See you on Monday
The Strong Towns staff and board are convening for an annual meeting for the next three days, so we'll be taking a short break from content in order to focus on planning for 2017 and beyond.
We'll be back to our usual schedule on Monday. Have a great weekend and in the meantime, you can check out some of our most popular content from the last few weeks below.
With interest rates rising, the cost and availability of housing are becoming increasingly popular topics of debate. But most of these discussions fail to challenge the root of the issue: the absurdity of mortgages as an investment vehicle.
If we listen to those concerned about housing affordability, rents are already too high and may only go higher. If we listen to those concerned about housing finance, rents are about to collapse. Can both of these narratives be true?
There’s a certain artistic quality to abandoned spaces—but if we look a bit deeper, these ruins also hold lessons about patterns of disinvestment and policy shifts that have adversely affected American communities.
The financial struggles of Houston and the cities of the Silicon Valley area—as well as tens of thousands of others across North America—have the same underlying cause.
Why don’t the small things get funding?
In Capitola, California, residents erupted in protest after Debra Towne, a beloved local senior, was hit and killed walking across a dangerous stroad. And unlike in so many other places, the city actually responded.
What does it really mean to say that housing can’t be both affordable and an “investment”?
You know what a stroad is… Now how about these other coined phrases that help tell the story of the challenges that local advocates grapple with?
(Top photo: Strong Towns president, Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns board member John Reuter)
I’ve mostly left Twitter/X over the past few months. Strong Towns, the organization, has pulled back substantially, as well. I want to explain why because it’s for different reasons than the increasing partisan divide (although that doesn’t help).