In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Strong Towns’s own Aubrey Byron about how to start your own bike advocacy group and have an impact on bike policy in your place.
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San Jose, California has embraced active transportation and pledged to eliminate vehicular deaths. So why is the city intent on widening a neighborhood street and building a four-lane overpass next to an elementary school?
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Most cities’ zoning and development regulations obsess over things that are easy to measure, like building height and density, at the expense of the things that actually determine whether we’re building quality places.
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Take a photo tour of some great streets in Syracuse and see what makes the traditional development pattern work so well on the ground.
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Bounce Innovation Hub, a tech incubator in Akron, OH, has not only given new life to the former B.F. Goodrich tire company headquarters. Its CEO hopes that it will be the start of a new wave of manufacturing in Akron.
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There are many ways for state and local governments to run hidden deficits, one of which is deferred maintenance. But it turns out there is a way to measure the extent to which local governments kick the maintenance can down the road.
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A few reflections during the middle of a marathon of travel.
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This was an unusually interview-heavy week for Strong Towns. Our top content of the week includes conversations with community developer Derek Avery, cycling advocate Chris Bruntlett, and urban researcher Aaron Renn, as well as a sneak preview of walkability guru Jeff Speck’s new book Walkable City Rules.
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Forget Barbie. What does the Millennial Dream House look like?
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A proposed gas tax hike in Missouri would just mean more money to perpetuate a broken system. It would continue the damage the state’s transportation policies have done to communities big and small.
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Local advocates who are at each others’ throats often have legitimate, but conflicting, aims. Talking about the trade-offs involved isn’t going to make us all start agreeing with each other. But it might make our disagreements more productive.
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Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint For Urban Vitality is a new book by Chris Bruntlett and Melissa Bruntlett aimed at sharing the successful strategies The Netherlands has used to build cities at a human scale.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Breanna Hawkins, Policy Director at the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, about pioneering healthy food initiatives in Los Angeles’s most food-impoverished neighborhoods.
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Spokane is an excellent illustration of a “soft default”. Like virtually every other city in the US, it is functionally insolvent, but functional insolvency rarely results in legal bankruptcy—just diminished services and deferred maintenance.
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Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, could address pedestrian safety by making real, substantial improvements to the design of its streets. Instead, it’s urging people on foot to… dress in brighter colors?
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Derek Avery spoke at the recent North Texas Gathering about doing revitalization without gentrification. As a follow-up, we interviewed Avery about his thoughtful approach to community development.
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Whether at the neighborhood or metropolitan level, more job growth doesn’t seem to improve economic mobility. What does is social capital.
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Read excerpts from the new book Walkable City Rules by acclaimed urban planner and walkability expert Jeff Speck. The book is designed to be an walkable-cities advocate’s best tool to go out into the world and actually make change.
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This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks with Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Aaron Renn about Carmel, Indiana, a city that has gone into nearly unparalleled amounts of debt in a bid to become Indianapolis’s premier suburb.
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Join us on October 29th in Akron, Ohio to talk about how to achieve lasting, positive change by focusing on strategic, small-scale, incremental investments—an approach we call Neighborhoods First.
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