Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

What would it mean to break out of the Infrastructure Cult and make capital investments that had a real return on investment? First and foremost, it would require us to spend public money on infrastructure projects that covered their own costs, not only today but indefinitely into the future.

The leadership class in America holds infrastructure investments in such high regard that the overwhelming benefit from new growth is simply assumed. It’s a foundational belief not open to serious examination.

And despite what engineers and economists model in their spreadsheets, commuters are humans and thus react to change in complex ways. Quicken their commute by 30 seconds, and they might sleep in half a minute more, move a mile further away from where they work, or decide to drive to the store during rush hour instead of waiting until mid-morning. E

For me, the evidence was pointing to a conclusion I found difficult to believe, yet impossible to ignore: The more our cities build, the poorer they become.

that’s not how infrastructure works. The generally accepted accounting practices for municipalities counts infrastructure as an asset, not a liability. There is no accounting of the tax base or the revenue from the community’s wealth; it’s simply ignored. With this approach, the more roads a city has, the more pipes in the ground, the more public b

What should baffle us, however, is how professionals and decision-makers are so possessed by faith in infrastructure spending. Cities with a mind-boggling backlog of unfunded road maintenance routinely go out and build new roads. Places with pipes crumbling and pumps failing from lack of maintenance give incentives to developers to build more pipes

Complex, adaptive systems learn through destruction. It’s not survival of the fittest – a phrase often misattributed to Charles Darwin – but rather, survival of the most adaptable. The fittest in one time and place may be at a fatal disadvantage in another. It’s those who can survive in both that have the opportunity to flourish.

For example, with all seriousness, project supporters will make a series of intellectual contortions to calculate the amount of carbon saved on a congested freeway, under the assumption that their capacity-building project reduces the amount of stop-and-go driving. They conveniently ignore the more obvious and intuitive fact that making it easier t

Any rationally minded person understands that the street in front of your home is not an asset for the community. It can’t be picked up and sold to the neighboring town. It can’t be pledged as collateral against a debt. The street is a liability, plain and simple. In the infinite game of running a city, it represents an eternal commitment to ongoin