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