Charles Marohn, Strong Towns President, will be participating in the Big Towns conference in Lafayette, Louisiana on April 24, 2024.

LOCATION: Acadiana Center for the Arts | DATE: April 24, 2024 | TIME: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. CDT

Housing is an investment. Investment prices must go up. Housing is shelter. When the price of shelter goes up, people experience distress.

This is the housing trap. It’s time to escape. This presentation introduces a first-of-its-kind discussion of the tension between housing as a financial product and housing as shelter. These insights will help local communities fight back against the current affordability housing crisis, and opt out of the boom and bust cycles that have typified housing in postwar America. 

This presentation offers a serious, yet accessible, history of housing policy in the United States and explains how it led us to this point in time: where we face a market that is rigged against people who, only a few decades ago, could have been homeowners or stable, long-term renters. Only local change, on a neighborhood or city-wide scale, can begin to restore balance to the housing market.