Here are some touchstone concepts that help underlie the Strong Towns view of how to achieve a world full of places capable of growing bottom-up prosperity
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This Canadian city is set to get a new, $2 billion, state-of-the-art hospital. All well and good except for one thing: why do they want to build it in a rural area on the far outskirts of town?
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A new Arkansas law prohibits cities from regulating the design of single-family homes in almost all instances. This is a bad idea which takes away an important tool in a city’s toolkit to nurture strong, productive places.
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Don't be seduced by the "signature project" that takes 20 years to complete, when there's huge basket of small projects you could hit the ground running on. That's a wildly different approach than anything our transit agencies or federal transportation funding mechanisms are set up for. But it's a more promising one.
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The allure of a silver-bullet economic development project is like that boat you buy for a low, low down payment. You know, the one that ended up sitting in your driveway under a tarp for years. Just ask Memphis.
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California’s high-speed rail project appears indefinitely on hold. What is the opportunity cost of all the things the state hasn’t done during the decade-plus its leaders have spent fixated on this?
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The most important thing for a local government is to avoid ruin.
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If granting exceptions to your city’s planning rules is so common as to have become the norm, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the rules themselves.
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To assume that a street-forward, mixed use development will activate a lifeless area is like assuming that gardening is a matter of “just add water.” In reality, different urban environments—like different soils, climates, and plants—require different elements of care.
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This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks with Jase Wilson, the founder and CEO of Neighborly, about bringing small-scale investors back to the municipal bond market, empowering people to invest in the real, observed needs of communities they care about.
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Decades ago, we decided where roads will go. Whether it makes sense or not today, that is where they must go.
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The more we invest in something, the harder it becomes to walk away. Yet, we need to walk away from a lot of what we’ve built.
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This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks with behavior change and sustainability expert Ruben Anderson about the good life, and how we fool ourselves into thinking we can use systematic rationality to create it for ourselves.
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These campaigns are the kind of thing that large, out-of-touch bureaucracies do when they want to appear like they are doing something without actually changing anything about what they are doing.
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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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The most important thing for a local government is to avoid ruin.
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If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. But if a mega-project doesn’t have the characteristics—massive public debt, heavy infrastructure burdens, dubious if any benefit for the surrounding area—that usually make such projects so odious, is it still a bad deal?
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Akron, Ohio’s subsidies for redevelopment of the failed Rolling Acres mall are a textbook case of the sunk cost fallacy: the tendency to examine new opportunities not on their own merit, but in the context of past investments.
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Sometimes the best thing that can come from a project is to have it be a warning beacon for others.
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Chuck Marohn responds to critiques of his essay, Sprawl is not the Problem.
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