I always have to remind my mom that she legitimately thought Obama might be the Antichrist… I honestly think the entire premise of the “End of the World” religious beliefs is just pattern recognition instincts being pointed at something entirely random.
It looks very, very silly in hindsight, but natural selection actually selects for a nontrivial predisposition to make type 1 errors, so we should expect them to be very common.
>I honestly think the entire premise of the “End of the World” religious beliefs is just pattern recognition instincts being pointed at something entirely random.
It isn't ever entirely random. They thought Obama was the Antichrist because they thought he was a Muslim, and a common interpretation of the Book of Revelations is that the final war of Armageddon will be a nuclear war between Christianity and Islam, after a New World Order/One World Government established by the Antichrist.
It is difficult to instigate regime change for democratically elected governments.
Iran has an unelected supreme leader.
Israel has a large portion of its population completely disenfranchised.
The US has a generally democratically elected government.
If one of these governments is going to fall during military instabilities, it would most likely be Iran. The US will have significant regime change in November if polling holds.
> Israel has a large portion of its population completely disenfranchised.
Care to elaborate? As far as I know, this is false. All Israeli citizens 18 or older can vote; there are no voting restrictions based on race, religion, gender or property; prisoners can vote (unlike in many US states for example); permanent residents who are not citizens cannot vote in national elections but may vote in municipal elections (not the case in the US). National turnout ranges between 65% and 75%.
Minorities are well represented: Arab and Druze citizens vote and have representation in the Knesset.
I struggle to find any dimension in which your statement is correct.
Very obviously, I’m referring to the Palestinians in the “Palestinian Territories” being de facto governed by Israel and are not allowed to vote in Israeli elections.
There is nothing obvious about that statement. In fact it's catastrophically wrong.
Palestinians in Gaza have been governed by Hamas since 2006. Before that, they had been governed by the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) since 1994.
Palestinians in Judea and Samaria ("West bank") have been governed by the Palestinian Authority continuously since 1994, with the exception of Area C.
Palestinians who live there are NOT "de facto governed" by Israel. They pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority; receive birth certificates, IDs, business licenses and social security payments from the P.A.; Go to schools, hospitals, courts, police stations and jails run by the P.A. And most importantly, they vote in elections run by the P.A. To say that they are "de facto governed" by Israel is ridiculous, and shows a lack of basic understanding of Israel and Palestine, and the conflict between them.
"The exception of Area C" is doing a lot of work in this argument. That's 61% of the territory of the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria") (those scare quotes also doing a lot of work).
To counter your list of things that the PA does de facto control, I will add: who controls the criminal court system? The checkpoints which lead to the outside world? The airspace? The ability to import and export goods? The roads? The territorial contiguity of Areas A and B? The decisions on building new settlements?
Aside from the municipal things you mentioned, which in most places in the world are controlled by subnational entities, Israel is in de facto control of the lives and futures of all 15 million people "from the river to the sea", roughly half of them Jews and half of them Arabs, while only one of those groups has what anyone in the West could consider to be a normal existence.
> "The exception of Area C" is doing a lot of work in this argument. That's 61% of the territory of the West Bank
Area C is less than 10% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank, 6% of Palestinian population if you count Gaza. Interesting that you chose to focus on territory! Last I checked, square kilometers do not vote, people do.
In any case, you are right that Area C is more complicated, since it is controlled by Israel and there are Palestinians who live there.
However, Palestinians living in area C can also vote in Palestinian elections. So although it is true that they live in a territory governed by Israel (unlike the other 94% of Palestinians), it remains false that they are a "large part of the Israeli population that is disenfranchised" (the original statement).
> ("Judea and Samaria") (those scare quotes also doing a lot of work).
Obviously the choice of name for this region reflects a political preference. But that works both ways. I prefer to call it Judea and Samaria because that's what it was called until 1948, when Jordan invaded and annexed it. "West bank" is a relic of Jordanian occupation, chosen by King Abdullah to absorb the region into his kingdom, not just politically but semantically. Jordan hasn't controlled the region in 60 years - longer than the occupation itself. It seems reasonable to stop calling it by its colonial Jordan name.
You seem to take particular issue with my use of the term "Judea and Samaria". That is also a political preference. Do you care to explain it the same way I explained mine?
> To counter your list of things that the PA does de facto control, I will add: who controls the criminal court system?
In areas A and B, the Palestinian Authority.
> The checkpoints which lead to the outside world?
On the Israeli side: Israel. On the Jordanian side: Jordan.
> The airspace?
Israel
> The ability to import and export goods?
The Palestinian Authority, but subject to stringent security control by Israel.
> The roads?
In Areas A and B: the Palestinian Authority.
> The territorial contiguity of Areas A and B?
That was jointly defined by the bilateral agreement at Oslo. So, both sides agreed on that.
> The decisions on building new settlements?
In area C: Israel.
In areas A and B: there are no settlements (Jews are not allowed to live there).
> Israel is in de facto control of the lives and futures of all 15 million people "from the river to the sea"
We're straying from the original topic of disenfranchisement... I will just say that, in my opinion, your view is simplistic and manichean. The closest we ever got to a resolution of the conflict, in 1994, was with a bilateral agreement. Neither side is fully in control of the outcome. Denying that Palestinians, too, have responsibilities and agency, is the surest way to perpetuate this conflict.
To wit, if you get to vote for the HOA board but not for the government that can override every decision the HOA makes, are you meaningfully enfranchised?
They're arguing that due to the failure/stalling of the two-state solution, the PA is effectively not a national government. It administers local services, like policing, courts, infrastructure. But it doesn't control borders, tarrifs and duties, or airspace. The Israeli military operates a parallel legal system that can detain and prosecute them, all under a legal framework that they have no vote or say in. I think its fair to call this a kind of disenfranchisement?
I understand where you're coming from, but this is a flawed analogy.
The legal framework for the Palestinian Authority's existence is a bilateral treaty. Israel did not unilaterally create this flawed administrative entity: it was jointly created with the PLO, as an interim step towards a fully sovereign Palestinian state. The negotiations that followed were also bilateral. These negotiations failed, leaving both sides with an incomplete interim solution. As a result Palestinians are neither citizens of Israel, nor of a wholly sovereign state. They are stateless, that is undeniable. But the reason they are stateless is not that they "have no vote or say". They had a say at the negotiation table in Oslo. They also had a say in Camp David in 2000, when Yasser Arafat walked away from a deal that would have given him a state with its capital in Jerusalem, and started the second intifada instead. They had a say in 2005 when they elected Abbas over reformist alternatives. They had a say in 2006 when they elected Hamas in Gaza. And they have a say now, as Abbas maintains the "pay to slay" program that rewards attacks against Israeli citizens with welfare payments to the attacker's families. There's a reason Israel insisted on overriding security control in the interim state. They couldn't trust the PLO, the very group that killed countless Israeli civilians in shootings, stabbings and bombings, to become the sole guardians of Israeli safety overnight. In Oslo the Palestinian Authority accepted the responsibility to prevent terrorist attacks against Israel. They are free to deliver on that commitment anytime.
My issue with your framing ("the PA is like an HOA"), the parent comment's framing ("Israel solely controls the fate of Palestinians"), and the original comment that started this whole debate ("Palestinians are a disenfranchised part of Israeli population"), is that it strips Palestinians of agency and shared responsibility. It's annoying when you do it. But it's tragic when Palestinians do it to themselves. By perpetuating this myth that they are helpless, blameless victims of external forces, they are making internal reform impossible ("what is there to reform? All our problems are Israel's fault") and any resolution to the conflict impossible ("we are the rebels, Israel is the empire. The only resolution is to blow up the death star").
To tie this back to the original topic of disenfranchisement: even in the flawed interim state created in Oslo, Palestinians have had the opportunity to vote. Not in a state, but in an institution created specifically to chart a path to a state. They elected a president, who then proceeded to cancel presidential elections (the last one was in 2005). They elected a legislative body, who started a civil war and established one of the most violent theocracies in the world. None of this was Israel's doing. To the extent that Palestinians are disenfranchised - denied the opportunity to vote - it is by their own leaders. If anything, it makes me glad Palestine isn't a full-blown state: with leaders like that, the more limits to their power, the better.
I shouldn’t even have to argue here. Access to the West Bank is controlled by Israel. That is de facto governance.
At best the Palestinian Territories have “quasi-governmental control.” I’m saying this as someone who isn’t particularly pro-Palestine. Pretending that Israel isn’t de facto the government of the Palestinian Territories is an unserious position.
If you don't like to argue, may I suggest not making controversial claims on controversial topics, in a place that encourages constructive debate?
> Access to the West Bank is controlled by Israel.
That is mostly true. On the border with Jordan it is jointly controlled by Jordan and Israel (like most international borders).
> Pretending that Israel isn’t de facto the government of the Palestinian Territories is an unserious position
I already explained in great detail the specific ways in which the Palestinian Territories are, in fact, governed by the Palestinian Authority. Taxation, elections, justice, police, education, healthcare, roads, sewers, business regulation, population register...
So far your counter-argument is that Israel controls the border... and therefore Palestinians should vote in Israeli elections? Should they also vote in Palestinian ejections? Or should the P.A. simply stop to exist? What point are you even making exactly?
Calling me "unserious" doesn't make you automatically "serious", or right.
I don't think the terms de facto and de jure mean what you think they mean. At this point it appears you're just throwing fancy words at me, and are not able to make a coherent point or meaningfully address mine. So, let's just agree to disagree.
The person you're responding to said they were unable to vote in Israeli elections. You said "no, they're able to, uhh, not vote in the case of those under Hamas and they're able to vote in elections held by the Palestinian authority in the case of those in the west bank." I don't know a ton about this, but I don't believe the Palestinian authority elections are the same as the Israeli elections. As I understand it, the right to vote is gated behind a citizenship process that is restrictive enough to generally prevent Palestinians from obtaining it.
> The person you're responding to said they were unable to vote in Israeli elections.
They said Palestinians are "a large portion of the Israeli population [that] is disenfranchised". That is a wrong statement. Palestinians are not part of the Israeli population and there is no expectation (on either side) that they would participate in Israeli elections. That issue has been largely settled by the Oslo framework in 1994.
> As I understand it, the right to vote is gated behind a citizenship process that is restrictive enough to generally prevent Palestinians from obtaining it.
I'm not sure which elections you mean.
- Israeli elections are for Israeli citizens. The 20% of Israelis who are Arab (sometimes loosely referred to as "Palestinians" as a loose synonym for "Arab living in former mandatory Palestine") can participate normally
- Palestinians in the West Bank vote in Palestinian elections. ' not aware of any citizenship-related restrictions there. Possible issues might be: logistics of getting to polls because of Israeli checkpoints; or simply the absence of elections (PA hasn't held a national election since 2006, although there are municipal elections).
- Specifically in East Jerusalem, on which Israeli claims sovereignty, Palestinians are classified as permanent residents of Israel. They may apply fot Israeli citizenship but that's probably a difficult process. As permanent residents they can vote in Israeli municipal elections, and as Palestinians they can vote in Palestinian national elections. But not being Israeli citizens they cannot vote in Israeli national elections. Perhaps that is what you're referring to?
The peace process that Oslo initiated is certainly dead. But Oslo itself, as the last bilateral agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, is de facto the law of the land, even though it was meant as an interim agreement. For better or worse...
This is like saying Australians are disenfranchised because they can't vote in New Zealand elections. They're not governed by Israel in any meaningful way.
It would be like if Native American tribes could not vote in American elections, but the federal government still controlled the ability for those nations to access the external world.
Correction: It is like saying Australians can't vote in general elections after being pushed out of 75% of the territory, except a small percentage who are tolerated in the major land since they won't make a difference.
The ostracized Aussies then can vote for their own leaders but will be blamed if they vote for the wrong ones and embargoed, regularly shot and even bombed from time to time to remind them who the place belongs to.
Palestinians living in the Palestinian Territories are not Israeli citizens and cannot vote. I would say the Palestinian Territories are occupied, not part of Israel (though Bibi definitely has a sizable camp in his government that would love to make it so).
Do we expect occupied peoples to have a vote? sort of depends how you define democracy. Under an American interpretation (no taxation without representation, 1 person 1 vote) there’s a good argument that you should count occupied peoples.
> Under an American interpretation (no taxation without representation, 1 person 1 vote) there’s a good argument that you should count occupied peoples.
Palestinians are not taxed by Israel. They are taxed by the Palestinian Authority, and participate in Palestinian elections. So they do have representation - just not in Israel.
If we are talking about Democracy—which is where I started this—then yes. If occupied peoples don’t have representation in the government occupying them, yes, that’s very obviously less democratic than if they did. Quite literally by definition. This shouldn’t be controversial.
How many times were they offered statehood. How many times did they attack Israel? Why is there a wall? You know what happened when the wall went up and security blockades went in? The number of Palestinian suicide bombings dropped. Palestinians have decades of history of terrorism. They could have been like Singapore. But they chose terrorism.
Palestinians already have statehood: Palestine is a state, just like israel is a state. They are exactly equal in value and in their right to exist free from coercion by the other.
The issue is that israel is attacking, invading, occupying, annexing, and genociding the state of Palestine.
The US is a republic with some democratic institutions, but the economists index isn’t some platonic indicator that gets to define who’s a good government and who isn’t. Several of its higher ranking countries have outright banned extremely popular political parties in recent years.
And both have a similarly executive-centric form of government where the president and the majority party hold a disproportionate amount of power. Although the US is even worse than France on this regard as far as I know.
I think it makes sense that both are categorised as flawed.
If you want to talk about rhetoric look at the idea of a “democracy index” - a score suggesting a scientific approach for determining how good/free a nation is.
We can play the “whose saying it game”, or look at the arguments. Democracy is rule by the lowest - and it’s easily manipulated by the popular. Buying votes, focus on the carnal, and immediate is a clear sign of democracy in decline.
I was more wondering about these emperors, kings, barbarians, and those in their influence who were casting aspersions at Athens. Why are we giving these historically incorrect people the time of day?
Once again, looking at incentives can help you find hidden motivations. But at some point you have to look at the arguments at see if they make sense or not.
The US founders didn’t believe in democracy. More people do today, mostly out of a sense that it’s moral obligation. Very few actually will argue it leads to better government outcomes.
The US and Israel are elected governments, but that should certainly not presuppose democratic. The Roman Republic was, for example, fully elected but simultaneously it was intentionally autocratic to the elite. That is why it fell to a dictatorship which then increased the liberty and standards of the people.
Democracy is the directness by which social participation equates to governance. The US is a federal republic with only two parties each bound by the same hostile funding system that benefits political contributions over the vote. That is far from democratic.
Democracy and Republic both mean “normal people are in charge of government” and are in opposition to monarchy. The distinction you are referring to was a contrived interpretation in the federalist papers to make a point.
No. Democracy and republic are fundamentally different. You want to equivocate them because there is a vote. They have always been different going back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans who each invented those terms.
Had. Israel probably has a list with the next 3 or 4 in line to replace Khamenei and is currently working towards eliminating them, like they did with the Hezbollah.
Regime change could also be triggered through impeachment or PM losing support and government coalition getting dissolved in the case of Israel.
The Israeli government has de facto control of large sections of the Palestinian Territories. The people in those territories, however cannot participate in the elections of that government.
The distinction being de jure and de facto control is something worth debating, but it’s trivially true that Israel controls large swaths of territory where people are not eligible to participate in that government.
In that order, in the context of that region. Then consider their meanings in the context of (say) Canada. Consider how conventional applications of those terms are different for the two.
This is too strong of a statement. There are perfectly sensible reasons to NIMBY certain activities. For instance, burning wood is probably ok in general, but a horrible idea in heavily populated cities.
Obviously, California is not composed exclusively of heavily populated cities. But it does contain a lot of them! So it is not completely insane that the regulation is skewed in favour of this.
Of course, for things that are equally polluting no matter where you do them (like burning fossil fuels), moving production outside of the location but still buying produced materials is simply passing the buck. But it's not totally clear to me that's what's happening here.
That's exactly why the Bay Area Air Quality Management District exists (established decades before the federal EPA):
> Charged with regulating stationary sources of air pollution emissions, the Air District drafted its first two regulations in the 1950s: Regulation 1, which banned open burning at dumps and wrecking yards, and Regulation 2, which established controls on dust, droplets, and combustion gases from certain industrial sources.
> Much research and discussion went into the shaping of Regulation 2, but there was no doubt about the need for it. During a fact-finding visit to one particular facility, Air District engineers discovered that filters were used over air in-take vents to protect the plant's machinery from its own corrosive emissions! This much-debated regulation was finally adopted in 1960.
Fossil are not equally polluting. There's a difference between living next to a generator with exhaust at ground level, a properly designed smoke stack, and just being further away so the reactive emissions can dilute and degrade.
CO2 might be a long term problem, but it isn't the core health concern of living near combustion facilities - moving those away from residential areas isn't passing the buck, it's just good sense.
> It makes no sense to say "oh, we need to manufacturer this stuff... just not here." That's basically NIMBYism for electronics.
This statement doesn't acknowledge why NIMBYism is odious. The reason is that we all need housing, but new housing may devalue current housing. While some may wish to protect their housing values/community feel/etc, others wish and may rightly deserve, access to housing at the same levels of access as earlier generations.
The analogy to manufacturing does not exist—to suggest it does ignores the real negative externalities to people who live next to polluting facilities, especially those where the pollutant was not recognized during use.
They are not fundamentally different. The underlying hypocracy of NIMBYism is wanting the positive outcomes from something (more housing, factories producing goods) with someone else having to suffer the downsides. How obnoxious it is depends on that upside/downside risk, but fundamentally if you want a thing to happen but you want it to happen near someone else, you are part of the NIMBY problem. (Note that wanting it to not happen at all, or wanting a version that is more expensive but nicer to be near, is not the same, so long as you're happy to bear the outcome of that thing being more expensive)
I think it’s reasonable to want factories and pollution to be far from anyone’s dwelling, no? And for all factories to have appropriate pollution control.
But is that really California's stance? Or is it more "if you do it here, do it the right way" and then everyone uses the more polluting production methods in a state that doesn't care
The outcome is the same as long as only California does it, but the ethics of it and the outcome if every state acted like that is vastly different
The notion of comparative advantage says you don't. It's not NIMBYism. And it's not a good faith argument when it comes from folks who have a bunker in New Zealand.
Similarly saying “you can’t have slavery but you can buy stuff made by enslaved people abroad” is morally inconsistent. I don’t know the obvious answer to this though.
Why? Manufacturing,design and engineering need highly different skill sets it's just not feasible to have both in one location because of the workforce required. It's the same in every other country some parts are industrial hubs and some design/engineering.
I have been a Strong Towns follower/member for about 6 years. I really don't think people realize the world of pain we're signing up for by not actually fixing the underlying problem of lack of density and walk-ability and their effect on the municipal budgets of American cities.
I know municipal finance is about as exciting socks for Christmas, but if the Strong Towns thesis is correct, we've basically found ourselves in slow moving crisis, where city budgets start very slowly, but very surely, become unsustainable, and by the time anyone notices, it's mostly too late to do anything about it. Pipes cost money, repaving costs money, replacing your wastewater system costs money... lots of money. The fact that they only have to be replaced every 30-50 years doesn't mean the costs go away... they just disappear temporarily. Deferring that maintenance doesn't actually do anything except make the problem worse tomorrow.
The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane. The idea that they're engaging in penny-smart, pound-foolish solutions is a strong signal that the city budget is already deeply broken, and likely is not fixable under the current paradigm of LA politics.
California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density, but it seems they are determined to do nothing until the wheels finally fall off, and the city's budget crisis spirals out of control. Even then, I wonder if they will take the Detroit-route and declare bankruptcy before actually addressing the problem.
To add to what the central city budget problem is - each new piece of street and road in LA has, on average, not paid for itself in terms of increased revenue from taxes or otherwise.
So for each new street widening, new road, and piece of highway capacity, LA was increasing it's financial liability to revenue ratio.
Add over decades all of the street and road construction that LA has done, and it now has a unsustainable amount of road maintenance it's responsible for compared to the amount of revenue it pulls in. I'm having a hard time finding numbers though so please correct me or add numbers if you can find them.
Unless things are really different in California from where I'm at, I find it unlikely that the city is responsible for maintaining state and federal highways.
At least in my state, state and federal highways are all the responsibility of the state DOT, which is massively subsidized out of general fund tax dollars and federal grants. There have been recent attempts to increase fuel taxes, but they get regularly shut down by the electorate. It's not looking good for highway maintenance, either.
You use the phrase "trivially fix". If your definition of "trivially" means several decades with the investment of billions of dollars, then perhaps. There are no "trivial fixes" in city infrastructure. Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land. For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move. This drives the price of any development up making it unprofitable in most cases. I'm sorry but I can't take you seriously.
When I say "trivially fix" I mean that, if the City/State wanted to fix the problem, they could.
>Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land.
Developers very obviously want to redevelop the vast majority of LA. The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit. To raise long-term tax revenues, LA could not just legalize redevelopment. They could actually incentivize it.
>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.
The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat (mostly due to Prop 13). Eventually the city will start having to raise taxes very dramatically or declare bankruptcy. That's the entire message from Strong Towns.
The more we put it off, the bigger the impact will be. When your city is effectively long-run insolvent, but you have the ability to change that even if it's politically unpopular (and LA does), then it's "trivially" doable, it's just that people don't want to.
That's not the case in many other cities.
In other cities demand isn't there. People will just leave when taxes go up, and the town will declare bankruptcy. At that point, they will effectively lose most of their population, or people will just live without things like clean water. An example of this happening is Jackson Mississippi, where the water system failed, and the city didn't have the money to fix it. The ultimate solution was just a federal bailout, which is not sustainable if these types of crises become endemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_cri...
Every time I look at a city/county budget, the schools absolutely dwarf everything else (it's not quick to disentangle different levels of government, but roughly speaking, it seems like schools are usually roughly the same cost as all other services combined where I've looked), which makes it hard for me to take seriously the idea that it's infrastructure like roads and sewage specifically leading to unsustainable budgets. e.g. if I remember correctly, special ed programs cost more than roads when I looked at the previous metro I lived in's budget, and sewers were revenue neutral with a county sewer fee.
Strongtowns seems a bit motivated in their analysis, to put it mildly.
This looks at current costs. The school is a cost every year, so every year that cost shows up on the budget. The problem is that road/water/sewer maintenance often doesn't show up on these budgets because these systems are usually built all at once. Because of this they usually also need to be replaced all at once. To see those costs before they happen, you need to use accrual accounting:
The entire message from Strong Towns is exactly that because cities often use cash accounting instead of accrual accounting in their budgetary processes these lingering issues of deferred maintenance don't show up until they do, and when they do, those costs will simply be too large for the city to cover without very politically unpopular interventions.
Capital improvements don't need to be paid all at once; that's what financing is for. And debt service does appear on budgets. In any case, why are we to believe that e.g. $1B in maintenance that's been deferred for decades is "the" problem when the school budget is $500M/year?
You’re making an argument about school budgets being too high. That’s fine. I’m arguing that, our school budgets are set, in large part, by our available resources. Viewing our resources from a long run perspective helps us set our current budgets.
If we cut the school budget only when we need to repave roads, we are playing fast and loose with our children’s future. When we set our budgets to be sustainable, we don’t rug pull parents who are trying to build a life in our cities.
I'm not even saying school budgets are necessarily too high. I'm just saying that if someone is claiming that what amounts to 5-10% of the budget is why cities go bankrupt, and that's why they need to entirely reshape how they develop to fit some idyllic vision of a pedestrian city, then I'm going to go ahead and doubt their analysis.
Like I'm happy that my (suburban) city requires new developments to connect to a city-wide bike trail network. That's great. I just don't think Strong Towns/Not Just Bikes presents a realistic mental model of the world. They seem to clearly be pushing for a specific vision regardless of facts.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying.
Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion USD. Assuming a lifespan of 35 years, that is basically a billion USD per year spent on servicing road infrastructure costs. If they don't spend that billion every year or put it aside for future repairs, their road infrastructure is going to decay. It might not sound like much in comparison to the full budget, but since the road network is the largest man made structure in the city, it will affect everyone and be the most noticeable failure on part of the government. Lack of police or fire fighting can show up in the form of stochastic damage that doesn't necessarily impact every citizen directly.
Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents in the city, they could raise taxes by $250/person-year. That doesn't sound unsustainable to me. Certainly not a "suburbs are a fundamentally broken model" level problem.
Lots of suburban cities in the US are really nice, well run places. LA even as an example of a poorly run area doesn't actually seem to be in much of a financial pickle.
The point is
> you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying
Is just confused. The $1B/year you came up with as sufficient is ~7% of the LA city budget (~$14B), and that's excluding major expenses like schools since that's the county budget. If you look more holistically at just "what's the local government spending", the amount you say is needed to properly maintain the roads is more like 3-4%. Roads are just not a financial problem. Strongtowns guy just doesn't like them.
Overtime for police can often be largely attributed to special events or occasions; for example, the city might have an entirely correct amount of officers for most of the year, but then during superbowl, presidential visits, Fourth of July parties, Pride, etc. They have a much higher need for patrol units, escorts, traffic management, etc. for those denser areas with more going on. They can't simply transfer officers around because that would leave other areas of the city under-patrolled, which runs the risk of unacceptably higher response times.
As a result, officers that worked Saturday through Thursday might also come in for a shift on Friday/Saturday, or might work a longer shift or split shift that day.
So the problem might not be that the police force needs 30% more staffing, but that the police force needs 80% more staffing on extremely rare occasions.
This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).
Just a note about police overtime: The correct amount of overtime for a union employee is not zero. Paying overtime for a few weeks each year to cover vacation can absolutely be cheaper than funding a pension and other benefits for several decades.
That’s absolutely untrue. The only reason companies track depreciation as they do is because it allows them to defer taxation. Public works projects are not paid out of current cash.
Strong Towns makes good arguments about certain things and are critical in a reasonable way of how civil engineering organizations rate the need for more civil engineering works. But the budget discussion makes zero sense.
The biggest expenses for county, city, town, village government are: schools, police & fire, Medicaid share in states that do that, and employee retirement and health. A small/midsize city spends 60% of its budget on police.
Capital projects are capitalized with bonds. Governments have the lowest bond expenses due to tax exemptions. Roadwork is not done in a cash basis. It’s bonded for 10-30 years depending on the job.
Yes, the problem is that our cities are already leveraged up to their eyeballs. At some point, the actual humans buying those bonds start becoming skeptical of the city’s ability to pay them back.
LA currently has about a billion dollars of outstanding general obligation bonds (edit: but that does not include all their future liabilities). They're still rated AA, but I presume that is because the credit writing agencies understand how many untapped revenue streams LA has, but again, those will require unpalatable political change. You can’t keep refinancing forever.
Philadelphia, Miami, and Chicago are getting close to junk bond status, and when that happens, the option to refinance starts evaporating very quickly.
I also think LA will be fine in the long run, I just think that their tax structure will force significant changes. The tax base is able to cover the cities liabilities, it's just that the residents don't want to pay those extra taxes, and don't want to change in ways that let other people pay them.
The city has a billion dollar deficit right now. Trivial for residents to afford ($83 per person), but difficult to actually implement politically.
Wikipedia says the GDP of the LA metro is ~1.5T. I think they could handle 1B in bonds. If they choose not to, it's not because it's some impossibility. Certainly not because roads are impossibly expensive.
I said general obligation bonds, not general liabilities. These technically are what makes this discussion so difficult.
My point is that much of what the city can tax has little to do with the city's GDP. Either the landscape of the city will have to change or the current taxation paradigm will have to change.
What they can tax does have to do with the GDP though. If they have a 1B deficit, they need to somehow tax <0.1% of activity (or cut services), whether through property tax, income tax, sales tax, corporate tax, or some other scheme. What they don't need to do is radically increase density, and since almost all of the costs scale with population, not area, density wouldn't even help that much (or might hurt if it leads to a lower percentage of net contributors).
Again, putting $1B in some perspective, the LA Unified School District budget (which is county-level, so not directly comparable to the city, but anyway) is just under $19B. Maybe someone else can ballpark how much of that is associated to the city. Or look the other things that scale with population: police, medical, waste, social programs, etc.
Again, they have $1B in the current deficit. The have $1B in outstanding bonds. They have myriad other outstanding obligations that won't show up on the balance sheet for 20+ years.
Okay, but relative to their resources, that's nothing. So they can just pay for those things. It's like worrying about a water heater replacement when you make well into six figures. At a macro level, it is obvious that the suburban model itself is not somehow financially unsustainable.
The city budget is $14B. So they need to make a ~7% adjustment somehow, which amounts to less than a 1% tweak to the local economy. That's not a broken system. It's not a ponzi scheme. It just means they should pay their bills and maybe reduce some waste. You yourself said it's trivial for residents to afford to just pay for the deficit.
So you get 40 years of "sewers cost us almost nothing to maintain woo" and then five years of "sewer maintenance is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars this year".
Take a look at LA’s budget then, it’s literally all police and police liability payouts which are already hundreds of millions of dollars over the budget for them.
> The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit.
The cost of building a housing unit is rather out of control in LA right now, due to a number of factors. Some of those factors involve permitting, but some involve complexities of complying with building regulation, and there is also insufficient availability of contractors and insufficient availability of labor.
The point is that the vast majority of budgetary issues in LA could be solved by just legalizing, and streamlining the production of something as simple as three-story row housing like the kind that's normal in San Francisco (which has a surprisingly good long-term outlook despite their current budget woes).
It's not rocket science here. If you make it easy to build housing, the industry grow to meet demand. If you make it difficult, it will be dominated by a handful of major players who can navigate the process.
I recently reviewed a bid from a not-particularly-fancy contractor for nearly $1M to build ~1200 sq ft in an empty lot in Los Angeles. This isn’t just a planning permit probem.
Even in cheaper areas without earthquake or hurricane construction codes, minimum $/ft is like $250 (for lowest quality components) and realistically more like $400.
Inflation for materials and labor makes any build incredibly expensive.
Plenty of labor and contractors other places in the US that could be brought in if someone was willing to offer stable work and pay. Even with the out-of-town bonus, many midwestern contractors and laborers would come out to near the same cost as locals because they were already making a fraction the wage out in the midwest.
But non-union construction is known to be unstable even outside construction's general boom-bust cycles and nobody is going to travel 1500 miles away without a contract guaranteeing they will have work/pay past the first 2 weeks. Too many workers have gotten burned being given great offers to travel for work only to get screwed over before they can recuperate their costs. Hell our own President is famous for screwing over construction companies and people just accept it as normal for the industry.
>The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat
So the kernel of the argument is that 1) someone bought a single-family home and based on ground truth (property tax, cost of living, etc.) and 2) that property tax isn't sufficient to fund the city?
Can you really blame someone for not sacrificing his position under these circumstances? If I'm meeting my obligation, what do I stand to gain from leaving my house and moving into an apartment? That's saying "I need you to move so that someone else can take your property." It's not going to go over well.
Zoning changes would generally make your property more value as a baseline. Then you could either stay put, or you could elect to move elsewhere while redeveloping your original place. This is common in Australia.
A common zoning change here is based on street frontage for semi-detached homes - the new ones are still 3-4BR, just attached at the garage and with smaller yards. If development required 15m frontage, but then that changed to 12-13m, that would mobilise a lot of owners to take advantage, though obviously others can just stay as is if they prefer.
It usually happens that an $800k lot value becomes $1m, regardless of the state of the house. The owner can then demolish a decades old house, build two places for $600k, sell one as a new home for $800k-1m to finance the build (and costs of moving out during that phase), and end up in a new house themselves. Often they've sacrificed yard that they found annoying to maintain anyway.
The above can be adjusted where it's possible to build 3-4 on a block, or a larger development of apartments.
Zone changes typically allow change, not force it, surely? An owner can just keep their SFH and large yard if they prefer. What they can't always control and often vote against is the composition of their neighbourhood.
>Can you really blame someone for not sacrificing his position under these circumstances?
What? There is a structural deficit problem. The ship is sinking. Complaining about how "we shouldn't have to change anything about the ship" isn't really a reasonable argument. We live on this ship... we have every incentive to make sure it stays above water.
I still don't get it though. Am I right that the proposition is: voluntarily accept a lower quality of life, or we'll either take your property or let it the neighborhood go to pot until you decide to give it up? People are not going to accept that. Look at the fiasco at defunding the fire department. I'll just patch my own sidewalk. I'm not vacating so that the next guy gets a deal. There's plenty of land. Develop there. Why not?
I'm not giving you a hard time. I'm saying that I made my choice. I'm going to stay in my home.
I don't really think those are the only three choices, though. The government can fail and be replaced with a new one that will shape things up. Then it'll be replaced by another that thinks it's too big and well off to fail, squander it, and fail. That's the typical cycle.
The problem is that you're camouflaging the implicit position of "I'm going to stay in my home, even if I have to see the world burn." as the seemingly reasonable position "I'm going to stay in my home", while being utterly ignorant to the consequences based on absurd levels of wishful thinking.
You're saying the government is going to fail, but actually it's not really going to fail. Someone is going to bail you out every single time. If the government failed, but I'm still in the house, it didn't fail hard enough. They should get better and more competent at failing. The failure needs to be more absolute and its consequences should be unavoidable. The bare minimum required is that they thoroughly crush my spirit and desire to keep living in this place.
People with a semblance of sanity left in their brain understand that getting the things they want, also means dealing with the associated costs and that if they insist on those things, they also implicitly insist on the costs associated with those things. When people refuse this cost benefit trade off, they will end up losing the things they want.
I'm trying to follow this but unclear of the root of the problem. Is it beacause building roads in L.A. is inherantly more expensive than elsewhere? I thought one of the selling points of cities was scale: costs are spread over more people. But, it sounds like road building is cheaper per resident in my small city. Sounds more like a corruption problem.
I'm suggesting that this isn't the actual answer. The thread started with the premise that the city doesn't have enough revenue, and that the way to increase that revenue is to bring in more people who pay more tax. Next, bringing in more people requires more housing, so that requires incentives for developers to displace people residing in SFH so that the can replace those with high density housing. There's a big problem: more people require more services beyond fancy curb cuts, like police, fire, water, electricity, schools, hospitals, etc. That cost that is spread also grows proportionally with the number of people, and you can't ignore that.
On the cost of building roads: there are cement and asphalt plants right in LA city proper, and also in weho and inglewood, among others in the county. LA has a price problem, not a cost problem.
There are more specters, too, which are bound to be political fights. For one, when you dig up a road, there are numerous places that will require displacing very large homeless camps. Now, credit where it's due, LA has shown that it is able to do that sometimes, like around Echo Park, which is the junction of several major thoroughfares like glendale blvd and the 101. Still, these are non-trivial projects that take years.
In Australia, as zoning changes, developers and owners alike tend to take advantage. If a house was being rented out, they might rebuild as 2-4 homes and rent those out. Otherwise, an owner might rebuild as two semi-detached homes, live in one and sell/rent the second to finance the build. If it is owned by someone who prefers to keep what they have, the next generation might not feel the same. Where there are opportunities, developers (and owners) will find them.
If you change the zoning, people will build to take advantage of that more flexible zoning. I own land in the city, I'd absolutely pursue the financing and coordinate the redevelopment of that land if:
- I could make more money
- if the zoning allowed it.
As it is right now, it'd be profitable, but the zoning isn't there for it.
It's trivial in the sense that it's easier than not doing nothing, because rather than create problems what we've actually done is systematically installed impediments to solutions. We only need to remove impediments, and the solution finds itself.
Obviously that's very simplified, but the point is we've built this Tower of Babylon that exists around property value that is completely optional and just makes everything harder.
> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density, but it seems they are determined to do nothing until the wheels finally fall off, and the city's budget crisis spirals out of control.
The state of California already mandated certain density improvements:
There is another law that mandated local communities plan to manage housing to accommodate population growth or the local community loses it's ability to deny permits. Struggling to find that but it was well before 2025 I believe.
The more likely reasons is corruption and paying off rising CalPERS costs:
I live in CA. My state senator is Scott Wiener. We are making some progress.
Your argument might be plausible if it weren't for the fact that this issue is happening -- predictably -- in every major sprawling city in America. Strong Towns has literally built a tool to effectively convert cities' cash-accounting budgets into accrual-accounting budgets. You can see it happening over time... you just need to account for the future liabilities in the way you look at your budget instead of ignoring them until it's time to replace the infrastructure.
Indeed, the problem is the same in Texas which is about as opposite California as you can get. Sprawling suburbs over old farm fields. Installing infrastructure is vastly cheaper when you are doing so in an unoccupied empty field.
None of those cities are saving money or even _planning_ for the inevitable repaving, pipe re-lining, etc. Worse: many of them were built up in waves so much of the city's infrastructure will "come due" around the same time.
I never imagined we would see San Francisco (of all places) overhaul its permit process. I can now build a deck in my backyard, add a story to my house, or build an ADU without having to pay DBI to send certified letters to all my neighbors asking if they'd like to object, then being forced in front of the planning commission when they do so. That's a direct result of the pro-housing legislation at the state level, something Wiener has been heavily involved in.
I think CA has bigger issues to tackle than repealing Prop 65 (IIRC, that's the one about carcinogen warnings). The other, may be happening in some places, but having lived here 20+ years in the Bay, I haven't seen even one example of either.
I saw all of these things driving through Sacramento twice. I think you’re probably just being dishonest or maybe you are in an are in an area where undesirables are priced out and you don’t leave your house.
Sure, some cities are resisting or having trouble but even the state is overriding them with state policies.
It’s just going to take time between passing bills, incentives lining up, and getting money for building homes. That’s also why the state has focused on ADUs too — because individuals can get through a whole decision process to develop housing quicker than a big developer can. ADUs have a lot of problems but the state knows this and is attacking the issue on both short and long term scales.
You don’t just steer the 4th largest economy in the world. It’s built like a steakhouse and steers like one.
Scott Wiener is my state senator. My point is exactly that many California cities are being forced to allow density, instead of just coming to that conclusion because it's a responsible one.
They don't want it, even if they need it. They're kicking and screaming and doing anything they can to stop it, while at the same time their city budgets are in the toilet. The only thing that's actually driving this reform is that housing prices are out of control, so you have a large demographics of people fighting to increase density.
Where this is not happening is everywhere else (think: Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Arizona). Those areas don't have the same demand for density, but they still have the same long-term structural deficit problems.
I've been shocked by how much my rural / politically red city (pop ~80k) here in California has moved on this issue over the last 5 years. Doubled the allowed meters per lot, super relaxed ADU rules and city + developer funded 5 over 1's in the renovated city center for some impressive density. Also all the new construction for restaurants or whatever in the area requires adding apartments above. Not to mention a massive initiative for safe bike paths from the commercial areas to the park trails. They also bought some longtime closed hotels and converted them to housing for homeless. Really big stuff and huge quality of life improvements.
I think Chuck Marone and his group make good points but their admonition by ASCE is also deserved. He really went too far with disparaging the profession because of differences in purely value judgments. Furthermore, the type of infrastructure you get is a political decision. Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built. The “what” is never a designers decision.
Now I think this is a problem with reflecting on. Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities? I did. I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.
> Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built.
I would disagree. The engineers absolutely steer the space of available solutions. Caltrans is a prime example, I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970. This absolutely influences the priorities of both the state and the cities that depends on the framework it sets up.
And yes city politics is separately a major problem.
Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct.
Everyone hates Nassim Taleb and he can be an asshole, but his math is impeccable. When your concern is with someone's personality because you don't like their math, then you've lost the plot.
Personality is not relevant when determining if someone is correct or not, but it does empirically matter in terms of how likely someone is to get something done based on that. If you think being right is the only thing that should matter, you've achieved your goal already once you reach that step, so congrats! If you agree that it's not the success criteria, it makes sense to start paying attention to those other factors, or else you'll end up only being right and not successful.
I'd argue that if these issues are important to you, and you want to convince people, you'll be more effective if you find a more compelling argument than "you aren't allowed to care about what you just told me you care about".
Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities?
This is actually generally the opposite of true. SFV is heavily Republican. Given the choice, self-made individuals prefer to live in or near blue cities despite the high taxes, because the lifestyle is objectively better than it is in the areas around red cities.
Indeed, a not-so-hidden secret of Fox News is that almost all of their anchors and personalities actually live in LA or NYC. (This is why Fox News personalities are so familiar with and obsessed with LA's problems. They're locals.) The Murdochs, for all their money prefer Los Angeles and NYC as their U.S. bases over no-tax states like Florida and Texas.
The engineers are a big part of the problem and drive regulations that featherbed themselves.
I got into a fight with my city over nonexistent crosswalks (the adhesive line strips wore off) near my home in an area where drivers have a hard time realizing where pedestrians cross due to a unique road setup.
You can’t just paint lines. The project ended up costing about $1.2M and required a traffic study, some stupid ADA assessment and accommodation that frankly any layperson could have figured out, and a complete streets assessment.
Basically, they sent out a few engineering technicians who make $20/hr, billed out 80 hours at $120 to count cars and people, and printed some boilerplate analysis (@$250/hr). The end result was they painted new crosswalks and added textured curb surfaces for ADA compliance, which allowed for the use of recovery act funds.
I love a good rant, but you just have no idea what you’re talking about. First, real engineers (the kind with, education and experience requirements and personal liability for their work) have labor markups that are maybe 2 to 3 times raw rate. I don’t know if 6X margins are normal for people who collect a check to “maintain” a finished product. Second, any civil engineer will tell you that complete streets compliance for federal funding is a waste of everyone’s time. Engineers didn’t come up with that, congressmen elected by people like you came up with that. Third, the only reason they did all of that study is because the people you voted for wanted to use money that was tax farmed from me instead of your city funds. They could have just sent out a road crew. You could also cut the check yourself. Finally marked crosswalks alter pedestrian behavior, but not driver behavior. Marking crosswalks where there is high traffic and no controls like a signal with a dedicated pedestrian phase are actually more dangerous than no markings at all. I don’t expect you to know that, but that’s why you should hire people like me and not try to do this yourself.
In fairness, I should have said "engineering companies" vs. engineers. Like any scenario, the engineers themselves have to work in the scope they are allowed to. Those firms absolutely lobbied our state legislature for all sorts of things that generate make-work revenue for them. Most of the proof of work is farmed off to low dollar employees.
In this particular scenario, it's an usual configuration that can't be changed for a bunch of reasons. There are functional, adequate controls that were added about 15 years ago and were not altered by the project I'm thinking about. The crosswalks and lane markings are essential because drivers tend to stop at the wrong place.
While we may have been getting rope-a-doped, our neighborhood association was willing to contribute a pretty significant amount of money to have the city do the work. Our position was that it was becoming a dangerous intersection with significant pedestrian traffic. We were told it was illegal for the city dpw to do so without the study work.
A late addition to your comment: the reason for all the "wasteful" red tape was that the right demanded all the documentation to prove that the underlying activity itself was not wasteful...thus imposing extra costs on everything that resulted in is several magnitudes more waste.
50 years ago, the U.S. was a nation that _made things_ whereas today it's primarily people conference calling and making slide decks for each other (perhaps not for long, given the progress of LLMs). What if that's the real underlying problem and not how many layers of people we can stack on top of each other in a small space?
This always grinds my gears (pun intended). Forcing everyone to live in a horribly dense, stifling, unhealthy situation isn't the issue. And the concept of saying LA isn't dense enough is beyond mind boggling, the number of people living there is beyond absurd. And yes, I know it's spread out, but the numbers don't lie, there's already more density than many places.
What this really is, is backdoor environmentalism. And I say that as someone that wants emissions down, reduced carbon, but a cat is a cat. And focusing on density to remove cars, because certain segments of the population rail against cars, isn't the problem people claim they are trying to solve.
For the roads? The easy way to pay for the roads, is to tax gas appropriately, and then ensure that tax only pays for roads. Nothing else, roads.
The second? Very clear end of year municipal budgets, showing how those funds were used.
Eventually, you'll reach a situation where the gas tax is the cost of road maintenance. And that's how it should be.
Back to the overall question? Well, I suppose you have quakes in LA, but outside of that concept, the US south is just about the easiest place to maintain roads.
In Canadaland, we have road damage due to freezing and thawing. Frost greaves for example, are where water gets under the pavement, freezes, and breaks it upward as the ice expands. No amount of drainage can fully protect from this, it just happens. And the cost for daily snow removal, ice mitigation(salt, etc), dirt being spread, the same for all the sidewalks isn't free.
LA has none of that. The US south doesn't, generally speaking.
LA doesn't have a road problem. It doesn't have a revenue problem. It has absurd infighting, like the entire rest of the US, with team politics and an inability to act as a result. It also has poor fiscal constraint.
Smaller LA side roads should last decades with proper maintenance.
But that's part of the problem too.
A tiny crack can be sealed, but leave it a year and it becomes a pothole.
LA is much less dense than Canadian cities. Taking the central municipalities which seem fairly comparable:
Toronto: 3.271M in 631 km2 = 5184/km2
Los Angeles: 3.879M in 1215 km2 = 3192/km2
Toronto's population is growing, up 17% 2021 to 2025, while Los Angeles is marginally down 0.5% 2020 to 2024.
Even smaller cities in Canada seem much more dense than their Californian equivalents, and they are more pleasant and walkable/cycleable because of that.
All true. There's also a perverse incentive in getting involved in LA. It's a major market where overly ambitious people go to make bigger names for themselves. Their goals are not aligned with operating the city; it's a stepping stone to CA and the national stage. Most major markets have this problem, of course, but LA is at the top.
> replacing your wastewater system costs money... lots of money. The fact that they only have to be replaced every 30-50 years doesn't mean the costs go away... they just disappear temporarily. Deferring that maintenance doesn't actually do anything except make the problem worse tomorrow.
I kind of disagree. Deferring maintenance does make emergency repairs more likely, but if you need to replace your sewer piping (for example) every 30-50 years, doing it at 33 year intervals means three installs in 100 years, and doing at 50 years means two installs in 100 years.
As long as you don't push the deferral so long that you end up having emergency repairs and remediation of significant leaks, deferring maintenance reduces the burdens of maintenance.
You do need to invest more in surveillance if you want to run your installed infrastructure longer, but surveillance is a good practice regardless, because sometimes 30-50 year infrastructure fails early. For sewers, the idea is camera inspections of all the municipal lines every 3-5 years to generate a prioritized list of maintenance/replacement projects; do the work as budget allows, rinse and repeat. Older sewer systems will benefit from more frequent inspections and newer systems can get by with less. You really shouldn't fully eliminate inspections on new systems, because earth movement and early material failure due to manufacturing error don't always happen on your schedule.
That said, a lot of sewers were initially installed in the post war boom times of the 1950s and deferred maintenance is coming due -- many portions may have been replaced as needed, but a lot of original pipes are hitting 70+ years of service life and are likely nearing the end of their life. There's an argument to be made that if they had been replaced at their forecast service life, things would be better now ... but that really just brings forward the next replacement.
IMHO, The City of Los Angeles really should be multiple municipalities. The boundary is pretty wonky, in part to capture the port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles International Airport, but also downtown vs San Fernando Valley; and that has got to make a lot of administration stuff significantly harder than if it were multiple geographically focused municipalities.
> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density
I agree that density is likely the right way forward, but I don't think it's trivial. Especially since organic density increases have been suppressed for so long, it's helpful to coordinate rapid increases in density so that dense housing lands in places with appropriate transit and other services; but coordination is difficult.
I've been thinking recently about how with the impending demographics crunch hitting a lot of countries soonish you're going to see a sort of day of reckoning for municipalities that were run poorly in the past because people will just move to ones that that don't have horrible budget and infrastructure deficits and the one sthat do will just shrivel up and die.
Tha perpetually increasing population growth is no more and that means no more growing tax base to paper over terrible decisions to pass them onto another generation.
For the first time in a long while we're looking at actual, real selection pressures on municiptalities.
One interesting question: what is "density"? Is it number of people per road-mile? Number of households? Structures? Sales tax revenue? Property tax revenue? Property value per road mile?
LA has somewhat insane property values right now, and by the metric of millions of dollars of residential value per road-mile, I think one might imagine the density to be sufficient to afford decent streets. Of course, that does not translate to municipal budgets or even to disposable income of the owners or the residents in those properties.
The Strong Towns argument is effectively talking about density as tax-revenue per road mile liability, and trying to keep that positive. Areas with high liabilities (sewer, water, buried electric, fiber, etc.) need to have higher tax-revenue per mile (more people, more businesses, etc) to support that infrastructure.
There are other ways around this though. If you force your citizens to maintain their own septic and well water (or even small-pipe potable water), and have unsurfaced roads, then you can do with much less revenue-per-road mile.
The point is that the federal government usually pays for the infrastructure up from (as an "investment"), but when that subsidized infrastructure is a net money-loser in the long run, cities growing actually makes the problem worse.
Tax revenue per area is generally a good metric in terms of the sustainability of a municipal budget.
Very few suburbs in the world have enough people density to clear that bar, no matter how much they tax them. More people density lets you clear the bar so much easier even when the incomes are drastically lower.
Fundamentally the issue, aside from lack of density, is Prop 13. In LA, and every other part of California, your tax rate will get frozen (forever, essentially) at what you buy your home for. So you have some people who now have a $7m home paying taxes as if it were $300k, because they bought it in 1978.
With a setup like that, of course SFHs, no matter how high they’re valued, will not provide enough tax revenue on their own
And people expect trains and metros to pay for themselves. Car infrastructure maintenance is bankrupting the government. And on top of that you have the opportunity cost of all the road and parking space.
Once I became a Dad, getting socks for Christmas suddenly turned into one of the most thoughtful gifts possible. A self-care item. The flip was very sudden and surprising.
I actually chose "socks for Christmas" as a metaphor because the types of people who like socks for Christmas are grown-ups, and grown-ups tend to actually view municipal finance as important and interesting.
A number of cities in Northern California are doing just this. We have at least 12 high density projects being built in Santa Cruz and we are a small city.
so the story is about a silly law requiring bike lanes and handicap curbs and your proposal is to kick everyone out of their homes and remigrate them into the cities?
ADA code is insanely expensive. We did a couple blocks of those silly dimple ramps for $250,000 . You could hire every blind person in town a personal guide for less than it would be to ADA all the side walks.
I suspect you don't understand how serious the problem is. The problem isn't "we need to add bike lanes." The problem is that the streets have to be repaved anyway and if the city can't afford to simply bring them up to code in the short run, then they can't afford to keep repaving them at all in the long run.
The sidewalks are going to have to be completely replaced eventually... not just the sections that need ramps. Right now the city can't afford to replaces just the ramp sections.
"the code" is the issue. This isn't building code like protecting earthquakes, electrical, fire safety. When people hear "the code" -- they think critical safety measures.
Activists came up with a doorjamb law to require bike lanes, ADA and road diets on every block that receives repair. That's just not practical in LA. You can't punish drivers into riding a bike to work.
this is coming from someone who biked and bussed to work in LA for 10+ years.
It's reckless policy that will only undermine your efforts and never reach the desired outcome.
As someone who has biked and rode trains to work for the past 30 years and continues to do so, I think requiring bike lanes whenever streets are repaved is a pretty awesome idea. ADA ramps are pretty great too, they are not just for disabled people, though the ADA lawsuit regime where private companies get sued needs to stop.
Yes I understand there is a funding issue, it needs to be solved by making the design and approval process more flexible and efficient, not by perpetuating the insane car-only design that kills pedestrians and cyclists.
Oh it's quite practical, many cities have done it. It just requires standing up to a bunch of selfish assholes who would rather pave over every bit of available space so they can drive around really fast in their giant SUVs while pedestrians and cyclists scurry about on the broken pavement of the 5% of the street right of way given to them, and get run over when they don't get out of the way of the SUVs fast enough.
What attitude do you expect from marginalized groups? Suffragists, slaves? Ring a bell?
If you think I'm exaggerating or something, I'm really not. You were born into a world already bulldozed for cars so you literally can't imagine an alternative reality. You're broken — can't see the world for what it is objectively.
Are rollerbladers marginalized? Cross country skiers ? It’s a hobby. This isn’t a civil rights movement, and it’s insulting to call cyclists “marginalized” like blacks , women and gays were.
To be honest with you I really don't give a shit about my reputation when it comes to this, I care about me and my kids not getting splatted by a speeding SUV when we dare to use the street, because I face this situation daily.
Where I live, our work has definitely been successful. The cities I bike in have been steadily improving their bike lane and pedestrian networks, and increasingly prioritizing them in plans and projects - though there is a long way to go.
It's interesting that you frame building bike lanes and reducing car speeds as "punishing drivers", seemingly ignoring that such changes enable micro-mobility users to commute to work safely.
That’s what it is . Remove capacity, increase travel times , increase driver frustration and in theory increase cycling and public transit. But the second part never happens . Travel times have been increasing for 40 years and cycling is still a fringe hobby
Removing car capacity by 50% and adding 1000% bike capacity at 1% of the cost is good, actually. It's not really 1000% of course, it's infinity% — the average cyclist is not capable of cycling on the roadway, so a bike lane literally enables them to do the activity at all; the value is immeasurable.
That you think cycling is a hobby is exactly the issue. I don't get to work by bike as a hobby, I do it to get to work, and get all the benefits of cycling at the same time. Win-win.
It's also quite deluded to think the USA has been putting non-negligible effort towards improving cycling for the last 40 years, to the point that you'd notice any difference in car traffic. Hate to bring it to you, but the reason traffic's getting worse is there are more and more cars, but there's only so much space and cars scale horribly. Hence, bikes and public transportation. Those scale exceptionally well and are the perfect solution for 95% of all city trips.
The USA is in 99.9% designed for cars. You're essentially complaining that the most dominant mode of transport is getting mildly deprioritized and is on the path to being only 99% dominant. Cry me a river.
Oh, and the reason you drive a car and not say, use public transport, is that for the last 50+ years the USA has invested into car infrastructure instead of public transport. So the car is not a mode of transport that you have chosen, that you prefer, that you like, it's one that was forced upon you. That you can't see it is somewhat hilarious, but really — just sad.
Just ask yourself: Do you have any other real choice than to own a car and drive everywhere?
I'm of multiple minds about this. I like high density. I like a car-less lifestyle of the last 30 years I lived without a car.
That said, currently I live in West LA. Traffic is atrocious! Doubling or tripling density will make it even worse, probably exponentially worse. Adding non-car transit options just isn't in the cards in any reasonable time frame because of all the people that block construction and because the USA, like most countries, refuses to setup a win-win situation for transit (like Japan) and instead continues to insist it be government based and therefore most likely to go over budget during construction and then under budgeted during operation.
At the same time, I wish our entire coast was 30-50 story high-rises. It's ridiculous to me that only a few elites get to view the ocean from their homes on the coast and everyone else is shut out because no one is allowed to build the high-rises.
this is coming from someone who lives in san francisco like you and has a 2 kid, 4 adult family with no car. it's been like 80 years of USA = cars. people seem to really like SFH + cars, they vote for it, they pay for it, and seem to accept even longer commutes than ever. consider why. it's not so simple.
> Strong Towns thesis is correct... slow moving crisis... The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane
see, this tells me you're not getting it at all. it is an insult to process, yes. But there's no crisis. Strong Towns is kind of obviously wrong.
i like their positions. but. i don't know what the point of strong towns is. people feel very strongly (haha) about it.
i can advocate for all sorts of stuff that is unpopular. it's meaningless. this is the hard thing about advocacy! strong towns spends a lot of words on stuff, but none of it on why someone who is happy with SFH cars lifestyle do, whatever it is they are asking that person to do.
> The entire point by Strong Towns is that people don't pay for it.
okay, people aren't paying for the ADA stuff. that's bad. but it's not a crisis. SFH cars people are living in that status quo every day. and it's not because they don't care and or because they are not disabled. i don't know how much the ramp codes really matter, i am not an expert, i understand that some experts in some narrow sense say they matter, but the real problem is a lack of leadership on holistic, bigger-picture issues like how to balance the costs and benefits of these sorts of requirements. we arrive at that cost-benefit organically right now, over and over again, in the absence of leadership, and most people seem pretty happy with it, which is a huge refutation of what strong towns is saying. do you get it?
strong towns says, "paying for this shit that doesn't matter does matter", which is wrong!
The point is "a warning" is not enough to communicate to people the gravity of what they are doing.
It is not enough to write "be careful" on a bag you get from a pharmacy... certain medications require you to both have a prescription, and also to have a conversation with a pharmacist because of how dangerous the decisions the consumer makes can be.
Normal human beings can be very dumb. It's entirely reasonable to expect society to try to protect them at some level.
OK so make the warning more annoying. Have a security quiz. Cooldown period of one day to enable. Require unlock via adb connected to laptop.
There are alternative solutions if the true goal is maintaining user freedom while protecting dumb users. But that is not the true goal of the upcoming changes.
- Don't reset it every 5 days / 5 hours / 5dBm blip in Wi-Fi strength, because this pretty much defeats end-user automation, whether persistent or event-driven. This is the current situation with "Wireless Debugging", otherwise cool trick for "rootless root", if it only didn't require being connected to Wi-Fi (and not just a Wi-Fi, but the same AP, breaking when device roams in multi-AP networks).
- Don't announce the fact that this is on to everyone. Many commercial vendors, including those who shouldn't and those who have no business caring, are very interested in knowing whether your device is running with debugging features enabled, and if so, deny service.
Unfortunately, in a SaaS world it's the service providers that have all the leverage - if they don't like your device, they can always refuse service. Increasingly many do.
Prediction: Android will roll out a flow for “experienced users” that they promised in November with “in the coming months” (https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...), which will allow “experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified”. And even then people will still complain Google is being too controlling by making the warnings too scary / the process too onerous, etc. (I don't expect installing apps from source via adb connected to laptop to go away!)
I do? It's a trivially comparable thing? I'm not even talking about ALL prescription drugs. I'm talking about the fact that some have interactions that can kill you. Having "life savings gone" consequences from a random app install is that level of danger.
A non-trivial number of people should probably have to go see a specialist before being able to unlock sideloading in my opinion... which means we probably all would have to. It's annoying, but I actually care about other people.
I have a hard time with this because it's the world we've lived in forever. Everyone knows installing an "app" installs an executable.
Doesnt android require a specific permission to be user-accepted for an installed app to read notifications? I think it's separate from the post-notifications permission.
This seems to be an issue of user literacy. If so, doesn't it make more sense for a user to have the option to opt into "I'm tech illiterate, please protect me" than destroy open computing as we know it?
this. just like how when you start playing a hard esoteric game like an RTS or MOBA, they ask you what your degree of comfort/experience with the genre is to avoid making a pro player go through the tutorial and vice versa.
In an ideal world where governments and corporations weren't trying to lock us into a closed system for massive surveillance and control, during the installation/setup of a mobile phone should be a question about tech literacy and protection. Selecting any option that isn't "I'm tech illiterate, please protect me" should be very annoying. There should be many warnings in uppercase bold red letters telling the user it can be dangerous and listing those dangers. But if I'm a developer and want to patch my kernel or modify the system as I please, I should be able to do so. If i want to install a malware app in a burner phone to study its behavior (or just for fun) I should be able to do so.
There would probably be one or two grandmas that would still somehow choose the pro hacker mode and get scammed down the line, but I think that minuscule amount of harm done is very much preferable to closing out *literally everyone else* from using the devices THEY BOUGHT.
OP here. You make a very good point. Most of the holes definitely don't need a consistent gradient across every point on the hole. However, some will. The goal is to reveal that underlying nature of the hazards, and this includes contouring. When we get into the really nitty-gritty aspects of contouring's outsized effects on architecturally interesting areas, the main worry I have is that you can't know where to skimp on the resolution until after you've got the result.
I do think, however, that there should be some relationship between resolution and the "stickiness" of the surface (with higher friction variable, e.g. heavy rough). Given the higher friction areas, there will be less movement in rollout. Less movement in rollout means that the net effect of the contouring is less significant, which means that the resolution is less important, and we can probably save time in these areas.
I'll really have to think about this. It's a good idea.
I suspect that in the future, apps will be like these blogs: most people will have them. The app authors will they they are great, most won't be great. Some will be great and hugely popular, many will be great but nobody will know or about them, because the attention economy is always hard.
I think that's fine.
What I really think is that most of the logical folks here think we ought to be focusing our attention and organizing to maximize the efficiency of app making, and that vibe-coding really blows that up, because there is no way to know what is quality and what is trash without actually having to do the work and figure that out. That does suck, but it's why creators should have blogs, github/bitbucket accounts, etc, to offer up their credibility to facilitate bona fides.
I think the programming industry is going to become a lot more like the indie game industry, where loose networks based on mutual respect start forming and critics review the newest apps, because you really don't want to waste a bunch actually using all the stuff.
It looks very, very silly in hindsight, but natural selection actually selects for a nontrivial predisposition to make type 1 errors, so we should expect them to be very common.
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