Why Galesburg Has No Money
January 16, 2022 8:08 AM   Subscribe

 
Okay, that was much more interesting than I was expecting going into it. Read to the end! Thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 8:45 AM on January 16, 2022 [8 favorites]


A lot of the details of this went over my head but I still found it interesting. It does seem like the situation could apply quite broadly, with many cities out there who have hollowed out their core in favor of luring big box stores to the edge of town with low taxes and encouraging sprawling subdivisions that look like the suburbs. It certainly sounded familiar to me in nearby Peoria.

Curious how the sudden and somewhat scandalous “temporary” closing of one of the local hospitals will affect the city, financially and otherwise.
posted by obfuscation at 8:48 AM on January 16, 2022 [4 favorites]


Great piece. And this is the truest true thing that has ever been said: "Almost no single family houses are contributing enough in property tax to support basic necessary maintenance of the street in front of their house."

An awful lot of people who live in suburban type developments with low density housing point out that they pay more property taxes than people who live in high density housing in older pre-war neighborhoods. But until you tell them, most of them have never thought about the fact that the city has to maintain a hell of a lot more road, hell of a lot more sidewalk, and a hell of a lot more sewer, which is often the most expensive part. Find out how much it costs to maintain each linear foot of residential road, sidewalk, and sewer in your town. And then find out how big pre-war lots are, and how big recent McMansion lots are. And have that fact in your pocket ready to point out to homeowners paying high property taxes on their ridiculously expensive McMansions that they are not paying nearly their share, because they consume so many expensive linear feet of city services, compared to older smaller lots, and in particular compared to apartment buildings.

Over in Peoria, about 45 minutes from Galesburg, it's quite clear that none of the new residential area the city annexed after about 1955 was built in a way that will ever be self-sustaining; the per foot costs of the road and sewer maintenance is simply too high. (And indeed, lo, Peoria is facing a billion-dollar sewer remediation project ordered by the EPA that the city cannot pay for, partly because of those sprawling exurban developments intended to keep white people from moving out of the city.) New developments are still being built this way, even though it is now abundantly clear, and people have been showing up to city council meetings for 30 years pointing out that these kinds of developments will never pay for themselves, and they will make the city more and more cash-strapped over time.

(I also have some hyper specific complaints about how Illinois allows telephone companies to charge customers different amounts based on whether they are urban, suburban, or rural, to account for the differing costs of maintenance, on the theory that a rural line requires a lot more telephone line than an urban line, but then as a practical matter people who live in exurbs and sprawl 90 minutes outside Chicago get to pay the suburban rate, while people who live in dense interior urban areas in Peoria that were given telephone service in 1893 and sometimes still have the original poles are paying the (expensive!) rural rate.)

Also I would just like to say, Galesburg's downtown is fucking charming and I am rooting for them, because it is a great little city. Also it has a beautiful historic courthouse if you ever happen to be there! It is not the most comfortable or efficient courthouse if you are actually using it for legal reasons, but it is extremely beautiful and I always found it a treat to visit.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:49 AM on January 16, 2022 [82 favorites]


...hell of a lot more sidewalk... You guys get sidewalks ? Great comments, BTW, Eyebrows Mcgee.
posted by bluefrog at 8:56 AM on January 16, 2022 [5 favorites]


It was nice to see the craftsman house example. When you evangelize housing density a lot of people get bent out of shape and assume it’s the end of all single family homes. In fact, we just need more varieties of home—don’t make it illegal to build non-McMansion houses.
posted by Monochrome at 9:01 AM on January 16, 2022 [12 favorites]


Yeah, that was great--thanks! By coincidence, just yesterday I watched this clickbait-titled yet more locally-informed than it sounds "brief history of one of the most fascinating cities in the United States, Gary, Indiana," via City Beautiful. It is what TFA would probably call a more typical story about people/industry leaving, offering fewer answers though it centers on a point about the cost of infrastructure maintenance and ends with optimism. I'd wondered what constructive solutions might look like, so I was glad to read this.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:04 AM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


I've been banging on this drum locally (if not nearly as clearly) for years. My city started to come around on this issue (encouraging infill and mixed use residential/commercial, charging more in development fees for properties farther out, preventing blocks of land in what should be dense urban areas from being developed as strip malls). We've also managed to prevent several city owned properties (including a complete central downtown block) from being turned into fricken parkades. The struggle against people who want full city services and 2 acre lots is intense but so far they've mostly been holding their own. There has been some side stepping where a developer will acquire a big block of land outside of city limits (and therefor out of city zoning and development control) and then provide all the infrastructure via a bare land strata. A couple of these are close enough to city limits that they end up trying to get incorporated into the city. But again amazingly the city has fended these off so far and several of these locations are now ghost developments as everyone moved away when the private infrastructure failed and was too expensive for the residents serviced to pay for.
posted by Mitheral at 9:16 AM on January 16, 2022 [12 favorites]


Our city already has pretty high property tax rates for a city in a state that already has pretty high property taxes. We can’t raise our property taxes, and we can’t raise any of the other taxes to make up for the difference. What is causing this and what do we do going forward?

As someone who's moved from a medium tax environment to America, Americans have a very distorted view of "pretty high" taxes. My home state of Western Australia has 2.4 million people and takes in US$10.3K per capita in revenue. My home LGA of Joondalup takes in US$622.40 per capita in their own revenue prior to intergovernmental transfers. So our SALT contribution is basically just shy of US$11K per capita.

Let's take a look at Illinois. Illinois takes in $42b in revenue on 12.67 million residents, $3,365 per capita. So already the state is less than a third of where I came from. Galesburg took in $59,698,780 in revenue in 2020 for a population of 30,000 which is about $2K per capita. The SALT contribution for a Galesburg resident is effectively $5,354 per capita. That's literally half of what someone would pay back home in Western Australia.

Most of America straight up has a revenue problem. It's been driven by years of drum beating about what minimal taxes do exist being too damn high on the back of a hangover of '80s Reaganism and too much "fuck you I got mine" among middle class and above boomers. If SALT taxes doubled dare I say the standard of living for everyone would basically improve overnight. Unemployment would drop as areas tackle their backlog of maintenance. There would be more upward pressure on wages as the government has money to hire people into better jobs. Tax receivables would go up at the same time because of all this new economic activity. Social services could be properly funded.

But nah, I guess taxes are pretty high already.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:25 AM on January 16, 2022 [62 favorites]


Any small town that has a statue of a poet with a goat as a featured landmark deserves to thrive.
posted by roger ackroyd at 9:26 AM on January 16, 2022 [8 favorites]


Your Childhood Pet Rock, I'd agree about tax rates, but if you look at what we're self-funding (health, disability, child care), it is high.

Search failing me - this ancient op-ed covers comparison w Ontario and Quebec. https://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Care-Comparison-Un-by-Kanuk-100221-791.html
posted by esoteric things at 9:50 AM on January 16, 2022 [7 favorites]


Very interesting, and good to see someone spell out with examples just how much the “big box stores fund the town” fallacy that I hear all the time. Sometimes my partner and I say “hey, what little old towns that are on railways could we move to?” Galesburg is the one we kept coming back to. It seemed to have a great history and quite a few cool old fixer-upper mansions for little money. But as we looked around street view we could see the disinvestment in downtown.
posted by Bunglegirl at 9:55 AM on January 16, 2022 [10 favorites]


I've bookmarked the article but haven't read it yet (having a bad ADHD day) but from the comments it sounds a lot like what they discuss in the Not Just Bikes video How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer.
posted by antinomia at 10:01 AM on January 16, 2022 [13 favorites]


but from the comments it sounds a lot like what they discuss in the Not Just Bikes video How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer

I was just coming here to post a link to that series. Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme from the same series goes over the same kind of numbers that the article does, and argues that most American cities remain solvent only by using ever more new development to fund themselves. A city like this one that wants to have a suburban layout and stay the same size is falling off the Ponzi treadmill into financial darkness, because a suburban layout can't pay for itself.
posted by clawsoon at 10:22 AM on January 16, 2022 [14 favorites]


"Let's take a look at Illinois. Illinois takes in $42b in revenue on 12.67 million residents, $3,365 per capita. So already the state is less than a third of where I came from. Galesburg took in $59,698,780 in revenue in 2020 for a population of 30,000 which is about $2K per capita."

Yeah, so that Illinois number is sales and income taxes (we do not have state-level property taxes); Galesburg is almost entirely funded by property taxes. That $59 million you're looking at? That's only the property tax revenues that go to the CITY of Galesburg, and that tends to be small-ish slice. Illinois has more small local units of government than any other state except Florida. The City of Galesburg gets only about 12% of the homeowner's property taxes, as she shows you when she shows you her tax bill. A Galesburg property tax bill is also going to a) Galesburg schools -- about 50% of the bill in most parts of Illinois; b) Knox County (about 12%); c) Galesburg taxes separately for fire, so that; d) the Sanitation district (sewers); e) the township, a godforsaken unit of government that no longer has any reason to exist BUT WE STILL GET TO PAY FOR IT!; f) soil and water. Those are all separate governmental entities, with separate elections, levying separate property taxes. That "$2K per capita" (which is not how this works, as it's by property value, but I digress) you've come up with by talking the City of Galesburg's numbers is actually just 12% of their local property tax bill.

Property tax bills in Central Illinois "rust belt" cities (Peoria, Galesburg) are among the highest property tax rates in the nation (Peoria topped the list almost the entire 12 years I lived there) for wildly degraded city services and struggling, underfunded schools. In a house worth about $100,000 in Peoria, I paid $3,500/year (or a full 10% of its equalized assessed value, which for residential areas downstate is 1/3 the market price of the home; it's "equalized" against agricultural property taxes, basically, although it would probably make more sense to do it the opposite way these days). When I moved to the Chicago area, people warned me about the "high property taxes." But you have to own a $300,000 house up here to start approaching those $3500 tax bills. And for that $3,500 in the Chicago suburbs, you get excellent police and fire and top-tier public schools; for $3,500 in Peoria we got a constantly-shrinking fire department closing firehouses with appalling response times and schools that couldn't afford copy paper for the Xerox machine and was using 20-year-old science textbooks because they could not afford to replace them.

Anyway, my current property taxing bodies are:
Town
Godforsaken Township
County
High School District
Elementary School District, which is separate
Community College District
Park District
Forest Preserve District
Water Reclamation District

(I also vote for elected officials for every single one of those taxing bodies.)

Every Illinois resident pays into some huge number of similar taxing bodies, so looking at just what the "town" takes in property taxes tells you very little about their property tax burden. Schools are by far the largest chunk. Cities CAN pay for libraries, parks, fire, sewers, out of their own budget, or those things CAN be separate taxing bodies with their own elected leadership, their own levies, etc.

This is actually one of the most fundamental discussions about inequality in Illinois; we rely so heavily on property taxes for school funding (and school funding takes up such an enormous portion of property taxes) that it dramatically exacerbates inequalities AND makes it very difficult for struggling cities to increase property taxes to the city to an adequate level, because the school property taxes are so high the burden becomes unaffordable. (Illinois is one of the states most reliant on local property taxes to fund schools, and we have no state equalization, it is very bad. Rich areas basically run public schools as ritzy private schools; poor areas get wildly inadequate funding support from the state.)

Anyway, Americans are undertaxed as a general thing, yes, but property taxes in central Illinois are, in fact, destructively high for the value of the homes, the wages paid by local employers, and the quality of services provided. The cities are choking to death; they have to raise property taxes to fund essential services, making them more unaffordable, so more people who can afford to do so move out, so taxes have to go up even higher. It's a death spiral.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:32 AM on January 16, 2022 [32 favorites]


So how much of the post-WWII car-positive propaganda push happened because the auto industry more-or-less won WWII for America and they wanted to keep the auto industry strong in case of WWIII?
posted by clawsoon at 10:36 AM on January 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


"It seemed to have a great history and quite a few cool old fixer-upper mansions for little money. But as we looked around street view we could see the disinvestment in downtown."

Two things Galesburg has going for it are a) it's the county seat, so it has the courthouse, which guarantees a small-but-reliable financial investment from the state to run those services; and b) it has Knox College. There's a great core of progressives in Galesburg who are attached to the college, and there's real enthusiasm for progressive policies in city development. (Not always enough to overcome more NIMBY sentiment, but ...) There's enough economic activity to prevent it from becoming a ghost town, and (without denying the very-real rundown empty storefronts) I really do find the downtown charming, with more activity and vibrancy the closer you are to the college.

Anyway, if you like Galesburg, I'd suggest visiting once when college is in session and seeing the vibrancy of the downtown then. (And then visiting in December when the students leave for the holidays and seeing if you can tolerate the winters!)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:39 AM on January 16, 2022 [10 favorites]


The range set out by Strong Towns, the organization that inspired most of this analysis

Ah, that's why the Not Just Bikes series came to mind - it was inspired by the same organization.
posted by clawsoon at 10:42 AM on January 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I started watching the Strong Towns and other modern urbanism channels over the past couple of years and they've really changed how I think about development in my town. I mean, they're talking about replacing a 70s-era eyesore of a bank and huge surface lot across from city hall and the library with a 4-5 story apartment complex with assisted living programs and all that, and on the one hand I know a lot of the neighbors are against the project because it buts up against the semi-historic district with beautiful old victorian houses, but on the other hand I know that adding density is really the only way forward. On the other hand they're talking about replacing a downtown surface lot with more residential apartments and I'm less enthusiastic about that because those lots are usually pretty full and don't have conveniently walkable replacements. I should go to the planning meeting for that to see what's on the table.

And yeah, it's frustrating talking about US taxes versus foreign taxes because it's really hard to get an apples to apples comparison. Hell, it's hard for me to wrap my head about property taxes a state away being described as destructively high when mine in Wisconsin are roughly similar feeling, and that's mostly down to how the pie is sliced.
posted by Kyol at 11:01 AM on January 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


Personally, I'd be delighted to pay more taxes in exchange for better services, public health care, etc., but that is not a majority view in this country. Nationally, there has been a clear move towards lower taxes and commensurate lower services for decades. It's not universally supported, but much more than just the lunatic fringe, and you end up with these sorry situations where places just can't sustain themselves by yanking on their own bootstraps.

Anyway, Americans are undertaxed as a general thing, yes, but property taxes in central Illinois are, in fact, destructively high for the value of the homes, the wages paid by local employers, and the quality of services provided. The cities are choking to death; they have to raise property taxes to fund essential services, making them more unaffordable, so more people who can afford to do so move out, so taxes have to go up even higher. It's a death spiral.

Living in the west, the property taxes paid in the midwest and east absolutely boggle my mind.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:16 AM on January 16, 2022 [4 favorites]


If these cities were run as "businesses" the first item on the agenda would be to sell off these "underperforming" divisions of the company. Unfortunately, these unprofitable areas seem determined to bankrupt the rest. Once the number of people in the former outnumber the ones in the latter, there's nowhere to go but down.
posted by meowzilla at 11:33 AM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


You know, there's a "divided by three" in that calculation for property tax that could be eliminated on properties which don't conform to certain development parameters, and that would make up the difference entirely.

I know raising property taxes isn't popular, but getting people to move to more efficient parts of the city? That's golden.
posted by hippybear at 11:36 AM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


Watching this video linked from the article... it starts out on such an optimistic tone with the city planners and city councillors who've been receptive to their message... and then they optimistically mention that they're working on convincing current residents (who've all moved to the town to have a big cheap car-friendly home on a big cheap car-friendly lot near car-friendly Dallas) and developers (who've made all their money building big cheap car-friendly homes) and you start to realize what a big political task they're up against.

How much does a presentation from them to a city councillor count against a phone call from a politically-connected, locally powerful developer?
posted by clawsoon at 11:37 AM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


"You know, there's a "divided by three" in that calculation for property tax that could be eliminated on properties which don't conform to certain development parameters"

This is a weird state law thing; agricultural property is taxed based on its agricultural value, which is determined by things like what kind of soil it has and how much rainfall it gets and what sorts of crops can be grown there (but you can look at price-per-acre for a very rough guide). As residential homes began to make up more of the value in the state, they had to come up with a way to tax them APART from the agricultural value of the land ... and then as residential real estate got more and more valuable, that formula had to be adjusted so that property taxes based on "flat value" wouldn't make living in a residential area completely unaffordable (while undertaxing agricultural land).

Anyway, "for property tax purposes, residential homes are valued at 1/3 of their fair market value" is state law, and is how we adjust how residential property is taxed vs. commercial, industrial, and agricultural properties. We also have some complicated "replacement tax" that businesses have to pay to compensate for a change in how we structured the taxation of businesses THE YEAR BEFORE I WAS BORN. But equalizing assessments to ensure uniformity is also part of combating racism in property taxes (for example), where a county assessor might round down the home value of all the white people living near him, and round UP the home values of the People of Color living in a redlined area. Counties are audited by the state to be sure that the tax assessor is achieving uniformity of assessment via the equalization process. When a county gets within 2 percentage points of 33 1/3, according to the state's audit, the state rebates them 50% of the chief assessor's salary, and authorizes state-paid performance bonuses for county employees in the department.

Anyway, the "1/3" is deeply embedded in how we calculate property taxes in Illinois and not as easy as "you don't qualify for this 1/3 thing." (And in case you can't tell, property taxes are a PRIME AREA FOR CORRUPTION FUCKERY in Illinois, which is part of why our rules are so complicated, to keep boxing out corruption.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:55 AM on January 16, 2022 [4 favorites]


Living in the west, the property taxes paid in the midwest and east absolutely boggle my mind.

That sentence is incomplete. What I meant to say: Living in the west, the property taxes paid in the midwest and east absolutely boggle my mind, given how dilapidated things often are. If they were paying high taxes and receiving amazing services, I'd be purely jealous.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:55 AM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


One - ironic? - thing is that if these towns succeed in building successful high-density neighbourhoods, those neighbourhoods will almost inevitably end up subsidizing the financially unsustainable car-centric neighbourhoods around them.
posted by clawsoon at 1:07 PM on January 16, 2022 [9 favorites]


the property taxes paid in the midwest and east absolutely boggle my mind, given how dilapidated things often are

"The west" is a big place. If you live in one of those places that doesn't really have winter, winter is expensive. It's expensive directly and it's really good at breaking stuff. Similarly, if you live someplace that was mostly built in the 1980s or later, your area doesn't yet have the heavy maintenance bills for roads and pipes and sewers and city buildings and so on that places with lots of 80-150 year old stuff do. It will, but doesn't yet.

I live in an old first-ring suburb of Buffalo. As far as I can tell, local government is doing fine -- excellent services and most everything is taken care of with taxes instead of extra fees. School districts here are independent and mostly tiny, but the one that we're in makes the schools I went through look like dogshit.* But, if you drove through, you'd probably think it was delapidated, because lots of buildings are 80-120 year old brick things that have been functionally but not necessarily cosmetically maintained and the roads develop potholes most every winter.

*Teachers and maybe even admins were doing the best they could with the resources, but educational resources in Florida are hard to come by given the concentration of standard southern conservatives and fucking snowbirds that don't give the slightest shit about the place they live.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:22 PM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


As an aside, as a Canadian*, it boggles my mind that local property taxes fund schools in the US. You just simply will never achieve anything resembling equality with that kind of nonsense. But then, I realize that's probably part of the plan.

* Yes, I know Canada's reserve schools are run atrociously by the Canada's federal government, but that's beginning to change.
posted by klanawa at 1:54 PM on January 16, 2022 [12 favorites]


Yeah, good schools are mostly reserved for people who can afford to buy them here.
posted by obfuscation at 2:11 PM on January 16, 2022 [5 favorites]


This is actually one of the most fundamental discussions about inequality in Illinois; we rely so heavily on property taxes for school funding (and school funding takes up such an enormous portion of property taxes) that it dramatically exacerbates inequalities AND makes it very difficult for struggling cities to increase property taxes to the city to an adequate level, because the school property taxes are so high the burden becomes unaffordable. (Illinois is one of the states most reliant on local property taxes to fund schools, and we have no state equalization, it is very bad. Rich areas basically run public schools as ritzy private schools; poor areas get wildly inadequate funding support from the state.)

As someone who attended ritzy private schools in the UK and Middle East, the school I saw as part of an exchange to New Trier was literally of the same level of educational quality as well as facilities fanciness as anything you can directly pay for privately. (excluding Le Rosey or Eton or something like that, but even there you're really just paying for being surrounded by princes)

"The west" is a big place. If you live in one of those places that doesn't really have winter, winter is expensive. It's expensive directly and it's really good at breaking stuff. Similarly, if you live someplace that was mostly built in the 1980s or later, your area doesn't yet have the heavy maintenance bills for roads and pipes and sewers and city buildings and so on that places with lots of 80-150 year old stuff do. It will, but doesn't yet.

Crucial! We live in a world now where the conversation is dominated by digital stuff which has very short lifecycles. An item of electronics from 20 years ago is a comedy prop. A distribution transformer from 20 years ago is about a third through its lifetime. A sewage pipe might well be a fifth or sixth through its lifetime. A suburban street should have been resurfaced once but in area without frost cycles, snowploughing, salt spreading etc. and light traffic (especially of heavy vehicles - the wear on surface scales with fourth power of axle load, yikes) could still be in "ok but not pristine" condition. I.e. you can ride a bike but would struggle on roller blades. I worked on a utility project where the rated life of the asset was a minimum of 120 years and it's really expected to last longer.

One of the things that the Strongtowns people are really keen on reminding us of (and not being from the US, this was very new to me) is that the initial build-out of infrastructure is often very well funded by a combination of federal, state, and private developer grants which are not available for maintenance. This can conceal the fact that the model of "low density / full urban service / low taxes" isn't actually long term possible.
posted by atrazine at 2:57 PM on January 16, 2022 [21 favorites]


One of the things that the Strongtowns people are really keen on reminding us of (and not being from the US, this was very new to me) is that the initial build-out of infrastructure is often very well funded by a combination of federal, state, and private developer grants which are not available for maintenance. This can conceal the fact that the model of "low density / full urban service / low taxes" isn't actually long term possible.

This feels very similar to what happens with public transit up in Toronto/Ontario, Canada as well: put together a new transit project attractive enough to win some politician some votes (even if it makes no sense from a planning perspective) and they'll happily promise the moon to you, but paying for maintenance and operating costs generally gets left by the wayside. It's almost like politicians like the good vibes from ribbon-cutting ceremonies more than they do the actual infrastructure they build.
posted by chrominance at 4:32 PM on January 16, 2022 [4 favorites]


The US really does seem terrible at maintenance. Like, a lot of people are ?surprised?offended?dismayed? that it has to be done -- both in the sense that they want their potholes fixed with low taxes, but also constant surprise that even privately managed things need maintenance pretty much all the time. I gather many condominiums are terribly under-capitalized, and there are plenty of private road associations that just can't deal. Now, annoyance at maintenance is surely a human universal, but people who moved here from abroad tell me most places expect it.

Sometimes I think we caught it from coastal California, which really is so habitable that you can slack off on a *lot* of stuff and not die.
posted by clew at 5:03 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


the wear on surface scales with fourth power of axle load

I daydream about instituting bicycle licensing just to have the license fee be a penny for a bike and then proportional to weight^4 for everything else on the road. It would have to be much *less* than a penny for a bike, actually. (Included, a fund to autopay for the bike license for any bike found unlicensed. The whole farthing each. Clearly there's a naming opportunity.)
posted by clew at 5:07 PM on January 16, 2022 [9 favorites]



So how much of the post-WWII car-positive propaganda push happened because the auto industry more-or-less won WWII for America and they wanted to keep the auto industry strong in case of WWIII?


It's not just the car culture, which was indeed promoted to keep the assembly lines running that could be retooled for tanks within hours. It's consumerism in general.

Remember the story of the Kitchen Debate between Krushchev and Nixon? It amazes me how Americans completely miss the takeaway that Krushchev took from it. It wasn't that American households enjoyed comforts that Russians could only dream of. Slavs take pride in their ability to endure and stay dignified and cultured without much comfort. No.

What Krushchev took away was that those same assembly lines making top quality steel gas ranges for American kitchens could be retooled for making top quality steel gun barrels within hours.

THAT was the message he took. And it was a good thing. It gave him more incentive to keep the Cold War cold, and it helped us win it. But in the United States people think they won the Cold War by being more vigorous consumers, and that is a lethally dangerous half truth. This is the notion that made us think that we can be "strong" by insisting on every comfort to which we are accustomed, which is why so many of us refuse to mask up for the safety of our waiters at Applebee's.

We think we were "strong" by being consumers, and it was not what won the Cold War, and it is what is making us lose our republic today.
posted by ocschwar at 5:13 PM on January 16, 2022 [20 favorites]


Hmm. I think I'd like to do these calculations for my city, too.
posted by rebent at 6:13 PM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


It wasn't that American households enjoyed comforts that Russians could only dream of. Slavs take pride in their ability to endure and stay dignified and cultured without much comfort. No.

That's a nice little just-so story, but it doesn't tally with my experience. Especially timed, as it was, during the Kruschev living standards boom.
posted by ambrosen at 6:15 PM on January 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


One thing I especially like about Hicks: the message that he's not out to shame anybody, he just wants to help move things forward. He says so a couple of times in the linked piece, and I happened to click into One Thing We Can Do Today to Help Galesburg Grow, and he does it there too.

I happen to think most people are doing the best they can. (I know lots of people disagree with that view, but I hold to it anyway.) An invitation to do something in a better way that explicitly comes with no shame attached seems a lot more likely to succeed than one that browbeats people for having done things in a particular way when they didn't have the information or resources to do it better.

Thank you so much for posting this, threementholsandafuneral - this is a post that I will value for a long time, as I explore the rest of Joe Hicks (inlandnobody)'s writings and check out the many great links in the comments here, especially all the Strong Towns stuff.
posted by kristi at 7:31 PM on January 16, 2022 [9 favorites]


That's a nice little just-so story, but it doesn't tally with my experience. Especially timed, as
it was, during the Kruschev living standards boom.


A just-so story doesn't need to reflect reality to still be part of a group's identity.

Same as that other just-so story of beating the communists by shopping at the mall.
posted by ocschwar at 8:14 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


"In early 1950s, the Soviet Union, having reconstructed the ruins left by the war, experienced a decade of prosperous, undisturbed, and rapid economic growth, with significant and remarkable technological achievements most notably the first earth satellite. The nation made it to the top 15 countries with highest GDP per capita in the mid-1950s. However, the growth slowed by the mid-1960s, as the government started pouring resources into large military and space projects, and the civilian sector gradually languished. While every other major nation greatly expanded its service sector, in the Soviet Union it was given low priority.Following Khrushchev's ouster..."
posted by clavdivs at 8:53 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


ambrosen, could you say how your experience contradicted it?
posted by clew at 11:58 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


Rich areas basically run public schools as ritzy private schools; poor areas get wildly inadequate funding support from the state.

Nth-ing this. I owe pretty much every opportunity I’ve had in my life to the rich aunt and uncle living in Lake Forest who invited me to live with them and finish high school at LFHS, the second best funded “public” high school in the nation at the time. The disparity between the western Michigan high school I transferred from and LFHS did more to open my eyes to the fundamental inequalities of America than just about anything else. My overworked and underfunded Michigan school had essentially written me off, not because they didn’t care, but because their limited resources could be better spent on a child that they might actually be able to help, while LFHS could afford to spare a guidance counselor who decided to make me her special project for the year and a half I was there.

Funding public schools purely through the locally gathered property tax is only one of the poisons that’ll be considered the cause of death when the country finally falls apart.
posted by Ghidorah at 12:06 AM on January 17, 2022 [17 favorites]


Funding public schools purely through the locally gathered property tax is only one of the poisons that’ll be considered the cause of death when the country finally falls apart.

Yet another piece of evidence for my contention that the defeat of the Family Compact, who were a bunch of former Brits and Americans who wanted to recreate (among other things) the class-stratified educational systems of their homelands, was the most important event separating the culture of Canada apart from that of Britain and America.

I owe pretty much every opportunity I’ve had in my life to the rich aunt and uncle living in Lake Forest who invited me to live with them and finish high school at LFHS

Which I guess means that the Fresh Prince of Bel Air would be a stretch if it were set in Canada.
posted by clawsoon at 6:09 AM on January 17, 2022 [4 favorites]


...except for the fact that the Fresh Prince of Bel Air wouldn't be a stretch at all in Canada if its origin was set in a residential school on a First Nations reserve.
posted by clawsoon at 6:12 AM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


There are still wide differences in intake demographics in Canada I would imagine. From my English experience where education is similarly centrally funded, people absolutely move to get into "good" schools, they just don't pay additional property taxes for it.
posted by atrazine at 6:20 AM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]


There are still wide differences in intake demographics in Canada I would imagine. From my English experience where education is similarly centrally funded, people absolutely move to get into "good" schools, they just don't pay additional property taxes for it.

My vague impression here in Toronto is that the same thing happens where people with money move to "good" neighbourhoods to get their kids into "good" schools. They do end up paying a bit more in property taxes simply because the price of property goes up, but they also raise more "extra-curricular" money for their schools because they're rich.

On the other hand, centralized funding means that this imbalance can be corrected somewhat by extra funding for schools in poorer neighbourhoods with things like the Model Schools for Inner Cities program.
posted by clawsoon at 6:46 AM on January 17, 2022


I have been nibbling away at a data project for my city to explore this. All the information you need is public, and has varying levels of access. Many cities have bought the ESRI open data tool, which basically barfs the internal GIS out for public data access. It isn't great, but here is a quick rundown form a few lots, within walking distance of my neighborhood, which is a hundred year old streetcar suburb that is now part of the city, that is surrounded by a variety of development of a variety of densities:

Property: My house
Notes: Inner Street Car Neighborhood, 100-plus years old.
Total Taxes: $7,198.03
Lot Size: 6,000 sf
Taxes/square foot: $1.20

Property: The Peloton
Notes: New Multi Use, with structured parking on former dairy plant. This was planned to be a few stories taller, but the NIMBY's fought it for all the usual reasons.
Total Taxes: $590,678.80
Lot Size: 69,364 sf
Taxes/square foot: $8.52

Property: Olin Office Building
Notes: 80's suburban-style two story office building, surface parking
Total Taxes: $51,832.13
Lot Size: 126,620
Taxes/square foot $0.41

Property: Pet supply Store
Notes: Hundred year old former bank building inside neighborhood
Total Taxes: $4,321.61
Lot Size: 3,600
Taxes/square foot: $1.20

Property: 122 E Main
Notes: Historic Downtown office building
Total Taxes: $1,447,859.93
Lot Size: 87.120
Taxes/square foot $16.62

It doesn't take long to come to the same conclusion! Low density, surface-parking-centric development is bad and unsustainable. This is giving me a push to dig into the data some more and see what I can do with it, or at least write a useful blog post like this one.
posted by rockindata at 6:55 AM on January 17, 2022 [5 favorites]


One thing they don't talk about in these specific calculations, but which becomes part of the calculations when they start talking about the whole system, is the need for more roads (and therefore more road-building and road-maintenance costs) in car-centric systems in all the places other than right in front of your lot. If your taxes can't even pay for the road in front of your house, how are they going to pay for the road you need to get to the grocery store? And how much wider (and therefore more expensive) is that road going to have to be if everybody has to drive to the grocery store?
posted by clawsoon at 7:24 AM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]


I do a fair bit of sewer collection and/or water distribution system design, and I am so often tasked with figuring out how far from town I can extend pipes to the low-density hinterlands for a given amount of money, often under the guise of encouraging development seemingly for development's sake.

Of course if it's funded by loans we are always subsidizing this expansion by increasing the utility bills of people who are already connected to the inner system. Not only do all these existing customers get no benefit from this expansion it usually puts the portions of the system that they use under greater stress.

There was a great keynote speaker at this year's North Carolina AWWA conference who talked about our responsibility to find "shovel-worthy" projects instead of "shovel-ready" projects. I'm not sure I've ever worked on one.

I think the worst was extending a gravity sewer line to a mobile home park with 20 dwellings that would carry their sewage to a pump station that also had to be built on land purchased for the purpose to pump up over a ridge to the nearest gravity sewer system. I counter-proposed that we give each resident $300k cash to buy a house in town, but nobody understood that I was serious.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:37 AM on January 17, 2022 [20 favorites]


I counter-proposed that we give each resident $300k cash to buy a house in town, but nobody understood that I was serious.

The little hamlet I grew up in (~100 people) had a full sewer system installed when I was a kid, including what we called the "sewer pond" out in a field. IIRC, each household paid ~$20,000, amortized over a couple of decades. (Looks like that'd be about $45,000 today, given inflation.) I assume that a big chunk of money also came from subsidies from other levels of government. I know for sure that a big chunk of subsidy money was involved when the hamlet, not having grown any larger, got itself hooked in to the nearest town's water system a couple of decades later.

It's interesting to speculate what would've happened if we'd been made to pay the full cost, or if someone had made us your offer of a free house in town.

I'm pretty sure, based on a survey we did, that people would've just stuck with their septic tanks and wells and water tanks if they'd been asked to pay the full cost for either project.

But if they'd been offered a free house in town? That feels like it would've been more of a 50/50 thing. A lot of the people living there were there precisely because they didn't want to live in town. They were willing to put up with the inconveniences of septic tanks and wells and having to drive to town to get anything because it meant they didn't have to live in town. But other people lived there just because houses were very cheap; they probably would've been happy for a free house in town.

It was a working-class hamlet. Not really any rich people. The wealthier people in the area tended to live on acreages outside the hamlet, so they didn't benefit from the sewer and water projects.
posted by clawsoon at 8:39 AM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


I think the worst was extending a gravity sewer line to a mobile home park with 20 dwellings that would carry their sewage to a pump station that also had to be built on land purchased for the purpose to pump up over a ridge to the nearest gravity sewer system. I counter-proposed that we give each resident $300k cash to buy a house in town, but nobody understood that I was serious.

I know of a project where persistent sewage backup problems would have required something similar and buying out the 10 or so hamlet residents was contemplated as solving the problem would have cost 10m. In the end it was decided that wiping a hamlet (which had existed in the literal legal sense) for time immemorial off the map to optimise our capital plan was not an honourable thing to do and we built the pumping station anyway.
posted by atrazine at 2:49 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


This was a cool read. I wonder if the tide is turning on how people think about what makes a good town or a good neighborhood. Where you consider yourself as living in your town or your neighborhood, not just in your house.

In my hometown, a stretch of road that goes out to the country was seeing cars go faster and faster, even though the speed limit remained 30 mph until you're truly out of town. There was a proposal to increase the speed limit and that's what the city was going to do, but somebody got smart and did interviews and research, and learned that it was extremely dangerous for people along that route and at least one person was even killed. The city decided to do a major overhaul of the street - it is now impossible to pass/overtake another vehicle, there are roundabouts which slow you down and protected sidewalks on either side. Every single time I drive it, people are walking on those sidewalks! (And it's winter in Minnesota.)

This particular area is definitely the big-house-on-a-big-lot model so it's very imperfect, but I have really appreciated seeing the city put the residents and pedestrians first.
posted by Emmy Rae at 5:55 PM on January 17, 2022 [4 favorites]


I don't know about a change in attitude but it is certainly the case that millennials and zoomers aren't getting driver's licenses like GenXers. It's actually becoming a bit of a problem in my profession that there is a good chance a new <25 year old apprentice won't have a driver's license. That basically never happened 20 years ago.
posted by Mitheral at 6:29 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]


millennials and zoomers aren't getting driver's licenses

I failed to trade in my driver's license on time when I moved provinces, so I've been without a full license for 20 years (and without any license at all for about a decade). Thanks for making me feel young again! I gotta get myself up to date on some zoomer trends!

What if I say it like this: Chorale
posted by clawsoon at 7:34 PM on January 17, 2022


It seems like there's just no way around it: there's going to be a reckoning between local governments, especially sub/ex-urban ones, and infrastructure maintenance costs.

The initial cost of building infrastructure is generally very small in relation to its infinite-horizon maintenance and upkeep costs. A section of road costs a lot more to maintain in perpetuity than it does to initially create. This makes it pretty easy to build yourself into a situation you can't maintain.

There's a lot of suburban infrastructure that's just getting close to the end of its lifespan, and nobody seems ready to pay for its replacement.

I'd be really curious to know if this was something that urban planners of the 1950s and 60s just ignored, or if they figured that they'd subsidize inefficient residential areas with business taxes from the cities they serve, or what.

But when you start factoring in all the maintenance costs for the infrastructure that makes suburbia suburban, it starts to look like a pretty expensive place to live. The cost of living in an area that's 1 home/acre is always going to be expensive in terms of utilities, compared to somewhere denser. You're just dividing that much more physical plant up among fewer people. (Or you're running your own DIY utilities, e.g. well water and septic.) The blunt-object solution is: pass the costs on to the people accruing the benefit, and if they can't afford the cost, they'll move somewhere more affordable.

However, I doubt this is politically tenable. The idea of being "taxed out of your home" is a pretty resonant one with voters. Some municipal governments just... won't. I foresee a lot of accounting chicanery to try and paper over the problem in the short term, and in the long term municipalities playing chicken with higher governments (state/Fed) to see who will get the most public ire once things really start falling down.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:15 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'd be really curious to know if this was something that urban planners of the 1950s and 60s just ignored, or if they figured that they'd subsidize inefficient residential areas with business taxes from the cities they serve, or what.

The impression I got of Robert Moses from The Power Broker was that he didn't care if he was bankrupting New York as long as he got those beautiful freeways built. I'm not sure how representative he was, but he was certainly someone who other urban planners of the time learned from and consulted with.
posted by clawsoon at 8:33 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


Rich suburbs secede from cities every so often and describe it as saving money. Have any cities cut their incorporated sprawl loose yet? Would they actually be better off medium term?

It could only be medium term, because even a tax war of all against all is a dumb way to run a polity. There's a whole volume by Beatrice and Sydney Webb on the history of road management in England and Wales that I remember for its *centuries* of trying to match up the people who wore a stretch of road, the people who profited by the road's existence, and the people responsible for repairing the road. And when I looked it up for a link, from the first para of the Preface:
The advent on the roads of the automobile and the motor omnibus is producing effects, both on public opinion and on administration, which are curiously parallel to those produced, three centuries ago, by the coming in of the carriage and the waggon. The "New Users" of the roads in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose aggressions on the pedestrians and on the road surface were made the subject of persistent complaint in their day, are now themselves resenting the quite analogous aggression of the "New Users" of the roads in the twentieth century.
posted by clew at 9:33 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]


"I'd be really curious to know if this was something that urban planners of the 1950s and 60s just ignored"

I read a bunch of Peoria's planning documents from the '30s through the '50s, basically the period of transition from street car neighborhoods to car ownership neighborhoods. One thing that struck me was the planners' belief that road paving materials would keep improving and getting cheaper, and require much less work to maintain. Which is sort-of a fair assumption, given how much less work paved roads were then brick roads (say), and the improvements in technology that allowed for machines to do a lot of paving.

There was also a wildly unsophisticated understanding of how traffic worked -- the baked in assumption was that as more people owned cars, you would just keep whining the roads, and there would never be a problem. (Early on, the plan for a minor arterial road in town was to eventually widen it to 10 lanes by 1964ish, with the assumption that there would be no knock-on effects of this except to move traffic faster.)

But yeah, a time of massive technological change + government investment in infrastructure. I feel like by the 60s, the flaws in this strategy were becoming apparent enough that planners SHOULD have been paying attention, but a lot the pre-war decisions to incorporate cars were maintenance-naive, and the post-war building boom was massively subsidized and over-exuberant.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:46 AM on January 18, 2022 [5 favorites]


"I'd be really curious to know if this was something that urban planners of the 1950s and 60s just ignored"

People have always incorporated into larger cities to escape debt obligations. It's not something that started with auto-dependence. Street car neighborhoods were complete financial farces, as in the street car was a fake unsustainable amenity [at regular neighborhood density] that if it lasted 20 years was an outlier. Modern federally funded transit systems are generally currently older than street cars were.

Also I'd like to point out that taxing your way out still depends on either (1) a growing tax base or (2) a town so fiscally conservative that they never build any amenities because Gary Indiana above was built moderately dense and it didn't save them from population loss or quick economic shambles.

I actually think lots of suburbs choose #2 currently, like mine for example [I live in the opposite of a tourist town - people only come to work], and that road repair and maintenance costs are slightly overstated and determined by the exact same people who could do the most about it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:09 AM on January 18, 2022


They were willing to put up with the inconveniences of septic tanks and wells and having to drive to town to get anything because it meant they didn't have to live in town.

Septic tanks are not particularly inconvenient on an individual basis - they often require large one-time expenses that a city water bill amortized over 30 years would easily cover. And cost almost nothing to run. Their environmental costs can be horrendous if there are lots of them and near water sources, above or underground.

Water lines are not expensive to run in rural areas. They are plastic flex-pipe buried just a few inches underground. They are much more expensive in cities with lots of competing infrastructure.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:13 AM on January 18, 2022


"Water lines are not expensive to run in rural areas. They are plastic flex-pipe buried just a few inches underground."

Whoa, where do you live? It's 42" absolute minimum by code where I live, because otherwise they freeze. 60" is preferred (and sometimes required) in rural areas so that farm equipment doesn't interfere with water lines, and because rural water lines are expensive to maintain.

Putting in water and sewer lines also disrupts topsoil, to the point that the state has stringent laws, requiring a soil engineer to approve projects and oversee soil removal and replacement, so that the topsoil is put back on TOP after trenching, no topsoil is wasted, and whoever's having the water line run has to pay to replace any topsoil with equivalent-quality topsoil.

Not only is it expensive to put in rural water and sewer lines, but that topsoil is hella freakin' valuable, and considered irreplaceable if damaged. Engineering and survey requirements are applied accordingly -- and fines and damages are assessed accordingly if you do it wrong. The state has a clear interest in maintaining the value of the incredible natural resource that is Illinois topsoil (best in the world) and they will fuck you up if you wreck it.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:35 AM on January 18, 2022 [7 favorites]


There is a lot of devolving infrastructure happening today and not just of the "bridge fell down because we didn't maintain it variety" but actual planned down grading of things like roads in places where usage hasn't declined but the ability to pay for maintenance has. You mostly see it in states like Michigan but it happens even in California and Texas.

They are plastic flex-pipe buried just a few inches underground.

That is certainly not the case everywhere. Here water lines are 1.5 metres (5ish feet) down to prevent freezing. And even a modest sub division is going to require a main of several inches that is generally composed of sectional PVC or welded HDPE.
posted by Mitheral at 8:37 AM on January 18, 2022


Also while a concrete septic tank is usually a one time cost septic fields are wear items with life times well under lifetime in most cases. Planning and budgeting for a 30 year life for type 1 and 2 fields is appropriate in most cases. Initial cost in my jurisdiction is C$15-40K for a property with sufficient flat land and easily double that for slope side homes. Type one systems require regular solids removal and often filter maintenance. Type 2 systems require regular pump maintenance on top of that plus an electrical supply. Both should be inspected annually by a qualified person 1-2 thousand dollars annually isn't out of line depending on distance from nearest solid waste site while also budgeting for field replacement. And that is ignoring the cost of the land the field occupies which can't be used for much but growing grass or a native meadow. You shouldn't park on it, install any sort of hard surface (temporary or permanent) or even water it too much [PDF guide from a local administration]. Anyone in my area who can gets on city sewer even when doing so incurres a significant connection charge.
posted by Mitheral at 9:17 AM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


Whoa, where do you live? It's 42" absolute minimum by code where I live, because otherwise they freeze. 60" is preferred (and sometimes required) in rural areas so that farm equipment doesn't interfere with water lines, and because rural water lines are expensive to maintain.

42" isn't deep. You can do that with a trencher, doesn't even require a backhoe.

And even a modest sub division is going to require a main of several inches that is generally composed of sectional PVC or welded HDPE.

Yes actual subdivisions require more extensive water infrastructure, mostly for the fire department.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:23 AM on January 18, 2022


For the hamlet I grew up in, the water supply line from the town's treatment plant had to cross two creeks in a steep-walled valley about a kilometer across and 50 meters deep. Every once in a long while some section of valley wall will give way. So I think all of that added some expense to the project.
posted by clawsoon at 10:36 AM on January 18, 2022


...oh, and it's in an area that gets down to -40 every year, so I'm not sure how feasible going over the creeks instead of under would be.
posted by clawsoon at 10:41 AM on January 18, 2022


I read a bunch of Peoria's planning documents from the '30s through the '50s, basically the period of transition from street car neighborhoods to car ownership neighborhoods. One thing that struck me was the planners' belief that road paving materials would keep improving and getting cheaper, and require much less work to maintain.

Say what you want about the proximity of Illinois, but I think that just as one factor, even in the 40s, plate tectonics wasn't yet accepted science!
posted by rhizome at 12:21 PM on January 18, 2022


actual planned down grading of things like roads in places where usage hasn't declined but the ability to pay for maintenance has. You mostly see it in states like Michigan but it happens even in California and Texas.

Last time I drove on highway 101 in California, parts of it were just one lane. Not one lane each way, one lane total. I had seen this before but as a temporary thing with pilot cars and orange temporary signs while the road was being worked on, but this looked like a permanent arrangement with traffic lights and road markings.

I think the issue is that it had become just to expensive to repair the road back to two lanes on the hillside. These are areas where heavy rains periodically make bits of the road fall off down a cliff or into the ocean.

I don't think I'd feel entirely comfortable driving on these roads in a rainstorm.
posted by yohko at 11:52 AM on January 20, 2022


There are parts of Tyrol in Austria where that is simply the norm. One lane of blacktop with a swatch of gravel on either side. When you see oncoming traffic you slow to a crawl and move halfway off the road.
posted by ocschwar at 4:29 PM on January 24, 2022


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