ana023: Strong Towns for Libertarians | Chuck Marohn Interview

Chuck Marohn’s “Strong Towns” philosophy has been a huge influence on our thinking. StrongTowns.org has grown from a personal blog into one of the most influential urbanist movements in America, with thousands of members and millions of readers worldwide.

Strong Towns is common sense, yet iconoclastic: Cities and towns need to manage their finances responsibly, and develop their infrastructure accordingly.

While Chuck’s prognoses may sound pessimistic, he believes that positive changes must happen at the level of the local community, rather than chasing easy money from Wall Street and Washington. This is an approach that we can get behind.

Chuck’s forthcoming book “Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity” is available for pre-order, and will be released on October 1st, 2019.

Use hashtag #ana023 to reference this episode in a tweet, post, or comment

View full show notes and links at https://anarchitecturepodcast.com/ana023

Intro

• Tim met Chuck at an event in Portsmouth NH
• Joe’s urbanism crash course
• Growth Ponzi Scheme
• Rothbard defines “Capital Goods” as goods which require maintenance
  • Land is permanent
  • Consumer goods are quickly used up
• Cities treat capital goods as consumer goods
• Strong Towns puts the meat on the bones
• Strong Towns has members from across the political spectrum
• Hope for libertarians
• “Stroad” – the “taint” of the built environment
  • ’tain’t a street, ’tain’t a road
  • …or is it a foot fungus?
• Not just about financial resiliency; it’s also about safety

Discussion

• What is a Strong Town?
  • A place that can take care of itself
  • Maintain basic infrastructure
  • “Most cities today… are insolvent”
• What makes towns fragile?
  • Post-WWII development pattern – horizontal expansion
  • Infrastructure capital costs wrapped into debt
  • Short term sugar rush for local governments
  • Repair/replacement costs come due in later generations
  • Cities chase more growth and take on more debt to cover repair costs
  • Growth Ponzi Scheme – eventually the math breaks down
  • Tradeoff between growth and stability
• This sounds a lot like the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT)
  • Fear the Boom and Bust
  • We don’t have any options that aren’t painful
• What solutions does Strong Towns propose?
  • “We have categorically rejected the idea of a solution”
  • Cities are complex adaptive systems – simple cause/effect doesn’t work
  • Solutions must emerge through feedback – can be very painful
  • Loans, Federal Grants put off the consequences
  • Good decisions can reinforce each other
• What are the roles of different actors in developing solutions?
  • “What two policies can we enact that would build Strong Towns”
  • Stop funding the local cul-de-sac from Washington DC
  • SB50 – forces expansion on certain areas
  • Libertarian at the federal/state level
  • Communal organization at the local level
  • Cities need to become competent at basic maintenance
  • Financially productive neighborhoods tend to be the most neglected, older, traditional development pattern
  • Cities need to orient themselves away from looking up the government food chain
  • Small quality of life investments have a huge payoff – street trees, crosswalks, walkability
• What if there was no city government? Does a city government have an inherent bias towards big projects?
  • Incentives are all messed up
  • When you institutionalize something, it tends to serve itself
  • Debate with Randall O’Toole – the holdout problem on a private street
  • The transaction cost problem – coercive social pressure vs. coercive government
  • Local government works best when it’s focused on the people, but has become the tool for implementing federal policy
• Government has taken the mantle of community
• The Red Button Libertarian Purity Test
• Small bets
  • Strong Towns has everyone from hardcore socialists to hardcore libertarians
  • There isn’t one path to building a Strong Town
  • Governmental localism
• It’s the best we have at this point
• The problem is the assumption that the government is the only approach
• Why do cities take on responsibility for new developments?
  • The price of your home should have factored in the maintenance costs
• User fees – low density development should pay more
  • Study in Lafayette, LA – how many times is your poop pumped?
• Baltimore – people have become accustomed to low fees that haven’t capitalized the cost of replacement
  • Utilities are local monopolies
  • Privatizing a system – closes a short term budget gap
  • “Privitazation merely runs the system the way that a competently run system should be”
• Privatization vs Privateering – from public to private monopoly
  • Private Public Partnership
  • Arizona State Capital – sold the building and rented it back
  • We should be leery of these deals – there’s not a lot of good decision making being made
• Are there any examples of successful divestiture of government responsibilities?
  • Memphis annexation to close budget gaps
  • Memphis is twice the size of Detroit, and 2/3 the people
  • De-annexation, shrinking the size of the city
  • The people being de-annexed want to be de-annexed
  • Reversion to county or unincorporated township
• Tax revenue as a proxy for success
• An inherent disconnect between tax revenue and user costs
• City council as a buyer’s group
  • Alignment between libertarians and advocates for the poor
  • Older lots – narrow, deep lots – require minimal infrastructure
  • Newer developments – more infrastructure per lot
  • The poorest neighborhoods subsidize the wealthier ones
• How do you quantify a productive area?
  • Wealth creation is the proxy for success
  • Value per acre correlates with success
  • This holds true regardless of the specific tax regime
  • Empire State building vs. trailer home
  • 1800’s planning books obsessed about value per acre
• Is density an oversimplification?
  • Yes
  • Planners love simple metrics
  • “Urban renewal is a poster child for people who thought density was the answer”
  • Correlation between public investment and private investment
  • Density is a side effect
  • Chuck’s family homestead – productive, didn’t require services
  • Core downtowns have more infrastructure, but more wealth
  • Big box stores – public investment almost as much as the private investment
  • Minimum 20:1 – 40:1 ratio of private to public investment
• Should a local small business owner (movie theater) be given a monopoly to keep out the big box chain?
  • Knee-jerk libertarian reaction – no special privileges
  • AMC benefits from the stroad subsidy
  • “People think, when we talk about the free market, that we’re talking about something that actually exists”
  • First, do no harm – take away the financial and infrastructure subsidies that prop up the big box model
  • Chuck would recommend the monopoly protection – they can always revoke it later
  • “The more things can be localized, the more our better angels tend to govern things”
  • If government can pick winners and losers – in many cases they’ll pick the corporate big box
  • The local ability to adapt and change is paramount
  • We should trust the community to support good local businesses
• Strong Towns: the book
  • 70,000 words in 6 months
  • No editing changes
  • It’s the Strong Towns story
  • Book tour
• Strong Towns has become a movement
  • “Back when I started, it was me writing a blog instead of going to a therapist”
  • Pre-2008, over 100 years of undeveloped lot supply
  • “Either I’m crazy, or the world’s crazy. I was open to either possibility.”
  • Almost 3,000 dues paying members, millions of readers
• Where’s the best place to start?
  • Link on the home page

Links/Resources

• Strong Towns
  • Newcomers page
  • Pre-order Strong Towns, the book
  • Strong Towns Podcasts
  • Connect with local Strong Towns groups
• Strong Towns Articles discussed
  • Sprawl is Not the Problem
  • Chuck’s Debate with Randal O’Toole
  • Lafayette – Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments
  • Arizona State Capitol Building – Desperate Times… Desperate (Insane) Measures?
  • Memphis’s U-Turn: How the City is Commiting to a Stronger Future – (blog and podcast episode)
  • On the Value per Acre metric: We measure car value based on miles per gallon, not miles per tank. Why don’t we do the same for our cities’ developments?
• Other people/websites mentioned
  • Joe Minicozzi – Urban3
  • Randal O’Toole’s “Antiplanner” blog
• Anarchitecture Podcast episodes mentioned:
  • ana020: The Power of Place-Based Community | Tim’s Freecoast 2018 Speech
• Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) resource page (Bob Murphy)
  • Mark Thornton’s “The Skyscraper Curse” is a great explanation of ABCT and shows the effects of the business cycle on city development
• Baltimore Votes to Become First Large U.S. City to Ban Water Privatization – Reuters
• Rothbard: Capital goods require maintenance (Man, Economy, and State, p. 484):
  We can, instead, reformulate the concept of “land.” Up to this point we have simply assumed land to be the original, nature-given factors. Now we must modify this, in keeping with our focus on the present and the future rather than the past.  Whether or not a piece of land is “originally” pure land is in fact economically immaterial, so long as whatever alterations have been made are permanent—or rather, so long as these alterations do not have to be reproduced or replaced. Land that has been irrigated by canals or altered through the chopping down of forests has become a present, permanent given. Because it is a present given, not worn out in the process of production, and not needing to be replaced, it becomes a land factor under our definition. In the ERE (evenly rotating economy), this factor will continue to give forth its natural powers unstinted and without further investment; it is therefore land in our analysis. Once this occurs, and the permanent are separated from the nonpermanent alterations, we see that the structure of production no longer stretches back infinitely in time, but comes to a close within a relatively brief span of time. The capital goods are those which are continually wearing out in the process of production and which labor and land factors must work to replace. When we consider physical wearing out and replacement, then, it becomes evident that it would not take many years for the whole capital-goods structure to collapse, if no work were done on maintenance and replacement, and this is true even in the modern, highly capitalist economy. Of course, the higher the degree of “capitalist” development and the more stages in production, the longer will it take for all the capital goods to wear out.

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