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

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

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

If the city spends $1 million repairing a street, it’s not sufficient for the tax base served by that street to only produce $1 million of revenue over the life of that street. If that’s all that results, then why bother? The public doesn’t build infrastructure just to have infrastructure.

The public officials and professional staff in Job City might be happy to have so much employment but, without the tax base from the housing, they are not going to have much revenue to pay their bills.

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.

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

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 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