A Movement for the Impatient
I’ve been involved with the Strong Towns movement for a decade now. I’ve met hundreds of passionate people who have invested significant time and energy in Strong Towns, and it never ceases to be humbling to see how much total strangers are willing to give of themselves to be a part of this thing we’re building.
“What distinguishes Strong Towns advocates?” is a question I’ve asked myself a lot. What draws people to this particular movement for change? The diversity of Strong Towns is astounding compared to literally any other movement for change I’ve ever seen. Urban and rural, young and old, total laypeople alongside professional planners, engineers and builders. Every corner of the political landscape is represented.
One thing that we all seem to have in common is that we won’t lower our expectations. Strong Towns people are people who can’t help but walk out our door and see the place we live as it could be, not just as it is.
These are eyes you have to learn how to see through. Once you do, you’re never the same.
I have a new perspective on this in 2023, having moved back to my hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, after two decades living far away from it. Minnesotans joke about the “boomerang” effect—people who grew up here tend to resurface here sometime around their mid-30s, often when they’re ready to raise kids. I fit the pattern to a tee.
I’ve taken it to the next level, though. Not only did my family and I move back to St. Paul this year, we bought my childhood home from my parents. I am now living in the house I grew up in.
I am tremendously grateful to be able to do this. At the same time, it’s disorienting. Every day presents opportunities to wrap myself up in nostalgia like a warm, well-worn blanket. I take my kids to the playground, and they want to traipse along the top of the same retaining walls I remember walking on as a child (much to my dad’s chagrin). Things as specific as the way the morning sun filters through the leaves of a particular maple tree in front of a particular neighboring house spark intense sensory memory. Familiar smells stop me in my tracks.
The neighborhood is a time capsule: remarkably unchanged. The inhabitants of many houses have moved on, of course, but there are a lot of photos you could take around here that would be hard to pin down to any particular year between 1990, when my parents bought this house, and 2023, when I did.
It’s easy to regard that as a pleasant thing; this neighborhood is quiet, attractive, and pleasant. And yet, other things around my hometown are remarkably unchanged too, less happily.
I remember the struggling, poorer parts of town we’d visit when I was a young child, though I didn’t understand the struggles as a kid. I didn’t know the long history of disinvestment, of harmful freeway schemes, of policies that reinforced racial segregation. I didn’t have those eyes for seeing yet. But I remember the places.
My dad would take young me to Pioneer Sausage Company on Rice Street after trips to the farmer’s market downtown. I’d get a free hot dog. Pioneer is long gone, and Rice Street is still pockmarked with vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. Some of those buildings are beautiful and historic. Rice Street is also a wide, frequently deadly, nasty stroad that undermines the wealth and livability of the North End neighborhood alongside it.
The North End neighborhood is nonetheless an object of pride and devotion for many who live in it. This is a street, and a community, that deserves better. It’s been 30 years; a lot of individual dreams have come and gone in that time, and some have succeeded. But the geography of opportunity and poverty in the city remains stubbornly constant. Why?
I remember the scary, six-pointed intersection of three stroads near where my mom worked when I was a teenager; how the teachers at the schools around there would talk of dreading that the day would come when a kid walking home from school wouldn’t make it. That intersection is still scary.
I remember asphalt wastelands as a kid. We’d go grocery shopping at Midway Shopping Center, a casualty of mid-century urban renewal that was depressing in the 1980s and is even more so now. It was dominated by windswept parking lots and struggling strip malls then; it’s even worse now. An old Metro Transit bus storage facility sat abandoned for many years. It was recently redeveloped into a professional soccer stadium, but none of the ambitious development plans for the land surrounding the stadium have moved forward. The appearance is of a bleak void.
That bleak void doesn’t define the neighborhood. It frustrates those who love the neighborhood. On the other side of the street, small local businesses, some of them with storied histories, some of them upstart successes, command intense loyalty from the community. The surrounding neighborhood, one of St. Paul’s most diverse, has a strong sense of community and history. People love Hamline-Midway. Why aren’t the people who love Hamline-Midway able to do more to make Hamline-Midway, the physical place, live up to their love?
Who gets to be part of the solution? To start a business, provide needed housing, enliven a derelict space? To advocate to make a neighborhood street safer and have that advocacy bear fruit—immediately, not after five years of study and planning? What is the bar of entry to do these things?
This is the animating question of Strong Towns. The people who love a place—and I’ve learned that those people are out there, almost anywhere you can throw a dart at a map—need to be able to participate in its sometimes uneven, sometimes challenging, but ultimately steady improvement. We should orient policy not to sitting on plans for years, but to meeting immediate, urgent struggles. We should make the next, smallest increment of development simple and viable, and always seek to empower and grow the ranks of those who are out there doing it.
Here as in most places, many of the most obvious changes seem to come in the form of a deus ex machina, a savior with a transformative plan. The old Ford assembly plant down by the Mississippi River is well into the process of becoming a brand-new neighborhood of thousands of residents. It’s impressive—beautiful, even. It will meet a huge need for housing; it will add to the tax base; it will fill a void and create a new option for those who want a walkable, urban place. But it has little to do with ordinary citizens who love St. Paul.
And in parts of town where the market isn’t as strong and private development is less of a slam dunk, asphalt wastelands wait decades for the right savior with the right large-scale development plan and the right financing.
St. Paul is a great city. I honestly think it’s the best place to live in Minnesota. But things about it feel stuck. It’s not for lack of trying, and it’s not because those in power want it to be. We’ve been blessed with some excellent political leadership. The city has taken bold steps, has even been a leader in things like ending parking minimums, reforming zoning, fighting blight in some smart ways.
I’m just impatient, because I can’t turn off the part of me that sees the struggles.
A colleague recently remarked to me that a lot of people seem to see dangerous streets kind of like we see the weather: something to curse, to complain about, but ultimately something we don’t control. I think many of us also learn to see all the other problems with our cities as just a weather-like backdrop. Business districts that are struggling to retain vibrancy or occupancy. Vacant, dead spaces draining our wealth. Whole neighborhoods that just can’t seem to catch a break.
Living in a city that isn’t growing very much (St. Paul’s population has only recently re-approached its 1960 peak) means constantly being asked to lower your expectations.
If you’re like me, you can’t do that.
I’m not a kid anymore. I’m pushing 40. I love this city and intend to live here for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be elderly and still passing by the same asphalt wastelands I knew as a child.
Strong Towns is a movement for everyone who is impatient for change, and who understands that the way we accelerate it is not by offering the right tax incentive, courting the right savior, but by empowering thousands of everyday people to make small bets. To tend to their own piece of ground in their own way.
If this resonates with you, we would love your support. Please become a member today.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.