You Were Mentioned on the Floor of Congress
One goal of the Strong Towns movement—your movement and ours—is bold to the point of audacious:
We want to change the North American development pattern.
Why? Because the North American development pattern extracts wealth, saddles municipalities with long-term liabilities, and is designed to decline. It’s also not good for people. Changing the way we plan, build, and move around our towns and cities is the only way to make our communities truly prosperous and resilient.
But none of us are naive about what we’re up against. We’re talking powerful lobbyists. Billions of dollars in infrastructure spending. The often-deliberately opaque ways development is proposed, analyzed, and discussed.
Thank you @RepGallagher for discussing the importance of fixing our roads first (and our report with @taxpayers, Repair Priorities!) on the floor of the House.
— Transportation for America (@T4America) February 26, 2020
Here's the short clip. Our friends at @StrongTowns get some love too! https://t.co/ti9aKkfzat pic.twitter.com/PO8VlU5Wed
There’s also the challenge of inertia. While the way we’ve built cities since roughly World War II is about a minute old in historical terms, we’re still up against decades of “This is how things are done” thinking. What Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn describes as the largest experiment in human history has now become conventional thinking. Changing the cultural conversation—which is what we have to do—will take time.
And yet it is changing. We see evidence of this everywhere. For example, Strong Towns content reached 1.8 million people last year. We’re hoping to pass the 3 million mark in 2020.
And just last month, our movement—your movement and ours—was mentioned on the floor of Congress.
On February 25, Representative Mike Gallagher (Wisconsin) gave a speech on the floor of Congress on infrastructure. Citing Strong Towns—as well as Taxpayers for Common Sense and our good friends over at Transportation for America—Rep. Gallagher asked the hard questions about why we’re spending hundreds of billions on new infrastructure even as our existing infrastructure crumbles:
Strong Towns, an infrastructure resiliency organization, has argued for years that governments need to consider roads as liabilities, not assets, because they eventually must be replaced for large sums of money. Yet, from 2009 to 2017, we collectively built 223,000 miles of new roads. Enough new lane miles to crisscross the entire country 83 times, [and they are estimated to cost] $8 billion a year to keep in good condition.
Think about this: $5 billion is about 11% of the current size of federal spending. As Strong Towns asked, if we devote 100% of all government spending to repair, would we even have enough to maintain what we’ve already built. Probably not. And yet, states, with federal dollars, are building more. The principle here is that growth of the system creates a future cost to the system...which explains much of our current infrastructure funding crisis.
The congressman is, of course, exactly right. As we’ve written elsewhere, “In a nation that has spent more than seven decades frantically spreading out, there are trillions of dollars of unproductive infrastructure already in the ground today waiting for us to make better use of. At Strong Towns, we see that our cities, towns and neighborhoods are dripping with opportunity. These opportunities are not of the mega-project variety. They are small, but they can positively transform everything about how we live our lives.”
Please believe us: We’re not posting the C-Span video here to pat ourselves on the back as an organization. When we think of the Strong Towns movement, we don’t think of our small staff (less than a dozen folks), our board, or even Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn. Here’s who we think of:
Our 2,800 members, who provide a broad-base of support (often in increments of $5-$10 per month) that makes possible every article and podcast we create, every event, all our community-building efforts, and literally everything else we do.
Allies like Transportation for America…and so many others: Urban3, AARP’s Livable Communities initiative, Verdunity, Vibrant Community Partners, Congress for a New Urbanism, America Walks, and dozens more.
The hundreds of thousands of individuals around North America who are doing the slow, often difficult work of changing the conversation in their particular towns and cities. Most of these folks will always be anonymous to us, but we do get to meet many of them at our Community Site, where there is a constant exchange of ideas, information, and inspiration.
We’re proud to have been mentioned in Congress, and we’re grateful Rep. Gallagher is championing a smarter approach to infrastructure spending. We hope he’s soon joined by hundreds of colleagues.
In the meantime, be encouraged that we’re all making progress on behalf of financial resilience, neighborliness, walkability and bikeability, and the un-conventional thinking we actually need.
MoDOT recently put out a tweet celebrating the 50-year anniversary of a highway that tore up Kansas City’s downtown. Here are just some of the (rightfully) angry reactions they got.