“How can a city not have pots overflowing with money if there has been so much growth? How are apartments subsidizing people who live in single-family neighborhoods?” That’s what the city of Oviedo, Florida, asked when it invited Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn (along with Joe Minicozzi and Cate Ryba of Urban3 ) to speak at its “Make Oviedo Stronger” event last week. We wanted to share Chuck’s talk with you today on the Strong Towns Podcast , because the core Strong Towns concepts he shared ...
Mar 07, 2022•39 min•Ep. 542
Today on the Strong Towns Podcast , host Chuck Marohn is speaking with special guest Annamarie Pluhar. Pluhar is an expert on co-housing and shared housing, and is the author of the book Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates . Despite the fact that practically the entire nation is experiencing a housing crisis , 27% of homes in the U.S. are single occupancy. In other words, one in four adults lives alone, and this is a serious cause of social isolation for many peo...
Feb 28, 2022•51 min•Ep. 541
Today on the Strong Towns Podcast, we wanted to give our listeners an update on the lawsuits that Strong Towns is involved in. For those new to Strong Towns, here is a brief overview: Charles Marohn, president of Strong Towns, is an engineer and maintains his license even though he stopped doing engineering work in 2012. Briefly in 2018, his license lapsed. Once he realized this, Marohn promptly renewed it, however, the Minnesota Board of Licensure is claiming that he misrepresented himself to t...
Feb 21, 2022•49 min•Ep. 540
Last year, our friends over at Urban3 introduced us to a nonpartisan nonprofit called Truth in Accounting , which recently published Financial State of the Cities 2022 , an annual report that they do on local governments and the state of their budgets. It’s an incredible piece of work, one that says, “We do not advocate for anything: no tax policy, no spending policy. The only thing we advocate for is good budgeting and accounting.” Their only goal is to get the numbers out there to the public, ...
Feb 14, 2022•56 min•Ep. 539
Today we wanted to share a conversation between Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn and renowned urban planner and walkability expert Jeff Speck. Speck is a returning guest on the Strong Towns Podcast , and author of the books Walkable City (which is getting an update this November with a new forward and introduction) and Walkable City Rules . He’s also the recipient of this year’s Seaside Prize , and has curated a weekend (March 4–6) of guest lectures at Seaside, which includes speakers like Ja...
Feb 07, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 538
It's time for another Q&A session! Today, Chuck Marohn will be responding to your questions on things like what to do about shoddy development, how communities can employ Strong Towns principles when big-money investments are already underway in their places, how bottom-up organizations can fundraise in order to secure longevity, and more. If you've got a burning query that you want us to answer, head on over to the Community Section of the Acton Lab, and post it there. Our goal is to addres...
Jan 31, 2022•55 min•Ep. 537
This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, host Chuck Marohn welcomes back a special return guest: Jarrett Walker, head of Jarrett Walker + Associates , a transit-planning firm based in Portland, Oregon. Walker has been a consultant in public transit network, design, and policy for many decades now, and has worked all across North America and other countries worldwide. He’s also the author of the book Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives ,...
Jan 24, 2022•48 min•Ep. 536
Can driverless cars really be the “safe, sustainable, and inclusive ‘mobility solutions’ that tech companies and automakers are promising us”? In his newest book, Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving , technology historian Peter Norton argues that we should treat these utopian promises about driverless vehicles with a great deal more caution and skepticism . Autonorama exposes how, from its inception in the Depression era, the automobile was a subject of controversy; believe it ...
Jan 18, 2022•58 min•Ep. 535
Americans drove less during the early months of pandemic, yet traffic fatalities increased. There was a sense among many safety experts that this was an anomaly, that fatality rates would revert to trend once people started driving again. That didn’t happen. Instead, as overall driving levels have returned to normal, crashes and fatality rates have remained shockingly high. These results are not explainable by any theory of traffic safety being used by modern transportation professionals. As a r...
Jan 10, 2022•57 min•Ep. 534
This week on the Strong Towns Podcast , we’re kicking off the new year by featuring a special guest: Tim Soerens, author and co-founder of the Parish Collective . Last year, Chuck read Tim’s books The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community and Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are —and even recommended them to his priest! If you’re not Christian or not religious, don’t worry: Tim’s not here to preach, but rather to tal...
Jan 03, 2022•40 min•Ep. 533
There have been dozens of people hit on State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, in recent years, including Gayle Ball who was recently killed crossing State Street in front of the Central Library. Council members are demanding action and they called a special meeting to discuss what can be done. The city’s engineer was there as well, and what ensued was a conversation in two different languages. One is the urgent language of the elected official, reflecting the sadness, fear, and anxiety of ...
Dec 06, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 532
All of a sudden, the new book from Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer , has been out for nearly two months. It’s already received dozens of five-star reviews , and Chuck is out talking about the book around the country, both through events and in the media . Thousands of new people are encountering the Strong Towns message of how to fix the broken—i.e., dangerous, ineffective, wasteful—North American transportation system. We recently invited the book’s ear...
Nov 29, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 531
Hey Strong Towns Podcast listeners, it's been a while. Chuck's been out on the road , but the subject of this episode was too important not to talk about now. We're revisiting a library in Springfield that many of you are familiar with, as the dangerous stroad in front of it, State Street, has been a subject many times in Strong Towns articles (and in Chuck's latest book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer ). Well, State Street is back in the news, and not because it's gotten any safer. We're ...
Nov 18, 2021•37 min•Ep. 530
On December 3, 2014, a 7-year-old girl named Destiny Gonzalez was killed while crossing State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. What gets lost in the shocking statistics about the number of pedestrians who die each year in traffic crashes— 4,884 in the U.S. in 2014 , more than 6,700 in 2020 —is that they aren’t “statistics” at all, or even “pedestrians” really, but people with names, who had hopes and dreams, and family and friends forever changed by the loss of their loved one. That was cer...
Sep 06, 2021•23 min•Ep. 529
Have you visited the Strong Towns Action Lab ? That's where we keep our best, most actionable content. We've written a lot over the years, and we wanted to have a place we could direct people to when they want to quickly access our top content—including videos, podcasts, and e-books. Think of it as a database of resources that we've cultivated just for you! Beyond that, the Action Lab is also where we've begun collecting questions from our readers and listeners , and today we wanted to take a lo...
Aug 30, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 528
Which comes first: a great transit system or a great city that can support it? What role does high-speed rail play in an overall, effective transportation system? And is an incremental approach really possible with high-speed transit? These are important questions with potentially complex answers. For insight we turned to Rick Harnish. He’s executive director of the High Speed Rail Alliance , the nation’s largest high-speed rail advocacy organization. The organization’s goal is to make high-spee...
Aug 23, 2021•53 min•Ep. 527
This week on the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck makes a confession about something he did that he now regrets...and you might be surprised at how much of it revolves around poor placement of park benches in his town of Brainerd, Minnesota. Of course, that's not all this episode deals with. What Chuck's beef with his local park's benches really boils down to is the systematic devaluation of public space , by people who have both good intentions and not a clue what they're doing. Their misguided atte...
Aug 02, 2021•56 min•Ep. 526
For more than four years, Strong Towns has been telling the story of the so-called I-49 Connector project in Shreveport, Louisiana. We say “so-called” because while this project may seek to connect two sections of I-49, it will do so by rending the Allendale neighborhood, a vibrant, predominantly black neighborhood that is the gateway to downtown Shreveport. It will also cost an extraordinary amount of money—an estimated $700 million—for less than four miles of road. Some state and city official...
Jul 26, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 525
You've read Granola Shotgun . You've seen Johnny Sanphillippo on our website (including in an article just released today ). You've heard him on the Strong Towns Podcast multiple times , and those interviews have each been hits with our listeners. So, we've invited him back again to chat with Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn. For those who don't know yet, Johnny is a blogger and small-scale developer working with property in and around Madison, Wisconsin. His adventures (and sometimes misadve...
Jul 19, 2021•59 min•Ep. 524
We hear it all the time: “Keep your options open.” It’s the philosophy that shapes much of our approach to education, career, and relationships. It also shapes where we choose to live and, critically, how we live there. Pete Davis calls this infinite browsing mode , and he says it is the defining characteristic of our time. Davis compares it to a long hallway with countless doors, each of which leads to new possibilities. Having options can be fun and even liberating. But there are also downside...
Jul 12, 2021•54 min•Ep. 523
The traditional development pattern of towns and cities evolved with humans, the same way ant hills evolved with the ant and bee hives evolved with the bee. Yet around the time of the Great Depression, North Americans began jettisoning millennia of accumulated wisdom about city-building in favor of a suburban development pattern that was scaled for cars rather than people, built to a finished state and all at once, resistant to feedback and adaptation, and ultimately unable to pay for itself. At...
Jul 06, 2021•52 min•Ep. 522
How far should we go in trusting experts? That's the question that Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn tackles this week on the Strong Towns Podcast . By taking a trip through the past to the present, Chuck looks at various events in recent history—from 9/11 and the Iraq War to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic—to see what they can teach us about blindly trusting in "absolute" expertise. It's a question that plays a central role in Chuck's new book , Confessions of a Recovering Engineer , whi...
Jun 21, 2021•53 min•Ep. 521
Jason Slaughter is the creator of Not Just Bikes , a fast-growing YouTube channel about urban planning and urban life. Based in Amsterdam, he often makes videos about why city living in The Netherlands is so good...including the bikes, but not just the bikes. Yet Slaughter grew up in London, Ontario, and many of his most-watched videos feature trenchant analyses of the North American suburban development pattern. He’s also creating a popular series (with five installments so far ) on core Strong...
Jun 07, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 520
Last week, we announced that Strong Towns has filed a lawsuit against the Minnesota Board of Engineering Licensure in federal district court. For more information about the case, its background, and anything that we're doing in relation to it, check out the landing page we've made where you can read the full complaint and get some additional context on our reform efforts. On Thursday, we held a briefing to chat about the lawsuit with our supporters. As guest speakers, the briefing features a mem...
Jun 01, 2021•41 min•Ep. 519
A small group of professional engineers are using the licensing process to stifle calls for reform and retaliate against Strong Towns for its advocacy. The Strong Towns organization advocates for reforming the way we build our cities, especially the approach that many professional engineers take with transportation and infrastructure systems. Our critiques of engineers include our video “ Conversation with an Engineer ,” our many statements on the way engineering organizations advocate for state...
May 24, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 518
How much conscious thought goes into our reactions to a place? It might be less than you think. The more we come to understand the human brain, the more we see how much the unconscious mind, and our need to socialize in particular, influences us. And by extension, it influences our architecture. Our capacity for recognizing human faces, for example, has subtly shaped many traditional styles of buildings. (You might even be picturing it now: the windows as "eyes," the door as a "mouth.") This is ...
May 03, 2021•57 min•Ep. 517
When it comes to housing, Detroit's struggles could be seen as a portent of things to come for other parts of America. Over the past fifteen years, one in three properties in the city have entered into tax foreclosure auctions, with speculators "milking" foreclosed homes for however much money they can get in the short-term, all while letting the property deteriorate. Meanwhile, residents of the home (either the owners themselves or renters) face the possibility of eviction. The ultimate cost fo...
Apr 26, 2021•58 min•Ep. 516
Here at Strong Towns we often talk about cities and towns in North America, but what about our friends across the pond? While cities in the UK may not be facing exactly the same kind of infrastructure crisis as ours, they were similarly impacted by new development patterns after WWII. Namely, the UK implemented planning systems (not wholly unlike zoning in the US) that have, decades down the line, now led to a housing crisis. "The thing that people sometimes say about our [system] is that we've ...
Apr 19, 2021•52 min•Ep. 515
Please note: This episode of The Strong Towns Podcast was recorded and scheduled for publication last week, prior to the recent shooting of Duante Wright. “Have you ever had a stare at death?” Michael Odiari has. So have many others who have been pulled over for would-be routine traffic violations. What should be standard procedure too frequently turns into a deadly interaction between police officers and motorists—the latter group being disproportionately composed of African-American males. “It...
Apr 12, 2021•40 min•Ep. 514
Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn has a conversation with representatives from our two Strongest Town finalists: Mayor Steve Streit of Lockport, and Mayor Robyn Tannehill of Oxford. To vote in the matchup, go here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/4/5/strongest-town-championship-round To catch up on the contest, and to see the full rules and schedule, go here: https://www.strongtowns.org/strongesttown
Apr 05, 2021•59 min•Ep. 513
