Edward Erfurt
Edward Erfurt is the Chief Technical Advisor at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.
In its Housing-Ready City Toolkit, Strong Towns recommended a 24-hour turnaround for permits. That's not an exaggeration.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, a man lost his life trying to catch the bus. When you look at where it happened, two things become clear: This was inevitable. It was also preventable.
Good urbanism isn’t an academic abstraction but a lived experience we can see and feel in the world around us.
Statewide zoning reform isn't producing the wins everyone expected. An architect reveals why: the permissions may have changed, but the reflexes never adapted.
Across the country, it’s clear that what truly makes a city resilient isn’t the plans, grants, or programs—it’s the people who care for one another and invest in their communities.
Small, precise zoning code text revisions can be a game-changer for communities facing housing shortages.
Better communication isn’t complicated. If your city wants more incremental development, start there.
For many small developers, the hardest step isn’t swinging a hammer or drawing a site plan; it’s figuring out where to start. Here's how Bentonville, Arkansas, is fixing that.
If you want more affordable, resilient, and context-sensitive housing, you need to equip your residents to build it. Here's how Sacramento did it.
On paper, backyard cottages were legal in Tallahassee, Florida. In practice, they were nearly impossible to build. Here's how the city changed that.
Cities shape themselves around what is easy and what is hard. If you want good development, you need to make it easy to do.
The challenge facing most small-scale developers isn’t vision or willpower. It’s isolation. If you want to get their builders' projects off of paper, you need to help them connect with a network.