Why Sprawl IS the Housing Crisis

(Image: Bob Jagendorf, Flickr. Cropped.)

On the surface, sprawl seems like an easy answer to the housing crisis. It fits with the mechanisms we have in place today, and it aligns with the lived experiences and political will of most Americans. But the reality of our housing crisis is more nuanced, and it's bigger than sprawl: The problem is the current way we develop, whether that's inside cities or on the fringes. Chuck explains why in this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast.

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  Chuck Marohn 0:09

  Hey everybody. This is Chuck Marohn with strong towns. Welcome back to the strong towns podcast. My local church is looking at doing a capital project. Churches do these kind of things all the time, right? We're doing an addition. We're adding on here, doing that. In our case, we're replacing the rectory, the place where the the priests live. And if I said I hated this project, it'd be an understatement. I probably have to spend a few more years in purgatory for that, saying that publicly or thinking it.

  We've had this interesting conversation and dialog in my church about whether we should do this project or not, and they recently did a survey of parishioners. You could go online or fill out the survey, or someone could call you and talk you through the questions, and then write down your responses. And they had a pretty healthy set of responses. Those were published last weekend. They were included in the bulletin a summary, and then you could get all the responses, all the data, by going online, which I of course did, downloaded, ran through AI, and got a little data set put together. I said, like, what is the top four concerns that people in the parish are expressing? And, you know, give me some statistical weighting and group them, and then give me some quotes and what have you the number one concern, not enough parking. The number one concern in my parish was that we didn't have enough parking.

  Now, let me be clear, we have a neighborhood church. I've gone here my entire life. My parents have gone here their entire life. My grandparents went there their entire life. I think my great grandparents were part of building this church. Originally. My grandfather's name is like on a plaque on the back wall, because they did this thing honoring the soldiers who were in World War Two at the time. This has been a neighborhood church for a long, long time. This church has existed in this location. It's kind of a cathedral like Catholic Church. It's been here for a while. In the last decade plus, we have spent an inordinate amount of time and resources, maybe emphasize resources, tearing down the neighborhood around the church to add parking. We have not quadrupled membership, but we have certainly quadrupled the amount of parking that we have. We tore down houses behind the church that's now a big parking lot. We tore houses across the street from the church that's now a parking lot. This proposal that they're going through now would add even more parking. They're trying to get the city to vacate the streets and they can expand the parking lot essentially up to the the steps, and, you know, near the steps of the church.

  This project has really frustrated me. It's frustrated me a lot, because I don't want to get too like Catholic on you here. But let me, let me go on a little diversion for a moment. Hey, we just have a new pope. So like you guys, can everybody, even the non Catholics in this audience, have been subjected to a little bit of Catholicism lately. I'm not going to give you theology, but let me give you this. If we listed the things that Catholics are supposed to worry about, and this is me sounding high and mighty like a great Catholic. I'm a struggling Catholic. I'm not pretending I'm better than anybody else, but if we go through the list of things that we're supposed to be worried about, the poor, the indigent, the underserved, washing the feet of criminals, I mean, let's just go through like the long list, the homeless, the dislocated parking is not high on that list yet. We are going to fundraise six, seven figures of money. And part of the teaser, or part of the the hook, the way we're getting people to fund this, to take out their wallets and spend this money, is by saying there would be more parking. We actually had one of the comments. And I don't mean to throw one of my fellow parishioners under the bus. I'm not gonna get there were no names. So like, this is all anonymous, but one of my fellow prisoners actually said it is. They didn't use the word intolerable, but they did say something like nobody should have to which maybe my brain is interpreted as intolerable. No one should have to leave the 730 mass and fight with the people who are coming for the nine o'clock mass over parking. In other words, there should be adequate parking for every one of the 730 mass and every one of the nine o'clock. Ass simultaneously, even though there's obviously like time between those two for people to leave and come and go. I live five blocks from church, and we generally walk. I will acknowledge. There are times in the winter when it's very, very cold that we will drive, but generally we try to walk.

  This bothers me a lot, and I struggle with what to do with this anxiety over this pent up frustration. There's a part of me that wants to just yell at the people in my church, like, what? What are you thinking? What is what is wrong with you. How can tearing down this neighborhood of which you have, you know, have your place of worship in, but have otherwise completely divorced yourself from, almost to the point of looking at it with disdain, it is better off as parking How can we reconcile that with what we're actually gathered to do. It bothers me. I feel like shaking some people right, yet, if I step back, I have to acknowledge the indisputable fact that a huge percentage of the parishioners of my church have as their top issue inadequate amounts of parking. Let me just throw in when we have driven in the winter. These would be, you know, Minnesota, winter, cold, days below zero, when we have driven in the winter, we have never had to walk more than half a block. We park on the streets. You can call me stubborn or whatever. I refuse to park in these parking lots. It's like, what is the holy ground? It's the opposite of holy ground. It's like, sacrilege. I just won't do it. I won't Park in any of these parking lots. So we park on the street and, you know, half a block away. That's Max when I was a kid and they didn't have all these parking lots, we would drive in from, you know, four miles away from the farm outside of town, and we would come in, and we would have to park a block away, maybe, like, a little bit on the next block. So you could say, a block and a quarter away would be like if we were really late.

  I have to step back and acknowledge that the parishioners, the people that I sit in the pews with, the people that I go to church with, they want parking and they want parking because that's the lifestyle that they live, that's the way that they go about their lives, that's the way that they have arranged themselves. And if I don't acknowledge that if I don't deal with that reality, if I don't take that reality into account, not only am I just going to be speaking right past people, not only going to be speaking to like a blank wall, I'm going to say things in my frame, in my prism, in my world, that are utterly foolish, incomprehensible and absurd to those who would look at new parking as like the obvious thing we should do.

  I say this because I've been pushed by a number of you to respond to the recent New York Times article by Conrad Doherty, called Why America should sprawl. The subtitle of this is that the word sprawl has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth. But to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it. Let me just say, as someone who does media great click bait article, right? Like, great article to start a conversation. The idea that the New York Times would publish an article pro sprawl, that is going to get a lot of a lot of discussion going. And I think in that sense, it's been good. And I also get the strategy, but let's also not kid ourselves friends, this country, America, the United States, and for the large part, Canada as well, and many other parts of the world, is built around auto oriented development. We drive, we live in cul de sacs. We shop at big box stores. We go to drive through restaurants. That is a ubiquitous American condition. Everybody listening to this here has gone through a McDonald's drive through. And that might not be your favorite thing, and it might not be the thing you do frequently. It might not be the thing you have done in the last decade, but we all share that experience. We've all been there, and for most of us, for most people, this is our lives. And let me take it to the next step here. Not only does our church, you know, response, reflect that, but our politics reflect that as well.

  Chuck Marohn 9:59

  If. You want to get elected to a statewide or, you know, a national office, you're appealing largely to people who live in subdivisions, who drive everywhere, who shop at big box stores, and people who expect free parking, even if you are in New York City, where I know we're having this experiment now in congestion pricing, which, by the way, I just so I'm clear. I like congestion pricing. I think we should have more congestion pricing. I think the price mechanism is the only way to deal with congestion. I like this, but we're having this huge experiment, and the reason why it is generating controversy is because a huge number of people in New York, particularly people who are close to power and influential, drive everywhere they go in our most walkable city, in our city with the most amount of transit, imagine what it's like. You know for the rest of the country, the political ecosystem we operate in, the physical environment isn't neutral. It's very auto dependent, and that does shape what is politically possible.

  So in an article like Connor Doherty's in the New York Times, says America should sprawl, I want you to recognize that this is not a bold proposal. It is, if anything, a capitulation to the status quo. It's a capitulation to what we have actually done and what we are geared up to do best. So I think we should acknowledge that if the goal is to build units, if you're looking out from New York City or Washington DC, if you're on Wall Street, or you're in the corridors of power, or you're in some kind of decision making framework in a state capital, and you're looking out on the landscape and you're saying, Hey, we don't have enough housing. We need to build more housing. What button do I press? What lever do I pull? What thing do I do right now, today, to get as much housing as I can? The easy button is sprawl. That's, in a sense, the machine we have built. Imagine you're working on an assembly line that builds cars, and you're saying, okay, America needs a lot more transportation. We could really use some busses, we could really use some trains. We could really use a lot of bikes. Oh my gosh, if we could just build a lot of bikes, that would be great. Like, people could get places really cheaply, really easily. But I run a car plant, and I'm going to go press the button tomorrow, and I want that button to spit out transportation. The easy thing to do is cars. The easy thing to do today is to just build more. What Doherty here is calling sprawl.

  The piece that he wrote is really well written, of course. I mean, say what you want about the New York Times. And you know, you can say a lot of other New York Times. The New York Times writes stuff that is well written. If you want to read good well written journalism is a good place to go. I think even more than that, it resonated with a lot of people, because it's saying what they already believe, right? We need more housing. However we can get it, wherever we can get it. That is a desperate thing, that is a lived reality by many, many people. And the way we do it is to use the mechanisms we have in place to go do that right now, to go do that today, to go do it at scale.

  Part of my I'm just going to use the word tension. Let's call it that. Part of my tension with the yimby the yes in my backyard, people is over the simplicity of their argument. Now, I know the simplicity is grand, right? Because if you're trying to mobilize people, if you're trying to get legislation passed, if you're trying to, you know, work in the corridors of power to assert power and steamroll others, do the things you need to do to get legislation passed, which, let's be clear, that's not what we're doing here at strong towns. If that's your deal, simplicity helps, right? I mean, go back and look at political campaigns. You know, my entire life, simplicity wins, right? Make America Great Again. It's the economy, stupid, right? Read my lips. No new taxes. These are things that resonate with people because they're simple. They point the compass in a direction and they say, like, Let's go do it. Let's get stuff done. Let's not sweat the details. Let's not worry about the nuance.

  But here's the problem, and this is why nuance is important. Sprawl. All. And let's just be clear at strong downs, we actually have, actually have a style guide the way we talk about things, you know, because we have guest writers and people who come in and chat about stuff, and we've actually created, internally a list of red words, yellow words. In other words, red. Don't use yellow. Use with caution. Sprawl is one of the red words. We just don't use it. To me, it's a bad rhetorical device to communicate something that, for us has more nuance than just garish, ugly, reckless. You know, growth, as Doherty describes it in the subtitle of that piece, we just don't use the word sprawl because we find that it actually polarizes and divides people when we're trying to open people's minds. I am going to use the word sprawl liberally throughout this conversation. It won't come natural to me, but I'm going to do it because that's the basis of this very specific article and this very specific dialog.

  Here's the problem with sprawl. It doesn't solve the housing crisis, and I'm gonna go a step further. Sprawl is the housing crisis. The housing crisis we have today is because of the way we have chosen to assemble ourselves on the landscape, the way we have chosen to develop, from a macro perspective, sprawl. It's not a housing strategy. It is a if anything positive, it's a growth it's an economic growth strategy. In reality, it has morphed into a debt strategy, a way to leverage debt, whether it is the debt of potential homeowners, whether it is national debt, whether it is state level debt, it is a mechanism to use leverage to bring capital into the market, to keep capital flow going, to keep the market moving, to keep things going. Sprawl is, at its core, not a housing strategy. It is a debt strategy.

  Chuck Marohn 17:18

  When you look at sprawl, what you are looking at is housing and development as consumption, not as production. You are looking at something that, through its manifestation, consumes more resources than it creates. Let me be very clear about this, because there's a lot of people who and this is why I don't use the term sprawl. When you use the term sprawl, immediately default to an environmental lens. Sprawl is environmentally destructive. It bisects ecosystems. It destroys habitats. It leads to a lot of driving, which creates lots of emissions. You can go down the list, and basically the kind of core of the sprawl conversation, or the conversation around sprawl, is an environmental conversation. We don't use the word sprawl because we don't want to get drug into that framework and that prism. I am not asserting that is environmentally destructive. I think you can make that assertion, and I think there's really good arguments along those lines, but that's not the argument that I'm trying to make. That's not the argument that strong towns is trying to make.

  When we say it is consumption, not production. What we are saying is that in our economy today, the underlying idea of sprawl is that we can invest $1 in sprawl, and it creates multiple dollars of economic benefit for the economy. It puts people to work. It creates jobs. It creates transactions in the economy. It gets people hiring people to do their yard, and hiring people to clean their pool and hiring people to, you know, what have you go down the list, put tile in their bathroom. Like sprawl is great. The more that we can build, the more loans we can originate, the more mortgage backed securities we can create, the more flow we can create in the economy. Sprawl is like this engine for growth. And what I am suggesting is that instead of having this massive multiplier where we spend $1 and as the economists like to say, you know, you have $2 $3 $4 generated throughout the economy, what sprawl does is it actually consumes it creates today and then takes in the future, and it takes and it takes and it takes in the future.

  Let me give an olive branch, in a sense, to I don't want to let the economists off the hook, because I feel like economists. Are intellectually lazy about this stuff. I mean, I've written a lot about how economists are just really stupid when it comes to infrastructure. You could go back to, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to misquote Keynes, because I think John Maynard Keynes is brilliant. I do think that the way that his ideas, I mean, Karl Marx was brilliant. I think the ways that his ideas have been interpreted, but to work, some of the things Marx said were horrible and awful, but some of them were brilliant insights. I think there's a difference between philosophical thinkers and then the way their ideas are used. I think Keynes is a brilliant philosophical intellect. I'm not sure that his ideas have been implemented the way he would call for them to be.

  And so I'm letting him off the hook here, but I want to say something that I've seen ascribed to him, this idea that we would do well in an economic downturn to just pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in if we paid people to dig ditches and fill them back in, people would have money. They would have resources. They could go spend those resources, and you would see this kind of flowering of second order and third order effects. Now I'm going out, and instead of starving, I've got money to go out and buy bread that puts someone to work, baking the bread that puts someone to work, collecting the wheat that puts someone to work, you know, all up and down the chain. And so the idea is, if we were in a recession, if we're in a depression, if we're in a really bad place economically, we can just pay people to dig ditches and then fill them back in. And that would be a productive use of money because of this multiplier effect, if we take that to the next step.

  And this is why I think this is where I think economists get lost, because I think they don't understand what they're actually prescribing. Economists will say, Well, if we instead of digging a ditch and filling it back in, if we built a bridge or a highway or a sewer and water pipe, or, you know, name, any of a myriad of potential infrastructure that we could build. Not only would we get the multiplier effect immediately, like Kane suggests, but we would also get this productive piece of, in a sense, national machinery that we would be able to use for good. Let me throw the bone out to the people who are going to argue, as economists have argued, but argue from the heart, from the gut, from their instinct that this is what success looks like. This is what we should do if we want to solve the housing crisis, if we want to create growth, if we want to create jobs, we should build sprawl.

  Sprawl creates a really quick sugar high for our economy. When you go out and sell the land, when you go out and build houses, cash flows, it flows through the economy. Yes, developers are out there doing this work, but they hire people, and they buy materials, and they have, you know, transactions everywhere from the realtor and the person writing the insurance policy and the person originating the loan all the way up to the person who's putting the shingles on and fixing up the plumbing and putting on your trim and painting the house, there's, there's a whole cadre of people who are now employed and now have jobs, because we have sprawl taking place, because we're out building this stuff. And if you think about bringing forward, which is what debt does? Debt brings spending forward to today. You bring that forward to today in exchange for not spending tomorrow, right? By bringing forward 30 years of spending to today through a mortgage, you can juice the economy in a really, really big way. This is the magic of building homes. This is the magic of sprawl. This is a magic of the assembly line process that we built, the problem that we have identified at strong towns.

  And this is not, I mean, I kind of thought this was me originally, because I'm figured this out on my own. It was very painful to go through and be like, Okay, I'm working as an engineer, I'm working as a planner. I'm building this stuff. I'm building a great, strong America. I'm doing really good work. Why is this not working? To then kind of understanding why that that was a that was a decade long journey for me that was very painful, but then I found out a lot of people who knew this stuff already talked about it for decades. You can go back to the Nixon administration, who wrote whole reports about the fact that sprawl consumes resources. It doesn't produce them because. What happens when you build that road? Now somebody's got to maintain it. And who is that somebody? That somebody is the local government, that somebody is the city. And what is the city? The city is just a collection of us. It's us working together in a place to do stuff together, right? If we're going to maintain that road. Look around at your neighbors. You all got to pitch in money to make that happen.

  There's no, you know, pot of money coming from the state. There's no gravy train coming from the federal government. Yes, there might be grants sometimes that you can get, but you got to maintain that stuff. Like that's going to be on you. You got to fix that road. You got to fix that pipe. You have to take care of that sidewalk. You've got to maintain that park, that building you built. You've got to repair it, that sewage treatment facility. You got to run it. You got to put people in there. You got to staff it. You got to work. You got it. You got to do this stuff like this is your responsibility. So local governments get stuck with those costs.

  Here's the catch, and this is why sprawl. You know, we don't talk about sprawl. We talk about things like the suburban experiment or the North American development pattern, because the sprawl part, the thing we would identify as the horizontal expansion part. The key to making that not work is that we do it in large amounts. We do it all at once, over a broad area, and we do it to a finished state. We build things to be static. Let's just look at that for a second, because this is also, by the way, what we do in our cities. This is why the post world war two development pattern, the suburban experiment, the way we build today, if we simplify it down to just sprawl, we are actually creating an argument that is incomplete. It just looks at the stuff on the edge of the city and says, you know, that stuff is bad, but treating the core of our cities in the exact same way well that that's okay or that is more understandable or more acceptable.

  Chuck Marohn 27:09

  Let me point out a truism that just you know on its face destroys all the math here. The truism is that the inflation rate for five decades now, at least, maybe more. The inflation rate on construction costs far exceeds the inflation rate on your tax base. In a say, like Minnesota, where you have property tax, there's a direct correlation, right? Because you build this stuff, and then you tax the property and you use that property tax to pay for the maintenance of the stuff you've built. It's kind of easy to see the difference. Let's pretend that you start on day one, and on day one, what you've built generates enough tax base, generates enough tax revenue to actually maintain the stuff that you put in the ground. Let's say that that's true on day one. By the way, not even close to being true in almost every instance, in every instance that I've ever looked at of stuff built in the last 20 years, it is absolutely not true, okay, but let's pretend for a minute that it is true. Okay, after year one, your housing values have gone up by x, and your construction costs have gone up by a factor of something above x. So what was true in year one is now no longer true, and every year that that goes on, it becomes less and less and less true. The gap grows more and more just from inflation of construction costs exceeding the inflation of home values and essentially capacity.

  This was a conundrum to me in the 1990s like I didn't understand, how can this possibly be you would, back then, they would have these books, you know, because we didn't have the internet the way we have today to research some of these things. So we would actually have these books that were published of construction inflation, because if we were working on a project and you had to say, three years from now, this is what this project is going to cost, you had to put an inflation factor into it, and you base that on historic inflation rates for concrete, for asphalt, for what have you. And so I look back in these books, and I'd be like, I don't get it. How can the inflation rate for this stuff be so much higher than the general inflation rate, or the rise of the overall economy? Won't we just eventually go broke? And the answer was, Oh, that's really cute, Chuck. Shut up and do the math.

  That is just one aspect you have. The other aspect that now your neighborhood is unable to change. Your neighborhood is locked into regulatory Amber, right? Your neighborhood is not supposed to evolve. It's not supposed to grow, it's not supposed to shift. This was the conundrum that I struggled with. How do you actually solve this, this cost disparity? Well, the answer. Is your neighborhoods need to become more productive over time. If we look at development patterns of the past, you would grow incrementally. You would add that paved road after you had a certain number of homes, you would add that sewer and water after you had a certain number of homes, you would add the new park after you had a certain number of homes, you'd put that amenity in after you had a certain amount of tax base, everything kind of grew together incrementally. You never got too far out in front of your skis.

  Now we build everything wide space all at once to a finished state, and then we lock it in stasis. Stasis is like the marketing brochure of the stuff that we built. Move to this neighborhood. It's a nice neighborhood. It's not going to change. We can protect it from change with zoning codes and regulations and homeowners associations and on and on and on, not no change is a feature, not a flaw. And so, and I pointed this out many times, you build a brand new subdivision, and on day one, it looks great, and on day two, it looks great. And on day three, it looks great. And when people go look at it, they're like, this is what success looks like. This is what a nice neighborhood looks like. This is what prosperity looks like.

  And then they drive over to the neighborhood that was built 30 years earlier, and they're like, Ooh, this is kind of starting to go bad. And then they go look at the one that was built 40 years earlier. And then like, ooh, this one is is a little worse yet. And then they go to the one that was built 50 years earlier and 60 years earlier. And they're like, Yeah, this is these. These people here. They don't care about their place, not recognizing that what happens when you lock a place down is that 25, 30 years after it's built, everybody's shingles need to be replaced. Everybody's siding needs to be replaced. Everybody's sidewalk needs to be replaced. All at the same time the entire neighborhood enters a phase of decline, all at the same time that is predictable, that is knowable, that is expected, that has no relationship to the, you know, quality of the individual living in the house.

  This is just time. This is how entropy works, and we get to that spot, and yes, just statistically, you may even be in a neighborhood where most people are willing to, you know, buck up and repaint their house and fix their roof and do all the stuff that you need to do to keep it working. But statistically, there's going to be some people who don't there's going to be some people who fall behind. There's gonna be some people who are so loaded up with debt trying to get into that place that they don't have the money to do all these other things, and so what happens is the neighborhood starts to show outward signs of decline at the exact time that it's starting to experience distress. At the exact time the road needs to be fixed, the sidewalk needs to be fixed, it shows outward signs of distress. What happens then? What happens to the affluent people in that neighborhood?

  We all know what happened. They move on to the next neighborhood. They move on to a better place. This This place is going bad. This place is not what it used to be. You know, we've got all the cultural narratives to explain what is happening in slow motion in front of us. And so we move on. We move on to the next like successful place, right? We leave behind people of lesser financial means to maintain a neighborhood at the time when costs are spiking and the kind of relentless math of maintenance costs growing and the neighborhood itself stagnating and in stasis just no longer works.

  If we go back in time and we look at the way neighborhoods worked prior to the suburban experiment, prior to the Great Depression, I've never claimed, and I'm not claiming now, that these were idyllic places. There were idyllic places. Absolutely, they're idyllic places in sprawl too. I'm not claiming that neighborhoods of the past were idyllic. What I am saying is that they grew and evolved and changed and matured incrementally over time. They were connected to the core of the city, and so each neighborhood that was added on the edge, because they were connected in this walkable framework, the proximity to that center, the proximity to the neighborhood center, the proximity to the core, that all became something that was reflected in land values.

  And the more people who moved to the neighborhood, the more those underlying land values would grow. Because not only did more people mean more customers and more patrons, but more customers and more patrons meant better shops and better places and higher quality establishments, which again meant a more desirable neighborhood and more people wanting to live there. And as these. Land Values accelerate change and evolution. What you would see is that people would say, hey, this house is falling apart. It makes sense for me to fix the roof, maintain the yard, replace the siding, or add a backyard cottage, or add a apartment building onto the side, or convert this into a duplex, or buy the house next door and make it a four unit place. There was a natural mechanism to thicken up these places over time, because it made financial sense in a regime of ever increasing land values based on proximity, there's a natural renewal mechanism that we see within neighborhoods, and this natural renewal mechanism automatically included different price points, housing of many different styles, many different price points.

  And not only that, but a market that was responsive to supply and demand characteristics, locally responsive to supply and demand, there's not a lot of people demanding to move to this neighborhood. Land values are going to stagnate. Whoa, lots of people want to move here. Land values are going to go up. Land value is going up. Creates this redevelopment pressure. All of a sudden, the redevelopment is a profitable thing to do, so now we're adding more units organically as we go. This mechanism has been stripped out. Sprawl strips it out. It strips it out, not only by ensuring, from a regulatory standpoint, that the land cannot grow in value. Sure, land will grow in value by inflation, but land's not going to grow in value by proximity. You lock land down through regulation. You don't allow the neighborhood to change. You lock land down because you don't allow neighborhoods to form, neighborhoods to function, or anything that would make the location better.

  Chuck Marohn 37:10

  And in fact, we often have active things, especially in poor neighborhoods, that make the neighborhoods worse off. Now we're going to come through and redo your road, and we can't afford the sidewalks anymore, so those are coming out. Now we're going to come through and redo your park, and we can't afford it. So now you know, we're going to take out the equipment, or not mow it, or not maintain it, and so the few scattered amenities that we do have stagnate over time as well. This is what you get with sprawl. This is what happens.

  And if we want to point a finger at why we have a crisis of housing today. I've even seen people credibly argue that we don't have a lack of housing units. I don't know as I fully buy that, but I can see it from where I'm at. We certainly do not have a lack of space or a lack of bedrooms or a lack of capacity, but what we do have is the lack of mechanisms to actually make that make any sense. This is a direct result of the way we have chosen to build. This is a direct result of sprawl. Building more sprawl doesn't solve that problem. Again. What is this development pattern? It is the ability to take 30 years of your future spending, bring it into today and spend it, which was really critical at the end of World War Two to get the economy going, keep us out of another Great Depression, to get us all moving today, we are trapped.

  This brings me to Texas. And Doherty's piece focused on Texas, you know. And I think for good reason, Texas is like the poster child for this kind of sprawl optimism. I know really, really smart people from Texas who like this is exactly what we need to do. We're leading the way. Doherty spoke to a lot of people putting this together. A lot of people that I know that are really smart. He also spoke to us, and none of our stuff made it in which you know, obviously didn't fit the narrative.

  The smart people that I know, though, talk about this idea of Sunbelt exceptionalism, which Doherty invokes in his his article, right Texas is leading. You know, Dallas Fort Worth is unstoppable. Places like Princeton, Texas, which were highlighted are, you know, on the edge of what is exciting growth, and they're seeing all kinds of things happen that are positive in terms of new investment and new housing and new growth and all this. It is hard for me to not and I'll just state it plainly and clear.

  Clearly, you know, Texas today is where California was 30 years ago. Texas today is just a generation behind California. California went through all of this. How do you think you got prop 13? Prop 13 would not pass today. I don't think maybe it would. I don't know, Californians are crazy. I don't understand them, but prop 13 was born out of the tax revolts of the 1970s and 80s. As in a sense, California was our first state to really go all in on sprawl, because you could do it in a moderate climate, without needing air conditioning, without needing all the stuff that you need. And in Texas, in Arizona, to be able to do this, you didn't need that in California. And so the technology was not necessary. It took 20, 30, 40 years for it to really get to the point where you could develop broad swaths of Texas in this same manner.

  And so California went first, and you saw California explosive growth, all this investment, all the sprawl, right? And then you started to see, after you get through the first generation, you started to see the second generation impacts. You start to see the maintenance bill come due. You start to see your property taxes going up. And what happens is that you have a tax revolt. Oh, these horrible local governments. They're just cheating us. They're just, you know, outspending on things we don't need to spend on. If they just simplified, if they just, you know, lived within their means, we would all be better off. And so you get a statewide referendum limiting the ability of local governments to raise property taxes.

  And that has, in a sense, killed a lot of California, because, you know, if you it was like sprawl fuel, right? You know, it was sprawl fuel, and then ultimately, redevelopment fuel, right? If you were a city and your existing tax base could only go up, you know, 3% a year, two and a half percent a year, or whatever the percentage was. But you could get new development out on the edge, where you could take an orange grove paying X number of dollars per acre and put in a new subdivision that would pay 100x let's focus all our energy on sprawl. Let's focus all our energy on the new subdivision. And so, in a sense, the problem that was creating the financial crisis, was just doubled down on as a solution to what became a city municipal crisis.

  California went through a period where they did redevelopment, which that also got kicked out, and I remember people being very angry about that, but this was basically the idea that the city would have these agencies that would go in and redevelop large swaths of their city from low tax base to high tax base, because that was like the own these were generally not good developments, but they were the only way that the city could make ends meet, or pretend they were going to start to make ends meet. A lot of the dysfunction that we see in California a lot of the dysfunction in their politics, in the narratives they tell themselves. I've said a number of times, California leads the country in hypocrisy, right? Because the narratives they tell about themselves, the things that they say they want to do, the things they say they stand for, are reflected in the opposite, in the negative, in the way that they build, the way that they act, the things that they do.

  Californians are not some weird, like different creature than the rest of us. You take a Minnesotan and you put them in California, they're going to be a Californian. You take a Texan and you put them in California. And you know, I know Texans don't like to think this, but in a generation, they're going to be Californians. They're gonna think the same way. They're gonna have the same hypocrisies, the same misconstruing, the same cognitive dissonance in their brain that everybody else around them does, that they're humans, is what I'm saying. And when we look at Texas, what we can see is the same humans, the same instincts, are driving the dialog and the conversation there every place where we build new stuff, those are the nice neighborhoods. Those are the newer places we can build. Those let's go build it at scale. Let's build a city, you know, all the way up the highway from Dallas to Oklahoma City. Let's just keep going. There's more and more and more land here. It's cheap, it's affordable. We can get it. We can build lots of units. And if we build lots of units, that's how we solve the housing crisis. That's how we address the housing problem.

  There's no recognition in the moment of how a state like California, which, I mean, let's be clear, gave us Ronald Reagan, a conservative state like California, became the place that it is today, and there's no recognition from Texans that they are on the exact same path. Let. Alone Oklahomans or Louisianans or Minnesotans, or, you know, any of us that have dabbled or gone down this path with this experiment, which is a subset of all of us. When I read like the mayor of Princeton going in Doherty's article, going on and on about all the things that they now need to do. Hey, we're growing, and so we need to do this, and we need to do this, and it's really expensive, and so we need more growth. I look at that and I'm like, This dude's not overseeing a master planning process, he's overseeing civic triage. This is a losing strategy, and the idea that the answer to whatever housing problem you think we have, and I definitely think we have one. But however you would define it, if the answer is sprawl is it's doing more of what got us here, that is the definition of insanity.

  I want to end by coming back to the yimby conversation, because I've had a little bit of, I mean, I always have a little bit of negative dialog with yimbys online. Maybe I'll give this disclaimer, because I think it's worth it. I, you know, chat one on one with a lot of people who identify as yes in my backyard, and you know, in almost all instances, I find them to be well aligned with what we're doing. I find them to be pleasant people. I find them to be people that I can work with. I find them to be people that embrace nuance and and dialog and can kind of recognize the tensions, the tensions that I led off with, with the parking at my church.

  But there's a subset of the yimby conversation, and this is the subset that tends to be most online, I would say, most political, that that really embraces, I think the kind of hyper divisiveness and over simplicity of this whole conversation, to me, the Connor Doherty article takes the, what I'm just going to call the extreme yimby point of view, which I'll just say, is build units. Build them wherever. You know. I mean, I've seen you be say, wait, I want brutal density. I want it wherever. You know. If you've got a neighborhood and someone's wants to build a six story apartment, you know, single family home neighborhood, go build it. Shove it down their throats. You know, they're a bunch of NIMBYs. You know, they're comfortable in their houses and everybody else and they, you know, they've got the whole like narrative, and it's a very divisive narrative of us against them, and they've got theirs, and we got to get ours. And, you know, all these people are comfortable.

  And it is a narrative that I am very uncomfortable with, but it's one that is not. It's not so far out of the yimby conversation that it's unidentifiable to them or unidentifiable to anybody who is seriously in that space. Of course, there has to be more than just building units. And I think if your whole thing is like, we just need to build units. Wherever it is. I don't care. We have a housing crisis. We don't have enough homes. The way we make housing affordable is just to build, build, build, build, build. If we can build a unit there, do it. If we can build a unit over here, do it. If we can build a big complex over here, do it. If we can build sprawl. Do it. We just need units. Units, units. If you subscribe to that thinking, this is the logical conclusion that you get to.

  And I've had a lot of yimby people push back when I said that, you know, I was asked when this piece first came out, what I thought of it, and I said to me, it's the logical conclusion of the hyper yimby mindset. You know, we need more units. We can't get them here. I'm sick of waiting. Let's just build them here, where we can get them and build them at scale. This is the hyper, you know, the logical outcome of that thinking. And I've had a lot of people push back and say, I don't know any yimby, who, you know, says we should build sprawl. I don't know any yimby Who says we should do anything but infill. I don't know any yimby Who says we should just build, build, build. And I gotta tell you, I run into them all the time. They scream and yell at me.

  I'm gonna say the worst offense that I've ever seen is someone like Steve Ozan, who is like a deeply thoughtful person. He wrote the book The original green and he has gone out of his way to try to engage with the yes in my backyard groups in a number of ways, saying, Hey, I'm all for more units. I want to build more and more and more. I think our neighborhoods need a lot more units, but we are making a huge disservice to everybody. And. Including the future people who will live in these places and just housing long term, if we don't look at things like design and how these fit in, and how we make the neighborhood this active cauldron of evolution and growth and renewal. I have seen him skewered in piece after piece after piece, tweet after tweet, comment after comment, vitriol thrown at this man who only said we should be building decent places at scale, lots of units.

  I've said before, we need a lot more housing. We need lots and lots of housing. Our core campaign is incremental housing everywhere. No neighborhood should be locked in amber. No neighborhood cannot be subject to some degree of change and maturing in evolution, infill matters, reforming zoning matters on that I feel like strong towns and the broader yes in my backyard movement are really well aligned, but there's a big percentage of the most vocal yimbys, and yes I said the most vocal, not the most thoughtful, but the most vocal, they far too often treat the housing crisis like simply a numbers game, more units full stop.

  When that mindset goes out and cheers for towers in small towns or sprawl on the edge of the city, as Doherty has in this article, the yimby movement stops being a reform movement, and it becomes a growth at all costs, machine, and I think that machine destroys not just neighborhoods, not just cities, but I think actually destroys, long term, the things that will make a housing market work.

  So if we're not going to sprawl, what are we going to do? We got to go out and build strong towns, we have to actually change the way we approach our neighborhoods so that every neighborhood can evolve and change over time. The next increment of development needs to be allowed in every neighborhood. At strong towns we put out earlier this year, the first of a set of three toolkits that we are producing. The first one was on regulatory reform. These are six things that cities can do today to make more housing legal in their cities. We call it the housing-ready toolkit. If you go to strongtowns.org/housingready, you can download that toolkit. It's six things.

  If your city is doing all six, let us know. There's a little form you can fill out. We'll put you on the map, and we will tell everybody that we know. Hey, this is a place that's ready to build. This is a place that's ready, that's taking housing seriously. This is a place that is independent of what the state government is doing, or the federal government's doing, or anybody else. This is a city that stepped up and said, we are doing what we can to get more housing.

  The second toolkit is in production right now. We are working on it. It is going to deal with how we create an environment where incremental developers can prosper. How do we get the people who are actually going to do this work building Hundreds 1000s of units, 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s across this country. How do we get those people off the sidelines and to work doing this work? The third Toolkit, which will come out early next year, is going to be on finance. How do local governments help finance this revolution? How do we get them to use their resources not at a loss, not as dumb money at the card table, but as actual difference maker to get housing units built.

  This is the strong towns approach. We need every neighborhood to contribute. We need every neighborhood to evolve, every neighborhood to mature, every neighborhood to become a stronger, more prosperous, more successful place. This is an urgent calling, and let me just say it's not just an urgent calling because we need the housing units, but we desperately need the housing units. It's an urgent calling because we need to fix our city's budgets. We need to make our streets safer. We need to make our places better places to live. There's a convergence of thought here, and this Conrad Doherty piece not only oversimplifies a problem responding to it in a hammer nail kind of way, but I think draws the worst instincts of the yimby movement out into the light in a way that just reflects badly on this entire conversation.

  Let's push back. Let's do this differently. Let's recognize that there is a third way. We don't have to choose between doing nothing and building sprawl. We don't have to choose between agonizing endless. Fights to get a big unit built over here, a subsidized unit built over there, we can actually go out and unleash people to provide lots and lots of housing, making their lives better, making other people's lives better, helping them to fulfill their dreams. This is all possible.

  If you're interested in more, not only go to strongtowns.org and go to that housing ready site. Strong towns dot org slash housing ready, but pick up the book Escaping the Housing Trap. Daniel Herriges and I wrote a national bestseller called escaping the housing trap. We've ended the book tour for that one, but I'm still, you know, happy to come out and chat with you. I'm happy to come out and be part of your community, part of your dialog, and talk about how we can make these things happen in the meantime, thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can To build astronomy. Take care.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Learn how to beat the housing crisis the right way. Download The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform today!

• Read more:

  • “Escaping the Housing Trap” by Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges

  • “America Should Sprawl? Not If We Want Strong Towns” by Charles Marohn

• Chuck Marohn (Substack)

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