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You are mistaking "what Cities spend on maintenance" for what it would cost to fully maintain the system. The author does a good job spelling this out:

> If we convert 177 miles into feet it’s 934,560 feet of road. At $20 per foot per year, we would need to spend on average $18,691,200 a year on road maintenance just to keep all of our roads properly maintained.

Note his actual estimate is ~$18.6M not the ~$4M you quoted - that was his hypothetical "even if I'm wrong by 4x too high" number.

> According to the capital improvement plan from earlier we are planning to spend an average of $3,220,000 per year.

Note that the author's cost figure is just for roads and does not include other similarly expensive infrastructure like water lines that are included in the city's Capital Improvements budget.

The reason for this gap in infra funding is they don't have the money, so they let most of the infrastructure decay, and use the money they have to patch the worst problems as best they can.

Every city in America is doing this. We just so used to it we don't think anything of driving on roads that are full of cracks and potholes and generally falling apart.

This gap is why the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the US a C- on infrastructure. (https://infrastructurereportcard.org)

Not that I disagree with your sentiment but the comment you're responding to observes that water lines --- the extra infrastructure beyond roads not included in the article's estimate but sort of implied as being significant --- are generally paid for by user fees, not property taxes.

I think this varies widely so any generalization needs many caveats… but I don’t think you can assume that. What I’ve usually seen is that water service, ie the cost of filtration and sewage treatment and maintaining pumps, is paid by user fees. Water infrastructure - the actual pipes - are usually considered capital projects and maintained out of different funds. But again the details vary on a subdivision by subdivision level not to mention state to state.

That sounds right to me, too.

Water service maintenance is often a different kind of pyramid scheme. In my area, for example, the user fees don't even remotely cover the maintenances, so the utility district relies very heavily on new service surcharges on new construction. These fees are completely outrageous, a minimum of $6000 for a tiny efficiency apartment less than 50 square meters. This obviously raises the prices of new construction. It also has the unfortunate result that the utility district budget waxes and wanes with the local construction market, and is subject to the whims of every local zoning board, so one town that never permits new construction still enjoys the flow of funds from the charges collected in other cities that do build.

I am billed by units of water used, not how far the water travels.

I don't buy the $18 million number. If the city has been only doing one sixth of the required maintenance, the roads would already be degraded to a point where it was obvious.

How do you know it’s not obvious? Road quality is a pretty standard complaint in small town America.

I mean like undriveable obvious.

Why do you think this is impossible? My city has been under-funding road repair for fifty years, is now believed to be about $300 million behind, and owns 50 centerline miles, 22% of the total streets in the city, with a pavement condition of "failed".

Can you tell me which city is that? I’d like to take a stroll using Street View, to see what failed infrastructure looks like.

Berkeley, California.

For a typical but also amazing example, see the photo at the top of https://mtc.ca.gov/operations/programs-projects/streets-road...

ETA: Street View to get you started https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8675561,-122.2930415,3a,75y,...

It’s more likely that the authors napkin math is wrong. He says that maybe he’s 50% off but it’s more likely that he’s 10x off.

The number includes replacement cost at end of life. Nobody calculates for that because it’s something you kick the can down the road for until you have catastrophic failure then you ask for state and federal funds

Did you see the posted photos of that road? It's as obvious as you describe.

I can't seem to edit my comment but it's here https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9373005,-90.3943558,3a,75y,3...

Maybe “fully maintained” is too high a standard for most roads in most towns? Maybe we are ok with doing minimal maintenance on most roads because road quality is just not worth the cost?

Well, they've done research on the cost of preventing potholes versus the costs to repair vehicle damage caused by potholes and maintenance is cheaper than repair. I don't know how that speaks to water mains, except that there are other Flint Michigans waiting to happen because many municipalities still have sections of lead pipe in their water network. They're working, and they've already oxidized so they can't afford to fix that when the storm water system is falling apart or the dam is failing or there's a recession.

Does full maintenance just mean filling potholes? Or is it more than just that?

>Overall rural lifestyle does not cost much more than the city in infrastructure costs - and I did similar calculations for previous strongtown articles. On a feeling level it make sense that dense city should be cheaper but reality is frankly it's not.

Who pays the cost to connect these rural areas to other regions?

The author thinks the city needs to spend a little over $18M per year just on roads. That would be about $1200 per year per house or $100 per month. Considering that their total property taxes are currently around $1700 per year in total property taxes that's a huge increase.

To get to 18M number, author approximated that cost of repair 3.5 lane medium use road in industrial area (aka heavy trucks) to all roads in the town which just not make sense. Cost of repair low use residential 2 lane road which is majority of roads in the city is much lower and frankly nobody repaves local roads every 30 years - it just not needed.

In addition $100 per month per house is significant but if it's the only thing that make small town more expensive than dense city it's still does not make city that much attractive.

I think there is a flaw in the author's analysis: It's based on a fixed cost-per-length model. Not all roads cost the same to maintain. A downtown city street that gets heavy, continuous use will have to be repaired much more frequently than a sidewalk-less rural road that gets ten cars per day on its busiest day. City streets are also more complicated to repair, often having sewer pipes and electrical lines buried in close proximity, so are likely more costly to repair each time, too.

Did you read what they wrote? They clearly outline the flaws and limitations of the analysis. They say it’s just an estimate.

Right, but it doesn't seem like a very good estimate and their whole argument hinges on it.

The author obviously put a lot of thought and effort into this article. I’m surprised he let that rough calculation be the basis for so much of it. I haven’t looked, but I suspect it isn’t hard to find expected maintenance costs for various types of roads.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the calculation is actually hard to come by because no one wants to acknowledge the issue. They all know the number is going to be fantastically large and unable to be voted in. So, they just ignore it and let the town deteriorate slowly like most of the USA.

My guess is that you live in a newer suburb where the infrastructure isn’t 100-150 years old. When your sewers, water lines, roads, municipal buildings, etc. are over a century old, you can no longer delay maintenance without cutting service levels. This is why older rural areas of the country like Appalachia are dotted with so many ghost towns; it stopped making sense to invest in those places decades ago because the infrastructure was so far gone it was just cheaper to build a new town somewhere else.

Many rust belt towns are going through this right now; my mom grew up in a rural factory town in southern NY that once had a population of nearly 10,000 — 50 years later, that population is closer to 500. And still dropping because most of the lots in town are unoccupied, rotting homes left behind when previous owners died that would be torn down if there was the money to do so, but there isn’t and it drags down property values of everything in the area.

Pittsburgh — a city big enough to have 3 professional sports teams — has entire neighborhoods that have been abandoned and fenced off after the population dropped by over 50% since the 1970s. Mostly so that the city doesn’t have to maintain power, sewer, water and roads in those areas because there just isn’t the money to rebuild them. There is an entire subway system under the city that has simply been abandoned due to lack of upkeep. The city is on an upward trajectory again, but property values in the city are still astonishingly low (10 years ago you could buy a livable-if-dated house in a good location for $50,000) and taxes are high.

Pittsburgher here. What are you talking about? There is no abandoned subway system under Pittsburgh. What we call the 'T' is alive and well. There are also not "entire neighborhoods that have been abandoned and fenced off".

Perhaps they were thinking of Rochester, New York: https://rocwiki.org/abandoned_subway

New Orleans could only afford to start fixing its streets and sewers with the FEMA money after Katrina.

>Many rust belt towns are going through this right now; my mom grew up in a rural factory town in southern NY that once had a population of nearly 10,000 — 50 years later, that population is closer to 500. And still dropping because most of the lots in town are unoccupied, rotting homes left behind when previous owners died that would be torn down if there was the money to do so, but there isn’t and it drags down property values of everything in the area.

I do not think any city whether dense or not can survive 20X drop of population and remain livable. If anything surburban locations are easier to clean up - it takes only a few days to a couple of weeks to clean up single store house and lot.

Imagine the mess if New York population dropped to 400k people? There is no way to maintain subway, road network and all other infrastructure with such small population. Skyscrapers and high risers require constant maintenance and will be danger to others if left unmaintained. Decaying rural home is danger only if you are in it or on purpose right next to it. Blast radius of falling high rise is quite a bit bigger.

In my inner ring suburb, the largest category of expense is policing. We spend more on police than we do on parks and roads.

Yeah I saw his property tax of $1,600 per year and how it was already too high to raise.

Tax rates of $8,000 to $20,000 are common around me.

Galesburg is a declining city in the middle of nowhere. People who live there probably drive to work ~50 miles away to Peoria or Davenport/Moline every day if they don't have a (probably) low paying job in town.

And if that's the case, they'd probably be better off moving closer to those cities, there's probably even cheaper homes within a shorter commute.

Also it's in Illinois, which is #2 in the country for highest overall property taxes[1].

Keep in mind he said a reasonable house value just north of their downtown is $75k, where the national average price for a home is $374k (as of Q2 2021), which is 5x the price. $1600 * 5 = $8000, which brings it up to what's near you.

And considering Illinois' property tax is higher than every other state other than New Jersey, I'm guessing the homes appraised value near you is likely a lot higher than $374k, even.

That being said, I don't understand why the government wouldn't be able to up just the city's percentage (as opposed to all line items on the property tax bill) by about $100-200/yr per person and use that to help close the gap. The percent going to the city of Galesburg is currently a tiny percentage of the overall tax.

[1]: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-again-ranks-no-2-in-...

People will fight against any tax raises regardless of the amount.

Well yes, that's one reason it probably isn't being raised. But if you could let the people know that "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.

It would be helpful if you could just go to a website, enter in a code from your property tax bill and see exactly how every dollar of the taxes you paid were used. This is one of the valid uses of a public ledger I can think of. In my opinion, all tax funded spending should be traceable like this with each transfer recorded and reported to the tax payer.

Doesn't checking the city's budget do the same thing? The only thing that site would add is multiply the budget amounts by your tax bill.

I don't feel like that addresses the part of the comment I was speaking to:

> "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.

At a minimum, you could create a system that takes the budget and shows a percent breakdown of where your money goes. If you packaged it nicely so that you could understand it at a glance it would go a long way towards what the comment I was responding to was talking about. After looking at my city's budget, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. For my municipality at least, it seems to be a mix of specific and extremely nebulous items. I can see that the fire department purchased several new vehicles and even the type of vehicle but the road works department just lists additions to their "fleet" and the sanitation department just lists "new vehicles". I see items for sidewalk and street repairs along with the name of the street but no indication of how much pavement was repaired or what the breakdown of labor vs materials was. I think knowing all of the details would help the public assist their representatives to correct overages and would be a bulwark against corruption. e.g. If I run a business that sells fasteners and I see that the city government is overpaying by 30% for the bolts they use to put up new street signs I could bid on the contract next time around or maybe tip off the newspaper if it's more like 200% over retail.

Money is fungible so it doesn't really make sense to ask where your specific dollars went. But in most if not all places in the US you can see the city or town budget and see where money came from and went in general. (It's mostly to schools in the majority of places with the per student expenditure actually often higher in more urban populations.)

While you cannot trace the money all the way through the economy, you can definitely trace the funds allocation by the articles of the budget, and pro-rate the amounts to the sum of the taxes paid by a person.

It's similar to the way you see amounts that went to taxes, insurance, etc on your payroll.

Technically, there are methods that would allow you to trace money all the way through the economy.

On a property tax bill, it tells you which entity is paid what from the bill. It’s broken down to the entity (city, pensions, schools, parks, cemeteries, libraries). If you want to dig deeper, you can go to the budget for each one of those entities

It's possible that the city is currently in equilibrium between tax rate and quality of roads. You can check the road that it getting fixed on and it's ok [1]. There are potholes here and there but otherwise it's perfectly drivable. There are roads of similar quality in much wealthier places in Bay Area. It's possible that reaction from poor people in town to increased taxes for roads will be - why? it's ok as is now.

I also checked a few random streets in the town and pavement is actually pretty good with few if any potholes. Random street as a point [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9371624,-90.3942909,3a,75y,2...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.93875,-90.3599034,3a,75y,346...

#1 is pretty rough especially as this is the summer w/o frost heaves. That is also from Aug 2019 and it's now 2022.

Separately, but related, I have always found it interesting that no one tries to calculate the wear on vehicles for things like bad roads, salt use, etc. Bending a wheel, accelerating suspension breakdown, and other issues from bad roads could easily outweigh some arguable savings of waiting longer. I'd rather push for adding less roads, allowing some paved roads to become dirt roads where low traffic weights & #s exist, and better maintenance of the remaining ones.

It’s likely hard to quantify and would require an in-depth survey of people over the course of 5-10 years with extreme diligence.

There is another quality that is missed out in these discussions too - which is the quality of life improvement. If you’ve ever driven on a nice road - you know it and you feel it. It’s pure bliss compared to most of the roads out there. Your car might go from feeling cheap and unbearable to luxurious - and if you have a nice car already then it feels sublime.

That aspect is one part where I’d gladly pay more for roads. The other aspect is prevention. I see very little emphasis put on the prevention of deterioration of roads. I think road quality could be improved if there were crews working all the time to keep the roads in shape and if people felt like their city would listen when they issue a complaint about the road. I figure this might save money and improve QOL over the long run.

"The Democrats claim for just the cost of Pizza each month we'll save our roads but we know what's really going on (pause) (dramatic music) and this is just the beginning.

Next it will be a Chinese takeout meal to help a library (show red Chinese flag to increase fear slightly), then the cost of a new refrigerator to pay teachers more (stock footage of a liberal looking nerdy professor), when will it end?

The tax and spend Democrats have an agenda and all they are looking for is an opening. (stock footage of snake slithering into nursery during the night)

We have to be vigilant to protect our families future (stock footage of 60-70 year old man, slightly overweight, wearing a red plaid shirt, jeans, and standing in front of an American flag) vote no on proposition 205 and say no to big government

(paid for by the committee of republicans and their rich supporters who need to convince poor people to vote for them)

> And considering Illinois' property tax is higher than every other state other than New Jersey, I'm guessing the homes appraised value near you is likely a lot higher than $374k, even.

It is the opposite. Illinois homes’ sale prices are kept down due to the higher (and always increasing) property taxes.

NJ is also the same outside the regions that get buoyed by the higher incomes of NYC/Philadelphia.

It is the same as any business with a lot of debt that gets valued lower than a comparable business with less debt. And NJ/IL and a few other jurisdictions have debt that is multiple standard deviation from the mean.

>It is the opposite. Illinois homes’ sale prices are kept down due to the higher (and always increasing) property taxes.

So true. I used to live in the Quad Cities, which holds Bettendorf and Davenport in Iowa and Rock Island and Moline in Illinois. When looking at houses, there might be a 25% difference in prices for similar houses in Iowa vs Illinois. Many of my coworkers on the Illinois side were looking to move to Iowa, but were going to walk out with very little equity by the time they took a hit on the sale price and pay transaction costs.

The consensus among locals was "Illinois state government may implode at some point, and pretty well the only way to avoid that is by significantly increasing taxes".

I'm not from the US and barely familiar with how properties are taxed, but would it be fair to guess that the range of road maintenance costs across the country are narrower than the range of housing prices? Labour would vary, but materials less so, right? So if suburban maintenance is funded by property taxes and people resist a certain level of taxation, then some level of increased density is the only alternative? Someone wanting small-town rural living would need to accept some adjusted balance of poorer roads, higher taxes or increased density?

Start charging $20k property tax and you'll probably accelerate the decline of Galesburg as people scramble to relocate to more affordable areas.

Absolute numbers aren't a tax rate. 1% of $2M home gets you to $20k/year easily. But the article talks about $100-200k homes; there is no way this town can have a 10-20% property tax rate.

That $1600 is based a 10% tax rate, if you look at the chart. That means the whole property is only worth $16,000. Are you really suggesting they charge more every year in taxes than the house is worth?

At the very low end there is a minimum tax regardless of property value. If you fall below a certain value you end up dragging down the community

If you live in Galesburg IL, or Jackson MI, Altoona PA, Rome NY or similar places if the property taxes were raised to 10x as much the homes would be worth literally zero. The rental income wouldn't cover the property taxes. And that is the underlying problem, when the costs are so high, collecting a "fair" or actually necessary amount of taxes has a debilitating effect on the economy