There’s a certain artistic quality to abandoned spaces—but if we look a bit deeper, these ruins also hold lessons about patterns of disinvestment and policy shifts that have adversely affected American communities.
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When you prioritize fast car movement on a street that should be for building community wealth, don’t be surprised when you end up getting neither.
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This year, Buffalo, NY, made headlines around the U.S. in the wake of a tragic shooting. But there’s another story to tell about Buffalo as a city, and it’s about decline and revitalization.
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How one Detroit resident is using Google Maps to chronicle the accelerating disappearance of some of that city’s neighborhoods.
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The paths to recovery for a small town and for an addict have much in common. And sometimes those paths can converge.
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Most neighborhoods face a stark choice between the trickle or the fire hose: either virtually no new development or investment, or cataclysmic change that leaves a place unrecognizable. We need to get out of this destructive dichotomy.
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The Strong Towns movement offers a template for creating a world we can be justly proud to pass on to our children, in a time in which so many of us feel like we're floundering to salvage the broken one we inherited from our parents.
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Deeply held beliefs, supported by flawed assumptions, blind us to realities and facts. The supposed wealth and prosperity generated by cut-through urban highways was always an illusion—but who will dare to point out the obvious truth?
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No name better symbolizes idyllic 1950s suburbia than Levittown. How these massive, master-planned communities—the epitome of America’s suburban experiment—have fared over 70 years tells a less rosy story.
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Revisiting a 2017 conversation between Charles Marohn and Chris Arnade about the toll of economic and social disintegration in American communities.
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Rust Belt cities have endured difficult losses, and no matter how hard they’ve tried, they have never quite been able to shake the financial and psychological wounds. So today, we’re taking the American city to therapy.
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Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our current institutions are in the process of failing and are unlikely to be reformed. Once the dust settles, we’ll create new institutions and a fresh cultural consensus that respond to pressing needs on the ground.
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