Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (III)

Marion IA Wal-Mart, Black Friday morning 2019

Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here. Response to chapters 3 & 4 is here.

Chapter 7 of Charles Marohn's new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Restore American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020) introduces the concept of measuring a place's productivity by calculating taxable value-per-acre, a concept to which he was introduced by Joe Minicozzi of Urban 3 LLC, but which they were both astonished to find was a standard planning tool 100+ years ago before it got forgotten. "It is lost wisdom, abandoned with so many of our ancestors' hard-gained insights" (p. 141).

It might be counter-intuitive, but the most productive blocks in any city tend to be older commercial and residential areas. Marohn includes an analysis he did in 2011 of two commercial blocks in his hometown that will be familiar to Strong Towns followers: the "old and blighted block" with 11 unattractive properties outperformed the block consisting of a brand new Taco John's Restaurant by 41 percent, $1.136 million to $803,000. Minicozzi's compared a downtown redevelopment area in his home of Asheville, North Carolina, and found it produced nearly 10 times the property tax per acre as the new Wal-Mart on the edge of town, as well as 1.76 times the sales tax per acre and a dozen times the jobs per acre (Table 7.1, p. 139). Yet city governments continue to push for the shiny and new, supporting them with tax incentives and wasteful infrastructure. "Across North America, our poor neighborhoods tend to subsidize our wealthy neighborhoods" (p. 141).

This is simple analysis that can be done as long as you have access to tax records, which are open records, or should be. (In researching a 2018 piece on big box stores in the Chicago area I found much of Cook County's tax records to be inaccessible.) Fancier analysis can include the cost of public infrastructure involved in serving the place, but acreage is a reasonable quick-and-dirty substitute. If anything properties closer to the center of the town should get a bonus because their streets, sewer pipes, and such are shared by the entire town, while infrastructure at the edge is used only by the specific property (pp. 114-115).

In Cedar Rapids, between my own calculations and those by my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan, we find results consistent with those found in Lafayette, Louisiana, and other places by Urban 3:

• Great America Building (2016) $13,999,048

• Bever Block (2017) $2,153,423

• 1420 1st Av NE (2018) $1,740,695

• SW Wal-Mart (2016) $501,557

• NE Wal-Mart (2016) $456,917

The Bever Block and 1420 1st Av NE have been demolished and replaced at some taxpayer expense with nicer buildings that have more parking. They still probably outperform the big box stores, which conjecture can be explored in future analysis. And maybe this summer I can play with some residential property tax numbers.

The moral of the math is, of course, that the more towns expand in a way that doesn't pay for itself in the long run, the deeper the hole they're digging for themselves, and the harder it will go for them on the day of reckoning. "The merciless nature of the math suggests this will be resolved in time" (p. 144). 

That is a scary prospect, one that's explored in chapters 5 and 6, mostly with math and logic. (For a starker picture of the smash to come, see the works of James Howard Kunstler, like The Long Emergency (Grove/Atlantic, 2005)). If we understand enough to pivot to "a chaotic but smart approach to evolving our cities" (p. 123), well and good, but if we can't afford to maintain what we have--and Marohn argues persuasively that we can't--some of our built environment is going to have to be abandoned. That is not going to be pretty or pleasant. And politics being what it is, the desirable approach that is locally-driven, rationally-based and community-minded is likely to be swamped by the parochial interests of those with wealth and political power who drove a lot of the expansion in the first place and don't feel now like they're getting subsidized. Those without means, who suffered from white flight and disinvestment, and now are suffering from gentrification, are going to take it in the teeth again, aren't they?

Happily, beginning with chapter 8, Marohn has some more hopeful ideas about managing the future.