By Ainsley Smyth/The Sunflower
Author and founder of the nonprofit Strong Towns Charles Marohn addressed a packed conference room at the Kansas Leadership Center in downtown Wichita Tuesday night.
“We have two conversations going on right now when it comes to housing,” Marohn said. “In one of these conversations, housing prices must fall. They must fall and they must fall dramatically in order to get people into homes. In the other conversation, housing prices cannot be allowed to fall, because if housing prices fall, all kinds of calamity results to our economy. This is the essence of what we call a housing trap.”
Marohn, author of books including “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis,” shared a message of community empowerment on the Kansas stop of his “Housing Trap Tour”.
Joseph Welch, an architecture and urban planning student originally from Kansas, said he took the Amtrak from Chicago to hear Marohn speak.
“I think that my career path is going to lead me to doing these kinds of things all the time. And so it was really important to me that I see Strong Towns when they’re here in Kansas … in downtown Wichita, the largest city in Kansas,” Welch said
Marohn advocates three steps he said were crucial to combatting the housing crisis.
The first is to remove most zoning laws and opt for mixed-use zoning.
“We need to change our codes and regulations,” he said.
This, Marohn continued, can help encourage neighborhoods to evolve, avoid decline or the rapid development that can leave residents “priced out” of their own neighborhoods.
“We have a grand bargain today in our housing environment, and that grand bargain is, all neighborhoods don’t have to experience any change at all, but one or two neighborhoods … are going to be radically transformed,” Marohn said.
The alternative, he argued, is a housing market where people have more options in types and price ranges of housing, like small starter homes, accessory dwelling units and duplexes.
“No neighborhood can be exempt from change,” he said. “Then, no neighborhood should experience radical change.”
Marohn also criticized Wichita’s parking mandates, minimum parking requirements for new buildings, which several other cities have rolled back in recent years.
“Your city has vastly too much parking,” he said of Wichita.
The next strategy, Marohn argued, is to create a community of individuals interested in learning to build these types of homes.
“We need to nurture an ecosystem of incremental developers,” he said.
The last point he argued is to “localize finance.”
“We can, as cities, throw all kinds of dumb money at housing and it will not benefit (us) at all,” Marohn said. “If we focus our resources on the part of the market that’s not being served today, we can radically transform our future.”
Marohn said that rather than trying to provide relief to residents affected by the housing crisis by subsidizing affordable housing, cities should focus their efforts on programs that help residents develop their neighborhoods at a smaller level.
Marohn’s audience included local government officials, housing advocates, developers and activists.
“I think that being here and communicating and networking with the people here who are making an impact and actually trying to actively change the urban environment and try to help build housing and make housing affordable and possible for the younger generation, I think, is the key important thing,” Welch said.
Brent Lewis, a local audience member, said his interest in housing came simply from the fact that “I live in one.”
Lewis said that discussions with the people sitting around him brought up the topic of whether housing should be considered a right.
“I never thought about it that way,” he said. “I mean, without it, your life’s in danger and we all have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Tuesday’s event was sponsored by the Realtors of South Central Kansas.
