Chuck on 'Bike Messiahs', State Highways and Housing

Chuck Marohn  0:09

Hey everybody! This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. It has been a while. I apologize for that. I have been, I've been on the road a lot, and that sounded like I was unhappy about being on the road. Let me just say, I'm a little bit tired from being on the road, but boy, being on the road is a is a massive gift in many ways. I was looking at the calendar before I started this, and in the last six weeks, I have been in Louisiana, in Asheville, and then I took a couple days and went to Arizona to visit my daughter.

My wife and I did as part of family weekend. She's a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson. From there, I went straight to Florida, where we had our Civic Leaders Summit. Then crazily went to Traverse City, Michigan, for like three hours. It's one of these crazy things where I landed. I have a lot of stories from on the road. I'll spare you all of them except this one was crazy. I landed at I think it was like 12:30 in the morning from Pensacola, traveling to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and when I got off, you know I'm a pretty efficient traveler. Got out, went to get a rental car.

I use National, so you just go and like get in your car, and then you drive, and they verify you on the way out, which is pretty efficient. So I got my car, I'm driving out, and I went through the checkout thing. The guy was kind of new, you know. Which okay, it's one in the morning. He's figuring stuff out. He sends me on my way, and I'm driving out. I got maybe like five miles down the road, and I had this like weird feeling. And the weird feeling was I don't know if I had the keys. So this is one of those cars where you just have the fob inside and you press the button and it goes.

And so I pulled over and I started looking around, and I did not have the key to the car. I put two and two together. I'm the guy didn't give me the key back. And so I drove back to the rental car place, drove up the ramp, drove all the way in, got out, like went up, and I'm like, dude, like I don't have the key, and he's like, well, that's guys on a different floor. I'll run down and check, come back up, like, no, we don't have it, and I said, you, it must be in the car, and we went back and forth. I'm like, no, it's it's certainly not in the car, no, it has to be in the car, shut the car off and turn it back on, and that will prove it.

I'm like, well, I'm, I'm not going to do that here because here is like the middle of the ramp. Why don't I like pull in somewhere and do it? So I convinced them I did that. Shut the car off. It wouldn't start. The key was not in it. I have been gone like all of 30, 20 minutes there and back. It's 30 minutes since I went. He's got to have the key. They didn't have the key. They could not find the key anywhere. And the only thing I can think of is that they gave the next person my key, because they did give me another car.

I got on my way, and when I came back the next day, there was my car parked in the same spot, no key, my OG car. Anyway, got to Traverse City at like I was like I think I got to bed at like four in the morning, and I think my talk was at like 10 in the morning or something like that. Anyway, it was one of those where I got done. I said thank you to everybody, and I had to walk out before I could literally like sit around and chat with people because I barely made it back to the airport and then flew home.

Chuck Marohn  3:20

I was home for a couple days and then where did I go? San Antonio, which was again like a fantastic trip. At the end of the San Antonio trip, is one of these things where I got into the airport and then I had to wait for my daughter, my Tucson daughter, to get home, her flight didn't land until quarter to one. I live; those of you who don't know, like a couple hours north of the airport. So again, we didn't get home till like 3 a.m.. She was coming home that weekend because we had a family wedding. So two days of family wedding stuff, great fun, crazy, and then I get up and get on a plane and go to the UK for a week.

I feel like I could just tell you travel stories, but in all of that craziness of wedding, kids home, all the stuff. Both my daughters were home. It was a great time, a great wedding. I forgot my computer, so I had planned to do all this work, including a podcast, including a bunch of other stuff. While I was in the UK, oh no, I forgot my computer. To make matters worse, within two hours of landing or three hours of landing, I dropped my phone and broke it. It didn't break like crack or anything, but the screen wouldn't light up anymore. It still worked. I kept.

Getting texts on my watch all week, but I couldn't make calls. I couldn't obviously like use a map or anything. It was a very weird week traveling around the UK. I'm gonna talk about that some other time. Let's just say I was there for work. It was astounding. Got to meet so many cool people doing amazing, amazing work. Manchester, Cardiff, London. I'll talk about it some other time. It was really great. Got back. My gosh. Took off for New York. I was in Poughkeepsie, Poughkeepsie, and then went on to Herkimer. I was going to say it the way I would say it, Herkimer, Herkimer. Both of those trips were amazing, amazing, and now after being home for a couple days and putting wood in the garage, getting ready for winter, back out on the road.

I'm in Florida tonight. I'm actually eating. Before I started this, I'm eating a gingerbread cookie from Disney Springs. Every year, this time of year, they have these amazing, thick, super thick. I used to have gingerbread growing up that was thin. They have the thickest gingerbread and is so good. Anyway, I went and got myself one of those, and I'm eating that now while I'm going to do this podcast. So they've asked me to do they. I feel bad. Gioia, who works with us, who's astounding. Gioia on the team, she's just wonderful. She was an intern with us for a while, and we loved her so much.

Chuck Marohn  6:20

We found a full time position for her. Part of what Gioia does is schedule our podcast, so she works with all of the people who are going to appear on the podcast to line that up, find calendars that make all that stuff. She's been doing that since I don't know, like May, June, and she's been doing a fantastic job of it, like really, really good job of it. That's why you saw like this year is the first year ever we've been very, very consistent in the podcast because we finally have now someone who is kind of working ahead, getting things lined up, but this is the first time Gioia went through a busy, busy travel season.

And so, poor Gioia put like a couple things on my calendar, and I'm like, "Look, this is the one day I'm in the office all month. I can't do this podcast." And there was another one on like some weird day where I was going to be in the office for two hours. We had one scheduled for when I was on the road in San Antonio, and I was just I am so burnt out and dead. Like I really can't do this. I feel bad because Gioia has been doing her job. I have not been doing mine, and I think, in retrospect, we would have probably had a few more in the can before we went on the road, and then not I forgot my computer or dropped my phone, or like all that crazy stuff.

Anyway, Gioia has been asking me to do a Q and A podcast. This is one of those things that we do with members. We've done a couple of them this year. I've said that I would like to do one every, every month, every six weeks or so. If you are a member and go to the Strongtowns Commons, Commons.strongtowns.org. Not only are you going to get like a whole bunch of conversation, a whole bunch of stuff that's going on there. All of our courses, all of our web broadcasts, a weekly ask Strong Towns anything like all of my columns before they're published. All of this stuff, like tons and tons and tons of stuff.

You will also get an invite to present questions or ask questions that I will do on this podcast. Gioia today said, "Chuck, will you please, please, please do a podcast this week?" I said, "Look, I will stay up late tonight, and I will do this podcast for you and for everybody else, and so she sent me seven questions, and I did like briefly look through them, but I didn't really read them closely enough to kind of get the vibe here. So let me start with the first one, which is from Connor. Connor says a lot of cities' transformative bike movements come from the top down.

A mayor steps in and immediately starts building bike infrastructure, and the percentage of bicycle trips people take goes way up. What should bicycle activists do in the meantime as we wait for our bike messiah? It's interesting because I feel like we're having a different conversation of bottom up and top down here. When you say a lot of cities' transformative bike movements come from the top down, what I am hearing and what I am seeing, and actually what I have experienced a lot of, is they're the byproduct of like a federal transportation investment, right? We want to do more transportation, biking and walking. We want more trails.

Chuck Marohn  9:21

We want more. What have you? And so, what we do is we look for a program: rails to trails, safe routes to school. Like, what federal pot of money can we access to allow us to build some type of large infrastructure project for biking and walking in our cities? I've long argued that this is not only the wrong way to go about doing it, but it's just it's like the slow road to stroad-ish infrastructure, right? Like it just you are fighting for table scraps in a system that is not set up for you. A and B is just going to deliver like big projects when you could be doing like a ton of little things.

Now, Connor goes on to describe the mayor stepping in and starts building bike infrastructure, and the percentage of bicycle trips goes up. Yes, like I wouldn't call that top down. To me, the mayor, in like you know a government sense is very close to the people, very close to the people being served. Sometimes it does take a catalyst mayor, or a catalyst council member, or a catalyst staff member, to in a sense like open people's eyes to a how easy this is to do, b how quickly it can be done, and see how cheap and low cost and high return it is. Right, like these are fantastic investments, and as soon as you see it, as soon as someone within the system sees it, it starts to become obvious to everybody.

Right, because as Connor writes here, the mayor starts going out and doing it, and then what happens? All kinds of people show up because it's not some, trail that's appended onto a stroad out designed for like a regional recreation. The mayor actually gets, or the advocate gets, or the council member gets, or the staff member gets, whoever is the catalyst here, like goes out and does, one version or other of our four-step process, right? Like they observe where people struggle with humility. They do. They ask themselves what the next smallest thing is. They go do that thing and they repeat the process over and over.

I don't think we need to wait for our bike messiah, right? I actually think by just having this conversation, where are the most affordable investments we can make that have the greatest return? And those are going to be biking and walking investments every single time. And they're easy to make, and they're urgent to make, and they improve people's lives really, really quickly. And if you know you're in a place where there is no, as Connor says, bike messiah. It doesn't mean you can't go out and do some of these things. That doesn't mean you can't go out and petition for them or demonstrate them or do a bottom-up tactical urbanism kind of project to show what it would look like.

Chuck Marohn  12:39

I feel like there's a lot of ways to have momentum here besides waiting for someone else. All right, James. James, I would love to answer your question. I can't really find your question. One of the tricks of doing this is that you have to be able to write a question like Connor did, where I can read it in like two or three sentences, James, your question is like a an introduction to a book, right? Like it's like the prolog. So I did scan this over. You start with talking about strobes here, and in a sense, having an observation that it's very enticing to want to go the stroad route because as a city you can get the state to pay to not only build it generally but to maintain and upkeep it and so the idea of putting the Costco along it or the Walmart along it or the Taco John's along it right the idea of putting those things in place becomes very enticing because for the local government, that's just tax base, that's just jobs, that's just you know permit fees and all the goodies that come with growth, without the long term maintenance costs, and that is true.

I remember as a young engineer figuring this out and actually having this conversation. This is this is way before Strong Towns, but it was like in the early days of me kind of having a journey from engineer planner to Strong Towns advocate. I remember talking to this town and saying like, "What? Why would you develop here in roads that you have to maintain, like why would you do that? Why wouldn't you just put your most intense development along the county maintained roads, which they don't care? Like they will let you do whatever you want. They're happy to have the growth. Why would you put it there where it's not going to cost you anything?

And I remember like looking around the room after I asked that question. It was obvious nobody had ever thought about that, but it also sat with them wrong, right? Like they kind of struggled. Like, huh, that seems off, Chuck. I remember just looking at that, going, well, like, what, what's your job here? Like, what are you doing? Aren't you trying to make the town's budget balance? Aren't you struggling with that? Like, what's going on here? That it was one of those nascent little insights that like built on and built on and built on until it got to you know some of the core strong towns insights.

James, I read your thing here, and I get the struggle, right? Like I understand you are frustrated with city that seems to take, one step forward and then two steps back. I just wanna I want to impart two things. One, when you are in the middle of it, that's what it feels like. That is what it feels like. It feels like one step forward, two steps back, because you're in the arena, right? You're mixing it up. You're very vested and disappointed when things don't work out. It's it's it's so clear to you. It seems so obvious, and I'm with you. It is obvious. It does seem obvious.

Chuck Marohn  15:49

And then when people don't do the obvious, they disappoint. And trust me, I'm deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed in my city. If you've been reading my columns or Substack over the last year, you've seen me disappointed with my church. You know these things hurt. They're deeply painful, and I hear you, but if you can step outside of it, especially you, James, because I know where you're at and I know where you're coming from, and I know the great city that you work in, and I know all the love and all the work that you put in there. If you can step out of it and look at it from outside eyes, what you see is it's not one step forward, two steps back.

It's it's one leap forward and a bunch of like struggles to maintain that ground and maybe a little bit of sliding, but then it's another leap forward and another leap forward. This stuff is hard, and it doesn't. I feel like if you're going to take a strong towns approach, you're going to have to learn to live with the day-to-day struggle of. I think these small disappointments, these small failures, these small because we are not pretending that life isn't messy. We're not pretending that you know there's some easy button that if we just get this legislation passed at the state level, or if we just get this project done, or if we just can put all our might behind this moonshot thing, that it's going to like somehow make things work.

It is much harder psychologically to make small little progress each day, with the hope that it ultimately adds up to something worthwhile. Because, as you say, James, you're going to take steps forward and then steps back, and you're going to you're going to feel that. You're going to feel that slogging through the mud. You're going to feel that you know day to day tension. It's hard to do that. It is much easier to not be in that slog, to not be trying to make day by day, step by step progress, to not be in a sense grinding it out, and just to sit back and say, if I can just get this one thing done, then everything will be better.

Like because if you're in that latter situation, you can kind of just not deal with reality, but just have hope. If I am going to live with hope that if we just get this preemption bill passed, or this big project funded, or this thing done, then things will get better. And even though they don't, even though that is not the path to getting stuff done, the time you spent kind of pining about that and working for that and hoping for that is much more comfortable from a human standpoint. It's much easier to live with that than it is to live with the day-to-day recognition that there's something in front of you that needs to be done.

Chuck Marohn  18:54

You can do it. Someone else can do it. We make little steps day after day after day. Sometimes we slide back. Sometimes we go forward. But it's a day to day to day grind. That is psychologically much harder to do. It's a much higher calling to be a strong town's advocate in that way, and James, I you know you put a lot of passion into your comment, and I'm not reading the whole thing. I just want you to know that I recognize that, and I recognize the struggle, and I recognize the pain, and I recognize just the difficulty of going through it day after day after day, and I have a ton of respect and honor for you in doing it.

All right, Andrew. Andrew asks, we have a town of about 6,500 that is a four-lane state highway running right down the middle of it. Yep, know the kind of place. It effectively splits the town. Half it creates traffic flow and speed issues and makes it really difficult for pedestrians to cross from one side to the other. How should we think about the different stakeholders involved, town or state, and start to make the case for improvements that address safety and walkability? All right, this is a really common question that I get, and it really goes to I think not just the credibility of the city, but almost this like outside offense that we have to live with.

Let me talk a little bit about Jersey City, and those of you that have heard me talk about Jersey City before, or were at the Strong Towns National Gathering, where Barkha Patel gave the keynote. I've heard a little bit about Jersey City. I want to talk about one aspect of it because I feel like this is the, amidst all the painting of bike lanes and you know bottom-up work that was done and all of the kind of heroic things building on top of each other incrementally to create a situation where you not only have no traffic fatalities, but you have a place that is becoming every day more and more and more impressive, spectacular, prosperous, great place to live.

You have a different orientation of a local government in relation to the state government. When the state DOT comes to Jersey City, Jersey City can say, "-we don't do it that way here," and Jersey City can say that because in Jersey City's own streets, it has set a different standard. It takes care of business. It does things the right way. And so, when the state comes through and say, "Hey, this state highway here," or county government comes in and says, "This is a county roadway here. Here's our standard. It's big. It's obnoxious. It's going to divide your city in half. We're going to run, 1000s of cars through here each day, and we don't really care about you or your people or your prosperity or any of that.

Chuck Marohn  21:58

We care about the traffic throughput. Jersey City can say, "-that's not how we roll here. Like that's not what we do. That's not how we approach things, and if you want to play ball here, you have to meet our standard. Now let's go to every other city, right? Because let's be clear, Jersey City does not have a trump card, right? Like they can't say to the state like demand you do things a certain way. But here's what Jersey City has: Jersey City has cachet because Jersey City walks the walk. They've demonstrated what they do. I look at cities all over. People will come to me and say, "Chuck, the state.is coming to town, and they're doing this horrible thing through the middle of the city.

How can we stop them?" And I will say, "Show me your streets. Show me your local streets. Show me where you have absolute control over things and what you have done. And in almost every instance, the local streets are horrible. They are excessively wide. They don't have sidewalks. They're really dangerous. They have no trees, street trees. It is the exact opposite of what they are asking the state to do. In a sense, they are arguing for the state to have a higher standard, a different standard than what they themselves have for their own place. Here's when I think of the state-town relationship, the only towns, the only cities that I have seen that have successfully pushed back on bad state DOT projects are places that, in a sense, have their own house in order.

Are places that are setting their own local standards and expectations, and that is because the decision on what to do is all based on expectations. We fall back into this thing where we think that having the right road standard or street standard is going to have some better outcome at the end of the day. If we can just change that, we can change everything. I find that to be ridiculous. Go to any city, and go to the richest, most affluent neighborhood in the city, and what you will generally see are beautifully designed streets. Go to the poor neighborhood then, and what you will find is over-engineered, over-designed, over like traffic-oriented kind of streets.

It is not because they have different street standards. It's because they have a different expectation. They are able to, in a sense, push on the process of making a decision. What I want us to do is to recognize that. Disparity between the affluent and the poor neighborhoods is appalling. It is wrong, right? Like on so many levels. What I'm asking you to do is recognize what it is. It is not a different standard. It's not a different approach. It's not a different process. What it is a different expectation of the people who are living in that place. If you want the state to respect you, if you want them to not run the four-lane highway through the middle of your city and make it a traffic sewer and divide your town, you have to create a different cultural expectation in your place around traffic and around what people should expect.

Chuck Marohn  25:39

That's the hard truth, right? So I go back to like the first question I answered about the bike messiah or whatever we were calling them. Get out and make your street safe. There's no state law. There's no federal law. There's no grant program. There's there's nothing hindering you from going out and making the streets under your jurisdiction safe, and if you make them safe, that is going to mean less asphalt, less concrete, more green space, more trees, in a sense, lower cost and higher private levels of investment. That's what it's going to mean. So you can improve safety while you make a better budget decision on your local streets.

And if you do that, go out tomorrow with paint and straw bales and cones and like start fixing your worst places. Do the Jersey City thing, right? Like go out to the shed and get the leftover tennis court paint and start fixing things. Do this for a decade, and what you're going to find is that you will create a culture in your city of people who want things differently. And then when the state comes in and says we are going to abuse you with our design, and by the way you have to meet our standard and you have to do this and you have to do that, you can say, -that's not how we do things here.

All right, Patrick asked. He says you were interviewing Victor Dover, and you asked him if his phone was ringing off the hook. Yeah, I do remember that. He said he was busy, and you followed up talking about the blessing curse of Seaside and how the ultimate goal is that normal places demand his service. Yeah, that was that's what I think the goal should be. I'm curious why normal places aren't pursuing companies that design streets to enhance the value of a place. This is a really good question, and I struggle with this one myself because I feel like, and I kind of started off. I know earlier I talked about things being obvious with James, right?

Like I talk, like this is obvious. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, right? Like it is very, very obvious. Why do cities make decisions that financially are ruinous? Trust me, I've struggled with this question for 20 years, I have gone so far as to actually have a city council. This is back in my pre-strong towns days. I actually had financial report in front of the city council, gone through it with them in depth, had in a sense no dissent, like nobody saying these numbers aren't true, these numbers aren't real. This is a distortion of reality. In a sense, showing them that the project they were going to do was financially ruinous.

Like it was really, really, really bad. It was going to return something like five cents or 10 cents on the dollar of what would be necessary to maintain it. This was a pretty fiscally conservative place. They all understood that this would mean higher taxes eventually for people. This was bad governance. They got it, and then they voted to do it anyway. I remember walking out of that meeting, going, "Why?" They clearly understood the financial implications? Why would they do this? And the only thing that I was able to come up with is that we have a broad cultural expectation of, in a sense, continuing our current development pattern, we are used to building this way, and the way I've described it to people is to say, like, if you went to, I show often the pictures of early Brainerd, my hometown, in my curbside chat presentation, I will show a picture from 1870 and then another one from 1905, and it's you know frontier town street basically.

Chuck Marohn  29:43

If you had gone to people in my hometown in 1900 and said, "Here's what I'm going to build," instead of lining up my building with the building next to me, putting you know a front on it that. Had a certain amount of symmetry to it, some opacity on the first floor, tied in with the neighbors, putting the trash and the latrine and like whatever and back instead of in front. Like I, what I'm going to do is build something that looks like what they're going to build 100 years from now. I'm going to set it way back. I'm going to put the garbage out front and all the stuff in front of it.

I'm going to you know have a weird contorted facade on it. I'm going to you know you go through that. People would think you're absolutely nuts. You're insane, and they wouldn't think that because they had master's degrees in urban design. They would think that because the cultural expectation at the time was to build in a certain way because that's what people looked around and saw. I think we are asking society to do something it doesn't naturally want to do, which is to think critically and to want to change, this is not like a natural thing. And we can look back and see, this actually didn't just happen overnight.

You get out of World War II and you start building suburbia. The early versions of suburbia looked a lot like pre-Great Depression development patterns. It was auto-oriented, but like those, we call them streetcar suburbs now. But a lot of them weren't streetcar suburbs; they were the first auto-oriented kind of suburbs, and they had a lot of the same feel. The buildings lined up; they defined space pretty well. They had narrower lots, sidewalks, walkability, street trees, like all these things. To get to the strip mall, the big you know garage mahal kind of things. You know the three car garage with the attached house. Like that took decades of evolution to get to this point.

We are far away from having a cultural consensus around going back to a development pattern that makes sense, and even when we can show people the numbers financially, they still struggle to see it. Like their body reacts; it's like a, it's like you're speaking a weird language. You're trying to trick them. Like something's wrong, and they like mentally rebel against it. I think that we are dealing with, in a sense, the need for a cultural shift. Let me point something out. This is what Strong Towns was designed to do. You know that riding home from that council meeting, I'm like, what? How do we fix this?

Like, how do we deal with this? And there's a part of me that just recognized we won't fix this until more and more people understand it, and more and more people are ready to talk about it, and more and more people are communicating with it in a language that everybody can understand. I don't spend a ton of time on Reddit. I actually think Reddit is kind of like one of the worst cesspools. Sorry for all of you that are on Reddit, but particularly like the strong town stuff. Someone sent me a thing and said, "Here's a conversation they're having about your last podcast episode." So I, I had a recent episode with the Happy Cities people about a plan to, in a sense, start creating walkability within an auto-oriented framework, and I said it was brilliant, and I think it is brilliant.

Chuck Marohn  32:51

Like I thought it was really brilliant. It was brilliant because it, in a sense, creates a bridge between where people are today and where we need to get to. And the comment on Reddit was they thought I was gaslighting them by pretending that, like we weren't in a war on cars, and I was acquiescing too much to the automobile, and we should have you know shut this whole thing down as being ridiculous. And the approach we should have is just to end all automobiles because you know whatever, whatever. If that's what you think, you live in a bubble. I went through at the beginning of this podcast all the places that I've been.

Guess what? They're all culturally predisposed to kind of repeat the current American development pattern over and over and over, as opposed to do something differently. If we want to change that? We have to have, in a sense, pockets of places doing it differently. Show people in their own community how this works well. Expand out and build out from that. This is a long-term cultural project that we are undertaking. And for those of you that think strong towns should be out doing consulting and out doing, you know that we are trying to change the way people talk about this stuff. That's what our whole. That's why we write columns.

That's why we do podcasts. That's why we do videos. That's why we don't have local chapters. That's why we have local conversations, right? Because. We are actually looking at this problem not as one where if we can just get the technical people lined up, everything will be fine. No, we actually have to get humans to see things differently and to want to change. That's a that's a much harder thing. It's a much higher bar. I'm also going to say, if we can pull it off, it will be a much more durable shift. All right, Aaron, you get two questions. I'll try to do both of them, my friend.

Okay, how do you distinguish import replacement from autarky, and how can a community pursue the form without drifting the ladder. Aaron has read the new book that's going to be coming out, and I'm hoping it will be on sale soon so that we can do an announcement and share it so you can get it. But yeah, Aaron was one of the people who read the book. So import replacement. I feel like we're going to be talking about this a lot next year. Jane Jacobs, Economy of Cities, talked about This idea, and I'll just say up front, it's been kind of widely rejected. Let's say by establishment economists, especially in the age of globalization, is kind of the opposite of globalization.

It's the idea that we are importing things into our community, and in doing that, we are exporting capital, and if we can reduce the amount that we import and actually do things for ourselves, we can keep capital locally and then allow it to do productive things. Autarky is this idea that we can, in a sense, have our cities become North Korea and just be like insulated things from the outside world. Aaron, I love you, man. These are like the one is a I think common sense approach to where we are today, and the other one is taking that to an absolute extreme. Which, if it were even possible, obviously would not be recommended that we do.

Chuck Marohn  36:46

Let's be very clear: no city. no American city, is going to build their own smartphones. build their own automobiles. Like you, you may have a city that does automobile manufacturing, I guess here and there. But like, no one's looking at like my hometown, the city of Brainerd, and saying, "Hey, we should manufacture computers here." No one's looking at you know Minneapolis in my home state saying if you know if we don't build the cars here like no one should have a car like that's just kind of silly we live in an insanely globalized world in a in a world that is globalized in a way that it has never been if you want a book that discusses this and what I think is like the shift.

There's a there's a book by Peter Zeihan called "The End of the World Is Just the Beginning." In fact, for our friends of strong towns, we actually sent you this book, so you had an opportunity to get. We have a book club that goes with that group, and that's the book that we are going through this fall. In fact, I think we're going to have a meeting on it or a book club meeting here in November to discuss it. That book is really about the end of globalization and how globalization was kind of you know post-war this kind of peak circumstance that instead of being normal was actually a very abnormal thing.

I found that Zeihan's analysis kind of rhymed with our analysis of the growth Ponzi scheme and the suburban experiment as not being a normal but being like an aberration, like a one-time thing that could happen, but in a sense can't repeat itself over and over. It's not a replicable model to achieve growth or prosperity or however you measure success. I think it's important to recognize that in a hyper globalized world, as that globalization regime winds down or is comes under challenge, whether it's from you know countries shutting off oil trade routes to piracy to you know wars and other conflicts that change global trade to tariffs and other things that we're seeing creep in and I let's just be clear I don't think this is like a one administration kind of thing I know there's a lot of.

we're in election season. I'm actually sitting here in my hotel room with the election returns on. It's Tuesday night, election night. So I know everybody's kind of keyed around that. I want us to step back and take a broader view because a lot of these trends are trends that have gone across multiple administrations, multiple parties. We are not in danger of becoming an autarky, a local place unto itself, but we do have the opposite. Which Aaron, since you read the book, you can't buy a locally created donut. But you can buy a donut from Dunkin' Donuts. If you want to look at like two extremes of the of the spectrum, the idea that a local donut shop is hardly viable, even though the inputs to that are very simple, and the margins are very big, but the Dunkin' Donuts is in a sense ubiquitous and everywhere.

Chuck Marohn  40:00

To me, it's a spectrum, and we're way, way, way on the one end. We're in no danger of getting to the other end anytime soon. Aaron's second question: Strong Towns often points to financial regulation and policy as drivers of the housing problem, but is offered less in the way of concrete guidance. Wow, Aaron, you are you're really pushing it tonight, huh? Can we expect something on that front soon? Well, Aaron, funny you might ask. So, I'm I'm laughing. It's a it's a fair question. I promised the third housing toolkit in the first half of 2026, I think a lot of you that have been around have seen that there's a lot going on here in 2026, and with John Reuter taking over in July as our executive director, it has in a sense stabilized the operations and freed me up to do other things, I've had a number of those other things on my list.

One of them has been to finish that third toolkit, the one from the Escaping the Housing Trap book. Let's review. The first toolkit was about how we have regulatory reform. How do we make it so that you can build entry-level housing, so it's legal to do in a community. The second one answered the question: Who is going to build it? How do we, in a sense, grow a new class, a new ecosystem of bottom-up incremental builders who are going to build the kind of entry-level housing that we desperately need? And then the third toolkit was going to be about how do we finance this? What are the funding mechanisms that we use to create capital that fills that funding gap where the funding isn't available today for these entry-level products?

I wrote that in August, and it's been it's been done since early August. The problem is, as we kind of work through rolling it out, I did not like the three toolkit idea. It just seemed too clumsy and burdensome, and so I took the toolkits and rewrote the whole thing. I rewrote them all in one guide. So we are actually getting rid of the first two toolkits are going away, and we are going to be rolling out this month. It's it's out of my hands now because it's done. I've handed it off to our production team, and they will go through and do all the things they need to do to finalize it, put the graphics together, the website together, the package to roll it out, all that.

But it is done. It is written. It is ready to go, and so you can expect that here in the coming days. And it will have, in a sense, a updated version of the first two toolkits, and then it will have all the financial stuff in the included integrated in. So look for that. All right, Gioia, a little home cooking here, gets her own question in. She asks, "How do you explain to people what you do for work?" I struggle to explain Strong Town's universe from ground zero to the average bear. Okay, Gioia, those are two different questions. How do I explain what I do for work, or how do I explain the Strong Towns universe?

Chuck Marohn  43:43

Right. Those are two very different things. I have people ask me all the time, like, how do I get your job? And I'm like, well, I never set out to have this job. It just kind of happened, and you know you have to be willing to starve for a decade, and then spend a lot of time on the road. But yeah, how do how do I explain what I do? Let's take that part first. I am the evangelist and idea machine for what is the most access, the broadest, the biggest urban reform movement of the 21st century. I am out sharing this message with as many people as I can, learning along the way, listening along the way, and again, I'll go back to what I was talking about earlier: that cultural shift and change, being in a sense like at the point of the spear of that, like the vanguard of that, and I'm taking what I learn and what I grasp and.

What I can put together, and turning that into not only books and columns and podcasts and stuff like that, but also increasingly things that would fall under traditional R&D kind of concept, like the finance toolkit and the crash analysis studio, and the housing toolkits, and pretty soon, a package on local economic development to go with a new book. So I am in the middle of that, and it's a really exciting time. I feel like I get to be, in a sense, in the middle of the fire, right? Like as this is all happening, it's a wild ride and it's a wild trip. I think your more maybe urgent question was how do you explain the Strong Towns universe to someone you meet?

And I feel like there's a couple ways that I would think about doing this if I don't know them at all. If I'm just meeting them for the first time, and I know nothing about them, and I really have no, even like immediate impression of who they are or what they think. I say that Strong Towns is a nonprofit organization working to help cities not go broke, working to help cities be better places, and that's really like how I introduce myself in like a five-second thing, right? That's not even elevator speech. That's just the like that's what we're about. I say that because like everybody can relate to that to some degree.

If you if you come at that question, everybody has like the underlying dilemma of like we need local government to function. Maybe your jam is like I think my taxes are too high. Maybe your jam is why does a city unable to do this or that? whatever we approach that when we say we want cities to be better, we want to help cities become financially strong and resilient. We want them to be better places for people. That's that's how I start it. If I've got a little bit longer of a elevator ride in a sense, I talk to them about changing that conversation. I will say, what we find is that pre Great Depression ways of building cities was really financially strong and resilient.

Chuck Marohn  47:19

It had a lot of adaptability. It allowed people the opportunity to get started at a very low cost and build their way up to success and prosperity, and that is increasingly unavailable to people today, so we want cities to be places of prosperity, places of opportunity, places that are financially sound and strong. We want cities to make good investments, and if you want to go deeper, strongtowns.org is the website. We got tons of tools there. They're all free and available. If you want to start light, go to any social media platform you want, including the YouTube and LinkedIn and where have you Instagram. If your jam is video, if your jam is social media posts, short bites, if you want books, like it's all out there.

You can go as deep as you want. Start wherever you want, and you know access the stuff in a way that suits you. That's how I start. And let's be very clear: what I'm not doing, I'm not expecting everyone to swallow the whole elephant right off the bat, I'm trying to start where people are and let them, in a sense, walk down the hallway to get to the room. Right, like I, we used to have this metaphor internally where the Strong Towns conversation has many doors you can enter with a different hallway you walk down to, in a sense, like orient yourself. But we all end up in the same room in the middle.

I think this is a good way to think about it. What we don't want to do is we don't want to shut doors to people, because actually to have the cultural change we want to have, there's going to be a lot of people in the room, and they need to come through different doors, and they need to have different kind of reasons for being there. But once they're there, see commonalities amongst everybody else in the room. That's the that's the trick. So we are not trying to shut doors. We are not trying to have everybody you know eat the whole elephant and understand everything. We're not even trying to have like a you know like here's the doctrine you must believe in order to be interested in strong towns and gain insights and ideas from strong towns.

In fact, there's a lot of people who I'll go back to Reddit. There's a number of threads on Reddit where it's like I can't stand Chuck Marohn. Chuck Marohn drives me nuts. And if you read that, it'll be like I think he has this maybe kind of right, but then the rest of this just really turns me off. And you know what I? Of that, cool. Like we've got a starting point here we can work with. Like that's good. What we want to do when we meet someone new, we're introducing these ideas for the first time, is not overwhelm them with our passion. Overwhelm them with, here's the right way to think about this, or here's a totality of understanding, but actually probably do more listening than we do talking, right?

Like, here's what we're about. What's going on in your place? What's going on in your life? What's going on in your community? What are you passionate about when it comes to your city? Because I can guarantee that whatever that is, we've got a door that will get you deeper starting there. All right, last question. This one's from Gerald. My city does cash-based accounting. Is apparently expected in this state for cities this size. Oh, as is expected. Okay, even the accountant does not recommend GAAP for us. There are simple things a city can do to get better view of its financial position without either or basically are there things that we can do to get a better view of our finances instead of you know changing our entire accounting system.

Chuck Marohn  50:42

I feel like there is a short answer, a medium answer, and a long answer. Let me. I think we're probably out of time here. I haven't set a stopwatch when I started this, so apologies, Gioia, if I'm going long. I feel like a very short answer is like this is what we created the financial decoder for, right? This is go take your financial reports, drop them in there. We are hopefully going to be releasing. This is one of those things that I've been working on. I know AI like triggers a lot of people. I get it. I understand. I'm not trying to shove AI down everyone's throat, but I can tell you what AI is like super amazing at, and that is analyzing data.

I think we are very close to being able to have this be automated in a way where a year ago we had to do it by hand. Take your financial reports, be able to drop it in and spit out, in a sense, the seven charts and the finance decoder along with interpretation and understanding of them, so that you kind of know where you're at. That's the easy answer, and you know you could do it right now. You can go to strongtowns.org. You can get the finance decoder. You can enter those numbers in yourself, and get that. And it will help you understand how your past decisions have affected your finances and gotten you to you know the place you're at today.

It will help you understand where you're at, and in a sense, like what the trajectory that got you here is, I think the medium answer or the answer that I hope comes out in the medium term. We are working on not only the kind of automation enhancement to the finance decoder, but another kind of analysis package that would go along with it that would allow cities to communicate this data with respect to their current upcoming budget. So, here's where we're at. Here's what our current budget means and will impact these trends. So, in a sense, pull that data that we've got from the past, connect it more closely to a current decision-making framework, and be able to you know publish that in a way that would be accessible to elected officials who really need that information who generally don't get it in that way, to staff who you know likewise don't generally look at things in that way, and then I think even more importantly to the general public, so that there is kind of a deeper sense of understanding when it comes to these complex financial numbers.

Chuck Marohn  53:50

the longer term thing, and this is one where I don't, necessarily have the answer to, but I feel like we're kind of working towards this. I do think there has to be some reform in how we do local government accounting. I've met with the agencies and the groups and the you know private organizations that oversee and advise and organize people around these things. I think in all of those circles, there's an understanding that current budgeting practices do not provide clarity for decision makers. There's a lot of people who are working on that and very sincerely working on that, trying to create greater levels of clarity.

But I think unless there is a structural reform, kind of in the way that there was structural reform around pensions, I think there has to be structural reform around infrastructure, around debt, and around some other things that don't show up or don't present themselves in a cash budget scenario. I think that this can. Happen. I'm not clear on the path that it needs to go to happen. I'm kind of working on the front end of that. That's why I said a short, medium, and a long, a long answer. I didn't mean like the time it would take me to answer it. I meant the time frame that I'm working on it in.

I feel like if we do the short and the medium right, it will build that cultural consensus in the places that it needs to shift around shifting some of these things, and then I feel like that destination, that path, will become clearer for all of us. I don't know what it is today. I really don't. I don't know where we need to end up. I just know the current system does not help people make good decisions, and so a system that would help them make good decisions to me seems like urgent and imperative. I, I feel like we can get there. I feel like the finance decoder is step one.

I feel like the analysis tool that we are working on and looking to release next year will be another step in that process that will hopefully get us there. There you go. Thank you to all of our members. Thank you to everybody who's on the comments who submitted questions. Sorry if you submitted after these seven were given to me. We will do this again very soon and have another opportunity to submit questions. So hold yours and we'll get back to it. Or just ask it on the comments. Like there's all kinds of people there who are really smart on this stuff who can help you out.

I remembered my computer this time, so I will try to drop in and add my own two cents too. So thank you to all of our members. Thank you to all of our members who aren't in the Commons. There's a lot of you who donate to Strong Towns who support us, not so you can be part of an online community, which you know is great. Like we love everybody who's there. A lot of the people who are there also support us because they want to see this message in more places. Thank you for those that do that. We are working on that cultural change. We're working to build that.

Chuck Marohn  57:03

All of your support helps us do podcasts like this. Have people like Gioia on our team that are amazing be able to travel like this and meet people and talk about this stuff and really build momentum around these ideas for change. So, thank you, thank you, thank you to all of our members, and for all of you that aren't members but are doing work in your place, who are trying to make your places stronger. I want you to know that we need you too. Thank you for all that you do, and hey, till next time, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

Take care, everybody.

‍