CNBC Tackles the Growth Ponzi Scheme
The Strong Towns movement was prominently featured in this new CNBC documentary video about the financial fragility of the suburban development pattern. The film calls into question the future of spread-out, auto-centric development, with particular emphasis on how mixed-use development can make our places stronger.
Watch it here:
“I think we often neglect to recognize that we’ve created a development pattern that is a throwaway development pattern. It is one generation of success and prosperity, and then we essentially walk away from it … we are basically just allowing it to fall apart. That comes with all kinds of costs.”
This is one installment in an ongoing series on suburban development, which started February 1 with “How Suburban Sprawl Weighs On The U.S. Economy.”
The most recent entry in the series focuses on the role of mixed-use development in suburban expansion, featuring commentary from Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn on behalf of the movement. He details how the suburban growth model resembles a Ponzi scheme, where the cost to maintain the streets, pipes, and other publicly owned infrastructure are continuously kicked down the road.
Paying the costs isn’t as simple as taking on more debt or raising taxes; it will take an entirely new approach to development to put cities on the right track and avoid ruin.
Others who were interviewed for the project cited projects such as the Mosiac District in Fairfax, Virginia, as an example of how to increase the amount of available housing at a lower infrastructure cost per unit. However, it’s important to consider the long-term liabilities that come along with these infrastructure investments, and the matter of who can actually create these neighborhoods.
Great townmakers know that part of the solution is to open up zoning codes to allow for mixed uses and more housing types, built not just by capital-rich large developers, but by local firms and even single-property owners. In neighborhoods where only single-family homes are allowed, opening the door for homeowners to renovate their structures into duplexes, build accessory dwelling units, or set up a small commercial operation are good first steps. This incremental approach doesn’t just provide more housing opportunities—It also increases the economic productivity of the neighborhoods and puts them on the right track to restoring financial stability.
Hundreds of thousands of people are discovering the Strong Towns movement with this video, and that’s something to celebrate. But this wouldn’t be possible without the support of thousands of advocates across the United States and Canada who are applying the Strong Towns approach in their own communities every day. It’s because of you that the principles for building financially resilient places are seeping into the way journalists, planners, and your neighbors think. Together, we’ll change the way our towns are made.
Help take the movement mainstream. Become a Strong Towns member today and support thousands of advocates across North America who are fighting against the suburban development pattern, and for resilient communities. We’re excited to welcome you on board.
Lauren Ronnander, the Director of Communications for Strong Towns, is an actual idealist who loves making things and double-spacing the end of sentences. Before joining the Strong Towns team in 2020, she worked as a journalist and an editor. She lives with her husband and an almost uncountable number of animals (including cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, and rabbits) in a super-awesome neighborhood in the American Midwest. Her experience in the Alaska Bush, downtown living in an up-and-coming Midwestern city, and now residing in a rural Chippewa Valley, Wisconsin, community has provided her with precious insight into the many ways our places can grow stronger.