"Developers in my city are only building luxury housing. They're not building anything that ordinary people can afford." If you’ve said this lately, or heard someone else say it, here are five possible reasons why.
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If “That Guy” is at every public hearing, there's something wrong with how your city is doing development.
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If your community has a huge backlog of unfunded infrastructure maintenance — and it’s the rare one that doesn’t — there are some basic and obvious steps that need to be taken.
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Medina, Washington is struggling to pay its bills. How can this be? And what does it mean for towns and cities that don’t have the two richest people in the world living there?
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Strong Towns member Andrew Kelsey shares how you can create a value per acre analysis for your city or town—no matter your skill level.
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"Developers in my city are only building luxury housing. They're not building anything that ordinary people can afford." If you’ve said this lately, or heard someone else say it, here are five possible reasons why.
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In an area where the population is growing, one question often vexes neighbors: why is that house or storefront vacant? It just doesn’t seem to make sense. Why do landlords leave properties empty when they could be getting rent?
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"Developers in my city are only building luxury housing. They're not building anything that ordinary people can afford." If you’ve said this lately, or heard someone else say it, here are five possible reasons why.
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Density is not our problem or our solution. Insolvency is our problem. Productive places are the solution.
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Churches ought to be at the forefront of stewarding local neighborhood spaces and places surrounding their four walls for human flourishing.
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A vast majority of our infrastructure is predicated on treating non-automobiles as second-class citizens. This is the status quo. One doesn't need to look far to find examples.
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What would our neighborhoods look like if we voluntarily reduced the amount of infrastructure? This isn’t a purely academic question. As municipal, state, and federal budgets get squeezed there’s going to be a point at which we have no choice but to stop building new roads and even reduce the amount of maintenance on the roads we already have. We could approach this situation with dread and a sense of loss, or we could embrace it as an opportunity to get a better quality of life for a whole lot less money.
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Seth Zeren provides this week's version of the Monday Member News Digest, a look at the blog posts written this past week by Strong Towns members.
Read More“It’s like building a Vikings’ stadium in a single season,” said State Transportation Commissioner Charlie Zelle. Ouch.To anyone who followed the Minnesota Vikings’ new publicly-financed stadium, this quote should make you cringe.
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You have to be willing to say no to the bad if you want your city to be built with the good, especially with the development incentives rigged as they are today. Sometimes this can create pro and anti-development factions in your city. A tool to diffuse that animosity is to remember that every time you say no to a proposal, you could be saying yes to something better.
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Adventure. Surprise. Engagement. Interaction. Engagement. Urbanism.
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We shouldn’t build infrastructure for the sake of creating jobs. Jobs and economic growth are a result of having a productive system in place, not the other way around. We need to create real net wealth that benefits not only the local communities, but the region as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, jobs are great. But, building infrastructure with the primary purpose of creating jobs, with little consideration to context, is setting a bad precedence and setting up communities for unexpected liabilities.
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