My hometown of Plano, Texas is the midst of a bubble. Everything seems fine! Taxes are low. The city provides great services. It has an AAA bond rating. The music is still playing, and therefore everyone must remain dancing. But we have a looming problem: staggering long-term infrastructure liabilities that we haven’t even fully accounted for.
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Denton, Texas seemed to be on the verge of an important step toward financial resilience: allowing its core neighborhoods to incrementally evolve and provide much-needed new housing. Now, is the city on the verge of moving in the wrong direction instead?
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City officials often ask, “What target price point for new homes will ensure that we can balance our books?” Here’s why they’re asking the wrong question.
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Derek Avery spoke at the recent North Texas Gathering about doing revitalization without gentrification. As a follow-up, we interviewed Avery about his thoughtful approach to community development.
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Strong Towns’s Aubrey Byron interviews John Simmerman and Amanda Popken, who presented on placemaking and tactical urbanism at our recent North Texas Regional Gathering.
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Our Gathering Coordinator Ivy Vann recaps #StrongTownsNTX, the North Texas Regional Gathering. We brought together aspiring change-makers and seasoned experts from all over Texas and beyond, and helped them connect with each other and learn how to make their own communities stronger.
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Collin County, Texas officials claim they need $12.6 billion for new roads in the next 30 years, and none of it for maintenance of what they’ve already built. That way lies madness.
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A recent D Magazine story nailed the problem with Dallas’s development pattern: the city has way more infrastructure than it can afford to maintain. But its solution—assessing local taxes differently—didn’t go far enough.
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John Simmerman and his organization Active Towns want to see a massive increase in the number of places with a culture of physical activity. Come see John speak at the Strong Towns Regional Gathering in Plano, Texas, and learn what he’s doing to help create that change.
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Austin needs a new Grand Bargain, one that includes everyone and exempts no one.
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Let’s walk through what it actually takes to build a small rental apartment on your property in Austin, Texas. It’s a lesson in how the city’s existing code stymies gentle, incremental, small-scale development.
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Austin’s CodeNEXT process, a dramatic overhaul of the city’s zoning code, tried to placate multiple constituencies with a “grand bargain.” The result was a draft code that satisified almost no one and failed to solve the city’s housing and growth challenges.
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Where is Austin supposed to put 135,000 new homes in ten years? The city posed the question. Diametrically opposed groups of residents could not come close to agreeing on the answer.
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This week we are examining what went wrong with Austin’s CodeNEXT process and what should be done now.
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Meet several of the presenters who will be at our North Texas Regional Gathering next month, and learn about the work they’re doing to move their Texas communities away from business as usual and toward fiscally sustainable development.
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We’re hosting a regional gathering in North Texas in October, and we’re assembling a line-up of local and national expert presenters. Our speakers bring a wealth of wisdom and experience in building strong towns, and we're proud to begin introducing them to you here!
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Texas has a history of aggressively using tax incentives to lure big business: a misguided economic development approach that produces little if any public benefit. Dallas’s bid for Amazon’s second headquarters falls right in line with this unfortunate pattern.
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As the population shifts in Austin, decisions about the future of the city's streets will have significant impacts for generations to come.
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Something is seriously wrong with your town's finances if merely fixing a street would require 17 year's worth of taxes from the people who use that street...
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It is very seductive to look at Houston's flooding as a simple engineering and planning problem.
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