We spend billions every year on our transportation network, large percentages of it based on traffic projections—despite the fact that we don’t accurately project traffic.
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Cities should take responsibility for getting the factors right that make public spaces lovable and worthy of care.
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California’s recent wildfires have ignited a conversation about whether the suburban experiment has put too many Golden State residents at risk. But this expert says it may not be so simple.
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University City, Missouri, is on the verge of a terrible decision: a redevelopment deal that would displace dozens of homes and minority-owned businesses in its unofficial “Chinatown” for big-box retail subsidized through tax-increment financing.
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Most of the land in our cities sits vacant for large parts of the day. Is this the best use of our resources?
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Dear Milwaukee, learn from the mistakes you didn't make. Don't build an entertainment district. Instead, let your city develop incrementally.
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All the talk about urbanism these days is dominated by places like Brooklyn, Portland, Vancouver, and San Francisco because they’re prosperous and fashionable. It’s so easy to dismiss them as anomalies.
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Regardless of what my city does -- hold taxes steady or increase them by 50% -- next year's budget will be a transaction of decline, an attempt to hold on, just a little while longer, to what we perceive that we have. We have to do better if we want a country full of Strong Towns.
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Great cities are chaotic. It's what makes them interesting. Regulating out things like Little Free Libraries does nothing but hurt your city.
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The structural problem in our road building system is that we’ve based these large financial decisions on faulty premises and inaccurate estimations. We’ve justified and enabled the subsidizing of less efficient forms of development through the aid of cost-benefit analysis. The 494 /169 interchange looks great on paper at first glance. It’s going to create jobs, handle more traffic, help the economy, and save time.
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Engagement photos are either urban or rural. They are either a former factory or a leafy meadow, the brick wall of a forgotten factory or an empty beach. Never the subdivision. Never the cul-de-sac.
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We have obsessive attention to detail on the things that matter to us and only pay superficial heed to those that don't.
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Strong Towns member blogs from around the country spotlight examples of how misguided development policy undermines a community's interests. Suburban ruins in California; deadly stroads in Pennsylvania; the faulty argument in favor of keeping an urban freeway in Dallas; doing the math on land use in suburban St. Louis; asking whether local government is serving its poorest constituents in Cedar Rapids; and calling out official corruption in Sarasota.
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The reason our bridges are crumbling is because we've made the conscious decision not to repair them. Instead, we've chosen to build new things (more specifically, mostly roads). And now, we're tasking the same people who created the problem to help get us out of it?
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Cities that tethered their future to this experiment are going to struggle while those that still have a pulse in their core neighborhoods will have a chance at renewed prosperity.
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If you want to understand in one photo why America's cities are struggling financially, here it is. Where is the wealth that is going to sustain this place generation after generation? It's not there.
Read MoreImagine if the City of Minneapolis was given $8.7 million that could only be used on downtown pedestrian and/or transit projects. What would they do? The answer is: not a pedestrian bridge to be used during 10 sports games a year.
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Let’s stop and reevaluate. Let’s assess what’s really important in our community. Building an over-sized school on over-sized road on an over-sized parcel strikes me as irresponsible. We need to return to a neighborhood model. We need to find the locations that don’t need a Safe Routes to School grants and build there. The places we are collectively building are places that our children hate. They’re inhuman, disregard our existing neighborhoods, cost us more money and unnecessarily burden parents.
Let’s make a change.
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We have embraced a degree of urbanism in our towns and cities. The planning, architecture and development communities have slowly adopted concepts of good urban design. It’s part of an ideological battle that the New Urbanists have won. But, we aren’t all the way there yet. We’ve only finished half the equation.
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