By Andrew Burleson, Free Range City through Strong Towns
In Summary:
In many cities, sidewalk repairs are left to individual property owners, leaving cracked concrete and trip hazards unfixed because the costs are too high. Denver voters approved a modest annual fee that allows the city to manage repairs block by block, replacing or leveling sections quickly and efficiently. The result wasn’t just smoother sidewalks — it sparked neighborhood enthusiasm and renewed faith that government can still deliver tangible results.
What Apopka can learn from this plan
For Apopka, the lesson is straightforward: residents often judge their city less by grand master plans and more by whether the basics work. A predictable, city-managed sidewalk or pedestrian repair program — funded through a small annual assessment or included in existing infrastructure budgets — could eliminate patchwork maintenance and make entire neighborhoods safer at once, rather than relying on individual homeowners to shoulder $2,000–$3,000 repairs. Just as importantly, visible block-by-block improvements create something rare in local government: goodwill. When residents see crews quickly and professionally fixing everyday problems, trust builds. And that trust makes it easier to tackle the bigger, more controversial issues Apopka faces, from growth and transportation to utilities and redevelopment.
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This was the scene throughout my neighborhood a few weeks back.
Our neighborhood’s sidewalks have been in mediocre shape for years, with a lot of cracked and uneven slabs, and even a handful of potholes. As a parent, I had to keep an eye out for all these trip-hazards when we’d walk around with the kids… it’s no fun when your toddler ends up sprawled across the concrete.
Run-down sidewalks are a pretty common problem across the country, in part because they exist in a bit of infrastructural limbo. While sidewalks are part of the right-of-way and obviously serve the general public, most cities expect each individual property owner to maintain their sidewalk individually. But this rarely happens because replacing concrete is difficult and expensive.
Related: Commentary: How disconnected street design turns everyday walks into deadly risks.
When I looked into it, just replacing a few cracked sidewalk sections in front of my house was $3,000! And while laying fresh concrete is somewhat DIY-friendly, replacing an old slab is really not.
A few years ago, Denver voters approved a program to solve this. Most residents pay $150 per year, and the city is fully responsible for maintaining the sidewalks.
This fall, the work crews appeared in my corner of town. They surveyed existing conditions, using spray paint to indicate which sections needed to be replaced, which ones could be leveled without replacement (grinding down small ledges, etc.), and which sections needed more careful work to deal with underlying tree roots or other complications. A few days later, the traffic cones appeared, and everyone moved their cars out of the way. The crews generally did a few block faces at a time: removing the old sidewalk with a small excavator and laying wooden forms on day one, pouring the new sidewalk sections on day two, and cleaning up on day three. It took less than two weeks to repair the entire neighborhood (about 90 blocks).
On its face, this is a pretty mundane story. City repairs infrastructure, “yawn.”
But what I didn’t anticipate is how excited everyone in the neighborhood was about this, how much it was the “talk of the town” for weeks. When the crews arrived on our block, we came out to say hello and thank them for their work. I was surprised to see most of the neighbors did the same. The kids were thrilled by the excavator and the cement truck, and the crew were all smiles as they demonstrated how it works.
The foreman told me this was one of the most fun jobs they’d ever had, that people had been bringing them snacks and drinks the whole time. You’d think that people would be grumpy about the disruption of several days of construction right in front of their homes, but instead the project was like a slow-motion community parade.
One of the hot topics of 2025 was State Capacity. Books like Abundance and Why Nothing Works had a lot to say about our inability to build enough housing, regional power lines, and commuter rail. There’s a general sense that government in America is too bogged down in vetocracy to get things done.
But the big failures at the top of the system should not be surprising in light of the dysfunction at the base. When our cities and towns can’t maintain basic infrastructure, we don’t have the foundation of institutional capacity and civic trust to do bigger things at the state or national level. Sidewalk repair is state capacity.
And for people who care about building state capacity, I think Denver’s program is a good model. Voters were asked a simple question (Do you want the city to repair sidewalks?) and they approved a new tax to fund it. The city put the program together, is doing a good job delivering, and people noticed! The next time the city puts a question to voters, they’ll be more likely to trust that the city can deliver results.
But for advocates who want to see government solve problems, it’s important to understand that state capacity starts at the local level, and there’s no shortcut to building it. We need to care deeply about maintaining our sidewalks, drinking water, schools, parks, and libraries. When we can’t do those things, we should be obsessed with figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it. With a strong foundation of high-functioning local government, we’ll have a much better chance of building effective state and national institutions.
Key Points:
- Sidewalk responsibility often falls to homeowners, leading to deferred maintenance.
- Replacing just a few slabs can cost thousands of dollars per property.
- Denver voters approved a city-run repair program funded by about $150 per year.
- Crews repaired entire neighborhoods within weeks using a systematic block-by-block approach.
- Visible, everyday improvements boosted community morale and trust in local government.
This article was originally published on Andrew Burleson's Free Range City. It is shared here with permission.
