Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
High drama in our content manager, John Pattison’s, backyard. This hawk comes daily and strafes John’s chickens—even though they’re protected in the pen. All the other backyard birds are on high-alert. John, who tooks this photo, gets to watch it all unfold through his office window.
Each week, the Strong Towns team shares their favorite links—the things that made us think in new ways, delve deeper into the Strong Towns mission, or even just smile.
This week, we started things off with another big announcement as part of our Strong Towns Year of Action: our new Action Lab. This is a developing space where you can find resources, explore success stories, and connect to fellow Strong Towns advocates—all with the goal of helping you build a stronger town or city where you live. You can also submit your questions if there’s something you’re not finding an answer to. The Action Lab is in the process of being actively built out, so please share any feedback you have along the way and let us know what would be most helpful to include in it.
We’re also still offering tickets to the upcoming Local-Motive Tour—10 online events in 8 weeks, all designed to help you take action and build a stronger town or city. Get your ticket now.
With that, here’s our links for the week.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Daniel: From Next City comes this interesting account of a pilot program in Vancouver, BC, in which 50 people experiencing homelessness were selected to receive a one-time, lump sum payment of $7,500 (about US$5,800) in cash, with no strings attached. The program then compared their life outcomes over the next two years with a control group, and found that the cash payment was remarkably effective at helping people get their lives back in order, allowing them to achieve stable housing and focus not on obtaining the day’s money but on seeking employment and training in new skills.
Economists have long favored simple, universal interventions of this sort—a direct cash transfer without a lot of bureaucratic hoops, monitoring, means-testing or stipulations. But it remains politically unpopular, because of widespread assumptions that the poor cannot be trusted to make sound, long-term decisions in their own best interest. In reality, what I’ve come to understand is a) poverty itself is often the biggest impediment to taking the actions that will better one’s long term prospects and b) as a general rule, the more complicated and bureaucratic a system or program is, the more that system or program will tend to exclude the neediest from effectively taking advantage of it. There are, of course, a ton of lessons for urban planning and the other city-building professions embedded in that latter point, too!
Rachel: My colleague John occasionally posts to his own blog and this week he ran some reflections about the riot at the capitol and the end of the Trump presidency, that I felt was worthy of sharing here (and he’s too modest to share it himself). What comes next for our nation and how do we heal? John has several insights about a potential response at the national, local and church levels. Here’s one favorite passage:
[Among] our other work, we need to get to know—really know—our actual neighbors. We need to know them as people, not merely as campaign yard signs. What are their stories? What do they value? What are they passionate about? Where are they struggling? What are their hopes for the neighborhood, for their lives, for their children?
Lauren: A Strong Towns community member shared this link with us this week; an exploration of good design based on A Pattern Language and the video game “Animal Crossing.” Author James Stuber shares how he applied the lessons from the text to his virtual island and home—it’s cute, its entertaining, and it might provide some inspiration for how to think about and design your own spaces.
Chuck: There are a lot of hot takes, but few of them are good or memorable. Worse, we are prone to find the one person who called the housing crisis in advance and believe them insightful on predicting the next crisis instead of recognizing that, in a country of 300+ million people, statistically there had to be someone called the housing crisis in advance (see Fooled By Randomness by NNT). All that being said, Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory has been very good on these things for a long time and, if you read this piece on the potential for a surge in the pandemic, you’ll see it is hedged in all the ways an appropriate data scientist would do, with a testable hypothesis to prove or disprove the underlying theory. This is not a panic alert but a pause for caution in what remains an ongoing tragedy we all just happen to be living through.
John: Part of the interview process for my job was to “pitch” some stories I thought would be a good fit for Strong Towns. One article I pitched—but haven’t yet written—was an article about Resistencia Coffee, a coffee shop co-founded in 2016 by my friends Coté and Tim Soerens in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood. Thankfully, to learn more about Resistencia, you don’t have to wait for me. Alana Al-Hatlani has written a nice piece for Seattle Refined about the shop, how it is weathering the pandemic, and Resistencia’s special place in the neighborhood.
Al-Hatlani writes that the opening of a coffee shop like this in South Park might have been a harbinger of gentrification. Instead, “Resistencia is a cafe by South Park for South Park, Resistencia keeps everything local.” This includes using a neighborhood coffee roaster, sourcing food from local vendors, and training “diverse residents of South Park to become baristas in a mostly white industry.” Inside the cafe, Resistencia is defined as "a local community standing up against adversity with relentless hope and care for everyone in the neighborhood." That’s been my experience with Resistencia…and with the Soerenses generally. I’m happy to finally introduce them to you.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Daniel Bailey, Marc Beechuk, Adam BellCorelli, Isabel Bowman, Louisa Conklin, Aaron Dorow, Max Gula, Ian McCain, Max Moss, Samuel Perkins, Alfonso Salas Infante, JoAnn Scott, Kirsten Shaw, Robyn Stanicki, and York XL, as well as an Anonymous member.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments.