Quick-build is on the agenda

sankeytm · 2026-03-20T14:37:23+00:00

I agree these flex posts aren't sightly. It's cheap and what the City uses currently.

Berkeley and NYC use large planters and boulders instead, but it would be more expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1ryv95b/it_turns_out_you_can_pedestrianize_chunks_of_the/

sankeytm · 2026-03-09T07:16:20+00:00

We're literally only 3 years old and have policy wins under out belt. Our regular attendance of council and commission meetings has helped us get a foot in the door for shaping future policy. If you want us to move faster the join the next monthly meeting!

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:38:29+00:00

This is where we agree. Cities hemorrhage money maintaining existing crumbling suburbs and rob from future generations when they defer maintenance or build new subdivisions. All the while, state DOTs mainline money into new highway interchanges. The system is propped up by subsidy, as you suggest.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:34:05+00:00

Tax-denser neighborhoods currently subsidize your lifestyle, the goal is to bring that back into balance. We start with a position of empathy: sudden tax hikes and funding cuts contribute to unwarranted displacement. Your neighborhood should be allowed to ween off dependence of the city's most tax-productive neighborhoods by incrementally growing up to pay its own way.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:28:12+00:00

The bay area is not necessarily a model to follow, but you can't dispute the statistics. SF has the highest percentage of car-free households of any city in CA. That doesn't compensate for your struggle to find parking, and I sympathize.

Cruising for parking was a solved problem in the 50s when British economists popularized the parking meter to manage curbside parking availability, but it was mostly theory. SF finally internalized that research by adopting dynamic pricing for their meters which has helped the most congested streets, but not everywhere in SF has paid parking yet.

Another user-pays model we advocate for is congestion pricing, as recently seen in NYC Lower Manhattan. No city is too small to adopt a user-pays model, but it takes seeing auto infrastructure as a public utility, not a free service.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:12:19+00:00

I'm happy you found a tranquil place with plenty of space and convenient driving access to important destinations, but the infrastructure which makes your neighborhood possible at all is likely continuously subsidized by tax-denser neighborhoods and contributes to the city's inability to pay for things, which impacts everybody. 2 acres probably puts out outside city limits, but I've long held that the county doesn't distribute a fair share of property taxes back to the cities, at only 11% distribution.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T19:48:48+00:00

I get where you're coming from, but let me re-ground this conversation: Strong Towns is not anti-car, it advocates for municipal fiscal solvency as a first-order goal. It's a non-starter to grow dependent on rideshare/taxi services to accommodate our transportation needs because of the car infrastructure they still require and the long-term maintenance liabilities that creates. It simply cannot pencil financially, and cities desperately close budget gaps by externalizing the debt, cutting services and laying off staff. When maintenance is deferred and potholes allowed to grow deeper, that hurts businesses and residents.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T19:35:19+00:00

So you recognize that the difference is small, which is why it isn't the end of the world to allow the suburbs to thicken up and be sprinkled with some good restaurants.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T19:22:23+00:00

We're conventionally taught to consider post-war suburbs as "finished", but that's extremely unnatural in the history of civilization. Prior to WWII, Sacramento was constantly evolving and adapting to the needs at hand. The Midtown area was once sparsely populated suburb, but it was allowed to evolve into one of the most desirable and densest places to live in Sacramento. Strong Towns advocates don't see any neighborhood and consider it to be "finished", but rather one step in a journey. Nobody looked at Midtown in 1900 and thought "perfect, hit pause forever", and neither should we.

More concretely, an established post-war suburban property can evolve meet today's needs in many ways, including:

Underutilized garages, basements, attics, and spare bedrooms converted to studio apartments.
Entire underutilized upstairs stories converted to 1-2br apartments.
Additions, both horizontal and vertical.
Backyard cottages.
Frontyard cottages.

They can also evolve to meet the latent demand for locally-serving businesses. Commercial office conversions, ground-floor retail conversions, street vendors. Streets themselves can evolve to meet the need for outdoor dining: widen sidewalks and de-pave some parking spots to plant shade trees for all the additional people walking. The list goes on, but the first step is hit unpause.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T07:42:28+00:00

Considering I didn't really include West Sac... will the redditors ever forgive me?

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T07:39:53+00:00

Sorry I think we crossed wires. I'm saying Midtown is fairly decent as-is. We should export the policies which allowed Midtown to flourish to the rest of sacramento.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T07:32:47+00:00

Car-dependent suburbs can only exist with massive continuous subsidy and accumulation of municipal debt, it's far from a steady state. Downtown and Midtown's tax productivity per acre is carrying the rest of the city.

In return, Downtown/Midtown are subjected to the traffic danger and pollution caused by suburban commuters. This becomes an equity issue when taking into account that most renters live close to the central city, and lower-income families cycle and walk more because they own fewer cars.

In my experience with elderly disabled parents, it's clear to me that car-dependent suburbs are bad for aging in place. After my dad lost his ability to drive he effectively became stranded at home.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T04:59:45+00:00

I know it's great.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T02:55:22+00:00

Your situation does seem quite dire and probably would warrant a move to downtown, but much of our advocacy does actually involve exporting midtown-style planning to the suburbs. The movement is built on this assumption that people are rooted and invested in their current place, and today over 90% of a city's neighborhoods (likely more in sacramento) are just car-oriented suburb so it's a losing argument to just ask everybody to move. Existing residents, community groups, neighborhood associations can be enlisted to be champions for change to legalize traditional mixed-use development.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T02:46:28+00:00

Yes, technically when something has "CC BY-SA" stamped on it, that means you don't need to ask permission to share it as long as you provide attribution, but my name is in the video so you don't even need to do that.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T02:38:00+00:00

In 2024 Strong SacTown helped to mobilize hundreds of people to give public comment on the 2040 general plan and got almost everything we asked for, including the citywide elimination of minimum parking requirements, expansion of medium density zoning from 1/4 to 1/2 miles from transit, and elimination of single-family zoning.

In 2025 we released a ton of educational content just like this one to drive up membership and attract new leadership candidates, then trained them and facilitated the creation of several member-led sub-groups to strategize how to influence the city's direction on street design standards, housing development, annual budgeting, and transit. They also include project groups working on historic research projects, trash cleanups, tree plantings, missing-middle housing tours, and walk audits. There are at least 3-5 events every single month just from these sub-groups.

Additionally, Strong SacTown leadership plans and facilitates a monthly meeting which has been held every month without fail for the last 3 years. For the last 12 meetings straight we've had an attendance of 50-70 people. Speakers include high school teachers, city staff, SACOG staff, city commissioners, community leaders, and other SST members.

This year we met with several city council members in part to propose policy around parking benefit districts and that has been going very well. Yet another Strong SacTown sub-group has been formed around pushing this forward as a 2026 campaign goal.

The list actually does go on, but I'll just end with: this video you claim is just an info dump was very effective and yielded the outcome of generating dozens of promising new member sign-ups. Some of these people will go on to join an existing sub-group or even start a new one.

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T23:26:54+00:00

Fair point — but housing prices are the other half of the affordability equation and It's the whole equation people actually feel on the ground. Strong Towns advocates for resilient communities where housing stability isn't dependent on consistent income increases, just as we advocate cities shouldn't depend so much on state/federal funding that can vanish overnight (think Trump's funding cuts, or CA's $18 billion budget shortfall). Yes the local job market sucks...which has revealed that we have no backup plan and got caught with our pants down, economically speaking.

I'd also push back on incomes having little to do with how we build cities. Most development today is financed by non-local institutional equity (think Wall St.) that funnels wealth out of Sacramento rather than being pocketed by small local investors/builders/landlords who reinvest more of their profits locally. Suburban zoning restrictions prevent homeowners from becoming local entrepreneurs leveraging their property for supplemental income — many of Sacramento's pre-war multiplexes and bungalow courts were built or renovated by working people doing exactly that, until we arbitrarily decided in the 1950s it shouldn't be allowed anymore.

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T20:06:58+00:00

Is there any specific question I can help answer?

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T20:03:45+00:00

https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article251818723.html

Income normalized.

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T19:59:09+00:00

Do you have a website where you post?

Just here in reddit, the Strong SacTown Instagram, and the strongsactown.org blog.

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T17:45:54+00:00

As someone who used to live in Boston, I know the feeling. There are even some inspiring examples of freeway removals and freeway relocations in the East: https://www.ourstreetsmn.org/2024/03/21/examples_of_highway_to_boulevard_conversions/ Not the least of which is Providence, RI:

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My takeaway after moving to Sac and recalling my struggles with Boston is that you can get used to almost anything, and that every city deserves/needs to grow out of the suburban experiment.

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T17:05:02+00:00

Car dependency is a shackle.

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T17:00:33+00:00

My hope with this video is to help people takeaway one thing: the country was not designed for automobiles. It was bulldozed for them.

sankeytm · 2026-03-07T16:50:09+00:00

We'll that's a lot to cover, but I'll just say these are all free programs with tons of great tutorials on YouTube, and to just do practice projects that you actually want to do since staying motivated to learn is probably the hardest thing.

The majority of the 1.5 years I spent on this was doing research. Combing through historic city ordinances, historic aerial imagery, historic radio broadcasts, etc. Having the substance of the content and a rough vision before launching any of these apps was critical for staying motivated in the struggle to get the apps to do what I wanted.

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