Chuck Marohn — 00:09

Everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. I recently spent some time in New Zealand. I was invited to go there and give the keynote address at their national planning conference. I was invited because they wanted me to talk about the new infrastructure plan that they had created — created by their national infrastructure commission — a plan that really reflects Strong Towns approaches, Strong Towns values, and a different mindset about growth and development across the country of New Zealand.

This is a group of planners — about 600 of them in attendance — who, I won't say that I struggle with, but I think struggle to hear the Strong Towns message. There's a lot of Who Moved My Cheese kind of thing: we've got a certain way of doing things, and now you're coming in and telling us that everything's going to be different. I have to say, this was a great group. They reacted really well. There were some good questions, and off tape, there was a lot of discussion and conversation that I was able to have with people about where New Zealand is headed and how things are changing.

I think a lot of these conversations are prescient to the kind of things that we are dealing with here in North America. When you have harder constraints, you can't be as dumb for as long. New Zealand is dealing with harder constraints than what we are here, and so they're kind of forced to face reality in a more urgent kind of way than we are. So it's a very good conversation I want to share with you.

We've been able to do this a little bit more. We've got some increased capacity here now for putting these podcasts together and getting this stuff out, and so we've been able to do some of these extra episodes off the normal rotation grid. Some of this is going to be repeat for some of you — it's a little bit of the Curbside Chat stuff — but the beginning, the introduction, the framing, and then towards the end, some of the local New Zealand content is going to be a bit different. So I hope you enjoy. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.

Chuck Marohn — 02:32

I had a wonderful conversation yesterday with Harriet and her team, with people asking really hard questions about where we're at today. So it means a lot to me that you all would sponsor me coming here and doing this, which was no small feat, I know. Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to come back to New Zealand and be able to chat with all of you. It's been humbling and delightful, and just very warm to be embraced and to have all the interactions that I've been able to have here. So thank you.

It does feel a little church-like, though, with everybody sitting towards the back. That's okay. We'll make do.

I was invited here to talk when the draft of the national infrastructure plan was released, and now coming back and having that plan adopted, it's very interesting to note some of the overall themes that touch on where we're at, Strong Towns-wise, in this conversation.

First, the plan suggests or notes that New Zealand spends more per capita — more as a percentage of GDP — than really any other advanced nation does on infrastructure. You're at about six or seven percent. In the US, we're at about two and a half percent, and Europe is at a different rate as well. You spend a lot. Of course you spend a lot — you're on a volcanic, earthquake-prone, tsunami-prone rock in the middle of the ocean. It's going to cost more to do things here.

If you recognize that, and also recognize that that percentage is not going to go up — you're not going to take away from hospitals and education and health care to fund infrastructure at an even greater percentage than you already do — then the second part of the plan says: we're going to focus on renewals. We're going to focus on taking care of what we've already built.

Chuck Marohn — 04:37

If you accept those first two premises — and when I was at your parliament and talked to a lot of parliamentarians, there's a pretty broad consensus that that's the reality we're in — the third part then becomes the undeniable part: there's not any money left.

There's no money for expansion. There's no money for building the next big thing. There's no money for, in a sense, repeating over the next 50 years what we have done over the last 50 years. That really challenges not just the business model of many people who are in these professions, but the very essence of what it means to be a planner.

I want to talk about our development pattern pre-Great Depression, because I think in many ways, what we are going to do as a profession is return to our historic roots. This is where I come from — my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. This is what it looked like in 1870: a bunch of little pop-up shacks, some hopes and some dreams by some people about what it ultimately could become.

If you study cities around the world, you recognize this pattern. Cities before what we call, at Strong Towns, the suburban experiment — the post-war expansion — began as little pop-ups, little villages, little settlements. When they were successful, they would grow in a very universal way: incrementally up, incrementally out, thickening up and maturing over time. Think of a culture growing in a petri dish. After 35 years, this little street here would become this street. After another generation of growing incrementally up, incrementally out, and thickening up and maturing in place, these two- and three-story wood structures would become buildings of brick and granite.

This is the way we built cities around the world for thousands and thousands of years — this incremental, fine-tuning, growing pattern. There's a city you might be familiar with. This is a little square in a US city. Here's what it looked like in 1898, here's what it looked like in 1911 — and now you might start to recognize it. A few years later, of course, this is Times Square.

So this pattern of development gives us small towns, mid-sized cities, large cities, and everything in between. We see this repeated over and over again. When you look at a development pattern like this, what you are looking at is a time-tested iteration of incremental growth and development. By incremental, I don't mean slow — we can make little steps very, very quickly. But what I do mean is that each one builds on the next. Here's what this street looks like today — the exact same street.

I think the defining characteristic between pre-Great Depression development patterns and post-war development patterns is that loss of the incremental approach — the idea that we can build all at once to a finished state, that we can, in a sense, get it right the first time, and then it is done. This is the big hubris that we as planners have to learn to get over: the idea that we can plan the final outcome, that we can predict what will happen, that we can say here's what perfect looks like, and we can go out and build it, instead of it being an iterative process over time.

It's important for us to recognize how we got to this — and I'm going to call it hubris again — this notion that planning was really about setting the next area for growth, the next infrastructure plan, and the next set of capital improvement needs.

Going back, and I'll talk about this in a US context with a lot of humility about your experience here: we can look at the Great Depression as a defining event. During the Great Depression, we had not only huge amounts of economic dislocation, but a long stretch of time with not just stagnation but steep community decline. My grandfather grew up during the Great Depression, and I remember asking him about his experience. He told me that when he was a young boy — a teenager — he could not live at home. He wound up moving in with the neighbors. He worked their farm, and they would feed him and allow him to sleep in the barn. Now, I'm from a small town in Minnesota, and let me tell you, Minnesota is very cold in the winter. The idea of sleeping in the barn sounds crazy to me. Yet my grandfather told me he felt very fortunate. He said he was better off than a lot of people during the Great Depression. What that communicated to me was that this was hard in a way that we have a hard time relating to today.

Chuck Marohn — 10:00

We are taught in US schools — and I want to try this here, because I've not done this in New Zealand — we are taught in junior high that the thing that got us out of the Great Depression is... let me see if it's the same here. What's the thing that got us out of the Great Depression?

Audience Member — 10:17

War.

Chuck Marohn — 10:22

He's from the States. That's not fair. Are you all taught this?

I feel like we have this really distorted language we use around economics in the United States. We are taught in junior high that the thing that got us out of the Great Depression was World War Two. You live in a culture dominated by the language of economists when the thing that supposedly got you out of the doldrums is global war — millions, tens of millions of people dying, families split apart, young people getting shipped overseas to kill and to die, all of our industries put into war production, rationing meat, rationing gasoline, rationing butter. These are not happy times. Yet economists would say that's when we got our mojo back, that's when things started working again. That's a really weird way to view the world.

Nonetheless, as the war went on, it became clear and evident that we were going to prevail, and the economists around the President started to freak out.

This is part of a memo that Paul Samuelson — probably the premier US economist of the last century — wrote to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He said: if this war ends, if it were to end suddenly, we would have the biggest period of economic dislocation that any economy has ever faced. Essentially, there is nothing different about our economy today than there was back in the Great Depression, except for this war. If we demobilize these troops and shut down all these industries, we're going to go right back into the depths of the Great Depression. Is that what happened? Of course not.

What we did is we started a new experiment — a new way of building across an entire continent. We looked and we said: how do we replace all of this war industry? What we do is we turn our cities into machines of growth. We input into them money for highways, money for infrastructure, subsidies for housing, subsidies for commercial development, and out of that, we are going to get growth. Guess what? It worked.

This is actually the story of the baby boom. The first couple of decades after World War Two, our economy grew at unprecedented rates. This massive explosion — as we turn cities into machines of growth, build more infrastructure, build more roadways, more housing, more commercial development, build, build, build — this new version of America made our economy boom. It built a middle class. It created what we call colloquially today the American Dream.

We still nostalgize this period of time. Importantly, from an economist's perspective, our national debt grew during this period, but by a much smaller amount. This allowed us to grow our way out of the debt we had from the war — our debt-to-GDP ratio dropped and dropped and dropped again.

We live in a world dominated by the thinking of economists. Our language, our way of talking about things, our very actions are influenced by the economic narratives we tell ourselves. The economic narrative that we tell ourselves — and incidentally, I have heard this repeated here from ministers down to planners, over and over — is that there's this idea that we can grow our way out of our economic problems. If we just do more of what we have done, things will get better. This is where that comes from, because for 25 years, that's what we actually did.

Chuck Marohn — 14:27

Let me show you what this looks like spatially — what this looks like on the ground. This is a map of a city in California. Not that I think you resemble the city in any way, or any of the places I've been here, but you will see that it rhymes with the experience that we have all had universally post-World War Two.

The little yellow square — that's the boundaries of Fresno, California in 1897. I want to show you how the boundaries change over time. Here is the city in 1909, now we go to 1922. This is that incremental development pattern — the city growing incrementally up, incrementally out, thickening up and maturing in place, going from those pop-up shacks to more intense buildings along the path. You can see that even during the Great Depression, the city continues to grow incrementally and continues to mature.

But now we're at the end of World War Two. We don't want to slide back into depression. We need to grow, build a middle class, experience growth and economic activity. We're going to turn our cities into machines of growth that can handle that for us. Here's what happens: 1958, 1970, 1983, 1995, and then the last one is 2010.

My city at the end of World War Two was 13,500 people. Today, the city that I live in is still 13,500 people — no growth — but we are ten times the area, ten times the amount of pipe, ten times the amount of road, ten times the area to provide police protection and fire protection and what have you.

When we look at this: I was part of a study in Lafayette, Louisiana that looked at why they were going broke — why they had no money to not only expand and do things they wanted to do, but they couldn't even fix the stuff they had. Why are we broke? We've had lots of growth. From the end of World War Two to today, their population has grown from over 30,000 to over 120,000 — three and a half times the population they had at the beginning of World War Two. They've had robust growth.

But when we look and ask: what is it required to provide drinking water to the people of Lafayette at the end of World War Two? It was five feet of pipe per person. Today it's ten times that amount. What did it take to provide fire protection for the people of Lafayette at the end of World War Two? It was 2.4 hydrants per 1,000 people. Today it's 21 times that amount. So yes, they've had robust growth — three and a half times growth — but they've grown their liabilities by 10 times and 20 times. And when we ask what their family income has grown by during that same period of time, family income has grown by 1.6 times.

We have literally taken on not just diminishing returns, but grown ourselves into insolvency.

Here's what this looks like on the ground. This is a neighborhood in my hometown. If you look at these two blocks, you'll see they're the same size area. They have the same amount of public infrastructure investment in them. They're on the same thoroughfare, the same neighborhood — everything about them is the same, except for the style of development.

In the 1920s, as my city was growing, the next increment outward was this neighborhood here. What you're looking at is the stuff on the far edge of town. That block on the left — remember I showed you the very first slide was that 1870s pop-up shack — this is what that is, the 1920s version. On the far edge of town, as the middle was thickening up and maturing, the far edge of town would have been where the upstarts go. That's where the small investments were, out on the edge. If things had continued as they thought they would — as they had for thousands of years — what would have happened to this neighborhood?

Well, eventually, the city would have continued to grow outward. Relative to the edge, this neighborhood would have become closer to the middle and so it would have become more valuable. You would have had a natural kind of redevelopment of the properties. They would have gotten second and third stories, become more intense and more ornate. That's not what happened. What happened after these were built is that we had the Great Depression, then World War Two, and then we turned the city into a machine of growth. We had to grow, grow, grow, and the city did — just out on the edge — and these blocks have been left behind. These places have stagnated for over a century now.

The city labeled them blight and got the one on the right torn down and rebuilt with a Taco John's drive-through. Now I know you all don't have Taco John's here. Taco John's is like Norwegian Mexican food. It's really popular where I come from. It's the kind of spices we like — very bland.

Here's the thing about the Taco John's: it met every requirement that the planners had for it. It met the zoning code and the setbacks. It met the parking requirements. It met the sign ordinance. It's got ADA-compliant bathrooms and great commercial sprinkler systems. They got them to put in a sidewalk along the side of it — the sidewalk ends right off screen, but they've got that little stretch there, so someday someone may be able to walk there. The environmental people showed up and asked them to put in a native plant area, so right behind the dumpsters on the side there's a little weed area where the stormwater drains.

We met all of our checklist items for this, but here's what nobody bothered to look at. That block on the left has a total value of $1.1 million. Add up all those old, blighted, run-down properties — they have a value of over a million dollars. That block on the right — same size area, same amount of public infrastructure investment, same cost to us as a community to sustain over time — has a total value of only $600,000.

There's 78% more wealth in that block on the left. The city collects 78% more property tax from the block on the left. The city collects way more utility fees because there are way more connections from the block on the left. Those are just the city's numbers. If we go out and interview people there, the block on the left employs more people and has more local business owners. Those local business owners, when we ask them, bank locally, use local accountants, use local attorneys. They are part of the community in a way that the block on the right is not.

This is a really compelling example, but it is an example that is typical of the whole. There's a good friend of mine named Joe Minicozzi — I think some of you have run into him here. He did some modeling for Christchurch, I believe, and maybe Auckland. His firm, Urban3 out of Asheville, North Carolina, does productivity mapping. If you think of a farmer going and spreading seed out on a field — the parts of the field that grow up the most robustly, we'd say those are the most productive parts. That's where you get the most bushels per acre. When we look at a city and ask the same question — what parts of the city are the most productive? Where do we get the most value per acre? — the maps are quite revealing.

This is Buffalo, New York. For those of you not familiar with Buffalo, in the early 1900s it would have been one of the richest cities in the world. It's at the beginning of the Great Lakes shipping region, lots of industry — an extremely wealthy city. But in the suburban experiment, it has experienced nothing but decline, literally losing population every year since the end of World War Two. But when we step back and ask where the wealth is in a city like Buffalo — where are the most productive parts of the city? — it's in those old neighborhoods. It's in those pre-Great Depression, incrementally built neighborhoods. It's in those places that are walkable, that were built slowly over time. That wealth is not only still there despite decades of decline, neglect, and disinvestment, but it absolutely dwarfs everything that we have built since.

This is a pattern we see repeated over and over. Whenever we have the pre-Great Depression development pattern, it is tremendously productive financially — it pays very high returns. Everywhere we see the post-war pattern of development — that grow-very-quickly, build-all-at-once-to-a-finished-state kind of pattern — we see increasingly declining levels of productivity. It doesn't matter where the city is, whether it's on water or inland, north or south. It doesn't matter if it's been gentrified or not. We see the same basic pattern.

Chuck Marohn — 23:53

This is a map of Lafayette, Louisiana. I mentioned Lafayette earlier when I showed you the numbers on their water system. This map looks like the other maps, but it's fundamentally different. This map answers the mayor's question to me: why is our city broke? Why do we have no money? You can think of this as a profit and loss map for the city.

Everywhere you see a property in blue, that is a property that pays more in taxes and fees to the city than it requires in ongoing service and maintenance — in a sense, profitable parcels. Every place you see red is the exact opposite: these are places that require more in ongoing service and maintenance costs than they themselves pay in taxes and fees. The higher the line goes, the more that disparity is.

In the middle, where you've got the spike of blue, that's their core downtown. To the right of that — excuse me — that crescent of blue that runs through there: those are some of the original neighborhoods of the community, some of what are today some of the poorest places in the community.

I want to make sure we're on the same page. The analysis we did assumed that the city goes out and actually takes care of this stuff. The fact that they're not only makes the blue line higher than what we show.

These places do not look prosperous, but they are, in a sense, subsidizing everything else in the community. What is all that post-war stuff? That's the malls, the strip malls, the franchise drive-through restaurants, the gas stations, the windy cul-de-sac streets with the single-family homes.

In Lafayette, Louisiana, when we did this study back in 2015, the median house paid $1,500 a year in taxes to the city. They paid other taxes to the state and federal government and the parish and so on, but that was the city's share. In order for the city to take care of and maintain — not expand, not build new, but just take care of and maintain what they've already built — the taxes for the median family would need to go from $1,500 a year to $9,200 a year. Twenty percent of what that family makes would need to be sent to the city just to maintain the existing roadway network, the existing sidewalks, the existing sewer and water and stormwater systems, the existing parks and public buildings.

That cannot happen. It will never happen. What we see is that Lafayette, Louisiana, like every city in North America, has built itself into insolvency. We have grown ourselves into a situation where we literally do not have the tax base or capacity to maintain the stuff we have already built.

We put out last year a tool called the Finance Decoder. The idea was to help cities look at their own annual financial reports — not as individual snapshots, but as long-term trends of their productivity. The Finance Decoder looks at things like how much debt you've accumulated over time, what state your infrastructure is in, how much you've depleted, and of course it also has this chart of net financial position. This is for Houston, Texas. It doesn't take an economics or accounting degree to recognize that down is bad.

What you have here is the accumulated surpluses and deficits — in this case, of the city of Houston — throughout its history. Another way to say this is: this is money that Houston has already spent that future spending will need to pay for.

If we look at cities across North America, they all have the same pattern — a declining net financial position. We have grown our cities into insolvency. We have asked them to grow, grow, grow today and to take on enormous long-term liabilities, and in a Ponzi scheme kind of way, those liabilities have all now come due, and we literally do not have the money to take care of them.

So the question becomes: what do we do when we've created this situation for ourselves? What do we do when we have built more stuff than we could possibly maintain?

There are a couple of answers to this that are obvious but very difficult for us to wrap our minds around, particularly as planners — because we are one of the key cogs in this machine of growth. We are the ones who say here's the expansion area, here's what the new transport system needs to be, here's how we build out here and out there, here's what the next iteration of the city is. We are a key cog in this. But what do we do when we don't have the money?

I began this talk by saying your national infrastructure plan — if you read it — is a great document done by thoughtful people, adopted now and part of your national policy. What do we do when we don't have money for the next iteration?

There are two things that become obvious that I'm going to speak to today. The next generation of planners are actually going to struggle with these realities, because they're very hard. The first thing is: we need to stop building the things that are making us poor. We actually need to quit doing what we've been doing.

The development pattern we have created post-World War Two — I know that as planners we have a lot of technical issues with it, and we often talk about them in terms of quality of life or environmental impact or climate change or whatever your frame or sensitivity is. I respect those points of view. But if we're going to label something sprawl and say you shouldn't like this because it's ugly, we have kind of proven that that's not a motivating factor for society.

What should be a motivating factor — and what should be at the tip of all of our tongues — is that this is economically not viable. We are literally, every time we do this, taxing existing residents to add new residents out on the edge. All of you who currently live in the city, if we're going to build in this way, are going to see your taxes go up and your services go down to provide a marginal benefit to someone way out on the edge. This is a bad set of trade-offs.

The other thing we're going to have to struggle with now is that instead of building more, instead of adding the next thing, our profession is going to have to shift to become really good at making better use of what we've already built.

I'm going to say this to finish with: this is a different version of planner. This is a different version of our profession. We often use the term "infill" to mean doing in the city or in neighborhoods the similar thing to what we do out on the edge. I think we have to stop using the word infill, because I think it distorts what we're talking about here. We're actually talking about fundamentally changing the way we go about our business to make better use of that which we've already built.

Let me give you a little bit of sense of what I think this looks like — and I am saying what I think this looks like. I'm not standing up here pretending that I know what the next version of planning looks like. I think this is something that we need to work on and figure out as professionals. I feel like the big challenge is evolving a new practice of how we do our profession.

To me, making better use of what we've already built means we have many things we can learn from the traditional pattern of development — that pre-Great Depression pattern — that will shine a light on things we can do today. So I start with the pop-up shacks and the idea that we have to have a low bar of entry, a bar of entry that allows everybody to help us co-create a city.

Jane Jacobs famously said cities have something for everybody when they're created by everybody. This idea of co-creation — something we do together — is intrinsic to the traditional development pattern. This is something that in my city we call a tiny house. My ancestors in the same city would have just called it a house. We have put the label "tiny" on it and suggested that if you want to build a 400, 500, or 600 square foot house — essentially a starter house — you have to meet all the requirements of a house. You have to meet subpart A through M of the tiny house code. You have to go beg permission from your neighbors. You have to genuflect in front of the planning board. You have to go through all this process so we can ensure that your starter home does not create chaos and mayhem in the neighborhood.

This is how cities were built really forever. The idea that we would put a small house in between two larger houses, or in the backyard of one, or make better use of that space — in a sense thicken up, provide more sewer connections, water connections, more users on that roadway, more units on that street — that's what we have to do today as planners. The idea that this should be difficult to do is the wrong direction. We have to lower the bar and make it much easier. Recognize too that when you build a house like this, it never stays like this. That 400 or 500 square foot house — what happens? The person gets married, they put an addition on the back. They have a couple of kids, they put a second story on. It grows. It expands incrementally over time. This is what we have built cities on, literally for thousands of years.

Here's a commercial version of this. We can go around Wellington today and see lots of small businesses, lots of people operating in storefronts. We can go around many of your cities and many cities in North America and see similar things, but what we often struggle to see are entrepreneurial startups.

Cities that want lots of dynamism need to have a very robust layer of entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur — let's be clear — is a crazy person with an idea who doesn't understand they can fail. That's different from an investor who has money and is trying to put it to work. We are comfortable often working with investors because they're straightforward. They bring in teams of professionals. They know what they're doing. They're looking for returns on capital. We struggle to work with entrepreneurs because they are literally people who don't have a sense that they can fail.

Great cities make place for entrepreneurs. This is Muskegon, Michigan. Muskegon had trouble filling empty storefronts in their downtown. When they talked to people, they recognized that the bar of entry was too high. So what they did is they actually scaled down to the level of an entrepreneur. They went and bought a bunch of storage sheds. They painted them up in funky colors, put them out into an empty lot they had in the downtown, kind of fixed the streetscape there by closing off a huge gap, and they rent them out really cheaply to startup entrepreneurs — $75 a month.

I have been to these places a couple of times. They're full of energy. The cool thing about it is that you have people there who are trying something in an environment where they can fail over and over again, because the stakes are really low. But once they figure it out, they graduate, in a sense, out of these sheds. The downtown is now full of businesses, and a lot of them had their start right here — where they could try, fail, try, fail, figure it out, and then make the step up to the next place.

We have a long history of doing this. Sometimes we do things like farmers markets and say, "Oh, this is really quaint." Or we do a food truck. This is not just a sideshow to everything else we do. This is the entrepreneurial layer in our communities, and we actually need to foster and nurture it in that way.

Chuck Marohn — 36:58

Let me give you a last way to think about the challenge we have in front of us. Instead of that big planning initiative — here's where the next round of sewer and water extensions are going to go, here's where we're going to run the big rail project, here's the big thing we're going to do next — making better use of what we've already built means going back and understanding where it doesn't work. It means going back and recognizing where what we have built does not actually meet the needs of people today.

That is a humbling experience. That is an experience that requires a lot of humility, but it's one that will be very profitable for us if we can get our minds around it.

Steve Jobs was once asked about his process for creating the iPod, and he said: if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said they wanted a better Walkman. Now the young people in the crowd don't know what a Walkman is — it's a very clunky cassette player that you would carry around. What Steve Jobs did is he looked at how people used the Walkman and what their frustrations were, and asked: how do we address those problems?

As planners, we like to do a similar exercise. We will often invite people in for a visioning session, and we will ask them to name their priorities. We put them up on charts on the wall and have them vote on what they think the biggest problems are. You'll ask one person, and they'll say, well, the sidewalks on my street are cracked and broken, the park isn't very well maintained, and it would be really nice if we had congestion-free roads. Then you'll ask the next person, and they'll say, well, the streetlights aren't taken care of on my block, the streets are all rutted up, and I just hate congestion on my way to work. As planners, we aggregate all of these together, look at 800 different comments on the board, and we'll see a mandate for fixing congestion.

What we actually need to see are 799 local problems that we can go out and solve right now. That's a different version of planning.

At Strong Towns, we have created a four-step process to make the lowest-risk, highest-returning financial investments that we can make. Step one: go out and humbly observe where people struggle. Where are people having a difficult time using the community as we have built it for them? This requires an extreme level of humility. We can't go out there thinking we know the answer. We actually have to ask the question: where are people having a difficult time?

Step two is a discipline: ask ourselves the question, what is the next smallest thing we can do to address this struggle? Notice I did not say "solve." We are done with solutions. "Solutions" is a mindset you have when you build all at once to a finished state, when you think you've actually solved something. Cities are never done — they are always works in progress. So no more solutions. What is the thing we can do that will make this a little bit better? What's the thing we can do with paint and straw bales and cones and duct tape and a shovel that will make this struggle a little easier to handle?

We're not looking to solve it. We're looking for feedback. Step three is to go out and do that thing — do it right now. Don't form a committee, don't study it, don't bring in a consultant. Just go do it. It's a small thing. Step four is to repeat that process over and over: watch how people react, watch how people do things, and learn how to make the city better.

Broad Avenue in Memphis. Memphis is a very poor American city. Because it's poor, they've done some of the most innovative things I have ever seen in city building. They had this little area — Broad Avenue — in deep decline. The highway ran right through the middle of their neighborhood. It cut off the foot traffic. This used to be a streetcar stop. The streetcar was ripped out and this place just died.

Some people in the neighborhood, literally fed up with the decline and neglect, went out, took things into their own hands, swept out some of the storefronts, swept up the streets, painted their own crosswalks and their own sidewalks and their own bike lanes. They did it with cheap corner paint from the hardware store. They worked with the business owners to get the buildings swept up. For one weekend, they held a block party where they invited businesses from all over the community to come in and open up, and they invited people from the neighborhood to come and see what this could be like.

They didn't go ask for permission. I actually talked to them, and they said if the city was going to come and shut them down, it would take till Monday to do it — and they were going to be gone by then anyway.

Here's the amazing thing that happened: people showed up, and then people kept coming, because once they saw what was possible, it opened up things and changed things for people. The city ultimately went out and took out that cheap paint and put in permanent paint that was going to last longer. It became more and more successful, and the city actually went out and took those temporary things and made them permanent — because they now had proof of concept. So they put in bigger sidewalks and trees and permanent bike lanes and narrowed up the streets.

Here's the cool thing: I was out there not too long ago, and two blocks over has got all the temporary stuff now. What is the city doing? They're actually seeding the next round of innovation. We did this here — we're not going to be dumb and think we can do it everywhere — but if we do the temporary stuff over here, can we get the same stuff going and build iteratively on it?

There's a group called the Better Block out of Dallas, Texas that does this professionally. You can go to their website, The Better Block, and they've got all kinds of guides and tools that are free to use for you to go out and do this kind of bottom-up planning.

Chuck Marohn — 43:09

This is a different style of local government, and I'm not going to stand up here today in front of you and pretend that this is either easy or obvious. But I think if we take seriously the idea that we are in a position where we cannot continue to do what we have been doing — that this idea of turning cities into machines of growth has reached its end because we have built ourselves into insolvency, that we have to take care as best we can of what we have and make better use of it — then I invite you to join us at Strong Towns in figuring out what this next version of planner looks like.

Whether it's North America or New Zealand, we all have many of the same constraints, many of the same issues that are driving us, and we're all dealing with many of the same things. Thank you so much for the invitation to be here today. Thank you for allowing me to share some ideas. I look forward to learning from all of you. I know that there's a lot that I need to learn yet about your country. It's very beautiful, and I'm grateful to be here. Thank you so much.

Outro — 44:28

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.

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