When it comes to parking, it’s time to reconcile our free-market rhetoric with our market-busting reality.
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Hilton Hotels sacrifices their customers in the name of efficiency. There is a lesson there for your city about the tradeoffs of efficiency.
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Decades ago, we decided where roads will go. Whether it makes sense or not today, that is where they must go.
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The more we invest in something, the harder it becomes to walk away. Yet, we need to walk away from a lot of what we’ve built.
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The core neighborhoods of our big cities and our small towns have more in common than we might think.
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Americans need to become more tolerant of government failure. That will happen, if and when, government starts to deliver improvements iteratively, and demonstrates the capacity to learn and improve with each iteration.
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Austin needs a new Grand Bargain, one that includes everyone and exempts no one.
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Does the average resident want dramatic change or do they want the urban development status quo?
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This week we are examining what went wrong with Austin’s CodeNEXT process and what should be done now.
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These campaigns are the kind of thing that large, out-of-touch bureaucracies do when they want to appear like they are doing something without actually changing anything about what they are doing.
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You can’t build stroads, subsidize big box stores and accept endless edge development, and have that work out for you just because you threw a block party, painted a mural and put in a temporary bike lane.
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We’re honored to celebrate Muskegon’s selection as the 2018 Strongest Town.
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If we want to fix crony capitalism, what we really need is to localize capital.
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Local governments can’t take on more and more promises without generating enough wealth to meet those obligations—not without a reckoning. We need a radical revolution in how we plan, manage, and inhabit our cities, counties, and neighborhoods. We need a Strong Towns approach.
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The most important thing for a local government is to avoid ruin.
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Akron, Ohio’s subsidies for redevelopment of the failed Rolling Acres mall are a textbook case of the sunk cost fallacy: the tendency to examine new opportunities not on their own merit, but in the context of past investments.
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County leadership continually brags about its low tax rate and high amount of services. But if you doubt the fundamental math behind that equation, there’s no need to look behind the curtain because the ratings agencies have given Cobb top marks.
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In 2012, we added our first strategic partners and Strong Towns transitioned from side project to a legitimate organization.
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It is the experiences of real people that should guide our planning efforts. Their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.
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When your community is financially fragile, you lose options. In the case of Brainerd, Minnesota, that may mean letting go of a landmark.
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