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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

>Many cities are perpetually broke because they owe more money in maintenance burden (fixing roads, pipes, etc) than they bring in through tax revenue.

This is just flat out not true. For all of the ink Strong towns spills they can't point to one municipality that's gone broke from infrastructure costs. The reality is that infrastructure just isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. It's 10% or less of the budget. Most of the money goes to cops, courts firemen, teachers, municipal workers and so on.

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> For all of the ink Strong towns spills they can't point to one municipality that's gone broke from infrastructure costs.

Ah, that's a bit of editorializing on my part. "Losing money" is probably more accurate than "going broke".

That said, Strong Towns has plenty of case studies of different places, to varying degrees, losing quite a bit of money this way:

- Spokane: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/10/24/dispatches-fr...

- Kanas City: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/5/kansas-citys-fa...

- Cobb County: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-add...

- Collin County: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-...

- Baxter: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/18/the-classic-ca...

I've read various reports from them and I've not seen numbers that stand up. I'm not going to go through 5 more of them in detail to find the same thing. If any of them have actual numbers showing infrastructure eating up say 30% of the budget id be happy to look. But I can all but guarantee that they'll be the same story. Infrastructure at 10% or less with criminal justice, fire, and schools eating up the money.

That infrastructure spend is too low. Steel and Concrete and buried utilities have a life. Many of the towns are up for significant capital investment beyond 10% maintenance. The spend is on 50s, 60s and 70s capex. It's getting old.

Surely, on the risk side the estimated repair and replacement costs for bridges alone could drive a truck through this?

What is your basis for saying 10% is too low?

I'm not suggesting that you are wrong, I just want to figure out how you would determine if the spend is too high or too low for any given town.

the potholes continued existence is probably an aspect

The delayed capital works. If 10% is normal, off the back of the Eisenhower era spend, the JFK spend, the LBJ spend on infrastructure, then capital works budgets have been lick-of-paint since. They're overdue for significant re investment.

The federal capital works improvement spending proposed as recovery intervention identifies 100 major bridges nationally, and another 10,000 worth investing in.[1]

Since then 10% can't stop, the likely spend has to be more. It's that simple.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

Your reply is useless, but I'll rephrase to clarify anyway: how would one determine what percentage is appropriate for planning long term? I.e. so that I don't see potholes in 10 years, would I need 12% or 18% or 44% or <>% ? What factors would this depend on? E.g. is it always above 10% or only if the town has a very low density?

But the point is they are not spending enough on infrastructure.

Only paying 10% on maintenance and then having perpetually potholed roads or a bridge collapse means the true cost is much higher.

Infrastructure has a lifetime and it needs big capital infusions to replace, of that money isn't being stored away for that date then that's just hiding the spending problem.

All these roads have been built by a society that has been poorer than ours. If they could afford that, so can we. It’s really as simple as that.

Poorer in absolute terms, sure. But take a random sample of 100 people from the city population and compare inflation (calculated including housing!) adjusted income and you'll see the opposite.

There is a machine on the road under my balcony right now, chugging and chewing asphalt 2 yards wide and spitting it up on a truck in-front of it.

Road maintenance must be so much easier today than in the 70s. It feel to me neglect is by choice not necessity.

But the demands on the roads are also higher. Cars have more horsepower, higher speed, more weight. In addition, the roads are usually poorly repaired, so you have to repair them more often. In addition, the contracts are often tendered for private companies and the cheapest company wins. Thanks to the poor quality, repairs then have to be carried out correspondingly often.

Highways need to be completely rebuilt every 10 years. Most countries can't do this hence potholes and non working lights.

> Highways need to be completely rebuilt every 10 years.

This is completely false. Even just repaving usually has longer schedule.

Wouldn't this vary, depending on load and climate?

Isn't the vast majority of road damage done by trucks due to their much heavier loads per axle? There probably are more trucks on the roads today to serve our larger population, but at the same time we've also built more roads. No idea how to translate that into average wear over time though per road.

> Cars have more … weight.

Really?

Thanks to the rise of SUVs.

And apparently not just that (as in more huge cars being bought). Even "small European cars" contribute.

Smallest trim/model 1999 F150 curb weight ~3900lbs

F150 2020 model ~4000lbs

(the F150 apparently can all go up to almost 5000 lbs)

VW Jetta 1991 ~2700 lbs

VW Jetta 2020 ~3200lbs

VW Golf 1992 ~2400lbs

VW Golf 2020 ~3000lbs

That's not how that works. Infrastructure is built with many years of a cities budget; they are maintained with the current years (and sometimes, the next 5 years) budget.

In some ways, we are poorer than our parents. Sure, we can buy TVs that are a ten times bigger for a fraction of the inflation adjusted price..

But we’re talking roads here, and roads are built with bitumen. The fact is that bitumen is getting scarcer and more expensive. Our cars are getting more fuel efficient and EVs don’t use fuel at all. But the cars still require the same amount of road, the same amount of bitumen, or maybe even more since cars are heavier and faster now.

We can’t extract oil just to make bitumen. That’s not economical. We primarily extract oil to get the fuel we need, and we get a certain amount of bitumen as a by-product.

Our parents generation was lucky that oil was practically pouring out of the ground..

Schrodinger's Market Economy.

This is the most prosperous, generous, and advanced civilisation ever, with the largest number of billionaires.

But most people who are younger than Boomers are poorer than their parents, and public infrastructure and public services have somehow become unaffordable.

Bitumen is such an insignificant portion of the price of a road that it can increase in price an order of magnitude with no noticable effect on the road price.

It would have an even smaller effect on road maintenance costs.

Let's use Carbocrete, made of co² sucked out of the air, powered by advanced high temperature fission or fusion. Mixed with remolten desert sand if need be, which is otherwise unusable.

That is not entirely true.

Try comparing how many minimum wage paychecks you needed to buy a house then and with how many you need now and what is took to build a house (including permits and land) and what it takes now.

It will be different form country to country and the tech level was lower but the majority of the young ones these days will neven own (paid morgage) a house by the time they are 35.

While housing is extremely over priced right now, it is also important to note that a "standard home" has changed ALOT.

My Grandparents raised 4 children in a 2 bedroom 1 bath 900 square foot home, which was a "standard home" in the 40/50's

Today the standard home is 2x the size with more bathrooms, and larger lots. This is a source of alot of the problems as well. When developers build a subdivision they are not building small homes, they are building 4 bedroom, 3 bath, 2,000 square foot homes

Overall The World Is Becoming a Better Place [1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5s6aZCPSg

To add to this: larger houses and plots hav the knock on effect of making under street piping need to be x3 or even x4 times longer to span the frontage, and have more complex outputs, and be larger with higher pressures - same but inverse for waste lines and their inputs.

Same for electric lines, and those lines have to carry _way_ more power. And Internet cabling, and road surface standards are higher, blah blah forever.

Size and modernity makes this not scale so linearly

The debt of modern development is higher than the debt of the previous cycles.

Really depends who you ask and where they live.

Home sizes in Paris haven’t changed much over the past 50 years.

Yet, prices have exploded. Heck, they’ve skyrocketed. For the exact same thing. Only a bit older.

New apartments, no bigger but built in the suburbs, far from the subway (and not close to the regional trains) cost the same as the old ones of the same size did in Paris 10 years ago (and they were already priced crazily).

With the same numbers of bathrooms but no job that could enable one to afford such a place less than 45 minutes away.

The 2.000sqft 3 bathrooms home with a lawn appears to be a very American thing.

All of that is true, my comment was based on US Housing trends as the context of this discussion is around the American Suburb.

Other nations have other issue, largely that they are locked in with limited amounts of land that can be repurposed for housing, thus this supply restraint is some of the cause of the price increases there. For example the nation of France is SMALLER in land area than the State of Texas yet has over 2x the number of people occupying that smaller land area

The US has TONS of underused land that is continually being developed for new suburban housing additions

I have nothing to say. Other than that I find it really pleasant to have the opportunity for some civil discourse with some civil people.

Thank you for that.

Alas, roads are not built by minimum wage workers chipping in a little bit from their meager salaries. They are built using tax funds, most of which is paid by upper middle class and the rich.

Which then percolate into the depths of the concrete mafia, developers, rent-seekers, to be washed, to minimize taxes.

That could be fixed.

> But the point is they are not spending enough on infrastructure.

OP said the point-- referenced in the article-- was that they are Ponzi schemes. If that is true then user treis is correct: we should see at least one municipality that went bankrupt from this problem.

The whole point of a Ponzi scheme is that it works, for a while.

Like I said, they are identifying an important problem that needs more discussion. But I do think think they're presenting the full picture, and either misattributing or distorting causes.

>Only paying 10% on maintenance and then having perpetually potholed roads or a bridge collapse means the true cost is much higher.

The numbers out there suggest that for 50-100% more spending we could fix everything. That means spending 20% or less of the budget instead of 10% or less. Even a worst case scenario is not the apocalypse Strong towns suggests.

And more to the point it ignores the things that are a threat. As an example, today Flint spends half the budget paying pensions for retired workers. Then there's things like Social Security, Health care costs, education costs, and housing costs. We have a lot of large and looming problems that defy a simple solution. Infrastructure is easy by comparuson.

Ah, the old "they only need to double the budget" approach.

So simple and straight forward.

What are they cutting to do that?

> What are they cutting to do that?

False dichotomy.

You can cover a budget where you double a 10% entry by increasing taxes 10%.

Or increase taxes 5% and cut 5% over the remaining 95% budget.

Or a mix in between.

This isn't rocket science. It's politics. In a democracy it is literally nothing more than a matter of personal will by an elected official. Budgets are drafted every year.

Yes, and the history of municipalities raising taxes to actually cover the infrastructure/other costs is that residents that can move out to other municipalities still using the Growth Ponzi strategy to keep taxes low.

No, not really. That's just the strawman you've grabbed hold to. Quite literally every single government institution has its budget set each and every single year, and every single public institution has to allocate their resources to their programs. Even though it's politically easier to increase debt and spending, let's not fool ourselves into believing a fairytale about how no expenditure has ever been lowered ever.

That's not really the point. A Ponzi scheme at some point blows up and everything falls apart. But their worst case is the suburbs have to fill <10% of their budget.

No, if the replacement cost is not being factored into to the ongoing costs then it isn't "they just need to double their infrastructure budget" to fix it. They needed to do that over 20 years, the entire lifetime of the infastructure. Every year where the 'true' cost is not being paid means even higher costs later.

Their numbers not standing up is a pretty bold statement. Would be nice if you would back it up a bit more.

Could it simply be that it's easier to cut costs at infrastructure than criminal justice, fire and schools? Maybe it's just 10% of current budget, but actually needed would be 30%. Hence the streets with potholes.

Bingo! Delayed maintenance is an easy way to shift spending. You can put off that road resurfacing another year (maybe spend 5% of budget on asphalt patches), but can you just cut 10% of your police force this year?

Cities ate receiving federal funds to fix their roads. Instead of going broke, it’s just become a situation in which we’re all paying for it.

Long before I ever heard of Strong Towns, probably decade(s) before it existed in fact, I observed a pattern as a teenager in my sunbelt home state in that there was perpetually a band of new development that was the "nice" part of town while previously "nice" areas were left to decay and become the "bad" parts of town.

I didn't know anything about how this was financed nor would it have crossed my mind at that time, but it was quite evident to me even without having ever left suburbia nor lived long enough to see more than one cycle of development that neighborhoods were essentially considered disposable, and it struck me as a bit strange.

That isn't a realistic failure mode; nowhere is going to spend their way into bankruptcy on infrastructure. A rational if cynical actor would go for handouts to political supporters at the last minute - if you're hurtling into bankruptcy, go out with a bang!

Realistically the mode is catastrophic failures on infrastructure. One might imagine a town descending into a public health emergency due to lead in the waterways for example. Or near collapses of major dams.

Now I have no idea if things like Flint or Oroville have anything to do with the sort of issues Strong Towns identifies. Hopefully they are just localised incompetence. But if Strong Towns is pointing at a real thing then the symptoms would look like that.

Flint in particular was incompetence at the state level, not local. Michigan passed a law saying that any bankrupt township can be run by an "emergency manager" who gets all local executive power. The mayor or city council no longer have any effective authority, nor do any other locally elected officials. It was the emergency manager for Flint who decided to switch water suppliers to reduce cost, and who decided not to use the chemical processing necessary for the new water supply to be compatible with the existing pipes. This was effectively a decision made at the state level that caused the Flint water crisis.

Meanwhile...

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=thousands+of+more+towns+lik...

Might not be relavant to the discussion, but social supporting structures like police and schools is infrastructure too, as in they're part of a foundation for a social system. What you refer to as infrastructure, I take it, is roads, water supply, electrical grid, etc., which are static structures, but they're not so different from a school, since both have a static and a dynamic element: the building and the operators. Hm, this rant got away from me. Just wanted to argue some terms.

It make sense when we talk infrastructure cost vs density to separate infrastructure that’s affected by density vs one that is not.

Density does not affect school or police cost much. School buses probably cost a bit more in suburbs but it is not major factor.

The fact that school buses are needed seems to be a sign that residential areas are not sufficiently dense for kids to walk to school. (I know that some cities use school buses to provide equal opportunity by randomly assigning kids to schools, which of course would continue to happen in high-density area too.)

School buses are also a sign that regular public transport is not good enough.

I don’t think it’s necessary for them to point to a city that’s actually gone broke. They just need to demonstrate that the trend is unsustainable.

And they done nothing of the sort. I have yet to see a place where spending on infrastructure maintenance is above 20% of municipality budget. Usually it’s around 10%.

Have you seen a city with under-maintained infrastructure?

https://www.artba.org/2021/03/23/over-220000-u-s-bridges-nee...

$42bil to fix all structurally deficient bridges in the whole of the USA seems pretty cheap. I was expecting a much larger number considering the doom and gloom here.

First it's bridges, then it's roading, electric lines, gas lines, water lines, sewerage, civic buildings needing maintenance (schools, hospitals, community centers).

There are endless projects that need money to maintain and the current system of sprawl spreads that money too thinly.

Yeah, from the article the baseline for the big stuff is 5 trillion

> In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes.

>>electric lines, gas lines, water lines, sewerage,

All of these are for profit business that should not need tax money to maintain..

>There are endless projects that need money to maintain and the current system of sprawl spreads that money too thinly.

If you look at where the actual tax money is being spent, is not being spread thin due to "system of sprawl" far from it.

In fact if you look at the actual data most of the time smaller cities have better maintained roads, schools, hospitals, and community centers than the more densely populated area's.

There is somewhat of a bell curve here, there is a sweet spot in population density, too much is a bad thing, and to little can be a bad thing.

Aren't they run like state owner utility companies though? They usually have no competition, state mandated prices, profits enshrined in law, etc..?

> bell curve

How much high-density cities with infrastructure in poor shape spend on infrastructure in percent of their budget? It might be that they still get a better bang for their buck, no?

Yeah, my research shows me the same. Strong Towns is contributing to what I think is an important conversation about responsible planning, but the budgets I've read are unambiguously clear: the costs balloons are public sector labor, not infrastructure. My local county population has been unchanged in almost 40 years and though we've had a growing debt that needs to be taken more seriously, it's not a crisis, building had been stagnant, and despite us having the first or second highest property taxes in the nation, home prices keep going up.

I wanna give Strong Towns the benefit of the doubt, but there seems to be a palpable sub rosa hatred of the suburbs by urban planning blogs and academics, despite their intense desirability if you look at demand vs. supply.

While any muncipal might not be broken (can they go broken in the first place?) are there ones that are becoming unliveable and dangerous? Because infrastructure cost paid is not infrastructure maintenance debt owned. E.x. the recently collapse condominium in Miami.

> can they go broken in the first place?

I guess if financial obligations exceed revenue (and assuming they can't borrow more), they go broke?

If anything, the condominium collapse in Miami suggests that Strong Towns is worrying about the wrong things entirely. They've been pushing for denser development on the pretext that low-density, suburban single family homes are supposedly a Ponzi scheme with unaffordable maintenance costs, but maybe the real danger is all the high-density, privately owned reinforced concrete condo blocks. Past a certain point they're basically uneconomical to repair - the way governments often handle this for infrastructure like bridges is by just building a new one and demolishing the old, but there's no way a bunch of private individuals are going to be able to afford that out of the blue especially if they've retired. (Particularly given that they cost substantially more to build than detached single family homes in the first place!)

This is a legitimate concern and as an eastern european I’ve always wondered what happens to old condo buildings, of which we have plenty.

Turns out every once in a while the gov picks up the tab and performs the reparations, while giving the residents an option to pay for the expenses during the next eg. 10 years or when selling their property. Some do refuse of course but mostly it works because the added value is quite high since it happens in hot areas where price/sqm is above avg. There are also estate investors buying bulk property in these old blocks knowing they will benefit from it, pushing retirees aside.

There are still plenty of troublesome condo blocks laying around without anybody touching them, but this might be a decent approach.

In some areas it may be possible to increase average density of single family home developments using land value tax plus an occupancy deduction to discourage leapfrog development and excess vacancies, to bring commuter neighborhoods closer to the urban core, with infrastructure on grid or other cost minimizing geometry.

In inner city areas where wages make up a substantially smaller fraction of gross receipts in comparison wealthy suburbs, the excess burden of state and local sales taxes on workers is substantially higher. Replacing state and local sales tax with land value tax may reveal exurban sprawl was motivated by desire to avoid austerity rather than desire for more space, and that middle class really doesn't mind living a bit closer to cities.

It should be possible to design multi-story buildings which don't unexpectedly collapse in 21st century. Perhaps public sector urban building associations can construct and maintain high quality vertical apartment cores and elevators, but auction long term leaseholds which allow owners to privately renovate and mortgage improvements for their floor or unit similar to private condos. Partial local public ownership of building associations could then be used to assert leasehold fees are always sufficient to cover regular inspections and repairs. Partial public ownership could also be used to force a sale if owners have not occupied the property in several years, died, or emigrated in order to ensure increase housing availability.

We’ve been building high density high rise privately owned buildings in NYC for 150 years and it seems to be working out OK.

NYC has outrageous coop and HOA fees - way beyond what it cost to maintain SFH in most of US. With average HOA fee for 3bdrm condo probably north of $2k/month now (and often $3k+/month), you can presumably do a lot of very expensive maintenance. It’s working fine because there are a lot of money in NYC not because it’s economical or sustainable on average american income.

That is a ridiculous over-generalization for a city of 8 million people with over one million unique structures.

Maybe NYC fees are realistic and everywhere else fees are too low to meet the maintenance debt?

Going straight from detached single-family homes to high-rise condos skips over a vast array of possibilities in between - duplexes, quads, cottage courtyards, townhouses, even the ubiquitous 4+1 with commercial space at ground level and living space above. I don't know about Strong Towns specifically, but AFAICT the modern urban-planning community is often critical of both extremes.

Advocating for the lost “middle” market of homes is something Strong Towns does.

The condos in Miami are not density. The building itself might be "density" but the site is not. Look at how far it is to neighboring buildings!

We don't advocate for density. In fact, have specifically written against density as a metric. We argue for traditional development patterns, which look a lot more like historic Charleston or Savannah than Miami condos.

The claim is not that some municipality has gone broke, it’s that they are underwater and only staying afloat by continuing the ponzu scheme.

This post had some case studies: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/14/the-growth-pon... one quote:

> A small, rural road is paved, with the costs of the surfacing project split evenly between the property owners and the city. We asked a simple question: Based on the taxes being paid by the property owners along this road, how long will it take the city to recoup its 50% contribution. The answer: 37 years. Of course, the road is only expected to last 20 to 25 years.

I’m not an expert here so I’d be interested in evidence to the contrary. But this sounds like a more nuanced point than the GPs TLDR.

This why here in Finland a lot of rural roads are being converted back to dirt. Basically keep the asphalt for as long as it can be with cheap repairs and once it needs to be redone just rip it off and put some gravel. Maintenance for these is cheap using existing infrastructure (trucks and loaders that the municipality already owns for winter/snow). Basically every spring just relevel it with a blade attached to a truck and add a bit of gravel.

I'd imagine that is bad for the environment, due to more/faster abrasion of the tires. More microplastics.

Rural roads = not that much traffic.

Is tire wear => microplastics an environmental concern that has been quantified? This is a new concept to me and I have no idea how to weigh the potential costs of this factor.

You could just put the 3 words without the => between them into some search thing and get many hits. It's significant.

Maybe less so if country roads with low traffic as poster downwards suggested. But tyres are soft, so it seems only logically they are abraded faster by gravel which is harder and has sharper edges, than a more flat surface.

When my city digs up all the streets near me to replace the sewer, storm, and many of the water pipes, how long until it recoups those costs via those services?

At some point, cities make infrastructure expenditures and don’t treat them as a bond investment directly against future income. This means some people pay more than they get and others get more than they pay.

https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/publicworksdepartm...

fascinating!

(now go figure out who's right. oh internet...)

Most cities will spend more on pensions than on infrastructure - the average is 13.5% of total budgets:

https://reason.org/commentary/city-budgets-bend-under-growin...

The pension systems across the West are fundamentally broken. If we're going to talk about ponzi schemes, pensions are the ultimate.

We need to privatise pensions completely, and encourage people to work later into life. Corporations and governments should have no responsibility for pensions - if someone can physically work, but doesn't have the money to independently retire, then they should continue to work.

Retirement is one of those things where it goes beyond raw economics into quality of life issues.

It feels like we've broken the social contract when we say to the prior generation "okay, you did your best and sacrificed to try to build a better world for us, now keep working til you're 80 in spite of failing health and diminishing capacity."

The problem with pensions isn't that the underlying math product was faulty. There are a bunch of assumed components in it-- expected retirement lifespan, rates of return on investments. There's no reason you couldn't build a robust and self-financing pension program by using conservative assumptions, but somehow the industry managed to consistently generate overly rosy models for decades. So who pays for the failure in due diligence and risk management?

(I am assuming we want to actually make good for the people who contributed to these programs in good faith. It seems that most charges to fix pensions are about replacing defined benefit pensions with something lesser that demands a much higher degree of risk tolerance to have any chance of the originally promised return.

I also wonder if there's some business benefits from retirement-motivated churn. At the top of the market, how much of high management is filled with people in their 60s who haven't had a fresh idea in years, but have reached a position of undisruptability? Having a low expected retirement age helps to cycle in fresh blood. Conversely, we've got a lot of seniors with cash crunches due to failed or insufficient retirement funding, stuck in low-skill jobs in a way that's likely depressing wages. The 72-year-old grocery cashier doesn't want to be earning $12 an hour, she wants to be at a rest home in Boca Raton. Send her there and the market wage rises to $15.

A country that can generate a trillion dollar bookseller can find a non-house-of-cards way to care for its elderly.

It's also "old think". In modern developments all this infrastructure belongs to the HOA/development corporation, and it is their long-term problem.

But yes, to a great degree this is stare at the potholes, not the pensions funds.

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