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Why Many Cities Have No Money

strongtowns.org

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Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#41

Post by flukus »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #37

> 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…

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

I think this is one of the main drivers in favoring cheap and punishing quality. I agree with 2 and 3, though I'd argue that private jails are one of the things that should be bought back in house.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#42

Post by flukus »

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.

That's still 10K per person per year (assuming a 25 years generation), which seems on the high side. I wonder how much of that is roads alone?

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#43

Post by droopyEyelids »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #37

> 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…

Love the idea behind point #3

Like many of us, my mind was instantly drawn to how the incentives would be gamed, but you know what? The current incentives are already gamed. We all read about the judge who got kickbacks for sending kids to a juvenile detention facility, etc.

Let's build our incentives in the opposite direction. A certain percentage of dishonest people will game the system. But many, and probably most, will actually work towards the idea. And nothing is accomplished perfectly in one pass, there will be reform and accountability.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#44

Post by otterley »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #37

> 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…

> 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.

Isn't that the typical depreciation schedule for infrastructural assets? I've seen some useful life tables used by accountants and 25 years seems to be a typical mark. Maybe 30 years, but rarely 50.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#45

Post by indexhtml »

vvpan wrote: post #18

I can't say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it's city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store,…

I grew up in the same town and strongly share your sentiments! I noticed Americans tend to be incredulous when I speak positively about it. Perhaps this is due to the obvious similarity to public housing layouts here and their negative associations, but also from a lack of appreciation (due to lack of first-hand experience of) the benefits that you mentioned above.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#46

Post by pyre »

flukus wrote: post #41
Gustomaximus wrote: post #37

> 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…

> Making asset sales/tenders/expenditure very public and show comparable cost ratios. E.g. cost per km of sewer I think this is one of the main drivers in favoring cheap and punishing quality. I agree with 2 and 3, though I'd argue that private jails are one of the things that should be bought back in house.

> I think this is one of the main drivers in favoring cheap and punishing quality.

The problem comes with evaluating quality. There are issues with over-valuing cheapness, but there are equally issues with using high-cost as an indicator of quality too.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#47

Post by jdavis703 »

twblalock wrote: post #14

There are some cities that get around this by requiring HOAs in new subdivisions, and requiring those HOAs to pay for maintenance of much of the infrastructure. The homeowners pay the same property tax they would pay anywhere else in the same city. There are a number of cities in the Sacramento area that have been doing this kind of thing for over a decade now. That approach brings in another set of problems, but it'…

I'd love to see a more local approach where say a couple hundred of my neighbors from the few blocks around me could vote to raise taxes for something specific, like repaving a street, or rehabbing a park. It's local money that you know stays local.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#48

Post by astronautjones »

devb wrote: post #11

There's a blog I enjoy that covers this sort of issue very frequently. It's interesting to see a hard data approach to explaining some of the municipal funding problems that are brewing nationwide. https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs...

thanks for this, the blog is quite interesting

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#49

Post by elgenie »

vvpan wrote: post #18

I can't say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it's city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store,…

Sprawl is pretty easy to avoid when car ownership rates are as low as they were in the Soviet Union.

Re: Why Many Cities Have No Money

#50

Post by otoburb »

leodeid wrote: post #5

In the intro, it is stated that "literally five or less" cities do not have these monetary problems. I'm curious what those cities are, and why are they special. If the answer isn't "they've always used accrual accounting", I don't buy that most cities are doomed due to accounting problems.

The article author Charles Marohn addresses this question in the comments section. His entire comment response:

"They are the ones with a very dominant urban core, where the urban fabric overwhelms the horizontal, auto-oriented stuff. I'm not saying these places won't struggle for the same reasons Lafayette will, but I suspect their decline/contraction will be less pronounced, less a defining characteristic.

NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Vancouver, maybe Chicago.... I'm not an expert on this scale of a place by any means so I could be very wrong but they don't seem to have the same underlying forces as a Lafayette (or even a Detroit or Memphis) where 80%+ of their infrastructure serves unproductive land use patterns. Might be 20-40% in these places."

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