The Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme

theatlantic.com

10 points·imgabe··2 comments

The problem as described has roots in the 1950s. "Have become" spans three or more generations, one could say have always been, and push back even further to the rings of development and the new town and garden city movement of the UK.

Mortgaging corporation (as in town corporations) technical debt to the future demands consistency of capex and opex by the town on infrastructure. Alas, the polity changed and so did the willingness to spend on capital works like roads and sewerage.

The first city in the article is Cicero Illinois and is a terrible example! It's hardly your prototypical suburb - it's a 150 year old city that the metropolitan area grew to encircle. You can probably attribute Cicero's problems to two things:

1. Cicero was the site of the Western Electric Hawthorne Works [1]. Back in the day, just about every single American home had something built in that factory. 45,000 employees in a city of 65,000 people. And then it closed. What do you think is going to happen to the city and its finances???

2. Mob-controlled corruption. Most famous being the town president Betty Loren-Maltese [2].

Now that the city has become extremely Latino and the city leadership is Latino, the population is up to nearly 90,000 people and the violent crime rate is significantly lower than US average. It is very dense and has excellent public transit - Strongtowns would enthusiastically approve of the built environment. The current problem is a lack of good schools and good jobs. But in 20 years, there is every reason to believe that it will be hailed as a wonderful success story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_Works

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Loren-Maltese

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