Strong Towns

[3.8] I recently visited my Mom who lives in a region of California that's functionally nothing more than pockets of suburbs. There's sprawling roads seemingly to nowhere, but sprinkled throughout this vast network are standard North American cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods. On my previous visits I had a tough time articulating why exactly I dislike the area so much. After all, cost of living is so much lower in her area, and there's still plenty of familiar retail and restaurant chains; why should I dislike it still so much? It all became clear to me when I discovered the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes,” a channel about urban planning and design. NJB points out how much of North American cities are designed exclusively with the privately owned car in mind, and how costly that can be. He did a series based on the commentary in this book, so I figured I ought to give it a read myself.

In Strong Towns, Marohn discusses how older cities were built specifically for humans (rather than cars) and how they were built gradually as people gained access to resources. Comparatively, modern neighborhoods are, as Marohn was oft to repeat a little too frequently, “built to a finished state.” Once built the developers leave and so begins the slow decline of the area, and now the local government is saddled with the maintenance costs for decades to come with no true means of paying for it. He describes how the need for cities to constantly grow to receive loans/grants from the state and federal government to pay for the maintenance of old infrastructure is similar to a ponzi scheme. A constant cycle of pushing massive debts further and further down the line. It was an alarming and poignant perspective on the state of our cities, and left me with little hope for what needs to change to make things better.