New Video from Strong Towns on the Road
“The problems that we face today were not because the people in the past were stupid or because we’re smarter today. The problems of the past are really a byproduct of us thinking and believing that we knew the answers... I’m not going to tell you that I know what the cities of the future will look like. I just know that what we have now is not viable and something’s going to change.”
This April, Chuck Marohn spoke in Eau Claire, WI for a group of local leaders and elected officials, hosted by the West Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission. They filmed an excellent video of both Chuck's presentation and the Q&A session afterward, and we invite you to watch one or both of them today.
If you're new to Strong Towns, you'll learn a lot from the presentation Chuck gave, which covers core Strong Towns concepts and explains the central problems with the American development pattern, plus how a Strong Towns approach can fix it.
And even if you've been reading Strong Towns for a while, the Q&A session addresses some key questions you may not have heard us answer before including how to work with property owners who don't seem to care about leaving buildings vacant, how to attract young people to small towns and how to incorporate business parks into the larger urban fabric.
Use the links below to jump to a specific discussion topic from the Q&A.
Strong Towns Q&A
0:00 Share Strong Towns content, become a member
1:32 Incremental improvements vs. big projects
7:00 Examples of successful strong towns
12:31 Property tax vs. land tax
19:49 Parking minimums
27:04 Small towns
36:21 Impact of online retail
40:50 Business parks
44:14 Gentrification
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We’ve been living for decades on the urban economic equivalent of anabolic steroids: it’s time for some good old-fashioned diet and exercise. The key is to reorient the way we approach growth. Instead of thinning out our cities and taking on more infrastructure liabilities, we need to wring real value out of the places we’ve already built.