I recently traveled to Denton, Texas, to meet with city staff to talk about the Crash Analysis Studio, Strong Towns’ approach to helping communities learn from serious crashes and turn those lessons into action. I went into the meeting knowing that Denton’s Vision Zero work contained some remarkable similarities to the Crash Analysis Studio. After spending a day with Local Conversation leaders and city staff, I finally understood why those connections were there.

They Showed Up Before the Policy Was Written

Stronger Denton didn’t participate in the city’s Vision Zero work from the sidelines. Local Conversation leaders Eric Pruett and Lauren Penn became involved in the city’s transportation and safety conversations through different roles. Eric participated on the steering committee helping Denton develop its Vision Zero work, while Lauren serves on the city’s Mobility Committee and contributed to the Vision Zero planning process.

That distinction matters because they weren’t simply showing up at the end of a process to support or oppose a finished proposal. They were participating while the city was still defining the problem, considering possible responses, and deciding what its approach to street safety should become. And they brought ideas with them.

During the Vision Zero planning process, Eric introduced the Crash Analysis Studio. “I pushed for CAS in the steering committee for our Vision Zero planning phase, and it made it into the plan, but was not classified as high urgency in the schedule.”

That may sound a little disappointing, but this was an important victory. The Crash Analysis Studio was introduced as an idea when the city was establishing a framework that would guide its future transportation safety work. Members of a Local Conversation had an opportunity to bring a practical response into that discussion before the policy had been written.

They weren’t merely asking the city to “do something” about dangerous streets. They were helping answer a harder question: what should the city actually do differently?

Bringing an Idea Into the Process

The Crash Analysis Studio gave Stronger Denton something concrete to bring into that conversation. It wasn’t simply an argument that Denton should make streets safer. It offered a practical response: establish a process following a serious crash that brings people together, examines the multiple contributing factors, identifies what can be changed and carries those lessons forward.

That idea fit naturally alongside other elements emerging through Denton’s Vision Zero work. The city’s safety framework calls for systematic crash analysis, ongoing monitoring and reporting, multidisciplinary coordination, Road Safety Audits, before-and-after studies and demonstration projects that allow the city to test responses and learn from the results. The Crash Analysis Studio added another piece to that framework: a way to shorten the feedback loop between an individual tragedy, what the city learns from it, and what happens next.

Stronger Denton didn’t need to write the Vision Zero plan or control the process. Its members needed to show up, contribute what they knew, and help connect an idea they believed could benefit their community with the work their city was already undertaking. By participating early, they helped create a pathway for that idea to move from a Strong Towns conversation into the city’s policy framework.

Then City Staff Described What They Were Already Doing

The next chapter of this story became apparent when I met with Denton staff. I expected to spend much of our meeting introducing the Crash Analysis Studio. Instead, as staff began describing how Denton responds to serious crashes, I started hearing something familiar. Denton has already begun developing many of the practices that make up a Crash Analysis Studio.

Staff described a response that can bring together transportation leadership, engineers and planners following a serious crash. They can visit the location quickly, conduct a preliminary review, supplement information from the police investigation, examine conditions on the ground and gather additional information about the place. The city’s broader safety work already involves transportation, police, engineering, operations, planning and communications.

They are collecting data, looking at speeds, examining roadway conditions and trying to understand what happened. They are also thinking about how those findings should inform the city’s next actions.

Denton doesn’t need Strong Towns to arrive with an entirely new program. The city is already building much of it. The opportunity is to help staff connect the pieces and formalize the process.

Turning “Safety First” Into a Practice

Eric shared something with me that stayed with me throughout the meeting. He observed that Denton had become very committed to “safety first” in its messaging, but that the city had “not yet operationalized it.”

That is a challenge facing many communities. A comprehensive plan, Vision Zero plan, or safety policy can establish an important commitment, but the real test comes after the next serious crash. Who gets notified, and who goes to the site while conditions are still fresh? The answers determine whether the city can identify contributing factors without the conversation ending at driver blame, decide what can be changed immediately and who has the authority to make that change, and communicate what it is learning to elected officials and the public.

Those questions turn “safety first” from an aspiration into an institutional practice. Denton already has answers to many of them. Our conversation was therefore less about creating something new and more about tightening the feedback loop between a serious crash, what the city learns from it, and what happens next.

Some of the opportunities we discussed were remarkably practical: clearly defining which crashes trigger the process, establishing who gets notified, formalizing the multidisciplinary convening, documenting contributing factors and recommendations and developing a communication process so elected officials and residents know that the city is responding and learning.

One of the simplest next steps is already on the table. Denton staff and Strong Towns can take a recent serious crash in Denton and walk through it together using the Crash Analysis Studio process. The city does not need to begin by writing another plan. It can begin by learning from a crash.

This Is What a Local Conversation Can Do

Stronger Denton didn’t control this process, and they didn’t need to. They helped introduce ideas while the city was still deciding what it wanted to do. Those ideas entered the plan. The plan established a commitment. City staff then began the harder work of translating that commitment into everyday practice. When I sat down with them, I heard them describe an emerging crash response process that already contained many of the elements of a Crash Analysis Studio.

That didn’t happen because a Local Conversation walked into City Hall with all the answers. It happened because local advocates understood that there was an important decision being made, showed up early, brought useful ideas into the conversation and remained engaged as those ideas moved forward.

There is a lesson here for Local Conversations everywhere. Don’t measure your influence only by whether City Council votes for the thing you asked for. Look upstream. Find the committees, planning processes, staff conversations, public workshops and other places where a community is still deciding what the answer will be. That is where a thoughtful resident with a useful idea can have tremendous influence.

The Denton story isn’t finished: there is still work to do to formalize the city’s crash response. Strong Towns now has an opportunity to come alongside Denton and help staff build on what they have already created.

This process started with residents attending a meeting, serving on a committee and explaining an unfamiliar idea until it found a place in the plan. The next step is already scheduled: Denton staff and Strong Towns will walk through a recent serious crash together, using the Crash Analysis Studio process to turn the city’s Vision Zero commitment into a repeatable practice.

This quandary is the result of housing serving two purposes at the same time. Housing is both shelter and an investment. When its value rises as an investment, the people who depend on it for shelter are the ones who feel the strain. Yet the scale of the housing crisis can make the challenge feel so overwhelming that communities become paralyzed, searching for a solution big enough to solve the entire problem instead of asking what they can do right now to make the next home possible.

When I share this idea, I receive a fair amount of skepticism from those who demand large, sweeping changes to tackle the housing crisis. Here is an example of an email conversation with a group of civic leaders in Frederick, Maryland, not all of whom were convinced that the Strong Towns approach could address their city’s problems. The pushback was pessimistic and direct:

No non-government approach [is] going to ease the housing crunch, since the market is built to work against affordability. Developers, agents, and the city itself all profit when prices rise, and the only party that actually wants a house to be cheap is the buyer, who typically has the least leverage in the transaction. Elected officials and residents may have empathy, but it competes for attention with everything else on their plate. A nearby parcel [has] just sold for a price that guaranteed nothing affordable would ever be built there, and a friend’s single tiny house, however well-intentioned, [isn’t] going to move the needle on a shortage this size. Incremental housing, sure. But against a crisis this large, it’s a drop in the bucket.

I read through this a couple of times and the last line stuck with me: “it’s a drop in the bucket.”

They are not wrong in what they are saying, but I think starting there creates another problem. When we define the struggle simply as “a lack of affordable housing,” we have made the problem so large that most of us have no idea what to do next. The enormity of the problem can become the reason we wait for someone else to act.

Against struggles like these, a single project can look like nothing at all, just a single drop in a very big bucket.

Start With the Struggle

Somewhere in the community, a family is trying to figure out how to keep an aging parent close by without the cost of a second household. A local developer is trying to build a handful of small homes on an infill lot, and the numbers don’t work. A divorced schoolteacher is a few months from losing the house, because a teacher’s salary and a mortgage built for two incomes no longer add up.

These are not abstractions. They are the households struggling with rent, the families unable to purchase their first home, older residents unable to find housing they can afford, and the people who work in our communities who increasingly cannot afford to live in them.

These are examples of actual struggles. Struggles that we can respond to through a four-step process:

The process does not begin by asking a community to solve housing affordability. It asks the community to observe where someone is struggling, because what we call the housing crisis is really the accumulated weight of many separate struggles. The family weighing a second household for an aging parent, the local developer whose site economics don’t work, the teacher a few months from losing his house, are not experiencing the same problem with different faces. Each is stuck at a different point, and each point calls for a different response.

Monte Started With the People Around Him

Monte Anderson’s idea for the Roommate House grew out of watching people close to him face housing situations that conventional homes did not serve very well.

One was his mother. As she got older, Monte knew he did not want to put her in a nursing home or other institutional setting if there was another way. He wanted her to be able to maintain her independence while living close enough to family for support and companionship.

Another inspiration came from a friend whose adult son struggled with mental health and alcohol problems. She wanted to live close enough to help her son when he needed her, but she also needed her own private space and the ability to live her own life. Living together in the same house was not necessarily the answer. Living close by, while maintaining separate spaces, could be.

Neither Monte’s mother nor his friend ultimately lived in the Roommate House. Their circumstances were the inspiration for it.

The idea became what Monte calls the Roommate House: taking an existing house and adapting it so several people can live close to one another while maintaining their own private living spaces. Over time, the property evolved into five separate living units, including a converted pool house.

Today, the property continues to serve people going through different seasons of life. Monte’s 20-year-old granddaughter, who was not quite ready to go completely out into the world on her own, lives in one of the units. A friend of hers, also 20, lives independently in another. Other residents have used the property for short- to medium-term housing needs.

That is part of what Monte learned from the project. Housing needs are not static. An aging parent may want independence while remaining close to family. A young adult may need an intermediate step between living at home and being completely on their own. Someone else may simply need a smaller, more affordable place for six months, a year, or a particular season of life.

Monte did not set out to solve the housing crisis. He responded to struggles he saw in the lives of people around him and experimented with a house that already existed.

The Roommate House demonstrated something much larger: sometimes the housing we need is already there. We simply need to allow it to adapt to the way people actually live.

Finley Street Started With a Project That Didn’t Work

The Finley Street Cottages in Atlanta began with a different struggle. Local developer Kronberg Urbanists + Architects wanted to invest in new housing in a city that needed far more housing than it had. The standard approach, one or two houses per lot, wouldn’t add up to much against that need. The development needed to yield more units, or the project wouldn’t pencil.

One of the barriers to this housing was parking. Off-street parking requirements would have consumed land that could otherwise hold homes, and on lots this size, that tradeoff was decisive. Atlanta had also limited how many accessory dwelling units a property like this could hold. When the city reduced the parking requirement and allowed more accessory units, Kronberg could rethink the site.

The firm did not begin by asking Atlanta to solve housing affordability. It tried to build enough homes on two small lots to make the project work. In trying, it ran into a regulatory barrier standing between the site and that goal. That struggle revealed something the city could change, and the city changed it.

The result was 16 units on two lots that once held two single-family houses, achieving 23 units per acre, a mix of historic houses, duplexes, accessory units, and guest houses grouped around a shared courtyard. One project exposed a barrier that, once removed, made similar small-scale development possible elsewhere in the city.

Noah Started With His Mortgage

Noah Tang is a high school teacher in Bloomington, Illinois. After a divorce, at 26, he found himself alone in a house he could no longer afford on his salary. Losing it would have put him back into a housing market where finding another home on a teacher’s salary would have been difficult.

But Noah had something valuable: two empty rooms. He noticed that most landlords in town leased on one-year terms or built their calendar around the school year, leaving young professionals and interns who didn’t know how long they’d stay with nowhere to go. This observation inspired him to write a Craigslist ad for the rooms.

Over the past four years, Noah has housed eight people this way. What began as a response to his own financial struggle changed how he thought about his role in the housing market. He didn’t need to wait for someone else to build affordable housing. With the resources he already had, two rooms and a house he was determined to keep, he could provide additional affordable housing.

What Happens When We Have a Thousand Drops in the Bucket?

This brings us back to the criticism that started the conversation. A roommate house is a drop in the bucket. A few cottages in Atlanta are additional drops in the bucket. A teacher renting spare bedrooms is unquestionably a few more drops in the bucket. These are many drops in the bucket that is being filled by many hands.

The mistake is assuming that an action has little value unless it is large enough to solve the entire problem. When we apply that standard, the scale of the housing crisis becomes an argument for doing nothing until someone arrives with a response large enough to match it. That is not how complex places evolve.

The value of a drop isn’t how much it fills the bucket. It’s what it teaches us about where the next drop should go. Sometimes the next action will be another small project. Sometimes it will be helping the next person navigate the process. Sometimes the lesson will reveal a regulatory barrier that local governments can remove for everyone. That is how small actions can lead to larger reforms.

The people who can create the next generation of incremental housing are often already living in our communities. They are homeowners, tradespeople, small landlords, architects, neighborhood entrepreneurs, and people like Noah who may not even think of themselves as developers. They don’t need to solve the housing crisis. They need to be able to take the first step. Accessory dwelling units, duplexes, small multifamily buildings, cottage courts, and adaptive reuse are legal in more places today than they were a decade ago, but making something legal does not guarantee that anyone will actually build it.

Imagine a community where hundreds of people are allowed and encouraged to try. Some projects will fail. Some will encounter financing problems. Others will reveal confusing regulations or unnecessary requirements. Some will work only under unusual circumstances. But others will succeed, and a successful project shows what worked while a failed one shows what got in the way. The community can then ask what barriers it can remove and what it can make easier for the next person.

Scale does not have to mean finding one organization capable of building a thousand homes. It can also mean creating the conditions where a thousand people are each capable of building one.

What Is Your Drop?

In that original email conversation, I posed a much smaller question than “How do we solve affordable housing?” I asked: what is one barrier to affordable housing in Frederick?

Once we identify that one thing, the next question becomes what we could do to respond to it. Maybe the answer looks like Monte’s: adapting a house already standing. Maybe it looks like Finley Street’s: removing a regulation standing between a project and the units it needs to work. Maybe it looks like Noah’s: renting out space that’s sitting empty. Maybe it’s something none of them tried. We won’t know until we start observing where people are actually struggling.

Find one person trying to create or hold onto housing. Ask where they are struggling and why, not how we should solve the housing crisis. Then ask what the next smallest thing is that we can do right now to address that struggle.

Try it. Observe what happens. Learn from it. Then take the next step. It will be a drop in the bucket. That’s how the bucket fills.

Seven years. That is how long it took my community of Charles Town, West Virginia, to install the two new welcome signs shown above.

There is a wonderful story behind those signs. Years ago, Rashedul Hasan Deepon, a planner for the city and an artist, was given the task of developing a wayfinding system for Charles Town. He researched the community, sketched ideas and developed a design drawing from things that are distinctly local. One of those elements was a colorful mosaic created by more than 500 members of the community. If you spend time in Charles Town, you know the mosaic. Families take photographs there. Students pose before prom and graduation. Couples take wedding pictures. It has accumulated meaning because people have incorporated it into their lives. The mosaic became part of the city’s identity, and its pattern and colors found their way into the new welcome signs.

The city council unanimously supported the wayfinding package. Businesses had been asking for better wayfinding. The city funded it. And then it took years to actually happen.

When the signs were finally installed, city staff celebrated the accomplishment on social media. I learned about the project the same way many other residents did. The signs seemed to appear out of nowhere, and almost immediately, people started debating them. Some loved them. Some didn’t. People argued over the colors, the design and whether the signs appropriately represented Charles Town.

I asked a different question: why did it take seven years?

When a Small Project Becomes a Big Project

The answer from city staff was revealing. The original designer left the city two years into the process. Four city managers were involved. The sign company went through three project managers. Staff turnover interrupted the work. Other problems demanded attention. With a small municipal staff, the project repeatedly went onto the back burner. The response was simply put: they did the best they could with the people they had. As someone who has been in that position in a small government, I believe them and appreciate their honesty.

This isn’t a story about incompetent government workers. Quite the opposite. There is something admirable about people carrying an idea through seven years of turnover and competing priorities until it finally becomes real.

But we should pay attention to what the experience is telling us. A relatively modest civic improvement became a seven-year undertaking. After seven years of design, approvals, funding, procurement, management changes and fabrication, the public finally experienced the result. Then came the feedback. Do you like it? Yes or no? Beautiful or ugly? Appropriate or inappropriate? But after seven years, what exactly is the city supposed to do with those opinions? The signs have been designed. The money has been spent. They have been fabricated. The concrete has been poured. At that point, “Do you like it?” may be one of the least useful questions we can ask.

We Have Been Doing Public Engagement Backwards

Years ago, Strong Towns Founder Charles Marohn wrote “Most Public Engagement Is Worthless.” His argument wasn’t that residents have nothing valuable to contribute. It was nearly the opposite. We routinely ask people questions they are poorly equipped to answer, such as what percentage of the city budget should go toward parks or which of several professionally prepared alternatives they prefer, while failing to ask about the things they know better than anyone else. Marohn argued that people’s actual experiences are much more valuable. How did you get here? Do you use the park? Do you feel safe walking here? “Our planning efforts should absolutely be guided by the experiences of real people,” he wrote. Their actions, rather than their stated preferences, should provide useful information.

I really like Ruben Anderson’s response, “Most Public Engagement Is Worse Than Worthless.“ Anderson argued that poorly structured engagement can actually corrode the relationships communities need. Asking people questions they aren’t equipped to answer and then disregarding their answers doesn’t build trust between residents and local government. It undermines it.

I agree with both critiques. But watching what has happened in Charles Town over the past two years has made me wonder about the next question. If conventional public engagement doesn’t work very well, what should replace it? Charles Town may be stumbling into an answer: we go for a walk.

A Walk About Nothing

Twice a month, people meet outside Charles Town City Hall for something called a “Walk About Nothing.” There is no agenda, no meeting minutes to prepare and no predetermined route. Sometimes a topic or destination is announced beforehand, but most of the time people simply show up and start walking.

The idea came from Charles Town’s business development and downtown coordinator, Liz Cook. Inspired partly by “Seinfeld,” the famous “show about nothing,” she wondered whether a walk with no formal purpose could create the connections she wanted to see in the community. The first walk took place in September 2024. Nine people and two dogs showed up. Attendance grew from there, and within the first year, a walk attracted 50 participants. Today, it isn’t unusual to have 50 or 60 people walking together.

City staff, elected officials, residents, business owners and whoever else wants to join spend one hour experiencing Charles Town together. They talk, notice things and ask questions. And because the conversation is happening in the place itself, an abstract issue can suddenly become something everyone can see and understand. That’s where things get interesting.

A Crosswalk in a Week

During one of the early walks, participants were talking about crosswalks. The city had installed new crosswalks in parts of Charles Town, and because the group was walking through the community, everyone could experience them together. That opened another conversation. Residents Sandy and Andy Cavalier raised concerns about the lack of a crosswalk in their residential neighborhood outside downtown. A council member followed up with City Hall the next day. Public Works responded, and within a week the neighborhood had a new crosswalk.

Think about that process. Nobody needed to commission a study. Nobody needed to organize a special public meeting. Residents didn’t need to prepare testimony. They were walking together, experiencing an improvement the city had already made, when someone essentially asked: could we do this in our neighborhood? Within a week, something changed, and now residents could observe the response. The “engagement” took the form of a feedback loop, as opposed to a transaction.

Not Everything Gets Fixed in a Week

Of course, cities are complicated. Not every problem identified on a Wednesday walk can be fixed by Public Works the following week. Washington Street demonstrates that. Nearly every Walk About Nothing eventually involves crossing or walking along Washington Street. It’s our main street, and it’s maintained by the state through the walks, people experience the street together. They talk about safety and about crossing it, and they have different ideas about what should change. There is a Safe Streets planning process addressing Washington Street, but that work follows a very different timeline. Larger changes will require coordination, funding, design and eventually construction. The walks don’t eliminate those constraints. They allow people to continue experiencing the street while those larger processes unfold. Instead of one public meeting followed by years of silence, there is another walk in two weeks, and another after that. The conversation continues.

Parking has been another recurring topic, and it sounds different when the conversation happens while walking through town. Participants can see the on-street spaces, the city-owned public lots, the private parking areas, which spaces are occupied and which aren’t, and the actual walking distance between a parking space and a destination. That creates an opportunity to ask a different question: does Charles Town actually have too little parking, or do our regulations require too much of it? Now parking mandates aren’t an abstract planning concept. People have experienced the conditions themselves. The city is currently working on code updates, although those proposals have not yet been presented. The walks haven’t formally enacted parking reform, nor should they. They are doing something that should happen before reform. They are building understanding, introducing people to an idea, connecting that idea to something they can see, and giving them time to think about it and encounter it again on the next walk.

Meeting the People Behind the Storefronts

The walks have also become a way to experience the businesses and people who make Charles Town what it is. On the Wednesday before Prismatic Art Studio opened, walkers were invited inside. They met the owner, Gabby, learned what she was creating and experienced a new community art space before its grand opening. On another walk, the group met Summer Wilks, the new owner of Charles Washington’s historic office. The building had been closed for decades. Wilks is working to restore the structure and bring new life to an adjoining former florist space. Instead of reading about the project in a newspaper, participants walked inside. She showed them the building. She showed them historic finishes being preserved. She told them what she hoped the place could become.

These encounters may never appear in the minutes of a public meeting. There are no comment cards to tally. There may be no measurable deliverable. Yet a business owner is no longer simply someone behind a storefront or an applicant at the permit counter. Residents understand a little more about what it takes to invest in their downtown. The business owner meets the people who live there. City officials hear the experience of both. The community becomes a little more connected. That is also public engagement.

Disagreement Is Part of the Feedback Loop

There is another reason these walks work. People don’t have to agree. Charles Town has established a designated outdoor drinking area, locally branded as Hip Sips, where adults can purchase approved alcoholic beverages and carry them within a defined downtown area. Not everyone supports the program. Yet on many Walks About Nothing, participants grab a beer and continue walking. The disagreement doesn’t need to be resolved before people can experience the community together. The same is true of Washington Street. The same is true of parking.

The purpose of the walk isn’t consensus, and that may be one of the most important lessons here. We have designed too much public engagement around producing an answer: which option do you prefer, do you support this project, what should we build. A feedback loop doesn’t require everyone to arrive at the same answer. It requires people to continue paying attention.

The Walk Is the Meeting

Earlier this year, I wrote that the highest form of public engagement isn’t a meeting. Cities routinely reserve a conference room, send notices, print drawings, prepare PowerPoints and invite residents to react to something before a project gets built. The process feels orderly, but it often rests on a flawed assumption: engagement must be completed before action can begin.

The Walks About Nothing have pushed my thinking one step further. Maybe public engagement shouldn’t be something we complete at all. Maybe it should be continuous.

Consider the conventional process: idea, design, public engagement, approval, funding, procurement, construction, and then, perhaps years later, public reaction. The project moves forward while the feedback loop remains open for only a brief moment.

Charles Town’s walks suggest another model: walk, observe, talk, learn, respond, walk again. Sometimes the response is a crosswalk. Sometimes it is the beginning of a conversation about parking mandates. Sometimes it is learning what a business owner is trying to accomplish. Sometimes it is recognizing that the street everyone is walking on is dangerous but that fixing it involves another level of government and a much longer process. And sometimes the response is simply another conversation. Then, two weeks later, people walk again.

This Is the Strong Towns Approach

There is nothing particularly sophisticated about any of this. The Strong Towns approach to public investment begins with something similarly simple: humbly observe where people struggle, identify the next smallest thing that can be done to address that struggle, do it, and then observe what happens. The emphasis on small increments isn’t merely about saving money. It creates the ability to learn. If our observation was incomplete or our response didn’t work as expected, we haven’t committed ourselves to an enormous irreversible solution. We can adjust and try again.

Public engagement should work the same way. Instead, we frequently attach engagement to large projects. By the time a project reaches the public, professionals may have already spent months or years working on it. There are drawings, budgets, schedules, consultants and funding commitments. Everyone involved has something invested in the solution. At that point, criticism is difficult to hear as information. It feels like opposition. And when the project is finally constructed, there may be little ability to respond to what we learn.

That brings me back to those welcome signs. I don’t have an opinion on the design or placement of Charles Town’s new welcome signs. I’m increasingly convinced that isn’t the interesting question or discussion to be had. People worked really hard on them, and there is meaning behind their design that connects to our community. There were legitimate reasons the process took as long as it did. But there is an important contrast between a project that took seven years before most residents could experience it and a walk where a resident pointed out a problem and Public Works responded within days. One isn’t evidence that the government is bad. The other isn’t proof that every problem is simple. They represent two different relationships with time, risk and learning.

Cities don’t need another technique for getting more people to attend public meetings. They need stronger relationships between the people who experience a place and the people responsible for caring for it. That requires something different from asking people what they want.

Go outside. Walk together. Observe what people actually experience. Listen when someone identifies a struggle. Try the smallest reasonable response. Then come back and see what happened.

Most of us move through the world without really seeing it. That is not necessarily carelessness. It is how our brains work. We become familiar with a place, recognize patterns, and begin filling in the details. The street we drive every morning becomes “the street to work.” The intersection becomes “the four-way stop.” The sidewalk, curb, signs, driveways, parked cars, and utility poles recede into the background.

We see enough to function, but observation asks something different of us. It requires interrupting that autopilot and looking at what is actually there.

There is an important difference between seeing and noticing. Seeing is passive. Our eyes receive whatever is in front of them. Noticing is active. It requires us to stop, pay attention, and eventually ask questions about what we see.

That sounds simple, but I have learned through my work as an urban designer that it can be remarkably difficult, especially for those of us who have spent our careers working with the built environment. Sometimes our expertise helps us see things other people miss. Sometimes it causes us to see things that are not there.

A Crash Analysis Studio in Brandon, Manitoba, taught me that lesson.

The Crash in Brandon

On June 27, 2022, shortly after 10 p.m., Grant Hamilton was cycling home with his wife after a family event in Brandon, Manitoba. At the intersection of Lorne Avenue East and Park Street, a westbound driver struck Hamilton as he was cycling east on Lorne Avenue.

Hamilton went over the hood of the vehicle and suffered severe injuries. He tore the meniscus in his knee, separated his shoulder, and lost his left pinky finger. He ultimately received 25 stitches and had his hand reconstructed at a hospital in Winnipeg.

Strong Towns later convened a Crash Analysis Studio to examine what had happened. The purpose of the Studio was not to recreate the collision with perfect certainty or determine who deserved blame. We wanted to ask a different set of questions: What conditions were present? What might have contributed to this crash? What could the community learn from it? What aspects of the built environment were within the community’s power to change?

We brought together technical professionals and people with local knowledge of Brandon. We reviewed the crash information, maps, photographs, and the design of Lorne Avenue and Park Street. Then we talked.

One issue kept coming up. People were not stopping at the intersection, and I thought I understood what they meant.

Of Course Those Are Stop Signs

I look at the streets all the time. I am a trained architect and urban designer, and I have spent decades working in and around local government. I spend far too much time wandering around places looking at curbs, buildings, intersections, and how people move through them.

When preparing for Crash Analysis Studios, I routinely spend time looking through Street View and studying photographs of crash locations. So when I looked at the Brandon intersection I saw the street, the poles, and the signs. I knew what I was looking at: stop signs.

The discussion about motorists not stopping seemed familiar to me. I live in a neighborhood where we joke that stop signs are not for the locals. My neighbors are familiar with the streets and are already driving really slow. However visitors driving through for the first time come to a complete stop. Someone who has driven the same intersection a thousand times might roll through it.

During the Studio, I asked whether these were like the stop signs in my neighborhood. Were they really there for the outsiders, while the locals knew the intersection and tended to roll through them?

One of the local experts stopped me and told me to look more closely.

I had looked closely, or at least I thought I had before the studio. So I opened the street view and the photos for the studio and took a second look.

But when we zoomed in, there it was. This intersection did not have red octagonal stop signs, it has bright yellow, triangular yield signs.

The official crash information confirmed it. Park Street was controlled by two yield signs, while traffic on Lorne Avenue had the right of way. I had been staring directly at them, and I had not seen them.

I Wasn’t Missing Information

That moment has stuck with me through every Crash Analysis Studio I have worked on since. The problem was not that I did not have enough information. The information was directly in front of me. The problem was that I had already decided what the information meant.

I saw a neighborhood intersection like the ones in my neighborhood. I saw a pole and markings in a familiar location of traffic-control signs. My professional experience completed the picture for me to conclude there were stop signs.

That is the strange thing about expertise. Years of experience allow us to process enormous amounts of information very quickly. A transportation engineer can glance at a street and recognize things most people would never notice. A planner reads development patterns. A police officer sees things in a crash scene differently from a public works employee. A person who uses a wheelchair notices details many designers routinely overlook.

Expertise gives us a lens, but every lens also filters. In Brandon, my technical background did not merely cause me to overlook something. It caused me to substitute what I expected to see for what was actually there.

It took a local expert with a different kind of expertise to interrupt me.

Observe First, Interpret Second

The Crash Analysis Studio is often described as a process for examining serious crashes and identifying contributing factors. It is that, but I increasingly think one of its most valuable functions is simpler: it teaches us how to observe.

A Studio creates a structured conversation where a police officer, engineer, planner, elected official, advocate, resident, and other participants can look at the same place and describe different things. The objective is not to determine who in the room has the best eyes. It is to recognize that none of us sees everything.

Instead of asking one expert to provide the answer, the Studio gives people with different forms of knowledge permission to compare what they see. One person notices the pavement while someone else notices the lighting. Another person knows how children cross the street after school. Someone who cycles the route knows why riders move several feet into the travel lane at one particular location.

Sometimes a person who lives nearby has to tell the professional who studies streets for a living that the thing he thinks he sees is not actually there.

That is not a failure of the process. That is the process working.

Learning to Look Again

The Brandon Studio ultimately recommended changes to the traffic controls, along with a series of other immediate, near-term, and long-term responses to the conditions participants observed.

Those recommendations mattered, but the lesson I continue to carry into conversations with cities happened before any recommendation was made. I was wrong about what I was looking at, not because I was uninformed, but because I was informed. My experience allowed me to recognize a familiar pattern so quickly that I stopped observing it.

That is a bias every professional carries in some form. The response is not to disregard expertise. It is to put expertise into conversation with other ways of knowing a place.

This is why I want cities conducting Crash Analysis Studios to spend more time learning how to observe. Slow down and walk the location. Take photographs. Stand where the pedestrian stands. Look from the driver’s approach. Travel the route of the cyclist. Ask the person who lives there what you are missing. Then bring those observations into a room and compare them.

The Crash Analysis Studio can help a city respond differently after a tragedy. It can identify contributing factors, create a feedback loop, and give professionals a process for taking action instead of simply assigning blame. But perhaps there is something even more fundamental happening: it can teach us to look at familiar places with unfamiliar eyes.

Safer streets begin with understanding the street that is actually there. Sometimes that starts with someone saying, “Look again.”

This intersection isn’t just creating a speeding problem. It’s sending mixed signals to everyone who uses it.

Signage placement, overgrown landscaping, and the geometry of five converging streets all combine to make the intended behavior unclear. The physical design fails to communicate to drivers how they’re expected to move through the space.

The default response is to start a study or hire a consultant, which will be costly and take months or years to complete. A small neighborhood intersection like this should not require an exhaustive process.

One of the most powerful tools in our toolkit is observation. We can walk the intersection with residents, and experience it as a driver. A few minutes of watching how people actually use the space reveals what the geometry and signage are communicating.

This “speeding problem” begins to reveal a collection of smaller issues: poor visibility, confusing signage, overgrown landscaping, awkward street geometry, unclear expectations. Each of these smaller issues are easy corrected. We can ask residents trim the landscaping. This city could issue a work order to move the stop sign and repaint the stop bar. Additional crosswalk striping could be added to the next budget cycle. These are all individual pieces where we can start responding immediately, in small and cheap ways, instead of waiting for a comprehensive fix that may never come.

You are the local champion for the latest updates to your city’s transportation plan. You encouraged your neighbors to show up to the meetings and complete the surveys. You helped build the consensus with the consultants. Maybe you even served on the committee. Year after year you put your heart into this effort because you believed that if your community could just get the right plan in place, things would change.

Then a serious crash happened on a street you know well. You asked what could be done, and you are told you one of two things:

"That location is already identified in our transportation plan," or, "That location isn't currently scheduled for improvements."

Both answers may be technically accurate, but neither helps the family that just lost someone. And if you've heard them more than once, you've probably started to wonder whether the plan is actually working or whether it has quietly become the reason nothing can happen yet.

That frustration points to something real, and it deserves an honest answer.

An Orderly Process

Transportation planning is designed as a linear process. Communities observe existing conditions through studies or walking audits. This information is then used to develop a plan illustrating what is possible, sometimes with several alternatives. The community is then asked to prioritize all of the recommended projects and the projects are ranked on a list. The plan is then submitted to secure funding for the final design and then the construction. Then, several years later, almost like clockwork, we begin the process all over again. The assumption built into that process is that implementation is what happens between plans.

Crashes that occur in the meantime get absorbed into the system. Staff reference them,  residents ask about them, and officials express concern. Eventually someone notes that the location was already identified, or that it isn't yet scheduled, and the conversation moves on. The crash becomes another isolated event and a date point rather than new information about how the transportation system is actually performing.

When the assumption is that implementation is what happens between plans, we miss the opportunity to learn. 

This would be considered a serious gap in almost any other field. Hospitals conduct regular reviews of unexpected patient deaths, not to assign blame, but to understand what happened and prevent the next one. Airlines study incidents to improve procedures. Manufacturers investigate defects to improve production. None of these organizations wait five years for the next strategic plan before learning from failure. They build learning into normal operations.

Transportation planning rarely does. There's no equivalent process or structured moment where a community stops after a serious crash and asks: What is this telling us?

That missing step has consequences. Transportation committees lose momentum after a plan is adopted. Their role shifts from shaping the future to waiting for projects that may take years to reach design, let alone construction. Meanwhile, crashes continue. Residents keep raising the same concerns. And elected officials keep being told to reference the plan as if the plan were a response rather than a starting point.

You Do Not Have to Wait

Here is what most transportation officials are never told: you don't have to wait.

There is something your community can do right now, without a new plan, without a new funding cycle, and without waiting for projects to clear design review. It's called the Crash Analysis Studio, and it exists to fill exactly the gap described above.

A crash analysis studio is a structured process for learning from serious crashes. When a fatal or life-altering crash occurs, a small response team gathers information about the location, the road design, the operating conditions, and the history of the site. Then a group of participants reviews that information together: elected officials, technical staff, community members with direct knowledge of the place. They work through a single question: What can we learn from this?

The purpose is not to assign blame. It's not a legal proceeding. It doesn't replace a police investigation or override the capital improvement process. It is, simply, the structured review that transportation has always needed and rarely had the same kind of learning process that hospitals and airlines have long considered essential to getting better over time.

Most communities already have what they need to begin a crash analysis studio because learning does not require a new city department, an external consultant, or additional budget line items. The people, the information, and the institutional capacity are already there. What's been missing to tackle our dangerous streets is a structured process for putting those pieces together after every serious crash and not just at the start of every planning cycle.

Cities Can Commit to Learning

The plan you worked so hard to support matters, because it identifies the big projects that are worth building. But a plan is a statement of intent, not a mechanism for learning. And the gap between a plan and safer streets is filled by something plans alone cannot provide.

Communities don't become safer because they adopted the right policy or an award winning plan. They become safer because they are committed to learning. They keep that commitment after every serious crash, not just once every five years when the planning cycle begins again.

That commitment is actually an easier lift than any plan because it starts with a single studio.

To learn more and find free resources for establishing the Crash Analysis Studio process in your community, visit strongtowns.org/crashstudio.

Recently, Manatee County Commissioner George Kruse published a piece explaining why he’d called his own county “poor” in a public meeting. He wasn’t being dramatic. He’d just run the numbers.

Manatee’s net financial position spiked after COVID, then dropped hard and is now approaching zero. The county is sitting on $39.2 million in reserves against a policy target of $111.7 million, a shortfall of $72.5 million. Road maintenance is underfunded by roughly $8 million a year, and that gap doesn’t hold steady. It compounds. Debt service is now the county’s second-largest budget line, behind only the sheriff’s office.

None of that happened because Manatee County overspent its annual budget. Kruse is direct about this: the county portion of his own property tax bill rose just $114 total over five years. The problem isn’t this year’s ledger. It’s everything the county built and financed in the years before this year’s ledger.

That’s the distinction most municipal finance debates miss entirely.

The Debate That Misses the Point

When a city announces budget cuts, the public conversation almost always follows the same script. One side says the city spends too much. The other says taxes are too low. The argument becomes a tug-of-war between two levers: spend less, or collect more.

It’s an understandable debate. It’s also the wrong one.

Beneath every municipal budget sits a bigger question that gets almost no attention: how much public liability has the community taken on, and how much productive wealth exists to support it? That’s the question that actually determines whether a place becomes financially resilient or slides toward insolvency. Kruse’s numbers show why. Manatee’s operating budget is about $500 million. After mandated spending, roughly $15 million is left for everything else: parks, libraries, transit, road maintenance. Even if every discretionary dollar went straight to reserves, the county would still land at less than half its policy target. Cutting harder doesn’t close that gap. The gap isn’t a spending problem. It’s a liability problem that spending cuts can’t reach.

Why the Operational Fix Doesn’t Work

When a government faces financial pressure, the instinct is almost always operational. Can we reduce staff? Delay a project? Consolidate a department? Those are reasonable questions, and they’re incomplete ones.

Imagine a company that gets less profitable with every new product line it launches. The first one pays for itself easily. The tenth barely breaks even. By the fiftieth, the company loses money the moment it opens the line, and no amount of cutting office supplies or renegotiating insurance changes that, because the problem isn’t operational. It’s structural. Each new product costs more to sustain than it earns.

Local governments can fall into the same pattern. If every new subdivision, collector road, and utility extension costs more in long-term liability than it returns in long-term tax revenue, each phase of growth produces a smaller return than the phase before it, until new growth stops paying for itself at all. That’s not a spending problem. It’s diminishing returns, and Kruse’s numbers show the mechanism in motion: Manatee has 35 miles of new roads under construction that will add roughly $600,000 a year in maintenance obligations, stacked on top of the $8 million gap the county is already carrying. Every new lane mile makes next year’s version of this problem larger, regardless of how efficiently the county runs its departments.

What Was Promised Thirty Years Ago

Nowhere in Manatee County is that pattern more visible than at Lakewood Ranch, the county’s largest development and, by extension, the largest single driver of new infrastructure demand in the unincorporated county over the past three decades. Lakewood Ranch’s internal streets are financed and maintained through its own community development districts, not the county’s general fund, and it’s worth being precise about that so the point doesn’t get lost in a jurisdictional technicality. But the ranch didn’t grow in isolation. Every phase required the county to extend and maintain the arterials, connectors, intersections, and utility lines tying it back to the rest of Manatee County, and those obligations sit squarely on the county’s books.

The first Lakewood Ranch community development district was established in February 1994. Its first neighborhood, Summerfield, opened in 1995. Today the ranch spans more than 33,000 acres of what used to be cattle and citrus land, is home to nearly 43,000 residents, and is still adding new villages, with close to 40,000 homes planned at full build-out. Roads typically need major resurfacing or reconstruction 25 to 30 years after they’re built. The county-maintained roads that came online to connect the ranch’s earliest phases are hitting that mark right now, arriving at the same time the county is absorbing the maintenance cost of everything still being built to serve the ranch’s continued expansion. Kruse’s own numbers capture that layering effect: 35 miles of new road under construction countywide today, stacked on top of an $8 million annual maintenance shortfall that predates any of it.

This is what “liabilities” means in practice. It isn’t an abstraction on a balance sheet. It’s a specific connector road built in the 1990s that public works has to reconstruct in 2026, whether or not anyone set money aside for it back when Lakewood Ranch was still cow pasture.

Growth Isn’t the Same as Wealth

This is the hardest lesson in municipal finance, and it’s the one Manatee’s charts make visible. Growth and wealth are not synonyms. A place can grow fast while getting financially weaker.

New development creates private assets for property owners. It also creates public liabilities for the local government that has to maintain the roads, pipes, and infrastructure that serve it. Those liabilities are manageable only if the development eventually produces enough tax revenue to sustain them over its full lifespan, not just its first decade.

Permit fees and new tax revenue from fresh construction feel like prosperity when they arrive. They arrive decades before the infrastructure’s largest bills come due. By the time those bills land, the growth that was supposed to pay for itself is instead financing yesterday’s obligations while creating tomorrow’s, larger, version of the same problem. That’s the pattern behind Manatee’s reserve cliff: a place that grew, cut its millage rate, and covered the difference with reserves that are now nearly gone.

Recognizing the Growth Ponzi Scheme

Strong Towns has a name for what happens when a place keeps approving new growth to cover the liabilities of the growth that came before it: the Growth Ponzi Scheme. New development generates permit fees and fresh tax revenue up front, and that revenue can cover the shortfall left by the previous decade’s infrastructure without ever paying down the underlying liability. It works as long as new growth arrives faster than old liabilities come due. It stops working the moment growth slows, or the moment enough infrastructure matures at once that the bill outpaces what new development can cover.

Manatee’s numbers suggest that moment may already be arriving. Lakewood Ranch is still adding villages, still generating new permit revenue, even as the roads built for its earliest phases are reaching the point where they need to be rebuilt. The question isn’t whether the county can approve enough new growth to keep this year’s math working. It’s whether that math can work indefinitely, or whether it’s simply postponing a reckoning further down the road, quite literally.

Local leaders can ask a different set of questions than the usual tax-versus-spending framing. How much infrastructure liability does this decision create? How much tax productivity will it generate, and over what time horizon? Would redevelopment inside Lakewood Ranch’s existing footprint, thickening what’s already built and served by existing roads, produce more long-term value per mile of infrastructure than approving the next new village? Where can the county add value without adding to what it has to maintain?

These questions move the conversation away from this year’s budget and toward whether Manatee’s growth pattern can sustain itself without a constant supply of new development covering for the old.

The Real Path to Solvency

Efficiency still matters. Cities should eliminate waste, tighten operations, and prioritize spending carefully. Those are signs of good stewardship. But stewardship can’t overcome bad math. If liabilities keep growing faster than productivity, a balanced budget this year just delays the reckoning.

Real financial resilience comes from increasing the productivity of land that’s already served by infrastructure: letting neighborhoods incrementally thicken, encouraging redevelopment where roads and pipes already exist, building more value per acre instead of more acres that need public maintenance.

Manatee County didn’t get $72.5 million behind on reserves by spending too much this year. It got there through three decades of decisions that added liabilities faster than they added productivity. Every place running the same playbook, growth financed by future maintenance nobody’s budgeted for yet, is on the same trajectory, whether or not anyone’s called it “poor” in a public meeting yet.

If you want to see where your own community stands, Strong Towns’ Finance Decoder is free and public at strongtowns.org/decoder.

Like planning departments across the country, Smithfield could have followed a familiar script for public engagement. They could have started by sending out flyers for a weeknight meeting at city hall inviting residents to share what they want to see over the next 20 years. When a handful of residents arrive and sign in at the meeting, they are handed a stack of sticky dots or notecards. After a presentation forecasting the future of their community, the audience is then asked to use their dots or notecards to share their thoughts.

Gregory had seen this pattern play out in surrounding communities and he knew exactly what would happen. The meeting would produce a list of projects, priorities, and competing interests. It would also miss something essential.

It wouldn't explain why people love Smithfield.

For Gregory, that mattered.

As Smithfield's Director of Planning & Economic Development, and as someone who grew up there, with both his and his wife's families deeply rooted in the community, this wasn't simply another planning exercise. Smithfield, founded in 1730, is a place with a long memory. Its identity isn't found in zoning districts, future land use maps, or transportation plans. It's found in the stories people tell about growing up there, raising families there, and caring for the town across generations.

Gregory believed the town's future should begin there.

Strong Towns was invited to share Strong Towns 101 at the Comprehensive Plan Kick-Off Meeting, and Gregory had shared with me in advance the questions he was going to ask his community. When I started my talk, I shared the innovative approach Smithfield was taking to this process. Gregory didn't feel that way about it. He wasn't trying to be clever. He was trying to make sure the plan started somewhere deeper than preconceived solutions or the usual arguments over what should get built next. Smithfield carries a lot of history. It felt right to start with what people already treasure and let everything else grow from there.

He realized that a planning process for a town founded nearly 300 years ago shouldn't begin by asking people what they wanted built next. It should begin by asking what was already worth preserving.

So Gregory asked a different question. Instead of asking residents what they wanted, he invited them to tell a story: "Tell us about a moment, place, or experience in Smithfield that shaped how you feel about this town."

It was a simple question, and it completely changed the conversation.

Neighbors who might never have spoken at a traditional public hearing began sharing memories of favorite places, family traditions, everyday routines, and experiences that made Smithfield feel like home. Those stories uncovered something no survey or dot exercise ever could. Beneath dozens of individual memories were values the community already held in common: community, strong schools, open space, and the distinct character of Smithfield's villages.

Then came the harder part.

Working together, each table turned those values into principles. Then Gregory asked the question that mattered most: when a town can't have everything, what should it lean toward?

The answers surprised him. Nearly every table arrived at the same place. Money.

How do you support great schools while respecting what taxpayers can reasonably afford? How do you preserve open space while recognizing the pressures of growth? How do you protect village character without pretending difficult tradeoffs don't exist?

One table distilled its thinking into a simple truth: "Once it's gone, it is gone forever."

Another table captured an idea Gregory recognized immediately from the Strong Towns presentation earlier that evening: "Start little, takes time."

He even noticed another familiar phrase appear in the worksheets.

Someone had written "stroads," carefully placed in quotation marks, as if trying out a new word for the first time.

Those weren't policy recommendations. They were signs that something deeper had happened.

Residents weren't simply reacting to proposals. They were beginning to develop a shared language for thinking about their community and the difficult choices that lie ahead. The conversation had shifted from debating projects to discovering the values that should guide every future decision.

The comprehensive plan that emerges from this process will almost certainly look different from the one it replaces. More importantly, it will be rooted in something deeper than policy recommendations. It will reflect the lived experiences, shared values, and long-term stewardship of the people who call Smithfield home.

That's what a Strong Towns approachlooks like in practice. It can't be handed to a community as a blueprint. It can't be prescribed as a one-size-fits-all solution. The Strong Towns approach is about helping local leaders find the confidence to ask better questions and create the conditions for their communities to shape their own future.

Gregory didn't set out to write a different comprehensive plan. He set out to help Smithfield discover what it already knew about itself.

Smithfield is still early in this process. The document itself, its zoning districts, its land use maps, its transportation plans, hasn't been written yet. But the foundation has. It's sitting on worksheets full of stories about villages, schools, open space, and what people are willing to give up to protect them. A town that starts there, with what it already knows about itself, is giving itself the best chance to get the rest right.

This week, I had the opportunity to spend time with the Strong Towns Local Conversation in Steubenville, Ohio. Like many conversations I’ve had with local advocates over the years, the discussion didn’t center on abstract planning theory. It centered on a very real local struggle.

And I suspect it won’t be unique to Steubenville.

The city has a new city manager who is making property maintenance a priority. After years of inconsistent enforcement, the city has adopted the International Property Maintenance Code and begun issuing notices of violation to property owners across town.

From the city’s perspective, this makes perfect sense. Steubenville, like many Rust Belt communities, has endured decades of economic decline. Buildings have deteriorated. Paint has peeled. Brick has gone unpainted. Windows have broken. Confidence has slowly disappeared. If the city wants to reverse that trajectory, allowing visible neglect to continue doesn’t seem like an option.

But there is another side to this story.

Over the last several years, a new generation of people have begun buying these long-neglected buildings. They aren’t national developers arriving with millions of dollars in financing. They’re entrepreneurs, local business owners, and incremental developers who have invested what savings they have simply to acquire a property. Now they’re trying to figure out what comes next.

Many fully intend to repair the broken windows. They plan to repoint the brick. They want to restore the storefronts and eventually open businesses that bring life back downtown. Their challenge isn’t willingness. It’s time.

When a building has accumulated decades of deferred maintenance, it is almost impossible for a new owner to address every deficiency within a 60- or 90-day compliance window. The purchase itself often consumed most of the available capital. The business they hope to open hasn’t begun generating revenue. Financing is difficult. Contractors are expensive.

Instead of feeling welcomed as someone trying to improve the community, many are experiencing their first interaction with City Hall as a notice of violation.

The city is trying to restore confidence. The investors are trying to build confidence. Neither side is wrong. They’re simply operating on different timelines.

That tension points toward a question worth sitting with: what would it look like if the city approached these property owners not as gatekeepers, but as guides?

A Bank Run on Confidence

Steubenville’s situation reminded me of a story Strong Towns has shared for years from Oswego, New York.

Like Steubenville, Oswego had experienced years of disinvestment. The city’s leaders eventually realized they weren’t simply dealing with deteriorating buildings. They were experiencing what they called a bank run on confidence. Residents weren’t avoiding improvements because they didn’t care. Many were waiting to see whether anyone else believed the neighborhood had a future.

Why paint your house if your neighbors aren’t going to paint theirs?

The city’s response wasn’t a massive redevelopment initiative. Instead, they created a matching microgrant program of up to $1,000 for visible exterior improvements for painting, landscaping, porch repairs, lighting, windows, roofs. Small projects people could actually accomplish.

But the most important part wasn’t the money. Seven out of every 10 property owners on a block had to participate. Suddenly neighbors were knocking on one another’s doors. People who hadn’t spoken in years were coordinating projects. Residents who couldn’t physically or financially participate found neighbors willing to help paint a front door or clean up a yard.

The grants didn’t transform neighborhoods because they were large. They transformed neighborhoods because they rebuilt confidence together. Sometimes the most valuable investment isn’t the dollars. It’s giving people confidence that they won’t be investing alone.

That’s the guide mindset at the neighborhood scale.

What If Enforcement Came With a Path Forward?

Code enforcement doesn’t have to arrive as a dead end.

When I was working at the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) in Martin County, Florida, many neighborhoods had significant code enforcement issues. For years, the county hesitated to enforce violations because many residents simply lacked the resources to make repairs. But ignoring the problems wasn’t helping anyone either.

So before code enforcement entered a neighborhood, the CRA assembled partners. The housing authority identified rehabilitation programs and grants. Habitat for Humanity’s Brush With Kindness program became a resource for modest repairs. Community organizations like Habitat Angles came forward as volunteers to lend a helping hand. All of these programs were coordinated alongside enforcement efforts.

When an inspector identified a problem, they weren’t limited to handing someone a violation. They could also connect that person to the CRA who coordinated people prepared to help. The notice remained and accountability remained. This difference was that hope was also introduced.

Communities often have more resources than they realize. The challenge is that those resources frequently operate independently of one another. Sometimes the most valuable role local leaders can play is simply helping people find each other.

The question isn’t simply: how do we get this building fixed? It’s also: how do we help this building become productive again?

Becoming Guides

The clearest example I’ve seen of what this looks like in practice comes from Broad Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee.

Most people know the Better Block story because of the temporary street improvements where residents painted bike lanes, constructed parklets, added planters, and a right-sized street. These temporary measures eventually became permanent and this process was repeated along the street. But another transformation which is less reported was also happening inside the buildings.

Vacant storefronts became temporary pop-up businesses alongside the street improvements. The first of these pop-ups simply involved opening a door and setting up a temporary shopfront. This proof of concept demonstrated interest in permanent shops that would require appropriate permitting.

Instead of requiring every building to undergo a complete renovation before opening, city officials worked with business owners to identify what was necessary to make spaces safe. The inspectors focused on the bare minimum: clear exits, emergency lighting, installing fire extinguishers. Rather than demanding every future improvement upfront, officials established a path for incremental compliance as businesses grew. Some communities have even experimented with temporary certificates of occupancy that document what activities are allowed today while establishing what improvements will be required as the business expands.

The role of the building official changed. They weren’t lowering standards. They were helping people understand how to reach them.

The city shifted from being gatekeepers to guides.

The Role of a Strong Towns Local Conversation

This is where I think Strong Towns Local Conversations have an opportunity to do something uniquely valuable.

Not by choosing sides. Not by telling the city it’s wrong. Not by telling property owners they’re right. But by helping everyone understand one another’s struggle.

A local conversation can introduce examples from places like Oswego, Martin County, and Memphis. It can convene property owners, city staff, building officials, lenders, nonprofits, and neighborhood organizations around the same table. It can ask questions instead of assigning blame.

What barriers are owners experiencing? What responsibilities does the city have? Where are the opportunities for partnership? How can we encourage visible progress while recognizing that revitalization happens incrementally?

Those aren’t questions with one correct answer. They’re questions communities have to work through together.

Every Strong Town starts with people willing to help their neighbors see a path forward. Sometimes the most important thing a local conversation can do isn’t advocate for a particular policy. It helps restore confidence that progress is possible.

I’d love to hear from others: join us in the Commons to continue this conversation with me and other Strong Towns members. Has your community struggled with balancing code enforcement and incremental investment? What responses have you seen help both cities and property owners move forward together?

He saw pedestrians crossing wide streets. People walking at night. Cyclists navigating roads designed primarily for vehicle movement. He also saw a troubling reality: Fort Smith had experienced pedestrian fatalities, and while city leaders were working toward safety improvements, meaningful street redesigns would take years and significant resources to accomplish.

Like many people who care deeply about their communities, Andy found himself asking a difficult question: What can one person do?

As a Strong Towns member and participant in the Confessions of a Recovering Engineer Accelerator Program, Andy was introduced to a different way of thinking about change. The Strong Towns approach helped him understand that cities are complex systems and that lasting improvements often begin with small, focused actions rather than grand solutions.

Andy realized he couldn’t reconstruct a dangerous road himself.

But he could start a conversation.

That insight led to a simple idea: a small reflector that could be handed to pedestrians and cyclists throughout the community. The reflector features a uniquely Fort Smith logo: a footprint shaped from the letters “FS,” making it both a practical safety tool and a symbol of local pride.

What happened next surprised him.

Every time he handed someone a reflector, a conversation followed.

People talked about walking. They talked about safety. They talked about where they crossed the street, how they got around town, and what it felt like to navigate the city outside a vehicle. The reflector did more than catch the light from approaching headlights. It helped people notice something often overlooked: every trip begins and ends as a pedestrian.

The idea spread. Andy distributed hundreds of reflectors, including 275 during Halloween alone. The Fort Smith Police Department now carries them in patrol vehicles and hands them out to vulnerable road users at night. What started as one citizen looking for a way to help has become a growing community effort to raise awareness from the bottom up.

The story is a reminder that nobody changes a place alone.

Large infrastructure projects matter. Street redesigns matter. Policy changes matter. But before communities make better decisions, people often need to see their community differently. They need opportunities to recognize who is using their streets and whose needs may have been overlooked.

Strong Towns members help make that work possible. Through programs like the Accelerator, members gain practical tools, encouragement, and support that help turn concern into action. Just as importantly, they become part of a movement of people discovering that meaningful change often starts with a conversation, a relationship, or a small next step.

Andy didn’t solve pedestrian safety in Fort Smith; he started helping his neighbors see pedestrians. And sometimes that’s exactly where change begins.

Sometimes the request grows out of frustration. The city wants to slow traffic, add crosswalks, narrow lanes, or plant street trees, but the county owns the road and controls its design standards. Other times, the motivation is administrative. A road inside city limits, the thinking goes, probably belongs under city jurisdiction.

Either way, the question eventually appears on a council agenda:

Should the city accept the right-of-way transfer?

The answer often feels obvious. But accepting a road is not just an administrative decision; it’s a long-term promise to maintain that infrastructure for decades to come.

Why Cities Want the Transfer

For many communities, gaining control of a road can feel like progress.

When a county owns the roadway, the city may have limited influence over lane widths, speed targets or intersection design. Counties often treat these corridors primarily as transportation routes designed to move vehicles efficiently between destinations.

Cities tend to see the same corridor differently. The road may run through downtown, past local businesses or alongside homes and schools. It’s designed like a highway and less like a street, which is a place where people walk, park, gather and do business.

Taking ownership can allow a city to align the design of the street with the surrounding land uses and community goals. Crosswalks, narrower lanes, street trees, on-street parking and other design choices suddenly become possible.

From that perspective, accepting the road transfer can feel like reclaiming control over an important public space.

But control is only one side of the equation.

What Ownership Actually Means

Every mile of road carries long-term obligations.

Pavement eventually fails. Stormwater systems need maintenance. Signals and lighting must be replaced. Sidewalks crack. Trees require care.

These costs rarely arrive all at once. They accumulate gradually over decades. But once a city accepts ownership of a street, those obligations become permanent.

Infrastructure isn’t simply a public service; it’s a long-term financial commitment.

A road transferred today may require major pavement replacement in 25 years. The pipes beneath it may last 50 years or more. The street design may shape development patterns for even longer.

Accepting a road means accepting responsibility for maintaining it through those cycles.

The Blind Spot in Many Road Transfers

In many cities, these decisions are made without fully understanding the long-term financial implications.

A road transfer might appear on a council agenda as a relatively routine item. Staff may frame it as a logical jurisdictional adjustment. After all, the road is already inside city limits.

But the underlying question often goes unexamined: Can the city sustainably maintain this street over time?

One way to approach that question is to look at the land the road serves.

Streets are supported by the economic activity that surrounds them. The homes, businesses and buildings along a corridor generate the tax base that ultimately pays for infrastructure maintenance.

If the adjacent land produces strong value, the community may have the financial capacity to care for the street over time. If the surrounding land produces very little value, such as large parking lots, low-density commercial strips or auto-oriented development, the long-term math becomes far more difficult.

Without examining that relationship, cities can find themselves accepting infrastructure obligations that the surrounding land cannot realistically sustain.

Control vs. Stewardship

This tension appears often in local decision-making.

Cities understandably want control over streets that run through important neighborhoods or commercial areas. Local control can unlock better design decisions and help shape more productive places.

But control alone is not the goal.

The deeper responsibility is stewardship.

Owning a street means committing future public resources to its maintenance and renewal. It means ensuring that the surrounding land and local economy are capable of supporting that obligation over time.

The decision to accept a road transfer, then, should not be driven solely by the desire for control. It should be guided by a more fundamental question:

Can this community responsibly own and sustain this street for the long haul?

The Council You’ll Never Meet

Somewhere down the line — 10, 20, maybe 40 years from now — a future city council will sit down to approve a budget.

They will look at a road that is failing. Pavement will be cracking. Pipes may be deteriorating beneath the surface. Sidewalks will be uneven and long overdue for replacement.

That council won’t remember the meeting where the road transfer was approved. They won’t know whether the decision felt routine or controversial at the time.

They will simply inherit the obligation.

Across the country, conversations about road ownership are happening quietly in council chambers and public works departments. They rarely make headlines, but they shape the financial trajectory of communities for decades. Treating these decisions with greater clarity and discipline may be one of the most important (and overlooked) steps cities can take toward building financially resilient places.

Every road a city accepts today is, in effect, a promise to that future council. A promise that the community believed it could sustain the street when the bill eventually came due. A promise that the land it serves would produce enough value to support its upkeep.

This isn’t an argument that cities should refuse road transfers. In the right circumstances, local ownership can help transform an auto-oriented corridor into a safer, more productive street.

But it does mean these decisions deserve more than a routine vote.

When a county proposes transferring a road, the real question isn’t about jurisdiction. It’s about stewardship, and whether the city can responsibly own this street for the long haul.

When most people hear about a traffic crash, they immediately look for a cause: a distracted driver, a pedestrian who wasn’t paying attention, or someone who made a mistake.

But for Malisa McCreedy, Transportation Manager for the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the most important question is often much bigger than that.

As Ann Arbor implemented the goals of its Moving Together Toward​ Vision Zero Comprehensive Transportation Plan, city leaders recognized that crashes are rarely isolated events. Crashes are the product of a system: street design, speed, visibility, land use, lighting, enforcement, expectations, and countless other factors that shape how people move through a place every day.

That realization led the city to create a multidisciplinary Crash Response team that meets monthly to review serious crashes that occur in the city. Representatives from the police department sit alongside city staff responsible for every aspect of the public right-of-way, from day-to-day operations to long-range planning. This team examines what happened, but more importantly, they ask why the system produced that outcome.

The Work Wasn’t Always Easy

As the Crash Response team dug deeper into crash analysis, they discovered that understanding the crash and explaining the contributing factors were often two different challenges. Ann Arbor Staff could identify multiple contributing factors, but communicating those findings to the public proved difficult. Community advocates wanted answers. Residents wanted accountability. Yet reducing a crash to a single cause often obscured what the city was learning.

Malisa in her role as Transportation Manager introduced the Strong Towns’ Crash Analysis Studio to her team to tackle this struggle. The Crash Response Team strengthened both their review process and their ability to communicate what they were finding. The Studio helped shift conversations away from blame and towards understanding. Instead of asking who was at fault, the Crash Response Team became better equipped to ask what conditions contributed to the crash and what changes could make future crashes less likely.

Just as importantly, Malisa discovered that Ann Arbor was not alone in this work. Through Strong Towns, city staff were connected to a broader community of practitioners, local leaders, and transportation professionals grappling with many of the same questions. How do you talk about crashes without reducing them to a single cause? How do you help residents understand the role that street design plays in safety outcomes? How do you create space for learning while still responding to community concerns? The value wasn’t simply a new process. It was the confidence that comes from learning alongside others who are committed to making their communities safer.

That shift has had real results. Ann Arbor has seen a reduction in overall crashes and is now able to focus more attention on the most serious crashes as it continues pursuing its Vision Zero Comprehensive Transportation Plan objectives.

What makes this story compelling is not that Ann Arbor found a simple answer. It’s that city staff embraced the complexity of the challenge.

Strong Towns often talks about the danger of false confidence. Cities are complex systems, and meaningful change rarely comes from a single solution. It comes from observation, learning, collaboration, and the willingness to ask better questions.

Malisa’s work demonstrates what that looks like in practice.

As a Strong Towns member, Malisa is helping bring these ideas into the daily work of local government. She is showing that safer streets are built not through certainty, but through curiosity, humility, and a commitment to learning from every experience.

Strong Towns members make this work possible. Their support helps communities access programs like Crash Analysis Studio, connect with peers facing similar challenges, and build the capacity to learn from experience. Members are not simply supporting an organization. They are helping create a movement where local leaders can find the tools, encouragement, and relationships needed to take the next prudent step toward safer and stronger places.

That work doesn’t happen all at once. It happens one conversation, one crash review, and one lesson at a time.

It’s an understandable question. It is also often the wrong place to start.

That realization shaped the work of Michelle Melin-Rogvin, a Village Commissioner in Forest Park, Illinois, and a Strong Towns member participating in the 2025–2026 Strong Towns Cohort.

Forest Park is a small community with relatively few roadway fatalities. Yet village leaders have seen a troubling number of serious crashes and near misses. Like many communities, Forest Park already had a Traffic Safety Commission dedicated to addressing these concerns. The challenge was not a lack of commitment towards safer streets. It was a lack of structure to take action.

When crash reports came before the Commission, the contributing factors were often unclear. Discussions quickly became unfocused, and meetings frequently ended without a clear path forward. The Commission had people who cared deeply about safety, but it lacked a framework for understanding what a crash might reveal about the broader transportation system.

As part of her Cohort project, Michelle explored a question many local leaders face: How do you shift the conversation?

Through Strong Towns, she was introduced to the Crash Analysis Studio. Rather than focusing on a single person to blame, the Crash Analysis Studio encourages communities to look at the many factors that contribute to a crash: street design, visibility, speed, land use, traffic patterns, and more.

Michelle began applying that mindset in Forest Park. She started by asking village staff to collect information beyond the initial police report after serious crashes. She encouraged staff to meet internally to identify contributing factors and then bring those findings to the Traffic Safety Commission for discussion. Instead of debating fault, The Traffic Safety Commissioners could begin exploring the next small steps that might reduce risk in the future.

The response has been encouraging. Village staff, fellow commissioners, and the mayor have all responded positively to a process that creates space for learning rather than blame.

What makes this story compelling is that Michelle did not arrive with a grand solution. She did not claim to have all the answers. Instead, she found a better way to ask questions.

That reflects one of the most important lessons of Strong Towns: our communities are complex, and meaningful change often begins with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to learn.

Strong Towns members make this work possible. Through programs like the Cohort, local leaders like Michelle gain access to ideas, tools, and peers who help them navigate difficult challenges in their own communities. The result is not a one-size-fits-all answer. It is a growing network of people learning how to make their places stronger, one prudent step at a time.

Michelle’s work in Forest Park is a reminder that better conversations can lead to better outcomes. And sometimes, changing a place begins by changing the questions we ask.

Like many local leaders, he already understood the challenges facing his community. As Board President of the Community Design Center Rochester, he spent his time thinking about the future of Rochester, New York, and the difficult questions surrounding transportation, housing, and neighborhood development.

The problem wasn’t a lack of ideas. The problem was figuring out what to do next.

Bill and Community Design Center Rochester Executive Director Dawn Noto entered the Strong Towns Accelerator through the Confessions of a Recovering Engineer course. The program focused on transportation, an issue that resonated in Rochester. The city had already removed a downtown freeway and reconnected neighborhoods that had been divided for generations. Yet that success revealed a new challenge: once a major victory is achieved, where do you go from there?

Through the Accelerator, Bill and Dawn encountered a different way of approaching local problems. Rather than searching for a comprehensive solution, they learned to start with a clearly defined struggle, bring together the people closest to it, and identify the next smallest step.

A year later, they applied those lessons to a different challenge: housing.

Like many communities, Rochester faces a shortage of homes. But Bill and Dawn recognized that the city wasn’t lacking organizations, advocates, developers, or neighborhood leaders willing to help. What it lacked was a shared framework for moving forward together.

Drawing on ideas from the Accelerator and the Housing-Ready approach, they convened dozens of organizations working on housing issues across Rochester. Instead of debating competing solutions, participants focused on identifying the obstacles they were encountering and the struggles they were hearing throughout the community.

The result wasn’t a master plan that would sit on a shelf. It was something more practical that could result in action.

Together, the group identified four areas where coordinated action could make a meaningful difference: creating pattern books and pre-approved building plans, developing a stronger economic narrative for housing, expanding opportunities for incremental development, and streamlining permitting through a faster approval process.

Those conversations eventually led to a community housing lecture series hosted by the Community Design Center Rochester. Strong Towns participated as a keynote speaker, but the most important work happened afterward. Local leaders stayed for a four-hour workshop focused on identifying concrete next steps within each of the four focus areas.

The conversation shifted from discussing the housing crisis to determining what each group could do next. 

That shift captures something important about how Strong Towns works.

Many communities do not suffer from a lack of caring people. They suffer from a lack of connection, coordination, and confidence about where to begin. Programs like the Strong Towns Accelerator exist to help local leaders navigate that complexity, connect with peers, and discover practical next steps that build momentum over time.

As a Strong Towns member, Bill helped bring those lessons home to Rochester.

The goal was never to solve housing issues overnight. The goal was to help his community take the next prudent step.

And then the next one after that, and the next one after that. 

That’s how strong towns are built.

(Credit: Community Design Rochester)

During a recent visit to Rochester, New York, I came away with something I don’t always find in communities wrestling with housing challenges: optimism grounded in reality.

Like many cities across the country, Rochester is struggling with housing affordability, disinvestment, and uncertainty about what comes next. What makes Rochester different is that it already possesses many of the ingredients needed to make meaningful progress. This is a community that does not have to wait on massive state mandates or billion-dollar megaprojects. They are already taking action at the most local level through incremental investment and a willingness to rethink how cities grow.

Too often, we treat housing as a problem that can only be solved with more subsidies, larger developments, or sweeping policy overhauls. Local governments frequently respond by layering on new regulations, adding new programs, and developing new approval processes that are well-intentioned but difficult to navigate. In practice, these systems can make it harder instead of easier for ordinary people to build housing.

What impressed me in Rochester was the growing recognition that many of the most important changes are actually within local control.

Cities adopt and administer their permitting processes which means that they have the power to simplify and streamline permitting. This does not mean lowering the standards, but removing unnecessary barriers. They can help residents navigate the process instead of treating every small project like a major legal proceeding. These are not hypothetical solutions requiring years of debate. Local governments can often implement these kinds of changes in weeks or months.

And Rochester has a major advantage: its existing urban fabric is its guide.

During my brief time in the city, I had the opportunity to drive through many of the neighborhoods in Rochester. I was struck by how many neighborhoods still retain the bones of traditional neighborhood development. In many parts of the city, homes sit near corner stores, small commercial buildings, and neighborhood-scale businesses. Rochester’s neighborhoods were historically built around industry, local commerce, and walkability. The city was designed for people to live near daily needs. 

These neighborhoods were developed prior to World War II and follow the traditional pattern of development. Each block was incrementally developed through many small bets. Over time, these buildings matured into the building we see today. These neighborhoods are proven complex systems that have adapted through both the highs and lows of the history of Rochester. 

That matters.

The conversation around housing often becomes trapped in debates about large transit systems or expensive infrastructure investments. But Rochester already has many of the physical patterns that allow neighborhoods to function with fewer car trips and more local activity. These are neighborhoods that can continue to mature and thicken up creating the opportunity to support local businesses, strengthen commercial corridors, and create a more resilient Rochester.

The city also has another critical ingredient: entrepreneurs.

In neighborhoods like the El Camino neighborhood in northeast Rochester, I saw signs of local energy everywhere. There were many small businesses operating under tents on the sidewalks and in empty parking lots, shipping containers had been converted into temporary shops, and the corner stores were all occupied. I witnessed residents actively shaping their own community through many small bets. Those are the exact conditions where incremental development can succeed.

Incremental development is not about waiting for one large outside developer to rescue a neighborhood. It is about empowering local residents to make small, steady investments where they already live. An inspiring business owner starting out in a parking lot under a tent. A homeowner adding an accessory apartment. A resident renovating a vacant storefront. A local entrepreneur building a small infill project on a neglected lot.

These smaller projects matter because they allow wealth, ownership, and decision-making to remain inside the community.

Large-scale development often depends on national financing trends and outside investors. Incremental development creates resilience because it spreads risk across many local actors instead of concentrating it into a handful of projects. It also builds trust. Neighbors are far more likely to support change when it is being led by people who already live in the community and are invested in its future.

Most importantly, Rochester appears ready for this conversation.

During my visit, I met residents, local leaders, designers, and advocates who clearly understand that the city cannot simply wait for outside solutions. There is a growing willingness to take the “next smallest step” to test ideas, remove barriers, and build momentum incrementally instead of waiting for perfect consensus or massive funding packages. That mindset is powerful.

The Rochester Design Center’s ongoing work reflects this same practical optimism. Their focus on actionable local strategies aligns closely with the Strong Towns approach: start small, lower risk, build familiarity, and allow communities to adapt over time.

No single project will solve Rochester’s housing challenges overnight. But cities do not become stronger through one giant leap. They improve through hundreds of small decisions that collectively make it easier for people to invest in their neighborhoods, build housing, start businesses, and remain rooted in the communities they love.

Rochester already has the urbanism, the entrepreneurial energy, and the civic leadership necessary to move in that direction, and that's why I left feeling optimistic. Not because the city’s challenges are easy, but because Rochester already has many of the pieces needed to solve them locally.

That’s not an accusation. It’s a structural reality.

When a serious crash happens, there is a well-established response. Police arrive, a report is written, and all the details are recorded. That report is shared with the prosecutor and insurance companies and fault is assigned. In some cases, the crash becomes part of a larger pattern that is used as evidence that a particular intersection or corridor may need improvement. Maybe that helps justify funding for a signal, a turn lane, or another intervention.

From the outside, this looks like learning. A bad outcome occurs, information is gathered, and something changes.

But most of the time, that’s not what’s happening.

What cities have built is a system for processing crashes, not for learning from them.

The Current Process is Designed to Answer a Very Specific Question

The traditional crash investigation model is designed to answer a very specific question: who is responsible?

That question shapes everything that follows.

Police reports focus on user behavior: who was speeding, who failed to yield, who was distracted. This information is essential for legal and insurance purposes. It helps assign liability and bring closure to individual cases.

But that same structure limits what the process can produce. If the goal is to determine fault, then the built environment becomes background context, not a subject of inquiry. The design of the street, the signals it sends to drivers, the cumulative effect of previous decisions. These environmental factors are rarely examined in a systematic way.

And just as important, the information often stops where it was collected.

The police department gathers information to reconstruct the actions that occurred minutes before the impact. This information is packaged into a report that is filed. And in many cities, it never becomes part of a shared, multidisciplinary conversation about what went wrong and what should change.

At the same time the city engineer might see aggregate data over time of repeated crashes. Public Works might hear complaints from residents about high speed or near misses. Community members may have their own lived experience of the same location.

But those pieces are not routinely brought together around a single question: what did this crash reveal about the system?

So the same patterns repeat. The same locations show up again and again. And each individual crash is treated as a discrete event, rather than part of a larger failure.

Cities Are Becoming More Proactive

A few years ago, the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, began to approach street safety and crashes differently. Like many cities, Ann Arbor adopted a Vision Zero plan with the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries. But they didn’t stop at just setting a goal. They built a practice around it.

As part of that effort, the city created a Crash Response Team: a standing, multidisciplinary group tasked with reviewing every serious crash. Not just documenting it, but reviewing each of these crashes to understand the contributing factors.

That distinction matters.

Instead of relying on a single report, the team brings together staff from different disciplines to look at each crash from multiple angles. They begin each review with the assumption there are multiple contributing factors. They examine not just user behavior, but the design of the street, the surrounding context, and the institutional decisions that shaped both.

The goal of this team is not to assign blame. It is to understand how the system behaved and where it failed.

When Ann Arbor invited Strong Towns to facilitate a Crash Analysis Studio workshop, it wasn’t because they lacked a process. It was because they wanted to strengthen one they had already built. That, more than any specific tool or methodology, is what sets them apart.

A Different Kind of Discipline

What Ann Arbor demonstrates is not a new program, but a different kind of discipline.

They have made crash review a repeatable, institutional practice. It is something the city does consistently, with structure and intention. It brings together multiple perspectives. It assumes complexity. And it is explicitly oriented toward learning.

That’s a different posture than most cities take.

In many places, learning is incidental. It happens if someone notices a pattern, if a project happens to align with a known issue, or if a particularly severe crash draws attention. But it is not built into the routine operation of the system.

Ann Arbor has moved that learning into the center of their process.

They are not waiting for patterns to emerge over years. They are examining each serious crash as an opportunity to understand how their streets function in the real world. And they are doing it in a way that allows different kinds of expertise to inform each other.

This is not about having better data. Most cities already have the data they need. It is about creating the conditions where that information becomes shared understanding and where that understanding leads to change.

A Commitment to Practice

It’s tempting to look at a city like Ann Arbor and assume the difference is resources, staffing, or political alignment. Those things help. But they are not the core issue.

The core difference is a commitment to practice.

Crash investigation, in most cities, is a task that gets completed. In Ann Arbor, crash review is an ongoing activity that the institution has chosen to take seriously. It is structured, repeated, and continuously examined for improvement.

That shift from reacting to individual events to building a practice of learning is what turns a safety plan from a document into something real.

The City of Ann Arbor has created an interactive Traffic Crashes Dashboard for the public. The dashboard is showing a trend of a decline in the number of crashes, and keeps a focus on reaching zero fatalities.

A Repeatable Approach

Other cities don’t need to replicate Ann Arbor’s exact structure to begin moving in this direction, but they do need to recognize what’s missing.

If crash data stays within a single department, if reports are written and filed without broader review, if the built environment is treated as fixed rather than examined then the system will continue to produce the same outcomes.

The first step is not a new tool or a new policy. It is a decision to treat crashes as something the city can learn from, together, on a regular basis.

That requires structure. It requires bringing the right people to the table. And it requires the discipline to keep doing it, even when the answers are uncomfortable or incomplete.

Ann Arbor’s example shows that this is possible. Not because they have solved the problem, but because they have committed to learning from it.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Housing Affordability at the Milken Global Conference. (Source: YouTube/Elex Michaelson)

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner recently spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference to a room filled with leaders in finance, business, philanthropy, technology, health and public policy. His focus was housing affordability, specifically the federal regulatory barriers that slow multifamily housing development, increase costs and make affordable housing harder to build.

He’s right to point to the problem.

Over time, we’ve layered housing development with procedural requirements, overlapping reviews, financing conditions, engineering standards, environmental assessments and legal hurdles that make it increasingly difficult to build housing at all. Those barriers don’t just delay projects. They drive up costs, and those costs are ultimately passed on to residents.

But there’s an important distinction local governments should pay attention to: many of the barriers HUD is focused on were written with giant leaps in mind. Massive multifamily projects with hundreds of apartments. Large regional developments backed by federal subsidies and institutional financing. Projects supported by consultants, attorneys, engineers, and compliance teams capable of navigating years of process.

And to be fair, projects at that scale often deserve substantial scrutiny.

The problem is that many cities apply the same mindset and often the same complicated procedural systems to the incremental developer trying to renovate a duplex, attempting to add a backyard cottage, or trying to build a starter home on an empty lot.

The result is predictable.

The people most capable of making small, productive investments in neighborhoods are often the least equipped to survive the process required to do it.

A local builder attempting to add a handful of homes should not have to navigate systems designed for billion-dollar development. Yet in many communities, small-scale housing faces the same zoning barriers, parking mandates, public hearing requirements, discretionary approvals, and delay-filled processes imposed on projects operating at an entirely different scale.

Cities often talk about housing affordability as though it is primarily a state or federal problem. But many local governments already control some of the very rules driving up costs and suppressing housing production in the first place.

That is what makes this conversation so frustrating.

Yes, some housing barriers are deeply embedded in federal law, financing structures, environmental review requirements, and legal systems that may take years or even acts of Congress to change.

But cities should not use that complexity as an excuse for inaction.

Most local governments already have the authority to make practical reforms that allow incremental housing growth to happen again. Strong Towns outlines several of these in the Housing-Ready City Toolkit, including allowing duplexes and triplexes by right, permitting accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in residential neighborhoods, legalizing starter homes, eliminating excessive lot size requirements, repealing parking mandates, and streamlining approval processes.

These are not radical ideas. They are intentionally incremental reforms designed to legalize the kinds of development patterns that built many of our most beloved neighborhoods in the first place.

And cities across North America are already demonstrating what this looks like in practice.

Fayetteville, Arkansas, legalized ADUs and reduced lot size barriers to allow incremental neighborhood growth. South Bend, Indiana, streamlined approvals and developed preapproved housing plans that can now be permitted in minutes instead of months. Atlanta reduced parking requirements, making small cottage developments financially viable. Kalamazoo, Michigan, reformed ADU rules, lowered lot size requirements, reduced parking minimums, and empowered local builders to begin reinvesting in vacant lots again.

None of these cities solved the housing crisis overnight, but they changed the trajectory. More importantly, they changed the mindset.

Instead of regulating every housing project as though it were a giant leap, they began creating systems capable of allowing small bets, gradual adaptation, and local reinvestment to happen again.

That shift matters because strong towns are rarely built through one massive project promising transformation overnight. Strong towns are built through thousands of small acts of investment made by local people over time.

A city that learns how to process a small infill project efficiently is building institutional capacity. A planning staff that learns to distinguish between a regional megaproject and a corner lot reinvestment project begins making more proportional decisions. A council that sees incremental success becomes more willing to tackle larger structural reforms later.

Housing abundance does not emerge from a single grand solution. It emerges from communities that make it easier for many small investments to happen simultaneously. The best housing reform conversations should not begin with the question, “How do we eliminate regulation?”

Instead, they should begin with a simpler one: Are we regulating a giant leap, or accidentally stopping a small step?

(Source: Matt Benson/Unsplash)

Two years ago, our community came together to fund several new elementary schools. The levy passed with overwhelming community support. There was urgency, optimism, and a shared understanding that our aging, overcrowded schools needed attention.

This year, the first of two new elementary schools is open. The second school is preparing to welcome students next year. At the same time of these openings, the school board is struggling to balance next year’s budget and the superintendent has presented a proposal that is cutting the band program.

In Jefferson County, West Virginia, we’re facing a reality that sounds almost absurd: we had to cancel the band program because we needed to buy buses.

This budget decision feels like a really hard choice that has come as a surprise during the time of community growth. It feels like, somewhere along the way, we decided transportation mattered more than music. But that’s not what happened.

The real choice was made years earlier.

Two years ago, the decision to build new elementary schools made perfect sense.

Our community is growing quickly. Older school buildings were struggling with both maintenance and overcrowding. The need to respond to this growth was real. Building new schools to accommodate this and future growth felt like a logical response to this struggle. Voters approved a levy. The School Building Authority of West Virginia provided a path to financing construction. The project moved forward with broad community support.

There was also a constraint built into that process.

To qualify for state support, the district needed large parcels of land in excess of over 40 acres to meet state building planning standards. Parcels like that don’t exist in the middle of town. So like many districts across the country, our school board went to the edge of the community.

Several large tracks of land were purchased to accommodate this and future growth. Plans were drawn for the new schools with all of the latest educational amenities. The new, modern schools were built. The first school’s opening for a moment, felt like a clear win for our community.

That feeling of winning quickly faded. 

The first of the new elementary schools to open replaced a building that had been part of the town’s fabric for decades. The school was nestled in an established neighborhood where most of the students walked, and only a small number rode the bus. 

The new elementary school sits on the edge of town where there are no adjacent neighborhoods. The school board had to build the streets because there was not an existing connected street network. The location and adjacent state highways provide no practical or safe way for students to walk or bike. So at this new elementary school, every student rides the bus.

Not some. Not most. All of them.

A Single Shift Felt Logical 

That single shift of relocating the school felt logical, even necessary to respond to the pressures of growth, but that decision two years ago changed everything.

When the decision to relocate the elementary school was made, the project penciled out. Impact fees helped cover the cost of land. Grants from the School Building Authority of West Virginia along with the levy provided cheap financing for construction. On paper, the numbers worked.

But those numbers reflected a moment in time to solve the problem of growth. These numbers did not reflect the long term obligations these new buildings created. Once every student needed a bus to arrive at the school, transportation is no longer a variable cost. It becomes a fixed one.

The district now has to expand its bus fleet, hire and retain more drivers, and pay for fuel, maintenance, and eventual replacement. These aren’t optional expenses. These are annual obligations locked in by the way the system is now designed. And they don’t go away.

When budgets tighten, and they always do, those fixed costs remain. The buses still have to run to pick-up and drop-off these students.

Seeking Flexibility

So the system looks for flexibility elsewhere. It doesn’t cut transportation because it can’t. The only option is to cut people and programs.

In Jefferson County, that means eliminating assistant band director positions, reducing the capacity of high school band programs, and cutting middle school sports.

These aren’t just line items in a budget. They are opportunities for students. They are the things that make school more than just a place to attend classes.

But they are also some of the only parts of the system that can be reduced.

We didn’t cut the bus route. We cut the band director.

This wasn’t the result of a bad decision made this year. It was the result of a reasonable decision made years ago, using the tools and incentives available at the time.

The goal was clear: provide a better learning environment.

Providing a better learning environment was the goal, and in many ways, the new buildings succeed at that. These schools are modern, well-equipped, and designed to serve our growing population. But the system that delivered those buildings optimized the process for getting them built. The process did not consider sustaining everything that comes with them.

By choosing a site that made walking impossible, we didn’t just change how students get to school. We committed ourselves to a more expensive system for decades to come.

We chose a system with less flexibility, fewer options, and harder tradeoffs.

It’s tempting to frame this as a debate about priorities. Band or buses. Activities or operations. Extras or essentials. But that framing misses the point.

The real issue isn’t what we value. It’s what we’ve made non-negotiable.

Once transportation became mandatory for every student, it stopped being something we could adjust. It became a fixed obligation. One obligation that crowds out everything else.

If we want to avoid these kinds of outcomes, we have to ask a different question earlier in the process.

Not just: Can we afford to build this school?

But: What will this decision require us to sustain, year after year, for decades?

Because the most significant costs are often the ones that don’t show up at the ribbon cutting. They show up later, when the system is under pressure and the only things left to cut are the things that give it life.

We didn’t cut the band because of this year’s budget. We cut the band because, years ago, we built a school that made transportation mandatory. That was the decision that set everything else in motion.

And until we start making different decisions at that point, we’re going to keep finding ourselves in the same place. Trying to preserve the things we value most, in a system that can no longer afford them.

This week, a new champion was crowned in the housing advocacy world. This champion does not wear a cape, but a large hoodie, and had the courage to ask a different question during public comment on a citywide zoning change proposed in the name of housing abundance.

David Modica’s public comment at a Marblehead, Massachusetts, town meeting has gone viral, and it was so powerful because everyone immediately understood what was happening.

Marblehead is like many Massachusetts towns struggling to balance state-level housing mandates with local implementation. That balancing act has resulted in the town finding a way to technically comply with the MBTA Communities Act while functionally avoiding the construction of any new housing. The town’s creative response meets the requirements of the state mandate by placing most of the zoning capacity on a golf course, where housing is unlikely to ever be built.

Standing at the microphone, hoodie sleeves pushed up, David Modica saw through all the technical “creativity,” recognized what was really happening, and posed this question:

“Are we trying to do nothing?”

The internet treated the moment as a triumph for the YIMBY movement, elevating it into a literal David-and-Goliath story. The problem is that nothing was actually solved or addressed. The question simply exposed something housing advocates already know to be true but have yet to tackle: Local governments often comply with the letter of reform while resisting its intent.

The housing crisis cannot be solved from the top down alone because where the rubber meets the road, and where the real action is needed, is at the local level. Every housing project depends on local government approval. Whether we are talking about a backyard cottage or an infill multifamily apartment building, the permission to proceed, and whether the project is financially viable, rests in the hands of local planning commissions and municipal building officials.

That does not mean state reform is misguided. Massachusetts lawmakers understood the problem clearly. Exclusionary zoning has constrained housing supply, driven up costs, and limited opportunity across much of the state. The MBTA Communities Act was written by serious people trying to address a serious problem.

The legislation itself is not the failure.

The problem is that even the best reform eventually collides with local implementation, and that collision changes everything.

Housing reform conversations often assume that once restrictive zoning is removed, housing will naturally appear. But cities are not passive systems waiting for deregulation. They are active political organisms with their own incentives, fears, financial pressures and institutional habits.

That means local governments can adapt to any reform without actually producing meaningful change. Sometimes this happens intentionally, as it appears to be happening in Marblehead. Sometimes it happens unintentionally in communities where the permitting process resembles more of a tangle than a path. But the result is often the same.

A state may require multifamily zoning and a city may technically comply. Yet the actual sites selected for housing may be politically untouchable, economically infeasible, infrastructure constrained, or otherwise unlikely to develop for decades. In Marblehead, it is a golf course that will never develop. In other places, the processes are so layered and complicated that the risk and cost discourage anyone from even trying.

On paper, capacity exists. In reality, nothing changes. Or worse, the housing trap grows.

This is why so many housing debates feel disconnected from lived experience. Residents hear announcements about “thousands of units enabled,” while year after year they see almost nothing built except a handful of large projects disconnected from the surrounding neighborhood fabric.

The spreadsheet says progress is happening through countless comprehensive plan updates and zoning changes. The neighborhoods prove otherwise.

The deepest housing problems are not merely ideological. They are operational.

A city can publicly support housing while at the same time extending approval timelines, applying parking requirements, restricting subdivision standards, creating ambiguity around utility costs, increasing fee structures, and dragging out public hearings, all of which make small-scale housing nearly impossible to build.

This is the part many national housing conversations miss. The future of additional housing will not be determined solely by governors, legislatures, or federal agencies. It will be determined by whether thousands of local governments are willing to change the everyday systems that shape development.

These reforms do not start with giant leaps or at the state Capitol. They start at the level of the block and neighborhood, with residents and housing advocates shifting how we talk about housing.

• Can I add a backyard cottage to my house to help stabilize my income?

• Can my children build a starter home as their first home in our community?

• Could a builder remodel a vacant single home into a duplex or into 3–4 small apartments?

• Could the vacant lot on my street be subdivided into two or more lots?

• Can a small local builder survive the permitting process?

These are intensely local questions, and they are where the housing shortage actually lives.

Marblehead is not unique. Across the country, local governments are caught between two pressures: residents who say they support affordability in theory but fear visible change in practice, and state governments increasingly demanding measurable housing outcomes.

The result is often a search for political equilibrium. Cities try to satisfy the state without significantly disrupting the existing development pattern that current residents have grown comfortable protecting.

This is how you end up zoning a golf course for homes that will never be built there.

Not necessarily because local officials are uniquely malicious or foolish, but because political systems often reward symbolic compliance over structural change. And, to be fair, local officials are responding to real pressures. Residents worry about traffic, schools, parking, infrastructure, taxes, and neighborhood character. Some of those fears are exaggerated and some are legitimate. But all of them are politically powerful.

Housing reform cannot simply be imposed from the top down. For reform to result in action, it must be operationalized locally. Strong Towns has long argued that resilient places are built incrementally from the bottom up. That insight matters here because the traditional pattern of development that once yielded abundant housing evolved through many small local decisions.

For most of American history, our neighborhoods evolved and adapted over time. A duplex appeared beside a single-family house. A small apartment building emerged near downtown. A homeowner added a rental unit over a garage. A corner lot intensified as demand increased.

That pattern created affordability through adaptation and many feedback loops.

Modern zoning systems largely outlawed that process, requiring everything to be built to a finished state.

Now many cities are trying to solve decades of suppressed incremental growth through large, politically explosive upzonings. When that happens, every housing conversation starts to feel existential because communities are no longer accustomed to gradual change.

The irony is that incremental housing is often the least disruptive path forward. A duplex on a residential block is less destabilizing than a massive apartment complex approved after years of political conflict. A backyard cottage changes a neighborhood less than skyrocketing housing costs that force families to leave altogether.

Small-scale adaptation can be a little messy, but that used to be normal. We made it illegal in an attempt to prioritize order. The lesson from Marblehead is not that state reform failed. The lesson is that housing reform succeeds only when local governments are prepared to translate policy into reality.

That requires more than legal compliance. It requires local leadership willing to ask difficult questions to shift the conversation:

• What kinds of housing are currently not permitted here and why did we make those illegal?

• What approvals and steps in the process could be simplified tomorrow?

• Where can incremental growth happen naturally?

• Most importantly: Are we actually trying to solve the problem?

Because communities eventually answer that question not through speeches, plans, or zoning maps, but through outcomes.

The housing crisis is not merely a shortage of units. It is a shortage of local systems capable of responding to change. And until cities rebuild that capacity, even the smartest legislation in the country will continue colliding with the same reality David Modica exposed in a Massachusetts gymnasium: We can comply with reform without ever truly embracing it.