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A
The Strong Towns national gathering is May 18th to 20th in Fayetteville, Arkansas. If you've ever looked at your town and thought, we can do better than this, you're not alone. This gathering is for people who care deeply about where they live and are trying to figure out what to do about it. We'll be working through the real challenges communities are facing right now, from housing and finance to transportation and neighborhood level change and learning from each other along the way. If you want to be a part of that, get your ticket and come join us at gathering.strongtowns.org.
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B
First class streetcar downtown with a fine ladies and the peeps are OG.
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A
Hello and welcome to UpZone today. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm joined today by two great guest contributors, Daniel Harrigus with the Parking Reform Network and Grayson Johnson, who is a senior specialist in government relations at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. But also both of these fine folks have extensive histories with Strong Towns. Grayson back in the day created the great Curbside chat video series that are still relevant today. Grayson has written a number of fantastic articles over the years for Strong Towns. Actually, not just a number, quite a number. And one of my favorites is an article in praise of background buildings. Also with me is Daniel Harrigus. Daniel was for a long time a key part of the Strong Towns ecosystem as a writer, contributor, editor in chief, many other hats that you've worn over the years and continues to be closely aligned with so much of what Strong Towns is doing, providing guidance, especially in his new role with the Parking Reform Network as a policy advisor there. And so welcome to both of you.
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B
Thanks, Norm.
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C
Thanks Norm. Nice to see you.
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A
Yeah, it's good to see you as well. We're talking snow, we're talking about the challenges of dealing with extreme weather. And the article today that we're going to be talking about is a recent Boston Globe article by Kate Selig titled that comes with a Price Tag How Snow Removal is Busting Town Budgets, which was published on March 30, 2026. The article talks about how cities like Boston in Massachusetts are blowing past their snow removal budgets, and not just by a little, like they're millions over, they're dealing with emergency reallocations. Some communities are having to dip into budget reserves to try to figure out how to basically make sure that contractors get paid, but also that the streets get cleared. And so these financial strains are very real. But the deeper question is not just about the storms. It's why are our cities so financially exposed to something as predictable as snow and extreme weather. When we look closely, actually it's not even just a winter problem, it's a year round systems problem that's tied to the sheer scale of what we've built. And so instead of just asking how cities can better handle snow, we're going to ask what is it about the way our cities are built that makes them so expensive to maintain in every season? And so maybe, Daniel, for you, what were some of the reactions that you had as you worked through the article and just thought about this in your own context in Minneapolis as well, having moved there from Florida, perhaps been somewhat surprised, surprised by the scope of it, to be like, oh, I'm back in my community that I grew up in, but the snow is omnipresent here through much of the year.
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B
I was kind of shaking my head with, you know, familiarity as I read the article. And I think you hit the nail on the head that ultimately it's not the, the root issue isn't the proximate issue of, hey, we had a couple record busting blizzards this year in New England. How do we deal with all this snow? It's having having the slack in the system to respond to a need that's a little bit out of the ordinary to budget for anything that isn't perennial, you know, absolute bare bones. We know we're going to do this all the time. Obviously you're in a northern climate, you know you're going to get snow. You don't know how much. It can be extremely variable. And the article talks about maybe becoming more variable and more unpredictable from year to year. But I think that, you know, the underlying sickness is just, you know, do you have the slack in the system financially to deal with contingencies? I mean, we see that we haven't had record busting snowfalls the last few winters. We've actually had abnormally warm and dry winters here in Minnesota. But the thing that we see happening here is we already had a problem with street maintenance backlogs, we had a problem with potholes. The perennial topic at the end of every winter is potholes. And what, what a shift in climate has done for us is we have a much more pronounced freeze thaw cycle in a place where it used to pretty consistently stay below freezing for the whole winter, maybe with the exception of a week or so here or there. So that is putting its own strain, you know, climate related strain on the public infrastructure. And the same thing, it becomes this absolute impossible math problem. So I think you could find a Lot of different places that are experiencing their own version of that. You know, even when the details are going to differ from region to region, from climate to climate.
- [05:21]
A
Grayson, what is it like when people are caught off guard by this? Because you mentioned, you know, you're in Ottawa and it is a slick operation. Like they know what they need to do. They. They make sure that the equipment is in place and they're ready to go for it. But what are some of the gaps or the challenges that definitely can emerge for cities when they're either not prepared or, you know, as we saw in the article, it talks about Boston having reduced its snow clearing budget on the assumption that, hey, those days where we would need this throughout the year or throughout the winter season, you know, maybe we can taper that down a little bit, probably from a few of those instances where they had, you know, less snowfall to deal with in, in any given year and then were caught off guard by this extreme.
- [06:03]
C
Yeah, I mean, first I have to offer my prerequisite disclaimer that I'm not here speaking on behalf of my employer. I'm just here as an old friend who really likes snowplows. So article was so interesting to me because I think of, and I can picture our operations in Ottawa. I live in a city that, similar to Montreal, is very cold. And so the snow stays pretty much all winter. We've still got it. And in our snow dumps, we have snow dumps here, that snow might stick around until August because there's so much of it. So when I think of that, I always, when I'm watching these things out on the streets performing their work, I'm wondering, wow, that must be so expensive to staff that up. Because when we're looking at these extreme events, it's really a surge pricing issue. And there's only so many trucks, there's only so many drivers. They're probably working overtime to do it. And so that's a really hard thing for a city to address where they need to have that available. And that's a, you know, it's not exactly reusable equipment. In a lot of cases, you know, your dump trucks would be. But snowblowers, you know, they have a particular purpose. And so that's what I was thinking about is how to equip for that type of situation. And then reflecting on my own city and asking, wow, how does Ottawa do it so well. And I would actually encourage anybody that's interested if you don't live in a winter city and you want to see something that is mesmerizing. Just Google on YouTube, you know, Ottawa snow removal. And it would be the same in Montreal. You know, these are old cities where you have snow blowers that will come and remove 6 foot snow banks between the sidewalk and the road. And they're actually, they've like got a line of dump trucks behind them and they're removing that snow and they're trucking it out to a dump to get it out of the street. And you know, that's not something that makes sense for a lot of cities because their snow is going to melt. Right. And so it is just a. It's a question that I really don't envy C having to deal with it because in the moment you need to clear your emergency access for hospitals, for your ambulances, for your police cars, for your school buses. You know, the city comes to a standstill until you can deal with the problem. But in order to be prepared for it, it would be an immense capital cost. And then in order to respond, you know, you need to have the staff on hand or to be able to hire them in short notice. And it's not like when you have a snowstorm that the city is the only one dealing with it. Right. Everybody's trying to clear their snow at that point. So I feel for people and I find it really like the inner child in me is just delighted by the idea of all of these trucks, like this heavy equipment coming together and figuring it out and how the, how the city would figure that out. But, you know, it's. It's something that also, you wonder what would be the equivalent in a summer city that doesn't have snow to deal with, but is dealing with. With surge pricing in another way. So that's what those are the things that were going through my mind.
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A
One, I live in the lower mainland of British Columbia, where we get about one week of snow activity in a year. But it can be pretty intense. I mean, we can get a foot of snow which basically snarls everything and just creates like this, this, you know, what feels like a catastrophe, even though the rest of Canada is laughing at us. And in that context, it's been. It was interesting. When I first started my job in the mayor's office, we had a massive winter storm that had hit. And so I rolled into work and they were in the throes of trying to figure out how do we dispatch every piece of equipment that we can get to basically deal with snow. And they had, you know, they had some blades and things like that, but a lot of it was just trying to figure out, do we send out our skid steers and our loaders and actually like physically dump snow into the back of trucks, knowing that as soon as the rain comes, all of that effort is for not because it'll basically do the work for us. And yet there was absolutely no way that they could take the. The foot off the pedal because it was just, you have to deal with this. Don't you see that our whole city is seized? And I was dealing with letters that were coming in immediately, what is wrong with you, city? And I was, you know, I'm a fiscal conservative, so I was like, we shouldn't have a whole like cavalcade of snow removal equipment on standby for the majority of the year if we will never actually need it. Like, maybe we can limp along for a week, get through it and then carry on. And I think I could share this on the podcast because I don't know how many of the politicals in Surrey would have the recollection back then, but there was a great problem that we had to deal with in the mayor's office, which is a very well meaning city staff member in a truck saw the mayor's driveway and was like, maybe I'll just do the mayor's driveway quickly. And we were like, no. So I don't think I'm breaking too many. But it was, it was fascinating because it was just that realization, oh, what did this person do? They meant well, but they've actually created the conditions which favoritism. And all of those layers are there, but deeper than that was what is our city actually prepared to do? And. And can we take it on the nose when we deal with extremes and just try to like, muddle along? But at the same time, whatever comes up in this article is just like the shortage of reserve, the absence of capacity in a lot of our places and just that sense that we're, you know, a lot of families live paycheck to paycheck, but I think a lot of cities are. Are in a very similar state, if not masking the fact that they're deeply insolvent. And so, Daniel, I mean, over the years, you've written a lot about these types of things. Do you want to touch on just some of your. Yeah. Pieces that you're like, hey, how do we, how do we address this? What do we do about this situation?
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B
One. I don't know. There are a few different things that sort of were sparked, you know, in my mind, listening to you and Grayson talk. I think, I mean, one question that's kind of core to strong towns. And I think it's not directly raised by the article under discussion, but I think that's going to become more and more of a question as you have. You've got cities that have no reserves, that have no slack, and then you've got different kinds of disasters, you know, different kinds of unprecedented events. And where do the resources go when you're in triage mode? And I think they don't necessarily get allocated in the most efficient or sensible way. Chuck wrote this thing years ago about transactions of decline, and sort of the concept has stuck with me about once you're constrained in what you can do immediately and what resources you can mobilize immediately, you almost. It's like the municipal version of what they talk about, the poverty tax with individuals budgets, where you end up spending your resources in kind of inefficient or even, like, superficially foolish ways because you're in just that immediate emergency mode. So I wonder, like. And maybe this is pivoting to a bit of what Grayson's talking about with Ottawa. Like, sitting here in the United States in a place where it does snow a lot and the snow stays and snow accumulates over the course of the winter, and we do a barely passable job. I mean, our streets get plowed. We function when there's plenty of snow on the ground by, you know, as someone who cycles to commute, by February and March, like, the bike lane has disappeared because it's buried in a snowbank and there's sand all over the roads, and it's kind of miserable. You know, we muddle through. Sidewalk clearing is a huge problem, especially for, like, people with disabilities, for people who are older. And, you know, the city has repeatedly looked into, like, municipal sidewalk clearing and concluded we can't do it. We don't have the resources to do this. Well, we can maybe pilot it in a few really popular business districts, but it's absolutely impossible to do this in sort of a broad way citywide. And so it's up to the property owner, and a lot of property owners don't do it, and everything gets covered in a sheet of ice and just generally impassable. Like, it's kind of a miserable situation. And then we look to an Ottawa or a Montreal and, like, the whole concept of, you know, you're efficiently dealing with snow, you're actually trucking it out to a snow dump. Your sidewalks are passable, your bike paths are passable in the middle of winter. And it's. It's this Miraculous thing. It's like, is it miraculous? Maybe it's just built different.
- [14:17]
C
Well, now I'm actually really curious what Minneapolis would spend, right. Because the winter maintenance budget for Ottawa is over $100 million. These are Canadian dollars. So I don't know what that would be in US and for Montreal it's 200 million. And I was reading, I kind of went into a little rabbit hole on snow removal when we decided we were going to talk about this. And in an article about Montreal, part of what they were sharing is that the expectations have begun, have grown because the equipment's better, the ability to remove snow is better. And so, you know, there might have been years past where people just shut down, right? They just didn't go to work that day. There wasn't an expectation that you would go there or people would just muddle through with worse snow clearing. But it is something that especially so often in the Strong Towns conversation, we talk about local governments being able to be close to the action and people engaging with that and really feeling the impact of their work. And like, snow removal is definitely an area where you feel the competency of your local government. And so there's pressure on a political angle to be really good at snow removal because people notice. But yeah. And in terms of that budget, I was looking into it for Ottawa and they do have operational reserves for snow. So I don't know if that is directly tied to that budget. So if, you know, this year we have a low snow year and they don't need to use the full budget if that is specifically tagged to a future snow removal piece. Somebody who knows more about our particular budgeting situation would have to answer that. But they do plan for it. You know, they have that rainy day fund for like, this is a big year, this is going to be not a big year. So I thought that was interesting too. Are you a listener who thinks I want to bring Strong towns to my community? Visit strongtowns.org, to set up face to face conversations about the future of our cities. When you host a Strong Towns event, you're bringing together residents, local leaders and professionals to build a shared understanding and real momentum in your community. If you're ready for bottom up momentum and making places people truly love, visit strongtowns.orgevents to learn more.
- [16:33]
A
But it touches on the challenge that we've got fires to deal with, we have heavy floods to deal with, we have droughts to deal with. We have, you know, garbage crises to deal. Like there's, there's sort of these Overlapping sort of cascading issues that, that can really start to creep up. And I think that discipline of having that reserve fund, I think, you know, just stands out. And, and that is one of those things that I think you're touching on, Daniel, with the idea of like when you get into transactions of decline, you're no longer covering your monthly credit card bill and now all of a sudden the interest is starting to accrue or like some of those, like core challenges are becoming more pronounced and you have to skimp on it and then you get caught off guard. And I'm not sure that that was the case in Boston, but certainly some of the other communities, they had persistently been lowering the amount that they expected to spend on this. And then they were over by, I think the one city had budgeted 600,000 and spent 6 million. Well, that, that is huge in a much smaller budget compared to 100 million in Ottawa. But if you have the productive base to be able to cover the cost for that, that certainly emerges. But one of the things, Grayson, that you had said fascinated you about this piece was just the, the grappling with extremes and sort of the predictability of extreme things occurring. And from a strong towns advocate perspective, like when we talk about incremental sort of thickening up of our places, it feels like it is the antidote to, to create really productive place so that it is more capable of withstanding the buffering and. Or the buffeting. Sorry of. Of a really intense, you know, episode or something that, that really rocks your city. You're, you're part of your work with Incremental Development alliance and sort of efforts at the local level is to create like local resilience. How is that partly that response to it and maybe creating the conditions for people to accept like, yeah, we're going to get, you know, whacked here, but we're in this together and we, you know, we're going to shoulder the burden, maybe lower our expectations a little bit just so that way we don't burn through precious resources in our place.
- [18:34]
C
Well, I should say that I feel like the, the money that we spend on snow removal is some of the best money that, you know, I am. I feel like it's a real bargain that, you know, we're probably spending about, you know, we're a city of a million people, you know, 1.19 or something. So it's about 100 bucks person per year if that's on budget. And I feel like that's an amazing bargain given the type of Winters that we're dealing with. So I would say that. But as you were talking about lower expectations and that sort of thing, I was thinking back to days when I lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and it's an area, and that there's probably a lot of places in the country and the continent where people can relate. A lot of people have pickup trucks, and a lot of people who are just a regular person, they'll have a plow attachment for their pickup truck. And I found that a lot of regular people in Fredericton were kind of helping each other out in sharing that burden. And so I imagine that there are places where that becomes a little bit of a default. That's not helping you for your ambulance route and for your school route and that type of thing, but it is in the category of muddling by. And so I imagine that some places the citizens have an expectation that it's part of their responsibility to clear snow. You know, every city has their own policy on if it's the homeowner or the city's responsibility to clear sidewalks. That can be really, really hard on people who have mobility issues if people aren't being responsible for that. Expectations are a huge. A huge question for all of us. It's something that I think about all the time right of. You know, I think that is maybe the critical question is what. What are. What are our expectations versus what we're willing to pay for?
- [20:20]
B
I feel like there's kind of three angles to this or three facets that interrelate, because there's the expectations question. There's a question of just the productivity to begin with, of your tax base, of your land use pattern. What can you support? But even that doesn't guarantee. There's also a question of kind of institutional competence and institutional muscle memory and just having the system set up to deal with things efficiently. And that's where I'm talking about, you know, some of the differences between Minneapolis and Ottawa, where in theory, similar climate, we're at a similar latitude. Canadian cities are not vastly more productive or vastly denser or anything than US cities. Why such a disparity in terms of the competence we believe we have to deal with something like snow clearance, that is going to be an issue, or I think, of like, New York City. You can't accuse New York City of having an unproductive land use pattern. But like, containerized garbage collection has been an enormous issue for New York forever. People are still leaving bags of trash at the curb where rats get into them. And you look at a Paris Or a London, the entire rest of the world is like, what do you do in New York? And New York is like, we can't solve this problem. Like, there are huge and somewhat chaotic, somewhat unpredictable kind of disparities in just institutional capacity from place to place that don't simply chalk up to what are your financial resources, like, how productive is your land use pattern or your tax base. So I think
- [21:50]
D
if you're working on safer, more complete streets in your community, you already know this isn't easy work. You see the problems clearly, the crashes, the near misses, and the designs that just don't work for the people they serve. And you're trying to do something about it, but you keep running into resistance, limited resources, or you just don't know what the next step should be. Should be. This is exactly why Strong Towns created the Strong Towns accelerator. This isn't a course where you learn ideas and move on. This is a small group of people working together through real challenges. Alongside Chuck Marone and myself and the entire Strong Towns team, we're here focused on figuring out what your next step can do, something you can actually do to make your street safer. In our next accelerator, we're going to be going through the book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. But most importantly, it's not just a book study. We're going to apply this together, apply it in your place with people who are facing the same types of struggles you are. If you're ready to stop just thinking about these problems and start building a response, even a small one, this is the program for you. You can learn more by signing up@strongtowns.org accelerator.
- [23:12]
B
That's kind of the, like, you know, there's sort of a triangle here of like, what can we get better at doing this problem solving? Can we have more functional institutions? What can we do within the resources available to us? How can we fix our, fix our land use problems in order to have more resources? And then on the expectations side of the ledger, I think it's on municipalities to have an honest conversation with their residents about like, I would love to see more kind of basic infrastructure and basic municipal services broken down in that per capita kind of way. Like Grayson, you were talking about $100 per resident of Ottawa for snow clearance. That's an amazing bargain. Like, why aren't more things broken down that way where we can actually start to have a conversation? Okay, like, so for this much money per person, per property, you can get this. For this much, you could get this. Let's have the policy conversation. Like, what Are we willing to pay? What can we do within what we're willing to pay? And then look at peer communities and what are they doing? And then we can start to actually be upset about things like why can't we get our act together and for a comparable budget, do what Canadian cities are doing? Why does, and not just things like snow removal, why does mass transit cost not just a little bit more to build in the US than in pure countries, but like sometimes five or ten times as much to build per, per mile? It's like, what are we doing here?
- [24:41]
C
The math is so much more complicated too when you think of it. One of the things that jumped out at me with this again in this little rabbit hole. It's going to sound like a tangent for a second. So I mentioned we have these snow dumps in Ottawa. So there's six dumps and it sounds like, you know, a garbage dump. It's not that at all. It's almost a reservoir. So there are these areas where, because as I said, the snow doesn't melt and so they have to truck it out. A couple times a winter, this parade of trucks will come through and like dump truck after dump truck will be filled up by the snowblower and they take it out to these snow dumps. And I've been thinking about that as snow clearance. But then reading this article, I realized, no, that's actually stormwater management. Because what they're doing is they are taking the snow to a place, they've built a reservoir so that it can melt, you know, and it's melting slower, you know, until August. And they're, they're controlling the output of the water at that point. So, you know, they're protecting the river, they're cleaning the water, they're removing the sediment, they're removing the garbage from it by doing that. And that made me actually wonder. I mean, I didn't have time to do this, but I was like, I wonder if I could compare the stormwater costs because, you know, this is five, six months a year in Ottawa that you are essentially, it's, this is a pipe above the ground and it is in the form of a truck and it's taking it over to the reservoir. So, you know, our stormwater costs may be lower because we have this higher snow removal cost. And could I compare that to a city that doesn't have that? You know, and I was like, oh, Dallas actually has the same budget as, as Ottawa and roughly the same population for its, its area. But I couldn't figure out its, its Stormwater cost. I think it's an interesting question to ask. But to your point, Daniel, on like comparing to other cities and how come they can do this and we can't, and comparing the cost of a service, I think that's also usually missing half of the equation, which is what could be saved by doing something differently or not doing something at all in some cases. So, yeah, you know, we see that all the time with urban forestry and like the economics of trees. It's really hard to have that conversation without showing how much it's saving you in all these other categories. So, yeah, I mean, I just think it's a, I think it's a really, it's a hard thing to do the math on in a comprehensive way, but just the straight up math of like $100 a year, I'm like, sold. That is amazing.
- [27:20]
B
That's a fascinating observation about the stormwater and sort of actually, actually tracing the chains down to like, what are we avoiding? That is also going to cost us money and is also going to cost members of our community money if we're not doing thing X. Regardless of, you know, whether thing X is wildfire mitigation in a climate that's prone to that, whether it's, you know, this is like, how much can we pay up front versus, you know, how much are we committing ourselves to in ongoing, ongoing maintenance of a system? There are all of these really complex questions. The thing that strikes me about, like the article that we read ended with this quote about like, we gotta clear the snow. What are we gonna do? Like, once you're in, once you're in that spot where there is an emergency staring you in the face and your constituents are angry and you have to do something, that's where you get the transactions of decline. That's where you don't have the space to have the nuanced conversation about what is the most efficient way to do this and what is actually the best way to get a return on the resources we're willing to put in. You can't have that conversation anymore. It's just like, we gotta clear the snow. What are we gonna do? We're gonna take on more debt, we're gonna do this. We're gonna dip into the reserves. We're going to figure it out. You know, we got to deal with the aftermath of the flood or the wildfire. We got to patch the potholes and maybe we're doing a quick and dirty patch in a way that actually, like, isn't going to last more than a couple of Years and we still have a decaying road, but we got to patch the potholes because the people who live in the neighborhood are furious. Like, that's the transactions of decline problem. It's like we actually need that, that financial resilience so that we have the breathing room to have the conversation about what is the, what is the actual smartest and best way to go about these things.
- [29:07]
A
And it stands out to me on, you know, the side of utilities are starting to realize how much they can do to sort of suppress peaks and spread out demand. And I think that there's actually a parallel. Like if we can think really clearly about peak management in our cities, that certainly looks like traffic, where at some point you just give up. You don't intend to keep up with peaks. You let them sort of naturally work themselves out, but with other things it's gonna look like finding how do we, for example, create the conditions which regular ongoing maintenance is just the norm, rather than us having to rush in to do emergency repairs and, you know, where we unleash the funding reservoir to just go and fix a big, you know, mainline water pipe in Calgary, but simultaneously have ignored many of the other sort of features that could have avoided that situation or helped us along the way. And I'm struck by that image of, yeah, stormwater management in that context. And, you know, Chuck wrote an article in 2020 called the Cost of an extra Foot that has been camped out in my brain for a long time. And he talks about the fact that the moment that you widen the street, you actually take on considerable new liabilities or financial obligations. As he puts it, if you add one extra foot of width per lane on a two, on a two block stretch of road, you're adding 3,040 extra square feet of pavement, which means thousands of cubic feet of additional snow to clear. And that is also coming with more truck trips, more staff time, there's more fuel equipment, where not to mention just having to put in the space and allocate that space for vehicle movement rather than what else it could be. And then the flip side of it is if you could, you know, for me, if I think like, how does a strong winter city sort of cope with snow? Part of it is keep your obligations of what you need to clear really minimal. So narrower roads help each other out that way. But then another element is the moment that you can do vertical stacking of homes. You. You double the number of paying participants in that scheme to cover what is, you know, basically underneath that roof. And so all of the rain that falls on a two story building or a one story building is the same amount. And yet now we have twice the number of participants in the local economy generating the necessary revenues to be able to cover the cost of caring for that stormwater. So if we had a third story, now all of a sudden we're actually in a situation we have three times as much as what we did up front and we haven't increased our stormwater obligations at that point. And I think that can be one of those areas where trying to help people understand the economics of our development pattern is at the core of the strong town's message. But we need to look for instances like this to really help people to do it because Boston's actually probably better off than a lot of other places that get snowed on. You know, they actually are more compact than many of their peer cities and yet even they were struggling with this. But I can imagine in Calgary, I actually, I'd be really curious as one of the very sprawled out cities just to see what Calgary snow clearing budget is. But their mother nature does a lot of the work for them with chinooks and things like that that come in and clear things out. But yeah, we definitely have this challenge. And what stood out to me was that sense of like, well, we haven't had much snow, so we're going to start to cut our snow budget. And yet being caught off guard then by just the like pendulum hitting again. Anything more on that that kind of captured your attention?
- [32:28]
C
I don't know that it's a problem that even money can solve necessarily. So when I was reading that Montreal article, they were talking about why costs had escalated so much. And one of the things they were saying is that equipment has become very expensive because a lot of the pieces were sourced from Ukraine. And then I'm like, oh well, I know nothing about the supply chain of heavy equipment, so if anybody can make any recommendations on that, very interested. But it brought back that conversation that Chuck has been having at strong towns in several podcasts and articles around the trade offs of infrastructure where there is only so much of certain things. There's only so many trucks, there's only so many people that can drive them, there's only so many resources and the materials need to be kind of allocated in the smartest way that we can do that. And that's why I find this such an interesting question because, yeah, is it the right decision, as you were saying, Norm, for a city to try and stock up on something that they're not necessarily going to need? To use all the time. And also, there aren't necessarily that many around. And so the cost of it is going to be even higher. That opens up sort of a different window for me in these questions of one, is it a problem that money can't solve and what do we do? There's probably a whole book of these types of problems that our cities are facing where it might actually be sort of a personnel issue or it might be, you know, something that the budget. The budget can't solve. And, yeah, I think that that opens up other questions on management. What are. What are our options when that becomes the case? I don't have answers there. I just. It was a reflection that really connected to me on some of the writing that Chuck's been doing recently.
- [34:19]
A
What about for you, Daniel, when we want to react to these extremes and we sort of hit the limits of state capacity or the limits of what we together as a community have. Have collaborated together to say, you know, this is what we're going to provide for each other. We're going to provide streetlights that work. We're going to provide pathways that connect. We're going to provide, you know, schools that educate. And. And at some point, we reach the point where we say, well, we cannot reliably say, we will always provide you a clear route to your workplace or to your home or to other spaces like that. When we run into these sort of exigent circumstances that just hammer our ability to respond in any way that doesn't just completely blow out the budget. If we're having to source parts from Ukraine in the midst of a war in order to keep up with our war on snow, like, we start to hit the limits of state capacity pretty quickly there. You're. You've often thought about, like, the asymmetry of many of the risks that we face and the things that we sometimes assume are authored into our social contract together, but actually are never were or never have been agreed to. Are there breakdowns in the sort of political way that we think about our communities as strong citizens versus taxpayers, that maybe this is surfacing for you? I threw a lot at you, but go ahead.
- [35:35]
B
Yeah. One thought that comes to mind is that we're going to see a lot more of questions. I think in the coming decades, we're going to see a lot more questions of just what are the hard limits to our ability to, you know, collectively provide the level of service that we maybe think we ought to be able to, or we think we're entitled to as taxpayers or citizens or whatever and we're going to have those tough conversations. And I think it's, you know, the parts from Ukraine is a great example. But I think, you know, there, there's reason to think that a number of issues involving global supply chains like that, that we're going to have more and more dis. That there, there's a lot happening that the average person is really only dimly aware of in terms of how stuff actually gets from A to B and how institutions actually assemble, you know, both the physical material but also the, you know, how institutional capacity actually works when you take it for granted and, you know, we've been able to take it for granted in large part because of the illusion of wealth that a lot of our communities have benefited from for a couple generations. Like, when that starts to go away, I mean, one, one set of outcomes involves, you know, we triage and we probably don't triage in the way that is most efficient or most equitable or whatever, but based on who are the loudest voices, who can demand that their needs get met first? And I think we see that pattern happen in a lot of communities and who is just like. I mean, there's. When there's a basic math problem where if you can't. If you can't do it, you're not going to do it. But who is gonna. Who is gonna be able, either through political leverage or through finding ways to privately provide or collectively for some community, you know, provide the things that used to be socially provided? Like, there are a lot of really complex outcomes and some of them are uglier than others. So my interest is in, like, how do you avoid the really ugly and inequitable outcomes where, you know, to put it bluntly, where rich people make a lot of noise and they're. Garbage gets selected and they have the 911 response times and their streets get plowed and their snow gets cleared and their whatever need, you know, gets met. And people who don't have that voice in the system don't get their needs met. And it looks like a different problem than it is at that point. It's not. There isn't a collective sense of we as an entire community, as an entire, you know, political entity. We have this insolvency problem that we have to figure out how to solve. It becomes something more acrimonious within the community. I think, to avoid that. And again, I'm talking in vague terms because I think this applies to any number of disasters or disruptions or what have you. I'm just, I'm Very interested in the question of how do we start having the really transparent conversations now. And I really appreciate the work that Strong Towns has done in the couple years since I was last working there on, you know, the making, making municipal budgets legible and the budget decoder and all that. So I mean, really, really incredible stuff. And I think that trajectory of work like that could be so transformative for just equipping communities to actually talk honestly about this stuff. I don't know that that was a satisfying answer. No, no, no, that's.
- [38:53]
A
I appreciate that because I think it's your mention of like, who gets listened to is one of those things that when I was in Medicine Hat explaining for the staff and, you know, residents in, in the city of Medicine Hat that their downtown is not the money pit that that many people sort of like collectively assumed it was, but it's actually their money pot because it is the place where there's the greatest amount of productive capacity occurring in, in close proximity to each other. And so their value per acre was significantly higher than the rest of the city. And in that context, to be able to say, like, collectively they far out earn and out sort of provide to the city the core resources that are necessary. And I think of when I was in the mayor's office and the disputes over why is my, my street not on a priority route network that needs to be plowed within, you know, 48 hours. And, and the response was, well, you know, because there's not a bus route on it and maybe ambulances don't take it at us often. But it'd been very interesting to say, well, you don't pay enough taxes. But they would have said, well, my tax bill is more than, you know, that person over there in another neighborhood. And yet I would say, yeah, but collectively your neighborhood contributes significantly less. And I think trying to help reframe that might be one of those areas, not to pit places against each other, but to say when you begin to resemble that more built up urban fabric, you can expect more services to emerge from that as well. And that idea of collectively we've got this wealth that individual parcels don't have, I think does matter in, in this context because it also requires a lot of public outlay of infrastructure in order to be able to cover those costs. But you know, it's funny, I'm looking out the window, I can see tulip bulbs. So I'm already ready to let snow be a bygone thing. But I know for some of you you're going to be dealing with it for a while and if you are traveling to Ottawa, definitely go and visit the snow. You'll have until August before all the snow from the snow dumps will be gone and your mind will be blown to realize that is storm water. That is not snow that I'm looking at. It's just in its solid form. With that, let's move into the down zone, which is just a quick reflection from each of us on something that we've been reading that probably has nothing to do with any of this that you want to share with other people who might be intrigued and go check it out for themselves. Maybe Grayson, why don't you go first?
- [41:11]
C
Sure. Well, first something that does have something to do with this is you'll pay for this by by your brother in law Mitch. I just wanted say thank you to him because by reading that book that was actually what helped me be able to go through financial statements and figure out those numbers for for Ottawa. So that is cool. Something that's unrelated for the down zone I've been doing a bit of a deep dive on how affordable housing is delivered in Europe lately and there's a PDF that you can get from Housing Europe from I think it's 2021 and it talks about cost rental housing and if you're in the affordable housing space, it's just a really interesting read on how it's sort of a flipped model from what we would do in North America where in North America we try and like make the rent lower, whereas in Europe they subsidize the household rather than the building in certain countries. Anyways, it's a deep topic. I'm not going to go into it in the down zone, but if you look up cost rental housing and a PDF from Housing Europe, I would recommend reading that.
- [42:17]
A
Daniel what's in your down?
- [42:19]
B
I got two young kids at home and I still sometimes struggle to find the blocks of time to really get deep into a book. I've got about three sitting on my nightstand that are unfinished, various stages of unfinished. Actually the most compelling thing I've been reading recently that has stuck with me and bear with me when I say this, but it's from a substack newsletter. Anand Jiridaradas I hope I'm not butchering his last name too badly, but he writes a newsletter called the Inc. Commenting on politics and you know, US politics and society and climate and a number of things. But he's been doing this amazing series called the Epstein Class. And that's where I say bear with me when I say this, it's not at all lurid stuff about the Jeffrey Epstein, you know, the perpetrators, the crimes. It's none of that. It's actually a really, really fascinating look at sort of the sociology of these elite circles, including financiers and jet setters of this sort and that, and then the academics and people who kind of relied on that largesse. But it's an interesting look at the sociology of people in those circles with some of the files that were released by the DOJ just as a starting point to explore these questions. I found it really, really insightful in terms of how this sort of insular elite thinks and what are the, you know, actually digging into, like what are the incentives that explain things that to anyone who's not part of those circles might just look like conspiracy or self dealing or just sort of inexplicable evil. So really, really, that's been fascinating. I think he's four articles into the series at this point and you told me this was supposed to be like 30 seconds and I'm not doing that. I won't digress.
- [44:11]
A
No, we're good.
- [44:15]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think something that was always a hallmark of my, my writing at Strong Towns was just like the determination to seek genuine understanding of any, anyone's perspective, anyone's, you know, role in a system and not chalk it up to, well, these are bad people doing bad things. So I think the interest in getting into the heads of just genuinely asking the question, why do people do what they do? Is that's something that I'm always looking for.
- [44:42]
A
Yeah, my, my take on conspiracy theories is that they're remarkably rational. They just start from the wrong premise. And so if you start with a wrong premise, all of a sudden you can be very rational and string together all of these core layers that definitely make that happen. And maybe somewhat related. I am very excited for season two of a podcast called Criminal Broads. It's a true crime podcast, which is not my genre at all, but I have my Greek professor in seminary. His daughter Tori Telfer is the host of the podcast. And so I was curious and started listening to it. It's about wild women on the wrong side of the law, serial killers, poisoners, cult leaders, all sorts of fantastic figures from the past up until present day. So season two is coming out. So definitely if you have a podcast subscription addiction, definitely go check that one out. And with that we are at the end of our upzone recording here today. Daniel and Grayson, thanks for jumping in with, with not much time to prepare, I really appreciated the conversation today.
- [45:42]
C
Anytime. Nice to see you again.
- [45:44]
A
Yeah, it was good to be able to do go down a little bit of a rabbit trail with each of you on what happens to snow when it falls from the sky and then collects in our city. So fantastic stuff. To those that are listening, thanks so much for continuing to be part of the Strong Towns movement. If you love what you heard, share that with us. We'd love to hear more. And if you have other articles or suggestions of things that you'd love for us to upzone, definitely feel free to pass that along with that. Take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong towns member@strongtowns.org membership.