What Does It Mean to Be a "Strong Town" During a Pandemic?

Earlier this week, a question began floating around from Strong Towns members and even The New York Times: Are cities and other walkable communities (like historic small towns) less safe during a pandemic than spread-out suburban areas? Might it be that the suburbs are “stronger” in terms of withstanding disease spread than the cities?

Some of my colleagues have already offered their responses. But for me, the short answer is yes! The suburbs are a better place to be…if you live in a suburban home with a gym in the basement, large fenced-in yard for exercising your dog, home offices for each adult, individual bedrooms and bathrooms for every family member, and a three-car garage with an extra freezer and well-stocked pantry. If that’s the case, then you probably are better prepared to make it through this thing more comfortably than the average resident of a compact, walkable neighborhood.  You can shut yourself off and still go about the basic activities of life from the comfort of your large abode.

But that’s not the reality of most suburban living. Sure, you might get slightly more square footage per person and a bigger slice of grass than someone living in a traditionally-designed neighborhood, but most suburban life looks a lot less like this:

Image credit: Flickr.

 and a lot more like this:

Image via Daniel Herriges

In most suburbs, the houses are modest and not terribly far apart.  Procuring any sort of supply—let alone visiting a hospital—requires a trip out the door and into a car or an unreliable bus.  At this point of social distancing and self-quarantine, life for most people in the suburbs isn’t much different or less dangerous than life for most city or town residents—unless you’re very wealthy. And the wealthy always tend to be more insulated from earth-shattering crises than the rest of us.

If you’re like most people, you’re gearing up, making sacrifices and figuring things out one day at a time, whether you live in a suburb or a city. And if one thing has become abundantly clear over the last few weeks, it’s this: We are all connected. That connection is making the cessation of viral spread really tough right now, but it is also the essence of what it means to be human.

As my friend Daniel pointed out earlier this week, we actually need each other more than ever right now, and communities that are bonded together—emotionally and geographically—are going to get through this better than communities that aren’t.  Just over the past week, I have seen countless messages flying on neighborhood boards and Facebook pages:

• My wife is a nurse and is riding bikeshare to the hospital so she can avoid public transit, but we’re out of sanitizing wipes and she would like to be able to sanitize the handlebars of the bike before and after riding. Can anybody help? Five people from the neighborhood immediately stepped in with offers to walk over and deliver wipes to this family’s house.

• I’m a college student who has suddenly been kicked out of my dorm and I can’t go home because my parents live in South Korea. Does anyone have somewhere I can stay? Spreadsheets have been created by local churches and circulated with requests and offers for housing, storage and more.

• The libraries are closed and we’ve already read through all of my toddler’s books. Does anyone want to organize a book swap? Comments have poured in with other families figuring out a system for sharing their books.

 Of course, these activities could happen in any sort of community, but the walkable nature of cities and small towns means that these actions can be taken at a moment’s notice, without relying on vehicles or money to do it. As Tristan Cleveland pointed out on our site earlier this week, compact neighborhoods also make things like grocery delivery and other necessary services easier to provide when most of a community is on lockdown. At a time when everything is in flux and businesses are closing left and right, we’re going to need to depend on our neighbors and our own creativity more than ever before. This is what cities were built to do: bring different types of people together for mutual support, idea-sharing, trade and enjoyment.

I’m an optimist and a forward-thinker, so, right now, I’m trying my darndest to focus on the future.  How do we make it out of this mess?  How do we rebuild our communities, our economies and our lives once the imminent threat is over? And with those questions in mind, strong towns are the only answer.

The Growth Ponzi Scheme, which has put so much of America on the brink of financial crisis already, is only going to become more obviously broken. The excessive level of debt our communities have relied on is only going to become a greater liability when the dust settles on this pandemic. The transportation systems we built beyond their capacity and the land we invested in that we had no hope of paying to maintain—all of it is going to come crashing down around us.

And what will need to step in and take its place? I’m betting on strong local economies, compact and walkable neighborhoods, and transparent, adaptable municipal governments. Those foundations will serve everyone who lives in our communities—rich or poor—and make us all stronger and more prosperous in the long run.

So, yes, if you have a five-bedroom, three-bathroom suburban home on a three-acre lot with great high-speed internet and a huge basement pantry, you’re probably going to enjoy the coming weeks and months more than many of us stuck in our small homes and apartments—and you might even have a better chance of avoiding getting sick. But, if you’re like most Americans, you live in a modest home with multiple occupants, and you’re going to be visiting the same grocery stores and pharmacies that everyone else is, with the same goal of riding this thing out that everyone else has. Suburb or city, I don’t know that it makes a lot of difference where you are right now.

The question is, where will we be when the panic subsides and the rebuilding begins?  We should be creating resilient—even redundant—local places.  We should be making the incremental steps and small bets that shape solid foundations for flourishing. We should be crafting systems that adapt and respond to changing situations. And we should be supporting networks of strong citizens who have the capacity to make all this happen.

Top image via David McBee.

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