Strong Towns Has Filed a Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering
For those unfamiliar with Strong Towns, here’s a best-effort summary of what they do:<p>Strong Towns is a non-partisan non-profit that advocates for cities and towns to build financially solvent places. Many cities are perpetually broke because they owe more money in maintenance burden (fixing roads, pipes, etc) than they bring in in tax revenue.<p>This happens primarily because towns in North America tend to build out large neighborhoods all at once (think: suburbia). At the start, the developers pay for all the infrastructure, and then “give” it to the city to maintain.<p>At first, everything seems fine. The city gets plenty of new tax revenue! But come 20 or 30 years later, it turns out that the tax revenue is not enough to replace the roads, fix the pipes, and so on.<p>And so to pay for the repairs, the city then builds yet another neighborhood in the same strategy to collect the initial tax revenue. It’s effectively a Ponzi scheme.<p>When it crashes, you get Detroit.<p>The gist is that many low-density spread-out suburban neighborhood with large, expensive infrastructure are a huge cost center for a city. And since most North American cities build this way, we have a lot of cities that are “functionally bankrupt” or will be soon.<p>If you&#x27;re a systems thinker who lives in a town that can&#x27;t seem to fix it&#x27;s potholes, you may want to check out the book they&#x27;ve published: &quot;Strong Towns&quot; by Charles L. Marohn Jr.