This city is stuck in a Ponzi scheme.

And every other midsize city like it.

For the purposes of this week’s newsletter, I’m going to assume you haven’t read Strong Towns because, if you have, you already know where I’m going with this, and you’re already aware of the insurmountable problem this city is faced with.

If that is you, maybe you made the smart decision and you’re packing your bags to move to Amsterdam as you read this - or MAYBE, like me, you’ve compromised on your anti-car, pro-density values to settle into a starter home on the edge of the city that was just recently vacated by a wealthy middle-aged couple with kids who bought into a new build in College Heights.

Maybe you bought it, secretly thinking to yourself, maybe one day… that could be me.

It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.
- Darrin Rigo, owning a house in the Hart

Prince George has been growing… outwards.

The premise laid out in Strong Towns (again, I highly recommend reading this book if you live in this city and care about its future) is simply that we built our North American cities wrong. Like, from the foundation, and from the *promise*, they are actually designed to fail.

Prince George has been sprawling for decades - its borders reaching further and further into the untamed central BC wilderness. By George (hehe), we’re the 2nd largest (by land area) city in the province (next to Abbotsford) at a whopping 316 km² and yet our population is under half theirs!

It’s a curious little conundrum, isn’t it? Prince George’s population has remained mostly static for the last decade yet there’s new development happening all throughout the city - College Heights has extended its way down to the new Creekside Way, North Nechako and the Brink properties, and University Heights, oh my.

The Growth Ponzi Scheme

Okay Darrin, you’re rambling - what’s the actual Ponzi scheme here?

One of the central thesises (thesi? thesis’s) to Strong Towns is that this outward growth is expensive. Like REALLY expensive - but not on the front end. The real tricky thing is new development is actually quite lucrative on the front end when the initial development happens and represent a wonderful, much-needed cash injection to the city budget!

The problem is that it’s an eventual expense that comes due some time around 15 years after the expansion. It turns out that new subdivisions cost money to maintain. Pipes burst, roads need re-paving and re-painting (lord, do they ever), garbage and street cleaning, snow plowing etc etc.

And so you can imagine as a City expands outwards rapidly, its cost of maintenance is also going up rapidly. What’s an easy way to make money to pay for all that development? Well, you’re in luck! A wealthy developer wants to buy a big chunk of land and plop a beautiful new subdivision of $750,000-$1.2M homes!

That should cover a good portion of this year’s maintenance budget… and so on, and so on.

While this is true for many cities, I think its fair to put these two bullet points beside each other:

• Prince George is perhaps the most sprawled city in BC. We have the fewest tax payers paying for the greatest land mass.

• This growth Ponzi scheme has an obvious stacking effect (like every Ponzi scheme) - meaning the more sprawled your city is, the more sprawled it must become to pay for its sprawliness (that’s a technical term).

So while this problem is a threat to every North American city, it feels like an especially prescient problem to our great little hub city.

Who do we blame?!

THE CITY. No, I’m kidding. It’s not their fault. It really, really isn’t. I think the folks at Strong Towns put it best:

There’s a major difference between a Ponzi scheme perpetrated by someone like Bernie Madoff and what we at Strong Towns call the “Growth Ponzi Scheme.” And it’s this: we don’t think the people in your City Hall are fraudsters. No one is being nefarious. This is just the status quo approach every one of us has inherited. While the North American development pattern is about five-minutes-old in the long history of city building, it’s all any of us have known.

The problem with this scheme is that it’s the result of decades of poor planning, and not any one City Councillor or Mayor. It’s generations of bad decisions that centred on a “great dream” that we are now having to pay dues for.

That said, I encourage you all to pay very, very close attention to our council meetings and when you see a big, affordable, dense mobile home development in the Hart get struck down by a Mayor who campaigned on a housing-first platform because it “out of character of the neighbourhood”, you can see how this problem is perpetuated. Anyways.

The Answer

If you’re coming to this newsletter for answers to decades-long urban planning problems, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I’m barely qualified to write everything that’s above this sentence.

Here’s what I know from listening to people way smarter than me:

• Vote for pro-density candidates in municipal elections

• Vote for pro-transit, and pro-walkable city candidates in municipal elections

• Advocate fiercely for things like mobile homes, apartment buildings, and other forms of dense housing. Watch for people who write letters saying mobile homes are a bad thing and yell at them, also fiercely.

• If you’re physically able, and enjoy it, ride your bike around a bit more!

• If you live in an area and have a life that works around it, take transit!

• Care about this issue enough to pay attention to City Council meetings and watch closely for who votes down denser housing options and fights fiercely for big new developments. Consider sending them a copy of Strong Towns.

I can also point you in a few directions to arm you with some knowledge:

• Follow smart people like Rylan Graham and Brent Toderian on Twitter.

• Read Strong Towns and/or become a member here:

  https://www.strongtowns.org

• Watch some Not Just Bikes:

Alright. That’s it. I promise not all of these will be this dense and long but this is just one I've been thinking about for a long time.

Thanks for reading!