Without having read anything:
1. What level of government are we actually talking about? Lumping cities like Vienna with towns like Heebieville is a short road to nowhere. What, for the purposes of this discussion, is a "city"?
2. Is the sprawl actually unaffordable, or do Americans just not want to pay the necessary taxes?
3. Are American "cities" in fact broke? More so than equivalent "cities" elsewhere (if such even exist).
4. The costs of building and maintaining infrastructure will vary substantially with topography, climate, geology, ecology.
I am a bit baffled about the reasons why American cities are suffering simultaneously from an out-of-control growth in residential sprawl that is incurring a huge and unpayable infrastructure maintenance debt, and from a crippling and stifling planning system that makes it all but impossible to build the houses that the people in the city desperately need.
And I'm also not sure why "city governments spend too much on new build infrastructure and not enough on maintenance" is a sign of a structural problem in American urbanism, rather than just a sign that local politicians aren't very good.
We have a local dead-end road with five houses on it, its very steep and the slope needs shoring up. Over a million bucks just for that. For five houses.
If you make some fairly conservative assumptions about house value and tax revenue and so on, that sounds like a great deal. The property tax revenue stream from five typical US houses over the next thirty years has a net present value of $1.18 million. If the slope slides away and the houses are destroyed, that tax revenue stream goes away. And that's ignoring secondary effects - the multiplier effect from public sector spending to shore up the slope, for example; the income and sales tax revenue from the occupants of those five houses...
It's certainly a much better deal than all this dialysis we keep handing out. Some of those people aren't even economically active ffs.
The property tax revenue stream from five typical US houses over the next thirty years has a net present value of $1.18 million.
Ok, but the city - the entity actually covering the bill - only gets one third of that, with the rest going to the school system and the state. Plus, we already use that revenue to cover the costs of running the city.
Income and sales tax revenue from the people living in those houses would be great if this was a state that had income and sales tax.
Plus, we already use that revenue to cover the costs of running the city.
Yes, and you'll lose all of it if those houses fall down the side of a hill!
From the outside I think Spike has the stronger case that the city, specifically, would be better off financially if the houses fell down the side of a hill -- that said, it could be worth it for non-financial reasons. You don't want a city to be too cavalier about abandoning residents .
However, I do think this discussion helps answer the question in 2.2. It's easy to argue for ancillary benefits if the initial cost/benefit calculation isn't positive.
Spending money on infrastructure for new building out on the edges has some element of investment to it: the newly built areas get annexed to the city, and those new houses start paying city taxes. What does the city get for maintenance? OK, they do some, and while everyone complains about potholes -- our climate guarantees them -- they do get filled quite a bit. The big ticket maintenance, though, seems like we do that with buckets of federal money.
I clicked around in the links, and I don't share their rosy view of the past. Cities invested in the creation of infrastructure, and never really budgeted maintenance. They expected the future economic viability of whatever industries the community was founded to serve to take care of the future. Close the mines and Butte is in a world of hurt. Stop making the machines at a scale to win a World War or rebuild after one, and Detroit is in trouble. Develop alternative ways to get cattle from Texas to Chicago, and Dodge City Kansas stops being what its promoters thought it could be when the railhead was built. Lots of American towns live or die based on fluctuations in oil prices.
Spike's five houses are certainly a problem. Isn't the live free or die solution to make the cul-de-sac private, and let the owners worry about shoring up the road, or not? (And more importantly, let them design and build to a different standard than the city must.)
I don't know the process, but I know that Pittsburgh has closed streets because it cost to much to maintain them. I think they buy the houses.
And I'm also not sure why "city governments spend too much on new build infrastructure and not enough on maintenance" is a sign of a structural problem in American urbanism, rather than just a sign that local politicians aren't very good.
Part of the case is that the federal government is a lot more generous on funding new roads and related infrastructure than on funding maintenance, so cities jump on the opportunities.
Another ST point not as conveyed in the OP (ST does slow-walk this a bit in my opinion because they want to be nonpartisan) is that when development is car-based and sprawling in the American model, it inherently can't pay for its maintenance and replacement, it just becomes a perpetual drain, but if it were allowed to be denser, it would pay for itself, because there would be more people and businesses paying taxes per square foot of road, per foot of water and sewage pipe, etc., and the regular taxes they pay would keep maintaining the neighborhood and even bringing in surpluses over the maintenance for more parks and whatnot.
And in that context it makes sense the federal government got into this mode of paying for the starting infrastructure, because in that older model it would have been a net long-term gain. But if it's propping up exurbia it's a problem.
In the past I found a detailed consultant's report for I think the Toronto metro area (or somewhere in Ontario, but definitely not the Halifax study with the great graphic) looking at this question in more seemingly-rigorous detail than the case studies ST cites. It did find that under certain assumptions, denser new development could pay for itself without new fees or what have you. However I've lost the link.
Isn't the live free or die solution to make the cul-de-sac private, and let the owners worry about shoring up the road, or not?
No, the live free or die solution is to enjoy a private advantage and stick the public with the cost.
(And more importantly, let them design and build to a different standard than the city must.)
This being a non-standard road is actually part of the problem. The road was laid out in 1836 and is by far the steepest in town, and does not conform with current standards for steepness.
To be clear, the city isn't going to make it any less steep at this point, just trying to keep it from falling into the ravine.
Why not let it fall into the ravine?
Is there a puppy at the bottom of the ravine?
Personally, I think the real fraud is the pensions. You hire a bunch of teachers and public servants and offer them nice pensions. The resulting schools and services attract residents, resulting in growth. You use the "growth" as evidence to skimp on funding the pensions. Then, when the growth stops, having educated your kids and earned money in a city that supported good industry, you fuck off to Florida and leave the pension debt for the next generation.
As usual, land value tax would solve this.
The old people made us drop the land value tax because it cut the prices of their very nice houses they needed to sell before fucking off to Florida.
Another ST point not as conveyed in the OP (ST does slow-walk this a bit in my opinion because they want to be nonpartisan) is that when development is car-based and sprawling in the American model, it inherently can't pay for its maintenance and replacement, it just becomes a perpetual drain, but if it were allowed to be denser, it would pay for itself, because there would be more people and businesses paying taxes per square foot of road, per foot of water and sewage pipe, etc., and the regular taxes they pay would keep maintaining the neighborhood and even bringing in surpluses over the maintenance for more parks and whatnot.
This is a good point but I wonder about it. There's a shipbuilding saying that "steel is cheap and air is free" - well, pipe is cheap, and I would be prepared to believe that "amount of pipe needed" is not the determining factor in the infrastructure cost of a development. If I want to build 60 new houses in a field somewhere, it's going to be pretty easy to dig a trench for the utilities through the middle of said field. If I want to build a 60-unit tower block in the middle of a city, putting in the sewage lines etc suddenly becomes rather more of an effort. I'm also not even sure whether pipe fails at a flat rate, or whether the failures have more to do with, say, being buried under a busy city road with lots of heavy traffic rolling over it. Similarly, heavier use will dig holes in a road faster, so even if there's less road the maintenance bill may be as high.
tldr the metric that matters may not be "dollar of tax per square foot of road" but "dollar of tax per dollar of incurred maintenance cost" which is not as easy to estimate.
whether pipe fails at a flat rate
Yes, the flatter it gets, the more it fails.
Cities invested in the creation of infrastructure, and never really budgeted maintenance. They expected the future economic viability of whatever industries the community was founded to serve to take care of the future.
What this brings to mind is the cost disease thing. It's conceivable that building infrastructure is mostly about buying stuff - steel and stone and machinery - while maintaining it is mostly about buying labour. Makes sense, right? It takes less stuff to maintain a bridge than it does to build it.
And what's happened over the last 70 years or so is the continuing slow increase in the cost of labour vs the cost of stuff...
21: Yes, but pipe is one of a couple of dozen outlay areas where this logic applies - the point is it all adds up, per the graphic from Halifax in my link in 12. Not just infrastructure, but also mobile services like police, fire, ambulances, garbage are far less efficient when they have long distances to travel between each service point.
That said, the big one ST harps on is roads, because they're not too expensive to maintain, but eventually they need replacing and that's a big lump of expense that doesn't first arise until long after the city is committed to suburbanization.
If I want to build 60 new houses in a field somewhere, it's going to be pretty easy to dig a trench for the utilities through the middle of said field. If I want to build a 60-unit tower block in the middle of a city, putting in the sewage lines etc. suddenly becomes rather more of an effort.
I'm talking out of my ass now, but surely in a city you will be connecting to capacious sewage lines nearby that already exist, and while you will need a bigger pipe it will be much shorter - middle of the tower block to somewhere in a street it faces. It's more complex, but I bet it works out to less cost per person.
"the federal government is a lot more generous on funding new roads and related infrastructure than on funding maintenance"
The NIH went through a period of funding fancy new databases and tools but of course grant reviewers almost never approved funding for maintaining or improving these so they gradually fell apart or shut down. I asked the NIH director about this once at a Q&A session and he said yeah, some of those are just going to disappear because we can't fund upkeep alongside new builds.
Our local transit system just put out a resort that fixing everything that's broken- not even expanding to new coverage- will be about $24B. When people freaked out they backtracked and said Oh that's a planning number, we're not actually asking for that much.
"Close the mines and Butte is in a world of hurt"
A world of Butte hurt?
Resort/report. Maybe the problem is too many new casinos.
The gas lines in my neighborhood are all being replaced. Street after street, over several years. None of the houses blew up or anything (they have in other areas), but I think the lines just reached the end of their life. Something similar happened to the water lines near my office, but that's a city utility and there's no money for a replacing before it breaks. So there are many outages and half-assed repairs.
One of the repairs was triggered be me. I saw a small hole at the bottom of a pothole. I couldn't see the bottom so I called the city. They tore up the street to find a big gap eroded by a leaking water line.
26: The Kennedy school put out a report a few years ago saying that the auto-based economy costs the state $64 billion. I didn't look into the details enough to know whether I buy their assumptions https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/01/massachusetts-car-economy-costs-64-billion-study-finds/
But I do think that we view the status quo of roads and people driving as "free" and see trains as "expensive"
If I were ever really rich, I would leave some money to an organization as an endowment for maintenance and operating expenses.
Cities like mine and SP's that were pretty much fully built out before automobiles are definitely in a different category here than expanding exurbs.
To ajay's 21 and Moby's 28, the local utility is also replacing the gas lines here, one street at a time, and they did my street earlier this year. While I'm sure there are some scale improvements, it certainly looked like much of the work was the linear part of the trenching and laying the new line (the house-to-house connections seemed to be much faster).
29: Holy shit, nice work.
25 is correct. One of the reasons greenfield development looks cheaper, even aside from fudging future costs/taxes, is that building a single family house in a built-up city really is more expensive than a single family house in a field, because the infra is complicated (most likely a vacant lot in the city once held a house, meaning there's a basement that was backfilled, plus old pipes etc that weren't properly cleaned out).
But that's just a reason not to be building detached houses in cities, which are suboptimal anyway (they're all but incompatible with walkability, which means everyone has cars, which is a downward spiral for urban livability in general). As Minivet says, the infrastructure costs for a 60 unit building are pretty modest on a per-unit basis.
One thing that I don't believe ST talks about is that urban infra, and streets in particular, is more efficient not just due to density, but due to the way city circulation works. Suburban development is almost always designed to prevent usage by anyone but residents (and service providers to those residents). So you build a half mile of road to serve 25 houses, and there's no larger benefit. Whereas urban streets generally interconnect and allow usage for purposes other than getting residents to their homes. It's not a direct economic gain, but it simply means that any given stretch of road is benefitting more people above and beyond the literal density increase.
Chuck Marohn spoke at our recent housing summit and was very interesting. He didn't talk as much about the road and infrastructure stuff as I gather he usually does since the focus of the event was on housing, but he did touch on it some. I'm not sure I buy the ST analysis completely but there's certainly some useful insights there.
33: Good point - although ideally big freight will not be going through most city streets either (amazing self-kneecapping by Seattle here), plenty of other commerce can and should.
And federal homebuilding standards made this even worse by encouraging the cul-de-sac model from I think the 40's or earlier!
He's coming back in the spring for something or other so if anyone has specific questions for him let me know.
32.1: It was on Craig by CMU. There were at least two other sinkholes on that stretch.
'Our local transit system just put out a resort that fixing everything that's broken- not even expanding to new coverage- will be about $24B. When people freaked out they backtracked"
Ah, so it clearly wasn't their *last* resort.
36: yes! The OP question. In other countries that better align with the ST premise - fewer administrative hurdles to dense growth, less car-dependency, etc, - are the cities actually more solvent and better able to stay on top of their infrastructure?
39: When one looks at what a lot of European cities have done with their streets it sure looks like they have more habitual surplus they can spend on improvements. But I mostly just see the high points (Hidalgo's Paris, etc.) so that could be highly misleading. And I'm sure the cities' financing streams, revenue sharing with regional and national levels, etc. look extremely different.
39: Thanks! I'll ask him if I get a chance. I'm not sure exactly what he's coming up for but I'm generally involved in related policy circles so I suspect I will be invited.
Pretty sure Paris is subsidized by the rest of France, at least it was in the nineties. There was an NYT piece in 1992, "Why Paris Works" that goes into some detail. Generally, citiy governments have better relations with regional/national governments in Europe than city-state relations in the US.
Maybe the general principles alluded to here about intrinsic cost of sprawl are more important in some cases, but I think there's an elephant in the room: How do the hostile micro-jurisdictions that have their own police and school tax and exclusion rules affect Philly or St Louis?
On a tangent, I'm sure the replacement of gas lines is long-planned and leaving them to decay is not good, but it does feel weird to be investing in gas infrastructure in 2023, as more things shift to electricity (heat pumps, induction stoves, and the like) and gas looks worse than it used to due to leakage issues (which happen at all stages, so just keeping the residential lines less leaky only helps a little). A recent house built from scratch near me this year (teardown of the old house) strangely went all-in on gas... but also had air conditioning, so they were 90% of the way to a heat pump anyway!
How do the hostile micro-jurisdictions that have their own police and school tax and exclusion rules affect Philly or St Louis?
That's definitely a big part of the divide too; I feel like ST skirts that to talk about the risks the development model poses even to those exclusionary communities. When asked why the model hasn't fallen apart after so long, they point to the cities being further subsidized by taking a chunk (transfer taxes, property taxes) of the increasingly unaffordable home values. Which does I think explain part of it, but those areas still feel "nice" to most residents; the infrastructure debt may be growing, it may be harder to add new parks than before or some such, but that's still more theoretical. The bedroom communities are still skimming a ton of economic surplus off the metro areas they depend on.
("It's like I declared my bedroom an independent jurisdiction and when we needed food said 'That's a kitchen issue,' but I still went to the kitchen to eat whatever I wanted." Paraphrased from Twitter.)
(I would add they don't have to be micro-jurisdictions. There are exclusionary suburbs with populations of 100k+.)
My wife has been getting into Strongtown, since they're positively referenced from Not Just Bikes and other transportation podcasts, which she's now enjoying.
I think MC did a good job of asking pointed questions in 1 -- particularly #2 about sprawl's sustainability. I think that the answer goes both ways - we are a wealthy enough nation that we could choose to tax ourselves to fix longer and longer runs of utilities, and their maintenance in perpetuity -- but the decision when made wasn't ever really presented as a tradeoff. "Here's some free money for growth" encourages very different behavior than giving a jurisdiction the cash to spend on the system as needed.
Our local downtown won a big upgrade/utility repair grant, which they hope will spur developers to actually build, rather than continuing to stall in the concept phase. Part of the delay was that developers have to improve the streets in front of their developments to the city specified standard (or pay in lieu fees to hire the city to do so) -- which means there are awkward stretches of street where east bound traffic goes from 2 lanes, to 3, to 1, in just a mile. And the far side of the street often doesn't match - it's waiting on a developer to install their features, even though it may be owned by a farmer who isn't looking to develop anytime soon. With the city investing in the infrastructure upgrade, the cost to redevelop old hotels, office buildings, etc. goes way down - so fingers crossed that they'll actually move on to building as they realize the greatly reduced expense.
On the general subject, this just came out today and I'm looking forward to reading it: Exclusionary by Design: An Investigation of Zoning's Use as a Tool of Race, Class, and Family Exclusion in Boston's Suburbs, 1920 to Today.
----
This research finds widespread evidence that over the past 100 years, zoning has been used by cities and towns across Greater Boston as a tool for excluding certain groups of people, including:
• Racial minorities, especially Black residents
• Lower-income and working-class residents
• Families with school-aged children
• Religious minorities
• Immigrants
• And, in some cases, any newcomers/outsiders at all
• Perhaps most surprising among these findings is that the evidence of direct racial discrimination is stronger for a later period of zoning restrictions--during the Big Downzone of the late 1960s and early 1970s--than it is for the first wave of zoning adoption during the 1920s and 1930s.
• During the first wave of zoning adoption beginning in the 1920s, Greater Boston was overwhelmingly White... Much of the exclusionary intent in the early period was directed at religious minorities, like Catholic and Jewish families, and working-class European immigrants.
Our local downtown won a big upgrade/utility repair grant, which they hope will spur developers to actually build, rather than continuing to stall in the concept phase. Part of the delay was that developers have to improve the streets in front of their developments to the city specified standard (or pay in lieu fees to hire the city to do so) -- which means there are awkward stretches of street where east bound traffic goes from 2 lanes, to 3, to 1, in just a mile. And the far side of the street often doesn't match - it's waiting on a developer to install their features, even though it may be owned by a farmer who isn't looking to develop anytime soon. With the city investing in the infrastructure upgrade, the cost to redevelop old hotels, office buildings, etc. goes way down - so fingers crossed that they'll actually move on to building as they realize the greatly reduced expense.
This has been a big issue in the housing conversation here as well. We put some money into a competitive grant application that may be able to address some of it at least for affordable housing development.
New report on exclusionary zoning in the Boston suburbs just dropped.
Damn, I was going for speed and you beat me to it.
I shouldn't have gotten bogged down watching the video. Its a good video!
• Perhaps most surprising among these findings is that the evidence of direct racial discrimination is stronger for a later period of zoning restrictions--during the Big Downzone of the late 1960s and early 1970s--than it is for the first wave of zoning adoption during the 1920s and 1930s.
• During the first wave of zoning adoption beginning in the 1920s, Greater Boston was overwhelmingly White... Much of the exclusionary intent in the early period was directed at religious minorities, like Catholic and Jewish families, and working-class European immigrants.
Yeah, there's a big element of retrojecting (?) current racial politics/discourse onto these past decisions. Especially in the BLM/1619 era, everything bad is supposed to have a racist backstory, while everything good is supposed to have a racial oppression backstory. But sometimes that wasn't the biggest concern! People make bad decisions for many reasons.
You often see this when non-planners talk about red-lining: a firm belief that red-lining was primarily about race, that it created, rather than reflected, segregation, and that it was all ulterior motive (ie that there was no legitimate concern about, say, run-down commercial districts). To be clear, red-lining was bad, and a lot of racism was baked into it, often with malign intent (DC was a Southern city, after all), but the simplistic story gets many things wrong in ways that are borderline disinforming.
One thing that's frequently misunderstood/gotten backwards is that American anti-apartment prejudice is old, deep, and completely predating significant urban Black populations. I personally suspect that it even predates anti-immigrant sentiment*, if only because I'm not aware of any time in US history when apartments weren't viewed as inferior to SFH (albeit mostly attached back then).
Again, to be clear, that doesn't mean that anti-apartment sentiment is rational or OK, just that I think there's a false assumption that opposition to multifamily housing is just dog whistle racism, when it's really just how Americans have always felt about it.
*which, if I'm recalling my US history correctly, rose in the '40s when the Irish started coming over in numbers. Germans, frex, were viewed askance, but prior to 1848 were either ancestral populations or not in large enough numbers to generate popular reaction.
53, 54: Agreed. Another factor that's poorly understood today is that even "racial" concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often about "degenerate" (sub-)races within the overall "white race" and the threat they posed to the "better" sort of white people, rather than about non-white people at all. This was behind a lot of eugenics and anti-immigration sentiment. Nell Painter's History of White People is good on this.
I got lots of problems with white people.
But not enough drive to write a whole book about them.
I personally suspect that it even predates anti-immigrant sentiment*, if only because I'm not aware of any time in US history when apartments weren't viewed as inferior to SFH (albeit mostly attached back then).
Probably correct, but it all flows together. (The report I was quoting from said there was also racial intent in the 1920's downzoning, it just wasn't as prominent as ethnic intent.) It was only well after the rise and even domination of anti-immigrant sentiment that there came to be any apartment bans - Euclid v. Ambler was two years after the Johnson-Reed Act. A lot of early experiments with zoning pre-Euclid were in places where it was racial: in 1917 the Supreme Court struck down explicitly racial zoning in Louisville, and the kind from Berkeley that became more of a national model was more anti-Chinese.
Also another effect of even early single-family zoning was to ban the kinds of detached homes immigrants were often building for themselves, like multiple homes clustered on one lot.
That person I previously quoted advising extra-high fire standards for apartments and extra-low standards for detached homes, back in the 1900s or 1910s I think, was doing so on the foundation of a belief that the Supreme Court would certainly strike down any laws simply banning apartments. Turned out he was wrong.
54* You don't have to look far to find anti-non-WASP statements from people like Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson. Franklin didn't think Swedes were white enough.
Then you have your swamp yankees.
And this is good old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.
You got a lot of jokes about intra-white racism in last decade's comedies - Parks & Rec, Community, etc. Usually shown in old people. I'm of two minds about it because it's kind of all things to all people - it lets some think "If he thinks that about Finns, I shudder what he thinks of Black people!" and others "Yep, us Irish had it just as rough back then."
It was only well after the rise and even domination of anti-immigrant sentiment that there came to be any apartment bans
Part of this is just that there weren't that many apartments at all until the big burst of urban development after the Civil War (which of course also coincided with the big burst of immigration). Even the biggest cities were mostly made up of single-family homes until then.
I joke with the Finnish-American draftsman who works next door about that long ago decision finding that Finns were Asians, for immigration purposes.
59. The 30 years war (Swedish attempts at large-scale conquest were a big part) was about as current to Washington as WWI is to us - 130 years then vs 110 today.
60. My then-gfs family introduced me to Bohunk as an ethnic insult-- maybe 1983?
I few weeks back I posted that long excerpt from Dred Scott about how the US imbibed English views of the humanity of people of African descent. This is more of that same: we got a lot of our ability to make ever finer distinctions on race, caste, class, etc etc as part of our patrimony.
63 The Swedes were on our side in that one, right? Against the French, anyway, another people Franklin considered too swarthy. You can take the boy out of Boston, but maybe you can't take all the Boston out of the boy.
64. Not on my side, Bohemia lost maybe 1/3 of its population.
Even the biggest cities were mostly made up of single-family homes until then.
On 4,000-square-foot lots, though?
England had their own civil war then-- I don't actually know much about the effects of either conflict on the other.
No, certainly quite dense and urban even if single-family.
No. The Swedes were allied with France (and theoretically with England and Scotland, though the Stuarts dropped out before Sweden got involved).
The Thirty Years' War was indeed very dense and many-more-than-single-family.
||
I'm home sick feeling so awful that I haven't even felt up to joining in the conversation, and I'd been excited to dig into this.
Anyway, this was announced: Apparently Heebieville State U is hosting the first presidential debate next fall. So that's not-exactly-exciting-but-still-something.
I finished season 2 of Abbott Elementary, so I guess I need to find some other way to spend this malaise.
|>
Poor Jimmy Carter. In hospice without his wife.
"I few weeks back I posted that long excerpt from Dred Scott about how the US imbibed English views of the humanity of people of African descent. "
Wait, sorry, I just realised: you were *agreeing* with it? You, a person in the year 2023, were reading the Dred Scott decision, because you were looking specifically for insight on racial relations, and thinking to yourself "you know, there is a lot really insightful stuff in here, I think I'll repost that where everyone can see"?
67: the 30 Years war was mostly over by the time the Civil Wars got started but a lot of English and Scots and Irish mercenaries came home and shared what they'd learned, often by demonstration.
73 I think a whole lot of white people in the past were wrong about the humanity of people of different races. I think Taney was overreaching when he says that no one in the past disagreed with his view. I think the belief that there are lesser breeds of human who deserve only diminished legal rights was fairly widespread in the 18th century, and bedevils us in various forms to this day.
Was Taney right when he says that the English were the worst racists of all? I don't have to have a view on that: they were certainly racist enough.
The debates at the constitutional convention surrounding the 3/5ths clause are pretty unflattering, both north and south.
Our colonial history, and our national history, are suffused with racism. Taney overstates it, but it's his conclusion -- that we must continue these traditions, no matter that we find them abhorrent -- that's most untenable.
Franklin lived in Philadelphia, an area originally settled as part of New Sweden. Anti-Swedish attitudes may well have been a thing.
I don't think Taney is telling us anything at all about the people who are descended from slaves. He's accurately reflecting an abhorrent view that was widely shared among white people at the time -- we had to have a war to change our constitution on this -- and maybe (as Taney says) yet more prevalent 80+ years earlier.
64.1: Given that the site is barely searchable now, could you point to the actual part of the text you're talking about? The Taney decision is pretty long.
I'm not very inclined to credit it if the gist is "Look at these other guys who are so much worse than us." That's the Putin playbook.
76: Point. But OTOH IIRC New Sweden was very small and gone more than a century before Franklin.
76: Philadelphia Eagles' fan threw batteries at Santa Claus. Maybe they are afraid of people from the north?
Interesting learning from the Boston report, related to my 58.last: before zoning was a thing, in 1912, Massachusetts passed a Tenement House Act that towns could opt into, that purported to be stricter fire standards, but also contained what we'd now call zoning restrictions constraining apartments in general, such as large setbacks, height restrictions, etc. The next year, they made a similar law that cities could opt into.
New Sweden was very small and gone more than a century before Franklin.
Well under a century. Don't forget how old Franklin is. Born in 1706 - set up in Philly 20 years later. New Sweden ended as a going concern in 1655, but a lot of settlers stuck around under the Dutch and then English.
Wiki says there were Swedish-speaking people in the area as late as the 1750s, which was around the time Franklin was referring to the Swedes as having a "swarthy complexion."
Franklin may well have known some descendants of Swedish settlers, but in that document he's clearly talking about Swedes in Europe.
In any case, he's being silly. Swedes grow underground, of course they're swarthy.
78 Taney wasn't saying that the English were worse than us. He's saying they are us, at least the us of the past, just before the founding documents were written. Our past is irredeemably racist. Since we're trying to stay faithful to the meaning of the founding documents, we must interpret and apply them in an irredeemably racist manner.
For ajay's benefit, I'll say again. I agree with Taney that in our colonial past, racist views were prevalent, even dominant. I do not agree with Taney that this constrains us from reading our founding documents in light of our modern understandings. Lots of people remain obsessed, though, with the we're-stuck-with-the-past view on essential questions of human rights. Some are on our Supreme Court.
I feel like you do not, in fact, have to hand it to Roger Taney.
For one thing, the kind of racism he was talking about was actually much less common in the eighteenth century than the nineteenth. Ideas about race shifted and evolved a lot over time.
Especially during that period! Again, Painter's book is good on the origins of a lot of racial ideas in the Enlightenment.
That Franklin link is a pretty solid example of eighteenth-century English racism.
Indeed. Note how it's mostly about white people.
In the land of pencils shades of gray are king.
I feel like some enterprising young conservative can easily show (1) the constitution gives rights only to white people (see Taney*), (2) Democrats clearly aren't white, (3) therefore, no rights for Democrats.
*This pays no regard to whatever Taney actually said, but as a conservative one doesn't have to.
93 There are plenty of conservatives who'd like to see the end of Wong Kim Ark.
87-88 I'll look into that. I don't often find my views darker than reality, but maybe in this case . . .
If swarth is so bad, why is there a college near Philadelphia that promotes more of it?
Quakers. Marching to the beat of a different drummer since the English Civil War.
IIRC, the Dred Scott dissents* get into the ways Taney warped history to get the result he needed to justify the decision. I can't remember if I read the whole set of opinions or just substantial parts of them; it's been a long time.** Taney also spends a lot of time trying to find a way to claim that black people could not be recognized as citizens. He may even have claimed that just because you're a citizen of Virginia, that doesn't mean you're a citizen of the United States. Whatever it took to deny black people rights, or claim that they never had rights to deny.
*Glancing at Wikipedia, I think the Curtis dissent is the one you want if you're picking just one.
**There's a relatively short collection of Dred Scott documents in the Bedford series of American history source books aimed at teaching undergraduates. I know I read that when I was a TA but didn't feel like it had enough depth, so I read more of the decision on my own. But it's a decent overview.
And Peanuts crap. Just an explosion everywhere.
Speaking of explosions, the fireworks store had a big sign reading "Your Diwali Superstore." I didn't even know Diwali had fireworks, but apparently it does.
OP link 1:
The unfunded infrastructure liabilities of U.S. cities is measured in the trillions
For the US, that's totally manageable.
They go on to cite themselves in mid-2020 saying Covid was about to pop the Ponzi. But housing starts bounced right back after the pandemic. There was a far larger fall in the GFC. If the Ponzi is a Ponzi why didn't it fold then? Was there a vast wave of city bankruptcies in the GFC?
What the final ailment for Detroit was simply doesn't matter to me. The auto-centric style of development undermined the resiliency of the city, tearing down social, political and financial strength that had made Detroit one of the world's greatest cities.
In the grand tradition of failed urban planning, details ignored in favor of theory. Detroit had one industry and died with it. All the monogorods all over the USSR died with their industries too. None of those places were auto-centric. People didn't have autos. All of those places were built with tower blocks and public transit.
Detroit had one industry and died with it.
What? The US auto industry didn't die. It continued to produce plenty of cars in and around Detroit all through the city's decline and still does.
There are some other US cities that declined as a result of the collapse of a local industry but the Detroit situation is different.
Ok! Did they go bankrupt maintaining their suburban infrastructure?
They went bankrupt because all the white people moved to the suburbs and took their money with them.
108: So, no.
Municipal bonds seem to have done just fine since 2014; a dip around Covid, a lot of turbulence since the current rate-hike cycle began. Though tbh IDK enough about bonds to have any confidence in myself here.
OTOH the defaulted municipal bond index appears to show declining interest since about 2019; but I don't see how you can separate that from Covid and interest rates.
This paper therefore examines all eight of the post-recession municipal bankruptcies (see Table 1)Yes. Eight. 8. VIII. 八. They stretch from 2009-2013; paper from 2020. If I'm reading it right that non-defaulted muni index in 109 includes over 210,000 (PDF, p.3) bond issues.
Literal municipal bankruptcies are indeed very rare. If the infrastructure cost thing is a crisis it's not one with immediately obvious effects.
112 was me. Not sure how that happened.
Our local governments are going broke. And I'm not just talking about the Harrisburgs, San Bernardinos and Detroits. I'm talking about basically all of themMore from 111.1.
Quantitative analysis of city budget data to examine the causes of bankruptcy is difficult across cities (Hendrick 2011). Not all cities use the same accounting practices and each city has its own distinctive financial structure (Sohl et al. 2009). It is therefore hard to compare the fiscal health of cities with precisionDifficult, across eight cases. Strong Towns is making claims about thousands (Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of cases. On skimming, all their cites are to their own research. The whole site smells like a cult.
And as pointed out, labor makes for an ever-rising share of costs: labor costs can vary a lot across the US, especially if you're willing to hire illegals below minimum wage.
"Taney wasn't saying that the English were worse than us. He's saying they are us, at least the us of the past, just before the founding documents were written. Our past is irredeemably racist."
But he's lying, dude. He wasn't a nice man.
111: There were more than that, but only like an order of magnitude more, still small compared to the total: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118479/bankruptcy-filings-us-chapter-9-municipality/
There are also remedies besides bankruptcy. In Pennsylvania Pittsburgh and other cities were put into a kind of state-run receivership where, and I am surely misremembering the details, financial decisions had to be okayed by a state manager. For some cities this condition lasted decades.
Ah, it's this. On that list is most large cities outside Erie and the greater southeast. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financially_Distressed_Municipalities_Act
That Harrisburg had to actually declare bankruptcy should tell you how badly they screwed things up with their incinerator plan.
117 makes sense - over here we have something similar. If a local council is catastrophically badly run (as so many are) it legally cannot go bankrupt, but it goes into something called Section 114 where it cannot incur further costs, and central government may take over management. (Local councils are legally unable to run deficits - outgoings have to match revenues every year. Section 114 is what happens when that rule gets broken.)
I think the problem here is that "bankrupt" has a very precise legal meaning. You actually have to be declared (or declare yourself) bankrupt - it's the result of a formal legal process. You can't be slightly bankrupt any more than you can be slightly married or slightly guilty.
It also has a rather vaguer everyday meaning, which is the one that is generally used - and that means anything from "heavily indebted" to "operating at a big deficit" to "likely to run out of cash reserves some time soon unless they do something". I would encourage people to use "broke" or "financially screwed" or "fiscally in the shit" or "suffering a state of acute pecuniary dysphoria" or "Detroit" for this sense.
For example, a lot of US companies that are colloquially said to have "gone bankrupt" have in fact gone into Chapter 11, which is a legal safe harbour specifically designed to stop them going bankrupt!
I can't find a good time series on this, but I'd also be curious how the share of municipal funding derived from state and federal transfers changes over time. That could hide some underlying rot. My read of recent PA budgets leads me to conclude it's actually not that large so maybe this isn't actually a concern, but more confoundingly what services are provided by which layer of government changes over time. Even if the state isn't providing to a municipality's general fund, it can still reduce its costs by, say, opting to provide for municipal police training.
118: Thanks, the media glosses that as bankruptcy, this clarifies what's happening in Birmingham.
That's *moral* bankruptcy.
119: i think Detroit was legally bankrupt. Their art was seized to pay debts to creditors.
119: also, "Ponzi scheme" has a very specific meaning but has somehow degenerated into meaning "pretty much anything the speaker dislikes", possibly as a result of the long-term campaign against US Social Security.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy is really bankruptcy is American English. Chapter 11 is to stop the business from being liquidated by using bankruptcy.
85.1: Again asking which particular parts of the decision you are referencing.
I remember the pre-2008 bankruptcy code debates and all the complaints about how bankruptcy is too easy on borrowers. At the time, I wasn't as worried about it. But that was before I developed my loathing of banks.
Also, I've not seen any research on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the really stupid lending that triggered the 2008 recession wasn't enabled by banks thinking "We've outlawed bankruptcy, so now we can get blood from turnips."
|| Oh right, "references". I hate everyone. |>
Eggplant has developed such a hatred for references that they are now refusing even to sign their own comments.
126, 128 - I have been out of the business so long that I am forgetting what Chapter 11 is. Apologies.
54, 61, belatedly: Concentrating on the US dislike of apartments (French! Ew!) misses the US *preference* for boarding houses; I think Dickens and Trollope both have Brits being slightly unnerved by how often otherwise rich and respectable USians board.
Which was not just living more densely than in a literal SFH, it was sharing servants and outsourcing their management. Kind of like GrubHub now.
I've talked about this here before, so, dcaf.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-fowered, rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house - The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port - a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck. One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph became explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely women had marched in the throng. The tiny fingerprints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name Marie. It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury - perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness - and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been
136: As I may have mentioned before, my dad boarded with a widow for something like ten years. He only stopped when he got married. After I was born, the woman he boarded with became my babysitter.
136: Good point. Also, later on in the 19th century but peaking in the early 20th, hotels of all kinds, grand to modest to seedy. And there was some moral panic on the subject (who knows what kind of guests you may be entertaining?!).
129: I swore I would never vote for Biden in a primary because of that Bankruptcy bill, and I didn't.
My great grandmother lived in the Drake Hotel in NY when she was an elderly widow. I wish I'd gone to visit before it was torn down. Sounds better than assisted living.
Margaret Thatcher spent the last years of her life in the Ritz, for similar reasons.