Episode Details

Last week’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast featured the first half of the conversation between Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns, and Matt Yglesias, the bestselling author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking  Bigger. Yglesias is the host of The Weeds podcast and cofounder of Vox Media. He recently launched the blog and newsletter Slow Boring.

In Part 1, Yglesias made the case for tripling the U.S. population, discussing how it would make America stronger at the community level and as a whole. Now in Part 2, Marohn and Yglesias talk about why the concept might be especially good for small towns and depopulated Rust Belt cities, how Yglesias addresses concerns about gentrification, and what needs to change about our economics and development pattern in order for “one billion Americans“ to be a prosperity-generating change rather than a prosperity-killing one. They also discuss Yglesias’s recent article on fixing the mass transit crisis.

• Slow Boring

• The Weeds Podcast

• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, by Matthew Yglesias

• Part 1 of the interview

• “Fixing the mass transit crisis,” by Matthew Yglesias

• Matthew Yglesias (Twitter)

• Charles Marohn (Twitter)

• The Strong Towns Local-Motive Tour