a generation ago e.g. Cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
- 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.
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
- Despite economic growth, the cost of replacing existing infrastructure is higher than it was a generation ago e.g. Cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
- 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.
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.
Keeping roads in shape for multi-ton vehicles to barrel down them is expensive. Keeping them in shape for humans, not so much.
There's no reason to have sidewalks in suburbs or rural areas where anything you'd reasonably want to walk to is miles away.
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.
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.
As a suburban kid I walked a few miles a day to school and back and so did a good number of classmates.
It would have been far more dangerous without sidewalks.
It would have been far more dangerous without sidewalks.
> 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.
It's plain irresponsibility.
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.
It's plain irresponsibility.
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.
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.
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.
>when the real disaster is the local government
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 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.
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?
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?
> The classic example is Enron.
Enron went to zero after their fraud went public.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> You absolutely have to find a buyer at the level you want to get out at.
If you want to equate that to needing to convince 51% of the voters, I'll leave the field.
If you want to equate that to needing to convince 51% of the voters, I'll leave the field.
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.
How different things could be if municipalities could run deficits?
Municipal bonds are almost like student loans in the US.
Municipal bonds are almost like student loans in the US.
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.
Like student loans, easier access means they can charge more.
The federal new starts transit programs are an example of this.
Joy of less costly is the measure.
Wake up to the developer perspective.
Wake up to the developer perspective.
Yet again an article about how it costs $X to do something with infrastructure but no explanation for why it costs $X. Until everyone starts asking "why?" and then addressing the resulting answers (commonly: kickbacks, overregulation, collusion in bidding, and simple "match the budget" bids) this issue will continue with every aspect of government-run service.
In Toronto, Canada a simple renovation of a subway stations entrance (painting, tile, basic refresh) can take several years. All the while they will rope off large sections or shut down escalators for months while there is ZERO work being done.
There was a Subway station called Runnymede that took about 5-7 years and when completely you couldn't tell they did anything. I am sure it cost 10's of millions of dollars and could have been completely started and finished by a private contractor in a couple months.
The city has never been manage properly because there are no consequences to the ineptness of the Politicians and bureaucracy that run it. You could complain (a lawyer friend did) and they basically either ignore or make up some story how difficult it is to lay 200 sq/ft of tile and clean an escalator...These things take years of hard work and planning....
Surprised the city doesn't come crashing down under it's own weight of dysfunction but they seem to prop it up by the endless tax or fee increases.
There was a Subway station called Runnymede that took about 5-7 years and when completely you couldn't tell they did anything. I am sure it cost 10's of millions of dollars and could have been completely started and finished by a private contractor in a couple months.
The city has never been manage properly because there are no consequences to the ineptness of the Politicians and bureaucracy that run it. You could complain (a lawyer friend did) and they basically either ignore or make up some story how difficult it is to lay 200 sq/ft of tile and clean an escalator...These things take years of hard work and planning....
Surprised the city doesn't come crashing down under it's own weight of dysfunction but they seem to prop it up by the endless tax or fee increases.
Escalator and elevator refurbishment projects are extremely lengthy because most of the replacement parts needed to overhaul old escalators/elevators are no longer stock items and need to be custom made. In the worst case, parts may need to be reverse-engineered, re-designed to be compatible with current materials and manufacturing processes, prototyped, tested, and made through limited-run production.
If an escalator/elevator is shut down for a few months (or years) due to refurbishment, it's because worn, but vital, parts of it have been removed for use as reference materials so replacements can be made. It is also possible that vital parts could be too worn for the escalator/elevator to operate safely until new parts have been made and installed.
I'll also point out that published information on the Runnymede project indicates that the current round of construction started at the end of 2018, involved the addition of three underground elevator shafts, and is expected to be completed at the end of 2020[0]. Unless you are referring to earlier work, your '5-7 year' timeline to 'clean an escalator' is a vast exaggeration.
[0] http://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA.j...
If an escalator/elevator is shut down for a few months (or years) due to refurbishment, it's because worn, but vital, parts of it have been removed for use as reference materials so replacements can be made. It is also possible that vital parts could be too worn for the escalator/elevator to operate safely until new parts have been made and installed.
I'll also point out that published information on the Runnymede project indicates that the current round of construction started at the end of 2018, involved the addition of three underground elevator shafts, and is expected to be completed at the end of 2020[0]. Unless you are referring to earlier work, your '5-7 year' timeline to 'clean an escalator' is a vast exaggeration.
[0] http://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA.j...
When overhauling, how just replacing the escalator with a new model, which would have parts more easily available?
This is frequently done when parts become too difficult/expensive to maintain, but replacement from scratch still takes many months.
Pretty much every part of the west is having problems with long elevator/escalator outages these days because so many escalators/elevators were installed in the infrastructure boom of the 1960s/1970s. They're now all reaching the end of their useful lives at the same time and they all need major overhaul and/or replacement.
Pretty much every part of the west is having problems with long elevator/escalator outages these days because so many escalators/elevators were installed in the infrastructure boom of the 1960s/1970s. They're now all reaching the end of their useful lives at the same time and they all need major overhaul and/or replacement.
I don’t know your qualifications, but I doubt you were involved in the project. When I hear people upset about infrastructure giving armchair estimates of how long it should take or how expensive it should be, I just hear the uninformed project manager being outraged at the software engineers’ estimates. “And when their work was done I toured the station/software and it looked exactly the same!”
I’m sure there’s bureaucratic inefficiency. But there’s always so much nonsense that gets appended to the criticism.
I’m sure there’s bureaucratic inefficiency. But there’s always so much nonsense that gets appended to the criticism.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that there is something wrong about tearing up 10-20 tiles in front of an escalator and shutting down for 6 months only to appear one day and finish the job but still leaving the escalator off for another 1-2 months only to reappear to remove the barriers and turn on the escalator. Now do that all over again in and around the entrance to the station for another 5 years.
If you use the station everyday, you notice these things.
If you use the station everyday, you notice these things.
A comparison, to give people an idea of why this story sticks out:
In my 25-floor condo, the company that did our elevator renovation was able to replace 3 elevators over the course of 1 year. They were done in sequence, not parallel, so we had full use of 2 elevators the entire duration.
In my 25-floor condo, the company that did our elevator renovation was able to replace 3 elevators over the course of 1 year. They were done in sequence, not parallel, so we had full use of 2 elevators the entire duration.
What you say has some merit, of course. Does 5-7 years for a station renovation pass any kind of rough sniff test, though?
I live in Toronto: Runnymede station specifically is in a very built up area, and there's not a lot of elbow room to work. Do a Street View of 265 Runnymede:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/265+Runnymede+Rd,+Toronto,...
* Opposite end: https://www.google.com/maps/place/260+Kennedy+Ave,+Toronto,+...
The subway in that area was built in the 1960s using (AFAIK) a cut-and-cover method, so it's not every deep below the surface:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_2_Bloor–Danforth#Subway_c...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel#Cut-and-cover
The original criticizing GP also assumes that it was a "simple renovation": is this a valid assumption? For example, how do you get a bunch of new elevators installed:
* https://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA....
Drilling multiple elevator shafts seems more than a "simple renovation".
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/265+Runnymede+Rd,+Toronto,...
* Opposite end: https://www.google.com/maps/place/260+Kennedy+Ave,+Toronto,+...
The subway in that area was built in the 1960s using (AFAIK) a cut-and-cover method, so it's not every deep below the surface:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_2_Bloor–Danforth#Subway_c...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel#Cut-and-cover
The original criticizing GP also assumes that it was a "simple renovation": is this a valid assumption? For example, how do you get a bunch of new elevators installed:
* https://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA....
Drilling multiple elevator shafts seems more than a "simple renovation".
Reconstructions of stations of the Prague metro tend to take between 6 and 12 months, rarely longer.
5-7 years remind me of the Sofia metro (Bulgaria) during the Soviet Bloc era. It was officially under construction for like 20 years but in practice, the budget just wasn't there so the works went forward veeeeeery slowly, in some years literally nothing was done.
5-7 years remind me of the Sofia metro (Bulgaria) during the Soviet Bloc era. It was officially under construction for like 20 years but in practice, the budget just wasn't there so the works went forward veeeeeery slowly, in some years literally nothing was done.
My intuition tells me 5-7 years doesn’t pass the sniff test. But if I’m wrong, maybe the government can endeavour to be more transparent. Doesn’t take a lot to show us a general timeline breaking down the major tasks.
My criticism is purely: we don’t know better so let’s avoid throwing numbers out there.
My criticism is purely: we don’t know better so let’s avoid throwing numbers out there.
> There was a Subway station called Runnymede that took about 5-7 years and when completely you couldn't tell they did anything.
Drilling shafts and installing new elevator is a bit more than a "simple renovation" IMHO.
https://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA....
And that assumes that they're not doing structural fixes for a station that was built >50 years ago (Line 2, B-D, opened in 1966).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_2_Bloor–Danforth
Drilling shafts and installing new elevator is a bit more than a "simple renovation" IMHO.
https://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA....
And that assumes that they're not doing structural fixes for a station that was built >50 years ago (Line 2, B-D, opened in 1966).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_2_Bloor–Danforth
Private contractors aren't a solution to the problem; that's orthogonal. Lots of work goes to private contractors here, with the same results.
The interesting comparison being to private contractors working for private entities. I somehow doubt that Walmart is spending years and tens of millions of dollars to re-tile one of their storefronts. Which proves that it can be done, when there isn't an incentive for corruption and waste.
The question is how to remove the corruption and waste.
The question is how to remove the corruption and waste.
You're right, Walmart isn't doing that. Part of the reason is that Walmart has essentially zero interest in building civic infrastructure. They have to just pass health & safety regulations and then they plan to do absolutely nothing more.
Public buildings and infrastructure, on the other hand, have other considerations in play. Durability, civic pride, long term safety ...
I travel around the US a lot and always marvel at the stuff that was built by/during the WPA. It is incredible - absurdly overbuilt by any current standards, but that very fact is at the heart of why they are still standing, still enjoyed, still viable.
Nobody will be saying that about any Walmart building in 90 years.
Public buildings and infrastructure, on the other hand, have other considerations in play. Durability, civic pride, long term safety ...
I travel around the US a lot and always marvel at the stuff that was built by/during the WPA. It is incredible - absurdly overbuilt by any current standards, but that very fact is at the heart of why they are still standing, still enjoyed, still viable.
Nobody will be saying that about any Walmart building in 90 years.
The WPA overbuilt everything because its underlying purpose was to reduce unemployment, even if it meant inefficient allocation of labor, because the alternative (massive unemployment) was considered even worse.
That entire system has since been discredited, because there is no actual need to allocate the labor inefficiently on purpose to reduce unemployment instead of still being as efficient as possible and just e.g. increasing the number or projects. Or even better, stimulating demand for labor by giving money directly to the general population.
But the problem in this case isn't high unemployment, it's high inefficiency. A program designed to reduce unemployment by increasing inefficiency is obviously not a solution for that.
That entire system has since been discredited, because there is no actual need to allocate the labor inefficiently on purpose to reduce unemployment instead of still being as efficient as possible and just e.g. increasing the number or projects. Or even better, stimulating demand for labor by giving money directly to the general population.
But the problem in this case isn't high unemployment, it's high inefficiency. A program designed to reduce unemployment by increasing inefficiency is obviously not a solution for that.
I wasn't discussing the employment side of WPA in any way.
I was talking about what they built and comparing it to contemporary big box store architecture.
You're making an implicit claim that the labor was used inefficiently, which may be true. But unless that takes longevity and less easily measured attributes into account, I'm not sure you can prove that.
I was talking about what they built and comparing it to contemporary big box store architecture.
You're making an implicit claim that the labor was used inefficiently, which may be true. But unless that takes longevity and less easily measured attributes into account, I'm not sure you can prove that.
It's straightforward to compare the net present value of overbuilt boondoggles to modern commercial architecture which trades dramatically lower initial construction costs for modestly higher ongoing maintenance. The reason private entities overwhelmingly choose the latter is not that they prefer to waste their own money.
Moreover, longevity is often a cost. How many overbuilt old post offices and municipal buildings are we now effectively stuck with in places where they're no longer an appropriate size for the locality? The city's needs are going to be different in twenty or thirty years than they are now, so there is no point in designing ordinary structures to last longer than that when it so often makes more sense to build a new one after that period of time consistent with the needs of today rather than a generation ago.
Moreover, longevity is often a cost. How many overbuilt old post offices and municipal buildings are we now effectively stuck with in places where they're no longer an appropriate size for the locality? The city's needs are going to be different in twenty or thirty years than they are now, so there is no point in designing ordinary structures to last longer than that when it so often makes more sense to build a new one after that period of time consistent with the needs of today rather than a generation ago.
There's an assumption there that its not possible to design and build things that can be adapative and function across a much longer timespan than a modern big box store's typical lifetime.
There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time. Since both costs are rather variable, it's hard to assess if that is true.
Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me. There are many incentives in play for private entities to favor short term gain over long term gain, and significant evidence that this affects their behavior just as much as it affects individuals and governments.
I don't agree that it's straightforward to compare "net present value". Go and visit the WPA constructions at many national parks. Nobody would agree to them being built today, so even if you could establish the cost to rebuild them, the fact that there's no way we would ever end up replacing them makes it extremely hard to establish their value to us as a society.
But I don't want to defend those old energy inefficient, hard-to-maintain structures to much. I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.
There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time. Since both costs are rather variable, it's hard to assess if that is true.
Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me. There are many incentives in play for private entities to favor short term gain over long term gain, and significant evidence that this affects their behavior just as much as it affects individuals and governments.
I don't agree that it's straightforward to compare "net present value". Go and visit the WPA constructions at many national parks. Nobody would agree to them being built today, so even if you could establish the cost to rebuild them, the fact that there's no way we would ever end up replacing them makes it extremely hard to establish their value to us as a society.
But I don't want to defend those old energy inefficient, hard-to-maintain structures to much. I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.
> There's an assumption there that its not possible to design and build things that can be adapative and function across a much longer timespan than a modern big box store's typical lifetime.
But that assumption is, by and large, true. If you look at hundred year old buildings, by modern standards they're extremely flawed. The insulation is typically poor or non-existent. They often had higher ceilings due to the limitations of contemporary lighting and HVAC systems, which are now a liability with respect to heating and cooling.
There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued, so a building from today would be expected to be similarly deficient by the standards of a hundred years from now, which means there is little reason to design it to last that long.
But the biggest flaw is often that the building is the wrong size. Decades ago you needed five stories and now you need ten. Or you needed five stories and now you need one. The obvious solution to that is to move to a bigger or smaller building as the need arises.
> There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time.
Not at all, because the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot. You don't have to knock it down to build a new one consistent with your current needs. You can build a new one and then sell the existing one to someone who may be able to make productive use of it as it is. But then it's not the state reaping the benefits of any unusual longevity.
And that assumption may still be true in many cases regardless. If you have a five story building which over time comes to be surrounded by skyscrapers, it could easily be cost effective to remove it and make the lot available for another skyscraper, or for the new owner to do so and in so doing yield two dividends to the local government -- one from the sale of a lot with a high property value, and then another from the increased property tax revenue from the taller building.
> Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me.
Temporal discounting isn't a problem, it's what you're supposed to do. An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it (or don't have to pay 50 years in interest on having borrowed it).
> I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.
In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money. But if that's what the taxpayers want, why don't the buy it directly?
More saliently, spending tens of millions of dollars to re-tile a subway station isn't doing that anyway.
But that assumption is, by and large, true. If you look at hundred year old buildings, by modern standards they're extremely flawed. The insulation is typically poor or non-existent. They often had higher ceilings due to the limitations of contemporary lighting and HVAC systems, which are now a liability with respect to heating and cooling.
There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued, so a building from today would be expected to be similarly deficient by the standards of a hundred years from now, which means there is little reason to design it to last that long.
But the biggest flaw is often that the building is the wrong size. Decades ago you needed five stories and now you need ten. Or you needed five stories and now you need one. The obvious solution to that is to move to a bigger or smaller building as the need arises.
> There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time.
Not at all, because the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot. You don't have to knock it down to build a new one consistent with your current needs. You can build a new one and then sell the existing one to someone who may be able to make productive use of it as it is. But then it's not the state reaping the benefits of any unusual longevity.
And that assumption may still be true in many cases regardless. If you have a five story building which over time comes to be surrounded by skyscrapers, it could easily be cost effective to remove it and make the lot available for another skyscraper, or for the new owner to do so and in so doing yield two dividends to the local government -- one from the sale of a lot with a high property value, and then another from the increased property tax revenue from the taller building.
> Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me.
Temporal discounting isn't a problem, it's what you're supposed to do. An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it (or don't have to pay 50 years in interest on having borrowed it).
> I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.
In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money. But if that's what the taxpayers want, why don't the buy it directly?
More saliently, spending tens of millions of dollars to re-tile a subway station isn't doing that anyway.
> If you look at hundred year old buildings, by modern standards they're extremely flawed. The insulation is typically poor or non-existent
You're assuming a certain type of climate. Hundred year old buildings with huge levels of thermal mass in year-round warm climates are exactly what you want, not insulation. The high ceilings are also extremely practical in such environments.
>There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued
Building design: no question that we've got new stuff that in the right conditions is better than what we had 100 years ago. We have some new stuff (e.g. insulated glazing) that is just better always. But there are many aspects of actual building construction that could be argued to have gone backwards in the last 100 years, mostly because of the rise of developer-led construction and the economics that this implies.
> the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot.
Fair point.
> An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it
That assumes that you don't gain anything of value from the expense today. If what you are saying was so simplistically true, there would no point in investing in anything at all. If I put money into blue chip stocks with the expectation of earning profits, I do so with the idea in mind that these profits will exceed any interest I might have earned by saving it. If we collectively put money into a beautiful city hall or park lodge, we do with the idea in mind that what we will gain over the life of the building is worth more to us that the interest we might have earned by saving the cost instead.
> In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money
If you can't differentiate or acknowledge the concept or utility of public investment in public places, then I'm certainly not going to persuade you that this is not what I'm asking for.
You're assuming a certain type of climate. Hundred year old buildings with huge levels of thermal mass in year-round warm climates are exactly what you want, not insulation. The high ceilings are also extremely practical in such environments.
>There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued
Building design: no question that we've got new stuff that in the right conditions is better than what we had 100 years ago. We have some new stuff (e.g. insulated glazing) that is just better always. But there are many aspects of actual building construction that could be argued to have gone backwards in the last 100 years, mostly because of the rise of developer-led construction and the economics that this implies.
> the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot.
Fair point.
> An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it
That assumes that you don't gain anything of value from the expense today. If what you are saying was so simplistically true, there would no point in investing in anything at all. If I put money into blue chip stocks with the expectation of earning profits, I do so with the idea in mind that these profits will exceed any interest I might have earned by saving it. If we collectively put money into a beautiful city hall or park lodge, we do with the idea in mind that what we will gain over the life of the building is worth more to us that the interest we might have earned by saving the cost instead.
> In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money
If you can't differentiate or acknowledge the concept or utility of public investment in public places, then I'm certainly not going to persuade you that this is not what I'm asking for.
>Public buildings and infrastructure, on the other hand, have other considerations in play. Durability, civic pride, long term safety ...
Who's paying? I can't express within the confines of the rules here how livid this sort of "we should spend taxpayer money on looking good to fluff our own egos" thinking is. The public is best served a vinyl tiled "Walmart subway" where the lightbulbs work and the trains run. Not a billion dollar marble monstrosity. Any bureaucrat opting to condone the latter is shirking their duty to use the resources at their disposal to deliver maximum results to the taxpayers.
Who's paying? I can't express within the confines of the rules here how livid this sort of "we should spend taxpayer money on looking good to fluff our own egos" thinking is. The public is best served a vinyl tiled "Walmart subway" where the lightbulbs work and the trains run. Not a billion dollar marble monstrosity. Any bureaucrat opting to condone the latter is shirking their duty to use the resources at their disposal to deliver maximum results to the taxpayers.
It has nothing to do with "fluff our own egos".
I'm not advocating for "a billion dollar marble monstrosity". I'm advocating for the difference between a well built city hall and a Walmart store.
I'm not advocating for "a billion dollar marble monstrosity". I'm advocating for the difference between a well built city hall and a Walmart store.
Procurement is one of the root causes, specifically running the procurement out of a government bureaucracy where the actual tactical outcomes (refurbishing the train station in the example above) are way down the list from other priorities such as the appearance of fairness in procurement, and other government aims like job creation etc.
In the US, it common for local or federal RFP's (requests for proposals) to include a hard requirement that qualified vendors have done the same kind of project before. This usually excludes any new players from the game.
How many companies build large bridges, airports, subways, railroads, tunnels, etc? Not many.
It is part of the racket that discourages innovation.
How many companies build large bridges, airports, subways, railroads, tunnels, etc? Not many.
It is part of the racket that discourages innovation.
Yeah, that is one facet of the overall institutional approach to procurement that treats everything like a commodity that can be perfectly substituted and comes down just to cost (and maybe a few other checkbox categories). A flexible approach that procures for outcomes but doesn't prescribe how to get there is much better at admitting creative delivery solutions, including those from new entrants.
Of course past experience is still a logical thing to consider when judging the overall risks of a project. But if you look for creative solutions you can get away from "look, this entrenched legacy business is the only one meeting out experience requirements".
Of course past experience is still a logical thing to consider when judging the overall risks of a project. But if you look for creative solutions you can get away from "look, this entrenched legacy business is the only one meeting out experience requirements".
Prevailing wage laws that are used in many areas. (added: private contractors must pay them if working in the government constructions projects)
https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.as...
https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.as...
> In Toronto, Canada a simple renovation of a subway stations entrance (painting, tile, basic refresh) can take several years. All the while they will rope off large sections or shut down escalators for months while there is ZERO work being done.
This most likely happens because of insufficient government funding for maintenance.
Government budgets reset every year; governments can't take unspent program money at the end on one fiscal year and bank it for next year. There is no way to "save up" for big expenses aside from directly allocating sufficient funds in the funding legislation.
That sort of lump allocation is a lot easier to get for new work. The main reason is, new work has better optics--you go from nothing to something. Maintenance, unless it changes the cosmetics, looks about the same at the end as it did in the beginning. Boring! "What did we get for all that money??" citizens ask.
And maintenance is harder to budget for in a lump sum because you don't know how bad things are until you actually start the work. This is generally true of maintenance--anyone who has renovated an old home knows this. Until you open the wall, you don't know how much work needs to be done.
So what you do in government is start the maintenance projects you have at highest priority, find out how bad things are, and then do as much as you can with the budget you have. It it's not enough to complete an atomic unit of work, you just sit on partially-done work until more money becomes available.
And ironically, the irritation caused by unfinished work can help get you the money to finish the work.
If maintenance was properly budgeted, then the subway system could afford to do a full refresh all in one continuous go. Usually it's not, so usually they can't.
This most likely happens because of insufficient government funding for maintenance.
Government budgets reset every year; governments can't take unspent program money at the end on one fiscal year and bank it for next year. There is no way to "save up" for big expenses aside from directly allocating sufficient funds in the funding legislation.
That sort of lump allocation is a lot easier to get for new work. The main reason is, new work has better optics--you go from nothing to something. Maintenance, unless it changes the cosmetics, looks about the same at the end as it did in the beginning. Boring! "What did we get for all that money??" citizens ask.
And maintenance is harder to budget for in a lump sum because you don't know how bad things are until you actually start the work. This is generally true of maintenance--anyone who has renovated an old home knows this. Until you open the wall, you don't know how much work needs to be done.
So what you do in government is start the maintenance projects you have at highest priority, find out how bad things are, and then do as much as you can with the budget you have. It it's not enough to complete an atomic unit of work, you just sit on partially-done work until more money becomes available.
And ironically, the irritation caused by unfinished work can help get you the money to finish the work.
If maintenance was properly budgeted, then the subway system could afford to do a full refresh all in one continuous go. Usually it's not, so usually they can't.
Canada is seriously declining. Have you seen grocery store prices lately?
Most of the housing in smaller cities is getting very old, built to very poor standards. Requiring constant maintenance. The owners often still stuck in 25 year mortgages, fixing houses that will fall apart in less time than that.
Many of Schools haven't been updated in decades, despite having asbestos insulation.
I visited a former Eastern Block country this past summer. New roads, infrastructure and buildings everywhere. Built to a much higher standard too. Much better food in Restaurants too. Thinking of moving back to Europe.
Considering the 300 billion deficit this year alone, declining credit ratting, higher taxes. The money for infrastructure will be hard to come by in the next decade.
Most of the housing in smaller cities is getting very old, built to very poor standards. Requiring constant maintenance. The owners often still stuck in 25 year mortgages, fixing houses that will fall apart in less time than that.
Many of Schools haven't been updated in decades, despite having asbestos insulation.
I visited a former Eastern Block country this past summer. New roads, infrastructure and buildings everywhere. Built to a much higher standard too. Much better food in Restaurants too. Thinking of moving back to Europe.
Considering the 300 billion deficit this year alone, declining credit ratting, higher taxes. The money for infrastructure will be hard to come by in the next decade.
> I visited a former Eastern Block country this past summer. New roads, infrastructure and buildings everywhere. Built to a much higher standard too.
To be slightly simplistic, that’s probably more of a reflection on the generosity of Western European taxpayers than an inherent standard of the country you visited
To be slightly simplistic, that’s probably more of a reflection on the generosity of Western European taxpayers than an inherent standard of the country you visited
Point of order: grocery price rises are due to the pandemic, in part due to the cost of protecting agricultural temporary workers from COVID-19. World harvests of many crops have also not been good this year[0], which has also increased prices.
[0] http://www.fao.org/3/ca9803en/ca9803en.pdf
[0] http://www.fao.org/3/ca9803en/ca9803en.pdf
Failures and inefficiency is just as common in private companies. It's just not as visible usually.
Assuming we're not talking about private companies doing government projects, a private company will eventually run out of money if their projects fail. That's ostensibly why it's good to run certain things privately: a bunch of entities get a go at making the most popular widget and society gets the benefit of having various widgets available. The losers have their assets/staff recycled into the economy.
Not saying it always works.
Not saying it always works.
Companies can have more money and power than countries. There's not much keeping them from running into the same inefficiencies. Money is often secured through oligopolies that naturally occur, allowing enough money to be spent on inefficiency.
I wonder if you have never seen waste at work?
I wonder if you have never seen waste at work?
Well that's what I mean by ostensibly and "not saying it always works".
There's a long list of ways it can go wrong.
There's a long list of ways it can go wrong.
There’s plenty of reasons beyond corruption. Repaving a mile of third avenue in Seattle costs a lot more than a mile of downtown Wendell, Idaho which will cost a lot more than chip sealing a mile of dirt road just two miles away from the center of Wendell. Salaries are more expensive in big cities. The job is more complex as the amount of infrastructure beneath the road surface, which requires ongoing access, so lots of man holes. Repaving in a dense urban center requires removing the old pavement, in a rural setting it’ll just be piled on top until it’s been layered four or five times.
There's an explainer (in the aether) comparing the cost of 1 mile of subway in misc locations.
Cost of land is a surprisingly high factor.
I'm generally against eminent domain. Because it's abused so easily and so often. But I would also like the option to build our way out of our messes.
Failing to make the real estate more affordable, maybe we'll innovate our way out. Some combination of telework, The Boring Company, and cheap personal transportation options.
Cost of land is a surprisingly high factor.
I'm generally against eminent domain. Because it's abused so easily and so often. But I would also like the option to build our way out of our messes.
Failing to make the real estate more affordable, maybe we'll innovate our way out. Some combination of telework, The Boring Company, and cheap personal transportation options.
Strongtowns always starts with their answer and works backward to find questions. Your approach is similar... ie “it must be corruption”.
The answer is always the same for local governments. ~70% of expenditure is for operations, and 60% of that is for cops and fire.
The answer is always the same for local governments. ~70% of expenditure is for operations, and 60% of that is for cops and fire.
And that 60% does not include defined benefit pension and retiree healthcare benefits that are understated or unstated because the government can use extra rosy assumptions and/or just skip saving money and then dump those expenses on future taxpayers.
Usually it does at the city/county level. The states usually are the only ones with the legislative power to duck payments.
What rules require the use of proper assumptions or funding at the city/county level?
There are many large cities with hugely underfunded pension plans.
There are many large cities with hugely underfunded pension plans.
90% of state/local pensions are administered at the state level.
Usually state plans mandate contributions to some degree -- in my state (NY) the year after a stock market crash is always a mess for schools and localities because the state requires increased contributions to make up for investment target misses.
Even where the state isn't a good or responsible pension administrator, the pension system membership usually takes the obligation off of the city/county balance sheet. States have sovereign immunity, so at the end of the day, the pensioners will take a haircut.
Usually state plans mandate contributions to some degree -- in my state (NY) the year after a stock market crash is always a mess for schools and localities because the state requires increased contributions to make up for investment target misses.
Even where the state isn't a good or responsible pension administrator, the pension system membership usually takes the obligation off of the city/county balance sheet. States have sovereign immunity, so at the end of the day, the pensioners will take a haircut.
> 90% of state/local pensions are administered at the state level.
Source? There is no shortage of articles online describing cities’ budget woes due to underfunded pensions needing increased contributions.
Jacksonville, Dallas, San Diego, San Bernardino, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, the list goes on and on. The state government has a pension fund for state employees, cities can have one for city employees, counties can have one for county employees.
Illinois actually codifies in its state constitution the fact that the government may NOT alter pension benefits.
Here are some links about the obligations of individual cities:
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2020-financial...
https://www.data-z.org/pension_database/
Source? There is no shortage of articles online describing cities’ budget woes due to underfunded pensions needing increased contributions.
Jacksonville, Dallas, San Diego, San Bernardino, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, the list goes on and on. The state government has a pension fund for state employees, cities can have one for city employees, counties can have one for county employees.
Illinois actually codifies in its state constitution the fact that the government may NOT alter pension benefits.
Here are some links about the obligations of individual cities:
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2020-financial...
https://www.data-z.org/pension_database/
City budgets aren't the only balance sheets.
Counties, corporations, charters, port authorities, states. I couldn't guess at all the structures and financing schemes that have been concocted.
For instance, Port Authority of NY and NJ builds, owns, and operates a massive amount of infrastructure. Completely apart from NYC. The Port Authority in my own region is its own separate nominally democratic fiefdom with its own powers to raise taxes, fees, etc.
Counties, corporations, charters, port authorities, states. I couldn't guess at all the structures and financing schemes that have been concocted.
For instance, Port Authority of NY and NJ builds, owns, and operates a massive amount of infrastructure. Completely apart from NYC. The Port Authority in my own region is its own separate nominally democratic fiefdom with its own powers to raise taxes, fees, etc.
This is the problem of politics in a nutshell. We tend to have strong opinions, as is out democratic duty. It's impossible (or very hard) to form opinions based on specifics. So we fall into tragically cliched thinking.
"The problem" is whatever the problem always is. Maybe its Capitalism. Maybe its "kickbacks, overregulation, collusion in bidding, and simple "match the budget" bids" It's probably whatever your worldview always points to.
"The problem" is whatever the problem always is. Maybe its Capitalism. Maybe its "kickbacks, overregulation, collusion in bidding, and simple "match the budget" bids" It's probably whatever your worldview always points to.
Silly me. I foolishly thought that careful investigations and analyses of situations like the ones described in TFA could help us figure out what "the problem" actually is.
The classic example of this is the 580/880 intersection replacement in Oakland/Alameda. It's a crucial intersection for the East Bay so when a tank truck caused a fire that collapsed it, the tender issued provided a massive bonus for each day ahead of projected schedule you achieved.
The winner completed it far faster than similar projects, and under projected budget, taking it all in from the bonus. Every day he was slow, he lost money. So the incentives were great, and the winning contractor did a great job. So we have the construction technology and we have the policy technology.
But similar projects frequently take forever. Why is that? We know how to make them fast, cheap, and good, clearly. We know how to set up the incentives on a per-task basis so we will do that as well. So I suspect it is because they actually aren't crucial. So you sell the buyer (the populace) on the price tag based on the supposed importance, but you actually do the work on the real importance. The gap between the two allows for profit for politically connected contractors like Tutor Perini and also for make-work for powerful groups like construction unions. What we don't know is how to set up the incentives such that good per-task incentives will be put in place.
In fact, I'd say that the true importance of any slow project is likely very low. In California, the following projects should not have started:
* CA HSR
* SF Central Line
During their lifetimes they will not yield positive economic utility.
The winner completed it far faster than similar projects, and under projected budget, taking it all in from the bonus. Every day he was slow, he lost money. So the incentives were great, and the winning contractor did a great job. So we have the construction technology and we have the policy technology.
But similar projects frequently take forever. Why is that? We know how to make them fast, cheap, and good, clearly. We know how to set up the incentives on a per-task basis so we will do that as well. So I suspect it is because they actually aren't crucial. So you sell the buyer (the populace) on the price tag based on the supposed importance, but you actually do the work on the real importance. The gap between the two allows for profit for politically connected contractors like Tutor Perini and also for make-work for powerful groups like construction unions. What we don't know is how to set up the incentives such that good per-task incentives will be put in place.
In fact, I'd say that the true importance of any slow project is likely very low. In California, the following projects should not have started:
* CA HSR
* SF Central Line
During their lifetimes they will not yield positive economic utility.
Wouldn't an incentive to get it done quick encourage cutting corners? It's critical infrastructure, sure, but all the more reason it should be fixed properly AND quickly.
Yes, you are right. You couple it with other constraints and an audit to ensure it's done well. I did not state the entire thing for brevity.
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Don't forget no incentive to be efficient or innovate better techniques / technologies on the part of both the city as a whole and individual employees. Government is the least accountable of all organizations and therefore the least effective at any given task.
I'm not sure what DFW and TXDOT do right but they routinely bring projects in on time and on budget (if not under). Two large projects that come to mind is the HighFive and Grapevine Connector. Both were huge and the High Five made headlines for some new bridge making machine the contractor invented. Whatever they're doing it seems to be working.
The projects may be on time and under budget, but from a citizen's perspective the transportation situation in DFW is excruciating. Endless construction, confusing junctions, deceptively labeled toll roads, and an NTTA site that won't let you use secure passwords (or security questions) to register. Give me fewer freeways and more public transit options any day, thanks.
Nobody doing critical infrastructure, public or private will be allowed to go under. Look at the privatised rail companies in the UK or the banks in 2008 for examples of this.
Competition and markets definitely do raise standards where that competition is fair and genuine and well regulated. Usually though, privatisation results in state awarded monopolies where little more gets done than before and costs rise because of the need to show a profit or bail out accrued losses because at the end of the day, the infrastructure has to keep running.
Maybe we can create a marketplace for bidding on infrastructure work job by job and maybe, it could be profitable for everyone. I’m not so sure though.
Maybe we can create a marketplace for bidding on infrastructure work job by job and maybe, it could be profitable for everyone. I’m not so sure though.
Many private rail operators in the UK have been allowed to collapse, UK gov has set up "operators of last resort" which are run by the government to take over services when that happens. Pre-pandemic, the East Coast Mainline and Northern operations were run by them after the private operators walked away on the verge of collapsing
Precisely, they were bailed out at the government’s expense. The trains are still running.
They have the opposite incentive. At a company (A good one), if you try something risky (New technology) and it doesn't 100% pan out, you can cut your losses. In a system with low level buyers managing the contract and alot of higher ups able to say 'no' you get this self defeating cycle. However, Elon was able to bully his way into contracts with his solution (Boring Company) cause:
A.) he's famous,
B.) He's protested to the GAO a number of times when he didn't get his way. (SpaceX, and original chicago build)
I see the same thing with private enterprise everyday.
Key difference being that there’s actually some mechanism for private enterprises to fail and go out of business.
You can vote political parties out of office. Locally, you can vote the corrupt mayor and all his cronies out of office and install a different one.
That requires (1) the failure to be visible and self-evidently the result of political processes and decisions (2) people to act on (1) and actually vote (3) alternate candidates that have a genuinely different plan.
It's not that easy to ensure that all 3 happen.
It's not that easy to ensure that all 3 happen.
>That requires (1) the failure to be visible and self-evidently the result of political processes and decisions (2) people to act on (1) and actually vote (3) alternate candidates that have a genuinely different plan.
>It's not that easy to ensure that all 3 happen.
That raises a couple of questions:
1. Why aren't problems visible?
Is it a failure of local government to disclose how they're spending your money? If so, why do you and your neighbors allow that? It is your money and your town after all. Especially since, even in a medium-sized city, a few hundred people who care about their quality of life can completely upend politics as usual.
2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?
Again, this seems rather odd to me. I can certainly understand (although I don't agree) that folks may think that Federal, and even some state elections don't give them any say. But local elections are a very different story.
3. Is it really true (as you seem to contend) Is it your contention that overwhelming majorities of people everywhere just don't care about the places they live, or for what purposes their tax dollars are used?
>It's not that easy to ensure that all 3 happen.
That raises a couple of questions:
1. Why aren't problems visible?
Is it a failure of local government to disclose how they're spending your money? If so, why do you and your neighbors allow that? It is your money and your town after all. Especially since, even in a medium-sized city, a few hundred people who care about their quality of life can completely upend politics as usual.
2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?
Again, this seems rather odd to me. I can certainly understand (although I don't agree) that folks may think that Federal, and even some state elections don't give them any say. But local elections are a very different story.
3. Is it really true (as you seem to contend) Is it your contention that overwhelming majorities of people everywhere just don't care about the places they live, or for what purposes their tax dollars are used?
> 1. Why aren't problems visible?
Can you actually see the almost complete failure of garbage disposal and recycling in your community? You cannot, because the failure doesn't happen there (mostly), and because most of us are not interested enough to ask (or research) the questions we would need to in order to understand how badly the people tasked with taking care of this have screwed it up.
> 2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?
Right now, I live in a mostly rural county in New Mexico. Before that, I lived right on the edge of Philadelphia, 300 yards outside the city line but closer to downtown than most of the city. I've lived in lots of other places too, both in the US and Europe, even Israel. In all of those places, a local vote is vote for someone who will be extremely constrained by the status quo and the larger political entities the surround us. So sure, I could vote for someone who might take some steps to improve a particular aspect of how the county/city/town/village deals with this or that, but it will always be taking place within the context of legislative, economic, energetic and social forces that are much, much harder to change. This can make it challenging to see the virtue of local elections, and thus to care about them in a way the reflects the extent to which we do actualy care about our communities.
Can you actually see the almost complete failure of garbage disposal and recycling in your community? You cannot, because the failure doesn't happen there (mostly), and because most of us are not interested enough to ask (or research) the questions we would need to in order to understand how badly the people tasked with taking care of this have screwed it up.
> 2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?
Right now, I live in a mostly rural county in New Mexico. Before that, I lived right on the edge of Philadelphia, 300 yards outside the city line but closer to downtown than most of the city. I've lived in lots of other places too, both in the US and Europe, even Israel. In all of those places, a local vote is vote for someone who will be extremely constrained by the status quo and the larger political entities the surround us. So sure, I could vote for someone who might take some steps to improve a particular aspect of how the county/city/town/village deals with this or that, but it will always be taking place within the context of legislative, economic, energetic and social forces that are much, much harder to change. This can make it challenging to see the virtue of local elections, and thus to care about them in a way the reflects the extent to which we do actualy care about our communities.
But then equally why would these problems be solved by private enterprise?
Why would using private enterprise allow these jobs are going to be done better?
These are fundamentally unanswered questions in this thread.
We would have even less visibility than before - I got no idea how Microsoft delivers Windows or how a private hospital is tracking performance wise? But a government gives me some kind of mechanism to see this.
Government acts as an imperfect (as you have carefully detailed) intermediary between those the service provider and service recipient the citizen.
And it is only as imperfect as the system is designed, there are adjustments that can be made, slowly sure, but they can be made.
These are fundamentally unanswered questions in this thread.
We would have even less visibility than before - I got no idea how Microsoft delivers Windows or how a private hospital is tracking performance wise? But a government gives me some kind of mechanism to see this.
Government acts as an imperfect (as you have carefully detailed) intermediary between those the service provider and service recipient the citizen.
And it is only as imperfect as the system is designed, there are adjustments that can be made, slowly sure, but they can be made.
Eventually you need the superstars to do the innovative work. Elon musk & his top employees are not reproducible on demand
No, but it is obvious that Musk could mobilize a lot of talent that might have been spent on less innovative work elsewhere.
It is my suspicion that there is actually a lot more talented people than we tend to think and the real problem is educating and managing them well.
There is an interesting case of Florence, Italy, which in the 14th and 15th century produced an incredible set of world class painters. That school is unmatched until today. We think that world class painters must be principially very rare, but maybe not so much. In a relatively short span of time, recruiting mostly students from Northern Italy only, the Florence school could produce quite a significant percentage of artistic heritage of the whole humanity.
It is my suspicion that there is actually a lot more talented people than we tend to think and the real problem is educating and managing them well.
There is an interesting case of Florence, Italy, which in the 14th and 15th century produced an incredible set of world class painters. That school is unmatched until today. We think that world class painters must be principially very rare, but maybe not so much. In a relatively short span of time, recruiting mostly students from Northern Italy only, the Florence school could produce quite a significant percentage of artistic heritage of the whole humanity.
I don't understand what a bunch of engineers at one of Musk's companies, or the ease of generating bunch of very good painters in Firenze in the 15/1600s have to do with the problem of improving/fixing city/local governance.
Consider Hsue-Shen Tsien, father of Chinese rocketry. He returned to China in 1955, when it was a developing country. Talent can be built up, it depends on the environment.
Elon Musk, who got his start through his sapphire-mining family is the best example of that, he knows how important access to money and politicians is.
Elon Musk, who got his start through his sapphire-mining family is the best example of that, he knows how important access to money and politicians is.
I understand why you say this, and I used to think that way myself and it makes rational sense when you compare the way government runs when you look at how you most probably work in an efficient team, getting things done etc (or maybe not!) .
But..
This seems too simplistic a rule to apply to large and complicated projects which likely are the case with creating and maintaining infrastructure.
If private investment can't calculate expected return they don't do it and this often is the case with complicated projects there is often high risk involved and no easily attainable reward (from a financial perspective).
This is why public / government undertakes these projects because they know what the expected benefit is to society and are not driven by ROI in the same way as private enterprise.
Your model needs to take this into account in order to be more persuasive.
But..
This seems too simplistic a rule to apply to large and complicated projects which likely are the case with creating and maintaining infrastructure.
If private investment can't calculate expected return they don't do it and this often is the case with complicated projects there is often high risk involved and no easily attainable reward (from a financial perspective).
This is why public / government undertakes these projects because they know what the expected benefit is to society and are not driven by ROI in the same way as private enterprise.
Your model needs to take this into account in order to be more persuasive.
Government's can and do fail.
It's extremely rare. Ask yourself how many companies from the 20th century are now defunct vs government programs (or governments in general).
You can probably count on one hand the number of governments that have "gone out of business" (so to speak), in the last 40-50 years. You'll need several people to tabulate the set of private enterprises that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A'd out of existence over the same timespan, in the US alone.
You can probably count on one hand the number of governments that have "gone out of business" (so to speak), in the last 40-50 years. You'll need several people to tabulate the set of private enterprises that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A'd out of existence over the same timespan, in the US alone.
The last 40-50 years have been pretty stable. But even so I’d guess that 20% of world governments have functionally gone out of business.
If you pick the 20th century, then the number of governments that have “failed” is really large as a proportion of total governments. We think of countries like France as having been around for hundreds of years, but their current constitution is only 62 years old. Romania had three different governments in about 50 years. Japan, China, and Vietnam all replaced their governments. Czechoslovakia came into being and disappeared.
If you pick the 20th century, then the number of governments that have “failed” is really large as a proportion of total governments. We think of countries like France as having been around for hundreds of years, but their current constitution is only 62 years old. Romania had three different governments in about 50 years. Japan, China, and Vietnam all replaced their governments. Czechoslovakia came into being and disappeared.
If you count having lost effective control of a significant part of their country as a government having failed, there are plenty. No-one would say that Syria or Libya have a single functioning government controlling the country at the moment, and you can throw swathes of central Africa in there as well.
Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of.
Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of.
> If you count having lost effective control of a significant part of their country as a government having failed, there are plenty.
Losing control of a significant part of a country isn't comparable to private enterprise failure, it's more comparable to the CEO of a company being replaced.
Imagine what retail would have been like if, instead of Sears being essentially replaced, we just elected a different set of leaders to run the same organization.
> No-one would say that Syria or Libya have a single functioning government controlling the country at the moment, and you can throw swathes of central Africa in there as well.
Right, and in general we consider that instability to be a bad thing, and a key goal of UNESCO (and adjacent organizations) is to make African nations as stable as Western democracies. That kind of stability just isn't sought out in the private sector.
> Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of.
If you were to ask me to pick a system where change happens through violence and bloodshed (civil wars, coups) vs peaceful financial transactions (M&A, bankruptcy) — I would choose the latter any day of the week.
Losing control of a significant part of a country isn't comparable to private enterprise failure, it's more comparable to the CEO of a company being replaced.
Imagine what retail would have been like if, instead of Sears being essentially replaced, we just elected a different set of leaders to run the same organization.
> No-one would say that Syria or Libya have a single functioning government controlling the country at the moment, and you can throw swathes of central Africa in there as well.
Right, and in general we consider that instability to be a bad thing, and a key goal of UNESCO (and adjacent organizations) is to make African nations as stable as Western democracies. That kind of stability just isn't sought out in the private sector.
> Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of.
If you were to ask me to pick a system where change happens through violence and bloodshed (civil wars, coups) vs peaceful financial transactions (M&A, bankruptcy) — I would choose the latter any day of the week.
An awful lot of this list is less than 100 years old.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutio...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutio...
Of the items in that list < 100 years old, the vast majority came about through violence via revolution, civil war, genocide, or regime change. That's a bug, and not a feature. Peaceful restructuring of government is rare, and when it happens, it’s noteworthy.
In contrast, peaceful restructuring of private enterprise (via startup incorporation, bankruptcy, or M&A) is just a way of life. People didn't die when PanAm, TWA, and Circuit City went out of business. People didn’t die when GM was restructured.
In contrast, peaceful restructuring of private enterprise (via startup incorporation, bankruptcy, or M&A) is just a way of life. People didn't die when PanAm, TWA, and Circuit City went out of business. People didn’t die when GM was restructured.
This criticism and comparison is ridiculous, there is no such thing as 'violent restructuring of private enterprise' because companies don't have armies, governments do.
And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
> This criticism and comparison is ridiculous
It's really not. We have more than enough history to corroborate.
> And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
Right, and these events are rare and noteworthy also — the only other time that had happened before that was during the 1930's. The same cannot be said for structural changes in government. In addition, if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars in the Middle East, the Balkan Kosovo War, the World Wars (and Holocaust), or what's going on in Central Africa...I really don't know what to say.
It's really not. We have more than enough history to corroborate.
> And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
Right, and these events are rare and noteworthy also — the only other time that had happened before that was during the 1930's. The same cannot be said for structural changes in government. In addition, if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars in the Middle East, the Balkan Kosovo War, the World Wars (and Holocaust), or what's going on in Central Africa...I really don't know what to say.
> if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars
There's more people dying each year due to lack of health care access in the US alone than multiples of the Kosovo War.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
Add to that all the drug overdoses in the US for just 2019:
> Drug overdose deaths in the United States rose 4.6% in 2019 to 70,980
https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2020-07-16-cdc-drug-overdo...
That's over 100k deaths per year that's definitely strongly linked to economic despair.
There's more people dying each year due to lack of health care access in the US alone than multiples of the Kosovo War.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
Add to that all the drug overdoses in the US for just 2019:
> Drug overdose deaths in the United States rose 4.6% in 2019 to 70,980
https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2020-07-16-cdc-drug-overdo...
That's over 100k deaths per year that's definitely strongly linked to economic despair.
Uh, just look at the Arab world.
Is the Lebanese government "in business" or no? That is a question with fuzzy answer, but if no government is 0 and competent government is 1, Lebanese government right now may be 0.02 or so.
Czechoslovakia, where I was born, disintegrated in 1992. The transition was peaceful, but the federal government simply is no more.
Is the Lebanese government "in business" or no? That is a question with fuzzy answer, but if no government is 0 and competent government is 1, Lebanese government right now may be 0.02 or so.
Czechoslovakia, where I was born, disintegrated in 1992. The transition was peaceful, but the federal government simply is no more.
Not really...
I mean, in theory, democracy ensures that inefficient leaders lose office, except that reality rarely lives up to theory.
IRL, the business models of most major tech companies are pretty impervious to most inefficiency. Most of their leadership is beyond the reach of shareholder discipline too. Monopoly makes a good moat.
Banks aren't accountable for their own losses. How many more examples do we need? Large company bankruptcies are a rarity, and when they do happen (eg american airlines) the resulting mess just enforces the bailouts mentality. Dealing with them is an exercise in kafkaesque patience and it is impossible to work out where their mindless bureaucracy starts and regulation begins.
In 2020, an anti-bureaucracy worldview that sees the dividing line as public/private is foolishly anachronistic.
Sure "some" mechanism exists for them to go out of business. That's about as useful as the ballot for creating efficiency.
I mean, in theory, democracy ensures that inefficient leaders lose office, except that reality rarely lives up to theory.
IRL, the business models of most major tech companies are pretty impervious to most inefficiency. Most of their leadership is beyond the reach of shareholder discipline too. Monopoly makes a good moat.
Banks aren't accountable for their own losses. How many more examples do we need? Large company bankruptcies are a rarity, and when they do happen (eg american airlines) the resulting mess just enforces the bailouts mentality. Dealing with them is an exercise in kafkaesque patience and it is impossible to work out where their mindless bureaucracy starts and regulation begins.
In 2020, an anti-bureaucracy worldview that sees the dividing line as public/private is foolishly anachronistic.
Sure "some" mechanism exists for them to go out of business. That's about as useful as the ballot for creating efficiency.
> I mean, in theory, democracy ensures that inefficient leaders lose office, except that reality rarely lives up to theory.
It's not just replacing inefficient leaders that's an important mechanism for "efficiency", it's also restructuring organizations. Democracy, at best, just means that you have different leaders, but the mostly the same set of bureaucrats operating the same programs. Private enterprises, on the other hand, allow us to whole-sale replace entire purveyors of goods & services with entirely different structures of organization in a manner that's difficult to reproduce for a monolithic public monopoly.
Imagine what retail would have been like if, instead of Sears being essentially replaced, we just elected a different set of leaders to run the same organization.
> IRL, the business models of most major tech companies are pretty impervious to most inefficiency.
When a business is unable to collect enough money to continue operating, it goes out of business. Almost no major tech company has been able to continue operating without either sustaining themselves, or collecting investment.
> Most of their leadership is beyond the reach of shareholder discipline too. Monopoly makes a good moat.
Sure, and monopolies are bad for the same reason. But most industries aren't run by monopolies. You only hear about the ones that are, because they're so noteworthy.
> Sure "some" mechanism exists for them to go out of business. That's about as useful as the ballot for creating efficiency.
I don't think that's true at all. You can count on one hand the government programs that have gone defunct in the last 60 years. The number of private enterprises that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A’d out of existence over the same timespan is almost countless.
You're 100% right about the banks and bailouts, though. That's not a private enterprise problem, though — that's a "our government is doing a stupid thing" problem.
It's not just replacing inefficient leaders that's an important mechanism for "efficiency", it's also restructuring organizations. Democracy, at best, just means that you have different leaders, but the mostly the same set of bureaucrats operating the same programs. Private enterprises, on the other hand, allow us to whole-sale replace entire purveyors of goods & services with entirely different structures of organization in a manner that's difficult to reproduce for a monolithic public monopoly.
Imagine what retail would have been like if, instead of Sears being essentially replaced, we just elected a different set of leaders to run the same organization.
> IRL, the business models of most major tech companies are pretty impervious to most inefficiency.
When a business is unable to collect enough money to continue operating, it goes out of business. Almost no major tech company has been able to continue operating without either sustaining themselves, or collecting investment.
> Most of their leadership is beyond the reach of shareholder discipline too. Monopoly makes a good moat.
Sure, and monopolies are bad for the same reason. But most industries aren't run by monopolies. You only hear about the ones that are, because they're so noteworthy.
> Sure "some" mechanism exists for them to go out of business. That's about as useful as the ballot for creating efficiency.
I don't think that's true at all. You can count on one hand the government programs that have gone defunct in the last 60 years. The number of private enterprises that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A’d out of existence over the same timespan is almost countless.
You're 100% right about the banks and bailouts, though. That's not a private enterprise problem, though — that's a "our government is doing a stupid thing" problem.
>>most industries aren't run by monopolies
Mineral exploration & refining, media, technology, finance & banking, military industry, online retail... what % of the economy are we at with just these?
Market discipline, creative destruction and such work to full effect for restaurants, hairdressers, landscaping... It's a small part of the economy, but good. Pretty unbureaucratic and efficient. Well functioning markets are great when you have them, they just aren't most of the economy.
Some industries (eg FMCGs, shipping) are concentrated, but a degree of market discipline still operates. Not like hairdressing, but there is at least price competition within a limited frame. Some private industries are just impossible to pick apart from government: Health and pharmaceuticals, all government contracting, real estate, etc. Most market mechanisms don't apply here either. They certainly don't apply in "systemic" situations.
It is a fact that a lot (arguably most) of the economy is very far from the market ideal that restaurants operate within. It's not totally black and white, but thinking of these issues in a 1970s frame is silly.
That doesn't mean private and public are identical, but a Smithian pin factory is as bad a model for most of the economy as a local fire department.
Mineral exploration & refining, media, technology, finance & banking, military industry, online retail... what % of the economy are we at with just these?
Market discipline, creative destruction and such work to full effect for restaurants, hairdressers, landscaping... It's a small part of the economy, but good. Pretty unbureaucratic and efficient. Well functioning markets are great when you have them, they just aren't most of the economy.
Some industries (eg FMCGs, shipping) are concentrated, but a degree of market discipline still operates. Not like hairdressing, but there is at least price competition within a limited frame. Some private industries are just impossible to pick apart from government: Health and pharmaceuticals, all government contracting, real estate, etc. Most market mechanisms don't apply here either. They certainly don't apply in "systemic" situations.
It is a fact that a lot (arguably most) of the economy is very far from the market ideal that restaurants operate within. It's not totally black and white, but thinking of these issues in a 1970s frame is silly.
That doesn't mean private and public are identical, but a Smithian pin factory is as bad a model for most of the economy as a local fire department.
> Mineral exploration & refining, media, technology, finance & banking, military industry, online retail... what % of the economy are we at with just these?
Mineral exploration: https://www.manta.com/mb_35_E31F37VC_000/mineral_exploration
Refining: https://www.mckinseyenergyinsights.com/resources/refinery-re...
Technology: https://medium.com/@progressivepolicyinstitute/10-things-you...
Military industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors
Finance & Banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks_in_the_U...
Online retail: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
None of these are monopolies. These are all concentrated, but not monopolized. To your later point, market discipline still functions in concentrated industries.
> Market discipline, creative destruction and such work to full effect for restaurants, hairdressers, landscaping... It's a small part of the economy.
The vast majority of industries are either operated by many small players, or a few large players (concentration). Actual monopolies are extraordinarily rare.
> Health and pharmaceuticals, all government contracting, Real Estate, etc. No market mechanism here either
This is also untrue.
Health & pharmaceuticals: Same story. concentration? Perhaps. Monopoly? Not by a long shot. You have major players like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, GSK, Amgen BV, Abbott, McKesson, etc etc.
Ditto real estate: https://www.propertymanagerinsider.com/the-biggest-u-s-based...
The private sector isn't a silver bullet, and there's always a place for democracy and governments. But we have to be real about what works where, and what doesn't.
Mineral exploration: https://www.manta.com/mb_35_E31F37VC_000/mineral_exploration
Refining: https://www.mckinseyenergyinsights.com/resources/refinery-re...
Technology: https://medium.com/@progressivepolicyinstitute/10-things-you...
Military industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors
Finance & Banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks_in_the_U...
Online retail: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
None of these are monopolies. These are all concentrated, but not monopolized. To your later point, market discipline still functions in concentrated industries.
> Market discipline, creative destruction and such work to full effect for restaurants, hairdressers, landscaping... It's a small part of the economy.
The vast majority of industries are either operated by many small players, or a few large players (concentration). Actual monopolies are extraordinarily rare.
> Health and pharmaceuticals, all government contracting, Real Estate, etc. No market mechanism here either
This is also untrue.
Health & pharmaceuticals: Same story. concentration? Perhaps. Monopoly? Not by a long shot. You have major players like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, GSK, Amgen BV, Abbott, McKesson, etc etc.
Ditto real estate: https://www.propertymanagerinsider.com/the-biggest-u-s-based...
The private sector isn't a silver bullet, and there's always a place for democracy and governments. But we have to be real about what works where, and what doesn't.
By your definition, I don't think I could sneak the east india trading company as an example of a monopoly.
We we speaking in a context. If we can't agree that any of these industries are monopolized... If we have to start by assuming that the market dynamics of a pin factory are at play in commercial banking... IDK where to go exactly.
Besides that, the other examples I gave were explicitly of non monopolies. Market dynamics like competition, creative destruction and such are not in operation. Monopoly (extreme concentration, trusts, oligopoly, monopsony, oligopsony, captive bottlenecks... do we really have to do this or can we just use "monopoly" as shorthand like normal people?)
>> we have to be real about what works where, and what doesn't.
We have to be real about what is a market, in the Smithian sense is, and what isn't. Military industry is not a market. There are a few big players with most of the market. One buyer. Political dynamics are many times more important than market dynamics. Same for commercial banking, pharmaceuticals etc.
In 2020 it is simply trite to look to the relative efficiency of government vs private (non-market) as the lens through which everything is seen. If we have to look through that lens, lets at least look through it honestly. Private vs Public has nothing to do with market discipline because market discipline doesn't exist for most of the economy... particularly if you measure it by market cap. Monopolism (using the term widely) is just one of the reasons, but there are others. The world is complicated and commercial banking is not subject to the same dynamics as local plumbing businesses. Pretending that they are is madness.
BTW, Adam Smith would have been on my side of this debate, as would have most of the old liberals. Market ideology has gone so far that people don't even need a market to apply it to.
We we speaking in a context. If we can't agree that any of these industries are monopolized... If we have to start by assuming that the market dynamics of a pin factory are at play in commercial banking... IDK where to go exactly.
Besides that, the other examples I gave were explicitly of non monopolies. Market dynamics like competition, creative destruction and such are not in operation. Monopoly (extreme concentration, trusts, oligopoly, monopsony, oligopsony, captive bottlenecks... do we really have to do this or can we just use "monopoly" as shorthand like normal people?)
>> we have to be real about what works where, and what doesn't.
We have to be real about what is a market, in the Smithian sense is, and what isn't. Military industry is not a market. There are a few big players with most of the market. One buyer. Political dynamics are many times more important than market dynamics. Same for commercial banking, pharmaceuticals etc.
In 2020 it is simply trite to look to the relative efficiency of government vs private (non-market) as the lens through which everything is seen. If we have to look through that lens, lets at least look through it honestly. Private vs Public has nothing to do with market discipline because market discipline doesn't exist for most of the economy... particularly if you measure it by market cap. Monopolism (using the term widely) is just one of the reasons, but there are others. The world is complicated and commercial banking is not subject to the same dynamics as local plumbing businesses. Pretending that they are is madness.
BTW, Adam Smith would have been on my side of this debate, as would have most of the old liberals. Market ideology has gone so far that people don't even need a market to apply it to.
Sure, but if they screw up it’s some poor investors money, not my tax money.
How can that be a useful model for building and maintaining roads, water supplies, sewers and so forth?
I thought the main point of the article was that cities spend $X in infrastructure to get $Y in short term profit with $Z in long term costs.
Sum($Z) >> Sum($Y) with $X paid for my subsidies.
Sum($Z) >> Sum($Y) with $X paid for my subsidies.
Thank you. This was my first thought too, and then for some reason I felt like a jerk for going there.
Why is the high cost of western labor not in your list. Labor is the main cost.
We need construction robots.
We need construction robots.
It’s much more complicated than that. If you’re interested, Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations compares transit construction costs across countries, for example why some countries like Spain and South Korea can build subways for 1/10 the cost per mile of USA construction projects. It basically comes down to “no one tried to make this cheaper”. Culture and history seem to be the primary drivers, more than labor costs, unions, corruption, environmental regulations, NIMBYs, etc.
Thanks, this is a great read[1]. The incuriosity he sees as the reason why nothing is done is something I've seen a lot of, and have been thinking more and more about. As he notes, it's not just lack of interest in making things better, but refusing to believe better is possible even when presented with examples of better systems.
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
Many local US governments establish prevailing wage-laws that set minimum wages for construction jobs that private contractors have to abide by if they go work for the government.
https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.as...
https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.as...
> no one tried to make this cheaper
What do you mean by this?
What do you mean by this?
It was never an organizational goal to reduce the cost of delivering infrastructure. Picture an overweight, out of shape person. Literally anything you do can improve health - portion size, macro balance, calorie restriction, daily exercise, intensity of exercise, change of environment, removal of food temptations, variety of exercise, cardio, weights, sports, etc. You don’t have to be a dietician or personal trainer to help this person. But if they don’t want to lose weight, they’re not going to try any of these.
Much of American infrastructure provision is like that hypothetical person - the goal is never to to spend less. Political and organizational goals are to increase budget, increase headcount, deliver ribbon cutting ceremonies, avoid affecting neighborhoods with powerful constituents, hit service coverage goals, create construction and operations jobs, etc. There’s no one whose job evaluation and advancement is based on reducing costs.
Much of American infrastructure provision is like that hypothetical person - the goal is never to to spend less. Political and organizational goals are to increase budget, increase headcount, deliver ribbon cutting ceremonies, avoid affecting neighborhoods with powerful constituents, hit service coverage goals, create construction and operations jobs, etc. There’s no one whose job evaluation and advancement is based on reducing costs.
Same projects in Western Europe are coming in significantly lower. Labor is cited as the main cost but it’s easy to hide corruption in labor costs.
But Western Europe (EU) has the benefit of temporarily importing cheap East European (Romania, Poland etc) under skilled workers to do the heavy lifting.
Aren't there like 10 million illegal immigrants in the US who serve similar function?
In NYC, the labor law requires paying "prevailing wage", which NYC decided is $100k+/year. See https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/nyc-wage... No wonder that all public projects are so expensive.
Presumably not for public contracts.
Western European Countries usually have a law in place that labor brought in for these contracts has to be paid the same wage as local labor.
This isn’t NYC. We outsourced to places like this before Mexico and China were options.
That is not a problem if you got "high cost labor" taxpayers.
We have "construction robots" already. It's called foreign labour and no one in the West would dare suggest bringing them in for one-off large infrastructure projects regardless of how many cost-benefit-analyses you can get the smartest economists on Earth to produce, nor the willingness of the laborers to do it.
It's interesting that so many of the responses mention the high costs of infrastructure upkeep is due to the density and complexity of the built environment in which is exists. The article however is pushing for denser development so there is less infrastructure to maintain. Interesting balance between the two opposing development patterns, both of which appear to lead to high maintenance costs.
The general principle is that we haven't figured out yet how to deal with monopolist markets (in other words, situations where there is no market). Competitive markets lead to high efficiency but there are many situations, often public projects, where there's no competition.
They're spending other people's money.
But how they get the money and from who is a factor too.
This always happens when real property is taxed rather than commerce, and the amount of land available for development is limited or fixed.
To start with all land is taxed according to its initial assessment, after that revenues can not increase without raising rates and/or further developing parcels to increase their taxable value.
Both of which are unsustainable in the face of any inflation at all.
Each of which have their staunch supporters at odds with the other.
If only rate increases are considered, rate increases will have to outpace inflation or the taxing authority will go bankrupt.
The taxing authority can not be allowed to fail especially since the original purpose of this type tax is for the taxpayer to go bankrupt before the nobility does.
Eventually the _landowner_ will be assessed more tax than the land itself brings in, and will require _owners_ having outsized wealth from other sources, often only multigenerational prosperity will be sufficient.
At the other extreme where revenue growth comes only from further property development, pressure is greatest on undeveloped properties having the biggest upside potential.
New infrastructure is built at the expense of the old, spread more widely, and naturally not yet having future inflated maintenance costs incurred.
Little hand-waving is needed when a tax payer & collector are all prospering over the deal in the short term and there is some plausibility to behave as if future prosperity for all taxpayers will increase at the rate enjoyed by those involved with the development. Surely making costly things easier by then.
Inflation makes it impossible to know for sure anyway.
Mix and match these growing costs across citizenry which is not becoming more prosperous, and eventually there is no discretionary wealth except among the few who overcame the inflationary toll.
Taxing commerce instead of property allows revenue to grow at the rate of real prosperity unlimited. With the risk that revenue will drop when prosperity drops, or the authority will go bankrupt at the same time as the general citizenry in such a case.
Not a realistic risk since the authority will have enough credit to delay its own bankruptcy until after the majority of the citizens are ruined.
I guess the point of view about what kind of tax could ideally fund infrastructure indefinitely depends on whether you are a lowly taxable subject or a high-born guv'nor.
But how they get the money and from who is a factor too.
This always happens when real property is taxed rather than commerce, and the amount of land available for development is limited or fixed.
To start with all land is taxed according to its initial assessment, after that revenues can not increase without raising rates and/or further developing parcels to increase their taxable value.
Both of which are unsustainable in the face of any inflation at all.
Each of which have their staunch supporters at odds with the other.
If only rate increases are considered, rate increases will have to outpace inflation or the taxing authority will go bankrupt.
The taxing authority can not be allowed to fail especially since the original purpose of this type tax is for the taxpayer to go bankrupt before the nobility does.
Eventually the _landowner_ will be assessed more tax than the land itself brings in, and will require _owners_ having outsized wealth from other sources, often only multigenerational prosperity will be sufficient.
At the other extreme where revenue growth comes only from further property development, pressure is greatest on undeveloped properties having the biggest upside potential.
New infrastructure is built at the expense of the old, spread more widely, and naturally not yet having future inflated maintenance costs incurred.
Little hand-waving is needed when a tax payer & collector are all prospering over the deal in the short term and there is some plausibility to behave as if future prosperity for all taxpayers will increase at the rate enjoyed by those involved with the development. Surely making costly things easier by then.
Inflation makes it impossible to know for sure anyway.
Mix and match these growing costs across citizenry which is not becoming more prosperous, and eventually there is no discretionary wealth except among the few who overcame the inflationary toll.
Taxing commerce instead of property allows revenue to grow at the rate of real prosperity unlimited. With the risk that revenue will drop when prosperity drops, or the authority will go bankrupt at the same time as the general citizenry in such a case.
Not a realistic risk since the authority will have enough credit to delay its own bankruptcy until after the majority of the citizens are ruined.
I guess the point of view about what kind of tax could ideally fund infrastructure indefinitely depends on whether you are a lowly taxable subject or a high-born guv'nor.
> The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure [...] To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year.
As best I can tell, the author was saying that Lafayette is spending only $150 / ($3300 + $150) =~ 4% of what it needs to spend to maintain its roads and drainage systems. That seems implausible. I wonder whether he has made an odd assumption: "currently, 10% of taxes go to maintenance of infrastructure; thus, if we increase taxes by $3,300, only 10% of the increase will go to maintenance of infrastructure." That odd reasoning might account for his "need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year" claim.
As best I can tell, the author was saying that Lafayette is spending only $150 / ($3300 + $150) =~ 4% of what it needs to spend to maintain its roads and drainage systems. That seems implausible. I wonder whether he has made an odd assumption: "currently, 10% of taxes go to maintenance of infrastructure; thus, if we increase taxes by $3,300, only 10% of the increase will go to maintenance of infrastructure." That odd reasoning might account for his "need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year" claim.
It can happend when towns grow quickly and the city sell the parcels for a significant amount of money.
In Denmark parcels are often sold for $50-100.000 in popular areas. This gives the town a significant amount of one-shot money.
If they use that one-shot money for running expenses rather than investments (in e.g. subways), then the town will go bankrupt when there are no new buyers of parcels.
It's somewhat like a ponzi scheme.
In Denmark parcels are often sold for $50-100.000 in popular areas. This gives the town a significant amount of one-shot money.
If they use that one-shot money for running expenses rather than investments (in e.g. subways), then the town will go bankrupt when there are no new buyers of parcels.
It's somewhat like a ponzi scheme.
> If they use that one-shot money for running expenses rather than investments (in e.g. subways), then the town will go bankrupt when there are no new buyers of parcels.
This is what happened to Mississauga, Canada (a suburb of Toronto): for the last fifty years builders had to pay developer charges which was used to build the initial infrastructure.
However things were constructed in a typical North American, car-centric fashion. Now that most of the available land is covered in large-plot, low-density housing, they kind of realized the money train has reached its destination and they now have to maintain all of this infrastructure.
The same mayor (Hazel McCallion) was re-elected over and over for forty years, and so the same kind of thinking was perpetuated over that time period because no fresh thinking was introduced and things basically ran on inertia. She is often labelled the "Queen of Sprawl".
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/how-hazel-mccal...
* https://archive.is/DpKKp
There are of course some plots left, and over the past few years they've been building medium-density townhomes, as well as more and more mid- and high-rise towers.
* https://www.insauga.com/is-hazel-mccallion-wrong-on-this-hug...
* https://torontostoreys.com/issue-of-the-year-mississauga/
This is what happened to Mississauga, Canada (a suburb of Toronto): for the last fifty years builders had to pay developer charges which was used to build the initial infrastructure.
However things were constructed in a typical North American, car-centric fashion. Now that most of the available land is covered in large-plot, low-density housing, they kind of realized the money train has reached its destination and they now have to maintain all of this infrastructure.
The same mayor (Hazel McCallion) was re-elected over and over for forty years, and so the same kind of thinking was perpetuated over that time period because no fresh thinking was introduced and things basically ran on inertia. She is often labelled the "Queen of Sprawl".
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/how-hazel-mccal...
* https://archive.is/DpKKp
There are of course some plots left, and over the past few years they've been building medium-density townhomes, as well as more and more mid- and high-rise towers.
* https://www.insauga.com/is-hazel-mccallion-wrong-on-this-hug...
* https://torontostoreys.com/issue-of-the-year-mississauga/
I'm from Germany, 50k seems pretty low for a plot of land. You already pay more like 100k already in the countryside. And then the commune doesn't really make a profit (if they didn't own the land beforehand).
Comparing parcel prices when parcel sizes are not specified seems meaningless to me.
Land is more expensive in Europe, that's a fact; EEA[1] has more than 500 million people for a size half of the USA, and as much relief and less plains: Scandinavia is just a big mountain, the Alps severely limit the possibility of cheap transportation in the middle of it, and UK the main economic powerhouse with Germany and France is an island not even connected to the continent where 50% of everything is around London. Also not enough waterways rely the economic regions apart from around Germany. Yeah subway and infrastructure cost less but everything else is costlier.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area
Scandinavia as a whole is not a big mountain. Did you mean Norway? B/C Sweden only has some mountains in the sparsely uninhabited borderlands and Denmark + Finland are basically flat.
FWIW the UK is connected via a rail tunnel to France. But most goods are transported via cargo ship and most people via planes, so how much does it really matter?
Furthermore, the US might have more land but they also have other challenges that Europe doesn't have, such as huge cities in dessert area, tornadoes, and no internal waterways from east to west (need the panama canal).
There's pro's and con's to the land on both sides of the Atlantic. But it seems far from a decisive factor in the wealth of our nations.
Furthermore, the US might have more land but they also have other challenges that Europe doesn't have, such as huge cities in dessert area, tornadoes, and no internal waterways from east to west (need the panama canal).
There's pro's and con's to the land on both sides of the Atlantic. But it seems far from a decisive factor in the wealth of our nations.
It‘s not as meaningless as it seems. Parcel sizes are very similar in similar areas: smaller in cities accommodating row houses and larger in the land planned for single or double family homes with a garden. There are some outliers, but usually you will only find very similar plot sizes in one area.
[deleted]
He's talking about accruals based accounting. I'm no accountant, but memory suggests that means adding something similar to [cost of asset / life of asset] to the annual maintenance cost.
Although it is still implausible, it is certainly possible to miss 95% of the cost if they spend very little on monthly maintenance (ie, under-maintain). Then at some point in the near future, the road will need to be ripped up and replaced. Not cheap.
Although it is still implausible, it is certainly possible to miss 95% of the cost if they spend very little on monthly maintenance (ie, under-maintain). Then at some point in the near future, the road will need to be ripped up and replaced. Not cheap.
A lot worser. Years long the mobile-posse shouted: 'The roads are runned-down, off! We want you (the Gov) to repair'em!'. And the time came when the government started some infrastructure-programs repairing bridges and -roads (also railroads), but the people were 'unthankful' shouting: 'Now it takes a lot more time to [Insert:Object]-[1]. Under construction...everywhere! we do not like it!', 'Do something!' And a lot more happend to "home" (-;
[1]-[Object.List]: get home; to work, to the shopping center, the Kindergarden, bring the kids to school, find a parking lot... get our everyday stuff done. ^^
[1]-[Object.List]: get home; to work, to the shopping center, the Kindergarden, bring the kids to school, find a parking lot... get our everyday stuff done. ^^
The article said about 10% of taxes goes to maintenance of infrastructure. I'm fairly sure that percentage is fixed.
That would be $150 + $330=$480 not $3,450.
That would make the current percentage 150/(330+150) = ~31% not ~4%.
That would make the current percentage 150/(330+150) = ~31% not ~4%.
10% can be changed by the counsil. Eg. to tenfold infrastructure spending taxes would double.
The percentage is fixed in the context of the discussion about why a $3,300 tax is needed on top of an existing $1,500 tax. This is not a discussion about how the rate of use of tax for infrastructure can change.
if you assume tax revenue is spread amongst all the things that are needed, then this makes sense. Instead of X number of things getting fully funded, and then roads/sewer maintenance getting a pittance, everything is under funded to the same degree, but everything still gets a little bit of funding.
In my experience, it's because people in the middle of nowhere are allowed to vote on infrastructure projects. They claim they don't want "their tax dollars" to pay for "them city slickers." The important bit they conveniently leave out is that cities majorly subsidize rural living through taxes.
There is also rampant corruption (at least for cities in CA).
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-corruption-scan...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Edito...
https://www.kqed.org/news/11839531/report-corrupt-sf-officia...
https://la.curbed.com/2020/6/18/21279345/los-angeles-corrupt...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-corruption-scan...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Edito...
https://www.kqed.org/news/11839531/report-corrupt-sf-officia...
https://la.curbed.com/2020/6/18/21279345/los-angeles-corrupt...
Local and State elections in the US are usually overwhelming dominated by larger cities and counties.
There is local representation but in many states legislative districts are allocated by population not geography so often areas with higher population density have more control.
And, State-wide elections, such as, Governor, Attorney General, state supreme court justices (where elected, such as, WA), initiatives, referendums, and so on, are often dominated by the high population centers.
There is local representation but in many states legislative districts are allocated by population not geography so often areas with higher population density have more control.
And, State-wide elections, such as, Governor, Attorney General, state supreme court justices (where elected, such as, WA), initiatives, referendums, and so on, are often dominated by the high population centers.
It's my understanding that relatively few people live out in the boondocks. Is that an incorrect understanding? In a democratic system, how could such a small population be at fault for preventing infrastructure spending in population centers?
Electoral college. Boondock states get two senators each. Urban states get two senators each.
California's 40 million people have the same representation in the senate as Wyoming's 580 thousand people.
California's 40 million people have the same representation in the senate as Wyoming's 580 thousand people.
The Senate is required to approve city's road maintenance expenditures? I thought the US was more decentralized than that.
This is what keeps the federal government and federal politicians so powerful, most areas need federal funds to keep up with these expenses.
Now you're talking in circles. @seattle_spring's theory is that people in the "boondocks" keep voting against infrastructure projects, even though "cities majorly subsidize rural living through taxes." Now you're saying that "most areas need federal funds to keep up with these expenses."
Is California rich enough to pay for its infrastructure projects by itself, or does it need money from other states to do it? If @seattle_spring is right and California doesn't need the money, then the Senate isn't holding anything up. California can proceed unilaterally. Maybe they can even vote for Republicans at the federal level, who won't make them continue to "subsidize rural living" in other states.
But if you're correct that California "need[s] federal funds to keep up with these expenses" then why shouldn't the rural states oppose it when it won't benefit them?
The reality is two-fold.
1) People in dense urban states aren't actually willing to spend this money, they just want to use these issues to get votes for Democrats. That's why they never actually build these things when they have to do it with their own money only.
2) Dense urban states want access to the Federal government's money printing machine. States cannot run structural deficits. But the rural urban states will be on the hook for that debt too.
Is California rich enough to pay for its infrastructure projects by itself, or does it need money from other states to do it? If @seattle_spring is right and California doesn't need the money, then the Senate isn't holding anything up. California can proceed unilaterally. Maybe they can even vote for Republicans at the federal level, who won't make them continue to "subsidize rural living" in other states.
But if you're correct that California "need[s] federal funds to keep up with these expenses" then why shouldn't the rural states oppose it when it won't benefit them?
The reality is two-fold.
1) People in dense urban states aren't actually willing to spend this money, they just want to use these issues to get votes for Democrats. That's why they never actually build these things when they have to do it with their own money only.
2) Dense urban states want access to the Federal government's money printing machine. States cannot run structural deficits. But the rural urban states will be on the hook for that debt too.
I was not talking about California, though.
Or New York or Illinois or whatever. The point is that you can’t have it both ways. If dense urban states have the money to pay for their own transit, they should vote Republican at the federal level so they can stop subsidizing Wyoming, and use those tax dollars to build whatever they want. But if they actually need federal funds to build transit, then Wyoming should be able to veto building transit in New York.
Blue states have all of the money. There is no reason for them to complain so much about the Senate. If they want a vast socialist welfare state with state of the art transit, they should be able to pay for it themselves.
Blue states have all of the money. There is no reason for them to complain so much about the Senate. If they want a vast socialist welfare state with state of the art transit, they should be able to pay for it themselves.
'Vast' is a matter of scale. What seemed large when we were a manual-labor country of 100M people, and what seems large now that we're an automated-production county of 450M, are quite different.
Michael Dell wrote in his memoir, that each time Dell Computer doubled in size, he had to completely redefine their processes. Well, the USA has grown a lot. Trying to fit 50-100 year old processes into the modern economy is bound to fail, for lack of scale and imagination.
A public transit system is honestly cheap at the price. Kind of a enlightened-self-interest thing. It lowers the cost of working, lets people make more choices about where to live, and generally makes markets more efficient.
Michael Dell wrote in his memoir, that each time Dell Computer doubled in size, he had to completely redefine their processes. Well, the USA has grown a lot. Trying to fit 50-100 year old processes into the modern economy is bound to fail, for lack of scale and imagination.
A public transit system is honestly cheap at the price. Kind of a enlightened-self-interest thing. It lowers the cost of working, lets people make more choices about where to live, and generally makes markets more efficient.
> they should vote Republican at the federal level so they can stop subsidizing Wyoming
Republicans being for states rights hasn't been true for my entire lifetime (30+ years).
Republicans being for states rights hasn't been true for my entire lifetime (30+ years).
We just had a huge battle where Republicans opposed Medicaid expansion in states. (Which would involve more blue state federal tax dollars going to red states.)
There are a couple of areas where Republicans support federal preemption, such as telecommunications (which falls squarely under even a narrow definition of the commerce clause, as “channels of interstate commerce”). But for the most part they fight federal encroachment in environmental laws (regulating infra-state bodies of water), health spending, etc.
When have Republicans had the federal government intervene to stop a domestic transit or health program that wasn’t reliant on federal dollars?
There are a couple of areas where Republicans support federal preemption, such as telecommunications (which falls squarely under even a narrow definition of the commerce clause, as “channels of interstate commerce”). But for the most part they fight federal encroachment in environmental laws (regulating infra-state bodies of water), health spending, etc.
When have Republicans had the federal government intervene to stop a domestic transit or health program that wasn’t reliant on federal dollars?
This is simply untrue, and it's enough to look at budgets of most places to see that.
Various reports show that the federal government picks up about a third of the tab for infrastructure spending, although it varies widely by state and type of infrastructure. This seems quite significant.
Federal government is typically shelling out money for things like interstates, major bridges and major water works. They give practically nothing for local roads and sewers. Additionally, federal government money comes from the people's income taxes anyway, and if federal government didn't tax people so much, the state and local government could tax them more instead, to cover bigger share of the costs.
The big issue I see here is that where I live, and I think in many more rural areas, federal infrastructure constitutes a significant portion of the total infrastructure. A generous portion of the major city streets, for example, are US highways, and flood control was almost entirely built federally (and maintenance must now be funded by the local flood control district). This no doubt varies by region, but the portion of infrastructure which is federally funded is not small.
“ if federal government didn't tax people so much, the state and local government could tax them more instead, to cover bigger share of the costs.”
I upvoted you and agree.
This is exactly my point, the power is at the federal level, and the state and municipalities rely on funds from ‘above’.
Here are some EPA federal grants for municipal water systems:
https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/drinking...
Sewer overflow grant:
https://www.epa.gov/cwsrf/sewer-overflow-and-stormwater-reus...
I Googled “epa muni water grants”.
I upvoted you and agree.
This is exactly my point, the power is at the federal level, and the state and municipalities rely on funds from ‘above’.
Here are some EPA federal grants for municipal water systems:
https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/drinking...
Sewer overflow grant:
https://www.epa.gov/cwsrf/sewer-overflow-and-stormwater-reus...
I Googled “epa muni water grants”.
A lot of the discussion is about federal taxes and subsidies. The federal government funds a lot of local stuff too. It maintains a lot of control over cities and states through funding. For example, if your roads and schools don't meet federal standards, that's okay, but you're not getting federal funding.
Everyone opts for federal funding.
Everyone opts for federal funding.
Thats true for the senate, but that’s why there is another branch that has proportionate representation. Both of them have important individual roles that the other branch would/could not do, due to political barriers.
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> It's my understanding that relatively few people live out in the boondocks. Is that an incorrect understanding?
The majority of Americans live in suburbs. The majority of counties are rural. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...
The majority of Americans live in suburbs. The majority of counties are rural. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...
Rural/suburban folks tend to own homes, and property owners vote more than renters do.
They also tend to move less and stay in the same district for a large percentage of their lives. It's a lot easier to vote if you only need to sign up once and the same process applies. If you're young and mobile, you're changing cities/counties/states and therefore less likely to keep up with the different races.
Considering how much more locked in the are it makes sense. The stakes are higher for them.
Not sure if that explains potholes all over chicago.
Is Chicago really that much worse than other similar cities like milwaukee or minneapolis? whenever I go to those (which, to be honest, isn't often) the streets don't seem _that_ much better.
In Milwaukee there just isn’t enough tax dollars to pay to fix the roads, replace lead pipes, upkeep for museums, parks, police, fire etc. Some of this is pension problems, so of it is likely government spending more than they had in the 50s for large public projects that now need complete rebuilds with no funds to do so.
Infrastructure spending in Milwaukee is $70M/year, when fire department is $120M/year and police is $300M/year. That's where the real costs are, not where Strong Towns say they are.
I think the overall Strong Towns message doesn’t only speak about infrastructure. It’s generally an argument against spending large amounts of money today on projects that benefit the town of the future that will of course never stop growing; or that this fancy, expensive new project will stimulate the growth we need to pay for it later.
Milwaukee in the 50s and 60s is an example of this. They built a lot of amenities and expanded infrastructure with public funds.
The growth stopped or reversed and there is no money to maintain the same level of services and amenities today. Thus underfunded parks, roads, pipes and museums. Aka, not a strong town but one struggling along.
Milwaukee in the 50s and 60s is an example of this. They built a lot of amenities and expanded infrastructure with public funds.
The growth stopped or reversed and there is no money to maintain the same level of services and amenities today. Thus underfunded parks, roads, pipes and museums. Aka, not a strong town but one struggling along.
This entire article and every comment can be summed up with the following sentence:
"Women need to have more babies because our entire economic model is built on growth and doesn't function without it and one of the best ways to grow is increase the population so you increase the taxable base."
You can slice it up however you want. You can bitch and moan about feminism if you're a woman, you can bitch and moan about men's rights if you're a man, but the bottom line is we need a lot more people to pay for all the tab we've run up.
"Women need to have more babies because our entire economic model is built on growth and doesn't function without it and one of the best ways to grow is increase the population so you increase the taxable base."
You can slice it up however you want. You can bitch and moan about feminism if you're a woman, you can bitch and moan about men's rights if you're a man, but the bottom line is we need a lot more people to pay for all the tab we've run up.
Freezing temperatures, salt, snow plow usage, heavy vehicles and more road usage, and inability to fix properly due to heavy road usage would explain that.
Does work in other countries with similar specs, so it's hardly a technical limitation. It's money, public money, and therefore politics.
I do wonder about US roads. Is it a reliance on the oil industry to build asphalt based roads?
Are they intentionally not meant to last?
Also, with regards to the US interstate system - why is it designed in such a way that any maintenance required a dramatic decrease in travel throughput?
Could it be designed to be functional in ‘maintenance’ mode?
Are they intentionally not meant to last?
Also, with regards to the US interstate system - why is it designed in such a way that any maintenance required a dramatic decrease in travel throughput?
Could it be designed to be functional in ‘maintenance’ mode?
America tends to like to do the cheaper thing and get the biggest number. Extra large pizzas made mostly with cheap vegetable oil and bread, lots of square feet with the cheapest drywall, materials and bad design, etc. Maintenance mode capable roads I would guess would cost as much as a road with one more lane, so they just build another lane instead of keeping one in reserve.
You either need to stop asking questions in bad faith or spend 10min reading about road construction on Wikipedia (hopefully the latter but this is the internet so...). The US doesn't really do things much differently than anywhere of similar climate with regard to road construction since climate dictates construction techniques. Asphalt is pretty universal.
All of our major systems: from infrastructure to employment to graduate work, is built on the assumption of eternal exponential growth. All of these past infrastructure decisions would've been fine if we continued to have exponential economic and population growth. More taxes/funding would come in and there'd be new money to continue to grow forever. Except it can't grow forever. Eric Weinstein coined the phrase "Embedded Growth Obligation" (EGO) to describe this phenomenon.
>"An embedded growth obligation is how fast a structure has to grow in order to maintain its honest positions," Weinstein says. "If you have a situation in which you have trial lawyers and they're supported by various associates, and the associates all want to become partners and trial lawyers themselves, then what you have is a situation where the law firm has to grow at a very fast clip if all those people are going to be satisfied with their job decisions. Well, very quickly that ability to grow runs out, and then people want to know, "Why am I stuck in a position going nowhere?"
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/eric-weinstein-intelle...
>"An embedded growth obligation is how fast a structure has to grow in order to maintain its honest positions," Weinstein says. "If you have a situation in which you have trial lawyers and they're supported by various associates, and the associates all want to become partners and trial lawyers themselves, then what you have is a situation where the law firm has to grow at a very fast clip if all those people are going to be satisfied with their job decisions. Well, very quickly that ability to grow runs out, and then people want to know, "Why am I stuck in a position going nowhere?"
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/eric-weinstein-intelle...
I really don't think this is the case here. Cities like Lafayette are just plain inefficient, and the inefficiency scales with growth: the more growth you have, the more sprawl you have, which means the more expensive things are, which leads to more inefficiency. This is probably one of the forces constraining the growth of cities like this.
The problem with most of suburban America is that it's completely unsustainable. Almost all suburban cities in the US require a constant injection of Federal funds to maintain infrastructure. Most people don't realize this because it's really something politicians score brownie points for, hence the accounting subterfuge they engage in (as mentioned in the article), as do most small cities in the USA.
We have no idea how long this Federal subsidy will be maintain, making it difficult to plan for. So many Americans want this idyllic, unsustainable suburban life-style that no politician will keep their job if they try to "take it away" (read: address the issue). But the longer we wait to build more sustainable cities, the worse things will be during the inevitable implosion.
America needs to be building medium-density, car-adverse cities now. The country can't afford to continue subsidizing driving to the degree that it has post-WWII. If this doesn't happen, most of the country is going to enter a serious depression.
The problem with most of suburban America is that it's completely unsustainable. Almost all suburban cities in the US require a constant injection of Federal funds to maintain infrastructure. Most people don't realize this because it's really something politicians score brownie points for, hence the accounting subterfuge they engage in (as mentioned in the article), as do most small cities in the USA.
We have no idea how long this Federal subsidy will be maintain, making it difficult to plan for. So many Americans want this idyllic, unsustainable suburban life-style that no politician will keep their job if they try to "take it away" (read: address the issue). But the longer we wait to build more sustainable cities, the worse things will be during the inevitable implosion.
America needs to be building medium-density, car-adverse cities now. The country can't afford to continue subsidizing driving to the degree that it has post-WWII. If this doesn't happen, most of the country is going to enter a serious depression.
The trick here is the federal government invests in this infrastructure using debt/bonds. The expectation is that there will be a return on this investment. Jobs are created or whatever, there's future increased tax revenue. Now you have more money to maintain the old infrastructure and/or build new. The fact that in this case the debt is incurred is at the federal level doesn't change the system. It's expected to result in greater federal taxes in the future.
This was a good explanation of why US cities will never be able to cover their infrastructure maintenance costs.
The town I live in recently completed a $20mil sewer treatment plant and is in the process of beginning a $2mil+ project to replace the water lines.
It has approx. 1,600 residents, although the neighboring town is a customer of our sewer plant and they supply our drinking water (even though we are on the river).
I believe, as an investor of municipal bonds, the tax liability is eliminated, so this may be a reason this type of investment is ‘pushed’.
The town I live in recently completed a $20mil sewer treatment plant and is in the process of beginning a $2mil+ project to replace the water lines.
It has approx. 1,600 residents, although the neighboring town is a customer of our sewer plant and they supply our drinking water (even though we are on the river).
I believe, as an investor of municipal bonds, the tax liability is eliminated, so this may be a reason this type of investment is ‘pushed’.
Municipal bonds are barely above the inflation rate. Split what 1,600 x2 = 3,200 ways a 6,250$ per person investment at those rates really isn’t that expensive. It’s roughly what everyone building a septic system would cost. Especially, if it’s sized with the expectation of any kind of growth.
>>> Especially, if it’s sized with the expectation of any kind of growth.
I don't think that most villages are growing. They're usually shrinking slowly as the old inhabitants die and the young leave to cities to find work. It's quite risky to go big and plan for growth when the taxpayer base is likely to shrink 10 years from now.
I don't think that most villages are growing. They're usually shrinking slowly as the old inhabitants die and the young leave to cities to find work. It's quite risky to go big and plan for growth when the taxpayer base is likely to shrink 10 years from now.
It is not built with expectations of growth and its useful life will end at approx the time the debt has been paid off (about 20 years)
Typically when building a septic system, it is one per household, not one per family member, though.
A family of four does not need 4 septic tanks.
Typically when building a septic system, it is one per household, not one per family member, though.
A family of four does not need 4 septic tanks.
If the sewer treatment plant is really only lasting 20 years before becoming worthless that’s an issue. Those things should be lasting 50 to 100 years with maintenance and equipment replacement not 20. My comparison was assuming roughly half the interest rate, twice the upfront cost, but twice the lifespan.
In comparison to a septic system for a family of 4 running ~12k, but only lasting 15-40 years.
In comparison to a septic system for a family of 4 running ~12k, but only lasting 15-40 years.
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Why don't we just stop building all this infrastructure, and move to a micro-community or individual model?
My parents' farm is on a well and septic, and a dirt road. Water purification is done with a UV filter. The infrastructure costs are almost nil.
We are in an age now where houses don't even need to be on the power grid -- a set of solar panels and a lithium battery makes traditional power distribution obsolete.
If it costs a typical suburban house $10k a year to maintain infrastructure, that's outrageous. Move to individually or community based infrastructure.
My parents' farm is on a well and septic, and a dirt road. Water purification is done with a UV filter. The infrastructure costs are almost nil.
We are in an age now where houses don't even need to be on the power grid -- a set of solar panels and a lithium battery makes traditional power distribution obsolete.
If it costs a typical suburban house $10k a year to maintain infrastructure, that's outrageous. Move to individually or community based infrastructure.
Probably because people simply don’t want to move to places with zero jobs, dirt roads, nowhere to shop, no power grid and no UPS deliveries.
I'm not talking about everyone moving to the country. I'm talking about localizing power/sewer/water infrastructure in medium density areas like suburbs. If you read the article you understand that its the suburban sprawl that is the expensive areas to maintain. High density downtown cores fund themselves just fine.
> High density downtown cores fund themselves just fine.
How? I live in city of chicago and roads here are just terrible, there are potholes everywhere. Chicago Suburbs are a superior in terms of roads, sidewalks ect. Not sure if you are saying that people in city are "just fine" with poor infrastuture ?
How? I live in city of chicago and roads here are just terrible, there are potholes everywhere. Chicago Suburbs are a superior in terms of roads, sidewalks ect. Not sure if you are saying that people in city are "just fine" with poor infrastuture ?
Strong Towns covers this: The whole “the suburbs are fine/better” is part of the pyramid scheme. Sure, they’re fine for the first 20-40 years. But then they deteriorate and the maintenance costs pile up. Tax rates increase to compensate. Wealthy residents who basically run their lives on tax avoidance simply move to a more recently developed suburb and the rest stay and suffer through a broke government, forced to do things like rely on police fines to sustain the budget (Ferguson, MO).
The “ring of wealth” moves around over the decades due to the pyramid scheme effect.
It isn’t hard to find suburbs with far worse roads and infrastructure than the city of Chicago. Maple Heights, OH, Parma, OH, Euclid, OH. I’m sure Chicagoland has plenty of them, I’m just not familiar with them. You also won’t see any upper middle class people living in these suburbs, not anymore.
The “ring of wealth” moves around over the decades due to the pyramid scheme effect.
It isn’t hard to find suburbs with far worse roads and infrastructure than the city of Chicago. Maple Heights, OH, Parma, OH, Euclid, OH. I’m sure Chicagoland has plenty of them, I’m just not familiar with them. You also won’t see any upper middle class people living in these suburbs, not anymore.
Because Chicago is supporting the rest of the state. We have horrible return on investment on our tax dollars.
If Chicago seceded and formed a city-state the Chicago budget crisis would end overnight.
If Chicago seceded and formed a city-state the Chicago budget crisis would end overnight.
The city really isn't severable from the burbs. Businesses based in the city create a lot money, but they are mostly staffed with people from the burbs.
Depends on which suburbs you’re referring to. The north shore, full of old suburbs, has awful roads. Most of the side streets are un-maintained original cobblestone. It’s like driving on a wave pool.
> My parents' farm is on a well and septic, and a dirt road. Water purification is done with a UV filter. The infrastructure costs are almost nil.
How well would such a thing scale, though, especially in a suburban/urban setting? IIRC sceptic systems need a certain amount/type of land to drain correctly, so that wouldn't work particularly well outside of relatively rural areas. Wells might not work beyond a certain population density due to insufficient groundwater recharge rate. And dirt roads still would require maintenance, especially if you want to support nontrivial traffic levels, not to mention relatively high-speed travel.
How well would such a thing scale, though, especially in a suburban/urban setting? IIRC sceptic systems need a certain amount/type of land to drain correctly, so that wouldn't work particularly well outside of relatively rural areas. Wells might not work beyond a certain population density due to insufficient groundwater recharge rate. And dirt roads still would require maintenance, especially if you want to support nontrivial traffic levels, not to mention relatively high-speed travel.
> Wells might not work beyond a certain population density due to insufficient groundwater recharge rate.
Isn't agricultural irrigation the largest source of groundwater depletion in places where it's an issue?
I believe basically all water here in Iowa is pulled from groundwater wells. I've never heard of it being something anyone was worried, but we also don't irrigate fields like they do in the Western states.
The main issue I hear about is people worrying about farm chemical runoff getting into the aquifers.
Isn't agricultural irrigation the largest source of groundwater depletion in places where it's an issue?
I believe basically all water here in Iowa is pulled from groundwater wells. I've never heard of it being something anyone was worried, but we also don't irrigate fields like they do in the Western states.
The main issue I hear about is people worrying about farm chemical runoff getting into the aquifers.
> Isn't agricultural irrigation the largest source of groundwater depletion in places where it's an issue?
> I believe basically all water here in Iowa is pulled from groundwater wells. I've never heard of it being something anyone was worried, but we also don't irrigate fields like they do in the Western states.
Those are good points; I should have qualified my comment with "depending on location and local groundwater conditions". Evidently wells do work for at least some urban areas, but whether it's a viable option for all, I don't know.
> I believe basically all water here in Iowa is pulled from groundwater wells. I've never heard of it being something anyone was worried, but we also don't irrigate fields like they do in the Western states.
Those are good points; I should have qualified my comment with "depending on location and local groundwater conditions". Evidently wells do work for at least some urban areas, but whether it's a viable option for all, I don't know.
I'm not a well expert, but from what I've read is that chemical runoff could get into shallow sandpoint wells, but if you drill a 200ft deep well, that water is millions of years old.
Did a quick search, and this link [1] from what appears to be a reputable source says most household wells are pulling up water that is less than 10 years old.
Granted that probably varies a lot by region.
I've heard of a fair number of people that have their wells go bad and need to drill deeper to get clean water.
Found this page [2] that lists registered well depths here in Iowa. Seems that somewhere in the 300-400ft range is common. Deeper for municipal wells.
[1] https://agwt.org/content/how-old-your-well-water
[2] https://www.iihr.uiowa.edu/igs/geosam/depth_map
Granted that probably varies a lot by region.
I've heard of a fair number of people that have their wells go bad and need to drill deeper to get clean water.
Found this page [2] that lists registered well depths here in Iowa. Seems that somewhere in the 300-400ft range is common. Deeper for municipal wells.
[1] https://agwt.org/content/how-old-your-well-water
[2] https://www.iihr.uiowa.edu/igs/geosam/depth_map
Yeah that's what I'm wondering... could decentralised water/power/sewer distribution scale? Like maybe not EVERYBODY has their own well/septic, but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?
This sounds like a great model to try out in newly-built, 'experimental' communities. Retrofitting existing ones would require more cooperation among residents than you could achieve, I think, except in unusual situations.
I am sure there are large numbers of lower income people who would be willing to try something other than a crappy apartment in a bad neighborhood if the per-month costs were similar. You'd need to deal with transportation issues (i.e. better buses, shared small electric vehicles or bikes, etcetera) and some other things, but it could be a promising method to explore.
Some people might even be willing to try things like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine-diverting_dry_toilet (incinerating toilets may be needed instead depending on the area) or agree to lower electricity usage for a reduction in monthly fees, among other things. I've been thinking about this idea for a number of years, and am somewhat surprised we haven't seen efforts toward it yet. Maybe I should do something.
I am sure there are large numbers of lower income people who would be willing to try something other than a crappy apartment in a bad neighborhood if the per-month costs were similar. You'd need to deal with transportation issues (i.e. better buses, shared small electric vehicles or bikes, etcetera) and some other things, but it could be a promising method to explore.
Some people might even be willing to try things like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine-diverting_dry_toilet (incinerating toilets may be needed instead depending on the area) or agree to lower electricity usage for a reduction in monthly fees, among other things. I've been thinking about this idea for a number of years, and am somewhat surprised we haven't seen efforts toward it yet. Maybe I should do something.
Yeah probably tough and expensive to transition existing neighbourhoods to this model... but is abandoning the current infrastructure and starting fresh more expensive than maintaining the already expensive existing infrastructure? Don't know.
I do know London, England is build on top of many many layers of obsolete sewer systems from a millenium of city living. Sometimes its best to abandon and rebuild.
I do know London, England is build on top of many many layers of obsolete sewer systems from a millenium of city living. Sometimes its best to abandon and rebuild.
> Like maybe not EVERYBODY has their own well/septic, but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?
Anecdotally, it seems fairly common for people to have municipal water and their own septic system in more "exurb-y" areas. Two of the people I work with (different states) have that setup.
It seems to be common because water treatment facilities are more efficient at scale, whereas a septic is pretty easy to maintain yourself.
Anecdotally, it seems fairly common for people to have municipal water and their own septic system in more "exurb-y" areas. Two of the people I work with (different states) have that setup.
It seems to be common because water treatment facilities are more efficient at scale, whereas a septic is pretty easy to maintain yourself.
> but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?
The space requirements are actually a decent amount lower than I originally expected [0, 1], so it could be plausible for individual lots to have their own septic systems (unless the area above the drainfield can't be used for safety/other reasons). Not sure if there are other factors that make centralized waste treatment systems preferable over individual septic systems.
[0]: https://www.washtenaw.org/1722/Sewage-System-Sizing [1]: https://inspectapedia.com/septic/Septic-Drainfield-Size.php
The space requirements are actually a decent amount lower than I originally expected [0, 1], so it could be plausible for individual lots to have their own septic systems (unless the area above the drainfield can't be used for safety/other reasons). Not sure if there are other factors that make centralized waste treatment systems preferable over individual septic systems.
[0]: https://www.washtenaw.org/1722/Sewage-System-Sizing [1]: https://inspectapedia.com/septic/Septic-Drainfield-Size.php
"Not sure if there are other factors that make centralized waste treatment systems preferable over individual septic systems"
Capacity is the main thing I can think of. If you get dense enough (e.g. 8-story apartment blocks) you'd need a pretty big septic field right next to the housing. Now that's land you can't use for housing or offices. At some point it's more cost-effective to whisk that waste away to some low-value land to do the processing.
I don't know at what level of density that's true, though. It could be pretty high.
Capacity is the main thing I can think of. If you get dense enough (e.g. 8-story apartment blocks) you'd need a pretty big septic field right next to the housing. Now that's land you can't use for housing or offices. At some point it's more cost-effective to whisk that waste away to some low-value land to do the processing.
I don't know at what level of density that's true, though. It could be pretty high.
Yeah, density was the main concern that led me to make my original comment in this thread. I was thinking of a more suburban setting when I wrote the comment you're responding to, but you do have a point (unless local zoning laws allow septic drainage fields to be used for other things, but that I know too little about). If you can't build on top of drainage fields or dual-purpose them, then you'll need to sacrifice some building space, which isn't optimal from a make-the-most-of-a-land-parcel view.
> could decentralised water/power/sewer distribution scale?
Not with conventional implementations and funding, but yes, scaling is technologically feasible at this time. However in the US, getting people to learn the necessary skills and discipline to maintain such systems to the needed baseline operating standards will remain a significant challenge.
Water collection and sanitation could be automated into a closed-loop system, but I've yet to see a COTS solution. Even if you commercialized it, you just move problems around: there would be a significant waste stream of filtration cartridges to handle when scaled up, for example. Cradle-to-cradle design and implementation of such systems is neither easy nor cheap.
You don't need the portability of lithium chemistry batteries, so I recommend redox flow chemistries, with some kind of solid state magnetohydrodynamic pump if possible.
While there are more active septic designs for smaller properties, they're much more expensive, and require more maintenance to keep running. From speaking with septic engineers and techs over the years, Americans have awful habits in general around sewer systems, and a lot of that keeps the septic industry thriving. A sustainable on-site treatment of human black water into safe compost compliant as EPA Class A biosolids would require people be much more diligent about ensuring pharmaceuticals for example, don't make it into the composting stream and instead go to incineration. Even if people do that, it gets expensive on a small scale. Or we come up with ways to automatically sample and test each individual deposit for pharmaceuticals. Which again, adds expense and more maintenance.
I have no doubt we can engineer the shit out the technical problems. I don't have good solutions for the assholes who are The Reason We Can't Have Nice Things, other than isolate myself into a Dunbar Number of like-minded and build our own systems.
Grids arose for a number of good reasons, and the systems design issues surrounding decoupling from them at scale are pretty thorny.
Not with conventional implementations and funding, but yes, scaling is technologically feasible at this time. However in the US, getting people to learn the necessary skills and discipline to maintain such systems to the needed baseline operating standards will remain a significant challenge.
Water collection and sanitation could be automated into a closed-loop system, but I've yet to see a COTS solution. Even if you commercialized it, you just move problems around: there would be a significant waste stream of filtration cartridges to handle when scaled up, for example. Cradle-to-cradle design and implementation of such systems is neither easy nor cheap.
You don't need the portability of lithium chemistry batteries, so I recommend redox flow chemistries, with some kind of solid state magnetohydrodynamic pump if possible.
While there are more active septic designs for smaller properties, they're much more expensive, and require more maintenance to keep running. From speaking with septic engineers and techs over the years, Americans have awful habits in general around sewer systems, and a lot of that keeps the septic industry thriving. A sustainable on-site treatment of human black water into safe compost compliant as EPA Class A biosolids would require people be much more diligent about ensuring pharmaceuticals for example, don't make it into the composting stream and instead go to incineration. Even if people do that, it gets expensive on a small scale. Or we come up with ways to automatically sample and test each individual deposit for pharmaceuticals. Which again, adds expense and more maintenance.
I have no doubt we can engineer the shit out the technical problems. I don't have good solutions for the assholes who are The Reason We Can't Have Nice Things, other than isolate myself into a Dunbar Number of like-minded and build our own systems.
Grids arose for a number of good reasons, and the systems design issues surrounding decoupling from them at scale are pretty thorny.
I'm not sure this is practical. You can't have wells and septics at high density, though you could probably localize certain things more than they are now.
Cities, small towns and rural locals have different costs. Rural areas maintain more kms of road per home, for example. Power/Data lines also cost more per home. Maybe these won't be necessary in the future, but they are for now. Obsolete is a strong word, still.
Like you though, the $10k price tag seems high to me. Is it really this high for the right reasons?
Cities, small towns and rural locals have different costs. Rural areas maintain more kms of road per home, for example. Power/Data lines also cost more per home. Maybe these won't be necessary in the future, but they are for now. Obsolete is a strong word, still.
Like you though, the $10k price tag seems high to me. Is it really this high for the right reasons?
But its not the high density that's expensive (the downtown core is actually the profit areas), its the medium density with sprawling suburbs that is what us so expensive to maintain for the very reason that localized infrastructure may work -- space between homes.
I still don't see how rural solutions apply. How is a dirt road a solution?
Honestly, I think it's hard to even discuss this without first understanding how road maintenance (sounds like this is the majority) adds up to $8000 per home.
Honestly, I think it's hard to even discuss this without first understanding how road maintenance (sounds like this is the majority) adds up to $8000 per home.
Forget the dirt road. Rural solutions for water/sewage/power work because their viability is not dependent on close geographic proximity. Its apparent that the urban solution being applied to suburban areas is not viable, so why not flip things around the other way?
I think most of the $8k is for roads. Wells (shallow wells certainly) will go dry if an entire suburb is drawing on the spring. Sceptics... With enough houses, someone somewhere will have a stinky one, but these could probably work. I doubt most suburbanites wants one.
Power... IMO, we're just not there yet. Maybe close, but even most rural homes use central power.
There might be some stuff that can be imported, but without more info it's hard to know what matters.
Power... IMO, we're just not there yet. Maybe close, but even most rural homes use central power.
There might be some stuff that can be imported, but without more info it's hard to know what matters.
Is well water available at sufficient quantity and distribution for this to work? Lots of large population centers get their water from lakes or large rivers. If you disperse the population to the surrounding areas, is there enough ground water or small rivers nearby to sustain an ultra dispersed model? Or would you still need small scale infrastructure?
Similar question with dirt road - how long is the dirt road before it reaches a non-dirt road? How much traffic is on it? If you dispersed a major population center this way and still needed to deliver groceries and ship out garbage and septic, how quickly would any given segment go between needing to be regraded?
The 10k amount doesn't come about because they built a large community and infrastructure. It came because they built their large community in an unwise manner resulting in high infrastructure cost. While moving to individual or smaller communities reduces to possible scope of screwing up your planning, it doesn't reduce your ability to screw it up.
Similar question with dirt road - how long is the dirt road before it reaches a non-dirt road? How much traffic is on it? If you dispersed a major population center this way and still needed to deliver groceries and ship out garbage and septic, how quickly would any given segment go between needing to be regraded?
The 10k amount doesn't come about because they built a large community and infrastructure. It came because they built their large community in an unwise manner resulting in high infrastructure cost. While moving to individual or smaller communities reduces to possible scope of screwing up your planning, it doesn't reduce your ability to screw it up.
We already have Americans not maintaining septic systems leading to outbreaks of hookworm.
Article for the curious: https://yellowhammernews.com/life-threatening-hookworm-resur...
Because it's inefficient, aka more expensive per person. Internet, canalization, public transport, etc., gets cheaper with higher population density.
330 million people living with their own well, septic, dirt road and water purifying UV filter.
Seriously?
Seriously?
No. Re-read my comment. Suburban areas only. Try to keep up before you get all salty and make yourself look dumb.
OK, I re-read it. In the last sentence you mention the cost of a suburban house. That's the only reference to "suburban areas only" I can see.
Panels + lithium battery does not yet make "traditional power distribution obsolete". I have a net-zero adobe house with its own grid-tied 6.6kW array. The additional cost at this time of sufficent storage to go off-grid without significant life style changes (none of which would be particularly awful, but still big) is substantial. I have no doubt it will decrease rapidly, but we're not there yet.
Sure, for rural and some kinds of suburban areas, your comments are on point. For rural, they're even more or less the default. For suburban, it can be hard to tell where "community service" would end and "what we do today" would start.
Panels + lithium battery does not yet make "traditional power distribution obsolete". I have a net-zero adobe house with its own grid-tied 6.6kW array. The additional cost at this time of sufficent storage to go off-grid without significant life style changes (none of which would be particularly awful, but still big) is substantial. I have no doubt it will decrease rapidly, but we're not there yet.
Sure, for rural and some kinds of suburban areas, your comments are on point. For rural, they're even more or less the default. For suburban, it can be hard to tell where "community service" would end and "what we do today" would start.
Sorry I thought it was fairly obvious we were only talking about suburbia because the article itself points out urban areas are funded just fine. Its suburbia where the cost/tax ratio is out of whack.
I'm sorry, it's not obvious to me why this would be downvoted. Would anyone care to elaborate?
Because it's completely orthogonal to the original arguments. Infrastructure is more than sewer systems, roads for example. Moreover everyone moving to septic tanks is a non environmentally friendly solution, and where are you going to bring the waste when the tanks have to be emptied (they need to be pumped out regularly), who is going to pay for that infrastructure?
Let's not even start on the argument that not everyone can and wants to live on a farm. Also rural living is probably the most inefficient when it comes to infrastructure.
Let's not even start on the argument that not everyone can and wants to live on a farm. Also rural living is probably the most inefficient when it comes to infrastructure.
I'm not talking about everyone moving to the country, I'm talking about bringing localized infrastructure to suburban sprawl. I doubt that would work in high density urban areas, but why could it not work in suburbs where every house is sitting on a 60x120ft lot?
Its those areas that the article describes as the expensive areas because everything is so spread out.
Its those areas that the article describes as the expensive areas because everything is so spread out.
The claim that any of this has zero infrastructure cost is laudable.
Either OP is extremely naive or being very disingenuous in there bias.
The farmer is notoriously running around the farm fixing shit in between tending to the crop because living off the grid is hard.
The farmer is notoriously running around the farm fixing shit in between tending to the crop because living off the grid is hard.
This is addressed in the article: federal programs promoting infrastructure growth provided the funds. Building new infrastructure generates lots of short-term income to a city in the form of sales tax, permit fees, etc. It's harder to plan for the ongoing maintenance for these projects.
Of course we should build less of it, but we can't unbuild what's already been built, and we can't account for city managers who aren't aware of this future problem.
If someone can solve the problem of the future being here, but being unevenly distributed...
Of course we should build less of it, but we can't unbuild what's already been built, and we can't account for city managers who aren't aware of this future problem.
If someone can solve the problem of the future being here, but being unevenly distributed...
Hot take: Its mostly just car infrastructure thats the cause of the problem. We spent way too much money for a large car-centric transport network that doesn't scale. Stop subsidizing and prioritizing cars as a primary form of transit and you fix most of the issues.
I worry that, culturally, we're too far gone. I, personally, hate driving in any place that's "downtown" by any measure. It's stressful, slow, the streets are never laid out in a sane way, etc. Kansas City, MO has a streetcar that runs north-south through a lot of the downtown area so that I can park in what city-dwellers assure me is "not downtown" right next to the northmost stop, then ride the streetcar to all of the attractions that are in the main night life district.
It definitely takes ~10-15 mins longer than if I just drove, but goodness it's just so much more enjoyable. I get to sit and look around at the city I'm in instead of focusing on driving.
I've dragged quite a few friends and family along and most people don't like it because: 1. it takes longer (have to wait for transport to arrive, it makes stops you don't need) 2. "iffy people" are on the streetcar
I laugh a bit at #2 because compared to almost any other non-car transport in the US I've ever seen, the occupants of the streetcar are just comically gentrified. Yeah there's one guy who's probably homeless, but everyone else is clearly out for a business dinner or a bunch of yuppies all dressed up to take the family out to dinner, and so on.
Thanks for bearing through me with this anecdote. But I hope it demonstrates two issues: 1. americans will put up with a lot if it makes their trip any amount shorter 2. americans vastly prefer to be annoyed and in control, versus less annoyed but not in control. e.g. they prefer car traffic where they're "in control" (can honk/drive aggressively?) vs waiting for public transport to arrive or waiting at stops they don't need 3. americans associate public transport with lower classes, the poor and homeless.
It'll take a lot of work to flip these around.
It definitely takes ~10-15 mins longer than if I just drove, but goodness it's just so much more enjoyable. I get to sit and look around at the city I'm in instead of focusing on driving.
I've dragged quite a few friends and family along and most people don't like it because: 1. it takes longer (have to wait for transport to arrive, it makes stops you don't need) 2. "iffy people" are on the streetcar
I laugh a bit at #2 because compared to almost any other non-car transport in the US I've ever seen, the occupants of the streetcar are just comically gentrified. Yeah there's one guy who's probably homeless, but everyone else is clearly out for a business dinner or a bunch of yuppies all dressed up to take the family out to dinner, and so on.
Thanks for bearing through me with this anecdote. But I hope it demonstrates two issues: 1. americans will put up with a lot if it makes their trip any amount shorter 2. americans vastly prefer to be annoyed and in control, versus less annoyed but not in control. e.g. they prefer car traffic where they're "in control" (can honk/drive aggressively?) vs waiting for public transport to arrive or waiting at stops they don't need 3. americans associate public transport with lower classes, the poor and homeless.
It'll take a lot of work to flip these around.
In my (US) city, they put in a bike lane along a street downtown with a lot of restaurants. It used to be a two-way street, now it's a one-way with a two-way bike lane taking up the rest.
People I work with argued that it was a bad idea because the restaurants would lose business because now there is less parking, and it just blows my mind that not being able to park directly in front of a restaurant is a deal breaker. Isn't the whole appeal of a city's downtown area to walk around a bit and look up at all the skyscrapers?
People I work with argued that it was a bad idea because the restaurants would lose business because now there is less parking, and it just blows my mind that not being able to park directly in front of a restaurant is a deal breaker. Isn't the whole appeal of a city's downtown area to walk around a bit and look up at all the skyscrapers?
Your anecdote reminds me of my experience in Salt Lake City. When I lived and worked in SLC back during the mid and late 90s, light rail was being proposed, especially with 2002 Olympic Games bearing down. Politicians proposed a simple north-south grid with some east-west connections. Well, the residents were up in arms! How dare you take away our right to driving in heavy traffic on i15. Fast forward 18 years and light rail has been such a huge success in SLC, people have fought for a spur to come to their neighborhood. This is another example of an infrastructure project that was good for all, not just a few profiteering politicians and contractors. Say what you will, but those Mormons know how to manage their municipalities (no offense to people of the LDS Church).
In the article there is a link to a follow-up article:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...
And in this one, a link to another interesting explanation:
https://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/ameri...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...
And in this one, a link to another interesting explanation:
https://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/ameri...
A critique from Bay Area planner Asher Kohn, also from 2017: https://www.asherjkohn.com/blog/2017/10/30/the-weak-logic-in...
I'm not sure there's is actual disagreement here?
Strong towns I'm pretty sure intentionally chooses it's rhetoric to try to be more Republican compatible. (Strength, budgets, irresponsibility, etc.) But ultimately they are asking for a big pile of federal dollars, to rebuild cities/towns to be more compact and efficient, just like most everyone left of center.
I think it's good to point out we shouldn't just densify everything --- we already use too much land area. Some places need to densified, and others need to de-densified (remove housing and use for other purpose).
Strong towns I'm pretty sure intentionally chooses it's rhetoric to try to be more Republican compatible. (Strength, budgets, irresponsibility, etc.) But ultimately they are asking for a big pile of federal dollars, to rebuild cities/towns to be more compact and efficient, just like most everyone left of center.
I think it's good to point out we shouldn't just densify everything --- we already use too much land area. Some places need to densified, and others need to de-densified (remove housing and use for other purpose).
But ultimately they are asking for a big pile of federal dollars
No, not really. They focus a lot on "try things out" at small scale, see what works, and improving a city's cash inflow vs outflow.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/19/the-strong-tow...
https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2020/04/29/coronavirus-studer...
A strong line of critique has been, "City A" knocks down a "blighted" business zone and replaces it with a single business w/ large parking lot & grass everywhere- but when you examine the financials, the new business brings less revenues to the city than the old "blighted" corner mall.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/2/the-cost-of-aut...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/22/the-more-we-gr...
No, not really. They focus a lot on "try things out" at small scale, see what works, and improving a city's cash inflow vs outflow.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/19/the-strong-tow...
https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2020/04/29/coronavirus-studer...
A strong line of critique has been, "City A" knocks down a "blighted" business zone and replaces it with a single business w/ large parking lot & grass everywhere- but when you examine the financials, the new business brings less revenues to the city than the old "blighted" corner mall.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/2/the-cost-of-aut...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/22/the-more-we-gr...
OK sorry, I rather embarrassingly misread https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason....
At least they agree that some up-front spending to reconfigure spaces to be more economically sustainable is necessary, if not that a big pile of federal dollars all at once is the way to do it.
At least they agree that some up-front spending to reconfigure spaces to be more economically sustainable is necessary, if not that a big pile of federal dollars all at once is the way to do it.
I’ve been reading strongtowns off and on for a few years. You’re correct that they try to have a left-leaning approach (densification) based on right-leaning principles (fiscal responsibility). But I haven’t seen them “asking for a big pile of federal dollars.” They seem so be saying that the pile of federal dollars that the towns and cities are already getting should be spent more responsibly, ie on projects that can be sustained by the tax value they create.
A lot of the initial taxation and allocation discussion seems likes somewhat of a red herring. The starting point is near the end, IMO: The cost of infrastructure maintenance is $8k-$10k per home.
Is this true? How variable is this between cities? How determined is it? Could it be less, how, etc.?
IDK if this number is normal or out of line, but I think this needs to be the starting point. My uneducated opinion is that it seems high.
Is this true? How variable is this between cities? How determined is it? Could it be less, how, etc.?
IDK if this number is normal or out of line, but I think this needs to be the starting point. My uneducated opinion is that it seems high.
Per google, $10K/yr is one median income per 2.8 houses. The concept of having one person for every three houses doing nothing but infrastructure maintenance is laughable.
The problem with wide spread innumeracy is random numbers can be printed for propaganda or other purposes and the vast majority of people will simply accept them. Combined with sophistry techniques such as anecdote proves the general rule, etc.
The problem with wide spread innumeracy is random numbers can be printed for propaganda or other purposes and the vast majority of people will simply accept them. Combined with sophistry techniques such as anecdote proves the general rule, etc.
Are you accusing this article of innumeracy and/or propaganda or is this just a general comment?
One difference between here and the States is that most of our tax money goes to the equivalent of city and state, and only a small percentage to the national government.
I pay an equal amount in federal and local property tax. Property taxes also pay for public schools.
Ironically, while people get in arms about how the federal budget is being spent almost no one knows what’s going on in their city or county budget. And that determines your quality of life just as much.
Ironically, while people get in arms about how the federal budget is being spent almost no one knows what’s going on in their city or county budget. And that determines your quality of life just as much.
Here means Germany? Or EU in general?
GP can't possibly mean Germany with chronic communal underfinancing (yet being hit by federal law creating entitlements all the time such as for eg kindergardens, energy efficient housing, etc),
Switzerland.
(and for the cousin comment: PfP yes, NATO no.)
(and for the cousin comment: PfP yes, NATO no.)
The Department of Defense gets the lion's share of U.S. tax dollars, but we're not supposed to talk about that.
At this point I can't tell if the politicians fund the DOD because they want to, or because they're afraid of the lengths it might go to protect its cashflow.
At this point I can't tell if the politicians fund the DOD because they want to, or because they're afraid of the lengths it might go to protect its cashflow.
2020 US federal budget $3.863T
2020 US defense spending $0.636B or 16%.
That’s the lion’s share?
2020 US defense spending $0.636B or 16%.
That’s the lion’s share?
It's actually 993 billion. And while it's not a full majority, it's definitely wayyyyyy too much. The overspending on military means other, productive parts of society are underfunded.
us defense spending is 3.2% of gdp, less than a third of social security, medicare and medicaid at 9.8%: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget...
See what I mean GP? We're really not supposed to talk about this stuff.
mrep, you're either misinforming me, or you're misinformed. That 3.2% that you named doesn't cover domestic military spending (Homeland Security, FBI, NSA) nor does it cover pensions for widows and retirees, nuclear weapons research, nuclear waste disposal, nuclear weapon manufacturing, interest on war debts, the VA. Factoring in these costs actually puts military spending second on your list: 993.8 Billion Dollars, just 7 billion shy of the trillion we spent on social security. We now have a growing number of "civilians" in the military too; these private contractors help to make military spending look smaller than it really is.
And keep in mind the military budget has only grown since 9/11 never shrinking. We're still blowing up Yemen, Somalia, the Levant and Afghanistan as I type this, after already blowing up Iraq, Libya and Pakistan over a period of 20 years. It's expensive.
mrep, you're either misinforming me, or you're misinformed. That 3.2% that you named doesn't cover domestic military spending (Homeland Security, FBI, NSA) nor does it cover pensions for widows and retirees, nuclear weapons research, nuclear waste disposal, nuclear weapon manufacturing, interest on war debts, the VA. Factoring in these costs actually puts military spending second on your list: 993.8 Billion Dollars, just 7 billion shy of the trillion we spent on social security. We now have a growing number of "civilians" in the military too; these private contractors help to make military spending look smaller than it really is.
And keep in mind the military budget has only grown since 9/11 never shrinking. We're still blowing up Yemen, Somalia, the Levant and Afghanistan as I type this, after already blowing up Iraq, Libya and Pakistan over a period of 20 years. It's expensive.
GDP can’t be spent. The Pentagon budget is about 750 billion and federal tax revenues are about 3.5 trillion so the pentagon budget is about 20% of tax revenues. The ‘about’s here are fudging billions.
We’re long past tax revenues defining government spending. Deficits are abound even in good times.
> Deficits are abound even in good times.
I can't wait to hear from "conservatives" who "care deeply" about deficits to come out of the wood works and teach us the virtue of "not spending money we don't have" now that we have given our tax breaks (again) to all the corporations from Amazon to Walmart.
Nobody gets to whine about deficits until we raise our tax rates up and stable for at least a decade[0]. I don't see anyone campaigning for higher property taxes (my recommendation is an annual tax of 7 to 9 percent[1] of the property value with a housing allowance to all residents physically present in the US) similar to the carbon tax in Canada.
[0] My off-hand recommendation for income above 50 x 2000 x minimum wage (for example, at a minimum wage of USD 15, it is USD 50 * 2000 * 15 = USD 1.5M), the progressive tax rate should be at least 90%.
[1] The idea being not paying this tax for roughly ten years ought to be enough to get you evicted with minimum fuss so we can "sell" the property to someone who will pay the property tax. No exceptions. No homesteads. No charitable work exception. Applicable nationwide.
I can't wait to hear from "conservatives" who "care deeply" about deficits to come out of the wood works and teach us the virtue of "not spending money we don't have" now that we have given our tax breaks (again) to all the corporations from Amazon to Walmart.
Nobody gets to whine about deficits until we raise our tax rates up and stable for at least a decade[0]. I don't see anyone campaigning for higher property taxes (my recommendation is an annual tax of 7 to 9 percent[1] of the property value with a housing allowance to all residents physically present in the US) similar to the carbon tax in Canada.
[0] My off-hand recommendation for income above 50 x 2000 x minimum wage (for example, at a minimum wage of USD 15, it is USD 50 * 2000 * 15 = USD 1.5M), the progressive tax rate should be at least 90%.
[1] The idea being not paying this tax for roughly ten years ought to be enough to get you evicted with minimum fuss so we can "sell" the property to someone who will pay the property tax. No exceptions. No homesteads. No charitable work exception. Applicable nationwide.
A pie diagram where the quoted percentages don't match their respective slices of the pie. Talk about misleading!
The pie slices represent the spend as a percentage of total spend, and the percentages are of GDP. I'd hope government spending is not 100% of spending!
The diagram is misleading. The reason is irrelevant.
Because other nations secure your defense.
I find this idea totally weird. Can you look at the last decade of US military actions and say this has increased European security? I think most people would say no, of course not.
Sure, the US pays a lot for defense, but is that money well spent? Did the EU benefit from the US invasion of Korea? Probably not. Vietnam? Also no. Iraq? Afghanistan? In all these cases, certainly no.
Sure, the US pays a lot for defense, but is that money well spent? Did the EU benefit from the US invasion of Korea? Probably not. Vietnam? Also no. Iraq? Afghanistan? In all these cases, certainly no.
> Can you look at the last decade of US military actions and say this has increased European security?
Here is a video [0] of the borders of European countries over the last 1500 years. There is potentially a correlation behind their stability since 1945 (11:16 in the video) and the US having a number of troops stationed in Germany comparable to the German army.
It is debatable whether it was all to do with the US; but the circumstantial evidence is substantial. The border redrawings may resume one day.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI
Here is a video [0] of the borders of European countries over the last 1500 years. There is potentially a correlation behind their stability since 1945 (11:16 in the video) and the US having a number of troops stationed in Germany comparable to the German army.
It is debatable whether it was all to do with the US; but the circumstantial evidence is substantial. The border redrawings may resume one day.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI
There hasn't been a credible outside threat to European security since the fall of the Soviet Union. Intraeuropean wars between major powers have become a lot less likely because of increased economic integration thanks to the EU.
Oh, just the small problems like Transnistria and Donetsk and Crimea.
I do not mean to be sarcastic, but Baltic nations are really happy to be protected by NATO. They are in Russian sphere of interest and cannot defend themselves on their own.
I do not mean to be sarcastic, but Baltic nations are really happy to be protected by NATO. They are in Russian sphere of interest and cannot defend themselves on their own.
From the the time USA took over Western Europe it has been at its most peaceful.
It's not supposed to increase European security. It's supposed to increase senatorial and corporate security.
If some other security also increases, that's a nice bonus.
If some other security also increases, that's a nice bonus.
Vietnam was originally a US funded French effort to retake its former colony, Iraq & Afghanistan rebalanced Middle Eastern power to secure an unthreatened flow of oil to Europe and Asia (even in the early 2000s, it was the EU almost wholly dependent on ME oil, not the US).
And then obviously as a result of acting as a third party security guarantor deterring internal conflict, the EU exists.
And then obviously as a result of acting as a third party security guarantor deterring internal conflict, the EU exists.
>rebalanced Middle Eastern power
This is totally absurd. Do you seriously see Iraq or Afghanistan as balanced? Or are you using 'rebalancing' in the same way I could use 'rebalancing' to describe flipping a table?
The second sentence is also ridiculous. The EU stops the EU from having internal conflicts. That's the original purpose of the union. I don't know what the US has to do with it.
This is totally absurd. Do you seriously see Iraq or Afghanistan as balanced? Or are you using 'rebalancing' in the same way I could use 'rebalancing' to describe flipping a table?
The second sentence is also ridiculous. The EU stops the EU from having internal conflicts. That's the original purpose of the union. I don't know what the US has to do with it.
Balance of power:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_power_(internationa...
The Treaty of Rome was signed in the late 1950s. It, and the subsequent steps to today’s EU are products of Europe’s own internal balance being suspended by the presence of something roughly US shaped [0].
That statement isn’t particularly controversial without delving into some heady revisionism as far as I’m aware. The EU certainly wasn’t developed in a vacuum, and US involvement in the region—especially re: security—was substantial to say the least.
[0] obviously there’s no formal role for the US in the EU, assuming a greater context.
The Treaty of Rome was signed in the late 1950s. It, and the subsequent steps to today’s EU are products of Europe’s own internal balance being suspended by the presence of something roughly US shaped [0].
That statement isn’t particularly controversial without delving into some heady revisionism as far as I’m aware. The EU certainly wasn’t developed in a vacuum, and US involvement in the region—especially re: security—was substantial to say the least.
[0] obviously there’s no formal role for the US in the EU, assuming a greater context.
I think in the immediate post-war era, the US was obviously the guarantor of european peace.
That's very different to saying the EU exists because of the US. That's also very different to your claim that interventions in the ME were to protect European interests.
Using your logic, you could say that Britain exists because of the US, because without US support, they would probably[1] have been invaded by the Germans.
[1]: Not very probably, but the chances of the USSR rolling over Europe were always a bit slim too.
That's very different to saying the EU exists because of the US. That's also very different to your claim that interventions in the ME were to protect European interests.
Using your logic, you could say that Britain exists because of the US, because without US support, they would probably[1] have been invaded by the Germans.
[1]: Not very probably, but the chances of the USSR rolling over Europe were always a bit slim too.
The primary threat to European peace isn’t external.
The EU was wholly created and developed during a suspension of internal politics, conflict, and balancing due to the distorting weight of a third party ensuring order, e.g. German reunification is opposed by Britain, France, and Poland without the presence and backing of the US rendering their oppo essentially useless. Repeat for N issues.
Britain’s current state wasn’t conceived and started because England, Scotland and Wales’ historically conflicting interests were rendered meaningless in the face of an ostensibly neutral third party keeping the peace allowing them to develop ever closer ties, England just conquered the rest a long time ago.
For reference, the last time Europe tried to collectively balance itself internally before conflicting interests inevitably metastasized into alliance formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_of_Europe
And forgive me but once again, I just cannot overstate how important suspending internal conflict was vs keeping the USSR at bay, or going further back, keeping the Nazis out of Britain.
The EU was wholly created and developed during a suspension of internal politics, conflict, and balancing due to the distorting weight of a third party ensuring order, e.g. German reunification is opposed by Britain, France, and Poland without the presence and backing of the US rendering their oppo essentially useless. Repeat for N issues.
Britain’s current state wasn’t conceived and started because England, Scotland and Wales’ historically conflicting interests were rendered meaningless in the face of an ostensibly neutral third party keeping the peace allowing them to develop ever closer ties, England just conquered the rest a long time ago.
For reference, the last time Europe tried to collectively balance itself internally before conflicting interests inevitably metastasized into alliance formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_of_Europe
And forgive me but once again, I just cannot overstate how important suspending internal conflict was vs keeping the USSR at bay, or going further back, keeping the Nazis out of Britain.
Is this a common view of european history amongst Americans? To me, it seems very idiosyncratic and strange. Here's some doubts off the top of my head:
1. Has the peace in europe been unusually long-lasting?
2. Are internal politics actually suspended? Russia, and by extension the USSR, was a traditional player in European conflicts.
3. Is there a fundamental difference between the soviet bloc / nato 'grand alliances' and the earlier ones?
4. What practical role did the US play in, for instance, German unification? I thought that was basically the German's own thing, with nobody else having a relevant opinion.
I'd see the recent cooperation between EU states as a result of the collapse of their empires. No empires means no squabbling over colonial territory, a loss of military power and prestige, and the end of an easy way of translating military power into economic success.
Usually, external powers cause instability, much as the US and the USSR did throughout the cold war in the third world.
Also, what internal conflict was possible to help the Nazis invade britain? Everywhere else in western europe was already conquered by the time such an invasion was in the works.
1. Has the peace in europe been unusually long-lasting?
2. Are internal politics actually suspended? Russia, and by extension the USSR, was a traditional player in European conflicts.
3. Is there a fundamental difference between the soviet bloc / nato 'grand alliances' and the earlier ones?
4. What practical role did the US play in, for instance, German unification? I thought that was basically the German's own thing, with nobody else having a relevant opinion.
I'd see the recent cooperation between EU states as a result of the collapse of their empires. No empires means no squabbling over colonial territory, a loss of military power and prestige, and the end of an easy way of translating military power into economic success.
Usually, external powers cause instability, much as the US and the USSR did throughout the cold war in the third world.
Also, what internal conflict was possible to help the Nazis invade britain? Everywhere else in western europe was already conquered by the time such an invasion was in the works.
Oh no, it’s not common at all day to day. US foreign policy has been heavily liberal & internationalist for a century or so now in a manner that deeply affects public opinion of it and its effects. More realist lenses such as this have enjoyed splendid isolation in their IR niches until somewhat recently, but even that slight bump in popularity is mostly negligible outside DC and academia.
Each of your doubts could be addressed with a book/subfield of study, so this will be very high level, unsatisfying, inevitably colored, and in the same vein of perspective as before:
1. https://europa.eu/european-union/sites/europaeu/files/pictur... , can also see the concert and it’s rocky phases leading up to WWI here.
2. Mostly as it relates to balancing and the results of that, though as you’ve pointed out this could all easily be viewed as balancing against the USSR (though the context, lack of relative economic power & length of time in alliance preclude this somewhat, alliances don’t necessarily prevent peer conflict, especially over time and as the participants strengths vary!).
3. Sort of? Cold War era alliances were standing, and meant to ensure peace vs reactive with a finite life span and intended to address a specific crisis, e.g. Napoleon. This obviously existed beforehand though, and indeed led to WWI. I’m not sure of the exact historical trends on this.
4. The eastern half was still soviet for one, France was very strong in the form of EC at the time and didn’t like NATO dominating/expanding for two, and Thatcher was just Thatcher for three. The whole process of reunification was such a fantastic example of skillful diplomacy on both sides that I really can’t do it justice here, suffice to say that US efforts pushed an uneasy/unwilling FR/UK to commit to the process, the “Two Plus Four” negotiating format, and Germany in NATO while brokering the guarantees and associated issues that led the USSR to accepting. Really recommend checking out the history of this if you have the interest and time, fascinating period of history.
And decolonization was absolutely key to integration! Staying on brand, I would only question whether it was fully voluntary (Suez), and whether the global cessation of translating military force into economic success among US allies post Bretton Woods & the WWII destruction of every single other blue water navy had more of an effect.
Finally, the third world was a battleground. External powers and powers in general often do cause instability, but the US in this case held near complete hegemony over Western Europe, and hegemony is quite closely linked with stability in general. One can also look at the relative internal placidity of the eastern bloc while the soviets held control, and its aftermath.
I’m not exactly sure as to what your last paragraph asks, but I’ve had enough fun writing this as is, whew.
Each of your doubts could be addressed with a book/subfield of study, so this will be very high level, unsatisfying, inevitably colored, and in the same vein of perspective as before:
1. https://europa.eu/european-union/sites/europaeu/files/pictur... , can also see the concert and it’s rocky phases leading up to WWI here.
2. Mostly as it relates to balancing and the results of that, though as you’ve pointed out this could all easily be viewed as balancing against the USSR (though the context, lack of relative economic power & length of time in alliance preclude this somewhat, alliances don’t necessarily prevent peer conflict, especially over time and as the participants strengths vary!).
3. Sort of? Cold War era alliances were standing, and meant to ensure peace vs reactive with a finite life span and intended to address a specific crisis, e.g. Napoleon. This obviously existed beforehand though, and indeed led to WWI. I’m not sure of the exact historical trends on this.
4. The eastern half was still soviet for one, France was very strong in the form of EC at the time and didn’t like NATO dominating/expanding for two, and Thatcher was just Thatcher for three. The whole process of reunification was such a fantastic example of skillful diplomacy on both sides that I really can’t do it justice here, suffice to say that US efforts pushed an uneasy/unwilling FR/UK to commit to the process, the “Two Plus Four” negotiating format, and Germany in NATO while brokering the guarantees and associated issues that led the USSR to accepting. Really recommend checking out the history of this if you have the interest and time, fascinating period of history.
And decolonization was absolutely key to integration! Staying on brand, I would only question whether it was fully voluntary (Suez), and whether the global cessation of translating military force into economic success among US allies post Bretton Woods & the WWII destruction of every single other blue water navy had more of an effect.
Finally, the third world was a battleground. External powers and powers in general often do cause instability, but the US in this case held near complete hegemony over Western Europe, and hegemony is quite closely linked with stability in general. One can also look at the relative internal placidity of the eastern bloc while the soviets held control, and its aftermath.
I’m not exactly sure as to what your last paragraph asks, but I’ve had enough fun writing this as is, whew.
Iraq was about securing the US Dollar as the reserve currency for trading oil, not about securing supply to Western Europe. Saddam was threatening to start trading in Euros - he wasn't threatening to cut them off.
“Unthreatened” by regional conflict that spirals into affecting regional output more than anything explicit like turning off the taps.
And I’m sorry, but I personally still can’t/won’t do petrodollar discussions on the internet. It’s a perfectly valid reason for US involvement here, but I have been deeply scarred when it comes to good faith on this subject.
And I’m sorry, but I personally still can’t/won’t do petrodollar discussions on the internet. It’s a perfectly valid reason for US involvement here, but I have been deeply scarred when it comes to good faith on this subject.
US has never done anything in foreign affairs for free.
Quite right. The US guaranteed the security of allies and their trade in exchange for opposition to the soviets, who no longer exist.
The current post soviet (& fledgling post ME) situation actually is relatively “free” though, there is an absolutely massive amount of inertia in place.
The current post soviet (& fledgling post ME) situation actually is relatively “free” though, there is an absolutely massive amount of inertia in place.
The Pentagon's New Map (Thomas P.M. Barnett) offers interesting insights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon's_New_Map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon's_New_Map
Barnett's #4 (war in the context of "everything else") is straight outta Clausewitz.
Interesting to see how he differs from 1984[1]:
Oceania is split across Old Core, New Core, and Disconnected.
Eurasia is split across Old Core and New Core.
Eastasia is split across New Core and Disconnected.
Disputed territories are contained within Disconnected.
Guess I'll track his trichotomy to see if it has any better explanatory power.
[1] roughly (in our world I think Eastasia is smaller): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Fou...
Interesting to see how he differs from 1984[1]:
Oceania is split across Old Core, New Core, and Disconnected.
Eurasia is split across Old Core and New Core.
Eastasia is split across New Core and Disconnected.
Disputed territories are contained within Disconnected.
Guess I'll track his trichotomy to see if it has any better explanatory power.
[1] roughly (in our world I think Eastasia is smaller): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Fou...
Nations never do anything for "free". Nations act in their own self-interest.
That is the nature of politics.
That is the nature of politics.
"defense"
Capital is so cheap these days, Lafayette should:
(1) borrow to fund infrastructure spending; and focus that into new local jobs and economic activity
(2) A boosted economy will allow higher taxes to be collected
(3) Better infrastructure will attract investment
But in this scenario, politicians will skip step 2 because it's unpopular; and the cycle will continue in a future generation.
(1) borrow to fund infrastructure spending; and focus that into new local jobs and economic activity
(2) A boosted economy will allow higher taxes to be collected
(3) Better infrastructure will attract investment
But in this scenario, politicians will skip step 2 because it's unpopular; and the cycle will continue in a future generation.
How will that help? The fundamental problem is sprawl - the density is too low to support the infrastructure to maintain it. Effectively, the city is making a loss on every square meter of land it builds infrastructure on. Using a loan to build more infrastructure will make the problem worse - unless you can raise the tax base around (ballpark estimate from the numbers given in the article) factor 10 or higher just to maintain that infrastructure. So the answer is to build less - make quarters denser, smaller footprint per person, less garden space per house, higher houses. This all goes counter the dream many people have - a suburb house with a garden, driveway, lawn and porch.
High density infrastructure like subways and trains is way more expensive than roads and pipes. It is a 100k town in the example not LA.
I lived a few years in a 180k town that was dense enough that you didn't need a car at all. It was maybe 15km from one end of town to the other. Public transport was mostly busses and a Tram line.
Yup. Lafayette has a population of 120k. Leeuwarden, The Netherlands has 124k and it's only 5km from edge to edge, and that's a very normal figure here.
The higher the density, the cheaper the infrastructure per person. It's not that difficult once you stop forcing everyone to drive.
The higher the density, the cheaper the infrastructure per person. It's not that difficult once you stop forcing everyone to drive.
* once you force everyone to stop driving
There is no force stopping anyone from driving. The vast majority of roads allow cars, nearly every single home will have one or more parking spots. If you want to do everything by car, you absolutely can!
But once other modes of transport are viable, there is just no need to drive that much.
Kids going to elementary? A five-minute walk. Kids going to high school? A 15-minute bike ride. Same for sports, friends, and basically everything else they do. This means they don't need to be ferried around by parents all the time and they don't need their own car at age 16. With some minor infrastructure changes, the roads will be safe enough to do this on their own! This eliminates a part of car traffic, so you actually need less space for infrastructure.
This applies to adults as well. There's no need to drive to work if it's a 15-minute bike ride. Grocery shopping? Well, you pass a store on your way home, so just pick up the ingredients required for that day's meal.
You can still do it the American way and drive everywhere, but not doing so is suddenly an option too!
But once other modes of transport are viable, there is just no need to drive that much.
Kids going to elementary? A five-minute walk. Kids going to high school? A 15-minute bike ride. Same for sports, friends, and basically everything else they do. This means they don't need to be ferried around by parents all the time and they don't need their own car at age 16. With some minor infrastructure changes, the roads will be safe enough to do this on their own! This eliminates a part of car traffic, so you actually need less space for infrastructure.
This applies to adults as well. There's no need to drive to work if it's a 15-minute bike ride. Grocery shopping? Well, you pass a store on your way home, so just pick up the ingredients required for that day's meal.
You can still do it the American way and drive everywhere, but not doing so is suddenly an option too!
You don’t even need to force everyone to stop driving. Once density increases, distances get easier to cover by bike or by walking, adding policies that make people liable for the cost of space to put a car (ban or realistic fees for on-street parking) people will reconsider owning a car. Basically you can still drive - there’s still roads, but you need to stash your vehicle on your property. And then people will start considering whether they still want that garage or maybe a bigger flat would be cool, too.
> there’s still roads, but you need to stash your vehicle on your property.
Yep, just took a little Google Maps trip around Layfette, just another US town where people park on the street because we have more cars than we can handle or our garage is full of Chrsitmas decorations.
Yep, just took a little Google Maps trip around Layfette, just another US town where people park on the street because we have more cars than we can handle or our garage is full of Chrsitmas decorations.
That's ridiculous. There are plenty of people driving even in dense towns.
Exactly - and that low density town is loosing money per mile road, sewage pipes, ... So it needs to build less miles, not more and increase the income per mile. If your startup is loosing money per sale, increasing sales is not a viable long term strategy.
You don't need subways and trains in a dense 100k town.
LOL. Most cities aren't New York and Los Angeles. Lafayette is a town that grew into a city. You will NEEEEEVER EVER get that particular populace into the idea that they should all huddle in miserable, adjacent caves around the city center.
I've often heard arguments like this for infrastructure spending, but I've also often heard that point 2 doesn't ever happen. You get a short term boost in jobs while the project is underway, but you don't get enough economic boost out of new roads and such to actually raise the tax base appreciably. It's basically just city maintenance work and businesses don't reward it as much as people think. Mind you, businesses will move out if you don't do it, but you won't see 2X tax revenue or whatever from that new waste plant, regardless of how it got sold to the locals.
I remember after the Northridge earthquake in 94 destroyed a section of Interstate 10 in Los Angeles. The state awarded the repair contract to a company with the stipulation of penalties of 200k/day after a certain amount of time, or a bonus a 200k/day if they finished before scheduled. https://www.planacademy.com/construction-project-acceleratio...
And every month in Lafayette, how much money goes to the interest on mortgage debt?
And how many human-hours a month do people in Lafayette twiddle away on corporate busywork so they can pay that interest?
And how many human-hours a month do people in Lafayette twiddle away on corporate busywork so they can pay that interest?
Maybe because middle class left to suburbs leaving mostly ghettos in the cities thus depriving them of them main source of income, the property tax?
In this case, the problem will fix itself, because suburbs are the Cold War creation, they can be seen as a compulsory wartime measure. Provided that relationship with China will not reach Cold War standoff levels, they will cease to exist by themselves, because modern people really don't want to live in them.
In this case, the problem will fix itself, because suburbs are the Cold War creation, they can be seen as a compulsory wartime measure. Provided that relationship with China will not reach Cold War standoff levels, they will cease to exist by themselves, because modern people really don't want to live in them.
Thats such an absurd opinion. People live in suburbs because you can raise a family at an affordable price point and not have your children see people shitting on the sidewalk. People also dont want to live around millions of people in close proximity if they can afford it. I lived in NYC for 10 years and its a complete trap that you can't escape because you dont have the logistics or financial means to move out (and I had a white collar job in finance). I had to get very well off before I could move out. Thats the primary reason cities become over-crowded. Its a one way street especially if you're single. Not because they're so great.
The suburbs are more popular than ever: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/millennials-l....
It's to even really true in cities that people perceive to be growing and vital. New York City, for example, would be shrinking if it wasn't for the influx of foreign immigrants: https://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/....
> The City of New York grew by over 362,000 residents between 2010 and 2016, a growth rate of 4.4% (Table 1). City officials consider this to be among the strongest periods of growth in the last half century (NYC Planning, 2017a). The population grew by 402,000 people through natural increase, and net foreign migration added an additional 500,000 residents. Net domestic migration was -524,000, as more people moved out of the city than moved in.
It's to even really true in cities that people perceive to be growing and vital. New York City, for example, would be shrinking if it wasn't for the influx of foreign immigrants: https://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/....
> The City of New York grew by over 362,000 residents between 2010 and 2016, a growth rate of 4.4% (Table 1). City officials consider this to be among the strongest periods of growth in the last half century (NYC Planning, 2017a). The population grew by 402,000 people through natural increase, and net foreign migration added an additional 500,000 residents. Net domestic migration was -524,000, as more people moved out of the city than moved in.
I dunno about that. Here in Chicago we've been seeing a massive migration out of the city to the suburbs for the past several years. In all of the reporting on the topic, no one has mentioned cold war fears as a motivation. It's always high taxes & failing infrastructure given as the reason.
> because modern people really don't want to live in them.
At least in the US, I doubt this is true, by and large. Given the sheer number of people in them, it seems to strain credulity that most don't want to.
At least in the US, I doubt this is true, by and large. Given the sheer number of people in them, it seems to strain credulity that most don't want to.
Blind support of new urbanism used to be a pledge of allegiance on this site; support seems to be shifting to something else, although I don't know what.
Beg to differ... many people find city life to be completely antithetical to a life of happiness.
I suspect they can keep up and they just will have to in the future. Right now you can see it in taxes for old established cities in the NE have higher taxes than growing states in the South. I saw that NY pays more for retired cops than it does for those working today - that isn't true for Miami/Phoenix/Dallas or other fast growing cities, but will be.
Cities could procure significant funds by assessing developers for long term maintenance costs. For example, it should be possible to estimate how many new housing units would require an additional fire station and the cost to build it. Then prorate that cost to each house. Same applies to libraries, parks, court houses and so on. Developers would tack the additional assessment on to the price of the house and that in turn might slow demand and growth.
Corruption is most definitely a factor, maybe not universal, but I have seen it. In my city a developer got approval for the first stage of new houses, about 130, and the county planning agency gave approval for the second stage conditional upon the developer building a bridge to allevate traffic. After the first stage was complete the county commissioners voted to pick up the cost of the bridge and the only explanation was the developer did not have the funds and the commissioners thought the second stage housing would be be an economic benefit to the community.
Corruption is most definitely a factor, maybe not universal, but I have seen it. In my city a developer got approval for the first stage of new houses, about 130, and the county planning agency gave approval for the second stage conditional upon the developer building a bridge to allevate traffic. After the first stage was complete the county commissioners voted to pick up the cost of the bridge and the only explanation was the developer did not have the funds and the commissioners thought the second stage housing would be be an economic benefit to the community.
You're describing property taxes in your first paragraph.
Then I was not clear. The prorated cost should be added to the fees charged to the developer. Developers would likely tack that onto the price of the house, so not a tax, but a develop fee.
Isn't that exactly the same root cause of why the article asserts American cities can't keep up with infrastructure upkeep? Cities accepting up front windfalls regardless of whatever long term costs that come with it?
That's effectively how it works in the UK. Look up "Section 106 agreements" if you want details.
The article talked about a “big pot of money” at the federal level but it seems that even if it addressed the backlog the problem would remain.
Why does infrastructure seem to work in Western Europe? Even little towns in Germany have good roads, water, electricity etc.
Why does infrastructure seem to work in Western Europe? Even little towns in Germany have good roads, water, electricity etc.
So basically these cities need to reduce their infrastructure to the point it's maintainable again. That could work for roads. It's not much fun, but in Russia often houses don't have an asphalted roads next to them. but perhaps it wouldn't work for pipes, because of hygiene reasons. Perhaps owners can be made to pay for at least some of those pipes through fees for the homeowners association rather than taxes. That way the excess is off the city balance sheet. Houses that are too far away from central infrastructure would just be vacated eventually. Maybe in time more efficient cost sharing appartments would replace these.
I noticed the author is a civil engineer. Asking a civil engineer if you need more infrastructure spending is a lot like asking a barber if you need a haircut or asking an orthodontist if your kid needs braces.
If that's the case, then the author's conclusion (that we need much less infrastructure because we have so much that it's absolutely impossible to maintain it) is even more interesting.
Indeed, Marohn (the author of TFA) has been attacked by other members of the civil engineering profession for his criticisms of it (going against established "dogma" as he puts it).
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/18/what-happens-w...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/18/what-happens-w...
Who is more qualified than an orthodontist to suggest whether a kid needs braces?
It's a classic straw-man, "Well of course a civil engineer says there are civil engineering problems! It's their job on the line!"
You know when a mechanic has a sign out front that says "free brake inspection", how often do you think he says "brakes look great, no work needed"? You should only take advantage of a offer like that if you already suspect something is wrong or in the case of a orthodontist when you think your kid needs braces to begin with.
It's the conflict of interest we're worried about. Not competence to make the assessment.
Or asking a doctor if you need medical treatment... OH WAIT.
No, it's more like if you go to a surgeon, he may suggest a surgical remedy because that's where his expertise is focused. Same here: a guy writing for this site is likely to focus his research on denser urban planning as a solution, and we should bear that in mind.
The funny thing is, I've watched his talk and he basically says "there is no solution". We've kinda screwed ourselves already, and whatever option we choose is going to hurt. But although we're in a hole, we do have the option to stop digging.
Perhaps surprisingly, I'd consider Charles Marohn to be less focused on denser urban planning than one would expect. His message is more that whatever we do, we should ensure that the tax base is enough to support the infrastructure we do build. It's fine to have people on farms in rural areas, but we shouldn't be running miles of paved road out to their houses.
And I think he's made a really good point before, which is that sparse, auto-oriented development, and development that depends fundamentally on endless growth for funding is actually a radical departure from how people have built villages, towns, and cities for pretty much all of human history. It's not something that was really intentional, people just copied what they thought seemed to work in Detroit and didn't think too hard about it. The cost-effectiveness of dense development, whether urban or rural, is pretty well proven at this point.
Perhaps surprisingly, I'd consider Charles Marohn to be less focused on denser urban planning than one would expect. His message is more that whatever we do, we should ensure that the tax base is enough to support the infrastructure we do build. It's fine to have people on farms in rural areas, but we shouldn't be running miles of paved road out to their houses.
And I think he's made a really good point before, which is that sparse, auto-oriented development, and development that depends fundamentally on endless growth for funding is actually a radical departure from how people have built villages, towns, and cities for pretty much all of human history. It's not something that was really intentional, people just copied what they thought seemed to work in Detroit and didn't think too hard about it. The cost-effectiveness of dense development, whether urban or rural, is pretty well proven at this point.
Either way, your second opinion will probably be another doctor, not an auto mechanic.
Does anyone know of data tools that could help (say) a city council understand the position of their own municipality? I think a lot of people are flying blind, not asking the right questions.
Hey, they have some info on this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/10/19/value-per-acr...
Usually the tax values of properties are available to the public, as well as digital maps of plots. You can combine the two to do a coarse analysis of how much each property is worth per acre.
Urban 3, the firm that did the analysis in the article, goes much further and includes things like where people take trips and which roads are the most valuable, that sort of thing. But even a basic analysis can be quite telling.
Usually the tax values of properties are available to the public, as well as digital maps of plots. You can combine the two to do a coarse analysis of how much each property is worth per acre.
Urban 3, the firm that did the analysis in the article, goes much further and includes things like where people take trips and which roads are the most valuable, that sort of thing. But even a basic analysis can be quite telling.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310
This does not explain long established cities such as Baltimore. They have driven all the high earners out through a combination of high taxes and lack of services. The high earners pay most of the taxes, so now they're just stuck.
From what I can tell, cities have very poor cost control, and regularly pay platinum prices for lead. And they end up not even getting lead.
From what I can tell, cities have very poor cost control, and regularly pay platinum prices for lead. And they end up not even getting lead.
> Except for a small handful of North American cities -- literally five or less -- Lafayette provides an insight into why your city has no money.
...
> It's a predicament that nearly every American city, with very few exceptions, finds itself in.
Does anyone know some of the American cities that don't follow this pattern?
...
> It's a predicament that nearly every American city, with very few exceptions, finds itself in.
Does anyone know some of the American cities that don't follow this pattern?
Contrary to what he says, pretty much none of the cities follow this pattern. Infrastructure maintenance is not a significant cost in most cities budgets, and the only cities that really have any significant problems with it are the ones that are decaying altogether for non-infrastructure related reasons (eg. main employer left, and people are leaving too).
Do you have anything I can read which contradicts his point on the cost of infrastructure spending? I'd like to see the counterpoint to his thesis.
I made a comment a while ago to that effect:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22909240
His thesis falls apart already if you do a back of a napkin calculation.
Here is another case study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913531
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22909240
His thesis falls apart already if you do a back of a napkin calculation.
Here is another case study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913531
Is maintenance not a significant cost because the infrastructure doesn't need maintenance, or is it not a significant cost because the infrastructure is left to decay?
Pick a few towns at random, look at their budgets, look at their road quality in Google Streetview, and see for yourself. I would love to hear of any examples of infrastructure costs killing cities, but I simply couldn't find any.
[deleted]
Man, it's too bad this author didn't read the other post on the front page about colorblindness; I can barely understand anything from his graph.
(Yes this post is from a few years ago, but it does provide a good example of the principles from the colorblindness post.)
(Yes this post is from a few years ago, but it does provide a good example of the principles from the colorblindness post.)
Georgism might be an answer to the problem of sprawling cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The concept of gaining public revenues mainly from land and natural
resource privileges was widely popularized by Henry George through his
first book, Progress and Poverty (1879)...
Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have observed that a public
levy on land value does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other
taxes. A land value tax also has progressive tax effects. Advocates of
land value taxes argue that they would reduce economic inequality, increase
economic efficiency, *remove incentives to underutilize urban land* and
reduce property speculation.
I still remember the title of this article before it was edited. It felt more honest before the edit.
The idea that cities must rebuild their infrastructure every generation is completely absurd.
the author did not take zoning in consideration. Public housing usually get built near transit centers where there are lots of business. The mix use zoning contribute to the higher revenue number.
This hits the proverbial nail right on the head. In many towns and cities (of various sizes) across the US, pro-growth agendas are enriching a handful at the expense of residents. Take Metro NY for example, where the latest development craze is market-rate, high-density housing. Gone are the projects building McMansions on an acre or more, as you can pack in hordes of people in thise apartment and condos. Of course, the politicians promise 'affordable' housing as a way to get public approval, but what always happens is a minor number of affordable units are given away in a lottery and the bulk of the project is market rate. Market in Metro NY suburbs is around $3200/mo for a two bedroom. Add to this many developers in this region are experts at getting local and state IDA funding, tax abatements and utility credits, it becomes clear the taxpayers are funding this development. To this post's credit, these projects all require some degree of infrastructure expansion and yes, much of the maintenance of this infrastructure occurs at the detriment of existing infrastructure. Roads, rails, airports,and the electric grid in this region has suffered to the point of being 3rd world or less. Yet, taxes are sky high. Consider a 1500 sq ft, 50 year old home in suburban NJ or NY already has property taxes of $10k-15k in any commutable town/city. And adding insult to injury is the labor costs, which in Metro-NY are among the highest in the world (yes, higher than Singapore).
Metro NY may be an easy target, but like the author of this post, I believe this is happening in many towns and cities across the US. We need to get smart about our growth and take politicians who promise grand infrastructure programs to task. Just look at Trump's Infrastructure Week boon dogle or Biden's now non-existent promise of national high-speed rail. Now these hollow promises would have been growth for the public good, not just the local pols and developers.
Metro NY may be an easy target, but like the author of this post, I believe this is happening in many towns and cities across the US. We need to get smart about our growth and take politicians who promise grand infrastructure programs to task. Just look at Trump's Infrastructure Week boon dogle or Biden's now non-existent promise of national high-speed rail. Now these hollow promises would have been growth for the public good, not just the local pols and developers.
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Can anyone confirm if this is accurate or not? It sounds pretty dire if so.
We all need to move to cities, and leave more land for nature.
No, I don't think I'd ever want to do that. I've lived for a short time in a dense urban environment and I hated it. I've seen pictures of European cities and they seen way too cramped for my taste as well. Like it or not, you will have to deal with the fact that most people don't want to live cramped up.
Also, do you think the people will just abandon their land if no one else buys it? "Nature" won't pay for it. They bought it from someone else and will therefore expect to be paid before relinquishing it.
Also, do you think the people will just abandon their land if no one else buys it? "Nature" won't pay for it. They bought it from someone else and will therefore expect to be paid before relinquishing it.
Could be a myriad of issues. In 10 years the People's Republic of China was able to construct, at a fraction of the cost per km, 16,000 miles of fully connected high speed rail compared to the California High Speed rail project that completed 100 miles in the same period of time.
I think its a total institutional failure - and neither Republican or Democrat have a solution.
From my personal perspective, China seems to be much more capitalist than the United States. And we have embraced extreme regulation preventing us from doing anything at all.
I think its a total institutional failure - and neither Republican or Democrat have a solution.
From my personal perspective, China seems to be much more capitalist than the United States. And we have embraced extreme regulation preventing us from doing anything at all.
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Can someone please give a tl;dr of the main argument?
kingkawn(1)
don't even need to read the article. the answer has been, is and will be always the same - welfare aka communism.
Just read the article and the follow on article. His answer to the problem? Paint crosswalks, and put in street trees in poor neighborhoods.
How does this strong towns crap keep finding its way to the top of HN? This site is just nonsense unsourced propaganda.
Forty years ago, countries like the USA decided that it was good to stop investing in the country and giving increasing tax breaks to corporations because that would be enough to create progress. Now even economists finally realize that these companies have done nothing to grow the economy and that all the money given to them was diverted to increased dividends and buy-backs, CEO compensation, and investments abroad. The problems with infrastructure are not isolated, it is just an aspect of the malaise that it the ideology that more money should be given to the already rich. Now the country doesn't have the fiscal basis to invest anymore and the people are getting the results of this irresponsible behavior.
TFA has a more nuanced position than this. It's central point is that cities/towns/communities expanded by adding large amounts of infrastructure without any possible means to pay for its maintainance in the future. They did so because they gained short term revenue from the expansion, but failed to have any model whatsoever of how the infrastructure would be maintained.
That is a myopic position because cities are not independent and don't live in a vacuum. Cities exist because it is in the interest of the country to develop areas with high industrial or services growth. The investments in infrastructure are a shared concern that benefits the whole country, not just the cities. This TFA theory is just another facet of neoliberal ideology that tries to compartmentalize profits and evade public investments in a large scale.
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.