Volts podcast: Charles Marohn on unsustainable suburbs

In 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.


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transcript)


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transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Charles 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 them in — subtracting more tax value than they added,
forcing everyone into cars, breaking apart communities and
saddling them with unsustainable long-term liabilities.


He began recording his observations on a blog called Strong
Towns. It quickly caught on, and over the years, Strong Towns has
grown into a full-fledged nonprofit with an educational
curriculum, an awards program, and a rich network of local
chapters working to improve the towns where they are located.


Marohn has since written several books, most recently 2021’s
Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and 2019’s Strong Towns.
Intellectually, he sits somewhat orthogonally to most of the
contemporary urbanist community. He’s an avowed conservative and
opposes many of the state and federal solutions to the housing
crisis favored by today’s YIMBYs.


But there is arguably no one alive in America who has done more
to get people thinking about what makes for a healthy community
and how the US can begin to repair its abysmal late-20th-century
land-use choices. I was excited to talk to Marohn about why
suburbs are money-losers, the right way to think about NIMBYs and
local control, and why the city planning profession is so
resistant to reform.


Okey-doke, without any further ado, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns.
Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.


Charles Marohn


Hey, thanks for having me.


David Roberts


This is really cool. I've been sort of a follower of Strong Towns
for many, many years. It's great to finally get you on here. I
wish we could be talking under more pleasant circumstances.


Charles Marohn


Oh yeah. You got to always have some joy and optimism to things.


David Roberts


I'm trying. Before we get into any of that stuff, I am sure this
is something you've talked about a million times, but I still
don't know that it's sunk into the general public. So let's just
summarize real quick right off the bat, the core of the Strong
Town's critique of suburbs, the sort of Ponzi scheme critique.
Because I think still to this day, it probably comes as a
surprise to most average Americans, just the idea that suburbs
don't pay for themselves, but I just don't think most people know
it. So let's just review that real quick.


Charles Marohn


It's astounding though because we've come a long way, because now
I see when people bring up what is kind of like an ignorant
statement of like, "I pay my taxes, this stuff is paying ..."
people are like, "Whoa, hang on, let me show you something." So
when I was a young engineer and planner, I have a civil
engineering degree, I have a planning degree, I was building all
this stuff to make cities really successful. I was putting in
roads and streets and pipes and building Walmart parking lots and
Arby's drive throughs and ...


David Roberts


Every architect's dream as a child.


Charles Marohn


Oh, yeah, no, this was great stuff. And I believed in my heart
that I was making the city that I live in, the city that I grew
up in, wealthier and more prosperous. But over and over and over
again, I would be exposed to these insane projects. These
projects that if you're an engineer, you kind of work in a silo
of design. If you're a planner, you kind of work in a silo of
regulation. But when you do both, you wind up with this left
brain, right brain conflict that makes you ask like weird
questions. And that's what I was doing.


I was asking questions like, "Okay, this is going to cost us a
million dollars. How long will it take us to recoup that with the
tax base that we get?" And I would run these numbers and it would
be insane things like 120 years. It's like, okay, either I'm
calculating this wrong, or something's really messed up. And I
started just doing this over and over and over again with all
these different developments that I had worked on. And in 2008, I
started to publish this stuff. I started to write a blog and I
share this stuff.


And quite frankly, I was open to the idea that maybe I was crazy,
right? There's got to be something I'm not seeing because there's
a lot of smart people doing this work. I can't be the only one
asking this question. But turns out, I was the only one really
asking this question. Or there were others, but they were
disparate voices, either from the past or silent. And we started
to build at Strong Towns. Myself and some of my colleagues and
friends started to build this body of insight, this body of
evidence that at a certain point just became undeniable.


And the undeniable nature of it is that when you build in the
suburban pattern, we call the auto-oriented pattern development
because we certainly find this style of development within urban
areas too. Right, we tear down stuff and rebuild it in a suburban
style. When you see this style of development, what we find is
that it generates from a cash flow standpoint, a lot of immediate
cash. The quintessential example is we get a developer to come in
and put in the pipe and put in the road and put in the sidewalks
and build all the infrastructure and then gift it to the city.


And the city then gets all the tax base, all the revenue, all the
money coming in from this without having to spend anything
upfront. So from a cash flow standpoint, the city is way ahead,
way ahead in year one, way ahead in year two, way ahead in year
three. But the problem with this transaction is that the city
then agrees to take on the long-term liability. We will go out
and maintain that road. We will go out and maintain that pipe.
And of course, they do this on behalf of the public, right? So we
all collectively together get cash today in exchange for a
long-term promise that we have to make good on in the future.


If you compare those two things, if you add up all the cash, and
you compare it to the ultimate amount we have to expend, in this
style of the development, the post-war style of development, the
style of the first ring, second ring, third ring, exurbs, the
style that we've re-developed the internal core of many of our
cities around. It's not just functionally insolvent. It's
bizarrely insolvent. It creates a dime or two of revenue for
every dollar of expense it generates. It literally is a
wealth-destroying, kind of, growth machine. And, yeah, I think
the difficulty in perception is that we can all see that cities
that are growing fast are shiny and new and look better and are
doing better than the cities that are stagnant or declining.


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


We can all see that. We can all see that those cities have bigger
budgets and fancier stuff. And while all of us, hopefully, live
multiple generations or multiple decades, keeping track of that
slope of decline or ascension over that period of time and coming
to grips with it is just not something the human mind is set up
to do. So I'm a little bit sympathetic to the culture and why the
culture has bought into this. I'm really hard on professionals
who have calculators and pencils and notepads.


David Roberts


Right. Well, you make the point that you have to bring in this
new cash to cover the old stuff and then even more cash to cover
the old, old stuff. So only as long as you're building new
suburbs are you staying ahead of the game.


Charles Marohn


You have to grow at accelerating rates.


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


And that is ... people objected to my use of the term "Ponzi
scheme." Like, early on at Strong Towns. That was a big fight we
had. People would come to our site and they'd be like, "How dare
you say Ponzi scheme?"


David Roberts


Oh, funny.


Charles Marohn


Because they assumed that anyone who runs a Ponzi scheme is
nefarious, is trying to do something evil. And I actually think
the psychology of a Ponzi scheme is a lot more human than that,
right?


David Roberts


Yeah. There are lots of examples that's just got to grow, got to
grow. And if you slow down growing, it all starts to fall apart.
I mean, that's a fairly common dynamic.


Charles Marohn


I don't blame the people who hate Bernie Madoff for losing all
their money. Right, I get that. But I think if you actually look
at Bernie Madoff's story, he felt pressured to show earnings, and
so he fudged a little bit. And then fudging a little bit one year
kind of forced him to fudge a little bit more the next year, and
that forced him to fudge a little bit more next year. And all of
a sudden, there was never a point where you could reckon with how
out of alignment things were. You had to just kind of pretend
that this Ponzi scheme would work itself out.


And when you saw, like, interviews with Madoff, they asked him,
like, "How do you feel?" And part of his feeling was, "I feel
relief."


David Roberts


Not running to stay ahead anymore.


Charles Marohn


Exactly.


David Roberts


Well, one of the things ... I mean, it's one thing to point to
this style of development and its intrinsic sort of
unsustainability and say, "Well, that's bad, but I can understand
why some places do it." But the situation in the US seems to be
that it has become utterly hegemonic. Utterly! I'm from Tennessee
originally, and a few years ago, we had occasion to drive down
from DC down through to Tennessee. You know, all these rural
highways, and you go to these small towns, you know, that have
maybe, like, 10-15, whatever, 20,000 people.


And even there, you get the four-lane strip with the big box
stores surrounded by lifeless, single-family home suburbs. Like,
even there, it's the same model. Insider cities, in the exurbs,
in the small towns, this bizarre, utterly, sort of, like,
unpleasant — it's just not pleasant to be in — style has become
utterly hegemonic in the US. And that's just baffling. Seems like
it requires some sort of explanation. And you were in that
profession. How does that happen? Because what you discovered is
not, you know, it doesn't take that much of a cognitive leap to
see it.


Charles Marohn


No.


David Roberts


And yet here it is hegemonic, and virtually, no one else is
objecting to it. And you started objecting to it 20 years ago,
and it's still going on. What the hell? What is the source of
this grip that it's got?


Charles Marohn


Yeah, it's a really good question, and it has led me to,
actually, over the last decade, spending more time studying human
psychology and human behavior than anything. And people are like,
"Have you read this planning book?" And I'm like, no, "I haven't
read a planning book in a decade. Have you read this new Kahneman
book?" Because that's where the answer comes in, right? Let me
simplify this down. Why do people smoke? Why do people who are
diagnosed as prediabetic continue to eat sugar? Why do people who
have a history of heart disease in their family eat fatty foods
and things that lead to heart attacks?


These are questions where I think if you are not participating in
that, we all have something like this, right? I mean, that's the
great findings of Daniel Kahneman, the cognitive psychologist.
Like, humans do irrational things, and we rationalize them and
pretend that we're different or we understand why, or we're in
control. But the reality is that we have a fast reaction, a gut
reaction, an impulse on how we do things.


David Roberts


System one.


Charles Marohn


System one, and then system two, rationalizes it after the fact.
So I know that I need to eat healthier, but there's a bowl of ice
cream that my kid is having, and she offered me one, and I'd be
really antisocial if I didn't, so I will eat healthier tomorrow.


And now it's tomorrow and I'm at work, and there's a pile of
donuts, and it's kind of like, I can have one. Like, it's not a
big deal. We are really, really good at rationalizing each
individual step of our own decline and demise. That's not a
commentary on the darkness of humanity. I think that there's good
cognitive reasons why humans, as they were evolving out of
hunter-gatherer societies, or even go back further, evolving out
of chimpanzees and primates and mammals, why this kind of instant
gratification gene, in a sense, is embedded in our DNA.


David Roberts


Very true for individuals. I think everybody immediately
recognizes that as individuals. But you would think one of the
reasons we build institutions or one of the reasons we build
expertise among groups of people is that we're supposed to be
able to watch over one another's shoulders, right, and check one
another so that we can check that error collectively. But
instead, here we have the entire profession acting basically like
the diabetic individual eating cake.


Charles Marohn


Okay, but here's what you said. We have institutions to, in a
sense, check our avarice, right? Check our human behaviors.
Totally agree. This is also why we destroy institutions from time
to time, because we, as humans, feel constrained by them. We feel
as if our avarice or our impulse is being constrained improperly.
I tend to be a little bit on the conservative side of things. I
mean, I'm a small-town guy from a rural area. I've grown to
understand the yin and yang of left and right and really
appreciate the dichotomy and the roles that people who are
pushing boundaries versus people who are trying to cling to
institutions and ways of being.


Like, I get the tension, and I actually appreciate the tension.
But it just, I think, shows that the suburban experiment cannot
be understood in any other way than a progressive attempt to
reshape the continent around a new set of ideas. It is a
destruction of a certain way of life in order to create whole
cloth, something that would be better. And it just so happens
that in our political framework, the mechanism of doing that
became, in a sense, the Republican mechanism, right? Like, we're
going to recreate this around a model of big business and big
top-down corporations and big top-down institutions.


So there's something for everybody, right?


David Roberts


Well, let's talk about, rather than the dysfunctions of the
planning and civil engineering professions. Let's just, at least
briefly, talk about when you talk about a strong town, the model
that's been lost in the car era. Presumably, physical layout has
a lot to do with that, but that's not everything. So sort of what
are the kind of elements of a strong town that you are trying to
recapture through this movement?


Charles Marohn


That's a great question. And I think that when we go back to the
early days before I started writing, when I was trying to get my
mind around this problem and trying to come up with like, well,
what does this problem mean and what do we do? I gravitated to
the New Urbanists because the New Urbanism is a collection of
people who have, in a sense, gone back and tried to understand
why do cities of the past work, and why do cities of today not
work? And they do things like go out and measure sidewalks and
street width and all this.


And there was a central argument, and I'm going to caricature the
New Urbanism. I love these people. I have a deep respect for
them. But I think there have been things that they have evolved
on over time. And I think one of the things that has been
evolving is this insight that if you just get the design right,
everything else will take care of itself. If you just build the
human habitat in the right way, the humans will respond. And
anyone who's ever been to Baltimore, which is one of the most
beautifully designed cities in America, will recognize that
that's simply not true.


There's a deeper interaction there. I think that we have to
recognize that at the end of World War II, we were, as a nation,
in this very unique position. We had just gone through the
Depression. We had just gone through, if you're a bean counter in
Washington DC, we got out of the Depression by starting, "you're
joining a global war." We were demobilizing millions of troops.
We were shutting down industries with millions of jobs. There was
a sense that we were just going to go right back into the depths
of the Depression.


And instead, we took these complex, adaptive human habitats that
had evolved and shifted and been very bottom-up for thousands of
years. And we said, "We're going to take all of this capacity,
all this industrial might." We had more oil in Saudi Arabia at
this point. We had the world's reserve currency. We had all the
gold. We had this culture that was united. We're going to take
all of this capacity we have and we're going to direct it into
this new project of building a new version of America. And that
means we got to build quickly, which means we have to
standardize, we got to have standard road sections, standard
street sections, standard housing forms, standard zoning
classification, standard building styles, and types.


And we have to repeat this process over and over and over and
over again. And if we can do that, it will create enough energy
in our economy to not only lift us out of depression and keep us
out of depression but make our country powerful and rich and
wealthy and build a really strong middle class. And it worked.


David Roberts


As you note, "As long as it's growing, as long as you're ahead of
the ..."


Charles Marohn


Yeah, we learned. That lesson really well, right? And so you even
hear economists now today saying, "Well, what should we do,
economists?" And they'll say, "Build more infrastructure, because
that worked in the 1950s and the 1960s." It is long past
diminishing returns. And the economists don't understand that. We
always talk about a strong town being more like diet and exercise
than it is like being ripped, right? So we can look at like a
weightlifter and be like, okay, or someone who does a ton of
aerobics and be like, alright, this person is in really great
shape. If you look at cities, there's no cities that are ripped.


There's no cities that are in really great shape, right? We've
all been subjected to 70 years of this macroeconomic growth
experiment. We're all atrophied, we're all struggling, we're all
insolvent, we're all in a mess. So strong towns. The idea is more
like diet and exercise. How do you develop good habits and good
practices that will allow your city to evolve, adapt, and grow
stronger and more prosperous over time? So that's what we focus
on. How are you doing your budget? How are you doing your design?
How are you doing your layout? How are you investing in
transportation?


What does your approach look like in terms of developing capital
projects? These are things we try to help people get a grip on
and just think about them differently.


David Roberts


I'm curious. I want to think that there's a lot of that progress
going on beneath the surface, because one of the things that's
most striking about all this is that the kind of critiques of
car-based suburbia that you are talking about go way, way back.
They go way back. And at this point, at least among my cohort,
whatever my demographic cohort is, people like me, it's just like
conventional wisdom at this point. Of course, it's bad. Of
course, if you build more lanes, there's just going to be more
traffic. You know, induced demand. Like, of course, if you build
around cars, businesses will do worse because, you know, of
course, more businesses get more business from pedestrians, just
like stuff like that among my crowd has just been accepted. And
yet ...


Charles Marohn


You lose every time.


David Roberts


The zombie shuffles on still. Still, still, still. So who are
these planners who haven't heard the news? Who are these traffic
engineers who haven't yet been convinced by the evidence for
induced demand? Like, what is the disconnect between this very
well-established critique at this point and the zombie that seems
unaffected by the critique just decade after decade?


Charles Marohn


Right.


David Roberts


I can't reconcile those, I guess.


Charles Marohn


Did the people running Rome not recognize that bread and circuses
was a dead end. Of course. Right? Of course, they did. We look
back and we're like incredulous, like how would they have done
something this stupid? And then we don't recognize that we are
human and trapped in the same kind of thing.


David Roberts


Right?.


Charles Marohn


Let me put this point on it. At Strong Towns, we spend a tiny bit
of time thinking about macro policy and how to change it and I
will take calls from Congressmen from time to time and chat with
them. They're very pleasant and all that, but we don't have a
program for that level. I don't actually think there's ... we
just passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that was totally a
disaster. If I could have written a horrible bill it would not
have looked any different than this. This was a bad, bad, bad
bill and it was acclaimed. It was acclaimed by both parties.


It was acclaimed by the national media. It was acclaimed, you
know, on Main Street. I still travel around the country and
people are talking about the infrastructure bill. You know, not
all that much, but like if they're going to say something
positive that's they point to that.


David Roberts


Well, the bar for success at the federal level is so low at this
point.


Charles Marohn


I don't think we should pretend that we are going to end the
bread and circuses, right. That's not the project that Strong
Towns is trying to undertake. I think at Strong Towns we have to
understand that, in a sense, the bread and circuses will end at
some point and that's going to be a really, really painful,
painful experience. And when that painful experience comes to
fruition, we need to have a project that not only is nascent but
is actually working in places. We need to have an alternate model
that has some credibility, some success, some adherence, some
people who have worked out some of the kinks and are figuring
out, like, here's a best practice for this, and here's a best
practice for that.


Because the alternative to that is going crazy as a society. And
we need something positive that we can do that will keep us from
going crazy.


David Roberts


That's a good segue into my next question then because the whole
Strong Town thing is to sort of reject grandiose top-down visions
from both the right and the left in favor of this sort of
bottom-up evolutionary, incremental ...


Charles Marohn


Can I push back a tiny bit?


David Roberts


Sure.


Charles Marohn


And then you continue your question.


David Roberts


Sure.


Charles Marohn


You said "Reject top-down vision" and I guess — "grand vision" —
I guess I want to say I feel like I have and I feel like so many
people affiliate with Strong Towns have grand visions. What we
reject is the grand sweeping action to achieve that vision,
right? It's the fact that I have a grand vision of "Here's what
my life is going to be." If I go out and borrow a ton of money
and just put myself in hawk and achieve for one instant the thing
that I was after. That's not really like attaining something,
right? I want to build up to what success looks like.


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


Humble steps,


David Roberts


Top-down imposed sweeping reforms then, in favor of bottom-up.
But the sort of other side of that is, at least in the current
urbanist, YIMBY, whatever you call it, community. When I hear
bottom-up, my first thought is NIMBYs. My first thought is,
insofar as there is community involvement in a lot of these
questions, it is almost always on the side of "No, no, no, build
nothing, change nothing, keep this crappy system that we built
because it's sending my home values through the roof." Or I also
think of environmental review and just the bureaucracy, and just
when I think local involvement, that's where my mind goes, is
sort of wealthy boomers going to town meetings, shouting at
people who want to build bike lanes.


So how do we reconcile that, sort of, like, bottom-up vision of
yours with the sort of scourge of NIMBY-ism that seems to be what
is actually happening bottom-up in cities?


Charles Marohn


Yeah, totally. I could not agree with your analysis more. Let me
give you a brief history of the 20th century as it goes with
public engagement. So we get out of World War II, we start
building all this stuff, and we empower engineers and we empower
planners and we empower corporations to just build, build, build,
build, just keep going. They actually had a plan at one point to
use atomic bombs to build a highway through the Rocky Mountains.
That's how much power we gave to engineers, right? I'm not
joking. Like that was the legit plan that went through.


Like, okay, we're going to do this. And the next phase was, "Wait
a second, this is totally junk. Like we hate this. We don't like
this at all." And then you have born out of that all the kind of
like environmental renaissance of the baby boomers, right? You
get the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and you get
environmental reviews and you get NEPA, you get all this stuff.
And what that establishes is a process to go through to
accomplish what you want to accomplish. And so in a sense, the
baby boomer response to the process dysfunction of building
suburbia was to attack it with more top-down process.


And now you go to kind of the next iteration. And the next
iteration is to say, okay, this is all messed up. These processes
are resulting in really bad things. We need — and I'm going to
put in superficial, I'm going to put in parentheses on the
beginning of this — we need a superficial level of public
engagement. We need the public to feel involved, feel listened
to. And it's almost like the participation trophy, right? For
public engagement, we need to have everybody feel like they're
heard but again, not results that we really want. We fight these
things.


We battle. But what this has done is it's empowered the NIMBY.
The craziest person can show up with two of their friends and
shout down the most sanest proposal. And the investiture of time
it takes to overcome that is just asymmetrical to what anyone
would be willing to do given the limited upside.


David Roberts


And of course legendarily, in a lot of these decisions, the
people who will benefit from them don't exist yet, right? Or
don't live there yet. That's the whole point. And if you're not
there yet, you can't very well show up to a meeting, right?


Charles Marohn


Or even look at something simple like, "We're going to put in a
new traffic light on this highway because Walmart wants to go
here." And you're like, okay, well what that is going to do is
it's going to rob about 30 seconds a day from everybody who uses
that highway. So 20,000 people who have invested for this highway
capacity to get somewhere are now going to have 30 seconds of
their day robbed. So over the course of a year, they're going to
have 3 hours of their life robbed or whatever that works out to
be. And over the course of a decade, they're going to have a day
and a half.


Alright, that is like a small bit of pain. How much time would
you spend at a public meeting trying to fight that? You're not
going to, right? Collectively when we add up everybody together
it's a huge dramatic loss. But for each individual player who's
negatively impacted, it's not enough to justify your
participation in the system. But for Walmart, the gain is
enormous, right? They'll hire teams of attorneys and teams of
advocates to go and show up. And say we need to do this.


David Roberts


Classic, classic asymmetry here.


Charles Marohn


Asymmetry. Right. And so you have this in many different realms.
Like the NIMBY who doesn't want something built in the house next
to theirs can show up with four of their neighbors and shout down
something. But the like 20 people who need a place to live,
they're out at their job and they're out working and they're
trying ... And the amount of time they would have to invest to
actually make a difference is so huge and the potential upside so
minimal. It's asymmetry. So the answer to this problem is not
look back through history. It's not to empower the technical
people more.


That's one option on the table that we just need to get ...


David Roberts


Technocratic override.


Charles Marohn


Yep, we need to get the oligarchy of technocrats in here to run
things for us because we're incapable. Option number two is that
we create more process. This is the baby boomer reaction, like
"More process, more process and we'll get better outcomes."
Option three, we'll call this the Gen X option. I don't know if
it is or not, but I'll claim it as my generation is the idea that
if we can have a lot of participation trophies and a lot of
theater of public engagement that maybe we'll get some better
ideas and people will certainly feel better about things.


David Roberts


Or a sheen of legitimacy.


Charles Marohn


Right, the sheen of legitimacy. The answer to it is the ancient
practice of subsidiary, the idea that decisions should be made at
the level in which they can competently be made and no higher.
And the role of every level is to either make the decision that
is at their level or assist the levels below them in making a
decision. I point often to the chicken problem, backyard
chickens. Where should backyard chickens be regulated? Should
they be regulated at the regional level, at the state level?
There really ... it's a block-level decision. If I'm going to
have chickens, that doesn't affect anybody except my neighbors.


And so that decision should be one that neighbors make together.
Now people will say, "Well Chuck, I don't like my neighbors. I
don't get along with them. We fight, we disagree." Okay, but you
got to work this one out. That's not a decision you can allow
other people to make for you. You have to, as a neighborhood,
make that decision, or as a block. "Well jeez, we just can't
we're at each other's throats."


To me that's where the role of the city comes in. The city says,
"Alright, I can't make this decision for you. I could, but that
would be wrong and it would be a dummy standard applied to
everybody and we need local nuance. I can't make this decision
before you, but what I can do is I can help you as a neighborhood
reach a decision together." If we had government that functioned
like that, what we would find is that the regional rail project
is not going to get derailed by one block of people who are rich
enough to hire lawyers and create all kinds of process. That's a
regional decision. It should be made by a regional government
representing everybody. But the chicken thing is not going to get
screwed up. Or contrasting, the big developer is not going to be
able to come in, buy off the city council, or mobilize whatever
to shove the eight-story condo unit down your throat.


David Roberts


Well, but I guess I would object to ... well, not object, but my
question is it seems slightly question-begging since the whole
point of contention here is if the decision is whether to put a
bike lane in neighborhood x. Is that like chickens, in that it
mainly or only affects neighborhood x and therefore should be
made at the level of neighborhood x? Or is it an infrastructure
decision that affects the whole city and its transportation flow
in which case you make it at the city level? Or, there's a lot of
research lately showing that these local NIMBY decisions are
creating a housing crisis which is having macroeconomic effects
on the entire country, which might suggest that maybe the federal
level is the level for some of these decisions.


So it's not obvious to me what the right level is. And in a
sense, that's the whole point of contention, is it not?


Charles Marohn


No. Well, it is in one sense because this is what politicians do,
right? They're like, "Well, this thing affects everybody. And so
the temperature you set your thermostat has to be decided in
Washington DC. Because it's a macro issue." The answer is not to
what degree does it affect everyone. The answer is, "At what
level can this decision be made?" And it should be made at the
lowest level that it can be made. I think one of the problems
that we confuse, and one of the things we get up our minds
wrapped around, is that we're so used to working at the wrong
scale that it's hard to reconcile the idea of subsidiarity with
the kind of projects we do today.


You brought up a bike lane, and a bike lane is like a very
popular kind of project amongst a certain group of people because
they're like, "We need more biking and walking." I can tell you
that almost every bike lane project I see is the wrong project
for that community. There are very few where it's like the right
project originated in the right way. And let me walk you through
that just briefly. We have a thing at Strong Towns that we call
the four-step process for public investments. And the core of
this process begins with going out and humbly observing where
people struggle.


A lot of times when we're looking at bike projects, they don't
originate with a humble understanding of where people are having
a difficult time using the city as it has been built. Where they
generally start with is either someone at City Hall really likes
bike lanes, there's a grant out there for bike lane projects. We
have a capital improvements plan, and our complete streets policy
says we should put in bike lanes, or some regional authority is
like, "We're trying to build a regional bike trail. You guys need
to put in a connection." All of those are the wrong place to
originate a project.


When we originate projects based on where people are having a
difficult time using the city, what we wind up doing is making
projects that are actually scaled to the urgent demands of people
on the ground. And those projects are not opposed. They have
their own baked-in constituency. And the thing about those kind
of projects is there's an endless number of them and the
implementation does look a lot more like subsidiary.


David Roberts


I don't know. When I think about bike lane decisions being made
at the neighborhood level, it's hard for me not to think that
there would just never again be a bike lane.


Charles Marohn


Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the city you live in, but if we
went out here where there's a lot of opposition to bike lanes. I
mean, the last big bike lane project we put in went right in
front of a Catholic church in town. And I go to the different
Catholic church, but I've attended this one. I know the priests,
I know the people there. The Catholic church was irate about it,
and they were irate about it because it took away the place that
they would park for funerals and weddings, right? Like, right out
in front, like it took away this place.


It was a stupid bike lane project. No one ever bikes there. It's
not a place where people bike. But what happened was they came up
with a master bike lane plan, a master bike plan. They were
redoing the street. This is phase one of implementation. And they
said, from a very top-down kind of rote approach, "This is where
the bike lane goes." And what they did is they generated a
ridiculous amount of opposition to bike lanes. My recommendation
to them, this is my city now, was, let's go out and see where
people are biking right now, and then let's bike with them or
follow them or talk to them and find out where you are biking
right now is it most difficult? Where are you having the most
struggle? I bike all the time. We can go out and do this. We can
go out and talk to people. Show, like, crossing this bridge:
really dangerous. Crossing the street: really dangerous. What can
we do to fix that?


And the amazing thing about fixing that is that a. there's
already people using it, they're just struggling, b. those people
are adjacent to other people who would probably use it but for
the danger or the struggle. And so, c. when you fix it, you not
only have a built-in constituency whose needs you're responding
to, but you have a related adjacent constituency that's going to
come forth and affirm the thing that you did and the value that
it provides.


That's how you build a culture of biking and walking, and that's
how you get bike lanes everywhere.


David Roberts


And can you point to a place? I mean, Strong Town gives these
awards, it runs these academies, tries to teach city leaders,
tell us a story of a town that is strong, that is doing things
like that.


Charles Marohn


That is ripped.


David Roberts


Not yet ripped, but on a good health plan, let's say.


Charles Marohn


Well, we have the annual Strongest Town contest, and that is
really a celebration of places that are doing this kind of
incremental work. Where are the places that are doing the diet
and exercise of building a strong town. And none of them are
perfect, and we tell them, like, "Don't be ashamed to apply if
you're not perfect, because none of these cities are." But we
have tended to have this long list of mid-sized towns where they
are, and I'm going to generalize here, but I think this is
generally true, where they are too poor to be stupid, but just
connected enough and coherent enough to grasp the need to work
together.


And those are places that are astounding. I mean, Pensacola, a
few years ago. I'm going to Jasper, Indiana here in a couple of
weeks. You know, these cities are places where they all have kind
of the same problems everybody has but have found unique ways to
deal with them. But if you told me like, Chuck — okay, I was in
Sacramento last week, and the people who run the Council of
Governments in Sacramento, it's this regional governance body,
they go around and around to places and talk to people, and they
do like these retreats. So they're going as a group to Salt Lake
City to learn from the people in Salt Lake City.


They have in the past gone to Amsterdam to learn from Amsterdam.
And they listed these places that they've gone. And then they
asked me, "Chuck, where would you go?" And I said, "I'd go to
Detroit, I would go to Memphis, I would go to Buffalo, I would go
to Shreveport, I would go to Cleveland, Akron." These are places
that you see the most innovation, the most entrepreneurial
spirit, the most flexibility of thought. These are the places to
me that are the most exciting.


David Roberts


And get zero national attention.


Charles Marohn


Oh, yeah, no, they get zero, right. But they're uninhibited by,
you know, we went back and talked about that cultural expectation
of the bread and circuses and all that. The bread and circuses
are done in these places, and so they're uninhibited by that
hang-up and they can actually focus on doing great stuff. And
these places struggle. I'm not going to pretend that you're going
to walk in there and go, "Wow, this place is amazing." But if you
scratch the patina a little bit and talk to some people and go to
some neighborhoods, you're going to see story after story after
story that will blow your mind, that you could do in Sacramento,
that you could do in an affluent place and see amazing success.


David Roberts


I want to get to politics. But there's one thing I wanted to hit
before then, and this is given what's going on as we are talking,
somewhat thematically appropriate question, but I wanted to ask
what makes ... it seems like one of the key features of a good
town, a good community, is safety, a certain level of public
safety. And I just wonder of all the reforms and things you look
for and things Strong Town rewards with its awards and whatnot,
what kinds of things create safety? I was reminded recently of a
Tweet thread where this woman asked, "What would you do if there
was a curfew for men? If they had to be in by ten, what would you
do?" And by far the most common answer was, "I would love to go
running at night. I've always wanted to go running at night and I
just won't now because of safety."


Charles Marohn


Right.


David Roberts


I'm sure physical structure and design structure has something to
do with that, but also there are other factors, community, sort
of. So, in the safety dimension, what makes the community safer?


Charles Marohn


I'll give you the number one thing and it's people, right? People
make it dangerous and people make it safe. I was able to spend
some time in southern Italy, which is a really amazing place, but
also very poor. And there were a lot of places where the crowds
and the sheer number of people in these places were conducive to
things like pickpockets and that kind of stuff. But not to rape,
not to assault, not to the things that you would fear. There's a
level of people less than that. The pickpocket part actually goes
away, too, because you lose the thickness of the crowd in a
sense.


When we look at places that are great for biking and walking, I
think our affluent assumptions is that places that are great for
biking and walking have great biking and walking infrastructure.
And that's actually not true. The places that are the best for
biking and walking have just the most people who bike and walk,
regardless of the infrastructure. So if you've got like crappy
infrastructure but there's tons of people walking all the time,
that place becomes instantly way safer than anything else.
Because, and I'm going to say this and people may recoil this,
but most people are good, most people are decent.


We do bad things sometimes, and sometimes we do things that will
make you cringe. But the reality is that most culture is actually
pretty good. We're pretty good to each other. And when we get
people out together, that added security of having more people
around you is what will keep you safe. This is a related insight
to Jane Jacobs's "Eyes on the Street."


David Roberts


Yeah, "Eyes on the Street." I was just thinking.


Charles Marohn


Yeah, but it's even, I think, a step beyond that. "Eyes on the
Street" recognizes that people don't want to get caught, right?


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


But I actually think there's a next step to that is that I think
people are genuinely inclined to be their most lovely self when
they feel like they are in an environment where other people are
viewing them.


David Roberts


Especially other people who are again going to be viewing them
the next day and the next day, right? A community of people.


Charles Marohn


Let me say it this way, people who matter to them. Right?


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


And I think there's a way to go really dark with that because
there's a way to have this be an insider versus outsider kind of
thing. Humans are, I think, lovely and beautiful to each other,
but a lot of that is a function of in-group versus out-group
behavior. And sometimes in out-groups, we are not as lovely to
each other. The response to that has often been, "Well, then
let's get police out there, and let's regulate that." To me, the
response in a healthy place is to just increase your in-group.


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


Like, expand your in groups.


David Roberts


Social trust. It's the bedrock of everything.


Charles Marohn


Yeah. When you look at ...there's a fascinating book by Tim
Carney, conservative writer, and he looked at ... basically, he
studied the 2016 presidential primary, and he was trying to make
some insights on community. So this was all Republicans, right,
places that voted Republican in the general election, so voted
for Trump in the general election. But he wanted to know what
places in the primary supported Trump and what places didn't. And
of course, this can be broke down precinct by precinct. And he
created a map around the country of what these places were and
what they look like.


And what he found is that the places that voted for Trump tended
to have more crime. They tended to have more social isolation.
They tended to have more people who identified as Christian but
didn't go to church. There was a bunch of things like that that
you were really getting a measurement of what I would just say is
like the end result of the suburban experiment, right? Like,
complete individual autonomy and social isolation from others.


David Roberts


God, I think that's so true. And I bring this up and people look
at me like I'm crazy. But I really think the suburban model, the
end product, is to make people into psychopaths. You make it so
that each lives in their individual castle, and the only way they
interact with the community is as drivers. And as I'm sure you're
well aware, nothing makes you more of an a*****e more quickly
than driving a car.


Charles Marohn


We've done studies on — not we, Strong Towns — we humans.
Psychologists have done studies with rats and with monkeys and
with chimpanzees, and we've looked at social isolation and the
impacts of it. And it does not take much social isolation to make
... and I would say lower level, not homo sapiens, completely
neurotic.


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


It does not take much social isolation. We have built a
development pattern where the marketing brochure is social
isolation.


David Roberts


Yes.


Charles Marohn


Here's how we can help you, facilitate you, being the most
antisocial person you can. Yeah.


David Roberts


Here's how you can escape other people.


Charles Marohn


Right.


David Roberts


And this is the thing, the safety thing. I've spent a lot of my
life walking around suburbs because I have dogs and I walk them
frequently in Seattle, where I live, is chock full of suburbs.
And the whole notion that they're safer has always struck me as
bizarre. And as you say, it's about the density of people. When
you're walking around suburbs, even healthy, wealthy suburbs in
the middle of Seattle, you just don't see many people. When you
see one, it's like the two of you alone on a block, and there's
something creepy about it. There's just something that's always
felt unsafe about it, even to me, a sort of stocky, white dude
who's probably the safest any human could be.


It just doesn't feel even safe to me. I've never understood this
idea that escaping away from other people makes you safer. I
don't know why that's taken hold.


Charles Marohn


Let me actually make this statement that I think affirms what
you're saying. The most dangerous development pattern is the
failing suburb. Because there you combine all of the neuroticism
of social isolation with all the desperation of poverty.


David Roberts


And we're going to see a lot more of those in coming years.


Charles Marohn


Oh, my gosh, that's my nightmare. I think that is the thing that
is going to define the 21st century is dealing with that problem.


David Roberts


Yikes.


Charles Marohn


Because you you isolate poor people in inner cities, and it's a
despotic thing, but you at least isolate them in coherent
neighborhoods. I mean, neighborhoods where they can walk to get
food and walk to a job and get on a bus and get somewhere to a
doctor or what have you. You isolate the same demographic. You
isolate poor people in America's second-ring, third-ring suburbs.
And, to me, you're talking "Mad Max."


David Roberts


Yeah, that's very dystopian.


Charles Marohn


Right. That's very dystopian.


David Roberts


Let your mind run. Well, I did want to ask you about this, too,
that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and
we're running out of time, but let me squeeze this one in, too.
I'm sure you've even asked a million times. The puzzle of how to
build a good place, I feel like is not solved, but I feel like
we're just setting out to build a brand new place. We have a lot
of good guidance and know a lot of things to do now. But of
course, the big problem in America is all the suburbs already
built along this crappy model spread out. It can only get to them
by car, and they're there.


What do we do with them? Have you ever heard, I mean, I've had a
lot of sort of urbanist-y kind of people on and ask this question
all the time, and if you had to hear a good answer, but what do
we do with them? Do you know of ways to rehabilitate or densify
or something to help your typical sort of windy, curly Q street
exurb? Or is it just lost to us?


Charles Marohn


Well, let's pause at this. There are some brilliant people
working on this problem. Ellen Dunham-Jones, Galina Tachieva,
they've created ...


David Roberts


Oh, they're coming on the pod in a few weeks.


Charles Marohn


Okay, great. They've made beautiful books, and they show
brilliant architecturally how we make this transformation. And
you look at them and you're like, this is genius work. The
problem is that the work is misaligned with the culture, and it
doesn't scale to the size of the problem. So I feel like there's
insights from those books that we can use and adapt, but as a
solution, suburban retrofit is not a solution. Because the
reality is when I say we collect ten cents, twenty cents on the
dollar of what we need to maintain all this stuff. The
implications of that is that a lot of what we built will not be
maintained.


David Roberts


Yep.


Charles Marohn


And so when we look at these places, we have to recognize that
the goal of saving them all and retrofitting them all is the
ultimate pouring good money after bad. Half of the streets we
have today, half of the roads we have today are not going to be
here 50 years from now like they just won't. The bridges will not
be here. The interchanges will not be here. This is bizarre.
People who have trouble getting their mind wrapped around this,
yet everybody who has trouble getting their mind wrapped around
this can think of what it looked like when we walked away from
the core of our cities.


We just walked away from these places, ordered them up, and said,
this is not ...


David Roberts


Detroit's right there. We can just go look at it.


Charles Marohn


We can go see it. It's not a difficult case study to examine. So
you look at this and then what you recognize is that there is no
discernible pattern between the neighborhoods that make it and
the neighborhoods that fall apart. And so what we need to do as a
public project is actually work in this bottom-up, incremental
way. And the places that start to coalesce and those will have
physical attributes, but they're also going to have cultural
attributes of people being willing to work together. The places
that start to coalesce into success, those are the places where
we make our limited investments.


Those are the places we triage. So if neighborhood A says, "We're
a bunch of NIMBYs and you're not allowed to build an accessory
apartment or a duplex in this neighborhood," but neighborhood B
says, "Hey, we welcome corner stores and we welcome duplexes and
we welcome all kinds of investment," and I'm a city and I can
only fix one neighborhood. I got to decide between A or B. I'm
going to pick the one that is embracing others. I'm going to pick
the one that has upside potential from an investment standpoint.
I don't think that's a hard choice to make.


David Roberts


Yeah, it is going to leave us with ...


It's going to leave us with a lot of mess.


Lots of abandoned, crumbling ... I mean, I guess no matter what
we do, we're going to end up there. But jeez, if you think that
landscape is vast and soulless now, just like, project your mind
ahead 50 years and imagine it crumbling and falling apart and
largely abandoned.


Charles Marohn


If we learn something from Detroit, which I think we should learn
a lot of things from Detroit, but if we learn something from
Detroit about that transition, there really needs to be an
industry of suburban salvage more than anything. Right? Instead
of having your house go to nothing. We're going to purchase it
and salvage it at some point.


David Roberts


Strip it for parts.


Charles Marohn


Yeah, strip it for parts. It's exactly what we'll do. Strip it
for parts. Because that wire has value. Some of the other stuff
has value. We'll strip it for parts.


David Roberts


Pretty bleak.


Charles Marohn


But it is bleak because what we built was stupid, right?


David Roberts


Yes.


Charles Marohn


I mean, I think a lot of us would like to save ourselves from,
like, okay, I didn't go to college. I knocked out my girlfriend
when I was 17, I have a drinking problem, and now I'm 45 and I
got my life straightened out. That's great, like from that point
on, do good things. Right? But it doesn't make up for the fact
that you kind of made a series of bad choices for a couple of
decades. You got to deal with that. And I feel like as a society,
we made two and a half generations of really bad decisions.


David Roberts


Well, America is so good at honest self-reflection and coming to
terms with its own mistakes in a mature and clear-sighted way. So
that shouldn't be a problem.


Charles Marohn


Was that Churchill, "We'll always do the right thing after we've
tried every other option"?


David Roberts


Yeah, that quote is starting to sound a little tinny to me, much
like Obama's arc of history. I'm like, well, when, though? Yeah,
we tried everything bad and we're still trying it. When's that?
Anyway, let's talk politics for a minute, you know, or at least
were last time I checked, in a self-described conservative. I
don't have to sort of belabor the evolution of the right in
America in recent decades and of the Republican Party, among
many, many, many other things. We have seen it now become
basically explicitly pro-suburb. Right? Instead of implicitly,
it's now saying, Joe Biden is going to come take your suburbs.


Charles Marohn


Yeah, no, he wants to kill the suburbs, right.


David Roberts


Put his flag down in the exurbs and everything else going on. So
I wonder I know that small "c" conservatives like you, sort of,
pro-urbanist conservatives exist. I know that the species exists.
Where is your political home? What has become of you? What do you
make of your own sort of political location at this point in
trajectory?


Charles Marohn


There's a really good book that was ... that no one's read by a
guy named Blake Pagenkopf, and I interviewed him on my podcast a
while back. I can't remember the name of the book, but he only
has, like, one or two, and they're both on the same topic. So he
helped me understand this because I had long ago, I mean, long
ago, like mid-2000s, walked away from the Republican Party and
said, "I may have conservative tendencies, but this branch of
national politics and local politics being nationalized doesn't
make any sense to me."


I've never embraced the Democratic Party because there's kind of
a central flip over the chessboard every now and then kind of
individualism to it that I've always kind of struggled with the
idea that every problem needs a big top-down solution that
reworks everything. And that impulse has always not been
something I could see in myself.


David Roberts


Well, this is a kind of old-school Burkean conservatism you're
talking about, right? Just have some respect for the accumulated
...


Charles Marohn


Accumulated wisdom.


David Roberts


Wisdom that's written into communities.


Charles Marohn


Right. Here's the interesting thing. And this is where Blake's
book really kind of helped me become comfortable with this.


David Roberts


It is, by the way, called "Rebooting our Political Operating
System."


Charles Marohn


Oh, thank you.


David Roberts


I looked it up.


Charles Marohn


What I found is that I could have better conversations that were
more productive and more operative with people who were far left
of center, but who were very bottom-up than I could have with
anybody who was conservative when they were at their core,
top-down. The bottom-up person who understands is very
environmentally sensitive and understands ecosystems and
understands that kind of thing, to me, I find really
enlightening. And I've learned a lot from people like that. The
person who cares deeply about social justice within the
neighborhood that I live in, I have learned to disassociate them
with a national social justice campaign run from a top-down to
drive votes. And I've learned to listen to them with compassion
and empathy because really, quite frankly, they're talking about
my neighbors and humans.


And I do love them and I do care about them. I feel like what
Blake's book describes is a political spectrum that doesn't go
left-right, it goes more quadrants top-down versus left-right.
And when you do that, what you find is that the left and the
right have a common cause politically. Democrats and Republicans
have common cause in top-down action. And that is the thing they
agree on the most, and that's where they can find consensus. And
I am ultimately, the other day, a bottom-up person. And I find a
lot more to work with on the political left from the bottom-up
than I find in the political right, which has become very, very
top-down.


David Roberts


The bottom-up left, you're talking about stuff like cooperatives
and things like that, citizen councils and all this kind of
stuff.


Charles Marohn


Yeah. And let me say it this way. A cooperative is not where my
sensitivities lie, right? The people who found cooperatives and
work in cooperatives and do other kind of left of center,
bottom-up things, they're motivated by things that are different
than what I feel like I'm motivated by. But I find their work
inspiring. I find their work adjacent to mine, and I find that we
can collaborate really, really well. And I respect them and I
respect where they're coming from. I am sensitive to other
things.


And when I can ground my sensitivities in a neighborhood level, a
bottom-up way in the humans that surround me, my things that I'm
sensitive to I can express those in ways that what I find is that
people who are left of center really understand and appreciate,
and even if they don't agree, they at least respect. When it gets
to the big top-down project, we have a hard time having a
conversation. And so I have kind of divorced my own reading list,
my own sensitivities, my own view of the world from the top-down.
I just don't spend a lot of time on it. I let it be. And I put my
efforts into this bottom-up project. And we started this
conversation with you saying something along the lines of tension
and with everything going on in the world.


And I said, we got to have a lot of hope and joy. The bottom-up
gives me a lot of hope and joy, particularly in other people,
particularly in people that I'm told I'm not supposed to agree
with.


David Roberts


Yeah, this reminds me of ... I don't know if you've been
following James Fallows. He's flying around in his little plane,
visiting small towns, and coming away with very much the same
thing you're saying. Like, if you're looking for a place away
from these intractable, maddening national debates where there's
actually some consensus and good things happening, you go to
these little mid-sized towns that are kind of out of a national
spotlight, and there's all kinds of good stuff happening.


Charles Marohn


I think that's true. I will also say this. I found the same thing
in large cities, New York City. If you talk to a true New Yorker,
they will describe New York City as a series of neighborhoods.


David Roberts


Right.


Charles Marohn


They don't describe it as a top-down system. They describe it as
a series of neighborhoods, each with their own culture, each with
their own attitude-approach. And to me, I find the same exact
kind of interaction with each other in a place like New York City
at the block level, at the neighborhood level that I do in in,
you know, a city like mine with 14,000 people.


David Roberts


Yeah. I just wonder, you know, we seem to be moving nationally
into a period of conservative dominance, at least for the next
few years.


Charles Marohn


And you say that, and I would actually say the opposite.


David Roberts


Really?


Charles Marohn


Yeah. No, I was having this conversation with someone today, and
I said, "If you are left of center and you are plugged in
nationally, you can go a long, long time without hearing an
authentically conservative message delivered well, you will only
hear caricatures of conservatism. But if you are a
right-of-center, unless you want to not listen to the radio, not
watch TV, not go to the movies, not go to college, not
participate in civic society, you are going to be bombarded
continuously with left-of-center messaging. You just will be."
And you might say, like, well, the Supreme Court is very right.


Okay, I get that. It's the way the kind of ping pong balls fell
in terms of turnover, and you can complain about political
maneuvers, and I get that. I respect those complaints. The
reality is that we are culturally top-down, a very left-of-center
project.


David Roberts


Well, this is the great contradiction, right? As we seem
culturally center left, but the Senate is structurally right. The
Supreme Court is structurally right. Now through gerrymandering,
the House is structurally right. We keep getting conservative
presidents that lose.


Charles Marohn


Lose the popular vote. Right.


David Roberts


So when I say dominance, at the very least, they're very likely
to control all three branches of the federal government for at
least some period of the next decade. And it seems like it's
going to be a very long time before Dem's get a trifecta back.
And it doesn't seem to me, given the character of the current
GOP, that they're just going to let blue cities merrily do what
they want, implement progressive policies. So I wonder if there's
any kind of new political coalition to be had based in good
city-making.


Charles Marohn


Yeah, that would be my hope. I mean, really, that would be my
hope. I will say I have been around long enough now. I'm 49.


David Roberts


Me too.


Charles Marohn


Oh, okay, good. We have the same, like, timestamp on our culture.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Charles Marohn


So I've been around long enough where I have experienced the
highs and lows of one-party dominance. Like, oh, we won
everything, and then, oh, we lost everything. And the reality is
we celebrate the New Deal and the 100 days of FDR that's never
happened again, and I don't think it can happen. Right. We will
have to have a different form of government for the type of
hegemonic thing to occur. Republicans had control of everything
just a few years ago, and they got zero things done. And they got
zero things done because they are the party of organization.


Right. Like, Democrats fight each other. Republicans line up and
vote for things. They still couldn't get anything done. And I
think what we've reached is we've reached a point where, at the
federal level, there's really not answers to any of our
existential problems. The answers have to be evolved out of local
conversations and local action. And so you just see, like, is
Obamacare a bad bill? Yeah. Is there a replacement you come up
with that would be good? No. So what do you do about that? You
just complain and try to get people out to vote for you so that
you can pretend you're going to do something.


I know people get frustrated because they want the federal
government to work. I think we don't appreciate that the federal
government is designed not to work. We are designed to have a
very limited federal government with power concentrated in states
and really concentrated in neighborhoods of people.


David Roberts


The one thing I would want to throw into that, and I'll get
yelled at if I go this whole interview without mentioning it, is
climate change. And I guess, do you see bottom-up reform in
cities moving fast enough or being dramatic enough to get a
handle on greenhouse gas emissions? In other words, I can
envision a lot of good things coming out of bottom-up, but it's
real hard for me to envision climate change coming under control
without some centralized top-down action.


Charles Marohn


Okay, let me make this a fair question. So we have Option A,
which is some type of top-down action to address climate change.
We have Option B, which is bottom-up action to address climate
change. And Option A and Option B are in a race against each
other to see who can get to where we need to be. What I'm going
to suggest to you is that Option A has zero chance or near zero
chance of getting to the finish line. And people can argue with
that and say, "Well if we just got like an overwhelming number of
people elected ..." Look, the most dedicated to climate change
president that has ever been has just done a gas tax holiday for
six months, right?


We're not at some tipping point where people are serious about it
and they're not. The best thing ... people ask me, "What's the
number one strategy we can do at the local level to build a
strong town?" And I'm like, a. go out and plant trees. Like
street trees are the lowest cost, highest returning investment
that can be made. The number two, get people walking and biking.
Build a culture of biking and a culture of walking. Number three,
fill your parking lots with stuff. Get rid of parking lots and
fill them with things.


David Roberts


Amen.


Charles Marohn


Now you tell me if your strategy was we need to get the right
people elected. They need to have the guts to pass the right
package to do the right stuff so that we get some action on
climate, so we get electric cars and we get whatever your package
of solar panels and what have you is. Or we can make a bottom-up
choice to emphasize communities that plant trees, get people
walking and get rid of parking. Which one is going to be further
along the race a decade from now? I don't even think it's close.
The strong town's approach actually can get done and actually
scales.


David Roberts


Scale is the question though, right? I mean, all these local
fights. One of the things that when I look at this strategy and I
think about it scaling that sort of causes me to despair is that
each local community is different. The dynamics are somewhat
different. It's just battle after battle after battle after
battle.


Charles Marohn


So at the end of World War II, we didn't have to convince people
to move to the suburbs. They didn't have to be like a national
program saying, "This is good for you, you should do this. I know
you don't want to do this, but you should do it." People did it
in mass. They wanted it. And I'm telling you people want walkable
neighborhoods. They want corner stores. They want good sidewalks.
They want street trees. We're not selling that strong house
anything that people don't want. People want us in droves.
They'll pay extra money for it. They fight to live in these
places.


David Roberts


They go vacation where it exists.


Charles Marohn


They go vacation in them, right. We just don't deliver it in the
marketplace. And I'm saying make that switch. We will deliver
this in spades, and it will scale big time. Because everybody in
policy understands, like, this is what people want.


David Roberts


Well, I hope you're right about that. And maybe we'll we'll check
in a decade and see whose strategy failed worse.


Charles Marohn


Yeah, well, I'm I'm not, you know, saying there should be no
top-down action, but I'm just saying I feel like what I see
happening with the progressive project is 98% of our energy put
into trying to win the next top-down election to get the results
we want and 2% of the energy put into recycling our Aquafina
bottle. And what I would like to see is 2% of our energy put into
this chess match of gladiators at the federal level and 98% of
our energy put into making places better. Because you do that and
it's a revolution. Everything changes.


David Roberts


Great. Well, alright, Chuck. Thanks so much for all your work.
And thanks for coming on and talking.


Charles Marohn


Thanks, friend.


David Roberts


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