When you recognize that things are broken, you have two options. You can wait helplessly for someone else to fix them, or you can start rebuilding the systems closest to you.
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Unlocking incremental development at the scale of the lot is the most transformative thing we can do because it impacts every lot in the city or metropolitan area.
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What if you could look at your city’s finances and understand what’s going on—not just this year, but over the long haul? Meet the Strong Towns Finance Decoder.
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Elizabeth Turman-Bryant is a councilmember in Burlington, Washington. She joins Tiffany to discuss the importance of balancing responsive bottom-up activism with influential local government involvement. (Transcript included.)
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From fast traffic to flower-filled crosswalks, a quiet revolution is reshaping Indianapolis’ streets. And it isn’t breaking the bank.
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What if you could see where your city makes money—and where it quietly loses it? That’s what a group of residents in Langley, British Columbia set out to do.
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Chuck is joined by Carlee Alm-LaBar and Kevin Blanchard, former city staff members in Lafayette, Louisiana. They discuss the challenges of balancing competing demands and priorities when working in local government. (Transcript included.)
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Denyse Trepanier is the president of Bike Walk Alameda. She joins Norm to discuss the city's efforts to improve biking infrastructure, including a network of low-stress bikeways. (Transcript included.)
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A deadly hit-and-run in Fayetteville, North Carolina sparks urgent calls for safer streets and stronger action from city leaders.
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Tired of excessive speeds on a neighborhood street, a community organization took matters into their own hands and saved lives in the process.
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Fragile cities are overextended, under-resourced, and deeply dependent on decisions made far away. Here’s what that looks like.
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For years, Pittsburgh struggled with rising traffic fatalities. Instead of accepting these tragedies as inevitable or waiting for outside funding, city leaders acted decisively with the resources they had. Here's how.
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A new push for parking reform in Connecticut reveals just how much public space and revenue towns are losing to outdated requirements—and what policymakers can do to fix it.
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Calgary is transparent about it’s finances. Now it’s time to uncover where value is being created—and where resources are being drained.
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In January 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice sued six of the nation’s largest landlords, accusing them of artificially inflating apartment rents. But the lawsuit reveals an even deeper problem.
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Steven Zittergruen is a city council member from Decorah, Iowa. He joins Norm today to discuss the ways he’s making his community stronger, including revamping the city’s budgeting process. (Transcript included.)
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If you’ve ever seen an underused property and thought, “Why doesn’t someone do something with that?”—take a look at this church in Texas.
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Ohio realtors and community advocates have created a practical toolkit to help communities across the state enable infill development.
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Cities slide into insolvency not with a dramatic collapse, but with a slow, steady drift into financial fragility.
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A Japanese study is the first to quantitatively measure the economic impact of tactical urbanism. Spoiler alert: it’s good for business.
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