Like many small, historic cities, Ellicott City, Maryland is a resilient town that has always rebuilt and recovered after natural disasters. It would be a shame if it could not recover from a man-made one.
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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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This week, we talked about why your city needs to cut out its bad habits and not just celebrate its good ones, what the perception of “scofflaw" cyclists” really says about our streets, why accessory dwelling units aren’t taking off even in cities that allow them, and a couple interesting perspectives on high-tech fixes for what ails our towns.
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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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Check out the first episode of our new podcast Upzoned! Each Friday, join Kea Wilson, Chuck Marohn, and occasional surprise guests to talk in depth about just one big story from the week in the Strong Towns conversation, right when you want it: now.
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Using tax incentives to subsidize retail is a lose-lose game that St. Louis's suburbs, desperate for short-term revenue, have been playing for too long. University City is mortgaging its future and selling out its small businesses with a $70 million subsidy for big-box development.
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Electric bikes and scooters have enormous advantages for short urban trips. How will they change our cities? When Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator in 1852, he never imagined skyscrapers.
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Earthship Biotecture is an attempt to answer a radical question: can you build a house that not only needs substantially less infrastructure than the average home, but needs almost no infrastructure at all?
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Want to better your community but don’t know where to start? Enter It’s the Little Things: a Strong Towns podcast that gives you the wisdom and encouragement you need to take the small yet powerful actions that can make your city or town stronger.
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Why stake our hopes on a technology that’s still far from ready for mass adoption? Building walkable cities, where jobs, goods and services are closer together, is a much surer, cheaper, less resource-intensive path to sustainability.
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Your town's streets are its vital organs. A great street can make a place, and a badly-designed street can kill a place. We want you to tell us about a street you love that makes your town a stronger, more resilient place.
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Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are a quintessentially Strong Towns approach to urban growth and affordability issues: bottom-up, decentralized, incremental, scalable and adaptable. Unfortunately, a litany of restrictions often makes them an unappealing option even where allowed.
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Myth busting time: that infuriating thing you saw a bicyclist do the other day? They were probably doing it for a reason, that reason probably had to do with safety, and it might not have been against the law after all.
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In the latest episode of the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck talks with Lynn Richards, President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). The two discuss how CNU has evolved, and what its future might look like as an organization, event, and movement.
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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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This week, we explored why even wealthy cities need to worry about their infrastructure costs, what “incremental development” really means and looks like, whether crony capitalism means the same thing when the capitalist is a local, tactical urbanism for dockless scooters, some real talk about the dangers of cycling, and more.
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We’re honored to celebrate Muskegon’s selection as the 2018 Strongest Town.
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Meet several of the presenters who will be at our North Texas Regional Gathering next month, and learn about the work they’re doing to move their Texas communities away from business as usual and toward fiscally sustainable development.
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In the latest episode of the Strong Towns podcast, we share a conversation Chuck had at CNU 2018 with three of the geoanalytics wizards from Urban3. Hear the latest on their efforts to spread the message about where your city’s wealth is really coming from.
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Sometimes our community leaders don’t do what we think they should. Here are some suggestions for getting their attention and influencing the agenda in your town or city.
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