Title: شهرهای قوی | پیدا کردن پایه های مالی خود در شرایط عادی جدید | انجمن دانیل برنهام در مورد ایده های بزرگ

چارلز مارون، AICP، در انجمن برنامه‌ریزی آمریکا درباره ایده‌های بزرگ سخنرانی می‌کند درباره اینکه چگونه شهرها از نظر مالی قوی و انعطاف‌پذیر شدند. این سخنرانی در ۷ فوریه ۲۰۱۳ در مرکز انرژی پروگرس برای هنرهای نمایشی در رالی، کارولینای شمالی برگزار شد. مارون رئیس Strong Towns است، یک سازمان غیرانتفاعی که برای کمک به شهرهای آمریکا در دستیابی به قدرت مالی و انعطاف پذیری اختصاص دارد. او نویسنده کتاب اندیشه‌هایی درباره ساختن شهرهای قوی، ج. ۱، نویسنده اصلی وبلاگ Strong Towns و میزبان پادکست Strong Towns.

قسمتي از متن فيلم: Uh chuck is president of strong towns a non-profit dedicated to helping america’s towns achieve financial resiliency he is author of the thoughts on building strong towns volume one and he’s the primary author of strong town’s blog also host of the strong towns podcast you could also find him on a

Tedx because i happened to be scanning one day and found him there and so i’m very excited uh to introduce my friend chuck marone thank you so much and thank you for inviting me and thank you for having me here tonight um our mission is to support a

Model of growth that allows america’s towns to become financially strong and resilient uh this presentation is uh is part of what i’m gonna talk about tonight are things that i’ve been going around the country speaking to communities about there’s three main takeaways that i want to

Leave you with i’m going to start with this and end with this the first is that the current path that cities are on is not financially stable the second the future for most cities is not going to resemble the recent past and then the third the main determinant of future prosperity for cities

Is going to be the ability of local leaders to transform their communities a little bit on nomenclature i sometimes talk about cities i talk about towns i talk about you know counties or boroughs or whatever we’re really talking about our local units of government if i were to name my organization strong

Local units of government it wouldn’t stick as well as strong towns it would be a lot to type in every time you went to the website so it’s strong towns but if i switch back and forth just interpolating your mind we’re really talking about here are local units of government

Sometimes as planners we forget uh and we do this as engineers too we do this as just citizens of this country we forget the history of building places that that came before our great suburban experiment uh we sometimes fail to understand that post-world war ii we really started

Something that had never been done before literally for thousands and thousands of years prior to our great suburban experiment we built places in a certain way uh this is ancient rome you could have gone to ancient greece you could have gone to the the cities of south america or asia or

You know the oldest civilizations in the fertile crescent and you would see layouts and design that were very similar in planning school we’re taught this is because the mode of transportation of the time was walking around everything was scaled to be walkable because that’s the only way people got any place

And the reason we build cities differently today is because people get around by cars so chuck of course is different it’s important to understand when you look at the the layout and the design that predominated human settlement really up until uh just after world war ii uh what you’re looking at is not

Something that was uh you know designed uh on the fly you’re not looking at something that was uh you know a part of a planning process what you’re looking at is something that evolved through trial and error literally over thousands and thousands of years there were many many civilizations that

Sprung up around the globe that didn’t survive to the point where they’re now ruins or they’re now places that we excavate but when you look at the places that were they all have this similar kind of feel to them you’re literally when we look at our cities today

Uh or you know the cities of this time we’re looking at the culmination of thousands of years of trial and error wisdom we’re looking at the places that survive this the places that were ultimately resilient we’ve started to build places on a much different template now

And we like to pretend we’re experts uh particularly us in the engineering profession you know we we teach ourselves traffic engineering and pretend that it has some thousands of year history instead of literally just a blink of the eye little experiment in how we’re going to do things

We pretend we know a lot more than we do but the reality is is this is a very young experiment very young and we are all in a sense the guinea pigs it’s important at this juncture literally kind of two generations into this experiment for us to stop and ponder and look at

What we’ve created and ask how is this experiment working one of the main aspects of this suburban experiment was how we financed it prior to world war ii really prior to the great depression growth at the local level was a local concern if we were going to create jobs if we

Were going to create economic development that was something we did locally after world war ii uh we had we had a different approach there was the notion that there was a federal and state role to growth and so what you saw were a lot of investments being made by the federal

And state government and things that would create growth locally sewer systems water systems that type of thing we saw for the first time you know the departments of transportation and these enormous investments and highways and highway infrastructure all under the guise of creating growth at the local level

We started to leverage debt not just debt at the municipal level which you know has been a significant change in 1950 the average city spent 2 percent of their budget on debt service today that’s over 20 percent and growing i’ve seen cities as high as 60 percent of their budget

Being spent on debt service but even more important than municipal debt we’re really talking about private sector debt the idea is these investments whether it’s from the federal government the state government the dot or the private sector create growth and that growth gives us tax revenues

At the local level this is kind of city administration 101. this is how all our cities function this is how we induce the economic growth that that email is talking about it’s important to understand the transaction that is taking place in this process it’s important to understand the incentives

That we have when the developer comes in and puts in the new development generally we as a local government pay very little for that we might have some staff time we might have a little bit of upfront costs and up-sizing some things but generally the private sector pays

For that when the federal government comes in with a grant or the d.o.t comes in with a project generally if there’s any local matching it’s very nominal it’s a very small part of the cost so our upfront cost in this suburban experiment for the new growth has been very nominal

But the benefits accrue to us immediately we get all this new tax base we get all this new growth in our local economy all these new jobs and that creates wealth for us in exchange we agree to assume this long-term liability of maintaining these systems that we’ve been

Building uh if you think about this over multiple life cycles the only way this transaction makes sense is if one of these two things are true either growth is going to continue at ever accelerating rates in other words there’s always going to be you know another peter to rob out there

To pay the paul that you promised a generation ago you would you would sustain or the pattern of development this this experiment this way we’ve started to build our places is actually going to generate more wealth and prosperity then it generates in long-term costs now even when we you know

Kind of thought that the first one it was true it kind of felt for a while like it was because growth was going gangbusters i think we understood in the back of our mind that we’re not going to grow at these rates forever you know ever accelerating rates uh unfortunately the second assumption

Is also not true and this is where for a brief period of time here this is going to get a slight bit technical we’ve gone through and done and i only have brought three examples here today but we literally have dozens on our website which i’ll give you that address at the

End that go through and analyze existing developments and and i am obsessive as an engineer about analyzing real world examples nothing theoretical and things that uh are nice and clean not a lot of background noise uh not a lot of you know other things that would would interfere with the analysis

This is kind of the quintessential one this is a dead-end cul-de-sac kind of suburban development on the far edge uh this is a you know a subdivision with some two and a half two acre lots roughly uh the only infrastructure here is a dead end road so this is kind of

The stuff you’d find on the way way far edge of a community the city’s policy was that every road in the city should be paved and so the city went out and paved this road the property owners here paid half the cost and the city paid the other half

We looked at the tax base within this development and when i say background noise white noise what i’m really talking about is you know there’s no through traffic here the only people utilizing this road are the people that live there if the people weren’t there there’d be no need for the road so

Really we looked at the taxes that those people are contributing to the overall tax base and said how long is it going to take the city to break even on their half of the investment and the answer is 37 years now the road’s not going to last for 37

Years but yet it’s going to take the city 37 years just to recoup the cost that they put into paving that road this would be a little bit more uh suburban style you know a little bit closer in these are like half acre three-quarter acre lots you can see

Some of these over here are a little bit bigger but the frontage is limited again not a lot of background noise here this is a closed loop system there’s a dead end cul-de-sac up on the top so there’s no through traffic there’s no commercial things going through here the only people utilizing this

Are people who get lost or the people who live here right we took a look at this one this was built in the early 80s the road was paved it completely fallen apart and needed to be reconstructed the cost was 354 000 we asked the question okay based on

The the revenue that the city is getting from this development how long is it going to take them to to recoup the cost they just spent the answer is 79 years we then ask the question okay let’s say that we wanted to collect enough money from the people within this development

To actually pay for the fixing of their own road before it fell apart okay so we have enough money to when the road falls apart we’ve got it we can fix it what would that mean it would mean an immediate 46 percent increase in taxes and annual increases of three percent

Over inflation every year for the next 25 years with all that money just going uh to pay for road maintenance now sometimes people will argue with me okay chuck we realize that we lose money on residential property we make it up on commercial commercials are cash cow

Now i don’t know any corporation that operates where they lose money on 90 percent of their transactions and they make it up on the last 10. i don’t know why a municipal corporation incorporated municipality would seek to operate any differently but nonetheless we find the same trends

In this experiment as it applies to commercial development as well this is a business park kind of the penultimate investment in terms of the return at least in our minds this one was built in the mid 1990s uh full uh you know wide industrial sized streets

Uh sewer water or storm sewer all the kind of infrastructure that you would need to have a successful business park it’s completely built out and the city felt this was so successful they wanted to mirror it repeat it on property they owned just adjacent so we asked the question how successful

Was this we can take the money the dollar spent in the mid 90s and bring them forward to today the cost would be 2.1 million we can actually go out and measure the amount of private sector investment that’s happened that’s 6.6 million now i need to pause here

Because of that 6.6 million dollars it’s important to understand a few things four of those lots are a church now i go to church churches are a very important part of our community but the church is not paying any taxes to the city two of the lots are a school bus

Maintenance facility again i went to school that my children go to school schools are very important part of a community they’re not paying any taxes to the city either one of the lots is a county maintenance facility and one of the lots is a city maintenance facility of the remaining

Lots the ones that are theoretically private sector tax paying entities every single one of them was either sold for a dollar and or was given a tax subsidy in order to attract the business there for the sake of our analysis we assumed every single lot in the new

Business park would be built within 12 months without any subsidies and they would all be full taxpayers if that were the case and if every single dime of new revenue was applied to retiring the debt for this project it would take almost three decades 29 years

For the city to pay off the loan now understand this was being sold to the public as a way we’re going to generate all this growth and it will keep everybody else’s taxes down but for three decades in the most wildly optimistic scenario imaginable for three decades everybody else’s taxes

Would need to go up to pay for you don’t have to plow roads here but we got to plow roads we got to mow ditches uh police protection fire protection every other service that would be needed this is what this looks like from a cash flow standpoint let’s pretend that a

Developer comes to town and says i would like to build this new development i’m not asking for any subsidies i’m not asking for anything from you i’m just asking you to approve my new development and for you then to take over the infrastructure as a as a long-term public maintenance

And most of us would say wow this is fantastic this is exactly the type of transaction we want to have some of us even call this public-private partnership now let’s say we’ve seen this strong town something and so we’re going to be really prudent and what we’re going to do is we’re

Going to take the money that would normally go towards infrastructure maintenance we’re going to take that when the when the new revenue from this development comes in we’re just going to pull that amount out and we’re going to set it aside and every year when that revenue comes

In we’re going to set it aside and we’re just going to keep adding to the pot so that you know in 25 years when we got to go out and fix the road or we got to go fix the infrastructure we’ve got the money this is what would happen in the first

Year you’d have a little bit of money the second year you would add to that the third year you’d add to that and as you go on and on every year the revenue comes in and you would continue to add to it until you get you know two decades out

And you would have quite a bit of money saved up but then when you had to go out and actually fix the infrastructure what you’d find is that you didn’t have nearly enough money the cumulative amount of wealth that you brought in is not enough to do the job and so your

Cash flow goes way way into the negative now let’s pretend that the same developer comes in two years later and says i’d like to do the same project same size a project and then comes in two years after that and does it again and two years after that and does it again

So in other words you’ve got a situation where you’ve got nice steady growth and again like in the last example we take the money and we set it aside for the future when we have to maintain this stuff uh here’s what would happen you actually you know have the first development come online

Then two years later a second development comes online then year five another one and as you go out in time your revenue actually starts to kind of accelerate upwards you’ve got all these new developments coming and you’ve got all this nice steady growth taking place and everything’s kind of on this upward

Trend and then of course when we get to year 25 and we actually have to go out and make a repair and do maintenance on that very first project it’s not a big deal i mean we gotta spend a little bit of money but we got it we’ve got the money

This is what we call the illusion of wealth okay because of course we understand that you know as you take this further out of the event horizon when you lose money on every transaction you don’t get to make it up on volume you know as you go further and further

Out you see that these transactions when they’re all negative transactions at the end of one life cycle you have this continuous downward pressure on your budget now there’s a look of like recognition in some of your eyes here um here’s here’s the thing you look at this

And i started out this conversation by saying you know we’re very young in this experiment uh 60 years and you could look and say well chuck you know but your kind of analysis here we should have gone broke a long time ago uh why haven’t we had to deal with this

Literally you know a generation ago and the fact is that we did this is a graph of debt now we’re all familiar to one degree or another with the narrative on our national debt our national debt is enormous it’s trillions and trillions of dollars uh i’ve had seven quarters of calculus i

Can’t explain to you what a trillion dollars is uh i remember i remember when i was in grade school we had the weekly reader and the weekly reader had this thing where it talked about the national debt and it said um you know if you converted the national

Debt into dollar bills and stack them on top of each other it would go to the moon and back like 23 times as if for a fourth grader replacing one abstract concept with another abstract concept would make it you know crystal clear our federal debt is enormous right it’s beyond our capacity

To understand or comprehend on this graph the blue line here is our national debt the black line is our gdp this green line right here the one that soars up that’s our private sector debt that’s debt that you and i have that’s home mortgages commercial real estate loans credit cards auto loans margin

Interest accounts student loans that’s private sector debt the way we financed the first generation of the suburban experiment was through savings and investment and reinvestment of that cash that that illusion of wealth cash that came from the returns on those early investments the way we sustained the suburban experiment

Through a second life cycle is by growth through taking on debt and if you look as we crossed over into the third life cycle growth induced by debt became so important to the system that we actually allowed it to become predatory we actually allowed people who couldn’t afford homes to buy homes

People who could afford modest homes we induced to buy at large homes people who could afford large homes we we induced to buy enormous homes we’ve run out of our capacity to continue this experiment by taking on more and more levels of debt obviously there’s some huge implications

Here the way we have financed this experiment the mechanisms that we use are waning the federal government the state governments do not have the capacity to induce growth at the local level uh the way that they did at the beginning of this experiment the dots are all functionally broke uh

And we don’t have time tonight to go deeply into it but i just actually did a podcast uh that was came out today that talked kind of about this if you’re interested in more about just how bad the dot situation is it’s it’s it’s it’s really hard to comprehend how

Broke the dots are but literally uh 25 cents 30 cents on the dollar that they have compared to their long-term liabilities and of course the private sector is maxed out we literally don’t have the capacity to take on more and more debt to keep this growth machine going

This means that local governments are going to be forced to absorb the costs of their development pattern if we want that road fixed we’re going to have to pay for it if we want that pipe repaired that’s going to be our bill if we want that new wastewater treatment plant built we’re

Going to have to figure out a way to fund that locally none of this can be done in the current pattern of development without large tax increases and or large cuts and services now i didn’t come tonight to tell you what you already know right at every level of government

We’re having this debate uh you know how big are the tax increases going to be and who’s going to pay those how deep are the service cuts and and where are they going to be felt it’s important as planners that we see the third variable in this equation the third variable

Being the current pattern of development as long as we continue to build places that are functionally insolvent as long as we continue to build places that will cost us more long-term than they’ll bring cumulatively in in wealth there is no amount of tax increase and there’s no amount of service cut that

Can fix that problem we literally have to build our places differently i had to put this in um because i i’m going to talk you know now about some of the things that we can do or we need to start doing uh to to deal with these situations but i would

Inevitably no matter how much time i spent i would get someone at the end who would stand up and say chuck i’m really upset with you uh you’ve come here and depressed me and you haven’t told us the solution what is the solution and you know it took me a long time to

Understand what was actually being asked because i was hearing the question but what was being asked was something very different what was being asked was chuck what can somebody else change about what they’re doing so i don’t have to change anything that i’m doing there is no such solution so uh what i

Want to talk about is ways that we can rationally respond to this complex complex set of circumstances that we find ourselves in and i always start with this photo here this is my hometown this is brainerd minnesota back in 1905 there’s a circus parade going through town all the people are out

This is my hometown this is pretty great this is a pretty great place right i mean you look at this and and this is really nice uh the planner side of me really likes it you know you’ve got good uh segmentation space good framing of the public realm

From an architecture standpoint you know these are nice buildings uh this is a very pleasant pleasant place um understand you know today i drove down to the to minneapolis-st paul to get on a plane it was two and a half hours when these people built this i mean they were a bunch of

Literally illiterate hicks in the middle of nowhere uh you know day’s journey from what anyone today would call civilization yet they built this place it’s pretty spectacular let me ask you some tough questions how thick was their zoning code you know how uh how many code enforcement officials did they have

How many you know master plans had they put together how much tax increment finance subsidy did they use how many economic development initiatives did they have you think about all the things that we do today as you know a matter of course is a part of our professional expertise that we bring

To bear the idea that we are you know experts in creating wealth and prosperity and building great places somehow these people figured it out without any of us how did they do that they literally just copied what the people before them did there was no genius here there was no you know

Master uh you know master intelligent person figuring out how to do this you can literally go to every podunk town uh across this country and they were great spectacular places because they literally copied what worked they took the knowledge that had accumulated over thousands of years they use local materials so you know

This is going to look different than what raleigh looked like in 1900 because the materials were different and the local architecture was different but the layout is going to be the same they were resilient places they were places built to endure because they were copying a pattern that had proven

To be one that would endure after 60 years of professional expertise after 60 years of planners and experts and engineers and zoning codes and everything we’ve done to create growth this is what the street looks like today you know literally a wasteland of parking and vacant buildings

And when we sit here today and say you know our cities are in this difficult financial situation our cities are all broke if you want to understand why our cities are broke there’s a half a million dollars of infrastructure in that street yet what is our return on that

Investment what do we get for that it’s just not good enough and it’s not going to work if you think about how we built these places we didn’t build them through some master plan we didn’t build them through uh you know going out and doing some huge growth initiative or some huge

Uh project that would spawn all this type of uh ancillary development we literally built it a little bit at a time this was the same block back in 1870 you know literally you know a bunch of pop-up little buildings out in the middle of the woods

This is uh a billiard hall is written on there um that’s written there’s a restaurant i’m sure there was a brothel somewhere down the road here you know these are a bunch of lagers in the middle of the woods popped up some buildings and the place took okay it took

And what happened was after 30 years uh enough of these tiny little investments everybody working uh on their own like little bees and a hive following what they knew intuitively to do wound up building this pretty darn spectacular place and you all groaned when i showed you that modern picture

This is what this place actually looked like right after world war ii i mean that should make you groan because what happened was not some master plan we didn’t go in and build a stadium or a con convention center and hope that all this stuff

Flowered in around it what we did is we went about the hard business of building a place one little tiny increment at a time and with everybody doing that across a broad framework we became very very successful this is what we’ve done in the suburban experiment these are two identical blocks in my

Hometown uh the one on the left we called old and blighted the one on the right i’ve called shiny and new they’re the same in every way uh they’re on the same highway they abut the same traditional neighborhood uh they’re the same exact size the same amount of public infrastructure

Everything about them is the same except for the development pattern that’s been used the old and blighted block looks like this it’s literally old and blighted it’s the most run down commercial block in town uh you’ve got the bail bonds the pawn shop uh the barber that will still do the flat top

The whole you know kind of low end of the spectrum in terms of development now the the shiny and new block used to look like this but the city’s comprehensive plan and the city’s code call for it to be torn down and redeveloped into a style more fitting of the of the corridor

Into this auto oriented style this is what the shiny new one looks like it’s a drive-through taco joint now understand the city was so excited to get this taco joint the planner was ecstatic because you know it met all the floor area ratios it met all the parking ratios

The sign fit the sign standard the engineer was happy because now there would be no accesses off the highway the cars could go through really quick all the accesses would be off the side roads the environmentalists were happy because the the the taco joint agreed to put native plantings in the

Storm water retention areas even the complete streets people were happy because they built a sidewalk through here for the theoretical bike you know the sidewalk ends right here but you you know you’ve got potential i guess so everybody was thrilled this is exactly what the city’s plans call for

Redevelopment of blighted areas into something more productive okay here’s the problem nobody stopped to look at when you look at that old and blighted block it has a total value of 1.1 million dollars when you look at that shiny and new block the same area the same neighborhood the same highway

The same amount of long-term public liability in terms of infrastructure maintenance it has a total value of eight hundred three thousand dollars okay the old and blighted block is 42 percent more valuable now stop and look at this for a sec how much worse could this get

You know if we had an active strategy to make that worse how how much how much worse could it get it really couldn’t look at this you know that taco joint that’s like on its wedding day right i mean it’s all downhill from this point on i mean we know

We know 30 years from now what that’s going to be right so you’ve got a development pattern here that is enormously productive versus one that is just inherently not productive this is what we’ve done throughout all of our cities across the country as part of this experiment

And if you look at this and say okay chuck we need to uh yeah we need to improve the productivity of our places we have all kinds of ways we can make this more valuable we’ve got no strategies for that none whatsoever this is a high return a high upside low

Downside investment and this is the exact opposite we took a look at the development on the edge of town this is the fleet farm complex on the edge of town you’ve got the big box store the uh the auto lot and the gas station uh 18 acres of land

Uh it has a total value of six hundred thousand dollars per acre this is the marquee development we’ve got on the edge of town um we took the same amount of area and applied it to our traditional downtown our old rundown uh you know blighted downtown this is a really nasty place

It has a total value of 1.1 million dollars per acre it’s 78 percent more productive literally we have been spending tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars to induce a development pattern that is incredibly low return and and low productivity when we had bequeath to us uh this very high productive development

Pattern literally built on thousands of years of cumulative knowledge how do we start to remedy this there’s a guy out of silicon valley that came up with this notion innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb while innovation that happens from the

Bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart the way this really applies in a city planning role does anybody know where this is yeah this is memphis it’s funny because people generally don’t know this is memphis because nobody thinks pyramids and memphis um you know the idea here was that we

Would build this stadium and of course the stadium would be a catalyst for additional growth right this 50 million dollar investment in a stadium would create all kinds of other growth and all the consultants and economists and everybody would come to the table and say oh yeah that’s what will happen

Um but of course it didn’t happen this is now you know closed uh being captioning not of the city not available them the attention that they want and they literally went up the store got buckets of paint and started painting in crosswalks and sidewalks uh they started painting in bike lanes

And parking lanes and you know with 500 and a weekend they put up they made the place pretty spectacular here’s what’s important about this before they started this project half of the storefronts were empty six months later they were all full and not only were they all full

But the rents that they were getting on the last places were double what they were asking for before the project 500 in paint enormously high return investment something that a top-down system is never going to identify but something that a bottom-up chaotic but smart system is capable of doing

There’s models for this this is tokyo 1945. tokyo had been firebombed for months and basically everything that could burn did burn uh and you know the post-world war ii japanese government in tokyo had no capacity to organize anything had no ability uh to organize any type of

Zoning any type of planning any type of regulation they couldn’t even go out and build infrastructure all they could do is just respond to what people did and they literally turned people loose and they said just go bill go rebuild the city go rebuild it and we’ll come behind and support it

And of course we all know what tokyo looks like today i love this profession and i think that you know planners have an incredibly important role to play uh in the recovery of this country and the comeback uh that that we need to do uh but we have to ask ourselves some

Really hard questions you know are we more a part of the problem than the solution are we really doing the things that we need to do to bring about the innovations that need to happen to turn our places into very productive very strong towns so to close the current path that cities

Are on is not financially stable we’ve all drunk the same kool-aid we’ve all followed the same model we’re all in the same place we didn’t trial this suburban experiment in new jersey and see how it worked we just literally did it everywhere the future for most cities is not going

To resemble the recent past i know there’s this idea that when the recession’s over we’ll go back to 2005 and everything will go again like it was we’re not even going to go back to 1955 let alone 2005. this is an entirely different set of circumstances and we’re going to have

To adapt to those and that means that uh the main determinant of prosperity will be the ability of local leaders to transform their communities it’s literally going to be up to us to take account of where we’re at to look at this complex set of problems we face

And to start to respond to them rationally i think we can do it and i think planners need to be at the forefront of that conversation this is our website strongtowns.org thank you so much for having me and i’m looking forward to questions and everything else as part of this panel

Discussion so thank you hey

ID: DRbw9JWQFh0
Time: 1365799206
Date: 2013-04-13 01:10:06
Duration: 00:37:08

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