A local fitness center in Chisholm, MN, shows that you don’t need to look far outside of your city or town to find the best people to develop it. | Continue reading
After taking a hiatus for her maternity leave, Rachel Quednau is back with a new episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution, where she's handing over the reins to our new host for the podcast. | Continue reading
For local governments, it’s often easier to let the tangled web of debt at the heart of the budget go unexplored. In cities reliant on sales tax, these problems are only magnified. | Continue reading
Strong Towns member Eric Pruett reflects on the National Gathering, and what it showed him about this growing movement. | Continue reading
Cities are complex systems, and wrapping your mind around them can be tough. Here are some frameworks to guide you. | Continue reading
Americans need housing relief imminently. Despite what you may have heard, upzoning isn’t likely to be the thing that delivers that—but here's why it’s still worth pursuing. | Continue reading
Design affects us in a multitude of ways, and when we look to nature as inspiration for designing the built environment, the core takeaways are: adaptation and incrementalism. | Continue reading
Congressman Jake Auchincloss: "We don't need a gas tax holiday. We need a gas tax reset: an overhaul of how we approach transportation funding.” | Continue reading
In Detroit's 48205 zip code, from 2014 to 2020, the number of vacant homes hardly budged, despite $25M spent demolishing 1,628 vacant homes. When the pandemic hit, vacant homes plummeted. What happened? | Continue reading
For the sake of our cities and the people who live in them, it’s time we fundamentally rethink how we regulate land in America. Read about it in this excerpt from Nolan Gray’s new book, Arbitrary Lines . | Continue reading
This interactive map allows you to view just how much space is being wasted in your city (and in the rest of the U.S.) on parking lots. | Continue reading
This one’s on you, engineering profession. Society is done tolerating this level of indifference, incompetence and incoherence. What are you going to do? | Continue reading
To protect our advocacy work against future harassment from the Minnesota licensing board, Strong Towns President Charles Marohn is retiring as a professional engineer. | Continue reading
When it comes to creating strong neighborhoods, there are some valuable lessons to be had from slowing down the pace and seeking novelty in the ordinary. | Continue reading
The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, recently survived a car crash. And she’s not blaming it on reckless driving. | Continue reading
We respond to a question posted for us on Reddit about a stroad that seems unfixable—and maybe that’s because it is. | Continue reading
The way be build towns and cities in North America is a radical departure from how our ancestors did it (even a few generations ago) and how cities are built elsewhere in the world. Here are 7 key differences. | Continue reading
Fact: New roads always produce new driving. Say hello to “induced demand.” | Continue reading
This small town in Maine is hoping to breathe life back into its Main Street…but is looking for solutions in all the wrong places. | Continue reading
In everyday life, people usually say “I need a plan” if something has gone wrong. Plans should play a similar role in cities. | Continue reading
Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” or “upscale”? | Continue reading
SB 9 just passed in California, effectively ending single-family zoning there. The open question is, "What now?" Will anything actually change? | Continue reading
Schools across the U.S. are experiencing a bus driver shortage, but the root cause of this issue has less to do with the COVID pandemic than one might think. | Continue reading
A recent Vice article seems to suggest that most Americans don’t want more walkable places. Here’s why that takeaway is totally wrong. | Continue reading
And what this tells us about what the common buzzword really means. | Continue reading
The eviction moratorium is going to end, and when it does, we face the prospect of mass evictions throughout the country. Let's talk about what that means and what it says about our housing system. | Continue reading
Does YOUR city have problems? Learn how to solve them with one WEIRD, simple trick! | Continue reading
Not every problem associated with housing is directly a supply or scarcity issue, but housing scarcity is real, and it tends to make just about all the other problems associated with housing worse. | Continue reading
Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are recognized as a new form of company in the crypto-friendly state. | Continue reading
In this new series, we’re looking at Collier County as a case study for how insolvent growth persists in Florida. What's the history behind Collier’s development, and where is it headed? | Continue reading
The Minnesota board that regulates engineering licenses is abusing their power in order to stifle the free speech of Charles Marohn and retaliate against the Strong Towns movement for their advocacy on transportation, infrastructure, and engineering reform. Strong Towns has filed … | Continue reading
Something remarkable is happening this year in City Halls across America. | Continue reading
Transportation engineering profession is at a crossroads. The industry has not honored its ethical obligations. That must change. | Continue reading
New maps from Urban3 visualize the shocking disparities in who is actually footing municipal bills in California. | Continue reading
What if we had a class of semi-amateur developers 10 or 100 times larger than it is today? | Continue reading
Removing parking minimums doesn’t mean getting rid of parking altogether. It means letting the market decide the right amount of parking. | Continue reading
A step-by-step path to get you — or your city officials — informed on the fragile-making effects of parking minimums…and on how to end them. | Continue reading
In a community dismissed as the “ghetto,” residents are doing the math on public investments — and finding surprises — then empowering residents to build a stronger future. | Continue reading
We can make low risk, high returning investments in our cities while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who are not benefiting from the current approach. | Continue reading
Problems have solutions. Predicaments have outcomes. We're in a predicament. | Continue reading
The best-laid plans can fail. Knowing that should cause us to think critically about what projects we pursue, how we pursue them, and how we evaluate success. | Continue reading
There is nothing stopping local leaders from addressing their community’s legacy of racial injustice. Here is a credible plan for getting started. | Continue reading
An incredible video from 1906 San Francisco—colorized and digitally remastered—depicts a time when streets were truly available for every type of user. | Continue reading
Ponzi schemes fail because they are built on illusions: there is no there there. So what happens when an entire continent of towns and cities is caught up in a kind of Growth Ponzi Scheme? We are finding out. | Continue reading
Greenspace is not the same as a park. This example from Jersey City, NJ shows you why that's the case and how to build better parks in the process. | Continue reading
Sometimes to appreciate the power, versatility, and appeal of missing middle housing, it helps to go somewhere it still exists. | Continue reading
A detailed analysis of 12 cul-de-sacs show the Suburban Experiment is a dead end. What will it take to make this city solvent? | Continue reading
It’s an article of faith among many that big and tall buildings don’t belong around small and short buildings. But does this idea actually stand up to scrutiny? | Continue reading