We Have Institutions to Check Our Avarice

In this episode, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns discusses why urban planning too often creates money-sucking suburbs, what it might look like to build healthy communities, and why there are so many barriers to doing so.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

Charles Marohn — “Chuck” to his friends — grew up in a small town in Minnesota and later became an urban planner and traffic engineer in the state. After a few years, he began noticing that the projects he was building were hurting the towns he was putting them in — subtracting more tax value than they added, forcing everyone into cars, breaking apart communities and saddling them with unsustainable long-term liabilities.

He began recording his observations on a blog called Strong Towns. It quickly caught on, and over the years, Strong Towns has grown into a full-fledged nonprofit with an educational curriculum, an awards program, and a rich network of local chapters working to improve the towns where they are located.

Marohn has since written several books, most recently 2021’s Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and 2019’s Strong Towns. Intellectually, he sits somewhat orthogonally to most of the contemporary urbanist community. He’s an avowed conservative and opposes many of the state and federal solutions to the housing crisis favored by today’s YIMBYs.

But there is arguably no one alive in America who has done more to get people thinking about what makes for a healthy community and how the US can begin to repair its abysmal late-20th-century land-use choices. I was excited to talk to Marohn about why suburbs are money-losers, the right way to think about NIMBYs and local control, and why the city planning profession is so resistant to reform.

Okey-doke, without any further ado, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.

Charles Marohn

Hey, thanks for having me.

David Roberts

This is really cool. I've been sort of a follower of Strong Towns for many, many years. It's great to finally get you on here. I wish we could be talking under more pleasant circumstances.

Charles Marohn

Oh yeah. You got to always have some joy and optimism to things.

David Roberts

I'm trying. Before we get into any of that stuff, I am sure this is something you've talked about a million times, but I still don't know that it's sunk into the general public. So let's just summarize real quick right off the bat, the core of the Strong Town's critique of suburbs, the sort of Ponzi scheme critique. Because I think still to this day, it probably comes as a surprise to most average Americans, just the idea that suburbs don't pay for themselves, but I just don't think most people know it. So let's just review that real quick.

Charles Marohn

It's astounding though because we've come a long way, because now I see when people bring up what is kind of like an ignorant statement of like, "I pay my taxes, this stuff is paying ..." people are like, "Whoa, hang on, let me show you something." So when I was a young engineer and planner, I have a civil engineering degree, I have a planning degree, I was building all this stuff to make cities really successful. I was putting in roads and streets and pipes and building Walmart parking lots and Arby's drive throughs and ...

David Roberts

Every architect's dream as a child.

Charles Marohn

Oh, yeah, no, this was great stuff. And I believed in my heart that I was making the city that I live in, the city that I grew up in, wealthier and more prosperous. But over and over and over again, I would be exposed to these insane projects. These projects that if you're an engineer, you kind of work in a silo of design. If you're a planner, you kind of work in a silo of regulation. But when you do both, you wind up with this left brain, right brain conflict that makes you ask like weird questions. And that's what I was doing.

I was asking questions like, "Okay, this is going to cost us a million dollars. How long will it take us to recoup that with the tax base that we get?" And I would run these numbers and it would be insane things like 120 years. It's like, okay, either I'm calculating this wrong, or something's really messed up. And I started just doing this over and over and over again with all these different developments that I had worked on. And in 2008, I started to publish this stuff. I started to write a blog and I share this stuff.

And quite frankly, I was open to the idea that maybe I was crazy, right? There's got to be something I'm not seeing because there's a lot of smart people doing this work. I can't be the only one asking this question. But turns out, I was the only one really asking this question. Or there were others, but they were disparate voices, either from the past or silent. And we started to build at Strong Towns. Myself and some of my colleagues and friends started to build this body of insight, this body of evidence that at a certain point just became undeniable.

And the undeniable nature of it is that when you build in the suburban pattern, we call the auto-oriented pattern development because we certainly find this style of development within urban areas too. Right, we tear down stuff and rebuild it in a suburban style. When you see this style of development, what we find is that it generates from a cash flow standpoint, a lot of immediate cash. The quintessential example is we get a developer to come in and put in the pipe and put in the road and put in the sidewalks and build all the infrastructure and then gift it to the city.

And the city then gets all the tax base, all the revenue, all the money coming in from this without having to spend anything upfront. So from a cash flow standpoint, the city is way ahead, way ahead in year one, way ahead in year two, way ahead in year three. But the problem with this transaction is that the city then agrees to take on the long-term liability. We will go out and maintain that road. We will go out and maintain that pipe. And of course, they do this on behalf of the public, right? So we all collectively together get cash today in exchange for a long-term promise that we have to make good on in the future.

If you compare those two things, if you add up all the cash, and you compare it to the ultimate amount we have to expend, in this style of the development, the post-war style of development, the style of the first ring, second ring, third ring, exurbs, the style that we've re-developed the internal core of many of our cities around. It's not just functionally insolvent. It's bizarrely insolvent. It creates a dime or two of revenue for every dollar of expense it generates. It literally is a wealth-destroying, kind of, growth machine. And, yeah, I think the difficulty in perception is that we can all see that cities that are growing fast are shiny and new and look better and are doing better than the cities that are stagnant or declining.

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

We can all see that. We can all see that those cities have bigger budgets and fancier stuff. And while all of us, hopefully, live multiple generations or multiple decades, keeping track of that slope of decline or ascension over that period of time and coming to grips with it is just not something the human mind is set up to do. So I'm a little bit sympathetic to the culture and why the culture has bought into this. I'm really hard on professionals who have calculators and pencils and notepads.

David Roberts

Right. Well, you make the point that you have to bring in this new cash to cover the old stuff and then even more cash to cover the old, old stuff. So only as long as you're building new suburbs are you staying ahead of the game.

Charles Marohn

You have to grow at accelerating rates.

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

And that is ... people objected to my use of the term "Ponzi scheme." Like, early on at Strong Towns. That was a big fight we had. People would come to our site and they'd be like, "How dare you say Ponzi scheme?"

David Roberts

Oh, funny.

Charles Marohn

Because they assumed that anyone who runs a Ponzi scheme is nefarious, is trying to do something evil. And I actually think the psychology of a Ponzi scheme is a lot more human than that, right?

David Roberts

Yeah. There are lots of examples that's just got to grow, got to grow. And if you slow down growing, it all starts to fall apart. I mean, that's a fairly common dynamic.

Charles Marohn

I don't blame the people who hate Bernie Madoff for losing all their money. Right, I get that. But I think if you actually look at Bernie Madoff's story, he felt pressured to show earnings, and so he fudged a little bit. And then fudging a little bit one year kind of forced him to fudge a little bit more the next year, and that forced him to fudge a little bit more next year. And all of a sudden, there was never a point where you could reckon with how out of alignment things were. You had to just kind of pretend that this Ponzi scheme would work itself out.

And when you saw, like, interviews with Madoff, they asked him, like, "How do you feel?" And part of his feeling was, "I feel relief."

David Roberts

Not running to stay ahead anymore.

Charles Marohn

Exactly.

David Roberts

Well, one of the things ... I mean, it's one thing to point to this style of development and its intrinsic sort of unsustainability and say, "Well, that's bad, but I can understand why some places do it." But the situation in the US seems to be that it has become utterly hegemonic. Utterly! I'm from Tennessee originally, and a few years ago, we had occasion to drive down from DC down through to Tennessee. You know, all these rural highways, and you go to these small towns, you know, that have maybe, like, 10-15, whatever, 20,000 people.

And even there, you get the four-lane strip with the big box stores surrounded by lifeless, single-family home suburbs. Like, even there, it's the same model. Insider cities, in the exurbs, in the small towns, this bizarre, utterly, sort of, like, unpleasant — it's just not pleasant to be in — style has become utterly hegemonic in the US. And that's just baffling. Seems like it requires some sort of explanation. And you were in that profession. How does that happen? Because what you discovered is not, you know, it doesn't take that much of a cognitive leap to see it.

Charles Marohn

No.

David Roberts

And yet here it is hegemonic, and virtually, no one else is objecting to it. And you started objecting to it 20 years ago, and it's still going on. What the hell? What is the source of this grip that it's got?

Charles Marohn

Yeah, it's a really good question, and it has led me to, actually, over the last decade, spending more time studying human psychology and human behavior than anything. And people are like, "Have you read this planning book?" And I'm like, no, "I haven't read a planning book in a decade. Have you read this new Kahneman book?" Because that's where the answer comes in, right? Let me simplify this down. Why do people smoke? Why do people who are diagnosed as prediabetic continue to eat sugar? Why do people who have a history of heart disease in their family eat fatty foods and things that lead to heart attacks?

These are questions where I think if you are not participating in that, we all have something like this, right? I mean, that's the great findings of Daniel Kahneman, the cognitive psychologist. Like, humans do irrational things, and we rationalize them and pretend that we're different or we understand why, or we're in control. But the reality is that we have a fast reaction, a gut reaction, an impulse on how we do things.

David Roberts

System one.

Charles Marohn

System one, and then system two, rationalizes it after the fact. So I know that I need to eat healthier, but there's a bowl of ice cream that my kid is having, and she offered me one, and I'd be really antisocial if I didn't, so I will eat healthier tomorrow.

And now it's tomorrow and I'm at work, and there's a pile of donuts, and it's kind of like, I can have one. Like, it's not a big deal. We are really, really good at rationalizing each individual step of our own decline and demise. That's not a commentary on the darkness of humanity. I think that there's good cognitive reasons why humans, as they were evolving out of hunter-gatherer societies, or even go back further, evolving out of chimpanzees and primates and mammals, why this kind of instant gratification gene, in a sense, is embedded in our DNA.

David Roberts

Very true for individuals. I think everybody immediately recognizes that as individuals. But you would think one of the reasons we build institutions or one of the reasons we build expertise among groups of people is that we're supposed to be able to watch over one another's shoulders, right, and check one another so that we can check that error collectively. But instead, here we have the entire profession acting basically like the diabetic individual eating cake.

Charles Marohn

Okay, but here's what you said. We have institutions to, in a sense, check our avarice, right? Check our human behaviors. Totally agree. This is also why we destroy institutions from time to time, because we, as humans, feel constrained by them. We feel as if our avarice or our impulse is being constrained improperly. I tend to be a little bit on the conservative side of things. I mean, I'm a small-town guy from a rural area. I've grown to understand the yin and yang of left and right and really appreciate the dichotomy and the roles that people who are pushing boundaries versus people who are trying to cling to institutions and ways of being.

Like, I get the tension, and I actually appreciate the tension. But it just, I think, shows that the suburban experiment cannot be understood in any other way than a progressive attempt to reshape the continent around a new set of ideas. It is a destruction of a certain way of life in order to create whole cloth, something that would be better. And it just so happens that in our political framework, the mechanism of doing that became, in a sense, the Republican mechanism, right? Like, we're going to recreate this around a model of big business and big top-down corporations and big top-down institutions.

So there's something for everybody, right?

David Roberts

Well, let's talk about, rather than the dysfunctions of the planning and civil engineering professions. Let's just, at least briefly, talk about when you talk about a strong town, the model that's been lost in the car era. Presumably, physical layout has a lot to do with that, but that's not everything. So sort of what are the kind of elements of a strong town that you are trying to recapture through this movement?

Charles Marohn

That's a great question. And I think that when we go back to the early days before I started writing, when I was trying to get my mind around this problem and trying to come up with like, well, what does this problem mean and what do we do? I gravitated to the New Urbanists because the New Urbanism is a collection of people who have, in a sense, gone back and tried to understand why do cities of the past work, and why do cities of today not work? And they do things like go out and measure sidewalks and street width and all this.

And there was a central argument, and I'm going to caricature the New Urbanism. I love these people. I have a deep respect for them. But I think there have been things that they have evolved on over time. And I think one of the things that has been evolving is this insight that if you just get the design right, everything else will take care of itself. If you just build the human habitat in the right way, the humans will respond. And anyone who's ever been to Baltimore, which is one of the most beautifully designed cities in America, will recognize that that's simply not true.

There's a deeper interaction there. I think that we have to recognize that at the end of World War II, we were, as a nation, in this very unique position. We had just gone through the Depression. We had just gone through, if you're a bean counter in Washington DC, we got out of the Depression by starting, "you're joining a global war." We were demobilizing millions of troops. We were shutting down industries with millions of jobs. There was a sense that we were just going to go right back into the depths of the Depression.

And instead, we took these complex, adaptive human habitats that had evolved and shifted and been very bottom-up for thousands of years. And we said, "We're going to take all of this capacity, all this industrial might." We had more oil in Saudi Arabia at this point. We had the world's reserve currency. We had all the gold. We had this culture that was united. We're going to take all of this capacity we have and we're going to direct it into this new project of building a new version of America. And that means we got to build quickly, which means we have to standardize, we got to have standard road sections, standard street sections, standard housing forms, standard zoning classification, standard building styles, and types.

And we have to repeat this process over and over and over and over again. And if we can do that, it will create enough energy in our economy to not only lift us out of depression and keep us out of depression but make our country powerful and rich and wealthy and build a really strong middle class. And it worked.

David Roberts

As you note, "As long as it's growing, as long as you're ahead of the ..."

Charles Marohn

Yeah, we learned. That lesson really well, right? And so you even hear economists now today saying, "Well, what should we do, economists?" And they'll say, "Build more infrastructure, because that worked in the 1950s and the 1960s." It is long past diminishing returns. And the economists don't understand that. We always talk about a strong town being more like diet and exercise than it is like being ripped, right? So we can look at like a weightlifter and be like, okay, or someone who does a ton of aerobics and be like, alright, this person is in really great shape. If you look at cities, there's no cities that are ripped.

There's no cities that are in really great shape, right? We've all been subjected to 70 years of this macroeconomic growth experiment. We're all atrophied, we're all struggling, we're all insolvent, we're all in a mess. So strong towns. The idea is more like diet and exercise. How do you develop good habits and good practices that will allow your city to evolve, adapt, and grow stronger and more prosperous over time? So that's what we focus on. How are you doing your budget? How are you doing your design? How are you doing your layout? How are you investing in transportation?

What does your approach look like in terms of developing capital projects? These are things we try to help people get a grip on and just think about them differently.

David Roberts

I'm curious. I want to think that there's a lot of that progress going on beneath the surface, because one of the things that's most striking about all this is that the kind of critiques of car-based suburbia that you are talking about go way, way back. They go way back. And at this point, at least among my cohort, whatever my demographic cohort is, people like me, it's just like conventional wisdom at this point. Of course, it's bad. Of course, if you build more lanes, there's just going to be more traffic. You know, induced demand. Like, of course, if you build around cars, businesses will do worse because, you know, of course, more businesses get more business from pedestrians, just like stuff like that among my crowd has just been accepted. And yet ...

Charles Marohn

You lose every time.

David Roberts

The zombie shuffles on still. Still, still, still. So who are these planners who haven't heard the news? Who are these traffic engineers who haven't yet been convinced by the evidence for induced demand? Like, what is the disconnect between this very well-established critique at this point and the zombie that seems unaffected by the critique just decade after decade?

Charles Marohn

Right.

David Roberts

I can't reconcile those, I guess.

Charles Marohn

Did the people running Rome not recognize that bread and circuses was a dead end. Of course. Right? Of course, they did. We look back and we're like incredulous, like how would they have done something this stupid? And then we don't recognize that we are human and trapped in the same kind of thing.

David Roberts

Right?.

Charles Marohn

Let me put this point on it. At Strong Towns, we spend a tiny bit of time thinking about macro policy and how to change it and I will take calls from Congressmen from time to time and chat with them. They're very pleasant and all that, but we don't have a program for that level. I don't actually think there's ... we just passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that was totally a disaster. If I could have written a horrible bill it would not have looked any different than this. This was a bad, bad, bad bill and it was acclaimed. It was acclaimed by both parties.

It was acclaimed by the national media. It was acclaimed, you know, on Main Street. I still travel around the country and people are talking about the infrastructure bill. You know, not all that much, but like if they're going to say something positive that's they point to that.

David Roberts

Well, the bar for success at the federal level is so low at this point.

Charles Marohn

I don't think we should pretend that we are going to end the bread and circuses, right. That's not the project that Strong Towns is trying to undertake. I think at Strong Towns we have to understand that, in a sense, the bread and circuses will end at some point and that's going to be a really, really painful, painful experience. And when that painful experience comes to fruition, we need to have a project that not only is nascent but is actually working in places. We need to have an alternate model that has some credibility, some success, some adherence, some people who have worked out some of the kinks and are figuring out, like, here's a best practice for this, and here's a best practice for that.

Because the alternative to that is going crazy as a society. And we need something positive that we can do that will keep us from going crazy.

David Roberts

That's a good segue into my next question then because the whole Strong Town thing is to sort of reject grandiose top-down visions from both the right and the left in favor of this sort of bottom-up evolutionary, incremental ...

Charles Marohn

Can I push back a tiny bit?

David Roberts

Sure.

Charles Marohn

And then you continue your question.

David Roberts

Sure.

Charles Marohn

You said "Reject top-down vision" and I guess — "grand vision" — I guess I want to say I feel like I have and I feel like so many people affiliate with Strong Towns have grand visions. What we reject is the grand sweeping action to achieve that vision, right? It's the fact that I have a grand vision of "Here's what my life is going to be." If I go out and borrow a ton of money and just put myself in hawk and achieve for one instant the thing that I was after. That's not really like attaining something, right? I want to build up to what success looks like.

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

Humble steps,

David Roberts

Top-down imposed sweeping reforms then, in favor of bottom-up. But the sort of other side of that is, at least in the current urbanist, YIMBY, whatever you call it, community. When I hear bottom-up, my first thought is NIMBYs. My first thought is, insofar as there is community involvement in a lot of these questions, it is almost always on the side of "No, no, no, build nothing, change nothing, keep this crappy system that we built because it's sending my home values through the roof." Or I also think of environmental review and just the bureaucracy, and just when I think local involvement, that's where my mind goes, is sort of wealthy boomers going to town meetings, shouting at people who want to build bike lanes.

So how do we reconcile that, sort of, like, bottom-up vision of yours with the sort of scourge of NIMBY-ism that seems to be what is actually happening bottom-up in cities?

Charles Marohn

Yeah, totally. I could not agree with your analysis more. Let me give you a brief history of the 20th century as it goes with public engagement. So we get out of World War II, we start building all this stuff, and we empower engineers and we empower planners and we empower corporations to just build, build, build, build, just keep going. They actually had a plan at one point to use atomic bombs to build a highway through the Rocky Mountains. That's how much power we gave to engineers, right? I'm not joking. Like that was the legit plan that went through.

Like, okay, we're going to do this. And the next phase was, "Wait a second, this is totally junk. Like we hate this. We don't like this at all." And then you have born out of that all the kind of like environmental renaissance of the baby boomers, right? You get the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and you get environmental reviews and you get NEPA, you get all this stuff. And what that establishes is a process to go through to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And so in a sense, the baby boomer response to the process dysfunction of building suburbia was to attack it with more top-down process.

And now you go to kind of the next iteration. And the next iteration is to say, okay, this is all messed up. These processes are resulting in really bad things. We need — and I'm going to put in superficial, I'm going to put in parentheses on the beginning of this — we need a superficial level of public engagement. We need the public to feel involved, feel listened to. And it's almost like the participation trophy, right? For public engagement, we need to have everybody feel like they're heard but again, not results that we really want. We fight these things.

We battle. But what this has done is it's empowered the NIMBY. The craziest person can show up with two of their friends and shout down the most sanest proposal. And the investiture of time it takes to overcome that is just asymmetrical to what anyone would be willing to do given the limited upside.

David Roberts

And of course legendarily, in a lot of these decisions, the people who will benefit from them don't exist yet, right? Or don't live there yet. That's the whole point. And if you're not there yet, you can't very well show up to a meeting, right?

Charles Marohn

Or even look at something simple like, "We're going to put in a new traffic light on this highway because Walmart wants to go here." And you're like, okay, well what that is going to do is it's going to rob about 30 seconds a day from everybody who uses that highway. So 20,000 people who have invested for this highway capacity to get somewhere are now going to have 30 seconds of their day robbed. So over the course of a year, they're going to have 3 hours of their life robbed or whatever that works out to be. And over the course of a decade, they're going to have a day and a half.

Alright, that is like a small bit of pain. How much time would you spend at a public meeting trying to fight that? You're not going to, right? Collectively when we add up everybody together it's a huge dramatic loss. But for each individual player who's negatively impacted, it's not enough to justify your participation in the system. But for Walmart, the gain is enormous, right? They'll hire teams of attorneys and teams of advocates to go and show up. And say we need to do this.

David Roberts

Classic, classic asymmetry here.

Charles Marohn

Asymmetry. Right. And so you have this in many different realms. Like the NIMBY who doesn't want something built in the house next to theirs can show up with four of their neighbors and shout down something. But the like 20 people who need a place to live, they're out at their job and they're out working and they're trying ... And the amount of time they would have to invest to actually make a difference is so huge and the potential upside so minimal. It's asymmetry. So the answer to this problem is not look back through history. It's not to empower the technical people more.

That's one option on the table that we just need to get ...

David Roberts

Technocratic override.

Charles Marohn

Yep, we need to get the oligarchy of technocrats in here to run things for us because we're incapable. Option number two is that we create more process. This is the baby boomer reaction, like "More process, more process and we'll get better outcomes." Option three, we'll call this the Gen X option. I don't know if it is or not, but I'll claim it as my generation is the idea that if we can have a lot of participation trophies and a lot of theater of public engagement that maybe we'll get some better ideas and people will certainly feel better about things.

David Roberts

Or a sheen of legitimacy.

Charles Marohn

Right, the sheen of legitimacy. The answer to it is the ancient practice of subsidiary, the idea that decisions should be made at the level in which they can competently be made and no higher. And the role of every level is to either make the decision that is at their level or assist the levels below them in making a decision. I point often to the chicken problem, backyard chickens. Where should backyard chickens be regulated? Should they be regulated at the regional level, at the state level? There really ... it's a block-level decision. If I'm going to have chickens, that doesn't affect anybody except my neighbors.

And so that decision should be one that neighbors make together. Now people will say, "Well Chuck, I don't like my neighbors. I don't get along with them. We fight, we disagree." Okay, but you got to work this one out. That's not a decision you can allow other people to make for you. You have to, as a neighborhood, make that decision, or as a block. "Well jeez, we just can't we're at each other's throats."

To me that's where the role of the city comes in. The city says, "Alright, I can't make this decision for you. I could, but that would be wrong and it would be a dummy standard applied to everybody and we need local nuance. I can't make this decision before you, but what I can do is I can help you as a neighborhood reach a decision together." If we had government that functioned like that, what we would find is that the regional rail project is not going to get derailed by one block of people who are rich enough to hire lawyers and create all kinds of process. That's a regional decision. It should be made by a regional government representing everybody. But the chicken thing is not going to get screwed up. Or contrasting, the big developer is not going to be able to come in, buy off the city council, or mobilize whatever to shove the eight-story condo unit down your throat.

David Roberts

Well, but I guess I would object to ... well, not object, but my question is it seems slightly question-begging since the whole point of contention here is if the decision is whether to put a bike lane in neighborhood x. Is that like chickens, in that it mainly or only affects neighborhood x and therefore should be made at the level of neighborhood x? Or is it an infrastructure decision that affects the whole city and its transportation flow in which case you make it at the city level? Or, there's a lot of research lately showing that these local NIMBY decisions are creating a housing crisis which is having macroeconomic effects on the entire country, which might suggest that maybe the federal level is the level for some of these decisions.

So it's not obvious to me what the right level is. And in a sense, that's the whole point of contention, is it not?

Charles Marohn

No. Well, it is in one sense because this is what politicians do, right? They're like, "Well, this thing affects everybody. And so the temperature you set your thermostat has to be decided in Washington DC. Because it's a macro issue." The answer is not to what degree does it affect everyone. The answer is, "At what level can this decision be made?" And it should be made at the lowest level that it can be made. I think one of the problems that we confuse, and one of the things we get up our minds wrapped around, is that we're so used to working at the wrong scale that it's hard to reconcile the idea of subsidiarity with the kind of projects we do today.

You brought up a bike lane, and a bike lane is like a very popular kind of project amongst a certain group of people because they're like, "We need more biking and walking." I can tell you that almost every bike lane project I see is the wrong project for that community. There are very few where it's like the right project originated in the right way. And let me walk you through that just briefly. We have a thing at Strong Towns that we call the four-step process for public investments. And the core of this process begins with going out and humbly observing where people struggle.

A lot of times when we're looking at bike projects, they don't originate with a humble understanding of where people are having a difficult time using the city as it has been built. Where they generally start with is either someone at City Hall really likes bike lanes, there's a grant out there for bike lane projects. We have a capital improvements plan, and our complete streets policy says we should put in bike lanes, or some regional authority is like, "We're trying to build a regional bike trail. You guys need to put in a connection." All of those are the wrong place to originate a project.

When we originate projects based on where people are having a difficult time using the city, what we wind up doing is making projects that are actually scaled to the urgent demands of people on the ground. And those projects are not opposed. They have their own baked-in constituency. And the thing about those kind of projects is there's an endless number of them and the implementation does look a lot more like subsidiary.

David Roberts

I don't know. When I think about bike lane decisions being made at the neighborhood level, it's hard for me not to think that there would just never again be a bike lane.

Charles Marohn

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the city you live in, but if we went out here where there's a lot of opposition to bike lanes. I mean, the last big bike lane project we put in went right in front of a Catholic church in town. And I go to the different Catholic church, but I've attended this one. I know the priests, I know the people there. The Catholic church was irate about it, and they were irate about it because it took away the place that they would park for funerals and weddings, right? Like, right out in front, like it took away this place.

It was a stupid bike lane project. No one ever bikes there. It's not a place where people bike. But what happened was they came up with a master bike lane plan, a master bike plan. They were redoing the street. This is phase one of implementation. And they said, from a very top-down kind of rote approach, "This is where the bike lane goes." And what they did is they generated a ridiculous amount of opposition to bike lanes. My recommendation to them, this is my city now, was, let's go out and see where people are biking right now, and then let's bike with them or follow them or talk to them and find out where you are biking right now is it most difficult? Where are you having the most struggle? I bike all the time. We can go out and do this. We can go out and talk to people. Show, like, crossing this bridge: really dangerous. Crossing the street: really dangerous. What can we do to fix that?

And the amazing thing about fixing that is that a. there's already people using it, they're just struggling, b. those people are adjacent to other people who would probably use it but for the danger or the struggle. And so, c. when you fix it, you not only have a built-in constituency whose needs you're responding to, but you have a related adjacent constituency that's going to come forth and affirm the thing that you did and the value that it provides.

That's how you build a culture of biking and walking, and that's how you get bike lanes everywhere.

David Roberts

And can you point to a place? I mean, Strong Town gives these awards, it runs these academies, tries to teach city leaders, tell us a story of a town that is strong, that is doing things like that.

Charles Marohn

That is ripped.

David Roberts

Not yet ripped, but on a good health plan, let's say.

Charles Marohn

Well, we have the annual Strongest Town contest, and that is really a celebration of places that are doing this kind of incremental work. Where are the places that are doing the diet and exercise of building a strong town. And none of them are perfect, and we tell them, like, "Don't be ashamed to apply if you're not perfect, because none of these cities are." But we have tended to have this long list of mid-sized towns where they are, and I'm going to generalize here, but I think this is generally true, where they are too poor to be stupid, but just connected enough and coherent enough to grasp the need to work together.

And those are places that are astounding. I mean, Pensacola, a few years ago. I'm going to Jasper, Indiana here in a couple of weeks. You know, these cities are places where they all have kind of the same problems everybody has but have found unique ways to deal with them. But if you told me like, Chuck — okay, I was in Sacramento last week, and the people who run the Council of Governments in Sacramento, it's this regional governance body, they go around and around to places and talk to people, and they do like these retreats. So they're going as a group to Salt Lake City to learn from the people in Salt Lake City.

They have in the past gone to Amsterdam to learn from Amsterdam. And they listed these places that they've gone. And then they asked me, "Chuck, where would you go?" And I said, "I'd go to Detroit, I would go to Memphis, I would go to Buffalo, I would go to Shreveport, I would go to Cleveland, Akron." These are places that you see the most innovation, the most entrepreneurial spirit, the most flexibility of thought. These are the places to me that are the most exciting.

David Roberts

And get zero national attention.

Charles Marohn

Oh, yeah, no, they get zero, right. But they're uninhibited by, you know, we went back and talked about that cultural expectation of the bread and circuses and all that. The bread and circuses are done in these places, and so they're uninhibited by that hang-up and they can actually focus on doing great stuff. And these places struggle. I'm not going to pretend that you're going to walk in there and go, "Wow, this place is amazing." But if you scratch the patina a little bit and talk to some people and go to some neighborhoods, you're going to see story after story after story that will blow your mind, that you could do in Sacramento, that you could do in an affluent place and see amazing success.

David Roberts

I want to get to politics. But there's one thing I wanted to hit before then, and this is given what's going on as we are talking, somewhat thematically appropriate question, but I wanted to ask what makes ... it seems like one of the key features of a good town, a good community, is safety, a certain level of public safety. And I just wonder of all the reforms and things you look for and things Strong Town rewards with its awards and whatnot, what kinds of things create safety? I was reminded recently of a Tweet thread where this woman asked, "What would you do if there was a curfew for men? If they had to be in by ten, what would you do?" And by far the most common answer was, "I would love to go running at night. I've always wanted to go running at night and I just won't now because of safety."

Charles Marohn

Right.

David Roberts

I'm sure physical structure and design structure has something to do with that, but also there are other factors, community, sort of. So, in the safety dimension, what makes the community safer?

Charles Marohn

I'll give you the number one thing and it's people, right? People make it dangerous and people make it safe. I was able to spend some time in southern Italy, which is a really amazing place, but also very poor. And there were a lot of places where the crowds and the sheer number of people in these places were conducive to things like pickpockets and that kind of stuff. But not to rape, not to assault, not to the things that you would fear. There's a level of people less than that. The pickpocket part actually goes away, too, because you lose the thickness of the crowd in a sense.

When we look at places that are great for biking and walking, I think our affluent assumptions is that places that are great for biking and walking have great biking and walking infrastructure. And that's actually not true. The places that are the best for biking and walking have just the most people who bike and walk, regardless of the infrastructure. So if you've got like crappy infrastructure but there's tons of people walking all the time, that place becomes instantly way safer than anything else. Because, and I'm going to say this and people may recoil this, but most people are good, most people are decent.

We do bad things sometimes, and sometimes we do things that will make you cringe. But the reality is that most culture is actually pretty good. We're pretty good to each other. And when we get people out together, that added security of having more people around you is what will keep you safe. This is a related insight to Jane Jacobs's "Eyes on the Street."

David Roberts

Yeah, "Eyes on the Street." I was just thinking.

Charles Marohn

Yeah, but it's even, I think, a step beyond that. "Eyes on the Street" recognizes that people don't want to get caught, right?

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

But I actually think there's a next step to that is that I think people are genuinely inclined to be their most lovely self when they feel like they are in an environment where other people are viewing them.

David Roberts

Especially other people who are again going to be viewing them the next day and the next day, right? A community of people.

Charles Marohn

Let me say it this way, people who matter to them. Right?

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

And I think there's a way to go really dark with that because there's a way to have this be an insider versus outsider kind of thing. Humans are, I think, lovely and beautiful to each other, but a lot of that is a function of in-group versus out-group behavior. And sometimes in out-groups, we are not as lovely to each other. The response to that has often been, "Well, then let's get police out there, and let's regulate that." To me, the response in a healthy place is to just increase your in-group.

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

Like, expand your in groups.

David Roberts

Social trust. It's the bedrock of everything.

Charles Marohn

Yeah. When you look at ...there's a fascinating book by Tim Carney, conservative writer, and he looked at ... basically, he studied the 2016 presidential primary, and he was trying to make some insights on community. So this was all Republicans, right, places that voted Republican in the general election, so voted for Trump in the general election. But he wanted to know what places in the primary supported Trump and what places didn't. And of course, this can be broke down precinct by precinct. And he created a map around the country of what these places were and what they look like.

And what he found is that the places that voted for Trump tended to have more crime. They tended to have more social isolation. They tended to have more people who identified as Christian but didn't go to church. There was a bunch of things like that that you were really getting a measurement of what I would just say is like the end result of the suburban experiment, right? Like, complete individual autonomy and social isolation from others.

David Roberts

God, I think that's so true. And I bring this up and people look at me like I'm crazy. But I really think the suburban model, the end product, is to make people into psychopaths. You make it so that each lives in their individual castle, and the only way they interact with the community is as drivers. And as I'm sure you're well aware, nothing makes you more of an a*****e more quickly than driving a car.

Charles Marohn

We've done studies on — not we, Strong Towns — we humans. Psychologists have done studies with rats and with monkeys and with chimpanzees, and we've looked at social isolation and the impacts of it. And it does not take much social isolation to make ... and I would say lower level, not homo sapiens, completely neurotic.

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

It does not take much social isolation. We have built a development pattern where the marketing brochure is social isolation.

David Roberts

Yes.

Charles Marohn

Here's how we can help you, facilitate you, being the most antisocial person you can. Yeah.

David Roberts

Here's how you can escape other people.

Charles Marohn

Right.

David Roberts

And this is the thing, the safety thing. I've spent a lot of my life walking around suburbs because I have dogs and I walk them frequently in Seattle, where I live, is chock full of suburbs. And the whole notion that they're safer has always struck me as bizarre. And as you say, it's about the density of people. When you're walking around suburbs, even healthy, wealthy suburbs in the middle of Seattle, you just don't see many people. When you see one, it's like the two of you alone on a block, and there's something creepy about it. There's just something that's always felt unsafe about it, even to me, a sort of stocky, white dude who's probably the safest any human could be.

It just doesn't feel even safe to me. I've never understood this idea that escaping away from other people makes you safer. I don't know why that's taken hold.

Charles Marohn

Let me actually make this statement that I think affirms what you're saying. The most dangerous development pattern is the failing suburb. Because there you combine all of the neuroticism of social isolation with all the desperation of poverty.

David Roberts

And we're going to see a lot more of those in coming years.

Charles Marohn

Oh, my gosh, that's my nightmare. I think that is the thing that is going to define the 21st century is dealing with that problem.

David Roberts

Yikes.

Charles Marohn

Because you you isolate poor people in inner cities, and it's a despotic thing, but you at least isolate them in coherent neighborhoods. I mean, neighborhoods where they can walk to get food and walk to a job and get on a bus and get somewhere to a doctor or what have you. You isolate the same demographic. You isolate poor people in America's second-ring, third-ring suburbs. And, to me, you're talking "Mad Max."

David Roberts

Yeah, that's very dystopian.

Charles Marohn

Right. That's very dystopian.

David Roberts

Let your mind run. Well, I did want to ask you about this, too, that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and we're running out of time, but let me squeeze this one in, too. I'm sure you've even asked a million times. The puzzle of how to build a good place, I feel like is not solved, but I feel like we're just setting out to build a brand new place. We have a lot of good guidance and know a lot of things to do now. But of course, the big problem in America is all the suburbs already built along this crappy model spread out. It can only get to them by car, and they're there.

What do we do with them? Have you ever heard, I mean, I've had a lot of sort of urbanist-y kind of people on and ask this question all the time, and if you had to hear a good answer, but what do we do with them? Do you know of ways to rehabilitate or densify or something to help your typical sort of windy, curly Q street exurb? Or is it just lost to us?

Charles Marohn

Well, let's pause at this. There are some brilliant people working on this problem. Ellen Dunham-Jones, Galina Tachieva, they've created ...

David Roberts

Oh, they're coming on the pod in a few weeks.

Charles Marohn

Okay, great. They've made beautiful books, and they show brilliant architecturally how we make this transformation. And you look at them and you're like, this is genius work. The problem is that the work is misaligned with the culture, and it doesn't scale to the size of the problem. So I feel like there's insights from those books that we can use and adapt, but as a solution, suburban retrofit is not a solution. Because the reality is when I say we collect ten cents, twenty cents on the dollar of what we need to maintain all this stuff. The implications of that is that a lot of what we built will not be maintained.

David Roberts

Yep.

Charles Marohn

And so when we look at these places, we have to recognize that the goal of saving them all and retrofitting them all is the ultimate pouring good money after bad. Half of the streets we have today, half of the roads we have today are not going to be here 50 years from now like they just won't. The bridges will not be here. The interchanges will not be here. This is bizarre. People who have trouble getting their mind wrapped around this, yet everybody who has trouble getting their mind wrapped around this can think of what it looked like when we walked away from the core of our cities.

We just walked away from these places, ordered them up, and said, this is not ...

David Roberts

Detroit's right there. We can just go look at it.

Charles Marohn

We can go see it. It's not a difficult case study to examine. So you look at this and then what you recognize is that there is no discernible pattern between the neighborhoods that make it and the neighborhoods that fall apart. And so what we need to do as a public project is actually work in this bottom-up, incremental way. And the places that start to coalesce and those will have physical attributes, but they're also going to have cultural attributes of people being willing to work together. The places that start to coalesce into success, those are the places where we make our limited investments.

Those are the places we triage. So if neighborhood A says, "We're a bunch of NIMBYs and you're not allowed to build an accessory apartment or a duplex in this neighborhood," but neighborhood B says, "Hey, we welcome corner stores and we welcome duplexes and we welcome all kinds of investment," and I'm a city and I can only fix one neighborhood. I got to decide between A or B. I'm going to pick the one that is embracing others. I'm going to pick the one that has upside potential from an investment standpoint. I don't think that's a hard choice to make.

David Roberts

Yeah, it is going to leave us with ...

It's going to leave us with a lot of mess.

Lots of abandoned, crumbling ... I mean, I guess no matter what we do, we're going to end up there. But jeez, if you think that landscape is vast and soulless now, just like, project your mind ahead 50 years and imagine it crumbling and falling apart and largely abandoned.

Charles Marohn

If we learn something from Detroit, which I think we should learn a lot of things from Detroit, but if we learn something from Detroit about that transition, there really needs to be an industry of suburban salvage more than anything. Right? Instead of having your house go to nothing. We're going to purchase it and salvage it at some point.

David Roberts

Strip it for parts.

Charles Marohn

Yeah, strip it for parts. It's exactly what we'll do. Strip it for parts. Because that wire has value. Some of the other stuff has value. We'll strip it for parts.

David Roberts

Pretty bleak.

Charles Marohn

But it is bleak because what we built was stupid, right?

David Roberts

Yes.

Charles Marohn

I mean, I think a lot of us would like to save ourselves from, like, okay, I didn't go to college. I knocked out my girlfriend when I was 17, I have a drinking problem, and now I'm 45 and I got my life straightened out. That's great, like from that point on, do good things. Right? But it doesn't make up for the fact that you kind of made a series of bad choices for a couple of decades. You got to deal with that. And I feel like as a society, we made two and a half generations of really bad decisions.

David Roberts

Well, America is so good at honest self-reflection and coming to terms with its own mistakes in a mature and clear-sighted way. So that shouldn't be a problem.

Charles Marohn

Was that Churchill, "We'll always do the right thing after we've tried every other option"?

David Roberts

Yeah, that quote is starting to sound a little tinny to me, much like Obama's arc of history. I'm like, well, when, though? Yeah, we tried everything bad and we're still trying it. When's that? Anyway, let's talk politics for a minute, you know, or at least were last time I checked, in a self-described conservative. I don't have to sort of belabor the evolution of the right in America in recent decades and of the Republican Party, among many, many, many other things. We have seen it now become basically explicitly pro-suburb. Right? Instead of implicitly, it's now saying, Joe Biden is going to come take your suburbs.

Charles Marohn

Yeah, no, he wants to kill the suburbs, right.

David Roberts

Put his flag down in the exurbs and everything else going on. So I wonder I know that small "c" conservatives like you, sort of, pro-urbanist conservatives exist. I know that the species exists. Where is your political home? What has become of you? What do you make of your own sort of political location at this point in trajectory?

Charles Marohn

There's a really good book that was ... that no one's read by a guy named Blake Pagenkopf, and I interviewed him on my podcast a while back. I can't remember the name of the book, but he only has, like, one or two, and they're both on the same topic. So he helped me understand this because I had long ago, I mean, long ago, like mid-2000s, walked away from the Republican Party and said, "I may have conservative tendencies, but this branch of national politics and local politics being nationalized doesn't make any sense to me."

I've never embraced the Democratic Party because there's kind of a central flip over the chessboard every now and then kind of individualism to it that I've always kind of struggled with the idea that every problem needs a big top-down solution that reworks everything. And that impulse has always not been something I could see in myself.

David Roberts

Well, this is a kind of old-school Burkean conservatism you're talking about, right? Just have some respect for the accumulated ...

Charles Marohn

Accumulated wisdom.

David Roberts

Wisdom that's written into communities.

Charles Marohn

Right. Here's the interesting thing. And this is where Blake's book really kind of helped me become comfortable with this.

David Roberts

It is, by the way, called "Rebooting our Political Operating System."

Charles Marohn

Oh, thank you.

David Roberts

I looked it up.

Charles Marohn

What I found is that I could have better conversations that were more productive and more operative with people who were far left of center, but who were very bottom-up than I could have with anybody who was conservative when they were at their core, top-down. The bottom-up person who understands is very environmentally sensitive and understands ecosystems and understands that kind of thing, to me, I find really enlightening. And I've learned a lot from people like that. The person who cares deeply about social justice within the neighborhood that I live in, I have learned to disassociate them with a national social justice campaign run from a top-down to drive votes. And I've learned to listen to them with compassion and empathy because really, quite frankly, they're talking about my neighbors and humans.

And I do love them and I do care about them. I feel like what Blake's book describes is a political spectrum that doesn't go left-right, it goes more quadrants top-down versus left-right. And when you do that, what you find is that the left and the right have a common cause politically. Democrats and Republicans have common cause in top-down action. And that is the thing they agree on the most, and that's where they can find consensus. And I am ultimately, the other day, a bottom-up person. And I find a lot more to work with on the political left from the bottom-up than I find in the political right, which has become very, very top-down.

David Roberts

The bottom-up left, you're talking about stuff like cooperatives and things like that, citizen councils and all this kind of stuff.

Charles Marohn

Yeah. And let me say it this way. A cooperative is not where my sensitivities lie, right? The people who found cooperatives and work in cooperatives and do other kind of left of center, bottom-up things, they're motivated by things that are different than what I feel like I'm motivated by. But I find their work inspiring. I find their work adjacent to mine, and I find that we can collaborate really, really well. And I respect them and I respect where they're coming from. I am sensitive to other things.

And when I can ground my sensitivities in a neighborhood level, a bottom-up way in the humans that surround me, my things that I'm sensitive to I can express those in ways that what I find is that people who are left of center really understand and appreciate, and even if they don't agree, they at least respect. When it gets to the big top-down project, we have a hard time having a conversation. And so I have kind of divorced my own reading list, my own sensitivities, my own view of the world from the top-down. I just don't spend a lot of time on it. I let it be. And I put my efforts into this bottom-up project. And we started this conversation with you saying something along the lines of tension and with everything going on in the world.

And I said, we got to have a lot of hope and joy. The bottom-up gives me a lot of hope and joy, particularly in other people, particularly in people that I'm told I'm not supposed to agree with.

David Roberts

Yeah, this reminds me of ... I don't know if you've been following James Fallows. He's flying around in his little plane, visiting small towns, and coming away with very much the same thing you're saying. Like, if you're looking for a place away from these intractable, maddening national debates where there's actually some consensus and good things happening, you go to these little mid-sized towns that are kind of out of a national spotlight, and there's all kinds of good stuff happening.

Charles Marohn

I think that's true. I will also say this. I found the same thing in large cities, New York City. If you talk to a true New Yorker, they will describe New York City as a series of neighborhoods.

David Roberts

Right.

Charles Marohn

They don't describe it as a top-down system. They describe it as a series of neighborhoods, each with their own culture, each with their own attitude-approach. And to me, I find the same exact kind of interaction with each other in a place like New York City at the block level, at the neighborhood level that I do in in, you know, a city like mine with 14,000 people.

David Roberts

Yeah. I just wonder, you know, we seem to be moving nationally into a period of conservative dominance, at least for the next few years.

Charles Marohn

And you say that, and I would actually say the opposite.

David Roberts

Really?

Charles Marohn

Yeah. No, I was having this conversation with someone today, and I said, "If you are left of center and you are plugged in nationally, you can go a long, long time without hearing an authentically conservative message delivered well, you will only hear caricatures of conservatism. But if you are a right-of-center, unless you want to not listen to the radio, not watch TV, not go to the movies, not go to college, not participate in civic society, you are going to be bombarded continuously with left-of-center messaging. You just will be." And you might say, like, well, the Supreme Court is very right.

Okay, I get that. It's the way the kind of ping pong balls fell in terms of turnover, and you can complain about political maneuvers, and I get that. I respect those complaints. The reality is that we are culturally top-down, a very left-of-center project.

David Roberts

Well, this is the great contradiction, right? As we seem culturally center left, but the Senate is structurally right. The Supreme Court is structurally right. Now through gerrymandering, the House is structurally right. We keep getting conservative presidents that lose.

Charles Marohn

Lose the popular vote. Right.

David Roberts

So when I say dominance, at the very least, they're very likely to control all three branches of the federal government for at least some period of the next decade. And it seems like it's going to be a very long time before Dem's get a trifecta back. And it doesn't seem to me, given the character of the current GOP, that they're just going to let blue cities merrily do what they want, implement progressive policies. So I wonder if there's any kind of new political coalition to be had based in good city-making.

Charles Marohn

Yeah, that would be my hope. I mean, really, that would be my hope. I will say I have been around long enough now. I'm 49.

David Roberts

Me too.

Charles Marohn

Oh, okay, good. We have the same, like, timestamp on our culture.

David Roberts

Yeah.

Charles Marohn

So I've been around long enough where I have experienced the highs and lows of one-party dominance. Like, oh, we won everything, and then, oh, we lost everything. And the reality is we celebrate the New Deal and the 100 days of FDR that's never happened again, and I don't think it can happen. Right. We will have to have a different form of government for the type of hegemonic thing to occur. Republicans had control of everything just a few years ago, and they got zero things done. And they got zero things done because they are the party of organization.

Right. Like, Democrats fight each other. Republicans line up and vote for things. They still couldn't get anything done. And I think what we've reached is we've reached a point where, at the federal level, there's really not answers to any of our existential problems. The answers have to be evolved out of local conversations and local action. And so you just see, like, is Obamacare a bad bill? Yeah. Is there a replacement you come up with that would be good? No. So what do you do about that? You just complain and try to get people out to vote for you so that you can pretend you're going to do something.

I know people get frustrated because they want the federal government to work. I think we don't appreciate that the federal government is designed not to work. We are designed to have a very limited federal government with power concentrated in states and really concentrated in neighborhoods of people.

David Roberts

The one thing I would want to throw into that, and I'll get yelled at if I go this whole interview without mentioning it, is climate change. And I guess, do you see bottom-up reform in cities moving fast enough or being dramatic enough to get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions? In other words, I can envision a lot of good things coming out of bottom-up, but it's real hard for me to envision climate change coming under control without some centralized top-down action.

Charles Marohn

Okay, let me make this a fair question. So we have Option A, which is some type of top-down action to address climate change. We have Option B, which is bottom-up action to address climate change. And Option A and Option B are in a race against each other to see who can get to where we need to be. What I'm going to suggest to you is that Option A has zero chance or near zero chance of getting to the finish line. And people can argue with that and say, "Well if we just got like an overwhelming number of people elected ..." Look, the most dedicated to climate change president that has ever been has just done a gas tax holiday for six months, right?

We're not at some tipping point where people are serious about it and they're not. The best thing ... people ask me, "What's the number one strategy we can do at the local level to build a strong town?" And I'm like, a. go out and plant trees. Like street trees are the lowest cost, highest returning investment that can be made. The number two, get people walking and biking. Build a culture of biking and a culture of walking. Number three, fill your parking lots with stuff. Get rid of parking lots and fill them with things.

David Roberts

Amen.

Charles Marohn

Now you tell me if your strategy was we need to get the right people elected. They need to have the guts to pass the right package to do the right stuff so that we get some action on climate, so we get electric cars and we get whatever your package of solar panels and what have you is. Or we can make a bottom-up choice to emphasize communities that plant trees, get people walking and get rid of parking. Which one is going to be further along the race a decade from now? I don't even think it's close. The strong town's approach actually can get done and actually scales.

David Roberts

Scale is the question though, right? I mean, all these local fights. One of the things that when I look at this strategy and I think about it scaling that sort of causes me to despair is that each local community is different. The dynamics are somewhat different. It's just battle after battle after battle after battle.

Charles Marohn

So at the end of World War II, we didn't have to convince people to move to the suburbs. They didn't have to be like a national program saying, "This is good for you, you should do this. I know you don't want to do this, but you should do it." People did it in mass. They wanted it. And I'm telling you people want walkable neighborhoods. They want corner stores. They want good sidewalks. They want street trees. We're not selling that strong house anything that people don't want. People want us in droves. They'll pay extra money for it. They fight to live in these places.

David Roberts

They go vacation where it exists.

Charles Marohn

They go vacation in them, right. We just don't deliver it in the marketplace. And I'm saying make that switch. We will deliver this in spades, and it will scale big time. Because everybody in policy understands, like, this is what people want.

David Roberts

Well, I hope you're right about that. And maybe we'll we'll check in a decade and see whose strategy failed worse.

Charles Marohn

Yeah, well, I'm I'm not, you know, saying there should be no top-down action, but I'm just saying I feel like what I see happening with the progressive project is 98% of our energy put into trying to win the next top-down election to get the results we want and 2% of the energy put into recycling our Aquafina bottle. And what I would like to see is 2% of our energy put into this chess match of gladiators at the federal level and 98% of our energy put into making places better. Because you do that and it's a revolution. Everything changes.

David Roberts

Great. Well, alright, Chuck. Thanks so much for all your work. And thanks for coming on and talking.

Charles Marohn

Thanks, friend.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much. And I'll see you next time.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe