Strong Towns
@StrongTowns
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We're changing *everything* about the North American pattern of development. Join us for the 2024 National Gathering, May 14th-15th in Cincinnati!
All Across America
Joined October 2009
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Philadelphia: 2020 and 2023. Which looks like a more productive street?
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"As reported by The Globe and Mail, residents spent a total of $181 million at curbside patios within 13 weeks of summer in 2021. If those spaces had remained dedicated to parking, only $3.7 million would have been reaped during the same time period."
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Hoboken, New Jersey is a dense city center that hasn’t had a traffic death in over 4 years. They’ve accomplished this by creating more narrow, one-way streets, high visibility crosswalks, raised intersections, curb extensions, bike & bus lanes, and removing parking spaces.
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Beautiful transformation in Makati, Philippines. This street is now safer for people walking, rolling, and driving alike due to simple infrastructure changes designed to slow motor vehicles.
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Towns: why does no one spend time here anymore?
Also towns:
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We used to build these all over North America, until zoning laws effectively made them illegal. It’s time to bring back missing middle housing.
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North American cities often go from skyscrapers to sprawl because we’ve made middle housing styles like fourplexes and mixed-use multiplexes illegal. If we want to build livable, human-scale places again, we have to start by legalizing them with zoning and parking reforms.
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Pedestrian deaths in the US have reached a 40-year high. It’s time for
@USDOT
to take this crisis seriously and start redesigning our streets to be safe for everyone.
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Historic districts make up some of our highest value areas where people love to visit and long to live, yet we’ve made building this style of development illegal almost everywhere in North America.
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For the first time, the Federal Highway Administration is acknowledging what a stroad is, and by extension, what a street and road are. That's huge!
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Excess parking is a financial drain on cities.
Housing is the heart of cities.
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Catfiddle Street in Charleston is a newly built development of 24 homes in a single acre. This should be broadly legalized across North America.
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A “road diet” is when the number of lanes on a road are reduced to improve safety for people driving, walking, and biking alike, while also providing space for different forms of transportation.
Send us a road that could use a diet!
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Picture this: you own a building. One day, you decide to open a business, so you renovate the ground floor into a commercial space and live above it.
This scenario was the norm for thousands of years. Today, it’s illegal in most neighborhoods due to zoning and parking laws.
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The top image is from a 1919 map of downtown Atlanta and the bottom is a photo of the same area from 2014.
Only one 3-building cluster of this entire multi-block area remains today. Most of the productive architecture has been replaced by wealth-sucking parking lots.
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If the federal government wants to fund transportation, skip the megaprojects. Start with a billion bollards. These will save more lives and help us build strong towns everywhere.
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Our cities used to be built like college campuses. They were walkable communities with mixed housing styles, civic centers, public spaces, and other amenities all woven closely together.
College campuses are designed for people. Let's start designing our cities that way.
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Activist group
@CrosswalksLA
has been painting DIY crosswalks since LADOT refused to do so for years. LADOT has even gone as far as removing these DIY crosswalks in parts of the city.
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The Netherlands: United States:
elementary school elementary school
with a bike path inside a highway
over its roof on-ramp
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Imagine how many unique shops would open across the country if we broadly legalized smaller retail spaces? Minimum square footage and lot size requirements stop entrepreneurs who can’t afford larger retail spaces from starting new businesses. They deserve the freedom of choice.
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If someone owns a building and wants to open a hair salon or bakery on the first floor, they should be legally allowed to, by right, in every North American neighborhood.
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The Chicago Riverwalk shows us what can happen when a city turns a precious resource into a place for everyone to enjoy and gain value from.
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The question is, why don’t kids hang outside anymore? Maybe it’s because we replaced our downtowns with big box stores, our streets with stroads, and our public squares with parking lots.
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"As reported by The Globe and Mail, residents spent a total of $181 million at curbside patios within 13 weeks of summer in 2021. If those spaces had remained dedicated to parking, only $3.7 million would have been reaped during the same time period."
#BlackFridayParking
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This is how we build strong towns!
American cities need to flip the street hierarchy inside out. We need a pedestrian core at the heart of every city and neighborhood.
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Cafes and corner stores should be allowed, by right, in every neighborhood.
That includes cul-de-sacs.
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German Sierra bought this building in 2020 to open a neighborhood coffee shop in Dallas and still hasn't been able to open because of a regulation requiring he have 18 parking spots, regardless of location, clientele, or local support.
Parking mandates kill small businesses.
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Want your city to go broke and become unlivable at the same time? This is how you do it.
when combined, these 7 enormous surface parking lots near downtown Louisville pay only a quarter of the property tax of 1 single nearby apartment building
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After the transformation of La Jolla Blvd, noise levels dropped 77%, retail sales rose 30%, and traffic crashes fell by 90%.
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When Americans go on vacation, they like places to conveniently walk or bike around, and yet many of those same people will oppose this walkable urbanism in their own hometowns.
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When many Americans hear “mixed-use development” they picture a chain store moving in next to their single-family home. We need to change that picture to neighborhood corner stores and cafes.
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Making a street appear and feel narrower causes drivers to navigate more cautiously, reducing speed and paying closer attention to potential conflicts. Want to make your streets safer? Try optical narrowing.
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We’re not telling society to “ban cars,” we’re asking local governments to stop subsidizing people who drive at the expense of people who don’t in every aspect of how we build places.
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“Why don’t kids play outside anymore?”
Look outside. We’ve turned our public spaces into car-only zones filled with parking lots and wide roads. We’ve turned walking or biking around town into a dangerous journey through speeding vehicles.
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The most successful, vibrant cities in the world today look a whole lot like they did a hundred years ago.
We know what works. We just need to get to work.
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Streets are better when they’re filled with people, rather than just parked cars.
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No, suburbanization created an enormous *illusion* of wealth for our country.
I, too, love walkable urbanism.
However, we should remember that suburbanization created *enormous* wealth for our country.
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Small mixed-use buildings with shops below and housing above should be legalized in every neighborhood.
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For nearly 3 years, Esther Street in Peekskill, New York has been closed to motorized traffic, becoming a beloved gathering place. Now, the city may reopen it due to “numerous complaints.”
Let these before and after pictures remind us all that great streets are for PEOPLE.
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Many Americans only go out on the weekends because going anywhere requires driving long distances, which takes too much time and energy during the week.
But if they could walk down the street to a cafe, pub, park, or library after work, they would go out far more often.
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US suburbs are a one life-cycle product that depend on new residents to cover their unsustainable maintenance costs.
After decades of kicking the can down the road, the early inner-ring suburbs are beginning to unravel.
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This $600 million highway expansion in San Mateo County really did its job!
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Just because YOU don’t want to live in an apartment or ride a bike to work doesn’t mean OTHER PEOPLE should be unable to do so.
Let’s reform our zoning, permitting, and parking laws so we all have the freedom to choose how we live in society.
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The narrow, car-free streets of Philadelphia are some of the most beloved places in the city. They’re also some of the most expensive areas to live, partially due to scarcity, since we’ve made this development style illegal to build nearly everywhere in America.
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Prior to World War II, we built places like Galena, Illinois everywhere. Then our development pattern changed from walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, to car-centric, single-use suburbs.
The former is resilient and adaptable. The latter is fragile and inflexible.
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For thousands of years, cities and villages around the world built mixed-use buildings with shops on the first floor and housing above.
It’s time to re-legalize this across North America.
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It's so easy: you can make your streets safer by cutting corners. Removing excessive pavement encourages slower vehicle speed, shortens crossing distance, and saves cities money and maintenance.
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Cottage clusters allow people to live in smaller lot homes and share space with their neighbors. They should be broadly legalized across North America.
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Why do 'booming' American towns struggle to budget for basic services? Look to the suburban development pattern.
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North America needs a revitalization of third places like cafes, pubs, libraries, and barber shops. For these places to thrive, we need compact neighborhoods where people can walk or bike to destinations so they can spend more time lingering and less time sitting in traffic.
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The San Antonio Riverwalk is a walkable public space filled with charming businesses and pathways, which has made it the most popular destination in Texas.
Great places like this are common throughout Europe, yet scarce in North America. Why do you think that is?
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“America can’t be built like Europe, it’s bigger and newer!”
This ignores the fact that every American city and small town alike was built to be walkable prior to the invention of cars. Our car-centric development style didn't just happen, it was a result of policies.
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In 2017, Time Square went from being a place for cars to a place for people.
Reply with another street in North America that should do this!
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Jane Jacobs taught us the value of fighting for great public spaces and showed us what’s possible when people take them back from cars.
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Is it possible to build homes for 1.3 million New Yorkers *without* radically changing neighborhood character?
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Picture this. You wake up and walk downtown. Neighbors greet you from their porches. The streets are filled with people—kids playing, adults chatting. You run into an old friend and catch up outside a local cafe.
This is the life we want to create in cities across North America.
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This is why we believe people should play a part in designing the places they live.
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Most car trips in America are under 6 miles, and they’re for things like groceries, appointments, shopping, and dining.
Our built environment requires people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles just to drive a few minutes away.
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It's time to line every street in North America with bollards.
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Walkable, mixed-use communities aren't confined to just big cities. We can build them in suburban and rural areas as well by reforming zoning and parking laws!
(Mount Gretna, PA)
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Our cities aren’t “crowded” or “full,” they’ve just dedicated half their space to car storage.
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Reminder that all of those dreamy towns you see in holiday themed books and movies would be illegal to build today due to modern parking mandates!
#BlackFridayParking
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There is no coherent argument against lining every street in America with bollards.
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More street trees = more shade, cooler surfaces, slower vehicles, less stormwater runoff, and more beautiful places worth walking!
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Just like highways don’t have to accommodate people walking, streets don’t have to accommodate people driving.
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No, this isn’t a city in Europe, it’s USC Village in Los Angeles, California. We can build walkable, liveable, human-scale places in America. The first step is legalizing them with zoning and parking reforms.
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Prioritizing cars at the expense of other forms of transportation turns places into parking lots.
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It’s not enough to criticize the status quo of North America’s development pattern. If we want to change the way things are, people need hope. They need vision. They need to see what’s possible when we work together to build a better future.
It's easy to get cynical if you're an American urbanist. But remember that the sprawl that surrounds you is a canvas for something so much better.
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Why do people love spending time in downtowns around the world? It’s simple. The narrow streets are designed for walking. The compact neighborhoods create nearby destinations. The trees. The architecture. The culture. The sense of place. This is the blueprint for strong towns.
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Small cafes and corner stores should be allowed, by right, in every American neighborhood.
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In Minneapolis and St. Paul, parking reform has helped increase the overall supply of homes, reduce the cost of construction, and shift the cities toward a less car-centric design.
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This kind of “bike lane” is the result of a bureaucratic design process that’s completely disconnected from human experiences in physical reality.
No one who owns a bike would ever approve this design.
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Cities should be made for living and lingering, not for vehicles to pass through.
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Want to understand the Growth Ponzi Scheme driving cities to insolvency, and making life more expensive for everyone? Read on 👇
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“If downtown doesn’t have parking everywhere, visitors might have to park several blocks away!”
If your downtown is productive and interesting, visitors will have no problem walking a couple blocks to their destination. Let’s prioritize creating a sense of place before parking.
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“We did not build places like this because we were rich, we became rich because we built places like this.”
-
@clmarohn
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Speed limits don’t determine how fast people drive. Street design does. If we want cars to move slower and safer, we need to design streets that encourage slower driving with features like narrow lanes, tight corners, raised crosswalks, wide sidewalks, and street trees.
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Stadiums are the universal sign of desperation in economic development.
They cost hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to build, and millions more in ongoing infrastructure maintenance, all while perpetuating unproductive land use.
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Hess Village is a pedestrianized area in downtown Hamilton, Ontario, filled with new murals, walkable patios, and other urban features. We need to legalize building more places for people like this!
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