Not everything in a Strong Town can be about dollars and cents. The finances constrain us—they are an important check on our avarice—but the things that make a place worth loving go far beyond the balance sheet.
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In this week’s top stories, we dug deep into the relationship between infrastructure spending and local economic productivity and resilience. From Minnesota to Florida to Texas, our approach to growth and development is producing massive long-term liabilities without the wealth to show for it. We need a paradigm shift.
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Could it make sense to put the onus on pedestrians to ensure their own safety—in Honolulu’s case, by considering making it illegal to cross the street outside of a crosswalk after dark? Maybe, but only if we had a system that actually gave people on foot equal opportunity to get around safely and conveniently. We don’t.
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See the latest content in the Strong Towns Knowledge Base.
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There’s nothing like taking to the streets on foot to understand the place you live a bit better. In this spirit, the work of Strong Towns helped inform a program of “walking audits” at a Florida university that teaches students to recognize how urban design affects both the financial and ecological sustainability of our cities.
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My city council has been offered an impossible choice: spend millions of dollars we don’t have repairing our historic water tower, or permanently destroy an iconic landmark and a piece of our history. But there is a third option.
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Alix Taylor—Manager of Water Programs at Green Communities Canada—shares how to depave neglected concrete in your own neighborhood, including how to get your neighbors involved in the process, how to pitch the idea to city leaders, and how to find sites in your neighborhood optimal for depaving.
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You might get more house for your money in an outer-ring suburb. But if you have to own and maintain multiple cars, are you better off? Common measures of housing affordability don’t include transportation costs, and so they fail to capture a realistic view of the true cost of living in certain places.
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My hometown of Plano, Texas is the midst of a bubble. Everything seems fine! Taxes are low. The city provides great services. It has an AAA bond rating. The music is still playing, and therefore everyone must remain dancing. But we have a looming problem: staggering long-term infrastructure liabilities that we haven’t even fully accounted for.
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A bill that has passed the Florida Senate proposes to build over 300 miles of new toll roads deep into rural areas of the state. Proponents claim it’s necessary to prepare for coming population growth. They couldn’t be more wrong.
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Equipped with “grit and grind”—but also with a whole lot of good data on the financial consequences of past development decisions—Memphis, Tennessee is taking smart steps toward a bottom-up renaissance. Just ask its Chief Operating Officer, Doug McGowen.
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While new transportation funding is needed, more money without significant reform is worse than no funding at all. We need to continue to oppose all of these funding efforts until serious reform is on the table.
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In this week’s top stories, we explored how to build momentum toward getting rid of your city’s pesky parking minimums; questioned why on earth it should ever take years to get a building permit (hint: it shouldn’t); and examined some of the strange-but-true aspects of complex cities—among them, narrowing roads can make traffic better (no, really), and building high-end housing can help low-income people find homes (no, really).
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A recent New York Times op ed despaired that economic trends have passed rural America by. So isn’t it time for some new economic trends?
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Your Strong Towns Knowledge Base question of the week, answered here.
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It’s time for mandatory parking minimums to go. That doesn’t mean, though, that the need for parking is going to magically disappear. We would also be wise to plan for smart, adaptable parking solutions, so our cities can incrementally urbanize.
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John Reuter—board member at Strong Towns and former councilperson at the City of Sandpoint, Idaho—shares his insights in how you can propose eliminating parking minimums in your town—including how to tell a compelling story, how to find data that enhances that story, and how to build community support around removing parking minimums.
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That high-end apartment building over there has nothing to do with the low-income families who need affordable housing over here, right? In fact, we’re all more connected than we tend to think—and a new study demonstrates this in a surprising way.
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Street trees can be a huge maintenance headache, but are they worth it anyway for a fiscally prudent city? What do we think of land banks? Why isn’t “efficiency” always a good thing for cities? What the heck does “vibrant” mean? And more of your questions answered in the video and audio from April 2019’s Ask Strong Towns webcast!
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The Strong Towns Podcast is back with brand new episodes. And to kick things off, we’re offering you a sneak peek into the upcoming full-length book by Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn—including details of the contents that haven’t yet been shared anywhere else. And you can pre-order your copy today!
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