Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
The biggest news here at Strong Towns is that, last week, Strong Towns filed a free speech lawsuit in federal district court against the Minnesota Board of Licensure. It is vitally important—not to mention a constitutional right—that reform movements like Strong Towns be allowed to advocate for much-needed changes to the engineering profession and practices, without fear of retaliation. To learn more about why we decided to take this solemn step, you can read our announcement here. We’ve also created a separate landing page where you can read the full complaint and get some additional context on our reform efforts.
In the meantime, the work of Strong Towns goes on, not just by staff, but by many thousands of Strong Towns advocates working to build lasting strength and prosperity in their communities. We recently got to celebrate a few of those amazing advocates when Chuck Marohn traveled to Lockport, Illinois, to celebrate that town’s Strongest Town win. Lockport TV broadcast the event live, and it is now available on YouTube, too.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Photograph of North Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Image via Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Daniel: One hundred years ago, on May 31, 1921, a white mob in Tulsa, Oklahoma, attacked and burned to the ground what was then the wealthiest Black community in the United States, the Greenwood District. The massacre left somewhere from dozens to hundreds of people dead, 10,000 homeless, and an entire neighborhood in ruins. This interactive feature from the New York Times uses a range of archival resources to reconstruct the fabric of Greenwood, including the buildings, names of individual businesses, and histories and photos of some of their proprietors. It is a stunning re-creation, not of the violence itself that is best remembered today, but of the tremendous value (in every sense, not just monetary) once contained in the rich and complex community that was Greenwood. I believe this kind of remembrance is vitally important for all of us as a society.
Rachel: This article from Reasons to be Cheerful tells the beautiful story of a city in Germany that has become devoted to being a more “aging-friendly” community, where people in later years of life can thrive and be happy. The city of Arnsberg has a small office in the local government called the “Department of Future Aging,” and just a couple staff people have been able to spark thousands of connections and conversations between residents about how to support and empower older adults. The city learned a lot from a survey of residents over 50 a few years back, and created this new approach in response. “Until that point,” the article explains, “the city’s approach to aging had been classically ‘deficit-oriented’—focused on what seniors could no longer do and primarily putting resources into nursing homes, rather than creating programs that capitalized on what they could still offer.” New benches and wayfinding signs, a community café, and many more ideas have sprung up as part of Arnsberg’s approach to being an “aging-friendly” city.
Chuck: Dear Winnipeg brings me back to the early days of Strong Towns and the free and fun blogging I was doing back then. Only, in contrast to my early writings trying to figure things out, Dear Winnipeg is on message and consistently nails it, providing valuable insights about their place. People often ask me how they can start building their own local movement for change. My first advice is to build your own pack—your own group of people who are working together on the project—and then, find someone who can communicate ideas so you can grow your sphere of influence. Dear Winnipeg is one of the best I’ve seen: add it to your regular reading list.
Image via Flickr.
John: For the second week in a row I’m recommending an article about the San Joaquin Valley. It turns out the city of Corcoran, California (pop. 21,960) is sinking. Over the past 14 years, some areas of Corcoran have sunk as much as 11.5 feet. Experts predict the city will sink by another 6–11 feet by 2040. The reason for the sinkage? Not bad luck with nature, but rather agriculture. For generations, big farming operations in the drought-prone Central Valley have been extracting huge amounts of groundwater, sometimes from wells that plunge a quarter-mile deep or more. As the water is removed, the clay compacts, causing what’s known as “subsidence.” The area of land around Corcoran that is sinking is so vast, and the subsidence process is so slow, that its impact on people’s lives has been mostly imperceptible. That may be changing as more infrastructure must be repaired, replaced, or protected. Mitigation efforts are getting costly for taxpayers in a town where the median household income is about half the national value.
For the second week in a row I’m also recommending that people in the San Joaquin Valley read our ongoing series, “Breaking Out of the Resource Trap.” The story out of Corcoran is a reminder that pinning your community’s entire future on one extractive industry—whether that’s mining, logging, industrial agriculture, etc.—puts you on shaky ground. Sometimes literally.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Mark Kelly, Guy Smith, Racheal Hoover, Lanie Keen, Bryan Graveline, Zannah Noe, Norman Richards, Joe Jacobson, Daniel Molina, Janis A. Devereux, Joseph Roskowski, Jocelyn Gibson, Brenden Regulinski, Sophie Michals, Florence N. Martin, Willem Maathuis, Lindsey Meek, James Jenner, Andrew Giraldi, Trung Dung Nguyen, Alex Boston, Byron Lubenkov, Elise Rapoza, Elizabeth Hoenig, David Peters, R. M. Thomson, Brett Pulley, Jeff Rother, Roberto Lambert, Andreas Norman, Brendan Abley, Ahmad Raza, Robert Meyer, Leah Loversky, Sean Walsh, Jeremy Shackett, S. Olivia Barbee, Cindy van Empel, Rebekah Spearman, Melinda Fleming, and Morgan Hooker.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!