Cities slide into insolvency, not with a dramatic collapse, but with a slow, steady drift into financial fragility.
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Despite assertions to the contrary, a city's budget is almost exactly like a family budget.
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Houston’s new Popular Annual Financial Report tells a reassuring story of short-term growth and recovery, but it ignores the city's long-term financial trends. If things are going to improve, public officials need to confront reality.
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The Finance Decoder reveals the long-term trends hidden behind annual balanced budgets. For Kansas City, those trends are deeply problematic.
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In this episode, Chuck explains that we’ve created a political climate where you either take a chainsaw to failing systems or you refuse to acknowledge that they’re failing. He then shows how the Strong Towns approach offers a better way. (Transcript included.)
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The Growth Ponzi Scheme encourages city governments to take on obligations they can never hope to sustain. Purcellville, Virginia, offers a stark example of where this path leads.
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Having to shut down major pieces of infrastructure because it can’t afford to repair or replace them is a bad position for a city to be in. But in some cases, it’s just the wake-up call officials need to start making better decisions.
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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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