IT'S BEEN GOING ON FOR AT LEAST A QUARTER CENTURY.

Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn visited an infrastructure conference in New Zealand.

I came prepared to be curious. I expected to find a radically different place, shaped by its own geography, politics, and history. And in many ways, the parts of New Zealand I experienced were that. But the more I listened, the more I spoke with people, the more I realized: The problems they’re facing—the ones keeping local leaders awake at night—are strikingly, painfully familiar.

When I got up to speak, I opened with a disclaimer: “I’m going to talk about the United States because that’s the context I know. Please feel free to tell me afterward how different it is here.” And then I started talking about our struggles: cities that can’t maintain their roads, water systems failing in places big and small, development that doesn’t pay for itself yet is locked into place by outdated regulations that make adaptation nearly impossible, and the quiet bankruptcy creeping up on communities that built too much, too fast, without doing the math.

When I finished, people lined up to talk. Not to argue. But to say, “That’s us, too.”

He built more recovery margin into his schedules than I do, discovering on his first (domestic) flight that he had not packed his passport and still managed to arrange a work-around either to retrieve it or to have other arrangements made before boarding his overseas trip.  The missing passport has been a nightmare once or twice but thus far I've always had it on hand before hopping the limo to the airport (or, in one instance, to the railway station.)

When he got there, he saw what I refer to as the Californication of New Zealand.  "The most shocking thing I encountered was that, by all appearances, New Zealand has merely copied the most expensive and least productive parts of our development pattern and then built that at scale."

There was an America's Cup going on as the 21^st Century began with some of the events conveniently during the end-of-semester break.  "At the time, I noticed all the scenic ridges above towns like Christchurch and Queenstown and to an extent Wellington were sprouting trophy houses: the Californication of which I speak."  New Zealand subsequently placed restrictions on foreigners buying property on those ridges but let the trophy house construction continue.  A few years later, I had some familiarity with Strong Towns arguments and offered this.  "America's Ugly Strip Malls Were Caused By Government Regulation, argues Scott Beyer in Forbes.  The culprits?  Start with single-use zoning, which might be necessary to allow a relatively simple computer program like the original Sim City to run on a Commodore 64, but which gets in the way of emergence."  Perhaps New Zealand's Land Use Experts read the same manuals their North American counterparts did.

Paraparaumu, North Island, 7 January 2000, as observed from the Wellington to Auckland day train.

What Strong Towns contributors describe as the Suburban Experiment ran out of Other Peoples' Money in the United States, and the New Zealanders, living at the end of a long supply chain for many of the trappings of California, are subject to the same thing.

That if we can just borrow enough, or get enough federal assistance, we can keep up.

But the underlying problem isn’t cash flow. It’s insolvency. The cities we built after World War II—the ones with wide roads, long pipes, and other expensive infrastructure serving large lots with static development patterns—don’t generate enough wealth to sustain themselves. And now that it’s time to pay for renewals, the money isn’t there. It never was.

It's a further shame that internal improvements have become political.  There used to be a funky suburban train service from Wellington to those bedroom communities.  I don't know that there still is.  The North Island is volcanic with much lower population density than Japan or Taiwan, so much for any rail corridors.