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.
Most infrastructure is designed to last decades, and many cities have stretched infrastructure - from bridges to sewers to more - decades beyond its original expected lifespan. The bills are starting to come due now.
Who paid for building them in the first place then? Were people in the 50s so much wealthier than now, that paying for the roads and sewers was peanuts for them, but we cannot afford it anymore?
The whole Strong Towns theory of infrastructure costs bankrupting cities does sound plausible, until you start doing the math. Then, it becomes totally absurd.
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.
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.
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!
Federal deficit spending and cost-disease are also things. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to think forward a decade or two.
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.)
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-...
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.
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.
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.
Why SF and Oakland have bad streets (2016)
Edit: remove that AMP bullshit
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Anothe...
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 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.
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.
>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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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?