If We Win, You Won't Hear About It

It’s our biannual member drive this week. Memberships are how we at Strong Towns continue to do what we do. We’re not one of those nonprofits whose budget comes overwhelmingly from grants from foundations—your support is integral to our growth model, and we can’t keep paying our salaries without it, let alone expand our staff. I hope we’re giving you lots of good reasons to become a member of the Strong Towns movement this week by donating in any amount, such as:

• You enjoy our daily written content and you want to keep it coming.

• You enjoy our three podcasts and you want to keep listening to them.

• You find value in the network of brilliant doers and thinkers that is the Strong Towns Community.

• You care deeply about the future financial resilience of our cities and towns. Or at least of one particular place that’s meaningful to you.

• You want that free copy of Strong Towns: the book that you can get by donating at the $10 a month level or higher, this week only.

But if none of those reasons has done the trick yet, here’s one more:

• You want to put us all out of a job.

I mean it. Let me explain.

Strong Towns's goal is to change the conversation everywhere about how we build and maintain productive places. This is an expansive, some would say naively ambitious, goal—and yet it's essential. We don't believe that our cities and towns will stop digging themselves into financial holes when two or three key federal policies change, for example. We believe a mass movement is required. We believe a paradigm shift in how we think about local prosperity is required—and that has to happen at the grassroots, among the people who elect local leaders, not just among the leaders currently in office.

We try to keep ourselves honest by asking "How will we know if we're winning?" And conversely, "How will we know if we're failing?"

If the name "Strong Towns" is on ten times as many tongues as today, but the same sort of bad investments are still being made with the same frequency as today, that will be a failure. If people who say they agree with us are finding themselves unable to apply our analysis in their actual work—because the institutional barriers are too high, or because they don't see the opportunities—that's a failure. 

Conversely, if Strong Towns is successful beyond measure in our work, it won't necessarily be because we're a household name when anyone talks about the built environment or municipal finance. That'd be flattering, but we really want our ideas to be viral. We, the organization, are just the delivery mechanism. 

If we win, really win, you won't hear about it—because the vast majority of the change we produce won't be attributed to us at all. It will be embedded in the broader culture.

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A guide to stroad repair created by our friends at Cultivate Collaborative. Click to view larger.

Our founder Chuck Marohn coined the word stroad in 2011 to explain a common mistake he saw in city after city: building wide streets that attempted to simultaneously be high-speed, high-volume traffic corridors, and productive places full of activity. Stroads end up failing on both counts.

At the end of 2019, as a planner by training, I can attest that the word stroad has permeated the planning profession to a remarkable degree—and to the point that many of the people using it don't know its origin. Great. They don't need to. If Strong Towns, the organization, went away tomorrow, transportation planners would keep talking about what's wrong with stroads.

Successful advocates should want to put themselves out of a job.

Checking in on the Overton Window 

I wrote in 2015 that we want to shift the Overton Window when it comes to how we think about planning, growth, and development. The Overton Window, in politics or policy, represents the range of ideas that are considered mainstream or uncontroversial. The goal of advocates who want systemic change is to move the window: to expand that mainstream to include more of the things you want to see, and to shift it to start excluding things you think shouldn't be considered valid or respectable ideas.

Small groups have a lot of power to move the Overton Window on issues in the public eye. The key is to permeate the conversation with a different view of what is normal, acceptable, and possible. And it’s clear to me that we’ve already started to do this.

Five years ago, it was almost unthinkable that a major U.S. city (or entire state!) would move to legalize the next increment of residential development—several forms of missing middle housing ranging from accessory dwelling units to triplexes—in every single neighborhood. That happened in 2019.

Five years ago, we were outliers in calling for #NoNewRoads: that is, an end to more top-down funding for our broken transportation system until its priorities are fixed to put maintenance ahead of expanding the system. In 2019, veteran advocates Transportation For America joined us in that call.

The number of cities doing away with parking minimums continues to expand. So does the number doing the math and asking tough questions about their future financial solvency. We hear a steady stream of stories of cities redoing elements of their zoning codes to encourage walkable, traditional neighborhoods over automobile-oriented ones. Every year more places take action to #SlowTheCars and reclaim their streets as platforms for producing value. Almost nowhere is moving in the opposite direction on any of these issues.

Part of our decision to be a media organization reflects the following observation: Your perception of what planning, or engineering, or development, or community activism, can be is shaped in large part by the range of things you read about planners or engineers or developers or community activists doing. If we're part of the regular media consumption of those who care about cities, then the stories we tell here will help shape your sense of the possible.

There's brilliant, boundary-pushing work going on in every city and town in America that should be the norm rather than the exception. Some of it in City Hall, some of it far from it.

If you want us to keep telling these stories and empowering Strong Towns advocates to change the realm of the possible, support us by becoming a member of the Strong Towns movement.

(Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons)

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