
The Trillion Dollar Question Facing Every Major American City - guildwriter
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/trillion-dollar-question
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haltingproblem
The website (and article) makes a shrill but intriguing point - American
municipal finance is a ponzi scheme. I was briefly exposed to it while working
on a financing project through a commercial lender. I was astounded to learn
that you can actually get the local city to issue bonds in _your_ favor to
fund roads, utilities etc for your _private_ project. The bonds are against
future hypothetical tax revenues from that very project but guaranteed by the
city. It is borrowing from the future in every sense hypothetical and
hypothecated ;) Fascinating.

At some point, those land improvements - the malls, the shopping centers or
housing complexes empty out and stop paying taxes. Alternatively, increases in
maintenance do not match increase in taxes. Perhaps that has never happened
yet in most of the growing west/southwest/midwest. When that happens you will
hit a death spiral like Detroit.

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a2tech
It seems like every time they update their website it ends up on HN and
everything the discussion is the same. Unless the website actually introduces
new facts or plans I wish it’d stop popping up.

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bryanlarsen
There's no hint of "cars are bad" in this article, so it's not the standard
StrongTowns article that gets posted to HN.

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chemmail
Time to move to Japan i guess.

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rektide
There's obviously a much deeper message here but gee whiz building vs
maintaining a city sure feels like it has some basic parallels & similar
tensions to adding to vs working on software projects. The mandate for growth
is real.

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whynotminot
This makes a lot of sense to me, and so do a lot of other things on that
website. I'm intrigued.

I'm also trying to see if there's anything shady here. Is Haliburton lobbying
for a big infrastructure repair contract or something?

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yodon
Boundless cynicism won't help you improve things. If the things you read make
sense and hold up to your critical analysis and are things you think should
happen, try to make them happen. If it should happen that there are others who
have a financial reason for wanting to make the things that you want to happen
happen, that is not a bad thing, that is a reason for them to help make the
things you want to have happen happen, which is good. As the scale of the
problem increases, the odds that someone somewhere is trying to find a way to
have a financial incentive to solve the problem approaches unity. That doesn't
mean big problems shouldn't be solved, it means that people are trying to
align their interests with the interests you want to succeed. Again, that's
good, if you want to see the problems solved.

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whynotminot
I don't think it's necessarily cynicism, just a healthy skepticism of my own
critical thinking abilities.

Something can be intuitive and seemingly sound and have the real world
practical effect of only lining someone's pockets without actually delivering
the promised improvements. I think, within reason, it's a good thing to not
implicitly trust your own reasoning, and I also think it's good to get an
understanding of the motives of whoever is trying to persuade you to their way
of thinking.

