Great read! I always found Strong Towns’ critiques of North American suburban planning useful because they put things in terms that liberals can understand easily - essentially, that widening roads and encouraging low-density development ends up costing towns more money, and that we can provide better services to more people by building more densely with more mixed uses. I hadn’t looked into the actual recommendations of Strong Towns’ founder, though, and this article points out some real doozies that are good to keep in mind when using his critiques.

I have long been familiar with a couple of the people behind Strong Towns. I think they have some useful insights and nobody else comes close to communitarianism as a way forward

But yeah, some stuff they say rubs me wrong

Very good article. I found my way to them through Not Just Bikes and resonated with many of their ideas - removing stroads, undoing car culture, even localism in the broad sense. This lifted the veil from my eyes.

They don’t actually mean Strong Town in the sense of strong communities, they mean local capital having more freedom to extract wealth more productively. Guess a broken clock and all that. Since it does happen to be true that denser building will results in more uses of the same land, and that means less car culture, etc.

Still I think the word for them is useful - they are popularizing some important ideas. But we can’t forget who they’re trying to empower in the end.

Yeah, but at least it sets up a condition in which better urbanist principles can be later used. You can get a Strong Towns conservative to agree to making walkable neighborhoods with denser development to set up the density needed for later mass transit projects.

It isn’t a solution, but a push in the right direction.

What’s hilarious is conservatives absolutely hate Strongtowns too, and pretty much all their policy goals are the opposite of the goal of ST. Even though Chuck Morohn is deeply conservative, he can’t really face that truth.

I think that title’s unfair, and that the approaches advocated by Strong Towns are probably closer to small-government Georgism, or Georgist municipalism.

The fact that the folks behind it identify as conservative is indeed a reason to, well, stay sharp and skeptical, but I think their flavor of conservatism is actually in direct conflict with most Americans who identify as such. Sort of like these folks actually believe what’s commonly used as distracting rhetoric.

Then again, I’m probably outside the main demographic of this community, I’m critical of big centralized power, and I’m a fan of both urbanism and land value taxation, so I get it if you judge that I’ve been had here.

Not to compare the two in terms of what they aim to accomplish, but The New Deal was largely the same

I’d never read Strong Towns directly, though I’ve read tangential books like Walkable Cities by Jeff Speck. In those contexts I had interpreted the financial aspects as a good way to pitch the idea to Liberal folk and any governmental restructuring I must have glossed over. This article makes me wonder if I should review and reassess those takes and adjust how I share information on the topic.

A good read!