Join Strong Towns for immersive experiences designed to help you make the Strong Towns approach real in your place.
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Mid-size regions like Kansas City don’t have the affordability struggles of, say, a fast-growing Denver or Seattle: they have their own unique challenges instead. Here’s how the “natural” affordability of homes in these places can be turned into an opportunity for an urban renaissance.
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“We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law.”
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We’re sharing the video and audio from our July 2019 live webcast Q&A with Jordan Deffenbaugh and Jim Hodapp, primary organizers of Strong Towns Local Conversations Strong Towns Sioux Falls and Strong Indy.
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San Bruno, California laid out a detailed blueprint for more housing. One developer followed that blueprint. $3 million and 3 years later, the city killed his project anyway.
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This place is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create.
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Two small Tennessee towns reveal the mighty power of a traditional downtown square—even one that isn’t designed to achieve its full potential. It’s simply the most foolproof and financially productive style of development there is.
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Traditional architecture has evolved through millennia of trial and error to harmonize with our unconscious impulses, make us feel comfortable and encourage positive social behavior. Modernism too often throws those lessons out the window—and one architect thinks the trauma of World War I had something to do with why.
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A real market urbanism looks like an organic system, where as many distortions as possible are removed and we’re left with irrational, fallible humans transacting with each other as freely as possible. There is good reason to correlate that with the traditional development pattern.
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When is it worth it to retrofit financially unproductive, auto-oriented places with walkable, mixed-use development? That dying shopping mall on the edge of your town? What about a brand new downtown for a sleepy bedroom community that never had one? This and more in our top stories of the week.
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Unpacking “smart cities” hype through a Strong Towns lens: when should we get excited about technological fixes to our cities’ problems? And when is sticking with a low-tech (but tried, tested, and resilient) approach more prudent?
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Missing Middle development—anything from a duplex to a cottage court to a small apartment building—is an indispensable piece of the Strong Towns vision for cities that are resilient, adaptable, and can pay their bills. We need to revive a culture of building this way: here are 5 ways cities can start.
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What’s the most suburban kind of place you can think of? If you said an outlet mall, you’re probably not alone. Is there a path to incrementally retrofit these malls to a more human-scaled environment… and even if there is, is it worth the trouble?
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Andy Diaz—founder at Urban Acres in Peoria, Illinois—shares how you can use local food to build community in your own neighborhood, including how to find the right investment for your neighborhood, how to grow your efforts incrementally, and why cities like Peoria and beyond need more $1,000 heroes (not $1 million heroes).
Those who are most comfortable with the status quo often demand that we exhaustively study any new policy for possible harmful side effects before taking action. But what if we applied the same scrutiny to the harmful side effects of not changing things?
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If your city is struggling to balance its budget, it’s not enough to just cut costs and not seek to increase revenues. That’s like a cyclist who tries to improve their performance only by losing weight.
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As part of the process for hiring a Content Manager, we asked interested individuals to submit any questions they might have so we could answer them for everyone at the same time. Here are some answers to questions we’ve received.
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Leander, Texas, a suburb of Austin, is a quiet bedroom community that recently found itself with a commuter rail station. Can it afford to waste the opportunity to create the transit-oriented downtown it never had?
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There’s every reason not to build a freeway through a poor, mostly-black neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana. So why is the state government taking money away from needed maintenance to push this bad project forward?
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If local governments are going to lose money on residential development, then they have to make it up on commercial development. That’s a risky business model, one that doesn’t pencil out.
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