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

If we’re going to break out of the Infrastructure Cult mentality, we would need to design our systems to respond to feedback. There is no clearer feedback on value than someone’s willingness to pay for something, yet our infrastructure funding mechanisms have a large degree of separation from the user’s willingness to pay for what they want. We all

The little shop owner thus shared a common fate with other property owners in the city. It was not a zero-sum game, where one benefits only at the expense of others. I’m not suggesting they all lived in harmony, but they had a lot of selfish incentives for altruism.

When it is reported that an infrastructure investment will save $1 trillion over the next decade, most people outside city-building industries, and a scary number of them within, assume that this means 1 trillion dollars. As in, this infrastructure investment will result in 1 trillion dollars that can be spent on something else: education, health c

by the end of World War II, it was very clear to a victorious nation what needed to happen if we wanted to keep from sliding back into economic depression: We all needed to copy the success of Detroit. That is what we did.

The public officials and professional staff in Job City might be happy to have so much employment but, without the tax base from the housing, they are not going to have much revenue to pay their bills.

The leadership class in America holds infrastructure investments in such high regard that the overwhelming benefit from new growth is simply assumed. It’s a foundational belief not open to serious examination.

Earlier in this chapter, I described the value of taking small steps in the dark and the dangers of large leaps. There is an important variation on that story that applies to situations where many people are leaping simultaneously.

Our modern development pattern – a continental-scale social experiment – was established during a period of unprecedented abundance after World War II. We were not only the sole economic superpower that wasn’t devastated by war; the biggest players in the world were indebted to us. We held the global reserve currency, we had the greatest amount of

This makes it sound like we can’t have anything nice. That is true only if we ignore the return on investment, if we don’t bother to ensure that the wealth we are creating generates sufficient revenues to cover our expenses. If we obsess about running a profit, we can have things that are very nice. Quite spectacular, in fact.