The Reform That Should Have Been Easy
What a failed vote taught me about culture, change, and the real work of building stronger towns.
I remember sitting in a city council meeting over 20 years ago, watching a reform die that should have been easy to pass.
For years, I had been working with a city that was struggling to keep up with the cost of maintaining its streets. Like most cities, they had adopted engineering standards that required roads to be built much wider than residents needed or wanted. The result was predictable: higher construction costs, more pavement to maintain and a growing financial burden that would eventually come due.
We had spent years studying the issue. We had run the numbers. We had shown how narrowing the city’s street standards would save millions of dollars over time while still providing safe access for residents, emergency vehicles and maintenance equipment. The city council understood the problem. They understood the solution. They were prepared to act.
Then, just before the meeting began, the fire chief and maintenance supervisor staged a demonstration in the parking lot.
They parked a fire truck next to a snowplow and stretched a tape measure across the front. The implication was obvious. Under the proposed standards, these vehicles might not be able to pass each other without slowing down. And if they had to slow down, someone, somewhere, someday, might die.
It was a powerful visual. It was also deeply misleading.
The situation they described was extraordinarily unlikely. Even if it occurred, the consequence would not be catastrophe but mild inconvenience. The city’s analysis was sound. The council knew it. The city’s leadership knew it. Everyone involved understood that the proposal represented a more financially responsible approach.
Yet the room filled with residents opposed to the change. They came to defend the status quo. They came to defend what they understood to be safe streets.
And when the vote came, the council abandoned the reform.
Not because they disagreed with it. Not because they thought it was wrong. Not because they failed to understand the math.
They voted “no” because they knew they were alone.
That meeting changed how I thought about change. Up until that point, I believed that better information would naturally lead to better decisions. I was an engineer: if there was a problem, then you studied it, gathered data, explained the tradeoffs, and presented a solution. Rational people would evaluate the evidence and make a rational choice.
That sounds embarrassingly naive now, but it didn’t seem naive at the time.
The problem was that I had mistaken information for understanding. The council already understood the issue. The challenge wasn’t persuading them, but rather helping enough people in the community see the issue differently. The fire chief and maintenance supervisor weren’t really arguing about pavement widths. They were defending a culturally familiar story about safety, responsibility and what a well-run city looks like. The residents who showed up that night shared that story. The council knew that after the vote they would have to go back into the community and explain a different story, over and over and over again.
They didn’t feel equipped to do that. And, frankly, they weren’t.
There was no budget for changing the conversation. No department responsible for helping residents think differently about growth, transportation, housing or public finance. There was no mechanism inside city hall for creating a new civic understanding of these issues.
The more I reflected on that meeting, the more I realized that this wasn’t an isolated problem. It was everywhere.
I would encounter planners who knew their zoning codes weren’t working. Engineers who knew certain standards produced bad outcomes. Elected officials who understood that their communities were financially overextended. Economic development professionals who recognized that chasing the next big project wasn’t making their city stronger.
The knowledge was often there, but the culture wasn’t. And culture is what determines what becomes politically possible.
That realization eventually led to Strong Towns.
Not immediately, though. At first, I thought the answer was simply to explain things better. I started writing, speaking, giving presentations, creating illustrations and developing new ways to communicate ideas that had traditionally been trapped inside professional jargon and technical reports.
One of the first things I discovered was that many of the existing terms weren’t helping. The language of planning and urbanism often acted as a barrier rather than a bridge. People either tuned out or immediately sorted themselves into ideological camps before a real conversation could even begin.
So we started building a different vocabulary.
Not because inventing terminology is inherently useful, but because people need language to describe what they are seeing. After all, you can’t have a meaningful conversation about a problem you can’t name.
Once someone encounters the word “stroad,” for example, they often start seeing stroads everywhere. Not because Strong Towns convinced them of something, but because the word helps them notice a pattern that had previously been hiding in plain sight.
The Power of Seeing Differently
That became one of our core insights: before people can act differently, they need to see differently.
For a time, I even hosted a video series called SID.TV — short for See It Differently TV. The title was straightforward because the mission was straightforward. We weren’t trying to tell people what to think. We were trying to help them notice things they had previously overlooked.
A city budget that had always seemed balanced suddenly looked fragile. A road project that had always been described as progress suddenly raised new questions. A neighborhood that seemed fully built out suddenly revealed countless opportunities for small, incremental improvements.
Once people saw these things, they began asking different questions. And when enough people began asking different questions, something interesting happened.
The conversation started to change.
This is the part that surprised me. When I started writing, I imagined that the audience would mostly consist of professionals: engineers, planners, public works directors and so on. Maybe a few elected officials. Instead, we attracted people from every walk of life.
Teachers. Retirees. Small business owners. Parents. Ministers. Neighborhood advocates. People who had never attended a planning meeting and couldn’t have explained a zoning code if you paid them.
They weren’t looking for professional development. They were looking for an explanation.
Something felt wrong in their community, but they lacked the language to describe it. The stories they were being told about growth, development, transportation and prosperity didn’t match what they were experiencing in their daily lives.
When they found Strong Towns, many had the same reaction: “I thought I was the only one.”
That realization turned out to be really important. Around this same period, I was speaking with Andrés Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanism movement. He told me that on a typical planning project, his team would spend most of their time not designing streets or drawing plans, but helping people understand why they should think differently about their city.
The technical work wasn’t the hard part. The cultural work was.
His observation perfectly matched what I had been experiencing. Again and again, I met local leaders who wanted to do better work but felt like they were pushing uphill. They were trying to advance reforms that made sense technically and financially, but they lacked public understanding and support.
They were fighting the same battle that the city council with the road narrowing proposal faced in that meeting years earlier.
What they needed wasn’t another consultant report. What they needed was momentum. They needed neighbors who already understood the problem. Residents who could explain the issue to their friends. Community leaders who could articulate a different vision. People willing to show up and say, “Yes, this makes sense. We should do this.”
Strong Towns gradually evolved into a way of creating that momentum.
The articles mattered. The books mattered. The podcast, the videos, the speeches, the social media posts — they all mattered. But none of them were the end goal.
The goal was creating the cultural conditions where better decisions became possible.
That’s why I’ve never thought of Strong Towns primarily as a media organization, even though millions of people engage with our content every year. The content is not the product. The content is the invitation. It’s an invitation to see differently, to ask better questions, and ultimately to become part of a growing movement of people working to make their places stronger.
From Audience to Movement
The most surprising thing was that people didn’t stop at seeing differently. They wanted to help.
Some shared articles with friends and neighbors. Some started local discussion groups. Some organized events. Some ran for office. Some volunteered for boards and commissions. Some became outspoken advocates in their communities. Others simply wanted to make sure the work continued.
That presented a challenge I hadn’t anticipated. How do you build an organization around a movement without turning the movement into a product?
Most organizations solve this problem by creating a transaction. Become a member and receive benefits. Donate and receive access. Pay and receive perks.
That approach never felt right to me.
After all, the core ideas of Strong Towns were never meant to be exclusive. If our goal was changing the conversation, the last thing we should do is put the conversation behind a paywall. All of the content and the analyses therein that we were producing needed to reach as many people as possible.
What we discovered instead was that many people weren’t looking to buy something. They were looking to belong to something.
Membership emerged not as a product but as a declaration. It was a way for someone to say: “This work matters. I want to help it grow.” Recognizing that was a powerful moment.
Strong Towns members aren’t customers. They’re not purchasing access to information. They’re not buying a package of benefits.
They’re helping create the conditions for change.
Everything we produce exists because members decided this work was important enough to support. And because they supported it, something remarkable happened: the conversation began spreading far beyond anything I had imagined.
Today, when I travel and speak, I routinely meet people who tell me they first encountered Strong Towns through a friend, a neighbor, a colleague or a family member. Someone handed them a book. Someone shared a podcast episode. Someone forwarded an article. Someone invited them to a Local Conversation.
The ideas moved from person to person, community to community, city to city. What began as an attempt to explain a few engineering and financial concepts evolved into a movement of people who care deeply about the future of their places.
That growth wasn’t inevitable. It happened because thousands of people decided not merely to consume the work, but to carry it forward.
And if you’ve benefited from this work but never taken that step, consider joining us. Not because you’ll unlock special access or receive exclusive perks, but because becoming a member is one way of helping more people see their communities differently, and helping create the cultural conditions for the changes we all want to see.
The council meeting that inspired Strong Towns happened many years ago. Today, when similar conversations take place in communities across North America, there is often someone in the room who has already read the article, listened to the podcast, shared the book, attended the gathering, or joined the conversation.
That’s not an accident.
That’s what a movement looks like.
The argument is never "we need slightly smaller emergency vehicles" 😟
I think anyone who learns how to effectively work in communities has a moment like you describe, when they have to accept that facts don't drive change, and that what is required is to cultivate understanding within a particular cultural context. Its even harder in conservation work than in planning because so many people have been taught that "following the science" is the only way to approach a problem.