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!”