Last week, I had back-to-back presentations at two conferences: the Health Policy Institute of Ohio’s Health Policy Summit and the Iowa Bike Summit. I hadn’t given a talk since the Spring, and the first two I got after five months of not speaking were at two different conferences within 24 hours of each other on two opposite sides of the Midwest.
I conducted a workshop on cost-benefit analysis at the Health Policy Summit at 2pm, then flew out from John Glenn International Airport in Columbus at 9pm on Thursday, landing in Des Moines a little before midnight. But my conference was not in Des Moines, it was in Cedar Falls, Iowa, a charming town in Northeast Iowa two hours from Des Moines. So I rented a car and drove for two hours so I could try to get some rest before my presentation at noon.
While on the way, I needed to listen to something to get me in the mindset for the Bike Summit, where I would be presenting on our work on the economic impact of cycling at the county level in Iowa. I listened to a couple podcasts. One was an interview with a cyclist who had participated in a couple 200-mile single day rides (what is up with cyclists and self-punishment?). I then listened to a podcast reviewing and explaining different tire pumps hosted by engineers that went about 12 feet over my head.
After that, as my eyes were sagging trying to make the last hour to Cedar Falls, I threw on an audiobook of a book called Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. I had heard about this as a book that presents an alternate approach to understanding how North American cities developed over the past seventy years and explaining how reworking local patterns of development can lead to more sustainable communities.
I got about a third of the way through the book and I plan to listen to the rest of it so I may have different things to say about it when I am done with it. But even in the first third of the book, the author put so much that was worth talking about.
Charles Marohn, the author, is an engineer by trade, and this comes out in his writing. His approach is smart, systematic, and creative, but also suffers from reductionist historical takes. One of the themes Marohn leans on throughout the book is that community development before the second half the 20th century was “natural” and embodied a patient, thoughtful process of trial and error that better served human well-being than the top-down approach to development that became prominent in North America over the past 70 years.
A big claim Marohn makes is that economic development under the current model is built on unsustainable models of growth. If today’s infrastructure is only maintained by building more infrastructure to attract more tax base, which leads to the need for even more infrastructure than that to attract further tax base to finance that maintenance. Marohn’s critique here reminds me a lot of the critiques of Fernando Centeno, a policy analyst out of San Antonio who has written extensively about the drawbacks of the widespread model of “economic development” as it is practiced in the United States.
Both Marohn and Centeno argue that short-sighted goals have subsumed the larger public policy goals of economic development. Marohn argues that economic development as currently practiced falls into a “you win or we lose” dichotomy, where the public sector chips in with infrastructure and economic development incentives to attract economic development, ultimately taking the hit themselves if the development never materializes or dries up over a couple of decades.
His answer to this seems to be to get the public sector out of the economic development game, which is an interesting impulse. He seems skeptical of the ability of planners to direct economic development and instead thinks that incremental development based on decisions made by businesses and residents will lead to more sustainable development patterns.
He does not argue that there is no place for the public sector, however. He accepts the general consensus that the public sector has a place to play in providing infrastructure like roads and wastewater management. But he makes a bold claim, saying that the United States has too much infrastructure. He says infrastructure is considered an asset when it should be considered a liability: a responsibility of the public sector to maintain over time. He rails against the American Society of Civil Engineers, with their annual infrastructure report cards always saying the United States does not have enough infrastructure and always encouraging the public sector to build more…so civil engineers can have more work to do.
Marohn’s proposed criteria for evaluating infrastructure development is this: will the infrastructure lead to higher or lower net revenues for the municipality building them? He encourages the use of the word “profit,” saying cities should be trying to make more money than they take in, and saying that this framework will bring discipline to urban development that they currently lack.
Marohn is opinionated. He is thoughtful: he has put a lot of work into coming to the conclusions he has come to in his analysis. He still arrives at some conclusions a bit too quickly. Clearly the “model of economic development” that existed before the second half of the 20th century was by no means perfect. I think even more clearly, reducing the test for infrastructure to “maximizing the financial position of the city” ignores a key role of the public sector: to maximize social value. Say building a bridge will get people to work quicker and ambulances to elderly people’s homes faster. This will not necessarily lead to more money for the city, but it could lead to higher social value, which is a more important goal for a city than maximizing financial position. In short, sometimes a city will take a hit on an investment in their coffers in order to grow their economy, reduce poverty or inequality, improve health or education, or increase happiness.
That being said, I tend to agree with Marohn more than I disagree with him so far. Municipal government could do a lot more to discipline their development patterns. And a part of this has to be fiscal sustainability. As much as maximizing social value needs to be the north star for any public institution, managing fiscal risk is always going to be a part of that calculation. If cities can do more to manage fiscal risk over the long-term, it will help them make their communities a place where markets are dynamic, poverty and inequality are minimized, and the populace is educated, healthy, and happy.