The Suburban Experiment killed the starter home. Here's how cities can bring it back to life.
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Just as a fragile ecosystem can wither without the right conditions, our housing system is struggling under the weight of imbalance. But small, intentional shifts can restore stability. The seeds of change are already planted. It’s time to cultivate them.
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With office vacancies and housing needs at record highs, converting one into the other seems like an obvious fix. However, office conversions are very difficult and expensive. Cities would get better results by enabling incremental development.
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Chuck is joined by Seth Zeren, a neighborhood real estate developer, to discuss the six code reforms recommended in “The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform.” (Transcript included.)
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Small, adaptable homes create opportunities for individuals and families to build stable, connected lives. Here’s how this style of development is creating housing opportunities in Florida.
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Tulsa, Oklahoma, is joining a growing list of cities that have integrated preapproved plans into their housing toolkits. This approach makes it easier for small-scale developers to complete projects quickly and cheaply.
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For decades, we've been living under an unspoken grand bargain when it comes to housing. Most people don’t think about explicitly, but it shapes nearly every conversation we have about growth, change and affordability in our cities and towns. It’s time to change the conversation.
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In this episode, Chuck discusses the common misbelief that an incremental approach to housing development is inherently slow, what that means for major cities, and how to make incremental housing more appealing to people who don’t want their neighborhoods to change.
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Chuck was recently invited onto The Building Culture Podcast to debate the housing crisis with California YIMBY’s Nolan Gray. It was a great conversation that explores how these movements align and differ in their approaches to housing.
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I want to draw two insights relating human development to the way cities evolve. These insights are critical to understanding America’s housing crisis and our response to it — and why building housing in major cities can't meaningfully address the housing crisis.
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To escape the housing crisis, we need a lot of housing to be built quickly. The key isn't large, ponderous projects; it's fast, widespread incremental development. We know the types of units that can be scaled and we know how to build them. The only thing we need now is for cities to devote themselves to doing it.
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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.
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.
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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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