Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

There are some fantastic breakdowns in market feedback here. The main one is that, for San Diego to develop an entire city of multi-story condo units at the intensity suggested by the underlying land values, the city would need tens of millions of new people. That’s not going to happen, so prices should drop. They don’t, and that’s because the next increment of development is not allowed. Or, where it is allowed, it has nearly as cumbersome a regulatory process, with as much uncertainty, as a more intensive development.

I could add to these distortions the centralized mechanisms of finance that induce larger developments, the national building and fire codes that favor massive new construction projects over incremental expansion, or the environmental rules that apply more scrutiny to neighborhood redevelopment than nature-wrecking projects out on the edge, among a long list of things we’ve done to make incremental development exceedingly difficult.

To remove as many distortions as possible, to give neighborhoods a chance to evolve, to build wealth in neighborhoods that is not merely transactional but reflected in the net worth of the people living there, cities must allow, by right, the next increment of intensity throughout all neighborhoods, and they must limit by-right development to only the next increment. The goal is to thicken up neighborhoods, to create feedback loops that allow emergent prosperity to build on itself. No neighborhood can be exempt from change, but no neighborhood should experience radical change all at once. This is the prudent discipline we must impose on ourselves.

Another design I reviewed retrofitted a neighborhood of single-family homes on cul-de-sacs. The first step was to connect the streets to form a grid. Then the intersections were intensified with commercial buildings. In between these commercial centers, the residential homes were reconstructed to bring them up to the street and form a more walkable environment. Again, as an exercise in design, it was gorgeous. I have serious doubts about the capacity of Americans to experience Suburban Retrofit as anything more than a niche undertaking in the most affluent places. The cost of these projects is enormous, far beyond what makes sense for most places. The number of people and businesses it would take to make a big-box store on the edge of town viable is more than most communities have to spare. And, if Suburban Retrofit of a site is successful, then there is an oasis of prosperity amid a disconnected suburban landscape, something that seems to merely repeat the mistakes of the modern development approach.

Today’s local governments are organized based on the efficiency model popular in business schools of the 1950s and 1960s. Borrowing much from the military, this model organizes personnel into silos based on tasks. Within each silo, a hierarchy is established with a clear chain-of-command. All of this is overseen by elected leadership, which – theoretically – directs this machine of efficiency to address community priorities.

While this approach is efficient, it lacks adaptability. Once a silo and hierarchy system is established, there is internal inertia that resists change. Repeated business cycles have forced most of the private sector – any part that relies on innovation – to address this shortcoming, largely by reorganizing into a flatter, team structure.

Local governments taking on debt to make an investment must ensure three things. First, the expenditure must have the potential to improve the city’s financial position. Taking on debt for a project that provides some quality-of-life benefit today – for example, improving the flow of traffic – can only be justified when all maintenance obligations are accounted for, there is no debt, and the community broadly supports repaying the obligation in short order. You don’t put in a swimming pool when your roof is leaking. Second, the improvement in the city’s financial position must be measurable in terms of dollars. It’s not enough to measure saved time, reduced carbon emissions, or an improvement in happiness and equate that to dollars. An investment that justifies debt must have a real return.

Cities shouldn’t be regulating things like temporary seating, siding finishes, or whether a building houses an attorney or an accountant. They should never mandate parking. They should obsess about how buildings address each other: that it opens onto the street, complements neighboring structures in scale and character, and respects the humans who traverse past it. This is not a call for deregulation as much as a new approach. Many cities are replacing the use-based codes they adopted to facilitate post-war development patterns with form-based codes that come closer to dealing with issues directly related to financial productivity. These are positive changes, especially when the form-based approach allows the neighborhood to incrementally thicken up without needing any special permissions.

In contrast, these neighbors are not capable of deciding where the regional rapid transit line should be located. Or what the capacity of the interstate should be. Or whether people of different races or incomes should be allowed to live in their community. They are not capable of making these decisions because each decision encompasses a higher level of complexity than backyard chickens.

California is a particularly perplexing example of this. The state, through ballot initiatives and legislative action, has stripped most taxing authority away from cities, leaving only a couple of coarse and nonadaptive approaches in the municipal toolbox. Cities respond by doing the one thing that brings in significant new revenue – more horizontal expansion – and the state supports that directly through massive levels of transportation subsidy. Then, given the environmental and social disaster of converting the open landscape to shoddy housing and, even worse, commercial development, as well as the obscene costs of the subsequent traffic congestion, the state enacts round after round of laws requiring environmental reviews, community engagement, and comprehensive planning and zoning regimes. These laws have slowed – through by no means stopped – the worst development practices, but they also have the perverse effect of giving individuals, especially the wealthy and well connected, mechanisms for stopping nearly any development proposal. Housing in California has become brutally expensive, partially because individual neighborhoods are empowered to delay, if not altogether stop, projects that would create more housing. In response, the California legislature has considered multiple proposals to strip local governments of decision-making authority on many building and permitting matters, further dulling any local initiative to adapt to the stresses being experienced. The t...

At the old house, the girls were stuck biking the driveway, maybe the cul-de-sac. Anything unaccompanied beyond that risked tragedy with a speeding vehicle and a moment of inattention. And even if they had ventured further, there was no place to go. Their friends were likewise spread across the area, brought together outside of school only through scheduled play dates and long car rides. The new neighborhood is full of kids. A city park is a mere block away. The girls have learned to navigate the neighborhood on their own, a life skill I took for granted yet few of their peers seem to possess. They can go to the store or the library or, when they scrounge up some money, downtown for an ice cream. I’m watching them grow into the kind of confident people I always hoped they would be. The move has saved me five hours a week of commuting. Instead of being stuck behind the wheel, I walk or bike to work. And to get groceries. And to the hardware store. And anyplace else I can reasonably get to, even in the winter. I go days without driving, and I’ve felt myself become more relaxed, less stressed, as a result. The most consequential change with the move has been adding neighbors to my life. I will acknowledge, having grown up on a farm without neighbors, and having watched some of my short-tempered uncles get in petty feuds with theirs, this was the thing I was most nervous about with the move. My apprehension could not have been more misplaced.

I’m an introvert who enjoys long walks alone, avoids social gatherings where possible, and can’t remember names. None of that has kept me from getting to know all my immediate neighbors. It’s almost impossible not to as we run into them all the time. I know their kids, their pets, and some of their plants. When we’re out of town, they watch our house. We do likewise for them.

I’m six feet tall. When I arrived in Italy, I weighed 185 pounds, a weight slightly above where I should have been at that age but by no means overweight. When I left Italy six weeks later, despite eating a bizarre amount of food, I weighed a very heathy 165. I could talk about the value of the Mediterranean diet, but that wasn’t it for me. It was all the walking.

He suggests that central to the project of liberalism – which includes both left- and right-minded thinkers – is the elevation of the individual over the society, a condition that simultaneously elevates the centralized state.

The only common cultural practice consistently reinforced by the structure of the places we’ve built today is consumption. All around us, we’re prompted to consume, to increase our desires beyond what we now have. This is contrary to the structure of prior societies, especially ancient ones, which acknowledged avarice but made self-denial a virtue, a path to inner peace.