The Strong America Tour kicks off this week in the Pacific Northwest. Everywhere we go — Spokane, Seattle, Kenmore, and Victoria — we see residents breathing new life into even the unlikeliest of neighborhoods.

The power and peril of looking backwards. We look back to learn much-needed lessons, but how do we avoid romanticizing a past that maybe wasn’t that great to begin with?

There are lessons to be learned everywhere about building places that generate not only wealth but community. This week we shared some of those lessons from across the ocean, but also a couple that you don’t even have to step off your front porch to learn.

Infrastructure doesn’t have to be expensive. But in the U.S., we infamously spend a fortune on it… and not always for the best results. This and more in this week’s top 5 articles.

Does Boston—one of America’s oldest and densest cities—have too much parking? The verdict is in. This and more in our top 5 stories of the past week.

A small town with pipe dreams of explosive growth… but also some failing pipes. A desert city that’s built twice the road system it can actually afford to maintain. This and more in our top stories of the week.

Why does modern architecture so often lack human-scale or comforting qualities—and what did World War I have to do with it? What would a real free market in urban development look like? Why are California cities’ latest efforts to produce more housing backfiring? This and more in our top stories of the past week.

Don’t miss our top 5 recent stories! In the last few days we’ve covered historic zoning reform in the Pacific Northwest; the lessons of European urbanism; the transformative power of public art; and our own founder’s journey to understanding the perverse incentives that shaped the world he was building as a young civil engineer.

We’re thrilled to see ideas that have been important to Strong Towns for years reflected in the national conversation, from ending exclusive single-family zoning to the high returns on building walkable neighborhoods. Check out these stories and more, in our top 5 posts of the week.

How do we create the kind of places that are lovable, distinctive, and will retain their value over time, rather than being discarded like cheap furniture when their age starts to show? This week’s top stories offer some insights.

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.

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).

Strengthening the most financially productive parts of our cities is not easy work, and this week’s top stories explored different tools for that work, from design standards to missing-middle housing to ensuring that core government services are actually located in the core. We also published an important message from our president, reaffirming our commitment to growing the racial diversity of the Strong Towns movement.

This week we crowned a victor in the Strongest Town Contest, and some of our most popular articles dug deep into the various aspects of America’s housing crisis—including why it’s so difficult to solve, but also why it’s not as expensive as we often think to do some real good.