How Local Heroes Are Building Strong Towns Across North America
Strong Towns advocates see better than most what we are up against — what we are actually up against.
They see fraying city budgets, and they see what’s behind all those unfixed potholes, crumbling infrastructure, understaffed public safety departments and growing backlogs of unfunded maintenance.
They see a built environment often hostile to people on foot and bikes, and they see the pattern that underlies it.
They see the housing crisis and the dysfunction at its root.
They see a hollowed-out downtown and understand why it has more empty storefronts than actual visitors.
Just as the character Neo eventually learned to see the computer code giving rise to the simulated reality of the Matrix, Strong Towns advocates like you have learned to see the Suburban Experiment, the underlying “code” that is making our communities less safe, less inviting and more financially fragile.
What’s great about my job as Strong Towns' community builder is that I get to work every day with more than 200 Local Conversations around the U.S. and Canada. The people who make up these local Strong Towns groups not only see the root problem of the Suburban Experiment but also know what their communities could be — stronger, safer, more financially resilient — and are working to make it happen.
Here are just a few recent examples:
As the Charlotte Urbanists hosted monthly neighborhood walks in their city, they noticed that many of the bus stops in Charlotte’s poorest neighborhoods didn’t offer even a modicum of comfort and support for transit riders. So the group built and installed a bus bench on their own. And then they built another. And then another. To date, they have installed more than 80 bus benches around the city. What’s more, the Charlotte Urbanist bus campaign was held up as a proof-of-concept when the regional transit authority was deciding if it should spend millions of dollars of its own money to improve bus stops.
Bike Orem members wanted city council candidates to experience what it’s like to bike in Orem, Utah. They also wanted residents to have a chance to talk with candidates about the challenges and opportunities facing their town. So Bike Orem invited all 12 city council candidates on a bike ride. It was a way of exposing them to the city’s cycling infrastructure and to the people trying to improve it. Around 50 citizens participated in the ride, where they got to meet candidates and ask questions. Bike Orem later won a leadership award from the city council.
Not long ago, members of Strong Towns Grand Rapids heard that five downtown buildings were slated to be torn down for surface parking lots. They heard that the decision was irreversible, but they also knew that the last thing downtown Grand Rapids needed was more parking lots. So they organized a successful letter-writing campaign that halted demolition. On the other side of the state, members of Strong Port Huron were organizing a letter-writing campaign of their own. The campaign generated more than 400 letters, leading the city to re-evaluate its plans for a dangerous and unproductive stroad.
Last fall, Local Conversations in Portland, Oregon, and Denton, Texas, collaborated with other local advocacy groups to convert excess parking into more productive uses. Strong Towns PDX collaborated with the local chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism to fix a dangerous intersection. In just 80 minutes, they used paint, traffic cones and excess parking spots to narrow the street, improve the crosswalk and slow cars. Stronger Denton worked with 16 different local groups to convert excess parking spots into parklets and outside living rooms, with potted plants, games, couches, information tables and advocates ready to have conversations about Denton’s future.
After a fatal crash in Chattanooga, Strong Chattanooga helped rally people to speak up at city hall. Thirty-nine people testified. The city not only listened but acted, starting by temporarily narrowing the dangerous street using orange construction barrels while it finalized redesign plans.
When a child was hit by a car, Civic Cincinnati undertook its first tactical urbanism project to draw attention to the dangerous conditions for people living, walking and biking there…especially children.
Last month, the Alabama Urbanists helped rally support in Birmingham as that city unanimously passed parking reforms that eliminated parking minimums citywide.
Sacramento, California, effectively ended single-family-only zoning, creating what amounts to a new form-based code. It also introduced a vision for thickening up plots of land within a half-mile of existing and planned transit. One local advocate told us, “For 15 years there have been pockets of advocacy in Sacramento, but largely uncoordinated. Now it’s highly coordinated and I think [Strong SacTown] has been a big part of making that happen.”
As of this morning, there are 218 Local Conversations around North America. More than 140 of those groups were formed in just the last 19 months. In addition, more than a thousand people in more than 900 other communities have asked how to start a Local Conversation where they live.
These folks know what we are up against. But they also know that the Suburban Experiment isn’t inevitable. It is a blink of an eye in the long history of city-building. The Experiment has failed, and now thousands of Strong Towns advocates are pushing back through Local Conversations. They are doing the good, long work of building stronger and more financially resilient places.
When you become a Strong Towns member, you help people start new Local Conversations. You help provide these local heroes with more resources, more training, more staff time, more technical assistance and more encouragement. You also help bring more of their stories to the broader movement through articles, podcasts, videos and case studies.
Help grow and support this movement for change by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Strong Towns is a member-supported nonprofit that gives local leaders, technical professionals and involved residents the insights to make their communities strong and financially resilient. You can support this work by becoming a member today.
John Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. In this role, he works with advocates in hundreds of communities as they start and lead local Strong Towns groups called Local Conversations. John is the author of two books, most recently Slow Church (IVP), which takes inspiration from Slow Food and the other Slow movements to help faith communities reimagine how they live life together in the neighborhood. He also co-hosts The Membership, a podcast inspired by the life and work of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer, and activist. John and his family live in Silverton, Oregon. You can connect with him on Twitter at @johnepattison.
Want to start a Local Conversation, or implement the Strong Towns approach in your community? Email John.