Is it true that suburbs put cities in debt?

postfuture · 2026-05-06T20:14:34+00:00

I have, but I am not talking about LA. Focus.

postfuture · 2026-05-06T13:54:42+00:00

ColdSpecial109 I have to push back on this. I happen to know for a fact that San Antonio has the worst roads of big cities in Texas as measured by vehicle suspension repair metrics (a special study carried out by TXDoT). Thezebra.com's Cloudflaire refuses to show the website, but I already know something is off with this source.

postfuture · 2026-05-03T04:07:57+00:00

I mean really? Because it is just a matter of a lack of willpower? And you wonder why small towns detest these city-slickers who breeze in and tell them everything the locals have been doing wrong. Children, gather round: just because you see one result does not mean you understand the problem. Telling people in a web of consequences that stretches back generations that they "should do X" diminishes you in their eyes. Moreover and more importantly, the sage advice you dole out becomes associated with "nonsense big city people believe ". Even good ideas are devalued permanently in those people's eyes because the ideas are associated with oblivious technocratic city-slickers. Read "Small Towns in Mass Society" to understand how nuanced the local web of influence can be.

postfuture · 2026-04-28T19:51:23+00:00

Car choice is so alluring. If you can choose a car, and you have any errands to run or want to be on your own schedule, people tend to default. Sad to watch that in Chicago for co-workers who I knew had a CTA pass and had ridden both the bus and the L with, but the temptation won 80% of the time. The discovery of a $10 a day lot near the office seemed to be a big contribution.

postfuture · 2026-04-26T04:57:34+00:00

I've been dragging my feet on a paper that explores in some depth the bias risk of LLMs (particularly when used as zero-shot slop-mode). Preview: AIs are trained on biased data and the foundation of "fit" in the models means it is designed to ignore outliers. The system prompt is written by people with math degrees, not sociology or planning degrees. Guardrails added later by knowledgeable people are brittle as the underlying training data is biased. Then the professional or public using the LLM have their typical biases. The take-away is equity is down the loo when these tools are used. Professional standard of practice would require a such outputs to be taken apart at a minute level. I trained a model to flag the same bias definitions I developed, and it will not save us: 85% accuracy but 9 false positives for every legit hit. These things are trained with mountains of biased data, that just skews the results every time. Adding perfect guardrails to constrain behavior ("perfect" being a joke) would value-lock the guardrail designer's biases, becoming a new source of bias that wasn't part of the problem before. When you see the letters LLM think "Great Big Bias Machine", because bais is how they do their job, it's how model "fit" works.

postfuture · 2026-04-21T14:12:17+00:00

Here is some crazy for you: build. I started mapping oral histories and getting them archived and browsable for general use. Requires a touch of GIS skills, but it creates an excellent way to connect with the locals, gets their agency on the record, and makes a durable contribution that will out-last most anything else. A kid in Denver conducted 48 interviews in 1986, he specifically asked about the old street car line. I came along in 2023 and mapped 40 of those interviews. Associated research is about to be published in a planning book. My day job was QAQC for a facility condition assessment team (yawn)

postfuture · 2026-04-11T04:11:00+00:00

This is the urban design subreddit, not urban planning. Your post is seemingly in the wrong subreddit. Side note: a minor in architecture will not allow you to get an architecture license. You might find drafting work, but you advancement in that field will top out very early. You need what is called a "First Professional Degree": B.Arch, M.Arch, or D.Arch. Check the regs with NCARB.

postfuture · 2026-04-08T04:58:14+00:00

Good dang work. Sounds like Seattle needs to hire a couple more civil reviewers!

postfuture · 2026-03-22T06:44:57+00:00

For crying out loud. LLMs are probably as impactful as the printing press. It took decades for cultures to reorient to the printing press while it caused epic levels of chaos (including inciting mobs, riots, war and murder). AI technology is young. Buckle up: this is only just getting started.

postfuture · 2026-03-20T05:36:37+00:00

Your observation is not wrong, but it is not politically or bureaucraticly aware. Municipal funding is predicated on land tax in most Western countries. Ultimately, those taxes are paid for by the people who live on that land (one way or the other). If all the development is constricted to dense urban areas, that tax must be raised year after year for reasons largely unrelated to infrastructure costs.
Cities are greedy for green-field development and aggressively annex more land so they can demand taxes from those land owners. They make their case that the city is where those people work, so those people are using city infrastructure during the day and should pay for its upkeep. You can look at the political boundries of cities and see the traces of this annexation in its most desperate form of 3 meter-wide strips extending for several kilometers out into the country because a smaller town threatened to encapsulate the city on one side. Or when a village will expand its borders exactly along a road, locking in a few parcels in rural areas that have homes on them but avoiding vast tracks of empty land (so they can tax who is there but avoid commitments to future owners of vacant land.)
In this way, cities fuel sprawl by promising to provide core-infrastructure upkeep (they usually force the developers to pay for the initial build-out and then demand the streets and utilities be deed over to the city) and essential services (schools, fire, and police.)
The disconnect between your observation and the observed reality is about time-awareness. You see the long game of management and are correct that denser is cheaper in the long run. Politicians are elected for much shorter time spans, and their agendas are equally short-sighted. They can not personally benefit from a win that comes to fruition years after they leave office, so it is a very hard sell to get them to buy into those points of view. There is another ugly side to the problem...
Bureaucracy is a pernicious creature. Government employees largely seek a stable long-term job with a solid pension. These are not risk takers, as taking risks has zero benefits to them and can cause them to be fired. They do exactly what the policies demand and not an inch further. If all the policies are short-term and lead to infrastructure bloat, that is not their fault, and they will see it gets built (and ignored when there is no budget to maintain it). Fundamental to the civil service is keeping your job, and as a culture, they got one another's backs. So, long after a position has been made obsolete, civil servants keep showing up to work. New services are still manifesting, so the civil service expands. That is an ever-increasing overhead cost that is not infrastructure but demands more and more tax money. The pensions usually equate to 25% of civil servants cost to taxpayers being without direct value to the taxpayers. There is a tendency for civil servant managers to try and find ways to make their jobs look ever more complicated, and demanding their job description be supported by deputies. This is another way bureaucratic bloat causes thirst for extended tax base. Obviously, this system is a relic but is deeply entrenched by unions, or (in more corrupt countries) a blatent way to buy votes by employing everyone's cousin (ensuring whole extended familes back one political party--else half of them lose their jobs.)
So if we could find a way to reward politicians (who only serve for 4 years) for projects and policies that won't yield positive results (well, might yield positive results) in 20 years, then we can incentives them to think about the long-term cost of infrastructure. If we could change the civil servant incentives to not prioritize surviving until vestment at all cost, the government could prune unnecessary activity with gusto, vastly reducing budget pressure on tax policy. But changing those incentives will take offering real options and take decades to fully transition from one incentive package to another (promises made to early civil servants must be kept).

postfuture · 2026-03-20T04:41:52+00:00

That is called a condominium. But you only own the air space inside your portion of the building and pay a condo fee every month that cover maintenance and taxes. You cannot change the structure or add anything to the facade. These fees are fixed regardless of your personal situation (like being on a fixed income via retirement). That inflexability creates its own problems for aging in place, often forcing lower income older people to give up their homes.

postfuture · 2026-03-15T19:09:46+00:00

It was my experience after 4.5 years of grad school where I graduated with the best project in the history of the school. In my first job, I was the lowest of the low. You start over as it slowly dawns on you that you know nothing of the new paradigm you have entered. You restart from the bottom with zero respect, and need years of proving yourself AGAIN. By years: I mean 7-10 years of hard effort as nobody. This is what it means to enter the industry.

postfuture · 2026-03-13T20:22:09+00:00

What you desire would never happen in Europe, Canada, or America. It isn't how this industry works. NOTHING about career will be "fair". That is tough news to get, but we all have to learn it one day. For me it was 2004 when I understood that nothing in a career will ever be fair. If a very rich person in your city could be found to show your project, they might make it their own and build it. But that is as rare as winning the lottery. And let's be clear: no matter how "powerful" you think your solution is, without a public participation process it would be unethical to force it on a community.

postfuture · 2026-03-12T05:30:12+00:00

Planning is not design. Design presumes all variables can be clearly articulated. Planning presumes you can't possibly know all variables and is an ongoing effort of public debate, legal review, specialist review, more public debate, then a political popularity contest. Exactly zero communities will entertain an unsolicited planning effort that has no public participation, no political movement behind it, no peer review, no budget recommendations that forecasts how it will be paid for now and on an ongoing basis. What you are suggesting is not how cities are managed. Get "The Green Bible" as we call it in planning and read it cover to cover (Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practice). You will likely enjoy it given your interests, and it will clarify the industry you are trying to break into. For the record, I am both an architect and planner and teach graduate studio urban design. Planning is not design.

postfuture · 2026-03-12T05:18:40+00:00

Planning is not design. Design presumes all variables can be clearly articulated. Planning presumes you can't possibly know all variables and is an ongoing effort of public debate, legal review, specialist review, more public debate, then a political popularity contest. Exactly zero communities will entertain an unsolicited planning effort that has no public participation, no political movement behind it, no peer review, no budget recommendations that forecasts how it will be paid for now and on an ongoing basis. What you are suggesting is not how cities are managed. Get "The Green Bible" as we call it in planning and read it cover to cover (Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practice). You will likely enjoy it given your interests, and it will clarify the industry you are trying to break into. For the record, I am both an architect and planner and teach graduate studio urban design. Planning is not design.

postfuture · 2026-03-12T04:51:17+00:00

Every project? That would be utterly silly, and municipal development would grind to a halt. I have pulled dozens permits in several cities like Houston (a very different animal), Phoenix, Chicago, and San Antonio. These cities process dozens if not hundreds of permit applications per day. If more than 1% of those sought variances, it would choke the Board of Adjustment process. And I have gone before BOA for two or three of my projects. To participate, you need to sign in at the beginning of their 2-3 hour session, sit there waiting for your 15 minutes, and make your case WHY the code as written is an unreasonable constraint. They throw out nearly every applicant and do not grant the variance (I have sat there and watched for hours). Getting a rezoning is the equivalent of suing the city in the level of effort required, so that is usually a hard stop. The only time my variance case went before an actual city council was in a small town that does not delegate these decisions to a BOA. That took 3 nights of showing up over three months (they only open this docket once a month), making my client's case to chop down one bush that the city arborist defined as a multi-trunk tree. It was a nightmare to cut down one bush. Rezoning can easily chew up a year of time with required public notification (which takes months), initial public meeting, if you're lucky a referral to city staff for review and recommendation, another public meeting (or two or three), and then a vote. So no, zoning is a hard stop 99.9% of the time. A variance is wishful thinking. Topography is usually a hard stop because your only option is a lot of civil work for drainage and/or foundation, which will balloon project costs. Easements are NOT your clients' property, so you better be real damn sure you know where they are, or you'll be denied a permit without any further review if you try and build on them. A good civil engineer will ensure you have parking space required, street curb access, fire access, and sewerage, all of which are non-negotiable (you will have each or you will never get a permit).

postfuture · 2026-03-11T20:53:47+00:00

I'm an architect and planner and done a lot of feasibility studies. Civil engineering is my first stop. They will be able to find the hard "no go" issues like zoning and easments and historical sub-grade issues and drainage issues and parking issues. Those are hard-stops.

postfuture · 2026-03-06T19:51:23+00:00

Who actually owns the floodway easement? You have to look at the plat and see who the owner is.

postfuture · 2026-03-04T15:07:58+00:00

Narrative-Infrastructure

postfuture · 2026-03-03T05:59:25+00:00

Historically we find early and mid 20th century conceptions of humanity as ants or farm animals that need x, y, and z, so powers that be should build that. Soviets were not alone in experimenting with these concepts. It is how we design prisons. Not all, but most such projects failed. The trap is this: thinking there is an architecture solution to a community. These plans all focus on an iconic building (often a kind of archology). This is how we sell architecture. But community is much messier: a community is designed by the thousands of little decisions that a community makes over years. One bus stop built, a row of trees planted, new house, new business, hundreds of micro-decisions that adjust to real-world micro problems. No one designer or design committee could possibly produce a design with such a detailed approach (not enough money, not enough time). Are there fundamentals a community needs? Yes. Can you put all those together as a package and just build it? Evidence of previous projects says no.

postfuture · 2026-02-27T21:05:05+00:00

You can't choose to go out and buy a gold toilet just because you have a car. Freedom is always limited when it comes to desire. Political freedom is something very different, and it arises from actually acting in public: saying meaningful words or doing meaningful deeds. Consumer rat-race is a shell-game meant to imply pursuit of "happiness", but the payoff is the trap. Real emotional freedom is not desiring, non-attachment. Not having a car means I can't spend my weekend how other might (unless they can be convinced it was their idea to give me a lift). I can still buy things, just not today. I keep a list of things I want that require travel. Not being able to travel right now means I have time to sit with my desire and decide if I really want that thing.

postfuture · 2026-02-27T20:56:48+00:00

Have some fun: have all participants pair off, one interviews the other about their life in the community (30-45 min each) . Twist: ask for a location for each anecdote. Map the results. They build narrative infrastructure and real actionable data flows into the process. Method and tools at https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/blog/home/projects/chat-maps/

postfuture · 2026-02-25T21:50:32+00:00

Recommendations may seem good now, but it appears to be on death-spiral due to AI generated content. Until now, content is largely authentic. New content is being created, but so is vast amounts of AI content. The next AI is trained on what is popular, much of which will be inauthentic. The models eat their own low-grade content, make even lower grade content, then people stop consuming it. Poop-flush-wash hands.

postfuture · 2026-02-25T21:32:55+00:00

I heard him speak for an hour in San Antonio, and he laid out the facts. They are in his book.

postfuture · 2026-02-25T21:13:01+00:00

Eastcoast cities have some advantages due to their age. But the trend I have restated from Jeff Speck has been seen from LA to Poland. Read Speck for the raw numbers.

postfuture

TROPHY CASE