The Top 3 Strong Towns Articles and Podcasts from 2022: Daniel's Picks
Happy Holidays, everyone! Here are my favorite articles we published in 2022—though truth be told, it was impossible to narrow it to three, and there were many others deserving of a spot on this list. (Some of them you’ll see shouted out by my colleagues this week in their own year-end lists, so be sure to check those out.)
If there’s any sort of pattern here, it’s that these are pieces that remind me of who the Strong Towns movement is for. I feel like in my own writing this year, I spent a lot of time trying to wrestle highly abstract ideas into coherent shape. And while there’s value in that, too, we should never allow ourselves to forget that the goal of all of this work—our work here on staff, and your work as local advocates and changemakers—is to improve lives. It’s to create the kinds of places that allow people and communities who are struggling now to flourish. We should always remember the stakes.
1. “An Epidemic of Blight Collides with a Pandemic,” by Alex Alsup
During the 2010s, you could watch Detroit disappear before your eyes. This process, of course, has been going on for decades—the city has fallen to roughly a third of its 1950 peak population—but it’s been striking in the past decade to use tools such as Google Street View to literally watch whole blocks give way to abandonment, decay, and demolition in just a few years. Our friend Alex Alsup has been an astute observer of this unfolding tragedy, as well as doing some brilliant work to push back on the public-policy factors exacerbating blight.
This year, though, Alsup drew our attention to an astonishing, underreported finding: in 2020 and 2021, the trend reversed. Instead of being abandoned and falling into disrepair, Detroit homes in the same neighborhoods and on the same blocks began to be reoccupied and fixed up. What is happening is not gentrification, but something less obvious and actually more important for policymakers to understand. In short, wrote Alsup, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, “the systems that caused blight and vacancy were silenced, temporarily.” A moratorium on evictions and water shutoffs. A pause on tax foreclosures. When it became a public policy priority to keep people in their homes—even destitute people—the effect was stabilizing for individuals and for struggling Detroit neighborhoods alike.
The lesson here, which applies far beyond Detroit, is, of course, not to cheer the pandemic and its terrible toll, but rather to recognize that when we treat the underlying causes rather than the symptoms of housing instability, it might be possible to start some virtuous cycles in a place whose history has been written in vicious ones.
(Source: Thunder Valley CDC.)
2. “Native American New Urbanism: How America’s Poorest County Created a Vision for the Future of Cities,” by Trevor Decker Cohen
Whatever your first mental image is when you hear the phrase “New Urbanism,” there’s a good chance it doesn’t look much like the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The back-to-basics urban design movement has struggled to shed its association with affluence. The image of New Urbanism is postcard perfect—maybe a little too perfect—master-planned, walkable “village” developments in the suburbs.
But our advocacy for incremental development is actually about something more profound than postcard aesthetics. Can you pick up a hammer and start building something, alongside your neighbors, that fills a need in your community? If not, what stands in your way? After all, the places that actually provide the model, the DNA, for New Urbanism, the traditional cities and towns built before the age of modern zoning and commuter suburbs, were largely built by people with few resources, improvising on tried-and-true patterns.
What Trevor Cohen documents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest places in the United States, is remarkable. A nonprofit, Native American-led developer, the Thunder Valley CDC, is building the future of the reservation, board by board, nail by nail. Starting with 34 acres of land, a straw-bale house, and volunteer labor, they’ve advanced to creating affordable, energy-efficient homes, community space, and a cooperative farm. Cohen describes an energy in the CDC’s offices somewhere between “a startup and a revolution.”
Affluent places will mostly figure out a way to be fine with or without the finer points of the Strong Towns approach. It’s places like Pine Ridge, like Detroit, like Memphis, like South Bend, that stand to gain the most from a revolution that actually empowers communities to take the steps to build sustainable wealth for themselves without waiting for resources or permission. If you’re a policymaker reading Cohen’s piece, I want you to think about what the local analogue of this looks like in your own community, and then I want you to ask if it’s possible. Or what barriers stand in its way right now.
I feel like I'm cheating a little bit with this one because this piece was not originally written for Strong Towns: it’s adapted from Cohen's book, Bright Green Future. Nonetheless, it’s among my favorite things that we had the privilege to publish this year, and it's one that I want to make sure Strong Towns readers have the chance to get acquainted with if they missed it the first time around.
(Source: Unsplash.)
3. “Little Worlds,” by John Pattison
Since first becoming acquainted with Strong Towns, I've heard our founder Chuck Marohn use a wide variety of adjectives to describe the Strong Towns approach. One of the adjectives Chuck will periodically use is “fractal.” I was a competitive “mathlete” back in high school, so I understood what this meant, but I struggled to explain it to anyone else. It felt like a very odd, intellectual, abstract way of describing the nature of the change we're trying to bring about.
My colleague John Pattison is one of the best writers I know. He has both the patience required to meditate on deeply complex ideas, and the humility and plainspoken approach required to turn those ideas into approachable wisdom, so that anyone can see how they might relate to life as it’s lived. So when John, who describes himself as “bad at math,” said, “I want to write a piece for the site about fractals,” I said, “Go for it.”
I find the resulting essay delightful, and as inspiring as anything we published in 2022. We have set ourselves an impossible task in this movement: our stated goal is to change the pattern of development of an entire continent. Note that crucial word: “pattern.” The question we have forced ourselves to ask in the Strong Towns movement—What do you do when you have to change everything?—begins to yield when you start understanding the task in terms of patterns, not isolated actions or public policy victories. A better world will be formed out of the critical connections we forge, the patterns we enact that can replicate and scale. It starts with small, humble actions that all of us can take in our own communities in a way that will cause them to be repeated by a thousand others. This is the bottom-up revolution. This is what fractal change means.
Connecticut is trying to reform state and local zoning laws to allow diverse and affordable housing production. However, their efforts still rely on the suburban approach — accruing large amounts of debt in anticipation of future growth — so they may be doomed to failure.