The things that get labeled as “gentrification” refer to a set of real, meaningful, widely held concerns, and that choice of label should never be an excuse to dismiss those concerns.
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These 5 harmful myths about Houston's land use planning need to be put to rest.
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The ship is sinking and we're not even rearranging the deck chairs; we're arguing about their color.
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New Urbanist design has been praised and criticized alike. A recent development in Orlando, FL offers a unique opportunity to examine the challenges and potentials for success in planned New Urbanist communities.
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If America's dysfunctional approach to transportation is going to be solved, it's going to have to be solved in places that look like Tulsa.
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Most cities' "traffic problems" are actually problems with the qualitative experience of traffic, not with simple travel time or delay. Perhaps we need a "Traffic Frustration Index" instead of a Traffic Congestion Index.
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A big piece of the infrastructure puzzle is not about the level of government making the investment, it's about the scale of the investment. Here are 5 "small bets" to build better transportation systems in our towns.
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There is arguably no place where half a century of suburban growth has more resembled a giant Ponzi scheme than in Florida.
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A reliance on federal funding for housing puts local entities at the mercy of distant decision makers whose priorities may or may not be aligned with theirs. Cities and advocacy groups should be thinking about how to re-localize and claim more control over the way we tackle these problems.
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NIMBYs are responding to a set of very rational incentives. That presents a challenge for those of us who hope to alter the course of the Suburban Experiment.
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In this special edition of the Strong Towns podcast, we bring you a short interview with Daniel Herriges, a Strong Towns contributor who wrote an essay for our new book, Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume II.
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This suburb is a growing place, but it's not a successful place. It risks becoming an increasingly isolating place full of people who are cut off from the economic mainstream.
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The state of Florida went all-in on the suburban experiment in a way that few other places did. Overbuilt and half empty, many Florida suburbs will never climb out of debt and decline.
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The recipe for a successful residential street is simple, timeless, and requires very little costly engineering.
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One historic home at a time, St. Paul, MN is demonstrating how a critical mass of Strong Citizens can be an incredible asset to a troubled area, and how local government can play a constructive role in the incremental revitalization of such an area.
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Our perception of Americans' housing preferences is distorted by the fact that we really have very few options available to us. Like our cable TV packages, our housing choices are "bundled," and many types of neighborhoods that might combine the things we actually love about urban and suburban environments are scarce, nonexistent, or outright illegal to build.
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Life in the exurban fallout zones of the housing crisis is precarious. Overbuilt and half empty, many suburbs will never climb out of debt and decline. Federal housing policies put them in this place.
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Creating a diverse mix of options to reduce car dependence incrementally is a sensible short-term goal of a robust transportation policy. We can make better cities by increasing the size and number of neighborhoods in which it's possible for the average person to live partially—not completely—car free.
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Scranton, Pennsylvania is not a wealthy place, but it is a place with underappreciated intrinsic wealth. Bet on older mid-size cities like Scranton, whose built-in advantages leave them well-positioned to weather future economic disruption.
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In an era of looming economic, social, and environmental disruption, the urban planning profession needs to be talking less about how to make cities efficient and attractive and more about how to make them resilient to the worst-case consequences of our actions. This is where Strong Towns thinking fits in.
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