The Congress for the New Urbanism’s annual meeting can be intimidating for a first timer. I remember walking around clueless during my first Congress, not knowing exactly what to do or where to go. Then all of a sudden I'd bump into someone like James Howard Kunstler, whose books I had loved, and I would be speechless and he'd be like, "Hey, do you know what time it is?"
This is CNU in a nutshell.
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Embracing the strengths of a traditional development pattern means allowing smaller homes -- the next level of investment for a vacant property -- as a way to kick start the incremental pattern of investment.
Read MoreLike the beating heart of the live organism it is, economies expand and contract wealth creation through cycles of innovation and commoditization. We can visualize bringing new products to market as a bell curve. On the left hand side rising side, the creation of a successful new product also creates a new company, new jobs and new wealth. Profit margins are high, the economy improves and most everyone benefits.
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My question is, how do I argue against a traffic engineer that isn't interested in the effects on the community of her LOS, and who believes that posted limits have no effect?
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I encourage you to become a regular listener of EconTalk. Economists look at the world differently than most people, and they approach problems with a different set of questions than we typically find in our discourse. I’m not suggesting we all think and act like economists, but understanding the approach will make you a more effective advocate for building strong cities, towns and neighborhoods.
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WHAT: A fast-moving, crash course in implementing Strong Towns thinking, featuring Charles Marohn of Strong Towns, Mike Lydon of Street Plans Collaborative and Joe Minicozzi of Urban-3.
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San Antonio, you have a lot of great stuff going on. And, more importantly, you have the potential to do some amazing things. The highest returning investments you can make – and the easiest and least costly thing you can do to make San Antonio a great place – is to focus on biking and walking throughout your core neighborhoods. You could move the needle from “despotic” to ‘manageable” fairly easily at very low cost. That would be game changing and would accelerate the kind of private investments you are seeing in and around other areas where walking and biking is more accepted.
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This fantastic graphic comes to me from Nathan Norris, the downtown director of Lafayette, Louisiana, via John Anderson of Anderson|Kim.
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Time equals money but does it also equal cash?
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Tomorrow I’m going to be speaking at the Public Health and the Built Environment Conference in San Antonio. Joining me will be our good friend from Active Towns, John Simmerman. I’m doing the opening session at 8:15 AM and John is doing the afternoon plenary at 12:40. (That’s central time zone.)
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What's wrong with simply letting sprawl fail?
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