Talking Messy Cities on the Strong Towns Podcast

I was grateful to be hosted on the Strong Towns podcast recently by Chuck Marohn. There’s a lot of good things I can say about Chuck, but first and foremost he’s just a really good human being. For me, that matters.

Strong Towns Podcast with Chuck

Strong Towns Podcast with Chuck

I wanted to supplement the episode with a few other thoughts, which is why I’m sharing this with you all - I know you can just click the link and listen. But often when people have conversations, you digest it later and think, “I should have also said THIS.” So here’s three additions, just for Substack subscribers.

1. I’ve pinned a post at the top of this site called, “What is a Messy City?’ I wrote that piece almost ten years ago. As I noted, it was very much influenced by Chuck’s work with Strong Towns. It’s a longer, more coherent explanation of what I said on the podcast. Read it here.

2. One theme I’ve explored on the podcast and in writing is how to effectively break cities apart into smaller units for better governance and management. This follows a core belief I’ve had after working for so many years, that our large public institutions just don’t work well because of scale. This is true of local governments, of school districts, of public universities, and more. Scale on the public side tends toward lack of transparency and accountability, because there aren’t market mechanisms to provide a check on the negative impulses of humans. Scale on the public side has led to silos and layers of middle management, with a real lack of problem-solvers at the neighborhood or grass roots level. Most importantly, it just leads to bad outcomes. I wrote a long tweet on this here, and hope to dig into this much more over time. I have come to believe 80% of the issues we wrestle with in cities and towns comes down to management at the wrong scale. Could we break cities apart into smaller units of 50,000 people or so? I’m not sure, but it’s worth trying.

   Note: I’m not one that thinks decentralizing management in some fashion would be more expensive. We have layers and layers of middle management in big cities, and it’s incredible how much time and money is wasted on a lack of effective coordination and problem-solving. The really hard-working and excellent people that work within these systems know this better than anyone. We have place-management organizations like the one I manage that also require money and staff. Private businesses spend beyond their Income Statements on additional security and public space management in order to fill gaps. Eliminate or consolidate those layers, focus resources on the ground, and my sense is we’d actually save money AND be so much more effective. We need people who can work at the neighborhood or district level, what we don’t need are their eight bosses.

3. I mentioned the notion that our biggest housing issue, and most cities frankly, is population loss and decline. A bit more detail on that - Midtown KCMO, which most locals consider to be the nicer part of the urban core, has dropped from 73,000 residents in 1950 to 28,000 today. That’s a loss of 2/3 of the population. Our overall urban core has shrunk from nearly 500,000 to about 200,000.

   A reality check: most big cities that existed in any size prior to WWII have this same issue.

   So when it comes to our particular conversation, the issue is population recovery. It’s not that recent college grads with liberal arts degrees can’t afford to live in the nicest part of the city. That may be true, but it’s a tiny concern compared to terminal population decline in large areas. We must grow, and we must have a growth mentality overall, which we have not often had in our city.

Just remember: you can just do things. You have agency. Don’t minimize what is possible.