What combination of increase in private investment and downsizing of public investment will give my city a private to public investment ratio of 30:1?
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This bench example is symbolic of a larger problem in the architectural and urban design worlds, which involves the design of buildings and urban elements as sculptural things, designed in ways that overlook human needs for comfort, familiarity, and delight, in favor of their being original, unusual, and unfamiliar, above all else.
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Walkable, human-oriented communities tend to be the happiest and healthiest, where the younger generation is looking to live, and the most financially productive types of places to build and retain. Creating human oriented communities is the essence of creating a Strong Town.
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I’m going to aggressively oppose any increase in transportation funding in Minnesota, any other state or at the federal level, until there is aggressive reform of this system. At this point, communal funds must be for maintenance only with any system expansion being paid by some form of user charge. #nonewroads
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The problem with modern capitalism is that there are not enough capitalists. We need a system that encourages diverse ownership of capital if we want to build and support the middle-class.
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Here are ten simple questions we call the Strong Towns Strength Test. A Strong Town should be able to answer “yes” to each of these questions.
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Aging suburbia is going through an identity crisis. Existing residents would like the place to stay much the same. New residents, including those who don’t live there yet, are demanding something else. The problem is that these places can’t continue to stay the same. Yet, the change is too difficult for many to swallow. This is why the default for most suburbs is decline. Growth isn’t built into their DNA.
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At the Strong Towns National Gathering I gave a rapid 8 minute presentation on walkability and the scale of the environment, and as part of my talk I briefly covered the concept of Places and Non-Places. For those of you that read my blog, this post will feel familiar to you and will be more of a recap - which I will apologize for - but based on the positive feedback I have received, I feel that this topic is important enough to share here. I wrote my original post on Places and Non-Places back in October of 2012, and as I expose myself to new experiences and think about these topics in more detail, my view of cities constantly evolves with me, so you will notice a few differences and a more refined description here.
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With all the talk of how to pay for a five year road plan, nobody seems to be willing to publicly acknowledge the obvious: Brainerd has more roads to fix and maintain than it has tax base to pay for them. This isn't a taxing problem and it isn't a spending problem. It is an insolvency problem, one that debt can only make worse.
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We need to rethink our urban areas. They need to be redesigned around a new set of values, one that doesn’t seek to accommodate bikers and pedestrians within an auto-dominated environment but instead does the opposite: accommodates automobiles in an environment dominated by people. It is people that create value. It is people that build wealth. It is in prioritizing their needs – whether on foot, on a bike or in a wheelchair – that we will begin to change the financial health of our cities and truly make them strong towns.
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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.
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A STROAD is a street/road hybrid. It's dangerous and unproductive.
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We've reconfigured our public spaces to accommodate the automobile. Today we need the humility to acknowledge that our ancestors -- who built in the traditional style -- may have known what they were doing.
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The underpinnings of the current financial crisis lie in a living arrangement—the American pattern of development—that does not financially support itself.
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If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth.
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Our development pattern is not productive enough to sustain itself.
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Our national economy is "all in" on the suburban experiment. We cannot sustain the trajectory we are on, but we've gone too far down the path to turn back.
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How did we build such an amazing place before the home mortgage interest deduction? How did we accomplish this before zoning? What created this place before we had state and federal subsidies of local water and sewer systems?
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When you can't let your kids play in the yard, let alone ride their bike to the store, because you know the street is dangerous, then the engineering profession is not providing society any real value. It's time to stand up and demand a change.
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