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Can someone name an example of a city that has gone bankrupt due to infrastructure costs that didn't also lose a large amount of its population or lose key local industries?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
Ponzi Scheme: a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.
We need a word that is not intentionally a fraud but is pretty much an example of an unsustainable pyramid.
(in its modern, dependent-on-continuous-growth interpretation)
Can someone name an example of a city that has gone bankrupt due to infrastructure costs that didn't also lose a large amount of its population or lose key local industries?
Found the text version more compelling myself: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
The US system means you can live outside cities (and so avoid paying city taxes) and travel in to enjoy the amenities they provide. The result is a classic "failure of the commons" where contributors move out and people in need move in. The growth fallacy relies on cities already being short of cash, it is a symptom, not a disease.
Suburbs pay city taxes but are basically subsidized owing to the infrastructure cost relative to tax rate. You can hardly chalk the problem to too few people living within the city boundaries, but ultimately for super-long commuters what it would mean is the bulk of shouldering the cost of those people falls on the communities outside the city. People go in to work, that means the amenities used are a) the roads whic…
I am biased because I quite like living in the suburbs, and get quite suspicious when some manifesto comes up that dictates I should feel bad for it. Why is the solution to live in better designed cities instead of better designed suburbs? Are cities still necessary given the modern conditions?
"Are cities necessary given the modern conditions?"
How many suburbs would exist without the corresponding city center? And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns?
Can someone name an example of a city that has gone bankrupt due to infrastructure costs that didn't also lose a large amount of its population or lose key local industries?
I think that’s a rather unfair question as cities should be resilient to significant population shifts. The world isn’t constant so the inability to handle change means you already have issues. Population shifts don’t just happen in an afternoon if a city can’t deal with a 10% population decline over a decade it was already in dire straits. Pensions for example are’t inherently an issue, it’s just a debt that should…