Daniel Herriges serves as Content Manager for Strong Towns, and has been a regular contributor since 2015. He is also 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:
Can Removing Lanes From a Busy Street Actually Make Traffic Better?
Can Removing Lanes From a Busy Street Actually Make Traffic Better?

A deep, dredged ship canal is a recipe for catastrophic flooding in a hurricane, whereas a coastal marsh absorbs the surge of water in a way that lets life continue to flourish. This analogy has something important to teach us about urban streets.

Building Design Requirements Are Sometimes Bad for Cities. But Abolishing Them All is Worse.
Building Design Requirements Are Sometimes Bad for Cities. But Abolishing Them All is Worse.

A new Arkansas law prohibits cities from regulating the design of single-family homes in almost all instances. This is a bad idea which takes away an important tool in a city’s toolkit to nurture strong, productive places.

Can We Afford a Better Alternative to Suburbia?
Can We Afford a Better Alternative to Suburbia?

Forward-thinking developers are building communities that take into account the hidden long-term costs of suburban development, and offer a more resilient alternative. But what if that alternative results in homes that are too expensive to be within reach of most Americans? And does it have to?

New York Is Finally Getting Congestion Pricing. Other U.S. Cities Can Learn a Thing or Two.
New York Is Finally Getting Congestion Pricing. Other U.S. Cities Can Learn a Thing or Two.

Cars take up a lot of space. And one way or another, that imposes very real costs on our cities. New York just took an important step toward acknowledging and covering those costs.

The Folly of Go-Big-or-Go-Home Transit
The Folly of Go-Big-or-Go-Home Transit

Don't be seduced by the "signature project" that takes 20 years to complete, when there's huge basket of small projects you could hit the ground running on. That's a wildly different approach than anything our transit agencies or federal transportation funding mechanisms are set up for. But it's a more promising one.

Is a Top-Down Approach the Best Way to Revitalize Downtown?
Is a Top-Down Approach the Best Way to Revitalize Downtown?

Richmond, Virginia’s proposed Navy Hill redevelopment would reinvent 10 blocks of the city’s core out of whole cloth, aiming for greatness in one fell swoop. The top-down, master-plan approach to city building is seductive. But it is also fragile.

Does Your City Have Shiny New Toy Syndrome?
Does Your City Have Shiny New Toy Syndrome?

The discipline of not acquiring more until we've wrung true value out of what we already possess can make our lives richer and fuller. And this is a lesson we need to apply to our cities as well.

Rewarding Neglect and Punishing Investment in Struggling Neighborhoods
Rewarding Neglect and Punishing Investment in Struggling Neighborhoods

In cities all over America, we deter people from revitalizing neighborhoods by punishing them with higher taxes for improving their property. A change in how we tax property could fix these incentives.

What's With That Empty Lot in the Heart of the City?
What's With That Empty Lot in the Heart of the City?

Even the fastest-growing cities have them: under-utilized lots in the center of town whose owners don’t want to develop, but also don’t want to sell. Often, the property tax code rewards this kind of land speculation.

Why The Public Doesn't (and Maybe Shouldn't) Trust the Experts About Housing
Why The Public Doesn't (and Maybe Shouldn't) Trust the Experts About Housing

Academic evidence doesn’t do much to shift public opinion about housing policy. What’s missing is trust—and cultivating that requires a different approach.

Which Countries Have the Most Pavement Per Person?
Which Countries Have the Most Pavement Per Person?

The answer might not be what you expect.

Forget Gas and Insurance. How Much Does Your Daily Commute Really Cost You?
Forget Gas and Insurance. How Much Does Your Daily Commute Really Cost You?

Your daily commute sucks. Is it also making you go broke?

The California High-Speed Train that Wasn’t: The Opportunity Cost of Megaprojects
The California High-Speed Train that Wasn’t: The Opportunity Cost of Megaprojects

California’s high-speed rail project appears indefinitely on hold. What is the opportunity cost of all the things the state hasn’t done during the decade-plus its leaders have spent fixated on this?

What's Missing From the Green New Deal
What's Missing From the Green New Deal

The proposed Green New Deal is ambitious and urgent—but completely omits any mention of local land use. Can sweeping federal policy mix with the kind of decentralized, bottom-up change we need?

The Hidden Value of a Poor Neighborhood
The Hidden Value of a Poor Neighborhood

All over North America, poor neighborhoods often punch above their weight when it comes to contributing real value and resilience to their cities—in both financial productivity and other, less quantifiable strengths.

Car-pocalypse Not Now: Why Predicted Gridlock in Seattle Was (Again) a No-Show
Car-pocalypse Not Now: Why Predicted Gridlock in Seattle Was (Again) a No-Show

Why are we still surprised when a highway closes and fears of traffic pandemonium don’t come to pass?

The Neighborhood Traffic Trade-Off
The Neighborhood Traffic Trade-Off

We’ve gotten very good at keeping traffic off of neighborhood streets. But at what cost to our cities?

What's the Real Size of Your City?
What's the Real Size of Your City?

Many of the most pressing problems we face can only be addressed if we know when to think about them locally, and when to think about them regionally.

Legalizing More Homes: It Matters How You Do It
Legalizing More Homes: It Matters How You Do It

We need to solve our housing affordability problems, but not by ignoring context and embracing “orderly but dumb” means.

Bringing You Practical Answers Through the Strong Towns Knowledge Base
Bringing You Practical Answers Through the Strong Towns Knowledge Base

The Strong Towns Knowledge Base is where we bring you answers and practical advice tailored to questions you submit, by crowd-sourcing the collective wisdom of our movement. Every Friday morning, we’ll be spotlighting something new from it.

Growth and the Fallacy of Control
Growth and the Fallacy of Control

The pitfalls of rapid growth are real. But trying to micromanage how, where, and even if our cities are allowed to grow is not the answer.

Three Cheers for Minneapolis (The 3 is for Triplex)
Three Cheers for Minneapolis (The 3 is for Triplex)

Minneapolis just became the first major U.S. city to embrace a key Strong Towns principle: every neighborhood should be allowed to evolve to the next increment of development.

Best of 2018: Why Are Developers Only Building Luxury Housing?
Best of 2018: Why Are Developers Only Building Luxury Housing?

"Developers in my city are only building luxury housing. They're not building anything that ordinary people can afford." If you’ve said this lately, or heard someone else say it, here are five possible reasons why.

Best of 2018: Gentrification and Cataclysmic Money
Best of 2018: Gentrification and Cataclysmic Money

Gentrification and concentrated poverty are two sides of the same coin. We’ve engineered our cities so that neighborhoods get either too much investment or too little: the trickle or the fire hose.

If We Win, You Won't Hear About It
If We Win, You Won't Hear About It

If Strong Towns is successful—really successful—you won't hear about it, because the vast majority of the change we produce won't be attributed to us at all. It will be embedded in the broader culture.

A Guide to Busting Parking Myths in Your Town
A Guide to Busting Parking Myths in Your Town

“There’s no parking around there!” How to hit the streets and collect the data yourself, and figure out whether your neighborhood actually has a parking shortage—or, more likely, an excess.

How Is Strong Towns Different?
How Is Strong Towns Different?

There are a lot of worthy movements and organizations that want your time, energy, and money. Here are some things that set Strong Towns apart.

The Comcast of Transportation?
The Comcast of Transportation?

Two recent articles illuminate a troubling trend toward locking ride-share, bike-share and scooter users onto proprietary platforms, making it harder to plan trips that could really free us from car-dependence.

We Regulate the Wrong Things
We Regulate the Wrong Things

Most cities’ zoning and development regulations obsess over things that are easy to measure, like building height and density, at the expense of the things that actually determine whether we’re building quality places.

When it Comes to Housing, Do Millennials Have a Different American Dream?
When it Comes to Housing, Do Millennials Have a Different American Dream?

Forget Barbie. What does the Millennial Dream House look like?