Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
This week, we welcomed a new staff member to the Strong Towns team: Norm Van Eeden Petersman, our Member Advocate! We’ll introduce Norm properly next week, but in the meantime, check out his Friday Fave below.
Also stay tuned for a special article that’s set to publish on Monday, written by Congressman Jake Auchincloss. We’re excited to see the Strong Towns movement reaching all the way up to Congress—although this isn’t the first time we’ve heard from Rep. Auchincloss. If you haven’t already, check out this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, were both he and Rep. Mike Gallagher spoke with Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn!
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Example of a 1950s “dingbat” apartment façade. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
Norm: Did you know that a dingbat is a type of housing? Have you thought about the origins and uses of front porches? Do you always read the plaques you find in the world around you? For my inaugural Friday Faves pick, I selected the 500th episode of the 99% Invisible podcast, because it answers these questions and more! I am a huge fan of the podcast’s core insight that careful observation of the built environment will yield rich rewards. As host Roman Mars put it, they tell stories about “how specific bits of the built world have shaped us” in the form of “love letters to the built world.”
This episode on aspects of vernacular in the built environment really resonated with me. One of the highlights of my recent trip to Lethbridge, Alberta, was walking around the downtown core with my brother-in-law (who is also a Strong Towns member) observing the way that the built world impacts us. We tried to read every plaque, assess the placement and condition of every street tree, and put ourselves in the shoes of others who traverse the streets. I’d never looked at the fine-grained details of my hometown in that way before and it made me love where I came from a little bit more.
(Source: Unsplash.)
Rachel: Earlier this week, we shared Strong Towns advisory board member, Gracy Olmstead’s essay, “One Year Without a Car (With Kids),” a republish from her lovely newsletter, Granola. One of her newsletter readers also wrote a thoughtful response piece, musing on his own experience riding the bus with his children and how it provided such a welcome change of pace from the usual franticness of constantly driving from here to there. “When you commute places by car, your attention during the commute is necessarily focused on driving. And when you have arrived at your destination or are back home, there’s always something (and usually several somethings) that need your attention. ... But yesterday while we sat at the bus stop waiting, I just looked around at downtown Lincoln. ... Something similar happens on the bus, of course: You don’t need to pay attention to the road. If you know when you need to get off, then you can just sit and wait, not thinking about anything in particular or doing any particular work during that time.”
This is 100% my experience with taking public transit, too. Not only is it better on the wallet, better for the planet, safer than a car, and all the myriad benefits that buses and trains bring, it’s also just more pleasant and relaxing to sit in a bus seat and watch the world go by. It allows you to really pay attention to the city around you in a way that you never can from behind a car windshield.
(Source: Unsplash.)
John: At Strong Towns we sometimes talk about the “Infrastructure Cult.” It’s the idea that the one thing Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on is that the road to prosperity is paved—literally, paved—by spending trillions on infrastructure. As Chuck Marohn wrote in the Strong Towns book, the “collective belief in the power of infrastructure spending is now so deeply embedded within our society that we struggle to identify it as belief, let alone systematically question it. We take it as truth, unequivocally.” Reading this interview with economist Herman Daly, I was reminded that there’s also a kind of Growth Cult.
Daly says, “Every politician is in favor of growth, and no one speaks against growth or in favor of steady state or leveling off. But I think it’s an elementary question to ask: Does growth ever become uneconomic?” For decades, Daly has been a voice in the wilderness, asking us to examine our underlying assumptions about growth, and advocating for what he describes as steady state or ecological economics. “I’m not against growth of wealth,” Daly told The New York Times. “I think it’s better to be richer than to be poorer. The question is, Does growth, as currently practiced and measured, really increase wealth? Is it making us richer in any aggregate sense, or might it be increasing costs faster than benefits and making us poorer? Mainstream economists don’t have any answer to that.”
(Source: Unsplash.)
Chuck: I’ve been doing a lot of compiling of thoughts and notes on the finance of housing and how the housing market has been unmoored from reality. The big part of the answer is that the housing market is a component of the overall “market” and that has, for nearly all of my adult life, been unmoored from reality, increasingly so each year. As always, Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory does a brilliant job of connecting the dots, explaining how we pulled future prosperity forward into today and how that has consequences we’re only beginning to understand.
Stephen King writing in the 1980s.
Daniel: This isn’t the first time I’ve shared the writing of frequent Strong Towns contributor Addison Del Mastro in this space, but this essay of his, for The Bulwark, is essential reading. In it, Addison writes that NIMBYism—the “not in my backyard” aversion to change that drives a lot of local politics around growth and development—is a “distorted love” of a place that ultimately confuses its built appearance, or certain nostalgic attachments, with its essence. Addison’s writing sidesteps the usual urbanist culture-war pitfalls. He is genuinely sympathetic to the world view of this kind of “NIMBY” and writes very authentically and not disparagingly about how to square the abiding love of a place or community, in all its particularities, with the understanding that to truly love a place is to let it change. Gradually, but constantly. For that matter, it strikes me that the same is true of loving a person. We will ultimately only stifle what we love (places, or people) when we reject that lesson.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Anna Bailliekova, Wayne Breton, Maria Casey, Michael Daly, Linda DuPriest, Rebecca Edwards, Salvador Erivez, Dana Eyre, Robert Jones, William Koehrsen, Riley Konsella, Nicholas Lineback, Kevin Lyons, Patrick McClanahan, Erin Murphy, Rebecca Murphy, David Ochsner, Edmond Rieffer, Brighid Rose, Edward Sanders, Paul Trombino III, Jeremiah Via, Victoria Via, and Brett Woslager.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!