Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Psst, guess what? The Strongest Town Contest is coming up soon, and between you and me, the application form will be released next week. Keep an eye out for it on Monday, and get ready to nominate your Strong Town for a chance to compete for the title of 2022 Champion!
By the way, the first Local-Motive session is also coming up in only two weeks—do you have your tickets yet? If not, grab them now to reserve your spot on this tour of 10 exciting one-hour sessions, all designed to equip you with the tools you need to take action and set your community on a path toward resilience and success!
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from the article “Eden Center: Is This Strip Mall Paradise?” Check it out here to join in on the discussion!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Michelle, Bonnie, and Joe Motherway, who now run Mr. D’s Food Center. (Source: The Daily Yonder.)
John: A moving story ran last week in The Daily Yonder about a family grocery store that, against long odds, has survived for some 75 years in Lander, Wyoming. They’ve been targeted by big grocery chains, weathered a pandemic, and are managing to stay open in the age of Amazon and Walmart. The story is a testimony not only to the resilience of Mr. D’s Food Center but also to the power of local business. Two-thirds of every dollar spent at a local business stays in the community, more than twice the rate of national chains. That money creates more local jobs, builds the overall prosperity of the community, and leads to more choice and diversity in the marketplace, among other economic and social benefits. “I think we need to be aware of what our dollar buys us,” says one of the family members who now helps run the store. “It’s not just buying the product. It also supports the whole infrastructure behind that product.” His sister Bonnie says, “We’re in the people business. We just happen to sell groceries.”
An interfaith group of clergy gathered at Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Community in Colleyville, Texas, to support law enforcement and the families of those taken hostage. (Source: Religious New Service.)
Rachel: We often share fun and entertaining links in Friday Faves but today I need to take a more serious tone. Last Saturday, during the hostage standoff at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, a story that hasn’t made many headlines involves the interfaith network of leaders and neighbors who stood by to offer support and help negotiate with the terrorist. This article from Religion News Service talks about the ongoing connections that Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker had with fellow priests and imams in his town and the power of those friendships during this moment of crisis. While in the end the hostages freed themselves, the support and prayers of this group of people from different religious backgrounds clearly played a vital role in diffusing the standoff, and offering healing to those impacted. In all of our communities, these connections no doubt exist between very different sorts of people—people that national media narratives would have us believe could never be friends. And in a crisis, these quiet friendships become essential. I hope we can all do our part to create more of them.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
Jay: When I worked as a non-profit community development director in very diverse communities in Anchorage, Alaska, it wasn’t always possible for everyone to agree on our priorities beyond safe streets, good schools, and affordable housing. The thing which might capture the community imagination and spur us on to action was unpredictable, but you knew it when you saw it. I worked with a group of people in the formerly red-light district of Spenard to rescue a 22-foot-tall Neon palm tree which sat in front of a terrible bar for many years. People saw this broken, pigeon-poop covered hulk as an icon—a symbol for the neighborhood—and they came out of the woodwork to make sure it didn’t leave the neighborhood when the bar was shut down in a drug bust.
In Oakland, California, there was a battered little Buddha statue Dan Stevenson and his wife put in a traffic median. They dropped it in there one day while they were picking up garbage and it became a symbol for placemaking, community, and neighborhood identity. Hope you enjoy this greatest hits 99% Invisible episode, “He’s Still Neutral.”
(Source: Old Urbanist.)
Daniel: Charlie Gardner, aka “The Old Urbanist,” hasn’t updated his blog since 2016, but the archives are full of brilliant and insightful reading, including this decade-old post that I recently stumbled upon. At Strong Towns, we tend to trace North America’s suburban experiment to the rise of mass automobile ownership and commuter freeways, but Gardner points out that the seeds of it may have been sown much earlier. By the late 19th century, the uniquely American idea of a commuter “downtown” as a centralized business district, surrounded by residential neighborhoods, had already taken hold. With it came the idea of separating the functions of a city into discrete zones, which would later (in its turbocharged form of late 20th-century suburbia) prove vastly destructive of cities’ resilience and financial productivity. In the comments (also worth reading), Gardner and others contrast this pattern to the complete neighborhoods that characterized—and still characterize—European and Asian cities, where commerce and entertainment are much more likely to be intermingled with residences.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Hollie Berry, Susan Braun, Matthew Buchanan, Bradley Caffee, Orlando Cardozo, Stephen Chin, Tia Cole, Steven Eames, David Fellner, Steve Gardner, Stanley Green, Chase Howard, Jesse Kireyev, Frank Martz, Doug Monteith, Landon Morgan, Steven Reeves, Chris Rink, Rowland Rose, Karen Rugg, Troy Sankey, and Mike Walker.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!