Hendrix is writing about the Dallas-Fort Worth region, but the same can be said of any metro area in America. We all embarked, all at once, upon the same massive experiment in the post-WWII era. We all now build most of the places we plan to inhabit all at once, to a finished state, according to a mass-production model. And once they’re built, there is nothing for them to do but decline.

The Inexorable Slide Into Decline

Our suburban neighborhoods are places that are not intended to change. They are, in most cases, not even allowed—by zoning codes, HOA covenants, or the rigidity of their own design—to evolve and renew themselves through incremental redevelopment. As such, these are neighborhoods that will never look better than the year the first buyers close on the first homes. The vinyl siding will never be newer. The pavement will never be smoother. There is nowhere to go but down.

Hendrix describes vividly the depreciation of the places that represented the American dream in the 1950s through 1980s into places of growing poverty, mounting municipal debt, and crumbling asphalt today. He makes clear this is not all about cheap, shoddy design—though some of it is. The boldface emphasis is mine:

Suburban neighborhoods become disposable not simply because they have been designed poorly. They also have been priced poorly. When the bill comes due for cheap homes and sprawling infrastructure, the ROI just isn't there for the renewal and repair needed for a truly sustainable city. So people move on and places deteriorate, leaving the bill for future generations.

The “people move on” part is a key part of the story here. If you live in a community that has some intrinsic uniqueness, some raison d’etre, you are apt to get residents who are committed to staying put and reinvesting in the place.

On the other hand, a lot of suburban American neighborhoods are interchangeable in form and function. The appeal of many of these places to home buyers is their newness: full stop. When they become older and less desirable, and the bills start to mount for deferred maintenance of the public infrastructure, what are residents with the means to move going to do? Why would they stay put? They can pay lower taxes and enjoy a nicer environment in the next, newest suburb down the line.

And so, we get disposable places, because they are places that could be anywhere and thus are nowhere. James Howard Kunstler made this observation in 1993’s seminal The Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler’s particular focus was on what makes much of modern suburbia unlovable from an architecture and design standpoint.

Strong Towns’s contribution to the debate, though, has been to shine a harsh spotlight on the financial unsustainability of places that never had a “there” there. Hendrix gets it, sticking to financial arguments, and he captures the Growth Ponzi Scheme in a nutshell: