Want Your City to Prosper? Then Forget Everything You Think You Know about Economic Growth (Episode 37)
Written by Nick Stumo-Langer | Jan 11, 2018
As a trained engineer and planner, Strong Towns Founder and President Chuck Marohn noticed something off about the decisions many of the cities and towns were making in regards to their economic development. In short, they were building with the expectation of overall decay, not of incremental improvement long-term.
It was then that Marohn decided to start writing and, in response to the bottoming out nature of the Great Recession, he formed Strong Towns, a non-profit whose mission “is to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient.”
Marohn is the guest for this week’s Building Local Power podcast and sits down with host (and ILSR co-director) Stacy Mitchell to discuss economic development in America’s cities and towns. The two delve into why conventional wisdom around development so often leads these communities down a dark path of decay.
“So the way we build now is we build things all at once and we build them to a finished state. There is no contemplation of a second life cycle. There’s no concept in our society that if you build a home, some day it will evolve into a duplex. Or if you build a commercial building that some day it will evolve into a two-story or a three-story commercial building. You build a big flat big box store and that’s gonna forever more, by our codes and ordinances and financing and everything, that will forevermore be a big box store,” argues Chuck Marohn, Founder and President of Strong Towns on how American communities are hamstringing their own futures.
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View a full transcript of the conversation here.
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Related Resources:
Podcast: Stacy Mitchell on the Big Box Swindle, Strong Towns — In July of 2016, ILSR co-director Stacy Mitchell sat down with our guest, Chuck Marohn, to discuss her book, Big-Box Swindle, and its implications for smart development in cities and towns across America.
Report: How Rising Commercial Rents are Threatening Independent Businesses, and What Cities are Doing About It — This report examines how high rents are shuttering businesses and stunting entrepreneurship, and explores 6 strategies that cities are using to create an affordable built environment where local businesses can thrive.
A Case for Height Restrictions, Strong Towns — In this analysis, Marohn delves deeper into the issue of dynamic height limit ensuring cities can be flexible in how they value their land for the best possible developmental future.
Report: Monopoly Power and the Decline of Small Business — This report from ILSR’s Stacy Mitchell details how the United States is much less a nation of entrepreneurs than it was a generation ago. This report suggests that the decline of small businesses is owed, at least in part, to anticompetitive behavior by large, dominant corporations.
View the full transcript of the podcast, below. If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage. Please give us a review and rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones — Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
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Originally published at ilsr.org.
