What the Strong Towns movement needs to do is change our cultural understanding about growth, development and the way we invest in our places.
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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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We should require our local governments to develop some discipline and reliability in their permitting approach. These are practices that demonstrate respect for both our civic institutions and the people they are supposed to serve.
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Denton, Texas seemed to be on the verge of an important step toward financial resilience: allowing its core neighborhoods to incrementally evolve and provide much-needed new housing. Now, is the city on the verge of moving in the wrong direction instead?
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Now that my city’s downtown is starting to thrive, we’re facing a new problem: a barrage of attempts to move centrally-located public facilities to unwalkable, suburban (and even undeveloped) areas.
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If a local resident or business owner with a high school diploma can’t sit down and figure out what she can and cannot do with her property in less than an hour, the zoning regime is exclusionary. Here are five guidelines for making it more accessible to laypeople.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Jordan Katcher—Community Development Specialist for the State of Utah, focusing on rural communities—about how government employees can break down silos in rural communities, including how to choose who to get involved in the process, how to understand the needs of rural communities, and most important, how breaking down silos can make rural communities stronger.
In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with three local leaders in open data—Kyle Taylor, Jesse Hamner, and Habib—share how open data works, including how you can use open data to act on your ideas, how you can encourage your elected officials to adopt open data policies, and how open data can make your city or town stronger.
Hilton Hotels sacrifices their customers in the name of efficiency. There is a lesson there for your city about the tradeoffs of efficiency.
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In this episode of our new podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob Moses chats with Nick Kittle, author of the recently released book Sustainovation: Building Sustainable Innovation in Government, One Wildly Creative Idea at a Time. Nick argues that—even in government—innovation is an attainable workplace culture that, when embraced, can create meaningful change in our cities, towns, and neighborhoods.
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Want to better your community but don’t know where to start? Enter It’s the Little Things: a Strong Towns podcast that gives you the wisdom and encouragement you need to take the small yet powerful actions that can make your city or town stronger.
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You can’t build stroads, subsidize big box stores and accept endless edge development, and have that work out for you just because you threw a block party, painted a mural and put in a temporary bike lane.
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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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In the latest episode of the Strong Towns podcast, we share a conversation Chuck had at CNU 2018 with three of the geoanalytics wizards from Urban3. Hear the latest on their efforts to spread the message about where your city’s wealth is really coming from.
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If you had five minutes to plant a seed in the mind of an influential leader in your community, what would you tell them? Or give them to read? What article do you wish Strong Towns would publish that would help you make a concrete, needed change in your own community?
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New research out of Boston University confirms that those who speak at local public hearings are not representative of the public as a whole. Elected officials seeking to understand constituents’ views should treat these hearings as only one source among many.
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In this podcast episode, Chuck interviews four under-30 attendees of the Congress for the New Urbanism about their aspirations, goals, and the challenges of making a difference and being taken seriously as ambitious younger people in their respective fields.
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We’re constantly told that the world has become a flaming dumpster fire, and that only large-scale actions are adequate to address today’s urgent problems. But is that true? Chuck and three panelists explore this question in a podcast episode recorded at CNU in May.
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Cobb County, GA is a classic case of misplaced priorities. What could $400 million for a baseball stadium have achieved had it gone toward investing in citizens’ needs and achieving real wealth?
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