The Federal Reserve just cut interest rates. Some people are celebrating the move as making housing more attainable, but it's really just reinforcing the housing trap. Need proof? Look no further than the 40-year mortgage.
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Small-scale developer Coby Lefkowitz joins us to discuss how finance shapes our cities, why debt is used to develop cities, and and why America's housing financial system privileges large-scale institutional development.
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For local governments, it’s often easier to let the tangled web of debt at the heart of the budget go unexplored. In cities reliant on sales tax, these problems are only magnified.
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The town council in Castle Rock, CO, received a shocking briefing at a recent meeting: that their single, mid-sized region within a single, mid-sized state has accrued almost a billion dollars of debt. But how?
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The Oregon Department of Transportation has been authorized to issue revenue bonds to finance potentially billions of dollars of highway widening projects.
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If you pull back the curtain on North America’s financially insolvent cities, you’ll see what’s REALLY propping them up.
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We’re getting another strip mall out on the edge of town, right next to the half-occupied strip mall built in 2007 before the last financial crisis.
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Endless growth is a luxury we literally can’t afford. Here’s why the path to true prosperity requires local communities to opt out of an economy of greed and bring decision-making back home.
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Cobb County, GA is a classic case of misplaced priorities. What could $400 million for a baseball stadium have achieved had it gone toward investing in citizens’ needs and achieving real wealth?
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County leadership continually brags about its low tax rate and high amount of services. But if you doubt the fundamental math behind that equation, there’s no need to look behind the curtain because the ratings agencies have given Cobb top marks.
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Ferguson, Missouri is still relying on so-called “fines and forfeitures” for a significant amount of its revenue.
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When your community is financially fragile, you lose options. In the case of Brainerd, Minnesota, that may mean letting go of a landmark.
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If public officials are going to use debt to pay for things, they must be vigilant about their lack of real skin the game.
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Strong, resilient cities have survived economic crises in the past and will continue to do so in the future. But what about the fragile cities?
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It should be hard for insolvent governments to take on more debt.
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Despite growing repair needs and the ever-more-apparent futility of addressing congestion through road expansion, the U.S. still spends vast sums of money to build new highways and widen existing ones.
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America has an infrastructure crisis, but it's not the one you think it is.
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Duncan's approach -- and the bipartisan approach of others who would shower money on our current system -- can only make our fragility problem worse. This thinking scares me.
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If the global economy is like a hot air balloon, we're only given the option to continually go higher -- despite the risk -- or cut all the air and crash. Those options aren't good enough.
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