Most city officials are operating in good faith, trying their best to make decisions that will help their community. Even when they've made bad decisions in the past, it's never too late to start making good ones.
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Local governments that follow a “mindlessly pro-business” approach sacrifice community well-being in the name of commerce, but end up devastating their cities’ downtowns by misunderstanding what helps an area succeed economically. It’s time to realize that helping local businesses means helping the community, too.
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East Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, manages to maintain a unique and magical sense of place even while being car-centric. Here’s how it does it, and how other cities can design their built environments to capture that sense of place.
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Building affordable housing seems like a win for cities struggling in the Housing Trap. But between its top-down nature and the public subsidies it requires, affordable housing can actually make things worse.
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City engineers rely on faulty logic and misrepresentations to maintain the status quo. This was made blatantly clear in a recent letter from the City Engineers Association of Minnesota (CEAM) — and it’s why a growing number of engineers are breaking from the party line to support reform. Here are CEAM’s top four arguments against parking reform and why they’re wrong.
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Understanding the real costs and long-term liabilities of our infrastructure is essential for the long-term prosperity of our places. Unfortunately, this detail is often overlooked in our decision-making process.
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A bill to legalize certain forms of “missing middle” housing statewide in Minnesota appears dead in the legislature. Yet, here are 4 reasons why it’s still not a total loss.
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Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network and Chris Meyer, legislative assistant to Senator Omar Fateh, talk all things parking reform on this week’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast.
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Some complain that getting rid of parking mandates is just an underhanded way of making auto use harder and harder in cities. But harder for whom, exactly?
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The parking reform bill Strong Towns has endorsed is necessary to get Minnesota cities unstuck.
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Minnesota legislators have introduced a bill that would eliminate minimum parking mandates statewide—and Strong Towns was there to cheer them on.
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Residents of Chisholm, MN, have shown that you don’t need to invest a lot of time and money to bring value to your community, and to provide a space for entrepreneurship.
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In Minneapolis and St. Paul, parking reform has helped increase the overall supply of homes, reduce the cost of construction, and shift the cities toward a less car-centric design.
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For the second time, a group of Minneapolis residents—enabled by existing law—have halted implementation of the city’s Minneapolis 2040 plan over its supposed environmental impact. Here’s why they’re doing more harm than good.
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Cities and towns big and small across the nation are ending parking minimums.
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The Minnesota Department of Transportation says they’re “rethinking” this freeway, but then came up with 10 proposals for roads for automobiles, just of different configurations. How rethought is that, really?
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A local fitness center in Chisholm, MN, shows that you don’t need to look far outside of your city or town to find the best people to develop it.
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Why is it so hard to imagine removing a 60-year-old freeway from the heart of my city—even as someone who likes the idea?
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Design doesn’t necessarily make a community, but, as this neighborhood in St. Paul, MN, shows, it does matter.
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This series of studies of 19th-century development in St. Paul, MN, can help us understand some of the earliest traces of what would later become the suburban development pattern.
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