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Normally when we think of building "stronger," more vibrant cities and places to live, we focus on growth, efficiency, and becoming bigger. Or we focus on urban concepts like "mixed-use" or "density" or "infill," with larger, more expensive development projects that incorporate these elements as having the greatest potential for positive change in order to tackle many of the problems of our cities, like endless sprawl and auto reliance.
In his book of the same name (Strong Towns), however, the author mentions that instead of focusing our efforts on a top-down approach, where we champion huge development plans and growth projects as the catalysts for spurring urban renewal and prosperity, we should instead focus our efforts on incremental processes from the bottom-up, where we continually iterate and try out new things on the local, ground level to see what works and what doesn't. Oftentimes, this means constant, minor maintenance or repair efforts of neglected neighborhoods that might appear blighted at the current moment, but which have the greatest potential for producing revenue for our cities and communities in the long term.
The reality is, it is frequently the "poorer" neighborhoods that are more productive or more potentially productive than the affluent, largely post-war neighborhoods in generating wealth for cities. This is determined on a "wealth per acre" basis, in which the row of traditional brick-front Main Street buildings offers much more than the master-planned shopping complex or Wal-Mart.
He uses examples of municipal governments giving tax subsidies (or not even) to the construction of these new developments (often strip malls or fast food joints), failing to realize how little tax revenue (and ultimately, wealth) these places create on this wealth per acre basis. Not to mention the fact that typically, the city government will have agreed to all future maintenance of the public aspects (collector roads, pipes, etc.) in exchange for the development happening in the first place. This is where the unsustainable "growth" part comes in.
The ultimate purpose is to create financially resilient communities where stability and long-term wealth are held in greater importance than a more "growth-at-all-costs" approach, which often only deepens our insolvency as we chase growth today for indebtedness tomorrow. The focus is on communities that boast high financial productivity and can adapt and respond to the changes of tomorrow. Instead of large, expensive "master-planned"-type developments, we should focus on basic things that we can easily experiment with, as simple as fixing our sidewalks, or storefronts, or parks, etc.
That being said, does anyone have any thoughts they'd like to share about this? Or if they've even heard of this "movement" at all? I know my explanation is only scratching the surface; I highly recommend reading the book to learn more about it.
I had heard and read about it about 3-4 years ago. I then read a website from an advocate who lived in a small town in upstate New York.
I appreciated that the concept didn't just blindly consign older neighborhoods into the trash heap of history, and it advocated that cities should reinvest in their older areas, but since the article/example I read was about a stagnant, upstate New York town, it wasn't directly translatable to my more robust city, San Diego. I could also see how these beliefs could be twisted into justifying what my city has been doing for 60 years: increasing density in older communities, and investing only the minimal amount necessary to prevent a complete social breakdown.
My skepticism was not about the concept, but more about how easily it could be twisted into something else.
I first heard Chuck Marohn when he was barnstorming around the country delivering "Curbside Chats" where he spelled out how what he called the "urban growth Ponzi scheme" worked.
At the time, Marohn described himself as a "recovering highway engineer" from Brainerd, Minn. He's been in recovery for nearly three decades now, and Strong Towns, the organization he was getting off the ground at the time, has grown mightily since then.
I think one of the reasons it has grown so much is because of the urban form it champions: that of the classic American Small Town, with its Main Street lined with a mix of shops, offices and cheap apartments over the stores, and tree-shaded Elm Streets lined with houses and arrayed in a grid that put everything within walking (or biking) distance. (And you didn't need no stinkin' bike lanes either: The residential streets didn't have much traffic, and the traffic on Main Street moved slowly enough that bikes and cars could get along.)
His profession had as its goal eliminating all this. No, that wasn't how the highway engineers saw it, but in their relentless pursuit of ways to enable more cars to move through an urban area faster, that's what it did.
Not only did this make urban roads and streets less safe for everyone except those behind the wheel, it also shrank municipal coffers.
How so? The disconnected, auto-oriented commercial development these roads generated didn't produce enough tax revenue to cover the upkeep on the infrastructure built to support it. (Think: a free parking lot produces no income, but you have to pay taxes on it anyway. The taxes would be greater if a revenue-producing building took up that space instead.)
Thus, to pay for the infrastructure built to support autocentric development, a municipality must recruit more suckers^W^W^Wfind even more businesses to locate along these roads with cars zipping along them. That, in turn, means even more sprawl and even more infrastructure that the taxes can't support.
Meanwhile, Main Street, even in its degraded state thanks to the roadside sucking business away from it, still produced more tax revenue per acre than the auto-oriented business strip. And it was accessible to all.
His presentation featured slides showing the main street of Brainerd ca. 1900 and the same street today. "Isn't that amazing?" he would say about the 1900 photo. "And the people just knew how to build it."
Which brings me to the roots of his "bottom-up" emphasis. Marohn is one of those rare birds: a libertarian conservative who probably has more fans on the left than on the right. But a lot of what he says is indeed quite conservative: That which is smaller and closer to the people is best. The people themselves can figure out how best to improve their situation without intervention from above. The ways we have traditionally built towns and cities work better than the ones we have developed since the Second World War and the rise of autocentric development.
His lecture made the point that, sooner or later, the maintenance bill comes due. For most of what we built in the 1950s, that time was the 1970s, and we kicked the can down the road then by papering everything over with debt. Now (this was the late 1990s), the bill is coming due again, and we can't just paper it over this time. What do we do to save our towns and our municipal balance sheets? Thus was born Strong Towns.
Much of his advice applies equally to larger cities. I listen to both the flagship "Strong Towns Podcast" and one of its spinoffs, "Upzoned." That latter one is hosted by a Kansas City urban planner, and Marohn frequently appears on it as a guest; it's a half-hour podcast where a single topic in urbanism is examined in detail, followed by a "downzone" where the host and guest share something interesting they've read or done over the week. (BTW, I really like the theme music for "Upzoned" — it's a song called "Get Out" written by a Kansas City rapper who's also a fanboy of the city's streetcar line; the video for the song was shot on it. He's wearing a T-shirt reading "It's about to get rail" in the video.) Both podcasts focus on promoting urban development that is "anti-fragile" — an interesting concept that refers to something that heals itself and gets stronger if it breaks. As we've seen over the past 20 or so years, shopping malls break and don't heal. All-at-once master-planned developments age and rot all at once too.
Meanwhile, Main Street proves resilient. Something former Fortune reporter Leigh Gallagher noted not long afterward was that both personal preferences and the economics were shifting in Marohn's direction. Autocentric suburban real estate wasn't holding its value as well as walkable suburban property was. Places like her hometown of Media, Pa., were attracting younger buyers, and their Main Streets were coming back from the undead. She outlined this in a book that Strong Towns advocates would probably like if they bought it, "The End of the Suburbs." (Media, FWIW, has one of those Main Streets I'm talking about. And it may be one of the few suburbs in the country that has a Main Street with a streetcar running down its middle. That Main Street has become a lot livelier and busier than the rather forlorn one I saw when I moved to the Philadelphia area in 1983. The old movie theater is now a performing-arts center that anchors one end of a business district filled with a wide array of restaurants, craft boutiques, clothing stores, local shops and a Trader Joe's.)
An urban-planner friend of mine here in Philadelphia told me in a conversation that Marohn has an ego the size of the rather large room we were standing in at the time. But no matter: the guy's on to something.
Where I part ways with Strong Towns is their predictions that sprawl is unsustainably expensive because of the high amount of infrastructure per person.
I haven't seen this borne out. There are lots of cities near where I live that are car-dependent suburban tracts built in the 50s through the 90s. I would call these places a lot of things, but they don't seem unsustainable. The older among them have already passed the maturity dates of the original bonds used to fund the greenfield infrastructure, and they haven't collapsed.
If anything suburbs are some of the cheapest ways to house people. Where I do see blight and failed infrastructure is in urban areas.
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