This story is not unique: a mid-sized Minnesota town is preparing to adopt a 50-year-old neighborhood. As the neighborhood struggles to pay for long-term maintenance on its roads and pipes, it seems like neither annexation nor autonomy will really solve the problem.
Read MoreThere’s simply no upside to making un-walkable places into C- versions of walkable cities. Making marginal improvements to driveable suburbia really isn’t worth the effort
Read MoreNecessary repairs to roads and streets often get put off for a later time despite the fact that we see them decline before our eyes. This is an even bigger problem for underground infrastructure where the problem is out of sight, out of mind.
Read MoreThe story of Lafayette is the story of America; they’ve just had the courage and foresight to ask a more sophisticated set of questions. They are responding to their stress and chronic budget shortfalls not by reflexively seeking more revenue or more service cuts – the standard responses – but by asking: why isn’t this working?
Read MoreJobs and growth are the results of a productive system, not a proxy for one.
Read MoreHave environmental and conservation advocates become comfortably co-opted within this nation's corridors of power to the point where they have become an obstacle to real reform?
Read MoreOur audience growth continues to accelerate – we have doubled in size since November – and, as we continue to experience, Strong Towns readers and listeners don’t comprise a nice, clean demographic profile (one of the greatest compliments you all provide).
In short, I appreciate that I sometimes need to slow down and connect some dots. I’m going to try and do that today.
Read MoreAmerica’s cities don’t need more growth. What they desperately need is a different development pattern, one that restores the resiliency and financial productivity of the pre-automobile approach to a modern America.
Read MoreThe auto-oriented development pattern is a huge financial experiment with massive social, cultural and political ramifications. It is time to start building strong towns.
Read MoreHow can we best invest cheap money? With a Strong Towns approach to debt centered on true investments which pay a measurable return and legitimate cash flow in a city that understands its true balance sheet.
Read MoreWe can’t over-simplify the dynamics of all that has happened in Ferguson, but it’s obvious that our platform for building places is creating dynamics primed for social upheaval. The auto-oriented development pattern is a huge financial experiment with massive social, cultural and political ramifications.
Read MoreTraditional development patterns create more jobs per acre than our auto-oriented buildings of the Suburban Experiment.
Read MoreThe underpinnings of the current financial crisis lie in a living arrangement—the American pattern of development—that does not financially support itself.
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreOur development pattern is not productive enough to sustain itself.
Read MoreOur 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.
Read MoreHow 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?
Read MoreIn this system, we need growth. We not only have infrastructure in the ground that needs to be paid for, but we are counting on the new development to pay for the maintenance of the old, existing development. We are deep into this Ponzi scheme.
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