Book review: Escaping the Housing Trap

$185,000 bought this house five blocks from me

Charles L. Marohn Jr. and Daniel Herriges, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis. Hoboken NJ: Wiley, 2024. 

(8/25/2026) This fall I'm part of a local group that has decided to take on the housing crisis in our town. There's one in every town, of course, and the precise nature of the crisis varies all over the place, with Cedar Rapids somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. Our group will benefit greatly from people like the authors of this book who have thought seriously about problems in housing, can explain their origins and nature in everyday language, and are optimistic about our ability to improve the situation in our communities. At least it has motivated me to read this third in a series of Strong Towns books! (See links to previous reviews below.)

The most recent measure of the Case-Shiller Index of U.S. home prices was 331.020 in May 2026, which means that, taking into account overall inflation as well as typical seasonal variation, the average home price this year is more than 3.3 times what it was in January 2000. Housing prices been rising steadily since early 2012. Rising home prices are good, say Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges, for three types of people: individual homeowners, for whom the value of their house is a major investment; governments at all levels, which can tax the increasing value and/or economic activity that it produces; and investors in funds that have great piles of money tied up in housing. As a result, though they say "they want housing to become more affordable," they want/need it to happen "without prices going down" (p. 6). Part I of Escaping the Housing Trap describes how housing has become a major investment--perhaps the major investment for most Americans: a perfect storm of zoning and construction standards, suburban development, and innovative financial instruments, with government backstopping when it all goes blooey. "In the 2020s, national too-big-to-fail banks seek long-term mortgages from fragile homeowners" so "there will always be a coordinated effort to reinflate the housing market. There must be; if the housing market fails, the financial system fails" (p. 70).

They also do a good job of explaining why all the new buildings have empty retail space: cutting rent so businesses can afford to move in would negatively impact the value of the building. It's more financially advantageous to keep the space vacant than to rent it at what the market will bear (p. 68).

Commercial space in New Bohemia and Czech Village has been filling up,
even first floor retail in this "three-over-one"...

...but time will tell how long it takes this newcomer
to fill its retail space

Part II looks at how the housing system affects those outside of it: renters, including those who would like to own their own homes, those in unstable housing situations, and those who are stuck in houses that are too much for them. Zoning and the financial system work together to prevent construction of missing middle housing that could be more widely affordable and a good investment (ch. 5, on zoning lockdown), and opposition to new construction is political powerful in towns across the country (ch. 6, on the NIMBY phenomenon). But even well-intentioned policies to expand access to housing fail to make a dent. They run up against the same obstacles that individuals in the housing marketplace have met: "The very same problems that bedevil the effort to get abundant, affordable market-rate housing to exist are going to make it hard to deliver affordable social housing at any sort of scale" (p. 145). 

$100,000 will get you four blocks from me

By now they have our attention, and we're anxious to hear what might be able to break the housing logjam in any sustainable, scalable way. Bring on Part III!!

It does not disappoint, unless you're looking for a slam-dunk solution, which they (and the Strong Towns organization) avoid like the plague. They do propose a new approach to housing, because any existing approach leads to one or more of the following intolerable outcomes: inability to provide much affordable housing, lowering existing property values, vulnerability to capital flows especially outflows, and/or adding to already-high local government liabilities (pp. 153-156). They recommend an approach that (1) focuses on "the people who aren't well-served by today's limited housing offerings," by (2) filling "the demand for low-cost, affordable units" with "the resources that are available locally" (p. 156). That means, while "no neighborhood can be exempt from change" (pp. 156-158), at the same time "no neighborhood should experience radical change" (pp. 158-159). 

There are a lot of supporting ideas in the remaining pages, centering around enabling and relying upon a "swarm" of small developers who don't need economies of scale to succeed (ch. 10), and shifting the financial paradigm by insisting that every development be self-sustaining (ch. 11). That means gradually "thickening" existing neighborhoods: more "starter" homes on smaller lots, and more small multi-family units ("missing middle housing"). They key to the approach is not plug-and-play what worked in, say, South Bend, Indiana (pp. 167ff.), but to take small steps cautiously and flexibly. 

Their argument is hopeful, accessible, reasonable, and done with integrity. There are surely weaknesses in it, but in the final analysis we must and can do better than keeping on with an approach that is spectacularly failing, even in relatively low-cost cities like Cedar Rapids.

(Source: strongtowns.org)

SEE ALSO: 

"Book Review: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer," 8 December 2021

"Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (V)," 5 April 2020 [with links to earlier essays in the series]

Joe Cortright, "Why America Can't Make Up Its Mind About Housing," City Observatory, 16 May 2017

Shane Phillips, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (and Keeping it There) (Island, 2020)

Pete Saunders, "It's Not an Affordability Crisis; It's a Misalignment Problem," Corner Side Yard, 19 August 2026

Angie Schmitt, "Without Changing Our Retail Model, We're Never Going to Get Walkable Cities/ Neighborhoods," Love of Place, 24 August 2026

10th Anniversary Post: Linn County's First Bicycle Boulevard

 

Marion portion of Linn County Trails and Bikeways Map
(downloaded from linncountytrails.org)

(8/18/2026) Linn County's first designated bicycle boulevard, announced ten years ago, may be forgotten but it is not gone. Nor is it a bicycle boulevard, but there is no need to chew that cabbage again. 

The trusty trails maps show three types of trail infrastructure in Marion. The most distinct are offstreet trails, such as the Grant Wood trail that runs east-west through Uptown Marion and on to the county line, the soon-to-be completed CeMar trail that will connect Marion with Cedar Rapids, and the Indian Creek Trail that runs parallel to 10th Street and connects to the Linn-Mar Community Schools campus.

The north end is at Tower Terrace Road,
next to the football stadium

The landscape is lovely, including creek crossings
(not pictured)

Mowed paths connect to nearby subdivisions

Flashers for crossing 10th Street north of Boyson Road

Several major streets have side paths, which are wide sidewalks that accommodate bicycles as well.

Tower Terrace Road has both a side path and a painted bike lane:
Aesthetically I like the wild growing median, but I think it 
encourages cars to go faster

Prudent riders of all ages choose the side path

The path invites conflict with turning traffic
(here at Dollar Tree, but crossing 10th Street is even dicier)

Some streets--McGowan Boulevard, 29th Avenue, and 31st Street--are designated "bike-friendly streets." This means, in the case of McGowan, the dreaded sharrow.

McGowan Boulevard, looking east from 10th Street

Geode Street, which becomes 3rd Street north of 29th Avenue, does not appear on the trails map since the 2021 edition, but should still qualify as a "bike-friendly street"--not because of its sharrow, but because it's a low-traffic street that is the only north-south street in that neighborhood that goes all the way from Boyson to Tower Terrace. In fact, Geode continues south of Boyson to Lininger Park, where it connects to the Creekside Trail, which eventually connects to the CeMar Trail.

Geode Street, north of Boyson: Sign and sharrow,
with special designation "BLVD"

Some of those sharrows have been repainted

Crossing 29th Avenue by Novak Elementary School,
with its track and excellent playground, remains rough

3rd Street facing south from Tower Terrace Road

So, yeah, calling Geode/3rd Street a "bicycle boulevard" was silly puffery. But it's certainly an important cog in an increasingly connected trails system.

ORIGINAL POST: "Linn County's First Bicycle Boulevard," 29 August 2016

SEE ALSO: "Do Bicycle Boulevards Need a Purpose?" 17 July 2018

yard by Gill Park (2016) is still decorated, but
alas bikes have been replaced by dogs and Charlie Kirk

Justice in the World Today (II)

Rising rents are just one obstacle to opportunity today
(Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University)

(8/11/2026) Some time ago, First Presbyterian Church in Cedar Rapids engaged me to do two talks, on justice and social welfare. Since they were scheduled close together, I've treated them as a two-part series, even though I don't think that's how they were conceived, and I'm not even sure I'm doing them in the intended order!

The first talk, "Justice in the World Today," happened August 2, and is described here. Drawing on Biblical and philosophical sources, I argued justice is a condition, in which people get what they deserve (substantive justice), and government officials play by agreed-upon rules (procedural justice). While even procedural justice is critical for marginalized people, because they are the ones who suffer most when things get irregular, social welfare seems to deal most directly with substantive justice. Leaving aside the question of who deserves more, we can agree at least agree that everyone deserves enough to live, the opportunity to improve their lives, and security from threats. (Note that I'm sliding over definitional issues with each of these ideas.)

If we accept all that, then it follows that public policy in a just society should look to the well-being of the poor, the mentally and physically handicapped, and other socially marginalized people. Do they have access to these things they need in life?

If we look upstream from the social problems that surround us, a common element is isolation. Physical isolation is most evident in areas of concentrated poverty, an unfortunate outgrowth of automobile-oriented development that left many areas behind and many people stuck there. Adults have less access to economic opportunities as well as lower life expectancy (Ludwig 2014). Children do less well in life than those raised in more socioeconomically mixed areas (Chetty, Hendren and Katz 2016). In disasters, people suffer most in these areas, as witness studies of the 1995 heat wave in Chicago that found deaths concentrated not just in very poor neighborhoods, but in those very poor neighborhoods where residents lacked access to each other found in places like grocery stores, public libraries, and senior centers (Klinenberg 2003, Helfland 2020). The difficulty of just getting from such neighborhoods to jobs has been dubbed "mobility redlining" by author Steven Higashide (2019: 92).

U.S. transportation policy has exacerbated physical marginalization by severing neighborhoods by building interstate highways through them, as with the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, I-94 in Minneapolis-St.Paul, and even I-380 in Cedar Rapids.

Not all isolation is physical. Homelessness is isolation of a different sort, driven by housing markets and inequality that make any risky personal choices even more costly. 

So, while direct provision of resources can deal with emergency situations, for most people on the margins, approaches that help to remove obstacles and build connections are more sustainable for everyone involved. 

• Encouraging compact development (as opposed to sprawl): the closer people are to the action the more they are likely to benefit 

• Encouraging local entrepreneurship (as opposed to colonization by out-of-town franchises and in particular big box stores): the more money that stays in the city the more likely it is that everyone benefits 

• Bringing more money into a city can benefit all its residents if and when that money circulates to support public facilities (the library, swimming pools, &c.) and local businesses. 

• Connecting areas of concentrated poverty to the rest of the city: ghettos are the result of design, and can only be overcome by design.

How these play out will vary from unique place to unique place, but wherever we are, there are stories to inspire us:

• Cycling Without Age, Copenhagen Denmark (Peñalosa 2026). Peñalosa's 880 Cities initiative is named for extreme ages, but his biweekly webinar is aimed at improving access across all manner of obstacles. This episode profiles a group of volunteers that provide trishaw outings for older adults. A similar program exists in Iowa City (J.C. Nesmith 2026).
• Redesigned transit network, Des Moines Iowa (Walker 2026). Walker's firm worked with Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority to improve ridership while cutting costs by 10 percent. Among other things, they got frequency down to every 15 minutes in central Des Moines and Windsor Heights, and the number of jobs available within 45 minutes' ride is up by 15 percent.
• Plant trees (Galle 2026). Not only do trees provide shade during heat waves, Nadina Galle summarizes health research that has found more trees related to heart health, neonatal outcomes, children's mental health, and health care spending.
• Housing (Strong Towns n.d.). Housing supply and cost are increasingly problematic, because many families are invested in the value of their house, zoning barriers price out small developers, and large developments carry risk both in the present and future. So, cities can help by enabling small, incremental development in their town. (See also Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn's latest book, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis [co-authored with Daniel Herriges, Wiley, 2024]).
• Housing First (McLean 2023, Kristof 2023, Ionescu 2023, Holder 2023). Cities like Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Denver have reduced their unhoused population by providing housing and following up with intensive support services. (Improvement is measurable, but the effort involved is admittedly intense, and the effects may not be noticeable to the casual observer.)

Bringing those at the margins into connection with the rest of us is not easy, and comes with costs. It's worth noting that not doing this comes with costs as well, in the form of security efforts as well as the loss of their talents. When God speaks through Isaiah to command the Israelites to Learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:17), it's not to make us less happy, but all of us happier.

PRINT SOURCES:

Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (Island, 2019)

Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago, 2003)

SEE ALSO:

"The Safety Dividend: The Surprising Impact of Well-Managed Public Spaces," Reimagining the Civic Commons, 11 August 2026

Justice in the World Today

 

Hope he gets some of that coffee:
Statue of Thucydides in Vienna, Austria

(7/31/2026) A long time ago, according to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE), a delegation from Athens went to the burg of Melos to demand its surrender. Melos, which was trying to stay neutral in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, resisted. The Athenians offered to argue it out with them, but refused to listen to arguments about justice. Justice, they said, was only for powers of equal strength, while weaker cities had to obey the commands of the weak.

Thucydides' rhetorical purpose in this conversation has been debated (cf. Fisher 2026), but one common interpretation is that democratic Athens had in its pride lost the moral bearings that were a source of its strength, presaging their catastrophic defeat in the war. Justice towards the weak, it seems, is an obligation of the strong. Moreover, philosophers from Plato to the Framers of the U.S. Constitution treat justice as a social condition rather than individual choice.

Justice in the Bible

If that was indeed Thucydides' argument, it would certainly be a Biblically-based conclusion. References to justice in the Hebrew Bible make clear that (a) it is one of God's fundamental expectations for human behavior, and (b) God repeatedly finds those in power failing to treat the weak justly. Here, for example is Amos, who explicitly mentions ill treatment of the poor as one thing that is pissing God off:

For I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins--you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe and push aside the needy in the gate... I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5: 12, 21-24, NRSVUE)

Micah and Isaiah sound similar themes: Learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:17). 

There's less of this in the New Testament, where, for example, Joseph is trying to be an individual "just man" (Matthew 1:19, RSV) when his first instinct upon learning of Mary's pregnancy is to get rid of her without subjecting her to public disgrace. But there's Jesus's condemnation of the collective religious leadership which "neglect justice and the love of God" (Luke 11:42, NRSVUE).

Justice in the World Today

So, our most ancient understandings of justice tell us that, in assessing the state of justice in the world today, we should look to the well-being of the poor, the mentally and physically handicapped, and other socially marginalized people. Do they have access to the things they need in life? The record is mixed, which may be news to those who tend towards either gloom or cockeyed optimism.

1. Substantive Justice

The aspect of justice that most directly affects the weak is substantive or distributive justice, in which everyone gets what they deserve--not necessarily equal portions, because people differ in all sorts of relevant ways. Here it's good to attend to Nicholas Kristof, who can be as gloomy as anybody, but whose annual end-of-the-year column reminds us of the progress our species has made. "Measured by child mortality, education, nutrition or women's rights, we humans are probably in the best decade in the past 300,000 years," he wrote in 2025, even as tyrants were waging wars and Elon Musk had eviscerated the U.S. Agency for International Development.

• Infant mortality increased over the previous year, but still was less than half what it had been in 2000
• Malnutrition continued to decline, though the rate of decline had slowed
• Literacy worldwide had reached 88 percent
• Deaths from drug abuse in the United States declined 30 percent since 2023
• Public health research had produced a new HIV drug, gene editing against sickle cell anemia, and possibly was close to being able to regrow limbs
• Solar energy is increasingly accessible, and batteries are close behind

The State of the Nation report, produced by the Murphy Institute at Tulane University, is America-centric but contains a lot of good information about other countries. They find the United States remains ahead of 98 percent of other countries in terms of other countries, and is also a leader in education, physical health, and violence reduction. However, we're declining on citizenship and democracy (only 33rd percentile in belief in democracy), life satisfaction, and mental health (only 11th percentile in depression and anxiety). While the U.S. remains high on environmental conditions, physical health (57th percentile in child mortality), and civil liberties, other countries are progressing more quickly. So it's a mixed bag, with a lot of progress in other countries, with some declines as well. The report's authors are unsure whether American decline in some areas is in spite of our economic growth, or connected to how that growth has been distributed.

2. Procedural Justice

Another important aspect is procedural justice, not just because we like the rule of law and respect for individual rights (which we do), but because corruption and arbitrary government limit progress and, particularly for the less-well-connected, opportunity. Freedom House's Freedom in the World report for 2025 shows the vast majority of people live under governments that are rated Not Free or Partly Free. Autocracy is asserting itself all over the world, "usually at the expense of minority groups, democratic activists, and a range of other perceived enemies." Freedom House analyzes the "real-world" freedom enjoyed by individuals, rather than what might be stated in the constitution. Assessment

is done by a combination of in-house analysts and country specialists. If you're curious, the United States rates 81 points out of 100, which puts it in the "free" category. However, it lost three points since 2024 and eight points since 2016.

Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2025 shows increasing public sector corruption worldwide: the global average is at a record low of 42 (out of 100, with higher being better on this measure), with more than two-thirds of countries score below 50, and 31 countries scoring significantly lower than they did in 2012. Corruption remains a serious threat in every part of the world. Unlike Freedom House, Transparency International collects their data from other sources, specifically 13 surveys of corruption done by agencies including the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. The U.S. is tied for 29th best of 182 countries, scoring 64 out of 100, down one point from 2024 but lost11 points since 2017.

Conclusion

I continue to find the annual January celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in my town meaningful, because it's a chance for the entire community to rededicate ourselves to making good on the promise of "justice for all." Pete Saunders (2026) listed a number of discriminatory public and quasi-public policies in the post-Jim Crow era, some still in full flower today: aggressive policing, exclusionary zoning, blockbusting, inadequate local public funding, retail redlining, and predatory lending. There is a lot of work to be done to build just cities, beginning with recognizing our common humanity and hence our mutual situation. As Dr. King said in his 1963 letter from jail to clergy in Birmingham, Alabama, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

--JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

SEE ALSO: "Roll Down Justice: MLK Day 2026," 20 January 2026

Cherokee Trail update

 

You can get there from here!

The Cherokee Trail, which eventually will run all across the west side of Cedar Rapids, is complete between Cherokee Park and Morgan Creek County Park. The next step is to go east out of Cherokee Park, across Edgewood Road to the intersection of Westwood Drive and F Avenue NW. According to the Linn County Trails Association, work continues in the City of Cedar Rapids to determine the specific route the trail will take, while awaiting funding from the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization. Unfortunately, the MPO has not been encouraging on that score ("June 2026 Trail News" 2026).

On a recent sunny weekday, I encountered a few cyclists as well as some walkers; they seemed comfortable, although there currently are few sources of shade, at least not in the middle of the day. Even in Cherokee Park, the effects of the 2020 derecho are noticeable. (I also encountered precisely no pit bulls on my hike, although there were reports that two had run away and were loose in the area.) 

For the time being, the trail starts at the eastern edge of Cherokee Park, a small but delightfully unique park located at Johnson Avenue and Midway Drive NW. A paved trail supplements an older gravel trail that goes completely around the park on either side of a little creek. That gives you three options for crossing the park. 

The paved trail crosses a bridge on its way out of the park...

west edge of Cherokee Park

...crosses Wiley Boulevard (with the help of a new crossing signal), and runs alongside a residential neighborhood. A few steps or turns of the wheel get you to Jacolyn Park, which has a new play area...

Jacolyn Park

...and a restroom. Here the separated trail ends, and the Cherokee Trail follows Gordon Avenue for several blocks.

Cherokee Trail on Gordon Avenue NW

Gordon Avenue is officially designated a bicycle boulevard, for which it qualifies by the low traffic volume, gentle roundabouts like the one depicted above, and frequent reminders on signs and the pavement.

Bicycle boulevard stencil, Gordon Avenue

People's Church (Unitarian-Universalist) moved out here from downtown several years ago. 

People's Church is located on the bicycle boulevard

Gloria Dei Lutheran and Cedar Hills Community Church are also located along the Cherokee Trail, for Christians seeking to arrive at their house of worship by a humbler conveyance than an SUV.

The bicycle boulevard turns right off Gordon Avenue onto Sharon Lane...

...which leads into Cherry Hill Park, where the paved trail resumes.

entering Cherry Hill Park off Sharon Lane

The trail winds through the park, running along the north edge of the large swimming pool.

There's a fix-it station right before you get to Stoney Point Road.

There's no signage at Stoney Point Road...

...but taking the right fork leads to a crossing with warning lights, which leads to E Avenue, which leads to Morgan Creek Park.

On E Avenue there's the choice of a bike lane
or parallel paved trail

In the park, it becomes the Morgan Creek Trail...

...which winds through the park...

...as far as 80th Street, where it turns north and runs parallel to the street, continuing as far as Covington Road (F Avenue in Cedar Rapids). The Linn County Trails Association anticipates the Iowa Department of Transportation will authorized bids for constructing the 1.7 mile stretch between Covington Road and the Cedar River, with construction happening in 2027. The bridge over the river may take longer ("June 2026 Trail News" 2026).

SEE ALSO: "Riding the Districts 2023," 12 June 2023

Post No. 650: Blogging as a vocation, or whatever this is

Hickok Hall at Coe College, where your humble
and mostly retired blogger wrote this post

I've been out of full-time teaching for two years now, which has left me with more time to read and write. This is a good thing! I write a lot--journals, songs, letters, blog posts. I seem to need to write, and I am grateful to you for reading and responding.

Blogging on Holy Mountain is what passes for work in my life these days, judging from the time I spend doing it as well as thinking about it when I'm not doing it. Sometimes, like now for example, I return to the academic building where I've had an office since 1990 to do this work. 

What keeps me going, besides an apparent compulsion to write out my thoughts, is the sense that this is a meaningful way for me to contribute to important discussions about the state of our world. The rewards are when I write myself into a better understanding of things and/or when my writing stimulates thoughtful responses from others. I don't need money, but I do occasionally think about moving to a hotter platform like Substack.

Last week in Christian Century, Texas pastor Mike Gaventa wrote about a "crisis of vocation" in the mainline Protestant church. Actually, the phrase he used was "vocational theology," which focuses on the language we use to talk about vocation, but he had plenty to say about vocation itself. His article rang some bells, even though (a) he used vocation in its typical sense of a chosen career, and (b) he was writing specifically about careers in the church. 

Gaventa begins by quoting theologian Frederick Buechner, who wrote in 1973 that "the place God calls you do is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." He suggests this fundamental truth might be amended by: 

1. distinguishing the call from "market-based assumptions about value and social status"
2. seeking "the well-being and best interests of the whole body," often in opposition to the status quo
3. enabling "the doing of gladless work," of which his repeated example is cleaning toilets
4. continued personal discernment, "because God is never done making any of us"

Is it possible to find work that is personally meaningful, but also brings you into community with God and your fellow human beings? (It would be good if it also had decent pay and benefits.) All work, even messy work, has dignity under those conditions.  In the 2023 Wim Wenders movie Perfect Days, Koji Yakusho plays a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. At first he seems to have a well-ordered life and a beatific attitude that is almost godlike, though in time we find there is dissatisfaction and loneliness and a backstory. Of course, when is there not? 

Perfect Days trailer (1:44)

While at graduate school in the 1980s, I regularly participated in the Wesley Foundation at the university, and for a while served on the church's Pastor-Parish Relations Committee. I remember that the associate pastor in charge of the day-to-day operations of the Wesley Foundation had in her job description the charge to help students identify a sense of mission in their chosen careers. I've often thought about that since, that any career can be a vocation if you consider how you might use your work to serve God. I've also thought, during my career as a college faculty member, that institutions under financial stress must make compromises to sustain themselves, which sometimes call the mission itself into question. I've wondered, in times of high levels of doubt, whether it might be better to make money however you can, and seek a vocation in your off hours.

Well, now I'm in a position where all my hours are off hours. There's a version of retirement in the mass media that makes it sounds like second childhood. But it's not hard to conceive of an alternate version that is a vocation or something much like it, focused on community not financial gain and involving continued personal discernment. And, at least on campus, the skilled and reliable Nick cleans the toilets!

Top posts of the 2020s

Pandemic hearts, April 2020

1. "The Hearts of Cedar Rapids," 11 April 2020
2. "Black Friday Parking 2021," 26 November 2021
3. "The Kind of President Joe Biden Could Be," 3 July 2020
4. "Hy-Vee is a Symptom of a Deeper Problem," 23 May 2024
5. "Eight Things That Make Me Proud in Cedar Rapids," 27 June 2025
6. "What Should Go into Brewed Awakenings?" 31 July 2020
7. "Move More Week Diary," 10 October 2022
8. "Even a Pretty MedQuarter Isn't Right," 12 September 2023
9. "More New Less Bo?" 4 July 2022
10. "Project 2025 and Our Common Life," 19 August 2024

As yet undiscovered posts of the 2020s

Mike Maas, John Korkie, and Carlis Faurot (not pictured)
perform at Maple Syrup Festival

1. "Maple Syrup Time Again," 30 March 2026
2. "Thinking Positively About Marjorie Taylor Greene," 25 November 2025
3. "Riding the Districts 2024," 10 June 2024
4. "Book Review: Palaces for the People," 6 July 2026
5. "Roll Down Justice: MLK Day 2026," 20 January 2026
6. "Train Horns," 6 October 2025
7. "Book Review: City Limits," 5 June 2024
8. "My Grand Day Out: Iowa River Landing and the Peninsula Neighborhood," 9 June 2026
9. "Subterranean Chicago," 9 December 2025
10. "10th Anniversary Post: What's Up in Uptown Marion?" 8 January 2026

SEE ALSO: "Blogging in a World Gone Backwards," 20 June 2025

10th Anniversary Post: The Future of the Suburbs

We've always viewed our nation as a place with unlimited land and natural resources.--
PETE SAUNDERS

Ten years ago, I was gearing up to teach the next generation of first-year Coe College students about urbanism. Maybe that's why Holy Mountain was full of urbanist basics like cities blowing their stash on big amenities, gentrification, and suburban sprawl. My post on suburbia was full of assumptions that now seem very much of that time. Following Leigh Gallagher's The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving (Portfolio/Penguin, 2013) I expected suburbia to be transformed by increasing economic inequality, consumer preferences for urban living, environmental issues, fiscal issues, corporate clustering, and secular declines in urban crime. 

When I revisited the topic six years later, those assumptions already looked dated. "Since I wrote [the 2016 post], the return to the city appears to have ebbed; it's early to judge, but it's certainly not proceeding at the pace of 2005-2015 (Frey 2022, Cortright 2020). Meanwhile, American society has been shaken by a series of earthquakes" including the Trump administration, Black Lives Matter protests, the pandemic, altered workplaces, economic changes, and climate disasters. There was a trend of suburbs adopting urbanist elements like central squares, small businesses, and bike trails.

Today I read two essays on suburbia, which is indeed transforming, in some places, but very much maintaining its preeminence in American geography. Bill Fulton (2026), an urbanist I admire but not enough to pay for his Substack, answered a question from someone in Texas about the Dallas metropolitan area, which is growing by leaps and bounds, even as "Downtown Dallas specifically is sucking wind" (questioner's wording). This is not what we were asking ten years ago, when McDonald's was moving its headquarters from Oakbrook to Chicago, and CRST moved from the edge of town to downtown Cedar Rapids (Cortright 2016, Smart Growth America 2015). There may be more to this behind the paywall, but the discussion of metro Dallas sounds like we're back to the 1980s, and 2005-2015 never happened.

Addison Del Maestro (2026) examines the housing crisis from the perspective of high-demand, high-price cities. More people seem to want to live in the hottest cities than can fit there, which drives prices up, making them unaffordable. While it's also true that "lots of smaller cities and towns have also seen price increases, because basically all communities pulled back on housing production for a few decades," some cities have features or cultures that attract a disproportionate percentage of the mobile population. I conclude that, while San Francisco prices spiral--their price-to-median-income ratio is over 10!--those who can't afford them retreat to the suburbs, somewhere or other. In Cedar Rapids, you could buy a downtown condo for $400K, or you could pay half that for something 15 minutes' drive away. So, you get some of the amenities of urban living at an affordable price. Note that Del Maestro is still assuming consumer preference for urban amenities.

Pete Saunders (2026), however, argues consumer preferences for new construction are even stronger than those for urban living. He cites a study by economist Kenan Fikri showing that the Economic Innovation Group's measure of the most prosperous neighborhoods--measured a variety of ways, notably not including taxable value per acre--shows the most prosperous are also the newest. Saunders reflects:

Historically, I understand why Americans have always favored new over old. We've always viewed our nation as a place with unlimited land and natural resources. We have a residential and commercial development investment structure that adheres to the same philosophy that bank robber Willie Sutton used when asked by a reporter why he robs banks: "Because that's where the money is." We can go anywhere. We can do anything. We've put no limit to our desires.

Does it matter where people choose to live? Well, yes it does. This is a blog about public policy, though, not individual ethical choices, and I'm not here to argue that people should never choose to live in low density areas. (Contrast that stance with that of Ross Douthat, cited in Del Maestro's post, who wants to "break up" existing high-demand cities, where it should be said a lot of people also live.) But we should not ignore the social costs of sprawl, particularly on municipal finances and the natural environment (but also community feeling and physical fitness). The future of suburbia seems strong; but will it prove adaptable to big changes coming?

Saunders, again:

In a nation that's prospered with the expansion of suburbia and the Sun Belt, what happens when they feel a tinge of obsolescence? When the five-bedroom, 4,000 square-foot McMansion can't be sold because the nation is getting older and has smaller households? We'll see.

If experience is any predictor, it won't spur a rush back to central cities, but rather to a new version of suburbs. And the most vulnerable will, again, be left in the dust, not to mention the natural world.

ORIGINAL POST: "The Future of the Suburbs," 18 July 2016

SEE ALSO: "The Future of the Suburbs (II)," 8 August 2022. Compare the current versions of the American Prairie Project...

house (Source: drhorton.com)

townhouses (Source: drhorton.com)

...with what they were showing four years ago:

(Source: cedar-rapids.org)

...though even then, to quote Daniel Herriges (2020), "What would you even walk to?"