I'm very interested in any citations you have about where they are wrong. Not because I'm trying to nerdsnipe, but genuinely because their thesis seems incredibly plausible, and would explain the development pattern in North America over the last 70 years. If the thesis is demonstrably wrong, I don't want to be wrong, or promote incorrect things.
>The maintenance things they write about are a small percentage of budgets and so cannot be why cities go broke.
The thesis is that the maintenance things they write about are only small because they are based on significant growth of revenues. The other issue they note is that maintenance costs are non-linear, in that they are irregular from year-to-year, so large cost all hit at once, even if they are predictable.
https://www.dsm.city/departments/finance/operating_budget.ph... is the finances from the city of Des Moines. It doesn't really give a breakdown in quite the way I stated, but it appears that a large part of the city budget is not at all related to infrastructure. In the US most cities will publish their budget (It is required by law in many states) so you can dig in more if you want.
I mean, so, right away, debt service is 17% of their budget. That should immediately be a red flag. Is it the end of the world? Of course not, but that's a non-trivial part of the budget that is dedicated to interest alone which strongly inhibits the ability for the city to borrow in an emergency situation.
Again, the issues that Strong Towns addresses is that the costs are not generally visible in the budgets, because they are on a cash accounting basis, and not an accrual accounting basis. There is no balance sheet in the traditional sense, and the spending on infrastructure is non-linear. So here, there is no depreciation of infrastructure in this budget except for city automobiles. The worry that Strong Towns is exactly that the depreciation and amortization expenses will overwhelm a budget when they come due.
Again, if I'm wrong, I want to know, but the entire point that Strong Towns illustrates is that these cash accounting based budgets, like this one, do not illustrate future liabilities in terms of ongoing revenues.
>The maintenance things they write about are a small percentage of budgets and so cannot be why cities go broke.
The thesis is that the maintenance things they write about are only small because they are based on significant growth of revenues. The other issue they note is that maintenance costs are non-linear, in that they are irregular from year-to-year, so large cost all hit at once, even if they are predictable.