Last week’s debate between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn was supposed to be about urban planning, but it ended up being more about urban finance. Marohn had been hired by the city of Lafayette, Louisiana to help it decide where to fund its infrastructure. He and his organization, Strong Towns, advocates that cities use return on investment model to help make such decisions.
Marohn raised some legitimate questions about city finances. For example, in a typical subdivision, the developer builds roads and streets and then deeds them over to the city. The city collects property and sales taxes on the new development, which can be a windfall for many years. But then, after 25 years or so, the street needs to be repaved, and the cost of doing so may not be justified by the taxes collected from adjacent properties.
Based on this, Marohn concludes that the nation as a whole should build no new roads anywhere. While that policy might make sense for slow-growing communities in Minnesota, where Marohn lives, it makes no sense for fast-growth communities in the Sunbelt, which need new infrastructure to support that growth.
Marohn’s three-dimensional charts showing the tax revenues minus urban service costs of individual parcels in Lafayette and other communities offered some intriguing insights. For example, he noted that districts that cities had declared “blighted” sometimes produced higher net revenues than the “renewed” structures that replaced them after urban redevelopment. But his analyses could also lead to peculiar recommendations.
For example, when one of Marohn’s colleagues found out I was from Oregon, he said something like, “Oregon should ban big-box stores because they never produce enough taxes to cover their costs.” But what if consumers want such stores? I responded.
As I noted during the debate, I found it “horrifying” that Marohn would advocate that cities make land-use decisions based on such criteria. City finances are based on a hodgepodge of taxes and fees that were often developed specifically to give one group of people free use of some city services while covertly charging the cost to some other group. The results, as Marohn has shown, are absurd, but to use those results to make land-use decisions merely compounds that absurdity.
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Of course, I am fully aware that city officials already use their own finances as primary criteria when making a wide range of policy decisions. Mayors and councilors may get elected intending to serve the people but quickly become victims of any city’s need to fund its basic services and the revenues available for those services.
It’s one thing to admit that this is a flaw in our political system. It is quite another thing to advocate, as Marohn does, that cities base their spending and land-use decisions on this flaw. Marohn argues that he is increasing transparency by providing cities with this information, but in fact he is really just giving cities reasons to fund favored projects and neglect other essential services.
During the debate, Marohn reasonably asked the Antiplanner what cities should do when they don’t have to power to charge mileage-based user fees or other user fees that Antiplanner supports. The rational answer is that governments should act as though markets were working and fund the things that people are willing to pay for even if there is no mechanism for them to actually do so. But that’s a trap, because it depends on the wisdom of city planners to figure out what people are willing to pay–a wisdom that they’ve proven they (as well as economists and people of any other profession) lack if only because no one can truly know what everyone in a city is willing to pay for everything without actual markets to collect those payments.
Until true market or user-fee mechanisms are available, cities having trouble funding essential services such as road maintenance and police should do three things. First, if infrastructure such as roads cost cities a lot more to rehabilitate than they originally cost to build, maybe there is something wrong with their cost structure. They are probably spending too much money doing studies, paying off unions, and catering to other politically powerful groups.
Second, once costs are controlled and there are still insufficient funds to do essential maintenance, cities should look at their budgets and see what non-essential activities are wasting taxpayer dollars. Streetcars, stadiums, fiber-optic systems, and similar projects are either wastes of money or ought to be funded by the private sector. While Marohn is right that cities need to rehabilitate roads and bridges every 25 to 30 years, it is also true that many cities and suburbs have successfully done this for more than a hundred years, so being short of funds today signals that cities are doing something wrong, not that the roads or other infrastructure shouldn’t have been built in the first place.
Third, cities should take another look to see what mechanisms really are available to fund various services. Most states allow cities to create local improvement districts that allow property owners to pay a fee for several years that can be used to repay bonds that are used for infrastructure improvements. Local residents are not going to support such districts, however, if they sense the city is using them to augment their existing bloated budgets, so cities must take the first two steps above before asking homeowners or businesses to pay into such funds.
Marohn claimed to consider himself something of a libertarian. But in the end, the difference between him and the Antiplanner is that he looks at city planning and finances from the point of view of city treasuries while I look at them from the point of view of present and future residents of the city. The fact that those two views are not aligned just means that voters must be ever vigilant against political schemes to spend their tax dollars on glitzy but useless projects and programs.
“Marohn claimed to consider himself something of a libertarian.”
Riiiight. Just like people can be somewhat pregnant.
Speaking of glitzy, but useless I’m going into Portland this morning using 99-E going North.
It used to get all backed up before the Ross Island Bridge because, stupidly, the Division Street overpass was not improved to six lanes when they had the chance replacing it. Eight lanes North and six lanes South, who would have thought to build the new overpass with six lanes? Anyway, they did add bike lanes though and in the years since it’s completion I have seen a total of two bicyclists using them.
I suppose they used the money saved from not improving the 99-E four lane bottleneck of an overpass on our new 1.5 billion dollar Orange line light rail to Milwaukie. So, now that that’s open I should be able to breeze past the Ross Island Bridge North on 99-E with no slow down, right? I’ll post tomorrow of my hopefully speedy trip into town.
I like Charles Marohn and strong towns. I appreciate that they’re raising the issue of ROI and city spending. That’s a rare thing to find among progressives.
The problem is that beyond the issue of being consciousness of city spending, they turn off their brains. It’s not just that Charles & Co. make puerile statements about banning big box stores or claim that a city won’t be able to afford asphalt, they make the puerile claim that Ferguson was designed to fail.
The problem is they have no metrics for this sort of claim. They have some subjective criteria, but nothing to explain why other aging inner ring suburbs have those sort of issues. And the idea of density and walk ability being the key doesn’t hold up either. If that was what was needed, Robbinsdale ( MN ) would be little different than Edina ( MN ). The East Philips neighborhood in MPLStown even with a light rail station can’t attract upscale housing and is still today mired in poverty while a neighborhood like Minnehaha with the same amenities has long been middle class.
Obsessed with a specific end, they eschew the obvious. Some communities like West Lake Township ( MN ) will never fail despite, presumably, being design to fail as Strongtowns would claim. They have no city water nor sewer. They do not have have sidewalks nor bike lanes. They mandate large lots ( 3 1/2 acres, IIRC ) and have allowed developers to build roads and hand them over to the township.
According to Strong towns this is a recipe for failure when in fact it’s quite the opposite. Lacking density, it makes no sense for the township – now nearly fully developed – to run any of their own services. The township contracts out police, fire, snow removal, tree servicing, et al.
The lack of density means they won’t need to raise capital to replace capital intensive storm water and sewage systems. The county ensures septic tanks are regularly pumped and up to code. The township has zero reason to have a single employee.
If the end goal is ROI and city design is the only way to obtain it, as Strongtowns seems to advocate, then it’s the West Lakeland township model they should be advocating. Of course they won’t since what matters to them isn’t the end – an well run city – but the means —> tools to force cities to exist in a specific way. This way may not involve those ticky tacky houses but the end result isn’t different, IMHO.
Gee, for once an intelligent conversation without name-calling by trolls (well, at this writing!)
Prk166: when average house values and household incomes are well above the regional average, the case in West Lake Township in the Twin Cities area, property taxes are probably more than sufficient to cover road costs, particularly without the financial burden of municipal water and power. But I doubt more middle class and lower income communities could survive or thrive, particularly with the high transportation costs of such low densities (~300/square mile), let alone the high private costs of maintaining relatively long driveways, private wells and pumping the septic tank every 2-3 years–which are incidental costs to those with the relatively high incomes present in “ranchette” country like West Lake Township (in parts of local Napa “ranchette” country, water must be trucked in from City of Napa fire hydrants at $100+ per load of 2,500 gallons. Intensive vineyard development is not compatible with lots of local houses strictly on wells, particularly during a multiyear drought, but I digress).
Strong Town points hold up quite well whenever municipal utilities are required, e.g., where 90%-95% of urban and suburban residents live e.g., at densities of 2,000-3,000 or more per square mile.
http://www.sellwoodbridge.org/?p=detour-bridge-approach2
How much does the temporary structure cost? People don’t like when the transportation infrastructure they use gets shut down for months to be rebuilt.
http://abc7chicago.com/archive/8688257/
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2014/03/pulaski_skyway_shutdown_famed_bridge_to_be_closed_toward_nyc_for_2_years_starting_april_12.html
Sometimes its done though, and it helps cut costs.
At 48 minutes in Chuck says that from 1949 to 2015 the feet of pipe per person increased ten fold, the number of fire hydrants per person increased by a factor of twenty. Why can’t the something cities are doing wrong in some cases be building more infrastructure, in some cases roads, per person than they did in the past? Some roads were great investments for cities. That doesn’t mean all of them were.
Pumping out the typical underground septic tank every 3 years costs @$350 ( @ $120 / yr ) . If someone can’t afford that, they can’t afford $1500 per year property taxes. And it’s less than the huge $10k – $20+k costs the Met Council charges for initial hookups.
Infrastructure – roads, sewers, water – generally cost aging, build out cities 12- 17% of their annual budget. That’s not the sort of thing that breaks a cities budget.
Are there any municipal utility districts – places separated from cities and the short sighted decision making of politicians – that have gone bankrupt? If so, how common is this?
Gee, for once an intelligent conversation without name-calling by trolls
Well, it was, until msetty showed up because his echo chamber got too lonely.
He and his buddy Charles Moron’s arguments and theories completely fall apart under even the faintest of scrutiny or the horror of actually being put into practice.
As I suspected, 99-E North was backed up to Holgate as usual. Unfortunately it seems I was right. We just spent 1.5 billion dollars to take bus riders off TriMet’s most efficient bus line and put them in rail cars.
A total waste of money. Clearly, widening 99-E to six lanes and a turn lane from O.C. to Grand Ave. would have been way more effective for a fraction the cost.
I have a great example of this. A small community in the Milwaukee Metro area recently voted to create a TIF district in order to loan a cheap and run-down condo development (units selling for about $50k apiece) money they could use to repair their roof, siding and other deferred maintenance items that condo fees should have been used to pay for over the years. From a purely ROI perspective, it makes some sense (although less so if you consider that no bank would make that loan), but it completely ignores the question of what the proper governmental role is. And what kind of incentives rewarding and propping up bad behavior like this creates.
prk166 said:
Pumping out the typical underground septic tank every 3 years costs @$350 ( @ $120 / yr ) . If someone can’t afford that, they can’t afford $1500 per year property taxes. And it’s less than the huge $10k – $20+k costs the Met Council charges for initial hookups.
In denser areas (>2,000/sq mi?) the hookup costs to sewer and water will be far cheaper than the original drilling wells and laying out septic tanks and leach fields, which will be north of $40,000-$50,000 in most cases. And are you sure property taxes in West Lake Township aren’t more like $5,000/yr+ given housing prices that appear to start around $500k, per Zillow et al?
I think the point stands regardless of what the brain dead troll “thinks,” er, brain farts. If the entire Twin Cities was developed at the density of West Lake Township it would cover 10,000 square miles, with horrendous transportation, infrastructure and other service costs unaffordable to most people, who make make considerably less than the $125k-$150k or more needed to live affordably West Lake Township.
Oh, at least Metrosucks now tacitly admits that he knows when he’s being referred to, just by the act of responding to my dig. Thanks for confirming your status, Metrosucky.
“Gee, for once an intelligent conversation without name-calling by trolls (well, at this writing!)”
That’s rich, especially when one can type into Google
msetty moron site:ti.org/antiplanner
and find dozens of examples of msetty calling people morons in the comments of this blog.
And that’s just one insult by msetty.
@FantasiaWHT
If you break down the costs to a government/utility district of a private property lot, and add up all the money paid by the owners of that lot in the form of utility fees, property taxes etc…you find that some pay more to the government than the government needs to cover their costs. Some pay less. Marohn has been saying that a lot of what’s being built today pays less than it costs the government. So in effect government is making investments by building a road to a new subdivision, extending utilities to it, or even just assuming responsibilities for future maintenance of that infrastructure, that offer a negative return. It’s ROI only from the point of view of the city ledger. His argument doesn’t have much to do with subsidizing the costs of bringing a low income housing development to a state of good repair.
O’Toole sees this disconnect between what is paid to the government and what is provided by it and says the problem is solved by a better tax/user fee structure to match revenues to expenses. He gave an example of getting together with his neighbors to pay to repave a road in his community, that if you devolve responsibilities everything can be handled at a lower level. He signed up for the mile based user fee for his car, and has given an idea of how it could be better setup to match users and producers than the current system does.
Even when something is nominally a user fee, that doesn’t mean it offers a great feedback mechanism. The flat charge per mile in Oregon’s system no matter the road or time of day doesn’t offer nearly as much feedback as a variable rate that reflects the cost of a particular road, and the higher cost of serving peak vs off peak traffic on a road that was widened to accommodate peak hour traffic. If someone lives on top of a hill and the water district builds a water tower so the people up there have pressure for their homes and fire hydrants even if there’s a power outage and the pumps used to get the water up there aren’t working, who pays for that? Or for the pumps? The city? Do the residents up there get a property tax surcharge? Pay a higher per gallon water bill to cover the added expenses? What if they don’t now but someone showed up and said they should? How do you transition to that better feedback mechanism that would take the largest asset of many people, their house, and make it worthless? Marohn says that’s where we are. When he performs a fine grained analysis of revenues and expenses at the lot level that many people would never be able to afford the costs of the public infrastructure provided to them.
@prk166
Marohn’s analysis of have shown some high end suburbs to break even more or less. That doesn’t mean someone making median income could afford to live in a community with that level of per capita public infrastructure. Hence the writing of what is affordable for those people.
Frank, I seem to recall you are one of the ones who started the name-calling when you found out that others and myself didn’t agree with you. Not that this is important.
Too many commenters here are completely unwilling to do a “counter-factual” (or put another way, “self-subversion”) on their beliefs, unlike a few others and myself (why do you think I bother reading The Antiplanner at all, since I already know that almost all that I read I disagree with and I think is wrong, but is generally a good intellectual exercise nonetheless?
The problem with an unwillingness to look at the “counter-factuals” to your beliefs is that you fail to recognize the weaknesses–if any–in your claims, leaving yourself open to being debunked. The Antiplanner doesn’t seem to do this either, since he’s never really provided specific retorts to myself, Marohn and many others.
See http://edge.org/conversation/philip_tetlock-edge-master-class-2015-a-short-course-in-superforecasting-class-iv. The linked videos are aimed mainly at effective forecasting, but the method is also very useful for checking the veracity of your beliefs (as Phillip Tetlock in the video says:
…Self-subversion is an integral part of what makes superforecasting cognition work. It’s the willingness to tolerate dissonance. It’s hard to be an extremist when you engage in self-subverting counterfactual cognition…
”
In denser areas (>2,000/sq mi?) the hookup costs to sewer and water will be far cheaper than the original drilling wells and laying out septic tanks and leach fields, which will be north of $40,000-$50,000 in most cases.
”
~msetty
$40k for a septic system? What do you base that on? Everyone I know has paid in the range of $3k to $5k depending what needed to be done with their land and how deep the well had to be dug, including my parents when they built their house and did their own general contracting.
“counter-factuals”
Like when you make any of your usual, suspect claims, for example?
Why do you pretend that everything you say is inherently true, like you’re God or something?
There is practically zero evidence to support most of your claims. Just a bunch of unproven theories that we are not interested in spending $200 million per mile to figure out if they work or not. The only way your buddies get their boondoggles built is by lying and ignoring the public.
“Frank, I seem to recall you are one of the ones who started the name-calling when you found out that others and myself didn’t agree with you. Not that this is important.”
Your recollection is suspect. Support your assertion with enough examples to prove the pattern you claim exists. But you can’t. Or you would have. I only respond with name calling when someone calls names first. And if this is not important, why the f*** are you even bringing it up?
Anyone can search your posts on this site and see that *you* are the instigator and that *you* are the one who uses insulting names first. It’s all there for anyone to see.
Yet somehow your name-calling tirades receive special protection from your “good friend” the Antiplanner, who will undoubtedly edit my post… But boy yours.
Go F yourself in your personal vacuum chamber you promised to retreat to.
“Marohn’s analysis of have shown some high end suburbs to break even more or less. That doesn’t mean someone making median income could afford to live in a community with that level of per capita public infrastructure. Hence the writing of what is affordable for those people.
” ~awhr
So what? I don’t take issue with everything they claim, just the broad, puerile claim that strong towns makes that decline is due to design.
”
Decline isn’t a result of poverty. The converse is actually true: poverty is the result of decline. Once you understand that decline is baked into the process of building auto-oriented places, the poverty aspect of it becomes fairly predictable.
” ~ Strongtowns
This is little more than talking in tongues. Any rational outsider can see it doesn’t make sense. Yet those indoctrinated in the religion will yell out amen.
Yes, they’re claiming that a lack of walkability and density _causes_ poverty. Setting aside their utter lack of understanding of what constitutes cause, it’s patently false. Inner cities are full of neighborhoods that meet their density prescription. Yet they’re full of poverty. Old inner ring suburbs meet their prescriptions too, yet most of them see declining household incomes, not growing. It’s obviously about much more than design, but never mind, it’s not about people, poverty is caused by how the concrete is poured.
But let’s set aside what I think If this poverty is so predictable as they claim, please point me to the studies that cover the back testing that shows it works.
I saw him speak in Houston recently. I found myself skeptical of his numbers claiming the suburbs are unsustainable from the perspective of a simple thought experiment: for a typical suburban house, try to imagine that house’s proportion of infrastructure attached to it, a small slab of road + a couple of pipes. Even if I as the homeowner had to personally replace those pipe sections and slab of concrete every 30 years at my own expense, it would still be a relatively manageable expense compared to the total spending to pay off the construction of that house + maintain it + taxes. He was trying to argue that a typical $250k suburban house has ~$500k of depreciating government-funded infrastructure attached to it, and I just find that extremely hard to believe.
I clicked on that first link. I saw nothing resembling a model.
Just more nostalgia masquerading as urban planning and public finance.
At the risk of entering a battle of wits with the defenseless (or at least those not interested in true conversation), I’ll point out that prk166 is not faithfully representing what I’ve said. He said the following:
Yes, they’re claiming that a lack of walkability and density _causes_ poverty. Setting aside their utter lack of understanding of what constitutes cause, it’s patently false. Inner cities are full of neighborhoods that meet their density prescription. Yet they’re full of poverty.
My claims are not and have never been about density. They are about the ratio of public investment to private investment. I’ve written over and over and over again that I’m not arguing for density. Some examples:
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/3/29/the-density-question
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/4/6/is-this-success
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/1/14/its-so-much-more-than-density.html
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/1/16/density-redux.html
Here I’ll quote myself from that first link:
I hate density as a metric and whenever I hear someone talk about it my mind reflexively moves on to something more worthy of my time. Yours should too. Density is not our problem or our solution. Insolvency is our problem. Productive places are the solution.
There is nothing puerile about my analysis of Ferguson, which you seem to be obsessed with. This is a pattern we see over and over again — supported by data and anecdote — of growth, stagnation and then decline. It is an outcome of the scale at which we build and finance our development pattern. I’ve explained the financial incentives probably the clearest in this article on transportation funding:
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/3/4/day-2-a-world-class-transportation-system.html
The conversation here seems more oriented towards modern conservatism: I have a lifestyle I like and I’m going to justify its continuation with whatever intellectual argument is necessary. I don’t find that very rigorous. And it does nothing to solve the very real financial problems we face, let alone mobilize people to make rational economic decisions. The sound arguments for introducing more market feedback into our system are drowned out in the public realm by these — dare I say — puerile assertions.
And for Tory….the numbers you are citing come from Lafayette, LA, where they have $16 billion of property values and $32 billion in public infrastructure. That’s data. You can be astonished by it and you can look out your window and see your street and pretend that is the world but, again, it’s hard to take such a willfully dismissive and narrow point of view seriously.
Like I asserted in the debate: if you want to argue here that the federal and state governments are too big, too intrusive and intervene in the market in ways that are distorting and, ultimately, quite destructive, we can find some common ground. If you want to argue that city governments operate in this way I will find that absurd, not only because local governments are a collection of us but also because they are largely pawns trying to survive in a larger game, one where the rules are rigged against them and their hands are tied behind their back.
And, finally, if you want to argue that our current pattern of development represents some expressed market preference in a market free of distorting intervention if not outright coercion, you’ll have no credibility with me. Those who assert such nonsense are, as I said earlier, using cheap rhetoric to justify their own lifestyle preferences. At the end of the day, it’s little different than those who pine for trains and density.
By the way, I found some more of ahwr’s spew on another site, PDX Monthly. Here is his solution to Portland’s problems:
The answer to Portland’s traffic problem is to discourage auto use. Rip out freeways, don’t reserve any public land for subsidized auto parking, don’t force new developments to build a single parking space (but allow them to build as many as they want), get rid of one way streets to improve connectivity, paint every crosswalk on a street with greater than 1000 AADT, enforce failure to yield laws rigorously, and narrow streets to one auto lane per direction.
”
There is nothing puerile about my analysis of Ferguson, which you seem to be obsessed with. This is a pattern we see over and over again — supported by data and anecdote — of growth, stagnation and then decline. It is an outcome of the scale at which we build and finance our development pattern.
” ~clmarohn
That only holds true if the definition of puerile you use is as painfully wrong as your definition of libertarian-ism.
You are correct, you don’t explicitly call for precise population densities. You instead abstract your calls for greater density by invoking ROI and a slew of things that go along with it. At the end of the day it amounts to advocating that governments require more dense development not less.
”
The sound arguments for introducing more market feedback into our system are drowned out in the public realm by these — dare I say — puerile assertions.
”
If you truly felt that market feedback was needed, you would join Mr. O’Toole and many others carrying out the reforms to enable them. You should already understand the differences in these positions; they’re the basic building blocks of the issues at hand.
I understand that this may feel harsh, to call one’s claims as puerile. You’re taking on an immensely complex problem and claiming to entirely know how it works, what is wrong with it and how it has to work. Those are giant claims for any one person.
More importantly they are puerile. Ferguson become Ferguson for a wide variety of reasons that no planning could have ever avoided. Those neighborhoods in St. Louis nearest to it were always poor relative to the city and the region. The housing built there was substandard in it’s day. Unless metro St. Louis were to see large increases in overall wealth along with other factors – such as MoDOT not using that increased tax money from the tax wealth to further build out freeways – meant it was bound to decline. It’s not great revelation that housing and commercial space that when built was substandard becomes exponentially so after , it was bound to filled with poverty 3 or 4 generations later.
This is even less insightful when one keeps in mind that some of Ferguson was part of an old Black Community. That part was always poor and the housing substandard. Most of the rest, as you’d expect for given it’s surrounds, was little more than cheap but new housing for the lower middle class and the middle class.
These 600 sq ft. – 1500 sq ft. houses were built in the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s. No amount of ROI would have prevented these houses, requiring lots of maintenance and lacking basic modern amenities ( good insulation, central air, et al. ) would have changed how the city would exist today.
No matter how well the city spent it’s money, it could not undue that it was full of houses that are 30-60% small than the downtown two bedroom loft where I currently reside. No matter how good their ROI, they couldn’t have stopped MoDOT’s freeway building . No matter how good their ROI, they couldn’t have change that going to a good public school is dependent on where ones lives and the feedback loop that it create in incentivising [sic ] people to move to enable consuming those good schools.
To lay out some vague points involving how some concrete and asphalt is shaped and say “see, they didn’t do what I advocate and today they’re a mess” is puerile. What would be proper is drop the hubris and admit that the city would still be a mess. There is not a robust body of evidence that shows otherwise.
And it’s the start of this last paragraph that is most telling of the basic problem at hand. We’ve seen it in other domains in the past. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that “experts” believe – and most people agreed – that we could predict if someone was to be a thief based on the shape of their skull.
At the end of the day, the positions advocated by Mr. Marohn are not any different. If things are properly shaped, they will create good outcomes. If they’re not, bad things will occur.
How is they embrace this flawed paradigm? They incorrectly believe that it’s places develop, not people.
People develop, not places.
One last shot, prk166, and then I’m just going to accept you intend to be willfully ignorant and stop bothering.
You made a small acknowledgement that your prior bluster was incomplete and then followed it up with another incorrect statement. You said:
You are correct, you don’t explicitly call for precise population densities. You instead abstract your calls for greater density by invoking ROI and a slew of things that go along with it. At the end of the day it amounts to advocating that governments require more dense development not less.
I say continuously that it is not about density (see prior links) but about the relationship between public and private investment, that a perfectly acceptable way to achieve a productive place is to LOWER the amount of public investment. Stop maintaining the road. Stop maintaining the sewer and water. Make those things private where the amount of revenue is insufficient to cover the cost. You shouldn’t try so hard to make a defense but instead inform yourself by reading what I’ve written.
You prove again that you haven’t in your next statement.
You’re taking on an immensely complex problem and claiming to entirely know how it works, what is wrong with it and how it has to work. Those are giant claims for any one person.
The very piece on Ferguson that you are obsessing over (http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/25/stroad-nation.html) begins with an acknowledgement that this is an incredibly complex problem that defies a simple explanation. If there is one major theme of my writing it is that cities are complex places and our attempt to pretend otherwise is arrogant folly. Some examples (which you should read before you embarrass yourself again):
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/6/17/complex-cities.html
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/9/8/domain-dependence.html
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/12/a-few-words-on-modeling
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/4/urban-renewal-remembrance-day
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/1/4/the-next-generation-dot.html
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/7/31/better-to-be-lucky-than-good.html
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/10/1/a-world-without-projections.html
It is those who claim that the American pattern of development — with its single family homes, highways full of frontage roads connecting big box stores and fast food — is an expression of the free market that clearly do not grasp the concept of market feedback. You and others like you are the ones who believe they know better, that you know how the world works and what outcomes should be. You haven’t a clue outside of your theoretical make-believe land.
Your analysis of Ferguson demonstrates — again — that you are just about having a world work for your preferred outcome, similar to the train and density crowd, than actually having people make real market decisions with real market feedback. Here’s what you wrote:
No matter how well the city spent it’s money, it could not undue that it was full of houses that are 30-60% small than the downtown two bedroom loft where I currently reside. No matter how good their ROI, they couldn’t have stopped MoDOT’s freeway building . No matter how good their ROI, they couldn’t have change that going to a good public school is dependent on where ones lives and the feedback loop that it create in incentivising [sic ] people to move to enable consuming those good schools.
Federal incentives drove the housing sizes. Federal spending and desire for economic development drove the interstates. State tax structures and federal incentives drove the placement of public schools as well as their quality, or lack thereof. You want to believe these are market outcomes because they are YOUR preference, and you can sneer at those in Ferguson who haven’t your luck, but it’s simply not reality.
And yes, if the city had been focused on long term ROI they would still have started with small homes but they would not have subsidized new, negative ROI development. Instead allowed their neighborhoods to mature the way cities did for thousands of years instead of squashing that with zoning and subsidizing new stuff in other places. They would not have gleefully fought for highways and stroads to devalue their neighborhoods at enormous taxpayer expense. They would not have taken on more liabilities they had wealth to sustain and would thus be able to provide a decent school, a decent park and other amenities to slow their decline.
If you want to write about me, my work and the Strong Towns movement, inform yourself. Stop being a reactionary fool who paints everyone who doesn’t view the world as you do with the same broad brush. You are trying to make a square peg fit into a rhetorical round hole and make yourself sound like an idiot to those who know better. Final example:
For example, it wasn’t that long ago that “experts” believe – and most people agreed – that we could predict if someone was to be a thief based on the shape of their skull. At the end of the day, the positions advocated by Mr. Marohn are not any different. If things are properly shaped, they will create good outcomes. If they’re not, bad things will occur.
Here’s what I wrote back in 2012 in a piece I linked to earlier called Better to Be Lucky than Good:
We frequently surrender power to experts, trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they, the experts, provide. This illusion of certainty is that — an illusion — but when it comes to traffic projections, many would prefer the comfort of that illusion over coming to grips with the notion that we can’t accurately predict the future. Understanding this tradeoff is key for those wanting to abandon current thinking and embrace a Strong Towns approach.
If you don’t have the time to properly inform yourself, before you spew more ignorance, at least read the elements of a Strong Towns approach. They are:
A Strong Town….
– Relies on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects,
– Emphasizes resiliency of result over efficiency of execution,
– Is designed to adapt to feedback,
– Is inspired by bottom/up action (chaotic but smart) and not top/down systems (orderly but dumb),
– Seeks to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale, and
– Is obsessive about accounting for its revenues, expenses, assets and long term liabilities (do the math).
Based on the comments, this site is not the home of libertarian thinking or market activism but shrill reactionaries zealously defending their world view. Not rigorous. Not honest.
If you want to know where the absurdity known as “planning for ROI” will lead, just think of the ultimate policy for producing its stated goal within the context of a growing city: Banning all new development within a jurisdiction except that which currently exists. Prices will rise, as supply is fixed, and the city will reap rewards as the ‘returns’ from higher property tax revenues roll in.
Also, see the extensive literature on ‘fiscal zoning’.
“Oregon should ban big-box stores because they never produce enough taxes to cover their costs.”
Does anyone outside the Strong Towns crowd believe that the reason retail stores exist is to serve as a tax farm for local governments? Talk about tunnel vision…
Does anyone outside the Strong Towns crowd believe that the reason retail stores exist is to serve as a tax farm for local governments?
Which I suppose brings us back to the central focus of “Strong Town” types….everything exists to serve at the pleasure of government, and for government’s benefit. Sure, some, such as Charles over here, are not exactly forthright with this, but where else could their beating around the bush behavior lead, if we were to connect the dots and actually follow through with the policy recommendations such a person made?
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The very piece on Ferguson that you are obsessing over (http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/25/stroad-nation.html) begins with an acknowledgement that this is an incredibly complex problem that defies a simple explanation.
” ~ Chuck Marohn
And despite that sentence, the rest of your piece ignores the complexity. You clearly place the blame of the cities problems on it’s design. You clearly do not acknowledge that Ferguson as a whole has never been prosperous. Look at the census data for household income in 1950 and 1960. Even in it’s best days it was average.
You’re right to criticize Ferguson and others for not putting money away in good times. There is no reason that a city shouldn’t be putting money away in a trust to cover the depreciation of it’s assets.
And btw, from what little I know, that is one of the main why city’s list assets in their budget. It’s not to show off wealth but to show depreciation, the cost of those large capital investments. In fact, if they do an excellent job in investing in maintenance they can depreciate them at a lower rate. If the accounting standards they follow are wrong, please let us know. It wouldn’t be the first time that people in charge were massaging the numbers to make things look better than they really are.
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Federal incentives drove the housing sizes. Federal spending and desire for economic development drove the interstates. State tax structures and federal incentives drove the placement of public schools as well as their quality, or lack thereof. You want to believe these are market outcomes because they are YOUR preference, and you can sneer at those in Ferguson who haven’t your luck, but it’s simply not reality.
” ~Chuck Marohn
That’s the spirit, Chuck. Now we’re cooking with fire. It’s these moments that our true selves come out. In this case, you’re not picking up what I’m putting down.
My issue with your take on Ferguson is the lack of nuance. I point out the issue with things like education and housing subsidies because those are issues beyond Ferguson. I do not see what we have today as a market outcome.
Whenever we distort or hide the price of something, the outcome isn’t a natural outcome. It is not a market outcome. Ferguson is not the result of market forces.
The issue I have with your critique is that you ignore all those large influences and unduly focus on the design of the city. You rightly raise the issue of what can the city control when it comes to Layette. Yet with Ferguson you don’t acknowledge that most of it’s problems are out of it’s hands.
Ferguson was never a wealthy city. It’s best of times, in the 1950s and 1960s when quickly grew and filled up, it’s household income was average for the state. By the 1980s, it’s 30 – 50 year old homes – small by the standards of the day and part of a school district that was below average for it’s day – more often than not were occupied by households with below average incomes.
To use a community that was never wealthy, largely full of substandard housing and stuck in a what is even by Missouri standards a piss pour school district and declare it as proof that design CAUSED the decline is puerile at best.
Is it harsh to call it puerile? Not at all. You may use the word complexity but your actions didn’t acknowledge it.
You were too quick to lecture about spending that you failed to acknowledge the property taxes paid by those businesses you singled out is enough to pay for the costs you mention. You were so busy dwelling on the lack of trees that you failed to acknowledge that the road you picked on is not a city street, but a county road. How much, if any, say did the city of Ferguson have in the design of that road? How much money did they and do they spend on it versus the county and – because it’s a county arterial – MoDOT?
If, as you rightly point out in the Lafayette debate, the focus should be on what we can do today, what could Ferguson do differently with that road? Would the city be better served if the county moved that traffic on other roads? Sure, theoretically there could be less traffic that has to be moved. But that’s out of the city’s hands, so what do they do?
I would like to also better understand why Ferguson’s walkable downtown doesn’t seem to be helping the rest of the city. I can vouch for the cigar shop. and the coffee shop ( I’d like to blame the latter’s cookies for filling me up before Thanksgiving even started; sorry, mom ). Why is that it’s doing well despite being located on one of those stroads, MoDOT route N. Did MoDOT give the city more of a say in it’s design? Is it because it’s close to the one pocket of residential affluence in the city? Or maybe the 1000+ employees at Emerson HQ? Or is it because historically that’s where downtown has always been, that’s where the mom and pop businesses like Ferguson Brewing would locate so it’s quite natural that they’re still there today? Something else? If you haven’t been there, head down there and walk it. It’s even closer to you than Houston.
Mr. Marohn, you are quite right to point out that cities create all sorts of red tape that infringes on entrepreneurial activity. Why not talk about what Ferguson does in that regard rather than poo-pooing an old strip mall which – given the current city – offers some of the relatively most affordable commercial space available in Ferguson today?
Mr. Marohn, you are quite right to call for cities to mindful of their spending. Debt is fragile. We’re in agreement there.
You’re quite wrong to repeatedly claim that I want people to live like me or that I’m foolish enough to view the status quo as a market outcome. I do not. That’s why I brought up the issue with the housing subsidies (income tax deduction, 30 year mortgages). That’s why I brought up the way our country has school choice , you have choice if you can afford to move into the school district. And then there’s the issue of enabling highway and freeway buildout via emminent domain ( aka the use of force ).
The problem I have is that you don’t acknowledge those with Ferguson. Worse, you make the facile claim that the design CAUSED the property. We know that’s fascicle. We know if we took all the Computer Science graduates from Carnegie-Mellon University over the last 30 years and forced them to live in Ferguson, they would not become impoverished. We also know the US poverty rate is 5 – 10 percentage points lower today than it was when Ferguson’s good generation began.
The problem is that a lot of what happened to Ferguson isn’t due to it’s design. A lot of it’s financial issues are not due to infrastructure but due to misguided TIFFs and too much spending on too many other things for too long ( again, 80%+ of it’s budget is and has been on things other than infrastructure ). A lot of Ferguson’s problems are out of it’s hands.
So what exactly can they do today with what they have control over today? You’re spot on with them becoming financially responsible. You’re correct that it’ll be a slow process through small, incremental improvements and not big fancy TIFF projects that never pay for what they cost. But you’re wrong to write so much on the city of Ferguson and focus on some stroad built and financed by St. Louis County.
It’s not wrong to say the design could be better. It’s just not right to do it without pointing out all the other contributions. Changing things will take time but it will never happen if we don’t acknowledge all the factors that contribute and acknowledge that cities can only change what they have control over today.
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There is nothing puerile about my analysis of Ferguson
” ~clmarohn
That’s on odd claim to make considering you claim that a lack of wide sidewalks CAUSED Michael Brown to try to kill the cop.
You also pontificate that it’s all a ponzi scheme and that a recent project of Ferguson Avenue doesn’t pay for itself as though it were nothing more than a city street. It’s a state highway. A mature analysis would take into account the value of the asset to the city, county, region and state.