"Jane Jacobs ends through Robert Moses means" is the modus operandi of many planners and advocates. It's also a total misunderstanding of both the brilliance of Jacobs and the shortcomings of Moses.
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We’re not just looking at a future where cities can’t count on federal support. We’re facing one where Washington itself might be powerless to intervene, even if it wanted to.
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Programs that rely on federal subsidies eventually collapse—or hollow out in slow motion. That doesn’t mean we should fight harder to protect those subsidies. It means we should build towns that don’t need them.
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The real liability isn’t doing something and getting blamed. It’s doing nothing and letting someone else die. You're protected. So do something.
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If we’re serious about housing affordability, we can’t just count units. We have to care about where and how we build.
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When you recognize that things are broken, you have two options. You can wait helplessly for someone else to fix them, or you can start rebuilding the systems closest to you.
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Fragile cities are overextended, under-resourced, and deeply dependent on decisions made far away. Here’s what that looks like.
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Cities slide into insolvency not with a dramatic collapse, but with a slow, steady drift into financial fragility.
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Every few years, the American Society of Civil Engineers releases its Infrastructure Report Card. Let’s be clear about what this report card actually is: industry propaganda, not unbiased analysis.
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Despite assertions to the contrary, a city's budget is almost exactly like a family budget.
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Cities across North America are financially imploding—not because of a lack of growth, but because of the pattern of growth itself. Few cities illustrate this pattern as vividly as Houston, Texas.
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The Finance Decoder reveals the long-term trends hidden behind annual balanced budgets. For Kansas City, those trends are deeply problematic.
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Many people think that increased efficiency and economies of scale in the housing market are the key to affordability. However, these benefits are not actually appearing. We do need innovation, but not in the form of new interest rate manipulations or complex securitization schemes.
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The Trump administration’s elimination of congestion pricing was shortsighted, but NYC’s congestion pricing was deeply flawed from the start. If congestion pricing is ever going to work as intended, it needs to be revamped with the right priorities.
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Florida is celebrating reduced crash fatalities and injuries. But is this decline real, or is it simply a return to pre-COVID conditions? We have to answer this question before declaring victory. Otherwise, we risk learning all the wrong lessons.
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A new order from the U.S. Department of Transportation is proposing a different approach to transportation spending. If implemented, it could deliver long-overdue reforms, the kind Strong Towns has long supported. However, the specifics raise serious concerns.
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Last Wednesday, a plane crash claimed the lives of 67 people, making it the deadliest U.S. air disaster in over two decades. It prompted an immediate, coordinated response on a local, state and federal level. And yet, when over 100 people die in car crashes a day, nothing is done. It’s time for that to change.
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For decades, we've been living under an unspoken grand bargain when it comes to housing. Most people don’t think about explicitly, but it shapes nearly every conversation we have about growth, change and affordability in our cities and towns. It’s time to change the conversation.
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Today, I want to look at a utility investment near my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. At first glance, it seems like an extreme case, but looking at it with a touch of scrutiny reveals a lot of insight into why America’s basic infrastructure systems are failing and will not be maintained.
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I want to draw two insights relating human development to the way cities evolve. These insights are critical to understanding America’s housing crisis and our response to it — and why building housing in major cities can't meaningfully address the housing crisis.
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