Charles L. Marohn Jr. > Quotes

“As planners, we've become so comfortable with a system that gives local planners and boards a tremendous amount of arbitrary and subjective power that we don't consider that maybe it should not be this way. Maybe we should have to work harder to write quality codes instead of relying on variances to bail us out when things don't work out quite as we have planned. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we don't know so much after all, that we can't predict the future and should quit trying to do so.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“At Strong Towns we have developed ten Placemaking Principles[xxvii] - axioms to live by for those wanting to build a Strong Town. The first one is this: “A Strong Town is financially stable and must not be dependent on government subsidy for the common maintenance of basic infrastructure systems.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“Our problem was not, and is not, a lack of growth. Our problem is 60 years of unproductive growth -- growth that has buried us in financial liabilities. The American pattern of development does not create real wealth. It creates the illusion of wealth.”
― Charles Marohn, Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“High speed auto travel has no place in urban areas where the cost of development demands a complex neighborhood pattern with a mixing of uses, multiple modes of travel and a public realm that enhances the value of the adjacent properties. High speed traffic destroys value within our neighborhoods. It drives out investment.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“Consolidation is a response to the notion that our problem is essentially one of efficiency. The idea is that local governments are not efficient enough; therefore, we can increase efficiency by combining them into fewer governments. Like the banking sector, having fewer players creates more efficiency. And like banks, fewer players will amplify fragility.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“An engineer designing a street or road prioritizes the world in this way, no matter how they are instructed: Traffic speed, Traffic volume, Safety, Cost The rest of the world generally would prioritize things differently, as follows: Safety, Cost, Traffic volume, Traffic speed In other words, the engineer first assumes that all traffic must travel at speed. Given that speed, all roads and streets are then designed to handle a projected volume. Once those parameters are set, only then does an engineer look at mitigating for safety and, finally, how to reduce the overall cost (which at that point is nearly always ridiculously expensive).”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“It is also important to briefly emphasize the difference between a land tax and a property tax. The former taxes the value of the land only (just the dirt) while the property tax includes both the land and the improvements that have been made. The land tax creates an incentive to improve one’s property (since only the land is taxed, taxes don’t increase when the property is improved) while the property tax creates an incentive to allow properties to decline (improving a property raises one’s taxes). If we want cities to be successful, if we want to build wealth within our state, we will stop discouraging people from improving their property.”
― Charles Marohn, A World Class Transportation System: Transportation Finance for a New Economy

“I would require that any “rails to trails” corridors be required to retain the rail alignment in perpetuity. It is important that we reserve the right to have a “trails to rails” program when that need arises (which I suspect it will).”
― Charles Marohn, A World Class Transportation System: Transportation Finance for a New Economy

“Part of the Strong Towns Curbside Chat presentation addresses government transfer payments, the first Mechanism of Growth that our cities have used post-WW II[xxiv]. For two generations, our cities and towns have counted on transfers from federal and state governments to fund -- in the name of "growth" -- basic infrastructure and services like roads, streets, sewer systems, water systems, public buildings, parks, trails, sidewalks and even things like planning and engineering and, yes, even lobbying (ponder the incestuous nature of that for a while).”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“Most Americans have heard of zoning. But to the extent that they know anything about it, it's what they know from games such as SimCity or Cities: Skylines. That is, zoning is part of the basic order of the city: a simple, universal, and presumably sensible regulation put in place to protect the character of our neighborhoods. Zoning, we are told, is the reason your home is unlikely to be menaced by a smokestack.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis

“Consolidation will not get at the core problems our cities face. If we want to build resilience and find solutions to our problems, we need to embrace the chaos — the innovation along with the failure — of natural systems, and create a framework where local governments can experiment with different responses to the current crisis.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“My recommendation to the city was that they make this a two-lane street. With roundabouts at the key college entrances, traffic would flow just fine, albeit much slower than it does today. Such a design, with 10-foot lanes, would be easy for pedestrians to cross, especially with a nice, wide median and periodic jut-outs of the median and walk to shorten the distance people have to cross. You could put large walks along both sides and they would actually be used as the slow-moving cars would not threaten pedestrians. You could also skip the bike lanes as the bikes could actually ride right in the traffic stream.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“Consolidation is the current least-painful way to avoid dealing with the underlying financial problems of our cities and towns. But like consolidation in the banking sector, municipal consolidation will only amplify the underlying fragilities in our development pattern. A better solution would be to embrace the innovations — and failures — that would come from thousands of local experiments in adapting to our current financial situation.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“We've spent two generations transforming a public realm once comprised of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods into auto-only zones. These are places where the kids used to play ball in the street. Today a kid can't even play safely in their own front yard.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“The difficulty that standard zoning creates for infill needs to be appreciated, because infill is just the start. We need to get far beyond the concept of infill. What we need is a system of development that allows neighborhoods to establish, grow and mature over time. Single-family homes need to evolve into duplexes. Duplexes need to mature into row houses. Row houses need to grow into low rise, mixed-use flats.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“We should not be building multi-million dollar interchanges, for example, to provide access to strip malls, gas stations and big box stores, all of which have very low financial productivity.”
― Charles Marohn, A World Class Transportation System: Transportation Finance for a New Economy

“most North American cities are going to contract over the next three decades. That means infrastructure will fail and neighborhoods will be abandoned.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

“The proper response to congestion between cities is to build capacity. The proper response to congestion within a city is to intensify land use. The former is simple, almost mechanical. The latter is extremely complex and nuanced. After decades of ripping cities apart in the fight against congestion, it is time we recognize congestion as our best friend in our effort to build wealth and prosperity.”
― Charles Marohn, A World Class Transportation System: Transportation Finance for a New Economy

“After perinatal conditions, which are problems that occur near or in the immediate months after childbirth, the leading cause of death amongst children ages 0 to 19 is auto accidents[xxxiv]. For accidental causes of mortality, there is no close second.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“When a licensed engineer references Level of Service for a local street, especially one at the very core of their community, it is a tell. It is an indication of a broad misunderstanding of the difference between a road and street, of deep confusion over what it means to build a place and how that is at odds with a driver's level of comfort. We would expect such professionals, if they are intellectually consistent, to live in a home built almost exclusively of hallways.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town

“The best thing we can do for the safety of our children is to get them out of the car by building mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods. The safest trip is the one not taken.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“But clearly, if we want innovation, we have to embrace failure. After all, what percentage of businesses fail? What percentage of species fail? Natural systems, like economic systems, evolve, adapt and create only in an environment where failure is allowed. If we want innovation, we have to allow failure.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“Our modern system of zoning, which separates everything into pods of different micro-uses and then connects each pod with a hierarchy of transportation, handles greenfield development brilliantly. That is, it is handled in a very predictable, efficient manner. On the other hand, modern zoning is brutal to infill. Small infill projects not only have to withstand neighborhood opposition, but the bureaucratic encrustation of paperwork, hearings, plan reviews and minutiae that don't scale down well, especially on sites that tend to be more challenging (the reason they are gaps in the first place).”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“Imagine two 9/11 attacks each year that killed just kids and you still would not have the number of child fatalities America has each year from auto accidents.[xxxv]”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“Enter the concept of a Complete Street. To me, the fundamental contribution of Complete Streets to the discourse surrounding the future of our towns and neighborhoods is the recognition that our streets must serve more than just cars and that the public realm can no longer be an auto-only zone.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“At Strong Towns, we've worked to illuminate the fact that this transformation has been done at tremendous financial cost. This is not only because the construction of wider, flatter and straighter streets has been expensive, but because the auto-centric nature of the transformed public realm drives private-sector investment out of traditional neighborhoods, dislocating it to places that provide more buffering to the car.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1

“We have largely convinced ourselves that transportation spending creates jobs, opportunity and wealth for Americans. Does it? This is a testable hypothesis where we can generate and obtain plenty of data, yet we don’t. Why?”
― Charles Marohn, A World Class Transportation System: Transportation Finance for a New Economy

“The best place to start would be the SmartCode or similar form-based alternative. In a form-based code, we see regulations that are permissive (state what they want) and not restrictive (state what they oppose), address primarily the form the property takes and not the use, create a predictable development pattern that is compatible with existing neighborhoods and streamline the bureaucracy to make approvals quick and easy.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr., Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1