Streets Are for Building Community Wealth. Here’s Why That’s So Important.

A street is a platform for building community wealth. This has been one of the core insights of Strong Towns since the earliest days of my writing. A road is a high-speed connection between two places, but a street is about building wealth within a place. Real, measurable, financial wealth.

There is a certain segment of our audience that has never liked that description, and I get that. They don’t like the idea that the objective of a street is to build wealth. We aspire to great things in this movement—higher things, in many ways—and financial wealth can seem like a reduction of those higher ideals.

Others have concerns with the implications of a strategy for building wealth. They assume, incorrectly, that wealthy neighborhoods mean neighborhoods of wealthy people. While neighborhoods of wealthy people can sometimes be places that build wealth for the community, it’s generally not the case. And, as we’ve demonstrated here numerous times, from Taco John’s to the study of Lafayette, it is the poorest neighborhoods where we often find the most wealth creation. And, yes, we’re still talking about real, financial wealth.

Some want to reduce the street to something physical, almost mechanical. When we announced our Safe and Productive Streets campaign, one audience member suggested that streets are a “location for endpoints,” stuff like houses and businesses. Such a utilitarian reduction of a street—making it something like a network with nodes—ignores the way streets work in the real world. Most humans are not so reductionist about their own habitat. At their best, streets are something we feel an emotional connection to.

Along those lines, I also typically hear from people who want streets to be more than just platforms for building wealth, as if building wealth is merely a representation of financial transactions and not a reflection of all that “more” we aspire to. Yes, great streets will be safe for kids and seniors. Yes, great streets will often have trees and ornamentation. And, yes, great streets will be beautiful. Incidentally, all these things are reflected in the calculation of wealth, if not directly than certainly obliquely. 

I appreciate where all of these objections come from, but I want to reiterate that streets are for building wealth, and I want to explain why that is such an important thing.

Put yourself in a meeting, a local city council meeting. Some proposal is being debated: maybe there is a new development going in, maybe a street is being widened, or maybe something else. I’ve been in this situation more than a hundred times, and it always goes the same way.

Someone gets up and voices a concern. It’s a legitimate concern and they are well spoken. People listen. Then another person gets up and does something similar. A long line of concerns are voiced—environmental, social, cultural—and all are respectfully heard.

Then someone gets up and makes an argument about economic growth. We need this particular thing to be approved because it will create growth. We need it because it will create jobs. We need it because the economic development authority wants it, the chamber of commerce supports it, or because some business owner says they’ll be hurt without it.

I sat through a ridiculous number of such meetings, in all kinds of different places, and I watched the argument about economic growth prevail over everything else. This happened time and time again, nearly without fail. The other concerns will be heard and there might even be some attempt to address them, but not if it imperils the economic growth argument. The push for economic growth is the dominant motivator at most city halls.

And nearly all modern economic growth projects are bad projects because they ultimately destroy community wealth. They actually cost more over the long term than they provide in revenue for the community. 

(Source: Unsplash.)

We can debate whether measurements of economic growth are a valid or meaningful statistic at the macroeconomic level of measurement, but there is no defense of it at the community level. For a municipality, a measurement of the number of transactions that occur within its boundaries is as useless a measure of reality as a measurement of spending is to a family. Things might be going well, or they might not, but measuring the size of your local economy doesn’t give much insight, either way. 

Wealth creation, however, is an economic metric strongly correlated to financial success. When we are trying to build wealth in a place, we focus on top line (growth) and bottom line (excess revenue, aka profit) at the same time. To build wealth in a community, we need patterns that produce more community revenue than expense, and that gap of profit needs to be retained locally. Do that with intention over a long enough period of time and you’ll have immense capacity to do positive things. 

By focusing on wealth creation as the objective, we address the underlying financial reality driving local government investment decisions, while also getting beyond the dynamics of the Growth Ponzi Scheme. 

And, on the ground, wealth creation correlates with many of the things people want to experience. In fact, it was only after years of trying to understand the negative financial implications of our current development pattern, and then searching for what did work, that I came to recognize how essential wealth creation was and how well it aligned with a project of bottom-up neighborhood building.

Streets designed for humans on foot build more wealth than those designed for automobile throughput, and it’s not even close. Streets designed to be safe for people walking and biking build more wealth than those designed primarily to accommodate automobiles. Streets that use good urban design, focus on building a sense of place, and connect by biking and walking to a surrounding neighborhood dramatically outperform, in terms of wealth creation, any collection of auto-oriented streets we can construct.

As Strong Towns advocates, we need to continually refocus the local conversation around wealth creation, a hard measurement of dollars retained in the community. How do our efforts build or destroy our local capacity to accomplish things? If we force the answer to that question, the conversation your community is having will abruptly shift toward a Strong Towns direction.

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