Strong Towns Week in Review
In case you missed it...
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Today, I want to look at a utility investment near my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. At first glance, it seems like an extreme case, but looking at it with a touch of scrutiny reveals a lot of insight into why America’s basic infrastructure systems are failing and will not be maintained.
In this episode, Chuck discusses the common misbelief that an incremental approach to housing development is inherently slow, what that means for major cities, and how to make incremental housing more appealing to people who don’t want their neighborhoods to change.
In this episode, host Tiffany Owens Reed is joined by Matt Harder, the founder of a participatory budgeting company, to discuss the importance of resident input on city budgets and the process of implementing a participatory method.
While long-term safety initiatives like updating street design standards or starting a crash response team are important, they must be paired with immediate action. A recent crash in Rochester, New York, shows why.
A mysterious plastic sign appeared on a Houston street, raising the speed limit to 60 mph — double the actual limit. Drivers didn’t seem to notice the difference.
In this special episode of Bottom-Up Shorts, host Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Edward Erfurt, chief technical advisor for Strong Towns, to discuss real-world examples of a transformative 4-step approach to public investment.
After a fatal crash, Rochester citizens and officials got to work, identifying factors that contributed to the crash, updating street design policies to make streets safer, and establishing a Community Traffic Safety Team to address other dangerous factors before crashes occur.
Chuck was recently invited onto The Building Culture Podcast to debate the housing crisis with California YIMBY’s Nolan Gray. It was a great conversation that explores how these movements align and differ in their approaches to housing.
I want to draw two insights relating human development to the way cities evolve. These insights are critical to understanding America’s housing crisis and our response to it — and why building housing in major cities can't meaningfully address the housing crisis.
To create change, you need community engagement. Unfortunately, many cities have complicated systems for engagement that take a lot of time and effort to work with. Here's how one community in West Virginia is cutting through that red tape.
In this episode, Local Conversation leader Michael Bassili explains how his group created a parking campaign that convinced their city council to eliminate parking mandates in their downtown.