How Strong Towns Principles Relate to Sioux Falls — An Infinite Game

- based on “Strong Towns — A Bottom-Up Revolution To Rebuild American Prosperity” by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

“The development of a city is an infinite game. A successful city does not have an end date. ” — Chuck Marohn

Marohn compares the life cycle of businesses within a city to a baseball game. A baseball game has a beginning, an end and a way to keep score. It is a finite game. A business has a beginning, an end and a way to determine if it was successful. A business will eventually fail or close and just like a baseball game, when it ends it goes away. It is a finite game.

Cities, on the other hand, are an infinite game. An infinite game does not have an end and is played differently than a finite game. Cities may fail but they do not go away — they hang on indefinitely while failing to provide their inhabitants with service or security. When places like East St. Louis fail they become ghost towns with vacant lots where businesses and houses used to stand. Crime becomes a serious problem and infrastructure falls apart. Failed cities are not pretty but they linger on.

So, the primary goal of a city in an infinite game is to not fail. This brings it into conflict with businesses that are playing a finite game and are out to win. Businesses do things that allow them to win even if it harms others. The gentrification of Oakland is an example. Businesses maximize profit by increasing rents and building housing that only the rich can afford. Residents who have lived in a neighborhood for years and helped make it a desirable neighborhood can no longer afford to live there. Homelessness has become a serious problem in Oakland because of this. So in an infinite game, a city like Oakland will continue to exist even as its citizens become homeless. What is Oakland’s responsibility to its inhabitants? Marohn suggests that “If the city is to endure, the individual competing objectives must be harmonized so they do not undermine the community”.

Some cities faced with rising rent and land values are trying to harmonize those competing interests. Minneapolis in its 2040 Plan will require developers to create some affordable housing with each development that is built or pay a fee or donate land. Minneapolis is also eliminating single-family dwelling requirements that tend to limit the amount of available housing. Berlin, Germany is freezing rents until more housing can be built in an attempt to keep renters from being forced out of the city. Time will tell if these actions are effective.

So how is Sioux Falls playing the infinite game of city building? At this point, we do not have requirements for developers to include affordable housing in a development. Recent construction in the downtown area, the most walkable and human-centric neighborhood in the city, has tended to be high-end developments without mixed incomes.

The city, state, and federal government funds affordable housing and several affordable housing units have been built. Older parts of the city have a mix of multi-unit buildings and more can be added to increase the supply of rental units. But as the city grows more aggressively, new challenges will arise. Will Sioux Falls leadership be able to understand the complex nature of the infinite game beyond the election cycle? We will see.

We don’t have a crisis at this point but as we continue to play the infinite game we will have to figure out how to harmonize competing interests.

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