Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn, Jr
Review by Polly Cleveland
Along with the automobile, Detroit pioneered a new American way of living: the auto-dependent housing development consisting of single-family houses arrayed around cul-de-sac streets. After World War II, the Detroit model subdivision exploded into the suburbs around the country. A post-war return to normal life, federal subsidies for veterans and new highways leading out of town—all combined to create a huge boom in suburban housing demand. Aided by federal and local subsidies for utilities, developers could build complete huge new single-family housing subdivisions outside existing cities—such as the famous Levittowns. Middle class white families moved out into these shiny new developments, leaving behind poorer and often minority families in older inner-city neighborhoods.
Before that time, most houses were built one by one, adjoining or replacing existing housing. Neighborhoods therefore represented a mix of older and newer, smaller and larger buildings. Limited transportation kept housing relatively dense. The high density in turn made it inexpensive for city governments to maintain services—police, fire, garbage, schools—and infrastructure—roads, sidewalks, sewers, water supplies, and other utilities. Moreover, due to the mixed age of structures, there were not unexpected peaks in costs.
All that changed with the new subdivisions. At first, they generated substantial tax revenues, making cities eager to encourage and subsidize more of them by extending utilities. But this pattern of growth contained a fatal flaw: Because all the utilities and houses in a subdivision were built at the same time, they all aged at the same rate. After 25 years or so of fiscal surplus, costs began to rise steeply for repairing infrastructure. In wealthier subdivisions, the city could raise property taxes to cover costs. In ordinary middle-class subdivisions, when city maintenance lagged, those residents who could afford it moved to newer subdivisions further out, leaving shabby houses on crumbling streets inhabited by ever poorer and often minority residents. This happened first in Detroit, where huge areas now lie abandoned. It is now happening in inner suburbs around the nation. Yet as inner suburbs crumble, towns pursue the same old financial fix: subsidizing brand-new subdivisions on raw land.
Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis Missouri, makes a good example. In 1970 the population of some 29,000 was 99% white. By 2010, the population had fallen to 21,000, only 29% white. Ferguson came to national attention in 2014 when a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, setting off widespread protests. Investigative reporters found that the financially-strapped local government, still largely run by white officials, funded itself in part by imposing fines on the poor residents for minor offenses like driving with a broken headlight, jailing them when they couldn't pay. Ferguson turned out to typify many aging suburbs.
Today the tragedy comes full circle: the more affluent members of the younger generation are moving back into the run-down central city neighborhoods that their grandparents abandoned. In part, that's because today's families need both parents to work, making central locations more desirable. As these people return, they gentrify old neighborhoods, pricing out seniors as well as working-class or poorer residents. The local residents of course fight back, with rent control and severe restrictions on new construction or modifications of old buildings. New York City's newly-fortified rent control laws essentially forbid landlords from raising rents to cover the cost of renovations. California has seen an explosion of homeless and "housing insecure" people, including people with steady jobs.
The author of Strong Towns, Charles Marohn, is a civil engineer and planner. He began his career advising towns on how to attract and support those so-desirable new subdivisions. Eventually the numbers caught his attention, particularly the staggering cost of maintaining the infrastructure in aging single-family subdivisions. He came to recognize that much of this infrastructure was simply long run unsustainable, and that towns were committing financial suicide in their pursuit of "growth."
Marohn also found that in their pursuit of "shiny and new," towns may destroy the most financially productive parts of their tax bases. These are often not the most valuable properties, but roughly those that yield the most revenues per acre. He gives an example from his home town of Brainerd, Minnesota. There were two identical adjoining blocks in an area the town had labeled "blighted." Aided by municipal subsidies, one block was razed and replaced with a Taco John's franchise with plenty of parking. But while the Old and Blighted block had a tax value of $1.1 million, this Shiny and New block had a value of only $620,000. Moreover, Old and Blighted housed 11 small businesses with local owners plus 6 extra full-time workers. On Shiny and New, Taco John's provided 20 to 25 part-time jobs. Not even new jobs, because Taco John's had merely relocated from three blocks away.
Marohn advises towns first of all to prioritize maintenance of the most financially productive areas, whether blighted or not. As he writes, "Mow the grass. Sweep the streets. Patch the sidewalks. Pick up the trash. Fill the potholes…See a streetlight out: replace it. See a weed: pull it. See a crosswalk faded: repaint it…The neighborhoods that are generating such wealth for the community need to be showered with love."
But then Marohn makes a recommendation that will shock most communities: reconsider the policies that restrict change and discourage denser development. Oversized new buildings pop up in the wrong places, he says, because it's so difficult, time-consuming and expensive for developers to battle all the restrictions that when they do finally get a permit, they build as high as they can. Property owners, he says, should have the right to develop their properties to the next level without their neighbors' permission. That is, an owner in a single-family neighborhood should have a right to install a mother-in-law unit, or even build two or three units. In a neighborhood of three units, owners should have a right to build low-rise apartment buildings. And so forth. Meantime, towns should scrap those off-street parking requirements, which waste land, raise housing costs and encourage reliance on cars.
In all his compelling case for allowing higher density, I wish Marohn had addressed the role of property taxes. As I wrote in How a Progressive Tax System Made Detroit a Powerhouse (and Could Again), a tax system that relies heavily on taxing land is both highly progressive and pro-density. Detroit collapsed not just due to unsustainable low density subdivisions, but also due to the loss of such a system. But the book is essential reading for local officials and all of us who love cities.
Marohn now spends his time on his Strong Towns non-profit media organization, setting up events and webinars to discuss growth, development and the future of cities.
Foreign-born workers—ranging from long-term U.S. residents with strong roots in the United States to more recent immigrants—account for 30% of workers in S&E occupations. The number and proportion of the S&E workforce that are foreign born has grown. In many of the broad S&E occupational categories, the higher the degree level, the greater the proportion of the workforce who are foreign born. More than one-half of doctorate holders in engineering and in computer science and mathematics occupations are foreign born (Figure 9).
In the United States, a substantial proportion of S&E doctoral degrees are conferred to international students with temporary visas. In 2017, temporary visa holders earned one-third (34%) of S&E doctoral degrees, a relatively stable proportion over time. They account for half or more of the doctoral degrees awarded in engineering, mathematics and computer sciences, and economics. Three Asian countries—China, India, and South Korea—are the largest source countries and accounted for just over half (54%) of all international recipients of U.S. S&E research doctoral degrees since 2000. By comparison, students on temporary visas earn a smaller share (6% in 2017) of S&E bachelor's degrees. However, the number of these students has more than doubled over the past 10 years.
A majority of the S&E doctorate recipients with temporary visas—ranging between 64% and 71% between 2003 and 2017—stayed in the United States five years after obtaining their degree. Those from China and India, however, saw a decline in their respective "stay rates" from 93% and 90%, respectively, in 2003 to 84% and 85%, respectively, in 2013; the rates remained stable from 2013 through 2017. The stay rate increased for those from South Korea (from 36% in 2003 to 57% in 2017). Stay rates also vary by field of doctoral degree. Among S&E doctorate recipients, social sciences (52%) has a lower stay rate than the average across all fields (71% in 2017).I know that we live in times of substantial concern about how technology may be transferred from the United States to other countries. Whatever one's concerns in that area, there is also another side to consider, which is that in raw numerical terms the US has a heavy dependence on imported science and engineering workers and American universities in science and engineering fields maintain their status and preeminence thank in substantial part to their foreign students.
In preparation for President Trump's State of the Union speech, the Economic Policy Institute has assembled research from the last year that examines the real state of the union for working people on wages, manufacturing and trade, taxes, labor standards, housing, and immigration.
China's per-capita spending on research and development is close to overtaking that of the United States.Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty
The gap in research and development (R&D) funding between the United States and China is closing fast, despite modest increases in US funding since 2000, according to statistics assembled by the US National Science Foundation (NSF).
The United States is increasingly "seen globally as an important leader rather than the uncontested leader" in science and engineering, the agency said in the latest edition of its biennial Science and Engineering Indicators report, which compiles metrics on the state of science and engineering in the country.
From 2000 to 2017, R&D spending in the United States grew at an average of 4.3% per year, found the report, which the NSF released on 15 January. But spending in China grew by more than 17% per year during the same period. Several other countries, including Germany and South Korea, also increased their spending at rates that outstripped that of the United States, but they remain solidly behind the two global leaders in terms of total funding. The United States accounted for 25% of the US$2.2 trillion spent on R&D worldwide in 2017, and China made up 23%.
Preliminary data from 2019 suggest that China has already surpassed the United States in R&D spending, said Julia Philips, chair of the National Science Board's science and engineering policy committee, during a press briefing. The board oversees the NSF and produces the Indicators reports.
Source: National Science Foundation
The emergence of other innovation powerhouses "can only be good", says Diane Souvaine, a computer scientist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. "New knowledge benefits everyone."
Souvaine, who chairs the National Science Board, notes that the United States still leads the world in many important metrics, such as total investment in R&D, proportion of highly cited publications and enrolment of internationally mobile students.
Julia Lane, an economist at New York University, objects to the NSF's use of spending as the pre-eminent metric for measuring the strength of the US science and engineering community. Instead of worrying about spending, she says, policymakers should be thinking about whether the dollars are being spent wisely. Lane also says that the continued attraction of foreign-born students and workers to the United States is "a good signal that good science is being done here".
But the NSF report found signs that this signal might be changing. The number of foreign-born students enrolling in US universities has declined by about 4% since 2016. And the retention rates for Chinese and Indian citizens who earn doctoral degrees in the United States have decreased by 9 and 5 percentage points, respectively, since 2003.
Shulamit Kahn, an economist at Boston University in Massachusetts, suspects that the tightening of US immigration policies, as well as increasingly strong university programmes in China and elsewhere, are the root causes of these declines.
At the same time, the global movement of researchers is opening up avenues for increased international scientific collaboration. Nearly 40% of scientific papers published by US authors in 2018 included foreign co-authors, up from 19% in 2000. Chinese scientists contributed to more than one-quarter of these manuscripts.
"The US–China relationship is the most important international scientific collaborative relationship we have right now," says Kei Koizumi, a former senior adviser in science policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. It's more appropriate, he continues, "to think of China as a collaborator than as an adversary".
The NSF report also found that US laboratories have become more diverse, by some measures. The participation of women and members of under-represented minorities in the science and engineering workforce has increased across the board since 2003, especially in the life sciences, psychology and the social sciences. However, because the total science and engineering workforce has also increased significantly over this period, the proportion of women in some disciplines, such as computer sciences and mathematics, has stagnated or even slightly decreased.
Molly King, a sociologist at Santa Clara University in California, says she is "not terribly surprised by any of the statistics" regarding diversity in the workforce. She cites several factors, including negative stereotyping and disparities in the rates at which women's papers are accepted and cited, which contribute to the persistence of the participation gap.
Furthermore, King says, owing to the differences in pay between science and engineering jobs and positions in other fields, this continued under-representation "has important implications for the gender (and racial) wage gaps and differential economic well-being". According to the Indicators report, the 2017 median salary for workers in science and engineering occupations was $85,390, more than double that for all workers ($37,690).
Koizumi thinks the report offers a clear road map of steps that the United States needs to take to remain competitive in global science and engineering: further investment in science, technology, engineering and maths education; increased inclusion of people from under-represented groups; and continued funding of science and engineering R&D. "It's all right there," he says.
The World Bank has warned that a massive debt wave is building worldwide. There is no telling who will be hit the hardest, but if vulnerable countries, from the United Kingdom to India, do not act soon, they may face severe economic damage.
