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Comment by doug_durham | Hacker News Reader

You use the phrase "trivially fix". If your definition of "trivially" means several decades with the investment of billions of dollars, then perhaps. There are no "trivial fixes" in city infrastructure. Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land. For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move. This drives the price of any development up making it unprofitable in most cases. I'm sorry but I can't take you seriously.

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When I say "trivially fix" I mean that, if the City/State wanted to fix the problem, they could.

>Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land.

Developers very obviously want to redevelop the vast majority of LA. The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit. To raise long-term tax revenues, LA could not just legalize redevelopment. They could actually incentivize it.

>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.

The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat (mostly due to Prop 13). Eventually the city will start having to raise taxes very dramatically or declare bankruptcy. That's the entire message from Strong Towns.

The more we put it off, the bigger the impact will be. When your city is effectively long-run insolvent, but you have the ability to change that even if it's politically unpopular (and LA does), then it's "trivially" doable, it's just that people don't want to.

That's not the case in many other cities.

In other cities demand isn't there. People will just leave when taxes go up, and the town will declare bankruptcy. At that point, they will effectively lose most of their population, or people will just live without things like clean water. An example of this happening is Jackson Mississippi, where the water system failed, and the city didn't have the money to fix it. The ultimate solution was just a federal bailout, which is not sustainable if these types of crises become endemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_cri...

> The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit.

The cost of building a housing unit is rather out of control in LA right now, due to a number of factors. Some of those factors involve permitting, but some involve complexities of complying with building regulation, and there is also insufficient availability of contractors and insufficient availability of labor.

The demand is there: https://la.urbanize.city/post/plan-skyline-altering-tower-ab...

The point is that the vast majority of budgetary issues in LA could be solved by just legalizing, and streamlining the production of something as simple as three-story row housing like the kind that's normal in San Francisco (which has a surprisingly good long-term outlook despite their current budget woes).

It's not rocket science here. If you make it easy to build housing, the industry grow to meet demand. If you make it difficult, it will be dominated by a handful of major players who can navigate the process.

I recently reviewed a bid from a not-particularly-fancy contractor for nearly $1M to build ~1200 sq ft in an empty lot in Los Angeles. This isn’t just a planning permit probem.

Even in cheaper areas without earthquake or hurricane construction codes, minimum $/ft is like $250 (for lowest quality components) and realistically more like $400.

Inflation for materials and labor makes any build incredibly expensive.

Did you pay it?

Plenty of labor and contractors other places in the US that could be brought in if someone was willing to offer stable work and pay. Even with the out-of-town bonus, many midwestern contractors and laborers would come out to near the same cost as locals because they were already making a fraction the wage out in the midwest.

But non-union construction is known to be unstable even outside construction's general boom-bust cycles and nobody is going to travel 1500 miles away without a contract guaranteeing they will have work/pay past the first 2 weeks. Too many workers have gotten burned being given great offers to travel for work only to get screwed over before they can recuperate their costs. Hell our own President is famous for screwing over construction companies and people just accept it as normal for the industry.

>The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat

So the kernel of the argument is that 1) someone bought a single-family home and based on ground truth (property tax, cost of living, etc.) and 2) that property tax isn't sufficient to fund the city?

Can you really blame someone for not sacrificing his position under these circumstances? If I'm meeting my obligation, what do I stand to gain from leaving my house and moving into an apartment? That's saying "I need you to move so that someone else can take your property." It's not going to go over well.

Zoning changes would generally make your property more value as a baseline. Then you could either stay put, or you could elect to move elsewhere while redeveloping your original place. This is common in Australia.

A common zoning change here is based on street frontage for semi-detached homes - the new ones are still 3-4BR, just attached at the garage and with smaller yards. If development required 15m frontage, but then that changed to 12-13m, that would mobilise a lot of owners to take advantage, though obviously others can just stay as is if they prefer.

It usually happens that an $800k lot value becomes $1m, regardless of the state of the house. The owner can then demolish a decades old house, build two places for $600k, sell one as a new home for $800k-1m to finance the build (and costs of moving out during that phase), and end up in a new house themselves. Often they've sacrificed yard that they found annoying to maintain anyway.

The above can be adjusted where it's possible to build 3-4 on a block, or a larger development of apartments.

Zone changes typically allow change, not force it, surely? An owner can just keep their SFH and large yard if they prefer. What they can't always control and often vote against is the composition of their neighbourhood.

>Can you really blame someone for not sacrificing his position under these circumstances?

What? There is a structural deficit problem. The ship is sinking. Complaining about how "we shouldn't have to change anything about the ship" isn't really a reasonable argument. We live on this ship... we have every incentive to make sure it stays above water.

I still don't get it though. Am I right that the proposition is: voluntarily accept a lower quality of life, or we'll either take your property or let it the neighborhood go to pot until you decide to give it up? People are not going to accept that. Look at the fiasco at defunding the fire department. I'll just patch my own sidewalk. I'm not vacating so that the next guy gets a deal. There's plenty of land. Develop there. Why not?

The three options you presented are the three available options. There is no fourth. Make a choice.

You might think there is option 4--municipal bankruptcy--but that is just option 2 and 3 combined.

Building buildings somewhere else will not fix your neighborhood.

I'm not giving you a hard time. I'm saying that I made my choice. I'm going to stay in my home.

I don't really think those are the only three choices, though. The government can fail and be replaced with a new one that will shape things up. Then it'll be replaced by another that thinks it's too big and well off to fail, squander it, and fail. That's the typical cycle.

The problem is that you're camouflaging the implicit position of "I'm going to stay in my home, even if I have to see the world burn." as the seemingly reasonable position "I'm going to stay in my home", while being utterly ignorant to the consequences based on absurd levels of wishful thinking.

You're saying the government is going to fail, but actually it's not really going to fail. Someone is going to bail you out every single time. If the government failed, but I'm still in the house, it didn't fail hard enough. They should get better and more competent at failing. The failure needs to be more absolute and its consequences should be unavoidable. The bare minimum required is that they thoroughly crush my spirit and desire to keep living in this place.

People with a semblance of sanity left in their brain understand that getting the things they want, also means dealing with the associated costs and that if they insist on those things, they also implicitly insist on the costs associated with those things. When people refuse this cost benefit trade off, they will end up losing the things they want.

I'm trying to follow this but unclear of the root of the problem. Is it beacause building roads in L.A. is inherantly more expensive than elsewhere? I thought one of the selling points of cities was scale: costs are spread over more people. But, it sounds like road building is cheaper per resident in my small city. Sounds more like a corruption problem.

>costs are spread over more people

I'm suggesting that this isn't the actual answer. The thread started with the premise that the city doesn't have enough revenue, and that the way to increase that revenue is to bring in more people who pay more tax. Next, bringing in more people requires more housing, so that requires incentives for developers to displace people residing in SFH so that the can replace those with high density housing. There's a big problem: more people require more services beyond fancy curb cuts, like police, fire, water, electricity, schools, hospitals, etc. That cost that is spread also grows proportionally with the number of people, and you can't ignore that.

On the cost of building roads: there are cement and asphalt plants right in LA city proper, and also in weho and inglewood, among others in the county. LA has a price problem, not a cost problem.

There are more specters, too, which are bound to be political fights. For one, when you dig up a road, there are numerous places that will require displacing very large homeless camps. Now, credit where it's due, LA has shown that it is able to do that sometimes, like around Echo Park, which is the junction of several major thoroughfares like glendale blvd and the 101. Still, these are non-trivial projects that take years.

Every time I look at a city/county budget, the schools absolutely dwarf everything else (it's not quick to disentangle different levels of government, but roughly speaking, it seems like schools are usually roughly the same cost as all other services combined where I've looked), which makes it hard for me to take seriously the idea that it's infrastructure like roads and sewage specifically leading to unsustainable budgets. e.g. if I remember correctly, special ed programs cost more than roads when I looked at the previous metro I lived in's budget, and sewers were revenue neutral with a county sewer fee.

Strongtowns seems a bit motivated in their analysis, to put it mildly.

When you are looking at your city budget... you're probably looking at cash-based accounting:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashaccounting.asp

This looks at current costs. The school is a cost every year, so every year that cost shows up on the budget. The problem is that road/water/sewer maintenance often doesn't show up on these budgets because these systems are usually built all at once. Because of this they usually also need to be replaced all at once. To see those costs before they happen, you need to use accrual accounting:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accrualaccounting.asp

The entire message from Strong Towns is exactly that because cities often use cash accounting instead of accrual accounting in their budgetary processes these lingering issues of deferred maintenance don't show up until they do, and when they do, those costs will simply be too large for the city to cover without very politically unpopular interventions.

Capital improvements don't need to be paid all at once; that's what financing is for. And debt service does appear on budgets. In any case, why are we to believe that e.g. $1B in maintenance that's been deferred for decades is "the" problem when the school budget is $500M/year?

You’re making an argument about school budgets being too high. That’s fine. I’m arguing that, our school budgets are set, in large part, by our available resources. Viewing our resources from a long run perspective helps us set our current budgets.

If we cut the school budget only when we need to repave roads, we are playing fast and loose with our children’s future. When we set our budgets to be sustainable, we don’t rug pull parents who are trying to build a life in our cities.

I'm not even saying school budgets are necessarily too high. I'm just saying that if someone is claiming that what amounts to 5-10% of the budget is why cities go bankrupt, and that's why they need to entirely reshape how they develop to fit some idyllic vision of a pedestrian city, then I'm going to go ahead and doubt their analysis.

Like I'm happy that my (suburban) city requires new developments to connect to a city-wide bike trail network. That's great. I just don't think Strong Towns/Not Just Bikes presents a realistic mental model of the world. They seem to clearly be pushing for a specific vision regardless of facts.

I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying.

Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion USD. Assuming a lifespan of 35 years, that is basically a billion USD per year spent on servicing road infrastructure costs. If they don't spend that billion every year or put it aside for future repairs, their road infrastructure is going to decay. It might not sound like much in comparison to the full budget, but since the road network is the largest man made structure in the city, it will affect everyone and be the most noticeable failure on part of the government. Lack of police or fire fighting can show up in the form of stochastic damage that doesn't necessarily impact every citizen directly.

Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents in the city, they could raise taxes by $250/person-year. That doesn't sound unsustainable to me. Certainly not a "suburbs are a fundamentally broken model" level problem.

Lots of suburban cities in the US are really nice, well run places. LA even as an example of a poorly run area doesn't actually seem to be in much of a financial pickle.

The point is

> you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying

Is just confused. The $1B/year you came up with as sufficient is ~7% of the LA city budget (~$14B), and that's excluding major expenses like schools since that's the county budget. If you look more holistically at just "what's the local government spending", the amount you say is needed to properly maintain the roads is more like 3-4%. Roads are just not a financial problem. Strongtowns guy just doesn't like them.

Overtime for police can often be largely attributed to special events or occasions; for example, the city might have an entirely correct amount of officers for most of the year, but then during superbowl, presidential visits, Fourth of July parties, Pride, etc. They have a much higher need for patrol units, escorts, traffic management, etc. for those denser areas with more going on. They can't simply transfer officers around because that would leave other areas of the city under-patrolled, which runs the risk of unacceptably higher response times.

As a result, officers that worked Saturday through Thursday might also come in for a shift on Friday/Saturday, or might work a longer shift or split shift that day.

So the problem might not be that the police force needs 30% more staffing, but that the police force needs 80% more staffing on extremely rare occasions.

This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).

Just a note about police overtime: The correct amount of overtime for a union employee is not zero. Paying overtime for a few weeks each year to cover vacation can absolutely be cheaper than funding a pension and other benefits for several decades.

That’s absolutely untrue. The only reason companies track depreciation as they do is because it allows them to defer taxation. Public works projects are not paid out of current cash.

Strong Towns makes good arguments about certain things and are critical in a reasonable way of how civil engineering organizations rate the need for more civil engineering works. But the budget discussion makes zero sense.

The biggest expenses for county, city, town, village government are: schools, police & fire, Medicaid share in states that do that, and employee retirement and health. A small/midsize city spends 60% of its budget on police.

Capital projects are capitalized with bonds. Governments have the lowest bond expenses due to tax exemptions. Roadwork is not done in a cash basis. It’s bonded for 10-30 years depending on the job.

Yes, the problem is that our cities are already leveraged up to their eyeballs. At some point, the actual humans buying those bonds start becoming skeptical of the city’s ability to pay them back.

LA currently has about a billion dollars of outstanding general obligation bonds (edit: but that does not include all their future liabilities). They're still rated AA, but I presume that is because the credit writing agencies understand how many untapped revenue streams LA has, but again, those will require unpalatable political change. You can’t keep refinancing forever.

Philadelphia, Miami, and Chicago are getting close to junk bond status, and when that happens, the option to refinance starts evaporating very quickly.

Wikipedia says the GDP of the LA metro is ~1.5T. I think they could handle 1B in bonds. If they choose not to, it's not because it's some impossibility. Certainly not because roads are impossibly expensive.

I said general obligation bonds, not general liabilities. These technically are what makes this discussion so difficult.

My point is that much of what the city can tax has little to do with the city's GDP. Either the landscape of the city will have to change or the current taxation paradigm will have to change.

What they can tax does have to do with the GDP though. If they have a 1B deficit, they need to somehow tax <0.1% of activity (or cut services), whether through property tax, income tax, sales tax, corporate tax, or some other scheme. What they don't need to do is radically increase density, and since almost all of the costs scale with population, not area, density wouldn't even help that much (or might hurt if it leads to a lower percentage of net contributors).

Again, putting $1B in some perspective, the LA Unified School District budget (which is county-level, so not directly comparable to the city, but anyway) is just under $19B. Maybe someone else can ballpark how much of that is associated to the city. Or look the other things that scale with population: police, medical, waste, social programs, etc.

Again, they have $1B in the current deficit. The have $1B in outstanding bonds. They have myriad other outstanding obligations that won't show up on the balance sheet for 20+ years.

Strong Towns wrote an entire piece on this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025-10-27-ground-zero-l...

Okay, but relative to their resources, that's nothing. So they can just pay for those things. It's like worrying about a water heater replacement when you make well into six figures. At a macro level, it is obvious that the suburban model itself is not somehow financially unsustainable.

The city budget is $14B. So they need to make a ~7% adjustment somehow, which amounts to less than a 1% tweak to the local economy. That's not a broken system. It's not a ponzi scheme. It just means they should pay their bills and maybe reduce some waste. You yourself said it's trivial for residents to afford to just pay for the deficit.

LA County has a bigger economy than many European countries, and would displace Illinois by GDP if it were a state.

LA is fine.

I also think LA will be fine in the long run, I just think that their tax structure will force significant changes. The tax base is able to cover the cities liabilities, it's just that the residents don't want to pay those extra taxes, and don't want to change in ways that let other people pay them.

The city has a billion dollar deficit right now. Trivial for residents to afford ($83 per person), but difficult to actually implement politically.

So you get 40 years of "sewers cost us almost nothing to maintain woo" and then five years of "sewer maintenance is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars this year".

Take a look at LA’s budget then, it’s literally all police and police liability payouts which are already hundreds of millions of dollars over the budget for them.

In Australia, as zoning changes, developers and owners alike tend to take advantage. If a house was being rented out, they might rebuild as 2-4 homes and rent those out. Otherwise, an owner might rebuild as two semi-detached homes, live in one and sell/rent the second to finance the build. If it is owned by someone who prefers to keep what they have, the next generation might not feel the same. Where there are opportunities, developers (and owners) will find them.

If you change the zoning, people will build to take advantage of that more flexible zoning. I own land in the city, I'd absolutely pursue the financing and coordinate the redevelopment of that land if:

- I could make more money

- if the zoning allowed it.

As it is right now, it'd be profitable, but the zoning isn't there for it.

>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.

This is closely coupled to the whole 'grandfathered in to very low property taxes from 50 years ago' problem.

It's trivial in the sense that it's easier than not doing nothing, because rather than create problems what we've actually done is systematically installed impediments to solutions. We only need to remove impediments, and the solution finds itself.

Obviously that's very simplified, but the point is we've built this Tower of Babylon that exists around property value that is completely optional and just makes everything harder.

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