Hacker News Reader

The model city of StrongTowns is European cities and suburbs. Carmel Indiana is far from that.

Compare the densest parts of Carmel to the densest part of a suburb of similar size and distance to its city Huddinge:

Carmel: https://www.google.ch/maps/@39.9641636,-86.1445548,1732m/dat...

Huddinge: https://www.google.ch/maps/@59.2347134,17.986286,1277m/data=...

The most noticeable part is that Carmel has way more roads and parkings. This is due to its bad public transport, notice how Carmel lacks a train station. Also if you look closer you can see that Huddinge has tens of bus lines running through covering most of this area (they are shown in Google maps), I can't find a single bus line in Carmel.

Another thing you can notice is the diversity of buildings. In Huddinge you have small dots of dense housing near its public transport/shopping hubs, with lots of freestanding houses filling the gaps. In Carmel on the other hand all of the places which would be filled with free standing houses are instead taken up by parking lots. In order to find any freestanding houses in Carmel you have to get further away, far enough that it is no longer within walking distance to any public hubs forcing them to take the car, which is why there are so many parking lots and large roads instead of houses in the center...

At first I thought like "hey Carmel doesn't look so bad". Then I realized all the grey stuff is parking lots, not houses.

You're right, that's an insane amount of parking spots! It looks like the parking spot to building ratio is 2 to 1.

Strong Towns preaches incremental development. Building anything "out of thin air" is basically antithetical that that.

Indeed. Relax zoning and restrain from subsidization. That should be the primary approach. But it's not free market zealotry. Interventions aren't ruled out, they should just be at the back of your playbook.

It's naive to think you can manufacture sustainability (i.e. a cost efficient, opportunity maximizing environment) out of whole cloth. If you intervene don't expect your money back, at least not in a way that let's you balance the books in this lifetime. You're intervening to achieve some specific social objective, then it's manifestly unlikely to produce an economic surplus that can be easily captured, even if it does produce a surplus. If someone says you can have your cake (low-income housing near economic opportunity, ubiquitous mass transit) and eat it too (pays for itself), it's probably a lie. Yes, it happens; but so does winning the lottery. But you don't build a legitimate budget on a pile of lottery tickets.

And to finance things sensibly based upon real revenue flows, not speculative debt drawing on wishful thoughts about future growth.

Sounds like the no true Scotsman approach to urban planning.

I disagree completely. Carmel's approach of building a big fancy new neighborhood all at once is the exact opposite of StrongTown's suggested approach of making small incremental improvements spread across many poor neighborhoods.

[1]

> Rely on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects.

> Inspire by bottom-up action (chaotic but smart) and not top-down systems (orderly but dumb).

> Seek to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale.

> Obsess about accounting for revenues, expenses, assets, and long-term liabilities (do the math).

[2]

> Spreading your money out over many small different investments gives you a large hedge against risk

> These places are built all at once to a finished state. Today is peak wealth; it's all downhill from here, regardless of how much public investment is made.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/22/the-more-we-gr...

[2] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...

How? Not complying with one of the explicit tenets of the Strongtowns philosophy seems like a valid rebuttal.

Can you tell us how it fits the definition of a No True Scotsman?

I'm not him - but it's obviously something close, if not full NTS. Real implementations always differ from ideals, so it's always possible to take a divergence and say it makes the implementation antithetical to the ideal. That's the heart of the fallacy. To counter, you'd have to identify the heart of the Strong Towns idea, the 'spirit', and demonstrate how the implementation violates that spirit.

Criticizing a specifically incorrect caricature of the tenets of an organization by pointing out the actual tenets of the organization is about as far from No True Scotsman as I can imagine.

It's actually a strawman, ironically enough.

You don't think incrementalism is at the heart of the Strong Towns idea?

I've no opinion. All I'm saying is, if you don't give strong evidence that it is at the idea's heart, then the argument is No-True-Scotsman. Like a lot of fallacies, there's a rather subtle ground between fallacious reasoning and legitimate argument, and I think NTS is basically in a class of problems like the ship of Theseus, that play on the distinction we commonly draw between the identity of a thing, and the thing itself.

> it's obviously something close, if not full NTS.

> I've no opinion.

Well this is a confusing line. Anyway, in addition to the other evidence provided in this thread, here is part of the Strong Towns mission statement[1]:

Enduring prosperity for our communities cannot be artificially created from the outside but must be built from within, incrementally over time.

1. https://www.strongtowns.org/mission/

"No True Scotsman" is second only to ad-hominem on the list of frequently misidentified fallacies in comments sections.

> tearing out intersections for roundabouts

As someone who drives in the UK, and has driven or been driven a lot in the in the US I so completely appreciate roundabouts.

They're just way faster. If there's nothing coming from the right (in the UK) then you don't need to stop. The frustration of stop/start driving from intersection to intersection in SF could be completely replaced by a mostly uninterrupted drive. Sure, they don't work so well when there's heavy traffic, but you just need to intelligently decide which intersections to put them at.

A non trivial amount of the CO2 difference between the EU and US comes from the difference between the two.

Unfortunately my town has round abouts with stop signs, which are just dumb.

> As someone who drives in the UK, and has driven or been driven a lot in the in the US I so completely appreciate roundabouts.

Roundabouts are also less common in continental Europe than in the UK (or Australia).

I think that's because the usual rule is that we give way to the traffic coming from the right even in countries where you drive on the right-hand side. But this rule really doesn't work for round-abouts, and so they become a potentially confusing corner-case (ha!) whereas everything is consistent in left-hand drive traffic countries.

So far I haven't seen that there is an actual problem with Carmel; it still seems like quite a nice place to be. The main issue seems to be that high debt load creates a high risk of bad consequences for the town.

Can you fault the city? The alternative was to not spend the money and spend all this time with lower risk of bankruptcy but in a more crappy/rundown environment. With the present course even if something bad happens they had a good series of years with the upgraded infrastructure--and counting. Doesn't seem that crazy to me.

I think StrongTowns like moderation. I often suggest to people that they should put savings into stocks to grow it for their retirement. If someone listens to me and sells the house, invests everything in the stock market and has to declare bankruptcy a year later after a crash it's absolutely not my fault and it says nothing about whether or not my advice was valid.

What do you mean when you say "middle class housing"? Are you referring to suburb-style developments, perhaps?

It's a bit strange isn't it? You can find middle class people living in rural farm houses, suburbs, inner cities, anywhere.

It really is.

I mean, I understand it. There are strong cultural ideas around the detached single family home with the white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and dog and so on. Rich people live in vast luxury flats in cities, and poor people in small tenements. Suburbs are for the middle class!

Our modern culture doesn't emphasize this quite as strongly as it used to, with cities becoming more idealized and suburbs less well-loved. So people talk about middle-class housing being hated instead of endless fields of suburban developments.

You are claiming Strong Towns is calling for some things that seem far from what they actually advocate. The page you linked doesn't say those things, so where are you getting this from? Could you provide actual quotes?

For example, Strong Towns advocates incrementalism. Building an entire neighbourhood from scratch, to a finished state, like the New Urbanist downtown, is not incremental development. Here's a page where the president of Strong Towns advocates incrementalism: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-g...

"There are two defining differences between pre-Depression and post-War development patterns. Pre-Depression development was incremental on a continuum of improvement while post-War development is built at a large scale to a finished state."

In any case, building yourself into debt to chase growth while cargo-culting aspects of successful towns is the opposite of incrementalism, and just dumb. It is clear that Strong Towns advocates, as a Prime Directive, building only what the town can actually afford to build long-term, including all maintenance and replacement.

From https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/22/the-more-we-gr... :

"Here is our approach:

- Rely on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects.

- Emphasize resiliency of result over efficiency of execution.

- Design to adapt to feedback.

- Inspire by bottom-up action (chaotic but smart) and not top-down systems (orderly but dumb).

- Seek to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale.

- Obsess about accounting for revenues, expenses, assets, and long-term liabilities (do the math)."

From the Strong Towns Strength Test https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/11/15/strong-towns-... :

"10. Does the city government spend no more than 10% of its locally-generated revenue on debt service?"

I did find a page calling for signalised intersections to be torn out in favour of roundabouts, with some fair questions about costs: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/1/15/missouri-round...

To be clear you’re exactly wrong about Strong Towns mission and message. The linked blog post is specifically criticizing the Carmel spending spree as irresponsible.

Strong Towns isn’t a New Urbanist organization, and in fact butts heads with the CNU regularly.

The extreme example are the ghost cities in China.

The ghost towns in China should be the canary in the coal mine. It's interesting to see how an authoritarian government can force its economy to move along. Eventually it has to fail... right?

Dunno.. Is China the ultimate bailout state? ... the population is educated enough and inspiring enough to innovate (or copy) technology. Sounds like the USA too... the difference is that the USA is controlled by special interests who can use other parts of the government to achieve their means whereas China is a single party... (same as Russia)...