Great discussion. I think getting state and local govs out of the residential zoning business eliminates top-down power in a way most everyone in the YIMBYverse and Strong Towns camp agrees with, the question is how we get there
Under our status quo politics, political will only exists for states to modestly liberalize residential zoning rather than do away with it entirely. Incremental changes in places like CA often don’t effectively lead to more development. YIMBY Law had a great report about all the ways state-level zoning reform in CA doesn’t work bc the reforms come with so many strings attached that few developers use them
Still, no state change in CA has been worse than local zoning. And sometimes reforms, often iterated and improved over time, work really well! ADU reforms in CA have been extremely successful because they essentially remove any ability to delay or deny ADUs within a loose set of standards. It’s a good template for other state preemption, but extending similar rules has repeatedly run into political obstacles
Still, on the pathway to restoring residential land use power to the property owner level, incremental changes by states (such as eliminating parking minimums in only the half mile around major transit stops, as done by CA’s AB 2097) seem far better than only supporting local changes that happen far slower and don’t scale. I’d rather use all the avenues available to us to restore zoning authority to the property owner
I like your point about how state reforms fail when they leave in too many discretionary levers. I’ve seen that locally too: technically liberalized processes that still have enough procedural veto points to make projects infeasible or exhausting. The CA ADU reforms are instructive because they didn’t just “allow” ADUs—they removed the ability to deny them. I agree that’s a template we should be learning from much more aggressively, and we could use that approach here where we technically legalized ADUs but nobody has even applied for one—some will argue this is because nobody really wants ADUs in this whole town but you know there's some other blockage in the pipeline, it's not about demand.
So, incrementalism is often the only path politically available because anything more ambitious just doesn't have a chance in hell. I guess my follow-up question is: how do we make it additive rather than just symbolic? If AB 2097 (ending parking minimums near transit) is better than nothing but still limited in scope—how do we ensure those reforms evolve toward universality? Because I worry that the political impulse is to treat the half-mile zone as “solved” while maintaining the core problem elsewhere.
Anyway, I’m with you: use every tool available. Local efforts are key! But they’re often blocked without outside help. State reforms are slow and politically constrained, but they’re often the only way to shift the terrain. I’m just not sure we have the luxury of hoping for a better grassroots moment when we’re decades behind and the costs of waiting keep compounding. I keep thinking about e.g. the Fair Housing Act and whether, without some kind of top-down approach, we'd be waiting for every angry old racist in America to die or be convinced to change their minds about blocking Black people from their neighborhoods.
The issue is his approach just restates the problem. Klein-Thompson’s critique is specifically of local decision making that’s pretty uniform in certain wealthy cities, which yields similar policies and similarly disastrous results.
Your local communities in the Bay Area, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, etc. make the same mistakes. Other cities— Houston, Dallas, etc. don’t make these mistakes.
The concept of states and localities as laboratories is useful in identifying what works and what doesn’t and applying those lessons more broadly. We know that things like restrictive zoning and endless veto points don’t work because they’ve been done in certain cities, and they’ve driven costs through the roof. Chuck doesn’t seem to make the laughably nonsensical claim that the explanation is that Houston has less powerful moneyed interests than San Francisco, but nevertheless the fixation on the idea that local control solves everything is just spectacularly unpersuasive.
Reality is… there’s a reason things don’t get built. It’s not that no one tried it and got wonderful results that were adopted by everyone. It’s rather that there’s a real tradeoff, real or perceived. Reality is, some people don’t want density where they live. They think it’ll bring poor darker skinned people to where they live. They think (correctly) that it will drive the price of their house down relative to where it otherwise would be. They think (perhaps correctly) that it will bring car traffic.
And these views are strongly held by people who have the money to have their voices heard, the time and flexibility to go to planning board meetings, and the wherewithal to navigate bureaucracy. Poor working people have none of these things, and they’re the ones that demonstrably lose. Romanticizing local control is not good; we’ve seen the demonstrable bad results it often gets us.
Great convo. I do think there is something to be said for seeding people’s imaginations with what is actually possible for their communities. My feeling is for every project that gets shouted down by the five angriest codgers in town, there are many more that simply never even get proposed because people don’t know that they’re options.
I sit on my town’s capital improvements committee and am wanting to dig in to be more impactful in that position, so I really appreciate you speaking to your boots on the ground experience with development projects in your town.
This is a little to the side of your point but in my particular "secret city" town, the general public seems terrified to show up to meetings, or at least pretends to be terrified so they have an excuse not to bother. "The Lab will fire me if I speak" is the #1 excuse (which is, of course, not true, Los Alamos National Lab lets you have opinions, just make it clear for whom you are speaking), and then everyone else follows. The County and the public schools are the next 2 biggest employers and when I try to do any coalition building, I get a raft of "I will lose my job if I speak, gotta keep my head down." The people who show up at meetings are 99% retirees.
I assume other towns aren't this weird/secretive/scared of everything and it might be easier to organize a coalition to show up and offer a counter-balance to the NIMBYs. I'm sure in your position you see a lot of NIMBY as well — I was chair of the parks and rec board at one point and capital improvements ... whew. Lots of battles.
That DOES sound like a unique challenge. At least so far I haven't run into otherwise interested people shying away from engagement because of possible employment blow back.
In an interesting way, you touch on something I've been trying to noodle on for a bit, which is the feeling that many of us would be happier working for smaller, maybe family-run, companies rather than the medium-large corps that employ so many of us. The US has the lowest share of self-employed people among OECD countries! Doesn't really square with our image of ourselves as self-made-by-bootstraps folk.
I need to revise my earlier statement because we do get a lot of families with kids showing up to advocate for things like rec facilities for our kids. But on the small, family-run company, that is interesting! I would not have thought about that but it makes intuitive sense. You should write more about that, I'd like to read it!
This was interesting and I learned a lot. And Chuck was nice and cool and super responsive in a follow up with rando me. So I feel a little bad throwing him under the bus. But he doesn't seem like it affects him. And I think it's a critical point in the current discussion, so...
When I started bringing up empirical evidence, Chuck directly called out that if I was the kind of person who was open to changing my mind because of evidence, that I was rare and he wasn't like me. He didn't need facts, just "logic and reason".
This is emblematic of a major problem with the left right now. They have it in common with the oligarchic right. Go talk to the those who convinced everyone the Laffer curve was real. Logic and reason without evidence is just making things up. Bare ideology.
Chuck seems generally sensible and it's not like Strong Towns is advocating all nonsensical stuff. But we fundamentally, inarguably cannot be successful on the left if we explicitly reject facts for whatever stories we like. It's disappointing that such a successful advocate for a lot of good ideas falls for this.
I missed that discussion you had with him but I agree he does seem really open to talking over things with all different kinds of people, which is cool. I completely agree with everything you say about the left and narratives and ideology ... but Chuck (to the best of my knowledge) is not really on the left and certainly not a leftist; I think he's a libertarian?He and I are coming at this from a small-town, not-the-coastal-elite perspectives. And we both are or were planning commissioners, which usually lends itself to being more pragmatic and less ideological. He and I are still hashing out the practical v. principles thing. I'll have to go find your discussion in the comments (or if it's handy, you can send me the link.)
Interesting to think of planning in a place like Los Álamos. So different from a big city. Maybe even moreso in a company town like Los Álamos? Beautiful place! We visited Santa Fe last year and drove through on the way to Bandelier.
Hey, this sounds weird, but reading this conversation was very exciting for me!
The fact that these issues are being surfaced and discussed by Strong Towns leadership is great. I've been active in some local Strong Towns chapters and while it's been great meeting like-minded people, we haven't really...been able to change much.
Traditional activism is brutal. I'm part of like 3 or 4 non profits. I have a bylaws committee meeting in an hour (I am sick of Robert's Rules). People (me) burn out. Oftentimes, you rely on stirring up anger or past trauma. You have to plead for money. And at the end of the day, you still are at the behest of elected officials who are worried (almost primarily) about their own job security!
Are you familiar with Civic Assemblies? I (potentially) am presenting to Strong Towns Artesia about them. I really think this could be a powerful tool in all kinds of activists efforts. Civic Assemblies are groups of people formed by random selection asked to deliberate on a topic and actually collaborate to problem-solve. I believe it's geniune democracy versus elections, which historially were considered tools of an aristocracy. I'll be sending you an email and really hope you give it some consideration.
Citizen Assemblies were the *exact* mechanism I was thinking about when reading Marohn's comment about the vetocracy. Seconding the ask for consideration; they really do seem like good tools for direct, deliberative democracy rather than vetocracy.
It's a good exchange. I definitely agree that local control is (perhaps counterintuitively) more top down than state intervention. Local government is dominated by older, wealthier people, particularly skewed towards those with parochial interests. Large numbers of people actually pay attention to and vote in gubernatorial elections. This includes more of the people (young, not yet established) who would actually support the kinds of reforms that would allow more housing.
We see this dynamic in Arizona, where city governments (e.g., Scottsdale) attempt to block denser housing developments. The company in that case got the state government to pass a bill that prevented cities from using referendums from blocking such housing developments. I'm not opposed to efforts at persuasion, but I think the fundamental starting point is that local government is inherently NIMBY-skewed, so deciding policy at a different level (state government) is a more realistic path forward.
No one is grappling with the inability of ANYONE to absorb the lower cost of housing. The "housing crisis" doesn't apply to homeowners. Homeowners do not want lower cost of housing. Municipalities do not want lower cost of housing. Institutional investors (ie, your 401k) do not want lower cost of housing. The American economy does not want lower cost of housing.
Chuck is either very stupid or just openly dishonest about this. Centralizing power is wrong so the only way to change things is... write a blog post about an ADU and hope people like it. It's very difficult to take this seriously without laughing.
He's just fundamentally wrong about how power works in our federalist system. The state is the only true entity with legitimacy in our system. Power is ultimately always centralized at that level. Cities and their charters exist through state regulation. If localities can't govern because they've created intricate local bureaucracies, states are the only ones who can actually fix that. Passing state laws to get the outcomes you want (because your current laws aren't working) is *not* centralizing power. That's where the power always was! Indeed if the state didn't have that power they couldn't pass the law.
I think Chuck is neither stupid nor dishonest - I think he's principled. His principle is "bottom up is good, top down is bad," and things flow from there. I am more of a utilitarian: I want the greatest good for the greatest number of people and I'm somewhat agnostic about how we get there. It's not that I don't have principles, but outcomes matter more. Give me a bottom-up playbook that has been proven to work to get zoning reform done, and I'm down. I'm not seeing that. It's not that bottom-up work isn't part of the coalition building, but ultimately as you say - power matters. How do we change that balance of power without addressing the underlying delegation of land use to hyperlocal (and often unrepresentative) per-project battles? I already argued this but seems to me, state pre-emption of cartel-like homeowner behavior isn't "centralizing power"; it's restoring accountability to a level where outcomes can align more closely with broader public interests. If we want more democracy, more equity, and more housing, we may need to break the grip of local gatekeepers.
As someone recently said in a coffee with you, the best solution can be in coalitions of bottom-up and bottom-down. Consider the range of interests that created Oregon's land use law and Washington's Growth Management Act. The inherent top-down and bottom-up goals and implementations in those states have enabled further legislative activities that incorporate the latest trends, including missing middle housing, revisions to design and environmental review processes, enhanced approaches to Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and backyard cottages, and modifications to parking and square footage minimums. It's all so contextual; speakers from afar of whatever persuasion can only go so far--usually to get the political discussions going. You've been at this for years--keep up the provocation. I like how you present the real challenges from the trenches (and your career) to the sages of the day--but the answers may come not from them but from the fruits of your considered diligence. Glad Ryan P. re-upped this for more to see, btw, because in the most laboratory-ish of towns, you present a fantastic laboratory for the fission and fusion of ongoing dogma.
I appreciate the response but I disagree that he's principled. I think he started from the conclusion that state preemption of local control is bad and he'll twist any argument to fit that conclusion, and I do feel that's dishonest. If we remove bureaucracy and allow people to build (bottom-up), that's not top-down technocracy. It was the technocracy that created the problem.
The logical outcome of his argument is that nothing can change because if anyone does anything to change it then it is "centralizing power" (lol). That's not serious or good faith.
Great discussion. I think getting state and local govs out of the residential zoning business eliminates top-down power in a way most everyone in the YIMBYverse and Strong Towns camp agrees with, the question is how we get there
Under our status quo politics, political will only exists for states to modestly liberalize residential zoning rather than do away with it entirely. Incremental changes in places like CA often don’t effectively lead to more development. YIMBY Law had a great report about all the ways state-level zoning reform in CA doesn’t work bc the reforms come with so many strings attached that few developers use them
Still, no state change in CA has been worse than local zoning. And sometimes reforms, often iterated and improved over time, work really well! ADU reforms in CA have been extremely successful because they essentially remove any ability to delay or deny ADUs within a loose set of standards. It’s a good template for other state preemption, but extending similar rules has repeatedly run into political obstacles
Still, on the pathway to restoring residential land use power to the property owner level, incremental changes by states (such as eliminating parking minimums in only the half mile around major transit stops, as done by CA’s AB 2097) seem far better than only supporting local changes that happen far slower and don’t scale. I’d rather use all the avenues available to us to restore zoning authority to the property owner
I like your point about how state reforms fail when they leave in too many discretionary levers. I’ve seen that locally too: technically liberalized processes that still have enough procedural veto points to make projects infeasible or exhausting. The CA ADU reforms are instructive because they didn’t just “allow” ADUs—they removed the ability to deny them. I agree that’s a template we should be learning from much more aggressively, and we could use that approach here where we technically legalized ADUs but nobody has even applied for one—some will argue this is because nobody really wants ADUs in this whole town but you know there's some other blockage in the pipeline, it's not about demand.
So, incrementalism is often the only path politically available because anything more ambitious just doesn't have a chance in hell. I guess my follow-up question is: how do we make it additive rather than just symbolic? If AB 2097 (ending parking minimums near transit) is better than nothing but still limited in scope—how do we ensure those reforms evolve toward universality? Because I worry that the political impulse is to treat the half-mile zone as “solved” while maintaining the core problem elsewhere.
Anyway, I’m with you: use every tool available. Local efforts are key! But they’re often blocked without outside help. State reforms are slow and politically constrained, but they’re often the only way to shift the terrain. I’m just not sure we have the luxury of hoping for a better grassroots moment when we’re decades behind and the costs of waiting keep compounding. I keep thinking about e.g. the Fair Housing Act and whether, without some kind of top-down approach, we'd be waiting for every angry old racist in America to die or be convinced to change their minds about blocking Black people from their neighborhoods.
The issue is his approach just restates the problem. Klein-Thompson’s critique is specifically of local decision making that’s pretty uniform in certain wealthy cities, which yields similar policies and similarly disastrous results.
Your local communities in the Bay Area, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, etc. make the same mistakes. Other cities— Houston, Dallas, etc. don’t make these mistakes.
The concept of states and localities as laboratories is useful in identifying what works and what doesn’t and applying those lessons more broadly. We know that things like restrictive zoning and endless veto points don’t work because they’ve been done in certain cities, and they’ve driven costs through the roof. Chuck doesn’t seem to make the laughably nonsensical claim that the explanation is that Houston has less powerful moneyed interests than San Francisco, but nevertheless the fixation on the idea that local control solves everything is just spectacularly unpersuasive.
Reality is… there’s a reason things don’t get built. It’s not that no one tried it and got wonderful results that were adopted by everyone. It’s rather that there’s a real tradeoff, real or perceived. Reality is, some people don’t want density where they live. They think it’ll bring poor darker skinned people to where they live. They think (correctly) that it will drive the price of their house down relative to where it otherwise would be. They think (perhaps correctly) that it will bring car traffic.
And these views are strongly held by people who have the money to have their voices heard, the time and flexibility to go to planning board meetings, and the wherewithal to navigate bureaucracy. Poor working people have none of these things, and they’re the ones that demonstrably lose. Romanticizing local control is not good; we’ve seen the demonstrable bad results it often gets us.
Great convo. I do think there is something to be said for seeding people’s imaginations with what is actually possible for their communities. My feeling is for every project that gets shouted down by the five angriest codgers in town, there are many more that simply never even get proposed because people don’t know that they’re options.
I sit on my town’s capital improvements committee and am wanting to dig in to be more impactful in that position, so I really appreciate you speaking to your boots on the ground experience with development projects in your town.
This is a little to the side of your point but in my particular "secret city" town, the general public seems terrified to show up to meetings, or at least pretends to be terrified so they have an excuse not to bother. "The Lab will fire me if I speak" is the #1 excuse (which is, of course, not true, Los Alamos National Lab lets you have opinions, just make it clear for whom you are speaking), and then everyone else follows. The County and the public schools are the next 2 biggest employers and when I try to do any coalition building, I get a raft of "I will lose my job if I speak, gotta keep my head down." The people who show up at meetings are 99% retirees.
I assume other towns aren't this weird/secretive/scared of everything and it might be easier to organize a coalition to show up and offer a counter-balance to the NIMBYs. I'm sure in your position you see a lot of NIMBY as well — I was chair of the parks and rec board at one point and capital improvements ... whew. Lots of battles.
That DOES sound like a unique challenge. At least so far I haven't run into otherwise interested people shying away from engagement because of possible employment blow back.
In an interesting way, you touch on something I've been trying to noodle on for a bit, which is the feeling that many of us would be happier working for smaller, maybe family-run, companies rather than the medium-large corps that employ so many of us. The US has the lowest share of self-employed people among OECD countries! Doesn't really square with our image of ourselves as self-made-by-bootstraps folk.
Citation: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/self-employment-rate.html
I need to revise my earlier statement because we do get a lot of families with kids showing up to advocate for things like rec facilities for our kids. But on the small, family-run company, that is interesting! I would not have thought about that but it makes intuitive sense. You should write more about that, I'd like to read it!
This was interesting and I learned a lot. And Chuck was nice and cool and super responsive in a follow up with rando me. So I feel a little bad throwing him under the bus. But he doesn't seem like it affects him. And I think it's a critical point in the current discussion, so...
When I started bringing up empirical evidence, Chuck directly called out that if I was the kind of person who was open to changing my mind because of evidence, that I was rare and he wasn't like me. He didn't need facts, just "logic and reason".
This is emblematic of a major problem with the left right now. They have it in common with the oligarchic right. Go talk to the those who convinced everyone the Laffer curve was real. Logic and reason without evidence is just making things up. Bare ideology.
Chuck seems generally sensible and it's not like Strong Towns is advocating all nonsensical stuff. But we fundamentally, inarguably cannot be successful on the left if we explicitly reject facts for whatever stories we like. It's disappointing that such a successful advocate for a lot of good ideas falls for this.
I missed that discussion you had with him but I agree he does seem really open to talking over things with all different kinds of people, which is cool. I completely agree with everything you say about the left and narratives and ideology ... but Chuck (to the best of my knowledge) is not really on the left and certainly not a leftist; I think he's a libertarian?He and I are coming at this from a small-town, not-the-coastal-elite perspectives. And we both are or were planning commissioners, which usually lends itself to being more pragmatic and less ideological. He and I are still hashing out the practical v. principles thing. I'll have to go find your discussion in the comments (or if it's handy, you can send me the link.)
Oh he's a libertarian. That makes sense. Libertarians are usually even worse on stories versus facts than leftists! Here's the discussion. https://substack.com/@stripingit/note/c-128062622?r=a7s9
Interesting to think of planning in a place like Los Álamos. So different from a big city. Maybe even moreso in a company town like Los Álamos? Beautiful place! We visited Santa Fe last year and drove through on the way to Bandelier.
Hey, this sounds weird, but reading this conversation was very exciting for me!
The fact that these issues are being surfaced and discussed by Strong Towns leadership is great. I've been active in some local Strong Towns chapters and while it's been great meeting like-minded people, we haven't really...been able to change much.
Traditional activism is brutal. I'm part of like 3 or 4 non profits. I have a bylaws committee meeting in an hour (I am sick of Robert's Rules). People (me) burn out. Oftentimes, you rely on stirring up anger or past trauma. You have to plead for money. And at the end of the day, you still are at the behest of elected officials who are worried (almost primarily) about their own job security!
Are you familiar with Civic Assemblies? I (potentially) am presenting to Strong Towns Artesia about them. I really think this could be a powerful tool in all kinds of activists efforts. Civic Assemblies are groups of people formed by random selection asked to deliberate on a topic and actually collaborate to problem-solve. I believe it's geniune democracy versus elections, which historially were considered tools of an aristocracy. I'll be sending you an email and really hope you give it some consideration.
Citizen Assemblies were the *exact* mechanism I was thinking about when reading Marohn's comment about the vetocracy. Seconding the ask for consideration; they really do seem like good tools for direct, deliberative democracy rather than vetocracy.
A good read: https://congress.crowd.law/case-belgian-sortition-models.html
It's a good exchange. I definitely agree that local control is (perhaps counterintuitively) more top down than state intervention. Local government is dominated by older, wealthier people, particularly skewed towards those with parochial interests. Large numbers of people actually pay attention to and vote in gubernatorial elections. This includes more of the people (young, not yet established) who would actually support the kinds of reforms that would allow more housing.
We see this dynamic in Arizona, where city governments (e.g., Scottsdale) attempt to block denser housing developments. The company in that case got the state government to pass a bill that prevented cities from using referendums from blocking such housing developments. I'm not opposed to efforts at persuasion, but I think the fundamental starting point is that local government is inherently NIMBY-skewed, so deciding policy at a different level (state government) is a more realistic path forward.
No one is grappling with the inability of ANYONE to absorb the lower cost of housing. The "housing crisis" doesn't apply to homeowners. Homeowners do not want lower cost of housing. Municipalities do not want lower cost of housing. Institutional investors (ie, your 401k) do not want lower cost of housing. The American economy does not want lower cost of housing.
Chuck is either very stupid or just openly dishonest about this. Centralizing power is wrong so the only way to change things is... write a blog post about an ADU and hope people like it. It's very difficult to take this seriously without laughing.
He's just fundamentally wrong about how power works in our federalist system. The state is the only true entity with legitimacy in our system. Power is ultimately always centralized at that level. Cities and their charters exist through state regulation. If localities can't govern because they've created intricate local bureaucracies, states are the only ones who can actually fix that. Passing state laws to get the outcomes you want (because your current laws aren't working) is *not* centralizing power. That's where the power always was! Indeed if the state didn't have that power they couldn't pass the law.
I think Chuck is neither stupid nor dishonest - I think he's principled. His principle is "bottom up is good, top down is bad," and things flow from there. I am more of a utilitarian: I want the greatest good for the greatest number of people and I'm somewhat agnostic about how we get there. It's not that I don't have principles, but outcomes matter more. Give me a bottom-up playbook that has been proven to work to get zoning reform done, and I'm down. I'm not seeing that. It's not that bottom-up work isn't part of the coalition building, but ultimately as you say - power matters. How do we change that balance of power without addressing the underlying delegation of land use to hyperlocal (and often unrepresentative) per-project battles? I already argued this but seems to me, state pre-emption of cartel-like homeowner behavior isn't "centralizing power"; it's restoring accountability to a level where outcomes can align more closely with broader public interests. If we want more democracy, more equity, and more housing, we may need to break the grip of local gatekeepers.
As someone recently said in a coffee with you, the best solution can be in coalitions of bottom-up and bottom-down. Consider the range of interests that created Oregon's land use law and Washington's Growth Management Act. The inherent top-down and bottom-up goals and implementations in those states have enabled further legislative activities that incorporate the latest trends, including missing middle housing, revisions to design and environmental review processes, enhanced approaches to Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and backyard cottages, and modifications to parking and square footage minimums. It's all so contextual; speakers from afar of whatever persuasion can only go so far--usually to get the political discussions going. You've been at this for years--keep up the provocation. I like how you present the real challenges from the trenches (and your career) to the sages of the day--but the answers may come not from them but from the fruits of your considered diligence. Glad Ryan P. re-upped this for more to see, btw, because in the most laboratory-ish of towns, you present a fantastic laboratory for the fission and fusion of ongoing dogma.
I appreciate the response but I disagree that he's principled. I think he started from the conclusion that state preemption of local control is bad and he'll twist any argument to fit that conclusion, and I do feel that's dishonest. If we remove bureaucracy and allow people to build (bottom-up), that's not top-down technocracy. It was the technocracy that created the problem.
The logical outcome of his argument is that nothing can change because if anyone does anything to change it then it is "centralizing power" (lol). That's not serious or good faith.