Strong Towns

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

  It would be difficult, yes, but would we be better for it? I don’t know, but I suspect we might.

  Moving to a Neighborhood

  Ultimately my family moved from the cul-de-sac into an urban neighborhood a few blocks from my city’s downtown. Moving from a neighborhood that I don’t believe has a future to a 1914 home in a historic area was one way my family acted on the insights from my work with Strong Towns. Even so, it was a lifestyle choice as much as a financial decision.

  At the old house, the girls were stuck biking the driveway, maybe the cul-de-sac. Anything unaccompanied beyond that risked tragedy with a speeding vehicle and a moment of inattention. And even if they had ventured further, there was no place to go. Their friends were likewise spread across the area, brought together outside of school only through scheduled play dates and long car rides.

  The new neighborhood is full of kids. A city park is a mere block away. The girls have learned to navigate the neighborhood on their own, a life skill I took for granted yet few of their peers seem to possess. They can go to the store or the library or, when they scrounge up some money, downtown for an ice cream. I’m watching them grow into the kind of confident people I always hoped they would be.

  The move has saved me five hours a week of commuting. Instead of being stuck behind the wheel, I walk or bike to work. And to get groceries. And to the hardware store. And anyplace else I can reasonably get to, even in the winter. I go days without driving, and I’ve felt myself become more relaxed, less stressed, as a result.

  The most consequential change with the move has been adding neighbors to my life. I will acknowledge, having grown up on a farm without neighbors, and having watched some of my short-tempered uncles get in petty feuds with theirs, this was the thing I was most nervous about with the move. My apprehension could not have been more misplaced.

  I live in Minnesota and it snows here in the winter, sometimes quite a bit. I’m responsible for shoveling the snow off the sidewalks in front of my house, but I often don’t get the chance. Every time it snows, there is an informal race to be the friendliest neighbor and clear everyone’s sidewalks. Very often, I’ll go out with a shovel only to discover that mine are already cleared.

  There’s an elderly woman across the alley who offered to pay me to clear the snow from her driveway. I clear the snow, but no money changes hands. She keeps an eye on things, including my kids and my sometimes wandering dog. It’s been more than a fair trade.

  I’m an introvert who enjoys long walks alone, avoids social gatherings where possible, and can’t remember names. None of that has kept me from getting to know all my immediate neighbors. It’s almost impossible not to as we run into them all the time. I know their kids, their pets, and some of their plants. When we’re out of town, they watch our house. We do likewise for them.

  I’m not so naïve as to believe that all neighbors are wonderful, but mine are. They add a lot of joy to my life. And even if they didn’t, they’re helpful. Life can be a struggle; it’s good to have someone right there helping. I imagine that the people who built my house more than a century ago felt similarly.

  That is, if they even noticed. This is how humans had been building neighborhoods for as long as any of them could remember. It’s possible they just took acting neighborly for granted. It was as expected a cultural practice as merging in traffic is to us.

  A Good, Long Walk

  I was part of an exchange program sponsored by Rotary International that sent me to Southern Italy back in the spring of 2000. I had never been out of the country, let alone to someplace so different from where I came from. The trip changed my life.

  Part of the unique experience of being in Italy was, of course, the food. The team I was with all ate like royalty. Our various Italian hosts brought us out for what felt like a Thanksgiving-scale meal, twice a day, every day. Later in the trip when I was on my own, I ate an entire pizza every day for dinner and, when I learned the word for “French fries,” added an order of them – fried in exquisite olive oil – to my regular diet. I’ve never eaten so much in a six-week period.

  The other unique experience for me was walking. I came from a city, in a culture, where a trip longer than a block meant getting into a car. In Italy, we walked everywhere. They all did. It was the easiest way to get around and, since everyone walked most places, the cities were very delightful to walk in.

  I’m six feet tall. When I arrived in Italy, I weighed 185 pounds, a weight slightly above where I should have been at that age but by no means overweight. When I left Italy six weeks later, despite eating a bizarre amount of food, I weighed a very heathy 165. I could talk about the value of the Mediterranean diet, but that wasn’t it for me. It was all the walking.

  All of us on the trip recognized the same effect. In fact, at one point we were sitting outside at a café watching people walk by when we decided to count the number of them who were obviously overweight. It was a busy street with at least a couple people walking by each minute. We were there about 30 minutes. Total count: zero.

  This is not to say that Italians don’t struggle with obesity – official statistics suggest that they increasingly do1 – nor that the well-tailored clothing they tended to wear didn’t have a slimming effect, but it’s clear that the people living there walked a lot, and that the activity seemed to keep them slimmer than what we were used to experiencing in America.

  Upon returning to the Central Minnesota lifestyle I was accustomed to, I not only quickly regained the weight, but over time added even more. Yet, when my family moved from the cul-de-sac to the neighborhood home, I experienced a similar slimming effect. I was not going to the gym to work out, but I was now walking and biking a lot as part of my daily routine. My youngest daughter, Stella, went to a neighborhood school a mile away and we frequently biked there together. The weight started to come down, little by little, despite no real changes to my (notoriously poor) eating habits.

  Public health is outside of my area of expertise, but it’s hard not to entertain a connection between the new, experimental human habitat we’ve created and our national crisis with obesity. Heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are all complex health conditions with multiple vectors of causation; I’m not attempting to argue otherwise. Even so, every time I’ve been to the doctor – for myself or with an elderly family member – the medical advice has always included daily physical activity.

  The people who lived in my neighborhood a century ago walked multiple blocks – often many miles – as part of their everyday routine. Their ancestors would have done likewise. Today, it’s not only possible but very likely that, without intentional effort, someone living in this same neighborhood would experience only a small fraction of that level of physical activity.

  Humans are adapting to a new set of conditions, shifting into habitat we’re not physiologically accustomed to. When we look at other species, we observe Darwin’s merciless insights: Evolution occurs with the survival of those best adapted to changing conditions. What type of human is best adapted to a sedentary lifestyle? It’s unclear, with our unique capacity to countermand death in many instances, how we will evolve under this new set of stresses.

  My walking and biking also revealed to me the large number of people who walk because they have no other choice. When I was traveling at high speeds in my car, these people were mostly invisible to me. Now they are everywhere, and I’m astounded by their struggles.

  Walking is a lifestyle for me. When it’s pouring down rain, or when the temperature is below zero as it often is during Minnesota’s winters, I have the choice to drive. Many of my neighbors do not. And as a professional running my own organization, I also have job security. If I decide I’m working from home to avoid nasty weather, there are no negative ramifications. For my neighbors that work multiple part-time jobs at or near minimum wage – and I’ve now met many of them – even being late has ramifications.

  Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can S
ave America, One Step at a Time, describes a good walk as one that is “useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.” As I ponder how these four elements in what Jeff calls his “General Theory of Walkability” apply to my town, I recognize how despotic for people not in an automobile we have made this formerly walkable place. That the change has come at such a great cost to our financial health and prosperity only makes it more disturbing.

  Financial realities demand that we make our cities more walkable, but it seems more than possible that this act will also make our lives better in unpredictable ways. As Speck suggests in Walkable City:

  We must understand that the walkable city is not just a nice, idealistic notion. Rather, it is a simple, practical-minded solution to a host of complex problems that we face as a society, problems that daily undermine our nation’s economic competitiveness, public welfare, and environmental sustainability.2

  In fairly simple and straightforward ways, we can improve the financial health of our cities while improving people’s lives. I’ve come to find that insight deeply satisfying.

  Talking to Each Other

  It’s hard not to question how our national discourse has been impacted by this development experiment. I’m aware that recency bias may prejudice us to believe that things have never been worse, but even if they aren’t catastrophic from a historical perspective, there is something that feels deeply broken about the way Americans speak to each other, especially on political issues.

  Many have identified social media as a root cause. I don’t want to discount that, especially since my own experience has demonstrated to me that the algorithms eagerly dispense a steady stream of distorted, inflammatory, and derisive information, regardless of who I follow and interact with. I have taken steps to expand the range of authentic voices I’m exposed to in my social streams, but the algorithms push intellectual junk food nonetheless. I’ve found it best to limit my own social media exposure.

  I live in a small town, but I get to spend a lot of my time in major cities, interacting with thoughtful people on substantive issues. In the modern political landscape, I go back and forth between Red America and Blue America, enjoying aspects of both but not feeling fully comfortable in either. Prior to November of 2016, ignorance of the other was accompanied with a level of suspicion, even curiosity. Following the election of Donald Trump as president, suspicion has turned to contempt, derision, and sometimes outright hatred.

  One of the common questions I find myself answering in both Americas is “Do they really believe . . . ,” as if the complex, multi-faceted “us” stands across the abyss from the monolithic “them,” geographic separation being the only thing keeping us from being debased, or worse, by the moral vacuousness of the other. Social media, and cable news, makes this experience more visceral, but there are reasons to suspect the core problem resides in how we have arranged ourselves.

  In his book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, journalist Bill Bishop combines demographic data, election results, and research in human psychology to show how America is becoming more politically polarized. As Americans move around in the modern landscape, they are now able to self-sort into neighborhoods of people with similar ideological frameworks.

  As people seek out the social settings they prefer – as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable – the nation grows more politically segregated – and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.

  We all live with the results: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life.3

  The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that Americans now live in “lifestyle enclaves” where they rarely encounter people with a different moral framework than their own. This has enormous ramifications for our discourse. When we don’t hear opposing viewpoints presented authentically by people we know and respect, those beliefs are easily reduced, caricatured, and discounted.

  This moves the median of accepted discourse in each enclave further to the extremes. A moderate opinion in an electorally blue city would be a radically left opinion in Red America. Conversely, a moderate opinion in a red precinct is offensive and heretical to those in Blue America. As Haidt explains in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics, this effect is universal across all political beliefs.

  Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.4

  What is different today from what our ancestors would have experienced is the unnaturally filtered and curated interactions we have with those of a different moral framework. Cities have historically had people of both liberal and conservative dispositions; in such places it would have been impossible not to intimately know someone with whom one politically disagreed. Today such moral isolation is easy, perhaps even the default.

  It’s my contention that cities need both mind-sets to solve problems and thrive. Hierarchy without compassion for individual suffering quickly becomes tyranny. The liberal framework is critical to helping us understand where existing social structures create harm, and pushing society to update, sometimes even completely reimagine, those structures.

  Yet, a society without a certain level of structure becomes chaotic, the destabilization creating deep psychological anxiety and tension. When conservatives advocate for certain institutions and traditions, they are – as Haidt has suggested – rightly pointing out that “you don’t help the bees by destroying the hive.”

  The deep irony of the post-war development experiment is that it was largely a liberal-initiated destruction of the hive, wrapped in the language of both nationalism and justice, that has now grown to be sacred to conservatives. Untangling that gordian knot of culture is going to require deep intention, and huge doses of empathy, by those who grasp the urgency of the situation.

  As an undergraduate, I identified with the Republican Party and called myself a conservative, even though I was more of a libertarian. This was during Bill Clinton’s first administration and the Newt Gingrich–led Republican Revolution. Around 2002, halfway through George W. Bush’s first term, I was invited to be a regular political commentator on a community radio station. We focused mostly on state politics but, of course, expanded our conversation as events warranted. I was introduced on-air as the “Republican” of the conversation.

  Over time, particularly as my work with Strong Towns progressed and I found myself interacting with lots of people outside of my moral matrix, I eventually stopped clinging to culturally defined political labels and allowed my own beliefs to wander. In 2015, I was invited to speak on a panel titled “Bipartisan Placemaking: Reaching Conservatives” at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Dallas. I thought about my remarks and came up with this formulation that fits most closely with my view of the world:

  At the national level, I tend to be libertarian. Let’s do a few things and do them very competently.

  At the state level, I tend to be a Minnesota version of conservative Republican. Let’s devolve power, use markets and feedback where it drives good outcomes, and let’s do limited state interventions when we have a broad consensus that things would be better by doing so. Let’s measure outcomes and hold ourselves to a high standard.

  At the regional level, I tend to favor a more progressive approach. Let’s cooperate in ways that improve everyone’s lives. Let
’s work together to make the world more just.

  At the city level, I’m fairly progressive. What do we need to do to make this place work for everyone? Let’s raise our taxes, and put sensible regulations in place, to make that a reality.

  At the neighborhood level, I’m pretty much a socialist. If there is something I have that you need, it’s yours. All I ask is that you do the same in return, for me and my family.

  At the family level, I’m completely communal. Without hesitation, I’ll give everything I have so my family has lives that are secure, happy, and prosperous. I expect nothing in return.

  Knowing this, which of the two dominant political parties do I most closely align with? I don’t think either one today, but if we went back a generation or two – or a hundred years – someone with my mind-set could have easily identified as a Republican or a Democrat. The parties themselves used to be far more intellectually diverse, less morally pure. I’ve presented this framework in front of many audiences and have always received positive feedback. In other words, I suspect my approach here is broadly representative of society. I believe that few of us are as rigidly orthodox in deed as our social feeds would suggest.

  In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen delves into the foundational assumptions of post-Enlightenment liberalism. His critique is the best explanation of the growing discontinuity between people, place, and politics that I have been exposed to. He suggests that central to the project of liberalism – which includes both left- and right-minded thinkers – is the elevation of the individual over the society, a condition that simultaneously elevates the centralized state.