Last Thursday I was sitting in a radio station in Lafayette, Louisiana, waiting to go on the air with the City-Parish President, Joey Durel, when he turned to me and said,

“I’ve been telling people for years that we need to think differently. I’ve known it. I’ve seen it. You guys are helping me explain what that means.”

“You guys” would be myself along with Joe Minicozzi and Josh McCarty of Urban 3. For over a year now, we’ve been working with Lafayette to do something that is simple in concept but massively complex in execution: build a tool that will shed light on the geographic mismatch between revenue and expenses throughout the city and surrounding parish. What are the revenues and what are the expenses for each parcel in the city?

This is no coarse model jacked up with assumptions. We’re not splitting the city into arbitrary 40-acre chunks and applying our biases to each. We’re taking an agnostic look at the data, pulling it together in a powerful way that has never been done before. What we’ve uncovered demonstrates in the macro what we’ve pieced together in the micro: auto-oriented development patterns are bankrupting our cities.

Running a city like a business?

It is sometimes said that we need to run our cities like a business. We fundamentally disagree with that premise.

A city is not a business for a number of obvious reasons. A city cannot be liquidated in a bankruptcy. If Lafayette fails, New Orleans does not get to purchase its tax base at bargain prices and make productive use of them. Lafayette does not get to rid itself of its obligations to provide services, even through bankruptcy. It is stuck with miles of roads, miles of pipes and thousands of acres of area along with all the good and bad financially that comes with that.