Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Each week, the Strong Towns team shares their favorite links—the things that made us think in new ways, delve deeper into the Strong Towns mission, or even just smile.
There’s a lot going on in our cities and our nation right now, and we hear almost every day from Strong Towns members who are working to address these challenges with a bottom-up, neighborhood-centered approach.
This was a busy week for our team as Chuck and Daniel both presented at the annual Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). On top of that, Chuck had to move to a new office on very short notice after the previous space Strong Towns was renting shut down unexpectedly. You can see in this picture the makeshift studio Chuck set up in about 30 minutes so he could broadcast his CNU presentation successfully.
We’ve also been working behind the scenes to roll out new courses in the Strong Towns Academy and we just released the first set of lessons in our course, Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach. We’re excited for all the ways we can keep helping you build Strong Towns through classes, webcasts, stories and more.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Lauren: My brother, who moved to Seattle mere days before media and government shifted focus to the COVID-19 pandemic, texted me this week: “Have you heard about CHAZ?” The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (which you can read about in this Seattle Times article) was established after law enforcement abandoned the East Precinct police station on Monday. There are things that scare me about CHAZ, but its existence challenges some deeply ingrained assumptions about which spaces are actually public, and how we are permitted to use those spaces.
The streets have become a more or less pedestrian-only zone. Different economic philosophies are currently coexisting in CHAZ, with people providing food for free or for sale. Volunteers are providing free medical services. Organizers are giving speeches, hosting relevant movie screenings, and making demands of the local and federal government. “We are trying to prove through action and practice that we don’t need [police] and we can fulfill the community’s needs without them,” John Moore, one of the volunteers, told the New York Times.
Chuck: This piece by Chris Arnade taps into the frustration and utter helplessness I’ve been feeling over the past two weeks. I feel like, as a society, we’re metaphorically watching Rome burn while being gaslighted by a professional class that is using the moment to display their moral superiority while simultaneously toasting some marshmallows over the coals. My best friend lost his factory job this week (business bankruptcy) and expressed it best: “Things are f’d up.” Yeah, they are. And like Arnade, I have little faith that we’ll be led out of this. Whatever comes next, we’re going to need to build it ourselves. Arnade writes:
The highly credentialed, whose smug certainty never ebbed during the pandemic, despite doling out one inconsistent proclamation and toothless platitude after another, have lost a level of trust that will be hard to win back. They got it so wrong so often, with such awful consequences, that it has been impossible to ignore. Perhaps globbing onto Black Lives Matter will save them.
Rachel: This discussion on the Strong Towns Community site inviting folks to consider how much their cities spend on policing kicked off a few days before we published Chuck’s article, “Is it time to hit the reset button on policing?” And since then, it’s been home to the beginnings of a helpful conversation. I invite everyone to check out the discussion and research how much your own city spends on policing. It’s time to ask some important questions about where our tax dollars are going, and whether there are better ways to keep residents safe and healthy than through our current bloated and harmful policing system.
Michelle: An article about “6 Ways COVID-19 Could Impact Housing Design” isn't anything new or groundbreaking but is sort of something we've been saying all along at Strong Towns. My sister, a realtor in a suburban area, thinks I'm a crazy Millennial because I'm alway talking about the importance of living close to my workplace, amenities, etc. Her house-buying clients are always looking for that perfect new house in the housing development in a great school district—she never gets clients talking about the same needs that I have. Maybe now these trends will catch up with her and we can get along next Thanksgiving.
Daniel: This story by Justin Ellis in The Atlantic, called “Minneapolis Had This Coming,” is one of many postmortems since the murder of George Floyd in my almost-hometown (I grew up across the river in St. Paul) sparked both a local and international burst of social upheaval. This one stands out to me for capturing the nuances of geography and history in a way that is meaningful and instructive and doesn’t reduce Minneapolis to clichés that could describe any Midwestern city.
The piece describes the role of the postwar suburban experiment in shaping Minneapolis: the stark gradient of wealth, investment and privilege as you travel the length of Lake Street, and the ways that more than just raw racism—a mix of federal policy, local planning, and a top-down, financialized development model—conspired to create those conditions. And it addresses both the city’s recent efforts to redress racial segregation through the zoning code, and the limitations of that strategy.
Miriel: I am a relatively new Ohioan; my family moved from Michigan to the north side of Columbus last summer. When clashes between police and protestors led to a week of citywide curfews, I went looking for information about the history of race relations in the area. This piece from 2018 is a thorough and thoughtful examination of the feedback loops between attitude and policy. I have seen with my own eyes the disparities across Parsons Avenue that Rev. John Edgar notes. Anyone who is interested in community development or housing policy would do well to give this article a careful read.
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Finally, from Alexa and all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement:
Amy Fennell, Andrew Kovacic, Ann Bass, Ann Thane, Barbara Forauer, Catherine Brooks, Daniel Klocke, Don Kulak, James McGee, Jeffery & Joyce Bastian, John Conway, John Johnston, Kaleb Warnock, Kate Roberts, Kyle Beidler, Leslie Fournier, Max Merritt, Maxwell Miltonm, McNeill Shiner, Meghan Beck, Nicholas Cunningham, Philip Lockwood, Scott Bitterli, Steve Myers, Tammie Pernas, Timothy Sternfeld, and Wesley Harris.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments or continue the conversation in the Strong Towns Community.