Latest / The Overlap / The Suburban Ponzi Scheme

Transcript

The Suburban Ponzi Scheme · The Overlap

0:01
Picture it.
0:02
It's Saturday morning in America.
0:04
You step out into your front porch with a cup of coffee.
0:07
The air smells like fresh cut fescue, mulch, and quiet desperation.
0:14
To your left, a sprinkler system is hissing rhythmically, fighting a losing war to keep the non-native Kentucky bluegrass alive in a climate it was never biologically designed to
0:24
inhabit.
0:25
To your right, a neighbor you've never spoken to and statistically will never speak to.
0:30
is washing a red Ford F-150 that has never hauled one load of lumber in its entire life.
0:37
You get in your car to go buy a carton of milk.
0:40
You back out of your driveway.
0:42
You navigate the winding labyrinth of the cul-de-sac.
0:45
You drive 1.5 miles past identical vinyl-sided houses, turn right into a massive four-lane arterial road, wait at three cycles of a red light, and finally pull into a strip mall
0:58
that looks exactly
1:00
like every other strip mall in northern America.
1:03
You have achieved the American dream.
1:05
You have space.
1:07
You have safety.
1:08
You have a two-car garage.
1:10
You have a yard.
1:11
But what if I told you that the ground underneath your feet isn't just soil?
1:17
What if I told you that your entire neighborhood, the asphalt you drive on, the pipes carrying your water, the streetlights buzzing overhead, is financially insolvent?
1:30
What if I told you the American suburb is not an engine of prosperity, as we've been told for 70 years, but actually a slow motion municipal suicide pact?
1:42
And most importantly, what if I told you the only reason your city hasn't gone bankrupt yet is because it's running like a literal mathematical Ponzi scheme?
2:06
Welcome to The Overlap, I am Joshua.
2:10
And I'm Will, surprise!
2:13
Fresh off of all the misadventures that Joshua told you all about.
2:17
Those are definitely not cover stories.
2:19
um I'm glad to be back.
2:23
missed you, Will.
2:24
If you've been following along, if you've been listening listener for the past couple of weeks, Will has been on hiatus, but he is back with us today.
2:32
And now that I'm back, we're going to absolutely ruin your neighborhood for you.
2:37
You're welcome.
2:39
I want to issue a trigger warning right now upfront.
2:42
If you own a home in a subdivision built after 1950, this episode is gonna hurt your feelings.
2:49
It's gonna make you look at the pavement at the end of your driveway and see a ticking time box.
2:55
In short, it is heavy because usually on this show we talk about these big abstract systems, things that happening at the global geopolitical scale.
3:05
talk about the healthcare industrial complex or the geopolitics of microchips or our fan favorite AI.
3:13
But today we're talking about something hyper local.
3:17
We're talking about why your city hall, yes, yours is broke.
3:21
Right.
3:22
I actually, really like hyperlocal.
3:24
was something that, um, a word that Carrie used to describe what it was like in Louisiana when I was talking about like gumbo, what I called gumbo, what I call Buddha and what I
3:35
call a two Faye and how that is made is very distinctly specific to my house, my neighborhood, the very small part of Louisiana that I came from.
3:46
Shout out to Scott, Louisiana.
3:48
Um, but
3:49
hyper local, it has always been a funny word that I love the way she describes it because it's so incredibly true.
3:56
It is.
3:56
You can place a cajun within a uh few hundred yards if you know what they put in their gumbo.
4:01
Pretty much, yeah.
4:03
That's almost identically right.
4:06
So the paradox that we need to start with, and I want everyone listening to think about their local town, is to think about the headlines in your local newspaper or the posts on
4:17
Nextdoor.
4:18
Don't go too deep.
4:19
Don't set up alerts.
4:20
Just check it once a week.
4:22
But on page one, the headline is always, Boomtown, city approves new 500 homes, massive growth, the economy is roaring.
4:29
It's always ribbons being cut and developers shaking hands, except for the past, you know, exactly one year and eight days or so, but I digress.
4:40
and then you flip to page three and the headline is now City Council Faces Budget Crisis Cannot Afford to Fix Potholes Police Budget Strained Fire Station Brownouts Libraries
4:52
Closing on Sundays You know what a library is, don't you kids?
4:57
They're those big buildings that in some cities are not even functioning.
5:01
It doesn't make sense, right?
5:02
Like if all of this growth is good and all these giant corporations building houses and setting up these multi-million dollar facilities, if building new houses creates wealth,
5:16
then the fastest growing cities in America should be the richest places on earth.
5:21
And they have gold-plated sidewalks and they're swimming in cash, but they're not.
5:27
They're drowning in debt.
5:29
And the reason comes down to a theory and really a mathematical proof that was popularized by an organization called Strong Towns, if you've not heard of it, and its founder, Chuck
5:39
Morrone.
5:41
Chuck is a fascinating guy.
5:43
Maybe something you thought you'd never...
5:45
a fun guy.
5:47
Some say so, yes.
5:49
But he is not, as you might imagine from that description, an anti-capitalist radical living in a yurt somewhere.
5:55
He's actually, and I know you don't hear him described as fascinating very often, but he is a civil engineer.
6:02
He's a conservative guy from Minnesota, and his origin story is basically that he spent decades building the suburbs of Minnesota.
6:09
towns he lives in, the cities he lives near in Minnesota.
6:13
He was the guy that signed off on the roads and the pipes.
6:15
And one day he decided to sit down and actually run the math on the long-term maintenance costs of the things he's building.
6:22
And he realized, much to his chagrin, I would imagine that everything he was taught in engineering school was a lie.
6:28
um That'll cause a crisis of...
6:34
Right.
6:35
The bridges will still hold up for the...
6:37
for a period of time, but he realized basically he had been duped into helping to build a machine that was designed to bankrupt the very people he was trying to serve.
6:46
Yeah.
6:47
So the thesis we're exploring today is pretty simple, but it's also incredibly terrifying.
6:53
The American pattern of suburban development does not actually generate enough tax revenue to pay for its own infrastructure.
7:02
It's actually a liability.
7:04
It's a financial drain that's disguised as an asset.
7:09
And the only way to keep the lights on and the float going there is to, uh the only way to hide the insolvency is to keep growing.
7:17
So growth covers a multitude of sins, as they say, uh but not forever.
7:21
To keep building more liabilities though, keep paying for the old ones.
7:26
That's the trick, right?
7:27
Which is any financial crimes investigator will tell you is the literal definition of the Ponzi scheme.
7:34
Right, so let's break this down as far as the mechanism is concerned.
7:38
Basically, no one sets out to bankrupt the city, right?
7:41
Nobody wakes up and says, let's destroy the municipal budget.
7:45
It happens because of a specific set of incentives.
7:48
Will, why don't you walk us through the transaction?
7:51
How does a cornfield become a crime scene?
7:55
Well, assuming you're not talking about a mishap in the annual corn maze, let me tell you how to follow the money timeline here.
8:02
This is where the trick happens.
8:04
So let's say you have a developer.
8:06
Let's call him Bob, because we call all of our pretend people Bob.
8:09
That's such a Bob thing to do.
8:11
uh Bob buys a farm on the edge of town.
8:14
He wants to build this subdivision called Whispering Pines Estates.
8:18
Can't you just see the commercial now?
8:21
which creates a paradox because the first thing Bob does is actually cut down all of the pine trees so the wind can whisper through the vinyl siding, but go on.
8:30
Right, it reminds me of that scene from Back the Future where Twin Pines Mall became Lone Pines Mall, Lone Pine Mall.
8:36
Naturally, Bob goes to the city council with his proposal, He says, I want to build 100 homes.
8:41
These are going be nice homes, $400,000 homes.
8:45
And here's the deal.
8:46
I, Bob the developer, will pay for everything up front.
8:50
I will build the roads.
8:52
I will lay the sewer pipes.
8:54
I will install the street lights and the storm drains.
8:57
It will cost the city zero dollars.
8:59
And the city council, of course, are chomping at the bet.
9:03
They look at this and they think, yes, free stuff.
9:05
They get 100 new families moving in.
9:08
Those families pay property taxes.
9:10
They pay sales tax at the local target.
9:13
They pay for water hookups.
9:15
From the city's perspective, in year one, it's pure profit, or at least it looks like it.
9:21
They get the revenue, but they didn't have to pay for all of the infrastructure beneath it.
9:27
Exactly.
9:28
That's what we call the sugar high.
9:30
That's year one.
9:32
All money's on the plus side.
9:33
All everything's flowing.
9:34
Dollars are flowing in.
9:36
But here's the catch.
9:38
Bob the developer builds the road, sells the houses, takes his profit, and Bob's gone.
9:43
Like the whispering pines he cut down, he's nowhere to be found.
9:47
He moves on to the next town.
9:49
He then grifts, I mean gifts, the road and pipes to the city.
9:54
Now the public and the taxpayers own the infrastructure.
9:57
And for a while, nobody really notices the problem.
10:01
For the first, say, 20 or 25 years, everything is great.
10:05
The road's brand new, it doesn't have potholes, the PVC pipes won't leak, the streetlights work, the city is collecting 20 years of taxes from these people and spending almost
10:16
nothing on maintenance.
10:19
This is the illusion of wealth phase where the family of family with two and a half kids and a dog are walking down the boardwalk, admiring the nice shiny new storefronts.
10:29
The city feels rich.
10:31
All this cash is coming in.
10:32
So what does one do when they're flush with cash and nothing to spend it on?
10:37
They act like someone who just won a small lottery.
10:39
They hire a new assistant city manager.
10:42
They buy a fancy new fire truck with Wi-Fi connections.
10:46
They build a new rec center with a lazy river.
10:48
They basically burn in the cash flow because it all feels like profit in the first couple of years.
10:53
But it's not profit.
10:55
It's a sinking fund that they aren't funding.
10:58
Because then when year 25 hits, that life cycle bill comes due.
11:05
Unlike Bob, bill sticks around.
11:08
Suddenly that asphalt road needs to be resurfaced.
11:12
The pumps for the sewage station lift burnout.
11:15
The storm drains cracked.
11:17
Now the city has to pay to replace that infrastructure.
11:21
And this is where the math falls entirely apart.
11:26
Also why I don't go by the name Bill, nickname Bill.
11:29
Right, so this is when the city engineer finally crunches the numbers, usually as a result of a massive panic, the city engineer realizes the horrifying truth.
11:39
The total amount of property taxes collected from those hundred shiny new homes over the last 25 years isn't even close enough to pay for the new road.
11:48
Yeah, let's talk about the sense of scale here.
11:51
Are we talking about being short a few hundred dollars or what?
11:55
No, we're talking about being short by orders of magnitude.
11:59
In a lot of cases, the tax revenue covers maybe 10 to 50 % of the replacement cost.
12:05
But his suburban infrastructure is expensive, right?
12:07
I mean, you have miles and miles of asphalt, miles of copper wires, miles of pipe, all serving a very small number of people.
12:14
Essentially, it's a density problem.
12:16
You have stretched the city thin like butter over too much bread.
12:19
So in year 25, the city suddenly staring at a multimillion dollar bill, they can't pay.
12:24
They're technically insolvent.
12:28
So the city council is in a room, right?
12:31
They're sweating and they have three options.
12:34
Option A, they can raise taxes, but to cover the gap, they would have to raise taxes by something insane like 400 or 500%.
12:43
So if they do that, of course the homeowners are gonna revolt.
12:46
They get voted out, the people move away, so that's usually off the table.
12:52
Option B, they cut services.
12:55
That's the old standby.
12:56
They decide, okay, we just won't pave the road.
12:59
We'll just do a patch job.
13:02
We'll let it crumble into the gravel.
13:04
We'll close the library.
13:05
We'll fire the police.
13:08
And that turns the town into a ruin.
13:10
So no one wants that either.
13:11
which leaves option C, the Ponzi option.
13:14
How do they solve the cashflow problem?
13:18
Well, the way to solve every Ponzi scheme cash problem is to bring in more cash, right?
13:24
They find a new investor.
13:25
They find a new developer, Bob 2.0, and the city says, OK, Whispering Pines is bleeding us dry.
13:32
We're flat broke.
13:33
But look, here comes developer, we'll call him Steve this time.
13:37
It's going to be confused between the Bobs.
13:39
He wants to build Oakwood Meadows.
13:43
Spoiler alert, he's taking down all the Oaks.
13:45
But build Oakwood Meadows further down the highway.
13:48
He's gonna pay for, wait for it, new roads.
13:52
He's gonna bring in, wait for it, new taxpayers.
13:55
And he's gonna pay massive on-front impact fees for the privilege of building.
13:58
What a good guy Steve is.
14:01
So basically the city council immediately approves the new development, right?
14:04
They take the cash from the new guys, Oakwood Meadows, and they use it to patch the holes in the budget caused by the old guys whispering pines.
14:13
They then use the money from the new investors to pay off the liabilities of the old investors.
14:19
And that'll be on your final exam here in Madoff 101.
14:22
ah Again, textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme.
14:26
But now you have a bigger problem.
14:28
You've doubled your liability.
14:29
Whispering Pines is still sucking the life out of the city.
14:33
But now you've added Oakwood Meadows, which in 25 years will also need its roads replaced.
14:37
Its library will be draining the city of money.
14:40
And it also won't have generated enough money to pay for it.
14:44
So you have no choice but to grow again.
14:48
You'll have to build Willow Creek, then Maple Ridge, then the shops at Maple Ridge, then the arena at Northern Tif Development District or whatever down the road.
15:02
You have to grow exponentially just to service the debt of the growth you did 20 years ago.
15:10
It becomes an addiction.
15:11
You can't stop growing or the whole thing collapses.
15:14
So that's why you have things like economic development councils and city coalitions in Oklahoma where I'm at.
15:23
The Oklahoma uh state law is that you cannot actually use any of the money from property taxes to fund your city.
15:32
has to come 100 % from sales taxes.
15:36
So we have a little bit of a different
15:37
scenario here, obviously we're talking a little bit about suburban blight, but in our case, uh it's, I mean, it's, we still have all of these problems, but usually they don't
15:49
say, hey, let's raise property taxes because that ultimately will not help the city's funding issue.
15:55
They say, let's raise sales taxes.
15:57
Then they have to justify that by bringing in new businesses so that out of towners are drawn in so we can pull their money to cover the...
16:06
budget deficit there.
16:08
And I think it's, even if you live in a city like, or a state like Texas, where you can tap into that property tax uh money, I think it's important to visualize why that tax
16:18
money is not enough.
16:20
It's not because taxes are too low, though they are relative to the cost.
16:24
It's because the yield is too low.
16:27
So Joshua, imagine a traditional city block, like an old downtown from 1920.
16:32
Before the car became king, you have a grid.
16:36
On one block,
16:37
You might have 20 small businesses, a barber, a baker, a candlestick maker.
16:42
Oh yes, there it is.
16:45
We're in dad joke synchrony.
16:48
You have a hardware store, know?
16:51
Maybe they have apartments above them, because that was often a thing.
16:54
Right, that's a high value environment, right?
16:58
You have one strip of asphalt, one water pipe, one electric line, but that infrastructure is actually serving 200 people and 20 businesses.
17:08
The revenue per foot of that pipe is massive.
17:12
Right.
17:13
Now imagine a cul-de-sac.
17:15
You have the same length of road, right, the size of a small city block, that same length of pipe, but it only serves two houses now.
17:24
Instead of 20 businesses and apartments, it's two houses.
17:28
Two families have to shoulder the entire replacement cost of that infrastructure.
17:32
The math doesn't work.
17:34
It's geometry.
17:35
Strong Towns has done these incredible case studies where they map cities like an MRI, showing financial productivity, quote unquote, financial productivity.
17:43
And what they find every single time is that the old poor gritty neighborhoods, the ones with the grid streets and the small houses are actually the cash cows.
17:52
They're being bled dry to subsidize the rich suburbs.
17:56
That is the irony that kind of breaks my brain really when I think about it.
17:59
We have this like cultural narrative that the suburbs are where the wealth is and this inner city is kind of where the poverty and the crime is.
18:08
But from a municipal cashflow perspective, the suburbs are these welfare queens, right?
18:14
They're the ones that are actually leeching off the productivity of the inner city.
18:19
The guy living in the McMansion on the edge of town is paying the Walmart price for like a bespoke suit.
18:25
custom tailored and the city, meaning the poor neighborhoods, is actually the ones picking up the difference.
18:31
You know, there's a famous example from Brainerd, Minnesota.
18:34
guess that's a real town, Brainerd.
18:37
They call it the Taco John study because it involved the Taco Johns.
18:41
So, you know, great, great name.
18:43
They compared two properties.
18:44
Property A was an old ugly block in the downtown.
18:47
They had the barbershop, liquor store, maybe an old rundown apartment upstairs.
18:53
From the look of it, you'd say it was blighted.
18:55
That's a bad word in urban development.
18:58
Blighted.
18:58
It's true.
19:01
have to keep the blight from spreading.
19:03
Custom like sailors though, civil engineers.
19:05
uh Property B was a brand new Taco John's drive-through on the edge of town.
19:10
Beautiful, shiny, paved parking lot, highly processed uh Tex-Mex.
19:16
And the city council looks at Taco John's and says, well, that's progress, right?
19:20
Like that's wealth.
19:21
Look at the new sign.
19:23
And then they look at the old block and say, well, this is garbage.
19:25
We should just tear it down.
19:27
You're breaking my heart here.
19:28
You know, as somebody who loves when the new Whataburger gets built, you know, even if it's 40 miles away, I'm now realizing this is all from Ponzi scheme.
19:36
It's breaking my heart.
19:38
But you know, hey, here's the thing.
19:39
Like you said, this is hard to get our heads wrapped around because we're so used to our cultural narrative.
19:44
mean, I like physically felt the resistance in me while I reading this, you know, reading our research for this podcast.
19:52
Like this can't be right.
19:52
There has to be a rebuttal somewhere.
19:54
But you know what?
19:55
Chuck ran the numbers.
19:57
Huh?
19:57
The old ugly block was worth $1.1 million on the tax rolls.
20:02
The new shiny Taco John's, 600K.
20:06
Almost half of what the old ugly block was worth in taxes.
20:10
The blighted block, pardon my French, was generating nearly double the tax revenue for the city.
20:17
And here's the key, the old block utilized existing infrastructure.
20:21
Taco John's required a massive new road, a dedicated turn lane.
20:25
new pipes, and huge amounts of space for parking that generates zero tax revenue.
20:30
a parking lot is just dead land, right?
20:33
It's asphalt.
20:34
It pays almost no taxes.
20:36
So we bulldoze high-yield productive cities to build low-yield expensive car depots.
20:45
We're literally replacing gold with plastic and patting ourselves on the back for modernization.
20:51
In this case, forever plastics, right?
20:52
It's sticky with a bill for a foreseeable future.
20:56
This brings us to the psychological aspect of it all.
20:59
Why do we do it?
21:00
If the math is so obviously bad, Chuck has opened our eyes.
21:03
Why does every city in America keep improving these developments?
21:07
Well, it's a growth addiction and it's an inherently American thing.
21:11
It's ultimately intergenerational theft.
21:14
We are partying on the credit of the people who come after us.
21:19
We're building infrastructure that we know we cannot afford to maintain just so we can have lower taxes and cheaper houses today.
21:29
So not only have we uh bought the golden handcuffs, but we're actually willing them to our kids in our less willing testament.
21:38
um Yeah, so to make this whole scheme work, to connect all these spread out houses to the Taco John's, we had to invent a new type of infrastructure.
21:48
We had to invent a specific type of road.
21:50
And it turns out this road is arguably the ugliest, most dangerous, and most soul sucking invention in human history.
21:58
god, I know you're about to say it.
22:01
You're talking about the Strode.
22:04
I am talking about the strode.
22:06
like, know, sounds like that.
22:08
It reminds me of several things actually, this word, but the first one is like that.
22:11
we can't mention for, you know, ratings sake, but.
22:13
Right, but you know that old commercial with the splode soda.
22:18
I don't know if you remember that.
22:20
It's strode.
22:21
That's about the same effect, but this is where the conversation gets really ugly because this is where the money meets the actual literal body count.
22:30
Okay, so you dropped the word.
22:32
You said it.
22:33
Strode.
22:35
S-T-R, whatever, shut up.
22:38
Strode, S-T-R-O-A-D.
22:42
And it kind of sounds like a glitch in your brain to make a Matrix reference, but it sounds like something you'd, I don't know, cough up, maybe something you would take a pill
22:52
for, like an STD, STI, but for the people who don't know what it is, why don't you explain what a strode is?
23:00
Okay, you've actually all seen them most likely, but they're the ugliest, most dangerous, and most financially ruinous piece of infrastructure in the American toolkit.
23:10
The term was coined by our good buddy Chuck at Strong Towns.
23:14
Good job, Chuck.
23:15
And it's a portmanteau, which is a fun word.
23:19
Fun word means new road, a new word made from old words.
23:22
And the old words here are pretty obvious if you think about it.
23:25
They're street and road.
23:27
Put that together, kids, and you get strode.
23:30
Mmm
23:30
understand why it's a disaster, have to understand that in civil engineering terms, or at least in sane engineering terms, a street and a road are two completely different tools
23:40
with opposite purposes.
23:42
Right, because in normal conversation, we kind of use them interchangeably, right?
23:46
Like I'm driving down the road, I'm parking on the street.
23:49
But what Will is saying is that they're actually two distinctly different things.
23:54
Right, in the world of urban and suburban planning, they are completely distinct.
23:59
Think of a road like a railroad track for cars.
24:01
Its purpose is to move people from point A to point B as fast and efficiently as possible.
24:06
It's a thoroughfare, right?
24:07
A road should be simple.
24:09
High speed, wide lanes, no stopping, no businesses, no driveways, just pure movement.
24:15
It's the open road that you've always heard about.
24:18
Think of an interstate highway, right?
24:20
That's a road.
24:21
It works, it connects places.
24:24
Okay, that makes sense.
24:25
It's basically a pipe for cars, right?
24:28
And a street?
24:30
A street is a platform for building wealth.
24:32
A street is a destination.
24:34
Think of Main Street.
24:36
It's a complex.
24:37
It's got pedestrians.
24:38
It's got shops.
24:39
It's got slow cars, parallel parking, people crossing to get coffee.
24:44
A lot of movement, a lot of things happening on a street.
24:46
The purpose of a street isn't to move fast.
24:48
The purpose is to get people to stop, get out of their cars, and spend money.
24:53
So roads are for high street, excuse me, roads are for high speed travel.
24:57
Streets are for high value commerce.
24:59
um This is what we think about, again, being a parent here of young kids, I've seen the movie Cars way too many times, but your road is Route 66.
25:11
Your streets are when you get to, now I'm blanking on the name of the town, Carburetor, it'll come back to me.
25:19
yeah, when you get to the, Radiator Springs, there we go, thank you.
25:23
Radiator Springs.
25:25
Yes.
25:25
so when you use the radiator springs, you're supposed to stop and you're supposed to buy gas from flow and uh army surplus from Sarge and all the fun characters that we miss and
25:35
love.
25:36
Sorry, aside finished.
25:39
Yeah, yeah, no worries.
25:40
mean, it just goes to show I every now and then will watch an animated movie as well.
25:45
Astro is basically what happens when you try to mash a street and a road together like a really bad Frankenstein experiment.
25:52
Exactly.
25:54
Astrode strives to be both a high-speed traffic artery and a destination for commerce.
26:00
What could go wrong?
26:02
It's that 45 mile per hour, five lane strip of asphalt that runs through every suburb in America.
26:07
You know the one that has a Jiffy Lube and Arby's, a mattress mattress firm and a Home Depot.
26:12
Used to have a Bed Bath and Beyond, but now just Beyond.
26:15
It has wide lanes so you feel comfortable driving fast, but it also
26:19
has a driveway every 50 feet and you wonder who lives on these things that would want to back out into this nightmare every morning to go to work.
26:26
Yeah, this is like kind of the futon of transportation, right?
26:29
It's a terrible couch.
26:31
It's a terrible bed.
26:33
It fails at moving traffic because there are red lights every quarter mile and people constantly turning into Chick-fil-A.
26:40
And then it fails as a place because nobody in their right mind wants to actually walk there.
26:46
You can't ride a bike there.
26:48
It's loud.
26:48
It's hot.
26:49
And it feels like you're going to die.
26:51
You don't see people having a romantic dinner on the patio of an Applebee's facing a six-lane strode.
26:57
And sadly, that failure is not just aesthetic, right?
27:00
It's not just that it looks bad and it's just creates an awful mess.
27:04
It's actually lethal from a safety standpoint.
27:07
Strode's are killing fields.
27:09
uh mean, it's it's Frogger writ large in the real world.
27:14
You got cars moving at lethal speeds, 45, 50 miles an hour, mixing with cars that are slowing down to turn right into that Chick-fil-A or stopped and formed a new lane, a new
27:23
takeout lane from the Chick-fil-A or pulling out of a driveway into traffic.
27:27
That differential is in speed, combined with the complexity of all the moving parts is what causes crashes.
27:35
Statistically, strode are the most dangerous places to drive or walk in America.
27:40
If look at pedestrian deaths, they almost always happen on these 45 mile per hour arterial strode.
27:46
Yeah, I mean, it's because the design is basically schizophrenic.
27:49
The road is wide and straight, which tells your brain, go fast, right?
27:55
It's a highway.
27:56
but the environment is full of conflict points.
27:59
People turning, people walking to the bus stop.
28:02
So the engineer puts up a sign that says 35 miles per hour, but the geometry of the road screams 60.
28:10
And when the police sit there and write tickets, and we call it safety enforcement, but really it's just bad design.
28:18
Well, we're really bagging on Strode's here and they deserve everything we're saying, but let's tie this back to the Ponzi scheme because Strode's aren't just ugly and dangerous.
28:26
They're financial black holes for the city.
28:30
Think about the infrastructure required for a Strode.
28:32
You need massive width.
28:33
You got to have five or seven lanes, including turn lanes, because you need a passing lane for when people get stopped in the Chick-fil-A line.
28:40
You need huge expensive traffic signals that hang on mast arms.
28:42
You know, those ones where it's like five lights across and they're blowing the wind all the time.
28:47
You need massive, right, just waiting to fall down on somebody's car.
28:53
You need massive drainage systems to handle the runoff from all that asphalt.
28:57
I mean, we're talking millions of dollars per mile to build and maintain a strode.
29:02
Yeah, and the argument is usually like, well, the businesses pay for it.
29:05
Look at the commerce, look at the Best Buy, look at the Olive Garden.
29:09
I don't know why we chose to mention failing businesses, but those businesses, they still pay taxes, right?
29:17
They do, although not a penny more than they have to, but again, you have to look at the yield per acre, right?
29:22
This is going back to our street that used to cover 20 businesses, and it now covers two houses.
29:28
A similar thing happens with the strode.
29:30
The strode businesses are land hogs.
29:32
They are notoriously inefficient.
29:34
Take a typical fast food franchise.
29:36
You have a tiny building, maybe 2,000 square feet, where the actual commerce happens.
29:41
But that building is surrounded by an ocean of parking, drive-through lanes, landscaping buffers.
29:47
That entire property may be one acre, but only 10 % of that acre is actually a building generating taxable value.
29:52
The rest is asphalt.
29:55
And guess how much tax asphalt pays?
29:58
It's zero.
30:01
So you have the diluted value of the land, right?
30:05
Compare that to the downtown block we talked about earlier in a downtown block, the building covers 100 % of that lot, right?
30:14
It's three stories tall.
30:15
So you have three floors of taxpaying activity stacked on top of each other, served by a very narrow street.
30:23
So on the strode,
30:25
You have a one story shack surrounded by a giant parking crater served by a massive highway.
30:32
The return on infrastructure investment for the Strode is actually pretty terrible.
30:38
But wait, there's more.
30:39
Like a dystopic infrastructure, or infomercial here.
30:43
Sorry, I'm floating slip.
30:45
Like a dystopic infomercial, big box stores also have a specific life cycle, cycle, right?
30:51
These big warehouse stores, we call it the 20 year cycle.
30:55
A big box store is built cheaply.
30:57
Have you ever looked around?
30:58
If you ever pause to look around, I know there's lots to look at when you're walking through Walmart.
31:03
But if you ever look up, they're not built, they're not high.
31:07
high quality buildings here.
31:08
We're talking about the cheapest warehouse you can throw up and a facade on the front of it that basically is not designed to last 100 years.
31:16
Not even half that.
31:17
It's designed to last about 15 to 20 years.
31:20
At the end of that cycle, guess what starts happening?
31:23
The roof leaks, the AC units falling apart, the facade's looking dated, the depreciation schedule runs out.
31:29
And so surely you might ask yourself, well, if it's generating all this money, surely the retailer will renovate it.
31:35
No, no, they don't really renovate it.
31:37
They move.
31:38
They literally just move two miles down the road to the new Strode.
31:44
The build a shiny new box, get a new tax break from the city for creating jobs.
31:52
And what happens to the old box?
31:54
Well, it just sits empty.
31:55
It becomes a zombie box.
31:57
And maybe if you're lucky, it becomes a Spirit Halloween for two months a year or an indoor trampoline park.
32:04
or an axe throwing facility or a brewery, but usually it just rots.
32:11
And here's the kicker, when that store goes dark, its tax value plummets.
32:15
Essentially just built up asphalt.
32:18
The city stops collecting the sales tax, the property tax assessment drops through the floor, but the road is still there.
32:24
The traffic lights are still there.
32:26
The pipes are still there.
32:27
The city still has to maintain that massive infrastructure that was built to serve that store, but the revenue that was paying for it is all gone.
32:34
Yeah, and also, in addition to that, the people who own the building won't lower the rent because they can write off the loss as a big loss at the end of the year and make up for
32:48
their lack of money movement in other areas.
32:52
The Ponzi scheme is like 30 levels deep.
32:55
It's basically disposable architecture served by permanent liability.
33:01
And there is an even darker scam happening right now.
33:04
Have you actually heard of the Dark Store Theory?
33:07
my gosh, can't even talk about it.
33:08
It's so frustrating.
33:09
This is legal looting.
33:10
So big retailers, and I'm not gonna name names, but they rhyme with Hall-Mart and uh Floam Depot and Slows.
33:20
And they have armies of lawyers, right?
33:23
They sue local cities to lower their property taxes.
33:27
And their argument is, hey, look, you shouldn't assess our store based upon what it costs to build or how much money we make here.
33:36
You should assess it based upon what it would be worth
33:39
if it were completely empty.
33:41
They basically argue that a functioning, bustling supercenter should be taxed at the same rate as a vacant, rotting warehouse down the street.
33:50
And they win these lawsuits.
33:51
That's the crazy part.
33:52
I'll never forget when I found out this was a real thing.
33:54
The first time I got a letter from somebody saying offering to lower my property assessment.
33:59
They basically forced these cities to return millions of dollars in taxes.
34:04
So not only are they low yield to begin with, right?
34:06
Because they're spread out.
34:07
They're all supported by these asphalt worthless patches of land, but they're actively clawing back the money they did pay, right?
34:14
They're willing to pay high paid lawyers to go after this.
34:17
So you know there's something there, right?
34:19
They don't pay high phone.
34:20
powered lawyers for nothing.
34:21
ah meanwhile, the local pizza place downtown, the one that can't afford a lawyer, they're paying full price for their land.
34:30
Yeah, so let's zoom out here, right?
34:32
You drive down a strode, you see neon signs, you see packed parking lots, you see new pavement.
34:39
Your brain says, this is a place of wealth.
34:42
This is prosperity.
34:45
But your brain is really lying to you.
34:47
What you are seeing is the same sugar high that we talked about earlier that the city council sees of the first life cycle.
34:54
You're seeing the cash flow before the maintenance bill comes due.
34:58
It's the cotton candy illusion of wealth, right?
35:02
It looks delicious.
35:03
The first few bites taste good.
35:04
You power your way through it until you get a stomach ache.
35:06
And then five minutes later, you're actually still hungry because you didn't get any nutritional value out of it.
35:11
Sorry, the slide for the dentists out there.
35:14
We've traded the permanent wealth of walkable mixed use cities, right?
35:18
Those vibrant collisions of culture and beautiful patchwork, wealth that grows over generations.
35:26
for the disposable short-term cashflow of the auto-oriented strip.
35:30
And when I say auto-oriented, that's literally about the cars, right?
35:34
Our culture is built around cars and has been for many years now.
35:38
We're literally stripping the value out of our land to park cars on worthless asphalt.
35:43
In many American cities, if you look at a satellite map, 40 to 50 % of the downtown land area is surface parking.
35:49
Dead space produces nothing, like a gap tooth in the smile of the city.
35:55
And we mandate this.
35:56
That's the crazy part.
35:57
Like if you want to open a small business, like let's say I want to open up a coffee shop in a suburb.
36:03
The city code requires me to build a certain number of parking spots, parking minimums, the city says.
36:10
Joshua, you can't open this business unless you have 3000 square feet of land for cars that might not even show up.
36:16
They're forcing me to waste this land.
36:20
They're forcing me to lower the tax yield of my own property.
36:26
And speaking of that local pizza parlor, I actually work with a local pizza joint with a single location.
36:31
And they can't open up in the store next to them, the storefront next to them, they built out a whole dining area and they can't even open it up because the city won't let them
36:38
because there's not enough parking allocated to that area.
36:41
So people have to stand in line and stand and wait while they're waiting for their pizzas to be cooked.
36:45
Thankfully they're cooked very fast there, but they're still standing around waiting because the city won't let them open up the dining area.
36:51
And all this connects back to the housing trap.
36:53
Because the stroad isn't just about shopping.
36:56
It's the only way to get to your houses, right?
36:57
The only way to get home is to follow the stroad.
37:01
We have designed a system where you cannot survive without a car.
37:05
One that forces every single family to buy into the Ponzi scheme.
37:09
So now your price of ownership, your table stakes to getting into the Ponzi scheme is that you have to own a car, which is a depreciating asset that costs you $10,000 a year.
37:20
That is a tax.
37:22
It's a massive private tax on every household imposed by bad urban design.
37:27
So we have insolvent roads, have commercial disposable strips, and now we have to talk about the holy grail.
37:37
The thing that everyone moves to the suburbs for, the detached single-family home, the yard, the fence, surely, surely the housing market is safe.
37:51
Surely our homes are good investments for the city.
37:54
Joshua, I have more bad news.
37:56
The American dream turns into the American nightmare.
37:59
The housing is the biggest loser of them all.
38:01
Because when you look at the cost to run a pipe to a house on a half-acre lot versus the tax that house pays, the math is horrifying.
38:11
Yeah.
38:11
So we're going to do the math on your lawn and you're not going to like it.
38:15
It's about to get personal.
38:17
So, well, at this point you've ruined the strip mall.
38:22
You've ruined the commute.
38:24
Um, but now we're at the gates of the castle.
38:27
We're talking about the single family home, the cul-de-sac.
38:30
This is the heart of the American dream.
38:33
We're told from birth that this is the smartest investment we will ever make.
38:39
My Zillow estimate says my house has gone up in value by a, well, it was 40%.
38:45
Now it's like 22 % over the past five years.
38:49
It makes you feel rich.
38:51
The city must be getting rich off of my property taxes, right?
38:55
I mean, not my city, but surely the cities are getting rich off of these property taxes, right?
39:01
Well.
39:02
Joshua, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your house in this scenario is a charity case.
39:08
From the perspective of the city treasurer, your lovely cul-de-sac is a financial disaster, and it comes down to a simple metric.
39:15
We're back to infrastructure per capita, or to put it more simply, feet of pipe per person.
39:21
Explain that.
39:23
Think about all the physical stuff required to keep your house running.
39:26
You have water, got sewer, electricity, gas if you're lucky, storm drains, asphalt, sidewalks if you're really lucky.
39:34
All of that is linear.
39:35
It runs in a line down the street.
39:38
In a cul-de-sac you have wide lots, right?
39:40
That's the whole beauty of the cul-de-sac, so you can put that pool in that you always wanted.
39:44
You have maybe 100 feet of frontage.
39:46
That means for your specific house, the city has to maintain 100 feet of road, 100 feet of water main.
39:52
100 feet of sewer line.
39:54
And who's paying for that 100 feet?
39:56
Just you, just the one family.
39:58
Okay, compare that to the traditional city block we talked about.
40:02
In the traditional city, think of a row of townhouses or a pre-war neighborhood.
40:06
The lots are narrower.
40:07
You got maybe 25 to 30 feet of frontage.
40:10
That same hundred feet of pipe is not serving one family, but three or four families.
40:14
You have three times as many people chipping in to pay for the maintenance of the same length of pipe.
40:19
It's the difference between three people splitting a dinner check or you paying the whole bill yourself.
40:24
Suburbia is the municipal equivalent of dining alone and paying for the whole table.
40:29
And the taxes don't make up for it because people in the suburbs usually pay higher property taxes in absolute dollars than people in smaller, older homes.
40:39
My tax bill is much lower in Oklahoma than it was in Texas.
40:46
But if the guy in the townhouse pays half of that, doesn't that cover it?
40:53
Again, we're talking about, and this is the great illusion, right?
40:57
um You're paying more, yes, but you're consuming exponentially more.
41:01
So think about it, if it's three families to one family, your tax bill would need to be three times the tax bill of the smaller older homes just to get started, and we're not
41:10
there, right?
41:12
So you pay more, but you consume exponentially more.
41:14
Strong towns analyze this in a city near and dear to both of our hearts, Lafayette, Louisiana.
41:20
They looked at the replacement cost of the infrastructure serving suburban homes to actually break even to save enough money to replace the road and the pipes when they rot
41:29
in 30 years, which is just a physical fact.
41:32
These roads are going to fall apart eventually.
41:34
The suburban homeowners taxes would need to increase something like $9,000 a year.
41:40
You're paying $5,000.
41:41
You should be paying $14,000.
41:44
The gap, that $9,000 deficit, is being subsidized by the city taking on debt.
41:49
or by stealing money from downtown districts.
41:51
This is the part that actually makes me angry because the narrative is always that the suburbs are independent.
41:58
We moved out here to get away from the city.
42:00
We don't want to pay for the city's problems.
42:03
But mathematically, the suburbs are the dependent ones.
42:06
The dense, poor inner city neighborhoods where the infrastructure is old, the roads are narrow, the houses are close together, those neighborhoods are solvent.
42:16
They generate more tax revenue per foot of pipe.
42:20
than they cost to maintain.
42:22
They are literally running a profit, and the city takes that profit and uses it to pave the cul-de-sacs in the wealthy neighborhoods which are running at a loss.
42:31
like a reverse Robin Hood.
42:33
The poor living in dense, efficient neighborhoods are subsidized in the lifestyles of the quote unquote rich who are living in the spread out, inefficient neighborhoods.
42:42
But because of way municipal budgets are mushed together in one big pot, nobody actually sees it.
42:47
It's all hidden in the quote unquote general fund.
42:50
If we send every neighborhood a bill for their specific infrastructure, the suburbs would go bankrupt overnight.
42:57
So, how did we get addicted to this?
43:00
If it's such a bad deal, why did we start building this way?
43:03
Because before World War II, we didn't do this.
43:06
We built towns, we built grids.
43:09
What changed?
43:10
All right, stick with me here.
43:11
This is a little bit, a little bit complicated.
43:14
The federal government and dry.
43:16
Yes.
43:16
All right.
43:17
Two of our favorite things on a podcast.
43:19
The federal government put his thumb on the scale is the short answer in a way that sounds again, sounds good from the beginning.
43:25
When you read it and you're like, Oh, this is great.
43:26
We have after World War II, we've got all these soldiers returning home and they need a place to live and a place to work.
43:32
And so we have the GI bill that lets them go to college and get trained on the new, technologies that that are happening.
43:39
And then we have the Federal Housing Administration to make sure that they can get a house.
43:42
The government wants to create housing for veterans.
43:45
I mean, could be more noble than that, right?
43:47
But they created rules for the mortgages.
43:50
The FHA says, we'll ensure your mortgages, thanks, but only if the house meets our criteria.
43:55
And the criteria favored new construction, single-family detached homes.
44:00
The American dream, right?
44:02
If you're not building the America dream, we're not interested.
44:06
But these are outside the city code and they literally redlined the old mixed use neighborhoods.
44:10
They declared them risky and they declared the new sprawling suburbs safe.
44:15
So the banks stopped lending in the city and started spraying money into cornfields.
44:21
And then we built the interstate highway system.
44:25
The federal government paid 90 % of the cost to build massive highways through the middle of cities.
44:31
It destroyed neighborhoods.
44:33
It destroyed suburbs within neighborhoods to make an easy commute to the new suburbs.
44:42
It was a massive subsidy.
44:44
We basically paid people to leave the city.
44:48
And here's the crucial part relative to the Ponzi scheme.
44:51
The feds paid to build it, but they do not pay to maintain it.
44:56
So again, like Bob coming in with their new roads, we'll put in your new roads.
44:59
We'll shoulder most of the cost.
45:02
But when they break, hey, you bought it.
45:06
So.
45:06
ah
45:08
The federal government is going to write a check to build a new highway interchange or the new sewer expansion.
45:12
The mayor cuts the ribbon.
45:13
Everybody takes their photo up.
45:14
Thanks, Uncle Sam.
45:16
But 30 years later, when that interchange cracks, Uncle Sam is gone.
45:20
The maintenance falls 100 % of the local taxpayers.
45:23
We accepted a free gift that costs millions of dollars to keep.
45:27
It's like someone giving you an elephant, saying, hey, it's a free elephant.
45:31
Look, it's beautiful.
45:32
This best elephant money can buy it, and I'll give it to you free.
45:35
But then you realize after they walk away,
45:38
that it costs 400 pounds of food a day for the next 40 years to feed that elephant.
45:43
And now that elephant's hungry because most of this infrastructure was built in two big waves, the post-war boom, the 1950s to 1960s, and then the housing bubble from the 1990s
45:56
to the 2000s.
45:57
And those warranties are expiring right now.
46:00
Those pipes laid in 1960, they're bursting.
46:03
The roads paved in 1995 are crumbling and cities are realizing that they have zero money in the bank to fix it.
46:11
And it doesn't cost peanuts to fix these, this infrastructure.
46:15
Uh, this is why your water bill is doubling.
46:17
Literally.
46:18
I've seen it happen.
46:19
It's very painful.
46:21
This is why your property taxes are skyrocketing.
46:23
Also saw that.
46:25
This is why there are potholes that swallow cars often in the inner city, which is technically could pay for these things if not for the burden of the suburbs.
46:33
But the growth machine has virtually stopped.
46:36
We can't grow our way out of it anymore because we've run out of land or the market is cool.
46:41
The Ponzi schemes run out of new investors.
46:43
And remember, these new investors and these new payments, they're exponential.
46:46
They're not just linear.
46:48
So now the investors who are us, we're left holding the bag.
46:54
I actually see this in my own town, right?
46:56
The city council will propose a bond, right?
47:00
Vote yes for the $50 million bond to fix roads.
47:03
And we vote yes because we hate potholes, right?
47:06
But borrowing money to fix a road is insanity, right?
47:10
A road is a depreciating asset.
47:13
It's maintenance.
47:14
You should pay for maintenance out of cashflow, not out of debt.
47:18
So borrowing 30-year money to fix a road that will only last 20 years is a death spiral.
47:24
That is using a credit card to pay for your mortgage.
47:27
And when you hit that pesky borrowing limit, then the cuts start.
47:31
And notice what gets cut.
47:33
They don't cut the road maintenance immediately because that's too visible, right?
47:36
Everybody knows where the potholes are.
47:38
And they feel them every day on their way to work.
47:40
They cut the soft services, parks, libraries, public transit, police response times.
47:48
We sacrifice quality of life to keep the asphalt on life support.
47:52
We become slaves to our own infrastructure.
47:54
And we exist just to pay for the road that lets us drive away from the house we can't afford to maintain.
47:59
bleak will.
48:01
We have built a living arrangement that bankrupts us publicly and isolates us privately, but we promised at the beginning that we wouldn't just leave people in the despair pit,
48:16
right?
48:16
Strong Towns isn't a doomer organization.
48:19
They actually have a plan.
48:20
There is a way out of this Ponzi scheme, but it requires doing the one thing that Americans hate doing the most.
48:28
Not the C word.
48:29
You mean it requires change?
48:31
Worse, it actually requires walking, uh, and it requires legalizing the old way of building.
48:38
Well, let's talk about this solution then.
48:40
How to fix your city, how to escape the trap, and why the granny flat might save the American economy.
48:47
So let's address the part where we can actually do something, right?
48:51
So we spent the last, I don't know, 30, 40 minutes or so demolishing the American suburb, right?
48:59
We called it a Ponzi scheme, we called it a suicide pact and an elephant that eats money.
49:04
If we end the episode right here, all of you out there are just gonna go lay down in traffic on the nearest road, but we promised you a way out.
49:13
Strong Towns doesn't just diagnose the cancer, they also prescribe the chemo.
49:17
So, Will, how do we stop the bleeding?
49:20
How do we make our cities solvent again without bulldozing everyone's houses?
49:25
Well, let's see if we can get through all the medical metaphors there.
49:29
The answer is actually surprisingly simple, but as you might imagine, politically difficult.
49:34
We have to do two things simultaneously.
49:36
Number one, stop the bleeding, stop building new infrastructure liabilities.
49:41
Of course, that's been our only ticket to surviving in this Ponzi scheme.
49:45
And then number two, on top of that, we have to thicken the soup.
49:48
We to increase the value of the neighborhoods we already have.
49:52
Thicken the soup.
49:53
I don't like the sound of that, honestly.
49:55
It sounds kind of gross.
49:57
But how does that translate into zoning laws?
50:00
Well, it means we have to embrace incremental development.
50:03
We need to stop betting on huge developers to build 500 homes at once and start allowing regular people to make small investments in their own property.
50:12
The silver bullet here is the ADU, the Accessory Dwelling Unit, also known as the Granny Flat or the Carriage House.
50:20
Okay, I'll bite.
50:21
Why don't we walk through the math of the granny flat?
50:24
Why does it save the city?
50:27
Okay, Joshua, you are the proverbial you here.
50:30
We live in a single family house on a quarter acre lot.
50:34
Right now, you're one taxpayer supporting that hundred feet of road.
50:38
But let's say the city changes the law to allow you to convert your garage into a studio apartment or build a small cottage in your backyard.
50:45
You've got the room for it.
50:46
So you spend $100,000 to build it and you rent it out to a grad student or to your mother-in-law.
50:52
Okay, I get riddle income, my property value goes up.
50:56
Right.
50:57
But look at it from the city's perspective.
50:59
Did they have to build a new road?
51:01
No.
51:02
Did have to run a new water main?
51:03
No.
51:04
Did have to build a new fire station?
51:06
No.
51:07
The infrastructure is already there, served by the existing services.
51:11
But now there are two households paying taxes on that same hundred feet of pipe.
51:15
So you just doubled the tax yield of that lot without adding a single penny of liability to the city.
51:20
It's kind of pure profit for the city you're living in or the municipality.
51:24
If we allowed every homeowner in the suburbs to add just one unit, just one, you could double the financial productivity of the city overnight.
51:34
We could solve the housing crisis and insolvency crisis at the same time.
51:39
Sound too good to be true?
51:41
Well, why don't we do it?
51:42
The short answer is it's illegal in almost every suburb in America.
51:46
uh Single-family zoning is a religion, right?
51:48
We talked about that.
51:49
It's the American dream.
51:51
Although we've put some pretty bad looks on it in our conversation today, the average person, that's the dream, right?
51:58
Get out there to the suburbs, own your quarter acre lot, have your yard that you can mow yourself.
52:05
If you try to convert your garage into an apartment, the zoning board is going to shut you down.
52:09
Your neighbors are going to scream, not in my backyard.
52:12
It'll ruin the character of our neighborhood.
52:14
What about parking?
52:15
yes, the Nimbys.
52:17
The character of the neighborhood, which loosely translated means I don't want poor people or renters living near me.
52:24
But the irony is the character of the neighborhood is currently financial insolvency, right?
52:31
it's champagne wishes and caviar dreams with a RC Cola and Moon Pie budget.
52:37
Lipstick on a pig.
52:39
So you can keep your character, right, and go bankrupt, or you can let a granny flat in your backyard and pave your roads.
52:48
You can't have both.
52:50
And it's not just ADUs, it's what we call the missing middle.
52:54
If you look at cities before 1940, you see a mix, right?
52:56
You see single family house next to a duplex, next to a small four-plex apartment building, next to a corner store.
53:04
That mix is incredibly resilient.
53:06
We made that mix illegal for the suburbs.
53:08
We need to re-legalize the duplex and the quadplex.
53:12
If you tear down a rotting old house, you should be able to replace it with a four-unit building.
53:16
It's a gentle density.
53:17
It's not a skyscraper.
53:18
It doesn't cast a shadow on everyone's lawn around it, but it quadruples the tax base.
53:23
It's maturing.
53:25
Cities are ultimately like forests.
53:28
There's so many cliches.
53:30
They're supposed to thicken over time.
53:33
A pioneer builds a cabin, then it becomes a house, then it becomes a shop.
53:38
We froze our cities in Amber in 1950.
53:42
We said, this subdivision shall remain exactly like this forever.
53:47
But that's not really natural.
53:48
It stops the metabolic process of the city.
53:52
We essentially need permaculture for our suburbs.
53:56
But that's how we fix the existing neighborhoods.
53:59
We also have to stop making the problem worse.
54:01
We need a fix it first policy.
54:04
That's what Strong Towns advocates for.
54:06
The city should pass a law.
54:09
We will not build any new roads or accept any new infrastructure liabilities until we can prove we have the money to maintain what we already have.
54:17
That unfortunately means telling the developers no.
54:20
When developer Steve, yeah, Bob and Steve, when Steve comes and says, look, I want to build Oakwood Meadows phase two on the edge of the town, the city has to say, look, Steve,
54:31
I'm sorry, we can't afford the road.
54:33
If you want to build it, you have to set up a private endowment to pay for the road maintenance forever.
54:39
We aren't taking ownership of it.
54:41
Or you tell Steve, we aren't expanding.
54:45
If you want to build,
54:47
Go buy that empty parking lot behind the target and build some apartments there.
54:50
Use the pipes we already have.
54:52
We have to stop horizontal expansion and start vertical infill.
54:57
But that requires a massive psychological shift, right?
55:00
We have to move from a growth mindset to a stewardship mindset.
55:03
We've been drunk on growth for 70 years.
55:05
We're addicted to the new, right?
55:08
The stroad, but stewardship is boring.
55:11
Stewardship is patching the roof.
55:13
Stewardship is fixing the sidewalk.
55:15
But stewardship is the only thing that's sustainable.
55:18
One last thing, we have to kill the stroad.
55:21
We have to go back to those dangerous, ugly arterial roads and put them on a diet.
55:25
Narrow the lanes.
55:26
plant trees on the edge, add bike lanes, make the drivers feel less safe.
55:31
Wait, make them feel less safe?
55:34
Yes, paradoxical, I know.
55:35
But when a road is wide and open, you feel safe driving 60 miles an hour, even if the speed limit is 35.
55:41
When a road is narrow and has trees near the curb, you instinctively slow down, right?
55:45
It tells your brain that there's something going on here, right?
55:48
That you don't have the space that you thought you had.
55:50
So you pay attention.
55:52
Paradoxically, making a road feel dangerous actually makes it safer and makes it a place where people might actually want to walk to a business without taking their life into
56:00
their own hands.
56:01
which again raises property value, right?
56:03
Spending money at those local businesses.
56:05
Yeah, think, you know, I don't know about you, driving along I-35, when they're doing road construction perpetually on I-35, they put up those big cement barricades.
56:19
And going 75 miles an hour feels awful unsafe when you realize that you're four inches from a barricade and four inches from the other lane.
56:29
The 18 wheeler behind you decides to pass.
56:32
Exactly.
56:33
So, so here's the reality, right?
56:34
The federal government isn't going to fix this.
56:37
They're just going to print more money for highway expansions.
56:40
The state government isn't going to fix this.
56:43
This fight is actually local, right?
56:45
This fight happens on Tuesday nights at 7 PM in the boring city council meeting that nobody ever goes to unless there's something that the community cares about as a whole.
56:57
Right, we're back to hyper local.
56:59
That's the call to action.
57:00
If you care about this, if you don't want your city to go bankrupt, and who wants that, right?
57:05
You have to show up.
57:06
You have to be the person who stands up when a new subdivision is proposed and asks, show me the long-term maintenance math.
57:12
Show me the math, right?
57:13
aah Who pays for this road in year 25?
57:16
And when they look at you blankly, you have to vote no.
57:20
And unfortunately, you have to be the person who supports the neighbor who wants to build a granny flat.
57:26
You have to be the yimby, yes, in my backyard, who understands that density isn't our enemy.
57:33
Insolvency is our enemy.
57:35
Or at least yes in my neighbor's backyard, right?
57:38
If you can't go all the way.
57:40
But this is where it all comes back.
57:41
This is actually a perfect overlap topic because we're not talking about being liberal or conservative.
57:47
Strong Towns has members from the far left and the far right.
57:50
This is about math.
57:52
Do you want a solvent city or do you want a bankrupt illusion?
57:55
I generally choose solvency, even if it means I have to share a wall with a neighbor.
58:00
So look, we have successfully ruined your commute, your house, and your view of the local strip mall.
58:07
Our work here is mostly done.
58:09
If you want to dive deeper into this, and you should because we've barely scratched the surface, go check out Strong Towns.
58:14
uh Chuck Marrone's book Strong Towns, A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity is kind of the Bible for this stuff, the Quran.
58:23
Read it.
58:24
it will change how you see the world.
58:27
I think more like to the Torah or the yeah.
58:31
just Tom Hood.
58:33
Yeah, there we go.
58:33
That's something for now that we've covered all the world's major religions Abrahamic religions.
58:39
Check out also this school.
58:41
I've watched some of these videos and it really is amazing.
58:43
There's a YouTube channel called Not Just Bikes and the host of that channel, the head of that channel does amazing videos visualizing all of this.
58:53
Yeah, you know, our town is actually allowed ADUs.
58:56
It's been met by...
58:58
sort of lukewarm response.
59:01
ah I mean, I know a couple of people have done it, but people didn't like run out to get loans to build granny sheds in the back or anything.
59:10
ah But I definitely could see how it could be, it could be a benefit in the short term.
59:15
But also I live in a, go ahead.
59:18
I was gonna say I've been saying for a while now that I think the future is in multi-generational dwellings.
59:23
And that's exactly what we're talking about here, right?
59:24
It's like having your family live close by.
59:26
There's a lot of value to it, a lot of advantages.
59:30
It's just, I don't wanna.
59:31
of lots of disadvantages, but we won't go into those.
59:34
There are some trade-offs, but at the end of the day, mean, it's an opportunity for us to rebuild a part of America that we lost due to the sort of greed and short-sightedness of
59:46
these urban planning uh units and city councils that didn't know what they were getting into.
59:51
Yeah, I mean, I moved into the country, right?
59:54
Like, and I knew that that's just there were certain trade-offs I was going to have to make because I wanted to have a garden without having to worry about city codes and I
1:00:04
wanted to have animals and these sorts of things.
1:00:07
um But some of the trade-offs that uh I have to worry about are the idea that we don't have recycling out here.
1:00:16
That was a huge thing.
1:00:18
It's like we don't have recycling.
1:00:19
And it's like, well, why don't we have recycling?
1:00:21
It doesn't make sense.
1:00:22
And when, when you call the city and you ask and you find out those things, they'll tell you, look, it just doesn't make sense.
1:00:28
We, we can't charge you the same amount that we charge everybody else to pick those things up from your house because your house is, you know, five acres from the next house, which
1:00:40
is five acres from the next house, which is 40 acres from the next house.
1:00:43
And so if we just went down your entire road in your, your, they break our area out in awards.
1:00:50
We just keep going.
1:00:51
There's only like, you know, 700 homes in your ward and it's the biggest ward, but we have thousands and thousands of homes in the other wards.
1:01:01
So the math just doesn't make sense.
1:01:02
And it was just something that we just sort of accepted, right?
1:01:05
We also don't have sewage out here.
1:01:08
We have our own septic system.
1:01:09
We don't have water.
1:01:10
We have a well, but we do have electricity and we do have fiber internet.
1:01:14
So I'm grateful for these things.
1:01:16
um But I definitely
1:01:20
can understand, you know, the there are trade-offs in this, right?
1:01:24
I mean, there's there's just trade-offs.
1:01:25
um Some people like that city life.
1:01:30
But if I had the opportunity to live in the city, but also, you know, be allowed to have a garden and be allowed to have, you know, a handful of chickens and things like that, I
1:01:41
think that that if we make those changes at a city level or at least fight for those changes at a city city level, then
1:01:50
it will make the prospect of living in the city a little better.
1:01:54
Agreed and in terms of the trade-offs, you for us, we recently moved to the mountains, which is the country, but higher up.
1:02:00
uh We also have the same problem.
1:02:03
We don't have any kind of uh no city utilities.
1:02:07
Nobody comes into our neighborhood and uh picks up our garbage out of a can.
1:02:10
So we have a little bit of extra hassle, but all we do is it just means that we bag everything up a couple of times a week.
1:02:16
And when we drive into town, which we do fairly frequently, drop the kids off at school or whatever.
1:02:22
We take a bag of trash with us and drop it off at the transfer station, which also accepts recycling.
1:02:27
So, you know, there's there's usually solutions to these sorts of problems, or at least there is here.
1:02:31
I don't know about the case in your area, but that's.
1:02:34
have a transfer station that you can drop garbage.
1:02:37
uh It's not free.
1:02:38
You do have to pay for it even if you live there.
1:02:41
It's like $16 for the first uh ton and a lot more after that.
1:02:47
And when we are going to take something to dump something large trash, we do take our recycling with us, like our cardboard boxes and aluminum cans.
1:02:54
um But we figured that the Earth benefit of recycling
1:03:03
would be outweighed by the gasoline that it takes to drive to the transfer station.
1:03:09
And the transfer station is not in a convenient place, you know.
1:03:13
Yeah, ours isn't either.
1:03:14
Actually, well, we'll say it's convenient for us.
1:03:16
I happenstance because it's on the way to my son's school.
1:03:19
So we can drop it off there, but it's still 20 miles away.
1:03:22
So we're still doing a lot of driving, but then also that helps with electric car, which is more to talk about there.
1:03:28
But anyway, we could talk about this all day.
1:03:30
So.
1:03:32
As for us, look, if you enjoyed this kind of descent into municipal madness, please do the things that keep us solvent, right?
1:03:40
Rate and review us on Apple podcasts and Spotify.
1:03:44
It really helps the algorithm finding us.
1:03:46
Share this episode with your local city council member or maybe your HOA president, despite their pleasantness or lack thereof, or that neighbor washing his truck in the red
1:03:57
F-150.
1:03:58
Actually, you know, maybe don't share it with him.
1:04:00
He seems intense.
1:04:01
You can find us out on the socials, bluesky, mastodon.
1:04:05
Come and argue with us about parking minimums.
1:04:07
We love it.
1:04:08
Visit our website for the graphs and the terrifying math we talked about today.
1:04:12
Will, do you have any final word of comfort for the suburbanites listening?
1:04:16
I just want to say that we'll probably re-release this as a Halloween episode with all the horrible things we talked about in the horrific descriptions, and the corn mazes and all
1:04:24
that sort of stuff.
1:04:25
just remember, the lawn is a lie.
1:04:28
Plant a garden.
1:04:29
There it is.
1:04:30
The lawn is a lie.
1:04:31
Thanks for listening everybody.
1:04:32
We'll see you next week.
1:04:33
uh Don't buy a house in a swamp and watch out for the strode.
1:04:37
Strode!
1:04:38
Struds.