The Strong Towns no-gimmicks approach truly is a "third way" for the city of New Albany because it crosses political boundaries.

Tony Beard drew this.

"Out there is someone who maybe disagrees with you on politics, but that person has a shared vision with you on making our cities, towns, and neighborhoods stronger. We need each other."

Lots of what I've been writing in this space since 2015 reflects what the movement's founder Charles Marohn calls the Strong Towns approach.

The Strong Towns approach is a radically new way of thinking about the way we build our world. We believe that in order to truly thrive, our cities and towns must:

+ Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience;
+ Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn;
+ Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation;
+ Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today;
+ Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances.

But most importantly, we believe that Strong Citizens from all walks of life can and must participate in a Strong Towns approach—from citizens to leaders, professionals to neighbors, and everyone in between. And that means we need you.

Marohn is honest about the challenges of broadening his organization's appeal among women and minorities, but he also identifies an area of unequivocal success. When I say there is a third-way policy position in communities like ours, this is precisely what I'm referring to.

Living with the Other, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... There is one place, however, where Strong Towns has a level of diversity that is as rare as it is powerful among American organizations in 2019: ideological diversity. We have people who enthusiastically identify as politically left-of-center, and we have people who enthusiastically identify as right-of-center. When Strong Towns supporters get together, it is this crazy mix of people we don’t see in other places. We don’t occupy the center—this is not a movement of moderates. It’s something different.

I’m convinced that is the key to our rapid growth and long-term success. You can be passionate about fiscal responsibility and small business and love Strong Towns. You can be passionate about equitable transportation and environmental stewardship and love Strong Towns. And that love can be authentic because we can meet those shared goals with a Strong Towns approach. It’s not a gimmick, and the people coming here understand that.

We’re entering into what I anticipate will be the craziest, nastiest, most media-manipulated, dysfunctional campaign season any of us will hopefully ever be subjected to. Regardless of your political point of view, you are going to be pummeled with messages designed to fill you with outrage at the other. Some of it might be true, and your outrage might be justified, but much of it will be half-truths designed to mobilize you to action. There will be less and less room for context and nuance.

I’m not asking you to change your opinions. I’m not asking you to moderate your point of view. I’m not even asking you to equivocate and accept any opposing viewpoint as equally valid. All I’m asking you to do is to recognize that the greatest strength of our movement is our unique ideological diversity: that out there is someone who maybe disagrees with you on politics, but that person has a shared vision with you on making our cities, towns, and neighborhoods stronger. We need each other.

In our discourse, Strong Towns advocates must try to be the peacemakers. The ones who turn down the volume. We can disagree without the hate. We may even extend an assumption of good intentions, and hope for the same in return. We might be pleasantly surprised.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt shared a New Years Resolution for our age. I think it is the standard all Strong Towns advocates should strive to follow:

I will give less offense (i.e., be more polite)

I will take less offense (i.e., give others the benefit of the doubt)

I will pass on less offense (i.e., not be the sort of retweeter Russian trolls want me to be)

I have not always met this standard. It’s difficult, and I’m all too human. Today let’s promise each other that we will strive to do so, and then let’s hold each other accountable.

As an addendum: For those readers puzzled by the fact that Roger the Flagrant Social Democrat finds it easier to chat substantively with local Republicans than many (though not all) Democrats, consider the possibility that local Democrats most enamored of the imperial Gahan approach to top-down patronage-disguised-as-infrastructure-improvement -- which itself is a refutation of the Strong Towns approach -- are rejecting my message because of this dissonance, and not any significant difference when it comes to left/liberal social justice and human rights issues.

That's because there are no differences between us when it comes to social justice and human rights issues. But too many local Democrats are unwilling to give due, detailed diligence to the Gahan personality cult's claims of brilliant fiscal management, which plainly is an illiberal and ruinous bait 'n' switch. Republicans see THAT part quite clearly.

As Marohn observes, the Strong Towns approach bridges a gap. It's an approach suitable for the city as a whole, especially the historic core, and if you're a voting resident of the 3rd district, you'll be hearing a lot more about this as the months pass.

The book is here: "Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity."

The Strong Towns book has been released. Soon there'll be stacks of these at the new Warren V. Nash Reisz Mahal City Hall, tomes towering as high as those Amazon boxes of Bicentennial seat cushion Crutchfields that Bob Caesar wasted tens of thousands of dollars of YOUR money buying in 2013 before flushing the invoices down the toilet to keep people like me from seeing them.

That was a joke, folks -- well, the first part.

There's no way Team Gahan reads Marohn, as his lessons would contradict the pay-to-play Ponzi Scheme which is Dear Leader's only true achievement in office.

More than a year of writing and editing, then months of anticipation and planning...it all led here. Today is the official release day for Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, the first book from Strong Towns founder and president Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

In Strong Towns, Chuck (as he’s known around here) upends conventional approaches to urban development. The North American development pattern, Chuck writes, equates to the largest human experiment ever attempted. "In the blink of an evolutionary eye,” he says, “we have transformed everything about how we live, get around, interact with each other, make decisions, conduct commerce, fall in love, and countless other aspects of human existence.” This pattern has come at an astronomical price, though. It traps cities and towns in a growth/debt cycle that racks up huge economic bills, not to mention steep social costs, that are rapidly coming due.

The Strong Towns approach, as you know, is different. We focus on bottom-up investments (“little bets”) that minimize risk and maximize a community’s ability to strengthen itself financially while improving the quality of life for all residents. Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City, called the Strong Towns book “our current moment’s most cogent, practical, and necessary response to the problem of urban economics.” Andrew Duany, author of Suburban Nation and the founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, put it this way:

Sometimes, in our depleted and cynical times, one hears “Well then, what is your genius plan?” Here it is, finally, with extraordinary force and clarity: a genius plan.

We think something special is happening around the release of this book. The publisher, Wiley, is reporting big pre-order numbers, which is compelling booksellers to take notice. Yesterday, we watched Strong Towns climb the sales ranks on Amazon, ending the day at #1 in three categories: Urban & Regional Economics, Development & Growth Economics, and Business Development. We can’t wait to see what release day has in store.

You’ve already done so much to get the book to this point, but can we ask one more favor? Will you help us spread the word this week? Would you take 30 seconds out of your day to recommend the Strong Towns book (or this site) to some friends—in a conversation over coffee, for example, via email, or on social. The link below provides a lot of information about the book. We’re going to keep that link continuously updated as the major reviews start to appear. (Two already have.)

“A Stronger America Needs ‘Strong Towns’ First,” by Michael Hendrix

“The Localist Theory of Charles Marohn’s Wonderfully Practical Strong Towns,” by Russell Arben Fox

The following links are a bonus of sorts from earlier in the summer, in which Marohn documents his personal journey.

My Journey From Free Market Ideologue to Strong Towns Advocate

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Pequot Lakes Bypass
Part 3: What Is Infrastructure?
Part 4: Analyzing the Cul-De-Sac
Part 5: Commercial Development
Part 6: Organic Markets in the Traditional City
Part 7: The Nature of Markets

Explaining the mayor's Rally's/Checkers photo-op in the context of Pay to Play, the Suburban Experiment, and Strong Towns.

This embarrassment owes to boondoggle splashback. I'm happy to explain.

The City of New Albany subsidized the Summit Springs hilltop development by means of using the roadway to the top as pretext to redevelop the Daisy Lane intersection at State Street.

At the time, this intervention was artfully justified by then-redevelopment honcho David Duggins' assertion that by working with private profit-seekers, the city could be sure the ensuing development would be done correctly.

Duggins subsequently was packed off to ruin human lives at the housing authority, but this lies outside the scope of today's Rally's indigestion.

From Team Gahan's standpoint, the "right" results from its Summit Springs TIF One Card deferred costs were immediately evident, and to avoid clutter, we'll spotlight just one.

In fact the overall verdict remains very clear.

The city's participation in Summit Springs under the scarcely examined rubric of "economic development" inevitably meant that business winners and losers were being chosen by local government, as in the instance of the laughably termed "iconic" Rally's/Checker chain restaurant grand opening; just note that by virtue of the public subsidies showered upon the private profiteers of Summit Springs, this restaurant itself benefited from municipal subsidies, as these same benefits were unavailable to a true indie small business opening elsewhere.

The city's propaganda team desperately needs a dose of localism, and also might learn from the example of Strong Towns, because in addition to the preceding, the infrastructure being TIFFed into creation on and near Summit Springs will bear maintenance costs in the future, and these are not being factored into the costs at present. While Summit Springs is within a short distance of the dense urban core, its rationale and required expenditures are firmly within the boundaries of the short-term "Suburban Experiment" described below by Charles Marohn ... of Strong Towns.

Read up, pay-to-play Gahanites.

Ha ha. I make myself laugh out loud at times.

---

What do you do when you need to change everything? by Charles Marohn

Our cities are struggling financially. But culturally, we lack a common understanding to explain why this is, let alone decide what to do about it.

Many people want to believe we’re simply not paying enough taxes. Others believe that our tax rates are too high. We might have too little regulation, or not enough. Some say we need an active government, and some, more of a free market... But at Strong Towns, we don’t see things in such binary ways.

Plenty of Americans wish we would listen to the experts and hand things over to the people who claim they know what needs to be done. Others believe we have too many experts, and that they know a lot less than they think they do...

We’re more nuanced here at Strong Towns; a little expertise combined with a lot of humility can be a powerful force for good.

A Cultural Consensus That Lacks Real Understanding

One area where we have something approaching an American cultural consensus is our need to spend more money on infrastructure. Left, right, center... it seems most people can agree on this. But Strong Towns advocates think differently.

What we at Strong Towns have seen so clearly is that our cities struggle not from the lack of a cultural consensus, but because of one.

We’ve structured our economy around the principles of the Suburban Experiment, an approach to growth that provides lots of short-term rewards at the expense of our long-term strength and resiliency. Our cultural consensus on infrastructure spending is built on false statistics and short-term planning, but it lacks a common understanding about the root causes of financial failure and financial success.

Strong Cities, Towns and Neighborhoods

If America is going to be a strong country, it must first have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods.

We can't manufacture prosperity with infrastructure spending or federal dollars; it has to be built from the bottom up.

We understand that cities become strong and resilient when they grow incrementally, when they shun the easy path of simplistic solutions and instead do the hard work of making modest investments over a broad area over a long period of time.

We know that local governments must focus on their financial productivity and that doing this math is not optional if we want to create prosperous places.

And at Strong Towns, we know that the cities that obsess about the struggles of their own residents — cities that make a commitment to observe where people struggle day-to-day within the community, and then focus on continuously doing the next smallest thing to reduce that struggle — these cities are not only going to help people; they are going to be making the highest returning investments they can possibly make. They are going to become Strong Towns.

These are radical insights. They run counter to our current consensus about growth, development and infrastructure. Yet, when we share these radical notions with others — when we have a chance to expose people to the Strong Towns message and our vision of the future — something amazing happens.

A Powerful, Radical Message That we can All Agree on

People who don’t agree — who can’t even productively talk to each other today — find something they agree on in Strong Towns. Something challenging. Something radical. Something that, if spread to enough people, can form that basis of a new cultural consensus.

A strong America made up of strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. That’s the vision.

We have a powerful message and we have built our organization around a movement to spread it. We’re attacking the complex problem of struggling cities by changing the current cultural consensus. We do this in three simple ways:

We create content.
We distribute that content as broadly as possible.
We nudge people to take action.

And it’s working. Don't miss out. Be part of what we're building together. Memberships start at just $5 per month. Join the movement.

I've joined Strong Towns, and encourage you to check it out.

For quite some time, I've been reading and sharing material from Strong Towns, and many thanks to Jeff Gillenwater for drawing my attention to this movement.

It's member drive week at Strong Towns, and I've finally got around to joining this 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

As indicated elsewhere recently, one thing we can surely do during these tumultuous times is use our support dollars wisely, whether for the cause of principled journalism (The Nation, The Guardian, CounterPunch), public television and radio, and organizations doing the nitty gritty of what's going to be needed more than ever, like Planned Parenthood, Freedom from Religion Foundation and the ACLU.

Needless to say, the Strong Towns mission and that of local governance as usual, as we experience it on most days in Nawbany, are somewhat at odds; there are a few precious points of convergence, but not many, and this needs to change.

I'm in a position like so many others, in that since the recent election, the precise course of action and opposition isn't yet clear apart from continuing an emphasis on localism. Until the fog lifts, we're supporting principled advocacy where we can, as we can, and Strong Towns fits the bill. A final thought: If you're of conservative inclination and believe Strong Towns is some sort of left-wing conspiracy, check it out -- but prepare to be very surprised at what you find.

---

THE MISSION OF STRONG TOWNS IS TO SUPPORT A MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT THAT ALLOWS AMERICA'S CITIES, TOWNS AND NEIGHBORHOODS TO BECOME FINANCIALLY STRONG AND RESILIENT.

For the United States to be a prosperous country, it must have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. Enduring prosperity for our communities cannot be artificially created from the outside but must be built from within, incrementally over time.

A STRONG TOWNS APPROACH

There are no universal answers to the complex problems America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods face. At Strong Towns, we seek to discover rational ways to respond to these challenges. A Strong Towns approach:

• Relies on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects,
• Emphasizes resiliency of result over efficiency of execution,
• Is designed to adapt to feedback,
• Is inspired by bottom-up action (chaotic but smart) and not top-down systems (orderly but dumb),
• Seeks to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale, and
• Is obsessive about accounting for its revenues, expenses, assets and long term liabilities (do the math).

Strong Towns and Wendell Berry: “Though many of our worst problems are big, they do not necessarily have big solutions."

At Strong Towns, our aim is to change the way that we talk about solutions for our communities. We want to change the way that built environment experts (architects, planners, engineers, etc.), elected officials, and engaged citizens think about and engage with their place. We believe that the only way to change a flawed cultural consensus is to build a movement of people pushing for change. Our work is aimed at building a broad coalition of people who reject the dominant patterns of development and financing and actively push for a different approach, both at the national scale and in their communities.

In New Albany? Unlikely, but a boy can dream.

After all, nowhere in the Strong Towns lexicon can one find a formula for campaign finance enhancement by special interest donors, now enshrined as daily reality in our town owing to Jeff Gahan's insatiable avarice.

But we can find definitions like this: "Growth Ponzi Scheme"

Most American cities find themselves caught in the Growth Ponzi Scheme. We experience a modest, short term illusion of wealth in exchange for enormous, long term liabilities. We deprive our communities of prosperity, overload our families with debt and become trapped in a spiral of decline. This cannot continue.

In New Albany, there is little hope of changing the conversation without changing the mayor and his chortling clique. November cannot come soon enough for me.

Changing the Conversation, Bo Wright (Strong Towns)

My role with Strong Towns involves sharing our message in small meetings with folks who have not previously been exposed to the Strong Towns message. There is a particular awkward moment that always occurs in these meetings. I walk through a short version of our signature Curbside Chat presentation and outline the Growth Ponzi Scheme, in order to describe “the problem” Strong Towns exists to solve. I’ve never finished showing the problem without the individuals leaning forward in anticipation of “the solution.”

I call the moment “awkward” because in the moment, the solutions I share seem so inadequate to the scale of the problem. We’re suggesting that cities and towns across North America are fundamentally insolvent and destined for standards of living well below what we’ve come to accept. The resulting social consequences are sobering, especially for the poor in our communities. And yet here I am, suggesting that we need to focus on the little things, make productive use of the infrastructure we’ve already built, and #DoTheMath when it comes to the long-term financial implications of development decisions. I don’t know what kind of solution would feel adequate for the predicament we’ve created across our towns and cities, but in the moment, “We need to begin by focusing on the little things” feels inadequate.

The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient. And we do this by seeking to change the cultural conversation about growth and development. As I’ve shared before, Strong Towns is not focused on directly changing public policy at any level of government, and we’re not consultants to cities. While these may seem like a natural leverage point for change—and a sexier solution—we believe that the root of the problem extends from faulty assumptions about how to create community prosperity and livable places.

American cities don’t struggle from a lack of a cultural consensus. They struggle because of one. Too many American citizens and decision makers believe that our current culture of unproductive growth, rapid development and intensive, debt-driven public investment is acceptable—or worse, they believe there is no alternative to it.

This consensus is based on a core, systematic misunderstanding of how communities create and destroy wealth. We lack a common understanding of why our places struggle, let alone what we might to do to help them thrive. We need to change the assumptions that our communities and their citizens have about how a community builds wealth. We need to change the conversation.

Wendell Berry on Counterproductive “Solutions”

Back to the idea I began with: that the solutions we offer do not feel adequate. I often come back to a quote by the agrarian author and poet, Wendell Berry. In “Local Economies to Save the Land and the People”, Berry writes, “Though many of our worst problems are big, they do not necessarily have big solutions. Many of the needed changes will have to be made in individual lives, in families and households, and in local communities. And so we must understand the importance of scale, and learn to determine the scale that is right for our places.”

The notion of solutions that are harmful if applied at the wrong scale is a recurring theme of Berry’s ...

Marohn: "Certified planners—along with licensed engineers—present the greatest institutional obstacle to wide-scale adoption of a Strong Towns approach."

A periodic reminder about Strong Towns.

WHO WE ARE.
Strong Towns is an international movement that’s dedicated to making communities across the United States and Canada financially strong and resilient.

THE PROBLEM WE FACE.
For generations, North American communities have been growing—or at least, they've been building. But as we've paved endless roads, raised countless buildings and put more and more infrastructure in the ground, we’ve given almost no thought to whether future generations will be able to afford to maintain the world we'll leave them with—or how many of the things we build are making our communities worse places to live today.

As today's essay by Charles Marohn was introduced in my member e-mail:

About ten years ago, a guy from Minnesota noticed something unusual was going on at work. He was a city planner who was respected by his peers, but the things he was helping communities build were putting them in debt—really deep in debt.

No one seemed to think this was a problem. In fact, most of his colleagues were doing the same thing. But when he did a little basic math, he realized that even in the best case scenario, the towns he worked with would never be able to afford to maintain all the pavement and pipe they'd put in the ground.

That guy, of course, was our founder and president, Chuck Marohn. And he decided to do something about this problem: he started the Strong Towns movement. And all those years, he maintained his planning certification, even though he stopped working professionally as a planner long ago.

These days, though, Chuck is considering letting that professional acronym fall off the end of his signature. And the reason why has some profound implications for the future of the Strong Towns movement.

Give it a read, and let us know: how will you make your town stronger today, no matter what letters are at the end of your name?

Good stuff.

Goodbye AICP? by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Earlier this year, I received a letter from the American Planning Association (APA) informing me that my certification from the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) was no longer in effect. The reason stated was that I had failed to complete the required ethics credit for my continuing education. There was a reinstatement process outlined in the letter, including an ultimate deadline for meeting this requirement and becoming an AICP certified planner without having to retake the test.

The letter has sat on my desk for months. I came into the office this evening to find the letter so I could reference it, and someone has cleared it off my desk. I’m unable to locate it. My AICP pin that was sent to me years ago is sitting here on the ledge, however, in the box it came in with a dead bug on top of it. Its disposition is revealing.

I’m coming to the realization that I just don’t care about my AICP. I certainly have not lost any sleep over the letter from the APA. For months, I haven’t bothered to take even the most rudimentary action regarding it. This isn’t the kind of behavior one has regarding a certification they value.

Here comes the meat.

It’s no wonder that the AICP has tended to be—in my experience—an echo chamber of public employees (with governments paying their certification) and the planning consultants who want credibility with those governments (so they can enjoy exclusivity in selling their services).

I’m neither, and I’m starting to get the impression that I don’t belong. Or am not really wanted. I spend a fair amount of time with planners—a great number of them are AICP—and I know there is a lot of enthusiasm for Strong Towns within APA’s membership. Even so, certified planners—along with licensed engineers—present the greatest institutional obstacle to wide-scale adoption of a Strong Towns approach.

Throw another log on the fire.

If we’re going to sit around and wait for planners to lead this revolution, we’re going to be disappointed. Some will be there with us, but most are going to be late adopters.

Strong Towns and "Five Low Cost Ideas to Make Your City Wealthier."

Before arriving at the promised low cost ideas, allow me to reiterate a valuable resource.

I've joined Strong Towns, and encourage you to check it out.

As indicated elsewhere recently, one thing we surely can do during these tumultuous times is use our support dollars wisely, whether for the cause of principled journalism (The Nation, The Guardian, CounterPunch), public television and radio, and organizations doing the nitty gritty of what's going to be needed more than ever, like Planned Parenthood, Freedom from Religion Foundation and the ACLU.

Needless to say, the Strong Towns mission and that of local governance as usual, as we experience it on most days in Nawbany, are somewhat at odds; there are a few precious points of convergence, but not many, and this needs to change.

NA Confidential supports principled advocacy where and as we can, and Strong Towns fits the bill. A final thought: If you're of conservative inclination and believe Strong Towns is some sort of left-wing conspiracy, check it out -- but prepare to be very surprised at what you find.

---

THE MISSION OF STRONG TOWNS IS TO SUPPORT A MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT THAT ALLOWS AMERICA'S CITIES, TOWNS AND NEIGHBORHOODS TO BECOME FINANCIALLY STRONG AND RESILIENT.


I've edited the five ideas, so be sure to dance through and read the explanations in their entirety. For amusement, try imagining Team Gahan embracing any of them -- and be prepared to laugh out loud, because if Marohn is guilty of omitting any one relevant point, it's the explanation of how low cost ideas like these still maintain required lines of beak wetting to the imperial campaign finance machine.

FIVE LOW COST IDEAS TO MAKE YOUR CITY WEALTHIER, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Yesterday we shared five ways in which federal infrastructure spending is making cities poorer. That piece included this observation:

What we have not figured out -- and what we won't figure out with another flood of federal infrastructure spending -- is how to translate maintenance into growth. How do we go out and fill potholes and fix leaking pipes and have that result in additional wealth in our neighborhoods? This is a daunting challenge that requires us to rethink -- from bottom to top -- how we develop our places. We need to modernize our zoning codes, building standards, housing incentives, insurance programs, etc. There are a lot of people trying to do this, but they get cast aside every time the federal gravy train rolls into town.

Here are some of the low cost initiatives that every city across the country should prioritize.

1. THE BETTER BLOCK
The Better Block uses small, low cost interventions to prototype larger scale projects.

2. INCREMENTAL DEVELOPMENT ALLIANCE
Developers R. John Anderson and Monte Anderson (no relation) have made careers out of building small, incremental projects in existing neighborhoods. Now they are doggedly training the next generation of small scale developers, giving them the tricks and insights to thrive in a development world not built for them.

3. OSWEGO RENAISSANCE ASSOCIATION
With very small amounts of capital, the Association has provided matching grants and resources to blocks of individuals wanting to invest in improving the look of their street.

4. ECONOMIC GARDENING
What do you do when you realize your city is never going to be able to subsidize enough businesses to create the jobs you need? There was no way to fill this hole with traditional economic development techniques. They were forced to innovate. The result: economic gardening, an approach that focuses on growing jobs in existing businesses rather than paying a business to relocate to the community. It's gardening, not hunting.

5. SMALL CHANGE
Small Change is allowing the regular investor to use their resources to invest in small scale projects, improvements that often don't neatly fit standard financing models. It's a little like crowdfunding, but for real estate, and there is an expectation of a return on investment.

It's this week: Strong Towns Conference and keynote speaker Charles Marohn, on cities, streets, and sprawl.

The Strong Towns Conference takes place in Louisville this week. I REALLY WANT TO GO, but I'm just not sure it can be done.

Crossing my fingers ...

First, a little about Charles Marohn, and information on the Strong Towns Conference. Then, one small but telling excerpt from the interview.

Ahead of Strong Towns Conference, Charles Marohn talks cities, streets, and the future of sprawl, by Branden Klayko (Broken Sidewalk)

The pattern of building more and more sprawl continues into the 21st century with potentially devastating economic implications to the well being of cities. Charles Marohn is a professional engineer in Minnesota who has been highlighting the problems with the way we design and build our cities today. To advocate for building prosperous cities, Marohn founded the nonprofit Strong Towns, with a mission “to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns, and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient.”

Marohn is the keynote at the Kentucky Heritage Council’s upcoming Strong Towns Conference, and we highly recommend attending. The two-day event takes place Thursday, September 24 and Friday, September 25 at the Kentucky Center for the Arts. Advance tickets cost $25 and tickets at the door are $35. The Heritage Council is partnering with Preservation Kentucky, Preservation Louisville, the Kentucky Main Street Program, and Friends of Kentucky Main Street. Additional support is provided by KHC member Nana Lampton and Hardscuffle Inc.

The excerpt:

What do we do with the existing network of sprawl that’s already been built?

Well, I’m going to paraphrase the Iowa department of transportation director, Paul Trombino, who said in June when I was there doing a lecture with him a lot of this stuff is just going to go away. We don’t have the money to maintain it. We don’t have the money to fix it. And it’s just not going to be maintained. It’s not going to be there. I think once you understand that in reality, that we’ve literally built more than we can possibly pay to fix, it opens up a whole other realm of thinking.

I think we need to start talking about how do we transition into a world where these things, from a market standpoint, start to go away. What we see now in a macro sense is an increase in suburban poverty and an increase in social isolation that goes along with that.

Strong Towns Week: “This blog has changed my life in profound ways and, in the process, your reaction has given voice to a movement that is slowing seeping into those cogs of government.”

The Copperhead can be intimidating.

You know, this guy up in Minnesota getting involved, and finding it discomforts the governing cliques, the sycophants serving them, and the oligarchs being served by them.

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable? Marohn is an engineer, but it almost sounds like journalism.

STAYING STRONG, by Charles Marohn

... I wanted to share this because I know there are Strong Towns advocates out there who occasionally get similar responses in their communities: Why don’t you move? Let’s see you run for council. Why don’t you show up? These are really destructive and dysfunctional notions that are meant to intimidate and shame the receiver. We can’t let that change what we do.

We all need to understand, first and foremost, that you don’t need to attend a meeting to care. You don’t need to be involved in the system that has been set up for you in order to be involved in your place. A base assumption of the Strong Towns movement is that the city is ours. We are not relegated to secondary citizens simply because we are not following the process set forth by those in power.

One of the more deeply offensive moments of my professional life was at a meeting of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s citizen’s board where one of the outspoken board members stated that, “the world is run by those who show up.” This was said in the context of defending the actions of a wealthy, highly-connected group of prime property owners who not only could afford to take time off work and travel 150 miles to the meeting, but retain legal staff and professional experts to advocate on their behalf. Needless to say, their opposition didn’t “show up” in the way that they had — their concerns thereby invalidated with a pompous remark.

City council meetings are incredibly unfair environments for a member of the general public wanting to be heard. The layout of most council chambers is intimidating and isolating. A person asking to speak has to come up to a podium, stand there alone and face an assembled group of officials who are seated behind an intimidating table and, often, elevated above the crowd. In my city, they are on television to boot. I’ve seen grown men shake with fear when asked to address the council in this way.

This is the home field for the staff and the city council. They have the benefit of having spent a lot of time in this abnormal environment. They know how the protocols work, how to control the floor and how to direct the discussion. They have inside information that members of the public don’t have, adding to the asymmetric power structure. I will never fault someone for not subjecting themselves to that, no matter how important their cause.

The format of a council meeting creates feedback that is disjointed and unhelpful. There is little opportunity for back and forth dialogue. Complex issues must be discussed in limited timeframes. Members of the public are often given cursory slots at the beginning and the end of the agenda and frequently leave feeling as if they are being patronized or tolerated, not listened to. I don’t blame anyone for finding little value in spending their time this way.

And this:

Here is what are we called to do as Strong Towns advocates:

1. A Strong Citizen is a leader by example, sharing the values of a Strong Town in the way they live their own life.
2. A Strong Citizen is actively involved in their community, although not necessarily in local government.
3. A Strong Citizen knows their immediate neighbors and works with them to resolve conflict and build a strong neighborhood.
4. A Strong Citizen seeks connections with others outside their neighborhood as a way to gain knowledge, build understanding and strengthen the community.
5. A Strong Citizen honors the work of past generations, respects the needs of the current generation and protects the interests of future generations.

Don’t be intimidated by haters. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

Strong Towns on "10 ways to promote local/regional food in your town."

Photo credit: Strong Towns.

Maybe in New Albany in high summer, though it would be quite challenging.

WHAT'S THE ROLE OF LOCAL FOOD IN BUILDING STRONG TOWNS?

You can't have a strong economy if your town is entirely dependent on other regions for your citizens' most basic needs. A healthy local food system is an excellent indicator that your town is a Strong Town—and that your economy is on the right track to becoming antifragile and self sufficient to meet its other needs, too. That's why the Strong Towns Strength Test asks, "If you wanted to eat only locally-produced food for a month, could you?". If your city can't answer "yes" to that question, you should read on.

Hint: Local food is about much more than farmers markets, so I won't hold my breath waiting for DNA to jump right on it. Wagons circling 'round the sinecure, and all that.

LOCAL FOOD: TURNING YOUR GREENS INTO GREENBACKS, by Brian Williams (Strong Towns)

There are many reasons to promote local food in your community: freshness; knowing where your food came from and how it was grown; supporting local farmers; having an alternative to fruits and vegetables that were trucked across the country from California or Florida.

Local and regional processing, distribution, and marketing “infrastructures” once existed, but then atrophied with the move to national distribution.

Today, if every farmer in Ohio pledged to grow for local markets, and every Ohio consumer vowed to buy local, we would have hungry people and wasted food. That’s because we lack the supply chain – the processing, distribution, and marketing “infrastructure” – to move food from farm to fork. I believe institutional markets are the key to developing that infrastructure. Most institutions cannot accept, say, a truckload of lettuce fresh from the field. They want it washed and trimmed and packaged – meaning the farm itself, or a third-party business, would need to provide those services. In either case, the service would add value and create jobs.

Just the 10 tags. Click through to read the essential explanations.

With that in mind, consider these 10 ways to promote local/regional food in your town:

1. Don’t focus on farmers markets, community gardens, and CSAs.

2. Do recognize the importance of slaughterhouses and trucks.

3. Get local-purchasing commitments from schools, hospitals, colleges, and other institutions.

4. Build a network of local farmers who will collaborate.

5. Enlist the support of existing food processing and distribution businesses.

6. Reach out to public health officials, economic development officials, food banks, bankers, etc.

7. Use these partners as the base for a local/regional food assessment, plan and council.

8. Don’t call it a Food Policy Council.

9. Build local food economic development infrastructure.

10. A food hub is not a food system.

Get going on any of these steps and you'll be on your way toward a more financially productive local food system.

"The Twelve Days of Safety Myths" is must reading for every candidate seeking office this year. How many of them will bother?

Jeff Gahan's self-interested City Hall isn't the only governing entity that would prefer you not ask questions of the sort raised in articles like this one.

Like many such aggregations of functionaries dependent on the status quo, New Albany's pillars wish us to trust preferred contractors/consultants/vendors like HWC Engineering, which can be trusted to maintain the car-centric status quo for all the beak-wetters.

Safety myths like these are at least part of the reason for Jeff Speck's street grid recommendations being rendered into fatty, filler-stuffed sausage by HWC.

And $5,000 more ... every single year. Coincidence?

I'm reprinting the text of the Strong Towns article in its entirety, but if you wish to read Kostelec's full treatment of each safety myth, you'll need to click through to the Strong Townsweb site  and follow the individual links there.

While you're there, look around. No doctrine is perfect, but Strong Towns provides an efficient model for responsible local planning and governance.

---

The Twelve Days of Safety Myths, by Don Kostelec (Strong Towns)

“But it doesn’t meet the standard.”

Heard that line before? Ever since the first video that Strong Towns ever created back in 2010 (the low-low-low-budget fan favorite Conversation With an Engineer) we have worked to expose the myths and excuses that too many in the traffic engineering profession use to justify deadly street designs. We’re talking about designs that prioritize automobile speed and traffic flow over human safety.

So we were delighted when our good friend Don Kostelec—transportation planner, avid blogger and Twitter user, and longtime safe-streets advocate—devoted an epic twelve-day series of essays in December to brilliantly dismantling some of the most common of these excuses for inaction or half-hearted action on safety—especially from state Departments of Transportation (DOTs).

Titled “The Twelve Days of Safety Myths” in honor of the classic Christmas song, Kostelec’s series is way too much for us to re-post here in its entirety, but it is absolutely worth reading in its entirety. Laypeople and transportation professionals alike can learn a lot.

We wanted to make sure our readers didn’t miss this must-read series, so here are links to all twelve installments. – Strong Towns Staff.

---

The Twelve Days of Safety Myths, by Don Kostelec

In the carol “The 12 days of Christmas,” the gifts are grander and grander with each passing day. I’m not sure I’ve accomplished that for you in this series, but I hope the time you spend reading them is well spent.

The goal was to help you dispel the common myths you hear from transportation agencies with regard to safety. The guidance isn’t as sacred as they want you to believe. The safety tips don’t make much sense when you look at the research. Even the research isn’t as clear cut as we would all like it to be.

I want you to be the drummers drumming to advocate for safer streets. I want you to be the pipers piping to influence changes in policies and practices. I want you to light the coals that keep the engineering lords a-leaping when they try to deny your requests.

On the 1st day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… bright, reflective vests!
A heavy “windshield bias”—a condition brought on by those who travel primarily by automobile but are tasked with developing safety initiatives for those outside a car—is revealed in campaigns and related materials that tell people who walk and bike what they should wear, without any consideration for an individual’s circumstances, the lack of proper roadway lighting to illuminate the marked and unmarked crosswalks, or the likely inadequacy of a motorist’s headlights.

On the 2nd Day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… magical force field paint!
The idea that paint is a solution for a safety issue is probably the single worst default position a designer can take. I look back on projects and plans I was involved with during my less-enlightened days and think, “I can’t believe I actually recommended a sharrow.” Or, “Why did I mention nothing more than adding a crosswalk?”

It doesn’t take too deep of a dive into prevailing design guidance and research to find language that discourages the use of paint as a standalone safety countermeasure.

On the 3rd day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… lifesaving tchotchkes!
Have you ever considered how much money traffic safety offices spend on swag to promote their campaigns? Who knew that “Toward Zero Deaths” thumb drives saved lives?

On the 4th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “shared responsibility!”
A child, all of 100 pounds, is mowed down by a person driving a 4,500-pound pickup truck. What will you likely hear from police officers, highway safety engineers, Governors Highway Safety Association, and state DOTs? “Now, remember, children, safety is a shared responsibility!”

Bull pucky. Shared responsibility on the road isn’t a valid expectation of people who walk and bike until they are given equal consideration in road design and equal opportunity to move safely throughout the system.

On the 5th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… 5-stage crossings!
“Alternative intersections” is putting it nicely. All of these designs require navigation by pedestrians (and bicyclists in some situations) in what traffic engineers call “stages”. A two-stage crossing, for example, is something we’re all familiar with. It’s essentially a median or refuge island at a street crossing. Crossing to the next island is a stage….

The problem comes into play at traditional signalized intersections where the introduction of two-stage, three-stage and four-stage crossings have become commonplace. Be aware at a public meeting when a traffic engineer starts spouting the virtues of requiring pedestrians to do multi-stage crossing.

The problem is they fail to consider the value of a pedestrian’s time. Which is funny, because they love to talk about how many seconds they shave off a commute and use that compute a “value of time saved” dollar figure to woo elected officials and the public into spending billions on these crazy designs. In failing to consider a pedestrian’s time, they’ve also failed to consider the Federal Highway Administration’s own published guidance related to pedestrian delay and safety.

On the 6th Day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… AASHTO standards!
Standard, /ˈstandərd/, noun: a required or agreed level of quality or attainment.

Required level? Or agreed level? Nearly everyone, especially the engineers, use the definition of standard that aligns more with it being a “requirement” rather than an agreed to level of treatment. Pitching elements of the AASHTO—the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials— "Green Book" as a requirement allows engineers to deflect questions about their decisions. On the contrary, if they used the term “standard” to mean something mutually agreed upon, that would open up the design to a true community-based approach.

But the interesting part is this: Not even AASHTO refers to its Green Book as a standard. It’s guidance.

On the 7th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “the nearest crosswalk!”
“Just go to the nearest crosswalk.”

Seems simple enough, eh? Pedestrians, just go to the nearest crosswalk and cross there. How many times have you heard that from a traffic safety campaign or a law enforcement agency?

These agencies never bother to examine how traffic engineers have designed roads to promote greater dominance of motorists on the streets. On a section of Glenwood Avenue in Boise, ID, there is a 3,700-foot gap between signalized intersections. That’s 500 seconds of walking time (!!!!!!) for a pedestrian who comes out mid-block in this stretch hoping to cross the street. The equivalent is like forcing a motorist to drive five miles up the road to make a U-turn just to cross the street.

On the 8th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… Complete Streets policy!
The Safety House has so many lights strung upon it that it puts Clark Griswold’s abode to shame.

Context Sensitive Solutions. Complete Streets Policy. Active Transportation Plans. Corridor Studies. Environmental Justice. Heads Up. Vision Zero.

I’m tired of the false promises. I’m tired of being strung along by the engineering profession, telling us that whatever their latest wave of buzzword practices will be finally be the solution that leads to safer streets for all road users. The buzzwords seem to evolve but the actual engineering of streets doesn’t.

On the 9th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “94 percent!”
How many times have you heard that go-to excuse from transportation agencies? “If everyone would just…”

If everyone would just obey the speed limit. If everyone would just use a crosswalk. If everyone would just stop texting and driving. If everyone would just stop drinking and driving. After all, since 94% of crashes are caused by human error, we’d be a lot safer if everyone would just….

On the 10th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “FHWA says so!”
The 10th day is a potpourri of items illustrating how the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a misunderstood organization. Just as AASHTO publishes “guidance” rather than “standards,” so does FHWA. It’s nearly impossible to find the words “shall” or “must” in FHWA’s published reports. The word “should” is prevalent across the wide spectrum of their transportation literature.

As we already know, transportation departments use FHWA’s publications and supported efforts to justify wider roads for cars at the expense of safety for people who walk and bike. However, if you look closely, you’ll find ample support from FHWA for equitable treatment of people who walk and bike. In all, FHWA isn’t the bad guy, here. We just have to learn how to use them to our advantage.

On the 11th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “Make eye contact!”
I walk or bike with my daughter every day to school. We have since she was in preschool. Our journey in Boise includes crossing a signalized, t-intersection of a five-lane road and a three-lane road. We cross the three-lane leg of that intersection.

Our walk today was indicative of how ill-informed the tip is for pedestrians to make eye contact. It doesn’t align with how roads are actually engineered and how motorists are encouraged via that engineering to operate on them.

On the 12th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… 12-foot travel lanes!
Sadly, it’s at the local and state level where the prevailing “standard” becomes a barrier to safety, all in the name of shaving a few seconds off a driver’s experience. The tendency is to give drivers the most forgiving road they can possibly design.

What engineers term the “forgiving road” is one that forgives the mistakes motorists make. Wanna speed because you’re late? Our roads accommodate that to a certain degree. Not so much when the pedestrian is running late and needs to get to a bus stop on that same road.

When you delve into the issues, you realize that the authors of the “standards” aren’t the bad guys. Their works promote a very flexible mindset, and have for many years. Lane widths are one such example. The recently-released 7th edition of the AASHTO Green Book is a testament to that, and it provides all the support you need for narrower travel lanes in your community.

A potpourri of the cringeworthy: "Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities."

This sounds familiar.

A lot of suburban chain retailers have been wrangled by city regulations into moving their parking to the side or back of the store, but they've moved the "front" of the store to the back right along with the parking lot, surmising (probably correctly) that that's how most of their customers will be entering. The problem is it creates a dead street that's hostile to human activity. Like this gem of an example of malicious compliance, in which a transformer box and some landscaping send a clear message: "Okay, they told us we had to have a door facing the sidewalk. They didn't tell us we had to make one our customers would ever want to use!"

In other words, Jeff Gahan's $15 million Reisz Mahal, which won't have an entrance from Main Street.

Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities, by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

 ... I hit up the Strong Towns Community site—our dedicated platform for Strong Towns members to meet each other and ask questions, offer advice and spark discussion—to crowd-source some ideas for a list of design features that should go the way of the dinosaur, lest the next generation be forced to cringe 25 years from now at our hard-to-reverse bad choices. And our brilliant members obliged with some good ones.

Some of these pertain to the public realm—the streets, the sidewalks, things the government itself ought to permanently stop doing. Some of them are about the private realm: things we might consider prohibiting developers from ever doing on their own land, because it harms and degrades the public realm when they do.

Either way, as a Strong Towns advocate, I'd be happy if I never saw another one of these urban design mistakes again in my city. How about you?

Here's the list. To read the reasons why, click through to Strong Towns.

• Sloped parking.
• Snout houses.
• Ultra-wide residential streets.
• Four-lane death roads.
• Retail that turns its back on the street.
• "Pod" subdivisions.
• Reeeeeeeally long blocks.
• Huge curb radii.

Strong Towns Week: "Traditional Development Patterns were, for thousands of years, synonymous with human progress."

I received an e-mail from Strong Towns (we're paying members):

"In a divided America, we believe the Strong Towns message is more needed than ever. So this week, we’re shaking things up a little. We’re going to shower you with some of our best content from the past several years — revamped and ready for sharing. Unless you’ve read every article we’ve ever written since 2008 (in which case, props to you!), we guarantee you’re going to discover something new and interesting this week."

This week as time permits, I'll be sharing some of these articles. Besides, today's essay is a good excuse to study a juxtaposition of images: the drawing above, and the 1905 postcard below.

ROMANCING THE STONE AGE, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

America's pre-Depression development pattern relied on exploitation of workers, poor living conditions and exclusion of women and minorities. How is the Strong Towns approach, which advocates for traditional development patterns, different?

... There are two differences between the Traditional Development Pattern and the Suburban Experiment that we find significant and critical. First, in the traditional approach, development happens incrementally over time. Things start small and then mature in phases. Conversely, for the suburban approach, we tend to work in large steps with grand designs. Economies of scale is a modern ethic that, combined with our perceived affluence, supersedes the more bootstrapping mindset of incrementalism.

The second difference is closely related. With the traditional approach, all development is on a continuum of improvement. It starts incremental and it is always seeking the energy to move to the next level of advancement. With our post-War Suburban Experiment, we build everything to a finished state. No additional improvement is anticipated or even desired.

That shift in mindset is really important. When your ethic is to build things to a finished state, the tendency is to demand the highest quality you can hope to experience. This means that even cities that are struggling financially are often weighed down by regulation and bureaucracy that ensures "quality construction." Lost is the notion of bootstrapping — doing what you can with what you have available — and with it, the notion of widespread upward mobility.

"There’s more to (Charles) Marohn’s idiosyncratic 'Strong Towns approach' than municipal finance."

This is a good summary of the Strong Towns philosophy as interpreted from a conservative perspective. As Charles Marohn has toured the country promoting his book, he seems to be in position to be questioned from "both" sides (liberal and conservative), which might be the best indication yet that he's on to something.

Is American Sprawl Already Bankrupt?, by Addison Del Mastro (The American Conservative)

On tour, the 'Strong Towns approach' weathers some criticism and provokes plenty of thought.

GREENBELT, Md.—As urbanist and activist Charles Marohn spoke here last month, expounding on the “spooky wisdom” in his Strong Towns book, the setting itself made for an interesting coincidence.

Marohn addressed a mostly older crowd in Old Greenbelt’s community center, an impressive art deco building that dates to the city’s founding under a landmark New Deal program. Greenbelt was an early planned community and a public works project, so it’s an interesting place to talk about Marohn’s advocacy of incremental development, and humanity’s coevolution with the traditional city. As such projects go Greenbelt has been quite successful, though it struggles with a once-shiny, now-degraded stretch of sprawl along its major thoroughfare, sometimes dubbed “New Greenbelt.”

Perhaps it is fitting that Greenbelt was platted and built during the Depression, however, because it is the post-Depression era—not the later post-war era—that Marohn identifies as the point when we abandoned the traditional, time-honed approach to building our places. And when it comes to the poster child of urban failure, Detroit, he notes that there is at least one area of agreement: “Detroit is some very different place from anywhere in North America,” he says to laughs. Detroit, however, weathered the Depression better than most American cities, and so, mistaking correlation for causation—and no doubt with encouragement from Detroit’s primary industry—virtually all urban and suburban development henceforth copied the Motor City’s sprawling, automobile-dependent pattern (which, ironically, was itself adopted after the core city was already affluent and famous).

Marohn’s core contention is that, at a high level, that development pattern was itself what bankrupted Detroit and intensified its poverty and decline. Furthermore, because nearly every post-Depression place is built on the Detroit blueprint, America writ large can look forward in 20 or 30 years to the same fate. It’s quite a claim, but it’s based on what appear to be hard and inarguable numbers. We’ve simply built too much stuff per person, far more than tax revenues or even reasonable debt loads can ever maintain. It doesn’t help that we build so much at once—entire neighborhoods built to a “finished state”—so that the cost of maintenance all comes due at once in a tidal wave of decline.

There’s more to Marohn’s idiosyncratic “Strong Towns approach” than municipal finance, however. There’s a fascinating mediation on the traditional city as a sort of complex, adaptive organism that has co-evolved with human civilization; an emergent system with its own rules, not a fragile monoculture. There is deep, time-honed, iterative wisdom embedded in the physical forms of places as built until the 1930s. Every pre-Depression city in the world “charted the same iterative course,” starting with a dirt street and some wooden shacks, and ending, if it got that far, in magnificent architecture and bustling, well-paved thoroughfares. These cities were not created, you might say; they evolved. To Marohn, building a mature city, all at once and to a finished state, is something like trying to turn a bud into a flower. There is something about the architecture of human society that militates against it. “Why is it like this?” Marohn asks. “I don’t know. It’s complex and it’s spooky” ...

Infuriating? Hilarious? Not a single bit of Strong Town's "Urban Planner's Oath" applies to what Jeff Gahan and his minions are doing in New Albany.

The Urban Planner's Oath? Like kryptonite, dude.  

It has been Jane Jacobs week at Strong Towns.

JANE JACOBS IS A POWERFUL SYMBOL FOR PRESENT-DAY URBANIST MOVEMENTS, BUT HER WORK IS ABOUT FAR MORE THAN JUST BUILDING WALKABLE PLACES.

From May 2-6, in honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth, Strong Towns will explore the hard-hitting realities of Jane Jacobs’ activism: the need for financial solvency in American towns, her insistence on local decision-making instead of top-down proclamations and her “chaotic but smart” approach to improving cities."

For me, the culmination of Jane Jacobs week is this Urban Planner's Oath.

In honor of Jane Jacobs week, we are seeking to fill an intellectual void by providing an oath for urban planners. While the American Institute of Certified Planners has a code of ethics with some statements of aspiration, they are not well aligned with a Jane Jacobs way of thinking. It is precisely that -- a way of thinking and not a set of outcomes -- that we are seeking to inspire. Please share this oath (created with input from Strong Towns members) and discuss it with the planners in your community.

Of the nine urban planner's bullet points, none apply to New Albany, where in reality, Jeff Gahan is the city's chief (sub)urban planner.

In fact, none of these points come even close to describing the way we do things here. Perhaps that's because Strong Towns openly uses a five-syllable word that sends local officials fleeing in all directions: Intellectual.

Talk about the kiss of death. Consider these three examples.

• I will not impose my vision but will seek to use my expertise to co-create the vision of those I serve,
• I will advocate for approaches that are within our grasp and will not assume that future generations will be able to bear burdens which we cannot bear today,
• If a monument is to be built in honor of the things we have accomplished today, I will insist that it be built by a subsequent generation as only they are capable of fully discerning our worthiness of such an honor.

Amazing, isn't it? You can't even imagine a New Albany mayor or city planner embracing these ideas, can you?

Can NA pass the "Strong Towns Strength Test" without a cheat sheet?

2 or 3 ... 4 tops.

Discussion? This might make an ideal opening tip next Tuesday.

Drinking Progressively: Tuesday evenings, beginning on November 25.

Click the link to see the ten questions.

Strong Towns Strength Test, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

... We understand that cities are complex, adaptable systems that defy easy or precise measurement, so we asked ourselves: are there simple observations we use to signal that a city is either a strong town or on its way to becoming one? If you went to a place and had a little bit of time, could you scratch the surface and get a sense of how strong and resilient it was?

Here are ten simple questions we call the Strong Towns Strength Test. A Strong Town should be able to answer “yes” to each of these questions.