Strong Towns

Take an after-dinner walk with your family—you can see your community with new eyes.

Before the Suburban Experiment, cities built wealth in downtown cores that were comfortably connected and walkable, making it easy for people to reach and do business with each other. This configuration concentrated the energy of the community, allowing it to be magnified by powerful feedback loops. For example, the more successful the downtown became, the more people wanted to live in close proximity to it. The more people who lived in and near the downtown, the more patrons there were for local businesses. The more patrons there were, the greater the investment in the downtown to serve them and the more successful it became. This was a positive feedback loop where improvements over time made things better for everyone. When homes and businesses are spread out — for instance, because they’re all separated by parking lots — they become disconnected from each other and lose that feedback loop. Think of it as a roaring fire where more and more fuel is being added all the time. If you take the logs in that roaring fire and spread them out over the ground, the fire will shrink. Some logs may burn and some may go out, but they don’t reinforce each other. The spread-out logs will never be able to match the power of the connected, roaring fire. If cities want to build traditional, productive downtowns, they need to ditch the parking mandates and bring those logs back together.

At Strong Towns, we talk a lot about thinking incrementally. But, why think in increments? Why not just do it right the first time? Well, because rarely is our first attempt our best attempt. This image is how Strong Towns member Andrew Price illustrates the advantages of thinking incrementally. On the left, the city is working iteratively, using cones and chalk to experiment with bike lane and tree placement. They tested it out for a few weeks, observed how people used it, then they washed it off and tried a different configuration. They finally settled on a layout that worked before they spent six figures repaving the street and installing trees. On the right, we see a sudden implementation: the city drew up plans, and spent six figures to install trees and bike lanes. Even though it appears to have less steps, the sudden approach isn’t actually faster. In fact, in places like Jersey City and Hoboken, which are more willing to iterate, they’re able to implement much-desired changes faster than the cities that try to get it right once and for all. And there’s an opportunity to save money in the process, or at least, get a higher return on their investment. Incrementalism does not mean doing things slowly: incremental development can be rapid and up to the task of reacting to pressing needs. Incrementalism looks like experimenting, rapid prototyping, iteratively improving, and reducing the risks of bad decisions. It starts with taking stock of what your problems are, and then taking one step to fix them, sooner rather than later.

In the city of Sandpoint, Idaho, “A decade after eliminating parking minimums in its downtown area, the city…is reaping the benefits of this bold policy change. According to Aaron Qualls, Planning and Community Development Director for Sandpoint, the decision has led to millions of dollars in investments and a revitalized urban core.” Read more: https://buff.ly/3V6qxxR

Debate time! New episode out with Charles Marohn from Strong Towns and Nolan Gray with California YIMBY. I found them disagreeing on X—which surprised me as I assumed they’d be on the same side—so I asked them on the podcast to hash out their ideas. It’s a great (and friendly) episode. Though for better or worse, I started out by reading their disagreement on X out loud, which is probably a painful experience to hear your own words in a heated moment repeated back. Nolan said it felt like he just went through a deposition. Having just been through a real life deposition myself the week before, I felt kind of bad. Sorry guys :) but to be fair, it does set the stage for a good convo! And a friendly one at that. Each of these guys has made significant contributions to the built environment via real policy changes and shifting culture and conversation. Thanks for coming on Chuck and Nolan. Check out their latest books Arbitrary Lines and Escaping the Housing Trap. Trailer below:

“Listening to the ideas and the concerns of residents helped me and helped my my team identify where Hoboken’s vulnerabilities were,” Hoboken Mayor Ravinder Bhalla explained at the “Beyond Blame” press conference on October 15. “It's important for leaders to listen to the people that they represent because that on-the-ground street knowledge is critical to making stronger and safer communities.” He would know: Hoboken is coming up on its eighth year without traffic fatalities and has successfully reduced severe traffic injuries by 68% in a couple of years.

Free and abundant parking has been woven into the fabric of our cities and towns for so long that many people struggle to imagine familiar places with less of it. Or they worry about the consequences: Can we really afford to do away with our parking mandates? Or will reducing parking drive shoppers away? However, several studies show that making areas more friendly to walkers and bikers is more beneficial than prioritizing drivers. Walkers and bikers spend more, are more likely to be loyal customers, are more likely to return to the business frequently, and make up way more of small businesses’ customer base than owners may think. Plus, prioritizing walkers and bikers lets business owners use their land more productively: A parking space converted into a bike corral will go from providing parking for one customer to up to twelve at one time.

We have to (re)legalize attainable housing types. Learn more with our new FREE online course “An Introduction to Incremental Development” created in partnership with the Incremental Development Alliance. https://buff.ly/3CTVDT7

A common argument against ending parking mandates and subsidies is that private building owners will purposefully undersupply parking, forcing people to park on the street and, thus, forcing the public to subsidize private parking needs. Daniel Herriges points out that this belief shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what parking is. It treats public parking as a free, common resource, and private parking as a necessary, inseparable part of a functioning business, house or apartment. If this is the case, not requiring private parking is the same as letting developers create incomplete and unusable products, forcing the public to absorb the externality. But parking isn’t a free, common resource or absolutely necessary. It’s an amenity. Public parking lots and garages that provide this amenity for free or at a loss are providing a public subsidy to individuals. And parking mandates are a different sort of subsidy, providing parking through what is effectively a tax on private development. City land is scarce and valuable — and that means it also has a price. If city planners are to use that land in a wise way that supports community prosperity, they need to start treating parking as the amenity it is. This can look like installing meters and charging a market-clearing price. It can look like running pay lots on the periphery of a popular, congested area. It can look like supporting lower-income residents by providing free or deeply discounted parking permits, or supporting drivers by running shuttles from parking lots to the city center. There will always be growing pains when a city makes a big change like removing parking mandates. But those pains can be addressed, and they don’t make the changes any less important. To learn more about ending parking mandates and subsidies, check out the Local-Motive 2024 session “The Parking Revolution is Here. Is Your Community Ready to Sign On?”

The true cost of these parking spots is significant — in some areas like New York City, below-ground spots can cost as much as $150,000. These expenses are typically passed on to residents, forcing even non-car owners to subsidize parking they don't use. Parking requirements in cities often lead to inefficient use of valuable urban space, with parking facilities that sit mostly empty when the land could be repurposed for housing, businesses or community spaces. The nonprofit Open Plans decided to illustrate how parking can waste valuable space by turning parking spots into a studio apartment. They only needed two spots to do it, too: on average, a single parking stall requires approximately 200–350 square feet of space. By occupying two spots in a Brooklyn garage, Open Plans was able to simulate what many onlookers described as “about the size of my first studio in New York.” What could you do with 400-700 square feet of space?