We’ve shared a fair number of articles by Chuck Marohn and his team at Strong Towns, a national non-profit that advocates for sensible approaches to development — sensible in terms of socially beneficial neighborhoods, and perhaps even more importantly, sensible in terms of financial sustainability. Much of the infrastructure development that has taken place in the U.S. over the past 75 years has been unsustainable, and thus has been, essentially, a drain on the wealth of communities. The only way we’ve been able to finance this lifestyle has been through a massive increase in government, business, and personal debt.
Because a good deal of our infrastructure has had a useful life of 50 years or longer, we didn’t fully notice the hole we were digging for ourselves. And in a community like Pagosa Springs, where much of our development has taken place over the past 30 years, the investments and growing debt have been covered by population and tourism growth, in a sort of ‘government Ponzi scheme’.
When the financial house of cards will come falling down, no one knows. But the folks at Strong Towns consistently advocate for changing our behavior now, before disaster strikes.
Mr. Marohn is working on a series of books about more prosperous towns and cities, and the first one came out in 2021.
But new approaches to transportation infrastructure are only one aspect of a solution. Another aspect has to do with land use. And the avoidance of…
