You have until the end of Sunday, March 10th to enter our 4th Annual Strongest Town Contest. Don’t miss your chance to tell the world your town’s story!
Read More
Skyler Yost, Ecosystem Builder for the city of York, PA, shares how you can foster entrepreneurship in your community—and create an environment in which entrepreneurs support one another, too.
Read More
Since 1913, Pennsylvania has allowed cities to tax land at a higher rate than buildings. This decision has led to some unique success stories: cities that have weathered post-industrial decline and revitalized their urban cores.
Read More
The newer generation of public housing projects offer a superficially pleasant facsimile of a New Urbanist neighborhood. But these are places built all at once, to a finished state, and deeply dependent on fragile institutional arrangements.
Read More
Even the fastest-growing cities have them: under-utilized lots in the center of town whose owners don’t want to develop, but also don’t want to sell. Often, the property tax code rewards this kind of land speculation.
Read More
Revisiting one of our most popular conversations ever, with well-known blogger and financial self-sufficiency expert Mr. Money Mustache. (Who has been in the news in 2019 for an amusing reason!)
Read More
The property tax punishes modest improvements and rewards steady decline. People who take steps to add value to their property pay more taxes, while slumlords and speculators pay less. There are a lot of reasons for cities to switch to a tax on land value, and more states should allow cities to make that change.
Read More
This week we explored an eclectic range of housing solutions for a changing America, revisited a favorite podcast about the limitations of traffic enforcement, explored what it means for cities to ask themselves whether they’re competing on price or quality, and more.
Read More
Slowing down drivers can save pedestrian lives. But is a little widget in your car the best way to do it?
Read More
Your Strong Towns Knowledge Base question of the week, answered here.
Read More
Once a month we host Ask Strong Towns, a members-only live Q&A webcast. Here’s the video and audio from this month’s.
Read More
Too often, decisions about parking in our cities are driven by emotion, anecdotes and gut reactions. Better data can help both policymakers and citizens understand the actual parking situation in their city more clearly.
Read More
Ryan Short—CEO of CivicBrand—shares how you can find your community’s true essence, including how to engage with your community to ensure the creation of your brand is a grassroots effort, how to ensure your brand actually aligns with what your community offers, and how finding your community’s true essence makes your city or town stronger.
Read More
Not every city’s situation is the same—but just about every city that needs more homes could benefit from one or more of these policies.
Read More
Making Room: Housing for a Changing America is a new report from the AARP and the National Building Museum that explores how the way Americans live together has changed—and how our housing stock hasn’t, but could.
Read More
If you can’t justify your half-a-billion-dollar freeway widening project with the usual argument, why not try a different one: that it will reduce crashes? Unfortunately, there’s no evidence for this either.
Read More
Speed enforcement won’t fix what’s actually a street design problem. And the way we use speed enforcement as a tool to accomplish other goals unrelated to speeding ends up not making anyone safer.
Read More
In just a few short weeks, the world will begin voting in our 4th Annual Strongest Town Contest. Don’t miss your chance to enter!
Read More
Modern Monetary Theory suggests that recessions can be avoided – along with lots of unnecessary pain – if policymakers will commit the resources to preempt them. Sounds like the same promise the Forest Service made fighting fires last century.
Read More
This week we offered our take on what cities and states should do in the wake of Amazon’s NYC debacle, took a tour of Memphis’s own economic-development gamble gone awry, explored a counterintuitive truth about North American vs. European development patterns, and more.
Read More