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Why Many Cities Have No Money

strongtowns.org

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Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#31

Post by battlebot »

h4nkoslo wrote: post #8

Summary: infrastructure costs to maintain spread out exurb style development end up being more than the incremental tax revenue, especially when you consider replacement costs and the potential for future higher borrowing costs. Property developers (along with car dealerships) are by far the strongest advocacy groups in many areas. It's not totally surprising that they've managed to capture the local government and p…

Not sure "exurb" is a real thing--most people living that far out have wells and leech fields and the density is pretty low.

Practically every person who sits on our city council is involved with real estate--either sales or development. It is rotten to the core because of their conflicts of interest.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#32

Post by pyre »

crashedsnow wrote: post #26

32 Billion for 125K people.. feels like a lot. ~250K for each and every person? I wonder what that calculation looks like.

That calculation is for fully replacing all existing infrastructure on the basis that over the course of a single generation most infrastructure will need to be replaced at least once due to maintenance/upkeep. So basically it will cost something like $32b per generation just for the upkeep of the existing infrastructure.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#33

Post by nhebb »

milesskorpen wrote: post #13
johnloeber wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know which the cities are, but I'd guess they're among the wealthiest ones. Maybe you'll find this useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_area...

Probably wealthy + dense — I'd guess NYC, SF, Seattle, Chicago are on the list. Not sure what else would get up there.

According to this ranking, Chicago and NYC are at the bottom:

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2017/01/09/How-Strong-Are-Your...

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#34

Post by [deleted] »

pyre wrote: post #32
crashedsnow wrote: post #26

32 Billion for 125K people.. feels like a lot. ~250K for each and every person? I wonder what that calculation looks like.

That calculation is for fully replacing all existing infrastructure on the basis that over the course of a single generation most infrastructure will need to be replaced at least once due to maintenance/upkeep. So basically it will cost something like $32b per generation just for the upkeep of the existing infrastructure.

[deleted]

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#35

Post by sdenton4 »

avn2109 wrote: post #21
milesskorpen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't read Strong Towns much, but I don't think you've read much of the stuff they put out. The blog definitely isn't in favor of mass privatization — that wouldn't help much, since the infrastructure is still crazy expensive and not worth paying for. The model of development that gets us out of this mess probably is one of much greater density + changes in accounting practices.

The model that gets us out of this predicament is trivially simple and literally fits on one line: Really Narrow Streets Unfortunately most North American local government has a savagely visceral hatred of that idea. Full disclosure I stole this idea from [0]. [0] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2006/032606.htm

Pretty good article; the metric that more fully captures the idea is the ratio of land used for cars instead of people. Narrow streets takes care of the on street parking idiocy, which is the worst of it, but the number of parking structure where there could be residential buildings is also helpful to track. And the six lane highways cutting through the middle of town takes a huge amount of space...

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#36

Post by milesskorpen »

nhebb wrote: post #33
milesskorpen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably wealthy + dense — I'd guess NYC, SF, Seattle, Chicago are on the list. Not sure what else would get up there.

According to this ranking, Chicago and NYC are at the bottom: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2017/01/09/How-Strong-Are-Your...

The includes pensions, which are separate issues — the Strong Towns piece is basically looking at property tax annually / cost of maintaining infrastructure annually (and ignores deferments and the like)

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#37

Post by Gustomaximus »

> When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city's infrastructure -- an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation -- it came to $32 billion.

A generation is what, 25 years? If you expect to replace all roads/electricity poles/sewers etc every 25 years you seriously need to look a quality. For this I feel this whole article is off.

> Humans are predisposed to highly value pleasure today and to deeply discount future pain

This is not true. One of the best test for predicting a child success is seeing if they will defer a treat now for more treats later. Many people have the sacrifice now for a better future instinct.

This article seems to make some vastly incorrect assumptions. Personally I think where cities are overspending 3 things could really help.

1) Making asset sales/tenders/expenditure very public and show comparable cost ratios. E.g. cost per km of sewer

2) Bringing more work back in-house. I feel this 'privatise everything is better' mentality is simply not true and does things that leads to infrastructure that needs replacement every 25 years and cost blowouts.

3) If you are going to privatise services price them on points of quality that you can enforce. E.g. Rather than jails getting a straight fee, they should get a small per convict allowance but a generous bonus for each released convict that spends 5 years crime free after release.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#38

Post by chiaro »

badsock wrote: post #27
berry_sortoro wrote: post #2

I don't even need to read the article to know that the real reason is not mentioned in there. The real reason is the FIAT debt based money system. The criminal private enterprise called the FED. Thats the real reason, everything else is a distraction from the truth.

It's not the Federal Reserve. That's one of the few institutions left that are run by humans! The lizard people are spreading conspiracy theories about it because that's the last unimpeachable bulwark of human resistance. And you fell for it! There is no complex situation that can't simply be explained by humanoid, human-skin-wearing alien creatures. For example: * Bad economy: Lizard people siphoning off a secret "l…

Christ, tell me about it. The presence of one fiat/debt conspiracy theorist in the comments is far less troubling than the collection of commenters seemingly amazed at his insight. Let's not even get into the the smug myopia of Murray "legal obligations to feed and clothe children are state oppression" Rothbard that is also getting trotted out.

Fiat currency is, of course, an improvement over previous precious metal-backed currencies. When you can't control the price of gold (or worse, leave the value of your currency as subject to private or foreign manipulation) prices become much more volatile, making it difficult to operate in the economy with much certainty. Fiat currencies also allow for the impact of recessions to be lessened by (for example) lowering the interest rates for the inter-bank loans it provides thus encouraging savings to be redistributed as consumption.

The fact that the bank is privately owned is both due to a need for independence from the political process (see Zimbabwe for exhibit A why this is a bad idea), and a relic due to the fact that banknotes were issued by a number of different institutions until it was decided that these competing standards should be replaced by one with authority vested in and financially backed by the state.

The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson is an easy book to get acquainted with the story and evidence supporting fiat currencies today.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#40

Post by gozur88 »

I'm not sure they're drawing the right conclusions from that winning/losing graph. That area downtown is green because that's where all the toniest businesses are located, and you can't have a city that consists of only upscale businesses.
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