Two simple questions can help us understand why different groups don’t seem to speak the same language about growth and development in cities, and why seemingly-strange political alliances form around these issues.
Read More
"Developers in my city are only building luxury housing. They're not building anything that ordinary people can afford." If you’ve said this lately, or heard someone else say it, here are five possible reasons why.
Read More
Will this new development make traffic worse? The conventional wisdom about the relationship between development and traffic contains a number of important misconceptions.
Read More
Can a master-planned community be consistent with Strong Towns principles of iterative, bottom-up placemaking? We take a tour of Serenbe, Georgia, an experiment in New Urbanism and eco-conscious living on the far outskirts of Atlanta.
Read More
Development impact fees are supposed to “make development pay its own way.” But if your development pattern is fundamentally unproductive, they don’t. They’re a one-time cash hit in exchange for taking on a permanent liability.
Read More
Is it magical thinking to expect the transition from car-dependent to walkable places to happen organically? When, and how, do we need a catalyst to jump-start that process?
Read More
"Developers in my city are only building luxury housing. They're not building anything that ordinary people can afford." If you’ve said this lately, or heard someone else say it, here are five possible reasons why.
Read More
Untapped, a six-week pop-up beer garden in the landmark Tennessee Brewery in downtown Memphis, might well have been a goodbye party for the long-neglected building. Instead, it caught a local developer’s interest and led to a second life for the historic structure.
Read More
When large storefronts sit empty for years, holding out for the perfect big tenant, while small businesses can’t find space to rent, we’ve got a serious problem.
Read More
Why is your city dotted with vacant lots? Probably because it’s functionally illegal to build on them.
Read More
Planners and developers have a lot to learn from their most vocal adversaries.
Read More
Strong, financially resilient neighborhoods emerge organically. Requiring one particular style of construction because we've see it work in other neighborhoods will not achieve this goal.
Read More
Lexington, KY offered my young parents an affordable home and a good life decades ago. If we want that opportunity to be available for the next generation, we're going to need to remove a lot of barriers to development.
Read More
The crazy distortions we see in housing and real estate won't be solved by centralized interventions, be they corporate or government. Only at the local level do we have the nuance to start creating something that works.
Read More
If urbanists want a successful, lasting renaissance of inner-city neighborhoods, they should allow the people who stuck it out through the lean years a controlling stake in their neighborhoods' rebirth.
Read More
Here are 3 reasons why our cities are desperately drawn to short-term megaprojects instead of small-scale improvements that will make our downtowns more successful in the long run.
Read More
A new redevelopment plan for an empty site in St. Paul, MN has pitted neighbors against neighbors, and blurred the lines of typical narratives that explain opposition to urban development.
Read More
A big developer bought up tons of historic properties in St. Louis. Now he's letting them crumble and burn.
Read More
Rational consideration of what it means to live in a built environment, colliding with other humans has been Strong Town’s gift to me.
Read More
A Chicago alderman opposes a new development that would create hundreds of new housing units and extensive retail space because it might cause congestion.
Read More