We’ve gotten very good at keeping traffic off of neighborhood streets. But at what cost to our cities?
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Gig Harbor, Washington has gone from fishing town to suburban bedroom community. With its founding industry largely gone, can the city remain a place that fosters community and welcomes newcomers to join in it?
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Data shows Portland’s scooter experiment worked. Maybe it’s time to critically appraise the 110 year experiment with cars.
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Cities are complex, organic, emergent things—and we impose top-down order on them at our own peril.
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How do we build Strong Towns in a culture of outrage?
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This week we took a good look at the sustainability of infrastructure costs, both in micro (a single street) and macro (a whole city), discussed why complex housing problems and brute-force solutions don’t mix, and more.
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Incremental development doesn’t mean slow development. Here’s how big places that need housing fast can get there using the Strong Towns approach.
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In 2018 we began to see Strong Towns transition from a set of key ideas and insights about the struggles our communities face to an organization capable of creating revolutionary change in communities across the country.
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Every week we spotlight one answer from the Strong Towns Knowledge Base. This week: what do we think about tax-increment financing (TIF), and why?
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Which neighborhoods in Denver are paying their share of the city’s infrastructure costs, and which ones aren’t? A Strong Towns reader did the math.
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Many of the most pressing problems we face can only be addressed if we know when to think about them locally, and when to think about them regionally.
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The Iowa Department of Transportation helps educate the public with this video explaining why reducing an urban street from 4 to 3 lanes can be a win-win for drivers and pedestrians.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Latoya Wilson—founder of the Rebuild Workforce Consultancy—shares how you can invest in the youth in your community, including how to understand the learning landscape for youth, how to create programs that are beneficial for students, and how to make your investments last throughout a student’s time in primary school and beyond.
We need to solve our housing affordability problems, but not by ignoring context and embracing “orderly but dumb” means.
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Ever heard someone say, “You can’t live in that part of town if you have kids. The schools are bad!” In this classic podcast episode from 2015, Chuck Marohn talks with Steven Shultis of Rational Urbanism about the myths vs. reality of urban schools.
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Doing the math on a routine, uncontroversial street paving project reveals an investment that will never pay for itself, in a city that has thousands of such investments. That we do it anyway reflects the cultural consensus at the root of our towns’ financial problems.
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In honor of one of America's most significant leaders, we'll be taking the day off from content and we'll resume our usual schedule tomorrow.
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This week we examined what the design of our places says about isolation and social trust, and why that matters when tragedy strikes. We explored the value of bottom-up experimentation in cities; celebrated a victory for free speech and public input; questioned whether all growth counts as economic development; debated a controversial solution to affordable housing shortages, and more.
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Almost every suburban house has one. But is the home garage an American institution or a national disgrace?
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Your Strong Towns Knowledge Base answer of the week! We want to help you get the answers you need to apply Strong Towns ideas in your own town or city. And we want you to chime in and share your own expertise, too.
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