Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the organization. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota. His obsession with maps began before he could read. His budding environmentalism can be traced back to age 4, when he yelled at his parents for stepping on weeds growing in sidewalk cracks. His love of great urban design and human-scaled, livable places has also been lifelong. Daniel has a B.A. from Stanford University in Human Biology with a concentration in Conservation and Sustainable Development. After college, he worked as an environmental activist for several years, in support of indigenous people's rights and conservation in the Amazon rainforest. He can often be found hiking or cycling. Daniel is from St. Paul, Minnesota. 

 

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RECENT ARTICLES BY Daniel:
Cultivating Happy Accidents
Cultivating Happy Accidents

Land use planning should be a means to an end — not an end in itself.

What Housing Vouchers Can And Can't Do
What Housing Vouchers Can And Can't Do

This government housing subsidy is more cost-effective and market-based than many programs, but its impacts are limited.

Give the People What They Want
Give the People What They Want

What you think you know about public preference (for a certain style of home, neighborhood, etc.) is all wrong.

Calming the Waters: How to Address Both Gentrification AND Concentrated Poverty
Calming the Waters: How to Address Both Gentrification AND Concentrated Poverty

Overheated rhetoric and protest from all sides over neighborhood change are a reflection of the insecurity many of us feel over the future of places we love.

Rough Waters: Gentrification and Cataclysmic Money
Rough Waters: Gentrification and Cataclysmic Money

An all-or-nothing development environment creates a built-in bias toward big actors who can weather wide market swings and are in a position to exploit them for profit.

Who Benefits From Neighborhood Improvements?
Who Benefits From Neighborhood Improvements?

If urbanists want a successful, lasting renaissance of inner-city neighborhoods, they should allow the people who stuck it out through the lean years a controlling stake in their neighborhoods' rebirth.

By Any Other Name: Gentrification or Economic Exclusion?
By Any Other Name: Gentrification or Economic Exclusion?

The things that get labeled as “gentrification” refer to a set of real, meaningful, widely held concerns, and that choice of label should never be an excuse to dismiss those concerns.

Houston isn't flooded because of its land use planning.
Houston isn't flooded because of its land use planning.

These 5 harmful myths about Houston's land use planning need to be put to rest.

The Wrong Conversation
The Wrong Conversation

The ship is sinking and we're not even rearranging the deck chairs; we're arguing about their color.

Baldwin Park: A Test for New Urbanism
Baldwin Park: A Test for New Urbanism

New Urbanist design has been praised and criticized alike. A recent development in Orlando, FL offers a unique opportunity to examine the challenges and potentials for success in planned New Urbanist communities.

Why I Went to the Strong Towns Summit
Why I Went to the Strong Towns Summit

If America's dysfunctional approach to transportation is going to be solved, it's going to have to be solved in places that look like Tulsa.

Everyone Knows We Have a Traffic Problem
Everyone Knows We Have a Traffic Problem

Most cities' "traffic problems" are actually problems with the qualitative experience of traffic, not with simple travel time or delay. Perhaps we need a "Traffic Frustration Index" instead of a Traffic Congestion Index.

Small Bets in Urban Transportation
Small Bets in Urban Transportation

A big piece of the infrastructure puzzle is not about the level of government making the investment, it's about the scale of the investment. Here are 5 "small bets" to build better transportation systems in our towns.

Best of 2016: Suburban Poverty
Best of 2016: Suburban Poverty

There is arguably no place where half a century of suburban growth has more resembled a giant Ponzi scheme than in Florida.

Localizing Affordable Housing
Localizing Affordable Housing

A reliance on federal funding for housing puts local entities at the mercy of distant decision makers whose priorities may or may not be aligned with theirs. Cities and advocacy groups should be thinking about how to re-localize and claim more control over the way we tackle these problems.

The Neighbor's Dilemma
The Neighbor's Dilemma

NIMBYs are responding to a set of very rational incentives. That presents a challenge for those of us who hope to alter the course of the Suburban Experiment. 

Book Interview: Daniel Herriges and the Overton Window
Book Interview: Daniel Herriges and the Overton Window

In this special edition of the Strong Towns podcast, we bring you a short interview with Daniel Herriges, a Strong Towns contributor who wrote an essay for our new book, Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume II.

A Suburban Poverty Boomtown: Lehigh Acres, Florida
A Suburban Poverty Boomtown: Lehigh Acres, Florida

This suburb is a growing place, but it's not a successful place. It risks becoming an increasingly isolating place full of people who are cut off from the economic mainstream.

Suburban Poverty: Hiding in Plain Sight
Suburban Poverty: Hiding in Plain Sight

The state of Florida went all-in on the suburban experiment in a way that few other places did. Overbuilt and half empty, many Florida suburbs will never climb out of debt and decline. 

Narrow Streets Do More With Less
Narrow Streets Do More With Less

The recipe for a successful residential street is simple, timeless, and requires very little costly engineering. 

One House at a Time on St. Paul's East Side
One House at a Time on St. Paul's East Side

One historic home at a time, St. Paul, MN is demonstrating how a critical mass of Strong Citizens can be an incredible asset to a troubled area, and how local government can play a constructive role in the incremental revitalization of such an area.

Unbundling our Housing Choices
Unbundling our Housing Choices

Our perception of Americans' housing preferences is distorted by the fact that we really have very few options available to us. Like our cable TV packages, our housing choices are "bundled," and many types of neighborhoods that might combine the things we actually love about urban and suburban environments are scarce, nonexistent, or outright illegal to build.

Suburban Poverty: Hiding in Plain Sight
Suburban Poverty: Hiding in Plain Sight

Life in the exurban fallout zones of the housing crisis is precarious. Overbuilt and half empty, many suburbs will never climb out of debt and decline. Federal housing policies put them in this place.

Car-Lite
Car-Lite

Creating a diverse mix of options to reduce car dependence incrementally is a sensible short-term goal of a robust transportation policy. We can make better cities by increasing the size and number of neighborhoods in which it's possible for the average person to live partially—not completely—car free.

Built-In Advantages
Built-In Advantages

Scranton, Pennsylvania is not a wealthy place, but it is a place with underappreciated intrinsic wealth. Bet on older mid-size cities like Scranton, whose built-in advantages leave them well-positioned to weather future economic disruption.

What We Don't Know, and What We Can't Know
What We Don't Know, and What We Can't Know

In an era of looming economic, social, and environmental disruption, the urban planning profession needs to be talking less about how to make cities efficient and attractive and more about how to make them resilient to the worst-case consequences of our actions. This is where Strong Towns thinking fits in.

24th Street, San Francisco
24th Street, San Francisco

San Francisco's Mission District is an example of everything that makes a Strong Town work: incremental development, urbanism oriented to people rather than cars, a deeply rooted local economy, and a distinctive sense of place. It's also in peril because of decades of collective failure to allow more places like it to be built.

Small Spaces and Secret Passages
Small Spaces and Secret Passages

Urban environments full of fine-grained detail, hidden nooks and crannies and narrow passages are memorable, lovable places that stimulate our sense of play and adventure. They are a way to use land more intensively and productively without building monolithic, outsized developments. A historic artists' colony nestled in a residential neighborhood in Florida provides an example.

Dream Big, but Plan Small
Dream Big, but Plan Small

St. Paul's River Balcony project is a refreshingly incremental and promising approach to creating new public space and reconnecting the city's downtown with the Mississippi River. It has the potential to demonstrate the power of pragmatic planning in small steps toward a grand vision.

Why Planning?
Why Planning?

The decision to pursue a career in urban planning: what's the value of it in a world where we acknowledge the fundamental complexity and unmanageability of cities? Planners as the conservation biologists of the urban ecosystem.