Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity is a most provocative book. Since reading it I haven’t been able to look at the built environment around me in quite the same manner. The outgrowth of popular blog, Strong Towns describes a movement in urban planning and the journey to its creation. Over the past decade “strong towns” has grown in numbers and influence, becoming a larger organization and attracting quite a bit of attention. Marohn’s thinking has garnered advocates and detractors, too, as the urban planning space never seems to be short of strong opinions.
The book begins with philosophical questions and history. Are we, today in modern America, living in a healthy and smart sustainable manner? Marohn asserts that we are not, that we have lost our way, chasing dollars that do not add up to true prosperity. He contrasts the quality and affordability of urban life before automobiles with what we have now. Drawing from extensive scholarship (do not be alarmed – this is no dusty academic tome) and personal observation, Marohn characterizes cities through the ages as complex systems, encompassing community and commerce, public and private. The building blocks of towns are simple structures that can be easily reconfigured to meet changing conditions, arranged in manners that are easy for people to transverse. Towns and cities are strongest when the grow incrementally, he stresses, and they fit within a network. Cities through the millennia have developed in this manner.
A hundred or so years ago, the model changed in the United States and in much of the western world. Today we drive to where we need to purchase, work and interact. Our buildings are often single use and disposable, and it is less common to have them part of an integrated system. Think about all of the malls, shopping plazas and sprawl, all single points yet not part of any network. Much of our built environment consists of individual points in space, each built and used according to current planning math. And while all of these structures and related activities may be profitable for the developer or the owner, over the longer term they cost us. This is at the heart of the book’s argument.
Marohn, a self-described fiscal conservative, comes from an engineering background. Return on investment, who pays and why, and questions of accountability are the focus of his career as well as the book’s next sections. In brief, picture a small town with an active downtown. Its Main Street need not look wealthy or even attractive, either. In this small town with rows of simple structures, perhaps small shops, the city is responsible for the infrastructure. The pieces are relatively cheap to maintain: short and highly used streets, straightforward power and sewer, and services all in one relatively small spot. Then imagine of the taxes that these small shops generate. They create more revenue for the town than they cost.
Along comes a developer to the small town, promising modern growth. The developer’s company wants to build a shopping plaza on the town’s periphery. It will contain shops with national presence, brands we know, drawing people and activity. Town leaders are excited and they agree to the plan. To make the developer happy, the town provides a tax break and is on the hook for new roads, new infrastructure. To pay for it all, the town floats a bond to pay for this exciting new development. The shopping plaza, once built, is buzzing with activity. However, it does not generate the same tax revenue per square foot as the tired downtown. Moreover, the town has to pay for the new traffic lights, the new lanes, and the sewer and power. Marohn does the math: the ROI is negative for the town. The only way the town can appear to meet its financial demands is to look for another developer, to float more debt and continue to chase growth. Looking down the road as the infrastructure needs attention, the lack of incremental development means big bills.
Jump ahead several decades. Things tend to fall apart on schedule, and this means that incremental repairs are elusive. The infrastructure needs repairs at the same time. Pursuing high-visibility growth, in other words, has weakened the town. Adding to the negative side of the ledger, if the plaza is successful, much of the revenue flows to the national brand – not to the community. After all, most of the small shop owners in the neglected downtown are local town members. It does not add up, yet that is the typical way in which America operates.
Small towns proposes policies that favor incremental change. It rejects growth for growth’s sake, and it stresses running municipalities like a business, generating a profit on a regular basis. Parking requirements for new buildings are bad, as are plans to widen roads for more traffic. In other words, most planned developments – especially the large ones – are not really helping our communities.
Fascinating, isn’t it? Growth, as we often think of it, is not making our towns stronger.
There is much to recommend about Strong Towns. Nonetheless, I would be quite cautious applying it across the board. One of the things I admire about the book and movement is that Marohn would acknowledge this. Each community is different.
David Potash
Good book, but their newsletters are even better. Here is their web site: https://www.strongtowns.org/