The Strong Towns Podcast
Rep. Jake Auchincloss returns to the Strong Towns podcast with a case for localism that takes it seriously without treating it as a cure-all. He explains why localism deserves a bigger role in national politics, not as a slogan, but as a way to rebuild trust and solve problems closer to the ground. That idea gets tested against some of the hardest problems facing cities today: transportation systems that reward expansion over maintenance, a housing market that has lost its entry-level rung, and federal policies that often struggle to match local realities. The conversation closes with a warning about digital life and a defense of face-to-face community.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Jake Auchincloss is a U.S. representative from the 4th Congressional District in Massachusetts. He is a husband, father of three, former Marine, former city council member, and Strong Towns guy.
Representative Auchincloss, welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. It's delightful to chat with you again.
It's delightful to be back again. I've been a Strong Towns disciple for, I think, going on eight years now.
Well, that means a lot. It's been really delightful to get to know you and also watch your voice impact the debate.
I want to chat with you a bit about localism, because you've written about it — you're standing in front of "Simple But Not Easy," your Substack, which I enjoy. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about localism as a governing philosophy. There's a setup for me. I'm 52. I grew up in a period of time where Republicans at least talked about being a bottom-up party. I've not voted for a Republican at a national level for a long time. I've also struggled to vote for Democrats at a national level for a long time, because localism has not been something that's been widely embraced.
It feels like you're speaking differently about this. I would like to give you an opportunity to chat about it. I'm not asking you to not be partisan, because you're a congressman. Obviously, Strong Towns is not a partisan movement. But I think it would be interesting to hear, in the context of your affiliation with the Democratic Party, why localism is important and what you think it brings to the table that's not being talked about right now.
Absolutely. There are a number of dimensions to address. Let me treat a few of them.
One is the legal, political, constitutional dimension, which is to tap back into the genius of our framers. Our framers understood that power is ambitious, that power is centralizing, and that power can be self-actuating. So what they did is they built in a number of guardrails against those behaviors of power. We are all familiar with the checks and balances in Washington — the judiciary, the legislature, the executive. What Americans have tended to take more for granted, and maybe examine less closely, is the bifurcation between federal and state and local power, and how much of a bulwark that has been against overreaching executive actions.
Now, there have been times in American history when that has been an excuse for states to maul the constitutional and civil liberties of their constituents. I would argue that in the last eighteen months, though, it's actually been the single most effective defense against an out-of-control president. It's a source of great resilience in our constitutional system that a governor can tell a president, "Go pound sand."
This is most top of mind right now with the Department of Homeland Security and infringements upon the mechanics of election systems. Most of our listeners will know that American elections are organized at the local and state level. That is of paramount importance to the integrity of the midterms and the presidential elections. Homeland Security is trying to get states to give their voter rolls over to DHS to run through an algorithm and to disenroll voters without their acknowledgment. Here in Massachusetts, our Secretary of State said no. I'm glad that I live in a state that can tell DHS what time of day it is.
So there's that dimension of localism. I think there's a deeper level, though, Chuck — you've written about this — which is that proximity trains citizens, and that citizens having to work with one another in real time, in real life, to deal with the direct feedback loops of their actions and to solve problems. I think it imbues autonomy. It imbues civic cohesion in places in a way that a federal government program just can't. I thought your piece on this was really beautiful. It's very hard to campaign on that — it's a very abstract ideal, a Kantian ideal in some ways. Yet I deeply believe in it.
I deeply believe in pride of place and in the role of placemaking as a way to train citizens and really as the well of public virtue.
This is the second thing the founders were geniuses about. They said: we're giving you this great constitution, but you can't keep it unless you maintain public virtue. I think you and I both probably feel like public virtue has been corroded in the last several decades, and placemaking in the Strong Towns format is a way to help restore it.
There's something subtle but important here that you embody and are expressing — the idea of "simple but not easy." A lot of people who stand up and say we should be more localist treat it as a panacea. It will solve all problems. It's going to be a struggle, too. It will just be a different form of struggle — a struggle where, as you said, that balance would actually address the greatest offenses of today. I want to give you a chance to talk about the idea that this is not the perfect answer to every single problem, but it is a way for us to engage in a more productive democracy.
It is, and it shouldn't be seen as an excuse for the federal government to not do its job, or to excuse away dysfunction. Some people will argue the National Institutes of Health should block-grant biomedical research to the states. That's a ridiculous idea. The externalities of basic research and discovery are really global in nature — certainly national — and they should be funded nationally. Similarly, having the Texas governor bus migrants to Colorado because border security is failing and he wants to score political points — that's not an example of federalism in action. That's an example of the federal government failing to do immigration reform properly.
The federal government has a big job to do, and it's got to do it well. You can't just throw these problems down to the state level.
What you can do, though, is reawaken within the American public a problem-solving attitude. It's one of the reasons I chair an outfit called Majority Democrats — forty elected officials nationally and about twenty-five candidates. We're a faction within the Democratic Party that's trying to reinvent the party going into 2028. We've been recruiting almost entirely mayors in the last several months: Mayor of Cleveland, Mayor of Cincinnati, Mayor of Kansas City, Mayor of Boise, Mayor of Miami, Mayor of Newport News in Virginia. These are problem-solvers. Housing, public safety, education — this is where you build trust.
I did read over the weekend that the mayor of San Jose, California, is in the running to be the governor of California.
A Majority Democrat, too. I find this interesting groundswell of problem-solvers — mayors and city council members.
Let me switch the localism conversation to transportation, because I think this is where you and I started talking recently. Right now, we have the Federal Highway Trust Fund up for renewal at the end of September. We have a system where a lot of our transportation decisions are made out of Washington, D.C. and flow down from there. Make the argument that there's an opportunity here to rethink that, and why a more localist approach to transportation would have benefits we're missing out on today.
I made this case in the pages of Strong Towns a few years ago. You and your staff made a much more sophisticated version a few months ago — the "Mission Accomplished" piece — and I agree with it. The interstate highway system was a forty-year successful endeavor to knit together this country for purposes of interstate mobility and commerce. We did it. What we've allowed is for the bureaucracy that was fashioned for a specific purpose to have mission creep, a lack of strategic focus, and insolvency.
What we are doing now is incentivizing states and localities to expand infrastructure that doesn't need expanding, at the cost of maintaining infrastructure that does — the roads, the bridges, the highways. What we should do instead is hone the Highway Trust Fund into a very specific set of maintenance-only purposes. Return the gas taxes to the states and allow those funds to be used for maintenance of existing infrastructure. The federal level would establish some very basic data, maintenance, and signage standards so the highways continue to operate as one national system. But mobility policy — this idea of expanding the number of jobs and services accessible within a thirty-minute commuter shed — that should be state and local. I just don't know why that is a federal interest. It's going to look very different in Massachusetts versus Montana, as it should.
I want to throw something at you. In my entire adult life — and this is going to be a broad generalization, so push back where I'm missing something — I've watched Republicans advocate for more highway spending and more highway expansion. I've watched Democrats, largely representing urban areas, say we need more money for transit and for biking and walking. The latter investments are the ones we've identified as being the highest-returning, the best use of transportation dollars.
In the political climate we've had, it seemed like the Democratic Party was willing to give a dollar of highway funding to get five or ten cents of bike, walk, and transit funding. If we wanted twenty cents of transit funding, we'd give two dollars of highway expansion money. That seemed like a bad tradeoff for everyone. Am I missing something in that analysis? if I'm not, how would you make the argument to your party members that a localist approach would be better?
This is a feature that defines politics at all levels: programs create their own constituencies, constituencies do their own lobbying and advocacy, and become self-perpetuating. I don't mean that as a criticism of any actor within that ecosystem. People operate within the incentives that they have. It's incumbent upon policymakers to step back and evaluate whether those incentives are actually leading to the best outcomes.
In this situation, what we're seeing is a complex between state departments of transportation, highway departments, and the construction industry. They are tremendously powerful advocates for the perpetuation of highway expansion, even when it's not hitting the metrics that matter to people. There's a whole open question about whether the metrics being measured at the federal level even matter to people — as opposed to just road miles traveled.
If you look at states like Virginia and what they tried to do with measuring outcomes at the state level for mobility policy, you start to see what it could look like. To me, the way to evaluate it is to measure mobility success in terms of the density of jobs and services within a thirty-minute commuter shed for an individual. Think of that as Marchetti's constant — thirty minutes is about how long somebody wants to go in one direction on a given day before heading back. How do we ensure the maximum abundance of opportunities for work, recreation, and amenities within that catchment area? That is the metric you should be measuring.
In some places, that's going to look like single-occupancy vehicle driving. In many places, it's going to look like micromobility, transit, or buses. But that really should be up to mayors and governors to figure out.
One pushback I've received on the "Mission Accomplished" idea is that without federal oversight or direction of where the money should go, state DOTs will just build more highways. In the book I wrote, "Confessions of a Recovery Engineer," I quoted a study the Massachusetts Department of Transportation did on congestion — the idea that we have to build all this stuff to deal with congestion. My counter-argument was: we need to build a lot more corner stores and places where people don't have to get in their car. What would you say, looking at it through a Massachusetts lens?
If money is given to states without a lot of strings, are states going to screw this up in a way that's irredeemable? Or do you think they'll figure it out and become leaders?
I have a hard time grappling with that criticism, because right now, in the status quo, if you're sitting in a state department of transportation seat, it always makes sense financially in the near term to build a highway. The federal match dollars are so much more attractive for highway construction than for transit — not just in the construction but also in the maintenance and operations. If you took away that set of incentives and left it as a level playing field, it's hard for me to imagine that would lead to more highway building, because the incentives for it would be removed.
Now, there are fifty states. Are some states going to do things we don't agree with? Yes. That's the nature of federalism. I think more states are going to do sensible things, particularly as more of the cost of maintaining these highways becomes visible on their balance sheets. They'll realize they're going to have to do things such as congestion pricing.
What's interesting about this moment is that because of the introduction of autonomous vehicles, we have a window of time to do sensible transportation revenue funding at the state level. But that window is probably only five to maybe ten years. States that start introducing autonomous vehicles can begin levying the autonomous vehicle companies — for deadheading, for parking. They can incorporate it into broader curb management policies that price and manage the curb effectively and create a dedicated set of enterprise revenues that go directly to funding transit and walkability improvements, all without having to tax or levy people directly. That is politically powerful. I think it's good economic policy and good transportation policy. But it's much easier to do without the federal government getting in your way.
The gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993. Whether we could solve these problems with a gas tax, a mileage tax, or a myriad of other proposals — do you see anything like that being politically possible at the federal level?
I think we can do autonomous vehicle legislation at the federal level. The sort of taxation based on deadheading and curb management I just described needs to be done at the state and local level — those revenues directed within that state. Different states will experiment with it and get it right. What I think could be done at the federal level is some type of data management and data privacy liability legislation at the OEM level, where it truly is national in scope. It would be helpful to have some standards from Congress about telematics, insurance, and data privacy.
I'm not asking you to predict, because none of us know. But what's the conversation heading into renewal of the Federal Highway Trust Fund? It seems to me, as an outsider, that this thing is not going to be wrapped up into some big omnibus jobs act — it's sitting on its own legislatively. Does that make it a bigger target? Does that make it less likely to get passed? What do you see building up to the end of September when this thing runs out of its legislative approval window?
I think it probably gets an extension. I don't think this wraps up this year. It gets extended and goes into next term, hopefully with Democrats in charge of the House or Senate.
I do hope Democrats take this opportunity to look at this program from first principles. What was really important from your "Mission Accomplished" proposal is creating a floor for rural states. That, to me, is the political killer for any kind of reforms — rural states saying, somewhat fairly, "We don't want our population, relative to the number of highway miles here, to be disproportionately disadvantaged. Having highways through our states is important to the whole country, and we should be subsidized for that." I think that makes a ton of sense, and we should do it.
That would be the political unlock for doing something bigger — basically putting this program towards a sunset, not in the sense that it's not working, but in the sense that it did what it was supposed to do and is now getting in the way.
We definitely need a highway across Nebraska. I'm not sure we need a fifth and sixth lane around Omaha for commuters.
I really think you're going to start seeing mayors lead on this even more. I believe that the curb in an urban environment is the least utilized asset that mayors and towns have. Changing the curb from an area meant as storage for people's vehicles to a platform for urban wealth creation is a really promising opportunity for mayors — and it ties into this idea of how we spend funding here.
When you look at a map of your city and start to realize the work that the curb does for you, and the opportunities to get the behavior from the private sector and from your citizens that you want by managing the curb more effectively, you start to realize that a fifth highway lane is not actually the best source of time and effort. What we're starting to see from cities — outdoor dining, automated enforcement, dynamic pricing, opening it up to micromobility and e-delivery slots on the curb — Donald Shoup would be very proud of us. We're accelerating wealth creation by using the street better.
Can we talk a little bit about housing? I think transportation and housing are in many ways inseparable. It feels like right now the administration has floated the fifty-year mortgage and they've floated privatizing Fannie and Freddie — and in my sense, allowing them to make riskier loans. It feels like we've run that playbook before. I don't know if you have thoughts on some of those proposals and what you think should be done. I'm also interested in how we deal with the broad housing problem throughout Massachusetts and throughout the United States.
This is the area where I have learned the most from Strong Towns, and where I'm constantly finding myself productively challenged by what you're putting out. I'm a housing abundance guy — a "build more, faster, everywhere" kind of guy. I'm also a guy who thinks that one of the pathologies in our housing policy nationally is that we treat housing as both an asset and a commodity. We tell people: buy it, it's your bank account, it'll get more expensive over time — that's treating it as an asset. We also say it should be cheap and getting cheaper so the next generation can buy it.
Those two things are fundamentally in conflict, and we never really wrestle with that tension. I've tended to believe it should really be a commodity — something that should be abundant and getting cheaper, if we want to commoditize it toward factory-built housing construction.
There have been two important things you've put forward that I've incorporated. One is this idea of incremental development as an important way to build a strong town. Just as heavy-handed government zoning really impairs a healthy town, very strong top-down massive development projects done out of scale or scope with the rest of the community can also be very distortionary. Ideally, as you've written, you upzone the entire place by one increment of density, and then, like a healthy ecosystem, you allow small-time developers to do granular development over time. I'm sold on that. I get it.
Then you put forward something more recently that has really thrown me, Chuck — I'm wrestling with it and I want you to talk about it. You basically said there are two factors at play in housing policy: local zoning, yes, but also national financial policy regarding housing. Powerful factors will resist any attempts to treat housing as a commodity. In some sense I can totally see that you're right about that, but I'm not sure how to operationalize it. What am I supposed to do with that information? Because we do need five to seven million more units of housing, and we do have to make it a lot cheaper to build — even if that means parts of the financial system send out antibodies to reject it.
I listened to the president when he signed one of the executive orders on institutional investors. He said something like, "Don't worry, we're not going to lower housing prices." I thought: well, that's saying the quiet part out loud. Here's the very politically inconvenient truth: what we actually need is a wealth transfer from older to younger Americans when it comes to housing. Older Americans bought their houses in the seventies and eighties for very little. Because of economic growth and restrictive zoning policies, their primary asset has inflated radically. It's a major source of baby boomer wealth.
It has also had the effect of making it impossible for their kids and grandkids to buy a house.
Some of these luckier kids are going to get direct wealth transfers from their parents — house equity, down payment assistance. But that doesn't feel very fair. It shouldn't be about who your parents are when it comes to your ability to buy a home. We need a structural wealth transfer, and that can only be done through zoning reform that fundamentally puts more supply onto the market. Your point, though, that I read recently, is that this is going to be very destabilizing. I'm kind of interested for you to tease out those thoughts a little more.
Let me run this thought by you. I think the gap in the marketplace is at the entry level. We've figured out how to finance thirty-year mortgages on single-family homes, duplexes, and apartment complexes really well. What we haven't figured out is how to finance entry-level homes. For a lot of cities, what that looks like is building a quasi-single-family home with a thirty-year mortgage attached, but asking the city, region, or state to subsidize it to make it more affordable. That doesn't actually scale.
There's a thing a friend of mine named Joe Minicozzi does in a presentation — I know Joe, Urban 3 — where he gets up and asks: "How many of you want to live in a 400-square-foot unit?" Nobody raises their hand. Then he rephrases: "How many of you have at some point in your life lived in a 400-square-foot unit?" Almost every hand goes up. That's the rub. When we look at what we finance, what we zone for, what we provide, we've essentially kneecapped the whole bottom rung of the market.
What that means is that anybody coming into the marketplace today needs to either become a renter and get stuck in an escalating rent situation where it's really hard to save a down payment and become financially stable — or they have to reach beyond what they're capable of doing to buy a house in a limited market with a lot of competitors. It just stretches everybody.
Our argument has been: if we can get enough entry-level units and finance those units locally — because there's no federal system to do that — and have the local building class be able to build and bring those onto the market, we can create an entry level that will, if not warp downward the prices, at least create a more stable footing. If I'm in Newton and I'm in a stable entry-level house and want to get into another thirty-year mortgage, I don't have to do it from a position of desperation. I can do it from a position of strength.
This is a very live issue for Democrats in Congress right now. I was just at a conference with a number of elected Democrats and we were talking about: if we take back the House, what would our number one issue be? I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that housing would be a top-three issue for seventy-five percent of elected Democrats in the House and Senate.
What we are wrestling with is this: the Democratic Party is broadly bought in on supply-side solutions to housing — a housing abundance approach. You've got to build more if you want it to be cheaper. The party gets that. What we're wrestling with is that these are long-tail solutions. We want to show people that we get it and that we are meeting them where they're at right now. A twenty-eight-year-old trying to buy a house for the first time doesn't necessarily want to hear about single-staircase permitting reform for six-story buildings that will modestly improve affordability in five years.
So we're trying to pair supply-side reforms with immediate homeowner assistance. Where I wrestle with it is: if you're doing supply-side reforms that in the medium term expand supply, but you're doing immediate demand-side subsidies, I worry about inflation. You're working at cross-purposes to a certain extent — and yet it's necessary. We've got to do both. So help me: what is a federal policy for starter homes that doesn't work at cross-purposes and doesn't lead to inflation?
My initial response is that I don't think there's a federal answer. Fannie and Freddie right now are doing construction loans, doing home equity bundling — basically doing everything they can to provide demand-side assistance and drive up the price of housing. That's good for the other side of their portfolio, which is a little fragile because the equity buffers aren't what they used to be.
Let me give you what I think is an outlier example that illustrates the system. In Detroit, there were people living in houses who would lose them when the house went into tax foreclosure. The owner wouldn't pay taxes, the county would seize the home and sell it at tax auction for the price of the back taxes — maybe fifteen or sixteen thousand dollars. The people in the house were paying five to seven hundred dollars a month. They could easily have owned the home outright in two and a half to three years. The problem was they didn't have the cash.
A fifteen-thousand-dollar mortgage is not financeable — there's no bundling program, no secondary market for it. Only a local bank would have to do it, and local banks won't take that kind of risk anymore.
To me, this points to a huge gap in the capital markets where entry-level, smaller units — starter homes — are just not financeable. You'll get builders who say, "We can't build that cheap." Part of my argument is: you can't build that cheap because you're not allowed to. You have to meet a certain threshold to get a long-term mortgage that can be bundled.
Muskegon, Michigan did what I think is the best example of addressing this. They took tax increment financing, which is typically used for commercial development, and — without asking for permission, asking for forgiveness later — started saying to people: if you build a starter house in an existing neighborhood, below a certain size limit, the city will make your down payment using tax increment financing. We'll go out, borrow the money, make your down payment, and collect taxes from you to pay it off. The payback window was around twelve years. If you leave early or flip the house, there's a clawback provision. They've gotten dozens of people into starter homes.
If the federal government could induce that type of local behavior through a repackaging of TIFs, that would be something. The tension is that whenever you get the financial markets involved, the system favors efficiency over nuance. Whenever you favor efficiency, prices just go up and the financial system starts to control the pricing feedback instead of local supply and demand.
Could we make this a product that local banks could hold? Could we make it part of their reserve funding, give them special exemptions to hold these, because for a bank it's all about liquidity — can they roll these onto a secondary market if they need to? I like that idea, because I also like the idea of supporting local and regional banks. They're the ones who do the lending at the granular level that supports strong towns. They'll lend to the restaurant, they'll lend to the nail salon. JP Morgan doesn't do that. These local banks are seeing their operating and overhead costs get out of whack given some of their compliance regulations.
A policy that both helped them hold this type of loan as part of their reserves and helped that starter home market — I think that could be attractive.
There's a niche with huge demand and no capital. If we attack that niche, we can do it without our underlying theory being "collapse the housing market" — which is really hard to do politically from a finance and homeowner standpoint.
When two-thirds of your voters are over the age of fifty, telling them you want their primary asset to be worth less money is not an attractive way to campaign. Even setting aside the politics, it's not stable. Part of the argument for an ownership society — and we can debate whether we've achieved that or whether it was a worthy idea — but the idea behind Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie Mae, the whole federal housing apparatus was to create an ownership society in an era of tumult and volatility. The idea was to create some stability in neighborhoods and places.
I don't think you can attack that head-on and have it make cultural sense across America.
My own experience across the thirty-five cities and towns I represent, and a lot of the public opinion research I have access to as chair of Majority Democrats, makes very plain that homeownership — being able to own a home by the time you're thirty, by the time you're thinking about starting a family — has outsized psychological impact on people's conception of the American dream, even beyond its financial import. You can sit down and say, well, actually it makes more sense to diversify into a 401(k). People want to own their home.
An element of creating citizens through proximity and walkability that you've described with Strong Towns is that people have a sense of equity in their place — a sense of ownership over their plot of land and that their future is tied up in their neighbor's future.
No, I think that's exactly it. You create — I don't want to be too nostalgic about this, but the greatness of bottom-up action is joining people across purpose and across diversity in our neighborhoods. When we get people chatting with each other, working together, talking about their future, they will do great things together.
You wrote an article recently about social media — there's a strong insight there about how we've created a lot of connectedness in a technical sense without creating a lot of connectedness in a human sense. I would argue we haven't even created connectedness. If I had to think of the philosophical opposite of Strong Towns, it would be the social media corporations.
The article you're referring to is an op-ed where I argue there's a coming cultural fault line between, on one side, in-real-life sweating, striving, and working together in face-to-face communities — and on the other side, digital dopamine: social media corporations, pornography, online gambling. These are really not platforms for speech but pharmaceutical companies in the sense that they manipulate and exploit the ventral striatum and the mechanisms by which you regulate your own dopamine. They're dopamine peddlers.
I'm seeing increasing pushback from parents and students to their business model, their surveillance and predation. It's getting increasingly mainstream to say that social media corporations are a problem and online gambling is a problem. The "yes, and" to that, though, is: what are we doing to make it easier to eat outside on a Friday night in your downtown? What are we doing to make it so that your eight-year-old can go bicycling by herself on a Wednesday afternoon? Because that is the other side of this — you've also got to empower in-real-life connection.
It's a beautiful way to put it. Let's end with that. If there are mayors listening here who want to get in touch with you and be part of the work you're doing, where would we send them?
Reach out to MajorityDemocrats.org. We want to hear from you.
Let me ask you one very last question. When we look at a campaign for Congress, you obviously need volunteers, donors, people to go door to door and make phone calls. When you think about the totality of people spending their time and energy, though — I wonder if you have any advice for people starting out today in terms of how they should think about their city council race, their mayor race, and those things in relationship to the things they're being called to do, such as showing up for a presidential candidate or fighting this big national fight.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I give to young people who want to get involved is: start locally and orient yourself locally. Fifty percent of your tax dollars go local and state. The decisions most impactful for your day-to-day life — housing, public safety, education — are made locally. It's also a way to learn the craft of politics.
I got my start knocking fourteen thousand doors — fourteen thousand one-on-one conversations. There are no glamorous press conferences running for city council. There are no digital media campaigns or TV buys. It is just one conversation at a time. But it builds a strong political intuition about where the median American is. What you come to discover is that two-thirds of Americans are between the forty-yard lines of public opinion. There is a deep reservoir of common sense and decency in the electorate — what the founders would have called public virtue. Our political system is getting decreasingly good at tapping into that public virtue, but the public virtue itself is still there.
The best way to reach it is through local action.
Representative Jake Auchincloss, thanks for taking the time to chat. It's so nice to see you.
You too. We'll talk again soon. Take care.
Take care. Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.