And I'm not just talking about the Harrisburgs, San Bernardinos and Detroits. If you don't understand that, you don't understand Strong Towns. Hey Chuck, get back to bashing engineers and planners.that's what people want.they want to hear you say that sprawl is bad.they don't want all your goofy thoughts on the economy. To those readers, I'm sorry, but we have to get the money together. There's an entire group of our readership here that simply checks out when we start talking about finance or Federal Reserve policy.
Get the money together or the kids don't have a future. And we're all scared to death what they're doing in Washington.you're printin', we're spendin', we're not spendin', sequestration. You better look at Detroit because that's what happens when you run out of money. LeDuff summarizes this succinctly in an interview he did on the Colbert Report (minute 3:10): We can pretend that Detroit is a case of corruption or incompetence or racial issues or globalization - and there are certainly many nuances and complexities - but at the end of the day, what has happened and is happening in Detroit has a lot of commonality with nearly every other city in this country. It was stunning to me, therefore, when LeDuff opened his book with the same basic argument. While there are many complexities to the situation there that make simple analysis somewhat questionable, at that basic level, the rest of the country is trending towards Detroit, not away. I've long seen Detroit as the canary in the coal mine and not some type of anomaly we can all sneer at.Īnd if you think it can't happen, that we can't over-subsidize, overbuild and over-extend ourselves into collapse, just take a look at Detroit. There is something between the growing and leaving that is critical. It is more complex than simply (1) we were successful and grew, (2) people left and now (3) we don't have enough money to maintain everything.
Here's something I wrote about a simplistic explanation of Detroit back in a 2012 Friday News Digest:
I've long held that Detroit is not some one off place that we can discount but that it actually represents the logical outcome of the Suburban Experiment. Fascinating because it is a glimpse into America's future and scary because the future is grim. Charlie LeDuff, Author of Detroit: An American AutopsyĪs Andrew Burleson was putting the finishing touches on his post here last week about Detroit's pending bankruptcy, I was on vacation pondering a powerful book by Charlie LeDuff ( twitter) that I had just finished called Detroit: An American Autopsy.įor me, Detroit is both a fascinating and scary place. Go ahead and laugh at Detroit because you are laughing at yourself.
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