Land Use and Services: A More Perfect Union
Date Posted: September 17, 2020
Posted In: Ideas,
From Strong Towns: This is the conclusion of a three-part series about the place of statewide land-use reform in a Strong Towns approach. The Strong Towns approach that recognizes that cities are complex adaptive systems for which the goal should not be to impose solutions on problems, but to ensure that our systems are able to respond to local, bottom-up feedback and produce solutions.
In the first part of this series, we discussed the pitfalls of statewide efforts to “fix” problems in our complex cities. The second article introduced the idea of Purchased Annexation as a justifiable statewide reform: a way to rectify a widespread problem while honoring the complex system that drives real estate development.
Today’s article will discuss a further reform that “gets us to a system that produces a solution”: a comprehensive planning regime that pairs urban services with land use to make explicit the connection between development intensity, tax revenue, and the services a city can afford to provide.
A Numbers Game
A central theme of the Growth Ponzi Scheme is the ability of some neighborhoods to receive expensive city services while failing to contribute enough taxes to cover their costs. As the data show (see “Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments,” by Chuck Marohn), the kinds of neighborhoods that don’t pull their own weight tend to be low-density and further from the urban core, yet they receive the same services for street maintenance, infrastructure upkeep, parks, and public safety.
The numbers are unambiguous in cases across North America, and yet this fact remains hidden in plain sight, largely because doing the math isn’t something cities are required to do when making planning decisions. If cities were required to conduct a full accounting of costs and revenues, most places would come to the same uncomfortable truth as Lafayette, LA, Cobb County, GA, and many others who have opened their books.