Community Development
Reaching the Limits of Passionate Defense: Time to turn back
When House Speaker John Boehner, indulging his inner Howard Beale, launched a Republican counterattack against the party’s far right wing, it seemed to me the GOP was finally rubbing up against the same rough edges of reality that have become apparent in big-time sports. And the lessons apply as much to civic life in towns…
Read More13 Ways to Kill Your Community
Not so long ago, fellow urban scribe and recently elected mayor of Concrete, Washington, Jason Miller, recommended the book, “13 Ways to Kill Your Community.” The timing was fortuitous. For a while, in an ongoing series of internal conversations, I’d been wrestling with a fundamental question of human nature: Are people basically good, with periodic…
Read MoreTonic or Toxic: Reimagining Homeowner Associations
A little over eight years ago I hosted a seminar on Homeowner Associations (HOAs) with my friend and collaborator Doris Goldstein. One of our speakers, David Wolfe, offered a unique perspective on HOAs. David, who had successfully managed hundreds of HOAs without litigation, argued that HOAs retain the personality that they are “born” with. Consequently, if…
Read MoreLessons from the Woods
Half-way through our family’s relocation to the woods for the month of August, placeshakers have been asking me for town planning lessons learned. It’s challenging to encapsulate a place as extraordinary as Victoria Beach, with its 101-year history of car-free summers and an elegant street grid of dirt roads that are tremendously kid-friendly. I’ve been…
Read MoreOld School Strategies for Connectivity (Hint: Batteries not required)
For years, I’ve been jotting down inverse relationships as they crop up in my professional and personal life. Here, for instance, is one from my previous career as a journalist: The quality of reporting at any event is inversely proportional to the number of reporters covering it. Think Super Bowls, political conventions and the birth…
Read MoreSustainability: What’s in a word?
The places we inhabit are rarely if ever arbitrary. They’re the products of intention. Personal. Economic. Environmental. Religious. We choose for ourselves, individually and collectively, the kind of places we want and — through leadership, policy, investment, advocacy, action and, at times, inaction — those places begin to take form. It’s a complicated dance of…
Read MoreCottage Simplicity: Keeping it easy, making it attainable
We talk often here on PlaceShakers about cottage living, as well as drilling down into how to make that happen at home, with conversations like Small Y’all: A Cottage Solution to the Housing Problem and “Pocket Neighborhoods”: Scale Matters. This weekend, strolling through Victoria Beach — an insightful cottage community in Manitoba, Canada — I…
Read MoreHere Comes Chaos: David Lynch sketches the landscape
If I’d been paying better attention (which is how I start a lot of sentences these days), I could have begun my reeducation in the ways things work in 1986. That’s when film director David Lynch gave us Blue Velvet. Back then, the way Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini embraced Lynch’s sex and violence mash-ups…
Read MoreCNU21: Insights and Highlights from Salt Lake City
Git ‘Er Done | Hazel Borys This year’s CNU was all about doing again, unlike the past few years where we’ve focused on stop-gap measures to redirect our investment choices to more resilient patterns. Looks like they might be starting to pay off. Still, we have plenty of hard work ahead to remove both legal and financial hurdles.
Read MoreWays to Fail at Form-Based Codes 04: Don’t Capture the Character
The other day, I was riding my bike from a deeply walkable, bikeable neighbourhood to a more auto-dominated environment, and I was struck again by the tactile response when you’re walking or biking through this change. In the walkable neighbourhood, fellow cyclists were in the streets or in bike lanes, mixing safely with the traffic-calmed…
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