Charles Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns, will speak in Wichita, Kansas, on January 28, 2025.

LOCATION: Kansas Leadership Center |  DATE: January 28, 2025 | TIME: 5 p.m. CST

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 but accessible history of housing policy in the United States. It explains how we reached this point, where the market 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.