Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Sam Ragucci in one of his favorite bookstores: Verbatim Books, in North Park, San Diego.
This week was all about infrastructure at Strong Towns. The White House recently released its “American Jobs Plan,” which outlines wide-reaching infrastructure spending goals, and Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn shared his reaction in a five-part series. Our take? Infrastructure investments must be more than a transaction. They have to make people better off. Infrastructure spending is harmful, not helpful, unless we ensure that every public dollar we spend has a real, productive return on investment. This is essential reading for our current moment, especially if you’re a local leader who wants to help your community toward a financially resilient future. Here’s the whole series:
“The American Jobs Plan Will Make Our Infrastructure Crisis Worse”
“The Half-Truth on Infrastructure at the Heart of the American Jobs Plan”
“When it Comes to Infrastructure, the American Jobs Plan is Business as Usual”
“The American Jobs Plan Delays Necessary Infrastructure Reform“
Also, a reminder that you have one week left to apply for our summer internship in partnership with Urban3. If you like writing and data, and want to be part of helping cities grow more financially strong and resilient (plus see your work featured on a national platform), please apply today!
Finally, make sure to join us back here on Monday for a big announcement. Alright, here are our links for the week.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Naomi Hattaway of Omaha, NE, repping her Strong Towns T-shirt.
Lauren: Do you have a Strong Towns t-shirt? Please send us your selfie! The Strong Towns movement is made up of enthusiastic people across North America, and everyone plays an important part. We want to show the faces that form the bottom-up revolution in future projects. If you’re interested in being one of those faces, take a selfie (or have someone snap a shot of you out and about in your community) and send it to me (lauren@strongtowns.org) with your name, and the state and city you live in. Here’s two submissions we’ve already received, one from Naomi Hattaway of Omaha, NE (left) and another from Sam Ragucci of North Park, San Diego (above). In addition, Sam shared this message with us:
“I live in a unique neighborhood of San Diego. North Park was a beautiful and walkable "streetcar suburb" of bungalows 100 years ago, but went downhill when many stores moved further out. Later, as a low-rent area, it attracted artists, then hipsters, and with the trend toward urbanism its location 2 miles from downtown made it desirable once again. We have a great mix of all kinds of folks here enjoying Balboa Park, one of a kind shops, and excellent food, craft beer and coffee. If you haven't been here, you should visit!" —Sam Ragucci”
Daniel: History is always messier than the narratives we use after the fact to impose legibility on past events. Transportation historian Sarah Jo Peterson does some mythbusting about the creation of the Interstate Highway System in this fascinating, well-researched essay. One of the myths Peterson dispels is that the architects of the system didn’t intend for highways to penetrate cities and encircle downtowns. In fact, in many places there were plans to do exactly that—and clear awareness of the communities that would be harmed and displaced—long before the bulldozers fired up. “Of course they knew,” Peterson argues, but what is true is that efforts to actually address or prevent these consequences fell short. And all that harm was greatly accelerated by the rush to build freeways everywhere once the 1956 Interstate Highway Act passed.
I think this kind of critical look at how destructive policies end up happening, even when the people involved aren’t naïve about the consequences, is absolutely crucial for everyone working in this field today.
Image via Sandy Carson / GalleryStock.
Rachel: It was exciting to see Strong Towns member and regular contributor Nolan Gray’s writing featured in The Atlantic this week. His essay, provocatively titled, “America Needs More Luxury Housing, Not Less,” provides clarity on the term “luxury housing” (often just a code word for “new housing”) and gives his take on why new apartments and condos are helpful for increasing overall housing access and affordability, even if you yourself won’t be living in them. Here’s a choice quote:
In the recent past, the typical NIMBY complaint was that new housing was too affordable, and thus a threat to “community character,” a term loaded with racial baggage. Today’s NIMBYism, savvy to a changing political landscape, makes hay opposing new housing on the basis that it isn’t affordable enough. [...] This story has captured the minds of many local policy makers. But it’s nonsense. For all the NIMBY pearl-clutching over the construction of luxury apartments and condos, American cities aren’t building enough of them.
Chuck: I have been waiting for conservatives to start embracing Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): the latest recycling of a time-honored tradition of currency debasement, but this time modernized with the veneer of educated sophistication. This article in the American Conservative is the first I’ve seen, but there will be more (after all, when it comes to Republican priorities, deficits don’t matter to them either). Perhaps the worst thing about MMT is how, with its seemingly intellectual foundations, it has anchored itself to a number of dramatic oversimplifications that plague economics—stuff like inflation. The idea that it is perfectly benign to print as much money as we want because sugar and apples and corn flakes are not going up in price, even though medicine, housing, college, and stocks are rocketing upward, is an absurdity only a true believer can so casually discount.
John: In this moving photo essay, writer and photographer Arati Kumar-Rao recounts a journey she took deep into the heart of Pemakö, a forested river gorge in Tibet. For centuries, this region has been a refuge for Tibetan Buddhists caught in the crosshairs of global geopolitics. It’s under threat again, not from advancing armies but from a race between Indiana and China to dam the rivers there. “The sites have been identified; when construction begins, vital old-growth forests, towns, hamlets, and whole swathes of Indigenous sacred lands and cultures will be submerged,” writes Kumar-Rao. She concludes:
...I trace with my feet the ancient rhythms of this still-beating heart of the Buddhist world. With every step there is a sense of reverence; with every other step there is a sense of impending loss, as I wonder how much longer before this, too, disappears into the maw of “progress.”
Linda: Last weekend, I binge-listened to the second season (seven episodes so far) of Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales podcast. Harford is an award-winning British economist, Financial Times columnist, BBC broadcaster, and author of several books, most recently The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics. His Cautionary Tales are “stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, daring heists and hilarious fiascos. They’ll delight you and scare you, but also make you wiser.”
Several of the podcast episodes this season touch on subjects covered in The Data Detective, which describes the science and psychology behind using strategies like patience, curiosity, and good sense to overcome our biases and better understand ourselves and the world, particularly with regard to statistical data. Among the interesting things I’ve learned while listening: Florence Nightingale was the mother of the infographic!
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Robert Narup, Juan Bran, William Long, Scott Peters, Leo Vrana, Hilman Lindsey, Alexander Harding, Bill Comerford, Camden Walsh, Bill Parker, Melynda Norriss, Johnathan Berard, Josh Kohler, Dylan Sullivan, and Jake Conrad.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!