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We advocate for a model of development that allows our cities, towns and neighborhoods to grow financially strong and resilient.
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You are listening to the Strong Towns podcast. Hey, everybody. This is Chuck Marone with Strong Towns. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Tomorrow so this is coming out on April 22nd. I'm actually in Boise, Idaho at the moment speaking at a housing conference, which is great timing because tomorrow, April 23, 2024, Escaping the Housing Trap, the Strong Towns' response to the housing crisis is coming out. It's the brand new book that we are releasing through Wiley Publishing. It's the 3rd book in the Strong Towns series. This one is focusing exclusively on housing and housing issues. I wrote this along with my colleague, Daniel Hargus. I'm out on book tour now. Hopefully, coming to a city near you at some point. But it's very exciting. You can go get it at your local bookstore. Hopefully, you can get it at your local library. You can certainly order it online from any distributor. We we work with Wiley Publishing. They're good to us. They've been great with us. But we work with them because they can get the book anywhere that people wanna get it. So if you are a local bookshop person, go get it at your local bookshop. That's beautiful. That's great. And they can get it through Wiley Publishing. If you get your books in other places, go get it there. A lot of people ask me, will there be a e version? Yes. I can't really explain why but they take the first 2 or 3 weeks and they do just the hardcover. Then you will get an e version that will be released at some point very soon. And also an audio book will be coming. Hate to disappoint you all. I will not be reading it again.
The Strong Towns Podcast
Alex Alsup: How Much of the U.S.'s Housing Stock Is Locally Owned?
Mon Apr 15 2024
Announces that you and Matthew Klobbski. Is that how I'd say his name? Yeah. Kloski. Yeah. Okay. That you you all did and put together looking at the amount of property that is not locally owned. So in any given jurisdiction, what percent of the property is owned locally and what percent is not. And, obviously, there's a lot of implications to that, but talk about the process you use. What were you looking for? What spawn this What are you looking into here? Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. So what Matthew and I wanted to do was look particularly at where ownership of housing stock fits nationally. And we didn't start out with that sort of high minded goal. We actually started out. Matthew was just, kind of playing around one day and wanted to use our property tax bill mailing address data to find what seems to be vacation homes in Florida for people who live in Michigan. We I live in Detroit, Matthew Matthews from, Michigan as well. And so he made this really cool, like, snowbirds map, which used property tax bill, mailing address data, to say, alright. Here are homes in Florida where the property tax bill is mailed to a address in Michigan, which appears to indicate a second home, a vacation home in in Florida. And, you know, Matthew started to I did this for a few other states and start to identify, like, oh, there's this these these interesting cluster rings, that you can identify people from different states are clustering in different parts of Florida for their vacation homes, which which makes it makes it into the owned way from home report. But from from there, we sort of stepped back and said, you know, beyond having fun with vacation homes and and and snowboard data, you know, why why don't we expand this to just look at the ownership of housing stock now
12. Strike House was huge, enormous compared to where we started. Compared to where we are today, it was a tiny, tiny, tiny audience of people. You know, measured in the tens of thousands, not the the the millions. And I gotta say, I felt like a mental amount of pressure to speak up and to to kind of speak my mind and and be part of this election cycle. That only magnified when we got to 2016. There there was this thing, and I'm I'm I'm gonna say this and, you know, this this entire episode will border on politics. I hope we end up in a space where you understand, just my aversion to what has become, you know, defined as politics today in our discussion. But I'm gonna say some things that will border on, like, sounding political, I suppose, as we go. But prior to the the 2016 election, there was a certain, let's say, just a strain of city building conversation that looked at strong towns as the conservatives. Right? I mean, even today, that that is out there. I mean, we see publications on the left, you know, liberal progressive publications framing us as, you know, very conservative. I've seen libertarian attached to us. By the way, I've also seen, you know, ultra progressive, 15 minute cities, I mean, the whole the whole spectrum, right, attached to us. But there was a certain vein because I was such a dominant force in this. I mean, I was not one of literally dozens of voices. I was the voice or the primary voice up really until 2013, 2014. The idea was, you know, this is Chuck Marone. Chuck Marrone is from a small town. He is conservative. Ergo, Strong Towns is a a conservative organization.
The Strong Towns Podcast
A Chat With Barkha Patel, Who Helped Achieve Zero Traffic Deaths in Jersey City
Mon Apr 01 2024
I learned a lot about the arts and language and, you know, history and all of these things, and the seeds were planted for me to start thinking about things like injustices in the world. And like I said earlier, dynamics between different social groups and and power and, you know, ethnicity and all of these things that play into it. So I didn't want to become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. My parents didn't want me to pursue something that wasn't guaranteed to give me success. So that was sort of the the tension for many years. And I haven't really shared this so I guess I'll share it with on this podcast with thousands of people listening. In between me going from my undergrad program and learning sociology and the classes without my parents knowing to them pursuing, an urban planning degree, my father suddenly became very ill and passed away very, very suddenly. And so I didn't get to share with him that I had been accepted into this great program. You know, the it was number 2 in the nation at that time for urban planning and then I was going to be doing all of this work. And that is a really difficult thing for me because even though he didn't know that this was a possible career choice for his daughter, I know he would have been the most proud because of who he was as a person. He he had this larger than life personality, and he created, you know, this little empire for himself and our family back in India that dealt with a lot of the things that I do now in my job. And you just never would think this is, a career you can pursue because it wasn't a traditional, very well defined path. But that is what I ended up doing, and it's something my brother and I talk about all the time that, you know, I keep finding myself in situations in my career.
The Strong Towns Podcast
Why We Need To Show Empathy Toward Drivers in Conversations About Street Safety
Mon Mar 25 2024
And that somehow it is a a good way to do advocacy. I'm kind of allergic to all of that. And so Twitter is a space where people, you know, go back and forth. And if you can get a good zinger in, you can get a lot of likes. And, I think it has kind of a self reinforcing echo chamber. I like to take the opportunity now and then to signal to my followers, to signal to Strong Towns advocates, that as you're out on the street, as you're out working with people, as you're out trying to get things done, not only is this not, like, a very helpful approach, but it's actually not a good mindset to have. Looking at your fellow humans as adversaries to be mocked at best and defeated, impounded into the ground at worst is just not a not a healthy way to live, and it's also not a healthy way to bring about change, Particularly on this issue, where 92% of Americans drive at least once a week, where, you know, outside of a handful of major metropolitan areas, that number goes up to 97, 98%, where 2 out of 3 vehicles that are sold every year is an SUV, where we essentially live in a culture where everyone is in a sense immersed to one degree or another in driving. When you have a a national profile like that and you lead with antagonism and a war on cars and a war on drivers and and these are the enemies, you tend to isolate yourself in a rhetorical bubble that not only doesn't lead to change, but actually leads to a lot of frustration and anger that I think is is misdirected. I get swept up in this anti driver thing a lot even though I drive every day. But this particular thread was about people having to buy bigger and bigger cars and saying that, you know, I need to do it to protect my family. And then