U.S. commercial real estate was way overbuilt before the pandemic. What will happen now that brick-and-mortar retail is cratering?
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Eating together can subvert partisanship, restore trust, and build stronger cities.
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Young people shouldn’t have to choose between living in the place they grew up and pursuing a prosperous life.
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Local and state governments have stepped in to fill the gap for businesses when the federal response was either too slow, too small, or not tailored to the right needs.
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How do local leaders make the right decisions in a world based less on facts and fundamentals than on who can tell the best story? It starts with learning to see beyond the false narratives.
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When an attempt to solve a problem ends up making the problem worse, that’s The Cobra Effect. It’s also a pretty good description of the decisions that are slowly bankrupting many of our towns and cities.
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The uneasy truce between farmers and gravel producers, the case for quitting the news, and a new children’s book about urban planners. These are just a few of the stories from around the web that Strong Towns staffers were reading and talking about this week.
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Neighborhoods don’t have to wait for distant gatekeepers to turn on the spigot of money and attention. Here’s a tool that can provide a homegrown pathway to economic development.
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Stickplexes — dense residential structures on 2,500 square feet of land per unit or less — are an underutilized option for many towns and cities. They can often go where missing middle cannot.
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In the inaugural episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution, we meet a business owner in Milwaukee who is providing a platform for other local entrepreneurs, while boosting the physical and mental wellbeing of his neighborhood.
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Large swaths of cities were bulldozed to build urban freeways. But there’s another reason freeway-building devastated city neighborhoods — and it’s a force still at work today.
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Urbanists may debate the merits of Top-Down Beautiful urbanism vs. Top-Down Pragmatic urbanism. But there’s a third, better way — one that emanates from the bottom up.
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A planner in Gallatin, Tennessee does the math to find out how much infrastructure his city can support and who’s paying their share. What he finds could be the Growth Ponzi Scheme in action.
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The feds don’t have serious solutions to the problem of pedestrian safety. It’s up to us to take action right where we are.
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The North American development pattern disrupted a way of building cities that has thousands of years of accumulated wisdom behind it—and is still at work in dynamic ways around the world.
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The Strong Towns podcast returns with a look at why we shouldn’t wait for top-down solutions to problems that can be addressed—at least in part—much closer to home.
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One simple change can make your city more affordable for residents, more friendly to entrepreneurs, and more financially solvent. Here’s how to do it.
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The future of New York's transit system will be decided by non-New Yorkers. It didn't have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way again.
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What heirloom seeds teach us about resilience, an illegal hoop-house in Chicago, and the unhelpful dichotomies between urban and suburban places. These are just a few of the stories from around the web that Strong Towns staffers were reading and talking about this week.
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The fates of cities and their small businesses are tied to one another. They also have a lot to learn from each other. Here are 7 “crossover truths” to keep in mind as you navigate the days, months, and years ahead.
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