Best of 2020: Our Favorite Podcasts
This year saw a few changes to our three podcast streams. In February, Abby Kinney, an urban planner in Kansas City, took over as the new host of Upzoned. She’s done a wonderful job in that role. In the fall, we launched a new podcast hosted by Strong Towns program director Rachel Quednau. The Bottom-Up Revolution tells the stories of people taking action to make their communities stronger and more financially resilient. Even our long-running flagship Strong Towns podcast, hosted by founder and president Chuck Marohn, experienced some changes: when Chuck was injured in an accident, the podcast went on hiatus for several months, returning in October. We’re at full strength now and regularly publishing three episodes per week. You can check out all our podcasts here.
Every December we publish our ten or twelve best articles of the year. I wanted to also draw attention to a few must-listen podcasts of the year from the hundred-or-so we published. These are the episodes that really seemed to resonate with listeners, that broke new ground, that will stand the test of time, or that we were just proud to produce. What were your favorite episodes this year? Let us know in the comments below. — John Pattison, Content Manager
Denise Hearn, coauthor of The Myth of Capitalism. Image source.
In the introduction to the book The Myth of Capitalism, Denise Hearn and her coauthor, Jonathan Tepper, write that capitalism has been “the greatest system in history to lift people out of poverty and create wealth.” Yet the “capitalism” we see in the U.S. today is so misshapen it hardly qualifies. “The battle for competition is being lost. Industries are becoming highly concentrated in the hands of very few players, with little real competition.” Capitalism without competition, they say, is not capitalism.
If you believe in competitive markets, you should be very concerned. If you believe in fair play and hate cronyism, you should be worried. With fake capitalism CEOs cozy up to regulators to get the kind of rules they want and donate to get the laws they desire. Larger companies get larger, while the small disappear, and the consumer and worker are left with no choice.
In this episode, Chuck Marohn and Denise Hearn discuss why reduced competition—in the form of monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies—hurts us not only as consumers and workers but as citizens and community members. They talk about the collusion (both direct and tacit) that consolidates wealth and power into fewer hands. And they discuss what our economic systems must learn from natural systems, including the role of competition and the importance of “habitat maintenance.” (Fans of Jane Jacobs' The Nature of Economies will love this part.)
Ending on a hopeful note, Marohn and Hearn also discuss the convergence, across industries, of new conversations about how to build stronger towns and stronger economies from the bottom-up.
In late September, Chuck Marohn published an article making the “local case for reparations.” Drawing on a detailed study conducted by the economic consulting firm Urban3, Chuck described the long-term fiscal impact of redlining policies in Kansas City, Missouri. He wrote:
This difference in margin of error is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of redlining. The people in one neighborhood [chosen for investment] are dealt face cards and aces. Those in the other [redlined] neighborhood get dealt twos and threes. It doesn’t matter how good you are at poker. It’s hard to mess up a winning hand, just like it’s hard to play your way to success when the deck is stacked against you.
The economic and social impact isn’t just felt by people who live in formerly redlined neighborhoods. For example, in a single half-square-mile neighborhood, redlining has cost Kansas City $30 million in lost tax revenue. Now multiply that across many such neighborhoods in Kansas City—where more than 50% of the city was “redlined” in the 1930s—and then consider that most towns and cities across the United States implemented similar policies. We start to get a clearer sense of the broad economic devastation wrought by decades of disinvestment in poor, predominantly black—though not exclusively black—neighborhoods.
Chuck goes further, though. Conversations about reparations often focus on a federal response to redlining—whether it should happen, and what it should look like. But Chuck says that cities shouldn’t wait for the federal government to do something about reparations. There are things towns and cities can do right now, using tools already at their disposal, to begin building last prosperity in disinvested neighborhoods.
In this episode of Upzoned, host Abby Kinney discusses “The Local Case for Reparations” with Chuck, as well as with Joe Minicozzi, principal of Urban3. Abby, Chuck, and Joe talk about Urban3’s data-driven analysis in Kansas City, the policies that have made Kansas City financially fragile, and what it will take to stop the bleeding in disinvested neighborhoods. (It’s less than you might think.) They also talk about the high price cities are paying for inaction, and why cities already have the tools they need to make the change they say they want.
Alexander Hagler shows off some products in the Center Street Wellness store
This was the inaugural episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution, a new 30-minute show featuring stories from the Strong Towns movement in action. In this episode, we hear from Alexander Hagler, an entrepreneur and urban gardener based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Hagler is one of those people who just exemplifies community building, local empowerment and can-do spirit.
Recognizing that his community in the Riverwest and Harambee neighborhoods of Milwaukee was not well served by things like fresh food access and other resources for healthy living, he founded a store called Center Street Wellness, which sells products for mental and physical wellbeing, mostly from local makers. The shop gives him a chance to craft a business around something he cares deeply about, as well as a chance for local, small-scale entrepreneurs to sell their wares in a storefront—something most do not otherwise get to do.
Hagler believes that anyone with a passion and dedication to something can turn it into a business, provided they put in the time and connect with others in their community who can partner with them for success. At Strong Towns, we know that by seeing a need in your neighborhood and stepping up to try and fill it, you can take the incremental steps to building prosperity from the bottom-up. There might be challenges along the way—as you’ll see in this conversation—but Hagler proves that heart and authentic devotion to your community will enable persistence.
James Howard Kunstler, author of Living in the Long Emergency
If you’re like us, there were a few trusted guides you looked to in 2020 to help make sense of a world turned suddenly upside down.
One of our most trusted guides has been James Howard Kunstler.
The author of essential books like The Long Emergency, The Geography of Nowhere, and the World Made By Hand novels, Kunstler has for years been eerily prescient in his ability to imagine and interpret the future. Chuck Marohn described The Long Emergency as “the most coherent narrative explanation I’ve read of the converging crises our society is living through, particularly when it comes to the triple threats of energy, economy and environment.” It's one of 15 books on the Strong Towns Essential Reading List, and somehow feels even more relevant today than when it was first published in 2005.
Kunstler’s latest book—Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward—is once again spookily timed. We received requests from listeners that we interview him about the book and the COVID-19 crisis...the very thing we were eager to do.
In this fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, Chuck Marohn and Jim Kunstler look at the impact of the crisis on the automotive and airline industries, our food systems, and more. They discuss the social upheaval being caused by COVID-19, including the understandable anger from people who see the federal government bailing out Wall Street while their own jobs disappear. They talk too about the problems with the argument that COVID-19 will launch a suburban renaissance—“All the signs are that suburbia is not only going to fail, but it’s going to fail pretty quickly and pretty harshly”—but also with some urbanists’ reflexive defense of cities.
But this conversation is not just doom-and-gloom. They also discuss how Living in the Long Emergency provides a ray of hope in dark days. The book helps us understand what’s going on....and also how to create a healthy, vibrant, and enjoyable future.
Host Abby Kinney, an urban planner in Kansas City, and regular cohost Chuck Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns.
As the suburbs—and, more specifically, single-family zoning—emerged as a political issue in the 2020 presidential election, what often got lost was context, nuance, and even the opportunity for consensus.
The irony is that, in the first half of the 20th century, the Suburban Experiment—an approach to growth (not actually limited to the suburbs) in which Americans build human habitats in large blocks and to a finished state—was launched and sustained through nonpartisan consensus.
Today, ending the Suburban Experiment should have broad bipartisan appeal. Because the Suburban Experiment hasn’t worked. In fact, it’s been a disaster. People on the political Left and the political Right might get there via different paths and priorities, but moving on from the Suburban Experiment could be an opportunity for common ground and the chance to point our towns and cities toward financial strength and resilience.
That’s the topic of this episode of Upzoned. Abby Kinney and regular cohost Chuck Marohn discuss a recent article in The American Conservative, “Zoning Reform Is Not Leftism.” They look at how we’re being pressured to view this issue through an increasingly partisan frame, why the predictability of single-family zoning is necessary when building at such huge scale, and how the Left and the Right could actually find consensus on this topic.
Tim Carney. Image via Gage Skidmore.
The rise of Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries—and his eventual win in the general election—defied expectations and confounded explanations. Nearly every national poll was wrong, and political observers have spent the last four years trying to understand what happened and why so many of the experts didn’t see it coming.
In his book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Timothy Carney makes the compelling case that the most common explanations for Trump’s ascendance—the economy, for example—don’t get to the root of things. He demonstrates that the people who resonated with Trump’s message that “the American dream is dead” are those whose communities lacked the social cohesion that binds neighbor to neighbor. While voters cast ballots mostly along party lines in November 2016, in the early primaries, Candidate Trump actually struggled in places where the institutions that are “the key to the good life”— faith communities, vibrant civic organizations, etc.—already gave people a strong sense of purpose and belonging. Maybe you’re starting to see why Chuck named Alienated America one of the best books he read in 2019, saying “I highly recommend it to anyone trying to understand the cultural ramifications of fragile places.”
Tim Carney is Chuck’s guest on this episode of the Strong Towns podcast, published in February. Together, they discuss how populism—on both the right and the left, and in 2016 as well as today—is springing from alienation (we need to belong to something). They talk about community’s physical dimension (proximity, walkability, etc.), why people are healthiest when they belong to “a lot of little platoons,” and why idleness is not so much a vice as an affliction. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in how frayed social bonds effect not just our national politics but our local life as well.
Back in August, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) warned of a “doomsday” scenario—including fare hikes and service cuts—if the federal government didn’t come through with $12 billion in aid. Writing about the MTA crisis, Chuck said that, if he ran the money printing press, the transit agency would get the money. But he also talked about how preposterous it is that it should ever have gotten to this point. New York City has the most valuable real estate in the nation. Why is the fate of the city, and indeed the whole New York region, being left for non-New Yorkers to decide? How could New Yorkers have let this happen?
In this episode of the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck approaches New York’s financial woes—as well as other crises (insolvent pension funds, student loan debts, crumbling infrastructure, and more)—from a different angle. He discusses why the changes that need to be made to fix our cities won’t come about in a culture whose solution is “Just print the money.”
He also talks about how money has increasingly become an abstraction, the two elements—liquidity and narrative—needed to prop up a system of a financial abstractions, and what happens when even one of those elements falters. For example, what happens when an increasingly polarized country can’t agree on a narrative to justify printing money to solve problems like the MTA crisis, student loans, etc.? How do we say “Just print the money” to pay the bills coming due for the decades-long suburban experiment, when we can’t agree on competing versions of history, morality, and the place of the United States in the world?
Chuck ends with a deceptively simple suggestion for how to push back against encroaching abstraction...and begin building stronger towns in the process.