Why is it so hard to imagine removing a 60-year-old freeway from the heart of my city—even as someone who likes the idea?
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Design doesn’t necessarily make a community, but, as this neighborhood in St. Paul, MN, shows, it does matter.
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Earlier this year, a man was killed in a car crash while crossing the street in Amarillo, TX. The driver didn’t see him—and when you look at his surroundings, it’s not hard to understand why.
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The single least expensive way to produce a lot of new housing is to follow a template that was once used in virtually every city. Unfortunately, most North American cities effectively prohibit it today. Does yours?
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A pediatrician, a pastor, a software developer, a pilot, and an urban planner walk into a bar. That’s not the setup for a dumb joke—rather, it’s a small sampling of our remarkably eclectic membership.
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This series of studies of 19th-century development in St. Paul, MN, can help us understand some of the earliest traces of what would later become the suburban development pattern.
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Public policy has winners and losers, and parking reform is, unfortunately, no exception. So how should that knowledge impact the way we approach parking reform?
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Americans need housing relief imminently. Despite what you may have heard, upzoning isn’t likely to be the thing that delivers that—but here's why it’s still worth pursuing.
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Settling down from a cross-country move, Strong Towns Editor-in-Chief Daniel Herriges reflects on what makes a place feel like “home,” and what prompts people to put roots in a location—even if it’s not a “perfect” place.
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Good urbanism doesn’t have to mean large apartment buildings or an immaculate row of brownstones; the ad-hoc version on display in this Florida neighborhood is more relevant as a model of adaptation for the rest of us.
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In 2021, California passed Senate Bill 9, ending exclusive single-family zoning. The first numbers have come in on this new law’s impact, and...they're not large numbers. But here's why that's not surprising (nor a cause for alarm).
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If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a whole community to build a building. The small-scale developers of South Bend, IN, are showing how to do just that—and do it successfully in the long term.
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Heated discussion about a new condo in Sarasota, FL, has got locals calling the building an eyesore. But is this a case of misdirected ire?
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“Community character" is often invoked to support exclusion and discrimination, but there are also communities whose unique "character" matters—a lot. How (if at all) should local government support such places?
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Los Angeles lost a hundred thousand affordable homes in a decade. Don’t look to bulldozers to explain how.
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Strong Towns Editor-in-Chief Daniel Herriges shares his favorite content from this past year.
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Discourse about affordable housing is dominated by a handful of extremely unrepresentative places, and the solutions that might be applicable in those places don't translate in the rest of the U.S.
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Most parking lots on Black Friday are not going to be full. Here’s one retail complex that’s an exception—but it just proves that having “enough” parking is always less important than creating a place people want to be.
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Bottom-up change led by local heroes leads to momentum that replicates virally—and we're seeing the results nationwide.
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Many of us are keen to express the “what” that we’d like to see in the built environment, but unwilling to think rationally and clearly about the “how.”
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