It Won’t Be Us: Thoughts on Our Current Craziness From a Strong Towns Perspective

In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck addresses the craziness of the current political climate. Using recent policy changes and public responses as examples, he explores how we’ve created a political climate of either-or: Either you decide to take a chainsaw to bankrupt and failing systems or you refuse to acknowledge that they’re bankrupt and failing.

Chuck shows how the Strong Towns approach provides a third path, where problems are recognized and addressed in a healthy way. He also gives a sneak peek at how Strong Towns is planning to help advocates and cities embrace this path.

• Click here for a computer-generated transcript.

  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey, everybody this Chuck Marohn, welcome back to the strong towns podcast. It's gonna be a weird i don't know where this one is gonna go. I've got a couple notes I've written down, but I'm really just going to try to speak from the heart here for a little bit. One of the great gifts that has been bestowed on me, or, or I've, I've been given, or I've, I've, you know, maybe you could say earned a little bit, or set myself up for, is I get to travel a lot. I get to meet a lot of people. I get to be in a lot of places. I have a real sense, I think that is unique of the country. I've presented strong towns ideas in every US state. I spend a good deal of my time traveling around and meeting people, meeting people who are doing local work, local policy work. But also, you know, local advocates is amazing. I had a conversation with someone yesterday who had gone to our national gathering last year, and this person was comparing it to other conferences that they've that this person has attended. And you know, the remark given to me was, your thing is weird, CNU has got a lot of professionals at it. Yours had some professionals, but it just had a lot of people who I couldn't put in a box. And I'm like, yeah, that that's strong towns. And I get to meet a lot of those people all the time. That that's what I get to do. I also have been invited to do some some other things. My graduate degree was from the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, now the Humphrey School of Public Affairs or public policy. I can't remember. I apologize anyway, I've been asked to be on their their advisory board, the dean's advisory board at the Humphrey School, which is really an honor. It's fantastic. I had my first meeting there a couple weeks ago, and it was delightful to meet everybody and to be back in that academic setting. But I really am kind of a fish out of water in that place. The overarching vibe of the meeting was one of I'm just going to use the word terror, abject terror. And this is a feeling that I've gotten as I've traveled around the country. There's a certain amount of terror over the chaos today going on in our nation's capital. I think you know me by now, I'm not like a partisan political person, so I hope if you're listening to this and you're super, super partisan, you try to be as generous as you can throughout this podcast, because I want to start by having some empathy for the people who are feeling terrorized today, who are feeling disjointed and out of whack, because I understand this is chaotic, this is crazy. And you know, the tumult and the chaos that is raining is creating a lot of fear, a lot of terror in a lot of places. At the Humphrey School, they're very concerned about grants. A lot of their students are funded through grants, and a lot of people who otherwise couldn't attend the school are having their essentially, their tuition, potentially rescinded or put on hold, or, you know, in an unknown status, in a way that is dramatic for everyone you know this, this is very upsetting. I have a very good friend whose wife works for the VA, and she's, you know, been given offers of buyouts, offers of, you know, whatever, early retirement or whatever. She's not old. She's young. I mean, she has been at the VA for like, seven, eight years now, said she would like to retire there. She likes it. She likes a job, you know, as redeeming value to her. And she feels, and I think the family in general feels very terrorized right now. You know, four weeks ago, showing up from work every day, doing your job. You know, doing your job the best that you can, and all of a sudden today, now, you know, am I going to have a job tomorrow? Are we going to be able to pay the mortgage? Is the savings we have the kids for college, going to be able to survive this like, what? What is our future? And it's very scary for a lot of people. I want to start by acknowledging that and recognizing that and saying that I feel that like when I travel around and I talk to people, I get that, I hear it, I feel it. It's ubiquitous. It's all over the place. And you know, it's true in last week, I was in Kansas, it's true in a red state like Kansas as. As it is in other places. Maybe the the expression of it is different, but the unsettledness is similar. I want to say a special thing to our Canadian friends. It's astounding to me how many members. We're over 6000 members now at strong towns. Thank you to all of you who are members. A lot of those, a significant number of those are Canadians. And, you know, Norm, a good friend on our on our team, is Canadian. I tease him all the time about being Canadian, but, but I have a great deal of affection for our neighbors to the north, and I know that there's a lot of shade being thrown right now. There's a lot of back and forth. There's a lot of ugliness to our interactions, and I'm sorry for that. I feel bad about that, and I realized that, you know, for two countries, that should be not just the best of friends, but even more intimate, like, just like we should be sitting on each other's porch having a drink and chatting. I mean metaphorically. I mean that we should be the best of best friends to have any tension crop up, you know, needlessly. So is very concerning, and I understand that. And I'm going to extend this to people around the world, I'm continually amazed how you know this, this podcast coming out of a small town in central Minnesota. You know, one of the more insignificant places on the continent is reaching people around the world. I of those 6000 members. I have seen the list, and I've seen the places that people have donated to us and chosen to become a member and support this movement from and it boggles my mind. It's very humbling. You know, people, people from Japan, people from Israel, people from you know, all over Europe, all over Asia, India. I'm jumping back and forth between countries and continents. I apologize, but it's amazing to me South Africa. It's astounding to me, the people who have identified with what we're doing and have stepped up and said, I want to be part of this. I want all of you to know that, yeah, this is crazy, and this is not what I would like to see. This is not what strong towns wants to see. And the unsettling nature of it all is very unsettling. You're right to feel unsettled. You are right to feel the chaos as unsettling. I want to try to help you through this, and I want to try to help you get to a place where you can not only see things clearly, but see things through a strong towns prism and recognize what our role as a movement is in what we're experiencing now today, if we go back to the early days of strong towns, and I'm thinking 2012 2013 when I was doing this podcast and starting to reach, you know, a meaningful number of people, I remember some of the early critiques of the work that I was Doing, the work that we were doing here was that we were 95% Chicken Little, and the other 5% was just rants with no solutions, right, like no program for what needed to happen. And I was really, really frustrated by that, because I felt like I was talking about, here's what needs to change. Here's what's wrong, here's what we should be doing. But I think it was a fair critique in the sense that we did not have a program, or we did not have, like, here's the five things you should do, or here's the three steps that should be taken. Never had anything as simple as that. Really, those early days were a lot about figuring that out. There's this huge problem. It is an overwhelming problem. It's an unignorable problem. I started to recognize in those conversations that there was a huge part of our audience that liked our critique of the problem but but struggled with the other side and part of the criticism of Chicken Little. Oh, you know, you're just Chicken Little. You're just putting out the problems the sky is falling. Chuck, they didn't actually want to, kind of struggle with the things that we said needed to be done. I wrote a article called The growth Ponzi scheme. It's our most read article ever. It gets passed around a lot. I'm actually going to be redoing it next month, and I'll tell you why here in a bit.

  Chuck Marohn 9:48

  But you know, the growth Ponzi scheme talked about the suburban development pattern and how it creates this financial sugar high for cities, and how, when you chase this kind of growth, what. Happens is you get this cash today, and then you get 10x that of long term liabilities. And so the response to it is to grow more and to grow more and to grow more, and in doing so, you dig yourself a bigger, bigger and bigger hole. There are a lot of people, and I'm not going to pigeonhole them all as progressives. I think that that's unfair. I think there were a lot of conservatives who bought into this too, but there were a lot of people who looked at that and said that that critique warms my heart. I like that critique. That feels good. You know, I don't like the suburbs. I don't think the suburbs should be, should be built. I don't think we should be subsidizing that style development. Thank you for putting numbers to what in my heart. I have known for a long, long time that that there was, there was a significant contingent of people who that was their response to our work. I'm not going to deny those people. I'm not going to say, you know, you, if that's your belief, you have no home here. I think you do have a home here. I just want to challenge you to think a little bit deeper when we are in our Chicken Little mode, right? If we want to call it that. What are the things that I have said? I've said, Look, your city is functionally insolvent. Your City has more liabilities than they have the capacity to meet those obligations. Your city has made too many promises to maintain roads and sidewalks and pipes, police protection, fire protection, to take care of parks, replace equipment, mow ditches, trim trees. Your city's made 10 times the number of promises that it can keep with the wealth that has been created in your community, there's a massive, massive mismatch. I've also said, and I think this is the part that, you know, some people listen to and be like, Oh, you're a doom and gloom. Er. Other people just like, gloss over it. Other people, you know, just like, okay, that that's cute, Chuck. You're getting a little bit in the Chicken Little territory. I've said there's no happy way that this works itself out. If you have 10x the promises, then you have cash to pay, or wealth to pay. There's really only two outcomes. You have to increase the amount of wealth that you have, or you have to decrease dramatically the number of promises you're going to keep. And let's not sugar coat that. I've not tried to sugarcoat this in the past, but let's be very direct about what I mean. There are going to be roads that are not fixed. There's going to be bridges that are abandoned, that fall down and are not replaced. There's going to be pipes where people are used to getting water out of where they're not going to get water anymore. That's what this looks like. That's what the end of this looks like. And the math is merciless. I mean, I wrote in my first book, the math on this, as is, is absolutely merciless. There's no way around it. There's no way to not deal with that. And so I want us to take this, this period we're going through right now, which I'm fine calling it chaotic, I'm fine calling it terrorizing. I think it has all of those characteristics. I'm deeply disturbed by what's going on and how we are going about it. But I want to be very, very clear that some degree of anxiety and pain is the outcome of the decisions that we've made. Don't take that as an excuse for what we're going through. Now, I have no excuse for it. I think it's horrible. I'm going to talk a little bit about how we do this differently, but let's start with this idea that, look things are really, really bad. We have created a horrible situation for ourselves, and it actually calls for dramatic action. I recently wrote an article about New York City's congestion pricing, and you know, some of you probably listened to the up zone podcast. Abby and I, last summer had this long talk about congestion pricing, when, you know the governor of New York said, and we explained what was going on exactly as it worked out. The governor of New York said, Yeah, I'm not going to approve this. Now, what Abby and I both said is that, yeah, it will be approved in January or in December after the election. That's exactly what happened, right? This congestion idea was widely unpopular among suburban voters. The idea is that we'll wait and then once the election is over, once you know President Biden wins re election, or you know vice president Harris wins election. The governor of New York will approve it, it will go into effect. And then, you know, everything will be fine. The first part of that happened, the election happened. And then you know, the governor of New York did say, Yep, go ahead with congestion pricing. It was booted up, and it starts to go but of course, the the Biden Harris part of it did not happen. Donald Trump was elected president, and in his first, I don't know how many days, there was an order that came out of the US Department of Transportation that said, hey, that approval that we gave you, that special dispensation that we gave you, in a sense, to go against what the the underlying rules of federal highway investments are, we're going to give you a waiver on that. And I went to some length there to talk about it being a waiver and special dispensation, because there's been a lot of you know, I wrote in the piece that I wrote, I said the administration has rescinded the federal approval for congestion pricing, and there was a lot of people who got angry with me. I'm going to talk here about some of the anger directed at me in this piece. A lot of people got angry and they said, well, they haven't, you know, it's not rescinded the minute what the administration did was illegal. They can't do this. We're still collecting it, we're still going on. We're still doing it. You know, we're in a big legal fight now, how dare you join the other side? I'm not a lawyer. I'm not pretending I know how this is going to work out, but I am going to step back and say the interstate system, the Federal Highway System, federal funding of local roads, brings with it a whole bunch of strings. One of those strings is that you can't toll roads unless you get, like, special dispensation to do it. You certainly have no, you know, there's nothing in the enabling legislation that allows congestion pricing. And so, in a way, you know, I kind of question whether the original thing was even legal. Now, I'm not a lawyer, I'm sure there's ways of going about this. I guess what I'm saying is that this is an arguable thing, right? What is not really arguable is the idea that you're getting money from the federal government to, in a sense, build and maintain this system, and because you're taking their money, you have to play by their rules. I don't like that. I don't like that system. I'm going to talk in a little bit about how I wish it was a different system. But you know the reaction right off the bat? I mean, we're in the first sentence of the article that I wrote, which to me, was just a statement of fact. You know, the administration rescinded the federal approval of congestion pricing, created all kinds of tumult on my feed. How dare you chuck side with the administration? How dare you even pretend that this was a move that they had any legal authority to make at all. How dare you I thought strong Towns was about local control. Strong towns is about localism, right? It's about subsidiarity. It's about bottom up. You know? We we have a centralized, top down system. We have a system that has centralized power in Washington, DC, centralized power in the executive branch, centralized power over your local streets, your local sidewalks, the decisions you make, not just on congestion pricing, but a whole bunch of things in Washington. DC, yeah, I don't like that system. I've been trying to change that system for a long time. I'm not going to be snide here and be like, welcome to the party all of you who embrace that system. And now don't like the other side of it, but, but come over to to to my side of the equation here, right? Like this is a bad system. And yes, you can say we'll give you federal highway money if you raise your drinking age at 21 and we'll give you federal highway money if you lower the speed limit to 55 or we'll give you federal highway money if you don't congestion price, you can say, Well, Chuck, like, one of those is good and one of those is evil. Like, okay, I understand. I get it. But what you've done is we've created a mechanism where you know, good can be done and evil can be done. It's like the one ring, right? I would use this for good, but it ends up doing evil. I am one who being a localist, being an advocate for subsidiarity, being an advocate for bottom up, believe in the good nature of humans, but also recognize that we can't build systems that depend on that. The

  Chuck Marohn 19:44

  article that I wrote talked about the congestion pricing system in New York. And for those of you that that don't know it, there's two important parts here. Number one, New York is is charging today, and the plan was to charge, in a sense, commuters. Coming into the city, the idea being that the charge would discourage some people from driving, and thereby improve the flow of traffic, create have less congestion, and make New York a better place to live. And the money that was collected from this congestion price would not just go to the city of New York's budget, or the state of New York's budget or some other, you know, political slush fund that people could use. It would go to addressing the very real demand increase that should be expected for transit by giving the money to the Metropolitan Transit Agency, the MTA. This exchange, and this is like two things I want to point out here, we congestion price, and the money goes to the MTA. What? Number one, congestion pricing. Number two, MTA. I want to split those up for a second, because this, this got to be like, I think people had a hard time understanding in the article that I wrote. You know, my dealing with these two as kind of two separate things, congestion pricing. I think congestion pricing is a good thing. I actually look at the City of New York, and I am puzzled as to why there are any automobiles throughout most of it, right? If you go to Manhattan, it's not clear to me why we have vehicles at all. You've got some of the best transit in the world. You could certainly turn the streets into even better transit if you didn't have to deal with the automobiles in the places where they've removed automobiles, not only have businesses flourished, property values flourished, basically human existence flourished. But nobody has a hard time you have an easier time getting around like mobility has increased. I don't know why you wouldn't say, you know, make it so you could do deliveries between 10pm and 6am or something. And those are the vehicles that could be allowed. And on most streets in Manhattan, you just didn't have cars during the day. I it would just be a nicer place. It would be a more productive place in every measurement of flourishing. I think it would be a net positive. I think congestion pricing is a very logical thing for a place in New York, where you, you know, are overrun with vehicles, and you have opportunity, not only for great walkability, great bikeability, but tremendous transit. I personally like Washington, DC is better. But I think, you know, in New York City, it's hard to argue is not the best transit system in North America. You look at this and like I get the argument for congestion pricing and on its own, standing on its own, it makes tons of sense. It makes tons of sense for all of you, who are, you know, the suburban commuter is, you know, taken in the shorts here, let me point out two things. Number one, part of what should happen with New York City having congestion pricing is that development should happen in other places. I had someone arguing to me once, someone who I really have a deep respect for, argued to me that, well, New York should have 20 million people living in it. I mean, it's got 11 million today. It should have 20 million. Like, we should just build the heck out of all this stuff. Like, that's, that's what should happen. I don't think so. I think, you know, large parts of New York, and I'm not trying to sound like a NIMBY apologist here, but I do think that lots of New York has just, you know, reached its level, its highest level of maturity. And while it can still add units, and still should add units, I don't think it can ever add units at the rate at which, you know, young people want to move there and find other young people to marry. A lot of what goes on today in New York City is really, you know, lifestyle kind of things. It's people moving there, living out their 20s and early 30s, finding other people and then leaving. I mean, that is a phenomenon that has happened. I know there's a lot of people who don't do that, but that is a really high percentage of people. I don't think adding, you know, trying to get New York to 20 million people is the answer here. I do think that congestion pricing should in theory, and I think a lot of this depends on, you know, the cities around it and their propensity to accept this should prompt huge amounts of demand for more development. In Hoboken, in Jersey City, in areas surrounding New York. I mean, really in Long Island, there should be a lot of thickening up, a lot of maturing, a lot more development. Because the more you can in a sense. Confidence cancel out those trips like, Okay, you're going to take this trip. It used to cost you a lot in terms of time. Now it's going to cost you time, but it's also going to cost you money. The more expensive that trip gets, whether you're taking it on transit or whether you're taking it by car, the more expensive that trip gets, the more demand there is for alternatives closer to home. We often think of like congestion as having one solution, adding more capacity, and congestion has two solutions, adding more capacity or redirecting that trip to something else, allowing your development pattern to grow, change evolve, respond in this complex way to traffic congestion by adding more local destinations. I think that congestion pricing is a net good, and I wish more cities could seriously entertain this. And I do think that the idea of our biggest, most influential city pioneering this is a net good. I think this is a good thing. I'm also going to say because I've had a lot of people say, Chuck, why do you hate transit? I don't hate transit. If I'm designing a system of congestion pricing in New York City, where does the money go? It does not like their automated traffic enforcement, going into the general fund, which just creates all kinds of horrible incentives, right? That money should go to improving transit, that money should go to making transit better. That's where that money should go. And so I totally agree with the idea that we collect this congestion pricing money and we give it to transit agencies. We give it to places that are going to make transit better.

  Chuck Marohn 26:43

  The problem is, and I'm going to get now to the second thing, right? Congestion pricing is good. The money should go to transit. Here's a second. Here's the second part of my thing. The MTA is a horrible organization. It is poorly run. It is mismanaged. It is laden with debt. It has decades and decades and decades of dysfunction. And when I say it's poorly run and poorly managed, I do not mean like the people running it today are incompetent or corrupt or doing a bad thing, any more than I think like the people who run the US Post Office are incompetent. And you know, what have you, the US Post Office has a bad underlying business model. It's laden with debt. It can't possibly make those debt payments and provide good service. That's just a fact. When we look at the MTA, it's the same exact thing for decades and decades and decades the MTA and really transit agencies around the country. This is a truism for transit. Transit agencies have tried to follow the highway model, tap into the Federal Highway Trust Fund, get that money. And the way you do that is you do big, big projects. Not a lot of money there for fixing the sign board, not a lot of money there for sweeping up the steps, not a lot of money there for keeping the escalator running, but there's lots of money there if you want to build some bespoke addition to your system. And of course, what happens then is all the politics around transits starts to align around the built and they will come model of big projects. So you get not only the local politicians, but you get all the advocates, you get the city councils, you get the land speculators, you get everybody kind of around the idea and the momentum that what we need is another big project. What we need is another extension. What we need is another bit of massive investment into our system. All of these things come with the local contribution, right? The federal government will give you this much money, if you will, raise this much money locally. And the way you raise this much money locally is you take on a big bond, and then you pay it back over time, and then you do that again, and then you do that again, and then you do that again, and you layer debt upon debt upon debt upon debt to the point where there's this absurd argument about transit paying for itself, and when I wrote confessions of recovery engineer, the transit advocates were really mad at me because I made the case that transit should pay for itself, and I laid out exactly how that would be done, and they were really, really mad at me because they didn't get to the second part. They got stuck on the first part transit should pay for itself. Transit is a wealth accelerator in a place like New York City. I mean, the idea that you would pay for it with increased land values and assessments, pay the capital costs and then use the toll box for O and M, to me, is like the most logical thing is very easy. No system today in North America runs that way, and so I understand the pushback, like the people who say, Well, you can't fund transit that way because you can't, because every transit agency, especially the MTA, is larded up with massive amounts of debt, and every year they do tons and tons and tons. Of debt service. And so in New York City, it's something like 80 cents. 85 cents of every dollar that they collect at the fare box goes to pay debt on prior capital projects that they've done. What that means is that the operations and maintenance budget gets squeezed and squeezed. The more big projects you do, the more big things you roll out, the more that O and M gets squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, because the more it's competing with the big infusion of cash. Oh, you you want that billion dollars? Well, you got to come up with a billion dollars of your own money. You got to take on a billion dollars of debt. You want that billion dollars from the federal government. You're gonna have to take on more debt. When you take on more debt, you've got to service that debt. You have to pay every month on bonds, and that squeezes the money that you have. What is the congestion pricing money going to go for? Is it going to go to repay MTA existing debt and put them in a better financial position? No, is it going to fund long term operations and maintenance so that you know you can have improving levels of service, improving conditions better, operations better? No, not at all. They're going to continue cutting routes, continue cutting schedules despite demand. Right? I have not spent a ton of time in New York, but I know enough people who have either left New York disgusted with the transit system, like I, I used to write it all the time, and now, like they've cut service and not I'm out of here. I hear this. I know this. I understand it. What is the congestion pricing money going to do? Well, MTA has floated a bunch of bonds to do new projects, new extensions, new stations, which, by the way, I'm sure are going to be awesome. And I'm sure there's lots of people are like, this will change my life. This is really needed. This is really great. I get it like we can always justify the next project. I understand the money from congestion pricing is going to pay debt on new projects that the MTA will do to expand service area. This is a bad business model. And so the article that I wrote was really looking at that business model and saying, Hey, this this agency, MTA, is really bad and needs reform. And oh, by the way, that is true whether President is Donald Trump or the president is Kamala Harris, the MTA is a bad agency with a bad business model that is not functioning the way that it should, and that needs massive reform back during the pandemic, I wrote an article about the MTA, and then I said, what we should be doing is going to them and saying, Hey, we will take over all of your you know, there was going to be, like, a bailout of the MTA. They were going to send them a bunch of money to basically, like, not have to reduce service as much as they were reducing it. And I said, we really need to do is fix it. We need to go there and reform it, and take away their debt and say we will only do this, though, if you run differently, that's what needs to happen. There needs to be reform. The system needs to be changed, because New York City needs great transit. New York City would benefit from great transit. New York City needs to have a system of expansion that is also tied to the land use and the property value increases. That's called an assessment. There's a way of doing this as a mechanism of expanding the system and having that expansion pay for itself. We don't use that. We're incapable of doing it because we're stuck this plan from New York City keeps the system stuck. I had people who commented on the article and said, Well, Chuck the MTA is desperate for money. Yeah, I know they're desperate for money. That's part of the problem. They're not a well run agency. They're not a good government entity. They need to be fixed. Now, here's the tension. If you listen to the administration, the administration has just said we're going to end congestion pricing. Screw the MTA. Screw all. View like, you know, this is done. We're just going to end it. And they will say things like, you know, we don't want suburban commuters to have to pay for a dysfunctional transit agency. And you know what? I think that's like a legitimately true thing, that that is a very easy case to make, because the second half of that statement is true a dysfunctional transit agency. I'm going to try to say this in like, a way that does not trigger a bunch of people. Part of where we're at right now, part of where we're stuck with this dysfunctional national political conversation, is that we have, you know, a team red and a team blue and a team red will look at a dysfunctional agency like the. TA and say, You know what that agency needs? It needs a chainsaw. It needs to be gutted like a pig, right? Like, let's just hack away at this thing. And Team Blue in reaction, says, Oh no, it doesn't need any reform at all. Maybe reform would be nice, but, like, what it really needs is a lot more money. What it really needs is ways to give it more money. Team Red is right in the sense that the MTA needs huge amounts of reform. Where they are faltering is that this is not how you do it. Team Blue, in this case, is way, way, way too tolerant of this dysfunction, and I think way too like unaware and blase and just not mindful of the fact that the longer this dysfunction goes on, the more, in the MTA case, the more the quality of the service is squeezed out in order to pay What are and let me put it in terms that I think will resonate, what is going to pay bond holders, rich people who buy tax free bonds from the MTA, that's who we are supporting with our transportation dollars. That's who is getting paid through this system as like a rentier class, that's who's getting supported by this congestion pricing scheme, the rich people who are floating bonds, you know, the pension funds, the insurance companies, the big Wall Street banks, the hedge funds, all that who are floating these, you know, buying these muni bonds that a place like The MTA is floating.

  Chuck Marohn 36:41

  That's where the money is going. It's not going to operations, it's not going to maintenance. It's not going to make the system work better. It's not going to increase service. It's going to pay debt. And yes, it's debt for new capital projects, but that is not you know, every capital project you do creates an obligation for decades in the future to take the money that you're bringing in and pay that debt. Okay, Chuck, but congestion pricing was that money? Yeah, it's just another source of paying more debt. Many of you are probably sitting right now, like the way that the readers of this article were, you know, Chuck, how can you defend the administration? I'm not, I'm disgusted. I'm horrified. Like, this is not I've said before. People get really mad at me. I get these people every now and then, who are like, you know, Chuck, you don't use the same language that that I do. I'm a I'm a Dyna wool progressive, and you don't use the same language as I do, and so you must be part of the Maga team. You know, denounce them, tell us who you voted for. I don't play those games, and I tend to like ignore those people. But I've said on this podcast a number of times, I did not vote for Donald Trump. I didn't vote for him in 2016 I didn't vote for him in 2020 I didn't vote for him in 2024 this wrecking ball is not what I want. This is not the way I want things to run. Chuck, why are you against transit? I'm not against transit. Transit is the number one wealth accelerator in major cities. We should be doing transit everywhere that we can financially justify it, and when we do it, will be a huge wealth accelerator. The reality is, is we do transit today as a charitable overlay of a dysfunctional highway system. We use the same money stream with the same values and the same approach, and we get the same bad outcomes. I want to divorce transit from that system. I feel like I'm the most pro transit person in the country. Chuck, why are you against congestion pricing? I mean, I hope that I've made clear I think congestion pricing is the answer. Like, I'm all for this, and I'm even more for devolving these decisions down to the local level, which also means cutting the strings, aka the funding from the federal government, and having this stuff funded more locally, where I think you get better decisions. Chuck, chuck the MTA needs money. They're desperate for funds. Yeah, I know, I know they are. That's part of the problem, right? That is both the problem and the symptom of the problem. A few weeks ago, I had Ben hunt from the website epsilon theory on the podcast. And, you know, some of you felt, Oh, that was a weird divergence. Some of you, I think, got it. Some of you felt that was, you know, a bit off topic. I love Ben, and I love his work, and I actually think he, more than anyone else right now is writing or has been writing about, you know, this change what's what's going on in our society. His work, you know, deals with investing, but also largely narrative how our culture develops. Narratives and how we talk about who we are to each other. He wrote an article on his site recently called it was never going to be me, and I'm just going to read the beginning of this. The first two paragraphs are quote. It's a quote from a resignation letter of a guy named Hagen scotten, I hope I'm saying that right. H, A, G, A N. Hagen scotten, S, C, O, T, T, E, N. Hagen scoten is the Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and he was asked by the Deputy Attorney General to dismiss federal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. This Assistant US Attorney was working on that case, and he was said, you know, stop working on the case, dismiss the charges. And instead of doing that, he resigned. Ben goes on to point out, you know, Scouten is a registered Republicans served three combat tours in Iraq. Was a war of the Bronze Star. You know is a good dude, right? Is the sense that you get. Here's the quote from his resignation letter. Quote, no system of ordered Liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges or the stick of threatening to bring them in again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me. I think that idea of it was never going to be me is such a powerful one, and I'm grateful for Ben for sharing that letter because I hadn't seen it in another place, but it's a powerful one that resonated with me, and I think gives us as strong towns advocates, a way to think about what is going on today. We can recognize that two things can be true at the same time. We can recognize that congestion pricing should happen. That is a good thing, that is a good policy, we can also recognize that the MTA is really bad and needs to be reformed, and that a lot of good would come from that we don't have to blindly support the current MTA, and we also don't have to look at the criticisms of the MTA as an attack on congestion pricing. We can recognize that these two things can be true. At the same time, we can recognize that cities don't have enough money to maintain their core infrastructure. We can recognize that and at the same time, we could recognize that the federal government shouldn't spend more on local infrastructure. We can recognize that those two things, while, while, seemingly today in our system, are in competition with each other, we can we can recognize that they can both actually be true. And let me take it a step further, we can diagnose the problem clearly that cities don't have enough money to maintain their infrastructure and not automatically, then have to believe that, well, the federal government should spend more money on infrastructure, right? That's the leap. We don't have to make that leap. We can recognize these two things are true. We can recognize that the Federal Highway Trust Fund is insolvent, and we can also recognize that putting more money into the Federal Highway Trust Fund is a really bad policy. Just because we recognize that the fund is insolvent doesn't mean that we have to support putting more money into it. We can actually oppose these things. And in the past, when we have opposed this type of infrastructure spending or this type of Highway Trust Fund bailout, there's all this, like litany of people that say, Well, what about my project? Well, this is good. This is we, yes, we can recognize that there are good things that come out of the Federal Highway Trust Fund, while also recognizing that there are a lot of bad things that come out of that Federal Highway Trust Fund, and that the way that it actually funds projects. The thing that it was set up to do, which is to expand the highway system, is done like needs to end it needs to go away. Be generous with me here, I'm going to veer a little bit. I want to make this very clear what I'm saying. We can look at an organization like USA ID, and we can see that it does a lot of good in the world. At the same time, we can look at an organization like USA ID and recognize that it is also bloated, corrupt and does a lot of bad, nefarious things in the world. We can see the. Those things at the same time. We don't have to blindly believe one or the other. And I threw that last one in that's not like core strong towns, because I know like that is one that has got everybody up in arms. It's not going to be us, it's never going to be me. It can't be us. We have to be able to see clearly that these two things can be true. At the same time,

  Chuck Marohn 45:28

  in the coming weeks, we are going to release at strong towns something called the fiscal health assessment. This is a project we've been working on for a while. We actually, in looking at city budgets very closely, recognize that a lot of the talk and the discussion around city budgets is very distorting. You know, cities that have to balance their budget every year come out with this, you know, hey, our budget's balanced. And then we start scratching the surface, and we recognize that, you know, there's a lot of smoke, mirrors, accounting gimmicks. We borrow money from 20 years in the future and spend today, and then that balances our budget today, which is all we care about. And then, you know, the next two decades, we're burdened with this debt. There's an intense amount of craziness that goes on because cities do cash budgets every year. It's like, we balance our budget because we got enough money in our pocket, but, you know, we mortgaged our house and sold off the kids college fund, you know. But hey, that's what we had to do to balance our budget this year. And the only thing we report is that the budget is balanced. Similarly, like the ratings agencies. Hey, this place is rated double A like, you know, go ahead, and you guys can borrow as much money as you want, and then you like, scratch the surface, and it's really, really bad. We wanted to find a way to show and demonstrate that really bad. And again, I'm going to go back to the Chicken Little stuff we've been saying for years. Cities are broke. Cities are bankrupt. Cities are insolvent, starting in a few weeks, we are going to be releasing the data and a worksheet for you to figure this out in your place. We're going to show you exactly how bad it is, and whatever you think it is, it is worse. It is worse. The fiscal health assessment is, we're kind of presenting it like a doctor's checkup, right? You go to the doctor and you get your cholesterol, you get your, you know, blood pressure, you run the blood work, and get all that stuff. And, you know, this is like, you go get your cholesterol, and it's off the charts, and you go get your blood pressure, and, like, you should be dead. And you go, you know, these are and it's uniform. I mean, this is the astounding thing. It's like across the board, every city we look at same thing and listen, this is our core argument, right? Everybody asked me, like, who's the city that's doing this? Right? Nobody. We're all in the middle of the same experiment. We all did the same thing at the end of World War Two. We are all growing in the same way. We all the same zoning, same building codes, the same federal government subsidizing this, the same housing market, the same everything, every city is broken the same way. Starting in a few weeks here, we're going to start rolling this out and showing people how bad it really is. It's bad. It's really bad. The answer to this being really bad is not to take a chainsaw to local government. It's not to take a chainsaw to the system. It's not to gut the system like a pig, right? That's not the answer. But the answer is also not to pretend nothing's wrong, to give the system more money to look at the symptoms and deal with those instead of dealing with the underlying problem. And this is where the tension comes, because right now, what we are being forced to do, what we are being asked to do, what we are being pushed to do, and what we've really been pushed to do my entire time here at strong towns, is to pick a team. You Go Team Red, you go team blue, and when you do, there's an entire subset of beliefs that you have to adhere to. If you go on one team, you've got to believe that everybody's corrupt. Everything is bad. All these systems are bloated. All these systems need to be ripped down to their studs. Let me say there's a lot that is real about that. There's a lot there's like an underlying truth and an underlying reality there, but the idea that we would hack it all with a chainsaw, that we would just rip it down, that that more can be gained through destruction, is just is just wrong. It's just not, not the way you actually fix these systems. If you don't like that, you're pushed to. The other team, and then the other team, you are a sense, asked to or required to make an excuse for every one of these systems. Because any show of like, yeah, the MTA, they're loaded up with debt. They need to be reformed. Well, now you're just talking like sympathy. Talk to the other team. You're just acknowledging that the other team has a point. And so what it's done is it's made us dumb, like blind and dumb to the actual problems, like, insensitive to these deep, deep, deep, structural problems. We're going to show you through the fiscal health assessment how bad this is. I actually did a little preview a couple days ago to a group in Houston. Houston's mayor, I wrote an article about this last year. Houston's mayor said, Houston is broke, like literally we are broke. We have $160 million budget deficit, and we're in a lot of trouble. And so, you know, he proposed cuts across a bunch of different places. 100 $60 million is what their cash budget shortfall is this year. $14.6 billion is what they've actually spent that they're going to need future revenue to pay for $14.6 billion that's the gap. That's $160 million annual deficit for 94 years. Houston, back in 2016 I think it was, was actually like balance sheet broke by their own numbers, like all this stuff in the fiscal health assessment comes from the city's own financial reports. We're not, you know, coming up with our own numbers, doing our analysis. We're just taking their numbers, plotting them up over time and showing you what it looks like. In 2016 Houston actually had more liabilities than they had assets. They were paper broke. They were on paper broke. They got a little bit better in 2020 2021 2022 2023 because they got a bunch of money from the federal government in the pandemic. But now it started to like go back on trend, right back to that deep, deep, deep insolvency. Houston is far from the worst place, far from the worst place, and Houston is devastatingly bad. Here's why I'm going through this. I know we feel a lot of terror today. I know a lot of people out there hurting. I know there's a lot of anxiety. I'm going to say this, and I don't want to sound insensitive, it was going to get worse. You can have cities be this bankrupt and not have it get worse. There's no state that can bail out all these cities. The federal government's not going to bail out all these cities, we might soften some of the symptoms here and there, but there's not going to be any general bailout. Houston's not going to get $20 billion to bail like it's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. This is going to get really bad and really ugly. And when I said at the top that there's going to be people who are getting water today who are not getting water tomorrow, there's going to be people who have sewage pipes that are going to stop working. There's going to have be people whose roads just fall apart and are never fixed. There's going to be people who call the fire department and they don't show up like this is going to be commonplace. That feels very chaotic, very disordered, very, very crazy. And I I I realized that I've been saying this for a long time. I sound like Chicken Little Right? Like things are gonna get bad. Things are gonna get worse. I'm telling you right now today, the things that you're feeling about what is going on in Washington, DC, right now, this kind of feeling of disorientation is going to be with us for a long time. The way we deal with this is to not join one of these big, top down teams. The way we do it is to recognize that two things can be true at once, that the way we do things is broken and needs to fix. Needs to be fixed, needs change, needs reform, and that people with courage, people with vision, people with empathy, can roll up their sleeves and do that. We can also recognize that there are people who are going to be hurt by this, people who are dependent on this, and we actually owe it to them and to ourselves and to our society and to our culture, to not ignore that and to actually deal with that and address that. As we change these systems, the train goes to one destination. We all end up in a place where like these things are ultimately going to balance out reach an equal. Librium, this distortion of the post war American Dream development pattern, auto based craziness, has a mathematical endpoint. It has a mathematical destination.

  Chuck Marohn 55:14

  The question is, how do we get there? And from a strong town standpoint, we get there, by us in our places, stepping up, taking responsibility for the systems we control and run and operate, and doing them in the most competent, capable way possible. That's how we fix this stuff. That's our way out. I'm not pretending that that is a way without pain. I'm not pretending that's a way without hard choices. In fact, this week, I was giving a talk, and some I was just gonna swear some rather like ignorant person said at the end, you know, you're saying we should build backyard cottages, and you're saying that we should allow single family homes to be turned into duplexes, and you're saying that we should have no minimum lot sizes and let people build smaller homes and neighborhoods. But where is everybody going to park? What's going to happen when the fire truck wants to drive down the street and there's people parked all over what? What is going to happen. You're talking about something you know that is untenable. And I said, Okay, I hear you understand. You find the pain of trying to find a place to park. You find the challenge of, how do we provide emergency services to areas with more on street parking congestion, you find that to be a huge challenge and a huge inconvenience. I understand. I find the fact that your city is completely broke and has no money to maintain their core services, the bigger challenge, the thing I'm more sensitive to, the thing, I think, is the larger emergency, so we can put on street parking as the highest priority that we can never like, allow that to be uncomfortable, in which case our taxes are going to continue to go up, our services are going to be cut, and our city is going to continue to fall apart. Or we can recognize that, hey, people with some ingenuity can actually figure out how to park and make other arrangements and deal with the thing that we're responsible for dealing with, which is running this city competently. That's what I'm asking us to do. That's the strong towns way. That's the way out of this craziness. That's the way to see through it clearly. That's the way to put all this in perspective. That's the way to not have sleepless nights about, you know, the insane stuff going on in Washington, DC. That's the way to actually have empathy for people everywhere. That's a way to actually love your neighbor. That's the way to care about Canadians, that's the way to care about people around the world. That is the way that we actually start to fix some of this stuff. I think we can stand up today and say, it's not going to be us. We're not going to be part of the chainsaw. We're not going to be part of the hacking of these systems. But it's also not going to be us to make excuses for why they don't work, why they're not running, why they're continuously broke and need more money and need more bailouts and need more fixes, and we are not going to be the ones to make excuses for the symptoms that we see. It's not going to be us. Thanks everybody for listening. Get out there and build a strong town, right? Like, keep doing what you can, and I don't, I don't care what you can do, right? Like, if it is, if it is, like, run for mayor, reform your city. Like, do that. If it is, share a social media post. Do that. If it's to put an arm around someone who's struggling, do that. That might be what we need right now. Thanks, everybody.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “It Was Never Going To Be Me” by Ben Hunt (Epsilon Theory article)

• “Ben Hunt: Surviving the Widening Gyre Through Hope and Community” (Strong Towns Podcast)

• Chuck Marohn (Substack)

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