Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

The few times when I’ve heard members of the Infrastructure Cult pushed to account for infrastructure spending’s return on investment, they always fall back on the assumed secondary benefits. They’ll argue that infrastructure spending makes the economy more efficient, for example, asserting this as de facto truth. The claim isn’t tempered by the fact that nearly every American can point to a local list of wasteful infrastructure projects, investments that cost a lot but didn’t seem to amount to all that much. Somehow building a new frontage road so the Walmart on the old frontage road can be relocated is assumed to be efficient. The same with building a new highway interchange so a few hundred homes can be built an hour away from the regional employment center. When looked at individually, the public-sector math behind most of these projects makes no sense. Yet, the true believer is comfortable assuming that, if you add up all the negative-returning infrastructure investments, the network effects from them produces a platform of economic efficiency. Not only is there no evidence to support that conclusion; it defies logic.

Rather than producing a multitude of unmeasurable benefits, it is far more likely that our passion for infrastructure spending is satiating a more human instinct. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. We include in our analysis the things that make the case for what we want to do, and we ignore the things that would undermine our cause. In other words, we exhibit cult-like behavior.

Beyond tolls and usage charges, we could extend our infrastructure funding approach to include value capture. This is the approach public and private developers for centuries have used to pay for their projects, from Augustus in Rome and Napoleon in Paris to the trading companies given land charters in the New World. It’s largely how Japan has funded its acclaimed high-speed rail system. Buy the land around the station at pre-development prices. Build the high-speed rail, which makes the land far more valuable. Sell the land at the new price and use the profits from the sale to pay for the rail line. This is great public policy, although the lobbyist for the land speculator is not going to be very happy when their anticipated windfall profits end up going instead to the project’s investor and risk-taker: the taxpayer.

what if we’re in the public sector? And what if, in the infinite game cities are playing, failure on the mundane project means damage to property, dislocation of people, expensive emergency repairs, and potentially even loss of human life? Or what if it merely means the slow decline of the systems the community has built or the ongoing denuding of the community’s wealth and prosperity? We need our best people leading the charge on maintenance.

Part of the unique experience of being in Italy was, of course, the food. The team I was with all ate like royalty. Our various Italian hosts brought us out for what felt like a Thanksgiving-scale meal, twice a day, every day. Later in the trip when I was on my own, I ate an entire pizza every day for dinner and, when I learned the word for “French fries,” added an order of them – fried in exquisite olive oil – to my regular diet. I’ve never eaten so much in a six-week period. The other unique experience for me was walking. I came from a city, in a culture, where a trip longer than a block meant getting into a car. In Italy, we walked everywhere. They all did. It was the easiest way to get around and, since everyone walked most places, the cities were very delightful to walk in. I’m six feet tall. When I arrived in Italy, I weighed 185 pounds, a weight slightly above where I should have been at that age but by no means overweight. When I left Italy six weeks later, despite eating a bizarre amount of food, I weighed a very heathy 165. I could talk about the value of the Mediterranean diet, but that wasn’t it for me. It was all the walking. All of us on the trip recognized the same effect. In fact, at one point we were sitting outside at a café watching people walk by when we decided to count the number of them who were obviously overweight. It was a busy street with at least a couple people walking by each minute. We were there about 30 minutes. Total count: zero. This is n...

Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, describes a good walk as one that is “useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.” As I ponder how these four elements in what Jeff calls his “General Theory of Walkability” apply to my town, I recognize how despotic for people not in an automobile we have made this formerly walkable place. That the change has come at such a great cost to our financial health and prosperity only makes it more disturbing.