The Asheville Downtown Association hosted the presentation, “Strong Towns: A New Model of Growth,” yesterday. Chuck Marohn, a planner and engineer with a broken ribcage, showed how small towns started in the US. Growth was slow and right-sized. It was bottom-up. He contrasted it to the Ponzi scheme, “Build It and They Will Come” practice of “leveraging,” or getting a huge, near-term ROI by taking out lots of loans with teeny immediate gains, resulting in a cliff when payback time calls. The most wonderful thing of all was that Marohn was talking about a new, progressive concept and not that fiscally-conservative free market stuff you and I and our fathers, and our fathers’ fathers have been whining about from the get-go. And I think the progressives were digging on it. Or maybe the best part was being able to smile with the urban planners afterward and say, “That was great!”
by Leslee Kulba
Wild West blogger