Want to do the kind of value-per-acre analysis that you’ve seen on Strong Towns before, but don’t think of yourself as a data wizard? Here’s a step by step guide for beginners.
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Meet several of the presenters who will be at our North Texas Regional Gathering next month, and learn about the work they’re doing to move their Texas communities away from business as usual and toward fiscally sustainable development.
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Local governments can’t take on more and more promises without generating enough wealth to meet those obligations—not without a reckoning. We need a radical revolution in how we plan, manage, and inhabit our cities, counties, and neighborhoods. We need a Strong Towns approach.
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Communities like Cobb County must address the problems that have plagued them from the outset by encouraging the style of development that produces true value per acre.
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Ferguson, Missouri is still relying on so-called “fines and forfeitures” for a significant amount of its revenue.
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“Gamifying” public participation in budgeting—by inviting citizens to move imaginary buckets of money around—is essentially a charade. All the while, we’re failing to get to the root causes of municipal budget struggles.
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The scale and value of what we’ve sacrificed in order to build parking lots and highways is staggering. Only by understanding that loss can we figure out how to build stronger towns.
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What would the opposite of the Strong Towns approach look like?
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One man’s quest to find the equation proving the value of gridded streets leads him down some interesting roads.
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Now, the story of a wealthy family who sold their farm and the developer who exploited an agricultural tax subsidy to keep it all together.
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This is basic and obvious math.
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If your city spends $30 million on new parks, then closes other parks due to a $30 million budget shortfall, something is very, very wrong.
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Why does Charleston’s quaint downtown have such astronomically high property values?
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Is anyone doing the math on the real costs of development in your city?
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There is no way to sustain a city over time without building wealth within it. That is why a Strong Towns approach is critical.
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The auto-oriented development pattern is an approach with limited financial upside and lots of downside. How much better does traditional development perform?
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No, that mall out on the edge of town is not producing enough sales tax value to outweigh its terrible return on investment in terms of property tax value.
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Something is seriously wrong with your town's finances if merely fixing a street would require 17 year's worth of taxes from the people who use that street...
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A Strong Towns member used tax data to figure out how much his local Target was actually contributing to his community.
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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.
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