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Comment by epakai | Hacker News Reader

What is the counterpoint to this argument? I feel like I'm only getting half an explanation here.

It's apparent from looking up Charles Marohn that he's contributing to a lot of pieces on the web to push this idea, but I don't buy that infrastructure expansion is a straight up ponzi scheme.

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I think there isn't usually a direct counterargument to be found. One of ST's core points is, hey, you're deluding yourself because you're not accounting for eventual repair costs of all the infrastructure you've already got. There is either no reply- because, heads in the sand- or the reply is that all the new people who will move there and the growth of the tax base will make it affordable. Which, while not exactly a classic ponzi scheme, pretty much resembles one.

It's really common, the whole "ignore future repair costs" thing. I lived in an HOA a few years ago that enjoyed low dues for many years, and everyone was always really happy about that. Guess what, the roofs and siding was ten years past due for replacement, and we had nothing in the bank. I want to say we were looking at special assessments of $30-40k/unit.

I'll try: Strong Towns' predictions of future maintenance-debt doom are already true today of the urbanist, transit-centric alternative. If any group of Americans had sufficient motivation and resources to maintain a good public transit system, it would be New Yorkers, and they empirically don't. The MTA is deteriorating rapidly despite the best efforts of one of the richest cities in the world. That's textbook "unsustainable." It may well be true that America's freeways will meet a similar fate in the future, but that doesn't tell you which one is better or worse.

The big roads Strong Towns despises have many lanes, road networks have many paths from A to B, and vehicles that are resilient to low-quality roads are readily available for purchase. On the other hand, the failure of any component anywhere in a rail network can ruin the whole system until it's fixed. If I have to live with a falling-apart transportation system, I'll take crumbling roads over crumbling trains.

That is a good point, public transit is not immune to ignoring future costs. However-

The real doom is when people abandon the town or city because property taxes have to be hiked dramatically to pay for the bill come due. This drives people to leave, which drives taxes higher, which drives people to leave... This kills the city.

New York & the train system there has big problems. But because there are so many people paying into it, nobody is leaving New York over the cost of fixing it. It is troubled but not failed.

ST's core raison d'être is abandoned, decaying suburban sprawl. Growing up in Silicon Valley, I didn't really get ST until I was walking through vast, crumbling suburbs in the midwest.

New York isn't so much fixing it as adapting to a long-term future with fewer, slower, less predictable trains. Their only hope is a multi-decade-scale IT project (positive train control) which is to say, they have no hope.

Adapting to worse mobility is also a thing you can do with roads. Drive slower over the potholes, close the lanes that are too far gone, revert to gravel if need be.

I guess you could say that dense cities are so singular and compelling, people will be willing to put up with poor mobility in exchange for the other opportunities they provide. Whereas exurbia is so abundant and generic, people will flee to an equivalent municipality with better mobility.

Strong Towns' message is more compelling for very small towns, which could be entirely walkable. Then there's no transportation infrastructure needed. People can walk on anything. But for small and mid-sized cities, it has some weaknesses.

> New York isn't so much fixing it as adapting to a long-term future with fewer, slower, less predictable trains. Their only hope is a multi-decade-scale IT project (positive train control) which is to say, they have no hope.

I think this is a gross exaggeration. New York's subway has pulled back from the precipice before; in the '70s the subway was literally falling to pieces on the ground, with routine derailments, trains running at 5MPH everywhere due to the state of the tracks, and record levels of crime. It got to the point where a triage plan suggested cutting out entire lines, including the L, which is now one of the most congested.

Today's issues can mostly be attributed to neoliberal City and State administrations (Giuliani, Pataki, Bloomberg, both Cuomos) that consistently cut MTA funding to tell a future national electorate that they balanced a budget. As a result the MTA took on debt, the interest of which is almost entirely responsible for all the fare hikes in recent memory.

Add in a near-crippling focus on safety in operations above all else, including speed, and it explains the current train unreliability.

> property taxes have to be hiked dramatically to pay for the bill come due. This drives people to leave

This is surprising to me, although I live in Canada and property taxes are a pittance. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/residential.a... So that's like two thousand dollars a year for a million dollar home.

Strong Towns is much more focused on NOT building new roads than on building new transit. Overall, the message is that new infrastructure of all kinds can be unsustainable financially.

Unless your town is so small that you can get away with purely walking, you're gonna need either roads or transit.

But the denser you are and the more mixed-use areas you have, the less road mileage you need per resident.

They don't advocate having no roads and transit...just being more cautious about expanding whatever infrastructure you already have. They are a foil to the idea that infrastructure expansion is always an "investment." Their emphasis is on maintenance and staying in good financial shape so that you can afford to replace infrastructure when it wears out. It's actually not a very radical position which is why they're able to draw crowds in red and blue places both.

New York's MTA, and the general budgetary situation, is mostly mismanaged, not impossible to keep up. And New York certainly doesn't get its fair share of the tax money raised within its city limits; not from the state and not from the federal government.

Consider that Nassau County, home of the first suburbs and one of the wealthiest counties in America by median income, has been under state fiscal control since 2000 because it simply cannot balance a budget. New York City infrastructure looks downright peachy compared to Nassau's troubles.

Obviously it’s possible to maintain public transit under some set of political sensibilities and structures; it works in Europe and Asia. But if any place in America would be willing to address mismanagement (meaning terminate the careers of the politicians who allow it), it would be New York. De Blasio just got re-elected by a wide margin.

The problem is that the MTA is managed by the state, not the city. De Blasio doesn't have a mandate to fix the subway; he was elected with a mandate to fix racial relations with the NYPD and get universal pre-K, and his reelection was mostly a function of there being no obvious Democrat alternative. It's why his main thing has been to promote the ferries, biking, and the BQX, because those are the only things he directly controls.

There was a gubernatorial challenger who was much more pro-subway, but she lost a campaign by basically treating it as a run for the mayor of New York and ignoring the rest of the state. (Her lack of managerial experience also didn't help.)

The counterpoint is the status quo. Keep building more roads and expanding suburbs. To be fair, this has worked well for the second half of the 20th century. Land was plentiful and a whole generation got the American dream suburban home at very affordable prices.

The roads were built very cheaply, often with federal subsidies, but much of this infrastructure is due for repairs and that’s where StrongTowns’s sustainability critique comes in. The status quo ignored future liabilities now coming due. And the political problem is structural: politicians get far more credit for building new roads and bridges than paying the bills for old ones or balancing budgets. So the forces that be are strongly pushing back against StrongTowns, and if you want to be skeptical and suspicious, I think it’s better to target that at the system rather than the skeptics trying to reform it.

Despite allthis, Texas roads are in much better shape than those in California despite the endless wave of bonds, Propositions, fees, and taxes that Californians impose upon themselves (monies all silently diverted into the general fund to shore up public employee pensions)

Yeah, the hijinks with the general fund are a problem. I think we need an electoral system that will allow multiple parties, because single party rule makes it hard to hold anyone accountable. But Republicans aren’t viable here and we’d need multiple left parties.

Also the general fund is starved partially because of propositions like 13 that unfairly limits taxation on people whose houses have appreciated tremendously in value.

California liberals will never accept that the Democratic "arrangement" with unions is corruption, because only Republicans can be corrupt

Found this article to be the other half of the explanation: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/07/12/an-open-letter-to-chuc...

Tldr: Zoning isn't going away, that will take educating multiple generations.

So his solution is to give up, build a "strong home", lead by example, and wait for society to catch up to your "strong home"? That's absurd.

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