Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Next week here at Strong Towns, we'll be releasing a new series—by Senior Editor Daniel Herriges—that's all about incremental development. Up until the past few decades, America's cities grew through the work of many hands, often at breathtaking speed. Today, however, we experience almost all real-estate development as the province of big, aloof, corporate entities who go where the money is.
In this upcoming, five-part series of articles, Herriges asks what it would take to bring back small-scale, incremental development in a big way. And that question takes him to South Bend, Indiana, where a growing network of homegrown “town makers” is transforming the city’s neighborhoods. Whether you're someone who's new to the idea of incrementalism or someone who's already interested in (or skeptical about) the concept, we think you're going to find this series fascinating. Keep an eye out for it, and sign up for our email list to get updates on all our content!
Comment of the Week:
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Christa: As someone who lives in a relatively small town that has no public transportation and is not highly walkable, this short segment from the September 26th episode of CBS Sunday Morning caught my attention. It highlights the current Automania exhibition at the MoMA and focuses on this country’s obsession with, and dependence on, the automobile. The exhibit is named after the 1963 Oscar nominated film “Automania 2000,” which is definitely worth watching.
Image via Unsplash.
Chuck: I know that Elon Musk is a hero to many (I get pushback from the masses any time I criticize him), but I continue to think of him as this era’s P.T. Barnum, more flim flam man than visionary leader, albeit at a time when being a huckster can also easily make a millionaire into a billionaire. Part of the mystique is the rebel persona, such as how he pushes back on regulators and standard industry practices. On that one, I’m not going to throw stones from my own glass house, but instead note that there is a big difference between what we are doing to elevate the practice of city building, and what Musk is doing by installing “insane mode” in his vehicles, which encourages drivers to accelerate more quickly, turn more sharply, and drive more aggressively. Clearly, we don’t share the same vision of the future.
Michelle: I feel like Chuck has been a presenter at a variety of national and international virtual conferences, and next week he will be presenting at the Housing Solutions Summit for the second time. This event is set up to provide information from a lot of different speakers on the crisis in housing affordability. Check it out!
Image via Zillow.com.
Daniel: Zillow wants to buy your house. Then it wants to turn around and resell it quickly after some modest repairs—oh, but don’t call it “flipping.” And nobody is quite sure what effect this will have on the American housing market, says this Vice article. (Did you get an ominous feeling in your stomach just then? Me, too.) This piece offers a window into the thinking of the companies aiming to become ubiquitous high-tech middlemen in the housing market—and the staggering sums of money they’re talking about committing toward this goal. This activity didn’t cause the skyrocketing cost of homes we’re seeing today (if you’re looking for one single culprit, you won’t find it), but it is part of the wave of big financial players looking to cash in on it, possibly driving things even higher in the process.
Erik Bootsma. (Image via NBC12.)
John: I receive weekly emails from the local school district telling me which bus routes are cancelled now and which are coming back online. My family is fortunate to live within less than 1.5 miles of our kids’ schools. But what about the families that don’t live within easy walking, biking, and driving distance? What about the families whose work schedules make it challenging to take their kids to and from school? Parents and guardians are being forced to constantly adapt, and I imagine it’s hard to make plans too far in advance.
I received another email this week—this one from Sharon Shaw, a Strong Towns advocate in Richmond, Virginia. She wanted to make sure I’d seen a recent news story about how another Strong Towns member, Erik Bootsma, was getting around the bus driver shortage. Each morning, Erik pedals his kids to school in a specially made Bunch Bike. Bootsma, whose father is Dutch, was inspired by the biking culture in the Netherlands. “My leg power and a little bit of electric power,” he told NBC12. “Plug in the battery once every week, and that’s about all I have to do. It’s nice not to be inhaling fumes and sitting in traffic.”
The reasons for the bus driver shortage are myriad. As my colleague Daniel Herriges wrote last month, one of those reasons is that we have spent decades making it harder to get kids to school without a car or school bus: closing and consolidating schools, making our roads unsafe for kids to walk and bike, relegating public transportation to an afterthought. Addressing this underlying problem in a smart, resilient way will take a Strong Towns approach. We’re proud (and grateful) that Strong Towns advocates like Sharon and Erik are leading the way in Richmond.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Ric Amis, Eleni Caryotakis, Kevin Craft, Bill Doyle, Ernst Grunow, Kevin Hoctor, James Hoppel, James Lenington, Andrina Ramsey, and Benjamin Weil.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!