In this follow-up to last week’s piece about Galesburg, IL, we’ll look at what the town needs in order to recover and thrive.
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Citizens of Galesburg, IL, are trying to save their public indoor pool and create a new activity complex. City council is sympathetic, but there's just one problem: money.
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The $1 trillion infrastructure bill is being signed into law. But who gets to decide how the money will be spent, and will they make the right decisions for communities of color?
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I’ve had to reconcile my foundational belief in markets with my experiences working with cities. This has been a painful process.
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The past proves that people tend to disregard the long-term costs of the plans they make, particularly if they reap the benefits and others pay the costs. We must become more sophisticated than this.
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The Oregon Department of Transportation has been authorized to issue revenue bonds to finance potentially billions of dollars of highway widening projects.
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A bill in Congress is pushing for a National Infrastructure Bank, which would mean (in theory) bold federal action to address America's infrastructure crisis. It's a big idea. It's also a really bad one.
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Cities with far more street infrastructure than they can maintain are in triage mode, and are going to have to decide what to keep paved and what to walk away from. Even if they won’t admit it yet.
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The Federal Highway Administration has a chart full of answers to that question you might find useful.
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The problem with new American suburbs isn’t a "lack of planning" or “uncontrolled growth” or “inadequate infrastructure.” The problem is a lack of basic financial solvency.
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The unproductive use of infrastructure has put most cities, even those that are superficially prosperous, in a position where they won’t be able to afford to maintain what they’ve built. The signs of this crisis are everywhere—if you’re willing to look.
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Why does infrastructure cost so much to build in the U.S.? The fundamental reasons aren’t technical. We’ve structured our postwar economy to use overspending on infrastructure as a way to induce short-term growth.
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Pine Island, MN (population 3,000) has huge dreams, yet they can’t take care of their basic systems. Who pays the price?
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How much road does your city have—and how much does it actually have the money to maintain? We compare “calories in” to “calories out” before we binge on ice cream; what if we took the same approach to our infrastructure budgets? One city did, and here’s what they found out.
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Early in my career, I helped plan a highway bypass for a small town that I was sure would generate a positive return on investment in the form of economic growth. The only problem? The actual numbers we calculated told a different story.
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I’ve had to reconcile my foundational belief in markets with my experiences working with cities. This has been a painful process.
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Tax-exempt properties have a significant fiscal footprint. Do we understand the impacts we create through the too-often wasteful way we design and build public facilities such as city halls, schools, libraries, and parks?
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Forward-thinking developers are building communities that take into account the hidden long-term costs of suburban development, and offer a more resilient alternative. But what if that alternative results in homes that are too expensive to be within reach of most Americans? And does it have to?
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Regional fragmentation allows cities to pursue quick growth and shift the long-term costs onto their neighbors. Can a proposal to merge St. Louis with its suburbs make the region stronger by fixing these incentives?
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California’s high-speed rail project appears indefinitely on hold. What is the opportunity cost of all the things the state hasn’t done during the decade-plus its leaders have spent fixated on this?
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