Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Nominations are now open for the Strongest Town Contest! For the seventh consecutive year, our members, readers, and listeners are invited to nominate their town or city for embodying the Strong Towns approach to building stronger and more financially resilient communities. We're not looking for places that are already perfect, but rather those towns and cities that are doing the hard work of becoming stronger, putting in place the processes, systems, and commitments that build enduring resilience and long-term prosperity.
Does that sound like your community? If so, you can nominate your city or town using this form!
In other exciting news, the Local-Motive Tour kicks off next week with our first session, “4 Quick Zoning Code Reforms for a Strong Town”! 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 Strong Towns Podcast episode “Jarrett Walker: ‘Prediction and Freedom Are Opposites’.” Check it out here to join in on the discussion!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: Epsilon Theory.)
Chuck: I recently finished the book Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller, which parallels that (in many ways, deeper) work being done by Ben Hunt over at Epsilon Theory. Ben is a true intellectual pioneer and his columns have had a big impact on my strategic thinking, but he’s taking it to a new level with Part 1 of a series called Narrative and Metaverse (Parts 2 & 3 are forthcoming). In this piece, Ben—an expert in the study of narratives and how they shape markets and society—describes narrative in physical form, as something that exists physically within the neurons of our brains and is transmitted to other neurons in others’ brains, like an intellectual virus. In other words, narratives live and die, similar to how a virus lives and dies, in conjunction with us and simultaneously (because of the cross transmission) somewhat independent of us. It’s a fascinating insight I’m working to get my mind wrapped around.
Lauren: This music video parody of Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” about how cities stifle new construction is pretty funny, especially with its nods to the original, very extra, music video. In recent weeks, Strong Towns has published several new articles (from Daniel Herriges and Marlene Druker) about how zoning reform can help open up opportunities to house more people and make communities more financially resilient, so this topic was already on my mind. If it’s been on yours and you are interested in learning more, there’s also a live workshop coming up you might want to check out.
(Source: Karla Theilen.)
Rachel: Shameless plug, but: Our Neighborhood Storyteller has been knocking it out of the park with her weekly columns. Karla’s column this week was about shopping at a locally-owned business for a mattress for her aging father. It reminded me of my own mattress shopping experience a few years ago when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Similarly, we got a recommendation to head to a nearby family-run store where the owner expertly walked us through all the options, offered us a good deal, and told us exactly what to expect. When we outsource all of our manufacturing and move our consumer world online, we lose these insights and connections, not to mention the opportunity for local business owners to make a living they can be proud of. Just one of many lessons I’ve already appreciated reflecting on through Karla’s columns. If you’re not reading them, you should be. Catch them every Tuesday morning on our site (or sign up for our email list to get notified when new articles are published).
(Source: Unsplash.)
John: One of my resolutions this year was to read more local news. I canceled nearly all the national news emails I was getting. Then, I subscribed to the print edition of the Statesman Journal, the daily newspaper closest to me. Over coffee, I catch up on the stories everyone else knew about yesterday. For some folks, not being up-to-the-minute-in-the-know would be unsettling. For me, it’s become a relief. All the emails I used to get, the breaking news alerts, the hot takes on social media—it was like having a Teletype machine inside my head. Plus, I get to do the crossword puzzle, and my seven-year-old and I read the comics together.
The best part of switching to the daily local newspaper has been the local articles: the news items, announcements, opinion pieces, and human interest stories I would never have seen otherwise. The issues I read about are more likely to be ones over which I have some agency. And these are articles about my neighbors, more or less.
I recently read about a nonprofit called Michelle’s Love that has an approach to caring that strikes me as so simple, so lovely. They help single parents with cancer (mostly single mothers) pick up the slack. Support comes in all shapes and sizes: help paying rent, mortgage, or utilities, meal deliveries, cleaning the house, etc. The article introduced a woman in Salem named Lisa Painter. Painter cares for three of her own children, as well as a granddaughter. She also has stage 3 breast cancer. A small, benevolent army of Michelle’s Love volunteers descended on Painter’s house and cleaned bathrooms, changed light bulbs and smoke detectors, replaced a broken lawn mower, and more. Reading the article my heart went out thrice: to Lisa Painter as she undergoes chemotherapy and cares for her family; to Michelle’s Love for doing what needs doing; and, yes, to my local paper for bringing me the story.
(Source: Bloomberg CityLab.)
Jay: Have you ever been in Portland, Oregon, when it’s 116 degrees? Last summer, my young kids and I visited my brother’s family in the Rose City in the aftermath of a heat wave that killed more than 500 people in the Pacific Northwest. It was hot enough that we haven't forgotten. Neither have a group of young climate change protesters taking on the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) over highway expansions there.
In October, “Youth Vs. ODOT” trick-or-treated the state agency by knocking on their door to deliver demands. Over the holidays they sang spicy, climate-themed carols like “You better watch out/You better not lie/You better stop letting Oregonians die.” They are still there, writes Laura Bliss in her CityLab piece “The Road Warriors.” I’ve followed Bliss’ top-notch transportation writing for a couple years and in this article she wonders—as do I—how $350 billion in federal highway funding from the Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act will be spent. “States have the flexibility to spend a lot of that money on public transit, bike lanes, electric vehicles and other lower-carbon choices,” Bliss writes. “But there has been little indication—even from progressive governors—that the vast majority will be used for anything other than roads.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Mac Beard, William Chaney, Tyler Clark, Heidi De Vries, C-Stanley Eby, Joseph Izaguirre, Laura Judd, Hillary Kwiatek, Nick Lanata, Jennifer LaPlante, Ethan Miller, Tim Morgan, Adam Nuwer, Aaron Osowski, Susan Sons, Ronnie Tidwell, Joan Vannorsdall, Michael Wolcott, Dorothy Wong, and Nicholas Wynn.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!