Strong Towns

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

  Few elected officials have any clue how much debt their community has. Much of it is hidden from the operating budget, tucked away in off-balance-sheet revenue accounts that are obscured by interfund transfers. An ideal state policy would require cities to report total debt. It would also limit the annual debt service of local governments, from all sources, to 5% of locally generated revenue, allowing that amount to climb to 10% with a community-wide referendum.

  In the absence of state mandates, local governments should voluntarily discipline their reporting and spending in this way. The temptation to solve today’s problems with debt is too great, and the potential ramifications too serious, not to be extremely wary over municipal indebtedness.

  Negative Knowledge

  I was at a city council meeting where a resident showed up to complain about a neighbor who wasn’t bringing their garbage can in quickly enough after pickup day. The guy making the complaint demanded that the city council enact an ordinance, with fines, for anyone who leaves their bin out more than 24 hours. Sympathetic council members quickly reached consensus on an entire set of regulations, fines, and routine inspections and then turned to me to see if I could put that package together for them to adopt.

  Before responding to the city council, I listed a bunch of reasonable explanations for why someone might not collect their garbage can right away. Then I asked the man making the complaint whether he had spoken with his neighbor about the situation. He hadn’t, of course, even though that would have taken far less time and energy – and likely been more helpful – than coming to the council meeting. He wanted the elected officials to address this discomfort for him. They were eager to be helpful.

  This is not uncommon. Most city codes, policies, and practices are a reaction to a complaint, discomfort, or irregular situation. They are enacted in all earnestness by people doing their best to safeguard the community. Many were enacted so long ago, and for such obscure reasons, that nobody recalls precisely why. The only consensus today is that bad things will happen if they are repealed, and – more importantly – the people doing the repealing will be held to account.

  If cities are going to build complex human habitat, the kind where individuals responding to feedback work collaboratively to make their place more prosperous, then local leaders need to resist the temptation to address every discomfort. More than that, there must be a concerted effort to repeal codes, policies, and bureaucratic processes, especially when they impede development at the next increment of intensity.

  For complex systems, the rationale of improving through removal is described by Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile.

  We know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). Knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition – given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.1

  I’ve recommended to city officials that they examine their regulations and identify those that, if they were ignored, would do damage to their community that could not be repaired in a decade. Keep only those rules and throw the rest out. There is so much to be done figuring out how to evolve cities to be financially productive, so many new lessons to be learned, that we should only restrict those things that can mortally wound the community.

  Cities shouldn’t be regulating things like temporary seating, siding finishes, or whether a building houses an attorney or an accountant. They should never mandate parking. They should obsess about how buildings address each other: that it opens onto the street, complements neighboring structures in scale and character, and respects the humans who traverse past it.

  This is not a call for deregulation as much as a new approach. Many cities are replacing the use-based codes they adopted to facilitate post-war development patterns with form-based codes that come closer to dealing with issues directly related to financial productivity. These are positive changes, especially when the form-based approach allows the neighborhood to incrementally thicken up without needing any special permissions.

  If we want productive investment, we also must be strategic with our regulation. For example, none of the buildings on the Old and Blighted block referenced in Chapter 7 have commercial sprinkler systems. Anyone looking to make improvements to one of these buildings must address this deficiency, an expense greater than the value of the building itself. There is no way the cost of a sprinkler will be recouped in a reasonable time frame, and so nothing happens. These buildings remain locked in regulatory purgatory; lack of investment ensures decline, but decline makes unprofitable the kind of investment needed to meet code.

  The phasing of this relationship needs to be reversed. Instead of stopping all investment until full compliance is reached, the process should be used to bring the building into compliance over time. For example, if a new business wants to open in an old building, do an inspection and make sure that there are no imminent health threats – no frayed wires arcing over bails of straw under a gasoline drip – and, barring any urgent issues, let them open provisionally.

  Six months later, once they have a sense of whether their business venture is viable, go out and document all the code deficiencies with the property. Rank them in terms of urgency. Require the business owner to put 3% of their revenue into an escrow account for addressing deficiencies, starting with the most urgent. When they are done, remove their provisional status and stop collecting the escrow.

  To build a productive place, people must be able to start with nothing and, through their efforts, end up with something. When we raise the bar to entry, we not only induce decline, we ensure that many of our neighbors will be left behind. Successful communities raise the bar of prosperity without raising the entry fee.

  Subsidiarity

  A closing note in this chapter on what I’ve heard the great architect and urban planner Andres Duany call “the chicken problem”: Who should decide whether a person can have backyard chickens? Who should establish those regulations, if any are even warranted?

  The identification of who is the critical preface to the central question of backyard chickens. Who decides? Is this something that should be decided by the city council? Should this be a decision of the regional government? Should the state weigh in or should there be federal legislation regulating the proper care and treatment of backyard chickens?

  Federal legislation seems absurd in this instance, and that is the point. A collection of neighbors can come to a decision on whether to have backyard chickens on their block. Whether or not they can cordially come to an agreement is beside the point: They have among them everything they need to have that conversation and make that decision.

  In contrast, these neighbors are not capable of deciding where the regional rapid transit line should be located. Or what the capacity of the interstate should be. Or whether people of different races or incomes should be allowed to live in their community. They are not capable of making these decisions because each decision encompasses a higher level of complexity than backyard chickens.

  In the United States today, who makes decisions is more impactful than what decision is ultimately made. It is absurd to suggest that Congress should regulate backyard chickens, but it is equally absurd to suggest that a few people in a neighborhood should have the capacity to, for example, block the construction of a regional transit line. American culture spends a lot of time debating what should be done, but hardly any time discussing who should make the decision.

  The concept of who decides is enshrined in a principle called subsidiarity. I have come to understand subsidiarity through Catholic teaching, but the concept goes back much further. Here is how Wikipedia presents the idea:

  Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Politic
al decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as “the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.”2

  Central to the concept of subsidiarity is the act of offering assistance, as opposed to mandating a direction. A collection of neighbors may not be able to reach a decision on backyard chickens; perhaps they are all antagonistic and have difficulty talking to each other. A modern approach would have the city step in, take over the decision-making process, and make a definitive ruling on whether backyard chickens are allowed and under what circumstances.

  In contrast, the practice of subsidiarity would call on the city to, at most, assist these quarreling neighbors with reaching a decision. They have the capacity to decide and so they must decide; that decision can’t be made for them. Maybe a city staff member goes out and talks to everyone, or maybe the city convenes a meeting with a third-party. It might be easier and more expedient for the city to rule but taking from these neighbors the responsibility to make the decision robs them not only of their agency, but their capacity to be a collaborator in the project of building a successful city.

  I am often approached by governors, state legislators, members of Congress, and, on a couple of occasions, even representatives from the executive branch of the federal government for my input on what they can do to follow a Strong Towns approach and build a stronger America. These interactions rarely go well because my answer – subsidiarity – is not the proactive set of policies they are seeking. For them, subsidiarity feels more like giving up. And power, once assumed, is difficult to relinquish.

  State and federal officials frequently express their reluctance to turn over decision-making to local officials they view as incompetent, ignorant, or worse. They fail to recognize how turning city councils into glorified dog catchers, by simplifying their authority and degree of action, Congress and state legislatures have created the conditions where the most competent, innovative, and dynamic local leaders tend to stay away from city hall.

  California is a particularly perplexing example of this. The state, through ballot initiatives and legislative action, has stripped most taxing authority away from cities, leaving only a couple of coarse and nonadaptive approaches in the municipal toolbox. Cities respond by doing the one thing that brings in significant new revenue – more horizontal expansion – and the state supports that directly through massive levels of transportation subsidy.

  Then, given the environmental and social disaster of converting the open landscape to shoddy housing and, even worse, commercial development, as well as the obscene costs of the subsequent traffic congestion, the state enacts round after round of laws requiring environmental reviews, community engagement, and comprehensive planning and zoning regimes.

  These laws have slowed – through by no means stopped – the worst development practices, but they also have the perverse effect of giving individuals, especially the wealthy and well connected, mechanisms for stopping nearly any development proposal. Housing in California has become brutally expensive, partially because individual neighborhoods are empowered to delay, if not altogether stop, projects that would create more housing.

  In response, the California legislature has considered multiple proposals to strip local governments of decision-making authority on many building and permitting matters, further dulling any local initiative to adapt to the stresses being experienced. The trend in California is to rule on everything from Sacramento, to only allow local governments the limited power needed to administer the policy direction set forth by the state.

  That tendency is the opposite of subsidiarity. California is by no means alone in this reaction, but, being the largest state, California’s efforts at centralization, the lurching from grand solution to grand solution in Sacramento, is the most visible example nationwide. I respect the motivation, but the relationship with local governments is not healthy.

  Federal and state political leaders who want to advocate for a Strong Towns approach will embrace subsidiarity as a governing principle. When legislating, they will ask themselves: What is the smallest, lowest, or least-centralized level of decision- making where this issue can be competently dealt with? Who should make this decision? Extra effort should be made to assist instead of mandate, to build competence while increasing feedback and accountability.

  This doesn’t mean local governments will always make the right decision. In fact, I can guarantee that many will not. They’ll make frustratingly stupid mistakes. Some of these will be hurtful, even offensive. Subsidiarity trades the dull and growing discomfort of a systematic decline for the acute pain of localized failure. Those who seek innovative responses to hardship must embrace that tradeoff.

  My experience has made me skeptical, however, that state and federal governments will voluntarily devolve power, even in the face of declining capacity to enforce their will. By remaking local government to focus on the broad creation of wealth, local leaders will develop the capacity to assert their own competence. America needs that to happen.

  Notes

  1 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (New York: Random House, LLC, 2012).

  2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(Catholicism)

  10

  An Intentional Life

  My oldest daughter, Chloe, came home from her first day of kindergarten bursting with joy. Back then she was a chatty princess with a lot to say. My wife and I listened to her tell us about her day: her teacher, the new routine, all the new friends she was making. It was beautiful.

  At one point she told us the important details about a new girl she met. This new friend had blonde hair (like Chloe) and blue eyes (like Chloe) and she liked the color pink (serendipitously, just like Chloe). With so much in common, they were destined to be friends. In fact, Chloe declared they were going to be best friends. The new girl’s name was Holly.

  It wasn’t long after that we found out an important detail about Holly: She lived with her family in a home directly across the street from ours. Not down the road. Not up the block. Directly opposite the street from our home.

  My wife and I had lived in our house for over a dozen years at that point. Holly’s family had lived in theirs even longer. We were both active families, involved in the community, with work, and with our churches. Yet, the thick woods covering the lots we each occupied along a cul-de-sac was enough of a barrier to our getting to know each other that we didn’t even realize our neighbors across the street had a little girl the same age as ours.

  That is, until they met at the kindergarten in the elementary school six miles away.

  I’ve spent a good portion of my professional life trying to understand why cities struggle financially. Why, despite all the growth, all the infrastructure, all the work that I was involved in trying to create prosperity, did the cities I knew most intimately have such profound financial problems? In searching for that answer, I have encountered questions that go far beyond my inquiry, questions I was unprepared for and feel incapable of adequately answering.

  How much more joy, happiness, and love would my daughter have experienced growing up had we understood that her best friend lived a few hundred feet away? How many walks with the stroller would have been made a little more lovely with neighbors?

  Questions like these are outside of my expertise, yet I’ve found myself dwelling on them. They are the essential questions, the ones that matter most. As I ponder what it means to be human, co-evolved with a habitat that – through thousands of years of trial and error experimentation – was harmonized for my existence, I can’t help but question what this great experiment has done to me, to my family, and to all of us.

  I’m blessed with the most beautiful mother-in-law. She is generous to a fault, always giving of herself to my wife, my children, and to me. As I think about h
ow our habitats shape our behavior, I’ve taken note of how she impacts my family.

  When we know my mother-in-law is stopping by, my wife will tidy up the house. It’s not that our house is particularly messy, or that my mother-in-law would judge us lacking if it were, but more that my wife’s respect and admiration for her mom makes her take note of the shape our home is in. It’s one of those subtle things, a cue to the rest of the family.

  I’ve watched how my two daughters burst with joy when their grandmother is around, how the affection she has for them is different from the way my wife and I interact with them. It’s a different dimension of unconditional love and it has an important impact on the kids. And, of course, while my wife and I talk a lot, those conversations are very different than the ones she has with her mom. I’m incapable of providing my wife with the calming reassurance that one conversation with her mom can bring.

  I’ve noticed changes in my own behavior. I’m a better man – I’m a better version of me – when my mother-in-law is around. I’m politer. I’m kinder. I’m less judgmental and more generous with my spirit. I find myself wanting to be a better person in her presence.

  It’s not lost on me that, if I had been born even a century earlier, there is a strong likelihood that my mother-in-law would be living with us, not in a house 15 miles away. If you asked me whether I want my mother-in-law living here, I – like nearly every modern American family – would say “no,” yet it’s clear to me that my children would be happier and more loved. My wife would maybe struggle a little but would likely feel more secure, more complete. And I’m confident that I would ultimately be a better person, that my low moments would be not-so-low, tempered by the daily influence of an extended family.

  I’m not suggesting we should all live with our in-laws. There is a reason why, when given the choice, Americans opted for a different living arrangement. Living closely with others can be difficult. There is tension to be worked out. Disputes to be resolved. Many competing interests to be harmonized.