Book Review
by Stuart A. Sutton

Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis

Charles L. Marohn, Jr. & Daniel Herriges

For most Americans, the housing crisis appears straightforward.

Home prices are rising faster than incomes. Rents consume an ever-larger share of household budgets. Young families struggle to purchase their first home. Workers find themselves priced out of the communities where they are employed. Homelessness has increased in many regions, and nearly every city seems engaged in contentious debates over housing production.

The usual explanations are familiar. Housing is too expensive because investors are buying homes. Developers are making excessive profits. Interest rates are too high. Construction costs have increased. Population growth has outpaced supply.

While acknowledging that each of these factors plays a role, Charles L. Marohn Jr. and Daniel Herriges argue in Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis that these explanations often miss a deeper and more fundamental problem. The housing crisis, they contend, is not simply a shortage of housing units. It is the result of a development system that has steadily eliminated many of the traditional ways communities once produced housing.

Like many books associated with the Strong Towns movement, Escaping the Housing Trap begins by challenging an assumption that most readers have rarely questioned. The modern housing market is often discussed as if there are only two meaningful options: large-scale suburban development on one hand and large-scale apartment projects on the other. Public debates frequently revolve around which of these approaches should be encouraged, subsidized, approved, or opposed.

Marohn and Herriges ask readers to consider a different question. What if the most important forms of housing are the ones we stopped building? This question drives much of the book's narrative.

The authors observe that many of America's most beloved neighborhoods were not created through massive master-planned developments. Nor were they built through large institutional housing projects. Instead, they evolved incrementally over decades. A duplex was added on one block. A small apartment building appeared on another. A homeowner converted a garage into a rental unit. A corner lot became a triplex. A large house was divided into several apartments.

Each project was modest. None transformed the neighborhood overnight. Yet together they produced a diverse housing stock capable of serving households at different stages of life and different income levels.

The authors refer to this category of housing as "missing middle housing"—a term that has become increasingly influential in planning discussions. Missing middle housing includes duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments, bungalow courts, townhouses, accessory dwelling units, and small apartment buildings. These forms once existed in abundance throughout North American cities but became increasingly difficult to build under postwar zoning regulations.

The result, according to the authors, is a housing market trapped between two extremes.

On one side are detached single-family homes, often requiring large lots and substantial infrastructure investments. On the other are large multifamily projects that require significant capital, extensive approvals, and institutional-scale development expertise.

Much of the housing that once existed between these two poles has effectively been regulated out of existence.

The book's title refers to this condition as a trap because it affects nearly everyone involved.

Homeowners struggle with affordability. Renters face rising costs. Cities face increasing political conflict. Developers confront mounting regulatory barriers. Neighborhoods experience stagnation because incremental adaptation becomes difficult or impossible. Meanwhile, the housing supply becomes less responsive to changing needs.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its historical perspective.

Marohn and Herriges remind readers that the neighborhoods many people now seek to protect were often built under rules that would prohibit their construction today. Walkable neighborhoods containing a mixture of housing types, corner stores, apartments above shops, and accessory units frequently predate modern zoning ordinances. In many cities, the most desirable neighborhoods are effectively illegal to reproduce under contemporary regulations.

This observation leads to one of the book's central arguments: the housing crisis is not solely an economic problem. It is also a regulatory problem.

Over many decades, local governments accumulated layers of zoning rules, parking requirements, setback regulations, density limits, minimum lot sizes, design standards, approval processes, and other requirements intended to solve specific concerns. While each regulation may appear reasonable in isolation, their cumulative effect has been to make small-scale housing development increasingly difficult. The consequences are profound.

When a homeowner can no longer easily add an accessory dwelling unit, when a local builder can no longer profitably construct a duplex, or when a small investor cannot rehabilitate a modest apartment building, housing production becomes concentrated in the hands of larger and larger developers capable of navigating increasingly complex regulatory systems. The result is a market that loses much of its capacity for incremental adaptation.

This theme will be familiar to readers of other Strong Towns works. Just as traditional cities evolved incrementally, housing markets historically evolved incrementally as well. The loss of that incremental process has reduced the ability of communities to respond organically to changing demand.

The book also challenges another common assumption: that housing affordability can be solved primarily through large-scale housing production targets.

The authors do not argue against building more housing. In fact, they repeatedly emphasize the need for additional housing supply. Their concern is that public discussions often focus almost exclusively on the quantity of housing while neglecting the mechanisms by which housing is produced.

A city may approve thousands of new housing units, but if those units can only be delivered through large institutional projects, the system remains fragile. Housing production becomes dependent upon complex financing structures, favorable market conditions, and a relatively small number of actors.

A more resilient housing ecosystem, the authors argue, resembles a healthy natural ecosystem. It contains diversity. It includes participants operating at multiple scales. Homeowners, small builders, local investors, neighborhood entrepreneurs, and larger developers all contribute to meeting housing needs.

This diversity is not merely a matter of fairness. It is a matter of resilience.

When housing production is distributed across thousands of small decisions rather than concentrated in a handful of large projects, communities gain greater flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. The book's path forward reflects this philosophy.

Rather than proposing a single national solution, Marohn and Herriges advocate removing barriers that prevent communities from growing incrementally. They encourage local governments to legalize missing middle housing, simplify approval processes, reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, permit accessory dwelling units, and allow neighborhoods to evolve gradually over time.

Importantly, the authors do not present this approach as a radical transformation. In many respects, they are advocating a return to development patterns that were once common throughout North America.

The goal is not to replace existing neighborhoods but to allow them to mature and adapt as they historically did. A neighborhood that can add a few accessory units, convert a large house into multiple residences, or accommodate a small apartment building becomes capable of increasing housing supply without requiring wholesale redevelopment.

This incremental approach also connects directly to the financial themes found throughout the broader Strong Towns body of work.

Housing built within existing neighborhoods often takes advantage of roads, utilities, schools, parks, and public services that already exist. Additional residents can increase the productivity of public infrastructure without requiring the extensive expansion of municipal systems. In this sense, infill housing can strengthen both housing affordability and municipal finances simultaneously.

The alternative—continuous outward expansion through low-density suburban development—may increase housing supply in the short term but often requires cities to assume additional infrastructure obligations that future taxpayers must eventually maintain and replace.

Thus, the housing question becomes inseparable from the fiscal health of communities themselves.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Escaping the Housing Trap is its reframing of the housing crisis as a problem of systems rather than villains. The authors resist the temptation to identify a single culprit. The crisis did not emerge because of one bad policy, one group of investors, or one generation of decision-makers. Instead, it arose gradually through the accumulation of rules, incentives, and assumptions that collectively constrained the ability of communities to adapt. This perspective leads to a more hopeful conclusion.

If the housing crisis is the product of a system, then it can also be addressed through systemic reform. Communities do not need to choose between preserving neighborhood character and accommodating growth. They do not need to choose between affordability and prosperity. They can instead create conditions under which neighborhoods evolve gradually, incrementally, and productively over time.

By the end of the book, readers are likely to see housing differently. The housing crisis ceases to be merely a question of prices, rents, and construction totals. It becomes a question of whether communities have retained the capacity to adapt to changing needs.

The ultimate lesson of Escaping the Housing Trap is that resilient housing markets are not built through megaprojects alone. They emerge from countless small acts of investment, adaptation, and reinvestment occurring across a community over time. The challenge facing many cities is not simply to build more housing. It is to rebuild the local systems that once allowed housing to evolve naturally as communities grew.

Marohn and Herriges offer no quick fixes. What they offer instead is a compelling explanation of how the housing trap was created and a practical vision for how communities might gradually escape it. Once readers understand the role that incremental development played in creating many of the neighborhoods they value most, it becomes difficult to view housing policy solely through the lens of unit counts and large-scale projects ever again.

Bibliographic Reference

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