Strong Towns

6Rational Responses

Our cities made decades of bad investments, sacrificing their stable wealth in exchange for new growth as part of a continent-wide experiment. Most local governments are functionally insolvent, having more long-term obligations than they have revenue potential. They react to this imbalance by trying to grow even more.

The fundamental lack of financial productivity in our development pattern has made our governing systems fragile, despite our best intentions. Calls for more efficiency, greater centralization, and much more spending reveals a lack of awareness, along with an embedded desperation. This can’t continue.

I’ve presented these facts hundreds of times, to audiences big and small, across the North American continent. The most common question I receive is also the most predictable: What is the solution?

People have gotten angry with me, quite indignant, over this. Once, at the end of one of my lectures, someone stood up and yelled at me, “Chuck, you’ve come here and scared us all. Don’t tell me you did this without a solution in mind. What are we supposed to do? What’s the five-step plan?”

Of course, I have ideas of what we should do, but I don’t have any magic that can keep decades of bad investments from unwinding. Much of what happens next is already baked into the North American cake. I’ve heard Chris Martenson, economic researcher and author of The Crash Course, frame an answer to a similar question in this way on his podcast:

Problems have ...