Agenda

More information coming soon!

See more than 60 infill homes designed or developed by Alli Thurmond Quinlan and Rob Sharp within less than a mile, ranging from small cottage courts to larger single-family dwellings. The tour includes the recent CNU Award-winning South Street Cottages and illustrates how incremental housing types can shape a cohesive, walkable neighborhood over time.

Representing the urban core of San Antonio means Councilwoman Kaur has the honor of supporting some of the city’s most exciting economic development opportunities, while also confronting some of its most persistent and complex infrastructure challenges. After nearly three years in office, many resident requests for crosswalks and traffic calming solutions remain unaddressed due to high costs, misalignment with traffic priorities, and limited capacity within the City’s Public Works Department.

One of the key strategies Councilwoman Kaur has been advancing is the use of quick‑build street projects. Often described as “lighter, quicker, cheaper” interventions, these approaches allow cities to test safety improvements using temporary materials such as planters and modular barriers. Quick builds enable the rapid deployment of traffic calming features, protected bike lanes, and intersection safety improvements, allowing the City to evaluate their effectiveness before committing to permanent construction.

This session will highlight the challenges Councilwoman Kaur has faced in implementing these projects, the importance of cultivating internal champions and community partners, and how she is using pilot projects to shift mindsets and accelerate more responsive infrastructure delivery, particularly through her Safe Passageway to Schools initiative.

Drawing on real-world municipal experience, the presentation highlights strategies such as clearer zoning frameworks, streamlined approval processes, and stronger collaboration between planners, developers, and residents. Simplifying development is not about lowering standards—it is about making expectations transparent, predictable, and efficient so that good projects can move forward more quickly. When cities clarify roles and responsibilities for staff they can encourage more housing production, support affordability, and create neighborhoods that are vibrant, inclusive, and resilient. This talk offers actionable ideas for local governments seeking to align policy, process, and community vision to deliver housing that meets today’s needs.

A community-focused rebel of a gal, MK left a VP role at a $3B regional firm to start her company Winter Wheat because she believes the same financial rigor that makes big deals work should be accessible to the people actually trying to fix their neighborhoods, not just the developers trying to extract value from them. This session is her attempt to hand you the playbook.

This session is a plain-language crash course in development finance and feasibility for local leaders who are done waiting for the right developer to show up. You'll learn how projects actually get funded, how to scan for key red and green flags, and what crowdfunding can and can't do for a community project.

Jon Jon Wesolowski (The Happy Urbanist) leads an all-star panel of creators and educators across social platforms, including Coach Balto (Bike Bus!), Hope Henchey (Hope Henchey Writes), Kelsey Huse (Memphis Urbanism), and McKenzie Ortiz (Pedestrian Pride), discussing how they got started, their experiences, and how they sustain their work over time.

Attendees of the Gathering already understand that places we build shape the lives we live. This session will build on that knowledge through a facilitated conversation with new urbanists Rob Parker and Alex Lazard for them to inspire attendees about what is possible in your community when you pair compassion for others with a deep understanding of how our places impact our lives.

What if place branding wasn’t about logos, slogans, or tourism campaigns, but about shaping the future of a community?

In this session, Ryan Short explores a reframing of place branding as a shared north star that helps communities align identity, investment, and decision-making. When done well, place branding clarifies what a place stands for and helps guide everything from public engagement and economic development to placemaking and long-term growth.

But strong places are not created by consultants or city halls alone. They are shaped by residents, advocates, and local leaders who care enough to get involved.

Drawing from real projects and insights from his book The Civic Brand: The Power & Responsibility of Place, Ryan explores the role everyday people play in shaping their communities. Because the places we love do not happen by accident. They happen when people recognize both the power they hold and the responsibility they share to shape them.

The hardest part of town making isn’t financing, design, or construction, it’s getting started.

Most people don’t struggle because they lack resources; they struggle because they don’t know how to spot a real opportunity.

In this session, we focus on how opportunities actually show up. Often, they’re not pretty. They’re the ugliest building on a good street, a forgotten property in the right location, or a place that can be bought at the right price and patiently made better.

Using the 12 Steps to Town Making and the five pillars, farming, form, finance, the flywheel, and the ecosystem we show how to evaluate a place, reduce risk, and take the first small, workable step forward.

This session is for anyone who wants to make money, do good, and help build stronger neighborhoods — one opportunity at a time.

Why are so many cities and towns across North America going broke? Our roads are deteriorating. Our governments are in debt. No matter how much we increase them, our taxes aren’t enough to fix it all. And no one seems to be able to agree on how we got here—much less how to change the course. This isn’t just about numbers on a budget. This is about the fate of the communities we love most, and the real people that live there. This is about how to give our citizens, today and tomorrow, a chance at the future they deserve. If we want American cities to be strong and resilient, we need to change everything about the way we plan and build our places. In this core Strong Towns presentation, Charles Marohn will explain, in plain language, how so many American cities have found themselves in decline after decades of “growth.” And then he’ll show you a revolutionary way forward that could create enduring prosperity—if we just have the courage to change our minds. If you’re new to the Strong Towns movement or you’ve never seen our core presentation, you might want to join this session.

You already know that parking minimums, setback requirements, and stone-age zoning laws make walkable community nearly impossible. Spoiler: The same antiquated town-building techniques help create a bangin’ loneliness epidemic too. Come check out the tactical interventions by imaginative neighbors who are crowbarring connection into environments that weren't designed for it.

In this session, Kat Vellos, human-centered designer and author of We Should Get Together, shares examples of how everyday people and forward-thinking municipalities are hacking their built environments to foster the human connection that prior planners wrongly assumed we could all live without. Through memorable case studies and facilitated peer discussion, you'll identify concrete ideas you can implement right away, whether you're a resident ready to activate your block or a staffer positioned to make your policies more connection-oriented. Come ready to laugh, rant, and plot the friendship-friendly revolution your community deserves — you'll leave with ideas, inspiration, and maybe even a new friend or two.

If communities want to become more fiscally resilient, encourage productive land use, and stop penalizing private investment, they need to rethink what they tax. This panel makes the case for land value taxation as a practical, pro-growth reform that aligns public revenue with publicly created land values. Instead of relying heavily on taxes on buildings, income, sales, and enterprise, land value taxation captures the value generated by infrastructure, public services, zoning, and community development.The discussion will cover the fundamentals of land value taxation, examples of its implementation, and evidence of its effects on development patterns, tax base performance, and local fiscal health. Panelists will also explore how communities can define and quantify land values and site value uplift, and how land-based revenue policies can help build stronger, more prosperous towns. This session is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Economics.

Transportation conversations often focus on infrastructure, engineering, and policy. But sometimes change begins with something much simpler: joy. Bike Buses, groups of children riding to school together with families and neighbors, are spreading around the world and transforming how communities experience their streets. What started as one ride has grown into a global movement with hundreds of routes and thousands of students. In this session, Bike Bus World founder Sam Balto shares how Bike Buses bring people together, help children gain independence, and show what our streets could feel like when they truly serve communities. Through stories, lessons, and practical insights, this session explores how small, joyful actions can help catalyze lasting change in transportation and community life.

Discover how a cohort of local developers helped transform Fayetteville into a national model for incremental growth. This session explores how small-scale, locally rooted projects, often led by first-time developers, have reshaped neighborhoods, strengthened the local economy, and built lasting community wealth. Grounded in real projects, not theory, the session will walk through the design decisions, development strategies, and policy conditions that made this work possible. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how incremental development actually happens on the ground, what barriers still exist, and how similar approaches can be adapted to their own communities.

Strong local movements are built on relationships. Yet many Local Conversation leaders struggle with the same challenge: how do you grow your leadership team and engage members more deeply without burning out? The most powerful tools community organizers use to solve this problem is the one-on-one meeting.

In this hands-on training, Mary Kate Norton will introduce participants to the organizing practice of one-on-ones. Through a model and structured practice, attendees will learn how to hold a meaningful meeting that builds trust, uncovers values, grows motivation, and strengthens relationships. If you’re looking to build the skills to lead bottom-up neighborhood transformation, this session is for you.

In this talk, Jon Jon outlines practical ways to retrofit the places we already live, from small, individual actions to larger neighborhood-led projects. We are often told that if we want to live in a village, we must first become villagers. The implication is that community depends mostly on how outgoing, generous, or selfless we are. But what if the struggle to connect is not a character flaw, but a design flaw?

The session features real-world examples from Jon Jon’s travels across the country, highlighting projects that make connection easier. The aim is not to make people try harder or turn them into extroverts. The aim is to shape neighborhoods where connection happens naturally and community is supported by design rather than sustained by exhaustion.

Across North America, Strong Towns Local Conversations show how ordinary people can make real change in their communities. Come celebrate and learn from three groups transforming their towns one conversation, one bus bench at a time. Leaders from Strong Towns ABQ, Strong Towns PDX, Strong Towns Chicago, and Spokane Reimagined will share stories from their cities, including the wins that kept them going and the challenges that pushed them to adapt. From organizing neighbors around safer streets and housing reform to quick-build and tactical projects, these groups show what local leadership can accomplish. Whether you already lead a Local Conversation or are thinking about starting one, you will leave with ideas, encouragement, and proof that this movement grows through intentional community building and local heroes.

Cities continue to pass transformational middle housing legislation at the state and local level, only to watch reform fail further downstream. The permits stall, the builders hesitate, and the lots sit unchanged. The gap between what is newly allowed and what actually gets built is where the real work begins.

This session draws on mddl's experience working across more than a dozen Canadian and American cities to examine what moves the needle. Building a culture of middle housing delivery requires foundational education and knowledge across three interconnected areas: the policy environment, the builder ecosystem, and the tools and processes that make implementation possible. Participants will work through a real site and explore the tools that enable delivery, leaving with a hands-on understanding of what implementation could like on the ground.

Join President and CEO of Smart Growth America, Beth Osborne, for a conversation with Founder and President of Strong Towns Chuck Marohn for a conversation about Strong Towns' recent white paper Mission Accomplished.

Transportation for America and Strong Towns agree that 1) the federal transportation program is not underfunded but, rather, fundamentally broken and producing bad results; 2) federal incentives push expansion over maintenance, creating future maintenance obligations that can't be met; 3) the taxpayer deserves accountability for the way transportation agencies spend their money; and 4) the country would be better off with no federal program than continuing with the one we have.

We disagree on the potential role of the federal government. Strong Towns wants to shrink and focus the federal role by sending the federal gas tax revenue to states and limiting USDOT to three narrow Interstate maintenance, national safety standards, and disaster response. Transportation for America wants to reform the federal role to one of goal setting, oversight and accountability—mostly because they don't trust the state departments of transportation.

Eliminating parking minimums is a win — but it's just the beginning. The real opportunity lies in what you do next.

The curb is some of the most valuable real estate in your city, and in most places it's being given away for free. Poorly managed parking doesn't just waste space, it fuels political backlash against reform, creates hurdles for safer streets, and leaves money on the table that could be invested directly in your neighborhood. The good news: curb management is available to any city, whether you've eliminated mandates entirely or are just getting started.

We'll be covering everything from the political case for active management, to real-world implementation, to what's possible when cities and advocates start treating the curb as public space rather than private property.

For decades, we’ve been building what Strong Towns calls “gray fields": aging shopping centers and office parks surrounded by oceans of concrete or asphalt. Too much parking. Too little productivity. Single-use retail in a market that has already moved on. From 30,000 feet, the solution looks obvious: take the excess parking and put housing on it. Townhomes. Apartments. Mixed-use. Incremental density. Easy, right? If it were that simple, we’d have solved this everywhere by now.

In this session, Monte Anderson shares his "on-the-ground" experience converting overbuilt parking lots at Wheatland Plaza in Duncanville, Texas, into townhomes using a condominium ownership structure, a powerful but often misunderstood legal tool in Texas. What seems like a straightforward infill strategy quickly collides with the gray areas: platting asphalt that was never meant to be subdivided, separating utilities from shared infrastructure, navigating fire and building code interpretations, zoning that says “yes” but functions like “no,” perceived parking panic versus actual math, financing projects lenders don’t recognize, and selling pieces of a shopping center to individual homeowners.

If we’re serious about turning liabilities into productive places, we have to learn how to work through these gray areas: legal, financial, political, and psychological. Done right, gray fields can become real neighborhood fabric again. And yes, it’s possible to make money and do good at the same time.

See the full range of incremental development downtown by Alli Thurmond Quinlan and Rob Sharp, from small historic duplexes and quadplexes to larger-scale commercial and civic investments. The tour begins with The Ramble, an Architizer A+ Award-winning project, and includes the historic Three Sisters redevelopment and the Quintuplex, a five-plex by Arkansas Poet Laureate Rosa Marinoni. The tour concludes at Ozark Natural Foods, runner-up for the 2022 World Architecture Awards American Building of the Year, illustrating how thoughtful design and incremental investment can reinforce downtown vitality.

Where did the corner grocery store go? Why are there no food trucks in my town? Why can’t I start a business from my house? It’s (regulatorily) complicated.

You shouldn’t need a law degree to start the business of your dreams. But in many towns and cities, starting something as simple as a neighborhood storefront or a coffee shop is a process entangled in complex zoning requirements, confusing paperwork, and thousands of dollars in permit fees before you can even open your doors. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Join us to learn how to rectify common regulatory barriers that block the small businesses that make neighborhoods vibrant and resilient. Drawing from national research from the Institute for Justice’s Cities Work initiative and pulling from entrepreneur insights, you will learn strategic reforms to make your town more small business friendly.

Many of us want to build stronger neighborhoods but struggle to connect with people whose experiences, priorities, or perspectives are different from our own.

In this workshop, Mary Kate Norton draws on her background in community organizing and her work with Strong Towns Local Conversations to explore how stories reveal overlapping experiences and values across lines of difference. Together, we’ll dive into how meaningful relationships often begin with small, intentional conversations. The session will explore how organizers sometimes need to change their rhythms, locations, or language to meet neighbors where they are - and why that effort is worth it. Participants will leave inspired to sit down for coffee with a neighbor, listen to their experiences, and discover the shared stories that can move a community forward.

In the battle for stronger towns, we all come up against some common counter arguments: “But people like driving.” “Residents don’t want to have to park two blocks away from their destination.” “The suburbs exist because everyone prefers to live that way.” How do you fight back against those arguments? With math. Joe Minicozzi, founder of Urban3 will walk through the math behind endless highways, subdivisions, and big box stores, and why it doesn’t pencil out. Then he’ll talk through how to use that math in your discussions with local leaders to advocate for stronger towns.

The decades long overnight success story of a neighborhood revitalized the Strong Towns way.

In the early 1800’s what is now Pettaway was originally an Indian Reservation. Later it was used as a Civil War Outpost before becoming a neighborhood to the growing Downtown Little Rock. Known for its racial and economic diversity during a time when such things were unheard of, Pettaway experienced many of the same struggles most downtown neighborhoods experienced post-World War II. Urban Sprawl and White Flight emptied the neighborhoods leaving only those who couldn’t afford to sell for a loss. Then came gang violence and a tornado in the late 90’s. Since then, there has been a quiet, slow revitalization with partners including The University of Arkansas, a non-profit CDC for affordable housing, the city of Little Rock followed by dozens of for-profit infill developers. Over a hundred homes and 20 new businesses later, this is the story of Pettaway.

In its second year, the Strong Towns cohort has quickly become a way to meet Strong Towns advocates and activists from across North America while building your own skills. In this session, you will hear from several cohort members in a series of brief presentations about a challenge they are facing in their community and their plan to use the four-step process to address it. This session is a great way to learn more about the cohort experience or to give you a boost about all the great progress being made in cities across North America by your Strong Towns peers.

This talk will explore how the five campaigns of Strong Towns align with some of our biggest environmental challenges. For example, transportation and residential energy use account for over 50% of U.S. energy consumption. Making these systems work efficiently and productively is key to solving many environmental challenges. Financial responsibility leads to environmental sustainability, which makes the campaign for transparent local accounting a move in the right direction for living within our means. Both movements have a shared value for using our resources wisely and productively.

We will also look at why Strong Towns messaging is more inviting, inclusive, relatable, and empowering than common approaches to environmental messaging. Ultimately, both movements are committed to creating healthy places where people can thrive. Strong Towns is particularly adept at bringing large systemic issues to our front door, where we can find meaningful local action that impacts our day-to-day lives. We need to apply this approach to solving more of our big problems, along with a renewed approach to stewardship of our places.

This session will feature Urban 3's Joe Minicozzi detailing his research on the market for short term rentals and the distorting effects on a community's financial health. His brief presentation will be followed by a back and forth between Chuck Marohn and Joe Minicozzi that will detail their insights into overcoming the Housing Trap and helping communities think through the challenges the short term rental markets pose to building stronger towns.

Many cities rely on budgeting practices that focus primarily on what must be paid this year, while making little provision for the costs that will come due in five, ten, or twenty years. Roads and other infrastructure are often treated as assets on paper, even as long-term maintenance obligations quietly accumulate. To make matters more challenging, municipal financial documents are frequently so opaque that even experienced government staff, let alone residents, struggle to understand the full picture.

The Strong Towns Finance Decoder was created to help communities uncover that bigger story. Using a city’s own public financial data, the tool visualizes key indicators over time, providing a clear-eyed view of a community’s actual financial condition and current trajectory.

In this session, you’ll learn how the Finance Decoder works and how communities are beginning to use it to better understand where they stand. You’ll walk away better equipped to examine your local finances through a Strong Towns lens and to ask a more important question: not just “Can we fund this?” but “How far behind are we, and what can we do now to strengthen our financial footing so we can provide the services we expect for generations to come?”