The Strong Towns Podcast

As a part of our special Member Week series, Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns Community Builder John Pattison talk about the Local Conversations program. They discuss how the first Local Conversations came to be, what’s changed, and how the Strong Towns organization is coming alongside these groups in new ways.

With so many Local Conversations spread out around North America, the Strong Towns movement will become unignorable. When that happens, it will be thanks to the support of our members. Strong Towns’ efforts to help start and support Local Conversations is only possible because of our members, whose contributions are expanding the movement. Will you help us grow the movement today?

On today's special Member Week episode, Chuck talks with Strong Towns Communications Associate Lauren Fisher about Strong Towns’ approach to communication. They chat about the big ideas we’re working toward and how to squish them down into little emails and tweets. And how difficult it is to do that amidst a big, loud, national political power struggle.

After listening, consider becoming a member of the Strong Towns movement at strongtowns.org/membership. And if you are already a member, know that you have chosen a path toward a strong future that might involve a poll booth, but offers power and hope beyond it.

Welcome to Member Week, where we’re celebrating our members and all that they do to support this movement.

This week, the Strong Towns podcast will be a little different. Tune in every day to listen as Chuck Marohn talks with Strong Towns staff about this movement and what our members are doing to make their places stronger.

In today’s episode, Chuck talks about the new Strong Towns strategic plan in action and what that will look like in 2023. Whereas we—as a small, fledgling organization—were once focused on just growing the movement, we’re now at a point where we can start mobilizing the movement. And that’s pretty exciting.

Still, we can’t do it without you. Our strategy relies on members. It takes a million local heroes to change the multitrillion-dollar development machine, and we need your support. 

Take a moment this Member Week to make a donation to Strong Towns: become a member.

In a September episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talked about the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. He spoke on the technicalities of American water systems, what failed in Jackson, and how Jackson ended up in a crisis. 

Now, in this week’s episode, Chuck dives a little deeper into water systems and why we even have them (hint: it’s not just about safe drinking water). He takes listeners back to the 1800s and describes how historical events affected the standard for today’s water systems—shining a light on current aging water systems, like Jackson’s, and how we should be thinking about water systems going forward.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “The Jackson Water Crisis Is Not a Fluke. Your City Could Be Next,” hosted by Charles Marohn, Strong Towns Podcast (September 2022.)

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).

We began building the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, and we completed the majority of it by the end of the 1960s. The goal of creating this massive transportation system was to connect far away places— and it’s met that purpose. Yet, even though the job is done, we continue to build and invest in the interstate highway system, despite that highway investments are a waste of resources and damage the fiscal growth of our cities. 

In this Strong Towns Podcast, Strong Towns Founder and President Chuck Marohn chats with Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst with Frontier Group, about their recent ”Highway Boondoggles” report. 

(And, in case you’re wondering, a highway boondoggle is a wasteful or pointless highway project that gives the appearance of having value but which drains scarce resources, making it harder to respond to current and future transportation needs.)

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Highway Boondoggles,” Frontier Group (September 2022).

• Learn more about wasteful highway expansion projects.

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).

• Cover image source: Flickr.

Sometimes, our local governments can get caught up in an ineffective mindset while managing cities, where they take on the role of a customer service representative. While it comes from a place of wanting to be helpful, it’s not always the best approach our cities should be taking.

In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, host Chuck Marohn discusses subsidiarity versus the customer service mindset we tend to see in city halls. Subsidiarity holds that it matters less what decision is made and more who makes the decision—in other words, a decision should be made at the lowest level that it can competently be made. When a city is making decisions that should be made at the block level, it can create a bigger mess than intended. 

To dive into and explain this concept further, Chuck relates his personal experience within his neighborhood, one that has not always been picture perfect.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).

• Cover image source: Flickr.

This September, Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn was invited to speak at the Hawaii Congress of Planning Officials Conference on the Island of Kauai. 

While he was there, Chuck went on a walking tour and witnessed the results of the post-WWII rise of suburban development. While he loved his visit to the island and feels incredibly grateful to the wonderful hospitality of the people there, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of sorrow for how their community has been damaged by the Suburban Experiment. 

He notes how much worse, and more bizarrely, the suburban development pattern presents itself on a smaller island space compared to in the contiguous United States. He spoke with local engineers who relayed the difficulties of upkeeping the suburban-style infrastructure in a tropical climate. The situation in Hawaii further confirms that we should be building our communities from the bottom up, able to adapt to our own unique spaces versus building all at once. 

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Learn more about the Suburban Experiment, how and why it happened, and how to approach the challenges it presents using a Strong Towns framework. All this and more in our free Academy course, “Strong Towns 101.”

• Attend a Strong Towns event near you.

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).

What’s happened with Jackson’s water crisis is an absolute tragedy. In late August, a state of emergency was issued after there was no clean running water in the city. Residents who could get water reported that they’d turn on the tap and be met with a brown consistency, and the city instructed people to boil it before any sort of usage. 

For seven weeks Jackson’s residents had to bear the brunt of a failing water system, and unfortunately it was bound to happen. Like all American cities, Jackson rests on the wrong business model and its systems are stretched too thin. It was only a matter of time before it started to leak. 

In this episode, Chuck Marohn covers the technicalities of American water systems, what failed in Jackson, and how Jackson even got to this place. Chuck also addresses the two main narratives that have been the national media focus during this crisis: climate change and racial inequity.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Financial Fragility Is To Blame for Jackson’s Water Crisis,” Charles Marohn, Strong Towns (September 2022).

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).

Jason Slaughter, producer of the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, is a pretty cool and talented guy. He’s created multiple excellent videos on Strong Towns ideas, taking our written words and translating them through his own voice into visual representations. A lot of our dedicated members have discovered us through Not Just Bikes’ compelling videos. 

In this episode, Chuck welcomes Jason back onto the Strong Towns Podcast, where they discuss one of his recent videos, “America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit).” 

U.S. and Canadian transit systems disrespect the people who use them. Most of the time, public transit is a hassle, it’s impractical, and it doesn’t make sense to use when transit routes take much longer than a car ride. The millions of dollars that are spent on our transit systems seem to go to waste when land use is not considered during the construction process. 

In this podcast, Jason and Chuck go more in depth about some of the absurdities of our modern transit system and the urban deserts they tend to drop riders off at—bringing to light some reasons why people don’t want to use public transit. They debunk the reasons some DOTs use for why we can’t have better transit, and what the process for building efficient public transportation systems should look like.

Bonus: Jason describes a time he and his kids used the transit system where he lives in Europe. 

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Not Just Bikes (YouTube).

• Check out Not Just Bikes’ livestreams on YouTube and Twitch!

• Support Jason through his Patreon.

• Jason (Twitter / Reddit).

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).

Fair property tax systems are crucial to developing a financially strong community, as property taxes represent a large source of public revenue for most local governments.

In today’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck Marohn talks with Joe Minicozzi from Urban3 about Buncombe County and the property tax inequities within Western North Carolina that are currently being investigated by the Just Accounting For Health (JAfH) consortium. 

A few months ago, Minicozzi presented some compelling disparities in the data on the assessment process to the Buncombe County Ad Hoc Reappraisal Committee—only for his presentation to be cut short by defensive audience members. In this podcast, Minicozzi shares that data he presented to the Ad Hoc Committee and talks about the historical practice of redlining, and how it has contributed to our current, broken property tax system. 

JAfH is a consortium partnered with Urban3, Strong Towns, the University of North Carolina-Asheville, and the Racial Justice Coalition. The team has been rigorously researching property tax inequities specifically in relation to Western North Carolina, as well as exploring implications of this system across the nation. Along with exposing the arbitrary data within the opaque property tax system, JAfH is answering the question, “How do systemic biases in local property tax policies and practices influence health equity in Western North Carolina?”

In this podcast, Minicozzi shows Marohn some slides from his original presentation to the Ad Hoc Committee. To view the slides, check out the accompanying video to this podcast on YouTube.

Additional Show Notes

• Learn more about Just Accounting for Health.

• Sign up for emails to stay up to date on JAfH findings.

• Joe Minicozzi (Twitter).

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).