I'm not following how you read Abundance as a proposal for top-down, centrally planned change. While it does have some things to say about issues like allocation of grant funding for scientific research and large-scale infrastructure, it is almost entirely about removing obstacles so that people on the ground can act, especially as it pertains to cities and housing. Those obstacles tend to exist at the level of local government, but the important detail is that they are obstacles, not which level of government they exist at or which direction the movement for change is coming from. Sometimes the pressure is going to come from below, from individual property owners who are tired of being told what they can't do, or from renters who are tired of being told their priorities don't matter, but other times it is going to come from regional or state level authorities that are more representative and have a bigger picture view of things, telling municipalities and neighborhood homeowners' groups that their narrow self-interest will no longer be allowed to impose stasis on entire metropolitan areas. I want to keep my eyes on the goal, and I don't see the point of insisting that only bottom-up change of a particular fashion is desirable. The status quo is deeply entrenched, and overcoming it is going to take work at a variety of levels, in a variety of directions, from a variety of actors. The important thing is that we meet in the same place. Everybody has a part to play, but this can't be done entirely through grassroots local action. In no way do I see Abundance as an insistence that local actors abandon their own efforts and wait for permission from above. I don't understand where in the text you're drawing such an exclusive message from.
I'm also confused by your criticism of Abundance as a proposal to streamline the existing system when the system itself is the problem, followed by the backyard cottage example in which you present working within the existing system as better than the alleged sweeping changes called for by Abundance. Abundance presents a vision of where we should be headed, but it doesn't follow to me that this means it is opposed to incrementalism in favor of dramatic and immediate change. I'm less familiar with Derek Thompson's work, but Ezra Klein, at least, strikes me as a "yes, and" type who wants to do whatever will move the needle in the right direction, not someone prone to either/or arguments. I think the conflict you present here between bottom-up incrementalism and aggressive top-down reform is a red herring.
My historical view is somewhat different from yours, too. While I agree that postwar urban renewal was misguided, the system we struggle against today arose afterward, as an overcorrection against it. Maybe you think Abundance is proposing to shove the pendulum all the way back in the other direction, but I don't see it that way. Unlike postwar urban renewal, Abundance doesn't come with a specific blueprint for redesigning cities, nor does it insist on razing and rebuilding en masse. The point I take from it is simply that things need to be allowed to change, and in service of that, the system built from the 1970s and onward around the goal of preventing things from changing needs to be dismantled.
The actual changes desired here are a mix of bottom-up local efforts and larger public endeavors, but again, I think focusing exclusively on one or the other is missing the point. Undoing the NIMBY system allows individual neighborhood actors to carry out incremental change, and it also gets out of the way of big infrastructure projects like transit and energy, which we do need, and which aren't going to happen through eking out small wins at the community level. I see Abundance as more "big picture" than "top down," and the Strong Towns message is a part of that picture, not an opposing worldview.
I'm involved in a fledgling Strong Towns chapter in my city, and I seek YIMBY-aligned allies wherever I can find them, but I'm alarmed by all the anti-Abundance rhetoric coming from the Strong Towns corner lately. I hope you can ease some of my concerns.
Thanks for this thoughtful pushback. I appreciate both the tone and the substance and I hear your concern.
First, I don’t believe Abundance calls for people to wait for permission from above. But I do think its framing, tone, and institutional posture reinforces a worldview that central authority is not only necessary, but inevitable and preferable in reshaping cities. That’s the part I’m reacting to. When urgency and scale are the only metrics that matter, it becomes easy to slip into the logic of command.
I agree with you that barriers to change exist at all levels. But the solution is not to empower higher levels of government to override lower ones “for the greater good.” That’s a pattern we’ve seen before and it too often ends with broken neighborhoods and deeper cynicism. The answer is to fix the systems that make local action so hard in the first place.
You’re right: local government can be the problem. But that’s a symptom of a deeper design flaw, where incentives, liability fears, and top-down constraints make it rational for local actors to say no. The goal isn’t to sweep them aside. It’s to rewire the system so they’re expected and equipped to say yes.
What you describe as “anti-Abundance rhetoric” is, from my perspective, a caution against substituting one broken system for another. The Strong Towns approach is not “only bottom-up change.” It’s that systems built on trust and iteration scale better than systems built on force and assumption. That’s not just a moral claim; it’s a practical one.
We seem to share the same goals, but I’m wary of skipping over the hard work of building local capacity in favor of systems that promise speed and deliver fragility.
Thanks for the response! I think we still have some distance to cover, so if you'll stay with me...
I'm still not grasping where your discomfort with the Abundance worldview comes from (going by the text of the book and Klein's individual musings on the subject). The read I get is not that they want to commandeer central authority in order to make things happen, but that central authority is blocking things from happening that naturally would otherwise. In terms of cities and housing, at least, that's most of the argument. Could you help me understand better where you see them calling for a centrally planned approach?
We may just disagree on the appropriate relationship between levels of government. I'm not specifically concerned with whether the higher or lower level prevails, but what is actually happening in a given policy situation. Bulldozing a city and rebuilding it according to a master plan "for the greater good" over neighborhood objections is undesirable, but in reaction to that we brought about a regime where fetishization of "local control" forbids people from doing nearly anything. I don't think continuing to honor that ethos has any hope of getting us where we need to be, and a state government stepping in and telling municipalities "you're not allowed to ban this type of construction anymore" strikes me as an entirely different thing from the central planning you allude to. Nobody is taking anyone's property, nobody is imposing a total redesign; we're just trying to break local governments of the idea that they have a duty to micromanage what people do with their property, and local homeowners of the sense that they are entitled to demand such micromanagement from their government. In debates over the importance or lack thereof of "local control," I'm sympathetic to the view that the most local level in this structure is the individual property owner, and that there is nothing sacred about the specific level that municipal government sits at. We're talking about granting positive rights that only allow people to act and force nothing. I fail to see how this resembles the Robert Moses-style urban planning you fear the return of.
If we can work at the grassroots to build a neighborhood consensus that accepts change, that's great, and I welcome that wherever it is possible, but state-level efforts have a role to play too. Building that neighborhood consensus is not always possible, and I won't accept a conclusion that neighborhoods where such a consensus cannot be reached will simply be allowed to continue in stasis. Whether or not a given apartment complex or mixed-use project gets built concerns the wellbeing of the whole urbanized region, and to me, giving special deference to the subjective feelings of a few incumbent homeowners because they happen to live across the street is poison. It is best if we can persuade them, but if we can't, I will not give up and refuse to pursue YIMBY policy in venues like state government out of an ideological commitment to localism.
I at least agree with you that prioritizing speed over all else leads to bad results, but if the idea is that the only appropriate way to do this is by building a local consensus and that pursuing state policy is cheating somehow, I don't agree, especially when the state policy initiatives aren't so much about speed as they are about undoing systems that make it impossible to do anything at all, at any speed. What exactly do you mean by local capacity, and what do you propose doing in cases where local sentiment is not forthcoming? I don't think governments should be in the business of forcing neighborhoods to accept redevelopment without a clear public need (like energy and transit projects), but I don't think a consensus, never mind a vocal minority, of neighborhood interests should be empowered to curtail the rights of local private owners to do what they see fit with their property, either. Too much control at that level is its own form of tyranny, which leads me to consider it entirely appropriate to appeal to a higher level to set impersonal ground rules, rather than leaving cities to drown in the emotions of those who bought their homes in 1975 and want their neighborhoods to look the way they did in 1975, in perpetuity. Nobody is entitled to that.
Thanks for staying with me on this. This is a rich discussion and I’m grateful for the push. I apologize for dropping out as I was in Providence for the Strong Towns National Gathering last week.
I want to start by saying: I agree with the frustration you’re expressing. I’ve spent most of my career in rooms where a small handful of people were able to derail desperately needed housing, often in ways that were exclusionary, self-serving, or flat-out incoherent. I’m deeply sympathetic to YIMBY advocates who are trying to overcome that. The system is broken. And I think a lot of folks backing state-level reforms are doing so in good faith because they’ve run into those walls.
Where I think we diverge—and where I feel discomfort with parts of the Abundance framing—is in how we interpret the system problem and what kind of fix we look for. You’re right that Abundance often critiques centralized blockages, not grassroots action. But the default response it promotes often reverts to a more centralized lever: fix the bottleneck from the top. And while that can be necessary, it can also reinforce a cycle we’re trying to break.
Let me explain.
For 70+ years in America, land use has been dictated by hierarchical systems: federal financing standards, state DOTs, municipal zoning codes modeled after templates, even neighborhood covenants designed by developers and enforced by HOAs. All of this came from the same modernist mindset: simplify complexity, centralize control, scale through uniformity. And it worked (for a while) until -- as with all over-simplified models of efficiency -- it hollowed out our cities, turned planning into technocracy, and sparked the very backlash we’re all now trying to undo.
What I’m pushing for isn’t a return to “local control” as a sacred principle. It’s a return to local *capacity*, the ability for communities to solve problems at the scale of lived experience, not just react to directives from higher up. Localism isn't about protecting incumbents. It’s about rebuilding trust, adaptability, and human agency in the places where we live. That doesn’t happen by default. It has to be cultivated. And too often, we skip that part in the race for reform.
So yes, sometimes state action is needed. But if that’s all we do, we risk winning the zoning fight and losing the broader war. I don’t want to legalize fourplexes and still see no one build them because the neighborhood is hostile and the financing isn’t there and the local government still operates under old assumptions. I want a system where reform sticks because it was built into the local DNA, not just handed down.
And in some ways that's harder, yes, but I'm willing to work for it (and so are thousands of others, and growing).
To your point about “what if local sentiment isn’t forthcoming?” That's fair. I’ve seen those places. But I’ve also seen the power of small wins to change minds. Coalitions can shift. Local cultures can evolve. We’ve seen it happen. The Strong Towns approach isn’t opposed to reform at other levels; we just believe you don’t get lasting change without ground-up ownership of the result.
So, I’m not drawing a line in the sand to say “only bottom-up change is valid.” I’m asking: What kind of system produces the most resilient and adaptive long-term outcome? And my answer is one that invests more energy in building local strength than just trying to work around it.
If that’s the future Abundance is pointing toward, then we’re aligned. But I don’t see that in the book, its most vocal proponents, or the discussions I'm having with people who profess to share that vision.
I think I understand a little better where you're coming from now; we've just received the book differently, and I do want to keep my attention mainly focused on the book, because mixing critique of the book with critique of people other than the authors who have imbued it with other meanings on their own can get messy fast. I've heard of people promoting "Abundance" as a Democratic campaign message, for example, which makes no sense to me, but that's not Klein and Thompson's fault.
I think the reason why Abundance focuses on centralized levers is because its intended audience is the kind of people who are active in Democratic politics in large cities and blue states, and its message is that areas under Democratic governance need to deliver the goods in order to make a credible case to voters. That is, the Abundance agenda is something you do to create a favorable climate for contesting elections, not something to spin into a campaign platform. The goal is to be able to point at California and New York as places where people live well, instead of places fraught with disorder and scarcity. This overlaps extensively with nonpartisan YIMBY efforts at all levels, but it's mainly preoccupied with getting Democrats to do some soul-searching about the contradictions between what they profess to believe, how they govern, and how that undermines their reputation. This really isn't a neighborhood-level context.
The kind of local action groups like Strong Towns concern themselves with is simply outside the scope of the book, but I don't take that to mean these approaches are mutually exclusive, or that the authors believe they are. The absence of references to localism isn't in any way a declaration that only state action is necessary to solve these problems; it's just talking to the people who are involved at that level. You're right that legalizing fourplexes statewide won't secure the financing to pay for construction or the neighborhood consensus to avoid local turbulence, but by the same token, arranging the financing means nothing if building them is forbidden or nearby NIMBYs are empowered to exploit environmental laws and public input processes to block approval. Building a neighborhood consensus without securing financing or removing the procedural obstacles to building is similarly a dead end.
I really want to emphasize that all of these things are important, and I hope you and others like you who are involved at the local level won't fire upon natural allies just because they are doing another kind of work in a different area. These efforts are in service of the same goal, we have so much to do, and so many adversaries are arrayed against us already, without us fighting each other.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. I really appreciate the clarity and tone. I agree that we’ve received the book differently, and I share your instinct to keep the critique centered on the actual text, not the discourse that’s grown around it.
I recognize the feedback -- I have received it from multiple corners -- but I’m not firing on allies here. I’m asking them to make their work stronger by taking local action more seriously, not as a roadblock to bypass, but as the terrain we all ultimately have to walk. We need change at every level, but if our victories require central force rather than cultural alignment, they won’t last. And if we build only where we have leverage, we may miss the chance to change places that truly need it.
Let’s keep this dialogue going. I respect the work, and I think we all benefit from sharpening our strategies together.
Like Chuck, I have seen - participated in - this story before, in having the State or Federal agencies inflict unfunded, one-size-fits-all mandates on local government. I have also been involved in using the Federal government as a way to attain goals the localities and states aren't ever going to reach. So, as other commentators have said, the way forward is all of the above, presuming one can sort out the right strategy at the right time. The grass roots campaign to get the legislature to act on ADUs, as it is described below seems to be in the ballpark. BUT, the UT legislature that allowed ADUs as a property rights matter then deprived local governments of much of their power to regulate land divisions.
SO, I am going to say a word for Chuck and the de-centralist camp. I got a whiff of authoritarianism reading Abundance, and I get more than a whiff from some YIMBY advocates here on Substack and elsewhere. And I have a hard time not connecting that to the fact that we are experiencing the worst abuse of centralized power in American history.
Authoritarianism is in the air, and we should be very careful about what we wish for. How is telling cities they must permit ADUs any less an application of power than banning abortion or gender-affirming care? Or how about de-funding public schools in favor of vouchers? Its fine when you like the results of the application of power from the top. Not so good when you don't.
I see what you mean, but I'm less sympathetic to accusations of authoritarianism when we're talking about positive rights. The city government that bans ADUs out of deference to the usual NIMBY suspects must feel rather authoritarian to the property owner who wants to build one, but can't.
If we were talking about mandating certain kinds of development, that would be one thing, but I don't consider it appropriate, in a country that prides itself on individual freedom and property rights as the US does, to demand that people win their neighbors' subjective aesthetic approval before building something of their choice on their own property. If someone doesn't like ADUs (or duplexes, or midrise apartment buildings...), they are free to choose not to build them on their own parcels, but their property rights do not include veto authority over surrounding uses. I'm here to destroy the implicit assumption that they do, at any level of government where it may exist.
I appreciate both perspectives here. To me, the tension isn't between local control and individual rights, it's between adaptive, collaborative problem-solving and the assumption that the only way to get change is to push it through from the top.
Yes, some cities have weaponized regulation to block ADUs and duplexes, and that’s wrong. But the solution isn’t to simply flip the power dynamic and impose a new set of universal mandates. That may change the outcome, but it doesn’t change the structure that led to dysfunction in the first place.
The Strong Towns approach isn’t anti-state or anti-policy. It’s anti-fragility. A system that only works when the “good guys” are in charge is a fragile one. We’re advocating for something stronger: a culture of development where rights are respected, change is possible, and communities build the local capacity to solve their own problems (not just wait for a higher power to fix them).
I agree that the local work you're talking about is important; I just don't think the higher-level efforts we're talking about preclude it, nor do I consider policies like allowing ADUs, single stair, etc. statewide to be "mandates."
They do block local governments from banning those things, but they don't make anybody do anything. If a property owner doesn't want to build them, they don't have to, but if they do, all the state is doing here is setting ground rules such that the local government, or coalitions of neighbors, are not empowered to impose mandates on that property owner.
You've emphasized that you're not against higher-level action, but the gist I get from the article and your comments suggest to me that you consider this an either/or proposition (otherwise you'd happily continue your local work and let the state-level people pursue theirs in peace). In what ways are you concerned that state or federal action would interfere with local-level efforts like yours?
I’m not concerned that state or federal action automatically interferes with local efforts. Some reforms, like ending parking minimums or legalizing ADUs, can clear the way for good things to happen.
What I worry about is how those actions can create the impression that policy wins alone are enough. But durable change depends on more than legislation. It requires ongoing alignment between rules and local values, capacity, and practice. Without that, good policy risks stalling out before it ever delivers on its promise.
So I’m not opposed to state action. I’m opposed to replacing civic muscle with a policy shortcut. Because long-term success isn’t just about legalizing something; it’s about making sure communities are ready and willing to embrace change once it’s allowed.
My thesaurus thinks requirements and mandates are synonymous, but that’s not a real answer. What’s rea is that I am helping a very small city make changes that include responding to a new law that requires it to permit ADUs.
This will take a minimum of 90 days of process, staff time, my fees, their attorney’s fees, the cost of two rounds of legal notices, and the cost of codification. And that is the minimum. If this was controversial, the costs would rise. Conservatively, this will cost them $2,000. That’s a dollar for every resident. And did the legislature offer to absorb that cost?
Of course not. Fortunately, there is some overlap with other changes that they want to make.
But that’s not all. This particular city has a limited water supply. Now the legislature is telling it to reserve some capacity for ADUs that won’t then be available for other uses. The city’s engineers and water rights attorneys have to factor that in. It isn’t hard, but it has to be done.
So, your statement that these “policies” don’t make anyone do anything is simply wrong. Local governments operate in a pretty constant reality of being told to do more with less. So, yes, sometimes they question that.
That's good context to consider; thanks for sharing it. I still don't think municipalities should be within their rights to blanket ban things like ADUs or duplexes/triplexes/quadplexes/what have you, and I still support state-level standard setting to take them out of that mindset, but I'll try to work the fact that moving away from that restrictive regime does require some footwork on the part of cities into my thinking on the issue.
My dude, I think you’re off the rails here. The abundance team are the ones doing all the state level reforms to allow bottom up development again. ADUs, minimum lot size, etc. “Abundance” is good branding.
More constructive is to try to persuade the abundance movement to be wary of top-down certainty (a risk in every political movement). You won’t persuade them by calling it urban renewal 2.0.
Ok, leaving aside what you are trying to do, you are a public figure, writing a review of a NYTimes best seller on a public online forum, so I don’t think you can control the audience.
I hear you, but I'm more trying to change the water around them and let them catch up.
All the people I want to work with and interact with ultimately reach a point where they grow tired of spending their energy fighting someone else's battles, elevating people who do good marketing but are, in reality, distant and divorced from their own reality. They will remember, show up, and then we'll welcome and celebrate them.
"But where "Abundance" encourages local advocates to give up their agency — to empower distant institutions in the hope that someone else will fix the problem — the Strong Towns approach begins with a different kind of invitation: You can fix it."
This is so divorced from the reality of how state level ADU reform happened in my state (Colorado), its actually insulting to the hundreds of local advocates who worked and showed up at 1 am hearings to make it happen. These advocates, who are the folks Strong Towns claims to represent, came together to inform and fight for the state legislation because they were tired of fighting and losing at the local level. They are in this to actually see new housing get built, not to fulfill a deep philosophical urge to spend their free time on losing efforts. And they are psyched to finally win. Chuck I urge you to examine your point of view on Abundance. There are things I disagree with Thompson and Klein on of course, but this line in the sand you are drawing is really going to lose a lot of people from the great Strong Towns overall message.
I hear that, and I respect the people who fought hard for that reform. My critique isn't aimed at them; it’s at a system that made that their best option. When top-down change feels like the only viable path, that’s a sign of local failure, not success. We want a world where that kind of fight isn’t necessary to make progress.
The elitist top down approach you criticize is the same thing that comes from the local up approach. “We know best, leave us alone but holding all the power to stop anything” Allowing too much localism is exactly what’s gotten us to a place with exclusive walkable places for elites and long commutes for less well off. I’d argue that states enabled municipalities too much and need to set minimums to allow market rate affordable housing back. I’m suggesting setting the duplex, and maybe triplex as the base unit by right maybe just for conversions to start. The bottom line is that the price to income ratio needs to reverse everywhere incrementally. Homes need to become “homes” again and not “ investments” Invest in stocks, bonds, small business, education. Make real estate boring again. The upward wealth generation transfer has played a big role in destabilizing the country.
I agree with much of what you're saying about affordability and the distortion of housing as investment. Where we diverge is in how to fix it. The localism we critique isn’t the same as local capacity. The answer to exclusionary control isn’t just higher-up control, it’s shared accountability, with state reforms that empower action and local cultures that embrace change. Without both, the outcomes won’t stick.
be convinced that most localities will ever do the right thing when it comes to accepting that home prices need to fall over the long term to get to 2-3 to 1 price to income ratio. They don’t even want to talk about the problem.
Sure they do -- I've traveled around the country having that exact conversation -- but prices are falling now, dramatically in some places, and so it's only a matter of time before the Federal Reserve steps in (or others, as needed) to prop prices back up.
I doubt some of your reading of Nichols. If I am reading you correctly, you have two critiques of Nichols. One concerns his desire for "permanence" and the other is a critique of top-down approaches. I don't read Nichols as advocating generally for top-down approaches. You need to make a textual case for this. He does cite a list of public utilities that need to be planned, but do you disagree that public utilities need to be planned as networks, and if you do, does that make you a "top-down" advocate?
I have not read *Abundance*, but I am not hearing "top-down" from them, either. If you have read it, make a textual case for your interpretation.
I link to the Nichols speech - you can read it for yourself. My critique of Nichols is his desire for permanence and his stated belief (read the speech) that smart people can set things like the size of yards and playgrounds, or designate the proper width of frontage or streets, and these can be universally applied as a good. The two critiques are related and have lack of humility as a common point.
I don't understand how disagreeing that infrastructure should be planned as a network makes me a top-down advocate. You might have mis-written that.
The thing about Nichols is that we're in 2025, not 1955, so they already built all the infrastructure. My 2025 argument is that we don't need to build more, just make better use of what we've already created and promised to maintain. That's a hyper-local undertaking, one that requires a lot of nuance and complexity. You can get ADUs built with state preemption but you solve this housing problems without local governments, and the people they serve, as partners.
Mechanical Permanence as an Antidote to Organic Messiness
In his speech, Nichols framed past American successes in heroic terms. The talk had tales of pioneers that “braved hostile Indians, conquered endless plains [and] crossed barren deserts.” Nichols spoke of people (of European descent) advancing across the frontier, founding settlements as they went. His suggested acts of heroism sound absurd, sometimes even offensive, to modern ears. Yet they made an important, albeit ahistorical, point for the audience.
These early Americans didn’t expect their settlements to be permanent. How could they? They were too busy trying to survive. Today, we can do better.
Listening to Nichols, one is prompted to pity these prior generations for the futility of their efforts. By his narrative, 19th- and early-20th-century Americans occupied “hurriedly built, mushroom settlements.” They did the best they could with what they had, but most of the settlements they built were “soon to decay and be abandoned; a few to become great cities.”
There is no sense from Nichols that these great cities are the by-product of an organic process, one that includes a degree of decay, even abandonment. When a city grows incrementally, a neighborhood matures through a process that includes decline and redevelopment. This is a feature, not a flaw, but Nichols described it as a “tragedy.”
Furthermore , Nichols laments that the common culture accepts the organic approach as “inevitable” or, worse, as “evidence of normal growth.” For Nichols and his peers, that attitude needed to change. Americans needed to see the messiness of the pre-Depression development pattern as unacceptable. Instead of a chaotic process of maturing, just do it right the first time.
“Let us not be content to build up and tear down,” Nichols said.
Nichols challenged the assembled crowd of developers, “How can we rest on our oars—largely accept conditions as they are…be proud of our past achievements—when billions of dollars of loss occur annually in the unnecessary building up and tearing down of large sections of our American towns and cities?” A new kind of developer could save society billions and bring about broad prosperity, with a new approach.
Progressive reforms of prior decades and New Deal responses to the Great Depression meant the tools needed to plan for permanence were now widespread. In the speech, Nichols called for distinct residential zones for small homes separate from zones for larger homes. Everything was to be “carefully allocated in respective areas” with well-planned transitions between them. Golf course, parks, parkways, and other buffers designed to create “seams of protection for residential areas.”
Neighborhoods planned to have “ample playgrounds” and “adequate park areas.” Access is by “quiet, carefully planned, curving minor residential streets designed to discourage through traffic.”
According to Nichols, all neighborhoods “must have elementary and high schools, libraries, shopping centers, churches with community activities, fire stations, utility and municipal facilities.” These will all be carefully located, well spaced, and planned for expansion.
Nichols also got into very specific details for what prosperity looked like on the ground. He called 25-foot residential lots “old-fashioned” and said new lots should be at spacious widths of “60 feet or more.” He called for “two feet of off-street parking space for each foot of floor space” in shopping areas. He said cities needed to zone ample amounts of land for future expansion.
There was even a spirit of egalitarianism. Nichols suggested his approach would create “good living in neighborhoods of modest homes as in areas of large homes.” Ideally, everyone could eventually have a slice of permanent prosperity.
“Light, air, sunshine, pleasing, harmonious architecture, open spaces... Here are the real heartbeats and sunbeams of urban life. Home ownership is on the march this very hour. Let us work to make our country a land of happy, contented homeowners.”
Taken as a whole, Nichols’s vision is a marketing brochure for America’s suburban experiment. Optimizing all areas of life has long been the unrealistic dream of the utopian. For Nichols, that dream was now possible, and it was developers that would make it happen. After the War , the ideals of the Progressive movement found their most vocal champion in the very big business mindset they spent decades opposing.
Yet the Nichols marketing brochure wasn’t selling a development approach as much as it was promoting a national investment strategy. Building for permanence requires lots of capital, the kind that is long-term and patient. The inverse of that insight is also true; making multi-decade investments requires confidence in the stability of the outcome.
Permanence can only be attained with long-term investments while long-term investments cannot be made without the promise of a plausible degree of permanence.
Neighborhoods needed to be built once, built right, and assembled in a way that secured their future. No bank could provide long-term financing if the neighborhood was in a constant state of flux. There could be no ongoing chaos of buildings reimagined, reworked, and replaced. No start-up slums maturing over time into stable and prosperous neighborhoods.
Local governments needed to be able to finance major infrastructure investments. They had to build water supply systems, stormwater management systems, and sewage disposal systems. They needed to finance the roads, streets, sidewalks, and bridges. Unlike pre-Depression developments, these new public investments needed to be made before the neighborhood had matured and before a sufficient tax base was established.
Municipal officials were not going to make such gambles unless they were assured, and could assure their voters, that what was being built had permanence. They had to plausibly believe they weren’t gambling but were making sound, long-term investments in the community.
Businesses also needed to have confidence in the stability of this new approach. It’s one thing to start a small business and grow it incrementally over time, expanding as success and capital allowed. An entire shopping plaza as a neighborhood amenity is something completely different. It needed to be built, to a finished state, before the patrons had fully materialized. The shops must include recognizable brands to provide the latest in lifestyle accessories. And those tenants needed to sign the kind of lengthy leases necessary to finance such an undertaking. None of that was possible without the promise of stability.
Most importantly, families needed to take on extended mortgages. They needed to buy homes built to a finished state in neighborhoods delivered as a completed package. They needed to believe that committing to a long-term debt instrument was a good investment. Large numbers of families needed to buy into a new model of stasis. They needed to believe in the possibility of permanent prosperity.
As Nichols extolled in his speech, “The home, the most precious possession in life—the real heritage of a free people—will have permanent value, and desirable, healthful and inspiring surroundings for many generations, where homes will grow old graciously.”
No more messiness. No more chaotic change. No more unpredictable evolution of neighborhoods over time. The promise to the new homeowner was simple: sign the mortgage and experience an ideal lifestyle along with the promise of stable financial value. You and your home can grow old graciously together. Build wealth together. A permanent prosperity.
Repeat this at scale, and America’s cities could become machines of growth. With Nichols’s vision, there is no more fear of sliding back into a second Great Depression. No more anxiety over social unrest or economic dislocation. Everyone willing to work hard could have a home and old-age security (at least those society allowed to assume a mortgage).
“Here is where we can lick socialism and communism,” Nichols said.
After World War II, housing as an investment became the key to social stability, economic growth, and wealth creation. It was the critical component of building a middle class. Housing as an investment was now the economic engine by which America would come to dominate the world.
For a moment in time, permanent prosperity felt possible.
I have written about Nichols, previously, too. How does this prove your interpretation or my interpretation of Nichols?
To repeat my criticism of your essay, I dispute your reading that Nichols advocates for a top-down approach in his Permanence speech from 1950. Sleeping on it, I am not revising my reading of Nichols, but I am questioning my reading of Marohn. Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by “top-down.”
That’s a fair question, and I appreciate the close reading. When I say “top-down,” I’m referring less to a specific level of government and more to a mode of problem-solving, one that assumes we can engineer outcomes from above through centralized plans, expert foresight, and large-scale interventions.
Nichols may not have called for federal control, but the spirit of *Permanence* reflects that mindset: stability through authority, predictability through design, order over emergence. That’s the contrast I’m drawing--> not government vs. market, but command vs. iteration.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I have not yet read your full piece on Nichols and permanence was a critical framing for him, so it's important that you chose to highlight it. Reading my own few paragraphs about Nichols that I updated last year, I am now remembering that I chose a different aspect of Nichols to highlight. *City-building* and *urban* was a headfake to suburban and regional planning.
Dude, I could have shared that quote without an attribution -- I believe it myself -- but I am a friend and didn't want to steal a man's line. I didn't attribute because I don't know as he wants it publicly tied to him. Go ahead and pretend I said it because it's not a strawman -- it's a smart line I wish I had developed myself.
I'm not following how you read Abundance as a proposal for top-down, centrally planned change. While it does have some things to say about issues like allocation of grant funding for scientific research and large-scale infrastructure, it is almost entirely about removing obstacles so that people on the ground can act, especially as it pertains to cities and housing. Those obstacles tend to exist at the level of local government, but the important detail is that they are obstacles, not which level of government they exist at or which direction the movement for change is coming from. Sometimes the pressure is going to come from below, from individual property owners who are tired of being told what they can't do, or from renters who are tired of being told their priorities don't matter, but other times it is going to come from regional or state level authorities that are more representative and have a bigger picture view of things, telling municipalities and neighborhood homeowners' groups that their narrow self-interest will no longer be allowed to impose stasis on entire metropolitan areas. I want to keep my eyes on the goal, and I don't see the point of insisting that only bottom-up change of a particular fashion is desirable. The status quo is deeply entrenched, and overcoming it is going to take work at a variety of levels, in a variety of directions, from a variety of actors. The important thing is that we meet in the same place. Everybody has a part to play, but this can't be done entirely through grassroots local action. In no way do I see Abundance as an insistence that local actors abandon their own efforts and wait for permission from above. I don't understand where in the text you're drawing such an exclusive message from.
I'm also confused by your criticism of Abundance as a proposal to streamline the existing system when the system itself is the problem, followed by the backyard cottage example in which you present working within the existing system as better than the alleged sweeping changes called for by Abundance. Abundance presents a vision of where we should be headed, but it doesn't follow to me that this means it is opposed to incrementalism in favor of dramatic and immediate change. I'm less familiar with Derek Thompson's work, but Ezra Klein, at least, strikes me as a "yes, and" type who wants to do whatever will move the needle in the right direction, not someone prone to either/or arguments. I think the conflict you present here between bottom-up incrementalism and aggressive top-down reform is a red herring.
My historical view is somewhat different from yours, too. While I agree that postwar urban renewal was misguided, the system we struggle against today arose afterward, as an overcorrection against it. Maybe you think Abundance is proposing to shove the pendulum all the way back in the other direction, but I don't see it that way. Unlike postwar urban renewal, Abundance doesn't come with a specific blueprint for redesigning cities, nor does it insist on razing and rebuilding en masse. The point I take from it is simply that things need to be allowed to change, and in service of that, the system built from the 1970s and onward around the goal of preventing things from changing needs to be dismantled.
The actual changes desired here are a mix of bottom-up local efforts and larger public endeavors, but again, I think focusing exclusively on one or the other is missing the point. Undoing the NIMBY system allows individual neighborhood actors to carry out incremental change, and it also gets out of the way of big infrastructure projects like transit and energy, which we do need, and which aren't going to happen through eking out small wins at the community level. I see Abundance as more "big picture" than "top down," and the Strong Towns message is a part of that picture, not an opposing worldview.
I'm involved in a fledgling Strong Towns chapter in my city, and I seek YIMBY-aligned allies wherever I can find them, but I'm alarmed by all the anti-Abundance rhetoric coming from the Strong Towns corner lately. I hope you can ease some of my concerns.
Thanks for this thoughtful pushback. I appreciate both the tone and the substance and I hear your concern.
First, I don’t believe Abundance calls for people to wait for permission from above. But I do think its framing, tone, and institutional posture reinforces a worldview that central authority is not only necessary, but inevitable and preferable in reshaping cities. That’s the part I’m reacting to. When urgency and scale are the only metrics that matter, it becomes easy to slip into the logic of command.
I agree with you that barriers to change exist at all levels. But the solution is not to empower higher levels of government to override lower ones “for the greater good.” That’s a pattern we’ve seen before and it too often ends with broken neighborhoods and deeper cynicism. The answer is to fix the systems that make local action so hard in the first place.
You’re right: local government can be the problem. But that’s a symptom of a deeper design flaw, where incentives, liability fears, and top-down constraints make it rational for local actors to say no. The goal isn’t to sweep them aside. It’s to rewire the system so they’re expected and equipped to say yes.
What you describe as “anti-Abundance rhetoric” is, from my perspective, a caution against substituting one broken system for another. The Strong Towns approach is not “only bottom-up change.” It’s that systems built on trust and iteration scale better than systems built on force and assumption. That’s not just a moral claim; it’s a practical one.
We seem to share the same goals, but I’m wary of skipping over the hard work of building local capacity in favor of systems that promise speed and deliver fragility.
Thanks for the response! I think we still have some distance to cover, so if you'll stay with me...
I'm still not grasping where your discomfort with the Abundance worldview comes from (going by the text of the book and Klein's individual musings on the subject). The read I get is not that they want to commandeer central authority in order to make things happen, but that central authority is blocking things from happening that naturally would otherwise. In terms of cities and housing, at least, that's most of the argument. Could you help me understand better where you see them calling for a centrally planned approach?
We may just disagree on the appropriate relationship between levels of government. I'm not specifically concerned with whether the higher or lower level prevails, but what is actually happening in a given policy situation. Bulldozing a city and rebuilding it according to a master plan "for the greater good" over neighborhood objections is undesirable, but in reaction to that we brought about a regime where fetishization of "local control" forbids people from doing nearly anything. I don't think continuing to honor that ethos has any hope of getting us where we need to be, and a state government stepping in and telling municipalities "you're not allowed to ban this type of construction anymore" strikes me as an entirely different thing from the central planning you allude to. Nobody is taking anyone's property, nobody is imposing a total redesign; we're just trying to break local governments of the idea that they have a duty to micromanage what people do with their property, and local homeowners of the sense that they are entitled to demand such micromanagement from their government. In debates over the importance or lack thereof of "local control," I'm sympathetic to the view that the most local level in this structure is the individual property owner, and that there is nothing sacred about the specific level that municipal government sits at. We're talking about granting positive rights that only allow people to act and force nothing. I fail to see how this resembles the Robert Moses-style urban planning you fear the return of.
If we can work at the grassroots to build a neighborhood consensus that accepts change, that's great, and I welcome that wherever it is possible, but state-level efforts have a role to play too. Building that neighborhood consensus is not always possible, and I won't accept a conclusion that neighborhoods where such a consensus cannot be reached will simply be allowed to continue in stasis. Whether or not a given apartment complex or mixed-use project gets built concerns the wellbeing of the whole urbanized region, and to me, giving special deference to the subjective feelings of a few incumbent homeowners because they happen to live across the street is poison. It is best if we can persuade them, but if we can't, I will not give up and refuse to pursue YIMBY policy in venues like state government out of an ideological commitment to localism.
I at least agree with you that prioritizing speed over all else leads to bad results, but if the idea is that the only appropriate way to do this is by building a local consensus and that pursuing state policy is cheating somehow, I don't agree, especially when the state policy initiatives aren't so much about speed as they are about undoing systems that make it impossible to do anything at all, at any speed. What exactly do you mean by local capacity, and what do you propose doing in cases where local sentiment is not forthcoming? I don't think governments should be in the business of forcing neighborhoods to accept redevelopment without a clear public need (like energy and transit projects), but I don't think a consensus, never mind a vocal minority, of neighborhood interests should be empowered to curtail the rights of local private owners to do what they see fit with their property, either. Too much control at that level is its own form of tyranny, which leads me to consider it entirely appropriate to appeal to a higher level to set impersonal ground rules, rather than leaving cities to drown in the emotions of those who bought their homes in 1975 and want their neighborhoods to look the way they did in 1975, in perpetuity. Nobody is entitled to that.
Thanks for staying with me on this. This is a rich discussion and I’m grateful for the push. I apologize for dropping out as I was in Providence for the Strong Towns National Gathering last week.
I want to start by saying: I agree with the frustration you’re expressing. I’ve spent most of my career in rooms where a small handful of people were able to derail desperately needed housing, often in ways that were exclusionary, self-serving, or flat-out incoherent. I’m deeply sympathetic to YIMBY advocates who are trying to overcome that. The system is broken. And I think a lot of folks backing state-level reforms are doing so in good faith because they’ve run into those walls.
Where I think we diverge—and where I feel discomfort with parts of the Abundance framing—is in how we interpret the system problem and what kind of fix we look for. You’re right that Abundance often critiques centralized blockages, not grassroots action. But the default response it promotes often reverts to a more centralized lever: fix the bottleneck from the top. And while that can be necessary, it can also reinforce a cycle we’re trying to break.
Let me explain.
For 70+ years in America, land use has been dictated by hierarchical systems: federal financing standards, state DOTs, municipal zoning codes modeled after templates, even neighborhood covenants designed by developers and enforced by HOAs. All of this came from the same modernist mindset: simplify complexity, centralize control, scale through uniformity. And it worked (for a while) until -- as with all over-simplified models of efficiency -- it hollowed out our cities, turned planning into technocracy, and sparked the very backlash we’re all now trying to undo.
What I’m pushing for isn’t a return to “local control” as a sacred principle. It’s a return to local *capacity*, the ability for communities to solve problems at the scale of lived experience, not just react to directives from higher up. Localism isn't about protecting incumbents. It’s about rebuilding trust, adaptability, and human agency in the places where we live. That doesn’t happen by default. It has to be cultivated. And too often, we skip that part in the race for reform.
So yes, sometimes state action is needed. But if that’s all we do, we risk winning the zoning fight and losing the broader war. I don’t want to legalize fourplexes and still see no one build them because the neighborhood is hostile and the financing isn’t there and the local government still operates under old assumptions. I want a system where reform sticks because it was built into the local DNA, not just handed down.
And in some ways that's harder, yes, but I'm willing to work for it (and so are thousands of others, and growing).
To your point about “what if local sentiment isn’t forthcoming?” That's fair. I’ve seen those places. But I’ve also seen the power of small wins to change minds. Coalitions can shift. Local cultures can evolve. We’ve seen it happen. The Strong Towns approach isn’t opposed to reform at other levels; we just believe you don’t get lasting change without ground-up ownership of the result.
So, I’m not drawing a line in the sand to say “only bottom-up change is valid.” I’m asking: What kind of system produces the most resilient and adaptive long-term outcome? And my answer is one that invests more energy in building local strength than just trying to work around it.
If that’s the future Abundance is pointing toward, then we’re aligned. But I don’t see that in the book, its most vocal proponents, or the discussions I'm having with people who profess to share that vision.
I think I understand a little better where you're coming from now; we've just received the book differently, and I do want to keep my attention mainly focused on the book, because mixing critique of the book with critique of people other than the authors who have imbued it with other meanings on their own can get messy fast. I've heard of people promoting "Abundance" as a Democratic campaign message, for example, which makes no sense to me, but that's not Klein and Thompson's fault.
I think the reason why Abundance focuses on centralized levers is because its intended audience is the kind of people who are active in Democratic politics in large cities and blue states, and its message is that areas under Democratic governance need to deliver the goods in order to make a credible case to voters. That is, the Abundance agenda is something you do to create a favorable climate for contesting elections, not something to spin into a campaign platform. The goal is to be able to point at California and New York as places where people live well, instead of places fraught with disorder and scarcity. This overlaps extensively with nonpartisan YIMBY efforts at all levels, but it's mainly preoccupied with getting Democrats to do some soul-searching about the contradictions between what they profess to believe, how they govern, and how that undermines their reputation. This really isn't a neighborhood-level context.
The kind of local action groups like Strong Towns concern themselves with is simply outside the scope of the book, but I don't take that to mean these approaches are mutually exclusive, or that the authors believe they are. The absence of references to localism isn't in any way a declaration that only state action is necessary to solve these problems; it's just talking to the people who are involved at that level. You're right that legalizing fourplexes statewide won't secure the financing to pay for construction or the neighborhood consensus to avoid local turbulence, but by the same token, arranging the financing means nothing if building them is forbidden or nearby NIMBYs are empowered to exploit environmental laws and public input processes to block approval. Building a neighborhood consensus without securing financing or removing the procedural obstacles to building is similarly a dead end.
I really want to emphasize that all of these things are important, and I hope you and others like you who are involved at the local level won't fire upon natural allies just because they are doing another kind of work in a different area. These efforts are in service of the same goal, we have so much to do, and so many adversaries are arrayed against us already, without us fighting each other.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. I really appreciate the clarity and tone. I agree that we’ve received the book differently, and I share your instinct to keep the critique centered on the actual text, not the discourse that’s grown around it.
I recognize the feedback -- I have received it from multiple corners -- but I’m not firing on allies here. I’m asking them to make their work stronger by taking local action more seriously, not as a roadblock to bypass, but as the terrain we all ultimately have to walk. We need change at every level, but if our victories require central force rather than cultural alignment, they won’t last. And if we build only where we have leverage, we may miss the chance to change places that truly need it.
Let’s keep this dialogue going. I respect the work, and I think we all benefit from sharpening our strategies together.
Like Chuck, I have seen - participated in - this story before, in having the State or Federal agencies inflict unfunded, one-size-fits-all mandates on local government. I have also been involved in using the Federal government as a way to attain goals the localities and states aren't ever going to reach. So, as other commentators have said, the way forward is all of the above, presuming one can sort out the right strategy at the right time. The grass roots campaign to get the legislature to act on ADUs, as it is described below seems to be in the ballpark. BUT, the UT legislature that allowed ADUs as a property rights matter then deprived local governments of much of their power to regulate land divisions.
SO, I am going to say a word for Chuck and the de-centralist camp. I got a whiff of authoritarianism reading Abundance, and I get more than a whiff from some YIMBY advocates here on Substack and elsewhere. And I have a hard time not connecting that to the fact that we are experiencing the worst abuse of centralized power in American history.
Authoritarianism is in the air, and we should be very careful about what we wish for. How is telling cities they must permit ADUs any less an application of power than banning abortion or gender-affirming care? Or how about de-funding public schools in favor of vouchers? Its fine when you like the results of the application of power from the top. Not so good when you don't.
I see what you mean, but I'm less sympathetic to accusations of authoritarianism when we're talking about positive rights. The city government that bans ADUs out of deference to the usual NIMBY suspects must feel rather authoritarian to the property owner who wants to build one, but can't.
If we were talking about mandating certain kinds of development, that would be one thing, but I don't consider it appropriate, in a country that prides itself on individual freedom and property rights as the US does, to demand that people win their neighbors' subjective aesthetic approval before building something of their choice on their own property. If someone doesn't like ADUs (or duplexes, or midrise apartment buildings...), they are free to choose not to build them on their own parcels, but their property rights do not include veto authority over surrounding uses. I'm here to destroy the implicit assumption that they do, at any level of government where it may exist.
I appreciate both perspectives here. To me, the tension isn't between local control and individual rights, it's between adaptive, collaborative problem-solving and the assumption that the only way to get change is to push it through from the top.
Yes, some cities have weaponized regulation to block ADUs and duplexes, and that’s wrong. But the solution isn’t to simply flip the power dynamic and impose a new set of universal mandates. That may change the outcome, but it doesn’t change the structure that led to dysfunction in the first place.
The Strong Towns approach isn’t anti-state or anti-policy. It’s anti-fragility. A system that only works when the “good guys” are in charge is a fragile one. We’re advocating for something stronger: a culture of development where rights are respected, change is possible, and communities build the local capacity to solve their own problems (not just wait for a higher power to fix them).
I agree that the local work you're talking about is important; I just don't think the higher-level efforts we're talking about preclude it, nor do I consider policies like allowing ADUs, single stair, etc. statewide to be "mandates."
They do block local governments from banning those things, but they don't make anybody do anything. If a property owner doesn't want to build them, they don't have to, but if they do, all the state is doing here is setting ground rules such that the local government, or coalitions of neighbors, are not empowered to impose mandates on that property owner.
You've emphasized that you're not against higher-level action, but the gist I get from the article and your comments suggest to me that you consider this an either/or proposition (otherwise you'd happily continue your local work and let the state-level people pursue theirs in peace). In what ways are you concerned that state or federal action would interfere with local-level efforts like yours?
I’m not concerned that state or federal action automatically interferes with local efforts. Some reforms, like ending parking minimums or legalizing ADUs, can clear the way for good things to happen.
What I worry about is how those actions can create the impression that policy wins alone are enough. But durable change depends on more than legislation. It requires ongoing alignment between rules and local values, capacity, and practice. Without that, good policy risks stalling out before it ever delivers on its promise.
So I’m not opposed to state action. I’m opposed to replacing civic muscle with a policy shortcut. Because long-term success isn’t just about legalizing something; it’s about making sure communities are ready and willing to embrace change once it’s allowed.
My thesaurus thinks requirements and mandates are synonymous, but that’s not a real answer. What’s rea is that I am helping a very small city make changes that include responding to a new law that requires it to permit ADUs.
This will take a minimum of 90 days of process, staff time, my fees, their attorney’s fees, the cost of two rounds of legal notices, and the cost of codification. And that is the minimum. If this was controversial, the costs would rise. Conservatively, this will cost them $2,000. That’s a dollar for every resident. And did the legislature offer to absorb that cost?
Of course not. Fortunately, there is some overlap with other changes that they want to make.
But that’s not all. This particular city has a limited water supply. Now the legislature is telling it to reserve some capacity for ADUs that won’t then be available for other uses. The city’s engineers and water rights attorneys have to factor that in. It isn’t hard, but it has to be done.
So, your statement that these “policies” don’t make anyone do anything is simply wrong. Local governments operate in a pretty constant reality of being told to do more with less. So, yes, sometimes they question that.
That's good context to consider; thanks for sharing it. I still don't think municipalities should be within their rights to blanket ban things like ADUs or duplexes/triplexes/quadplexes/what have you, and I still support state-level standard setting to take them out of that mindset, but I'll try to work the fact that moving away from that restrictive regime does require some footwork on the part of cities into my thinking on the issue.
Thanks for the like, Chuck.
My dude, I think you’re off the rails here. The abundance team are the ones doing all the state level reforms to allow bottom up development again. ADUs, minimum lot size, etc. “Abundance” is good branding.
More constructive is to try to persuade the abundance movement to be wary of top-down certainty (a risk in every political movement). You won’t persuade them by calling it urban renewal 2.0.
I feel like they are not the target audience, here. At least not my target audience.
Ok, leaving aside what you are trying to do, you are a public figure, writing a review of a NYTimes best seller on a public online forum, so I don’t think you can control the audience.
I hear you, but I'm more trying to change the water around them and let them catch up.
All the people I want to work with and interact with ultimately reach a point where they grow tired of spending their energy fighting someone else's battles, elevating people who do good marketing but are, in reality, distant and divorced from their own reality. They will remember, show up, and then we'll welcome and celebrate them.
"But where "Abundance" encourages local advocates to give up their agency — to empower distant institutions in the hope that someone else will fix the problem — the Strong Towns approach begins with a different kind of invitation: You can fix it."
This is so divorced from the reality of how state level ADU reform happened in my state (Colorado), its actually insulting to the hundreds of local advocates who worked and showed up at 1 am hearings to make it happen. These advocates, who are the folks Strong Towns claims to represent, came together to inform and fight for the state legislation because they were tired of fighting and losing at the local level. They are in this to actually see new housing get built, not to fulfill a deep philosophical urge to spend their free time on losing efforts. And they are psyched to finally win. Chuck I urge you to examine your point of view on Abundance. There are things I disagree with Thompson and Klein on of course, but this line in the sand you are drawing is really going to lose a lot of people from the great Strong Towns overall message.
I hear that, and I respect the people who fought hard for that reform. My critique isn't aimed at them; it’s at a system that made that their best option. When top-down change feels like the only viable path, that’s a sign of local failure, not success. We want a world where that kind of fight isn’t necessary to make progress.
The elitist top down approach you criticize is the same thing that comes from the local up approach. “We know best, leave us alone but holding all the power to stop anything” Allowing too much localism is exactly what’s gotten us to a place with exclusive walkable places for elites and long commutes for less well off. I’d argue that states enabled municipalities too much and need to set minimums to allow market rate affordable housing back. I’m suggesting setting the duplex, and maybe triplex as the base unit by right maybe just for conversions to start. The bottom line is that the price to income ratio needs to reverse everywhere incrementally. Homes need to become “homes” again and not “ investments” Invest in stocks, bonds, small business, education. Make real estate boring again. The upward wealth generation transfer has played a big role in destabilizing the country.
I agree with much of what you're saying about affordability and the distortion of housing as investment. Where we diverge is in how to fix it. The localism we critique isn’t the same as local capacity. The answer to exclusionary control isn’t just higher-up control, it’s shared accountability, with state reforms that empower action and local cultures that embrace change. Without both, the outcomes won’t stick.
I’ve yet to
be convinced that most localities will ever do the right thing when it comes to accepting that home prices need to fall over the long term to get to 2-3 to 1 price to income ratio. They don’t even want to talk about the problem.
Sure they do -- I've traveled around the country having that exact conversation -- but prices are falling now, dramatically in some places, and so it's only a matter of time before the Federal Reserve steps in (or others, as needed) to prop prices back up.
I doubt some of your reading of Nichols. If I am reading you correctly, you have two critiques of Nichols. One concerns his desire for "permanence" and the other is a critique of top-down approaches. I don't read Nichols as advocating generally for top-down approaches. You need to make a textual case for this. He does cite a list of public utilities that need to be planned, but do you disagree that public utilities need to be planned as networks, and if you do, does that make you a "top-down" advocate?
I have not read *Abundance*, but I am not hearing "top-down" from them, either. If you have read it, make a textual case for your interpretation.
I link to the Nichols speech - you can read it for yourself. My critique of Nichols is his desire for permanence and his stated belief (read the speech) that smart people can set things like the size of yards and playgrounds, or designate the proper width of frontage or streets, and these can be universally applied as a good. The two critiques are related and have lack of humility as a common point.
I don't understand how disagreeing that infrastructure should be planned as a network makes me a top-down advocate. You might have mis-written that.
The thing about Nichols is that we're in 2025, not 1955, so they already built all the infrastructure. My 2025 argument is that we don't need to build more, just make better use of what we've already created and promised to maintain. That's a hyper-local undertaking, one that requires a lot of nuance and complexity. You can get ADUs built with state preemption but you solve this housing problems without local governments, and the people they serve, as partners.
I have read the permanence speech. Have you?
Of course. I wrote about it extensively in "Escaping the Housing Trap."
Here's an excerpt from Chapter 3:
Mechanical Permanence as an Antidote to Organic Messiness
In his speech, Nichols framed past American successes in heroic terms. The talk had tales of pioneers that “braved hostile Indians, conquered endless plains [and] crossed barren deserts.” Nichols spoke of people (of European descent) advancing across the frontier, founding settlements as they went. His suggested acts of heroism sound absurd, sometimes even offensive, to modern ears. Yet they made an important, albeit ahistorical, point for the audience.
These early Americans didn’t expect their settlements to be permanent. How could they? They were too busy trying to survive. Today, we can do better.
Listening to Nichols, one is prompted to pity these prior generations for the futility of their efforts. By his narrative, 19th- and early-20th-century Americans occupied “hurriedly built, mushroom settlements.” They did the best they could with what they had, but most of the settlements they built were “soon to decay and be abandoned; a few to become great cities.”
There is no sense from Nichols that these great cities are the by-product of an organic process, one that includes a degree of decay, even abandonment. When a city grows incrementally, a neighborhood matures through a process that includes decline and redevelopment. This is a feature, not a flaw, but Nichols described it as a “tragedy.”
Furthermore , Nichols laments that the common culture accepts the organic approach as “inevitable” or, worse, as “evidence of normal growth.” For Nichols and his peers, that attitude needed to change. Americans needed to see the messiness of the pre-Depression development pattern as unacceptable. Instead of a chaotic process of maturing, just do it right the first time.
“Let us not be content to build up and tear down,” Nichols said.
Nichols challenged the assembled crowd of developers, “How can we rest on our oars—largely accept conditions as they are…be proud of our past achievements—when billions of dollars of loss occur annually in the unnecessary building up and tearing down of large sections of our American towns and cities?” A new kind of developer could save society billions and bring about broad prosperity, with a new approach.
Progressive reforms of prior decades and New Deal responses to the Great Depression meant the tools needed to plan for permanence were now widespread. In the speech, Nichols called for distinct residential zones for small homes separate from zones for larger homes. Everything was to be “carefully allocated in respective areas” with well-planned transitions between them. Golf course, parks, parkways, and other buffers designed to create “seams of protection for residential areas.”
Neighborhoods planned to have “ample playgrounds” and “adequate park areas.” Access is by “quiet, carefully planned, curving minor residential streets designed to discourage through traffic.”
According to Nichols, all neighborhoods “must have elementary and high schools, libraries, shopping centers, churches with community activities, fire stations, utility and municipal facilities.” These will all be carefully located, well spaced, and planned for expansion.
Nichols also got into very specific details for what prosperity looked like on the ground. He called 25-foot residential lots “old-fashioned” and said new lots should be at spacious widths of “60 feet or more.” He called for “two feet of off-street parking space for each foot of floor space” in shopping areas. He said cities needed to zone ample amounts of land for future expansion.
There was even a spirit of egalitarianism. Nichols suggested his approach would create “good living in neighborhoods of modest homes as in areas of large homes.” Ideally, everyone could eventually have a slice of permanent prosperity.
“Light, air, sunshine, pleasing, harmonious architecture, open spaces... Here are the real heartbeats and sunbeams of urban life. Home ownership is on the march this very hour. Let us work to make our country a land of happy, contented homeowners.”
Taken as a whole, Nichols’s vision is a marketing brochure for America’s suburban experiment. Optimizing all areas of life has long been the unrealistic dream of the utopian. For Nichols, that dream was now possible, and it was developers that would make it happen. After the War , the ideals of the Progressive movement found their most vocal champion in the very big business mindset they spent decades opposing.
Yet the Nichols marketing brochure wasn’t selling a development approach as much as it was promoting a national investment strategy. Building for permanence requires lots of capital, the kind that is long-term and patient. The inverse of that insight is also true; making multi-decade investments requires confidence in the stability of the outcome.
Permanence can only be attained with long-term investments while long-term investments cannot be made without the promise of a plausible degree of permanence.
Neighborhoods needed to be built once, built right, and assembled in a way that secured their future. No bank could provide long-term financing if the neighborhood was in a constant state of flux. There could be no ongoing chaos of buildings reimagined, reworked, and replaced. No start-up slums maturing over time into stable and prosperous neighborhoods.
Local governments needed to be able to finance major infrastructure investments. They had to build water supply systems, stormwater management systems, and sewage disposal systems. They needed to finance the roads, streets, sidewalks, and bridges. Unlike pre-Depression developments, these new public investments needed to be made before the neighborhood had matured and before a sufficient tax base was established.
Municipal officials were not going to make such gambles unless they were assured, and could assure their voters, that what was being built had permanence. They had to plausibly believe they weren’t gambling but were making sound, long-term investments in the community.
Businesses also needed to have confidence in the stability of this new approach. It’s one thing to start a small business and grow it incrementally over time, expanding as success and capital allowed. An entire shopping plaza as a neighborhood amenity is something completely different. It needed to be built, to a finished state, before the patrons had fully materialized. The shops must include recognizable brands to provide the latest in lifestyle accessories. And those tenants needed to sign the kind of lengthy leases necessary to finance such an undertaking. None of that was possible without the promise of stability.
Most importantly, families needed to take on extended mortgages. They needed to buy homes built to a finished state in neighborhoods delivered as a completed package. They needed to believe that committing to a long-term debt instrument was a good investment. Large numbers of families needed to buy into a new model of stasis. They needed to believe in the possibility of permanent prosperity.
As Nichols extolled in his speech, “The home, the most precious possession in life—the real heritage of a free people—will have permanent value, and desirable, healthful and inspiring surroundings for many generations, where homes will grow old graciously.”
No more messiness. No more chaotic change. No more unpredictable evolution of neighborhoods over time. The promise to the new homeowner was simple: sign the mortgage and experience an ideal lifestyle along with the promise of stable financial value. You and your home can grow old graciously together. Build wealth together. A permanent prosperity.
Repeat this at scale, and America’s cities could become machines of growth. With Nichols’s vision, there is no more fear of sliding back into a second Great Depression. No more anxiety over social unrest or economic dislocation. Everyone willing to work hard could have a home and old-age security (at least those society allowed to assume a mortgage).
“Here is where we can lick socialism and communism,” Nichols said.
After World War II, housing as an investment became the key to social stability, economic growth, and wealth creation. It was the critical component of building a middle class. Housing as an investment was now the economic engine by which America would come to dominate the world.
For a moment in time, permanent prosperity felt possible.
I have written about Nichols, previously, too. How does this prove your interpretation or my interpretation of Nichols?
To repeat my criticism of your essay, I dispute your reading that Nichols advocates for a top-down approach in his Permanence speech from 1950. Sleeping on it, I am not revising my reading of Nichols, but I am questioning my reading of Marohn. Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by “top-down.”
That’s a fair question, and I appreciate the close reading. When I say “top-down,” I’m referring less to a specific level of government and more to a mode of problem-solving, one that assumes we can engineer outcomes from above through centralized plans, expert foresight, and large-scale interventions.
Nichols may not have called for federal control, but the spirit of *Permanence* reflects that mindset: stability through authority, predictability through design, order over emergence. That’s the contrast I’m drawing--> not government vs. market, but command vs. iteration.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I have not yet read your full piece on Nichols and permanence was a critical framing for him, so it's important that you chose to highlight it. Reading my own few paragraphs about Nichols that I updated last year, I am now remembering that I chose a different aspect of Nichols to highlight. *City-building* and *urban* was a headfake to suburban and regional planning.
https://bnjd.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/31028857/share-center?alreadyPublished=true
"A friend of mine summed up the underlying tone of "Abundance" this way: “Give us back all the power and control we had from 1945 to 1965.”"
Can you show receipts? Whenever a writer makes allusions like this, its a good sign they are battling a strawman
Dude, I could have shared that quote without an attribution -- I believe it myself -- but I am a friend and didn't want to steal a man's line. I didn't attribute because I don't know as he wants it publicly tied to him. Go ahead and pretend I said it because it's not a strawman -- it's a smart line I wish I had developed myself.