The Strong Towns Podcast
Strong Towns
300 episodes
The Strong Towns Podcast is a weekly conversation on the Strong Towns movement, hosted by Strong Towns Founder and President Charles Marohn and frequently featuring special guests. The podcast explores how we can financially strengthen our cities, towns, and neighborhoods and, in the process, make them better places to live. Join Chuck in examining how everything from urban design to economics to systems theory to psychology helps inform this core question.
Episodes page 4 of 6
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The Impact of Systemic Racism on Jackson’s Water Crisis
A prominent question that keeps coming up since the beginning of the Jackson, Mississippi, water crisis is, “How did we get to this point?” If you’ve been tuning in to the Strong Towns Podcast, you’ll know that Chuck…
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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Most Comprehensive Resource Strong Towns Offers
The final installment of this week’s special Member Week Strong Towns Podcast features a discussion between Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns’ new director of community action, Edward Erfurt. Longtime listeners may…
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A Whole New Framework for Analyzing Car Crashes
Membership is 40% of Strong Towns’ revenue—we couldn’t do this work without you. As the Strong Towns movement has grown, we’ve started to take on larger projects and have looked at ways that we can support those…
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This Is How the Strong Towns Movement Becomes “Unignorable”
As a part of our special Member Week series, Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns Community Builder John Pattison talk about the Local Conversations program. They discuss how the first Local Conversations came to be, what’s…
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The Power of Talking Locally Over the Noise of National Politics
On today's special Member Week episode, Chuck talks with Strong Towns Communications Associate Lauren Fisher about Strong Towns’ approach to communication. They chat about the big ideas we’re working toward and how to…
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The Strong Towns Strategy
Welcome to Member Week, where we’re celebrating our members and all that they do to support this movement. This week, the Strong Towns podcast will be a little different. Tune in every day to listen as Chuck Marohn…
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Water System Crises and Solutions
In a September episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talked about the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. He spoke on the technicalities of American water systems, what failed in Jackson, and how Jackson ended…
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The Highway Boondoggles Report
We began building the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, and we completed the majority of it by the end of the 1960s. The goal of creating this massive transportation system was to connect far away places— and…
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What Customer Service Should Mean for a City
Sometimes, our local governments can get caught up in an ineffective mindset while managing cities, where they take on the role of a customer service representative. While it comes from a place of wanting to be…
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Hawaii’s Suburban Experiment
This September, Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn was invited to speak at the Hawaii Congress of Planning Officials Conference on the Island of Kauai. While he was there, Chuck went on a walking tour and witnessed…
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The Jackson Water Crisis Is Not a Fluke—Your City Could Be Next
What’s happened with Jackson’s water crisis is an absolute tragedy. In late August, a state of emergency was issued after there was no clean running water in the city. Residents who could get water reported that they’d…
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Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns Discuss Public Transit in North America
Jason Slaughter, producer of the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, is a pretty cool and talented guy. He’s created multiple excellent videos on Strong Towns ideas, taking our written words and translating them through…
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“Bias Writ Large” in the Property Tax Assessment System
Fair property tax systems are crucial to developing a financially strong community, as property taxes represent a large source of public revenue for most local governments. In today’s episode of the Strong Towns…
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One of the Most Dangerous Assumptions We Have Made
Thanks to technology, cars and roads just keep getting safer, right? That’s the message we hear in the news and advertising on a regular basis. But if that were the case, traffic fatalities should be going down as…
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The Drip, Drip, Drip of Traffic Deaths
Every hour, four people are killed in a car crash. Over a year, this totals up to about 40,000 people. “It’s an astounding number,” says Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn. In this episode of the Strong Towns…
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An Update on Strong Towns’ Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering Licensure
In today's episode, Chuck Marohn gives an update on where Strong Towns is at in its ongoing lawsuit against the Minnesota Board of Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and…
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Majora Carter: Reclaiming Your Community
Success: however you define it, it’s what many of us strive for. Whether it’s success in one’s career, school, family life, or other dreams, no one wants to experience a perceived failure in life. In the minds of many…
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Nolan Gray: Exposing the Arbitrariness of Zoning Codes
Professional city planner and longtime Strong Towns contributor Nolan Gray comes to The Strong Towns Podcast today to talk about his new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. As…
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End the Parking Mandates and Subsidies That Are Hurting Our Cities
Building community wealth is difficult. There’s a lot of hard work involved, there are tough calls, there is risk. In even the best of circumstances, there’s always a chance your investment (in dollars, time, and…
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Legalizing Incremental Change—Everywhere—To Meet America’s Housing Needs
A house is many things. It is shelter, a place to live. It is an investment, a store of wealth. It can be a repository of memories and it can be a dream for the future. “The American Dream,” as a home is sometimes…
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Your City’s Accounting Is Unnecessarily Obscure. It’s Time To Pull Back the Veil.
Who do we prepare local budgets for, the citizens of a community or distant Wall Street bond investors? Is it more important that an elected council member know what is going on with a city’s finances, or should our…
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America *Must* End Highway Expansions, Before It’s Too Late
When we build a highway, we know we have to maintain it. The same applies to a bridge. Every highway or bridge that has ever been built comes with a predictable and easily calculable schedule for maintenance. This…
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Safe and Productive Streets
A street is not merely a place for cars. In fact, the primary purpose of a street has nothing to do with motor vehicles at all. A street is, and always has been, a platform for growing community wealth and capacity,…
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Mike McGinn: Making America More Walkable
America Walks is a nationally recognized non-profit organization that aims to create a more walkable America by giving people resources to effectively advocate for change. Join Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn in a…
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This Vancouver-Based Artist Is Writing Music…About Building Strong Towns!
People have taken the Strong Towns approach in a lot of fascinating directions, but this might be one of the most fascinating yet: William Chernoff is a young, Vancouver-based musician who has written songs inspired by…
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Chuck Marohn Answers Your Questions
It's time for another Q&A session! Today, Chuck Marohn will be responding to your questions on things like how to calculate the actual value of spaces like public parks, whether or not high visibility traffic cameras…
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Ryan Crane: Malpractice and Accountability in Engineering—A Surgeon’s Take
In most medical centers, physicians hold routine “morbidity and mortality” conferences, where they analyze cases where patients died or were seriously injured while under medical care. In today’s episode of The Strong…
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An Update and the Strong Towns Strategic Plan
Chuck is taking a little break from podcasting for a few weeks, but in the meantime, here's an update on what's going on behind the scenes at Strong Towns!
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“How Can My Town *Not* Be Wealthy When There’s Been So Much Growth?”
“How can a city not have pots overflowing with money if there has been so much growth? How are apartments subsidizing people who live in single-family neighborhoods?” That’s what the city of Oviedo, Florida, asked…
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Annamarie Pluhar: Shared Housing Doesn’t Have to Be Scary
Today on the Strong Towns Podcast, host Chuck Marohn is speaking with special guest Annamarie Pluhar. Pluhar is an expert on co-housing and shared housing, and is the author of the book Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for…
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The Latest Update on the Strong Towns Lawsuit
Today on the Strong Towns Podcast, we wanted to give our listeners an update on the lawsuits that Strong Towns is involved in. For those new to Strong Towns, here is a brief overview: Charles Marohn, president of…
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Truth in Accounting: Making Cities’ Finances Transparent for All
Last year, our friends over at Urban3 introduced us to a nonpartisan nonprofit called Truth in Accounting, which recently published Financial State of the Cities 2022, an annual report that they do on local governments…
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Jeff Speck on Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
Today we wanted to share a conversation between Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn and renowned urban planner and walkability expert Jeff Speck. Speck is a returning guest on the Strong Towns Podcast, and author of…
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Chuck Marohn Answers Your Questions
It's time for another Q&A session! Today, Chuck Marohn will be responding to your questions on things like what to do about shoddy development, how communities can employ Strong Towns principles when big-money…
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Jarrett Walker: ”Prediction and Freedom Are Opposites”
This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, host Chuck Marohn welcomes back a special return guest: Jarrett Walker, head of Jarrett Walker + Associates, a transit-planning firm based in Portland, Oregon. Walker has been a…
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Peter Norton: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving
Can driverless cars really be the “safe, sustainable, and inclusive ‘mobility solutions’ that tech companies and automakers are promising us”? In his newest book, Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving,…
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Driving Went Down. Fatalities Went Up. Here’s Why.
Americans drove less during the early months of pandemic, yet traffic fatalities increased. There was a sense among many safety experts that this was an anomaly, that fatality rates would revert to trend once people…
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Tim Soerens: Reconnecting Churches with Their Neighborhoods
This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, we’re kicking off the new year by featuring a special guest: Tim Soerens, author and co-founder of the Parish Collective. Last year, Chuck read Tim’s books The New Parish: How…
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Two Different Languages
There have been dozens of people hit on State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, in recent years, including Gayle Ball who was recently killed crossing State Street in front of the Central Library. Council members…
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Which Wins Out: An Engineer‘s Discretion or a Book of Standards?
All of a sudden, the new book from Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, has been out for nearly two months. It’s already received dozens of five-star reviews, and Chuck is out…
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Another Tragedy at Springfield
Hey Strong Towns Podcast listeners, it's been a while. Chuck's been out on the road, but the subject of this episode was too important not to talk about now. We're revisiting a library in Springfield that many of you…
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The Hidden Values Behind Our Unsafe Streets
On December 3, 2014, a 7-year-old girl named Destiny Gonzalez was killed while crossing State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. What gets lost in the shocking statistics about the number of pedestrians who die…
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Chuck Marohn Answers Your Questions
Have you visited the Strong Towns Action Lab? That's where we keep our best, most actionable content. We've written a lot over the years, and we wanted to have a place we could direct people to when they want to…
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Rick Harnish: Stronger Transit for Stronger Cities
Which comes first: a great transit system or a great city that can support it? What role does high-speed rail play in an overall, effective transportation system? And is an incremental approach really possible with…
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Bad Benches (and Other Park Problems)
This week on the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck makes a confession about something he did that he now regrets...and you might be surprised at how much of it revolves around poor placement of park benches in his town of…
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Fighting an Urban Highway Expansion in Shreveport
For more than four years, Strong Towns has been telling the story of the so-called I-49 Connector project in Shreveport, Louisiana. We say “so-called” because while this project may seek to connect two sections of…
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Johnny Sanphillippo: The Trajectory of Suburbia
You've read Granola Shotgun. You've seen Johnny Sanphillippo on our website (including in an article just released today). You've heard him on the Strong Towns Podcast multiple times, and those interviews have each…
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Pete Davis: The Case for Commitment in an Age of “Infinite Browsing”
We hear it all the time: “Keep your options open.” It’s the philosophy that shapes much of our approach to education, career, and relationships. It also shapes where we choose to live and, critically, how we live…
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Here's How Cities Undermine Their Own Competitiveness
The traditional development pattern of towns and cities evolved with humans, the same way ant hills evolved with the ant and bee hives evolved with the bee. Yet around the time of the Great Depression, North Americans…
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Expertise Is Not Absolute
How far should we go in trusting experts? That's the question that Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn tackles this week on the Strong Towns Podcast. By taking a trip through the past to the present, Chuck looks at…
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