Seairra Jones
Seairra Jones serves as the Lead Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. Her experiences and travels have taught her a lot about cities, and remain as an inspiration as she works behind the scenes guiding our videos and podcasts.
Working with your local engineers and transportation officials can be challenging. How do you collaborate with people who are often responsible for the bad infrastructure in your place? One successful group focuses on bringing positivity and concrete suggestions to the conversation.
Wisconsin offered a $3 billion dollar subsidy to Foxconn and were promised a $10 billion factory and 13,000 jobs in exchange. Instead, the locals got three empty buildings, a few hundred jobs, and a mountain of debt. Sorry, Wisconsin. As Ronny Chieng from the Daily Show put it, “You got catfished.”
Like many U.S. towns, Maumee, OH, has a state highway that cuts through their Uptown. For decades, it’s been known as a dangerous road…but no longer: the city is taking back its streets and making them places for people, not cars.
In Capitola, California, residents erupted in protest after Debra Towne, a beloved local senior, was hit and killed walking across a dangerous stroad. And unlike in so many other places, the city actually responded.
Monte Anderson is a local developer who sees it as his mission to revive his community—not only through neighboring relationships, but also by saving the abandoned and broken spaces.
We have to end highway expansion and focus on projects that actually build wealth in our cities. If you’re not convinced, then read on.
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If any city or county wants to be effective in creating a safer street, they’ll develop multiple responses to calming traffic, instead of relying on only one or two changes that still prioritize thru-traffic.
Searching for a place where people work together and things actually get done? Look no further than Jasper, IN, where a gorgeous downtown renovation serves as an example of a place that’s “built by many hands.”
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Local advocates in Langley, BC, are starting the conversations their city needs to hear if it wants to undo decades of investing in the Suburban Experiment.
The battle against highway expansions can be one of the toughest fights an advocate will ever come up against. But as this Florida-based Local Conversations group has shown, persistence will eventually pay off.
Residents of Chisholm, MN, have shown that you don’t need to invest a lot of time and money to bring value to your community, and to provide a space for entrepreneurship.
Sixty letters of opposition from local advocates in Grand Rapids, MI, halted an irreversible decision: the teardown of five downtown buildings for surface parking lots.