The Middle Class Was Built in Washington, Not at City Hall
The same people who mock Moody’s negative outlook for Newark neither appreciate nor understand what Bloomfield’s excellent Moody’s short-term credit rating of MIG1 and its long-term A1 actually mean. Now, for cities that want to keep running as single-family-home suburban fantasies, they must either institute fees or borrow money for upkeep.
Good credit is a critical prerequisite for borrowing, enabling cities to fund needed upkeep even if they resist increasing fees.
“You can’t handle the truth.”- A Few Good Men
For suburbia in 2026, that means austerity, that oftn means defunding your schools.
So for the US communities, your options are to borrow money, “punt” until the next administration, and go into debt, or user fees, which is the freemarketeers' wet dream.
This is what I don’t understand. The same people who call “urban” mayors irresponsible for NOT instituting more fees and building too much are the same people who call “suburban” mayors duplicitous for charging fees, as they are not allowed to build. This is literally the same “reformer.” What game is really going on here?
The current fiscal nightmare cities and school districts are now facing was not caused by a single item. It wasn’t one mayor or one unpaid bill; it was several things, well actually dozens, well...this is only FB, later Patreon, but it is not ONE thing. It is occurring because overlapping pressures rooted in many past actions are reshaping local finance, even as I type this. During the pandemic, federal relief, especially the $190 billion ESSER program, temporarily expanded school and municipal budgets.
That funding expired in 2024, creating a sudden “funding cliff” as districts lost a major revenue source while upholding higher staffing and service levels.
“So you’re saying they were irresponsible!”
“No, Jesus Christ, are you five, like there is no ‘gotcha,’ not like that.”
At the same time, federal support has remained relatively limited or uncertain, sometimes delayed or withheld, adding instability to local budgets.
(You know, because of the effing fa/c/ist in the White House that disaster patriarchy insists is "just the same" what you think is bad is your imagination, like your endometriosis! "See if we do this mutual aid garden dot dot dot dot")
In addition, cities are facing rising costs from inflation, infrastructure needs, and service demands, while revenue growth is slowing, and to add to this, some states are cutting taxes without replacing lost local funds, because they wouldn’t want to risk helping lazy people who aren’t men and aren’t white.
The result is a structural gap. To close it, local governments are raising fees, increasing property taxes, cutting services, and continuing to rely on borrowing—deepening dependence on capital markets rather than reducing it.
“But why do they have to borrow money?”
“You ask this question, but you just got through writing a 1000-word post on Newark and their negative Moody outlook?”
“Why do you think cities need credit?”
Hegemony has transformed modern cities from lived space to credit profiles. Our communal existence, from school to our social lives, is translated into tax base, revenue consistency, and debt capacity. Our communities are flattened into letter grades. In this conception, urban life is rendered commensurable, comparable, priced, and ranked, within the physics of risk.
Credit ratings produce cities. Your city is not the town square, the beautiful pond, no. Your city is its credit rating.
And this is solidified in op-eds, social media, and even at bars. Defining fiscal “health” as stability, predictability, and compliance, they establish the terms under which cities can borrow, build, and even imagine their future selves. Governance becomes anticipatory: budgets are molded not only by residents’ needs but also by the fear of a downgrade.
A credit rating is spatial discipline. The city is disciplined for investors, its future discounted in advance. And use and effectiveness are subordinated to its exchange value. The right to the city is now on its knees, to its obligation to repay.
It’s Nate running from Naz.
Credit ratings did not originate with neoliberalism—they had existed for decades—but the 1970s converted them from advisory tools into governing infrastructure. Earlier, cities borrowed through a mix of local banks, federal aid, and bond markets, with ratings as one input among others. The fiscal crises of the 1970s, especially the 1975 New York City collapse, shattered this system and accelerated a shift toward austerity and market dependence.
At the same time, regulatory changes—particularly the SEC’s 1975 creation of the NRSRO category—embedded ratings into financial rules, requiring institutions to rely on them.
As institutional investors replaced local lenders and cities increasingly financed themselves through debt, credit ratings became the common language of risk.
With this neoliberal restructuring, ratings became conditions of access to capital, altering urban governance around creditworthiness, discipline, and anticipatory compliance.
Suburban land use does not pay for itself, but in many cases can become “Minnie the Moocher.” By privileging single-family homes, cities spread housing infrastructure across large areas, limiting revenue per acre. Low-density development generates less tax revenue per acre, yet requires more roads, pipes, and services per resident.
The consequence is that single-family homes become a location of privatized gains and socialized tantrums. This individualistic white picket made-it-my-way lifestyle is heavily subsidized by business districts in large, often currently or formerly hypersegregated inner cities.
Over time, this disequilibrium becomes structural. As infrastructure ages, maintenance costs rise while the tax base remains thin. The thinness is exacerbated by the lack of development and seniors with caps on their property taxes or Prop 13 (a la California) protections. Municipal budgets fill the gap through higher property taxes, user fees, or, most persistently, debt. This is what gets me, you don’t development, AND you think debt is bad, but you don’t want, as you call, “nannygate” sharing and the feds telling you what to do.
You want it all, and you need to understand that is not how this works.
I didn’t say it’s fair or not fair. I’m simply saying what is, get mad at the Chicago School.
And your federal government no longer cares. The whole “the local is what matters most” was kind of a lie, and some of you folks are going to discover exactly why.
If you own a SFH, you actually aren’t paying enough taxes, not in comparison to what you’re getting. “Stable” homeownership masks a system that depends on continuous borrowing to sustain itself.
Most residential areas are loath to raise any taxes. This can be seen as a result of the plateau of lower and middle-class incomes in the USA after the Stagflation of 1973. High marginal tax rates were removed for high-income earners, which made middle- and working-class wages a target for increased executive pay. Worker productivity has increased more than 200% since 1970, but wages haven’t proportionally moved since 1973. And that money is not available for working and middle-class families to invest in their communities because they are just struggling to keep up with inflation.
This spatial model creates financial dependence. As cities turn to capital markets to finance basic obligations. They become governed by creditworthiness. Ratings become conditions of survival.
The suburban setting thus generates its own discipline: space expands, revenue thins, and the city is compelled to borrow, binding it to the abstract judgment of investors.
Do you want to pay or build? That is your choice.
I don’t want to pay fees. I want to have a SFH.
That’s not how this works in real life. Now you can kick and scream and cry, but one of those two things is happening, unless extractive capitalism ends tomorrow. Oh, we could, of course, have a sane federal government that follows the social contract and funds society properly, but FREEDOM and REFORM, and MY RIGHTS…