Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together
What Strong Towns and Abundance have to teach each other
The YIMBY Town conference will be happening September 14-16 in New Haven, CT. I will be presenting a session entitled “If you legalize it, will they build it? Real Estate Development 101.” If you’re planning to attend the conference, I hope you’ll make it. I’ll try to publish the key points afterwards.
I also wanted to acknowledge that Jeremy Levine recently published a somewhat similar piece. I come to some similar conclusions, but I think also tread some different ground. I’d be curious how folks read our two essays together. Thanks for reading!
ABUNDANCE CREATES A STIR
There have been a lot of heated pixels since Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein published their book Abundance earlier this year. Much of that has been intra-left battles between the anti-monopolist left (for example) and liberal abundance types. It has also prompted some harsh words from Chuck Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns, “a bottom up movement to rebuild American prosperity”.
Fortunately these exchanges have been mostly civil learning experiences–because there is a lot to learn from each other! Today I’d like to help facilitate this cross pollination, and try my hand at explaining some of the core Strong Towns ideas (as I’ve come to understand them) and how they might apply to a better Abundance movement (which I am also a supporter of). I think there’s a real opportunity for synthesis if we are able to stay humble and curious.
Who is the guy writing this?
I’m a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer, educator, and advocate. My day job is shoving the slippery stone up the hill of neighborhood repair: historic rehab, adaptive reuse, and neighborhood infill on the walkable west side of Providence, RI.
I’ve been around the Strong Towns conversation since around 2012, making me a founding member. I have written many times on the Strong Towns blog and was deeply involved in bringing the Strong Towns National Gathering to Providence this summer. Chuck and I have road tripped together, talking for hours in the car. Though we don’t always agree, Chuck is a friend and a great guy.
I’ve also been involved in YIMBY activism (a foundation stone of the Abundance movement) for about as long. As a young city planner working in Newton MA and living in Cambridge, I got involved with A Better Cambridge when they were just starting out, and I’ve stayed connected with the leaders who went on to found Abundant Housing MA. Being a displaced SF Bay Area native, I followed with interest the rise of Sonja Trauss and SF BARF and other early YIMBY groups. In the last three years I’ve co-founded a pro-housing (YIMBY) group, Neighbors Welcome! Rhode Island, we’ve joined the national Welcoming Neighbors Network, and have had significant success passing housing reforms in the Ocean State.
Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together
It’s my goal in this piece to persuade you of the possibility and benefits of synthesis between Strong Towns Thought and Abundance Thought. Two great tastes that taste great together.
In trying to understand the tensions between Strong Towns and Abundance, I think it’s helpful to to understand that each movement is fundamentally positive visions but operating in reaction to a different moral crisis.
Strong Towns puts it right on the homepage: “A broken development pattern is bankrupting your city and endangering your neighborhood. A member-powered movement is fighting back.”
The Abundance vision is more diffuse, but might go something like this: A morass of regulations, industry capture, and incumbent interests is clogging up our economy, leading to shortages of essential needs (housing, energy, education, medicine, etc.), while enervating the ability of voters and public officials to change course. An elite movement is developing policy reforms and electoral strategies to fight back.
These different moral crises shape the perceptions of each camp. I hope to help bridge the divide, because both perspectives have important things to teach us. Below I’m going to do my best to give high level descriptions of each school of thought, feel free to skip ahead to section IV if you’re already familiar with both.
STRONG TOWNS THOUGHT
There are a lot of nuances to what we might call Strong Towns Thought. Below I try to represent them in their best form. I will almost certainly miss some details or even whole topics, nevertheless, I will pull out some lessons that Abundance-folks could benefit from.
The first and perhaps most important observation and foundation of Strong Towns Thought is that many types of development that seem to make a community wealthier are actually net fiscal losers: they don’t generate enough tax revenue to support their infrastructure life-cycle costs. Even if every dollar of property taxes paid by the culdesac was saved, there wouldn’t be enough to pay for the cost of repairing the road, replacing the pipes, etc. in 25 years when they are due. These projects are fiscally insolvent, and our towns are full of them: subdivisions, drive throughs, and power centers. Chuck dubbed this effect the “Growth Ponzi Scheme.” New development is needed just to pay the costs of older development, in a never ending need for new growth to keep the ponzi scheme going.
Every road or pipe we build comes with the implicit promise that we (the public) will continue to maintain it. Yet, there’s no conceivable local tax revenue that can cover the cost of maintaining and repairing them all. So towns can only maintain good repair through top-down transfers, which have to be justified with growth, which makes the problem worse. Or communities go into soft default: where they just don’t/can’t maintain the infrastructure (promises) they have made—sidewalks and streets, parks, schools, city services, water quality, etc. all start to decay. This results in places like Ferguson, MO. Places where things are falling apart, there’s no money to fix it, those with means move to the shiny new suburb, leaving behind the decay and those who can’t leave. This is a moral crisis.
From these observations came something that we call, doing the math. The Taco Johns vs. old and blighted block was probably the first example. The shiny and new building seems valuable, but actually uses up so much space that even rundown buildings in the pre-sprawl development pattern generate more taxes in the same land area.
By dividing a properties tax income by the lot area we generate a new map of the city—such as this study of Lafayette LA that shows our downtowns as huge spikes of value, our older neighborhoods pulling their weight, and many shiny and new places actually as fiscal losers, subsidized by poorer residents of the older, more run down, yet more fiscally productive neighborhoods. Doing the math means that we should actually look at the details of the fiscal picture of proposed development to see if it makes our town stronger and more resilient or weaker and more fragile.
The result of the ponzi scheme is that many towns have essentially become wards of the state (and federal) government and require top-down infusions of cash (and debt) to meet capital maintenance needs. As a result, they become responsive to top-down directives and incentives, instead of being responsive to the bottom up needs of their residents and businesses. We do things because we can get a grant for them, not because it meets an urgent need on the ground. And since grants are easier to get for new things than maintenance, the free money of grants is plowed into expanding our future maintenance liabilities, making us more fragile.
The next core idea is that we are currently in a “Suburban Experiment.” Our post-war prosperity (and the self-confidence of high modernist ideals) gave us the will and ability to radically transform the way we build and live: the highway, rigid separate use zoning, neighborhoods built all at once to a finished state, etc. When we perceive ourselves to be wealthy, we tend to be less careful with how we spend our money, assuming further growth will fix any bumps along the way. We got a little careless, a little stupid. We didn’t learn well from our mistakes. New subdivisions are locked in by zoning and other rules. They tend to be at their best right after completion and slowly decline instead of thickening up and gaining value over time like traditional neighborhoods.
To the present we see many examples of dumb projects: building a new strip mall just down the road from the recently vacant K-Mart, the industrial park whose initial public infrastructure costs will never be recouped by tax revenue, the “shovel-ready” bridge that’s not really needed. (Shovel ready is often a euphemism for “project that some agency or leader likes enough to get designed, but that nobody really wants badly enough to build, because it doesn't work fiscally—unless you give me a bunch of free money.”) These are transactions of decline because they increase liabilities faster than assets, and they are only possible because we are awash in money looking for something to invest in. If we had less easy money, the Strong Towns Thinking goes, we’d be more careful to make sure we made good investments, that would pay back the public purse, and make us all more prosperous over time. It wouldn’t be as shiny and new on day one, but it would grow, like compound interest, into shared wealth over time.
A key book in the evolution of Strong Towns Thought is Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott. A seminal work in sociology, Seeing Like a State explores the failures of what is called “high modernism,” a design and governance perspective that believes the world and society can be rationally planned and perfected. Surveying cases ranging from German scientific forestry (which promised to increase timber yields through perfect mono-croping, until it collapsed from disease) to the building of the perfect planned city, Brasilia (hey, it looks like an eagle from a helicopter!).
Contrasting the thinking of le Corbusier and Jane Jacobs, the book makes a compelling case that the instruments of modern statecraft–maps, censuses, surveys, spreadsheets, etc. require flattening society and the environment. Overconfident central planning based on these simplifications tends to fail because it fails to understand how these complex systems work. In contrast, the concept of subsidiarity calls for decisions to be made at the closest scale where they can be competently made. From this contrast came the pithy phrase: “orderly, but dumb vs. chaotic, but smart.”
The top-down view reached its zenith and hubristic fall with Urban Renewal, as personified in Robert Moses. Whole quarters of cities were bulldozed to make way for new “rationally planned” districts and highways, in what is almost universally now understood as an epochal blunder. Not only were over a million people directly displaced, their communities and livelihoods destroyed, but the resulting districts failed to prosper and instead scarred the city around them such that we are still, over 50 years later, only beginning to repair the wounds.
In contrast, we can look at most historic cities that we value today and see that they were predominantly built by small-scale, local builders, developers, and residents, working incrementally: a shack, replaced by a bigger wooden building, replaced by an even bigger brick building, etc. Strong Towns Thinking calls for this kind of incremental development. It’s more distributed, it’s more flexible, more resilient, and it’s not slower (as we can see from the rapid growth of American cities at the turn of the 20th century).
An early and challenging observation is that around many new American light rail stations, even a decade after Transit-Oriented up-zonings, the infill development is halting and much blight remains. Struggling to come up with a reason for this, Strong Towns Thought (among others) hit upon an important point about up-zoning: concentrated up zoning raises the potential value of the land around the station. The result is that each existing owner is going to hold out for the redevelopment opportunity (the big “5-over-1 apartment building) that will pay them the most for the land, investing in an adaptive reuse or some townhouses. So upzoning can actually disincentivize smaller incremental investment and redevelopment. BUT, because there are limits to how many and how quickly the big projects can come, the result is a lot of land going to waste around expensive public infrastructure. Could that have been different if the zoning had instead found a way to encourage more incremental redevelopment, getting that fly-wheel of improvement going?1
ABUNDANCE THOUGHT
The Abundance movement is a cross-partisan big tent that has emerged over the past decade. Participants have different entry points: the slow recovery from the Great Recession, the supply chain bottlenecks following the pandemic, the absurd expense and delay of American rail projects, regulatory barriers to decarbonizing electric infrastructure, and the rising cost of housing. It’s kind of an unexpected ad-mixture of libertarians, YIMBY’s, and state-capacity liberals. There’s no one in charge, notwithstanding Thomspon and Klein’s book. For a more detailed history of the evolution of the Abundance movement, check out this podcast, hosted by the Niskanen Center. Niskanen itself, founded as a pragmatic libertarian think-tank, has become a center of the abundance movement. Abundance now has its own conference, the second annual will took place in DC in September.
The earliest strand of Abundance that I came to be aware of was the Yes in My Back Yard (YIMBY) movement. YIMBY organizing started at the local level in a few of the most supply constrained and expensive housing markets: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston. I was an early member of A Better Cambridge which actively fought these issues out at the local level, both project by project, and then increasingly by winning elections and changing ordinances. However, YIMBY advocates working at the local level soon realized that there were barriers to housing that could only be solved by state level action and began forming state-level YIMBY groups, like CA YIMBY and Abundant Housing MA. Local reforms are by their nature local, but housing markets are regional. Cambridge or Boston alone can’t solve the MA housing shortage, every community must to its part, but winning change across 100 exclusive small towns is impractical (especially given that only current residents get a vote).
Another key plank of the emerging Abundance thought came from liberals and progressives concerned about climate change and working on energy decarbonization. They realized that society’s problems cannot all be resolved merely by regulation or redistribution, we have to actually build stuff. And the way our institutions are set up now (for example, requiring environmental impact reports for adding bike lanes) make it exceedingly difficult to build the infrastructure we need and want: faster trains, cleaner electric grid, lower-cost health care, etc. In contrast to a strain of “degrowth” environmentalism, people are good! (not a cancer) and having abundant (clean) energy is good. We need a “liberalism that builds” said Ezra Klein co-author of the book Abundance, a “supply-side progressivism.”
In Abundance Thought, we need to invest in increasing “state capacity” so that government can do more things and/or do them better. We can hire in-house technical capacity, instead of outsourcing everything to expensive consultants and contractors. We can give government officials more discretion to make good decisions (and hold them accountable for poor ones, instead of hiding behind “I was just following procedure”). Even Tyler Cowen, the libertarian-ish economist who writes at Marginal Revolution, has advocated for “state capacity libertarianism.” Crucially “state capacity” doesn’t just mean the feds, or state governments. A signal example for many state capacity advocates are the “sewer socialists” of early 20th century Milwaukee, who were derided by other socialists for focusing on day to day nuts and bolts of operating a city for the people, instead fomenting the Revolution. Cities and towns need more state capacity as well!
This leads to a fourth(?) plank of Abundance Thought, most notably articulated in a 2019 Michigan Law Review article entitled “The Procedure Fetish,” by Nicholas Bagley. “The Procedure Fetish” aimed to “draw into question the administrative lawyer’s instinctive faith in procedure, to reorient discussion to the trade-offs at the heart of any system designed to structure government action, and to soften resistance to a reform agenda that would undo counterproductive procedural rules. Administrative law could achieve more by doing less.” Bagley reviewed the development of Administrative law through the 20th century, often led by liberals who wanted to make sure the government didn’t do harm. But the result today is that government can’t do anything, good or bad. We’ve made government so ineffective, is it any wonder that people don’t want government to do more things? More books have since come out further developing these themes, including Jen Pahlka’s Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (2023) and Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back (2025).
Another important plank of Abundance, drawing particularly on libertarian economic critiques, has to do with occupational licensing and other barriers to starting a business, a.k.a. “permission slip America.” Over the past century, at the Federal and State level we have erected many more requirements to go into business. Even hair-dressers require expensive training hours and a special license. Licenses aren’t necessarily transferable across state lines. It’s harder for immigrants to practice their professional expertise because, again, licensing. The combination of licensing, complex regulatory environments, state regulation of hospital growth and medical school seats, all together work to benefit incumbents, reduce competition, and reduce economic vitality.
The Abundance movement is young, pragmatic, and ideologically diverse: from anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, to moderate liberals, and democratic socialists. One shouldn’t assume Abundance as a purely “elite” movement, either. There are a lot of local and state YIMBY groups with probably tens of thousands of combined members and energetic attendance at happy hours and events. The Abundance movement is united around the idea that we can make our world better; that we can shift away from a scarcity mindset that dominates our politics; that dynamic markets are good and effective government is good. The failures of our markets and government to end homelessness, to combat climate change, to reverse declines in life expectancy, to provide economic opportunities and responsive governance—these are the moral crises that animate Abundance thought.
THE GREAT DEBATE: TOP DOWN OR BOTTOM UP?
The signal issue at debate between Strong Towns Thought and Abundance Thought around housing is state pre-emption, specifically the ways that many states are rewriting the rules about which land-use and development decisions municipalities get to make for themselves and which are subject to state-level limits or mandates. This gets shortened to “top down, or bottom up,” but I’m not sure that’s the right question.
The word “subsidiarity” refers to the idea (common in Catholic teaching) of making a decision at the smallest scale and most local level that it can be competently made, rather than by a centralized authority. Subsidiarity has been a common thread in the work of the New Urbanists and Strong Towns. So what’s the right level to make decisions about housing reform and development?
For almost a century the answer has been: at the city or town level (before this point the answer was mainly “nobody”). Since the advent of modern planning and zoning controls in the 1920’s, the states passed enabling acts giving local government the responsibility for planning and zoning. Accelerating in the 1950s through the end of the century, cities and towns have created complex and exacting standards to govern private land use and development. The original zoning ordinances might have been a 20-page pamphlet. Today’s zoning ordinances are measured in hundreds of pages and might specify how many bicycle parking spaces you need, the calipers of trees to be planted, fenestration details, and separate two-family dwellings from three-family dwellings or medical offices from lawyers’ offices into different zones.
Because local governments are responsive to their residents, they prioritize the opinions of people already living in a town (non-residents don’t get to vote). Smaller communities lack the resources to hire expert technical staff. In local elections that are often decided by dozens of votes and where angry neighbors might accost a local official while grocery shopping, a few energetic citizens can exert more pressure than the silent majority of the town. “Don’t rock the boat,” status quo bias tends to dominate. Each town in a large metro area faces something of a prisoner’s dilemma. It would be better for the whole region if there were more homebuilding, but no town wants to move first, especially when it’s true that “our town can’t solve this regional housing crisis.”
As the housing crisis has worsened and spread from big coastal metros to many other parts of the country, local housing advocates have struggled mightily to make change at the local level. The scale of the problem and the structural difficulty of winning change at the local level has led to a focus on rewriting the original deal between cities and states about who runs land use: from Yimby Action’s Laura Foote and Jeff Fong’s open letter:
“Marohn believes you have to solve problems at the level of government where tradeoffs can be accurately assessed. YIMBYs agree — and that means working at the state level. Only there can chronic problems like workforce housing shortages or mega-commuting be accurately assessed and command the attention of legislators. Only at the state level does a chronic teacher shortage or an aging population become an unignorable symptom of a housing shortage.”
The risk, that Chuck and many others are rightly sensitive to, is that this “top down” reform effort risks replicating the worst excesses of mid 20th century top-down planning, whether on purpose or inadvertently by creating tools and institutions that can be repurposed in this way by others. I agree that skepticism is warranted.
A state pre-emption bill, such as the recent effort in Minnesota to limit parking requirements, might help municipalities get “unstuck” from a bad status quo, or as we’ve seen in Portland, OR, state-wide housing reform allowed local reform to coalesce and go further. But it could also go the other way: the state could require municipalities to require parking, to preserve single-family zoning, or otherwise limit the flexibility of cities and towns to respond to their problems with creative bottom-up solutions. We might exacerbate the drift of municipalities into wards of the state, the lowest rung on the food chain, taking what scraps they get from “higher” levels. This is a reasonable concern! Indeed, it’s kind of the world we already live in.
So when Chuck writes:
Yes, we need housing now. But if we want reform that endures — surviving political shifts, taking root, and growing — we need more than top-down mandates. We need cities that are capable of governing themselves well, that can understand their challenges, weigh competing values, and act in the public interest without constant micromanagement from above.
I agree! The question of how we cultivate more capable cities and towns is a hard one and it is central to Strong Towns Thought, for example, the Strong Towns Strength Test or the importance of Strong Citizens. Strong Towns doesn’t ask (or answer) which politician should I give my vote to or what state policy can someone else enact that will fix our problems such that I don’t have to change anything else about how I live. It’s a much… harder… set of precepts. It asks individual people “keep doing what you can to build a Strong Town.” What can you change about your life that makes a difference? It encourages a flywheel of small incremental bets and positive social engagement with your neighbors that increases the power, competence, and camaraderie of the citizens of a town to solve their own problems instead of reaching for a handout or a permission slip. Hell yeah.
Why not both?
I find much that I agree with in both camps. To paraphrase this excellent essay on liberalism, when my answer to the question “top down or bottom up?” is “it depends on the circumstances,” it’s not because I’m a squish who can’t pick a side—it’s because that’s the right answer!”
To borrow from subsidiarity again, not only is the appropriate level for decision making going to vary depending on the domain (streets, utilities, building permits, etc.) but it will also vary over time and between regions, because the world is complex, messy, and dynamic.
Early on in Strong Towns Thinking we used to talk a lot about predicaments instead of problems. Problems imply solutions. Predicaments on the other hand are thornier and involve tradeoffs without clear solutions. Instead we hope to have wise responses. A lot of our predicaments today are the result of a previous generation’s ‘solution:’
Environmental impact statements were a solution to industrial pollution, but now make it harder to install renewable energy;
Urban highways were a solution to urban decline, but now the highways hamper rejuvenation;
The 30-year mortgage and federal mortgage insurance were a solution to falling homeownership in the Depression, but now home prices can never go down; and so on...
Our hope is that we can, through wiser responses, ameliorate today’s problems without laying the seeds for the problems of the next generation.
Scale, Business Model, and Ideology
Are there any principles that might help us assess the correct level to make a decision? What makes a given body make good decisions or bad decisions?
I think scale is important. It speaks to the availability of information about what to do–decisions made too far away or lacking context can often go awry. It speaks to depth of resources and maybe power too. Some technical decisions need resources that are only available at scale. Things like designing a transportation network or a utility district that necessarily cross municipal boundaries will require a supra-municipal body to coordinate and specialized technical skills. If you want to get the DOT out of your main street or reform your MPO’s funding priorities you’re going to need state (and maybe federal action).
But scale alone doesn’t explain why some cities and towns are leading on housing reform, and others are dragging their feet. It doesn’t explain why the Netherlands has created ample bike infrastructure top down, but in the US top-down DOT’s are still widening highways. I think some other variables are also important: Business Model and Ideology.
By business model I mean roughly, where does their money come from / who are they responsive to. If a town or agency gets substantial funding “top down” from the state, then it’s obvious that they would be responsive to the priorities of higher-level government agencies. This can be seen when cities pursue projects not because of a bottom up demand for it, but because a grant from the state was available. We’ll do the project with free money, why not! Similarly, a DOT might be responsive to a board of business executives or state legislators who hear from contractors about how many jobs the highway project will create. The DOT doesn’t really see your neighborhood group as a stakeholder in its operations. If it ignores you, its budget won’t be affected next year. Getting these incentives right, making sure agencies and governments have skin in the game, are responsive to bottom up concerns, and connected to actual economic benefits, is important! But it’s not the only thing that matters…
There’s also ideology to consider. By ideology I mean roughly how people see the world, what they believe to be normal, what is the good life, who or what is evil. Ideas matter. You might have two regional transportation agencies that build very different transportation systems—because their leaders and key stakeholders believe or want different things. Half a century ago, Dutch cities were just as choked in traffic as American ones, but they had different ideas and made different decisions. The American Dream of a detached home and two trucks in the garage is ideological. People might want different things. Indeed, many do and choose to live differently.
It matters what people in charge believe. A different Robert Moses would have done different things. The obviously different outcomes of Paris, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Oklahoma City are a testament that technology is not destiny and that different arrangements of scale, business model, and ideology can lead to radically different outcomes.
So our debate over scale is important. But there’s not one ’right answer’ for all time or all contexts. Scale alone isn’t determinative of good or bad outcomes. We must remain flexible, curious, and humble. We have to attend not only to the scale at which a decision is being made but the business model of the agency and the ideology that shapes the views of its participants.
So, Chuck is right that we need strong towns and cities. It also appears to be true that we need state reforms to make that possible, and we need bottom up cultural change to achieve it. State reforms that create permission and coordination; bottom up persuasion and energy to power the renewal.
WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM EACH OTHER
I don’t think either Strong Towns Thought or Abundance Thought has a monopoly on truth or wisdom. In keeping with the virtues of humility and curiosity, it would be very weird if we believed ‘our side’ had all the answers. There is a danger in rhetorical fighting on-line: that we may harden partisans in each movement and reduce their openness to learning from each other. This would be a crippling mistake. I think there are very important lessons that both Strong Towns and Abundance can, even need, to learn from each other.
Lessons for Abundance
The headline criticism of Abundance in Chuck’s writing concerns the rapid embrace of state-preemption, and perhaps an over affection for top-down decision making. There is a simple risk that first your state preemption might be poorly crafted, resulting in bad outcomes across a state, instead of town by town. One-size-fits-all solutions tend toward the “orderly, but dumb” side of the spectrum. (I even have experience with this: writing state-level bills to shift local zoning is hard to do right! I really wish cities and towns would do it without the kick in the pants.) The second risk is that state preemption is a double edged sword. YIMBY’s tend to presume that they will always have the momentum at the statehouse, but there’s real risks that backlash is even more powerful if it uses state-preemption to push back against good local experimentation. We’re raising the stakes by bringing things to the state house.
Social movements in-part tell people where to focus their attention and efforts. Strong Towns Thought tells people to focus their efforts on your neighbors, your block, your neighborhood, town, and city. Tactical urbanism isn’t just prototyping solutions, it’s political rehabilitation for citizens learning that they can just do stuff. If Abundance, as a movement, is more interested in the levers of statehouse power, does that mean we’re encouraging people to look up instead of out? Does telling a story of top-down technocratic reform mean all we’re asking for from people is to vote for our guy, encouraging people to be passive consumers instead of co-participants, and reducing engagement with neighborhood, city, and town? That’s pretty thin gruel for a functioning society. Abundance folks should be looking to balance legislative wins with ways people can directly strengthen their own communities.
Conor Dougherty, author of Golden Gates, an early history of the YIMBY movement, recently published a piece in the NYTimes entitled Why America Should Sprawl. Chuck wrote a reaction, the core criticism being that yes, “sprawl” gets you a lot of houses quickly. But per Strong Town’s doing the math on the suburban ponzi scheme, that development is insolvent from day one and will create new, acute problems in the next generation. YIMBY and Abundance have a lot to learn from Strong Towns about the fiscal interplay of development, infrastructure, and municipal budgets. If we don’t get this right, it’ll be my prediction for the predicament we leave the next generation with: sure, housing is cheaper, but we’re unable to keep up with impossibly expensive decaying infrastructure.
Not all growth is really growth. Some of it is borrowing from the future, making you feel prosperous now, but you’re really just taking on debt (liabilities you’re committing to pay in the future). What you want is growth that builds up community assets faster than liabilities. It’s important to understand the difference. Abundance needs to have answers on how we build strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods that go beyond building stuff. There’s a lot to do here, and many good ideas that Strong Towns has been pioneering include better budgeting practices and restructuring city departments.
Lastly, in Strong Towns Thought there’s a general concern that when you are operating from a place of abundance, there’s a general lack of discipline and constraint that comes from scarcity. As a result you’re more likely to do stupid stuff (like mid-century auto suburbia locked in amber by zoning). Abundant homes or cheap zero-carbon electricity sound good, but abundant stripmalls or urban highways sound bad. Scarcity can be the wellspring for creativity, frugality, and responsiveness—these are good virtues! (There are different kinds of abundance: what would abundant freedom of action look like, without abundant debt finance?)
We’re tinkering with complex systems, so we need to be careful that just “pumping more (money, power, etc.) into them” doesn’t cause more problems than it solves. You know, some humility and curiosity.
Lessons for Strong Towns
Strong Towns also has things to learn from Abundance and the YIMBY movement. One big difference between the Strong Towns and YIMBY/Abundance is the diversity of organizations. Maybe ironically Strong Towns comes out as more centralized than Abundance: there’s one national nonprofit organization with no real competitors for the movement’s center of gravity with over a hundred local chapters that have spontaneously organized to apply Strong Towns insights, with help from the national org. Abundance in contrast is a huge tent, with many centers of power–from the Niskanen Center, to the Mercatus Institute, to the Welcoming Neighbors Network and the congressional Build America Caucus, to Arnold Ventures and Open Philanthropy, to dozens of state and local YIMBY orgs, increasingly funded with staff and internal legislative and research capacity. There’s literally no one group or committee that is setting the precepts. It’s a big messy family.
Strong Towns qua movement could benefit from more centers of thought, communication, and organizing. (There are a few allied orgs like the Incremental Development Alliance, Neighborhood Evolution, and Urban3, but they are each mainly working on their issues, rather than being part of a larger movement.) Could the movement grow faster if there were more voices and orgs under a shared banner?
Relatedly, Abundance, unlike Strong Towns, has cultivated many relationships in academia, existing think tanks, journalism, and other elite groups. Having a cadre of researchers engaging with your ideas means that they get more careful testing and exploration than an advocacy group can do on their own. For example, there are now many careful economics papers exploring the impacts of new market rate development: does it help or harm low income renters? (help, mostly). This is an important question, because if you can answer it rigorously, it improves your understanding of problems you’re working on, it helps you design more effective reforms, and it helps make your case to skeptical audiences. Similarly, having allied journalists (people like Jerusalem Demsas and Conor Dougherty) help get your ideas out in the popular press, and expand your reach.
So for example, I think it would be really helpful for Strong Towns if there were a public finance researcher that could verify econometrically the suburban ponzi scheme and publish it in a reputable economics journal. Or, while I really like the idea of permitting development to the next increment, I don’t think we either understand the historic processes of incremental development that we use as precedents well enough, nor have we really calibrated what an economically viable next increment of development would be. Great research directions for an economic historian or urban geographer. There’s a lot of work to do here, I don’t think we have it all figured out!
Strong Towns views on state preemption are already softening. But, I think we have a lot more state level work to go if we’re going to get a world of Strong Towns. Just to recall a previous example, state DOT’s and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO’s) are powerful state and regional bodies that guide a lot of transportation funding, sponsor destructive highway widening projects, and dictate a lot to cities and towns about how their streets and roads can look. If we’re going to rebalance these scales and build stronger cities and towns… we’re going to need to reform these organizations at the state (and federal) level. Strong towns need state reforms. Strong Towns groups can learn a lot from the success of YIMBY orgs, but DOT’s and MPOs, with many powerful vested statehouse interests, will be much harder nuts to crack than changing zoning enabling laws. Strong Towns groups are going to have to build long-term state house power through elite engagement, organizing, and lobbying, before cities and towns will be out from under the DOT’s thumb.
Strong Towns Thought has a lot to commend to itself, but it’s not gospel. It’s not infallible. I think there could be a little more care about throwing out pronouncements, and more going back to its roots of doing the math, carefully studying phenomena, and challenging received wisdom. We have so much we still don’t understand about how development, neighborhoods, cities, and towns work. We all have a lot to learn from each other.
CONCLUSIONS
I hope that in this essay, I have done both Strong Towns and Abundance justice in how I have described their origins, core ideas (as they relate to housing in particular), and provided some useful examples of how each side could benefit from learning from each other. In the end, the dividing line between these two sides runs through the heart of a lot of people, myself included. I want to avoid these two movements pulling apart into opposing camps.
This isn’t a new thing however, it’s more American than apple pie. From the time of the founding, America has been pulled in two directions: (very roughly) the Hamiltonian: urban, federalizing, ambitious, financialized, industrializing; and the Jeffersonian: rural, self-sufficient, yeoman, agricultural, conservative, etc. Both factions have important things to recommend them, and blindspots and harms to guard against. America is, has been, and will continue to be a place of paradox, contradiction, and synthesis; of big ideas, and imperfect execution. Both Strong Towns and Abundance are pieces of that evolving social tapestry; we are better together.
As I tell my students: saving the world is a team sport. In a team sport, the individual players might have quite different aptitudes, preferences, and knowledge: some people play offense, some defense, some are strategic, some excellent shots, or incredible endurance, there’s special teams, and enforcers, and coaches. A good striker might not make a good goalie, a good coach may not make a good quarterback. But as long as we understand that despite our differences we’re all on the same team, working to move the ball in the same direction, we’re going to be more effective than if we’re each just doing our own thing and ignoring each other.
And moving the ball down the field is what matters. People need present relief, on housing for example. If your program’s benefits are too far off, too abstract, then someone else (perhaps a charlatan) will sweep in and offer the quick fix. If we as neighbors, or developers, or policy makers, or whatever, can’t get stuff done, if we can’t meet our neighbors needs, then we will not maintain democratic legitimacy. And if what we build and do is bad, we will also lose legitimacy. To get to the long run, you have to be effective in the short run; and to win in the long run, your answers to both have to work. That’s a tough rubric to meet.
Chuck has described three virtues of the Strong Towns movement as Stewardship (for people and place), curiosity and humility. These are great virtues to guide us in our work. The Abundance movement comes from a more ‘utilitarian’ perspective, and that’s helpful too, caring as we do about outcomes, distribution of benefits, and the full panoply of human needs for a flourishing life in a prosperous place.
Whether you see yourself as more Strong Towns or more Abundance, I this essay has shed some light on the recent heat between the two movements. I’m looking forward to the future of both movements and will continue to work toward mutual learning and synthesis. After all, these are two great tastes. How much better are they when you put them together?
To give Strong Towns Thought its due, there are many other important contributions to improving our cities and towns that are less central to this debate: The four step process. The Stroad. The problems with traffic engineering priorities. Fighting urban highways. The importance of accurate accounting in local government, and their Finance Decoder tool. Black Friday parking and the need for parking reform, and lots more.
This is an admirable and useful effort to bridge a gap between movements that would benefit from working together. One of the challenges facing such movements is that they both reflect views of groups that, while often including some directly involved with government and planning agencies, neither reflect the actual policies that presently determine state or local approaches. In other words, they reflect views of how things ought to be; such movements tend to develop strongly-held beliefs that can become doctrinaire because they remain theoretical and have not gone through the process of being subjected to political and economic realities.
This leads to partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise since no one wants to compromise on a vision, especially when it is hard to disprove something that hasn’t been implemented pursuant to that vision.
So theorists, even if they are working professionals, argue for their vision rather than doing the hard work of developing consensus. That’s why sincere and pragmatic efforts such as this piece are so valuable. If the two groups could create forums and teams to collaborate on how to move forward in specific locales, the theoretical underpinnings of all visions could be tested in the harsh environment of specific realities.
Well said Seth! Thanks for your shoutout
Aligned with both our essays, I see room for different types of orgs to emphasize local community building vs state technocratic reform, ideally in partnership with each other.
Yesterday I co-hosted a happy hour for pro-housing residents in my hometown and some of the nearby communities as part of my local pro-housing and transit advocacy group, Inclusive Lafayette. We talked about how we could more effectively organize to attend city council meetings, host educational events, and build our base in some of the other cities that are just developing pro housing consciousnesses. We also talked about how we could support California YIMBY’s efforts to pass state legislation that would accelerate reform in our communities. Deepening the interplay, CA YIMBY bought food and drinks for the event (Inclusive Lafayette isn’t an incorporated nonprofit so we don’t have our own money). So even though they don’t do any of the local community building work themselves, they helped us host a better event, which both feeds into our local work and makes it easier to build the base of support needed to pass good state laws
So many other thoughts from your essay on other topics, that just jumped out to me as just one example of how the housing abundance movement melds local and state level advocacy. And a way that Strong Towns can stay true to its localist roots even as it warms up to certain types of state action. Looking forward to deeper conversations at YIMBYTown!