Let's Do the Math - A Chat With Joe Minicozzi

If you’ve hung around Strong Towns for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard the phrase “do the math.” It’s an encouragement to look beyond a shiny brochure or a politician’s slick pitch to find out whether a development in your town, especially a new development, is truly worth the public (and private) investment. Will it provide a real return in terms of tax dollars to the city? Will it cost more in infrastructure than it actually offers to the neighborhood?

This Q&A is a follow-up of the Strong Towns Local Motive Session /Let's Do The Math: Is This Development Worthwhile?/ Watch the original recording here: https://academy.strongtowns.org/p/lm-...

00:00 Welcome to the Q&A
01:16 How is the infrastructure cost typically calculated and where can I find it?
06:27 Where are the "sweet-spots" of development intensity balanced against added infrastructure complexity / expense?
08:22 How do you see the value of urban parks, open space, and particularly urban tree canopy, affecting your analysis?
18:32 How does low income housing relate to doing the math?
22:33 How to do the math on industrial uses, including industrial parks.
25:05 Can a 40 unit mobile home park be a better value than a 178 unit planned development?
26:33 Potential for success in turning dying strip malls into housing?
28:35 What is the most valid critique of your methodology? Should tax revenue per acre be used to direct spending when many other values are equally important?
32:26 What do you make of the fact that the 1920s residential street in South Bend also loses money?
42:18 How do you factor it in if your state, country, and city governments are also funded by sales tax?
50:30 If you're telling someone not familiar with ST's "doing this math" how would you explain it? What's the elevator speech?
52:05 How can a small town that can’t afford urban3 can utilize this type of analysis? What are some of the simplest, most affordable, open-source tools to effectively display the disparity in property taxes?
55:41 Office-dense downtowns struggling to revive now find office building conversion to residential is too costly. Other ideas? Art districts?
57:48 We typically examine & compare North American and European cities, but how do cities on other continents perform per VPA analysis?
1:01:14 What are your thoughts on valuing view corridors (in Colorado)