Once a month we host Ask Strong Towns, a members-only live Q&A webcast. Here’s the video and audio from this month’s.
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Too often, decisions about parking in our cities are driven by emotion, anecdotes and gut reactions. Better data can help both policymakers and citizens understand the actual parking situation in their city more clearly.
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Ryan Short—CEO of CivicBrand—shares how you can find your community’s true essence, including how to engage with your community to ensure the creation of your brand is a grassroots effort, how to ensure your brand actually aligns with what your community offers, and how finding your community’s true essence makes your city or town stronger.
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Not every city’s situation is the same—but just about every city that needs more homes could benefit from one or more of these policies.
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Making Room: Housing for a Changing America is a new report from the AARP and the National Building Museum that explores how the way Americans live together has changed—and how our housing stock hasn’t, but could.
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If you can’t justify your half-a-billion-dollar freeway widening project with the usual argument, why not try a different one: that it will reduce crashes? Unfortunately, there’s no evidence for this either.
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Speed enforcement won’t fix what’s actually a street design problem. And the way we use speed enforcement as a tool to accomplish other goals unrelated to speeding ends up not making anyone safer.
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In just a few short weeks, the world will begin voting in our 4th Annual Strongest Town Contest. Don’t miss your chance to enter!
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Modern Monetary Theory suggests that recessions can be avoided – along with lots of unnecessary pain – if policymakers will commit the resources to preempt them. Sounds like the same promise the Forest Service made fighting fires last century.
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This week we offered our take on what cities and states should do in the wake of Amazon’s NYC debacle, took a tour of Memphis’s own economic-development gamble gone awry, explored a counterintuitive truth about North American vs. European development patterns, and more.
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You probably use Zillow to shop fantasy mansions in cities you could never afford. But would you sell them your house?
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Your Strong Towns Knowledge Base question of the week, answered here.
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In a “sort-by-price” world, you should be careful getting into a race to the bottom. This applies as much to cities as businesses.
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Academic evidence doesn’t do much to shift public opinion about housing policy. What’s missing is trust—and cultivating that requires a different approach.
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Strong Towns’s own Kea Wilson discusses what her time as a bookseller at Left Bank Books in St. Louis taught her about making local businesses a third place, including what building a third place actually looks like, how third places are more economically resilient, and how you can make your local business a third place.
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The answer might not be what you expect.
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Regional fragmentation allows cities to pursue quick growth and shift the long-term costs onto their neighbors. Can a proposal to merge St. Louis with its suburbs make the region stronger by fixing these incentives?
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The allure of a silver-bullet economic development project is like that boat you buy for a low, low down payment. You know, the one that ended up sitting in your driveway under a tarp for years. Just ask Memphis.
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Revisiting a 2017 conversation between Charles Marohn and Chris Arnade about the toll of economic and social disintegration in American communities.
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Amazon has pulled out of the deal with New York City. It’s unlikely subsidies are going away, so what can other cities learn so they don’t repeat mistakes?
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