Charles “Chuck” Marohn is the president of Strong Towns, a national organization he started in 2008 as a blog and grew into a widespread movement advocating for financially resilient, prosperous cities and towns through bottom-up, incremental development. Chuck is the author of countless articles and three books: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (2019), Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (2021), and Escaping the Housing Trap (2024), and he hosts the Strong Towns Podcast while speaking widely across North America. Chuck lives in Brainerd, Minnesota, with his family.
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Transcript:
Geoff (00:05)
Welcome to the Yeoman Podcast. I am your host, Geoff Graham. With me today is Charles—”Chuck” to his friends—Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns.
What can I say about Chuck and Strong Towns? He started the organization in 2008 as a blog, and it has grown through great effort and with a great deal of help from many people—dozens of employees, thousands and thousands of members—to be what I think is the most compelling and important voice in urbanism, land use, the forces that are shaping our built environment, rural environments, and the patterns of human settlement.
Chuck and Strong Towns are two of the reasons that I’m incredibly optimistic for our future. On Chuck personally, he is the author of three books—is that right, Chuck? I didn’t miss one.
Chuck (01:12)
Three books, yep.
Geoff (01:32)
Yeah, starting in 2019 with Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, then in 2021 Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. Hopefully we will touch a little bit on that part of his story. And most recently, Escaping the Housing Trap in 2024.
He’s also the host of the Strong Towns podcast and has been recognized by Planetizen—you’ve probably heard of it—as one of the 15 most influential urbanists of all time. And I think that’s true. I think that’s totally true. I would rank him higher.
Chuck (01:55)
There’s some recency bias there, Geoff.
Geoff (01:59)
Maybe. And that’s two times, I think—2017 and 2023. He lives in his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota with his family. He’s married to his high school sweetheart. We are talking now via the junior high in which he has an office, in the kind of redeveloped part of his junior high, which is where he met his wife.
And I’ll just say to that last point about the most influential urbanists: I would say that right now, at least in this time that we live in, the message from Chuck Marohn and from Strong Towns is the most important message for our built environment, for our towns, for our rural landscapes.
And I’m excited to have Chuck with me. Thank you, Chuck, for joining us.
Chuck (03:03)
Thank you, Geoff, my friend. That’s a high standard to live up to. So I will try to do that. It is delightful.
Geoff (03:09)
I was going to start out with a different question, but now people are saying this word all the time—and I’ve called myself this—but what is an urbanist?
Chuck (03:25)
I never call myself that. In fact, I think one of the things that kept me away from the Congress for the New Urbanism for a long time was the term “urbanism.” To me, urbanist means big-city person, someone obsessed about a big city. And I live in a small town. I’m not that. But in my pursuit of answers to questions I had, I wound up back at CNU over and over and over again. And I wound up with people who describe themselves as urbanists. Okay, well, maybe I’m one of them, perhaps.
I feel like the term has applied to me as someone who cares about cities, city form, city life—including big cities, small towns—how the way we build, design, grow, change, adapt, mature our neighborhoods results in human prosperity and flourishing. I feel like that’s kind of maybe my core definition.
Geoff (04:32)
Yeah, I share your reservations about that term and use it reluctantly because it feels so kind of siloed or something. But is there a better term for people who are working to make our human settlement patterns better?
Chuck (04:51)
Well, okay. Let me start off with a lack of humility then.
Geoff (04:52)
Then my brother, whom we both know, he calls himself a civic artist, kind of tongue in cheek.
Chuck (05:02)
I like that. I mean, that describes him really well. Part of my tension is I didn’t feel “urbanist” is a good description. Fifteen years ago, when I’m traveling around and starting to do what eventually becomes Strong Towns, when local newspapers would report on me coming to town, they would say “smart growth advocates.” And I’m like, my gosh, I’m not a smart growth advocate. What are you talking about? I never mentioned the term. I never talked about it.
My wife is in media. My wife is a news reporter—was, back then; does radio now. She said, they’re just using the term that most closely associates with you. And she said, what do you want them to call you? And I said, I’d like them to call me a Strong Towns advocate. I think 15 years ago, that didn’t mean anything. I think today it actually does. Maybe if we’re looking for a term, I feel like “Strong Towns advocate” hopefully will replace “urbanist” as the default description for how people want to be known.
Geoff (05:59)
I’m gonna start calling myself that.
Chuck (05:59)
Yeah. Hopefully we’ll replace “urbanist” as the default description for how people want to be known.
Geoff (06:08)
I’ve always felt like an urbanist is maybe someone who dwells within a city and loves everything that’s happening in their city—soaking up city life. And that seemed kind of not quite there.
Chuck (06:20)
No. If you had to describe an urbanist in a superficial marketing way, you’d say they like lattes and going to the opera and visiting the museum and hanging out in the park. And I’m like, I live in a small town. I’ve none of that. That’s not my experience.
Geoff (06:35)
Right. Yes.
Geoff (06:46)
To your point, when it has been my experience in just talking about real estate development things—if you talk about urbanism to a small-town person, it’s kind of alienating. I don’t mean that in a provincial or condescending way. It’s like they don’t identify with that.
Chuck (07:02)
Yeah!
Chuck (07:12)
There’s a whole lexicon, and it unfortunately crosses over into our politics and our cultural discussion—which all those lines are blurred now, of course, in the US today. But there’s this whole lexicon of terms and descriptors that are really coded left, progressive, San Francisco, New York, big media—all that. And that language is kind of just taken for granted by people who live in that sphere as the sophisticated way to talk about this.
But if you get to the rest of the country, I love to walk from my house downtown and go out to eat. I like to walk to the football field at the high school and watch the Friday night football game. I like to take my dog for a walk through the neighborhood or bike to the grocery store. My church is literally right across the street from my office. We walk there on Sundays.
I think if you just took the experience that I enjoy and dropped it into San Francisco, you would say, “Chuck’s an urbanist.” But if you take that experience and put it here and mix it with everybody else who’s here, it’s a term that doesn’t feel like it’s the right anchoring.
Geoff (08:32)
Yeah. So maybe good to elaborate a bit more on Strong Towns. First, people if they have followed your work may be familiar with this, but you started your professional journey as a civil engineer. And having worked with civil engineers, particularly in the transportation world, it’s often very difficult for someone who wants to build a strong, resilient place—it’s sometimes a little antagonistic with the civil engineers.
May I ask you what took you from civil engineer to Strong Towns? I’m really asking, what radicalized you?
Chuck (08:58)
Yeah, that’s a good question. I was actually a misfit civil engineer, which won’t shock you at all. So when I was in high school and college, what did I want to do? There were really two things that I would have liked to have done.
The first one was get married to my girlfriend—you know, we talked about, I met her literally in this building, this junior high, and we dated through high school and college and we’re married now 30 years. That all worked out. That was one ambition that I had that I was serious about. I love this woman and wanted to spend time with her.
The other ambition I had was really to play music. I’m a drummer. I like percussion. I had a scholarship to go play music in college and I was like, this is what I want to do.
Geoff (09:47)
I didn’t know that. Yeah.
Chuck (10:06)
Those two things didn’t reconcile in my brain. I grew up on a farm. I’m enough of a practical person where even my dad was saying, you can’t do music. You have to do something serious and then you can do music on the side. Ultimately, I knew I was good at math. I did two summers in the army to pay for college because my parents didn’t have any money to pay for it. So if I was going to go to college, I was going to have to pay for it myself, so I joined the guard.
It was in doing pushups at 4 a.m. where I’m like, I gotta do something serious. I can’t go home to my girlfriend, my future in-laws, and say I’m gonna be a drummer. What the hell? They wouldn’t let me around their daughter. So civil engineering seemed interesting to me because I liked cities. I was always interested in how things were built, how things were laid out. As a kid, I used to draw cities, pictures of cities and stuff. So civil engineering seemed like a way to take my skill at math and all the fundamental things you need and go be an engineer.
When I got that job, I liked it. It was fun, problem solving and what have you. But it took me about three years to hit the limits of what my engineer brain could take. Okay, why are we doing this? I remember they would call me Mr. Why—why do you always ask why we do this? What is it about you? I would go to these meetings and I’m like, why are we doing this? What is the reason? Why can’t we do it this way?
After five years at an engineering firm, I was like, I gotta do something else or I’m gonna go nuts. A mentor of mine had been talking to me about going to graduate school to get an urban planning degree. I applied on a whim. I did really well. They let me in. They offered me a big scholarship and I’m like, well, I’m 26. If I’m gonna ever do this, I should do it now.
My wife said no at first. We were actually at the point where we were talking about kids—like maybe now’s a good time. And this opportunity came up and we pivoted.
Geoff (12:03)
Did you all have any kids yet?
Chuck (12:30)
And my wife is a saint, just very gracious and supportive and said, go do this. While I was there, I wound up starting my own planning firm, working with a few cities around my hometown. And then it grew and grew and I wound up hiring some of my classmates. By the time I got done with my graduate program, I had a firm that was approaching a million dollars a year and I had hired a few of my classmates and we were working all over the state doing mostly small-town planning, light engineering kind of stuff.
It was through that process that I again was really enthusiastic. We can help a lot of cities. We can make a lot of stuff better. And it took a few years where I started to run into the why are we—what is going on? Why are we doing this?
Geoff (13:47)
Can I ask what year you were in graduate school?
Chuck (13:50)
2000 to 2002. So just the first couple years at the Humphrey School here at the University of Minnesota.
Geoff (14:00)
Was trying to think about what was going on in the academic zeitgeist in the 9-11 era.
Chuck (14:05)
9-11. Yeah. Right in the middle. So that was a big mental shift. It’s funny because I’ve got a 21-year-old kid who has historic memory of 9-11 but not the mental shift that we all went through when you live through that. But yeah, that was the period of time. My first kid was born in 2004 and I had been out of graduate school like a year and a half.
Geoff (14:38)
We are the same age? 52?
Chuck (14:42)
I’m 52. Yeah. So it was actually a process in running my own firm where I got to the point—I would show up to these meetings, I think this is the vignette—I would show up to a meeting as the planner and the engineer would show up with some stupid plan. Like we’re gonna spend a million running sewer and water systems and roads all over the place in a small town with a budget of like $800,000. And we’re gonna spend—it would be as if the city of Minneapolis just dropped randomly 10 billion dollars on a project proportionate to their budget. It’s just nuts. We’re just going to do this.
And everyone would nod and be like, OK. And then I would say, OK, here’s the tax base you’re going to get from this. You can’t even pay the interest on the debt, let alone retire the debt, let alone maintain any of this. If you get the tax base that you’re hoping—which is also a gamble and a risk.
I was told a number of times to just shut up and do my job. Your job is to review the permits, your job is to do planning, your job is not to do the engineering, and your job is not to do the financial work. After going through that a number of times, I won’t say that it radicalized me, but it got me to where by 2006 and 2007, as the housing market—because we were on the very front end of the housing market—my company was, before you can default on a house, you have to build it. Before you can build it, you got to come to us. And so we were a leading indicator and my business cratered. We went from a million in revenue to 300,000 between 2006 and 2008.
Geoff (16:37)
You were a leading indicator. Yeah.
Chuck (16:46)
So it was just gutting this thing that I had built. By the time we got to 2008, I was mad. I’ve been telling cities, this is really stupid. You’re going to pay. This is not going to work out. And then it didn’t work out. It collapsed. And then the cities kind of said, well, the last thing we need is a big-mouth consultant telling us how we screwed up. And so I lost half my contracts.
At that point I sat down and started to write. If you’ve ever been to a therapist or talked to someone who has, a lot of times they’ll recommend journaling. I love writing anyway. And I thought, well, this is cheaper than therapy. I’m not going to go to the therapist. I’m just going to write what I’m seeing. So I said, I’m going to write three days a week. And that’s what I did. And that was the beginning of Strong Towns.
It was really my way of getting what were kind of angry, frustrated thoughts coalesced and out in a coherent way where I could explain them to people, understand them fully myself, and then ultimately— wasn’t my plan—but ultimately have other people interact with them.
Geoff (18:06)
So kind of to recap: grew up on a farm in a small town.
Chuck (18:11)
Yeah. When I say farm, Geoff, the homestead that was homesteaded by my great-great-grandparents. So not a big factory farm like today—you might call it a hobby farm, although that’s what we fed ourselves with. My dad worked at the mill and got hurt and couldn’t go back. And so he actually went to school for a few years while I was growing up and became a teacher.
Geoff (18:45)
So that’s good that you missed him as a teacher.
Chuck (18:52)
It’s very good. Yeah. That would not have—even in the same building—worked out well.
Geoff (18:58)
Yeah. I can imagine. So kind of rural America, small-town America, get into—become a civil engineer, have a creative bent and are in a position to be consulting to, advising in some capacity, small towns on their infrastructure and what they should do—starting to see like, this stuff doesn’t make financial sense. Everybody’s like, you’re crazy. Just do the job. And began a blog during the great financial apocalypse of 2008. And that led to Strong Towns.
A question in there that I didn’t get was: you are an accomplished—an impressive economic thinker. Where does your curiosity for economics come from? Because it weaves into—I feel like it’s the thing that most people just don’t even get—economics and finance, I should say, like that sort of thing. Has it just been you read some books or is there more to it than that?
Chuck (20:21)
Not a lot more to it than that. But I think maybe the intensity of it is what is different. As an engineer, you take a course in engineering economics, which is not Keynesianism versus the Austrian school. It’s here’s how a project cash flows, here’s what you can salvage things at the end, here’s over a 25-year life what the net present value is. To me, my economics background was very practical, site-oriented. It was closer to accounting than it was economics.
When I was in the early phase of discontent with the planning firm that I had started—why is this not working, why are we being asked to work on these projects?—I realized that I didn’t have the language to explain what my gut was feeling.
Geoff (20:53)
It was accounting. Yeah.
Chuck (21:22)
I did a number of things. One thing I did is I just turned on CNBC. I bought a subscription—which was actually kind of expensive back then, a streaming subscription to CNBC. It was like 80 bucks a month that I didn’t have—just to stream that one channel from my computer. Every time there was a phrase or a term that was uttered, I would write it down and try to figure out what it meant. Like the idea that bond values go down when interest rates change—why? What’s the relationship? And so I started to dig into that.
At the same time, I’m a bit of an obsessive reader—maybe that’s an understatement. I spent probably two to three years reading 30, 40 economics books a year. Just different people who had different takes on different things regarding economics. You and I have bonded over Nassim Taleb and how much we like his writing. I think his was part of a larger group of people that I was reading. But I found his stuff to be probably the most inspirational in terms of the questions I was asking because it dealt with uncertainty and risk and what we actually know and don’t know and the limits of what we can know.
To me those were the things that the whole political economic debate that we have is kind of silly when you actually get down to a project in a city or the way we run things in a local government. That’s what I was interested in: how does this stuff actually work? How does a balance sheet work? How does public accounting work? Why can cities run balanced budgets every year but be in huge amounts of debt?
These things didn’t make sense and I just kept digging until I figured them out to my satisfaction.
Geoff (22:44)
Something I love about you and y’all’s work at Strong Towns is you’re injecting into the conversation something about the human settlement pattern, about how we build, how we pay for what we build, this question of how do we pay for it? What’s going to happen when we can’t pay for it anymore? It’s a topic that I feel like a lot of—might broadly call them environmental advocates or urbanists or whatever you want to call the sort of group who tend to be waving the flag—I don’t see them saying like, well, we really need to look at how we’re financing this stuff.
But I feel like if people began to view so much of what we do through that lens, then the problems we’re facing with our human settlement pattern will become much clearer. And the solutions will become more obvious too—or at least the direction we need to go. They’re very complicated at this point, so probably not obvious.
Chuck (23:58)
It was—so I’ve come a long way since those early days in terms of understanding. I think having a better understanding of human motivation. I had another crisis like this where I spent probably three years reading psychology books, just trying to understand human psychology and group psychology—like, why do we react the way we do?
But the early frustration was I would run into these people who would say they were fiscally conservative and they didn’t really even care to investigate the math. There was just this underlying belief that if we were growing, it was good. And then there was another group that claimed to be kind of anti-growth, but they were not anti-growth because it didn’t make sense. They were anti-growth because no oil, no environmental whatever. And I found both of these conversations to be completely incoherent in a way that was at first maddening to me. And that’s ultimately why I ended up in the psychology stuff. These are smart people—why do they think this way?
But when I was in the economics phase, I was kind of a kindred spirit with the person who is saying we should be pro-growth and we should be making investments and we should be prudent about what we’re doing. I’m kind of aligning with the outcomes that the people who are anti-growth want because they’re like, this is a dumb project, why are we doing this? But I don’t feel like I have the same inspiration as them. Like I’m not motivated by the same things.
Why am I winding up in this place? And the math was kind of comforting to me because I could just—I remember showing up to one meeting where the city was going to build this industrial park and they had already built an industrial park and they were convinced it had done really well. It’s all built out. It’s great. We’re going to build the same thing on land we own right next door.
And I showed up with the math: here’s how the existing industrial park is performing. You gave a tax subsidy to every single business that was in here, except for the public ones that you just gave the land away for free. So you are making no money off this book and you’re calling it a success because the lots are full. What kind of performative thing is that?
And that was actually a moment where I looked around the table and I said this out loud after the meeting was over and it was not taken well. I looked around the room and I’m like, you’re making money out of this transaction, you’re making money out of this transaction, you’re making money out of this transaction. Everybody in here in this room gets paid if the project goes forward. None of us get paid if the project is successful.
And to me, that was like a big wake-up moment. Okay, I get the motivated reasoning on why we don’t ask these questions and why when I bring them up, it’s like I’m releasing a stink bomb in the room. Everybody’s like, Chuck, don’t want him at our meeting. We don’t want him there. Because these were questions that had obvious answers that no one wanted to grapple with.
Geoff (28:35)
How did—when you say it wasn’t received well, how—what was that like?
Chuck (28:43)
That was a city where I started to get not invited to meetings that I should have been at. And then ultimately when my contract came up at the end of the year, they opted to downsize the department.
Geoff (29:01)
Was this pre-Strong Towns?
Chuck (29:05)
This would be 2008–2009, so right in the time when I’m starting to write this stuff.
Geoff (29:10)
Yeah. Well, on that sort of dislocation between your—
Chuck (29:20)
I’m explaining how I’m a bad businessman.
Geoff (29:25)
I mean, you have—I don’t know if this is fair, but my perception is you have this terrible curse where you need people to be accurate and clear-eyed. You want people to understand what’s happening. And—
Chuck (29:43)
I think if I had a moral virtue that I would brag about, it is that I can’t live in the dissonance of getting paid to do things that I think are not good. And oftentimes to be a consultant, you have to be okay with—
Geoff (29:57)
You’re put in that position. Yeah.
Chuck (29:56)
Yes. And I was never good at that. I had to believe in what I was doing.
Geoff (30:11)
That’s—you know, I do—maybe we’ll—I do want to kind of get onto some other things, but just as a tangent, my observation is that’s really, really common among entrepreneurs and small business owners. Like it’s—and partly why they’re doing what they’re doing is they make themselves kind of unemployable. That attribute might lead them to be unemployed. Well, it’s not across the board—like everybody who starts a business is that way—but they kind of have their values that they want to live, and it’s hard for them to put themselves in a position where they need to—you know, do the—I’m blanking on his name, the guy that—it’s hard to get a man to see something that his paycheck depends upon him not seeing. Upton Sinclair, yeah, right.
Chuck (31:03)
Upton Sinclair, yeah. Can I actually take it a step further? I actually think there is resentment that often grows amongst people who opt for the other choice.
In 2004, when Chloe, my oldest, was born, the city here—adjacent to the one I live in now, the one where my family homestead is—in Baxter had their city planner job open. It was like 80, 100,000 a year, something like that. It was way more money, many multiples of what I’d ever made, and many more multiples of what I would make until two or three years ago. In 2004, I would have been making good money. I would have had few night meetings. It would have been a simple job, but it would have been the yoke of doing stuff that I found very non-redeeming—like being the planner for the next phase of the Walmart and Costco and frontage road expansion.
I remember going for a long walk with my wife and having this conversation about it. I felt this responsibility because we had this kid to actually do something that would make money—my consulting firm had been in the early days very up and down. One month we were doing well, the next month it was like, my gosh. And when you hire people, you lose money for a couple of months before they become billable.
It was a question of responsibility to my family. And my wife, again a saint, said you can’t do that. You will be miserable and not a good dad and not a good husband. Don’t do it. I have a ton of admiration and respect for her because we live a beautiful lifestyle.
Geoff (32:14)
Well, you know, not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured. The impact of the work is enormous. You had mentioned about resentment, and I thought you were going to take it in a different direction than you did.
Chuck (32:39)
That’s a good life.
Geoff (32:59)
You were saying that there’s resentment that fosters in that environment. Can you elaborate on that? Or did I miss part of that?
Chuck (33:05)
No, I feel like there is a… So Nassim said in one of his books, and he said a number of times, we should be building statues to entrepreneurs because they’re like the soldiers who go out and risk death and often are slaughtered. Yes, the odds are stacked against them.
Geoff (33:19)
Yeah, the odds are stacked against them. No sane person would ever pursue that path.
Chuck (33:41)
There is a certain amount of—I use the word resentment and I actually think that is the right word—but I feel like a lot of people make the decision for very practical reasons: I want to pay my mortgage, I want to go on vacation. I want to take the path that goes against their own inner inspiration perhaps.
You’re 52 now. You can look around at the people who have been at that now for a couple of decades of their life. When I get together with friends or run into people that I know that are at that—how are you doing? It’s the old grind. Wow, Chuck, you’ve really made it, you’re doing great. And I’m like, well, my life earnings and your life earnings are way different. Mine are not nearly as high as yours.
But my happiness is probably way higher, and my job satisfaction is probably way higher. I’m making decent money now. We’ve grown this to the point where it’s pretty stable and I can pay myself. The board pays me a decent competitive salary. But you still have that underlying resentment of where you’re at today without the recognition of what it took to be here and what trade-offs you have to make.
Maybe I’m just more aware of it because of the age cohort I’m in. But I often advise our younger people on the team here: if you buy a house, you’re buying the need to be stable. And the need to be stable means you might have to make different career choices. So just have that in mind.
Geoff (35:22)
Can I ask—maybe it totally does. Yeah, it does.
Chuck (35:22)
Does that make sense?
Geoff (35:31)
I think you’re kind of invoking the same observations about entrepreneurs is a great one. They’re kind of artists in a way—or many of them, not all certainly, but many of them are artists.
I want to shift gears and ask you something about an observation you made about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. And I’ll also ask you, maybe for people who aren’t familiar with those historical figures, to explain a little bit about who they are.
But you have said, and I think this gets to the core of a problem you and I both have with a lot of what happens in the planning profession: you can’t achieve Jane Jacobs ends via Robert Moses means. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
Chuck (36:00)
Didn’t you also—you and I got into a vibe on Twitter a while back—governing like Caesar with Jesus in mind?
Geoff (36:12)
That sounds like something we would have chatted about.
Chuck (36:17)
Yeah. So to me it is the fatal recognition that I think the planning profession fails to struggle with—and even offshoot to that, people who I’m good friends with in the New Urbanism and what have you I think struggle with this as well—because there’s this idea that we’re really smart people, we know the answers, and people should just empower us to do the thing we know how to do.
Robert Moses—he was originally the parks director in New York and ultimately became—I don’t even know what his title was—but he is the guy who, in a sense, engineered the highways through not just New York City but all across New York state. The grand planner and mobilizer of people and resources and money and institutions to reshape cities around the automobile. Robert Moses is kind of the archetype.
I do think that the engineering profession—even though I never learned about Robert Moses in engineering school—his kind of thinking is embodied in what we’re taught in engineering school, which is: we got to solve a problem. There needs to be traffic flow from here to here, or there needs to be a sewer extension out to here. And the way you solve the problem—sometimes you got to rip stuff down and tear it apart. And all that’s good because we can reshape the city in a new form. We’re so much smarter now. We know things they didn’t know back when they originally built this neighborhood. And we can tear it down and do it right this time.
Jane Jacobs would be the antithesis of that. And Jane Jacobs is very much—I feel like, and I don’t think she would say this, and I don’t think many of the Jane Jacobs acolytes would say this—but I feel like there’s a Chesterton’s fence aspect to Jane Jacobs.
Geoff (39:14)
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
Chuck (39:31)
Or if you do tear it down, tear down a small part first and then see what happens before you rip out the whole thing.
Geoff (39:38)
Why do you say you don’t think she would like that?
Geoff (40:43)
She might—it’s so interesting because it’s hard to read Jane Jacobs today through the lens of modern progressive thought because she is a bastion of modern progressivism. When I read her, especially her writings on economics, her writings on economics are basically Austrian school economics.
Geoff (40:19)
Like kind of Austrian school with a sprinkling of soul and love.
Chuck (41:15)
I would say localism. Love and soul is a good way—like the bottom-up grounding. There’s a lot of humility there. There’s a lot of “okay, I don’t know exactly why this is this way, but here’s what I observe.” What I love most about Jane Jacobs is how she reasons not through theory—”let me apply this grand vision to micro things.” She starts with the micro and kind of almost hunts for the weird exception and then says, what does this explain? It’s very Darwinian scientific method: I’m going to observe 200 different turtles and then try to figure out what this one that is different is explaining about the rest.
Geoff (41:58)
She has a little book on that, The Nature of Economies is her, I think, penultimate book. And it’s exactly about that.
Chuck (42:01)
Yeah. Yep. I remember I was reading one of her books that was assigned in grad school. And it had a whole chapter where she just eviscerated the Federal Reserve and the idea of top-down finance. Like, we’ve spent trillions on economists’ fantasy experiments about how the world should work. I’m like, my gosh, what would she think about what we’ve done today? Because that was written in like the 70s.
Geoff (42:31)
My goodness. I have been going down rabbit holes of people writing in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, alarmingly writing then: this is where it goes, we can’t keep doing this. And like, whoa, boy, if you only knew.
Chuck (42:50)
Well, and I’ve done that too. The thing that I’ve tried to reconcile with today—and this really comes out of my experience in 2008—is I’m in that same mindset, like we can’t keep doing this, but people have been saying that for 70 years and we’ve done it for 70 years. Could we do it for another 70 years? That would be the rest of my life plus some. It’s possible we could. I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s possible.
So Jane Jacobs grounds us in a certain humility that to me was very familiar and comfortable when I started to wrestle with it. The idea that we should want things to change and get better, but we should start as our basis with a humble understanding of where we are now and how we got here. We should work in a sense with the next increment of change and let humanity respond to that and basically react to what we’re doing and use that to inform whether we’re right or not or whether we know what we’re doing or not.
I think this is the big schism mentally in most planners’ brains. We’re gonna do a comprehensive plan and we’re going to set out a vision and we’ll listen to people, sure, we’ll have public meetings and we’ll go through a whole visioning process. But at the end of the day, we’re really smart. We’re gonna get the smartest people we know in a room. We’re gonna say this is how it should be and we’re gonna lay that out and then we’re gonna stubbornly cling to it or hold up that stubbornness as a virtue as we go forward in time.
To me, I think that brand of planning, that brand of city building needs to die. It could not die quickly enough—like needs to go away and be a vestige of the past. That’s 95% of the planning profession today.
Geoff (44:17)
Yeah, I had a back and forth a few months ago with a person—I’d call this person kind of an urbanist in the broad term—who was extremely celebratory of Napoleon and Baron von Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris. That it’s great, and this person’s position was we need a lot more of that. We need a lot more of that. Make big plans, you know.
Chuck (44:47)
Yeah. As if the urban renewal people weren’t inspired by the same thing, right?
Geoff (44:51)
And that was my reply. I was like, well, that’s actually what got us into this mess—this big blast-radius, technocratic, top-down imposition. And we had a big disagreement about it, but there was no room for—my sense was that we both share an affinity for the Jane Jacobs end. But this planner has a great love for the Robert Moses means.
Chuck (45:20)
Mm-hmm.
Geoff (45:20)
And it was just like the response was the problem with all the urban renewal stuff, everything that’s happened in the 1900s, many things that are happening still, is the technocrats weren’t smart enough. We just needed smarter technocrats. We need people like Haussmann. If we can only find those people and give them the power, then everything will work out. I’m like, you know, we don’t really know what Paris was like. The old, cool medieval parts of Paris, they’re really cool. They’re pretty awesome. And there are a great many cities all over the world that are still very medieval that are pretty cool and work really well. Are we sure that Haussmann’s impact was positive? And are we sure that providing the smartest people with the technocratic control over everything is really going to have a good result? And I think we just were speaking past each other.
But to your point, I do think that’s 95% of the people in the profession. But I think that’s changing; five years ago it was 98%.
Chuck (46:23)
When I was in graduate school—I’ll give you that, I do think Mike Lydon with Tactical Urbanism stuff has done more to kind of just shake up the conversation. It was amazing because going through graduate school, I was five years older than everybody else. Everybody else had done their undergrad and then they went to graduate school. The cool thing about a planning degree is that people come from all over. So we had people who had art degrees and literature degrees and political science degrees and economics. They were coming from all different professions and they wind up in urban planning.
To a person, if you would have asked any of them, what’s your highest career aspiration, it would have been to build a city from scratch. Because to build a city from scratch, I can make it in my own vision. I can do it perfect. It will be way better than any that has ever come before. Because I am more informed, more intelligent, more thoughtful than everybody who’s come before. And I can do this in a better way.
And I don’t think that is as much arrogance and hubris of the soul as it is of the time. Because we’re on this progression of progress—like when we were kids, we had the Apple II computer, and then we had PC compatibles, and then cable modems, and then pretty soon you’ve got an entire world in your pocket with a smartphone. People who have lived through that progress, I think just naturally think they are smarter and more informed than everybody who came before them because they have—I mean, I can look up right now who won the World Series and was the MVP in any year in history. Of course, I know more than anybody who came before me. I’ve got this in my pocket. I can just look it up.
I think what lacks—and really what the urban planning profession lacks—is what I would just call the teaching of humility. I feel like I have an advantage because I grew up Catholic. And there’s a caricature of Catholicism where it’s nuns slapping you on the wrist with rulers. But a big part of Catholicism is a humility about thousands of years of practice that have come before. And in a sense, submitting to that without fully understanding it as a path to some greater form of being.
That’s actually a hard leap to make in a society where everything keeps getting better and better and better. It’s way easier to believe in your own innate superiority over the backward, Luddite people of pick-your-timeframe-ago.
Geoff (49:38)
Yeah, that makes sense.
Chuck (49:48)
Can I add one other thing about the Jane Jacobs–Robert Moses thing? Because you asked me about wanting Jane Jacobs ends with Robert Moses means. One of the things that I find the greatest dichotomy is when people read The Death and Life of Great American Cities and they’ll cite the sidewalk ballet. And Jane Jacobs was all about sidewalks. She wrote this whole thing about the sidewalk ballet. And the takeaway is we need to build sidewalks. And so they will come away with, we need a plan for sidewalks. We need standards. We need an implementation plan. We need to come up with here’s how we’re going to—we’re spending $2 million this year and $4 million next year. And here’s our overall sidewalk plan. And they’ll go and implement it. And they think they’re doing Jane Jacobs because they read sidewalk ballet as sidewalk.
Jane Jacobs, if she would have put one word in bold and one word in tiny subscript, sidewalk would have been tiny and ballet would have been bold capital letters. Because a ballet is like a dance back and forth. It’s movement and it’s not one director. It’s actually multiple people working in concert with each other. And when she talks about a sidewalk ballet, she’s really talking about the complexity of humanity.
If we were going to do sidewalks by Jane Jacobs, we would go out and— we’ve got a four-step process at Strong Towns that is kind of modeled on this idea—we would go out and humbly observe where people are struggling. We would then say, okay, this struggle here is really related to the fact that there’s a gap in the sidewalk or the sidewalk’s broken. Let’s go fix that. Let’s go deal with that now. And then repeat that process over and over again.
It’s a very—it is in a sense the same underlying inspiration, sidewalk ballet, but the implementation emphasizes one word or the other. And I think our planners would like to implement sidewalks where the Jane Jacobs in us should really be emphasizing ballet.
Geoff (52:56)
Does the—to riff on that a little bit—does the Robert Moses in us want to emphasize sidewalk formation marching or a marching band—kind of some sort of antithesis of ballet?
Chuck (53:17)
I think it is the—you know this—we have made efficiency a cultural virtue of America. And I do think Robert Moses implicitly taps into the efficiency virtue in a way that we don’t culturally really question all that much. Of course we would do that efficiently, right?
Geoff (53:48)
This is maybe a turn—I would like us to be able to talk in our time together about monetary policy. And that sounds maybe elite, but it relates to the efficiency thing. I think that Robert Moses-ism is performative efficiency. I would say that it’s an infatuation with top-down planning as a means to achieve efficiency. But it’s clearly the opposite of that.
Even Ivan Illich’s thing about counter-productivity—when you add up all the time working to make money to buy your car and buying gas and then sitting in traffic, and you add up all that, what’s your real speed of travel? It’s four miles an hour, which is about what you can do with a horse trotting along. And I feel like there’s a lot of that in the Robert Moses-ian thing.
I would like to talk to you about these grand plans—grand ambitious plans to be imposed down—and how they get enabled, facilitated, supported, financed with public debt and given how our monetary policy is set up. I feel like you’re the person who can talk about this cogently, so no pressure. What’s your initial reaction to that?
Chuck (55:32)
So let me give you an insight and an analogy. Strong Towns—we have 6,500 members, like individuals who have donated to us in the last year. A lot of them are $5 a month, small donations. When we have surveyed our members, what we find is that there’s a really weirdly high percentage—5%, 6%—that are computer programming people, people who do computer programming. And this is not the tech bro. This is the I write, I deal with computers and programming.
The way they’re finding us is not because they love urbanism—although a lot of them live in cities. The reason they find us so compelling is because of that bottom-up iterative approach. If you go back to computer programming 30 years ago, it was Robert Moses: get smart people, write code, pound through things, debug, figure it out. And what happened is that that was seen as the most efficient way to do things.
When you get to modern coding, what you’re really talking about is something that’s more evolutionary. And I think we’re all starting to get a glimpse of this with AI now, where you’ll say, okay, we’re here and we’re trying to get to here. We’re going to have 1,000 different algorithms running at the same time trying to figure this out. And then we’ll look at the 1,000 different ones and kind of figure out which one works best. And then we’ll take that one and we’ll iterate that one to the next level. We’ll take the 5% of them and iterate those up.
What you are doing is you are not, in a sense, bulk trying to ram your way through it with resources and effort and human power. You’re using the machine to let it grow and let it figure out. Again, it’s a lot more like Darwin and evolution sped up than it is top-down, God coming in saying, I’m creating camels with two humps.
I think that the mindset of the programmer is actually more attuned to the way cities are well built and effectively built and should be built—the modern programmer than the programmer of 40 years ago. And of course those programmers of 40 years ago are gone because they got wiped out and taken over by the new version.
If we switch to monetary policy—I always feel hesitant talking about this because as soon as I mention it, I’m going to get—and you and I will both get—inundated, maybe depending on your audience, with people who have their own theories of how money works and money is a construct and we can just do whatever.
I feel like the monetary system we have today—run and managed by people who would be the computer programmer of 40 years ago—is: I’m really smart. I’m going to pound my way through this. We’ve got a problem—here’s our toolkit: lower interest rates. We’ve got a hiccup over here—here’s our toolkit: print money.
I have ideas of what a modern computer programmer—like an evolution kind of system—would look like, but it would look very, very different than the one we’ve set up. The one we’ve set up is designed to me to scale a big top-down economy without nuance. And I do think that that works for a short period of time. And so you get, in a sense, efficiency, but then what you get is this fragility trade-off. And what happens is the cycles start to get crazier—the bigger amplitude craziness and the crash is crazier. And so the rescue is crazier.
To measure that inefficiency is measuring one variable without the other. It’s measuring efficiency without fragility or without risk or without volatility. It’s just saying this is efficient. And it is efficient. Right now, we’re doing quantitative easing again. Why? Inflation is above target. Unemployment is low. The stock market’s booming. We’re doing it because it all feels fragile underneath. And there’s a fear that if we don’t do it, that the whole thing will crash.
The idea that the whole thing could crash is like—here we’ve got three doors: door number one, prosperity; door number two, stagnation; door number three, total market failure. The idea that we would have a system where door number three is one of the possibilities—and a serious possibility that we would need to print lots of money in the current situation to avoid—to me, that’s like saying, I’m searching for an analogy: okay, we’re going to open this door. One door is health and prosperity. The next door is we struggle through life. And the next door is you’re going to get mauled by a grizzly bear. Go ahead. You got a one-out-of-three chance. I’m like, I don’t want to play that game. That’s not a game I want to play. That’s what our economy is right now from a macroeconomic standpoint.
Geoff (01:01:49)
Well, I think that’s a good setup. I was wanting to get technical—which is maybe not all that interesting—but it’s something that’s been a bee in my bonnet. Here’s my sense of things. When people look at the world as it is—you know, we go get in our car and we drive down the highway and we go do these things. And then we go to the grocery store and we buy our food that was grown in California or maybe Mexico or maybe even further afield. And then we drive home and we do all these sorts of things. And they’re just like, that’s how it is. It just happened. That’s the natural evolution of prosperity and people working together.
It has created a landscape like this where you drive to the Dollar General or the Super Walmart or the Publix. And maybe if you’re on a road trip somewhere, you might drive by some big giant Monsanto field of something. My sense is that’s just not a natural thing. This didn’t happen just naturally. Humans left to our own devices—living with gravity, like real forces in our lives, gravity and physics—that’s not what would happen.
It’s actually—we would continue to progress. We would continue to innovate. We would have innovations that help us lead better, more prosperous, more flourishing lives. But this scale thing of giant, massive organizations shipping stuff all over—it just wouldn’t work that way.
My hypothesis is that the monetary policy we’ve had now for well over 100 years—but especially so for the last 40 or 50 or so—is such that it creates advantage to two things: it creates a special advantage to those with access to capital so they can do bigger things. And then from a public spending perspective on infrastructure, it has the public—the state, our governments—spending things to build really, really big things that I think Strong Towns articulates in really good ways: hey, these don’t pencil. And doing it with money that it has taken from the future—taken from an unconsenting future—it is operated outside of gravity in the world of physics. Like it’s not bound by real things.
So the scale of stuff gets so giant and enormous. That is my sense—my hypothesis—that these problems of modernity, most of them that we scrutinize and wonder about, their root cause is this monetary-policy-induced move from a low-time-preference society to a high-time-preference society where external costs are externalized all the time.
So I want to be able to say that in one sentence, but it took me that long to say that. What’s your reaction to that?
Chuck (01:05:27)
So I totally agree. And let me put some meat on it because I feel like there are two examples that just jump out at me. I’m obsessed with Dunkin’ Donuts—not because I love Dunkin’ Donuts. I like their butternut donut. It’s kind of weird we don’t get them here in Minnesota. Dunkin’ Donuts is a corporation that we all know, we’ve all heard of, we’ve all seen.
Geoff (01:05:40)
Mm-hmm.
Chuck (01:05:56)
But if you step back and look at what Dunkin’ Donuts does—it does coffee and drinks and donuts. Creating donuts and coffee is the ultimate startup entrepreneur thing. If you go to immigrant communities, communities dominated by immigrants, there’s always local donut shops all over the place because it’s the easiest business to start. You need a deep fryer, some dough, a display case, and a cash register. Really, you can do this on borrowed money from under the mattress. It’s a really cheap business to start.
So why is there a need for Dunkin’ Donuts? And why does Dunkin’ Donuts exist when so many local competitors could undercut them in price?
I was over in the neighborhood next to us. We have a Dunkin’ Donuts here in town, which started like a year or two ago. When Dunkin’ Donuts came to Minnesota, they made this announcement: we’re starting 50 franchises in Minnesota. If you want to be a franchisee, get ahold of us. Here’s the requirements. And one of the requirements was you have to have a half million dollars of liquid net worth and like $2 million total net worth. Those are numbers that clearly—if you take the immigrant startup person on one end and the Dunkin’ Donuts franchisee on the other—these are two different worlds. One cannot be the other.
So Dunkin’ comes in and they get their high-net-worth investor. They start the franchise up. And then what they do is they make really good use of the transportation network that we built them.
Geoff (01:07:29)
Mm-hmm.
Chuck (01:07:51)
The Dunkin’ up the street I saw the other day had a semi outside delivering their franchise package of stuff—like here’s your refresher stuff and here’s your coffee and here’s your donuts frozen or whatever it is. They don’t make things there. They get it all delivered in and then they prepare it. The guy getting this was a full tractor trailer. I mean, this was a big huge thing parked in the alley. The guy who got off was wheeling a two-wheeler full of stuff. That was a delivery for that store.
That person, I’m assuming, is gonna get in a truck and drive to the next Dunkin’ and the next Dunkin’ and the next Dunkin’, and their day is spent going from a warehouse door to door and dropping off small, basically pickup-size deliveries to all these different Duncans on a massive truck.
Why can they do that? They can do that because the state has built this massive interstate system. They not only allow it to be clogged with Dunkin’-level trucks, but that’s actually the design. That’s what it’s there for. When you get off the interstate system, we have built this massive trillions and trillions dollars worth of local roadways to allow them to get across town as quickly as possible with minimal conflict. We have taken all of our local streets and we’ve widened them out for semi tractor trailers—even though little kids walk across here to school and we as local taxpayers are paying for 10 feet of roadway that we don’t need and don’t use except so that Dunkin’ can get their delivery or McDonald’s can get their delivery or what have you.
And so you look at it over and over again—every part of the system becomes incrementally more expensive in ways that don’t provide any benefit to that immigrant starting the donut place. They provide immense competitive advantage to Dunkin’ Donuts. And we call that efficiency because now you can have one warehouse and they can source from a handful of farmers the materials they need and they can make the supply chain really efficient.
Okay, that’s all the stuff we do on the ground to benefit one over the other. And it costs all of us—not just in tax dollars and debt, but it costs us in the community actually being worth less because you got a highway in front of your house as opposed to a local street where people would walk business to business or whatever. It makes our communities less valuable.
Now add on to that the fact that in 2020 we have a pandemic and the stock market starts to drop because Dunkin’ Donuts is not having people come to their donut place. So what do we do? We got to give them money. We got to bail them out.
I wrote a whole article about the Cheesecake Factory. The Cheesecake Factory literally got Federal Reserve bailout money—tens of millions of dollars in money to keep them afloat because they’re listed on the stock exchange and we can’t have their stock go down. We actually have to bail them out. It’s not because you can’t get a hamburger locally. It’s not because people love the Cheesecake Factory. It’s because they’re part of this system. We can wipe out every immigrant donut place. We can wipe out every local hamburger joint. But we can’t let go of Dunkin’ Donuts and we can’t let go of Cheesecake Factory because they are a systematic part of this top-down, efficient economy that we bless with cheap financing and a backstop and all of this monetary infusion whenever they run into a difficult time.
That fragile model should have disappeared multiple times in our lifetime because it did not work. And yet we have stepped in and rescued it to the detriment of all the bottom-up entrepreneurs that should be existing today in our ecosystem, providing services and goods and things that people need. Instead, those people can all go work for Dunkin’ Donuts. And by the way, they’ll have a 401k plan, so they’ll be better off. That’s how Dunkin’s coming to create jobs.
Geoff (01:11:42)
Yes, right. Dunkin’ is coming to create jobs. They’re creating jobs.
Chuck (01:11:57)
To me, that’s always the—I had a guy who ran a grocery store. I didn’t get along with him. I didn’t really like him, but he was a local entrepreneur that ran a small grocery store in town. This is a city that I was working in and a big chain grocery store came to town and everybody was so quick to crap on the local entrepreneur. They give $800,000 of tax subsidy to the new grocery store. The state widened the highway, made all kinds of changes to accommodate them. All this stuff. We rolled out the red carpet for this big-box grocer.
And people locally were like, this is progress. This local grocer just couldn’t compete. He couldn’t make it. And the guy ultimately went to work—I saw him one night—he was working at Walmart because his business went out of business. He needed a job to take care of his family. He was working the night shift at Walmart as a manager.
To me, there’s a certain—I don’t want to make this a political argument—but there’s a certain paternalistic, progressive-esque but sometimes conservative-esque, top-down, paternalistic idea that the guy’s better off because he doesn’t have to run this business and be worried about payroll next month. He can just work for a stable corporation, have a 401k, have a good retirement, have his life taken care of, and everything will be good.
And I looked in this guy’s eyes and I saw a lesser human being. And it made me sad.
Geoff (01:13:48)
Sadness. I think about that. I mean, that was the story of the pandemic, like super compressed, outstanding for the biggest restaurant chains and an absolute bloodbath for small businesses. I think about exactly that. I drive through—I’ve written about this a little bit from time to time—my mother’s hometown. She grew up outside of Blairsville, Georgia, which makes it a very, very small place—Choestoe Valley. And when I was a little kid, vibrant Main Street, all these little kinds of things. And now when you drive through on the highway that sort of goes around the town, it’s Dunkin’ Donuts—I bought some other bacon things there at that Dunkin’ Donuts—and Hardee’s and there’s just—every business on that new Main Street is a financialized transnational corporation.
And people are just like, well, that’s just how it is. That’s progress. I’m like, I don’t know—that doesn’t seem like progress to me. Instead of all these small business owners living in and operating within their community and employing their neighbors, now they all work for a distant faceless group that has no stake. But the argument is like, consumer prices are low. But are they really? When you add it all up, are they really?
Chuck (01:15:18)
Well, I just looked up my article on the Cheesecake Factory because it’s been like five, six years since I wrote this. I forgot—they had spent in the four years prior to the pandemic, they had spent 425 million buying back their own shares, which you know and I know is a way to take cheap money—because interest rates were near zero then—to take cheap money because they took on 1.6 billion dollars in debt during the same period of time, to take cheap money, buy back your shares, use that to inflate your stock price and make your executives rich. And okay, that’s a strategy. I think that’s an immoral strategy, but it’s a strategy.
Geoff (01:15:57)
I mean, but it’s what they’re paid to do. Them’s the rules.
Chuck (01:16:01)
It’s exactly what they’re paid to do. But when things don’t work out for them, they should go away. Cheesecake Factory, Dunkin’ Donuts—all these places should have failed during the pandemic. They should have gone away. They should have failed in 2008–2009. Instead, we said that cannot be allowed. That is not acceptable.
Yet every little small business—I mean, we still have empty restaurants and empty storefronts from the pandemic where small businesses, local entrepreneurs were allowed to fail. And this comes after 50 or 60 years of highways run through the middle of the city and subsidizing the whole highway strip out on the edge to the detriment of the core downtown and everything else that’s here.
I get where there’s a hyper-libertarian argument that calls that efficiency, that calls that progress, that calls that a free market. And I can understand how—if you bound the idea of free market in a certain price range—you can say yes, Cheesecake Factory competes with Applebee’s competes with Buffalo Wild Wings and that’s a market.
But if you look at actual markets—and I think nature is the best market to look at—in nature, you don’t have all sequoias. You have a handful of big players, apex predators that survive. But for the most part, nature is dominated by small incremental players. When the tree falls in the forest, a new tree doesn’t just come up. A hundred trees come up and they all kind of fight. And over the course of 50 years, you’ll have one that takes its place. But then the next one will fall down because it’s aged out and it can’t adapt.
We have created the most unnatural economy that you could—the most unnatural distorted economy that we could create. And it’s based on this premise to me that came out of the Great Depression and World War II that really has amped up—you could see incrementally with each crisis—the kind of cultural backstop around it: we can actually countermand every downturn through monetary policy.
Geoff (01:18:44)
And as long as we can afford the debt service.
Chuck (01:18:51)
Well, respectfully, I feel like I’ve moved beyond that statement. That’s something I would have thought back in 2010. I’m at the okay, you might be right, but I’m…
Geoff (01:19:06)
Good, yeah, help me learn something.
Chuck (01:19:15)
Okay, I’m of the mindset that we will always find a way to kick the can down the road. Yes, if we can afford the debt—because we are willing to sacrifice everybody who’s not in the position to kick the can. And if you want to put a face to that, just take Ohio: we’re willing to wipe out all of Ohio and have a huge percentage of population become drug addicts and have all their cities go bad. And we did that in the nineties and the early two thousands. And we’re like, well, you didn’t keep up.
I think as long as there are winners in a position to do this, I think that we will—let me put it this way. I am sympathetic to the argument that at some point the bond market will flare up and tell us you can’t do this anymore. But if I were to bet—like if you said, Chuck, your life is going to end when the bond market cannot be corrected anymore—I would say I’ll take that bet because I think it will be a long time. I think it will be far longer than the rest of my life because I think that we will.
I’ve done this series the last like seven years about the inflation of Christmas cookie ingredients because every year my Christmas cooking ingredients go up by 10, 11 percent and the core inflation number for bakery goods or for bakery ingredients is like one percent, one and a half percent. I’m like, they will lie with statistics. They will print money when they need to. They will tell us it’s raining when they’re pissing on your leg.
I don’t think the failure that we will see will come from a top-down reckoning. I think it will come from, in a sense, a bottom-up revolution.
Geoff (01:21:19)
Well, you’ve—yeah. Well, I hope that I’m wrong about that and I hope that we do see the revolution rather than the reckoning.
Chuck (01:21:20)
That’s my gut.
Geoff (01:21:37)
And I’ve kept you way longer than the time I asked you for. But if you have a few more minutes, I would hate to end on the sort of doomer side and ask if you can share some of your reasons for optimism right now, if you have them. I listened to your great conversation with our mutual friend Jim Kunstler a few weeks ago. And I totally love Kunstler. He’s the greatest. And I loved y’all’s conversation. And I didn’t feel like you got to the point in that conversation where y’all were able to trade some reasons for optimism. I’m wondering if we might have that here.
Chuck (01:22:06)
Yeah. I think my default position is optimistic these days. That wasn’t true in 2008, 2009, 2010 when I started doing this. If I have to say what that optimism is grounded in, I think it’s grounded in a couple things.
First, I’m sitting at the middle of a web of thousands of people around North America—and increasingly around the world—that are opting out of the current insanity and saying, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and make my place better. And actually seeing real success at doing that. I feel it is still the beginning of a wave, but I feel like it’s a wave nonetheless. And with what we see in terms of the exponential growth of our movement—the kind of mobilization of thousands of people—we’re up to over 300 different local chapters around North America that are these people who are like, okay, we’re getting together and we’re going to go to city hall and we’re going to go take care of the park. And we’re going to go basically rebuild civil society at the local level in the absence of any coherent thing that is doing that.
There’s so much untapped capacity in this country. And there’s so many people who are ready to do it that I think all they need is often for us to give them permission. Like, just go do it. Yeah, you can do it. And here’s someone else did—just copy what they did. Go do this.
We have created a society where we have a lot of spare parts and unused capacity and people who are underemployed and cast aside and not valued economically—even the guy working at the Walmart that I brought up earlier. These are all people waiting to do good. And to me that well of capacity gives me a lot of optimism.
Geoff (01:24:38)
Do you—before you go on to the next one—can I ask you to—I totally agree with that. And I’m particularly excited about Gen Z. I’m particularly excited about young people.
Chuck (01:24:52)
Okay, this is what I was gonna say next. Because I’ve got these two kids that are Gen Z and…
Geoff (01:24:55)
Yeah, okay, great, right? Nothing makes you optimistic for the future like having great kids.
Chuck (01:25:05)
Yeah, and I’m aware of my own bias in this regard. Are there problems? Yeah, totally. Do the zombie kids on their phones freak me out? Hell yeah. Does the fact that we teach kids school now on computer freak me out? Yeah, this is not good.
But when you actually talk to them—and my youngest one graduated from high school last year, so I’m kind of out of the active parenting mode where I’m brushing up against all of them all the time—when you talk to them, they’re not dumb. They’re very aware of how social media manipulates them. They’re very aware of the current political environment. They’re very aware of the fact that parts of the system don’t work and don’t work for them and are designed basically for boomers. They really need to do something different.
As an echo of our generation, I feel like the great thing about our generation is this: the latchkey kid turned into the resilient kid and the resilient adult and the one who—if you’re in a bad situation, you want a Gen X person because they’re realists, they’ll get stuff done. I feel like as an echo of us, they have a certain amount of that characteristic to them that makes them endearing to me. I’m going to roll up my sleeves and I’m going to do this. I’m ready to take on. I’m not expecting things to be handed to me.
Those generations ahead of us and behind us—the boomers who are kind of biding their time and trying to hang on to “let’s not let anything change till we exit the stage.” And then the millennials, which are really this kind of intellectual echo.
Chuck (01:26:05)
When we look at the boomers and the millennials, I think that there is this echo of things were easy and then things should be easy. The millennials are like, why aren’t things easy? And I think both of them—if you’re not frustrated with the generation ahead of you and you’re not bewildered by the one after you, you’re probably not paying attention. I think that’s probably a common thread throughout modernity.
So I have no doubt that if this was two millennials talking, they would have lots of complaints about us. But I find that next generation, that Gen Z, just really to be an optimistic one, and one that I think is practical and ready to roll up their sleeves and deal with problems. And I think they’re the exact right people to be hitting the early part of the workforce right now, because they’re resilient, they’re scrappy, they’re going to try things, they’re going to roll with punches, and I like them.
Geoff (01:27:20)
I feel like part of that—part of what I’m so excited about for them, for us—is their spirit of bottom-up, which is maybe like they’ve lived through, they’ve been aware and been paying attention through a time when top-down so clearly failed. It is so clearly failed that many of them at least seem to just not even concern themselves with the top-down and intuitively especially interested in making a bottom-up revolution.
Chuck (01:27:31)
The interesting thing—you and I were Reagan, Bush, Clinton. There was a certain overlay of functionality in the discourse. When you have basically kids who have grown up with the end of Obama, Trump, Biden, now Trump again—even the ones that come to me like this hyper-YIMBYs that come to me like, we need the federal government to do this and that—the minute you start engaging with them, they’re like, yeah, that’s really dumb. We should be out building this in our city. We should be doing this here. And they’re very quick to move to what can I do in the place that I live?
That is different than millennials. And a lot of the millennials I talked to really look to the top-down system by default. I do think that that is an echo they’ve inherited from their boomer parents largely.
But let me put it this way—and Kevin Klinkenberg has got into this too. I actually think he’s an interesting one you should chat with because he’s kind of delved into this. He’s—I don’t feel like I’m a Generation X booster. I don’t run around going, Generation X is awesome.
Geoff (01:29:22)
I talked to Kevin, by the way—it’s like episode single digits, the higher single digits.
Chuck (01:29:25)
You did. Yeah. Kevin is, I think, does a really good job of describing the attributes of Gen X that make it really good for leadership in this moment. Because in a lot of ways, we’re reluctant leaders. We’re people who will lead if we have to, if things are screwed up, but we’re not jumping and dying to lead. I feel like that Gen Z echo of our generation really has that same mindset. And right now we do just need people who go out and get stuff done.
Geoff (01:30:03)
I feel like that’s there and an additional thing that the generational thing that the tide is sort of coming in our favor. And then another thing that I tell people about that are younger people who seem—concern is not the right word—but like the challenge is enormous, or feeling a bit overwhelmed with the challenge ahead that we have and making our world a better place for us and our future—is the dialogue. Like that you and I are having this conversation today—’cause we probably would have had this conversation, a very similar one 20 years ago or something similar—but that so many people are talking about this right now. So many people are—whether there’s a thriving YIMBY movement or for a lot of misgivings about it—or whether there’s this interest in regenerative agriculture or there’s a questioning— it seems like we are moving together as a people in a really—in a beginning to move in a really positive direction as many people are, in this period of institutional turmoil, losing faith in these people, these institutions that are supposed to come save us, but gaining faith and confidence in a bottom-up revolution.
Chuck (01:31:43)
So let me—I don’t think I want to temper that, but let me give a slightly different spin. Because I wrote an article towards the end of last year that ran—I can’t remember where it ran—but it was about Gutenberg. And the idea that we create the printing press and kind of what we’re taught in junior high is create the printing press, you get the Reformation, you get the Enlightenment, you get modernity. It all flows from the sharing of information. And it’s a really nice story, but what it leaves out is the 100 years of revolution and bloodshed and turmoil and millions of people killed and wars.
So I look at today’s moment as being, in a sense, similar—and that we have this disruptive technology that allows us to communicate without the gatekeepers of the past. The gatekeepers in the Reformation would have been the Catholic Church and the aristocracy. Today, the gatekeepers are mainstream media and official government institutions. During the pandemic, it was the National Institute of Health. We’re having dialogue now outside of that, and it creates a lot of chaos and a lot of turmoil.
I do think there’s an open question, and I am optimistic about this. I think what you saw with Gutenberg was this period of intense chaos and then new institutions forming that were, in a sense, consensual institutions—like a media, the press, newspapers. You had certain institutions that formed from a government standpoint.
I think that we are in this process of tearing down and reforming. I’m optimistic about the nature of the medium—and it’s not social media so much, but the idea that we can start—I’ve got an interest in drumming of this style—with this, you can actually have subgroups of like five people from around the country who are interested in the same thing, who can meet regularly and talk about whatever that is.
I’m not naive enough to think that this disaggregation into tiny subgroups can’t be manipulated or can’t be misused or can’t have a big macro overlay that is Orwellian, but I do feel like the institutions that will come out of this chaos are going to, by default, be more bottom-up, more democratic, more participatory—and not in a show-up-and-give-my-opinion, but I actually bring a shovel and a rake and do something.
And I think that that is a more de Tocqueville kind of America. I think it’s a more participatory America. It’s a more Strong Towns America. I think this is a better place for everybody. But we gotta get there first, right?
Geoff (01:35:48)
Love that. Yeah. And we will. That seems like a great place to wrap up this conversation. I can talk to you for hours and hours. And before we officially wrap it up—Chuck, can you share with people where they should find you? I think it should be obvious, but yeah, go ahead.
Chuck (01:36:10)
Likewise. StrongTowns.org is our main website. We tell people plug in on the social media feed of your choice—we’re on all the major ones. You’ll find us. We’ve got four different podcast streams. So if you just type like Strong Towns podcast, you’ll get the main podcast that I do. But there’s a bunch of other ones. And yeah, if you want to really be in the know, you can sign up for email on our site. We got a really active email list. And if you want to support what we do.
Geoff (01:36:39)
And if you’re in a decent-size market or maybe even a very small one, there’s probably a Strong Towns group in your town.
Chuck (01:36:45)
There’s a group near you. Yeah, StrongTowns.org/local—it’d be where you’d find that. Yeah, and so there’s lots of ways to plug in. And we love people who are ready to come to the table with that shovel and start digging.
Geoff (01:37:14)
Chuck, thank you so much. I’ve loved having this conversation and I hope to see you soon in person. I don’t know when that’ll be. It’s been too long.
Chuck (01:37:19)
Thank you, friend. I was gonna say the last time we got together was at your place a couple years ago, which was fantastic.
Geoff (01:37:34)
Yes, we keep wanting to put another event like that on the calendar. My brother and I—with my dad, my late father now—produced an event a few years ago called the I’On Dialogues. And we got some the greatest people in the world to come and talk about really wonderful stuff. We’ll get another one on the calendar. It’s sort of on my to-do list.
Chuck (01:38:00)
Well, we’ll try not to wait for that.
Geoff (01:38:03)
My guest today has been Charles “Chuck” Marohn of Strong Towns. Thank you, Chuck.
Chuck (01:38:12)
Thank you, friend. Take care.
Yeoman 