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What you're quoting is the money that was allocated to maintenance (the budget), not the actual amount required to maintain quality and level of service comparable to when things were originally built. But also, Seattle is a bad example, as the city of Seattle is largely pre-war and has an exceptionally valuable Downtown, and Seattle is booming off the charts compared to the rest of the US.

If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling around metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and take a hard look at their maintenance costs versus income. Unfortunately, Seattle's economy isn't the norm.

This argument is it, but it says something different than you realize. The bigger problem is that as cities become less financially and culturally relevant/desirable their revenues decline at faster clip than their investment and spending. Its not infrastructure or anything in particular it's just a problem of congruency.

Infrastructure is a fixed cost. On paper. But of course quality can be always traded off for cost. And that's what happens usually if revenue dries up.

Potholes, cracked asphalt, insufficient storm drainage, and so eventually a lot of damage to property (floods, cars, etc.).

You also have to account for federal funding. NYC in particular depends on it for infrastructure maintenance, and important maintenance goes neglected without that funding (cf. Hudson Gateway).

but even then they provide enough worth to the states to merit the federal costs

NYC sends a heck of a lot more to the Federal Treasury than it gets back.

Even in Detroit where we have notoriously crippling roads and no public transportation we have constant large strips of highway shut down for replacement. At our lowest point the poor infrastructure cause wear on vehicles, that can probably be curbed with public transportation.

Detroit has a lot of suburbs that are doing very well. The problem with Detroit was basically white flight away from the city and into the suburbs: those people didn’t leave and take their money to California or Texas. The result was a very lopsided tax base in the region.

As someone who lives in a suburb of Detroit, this is an oft-repeated fact that, while true, doesn't capture much of what's wrong with the Detroit Metro area

Seattle is a boom town like most of the towns out west. It booms and then the busts are especially hard. My dad remembered the “will the last person leaving Seattle please turn off the lights” sign after working for Boeing in the late sixties. Much of the Seattle suburbs is post war, heck, it’s even post 90s from what I remember growing up.

Seattle does not seem to be skimping on maintenance of its infrastructure. City roads do not have potholes and are generally of good quality.

Anywhere I look, municipalities don't spend too much on road maintenance. If the argument is that it's below what's actually necessary to spend to maintain it, and in near future it will come and bite us, clearly some places must already be ahead of the curve and already have significant pains due to falling behind with maintenance and having no budget to pay for it. Where are those places?

> If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling around metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and take a hard look at their maintenance costs versus income.

Can you name one of those places around Chicago so that we can look at its budget? Memphis budgets around 10% of its revenues for infrastructure. Is it significant? Yes. Will it bankrupt the city? No.

What about the west Seattle bridge, a huge chuck of Seattle just got cut off for many years due to failing infrastructure. That’s probably the first of many infrastructure debts coming due

> That’s probably the first of many infrastructure debts coming due

The problem isn't related to infrastructure alone. US debt is already above $24 trillion [1]. The Federal Reserve just put $6 trillion on its balance sheet [2] that is unlikely to ever be unwound. We've already spent far into the future. It's important to allocate capital intelligently in the near term to ensure disaster is averted when defaults occur en masse decades from now. I'd rather fix all of our existing infrastructure that gets a D+ rating [3] and then default on that debt in the future; we still get to keep what has already been built. The debt is "funny money".

A better title, with more weight towards the financial situation, would've been "We've Built A Civilization We Can't Afford." We have to stop kicking the can, but you need leaders with the fortitude to tackle these painful issues, and an electorate that will support them. Is that likely? I wouldn't bet my own money on that.

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

[3] https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

I live near Seattle. The bridge you're talking about is actually a modern replacement that has failed well before reasonable expectations. I don't recall hearing a root cause, but I don't believe anyone was expecting this or that it's a results of lack of maintenance.

From what I understand, the West Seattle bridge is not failing due to lack of maintenance, but rather due to constructions defects. No amount of maintenance could have prevent the current problems.

> just got cut off for many years due to failing infrastructure

But not because Seattle hasn't paid its dues, but due to an engineering fault / design problem. The bridge was expected to last another 40 years and was being regularly inspected (which is how the issue was found). The bridge was built in '84 and inspected multiple times a year.

Seattle also has very, very mild weather. go look at the Midwest. Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, etc. places that have hard freezes, frost heaves, and road salt. when I lived in WI, they had crews to fill potholes with 'hot patch' and after a few years, it's more patch' than concrete

Ok. So does that mean suburbs with mild weather are fine, but those without are screwed? Are suburbs sustainable in California but not Cleveland? This doesn't appear to be the message of Strongtowns.

All else being equal, I would bet on people migrating from places with less desirable weather to more desirable weather. More importantly, people with disposal income who can afford to migrate will migrate.

The answer is always “it depends”. Infrastructure in declining industrial suburbs is declining because... they are in decline and wealth has been shipped off.

Strong towns gives a single answer to all problems with a smarty pants tone. They have a point worth hearing, but it gets old the 59th time you read it.

But you're talking about Seattle, one of the largest cities in the USA. It's experiencing growth.

Strongtowns isn't worried (as much) about large metro areas. His "shtick" is that the rest of the country, where populations are shrinking or stagnating, can't continue to run ponzi-like growth plans anymore that presume the population will continue to increase. They're not going to.

Go find yourself a town of 10,000 people that has a massively over-budge roads and water department. You won't have to look far- just leave the big cities, driving in any direction for an hour or two. Those same towns have low incomes, generally, meaning your "only $700/year" is enough to bankrupt people.

In short: I think you're living in a bubble and haven't ventured outside of it very far in a while.

Yes, that. But even cities experiencing growth aren't likely to get a pass in the short term.

Austin has had massive growth but what happens when sales tax, hotel taxes, fuel taxes, local income taxes (not in Austin but other places), etc all take a massive hit all at once?

With canceling SXSW this year, they're projecting there was an immediate $30-50M tax revenue hit and hotel occupancy is still ~4% when it's normally 70%. Sure, there's less wear and tear on infrastructure but they don't cancel out.

Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US..

> Fundamentally, it looks like most cities are living "paycheck to paycheck" like a good part of US..

Governments in general (and the departments/agencies thereof) tend to live "paycheck to paycheck" specifically because they're typically discouraged from saving a whole lot of money; there's almost always a "spend it or lose it" mentality (whether informal or actually codified in budget policies) that instead encourages spending every last penny of funding received lest whoever's in charge of the budget decide "well they're running leaner than expected so let's slash the budget to what they're actually spending and turn that into a tax break".

When you look at abandoned towns over the last century, it wasn’t due to overbuilding of roads but from some local employer moving away. In this case it doesn’t matter if you have 6 lane highways or dirt roads if no one is being payed to live there anymore.

There is a middle ground between a growing city and an abandoned town. I run a very small startup in this space and we work with towns who have a growing population but a shrinking downtown business core. Some people can't afford to live in the big cities, some want a lifestyle that they can't get in the city, some have other reasons, but there's a growing problem in the Midwest of bedroom communities. People move into small cities outside of Madison, Detroit, Indianapolis, etc and don't spend a single minute in the central business district. They don't spend a single dollar in the town they live in.

These people wake up in the morning and drive into the big city for work, which needs huge roads running through otherwise small residential areas. Now those roads are too dangerous to cross, so pedestrian traffic plummets. When the people come home, they get their family together and drive back to the big city to go to a concert, visit a museum, or get dinner. We've talked to so many people who live biking distance to their town's central business district but have never been there. They only live in Ada or Lowell, but they spend all their time and money in Grand Rapids. And Fulton Street isn't a road you'd want to walk across, because of all that traffic.

The way it works: a town was thriving with an engaged population spending time and money in the central business district. One person moves away, and someone else moves into their house. This new person is fleeing the big city, but is still economically tied to the big city (not the small town). Now imagine 20 or 30 houses go for sale in this town every year. After a few years, that's a major hit to the small town's economic prospects. Businesses start to close, which accelerates the problem. And many of the newcomers want to live in subdivisions rather than city limits, so houses in city limits are sitting just as vacant as the businesses, and the town has less tax revenue to fix any of the problems. So it gets worse year over year until the town dries up. The only thing left is the major road, the McDonalds, and the gas station. But the people living in those subdivisons just outside of city limits still need to get to the freeway, so the town has to maintain massive roads used mostly by people who aren't paying them any taxes.

This is the story of hundreds of towns in every Midwestern state, tens of thousands of towns across the country. We're building a network of four lane roads through the ruins of small towns and leaving the city council to pay for infrastructure no one is using anymore, with tax income they don't have anymore, for citizens who don't spend any time or money in those towns.

Why don't they have tax income? Presumably all the residents of these bedroom communities are paying property tax.

You may have missed the part where I talked about subdivisions right outside of city limits. The towns only get tax revenue from people who live inside of city limits.

Small town business districts aren't losing business to the Big City, they're losing it to Amazon and big box stores (and the latter avoid being within Big City limits, anyway).

>Go find yourself a town of 10,000 people that has a massively over-budge roads and water department.

Maybe, but the city mentioned in the article spends 10% of it's budget on infrastructure. That might be more than it should but it's not bankrupting them anytime soon.

> But you're talking about Seattle, one of the largest cities in the USA. It's experiencing growth.

It is growing because people want to live there. They don't want to live in the communities idealized by the "strong town" people. They want to live in suburbs around a downtown core, which is what Seattle is.

Yep, in a lot of cities (and states) very generous pensions are what really bleeds their budget dry. Infrastructure cost is marginal and lot more infrastructure maintenance could be done without those gigantic pension expenses.

That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now. At the time most of the budgets could be allocated to direct city spending instead of starting with half of your budget already gone before you even have it.

Of course you could argue that it still means that we built cities that we couldn't afford since employee benefits are part of the normal expenses. But imo, it means more that , at the time, a few took advantage of local politicians unwillingness to go against more and more generous and unaffordable pension schemes that ended up crippling future generations with perpetual debt and underfunded services when they themselves never had such a burden to carry. If it wasnt for that borderline intergenerational theft , the infrastructure of our cities is not only something we could easily afford to maintain but could even be tremendously expanded.

Edit: I'm not arguing that pensions should not exist or that unions are bad. It's just that in the public sector specifically, ridiculous and unfair payouts were negotiated where the public sometimes ends up paying for far more than what the employees contributed themselves.

I argue defined benefit pensions should not exist. There is clearly a conflict of interest between voters (100% of government employees who will want to increase their benefits) and politicians (who need the vote of all of those government employees because so many non government employees do not vote). You even wrote it yourself:

>That's why infrastructure was much better in the past: most of the population was economically active and local governments didn't have any permanent financial burden like they have now.

They didn't have the financial burden because their ancestors didn't punt labor costs decades into the future. And given the opportunity to punt labor costs decades into the future and provide lower taxes now, how is a politician who is prudent and wishes to account for today's costs today going to win an election?

The only solution is to ban defined benefit pensions (and all deferred compensation schemes) so there no longer exists one less avenue for future taxpayers to get taken for a ride.

> The only solution is to ban defined benefit pensions (and all deferred compensation schemes) so there no longer exists one less avenue for future taxpayers to get taken for a ride.

Then you'll have to raise wages for government jobs dramatically. The decent pension is one of the perks that attracts people to those careers.

I think the main problem is that governments never want to pay into the pension pot during boomtimes, and then they cry poverty when the economy is in a downturn. In principle, an "immortal" entity like a state pension fund should be much better positioned to manage risk over time than a single individual with only one lifetime and one 401(k).

> Then you'll have to raise wages for government jobs dramatically.

I don’t see the problem with paying market wages to people to avoid screwing future taxpayers.

And there is no such thing as an immortal entity. My kids and I will be paying for benefits enjoyed by my parents and grandparents. (I know there are things my ancestors have done that I have and will benefit from, but I’m strictly speaking in context of payment/benefits for defined benefit pensions).

Something that kills me is how roads are paved and then within a few months they're torn up to do work on pipes underneath like clockwork. They say it's because the utility companies and the town don't have good communication, but think we all know it's because of kickbacks from the paving companies. I've rarely ever seen work done under roads that weren't just paved over. And no, it's not just because I only notice it when the road is new because every since I've had this realization about 10-15 years ago I've been paying attention to it and it's still the case.

Aside from that, a big issue is that cities aren't designed for maintenance. Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs. It'd be faster and cheaper b/c no more repavements, you don't need super heavy equipment (simple forklift with chains can move them), and it'd cut down on job completion time, not to mention it's much easier to plan. For anything that crosses a street, do it at intersections and you can just make intersections a composition of concrete slabs that again can be moved.

Another issue is not utilizing technology. It'd be incredibly simple to create a web portal where citizens can report maintenance issues like potholes, broken street lights or traffic lights, tree limbs that need cutting to keep away from power lines, a sewer drain that's clogged, a fire hydrant that's leaking, etc. The list goes on and on. All these things being reported would make it much easier for the city to plan the maintenance so you could bang out a bunch of things at once early on rather than waiting for it to build up so much that it becomes obvious without the reporting and by that time it's usually late and has lead to other issues.

My city has an app you can report things like that with so it exists.

> Why are we still building towns with the pipes under roads? Keep them under the sidewalks with loops in the cement blocks so they can be easily lifted up and moved for repairs.

This isn't a bad idea for maybe a single utility but I dont think you are considering how many utilities are under the ground: water, sewer, street runoff, natural gas, electricity, telecommunications. Each of these may have multiple lines for each of service, distribution, and transmission. One of the reasons streets get torn up a lot is that there is a low of equipment underground!

Water pipes, at least, can't be allowed to freeze. In most of continental USA, that would preclude locating them in a vault under the sidewalk.

No city goes bankrupt because of road maintenance. They just choose not to do it. There are plenty of towns and cities across the USA that have just been left to decay.

Correct. If you could look at one city budget and derive from that budget what it costs to sufficiently maintain infrastructure, then you would never see a bridge collapse, or a water main break, or a pension fund crisis. Look around at how often those things happen.

That someone would look at a city budget, which is a primarily political document, and believe that document reflects actual costs to sufficiently maintain anything, is simply naive.

lol some socal cities are kinda like that. The streets are maintained just fine but the business owners/landlords are trying to squeeze every last drop out of their 1960s pieces of junk and refuse to maintain/update/rebuild them.

Yes, when you read that St. Louis, say, "lost" 600,000 people over the last 60 years, everybody should understand why that's a ridiculous fiction. Those people didn't leave St. Louis. They moved slightly west across invisible and arbitrary 150-year-old political borders that have no relation to the built environment of the region today. They still live in "St. Louis" by any commonsense definition.

It's the same all over the Rust Belt.

So what really happened? We built new subdivisions for the exact same set of people and the old parts of town just fell apart entirely. The maintenance was completely ignored.

Nobody left St. Louis. They just took developer and federal money and built new housing in St. Louis County (the original suburbs). And then when those old suburbs started to decay, they did it again by moving out to St. Charles (the new exurbs).

The latest wave of this is the "return to the city" movement in which the same set of people continue the cycle by abandoning the housing that was built to replace the housing they're returning to.

I'm using St. Louis as an example here, because it's the city I know the most about, but it's the same everywhere.

Seattle is one of the most prosperous regions of the US. Even so, your suburban lifestyle is probably subsidized by people who live in more urbanized parts of the metro.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment...

That said, I agree that total collapse of municipal finances is unlikely outside of particularly poor exurban areas.

There is not much urbanized part of the metro to speak of. It’s all suburbia, even in the city itself, 75% is zoned for single family houses. Given that my property taxes are 10 times what Strongtowns thinks it costs to maintain the streets, I seriously doubt I’m being subsidized by anyone when it comes to infrastructure.

A lot of people assume that urbanized metros imply a lot of high-rise residential. But take a place like Somerville in MA. It's one of densest cities in the country outside of the environs of NYC and there's not much high rise construction generally and a lot of the city is standalone houses.

What about the fact there are two of the largest tech companies in the world headquartered nearby? The downtown most definitely subsidizes suburbia.

Microsoft practically built a whole suburban town far from Seattle and made it its headquarters. It subsidizes suburbia because it is suburbia.

Workers from Boeing 'built' the suburbia that Microsoft moved to, most of the housing in Redmond predates Microsoft.

> I live in a suburban development in Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will finally kill our budget?

"Packed row to row" and "50 years, with a good amount over 100 years old" isn't nearly descriptive enough to say whether it is financially sustainable. How packed? How dependent on long highway commutes? And importantly, how prosperous are the residents (the suburban Seattle area is pretty prosperous)? All of that matters a lot for how soon the financial pictures turns unsustainable.

> the infrastructure costs story simply doesn’t add up.

Roads aren't the only bit of infrastructure. Water lines, electricity distribution, land maintenance, and more. The unit costs of all these thing scale up rapidly with decreased density. The leading edge of the failures will be in places where the property tax base has already collapsed and the government is forced to make infrastructure maintenance trade-offs with bad consequences (i.e. Flint, MI), but the fragility is there in lots of cities, just perhaps not yours at this time.

I think Strongtowns would argue that cities are taking on infrastructure debt — that Seattle should be spending far more than $150-200m. The cost could be somewhat visible in the short term with more potholes or whatever, but probably becomes most striking when there are major infrastructure failures like the I-35W bridge or the Genoa Bridge.

If you take your assumptions on face (and I think some might be off, but I'm not expert), we're saying that homeowners should think of the cost of repaving roads as on par with replacing a roof. I don't think most people think this way.

Last I looked Strongtown calculations seem to be based on areas in the Midwest. It's plausible that more expensive places to live are making enough to maintain infrastructure.

For example I live in a 50 year old 1.5k square foot house in a suburb and pay around 12k/year in property taxes. Which was far above the calculations one of the blog posts said that the town would have to collect.

The I-35W bridge collapse had nothing to do with insufficient maintenance, in fact maintenance materials and vehicles on the bridge were a contributing factor. The primary cause was weak gusset plates, incorrectly specified when the bridge was first built 40 years earlier.

> If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that went bankrupt because of it?

There's often a reduction of services. Some US towns / counties can no longer afford pavement so they're letting roads become gravel:

* https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-...

* https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2009/counties-weig...

These articles are about rural roads, this has nothing to do with suburban development patterns that Strongtowns rails against.

Others have made good comments so I'll just summarize; the author is not worried about Seattle. However, if you visit some declining suburbs in the Midwest you'll immediately realize what he's talking about.

Can you name one or two of the Midwest places, so that we can look into their budgets and see how much of them are infrastructure maintenance costs?

Some of the older suburbs in the southern Kansas City metro area strike me as examples. (I don't really know names)

I'm not sure you'll find a lot of maintenance on their budget- the problem is precisely that nothing is being maintained.

I picked a town of Grandview, MO, because it was far on the south side of Kansas City metro, and its population stayed completely flat for last 40 years. Seems like a perfect candidate for Strongtowns argument: residential areas are all sprawl, industrial areas are packed together, and looking at its Main Street, it's a stroad[1], which Strongtowns says is "enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive". No population growth means that there is no new development to pay for the old ones, which is what Strongtowns calls a Ponzi scheme[2]

Let's take a look at the budget[3]. Grandview intends to spend $37M, only $1M of which is budgeted for street maintenance, which is more than average in previous years. Are the streets deteriorated and decayed due to lack of maintenance? I spent 5 minutes on Google Streetview, and while the residential streets are far from pristine, I couldn't find a single pothole. I did, however, find road work, repaving a street[4]. This[5] is a representative example.

Is Grandview a bad example? Is it somehow better than average? Is there some magic that makes Grandview work quite fine? No, I don't think so: for all I know, Grandview looks exactly like hundreds of others suburban towns in America that I've seen. This is what bugs me about Strongtowns: for all of its doom prophesying, I haven't yet seen a single town struggling to maintain suburban infrastructure. Failing to meet pension obligations, sure. Overblown salaries for city employees, yep. Large police department with lots of new toys in a town with almost no crime? Sadly, too common. But residential street maintenance killing a budget? Hardly.

[1] - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-... [2] - https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [3] - https://www.grandview.org/home/showdocument?id=9346 [4] - https://goo.gl/maps/6DFjmEVoueoQwD7H9 [5] - https://goo.gl/maps/HWkWMT3GGK8WnNpX8

There is also generally less traffic and buried utilities under suburban and rural roads, which decreases maintenance costs.

Also, look at rural communities...

They manage to maintain a mile or more of roads to most isolated houses.

To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government. The sparsely used road users aren’t bearing the full cost.

"To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government."

This is generally true - typically, paved rural roads in the US are county roads. Nicely maintained gravel roads are typically county roads as well.

When people look at the tax base and where federal dollars are spent, the Red areas usually end up getting anywhere from $103 to $110 in federal dollars for every $100 collected in federal taxes, and much of that comes down to roads and highways.

Without the highways most of these areas wouldn't be able to buy or sell goods to the outside world.

(Aren't trains cheaper? Maybe we should be building more track and fewer lanes)

the assumptions going on here are all about costs.

when in reality current transportation infra funding from federal government is about military defense.

its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space. there is no reason they couldn't and would reduce costs overall. but it also means a single strike can disable all 3 systems.

in today's world I think its a pointless effort and we should resolve those issues to reduce the overall costs. but here we are.

> its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space.

They sometimes do, though. Namely: if you're going through the mountains, there are only so many mountain passes, and therefore only so many places where these things can get through the mountains. I-80 in the Sierra Nevada mountains is a perfect example of this; between Colfax and the 80/20 interchange (if not all the way to Truckee) they're very much occupying the same space because there's nowhere else to go (thankfully that power line's pretty minor compared to the one following 49 to the north, but the one following 49 also happens to be colocated with rail).

The more viable solution - and indeed, if you look at a map of our energy infrastructure¹, the one that we use - is to make the connections as redundant as possible. This has plenty of peacetime benefits, too (for example, if I-80 and the adjacent railway both shut down because of a blizzard or avalanche, trains and trucks can route around it, albeit with delays).

----

¹: https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php

A dirt or gravel road wide enough for one car. Also lacking lights plowing or a sidewalk.

Most of those roads are

1) city or county highways and also serve a commercial purpose

2) are bad quality and have been left to decay

3) have been crushed and turned to gravel roads

Modeling rural communities as remotely self-sustaining economically is a fantasy. They "manage" to maintain these roads through heavy subsidization by more economically-productive cities.

Obviously dense cities (in their current form) aren't completely self-sustaining either, given that they need food. But this is universally-understood, while for some reason many people seem to be unaware how much of a closed-loop rural communities _aren't_ when they talk about the sustainability of sparse living patterns at modern standards of living.

Sounds like farm towns could self-sustain with a sacrifice in some luxuries and tax money from cities, but cities would starve.

Luxuries like what? Roads? Fire departments? Police? Schools? There’s a floor, and often they don’t generate it, instead relying on state and county funds.

The economics at the state level, play out just like how they do at the national level. The high population, economically vibrant parts generate tax revenue, which is redistributed to the sparsely populated, economically depressed areas, of which are not self sustaining, no matter how much the net receivers think they are.

Compared to food and water those things are luxuries.

Obviously both types of regions need each other to maintain the modern style of living as mentioned, but in some kind of societal collapse situation you'd probably rather be on some isolated farm that could theoretically sustain itself. And I feel like if those areas chose to go on with less subsidy money they could do so, but it's not a bad trade for food and everything else that comes from them. If one really wanted to hold the other hostage the one with the food would win.

When did we go from 'self-sustaining' to societal collapse? It seems to be some weird fantasy where these isolated towns are somehow more self-sustaining because they could vaguely survive in the case of a societal collapse.

That doesn't make them self-sustaining in modern society. And saying that roads are a luxury seems to be incredibly ignorant of how society evolved and how important trade routes (as well as ocean access, something cities generally have) for getting resources you otherwise don't have access to. Such as materials, spices and meds. Something that, you know, an isolated farm wouldn't readily have access to.

Especially since salt is kind of a big deal for food preservation.

The original comment you replied to explicitly mentions "at modern standards of living".

Many rural areas don't have fire departments in the same way that cities have fire departments. They have "volunteer" fire departments, who do receive public funding but who are not expected to put out any particular fire. There aren't enough fires to justify anything more.

Your "state level" explanation seems to ignore states that don't have major metropolitan areas.

Luxuries like roads and power?

Ruralites can (and often already do) drive 4WD vehicles and run generators (or nowadays solar + batteries) for power. In an extreme case, they'd be at least somewhat willing to revert to horses and candles (hell, quite a few might even consider that fun). It'll take adjustment, but it ain't an insurmountable problem.

The far bigger concern is that very few (if any) rural towns in the US have self-sustaining food supplies. Cut off their access to the outside world, and there's a very high probability that they'll starve just as quickly as a larger city will. American agriculture has shifted hard from diversified/robust subsistence farming to large-scale industrialized monocrop farming, so you'd have to rewind a century or so of "progress" in order for a rural town to be able to feed itself. This is also not an insurmountable problem, but the effects are quite a bit more dire.

Cities would starve from...what?

This narrative always seemed remarkably short-sighted because cities have enough economic bargaining power that they can just import the goods they need. Farm towns would quickly fall apart the moment they had to pay for all of their infrastructure (meaning power, internet, gas, transportation) because all of that is heavily subsidized.

The unrealistic hypothetical seemed to be essentially that a city or a farm town was moved to an island on its own or otherwise barricaded. The city would suffer a big population loss and have trouble making the land usable for growing food again, while the farm area would have an easier transition to a frontier-town-like lifestyle.

Yea, my original comment implied this unrealistic hypothetical because I wanted to avoid the conversation getting derailed by the inevitable rural fetishists pretending that cities are irredeemable cesspits instead of "what makes modern standards of living possible, for both urban and rural areas".

Don't get me wrong, as much as I prefer dense urbanism, there are plenty of things about sparse living that appeal to me, and I fully understand how many people would choose suburban or rural life. Hell, I'm not even supposed to some degree of subsidization from more efficient communities, just on grounds of diversity and anti-fragility. It just gets frustrating how committed sparsity advocates are to pretending that these lifestyles aren't heavily subsidized. A self-sustaining rural community (despite having its charms) would be appealing to far fewer people than one that gets to have its cake and eat it too, by redistributing some of the societal advantages of urban living (like economic efficiency).

Just importing the goods they need works fine until there's some global crisis that disrupts food supply chains so much that you can't anymore. Say, a pandemic so disruptive to global trade and economic activity that a bunch of less wealthy countries just decide to say they're going to keep their food to themselves so their people don't starve. You know, like the one happening right now.

Yes, and you're saying that smaller towns would be immune to this effect?

Because again, despite what people seem to think, smaller towns rely a lot on cities as part of their supply chain for things such as medical supplies, gasoline and infrastructure. Isolated farms are not self-sufficient no matter how much you may believe it to be so, because once the power runs out, once the water stops flowing and the supplies stop coming in, said isolated farm is far and away from other natural resources that are rather important for farming and survival.

I'm wondering if people have ever been to the midwest?

Anti-fragility of supply chains is (mostly) orthogonal to the urban/rural question.

Some big parts of why we subsidize rural areas is 1) an emergent property of allowing people to live where they choose and providing a base standard of living for every community, and 2) romanticism for our pastoral past, and an implicit belief that societies should provide the opportunity sparser living with more exposure to nature.

I don't want to brush off these aesthetic concerns as "wrong": the 100% urban megalopolises of science fiction always carry at least a tinge of dystopia, because a desire for nature and open spaces is to some degree hardwired in us. But they have nothing to do with what we're talking about, which is sustainability.

The kind of robustness you're talking about doesn't have a whole lot to do with the urban/rural divide. It's entirely possible to have an almost-universally urban population and still maintain domestic food production, either by changing agricultural practices to fit cities better or at worst by having a "skeleton crew" instead of entire communities (the number of people living in sparse communities right now is _far_ below the minimum number of people we'd need to grow food).

Again, I'm not suggesting we do this, or that there's a clear path from point A to point B. I'm just illustrating how your point is a non sequitur.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion from either my comment or contact with the real world. I chose my words pretty precisely to avoid my point getting buried by a tangential conversation about the other direction of dependency: "dense cities in their current form" depend on rural areas. It's pretty easy to imagine an almost-fully urbanized society that grows food without having to sustain a significant amount of population spread sparsely.

On top of that, the idea that rural areas' standard of living without urban subsidization would amount to losing "some luxuries" is so out of touch with reality that I don't even know where to start (though the sibling comments do a good job).

I live in rural KS. We afford our roads in rural areas by purposely not paving them. Maintenance of gravel roads in the East and dirt roads in the West is accomplished by running a road grader down them every few months. There are paved county roads every 5 to 10 miles. These are generally only chip and sealed every 3 to 5 years, not repaved, and are not smooth. Every 15 to 25 miles there is a paved state road. Even many of them lack shoulders, leaving nowhere to stop in emergencies and causing semis to roll when they catch the edge of the road. Even for those of us in town, UPS and FedEx packages are generally coated in dirt upon arrival. The one benefit is the low cost of maintenance.

Long term, the cheapest roads are in older towns that still have brick streets. Some are a 100 years old and have nearly zero maintenance. They are slick and noisy.

On a side note, we have hundreds of miles of gravel roads to bike. We even have an internationally attended event called the Dirty Kanza.

Seattle is urban and has 50% higher population than KC in 25% of the area. Strongtowns (despite its ironic name), is pro-city and anti-town. The OP article is quite clear about this, as it argues against KC spreading into suburban sprawl.

You'd need an example of a suburb or exurb to prove your point.

You haven’t seen Seattle, have you? 75% of total area of the city is zoned for single family houses. Sure, it might not literally be “suburban”, but the development pattern is just the same.

Of course, the same thing is true in the actual suburbs. Consider Lynnwood, a town of 35 000. It’s annual revenues are around $300M, and road maintenance is around $6-8M. It spends around 7 times as much on its police force as it does on roads. When does it go bankrupt?

Those SFH zones are getting infilled by apartment buildings and townhouses and ADUs and people selling their backyards to create a new lot. It's nothing like vast surburban tracts.

Lynnwood has 35K people in 8 square miles, 5 Kpeople/sqmi.

KC has 500K people 310 square miles, 1.4 Kpeople/sqmi.

In most towns, education is a huge chunk of the budget. In my semi-rural Massachusetts town of about 7,000, 62% of the budget goes to the town's elementary school and its share of the regional high school. Public works is only about 8% and public safely is a bit under twice that.

As far as I know that's pretty common--in fact, I expected the educational spend to be higher, which it probably is in some places. (Per student spend for the regional high school is about half the spending in Cambridge for example.)

How does a town of 35K people raise $300MM in annual tax? $8,500 per capita seems very, very high.

It has a biennial budget of 197 million usd. That is to say a budget for every 2 years.

It has a population of 38,511. The budget works out to aprox $2558 per person.

Per capita income is just shy of 20k