Matthew Yglesias: The Case for One Billion Americans (Part 2)
Last week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast featured the first half of the conversation between Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns, and Matt Yglesias, the bestselling author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Yglesias is also the host of The Weeds podcast and cofounder of Vox Media. He recently launched the blog and newsletter Slow Boring.
In Part 1, Yglesias made the case for tripling the U.S. population, discussing how it would make America stronger at the community level and as a whole. Now in Part 2, Marohn and Yglesias talk about why the concept might be especially good for small towns and depopulated Rust Belt cities, how Yglesias addresses concerns about gentrification, and what needs to change about our economics and development pattern in order for “one billion Americans'“ to be a prosperity-generating change rather than a prosperity-killing one. They also discuss Yglesias’s recent article on how to fix the mass transit crisis.
Developers often have to jump through hoops to get their projects approved by a city. When a Costco branch in California was faced with lengthy waiting periods and public debate, it decided to take a different approach: adding 400,000 square feet of housing to its plans so it qualified for a faster regulatory process.