Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

This week, our team (especially Chuck) has been hard at work preparing a new resource about economic development that we’re excited to share with you soon. It’s our Year of Action at Strong Towns and we’re focused on creating and providing tools that will help you take action in your own community.

On a related note, for the next few weeks, we’re also offering a special 20% discount on our new course “Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach” and a 20% discount on our full eight-course bundle, too. Why are our communities going broke? Why does increased investment never seem to pay off? And most importantly, what’s a better way forward, one that strengthens our towns and cities from the bottom-up? Learn the answers to these and many other questions in the Strong Towns Academy. Grab those discounts before they’re gone.

Another great place to get your questions answered is our Action Lab. We’ve got an ongoing space to submit questions to Strong Towns. The ones with enough votes will be answered by Strong Towns staff, and our members are jumping in to answer questions, too.  

Alright, here’s your links for weekend reading.

Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:

Rachel: I’m moving across the country in a couple of weeks, so this article in Christian Century caught my attention. It explores motivations for relocating and talks about the writer’s choice to move—not for a cheaper cost of living or a new job—but to be nearer to friends. This decision may seem unusual in an American culture that is caught up in self-bettering, independence, and accumulation of stuff, and that’s a shame. “In the United States, we prize the self as the key to happiness and the good life,” writes Heidi Haverkamp. “Perhaps this is why loneliness has become so endemic. We may have crippled ourselves with our focus on the personal, the individual, the wellness of me instead of us. … There are many ways to find happiness and fulfillment in this life. The most important, and the easiest, may simply be spending time enjoying our relationships and friendships.”

Linda: I loved this photo gallery of mosaics created by an anonymous artist based in Lyon, known as EmEmem. “His work involves filling potholes and cracked walls on city streets with beautiful mosaic designs, a process he calls ‘flacking’—a play on the French word flaque, meaning puddle or patch.” It reminded me of the Japanese art of kintsukuroi—repairing a piece of pottery with gold or silver lacquer, with the understanding that breakage and repair is part of its history, and the piece is more beautiful for having been broken. It also reminded me of this quote by Terry Tempest Williams: “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”

Lauren: Warning: this is the story of a close brush with death, and as such contains a verbal account of injury and emergency, and footage of still-healing scars. I take very seriously any story that so moves my husband that he shares it with me. This one was worth the follow-up. Scott Allen DeShields, Jr., the Youtuber known as Kentucky Ballistics, gives a blow-by-blow of his recent nearly fatal—and highly unlikely—firearm accident. His survival was an earned miracle. Both he and his father, who played a huge part in saving his life, are professionally trained in emergency preparedness, which allowed them to act quickly and correctly. And although it’s not explicitly mentioned in the video, this story is a beautiful testament to the intense trust and love that can exist between men.

Image via Unsplash.

Chuck: I acknowledge that I was wrong about general inflation following the housing crisis (the capacity of the economy to suck up printed dollars by inflating assets and other protected sectors without raising the price of milk, bread, meat, gasoline, clothes, and other essentials taught me something) but, as many of you know, I’m still long-game betting on currency-wrecking levels of inflation. Some of you also know that, despite my apprehension over monetary debasement, and my appearances on some bitcoin podcasts, I’m not a crypto currency advocate. This article by Ben Hunt reflects the best case for Bitcoin and summarizes my apprehension (although Ben is more pro-crypto than I am). Once you are done reading that, check out Remy’s Dogecoin Rap and join me in having this stupidly clever, but catchy, song in your head this weekend.

Daniel: There’s been no shortage of headlines about the stratospheric real-estate market in big U.S. cities, but even so, this was a new one for me: aggressive investment firms seeking huge paydays by buying up income-restricted affordable housing complexes, with the intent of hiking the rents when the restrictions (which are usually 15 or 30 years) expire. The details of how they’re able to do this are messy and have to do with the convoluted structure of the tax-credit deals that finance most low-income housing, to begin with. This exposé is worth a read if you want to get in the weeds. It’s an object lesson in America’s dysfunctional approach to housing, where the goal of affordability and stability for tenants is perpetually at odds with the broader economy’s dependence on reliable profits for those who buy and sell real estate.

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Tyler Moldovan, Matthew Ahlschwede, Yufan Lou, Scott Peters, Lily Kelly, Paul Nelson, Michele Johnstone, Charles Saxe, and Jessica Schouten.

Your support helps us provide tools, resources and community to people who are building strong towns across the country.

What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!