“What Now?” How To Move From Awareness to Action as a Strong Towns Advocate

(Photo by ZED Images.)

An early version of the Strong Towns theory of change — something we worked internally to articulate, to help guide the organization’s growth and priorities — referenced the idea of “a million people who care.” The idea was that if we could broadly spread the word about the need for a better approach to growth and development in America’s cities and towns, and do so in a compelling enough way that those people would then spread the word themselves, then we could reach critical mass.

Exponential growth would, in a matter of years, get us to a point where America’s local governments could not ignore the Strong Towns movement.

Every startup aims for an impossible rate of adoption of their product or message. While we haven’t doubled our membership year over year since 2015 (a beyond-ambitious goal), the diffusion of this message has still been incredible.

I was riding my bike home recently from a standing-room-only book talk (for journalist Henry Grabar’s "Paved Paradise": a terrific, page-turning read about the harm done to our cities by parking mandates and subsidies). I stopped at a gas station to buy some milk. I hadn’t really paid attention to the fact that I was still wearing an “EXCESS PARKING RUINS CITIES” sticker on my shirt, until the 20-something cashier said, “Hey man, love your sticker. Right on.” We started talking.

Turns out, he grew up in the far exurbs of St. Paul, which he found extremely isolating. Getting anywhere of interest required having a ride, and nothing about the environment seemed to encourage a sense of community. Moving to the city after school had felt incredibly liberating — "I don’t even have a car of my own, but I can finally get places.” His coworker, who had wandered over, agreed emphatically.

He then told me, “And what’s crazier, did you know all those suburbs can’t even pay for themselves? Like, their taxes aren’t covering all the roads and stuff they build.”

He had no idea who I was. I asked him if he knew Strong Towns because the stuff he was saying sounded straight out of this cool advocacy organization he should know about. He vaguely knew the name because he’d heard about it from a couple of his favorite YouTube and TikTok creators. I told him to go check it out. (I left him a few Parking Reform Network stickers like the one I was wearing, too.)

I have these interactions more and more. There is an undeniable wellspring of sentiment, especially among many teens and young adults, that the prevailing way North America builds its cities is rotten. I keep meeting people who feel this viscerally. They’re angry that the roads in their community are scary to cross or to walk alongside. They know there isn’t enough housing in the places they want to live. They know the bus should be able to get you there, and they know it can’t. They know what it feels like to be in a public place that encourages human interaction and connection, and they know there aren’t many such places accessible to them. They want better.

The task is increasingly not to convince people of that. A really substantial number of people are convinced, and they want to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

What we as a movement are up against, though, is the fact that “getting to work” can feel like standing on the shore of Lake Superior with a bucket and someone saying, “Alright, let’s start emptying this sucker.”

From Building Awareness to Changing Default Practices

There is so much to change. Case in point, I had to go through three notably dangerous intersections just during that bike ride home, spots where many people walk and bike, but where the design encourages high-speed traffic movements. There are many people in my city who understand the problem, and a good number of those people work at City Hall. It’s just that there’s a staggering amount to fix and our public works department is in perpetual triage mode.

Now consider:

• There are nearly 36,000 municipal governments in the U.S.

• There are 500,000 local elected officials, including 135,000 city councilors and mayors.

• They oversee the work of 14 million local government employees.

• Local governments in the United States oversee 3 million miles of roadway, out of 4 million miles total.

The operating system by which North America creates the built environment is bad. It produces predictably bad consequences. And that operating system is being run in a staggering number of places. How do you change it?

Through my work, I’ve met many people who directly create the built environment (developers, architects, engineers and so on). The ones whose orbits I end up in are often working really conscientiously to give us better places to be. And they are constantly being stymied by dumb rules applied on autopilot.

Things that should be easy to do are hard to do. And things that do concrete harm to our communities are all too easy.

Building your standard, wide drag-strip of a suburban street: easy. Frictionless. There are almost no roadblocks if you’re a developer wanting to do this.

Building a cozy street that encourages slow speeds: good luck. You’ll have to convince the fire department their trucks will be able to navigate the neighborhood. You’ll have to convince the engineers that, yes, it’s okay to plant these trees next to the roadway, and, yes, it’s okay for that curve to be that tight and, yes, it’s okay for that corner not to be more rounded. You’ll need a lot of special permission and scrutiny.

For the most part, this won’t be a big-picture ideological battle about how cities ought to be built. It won’t be about convincing people that the kind of slow, humane street you’re trying to build is a nice place to live: a rendering or photo is enough to convince 90% of humans of that. No, your obstacle is something more mundane: a bad operating system. Pages and pages of checkboxes, each one of which imposes a little more cost and complexity. A tax on doing the right thing.

Providing a sea of parking for your development: easy. Few checkboxes. Getting that variance to provide less, convincing your project lender that less is okay, and getting a design approved that deprioritizes car access: hard.

Building a new community with a large range of housing styles and price points is hard. There will be lots more checkboxes to check than building one type of house at one price point, over and over.

If the Strong Towns movement wants a better built environment at scale, it needs more than a million people who care, and who dislike the status quo. It needs to do three things:

1. Refuse to Accept Bad as the Default

This is where the “million people who care” part comes in. This is (I hope) the kid I met at the gas station. This is everyone out there who knows they want better, and is willing to speak up in whatever way they’re personally prepared to when the powers that be try to serve up “worse.” Speak at a public meeting; call your city council person; if you need to, protest. Maybe go out with a few friends and paint a crosswalk at night.

2. Cultivate Leaders on the Inside

These people must understand the levers of change and the subtle ways in which harm is perpetuated. The movement needs armies of people in city planning departments who are no longer willing to rubber-stamp bad projects while subjecting good ones to death by a thousand checkboxes, and it needs elected officials who have their backs when they move to fix the death-by-checkbox problem. It needs people in the lending institutions that finance development who understand how to make it easier to build better. It needs engineers who will speak truth to power and will teach the public how to push back against the worst zombie ideas of their own profession.

3. Help Expand the Movement

Strong Towns (the organization) can’t speak directly to 36,000 local governments, 135,000 city councilors or 14 million employees. We can’t. What we can do is create programs that you all — out there, reading this — can help spread. These programs act like a patch on that bad operating system. The key is to get everybody to install the patch.

The Crash Analysis Studio — an alternative response to deadly traffic incidents that doesn’t involve years of studies and dithering and hand-wringing while changing nothing — is one such patch.

Programs to train incremental developers and help them form local, connected cohorts that can offer mutual support and resources — that’s another patch.

Giving cities simple tools to ask better questions about, the financial impacts of development they’re approving or the effect of their zoning policies on housing availability — these things can start to create replicable change.

This, in my experience, is where Strong Towns punches above its weight compared to most advocacy organizations. Strong Towns is constantly asking not “Will it scale?” but “Will it replicate?” (Hat tip to Mike Keen, one of my incremental-development heroes, for that question.)

There’s a huge amount of work to do, and the Strong Towns movement has barely scratched the surface, but the momentum is there to seed replicable change across all of our communities. I encourage you to take a moment to support this work this week by becoming a member of Strong Towns or renewing your membership.

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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.