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Picture it.

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It's Saturday morning in America.

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You step out into your front porch with a cup of coffee.

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The air smells like fresh cut fescue, mulch, and quiet desperation.

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To your left, a sprinkler system is hissing rhythmically, fighting a losing war to keep
the non-native Kentucky bluegrass alive in a climate it was never biologically designed to

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inhabit.

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To your right, a neighbor you've never spoken to and statistically will never speak to.

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is washing a red Ford F-150 that has never hauled one load of lumber in its entire life.

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You get in your car to go buy a carton of milk.

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You back out of your driveway.

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You navigate the winding labyrinth of the cul-de-sac.

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You drive 1.5 miles past identical vinyl-sided houses, turn right into a massive four-lane
arterial road, wait at three cycles of a red light, and finally pull into a strip mall

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that looks exactly

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like every other strip mall in northern America.

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You have achieved the American dream.

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You have space.

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You have safety.

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You have a two-car garage.

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You have a yard.

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But what if I told you that the ground underneath your feet isn't just soil?

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What if I told you that your entire neighborhood, the asphalt you drive on, the pipes
carrying your water, the streetlights buzzing overhead, is financially insolvent?

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What if I told you the American suburb is not an engine of prosperity, as we've been told
for 70 years, but actually a slow motion municipal suicide pact?

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And most importantly, what if I told you the only reason your city hasn't gone bankrupt
yet is because it's running like a literal mathematical Ponzi scheme?

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Welcome to The Overlap, I am Joshua.

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And I'm Will, surprise!

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Fresh off of all the misadventures that Joshua told you all about.

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Those are definitely not cover stories.

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um I'm glad to be back.

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missed you, Will.

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If you've been following along, if you've been listening listener for the past couple of
weeks, Will has been on hiatus, but he is back with us today.

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And now that I'm back, we're going to absolutely ruin your neighborhood for you.

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You're welcome.

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I want to issue a trigger warning right now upfront.

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If you own a home in a subdivision built after 1950, this episode is gonna hurt your
feelings.

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It's gonna make you look at the pavement at the end of your driveway and see a ticking
time box.

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In short, it is heavy because usually on this show we talk about these big abstract
systems, things that happening at the global geopolitical scale.

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talk about the healthcare industrial complex or the geopolitics of microchips or our fan
favorite AI.

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But today we're talking about something hyper local.

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We're talking about why your city hall, yes, yours is broke.

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Right.

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I actually, really like hyperlocal.

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was something that, um, a word that Carrie used to describe what it was like in Louisiana
when I was talking about like gumbo, what I called gumbo, what I call Buddha and what I

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call a two Faye and how that is made is very distinctly specific to my house, my
neighborhood, the very small part of Louisiana that I came from.

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Shout out to Scott, Louisiana.

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Um, but

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hyper local, it has always been a funny word that I love the way she describes it because
it's so incredibly true.

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It is.

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You can place a cajun within a uh few hundred yards if you know what they put in their
gumbo.

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Pretty much, yeah.

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That's almost identically right.

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So the paradox that we need to start with, and I want everyone listening to think about
their local town, is to think about the headlines in your local newspaper or the posts on

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Nextdoor.

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Don't go too deep.

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Don't set up alerts.

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Just check it once a week.

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But on page one, the headline is always, Boomtown, city approves new 500 homes, massive
growth, the economy is roaring.

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It's always ribbons being cut and developers shaking hands, except for the past, you know,
exactly one year and eight days or so, but I digress.

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and then you flip to page three and the headline is now City Council Faces Budget Crisis
Cannot Afford to Fix Potholes Police Budget Strained Fire Station Brownouts Libraries

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Closing on Sundays You know what a library is, don't you kids?

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They're those big buildings that in some cities are not even functioning.

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It doesn't make sense, right?

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Like if all of this growth is good and all these giant corporations building houses and
setting up these multi-million dollar facilities, if building new houses creates wealth,

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then the fastest growing cities in America should be the richest places on earth.

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And they have gold-plated sidewalks and they're swimming in cash, but they're not.

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They're drowning in debt.

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And the reason comes down to a theory and really a mathematical proof that was popularized
by an organization called Strong Towns, if you've not heard of it, and its founder, Chuck

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Morrone.

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Chuck is a fascinating guy.

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Maybe something you thought you'd never...

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a fun guy.

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Some say so, yes.

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But he is not, as you might imagine from that description, an anti-capitalist radical
living in a yurt somewhere.

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He's actually, and I know you don't hear him described as fascinating very often, but he
is a civil engineer.

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He's a conservative guy from Minnesota, and his origin story is basically that he spent
decades building the suburbs of Minnesota.

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towns he lives in, the cities he lives near in Minnesota.

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He was the guy that signed off on the roads and the pipes.

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And one day he decided to sit down and actually run the math on the long-term maintenance
costs of the things he's building.

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And he realized, much to his chagrin, I would imagine that everything he was taught in
engineering school was a lie.

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um That'll cause a crisis of...

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Right.

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The bridges will still hold up for the...

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for a period of time, but he realized basically he had been duped into helping to build a
machine that was designed to bankrupt the very people he was trying to serve.

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Yeah.

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So the thesis we're exploring today is pretty simple, but it's also incredibly terrifying.

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The American pattern of suburban development does not actually generate enough tax revenue
to pay for its own infrastructure.

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It's actually a liability.

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It's a financial drain that's disguised as an asset.

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And the only way to keep the lights on and the float going there is to, uh the only way to
hide the insolvency is to keep growing.

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So growth covers a multitude of sins, as they say, uh but not forever.

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To keep building more liabilities though, keep paying for the old ones.

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That's the trick, right?

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Which is any financial crimes investigator will tell you is the literal definition of the
Ponzi scheme.

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Right, so let's break this down as far as the mechanism is concerned.

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Basically, no one sets out to bankrupt the city, right?

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Nobody wakes up and says, let's destroy the municipal budget.

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It happens because of a specific set of incentives.

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Will, why don't you walk us through the transaction?

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How does a cornfield become a crime scene?

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Well, assuming you're not talking about a mishap in the annual corn maze, let me tell you
how to follow the money timeline here.

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This is where the trick happens.

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So let's say you have a developer.

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Let's call him Bob, because we call all of our pretend people Bob.

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That's such a Bob thing to do.

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uh Bob buys a farm on the edge of town.

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He wants to build this subdivision called Whispering Pines Estates.

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Can't you just see the commercial now?

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which creates a paradox because the first thing Bob does is actually cut down all of the
pine trees so the wind can whisper through the vinyl siding, but go on.

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Right, it reminds me of that scene from Back the Future where Twin Pines Mall became Lone
Pines Mall, Lone Pine Mall.

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Naturally, Bob goes to the city council with his proposal, He says, I want to build 100
homes.

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These are going be nice homes, $400,000 homes.

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And here's the deal.

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I, Bob the developer, will pay for everything up front.

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I will build the roads.

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I will lay the sewer pipes.

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I will install the street lights and the storm drains.

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It will cost the city zero dollars.

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And the city council, of course, are chomping at the bet.

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They look at this and they think, yes, free stuff.

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They get 100 new families moving in.

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Those families pay property taxes.

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They pay sales tax at the local target.

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They pay for water hookups.

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From the city's perspective, in year one, it's pure profit, or at least it looks like it.

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They get the revenue, but they didn't have to pay for all of the infrastructure beneath
it.

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Exactly.

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That's what we call the sugar high.

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That's year one.

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All money's on the plus side.

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All everything's flowing.

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Dollars are flowing in.

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But here's the catch.

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Bob the developer builds the road, sells the houses, takes his profit, and Bob's gone.

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Like the whispering pines he cut down, he's nowhere to be found.

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He moves on to the next town.

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He then grifts, I mean gifts, the road and pipes to the city.

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Now the public and the taxpayers own the infrastructure.

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And for a while, nobody really notices the problem.

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For the first, say, 20 or 25 years, everything is great.

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The road's brand new, it doesn't have potholes, the PVC pipes won't leak, the streetlights
work, the city is collecting 20 years of taxes from these people and spending almost

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nothing on maintenance.

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This is the illusion of wealth phase where the family of family with two and a half kids
and a dog are walking down the boardwalk, admiring the nice shiny new storefronts.

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The city feels rich.

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All this cash is coming in.

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So what does one do when they're flush with cash and nothing to spend it on?

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They act like someone who just won a small lottery.

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They hire a new assistant city manager.

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They buy a fancy new fire truck with Wi-Fi connections.

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They build a new rec center with a lazy river.

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They basically burn in the cash flow because it all feels like profit in the first couple
of years.

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But it's not profit.

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It's a sinking fund that they aren't funding.

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Because then when year 25 hits, that life cycle bill comes due.

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Unlike Bob, bill sticks around.

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Suddenly that asphalt road needs to be resurfaced.

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The pumps for the sewage station lift burnout.

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The storm drains cracked.

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Now the city has to pay to replace that infrastructure.

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And this is where the math falls entirely apart.

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Also why I don't go by the name Bill, nickname Bill.

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Right, so this is when the city engineer finally crunches the numbers, usually as a result
of a massive panic, the city engineer realizes the horrifying truth.

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The total amount of property taxes collected from those hundred shiny new homes over the
last 25 years isn't even close enough to pay for the new road.

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Yeah, let's talk about the sense of scale here.

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Are we talking about being short a few hundred dollars or what?

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No, we're talking about being short by orders of magnitude.

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In a lot of cases, the tax revenue covers maybe 10 to 50 % of the replacement cost.

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But his suburban infrastructure is expensive, right?

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I mean, you have miles and miles of asphalt, miles of copper wires, miles of pipe, all
serving a very small number of people.

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Essentially, it's a density problem.

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You have stretched the city thin like butter over too much bread.

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So in year 25, the city suddenly staring at a multimillion dollar bill, they can't pay.

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They're technically insolvent.

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So the city council is in a room, right?

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They're sweating and they have three options.

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Option A, they can raise taxes, but to cover the gap, they would have to raise taxes by
something insane like 400 or 500%.

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So if they do that, of course the homeowners are gonna revolt.

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They get voted out, the people move away, so that's usually off the table.

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Option B, they cut services.

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That's the old standby.

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They decide, okay, we just won't pave the road.

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We'll just do a patch job.

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We'll let it crumble into the gravel.

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We'll close the library.

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We'll fire the police.

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And that turns the town into a ruin.

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So no one wants that either.

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which leaves option C, the Ponzi option.

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How do they solve the cashflow problem?

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Well, the way to solve every Ponzi scheme cash problem is to bring in more cash, right?

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They find a new investor.

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They find a new developer, Bob 2.0, and the city says, OK, Whispering Pines is bleeding us
dry.

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We're flat broke.

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But look, here comes developer, we'll call him Steve this time.

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It's going to be confused between the Bobs.

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He wants to build Oakwood Meadows.

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Spoiler alert, he's taking down all the Oaks.

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But build Oakwood Meadows further down the highway.

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He's gonna pay for, wait for it, new roads.

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He's gonna bring in, wait for it, new taxpayers.

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And he's gonna pay massive on-front impact fees for the privilege of building.

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What a good guy Steve is.

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So basically the city council immediately approves the new development, right?

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They take the cash from the new guys, Oakwood Meadows, and they use it to patch the holes
in the budget caused by the old guys whispering pines.

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They then use the money from the new investors to pay off the liabilities of the old
investors.

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And that'll be on your final exam here in Madoff 101.

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ah Again, textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme.

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But now you have a bigger problem.

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You've doubled your liability.

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Whispering Pines is still sucking the life out of the city.

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But now you've added Oakwood Meadows, which in 25 years will also need its roads replaced.

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Its library will be draining the city of money.

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And it also won't have generated enough money to pay for it.

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So you have no choice but to grow again.

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You'll have to build Willow Creek, then Maple Ridge, then the shops at Maple Ridge, then
the arena at Northern Tif Development District or whatever down the road.

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You have to grow exponentially just to service the debt of the growth you did 20 years
ago.

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It becomes an addiction.

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You can't stop growing or the whole thing collapses.

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So that's why you have things like economic development councils and city coalitions in
Oklahoma where I'm at.

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The Oklahoma uh state law is that you cannot actually use any of the money from property
taxes to fund your city.

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has to come 100 % from sales taxes.

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So we have a little bit of a different

221
00:15:37,910 --> 00:15:49,228
scenario here, obviously we're talking a little bit about suburban blight, but in our
case, uh it's, I mean, it's, we still have all of these problems, but usually they don't

222
00:15:49,228 --> 00:15:55,422
say, hey, let's raise property taxes because that ultimately will not help the city's
funding issue.

223
00:15:55,422 --> 00:15:57,863
They say, let's raise sales taxes.

224
00:15:57,884 --> 00:16:06,946
Then they have to justify that by bringing in new businesses so that out of towners are
drawn in so we can pull their money to cover the...

225
00:16:06,946 --> 00:16:08,499
budget deficit there.

226
00:16:08,750 --> 00:16:18,853
And I think it's, even if you live in a city like, or a state like Texas, where you can
tap into that property tax uh money, I think it's important to visualize why that tax

227
00:16:18,853 --> 00:16:20,173
money is not enough.

228
00:16:20,413 --> 00:16:24,734
It's not because taxes are too low, though they are relative to the cost.

229
00:16:24,734 --> 00:16:26,875
It's because the yield is too low.

230
00:16:27,175 --> 00:16:32,510
So Joshua, imagine a traditional city block, like an old downtown from 1920.

231
00:16:32,717 --> 00:16:36,118
Before the car became king, you have a grid.

232
00:16:36,118 --> 00:16:37,034
On one block,

233
00:16:37,034 --> 00:16:42,214
You might have 20 small businesses, a barber, a baker, a candlestick maker.

234
00:16:42,214 --> 00:16:44,594
Oh yes, there it is.

235
00:16:45,174 --> 00:16:47,894
We're in dad joke synchrony.

236
00:16:48,274 --> 00:16:50,794
You have a hardware store, know?

237
00:16:51,034 --> 00:16:54,434
Maybe they have apartments above them, because that was often a thing.

238
00:16:54,783 --> 00:16:58,247
Right, that's a high value environment, right?

239
00:16:58,247 --> 00:17:08,459
You have one strip of asphalt, one water pipe, one electric line, but that infrastructure
is actually serving 200 people and 20 businesses.

240
00:17:08,459 --> 00:17:12,723
The revenue per foot of that pipe is massive.

241
00:17:12,974 --> 00:17:13,204
Right.

242
00:17:13,204 --> 00:17:15,775
Now imagine a cul-de-sac.

243
00:17:15,875 --> 00:17:24,338
You have the same length of road, right, the size of a small city block, that same length
of pipe, but it only serves two houses now.

244
00:17:24,479 --> 00:17:27,900
Instead of 20 businesses and apartments, it's two houses.

245
00:17:28,000 --> 00:17:31,861
Two families have to shoulder the entire replacement cost of that infrastructure.

246
00:17:32,202 --> 00:17:33,902
The math doesn't work.

247
00:17:34,163 --> 00:17:35,483
It's geometry.

248
00:17:35,603 --> 00:17:43,096
Strong Towns has done these incredible case studies where they map cities like an MRI,
showing financial productivity, quote unquote, financial productivity.

249
00:17:43,226 --> 00:17:52,452
And what they find every single time is that the old poor gritty neighborhoods, the ones
with the grid streets and the small houses are actually the cash cows.

250
00:17:52,592 --> 00:17:55,434
They're being bled dry to subsidize the rich suburbs.

251
00:17:56,030 --> 00:17:59,701
That is the irony that kind of breaks my brain really when I think about it.

252
00:17:59,701 --> 00:18:08,925
We have this like cultural narrative that the suburbs are where the wealth is and this
inner city is kind of where the poverty and the crime is.

253
00:18:08,925 --> 00:18:14,347
But from a municipal cashflow perspective, the suburbs are these welfare queens, right?

254
00:18:14,347 --> 00:18:19,368
They're the ones that are actually leeching off the productivity of the inner city.

255
00:18:19,469 --> 00:18:25,821
The guy living in the McMansion on the edge of town is paying the Walmart price for like a
bespoke suit.

256
00:18:25,821 --> 00:18:31,590
custom tailored and the city, meaning the poor neighborhoods, is actually the ones picking
up the difference.

257
00:18:31,841 --> 00:18:34,453
You know, there's a famous example from Brainerd, Minnesota.

258
00:18:34,453 --> 00:18:37,104
guess that's a real town, Brainerd.

259
00:18:37,465 --> 00:18:41,067
They call it the Taco John study because it involved the Taco Johns.

260
00:18:41,067 --> 00:18:43,109
So, you know, great, great name.

261
00:18:43,109 --> 00:18:44,950
They compared two properties.

262
00:18:44,990 --> 00:18:47,562
Property A was an old ugly block in the downtown.

263
00:18:47,562 --> 00:18:53,175
They had the barbershop, liquor store, maybe an old rundown apartment upstairs.

264
00:18:53,316 --> 00:18:55,287
From the look of it, you'd say it was blighted.

265
00:18:55,287 --> 00:18:58,339
That's a bad word in urban development.

266
00:18:58,339 --> 00:18:58,769
Blighted.

267
00:18:58,769 --> 00:19:01,022
It's true.

268
00:19:01,022 --> 00:19:03,499
have to keep the blight from spreading.

269
00:19:03,499 --> 00:19:05,272
Custom like sailors though, civil engineers.

270
00:19:05,272 --> 00:19:10,961
uh Property B was a brand new Taco John's drive-through on the edge of town.

271
00:19:10,961 --> 00:19:16,319
Beautiful, shiny, paved parking lot, highly processed uh Tex-Mex.

272
00:19:16,574 --> 00:19:20,199
And the city council looks at Taco John's and says, well, that's progress, right?

273
00:19:20,199 --> 00:19:21,401
Like that's wealth.

274
00:19:21,401 --> 00:19:23,084
Look at the new sign.

275
00:19:23,084 --> 00:19:25,768
And then they look at the old block and say, well, this is garbage.

276
00:19:25,768 --> 00:19:27,249
We should just tear it down.

277
00:19:27,873 --> 00:19:28,793
You're breaking my heart here.

278
00:19:28,793 --> 00:19:36,667
You know, as somebody who loves when the new Whataburger gets built, you know, even if
it's 40 miles away, I'm now realizing this is all from Ponzi scheme.

279
00:19:36,667 --> 00:19:38,017
It's breaking my heart.

280
00:19:38,417 --> 00:19:39,598
But you know, hey, here's the thing.

281
00:19:39,598 --> 00:19:44,150
Like you said, this is hard to get our heads wrapped around because we're so used to our
cultural narrative.

282
00:19:44,150 --> 00:19:52,113
mean, I like physically felt the resistance in me while I reading this, you know, reading
our research for this podcast.

283
00:19:52,113 --> 00:19:52,833
Like this can't be right.

284
00:19:52,833 --> 00:19:54,644
There has to be a rebuttal somewhere.

285
00:19:54,644 --> 00:19:55,644
But you know what?

286
00:19:55,644 --> 00:19:57,457
Chuck ran the numbers.

287
00:19:57,457 --> 00:19:57,749
Huh?

288
00:19:57,749 --> 00:20:02,613
The old ugly block was worth $1.1 million on the tax rolls.

289
00:20:02,754 --> 00:20:06,036
The new shiny Taco John's, 600K.

290
00:20:06,777 --> 00:20:10,420
Almost half of what the old ugly block was worth in taxes.

291
00:20:10,721 --> 00:20:17,026
The blighted block, pardon my French, was generating nearly double the tax revenue for the
city.

292
00:20:17,026 --> 00:20:21,129
And here's the key, the old block utilized existing infrastructure.

293
00:20:21,150 --> 00:20:25,383
Taco John's required a massive new road, a dedicated turn lane.

294
00:20:25,383 --> 00:20:29,425
new pipes, and huge amounts of space for parking that generates zero tax revenue.

295
00:20:30,092 --> 00:20:33,276
a parking lot is just dead land, right?

296
00:20:33,276 --> 00:20:34,167
It's asphalt.

297
00:20:34,167 --> 00:20:36,809
It pays almost no taxes.

298
00:20:36,810 --> 00:20:45,099
So we bulldoze high-yield productive cities to build low-yield expensive car depots.

299
00:20:45,099 --> 00:20:50,545
We're literally replacing gold with plastic and patting ourselves on the back for
modernization.

300
00:20:51,113 --> 00:20:52,986
In this case, forever plastics, right?

301
00:20:52,986 --> 00:20:56,380
It's sticky with a bill for a foreseeable future.

302
00:20:56,882 --> 00:20:59,306
This brings us to the psychological aspect of it all.

303
00:20:59,306 --> 00:21:00,348
Why do we do it?

304
00:21:00,348 --> 00:21:03,132
If the math is so obviously bad, Chuck has opened our eyes.

305
00:21:03,132 --> 00:21:06,456
Why does every city in America keep improving these developments?

306
00:21:07,213 --> 00:21:11,415
Well, it's a growth addiction and it's an inherently American thing.

307
00:21:11,416 --> 00:21:14,698
It's ultimately intergenerational theft.

308
00:21:14,878 --> 00:21:19,661
We are partying on the credit of the people who come after us.

309
00:21:19,942 --> 00:21:29,268
We're building infrastructure that we know we cannot afford to maintain just so we can
have lower taxes and cheaper houses today.

310
00:21:29,899 --> 00:21:38,374
So not only have we uh bought the golden handcuffs, but we're actually willing them to our
kids in our less willing testament.

311
00:21:38,374 --> 00:21:47,679
um Yeah, so to make this whole scheme work, to connect all these spread out houses to the
Taco John's, we had to invent a new type of infrastructure.

312
00:21:48,180 --> 00:21:50,881
We had to invent a specific type of road.

313
00:21:50,981 --> 00:21:57,725
And it turns out this road is arguably the ugliest, most dangerous, and most soul sucking
invention in human history.

314
00:21:58,321 --> 00:22:00,849
god, I know you're about to say it.

315
00:22:01,494 --> 00:22:03,379
You're talking about the Strode.

316
00:22:04,135 --> 00:22:06,510
I am talking about the strode.

317
00:22:06,612 --> 00:22:08,456
like, know, sounds like that.

318
00:22:08,456 --> 00:22:11,465
It reminds me of several things actually, this word, but the first one is like that.

319
00:22:11,465 --> 00:22:13,985
we can't mention for, you know, ratings sake, but.

320
00:22:13,985 --> 00:22:18,345
Right, but you know that old commercial with the splode soda.

321
00:22:18,345 --> 00:22:19,705
I don't know if you remember that.

322
00:22:20,025 --> 00:22:21,745
It's strode.

323
00:22:21,925 --> 00:22:30,165
That's about the same effect, but this is where the conversation gets really ugly because
this is where the money meets the actual literal body count.

324
00:22:30,416 --> 00:22:32,888
Okay, so you dropped the word.

325
00:22:32,888 --> 00:22:33,888
You said it.

326
00:22:33,888 --> 00:22:34,988
Strode.

327
00:22:35,390 --> 00:22:38,452
S-T-R, whatever, shut up.

328
00:22:38,452 --> 00:22:42,194
Strode, S-T-R-O-A-D.

329
00:22:42,234 --> 00:22:52,661
And it kind of sounds like a glitch in your brain to make a Matrix reference, but it
sounds like something you'd, I don't know, cough up, maybe something you would take a pill

330
00:22:52,661 --> 00:23:00,006
for, like an STD, STI, but for the people who don't know what it is, why don't you explain
what a strode is?

331
00:23:00,466 --> 00:23:09,962
Okay, you've actually all seen them most likely, but they're the ugliest, most dangerous,
and most financially ruinous piece of infrastructure in the American toolkit.

332
00:23:10,183 --> 00:23:13,805
The term was coined by our good buddy Chuck at Strong Towns.

333
00:23:14,065 --> 00:23:15,506
Good job, Chuck.

334
00:23:15,746 --> 00:23:19,069
And it's a portmanteau, which is a fun word.

335
00:23:19,069 --> 00:23:22,871
Fun word means new road, a new word made from old words.

336
00:23:22,891 --> 00:23:25,173
And the old words here are pretty obvious if you think about it.

337
00:23:25,173 --> 00:23:26,954
They're street and road.

338
00:23:27,394 --> 00:23:30,216
Put that together, kids, and you get strode.

339
00:23:30,259 --> 00:23:30,876
Mmm

340
00:23:30,876 --> 00:23:40,687
understand why it's a disaster, have to understand that in civil engineering terms, or at
least in sane engineering terms, a street and a road are two completely different tools

341
00:23:40,687 --> 00:23:42,258
with opposite purposes.

342
00:23:42,365 --> 00:23:46,459
Right, because in normal conversation, we kind of use them interchangeably, right?

343
00:23:46,459 --> 00:23:49,141
Like I'm driving down the road, I'm parking on the street.

344
00:23:49,222 --> 00:23:54,397
But what Will is saying is that they're actually two distinctly different things.

345
00:23:54,610 --> 00:23:59,062
Right, in the world of urban and suburban planning, they are completely distinct.

346
00:23:59,062 --> 00:24:01,643
Think of a road like a railroad track for cars.

347
00:24:01,643 --> 00:24:06,035
Its purpose is to move people from point A to point B as fast and efficiently as possible.

348
00:24:06,035 --> 00:24:07,946
It's a thoroughfare, right?

349
00:24:07,946 --> 00:24:09,446
A road should be simple.

350
00:24:09,446 --> 00:24:15,969
High speed, wide lanes, no stopping, no businesses, no driveways, just pure movement.

351
00:24:15,969 --> 00:24:18,710
It's the open road that you've always heard about.

352
00:24:18,710 --> 00:24:20,281
Think of an interstate highway, right?

353
00:24:20,281 --> 00:24:21,591
That's a road.

354
00:24:21,651 --> 00:24:23,602
It works, it connects places.

355
00:24:24,466 --> 00:24:25,933
Okay, that makes sense.

356
00:24:25,933 --> 00:24:28,544
It's basically a pipe for cars, right?

357
00:24:28,544 --> 00:24:29,646
And a street?

358
00:24:30,013 --> 00:24:32,433
A street is a platform for building wealth.

359
00:24:32,594 --> 00:24:34,694
A street is a destination.

360
00:24:34,755 --> 00:24:36,175
Think of Main Street.

361
00:24:36,175 --> 00:24:37,636
It's a complex.

362
00:24:37,636 --> 00:24:38,814
It's got pedestrians.

363
00:24:38,814 --> 00:24:39,547
It's got shops.

364
00:24:39,547 --> 00:24:44,012
It's got slow cars, parallel parking, people crossing to get coffee.

365
00:24:44,012 --> 00:24:46,660
A lot of movement, a lot of things happening on a street.

366
00:24:46,660 --> 00:24:48,560
The purpose of a street isn't to move fast.

367
00:24:48,560 --> 00:24:52,742
The purpose is to get people to stop, get out of their cars, and spend money.

368
00:24:53,222 --> 00:24:57,234
So roads are for high street, excuse me, roads are for high speed travel.

369
00:24:57,652 --> 00:24:59,113
Streets are for high value commerce.

370
00:24:59,113 --> 00:25:11,302
um This is what we think about, again, being a parent here of young kids, I've seen the
movie Cars way too many times, but your road is Route 66.

371
00:25:11,302 --> 00:25:19,388
Your streets are when you get to, now I'm blanking on the name of the town, Carburetor,
it'll come back to me.

372
00:25:19,388 --> 00:25:23,811
yeah, when you get to the, Radiator Springs, there we go, thank you.

373
00:25:23,871 --> 00:25:25,237
Radiator Springs.

374
00:25:25,237 --> 00:25:25,846
Yes.

375
00:25:25,846 --> 00:25:35,192
so when you use the radiator springs, you're supposed to stop and you're supposed to buy
gas from flow and uh army surplus from Sarge and all the fun characters that we miss and

376
00:25:35,192 --> 00:25:36,042
love.

377
00:25:36,903 --> 00:25:39,203
Sorry, aside finished.

378
00:25:39,474 --> 00:25:40,255
Yeah, yeah, no worries.

379
00:25:40,255 --> 00:25:44,701
mean, it just goes to show I every now and then will watch an animated movie as well.

380
00:25:45,063 --> 00:25:52,363
Astro is basically what happens when you try to mash a street and a road together like a
really bad Frankenstein experiment.

381
00:25:52,688 --> 00:25:53,888
Exactly.

382
00:25:54,549 --> 00:26:00,171
Astrode strives to be both a high-speed traffic artery and a destination for commerce.

383
00:26:00,171 --> 00:26:01,712
What could go wrong?

384
00:26:02,032 --> 00:26:06,994
It's that 45 mile per hour, five lane strip of asphalt that runs through every suburb in
America.

385
00:26:07,155 --> 00:26:12,437
You know the one that has a Jiffy Lube and Arby's, a mattress mattress firm and a Home
Depot.

386
00:26:12,437 --> 00:26:15,398
Used to have a Bed Bath and Beyond, but now just Beyond.

387
00:26:15,519 --> 00:26:19,240
It has wide lanes so you feel comfortable driving fast, but it also

388
00:26:19,294 --> 00:26:25,838
has a driveway every 50 feet and you wonder who lives on these things that would want to
back out into this nightmare every morning to go to work.

389
00:26:26,225 --> 00:26:29,598
Yeah, this is like kind of the futon of transportation, right?

390
00:26:29,598 --> 00:26:31,188
It's a terrible couch.

391
00:26:31,289 --> 00:26:33,030
It's a terrible bed.

392
00:26:33,671 --> 00:26:40,576
It fails at moving traffic because there are red lights every quarter mile and people
constantly turning into Chick-fil-A.

393
00:26:40,576 --> 00:26:46,721
And then it fails as a place because nobody in their right mind wants to actually walk
there.

394
00:26:46,721 --> 00:26:48,092
You can't ride a bike there.

395
00:26:48,092 --> 00:26:48,942
It's loud.

396
00:26:48,942 --> 00:26:49,773
It's hot.

397
00:26:49,773 --> 00:26:51,444
And it feels like you're going to die.

398
00:26:51,834 --> 00:26:57,698
You don't see people having a romantic dinner on the patio of an Applebee's facing a
six-lane strode.

399
00:26:57,949 --> 00:27:00,890
And sadly, that failure is not just aesthetic, right?

400
00:27:00,890 --> 00:27:04,911
It's not just that it looks bad and it's just creates an awful mess.

401
00:27:04,911 --> 00:27:07,732
It's actually lethal from a safety standpoint.

402
00:27:07,732 --> 00:27:09,142
Strode's are killing fields.

403
00:27:09,142 --> 00:27:14,323
uh mean, it's it's Frogger writ large in the real world.

404
00:27:14,323 --> 00:27:23,586
You got cars moving at lethal speeds, 45, 50 miles an hour, mixing with cars that are
slowing down to turn right into that Chick-fil-A or stopped and formed a new lane, a new

405
00:27:23,586 --> 00:27:27,787
takeout lane from the Chick-fil-A or pulling out of a driveway into traffic.

406
00:27:27,923 --> 00:27:34,772
That differential is in speed, combined with the complexity of all the moving parts is
what causes crashes.

407
00:27:35,093 --> 00:27:40,659
Statistically, strode are the most dangerous places to drive or walk in America.

408
00:27:40,700 --> 00:27:46,177
If look at pedestrian deaths, they almost always happen on these 45 mile per hour arterial
strode.

409
00:27:46,965 --> 00:27:49,659
Yeah, I mean, it's because the design is basically schizophrenic.

410
00:27:49,659 --> 00:27:55,186
The road is wide and straight, which tells your brain, go fast, right?

411
00:27:55,186 --> 00:27:56,217
It's a highway.

412
00:27:56,468 --> 00:27:59,341
but the environment is full of conflict points.

413
00:27:59,341 --> 00:28:02,284
People turning, people walking to the bus stop.

414
00:28:02,284 --> 00:28:10,158
So the engineer puts up a sign that says 35 miles per hour, but the geometry of the road
screams 60.

415
00:28:10,251 --> 00:28:17,828
And when the police sit there and write tickets, and we call it safety enforcement, but
really it's just bad design.

416
00:28:18,079 --> 00:28:26,924
Well, we're really bagging on Strode's here and they deserve everything we're saying, but
let's tie this back to the Ponzi scheme because Strode's aren't just ugly and dangerous.

417
00:28:26,944 --> 00:28:29,365
They're financial black holes for the city.

418
00:28:30,146 --> 00:28:32,487
Think about the infrastructure required for a Strode.

419
00:28:32,487 --> 00:28:33,888
You need massive width.

420
00:28:33,888 --> 00:28:39,971
You got to have five or seven lanes, including turn lanes, because you need a passing lane
for when people get stopped in the Chick-fil-A line.

421
00:28:40,071 --> 00:28:42,923
You need huge expensive traffic signals that hang on mast arms.

422
00:28:42,923 --> 00:28:47,775
You know, those ones where it's like five lights across and they're blowing the wind all
the time.

423
00:28:47,951 --> 00:28:52,836
You need massive, right, just waiting to fall down on somebody's car.

424
00:28:53,197 --> 00:28:57,001
You need massive drainage systems to handle the runoff from all that asphalt.

425
00:28:57,062 --> 00:29:02,107
I mean, we're talking millions of dollars per mile to build and maintain a strode.

426
00:29:02,908 --> 00:29:05,822
Yeah, and the argument is usually like, well, the businesses pay for it.

427
00:29:05,822 --> 00:29:09,726
Look at the commerce, look at the Best Buy, look at the Olive Garden.

428
00:29:09,887 --> 00:29:16,334
I don't know why we chose to mention failing businesses, but those businesses, they still
pay taxes, right?

429
00:29:17,257 --> 00:29:22,782
They do, although not a penny more than they have to, but again, you have to look at the
yield per acre, right?

430
00:29:22,782 --> 00:29:28,296
This is going back to our street that used to cover 20 businesses, and it now covers two
houses.

431
00:29:28,716 --> 00:29:30,378
A similar thing happens with the strode.

432
00:29:30,378 --> 00:29:32,660
The strode businesses are land hogs.

433
00:29:32,660 --> 00:29:34,821
They are notoriously inefficient.

434
00:29:34,842 --> 00:29:36,583
Take a typical fast food franchise.

435
00:29:36,583 --> 00:29:41,807
You have a tiny building, maybe 2,000 square feet, where the actual commerce happens.

436
00:29:41,807 --> 00:29:46,941
But that building is surrounded by an ocean of parking, drive-through lanes, landscaping
buffers.

437
00:29:47,199 --> 00:29:52,988
That entire property may be one acre, but only 10 % of that acre is actually a building
generating taxable value.

438
00:29:52,988 --> 00:29:55,101
The rest is asphalt.

439
00:29:55,632 --> 00:29:58,544
And guess how much tax asphalt pays?

440
00:29:58,865 --> 00:30:00,045
It's zero.

441
00:30:01,287 --> 00:30:05,850
So you have the diluted value of the land, right?

442
00:30:05,850 --> 00:30:14,407
Compare that to the downtown block we talked about earlier in a downtown block, the
building covers 100 % of that lot, right?

443
00:30:14,407 --> 00:30:15,859
It's three stories tall.

444
00:30:15,859 --> 00:30:23,584
So you have three floors of taxpaying activity stacked on top of each other, served by a
very narrow street.

445
00:30:23,645 --> 00:30:25,168
So on the strode,

446
00:30:25,168 --> 00:30:32,446
You have a one story shack surrounded by a giant parking crater served by a massive
highway.

447
00:30:32,446 --> 00:30:37,400
The return on infrastructure investment for the Strode is actually pretty terrible.

448
00:30:38,027 --> 00:30:39,747
But wait, there's more.

449
00:30:39,747 --> 00:30:43,387
Like a dystopic infrastructure, or infomercial here.

450
00:30:43,707 --> 00:30:45,487
Sorry, I'm floating slip.

451
00:30:45,487 --> 00:30:51,887
Like a dystopic infomercial, big box stores also have a specific life cycle, cycle, right?

452
00:30:51,887 --> 00:30:55,067
These big warehouse stores, we call it the 20 year cycle.

453
00:30:55,527 --> 00:30:57,467
A big box store is built cheaply.

454
00:30:57,467 --> 00:30:58,327
Have you ever looked around?

455
00:30:58,327 --> 00:31:03,107
If you ever pause to look around, I know there's lots to look at when you're walking
through Walmart.

456
00:31:03,107 --> 00:31:07,125
But if you ever look up, they're not built, they're not high.

457
00:31:07,125 --> 00:31:08,386
high quality buildings here.

458
00:31:08,386 --> 00:31:16,539
We're talking about the cheapest warehouse you can throw up and a facade on the front of
it that basically is not designed to last 100 years.

459
00:31:16,559 --> 00:31:17,880
Not even half that.

460
00:31:17,880 --> 00:31:20,801
It's designed to last about 15 to 20 years.

461
00:31:20,801 --> 00:31:23,202
At the end of that cycle, guess what starts happening?

462
00:31:23,202 --> 00:31:29,545
The roof leaks, the AC units falling apart, the facade's looking dated, the depreciation
schedule runs out.

463
00:31:29,605 --> 00:31:35,047
And so surely you might ask yourself, well, if it's generating all this money, surely the
retailer will renovate it.

464
00:31:35,427 --> 00:31:37,538
No, no, they don't really renovate it.

465
00:31:37,538 --> 00:31:38,678
They move.

466
00:31:38,898 --> 00:31:44,019
They literally just move two miles down the road to the new Strode.

467
00:31:44,380 --> 00:31:52,222
The build a shiny new box, get a new tax break from the city for creating jobs.

468
00:31:52,383 --> 00:31:54,604
And what happens to the old box?

469
00:31:54,604 --> 00:31:55,985
Well, it just sits empty.

470
00:31:55,985 --> 00:31:57,866
It becomes a zombie box.

471
00:31:57,866 --> 00:32:04,898
And maybe if you're lucky, it becomes a Spirit Halloween for two months a year or an
indoor trampoline park.

472
00:32:04,906 --> 00:32:10,339
or an axe throwing facility or a brewery, but usually it just rots.

473
00:32:11,049 --> 00:32:15,402
And here's the kicker, when that store goes dark, its tax value plummets.

474
00:32:15,662 --> 00:32:18,164
Essentially just built up asphalt.

475
00:32:18,204 --> 00:32:24,548
The city stops collecting the sales tax, the property tax assessment drops through the
floor, but the road is still there.

476
00:32:24,548 --> 00:32:26,009
The traffic lights are still there.

477
00:32:26,009 --> 00:32:27,550
The pipes are still there.

478
00:32:27,550 --> 00:32:34,735
The city still has to maintain that massive infrastructure that was built to serve that
store, but the revenue that was paying for it is all gone.

479
00:32:34,986 --> 00:32:48,215
Yeah, and also, in addition to that, the people who own the building won't lower the rent
because they can write off the loss as a big loss at the end of the year and make up for

480
00:32:48,215 --> 00:32:51,807
their lack of money movement in other areas.

481
00:32:52,228 --> 00:32:54,809
The Ponzi scheme is like 30 levels deep.

482
00:32:55,110 --> 00:33:01,434
It's basically disposable architecture served by permanent liability.

483
00:33:01,434 --> 00:33:04,318
And there is an even darker scam happening right now.

484
00:33:04,318 --> 00:33:06,705
Have you actually heard of the Dark Store Theory?

485
00:33:07,138 --> 00:33:08,171
my gosh, can't even talk about it.

486
00:33:08,171 --> 00:33:09,024
It's so frustrating.

487
00:33:09,024 --> 00:33:10,658
This is legal looting.

488
00:33:10,846 --> 00:33:20,660
So big retailers, and I'm not gonna name names, but they rhyme with Hall-Mart and uh Floam
Depot and Slows.

489
00:33:20,660 --> 00:33:23,181
And they have armies of lawyers, right?

490
00:33:23,181 --> 00:33:27,722
They sue local cities to lower their property taxes.

491
00:33:27,883 --> 00:33:36,306
And their argument is, hey, look, you shouldn't assess our store based upon what it costs
to build or how much money we make here.

492
00:33:36,306 --> 00:33:39,921
You should assess it based upon what it would be worth

493
00:33:39,921 --> 00:33:41,975
if it were completely empty.

494
00:33:41,975 --> 00:33:50,211
They basically argue that a functioning, bustling supercenter should be taxed at the same
rate as a vacant, rotting warehouse down the street.

495
00:33:50,462 --> 00:33:51,723
And they win these lawsuits.

496
00:33:51,723 --> 00:33:52,553
That's the crazy part.

497
00:33:52,553 --> 00:33:54,625
I'll never forget when I found out this was a real thing.

498
00:33:54,625 --> 00:33:59,888
The first time I got a letter from somebody saying offering to lower my property
assessment.

499
00:33:59,888 --> 00:34:03,691
They basically forced these cities to return millions of dollars in taxes.

500
00:34:04,051 --> 00:34:06,483
So not only are they low yield to begin with, right?

501
00:34:06,483 --> 00:34:07,243
Because they're spread out.

502
00:34:07,243 --> 00:34:14,508
They're all supported by these asphalt worthless patches of land, but they're actively
clawing back the money they did pay, right?

503
00:34:14,508 --> 00:34:17,971
They're willing to pay high paid lawyers to go after this.

504
00:34:17,971 --> 00:34:19,131
So you know there's something there, right?

505
00:34:19,131 --> 00:34:20,012
They don't pay high phone.

506
00:34:20,012 --> 00:34:21,044
powered lawyers for nothing.

507
00:34:21,044 --> 00:34:30,280
ah meanwhile, the local pizza place downtown, the one that can't afford a lawyer, they're
paying full price for their land.

508
00:34:30,531 --> 00:34:32,921
Yeah, so let's zoom out here, right?

509
00:34:32,922 --> 00:34:39,703
You drive down a strode, you see neon signs, you see packed parking lots, you see new
pavement.

510
00:34:39,703 --> 00:34:42,804
Your brain says, this is a place of wealth.

511
00:34:42,804 --> 00:34:45,065
This is prosperity.

512
00:34:45,105 --> 00:34:47,265
But your brain is really lying to you.

513
00:34:47,265 --> 00:34:54,467
What you are seeing is the same sugar high that we talked about earlier that the city
council sees of the first life cycle.

514
00:34:54,467 --> 00:34:58,698
You're seeing the cash flow before the maintenance bill comes due.

515
00:34:58,949 --> 00:35:02,169
It's the cotton candy illusion of wealth, right?

516
00:35:02,169 --> 00:35:03,468
It looks delicious.

517
00:35:03,469 --> 00:35:04,969
The first few bites taste good.

518
00:35:04,969 --> 00:35:06,849
You power your way through it until you get a stomach ache.

519
00:35:06,849 --> 00:35:11,489
And then five minutes later, you're actually still hungry because you didn't get any
nutritional value out of it.

520
00:35:11,749 --> 00:35:14,429
Sorry, the slide for the dentists out there.

521
00:35:14,429 --> 00:35:18,449
We've traded the permanent wealth of walkable mixed use cities, right?

522
00:35:18,449 --> 00:35:26,671
Those vibrant collisions of culture and beautiful patchwork, wealth that grows over
generations.

523
00:35:26,671 --> 00:35:30,984
for the disposable short-term cashflow of the auto-oriented strip.

524
00:35:30,984 --> 00:35:34,147
And when I say auto-oriented, that's literally about the cars, right?

525
00:35:34,147 --> 00:35:37,829
Our culture is built around cars and has been for many years now.

526
00:35:38,049 --> 00:35:42,632
We're literally stripping the value out of our land to park cars on worthless asphalt.

527
00:35:43,073 --> 00:35:49,357
In many American cities, if you look at a satellite map, 40 to 50 % of the downtown land
area is surface parking.

528
00:35:49,558 --> 00:35:54,401
Dead space produces nothing, like a gap tooth in the smile of the city.

529
00:35:55,381 --> 00:35:56,611
And we mandate this.

530
00:35:56,611 --> 00:35:57,592
That's the crazy part.

531
00:35:57,592 --> 00:36:03,303
Like if you want to open a small business, like let's say I want to open up a coffee shop
in a suburb.

532
00:36:03,343 --> 00:36:10,545
The city code requires me to build a certain number of parking spots, parking minimums,
the city says.

533
00:36:10,545 --> 00:36:16,646
Joshua, you can't open this business unless you have 3000 square feet of land for cars
that might not even show up.

534
00:36:16,646 --> 00:36:19,887
They're forcing me to waste this land.

535
00:36:20,147 --> 00:36:25,208
They're forcing me to lower the tax yield of my own property.

536
00:36:26,051 --> 00:36:31,642
And speaking of that local pizza parlor, I actually work with a local pizza joint with a
single location.

537
00:36:31,743 --> 00:36:38,624
And they can't open up in the store next to them, the storefront next to them, they built
out a whole dining area and they can't even open it up because the city won't let them

538
00:36:38,624 --> 00:36:41,225
because there's not enough parking allocated to that area.

539
00:36:41,425 --> 00:36:45,226
So people have to stand in line and stand and wait while they're waiting for their pizzas
to be cooked.

540
00:36:45,226 --> 00:36:51,548
Thankfully they're cooked very fast there, but they're still standing around waiting
because the city won't let them open up the dining area.

541
00:36:51,799 --> 00:36:53,992
And all this connects back to the housing trap.

542
00:36:53,992 --> 00:36:56,032
Because the stroad isn't just about shopping.

543
00:36:56,032 --> 00:36:57,972
It's the only way to get to your houses, right?

544
00:36:57,972 --> 00:37:01,312
The only way to get home is to follow the stroad.

545
00:37:01,852 --> 00:37:05,332
We have designed a system where you cannot survive without a car.

546
00:37:05,852 --> 00:37:09,252
One that forces every single family to buy into the Ponzi scheme.

547
00:37:09,592 --> 00:37:20,352
So now your price of ownership, your table stakes to getting into the Ponzi scheme is that
you have to own a car, which is a depreciating asset that costs you $10,000 a year.

548
00:37:20,592 --> 00:37:22,192
That is a tax.

549
00:37:22,726 --> 00:37:27,128
It's a massive private tax on every household imposed by bad urban design.

550
00:37:27,379 --> 00:37:37,262
So we have insolvent roads, have commercial disposable strips, and now we have to talk
about the holy grail.

551
00:37:37,262 --> 00:37:51,046
The thing that everyone moves to the suburbs for, the detached single-family home, the
yard, the fence, surely, surely the housing market is safe.

552
00:37:51,046 --> 00:37:54,467
Surely our homes are good investments for the city.

553
00:37:54,718 --> 00:37:56,849
Joshua, I have more bad news.

554
00:37:56,849 --> 00:37:59,710
The American dream turns into the American nightmare.

555
00:37:59,751 --> 00:38:01,992
The housing is the biggest loser of them all.

556
00:38:01,992 --> 00:38:10,876
Because when you look at the cost to run a pipe to a house on a half-acre lot versus the
tax that house pays, the math is horrifying.

557
00:38:11,157 --> 00:38:11,467
Yeah.

558
00:38:11,467 --> 00:38:15,368
So we're going to do the math on your lawn and you're not going to like it.

559
00:38:15,568 --> 00:38:17,309
It's about to get personal.

560
00:38:17,629 --> 00:38:22,130
So, well, at this point you've ruined the strip mall.

561
00:38:22,130 --> 00:38:24,291
You've ruined the commute.

562
00:38:24,291 --> 00:38:27,402
Um, but now we're at the gates of the castle.

563
00:38:27,402 --> 00:38:30,873
We're talking about the single family home, the cul-de-sac.

564
00:38:30,873 --> 00:38:33,273
This is the heart of the American dream.

565
00:38:33,273 --> 00:38:39,635
We're told from birth that this is the smartest investment we will ever make.

566
00:38:39,723 --> 00:38:45,545
My Zillow estimate says my house has gone up in value by a, well, it was 40%.

567
00:38:45,545 --> 00:38:49,451
Now it's like 22 % over the past five years.

568
00:38:49,832 --> 00:38:51,793
It makes you feel rich.

569
00:38:51,914 --> 00:38:55,307
The city must be getting rich off of my property taxes, right?

570
00:38:55,307 --> 00:39:01,192
I mean, not my city, but surely the cities are getting rich off of these property taxes,
right?

571
00:39:01,192 --> 00:39:01,872
Well.

572
00:39:02,216 --> 00:39:08,201
Joshua, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your house in this scenario is a
charity case.

573
00:39:08,441 --> 00:39:15,887
From the perspective of the city treasurer, your lovely cul-de-sac is a financial
disaster, and it comes down to a simple metric.

574
00:39:15,968 --> 00:39:21,522
We're back to infrastructure per capita, or to put it more simply, feet of pipe per
person.

575
00:39:21,928 --> 00:39:22,895
Explain that.

576
00:39:23,764 --> 00:39:26,784
Think about all the physical stuff required to keep your house running.

577
00:39:26,804 --> 00:39:34,464
You have water, got sewer, electricity, gas if you're lucky, storm drains, asphalt,
sidewalks if you're really lucky.

578
00:39:34,564 --> 00:39:35,824
All of that is linear.

579
00:39:35,824 --> 00:39:37,824
It runs in a line down the street.

580
00:39:38,364 --> 00:39:40,464
In a cul-de-sac you have wide lots, right?

581
00:39:40,464 --> 00:39:44,104
That's the whole beauty of the cul-de-sac, so you can put that pool in that you always
wanted.

582
00:39:44,344 --> 00:39:46,524
You have maybe 100 feet of frontage.

583
00:39:46,524 --> 00:39:52,340
That means for your specific house, the city has to maintain 100 feet of road, 100 feet of
water main.

584
00:39:52,340 --> 00:39:54,043
100 feet of sewer line.

585
00:39:54,043 --> 00:39:55,924
And who's paying for that 100 feet?

586
00:39:56,085 --> 00:39:58,458
Just you, just the one family.

587
00:39:58,709 --> 00:40:01,722
Okay, compare that to the traditional city block we talked about.

588
00:40:02,279 --> 00:40:06,543
In the traditional city, think of a row of townhouses or a pre-war neighborhood.

589
00:40:06,543 --> 00:40:07,804
The lots are narrower.

590
00:40:07,804 --> 00:40:10,606
You got maybe 25 to 30 feet of frontage.

591
00:40:10,607 --> 00:40:14,750
That same hundred feet of pipe is not serving one family, but three or four families.

592
00:40:14,851 --> 00:40:19,154
You have three times as many people chipping in to pay for the maintenance of the same
length of pipe.

593
00:40:19,335 --> 00:40:24,199
It's the difference between three people splitting a dinner check or you paying the whole
bill yourself.

594
00:40:24,560 --> 00:40:28,923
Suburbia is the municipal equivalent of dining alone and paying for the whole table.

595
00:40:29,174 --> 00:40:39,117
And the taxes don't make up for it because people in the suburbs usually pay higher
property taxes in absolute dollars than people in smaller, older homes.

596
00:40:39,778 --> 00:40:46,360
My tax bill is much lower in Oklahoma than it was in Texas.

597
00:40:46,360 --> 00:40:52,882
But if the guy in the townhouse pays half of that, doesn't that cover it?

598
00:40:53,503 --> 00:40:57,054
Again, we're talking about, and this is the great illusion, right?

599
00:40:57,054 --> 00:41:01,695
um You're paying more, yes, but you're consuming exponentially more.

600
00:41:01,696 --> 00:41:10,608
So think about it, if it's three families to one family, your tax bill would need to be
three times the tax bill of the smaller older homes just to get started, and we're not

601
00:41:10,608 --> 00:41:11,738
there, right?

602
00:41:12,019 --> 00:41:14,980
So you pay more, but you consume exponentially more.

603
00:41:14,980 --> 00:41:19,921
Strong towns analyze this in a city near and dear to both of our hearts, Lafayette,
Louisiana.

604
00:41:20,321 --> 00:41:29,081
They looked at the replacement cost of the infrastructure serving suburban homes to
actually break even to save enough money to replace the road and the pipes when they rot

605
00:41:29,081 --> 00:41:32,241
in 30 years, which is just a physical fact.

606
00:41:32,241 --> 00:41:34,281
These roads are going to fall apart eventually.

607
00:41:34,532 --> 00:41:40,412
The suburban homeowners taxes would need to increase something like $9,000 a year.

608
00:41:40,612 --> 00:41:41,712
You're paying $5,000.

609
00:41:41,712 --> 00:41:43,892
You should be paying $14,000.

610
00:41:44,112 --> 00:41:49,052
The gap, that $9,000 deficit, is being subsidized by the city taking on debt.

611
00:41:49,070 --> 00:41:51,433
or by stealing money from downtown districts.

612
00:41:51,684 --> 00:41:58,284
This is the part that actually makes me angry because the narrative is always that the
suburbs are independent.

613
00:41:58,284 --> 00:42:00,364
We moved out here to get away from the city.

614
00:42:00,364 --> 00:42:03,084
We don't want to pay for the city's problems.

615
00:42:03,084 --> 00:42:06,284
But mathematically, the suburbs are the dependent ones.

616
00:42:06,284 --> 00:42:16,324
The dense, poor inner city neighborhoods where the infrastructure is old, the roads are
narrow, the houses are close together, those neighborhoods are solvent.

617
00:42:16,324 --> 00:42:20,119
They generate more tax revenue per foot of pipe.

618
00:42:20,119 --> 00:42:22,064
than they cost to maintain.

619
00:42:22,064 --> 00:42:31,162
They are literally running a profit, and the city takes that profit and uses it to pave
the cul-de-sacs in the wealthy neighborhoods which are running at a loss.

620
00:42:31,413 --> 00:42:33,233
like a reverse Robin Hood.

621
00:42:33,794 --> 00:42:42,276
The poor living in dense, efficient neighborhoods are subsidized in the lifestyles of the
quote unquote rich who are living in the spread out, inefficient neighborhoods.

622
00:42:42,437 --> 00:42:47,738
But because of way municipal budgets are mushed together in one big pot, nobody actually
sees it.

623
00:42:47,778 --> 00:42:50,759
It's all hidden in the quote unquote general fund.

624
00:42:50,939 --> 00:42:56,231
If we send every neighborhood a bill for their specific infrastructure, the suburbs would
go bankrupt overnight.

625
00:42:57,036 --> 00:43:00,449
So, how did we get addicted to this?

626
00:43:00,651 --> 00:43:03,534
If it's such a bad deal, why did we start building this way?

627
00:43:03,534 --> 00:43:06,958
Because before World War II, we didn't do this.

628
00:43:06,958 --> 00:43:09,281
We built towns, we built grids.

629
00:43:09,281 --> 00:43:10,452
What changed?

630
00:43:10,703 --> 00:43:11,783
All right, stick with me here.

631
00:43:11,783 --> 00:43:14,343
This is a little bit, a little bit complicated.

632
00:43:14,523 --> 00:43:16,303
The federal government and dry.

633
00:43:16,303 --> 00:43:16,843
Yes.

634
00:43:16,843 --> 00:43:17,063
All right.

635
00:43:17,063 --> 00:43:18,883
Two of our favorite things on a podcast.

636
00:43:19,083 --> 00:43:25,003
The federal government put his thumb on the scale is the short answer in a way that sounds
again, sounds good from the beginning.

637
00:43:25,003 --> 00:43:26,583
When you read it and you're like, Oh, this is great.

638
00:43:26,583 --> 00:43:32,183
We have after World War II, we've got all these soldiers returning home and they need a
place to live and a place to work.

639
00:43:32,183 --> 00:43:38,943
And so we have the GI bill that lets them go to college and get trained on the new,
technologies that that are happening.

640
00:43:39,307 --> 00:43:42,829
And then we have the Federal Housing Administration to make sure that they can get a
house.

641
00:43:42,869 --> 00:43:45,031
The government wants to create housing for veterans.

642
00:43:45,031 --> 00:43:47,592
I mean, could be more noble than that, right?

643
00:43:47,692 --> 00:43:50,034
But they created rules for the mortgages.

644
00:43:50,034 --> 00:43:55,657
The FHA says, we'll ensure your mortgages, thanks, but only if the house meets our
criteria.

645
00:43:55,657 --> 00:44:00,600
And the criteria favored new construction, single-family detached homes.

646
00:44:00,600 --> 00:44:02,201
The American dream, right?

647
00:44:02,267 --> 00:44:05,463
If you're not building the America dream, we're not interested.

648
00:44:06,020 --> 00:44:10,189
But these are outside the city code and they literally redlined the old mixed use
neighborhoods.

649
00:44:10,189 --> 00:44:14,839
They declared them risky and they declared the new sprawling suburbs safe.

650
00:44:15,090 --> 00:44:21,795
So the banks stopped lending in the city and started spraying money into cornfields.

651
00:44:21,996 --> 00:44:25,178
And then we built the interstate highway system.

652
00:44:25,178 --> 00:44:31,884
The federal government paid 90 % of the cost to build massive highways through the middle
of cities.

653
00:44:31,884 --> 00:44:33,605
It destroyed neighborhoods.

654
00:44:33,765 --> 00:44:42,473
It destroyed suburbs within neighborhoods to make an easy commute to the new suburbs.

655
00:44:42,473 --> 00:44:44,518
It was a massive subsidy.

656
00:44:44,518 --> 00:44:47,319
We basically paid people to leave the city.

657
00:44:48,123 --> 00:44:51,245
And here's the crucial part relative to the Ponzi scheme.

658
00:44:51,466 --> 00:44:56,269
The feds paid to build it, but they do not pay to maintain it.

659
00:44:56,510 --> 00:44:59,953
So again, like Bob coming in with their new roads, we'll put in your new roads.

660
00:44:59,953 --> 00:45:02,395
We'll shoulder most of the cost.

661
00:45:02,395 --> 00:45:05,437
But when they break, hey, you bought it.

662
00:45:06,158 --> 00:45:06,558
So.

663
00:45:06,558 --> 00:45:08,049
ah

664
00:45:08,049 --> 00:45:12,441
The federal government is going to write a check to build a new highway interchange or the
new sewer expansion.

665
00:45:12,441 --> 00:45:13,711
The mayor cuts the ribbon.

666
00:45:13,711 --> 00:45:14,842
Everybody takes their photo up.

667
00:45:14,842 --> 00:45:16,282
Thanks, Uncle Sam.

668
00:45:16,282 --> 00:45:20,584
But 30 years later, when that interchange cracks, Uncle Sam is gone.

669
00:45:20,624 --> 00:45:23,565
The maintenance falls 100 % of the local taxpayers.

670
00:45:23,785 --> 00:45:27,647
We accepted a free gift that costs millions of dollars to keep.

671
00:45:27,859 --> 00:45:31,268
It's like someone giving you an elephant, saying, hey, it's a free elephant.

672
00:45:31,989 --> 00:45:32,849
Look, it's beautiful.

673
00:45:32,849 --> 00:45:35,240
This best elephant money can buy it, and I'll give it to you free.

674
00:45:35,240 --> 00:45:37,931
But then you realize after they walk away,

675
00:45:38,193 --> 00:45:42,936
that it costs 400 pounds of food a day for the next 40 years to feed that elephant.

676
00:45:43,602 --> 00:45:56,622
And now that elephant's hungry because most of this infrastructure was built in two big
waves, the post-war boom, the 1950s to 1960s, and then the housing bubble from the 1990s

677
00:45:56,622 --> 00:45:57,722
to the 2000s.

678
00:45:57,722 --> 00:46:00,562
And those warranties are expiring right now.

679
00:46:00,562 --> 00:46:03,602
Those pipes laid in 1960, they're bursting.

680
00:46:03,642 --> 00:46:10,410
The roads paved in 1995 are crumbling and cities are realizing that they have zero money
in the bank to fix it.

681
00:46:11,219 --> 00:46:14,879
And it doesn't cost peanuts to fix these, this infrastructure.

682
00:46:15,079 --> 00:46:17,539
Uh, this is why your water bill is doubling.

683
00:46:17,539 --> 00:46:18,419
Literally.

684
00:46:18,419 --> 00:46:19,499
I've seen it happen.

685
00:46:19,499 --> 00:46:20,999
It's very painful.

686
00:46:21,019 --> 00:46:23,619
This is why your property taxes are skyrocketing.

687
00:46:23,619 --> 00:46:25,119
Also saw that.

688
00:46:25,119 --> 00:46:33,279
This is why there are potholes that swallow cars often in the inner city, which is
technically could pay for these things if not for the burden of the suburbs.

689
00:46:33,639 --> 00:46:36,319
But the growth machine has virtually stopped.

690
00:46:36,539 --> 00:46:41,183
We can't grow our way out of it anymore because we've run out of land or the market is
cool.

691
00:46:41,183 --> 00:46:43,425
The Ponzi schemes run out of new investors.

692
00:46:43,425 --> 00:46:46,843
And remember, these new investors and these new payments, they're exponential.

693
00:46:46,843 --> 00:46:48,369
They're not just linear.

694
00:46:48,891 --> 00:46:54,075
So now the investors who are us, we're left holding the bag.

695
00:46:54,326 --> 00:46:56,857
I actually see this in my own town, right?

696
00:46:56,857 --> 00:47:00,327
The city council will propose a bond, right?

697
00:47:00,408 --> 00:47:03,769
Vote yes for the $50 million bond to fix roads.

698
00:47:03,769 --> 00:47:06,829
And we vote yes because we hate potholes, right?

699
00:47:06,829 --> 00:47:10,820
But borrowing money to fix a road is insanity, right?

700
00:47:10,820 --> 00:47:13,551
A road is a depreciating asset.

701
00:47:13,551 --> 00:47:14,771
It's maintenance.

702
00:47:14,812 --> 00:47:18,392
You should pay for maintenance out of cashflow, not out of debt.

703
00:47:18,392 --> 00:47:24,594
So borrowing 30-year money to fix a road that will only last 20 years is a death spiral.

704
00:47:24,768 --> 00:47:27,571
That is using a credit card to pay for your mortgage.

705
00:47:27,822 --> 00:47:31,853
And when you hit that pesky borrowing limit, then the cuts start.

706
00:47:31,853 --> 00:47:33,314
And notice what gets cut.

707
00:47:33,314 --> 00:47:36,483
They don't cut the road maintenance immediately because that's too visible, right?

708
00:47:36,483 --> 00:47:38,235
Everybody knows where the potholes are.

709
00:47:38,235 --> 00:47:40,676
And they feel them every day on their way to work.

710
00:47:40,676 --> 00:47:48,518
They cut the soft services, parks, libraries, public transit, police response times.

711
00:47:48,618 --> 00:47:52,419
We sacrifice quality of life to keep the asphalt on life support.

712
00:47:52,599 --> 00:47:54,810
We become slaves to our own infrastructure.

713
00:47:54,810 --> 00:47:59,320
And we exist just to pay for the road that lets us drive away from the house we can't
afford to maintain.

714
00:47:59,808 --> 00:48:00,898
bleak will.

715
00:48:01,099 --> 00:48:16,024
We have built a living arrangement that bankrupts us publicly and isolates us privately,
but we promised at the beginning that we wouldn't just leave people in the despair pit,

716
00:48:16,024 --> 00:48:16,305
right?

717
00:48:16,305 --> 00:48:19,287
Strong Towns isn't a doomer organization.

718
00:48:19,287 --> 00:48:20,357
They actually have a plan.

719
00:48:20,357 --> 00:48:27,730
There is a way out of this Ponzi scheme, but it requires doing the one thing that
Americans hate doing the most.

720
00:48:28,186 --> 00:48:29,139
Not the C word.

721
00:48:29,139 --> 00:48:31,287
You mean it requires change?

722
00:48:31,287 --> 00:48:37,460
Worse, it actually requires walking, uh, and it requires legalizing the old way of
building.

723
00:48:38,204 --> 00:48:40,912
Well, let's talk about this solution then.

724
00:48:40,912 --> 00:48:46,797
How to fix your city, how to escape the trap, and why the granny flat might save the
American economy.

725
00:48:47,257 --> 00:48:51,137
So let's address the part where we can actually do something, right?

726
00:48:51,137 --> 00:48:59,297
So we spent the last, I don't know, 30, 40 minutes or so demolishing the American suburb,
right?

727
00:48:59,297 --> 00:49:04,157
We called it a Ponzi scheme, we called it a suicide pact and an elephant that eats money.

728
00:49:04,377 --> 00:49:13,361
If we end the episode right here, all of you out there are just gonna go lay down in
traffic on the nearest road, but we promised you a way out.

729
00:49:13,375 --> 00:49:17,695
Strong Towns doesn't just diagnose the cancer, they also prescribe the chemo.

730
00:49:17,695 --> 00:49:20,080
So, Will, how do we stop the bleeding?

731
00:49:20,080 --> 00:49:24,949
How do we make our cities solvent again without bulldozing everyone's houses?

732
00:49:25,798 --> 00:49:29,059
Well, let's see if we can get through all the medical metaphors there.

733
00:49:29,059 --> 00:49:34,270
The answer is actually surprisingly simple, but as you might imagine, politically
difficult.

734
00:49:34,431 --> 00:49:36,931
We have to do two things simultaneously.

735
00:49:36,992 --> 00:49:41,293
Number one, stop the bleeding, stop building new infrastructure liabilities.

736
00:49:41,333 --> 00:49:45,394
Of course, that's been our only ticket to surviving in this Ponzi scheme.

737
00:49:45,754 --> 00:49:48,355
And then number two, on top of that, we have to thicken the soup.

738
00:49:48,355 --> 00:49:51,456
We to increase the value of the neighborhoods we already have.

739
00:49:52,195 --> 00:49:53,585
Thicken the soup.

740
00:49:53,585 --> 00:49:55,863
I don't like the sound of that, honestly.

741
00:49:55,863 --> 00:49:57,495
It sounds kind of gross.

742
00:49:57,697 --> 00:50:00,161
But how does that translate into zoning laws?

743
00:50:00,752 --> 00:50:03,973
Well, it means we have to embrace incremental development.

744
00:50:03,993 --> 00:50:11,816
We need to stop betting on huge developers to build 500 homes at once and start allowing
regular people to make small investments in their own property.

745
00:50:12,017 --> 00:50:19,880
The silver bullet here is the ADU, the Accessory Dwelling Unit, also known as the Granny
Flat or the Carriage House.

746
00:50:20,131 --> 00:50:21,794
Okay, I'll bite.

747
00:50:21,794 --> 00:50:24,458
Why don't we walk through the math of the granny flat?

748
00:50:24,921 --> 00:50:26,763
Why does it save the city?

749
00:50:27,366 --> 00:50:30,987
Okay, Joshua, you are the proverbial you here.

750
00:50:30,987 --> 00:50:34,407
We live in a single family house on a quarter acre lot.

751
00:50:34,608 --> 00:50:38,048
Right now, you're one taxpayer supporting that hundred feet of road.

752
00:50:38,188 --> 00:50:45,266
But let's say the city changes the law to allow you to convert your garage into a studio
apartment or build a small cottage in your backyard.

753
00:50:45,266 --> 00:50:46,630
You've got the room for it.

754
00:50:46,630 --> 00:50:51,601
So you spend $100,000 to build it and you rent it out to a grad student or to your
mother-in-law.

755
00:50:52,473 --> 00:50:56,565
Okay, I get riddle income, my property value goes up.

756
00:50:56,977 --> 00:50:57,708
Right.

757
00:50:57,708 --> 00:50:59,729
But look at it from the city's perspective.

758
00:50:59,729 --> 00:51:01,311
Did they have to build a new road?

759
00:51:01,311 --> 00:51:02,191
No.

760
00:51:02,207 --> 00:51:03,953
Did have to run a new water main?

761
00:51:03,953 --> 00:51:04,263
No.

762
00:51:04,263 --> 00:51:06,836
Did have to build a new fire station?

763
00:51:06,836 --> 00:51:07,256
No.

764
00:51:07,256 --> 00:51:11,279
The infrastructure is already there, served by the existing services.

765
00:51:11,480 --> 00:51:15,063
But now there are two households paying taxes on that same hundred feet of pipe.

766
00:51:15,063 --> 00:51:19,946
So you just doubled the tax yield of that lot without adding a single penny of liability
to the city.

767
00:51:20,635 --> 00:51:24,479
It's kind of pure profit for the city you're living in or the municipality.

768
00:51:24,479 --> 00:51:34,027
If we allowed every homeowner in the suburbs to add just one unit, just one, you could
double the financial productivity of the city overnight.

769
00:51:34,087 --> 00:51:38,921
We could solve the housing crisis and insolvency crisis at the same time.

770
00:51:39,731 --> 00:51:41,071
Sound too good to be true?

771
00:51:41,071 --> 00:51:42,472
Well, why don't we do it?

772
00:51:42,992 --> 00:51:46,453
The short answer is it's illegal in almost every suburb in America.

773
00:51:46,453 --> 00:51:48,994
uh Single-family zoning is a religion, right?

774
00:51:48,994 --> 00:51:49,594
We talked about that.

775
00:51:49,594 --> 00:51:51,094
It's the American dream.

776
00:51:51,094 --> 00:51:58,036
Although we've put some pretty bad looks on it in our conversation today, the average
person, that's the dream, right?

777
00:51:58,036 --> 00:52:05,018
Get out there to the suburbs, own your quarter acre lot, have your yard that you can mow
yourself.

778
00:52:05,358 --> 00:52:09,469
If you try to convert your garage into an apartment, the zoning board is going to shut you
down.

779
00:52:09,811 --> 00:52:12,198
Your neighbors are going to scream, not in my backyard.

780
00:52:12,198 --> 00:52:14,004
It'll ruin the character of our neighborhood.

781
00:52:14,004 --> 00:52:15,366
What about parking?

782
00:52:15,617 --> 00:52:17,458
yes, the Nimbys.

783
00:52:17,979 --> 00:52:24,604
The character of the neighborhood, which loosely translated means I don't want poor people
or renters living near me.

784
00:52:24,784 --> 00:52:30,848
But the irony is the character of the neighborhood is currently financial insolvency,
right?

785
00:52:31,489 --> 00:52:37,123
it's champagne wishes and caviar dreams with a RC Cola and Moon Pie budget.

786
00:52:37,761 --> 00:52:39,148
Lipstick on a pig.

787
00:52:39,761 --> 00:52:48,432
So you can keep your character, right, and go bankrupt, or you can let a granny flat in
your backyard and pave your roads.

788
00:52:48,432 --> 00:52:50,093
You can't have both.

789
00:52:50,344 --> 00:52:53,636
And it's not just ADUs, it's what we call the missing middle.

790
00:52:54,017 --> 00:52:56,799
If you look at cities before 1940, you see a mix, right?

791
00:52:56,799 --> 00:53:04,004
You see single family house next to a duplex, next to a small four-plex apartment
building, next to a corner store.

792
00:53:04,165 --> 00:53:06,106
That mix is incredibly resilient.

793
00:53:06,106 --> 00:53:08,768
We made that mix illegal for the suburbs.

794
00:53:08,949 --> 00:53:12,031
We need to re-legalize the duplex and the quadplex.

795
00:53:12,031 --> 00:53:16,274
If you tear down a rotting old house, you should be able to replace it with a four-unit
building.

796
00:53:16,500 --> 00:53:17,603
It's a gentle density.

797
00:53:17,603 --> 00:53:18,823
It's not a skyscraper.

798
00:53:18,823 --> 00:53:23,588
It doesn't cast a shadow on everyone's lawn around it, but it quadruples the tax base.

799
00:53:23,939 --> 00:53:25,689
It's maturing.

800
00:53:25,689 --> 00:53:28,470
Cities are ultimately like forests.

801
00:53:28,510 --> 00:53:30,211
There's so many cliches.

802
00:53:30,211 --> 00:53:33,011
They're supposed to thicken over time.

803
00:53:33,031 --> 00:53:38,553
A pioneer builds a cabin, then it becomes a house, then it becomes a shop.

804
00:53:38,553 --> 00:53:42,274
We froze our cities in Amber in 1950.

805
00:53:42,274 --> 00:53:46,915
We said, this subdivision shall remain exactly like this forever.

806
00:53:47,035 --> 00:53:48,635
But that's not really natural.

807
00:53:48,635 --> 00:53:52,086
It stops the metabolic process of the city.

808
00:53:52,604 --> 00:53:56,477
We essentially need permaculture for our suburbs.

809
00:53:56,958 --> 00:53:59,199
But that's how we fix the existing neighborhoods.

810
00:53:59,199 --> 00:54:01,721
We also have to stop making the problem worse.

811
00:54:01,762 --> 00:54:04,023
We need a fix it first policy.

812
00:54:04,103 --> 00:54:06,836
That's what Strong Towns advocates for.

813
00:54:06,836 --> 00:54:09,187
The city should pass a law.

814
00:54:09,208 --> 00:54:17,274
We will not build any new roads or accept any new infrastructure liabilities until we can
prove we have the money to maintain what we already have.

815
00:54:17,525 --> 00:54:20,406
That unfortunately means telling the developers no.

816
00:54:20,547 --> 00:54:31,363
When developer Steve, yeah, Bob and Steve, when Steve comes and says, look, I want to
build Oakwood Meadows phase two on the edge of the town, the city has to say, look, Steve,

817
00:54:31,363 --> 00:54:33,334
I'm sorry, we can't afford the road.

818
00:54:33,334 --> 00:54:39,597
If you want to build it, you have to set up a private endowment to pay for the road
maintenance forever.

819
00:54:39,917 --> 00:54:41,598
We aren't taking ownership of it.

820
00:54:41,598 --> 00:54:45,681
Or you tell Steve, we aren't expanding.

821
00:54:45,681 --> 00:54:47,007
If you want to build,

822
00:54:47,007 --> 00:54:50,663
Go buy that empty parking lot behind the target and build some apartments there.

823
00:54:50,663 --> 00:54:52,345
Use the pipes we already have.

824
00:54:52,345 --> 00:54:57,733
We have to stop horizontal expansion and start vertical infill.

825
00:54:57,984 --> 00:55:00,246
But that requires a massive psychological shift, right?

826
00:55:00,246 --> 00:55:03,678
We have to move from a growth mindset to a stewardship mindset.

827
00:55:03,938 --> 00:55:05,949
We've been drunk on growth for 70 years.

828
00:55:05,949 --> 00:55:08,181
We're addicted to the new, right?

829
00:55:08,181 --> 00:55:11,563
The stroad, but stewardship is boring.

830
00:55:11,624 --> 00:55:13,365
Stewardship is patching the roof.

831
00:55:13,365 --> 00:55:15,506
Stewardship is fixing the sidewalk.

832
00:55:15,546 --> 00:55:17,947
But stewardship is the only thing that's sustainable.

833
00:55:18,688 --> 00:55:21,210
One last thing, we have to kill the stroad.

834
00:55:21,390 --> 00:55:25,553
We have to go back to those dangerous, ugly arterial roads and put them on a diet.

835
00:55:25,673 --> 00:55:26,848
Narrow the lanes.

836
00:55:26,848 --> 00:55:31,440
plant trees on the edge, add bike lanes, make the drivers feel less safe.

837
00:55:31,440 --> 00:55:34,039
Wait, make them feel less safe?

838
00:55:34,324 --> 00:55:35,755
Yes, paradoxical, I know.

839
00:55:35,755 --> 00:55:41,914
But when a road is wide and open, you feel safe driving 60 miles an hour, even if the
speed limit is 35.

840
00:55:41,940 --> 00:55:45,622
When a road is narrow and has trees near the curb, you instinctively slow down, right?

841
00:55:45,622 --> 00:55:48,464
It tells your brain that there's something going on here, right?

842
00:55:48,464 --> 00:55:50,666
That you don't have the space that you thought you had.

843
00:55:50,826 --> 00:55:52,287
So you pay attention.

844
00:55:52,287 --> 00:56:00,633
Paradoxically, making a road feel dangerous actually makes it safer and makes it a place
where people might actually want to walk to a business without taking their life into

845
00:56:00,633 --> 00:56:01,844
their own hands.

846
00:56:01,876 --> 00:56:03,757
which again raises property value, right?

847
00:56:03,757 --> 00:56:05,735
Spending money at those local businesses.

848
00:56:05,806 --> 00:56:18,946
Yeah, think, you know, I don't know about you, driving along I-35, when they're doing road
construction perpetually on I-35, they put up those big cement barricades.

849
00:56:19,287 --> 00:56:29,475
And going 75 miles an hour feels awful unsafe when you realize that you're four inches
from a barricade and four inches from the other lane.

850
00:56:29,551 --> 00:56:32,235
The 18 wheeler behind you decides to pass.

851
00:56:32,235 --> 00:56:33,036
Exactly.

852
00:56:33,036 --> 00:56:34,596
So, so here's the reality, right?

853
00:56:34,596 --> 00:56:37,578
The federal government isn't going to fix this.

854
00:56:37,899 --> 00:56:40,560
They're just going to print more money for highway expansions.

855
00:56:40,560 --> 00:56:43,322
The state government isn't going to fix this.

856
00:56:43,322 --> 00:56:45,703
This fight is actually local, right?

857
00:56:45,703 --> 00:56:56,810
This fight happens on Tuesday nights at 7 PM in the boring city council meeting that
nobody ever goes to unless there's something that the community cares about as a whole.

858
00:56:57,182 --> 00:56:59,343
Right, we're back to hyper local.

859
00:56:59,584 --> 00:57:00,985
That's the call to action.

860
00:57:00,985 --> 00:57:05,179
If you care about this, if you don't want your city to go bankrupt, and who wants that,
right?

861
00:57:05,179 --> 00:57:06,610
You have to show up.

862
00:57:06,751 --> 00:57:12,376
You have to be the person who stands up when a new subdivision is proposed and asks, show
me the long-term maintenance math.

863
00:57:12,376 --> 00:57:13,817
Show me the math, right?

864
00:57:13,817 --> 00:57:16,299
aah Who pays for this road in year 25?

865
00:57:16,299 --> 00:57:20,242
And when they look at you blankly, you have to vote no.

866
00:57:20,918 --> 00:57:26,583
And unfortunately, you have to be the person who supports the neighbor who wants to build
a granny flat.

867
00:57:26,583 --> 00:57:33,309
You have to be the yimby, yes, in my backyard, who understands that density isn't our
enemy.

868
00:57:33,309 --> 00:57:35,390
Insolvency is our enemy.

869
00:57:35,926 --> 00:57:38,606
Or at least yes in my neighbor's backyard, right?

870
00:57:38,606 --> 00:57:40,026
If you can't go all the way.

871
00:57:40,026 --> 00:57:41,666
But this is where it all comes back.

872
00:57:41,666 --> 00:57:46,886
This is actually a perfect overlap topic because we're not talking about being liberal or
conservative.

873
00:57:47,326 --> 00:57:50,226
Strong Towns has members from the far left and the far right.

874
00:57:50,366 --> 00:57:51,966
This is about math.

875
00:57:52,066 --> 00:57:54,806
Do you want a solvent city or do you want a bankrupt illusion?

876
00:57:55,057 --> 00:57:59,769
I generally choose solvency, even if it means I have to share a wall with a neighbor.

877
00:58:00,212 --> 00:58:07,195
So look, we have successfully ruined your commute, your house, and your view of the local
strip mall.

878
00:58:07,216 --> 00:58:09,096
Our work here is mostly done.

879
00:58:09,217 --> 00:58:14,279
If you want to dive deeper into this, and you should because we've barely scratched the
surface, go check out Strong Towns.

880
00:58:14,279 --> 00:58:23,404
uh Chuck Marrone's book Strong Towns, A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American
Prosperity is kind of the Bible for this stuff, the Quran.

881
00:58:23,404 --> 00:58:24,394
Read it.

882
00:58:24,554 --> 00:58:27,209
it will change how you see the world.

883
00:58:27,460 --> 00:58:31,760
I think more like to the Torah or the yeah.

884
00:58:31,760 --> 00:58:33,140
just Tom Hood.

885
00:58:33,140 --> 00:58:33,560
Yeah, there we go.

886
00:58:33,560 --> 00:58:39,220
That's something for now that we've covered all the world's major religions Abrahamic
religions.

887
00:58:39,300 --> 00:58:41,560
Check out also this school.

888
00:58:41,560 --> 00:58:43,940
I've watched some of these videos and it really is amazing.

889
00:58:43,940 --> 00:58:52,540
There's a YouTube channel called Not Just Bikes and the host of that channel, the head of
that channel does amazing videos visualizing all of this.

890
00:58:53,488 --> 00:58:56,753
Yeah, you know, our town is actually allowed ADUs.

891
00:58:56,753 --> 00:58:58,676
It's been met by...

892
00:58:58,927 --> 00:59:01,699
sort of lukewarm response.

893
00:59:01,699 --> 00:59:10,006
ah I mean, I know a couple of people have done it, but people didn't like run out to get
loans to build granny sheds in the back or anything.

894
00:59:10,006 --> 00:59:15,691
ah But I definitely could see how it could be, it could be a benefit in the short term.

895
00:59:15,811 --> 00:59:18,383
But also I live in a, go ahead.

896
00:59:18,529 --> 00:59:23,129
I was gonna say I've been saying for a while now that I think the future is in
multi-generational dwellings.

897
00:59:23,129 --> 00:59:24,569
And that's exactly what we're talking about here, right?

898
00:59:24,569 --> 00:59:26,889
It's like having your family live close by.

899
00:59:26,889 --> 00:59:29,509
There's a lot of value to it, a lot of advantages.

900
00:59:30,076 --> 00:59:31,531
It's just, I don't wanna.

901
00:59:31,531 --> 00:59:34,945
of lots of disadvantages, but we won't go into those.

902
00:59:34,945 --> 00:59:46,215
There are some trade-offs, but at the end of the day, mean, it's an opportunity for us to
rebuild a part of America that we lost due to the sort of greed and short-sightedness of

903
00:59:46,215 --> 00:59:51,600
these urban planning uh units and city councils that didn't know what they were getting
into.

904
00:59:51,690 --> 00:59:54,961
Yeah, I mean, I moved into the country, right?

905
00:59:54,961 --> 01:00:04,105
Like, and I knew that that's just there were certain trade-offs I was going to have to
make because I wanted to have a garden without having to worry about city codes and I

906
01:00:04,105 --> 01:00:07,046
wanted to have animals and these sorts of things.

907
01:00:07,046 --> 01:00:16,970
um But some of the trade-offs that uh I have to worry about are the idea that we don't
have recycling out here.

908
01:00:16,970 --> 01:00:18,395
That was a huge thing.

909
01:00:18,395 --> 01:00:19,801
It's like we don't have recycling.

910
01:00:19,923 --> 01:00:21,404
And it's like, well, why don't we have recycling?

911
01:00:21,404 --> 01:00:22,204
It doesn't make sense.

912
01:00:22,204 --> 01:00:28,379
And when, when you call the city and you ask and you find out those things, they'll tell
you, look, it just doesn't make sense.

913
01:00:28,379 --> 01:00:40,287
We, we can't charge you the same amount that we charge everybody else to pick those things
up from your house because your house is, you know, five acres from the next house, which

914
01:00:40,287 --> 01:00:43,199
is five acres from the next house, which is 40 acres from the next house.

915
01:00:43,199 --> 01:00:49,943
And so if we just went down your entire road in your, your, they break our area out in
awards.

916
01:00:50,227 --> 01:00:51,447
We just keep going.

917
01:00:51,447 --> 01:01:01,010
There's only like, you know, 700 homes in your ward and it's the biggest ward, but we have
thousands and thousands of homes in the other wards.

918
01:01:01,010 --> 01:01:02,870
So the math just doesn't make sense.

919
01:01:02,870 --> 01:01:05,681
And it was just something that we just sort of accepted, right?

920
01:01:05,681 --> 01:01:08,122
We also don't have sewage out here.

921
01:01:08,122 --> 01:01:09,892
We have our own septic system.

922
01:01:09,892 --> 01:01:10,803
We don't have water.

923
01:01:10,803 --> 01:01:14,374
We have a well, but we do have electricity and we do have fiber internet.

924
01:01:14,374 --> 01:01:16,274
So I'm grateful for these things.

925
01:01:16,274 --> 01:01:19,815
um But I definitely

926
01:01:20,425 --> 01:01:24,138
can understand, you know, the there are trade-offs in this, right?

927
01:01:24,138 --> 01:01:25,779
I mean, there's there's just trade-offs.

928
01:01:25,779 --> 01:01:30,183
um Some people like that city life.

929
01:01:30,183 --> 01:01:41,251
But if I had the opportunity to live in the city, but also, you know, be allowed to have a
garden and be allowed to have, you know, a handful of chickens and things like that, I

930
01:01:41,251 --> 01:01:50,416
think that that if we make those changes at a city level or at least fight for those
changes at a city city level, then

931
01:01:50,416 --> 01:01:53,934
it will make the prospect of living in the city a little better.

932
01:01:54,185 --> 01:02:00,770
Agreed and in terms of the trade-offs, you for us, we recently moved to the mountains,
which is the country, but higher up.

933
01:02:00,770 --> 01:02:03,932
uh We also have the same problem.

934
01:02:03,932 --> 01:02:07,024
We don't have any kind of uh no city utilities.

935
01:02:07,024 --> 01:02:10,817
Nobody comes into our neighborhood and uh picks up our garbage out of a can.

936
01:02:10,817 --> 01:02:16,591
So we have a little bit of extra hassle, but all we do is it just means that we bag
everything up a couple of times a week.

937
01:02:16,591 --> 01:02:22,015
And when we drive into town, which we do fairly frequently, drop the kids off at school or
whatever.

938
01:02:22,049 --> 01:02:27,149
We take a bag of trash with us and drop it off at the transfer station, which also accepts
recycling.

939
01:02:27,309 --> 01:02:31,649
So, you know, there's there's usually solutions to these sorts of problems, or at least
there is here.

940
01:02:31,649 --> 01:02:34,767
I don't know about the case in your area, but that's.

941
01:02:34,767 --> 01:02:37,048
have a transfer station that you can drop garbage.

942
01:02:37,048 --> 01:02:38,908
uh It's not free.

943
01:02:38,908 --> 01:02:41,009
You do have to pay for it even if you live there.

944
01:02:41,009 --> 01:02:47,191
It's like $16 for the first uh ton and a lot more after that.

945
01:02:47,451 --> 01:02:54,693
And when we are going to take something to dump something large trash, we do take our
recycling with us, like our cardboard boxes and aluminum cans.

946
01:02:54,693 --> 01:03:03,125
um But we figured that the Earth benefit of recycling

947
01:03:03,477 --> 01:03:08,795
would be outweighed by the gasoline that it takes to drive to the transfer station.

948
01:03:09,237 --> 01:03:13,053
And the transfer station is not in a convenient place, you know.

949
01:03:13,066 --> 01:03:14,207
Yeah, ours isn't either.

950
01:03:14,207 --> 01:03:16,649
Actually, well, we'll say it's convenient for us.

951
01:03:16,750 --> 01:03:19,612
I happenstance because it's on the way to my son's school.

952
01:03:19,793 --> 01:03:22,536
So we can drop it off there, but it's still 20 miles away.

953
01:03:22,536 --> 01:03:28,282
So we're still doing a lot of driving, but then also that helps with electric car, which
is more to talk about there.

954
01:03:28,282 --> 01:03:30,624
But anyway, we could talk about this all day.

955
01:03:30,981 --> 01:03:31,693
So.

956
01:03:32,055 --> 01:03:40,720
As for us, look, if you enjoyed this kind of descent into municipal madness, please do the
things that keep us solvent, right?

957
01:03:40,720 --> 01:03:44,131
Rate and review us on Apple podcasts and Spotify.

958
01:03:44,131 --> 01:03:46,683
It really helps the algorithm finding us.

959
01:03:46,683 --> 01:03:57,669
Share this episode with your local city council member or maybe your HOA president,
despite their pleasantness or lack thereof, or that neighbor washing his truck in the red

960
01:03:57,669 --> 01:03:58,449
F-150.

961
01:03:58,449 --> 01:04:00,362
Actually, you know, maybe don't share it with him.

962
01:04:00,362 --> 01:04:01,883
He seems intense.

963
01:04:01,904 --> 01:04:05,128
You can find us out on the socials, bluesky, mastodon.

964
01:04:05,128 --> 01:04:07,071
Come and argue with us about parking minimums.

965
01:04:07,071 --> 01:04:08,052
We love it.

966
01:04:08,052 --> 01:04:12,017
Visit our website for the graphs and the terrifying math we talked about today.

967
01:04:12,017 --> 01:04:16,272
Will, do you have any final word of comfort for the suburbanites listening?

968
01:04:16,703 --> 01:04:24,450
I just want to say that we'll probably re-release this as a Halloween episode with all the
horrible things we talked about in the horrific descriptions, and the corn mazes and all

969
01:04:24,450 --> 01:04:25,430
that sort of stuff.

970
01:04:25,430 --> 01:04:28,196
just remember, the lawn is a lie.

971
01:04:28,196 --> 01:04:29,427
Plant a garden.

972
01:04:29,834 --> 01:04:30,325
There it is.

973
01:04:30,325 --> 01:04:31,317
The lawn is a lie.

974
01:04:31,317 --> 01:04:32,308
Thanks for listening everybody.

975
01:04:32,308 --> 01:04:33,580
We'll see you next week.

976
01:04:33,580 --> 01:04:37,968
uh Don't buy a house in a swamp and watch out for the strode.

977
01:04:37,968 --> 01:04:38,955
Strode!

978
01:04:38,955 --> 01:04:40,269
Struds.