Yes, many thriving places have attractive lawn furniture, tasteful signage, and abundant flowers. But adding those items to a place with fundamental flaws is just lipstick on a pig.
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Toms River, NJ was built as a collection of convenient commodities and it will be discarded once it exceeds its usefulness.
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Building after massive building now sit empty in towns across America. Yours is up next.
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Strong Towns contributor, Johnny Sanphillippo kicks off our Antrifragile book club week with this critique of the antifragile concept and commentary on the challenges of actually implementing it
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Do we want to make life easy on the experts, or make Detroit a better place that can also pay its bills?
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My attempts to build a tiny home have been thwarted by a hostile regulatory environment at every turn. So here's what I did instead.
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There’s a lot of talk these days about how Texas is the new California, but you need to take that concept with a grain of salt. It’s a short term phenomenon.
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Neither raw commerce nor government bureaucracies can ever deliver the same quality results as a close-knit subculture. This is quite evident in the community kitchens of the Sikhs.
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We need to read all of Jacobs’ books in order to put her more popular work into a larger perspective.
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What we’re witnessing isn’t a modern aberration of multi-story buildings being imposed on the traditional city. It’s actually a return to the historic pattern after an odd twentieth century hiatus.
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I have a unique perspective on the topic of the working class, the poor, and the homeless. It isn’t an abstraction for me. I experienced these things directly in my own life.
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How exactly do you live a normal mainstream life in a way that also happens to allow you to ride out an unexpected storm – be it natural, economic, medical, or political?
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For those of you who expect to be sitting in your own personal car being whisked around in effortless comfort and privacy as you commute to distant suburban locations… Not quite.
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Walking away from a neighborhood is seen as a harmless passive act. Moving in is viewed as an act of aggression and displacement.
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The low density auto-dependent development pattern will persist for a few more decades. So will hyper dense concentrated city centers. And then both will decline as they become overwhelmed by multiple physical, economic, and political constraints.
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I have a lot of conversations with people about the challenge of improving public schools, building affordable housing, and more. But the truth is, we as a society don’t want to solve these problems. So we won’t.
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Are the suburbs the new frontier for artists, musicians and other countercultural communities?
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What will happen to stagnant, poorly aging neighborhoods that are neither verdant and exclusive like the most desirable suburbs, nor vibrant and urbane like rapidly gentrifying city centers? They might actually be a sweet spot at an affordable price.
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What does the actual global middle class looks like? Take all 7.3 billion people on the planet and line them up according to material wealth like a statistician. Then look toward the center.
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There’s a weird war raging these days between people who advocate urban living and folks who can’t stand to live in anything but a fully detached home. I always choose the thing in the middle. I’m a Main Street kind of guy.
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