The Trillion Dollar Question Facing Every Major American City

The Trillion Dollar Question Facing Every Major American City(strongtowns.org)

16 points by guildwriter 5 years ago | 9 comments

The website (and article) makes a shrill but intriguing point - American municipal finance is a ponzi scheme. I was briefly exposed to it while working on a financing project through a commercial lender. I was astounded to learn that you can actually get the local city to issue bonds in your favor to fund roads, utilities etc for your private project. The bonds are against future hypothetical tax revenues from that very project but guaranteed by the city. It is borrowing from the future in every sense hypothetical and hypothecated ;) Fascinating.

At some point, those land improvements - the malls, the shopping centers or housing complexes empty out and stop paying taxes. Alternatively, increases in maintenance do not match increase in taxes. Perhaps that has never happened yet in most of the growing west/southwest/midwest. When that happens you will hit a death spiral like Detroit.

a2tech 5 years ago |

It seems like every time they update their website it ends up on HN and everything the discussion is the same. Unless the website actually introduces new facts or plans I wish it’d stop popping up.

bryanlarsen 5 years ago | |

There's no hint of "cars are bad" in this article, so it's not the standard StrongTowns article that gets posted to HN.

chemmail 5 years ago | | |

Time to move to Japan i guess.

core-questions 5 years ago | |

Somewhat ironic in contrast to the article's push for us to do unglamourous, boring tasks like maintaining the basics.

Yes, the same thing will pop up again and again until it starts to look like a solved problem; in the case of maintenance problems, reasonably funded systems are what is needed to resolve the issue so that it can reach a steady state over the long term.

It may not be novel to you, but that's just it: this novelty seeking behaviour comes at a cost to all the basic things that don't get the attention they should.

rektide 5 years ago |

There's obviously a much deeper message here but gee whiz building vs maintaining a city sure feels like it has some basic parallels & similar tensions to adding to vs working on software projects. The mandate for growth is real.

whynotminot 5 years ago |

This makes a lot of sense to me, and so do a lot of other things on that website. I'm intrigued.

I'm also trying to see if there's anything shady here. Is Haliburton lobbying for a big infrastructure repair contract or something?

yodon 5 years ago | |

Boundless cynicism won't help you improve things. If the things you read make sense and hold up to your critical analysis and are things you think should happen, try to make them happen. If it should happen that there are others who have a financial reason for wanting to make the things that you want to happen happen, that is not a bad thing, that is a reason for them to help make the things you want to have happen happen, which is good. As the scale of the problem increases, the odds that someone somewhere is trying to find a way to have a financial incentive to solve the problem approaches unity. That doesn't mean big problems shouldn't be solved, it means that people are trying to align their interests with the interests you want to succeed. Again, that's good, if you want to see the problems solved.

whynotminot 5 years ago | | |

I don't think it's necessarily cynicism, just a healthy skepticism of my own critical thinking abilities.

Something can be intuitive and seemingly sound and have the real world practical effect of only lining someone's pockets without actually delivering the promised improvements. I think, within reason, it's a good thing to not implicitly trust your own reasoning, and I also think it's good to get an understanding of the motives of whoever is trying to persuade you to their way of thinking.