Marohn pronounces “the great suburban experiment” a failure in Curbside Chat

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Brainerd, Minn., in 1884. No experts, no zoning code, no subsidies – the town just worked.

For thousands of years, people everywhere built communities to the scale of the person on foot. For the past 60 or so, Americans have built them to the scale of the automobile. Minnesota civil engineer Chuck Marohn told an audience in Brewerytown yesterday that this 60-year experiment in radically reshaping our built environment has been a fiscal flop and offered some principles for getting American cities and towns back on a sustainable path.

Marohn, founder of the Strong Towns movement, spoke at Next City's Storefront for Urban Innovation in the first stop on a week-long tour of Pennsylvania that will take the Strong Towns "Curbside Chat" series to 11 cities and towns across the state.

The problem with "the great suburban experiment," Marohn said, is that its numbers fail to add up. Cities and towns chased growth in revenues by adding infrastructure whose replacement costs those revenues could not cover.

"The main costs of new development were paid by someone else," he said. "We as local taxpayers don't pay much of that. But the benefit is substantial. All the new revenue comes to us. The catch is that we agree to maintain all those improvements forever. We agree they're going to become part of the long-term public obligation.


Brainerd at the dawn of the automobile age, ca. 1930. Still a picture of health.

"For that to work, one of two assumptions must be true: Growth must continue at an accelerating rate or the pattern ultimately generates more revenue than is needed to maintain the infrastructure. Neither of these assumptions are true."

Marohn gave several examples of individual local projects whose costs would take more than an entire life cycle (roughly 30 years) to recoup. In each case, covering the full costs of replacement and maintenance would require tax increases of 25 to 40 percent plus annual three percent increases beyond the rate of inflation.

By contrast, Marohn noted, the historic, pedestrian-scaled pattern of town-building that produced places like his native Brainerd, Minn., had been and can be financed locally and sustained out of local revenues.

"The horizontal expansion of our places began to seize up in the 1970s," he said. "It took a while for us to figure out what to do to keep it going, but we did – we transferred from an economy built on savings and investment to one built on growth through debt.

"We encouraged massive speculation in order to keep the housing market going."

Now the bill for that second cycle of unsustainable growth is coming due, he said. "Local governments will have to absorb the costs of the current development pattern now. It can't be done without huge tax increases or huge cuts in services."

So what's the way out of this conundrum? "The real question is, How do we rationally respond to this set of circumstances? The damage has already been done," he said.


The same street in Brainerd today. "We took a street that was spectacular and turned it into one that was quite fragile and tragic."

For starters, we need to return to the proven and workable organic development model that built most of the nation's pre-World War II cities and towns. Showing a slide of the main street of his hometown of Brainerd, Minn., in 1884, he noted, "This spectacular little city was built by a bunch of uneducated hicks in the middle of nowhere. They didn't have urban development specialists. They didn't have tax increment financing and 300-page zoning codes. They simply followed what people before them had done. For thousands and thousands of years we've been building this way." Then, showing a slide of the same street today, he noted, "After all those years of experts, we took a street that was spectacular and turned it into one that was quite fragile and tragic."

The first of the strategies he listed for getting there was: "Stop what we're doing. The most difficult thing for governments to do is pull the plug on projects already in the pipeline, but the first thing we need to do is take a breather from the suburban experiment."

Then we need to take stock of what's already there. No city, he said, really knows just how much stuff it has to maintain, what condition it's in, or how much it will cost to keep it functioning. "A few cities have looked at small sections, and they found themselves overwhelmed by the liabilities."

Once that's done, "we have to start talking about triage," he said. "This is difficult for local politicians to do, because it means choosing one thing over another. It places a burden us to act responsibly."


Our current cityscapes were built on a mountain of debt, Marohn said. The green line in the chart above is the total level of private debt over time, and the line below it represents public debt. The bottom line represents total gross domestic product.

Fourth, "we must commit to always add value. Every transaction we do at the government level must add to the value of our places." The traditional, organic development model, he noted, does this better because it allows for incremental investment and it produces more value and more total tax revenue from the same land area. By following the postwar suburban model, he said, "the city subsidies its own decline."


Traditional development has two big advantages: It's easily scalable and it produces more value.

The fifth strategy is to take into account Carlson's Law: "Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart." Put another way, we need to allow ordinary people to figure out for themselves what works and how to replicate it.

Finally, Marohn recommended shifting from taxes on property to taxes on land. He noted that property taxes discourage redevelopment because owners of blighted properties will resist projects that force their own taxes up as well. "And when we discourage reinvestment, it's counterproductive," he said.

The Strong Towns Pennsylvania Curbside Chat tour continues through Jan. 11. A complete schedule appears on the Strong Towns website.