Strong Towns is a movement confronting the decline that’s baked into the American development pattern and offering a way forward that creates more successful, prosperous communities.
If you're new to this space, welcome. Here are 5 steps to help get yourself acquainted with our message and our movement. I guarantee that any one of these items will get you thinking about your city in a totally new way.
1. Explore the Curbside Chat.
Start your journey with the Curbside Chat. It's our core message, summarized in a series of videos and articles. The Curbside Chat clearly lays out the problem with the American pattern of development, and why a different approach is both necessary and, indeed, the only way forward if we want to build productive, prosperous communities. Explore the series below.
America’s cultural belief is that growing cities experience not only opportunity and prosperity today, but also success far into the future. There is a built-in assumption that new growth pays for itself today and generates enough wealth to sustain itself generation after generation This is a flawed assumption.
New growth creates an illusion of wealth. Local governments experiencing growth look and feel successful; they have high revenues and very little immediate costs associated with them. Long term though, as the liabilities start to come due, they learn that a free road isn't really free.
The biggest problem we face in this country is not a lack of growth. What we lack in America is productive growth—growth that builds wealth generation after generation. Productive growth makes a place better with age. It's full of cycles, endings and beginnings, rather than being a linear journey toward decline.
We like our places to emerge fully formed and then we expect them to never change, but that's not how life works. Cities need to be able to change and adapt, to start small and mature incrementally over time. We can't wait around for a big developer or a mega-project to fix our cities. The kind of development we need today happens from the bottom up.
The traditional development pattern has tremendous financial upside and limited financial downside. In contrast, our new, experimental approach is incredibly fragile with limited financial upside and a downside that can literally go negative. We can learn from the past in order to stop making the mistakes that will condemn our future.
2. Learn about the Growth Ponzi Scheme.
Once you've whet your appetite with the Curbside Chat, you'll probably be a little fired up. But what if we told you that all the unproductive growth you see when you look around your town is only the tip of the iceberg—and underground, things are even worse? The Growth Ponzi Scheme series give you a chance to dig deeper into why our nation's infrastructure crisis is so urgent—and not in the ways you may think. Don't have time to read the whole thing? Here's a short summary essay.
The underpinnings of the current financial crisis lie in a living arrangement—the American pattern of development—that does not financially support itself.
If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth.
Our national economy is "all in" on the suburban experiment. We cannot sustain the trajectory we are on, but we've gone too far down the path to turn back.
How did we build such an amazing place before the home mortgage interest deduction? How did we accomplish this before zoning? What created this place before we had state and federal subsidies of local water and sewer systems?
3. Take the Strong Towns Strength Test.
Want to figure out what your town is doing well and where it needs to improve in order to be a strong town? Take the Strong Towns Strength Test. It's 10 questions that will not only make you think about the way your community is built, but also show you how to build it better.
4. Find out the real reason your city has no money.
Prepare to have your mind blown by just how screwed up the typical American city's land use is and what massive impacts that has on our local budgets. Read this short but powerful article to get the full story. Then check out Part 2: Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments.
5. Keep going with all our best content.
If you've gotten this far down the list, thanks! We're glad you're digging deep in the Strong Towns message. You can find all our top articles from the last several years right here:
We can make low risk, high returning investments in our cities while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who are not benefiting from the current approach.
The consequence for minor lapses in judgment shouldn’t be death.
In this formative series, we lay out the value and importance of incremental development — and why it must be the only path forward if we want to build strong towns.
Many people leave the city and head for the suburbs once they have children. I did the opposite.
Here are our 6 most talked about and beloved podcast episodes from the year.
Improving a city doesn't take a lot of money. It just takes courage.
By designing our cities for cars, we have created landscapes that exclude the aging.
Our cities are so financially fragile and desperate for growth that they will do anything to land America's most eligible corporate bachelor.
These 7 steps will take you from a nebulous idea to successfully addressing an issue that matters in your town.
Here are the 5 immutable laws of affordable housing that cities must recognize if they want to move forward — plus 3 strategies for achieving true housing affordability.
Small maintenance projects focusing on below ground infrastructure in old, established neighborhoods have the greatest potential for positive returns.
The line between optimism and reality can be a fine one to walk.
Infrastructure was supposed to serve us. Now we serve it.
Cities are filled with talent, ideas, and hardworking people. We just need to provide them with the platform to be productive.
Can a suburban “downtown” built from the ground up for over $150 million succeed?
Leaders in Shreveport, Louisiana want to construct a new highway right through the heart of their city. And the economic arguments they're using to justify it are completely bogus.
I don't need to be an expert to tell you that our streets are not bike-friendly.
It’s pretty easy to destroy a walkable place. We’ve been doing it for so long.
Many people would have us believe that America is failing to invest in its infrastructure. If only it were that simple.
Should cities invest in big projects in the hopes of increasing tourism, or invest in the people that have already taken a risk by moving back into their long-dormant downtowns?
A federal infrastructure bill is going to make your city poorer in the long run. Here's why.
Routine traffic stops are dangerous for all involved and do little to improve safety. It's time to end the practice.
We must build places that enable us to see the lives of others with knowledge, love, and compassion. This means getting our hands dirty in the soil of our community.
We figured out how to live in an exciting kid-friendly city on the cheap.
I encourage you all to stop using the word "sprawl." It doesn't accurately describe the problem, it prevents us from getting to real responses and it unnecessarily divides the national dialog in ways that are unhelpful.
We produced over 100 podcasts in 2016. Here's our 7 best podcasts from the year.
Scale our economy to those working at the ground level and we will see a true prosperity emerge from the fear and acrimony that is our national dialog.
Do car drivers have to pull up to each intersection, lean out their window and push a button in order to get a green light? No.
If the global economy is like a hot air balloon, we're only given the option to continually go higher -- despite the risk -- or cut all the air and crash. Those options aren't good enough.
What will happen to homeowner's associations in an America with increasing suburban poverty? It will be messy.
(Top photo source: Daniel Case)
For thousands of years, humans built settlements scaled to people who walked. In a generation, Americans transformed an entire continent around a new transportation technology. We often fail to appreciate how we are testing this approach as we go. Quite simply: it's a massive experiment.