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Strong Towns MKE Book Club
This event is open to all who are interested in learning about the policy choices that created our housing crisis and the Strong Towns approach to addressing it. Discussion will be centered around Charles Marohn’s Escaping the Housing Trap (2024). Reading is encouraged, but optional. A brief summary of key ideas, and questions for discussion, will be presented to kick off the conversation. Hope to see you there!
Reading Group First Meeting
Join us at the Milwaukee Public Library in Bay View for our very first book club get together.
Milwaukee Crawl with Strong Towns Staff
Strong Towns National Staff will be in Milwaukee!
Join us to meet the Strong Towns team and show off our great city.
UPDATED EVENT DETAILS
Agenda
3 p.m. Meet at the Milwaukee Public Market Tiki Bar | Saint Paul and Broadway
3:15 p.m. Downtown Walking Tour
4:45 p.m. Kimpton Rooftop Bar | Chicago and Broadway
5:30 p.m. Summerfest
6 p.m. Summerfest | Meet inside the Chicago Street gate
⭐️$5 Summerfest Admission if Purchased before 6 p.m.⭐️
Charles Marohn | Escaping The Housing Trap
Understand the root causes of America’s interrelated housing crisis and the intentional responses Metro Milwaukee cities can make to address it.
Join the Strong Towns Metro Milwaukee community on Thursday, June 20th at 11:30 a.m. CST for a virtual presentation by Charles Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns.
REGISTER HERE for this virtual presentation
Housing is an investment. Investment prices must go up. Housing is shelter. When the price of shelter goes up, people experience distress.
This is the housing trap. It’s time to escape. This presentation introduces a first-of-its-kind discussion of the tension between housing as a financial product and housing as shelter. These insights will help local communities fight back against the current affordability housing crisis, and opt out of the boom and bust cycles that have typified housing in postwar America.
This presentation offers a serious, yet accessible, history of housing policy in the United States and explains how it led us to this point in time: where we face a market that is rigged against people who, only a few decades ago, could have been homeowners or stable, long-term renters. Only local change, on a neighborhood or city-wide scale, can begin to restore balance to the housing market.
After this one-hour presentation, you’ll understand:
How the tension between housing as an investment and housing as shelter impacts where and how we live.
How financial innovations in the Great Depression stabilized the housing market, and how those tools were repurposed after World War II to rapidly expand America’s cities.
How a series of housing price bubbles and banking crises have financialized the housing market, transforming homeowners from the customer purchasing a home to the product supporting a mortgage.
How regulations designed to facilitate the rapid growth of cities end up stagnating neighborhoods and creating artificial housing shortages.
Why making it easier for more people to borrow more money is not a solution to housing affordability and, in fact, has only made housing less broadly attainable.
The huge difference between a goal of making affordable housing and a goal of making housing affordable.
REGISTER HERE for this virtual presentation
About Charles Marohn Known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues, he is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a civil engineer and a land use planner with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.
Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019), And of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley, 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America. Planetizen named him one of the 10 Most Influential Urbanists of all time.
Jane's Walk - The Beerline Neighborhood
Join Joe from Strong Towns Metro MKE for a stroll through one of Milwaukee’s newer neighborhoods. Sign up on EventBrite (free)
May Happy Hour
Join us at Third Space Brewing (nice outdoor space if the weather’s good, nice indoor space if it isn’t) and we will speak of many things.
Transit: MCTS Route 24 runs north and south on the 16th Street viaduct; staircase down to St Paul.
Bus Bench Building
Join fellow Strong Townies to build bus benches. This work suppoorts our Bill’s Bus Benches campaign.
Interested? Use the Contact Us form and we’ll forward location information details.
Strong Milwaukee Monthly Meeting
The May Strong Towns Metro MKE local conversation is pleased to welcome Jessica Wineberg, Policy Director for Milwaukee Vision Zero. The Vision Zero plan sets the goal of guiding the City and partners to achieving zero traffic deaths or life changing injuries by 2037. Join us at Wheel and Sprocket, and if you haven’t already done so, take the Vision Zero survey.
Urban Spaceship | Growing MKE
Join the Urban Spaceship community for networking and a presentation on the just-released draft of the Growing MKE plan. RSVP here.
An Amazing Vision for the Future of the I-794 Corridor
VIRTUAL EVENT
Join Strong Towns Metro Milwaukee as Greg Walthers and John Everitt present their amazing vision for what the reconstruction of the I-794 corridor through Downtown Milwaukee could become.
