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.

When a fatal crash happens on a city street, the official response is almost always the same. First responders arrive. The scene is cleared. A police report is filed. The road reopens.

From the outside, this can look like the full response. It isn’t. In most cities, what follows is a slower, more deliberate process: a study is commissioned, a plan is developed, and a project is added to compete in a future funding cycle.

None of that is inherently wrong. In fact, many cities are doing serious, thoughtful work to improve safety. But after months of conversations with city staff across the country that included engineers, planners, public works directors and Vision Zero coordinators, it’s become clear that the core problem isn’t what happens immediately after a crash.

It’s what happens next.

Almost Every Conversation Starts the Same Way

“We already do this. We’ve been doing this for quite some time.”

That’s not defensiveness, it’s accurate. Cities pointed to annual hazard reports, high-injury network analyses, signal upgrades, pedestrian refuge islands, and a growing list of safety interventions. In Fort Smith, Arkansas, a public works director described a proactive program addressing dangerous intersections. In Columbus, Ohio, staff highlighted a well-developed Vision Zero effort. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, monthly interdepartmental crash reviews have contributed to measurable safety improvements.

These are not cities ignoring the problem. They are cities investing real time, money, and expertise into addressing it.

But as those same conversations continued, a different pattern began to emerge.

Cities Are Generally Good at Handling the Very Small and the Very Large

Cities can respond quickly to 311 calls, routine maintenance requests, and signal timing adjustments. At the other end of the spectrum, they can deliver major capital projects: corridor reconstructions, federally funded safety improvements, and long-range plans.

What they struggle with is everything in between.

A fatal crash that doesn’t occur on a designated high-injury network. A dangerous intersection that doesn’t meet signal warrants. A street that residents know is unsafe, but where the data hasn’t yet reached a threshold that justifies a capital project.

These situations fall into a kind of operational gap. They are too serious to ignore, but they don’t fit neatly into the systems cities have built to respond.

This is the missing middle of city operations and it’s where crash response often breaks down.

Inside That Gap, Failure Doesn’t Look Like Neglect. It Looks Like Fragmentation.

After a serious crash, no single department is clearly responsible for what happens next. Police have reports and data. Engineers have design authority. Public works has materials and crews. But there is often no shared process to bring those pieces together.

Instead, departments operate independently, generally without access to all the tools or information they need.

One planner described a moment after a pedestrian fatality at a busy crosswalk. The engineering team’s response was that they “didn’t want to have a knee-jerk reaction to every single crash.”

From the outside, that can sound callous. But inside a system with limited staff, constrained budgets, and no clear way to triage these events, it’s a rational response. It reflects a deeper problem: not a lack of concern, but a lack of structure for acting.

When no shared process exists, even serious events struggle to produce coordinated action.

A Fatal Crash Should Function as a Clear Signal

I fatal crash is a moment when the system reveals something important about how it is performing. But in many cities, there is no mechanism to translate that signal into a timely response.

Instead, the signal gets absorbed into existing workflows in the form of studies, plans, and future capital projects, operating on timelines measured in months or years.

Meanwhile, the public is operating on a different clock. After a fatal crash, people expect acknowledgment, visible action, and evidence that the city is learning from what happened within days, not years.

When that doesn’t happen, trust erodes. And it erodes even in places where meaningful work is underway but not visible.

This is what institutional fragility looks like: not the absence of effort, but the inability to adapt in real time when conditions demand it.

What These Conversations Make Clear Is That Cities Do Not Lack Knowledge

Cities know where many of their dangerous locations are. They understand the contributing factors behind crashes. They have staff with deep expertise and, in many cases, access to materials and tools that could be deployed quickly.

What they lack is a shared way to act on what they already know.

Specifically, they lack a defined, cross-departmental process for responding to serious crashes in the space between immediate emergency response and long-term capital planning.

Without that, each event becomes an exception to be managed rather than a signal to be acted on.

Some cities are beginning to address this gap by creating more structured, immediate responses.

One example is the Crash Analysis Studio, which brings together staff from across departments to examine a crash site, identify contributing conditions, and develop near-term actions using existing resources. The specifics vary by community, but the underlying shift is the same: treating a crash not as an isolated incident, but as a trigger for coordinated, timely response.

The important point is not the program itself. It’s the recognition that this middle layer of response needs to exist. If there is one thing these conversations have clarified, it’s this: the issue is not whether cities care about safety or are doing work to improve it. The issue is that they are missing an operational layer.

They have systems for small problems. They have systems for big projects. But when something serious happens that doesn’t fit either category, they often have no clear way to respond.

And that is where some of the most important opportunities to prevent the next crash are being lost.

This is the general practice occurring in Lake County, Florida, with each of its 14 incorporated cities. Each new development proposed in the county requires public utilities, and this begins a negotiation between developers and the city. Buried in the service agreement is a requirement for the development to annex into the city, institutionalizing annexation as a routine step for every new utility customer.

But annexation is not routine. It is one of the most consequential long-term financial decisions a city makes. In most places, however, it is evaluated using only short-term metrics.

When a city annexes land, it is not simply adding acreage to a map. It is extending a set of promises. Roads will be maintained. Pipes will be repaired. Police will respond. Parks will be cared for. Fire trucks will arrive within a defined response time. These are not abstract commitments; they are measurable service standards with geographic implications and long-term price tags.

Yet those service standards are rarely treated as part of the annexation decision.

In many cities, elected officials establish levels of service (sometimes years earlier) with little connection to how those standards compound as the city expands outward. A six-minute fire response time is a platinum level of service we should all strive to achieve. But this is not just a public safety goal; it is a spatial commitment. This level of service determines how far development can extend before another fire station must be built. It determines how many personnel must be hired and how many new trucks need to be purchased. This sets in motion apparatus replacement cycles and building maintenance schedules that stretch decades into the future.

Those are financial obligations that obligate a city indefinitely. But these obligations are rarely, if ever, analyzed and discussed when annexation comes forward for approval.

Instead, the discussion tends to focus on near-term gains. Staff reports highlight impact fees that will be collected and the projected growth in property tax revenue. Elected leaders celebrate the new boundary now under city control and the value of adding new rooftops to the city’s tax rolls. The annexation is framed as an opportunity: more growth, more revenue, more control.

What is typically missing is a 30- or 50-year projection of the cost of maintaining adopted service standards over that newly annexed geography.

How much will it cost to maintain roads at the city’s adopted condition rating? What are the maintenance requirements and replacement costs for additional fire stations required to preserve the response-time commitment? What are the staffing implications once pension and health care obligations are fully realized? When will the infrastructure built to serve this area reach the end of its life cycle, and what will replacement cost in today’s dollars?

These questions are not hostile to growth. They are basic financial due diligence. Yet in many communities, they are not systematically required before annexation is approved.

This is where the structural misalignment occurs.

Low-density, disconnected development patterns typically produce modest tax revenue per acre. They require longer stretches of pipe, more linear feet of road, and wider service areas per household. When those patterns are annexed into a city that has adopted high, uniform service standards, the obligations are locked in immediately. The revenue, however, remains thin.

If the long-term cost of maintaining those standards exceeds the long-term productive capacity of the land, the city has made a financially unsound decision, regardless of how attractive the short-term numbers appeared.

The problem is not annexation itself. Annexation can be a powerful tool. It can bring coherence to fragmented governance. It can align land use and infrastructure planning. It can allow cities to shape growth rather than react to it.

But annexation without rigorous fiscal analysis is not control. It is exposure and risk to the city.

A city that annexes land is committing to decades of service delivery. That commitment should be evaluated with the same seriousness as issuing long-term debt because, functionally, it is similar. The city is assuming future liabilities in exchange for present benefits.

Fiscal discipline would require a simple shift in practice. Before approving annexation, a city should evaluate projected long-term revenue against the full life-cycle cost of maintaining adopted service standards in that area — not just the initial capital expense and not just the impact fees. Cities need to evaluate ongoing operations, maintenance, staffing, and eventual replacement costs.

If the land cannot reasonably sustain the promises the city has already made, the annexation should not move forward, at least not without adjusting either the development pattern or the level of service commitment.

This is not anti-growth. It is pro-resilience.

Growth that cannot sustain itself financially weakens a city over time, even if the near-term balance sheet looks healthy. Growth that aligns long-term obligations with productive capacity makes a city stronger with each increment.

Annexation is not a minor procedural step. It is a generational financial decision. Treating it as anything less invites structural imbalance that may not become visible for years, until replacement cycles arrive, staffing costs mature, and the math can no longer be deferred.

Cities do not lose control because they fail to annex enough land. They lose control when they make long-term promises without verifying that those promises can be kept.

Real control begins with fiscal discipline.

When cities talk about public engagement, they usually mean a meeting.

A conference room at city hall is reserved for a weekday evening. Notices go out in the mail and are posted on the city’s website. Drawings are printed and mounted on foam board and the design team prepares a presentation. Residents are invited to react, offer feedback, and help shape a decision before anything is built.

This process feels orderly. It feels fair because the community is invited to attend. It feels like participation, even when only a handful of people show up.

But it rests on a flawed assumption: that engagement must be completed before action can begin.

And there’s a reason cities cling to this model which has little to do with genuine participation. Public meetings are risk management. They give agencies something to point to later: “The public had every opportunity to provide input,” or, “This design reflects what we heard through our engagement process.” The meeting was never meant to change the outcome. It was meant to protect the decision-maker.

That’s not engagement. That’s preemptive deflection.

And it fails in a very specific way. When engagement is treated as a gate, something to clear before action can begin, we end up asking people to do something genuinely difficult: interpret technical proposals and predict how they will function in real life. We show residents plans, cross-sections, and traffic models. We ask them to evaluate tradeoffs and form opinions about designs they have never experienced.

Even professionals struggle with this. For everyone else, it means translating abstract information into lived reality, and most people don’t think in diagrams or design standards. They think in habits and experiences: how they drive to work, where they cross the street, how their kids get to school.

So the feedback we get is predictable. Cautious. Reactive. It centers on fear of change not because people oppose improvement, but because they genuinely cannot picture what’s being proposed.

We call this engagement. But what is really happening is theater.

People understand places by using them

Engineering drawings are written in a language that must be learned the way you learn Latin or Greek, requiring years of deliberate study. We must recognize that a set of construction plans for a street is a technical and legal document: precise, exacting, and purpose-built to translate a concept into instructions a contractor can execute. That is exactly what it should be. But it is not how anyone understands their community.

When we place those technical drawings in front of residents and ask for meaningful feedback, we are asking people to become fluent in a language they’ve never spoken.

People don’t experience their neighborhood through plan views and cross-sections. They experience it by walking to school, pulling out of a driveway, waiting to cross a busy street. That knowledge is real, it is local, and it is exactly what technical drawings cannot capture. But our engagement process assigns these experiences no formal value.

Cities can shift from merely theater to meaningful action

Instead of asking residents to imagine how a street might function via large-scale plans or a PowerPoint presentation, cities can show residents quickly, cheaply, and in the real world. Cities can temporarily narrow a lane with cones. They can extend curbs and shorten a crossing with paint. They can transform a center turn lane into a temporary median with simple barriers. These aren’t permanent decisions. They’re tests and very small bets that invite a fundamentally different kind of public participation.

People can engage and provide real-time feedback by driving the street. Walking across it. Navigating it on a bike. They experience the change in context, at real speeds, with real constraints. They don’t need to interpret a drawing because they no longer have to imagine the outcome.

This produces a kind of understanding no meeting can replicate.

It also changes who gets to participate. Engagement is no longer limited to those who can attend a Tuesday night session or feel comfortable speaking in a public forum. It includes anyone who uses the street by simply asking them to do their everyday activities. The feedback that comes back is grounded in something real: This feels safer. This is confusing. This slows traffic too much. This makes crossing easier.

The conversation stops being about what might happen. It becomes about what is happening.

For technical professionals, this reframes the entire problem

The hardest part of building public trust isn’t explaining your work. It’s giving people a genuine stake in it. Most residents don’t distrust engineers or planners. They distrust abstractions. They distrust decisions that feel finished before anyone asks them. And they’ve learned through eight decades of practice that their input at a public meeting rarely changes anything. That’s not cynicism. That’s pattern recognition.

Temporary interventions break that pattern. When a city makes a small, reversible change and invites the public to experience it, the message is fundamentally different: “We don’t have this figured out yet. Help us learn.” That posture is disarming. It builds credibility precisely because it doesn’t claim certainty.

When residents are treated as co-investigators rather than an audience, their relationship to the work changes entirely. They’re not being told what the data means. They’re helping figure it out. That shared process of discovery builds the kind of trust that no polished slide deck ever could.

This is incremental learning in its most practical form

Small, reversible changes let cities move faster and learn in real time. If something doesn’t work, adjust it. If it does, refine and expand it. Technical expertise still matters but it’s no longer the only lens through which decisions get made. Local knowledge becomes equally important. Residents aren’t being asked to become engineers. They’re contributing what they already know through direct observation and daily use.

Over time, this builds something durable: shared understanding.

By the time a city moves toward a permanent design, the dynamic has fundamentally changed. People aren’t reacting to an abstract proposal. They’ve already lived through the tradeoffs. They’ve seen what worked and what didn’t. The conversation is no longer speculative; it’s grounded in something real that residents and professionals experienced together.

At that point, engagement isn’t about convincing anyone. It’s about moving forward with what was already learned together. The most meaningful public engagement doesn’t happen in a meeting room. It happens on the street in our daily activities and in the shared work of trying to understand it.

If we want better outcomes and more trust, we need to stop treating engagement as a prerequisite to action. Done right, making change carefully and incrementally is the engagement. The meeting was never the point. The street always was.

A fatal crash occurs on a city street. Media calls begin immediately. Elected officials want to know what happened and why. The community demands answers and action so it never happens again.

Outside city hall, there is great urgency. Inside city hall, everything slows down.

Police investigations are underway, and legal counsel advises caution. Engineers wait for confirmed facts before acting. The city wants to communicate something meaningful without saying too much that could impede the investigation. Everyone involved cares deeply, yet almost nothing can move.

That moment is where the limits of our current approach to traffic safety become visible.

We’re Doing the Right Things, Yet Still Falling Short

Most transportation professionals are not indifferent to safety. After working with many of them, I will assert quite the opposite. These professionals live in these communities. Their families use these streets.

Over the last decade, transportation staff across the country have led cities to adopt ambitious safety goals. They’ve formed cross-departmental crash teams and task forces. Cities have invested in culture change within engineering and operations by adopting safety plans and creating safe streets policies.

All of these cumulative efforts reflect real work, real learning, and real progress.

And yet, when a severe or fatal crash occurs, the same frustrations resurface—both inside city hall and out. The gap between intention and outcome becomes impossible to ignore.

This is not a failure of values. It’s a sign that something structural is being missed.

→ You might want to read: Analyzing Crashes Can Be Painful, but Creating Safer Streets Is Worth It

A System Built for Investigation, Not Learning

In the immediate aftermath of a fatal crash, responsibility fragments. Each part of the system does what it is designed to do. For example, police focus on determining fault. Legal teams manage liability and risk. Leadership tries to respect due process while responding to public grief.

Each of these roles is important, but taken together, they reveal that our safety systems are optimized to investigate crashes, not to learn from them in real time. No one is explicitly responsible for answering the most urgent question the public is asking:

What can the city do now to reduce the likelihood of the next fatal crash?

When that question has no clear owner, the system defaults to what it can do quickly and safely. Explanations emerge faster than actions.

When Process Overtakes Outcomes

In these moments, narratives about human behavior take center stage: impairment, distraction, speed, poor judgment. These factors are often real, and acknowledging them is not wrong. But when institutions lack the ability to act visibly in the near term, these explanations begin to carry more weight than they should—not because they fully explain what happened, but because they help explain why nothing can happen yet.

Over time, the story shifts from what could be changed to what cannot be controlled.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about recognizing how procedures meant to protect institutions can easily overtake the safety outcomes those institutions exist to deliver. Avoiding mistakes becomes more important than preventing the next tragedy.

The result is a system that values certainty over adaptation, even when delay carries its own risks.

Why Streets Are Different From Everything Else Cities Fix

Cities act quickly all the time. Parks departments repair broken playground equipment. Public works crews fill potholes and replace damaged signs. Utilities respond immediately to failures. But streets are different.

Authority over street changes is often diffuse. The timing is unclear; the responsibility is shared across departments, each with its own constraints. Taking immediate action can feel like acknowledging fault or increasing liability—even when the intent is prevention. This is how streets become a gray zone where waiting feels safer than acting.

From the perspective of residents who use that street every day, this distinction is hard to see. What they experience is simple: a life was lost, and nothing about the place where it happened looks different. They have no insights into the system, only that it appears unable to respond.

When a serious crash occurs and visible action is delayed, a vacuum forms. In that vacuum, advocacy fills the space. Calls for action grow louder. Demands become more specific. Positions begin to harden. Inside city hall, staff find themselves caught between professional judgment, legal constraints, and an urgent public expectation that something—anything—should happen now.

Too often, this situation is interpreted as community resistance or unreasonable pressure. In reality, it is the predictable outcome of a system that has no way to act incrementally under stress.

A safety framework that only functions once plans are finalized, studies are complete, and consensus is secured will always feel inadequate in the moments that matter most. It is not designed for learning in real time or for visible, low-risk action while uncertainty still exists.

Cities can do many things right and still fail at safety if their systems prioritize process over outcomes and centralized certainty over local, timely action.

If we want safer streets, we need institutions capable of learning before everything is known and acting before tragedy fades from view.

The public discussion usually starts something like this: a new development brings new residents, more traffic, and greater demand for public services. Roads, schools, pipes, and parks don’t build themselves. Someone has to pay for them. Asking growth to pay for growth sounds fair. It sounds prudent. And yet, many cities that rely heavily on impact fees still find themselves financially fragile. They struggle to maintain infrastructure, stretch operations thin, and quietly drift toward insolvency.

That’s because impact fees are not wealth. They are a one-time cash payment—better understood as an entry fee into the local economy. In states that allow them, impact fees are established through detailed studies and formal processes. They are typically calculated by identifying a set of planned capital projects and spreading those costs across anticipated growth. Impact fees fund construction, but critically, they do not fund sustainability.

They make it possible to build infrastructure. Ribbons are cut. Photos are taken. The balance sheet looks temporarily healthier because a revenue source exists for construction. But the real costs—operations, maintenance, and eventual replacement—arrive much later. When they do, there is no second impact fee waiting to cover them.

This is where the illusion begins. Most municipal insolvency does not begin with reckless spending. It begins with deferred maintenance.

When the bill comes due

Consider a water or wastewater treatment plant that has served a community for decades. Its systems age gradually. Pumps wear out. Mechanical components reach the end of their useful life. Keeping the plant functional requires steady reinvestment over time. In many cities, that maintenance has been deferred because the budget could not absorb those costs.

Just as those expenses compound, growth arrives. New developments request service extensions. New ratepayers are promised. Suddenly, impact fees create an opportunity to expand the plant. Aging equipment is replaced. Capacity is added. Long-standing problems appear to be solved—once again paid for by growth.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. In Winter Garden, Florida, city leaders recently approved dramatic increases in water-related impact fees, including roughly a 330 percent increase in wastewater connection fees. The revenue is intended to fund upgrades and expansion to the city’s wastewater treatment facility. The improvements are necessary to meet regulatory requirements and accommodate growth. But the funding strategy reveals a deeper pattern. Rather than confronting years of deferred maintenance and rising operational costs through rates or long-term financial reform, the city leaned heavily on new development to finance both expansion and correction. Yes, impact fees made the upgrades possible, but they also masked an underlying issue: a system whose ongoing costs were not being sustainably funded before growth arrived—and will be even harder to sustain after expansion.

The system struggled because rates did not reflect the true cost of operating and maintaining it. Impact fees did not correct that imbalance. They merely obscured it. Now the city owns a larger, more complex, more expensive system supported by the same revenue structure that failed the original one.

Future obligations grow, hidden behind a one-time infusion of cash that made expansion feel prudent. When growth slows or maintenance cycles return, the math becomes unavoidable. This is how cities drift toward insolvency—not through recklessness, but through a series of decisions that prioritize short-term funding over long-term capacity. Impact fees allow cities to build new assets without fixing broken revenue models, expand systems they cannot sustainably maintain, and confuse growth-driven cash flow with genuine financial health.

This is the Growth Ponzi Scheme in practice: using today’s growth to cover yesterday’s obligations while creating even larger obligations for tomorrow. The system only works if growth continues—and accelerates. When it slows, the math collapses.

Though, this reality raises an important question: if cities don’t rely on impact fees, how do they pay for growth? How else do they meet new demands, expand services, or respond to increased use of infrastructure? It’s a fair question, but underpinning it is the assumption that growth itself creates wealth, and that visible expansion signals financial strength. Strong Towns has long described this as the “illusion of wealth.”

New buildings, new lanes of pavement, and new facilities look like progress. They create the appearance of prosperity. But appearances can be deceiving. Much of what we interpret as wealth is actually a collection of new obligations—assets that require ongoing maintenance, staffing, and eventual replacement. When those long-term costs are not honestly accounted for, growth feels like a solution when it is often just delaying the inevitable.

Impact fees reinforce this illusion. They provide a burst of cash that makes expansion feel affordable and responsible, encouraging instant action. What they do not provide is the ongoing revenue needed to sustain what has been built. The result is a system that rewards expansion while unwittingly underfunding what already exists.

Is there another way?

Instead of outsourcing financial discipline to impact fees, cities can look inward—at their budgets, capital plans, and long-term obligations—and begin by separating proposed spending into two categories.

The first is deferred needs: maintaining buildings, staffing essential services, and repairing existing infrastructure. These are not growth costs. They are obligations that were postponed. The right question is not how to pay for them now, but why they were deferred in the first place. The second is aspirational projects: new facilities, expansions, and amenities that feel urgent because growth makes them visible. These projects create new long-term liabilities. They can wait until a city has demonstrated the financial capacity to sustain them.

This shift requires patience. It requires transparency. It requires cities to understand what they can truly afford—and to recognize that they cannot build their way out of a liability.

For the past eight decades, American cities have followed a development pattern fundamentally different from the one that built towns for centuries before it. Modern development prioritizes rapid expansion, separated uses, and large upfront infrastructure investments. Success is measured by how much gets built, how fast, and how far outward services extend. What this pattern rarely measures is whether the resulting places generate enough long-term value to sustain the infrastructure they require.

Traditional, incremental development does not demand massive upfront investments. It allows places to thicken and mature over time, generating increasing value without proportionally increasing liabilities. In this pattern, cities do not rely on windfalls from growth to remain solvent. They focus on stewardship first. They fix what they own. They align revenues with responsibilities. Aspirational projects follow demonstrated strength, not the promise of future growth.

Impact fees are a rational response to a fragile growth model. But they are not a path to financial resilience. If a city cannot afford to maintain what it already owns, expanding it will not solve the problem. It will only hide it—until it becomes impossible to ignore.

“Would be interested in the Strong Town’s take on this project proposed for a long vacant city owned lot on the edge of downtown Des Moines, IA. Normally those of us in Strong Des Moines [the city’s Local Conversation] would be against a drive-thru business like this in our downtown area but are finding the group having mixed feelings on this.”

The site is complicated. It’s oddly shaped, bordered by railroad tracks, constrained by easements, and has sat vacant for years. Under normal circumstances, an auto-oriented use so close to downtown would be a clear “no.” But nothing else has happened on this site, and this is the only proposal the city has received.

The Local Conversation found itself torn.

On one hand, the project would put unproductive land back on the tax rolls. The developer has made some accommodations for bikes and pedestrians. After years of vacancy, it feels like a win that something might finally happen.

On the other hand, the proposal represents the lowest-intensity form of commercial development: a small building centered on the site, wrapped by a drive-thru and surrounded by parking. Across the street, new urban mixed-use buildings are taking shape and this project could set a precedent for auto-centric uses along an important developing corridor. Whatever is built here will likely remain for decades, delaying the possibility of something more urban.

What makes the situation especially uncomfortable is the fact that when the city put the property up for sale, this was the only interested party. There were no other buyers.

If this is the only option, what are we supposed to do? Say no and leave the land empty indefinitely? If even a drive-thru can’t make this site work, what will?

This is where Strong Towns thinking asks us to slow down and reframe the problem.

The Real Question Isn’t the Drive-Thru

The debate in Des Moines isn’t really about whether a drive-through is good or bad. It’s about whether the city has done the work to understand the potential of this site. When a project is presented as the last, best, or only hope for a piece of land, that’s usually a signal. The site isn’t hopeless, but evidently the city hasn’t yet invested in clarifying what’s possible there.

A drive-thru isn’t a permanent land use, even if it’s built to look permanent. It’s a suburban development pattern optimized for speed, convenience, and short-term return. It consumes a lot of land, generates relatively little value, and often struggles to support the infrastructure around it over the long run.

At Strong Towns, we’ve observed a useful rule of thumb: for every dollar of long-term public investment in streets, utilities, and maintenance, a place typically needs around roughly $40 of private investment to make the math work. A low-intensity, auto-oriented project on a prominent urban site rarely comes close. So the question becomes: Why is this all the market is offering?

When cities say, “No one else is interested,” what they often mean is: no one else is interested under the current rules, risks, and uncertainty.

Zoning, setbacks, parking requirements, access standards, and stormwater regulations aren’t neutral. They shape what kinds of projects are feasible, financeable, and predictable. If those rules make urban buildings difficult or risky, the market will respond with suburban formats—even in downtown-adjacent locations. Not because developers lack imagination, but because lenders finance predictability, not creativity.

This is especially true on difficult sites, where complexity translates directly into risk. And that’s where cities have an opportunity to respond differently.

Invest Before You Sell

Instead of treating city-owned land as something to offload as quickly as possible, cities can make a small, strategic investment before the sale. These are modest investments that pays dividends for decades.

That investment isn’t a subsidy. It’s clarity, and its costs nothing for a city to be clear about its identity and expectations. The fact we need to recognize is that all of these development standards and zoning regulations are both adopted and administered by the city. In other words, the most knowledgeable experts on these are the technical experts working in city hall, so we can start by asking these experts what is possible.

Here’s what that can look like in practice:

• Complete a quick study to understand the maximum reasonable building placement and footprint. Answer the question: where and how much can be built on this site? This is a simple task that can be undertaken by the city planner and result in a simple box illustrating where a building could be placed on the site.
  

• Identifying any zoning or development standards restrict or prevent urban, walkable development. This is the opportunity for city plan reviewers to stress-test the code on a real project. If needed, adjust those rules so the desired pattern is actually legal, or provide technical guidance explaining how to achieve the desired outcome.
  

• Creating simple visuals like sketches, massing diagrams, and share precedent images, that show what could be built to inspire and attract attention. These visuals move the conversation beyond a vacant lot and communicate what is possible.
  

• Outline the steps required for development approval and entitlement. Clearly outlining a predictable low-risk path to entitlement lowers the risk and establishes expectations for an investor. If needed, use this as an opportunity to improve and streamline the process.

These steps do not require expensive consultants or exhaustive reports, or even designing the site to a finished state. It’s all about removing mystery from the development process. This signals to the community that City Hall understands the site, that it is aligned internally and is ready for a stronger outcome. When that happens, the pool of potential developers changes.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I saw this firsthand while working as an urban designer in Martin County, Florida. Many redevelopment areas included challenging parcels—irregular sites, politically sensitive locations, and neighborhoods exhausted by years of stalled plans. Instead of waiting for proposals, we asked a different question: What would a productive development look like here, and what’s preventing it?

We tested building envelopes, reviewed codes, and created simple diagrams showing how sites could develop incrementally over time. In some cases, we adjusted standards that forced suburban layouts. In others, we simply clarified the process.

That modest upfront effort changed everything. Developers no longer had to guess what the county wanted. Lenders saw reduced risk. Community members could respond to tangible possibilities instead of vague promises.

Back to Des Moines (and Everywhere Else)

This is why the Des Moines example matters, even if the drive-thru ultimately gets built. It highlights a common pattern: cities reacting to proposals instead of shaping conditions, and measuring success by whether something happens rather than whether the outcome strengthens the community over time.

Strong Towns members don’t need to win every individual fight. But every fight should offer a learning opportunity.

City-owned land is one of the most powerful tools local governments have. Used passively, it tends to deliver the bare minimum. Used intentionally—even with a small investment—it can nurture higher-value, more resilient development patterns that compound over generations. This approach doesn’t guarantee a better proposal every time, but what it does is improve the odds.

The next site is always more important than the current one. And the work that makes the next site successful often begins long before a “For Sale” sign ever goes up.

Not long ago, Zillow’s annual top search terms read like an interior design scrapbook: quartz countertops, stainless steel appliances, farmhouse sinks. Those searches revealed preferences about taste. This year, in Connecticut, Idaho, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, the top search terms included: “ADUs, casitas, duplexes, guest houses, in-law suites, and mother-daughter homes.” These are signals that households are actively seeking ways to live together, generate income, and adjust as family needs change.

In every region of the country, people are asking: How can our homes work harder? How can they shelter more life, more needs, more changes?

This is not a niche interior design moment, or another missing middle advocacy article. This is a demonstration in the shift in public perception and public understanding about housing, and a departure from the suburban experiment.

A Market Responding to Policy Failures

The Zillow data doesn’t just tell us what people typed into a search bar or what they are swiping on their phones, it tells us the type of housing that people want to live in right now.

ADUs, casitas, duplexes, guest houses, in-law suites, and multigenerational homes, are not new forms of housing. These homes have existed for generations and can be found hidden within many of our existing neighborhoods. They provided shelter for changing family sizes, shifting economics, and aging in place. That variety is what made neighborhoods resilient.

So why do these housing types feel like a trend? Because for decades, zoning codes and land use policies made them difficult, expensive, or outright illegal to build. People who want flexible homes are often forced into workarounds: illegal conversions, precarious arrangements, or leaving cities that won’t accommodate their needs which further exacerbates the housing crisis. These search terms reflect a more astute homebuyer looking for practical ways to navigate a housing system under strain. The real demand isn’t for rigid, one-size-fits-all single-family homes; it’s for housing that can evolve alongside real life.

In a Strong Town, housing emerges in response to local needs, through many small bets made by many people over time. Families build a backyard cottage instead of a shed so they can age in place. Homeowners convert a bedroom into an accessory apartment to make room for relatives or generate modest rental income. Neighbors build a duplex on a vacant lot, growing their community while learning, often for the first time, how to be developers. These are modest responses, but together they create resilience.

This is the direction many cities are beginning to explore, not because it’s trendy, but because the market is pushing them there. Incremental housing allows communities to respond to demand without overextending financially, over-promising growth, or locking themselves into inflexible systems. The market is offering cities a clear compass: people want homes that can adapt, absorb change, and support multiple chapters of life.

That same logic underpins the Strong Towns Housing Ready Toolkits. These resources are designed to help cities take practical, step-by-step actions to reform codes, improve processes, and nurture local investment. In other words, to create the conditions for incremental housing to happen legally and predictably.

Housing-ready cities understand that this work isn’t easy or fast. It isn’t heroic or sweeping. It’s patient and principled. And in the end, it does something remarkably simple: it gives communities the ability to respond as needs change.

Zillow’s search data suggests households are already imagining a different way of living together, even as policy lags behind. The question for cities is no longer whether this future is coming, but whether they will make room for it.