Building Sulphur Springs stronger

Cities all across the United States today are likely facing insolvency in the future if they do not change how they manage growth, Strong Towns founder and former city planner Charles Marohn said at a seminar Thursday in front of an audience filled with local business, county and city leaders.

“I come from a small town in Minnesota,” Marohn said. “We had done all the things that you do to get growth and development. We had put in the roads, the road widening, the frontage roads, the interchanges. We had subsidized businesses. We had extended sewer and water. We had brought in new housing. And we still had these perpetual budget deficits.”

The problems lie in urban sprawl, which is the rapid expansion of low-density, cheap housing and the resulting infrastructure liabilities taken on by cities. Sulphur Springs City Manager Marc Maxwell had addressed the issue in past city council meetings, saying the total cost for infrastructure maintenance is outpacing the tax base available.

Marohn echoed that, and he used his hometown of Brainerd, Minn as an example. In the early 1900s, it had a population of roughly 10,000, and now it has a population of about 13,500, an increase of about 35%. However, its area had increased by ten times.

“While we’ve been able to grow our population, we have grown our liabilities even more,” Marohn said. “It has taken more and more input to get a lower and lower degree of output.”

Cities are no longer adaptive in their growth, Marohn said, and the slow evolution of neighborhoods from single-family homes to duplexes to other buildings is no longer seen as commonly due to government zoning and regulations.

“Today, we don’t have rising land values. We don’t have that thickening up of neighborhoods,” Marohn said. “We have zoning regulations, building codes and financing that require it to stay a home, exactly like it is. What happens in today’s market is that the affluent people of that neighborhood pick up and move to the next new neighborhood, leaving behind people who have lesser means in a neighborhood that is systematically starting to fall apart.”

In the past, cities were “organic,” according to Marohn, with growth happening incrementally and more densely. Pop-up shops were “tiny bets” on the future, and as the city would grow, land values would rise. However, the shops’ buildings would not rise in value, creating redevelopment pressure. In the past, that pressure resulted in vertical, dense development.

After World War II, the United States began to develop horizontally, and cities exploded in land area and installed all the necessary infrastructure to support its development. It has been the view that cities and the public sector would be the “kinetic growth machine” leading to prosperity, Marohn said.

With rising costs of maintenance for all its streets, water and sewer and tax base that cannot keep pace, cities are facing future bankruptcy if changes are not taken during the next generation, Marohn said.

He used the city of Detroit, Mich. as an example. The city filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and Marohn blamed its sprawl problem that placed too much stress on the city coffers. He said the city had experienced horizontal expansion long before the end of World War II. Detroit is simply a look into the future if growth is not managed responsibly, according to Marohn.

“We all copied the standards, the approach, the layout and design pioneered by Detroit,” he said. “Detroit is not some crazy anomaly. They’re not some crazy group of people any different from us. They’re just early.”

The Strong Towns approach to the problem is to allow neighborhoods to be adaptive, to evolve from single-family homes to duplexes if owners wanted. Marohn suggested there should be no obstacles in zoning to meet that end, and when asked if allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) were in the right direction, Marohn agreed.

Controlling growth to be incremental and not in huge surges is another key to keeping a balance in maintenance and tax base. In the case of big migrations, Marohn said cities should try to direct growth to the areas needing it.

The bar of entry should also be lowered, Marohn said, using the example of lessening regulation on “tiny” houses. These houses were considered standard startup homes in the past, but now they typically have to meet more building codes than other homes. For businesses, it could come from cities creating a space for entrepreneurs to either flourish or fail without huge gambles on renovating a building.

For those looking to make the first change, it is time to “humbly observe struggles” of people using the city, determine the smallest thing to address, not solve, the struggle and then do that. Marohn said if a path is worn into the ground by constant foot traffic, trees could be planted at first to provide shade on the path.

“We need to be done building new infrastructure,” Marohn said. “We don’t have the tax base. We don’t have the productivity. We don’t have the capacity to maintain the stuff we have already built.”