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Show Notes
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.
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 a