Strong Towns: A Bottom-up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn, jr.
Wiley, 2020
reviewed by Alayne McGregor
“There is no reason for any North American city to build another foot of roadway, or put in another length of pipe, to serve any new property anywhere. Our infrastructure is maxed out; we’re done expanding and, in fact, I anticipate nearly all our cities contracting their obligations to some extent.”
That’s the gauntlet Charles Marohn has thrown at city governments across the continent. Having done the calculations, he has concluded that continued expansion into new suburbs will eventually bankrupt cities because the money is not there to maintain them in the long term.
New infrastructure – subdivisions, roads, sewers, etc. – is not an “investment,” he contends. It’s a liability which will come due when there won’t be the tax revenues to support it. Many cities right now are paying for current maintenance needs from taxes coming in from new developments in what is essentially a Ponzi scheme, he says, because that money needs to be saved for future maintenance.
“An infrastructure cult”
In his book Strong Towns, Marohn argues that cities are addicted to growth.
“Thanks to a bunch of perverse incentives, we’ve prioritized growth over maintenance, efficiency over resilience, and instant, financially risky development over incremental, financially productive projects,” he argues. “Cities with a mind-boggling backlog of unfunded road maintenance regularly go out and build new roads. Places with pipes crumbling and pumps failing from lack of maintenance give incentives to developers to build more pipes and pumps for the public to maintain.”
Marohn, who is an American civil engineer and land use planner, says that the belief in the power of infrastructure spending us “now so deeply embedded within our society that we struggle to identify it as belief, let alone systematically question it … Since the end of World War II, America’s leadership class has grown to be an infrastructure cult.”
Instead, he says that cities should be in the business of wealth creation, and that means first maintaining and supporting existing viable neighbourhoods, rather than continuing to build out. First, fix the potholes and cracked sidewalks, sweep the streets, mow the grass, and pick up the trash. When there’s extra money, make small changes incrementally, based on looking at actual neighbourhood needs and experimenting with temporary changes.
“Maintenance secures a community’s wealth; little bets are how to expand it.”
“See a streetlight out: replace it. See a weed: pull it. See a crosswalk faded: repaint it. See a sidewalk broken: fix it. The [downtown] neighbourhoods that are generating such wealth for the community need to be showered with love.”
He also emphasizes the importance of maintaining critical systems and adding to them, to increase a city’s resiliency.
Preserve current neighbourhoods first
Marohn favours traditionally-designed neighbourhoods (such as Centretown and Ottawa’s inner suburbs), which build on centuries of “tinkering” to create emergent systems that work. These neighbourhoods are able to grow incrementally. This house may gain an addition, or a granny flat; this smaller building may be replaced by a larger. They can change based on changing demographics and needs. And they create more wealth for the city because they’re have a greater tax base.
On the other hand, when a developer puts up a suburban subdivision, everything goes in at once: the houses, the sewers, the water lines, the arterials, the local roads, the power lines. That’s great for a while – until the infrastructure all starts to need repairs at the same time and the city might not be able to afford the cost. And because it’s automobile-dependent, it creates less wealth for the city.
Cities term all that new infrastructure an “investment”. Marohn calls it an “eternal maintenance obligation,” and describes it as a “Municipal Ponzi Scheme.” He is particularly critical of “investing” in new roads and interchanges to attract big box stores and warehouses; he’s checked the numbers in several cities (at one point doing a year-long study) and demonstrates that the long-term payback simply isn’t there.
Nor does it make sense to take on debt for a project that doesn’t have a monetary payback, he says: “It’s not enough to measure saved time, reduced carbon emissions, or an improvement in happiness and equate that to dollars. An investment that justifies debt must have a real return [in tax dollars].” Otherwise, the city will be forced to continue to pay for the project at the expense of other needs in the budget.
Studies show cities lose money on growth
Marohn came to these conclusions after running his own planning and engineering firm for more than a decade. One of the projects he worked on was determining the financial costs and benefits of a highway widening or bypass project in a Minnesota city. His firm costed out the alternatives, and then projected how much private wealth would be created based on each alternative and thus how much more taxes the city would get. In every option, the city lost money: in the option he preferred, it spent $1.5M and only gained an extra $121,000 in taxes over the life of the improvements.
He said he subsequently modelled dozens of residential developments: urban, suburban, exurban, and rural. “I could not find one that came close to covering its own basic expenses, let alone the collector roads, traffic signals, bridges, interchanges, an other communal expenses those revenue streams were expected to support. Not a single one.”
But what if people prefer cul-de-sac suburbs? “I can respect that some people prefer development styles that are financially ruinous to my city…[but] my local government should not feel any obligation to provide those options, particularly at the price points people expect.”
On the other hand, when he looked at tax revenue from traditional main streets – even those which were badly run-down – it substantially exceeded that from big box developments. The same was true for job creation and local economic development. In his hometown of Brainerd, MI, an “old and blighted” block with 11 small businesses has a total taxable value of $1.1M, whereas a redeveloped block with a new fast food franchise on it only had a taxable value of $620,000. The old block generates 77 percent more property tax than the new, although both cost the same to service.
The planning group Urban3 modeled hundreds of cities across North America, he said. Their conclusions: older neighbourhoods financially outperform newer neighbourhoods, even if blighted. Poor neighbourhoods tend to outperform wealthier ones (with an exception for highly gentrified areas). If a city has a traditional core, the closer to the core the higher the level of financial productivity. The more storeys a building has, the more financially productive it tends to be. The more reliant on the automobile an area is, the less financially productive.
Traditional neighbourhoods are more flexible
Traditional downtowns, because of the nature of their buildings and their dense design, also can shift uses more easily than a big-box complex. “I’ve seen some of these storefronts shift from retail, to a restaurant, back to retail, then to office space. There is an amazing amount of flexibility in this pattern, an ability to adapt as the market changes.”
He argues that cities must stop depending on growth, because it leads to financial insolvency. Traditional cities could grow, but were stable without growth. Today, though, many American cities “are increasingly like a person on a bicycle; it must keep growing, at ever-accelerating rates, or things fall apart.”
Instead, cities – as complex systems – must build strength and stability at a fractal level. “Successful blocks beget successful neighbourhoods. Prosperous neighbourhoods make up a prosperous city. A strong and stable state is an assembly of strong and stable cities.”
Marohn lives in a small town in Minnesota. In Canadian terms, his politics might be described as a cross between small-c conservative and Green. He describes himself as originally Republican, but says his actual politics range from libertarian federally to progressive at a city level to “pretty much a socialist” at the neighbourhood level. He emphasizes throughout the book the importance of working across party lines to create good cities.
Marohn’s conclusions echo what Ottawa community activists have been saying for many years – that areas within the Greenbelt are subsidizing suburbs outside it. But those discussions have centred around the initial costs of building those suburbs; Marohn adds in the bigger bill of the full lifecycle costs.
His solution? Gradual intensification, with certain levels of infill as of right, rather than just plunking in high rises. That’s a partial solution, but doesn’t deal with problems of high land costs and other barriers to development, nor current developer preferences. Nor does this book deal with gentrification and how low-income residents get pushed out of liveable neighbourhoods into the suburbs. But his analysis does encourage us to avoid mistakes like suburbs designed to fail.
Strong Towns is available at the Ottawa Public Library.