What do you think?
Rate this book
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.
Inside, you'll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles--and why it just doesn't work. New development and high-risk investing don't generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens' quality of life.
Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the "traditional" search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.
Inside, you'll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles--and why it just doesn't work. New development and high-risk investing don't generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens' quality of life.
Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the "traditional" search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2019
441 people are currently reading
6,477 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 359 reviews
September 26, 2020
Did not finish.
I wanted to like this book. I even agree with most of it! To be fair, the central insight - that planned neighbourhoods aren't able to pay for themselves, with disastrous consequences - is very good. It seems unintuitive to think that affluent-seeming suburbs are really a pyramid scheme, but according to this book, their financing structure is totally unsustainable.
Once this point is made, things begin to go off the rails a bit. The central message is repeated in several different ways. Few citations or detailed case studies appear to support the argument. Many personal anecdotes are presented that aren't that useful. The citations that do appear are from pop philosophy and economic books, that while often to my personal taste (I like Taleb and Diamond!) do not suggest a rigorous approach.
Half the time I feel like I'm being yelled at, if only because the exhortations are so strong while the evidence is quit thin.
I think this is a valuable perspective, and I find it deeply unfair that downtown neighbourhoods generating immense economic value subsidize wasteful, parochial suburbs. I just don't think the writing style or epistemology of the author are to my taste.
I wanted to like this book. I even agree with most of it! To be fair, the central insight - that planned neighbourhoods aren't able to pay for themselves, with disastrous consequences - is very good. It seems unintuitive to think that affluent-seeming suburbs are really a pyramid scheme, but according to this book, their financing structure is totally unsustainable.
Once this point is made, things begin to go off the rails a bit. The central message is repeated in several different ways. Few citations or detailed case studies appear to support the argument. Many personal anecdotes are presented that aren't that useful. The citations that do appear are from pop philosophy and economic books, that while often to my personal taste (I like Taleb and Diamond!) do not suggest a rigorous approach.
Half the time I feel like I'm being yelled at, if only because the exhortations are so strong while the evidence is quit thin.
I think this is a valuable perspective, and I find it deeply unfair that downtown neighbourhoods generating immense economic value subsidize wasteful, parochial suburbs. I just don't think the writing style or epistemology of the author are to my taste.
January 21, 2020
My husband Will surprised me with a new urban planning book for Christmas, and I enjoyed reading this over our holiday break. The author, a Minnesotan who's been an urban planner for several decades, argues that our cities are on the verge of a long, slow decline, and that any solution needs to begin with a bottom-up approach. Marohn pushes for change beginning at the most local level—not by implementing billion-dollar regional plans, but instead carrying out whatever the "next smallest thing" is that can improve our community. I really enjoyed this, although I've gotta admit it was disheartening (as well as unsurprising, and validating) to see my city as a negative example for the recently completed Ohio River Bridges Project.
May 25, 2022
Edited to add: I listened to the audio book.
Ok, so I've been on my city's planning commission for a few years. I've been introduced to many of the Strong Town tenets through my trainings, so I decided to read the book. I agree wholeheartedly with Marohn's call for cities to be self-sufficient and to be wary of expansion without plans for maintenance. However, I have MANY problems with the way Marohn presented his argument. He totally avoided addressing valid counterarguments. He glorified development patterns of the past without acknowledging the many socioeconomic and social issues they created. He talked about all current cities as money pits with no hope--his attitude dismissed any possibility of a middle ground or compromise. He talked frequently about how he crunched numbers and came up with important takeaways ---without sharing those numbers. When I listened to the barbell chapter, I was shocked at how misleading Marohn's investing advice was. All the peer-reviewed research says that the barbell approach is way worse for the common investor than index funds. It was a terrible analogy. After that chapter, I don't know what I can and can't trust in the book. Until Marohn includes 1) some peer-reviewed sources to back his beliefs and 2) a fair, balanced argument, I can't fully buy into his philosophy.
Ok, so I've been on my city's planning commission for a few years. I've been introduced to many of the Strong Town tenets through my trainings, so I decided to read the book. I agree wholeheartedly with Marohn's call for cities to be self-sufficient and to be wary of expansion without plans for maintenance. However, I have MANY problems with the way Marohn presented his argument. He totally avoided addressing valid counterarguments. He glorified development patterns of the past without acknowledging the many socioeconomic and social issues they created. He talked about all current cities as money pits with no hope--his attitude dismissed any possibility of a middle ground or compromise. He talked frequently about how he crunched numbers and came up with important takeaways ---without sharing those numbers. When I listened to the barbell chapter, I was shocked at how misleading Marohn's investing advice was. All the peer-reviewed research says that the barbell approach is way worse for the common investor than index funds. It was a terrible analogy. After that chapter, I don't know what I can and can't trust in the book. Until Marohn includes 1) some peer-reviewed sources to back his beliefs and 2) a fair, balanced argument, I can't fully buy into his philosophy.
January 27, 2021
I recently started reading posts on Charles Marohn's website, strongtowns.org, and so I decided to read the book behind the website. I think more urbanists and city planners should read this, as it makes some essential points about the fallacy of seeking growth to pay for infrastructure, the need to shift from a federal perspective to a city perspective in macroeconomic thinking, and the importance of choosing meaningful metrics (such as value-per-acre/cost of maintenance rather than standard estimates of economic ROI) for estimating the usefulness of civic investment.
That said, I feel that Marohn's reluctance to engage with issues of racism and classism underlying the way many American cities are planned hurts his case; he notes that racism played an unexamined, secondary role in the decline of cities like Detroit and Ferguson, MO; staying within Mahrohn's dollars-and-cents framework, I'd argue that these cities declined more rapidly and dramatically due to the added cost of apartheid infrastructure that has historically been less present in cities like Marohn's hometown of Brainerd, MN. The lack of interest in reckoning with the financial and human cost of racism makes sustainable city planning harder to implement effectively. Similarly, Marohn's suggested strategies for addressing the insolvency of American towns read as callous without awareness of the optics of suggesting a focus on ROI over all else, and could easily be used to justify the sort of poor planning decisions that Marohn wants cities to avoid, particularly if his warnings about maintenance cost and wasted acreage go unheeded.
In summary, I think that there are several very important ideas in this book, but it is a starting point, not a guide.
That said, I feel that Marohn's reluctance to engage with issues of racism and classism underlying the way many American cities are planned hurts his case; he notes that racism played an unexamined, secondary role in the decline of cities like Detroit and Ferguson, MO; staying within Mahrohn's dollars-and-cents framework, I'd argue that these cities declined more rapidly and dramatically due to the added cost of apartheid infrastructure that has historically been less present in cities like Marohn's hometown of Brainerd, MN. The lack of interest in reckoning with the financial and human cost of racism makes sustainable city planning harder to implement effectively. Similarly, Marohn's suggested strategies for addressing the insolvency of American towns read as callous without awareness of the optics of suggesting a focus on ROI over all else, and could easily be used to justify the sort of poor planning decisions that Marohn wants cities to avoid, particularly if his warnings about maintenance cost and wasted acreage go unheeded.
In summary, I think that there are several very important ideas in this book, but it is a starting point, not a guide.
October 29, 2019
I've been a fascinated follower of the Strong Towns blog for years, and count Chuck Marohn as one of my favorite contemporary thinkers. Not only are his insights novel and prescient, but he comes from a place of down-to-earth morality and honesty that couches his arguments in a place of authentic integrity.
He fiercely refuses to allow his concepts to fall into facile, pre-conceived partisan categories and yet is unflinchingly direct in indicting the many injustices that have been perpetrated via our Post World War II system of development. The arguments are nuanced and at times complex, but also carefully constructed to maximize accessibility. I'm hard pressed to think of any other writer within the general urban planning realm that has coined so many useful and accessible terms (Suburban Ponzi Scheme, Incremental Development, Traditional Development Pattern, Do The Math, Stroad ect.). He clearly illustrates the pervasive fragility at the heart of our development pattern and yet is also able to recommend a practical path forward that is heavy on pragmatism and light on speculation and grandiosity.
Strong Towns is a welcome distillation of the years of philosophical work developed via the Strong Towns blog. It's a joy to see all of the concepts finally tied together in a single cogent and relatively succinct work. My only hope is that the concepts can continue to permeate into the greater culture and hopefully bring some additional sense to our increasingly hostile and entrenched conversation about the future of America.
He fiercely refuses to allow his concepts to fall into facile, pre-conceived partisan categories and yet is unflinchingly direct in indicting the many injustices that have been perpetrated via our Post World War II system of development. The arguments are nuanced and at times complex, but also carefully constructed to maximize accessibility. I'm hard pressed to think of any other writer within the general urban planning realm that has coined so many useful and accessible terms (Suburban Ponzi Scheme, Incremental Development, Traditional Development Pattern, Do The Math, Stroad ect.). He clearly illustrates the pervasive fragility at the heart of our development pattern and yet is also able to recommend a practical path forward that is heavy on pragmatism and light on speculation and grandiosity.
Strong Towns is a welcome distillation of the years of philosophical work developed via the Strong Towns blog. It's a joy to see all of the concepts finally tied together in a single cogent and relatively succinct work. My only hope is that the concepts can continue to permeate into the greater culture and hopefully bring some additional sense to our increasingly hostile and entrenched conversation about the future of America.
November 19, 2021
Very recently, in the last month or two, I've gotten interested in city planning, particularly when it comes to areas that are friendly to bicycles and pedestrians. The YouTube channel "Not Just Bikes" started it all, although its focus on the Netherlands was a little alienating. What can we in the U.S. do to turn the focus away from cul-de-sacs and cars toward neighborhoods and neighbors?
My own experiences from living in a California bedroom city of 200,000 or so were a partial incentive. Why is this city so desolate and passionless, despite so many souls living here? There's no downtown to speak of, no nightlife full of entertainment, dining, or shopping. The only pedestrians are people who have no other choice but to do so, because they're either homeless or going to work. Four-lane "stroads"--a homunculus birthed from a street and a road, featuring fast* traffic, businesses, parking, and as little concession to pedestrians as possible--are the primary means for drivers, I mean, people, to get from their houses or apartments to their jobs, or to whatever strip mall.
*if you think "somewhere between 10 and 50mph, depending on level of congestion" is fast
Strong Towns gives a basic introduction to how we can move from the present car-worshiping mode to a healthier (in any sense), holistic view of city planning. It urges us--both city planners and citizens--to turn away from objectively insupportable, developer plan-driven single-family sprawl to a mode that's more like cities have been for millennia: fractal, compact, versatile, able to thrive through minor upsets.
This was fairly basic in its approach, which isn't bad. My cynicism makes me think that the book is intended as a lever to encourage the reader to talk to their own city council and bring the Strong Towns team in for a consultancy.
However! I think what Marohn is saying is correct. The suburbs were an experiment funded by the U.S. government (not birthed from our individual pluck and industry, despite our mythology that says otherwise) and it is quickly failing. Our sustainability and strength lie elsewhere.
Humans are designed to live in concert with each other, not on blocks of land where no household has any significant interaction with any other on its block, businesses and residences are compartmentalized by zoning, and any unfamiliar face spurs calling the cops. The 1-9% cul-de-sac lifestyle isn't supportable via taxes, and the illusion of every suburban home being an unsullied fiefdom will break down when city governments find that they don't have enough taxpayer dollars to throw at a 1950s version of "the American dream" forever. Or even for another generation.
My own experiences from living in a California bedroom city of 200,000 or so were a partial incentive. Why is this city so desolate and passionless, despite so many souls living here? There's no downtown to speak of, no nightlife full of entertainment, dining, or shopping. The only pedestrians are people who have no other choice but to do so, because they're either homeless or going to work. Four-lane "stroads"--a homunculus birthed from a street and a road, featuring fast* traffic, businesses, parking, and as little concession to pedestrians as possible--are the primary means for drivers, I mean, people, to get from their houses or apartments to their jobs, or to whatever strip mall.
*if you think "somewhere between 10 and 50mph, depending on level of congestion" is fast
Strong Towns gives a basic introduction to how we can move from the present car-worshiping mode to a healthier (in any sense), holistic view of city planning. It urges us--both city planners and citizens--to turn away from objectively insupportable, developer plan-driven single-family sprawl to a mode that's more like cities have been for millennia: fractal, compact, versatile, able to thrive through minor upsets.
This was fairly basic in its approach, which isn't bad. My cynicism makes me think that the book is intended as a lever to encourage the reader to talk to their own city council and bring the Strong Towns team in for a consultancy.
However! I think what Marohn is saying is correct. The suburbs were an experiment funded by the U.S. government (not birthed from our individual pluck and industry, despite our mythology that says otherwise) and it is quickly failing. Our sustainability and strength lie elsewhere.
Humans are designed to live in concert with each other, not on blocks of land where no household has any significant interaction with any other on its block, businesses and residences are compartmentalized by zoning, and any unfamiliar face spurs calling the cops. The 1-9% cul-de-sac lifestyle isn't supportable via taxes, and the illusion of every suburban home being an unsullied fiefdom will break down when city governments find that they don't have enough taxpayer dollars to throw at a 1950s version of "the American dream" forever. Or even for another generation.
July 7, 2020
As I went through the book, my impressions of it vacillated between good and mediocre. On one hand, I was disappointed about the depth of ideas and the rigor of supporting materials. On the other hand, I did enjoy its conversational style - and at times I did have a vivid sense of a dialogue with the author. But at the end of the day, Charles Marohn probably did not set out to write a Teutonic treatise. He probably intended something simple and more relatable. And that was exactly how the book turned out to be.
In essence, Marohn argues for viewing infrastructure as a liability - they require increasingly large amounts of maintenance each year. They always start as something nice and shiny but begin to fall apart in two to three decades. Since the suburb extension facilitated by infrastructure almost always fails to bring in sufficient tax revenues, local governments will find it financially challenging to repair stuff. The residents move on to new neighborhoods, and the old ones doomed to demise.
Marohn argues for a simple tax revenue per acre to assess the value of a development. Under this metric, older town centers almost always outperform the suburbs. It is surprising that the neighborhoods with the best financial performance are actually the shabby ones - the ones that 1) produce more tax dollars per acre as they are more densely developed; and 2) do not come with a big maintenance bill (simply because the local governments ignore them). It is the tax revenues from the poor neighborhoods that subsidize the maintenance of rich neighborhoods - something very counterintuitive.
Marohn has an enlightening way of defining his politics. He describes himself a libetarian at national level, and then becomes incrementally more progressive/socialist when it comes to the local/community levels. I am not saying this is the correct/only template for the political right to start a dialogue in today’s environment - but it sets clear boundaries in our discourse and could help bring back some civility.
The book ended with a strong touch of nostalgia. Connections with neighbors, walk-centric lifestyles - all quintessential in oldtime city centers. The almost emotional digression was not necessary in my view - but it did strengthen the conversational style and increased the text’s connection with the readers.
All in all, I would say I enjoyed the book. Read it like a blog post rather than a more buttoned-up analysis - and you will enjoy it as well.
In essence, Marohn argues for viewing infrastructure as a liability - they require increasingly large amounts of maintenance each year. They always start as something nice and shiny but begin to fall apart in two to three decades. Since the suburb extension facilitated by infrastructure almost always fails to bring in sufficient tax revenues, local governments will find it financially challenging to repair stuff. The residents move on to new neighborhoods, and the old ones doomed to demise.
Marohn argues for a simple tax revenue per acre to assess the value of a development. Under this metric, older town centers almost always outperform the suburbs. It is surprising that the neighborhoods with the best financial performance are actually the shabby ones - the ones that 1) produce more tax dollars per acre as they are more densely developed; and 2) do not come with a big maintenance bill (simply because the local governments ignore them). It is the tax revenues from the poor neighborhoods that subsidize the maintenance of rich neighborhoods - something very counterintuitive.
Marohn has an enlightening way of defining his politics. He describes himself a libetarian at national level, and then becomes incrementally more progressive/socialist when it comes to the local/community levels. I am not saying this is the correct/only template for the political right to start a dialogue in today’s environment - but it sets clear boundaries in our discourse and could help bring back some civility.
The book ended with a strong touch of nostalgia. Connections with neighbors, walk-centric lifestyles - all quintessential in oldtime city centers. The almost emotional digression was not necessary in my view - but it did strengthen the conversational style and increased the text’s connection with the readers.
All in all, I would say I enjoyed the book. Read it like a blog post rather than a more buttoned-up analysis - and you will enjoy it as well.
July 31, 2021
Having grown up in a traditional American suburb, I never really thought about how the built environment influenced so many aspects of my life. Every trip to work, school, the grocery store, or a friend's house required a car trip across miles of sprawling pavement. I was utterly dependent on my mom and, after turning 16, my own car to navigate each of life's smallest necessities. Driving long distances for simple tasks was just what everyone did. I never thought to question it.
But after several years of living in an older, denser neighborhood, the layout of my hometown has started to seem increasingly bizarre. Where I live now, I am within easy walking distance of bars, restaurants, small retail stores, my job, a gym, and even a movie theater. The network of people I know as my neighbors expands several blocks in all directions, and we encounter each other frequently on walks or at nearby restaurants. In an average week, I'll use my car exactly once to go the grocery store. And it's amazing.
Contrast this to the last time I spent the weekend at my mom's house. Though it was a short trip, we took no fewer than 10 car rides going to and from different restaurants, stores, and relatives' houses. I went for a walk though her neighborhood's winding, aimless streets and felt...like I was doing something weird? Maybe it was the total absence of other people outside, or the fact that in four miles of walking I came nowhere close to anything that could be described as a destination. The ultimate effect was a feeling of alienation and placelessness. I suddenly understood why no one else was outside walking on that beautiful spring afternoon.
The effects of these stark differences in development patterns extend far beyond the subjective experience of individual pedestrians. In fact, Charles Marohn argues that the predominant mode of suburban development that produced neighborhoods like my mom's is fundamentally undermining the economic prosperity of our cities and the well being of the citizens who inhabit them. Since the end of the Second World War, countless municipalities have fallen prey to the allure of endless, outwards development with no consideration for future infrastructure liabilities or the vitality of the older neighborhoods left behind. It has left us with cities stretched far beyond their means, and forced us as citizens into an extremely harmful dependence on the automobile to survive.
Strong Towns is a movement that calls for a radical reimagining of the ways we build and maintain our cities.
But after several years of living in an older, denser neighborhood, the layout of my hometown has started to seem increasingly bizarre. Where I live now, I am within easy walking distance of bars, restaurants, small retail stores, my job, a gym, and even a movie theater. The network of people I know as my neighbors expands several blocks in all directions, and we encounter each other frequently on walks or at nearby restaurants. In an average week, I'll use my car exactly once to go the grocery store. And it's amazing.
Contrast this to the last time I spent the weekend at my mom's house. Though it was a short trip, we took no fewer than 10 car rides going to and from different restaurants, stores, and relatives' houses. I went for a walk though her neighborhood's winding, aimless streets and felt...like I was doing something weird? Maybe it was the total absence of other people outside, or the fact that in four miles of walking I came nowhere close to anything that could be described as a destination. The ultimate effect was a feeling of alienation and placelessness. I suddenly understood why no one else was outside walking on that beautiful spring afternoon.
The effects of these stark differences in development patterns extend far beyond the subjective experience of individual pedestrians. In fact, Charles Marohn argues that the predominant mode of suburban development that produced neighborhoods like my mom's is fundamentally undermining the economic prosperity of our cities and the well being of the citizens who inhabit them. Since the end of the Second World War, countless municipalities have fallen prey to the allure of endless, outwards development with no consideration for future infrastructure liabilities or the vitality of the older neighborhoods left behind. It has left us with cities stretched far beyond their means, and forced us as citizens into an extremely harmful dependence on the automobile to survive.
Strong Towns is a movement that calls for a radical reimagining of the ways we build and maintain our cities.
April 28, 2024
As I expose myself to the way other countries live (mostly Europe), the more I realize how effed up just about everything we do as cities and “communities” are in the US. From having to drive every freaking place to shitty healthcare, to a broken, unfixable (as it is now) political system.
This exposure led me to this book.
Strong Towns started fine. Then personal anecdotes and stories that don’t fit well pop up. Couple that with lots of fluff, the substance is lost.
But, the substance makes sense. We need to rethink the endless outward expansion of towns and cities. I blame the New Deal - which did help create jobs, but the cost is a car obsessed culture and the loss of a walkable town and city.
Strong Towns ended very strangely with Charles talking about religion and whatnot that awkwardly kinda-sorta tied in - this adds nothing though.
This exposure led me to this book.
Strong Towns started fine. Then personal anecdotes and stories that don’t fit well pop up. Couple that with lots of fluff, the substance is lost.
But, the substance makes sense. We need to rethink the endless outward expansion of towns and cities. I blame the New Deal - which did help create jobs, but the cost is a car obsessed culture and the loss of a walkable town and city.
Strong Towns ended very strangely with Charles talking about religion and whatnot that awkwardly kinda-sorta tied in - this adds nothing though.
April 23, 2025
I am unashamed to say that I found this book thrilling! Four years of close proximity to my college roommate (an Urban Studies major then and an Architecture Masters more recently) made me into something of a New Urbanism radical before I had the faintest grasp of what I was even talking about. Back on breaks as a freshman and sophomore, walking around Texas cities with my family (meaning, walking from a parked SUV across a lot and into a strip mall), I’d find myself asking out loud, “Do we really think this is human-scaled?”
Thank you, Gabe! You have been dead-on about this topic. My experience living in Madrid, Chicago, and New York (and visiting you in Boston, and many other friends in other cities) has repeatedly proven the thesis that while all cities are imperfect, some are more perfect than others (in form, function, and flourishing). Once one gets bitten by the “urbanism” bug, a spidey-sense develops for noticing that everything is intimately bound up in everything else. I’ve been a geography-oriented thinker since I was pre-verbal, pointing with chubby fingers at the laminated map placemats that my mom gave me for eating / drawing / playing on. Imagine my delight in learning over the past few years that my mental map of place could also be the heuristic cubby-shelf for ideas about all sorts of things: history, law, politics, culture, family, religion, racial and social justice, art, schools, sports, science and industry, humanity’s interactions with the natural world, even our sense of moving through, processing, experiencing, and shaping reality itself! At this point, without exaggerating, I process most of these things on top of an understanding of the built environment. Perhaps giving “place-ness” so foundational an intellectual assignment reflects a deep value judgment of mine. But I would actually argue that its primacy is more practical: the built environment gets to be home base because it shapes and is shaped by all of those other things. It is the arena where complex life occurs.
As Chuck Marohn brilliantly outlines in this book, the way our towns and cities are built and the types of people and communities they nourish and attract are locked in an intricate feedback loop. Marohn’s book and the broader “Strong Towns” movement aim to get people thinking critically and hopefully about the types of places they want to live in and foster. Civic leaders (planners, councilors, mayors, local administrative employees) are the obvious target audience, but the book also envisions a civic fabric that encompasses every community member. So the only credential you need to cross the Strong Towns threshold is that you live in a place. In other words: “Welcome Everyone.”
One more point I’d like to emphasize: if you have ever worried that your poetic love of a vibrant city was built on supposedly flimsy ground – such as the symphony of sounds and the collage of sights at the street level, or the beautiful tapestry of humanity in a diverse place (or other such “bleeding heart” subjects of praise) – this book can greatly improve your knowledge and understanding of how to craft good urbanist arguments in the register of fiscal responsibility and a somewhat conservative understanding of family, faith, and other tenets held dear by less progressive neighbors. The writing contains no dark magic or sophistry, and it certainly does not rely on bad faith word salad; rather, Marohn makes the case earnestly and forcefully that the ideas behind resilient, dense, human-scaled, sustainable, and philosophically humble communities are ideas that everyone should embrace because they benefit every rung of society, every creed, and every lifeway.
If you can’t already tell, I am a Strong Towns convert.
Thank you, Gabe! You have been dead-on about this topic. My experience living in Madrid, Chicago, and New York (and visiting you in Boston, and many other friends in other cities) has repeatedly proven the thesis that while all cities are imperfect, some are more perfect than others (in form, function, and flourishing). Once one gets bitten by the “urbanism” bug, a spidey-sense develops for noticing that everything is intimately bound up in everything else. I’ve been a geography-oriented thinker since I was pre-verbal, pointing with chubby fingers at the laminated map placemats that my mom gave me for eating / drawing / playing on. Imagine my delight in learning over the past few years that my mental map of place could also be the heuristic cubby-shelf for ideas about all sorts of things: history, law, politics, culture, family, religion, racial and social justice, art, schools, sports, science and industry, humanity’s interactions with the natural world, even our sense of moving through, processing, experiencing, and shaping reality itself! At this point, without exaggerating, I process most of these things on top of an understanding of the built environment. Perhaps giving “place-ness” so foundational an intellectual assignment reflects a deep value judgment of mine. But I would actually argue that its primacy is more practical: the built environment gets to be home base because it shapes and is shaped by all of those other things. It is the arena where complex life occurs.
As Chuck Marohn brilliantly outlines in this book, the way our towns and cities are built and the types of people and communities they nourish and attract are locked in an intricate feedback loop. Marohn’s book and the broader “Strong Towns” movement aim to get people thinking critically and hopefully about the types of places they want to live in and foster. Civic leaders (planners, councilors, mayors, local administrative employees) are the obvious target audience, but the book also envisions a civic fabric that encompasses every community member. So the only credential you need to cross the Strong Towns threshold is that you live in a place. In other words: “Welcome Everyone.”
One more point I’d like to emphasize: if you have ever worried that your poetic love of a vibrant city was built on supposedly flimsy ground – such as the symphony of sounds and the collage of sights at the street level, or the beautiful tapestry of humanity in a diverse place (or other such “bleeding heart” subjects of praise) – this book can greatly improve your knowledge and understanding of how to craft good urbanist arguments in the register of fiscal responsibility and a somewhat conservative understanding of family, faith, and other tenets held dear by less progressive neighbors. The writing contains no dark magic or sophistry, and it certainly does not rely on bad faith word salad; rather, Marohn makes the case earnestly and forcefully that the ideas behind resilient, dense, human-scaled, sustainable, and philosophically humble communities are ideas that everyone should embrace because they benefit every rung of society, every creed, and every lifeway.
If you can’t already tell, I am a Strong Towns convert.
February 8, 2024
This app is so garbage i literally was 2 paragraphs into my review and it crashed and deleted it. Cool concepts, could’ve gone into more detail, would recommend people read it as it covers topics i feel strongly about but i don’t think anyone would. Watch Not Just Bikes the youtube channel.
May 25, 2020
The first few chapters are frustratingly facile, with all the hallmarks of sloppy rhetoric: unlabeled heuristic graphs, unsupported assertions, a lack of citations, sweeping appeals to “our ancestors” and “tradition.”
But when it gets into case studies it really begins to shine. The writing cleans up, a number of useful concepts are introduced, and the included references to organizations and studies start to get interesting and relevant to me if I ever want to participate in activism in a place where I’m living.
The repetitiveness was a bit annoying but I guess it helped to hammer some points home. Could have maybe been 25% shorter. And, one lingering question I have is, how does this interact with the standard and proven criticisms of trickle-down economics? Doesn’t a wealth-concentrated system like the one proposed for a “Strong Town” breed corruption and exploitation, long term, no less than the current globalist-first neoliberal approach?
But largely the arguments are convincing and give a lot of hope. The narrative of the long decline to come is consistent with a lot of other thinkers whom I respect, and it’s very heartening to read something that addresses it directly.
Reminds me of the quote from The Pale King, chapter 19 (paraphrasing): “there’s different types of conservatives. You always have to ask, what exactly is it they want to conserve?”
But when it gets into case studies it really begins to shine. The writing cleans up, a number of useful concepts are introduced, and the included references to organizations and studies start to get interesting and relevant to me if I ever want to participate in activism in a place where I’m living.
The repetitiveness was a bit annoying but I guess it helped to hammer some points home. Could have maybe been 25% shorter. And, one lingering question I have is, how does this interact with the standard and proven criticisms of trickle-down economics? Doesn’t a wealth-concentrated system like the one proposed for a “Strong Town” breed corruption and exploitation, long term, no less than the current globalist-first neoliberal approach?
But largely the arguments are convincing and give a lot of hope. The narrative of the long decline to come is consistent with a lot of other thinkers whom I respect, and it’s very heartening to read something that addresses it directly.
Reminds me of the quote from The Pale King, chapter 19 (paraphrasing): “there’s different types of conservatives. You always have to ask, what exactly is it they want to conserve?”
January 10, 2021
Rarely has a book caused me to pause and think about everything around me as much as this one. In essence, the book describes how to ensure that your city is resilient enough to withstand economic setbacks and remain economically solvent for generations to come. It came as a shock to me to realize that if the claims made by the book hold true, then the thriving suburbs of much of Utah and Idaho today (the cities where I've spent most of my life) will become like the abandoned/dilapidated parts of Detroit in the next 30-40 years.
As dreary as it sounds, I believe it's true. As I read this book, I trained myself to look around at all of my surroundings with a clearer understanding of how stupidly we've designed our cities and neighborhoods, and how slow decline is their inevitable fate.
Is there something that can be done to prevent this? Well, yes, but to be honest, it's really too late for many American cities and towns. The America of 2050 will be a nation full of cities similar to modern-day Detroit. Cities that are in despair, decline, disinvestment, and bankruptcy.
Depressing? You betcha. But you can't fix/prevent a problem unless you acknowledge it.
Enjoy your peak while you can Southeast Idaho/Utah & Davis counties. It can only last so long.
As dreary as it sounds, I believe it's true. As I read this book, I trained myself to look around at all of my surroundings with a clearer understanding of how stupidly we've designed our cities and neighborhoods, and how slow decline is their inevitable fate.
Is there something that can be done to prevent this? Well, yes, but to be honest, it's really too late for many American cities and towns. The America of 2050 will be a nation full of cities similar to modern-day Detroit. Cities that are in despair, decline, disinvestment, and bankruptcy.
Depressing? You betcha. But you can't fix/prevent a problem unless you acknowledge it.
Enjoy your peak while you can Southeast Idaho/Utah & Davis counties. It can only last so long.
November 13, 2021
Ooof what a great book. Recommended for anyone who is American and is alive.
February 9, 2025
An absolute must-read. Makes me want to run for city council.
Shocking, terrifying, and honestly kinda depressing. So clearly lays out, with research to support, the nagging feeling of why cities like Chicago are so much more compositionally robust than cities like Dallas. (unimodal population density function, proportional land values to land-improvement values, INCREMENTAL growth mechanisms, etc.)
If you’ve ever heard me lament zoning, this book (along with the 3rd in the series: Escaping the Housing Trap) is why.
"The Municipal Ponzi Scheme"
From a municipal finance perspective, "our poor neighborhoods tend to subsidize our wealthy neighborhoods."
Shocking, terrifying, and honestly kinda depressing. So clearly lays out, with research to support, the nagging feeling of why cities like Chicago are so much more compositionally robust than cities like Dallas. (unimodal population density function, proportional land values to land-improvement values, INCREMENTAL growth mechanisms, etc.)
If you’ve ever heard me lament zoning, this book (along with the 3rd in the series: Escaping the Housing Trap) is why.
"The Municipal Ponzi Scheme"
From a municipal finance perspective, "our poor neighborhoods tend to subsidize our wealthy neighborhoods."
January 25, 2025
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn Jr. (2020)
Strong Towns Book 1
xii+241-page Kindle Ebook
Genre: Nonfiction, Business, Economics, Politics, Urban Planning
Featuring: Table of Contents, Foreword by Michele C. Martinez, Human Habitat Complex, Adaptive Systems; Pompeii, End of Chapter Notes, Incremental Growth, Complex versus Complicated Buildings, Photos, Neighborhood Renewal, The Stifling Nature of High Land Values, Private and Public Investment, Revenues and Expenses, Metaphors, Infrastructure Not as a Means, but as an End The Municipal Ponzi Scheme; The Illusion of Wealth, Understanding Detroit The Infrastructure Cult, The American Society of Civil Engineers, Real Investment, Paper Returns; Accounting for Infrastructure, Assuming Secondary Effects, A Real Return on Investment, The Data Doesn’t Lie, Growth or Stability, Where Does Strength Come From?, Depression Economics, The Last Country Standing, The Post-War Boom, Struggling with Constraints, Going All In on Debt, The Difference Between Growth and Wealth, A Paradox of Thrift or Avarice?, Rational Responses, Restoration of Normal, Productive Places, The Financial Strength of the Old and Blighted, Downtown versus the Edge, Tables & Graphs, Making Strong Investments, The Barbell Investment Approach, Low-Risk Investments with Steady Returns, Filling in the Gaps, Prudent Constraints Suburban Retrofit, Place-Oriented Government, How a City’s Priorities Must Shift to Build Wealth, Recognizing Our Confirmation Bias, Understanding Debt, Afterword by LeVette Fuller, About Strong Towns, Get Involved in the Strong Towns Movement, Index, List of Tables, List of Illustrations
Rating as a movie: PG-13
Books and Authors mentioned: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa; Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment by Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander, The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability by Stephen A. Mouzon, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory by Neil F. Johnson, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand” by Nassim Taleb, Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs, The Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street by Tomas Sedlacek, The Crash Course by Chris Martenson, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Tactical Urbanism, Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, Walkable City by Jeff Speck, The Big Sort by Bill Bishop, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics by Jonathan Haidt, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen, Tribe by Sebastian Junger,
Memorable Quotes: Today we build individual homes, as well as complete neighborhoods, all at once, to a finished state. There is no starting small and adding on as resources allow; property is purchased using long-term financing sold into a secondary market, with banks and insurers requiring a finished product as a prerequisite to completing the transaction. Standardization of the core product and assembly methods has made the home-building process hyper-efficient, theoretically driving down the cost per square foot. The price of a home has not gone down, however; the amount of square feet per structure has merely gone up. Financing mechanisms force home builders to build to a final state, and they force buyers to enter the market with a fully mature home at a high price point. The true entry-level product has been squeezed out. Along with a higher bar to entry, zoning and building regulations keep things from evolving. Regardless of need or changing circumstance, modern zoning codes typically don’t allow single-family homes to be converted into multi-family, not even to rent out a room to a college student for some extra cash. Same with adding a business. Even if the market demand is there, zoning regulations might allow some limited home occupations, but nothing that would betray the residential uniformity of the neighborhood.
For many cities, even those that are still growing, the illusion of wealth is fading. We are now 70 years into this experiment and we find ourselves with large amounts of debt while facing unpayable levels of obligations. This isn’t a matter of raising taxes or cutting services to make things balance out. It is coming down to a decision more akin to triage. Which road do we fix and which do we let fall apart? Which pipe do we repair and which one do we walk away from? Which neighborhood do we save and which do we write off? For cities who have arrived at this point, there are no good answers. The conversation, once broached, always seems to circle around to the American case study: Detroit.
When you take a prosperous and stable city, spread it out at tremendous cost over an enormous area, denuding and bisecting the original fabric as part of the transition, then saddle it with decades of liabilities, you end up with Detroit. Like all bankruptcies, it happened slowly and then all at once. Detroit is not some strange anomaly. It’s just early. It’s just a couple of decades ahead of everyplace else.
The community’s asset isn’t the street in front of your home; the asset is your home. Or at least the future tax revenue related to that property. The value of your home represents wealth within the community, wealth that can be tapped to meet the promises the community makes, like maintaining roads and pipes. That cash flow can be – and frequently is – pledged as collateral by the local government when they issue bonds.
We started with an approach to city-building based on thousands of years of trial and error experimentation, a method that – while not necessarily efficient in its day-to-day operation – was stable, adaptable, and resilient. We now have a new, experimental approach, one where we make transformative investments based on our cultural desires, wrapping them in a veneer of intellectual theory and propaganda math.
Today, nearly every U.S. city has a backlog of routine infrastructure maintenance they will never be able to perform. This represents miles of street that won’t be fixed, and huge lengths of pipe that will never be replaced. This infrastructure serves the homes and businesses of Americans. It is the foundation of their personal wealth. Ultimately, none of that will matter. In pursuit of growth nationally, we have rendered our cities financially insolvent. The base assumption of all our theories seem to be that a strong national economy would trickle down to strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods. This belief held true whether the trickle-down mechanism was large government or large corporations, government spending or tax cuts, the empowerment of centralized bureaucracies or centralized corporations. America’s leaders seemingly believed that, if we strengthened the top, it would strengthen the bottom.
I think it’s rather clear that Americans prefer “smart” over “dumb,” yet time and again, Americans – especially the more affluent ones – have an even stronger preference for order over chaos. We have the luxury of tolerating a lot of dumb in the pursuit of order. If you doubt this, think back to the last time you sat at a traffic signal in the middle of the night. You can see in all directions, there are no cars anywhere in sight, yet you wait for the light to turn green. You sacrifice your own ability to think and act independently on your judgment, as well as your time and fuel, for the sake of order. This is so accepted it’s done without any thought given to the tradeoff.
Let me summarize: In exchange for 26 years of tax relief, the community was able to get an out-of-town franchise restaurant to abandon their old building and move three blocks up the street where they tore down a block of buildings and replaced them with a development that is 44% less valuable than the development pattern of what was removed. By any financial measure, this is a bad investment, yet cities everywhere routinely do this exact kind of transaction.
Middle-class housing subsidies and transportation spending are the bread and circuses of modern America. Americans express a preference for single-family homes on large lots along cul-de-sacs because that’s the lifestyle we subsidize. We’ve been willing to bankrupt our cities, and draw down the wealth prior generations built, in order to provide that subsidy. It can’t go on indefinitely.
My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🏞🏗🧱🏘🏢🏥🏦🏫
My thoughts: 🔖Page 37 of 241 [Chapter] 3 An Infinite Game - I need some fiction in my life. This book is pretty good so far, it reads a bit like a social studies book, it's not bad but I need a break from non-fiction, this is my 4th NF book in 2 days.
🔖171 [Chapter] 9 Place-Oriented Government - My mind has been blown. This makes so much sense.
I was surprised the book ended with Shreveport but it was fitting for me as I was thinking about the ups and downs of that area while reading. This was very eye-opening. I want to read Book 2 in series, I started with Book 3, and I definitely see how we waste money to make money on several levels. This book has made me rethink everywhere I've ever lived and all of the ongoing construction I see.
Recommend to others: Yes, you don’t have to work for a city or board to get value out of this book.
Strong Towns
1. Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
2. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town
3. Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis
Strong Towns Book 1
xii+241-page Kindle Ebook
Genre: Nonfiction, Business, Economics, Politics, Urban Planning
Featuring: Table of Contents, Foreword by Michele C. Martinez, Human Habitat Complex, Adaptive Systems; Pompeii, End of Chapter Notes, Incremental Growth, Complex versus Complicated Buildings, Photos, Neighborhood Renewal, The Stifling Nature of High Land Values, Private and Public Investment, Revenues and Expenses, Metaphors, Infrastructure Not as a Means, but as an End The Municipal Ponzi Scheme; The Illusion of Wealth, Understanding Detroit The Infrastructure Cult, The American Society of Civil Engineers, Real Investment, Paper Returns; Accounting for Infrastructure, Assuming Secondary Effects, A Real Return on Investment, The Data Doesn’t Lie, Growth or Stability, Where Does Strength Come From?, Depression Economics, The Last Country Standing, The Post-War Boom, Struggling with Constraints, Going All In on Debt, The Difference Between Growth and Wealth, A Paradox of Thrift or Avarice?, Rational Responses, Restoration of Normal, Productive Places, The Financial Strength of the Old and Blighted, Downtown versus the Edge, Tables & Graphs, Making Strong Investments, The Barbell Investment Approach, Low-Risk Investments with Steady Returns, Filling in the Gaps, Prudent Constraints Suburban Retrofit, Place-Oriented Government, How a City’s Priorities Must Shift to Build Wealth, Recognizing Our Confirmation Bias, Understanding Debt, Afterword by LeVette Fuller, About Strong Towns, Get Involved in the Strong Towns Movement, Index, List of Tables, List of Illustrations
Rating as a movie: PG-13
Books and Authors mentioned: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa; Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment by Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander, The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability by Stephen A. Mouzon, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory by Neil F. Johnson, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand” by Nassim Taleb, Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs, The Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street by Tomas Sedlacek, The Crash Course by Chris Martenson, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Tactical Urbanism, Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, Walkable City by Jeff Speck, The Big Sort by Bill Bishop, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics by Jonathan Haidt, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen, Tribe by Sebastian Junger,
Memorable Quotes: Today we build individual homes, as well as complete neighborhoods, all at once, to a finished state. There is no starting small and adding on as resources allow; property is purchased using long-term financing sold into a secondary market, with banks and insurers requiring a finished product as a prerequisite to completing the transaction. Standardization of the core product and assembly methods has made the home-building process hyper-efficient, theoretically driving down the cost per square foot. The price of a home has not gone down, however; the amount of square feet per structure has merely gone up. Financing mechanisms force home builders to build to a final state, and they force buyers to enter the market with a fully mature home at a high price point. The true entry-level product has been squeezed out. Along with a higher bar to entry, zoning and building regulations keep things from evolving. Regardless of need or changing circumstance, modern zoning codes typically don’t allow single-family homes to be converted into multi-family, not even to rent out a room to a college student for some extra cash. Same with adding a business. Even if the market demand is there, zoning regulations might allow some limited home occupations, but nothing that would betray the residential uniformity of the neighborhood.
For many cities, even those that are still growing, the illusion of wealth is fading. We are now 70 years into this experiment and we find ourselves with large amounts of debt while facing unpayable levels of obligations. This isn’t a matter of raising taxes or cutting services to make things balance out. It is coming down to a decision more akin to triage. Which road do we fix and which do we let fall apart? Which pipe do we repair and which one do we walk away from? Which neighborhood do we save and which do we write off? For cities who have arrived at this point, there are no good answers. The conversation, once broached, always seems to circle around to the American case study: Detroit.
When you take a prosperous and stable city, spread it out at tremendous cost over an enormous area, denuding and bisecting the original fabric as part of the transition, then saddle it with decades of liabilities, you end up with Detroit. Like all bankruptcies, it happened slowly and then all at once. Detroit is not some strange anomaly. It’s just early. It’s just a couple of decades ahead of everyplace else.
The community’s asset isn’t the street in front of your home; the asset is your home. Or at least the future tax revenue related to that property. The value of your home represents wealth within the community, wealth that can be tapped to meet the promises the community makes, like maintaining roads and pipes. That cash flow can be – and frequently is – pledged as collateral by the local government when they issue bonds.
We started with an approach to city-building based on thousands of years of trial and error experimentation, a method that – while not necessarily efficient in its day-to-day operation – was stable, adaptable, and resilient. We now have a new, experimental approach, one where we make transformative investments based on our cultural desires, wrapping them in a veneer of intellectual theory and propaganda math.
Today, nearly every U.S. city has a backlog of routine infrastructure maintenance they will never be able to perform. This represents miles of street that won’t be fixed, and huge lengths of pipe that will never be replaced. This infrastructure serves the homes and businesses of Americans. It is the foundation of their personal wealth. Ultimately, none of that will matter. In pursuit of growth nationally, we have rendered our cities financially insolvent. The base assumption of all our theories seem to be that a strong national economy would trickle down to strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods. This belief held true whether the trickle-down mechanism was large government or large corporations, government spending or tax cuts, the empowerment of centralized bureaucracies or centralized corporations. America’s leaders seemingly believed that, if we strengthened the top, it would strengthen the bottom.
I think it’s rather clear that Americans prefer “smart” over “dumb,” yet time and again, Americans – especially the more affluent ones – have an even stronger preference for order over chaos. We have the luxury of tolerating a lot of dumb in the pursuit of order. If you doubt this, think back to the last time you sat at a traffic signal in the middle of the night. You can see in all directions, there are no cars anywhere in sight, yet you wait for the light to turn green. You sacrifice your own ability to think and act independently on your judgment, as well as your time and fuel, for the sake of order. This is so accepted it’s done without any thought given to the tradeoff.
Let me summarize: In exchange for 26 years of tax relief, the community was able to get an out-of-town franchise restaurant to abandon their old building and move three blocks up the street where they tore down a block of buildings and replaced them with a development that is 44% less valuable than the development pattern of what was removed. By any financial measure, this is a bad investment, yet cities everywhere routinely do this exact kind of transaction.
Middle-class housing subsidies and transportation spending are the bread and circuses of modern America. Americans express a preference for single-family homes on large lots along cul-de-sacs because that’s the lifestyle we subsidize. We’ve been willing to bankrupt our cities, and draw down the wealth prior generations built, in order to provide that subsidy. It can’t go on indefinitely.
My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🏞🏗🧱🏘🏢🏥🏦🏫
My thoughts: 🔖Page 37 of 241 [Chapter] 3 An Infinite Game - I need some fiction in my life. This book is pretty good so far, it reads a bit like a social studies book, it's not bad but I need a break from non-fiction, this is my 4th NF book in 2 days.
🔖171 [Chapter] 9 Place-Oriented Government - My mind has been blown. This makes so much sense.
I was surprised the book ended with Shreveport but it was fitting for me as I was thinking about the ups and downs of that area while reading. This was very eye-opening. I want to read Book 2 in series, I started with Book 3, and I definitely see how we waste money to make money on several levels. This book has made me rethink everywhere I've ever lived and all of the ongoing construction I see.
Recommend to others: Yes, you don’t have to work for a city or board to get value out of this book.
Strong Towns
1. Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
2. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town
3. Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis
January 15, 2020
I’ve been a follower of Strong Towns for a few years now and I always feel inspired after reading Chuck’s writing. The Strong Towns message says that “to truly thrive, cities and towns must:
- stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience
- stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn
- stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation
- stop building our world based on abstract theories and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today
- stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances”
I think this is the most rational course of action American cities and towns need to take this century to undue the short-sighted decisions that were made in the last century.
- stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience
- stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn
- stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation
- stop building our world based on abstract theories and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today
- stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances”
I think this is the most rational course of action American cities and towns need to take this century to undue the short-sighted decisions that were made in the last century.
November 25, 2020
A little light on recommendations for municipalities, but very informative. Author gets side-tracked too often as well.
March 7, 2023
This is a book that gives you a lot to think about - particularly if you are involved in the process of developing cities through engineering projects as I am. It puts forth uncomfortable ideas and expects the reader to grapple with them, making the case that in order to be sustainable the values with which we build urban and (especially in my mind) suburban areas need to be dramatically altered. Whether it is an accurate prediction or not, Marohn certainly seems to be of the opinion that these values will be changing anyway, regardless of what we want.
It's not all doom and gloom here though. Behind the debt wall modern towns face are hints at ways to develop that are healthier for our economies and cultures. There are possible solutions and ways to think about the problems cities face presented. Whether or not any one particular approach supplied is "correct", I expect to be mulling over the core principles for quite a while and looking for ways to apply them.
It's not all doom and gloom here though. Behind the debt wall modern towns face are hints at ways to develop that are healthier for our economies and cultures. There are possible solutions and ways to think about the problems cities face presented. Whether or not any one particular approach supplied is "correct", I expect to be mulling over the core principles for quite a while and looking for ways to apply them.
January 19, 2025
There is nothing shocking or new in this book but it is one that lots of people should read. We have choices to make, let’s make good ones. For people who are just starting to wonder why they have to spend so much of their time in a car (and hating it), read this book. For those who feel burden by their houses or locked out of the market, read it. If you’re considering serving on city council or a city board, I hope you’ve already read it. Our cities are underserving us! We can do better! One of the ideas in the book I most appreciate is the argument that we have make some bold moves to show people they can have more/better — cities just need to do it and not wait to get everyone on board. Many people will have to see these changes in action to get it, so let’s do it now.
May 31, 2020
Strong Towns has a similar conclusion as other modern planning books… urban development patterns prior to World War II were far superior to the sprawling development patterns in the U.S. that followed WWII and we need to return to the dense, walkable communities that we used to build. The book has a different focus than most planning books, however, in that the author’s main argument is that our current sprawling development pattern has set our cities on the path to financial insolvency and most just haven’t recognized it yet. We will eventually, he argues, have to abandon infrastructure maintenance and repair in large segments of our sprawling cities and instead focus our limited financial resources on maintaining the infrastructure in the most financially productive parts of our cities, the central core areas where most of the older pre-WWII neighborhoods exist.
A key measure the author introduces is value per acre. Old, even blighted and poor neighborhoods, far out perform financially new low-density neighborhoods when measured by value per acre, which is important because public infrastructure costs (length of water pipes, miles driven by police patrols) are tied to geographic size.
Prior to the automobile, cities were built so that everything was within walking distance and they evolved to be flexible, adaptable and to respond quickly to feedback. Development of buildings occurred one at a time and each new building could adjust to changing circumstances (such as economic conditions or cultural tastes). Each new building added value and as value increased it justified public investment such as paved roads, water, sewer, libraries, etc., and people felt justified in improving the value of their individual building.
After WWII, however, we built cities around the car and in a time of resource abundance so that we didn’t worry about cities being efficient or adaptable. Today development occurs all at once in large subdivisions and the public investment of infrastructure occurs up front, placing the public at financial risk if the development fails. With this approach, the whole development declines all at once as it all ages at the same time, resulting in declining value over time. The wealthier residents able to afford repairs eventually move on to newer developments, thus accelerating the decline. Zoning rules prevent neighborhoods from evolving to the next iteration of intensity.
The automobile also opened up vast amounts of land to development and the increased supply of land resulted in a drop in land values in the city. This made the economics of maintaining expensive buildings in the city not worth the cost, so cities declined and aging buildings were demolished for parking lots or highways to serve the wealthier residents who had moved out to the suburbs.
Tax revenue from this low-density development doesn’t pay for maintenance of the government services to that development (the roads, sewer, water, police, etc.) over time, but this fact is hidden because the development is new and maintenance costs don’t accumulate until decades later. The tax and fee revenue from a new development, however, is immediate, so we are hooked on always pursuing new development to try to pay for the maintenance of older development, while always slipping deeper and deeper into a long-term trajectory of municipal financial insolvency. The author argues that we need to prioritize stability over growth.
Furthermore, big infrastructure projects such as new roads or road expansions don’t pay for themselves when you factor in long term maintenance, but engineers and others pretend they do by calculating the value of time saved not in traffic or other gimmicks that don’t actually result in real financial benefits.
With the earlier decline of cities, poor people were left behind in urban areas, but they were often in functional, if underinvested, neighborhoods. With the current decline of suburbs, poor people are now being forced to relocate out there through gentrification, but now must live in dysfunctional neighborhoods entirely dependent on expensive car use.
The author argues that the solutions to this problem of financial insolvency resulting from sprawling development will be local from ground up, not top down from the state or national level. Changes must occur incrementally to allow for experimentation and to see what does and doesn’t work, rather than through the type of big development projects with which we’re used to. He proposes how to reorganize city bureaucracy and to replace use-based zoning with form-based zoning (i.e. instead zoning based on whether it is residential vs. commercial, zoning would be based on the size of the building and how it fits with a neighborhood). He also argues to revise (or remove) regulations to allow more flexibility; to decentralize decision making; to make cities more walkable and healthier; and, ultimately, to connect with each other in our communities, despite our differences, and work to save our cities.
This is not among my most favorite planning books – it lacks the details on an alternative vision for how we could better design urban spaces - but it provides a unique perspective with regards to the long term fiscal impacts of our sprawling development.
A key measure the author introduces is value per acre. Old, even blighted and poor neighborhoods, far out perform financially new low-density neighborhoods when measured by value per acre, which is important because public infrastructure costs (length of water pipes, miles driven by police patrols) are tied to geographic size.
Prior to the automobile, cities were built so that everything was within walking distance and they evolved to be flexible, adaptable and to respond quickly to feedback. Development of buildings occurred one at a time and each new building could adjust to changing circumstances (such as economic conditions or cultural tastes). Each new building added value and as value increased it justified public investment such as paved roads, water, sewer, libraries, etc., and people felt justified in improving the value of their individual building.
After WWII, however, we built cities around the car and in a time of resource abundance so that we didn’t worry about cities being efficient or adaptable. Today development occurs all at once in large subdivisions and the public investment of infrastructure occurs up front, placing the public at financial risk if the development fails. With this approach, the whole development declines all at once as it all ages at the same time, resulting in declining value over time. The wealthier residents able to afford repairs eventually move on to newer developments, thus accelerating the decline. Zoning rules prevent neighborhoods from evolving to the next iteration of intensity.
The automobile also opened up vast amounts of land to development and the increased supply of land resulted in a drop in land values in the city. This made the economics of maintaining expensive buildings in the city not worth the cost, so cities declined and aging buildings were demolished for parking lots or highways to serve the wealthier residents who had moved out to the suburbs.
Tax revenue from this low-density development doesn’t pay for maintenance of the government services to that development (the roads, sewer, water, police, etc.) over time, but this fact is hidden because the development is new and maintenance costs don’t accumulate until decades later. The tax and fee revenue from a new development, however, is immediate, so we are hooked on always pursuing new development to try to pay for the maintenance of older development, while always slipping deeper and deeper into a long-term trajectory of municipal financial insolvency. The author argues that we need to prioritize stability over growth.
Furthermore, big infrastructure projects such as new roads or road expansions don’t pay for themselves when you factor in long term maintenance, but engineers and others pretend they do by calculating the value of time saved not in traffic or other gimmicks that don’t actually result in real financial benefits.
With the earlier decline of cities, poor people were left behind in urban areas, but they were often in functional, if underinvested, neighborhoods. With the current decline of suburbs, poor people are now being forced to relocate out there through gentrification, but now must live in dysfunctional neighborhoods entirely dependent on expensive car use.
The author argues that the solutions to this problem of financial insolvency resulting from sprawling development will be local from ground up, not top down from the state or national level. Changes must occur incrementally to allow for experimentation and to see what does and doesn’t work, rather than through the type of big development projects with which we’re used to. He proposes how to reorganize city bureaucracy and to replace use-based zoning with form-based zoning (i.e. instead zoning based on whether it is residential vs. commercial, zoning would be based on the size of the building and how it fits with a neighborhood). He also argues to revise (or remove) regulations to allow more flexibility; to decentralize decision making; to make cities more walkable and healthier; and, ultimately, to connect with each other in our communities, despite our differences, and work to save our cities.
This is not among my most favorite planning books – it lacks the details on an alternative vision for how we could better design urban spaces - but it provides a unique perspective with regards to the long term fiscal impacts of our sprawling development.
June 18, 2023
2 stars? Maybe a little harsh? 3 stars probably too generous. I enjoyed all the little stories/examples the author to make their point, but felt this book could have been half as many pages.
November 12, 2019
Such a great book.
February 1, 2024
A good read that lays out systematic issues with today's cities and modern American living. I wish he would've delved more into specifics on the lifecycle and cost breakdowns of roads/maintenance combined with increasing (inflating) cost factors. Would recommend. The Strong Towns YouTube videos are good too.
September 13, 2023
Everyone should read this book.
May 17, 2022
I love when those who studied other disciplines ALSO happen to be great writers. Another great book on urban planning/design and how to shift our paradigm on the role of cities.
I would recommend this to anyone and everyone.
I would recommend this to anyone and everyone.
July 10, 2023
In between a 4.5 and a 5. Very interesting concepts in. Left me with a lot to think about regarding the future of our cities. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 we're so gripping and stimulating that they often stopped me from wanting to play Zelda (that's saying a lot right now). This is a must read for everyone imo
August 3, 2023
Phenomenal.
December 17, 2023
5 stars for the ideas presented in this book that aren’t taught to many planners in the profession, let alone your average citizen: most modern developments do not pay for themselves, and aren’t built long enough to last for even a portion of the time that historic buildings were built. Suburbs are a pyramid scheme and modern development has eliminated the potential to adapt to customer, preference, help build individual equity, or expand and contract with changing market forces or opportunities. (Nice shout out to Joe Manicozzi from Urban 3 who also tells this story with data)
I really appreciate the work that Strong Towns is doing to deliver this message on a consistent basis through their various channels, and was glad to finally read this book. However, after the first third of this book, the point has been made, and the remainder feels a bit like screaming into the void.
A few things I’d like to remember/reference later/spoilers:
* People are attracted to edges - Jane Jacob’s and the Pattern Book
* As an engineer, they are trying to see cities as a collection of streets, roads, pipes
* Training in urban planning can add some depth in the world of economic impacts and land use, but has been fundamentally been reduced to zoning and allowed uses
* Systems that are overly complex become weaker and easier to stress and break. Misdiagnose problems as a result of limited variables, instead of the overall system, and further increase fragility. Happened in a time of unprecedented wealth and motivated young people. Dream big and we can do anything! (Simply Complexity book)
* In real world world situation, where there is limited competition, it matters very little what decisions are made. There’s no incentive to fix complex, systemic issues in a time of abundance. Have the money, hire more officers. More cars, build more lanes.
* The first iteration of every city was cheap buildings on cheap land. Each new building and business increased the value of the land.
* Historically cities have happened, organically and incrementally, with small changes. Today, we have the ability to build to the ideal and skip a lot of steps to get to what we perceive as the ideal. There is no anticipation of change or adaptation, like historic commercial buildings with shared walls that could be expanded in to or change with demands. Or small homes that could be added onto or a porch and closed depending on growing needs and resources. Each house was adaptable, creating multiple iterations for the neighborhood overtime. Today we build complete homes and neighborhoods with banks and insurers requiring a finished product, eliminating true starter homes by increasing cost of a mature home at a higher price. Homes will all reach life cycle at same time ensuring all pressures of decline will happen at once. Two options: stagnation or decline.
* Renewal only makes sense when land value is high enough to justify investment, rather than moving on to the next neighborhood. This is why beautiful historic buildings were demolished for parking lots in the inner-city, because the cost to maintain didn’t outweigh the function of the parking.
* Value per acre isn’t taught to planners- especially along highways. The more smaller business the more local businesses supported like accountants, printers, lawyers, etc compared to a centralized big box
I really appreciate the work that Strong Towns is doing to deliver this message on a consistent basis through their various channels, and was glad to finally read this book. However, after the first third of this book, the point has been made, and the remainder feels a bit like screaming into the void.
A few things I’d like to remember/reference later/spoilers:
* People are attracted to edges - Jane Jacob’s and the Pattern Book
* As an engineer, they are trying to see cities as a collection of streets, roads, pipes
* Training in urban planning can add some depth in the world of economic impacts and land use, but has been fundamentally been reduced to zoning and allowed uses
* Systems that are overly complex become weaker and easier to stress and break. Misdiagnose problems as a result of limited variables, instead of the overall system, and further increase fragility. Happened in a time of unprecedented wealth and motivated young people. Dream big and we can do anything! (Simply Complexity book)
* In real world world situation, where there is limited competition, it matters very little what decisions are made. There’s no incentive to fix complex, systemic issues in a time of abundance. Have the money, hire more officers. More cars, build more lanes.
* The first iteration of every city was cheap buildings on cheap land. Each new building and business increased the value of the land.
* Historically cities have happened, organically and incrementally, with small changes. Today, we have the ability to build to the ideal and skip a lot of steps to get to what we perceive as the ideal. There is no anticipation of change or adaptation, like historic commercial buildings with shared walls that could be expanded in to or change with demands. Or small homes that could be added onto or a porch and closed depending on growing needs and resources. Each house was adaptable, creating multiple iterations for the neighborhood overtime. Today we build complete homes and neighborhoods with banks and insurers requiring a finished product, eliminating true starter homes by increasing cost of a mature home at a higher price. Homes will all reach life cycle at same time ensuring all pressures of decline will happen at once. Two options: stagnation or decline.
* Renewal only makes sense when land value is high enough to justify investment, rather than moving on to the next neighborhood. This is why beautiful historic buildings were demolished for parking lots in the inner-city, because the cost to maintain didn’t outweigh the function of the parking.
* Value per acre isn’t taught to planners- especially along highways. The more smaller business the more local businesses supported like accountants, printers, lawyers, etc compared to a centralized big box
November 16, 2024
If you're passionate about better cities, this is the book to shove down everyone’s throat (and I highly encourage you to do so). Starting from the reasonable argument that cities should balance their budgets, Charles continues on by pointing out the absurdity of American suburbia and our accounting at the city level. With an easy to understand writing style, plenty of real world examples, and logical arguments that appeal to both sides of the political spectrum, even Ford F-150 owners might be convinced to allow some mixed use (assuming they can read).
Displaying 1 - 30 of 359 reviews