The Strong Towns Podcast
Chuck walks through three ways of seeing the housing crisis: supply, demand, and the Strong Towns view that grapples with “dark finance” and capital flows. He explains why campaign-style wins and single-variable fixes rarely deliver real affordability. The episode closes with a candid update on recent leadership changes and how Strong Towns has restructured its media work over the past year.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. We're going to talk a little bit about housing here, but I want to let you know that at the end of the podcast, I'm going to give you a little update on where I've been, what I've been doing, why you haven't heard from me for a while, and what's going to happen in the future. But first, let's talk housing.
I have been having an ongoing conversation with you all, with the world, with Strong Towns members, with Strong Towns-adjacent people about housing for quite a while now. We put out Escaping the Housing Trap about two years ago now, and that was the culmination of a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of dialog around housing. The book was a national bestseller. Very nice. I don't take that as an affirmation necessarily of myself or of Daniel, my co-author, but I do think that it is indicative of how much this movement has grown, and also the fact that you weren't getting those insights in other places.
I think that there is a conversation about housing — obviously there's a housing advocacy conversation that is going on and has its own rhythm and its own internal dialog. There's also a financial conversation about housing going on that has its own rhythm and internal dialog, and the overlap between these two is almost non-existent. In fact, even when I talk deeply with people who really get the advocacy side, when you talk about basic finance concepts, they just don't get them. This is not part of their lexicon. When I talk to people who are deep into finance and you start talking about housing policy, they have a very — I'm going to say — simplistic view of how that world should work. These are two very different things, and the intersection, the overlap between them, is intricate and complex. They're both very blind to the other.
Okay, let me not get too weird. My youngest daughter is going to school for astrophysics, and while this is her doing and her passion and her thing, it didn't come out of nowhere. She and I have talked about these things. I love this stuff. I find it fascinating. My oldest daughter is doing something very different, but it didn't surprise me that one of my two would find their way to physics.
One of the interesting things in physics right now is that there's so much of the universe, so much of what's out there, so much of what's here, that we don't understand. Einstein's theories were a huge advance over Newton's theories because they closed a bunch of loops and explained a bunch of things. But we look out into space and we have these great theories that explain things, and what we see should not exist — it doesn't make sense. What we know with absolute confidence is that Einstein's theories, as genius as they are, as massive a breakthrough as they were, as descriptive as they are of many of the things that we directly interact with, we know that they're incomplete. We know that there's something out there we don't get. In fact, what we often do when we run into that in physics is we just call it "dark" — there's dark matter, there's dark energy. When you say, well, what does that mean? Well, 85% of the universe is dark matter and dark energy. 85% is almost everything. What we are saying in physics, with as much as we have learned and discovered, is that we recognize almost everything we can't really explain. There's some weird set of forces and masses and things that are interacting on the stuff that we know and understand that we just can't explain.
Why am I talking about physics? I think when we go back to housing, one of the things that we can say — if we're inquisitive, if we're thoughtful — if we sit in the housing advocacy camp and we obsess about zoning and building and all that, I think we can look out and say there's a universe here. 85% of the universe is dark energy. It's dark finance — we don't understand it. It's voodoo. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and it also doesn't mean that it isn't having a massive impact on the structure of the housing universe as you recognize it.
I think there's also the people who are sitting in that dark housing, that dark finance space, and they look out and they're like, the only thing that matters is finance and interest rates and capital flows and all that to housing, and then they apply very simplistic models to the way housing is built and constructed. I think they also fail to recognize the complexity of what's going on.
I bring this up because I feel like for quite a while we have been talking past each other. By "we," I really want to talk to Strong Towns advocates. I've been having — I don't want to put this as offline conversations — conversations with some people in the housing advocacy space who are advocating for the kind of reforms that we generally are not very enthusiastic about here at Strong Towns.
If you've been around here for any period of time, you've seen some online conversations, and I've actually tried to avoid them for the last couple of years. The Twitter spats kind of thing — it's just not helpful, it's just not productive. We're not just talking past each other; we're, in some sense, performing and preening in front of an audience. It's not a good look. It's not what I want to do. It's not very helpful. It's not good dialogue. I've tried to avoid it and stay away from it. That being said, I have had what I think are honest, sincere, thoughtful dialogs with people who have fundamentally disagreed with us at Strong Towns on what approach we think we should be taking to housing.
In the course of these conversations — I mean, I knew this and understood it going in — I think I have a deeper appreciation for it now, having engaged in some of this dialog with multiple people. Just how much we're talking past each other. How much our framing and our starting point — obviously two people who are thoughtful and considerate and sincere can have different framings, different worldviews, different motivating factors and talk past each other. I get it. What I have become more aware of is just how structurally embedded this is in our dialog, and how in many ways it lines up with a lot of moral foundations theory from Jonathan Haidt and everything else. We just start with a worldview, and that worldview shapes how we think and talk about things.
I say this as a way to introduce three different ways of looking at and understanding the housing crisis as we experience it today. I want to present this not because I want to say any of them are wrong. In fact, I don't think they are wrong. I think there's a dark energy thing out there — your Newtonian model may describe the world in one way but has limitations. The Einsteinian model may be an improvement in some ways but has limitations. A grand unifying theory does not exist. So what limitations are you willing to accept? What things are you willing to say you're not going to understand?
I get that we're starting from different places and see different things. I want to try to explain it so that — particularly for Strong Towns advocates, for our local conversations leaders, for our members, for our elected officials and other people who are trying to do housing reform — there's maybe a better understanding of these different ways of viewing and how they create certain blind spots.
So let me give number one. I've just called this the supply view, and this is the idea that we just haven't built enough housing. I want to say this the right way, because I feel like this is the loudest voice today — the voice that you maybe hear more in a national dialog kind of standpoint. When we say we have a housing crisis, it's a crisis of affordability, and there's a certain supply-demand logic that says if housing is unaffordable, the way you make it more affordable is to build more.
The diagnosis here is really straightforward. Housing is expensive because we haven't built enough of it. We need to go out and build more. In this framework, anything that we can do to build more housing is a net good. If you start in a kind of linear perspective — on one side, we're not building any; on the other side, we have abundant housing — anything you can do to move from nothing towards abundance is deemed good. So if you have zoning codes, let's get rid of them or reel them back. If you have NIMBY opposition, let's overcome that. If you have bad bureaucracy at City Hall, let's strip that out of the way. All of these things — whether it's the regulations or the process or the neighborhood opposition — those all create barriers to building housing, and by doing so create an artificial scarcity, because if those things weren't there, more and more housing could be built.
I feel like I get this framework. I feel like I get this understanding. I'm going to say there's a certain logic to it — it makes sense, and I think in a lot of places it's actually descriptive of what's going on.
If this is the approach that you have, if this is the worldview that you have, then what flows out of that is pretty basic. The tactics kind of flow naturally: get rid of the regulation, legalize more housing types, get out there and build, override those restrictive zoning codes, streamline the approval process, force local government to do things that would not be in the way of building more housing, reduce barriers. You often end up at the state level or at the federal level pushing for policy making at that level to, in a sense, change what is acceptable and what is allowed at the local government level. Sometimes we call this state preemption — taking away the rights of obstructionists (I'm using air quotes for "obstructionists") to get in the way of the goal, which is to build more housing.
Because of those tactics that flow, what you tend to get with the supply view is something that feels a lot like a political campaign. A political campaign — what do you have? You have villains. You have clear metrics of success. There's a thing you're trying to win. So who are our villains in this case? NIMBYs. If you've heard me having dialog publicly with people who fit into this supply view, a lot of times they start with, "I'm anti-NIMBY, I'm against NIMBYs, I'm at war with NIMBYs." NIMBYs are like the bad thing. In fact, I've been slurred a number of times — being called a NIMBY, which is one of the most absurd things. I'm the first person in urbanist space, like 15 years ago, to call for basically no neighborhood to be frozen in space. I'm the opposite of a NIMBY. But I've been labeled a NIMBY a number of times, a NIMBY-enabler, NIMBY-light, NIMBY-adjacent. "NIMBY" is the slur word — that is the archetype of the enemy. You're at war with outdated regulations and bureaucrats and anyone who would slow down construction and stand in the way of what the market (air quotes) would naturally deliver.
The metrics look like the amount of legislation passed, the number of units actually constructed. These are clear wins — we're doing battle with NIMBYs, we're doing battle with obstructionists; look, we got this state to approve that and this state to approve that, and then these units got built. It's directly attributed to us. This is a very campaign-esque mindset and approach. It's also kind of clean and scalable. So I get the seductiveness of this viewpoint. If you are of the mindset that the problem we have in housing is that not enough has been built, this lends itself very well to a satisfying set of things to do.
I think we can look at other veins — whether it is gun control or abortion or tariffs or immigration — and we can see how in those domains a simplistic approach is really effective political organizing, but it's not very effective in terms of actually dealing with the underlying issue.
The supply view lends itself really well to a campaign. It is, in a sense, true in a very narrow sense, and true in specific neighborhoods — absolutely true. You could point to this and say, yes, absolutely true, this applies here.
I do think this is not an illegitimate point of view. I'm not saying this is a point of view without merit. There is no doubt that restrictive zoning codes prevent housing from being built where it would otherwise be built. That is a truism. It's also a truism that neighborhood opposition prevents housing from being built that would otherwise be built — housing that we need, housing that we should have. Neighborhood opposition prevents that. Both of those things are true.
I think it's important to recognize, though, that this is an incomplete model. I've said for a long, long time — and this is core to the housing trap idea — that the idea that we can build our way to affordability ignores the dark finance, the dark matter, the 85% that's sitting out there that we are not quite grasping, that has a feedback loop that we just don't ponder very much. When you create an economy where the foundation of it is housing price appreciation, and then you say we are going to build more housing as a way to make houses more affordable — in other words, to lower price, to depreciate price relative across the economy — that feedback loop does not work.
The dark finance out there, the 85% that is kind of affecting things that we don't really interact with day to day but is just this big force, is going to prevent that theory from actually delivering affordability. Let me be clear: affordability should be the goal. The goal is not to be on a linear perspective where anything that brings us one more unit is good. The goal is actually, how do you get to affordability? If you have a one-dimensional argument about supply, you will not get to affordability.
Let me talk about the second view. I've called this the demand view. I've had other people say, "Chuck, you should call this the greed view," or some other names, and I'm like, no, this is really the opposite of supply. This is a demand side. The idea is that we have housing — maybe we don't have enough, but we've got lots of housing. The biggest problem is not that we're not building enough, or that we don't have enough, or that we have too much regulation. It's that the housing we have is, in a sense, being misappropriated in some way.
This starts in a different place than the supply view. It has a different set of bad actors, a different set of bad outcomes, a different set of villains, but it ends up in another place: there isn't enough housing to go around. The villains in this view are people like investors who own multiple properties, people who buy up properties and turn them into short-term rentals — taking units out of the marketplace and putting them aside for tourists, transients, and other temporary users, letting them sit vacant. They're corporate buyers or big investors who drive up prices, buy homes, and have them sit vacant as part of an investment portfolio.
We get this in high-demand markets. How often have we heard how many apartments are sitting empty in Manhattan or San Francisco because investors from wherever bought them up just as a good investment?
The villain here may be a landlord who is raising rents. For a variety of reasons, they've got an algorithm that's telling them what the market can support. They don't care about their tenants — basically, they've got the leverage, so they can raise rents, and if they can raise rent, it doesn't matter what they need for rent to make things work; if they can get more, they will.
There are a lot of villains here. I'm going to say this because I do think that there is a lot to the supply argument — we're not building enough housing, there's not enough housing out there, that's very clear. There's also a lot to this demand side. There are people who have bought up units in Manhattan who are just holding them as investment properties. That is not an uncommon thing. I'm not going to get deep into this, because I'm saving it for the future and I have a little bit more research to do.
But I went last week, two days, to a short-term rental conference, and I did not go there to speak. In fact, I went rather surreptitiously — I used my name, I didn't do a false ID or anything. This was a conference for people who want to do short-term rentals. I went to learn about the short-term rental market. I wanted to actually be in the room where people who were doing this, making these kind of investments, talked about what they were doing and gave each other tips and strategies and all that. That's what I went and did last week.
I will say it is kind of appalling what you are able to do, what the tax codes allow you to do, what they create incentives for you to do, and what the mortgage market provides. You can absolutely see the concept of the marginal buyer — the person who's willing to pay the highest price for a home — being the one who sets the price for all other homes. That is a market truism: the marginal buyer is always the one who sets the price. What you have is a player in the marketplace that we have enabled to, in a sense, pay insane prices and dominate a market.
This conference was in North Carolina, and one of the presenters was very active in the Asheville area. It was just astounding to me — the market force and the market leverage that one person is able to provide in a region like that, basically buying up hundreds of homes and changing the entire dynamics of that local market and making it work with really bizarrely wide margins. If your worldview is that the market is rigged, that okay, maybe we need to build a few more homes but what we really need to do is stop this exploitation — there are many, many data points you can point to that are not conspiracy theories, that are not academically unsound. There are lots and lots of data points that support this worldview. Short-term rentals is one.
If this is your worldview, again, the tactics are kind of clear, and they feel like a political campaign. Rent control, restricting short-term rentals, limiting institutional buyers, giving people who are at a disadvantage direct assistance — maybe for down payments or what have you — using the power of the state to protect tenants, to shield first-time home buyers, to give people a helping hand.
Your campaign is less, I think, about unlocking the free market than it is moral and protective — in a long tradition of politics that we have in this country: how do we look out for the little person?
When you run into people who have this worldview on housing, they've got another set of villains. It's not the NIMBYs and the obstructionists and the bureaucrats at City Hall — it's speculators, it's corporations, it's greedy people. You've got the people you're defending: displaced families, tenants, renters that are getting squeezed. There's a whole set of approaches that work really well, again, in this us-versus-them, Manichean kind of political arena. How do we go in and enact our agenda? How do we stop this bad thing from happening and allow room for this better thing to happen?
Let me reiterate — as I did with the supply narrative — there's a lot of truth here. Financialization has completely changed housing markets. Speculation does occur, and it's not a small part of the market. Short-term rentals, the apps that landlords have — all of these things do drive up costs, and sometimes they drive up costs dramatically. I was looking at the cash flow models and projections from these short-term rentals at that conference, and it even blew my mind. The wide margins that you can get in the right place, in the right market — you're just printing money. It's astounding. It is a gold rush, in a sense.
This stuff is real. So when I watch the supply side and the demand side people argue back and forth and point fingers at each other, I feel like what they are not stopping to acknowledge or respect is that each side does have an insight on truth. Each side's framing is different, and the place they start from — going back to Jonathan Haidt and moral foundations — the thing that they are sensitive to has led them to a different conclusion. But if we step back and look, they both have a sliver of the truth. They're both sharing in something that is true, but they both are missing a part.
This brings me to the third view. I've called this the Strong Towns view. Let me say upfront: I am not suggesting that Strong Towns has the full truth. I'm not suggesting that we have everything figured out, that somehow we are able to see things that other people are not, that somehow all of that dark energy for us is made visible and it's invisible for everybody else. But I am suggesting that we have actually tried to ask the question: what is that dark energy? What is that dark finance? How is that interplaying here? While I'm going to say that system is vastly more complicated than I can understand — way more complex than I have the capacity to know — every time I dig into it, I wind up uncovering more and more stuff that never crossed my mind, because the financial markets are full of innovation.
Think back to 2006, 2007, when you had Greenspan and ultimately Bernanke saying, hey, subprime is contained. What they didn't recognize were all the things that they didn't recognize, and they weren't humble enough to say there's all this dark finance out there that we just don't grasp, we're assuming things based on stuff we don't understand. I'm not sitting here today pretending that I understand it. I am suggesting that we can't ignore it, and that if we ask questions about it, we can actually see some very logical feedback loops that tend to form.
In the Strong Towns view, housing is shaped primarily — not exclusively, but primarily — by two overlapping forces. The first is the supply and demand of homes. Yes, how much we build has a big impact. Yes, how those buildings are ultimately used — if they're turned into short-term rentals or tied up in other financial schemes — yes, that has a big impact on the market. Supply and demand of housing has a huge impact. The other overlapping force is the national supply and demand of capital. We have two nested systems: the local supply and demand of homes, and this larger kind of financial fluid that we all flow in — the national supply and demand of capital.
We have to acknowledge that in today's America, a house is not just a place to live. A house in today's America is literally a financial asset. It's not just a financial asset for a family, although that is part of this. The house is a financial asset for the global economy. Bundles of homes put into securities and sold off are the collateral for banks, for insurance companies. They support pension funds. They are the primary security that allows our financial system to function. The value of these homes underpins municipal budgets. They anchor household wealth. We have placed them as the very foundation of our economy.
What this means is that when prices rise, when prices are rising, capital starts to flow into housing. This accelerates prices upward. We saw this during the pandemic, with the inflation and with all the money that was given out, freed up in a sense, flowing into housing as people moved around. We see this in the early 2000s when subprime shaped the way the market reacted, creating a marginal buyer that was, in a sense, price insensitive.
I argued in Escaping the Housing Trap that we saw this again in 2011, 2012, 2013, when corporate buyers moved in — again, less sensitive to price, more price insensitive. I think we see that in the short-term rental market in some places. I think we see that in other markets where buyers that are less price sensitive become the marginal buyer, the buyer that sets the overall market for everybody else.
When housing prices are rising, it's not that your local bank says, "oh, invest in housing." What happens is that the money that would normally go into other safer securities — let's just say treasury bonds, a 90-day treasury bill, might pay one and a half percent — if a bundle of mortgage-backed securities pays three and a half percent, I'm going to get that extra 2% margin, especially if that bundle of mortgages can be rated AAA, can be seen as secure, can be noted by the federal government as adequate capital reserves for your bank and your pension fund and your insurance company. I'm going to move in and grab that extra yield. I'm going to put money, in a sense, into housing. I'm going to create more demand for more mortgages, for more loans to be made, for more houses to be built. Because in a market where prices are going up, that seems like a really safe investment that pays a higher yield.
Now, when prices flatten, what does capital do? It starts to hesitate. It starts to maybe be a little bit apprehensive. Maybe that extra little bit of interest rate yield is not worth it, because I'm not sure about the underlying security here. When prices start to meaningfully fall, that's when capital pulls back. It's not like the local builder says, "I can't do this anymore because the market's pulling back" — although there's some of that too. What it is is that the trillions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that is flowing back and forth says, you know what, that investment over there feels more risky than it did six months ago, and I'm going to take my money and put it over here where I can get a decent return with less risk. The amount that I'm getting in extra return does not justify what I perceive now — in a falling market — as an adequate return. It does not justify the amount of risk that I'm taking.
A declining market, a stalled market, a market that's becoming more affordable, changes capital flow dynamics in a way that just has less money going into housing. That's not nefarious. It's not like someone sat up and said, how do we mess with the housing market? That is the trap we have built. I wrote three chapters about the housing trap itself in this book — a chapter about how we created the trap, how we set the trap, and then how we are now trapped. Those are literally the three chapter titles. Go read that — Escaping the Housing Trap — because it describes a process that is not one where we set out in a nefarious way to create this situation, but one where by solving this problem and solving that problem and solving the next problem in the way that we did, we walked ourselves into a situation where we are stuck.
Housing is an asset that needs to appreciate, and if housing doesn't appreciate, the economy stops working the way that it's supposed to, the way that we want it to, the way that we need it to. That is a trap. Let me be clear: the trap doesn't make housing reform impossible, but it does make it more complex. If we go out and build large-scale supply and start driving down housing prices, capital is going to pull back. That is a reality of the system around us.
If we go out and create all kinds of demand-side protections — where we limit the amount of rent increases, and we limit the amount of short-term rentals, and we limit the amount of corporate ownership, and we tamp down on that side of the market — financing is going to freeze up, and construction will slow down. Those are things that happen. When asset values fall, when housing prices fall, cities — and this is largely true for the country; there are a handful of states where this isn't the leading driving factor, but in most states — local governments just struggle. They're dependent, like everybody else, on rising property values to be able to maintain that park and rebuild that road and police and fire protection out there. That comes from that appreciating value.
When housing prices stop appreciating and start declining, homeowners feel poorer — whether that is reality or not, that's how they feel. Lenders start to become more cautious. Pension funds start to freak out. Political pressure builds to stabilize prices. It's important to recognize in this system — whether we want to label them NIMBYs or predators or greedy landlords or evil corporations — these are not neutral actors. These are not people on the sidelines. Their losses are real. Their ability to affect things is concentrated and in many ways greater than ours. They're politically connected. Even in the states where we've seen tremendous amounts of housing reform, a lot of that has been hedged by the fact that you have to work at these levels with all these other players. That reality shapes what's tolerated. It shapes what kind of outcomes are actually allowed.
If housing prices continue to fall the way that they have been for the last six months, and if that decline becomes broader and more sustained, you will see more of what we have already started to see, which is pressure to stabilize the market. How do we get lower interest rates? How do we get more money into housing? How do we get prices stable and going back up?
Here's Strong Towns: we're not denying in any way that there are supply constraints. When I have conversations with the supply view people, I'm like, yep, we agree on many, many things. I also don't really disagree with the demand side people. I don't deny that there's speculative behavior. I don't deny that this is having an impact on the marketplace — I think it's a big impact. I don't think it's a minor impact. I think it's kind of silly when we argue back and forth about, oh, corporate ownership is only point-2% of the market. And I'm like, yeah, but what percent of the transactions is it? It's the marginal buyer. It's always been that.
What we question here at Strong Towns — and the thing we struggle with, and the thing we ask our members and our local conversations and our advocates and the people who want to build strong towns to struggle with — is the idea that simple, single-variable explanations can deliver on campaign energy and sound bites and populist appeal, but can they really deliver on affordability?
The answer is no, they can't. Not in a system where home price appreciation is so central to that dark finance, to that whole system that sits out there.
I feel like this is the central issue to why we talk past each other. If you believe supply is the problem — and that is your focus; you may even say, yeah, we know that there are other things, but supply is the issue we're going to deal with, and the more units we can get built, the better off we are, just build one more unit, build one more unit after that, keep building — your tactics become very simple and straightforward. You escalate. You go to the state government and push for preemption. You identify obstructions and you try to take them down. You mobilize your supporters into what feels like a campaign. You shout down the opposition, you label them and slur them and say that you are ignorant of the studies that prove our point of view. There's a whole campaign-style of rhetoric that goes along with this. What you're trying to do is have legislative wins — let's unlock capacity by sledgehammering our way to dealing with the supply issue.
This feels very familiar to those who are on the demand side. If you're on the demand side, you also tend to escalate upward. You identify the people who are being harmed. You mobilize them. You mobilize their advocates. You pursue legislation that's going to give you protections. You try to redistribute some of those gains. Winning here may not look like unlocking something — it may look more like restraining something. Controls enacted, the power of people to exploit restrained, some type of control that prevents the harm that you've identified and that you are sensitive to from occurring.
These two approaches — the supply side, the demand side — have a familiar political grammar. You rally your side, you point to the enemy, you use populist rhetoric, and if you win, you get a legislative victory. I get that, I really do.
But if you believe, like we do at Strong Towns, that this problem is more structural — that it's embedded in finance, it's embedded in politics, it's embedded in the local fragility that we see in our blocks and in our neighborhoods and in our cities — then you've got to come up with a different approach. That approach is going to look and feel differently.
It's going to look like building local capacity. It's going to look like normalizing incremental development, the maturing of neighborhoods over time. It's going to reduce regulatory friction — yes. It's going to seek to get more homes built — yes. But it's going to do that in a framework where neighbors and people living in a place are part of the solution, not part of the problem to overcome. It's going to do it where City Hall is part of the solution, not part of the thing to be torn down and redirected.
Your approach, if you're Strong Towns, is also going to look broader. Instead of saying, there are three neighborhoods in San Francisco where we need to have a sledgehammer and get things built over local opposition, you're going to recognize that we really need all of these cities across all of California to get new homes and to get them in a broad, robust kind of way. You're going to recognize that making Cincinnati a better place to live, and making Cleveland a better place to live, and making Kansas City and Omaha and Tulsa and Shreveport and Memphis better places to live are all a key part of taking pressure off of Manhattan. By better places to live, I mean neighborhoods that are safe, neighborhoods that are inviting, neighborhoods where people can invest in and expect that their quality of life and their personal finances will get better over time — places where there are jobs, places where there are opportunities.
Strong Towns — if you are of the mindset that housing is a more complex kind of undertaking — winning for you is not going to look like a single legislative moment. It's not going to look like a victory of having a bill signed or having some kind of cathartic sledgehammer come down on your foes. It's going to look like a neighborhood that now embraces a duplex being built. It's going to be someone who recognizes that when a neighbor builds a backyard cottage so that their mother-in-law can move in, that's a victory for everyone. When those kinds of things are normalized — that's what victory looks like. When a local developer can come in and do a successful redevelopment project in a neighborhood and the neighborhood is stronger, not more divided, by that happening — that's what success looks like.
You don't get to that success by escalation. You don't get to that success with populist rhetoric. You don't get to that success by having enemies and seeking to defeat them. You actually get to that success by empathy, by understanding, by working together, by trying to create the social and cultural feedback loops that bring about that stronger, more legitimate development approach with greater local legitimacy.
I think this difference in approach leads us to talk past each other and leads us to get cranky with each other. Let me be clear — I've had a number of people get really mad at me when our stuff is used in these state preemption battles. Recently in Michigan, the Michigan Municipal League came to me and said, hey, here's what we're doing to help cities reform, and I actually thought it was really smart. I actually thought what they were doing was great. This is an organization that represents all cities, saying to their groups — the people who are part of their coalition — hey, we need to change, we need to reform, we need to do things; here are the things that we need to do differently. I thought that was a great approach, and I wrote a letter for them in support of that approach. That letter ended up as part of the debate at the state capitol over preemption, and quite a few people got mad at me: "Chuck, why are you sticking your nose in here? Why are you intervening?"
I get it. When you've organized yourself as a campaign, when you have identified enemies and when you have identified your metrics of victory as being defeating these enemies at this place, in this battle, with this legislation — anything that calls that into question, anything that slows that down, anything that prevents that feels like it's coming from an enemy.
That goes for the demand side people too. When we don't completely agree with the idea that there should be no short-term rentals, or when we won't speak out against all corporate ownership, or when we say we don't think rent control — especially long-term rent control — is a good idea, these things tend to get people cranky with us, particularly in that political environment.
Let me say the opposite. When you are working at the base level, when you are trying to shake hands with neighbors, when you're trying to work with City Hall, when you're trying to make things work on this block so that it can then work on the next block, so then it can spread neighborhood-wide, so then it can spread city-wide, so then it can inspire others and show that good things can happen when you do things in a different way — when that's your approach, the people who are screaming preemption, the people who are trying to divide people, the people who look around and see nothing but friends and enemies, those people become a horrible pain in the neck. They are massively irritating. They really tear down what you are building. They become the divisive voice that perpetuates the status quo.
I'm trying really hard to not see it that way. I'm trying really hard to see good intentions, and I think there are good intentions. What I really want more than anything else is for our movement — the Strong Towns movement — to focus on what matters, what we can do. We're not a political campaign. We're not here to win a moment. We're not here to conquer our foes. We're not here to get a certain legislation passed at the state level or the federal level. We're not using our energy to mobilize people in service of a statewide campaign.
We're here to build places that are strong, that are prosperous, that work for everybody. I think in the context of housing, where reforms hold their legitimacy over time — and by holding their legitimacy, what I really mean is that they can be understood and embraced by the community.
Let me be clear: that's not the easy button. That's not the quick way to success. I'll go back to my physics metaphor: when you ignore all dark energy, when you ignore friction, when you ignore all these complexities — take them out of it — all of your equations work really well. If you want the easy button, you're not part of what we're doing here. You're not Strong Towns.
We're not about ignoring all of those things. I'm not pretending we understand them all to a massive depth. I'm not pretending that there is a deeper set of knowledge or understanding at Strong Towns than there is in other places. What I'm suggesting is that we are not going to pretend that these things don't exist. We're not going to pretend there's an easy button. We're not going to pretend that we can proceed without having the difficult conversations in our neighborhoods with the people around us, generating consensus incrementally as we go.
We have to get to a place where our neighborhoods can thicken up over time, can mature over time, can become better places — not just because that's what we need to do from a housing standpoint (though it is), but because that's what we need to do from an economic standpoint, a job standpoint, a cultural standpoint, a safe streets standpoint. All of these other dimensions that cities work in, that are deeply complex, that go beyond just housing — we actually need to be able to do this at the block level, at the neighborhood level.
Stay the course, friends. I realize that there is urgency. I feel that urgency. But let me be clear: the urgency doesn't allow us to skip steps. It doesn't allow us to get 10% down the road to affordability and pretend we accomplished something. It actually requires us to do hard work today in the trenches, because we need to get to a place where our cities, in a sense, heal themselves. That's the way this scales. That's the way we get to true affordability.
That work may initially appear slower. I don't think it will ultimately prove to be slower. I don't think we will end up in the dead end that I think state preemption gets you to. The work that we are doing is more resilient. It's a kind of work that you're going to be able to point to years from now and say, I was part of making this place stronger. That's ultimately what it means to build a strong town.
All right, friends, it's March, and I've been gone for a while. We always chill a little bit in December — December is our wind-down month. We do our retreat and kind of get set up for the next year, but then I like to kick it in January. I feel like I've done some of my best writing and some of my best podcasting in January. I got a little bit of time in December to think about things, the grind kind of slows down, my mind wanders a little bit, and I'm able to come back and kind of hit it with a vengeance. That did not happen this year.
We had in November some large turnover in the organization. I'll spare you all the sausage. Let's just say Strong Towns as an organization — I've been doing this since 2008. Those initial years were really hard, trying to get from me to me and someone else. It was me and the board for a while, and a strategy to do a little bit here, do a little bit there, see what took, see what worked. To get to that second and third person was such a difficult slog. Going from 100 members to 300 members to 1,000 members — it was an incremental slog. We practice what we preach — no easy button. There was never an easy button.
But we've gotten to the point now where we've got a large movement, a growing movement, a lot of stuff going on in many different dimensions — whether it's providing programs and assistance, still doing the communications and all the media stuff. Part of what I do is I run a big organization now. We've got dozens of people that work here, and we have built a management structure. Part of my learning curve — and this is particularly hard for me as an engineer, because the engineering mindset is a fix-it mindset — it's very hard for me to work through other people. Maybe the kindest, most generous way to do it is to work through other people to get stuff done. It's not that I have a problem with working through other people — I will let other people do things their way. But when things aren't working out and things aren't going well, how do you react to that? How do you solve that problem? Because ultimately, on the day, that is a very huge human problem, and my tendency for solving problems tends to be a little bit more systematic than human.
I recognize that about myself, and so I've had to lead this organization and this movement by, in a sense, trying to find a balance — suppressing my best instincts with my worst instincts. Let's talk a little bit about my worst instincts, just to be fair. As an engineer and as a natural engineer, I have a systematic mindset that helps me evaluate things, helps me seize connections maybe a little bit easier than other people, but that can also be a crutch. If something's not working — and last year, there were a number of key things that were not working in the organization — it's easy for me to kind of see the problem and then come up with how I would fix it. When you empower other people to do those things, sometimes they don't see the same problem you do, and sometimes they're unwilling or incapable of fixing it the way you want it to be fixed. So what do you do? I've read a ton of management books about this. I've talked to a lot of people about this. This is not a unique thing to me or Strong Towns. This is part of a transition that I think all organizations go through — where you look and you have people who are really good at doing one thing, you ask them to do another thing, you're expecting them to grow kind of instantly, and then you watch them struggle and get caught in this trap of, okay, how do I help them grow versus how do I fix this problem?
By last November, it became clear that we needed to fix a couple of problems, and allowing people to grow was not working. So I reassigned one person out of a management role — that person ultimately left the organization. I had another person who I had to ask to leave, which was very painful and not much fun for anybody, and created a bit of tumult internally. I had a third manager — third of three — who ultimately decided that they wanted to go in a different direction, which I think was probably the right move for all of us. So I've lost basically my entire management layer here at Strong Towns. It's myself, Carly — our Chief of Staff — and then trying to figure some things out.
The good part of this is that it allowed me to fix some things. I do think that structurally, we are much sounder right now. We're moving in the right direction. The media part of what we do is in a market that has changed very quickly and continues to change all the time. Even our Google Analytics, that tells us how much traffic we're getting and where it's coming from and where the flow is on our website — that has changed dramatically in the last 24 months, in a way that we have not kept up with. So in some sense, we are flying blind in some areas. In other areas we're really strong, but we're flying blind in some key areas. Keeping up with that requires a certain dedication, a certain focus, and I do think a certain level of innovation. When you lose that for a year or two or more, things start to atrophy really quickly, and the world starts to pass you by really quickly. The media side, the communication side — the grow-the-movement side of this — can fall apart really quickly.
I think what we found last year was that by the second quarter of the year, we were having a really great conversation with ourselves — internally, ourselves as a movement. Now, the movement's pretty big. We're getting millions of visitors to our website every year — I think we had 12 or 14 million views on YouTube. So it's not a small conversation, but it's not the growing conversation that it had been, and that kind of momentum is really important to doing what we're doing.
Remember when I said, like 10 minutes ago, that this is block by block? Here's what we do as part of that as Strong Towns: we magnify that. Because what we want is for the next person doing it on the next block to have a feeling of inevitability, because everybody else is doing this. You can see how parking reform shifted really, really quickly in this country when it became evident that more and more and more people were doing it. I'm not saying that we single-handedly shifted the parking debate — there are a lot of people who were adding a lot to that, Donald Shoup primarily intellectually among them — but I think our contribution was to make it look inevitable, like everybody's doing this. You don't have to ask, are we taking a big leap here or not? That's what our communication work does. It reaches new people and makes stuff feel inevitable. It allows us to magnify local successes into national and international stories that other people can learn from and copy and build on, and it creates momentum around reform.
When you're not reaching new people, you're just talking to the same people. You can get really good metrics in one dimension that say, hey, you're getting lots of engagement. But if that engagement is not engaging new people, growing audience, increasing reach — you're really stalled out. I think for a bit last year, we started to stall out, and we have fixed that now.
What has happened is that for this podcast, I basically went back into manager mode for November, December, January, February, while we set things up, put things in motion, changed some things around, outsourced some stuff, changed some job descriptions, updated some strategy, had a lot of internal meetings, refocused things. If you're watching the broader Strong Towns conversation, you may have seen some of this. If you keep an eye on it over the next six months, you will be seeing a lot of this — subtle changes in how we're doing things and approaching things.
That being said, I have not been able to do this podcast, and I've sat down and done a couple of them that I wasn't happy with how they turned out. We released one of those — there was about two-to-one positive feedback on it, but the negative feedback was really negative, and so we ended up taking that one down, just because I didn't have the bandwidth to have that ongoing conversation.
We are now — and the reason I'm doing this one today is because we have a brand new person on team who's running our podcast. Love you, Joya — you're awesome. Joya started as an intern with us and is now on full time and is going to be managing all of our podcast feeds. So we're going to have regular, ongoing scheduling of guests, podcasts running through the process, published — all that. Which is really good, because I can do these from the road, I can do these from all over the place, and I can keep up with a professional, good system, good approach. Very happy with that.
We also have some other supporting stuff that we're bringing in and taking care of. I really deeply appreciate our members and the people who have been supporting us and have given us the kind of financial foundation to be able to do these things. We don't take that for granted.
We're in this together. When you make a donation to Strong Towns, I look at that as a commitment to us, and our side of that commitment is that we need to do this really well. We need to build on our strategy really well. We need to not get complacent about what we're doing and not let the world pass us by.
So I just want to ask a little bit of your forgiveness and forbearance. I'm sorry that I haven't been around for the last couple of months, and I wasn't really in a position to communicate why or when I would be back. I anticipate now that I'll be back kind of indefinitely. If you enjoy the Strong Towns Podcast, if you enjoy what we're doing here, expect more.
We're relaunching Up Zoned soon, so that podcast will be back online here in the next couple of weeks. The Bottom Up Revolution has been going strong, and the Bottom Up Shorts have been even better. If you're not checking into that podcast, do that. Those are our three main podcast feeds here at Strong Towns. My video channel on YouTube is back up and running now too, and you should see a couple of videos a week there on an ongoing basis.
The columns — I've been good on those, so you've been getting a fresh column from me every week this year. If you're on Substack, you can just go to "Chuck at Strong Towns" and I'm there too. If you are a member of Strong Towns, we have launched The Commons. The Commons is our own internal conversation. We got rid of the comments after our articles, and we brought all of that into what is our own kind of internal social media feed. If you want to be part of that conversation, we have resources, courses, and all the insider stuff. I'm publishing my articles early there. I'm doing dispatches from the road and that kind of thing. We've got a lot of stuff.
There are hundreds of people on there now. We've been launching with a small group, but it's growing bigger and bigger. It will soon be up to thousands of people who are having conversations there about how to do Strong Towns stuff. If you are a Strong Towns member, you will have received — or will shortly receive — an invitation to join The Commons. I think we are close to inviting everyone now. If you're trying to get your invitation, email Anthony at [email protected]. Tony, I'm going to throw you under the bus here for a sec — email Tony at [email protected], and he'll get you an invitation if you're a member. If you're not a member, go sign up and be one, and then go to The Commons and be part of the conversation.
Hey everybody, thank you for being here. Thanks for all you do. Thanks for your patience. I was going to say I love you — and I do. I love you all. I really do. I've been traveling, and my travel schedule really kicks in quite a bit in April and May.
It is so gratifying to be out on the road and run into people at conferences where I'm speaking, at places where I've been invited to go — even in airports. I had someone come up to me in the Delta lounge in Atlanta, and someone else at baggage claim in Minneapolis. It means so much to me. I'm deeply, deeply grateful for all of you and all the work that you're doing and how much you care.
So thank you. Thanks for your patience. You'll hear again from me soon. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.
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.