It’s been chilly here in Denver, fitting weather for a midwinter update on your movement and how things look from the perspective of the Strong Towns Board. I have a few reflections for you today: two progress updates and two challenges that we’re working through.

Update: The Housing-Ready City

On February 27, Strong Towns released "The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform." We’ll have lots more content around the toolkit this month, so keep an eye out.

I could not be more excited about this work. I got to participate in the working group that powered these ideas, and I deeply appreciated the time and expertise the panel brought together. This set of commonsense, incremental reforms is practical and attainable in any city in North America, and it will help cities respond to the housing trap.

The housing toolkit is also an important milestone in our movement.

We believe in bottom-up responses as opposed to the top-down, orderly-but-dumb prescriptions that got us into this mess in the first place. So we have been deliberate in not making pronouncements about one-size-fits-all “solutions,” instead advocating for an approach anchored on local people responding to their community's specific needs and sharing the lessons they learned with our broader community.

At the same time, we recognize that finding new ways to respond to the challenges our cities face is difficult. Our movement is hungry for guidance and seeking well-defined action people can take in their communities right now. These things exist in tension for us.

The first time we felt confident recommending a “universal” policy was our campaign to end parking requirements. This is a simple reform, eliminating a single, specific regulation that is almost omnipresent in North America and serves no useful purpose.

The housing toolkit is the second time we’ve recommended a set of specific, proactive policy changes. These policies are small, incremental and broadly applicable to our cities, yet we are confident cities that adopt the full toolkit will set themselves on a new path. I think we’ve found a balance here, where we are giving specific enough guidance to help empower our membership without falling into the oversimplified top-down approach.

We’re eager to hear about your progress as you take this toolkit and use it in your communities. If your city is implementing these reforms, add it to the map of Housing-Ready Cities!

Update: The State of Strong Towns

On January 30, we hosted the State of Strong Towns livestream. If you missed it, you can watch the recording here or read the annual report here.

This was the first time we’ve used this format to give a progress update on the Strong Towns movement, and we were really pleased with the reception. In particular, we were happy to deliver key insights to more than 500 attendees of the members-only portion of the address.

Hopefully, you’re sensing a theme. We’ve always been a member-powered, bottom-up movement. But in the past, we’ve mostly interacted with members via our content stream. One of our goals in 2025 is to deepen the level of engagement we have with our members, to make membership in Strong Towns something that feels truly participatory. We’re still building these muscles, but I’m excited about our progress.

Relatedly, a key goal for us this year is to reach 8,500 members. We started the year at 5,721. As of today, we've grown to 5,976, so we’re on track so far. I hope you’ll help us get there by spreading the message in your community and helping us build our national movement of Strong Towns thinkers, doers and advocates.

Challenge: Navigating a Shifting Media Landscape

One challenge that we’re working through right now is how to continue spreading our message effectively as the media environment around us changes. In its infancy, Strong Towns was primarily a blog. Later we added podcasts and shifted the focus of our written content to social media, especially Facebook. We centered our strategy on sharing short, engaging social media posts that would draw people into the longer-form content on our website. We had great success with this for a long time. However, the media environment is always changing, and this approach became less fruitful over the course of 2023 and 2024.

In 2024, we truly embraced video for the first time and have had a small breakthrough there, especially in our short-form video. Most of our videos are getting tens of thousands of views, and our best content so far is reaching around a million viewers.

As a media organization, our primary goal is always to spread our message and create millions of people who care. We’re optimistic that we’ve got a lot of room left to grow in the video field, and we think it’s a good medium for our message since many of the ideas we discuss are easier and more visceral to understand when you “see it.”

This is an exciting moment, but also an uncertain one. We’ve needed to rethink our approach to the written content that has always been our anchor, including making changes within our staff to shift our content focus. It feels like we’re approaching the next chapter of our media strategy, but we’re not quite there yet, so it’s a season of experimentation and learning for us.

Challenge: Learning To Lead Within a Bigger Tent

The last challenge I’ll share today is how to make Strong Towns a more effective coalition member and coalition leader. When we formed the organization more than a decade ago, we were in many ways a voice in the wilderness, questioning the status quo. Our first strategic plan in 2014 was to try and create “a million people who care” about our issues — a goal that felt wildly ambitious at the time. We had a few allies, especially the Congress for the New Urbanism (where many of us met), but we were almost always the outsiders.

Today, there are a number of complementary movements and organizations growing alongside us, such as our friends at the Parking Reform Network, the Incremental Development Alliance and the Vision Zero Network, as well as movements like YIMBY. We see these organizations and movements as having significant overlap — and, in some cases, almost total alignment.

But there are differences, of course, and it’s our comfort zone to critique, question and even criticize when we think others are taking the wrong approach or advocating for the wrong kind of change. We especially wrestle when groups advocate for broad, sweeping, top-down change, which we see as the path that got us into this mess in the first place.

Where we have common goals but differences in our ideas, we think it’s worth hashing those differences out. Debate makes our ideas stronger and helps us find the most effective path. But we recognize that there’s a difference in the way you debate constructively among friends, versus the way you engage with the opposition.

At its best, Strong Towns leads with empathy and builds community. As the number of organizations and movements that we share substantial common ground with us continues to grow, we seek to be an effective influence “from the inside,” to help advance common causes and celebrate wins while also strengthening each other's ideas and learning from each other.

Thanks for reading, and keep doing what you can to build strong towns!

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