Benjamin Herold, author of Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, joins host Chuck Marohn on this week’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast.
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Five families from Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburg move to the suburbs in search of the American dream…only to find decline.
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Millennials are getting older, having children…and fleeing to the only places where they can afford housing: the exurbs.
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I was asked how much the typical suburban development is costing this Tennessee city. Here’s what I found.
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Are they a fountain of mixed-use opportunity or a financial drain for cities?
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This series of studies of 19th-century development in St. Paul, MN, can help us understand some of the earliest traces of what would later become the suburban development pattern.
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If there has ever been a good time to change our development pattern, the time is now.
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We’ve created a society in which families have to choose between either spread-out, single-family living or dense urban living—and each side of this (artificial) binary can come with upsides and downsides.
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The winds are shifting for cities. Are you paying attention?
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Zoning restrictions in this Minneapolis suburb have rendered much of its original development in violation of its current rules. The city’s leadership is looking to change that.
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A lot of suburban house models distort traditional architectural styles and patterns. Here’s a simple markup showing how they could be improved, without increasing building costs.
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A recent CNBC documentary features Strong Towns insights from Charles Marohn about why suburban development is so risky.
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Suburbia was an experiment—an experiment in the service of building lots of housing very quickly.
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Small-scale, incremental development works in the suburbs too, if we let it.
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As people interested in undoing damage caused by the rise of the suburban development pattern, how should we feel about so-called “McMain Streets”?
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In this Not Just Bikes video, Jason Slaughter explains how raising children in the suburbs significantly restricts their ability to be independent.
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In the realm of urban planning, there’s plenty of discourse out there about housing affordability—but what about household wealth building?
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We tend to choose larger homes than we want our neighbors to choose. The result: suburban-style development that doesn't match what people actually want from their communities.
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NIMBYs are responding to a set of very rational incentives. That presents a challenge for those of us who hope to alter the course of the Suburban Experiment.
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Should states and counties push back against local governments to crack open more options for housing, or will that be counterproductive?
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