The Strong Towns Podcast

In this special crossover edition of our It's the Little Things podcast, Strong Towns community builder Jacob Moses talks with Karl Fundenberger about his ten years of bike advocacy in Topeka.

As a bike advocate in his hometown of Topeka, Kansas, Strong Towns member Karl Fundenberger has long advocated for little bets to boost the bikeability of Topeka. Yet, as bike advocates across North America commonly experience, city officials often considered these investments notable yet unrelated to the City’s long-term prosperity.

That changed, however, when Karl discovered, through Strong Towns, how streets designed to keep people on bikes safe actually boosts community wealth. Designing streets that discourage deadly speeds—a noble mission in itself—suddenly included a financial tilt, capturing the attention of the City’s budget-conscious officials.

Bike Topeka advocates for complete streets, a community connected via safe walking paths and biking routes, getting to know our neighbors through fun events, and moving Topeka back toward a traditional development pattern that is centuries old. - Bike Topeka

Today, Karl and his peers run the bike advocacy organization Bike Topeka where—through group rides, book clubs, and peer support—encourage people to ride their bikes while advocating for a development pattern in which cyclists and cities’ budgets alike thrive.

In this episode, Karl reflects on the ten years since he joined Topeka’s bike community and shares how the Strong Towns movement has influenced his advocacy.

Show notes:

• Bike Topeka
• Bike Topeka on Facebook
• The Economics of Development 101 with Joe Minicozzi
• Join the Strong Towns movement

We kick off Strong Citizens Week here at Strong Towns with a conversation with Mr. Money Mustache. MMM is -- by far -- the guest our listeners have most requested, and for good reason. He is the individual digital to our community analog. His insights will help you live a better life and, should you choose to be a true Mustachian, put you in position to help your community become a Strong Town.

If you're not already, you should be reading everything you can at mrmoneymustache.com. You can also follow MMM on Facebook andTwitter.

The affordable housing crisis is affecting not just people in coastal cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco, L.A., Seattle, and Portland. The crisis is spreading geographically and rippling throughout the economy. In the midst of such a crisis, it’s natural to want to assign blame; it’s also natural to look for a silver bullet solution. But is that even possible with a phenomenon as massive (and massively complex) as the housing crisis? Is development a rigged game, open only to the largest and best-connected firms?

To help us get some answers we talked to Jenny Schuetz, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institution. Schuetz is an expert in urban economics and housing policy, with a focus on housing affordability.

In this episode of the Strong Towns podcast, Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn talks with Schuetz about her recent article on the factors driving up housing costs. She and Chuck discuss the role of uncertainty—both “time uncertainty” and “success uncertainty”— in the soaring cost of homes, why only the biggest developers can afford to build in some major metros, and why local housing discussions often pit the homeowner class against the renter class.

They also discuss what city officials and local advocates can do to loosen the housing market in their places—including allowing the next increment of growth by right, similar to the recent change in Minneapolis.

This is a masterclass on the housing crisis from one of the nation’s foremost experts.

Additional Show Notes:

• Read Jenny Schuetz’s article: “Who’s to blame for high housing costs? It’s more complicated than you think.”
• Follow her on Twitter: @jenny_schuetz
• Jenny Schuetz at The Brookings Institution
• Subscribe to the Brookings Metro Newsletter
• Recent Housing Articles from Strong Towns
  • “Why Are Developers Only Building Luxury Housing?”
  • The 5 Immutable Laws of Affordable Housing
  • 8 Things Your Town Can Do to Add More Housing (Without Spending a Dime)
  • Can We Afford to Care About Design in a Housing Crisis?
  • We Used to Just Call These Houses

Does the United States have too few people? It’s a provocative question—but one perhaps not asked often enough. And journalist Matthew Yglesias has an even more provocative answer.

In his new bestselling book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Yglesias makes the case for tripling the American population. The U.S. is not “full,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Many of its iconic cities—including not just famous cases of collapse like Detroit but also Philadelphia and Chicago and dozens of smaller cities like Rochester and Erie—actually have fewer residents than they had decades ago. And virtually all of our thriving cities easily have room to grow and accommodate more people.” As things stand now, he says, the United States is “staring down the barrel of inevitable relative decline.” The economies of China and India are growing quickly and threaten America’s position as the world’s leading power. And there are compelling domestic reasons for growing the population too.

Matthew Yglesias is the special guest on this week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast. (It’s our first podcast of 2021, and the first of a two-part interview.) Yglesias is the host of The Weeds podcast and cofounder of Vox Media, and he recently launched the new blog and newsletter Slow Boring. In this episode, he talks with Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn about why population growth would make the U.S. stronger—not just at the international level but as a “community of communities.” They also discuss why the idea of one billion Americans is actually a centrist one, why it doesn’t have to be an environmental disaster, and how it can get done.

Part 2 of the interview will run next week. But we think by the end of this episode you’ll see why Chuck named One Billion Americans one of the best books he read in 2020.

• Slow Boring
• The Weeds Podcast
• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, by Matthew Yglesias
• Matthew Yglesias (Twitter)
• Charles Marohn (Twitter)
• The Strong Towns Local-Motive Tour

This is the third episode in the Strong Towns Podcast's special Member Drive series. Every day, Chuck is reading one of his best articles that you might’ve missed. Today, he’s reading “How Fannie Mae Puts a Chokehold on Local Home Financing Solutions.” This article explains how mortgage financiers rose to dominance through an “orgy of debt and price appreciation” and how they continue to twist the conversation around housing to further increase prices and debt. Make sure to check back in tomorrow to catch the next installment of this special series.

If you enjoy this podcast, or any of the other work Strong Towns does, become a member today. Be the change your city needs.

• Become a member today!
• Chuck Marohn (Twitter/X).