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Current Affairs

PREVIEW: Chuck Marohn on Strong Towns

Current Affairs

Current Affairs

Comedy, Government, News, Culture, Politics

4.4645 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2019

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Current Affairs host Pete Davis sits down with engineer, land planner and founder of the Strong Towns movement, Chuck Marohn, to discuss how to create thriving towns and cities. This is an excerpt from an exclusive Patreon episode. To gain full access to this episode, as well as lots of other delicious bonus content, consider becoming one of our patrons at www.patreon.com/CurrentAffairs.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Because of the way we have built, we've come to kind of equate big with successful.

0:05.6

And the reality is, is like any farmer can tell you that it's not the amount of acreage

0:10.9

you till. It's the productivity of that acreage. How much are you getting back per acre?

0:15.8

If you've got good soil and if you've got good irrigation and if you get a good summer of sun, you can generate a lot

0:22.7

per acre, you know, in a small plot of land. If you've got a large piece of land and you don't have

0:28.5

very good conditions, it doesn't matter. You're not going to produce all that much. What Jimmy's pizza

0:32.4

demonstrates is that when we were poorer, when we were poorer as a country, before we had the prolificacy to kind of

0:38.6

just grow, grow, grow horizontally, what we built was not only very frugal, but incredibly productive.

0:44.7

It has a productivity of $3.4 million per acre. So that's basically, if you have an acre of land

0:53.4

that's developed in the style of that Jimmy's pizza,

0:56.5

which is a rundown kind of a shack of a pizza place, there's nothing spectacular about it,

1:01.8

nothing great about it. It's going to generate $3.4 million of wealth for the community.

1:07.4

If you look at that Kmart, which is the one I kind of juxtaposed with it, the Kmart

1:12.8

is at 350,000 an acre. So basically, Jimmy's pizza is 10 times more productive than the Kmart. And

1:20.2

you look at that and you're like, well, yeah, but Kmart is like our biggest taxpayer. Kmart

1:24.3

pays a ton of sales tax and a ton of property tax and Jimmy's pizza only generates

1:29.9

this small little amount. And that's very true. But Kmart's also, you know, utilizing like all of your

1:36.3

land. Like they're using a ton. You've got millions of dollars of pipe in the ground. You've got millions

1:41.4

of dollars of road and street and curb and sidewalk. You've got

1:45.3

like a ton of money committed to it. What we have done, and my friend Joe Minnikozi is the one who I think

1:51.1

has perfected this kind of way of thinking about things. He's a planner with Urban 3. His firm does

1:57.2

a lot of these visual analyses. He pointed out, if we were going to take this mentality and take it to automobiles, you would

...

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