What is worth keeping in your town? Would you pay for it?

It is not ok to make your children pay for stuff they probably will not use. The generation before mine was selfish. Initially - I get it, nobody knew how the built environment would turn out. Frozen tv dinners sounded awesome, it did not take us that long to determine they are not a good replacement for the real thing.

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One of the frustrating things people often cite about the Strong Towns approach is that we don’t often prescribe an outcome. We don’t, for example, say public debt is bad always and forever and will ruin our society. There are times when debt is a useful, even necessary, tool. Our approach has been to help people think through what they are trying to accomplish with public debt to determine if their plans are worthy of the obligation.

If we said public debt is bad always and forever—or that TIF or parking or apartments or stroads without sidewalks or take your pick of topics—that would make Strong Towns easy to understand, although ultimately not very helpful. The world is not that neat. In fact, it’s incredibly messy. Frustratingly messy.

It’s the complex, adaptive nature of cities described by Jane Jacobs that our movement embraces. That’s why a lot of professionals struggle with Strong Towns thinking. Robert Moses might have been wrong, but he had a clarity of vision that led to action. Many desire Jane Jacobs outcomes, but have no tolerance for messiness of thought or action it requires. For them, if Robert Moses had had the right vision—their vision—he would have been a great man.

It’s with this understanding (and a lot of doubt and anxiety) that I approach a current dilemma in my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota: Do we use public debt—a lot of public debt—to save an historic landmark, or do we tear it down and move on?

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/23/the-costs-of-fragility

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