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

I ran the numbers; it would take 37 years of my neighbors and I paying taxes for the city to merely recoup the cost they had initially put into building the road. That was longer than the road was going to last. It was a dead-end road; we were the only ones who used it. If my taxes weren’t even enough to cover the initial construction costs, who wa

Earlier in this chapter, I described the value of taking small steps in the dark and the dangers of large leaps. There is an important variation on that story that applies to situations where many people are leaping simultaneously.

Americans spent an incredible amount of money to destroy generations of wealth, buildings of such magnificence that we could not recreate them today if we desired to.

When the public sector leads, vacant space becomes an embarrassment instead of an immediate fiscal crisis. The human need to fill the space, at whatever cost, is not conducive to good decision-making. Worst of all, putting all the public improvements into a finished state before any private investment has occurred merely ensures that the city will

If we’re going to break out of the Infrastructure Cult mentality, we would need to design our systems to respond to feedback. There is no clearer feedback on value than someone’s willingness to pay for something, yet our infrastructure funding mechanisms have a large degree of separation from the user’s willingness to pay for what they want. We all

Our modern development pattern – a continental-scale social experiment – was established during a period of unprecedented abundance after World War II. We were not only the sole economic superpower that wasn’t devastated by war; the biggest players in the world were indebted to us. We held the global reserve currency, we had the greatest amount of

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

When it is reported that an infrastructure investment will save $1 trillion over the next decade, most people outside city-building industries, and a scary number of them within, assume that this means 1 trillion dollars. As in, this infrastructure investment will result in 1 trillion dollars that can be spent on something else: education, health c

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.