This guide will take you through short-term and long-term strategies for downtown and Main Street recovery in the wake (and midst) of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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This engineer offers a strategy for slowing down cars that could be a bridge between what communities want and what engineers want.
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Today I’m sharing a plan I offered to my colleagues on our local parking committee. My hope is that it'll benefit those who are thinking through similar issues in their places.
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In 2016, Portland enacted an Inclusionary Housing policy affecting buildings of 20+ units. The result? The city now has a bunch of new 19-unit buildings. Let’s talk about intervening in a system as complex and adaptive as the housing market.
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What can be done about retail structures when they’re abandoned by their big-box tenants? One solution: break them down into smaller, much more dynamic spaces.
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Conventional economic development practice focuses on recruiting new businesses to relocate to the community. In reality, the most stable and prosperous businesses are those that are homegrown.
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These 4 steps will put your city or town on the path toward greater resilience and sovereignty.
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Our streets are “dangerous by design.” We answer a listener’s question about the role of automated enforcement in making them safer.
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Son las experiencias de personas reales que deben guiar nuestros esfuerzos de planificación. Sus acciones son los datos que deberíamos recopilar, no sus preferencias declaradas.
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This place is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create.
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What’s the most suburban kind of place you can think of? If you said an outlet mall, you’re probably not alone. Is there a path to incrementally retrofit these malls to a more human-scaled environment… and even if there is, is it worth the trouble?
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If your city is struggling to balance its budget, it’s not enough to just cut costs and not seek to increase revenues. That’s like a cyclist who tries to improve their performance only by losing weight.
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Scott Ford, former Director of Community Investment for South Bend, Indiana, knows a thing or two about how to turn around a declining place’s fortunes. He shares some key insights with us.
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“Though many of our worst problems are big, they do not necessarily have big solutions. Many needed changes will have to be made in individual lives… and in local communities.” Wendell Berry wrote these words about reforming agriculture, but they apply to building Strong Towns as well.
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My city council has been offered an impossible choice: spend millions of dollars we don’t have repairing our historic water tower, or permanently destroy an iconic landmark and a piece of our history. But there is a third option.
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The most important thing for a local government is to avoid ruin.
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It is the experiences of real people that should guide our planning efforts. Their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.
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We seek to expose as many people as possible to Strong Towns ideas, and nudge them to act. This is how we aim to change the continent-wide conversation about growth, development, and governance.
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Meet several of the presenters who will be at our North Texas Regional Gathering next month, and learn about the work they’re doing to move their Texas communities away from business as usual and toward fiscally sustainable development.
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In working to create better places, keep the stakes low, so even skeptics are more willing to indulge some risk. Take a little step. Root the conversation in reality. Then adjust and press on to those big plans.
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