That's the basic premise made by StongTowns.org. It's hard to pick a single post to start but the one about Layfayette, Louisiana is a good case study and a good place to dive in, imo.
Lafayette is my hometown. The article says this isn't a cultural issue, but when a majority of cities shares the problem, that speaks to a national culture of scarcity. The desire for growth stemming from feeling there isn't enough to do, land to build on, people living there, etc. was definitely prominent in Lafayette. It's that shared mindset driving this phenomenon.
The key messages of strongtowns are unambiguous 1) fiscal conservatism and 2) small-scale self dependence.
Small scale self dependence is a significant problem in the US (and many parts of the world) where the poor have been, through intentional historic policy, ghettoized. If you first scale back spending to maintenance levels, and then push against state level redistribution, you end up with pretty predictable results that look alot like the ghost of redlining come back to life. Even if you excise #2 from the platform, it's still the end result. By explicitly adopting strongtowns brand fiscal austerity, there just wont be money left to fund schools in poor neighborhoods.
Look, I'm not saying what we've got now is a perfect solution, far from it. I even think that if we could start from absolute scratch, there are some aspects of strong towns that would solve some of today's ills. But we have poor cities, of every makeup, size, demographic, and skin color, and I don't think that "market urbanism" (ie the same market forces that got us to where we are today albeit with stronger federation) can get us out.
Edit: I guess I should clarify that my criticism of strong towns applies equally to economically destroyed rural communities, who make up the largest recipients of food stamps in America.
I picked a town of Grandview, MO, because it was far on the south side of Kansas City metro, and its population stayed completely flat for last 40 years. Seems like a perfect candidate for Strongtowns argument: residential areas are all sprawl, industrial areas are packed together, and looking at its Main Street, it's a stroad[1], which Strongtowns says is "enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive". No population growth means that there is no new development to pay for the old ones, which is what Strongtowns calls a Ponzi scheme[2]
Let's take a look at the budget[3]. Grandview intends to spend $37M, only $1M of which is budgeted for street maintenance, which is more than average in previous years. Are the streets deteriorated and decayed due to lack of maintenance? I spent 5 minutes on Google Streetview, and while the residential streets are far from pristine, I couldn't find a single pothole. I did, however, find road work, repaving a street[4]. This[5] is a representative example.
Is Grandview a bad example? Is it somehow better than average? Is there some magic that makes Grandview work quite fine? No, I don't think so: for all I know, Grandview looks exactly like hundreds of others suburban towns in America that I've seen. This is what bugs me about Strongtowns: for all of its doom prophesying, I haven't yet seen a single town struggling to maintain suburban infrastructure. Failing to meet pension obligations, sure. Overblown salaries for city employees, yep. Large police department with lots of new toys in a town with almost no crime? Sadly, too common. But residential street maintenance killing a budget? Hardly.
Wow! I read your comment the opposite of what you said at first, then thought you were burying the lede somehow, then it sunk in that you were serious. I’ve lived in several of the top 5 cities in the US, and several rural towns, and am reasonably well versed in the economics of same (big StrongTowns fan, done professional work in the city/town governance and finance in a past life). I can say that with my experience I’ve been hanging on every word of the above walls of text and find them to be on point and accurate.
Many suburban towns rely on growth for a large portion of their revenue. When growth eventually slows they no longer have enough money coming in to the meet their maintenance costs. Strong Towns calls this the “Growth Ponzi Scheme”:
exactly, looked into this heavily years ago and this is spot on. These towns will basically never turn into anything worth investing energy into and most have absent local governments.
For those unfamiliar with Strong Towns, here’s a best-effort summary of what they do:
Strong Towns is a non-partisan non-profit that advocates for cities and towns to build financially solvent places. Many cities are perpetually broke because they owe more money in maintenance burden (fixing roads, pipes, etc) than they bring in in tax revenue.
This happens primarily because towns in North America tend to build out large neighborhoods all at once (think: suburbia). At the start, the developers pay for all the infrastructure, and then “give” it to the city to maintain.
At first, everything seems fine. The city gets plenty of new tax revenue! But come 20 or 30 years later, it turns out that the tax revenue is not enough to replace the roads, fix the pipes, and so on.
And so to pay for the repairs, the city then builds yet another neighborhood in the same strategy to collect the initial tax revenue. It’s effectively a Ponzi scheme.
When it crashes, you get Detroit.
The gist is that many low-density spread-out suburban neighborhood with large, expensive infrastructure are a huge cost center for a city. And since most North American cities build this way, we have a lot of cities that are “functionally bankrupt” or will be soon.
If you're a systems thinker who lives in a town that can't seem to fix it's potholes, you may want to check out the book they've published: "Strong Towns" by Charles L. Marohn Jr.
If you want people to come and spend money in your small towns, you're going to have to give them some reason to do that. If you don't want that, that's certainly your business, but with the consolidation of agriculture and the mechanization of manufacturing that have been going on the last several decades, it's not clear to me what else your local economies can be based on. And indeed, the depopulation of rural areas and small towns that this article is discussing suggests that a lot of local economies are having a very hard time.
If you have a better idea for a solution, by all means, tell us.
I would say Strong Towns believes that infrastructure in American cities is unsustainable. In particular the "commercial strip" architecture and many suburban developments don't generate enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure that supports them.
They are not against infrastructure development but they are against unprofitable infrastructure development and they see "infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure" not as something that will lift people out of poverty but as something that will keep people poor.
>and the towns that can't afford that industry or don't have anything particularly commercializable to sell get left in the dust.
What's wrong with this? If a town doesn't have anything to offer, then why does it exist at all? And why should anyone outside the town be supporting it to help its continued existence?
The western US is full of "ghost towns": towns that used to exist back in the 1800s during the mining boom then, but when the mines dried up, so did the towns. The people all left and the town fell back to nature. These days, there's usually nothing left besides building foundations, if that. Small towns these days that have nothing left to offer should go the same way.
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.
Strong towns has a whole section dedicated to this issue [0].
Sadly I couldn't find a decent summary. I think this article of the site [1] is the closest thing.
Yes, the failure is not that a town decayed post-industrialization, it's that the federal government doesn't believe in supporting the people who are left behind after these busts. No re-training funds, no relocation support, housing placement, etc.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
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