Strong Towns Is Where The Housing Crisis Response Starts
This week, the Strong Towns movement was featured in two influential publications — The New York Times and the Civitas Institute — underscoring our growing reputation as a national leader in building more financially resilient communities.
In The New York Times piece “In Car-Centric Arizona, a Suburb Bets Big on Bicycles,” our Chief Technical Advisor Edward Erfurt is quoted as a go-to expert on land use and development. The story examines an ambitious Arizona development that’s trying to shift away from the expensive, auto-dependent planning standard. Edward’s insights highlight the importance of design that helps cities — and the people who live in them — thrive.
Mentions like this don’t happen by accident. They’re the result of years of work by a growing movement — by people like you — that is challenging the status quo and spreading a forward-thinking approach to building towns. As more communities wrestle with the financial consequences of the Growth Ponzi Scheme, Strong Towns is showing up in common and professional discourse, offering both critique and a practical path forward.
At the same time, a new report from the University of Texas at Austin's Civitas Institute, “How to Address the Nation’s Housing Supply and Affordability Challenges,” includes a powerful quote from our founder, Chuck Marohn. His message is simple but bold: We don’t need sweeping national programs to solve the housing crisis; we need local action and incremental development. The report emphasizes how cities can unlock more housing options by removing unnecessary barriers and empowering local builders.
Together, these two mentions tell a bigger story: Strong Towns is leading the conversation on two pressing, and inextricably linked, challenges facing American cities: transportation and housing. And we’re doing it by offering a clear alternative to the broken standard approach.
Thank you for being part of this movement. Every time you share a Strong Towns article, host a local event, or support our work, you help amplify this message. We’re proud of this — and even more excited about where we go from here.
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Lauren Ronnander, the Director of Communications for Strong Towns, is an actual idealist who loves making things and double-spacing the end of sentences. Before joining the Strong Towns team in 2020, she worked as a journalist and an editor. She lives with her husband and an almost uncountable number of animals (including cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, and rabbits) in a super-awesome neighborhood in the American Midwest. Her experience in the Alaska Bush, downtown living in an up-and-coming Midwestern city, and now residing in a rural Chippewa Valley, Wisconsin, community has provided her with precious insight into the many ways our places can grow stronger.