Can We Build Strong Towns from Scratch in the 21st Century?
Host Abby Kinney, an urban planner in Kansas City, and regular cohost Chuck Marohn, Strong Towns founder and president.
With the housing market still hot as a red poker despite an uptick in interest rates, Nolan Gray, in a recent article from Bloomberg’s CityLab, explores the idea of building brand-new cities (in the mode of 21st-century China or the Brasilia of the latter 20th century) to address the housing crisis. Alain Bertaud, a fellow at the Marron Institute for Urban Management and a former city planner at the World Bank, engages with Gray in this published interview to explain whether or not this is a realistic solution.
Host Abby Kinney and her co-host Charles Marohn of Strong Towns chew it over in this episode of Upzoned.
“Historically, infrastructure follows the market, not the other way around,” Kinney notes. “Huge public investments in infrastructure where there are no jobs are not really a very smart investment because the upfront costs of building an entire city's worth of infrastructure are so incredibly high. The public sector would have to be in a negative cash flow for a very long time.”
Marohn talks about places where this has actually been done, with the government fronting the money for infrastructure and subsidizing individuals through mortgages and commercial real estate loans. “They fail in every financial metric that is longer than the immediate sugar high you get out of the transaction,” he says.
There are interesting examples, as both hosts discuss, but it’s hard to beat an organically grown, incrementally developed city, where historic trial and error has made places that work. Where do you fall on this question?
Abby Newsham is the cohost of the Upzoned podcast. Abby is an urban design and planning consultant at Multistudio in Kansas City, Missouri. In her own community, she works to advance bottom-up strategies that enhance both private development and the public realm, and facilitates the ad-hoc Kansas City chapter of the Incremental Development Alliance. When she’s not geeking out over cities, Abby is an avid urban mountain biker (because: potholes), audiobook and podcast junkie, amateur rock climber, and guitarist. You can connect with Abby on Twitter at @abbykatkc.