The financial struggles of Houston and the cities of the Silicon Valley area—as well as tens of thousands of others across North America—have the same underlying cause.
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“Is this a good project, or will it set up my city for financial insolvency??” Here’s how to find out.
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If we’re not paying attention, it can be hard to tell whether a city is using debt to simply to smooth out cashflows, or if it’s just covering up insolvency. Here are four telltale signs of the latter scenario.
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At a glance, the sales tax is a nearly invisible revenue source that is also a cash cow. Yet, for local governments, it is the most distorting of taxes. Here’s why.
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The Conservancy of Southwest Florida has done the math on a proposed development in rural Collier County, FL, and what they discovered enabled them to take a large-scale developer to court.
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What kind of financial challenges can our cities and towns expect to face in the new year?
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Part of having transparent local accounting is ensuring that the people living in a community know and understand the public costs associated with their homes and businesses. Right now, that isn’t the case in most places.
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Yet another failed mall (this time in Milwaukee, WI) proves to be a drag on—and an active harm to—its surroundings.
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Don’t be fooled: Winnipeg’s newly proposed “rapid transit” project is actually a road-widening project in disguise. And it aims to borrow money so the City can destroy millions of dollars of its own tax base.
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We expect city budgets and financial reports to inform citizens and community leaders alike, but in reality, local government accounting is unnecessarily complicated, confusing, and illogical.
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Michel Durand-Wood takes us on a hilarious walk through the stages of grief as he puts a financial spike in the heart of his beloved city’s unsustainable 2050 Master Plan.
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This organization is suing their local government over an insolvent, master-planned development in Collier County, Florida.
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In this new series, we’re looking at Collier County as a case study for how insolvent growth persists in Florida. What's the history behind Collier’s development, and where is it headed?
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Fernando Peralta Berrios—president at the Las Familias de Rosemont neighborhood association in Fort Worth, Texas—discusses how he and his neighbors have partnered with the City of Fort Worth to guide public investment in its historically disinvested neighborhood.
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Strong Towns member Cindy Long discusses how the Strong Towns Community inspired her to ask her city council the hard questions about the city's financial status.
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Local governments can’t take on more and more promises without generating enough wealth to meet those obligations—not without a reckoning. We need a radical revolution in how we plan, manage, and inhabit our cities, counties, and neighborhoods. We need a Strong Towns approach.
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Jordan Clark and Felix Landry of Verdunity discuss the importance of understanding the fiscal consequences of our development patterns, as well as the ways that cities can use map-based fiscal analysis to make more holistic land use decisions.
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You can’t build stroads, subsidize big box stores and accept endless edge development, and have that work out for you just because you threw a block party, painted a mural and put in a temporary bike lane.
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In the latest episode of the Strong Towns podcast, we share a conversation Chuck had at CNU 2018 with three of the geoanalytics wizards from Urban3. Hear the latest on their efforts to spread the message about where your city’s wealth is really coming from.
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Local governments can’t take on more and more promises without generating enough wealth to meet those obligations—not without a reckoning. We need a radical revolution in how we plan, manage, and inhabit our cities, counties, and neighborhoods. We need a Strong Towns approach.
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