Strong Towns

The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model for growth that allows America's towns to become financially strong and self-sufficient.

The American approach to growth is causing economic stagnation and decline along with land use practices that force a dependency on public subsidies. The inefficiencies of the current approach have left American towns financially insolvent, unable to pay even the maintenance costs of their basic infrastructure. A new approach that accounts for the full cost of growth is needed to make our towns strong again.

The Strong Towns approach ultimately requires a reorientation of emphasis and a renewed understanding of what it takes to build a town or a neighborhood.

The current approach to growth emphasizes investments in new infrastructure to serve or induce new development. This approach uses public dollars inefficiently, destructively subsidizes one type of development over another and leaves massive maintenance liabilities to future generations. A Strong Town approach emphasizes obtaining a higher return on existing infrastructure investments. We can no longer simply disregard old investments in favor of new, but instead we need to focus on making better use of that which we are already committed to publicly maintain.

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/ 

• Added Apr 14, 2010
• Activity Rank #4 : Popularity Rank #10
• 2 posts in 24 hours : 17 posts in 4 weeks
• Tags:
  • Community / Economic Development
  • Infrastructure
  • Land Use
  • financial return
  • financially sustainable
  • infrastructure
  • neighborhoods
  • return on investment
  • Strong Towns
  • towns