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.
Rachel met up with a friend for a windy but lovely hike at a state park in New Hampshire this week. Here’s the view from the picnic area.
Hi everyone, welcome to another Friday Faves. This week, we closed out our recent Strong Towns Podcast listener survey, and have been deeply appreciating the thoughtful feedback from hundreds of listeners. One favorite quote stands out, regarding the podcast: “It's one of the few media outlets that I can listen to and not feel like I'm losing my mind.” :)
We’re currently publishing new episodes of Upzoned every Wednesday—that’s the 30 minute podcast where we take one story from the week’s news and offer a Strong Towns perspective on it. Our other two podcasts, the main Strong Towns Podcast and It’s the Little Things, are both taking a break but will be back soon. Now’s a great time to catch up on the episode archives. If you haven’t listened to Strong Towns podcasts before, it’s a format you might appreciate—a little more casual and conversational than our daily articles, and a space where we bring in tons of smart, thoughtful guests.
Finally, in case you didn’t see the announcement, we’re hiring an Office Assistant. (Our fantastic former Office Assistant, Missy, of the last two and a half years, left to take another job in July.) This position is partly remote, but requires a couple visits to our Brainerd office each week to complete in-office tasks. If you live in Central Minnesota and you’re interested in a flexible, family-friendly part-time job, please apply! And if you know someone who might be a good fit, please share the posting with them.
We hope you’re able to find some time for rest during the long weekend ahead.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Chuck: It was a shock to learn that Wick Allison, the publisher of D Magazine in Dallas, passed away this week at age 72 from a struggle with bladder cancer. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many people through my work at Strong Towns, but Wick’s powerful personality left more than a memorable impression. Our condolences go out to his entire family as well as the staff at D Magazine, which we know will continue to do inspiring work.
John: When people ask me where I’m from, it’s not an easy question to answer. I’m a third-generation Oregonian, and I live there now, as do my parents, grandparents, and most of my brothers. Yet I also spent many formative years in Kansas and Nebraska. I feel a strong emotional bond to those places, and the people there still feel like My People. So I’d like to claim dual citizenship with Oregon and the Midwest, if they’ll have me.
I bring that up because of how heartened I was—and even a little homesick—to read this piece in The Daily Yonder. More young Nebraskans want to stay in their hometowns, and changing norms around virtual work may be breaking down one of the major hurdles to making that happen. It’s also good to see that rural towns aren’t putting all their eggs in the virtual work basket, but are empowering people to “build communities with potential to attract and nourish new economic opportunities” and turn “their hometowns into places where residents thrive.” I can’t wait until I can go back and visit some of those great places again.
Lauren: Forgive the age of this NPR article about why vegetables reach mammoth sizes in Alaska. This week, someone I worked with in college posted photos of how he weighed his 45.1lb cabbage plant: by taking it to the Fairbanks International Airport and putting it on a luggage scale. Were it not for COVID-19, many gardening enthusiasts would have taken much larger produce to compete in the Tanana Valley State Fair in August, but just four years short of the event’s 100th anniversary, it was cancelled for the year. This is a winding way to say, there’s a very special kind of community in Alaska, where I grew up. That’s so often the direct result of the climate of the place, and it’s hard to watch a place you love be affected by the pandemic.
Rachel: This article in The Atlantic titled “A Stranger Helped My Family at Our Darkest Moment” was a weird but heartwarming read. I tend to avoid The Atlantic because it’s almost always filled with doom and gloom, predictive headlines along the lines of “Everything’s Screwed, We’re All Going to Die.” (No, seriously.) So I was pleasantly surprised by this essay about a scary experience in which a stranger stepped up to help. The author, Rachel Martin, reflects on how unusual even the simplest interaction with a stranger is today. We barely look at each other on the sidewalk and we shuffle quickly through the grocery store. That’s why this experience of a stranger jumping to someone’s aid was so striking. I’m a fairly introverted person and even I am starting to really miss random encounters. Martin writes:
[The] pandemic has made me realize how much I need even the most casual interactions with strangers. I need those people to feel less strange. I need to feel like we aren’t all floating around in our own bubbles, concerned only with the health, pocketbooks, and survival of ourselves and the ones we love. Because if we stop being able to connect with those we don’t know, if we stop being able to see ourselves in them, our empathy starts to atrophy. And then where are we as people? As a society? What are we left with?
Daniel: This is a great little history of an iconic housing type in Boston and other New England cities: the triple-decker. The article, without (I think) intending to, makes a strong case for the incremental development approach we champion at Strong Towns. It explains how triple-decker buildings arose in the late 19th century as an affordable alternative to the tenement model that became so infamous in other cities such as New York, who built triple-deckers (a startlingly broad variety of business owners, speculators and small-scale developers), and how they allowed many thousands of people to get a foothold in the housing market and build a bit of wealth.
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Finally, from Alexa and all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Matt Biggar, Jan Harnik, Dave Huber, Coby Lefkowitz, Angu Liu, Robert Morgan, Kevin Rezek, Robin Sampson, James Skaggs, Garrett Tyson, and Andrew Wright..
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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.