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.
Read MoreIn 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.”
Read MoreFearing 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.
Read MoreSince 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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreYou’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.
Read MoreWe 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.
Read MoreMany 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.
Read MoreCriminalizing 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.
Read MoreCan 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.
Read MoreNorth 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.
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreNo 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.
Read MoreBuilding 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.
Read MoreFrom 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.
Read MoreHabitat for Humanity offers a wide range of programs to help people become homeowners, giving the organization a unique perspective on the housing crisis. Strong Towns sat down with two representatives to learn about this perspective, including how Habitat is handling high building costs and why Habitat owners participate in the construction of their homes.
Read MoreA new development in Tempe, Arizona, claims to be “the best place to live car-free in the U.S.” But while this development has many of the trappings of a strong town, it’s lacking one of the most important elements: resilience born from incremental development.
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