Norm Van Eeden Petersman, Strong Towns Director of Membership, will be speaking about housing at 2025 Northwest Michigan Housing Summit in Traverse City, Michigan this October.

LOCATION: Hagerty Center | DATE: October 27-28, 2025

The annual Northwest Michigan Housing Summit is an annual event presented by Housing North and its partners. Every year, we work to offer an event that helps expand opportunities for networking, discussions, and exchanges with partners and supporters on housing solutions for our communities. Each year, we feature several updates and presentations highlighting solutions and tools for housing being used in the region.

This year’s summit, themed: "ROOTED IN COMMUNITY: Housing Solutions for Collective Impact", promises to be a catalyst for change, bringing together leaders and changemakers to advance housing solutions rooted in local needs and collective action.

Talk of a "housing crisis" pervades North 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. 

In this presentation Norm will help you understand the root causes of North America's interrelated housing crises, and identify some rational responses that your city (and every city) can take.