The Englewood Review of Books
Best Books of 2024
Advent Calendar – Bonus Days
December 31
Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis
Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges
The Englewood Review of Books
Hardback: Wiley, 2024
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The reality of the America’s housing dilemma thus mandates a solution that would do several things simultaneously: “rapidly add new housing units at affordable prices; not adversely impact the existing housing market; allow for the flow of capital into [a] community [while slowing] the flow of capital out of [a] community; and grow [a] city’s tax base without adding to the liabilities of local governments.” Unfortunately, as Marohn and Herriges trenchantly comment, “there is no approach currently on offer that allows these things to happen… no set of Wall Street investments, [no] federal programs or subsidies, [no] top-down housing initiatives capable of working even close to these parameters” (pp. 154-155). Hence, if we are do anything to address much-too-high home and rental prices (which is absolutely tied to the total amount of housing stock), and if we are to do anything to address American’s increasing homelessness problem (which again, more than one might expect, is also absolutely tied to the total amount of housing stock), some radical re-thinking of both housing and our finance system (or, to their mind preferably, multiple revived local finance systems), as described in the final chapters of the book, is imperative.
Are they correct? In terms of laying out the economic and structural problems with housing construction and costs in America, I think so. … Their case is made even stronger by refusing to suggest that any one factor alone built the trap we are in. They cast a sharp eye at zoning, federal policies, suburban aspirations, financial deregulation, and more, but also insist that there’s every reason to believe that almost all of these bankers, reformers, policy-makers, developers, city officials, and homeowners like ourselves over the past century, were genuinely making what seemed to them at the time reasonable choices to deal with real problems. Hence their conclusion that we have all (mostly) unintentionally built this maddening trap for ourselves makes intuitive sense. Even if Strong Towns’s particular approach to localism isn’t your cup of tea, the chapters where they quickly, yet never simplistically, lay out what they see as dozens of little-noticed contributing factors to this trap (the insurance industry’s backing of 1927’s Uniform Building Code, developer J.C. Nichols’s 1948 dangerous “Planning for Permanence” vision, the federal reforms which allowed savings and loan institutions to massively expand in the 1980s, the consequences of an effective zero interest rate policy in the 2010s, and much more) deserve a close read.
- from a review by Russell Arben Fox at Front Porch Republic
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