CHARLES MAROHN: It's
very nice to be here. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation
and also the warm welcome. My name's Chuck. I am an engineer and a
planner from a small town in central Minnesota. I'm the president
of an organization called Strong Towns. Our mission is to support
a model of development that allows our cities,
towns, and neighborhoods become financially
strong and resilient. This is the last
stop for me on what's been a 40-day kickoff event
for the release of our book. It came out October 1st. I'm glad they've got
copies here for you. You can get them anywhere. I want to start with an
idea, a concept, that is very popular in the planning
professions, that has also kind of crept out into the
broader world, this idea of make no little plans. This is a quote from the
great planner Daniel Burnham. We take this quote,
because it says something about who we are as people,
who we aspire to be, who we want to be. It's something that draws on
I think our greatest sense of aspiration. Make no little plans, dream
big, think of the possibilities, and then go out and
reshape the world. We put this in our kids'
bedrooms when they're born. We chisel this into granite, and
stand and admire the thought. We use these words to inspire
us to reach for greater things. And there's something
beautiful about this. There's something
amazing about this idea, make no little plans. Daniel Burnham, when he put
together the Chicago plan, made no little plans. He had a grand vision for what
this city, decimated by fire, could be reborn as. And we, in the
planning profession, look at great plans like
this and admire them. We admire them for their vision. We admire them for
their aspiration. We admire them for
how they inspire us to reach for something greater. When Daniel Burnham
put together his plan, he looked around at the
cities around the world and was inspired by
what he saw, inspired by what the great
cities had accomplished. And this idea, this
embodiment, in the early 1900s, of make no little
plans, not only inspired a city in Chicago,
but inspired an entire nation. How do we go out and
make no little plans? The interesting thing
about the cities that inspired Daniel
Burnham is that they were built at a time when
our reach was constrained, far more than our vision. We could dream, and design,
and imagine amazing cities, but we had a very
limited capacity to build them, certainly
to build them quickly. That changed with the
advent of the automobile, with the advent of
mechanized construction, with some of the modern building
and construction techniques that came available
in the early 1900s. And by the time we got
through the Depression, by the time we got
through World War II, and we actually got down
to the business of making no little plans, we can look
across the North American landscape and see
that we certainly followed Burnham's advice. We made no little plans. And we went out and
took no little actions. We went out and reshaped
an entire continent around a new set of ideas, in
a very short period of time. This is an amazing
transformation, something unprecedented
in all of human history. The idea that we could
take, and in kind of one fell swoop go out and
remake the way people live, the way people meet each
other, the way they interact, the way they conduct commerce,
the way they fall in love, that we could reshape
an entire landscape around a new set of ideas, in
literally the blink of an eye. We look at this
pattern of development, this make grand plans
and go out and execute on them style of development. What we see is that these places
would grow very, very quickly. Our reach was no
longer constrained. And all of a sudden, we
could go out and make all kinds of things happen. This is a map of
Fresno, California. We use Fresno, because we've
got some really great maps of Fresno. But you'll see in this map
cities around North America, because they experience
very similar kind of growth patterns. This is the boundaries
of Fresno in 1897. Watch what happens over time. This is the Daniel Burnham era. Now we hit the Great Depression. We get to the end
of World War II. And now we kick in,
where all of a sudden we're going to reshape
an entire continent. And the development pattern,
our capacity to build, our capacity to
reshape, our capacity to grow our communities
changes dramatically in a very short period of time. A city like mine-- I live in Brainerd, Minnesota--
it's a couple hours north of Minneapolis-St. Paul-- at the end of World War II
was around 13,500 people. Today, my city is 13,500 people. It's 10 times the size. This is a different
style of growth, a different way of building
a community, a different way of creating places. What we created
was a machine that allowed us to implement
all of these grand visions all at once in a very
short time frame. And created a lot of
growth for our communities, but at a certain
long-term tradeoff. This is data from
Lafayette, Louisiana. At the end of World
War II, Lafayette was a little over 33,000 people. Today, it's a little 120,000. That's a three and
a half times rate of growth, a tremendous
amount of growth in the post-war period. But when we look at a
place like Lafayette, and we say, all
right, what does it take to provide water service
to the people in Lafayette? At the end of World
War II, it took five feet of pipe per person. Today it takes 50 feet of pipe. That's a 10 times increase. What does it take to provide
fire protection for the people there? Well, at the end
of World War II, it took 2.4 hydrants
per 1,000 people. Today, it takes 21 times that. So while this pattern, this
way of building our cities, now today allows us to
grow very, very quickly. We can grow our
population by three times. What we see is that we're
growing our liabilities by much more, by 10 times and 20 times. We could maybe justify
this to ourselves, like this might make sense
if our people were also becoming wealthier,
if our families were becoming better off,
if our small businesses were prospering. But when we step
back and we look at the people of Lafayette,
very much like people around the country,
what we see is that they are saving
less, borrowing more, and their incomes are
just not keeping up. We grow our liabilities
by 10x and 20x, but our actual wealth grows
by only a tiny, tiny fraction of that. This is an approach that has
a diminishing set of returns, a set of returns that,
while very profitable for us in the immediate decades
after World War II, has started to become less, and
less, and less so over time. And what we see are
cities that are struggling to make ends meet, cities
that have difficulty doing basic things, like maintaining
parks, and maintaining roads, fixing sidewalks,
and crosswalks. We see cities of
all sizes struggling with these basic, basic things. There's a reason why this is. The development
pattern that we have enacted, the one that is now-- kind of enables all these
visions to come true in a very short period of
time, grows very, very quickly, but it lacks a certain
level of productivity that we see in this more
limited style and approach. These are a
neighborhood-- this is a neighborhood in my hometown. I'm going to show you a couple
blocks right here to focus on. You'll see these blocks are
the same identical size, the same identical area. They have the same amount
of public infrastructure built on them. You can think of this as they
cost the city, the community, the same amount to provide
service and maintenance to. When we look at these
blocks, that one on the left is a collection of
little pop-up shacks. These would have been on the far
edge of town, back in the 1920s when these were
built. Today, you've got a pawn shop, a couple
liquor stores, a tattoo parlor, pretty much the lowest value
rent place in the community. Two blocks over used
to look just like this. The city labeled it
blight, got it torn down. Now we have the new Taco
John's drive-through. Don't know if any of you have
experienced Taco John's or not. It's the Norwegian
version of Mexican food. You would appreciate the tater
tots dipped in a mild Cheddar cheese, just like they do
in Mexico, I've been told. We were thrilled about
this switch, right? We got rid of blight. We got rid of something
that was old and blighted. We got something that
was shiny and new. We got something that met all
the requirements of our zoning code. It met all the
building standards. It's now fully sprinkled. It's got ADA
compliant bathrooms. We've got plenty of parking
now in this new development. It meets the sign ordinance,
the floor area ratio. The environmentalists
showed up at the meeting and asked us to put native
plants in the stormwater area. In that little five foot
gap between the curb and the street, there's
some shrubbery in there that met that. The bike-walk people showed
up and wanted a sidewalk, so we put a little stretch
of sidewalk in there. The sidewalk ends
just right off screen, but we got that stretch. Everybody was thrilled
about this, right? It met every
checklist that we had, including the capacity to be
financed on a secondary market, insured, this was a home. Here's what nobody
bothered to consider. That old, blighted,
rundown block has a total value
of $1.1 million. That shiny and new one-- it's the same size
area, the same amount of public infrastructure,
the same essential cost to the community, but at
a value of only $600,000. Understand what
you're looking at. That old, blighted,
rundown block, that traditional
development pattern, that kind of
constrained way that we had built for thousands
and thousands of years, in its infant phase, after
almost a century of decline and neglect, still outperforms
financially the stuff we build brand new today. And it's not even close. We've all been around
long enough to understand what the future of that
taco place is as well. 20 years from now,
that taco place will be a used car lot
10 years after that, it will be boarded up. We'll be trying to get
some type of tax subsidy to tear it down and rebuild it. This is a pattern we see
repeated over, and over, and over again. This site is not
some strange anomaly. It's part of a broader
pattern, a pattern of growth and development
that we have seen that creates a sharp contrast
between the way we built in the pre Daniel Burnham
era, the thousands of years of human history of building
places incrementally over time, and this new post-Depression,
post World War II pattern of development,
where we go and we build our cities all at
once, and we build them to a finished state. This is the city of Buffalo. What I'm going to
show you now is a series of maps put together
by a good friend of mine, named Joe Minicozzi. Joe runs a firm
called Urban3 out of Asheville, North Carolina. And they do financial
productivity modeling for cities. They've modeled hundreds
of cities around the world. What I'm going to show you
right now, think of a cornfield. The parts of the field that
grow up the most robustly, we say that's the
most productive part of the cornfield. That's where we get the
most bushels per acre. Where in a city do we have the
most financial productivity? Where do we get the
most value per acre? And I start with Buffalo, New
York, because first of all, I have a soft spot for Buffalo. I like it. It's a city that I like a lot. But it's a place that
struggles deeply. If you go to Buffalo,
the decline, the blight, the despair can be
overwhelming at times. Buffalo has lost population
every single year since the end of World War
II, including last year. It's been a steady,
downward decline. Yet, when we step back, and
we say in a city like Buffalo, where is the wealth? Where's the most productive
parts of the city? Can you point to that
traditional development pattern? Can you point to that part
of the community built before the Great Depression,
before World War II? Not only is it a massive
repository of wealth, but it absolutely
dwarfs everything that we have built subsequent. This is something we see
in cities of all sizes. Here's another place in upstate
New York, same kind of pattern. We can go around
the country and look at different places,
of different latitudes, different sizes,
different east-west parts of the continent. And no matter where
we look, what we see is the same general pattern
repeated over and over again. Our pre-Depression
development pattern is financially very productive. Wherever we have
walkable neighborhoods, they are very productive. Wherever we start to build
second and third stories, we find development
that is very productive. And whenever we find this
post-war development pattern, this very spread out, very
decentralized, very flat type of development
pattern, we see something that costs
a tremendous amount to provide service
and maintenance, but doesn't produce
nearly as much wealth. This is a little
city by where I live, Crosby, Minnesota,
about 1,200 people. When I first went
here, they said, Chuck, we have some great stuff
happening on the outskirts, on the south of town, some
great stuff happening out there on the east of town, but
those core neighborhoods just struggle. They're really rundown. They're really bad. We need to figure out some
way to get this stuff torn down and renovated. And then we showed them
where all their wealth is, in those poor neighborhoods,
in the neighborhoods where all their poor people live. This is a pattern of development
that we see repeated over, and over, and over
again, this idea that our new kind of
experimental way of building cities, of transforming things,
of taking these grand visions that we had and put
them into action, very quickly, all at once,
to a finished state, creates a developed pattern
that allows us to grow very, very quickly, but is failing
to produce the amount of wealth and prosperity, particularly
the enduring wealth and prosperity
necessary for us to take care of all of these
obligations we take on when we grow and develop in this way. This is a map of
Lafayette, Louisiana. It looks similar to the prior
maps that I've shown you. But this one is a
little bit different. This one is not a map of
financial productivity. You can think of this one
more as a profit and loss map. As part of a team,
along with Urban3, I went to Lafayette,
Louisiana, and helped them analyze all of the expenses
that the city was experiencing, all the road and street
maintenance, all the parks, where their transit system
went, their fire and police protection. We mapped all these
up in separate maps, here's where you're
spending your money. Then we looked at all of
their sources of revenue. Here's where your
property tax comes from, here's where your sales
tax come from, here's where your utility
fees come from. We mapped all those up. At the end, we mashed
all these maps together into this profit and loss map. Everywhere where you
see a blue property is a property that is paying
more in taxes to the city than it requires in ongoing
service and maintenance. Everywhere where you see
red is the exact opposite. These are properties
that cost more to provide ongoing service and
maintenance on an annual basis than they generate in revenue. What's going on here? There's a core in the middle. You see that spike, the
higher that line goes, the more the disparity is. So that very profitable
part in the center is their core downtown. Just to the east
of that, there's a crescent of blue that
runs through there. Those are the poorest
neighborhoods of the community. Here's kind of a snapshot
of what those look like. If we look at these
neighborhoods, if we look at the core
downtown of Lafayette, even though they
are working at it, they are taking steps
to make it better, it still doesn't pass
the eye candy test. These neighborhoods look rough. When we look at that
picture in the bottom right, that's a representative sample
of those poorer neighborhoods. This place looks rough. It certainly is. When we were going
there and going to get an Airbnb
to do this work, the city staff told us, stay
away from those neighborhoods. Don't go there. That's where the
burglaries happen. That's where the homicides
happen, like don't go to that neighborhood. From an eye test,
it looks rough. From a numbers test, financially
it's doing fantastic. It's doing really, really well. It's very profitable
for the community. And just so we're
all on the same page, our analysis assumes
that the city is out there doing the work. The city is actually out
there maintaining the ditches, maintaining the streets, taking
care of all the stuff they've said they would take care of. They're clearly not doing that. And so the profit margin
that we show in this map is actually greater, because
they're not spending the money. What's all that stuff in red? Well, we understand
what that is, right? That's the mall, the big
box stores, the strip malls, the franchise drive-through
restaurants, the gas stations, the windy, cul-de-sac
streets, the three car garage with the attached house. That's all this stuff
out on the edge. That's all this stuff that
looks like prosperity. But when we run the
numbers, what we see is that it's dramatically,
dramatically in the negative. In North American
cities today, except for the ones that
have experienced large amounts of
gentrification, what we see is a general trend, where the
poorest neighborhoods subsidize the wealthiest neighborhoods. In the city of Lafayette,
you have the median family paying $1,500 a year
in taxes to the city. They will pay other
taxes to the school district, and the parish,
and what have you, but $1,500 to the city. In order for the city to
take care of everything that has been built, to provide
all the services that they've said they would
provide, median taxes need to go from $1,500
a year to $9,200 a year. $1 out of every
$5 a family makes need to get sent
back to the city just to take care of
what's already been built. That can't happen. And it will never, ever happen. And so this massive
backlog of maintenance that the city is
already struggling with, the tens of millions
of dollars of roads that they don't know how
to maintain, all this pipe that they have in the ground
that they don't have the budget to fix, all the parks,
and the buildings, and everything that they've said
they would do, at some point in the future is going to
become an acute crisis. And they're going to have to
decide what road we let fall apart, what road
we take care of, what pipe we repair and replace,
with pipe we let fall apart, what neighborhood we
continue to service, and what neighborhood
we walk away from. Does this sound
like a city we've all kind of thought about,
at least a little bit? Of course, it does. It sounds like Detroit. As I travel around the country
and I talk to cities about, and communities of people
about their future, about the struggles that they
have, about what we can do to make
things better, we always tend to wind up
discussing Detroit to one degree or another. Pretty much everybody
has an explanation for what has
happened in Detroit. If you're on one side of
the political spectrum, you have a complete explanation. It's internally coherent. If you're on the other side
of the political spectrum, you have a complete explanation
for what happened in Detroit. It's politically coherent. Neither of these
narratives overlap. And none of the other
narratives about Detroit really overlap with each
other, except in one key point. And it's the one
key point that we seem to have almost
universal agreement on. And that is this, my
city is not Detroit. What happened in Detroit is
different than what's happening in my city or any other city. Detroit is some kind
of freakish anomaly. What happened there
will not happen here. Here's the strong town's
narrative of Detroit. In the early 1900s, before Henry
Ford, before the automobile, Detroit was one of
the richest cities, not just in North America,
but in the entire world. This was a place of such
grandeur and opulence, that you can go there today and
see the magnificent buildings that still exist. You could take something
like the Detroit Opera House and drop it into any
cosmopolitan capital in Europe, and it would be right at home. This is an amazingly
wealthy city. As the city was
becoming the Motor City, as they began to experiment
with the automobile, they were the first city to try
this idea where people would live on the outskirts
of town, drive in in the morning for work. At the end of the
day, drive back out. They were the first city
to run highways and cut up their neighborhoods in
order to make that happen. They were the first
ones to, at scale, rip out their transit
system to start to tear down buildings
and create parking, in order to facilitate
this change. And when we hit the Great
Depression and cities across North America started
to go into bankruptcy, and have massive,
massive fiscal distress, there was one city, and kind of
a community of satellite cities around it, that comparatively
did fairly well, that being, of course, Detroit. And by the time we got to
the end of World War II, it was very clear
to local leaders around the country
what they needed to do if they
wanted to experience growth and prosperity in
this post-war country. They needed to copy the
development pattern pioneered by our greatest city,
that being Detroit. And that's what we did. We all copied Detroit. Detroit's not some
crazy anomaly. It's not some
strange, weird place. The people there are not any
different than you and me. Detroit's just early. They're just a couple of
decades ahead of everybody else. When you take a wealthy
city and you spread it out over a huge area,
denuding the tax base, while driving up the cost
of providing service, you get the
bankruptcy of Detroit. Like all bankruptcies,
it happens gradually, then all at once. It's important to understand
the fundamentals of what Detroit did, because it's is
going to help us reconcile this whole Daniel Burnham
insight of make no little plans with the idea of how we
actually go about implementing and creating those plans. What Detroit did is they took
a system that was fundamentally complex and changed it into one
that was merely complicated. Let's talk about the
difference between those. Complex adaptive
systems-- we can think of things like rainforests. We understand that
a rainforest is a collection of many
different flora and fauna. They all act independently
of each other. They all are able to receive
feedback from their environment to adapt and change. We understand that the
properties of a rainforest are emergent. You can't go out and
plant a rainforest. You can't go out and
create a rainforest. It's something that
is the byproduct of an evolutionary
emergent process. We can say the same exact thing
about human habitat, the places that we built for thousands
and thousands of years around the world. Very much like we understand
that a bee and a beehive are co-evolved to
exist together, they're co-evolved
to meet the needs of each other, human habitat,
the cities that we built, are the byproduct of thousands
and thousands of years of trial and error experimentation. We tried things. The things that worked, we
kept, we copied, we passed on. The things that didn't
work, those ideas went away. Sometimes people died. Civilizations vanished. Those ideas weren't
transmitted on. And so after thousands
of years of this, you grow to have
a system that is highly adaptable, very
flexible, resilient, and strong. Complex adaptive systems
differ from systems that are merely complex
in fundamental ways. Primarily among them
is the fragility. A Rube Goldberg machine
is very complicated. We understand that it takes
some really smart people to put one of these things together. But we also understand
that if you go in and cut one of these strings or
move one of these blocks, the machine doesn't evolve
and adapt into something else, it just stops working. If we look at an
automobile engine, and automobile engine takes
some very intelligent people to put together. it's a
very complicated machine. And in order run an
automobile engine, it takes some very thoughtful,
intelligent people. This is very complicated. But we understand that if
we stress an automobile engine, if we push
it past its limits, it doesn't evolve and become
a toaster or a wash machine. It just breaks as an engine. The fundamental
difference between systems that are complex and systems
that are merely complicated is their fragility, their
capacity to adapt and evolve to new conditions. When we look at
the natural world, we can see this in stark relief. We understand that if
a rainforest receives a little bit too much
rain in one area, or a little bit too
much sun, the rainforest doesn't collapse. It doesn't cease working. Different flora and fauna
will adapt and take over. A slightly different
pattern will emerge. But do the same
thing to a cornfield. Give it a little bit too much
sun or a little too much rain, it doesn't evolve
and become soybeans. It just becomes bad corn. It just fails at what
it's designed to do. This is the difference
between habitat that is complex and adaptable,
that is created incrementally over time, versus habitat
that is built all at once to a finished state. When we look at human habitat
over time, what we see is a complex pattern
that is able to adapt to times that are good,
times that are bad, times that are fast growth,
times that are stagnant, times where we have
a lot of surplus, times where we have want. When we look at our current
development pattern, what we have is a monoculture,
a style of development that is designed to be built all
at once, to a finished state, to be done. We are the first civilization
in all of human history to have the hubris to
believe that what we build is a complete product. Only God has ever built
something and said it is done. And all of a sudden,
we come along and believe that
we can build things that will never more change. This is not how human
habitat is assembled. Human habitat, for
all of human history, has been assembled
incrementally over time. This is my hometown
back in 1870. This is a very first
iteration of my place. And the interesting thing
to note about this little collection of pop-up shacks is
that every city that was ever built in all of human history
began in exactly this way-- some poor people, some pop-up
shacks, some hopes, and some dreams. We built thousands of these
places and a lot of them failed. What happens when a
place like this fails? Not much, right? A few people salvage
what they can. They move on to the next place. But we built thousands
of places like this. And a lot of them
were successful. And they were successful. They would grow in
a very simple way. They would grow incrementally
up, incrementally out, and become incrementally
more intense. The little building blocks-- you
can think of a culture growing in a Petri dish. More and more people
moved to this place. The underlying land
values would increase, creating this natural
redevelopment pressure. So after 30 years of
growing incrementally, this little street here
would become this street. And after another 40
years of continuing to grow incrementally up,
incrementally out, and become incrementally more intense,
these little two and three story wood structures
would evolve and adapt to become buildings
of brick and granite. This is the way humans
have constructed over time their
habitat for thousands and thousands of years. This incremental, one step, and
then the next step, and then the next step, this
complex adaptive system, this ability to respond
to both opportunities and stresses within the system
to optimize many competing different things over time. After World War II, we began
this new experimental approach, this idea that we could
go out and make big plans and then execute on them,
building things all at once to a finished state. And when we look at
streets like this today, here's what this exact
same street now looks like. It's a wasteland of parking
and half occupied buildings. And understand
that the community has invested in that
little stretch of street that you're looking at
there a half million in the public infrastructure. Where is the wealth that will
sustain that, generation, after generation,
after generation? It's just not there,
it's not there. I believe in this idea
of make no little plans. I think that we have to
be an aspirational people. I think that we have to
have grand visions of what the future can be. And I think we should dream big. But I think we have
to temper today. Because we have the capacity
to blow ourselves up. We have the capacity
to utterly transform in grotesque and unrecognizable
ways, before we've even been able to process the
reaction to what we've done, the places that we live. So we have to temper our vision. We have to restrain
our reach, to join the idea of make no little
plans with a simple reminder to make no large leaps. We have to discipline ourselves
to actually work incrementally as we're going about,
to allow the humility of our vision, the
humility of our actions to creep in and provide
the feedback that we need, so that we can adapt our
approach to actually achieve those grand visions. There's some things that
our cities desperately need to do today to make this shift. We need to, first of all, take
obsessive care of what we've already built. We have
created, after World War II, a kinetic growth machine,
the objective of which was to replicate a
development pattern over, and over, and over, and over. We've long outstretched
the capacity of that to do good to us. And it is now doing
a lot of harm. We actually need to
retool that machine, to focus on getting
more value out of the things we've already
built. A focus on maintenance, a focus on the very like
unflattering, un-ribbon cutting, un-grand opening
kind of just basic bread and butter stuff
at the local level will unleash a
wealth of opportunity for us, if we can discipline
ourselves to do this. We have to make better use
of the stuff we have already built. This is a little block
in Peoria, Illinois. And I love this one, because
you can find these places here in New York City. You can find them in
eastern coast cities. As you go further west, they
become lesser and lesser. You think of like
very poor people trying to make good use
of the things they built. Check out that little Gary
Morris lawyer's office there in the middle. Here's what that
building looks like. This is someone trying to
squeeze a tiny bit of value out of like seven feet
between two buildings. Here's the amazing thing. When we look at the financial
productivity of the place, the Walmart in Peoria has
a financial productivity of $598,000 an acre. The little Gary Morris law
office, like six times that. It's a financial powerhouse. Why? Because it's making
really good use of space. We can do this everywhere. We can go back and make
really good use of space. We need to make our
places worthy of care. I've become good friends
with a guy named Steve Mazen. And as an engineer, as a
planner, some of his ideas seemed really crazy to me. I'm going to give
you one of them. He said, if we want places to be
loved, and cared for, and taken care of, we have to
make them lovable. They don't teach you that
in engineering school, but it's absolutely true. We've come up with this idea
that we can create things that are maintenance free. Maintenance free simply means
it will never be maintained. If you build places that
are easy to maintain, they're not going
to be very lovable, and no one's going to spend
the time or the energy to maintain them. We actually have to go
back into our places now and make them
worthy of our affection. We have to start responding
to how people actually use the city. I'm here in Manhattan today,
and it's fascinating to me, because in everything
that you do here, you're actually leading
the country in this. And I know sometimes it's
frustrating to live here. Go out of this
place and recognize that cities are
completely ignoring the actual human experience
of living in a place. We've created at Strong
Towns a four step approach to make these kind
of high returning investments. It's actually very, very simple. The first step, go
out and humbly observe where people struggle. Go out with humility
and walk with people, experience the city
as they experience it, and observe where they're having
a difficult time using the city as it's been built. Step number two, ask
yourself a question. What is the next smallest
thing that we can do right now to address that struggle? Not what is the grand
solution, what's the thing that we can
get the big grant for. It's what is the
thing that we can do with duct tape, and paint,
and cones, and straw bales, to make this struggle
a little bit easier? Step number three,
do that thing. Do it right now. Don't form a committee. Don't study it for six months. Don't bring in a consultant. This is a tiny little thing. Just go out and do it. Step number four, repeat that
process, again, and again, and again. Our cities have
oriented themselves up the government food chain. We positioned ourselves at the
bottom of these capital flows. And we orient city hall,
and we orient our community conversations around
what's the big project we can get from Washington, DC? What's the thing that our
state capital can deliver? What can we get from the
municipal bond market? How can we get a big
developer to come to town? We need to invert that mindset. And we need to focus
with all intention and humility on the
struggles that people have in our communities. If we do that, not
only will we be prompted to make
the lowest cost, highest returning investments
that we can possibly make, but we will be improving
the lives of our friends and neighbors as we do it. We need to stop
subsidizing parking. I mean, for crying out
loud, what are we doing? Why, when you build a
residential building in New York, do you have to demonstrate
that you have adequate parking? It's an insanity that I
don't understand, here, of all places. But you can go
around the country, and in places where
it is mostly parking, the thing that they
still obsess about is not having enough
places to park. Our cities should not be
worried about forcing people to walk a block or two. They should be worried
about not being worthy of a one or two block walk. We need to make places that are
so wonderful, and so beautiful, and so magnificent that
they attract people to walk far more than that. We need to stop
subsidizing parking, whether it's minimum
parking requirements, or whether it's us taking our
taxpayer money out and actually paying for it. I wanted to put this in
here too, because I know in New York, and in some
of our fast growing cities, we're having this
housing crisis. It's important to note,
and I'll just say this, there's two different
housing crises going on in this country. The one here is one driven
by a set of variables that are causing housing
prices to go very high compared to what wages are. In other parts of the country,
we have very low housing prices, but we don't have jobs. And so those houses
are also unaffordable, but for a very different set
of reasons and conditions. We sometimes treat
them the same. And when we talk
about housing crises, the media tends to
originate from the areas where they're having the first
kind of housing crisis, not the second kind. So the second kind is
kind of elusive to us. A big part of the
disconnect we have is when people hear that you can
get a home in a city two hours from here for $40,000. And you have people who
make that in a month. It's very difficult
for people to process and understand, how do you have
an affordable housing crisis? I want to step back amidst
both of these things and have us recognize a
couple of very simple truths about housing in
this country, truths that should be evident to
us in the post 2008 housing panic and re-inflation
of the bubble. Who benefits from
high housing prices? There's a long list of people
who benefit from high housing prices, including
governments at all levels, people who currently own houses,
banks, insurance companies, everybody involved in the
building and construction industries. Pension funds benefit
from high housing prices. Do you remember the abject
panic we had in 2008 when housing did this? Who doesn't benefit from
high housing prices? It's a much smaller
list, and it's a much smaller list of people
who can be very easily not listened to and marginalized. When we look at our
conversation about housing, it's very interesting,
because we tend to want to deal with
these symptoms of the housing problem. We're comfortable with
things like rent controls, and a little bit of
inclusionary housing over here, but we're really freaked
out about allowing this complex, adaptive
system to respond to the stresses and the
pressures that we're feeling. At Strong Towns, this is a deep,
deep conversation we're having. But I want to leave you with our
one adage and our one insight. And that is this,
no neighborhood should experience
radical change. But no neighborhood should
be exempt from change. When we see neighborhoods locked
under glass, frozen in amber, the idea that it's built
to a finished state and it should never
evolve, what we see are neighborhoods that
are, at their core essence, dysfunctional. But when we see
neighborhoods that are razed completely, and
transformed utterly overnight, displacing the people
that are there, and disrespecting what is
current mode of operation, we also see something that
is deeply dysfunctional. Those are generally the only
two choices on the menu today. We need a third choice. And that third choice has to
be an incremental evolution of our neighborhoods. The complex, adaptive
feedback that would allow single family homes
to, with very little friction, become duplexes. Allow duplexes, with very little
friction, to become four units. Allow some of the three and
four story buildings, outside of our building here right
now, to become 8 and 12 story buildings, without the huge
amount of stress and friction that we have put
into this system. We have to allow
our housing market to have the complex, adaptive
feedback that has made it strong in the first place. The reaction that I
most commonly get, particularly from fast
growing cities, is, Chuck, we can't work incrementally. We can't make no small leaps. We have to work in large leaps. Chuck, the world's on fire. There's a climate emergency. There's a housing emergency. There's public
health emergencies. If we don't think big,
if we don't act big, we will never
accomplish anything. I don't agree with that. Because I look at
places like this, and I understand that
they started like this, and they went like
this, and then there came this, and
then ultimately became this place here. Every great place that
we built that inspired Daniel Burnham made no
little plans, but also took no large leaps. They were all built
incrementally, one step at a time. Not with one great man
laying out of vision and mobilizing
people to do it, but with many, many,
many common visions, joined together,
interacting with each other in complex ways, to
ultimately, over time, build places that were
healthy, were adaptable, were productive, and were strong. That's what we should
be working towards. Thank you so much for
coming out and being here. [APPLAUSE] I really appreciate the
invitation and the courtesy that you've extended to me. If anybody has something they
would like to chat about, I know that they have asked
that you go to a microphone, so you can be heard. And I would more than welcome
taking a few minutes here to discuss. So please-- AUDIENCE: Hi, thank
you for coming. That was a really cool talk. I might be biased because
I live here in New York, but one thing I
kept thinking about while you were
talking was density, and how like a lot of the
dysfunctional patterns you were discussing seem to me
to correlate with low density. A, do you agree with
that interpretation, or is that overly simplistic? And B, do you think
it's possible to reverse this de-densification trend
that we've had in this country? CHARLES MAROHN: The short
answer is, A, yes, I think it's an
oversimplification. Not because I
think you're wrong, but I think you've got the
correlation causation backward. A lot of times planners will
look at density as an answer, and they'll go out and
build things that are dense. You and I can travel
around, and I can show you all kinds of things that
are very dense, that don't have financial
productivity, that they're not productive. And so what we
like to talk about is density is well
correlated with success, but it's not the cause. It's more of an
outcome of success. So if you're going to key on
something to drive success, it really is a ratio
of private investment to public investment. You've got to have
enough private investment to sustain your
public investment. You can have a farm, and a farm
can be a very productive way to build, but you
can't have a farm with a million dollars of
street, and sewer, and water, and stuff in front of it. It's going to be a farm with
a well, and a septic tank, and a little gravel road. That's very productive. That works just fine. You wouldn't put a well out
in front of this building. That would be absurd. You've got plenty of
wealth here in Manhattan to sustain subways,
and great transit, and streets and all that. So I think density
is correlated. Can we reverse it? I think that the
answer is maybe I'm beyond can we, in just
recognizing the fact that it is happening whether
we want it to or not. We can look at a
place like Detroit, and what we see in Detroit is
that you have a downtown now that is kind of becoming a boom
town of more affluent people. You've got sometimes literal
and sometimes figuratively gated communities, way
out on the edge. But then in this
middle area, you've got this kind of despair,
where neighborhoods are being abandoned. Houses are literally like
going away, burning down or falling down. But then you've got
these neighborhoods starting to coalesce,
where people are coming together,
spontaneously working together to create neighborhoods
and communities very much in what we would see
in a traditional sense. If we look at it as a whole,
the density is very low. If you start to look at these
pockets that are aggregating, they're actually
becoming dense again. They're becoming places again. And I think that that is one
likely outcome that we will see as we struggle with this. Because we cannot maintain
every cul-de-sac we built, every frontage road we built,
every mall, every strip mall. A lot of this stuff
is going to go away. And what will
result is a pattern that is more productive. AUDIENCE: Thanks. CHARLES MAROHN:
Thank you so much. Please-- AUDIENCE: Hi thanks a lot for
that really interesting talk. I'm curious if-- I think you mentioned
earlier in your talk, that it was
something like, other than cities that have gone
through gentrification process. CHARLES MAROHN: Yeah. AUDIENCE: I was wondering if any
in one of those maps of capital going in or going out, how
someplace like New York looks nowadays. CHARLES MAROHN: We've
never modeled New York. The data is not-- it's not been
available in the way that some other places have. New York would be off the map. I mean we've seen
places like this. I think it's important
to understand the point on gentrification. Because some of those cities
are highly gentrified that we showed and some aren't. But you see the same pattern,
whether it's blighted. You see the same
pattern, whether it's occupied by wealthy
people or poor people. The most productive land
is geographic based, not income based. But let me say this, and
I'm going to say this, it's going to sound
a little coarse. Be generous with me in
your interpretation. If we go back in time
and we look at cities, cities used to be wealthy people
surrounded by poor people. That's what a city was. Think of a castle. You were inside the castle
walls, and you were connected, and if you were outside,
you were kind of left to fend for yourself. In the United States,
after World War II, we decided that cities would
become poor people surrounded by wealthy people. I think that was horrible public
policy for many, many reasons. But we put trillions of dollars
into making that happen. As those support systems
start to go away, what we see is that American
cities are starting to, again, become wealthy people
surrounded by poor people. That is the most
despotic outcome that can possibly happen. Because if you look at
cities of the '50s and '60s, and this decline we had,
people trapped in those places struggled. And this was not a
kind thing to do. Yet they struggled
within neighborhoods that were coherent,
places where you could get groceries, and
get a job, and get on a bus, and get somewhere. Today we are trapping
people in suburbs that A, are falling
apart, B, don't have that kind of basic
life infrastructure, and C, just have a really high,
high burn rate, financially and energy wise, in
order to live there, which the poorest people in
our communities don't have. So the pattern is going to look
the same, whether the community is poor or wealthy. The height will be different. Like a like a New York is going
to have a big, huge spike, because it's a
very wealthy place. A little town in
North Carolina is going to have the same
general layout to their model, but it will be at
much, much lower rates, because it's a poorer place. I think that the challenge
we have is not, in a sense, making the outskirts wealthier
, because that would be a really crazy development pattern,
but finding a place in those communities that are going
through that gentrification pressure, to switch from an all
at once development pattern, which has dislocation with it,
to an incremental development pattern that brings people
with and shares that wealth and a broader distribution. Does that make sense? AUDIENCE: Yeah, it would
be interesting to hear ideas for those policies. CHARLES MAROHN:
I'll give you one that I think is a
really good model. And I'm embarrassed
to go around sometimes because I'm from
Minnesota, where we don't like to talk about ourselves. But I'll toot our
horn a little bit. I think Minneapolis has
what, today, is like the best policy for urban development
in terms of how they're dealing with single family homes. If you have a single
family home in Minneapolis, and the ordinance will
be finalized in December, there is no friction for you
to turn it into a triplex. Imagine tripling the
capacity of housing stock in the neighborhoods
of Minneapolis. It's a huge boom. And I think we'll be great
for people who prior would have been just gentrified out. Please. AUDIENCE: Hi, so thanks
again for your talk. I feel like I learned a lot. But I came into the
talk with having thought a lot about the
influence of cars on society. And in the first
half your talk, when you were talking a
lot about how there is this major shift around the
time of the Great Depression, and then after World War II,
to me, that seemed like it was very, well not
coincidental, but it could seem coincidental
or very causal, that when cars became
affordable and cheap, and then the government
started subsidizing the infrastructure
for the cars, that's when this like build all at
once mentality became popular, and the densification
went way down. And so I'm wondering how
much you agree with this and maybe how you
would approach it from a policy
perspective, how much the regulation of cars
and of car infrastructure would make a difference. CHARLES MAROHN: Again,
I get where you're at. I think a little bit with
the density question, it's a cause-effect
kind of thing. The idea is that cars have
caused this development pattern. And the reality is we can go to
other parts of the globe, where they have cars, and they don't
have this development pattern. So it's not clear to
me that cars caused it. What we did with cars is we used
the automobile to accelerate this growth strategy we had. But even in your
beautiful city here, until very, very
recently, you decided that the best thing
that you could do would be to turn over the
public realm to fast moving automobiles. And you still struggle to
kind of walk back from that. It didn't change the
overall density or layout. It just made it a
little more miserable and treacherous to live in. The fact that you've
started to switch it now has made the place more
delightful, and more inviting, and more welcoming for
the humans who live here, but it didn't really affect
the development densities, in a sense. I think that we-- let me just summarize. I don't think the
automobile is our problem. And I don't have any
problems with the automobile. I do think that we have created
this very strange paradigm, where, in most of
America, the automobile is used for trips of two blocks. You all of the sudden have
created a thing where you cannot walk to a place or cannot
get somewhere without driving. We've essentially gone from
automobile as liberation to the automobile as
like mandated prosthetic in 90% of the built habitat
we've created in the US. You won't find that
any other place in the world, even where they
have high automobile usage rates. So we have some
deep dysfunction, but I think it's more
of an urban design than it is actually driving
the underlying problem. The underlying problem
is one of finance, more than the actual automobile. The fact of how we finance ,
things how we build them all at once to a finished state has
become the huge problem that we're struggling with. Are we done? OK, I apologize for not being
able to get to everything else. Again, thank you. I really, really appreciate
the opportunity to be here. MODERATOR: Give a big round
of applause to Charles Marohn. [APPLAUSE]
My favorite line of the talk might be, "Our cities should not be worried about forcing people to walk a block or two, they should be worried about not being worthy of a one or two block walk".
Thank god for Mahron.
I think his points, while not encompassing every single issue perfectly when it comes to urban design, make a strong case from the human scale aspect, as well as the financial aspect. And the latter is super fucking key for getting more sensible urban policy more mainstream in America. The more people realize the financial insolvency of their municipalities, the more they're likely to make personal sacrifices when it comes to density to ensure they maintain the services they desire from their municipality.
I just obtained his book on my kindle, very excited to read.
His narrative for Detroit is the most cohesive, convincing, and terrifying one I have ever heard. 😬