Chris Allen, Strong Towns Director of Events and Partnerships, will be presenting on housing at the 2025 Kansas Housing Conference in Overland Park, Kansas on October 28, 2025.

LOCATION: Overland Park Convention Center  |  DATE: October 28, 2025  |  TIME: 7:30 a.m. CT

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.