The global pandemic is laying bare all the fragility that has built up over decades within our society. These are scary times filled with uncertainty. It’s unclear what next month will bring, let alone next year. Strong Towns is a bottom-up revolution to rebuild American prosperity. Thousands of people across North America are using the Strong Towns approach to make their cities stronger and more financially resilient. You’re not alone. Become a member of Strong Towns at strongtowns.org/membersh...
May 18, 2020•24 min•Ep. 482
If you’re like us, there are a few trusted guides you’ve looked to for help making sense of a world turned suddenly upside down. One of our guides has been James Howard Kunstler . The author of essential books like The Long Emergency , The Geography of Nowhere , and the World Made By Hand novels, Kunstler has for years been eerily prescient in his ability to imagine and interpret the future. Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn described The Long Emergency as “the most coherent narrative explanat...
May 11, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 481
A couple weeks ago, the price of oil dipped below zero (negative $37.63, to be exact). This was unprecedented. Decreased demand due to COVID-19, the Russia-Saudi Arabia oil war, and near-full storage capacity—together, they briefly forced producers to pay others to take oil off their hands. At the same time, we started hearing reports of food producers dumping milk , plowing under lettuce , and smashing eggs —even as shoppers complained that their grocery stores couldn’t seem to keep milk and eg...
May 04, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 480
Almost exactly one year ago , we chose Chuck Marohn’s 2013 interview with Chris Gibbons as one of the Strong Towns podcast’s eleven “greatest hits.” Why this episode from among several hundred choices? Not only because it’s a compelling listen, but because Gibbons’s approach to economic development — Economic Gardening — has become such a core concept for us. It’s like we said last year: [Economic Gardening is] an approach to growing a city’s job base and economic prosperity that doesn’t involve...
Apr 27, 2020•56 min•Ep. 479
A brief update from Chuck Marohn on the Strong Towns Academy and the absence of new podcasts on the feed. There is a lot happening in the world and at Strong Towns. We hope you are all safe and healthy.
Apr 21, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 478
Why is change so hard? In part, change is hard because our culture—our society, and our sense of our place in it—often prevents us from seriously considering options beyond the status quo. Every country and every culture on the planet is now confronting a common enemy. Why have some countries been more successful than others in bringing the coronavirus under control? One big factor: widespread use of masks . And not only that, but the cultural acceptance of wearing masks in the first place. In t...
Mar 31, 2020•37 min•Ep. 477
Shauna El-Amin talks about the "build your own" philosophy that has helped Beloit grow its downtown one entrepreneur at a time, the coordinated effort to rehab once-blighted properties into homes and businesses people love, and how the impact one transformation can boost the morale of an entire neighborhood. Vote in the semifinals of the Strongest Towns contest More information about the Strongest Towns contest...
Mar 24, 2020•27 min•Ep. 476
Sarah Caron and Michael Heuer talk about zoning changes that helped create housing options for people of all ages and abilities in Watertown, how switching to two-way streets (and ending parking minimums) boosted the already vibrant downtown, and Watertown's "secret weapon" in building a stronger community. Vote in the semifinals of the Strongest Towns contest More information about the Strongest Towns contest...
Mar 24, 2020•44 min•Ep. 474
Luke Sims on why re-legalizing mixed-use neighborhoods in Winona has led to the kind of organic development that makes people happy, Winona's success in helping people start and grow businesses, and on lowering the barrier to entry -- both for entrepreneurs and homebuyers. Vote in the semifinals of the Strongest Towns contest More information about the Strongest Towns contest...
Mar 24, 2020•34 min•Ep. 473
Christa Horne and Bob Hughes talk about finding the balance between attracting tourists (100,000 visit each year) and nurturing local industry, Hamilton's success in growing homegrown businesses, and a simple idea started in Hamilton that's become a nationwide movement in the fight against coronavirus. Vote in the semifinals of the Strongest Towns contest More information about the Strongest Towns contest...
Mar 24, 2020•29 min•Ep. 475
A brief update from Chuck Marohn and (by request) a replay of Chuck's recent appearance on the Tales from the Crypt podcast with Marty Bent. Many thanks to Marty for allowing the rebroadcast. Sign up for the latest free Strong Towns web broadcast , and invite a friend to do likewise.
Mar 23, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 472
There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen. Suddenly, the fragility that Strong Towns has long talked about is front and center to our national conversation. What is a Strong Towns advocate to do? We're starting that conversation today as the Strong Towns movement shifts into a new mode of operations to fit the times we find ourselves in.
Mar 17, 2020•30 min•Ep. 471
There are many emotions associated with the creation of a new building in our neighborhood. They can be symbols of our best hopes...or our worst fears. Many of us have strong feelings about the kinds of buildings we want in our cities and towns, but, unless we are developers ourselves, chances are good we don’t have a holistic understanding of all the disciplines involved in creating that new building — disciplines that include urban planning, architecture, law, finance, and government, to name ...
Mar 09, 2020•52 min•Ep. 470
We’re undergoing a massive demographic shift in the United States, says Danielle Arigoni , director of AARP’s Livable Communities initiative . By 2034, for the first time in our country’s history, there will be more people over the age of 65 than under 18. These changes make it not only important but urgent to build towns and cities that are strong for people of all ages and abilities. The Livable Communities initiative is on the front lines of doing just that. We’re breaking from our usual Mond...
Mar 06, 2020•20 min•Ep. 469
What comprises a legacy? Is it your one big win (or big loss)? Probably not. No matter what domain of life we’re talking about—the built environment, our city finances, or our family and community—chances are good that our legacy will be (in the words of today’s podcast guest) the accumulation of many little decisions. The big question is whether the legacy we leave will be one we intended to leave. This week’s guest on the Strong Towns podcast is David McAlvany, a respected thought leader on th...
Mar 02, 2020•45 min•Ep. 468
The affordable housing crisis is affecting not just people in coastal cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco, L.A., Seattle, and Portland. The crisis is spreading geographically and rippling throughout the economy. In the midst of such a crisis, it’s natural to want to assign blame; it’s also natural to look for a silver bullet solution. But is that even possible with a phenomenon as massive (and massively complex) as the housing crisis? Is development a rigged game, open only to the larges...
Feb 24, 2020•48 min•Ep. 467
The rise of Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries—and his eventual win in the general—defied expectations and confounded explanations. Nearly every national poll was wrong, and political observers have spent the last four years trying to understand what happened (and how so many of the experts missed it). In his book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse , Timothy Carney makes the compelling case that the most common explanations for Trump’s ascendance—the economy, for exa...
Feb 17, 2020•54 min•Ep. 466
All too often, the national narrative portrays Louisiana as a backwater state. But we here at Strong Towns see things very differently . For example, we think Shreveport, Louisiana doesn’t get the credit it deserves for changing the local conversation around what will make the city stronger. We’ll go even further and say that Shreveport has one of the leading downtowns in the country—though too few people (including too few Shreveporters) are aware of it. On this week’s edition of the Strong Tow...
Feb 10, 2020•59 min•Ep. 465
From the Strong Towns Gathering in Santa Ana, California, is a discussion about whether the state of California should bring back local redevelopment agencies. Mike Madrid and Steven Greenhut join Chuck Marohn to debate the matter.
Dec 17, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 464
A brief update from Chuck Marohn followed by an extended Q&A rebroadcast from an appearance on the Go Cultivate podcast by Verdunity .
Dec 10, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 463
By coincidence, on October 1, the very day Wiley released the new Strong Towns book , Wiley also published the new book by Quint Studer. It was coincidental for two reasons: Because Studer —in addition to being a businessman, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and leadership expert—is also a Strong Towns member , a past contributor to this site , and a passionate community leader working tirelessly to make his own city of Pensacola, Florida a more vibrant and economically resilient place. (Pensac...
Nov 18, 2019•57 min•Ep. 462
If you want to get an idea of where the professions that shape our built environment—professions like urban planning, civil engineering, public policy, architecture, and so forth—are going, you could do a lot worse than to talk with current students in those fields. So we did. Strong Towns Senior Editor Daniel Herriges (a recent policy-school grad himself, with a 2017 Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree) convened a panel of three Strong Towns members who are current students in fields t...
Nov 14, 2019•28 min•Ep. 461
There is a moment in the history of Strong Towns that has become legend both inside and outside of the organization. For those of you that haven’t heard about it before, it was the most important pivot point in the direction of the movement. Andrew Burleson—our Board Chair then and now—was standing up staring at a collection of Post-it notes on the wall. He had just walked us through an exercise to sort those notes. On each one was an idea—think of it as a program—of what the organization could ...
Nov 14, 2019•21 min•Ep. 460
Last month, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity was published. Since then, I’ve been touring North America to promote the Strong Towns movement and share our ideas with audiences big and bigger. It’s been an astounding six weeks. And as the person who has been here from the start, the one who wrote the very first article on this site eleven years ago, the one who coined the term “Strong Towns” and first started talking of the work as a “movement for change” (when ...
Nov 11, 2019•15 min•Ep. 459
It’s hard not to be encouraged by what’s happening in Kansas City. On both the Kansas and Missouri sides, there are indications that the conversation is shifting. The assumptions about development that led Kansas City to become one of most car-centric metropolitan areas in the world (it has more freeway lane miles per capita than any other U.S. city) are now being challenged. Here are a few hopeful signs: Kansas City, Missouri recently commissioned a groundbreaking fiscal assessment by Joe Minic...
Nov 05, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 458
As writer Gracy Olmstead was commuting to work in Washington, D.C. from her home in the suburbs, she often thought back to her childhood, being raised in the same rural Idaho town in which her great-great-great grandparents had homesteaded a century earlier. “When I was growing up, there was a sense in which the cloth of your life was very interconnected,” she says. “There was a lot of life you lived in one place.” Her experience in the city had been very different. She felt as if her life had b...
Oct 28, 2019•44 min•Ep. 457
Gentrification. As we’ve written elsewhere , the term often sheds more heat than light. This is due not only to its negative connotations and lack of precise meaning, but also because gentrification plays out differently from one city, one neighborhood to the next. Gentrification is used to describe convey a force that feels at once mysterious, unavoidable, and unstoppable — not unlike The Nothing in The Neverending Story . It is a word marshaled into service by those advocating for threatened n...
Oct 21, 2019•47 min•Ep. 456
"No one's coming to save my city for me, so what is it that I can do?" -- Paul Stewart, Oswego Renaissance Association There is more than one kind of housing crisis. The crisis we hear the most about is the crisis of supply. This is the housing crunch being felt so acutely in places like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, New York, Lexington, and Austin. But there is another kind of housing crisis too. It gets less attention though it is arguably more widespread. This is the crisis of dem...
Oct 14, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 455
Rachel Quednau returns for this very special episode of the podcast, the finale of our weeklong series inspired by Chuck Marohn’s new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity . After catching up on what Rachel has been doing since moving to Boston, the two friends talk about the evolution of the Strong Towns conversation. Strong Towns initially focused almost exclusively on planning and engineering, but now it goes beyond “the math” too, asking essential question...
Oct 04, 2019•38 min•Ep. 454
In episode four of this weeklong podcast series, Chuck Marohn talks with Andrew Burleson — software engineer, Strong Towns board chair, and frequent podcast guest — about the difference between a problem and a predicament, why conventional development can't pay for itself, and how auto-oriented cities are built on the assumption of never-ending sunny days. They also discuss how stretching our towns and cities are weakening the “gravity" that holds people and places together, as well as the ways ...
Oct 03, 2019•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 453
