The Strong Towns Podcast

Tales from the Crypt, +Update

A brief update from Chuck Marohn and (by request) a replay of Chuck's recent appearance on the Tales from the Crypt podcast with Marty Bent. Many thanks to Marty for allowing the rebroadcast.

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Do What You Can, a Coronavirus Update

There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen. Suddenly, the fragility that Strong Towns has long talked about is front and center to our national conversation. What is a Strong Towns advocate to do? We're starting that conversation today as the Strong Towns movement shifts into a new mode of operations to fit the times we find ourselves in.

Ben Stevens: Every Building Is a Startup

There are many emotions associated with the creation of a new building in our neighborhood. They can be symbols of our best hopes...or our worst fears. Many of us have strong feelings about the kinds of buildings we want in our cities and towns, but, unless we are developers ourselves, chances are good we don’t have a holistic understanding of all the disciplines involved in creating that new building — disciplines that include urban planning, architecture, law, finance, and government, to name just a few — or the risks involved.

Ben Stevens wants to help demystify the process, not just for laypeople with a vested interest in what gets built in their neighborhoods, but even for those professionals involved in one aspect of the creation of a building but who may not have a full appreciation for the other aspects.

Ben is the author of the recent book The Birth of a Building. He is a real estate developer, a project manager at an affordable housing development firm in Chicago, and the founder of The Skyline Forum, an online interview series with developers, architects, and urban planners. He is also our guest on this week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast.

Together, Ben Stevens and Chuck Marohn talk about incremental development and why the development that’s best for our cities is often the most difficult as a business model. They discuss the “perfect storm” of housing affordability. (It’s not merely an issue of supply, but also financing, pressures from neighborhood associations, unprecedentedly high quality, and more.) They also discuss the tension at the heart of the American dream and why the creation of a building is a complex (and not merely complicated) undertaking.

Then we hear about two simple ways city officials can “kick the tires” on the development process in their own community, with an eye toward lowering risk and getting the kind of development they most want.

This promises to be the first of multiple conversations over the coming months and years. You don’t want to miss it.

Show Notes:

• The Birth of a Building, by Ben Stevens (book)

• The Birth of a Building (website)

• The Skyline Forum

• Ben Stevens (Twitter)

• Ben Stevens (LinkedIn)

• Recent Strong Towns Articles on Incremental Development

  • How Incremental Development Came to Miami, by Andrew Frey

  • Is “Gentle Density” Enough, by Daniel Herriges

  • How to Get Started as a Small-Scale Developer, by R. John Anderson

Danielle Arigoni: Making Great Places for People of all Ages

We’re undergoing a massive demographic shift in the United States, says Danielle Arigoni, director of AARP’s Livable Communities initiative. By 2034, for the first time in our country’s history, there will be more people over the age of 65 than under 18.

These changes make it not only important but urgent to build towns and cities that are strong for people of all ages and abilities.

The Livable Communities initiative is on the front lines of doing just that. We’re breaking from our usual Monday publishing schedule to tell you more about it on this episode of the Strong Towns podcast.

Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn talks with Danielle Arigoni about why placemaking isn’t just for Millennials, about how temporary projects help move the needle on poverty, and why it’s more important than ever to engage the whole community in building stronger, more livable, and more livable communities.

Danielle also introduces listeners to an abundance of resources from AARP. These include: 

• A grant program that will fund at least $1 million of quick-action projects that lead to demonstrable change
• A new book collaboration with Team Better Block
• A new report on rural livability
• And much more.

Show Notes:

• AARP Livable Communities (site)
• AARP Livable Communities (Twitter)
• Community Challenge Grant
• The Pop-Up Placemaking Toolkit (with Team Better Block)
• 2020 Rural Livability Report
• Age-Friendly Network
• AARP Livable Communities Newsletter
• Team Better Block
• Recent Strong Towns articles on building livable communities for people of all ages:
  • Want a city that works for people of all ages? Take these 3 steps., by Rachel Quednau
  • America is Aging. And Seniors Will Suffer Disproportionately From a World Built Around Driving., by Daniel Herriges
  • A (Solvable) Epidemic of Loneliness, by Chuck Marohn
  • The Livability of a Multi-Generational Neighborhood, by Daniel Herriges
  • The Isolation of Aging in an Auto-Oriented Place, by Sara Joy Proppe

David McAlvany: Legacy is an Accumulation of Little Decisions

What comprises a legacy? Is it your one big win (or big loss)? Probably not. No matter what domain of life we’re talking about—the built environment, our city finances, or our family and community—chances are good that our legacy will be (in the words of today’s podcast guest) the accumulation of many little decisions. The big question is whether the legacy we leave will be one we intended to leave. 

This week’s guest on the Strong Towns podcast is David McAlvany, a respected thought leader on the global economy. David is the CEO of McAlvany ICA and the host of McAlvany Weekly Commentary, a podcast about monetary, economic, and geopolitical news. (This is on the very short list of can’t-miss podcasts for Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn.) David is also the author of The Intentional Legacy, a book about consciously shaping the legacy we hope to leave future generations.

In this episode, Chuck Marohn and David McAlvany discuss how to be more intentional in what we pass on to the future—at home and at work, as well as in our cities and towns. They talk about how the increasing speed of life may be affecting the quality of our decisions, why crises emerge when we ignore basic maintenance—this is true both in the built environment and in our most important relationships—and who an elected official’s real constituents are (hint: it’s not voters in the next election).

The word “intentional” comes from a Latin word meaning “to stretch toward.” Thus, to be intentional with our legacy is to stretch towards the future even as we make decisions in the present. This wide-ranging conversation will help us make the right decisions, the kind of decisions—big and small—we’ll feel comfortable rippling ahead of us for generations to come.

Additional Show Notes:

 

• The Intentional Legacy (book), by David McAlvany
• McAlvany’s Weekly Commentary (podcast)
• DavidMcAlvany.com
• McAlvany ICA
• David McAlvany (Twitter)

 

Jenny Schuetz: Who's To Blame for High Housing Costs?

The affordable housing crisis is affecting not just people in coastal cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco, L.A., Seattle, and Portland. The crisis is spreading geographically and rippling throughout the economy. In the midst of such a crisis, it’s natural to want to assign blame; it’s also natural to look for a silver bullet solution. But is that even possible with a phenomenon as massive (and massively complex) as the housing crisis? Is development a rigged game, open only to the largest and best-connected firms?

To help us get some answers we talked to Jenny Schuetz, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institution. Schuetz is an expert in urban economics and housing policy, with a focus on housing affordability. 

In this episode of the Strong Towns podcast, Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn talks with Schuetz about her recent article on the factors driving up housing costs. She and Chuck discuss the role of uncertainty—both “time uncertainty” and “success uncertainty”— in the soaring cost of homes, why only the biggest developers can afford to build in some major metros, and why local housing discussions often pit the homeowner class against the renter class.

They also discuss what city officials and local advocates can do to loosen the housing market in their places—including allowing the next increment of growth by right, similar to the recent change in Minneapolis.

This is a masterclass on the housing crisis from one of the nation’s foremost experts.

 

Additional Show Notes:

• Read Jenny Schuetz’s article: “Who’s to blame for high housing costs? It’s more complicated than you think.”

• Follow her on Twitter: @jenny_schuetz

• Jenny Schuetz at The Brookings Institution

• Subscribe to the Brookings Metro Newsletter

• Recent Housing Articles from Strong Towns

  • “Why Are Developers Only Building Luxury Housing?”

  • The 5 Immutable Laws of Affordable Housing

  • 8 Things Your Town Can Do to Add More Housing (Without Spending a Dime)

  • Can We Afford to Care About Design in a Housing Crisis?

  • We Used to Just Call These Houses

Tim Carney: "Alienated America" and the Rise of Populism

The rise of Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries—and his eventual win in the general—defied expectations and confounded explanations. Nearly every national poll was wrong, and political observers have spent the last four years trying to understand what happened (and how so many of the experts missed it).

In his book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Timothy Carney makes the compelling case that the most common explanations for Trump’s ascendance—the economy, for example—don’t get to the root of things. He demonstrates that the people who resonated with Trump’s message that “the American dream is dead” are those whose communities lacked the social cohesion that binds neighbor to neighbor. While voters cast ballots mostly along party lines in the general election, in the early primaries, Candidate Trump actually struggled in places where the institutions that are “the key to the good life”— faith communities, vibrant civic organizations, etc.—already gave people a strong sense of purpose and belonging. Maybe you’re starting to see why Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn named Alienated America one of the best books he read in 2019, saying “I highly recommend it to anyone trying to understand the cultural ramifications of fragile places.”

Tim Carney is Chuck’s guest on this week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast. Together, they discuss how populism—on both the right and the left, and in 2016 as well as today—is springing from alienation (we need to belong to something). They talk about community’s physical dimension (proximity, walkability, etc.), why people are healthiest when they belong to “a lot of little platoons,” and why idleness isn’t so much a vice as an affliction. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in how frayed social bonds effect not just our national politics but our local life as well.

Show Notes:

• Timothy Carney on Twitter

• Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner

• American Enterprise Institute

• Alienated America (out in paperback this week)

• Chuck Marohn’s Best Books of 2019

• “Dignity in an Alienated America”: A Conversation between Tim Carney and Chris Arnade

Liz Swaine: Bootstrapping Downtown Shreveport

All too often, the national narrative portrays Louisiana as a backwater state. But we here at Strong Towns see things very differently. For example, we think Shreveport, Louisiana doesn’t get the credit it deserves for changing the local conversation around what will make the city stronger. We’ll go even further and say that Shreveport has one of the leading downtowns in the country—though too few people (including too few Shreveporters) are aware of it.

On this week’s edition of the Strong Towns podcast, we explore why we’re so excited about what’s unfolding in Shreveport. In this episode, Strong Towns president Charles Marohn interviews Liz Swaine, the Executive Director of the Shreveport Downtown Development Authority. Marohn and Swaine discuss the incredible renaissance of Shreveport’s downtown and why it’s important that this renaissance has unfolded incrementally. They talk about “demolition by neglect” and a better use for incentive money. And they discuss the proposed Cross Bayou Point plan, an expensive (and decidedly un-incremental) approach to redevelopment—what it is, why it will make Shreveport weaker, and why the campaign to approve it has been genuinely offensive.

In this episode, downtown advocates everywhere will learn how to better work with local officials to spur positive change in their own communities, how to make progress without burning bridges, and how to accept the inevitable defeats.

Highlights:

“It’s really important not to take things personally. You do your best, you fight your hardest, and then you shake hands and live to fight another day. It’s important for you to let those elected officials that you’re either with or against know that you’re with them or against them on this, but on the next issue you may be reversed.”

“We had a situation here several years ago. There was a city councilperson and they were debating a project in a nice council district that’s a lovely place and people like to live there and shop there. There was a business that wanted to come in that was completely incorrect for that area, and the statement was actually made, ‘We can’t do any better than this.’ That made me angry because we can always do better. We can always do better. The minute we start thinking that we can’t do any better than this, that’s our future.”

Show Notes:

• Shreveport Downtown Development Authority

• Liz Swaine’s column on Cross Bayou Point (Shreveport Times)

• A roundup of some of our previous article on Shreveport

 

Should California Bring Back Redevelopment Agencies?

From the Strong Towns Gathering in Santa Ana, California, is a discussion about whether the state of California should bring back local redevelopment agencies. Mike Madrid and Steven Greenhut join Chuck Marohn to debate the matter.

Go Cultivate with Verdunity

A brief update from Chuck Marohn followed by an extended Q&A rebroadcast from an appearance on the Go Cultivate podcast by Verdunity.