Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor and founding member of Strong Towns.

Sustain Saint Paul’s June community member meeting features special guest from Strong Towns: Daniel Herriges!

Breaking out of the Housing Trap: A Strong Towns Presentation

Talk of a "housing crisis" pervades American cities—be it about off-the-charts rents in coastal cities or hyper-vacancy in the Rust Belt. These problems are symptoms of a deeper dysfunction. Over nearly a century, through often well-intended top-down policy interventions, we've turned a complex system that should be adaptive and self-correcting into one prone to a never-ending cycle of boom and bust, crises and overcorrections.

To address the dysfunction at the root of our housing problems, we need to shift our approach. We must move away from a model in which large developers and centralized financial institutions have unprecedented sway over what is built and where, to a more antifragile housing ecosystem in which the bar to entry is low, and every neighborhood can undergo incremental change over time.

A “Breaking Out of the Housing Trap” presentation will help you understand the root causes of America's interrelated housing crises, and identify some rational responses that our city (and every city) can take.

Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development. He grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, before moving west to the San Francisco Bay Area, and later east to Sarasota, Florida, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and too many pets.

Daniel’s obsession with maps began before he could read; a general fascination with cities and how they work was soon to follow. He can often be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods (of his own town or another) on foot or bicycle. Daniel’s lifelong environmentalism can also be traced all the way back to age 4, when he yelled at his parents for stepping on weeds growing in sidewalk cracks.

We’ll share quite a few updates around Saint Paul. Daniel will join us between 7:15pm-8pm.