For Strong Towns to win, we need the broad culture to change. We change the broad culture by being a positive force…
Author: Charles Marohn
Charles Marohn is a Professional Engineer (PE) and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). He’s the Founder and President of StrongTowns.org . He was named one of the 10 Most Influential Urbanists of all time by Planetizen in 2017.
STRONG TOWNS: The Housing Market is a Bubble Full of Fraud
Prices are artificially high due primarily to the downstream effects of financialization. Localized supply and demand dynamics are a mess…
STRONG TOWNS: Here’s the Real Reason Houston Is Going Broke, Part Two
State and federal governments will pay cities to make bad financial decisions and transactions not in the broad financial interest of their own residents…
STRONG TOWNS: The Real Reason Houston Is Going Broke, Part One
In many ways, Houston is the cleanest shirt in the laundry basket, but it’s still a dirty shirt. Their budget is broken, their approach to finance an absolute disaster…
STRONG TOWNS: Where Do Infrastructure Projects Come From?
The question the council is being asked is overly simple: do we want ostensibly free money from the state and federal government to address one of our many problems?
OPINION: Is the U.S. Trapped in a Perpetual Housing Bubble?
A post-bubble recovery in the housing market, one that restores it to unsustainable levels, feels like madness…
The 2023 Christmas Cookie Inflation Guide
We might be told that inflation is up only 3.2% (3.3% for food), but in my reality I’m paying 12% more for baking ingredients than I paid last year….
OPINION: Where Will Housing Prices Be, a Year from Now?
Interest rates near zero is like removing gravity from the financial markets. Do it briefly and it feels kind of fun, but do it for a decade and a half and things start to grow and morph in strange ways…
OPINION: Death on the Highway
I’m treading in these sensitive waters because I want to make a point about the human condition and our response…
OPINION: Building More Roads While Rome Burns
Residents pay their taxes, pay tolls, and support initiatives to fund transportation, with the understanding that the state will properly maintain the roads and bridges they construct…
OPINION: Legalizing Incremental Change — Everywhere — To Meet America’s Housing Needs
In cities of all sizes and geographies, we witness housing markets that are broken…
OPINION: To Fully Observe, We Need to Walk
As Chris suggests, walking “is being forced to watch the whole movie.” In contrast, being driven or even riding a bike is more like teleporting in…
OPINION: Why We Need to Embrace Traffic Congestion
We have spent trillions making it easy to drive everywhere, so much so that we made it difficult to walk anywhere…
OPINION: A Year of Living with Intention
Those lavish efforts were essentially a joint project between the titans of industry (let’s just call them “corporations”) and those who had the ability to change public policy (let’s simplify and call them “government”)…
Denver Housing Program So Successful, Federal Government Offers Millions to Expand It
“It has really confirmed everything that we as an organization have known about housing with supportive services…”
OPINION: Five Community Values for Building a Strong Town
When we study pre-Depression cities, we find that most of what was built was adaptable. That’s the legacy of building in a time when you couldn’t afford to make mistakes…
OPINION: Will We Have an Infrastructure Bill? Who Cares?
Absent any serious conversation about substantive reform, does it really matter if the legislation funds repair of 12% of highway miles or only manages to fund 8%?
ESSAY: Learning from the Ruins of Pompeii
The building was located near the edge of town. The land was likely acquired for free or at a very low price. Prime real estate near the center of town would have been much more expensive…