The latest ideas, insights and action from around the Strong Towns movement.

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Latest Podcasts

(Transcripts Included)

How a Georgia City Made Missing Middle Housing Legal

How a Georgia City Made Missing Middle Housing Legal

A Shared Identity Makes Cities Strong. Here's How To Find Yours.

A Shared Identity Makes Cities Strong. Here's How To Find Yours.

How Bike Buses and Walkable Streets Help Kids Thrive

How Bike Buses and Walkable Streets Help Kids Thrive

How To Fix Washington DC's New Rules for Outdoor Dining

How To Fix Washington DC's New Rules for Outdoor Dining

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Latest Stories

We've Built Cities We Can't Afford

Kansas City, Missouri, has a serious infrastructure problem. But an emerging conversation is charting a path toward greater strength and financial resilience.

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How to Get to Great Bus Service in a Car-Dominated Place

Indianapolis proves you don’t need billions—or rail—to build transit people actually use.

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Two Photos Reveal Why the Key to Slowing Traffic is Street Design, Not Speed Limits

Two simple photos show the difference between a street simply designated 20 miles per hour, and one actually designed to be safe. We can't regulate our way to safety.

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The Trick-or-Treat Test

Connected streets + varied houses = better trick-or-treating and financially stronger neighborhoods.

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We Used to Just Call These "Houses"

We used to have a different name for the modest dwellings that now get labeled “tiny houses.” For most of history, this was simply a house—a low-cost way for people to put down roots in a place and begin to grow some wealth for themselves and the neighborhood.

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The March of Build-It-And-They-Will-Come Suburbia

The problem with new American suburbs isn’t a "lack of planning" or “uncontrolled growth” or “inadequate infrastructure.” The problem is a lack of basic financial solvency.

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Lessons from the Streets of Tokyo

An urbanist abroad discovers that Tokyo faces many of the same challenges as U.S. cities — off-street parking, pedestrian safety, utilizing space, etc. — but is addressing them in very different ways.

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The Strong Towns Approach to Public Investment

Making better use of what we have already built is a hyper-local undertaking, one done at the block level.

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This Neighborhood in Germany Shows Us Why American Planned Communities are So Abysmal

We all know the pitfalls of master-planned communities, right? Sterile. Homogenous. Certainly not adaptable or resilient over time. Is there a way around it? Maybe, if this fascinating case study from Germany has anything to teach us. And it all starts with one word: Baugruppen.

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What does "gentrification" really mean?

Everyone seems to have an opinion on gentrification. But what does the word actually mean?

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What Is Traditional Development?

We use the phrase “traditional development pattern” in dozens of Strong Towns essays. Here’s your one-stop-shop explainer article as to what that means.

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Value Per Acre Analysis: A How-To For Beginners

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The Causes of Traffic and Congestion

Will this new development make traffic worse? The conventional wisdom about the relationship between development and traffic contains a number of important misconceptions.

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Most Public Engagement is Worthless

It is the experiences of real people that should guide our planning efforts. Their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.

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“Why Are Developers Only Building Luxury Housing?”

If you’ve asked this lately, or heard someone else ask it, here are five possible reasons why.

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The Real Reason Your Local Mall is Failing

The closing of the mall’s anchor store exposes how fragile the community’s business model is, providing an opening to shift approach.

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What's a STROAD and Why Does It Matter?

Show this video to anyone who needs a crash course in what makes our streets dangerous and how to make them safer and more financially productive.

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Why Walkable Streets are More Economically Productive

3 dollars and cents arguments that definitively prove the need for people-oriented, walk-friendly places.

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The Real Reason Your Downtown Died

Government and corporate decisions half a century ago robbed our cities of life and prosperity today.

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10 Questions to Ask Someone Running for Local Office

Want to figure out whether a local candidate for public office will uphold Strong Towns principles and values on the job? Ask them these 10 questions.

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Why Parking Minimums Almost Destroyed My Hometown and How We Repealed Them

Plus 5 tips for repealing parking minimums in your community.

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The Negative Consequences of Car Dependency

Towns that are designed for cars instead of people experience serious challenges that negatively impact small businesses, community health, and financial success for everyone.

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Fine-Grained vs. Coarse-Grained Urbanism

There's a big difference between these two types of development and one will create a far better outcome for our cities.

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Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments

We can make low risk, high returning investments in our cities while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who are not benefiting from the current approach.

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