You're ready to #DoTheMath in your own town. These 6 resources will help.

An early Strong Towns video, from 2013, shows why conventional return on investment calculations are so inadequate.

Chuck Marohn tells the story of the time when, very early in his own journey “from free market ideologue to Strong Towns advocate,” he was involved in a basic maintenance project for a cul-de-sac. It was, he wrote, the ideal test case to help him answer some of the “existential questions” he couldn’t shake about whether the work he was doing as a planner and engineer was actually undermining the long-term financial prosperity of the communities...communities he was supposed to be serving.

The cost of the project in question was $354,000. Chuck ran the numbers and found that, even if every single property tax dollar dedicated to infrastructure from the homeowners on that loop was applied to just this one maintenance project (an impossibility), it would still take somewhere between 53-79 years to pay it back—by which point, the cul-de-sac would have gone through one or two additional lifecycles that would also need to be paid for.

When we #DoTheMath, as Chuck did, we are confronted with the tragic absurdities of the North American development pattern. But one question we get often from people is how they can start doing the math in their own towns and cities. People who aren’t built environment professionals often feel especially intimidated—yet the work of stopping the bleeding and making our cities more financially resilient is too important to be left only to the professionals.

We’ve compiled some of our most helpful resources on how you can do the math for your own neighborhood and community. Most are practical—how to read a city budget, how to do a value per acre analysis, etc.—but there are also stories of people (including laypeople) who have done this work in their own towns.

1. A How-To Guide For Making Sense of Your City’s Budget (Video)

Do you know how much money your city takes in each year and from where? Or how about whether your city spends more on roads or schools? It can be intimidating to try and wade through a 200-page government PDF filled with obscure acronyms and confusing charts, but our friends at Urban3 put together this video to help. The goal is to lift the veil on municipal budgets and give you the confidence to take a look at yours.  You can do this. We will walk you through the process.

2. How To Do the Math on a Proposed Development in Your Town (Video)

Back in 2017, three government staffers from Fate, Texas led an excellent webcast on how to do the math on proposed developments in your city. Michael Kovacs, Justin Weiss and Will Rugeley shared their approach to doing Planning Commission and City Council briefings on new proposed developments that include a basic, yet effective, fiscal sustainability analysis. This would be a good one to share with local leaders in your own community.

3. Value Per Acre Analysis: A How-To For Beginners (Article)

A strong city or town needs to make sure that its land use is productive: that is, that the activity taking place on that city's land is creating enough wealth to support the infrastructure and services needed for that place to continue to exist and thrive. But far too few places actually do that math. And when you do it, you often find things that run counter to conventional wisdom about where your city's wealth is coming from. Here’s how to do a basic value per acre analysis...even if you don’t geek out on Excel spreadsheets like some people do.

4. Strong Towns Member Leads a DIY Value Per Acre Analysis (Video)

At Strong Towns, we obsess over the financial resilience of cities. And understandably so: dismiss the math and, over time, you may discover that your city has no money. What if you had the skills and insights to create a value-per-acre analysis for development in your community? You don’t need a ton of training to do this analysis—just a little help to demystify the process. Last October, Strong Towns member Andrew Kelsey shared how you can create a DIY value per acre analysis using tools and information that are widely available. 

5. How Much Does a Mile of Road Actually Cost? (Article)

One of the most common questions we get asked by our readers and members is, “How much does it actually cost to pave, or repave, a mile of road?” It’s a simple question...but one without simple answers. Yet it’s a necessary question to grapple with if you’re trying to demonstrate to someone that the place where you live is accumulating infrastructure liabilities it will not be able to keep up with. This article will help, drawing on data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

6. Examples from around North America

Here are some of our favorite examples of people who are have done the basic return on investment math in their own places. What we and others have found may seem counterintuitive—like the fact that poor neighborhoods make the best investments—but it’s right there in the data. This is why our cities need folks like you: so they can stop squandering wealth and instead focus on more productive development patterns.

• “This is why you #DoTheMath, even on small projects,” by Jared Wright (McKinney, Texas)

• “Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investment,” by Charles Marohn (Lafayette, Louisiana and Brainerd, Minnesota)

• “What’s In Your City’s Wallet,” by Felix Landry (Bastrop, Texas)

• “Doing the Math on Sidewalks,” by DJ Sullivan (Nashville, Tennessee)

• “It’s All Downhill from Here,” by Michel Durand-Wood (Winnipeg, Canada)

• “Choose Your Fate, Texas,” by Daniel Herriges (Fate, Texas)

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