The Big Fiscal Impact of Small Upzonings

This study conducted in the U.K. supports concepts about incrementalism that could, and should, be adopted in North American places.

Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places

Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” or “upscale”?

Herriges, Urban Design, Walkability, Top StoryDaniel HerrigesNovember 3, 2021urbanism, urban design, walkability, gentrification, Gentrification

Small Town. Big Housing Crisis.

The housing crisis is hitting small, rural towns—often in even more stark and dire ways than in urban areas.

Herriges, Housing, Rural, Top StoryDaniel HerrigesOctober 27, 2021Housing, colorado, rural, Small Towns, small towns, housing crisis, Housing Crisis, housing cost

Love, Money, or Desperation

Who is actually going to do the work of incremental development, and what will their motivations be?

Fixing Finance for Small-Scale Development

For most small-scale developers, capital is a significant barrier to doing small infill projects. But that isn't because the money isn't there to be had.

A New Generation of Town Makers

A cohort of small developers representing over 100 properties in poor, disinvested neighborhoods are, together, the largest developer in South Bend, IN. Can their success be replicated?

Paths of Greater Resistance

Incremental development today is far from the path of least resistance. To do it, you'll need the ability to navigate dozens of regulatory barriers.

Where Did All the Small Developers Go?

We need people who will build in the places where big, corporate developers won’t. But how do we get enough small-scale developers back to make a difference?

Movie Set Urbanism: Revisited

What do we find when we look behind the "New Urbanist" façade of this master-planned development?

Cleaning My Swimming Pool Is Like Building Strong Towns

Cities are complex systems…and maintaining a healthy system in a stable equilibrium is relatively easy. But restoring an unhealthy system back to equilibrium is very hard.

Herriges, Top StoryDaniel HerrigesOctober 6, 2021complexity, complex systems, strong towns approach

The Secret Sauce (Maybe) of California's Zoning Reform

SB 9 just passed in California, effectively ending single-family zoning there. The open question is, "What now?" Will anything actually change?

The School Bus Driver Shortage is a Problem We Didn't Have to Have

Schools across the U.S. are experiencing a bus driver shortage, but the root cause of this issue has less to do with the COVID pandemic than one might think.

"Does It Scale?"

How should we think about scalable impact, and how should it inform our approach when trying to grapple with big, pervasive problems?

Herriges, Incrementalism, Top StoryDaniel HerrigesSeptember 22, 2021strong towns approach, advocacy, incrementalism, incremental

Is it 2021 or 1961 at America's DOTs?

Here’s a roundup of five highway boondoggles that are threatening neighborhoods right now in the U.S. Think of it as a hall of shame.

Walkability and the Culture Wars

A recent Vice article seems to suggest that most Americans don’t want more walkable places. Here’s why that takeaway is totally wrong.

Herriges, Suburban Experiment, Walkability, Top StoryDaniel HerrigesSeptember 15, 2021walkability, suburbs, suburbanization, psychology, car culture

We Need a New Conventional Wisdom About Streets

We're at a tipping point in how we design and think about our public streets. And things can tip the right way, once we confront the bankrupt ideology guiding our transportation system.

Landlords Are Not Developers (and Vice Versa)

Conflating the one with the other keeps us from understanding the housing market in a coherent way. Here’s why.

Housing, Herriges, Top StoryDaniel HerrigesSeptember 2, 2021housing, real estate, developers, landlords

The State Fair Parking Lottery

What a million-person festival and an experiment in pop-up entrepreneurship teach us about the incoherence of parking policy.

Parking, Herriges, Top StoryDaniel HerrigesSeptember 1, 2021parking, Donald Shoup, Minnesota, parking pricing

Amazon Goes Back to the Future?

It might seem counterintuitive that Amazon, the mall killer, would want to open its own department stores. But it’s worth understanding why the company sees this as a strategic move.