Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

It’s been a busy week here at Strong Towns as we gear up for the start of the Confessions Book Tour, which is kicking off next week in Central Texas! Chuck Marohn will be speaking at three events around the Austin area, so if you’re in town, don’t miss out on the chance to hear about this groundbreaking new book in the Strong Towns series. And if you’re situated elsewhere in the country and are interested in hosting a tour stop in your community, please let us know by filling out this quick and easy form.

There’s only a week and a half until the launch of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, so if you still haven’t done so yet, make sure to preorder the book today! Those who do will get access to some cool bonus items, but only up until the book’s release on September 8.

Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:

Image via The Daily Independent.

Lauren: In what appears to be a case of revitalization gone wrong, the city of Russell, Kentucky, voted in May to use eminent domain to take possession of the property currently occupied by the Russell Convalescent Home, where 27 people with mental disabilities live and are cared for. The decades-old community is slated to be replaced by an open-air pavilion, according to the mayor. One important part of the Strong Towns approach is to “stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today.” It might be too easy for outsiders to judge what is happening in a community far, far away. But perhaps this example can fortify our commitment to observing what works right now in our communities, and refraining from trading these things in for shiny new project that might work later.

Image via Tony Fischer/Flickr.

Rachel: With eviction moratoriums—and the question of whether they’ll soon be lifted—on everyone’s mind, I appreciated this story about how mediation can help both tenants and landlords going through this process. Trained mediators in Philadelphia have brought tenants and landlords together to develop payment plans and come to housing agreements that work for both parties. Mediation helps avoid costly lawyer fees for everyone involved and can keep evictions off someone’s record—a crucial element in enabling a family to find housing again in the future. I had the chance to be trained as a mediator in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I served in a local small claims court and I’ve seen the transformative power of this model of dispute resolution.

Sarah: This video from Vox does a great job of taking a confusing, oftentimes boring subject, and making it visually interesting and easy to understand. In this video, they look at housing and why it is so hard to find affordable housing in so many cities across the U.S. I found the video to be both comprehensive and honest about the issues with housing supply. It also gives interesting solutions to the affordable housing shortage.

Image via WikiCommons.

Daniel: I loved this interview with the Nigerian-born author and satirist Elnathan John about freedom of expression and speaking truth to power. It's full of sharp insight that defies the tropes of the heavily polarized U.S.-centric debate about "cancel culture," even as interviewer Conor Friedersdorf periodically appears to seek to box John into the terms of that debate. I particularly like John's observation that if you're positioning yourself as a critic of power, too much popular acclaim isn't necessarily a good sign, so much as an indication that you're not challenging the people or ideas that really need to be challenged.

Image via Flickr.

Chuck: For many years I have thought of writing a picky eaters review of ballparks where I comment on two items where I am an expert: hot dogs and plain nachos (chips with cheese). For example, the best nachos I’ve ever had was in 1996 at the United Center in Chicago. Fresh, hot chips (not in its own individual package—yuck) covered with mildly spicy cheddar cheese. Exquisite. Yet, nothing will ever beat the Dome Dog, the premium hot dog selection in Minnesota’s Metrodome. I love Target Field, the Metrodome’s replacement, but the Big Dog they have there feels cheaply corporate in comparison to the original Dome Dog. “Is the Dome Dog responsible for saving the franchise’s on-field play, and, by extension, the franchise itself? Impossible to say…but yes, yes it did.”

Image via Unsplash.

John: Just before I read this article from Oliver Burkeman I watched a five-minute video of Corgi races. Then I texted the video to three friends. Before that, according to my browser history, I checked Instagram, read about a shipwreck on the Oregon Coast, checked my email, Googled “how to prevent coronary thrombosis,” and watched a YouTube video about a planner called “Sacred Ordinary Days.” That last one is funny to me because Burkeman’s article explores why—given the brevity of life—we spend so much of it distracted online. Distraction truly matters, he writes, “because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”

Burkeman’s article, an excerpt from his new book, isn’t a diatribe against the Internet. Nor is it stuffed with productivity hacks. It does contain a fair bit of wisdom though, and reading it, I thought of some of my favorite quotes: “How we spend our days is...how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life) “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90) “The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes to-day.” (Seneca, and Chuck Marohn) And this, from one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” But life’s not all about getting stuff done, because what Oliver is doing in that poem is contemplating a grasshopper. “I don’t know what exactly a prayer is,” she writes:

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—

Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Luke Sims, Kevin Bryant, Austin McDougal, Mike Herr, Kate Ingersoll, Scott Gann, Zachary Morse, Brian Olszak, Katherine Kennedy, Joshua Thomas, Don Williams, and Honeywell International Corporation.

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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!