Breaking Down Atlanta's Suburban Experiment (Sandy Springs, Alpharetta: 2015, city hall, credit)

[jeoff]

Originally Posted by brown_dog_us

The author finishes with this:



but absolutely no facts to back up that Gwinnett County has financial problems or how it is in a better financial position than Orange County.

And, even if it is, Orange County seems to be mostly a college town and its suburb population 100,000—how is that a model of how a county outside of Atlanta should or could grow? I imagine Athens-Clark-County could learn from them.

[JAS]

I can understand questions about Gwinnett's growth, but comparing it to Orange County, NC is silly. A few notes, I'm sure there are others:

1) For starters, Orange County's main industry is UNC and its hospitals. The county as a whole has never been like Gwinnett.
2) The county's growth policies (especially Chapel Hill) have made housing relatively expensive for the area, which means that the average middle-class family would likely live in Wake or Durham or somewhere else due to costs.
3) Orange County was settled in the 1700's. The county seat is actually Hillsborough, a small town north of Chapel Hill. These towns were formed over 200 years ago; Gwinnett doesn't have that history.
4) And despite the growth of the Triangle, it still isn't as populated as the Atlanta metro.

I lived in Chapel Hill for about 3 years back in the 1990's, and it is a nice place to live ... but it has never been similar to Gwinnett.

[jsvh]

That is kind of the point: The counties developed in very different ways.

The authors are making the argument that having a small town "downtown" sounded by rural area is much more economically sustainable model than a county filled with suburban sprawl even if that suburban county has a lot more density on the whole.

[autolycus25]

Originally Posted by brown_dog_us

They didn't have the thriving downtowns when the suburban growth slowed 20 years ago.

Roswell has continued to grow at a decent rate even in the last 20 years. It's really only be the last 5-10 where there's been a significant slow down in growth. The city will, IMO, start to have some financial problems if we can't get a better mix of commercial property than what we currently have. Alpharetta and Sandy Springs are much better positioned as far as that goes.

The downtown master plan which continues to push toward a walkable downtown village will help a lot, if the anti-development, and supposedly pro-historic district, people don't put a halt to it. If they do, Roswell could be in for a lot of trouble. The city also needs to try to bring back some of the developers who were interested in the large parcels near 400-92 and get some large Class A buildings in that area. Unfortunately they were kind of run off a decade ago when the anti-development types successfully blocked a development that would have looked like a smaller version of Avalon (and would have been finished long before Avalon).

[jeoff]

Originally Posted by jsvh

That is kind of the point: The counties developed in very different ways.

The authors are making the argument that having a small town "downtown" sounded by rural area is much more economically sustainable model than a county filled with suburban sprawl even if that suburban county has a lot more density on the whole.

Which is sustainable for a county with university town. How do you do that for a county in Georgia? Growing from a bedroom community to something Gwinnettish has obvious downsides. But a small dense town in the countryside is probably going to be dependent on a limited number of businesses—- that is hardly a guarantee of economic stability or sustainablity in the current age (unless that business is a flagship university).

[jsvh]

Originally Posted by jeoff

Which is sustainable for a county with university town. How do you do that for a county in Georgia? Growing from a bedroom community to something Gwinnettish has obvious downsides. But a small dense town in the countryside is probably going to be dependent on a limited number of businesses—- that is hardly a guarantee of economic stability or sustainablity in the current age (unless that business is a flagship university).

Zoning. Scale back setbacks, parking minimums, density limits. Also how we build transportation infrastructure matters too.

A university does nothing magic on it's own. Creating a dense, walking-scaled node is the key.

If you travel elsewhere in the world without our zoning laws you will find our suburban sprawl is the odd experiment. Most of them are more the dense "small town" nodes in the middle of rural areas.

[Radical_Thinker]

I fail to see why lots of debt is a problem for the future. If the county continues to do well, the debt gets paid off in time. If it goes downhill, the county goes bankrupt. Bye-bye debt. Same with the US as a whole - we borrow money to the sky (which we'll do in the next 20 years or so) and most likely, we'll not be able to pay it off. Bankrupt city. But everything that we've built with that cash is still there - that doesn't go away. We'll just have to have balanced budgets for a few decades, is all...lol.

Money is cheap. Debt is cheap. And life goes on. And it's certainly nothing to break a sweat over.

[fourthwarden]

Originally Posted by arjay57

I'm not sure I understand what they mean by "Gwinnett's precarious financial status." They've got a AAA bond rating.

Hemingway put it rather succinctly when asked how he went bankrupt:

"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

Keep in mind that infrastructure burdens work on generational timelines. For example, road lifetimes are generally thought of as 25 year spans. Given the year-by-year budget style that most governments go with, that masks the long-term problems.

A road may generate enough money to keep up with annual maintenance and annual payments on the bonds that were issued to build that road in the first place, indeed it may generate a good bit more, giving the image that it is a net economic benefit, but when it comes time to replace that road, we might find that there was not enough money made to afford it.

Furthermore, bond ratings are a (highly) educated guess, but they are not perfect. They attempt to evaluate the economic well-being of an area: what is the Median income, how concentrated is community’s dependence on certain employers or industries, what is the diversity of the tax base, what is the rate of population growth, is the population younger or older, are tax revenues going up or down, why are revenues going up or down, what are the tax rates and can they be increased without decreasing revenues, is the economic area undergoing challenges, how affluent is the community, city, or state, etc?

You can go through the list of variables, and check off a ton of good things to earn a bond rating, but if your books ignore long-term burdens, then you've still got a problem. As that problem becomes more apparent, with the burdens catching up and overwhelming what positive revenue you had, then your rating would start to get drop.

An example of that happening in the real world was with Detroit. There were a lot of problems baked in early with the city, between mismanagement, a lack of economic diversity, and, yes, infrastructure burdens larger than they could sustain. Still, the city's bond ratings were comparatively high for a while before everything fell apart. Moody rated the city between BBB & BB from 1970 to 2005, while S&P rated the city A from 1998 to 2005. In 2005, though, the credit rating tanked over the next seven years.

[arjay57]

Originally Posted by fourthwarden

An example of that happening in the real world was with Detroit. There were a lot of problems baked in early with the city, between mismanagement, a lack of economic diversity, and, yes, infrastructure burdens larger than they could sustain. Still, the city's bond ratings were comparatively high for a while before everything fell apart. Moody rated the city between BBB & BB from 1970 to 2005, while S&P rated the city A from 1998 to 2005. In 2005, though, the credit rating tanked over the next seven years.

Detroit was the opposite of suburban sprawl. It was a dense urban area with nearly 2 million people packed into a city the size of Atlanta.

[jsvh]

Originally Posted by arjay57

Detroit was the opposite of suburban sprawl. It was a dense urban area with nearly 2 million people packed into a city the size of Atlanta.

They were. They are many times smaller now.

"Motor city" full on embraced car culture & sprawl and sliced itself up with way more highway than even the pro-highway folks on this forum could dream of.

Highways in Atlanta city limits:
-75
-85
-20
-285
-400

Detroit:
-75 (Fisher Fwy)
-Chrysler Fwy
-94 (Ford Fwy)
-96
-375
-10 (John C Lodge Fwy)
-39 (South Field Fwy)
-8 (Davidson Fwy)

And again, that is just the city limits.