8 Ways Politicians Can Make Our Cities Strong
How to apply the Strong Towns approach.
1. Focus on your downtown and an ecosystem of neighborhoods. A strong and prosperous place is a healthy ecosystem. Traditional neighborhoods around a core commercial center form the most adaptable, productive, and strong form of development. These places need to thicken up and become vital again. That’s where our iterative and incremental efforts should begin.
2. Focus on neighborhood compatibility and not simply use. Fragile development approaches focus on separating all elements of human habitat into monoculture pods. This is what use-based zoning does, even though monocultures are uniquely fragile. Development regulations need to focus on overall compatibility instead of trying to solve every potential conflict with different degrees of isolation.
3. Focus on expanding housing opportunities. Top-down financing has provided local communities with an abundance of single-family homes and clusters of highdensity apartments, but this is like a forest with only two types of plants: sequoias and ferns. Housing types that fall somewhere between these two are often called the “missing-middle” and they’re “missing” partially because cities make them difficult to build. There is enormous demand for expanded housing opportunities and we need to respond to that feedback.
4. Focus on transportation as a means, not an end. Spending money on transportation does nothing for us if it doesn’t make us stronger and more prosperous. Throw out the transportation wishlist (and it’s critical to redirect staff or they will keep pushing for these projects). Shift capital investment dollars so that 90% or more goes toward maintenance, with the remainder directed to neighborhood-focused enhancements identified using the Strong Towns 4-Step Approach to Making Capital Investments.
5. Focus on economic development with a gardening mentality. In good times, nearly every city was out trying to hunt for their next business, paying whatever it took to get them to town. Winning a race to the bottom meant financially losing for the community over the long run. Focus on growing your own ecosystem of businesses, replacing your imported goods and services with locally-produced alternatives whenever possible.
6. Focus on leveraging public spaces. When cities had excess resources, we could pretend that parks were mere recreational amenities. Poorer cities of the past built spectacular parks by recognizing their capacity to improve surrounding property values. Instead of building a parking lot, physically connect your community to your park with improved walkways.
7. Focus on your people. Public engagement must shift from something we do formally as part of a process to something continually ongoing, collected at the point of human experience. Think of a restaurant with a suggestion box versus one where the owner stops by the table while you are eating. That’s the shift we need to make.
8. Focus on reducing debts and liabilities. Cities are burdened with decades of legacy obligations from the suburban growth era—promises that now rob communities of options. The obligation to maintain a road or repair a pipe has real consequences on people’s lives if ignored, so it’s not clear how these unpayable local commitments are rebalanced to fit local capacity. We should be cognizant of not expanding our liabilities while we find ways to adjust community commitments to match community resources.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of work to be done, but it will get you powerful momentum in the direction of growing stronger and more prosperous.
