Suburban growth in America is a devil's bargain. The prevailing post-WWII development approach is based on the rapid outward expansion of automobile-oriented suburbia. Such development, enabled by costly new roads and utilities, produces short-term growth and an infusion of cash for local governments. But it does so at the expense of unpayable long-term liabilities once that infrastructure begins to require maintenance.

This dynamic, which Strong Towns calls the Growth Ponzi Scheme, has been fueling the breathtaking expansion of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex for decades now. The superlatives write themselves. While Dallas defers road maintenance and has a $1.5 billion backlog in flood mitigation projects, the region’s suburbs spend eye-popping amounts to facilitate outward expansion. This expansion, in turn, spreads North Texas's wealth ever outward, hastening the decline of poorer parts of the region. In 2018, voters in Collin County (whose population has tripled since 1990) approved a $750 million bond issue for new roads, described by backers as “a start” toward raising the $12.6 billion officials say they will need over the next few decades. That is only for projected new roads, not maintenance of existing ones.

At some point, the forces that have buoyed the region’s outward expansion will slow or reverse, and Texans will be left with a bloated infrastructure and a tax base spread too thin across the landscape to support it. Then it will really be necessary to make difficult choices.

What does it take to stand against this tide and choose a different, more resilient path? We've been closely watching the tiny suburb of Fate, Texas, for several years now, as they seek to answer that question. Fate is the site of a remarkable effort by local leadership to incorporate meaningful financial resilience analysis into the city's planning process. It is one of only a few communities nationwide putting Strong Towns principles into action in a truly innovative way.

There's a problem, though. There is still a large disconnect between the current development pattern and the fiscally productive growth that Fate needs.

It turns out that to #DoTheMath is the easy part of changing your community's business model. The profoundly difficult part is telling a different story of what your community ought to be.

At some point, you have to, shall we say, choose your fate.

The Predicament

Fate's planning staff saw the writing on the wall. It wasn't just the region's core cities like Dallas drowning under unpayable maintenance obligations. The advance signs of trouble are there, not far under the surface if you know how to interpret a municipal budget, even in other nearby suburbs like the City of Richardson. In 2012, Richardson began a ten-year campaign to address the conditions of every residential street. For the past six years, Richardson has increased its annual contribution to street and alley maintenance by approximately 319%, to $4.4 million. The problem? According to the city's most recent Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, Richardson has over one half billion dollars’ worth of infrastructure assets of which, according to a recent article, the majority has exceeded its useful life. At the rate of $4.4 million dollars a year, it would take 126 years to amass enough money to replace all of that infrastructure (and that’s not accounting for inflation).