The Strong Towns Podcast

A growing body of research—including research by Raj Chetty’s Equality of Opportunity Project (now called Opportunity Insights )—is making it plain: where a person lives has a huge influence on their ability to build prosperity, climb the economic ladder, and pursue the American Dream. Yet why do some cities and neighborhoods do better at this than others? What lessons can be learned and then tran...

Strong Towns advocates believe the way to grow stronger and more financially resilient towns and cities—and, by extension, a stronger, more resilient country—is from the bottom up. A bottom-up approach is one that meets the actual needs of residents. It taps into the energy and creativity that already exists in our communities. It is sensitive and responsive to feedback. (“This is working. That is...

As leaders in Washington, DC look to stimulate the American economy, one course of action with bipartisan support— as per usual —is to pour money into infrastructure. Yet as Strong Towns readers know, infrastructure spending often leads cities down the road of insolvency rather than prosperity , and not all infrastructure spending is alike . In a recent two-part policy brief , Joseph W. Kane and S...

Since January 2017, at least once a month (and often more frequently than that), Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn has co-hosted a radio show on 91.7 KAXE, Northern Community Radio , along with his friend Aaron Brown —an author, reporter, and educator—and Heidi Holtan , the station’s News and Public Affairs Director. Since the debut of Dig Deep , topics have varied widely: the 2020 election, Min...

The ongoing pandemic has raised big questions about the future of North American cities. For example, we’ve heard for almost a year now that COVID-19 will be the end of cities and the triumph of the suburbs. After all, why would people who could work anywhere choose to live in dense, plague-riddled cities? We’ve published our share of responses to this line of thinking—including articles by Joe Co...

In last week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns, talked with the economist Alison Schrager about uncertainty and risk. In this week’s episode, Chuck provides some additional thoughts on risk—and, in particular, the risks towns and cities are taking with their financial futures. Not only are communities making bad bets by going all-in on t...

Is there a meaningful difference between risk and uncertainty? On the face of it, we might not think so; in casual usage, we could employ the words interchangeably. But some economists see an important distinction between the two. Early in the American experience of the pandemic, economist Allison Schrager wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal called “Risk, Uncertainty and Coronavirus” (paywa...

Most American transit systems were fragile before the pandemic—struggling for revenue, dependent for survival on federal money, inadequate fares, debt, and, in some cases, donations from local businesses. The pandemic has exacerbated these problems and turned existing transit models on their heads. In late December, Gabrielle Gurley, a deputy editor at The American Prospect, wrote an article about...

Last week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast featured the first half of the conversation between Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns, and Matt Yglesias, the bestselling author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking  Bigger . Yglesias is the host of The Weeds podcast and cofounder of Vox Media . He recently launched the blog and newsletter Slow Boring . In Part 1, Yglesi...

Does the United States have too few people? It’s a provocative question—but one perhaps not asked often enough. And journalist Matthew Yglesias has an even more provocative answer. In his new bestselling book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger , Yglesias makes the case for tripling the American population. The U.S. is not “full,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Many of its...

In 1986, the Italian journalist Carlo Petrini organized a protest of the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Holding bowls of penne pasta, the protestors chanted, “We don’t want fast food, we want slow food.” By one standard, the protest was unsuccessful: the McDonald’s opened as planned. (It was apparently such a big deal that teenagers “nearly stormed the restauran...

It happens all the time: there are certain things entrepreneurs and commercial property owners know they need in their business district to really thrive—a relentless approach to maintenance, a high level of cleanliness, increased public safety, splashes of beauty, physical improvements, etc.—yet their town or city can’t afford to provide them. How to fill those gaps? For an increasing number of p...

Back in August, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) warned of a “doomsday” scenario —including fare hikes and service cuts—if the federal government didn’t come through with $12 billion in aid. Writing about the MTA crisis , Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn said that, if he ran the money printing press, the transit agency would get the money. But he also talked abou...

COVID-19 has been brutal for small businesses. Back in September, data from Yelp showed that nearly 100,000 businesses had closed for good. That was two-and-a-half months ago...and many experts believe the next few months will be even worse for small businesses. A global pandemic was going to be destructive no matter what, but it’s clear now that small businesses were on a weak footing to start wi...

Our members volunteer more. They vote more. They get involved more. In a world of political polarization and paralyzed governance, they are the credible advocates out there getting things done. I love these people. All of them. This is our Member Week. I know that 2020 has been brutal and that many of you are not in a position to support us. That’s okay -- you get yourself strong, do what you can,...

In many PCs, the first software to run after hitting the power button is called BIOS (Basic Input-Output System). BIOS loads the computer’s operating system and the individual settings that make your personal computer so...personal. A malfunction at this most basic level leads to a cascade of other problems , including error messages, poor performance, or refusing to boot at all. It’s important to...

Every year, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn releases a list of the best books he read that year . Past lists have included books that shaped the Strong Towns conversation in profound ways: Chris Arnade’s Dignity (2019), Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (2017), Cognitive Architecture, by Ann Sussmann and Justin Hollander (2017), and Tomas Sedlacek’s Economics of Good and Evil (2016), to name j...

What do we call a society that—from Wall Street to Main Street, from Washington, D.C. to your local city council chambers—seems to have been uprooted from facts and time-tested fundamentals, and is being driven instead by whatever stories can be sold as truth? Ben Hunt calls it “Fiat World,” a world declared into existence. A former hedge fund manager, in 2013 Ben Hunt created Epsilon Theory , a n...

Here’s a taste of our newest podcast, The Bottom-Up Revolution, hosted by Rachel Quednau. In this episode, you’ll hear from Alexander Hagler, an entrepreneur and urban gardener based in Milwaukee, WI who founded a store called Center Street Wellness, a space for local makers to sell their handcrafted products focused on mental and physical wellbeing. And you’ll learn about how to support entrepren...

What is keeping us from doing the things we need to do right now? Why do we outsource the response to urgent problems to the federal government and other distant entities—responses that may never come, or may come with solutions that don’t actually fit our communities? Consider California governor Gavin Newsom, standing amidst the wreckage of a wildfire in September, saying the United States needs...

We'd be deeply grateful for your feedback on this podcast—what sort of episodes you like best, how you access the show, etc.   Fill out our survey at strongtowns.org/survey  and you can be entered in a drawing to win a free signed copy of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.    Thanks!

Two Minnesotans -- Aaron Brown and Chuck Marohn -- are regular commentators on KAXE community radio out of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and have regular conversations where they dig deep into the issues of the day. The Dig Deep program is hosted by KAXE's Heidi Holton and can be heard on-air as well as by download at KAXE.org .

What a new strip mall reveals about the massive disconnect between what's "good" for the macro-economy and what's actually good for a local community.   Reminder: The subscription bundle for the Strong Towns Academy is only available through Friday, June 5, 2020. This is your chance to get all nine courses at 83% off the a la carte price. These courses unpack the Strong Towns approach to everythin...

On the final day of the member drive, Chuck discusses what success means for the Strong Towns movement. Sign up to become a member at strongtowns.org/membership .

In this special crossover edition of the Upzoned podcast, we're looking at the "smart cities" movement in general...and the ill-fated Toronto waterfront project in particular.   ...   A controversial project in Toronto that would have transformed “a slice of Toronto’s waterfront into a high-tech utopia” has been shut down by Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet) due to "unprecedented economic u...