On this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck continues answering housing questions submitted by Ohio State University students, covering topics from building codes to local action.
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Allowing housing units to be built on small or irregular lots is a gamechanger for cities that are fighting the housing crisis. Here’s why that allowance is so important and how three developers are using small units and creativity to bring more housing options to their communities.
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The U.S. is in a massive housing bubble fueled by widespread fraud. With banks incentivized to look away and Wall Street and Washington incentivized to keep housing prices artificially high, a bottom-up approach is the only hope for bringing sanity back to the housing market.
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In this episode of Upzoned, host Abby Newsham is joined by John Anderson, a builder and developer in Georgia, to discuss the Strong Towns take on “urban homesteading.”
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Fearing traffic congestion, pollution and water scarcity, the city of Santa Barbara, California, enforced a population cap by preventing the construction of extra housing units. However, 40 years later, the lack of housing is proving to cause these issues more than prevent them.
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Since enacting broad housing reforms in 2019, Durham, North Carolina, has been experiencing an explosion of missing-middle housing and housing affordability. Here are the main reforms the city enacted and how they're helping it fight the housing crisis.
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In this special episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks about the ways housing fraud manifests, how it gradually saturates the market and how it’s connected to the current housing crisis.
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The U.S. is in a massive housing bubble fueled by widespread fraud. With banks incentivized to look away and Wall Street and Washington incentivized to keep housing prices artificially high, a bottom-up approach is the only hope for bringing sanity back to the housing market.
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The United States has attached a societal and even moral weight to the Suburban Experiment, codifying it across the country. But that wasn’t always the case. Many beloved and iconic building styles are incremental, and they’re proof that America can return to a more resilient way of building.
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In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck explains why federal and state government policies can’t solve the housing affordability crisis and how that power actually lies with local leaders.
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You’ve heard of YIMBYs and NIMBYs, but have you heard of YIGBYs? The “Yes In God’s Backyard” movement focuses on leveraging land owned by religious institutions to alleviate the housing crisis.
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We can’t wait for big government housing programs to fix the housing affordability crisis — in fact, they can actually make things worse. But don't lose hope. Local governments have the power to tackle the housing crisis in ways that actually work.
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Many people believe that, with some zoning changes, large-scale development will be the true key to the housing crisis. This isn’t the case. Large-scale development worsens the issues that caused the crisis in the first place. Here’s a few of the ways incremental development is better for cities than large-scale.
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Criminalizing homelessness is often an attempt to make public spaces safe and comfortable. It fails miserably, at the cost of persecuting some of the most vulnerable members of the population. If cities want a real, sustainable solution to a homelessness crisis, they need to address the underlying cause: North America’s broken housing system.
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Can your city escape the housing trap simply through blanket rezoning? How should your city handle historic designations that are blocking housing development? Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn answers these questions and more in this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast.
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North America is facing two widespread crises at the same time: housing and loneliness. This group is proving that cohousing might be the solution to both.
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When fighting the housing crisis, you need to get creative. Toronto is doing just that. Not only have they created a partnership between public officials and private developers, but they’ve also identified a valuable urban resource that often flies under the development radar: transit property.
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No city is an island, and no city can judge its place in the housing crisis based solely on local demand. They must also consider how their restrictive policies may be driving housing demand to other places — or how other cities may be driving demand to them.
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Building affordable housing seems like a win for cities struggling in the Housing Trap. But between its top-down nature and the public subsidies it requires, affordable housing can actually make things worse.
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From college students trying to make ends meet to older individuals who need support from live-in caretakers, occupancy limits make life unnecessarily difficult for a lot of people. Colorado has passed a law that’s going to change that.
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