Abby Newsham  0:04  

This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.

Abby Newsham  0:18  

Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, the show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Towns conversation, and we upzone it: We talk about it in depth. My name is Abby Newsham, I'm a planner in Kansas City, and today I am joined by my friend Chuck Marohn. Hello. Welcome to Upzoned.

Chuck Marohn  0:39  

Hey. Haven't seen you for 48 hours.

Abby Newsham  0:42  

I know! So Chuck was in Kansas City just a couple of days ago, and you had a great turnout to your talk. So congratulations.

Chuck Marohn  0:50  

You know what? Joe was even better than that, though. How many people either lining up to get books signed or coming up to me afterwards saying "I listen to Upzoned. Upzoned is one of those podcasts that I can't miss."

Abby Newsham  1:05  

Really?

Chuck Marohn  1:06  

Oh no, I'm telling you a really high percentage of people told me that. I just thought that was really cool, because, you know, this is not a Kansas City-based podcast, but you're in Kansas City. Kansas City comes up plenty. And then we have people on from our friend groups and acquaintance groups, and those happen to be a lot of Kansas City people from time to time. So it was cool, because I hear it every now and then, but I heard it a lot this week.

Abby Newsham  1:35  

Well, yeah, it's a little bit of a biased crowd, because it is a Kansas City crowd. But I really enjoyed talking with some folks that I'd never met before, who said that they listened to this show and we had good conversation. It's great to hear people in your region that are in cities that you don't really go to, within the suburbs and towns in the region, that came to your talk and are doing things for their communities that I was not aware of. It's just really cool to see how many people are tapping into this message and these conversations and content and getting something from it. So I appreciated that.

Chuck Marohn  2:22  

It was a lot of fun. It was a very affirming trip. Especially since my first trip to Kansas City ended up to be such an antagonizing thing.

Abby Newsham  2:35  

Yeah.

Chuck Marohn  2:37  

I made a couple comments, and then it got picked up locally and became this literally antagonistic thing. I've had such good interactions with Kansas City since then, and I just really love it. So we're having all the fun.

Abby Newsham  2:54  

And I think they said that, back then, Kansas City was a lot more self-conscious or insecure?

Chuck Marohn  3:01  

Yeah, insecure, but this would be like 12 years ago. I was insecure too. So maybe we both matured.

Abby Newsham  3:08  

Well, I appreciate that self awareness. That's great. All right. Well, we're gonna talk about an article today that is surely to upset some people, because we've got a rage-bait title right here, by Bloomberg. So we're going to talk about the question raised, which is, "Should we let public transit die?" Very much a rage-bait article title. So by the end of 2026, if nothing changes, a lot of US cities are going to see big chunks of their public transit systems disappear. For decades, transit has basically survived on a mix of fare revenue and government funding, and it's never been really profitable, no more than road construction is. But as the article points out, it has provided really two major benefits that have been the argument of why the investment is worthwhile. The first is that, in dense cities, there's just not enough space to have everyone drive a car. The system really only works if lots of people move around in ways that use space efficiently. It's a basic and unavoidable reality that cities run out of space if everyone drives, and no technology necessarily changes that fact. The second is that every community has people who can't drive, don't want to drive, and probably shouldn't be driving, and plenty of others would benefit financially if they didn't need to own as many cars. So these two reasons, which come down to space and personal autonomy, are why transit has been funded, according to the article, for the past 50 years or so. But now after covid 19, emergency federal dollars that had been keeping transit agencies afloat are now drying up, and fare revenues are also drying up because ridership has not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. Another important point is that the cost of service has continued to climb due to a hiring cost crisis. Really, transit agencies are now competing with delivery companies for drivers and mechanics, and the only real way to fix that is to pay more to attract workers. So I think that this ultimately, all gets to this question, at least for me, of "Are we willing to fund these things ourselves, if revenue is drying up and not coming from the federal or state government to save us?"

Chuck Marohn  5:55  

I was reading this article, and I was like, "This is really smart. I think this is a really smart framing, and I think these are thoughtful questions." And then I got to the end and I realized that Jared Walker had written it. So I'm like, "Oh, okay, that makes sense. Now I get it." So I'm a guy, and I think I get a pass on talking about the Roman Empire for a minute. To me, I feel like this question is a lot like the British at the fall the Roman Empire. You're sitting there in your town in England, and you have people who talk about how, a century or two earlier, there was no running water, there was no hot baths, there was no security. It was just this tribal wasteland. And now the Romans have come. And yes, the Romans have brought with them a certain amount of oppression and demands, and what have you, but they also have brought roads. They also have brought the warm water. They've also brought security, and on and on and on. Remember the the Monty Python thing? "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

Abby Newsham  7:12  

Yeah.

Chuck Marohn  7:12  

Yeah, you get that. And then, because this is the far reaches of the empire, when Rome starts to fall apart, they take the troops out, and they take the administrators out, and they leave, and they walk away from the vast frontier. And what happens in the frontier? Everything falls apart. It doesn't fall apart because they don't want it to keep running. It doesn't fall apart because people there don't care or they wouldn't prefer to have warm baths over not. It's not like they don't want these things. It's just that they don't have the capacity to provide them themselves. So what you have is a situation where, under one set of conditions, this thing that we would never have done before and otherwise wouldn't do is possible, and then those conditions go away, and now it's not possible anymore. I feel like that is the conversation about the insane transit systems that we built. Let's be clear, we've built an insane auto-based transportation system. It is one that I think is going to be about half the size it is now in the next generation. I think that the next generation of engineers and planners and traffic analysts and what have you are going to preside over a system decline or a system decrease, a subtraction of the system, as opposed to what the prior two generations have done, which is system expansion. I think we have reached the peak of the transportation empire, and it is now receding. The thing that you see receding first is the most fragile part, and that's this alternative overlay of transit that we have built on the base of this dysfunctional auto-based system. And I tell people, I don't know how to solve that problem. I don't know how to fix that. How do you sustain the unsustainable? You could say, "Well, the federal government should be more generous. This is a moral issue. It should happen. We should be committed to transit." All those things are really nice slogans. But it doesn't change the fact that, in the Democrat plan, the federal government's gonna borrow $3 trillion this year, and in the Republican plan, it's gonna borrow $2.5 trillion this year. No matter what you do, the federal government's running out of money. You can say, "Well, Chuck, just print the money." I think if you go down that route, you're not having a serious conversation. We are seeing the end of the suburban experiment. At Strong Towns, we've been talking about this for a decade and a half. This is not financially viable, it's not going to be maintained. You're watching, in these transit systems, the most vulnerable part fall apart first. I think we have to recognize it as that. I think we should have transit. I think we should have transit in every city. I think it's a great wealth accelerator, but not the way we are currently building it or operating it. Does that make sense, Abby?

Abby Newsham  10:37  

It does make sense. I keep going back to comparing this system of transit to our system of roads. As the article points out, roadways are also not profitable, and it's a system of transportation that we've built out across our regions. I think part of the reason why the transit system is much more vulnerable is because, number one, a lot of vulnerable people use transit, and those are people that have less political power than people who are driving. I think the other thing is that transit systems require a lot of people to work within an agency and run the system. You need drivers, you need mechanics. It's a system with a consolidated way of operating. Within a roadway system, all of the costs of essentially, quote unquote, operations are decentralized to the users. We're paying for our own car maintenance. We're driving ourselves. When actually funding these things in a transit system, it's easy to point to and make cuts around, because it's just a vulnerable system in and of itself. But it's not necessarily any less efficient than all of our roadway systems, which are attached to parcels that create revenue generation for our cities that are never going to pay for all of this infrastructure that we've built across our regions. I think the good thing about looking at a transit system is that it can change more readily than you can just change and retrofit roadway systems. We can't really necessarily unbuild all these roads that we've built across our metros. To your point in your book, you've talked about how we're really going to have to triage, if it comes down to it, what we take care of and what we don't. But transit systems can retrofit, and they can change. It seems like that funding is going to need to come from a regional source. We are going to have to pay for these systems ourselves and have smaller, more retrofitted systems of transit if we are going to even dream of having functional systems. And I guess, with this whole point, I'm really just talking about bus systems. If you've built out rail and other kind of heavy systems, those are like roads. You can't just change them that readily.

Chuck Marohn  13:41  

Let's come back to a discussion about vulnerable people in the system, because I feel like there's some really important insights there. Before we do that, I'd like to talk about the thing you just brought up, about the fixed costs versus the malleable costs. As a way to get your mind wrapped around this, think about the idea that we're collecting locally, like, 20 cents on the dollar of what is needed to maintain our roadways. I'm sure there are cities that I could point to that are doing better than that and less than that, but every city that we've looked at through the Finance Decoder shows that their infrastructure capacity is declining steadily over time. If we decide tomorrow -- and let's be clear, as Jared says in the article, cities have already decided this. They're already doing this. If we decide tomorrow that we're going to do a 20% cut in the massive underfunding, we're going to cut that by an additional 20% on the roadway side and on the transit side, what does it look like on the roadway side? It looks like we're not going to maintain roads that we're already not maintaining. In other words, a road we were going to fix this year, we'll put it off for another two years. Guess what? Cities have been doing that for decades now. That's part of the thing. So your road just gets like a little junkier, a few more potholes, a few less fixes. It gets put off. Your sidewalks fall apart. It's a slow, soft default. What does it look like if we cut our transit system by 20%? It looks like here's five bus routes we're no longer going to do. Here's three lines that I get zero service. In other words, the shock of it is from 100 to zero. It's like an on-off switch. It's binary. Where, with a road maintenance and all that, it's a slower decline. So I think it just augments this idea that a transit system built on this fragile foundation is itself ridiculously fragile. To me, this idea becomes more acute with transit because we've put it in this crazy fragile position.

Abby Newsham  15:57  

I feel like that provides some clarification for what I was thinking through. Transit is an on-off switch. You said you wanted to come back to talk about the vulnerable users of transit and how that affects things. I feel like, because it's such a binary on-off switch, it immediately affects people who rely on the system. Suddenly this system is no longer operating in a way that doesn't as immediately affect people who are driving. They're just having to weave around potholes and things are slowly declining, but it doesn't stop their ability to get to work, for example.

Chuck Marohn  16:47  

Yeah. This may get a little ranty for a minute on the vulnerable user thing. I'm going to say something, and it might not sit well with some people, but I feel like it needs to be stated. I think when it comes to transit, there's a certain group of people -- and it's not a small portion of people -- for whom we need transit because we care about vulnerable people. They're empathetic, they're moved by that, and they want to try to address that issue. The way they're addressing it is with transit. There's a whole other group of people, though, and  I think they tend to dominate the transit conversation and space. I'm going to say this, and I think this is very true, but it's not going to come out nice. I think vulnerable people, for them, are part of the marketing brochure. They're part of the conversation around transit. We're going through a government shutdown right now, as you and I talk, and maybe it will be resolved by next week or what have you. But one of the things that we see the federal government doing -- and it doesn't matter if it's a Democrat or Republican administration -- the minute there's a impasse in Congress and the budget doesn't pass and there's a shutdown, they close the Washington Monument, and they close the Smithsonian and they close Yellowstone Park, and they close the high-profile things that people really like and want and desire as a way to make it painful. We see the administration right now saying, "Hey, we're going to fire all these people. We're going to do all this stuff because we make it really painful." I feel like a lot of transit advocacy holds vulnerable people up as the avatar of funding the system that they would like to see or use. So when things start to go bad, they get hurt first. Like they're the ones on the front line. They're the ones who are sitting out there, vulnerable because of how we built the system and how we place them in this. To me, if the idea is that we need to have a transit system to serve vulnerable people, and that is something that is innate to us as compassionate humans living in a city, living in a place, living in a community. Making sure that everybody has a base level of prosperity and quality of life that they can enjoy. By the way, I'm saying those things sincerely. I can make the case for that. I think that is a good case. It's really critical that transit not be a charity, but that transit actually be a fundamental, viable thing. That means it can't be dependent on federal government funding. It can't be dependent on state government funding. It can't be the thing that, if 10% or 20% of it gets cut, it falls apart and doesn't work. You actually have to build a transit system that's more financially robust than that, and you can't do that without building actual places where transit works. In other words, it's a land-use conversation, not a transportation funding conversation. This is where the whole funding of transit has things backwards. We've tended to look at a problem -- poverty, vulnerable people, people who can't get to jobs, people who can't get to work -- and we've treated that like a transportation problem because transportation is where the money is. Why do you rob the bank? Because that's where the money is. Why do you build transportation projects? Because that's where the money is. Because we treated it like a transportation problem and not a poverty problem, not a land-use problem, not a neighborhood problem, not a community problem, our responses have put the people we were trying to help in the most dependent and vulnerable position in our society. As soon as the charity starts to run a little bit dry, the whole thing collapses. My call for people who care about vulnerable people is, if you care about vulnerable people, you have to build a construct which is not dependent on the benevolence of a distant bureaucracy to dish out money to you.

Abby Newsham  21:41  

Yeah. There's so many different things that I think about when you say that. I feel like it gets down to this very fundamental question. When you talk about transit, I'm also thinking about how there are similar arguments that come up for housing, for example, and other things that are desired to direct spending to help people who are vulnerable. I think it's rare that I ever see vulnerable people actually in those conversations. It's typically people who are within these systems. I'd be curious about the thoughts of people who are actually using these systems. Maybe that's just something I'm detached from, but I feel like it does get to this fundamental question of "What is government and society to do about these challenges?" Do we address these things in this way just because we've put these funding sources into these categories of transportation or housing or whatever in a top-down manner from the structure of the federal government? Because I agree with you. I think there's this ideal perspective about how cities ought to operate. I think in the US, especially, we have not decided, as cities, what we really want to be. Everybody wants to have their cake and eat it too. We have all of these metropolitan areas and regions that are trying to be cities and have transit systems and serve everybody who needs it, and then also have continuously sprawling suburbs and highway projects. It's like we're trying to do two things at the same time, and these are just ever-competing things. It does affect people, and not just vulnerable people. It's like the futon example that you've talked about before. We have regions that are not a comfortable bed and not a comfortable couch, and we're trying to have it both ways.

Chuck Marohn  24:18  

I was in Akron a couple of weeks ago, and I hadn't been for a long time, but I was there talking Housing Trap stuff. About seven years ago, I was there doing transportation work, and they brought me out to this bus stop that they had built, and it was part of a federally funded thing where they were building bus stops. They were really proud of this nice facility that they had built, and it was going to serve the vulnerable in this neighborhood. We sat in the parking lot across the street and watched people, because I said, "Let's sit here for a while. I just want to see how this works." Because I could see right away that this was a thing that probably met federal design criteria, probably met the outsourced consultant's ideal plan. But I was just looking at like, "This is not functional in any way for people who live in this neighborhood, who predominantly walk, who don't own cars." To get to it, you had to cross a four-lane stroad. It was way far away from any signal or crosswalk. So in other words, we sat there, and in 10 minutes we saw multiple people coming to this bus stop, all of which had to jaywalk across a dangerous street in order to get to this new bus stop that they had used. I don't think that the people who put it in lack compassion. I don't think that the people who put it in were motivated by the wrong things. I don't think they lacked empathy. I think what they lacked is a contextual understanding of the neighborhood that you would only actually get from doing small, incremental projects in a neighborhood and then getting the feedback from those projects. They were sensitive to the federal grant they got. They were sensitive to the design criteria that were handed to them. They were sensitive to dealing with the issues that they were having to work around, which was traffic flow of automobiles, traffic flow of the intersection, how they acquire the right of way, all these things that are really not based on the experience of people who use the system, but are based around the people who are providing the service. Because of that, in this high-demand neighborhood with tons of vulnerable people who desperately need transit, you had a transit system that doesn't actually meet their needs. You and I were talking earlier about the city staff's response to a broken sidewalk in this area where it was really important. I'm going to paraphrase what you said their response was. "Let's wait till the whole system falls apart, or there's more things that are bad, and then we can aggregate it into one big project and do one big bond and one big thing and fix all these broken sidewalks." And you were like, "Hey, how about we just fix this little segment of sidewalk now, because it would make a huge difference to a lot of people and we could do that relatively cheaply, without having to go through all this expense." And people were like, "Oh, wow, okay, great idea." I think to most people, they step back and they're frustrated by how government delivers things. But the reality is, in these transit systems that are falling apart, you're seeing more visibly the clunkiness of a government delivery system that assumes permanently increasing levels of affluence. We just don't have that. We never did have that.

Abby Newsham  28:22  

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. When we rely on these federal grants to run our systems -- and I mean we as local citizens living in local cities and towns -- we become very vulnerable to changes. Especially now, but I think that we do have systems that have assumed that we had stability in our funding. We are going through a lot of changes, not just in the transit space but in a lot of different spaces, and I think a lot of people are now scrambling to figure out how we find alternative mechanisms to fund things that are important to us. From the perspective of transit, the sidewalk example is essentially a triage example. We're saying, "Hey, you only have this much money. Let's do something here in this smaller area, because it will be meaningful and enable your system to function. Even though it's not the $20 million project to make everything nice and shiny and new, it will work."

Chuck Marohn  29:34  

Abby, instead of building the big box store conglomerate out on the edge that we can all like drive to and then saying, "Oh, poor people need to get there too, so let's build a crappy bus system that will get them there," maybe we could just build houses for poor people in existing neighborhoods, and then allow them to open businesses too, so they won't be poor. I feel like if you take transportation funding off the table, which we're in the process of doing, what you see is not that we can't solve these problems, but that there's a whole bigger toolbox that we could actually use that would solve the problems in more beneficial ways.

Abby Newsham  30:09  

I don't have the answer to this necessarily, but it is making me think about if we have some ways to fund transit locally and fund smaller systems. It's going to be very difficult, I think, especially for areas that have sprawled out transit systems, to actually decide who you serve and where you put these things. I think, from the urbanist perspective, they would say, "Well, put transit where the density is and make it accessible to more people." But we also have this land-use and housing affordability issue that a lot of people who may have relied on transit before are in really the declining suburbs where things are more affordable. So I think that's a challenge too. This is a big land-use issue and affordability issue, and I just don't know how you square that circle. Transit is not necessarily my background, but it's an incredibly challenging set of circumstances, and it's not a solution-based outcome, right? It's something that has to be managed.

Chuck Marohn  31:32  

This is the big question that we're dealing with in all of society. How many times have I done this presentation where I'm like, "All right, Lafayette, Louisiana. Their population grew by three and a half times. Their household income grew by 1.6 times. Their sewer and water pipe grew by 10 times. Their roadway grew by 20 times." At some point, we have to get beyond the idea that there's a solution for insolvency and say, "How do we manage this in the most optimum way possible?" I think the sooner we transition to that, the sooner we stop pretending that we can actually do this, and we start developing other responses that could actually help way more people. I think we could actually make things way better more quickly for a lot of people. Can I quote Jared here? I think this is a political observation, but I think it's rather astute. He said, quote, "We can never expect rural areas to enthusiastically support such an intrinsically urban service as transit any more than we can expect urban voters to be excited about agriculture subsidies or rural road construction. That's why, in my view, the future lies in making these decisions as locally as possible." I feel like Jared is on to something here, which is, the quicker we can actually localize the capital, the bigger toolbox we give people to actually solve this problem. I've been working on this stuff about the Federal Highway Trust Fund. The Federal Highway Trust Fund runs out in one year, and then it would have to be reauthorized. It's been insolvent for two decades now, so there would need to be more allocation of money to keep it going. It funds the dumbest, worst projects. I would just love to see either the federal government doesn't collect that money and we let states collect it or, if the federal government's going to collect it, we just give it right back to states, and allow states and localities to have a bigger toolbox to adapt to this change we're going through. I feel like Jared is leaning that way, or on the same page on that, and this is a guy who has spent his life working on transit for, to me, all the right reasons.

Abby Newsham  34:10  

I don't think this is addressed in the article, but I do have a question about, if the federal government is going to cut all of these different things, are we going to not pay as much in taxes to them? Are they going to cut our taxes to the federal government so that people are able to localize how their taxes work and what we decide to spend our money on? To me, if that's the case and we decide, "Hey, we're going to tax ourselves at the regional level for transit, because we're not paying as much in federal tax," okay. But I have a feeling that people are going to pay just as much in federal tax but then we'll also have to fund things locally. I'm with you on how we should localize the funding, because, frankly, it's a really horrible thing that cities have to continuously justify to others in the hierarchy that cities are worth funding. I would love for cities to have more autonomy over what we decide to spend money on. I just have a feeling that we're going to end up paying twice.

Chuck Marohn  35:36  

I'm gonna say this, and I don't mean this to be condescending, Abby.

Abby Newsham  35:39  

Sure.

Chuck Marohn  35:39  

It's very cute to actually think that we're being taxed to pay for government.

Abby Newsham  35:44  

Yeah.

Chuck Marohn  35:46  

You now have three Republican administrations and two Democrat administrations in this century, or this millennia, that have funded significant parts of government without paying for it. There's a whole cheerleading chorus about how that's not a big deal and we don't need to do that. You know, "We can print money," and what have you. The idea that we are going to get money back from taxes is predicated on the idea that our taxes are actually funding the services we get. The services that we get are increasingly funded by just debt. I think if you follow that down a road, you wind up in a place where there's a whole lot that we are going to pay for that we've already spent in the past at some point. Or a lot less we're going to receive in the future, so that our taxes can go to paying for past things. I feel like there's a fiscal prudence conversation at the federal level that I avoid talking about because it is just so political and almost religious. "Deficits don't matter" kind of religious, and there's no way to talk people out of that. I think the thing that is real and inarguable is that city government is exactly like a family. We can't print our own money. We have to actually raise the money we spend. If we borrow money, we have to pay it back. If we go through bankruptcy, lots of people get hurt. You cannot say government operates differently than a family unless you say the federal government, which prints its own money and has a whole different system. A federal government operates different than a family, but states do not, cities do not. I think the more we conflate cities and states with the federal government, the more of a disservice we do to the actual dollars-and-cents fiscal prudence we need to to be compassionate, to do real things, to provide real services. I think the more trouble we get into. Let me say it this way. We all have that one free-spending friend when we were in college who we go out with, and they'd be like, "Yeah, let's do this, and let's do that." Maybe they had dad's credit card or maybe they just were profligate or whatever. Then we get home and we'd be like, "Oh my gosh, I overspent. Why did I do that?" For cities, that prolific friend is the federal government. The federal government's like, "Here's money for this project, here's money for that project. Do this. This is good." Cities need to actually look and say, "No. This may be fun in the short term, but this is really bad for me long term. I need to put my money into things that actually benefit my citizens more than these federal systems."

Abby Newsham  38:57  

That's a really good example, actually. I feel like we're at a point that we've been hanging out with that friend for so long, that it's not like we're in our 20s and we can turn our life around. It's like we're nearing retirement and we have no money, nothing to show for it. So I feel like things are much more dire. We haven't proactively planned to not rely on these systems. We have been relying on them, and now we have to be very reactive to what's happening. We can't go back and change things, but now we have to respond reactively and find ways to make the right decision in the moment, which I think is very challenging for a lot of cities and organizations right now.

Chuck Marohn  39:57  

We are, at the national level, having -- I don't want to say a conversation, because I think that makes it more sophisticated than it is.

Abby Newsham  40:05  

Is that what it is?

Chuck Marohn  40:07  

We're having a national existential crisis over what government is. I think the one thing that we agree on, at least two political parties agree on, is that the federal government needs to be very big, very expansive, very in your life. It's just what version of that do we have? Do we have a red version or a blue version? I would argue to local leaders that what you need is a buffer from that craziness. Because you're on a fixed income, they're playing with a trust fund, and they want to get you to do A, B and C, because it's actually good for them and bad for you. It's time we create some distance between the narcissistic dysfunction that we're getting. And that's from both parties. That's not a Democrat/Republican thing. The whole place is kind of crazy in that way.

Abby Newsham  41:07  

Yeah, the federal government is just not a very good friend.

Chuck Marohn  41:13  

Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, because I have been writing that since I started writing in 2008. It was really controversial at first, because there were a lot of people were like, "We need to go build these transit systems and the only way we can do it is if the federal government supports us." I was on Nantucket earlier this year, and on Nantucket, they want to do this transportation project that they can't afford, and they're going to the federal government to ask for money for it. They applied, and they're like, "We have a reasonable expectation we're going to get this." On Nantucket, their joke was, "Billionaires hire millionaires to mow their yard." This is one of the most affluent zip codes in the entire nation. When I gave my talk there, I brought this up, and I asked them, "Who are you expecting to be taxed to pay for the grant you are seeking from the federal government? Which zip code should send money into Washington DC so that it can be sent to you, so that you can have this road project on Nantucket?" That was an uncomfortable question. Should we tax the neighborhoods of Detroit? Should we tax Memphis to pay for Nantucket? Should we tax South Boston? Like, who should pay for this? The reality is, that's an absurd question. It's Nantucket that should be paying for the other places, if you're really about redistribution of wealth. We're not. We, as a society, are about trying to conjure something out of nothing at the federal level. I think that's the thing we've become addicted to. That's the magic that we've assumed will continue to happen. If you read this article, and if you care about transit, and you start to understand what is being said by Jared here, I feel like what you're seeing is that illusion breaking down in its most obvious way. Like, "No, we're not going to tax Detroit to pay for Nantucket. We're going to borrow money and conjure it out thin air and give it to Nantucket." That's not a viable long-term strategy, either to maintain a transit system in cities across the country, or even just run a darn country. It doesn't work.

Abby Newsham  43:39  

Yeah, unless we pay for it ourselves. I think that's going to be really difficult in a lot of places.

Chuck Marohn  43:47  

If Nantucket can't do it for a road, point to who can do it. We talk a lot about highways and how, "Oh, people don't understand how subsidized highways are. They think they're paying for it the gas tax. It's really not true. We need to make sure that they know." And it's like, yeah, I agree with it. But people actually think we're paying for government. They actually think that we're being taxed -- because we are being taxed, we're being taxed a lot -- and that we're sending it to Washington DC, and then Washington DC is funding government, with a little bit of borrowing. But it's not, and we're not. We actually do not pay for a large portion of what we consume. That is really difficult for people to get their minds around.

Abby Newsham  44:35  

Well, Chuck, let's leave it there. I feel like this is just the ultimate predicament. It aligns with a lot of things, with the roads, with how we ultimately build our cities, and it'll be interesting to see what the reaction is to such a lack of federal funding, and how cities actually contend with that. It's a little bit scary, honestly, but yeah, it's going to be an outcome.

Chuck Marohn  45:13  

To me, if people read this article and see it as a left-right political issue, or see it as a government choice to stiff transit or see it as anything else except basically the next stage of the end of the suburban experiment, I think they're missing the story. I think they're missing what this actually is. This is one of the fragile links of the suburban experiment failing as the next tremor in a bigger earthquake.

Abby Newsham  45:49  

I think it may expedite things in terms of the triage situation.

Chuck Marohn  45:57  

Yeah, I think we'll accelerate decline. Yeah.

Abby Newsham  46:00  

Yeah.

Chuck Marohn  46:00  

Yes. So on that happy note, let's do the downzone.

Abby Newsham  46:06  

Yeah, I know. I'm like, this is pretty real. But yeah, let's do the downzone before we end. It's part of this show where we share anything that we have been reading, watching, listening to, anything that has been on our minds these days. Chuck, what do you have for the downzone today?

Chuck Marohn  46:29  

I got this book called "Little bosses everywhere: How the pyramid scheme shaped America." It was by Bridget Read, R, E, A, D, I think that's how you would say her last name. I did not like it. I got it on audiobook, I listened to the entire thing, I went to quit it a couple times. It was kind of sold to me as being a broader conversation about how the economy is, is wired this way with the kind of Amway direct selling.

Abby Newsham  47:06  

Yeah, multi-level marketing.

Chuck Marohn  47:09  

Multi-level marketing being like the thing. It was basically a book about multi-level marketing. I've never done this. I'm kind of allergic to it. I'm not a sales person, so this never enticed me in any way. I've got a family member that got really into multi-level marketing, like multiple different versions of it, and it's never worked out well. The thing that didn't occur to me that I did get from this book, that I thought was a valuable insight, was this: Its popularity rises during recessions and difficult economic times, and it rises the greatest in the poorest places, because it feels like a get rich quick scheme when it's actually like a predatory financial model. They described this one Ohio town where basically, all these desperate people were going to sell whatever the latest multi-level marketing thing was. And you look around and they're all in each other's pyramids. And it's like, we just ran out of people in this town. You've got to have eight people so that I can make 40 bucks. And then they've each got to have eight people so that you can make 40 bucks. And you just run out of people that everybody knows, because everybody's doing multi-level marketing to every other desperate person in town. It went from one of these things that I have found to be kind of annoying to one of these things that I now find to be tragically sad. It was one of those books that could have been an article, but there was enough story there to turn it into a book, but it was an article worth reading, basically.

Abby Newsham  49:09  

Yeah. I think I've brought this up probably many years ago on this show, but there's a podcast called The Dream that is about multi-level marketing. They have like, several seasons now. They've talked about the wellness industry, and they basically talk about predatory industries. The first season is all about multi-level marketing. They go through the process of signing up for one, getting into it, figuring out how it works, interviewing people that have been really deeply entrenched in many different companies. It is really fascinating how it works as a model. I've never done multi-level marketing. I don't know that I know people who have done it. But it's very predatory because, essentially, the people who are involved with it are the buyers. It's like, they're the ones buying all of the things, and they're spending, a lot of the times, more than they'll ever make on it. So if you are interested in the topic, I would recommend The Dream. I thought it was a pretty good podcast. I probably wouldn't read this book, because I bet a lot of the content from that is on there. And if you don't recommend it, I'm not going to read the book.

Chuck Marohn  50:36  

Yeah, it won't make my top five lists at the end of the year. But it wasn't too long. I think I listened to it when I was working in the yard one weekend, and it was not bad. I think it was supposed to make me angry. It actually just made me sad, because it's not going to go away. Towards the end, they're talking about basically all the big players, and they're all tied into regulatory systems in a way where, I think you could, if you're in the government, look at this and say, "We should just get rid of this."But they never will. So you're just kind of sad, because it's one of these sanctioned exploitation devices. I always hate things in particular that take, I think, what is a natural human desire for improvement -- you know, I want to improve my condition in life. Then they give people a shortcut, like, "here's a quick, pain-free, easy way to do it," and then make it your personal failure if it actually doesn't work out, when it was never going to work out. So, yeah, it made me sad, because I know a lot of people who are really good people who have spent a lot of energy in their life doing that, when that energy could have gone to things that not only I think served them better, but actually made the world a better place, instead of trying to sell someone a necklace or a lotion or a cleaning product or whatever it was.

Abby Newsham  52:22  

Yeah, it is unfortunate, because people who are doing it, they're trying to take control of their situation and make their own money and be empowered. These companies take advantage of that and give people a product that they can't make money on. Yeah, it's horrible.

Chuck Marohn  52:46  

They are selling a narrative, not a product. And that narrative is very seductive to a certain kind of person who is in a vulnerable spot, but also sees themselves as a conduit to their own salvation. I think being a conduit to your own salvation is a spark of a good thing, right? But it's not designed to lead you to the Promised Land. Well, you go ahead.

Abby Newsham  53:15  

Yeah, the book that I'll admit I haven't started it yet, because I just got here, but I'm going to be reading the Story Brand book that you recommended the other day.

Chuck Marohn  53:28  

Oh nice. Good. That's a very easy read, but it's one where you should take some walks in between chapters and just think about it.

Abby Newsham  53:37  

Oh, really? Okay, that's good to know.

Chuck Marohn  53:40  

Yeah, I feel like it's really simple, but I feel like the more you actually think about it and apply it, the deeper the levels go. What motivated you to do that, besides me telling you?

Abby Newsham  53:59  

Well, you mentioned it when we were in that meeting the other day with a group of folks, with Dennis, when you were in Kansas City. Believe it or not, I find it to be really challenging to clarify what I'm trying to say and to structure it in a way that makes sense and is clear. I think that is something that's challenging to do. Whether it's through my job or otherwise, that's something that I've been wanting to get better at. I am actually actively reading a book called "Dare to lead" that was recommended to me by Bernet Brown. I'm now entering a point where I'm managing other people. I'm in a transition in my life in terms of how I'm operating professionally, so I've been really interested in communication, and how do you think systemically about working with others. I am someone who can do things independently fairly well, but that's not how you grow in a profession and how you do things. I mean, you know this, you run an organization. It started as a blog, and you doing stuff, and now you have a whole team of people, and you run a whole operation. I don't know what that was like for you, going from being more of like an autonomous, independent person to working now with a huge organization, and not to say that's where I'm headed, but it's something that I'm just very aware of right now. So I've been really interested in leadership communication and also like storytelling as well.

Chuck Marohn  56:10  

Well, let me say this for you and for everybody who's listening who finds themselves in a similar situation. I think if you step back and look at the stats and the growth of Strong Towns and the whole thing, you would say, "Wow, Chuck is a great leader. What great success. Look at the transformation." I can tell you that there's not a day when I don't feel completely out of my league, where I don't feel like I completely don't know what I'm doing. I'm messing this up. I'm like, tragically screwing up. I don't know what the next step is. I'm not sure where to go next. I feel like, if you're not working a step or two above your comfort zone, you're really not doing anything important. So, yeah, keep going, Abby. I mean, you're awesome, and I feel like the fact that you're at this point where you're maybe challenging yourself and asking those questions, it's all a good thing. And don't feel like other people have the answer. Like you'll figure this out. It's not impossible.

Abby Newsham  57:15  

Yeah, definitely. I feel like I feel comfortable saying that, because I don't feel like I'm in the wrong place. I feel more like, very curious about how can I do something better? I'm just very curious about it. I really like information. So I seek out information when I am faced with something that I find different or challenging. Whether or not they necessarily have the answers, I think that these things will help me think about things in a different way, which is constructive.

Chuck Marohn  58:06  

I always said, when my girls were eight and 10, I felt really confident that I could raise girls that were three and five, but I had no idea what to do with an eight year old and 10 year old. Then now they're 18 and 20, and I'm like, I don't know what to do with an 18 and a 20 year old, but I would be really good if they were 14 and 16 again, because I felt like I handled that well. You're always going to be faced with the new thing that you're not sure what to do about. You just keep informing yourself, keep learning. I mean, you've surrounded yourself with great mentors, too, and people who are there to help you and bounce questions off of and give you some insight and advice that you should take some of it, but not all of it. I think, yeah, you'll be fine. It'll work out.

Abby Newsham  58:59  

Yeah, I feel very lucky. There's a lot of really great people in my life, and you're one of them, Chuck, so I appreciate that.

Chuck Marohn  59:10  

Thanks, Abby. I like being your old guy that you can ask questions of.

Abby Newsham  59:18  

The old wise Buddha my life. No, that's Monte. He's, the Buddha.

Chuck Marohn  59:26  

When I started my first job, the the old guy that I asked advice from just turned 50, and when I turned 50, and I looked at the rest of the team, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I'm the old wise guy." The funny thing is, I'm like, "You shouldn't be asking me for advice, I'm gonna screw things up for you." And then I realized that's probably what my boss thought when I was 22 asking for advice. So, yeah.

Abby Newsham  59:51  

That's funny.

Chuck Marohn  59:53  

We don't get to play the record again, so you just get to play it once.

Abby Newsham  59:57  

Yeah, absolutely.

Chuck Marohn  1:00:01  

All right. Thanks, Abby.

Abby Newsham  1:00:03  

Thanks so much Chuck and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Upzoned. Have a great day, Chuck.

Chuck Marohn  1:00:10  

You too. Take care.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  1:00:14  

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.