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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

What a crock. This is an extremely biased presentation meant to prime the reader for the awful right wing plan he's going to unveil in his next blog post. No doubt privatizing the infrastructure to "relieve" the taxpayer of the burden. Never mind that somehow it is still going to have to be paid for and if it's privatized we will have to pay more so the new owner can make a profit.

The reality is cities are insolvent because of decades of tax breaks for businesses and the stagnant wages of the middle class.

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I don't read Strong Towns much, but I don't think you've read much of the stuff they put out. The blog definitely isn't in favor of mass privatization — that wouldn't help much, since the infrastructure is still crazy expensive and not worth paying for.

The model of development that gets us out of this mess probably is one of much greater density + changes in accounting practices.

The model that gets us out of this predicament is trivially simple and literally fits on one line:

Really Narrow Streets

Unfortunately most North American local government has a savagely visceral hatred of that idea.

Full disclosure I stole this idea from [0].

[0] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2006/032606.htm

Pretty good article; the metric that more fully captures the idea is the ratio of land used for cars instead of people. Narrow streets takes care of the on street parking idiocy, which is the worst of it, but the number of parking structure where there could be residential buildings is also helpful to track. And the six lane highways cutting through the middle of town takes a huge amount of space...

I feel like urbanists should talk about Mexico more. They have really narrow streets, as-of-right construction, and they are much closer than Vienna or Hong Kong.

As someone with a city planning hobbyist interest, I've visited Mexico City and greatly disliked it. It's a miserable city to get around in, though I can see its potential if it ever decides to move away from heavy car infrastructure (some core neighborhoods are pretty nice so long as you don't want to leave them). Were you thinking of somewhere else in Mexico, or specific parts of Mexico City?

I was further north- Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.

that wouldn't help much, since the infrastructure is still crazy expensive and not worth paying for.

Surely it would help, then? The entire point of the article is that local governments built infrastructure that isn't worth paying for, and paid too much for it, because of bad planning/misaligned incentives.

If towns were fully privatised then there'd be no assumption of government bailouts, and towns that overbuilt would go bankrupt and be abandoned/eventually bulldozed. In practice governments are rarely willing to let that happen. Even in the case of Detroit it was bailed out.

I'm a member of Strong Towns, and it's an interesting mix of people from both left and right.

If I had to sum it up, it might be something like 'traditional development patterns', akin to what you saw in pre-WWII cities in the US, and much of Europe. More walking, and biking. There's a lot to like for a lefty like me.

My guess would be more along the lines of calling for more centralized development and less horizontal expansion?

I agree that it is extremely biased, but it doesn't seem to be "right wing" when it is the left wing that usually expounds about its utter hatred for suburban living. It's just too bourgeoisie.

Yes, wages are stagnant. Why is that? Taxes too high perhaps?

Real estate developers and real estate agents run most cities. They are always looking out for their own interests and damn the future consequences. The biggest problem with real estate people is their average IQ is so low.

> This is an extremely biased presentation meant to prime the reader for the awful right wing plan he's going to unveil in his next blog post.

Maybe, but urban densification is a very left wing thing.

Living in such a manner that one can pay for necessities is a conservative virtue.

I wish. Have you seen the fights over increased density in left wing areas like SF, Portland, and Seattle?

NIBYism trumps politics on all sides of the spectrum. "Lefties" are all for densification, just not here, because here is special and needs protecting. Densification over there on the other hand is a great idea.

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