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SNL: Did the 2008 crash have an impact on your decision to begin blogging? CM: That was a big part of it, actually. Two thousand eight was the election year and it was the time things really started to melt down and implode. A lot of it was for my own mental health. The early blog days were my personal therapy session. When you write, it helps you sort out your thoughts. SNL: Strong Towns describes our suburban growth pattern as a "Ponzi scheme." How so? CM: The way we finance growth — from strictly a local government standpoint — the transactions come at a very low cost. When the federal government comes in with a grant or the state comes in with subsidies, as a local government we don't pay a whole lot for that. But all of a sudden now we get all this growth, all this tax revenue. Everything looks good. But we take on the long-term liability of maintaining all this stuff. We agree we'll fix the pipes and the roads, and that obligation doesn't come due for a generation. We get the near-term illusion of wealth, and those costs are going to come decades in the future. Then we go out and get more growth, because growth creates more instant wealth and makes us in a monetary sense better off. Without the malicious intent, it has the same function as a Ponzi scheme. SNL: Sarasota seems to have a lot of decaying strip malls. CM: It's incredibly common. The post-World War II pattern of development has a very pre- dictable curve to it. You have rapid growth; then, you have this period of stagnation and then just rapid decline and it goes into com- plete disuse. We see this again and again and again. We are living with, burdened with, that declining period of stuff that happened a gen- eration ago. Florida is particularly nasty in a lot of ways. It's so random. Around the Orlando area, you'll be driving and there's an abandoned strip mall next to a brand new mall. The pat- tern is so random it's hard to see how you stitch those gaps together. SNL: You say "age diversity" is an import- ant factor in building a strong town. We certainly lack that. How does a community increase that? CM: What tends to happen is you have distorted feedback loops. If you have a pop- ulation that tends to be elderly, they tend not to favor investments that attract young families. If you don't have kids in schools, you're not as hypersensitive about the condi- tion of schools. If you've got a college town, they tend to be less interested in things that help senior citizens lead productive lives. In Sarasota, you guys are kind of swamped by Press Releases & News Tips News@SarasotaNewsLeader.com Sarasota News Leader March 7, 2014 Page 52