A few weeks ago, my husband and I pulled away from our driveway in Waco, Texas, and pointed the car north, toward I-35. It was around 10:00 a.m. and we had several hours of driving ahead of us. My final destination was Huntsville, Alabama, where I’d spend the week with a childhood best friend. After […]
Lined with trees, a historic movie theater, and a handful of small businesses, Austin Avenue is one of the prettiest streets in downtown Waco. Unfortunately, it’s also jammed-packed with cars. Parked automobiles regularly line both sides of the street and a steady flow of through traffic fills both lanes at a steady pace daily. Even […]
A few weeks ago, I piled into a car with two girlfriends from church. We strapped my son Levi into his car seat and headed for I-35. We were on our way to see a friend and her family who had just returned to Texas from Missouri and were getting settled in San Antonio. With […]
You know what they say about hindsight: it’s 20-20. I definitely felt this recently as I walked in the hot summer sun back to my car. I had just spent the last hour in conversation with a council member. It was one of those moments that reminded me of something I appreciate about living in […]
This article originally ran for Strong Towns I first fell in love with cities from reading Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I especially resonated with her description of city streets as a “ballet,” finding it to be a delightfully accurate analogy for the kind of street life I experienced […]
The processes that drive community engagement in our cities are broken, so most of us avoid them. They take up a lot of time, involve a dizzying amount of coordination, require divine measures of patience and rarely lead to the satisfaction of seeing something worthwhile accomplished in a quick and sustainable fashion. Like most political […]