I am wondering if there is any consensus in urban economics and/or public finance on the fiscal analysis and arguments Strong Towns makes. Despite the increasing notability of Strong Towns in a lot of grey and popular urban discourse, I haven't seen many academic takes on it, particularly from economics.
One of the outliers is this article from Dustin A. Shane in the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, which summarizes the Strong Towns argument thusly:
Many state and local governments are currently experiencing significant budget shortfalls (Garrett and Livingston, 2019; Schmitt, 2019). In places where growth has slowed or stopped, governments are facing mounting levels of debt or the prospect of tax hikes (Kelly, 2019; Miller, 2019). While there are myriad reasons why a municipality or state may be fiscally insolvent, Charles “Chuck” Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, an international movement in the United States and Canada dedicated to making “communities financially strong and resilient” (Strong Towns, n.d.), and author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Marohn, 2019c), argues that a major part of the problem is overextension in the area of infrastructure provision.
[…]
It is frequently argued that suburbs are necessary because of the personal consumption and lifestyle choices of Americans (Kotkin and Berger, 2017). Others find that density levels play little role in increasing social cohesion and neighborhood ties (Freeman, 2001) and that compact development does little to advance many common planning goals, such as energy savings, increased transit use, and social equity (Gordon and Richardson, 1997). However, because Marohn’s conclusions mostly flow from simple arithmetic, reviewers of Marohn’s book have generally not quibbled with the main thrust of his argument (Crichton, 2019; Fox, 2019; Hendrix, 2019; Renn, 2019). Marohn responds to many potential objections in his book and in articles published on the Strong Towns website (Marohn, 2019a, 2019c; Strong Towns, 2016). This author assumes that Marohn’s approach is basically sound. More infrastructure and fewer taxpayers equals larger cost shares, and while the total roadway maintenance bill would conventionally be divided among all parcels to determine per-parcel share, according to the Strong Towns approach, this is inefficacious. Though many parcel owners will use roadways other than those in their immediate vicinity, evidence suggests those living in denser, more centrally located neighborhoods will use fewer roads and less of them (Ewing and Cervero, 2017, but see Stevens, 2017). Using a distance-based allocation for roadway maintenance expenses exposes the disproportionate expenditures that sprawled developments are forcing cities to make on their behalf. At some distance from the core, the maintenance costs will exceed the revenue contributions. The question this paper seeks to answer is, for a city with Gallatin’s population, tax base, and infrastructure obligations, how far does the “zone of solvency” extend? The answer to this question will be useful to planners interested in measuring sprawl’s effects on fiscal solvency.
The journal is not an economics one and I'm not sure if the author has any economics or academic public finance background, however.
The other exception I found was a more critical review in the Illinois Municipal Policy Journal by Kenneth Kriz, a public finance expert.
I am generally inclined to agree with the thesis that there's been too much suburbanization and auto-centric infrastructure and there are fiscal issues with this way of building cities. But I'm curious how much some of the more pithy and neat, seemingly persuasive, story elements of Strong Towns holds up and if there are any additional considerations to some of the methods they use (such as tax parcel analysis of different property types).
Is there an urban economics or public finance consensus on the Strong Towns thesis?
byu/OccasionalObserver inAskEconomics
Posted by OccasionalObserver