“At Strong Towns, we push back on the concept of a “solution.” There is no solution to the housing trap we find ourselves in… it’s always been an approach… People need to be able to try things, to respond to street or opportunity as it presents to them. Those responses need to be incremental, a discipline that expresses humility, allowing us to be wrong in a way that helps, not hurts.”
We need to let our cities fail faster so they can heal faster.
Escaping the Housing Trap is 2024’s entry in Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns series. The first book was Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (2020), followed by Confessions of A Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (2021), and now Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, this time with co-author Daniel Herriges.
It seems like everybody is talking about housing—in particular “affordable housing”. Marohn & Herriges start off this book with an in-depth discussion of housing finance over the last 100 years. Snoozer, right? No way. Housing as Investment is a great idea for building wealth, unless you’re trying to break into the housing market. This is the first jaw of the housing trap.
Housing as Shelter is the second part of the book and the second jaw of the housing trap. Here the duo break out the diatribes against the evils of zoning and NIMBYism and the joy of YIMBYism we all know. I agree with some. We need to remember there’s Affordable Housing capitalized, the state-run housing projects, and there’s affordable housing lower-case as in housing people can afford. The greatest amount of lower-case affordable housing is Manufactured Housing built to meet the HUD Code. Derisively labeled “mobile homes”, HUD Code housing is often better quality than stick-build structures since they are constructed indoors out of the weather and inspected regularly. We need to allow HUD Code Manufactured Housing wherever we allow stick-build single-family homes.
I don’t agree with other parts of this section. The small town I work in doesn’t allow on-street parking—the streets are narrow brick already. That slows people down, but there’s not enough room for parking even when the snow plows aren’t out. Plus there’s no transit so almost everybody has cars. More generally, there is no really functional mass transit and eliminating parking won’t create enough demand to fund small systems for rural areas.
A lot of it is context. There are parts of the Strong Towns approach I’m struggling with. Zoning is not evil in itself. Zoning was intended to protect public health, welfare, and safety, as affirmed by the US Supreme Court in the landmark case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co, the source of the term “Euclidean Zoning”. Yes, some people used zoning to exclude people based on race and income, but not everybody everywhere. When I was younger I lived in old homes which had been cut up into small apartments—they provided affordable housing, at the expense of destroying beautiful neighborhoods of single-family homes. On the other hand, as a Zoning Administrator I became really tired of arguing with people who wanted to stick an accessory apartment in the basement for their kids, when it was just like places I had lived myself.
Housing in a Strong Town is the third part of the book. Where Part I explains the cost of housing, and Part II tries to explain the constraints on building new housing, Part III is a “response” not a “solution” to the housing crisis. “At Strong Towns, we see cities as complex, not merely complicated. Understanding the difference is essential.” Understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, rather than rigid mechanical systems, is a radical change in perspective for urban planning and development. We have developed tools such as zoning to protect optimized urban systems—locking them in amber, so to speak—while the world around us is constantly changing. Personally, I know this on a molecular level yet I struggle with it daily. Like Chris Gibbons’ idea of Economic Gardening, compared to traditional industrial recruitment, this perspective looks at complexity as messy, and chaotic, yet essential. Adaptation and response is the norm, not static stability.
There are tools offered towards the ends of more affordable housing, such as:
· Rapidly add new housing units at affordable prices
· Not adversely impact the existing housing market
· Allow for the flow of capital into the community, but slow the flow of capital out of the community
· Grow the city’s tax base without adding to the liabilities of local government
Part III wraps by presenting Principals of a New Approach to Housing. A “new paradigm for housing” focuses on what can be done, now, with resources available.
No Neighborhood Can Be Exempt from Change: Strong Towns has been calling for increasing densities for a long time, although Charles also continues to deny that. “By necessity, change means adding housing units. It means the neighborhood thickens up, maturing over time… The next increment of development intensity needs to be allowed by right.” Where single-family homes are allowed, we ought to allow duplexes and accessory dwelling units (ADUs). We need “gentle-fication” of Missing Middle Housing. That’s a great idea, in theory, but not always an easy idea to implement.
No Neighborhood Should Experience Radical Change: Here’s where the message comes back to earth. Just as in the call for incremental densification, the authors call for no more than incremental change. Development is, like Money Ball, a game of bunts and singles. Hedge your bets.
There must be a Low Bar of Entry to Obtaining Housing: Start small, add small, stay flexible. How many cities restrict housing units to a minimum of 800 square feet? The International Residential Code (IRC building code) treats any home larger than 400 square feet the same, as long as they have sleeping, kitchen, and bathroom facilities. Now IRC also has Appendix Q for “Tiny Houses” smaller than 400 square feet.
Housing Must Be Part of a Neighborhood-Level Economic Ecosystem: Corner shops are a great idea, if you are buffered and not living next door. Heck, how about bringing back the corner pub? Yet they’re not going to eliminate the need for parking outside of Metro Areas. Make it easier to build less parking, yes, but enough with the war on cars.
Public Infrastructure Investments Must Focus on Where People Struggle to Use the City as it has Been Built:
1. Observe where people in the community struggle.
2. Then ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we an do right now to address that struggle?
3. Do that thing. Do it right now.
4. Repeat.
Maintaining a Sense of Urgency: As they say “We are not providing a solution but a mechanism for solutions to emerge from within complexity.” The rest of Part III presents ideas for making incremental change easier and cheaper. We need more small housing developers. We need to make it easier to finance small housing development. We need to build Strong Towns.
Originally published in the APA Small Town & Rural Planning News, Summer 2024.