Chris Allen, Strong Towns Director of Events and Partnerships, will be presenting on housing at a housing conference hosted by Housing Opportunities Made Easier in Camarillo, California.

LOCATION: The Serra Center |  DATE: October 16, 2025  |  TIME: 8:30 a.m. PT

The 2025 Housing Opportunities Made Easier (HOME) Conference will take place on Thursday, October 16, from 8:30AM to 2:30PM PST at "The Serra Center" in Camarillo. HOME's Annual Conference attracts some 300 attendees, focusing on innovative housing solutions, collaboration, and policy advancements. This year's theme is "Connecting Communities," where attendees will learn from various panelists and speakers on how Ventura County can join forces for housing solutions.

Chris Allen will be giving a lecture titled “Breaking Out of the Housing Trap”. Talk of a "housing crisis" pervades American cities—be it about off-the-charts rents in coastal cities or hyper-vacancy in the Rust Belt. These problems are symptoms of a deeper dysfunction. Over nearly a century, through often well-intended top-down policy interventions, we've turned a complex system that should be adaptive and self-correcting into one prone to a never-ending cycle of boom and bust, crises and overcorrections.

To address the dysfunction at the root of our housing problems, we need to shift our approach. We must move away from a model in which large developers and centralized financial institutions have unprecedented sway over what is built and where, to a more antifragile housing ecosystem in which the bar to entry is low, and every neighborhood can undergo incremental change over time.