The goal of a town or city is to endure FOREVER. To do that, cities have to be solvent. In fact, solvency must become an obsession for Clarksville. A “balanced budget” is not enough. At a minimum, this means having more assets than liabilities and an ability to pay our debts. But cities have new habits to develop and bad habits to unlearn.

For example, we need to do #DoTheMath on every proposed new development: What are the short-term costs now, and what will we be paying to maintain or replace for generations to come? More poignantly, what will YOUR KIDS AND GRANDKIDS be paying?

Not only do we need a more thorough accounting of our debts, we need a more accurate definition of assets. Here’s a big one: streets are not assets.

Go deeper with these articles:

“The Real Reason Your City Has No Money,” by Charles Marohn

“We Are All Detroit,” by Charles Marohn‍

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For Clarksville, the supply of land might seem limitless. But that just isn’t true. Land is a finite resource and, as the literal foundation of a community’s success, it has to be stewarded well. Not only is land finite, but not all land is worth the same; Any farmer can tell you that.

We must use the land we have productively and efficiently. The largest source of government waste in Clarksville is how we (poorly) allocate and underutilize land.

As Strong Towns senior editor Daniel Herriges has written, “the activity taking place on that city's land [must be] creating enough wealth to support the infrastructure and services needed for that place to continue to exist and thrive.” 

Go deeper with these articles:

“We Need Growth. But Only If It Generates Real Wealth,” by Daniel Herriges

“Value Per Acre Analysis: A How-To For Beginners,” by Daniel Herriges‍

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A community getting serious about solvency and more productive land use will soon find itself thinking differently about transportation. One example is with our network of roads and streets. If streets are liabilities rather than assets, then we need to be even more discriminating about if, when, where, and how we build or expand them.

A Strong Towns series focused on how Kansas City, Missouri, went all-in on the Suburban Experiment after World War II, including adding more than 1,600 miles of streets and roads—a 12x increase for only a 13% bump in population. The costs for maintaining and replacing those roads continue in perpetuity; it’s the equivalent of Kansas City taxpayers building a road to Los Angeles every 50 years or so. 

Kansas City isn’t alone in this trend. Far from it. Clarksville needs to evaluate every transportation decision by whether or not it will build enduring prosperity.

Go deeper with these resources:

“A Transportation Revolution,” by Charles Marohn

Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach (course)

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
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The temptation is understandable: chase after new jobs and new growth, at almost any cost. But this approach can lead to a “race to the bottom,” with different cities competing to see who can give away the most stuff—in the form of tax breaks and other incentives—to a big employer looking to move or expand. It can also tempt cities to “chase smokestacks” by expanding infrastructure and subsidizing new development in the hopes that, “If we build it, they will come.”

A Strong Towns approach to economic development looks less like big-game hunting and more like gardening. If you build a strong town using the principles laid out here, employers (and prospective employees) will beat down the door to move there.

Go deeper with these articles:

“Is Your City Racing to the Bottom or the Top?” by Jordan Clark

“A Tax-Incentive Race to the Bottom Won't Make Texas Strong,” by Daniel Herriges

Jane Jacobs described neighborhoods as co-creations, writing, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

Places endure when residents assume ownership of their cities. This is quite different from the passive role conventionally played by residents. In the Strong Towns 101 course, Chuck Marohn describes the shift that must take place as moving from “Residents as Customers” to “Residents as Shareholders.”

For 13 years, we’ve been documenting the stories of Strong Citizens, including in our podcasts It’s the Little Things (2018-2020) and The Bottom-Up Revolution (2020-present). Check them out below.

Go deeper with these podcasts:

The Bottom-Up Revolution

Chuck concludes this lesson in Strong Towns 101 by urging local governments to reframe their role and refocus their attention. Local government isn’t the implementation arm of state and federal policies. Yet too often, local government finds itself looking up the “food chain” for money and direction.

But that’s not how Strong Towns views local government. In the Strong Towns approach, local government—a “collection of us”—re-orients toward people, toward the needs of residents, in a posture of service. It relates to the state and federal governments first and foremost as advocates for its residents. “The hallmark of a Strong Town,” Chuck says, “is a local government that is focused on its people, on serving them, and on being relevant to this ‘co-creation’ of a place.”

“Local government is the highest form of government where a community can have a conversation with itself to solve its own problems.”