In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn discuss North America's uniquely large fire trucks and how they impact street safety.
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Most city officials are operating in good faith, trying their best to make decisions that will help their community. Even when they've made bad decisions in the past, it's never too late to start making good ones.
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In many cities, officials recognize that it's better to stop a problem from occurring than try to control it after the fact. When faced with a recurring problem (like riotous parties), they pass ordinances that target its root causes. Why not do the same with street safety?
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Alec Davis is the founder of Momentum Des Moines, an urban advocacy organization dedicated to building a better city by working with local government to end car dependency and make the city more accessible for everyone
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Since enacting broad housing reforms in 2019, Durham, North Carolina, has been experiencing an explosion of missing-middle housing and housing affordability. Here are the main reforms the city enacted and how they're helping it fight the housing crisis.
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In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn talk about the rapid population decline of children under five years old in large urban areas and what this means for the future of cities.
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In this special episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks about the ways housing fraud manifests, how it gradually saturates the market and how it’s connected to the current housing crisis.
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Jane Jacobs identified four key ingredients for good urban settings: compact development, varied buildings, mixed uses and short blocks. Here's why these ingredients are important and how certain regions in the U.S. might face more difficulty in implementing them than others.
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In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck discusses municipal finance with Michel Durand-Wood, a longtime Strong Towns contributor and local budget aficionado.
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The traffic engineering profession has three responses to fatal crashes: blame the driver, call for more engineering or conclude it was an accident that couldn't be prevented. These are understandable human reactions. Here's why they're also inadequate and what should be done instead.
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North America's built environment makes it too dangerous for most children to walk to school. Edward Erfurt, Strong Towns' director of community action, knows that from experience. Here's how he's planning to make the street outside his son's school safer.
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Jennifer Krouse is a real estate strategist and the CEO of an architectural publishing house. She joins the podcast today to talk about the ways stock plans make incremental development easier and less risky, the art of placecraft, and the importance of places being productive.
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Car companies have been talking about making cars a third place for years, and the concept has been engrained in North American culture for even longer. But can cars actually function as a third place? More importantly, should they?
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In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn talk about the challenges of building an Olympic Village and then repurposing it after the Games are finished.
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The practice of "grandfathering in" old buildings — letting them exist without meeting current building codes — is a good one. However, buildings lose this protected status if their owners perform renovations or additions, resulting in many buildings declining or sitting empty. It doesn't have to be this way.
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In Florida, flooding from Hurricane Debby exposes how the suburban pattern of development can worsen natural disasters and make it more difficult for residents to evacuate.
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In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck is joined by Eric Goldwyn, a leading urban scholar and transit expert, to discuss the benefits of high-speed rail and how it could brought to the U.S.
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The U.S. is in a massive housing bubble fueled by widespread fraud. With banks incentivized to look away and Wall Street and Washington incentivized to keep housing prices artificially high, a bottom-up approach is the only hope for bringing sanity back to the housing market.
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Greenfield development may be appealing to people who are fighting the housing crisis, especially on cheap rural land. But if these developments are the only places with housing affordability, people who can't drive — whether due to age, disability, or finance — are out of luck. That's not a real solution.
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Seth Zeren, a neighborhood developer and founding member of Strong Towns, returns to The Bottom-Up Revolution to talk about the political side of incremental development and how to deal with issues like balancing needed development with increased property taxes.
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