Charles L. Marohn Jr.

This book was recommended to me by a friend who serves on a transportation committee and has been thinking a lot about walkable cities, civil engineering, and urban planning.

As you might have guessed from the title, the author is from a conservative town in the midwest. That said, he is talking about themes that are relevant across the country.

Marohn's key message is that most municipalities are financially insolvent, and that they need to engage in planned degrowth. Having been part of the Transition Towns movement, this is not a new message, but it is the first time I'm hearing a degrowth message from someone on the conservative side of the political spectrum (although he doesn't use the word himself, and he doesn't reference degrowth scholarship, aside from Chris Martenson, who isn't really degrowth either).

The first thing Marohn looks at is the way in which many communities across the United States have been establish whole-cloth, rather than in an incremental fashion. As a result, they are social and financial disasters. Christopher Alexander, in his seminal four-volume series, "The Nature of Order," describes this difference as fabricated versus generated structure (I highly recommend these books if you haven't yet heard of them; Marohn fails to reference Alexander's scholarship on the subject). Alexander even has a way of "measuring mistakes," similar to the way in which Marohn begins to tally up the financial losses of poorly planned infrastructure projects.

For all Marohn's talk of insolvency and municipal accounting, one thing that is missing from the text is a systematic analysis of municipalities across the country. Are there any trends can we see? Are there any kinds of infrastructure projects that tend to be worth the investment? What about the different debt and finance structuring? Marohn also fails to discuss the literature regarding alternate forms of taxation, such as the Land Value Tax, or the Harbeger Tax—which feel relevant, as he is discussing municipal finances, and one point of leverage that municipalities could explore would be a different approach to taxation.

Marohn's citation of Chris Martenson. Martenson's "Crash Course" in economics circa 2011 was influential for me. In short, the Crash Course claimed that a interest-bearing money supply is fundamentally unsustainable, so collapse is inevitable. Although I'm a proponent of what some would call "degrowth," now that I've dug more deeply into monetary theory, I've learned that Martenson's logic is flawed. Marohn touches on global economic theory. I find his lack of knowledge on the subject detracted from the book, and I wish he'd just left it out. Although I'm not a Keynesian, I do agree with Keynes' statement, "anything we can do, we can afford." If you'd like to learn more about relevant economic theory, I can recommend Brett Scott's essay, "Zero is the Future of Money," about the credit theory of money.

Many years ago, I wrote a piece called "Decommissioning Funding," looking at the way in which projects should establish funds at their inception for their eventual remediation. For all Marohn's encouragement for communities to abandon certain developments and infrastructure, he fails to describe the funding mechanisms for the decommissioning of these places. I'm not suggesting they shouldn't be closed down, but we do need to look at the ecological implications of doing so.

Marohn also is implicitly focused on urban rather than rural application of his ideas. He talks about the return on investment of high-density mixed use developments, and the error of cult-de-sacs. He doesn't reference the dirt roads of rural communities in Vermont, and the way in which agricultural communities can still make prudent financial decisions, despite their low population density, simply by minimizing costs. In Colin Woodard's 2004, "The Lobster Coast," he describes the ways in which high-density planning actually complements the preservation of rural communities. Intuitively, this makes sense (urban communities rely on rural communities for resources such as food and water), although Marohn doesn't give this subject attention.

Regenerative business practitioner, Carol Sanford, has an ordering framework called "Levels of Work." It has five levels: stabilize, operate, maintain, improve, and regenerate. Sanford often applies this framework in the business context. A well-functioning business is working on all of these levels simultaneously. A failing business might only be focused on stabilize, or stabilize and operate. "Strong Towns" is focused almost exclusively at the "stabilize" level—cutting underperforming infrastructure and getting towns back into the black. There is some talk of maintenance. There isn't any discussion at the "improve" and "regenerate" levels, and this is an issue, as this is where passion and commitment are generated.

Speaking of maintenance, I used to work for a pipe organ builder, Stefan, with a motto of, "perfect is good enough." One of my co-workers said, "that's great, until you've rebuilt a bellows for the third time in a row..." Hyperbole aside, Stefan told me a parable about a piano. In the beginning, this piano was in great condition. Then it got a scratch. Seeing the scratch, next time the piano was moved, the movers took little care, and it got a dent. Seeing the dent, little care was again exercised, and the ivory of a key was broken. Soon enough, the piano is a piece of junk. When is the point to turn around this vicious cycle? That first scratch should have been repaired (nothing a little alcohol and elbow grease can't work out of a nice coat of varnish). If people perceive something as immaculate, they will take exquisite care. If they perceive something as damaged, they'll pile on the abuse.

There are a lot of ways that I've been living by the strong towns principles in my own life. I lived with my partner's parents for five years in a multi-generational household. We hospiced her father through end-of-life. We now live in a little village, with tiny houses, where neighbors all know one another, where upkeep and overhead are low, and where you can repair the structures yourself.

Overall, if you care about walkable cities and municipal budgets, you'll enjoy this book. I'm glad that I read it, and it gives me a renewed interest in municipal budgeting. That said, I wish that it was a more well-researched text, and I hope that other scholars pick up where Marohn has left off.… (more)

This book felt somehow more focused than his previous book, "Strongtowns", and also a bit more scatterbrained.

I think the parts of the book that were focused on how engineering design standards value speed and throughput of traffic, over safety, wealth creation, and return on investment were really good. I thought this was what the whole book was going to be about.

Other parts, I'm not so sure about. I think much of the book was spent either re-explaining ideas that were in "Strongtowns" or were creating an assumption that you have read it. I think there was a bit too much overlap, and felt pretty redundant at times.

Some of the topics had way too much time spent on them as well, such as the section on policing. I actually agree with many of his takeaways on policing reform, however it felt a little hamfisted and I'm not sure this was the right medium to tackle the topic. What does policing have to do with engineering? Isn't this book supposed to be about how he's had to shift his paradigm from "engineer thinking" to "Strongtowns thinking?"

I also have some troubles with his logic sometimes. Sometimes I think governments need to spend on providing public services to people, even if it "loses money". I understand his premise is that unless municipalities start focusing on revenue positive projects, cities will become insolvent. However with things like mass transit, sometimes you need to keep investing in it, in order to create a system that encourages ridership. Other times I think he used some examples that were really unconvincing to prove his point that something is a waste of money, and something that people don't value.

Overall, I definitely still enjoyed the book, and will definitely read anything more he decides to write.… (more)

A really great book, that looks at city planning and urbanist ideas, but from a fiscally conservative point of view.

The basic premise, is that since WWII, cities have been continuously growing, and creating a negative feedback loop. The growth creates huge maintenance obligations, and the only way to create more cashflow to pay for the maintenance is create more growth, creating a downward spiral of bankruptcy and insolvency. Most of the towns in America are on the brink of bankruptcy, and will not be able to pay maintenance obligations, debt/interest payments, and pension payments for former and current employees.

The only solution, is to cut the dead weight. Focus on the neighborhoods that create revenue (dense neighborhoods, usually lots of older buildings, lots of small businesses), promote walkability and transit, and get away from car dependency.

This is a fascinating conclusion because it's the same conclusion that leftist urbanists and new urbanist urban planners tend to come to, but Charles coming from a fiscally and politically conservative perspective.

He generally made his point pretty well, but occasionally would stray off the path with some pop psychology tangents, or semi-relevant anecdotes. While this book was fairly short and effective, I think it definitely could have been trimmed a bit. The last chapter diverged into some weird spiritual, anecdotal, philosophical rant that went nowhere but tried to be profound. Just stay in your lane bro.… (more)