The Infrastructure Conversation I Didn’t Expect in New Zealand
I flew halfway around the world to listen. Forty hours of airports and connections, from Minnesota to Wellington, New Zealand, where I was invited to speak at the 2025 Looking Ahead Infrastructure Symposium, the launch of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission's (Draft) National Infrastructure Plan. I almost didn’t make it; on the first flight out of Minneapolis, I realized I’d left my passport at home, nearly three hours away. But I’m so grateful I did.
I came prepared to be curious. I expected to find a radically different place, shaped by its own geography, politics, and history. And in many ways, the parts of New Zealand I experienced were that. But the more I listened, the more I spoke with people, the more I realized: The problems they’re facing—the ones keeping local leaders awake at night—are strikingly, painfully familiar.
When I got up to speak, I opened with a disclaimer: “I’m going to talk about the United States because that’s the context I know. Please feel free to tell me afterward how different it is here.” And then I started talking about our struggles: cities that can’t maintain their roads, water systems failing in places big and small, development that doesn’t pay for itself yet is locked into place by outdated regulations that make adaptation nearly impossible, and the quiet bankruptcy creeping up on communities that built too much, too fast, without doing the math.
When I finished, people lined up to talk. Not to argue. But to say, “That’s us, too.”
Long ago, I thought the core Strong Towns insights were uniquely Minnesotan, maybe even applicable to the American Midwest. A decade and a half on the road meeting people has definitively proven to me that this is a shared North American challenge. Even so, the more places I visit outside of my home country, the more people from around the world I meet, the more universal this all seems.
A Plan That Starts in the Right Place
The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission deserves serious credit. Their new plan isn’t a wish list. It’s not a flashy collection of big projects with big promises. It begins with a rare admission, one most public agencies around the world refuse to say out loud:
We’ve built more infrastructure than we can afford to maintain.
The plan’s authors don’t hide behind GDP projections or vague buzzwords. They name the problem directly: a rapidly aging population, a looming 115% debt-to-GDP ratio, and infrastructure systems wearing out faster than they’re being repaired. State-owned assets are deteriorating at an estimated 9.3% per year. Routine maintenance funds are regularly diverted to new capital builds. In many places, there’s no clear record of what exists, what condition it’s in, or how it will be renewed.
In short: New Zealand is learning the lesson Strong Towns has been shouting for years. Maintenance—“renewal,” as they call it—has to come first. Because every new pipe, road, and sidewalk isn’t just an investment; it’s a long-term liability. An intergenerational promise and obligation.
And like the United States, New Zealand has made too many of them.
Yet, naming the problem is just the beginning. Even in a plan as thoughtful as the one they put together, I can see the same core challenge we face here in America: We still don’t know how to get more value out of maintenance (renewal).
In a political culture built on growth, ribbon cuttings get attention. Renewals get complaints.
New infrastructure projects garner headlines. Taking care of what someone else built garners headaches.
When a new subdivision is built, there's an expanded tax base, there’s momentum, there’s a feeling of progress. But when you replace an old pipe under a quiet street, life goes on exactly the same, just with a big repair bill added on. The person whose water still works doesn’t feel grateful. They feel disrupted. Inconvenienced.
That’s the core problem. We know renewal is essential, but we don’t know how to make it financially or culturally rewarding. So instead, we keep chasing the illusion of new.
And, just like here in North America, New Zealand’s politicians love the new. I heard all about the past government’s plans for a $15 billion mega-rail project in Auckland and how it was canceled by the new government. Then I heard about the new government's $10 billion mega-highway expansion project and how the past government opposes it.
Here’s how you know the Infrastructure Commission is thinking about things in serious ways: neither of these projects are part of their recommendations. A bunch of other high-profile projects also didn’t make the cut. That’s what happens when you take seriously the idea of a positive return on investment.
Lessons and a Warning from the U.S.
When I traveled to Hawaii years ago to speak at a conference, I expected their approach to building cities and neighborhoods would be radically different from what I knew in Minnesota. After all, here we sit on hundreds—sometimes thousands—of feet of flat, forgiving sand. It's easy to dig, easy to drain, and endlessly accommodating. You can build almost anything here because the land gives you plenty of margin for error.
Hawaii, on the other hand, is a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. I assumed, rather naively it turns out, that this kind of landscape would demand a different approach. Something more adaptive and restrained. Surely they wouldn’t blast through volcanic rock to build wide roads and cul-de-sacs, or shoehorn in big box stores with massive parking lots and suburban drainage systems.
But, to my surprise, that’s exactly what they did. Despite the extraordinary cost—just the gravel alone is either imported by ocean ship or crushed from volcanic rock—they copied our development pattern almost exactly. And where it doesn’t pencil out in Minnesota, it’s downright insane on the Hawaiian Islands. Through a Strong Towns lens, nothing there makes sense.
So, when I arrived in New Zealand—another island nation with even more dramatic natural challenges—I was eager to see how those constraints shaped their development patterns. Surely a place with such dramatic terrain and deep, intimate awareness of nature’s power would have evolved a different way of building.
Nope. The most shocking thing I encountered was that, by all appearances, New Zealand has merely copied the most expensive and least productive parts of our development pattern and then built that at scale.
The population of New Zealand (5.2 million) is close to that of Minnesota (5.8 million) while the land area (104,000 square miles) is also close to my home state (87,000 square miles). I didn’t get to see as much of New Zealand as I would like—and I hope to see more in the future—but I saw enough to make the same conclusion I made in Hawaii: This makes no sense.
In a podcast I recorded while I was there, I shared what I’ve seen in American cities. Places where we’ve been pretending for decades that deferred maintenance is a solvable budgeting problem. That if we can just borrow enough, or get enough federal assistance, we can keep up.
But the underlying problem isn’t cash flow. It’s insolvency. The cities we built after World War II—the ones with wide roads, long pipes, and other expensive infrastructure serving large lots with static development patterns—don’t generate enough wealth to sustain themselves. And now that it’s time to pay for renewals, the money isn’t there. It never was.
In Detroit. In Jackson, Mississippi. In hundreds of small towns across the country. The pipes are failing. The bridges are closing. And the tax base isn’t enough to fix it.
So we borrow. And then borrow again. And when the bill comes due, we’re shocked. Angry. Betrayed. And broke.
If New Zealand keeps building the way North America has, it will end up in the same place, likely sooner.
What Gives Me Hope
What struck me most during my visit was the eagerness to have this conversation. The Infrastructure Commission isn’t looking for applause. They’re looking for real answers. Their leadership is honest about the challenges, open to the hard questions, and committed to starting from ground truths about what we can afford, what works, and what doesn’t.
And across the public meetings I attended, local officials, planners, and community members weren’t defensive. They seemed to be relieved. Relieved to hear someone name the problem they already felt. Relieved to realize they weren’t alone.
There was a Māori proverb shared at the conference’s opening:
He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.
(What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.)
That’s the real infrastructure we need to build our next set of plans around. Not roads. Not pipes. People.
Everything else should follow.
To my New Zealand friends: Thank you for the kindness and generosity you showed me during my brief visit. I hope our conversation continues and that we have many more chances to learn from each other.
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Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.