For decades, many city leaders have thought the only way to end blight was to tear down the eyesores and start fresh. Mobile, Alabama had another idea.
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Some YIMBYs don’t like Strong Towns and claim we are anti-development NIMBY. Yet, NIMBYs hate us because we insist neighborhood evolve, adapt, and change. What’s going on here?
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Instead of subsidizing or regulating our way to the finished state we think we want in our neighborhoods, there s a much more powerful—and achievable—path we can take.
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Every time it seems like our housing crisis is going to bring everything crashing down, banks inject a dose of antigravity. How long can it go on?
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Come on, Chuck, just give it up already and tell us what works. If it were only that easy.
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What the Strong Towns movement needs to do is change our cultural understanding about growth, development and the way we invest in our places.
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Last call before things get really crazy.
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The desperate need to fill pension shortfalls may be wreaking havoc on the financial system.
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Liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. So why do so many of them agree that we need more infrastructure spending—even if it might make our town weaker?
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As an engineer, I once had property owners turn out en masse to oppose a project I was working on that would fix their potholed street and broken sidewalks. Find out why—and one key policy change that might have led to a different response.
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Not everything in a Strong Town can be about dollars and cents. The finances constrain us—they are an important check on our avarice—but the things that make a place worth loving go far beyond the balance sheet.
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My city council has been offered an impossible choice: spend millions of dollars we don’t have repairing our historic water tower, or permanently destroy an iconic landmark and a piece of our history. But there is a third option.
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The Strong Towns Podcast is back with brand new episodes. And to kick things off, we’re offering you a sneak peek into the upcoming full-length book by Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn—including details of the contents that haven’t yet been shared anywhere else. And you can pre-order your copy today!
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We should require our local governments to develop some discipline and reliability in their permitting approach. These are practices that demonstrate respect for both our civic institutions and the people they are supposed to serve.
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Human behavior can be influenced in subtle—and often very pro-social—ways through design of place.
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We have a lot of work ahead at Strong Towns to meaningfully engage people of color and to grow the racial diversity of our movement. We’re committed to doing that work.
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App developers are promising that any citizen with a smart phone can take part in planning their city like never before. But is there more to community engagement than what you can fit within the borders of a screen?
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It’s hard to have a coherent conversation on affordable housing when most of those involved in the discussion directly benefit from — and in some ways depend on — higher housing prices.
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Using routine traffic stops as a pretext to root out other types of crime is as disingenuous as it is unhelpful. We need to design intuitively safe streets—and then use traffic enforcement for the minority of drivers who are actually driving recklessly.
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Last week, we announced the biggest news in the Strong Towns universe in a long time: our founder wrote a book. This week, we’re taking you behind the scenes.
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