Strong Towns' Guide to the Election Year
(Source: Pexels/Rosemary Ketchum.)
I began writing the blog that would become Strong Towns in November 2008, shortly after the election. I've said many times that it was a form of therapy for me, a way to sort out the many thoughts banging around in my head. Was I crazy or was the world crazy? I wasn't sure.
Many of you remember 2008 as the election of Barack Obama, but it was so much more. A massive housing bubble had popped. The economy was in freefall, with foreclosures, bank failures, and widespread layoffs dominating the news. As an engineer and planner working for dozens of cities across Minnesota, I felt like I was on the front lines of the crisis.
While it feels quaint today, the election was very contentious. Seemingly the only points of consensus among our nation’s leaders was the need to bail out the largest banks, the wisdom of expanding infrastructure as a way to create jobs and stimulate growth (shovel ready projects), and an urgent desire to re-inflate the housing market.
With that as conventional wisdom, you can understand why I questioned my sanity.
This is the fourth presidential election year since the founding of Strong Towns. I've hated every one. Strong Towns is a bottom-up revolution to rebuild American prosperity. We have grown this movement primarily through online media. Yet, every four years, all a segment of our audience wants to talk about is which national leader should be empowered to impose a top-down set of simplistic solutions on the complexity that is America.
A small, but very loud and vocal, portion of our audience.
At best, it is a distraction that sucks air out of the room. At worst, it takes our bottom-up conversation—one that crosses all kinds of social and cultural boundaries—and tries to force it into a left–right, us-versus-them, angry political binary.
The worst of these was, of course, the 2016 election. We managed to navigate the months leading up to it fairly well, staying on message while still remaining mostly relevant. The day after the election, however, things went crazy.
I was in Texas at the time, speaking at a conference. I got back from my talk and all the lights were blinking red. My inbox was full of messages, many demanding that I forcefully denounce the president-elect. In the days that followed, a handful of people on Twitter and Facebook insisted—in true witch hunt style—that I had voted for Donald Trump. (I hadn't.) They started multiple threads condemning me for it. We had quite a few people quit Strong Towns, a few demanding a refund on their prior donations.
My own personal Facebook was so bad that I spent two weeks posting nothing but happy photos of puppies, rainbows, and mountains just to cleanse my feed. People who were my friends, who knew me, insisted that we could not be friends if Strong Towns didn't join what they were calling "the resistance," a coalition of organizations allied against the Trump administration.
We refused. I refused. We stayed on message, stuck to Strong Towns issues. It cost us some members and it cost me some friends. I'm sad about that, but I feel the movement is better off overall as a result.
It's now February of another presidential election year and, sadly, the push to divide us has already started to heat up.
A few weeks ago, I joined a press conference at the Minnesota State Capitol in support of a bill that will prohibit cities from adopting parking minimums. The bill was sponsored by state senator Omar Fateh, a Minnesotan of Somali descent. Also there to support the bill was U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, who is also of Somali descent. Both of them are Democratic Socialists, an affiliation I learned in the days after the press conference. (I didn’t know prior because it is a fact mostly irrelevant to me.)
I learned this because, once again, I was bombarded by people—some friends—questioning what I was doing standing with people sympathetic to terrorism and genocide and wanting to impose sharia law. I share these slurs not because I believe them, but because I heard them. People called on me to denounce both of these public officials and to distance myself from this legislation.
I refused. We refused. To the contrary, I made it clear that I will stand with anyone who is for parking reform. Strong Towns will work with anyone when they are advocating for parking reform, which is one of our five priority issue campaigns. We are staying focused on our message.
Following the dustup over Representative Omar and Senator Fateh, I received strong criticism from other quarters. On Twitter, a couple of threads called on me to distance myself from the American Solidarity Party. If I didn’t, the call was for Strong Towns to distance itself from me.
Again, my inboxes and messages were flooded with people wanting accountability. Chuck, they would say, you are the leader of this movement; you need to condemn these bigots whose policies advocate for the abuse, even the death, of women, trans people, and other marginalized groups. If you don't, Strong Towns will fall into disrepute. (Again, I find these slurs disgusting, but I share them as they were presented to me.)
During the 2020 election, the American Solidarity Party—a very small third party that closely aligns with Catholicism—contacted me (note that I am Catholic). They wanted to incorporate the Strong Towns approach to housing reform, safe streets, ending highway expansions, and parking reform into their platform. They asked me to advise them. I agreed and they named me an official advisor.
I agreed because—I'll repeat—I will work with anyone who is ready to pursue a Strong Towns approach. If you want my advice on how to build safe streets, stop highway expansions, build more housing, end parking subsidies, and make local government accounting more transparent, I’m ready to talk.
As we enter another election year, here is the promise I make to you: We will always remain focused on core Strong Towns issues. We will not enjoin any other efforts outside of our core areas of focus. We have nothing valuable to say outside of those areas, and so we will not say anything.
You should feel free to support any candidate you want in any way that suits you. I don't criticize people who participate in national politics, even people who give it more of their time and energy than I think it deserves. When you're ready to join with others to get things done on the ground, you will always be welcomed here.
And when you do join us, you will find that we have all kinds of people in this movement. We have people who consider themselves Republicans and people who consider themselves Democrats. We have people who consider the 2nd Amendment core to who they are and others who want to abolish the police. We have people of many faiths, and people with no religious or spiritual practice. We have people with complex and nuanced views on abortion, gender, race, and all the other flashpoint issues that often divide us.
By engaging in bottom-up work on areas of shared interest, in communities people care deeply about, joining with others around the world that are pursuing common purpose, we bridge many divides. We open dialogue. We learn from each other.
We sometimes even grow to love each other. I’m very proud of that.
I have been told that I am privileged to be able to not engage directly on these big national culture issues. I believe I understand that criticism and I’ll accept it. I don’t think that history will judge me as having led a privileged life, but I hope that I am putting the privilege I do have to good use. It is clear to me that Strong Towns is my calling. That is what I’m focused on. I do feel blessed to be able to do something that is so meaningful to me.
Others will continue to insist that I renounce some of the teachings of the Catholic Church, denounce those who align with them, and profess things that will, in this instance, make me more acceptable to those who consider themselves socially progressive.
As I've expressed in private many times over the past couple of weeks, I'm sorry but I cannot do that. To live life as a Catholic is to humbly submit. It is not a belief buffet where you pick and choose what you want. That being said, I struggle—as do all practicing Catholics I know—to fully be the person I’m called to. Practicing the Catholic faith is 99% about working to grow closer to God through prayer, fasting, forgiveness, repentance, service, and love. The other 1% I have not gotten to yet.
That being said, I ask you to remember that Strong Towns is way bigger than me. It is a movement with millions of readers and thousands of members around the world. They are the heroes of this story, the ones out there working from the bottom up to make their places stronger and more prosperous. Strong Towns is a movement with great diversity. We have achieved that precisely because of our focus.
If you are looking for Strong Towns to join in election year battles by choosing a candidate, joining a coalition, or professing certain beliefs not core to our mission, you are going to be disappointed.
If you want me, personally, to publicly affirm a set of beliefs you hold, beliefs you think all good and decent people should likewise hold, I'm sorry. Publicly, I’m focused on the work we do here. I will leave everything else to be worked out in private.
Charles Marohn—known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues—is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and civil engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.
Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America.