Copyright © 2020 by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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ISBN 9781119564812 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781119565154 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119564805 (ePub)
Cover Photograph: © Getty Images | Zhu Qiu / EYEEM
Cover design: Paul McCarthy
For my friend Joe, whose generosity knows no limits.
For my wife, Kirsti, whose patience is likewise endless.
And for my daughters, Chloe and Stella, who have been
asked to sacrifice too much.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Chapter 1. Human Habitat Complex, Adaptive Systems
Spooky Wisdom
Systems That Are Merely Complicated
Notes
Chapter 2. Incremental Growth Complex versus Complicated Buildings
Neighborhood Renewal
The Stifling Nature of High Land Values
Private and Public Investment
The Party Analogy
Note
Chapter 3. An Infinite Game An Infinite Game
Revenues and Expenses
Infrastructure Not as a Means, but as an End
The Municipal Ponzi Scheme
The Illusion of Wealth
Understanding Detroit
Notes
Chapter 4. The Infrastructure Cult The American Society of Civil Engineers
Real Investment, Paper Returns
Accounting for Infrastructure
Assuming Secondary Effects
A Real Return on Investment
The Data Doesn’t Lie
Notes
Chapter 5. Growth or Stability Where Does Strength Come From?
Depression Economics
The Last Country Standing
The Post-War Boom
Struggling with Constraints
Going All In on Debt
Does Growth Serve Us?
The Difference Between Growth and Wealth
A Paradox of Thrift or Avarice?
Notes
Chapter 6. Rational Responses A Long Decline
Restoration of Normal
Making Difficult Decisions within a Complex, Adaptive System
Notes
Chapter 7. Productive Places A Simple Math Problem
The Financial Strength of the Old and Blighted
Downtown versus the Edge
Value per Acre
Lafayette’s Return on Investment
Personal Preferences
Notes
Chapter 8. Making Strong Investments The Barbell Investment Approach
Low-Risk Investments with Steady Returns
Little Bets
Filling in the Gaps
Prudent Constraints
Suburban Retrofit
Notes
Chapter 9. Place-Oriented Government The Local Government Response to Hardship
Designed for Efficiency
A Focus on Broad Wealth Creation
Celebrate Maintenance
Recognizing Our Confirmation Bias
Understanding Debt
Negative Knowledge
Subsidiarity
Notes
Chapter 10. An Intentional Life Moving to a Neighborhood
A Good, Long Walk
Talking to Each Other
A Life of Meaning
Notes
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About Strong Towns
Get Involved in the Strong Towns Movement
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 7 Table 7.1
Chapter 9 Table 9.1
Table 9.2
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1 Figure 1.1 (a) Traditional home with proportions of a face. Neither the (b) ranch home nor...
Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 Front Street in Brainerd, Minnesota, 1870
Figure 2.2 Front Street in Brainerd, Minnesota, 1904
Figure 2.3 Improvement to Land (I/L) Ratio over Time
Figure 2.4 Private Investment Leading Public Investment
Figure 2.5 Public Investment Leading Private Investment
Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 Municipal Cash Flow over One Life Cycle for a Single Development
Figure 3.2 Municipal Cash Flow over One Life Cycle for Multiple Developments in Sequence
Figure 3.3 Municipal Cash Flow over Two Life Cycles for Multiple Developments in Sequence
Chapter 8 Figure 8.1 Investment Allocation for a Medium Strategy and for a Barbell Strategy
Figure 8.2 What Is the Value of the Vacant Lot?
Figure 8.3 What Is the Value of the Single-Family Home?
Chapter 9 Figure 9.1 Debt Is Not Necessary because Cash Flow Is Sufficient to Fund Maintenance
Figure 9.2 Debt Is Used to Make Up for a Cash-Flow Shortfall but Revenue Is Sufficient to ...
Figure 9.3 Revenue Is Not Sufficient to Cover Ongoing Maintenance Expense, but That Fact I...
Foreword
Santa Ana, California, is working hard and pulling together to transform itself into a twenty-first-century city by following the advice and principles that Chuck Marohn lays out in Strong Towns.
I met Chuck in 2014 when he spoke in Santa Ana, California, where I served as a city council member, but I had followed Strong Towns for many years before that. Chuck’s love for America’s cities, and his desire to make them strong and resilient, resonated with me because that’s how I felt about my city.
Thanks to my study of the Strong Town
s philosophy, I have learned that cities can cultivate resiliency and prosperity in the lives of even their most vulnerable citizens. It’s every elected official and public servant’s responsibility to ensure we have systems in place that help cities meet the needs of their people. This book not only explains why this is so urgent, but how we get there.
For twelve years, I served on the City Council of my hometown of Santa Ana. Our community is 78 percent Latino, 10 percent Asian, and 9 percent white, with a high population of undocumented residents. It’s a modern-day Ellis Island for Latinos with a median age of 29, nine years below the US median. Santa Ana, which is the fourth most densely populated city in America (right after Boston), faces all the challenges of today’s urban America.
When I arrived in Santa Ana in 1990 as a young girl, I faced challenges too. My mother was in prison. I didn’t know my father. My great-grandmother was raising me and eleven other great-grandchildren. We grew up in an environment with poverty, gang violence, and drugs.
I was one of the only kids who didn’t use drugs, go to jail, or join a gang. I was fortunate. I had teachers and a few other adults who saw something in me and tried to help. The Boys & Girls Club of Santa Ana became my family. When I graduated high school, a businessman and community leader involved in the Boys & Girls Club offered me a job that would also pay for my education. I went to work for Mark Press at his baking company while attending the local community college. This changed my life.
I realize today that none of this would have happened without the invisible glue that binds a community together. These are the connections that are essential to a strong town.
From Chuck Marohn I came to understand how vital the physical layout of a city is for creating those connections. Strong towns aren’t made by real estate speculation or self-serving public policy. They are grown by the ideas, creativity, and the imagination of people within the community and by entrepreneurs and public servants who understand what needs must be addressed for the place to prosper.
I decided to run for city council at age of 26 because I wanted to create that same sense of opportunity for others that I had been given. Nobody believed I’d win, much less make a difference, but I told my story over and over and knocked on thousands of doors. I looked people in the eye and said, “I’m not a politician. All I want to do is make a difference in the community that helped raise me.” They gave me a chance, and I am grateful to say that I kept my word. I served on the Santa Ana Council from 2006 to 2018.
Like Chuck, I am a fiscal conservative and was vocal about the city being insolvent: you can’t spend money you don’t have. Chuck helped me understand the roots of today’s public sector fiscal crisis, how we regulate real estate development in favor of auto-oriented sprawl instead of building communities that focus on mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods that emphasize social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
I became a positive disruptor, despite people who didn’t want me rocking the boat. We were living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Chuck came to speak to us. We had the building blocks – a street grid, a promising downtown, amazing residents, and active neighborhood associations – we just needed the right messenger to explain that we could make the changes we needed without leaving people behind. The Strong Towns message changed the conversation.
In the past, an alarming number of Santa Ana’s residents were falling through the cracks. The standard public policy responses were based on flawed notions of what makes communities thrive. Strong Towns provides an alternative approach, one that works because it focuses on people.
Chuck believes in getting out and experiencing a community with the people who live there. It’s the only way to understand where their struggles are. I saw the truth of this when I served as a volunteer policy advisor for a federal court judge who presided over a homeless case with north Orange County cities. This judge walked the six-mile riverbed stretch where more than 1,000 people were encamped. He threatened to issue an injunction and, soon after, Santa Ana built a temporary shelter in just 28 days. Within a year, we had 5 shelters in Orange County and 4 more in the pipeline.
We followed Chuck’s advice in other areas too, looking for high-impact ways to make neighborhoods better for our people. Santa Ana has a very high rate of pedestrian fatalities—the third highest in the United States behind Los Angeles and San Francisco. This is an urgent matter because 56 percent of our residents don’t have access to a personal car, and alternative transportation options are severely limited. We sought and received over $44 million in funding for active transportation and safety so we could address these struggles.
I stepped down from city council in 2018, but the things I fought for are still coming to fruition. We have more biking and walking infrastructure than any other city in Orange County. A streetcar is coming and promises to transform our downtown. We’ll have more housing and more transportation choices, and we are creating a stronger sense of place. Such changes take time and happen incrementally, but with a Strong Towns approach, we’re getting there.
When people hear the Strong Towns message, they get it. They see that we simply can’t keep doing things the way we have been. Our current approach is outdated. Our governments are antiquated, with little focus on fiscal sustainability. No longer can cities experience massive growth with no way to maintain it.
A new approach will require innovation, organic co-creation of the community, transportation systems that make sense, thriving downtowns, and a commitment to taking a hard look at the math before we make decisions.
Right now, few cities have those conversations. Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns are changing that. We have the ability to rebuild our communities and create a broader prosperity. This book is your paradigm shift to get started.
Michele C. Martinez
Former City Councilmember,
City of Santa Ana, California
1
Human Habitat
For thousands of years, humans built cities for people who walked. The size of buildings, spacing of destinations, and distances individuals would travel on a routine day were scaled for a society where nearly everyone traveled by foot. This was true for human settlement across all continents, spanning all latitudes.
Today, in North America, we build cities around a more modern transportation technology: the automobile. We have developed different building types, different development styles, and different ways of arranging things on the landscape, all to accommodate a living arrangement based on automobile travel.
If you query Americans about this transition, nearly all would talk about it in terms of progress. Humans of the past used to walk everywhere and so they built settlements around people who walked. Today, we drive everywhere, and so we build our cities around people who drive. Someday people will have jet cars or teleportation technology and their cities will look completely different than ours.
The narrative we tell ourselves is one of progress. We like to think of it in this way because doing so places us on a path of improvement, one where our lives are continually getting better. There is another way to think about these changes, however, that isn’t quite as comforting. It’s a more plausible narrative, one worth pausing to consider.
When we ponder the layout of ancient cities, we must acknowledge that they are the byproduct of thousands of years of human tinkering. People came together in villages and tried different living arrangements. What worked, they copied and expanded. What didn’t work, they discarded. That is, if those experiments hadn’t already killed or disbanded them.
Humans used trial-and-error experimentation for thousands of years to refine humanity’s approach to building its habitat. By the time history reaches the apex of ancient cities Americans are familiar with, places such as Athens or Rome, those experiments had been tested during times of abundance and scarcity, peace and war, disease, pestilence, stagnation, and growth. The result was a pattern of development that was adaptable, productive, and strong.
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br /> This same pattern can be seen in the pre-1900s cities of North America. While the architecture changes with geography and time, the essential layout is the same. A person living in a frontier town in the early 1900s, or Manhattan of the same period, could have bought a meal, earned a paycheck, and found a place to sleep, all within a reasonable walk. In other words, these neighborhoods would have been familiar to our ancient city-dwelling ancestors.
That same insight is no longer true. The way we now build cities in North America would be unrecognizable to an American who lived even a century ago. It would be difficult for them to comprehend a highway, a parking lot, a shopping mall, or a middle-class family in a single-family home with a three-car garage. They would be lost in the world of big box stores, office parks, and cul-de-sacs.
Get beyond whether the changes have been positive or not; there is one important aspect of this shift that is critical to acknowledge: It was abrupt. Humans had been living one way for thousands of years, yet within just a couple of decades, Americans transformed an entire continent around a new set of ideas.
Those ideas were not the byproduct of thousands of years of trial and error experimentation. They did not evolve into being. They originated largely from the writings of a handful of European intellectuals, notions their cultures largely rejected, but Americans – with lots of room, boundless optimism, and no ancient moorings – readily adopted.
In the context of human history, the North American development pattern is the largest human experiment ever attempted. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, we have transformed everything about how we live, get around, interact with each other, make decisions, conduct commerce, fall in love, and countless other aspects of human existence.
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