Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn Jr.
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2024-01-28
Genuinely made me rethink some core assumptions I had:
- Infrastructure spending is not always good. Building new infrastructure means taking on new maintenance costs indefinitely. The infrastructure doesn’t necessarily pay for itself.
- Density is a byproduct of success. Density does not necessarily cause success.
I disagree with one of the main points: that city infrastructure needs to pay for itself through property taxes. Given that state and federal governments can give grants to cities funded by income tax and sales tax, infrastructure may be able to pay for itself in other ways. However, I agree with the general point that infrastructure should pay for itself somehow.
He makes a big prediction: We can ill have fewer lane-miles, fewer pipes and less urbanized land in thee decades than today (written in 2019, meaning 2039). I guess we’ll see.
Great quotes:
- Antifragile complex adaptive systems imperfectly harmonize many competing priorities simultaneously over time, limit risk of catastrophe while maintaining the capacity for improvement during stress events.
Random notes
- In times of abundance, there’s no need to make strategic decisions. We can act cleverly or stupidly and it doesn’t make a difference. He makes the argument that after WW2, we threw money at all problems. Add more lanes, more police, more subdivisions, more malls. No multi purpose buildings.
- Incremental development is better than our weird habit of building whole neighborhoods at once. Monoculture. Adaptability. Redevelopment. Little bets to probe uncertainty. Feedback.
- Highways. Plan was to increase land value by connecting places. Instead, flooded market with land, reducing price/value
- Building infrastructure ahead of time removes incentives for growth. Usually people would want development, increase land value, fund more infrastructure
- Most cities do not have income tax, so job creation doesn’t factor into cost benefit analysis. Same with sales tax.
- Every city wants to grow, and it usually makes them poorer.
- A big problem is that maintenance costs mostly come decades after initial investment. Short term growth hides long term insolvency
- There are many many ways that we overestimate the benefit and underestimate the cost of infrastructure projects. Count time saved by commuters and multiply by average wage. Count estimated avoided repairs on cars. Ignore induced demand, sleeping in longer, traveling during rush hour. And how are you going to get those savings into the hands of the contractors who build the road? And why aren’t you counting the increased congestion from construction?