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.
Hello from the team! The biggest news in our Strong Towns world this week is that we kicked off our Local-Motive online event tour with a fantastic presentation and conversation, featuring Charles Marohn (President of Strong Towns) and Ashwat Narayanan (Executive Director of Our Streets Minneapolis), all about how to choose your next bike lane battle. You can access the recording, plus two other pre-recorded sessions and all seven upcoming events by grabbing a roundtrip ticket to the Local-Motive Tour here.
You also still have a couple days left to apply for our newly announced Copy Editor/Designer position. We’ve already had a few savvy folks point out typos in the announcement itself so you can see… we need you!
Thanks for all that you’re doing out there to build strong towns, and thanks for supporting this movement along the way. Stay warm and well!
Betty, Lauren Fisher's muttsky, steps out into the first heavy snow she's seen in too many months. She thinks winter is really her color.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Lauren: If you like talking about the weather, I’ve got a fun factoid for you. Every year since 1917 in Nenana, Alaska (the city of fewer than 500 people I’m most inclined to call my hometown), locals set a tripod structure on the Tanana River and hold a contest to see who can guess when the ice will melt enough that the tripod falls through in the spring. People from all over the world purchase a ticket and guess the date, hour, and minute they think the tripod will sink into the river. In 2018, nearly 250,000 guesses were sold at $2.50 per guess. The money raised is used to benefit local organizations.
Tickets for the 2021 breakup went on sale Feb. 1, but my favorite part of the tradition has yet to take place. During a normal March, Main Street is blocked off in front of the community center and a big ol’ party called Tripod Days is held. There are local craft vendors, concessions, music, and contests for people of all ages. The unofficial motto of the day is “everybody gets a quarter”—the participation prize for competing to determine who has the prettiest (or dirtiest) Carhartts, who looks the most like their dad, or who can hula hoop the best. This year, festivities will likely be limited to outdoor fun such as pop scrambles and dog sled races. The commitment to tradition and community Nenana shows is surely one element of being a Strong Town.
Rachel: This was the weirdest story I’ve read in a while: a municipal government is trying to stop a coastal church from sharing its parking lot with beachgoers. There are lots of interesting nuances to the First Amendment questions that surround this issue, but what it really brings up for me is an important reminder that so many of the parking lots in our communities can be put to much better use. Churches are a prime example of a building that typically has plenty of parking sitting empty much of the week, and why not let it be used? The same goes for medical offices and schools—both of which are typically closed on the weekends. In fact, I used to attend a church across the street from a school and we had an explicit agreement with the school that we could use their large, empty parking lot on Sundays. It worked out well for everyone. Of course, an even better step would be to rethink whether we need these church or school or doctors’ office parking lots at all (or at least, do they need to be so big?). If you want to dig into that further, visit the Parking section of the Strong Towns Action Lab.
Michelle: Like a lot of people with a garden, we fight with groundhogs every summer. The person in this heartwarming video shared a solution to this problem, with some very adorable results.
Chuck: I referenced this article in my podcast on Monday. Especially for those who generally don’t fret over government spending or deficits (those that prioritize other urgencies), this is an accessible explanation of risk absent the predictions of certain doom that often accompany such pieces. I also appreciate it because Noah Smith doesn’t pretend to know the answer, just the right question. And it is the right question because we can borrow and print money up to the point that we can’t, and after that everything changes. It would be nice to have a better sense of where that point is, especially since we seem determined to run the experiment.
John: In 2020, two Michigan dams—both more than 90-years-old—failed, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. As Abby Kinney and Chuck Marohn discussed last May on an episode of our Upzoned podcast, there are more than 20,000 high-risk dams in the United States. But it turns out the U.S. isn’t the only country facing a crisis with its aging dams. According to a new U.N. report there are more than 19,000 large dams worldwide (“large” meaning taller than 49 feet) that are older than 50 years, with hundreds of millions of people living downstream. Fifty years is right around the time many such dams need major maintenance or removal. “The 20th century was a boom time for dam builders,” writes Fred Pearce in Yale Environment 360, and especially the 1950s through the 1980s. Right on schedule, the maintenance is coming due. Tragically, in the U.S. and around the globe, that maintenance is being kicked down the road—which means more failures, more displacement and damage, and, it’s reasonable to expect, the loss of many lives.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Stacy Atkins-Salazar, Hunter Austin, Glenn Barr, Better Neighbourhoods, Inc., Matthew Corkwell, Randy Danielson, Jim Fini, Mary Gronen, Pat Howlett, Phillip McGinn, Jonathan Neely, Shante Nixon, Molly O’Reilly, Daniel Romanko, Raija Suomela, and Neil Williams
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments.
Cover image via Tomek Baginski on Unsplash