Comment by imtringued
10 hours ago
I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying.
Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion USD. Assuming a lifespan of 35 years, that is basically a billion USD per year spent on servicing road infrastructure costs. If they don't spend that billion every year or put it aside for future repairs, their road infrastructure is going to decay. It might not sound like much in comparison to the full budget, but since the road network is the largest man made structure in the city, it will affect everyone and be the most noticeable failure on part of the government. Lack of police or fire fighting can show up in the form of stochastic damage that doesn't necessarily impact every citizen directly.
Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents in the city, they could raise taxes by $250/person-year. That doesn't sound unsustainable to me. Certainly not a "suburbs are a fundamentally broken model" level problem.
Lots of suburban cities in the US are really nice, well run places. LA even as an example of a poorly run area doesn't actually seem to be in much of a financial pickle.
The point is
> you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying
Is just confused. The $1B/year you came up with as sufficient is ~7% of the LA city budget (~$14B), and that's excluding major expenses like schools since that's the county budget. If you look more holistically at just "what's the local government spending", the amount you say is needed to properly maintain the roads is more like 3-4%. Roads are just not a financial problem. Strongtowns guy just doesn't like them.