EDITOR’S NOTE: In Part One, Charles Marohn compared the growth of his home town, Brainerd, Minnesota, to the growth of a human child, going through exciting but often challenging phases. It originally appeared on StrongTowns.org on January 13, 2025. We’re sharing the story in two parts.
Shown above is Brainerd in 1905, 35 years later. It’s the same city as in 1870… the same DNA… transformed into a more mature form. There is a circus parade going through town — how delightful — and people are lining the streets to get a look at it. The shacks are gone as is the untended mud in front of the buildings. Instead, people stand on elevated wooden sidewalks, with a real street at their front and two-story buildings at their backs. Compared to 1870, this city had matured nicely.
Yet, it was far from perfect.
There might have been a water system here, but sewage was almost certainly still of the latrine variety, in the back alley. The street was gravel, dusty and easily rutted. These two blocks might have had some charm, but the surrounding area was in a less mature state of development, a collection of ramshackle shacks with outhouses. This section of street is a kindergartener surrounded by infants and toddlers.
Fortunately, this city — like nearly all North American cities — would not be subjected to arrested development for another half-century. In that time, it continued to grow incrementally. It continued to mature. The two- and three-story wood buildings were replaced by buildings of brick and granite. This tax-base maturity allowed the streets to be paved and sewer and water systems to be built.
Our kindergarten street is now a pre-teen.
To become a pre-teen, one must mature through the infant, toddler and adolescent stages of development. Each of those phases has its own set of challenges, it owns lessons to learn, and its own triumph of maturity. Each stage is beautiful in its own way, but also frustratingly challenging. That’s what it means to grow.
The challenge prompts growth. The growth prompts renewal. Maturity means lessons learned, adaptation, and — in a larger sense — evolution over time. You replace one set of problems with a new set of problems. One form of beauty with another form of beauty.
This brings us to the first critical insight of incremental development that I want to share in this column: When we build all at once to a finished state, we can sometimes solve the immediate problem in front of us, but we limit the ability of future generations to learn lessons, adapt and evolve. If we suddenly made that infant into a pre-teen, they could skip all the messiness of being a toddler and an adolescent, but they would be a really stupid and maladapted pre-teen.
And if we then froze them at being a pre-teen, we would be stuck with a really stupid and maladapted pre-teen, one afforded little opportunity to learn, grow and mature. This is what postwar development has done to all American cities. When it comes to the places we build, we are — top to bottom — essentially the worst kind of helicopter parents.
This describes pretty much all of North America, but New York City, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and a handful of other very mature cities experience an amplified version of this problem, especially when it comes to housing. This has to do with the metabolic rate of change.
Go back to the infant. A newborn baby weighing 8 pounds that develops in the typical fashion will reach 16 pounds by the time they are six months old. They double in size in just six months! People often say that infants do three things: they eat, they sleep and they poop. They are actually doing four things, and the fourth is astounding: They grow! They are working hard to grow really, really fast.
At 12 months, the baby will likely be 20 pounds. They will double in the first six months, but in the next six months, they grow by only 25%. Their metabolic rate of change slows as they grow. I’m 51 years old — a fully mature human adult — and if I grew by 25%, let alone doubled in six months, it would be a disaster. My rate of change is almost zero. That’s what it means to be mature.
Here is how iconic Times Square has matured. Notice how the rate of change slows over time. Just like my hometown of Brainerd and those early shacks, New York City grew really quickly in the early years — dramatic levels of change — but now it has slowed. Very little change, very slow pace of change, because it is a mature place.
Here, then, is the second critical insight: If the goal is to build a lot of housing fast — and our goal should be to build a lot of housing fast — then we can’t focus the bulk of our efforts on a handful of mature cities. Yes, we can build large buildings in New York City, San Francisco and Washington D.C…. those places are far more mature and require that level of investment… but we won’t build those large units fast, nor will we build a lot of units quickly in such places. That’s just not the nature of how mature systems operate.
As I wrote last week, incremental is not slow. In fact, if we want to build a lot of units fast, if we want to house a lot of people at affordable prices, the only way that can be done is incrementally, in every neighborhood, in every city, across the entire continent. That’s the bottom-up revolution Strong Towns is pushing for.
“But, Chuck, people don’t want to live in Brainerd or Pawtucket or Cincinnati or Fort Collins. They want to live in a few large cities; the demand there is overwhelming…”
Okay, sure, and we should build in those places, but that won’t solve our broad housing problems. It won’t even move the needle. And the reason there’s such demand for those places goes way beyond housing to a set of broader economic dysfunctions, stresses that can only be alleviated — not made worse in any way — by rapidly maturing the nation’s other cities.
Our nation’s major cities have many problems, but they are the problems associated with more mature places. Those are not the same problems experienced throughout most of America. There is no reason for housing to be expensive in Brainerd or Pawtucket or Cincinnati or Fort Collins. These places need a different approach — a Strong Towns approach — to become the dynamic nation’s primary response to the housing crisis.
Incremental housing everywhere. Rapidly maturing neighborhoods that become more financially productive and prosperous as they grow. This is how we alleviate housing prices. This is how we build strong towns. This is how we renew American prosperity.
Learn what lies ahead for incremental housing in 2025 by joining us for the State of Strong Towns address on January 30 at 4pm EST. Click here for more information.