Strong Towns

For the United States to be a prosperous country, it must have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. Enduring prosperity cannot be artificially created from the outside but must be built from within, incrementally over time. An America in transition must focus on developing strong, local communities, places where humanity’s creativity, compassion and spirit of collaboration can flourish.

We advocate for a model of development that allows America's places to grow financially strong and resilient.

America's 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.