Joel Goodhart for
Blacksburg Town Council

This toolkit from Strong Towns offers practical, familiar solutions that draw from traditional neighborhood development or TND.

The recommendations are reasonable and commonsense, and would allow neighborhood housing to incrementally mature over time, instead of very suddenly and all at once.

Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain—and designing a town (or city) where everyone drives everywhere for every trip requires more roads (and parking) than a town's tax base can realistically support.

Instead of recognizing this unsustainable pattern, services get cut or a town doubles down on suburban sprawl, further increasing the amount of infrastructure per person and deepening the town's future financial strain trying to maintain it all. One of the best blog posts I've ever read.

For generations, cities and towns in the U.S. and Canada have prioritized expansive, costly, and "unproductive" growth—which is growth that fails to generate enough revenue to sustain itself long term. As a result, today’s new development must cover the mounting maintenance costs of yesterday’s infrastructure and capital projects. Backlogs for roads, maintenance, and utilities continue to grow, while our cities and towns face trillions in unfunded liabilities.
 

Yet, instead of addressing this financial crisis, the conventional response has been to double down on more unsustainable growth, pushing the problem further into the future until bankruptcy, like the City of Houston is experiencing now.

Value per acre is a way to measure the financial productivity of land by looking at how much tax revenue a property generates relative to its size. Instead of just considering total property value, it focuses on how efficiently land is used to support a town’s infrastructure and services.

For example: A downtown mixed-use building with shops and apartments might generate far more tax revenue per acre than a big-box store with a huge parking lot, even if the big-box store has a higher total value. So we need to focus on projects that have a better value per acre!

Every neighborhood should have a walkable center—a place with schools, shops, restaurants, and parks that residents can easily access without a car. This used to happen naturally, often where streetcar lines ended, shaping vibrant, connected communities like Grandin Village in Roanoke, VA.

Rebuilding these neighborhood hubs would give kids the freedom to walk to the store safely, foster stronger local economies, and create more autonomous, livable spaces for everyone. Instead of sprawling commercial development that under performs financially and hurts local business, we should focus on revitalizing neighborhoods with places people actually want to be.

"In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought."

This is a great book to read, and it's really challenged my thinking related to our streets in town and how we can make them better.

Missing Middle Housing includes a variety of housing types like duplexes, fourplexes, cottage courts, and multiplexes. These compact, human-scale buildings blend naturally into existing residential neighborhoods while promoting walkability, local businesses, and the viability of alternative transit. They are part of the keystone species that are missing from our town's local housing ecosystem and zoning codes.