Paths Magazine

---

January 12, 2025

By Ben Garst

On the Banks of the Maumee River, there are two cities. To the south is Perryburg, where I grew up, and to the north is Maumee and the greater Toledo suburban sprawl. On election day, Perrysburg voters again rejected a levy to increase funds for an already highly strained public school system. Now that the levy has failed, many teachers will be dismissed, and more students will take classes in what amount to mobile homes or trailers. Everyone seems to have an explanation for the incongruence between Perrysburg’s growth in the south and the spiraling costs of maintaining core services and infrastructure systems. Some blame the development of new apartments with tenants that some argue don’t pay their fair share. Others lament what they call the frivolous spending of school administrators. 

Some months before the levy failure, while working for Ohio’s senior U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, I received a shocking number of calls from the citizens of Maumee asking for funding assistance to pay for the sewage improvement that the city was demanding individual homeowners foot the bill for. With coincidentally similar timing, Perrysburg and Maumee now face different symptoms of the same problem: the financial insolvency of suburban development. In simple terms, both cities in the long term do not collect the necessary tax revenues to pay for the infrastructure supporting both new development themselves in addition to the older areas of the city. So, in a ponzi-scheme-esque way, cities like Perrysburg, for example, approve road upon road of new single-family homes in the hopes that this growth will produce tax revenue to fund streets already falling into disrepair in older, and primarily lower-income and less-white areas. 

The school system’s budget shortfalls, only exacerbated by the latest levy failure, speaks to the city’s inherently problematic financial model. As in many Ponzi-esque schemes, generations of hard-working and well-meaning citizens invest heavily. Suburbs cost more to maintain, yield lower property values, and diminish property tax revenues.  Suburban taxes struggle to maintain suburban living.  This means municipalities must continue to expand suburbia to cover costs.  Like a Ponzi scheme, new investors pay for the returns of older ones. Unaware of this, many taxpayers blame local issues on current city leaders, levy failures, or development broadly. Taxpayers often fail to realize the broader systemic issues of suburbia. 

In addition to financial difficulties, suburbanization often heralds a decline in social capital. This summer, I saw “Join or Die” , a documentary that reevaluates Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”. Putnam argues that there have been measurable declines in health outcomes and social cohesion over several decades including across political and income divides. Putnam posits that Americans should join clubs and find other ways of establishing social capital. This conception entails “features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” While the focus of Putnam’s work is not on suburbanization itself, he does acknowledge the role suburbanization plays in America’s declining attainment of social capital. 

Take Americans’ attitudes towards places like Kenyon. Kenyon is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. Evidently, parents choose to invest significant amounts of money to afford their children a ‘college experience.’ In addition to classes, a central part of Kenyon life is socializing. This is the reason, broadly speaking, for fraternities, pre-professional organizations, and even music ensembles. Such social institutions often depend on a higher density of young people found on college campuses. In contrast suburban ‘cities’ like Maumee and Perrysburg, in their pre-suburban city centers, resemble a college campus with the sort of traditional social, political, and other organizations that Putnam refers to. In Maumee, for example, it is no coincidence that the Elks Club is located feet from the walkable city center, while in Perrysburg, the city center is home to the American Legion. Young people’s attraction to active college campuses indicates that they might reasonably desire to live in places other than suburbia. 

Despite the challenges suburbanization poses to increasing American’s social capital accumulation, nonpartisan nonprofit groups like Strong Towns offer citizens and city leadership alike many manageable policy directions to pursue. Suburbia is the product of postwar federal policy that enforces a one-size-fits-all (low density) model for development. Solutions must be local, tailored to the diverse needs of various municipalities. Federal funds certainly help when local input is considered, but if history is any guide, some of the most desirable developments are specific to their location that encourage sensible levels of density: like a college-campus. 

Suburbanites have reason to question the merits of extreme density. Following a bell curve, extreme density like that of Manhattan does not afford ever-increasing levels of social capital accumulation. Many residents in such places likely experience living next to many neighbors but never knowing any of them. Getting the density-balance right means that people don’t live in political echo chambers because dense mixed-use communities entail people diverse in every sense of the word living and working alongside each other. This reality not only increases social cohesion but also means that people are more likely to perceive the passage of levies as something that will provide tangible benefits to the community. Beyond political perception, on a more fundamental level, getting residential density right means that cities can raise greater tax revenues relative to their total expenditures while ensuring the financial solvency of the city. Putnam is correct in saying that people should join clubs. Still, if we recognize the far more significant role the built environment has in affecting our interactions on a more micro scale, the impacts will be far more consequential and lasting.

Ben Garst can be reached at garst1@kenyon.edu

---

• Mail
• Facebook
• Twitter

---