The Strong Towns approach to public investment is part of an overall strategy of shifting our local energy from chasing the next project to building real wealth.
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For a traffic engineer, to be conservative in your design is to spend extra money building capacity you don’t really need. The spiraling costs of this approach are enormous.
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Copying and pasting lighting codes from other cities seems like a good idea. Why reinvent the wheel? But doing so thoughtlessly can obscure what is unique and valuable about your own community.
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We have to stop looking at the stagnation and decline of our blocks and neighborhoods as a normal part of the development process.
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We’ve been living for decades on the urban economic equivalent of anabolic steroids: it’s time for some good old-fashioned diet and exercise. The key is to reorient the way we approach growth. Instead of thinning out our cities and taking on more infrastructure liabilities, we need to wring real value out of the places we’ve already built.
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A trip to Italy reveals the physical, social, and even cultural benefits of walking. But coming home to the auto-oriented U.S. reveals something too: just how dangerous, difficult, and unpleasant we’ve made things for pedestrians.
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The ideas behind Strong Towns began in my small town of Brainerd. A tour starting in Memphis is designed to bring them home.
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When my school district proposed tearing down buildings for parking, I and others suggested there were more creative and less destructive ways to solve these problems. We were scoffed at, and we lost. Hate to say, “I told you so,” but….
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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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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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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn about how you can get ideas for making your neighborhood stronger, including how both the concerned citizen and the public official can act on ideas, how to share them with your tribe, and how to take the next incremental step in making your neighborhood stronger.
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When your community is financially fragile, you lose options. In the case of Brainerd, Minnesota, that may mean letting go of a landmark.
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You can't have a neighborhood school without a neighborhood. We shouldn't be forced to choose between the two.
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We don’t need a parking lot as badly as we need our city to become financially strong and healthy.
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What's it like to move from a 5 acre semi-rural home to a downtown neighborhood?
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Large surface parking lots do not make good neighbors.
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Hospitals around the country are realizing that it is good policy and good business to take an interest in the welfare of the neighborhoods they are in.
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We're bringing back our See It Differently TV (SID.TV) series on YouTube. In this new short video, Chuck Marohn shows us how a hospital parking lot offers both challenges and opportunities for the surrounding neighborhood.
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In closing many neighborhood schools over the years, my local school district has walked away from neighborhoods that are already struggling, making the situation in those places much worse.
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Welcome to our weekly podcast where Strong Towns staff, Chuck Marohn and Rachel Quednau, discuss recent and upcoming events, top posts on the website and other organizational updates. Today's podcast include a special announcement that you won't want to miss.
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