Strong Towns

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

  Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expanse of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state. In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas.

  The deeper cooperation helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary liberal states – whether in Europe or America – have become simultaneously more statist, with ever more powers and activity vested in central authority, and more individualistic, with people becoming less associated and involved with such mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political parties, churches, communities, and even family.

  For both “liberals” and “conservatives,” the state becomes the main driver of individualism, while individualism becomes the main driver of the state.5

  I still talk politics on the same community radio station, but I worked to change the format. The program I’m now on is a monthly show called Dig Deep, where, for an hour or more, I join with the liberally-minded Aaron Brown in an effort to identify common ground across our political divide. We both work hard to avoid cheap shots and flaming rhetoric – it’s harder than it sounds – and we’ve committed intentional effort to understanding each other, even when we don’t agree.

  I think it’s no coincidence that Aaron and I find we have the most agreement when it comes to what should happen at the local level. I’m convinced that, the more we shift our focus and energy to cities, towns, and neighborhoods, the more virtue we will find in each other, and the more we will accomplish.

  A Life of Meaning

  Most nights I take a walk with the family dog, a Shar-Pei/Lab mix named Gryffindor. We have a regular route we travel that takes us by St. Francis Catholic Church. This is the church my family attends. My parents go there. I remember sitting next to my grandparents, who went there when they were alive, as did my great-grandparents, whom I knew briefly as a young boy. I presume the two generations of Marohns prior to them helped build the church, which replaced a smaller one up the street.

  My wife and I were married in that church and our kids were baptized there. In addition to weekly mass, I’ve attended many funerals and weddings, experiencing the highs and lows of life with family, friends, and passing acquaintances. Beyond the spiritual connection, the place has deep personal meaning for me.

  I try to walk by it each day. I tend to slow down and look at it, shutting off whatever I’m listening to and intentionally putting myself in that place at that time. Sometimes I stop and sit on the steps. I’ve said prayers there by myself. I’m not going to suggest I’m a good Catholic or even a good Christian – they are both a struggle for me – but there is something about the regular, intentional contact that I have with that place, and all its meaning, that guides my heart in ways I’m grateful for.

  I feel the same about the cemetery, which Gryffindor and I regularly walk through. My grandmother is buried there. She was a beautiful Norwegian woman who passed away during my senior year of high school; she was far too young. She lived in the neighborhood and when I went to grade school – the school my mother attended and then where my children also went – I used to walk over to her house for lunch on Fridays.

  Grandma would feed me pizza, my favorite. For dessert, it was Twinkies – a coveted treat my practical mother would never buy – except at Christmas time, when she’d fill me full of krumkake and rosettes, two Norwegian cookies. Then we would just sit and talk.

  I’m not sure what I believe about the afterlife, but I often stand at her grave and talk to her. I tell her spirit the good things of my life as well as the struggles. I tell her about my wife – whom she knew – and the kids, whom she never met. I’m not sure what impact this has on my soul, but grandmothers are there for listening and loving. In that way, she is still very much my grandmother.

  In 2004, when I was running my engineering and planning firm, I received a call from a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, New York, named Moshe Landau. He had found my name doing an Internet search for “rural planner.” Moshe wanted to know if I would come to Brooklyn to meet with him and his community about potentially building a new city for them in the middle of rural Kansas. Being unqualified for such an undertaking on virtually every level that mattered, I, of course, agreed to meet.

  I’m from a part of America where religious diversity means Catholics and Lutherans, so I knew embarrassingly little about Jews and even less about the Hasidim. I ordered and read as many books as I could and, by the time I made the trip, had a thorough book understanding of the history of the Hasidim, their migration to America, their struggles in Brooklyn, specifically, and many of their religious beliefs and practices.

  What I discovered instead was something no textbook could have revealed. The Hasidic in Brooklyn are a complex community of people who have chosen an intentional way of living together. In many ways, it embraces modernity – Moshe and I bonded over our passion for the show 24, which was big at the time – but it also clings to the traditional. I found them beautiful and inspiring.

  I know the Hasidim are controversial in New York. They live very different lifestyles than the typical New Yorker, even those who are Jewish. Due to their social structure, they tend to be an overly influential voting block (literally) when it comes to borough-level politics, a source of tension. Their approach to gender-relations, social hierarchy, and education are far outside of the modern mainstream. Still, as a Catholic who struggles with living my faith, here for the first time I was among people who had structured their place to reinforce the lives they desired to live. It had a large impact on me.

  As we talked about the new city they wanted to create, they didn’t seem to care about any of the practical things that an engineer or planner would concern themselves with. The things they impressed on me had to do with their community. They needed access to Kosher food for their table practices. They needed neighborhoods where they could walk to their worship places since they didn’t drive on the Sabbath. They needed gathering places and social spaces that reflected their values and priorities.

  I spent three days among them. I found many of their practices strange, but none without meaning. As time went on, I recognized that, if Moshe came and visited me, he would likely find the Catholic tradition odd, but he would be more perplexed by how it is undermined by the place in which it is embedded. That was the biggest difference between our lives.

  I would never seek to structure my city to reinforce Catholic practices, nor would I recommend that any American city do so for any religious faith. Even so, I’m aware that neighborhoods of the past, and sometimes entire cities, were structured around such practices. In fact, when it comes to ancient cities, I’m unaware of any city that wasn’t.

  Chris Arnade worked for two decades as a bond trader before giving that up to devote himself to documenting the lives of the poor and those struggling with addiction. His photos and commentaries are moving in a way that challenges the comfortable. I had an opportunity to interview him for the Strong Towns Podcast and asked what he thought the most important thing was that would improve the lives of the struggling people he met. His answer: religion.

  Arnade went to pains to point out that he was not religious and that he wasn’t suggesting that the poor and addicted find solace in mystical beliefs. Religion, in the context he was referencing, is the practice of community, of people coming together to help each other with the complex burdens of life. Some of these burdens are financial and physical, but many are deeply emotional. Such practices have been with humans since the beginning of recorded history. We are, in a sense, co-evolved to bind together in this way.

  The United States is a secular nation, and as an American citizen, I am firmly committed that it remains that way. Even so, it’s clear that as our religiosity fades, there is no cultural s
tructure providing equivalent meaning and guidance for our lives. There is no common purpose, no unifying set of moral beliefs, that binds us together as people.

  Some may argue that there is no consequence to this, but it’s hard not to associate the reported rise in depression, loneliness, and suicide with a living arrangement that runs counter to our evolved nature. As Jonathan Haidt suggests:

  When I began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You’ll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between.

  It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

  Once you understand our dual nature, including our groupish overlay, you can see why happiness comes from between. We evolved to live in groups.6

  The only common cultural practice consistently reinforced by the structure of the places we’ve built today is consumption. All around us, we’re prompted to consume, to increase our desires beyond what we now have. This is contrary to the structure of prior societies, especially ancient ones, which acknowledged avarice but made self-denial a virtue, a path to inner peace.

  Human habitat evolved to assist us in becoming a better member of the community, to nudge humans along a path of virtue. This goal is completely absent in modern conversations about building cities. For some individualists, even the suggestion is offensive.

  What does it mean to “live a good life” in modern America? Beyond an individual’s capacity to consume, it’s unclear. Does a “good life” today have a moral dimension, one that involves sacrifice and self-denial for the benefit of others? Military journalist Sebastian Junger, who spent significant time reporting from the front lines of combat, suggests an answer in the structure of society.

  It’s revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny.

  Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught. What tribal people would consider a profound betrayal of the group, modern society simply dismisses as fraud.7

  I served in the Army and I found Junger’s book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging deeply relevant to that experience. While there was a lot of hardship and difficulty involved, there are few things I’ve ever done that have been as rewarding or made me feel happier. I discussed this with my grandfather, a Marine veteran of World War II, and he felt the same: He experienced horror and trauma, but also felt a great deal of belonging, pride, and happiness. According to Junger:

  Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.

  Modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result, mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth. The more assimilated a person is into American society the more likely they are to develop depression during the course of their lifetime.8

  Junger goes on to note that the Amish, who live as a community apart from American society, shunning nearly all modern conveniences, have “exceedingly low rates” of depression.

  When I was visiting the Hasidic in Brooklyn, I stopped with Moshe at his apartment. He has a wife and three children and together they live in a place smaller than my college apartment. They are always intimately surrounded by other Hasidic Jews.

  In their living room – which doubles as a bedroom overnight – there were two extra children in folding playpens. Moshe told me that his rabbi asked if he and his wife would take in these children for a while so a neighboring couple could work on their struggling marriage. I looked around the extremely cramped apartment and asked how long this was going to be. Moshe shrugged, “As long as they need, I guess.”

  My house has vastly more space than Moshe’s, yet I can’t imagine opening it up like that. Even more telling, I can’t imagine being asked to do so. I don’t even know where such a request would happen. It would require a frequency of contact, a level of intimacy, with people in my community that I just don’t have.

  When it comes to the people in my community, I am often asked to donate, but I’m rarely asked to give. Yet, at my own parish, we frequently sing a hymn written in honor of our namesake, Saint Francis, that includes the line “It is in giving of ourselves that we receive.” These thoughts are not absent in our words, nor often in our deeds, but those actions require intentional struggle against the places we have built, places designed to suppress the intimacy of community.

  There is a beautiful line in that Prayer of Saint Francis that I find myself often returning to. It has come to me as I finish this work.

  O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

  to be consoled as to console,

  to be understood as to understand,

  to be loved as to love.

  Building a Strong Town requires that we seek not to be understood, but to understand each other. Not to be served, but to live as servants to those around us. We must receive the wisdom of our ancestors with humility and, with the same level of introspection and dedication to sacrifice, undertake the work of passing on a better place to subsequent generations. That is our burden.

  It’s also our path to salvation. Our cities are struggling financially, trapped in a system grinding them into decline. Working together in an intentional way, it is possible to make our places stronger financially while also improving the lives of people. That is the essence of a Strong Towns approach, the bottom-up revolution America desperately needs.

  Notes

  1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5278644/.

  2 Jeff Speck, Walkable City (New York: North Point Press, 2012).

  3 Bill Bishop, The Big Sort (New York: Mariner Books, 2009).

  4 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).

  5 Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

  6 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).

  7 Sebastian Junger, Tribe (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2016).

  8 Ibid.

  Afterword

  In 2016, a group of Shreveport, Louisiana, city leaders and residents met with Charles L. Marohn, Jr. to discuss how our city could expand its capacity to self-correct through better policies and practices. As a result, our city and its culture have been changing daily.

  As a river city, Shreveport thrived on the spoils of cotton and oil before supporting a strong middle class built primarily on the telecom and automotive industries. Neighborhoods sprung up around the industrial nuclei to create short commutes for workers. During this time, planners left room for growth around these nuclear points connected by Interstate 20. In more recent times, we have been a culture of drivers who watched our local downtown department stores evolve and relocate to upscale retail centers or malls.

  Our history is complex and full of beautiful contradictions and painful moments that impact the decisions that have been made in regard to our development pattern over the last 60 years. Shreveport’s core is a checkerboard of cultures and classes with historic neighborhoods patchworked together yet divided by commerce, highways, train tracks and our own psychology. Our population has transitioned from stagnant to declini
ng as members of Generation X and Millennial cohorts leave to find opportunities in larger metropolitan areas. We are finding our way back to the core through the realization that we can no longer afford to acquire any more land and that we are at reckoning if we want to strengthen our city.

  My group, ReForm Shreveport, began in 2016 as four friends on a mission to get Shreveporters to reconsider their relationship with the built environment. We host small group discussions about Strong Towns concepts. We tour the most productive parts of our city and discuss our failures and successes. We communicate with businesses about the potential of human-scaled retail and service sector development. We reach out to city leaders to encourage policy changes. We set goals to take on the “next small thing” that can make a big difference, just as Chuck encouraged us to do in the fall of 2016.

  Our first project, which came just weeks after Chuck’s visit, was to encourage walking in the neighborhood with the most walkability outside of downtown. The historic Highland neighborhood is adjacent to downtown and features a mix of grand homes dating back at least a century as well as modest, character-filled Craftsman bungalows crafted during the city’s post-war boom. The tree-lined streets border blocks where some of the richest and poorest citizens in our city reside and, in some cases, live next door to each other. ReForm Shreveport began cleaning up the neighborhood’s central park to increase usage and pedestrian accessibility. We partnered with a local permaculture influenced farmer to mitigate erosion and save trees. We gained the trust of the city’s parks department by working with some intrepid public officials who helped with the park’s beautification. We canvassed the neighborhood to learn how the residents around the park used it (not much) as well as their hope for a safer and more useful space that they would use more often. Highland Park sees many more visitors today than it saw five years ago.