Sure, we can just keep on increasing taxes until all the top earners leave for cheaper areas.

I prefer low taxes.

What's there to lose by building towns at a human scale? Personally, I can live without Fauxrari speeding past my door at 2 am.

Yes and California where I am just announced a 90 billion dollar tax surplus and I see road and bridges getting fixed all the time. Maybe the rest of the country is falling apart. I don't really know.

Austin is a highly productive dense city, not a low density suburb.

> The idea is that we just don't have enough productivity to sustain slightly longer roads, and live in the same houses we used to have on farms in 1920s is insulting to reader's intelligence.

Plenty of academic research/literature on this, as well as books:

> Chuck is not the first to point out the financial inefficiencies associated with sprawl. Robert Burchell of Rutgers[1] has led several important studies showing the substantially increased municipal costs associated with sprawl development; my then-colleague Matt Raimi devoted a well-researched chapter to it in our 1999 book Once There Were Greenfields.[2] At NRDC, we undertook a small empirical study[3] in Cleveland and Chicago that confirmed the additional operating and maintenance costs associated with suburban wastewater infrastructure when compared with that in the cities.

* https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

Strong Towns is only reporting what the literature is saying. You're free to be skeptical, but that's what they've concluded from the empirical evidence. The claim is falsifiable if you want to get into testing it.

Measure the cost of services per acre/hectare of low-density and of high-density, then measure the revenues. You'll see which is net positive and which is net negative:

> Urban3 is a consulting company that helps cities better understand the economic impact of development. They have worked with many American cities to better understand and visualize the costs of development, and uncover which properties are productive, and which are not. Some municipalities have been willing to share that information, and it has provided a fascinating glimpse into the financial problems caused by sprawling car-centric suburban development.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Lafayette, LA case study from the video:

* https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/lafayette-la/

* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

This is an accounting and ROI issue. If you don't want to believe the numbers… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Isn't Austin a city that is growing, continually attracting people? If so, it is not a valid example against their claim.

If you allow some pedantry:

The claim is that _cities that don't keep growing_ go broke: a->b

Showing ~b (Austin didn't go broke) only allows you to deduct ~a (Austin is growing) by modus tollens

all numbers rounded. I live in a city near Boston.

total budget: 300MM

school budget: 100MM

attributable to maintenance/keeping things running, including debt service: 92MM

fire and police: about 20MM each.

Also add: - debt service related to infrastructure - higher transportation related costs, eg for school buses, fire fighting, parking related building costs But I agree Strongtown arguments tend to ignore other big cost categories.

> Infrastructure costs are typically around 10% of the budget of municipalities, and almost universally are under 20%.

Today's infrastructure/capital spending is tomorrow's operating spending:

* https://www.dearwinnipeg.com/2020/02/24/accounting-101-for-c...

* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/8/holy-leaping-d...

If you don't believe this talk your local CPA.

Yes, when the political organization that would look bad if it bankrupted itself chooses how to do their accounting, they choose methods that make it look like they aren't bankrupt.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/12/7/the-lies-we-ac...

> It may be easiest to think in terms of personal finance. Imagine you purchase a car for $20,000 in 2015, but under a special promotion no payments are due on your bill until 2018. In what year did you incur the $20,000 bill? Most people would say 2015, the year you acquired the car. That’s the answer mandated under accrual accounting, a method of financial reporting required of all public companies by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. But many state and city legislatures disagree. They operate with the conviction that a bill is not incurred until the money leaves your bank account to pay it. So if you choose not to pay the bill for your car until 2018, for accounting purposes the bill will only appear that year.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/19/is-a-street-an...

> Current accounting practices do not bear any relation to the future cash flow or the actual financial health of the city. When cities take on obligations, they should be properly accounted for as liabilities, not assets. When the city uses debt to build new infrastructure, it is taking on the double liability of both the current debts payments and the future maintenance obligation. The tax base associated with these obligations needs to also be accounted for as a cash asset (think of it like an annuity) discounted over the useful life of the infrastructure. Then we would have an accurate account of the obligations (liabilities) of the community and how that compared to the tax base (assets) that needed to support them. In short, a true account.

> Infrastructure costs are typically around 10% of the budget of municipalities, and almost universally are under 20%. Look up your own city or town, and report back if you find otherwise.

Give the crater sized potholes I used to see when I lived there , I’d believe even less for cities in SCl.

The article says "most cities". The majority of municipalities in the US and elsewhere are those less trendy places. It’s a case of availability bias to think of NY or LA or Seattle or Austin as representative of "most cities". The "towns" in Strong Towns gives an idea of the size range of the municipalities they are talking about.

Ponzi schemes run fine as long as the growth continues. The challenge is running at steady-state, or even weathering declines. That’s when you see if full-cycle costs reconcile.

To quote Warren Buffet -- "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." That's one of the main points of Strong Towns; a focus on resiliency. Down turns in the economy, be it one oversized local sector (a local coal mine maybe) or all sectors (e.g. GFC), can be a trigger for a collapse; especially for a community that has focused all it's efficiency on that (those) sectors. If there's nothing left in the tank when the bad times come you only have one option left, collapse (and quite often a cascading collapse). Here's a term I just came up with; Sociological margin call.

The Strong Towns thesis is that there are a lot of ways for things to "look" fine when things are not actually fine.

As an example, municipalities often count physical infrastructure like streets and water pipes as an asset on their books[1], even though it is illiquid and incurs large long-term liabilities.

[1]https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/19/is-a-street-an...

That some cities get in trouble for any number of reasons isn't news and has been true throughout history, but to call America a Ponzi scheme is essentially meaningless. You might as well call civilization itself a Ponzi scheme that requires new members when they turn 18 to participate while old members at 65 cash out.

Outlining why civilization was a mistake is interesting, but not sure what good can come out of it: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

What does a walkable small town mean? I can walk to a pub, maybe some other food place, and a small market? The town I live in, like many around New England, has a cute little town center where the library and town hall are but there's not a lot else there. I'm certainly not living there without a car even if I were in the center.

I've spent some time doing walking tours in England and it doesn't seem much different.