Day One of Strong Towns National Gathering 2025

Urbanists from Dallas, TX traveled to Providence, RI for annual gathering of Strong Towns advocates. Here's how our first day went!

Jun 11, 2025

Yesterday was the first day of Strong Towns National Gathering, an annual conference that brings together volunteer advocates, urban planners, and public officials from across the U.S. to share ideas, lessons, and strategies for building stronger communities.

This year, I and several North Texas advocates traveled to Providence, Rhode Island for the two-day event. My goal was to gather as many practical ideas and proven strategies as possible that I can apply back in Dallas. I set up a group text with other Dallas urbanists who went so we could stay connected and share takeaways from sessions we attend. You can browse the conference agenda for details about the events we attended. Below are our notes from the first day.

How to Activate Local Advocates in Your Town—and Keep Them Engaged for the Long Haul. “My biggest takeaway (of many) is to set a goal to meet 1-on-1 in-person with (almost) everybody who signed up on our member list. We have 100 people signed up on our member list, so I will need help reaching that goal by the end of summer!” -
Hexel Colorado
Building Strong Towns Awareness Through Digital Media. “Learn how to cultivate messaging around visions that anyone can understand & agree with (e.g., make it safer for kids to cross street going to school) rather than an urbanist virtue for its own sake (e.g., to improve walkability).” -
Hexel Colorado
What I've Learned from Walking the World.
- “Love this quote from speaker
  Chris Arnade
  : To truly understand a place, you have to walk it… there’s no fast forwarding through anything. Great talking point to promote walk audit events back home.” -
  Hexel Colorado
- “I wrote that down, too! Great quote. Can also be used for the case of creating bike lanes, which are a tool to increase safe walking spaces.” - Krista Knightengale
- “It’s why I take buses everywhere too” - Chris W.
- “I think his point about looking at urbanism among Mexican-American and Hispanic cities like El Paso is something we can dive deeper into back in Texas” -
  Hexel Colorado
Walking Tour: Revival after (Urban) Renewal. Notes from
Warren Pena
:
- Small bets make for small failures.
- You can't really know what a community needs without actually being there. As a developer, it's best when you actually live there and have to live with your choices.
- Beware when you start hearing housing units referred to as "product".
Making Abundant Housing a Reality. Some notes from
Warren Pena
(he had a bunch!):
- A price-to-income ratio of 3–4x is considered “affordable.” Thirty-five years ago, only California and New York City exceeded that, but unaffordability has since become widespread nationwide.
- As household sizes have shrunk, more homes are needed for the same population. Yet housing construction hasn’t kept pace—and annual homebuilding has declined sharply since crashing in 2007.
- Other things we need to truly fix this problem: ADUs, building code reform, and allowing residential in commercial districts.
Walking Tour: Using a Neighborhood Walk to Make Housing Issues Tangible. “One thing we talked about is incremental design, a mix of basic and permanent design. For instance, there’s a basic bus island design, but they hope to gradually evolve it as they get more feedback from people and also funding. Also, the need to sacrifice for the larger vision. For instance, in this street corridor where they were trying to calm traffic, the original intent was not to have any parking on the main road, but the city wanted it and wasn't open to discussion, so they adapted their vision to incorporate the parking so the larger vision of traffic calming would still be realized. So I guess it's about knowing what the purpose is and where you can compromise/adapt so the larger goal is still met.” - Dhiren P.