Debunking the "Slow and Incremental" Myth: The Key to Rapid Housing Growth

In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck discusses the common misbelief that an incremental approach to housing development is inherently slow. He explains how an incremental approach can actually be much faster than focusing on large housing projects, what that means for major cities, and how to make incremental housing more appealing to people who don’t want their neighborhoods to change.

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  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey, everybody. This chuck meron with strong towns, welcome back to the strong towns podcast. Hope you like the new bumper music. We put that together here. Yeah, it works for me, so I hope it works for you. We're starting the year off here with a couple weeks of housing stuff. Last week, we had the the conversation on the building culture podcast that we replayed for you this this week, I want to talk a little bit about I want to start with an article that appeared in Vox last month, quoting me. You know, anytime you talk to a journalist and and let me be clear, my wife is a journalist, and, you know, has been a reporter, newspaper reporter and then radio reporter, for decades now, for our entire adult life, right since, since we were married, she has been a news reporter. I have a lot of respect for news reporters. Is a hard job. You are taking lots of information from lots of people, and you are translating into something that non, let's say non, people who are not deep in the conversation have to understand. In the early days of strong towns, I used to get really angry because the reporters would report on us as a smart growth organization. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm not a smart we're not we're not a smart growth organization. Come on. And actually wrote an article like, we are not a smart growth organization, which made the smart growth people mad, because they kind of like, we like you. And I'm like, I like you too, but like we're doing, we're emphasizing different things. We're approaching this in a different way. My wife explained to me. She said, Well, they're going to call you a smart growth organization, because that's the lingo, that's the lingo that their readers will understand. And I'm like, That is wrong. And she goes, Well, it's not wrong. It's not the way you want. It's presented, but for their readers, it's like a fair approximation. I go with that. I recognize that reporters use common language and fair approximations, and when I am frustrated with a report, I think it's a healthy thing to do to step back and say, Okay, how could I communicate this point better? The article in Vox was about housing, and I'm going to spare you the long conversations I had with the reporter on this one, I actually thought the conversation started out not very good, or like we were we were misaligned. We were speaking past each other, not understanding each other. And then at the end, I thought everything really clicked. When the article came out. I'm like, Oh no, maybe not as much as I thought in the article. It was comparing basically three different approaches, or three different mindsets about housing. And when they got to strong towns, they said strong towns prefers a quote, more slow and incremental approach. And I just about put my fist through the monitor, because the last thing we are about is a slow approach. Now we are about an incremental approach, but incremental is not slow. Incremental is not the same thing as slow. And in fact, if you are about fast, the only way you can be about fast is to be about incremental. Give me a little bit of time here to explain this. Let's first of all recognize that large does not mean fast, right? Oftentimes, we think we need to get housing built. We need lots of housing built. We need to get more and more and more housing. We're way behind. We need a lot more units built. What we default to, I think would be more charitably called large, right? Let's get a big developer to come in and build, you know, 40 units, 400 units, 4000 units, whatever your scale is, build that on a on a greenfield site, on the edge of town, new units, bam. I realize that's not what a lot of Embs are calling for, and a lot of other people are calling for, but that that would be considered fast, right? Like, fast, bam, bunch of units all at once. We also look at apartment buildings and condo units and places where you building, like, five over ones. We're going to come in, we're going to create a concrete platform, we're going to put wooden construction on top of that, and then, bam, 200 units in place, or bam, 80 units in place. And people equate that with fast. That's not fast. That's big. And if you actually look at those projects, what you find is that in terms of unit production, they're actually really slow. They have lengthy approval processes, which oftentimes they should, because they, they're, they're doing a lot. I mean, if you go out and build on a greenfield site, to me, for the most part, we don't have enough approval process on things like that. I mean, we're cities are taking on all kinds of liabilities, all kinds of things. Things. When they do those they're generally pretty poorly planned, pretty like quickly thrown together. It is a process that ultimately takes a while, even when it doesn't deliver very good results, but it takes a while, and then you actually have, because you're dealing at scale, you actually have a lot of financing issues that you have to deal with. You generally are working with multiple banks to secure financing. You are generally dealing with multiple, in a sense, product lines to secure financing. You also have to because you're working on an efficiency model, you are lining up contractors in a way that operates kind of mechanistically. So this is me, you know, going to like a world war two analogy. And there's gonna be a couple of world war two analogies in this podcast. Let me give you the first one. To me, it's like a Montgomery, General Montgomery in World War Two, as opposed to General Patton in World War Two. If you're going to build a five over one, an apartment, condo, a big, new subdivision of homes, what you have to do is you have to line up all the things. This is a General Montgomery mindset. We've got to get the supply route in place. We got to get the troops in place. We got to get this in place. We got to have everything. He kind of famously had to have everything lined up in order before he would jump off, before he would move. The patent mindset is the exact opposite. It's like, yeah, the supplies will catch up to us. Let's just go. We got him on the run. Keep pushing. Hey, there's a bridge. Cross it. Hey, there's a field. Go through it. Go, go, go, go, go, everybody, just go as fast as you can. And his job was kind of like to be out front, leading and then saying yelling like, catch up, catch up, catch up. When I look at housing and I look at large projects, what I see is the Montgomery mentality, right? I'm not saying this doesn't deliver housing. I mean, Montgomery delivered victories, right? I'm not even going to say, for the sake of this conversation, that it's a bad way to build what I'm saying is it's not fast, and if your goal is fast, you can't have that kind of approach. If your goal is fast, you need a more patent esque approach. You need an approach that is, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. That is what a strong towns approach is. When Vox writes slow and incremental, what they are doing, what the report is doing, is taking the common language, and I'm recognizing this, I'm saying, this is a this is my fault, not their fault. They are taking the common understanding of incremental and replacing it with the word slow. And I don't look at incremental as slow, in fact, by trying to solve the problem of, how do we get things done quickly? How do we get things done fast? The answer that I have come to, the answer that we at strong towns, have arrived at, is it has to be incremental, because incremental is the only way you get too fast. Let me give my second world war two analogy here, and then, yeah, I think it's probably done all right. At the beginning of World War Two, you had the British Army stuck at Dunkirk. If you haven't seen the movie Christopher Nolan movie, it's so good. It's just fantastic. These troops are stuck at Dunkirk. They're trying to get them off the beach. The British Navy is, you know, backing up to the pier and loading people on. It's slow. It's plodding. You have these big ships, they finally pull away, they get blown up because they're easy targets for the planes, slow, lumbering, big. I feel like, in the context of the Vox article, that would be considered fast because it is large, it is big, right? You know you can, you can move a lot of troops at one time.

  Chuck Marohn 9:04

  What happened at Dunkirk? And the reason Dunkirk is kind of famous today, or the reason we celebrate Dunkirk, even though it was a loss for the Allied Powers, is because of the merchant navy, right? The idea that instead of having these big ships that were really slow to move, slow to load, slow to get people out, big, lumbering targets, easily taken out. What they did is they called on the merchant to take their little boats across and pick up handfuls of people all across the beach. Get 10 people here, get 30 people here, get 15 people here, get them on the boat and bring them back. These ships were too small to sink or too small to really see and bother with. They were too dispersed and spread out. They were able to each do a little bit here and there and here and there, and they got they got the troops off in a way that never would have happened if you had stuck with the big ships. What? I'm saying incremental what I'm saying is Merchant Navy. When I hear big projects or large or we gotta build a lot of housing, I hear the standard system telling me British navy, like big gunships, and what I'm proposing to you, or what I'm suggesting to you, or what I'm arguing to you and to Vox and to anyone else who wants to write about housing issues or talk about housing issues, is that we need to have a mindset that is fast. And the only way you get to a mindset that's fast is through incremental is through dispersed action. Is through lots of small things happening in lots of places all the time. Not big, lumbering projects, not big large projects, not large approvals, large things, we actually need a lot of distributed action. Now, Chuck, you're telling me, instead of building that 200 unit apartment building, I should be focused on Backyard cottages and, you know, starter homes, a small little 600 800 square foot homes in between existing homes, or taking that fourth spare bedroom someone has and converting that into a rental apartment. How is that? How is that fast? I really want that 200 unit condo building that seems like so much more progress all at once. I want to talk to you about compounding and the power of compounding. There's this, I don't know if it's famous or not. There's this story that I saw many times growing up to try to teach kids compounding. It's probably good for teaching adults too, but I remember getting it like third grade, and again, in fourth grade, and you know, a certain point you start to understand the gist of the story. The idea was, someone had done something, and the king wanted to pay them for it. And I'm going to give you a lavish reward. Name, the name, the amount that you want, and the person you know, very cleverly says, All I want King is a penny. Just give me one penny today, and all I want is for you to double that Penny every day for the next 30 days, and then I'll be happy like that will pay me off, and that will be great. And the king's like, wow, how foolish. Just a penny and doubling it can't be that much of a deal. You realize that you take a penny and you double it, and the next day you have two pennies, and then you double. The next day you have four pennies, and then you double. The next day you have eight and 16 and 32 and on and on and on. By the end of 30 days, that Penny is now $10.7 million this is the power of compounding, the idea that in the initial phases and in investment worlds and in math worlds and in biology world ecosystem studies. If you've seen climate models at all, you see this hockey stick right where the phase shifts from kind of what seems like incremental growth to something that is really, really rapid. This phase shift in the hockey stick stage, like the the hockey stick part, that's the compounding part. That's where the dumb, the doubling takes you. You know, from 5 million to 10 million in day 29, to 30, right? That's, that's what happens when you start to get the systems in place to do this over and over and over again in this bottom up way things start to expand very, very, very quickly. I actually suggested that we need to crash the housing market for entry level units. And a couple of people push back. Like, how dare you chuck How dare you say, we crash this market. There's all kinds of people out there working like, Look, we're not going to get there tomorrow. There's nobody working on bottom up housing today that's going to have their their model undermined by us building too many units. But the point was, I want to shift our energy from these big projects, these big top down projects, the big approvals, the large and slow process to the bottom up, incremental and fast process. And if you do that, and you do that right at some point, and it will be a long time from now, but at some point, you will provide so many units at that level that you actually overshoot the market demand. And when you have way too much supply and not enough demand, you will crash prices. That. That is what I would like to get to. And the only way you get to that, the only feedback loops that gets us to falling home prices is a feedback loop that builds a ridiculous number of units, very, very fast over time. That is not large, that is small, that is not all at once, big projects, that is incremental, distributed over a broad area. Let me make one point about the hockey stick, because it's going to come up in a little bit. This is how natural system. Systems grow, right? There is an equilibrium. There is a feedback that will control some of that hockey stick growth phase. But really in natural systems, I mean, if you look at a bacteria under a culture, like a culture under a petri dish, right, like under a microscope, it's going to grow in this exponential way. If you look at a natural system proceeding this way, you're going to see that style of growth. What we want is, we want our response to housing shortages to have that kind of organic effect, have that kind of organic nature to it, where it can be more nuanced, more responsive. It can be a lot quicker. It doesn't rely on a handful of big actors to make decisions that ultimately, you know would not be in their best financial interests. This brings me to a attention that I want to give voice to, because I think it's, I think it's an impediment to us having a really good national dialog, and really North American dialog about how we provide housing, and that is this idea that we are not going to solve or even put a dent in the tension we have Today over housing by focusing on a handful of very large cities where there's a ton of demand, New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Chicago. These are places that you know, Vancouver. These are places that have overwhelming amounts of demand compared to the supply, and because of that, and because these places are also centers of culture and media and thought and intellect and dialog, because a lot of this emanates from that, not from Podunk Brainerd, Minnesota, in the middle of Central Minnesota, because So much of our conversation focuses around these key places. The conversation around housing tends to emanate from an understanding of those places. Look, there's an overwhelming demand. We don't have enough. We need to go out and build. And when we build, the way we build here is very large. So let's create program systems responses that are very large. I have argued, and I'm going to argue again today, that we will never solve our housing tensions. We'll never alleviate problems we have in a housing affordability with a response centered on or kind of scaled to what we see in our largest, most mature cities. Let me go back to the organic conversation again, because what we want is we want market feedback loops to actually drive the kind of investments that we need to create housing very, very rapidly.

  Chuck Marohn 17:57

  I started sharing this analogy last summer when I did a presentation in Geneva, Switzerland, because I had to explain incremental to an international group of people, a lot of whom didn't speak English. I had to be able to talk to them and communicate to them in a way that was universal. And so what I did is I put a picture of my daughter up there, my oldest daughter, Chloe. I put the picture of her as a, as a baby, you know, and everybody in the crowd, there's a, oh so cute, you know, like you get that effect, because, you know, babies are cute, right? My baby's super cute. She was. She's still cute today, but in a different way. So I showed this picture of her as as a baby, and I said, this is where humans start, right? This is where we get our start. And then I put up a picture of her as a as a toddler, like this is the next step, right? When we look at the baby, there's a lot to love about the baby, right? I mean, babies are beautiful. They're, they're, they're so precious, like everything about them is just perfect, right? We love them unconditionally. I tell people that when my baby was born, when Chloe was born, there were two things that happened to me that I wasn't expecting. You know, the story of the Grinch, where, at the end, their heart grows like three sizes. I loved my wife. I love my wife, but at that point I loved my wife the maximum amount that I could. And when this baby was born and brought into my life, I realized that my love muscle, whatever that is, my heart, could grow three sizes there was actually, like, way more there than what I had exercised in loving my wife up to that point. And so all of a sudden, this is infant like, expanded my capacity to love instantly, right? The other thing that happens to me happened to me when I had a baby, when my wife and I had Chloe, was that it's. To this chronometer. You know, my wife and I had dated for seven eight years and then had been married seven eight years before we had the kids. So we, we, you know, we met in junior high, all that stuff. When you have someone like that in your life, you age in parallel, at essentially the same rate, and so your aging is less perceptible when you get the chronometer, you have a baby. Babies age really fast. Chloe today is 20 years old. I look back at her as an infant like it was yesterday. It just happened. This aging process starts to speed up, because you have a, in a sense, a chronometer, a stopwatch, a thing that is there, this living human being, this organic thing that is growing at a rate that is not in sequence, in parallel with you, but is on a different timeline, a different rate of change, a different set of pace. And it's disorienting for someone you know when you have your first baby, because all of a sudden it's like, wow. I did not realize life was traveling at this speed. Babies are beautiful, but babies are also like just total demons. I say that in the in the kindest, most beautiful way, right? They scream all night, right? They mess up your sleep. Babies sit around and, you know, soil themselves, and you've got to take care of that. They scream. They spit up on you. They they do all these things that you're like, oh, it would be really nice if this wasn't happening. And at some point those things do stop happening. And they stop happening because the baby matures to the next phase. I show the picture of Chloe as a toddler, and I'm like, I loved Chloe as a toddler, right? Chloe as a toddler, all of a sudden Dad was more important, right? When, when Chloe is an infant, mom is super important. I'm not saying Dad is not important, but Mom is, like, central to the whole thing. I mean, mom is literally, like, feeding the kid from her own body, so that that makes her more important than me, and I can accept that there's no problem here. But once she becomes a toddler, none of a sudden, you know, Dad dance parties and all this fun that we can have together. My kid was a talker early, so she was very vocal. So he's had lots of conversations and we would do, I was able to structure my work environment. Then this would have been early 2000s where I could work from home one day a week, which meant not really working at that point. I was running my own company, so I could, I could do that, and we just hung out. We hung out every Friday until she started kindergarten, which was one of the things I'm most grateful for in life is that we had that, like one on one, and then when the next daughter, Stella was born, two on one experience without mom around, because when it's just dad and everyone, like, everything changes. And it's a blast. This was so much fun. It was great. I just love it. I have, I have the best memories of Chloe as a toddler, but I also look back at the toddler days and realize, Oh my gosh, this was hard. Yes, we had gotten rid of all the hard things about being an infant, no more spitting up, no more soiling yourself, no more screaming in the middle of the night, randomly like all that was gone, but now you have a new set of problems, right? I mean, this kid hated transitions. He'd be like, hey, Chloe, we're gonna, you know, get in the car and go here. She'd like, I'm in the middle of something. I don't want to go throw a huge tantrum. Hey, Chloe, we're in a store. We're gonna go over here now. No, like, throw us up on the floor. Massive tantrum. I remember she went through this phase where it was like, I do, I do. COVID, does? Dad, I do, I do. And it was like, okay, and we're gonna go now. And she's like, Okay, I'm gonna put my shoes on. I do. And this kid, like, could not put her shoes on. And I'd sit there, it'd be like, five minutes, she would be sticking to it, like, trying to get the dang shoe on. She couldn't do it if I tried to help it anyway, she pitched a huge fit screen, Matt, you're like, you're stuck. And I remember just being, like, constantly frustrated by this kid, thinking it will be so nice when she grows out of this. Of course, she eventually grew out of it, right? I put up on the screen pictures of Chloe at different phases of life, and each one, as I note, is the same person. It's the same person. You you can't look at that infant, or you can't look at that high school graduate and not see the same person. It is the same person, but obviously in very different forms, at very different stages of maturity, stages of development, and each one, they are the same person, yet a slightly different person. There's a lot that's really important about this, but let me give you one right now. With each phase, you have a certain amount of beauty attached to it, a certain amount of. Wonderment and charm and joy and beauty, and you also have a certain amount of frustration and anxiety and things that you wish were different. That is the nature of organic systems. All right, I'm going to switch away from COVID for a second and talk about cities, and then we're going to go back to the infant. Okay, one of the other things that I I like to do my presentation is show pictures of cities over time. I've got some great pictures of Brainerd. I've got some great pictures of Times Square. I've got other cities where we have photos. I like to show this because you're showing, in a sense, the same kind of progression. So I show people what my daughter looks like over time, and I show them what my city looks like over time. Here's the infant version of the city. These little pop up shacks in the middle of the North Woods of Minnesota. Here is the toddler version of a city. Those pop up shacks are now transformed into two and three story wood structures, and there's still a dirt street, but there's wooden sidewalks and other things now that show like a more mature version of it, right? And now, here is the adolescent version of a city. These wood structures are now brick and granite, and there's things that are more permanent. This is the maturing of a place, just like with my daughter, just like with a human baby, each phase of development has things we wish we didn't have to deal with.

  Chuck Marohn 26:33

  It has great beauty and it has lots of potential, but it always has things we wish we didn't have to deal with, but dealing with them is, in a sense, how you mature to the next stage. So we look at that infant stage of my hometown, these little pop up shacks. You can imagine that the people there were really, really excited about being in that place, right? I can get in on the ground level of a new city. I can get in really cheap. I can put in my sweat equity. If we build this place and work on it together, it's going to grow and we're all going to be better off and more successful. We can maybe sell this or flip it, or do whatever I you know, there's a lot of like these frontier towns, a lot of excitement in the air, right? New place, new hope, new potential, but all of it is just really brutally hard, right? There's no water system, there's no sewer system, there's, probably isn't, not even a police department or rules or law like you're, you're literally having to do the hard work day in and day out to make this place work. But you fast forward, and you look at the next photo, and you're like, Oh, they got a lot of those things figured out. Now, they figured out, like how to work cooperatively. They actually have founded a city now. They have a mayor, they have a constable, or whatever it would have been. They've got bucket brigades to fight fires. They probably got rudimentary water system. They've, you know, put the latrines in the back of the buildings to keep the sewage out of the streets. I mean, they've, they've taken these next steps so it is a better version, or let me not say better, let me say more mature version of the city that came before they solved those problems and they were able to reach this next level of maturity to get there in doing so they take on, like a whole bunch of other problems, right? There's a whole bunch of new frustrations that you have in this, like, toddler version of the city that you've got to deal with that by the time you get to the adolescent version. Now, you've got paved streets, you've got sewer and water in the street. You can see them from the from the picture, like, Oh, there's the catch basin and there's a sewer system goes, there's a water hydrant and there's electric lights. You're starting to, in a sense, mature and solve some of these problems. Let me put this together. And going back to the original Vox article, we you know, strong towns is promoting a more slow and incremental approach. No, we are not. We are promoting an incremental approach that is fast, in fact, the fastest approach on offer, compounding hockey stick growth, ultimately, when we get this like moving in the right direction, something that we can do every place, like something that every community can experience, immediate growth, fast results, accelerating over time. But we are also promoting an approach that solves problems over time, that makes places better over time. Let me go back to Chloe for a second. When a baby is born, Chloe was like eight pounds something, I don't remember. My wife remembers all that stuff. I don't remember it was eight pounds, something, right? All props and respect to my wife, who was obviously more intimate with the weight of the baby than I was, Chloe weighed something like eight pounds when she was born. Six months later, this kid weighed like 20 pounds, right? Or at least like 16 like she. Doubled in six months, just bam. Like, this kid comes out. She's a she's a tiny, little, fragile infant. Six months later, she's massive. She's huge. Like, I'm like, Oh my gosh. What happened this kid is huge. That rate of change, the doubling in six months does not continue, like the penny, right? Every six months, the kid doubles eventually, you know, by the time they're for their shack, and then they double. Like, what is double shack? Right? Like it. That's not what happens. What happens is that the rate of change slows over time. As the baby matures, the rate of change starts to slow down. Each degree of change becomes harder to do. Take requires more effort, more time, and it slows them down. And so you get a baby that will double in the first six months, but in the next six months, will only grow by 15, 20% by the time you become fully mature, you're not growing at all. I'm 51 years old. I've gained a few pounds here and there, but my body weight has been the same for like, 30 years. Basically, I'm not changing anymore. I am fully mature. Here's the insight on incremental, fast, organic systems. If you want to grow fast, if you're looking at like human capacity, like we want to grow human mass, very, very fast. Would you rather have a 10 adults or B, 10 babies? You would rather have B 10 babies, because 10 babies are going to double in six months and the 10 adults aren't going to change at all. No matter how many McDonald's drive throughs you put them through, right? They may change a little bit, but is it not going to be much if we want to build a lot really fast, you can't go to mature places, because mature places change much more slowly, much more methodically. The rate of change, just by their very nature, has to be slower. And so when we think about housing problems in San Francisco, in New York and Vancouver and Washington, DC and what have you, are these problems real? Yes. Will they be alleviated by building more housing? They won't be made worse by building more housing. But can we actually get to the point where we would build enough housing in those places to lower the price, change the demand structure actually like meet the demand. No, it's impossible. It will never, ever happen. The rate of people who would want to move into those places is always going to exceed the very slow pace that we can build there at my board meeting, one of my board members is a New Yorker, and we were just chatting, and I don't remember the exact numbers that he gave me. I wish I could quote them, but he said, you know, something along the lines of our moonshot goal for building housing over the next decade is, like, 10% of what's actually needed. Like, that's the moonshot. Like, if we do everything right, and we pull out all the stops and we do all this, we're going to hit 10% of what is suggested that we need in the market right now. These, these are not approaches because, and that is not because New York is a bad bureaucracy, and New York is not a dynamic place, and New York is incapable of being or not serious or like, go through all the political things, even if all those things were aligned, even if you got the moonshot right, New York is just a mature place. It's a lot harder to take a six story building and make it into a 20 story building than it is to take a one story building and make it into a two story it just is. It is not 20 times more difficult. It is not 200 more times more difficult. It is 1000s of times more difficult. It is unfathomably more difficult to do this. And so if we are going to insist that we must deal with or must have an approach centered on solving the housing problems in our major cities by building exclusively in our major cities, or if that's going to be the point of emphasis, or let me put it a different way, if we are going to create programs customized to our major cities and then roll those out in the you know, brainerds and pawtuckets and Fort Collins and Kansas City and what have you of the world. What we are going to do is we are not only not going to build enough housing, but we are going to hinder the housing that needs to be built in all these other places. I have no problem with building more in San Francisco. I. Don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I wish it would happen like I I agree with the arguments that are put forth that, like, look, we put this big transit investment here. Why are we not building more? I got the same thing in New York City, you know? Why are we not building more here? Why do we have these parking requirements? What are we doing? I was in Washington, DC, and I get kind of the battle over building heights. And I'm a little bit sympathetic to the idea that in our capital city, having a building height limitation, particularly in key areas where we are, in a sense, celebrating our unity as a nation is not a bad thing, particularly when I get on a transit stop, a major metro, you know. But probably the, in my opinion, the country's best, at least number two metro system in the country. And you go two stops, and you're in a neighborhood of single family homes and one story buildings and strip malls. The idea, you know, that we wouldn't grow there in that other neighborhood, but that we, you know, look to say, all right, how do we take this six story building that's, you know, four blocks from some monument, and make it a 12 story building. What are we doing? What are we doing that that is that will not solve anything, and

  Chuck Marohn 36:13

  it certainly won't solve anything fast if we want to build housing fast, if we want to build a lot of housing, and if we want to, quite frankly, take the pressure off of New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, to solve our housing problems, we actually need to build a lot of housing in a lot of places very, very quickly. To do that, we need to recognize that we got to take places that are in an infant phase and grow them to a toddler phase. And they are designed to do that. They are set up to do that really well, really easily, really fast and at scale. We can do that today. We can do that tomorrow. Your city can do that without needing a federal grant, without needing state assistance, without needing anything outside of your community. You can do that right now. The corollary that goes with this, the point that goes along with this insight about the rate of change, the metabolic rate of change, the fact that we have to focus on these non mature places if we want to get housing built fast, is the damage we do when we skip steps. I said earlier, you know that you've got this toddler that you're trying to, in a sense, grow to an adolescent. That process has a lot of messiness to it, but it's necessary to become an adolescent to solve the problems of being a toddler. You got, you got to learn how to go the bathroom, right? Not in a diaper, but on the toilet. Like, that's part of the maturing process. You have to learn how to eat solid food. That's part of the maturing process. Like we get that sometimes, I think we don't recognize or understand that. If we just took the toddler, we took the infant. And we said, All right, instead of having you go through as an infant, the toddler phase, the adolescent phase, the pre teen phase, the teen we're just gonna take you directly to adult. Bam, done. You're an adult now, and in a sense, you're a fully formed adult. You don't have, like, the problems anymore that an infant has your your stomach is developed, your organs are developed, your eyes are opened. You've got the muscle mass all that. I think we just recognize, first of all, the absurdity of that, like that's insane. You couldn't do that. But we also recognize that you have 18 years plus of development that you have missed out on insights, knowledge, experiences, and I'm not just talking about like the joy and the happiness that comes through that, but you would have, if you somehow did that, a completely like, maladapted, disformed human being. It wouldn't work. You can't skip over the problems. I'm gonna go back to cities, because I think this is a harder one for us to grasp with it with a human being, it's obvious, right? Like, yeah, Chuck, you can't skip from infant to adult. You'd be a you'd be a total mess. You wouldn't even know how to talk. Like, what do you what do you mean? Right? For cities is a little bit harder, because as an affluent society, as a society that not only has access to a lot of resources, but has a lot of how do I say this kindly, a great capacity, relying on experts and expertise and technical expertise, we think a lot of ourselves and our capacity to not only solve problems, but to actually fully identify and understand the problems we face. When you combine that propensity with a lot of money, you. What you see is that people look at the problem in front of them, and then they go solve it, and they try to solve it forever. This baby poops their pants. Oop. Here's how. Let's solve that, and it'll be done. They'll just make them an adult. We're done. This neighborhood is kind of messy. It doesn't really work the way we would like it to. Well, all right, let's tear it down and build a new one. This street isn't working for us. Oh, let's get a grant and reconstruct the whole thing, and we'll skip like three phases of development and just get to, you know where we want it to be precisely when we build all at once and we build things to a finished state, we not only miss out on that rapid, organic change phase, but we miss out on all the learning. We miss out on all the knowledge. We miss out on the things that make us grow stronger, the things that give us the capacity to solve problems, the capacity to improve. We rob people of the ability to participate in that journey. We hand it over to technical people. We hand it over to the strong mayor. We hand it over to the lone visionary who's going to make, in a sense, a temporary transformation. I'll just use this phrase without earning it right, without going through there's this great line from the character Malcolm in in Jurassic Park, where he looks at, I can't remember the guy's name who created Jurassic Park, but he said, you know you, you wield this knowledge, this genetic manipulation knowledge, you, you wield it, But you haven't actually earned the right to use it. It was just handed to you as something, and you don't respect it. You don't understand it, you don't understand the power of what you're doing, because you haven't actually had to earn it. And I feel the same way often about our cities, we have this process set up where you do grow incrementally, and vast portions of that, especially when you're less mature, is very, very, very fast, and in doing that, we learn, we gain knowledge, we grow stronger, we build capacity within our communities that will continue to allow us to grow and adapt and change and evolve as we mature. The goal here is to mature. It's not to be mature, right? It's not to reach some end phase where everything is perfect, because I mean point to where that city is. It doesn't exist. Every city has problems. Every city has things they're working through. Every city has things as things they wish they could change. We have, in a sense, robbed ourselves of the capacity to fix those kind of problems by skipping all these stages of development. Strong towns approach. Incremental is not slow, but it is disciplined in that it forces us, or it focuses us, on solving the problems in front of us as a way to mature to the next phase and the next set of challenges. This is where I want to make one last point today, and that has to do with the not in my backyard, crowd, the NIMBYs. If you listen to that podcast last week, you heard Nolan gray with California yimby introduce himself as a fighter of NIMBYs. We are trying to do battle with the evil NIMBY. And I get that from like, a marketing standpoint, right? It helps to have an enemy. If you have an enemy, you can point to them, and that's a good like fundraising strategy and everything else. Like rally the troops. There's our enemy. Like, go after them. I think sometimes people who have advised me on marketing, have said, like, you know, you could be better at this chuck, because you are, you are not making enemies. In a sense, you could raise so much more money, and you could do so much more if you, you know, were willing to, like, pick a partisan side, like the the California EMB group did in the last election, or if you were willing to, you know, weigh in in some kind of fractious way and say, this is, this is our side, and that's their side. Do that a little bit in places, but even when it comes to like, you know, engineers and others, I'm like, All right, we we need you with us, like we need you to change. And I might be hard on you at times, and I might push you at times, but we need you with us. When it comes to housing, I'm going to insist. I'm going to say it over and over and over again that we can't be in a war against NIMBYs. It just will not work. There is no way to win that war. Just like I've said in the past here, that a war on cars is really like a dumb thing. If you have a country that is democratically run right where people show up and vote for the policies and the candidates they want, and 92% of people drive and say, like, I don't have any other way to live my life in this country without getting in a car. To have a war on cars is essentially like eight. Suicide pact, like it's, we're just going to have a war on everybody, so it's us against the world. And I, I just don't do those kind of things that's really dumb. A war on NIMBYs or making NIMBYs the enemy to be overcome, to be defeated, to be shouted down. There may be some cachet for that in places where there's a war on cars, right in, in a New York, in a San Francisco, again, in these big culture centers, where the messaging gets pumped out of, when it gets out of those places, there is no place for a war on 80% of the people who vote, 95% of the people who hold office and make decisions the vast majority of the city staff. These are all homeowners and existing neighborhoods. Not all of them might meet your definition of NIMBY, but they all are going to have some type of existing homeowner bias within them. The idea that we would frame our arguments, frame our discussions, frame our enemy as being in opposition to them is just a really dumb tactical approach. If you want to get something done

  Chuck Marohn 46:09

  a strong towns approach, a bottom up incremental approach is not only really fast, it not only puts us in a great position to solve problems and succeed and mature and become a better places over time, but it actually aligns with the priorities of people who are in the neighborhood today. Now you may say, Well, Chuck, I don't know a single person in existing neighborhood who wants any growth at all. They're all NIMBYs. They're all anti this stuff. Okay, I'm gonna say that's a caricature, and it feels a lot like a caricature that people say all drivers are evil and awful and they just want to run people over. We take these things too far. We create this hyperbole around this persona that we've created. We make them into evil and again, great fundraising strategy, great mobilization strategy, bad strategy for actually getting things done. Do I want to do this or not? I'm going to do this, and I'm going to ask you for some generosity, because this is going to veer a little bit off course, and I want you to be generous with me and my intentions here, I want to talk just really, really briefly about the strategy around gay marriage. I'm 51 gay marriage for most of my life was anathema, a thing that society would not accept. Some of you that are younger in this audience might not appreciate the fact that every presidential candidate running for president up until the last one, Joe Biden, and not when Joe Biden was vice president and not in 2016 when he was not didn't run in the primary, but was part of the conversation. None of them supported gay marriage. They just, they just didn't. They may have privately supported it, I don't know. I mean, we could, we could talk about that. I think they would like us to think that today, they really didn't. Gay marriage was far outside the mainstream issue. And I'm going to this is not to try to be provocative here, and I'm again, please be generous with me. I'm not trying to make a moral statement on gay marriage or anything like that. I'm trying to talk about the marketing of it. In my college years, high school years, early adult years, gay marriage was, you know, gay pride parades and bumping and grinding in spandex on floats feather boas and, you know, gay parties. I mean, that that's what it was. What shifted dramatically. And what I saw shift the conversation dramatically was when gay marriage became about, you know, the same sex couple that lived up the block that wanted to visit each other in the hospital, when it became about a family who wanted to adopt a kid and, you know, show some love in the world, and just were prevented from doing it. When it was someone who wanted to serve their country in the military but wasn't allowed to. When it became very normal, it was very easy to do. And I know that that offends some people, because, like, I, you know, I want you to embrace the full experience. I'm like, Okay, I I'm trying to understand and respect, but I'm saying from a marketing standpoint, it's one thing to say no to something that seems very distant and foreign from where you are and what your experience is, but when it's put in terms of like, people you know and people you understand, which is that's like the strongest argument for gay marriage, right? It's like, you know, yeah, I like the two ladies that live across the street from me. They're really sweet. They're very nice. They looked after our kids. They, you know, I see them, I wave to them, I help them out. They're nice. You mean what? They're gay. They want to be married. They want like, Yeah, well, like, I can't, I wouldn't say no to that. When you make it very human and personal, what you find is that we have a lot in common, and a lot of the things that maybe would be. Kind of like macro forms of resistance, or, you know, things that would, in a psychology standpoint, you know, trigger people to one side or the other debate all of a sudden soften and become something we can actually work with. When you look at the NIMBY yimby conversation, when the fight is over, like big apartment buildings in big cities, and that's the abstraction that is brought out, and then all of a sudden, the programs that are created to create more housing are building like, you know, big five over one buildings in my little town, which is basically like what we're getting now for for housing, that's the next big housing project. You know, those things are jarring in a way that like people can't relate to. And if you say, we need more housing everywhere, they're gonna say, Well, I I've see what you do like I don't want that. That's not That's not what it looks like to me. But what about the woman who lives next door to me, whose husband passed away, and who would like to stay in her house? I have this neighbor. She would love to stay in her house, but it's it's a lot to maintain, mowing the yard, shoveling the sidewalks. I help with the sidewalks when I'm home. I travel a lot, so I don't always get to but help with the sidewalks. What if she could take one of her spare bedrooms. Have, you know, I'll go over and help, but have somebody come over and put in a little kitchenette, cut out a door to the outside, put a little staircase, and rent that out as an accessory apartment. What if she could do that? And what if she could take, you know, on a fixed income, this little bit of investment and allow her to rent out that part of the house and turn that into a stream of cash. And knowing her, you know, very sweet lady, she's not going to be, you know, mining the internet to see what's the maximum amount of price she can provide. You know, what? What does the algorithm say? I can increase rent by this year, she's going to be a pretty decent landlord. And the person is going to be living essentially in her house, or right in a unit that is within what she has always considered her house. And so she's going to look after them. She's going to take care of it. She's not going to let them be crazy and throw big parties. You know? She's get them kicked out if they do that, like, as you really should, so they're gonna be good tenants. They're gonna be good neighbors. And if it works out, and I'm idealizing a little bit here, but like, it's not far of a stretch to say, hey, I'll lower the rent by a couple 100 bucks a month if you mow the yard and you maintain the sidewalks, and you know, if I need help, like, if I fall and need assistance, you call the ambulance for me, or drive me the hospital or what have you. These things are very human transactions, really. They're very moral transactions that I think would be naturally built into a system like that. Well, you look at my neighbor, she can't do that today. That's a duplex. Can't build that, can't do that change. There'd be all kinds of, like, building code restrictions, all kinds of ways that she couldn't do that. That'd be very easy to do. If you went to my neighbor and said, Hey, we're gonna take the house across the street from you. That was gonna come down. We're gonna build an apartment building. She'd be like, what, I've lived here my whole life, like, this is my neighborhood. I'm invested in it like I I don't want it to transform like that. I don't want to change like that. Okay, she's a rotten NIMBY. Let's fight her. Let's, let's shut her down. Let's, you know. But if we go to her and say, Hey, here's how you benefit from adding more units. Here's how your neighborhood matures from single family homes to duplexes by adding more units. Here's how that's done. Really, really quickly, really, really fast, so that a lot more people, including your grandkids and others, can afford homes. I don't think we have the NIMBY problem with that person.

  Chuck Marohn 53:51

  I think we can have the same conversation about a backyard cottage. I have other neighbors up the street who would love to have their in laws be able to live on the lot with them. Have plenty of backyard space to fit it in. I look at my neighbor, and I have, I have great neighbors, except for one. I have one neighbor that is, let's just say, problematic. I am hoping that they move at some point. If they do move, I want to buy their property, because there's enough room between me and them for another house, and I would like to put a small starter house between the two of us. The configuration of their lot and the configuration of my lot are just a little bit off in the sense that if they are out in their yard, we are we're looking at them out our dining room window in a way where we're like five feet above them, and it is a little bit awkward. I will grant that there are ways to design this and do this. That would be very nice. I would love to see a little starter home in between us. I think it would solve both of the tension problems for the next owner, and, you know, allow us to keep our house where it is configured like it is, with a south facing large window that can. Captures a lot of sun. I can't build that unit today, right? We've got these minimal lot size requirements. We've got these density requirements. We've got these things. It could easily go there. There's plenty of room. The sewer and water there, the sidewalk there, the street is there. Like, everything's there to handle it. If you went to my neighbor, or myself, or any of my neighbors today and said, Hey, we're going to tear down a couple of these houses over here, and then you're gonna get a five story apartment across the street. No one's down for that. No one's gonna agree to that. That is gonna create all kinds of tension. But if we said, you know, Chuck is buying this neighbor's house, I'm gonna put in a little starter home in between. I'm gonna go the planning board and kind of work, you know, like those things, if neighbors get mad, they're getting mad at me, like, I can have that conversation that's like, I can, I can explain that a lot better than a policy person at City Hall can. Here's the insight. Then, the strong towns approach is not slow, it's fast. It is the only fast offering on the table. Not only is it fast, but we can build a lot of units in a very distributed way, in a really quick, fast fashion, but in a way that allows us to solve the problems of our community and grow and mature our places so that they become better versions, more complete versions of themselves. And we can do it not in a battle with our neighbors, not in a fight, a Manichean fight, where we split the good people from the bad people, and we we try to demonize the bad and fight for the good and make everything a trench warfare in our neighborhoods, we can actually do this in a way where everybody can get behind it, because they see how they themselves and their neighbors can benefit from this change. This is how you accelerate units. This is how you make housing dynamic. This is how you create a market for entry level units. And quite frankly, this is how you get lots of people in the housing This is what a strong towns approach is. And I know that the challenge I have is communicating this to people like a reporter from Vox, who you know has a different framework and a different set of understandings and a different grounding than what we do. I know that that is my challenge. I welcome all of your input on on ways that we can explain this better, but strong hands the incremental approach to housing is the fast approach. It is not slow. In fact, if you start with the idea that we want to build housing fast, and you say, how do we do that, the only answer you can get to that actually scales and actually works is a bottom up, incremental approach. Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strength.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Chuck Marohn (Twitter/X).

• Learn what comes next for incremental housing in 2025 by tuning into the State of Strong Towns address on January 30 at 4 p.m.

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