Our Post on Strong Towns Generated Lots of Strong Opinions

The conversation so far and what's happening next

Our post on August 4 — Strong Towns Need Strong States — outlined some areas of disagreement between us and Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn and has been generating a lot of discussion. We wanted to pull out a few of the most interesting responses thus far.

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Marohn’s initial reaction to our post was positive, writing:

This is the kind of good-faith disagreement I think our movement needs more of,” wrote Marohn. “We all want to see more housing, greater access, and more prosperous, welcoming communities. The question is: How do we get there? And just as important: Who decides what ‘there’ looks like?

In his full length response post, titled “Is the City the Problem?”, he went on to say “Just because cities aren’t working the way they should doesn’t mean they’re the problem. In fact, I believe cities are still our best hope for real reform.”

Marohn said that meant he disagreed with us on one possible avenue for housing reform — state preemption laws, which take away cities’ ability to say no to new housing, arguing:

Again and again, tools originally meant to solve local problems — tools like comprehensive planning, the 30-year mortgage, even the credit score — are absorbed into centralized systems and gradually repurposed to serve other priorities.

But, he went on to say, he thought that cities ought not to be treated simply as “the lowest level in a hierarchy of governments, tasked merely with implementing state and federal mandates.” In other words, they have a life of their own, and we ought to be turning them into better places instead of only working at the state level. (We should add, we are curious to understand more how Marohn distinguishes the preemption laws he supports from the ones he doesn’t. The principle isn’t completely clear to us here.)

Where we disagree with him is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. Marohn seems to argue that we should wait for public opinion to catch up before we change state laws, but we think that changing state laws is a great way to drive changes in public opinion.

On that same topic, a few days later, the writer

Addison Del Mastro

weighed in with a thoughtful post in which he said that while he agreed in principle with Marohn, in reality, “it’s not exactly easy to build local capacity when an unrepresentative minority of NIMBYs controls the machinery of land-use decisions at the local level. So in my view—again, not held doctrinally, just my sense of the issue—freeing up that machinery is a precondition of capacity-building, not somehow contradictory to it.”

A Little More On Zoning Preemption

Our post also kicked off a great discussion on Reddit. One commentator wrote:

I see the impact of this tension between the motivation to retain or strengthen local control and the motivation to increase housing supply and drive down housing costs in the city where I work -- Milwaukee, WI. Despite the best intentions of the policymakers pushing reforms that try to encourage development while requiring community input and emphasizing aldermanic privilege, city departments themselves will tell you that standard, universal rules and practices will improve confidence among builders and financial backers and drive down construction timelines.

We would add that this case is an important example of why it helps to look at specific cities when you are talking about these questions — it’s harder to figure it out in the abstract and much easier with particulars.

Another said:

In Michigan the current city-township system was created for explicitly racist purposes, and the existing - sometimes almost comical - boundaries exist to service those purposes. For heaven’s sake, my own city of Grand Rapids, MI contains another city (East Grand Rapids) for this reason. These boundaries are not logical, and they are not laid out with any idea of coherence or efficiency - and they are legally and politically impossible to move. The power of land-use is delegated to cities and townships by the state, so even describing state action as “preemption” is IMNSHO disingenuous; the state is simply the superior in the hierarchy.

Many of the comments on our original post were very insightful as well. Special shoutout to the YIMBY Jeremy Levine, who reframed Marohn and Del Mastro’s commitment to handling decisions at the lowest possible level:

We all want to restore bottom up community planning, which means restoring agency over residential land use to the lowest level of decision-making possible, the individual property owner. State legislation that helps restore decision-making to the individual landowner isn’t the same as state-driven highway planning or other top down policies, it’s a fundamental part of reviving true bottom-up planning.

(We think that’s a good point as far as it goes, but obviously we and most YIMBYs are not full-on libertarians about property rights — governments can and should have a say.)

Scott, a land development planner in Asheville, NC, chimed in to say he supported state preemption, writing that he views “state-wide “standardization” as a pro, as it creates greater predictability and consistency for what Permitted Uses can be built and where they can be built.”

In the end, there remains much more agreement than there is disagreement between YIMBYs and Strong Town advocates. As Seth Zeren pointed out, “I am likewise in both camps and baffled by some of the fighting.”

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That’s it for now, but we’re looking forward to continuing the discussion with Chuck when Laura joins him on an upcoming episode of The Strong Towns podcast — stay tuned.