Townhall Series: Pillars of a Strong Town with Charles Marohn and Lou Powell
Overview of this Episode
In this episode of the Trust Your Voice podcast, host Sylvie Légère sat down with Charles Marohn, Founder and President of Strong Towns, and Lou Powell, President of High-Tech Small Town, to talk about what makes a town strong and thriving.
In this conversation, Sylvie with Charles and Lou discuss:
What makes a strong town?
5 pillars of a strong town to note of
Insights on what makes a thriving community
How to improve the quality of life and prosperity of a community
Transforming cities to be successful
Here is an article how High-Tech Small Town, with their advocacy of bring tech talents and attracting high-tech remote jobs into a small town, made Aledo stronger than it was before.
Charles authored great books about communities in America: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: A Strong Towns Approach to Transportation . He has a podcast piece about struggling communities and you may listen it here: A Model for Suburban Development? And lastly, if you want to know the difference between a road and a street, Charles also has a TedTalk episode about it.
Connect with Lou:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/loupowell
Connect with Charles:
LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesmarohn
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/marohn
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/clmarohn
We hope you enjoy the episode! Tell us what you think by leaving a review on Apple podcasts. Stay tuned for more episodes and be sure to subscribe to the Trust Your Voice podcast on your favorite podcast player.
Episode Transcript
Sylvie Legere 0:02
Welcome to the Trust Your Voice podcast. My name is Sylvie Legere. And as a civically engaged entrepreneur, the co-founder of the policy circle, and a mom, I've noticed that too often we underestimate our leadership potential, and we forget that we can be a catalyst. I believe that no matter where you are in life is meaningful conversations, like the one we will have today that ignited new ways to think about our purpose, you can be a spark for others, you just need to trust your voice, even if it's a little shaky. So let's start the show. Welcome to the trust your voice podcast, I'm Sal religion, your host, and I am doing a series of episodes around being a spark in your town. So there are 46 million Americans who live in small cities, those are between 20,200 1000 people with really stagnant and declining population. If you want to learn more about this, I really invite you to review a great article that I found published in The City Journal, on struggling communities in America. And the link is in the show notes. So today, what I would like to explore is what makes a strong and thriving community. And for that, I would like to share with you two interviews that I did, during the last policy circles Summit, which was actually focused on the theme of thriving communities. So first, my interview with Charles, who is known as Chuck, and he's the founder and president of strong towns, and he's a now retired professional engineer, and then land use planner with decades of experience, and yields a bachelor in degree in civil engineering and a master's in urban and regional planning, both from the University of Minnesota. And he's also the author of this theory, detailed guide book that's called strong towns, a bottom up revolution, to rebuild American prosperity. And he's also the author of Confessions of a recovering engineer, a strong town's approach to transportation, he did a TED Talk of the difference between roads, and streets. So I'm excited to share with you a few of his thoughts about what makes a strong town. So Charles, what is your background? And what drove you to think about what makes a strong town and to launch a full on organization on this?
Charles Marohn 2:30
My name is Charles Marohn. I am the founder and president of Strong Towns, we are an organization that advocates for a more fiscally responsible approach to local government. How do we build cities that generate wealth for communities that increase their prosperity, increase their capacity, allow them to do more for their people and allow people to live a higher quality of life. So my background is in engineering and planning, and I recognized back when I was doing that kind of work that the cities that I worked with could grow very fast, we had lots of policies in place and lots of programs, to add new homes, add new roads, add new pipes grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. But that growth was all coming at a cost, it was actually making the city financially worse off. We were in a sense, taking on a lot of long term liabilities. And in exchange, we were getting immediate growth, that math equation doesn't work over the long term. And so a strong town is one that at its core, at its essence can take care of itself. It's one that is not financially overextended. It's not one that is financially frayed. It's one that makes really good use of its existing infrastructures, existing resources, and kind of maximizes the value for the community, out of every foot of pipe, every foot of road every foot of sidewalk is kind of obsessed about how do we make this a better place with the stuff we have, as opposed to how do we build a whole bunch more stuff?
Sylvie Legere 4:07
So Charles, share with us what are the five pillars of a strong town that you identified?
Charles Marohn 4:15
In 2022, we started to look at the different policy areas that we had been working in and focused on five what we are calling priority campaigns. The first one is transparent local accounting. The idea that local government budgets are often written with an investor in mind bond company A ratings agency, and not the transparency to constituents to people living in the community or or even to elected officials. Elected officials oftentimes find their own budgets to be very opaque. This is not necessary and we advocate for better transparency in local accounting. The second campaign is safe and productive streets. The idea that when we look at a local street, a neighborhood street, the place where you might live or where you might shop Are you might go out to eat or what have you. That Street is designed not for through traffic and the speed of through traffic. But for the value of that place, how do we de emphasize the speed of through traffic and emphasize instead, the value, the safety, the productivity of that street. The third campaign then is and highway expansions. We recognize that the federal government, state government spends a lot of transportation dollars in local communities, making investments that are marginal in terms of their benefit, but have enormous impacts in terms of taking the air out of the room locally, there's so many things that we need to do from a transportation standpoint, at the local level, and building the fourth lane or the fourth overpass between you and the next city is just not it. We don't have the money to maintain the highways we've already built, we would like to see a shift our focus away from building more to making better use out of what we already have. The fourth campaign then is about incremental housing. When we look back at successful cities of the past, we recognize that neighborhoods were not stagnant places, they were not places that were locked, in a sense in amber, the way that we freeze them today through zoning, through building codes through other financial incentives, neighborhoods evolved and they adapted and they changed, they changed to give people living in the neighborhoods more opportunity. They changed and evolved to provide housing that was more affordable, that had a lot of different price points and a lot of different options for where people are in their life. And we want to get back to that we want every neighborhood in the country to be able to incrementally evolve and change over time, not massive shifts, not unrecognizable levels of change, but healthy levels of growth and evolution. And then our final campaign, the fifth campaign is about parking. We want to eliminate parking mandates and subsidies. When local governments come in and mandate that businesses provide a certain level of parking, they are shifting the competitive landscape towards large corporate businesses that locate out on the edge and away from small businesses and local business that maybe attracts people in different ways. When local governments subsidize parking, they're doing a similar thing they are taking land use that would generally be productive, taxpaying and devaluing it, locking it in place as in a sense, the most low value use that a city can have, when you have a parking lot, you generally have sewer, water roadway sidewalk, a storm sewer, you're draining that you have an enormous amount of expense for a tiny, tiny tax base. We want to get those places converted back into things that are productive things that actually improve the quality of life for people living in a place.
Sylvie Legere 7:53
So I think these pillars are really interesting and counter a little bit counter current thinking about eliminating parking mandates, safe and local streets, ending the highway expansions and really demanding fiscal transparency and responsibility. Those are very specific requirements I think that you've defined for making a town a strong town economically enviable, I'd love for you to talk about how we can improve the quality of life and prosperity of a community that can you share how a city's priorities can shift to build wealth in the community?
Charles Marohn 8:32
If you go into any city hall in America, you are going to run into a system that is oriented vertically, we call it most city halls are obsessed with what is the latest state program, what is the latest federal grant opportunity, who is the developer that will come in from the outside and make an investment in our community. And so they become very sensitive to the vertical flow of cash into the city, enabling them to do things if cities want to grow more productive if they want to provide a higher quality of life, for people living in the community if they want to make lower risk, lower cost investments that have a much higher financial return, they need to shift their orientation to be horizontal. And by horizontal I mean, instead of being sensitive to the cash flow, instead of being sensitive to the programs from the state and federal level. They need to become sensitive to the urgent concerns of residents in their communities. Where do people struggle? And what can we do to alleviate those struggles with the resources we have? At strong towns, we've created a four step approach to making Low Risk High Return investments and it starts with going out and humbly observing where people struggle where people are having a difficult time using the city as it has been built. We then ask cities to ask themselves a question with the resources we have with the stuff we have on hand. What is the next smallest thing we can do to alleviate that struggle? We intentionally say don't try to fix it permanently, don't try to solve it forever just make it a little bit better make it a little bit easier. The third step that hasn't gotten do that thing. There's no real barriers to making small improvements over a broad area code to it. And the first step then is to repeat the process over and over and over. If we can become sensitive to the places that people struggle in our neighborhoods, what we find is that there's an almost unlimited number of investment opportunities that any city can make opportunities that are very low cost very low risk, and have enormous financial upside. In other words, these are investments that grow our wealth, grow our capacity, make our communities more prosperous. And the great thing about them is they cannot help but improving people's lives because they're oriented around where people struggle. That's the essence of a strong towns approach, aligning people's quality of life with the financial outcomes that we're all trying to achieve.
Sylvie Legere 10:56
You know, as Charles said, the essence of a strong town approach is to really focus on investment on where people struggle and repeat those investments in a incremental way. Charles is really inviting city leaders and citizens like us to go a little bit countercurrent to swim upstream and resist the temptation of focusing on bringing in huge big capital projects. So I really invite you to visit strongtowns.org. They have a ton of resources there on city planning and development, some courses and I think it will really help each of us to trust our voice and engage in those conversations around city planning, Charles shared some ways to make a city viable and thriving from a planning perspective.
Sylvie Legere 11:44
As we've been talking about often on this show, government actions and directives impact people and companies. That's why government relations, our critical business function for mitigating risk and identifying opportunities, but really, it's often difficult to navigate and find expertise, so your company can now access the top Public Policy and Government Affairs experts for insights, advice and advocacy work on demand, invite you to visit poligage.com for a free consultation. Now, let's get back to the episode.
Sylvie Legere 12:18
Next, what I would like to do is introduce you to the work of Lou Powell, who is the president of a High-tech Small Towns. So Lou brings a steadfast drive for innovation in to his role as EVP of solutions and Innovation at concentrics capitalist. He also worked in advertising and digital marketing, before launching his own business vandyk Digital, which he co led for 19 years before it was acquired by PK. Lou is really lifelong student of technology. He's bringing a design thinking approach to all of his work, and is right now the president of a High-tech Small Town, which is a nonprofit that's focused on technology based economic development in rural communities and knees starting with Aledo, Illinois. There's I put in the show notes, a really great article about what's making Aledo stronger through tech. It's an article that was published on Monmouth College website. So, Lou, how did you initiate the High-tech Small Town project in Aledo, Illinois,
Lou Powell 13:26
I'm a tech entrepreneur, I am from Aledo, Illinois. And over the last decade or so we've been watching our small towns erode as we watch folks urbanized in suburban eyes and being a part of the tech community. I just saw so many opportunities for us to make a difference in the life of our small town and see if we can make an economic turnaround. So high tech small town was started as a way to create economic prosperity in rural towns using technology.
Sylvie Legere 13:56
So share with us what are the goals, the High-tech Small Town in Aledo?
Lou Powell 14:01
The goals or goal of high tech small town is pretty singular in nature. And one of the things that I'm pretty adamant about is being singularly focused, even if that focus changes over the lifetime of your organization, a startup is going to be very differently focused than a more mature organization. So as we change and see success, we'll definitely change our focus. But our objective right now is to be solely focused on bringing in tech talent into the community. And so that is our objective, that we can make a difference economically by bringing tech talent or retaining emerging tech talent in the community. And that's our objective. And we're trying to accomplish that through a number of activities. So the activities that we're doing to accomplish that goal are working with the secondary schools, to create awareness and to do things like code camps to create interest and help them understand the breadth and inch resisting things that are going on in tech careers, and then work with high schools as a second objective, to create dual enrollment programs that will enable students to come out of their, their high school experience with a tech certificate that would be a springboard for going on for an associate's or bachelor's degree, or potentially just to go directly into industry and get some great experience out of the gate with all of those, you know, basic tech qualifiers. So that's something that we're really excited about and have interest with a four or five high schools and getting involved with that. We're also looking at creating relationships with the local code camps, universities, you know, junior colleges, etc, and trying to create different programs and internships in the local community that we can bring them into to create that introduction to those new tech workers. And then in lastly, we're working with different employers in the region to see if we can bring those folks that we've influenced and make those employees of those companies in our small town. So to enable that we've opened a tech center in a historic Andrew Carnegie Library. And so we renovated it and turned it into a co working space to lower the bar and give people the opportunity to bring in a single or a couple of tech workers in that rural setting.
Sylvie Legere 16:23
And how do you engage the stakeholders and the town in this initiative? Who are they? And how do you get them on board?
Lou Powell 16:30
The stakeholders for us are a varied group. So we're we're working with the local schools, we're working with local government, we're working with local businesses. And so right now, it's mostly the folks that are invested in the nonprofit that started it that are involved with that we're working with a couple of folks that we've brought in as employees to help us manage and operate that on a daily basis, but it's just through continuous outreach in alignment. And again, we're in a nascent place where I think a lot of the things we're doing, we've got expectations, but one of our biggest expectations is to learn, and to respond to the things that are working.
Sylvie Legere 17:11
And how is this initiative supported and remain viable?
Lou Powell 17:16
High-tech small town operates currently on a modest budget, but we have donations that are made, we're a public charity. So we rely on folks to donate directly. And we've got some donors who are giving directly to keep operations running. And we've also applied for several grants and have been awarded grants to help us run things like code camps, and do marketing and different things that we've been doing to get the program off the ground.
Sylvie Legere 17:39
And how do you measure success year over year when you're trying to transform a city, you have to be very patient? So share with us your measures of success?
Lou Powell 17:50
How do we measure success. So that is one of my strong beliefs that you need to be singularly focused, I think that it's great to have many KPIs for your organization. But I think that it's most effective when you have one and ours right now is bringing people into the community who make an economic difference, whether that's an entrepreneur or someone working in the tech industry, who wasn't working there before. So right now, our KPI is we've brought in eight folks that weren't working in the community previously, over the last 12 months. And that's our metric. And we hope next year, we're going to double that, that doesn't seem huge. But when you're looking at a small community, when you start adding 20, white collar, good paying jobs to the community, that starts to make a significant impact. And over time, we're hoping that that's going to become exponentially more impactful.
Sylvie Legere 18:40
How do you keep the momentum? This is a huge endeavor, how do you keep it going?
Lou Powell 18:45
You just have to be tenacious, you have to believe in your cause and believe that it's something that is worthy, and you have to be contagious. And that is that it takes someone who can rally the team and keep everyone focused on success. And that is that is a critical thing.
Sylvie Legere 19:02
Finally, share with us your insights on what makes a thriving community, and especially a community that welcomes tech workers.
Lou Powell 19:12
You know, there's so many aspects of a thriving community. And a lot of it is more than just the jobs. It's all of the things that go around those jobs. And so our nonprofit is not necessarily focused on those things, but is involved with them, because we see that a thriving community has got downtown living, it's got downtown restaurants, it's got third spaces, and it's got entertainment. So those are critical aspects of the tech role actually taking root and growing in our communities. So we're actually working with the city and with other entrepreneurs in the area that are focused on those things to make sure that there's a cohesion between all of the efforts that we're doing so everyone's not running off in different directions. So those 10 Gentle influencers Right, you've got to keep your eyes on those things and make sure that everything necessary for your success is all working in the right direction.
Sylvie Legere 20:07
So I hope you enjoy learning about the focus and mindset of Charles with Strong Towns and of Lou Powell with High-tech Small Town. These guys are laser focused, and they bring to the table solution approaches that are incremental, that involve the whole community. And the transformation of a community needs to start from within and be guided by some really strong principles. So I really invite you to visit their websites, strongtown.org. And you can also follow Lou Powell on LinkedIn. Also, I invite you to consider hosting a conversation in your community using a policy circled brief that is called the fabric of neighborhoods. They really get you to think about what makes a thriving neighborhood and how can I be involved to perhaps advance a component of what makes a tribe and community thank you for joining me Sylvie Legere on my trust your voice podcast. I hope that this episode brought you a new way to think about your voice, how to trust yourself, and how to use your voice for good in your life and in your community. If you liked this podcast, be sure to leave us a review in Apple podcasts. And subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player again.