These 6 Code Reforms Will Bring More Housing to Your City
In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks about housing development and zoning code reform with Seth Zeren, a neighborhood real estate developer in Providence, Rhode Island. They dive into the six code reforms recommended in “The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform,” covering why they’re important and how they help developers, residents and cities.
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Chuck Marohn 0:09
Hey everybody this. Chuck Marohn, welcome back to the strong towns podcast, as I have been traveling around North America talking about housing in wake of the release of escaping the housing trap. Last April, one of the things that has hit me over and over and over again is the enormity of this housing problem. All of the things that we need to do at the local level, we've tried to simplify down to three big concepts. Let's fix the regulatory process. Let's get incremental developers out there to do this work, and let's help finance these entry level units, even that has been too big of a bite for a lot of places, and so this year, we committed to putting together three tool kits here at strong towns to try to make these things a little bit more bite sized. That first tool kit is now available, and to talk about it, I wanted to have one of our best friends been on the podcast many times. Incremental developer himself from Providence, Rhode Island, Seth, searen, back on the podcast. Seth, welcome back to the strong nouns podcast.
Seth Zeren 1:13
Thanks, Chuck. It's it's great to be here. It's nice to
Chuck Marohn 1:17
talk to you. I feel bad because I think the last time you've been on the podcast a number of times, but I don't think we've actually talked since the time that we had the conversation. Up zone about your article, which was really good, but my board was mad at me because we kind of were a little, I'm not gonna say critical of your article, but like, you know, I we went back and forth, Abby and I did, and some of my board members said, We love Seth, why are you being mean to Seth, I hope I'm not being I love Seth, I hope I'm not being mean. Well, you know, I was a
Seth Zeren 1:51
little grumpy at first, and then I know it's okay. It's okay, it's good. Because I actually, I have a draft like response thing that I've finished, but I think one of the things that's important, and one things that always drew me to strong towns, and also the congressman, urbanism has been the debate. And if people don't disagree about stuff, then it gets really boring and we all just start repeating each other, and there's a dogma and there's a script. And so I would rather be in a place where we have disagreements and we argue and I mean, I think you're wrong about it, but that's okay. You think I'm wrong about it too, but, like, my argument will get better, because I have to contend with your insights, your perspective. And it's like the classic John Stuart Mill thing, like, if you only know your side of the argument, you don't even know that, right? You gotta actually debate with people. It's boring and we also get sloppy. It sharpens our you know, steel sharpens steel kind of thing. So I appreciate that.
Chuck Marohn 2:49
Well, I love chatting with you, because you are an ideas person, in addition to being somewhat out there doing real work, not just ideas, from like, an academic perspective. So it's a
Seth Zeren 3:01
real burden to be an implementer and also an ideas person. I think both kind of hamper the other sometimes.
Chuck Marohn 3:09
Yeah, yeah. I hear you. Can we set the stage for this by having you just spend a minute or two talking about what you do on a day to day basis? I know other people the podcast audience keeps growing and growing and growing and growing and growing. And I don't think everybody goes back and listens to all 1000 episodes. So you've been on a few times, I hope not. Yeah, no, I actually knowing what those whole episodes sound like. A lot of
Seth Zeren 3:34
hours. Yeah. So I'm a neighborhood real estate developer based in Providence, Rhode Island. I've been a developer for about 10 years or so now. So I don't laugh when I say I'm a developer anymore. That was the first couple years I had a real imposter syndrome feeling because I didn't come from a real estate background. I don't come from a real estate family. Kind of wormed my way in, had an apprenticeship with a good mixed use firm in the Boston area, and then came time to buy a house I couldn't afford Boston Area anymore, so my wife and I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, about an hour south, and we're able to buy a three family and I linked up with a local real estate development firm where I'm now a partner. I'm one of the young generation of new partners. So our armory management companies are operating business. We have, obviously, it's real estate, so this bunch of other little companies, but we are a full service real estate company. We do property management, we do our own maintenance work, we do our own construction business, and we do our own development work. So we kind of do a little bit of everything. I am a licensed real estate broker as well. And yeah. So the kind of work we do is very geographically focused. We mostly work in a few neighborhoods of Providence, kind of around where we live. Most of the team lives, kind of in this area. And so that ranges from residential, commercial. We manage about 250 apartments and about 300,000 1000 square feet of commercial space. And so, like a current project we're doing right now, we just bought an old it was originally built as a pair of side by side townhouses in about 1850 and we purchased this building in the fall, and we are finishing up plans to actually convert it. It was then converted to Office at some point in the 20th century. So it was, you know, law, law office or whatever, and we're in the process of converting it back into residential. End up being four residential apartments. It's a small, simple rehab kind of project, but complicated in its own ways. We actually had a fun discovery. We were looking at a closet under the floorboards, you know, sort of the construction of the of the floor sandwich. And we found underneath the plywood, there was a layer of old linoleum, and underneath that, like really old linoleum, and underneath that was a newspaper from 1892 Wow. And they were using it essentially as, like a layer between the actual wood deck flooring and this little one they put in. So I've got it on the floor. I'm trying to get some archival sheets so I can preserve this thing. It's pretty wild. 1892 newspaper under this floor. So that's the kind of project we do with some regularity. We also are doing a larger mill rehab that is all commercial. So it's about a 50,000 square foot mill building and an industrial section of Providence to the west, and that we are completing someone's half finished mill conversion into sort of artist, fabricator space. And that projects about half done today, and that'll be like probably $3 million of construction to get through that. So it's a pretty big project for us. And then we're also working on some ground up new construction, multi family so that's like, I have two projects in the pipeline, a 19 unit mixed use building and, like, a 28 unit all residential building in the pipeline. So that's a flavor of the kind of stuff we do. A lot of our projects have a kind of neighborhood orientation. And we were neighborhood guys, we see the long term value is actually the neighborhood, and that our work is strengthening that whole neighborhood, and then you own a piece of that, and that piece gets better. So a lot of our we work off site, a lot, maybe more than we ought to. We think about the street trees. We think about the sidewalks, we're advocating for stuff with the city and the state, and we're just trying to take good care of our place, we think a lot about our curation of our commercial tenants, because we're trying to, again, create this really prosperous place, and that means we'll do well too in the long run, right?
Chuck Marohn 7:37
Although, as a developer, you and your family live in a huge mansion and just burn money for you
Seth Zeren 7:44
know, my wife is always like, where's all the money? And I'm like, it's in the buildings. Honestly, there's money. Look, look, I have a spreadsheet that says we have money, but of course, there's no money because all your cash just gets put back into the building. I live in a triple decker. Yeah. So we bought, we bought a three family when moved to Providence, and we live on the second floor. We have two tenants, one upstairs, one downstairs, and yeah, that's how we we get by. I made
Chuck Marohn 8:08
that joke and I asked that question, because I do think that, you know, we're going to talk about ways to make development easier, but I do think that there is this perception among some Well, I think there's multiple perceptions, but one is that being a developer is just like screwing people and making tons of money off of high housing prices. And there's another one that being a developer is just like, really easy. You just make bank continuously, and you you were born into riches, and so now you've just leveraging those riches to make money. And I watch you, and I watch other people do this work, and it's really, really hard work, and the margins are really tight often. And yeah, let me add this, and then I'll turn it over. I watch people who do this work do it out of love and kind of insanity. And I don't know is that's a healthy way to live, but that's what I that's what I see a lot. So yeah,
Seth Zeren 9:10
there are a lot of easier ways to make money than being a real estate developer. Yes, and we, and actually we joke, one of our attorneys said, you know, there's a lot of other ways to make money in real estate other than being the owner, because, you know, a lot of those other professionals, you like, the developer, gets paid last. You know, we sort of eat last at the table, because everybody else gets paid first, your taxes, your insurance, your architect, the contractors, everybody else is getting paid. And if there's money left over, you might get paid. You might get paid pretty well, but there's a very real chance you might not get paid at all, or you might be writing a check yourself to cover those costs. Right? I know that's not real to people, because, like, like, one of the things, and this will tie in a little bit to the the housing toolkit, is that it's the case today that the development work is this sort of separate field. And. Most people don't interact with the building of their city, either in construction or in development or in those sort of related fields. They buy things or they rent things produced for them by other people, right? And so there's this, there's not a there's not a continuity between the way things And historically, that that's a little weird because it, and it's still the case in many parts of the world that a lot of people build their own homes, or their house is built for them by their uncle or their cousin, or it's built by their neighbor down the street, or it's built, you know, there's a sort of continuity where, you know, the people in the system, yeah, yeah. And I feel like in the United States today, in a lot of Western countries, we have this sort of chasm between, like, these people over here who build the city and these people over here who consume the city, and they don't really talk, they don't interact in their lives. But I do think your point is really valid, that that the developer is the classic Hallmark movie villain, right? I mean, like our culture has for two or three generations, you know, looked at the land developer, right, the person who builds things on land, as most likely doing harm, right to the community, to the neighborhood, and doing it for their own personal benefit. Now obviously I'm not saying I do this out of charity, like we do run a for profit business. We'd like to make money. We like to pay our investors by making money is how we get resources to do the next project. You know, I think there's sometimes a naive idea that that there could be all be done with no profit, but actually it's profit that allows the accumulation of the capital that allows you to build the next building. And I mean that quite literally, like you want to build an $8 million building, like you someone's got to write a big check, and if no one has a check to write, then you can't build the building, right? So calculation is not evil. It's necessary,
Chuck Marohn 11:52
yeah, if that person could take that same check and put it into a municipal bond and get 4% risk free. Oh, yeah, so it's hard to
Seth Zeren 12:03
be competitive return. Yeah, treasury bonds are in the forest now. So our projects, you know, and because there's real risk of loss, either just we don't perform as well, or like, hell, the building burns down. Like there's right real risks here. It's also not liquid, like you can't just ask for your money back, like, I can't make a market for you tomorrow and give you, send you a check, right? And so there's a real so real estate tends to require, you know, a return that is above, certainly, like the S, p5, 100, right? You have to do better than stocks, because those are liquid, and often quite a bit better than stocks. Now we also have, there's some tax benefits like so it's complicated talk to your tax professional, you know, right? I cannot give you tax advice. But anyway, the point is, it's like, you know, the other thing that's interesting about real estate development is that, in some sense, a little bit differently than a lot of other professions. It's not like one thing. So there are a lot of different kinds of real estate development. Right? The guy who's flipping houses works in real estate. The guy who owns Self Storage works in real estate. The woman who just owns a portfolio of CDSS works in real estate. Right? Whether you were born to a real estate family, which either met, you have some inherited wealth, or at least the connections and knowledge and wherewithal, or if you're just scrapping it like you both work in real estate. And all of those people are technically real estate developers, but their experience, their resources, are very different. I drive like a Honda HRV,
Chuck Marohn 13:40
really crashed it. Oh, I drive a Honda HRV as well. There we go.
Seth Zeren 13:46
It's the dad all wheel drive. It's very useful.
Chuck Marohn 13:49
And, you know, all and it works, yeah,
Seth Zeren 13:53
and I have a cargo bike. My second car is a cargo, electric cargo so I'm the one developer in town that rolls up to job sites. And, like, you know, a very expensive, but much cheaper than a car cargo bike, yeah, and a lot of other developers, yeah, they roll up in, you know, a $60,000 BMW. And that's just, it's a little bit of an attitude and cultural difference, you know, and some of it's just that people are really, actually doing this work from very different starting point, yeah.
Chuck Marohn 14:18
Let me switch to the toolkit. I think one of the things that I realized early on, talking to you, talking to other people who do development, is there's, in a sense, like, an infinite number of things that we could do to fix codes, to fix approaches, to make things better. But there are some that are, in a sense, like a common denominator across places. And we came up with this concept of being a housing ready city, if you are a city that is, you know, we want to address housing here. We want to make it easier to build. We want to make it. The housing more affordable. What are the common things that every one of these cities needs? And we came up with six policies. Said, if you're doing this, you haven't solved every problem, but you solved in a sense, like the big ones, like You're like the balls, the ball is going to start rolling downhill. Now I want to go through these with you. I know you would add more to this list, and I want to get to that at the end, but I want you to react to these and give your kind of insight on why this would, from your perspective, make things work better. So let's just start with the easiest one. Policy number one is allow single family homes to be converted into duplexes or triplexes, and make that by Right. Talk a little bit about that.
Seth Zeren 15:46
Well, I want to kind of roll that together with also the backyard cottages, because I think they operate. Okay.
Chuck Marohn 15:51
Backyard cottages is policy number two to get all residential zones, yep. So
Seth Zeren 15:58
this is a scale smaller than I usually work at now. I'm now working at a bigger scale in this but one of the lessons that we've learned from California's experience with ADUs with accessory dwelling units, which is the backyard cottages, is that if you make it easy enough, then you actually access a part of the construction market that isn't building homes, and that's the flipper. So what we saw in California was people who are buying existing, tired, beat up homes. They're doing it already anyway, and they're like, right of it, you know, they do a nice job. They do a crappy job. They you know, whatever. There's a whole range of people who are great at it, people who are just putting lipstick on it today, that that land they're working on, like the 90% of the city, that you can't build more homes on those parcel, right? It's just you have a single family house. You can fix it up, or you can replace it, but that's it. That is a big number of people. They're doing a lot of work today. They can't add to your housing stock. All they can do is make that house nicer and more expensive. And why this is not in California because of the code. Well, right? Because what happened in California was they made the 80 rules easier and easier and easier until they finally got to some sort of tipping point of easiness where a lot of those flippers realized, Hey, I could also add an in law suite or a backyard cottage or whatever, because they're already in the building. They're already renovating, they're already doing stuff. So they're already there, they're already mobilized, they're already running a project. And they're like, I could add this, right? And so now you take this whole group of people who is only function right now is to upgrade the existing housing stock and make it more expensive and nicer, and you're letting them also participate in adding to the housing stock. And so there's a term, I think there's a lot of leverage in the fact that we already have this whole world of people who are also really the lowest cost. They have very little overhead. They're the lowest cost way of renovating housing stock. So anyway, so allowing those projects, I mean, the city has to get out of the way, right there. The city zoning rules regulate the use of the land. And you know, this is a classic form based zoning critique, which is like, if the house looks the same, who cares if one family, two family or three families live in it? Like, what's the public interest in that? And you know, you can go back, and I know you and Daniel and others have looked at the history of this, and it's like, oh yeah, they actually wrote down why they wrote down at the time, in the 19 teens and 20s, that they thought that like having they thought that the correct way for a family to live a middle class family was as a nuclear family unit. And they didn't like the idea of strangers living you know, near you, that was risky for children, for women, you
Chuck Marohn 18:45
know, like undesirables moving in, yeah, undesirable Vagrant,
Seth Zeren 18:49
you know, the mere parasites on the residential character of the district. And so that's the legacy, right? But it's so long ago we've forgotten why we did it, and so now it just sort of seems like Moses brought it down from the mount that said, like single family is the only thing that's acceptable. But actually, this is normal. This is how it always worked.
Chuck Marohn 19:13
Yeah. I keep finding myself telling people that the anomaly in human development is not like what we're advocating for or what you know you're out building. The anomaly is the 75 years that we've been living through after World War Two. And if you look at the way we have historically built housing, not just in this country, but around the world, the idea of large tracks of single family homes that will forever and without end, be single family homes. It just never occurred before in history. It's not a it's long term, viable arrangement. Yeah, right. I
Seth Zeren 19:54
find this. This is also something that we encounter also in the research about public persuasion. Their perception, like, we don't need to call what we're doing innovative. In fact, people don't really like innovation in the house next door to them, right? They like is normal, common sense, like time tried and true, that kind of stuff. And that's correct. We're not not lying. I'm just telling the story a different way. Yeah. So, I mean, I think these ones are really good, right, wherever we can. And I think the other component here, and this is tricky, right? So internal conversions of existing dwellings, and we'll talk about this later, like the city has to get out of the way. The next problem you will encounter is the building code, right? But as a practical matter, like, that's the lowest cost way to build more units, because you already have most of what you need. You have a foundation, you got walls, you got a roof, and you're gonna do some work inside the structure, but you're not building new foundation and new walls and new structure
Chuck Marohn 20:52
most of the time. What about what about this idea? And I, I've been out telling people that this is a great idea. I want to hear your and we've already established that we can disagree, so go ahead and go ahead and disagree. What about this? This idea that you know more than two thirds of family units in this country are one and two person households, yeah, and more than two thirds of the homes we have are multi bedroom, single family homes, to me, there seems like a huge, kind of bottomless opportunity to take spare bedrooms and spare bathrooms at a kitchenette and make, in a sense, an unlimited number of efficiency apartments and other Yes, that would would help the family their cash flow, and also help someone who needed a place to get started, or a transition place, or what have you find your home is this. I mean, I think it's crazy.
Seth Zeren 21:48
It might be, it might not be, I don't know. I think we should be careful about being too optimistic, for a few reasons. But also we shouldn't let that cost the sort of restraint, let us not try, because I think there is, you're right, that there is a sort of tremendous amount of space. But what are the potential pitfalls? Well, one of the potential pitfalls is that in a lot of those houses, the bedrooms are upstairs, and it's really hard to create a direct entry without another staircase, which you may not have. And so there may be sort of structural limitations in terms of creating that independent suite that also preserves the usability of the the sort of larger portion of the house. You know, I think the other bigger problem that I always reflect on is, and I'm on a building code commission for the state of Rhode Island, where we review appeals for the building code. You know, variances, essentially. And, you know, I know that the building code, people are like, well, it's a separate dwelling unit, which means it needs to have a separate, one hour separation, which is going to be somewhere between really hard and impossible to achieve in an existing structure that wasn't built for that purpose, right? Sure. So, like, can you get over that? Yeah, absolutely. We can totally get over it. Like, the reality is, you could let your any unrelated person live in that bedroom too, and it would be fine, but it will require, ultimately, action at the state level, and with the sort of building codes that we use in United States to get to the point, doesn't mean we shouldn't also get the municipalities ready. In fact, I think it's really helpful to set like this ambitious goal, because I think towns and cities committing themselves to this goal is actually really important, because it'll give them something to measure themselves against, yes, and give them a goal. And then they'll do these six things, and then they'll find the next six things that they have to overcome, but they'll the ball will be rolling. They'll be on the right direction, right? The other limitation, I think, is that, and this is something I'm wrestling with right now. I don't know that this is correct, but I've heard the many presentations our friend Ali's made this point a lot, household size is decreasing, but I keep reflecting that on the margin, most people would prefer to have a bigger house than the one they have in now, sure, right? And that includes single you know, so like the idea that just because single person households are increasing means that, like, the one bedroom is going to be the preferred outcome is, I don't think correct in a market perspective. I think the argument is useful because a lot of municipalities are like, frightened of one beds because they're like, I don't know who's going to live there. And I'm like, it turns out a lot of people in your town are really one person anyway, or two people, they'll be okay. So I think, rhetorically, that's useful. But I think I'm realizing, like, and I see this in our own development work, it's like, you know, the same couple might rent a one bedroom as a two bedroom apartment. They might even rent a three bedroom apartment, so they have a guest bedroom, or they have, if they have a kid and they want a home office, like, so it's, you know, I think there's also locational questions about like, where are these homes located, and which of them are going to be convertible, and which of them are going to be just not desirable? Sure? From so anyway, I like, I'm cautiously optimistic.
Chuck Marohn 25:03
Yeah, no, that's fair. That's fair. Let me, let me ask you about the third policy we wrote, legalized starter homes in all residential zones. And we talk about starter homes as being smaller houses. I've tried to shame the term tiny house out of existence, because I do feel like there is a fetish over always in this cute, like, tiny house, and we're building this community of tiny homes, and it's almost like, uh, like, a fetish, like, I think it's like, oh, it's so cute. I'm cognizant of the idea that I can look out the window in my office, which is in a traditional neighborhood, and I see a bunch of starter homes. And they're not starter homes that are now 500 600 square foot they're 1200 1800 square foot homes that,
Seth Zeren 25:54
well, you have Sears capital accounts,
Chuck Marohn 25:55
yeah. Some of these are, yeah, yeah. But these were places that started small and were added on to and added on to, is there a place for starter homes in our development?
Seth Zeren 26:07
Okay? I agree. I agree also with the tiny home framing. I mean that that was an interesting moment, and it's going to continue. It'll continue to be a piece of the pie. But it's not like it's not doing what we're talking about here. And I think you're right to distinguish from that. But the starter home idea, which I think also harkens back to the Katrina cottage and other versions of like, what's the minimum viable house you could build on a piece of land that is low cost to build? It might be one story, might be two stories, but it's you sort of have the intention of adding on to it. And just as a quick aside, like the reason McMansions look super weird, right? If you go back to the sort of architectural history of it, is because what they're doing is they're trying to replicate all at once the the appearance of a house that has been added on to over time. Yes, so they're trying to create that farmhouse that's been there for 150 years and has had six editions with six different roof lines and six different materials, but they do it all at once, and it just doesn't work, right? It doesn't it doesn't make sense, right? So it's like an uncanny valley. That's why those houses give you an uncanny valley feeling. It's because they're trying to be something they're not, right? So yeah, and I had some weird pushback on the term starter house, and I don't know that I agree with it, but I've had that. I have to sort of note it, that the term certainly set some people off, I think, for reasons I don't fully understand, but I've had that feedback other places it's been really popular. We're using it in some of our state housing campaign work in Rhode Island. It's not as relevant here in a built up place, because most of the parcels have buildings on them. To the extent we're doing subdivision and our housing markets this point so expensive that like, land is really valuable, unless we're doing policy number four, like we're not going to build this. But I also think making this is a good idea in a lot of regions where you are doing horizontal expansion, or you're doing large infill, it's certainly a good idea anytime we're limiting, like the minimum build, minimum structure size, that should just go away. That's that's a terrible idea. Yeah, that's the main place this would play out, right?
Chuck Marohn 28:18
I do feel like there's a relationship between a backyard cottage and a starter home when you get to this policy four, which is eliminate minimum lot size requirements. Because so this one's oftentimes a backyard cottage can be a starter home on its own lot, in a sense. So the minimum lot size requirement is one that, as I've talked to planners, and I'm just, let's say Zoners, people who deal with zoning code restrictions, this one freaks them out, because I feel like it seems like they feel like they're giving up control over something that is sacred to them. Make the case for eliminating minimum lot sizes, because this is one that I feel like zoning officials will have the most problem with. Oh
Seth Zeren 29:07
yeah, no, we see it too, and we're taking a swing at minimum lot size in Rhode Island. This, this, that'll probably be our most incendiary bill, right? Yeah. And part because the planners and the municipalities, I think we've talked about this in the past, that there are, there are people who are sort of the guardians of what is, and who tend to focus on the downside risks, right? And so that's like a mindset that you've got a lot of stop energy, right? And so there are a lot of ways you could potentially abuse minimum lot size, right? And you can start to imagine those scenarios from a developer's perspective. I don't know so many of those scenarios are very realistic, like because we just wouldn't do most of those things.
Chuck Marohn 30:02
X has value, and when you straight it up by doing a bad it doesn't have
Seth Zeren 30:05
value. You don't want to destroy the value, right? But so the case for minimum lot size, and I like of all of these, this might be the most or second most important one from my perspective, because particularly in a built up place, you do have parcels that are a little larger than others. One of the things we see a lot in Rhode Island and a lot of other states is like a neighborhood might have been plotted at 4000 square foot lots, and then later they upped the zoning to 7000 square foot minimum lot size. But if someone bought two or three lots back in 1940 or 1950 and they just built a house on one of them, but they had those three lots, and they wanted a bigger yard or whatever. Now that parcel can't be subdivided because it's too small to make new 7000 square foot lots, and so you can't you've lost that sort of development potential. And it doesn't sound like it sounds like a small thing, but when I've looked at a few sort of random case studies, I'm like, Well, if I could go back to the same, or even a little bit smaller than the original plotting size, I could increase the number of homes in this neighborhood by 10% without radically changing. These are still just single family homes on slightly smaller lots, so they'll be slightly smaller as buildings. 10% housing growth would be gigantic. That would be a transformative thing. It doesn't look like much because it means every block gets one extra house. It doesn't seem like, oh gosh, it's not a whole lot, but it'd be a really big deal. And then in existing neighborhoods, this is extremely important where you've got built up places, because, again, you've got often, sort of just weirdly shaped bits of land. And so like, your table says it has to be 7000 square feet? Well, if you're 6950 square feet, you're just Sol. And that doesn't make any sense, right? These are arbitrary lines in the table. And then I think another piece, which isn't engaged with specifically here, but I think we're highly aware of, is that in a lot of cases, the way to make homes more affordable is to build on smaller piece of land and build a smaller house, right, which is sort of talked about here. And one of those types in particular, is bringing back the townhouse as if on, ideally, on a fee simple lot, right? And so a lot of townhouses today are built as condos. And that has some advantages, but mostly long term, has disadvantages. You don't actually own the land under your building. You don't have complete control over your structure. You can't add on to it. You can't modify it. In 100 years, it's going to be really it's still going to be townhouses. It's not going to evolve and change, because no one can really own the whole thing very easily. They're going to own just pieces of it. But if you have a feed simple townhouse, you know, then, which means that the lot lines on either side, there's no side setback, and the buildings touch. I think one of the things that I'm most struck with American cities having forgotten how to do is have buildings touch. Even in districts that are being redeveloped from scratch, every building sits apart from its neighbors, independent, right? And that's actually uncommon. It's super uncommon in the history of the world, and it's super uncommon elsewhere in the world today, people are building buildings that touch. So getting back to the idea of buildings that touch, because those side yards end up being a ton of wasted space that you know you're not actually using for anything, not using it inside the building for usable space. It's too small to use as a yard or a garden. You just so it's just this sort of vestige. And so that feasible townhouse is really important for a couple of reasons. One, it's residential code, so it's on the lower bar of things you have to do. It is separately financeable, both for the builder and also for the homeowner. And so you're going to get the best sort of financing structure for that building type, and it's going to be lower cost to build, and it's going to be really land efficient, and that's great, yeah, a lot of people just want to own a house, right? They don't want to have to, like, make you sell the house. You go upstairs to your bedroom, it feels like a house if you know, you're not running an apartment building, you know, living, you know. So it just, it hits a lot of boxes. And it's not surprising, because all around the world, as soon as people lived in dense concentrations, this is what we built. Everywhere in the world, we build this, yeah. So getting back to that building type and that, to do it, you gotta really shrink minimum lot size. And that gets, you know, the planner is worried about, like, what happens if someone subdivides, like, a bunch of 700 square foot lots that don't touch the street? And I'm like, Well, that would be crazy. No one would do that. And also, like, in the worst case scenario, that they do, like, people figure it out. But I think there's a lot of fear of people. How will people figure things out? I don't
Chuck Marohn 34:43
know. Well, I mean, they will talk to each other, or, at the other extreme end, they will end up in court and have some type of, you know, lesson be learned that will be passed on to others, right? I mean, I There you go.
Seth Zeren 34:58
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like, there. It can be a learning system, right? But you'll learn by doing stuff.
Chuck Marohn 35:05
As someone who spent time in a regulatory place, doing subdivision regulations. I do know that there are idiots out there who will do really dumb things. I feel like you know part of the city's role became, we're going to save everybody from themselves by essentially not allowing anything to happen. So like you know nothing, nothing bad can happen unless you go through this really expensive, long, drawn out planning or condominiumizing process, in which case you know you're going to take something that could be done, could be done for a couple $1,000 and turn it into a $30,000 project, right, right?
Seth Zeren 35:50
And now, yeah, I mean, I think that has to get readjusted. And I also think related to that too, is that there's a lot of discomfort, particularly amongst staff planners and others about and legally, like we haven't set it up this way, but like to have be able to give people advice. Yes, right. People do give each other advice, but I think we have misbalanced the system. Where I used to joke when I was I used to be a regulator too. I used to be a staff planner, and I used to joke it would be, it would be get better outcomes if there were no rules. And it was just like, whatever Seth and the developer can agree on, and if I do a bad job, you fire me. Yeah. Like, obviously, that's in some sense, a crazy system, but also, like, I think objectively, you would have gotten better results.
Chuck Marohn 36:41
Yes. Well, I, I've pointed out that we used to not have planners and engineers and all this. We would have talent architects who are essentially like their job was to create a valuable place.
Seth Zeren 36:52
Yeah, yeah. And that's the same kind of mindset, right? It's you have to be thinking outside of your site, because when you're when your job is enforcing rules, you feel like your scope is limited the edge of your rule book. And that's not actually how cities and towns work. That's why I feel like as a developer, I often get to do more planning work, or I get to do I get to do as much planning work, in some ways, as I used to, because I just choose to do it. You know, I don't have artificial limits on this, on the boundaries of my practice well.
Chuck Marohn 37:23
And when you're a code enforcer, heroic behavior is strictly enforcing the code, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the culture creates that we're like, Oh, you're so brave well. And
Seth Zeren 37:33
also like, that's true. And also the people who survive in those roles, you're preferentially sorting for that mindset, that that talent, that aptitude, because the people who want to do stuff and shake things up will leave, right? So by the time you're you're 40, you know, 40 or 50 years old, and you're the like the senior planner in charge of,
Chuck Marohn 37:55
you know, right, right, right? You self selected, yeah.
Seth Zeren 37:59
So anyway, yeah, this park is ties a bit into
Chuck Marohn 38:03
policy five, which is repeal parking mandates. And I, you know, this is always when I'm someplace in cities. Say, what should I do? I go and quote John Anderson and say, if you still have parking mandates, you're not serious, and you're not going to attract anyone who wants to do building or development, because you're just not serious about building housing. How would you look at policy five, repeal Park? I
Seth Zeren 38:29
would agree with that, but you're saying it's similar, in part, because we have this culture of, like, what we tried to figure out the science of, like, how many parking spaces places need. And, you know, rest in peace. Don Shoup, I read the high cost of free parking back in graduate school. And it definitely blew my mind that a lot of the rules that are in the books are just made up. And I think we keep uncovering more and more places where, like, whether it's traffic engineering or zoning tables, where it's just, like, I just, I don't know, some guy thought it up in 1930 and there's based on, like, four data points, and it's just been Xerox enough times we've forgotten that it has no real foundation. This with like lot size is like the killer app. And I think people don't quite realize how much land parking takes up. So, like, a parking space is at least 300 square feet between the actual stall plus the drive aisle right behind it, and it's going to be a good bit more than that, once you add in the rest of the circulation space and all the stuff that goes into it, all the storm water management you have to do for all the extra impervious surface you've created, it just turns into a huge thing. We're actually going through a project right now where we're actually getting a zoning overlay moved across the street because we had a we have a project that sort of held up over a parking requirement. We're going to get over it. Providence and zoning ordinance is actually pretty sensible, but we basically this project like, can't go forward. It's on a 10,000 square foot urban infill site. You can't put enough parking on there, even if you park the whole ground floor to support anything. And you would destroy your whole ground floor doing it. And the yield would be really inefficient, because on a small site, I got to fit two stairs in an elevator. It's just, like, I get like, six parking spaces. It's a disaster. Yeah, yeah, I'm just going to do nothing. I'm actually going to park them on another lot we own across the street. But I have, you know, so I'm trying to, like, so to do that under the current rules, I'd have to, like, actually create, like, a municipal lien, I'd have to bring the city into the management of my own internal parking leases between these two properties that we control. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. Like, I'm gonna, I don't want you in my business. You don't want to be in my business. Like, right? I want to maybe move these things around. If I need less parking, I'm gonna provide less parking. Like, so we're moving a zoning overlay across the street that lets us have zero parking requirement, and it's gonna let the project move forward, and particularly in infill context, it's essential, because most infill lots are not plotted in a way that you can put any kind of density, any kind of intensity of use and meet a parking requirement, just like period. And then I think on Greenfield sites, it's not an excuse to just do it on Greenfield sites. Because if you require parking requirements on Greenfield sites, you're just only going to build suburbia, because that's what the parking requirements code for. If you want to build, like a new village or New Town Center or something like that, you got to have a different set of rules. And so this one, I agree, is like, to me, it's like, and I actually tell my developer students this. I teach about real estate development sometimes, and I usually give them a list of like things to look for in municipalities if they want to work there. And this is usually one of the top ones of the list is like, you know, do they have parking requirements? Because if they do, you know, proceed at your own risk.
Chuck Marohn 41:35
To me, it's the red Eminem. She uses the Van Halen thing, you know that story, right? Like, yeah, did you actually put the contract together and they would have, like, the one indicator thing in there, and if they showed up and there were read M M's, they would be like, well, you obviously haven't read our contract thoroughly, yeah, you know. So if you go in and to me, I look and there's 20 pages of parking tables, I'm just like, I don't have to look at anything else. I know this place is not serious. Yeah,
Seth Zeren 42:06
yeah, exactly. And it's, and I think there's a this is, again, there's a lot of fear amongst the Zoners, as you call them, or just generally, the neighbors, the residents, the political leaders that, like someone will do something stupid. I'm here to tell you someone, yes, someone's already doing something stupid in your town, right, right? And unfortunately, the rules can't cure stupid, and I wish they could. I spent a number of years of my life trying to write better zoning ordinances, and I switched to the developer side, and I, you know, people make mistakes. People have bad ideas, and you can either let them, we're basically preventing good stuff from happening in the but we can't actually stop the bad stuff from happening. So you should just stop preventing good stuff so that you can at least get good and bad. Yeah, I wish there was a better answer, but I don't think there is.
Chuck Marohn 43:00
Not to get too esoteric, but I do feel like the culture of building has been harmed by this fact that we, you know, we can't stop stupid, but we can stop good. And I think our cultural understanding of what it means to build a good place is impaired by the fact that, you know, we have a limited upside really well. And
Seth Zeren 43:21
let me sort of make this the developers perspective, so that that that scenario you've just proposed from the developers perspective tells me I should just make more strip malls. Yeah, because, you know, that's the cultural script. Everybody knows how it's going to work. I don't have to educate my architect or my engineer or the city planning staff or whatever. That's a thing, and we can just repeat it, and there's no upside for me trying to think about, huh? I wonder if I can make more money doing it this way, and
Chuck Marohn 43:48
nobody will like the strip mall, but everyone will accept it as, like, the least dumb thing that you know consensus will create, right? Yep, yeah, I'm with you. Number Six policy number six is to streamline the approval process. And that is, I don't think there's anybody who would say, Oh no, don't streamline the approval process, but we actually created a metric that you should be able to submit a permit. And I used to say four hour turnaround time. Enough people push back on that. They said we need 24 hours. But we said you should be able to apply for a permit today and get approval by tomorrow, assuming you know you're submitting all the things that you need. I really realize that you know an incomplete application is not a real application, but if you go in and you've got your plans and your forms filled out and everything done, why would we take more than 24 hours to review that when I first started traveling around the US as part of strong towns and got outside of Minnesota, we have a thing called the 60 day rule here, where if you submit a plat, it's got to be acted on within 60 days if you submit a. Variance or conditional use requests, let alone a shock. You got a shot clock? I was shocked when I got to California. And they're like, I'm like, how does it take years? Don't you have a law? And they're like, No, we don't have anything like that. Florida, you know, New York, like none of these states have a shot clock. I think that our cities, I'm not necessarily saying they should have a shot clock where, like in Minnesota, if you don't act in 60 days, it's automatically approved, but we should measure, basically the aging. How long does it take you to process permits and make it a goal to get them down to 24 hours? Yeah, though
Seth Zeren 45:38
this is, this is really interesting. This is one's the one that's like, least contentious and hardest of your whole list. Yes, the other ones, you just change the rule, and then, like, you follow the rule, and it's better. But this one is not just like stating a goal, which I think is good. I think 24 hours is fine. I would be very happy to get a plan back in a week, but 24 hours would be great, but it touches on other things like management and software and culture that are actually much harder to change. Even though everyone agrees that streamlining would be great, it highlights a couple problems, right? So one of the problems is that people often don't understand is that zoning approval is not the same thing as a building permit, and often those are in two separate departments, are being processed by two separate people with two separate applications. So like, getting a zoning approval should be one thing. I think, getting to the point where the building permit is also fast is also relevant. There's more review that typically happens with the building permit, figuring out how to do so. These are, I think, like, setting the goal is really good, and then figuring out how to do it will be really hard, and you'll have to get case studies of how people are doing it. I do think one of the things that we've done in Rhode Island is we've moved all the building permit applications into a consistent online portal. And so a couple of good things. One, they can't lose our plans anymore, which is fantastic. It used to be like, Oh, how's the plan review going? Oh, I can't find them anymore. Can you bring me another set? Like, what are we doing? Yeah, so no one can, and it's great. So, like, they can add messages to our portal, and then I can respond in the portal, like, five minutes later. So in terms of the communication process, it's so much better. We can add plans, we can remove stuff, we can, like, check boxes. People can submit forms. That's really helpful. I think also what's really important about that is it essentially can. It already keeps track of how long it's taking. You know when the thing was submitted, you know when it's done. And I don't think anyone's quite done the math yet, but at some point that data set will start to emerge, and you'll be able to see like, well, what's working, what's not working. And that's valuable for the city on a management front, like staffing turnaround, et cetera. It's also valuable on a public policy front, because I think the other thing that comes out of streamlining the permitting process that will have to come out is, do we need all these rules? Right? Because part of the reason it takes a long time to review is because we've said projects have to comply with a whole bunch of different rules.
Chuck Marohn 47:59
Well, this rule takes 30 days to, on average, to go through. But it really is not adding any value. So can we siphon off 90% of the applications where this isn't applicable and only apply it to the you know, there's, there's those kind of things that I think we just don't I'm going to say this, and I don't want to sound like too anti government here, because I'm really not, but there is a certain like, internal to the system. We're not sensitive to these things. And so the fact that it takes 90 days or two years, or, like, whatever, that's not my problem. Like that. Like, yeah,
Seth Zeren 48:37
here's my I was a staff person. I got you get pat on them back for following the rules. Yes, that's what you get rewarded for, not for did it happen? Did anything get done? It's not right, not a criteria. I think this, to me, highlights in a sort of a mild criticism I have of the broader urbanist movement, because people are very focused on design and they're also very focused on policy, but we're not super focused on administration, management, implementation. Like, how would you structure the building department? You know, building inspection standards, whatever you want to call it, so that this is possible, isn't really a question about, like, what the right design details are, or what the right zoning ordinances. It's like a different kind of question that. But like, here's the here's the thing, if you want to build and manage cities, like, that's managing groups of people. And so, like, if you care about having good cities, that means you care about managing people well, and we have to get better at
Chuck Marohn 49:40
that. Yes, we do Absolutely. That's what we're trying to get at with this sixth one is that we actually need to spend some time internally on these process, processes that we put in place. Let me take a minute and have you talk about what's not on this would not in this toolkit, because I think one of your. Reactions to it was, this is great, like I'm in but here's other things, like, here's the next layer of the onion. And is there any way for us to go down this path? And I think one of your things has been particularly along the building code lines, which we don't address here with this toolkit. No, it would be, what would be the next rendition here? Yeah,
Seth Zeren 50:23
I think this package is great, and I'm no shade on it at all. And it is great in part because it is narrowly focused on things. It's tractable, right? A city or town can make these changes. Some will be easier than others, but they're doable. You're right that I highlight building code because I think a lot of urbanists people or, you know, and particularly amateur urbanists, focus on the zoning piece, but they don't always rate the impact that the building codes have on why things can't happen, or why things are so expensive. And, you know, at the risk of getting myself in some amount of trouble, like, the reality is the building codes that we live under the United States, the so called International Building Code applies to the United States and Canada, sort of, and like Bahrain, every other country on Earth writes their own building codes, and they do different stuff. And we are very insulated, and we tend to think about what we're doing, but we don't pay a lot of attention to what other countries are doing, good, bad or different. Like, I'm not saying everyone else has the right answer. I'm just saying we're not even curious. We're not even curious. And the building codes are not written by a governmental agency. They're written by a trade organization, like a private trade association, the International Code Council. It's not like they're bad people. I'm not saying they're malevolent, but I'm just saying they're not they're not responsive to public politicians or elections or anything else internal process, let
Chuck Marohn 51:44
me, let me say this, which, you know, I feel like I can say this, they're more influenced by people who sell elevators and fire suppression systems than they are by people who are trying to build housing affordably. And so I think you end up getting this amalgamation of add ons, add ons, add ons, add ons, add ons, which are impossible to argue against.
Seth Zeren 52:09
Each individual one make is reasonable, sort of on its own individual one is reasonable, right? But the result is it feels like a new construction building is like designing a space shuttle. Yes, the amount of pipes and vents and ducts and fire dampers that go into a new building. Unless you're doing it, you just have no idea. And I sometimes joke about like, remember when you just used to build buildings that had walls and floors and ceilings, and if you wanted fresh air, you opened a window, and we didn't have to install a mechanical device that will break with filters that have to be replaced. It has two ducks in and out of the building. It looked like ugliest like ugly as sin, you know, but that's how we handle fresh air today, because the code says so. And like, yeah, on some level it makes sense. Like, you know, the same thing can be said of about a dozen different things. American elevators are twice the size of elevators in Europe. You know, all of our elevators are sized for stretchers and like, sure, on balance, it's better to have a bigger elevator. But like, the world's not like, it's not free. It costs a lot of money to make the elevator twice as big. So, like, the one of the ways I talk about this is that you live in a house that was not gut renovated in the last three years. It's not up to modern code. You know, my house was built in 1893
Unknown Speaker 53:24
Yeah, balloon frame. Your balloon frame,
Seth Zeren 53:27
too. Probably, you know, yeah, you know, my wiring has been updated, my pipes have been updated. But it's like, you know, it's not super up to code. It's that was done 20 years ago. So, like, I live in a non code compliant house that could not be legally built today, and I'm not dead, right? You live in a non code compliant house and you let your children sleep. There, you monster, yes, which tells us, and like, 98% of Americans live in non code compliant houses. They don't comply with the current building code. So this is, like, your point about traffic safety. Like, if everyone's a deviant, then maybe the rules are wrong, or the design is wrong. And I think that's sort of like, our building code is aspirational. Sure it would be great. These are like, perhaps this is the best building you could build if you hit this standard. But the reality is, we all live over here in some other reality. But what we're doing is all the new buildings have to meet that target, and not for nothing. If you think that age is some sort of proxy for building safety, if our building stock is getting older because it's so hard to build new buildings, then our building stock is, at a population level, getting more dangerous. I'm not sure that's actually true, but if you think of it just in that way, right, if you think of it in that way, right? Yes. So we've got, you know, I sometimes joke like if we hadn't updated the building code since 1970 and our houses, we had more houses and they were cheaper. Would we have would that have been a preferable trade? I don't know. Yeah, it certainly has always been the case that if you have more money, you can make a nicer house. Like that's how things work. But we sort of legislated this, this high. Floor. And this is this gets to some of the zoning pieces we've also legislated high floors in other ways. The related piece of that is that these are still laws that are adopted by state governments. Like your state legislature doesn't have to adopt the building code as drafted. They can adopt a different building code. It is just a public law. And until a couple decades ago, most states had their own individual building codes, and that, I think, in fairness, has some disadvantages, right? In terms of interoperability. I mean, like, especially in small states, sure, I get it, their consistency makes some sense. But like, we've, we've abdicated our responsibility and and it's, it's, I get why. It's hard, because the legislator says, Oh, what if we don't need sprinklers in three family buildings, and then you'll have a firefighter in full dress uniform come to the meeting and say, then everyone will die. And that's pretty hard. That's hard to counter because you got, you know, this heroic figure wearing a fancy uniform showing up to your meeting, and everyone's going to listen. So like, I get it. It's really hard. But it's also my partner, Mark, will tell the story that firefighters do heroic, insane things, right? They run into burning buildings and they pull people out of them they have to deal with, you know, burning flesh, right? Which is something none of us have to encounter. And I have tremendous respect for that, and it is probably pretty horrific, right? It's probably very stressful to deal with that absolutely emergency room doctors have to deal with people who are maimed in car crashes, and they have to deal with horrible stuff too. That is also probably traumatic and stressful in a lot of ways, too. Emergency room doctors don't get to write the traffic laws, right? We understand that the people who deal with the most horrific outputs of the system are not the only people. I mean, like, they should probably be involved, but they can't be the only people in the conversation. Well, we've got a situation where fire codes tend to be written by the firefighters and the fire marshals and everyone else is like, Ooh, I don't want to touch that, like they got it. And I'm like, they should be at the table. Absolutely, they know a lot of really important stuff. But it's not the only perspective. It's not the only experience that that is relevant to crafting or building and fire code requirements. The same thing the building inspector is also, you know, again, it's the same compliance mindset. The ones who to survive to the end of their career tend to be very rule oriented, very risk averse people. I know some of them right, and they struggle right. So today is the case that we like are building new boy scout camp sheds in a state park or in a Boy Scout camp in Rhode Island. They wanted to put mini splits in so they could have season extension. All right, fair enough. Oh, well, technically, it's a, it's a transient residential occupancy, and now they're conditioned, so you need fire suppression. Oh, in a Boy Scout cabin, right? And I'm like, is everyone else in this room insane? Yeah? Like all of us have slept in an unsprinkled, unheated or lightly heated cabin, yeah, all dead, right? And like, you would let your kids sleep there, absolutely you would. The rules. The rules are correctly interpreted to say that now the best part of it is actually, because it's a remote cabin. You're not actually installing a wet system. No, you're installing a chemical suppression system. So the next time Johnny lights up some Purell gel and sets off the detector, they're all getting sprayed with flame retardant. Does that seem like a better scenario? Yes, it's a single story, single room cottage, like in the worst case scenario, where it's on fire. Like, they go out the door, it's right there, or they go out a window, it's right there. Like, what are we worried about, but that they are correctly interpreting the rules? That is what the rules say. And it's insane. So anyway, that's just like a couple micro cause, some examples of this, where it hits the road on these projects, right? I mentioned fire separation, like, you know, three and four family dwellings, which is like, a key part of missing middle housing, are technically commercial structures under the International residential commercial codes, which we use in the United States. So a lot of states are now trying to get threes and fours moved over the residential code we're working on that in Rhode Island. North Carolina did it a couple years ago. There's other states I know where they're working on it. So there's lots of these kinds of examples where, you know, as soon as you fix the zoning, you will realize the building code is your next problem. And then after I fix the building code, we will realize the utility regulations are our next problem. And, you know, and it's just like, then the D O T regulations, and it's like, everyone has built up muscles and rules and systems that replicate a very particular 20th century building pattern that is novel and not sustainable, and it's just really hard to get people to change and to believe that changing isn't going to like look. Need to everybody
Chuck Marohn 1:00:00
dying. Need to catch catastrophe, right? Yeah.
Seth Zeren 1:00:03
So anyway, that's my little pitch about the future. I
Chuck Marohn 1:00:07
think it's great. And you just, you know, obviously we have a we have a lot of work to do, right? Let
Seth Zeren 1:00:11
me just discuss one thing, like, you've got these three, three packages which are focused on municipal folks. And I think that's right. And I think it would be constructive to, you know, get together with, you know, some of the folks in the yimby movement that you don't find as annoying, like me, I don't know, but others, and come up with a state playbook, because the building code stuff that's a state issue, like those are state laws, right? Most cities can't do their own thing. So there's, there's a housing there's a state level housing ready playbook. And I know, and I know we're all and I share this sort of anxiety around state preemption. I think it I'm a little bit more comfortable with, I think it's a little bit more necessary, maybe than than you think.
Chuck Marohn 1:00:57
I've become a little I become a little bit less mill. You know, to me, it's like the lazy way out, and I want cities to take responsibility and to mature and to be like, worthy of governing. But yeah, there's places where we're just stuck. And I
Seth Zeren 1:01:15
think, I think you've been one of the few voices pointing out the preemption can cut both ways. And I think that's really important, and I think about this too, which is like, if you lose this political debate, then in the suburban town, say, No, we're going to use preemption the other way to protect ourselves. Now you're worse off.
Chuck Marohn 1:01:31
That could never happen. Could it set
Seth Zeren 1:01:33
it could never happen. I mean, people like Rhode Island were like, aren't you guys like a city state? And I'm like, Yeah, 50% of the GDP is in the city of Providence, but only 18% of the people, which means we only have 18% of the votes in the legislature. So it's like we're the opposite of a city state, right? Like the city doesn't run the state. The state runs the city. Yeah, it's backwards anyway.
Speaker 1 1:01:55
No, can we talk about Providence just for a minute? Oh, yeah, you guys are coming to Providence.
Chuck Marohn 1:01:59
Because, dude, we're coming to Providence. So tickets for the National gathering have gone on sale now. There's a limited number of seats because we're doing our gathering in a really funky way, where we're doing it amongst many different spaces that all have kind of limited seats. It's going to be really fun. It's going to be great interactive. I love providence. I want to tell people, don't wait on it and think you're going to get tickets the last week. I don't think there will be any available. Go strongtowns.org, and get your tickets. Now. Why? Why should people go to Providence? Seth, not the strong towns case, but the city case, like, why do you live there? What's great about this place. What are people? Yeah, when they get to totally
Seth Zeren 1:02:42
Providence is a great little city. And I think this, the best of America is in our great little cities, honestly, you know, we got the city is like, I don't know. We have hundreds of cities between, I don't know, 50 and 200,000 ish people, right? That's the sort of sweet spot plus or minus. We have great, beautiful architecture, you know, we're a colonial city going all the way back. We joke that we have pre war architecture. That's pre Civil War, you know? Yeah, you know, we have no missing middle here, where the city is built out of the missing middle. So if you're interested in architecture, you're interested in development, there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on here. We did take a highway out of the downtown a number of years ago, and those pieces are finally kind of getting filled in. So if you want to look at the do's and don'ts of highway removal, we got great stories about that, about reconnecting to a river that was sort of an abandoned industrial wasteland that's become a really active, beautiful place. You know, we're also sitting with a lot of challenges, right? We have one of, you know, usually we're one of the fastest growing rents and housing price markets as a metro in the country. We don't build nearly enough homes. We're close to Boston and New York. People's incomes are strong. The housing stock is interesting and good. So we're really dealing with a really intense housing problem here. We're a small city. It's bikeable, it's walkable, it's transitable, but we also still struggling with having turned ourselves into an auto oriented city and like, how do we turn that boat around so that we can grow as Providence lost, like 60, you know, lost almost a quarter of its population in the 20th century, sure, and we're trying to grow again, but you kind of face hard limits on growth when you're assuming car trips will get you everywhere. So a lot of great you know, there's good challenges, there's good opportunities, there's great food, there's great music. We're going to have a really fun Block Party some of our properties on the west side of Providence. All right, I'm going to be given some tours. I don't know. We're gonna have a fun time. We're gonna have
Chuck Marohn 1:04:43
a great time. We're gonna have a really great time. And I, I'm gonna thank you a number of times, you know, between now and then and after then, but, you know, I'll say it here, thanks for everything you've done to help make this happen too. I mean, we're, we're, we've relied on you kind of pointing us in different directions. And suggesting, you know, look at this venue or look at that thing. And I'm just really grateful for all the help you've given our team and putting this together. So I'm excited. Well,
Seth Zeren 1:05:09
it's gonna be fun. I'm excited too, and I'm glad. I'm really happy to been able to be kind of, you're like, Man on the inside here, yeah, you know, I don't have that much logistical capacity, but I got a lot of connections and ideas, and, you know, I'm just really excited to bring you guys to town and to have the strong towns conversation kind of try to find and grow a footing in New England, because it's, it seems different than than the upper Midwest, but it's actually, it is. It is different, and like our suburbs having all the same problems, it doesn't feel the same way, but it's the same problems. It's exciting
Chuck Marohn 1:05:44
problems. Yeah, I've, I've learned so much in my time in the in New England that shocked me in the biggest thing that shocked me is how similar the problems are, right? Like, I just assume this is such a different place. Things are more historic. They're more put together. They've got it figured out. And I'm like, Oh no, my gosh, they're we're doing we're all doing the same Well, yeah,
Seth Zeren 1:06:06
exactly. We're all doing the same things. We're just at different points on the on the on the life cycle.
Chuck Marohn 1:06:12
Yeah. Seth searen, thank you so much. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll talk again soon. Yes,
Unknown Speaker 1:06:18
and see you in Providence. See
Chuck Marohn 1:06:21
you in Providence. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care everybody.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
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Chuck Marohn (Substack).
Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.