We use streets every day and yet we rarely think about them unless they remain unplowed, potholed or closed — which happens all too often in the Twin Cities. Weather has a lot to do with why our streets take such a beating, but our development patterns since World War II also have a lot to do with why we have such a hard time maintaining them.
That point became clear when Joe Minicozzi came to town a couple of weeks ago. The principal of Urban3, an urban planning consulting firm in Asheville, N.C., Minicozzi has shown communities around the country why they have fallen so far behind in fixing their streets, and his answer differs markedly from much of the rest of the civil engineering community.
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives the nation a "D+" in its annual infrastructure report card, arguing that we spend about half of what we should annually on maintaining roads. The ASCE says government needs to spend more money on infrastructure, a lot more: $3.6 trillion by 2020.
Minicozzi sees the situation differently. He shows how our poorly maintained streets stem largely from the low-density developments that arose in this country over the past 70 years, resulting in an enormous mismatch between the cost of fixing our extensive infrastructure and the taxes generated by sprawl. He makes his case with compelling three-dimensional maps of the data, showing the extent and depth of the problem in all but the most built-up parts of our cities.
How did we get in such a fix? Before World War II, communities remained relatively compact and built streets in an incremental fashion, as development occurred, with enough density and mix of uses to generate the tax revenue needed to fix the roads in the future.
After the war, large-scale suburban development led to a vast increase in the amount of infrastructure needed to serve these low-density communities. Developers buried the initial cost of infrastructure in the sale of buildings and properties and then handed the roads and sewers over to the municipalities to own and maintain.
That worked well as long as the new infrastructure needed little repair. Also, as Minicozzi observes, many communities saw this infrastructure not as a liability, but as an asset because developers gave it to them, even though a community cannot sell its roads. Such thinking led cities "to focus on the taxes that might flow from a development without adequately considering the land base they will use up or the costs they will incur," says Minicozzi.
He calls a community's land base its "raw material" and the tax base its "product." Cities have struggled financially by wasting their land base on low-density development and lowering their tax base with too many low-quality buildings. The fiscal health of a city, says Minicozzi, depends on the revenue per acre it receives, and simply put, "dense development produces a greater return to a community than putting tax dollars toward sprawl."
