An Approach, Not a Solution, to Escaping the Housing Trap
“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 these days—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. I get a lot of Chuck’s frequent co-contributor Joe Minicozzi , AICP, in the discussion of land value and market dynamics. Plus, for me, this section was more likely to spark nightmares than sleep. Housing as Investment is a great idea for building wealth, unless you’re trying to break into the housing market. There’s just no way the powers-that-be can let house prices retreat to “normal” so first time homebuyers and the renting class can have any hope of buying shelter. 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 from their web blogs and social media. 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, so the Planning Commission has said they want to keep off-street parking minimums outside Downtown. Plus there’s no transit so almost everybody has cars. More generally, there is no really functional mass transit outside major metropolitan areas anywhere across the US, and eliminating parking won’t create enough demand to fund small systems for general use.
A lot of it is context. There are parts of the Strong Towns approach I’m struggling with. Along with policy prescriptions coming from our associates at APA and other places, as it applies differently in different places. 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:
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 frankly would you buy a home knowing an apartment building could go up next door? I don’t know that I would. Then again, that may be the only home I can hope to afford.
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 or 900 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. This part of the book is, in my opinion, needlessly dismissive of neighborhood concerns about the health and safety of cute little Tiny Homes the size of a large garden shed. Yet they can be safer than living in a tent or sleeping rough under the stars.?
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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:? Yup. Here’s their simple 4-part process:
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.
I first got to know “Chuck” a bit when I worked in Minnesota 20 years ago. He was a lone voice in the wilderness—if you can call Brainerd and the Lakes Country of northern Minnesota a wilderness. At the time, like I, he was
a member of the America Planning Association (APA) and American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), yet couldn’t even get the Minnesota APA to invite him to speak at a state conference. Then the President of APA invited him to speak at the National Planning Conference—we’re never “experts” in our own backyards. If I wasn’t doing what I am doing, I would love to be doing what Charles is doing, mostly.
These day’s he’s left behind the AICP and moved on (there was also a kerfuffle about his Professional Engineer (PE) certification, but that’s neither here nor there). He’s building the Strong Towns movement into a grassroots organization turning ideas into projects and policy. This also led to a national gathering the last couple years, in advance of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) annual events.?
It’s been interesting to watch as these ideas gather traction across the country. I’ve been critical of APA over the years for their urban and suburban bias—they don’t know Small Towns & Rural Areas and don’t seem to particularly care. CNU is by name an “urban” outfit, but at least they’re honest about it. Then again, many small towns are much more “urban” than any new suburb sprawling outside a major metro area so they offer useful ideas for all of us.
One trend we’re seeing from both Strong Towns and APA is the push for state and federal pre-emption of local zoning regulations. I expect it from Strong Towns, but I don’t appreciate my professional association tearing down my profession. As a student of Jane Jacobs, I cringe at letting the folks who brought us Urban Renewal and redlining tell local communities what to do. We’ve had enough of Big Brother urbanism. A city of 1,500 is much different than a metropolitan center of 150,000 or 1.5 million. Give us the tools and we’ll figure it out. Other planners I respect have noted it would be easier to argue for Strong Towns ideas with local elected officials if they were mandated by State elected officials. I would rather let the Strong Towns approach speak for itself in the marketplace of ideas.
All three Strong Towns books are available in hard-back from Wiley publishers at a quality bookseller near you, or ebook/audiobook online.