Shows
KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st CenturyKunstlerCast 434 — Charles Marohn on Strong Towns and the Battle to Reform the Fiasco of Suburban SprawlCharles Marohn is the founder and president of Strong Towns. With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous through classic, traditional town planning. He's the bestselling author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis. Like your host, JHK, Chuck is a member in good standing of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national movement to repair and reform the fiasco of Suburban sprawl lanes development. The KunstlerCast theme music is the...
2025-11-2857 min
New PolityBuilding Strong Towns after the American Decline w/ Chuck Marohn
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America was a place of untold wealth in the post-war period. But today, many small towns are faltering and facing financial collapse. In this podcast, Strong Towns founder and president Charles Marohn sits down with Marc Barnes and Jacob Hyman to discuss how this collapse came about, and how to rebuild the small town. Subscribe to New Polity Magazine! https://newpolity.com/magazine. Check out our books: https://newpolity.com/press Read our essays: https://newpolity.com/essays.
2025-10-0200 min
New PolityBuilding Strong Towns after the American Decline w/ Charles MarohnAmerica was a place of untold wealth in the post-war period. But today, many small towns are faltering and facing financial collapse. In this podcast, Strong Towns founder and president Charles Marohn sits down with Marc Barnes and Jacob Hyman to discuss how this collapse came about, and how to rebuild the small town. Subscribe to New Polity Magazine! https://newpolity.com/magazine. Check out our books: https://newpolity.com/press Read our essays: https://newpolity.com/essays.
2025-10-0259 min
Fuel Your Mind With The Full Audiobook Everyone Is Talking About — So Captivating!The Civic Brand by Ryan Short, Charles Marohn - forewordPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/246235to listen full audiobooks.
Title: The Civic Brand
Author: Ryan Short, Charles Marohn - foreword
Narrator: David Bryant
Format: mp3
Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
Release date: 09-10-25
Ratings: Not rated yet
Genres: Business Development & Entrepreneurship
Publisher's Summary:
The Civic Brand: The Power & Responsibility of Place is a bold and practical book that challenges conventional thinking about city-building, tourism, economic development, and community engagement. Author Ryan Short introduces a new framework for shaping more resilient, equitable, and loveable places that is rooted in identity, values, and a triple bottom line.
2025-09-105h 27
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values181 – Escaping the Housing Trap with Chuck MarohnThe housing market today is in an increasingly unsustainable paradox: younger Americans need houses to be more affordable so that they can become homeowners. Meanwhile, homeowners and the entire U.S. economy need houses to rise in price to make them a secure and profitable investment. Thus, we are trapped between making homeownership increasingly difficult or sinking the economy. Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by president of Strong Towns Chuck Marohn to discuss his latest book: Escaping the Housing Trap. About Chuck Marohn From strongtowns.org Charles Marohn (known as "...
2025-07-0157 min
The Strong Towns PodcastNYT Journalist Shares Why America Should SprawlA few weeks ago, the New York Times article "Why America Should Sprawl" went viral, sparking a national discussion about housing and development patterns.
In today’s episode, Chuck sits down with Conor Dougherty, the reporter behind the article, to discuss his perspective on housing in more depth.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Prefer to read or watch? We've got you covered. Click here for the transcript or here for the YouTube video.
Learn how to beat the housing crisis the right way. Download The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform today!
...
2025-06-0959 minThink and Act LocallyThe Strong Towns Podcast - NYT Journalist Shares Why America Should SprawlA few weeks ago, the New York Times article "Why America Should Sprawl" went viral, sparking a national discussion about housing and development patterns.
In today’s episode, Chuck sits down with Conor Dougherty, the reporter behind the article, to discuss his perspective on housing in more depth.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Prefer to read or watch? We've got you covered. Click here for the transcript or here for the YouTube video.
Learn how to beat the housing crisis the right way. Download The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform today!
...
2025-06-0959 minThe Strong Towns PodcastWhy Sprawl IS the Housing CrisisOn the surface, sprawl seems like an easy answer to the housing crisis. It fits with the mechanisms we have in place today, and it aligns with the lived experiences and political will of most Americans. But the reality of our housing crisis is more nuanced, and it's bigger than sprawl: The problem is the current way we develop, whether that's inside cities or on the fringes. Chuck explains why in this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Learn how to beat the housing crisis the right way. Download The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit...
2025-05-1956 min
ZacCastThe housing trap with Chuck MarohnOn this epic episode, we welcome Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns. Chuck's bestselling new book, Escaping the Housing Trap, kicks off the conversation, which winds its way through a variety of important issues facing cities today. Topics02:33 - What is the housing trap?04:05 - Pre-Depression era housing finance08:00 - Government response to Depression vs the 2008 Housing Crisis13:15 - Supply and Demand vs Finance as causes of the housing crisis16:04 - Did we get here via High Modernism or hot fixes? 23:16 - When did we cross the Housing Trap R...
2024-09-261h 36
The NEI Pioneer PodcastCharles Marohn: A Movement For Housing ChangesOn this edition of The NEI Pioneer Podcast, Vice President of Regional Initiatives Ryan Twiss and Head of MarCom Jonathan Sackett welcome Charles Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns. Fresh off the stage of his keynote speech at the NEI SDC Housing Symposium, Charles discusses his organization, the housing crisis debate, and NEI’s housing market potential and how it can meet the need for more housing. To learn more about Charles and his organization: https://www.strongtowns.org/ To learn more about 2024 NEI SDC Housing Symposium, visit https://neisdc.co...
2024-09-1853 min
Brick by BrickSolutions Sidebar: A Building Boom Of Entry Level Housing with Charles MarohnIf we had an abundance of entry level units, there would be a lot of different opportunities,” says Charles Marohn. “A person who is in their first job, a person who’s just getting started with their family, a couple that has just gotten married, people should be able to move up when they’re ready.” In his book Escaping the Housing Trap, Marohn says because we can’t afford for housing prices to fall, one strategy is to look around your neighborhood and instigate a building boom of 600 sq. ft. houses. Among other things, in an interview with Brick by Bri...
2024-07-1034 min
Embrace The Full Audiobook Everyone Is Talking About — So Heart-Pounding!Escaping the Housing Trap by Charles L. Marohn Jr., Daniel HerrigesPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/43133to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Escaping the Housing Trap
Author: Charles L. Marohn Jr., Daniel Herriges
Narrator: Stephen R. Thorne
Format: mp3
Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
Release date: 05-21-24
Ratings: 5 out of 5 stars, 36 ratings
Genres: Real Estate
Publisher's Summary:
Escaping the Housing Trap is the must-have resource for everyone with a stake in the future of housing in America-and that means everyone. Listeners will find discussions of housing as an investment and how the country's neighborhoods are being transformed by the introduction of large amounts of investment; explorations of housing as shelter, including...
2024-05-2110h 02Indulge In Into A Eye-Opening Full Audiobook At Home.Escaping the Housing Trap by Charles L. Marohn Jr., Daniel HerrigesPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/46702to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Escaping the Housing Trap
Author: Charles L. Marohn Jr., Daniel Herriges
Narrator: Stephen R. Thorne
Format: mp3
Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
Release date: 05-21-24
Ratings: 5 out of 5 stars, 36 ratings
Genres: Sociology
Publisher's Summary:
Escaping the Housing Trap is the must-have resource for everyone with a stake in the future of housing in America-and that means everyone. Listeners will find discussions of housing as an investment and how the country's neighborhoods are being transformed by the introduction of large amounts of investment; explorations of housing as shelter, including discussions...
2024-05-2110h 02
The Messy City PodcastA Conversation with Charles MarohnChuck Marohn, the President and Founder of Strong Towns, joins me to talk about his newest book, “Escaping The Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” Along the way, we also discuss the upcoming Strong Towns National Gathering in Cincinnati, a different way cities can think about building and financing new sports facilities, and our different takes on the place-making of Disney World.If you have an interest in attending the National Gathering in May, I highly recommend it. Register at this link, and use this code for Discounts: KEVINK2024For some back...
2024-04-301h 03
Thesis Driven Leader SeriesAuthor Charles Marohn on How to Fix CitiesWhile Charles Marohn began his career as an engineer, he soon realized that the problems plaguing American urban design - particularly in the suburbs - ran deep. So he quit his engineering job and began writing about how to redesign cities for livability and people rather than cars. His work - including books Strong Towns and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer - became very influential in the New Urbanist movement and the past decade of innovation in urban design and real estate development.In this episode, Marohn joins Brad on the final episode of Season One of...
2024-04-231h 04
Active TownsMoving Past Blame w/ Charles Marohn, Founder of Strong Towns (video avaialble)In this episode, which I've edited down from our Livestream on Oct 27th, 2023, I welcome back Charles "Chuck" Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, for an in-depth discussion about proven strategies for creating safer streets without resorting to a constant cycle of trying to find someone to blame. Thank you so much for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and subscribe to the Podcast on your preferred listening platform, and don't forget to check out the Active Towns Channel for more contentHelpful Links (note that some may include...
2023-11-061h 22
East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew GrayDaniel Volland: Anchorage Assembly member on housingSend us a textNorth Anchorage Assembly Member Daniel Volland was born and raised in Washington State, and began coming to Alaska regularly in 2016 to do remote work as an optometrist. After relocating permanently to Anchorage in 2019, he became very active very quickly in local politics and successfully ran for the newly established 12th seat on the Anchorage Assembly in the summer of 2022. Today he is talking about the Anchorage Assembly’s Housing Action Strategic Plan and the Anchorage Housing Action Week that just finished with a big summit on Friday. That summit was held at...
2023-11-061h 02
Lit with CharlesChuck Marohn, host of "The Strong Towns" podcastToday’s episode follows an interesting literary path. The first stop in that path is a book written in 1974 by Robert Caro, called The Power Broker. It’s one of the most brilliant biographies of all time. If you’re looking for a magnificently researched, and totally gripping book on the life of one of the most influential men of the 20th century, then this the one. It’s the story of Robert Moses.
That name may not mean much to a lot of people but in short, he’s basically the man who built New York City from t...
2023-09-1851 min
Assorted PerspectiveStrong TownsIn this educational and playful Assorted Perspective episode Jackie and Anna talk about city design using Charles Marohn's book Strong Towns.Have you ever wondered how cities fund infrastructure or why that pothole that always gets you is taking so long to get filled? Jackie and Anna discuss this and more!Sources: Marohn, Charles L. Strong Towns: a Bottom-up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Hoboken, New JerseyL John wiley &sons, inc, 2020Theme song by Sebastian Bracamontes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
2023-04-2551 min
The Political OrphanageThe Coming Suburban Apocalypse - Charles MarohnAmerican cities are prioritizing big box stores over small businesses, in a model predicated on permanent growth. But when growth hits a snag, will suburbs collapse? Charles Marohn is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and (retired) professional engineer. He is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity SUPPORT THE SHOW! Patreon.com/andrewheaton
2023-03-061h 30
Trust Your VoiceTownhall Series: Pillars of a Strong Town with Charles Marohn and Lou PowellIn this episode of the Trust Your Voice podcast, host Sylvie Légère sat down with Charles Marohn, Founder and President of Strong Towns, and Lou Powell, President of High-Tech Small Town, to talk about what makes a town strong and thriving.
In this conversation, Sylvie with Charles and Lou discuss:
What makes a strong town?
5 pillars of a strong town to note of
Insights on what makes a thriving community
How to improve the quality of life and prosperity of a community
Transforming cities to be successful
Here is an ar...
2023-02-2321 minThe Strong Towns PodcastLawsuit Update: Making a Stand for Engineers in the Minnesota State Court of AppealsAnyone should be able to speak up and question whether current engineering practices truly benefit our communities. That’s especially true for licensed professionals who have a special duty to the public to be heard. And when they do speak up, their statements should not make them a target for licensing boards.
Members of the Minnesota board of engineering licensure are supposed to uphold the integrity of their institution, but instead they have abused their power, overstepping their authority in order to slander a leading reformer—someone who was not even practicing engineering—by issuing a state order a...
2023-01-3050 minThe Strong Towns PodcastThe Impact of Systemic Racism on Jackson’s Water CrisisA prominent question that keeps coming up since the beginning of the Jackson, Mississippi, water crisis is, “How did we get to this point?”
If you’ve been tuning in to the Strong Towns Podcast, you’ll know that Chuck has talked about the water crisis in Jackson a couple of times working to answer this question. He’s gone in depth about the financial fragility of our water systems, how they work, and why we even have them.
After hearing Chuck’s analysis, some Strong Towns members felt there was not enough emphasis on the impact sys...
2022-11-2155 minThe Strong Towns PodcastWater System Crises and SolutionsIn a September episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talked about the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. He spoke on the technicalities of American water systems, what failed in Jackson, and how Jackson ended up in a crisis.
Now, in this week’s episode, Chuck dives a little deeper into water systems and why we even have them (hint: it’s not just about safe drinking water). He takes listeners back to the 1800s and describes how historical events affected the standard for today’s water systems—shining a light on current aging water systems, like Jackson’s...
2022-11-0738 minThe Strong Towns PodcastWhat Customer Service Should Mean for a CitySometimes, our local governments can get caught up in an ineffective mindset while managing cities, where they take on the role of a customer service representative. While it comes from a place of wanting to be helpful, it’s not always the best approach our cities should be taking.
In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, host Chuck Marohn discusses subsidiarity versus the customer service mindset we tend to see in city halls. Subsidiarity holds that it matters less what decision is made and more who makes the decision—in other words, a decision should be made...
2022-10-1050 min
Mass Construction ShowChuck Marohn, P.E.: Strong Towns, Freedom of Speech & MN's abuse of PowerIn this episode we speak with Charles Marohn, Founder of Strong Towns, about the Minnesota Board of Engineering's frivolous investigation and censure of him. We also talk about the work of Strong Towns and why the board would be threatened by their advocacy. Here's the full info on the case and here's the hearing we spoke about.
Today's Show is brought to you by Central, commercial carpenters and supporters of our conversations. Enjoy the show!
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2022-09-2759 minThe Strong Towns PodcastHawaii’s Suburban ExperimentThis September, Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn was invited to speak at the Hawaii Congress of Planning Officials Conference on the Island of Kauai.
While he was there, Chuck went on a walking tour and witnessed the results of the post-WWII rise of suburban development. While he loved his visit to the island and feels incredibly grateful to the wonderful hospitality of the people there, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of sorrow for how their community has been damaged by the Suburban Experiment.
He notes how much worse, and more bizarrely, the subu...
2022-09-2658 minThe Strong Towns PodcastThe Jackson Water Crisis Is Not a Fluke—Your City Could Be NextWhat’s happened with Jackson’s water crisis is an absolute tragedy. In late August, a state of emergency was issued after there was no clean running water in the city. Residents who could get water reported that they’d turn on the tap and be met with a brown consistency, and the city instructed people to boil it before any sort of usage.
For seven weeks Jackson’s residents had to bear the brunt of a failing water system, and unfortunately it was bound to happen. Like all American cities, Jackson rests on the wrong business model and...
2022-09-2254 min
Podcasts | The Survival PodcastChuck Marohn of StrongTowns.Org on Resilient Communities – Epi-3152Today we are joined by Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns.org to discuss his work in building more resilient towns and cities along with a bottom up approach to restoring and rebuilding American prosperity. Charles Marohn is dedicated to the survival of North American cities. A retired engineer, he’s a national expert on townmaking and transportation design. In 2008, he started a blog called Strong Towns, which identified the causes of decline in our cities and challenged standard municipal management practices. Over time, this publishing effort grew into an international movement of people advocating for rigorous accounting and local leadership that’s respon...
2022-08-241h 50The Strong Towns Podcast“Bias Writ Large” in the Property Tax Assessment SystemFair property tax systems are crucial to developing a financially strong community, as property taxes represent a large source of public revenue for most local governments.
In today’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck Marohn talks with Joe Minicozzi from Urban3 about Buncombe County and the property tax inequities within Western North Carolina that are currently being investigated by the Just Accounting For Health (JAfH) consortium.
A few months ago, Minicozzi presented some compelling disparities in the data on the assessment process to the Buncombe County Ad Hoc Reappraisal Committee—only for his prese...
2022-08-081h 02
Active TownsStrong Active Towns Livestream w/ Charles Marohn (video available)In this episode, I reconnect with my good friend, Charles "Chuck" Marohn, founder of the Strong Towns organization and worldwide movement, for a discussion about the inherent connections between Strong Towns and Active Towns, the need for reform in the traffic engineering and city planning fields, and he provides the latest update on his battle with the state licensing board.Watch the video version of this episode to get the full effectStrong Towns and Active Towns together again! I was honored to welcome Charles "Chuck" Marohn, founder and president of the Strong Towns organization...
2022-07-241h 21The Strong Towns PodcastThe Drip, Drip, Drip of Traffic DeathsEvery hour, four people are killed in a car crash. Over a year, this totals up to about 40,000 people.
“It’s an astounding number,” says Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn.
In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks about his experience serving for nine years in the National Guard. He covers some sensitive topics, relaying what he’s learned from how people respond to military deaths, and what that can tell us about how we respond to traffic deaths.
“I bring this up, because I want to talk a little bit about the way...
2022-07-1844 min
VoltsVolts podcast: Charles Marohn on unsustainable suburbsIn this episode, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns discusses why urban planning too often creates money-sucking suburbs, what it might look like to build healthy communities, and why there are so many barriers to doing so.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsCharles Marohn — “Chuck” to his friends — grew up in a small town in Minnesota and later became an urban planner and traffic engineer in the state. After a few years, he began noticing that the projects he was building were hurting the towns he was putting...
2022-06-291h 11The Strong Towns PodcastMajora Carter: Reclaiming Your CommunitySuccess: however you define it, it’s what many of us strive for. Whether it’s success in one’s career, school, family life, or other dreams, no one wants to experience a perceived failure in life.
In the minds of many throughout America, the indicator of success is the action of leaving your neighborhood—for good. A stigma exists in many places that, if you truly have talent and are to accomplish great things, you will not stay in your community. Instead, you’ll go off to find something better.
Majora Carter, an urban revitalizati...
2022-06-2050 minThe Strong Towns PodcastNolan Gray: Exposing the Arbitrariness of Zoning CodesProfessional city planner and longtime Strong Towns contributor Nolan Gray comes to The Strong Towns Podcast today to talk about his new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It.
As you may have already gathered from the title, this is a book all about the flawed nature of zoning, and why reforming our zoning codes is such a key part of building stronger, more financially resilient cities and towns.
As Strong Towns Podcast host Chuck Marohn notes, if you don’t know anything about zoning, you’re going to g...
2022-06-1354 min
Mac & BleuAdvocating For Cities Of All Sizes To Be Safe, Livable, and Inviting with Charles MarohnAdvocating For Cities Of All Sizes To Be Safe, Livable, and Inviting with Charles MarohnCharles Marohn, known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues, is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and (retired) professional engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.Strong Towns is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media advocacy organization. They produce content that analyzes the failures of the post-war North American development pattern while giving citizens the knowle...
2022-06-0859 min
Phoenix Business RadioStrong Towns – Advocacy by Chuck Marohn E6Strong Towns – Advocacy by Chuck Marohn E6 Charles Marohn, known as "Chuck" to friends and colleagues, is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and (retired) professional engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, [...]
2022-06-0859 min
Phoenix Business RadioStrong Towns – Advocacy by Chuck Marohn E6Strong Towns – Advocacy by Chuck Marohn E6 Charles Marohn, known as "Chuck" to friends and colleagues, is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and (retired) professional engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, [...]
2022-06-0859 minThe Strong Towns PodcastMike McGinn: Making America More WalkableAmerica Walks is a nationally recognized non-profit organization that aims to create a more walkable America by giving people resources to effectively advocate for change. Join Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn in a conversation with Mike McGinn—executive director at America Walks and once mayor of Seattle—where they talk about the things that make America less walkable and what we can do about it.
“We're both struggling with that highway building coalition in our work,” says Chuck. “I think the thing about America Walks today is that I see you’re approaching it from a fresh [and] energize...
2022-05-231h 04
The Brass SpittoonChuck Marohn on the Human Errors of Traffic EngineeringChuck Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns and author of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, discusses streets, roads, “stroads,” and the perils of the American traffic system. A trained engineer himself, Marohn once imbibed the discipline’s dominant dogmas. Today, he advocates for cities and towns where slower moving cars can get us where we want to go faster.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Charles “Chuck” Marohn
Highlights
1:15 A boy from Brainerd
3:45 Strong Towns explained
6:30 What’s an engineer good for?
8:45 Breaking through with talking bears
13:15 ...
2022-05-1051 minThe Strong Towns PodcastThis Vancouver-Based Artist Is Writing Music…About Building Strong Towns!People have taken the Strong Towns approach in a lot of fascinating directions, but this might be one of the most fascinating yet: William Chernoff is a young, Vancouver-based musician who has written songs inspired by Strong Towns.
During the pandemic, Chernoff also started writing about music, building strong towns, and more. In this conversation, Marohn (a musician himself) and Chernoff discuss the creativity involved in writing and music, the way they’re inspired by others and build upon previous work, and the collaborative nature of art. Chernoff specifically talks about the importance of cultivating financially successful lo...
2022-05-0955 min
Doomer OptimismEpisode 34 - Chuck Marohn w/ Anarcho- Contrarian and Kara MarshallThis episode of Doomer Optimism sees frequent contributor Anarcho-Contrarian (@AnarContrarian)and DO newbie Kara Marshall (@karakara98) sit down with the founder and president of Strong Towns, Charles Marohn (@clmarohn). Naturally, the conversation drifts toward community resilience and building...well...strong towns, as well as the future of community building.
About Charles Marohn
Charles Marohn—known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues—is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a professional engineer and a land use planner with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of...
2022-05-0454 minThe Strong Towns PodcastChuck Marohn Answers Your QuestionsIt's time for another Q&A session! Today, Chuck Marohn will be responding to your questions on things like how to calculate the actual value of spaces like public parks, whether or not high visibility traffic cameras influence driver behavior, and choosing between unfavorable options in planning processes.
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 address as many questions as we can, and especially the ones that we think are going to help a...
2022-05-021h 02
Regenerative SkillsCharles Marohn on the keys to designing strong and resilient townsLearn more and register for the Profitable Syntropic Agroforestry course today!
Fill out this form to receive free trees and planting support as well as a consultation call with Oliver
I’ve often wondered what in the world goes on in the thought process behind the planning and design of the newer towns that I’ve lived in. In the case of really old places, the layout and architecture always made more sense to me. Streets are laid out with orientations to sun patterns or for ease of access to important markets or buildings, and the homes reflect the integral rela...
2022-03-181h 16The Strong Towns Podcast“How Can My Town *Not* Be Wealthy When There’s Been So Much Growth?”“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 with Oviedo are applicable in so many other cities and towns ac...
2022-03-0739 minThe Strong Towns PodcastAnnamarie Pluhar: Shared Housing Doesn’t Have to Be ScaryToday 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 people. Shared housing can be a solution not only for addressing our scarcity...
2022-02-2850 minThe Strong Towns PodcastThe Latest Update on the Strong Towns LawsuitToday 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 the public during the time when his license had expired. They are now demanding that Marohn...
2022-02-2149 minThe Strong Towns PodcastTruth in Accounting: Making Cities’ Finances Transparent for AllLast 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, as they believe strongly that governments are harmed when citizens (and someti...
2022-02-1456 minThe Strong Towns PodcastJeff Speck on Confessions of a Recovering EngineerToday 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 Janette Sadik-Khan, Mike McGinn, Dar Williams, Andres Duany, and Strong Towns’ own Chuck Marohn. It’s going to be a gr...
2022-02-071h 00The Strong Towns PodcastChuck Marohn Answers Your QuestionsIt'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 address as many questions as we can, and especially the ones that we...
2022-01-3154 minThe Strong Towns PodcastJarrett Walker: ”Prediction and Freedom Are Opposites”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, as well as the blog Human Transit.
Recently while doing his end-of-the-year desk cleaning, Chuck came across an...
2022-01-2448 minThe Strong Towns PodcastPeter Norton: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech DrivingCan 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 or not, not everyone initially wanted cars around. Over time, however, a shift occurred that caused us to see automobiles as the solution, and a not a...
2022-01-1858 min
Pedaling The PuebloStrong Towns with Chuck MarohnRecovering engineer, Chuck Marohn, founder of StrongTowns explains what makes towns resilient and better suited to the people residing in them. Sitting down with Living Streets Alliance, we get to hear about Chuck’s new book and the importance and gravity of designing better streets centering human beings.
A Strong Towns Approach to Transportation
Like many areas of North America, the Tucson region continues to struggle financially despite decades of “growth.” From tax breaks reserved for large-scale developments, to ever-sprawling housing developments, and expensive transportation plans focused primarily on road widening, we keep searching for a silv...
2021-11-1104 min
Charter Cities PodcastBuilding Strong Towns with Charles “Chuck” Marohn“The North American development pattern, the way we build our cities, creates a lot of liabilities and not enough wealth, financially, to actually take care of those liabilities.” These are the words of today’s guest Charles “Chuck” Marohn. Chuck is the founder and president of Strong Towns, as well as a professional engineer and land use planner with decades of experience. He is also the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. In this episode, Chuck sheds light on how the way in which we build our cities has drasti...
2021-10-2553 min
Indulge In Your Ears To A Edge-Of-Your-Seat Full Audiobook.Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles L. Marohn Jr.Please visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/9to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
Author: Charles L. Marohn Jr.
Narrator: Christopher Douyard
Format: mp3
Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
Release date: 09-21-21
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars, 211 ratings
Genres: Architecture
Publisher's Summary:
In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, renowned speaker and author of Strong Towns Charles L. Marohn, Jr., delivers an accessible and engaging exploration of America's transportation system, laying bare the reasons why it no longer works as it once did, and how to modernize transportation to better serve local communities.
2021-09-219h 21
GovLove - A Podcast About Local GovernmentTransportation for a Strong Town with Charles MarohnDesigning streets for neighborhoods. Charles Marohn, the President and Co-Founder of Strong Towns, joined the podcast to talk about his new book on transportation, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. He discussed streets, roads, and stroads, as well as the importance of designing streets for the speeds and outcomes communities want to see. He also shared his thoughts on speed design, traffic signals, and departments of transportation. Host: Ben Kittelson
2021-09-071h 15
Active TownsConfessions of a Recovering Engineer w/ Chuck Marohn (video available)In this episode, I reconnect with Charles Marohn, Founder of Strong Towns and author of the new book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town for a discussion about the compelling need to reform both our transportation systems and how those systems are planned and designed. Landing page for this episodeVideo version of the episodeIn 2010 Charles Marohn, Founder of the Strong Towns organization sat down to create a computerized animated cartoon video called Conversation with an Engineer. As he says in this podcast episode the dialog just flowed...
2021-09-031h 23The Strong Towns PodcastChuck Marohn Answers Your QuestionsHave 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 look at some of those here on the Strong To...
2021-08-301h 05The Strong Towns PodcastRick Harnish: Stronger Transit for Stronger CitiesWhich 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-speed trains “fast, frequent, and affordable.” Harnish cofounded the Alliance in 1993 (he’s also a Strong Towns member), and we’re pleased to...
2021-08-2353 minThe Strong Towns PodcastJohnny Sanphillippo: The Trajectory of SuburbiaYou'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 misadventures) in the suburbs of Madison, along with traveling, interviewing others, and photographing places around the country, have all afforded...
2021-07-1959 minThe Strong Towns PodcastPete Davis: The Case for Commitment in an Age of “Infinite Browsing”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 downsides of hopping from room to room, of living life in the ha...
2021-07-1253 minThe Strong Towns PodcastHere's How Cities Undermine Their Own CompetitivenessThe 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 Strong Towns we call this massive and relatively sudden shift the “Suburban Experiment”—and we’re all the guin...
2021-07-0651 minThe Strong Towns PodcastExpertise Is Not AbsoluteHow 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, which is available for preorder and will be coming out on September 8. In t...
2021-06-2153 minThe Strong Towns PodcastListen to the Briefing About the Strong Towns LawsuitLast 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 member of the legal team, William Mohrman, along with Strong Towns board member John...
2021-06-0141 minThe Strong Towns PodcastStrong Towns Has Filed a Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering Licensure in Federal District CourtA 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 and federal funding, and our assertion that engineers are often grossly negligent in their street designs when it comes to their treatment of people walking and...
2021-05-241h 00The Strong Towns PodcastAnn Sussman and Justin Hollander: Architecture and the Unconscious Mind
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 an aspect of neuropsychology that other industries readily acknowledge. Your brain...
2021-05-0356 minThe Strong Towns PodcastMichael Odiari: Putting a Check on Deadly Traffic StopsPlease 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’s scary to be a Black man in America,” Odiari says, having himself looked down the barrel of an officer’s...
2021-04-1239 minThe Strong Towns PodcastEric Jacobsen: How Car Culture is Making Us Lonelier“Choosing screens over people.” It’s a phrase we hear often these days in relation to smartphones and other digital devices. But, as Eric O. Jacobsen describes in his new book, Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens, we started choosing screens—or, more precisely, windshields—decades before the smartphone.
Prior to the rise of car culture, we could expect to regularly interact with friends, neighbors, and strangers as we made our way through cities developed with walkability and multimodal transportation in mind. Especially since World War II, we still encounter...
2021-03-2956 min
Coastal ConversationsStrong Towns 101 with Chuck Marohn On this conversation, Charles "Chuck" Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns, explains why promoting entrepreneurship has a much different impact on the overall wealth of a community than pursuing national mercantilist capitalism. It not only allows ordinary citizens to pursue their dreams; it works organically to create places where people want to be. Plus, it keeps capital in your local market. He explores the benefits of encouraging this brand of entrepreneurship and offers some guidelines to help you set your community up to prosper over time. Resources Strong Towns
2021-03-251h 29The Strong Towns PodcastBeth Osborne: America's Roads are "Dangerous by Design"The numbers are staggering, saddening, maddening.
From 2010-2019, 53,435 people were killed by drivers while walking. That’s up 45% from the previous decade. In 2019, the last year for which we have complete data, 6,237 people were struck and killed...the equivalent of more than 17 per day. The years from 2016-2019 were the four deadliest years in nearly three decades. And early numbers indicate that 2020—a year in which driving was down 13% due to the pandemic—actually saw an increased death rate.
What’s going on? With so much money and lip service (“Safety is our top priority”) paid to safe...
2021-03-2251 minThe Strong Towns PodcastCullum Clark: Creating Cities of OpportunityA growing body of research—including research by Raj Chetty’s Equality of Opportunity Project (now called Opportunity Insights)—is making it plain: where a person lives has a huge influence on their ability to build prosperity, climb the economic ladder, and pursue the American Dream.
Yet why do some cities and neighborhoods do better at this than others? What lessons can be learned and then translated into local policies and practices elsewhere, so that more Americans have access to economic opportunity?
To help answer these questions, The George W. Bush Institute is producing a series...
2021-03-0859 minThe Strong Towns PodcastRep. Jake Auchincloss & Rep. Mike Gallagher: How Congress Can Support Local Leaders and Get the Economy Going (Video)Strong Towns advocates believe the way to grow stronger and more financially resilient towns and cities—and, by extension, a stronger, more resilient country—is from the bottom up.
A bottom-up approach is one that meets the actual needs of residents. It taps into the energy and creativity that already exists in our communities. It is sensitive and responsive to feedback. (“This is working. That isn’t. Let’s hit the gas here, and pump the brakes there.”) It relies on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects. And it is obsessed with running the numbers...
2021-03-0153 minThe Strong Towns PodcastJoseph Kane: Prioritizing People (Not Projects) In Infrastructure SpendingAs leaders in Washington, DC look to stimulate the American economy, one course of action with bipartisan support—as per usual—is to pour money into infrastructure. Yet as Strong Towns readers know, infrastructure spending often leads cities down the road of insolvency rather than prosperity, and not all infrastructure spending is alike.
In a recent two-part policy brief, Joseph W. Kane and Shalini Vajjhala of The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program wrote that “to truly improve the country’s infrastructure and help the most vulnerable households, federal leaders cannot simply throw more money at shiny new projec...
2021-02-2258 minThe Strong Towns PodcastRichard Florida: Remote Work and "The Rise of the Rest"The ongoing pandemic has raised big questions about the future of North American cities. For example, we’ve heard for almost a year now that COVID-19 will be the end of cities and the triumph of the suburbs. After all, why would people who could work anywhere choose to live in dense, plague-riddled cities? We’ve published our share of responses to this line of thinking—including articles by Joe Cortight of City Observatory, Joe Minicozzi of Urban3, and others—but the gloomy predictions keep coming.
For years, one person we at Strong Towns have turned to again an...
2021-02-0830 min
Locally Grown with Jim FiniEpisode 31 - with Charles Marohn of Strong TownsI published my book, Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government, in October 2019 thinking that I was at the forefront of a movement to restore America’s bottom-up constitutional design and its power to make government more responsive, holistic and sustainable. Silly me. I discovered a couple months ago that Charles Marohn has been turning grassroots principals into real action with his Strong Towns organization for more than a decade. This is one of my favorite interviews with someone who is a true kindred spirit. Our bottom-up movement just got a helluva lot stronger now that Locally Grown and Smal...
2021-02-0446 minThe Strong Towns PodcastBad BetsIn last week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns, talked with the economist Alison Schrager about uncertainty and risk. In this week’s episode, Chuck provides some additional thoughts on risk—and, in particular, the risks towns and cities are taking with their financial futures.
Not only are communities making bad bets by going all-in on the Suburban Experiment, they assume the government (state and federal) or the market will be there to bail them out if the worse—functional, or actual, insolvency—happens. But, as Chuck demonstrate...
2021-02-0159 minThe Strong Towns PodcastAllison Schrager: "The only insurance against uncertainty is resilience."Is there a meaningful difference between risk and uncertainty? On the face of it, we might not think so; in casual usage, we could employ the words interchangeably. But some economists see an important distinction between the two. Early in the American experience of the pandemic, economist Allison Schrager wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal called “Risk, Uncertainty and Coronavirus” (paywall). “The novel coronavirus appears at first to be a problem of risk management,” she wrote. “It is a dangerous disease that threatens the lives of our neighbors and loved ones. Our response—increased social distancing, shutting down busines...
2021-01-2545 minThe Strong Towns PodcastGabrielle Gurley: For Transit, "The Cuts are Coming"Most American transit systems were fragile before the pandemic—struggling for revenue, dependent for survival on federal money, inadequate fares, debt, and, in some cases, donations from local businesses. The pandemic has exacerbated these problems and turned existing transit models on their heads.
In late December, Gabrielle Gurley, a deputy editor at The American Prospect, wrote an article about how transit systems have responded to the pandemic. “Most operators have mastered the virus precautions, requiring masks, social distancing, and deep-cleaning and disinfecting,” she wrote. “Some have coped better than others, though, in rethinking how to serve passengers who are...
2021-01-1854 minThe Strong Towns PodcastMatthew Yglesias: The Case for One Billion Americans (Part 2)Last week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast featured the first half of the conversation between Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns, and Matt Yglesias, the bestselling author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Yglesias is the host of The Weeds podcast and cofounder of Vox Media. He recently launched the blog and newsletter Slow Boring.
In Part 1, Yglesias made the case for tripling the U.S. population, discussing how it would make America stronger at the community level and as a whole. Now in Part 2, Marohn and Yglesias talk about why...
2021-01-1136 minThe Strong Towns PodcastMatthew Yglesias: The Case for One Billion Americans (Part 1)Does the United States have too few people? It’s a provocative question—but one perhaps not asked often enough. And journalist Matthew Yglesias has an even more provocative answer.
In his new bestselling book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Yglesias makes the case for tripling the American population. The U.S. is not “full,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Many of its iconic cities—including not just famous cases of collapse like Detroit but also Philadelphia and Chicago and dozens of smaller cities like Rochester and Erie—actually have fewer residents than they had de...
2021-01-0447 minThe Strong Towns PodcastChris Bernardo: Filling the Gaps to Support Local BusinessesIt happens all the time: there are certain things entrepreneurs and commercial property owners know they need in their business district to really thrive—a relentless approach to maintenance, a high level of cleanliness, increased public safety, splashes of beauty, physical improvements, etc.—yet their town or city can’t afford to provide them.
How to fill those gaps? For an increasing number of places, the answer is to form a business improvement district. Business improvement districts are designed to help close the gaps in communities without the tax base to provide the services and improvements essential for ec...
2020-12-0748 minThe Strong Towns PodcastJust Print the MoneyBack in August, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) warned of a “doomsday” scenario—including fare hikes and service cuts—if the federal government didn’t come through with $12 billion in aid. Writing about the MTA crisis, Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn said that, if he ran the money printing press, the transit agency would get the money. But he also talked about how preposterous it is that it should ever have gotten to this point. New York City has the most valuable real estate in the nation. Why is the fate of the city, and indeed t...
2020-11-301h 01The Strong Towns PodcastStacy Mitchell: Fighting for Small Businesses and Strong Local EconomiesCOVID-19 has been brutal for small businesses. Back in September, data from Yelp showed that nearly 100,000 businesses had closed for good. That was two-and-a-half months ago...and many experts believe the next few months will be even worse for small businesses.
A global pandemic was going to be destructive no matter what, but it’s clear now that small businesses were on a weak footing to start with. Why? That’s the topic on this episode of the Strong Towns podcast...and there’s no guest better able to help us make sense of it than Stacy Mitche...
2020-11-2345 minThe Strong Towns PodcastBlake Pagenkopf: Rebooting Our Political Operating SystemIn many PCs, the first software to run after hitting the power button is called BIOS (Basic Input-Output System). BIOS loads the computer’s operating system and the individual settings that make your personal computer so...personal. A malfunction at this most basic level leads to a cascade of other problems, including error messages, poor performance, or refusing to boot at all.
It’s important to get the foundational things right, and not just in our computers. For too long, says Blake Pagenkopf, author of The Structure of Political Positions, our political discourse has been hobbled by a fu...
2020-11-0949 minThe Strong Towns PodcastDenise Hearn: The Myth of CapitalismEvery year, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn releases a list of the best books he read that year. Past lists have included books that shaped the Strong Towns conversation in profound ways: Chris Arnade’s Dignity (2019), Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (2017), Cognitive Architecture, by Ann Sussmann and Justin Hollander (2017), and Tomas Sedlacek’s Economics of Good and Evil (2016), to name just a few.
Spoiler alert: 2020’s list will include The Myth of Capitalism, coauthored by Denise Hearn, this week’s guest on The Strong Towns Podcast. Hearn is a Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project an...
2020-11-0256 minThe Strong Towns PodcastWhat Are We Waiting For?What is keeping us from doing the things we need to do right now? Why do we outsource the response to urgent problems to the federal government and other distant entities—responses that may never come, or may come with solutions that don’t actually fit our communities?
Consider California governor Gavin Newsom, standing amidst the wreckage of a wildfire in September, saying the United States needs “get our act together on climate change.” The climate crisis, he said, “needs to enliven all of us in this nation…” Or think of Kansas City, Missouri, standing by, apparently, for a federal...
2020-10-1949 min
A Free SolutionCharles Marohn of Strong Towns | July 17th, 2020Kevin interviews Charles "Chuck" Marohn, founder of Strong Towns about building financially responsible local government, how federal and state governments encouraged us to overbuild our infrastructure, how we can find our way out of this mess, and whether cities are still a good option during the pandemic.
2020-07-1743 minThe Strong Towns PodcastSmart Cities: "Are we creating solutions looking for problems?"In this special crossover edition of the Upzoned podcast, we're looking at the "smart cities" movement in general...and the ill-fated Toronto waterfront project in particular.
...
A controversial project in Toronto that would have transformed “a slice of Toronto’s waterfront into a high-tech utopia” has been shut down by Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet) due to "unprecedented economic uncertainty."
“At one point,” writes Andrew J. Hawkins in The Verge, “Sidewalk Labs’ plan was to spend $1.3 billion on mass timber housing, heated and illuminated sidewalks, public Wi-Fi, and, of course, a host of cameras and other sensors to monitor traff...
2020-05-2128 minShort CircuitShort Circuit 128 (4/9/20)Did you know your city might go bankrupt because it doesn’t respect property rights? Strong Towns, Zoning, and Engineering Licensing
Use iTunes? itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/short…cuit/id309062019
Use Android (RSS)? feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundclo…247/sounds.rss
Newsletter: ij.org/about-us/shortcircuit/
Want to email us? shortcircuit@ij.org
Transcript: https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Short-Circuit-128_otter.ai-FINAL.pdf
Charles “Chuck” Marohn, Strong Towns https://www.strongtowns.org/contributors-journal/charles-marohn
Strong Towns (the book): https://www.strongtowns.org/book
Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co.: https...
2020-04-0935 min
TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast#141: Charles MarohnJoin Marty as he sits down with Charles Marohn, Author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity, to discuss:
- How America has been very wasteful with resources for the last five decades
- The problems with top-down decision making
- Why centralized economies "on the bike" don't work in the long-run
- The morality of Fed policy
- Parallels between modern day America and the Weimar Repulic
- How small towns can start over and stand on their own two feet
...
2020-03-171h 14
The Strong Towns PodcastLiz Swaine: Bootstrapping Downtown ShreveportAll 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 Towns podcast, we explore why we’re so excited about what’s unfolding in...
2020-02-1059 min
City Journal AudioA Model for Suburban Development?Charles Marohn joins Michael Hendrix to discuss why the current approach to suburban development isn’t working—the subject of his new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.
“Strong Towns,” notes Aaron Renn in his review of the book for City Journal, “resulted from [Marohn’s] discovery that the highway projects he designed showed a negative return on investment.” Marohn has dedicated his career to helping the country’s older suburbs avoid such costly mistakes by founding the book’s namesake organization, Strong Towns. “Whether or not one agrees with his many observations and prescriptions,” Renn writes, “Marohn provid...
2019-11-2025 min
City Journal AudioA Model for Suburban Development?Charles Marohn joins Michael Hendrix to discuss why the current approach to suburban development isn't working—the subject of his new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. "Strong Towns," notes Aaron Renn in his review of the book for City Journal, "resulted from [Marohn's] discovery that the highway projects he designed showed a negative return on investment." Marohn has dedicated his career to helping the country's older suburbs avoid such costly mistakes by founding the book's namesake organization, Strong Towns. "Whether or not one agrees with his many observations and prescriptions," Renn writes, "Marohn p...
2019-11-1825 min
Bridge Builder PodcastCharles Marohn (Strong Towns) on Making Communities Financially Strong and ResilientWhy do some communities thrive while others collapse? Charles Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns, helps examine that question bringing his insights into how the built environment plays a role in building strong communities. Charles has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute.
In our mailbag segment, we answer several questions regarding how the MN Catholic Conference decides which policy issues to take positions on at a given time. Then, in our bricklayer segment, we discuss how you can connect with your elec...
2019-10-0730 minThe Strong Towns PodcastJames Howard Kunstler: It's All Going to Have to Get SmallerThere is a prevailing fallacy, despite warning signs to the contrary (looming peak oil, fragile markets, and climate weirdness, among others), that we can continue in perpetuity the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. All we need to do is to pump into The System more debt or more political insanity, or hope that alternative energies or some new techno-solution will bail us out.
But, at best, all debt-fueled growth, shale oil “miracles” and green fuels can do by themselves is to make the Long Emergency just “a little bit longer.”
“The Long Emergency” is a phrase co...
2019-09-2357 minThe Strong Towns PodcastBen Westhoff: Ferguson, Five Years Later
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a northwestern suburb of St. Louis. Brown’s death, and the protests that followed, helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement and drew global attention to police brutality and racial inequality in the United States.
Five years later, what has changed in Ferguson? That’s the topic of a moving recent article from The Verge by award-winning St. Louis journalist Ben Westhoff — and the topic of today’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast. Strong Towns president Charles Marohn was interviewed by Westhoff...
2019-09-0341 minThe Strong Towns PodcastWhat Happens When Housing Becomes a Cash Crop?Giorgio Angelini didn’t exactly pick the most fortuitous time to start architecture school. He enrolled in Rice University’s architecture program in 2008, just as the U.S. economy was plunging into recession and new construction screeching to a halt.
But this led to its own sort of opportunity—a chance to engage with some serious questions about architecture’s role in bringing about the housing crisis, and, perhaps, in bringing about a positive response to it. For a research project, Angelini visited aborted suburban subdivisions in California’s Inland Empire—the kind where one home stands adrift in a...
2019-07-2956 min
The Strong Towns PodcastThe Week Ahead, August 21, 2017Chuck Marohn shares the highlights from his recent family vacation to Washington DC including visits to the Library of Congress, the US Capitol, and several national monuments. He also discusses an upcoming Strong Towns event in Tulsa, OK and his recent article, "A Spirit of Generosity." Rachel talks about a new favorite podcast, Left, Right & Center.
Mentioned in this podcast:
Event in Tulsa, OK
"A Spirit of Generosity" by Charles Marohn
Left, Right & Center
2017-08-2137 min
EconTalkCharles Marohn on Strong Towns, Urban Development, and the Future of American CitiesCharles Marohn, President of Strong Towns, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts urban development and what makes a strong town. The two discuss how the post-World War II approach to town and city planning has led to debt problems and wasteful infrastructure investments, and how changes as small as the width of roads make cities more vibrant. Other topics discussed include central Detroit today as a model of city growth, the incentive problems associated with how state and federal infrastructure funds are distributed, and Marohn's efforts to change civil engineers' perspective on growth.
2014-05-121h 04Bloodthirsty VegetariansBV Podcast #0199Listen Up!
Welcome to show number 199. I know that number has to be meaningful on some level!A shout out to our friend Andy WelfleWe discuss the first presidential debateTune 1: The Show by Mike Holstein as performed by Spork (AKA Cosmic Ray Liotta)Top Five films/TV shows/books you would like to see producedTune 2: Button Up Your Overcoat as performed by Miss Rose & Her Rhythm PercolatorsWe discuss Strong Towns by Charles L. MarohnThe first five people to send their mailing address to our feedback email will receive a complimentary copy of Charles Marohn's bookAuf wiedersehen!...
2012-10-0500 min