The Neighborhood Outside the Church Doors

Chuck Marohn  00:08

Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. This week I'm going to share a talk that I gave at a Catholic church here in Edina, Minnesota. I was invited to go down to a little fair they were having on a Saturday. It's about two and a half hours away. I got up, drove down, gave this talk. It was really delightful. It was a great time, and I thought it went so well that I would share it here.

I do want to give a little advance warning for people. I talk at the very beginning about Catholic social teaching, and it's one of the ideas that everybody in the room was sharing, but I recognize, as I share it here, that not everybody listening will be sharing it. So I want to give you a definition so that if you're not Catholic and you don't know what Catholic Social Teaching is, you don't read too far into it. It's basically the doctrine within the church that looks at matters of social justice, dignity of the human person, the common good, and care for the poor. Catholic social teaching really looks at how economic systems serve people rather than money — I think that's maybe the best way to put it. So when I talk about that, that's what I mean. Just some Catholic lingo for you all.

If this is not your jam, if you're like, "I don't want to hear what you say to Catholics," that's fine. You're not mandated to listen to this. I talk to a lot of different groups, and of course I shape my message around those groups and how they are most likely to hear and respond to Strong Towns. I am Catholic, and so it was an interesting intersection for me of my own faith and my own practice with the ability to talk about Strong Towns and what I see as my calling to advocate for the Strong Towns changes that we need.

I think I say this a couple of times in the talk, but maybe I'll reiterate it here: Strong Towns is a secular movement. Of course we work in the secular world, and you don't have to be of any religious faith — or any faith at all — to find Strong Towns ideas valuable, to advocate for Strong Towns in your places, or to be welcome here in our movement and in our conversation.

So with that, enjoy this little talk, and keep doing what you can.

"Yes, thank you. I actually say to friends — not really in public — that we're smuggling Catholic social teaching into the secular world. So that's the way that I would talk about it. Thank you. It's very nice to be here, and it's very humbling to be able to speak to you about this. I don't get to do this kind of thing very often. I do a lot of public speaking, but it is all about Strong Towns issues — Strong Towns forums, community meetings, conferences. I was in Des Moines this week speaking at a conference, meeting with city officials and that kind of thing. So it is a pleasure and a treat for me to be able to think about and talk about and share ideas in this kind of setting with people who share a common framework and a common understanding of the world. So thank you for the invitation.

I wanted to start by talking about a trip I made 26 years ago. I'm 52 — so just half my life ago — I got invited to go to Italy. As a 26-year-old man, I was part of a rotary exchange program. They sent four or five professionals from Italy to our district up in the Brainerd area, and then likewise had an exchange where we went to Italy. It was a fascinating trip. In true Italian fashion, they weren't ready for us. The trip actually fell apart after two weeks — it was kind of a disaster on their end. The team they sent here had a fantastic time, but it was supposed to be a professional exchange and did not exactly work that way.

I had a sub-agenda myself, because I had never traveled outside of the country, never traveled to Italy, and as a Catholic — as someone who had been brought up Catholic and lived a Catholic life — my Catholicism was important to me. It was exciting to go and live amongst Catholics. Italy is a 98% Catholic country, a country where there's almost a church on every block, seemingly. What would it be like to be around people who live their Catholicism so fully and deeply and immersed in it, as opposed to being one tiny part of a larger secular society?

Not to demean the Italians in any way, but it was, to say the least, very underwhelming. There are certainly the icons of Catholicism everywhere, certainly the churches, and reminders that you're in a Catholic country appear quite frequently. But what I found and experienced was that the practice of Catholicism was not quite what I thought it would be.

I remember one instance where I went to church in a number of different places. I was actually fortunate enough to be able to go to church at St. Peter's at the Vatican. I remember sitting there as a cardinal was doing Mass — in Latin or Italian, I couldn't tell the difference, as my skills in both are equally poor — trying to follow along. The woman next to me had her cell phone ring. This was in 2000, so younger people: we used to not have cell phones. I did not have one with me at the time. She picked up her phone and said "Pronto" — which is like "ready," the way Italians answer the phone — and had a conversation with someone. I'm sitting there mortified: this is the most solemn place, the most serious Mass, what are we doing? Then, as we're getting up to go for Communion, her phone rings again, and again she's like "Pronto," having a nice conversation as we're walking up. It just occurred to me how casual and almost transactional our faith can become at times, and the juxtaposition between the place we were in and the way we practiced there was very jarring.

I got back, and a few years later I got a call from a group in Brooklyn, New York, the Williamsburg neighborhood. A message was left for me that my secretary put on my desk: "A guy named Moshe Landau, Hasidic Jew, wants you to build him a new city. Please call." There's a number — and I'm an engineer and a planner from Central Minnesota. What in the world are we talking about? So I called this guy and ended up going out there, because I'm completely unqualified to build someone a new city but I thought there's something here to learn. I got to spend a few days, and then had subsequent trips and experiences with the Hasidic in Brooklyn.

The Hasidic live in some of the highest-density housing in the US. Williamsburg is a largely Hasidic neighborhood. The family I got to know really well lived in a one-bedroom apartment with five kids — their living room was also the dining room, also the

bedroom for the children during the day, so all the furniture was fold-up and modular. They were deeply, deeply committed to practicing their faith: kosher meals, separate meat and dairy dishes all stored in separate places in an apartment that felt like the size of my college dorm room.

I got invited to their apartment. They had two kids in a playpen in this living-room-slash-dining-room-slash-bedroom who were having a difficult time and carrying on a little bit. She said, "Let me help out with this kid and that one." I said, "Wait, you have five kids — who are these?" She said, "Oh, there's a family having marital problems, and we're taking their kids for a while so they can have some time to work things out together." This was something I ran into over and over. They lived in what they called a "pressure cooker" because of the density and all the people in one place.

What they wanted me to do — and I'll just tell you because it's not central to the story but it's a little crazy — was help them build a new city in rural Kansas. They were going to move 50,000 Jews from Brooklyn to the middle of Kansas. If you do the math: if you move 50,000 Jews to a county that had about 5,000 people, you would essentially take over the county. It ultimately fell apart for a number of reasons. First of all, it was an insane idea. Second of all, one of the big things that didn't work — and this is going to be their term, not my term — was that they were having trouble getting "Jew infrastructure" there. What that meant was a connection to their rabbi, the ability to practice their faith, and all of the things central to the practice of their lives, from kosher foods on down.

The thing that astounded me so much about the Hasidic was how, even in a place that seemed hostile in many ways to what I'd call normal human life — choosing to live in a place where your living room is your dining room is your kids' bedroom, with not one kid but five kids plus two you've taken in to help another family — it was a very normal situation for them. They never talked about it as a hardship. What they talked about the whole time was how they were practicing their faith, how their faith and their practice was something they had put first, and all of these things that might be annoyances or inconveniences were central to the practice of their faith.

I wanted to start with these two stories — Italy and the Hasidic — because as a Catholic, I have long struggled to live the life I feel called to live. When I look at the models, I thought: when I get to Italy, I will witness people for whom it's easier to live that life than it is for me here. I grew up on a farm in rural Baxter and lived on a five-acre lot with my wife — we had to drive 15 miles to get to church. It's not something you do passively. But while Italy certainly had the configuration for a Catholic lifestyle, something was missing. Then when I went to Brooklyn and lived for a few days with the Hasidic, here were people who struggled against the conditions they were given but in a sense dedicated themselves to a certain approach — and let's be clear, an approach that was really difficult to sustain in New York. They are not a popular group there. Yet their commitment to their way of life was paramount.

I said that Strong Towns is a lot about smuggling Catholic social teaching into the secular world. I have spent a lot of my time trying to help cities adapt and change and grow stronger, grow more resilient, and grow more human. The core insights of Strong

Towns really go to the way that we build our cities, the way we construct our places, and the underlying rationale for why we do that — stuff we often take for granted.

As a civil engineer, as a young planner, I got an undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota in civil engineering, worked for five years, got my license, went back and got a master's degree in urban and regional planning from the Humphrey School. In all of those situations, I had never been called upon to question the underlying assumptions of our development patterns. It was just the way things are. But I want to give you a brief history of this so you can think like a Strong Towns person and see some of the challenges that — especially for us as Catholics — are poignant, because we've come to accept them as literally the way things are today.

If we go back to Edina, to Minneapolis-St. Paul, to Brainerd, prior to the Great Depression, what you would have experienced is a development pattern that was hyper-local. In Strong Towns, we talk about an incremental development pattern — the idea that place was paramount. We had neighborhoods built around the church, neighborhoods built around different institutions. You can go to the small towns up where I live — all the "saint" towns, St. Peter, and so on — and when you come over the ridge, there's the church in the middle of town, and the streets kind of lined up on it as the central place. This is how we built neighborhoods, whether it was a Catholic neighborhood or a Lutheran neighborhood or a Jewish neighborhood. These institutions were things we built incrementally around in ways that were very bottom-up, from the way you would finance a house at a local bank with a 50% down payment and a short-term loan, to the way we would finance infrastructure and decide where we were going to expand.

We could look at the industrialization of America and the rise of the automobile and all of that, but I feel like the dividing line we should keep in mind is the shift between pre-Depression economics and post-war economics. Every place around the world has the automobile. Every place around the world has modern construction techniques. Nobody builds the way that we do — or at least not as their core approach; they do it as a luxury good. What we did was fundamentally different, and the dividing line is really the Great Depression and World War Two period.

Leading into the Depression, we had the Roaring Twenties, a period of great economic growth — the blow-off top of our industrialization period. Then we hit the Great Depression and the economics of our country changed. My grandfather was a Marine at the end of World War Two, actually part of the first group into Nagasaki. He grew up largely during the Great Depression. When he was young, his mother passed away and he wound up moving in with neighbors. He told me he felt very fortunate and lucky because he was better off than most during the Depression — the neighbors allowed him to sleep in the barn and feed him in exchange for working the farm. We all live in Minnesota. You can imagine what a 1930s barn in February would have been like. When my grandpa tells me he felt more fortunate than other people, I took that to mean this was hard in a way we can't comprehend.

With that as a backdrop for what the Great Depression was, we are all taught in economics circles that the thing that got us out of the Depression was World War Two. Let's look at this for a moment through a Catholic lens and realize how warped that

thinking is. We were in economic hardship, and the thing that got us back to our glory days — the thing that gave us our mojo back as a country — was a global war where tens of millions of people died, where our brothers and sisters were asked to go overseas and kill and die, where lots of other people of working age were drafted into the industries of war to build things that had no utility beyond being blown up: ships, planes, munitions. This was considered the height of economic success because the metrics went in the right direction: unemployment went down, GDP went up. This should be a signal to us that we live in a world dominated by economists and economic thinking.

As the war was coming to an end, the advisors around the President started to, in a sense, freak out. There's a memo that is famous in economic circles — Paul Samuelson wrote to FDR saying that if the war were to end, there would be the greatest period of economic dislocation any economy had ever seen. In other words, if we win this war and bring home these troops and shut down these industries, we're just going to slide right back into the depths of the Depression. There's nothing really different about the economy in 1945 than there was in 1935.

We all live in their future, and we know that didn't happen. What actually happened was the greatest economic boom in global history — a 20- to 25-year boom that we have been trying to repeat ever since. From a land-use and engineering-and-planning standpoint, what we did was come back from the war and turn our cities into machines of growth. We engineered economic growth by building a new version of America. Instead of cities that grew incrementally over time — thickening up, growing out, growing up, always with one hand on a supporting beam and another reaching out to something new — we said we're going to turn our cities into the thing that replaces war spending and make them grow very, very quickly. Interstate highway construction, the subsidization of infrastructure, massive housing subsidies and commercial real estate subsidies, and a whole secondary market to squeeze more and more liquidity into how we build all allowed our cities to expand very rapidly.

I like to point out that Brainerd, Minnesota, at the end of World War Two was around 13,500 people. Today, Brainerd is still around 13,500 people, but it's ten times the area — ten times the amount of pipe, ten times the amount of road, ten times the area to provide sewer and water and police and fire protection. We've been able to grow our cities very quickly and generate a lot of transactions — a lot of growth as we measure it in terms of transactions. But there has been, and this is the core Strong Towns insight, a huge trade-off for us locally, a huge trade-off within our cities.

I called this early on a Ponzi scheme. There's a sense that Ponzi schemes are all nefarious, but I actually don't think that's true. If you study Ponzi schemes — take Bernie Madoff, for example — very few people who find themselves in a Ponzi scheme actually set out to run one. Madoff mostly just fudged some numbers in his books so it looked like he was doing better than he was, thinking, "Next year I'll make it up." Then the next year he couldn't make it up, so he fudged it a little more and a little more. By the time a couple of decades go by, you've corrupted yourself inch by inch along the way until running the Ponzi scheme becomes the thing you're doing.

When we look at cities, we see that when a developer comes in and builds a new development out on the edge — puts in 40 new homes, pays for the sewer and water, builds all the commercial infrastructure, all the stuff that's needed — that transaction feels very much like a cash sugar high for us. We didn't have to spend hardly anything. We get all this new growth, the permit fees, the sewer and water hookup fees, and now we get the new property taxes. What we do as a community is say, "We'll take over and maintain that road, maintain that pipe, provide those services." But we all understand how this works: if you buy a new house, how much maintenance work do you have? Not very much. The doors are all on, the siding is fine, the sidewalks are brand new, the roof is good. Go out 20, 25, 30 years — what happens? All that bill starts to come due.

When the city takes over new infrastructure, for the first five to ten years there's nothing to do. That 15-year-old sidewalk, that 20-year-old pipe — they don't really need much work yet. From a cash-flow standpoint, we feel very, very rich. You watch cities that grow explosively. Right now in our region, places like Rogers and Otsego — these are the places where the sun is shining and it's easy to make hay today. You can open up the ground, developers come in, they build, and all of a sudden you've got all this cash flow, and you see them building the fancy City Hall and the fancy Fire Department and the police station and spending money on parks because they're the rich place to be right now.

The problem is, when you build a place all at once — to a finished state rather than incrementally — you get this echo effect 25 years later. Everybody's roof was built at the same time, so it has the same lifespan and fails at the same time. Everybody's siding needs to be replaced at the same time. Everybody's sidewalk goes bad at the same time. Everybody's appliances start to need replacement at the same time. The city infrastructure needs maintenance at the same time. Now all the bills come due at the same time, while the neighborhood is going into decline.

What do we do to arrest this decline? In prior versions of human history, we didn't build to a finished state. We built incrementally in a framework that would renew itself over time. As we grew, we thickened up. The middle of the city became more valuable. The neighborhoods would become more valuable as we grew out. Think of it like a bell curve — out on the edge is your startup land, in the middle is your more expensive land. That rising land value, when things start to decline and fall apart, would create natural redevelopment pressure that would keep the city renewing. You didn't get hyper-growth, but you got enough growth combined with stability to make it all work.

When we go out and grow very quickly — neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood — and they start to fail, the city responds in a predictable way. First, they try to grow more, because growth is the thing that gives you free cash flow. Growth is what will give you the money to fix what's now falling apart. So you see our cities obsessed with growth, obsessed with the next project, the next thing. You can go to City Hall today and see how our cities have oriented themselves vertically around: what money can we get from the federal government, what money can we get from the state, what money can we get from a developer to come in and build something new so that we can grow? You also see cities raising taxes, cutting core services, and doing things that begin over time to feel predatory — really regulating poor neighborhoods to keep

them from dropping any further, trying to put a regulatory floor on the decline. This is a series of transactions that are not only dehumanizing but contrary to what prosperity looks like for us on the ground.

In most of my talks, I put up a picture of a Taco John's in Brainerd and the block right next door to it, because that block used to look like what the Taco John's block used to look like: a bunch of little tiny shops — a liquor store, a pawn shop, a bankruptcy attorney, a tattoo parlor, the kind of things we think of as bottom-feeding economic development. But then the next block over, you have the Taco John's, which used to look like that, but we labeled it blight, tore it down, got it redeveloped, and now we've got a Taco John's. This is a transaction that in every dimension we tend to value today looks like success. We got rid of blight. We got rid of the tattoo parlor. Now we've got something that meets our zoning codes, our building codes, has ample parking, has a double drive-through. We even got a little bit of bike and walk infrastructure in and a storm-water area that the environmental people were happy about. We've got all the stuff that we say success today looks like.

The problem is that the Taco John's block as a whole has a value of $600,000. That old, blighted, junky, run-down block has a value of $1.1 million. They're the same size, the same area, they cost the city the same amount of money — but the city is actually making 78% more tax revenue on that old block. That's a really compelling story, and I have a bunch of maps that show this is not a one-off anomaly. This is the pattern repeated over and over again.

But I want to pause on that Taco John's block for a second, because what we're looking at is the efficiency mindset made real — the idea that cities can be reduced not to human transactions but to economic and financial transactions. Taco John's is really efficient. They put a lot of people through the drive-through every day, have ample parking, and it is an investment that can be easily sold off on a secondary market, securitized, and bundled up. This is the height of efficiency in our current mindset of how we build cities.

If you look at that old blighted block, it is inefficient in every metric we've come to value. But if we ask: how many employees do each of these have? That old block has about double the number. How many local owners? Taco John's has no local ownership; the old block had about eight different local businesses with local owners. Where do those people bank? Who do they use for accounting? For legal work? Where do they advertise? When we go through and ask all these questions, what we see is that one block is part of an economic ecosystem that is driving the community, and the other is part of an economic system that is driving efficiency on paper but actually taking wealth and capacity out of the community.

I want to give you one other look at this in a way I don't generally talk about in my secular talks. We've got a church bulletin that comes out every week, and the last page has all the local supporting advertisers. Taco John's is not on the back page. Neither is Dunkin' Donuts, Taco Bell — that's not what they do, not where they advertise. Who's there on the back page? About half of those businesses from the old and blighted block, and a bunch of other little things in the city.

We have this measurement called the Fourth of July measurement: how many people are going to be in your Fourth of July parade? It's never the highly efficient, highly tuned businesses that show up. It's always the ones with a human connection.

I said that when you go into City Hall, you get a very vertical orientation. At Strong Towns, we talk about taking City Hall and making it more horizontal, and we've given this thing we call the Four-Step Process as the highest form of public investment. Right now, when we think of public investment, we think of the city going out and spending $5 million widening this road, or $8 million putting sewer and water in over here, or millions of dollars trying to get some new business to open up or move in. When we study those investments, we see that yes, they create a lot of transactions — if you're the state or federal government, you measure that as GDP growth. But if you're the local government, those transactions are almost always negative-returning, if not immediately then over the long term.

Here's what's not negative-returning: our Four-Step Process. Step one: go out and humbly observe where people struggle, where they're having a difficult time using the city as we have built it. Step two: ask yourself, what is the next smallest thing we can do today to address that struggle? Not to solve it permanently, not to make it something we never have to worry about again — but what can we do with the materials we have on hand to alleviate that struggle and make it a little easier for people to live in this community? Step three: do that thing. Do it right now. Step four: repeat the process over and over.

This is how we take a system that is sensitive to changes in federal grant requirements, changes in state legislation, what the interest rates are, and what the development community wants, and make it a community that is instead sensitive to where people are having a difficult time using what we have built. Where are the connections in our community not as sound as they should be? Where are people having a tough time today?

Let me give you the Strong Towns punchline, because I think we all in this room share an understanding of the human dimension: this is actually a more moral system, a more just system, a more human way of approaching things. But it is also the best financial way to approach things. These are the lowest-cost, highest-financial-returning investments we can make. This is how we take our cities, which are being ground into insolvency, and actually turn them around — making them more functioning, more profitable, less predatory, more service-oriented, financially sound, and resilient.

I want to close by talking a little bit about my church, St. Francis Catholic Church. When I was a little kid, I used to sit next to my great-great-grandparents, so this has been my church for a long time. My grandfather's name is on a plaque in the back as one of the parishioners who went and fought in World War Two. I grew up on a farm homesteaded by my great-great-grandparents, so I am very rooted in Brainerd.

I was told years ago — and I've seen this written in other places, though I've also seen it contradicted, so take it with a grain of salt since I'm not a Greek speaker — that the word "parish" comes from two Greek words meaning "to dwell aside." The idea being conveyed to me was that a parish is not the church building, it is not just the people

inside it — it is literally the people living in communion with the church, with a very strong emphasis on proximity and location.

It was maybe 15 years ago that there was a murder across the street from my church. St. Francis Church has a school right next to it, all one evolving campus, and right across from the front entrance of the school there was a murder — not a random killing, but a drug deal where someone went in and shot two people in the back of the head. Horrific. Right across the street from the school's front door.

The reaction of my priests and my church was to go to City Hall and demand changes: more regulation, more enforcement, more police protection. Get this building torn down and redeveloped. Be harder on the landlords who were renting it out. I get that instinct because it's our social instinct — it's what we've been taught is an acceptable community response. But it depressed me. I'm going to say some things and try to say them with as much humility as I can, because I'm not going to pretend that I have the answer or know what's right or have even invested the time and energy I should have. I feel very conflicted about my own parish, because I've been called to do this Strong Towns work and I feel it's very important — and I have not devoted as much time and energy to my own parish as I should have.

But the thing that made me sad is that we never stopped and asked what our role was in the decline of the neighborhood. We never asked: Why doesn't a Catholic own that building and care for it with love? Why does our neighborhood — around a church — suffer from decline and neglect while we all live very far away and drive in? Why are the investments we make in the neighborhood — buying up homes so we can expand our parking — in a sense devaluing all the buildings around us and making them ripe for slumlords?

We spend a lot of time in my parish talking about everything inside the church building. We've had sermons about the different cloth we lay on the altar, about how the altar is configured and why that's important, where the statues sit and why that matters for our practice of faith, why the aisles are configured as they are, what the stained glass windows mean. I feel this is all deeply beautiful and a huge part of our practice, of building our Catholic faith and helping us immerse ourselves in Catholic teaching. But then you walk out the door and you're faced with concrete, cement, air conditioning units, and weeds in the grass. There is an entire neighborhood here that is literally our parish — what we are called to steward and be part of.

When we talk about our Catholic faith, it's one thing to show it to the person next to you in the pew or behind you when you share a sign of peace. It's a completely other thing to show it to the stranger living in the house next door, the person who lives two blocks away. When we want to shine a light — to take the basket off and let it be seen — it's harder to do when it's only happening inside the church itself.

The challenge I think we face is to take our values and let them live through the cities that we build. It is hard to do that in a secular society. We value efficiency more than stability. As a society we value the next transaction more than making good, prosperous communities — well, let me say that a different way. I don't think we as a society

actually value that. I think the systems we've set up push that, and we don't really question them all that much. It actually runs counter to our values.

None of us in this room are going to change the Federal Reserve. None of us are going to change the Wall Street system. None of us are going to change who is president or what comes out through all of that. We're not even going to change what happens at our own state legislature. But here's what we as Catholics can change tomorrow: we can change the way we interact with the neighborhood around us. We can show these places the love that we practice towards each other here. Some of those people will be Catholic and some will not, but they will know us through our deeds.

When we sit in this room and glorify God through holding this space sacred, if we recognize that that space emanates out from here — one block, two blocks, three blocks, six blocks — we can genuflect in front of the altar and carry that same mentality six blocks from here, because it's the same God in the same place, emanating out. This is what I feel like we as Catholics can do right now. If we want to think of it in secular terms, it would be a demonstration project of what Catholic love looks like — caring for a place.

Here's the cool thing: if we do this, I actually think we are merely demonstrating what most of society wants to see. This is not something where if we care for the neighborhood around us, make it a more inviting place, build more homes, allow more people to live here, make it more walkable, allow a family to thrive in this neighborhood without needing two cars — change their economics, encourage family formation and support the way the Hasidim did in Brooklyn — that we'll alienate people. I think if we do these things and project Catholic love and Catholic values into them, what we will find is that the vast overwhelming majority of our society actually wants to live that way. They might not identify it as Catholic, and they might never want to become Catholic, but they will want to become more like the Catholic social teaching describes. The justice that we talk about, the way that we think, is a very human way to live in communion with God.

Thank you so much for having me here today. This has been really fun for me to think through these thoughts in this way and share them with you, and I appreciate all the positive smiles and feedback. We say at Strong Towns: keep doing what you can to build a strong town. That is not a call to do everything. It's a call to do what you can. So as Catholics, let's just do what we can to make the world better. Thank you so much."

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  46:26

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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