There’s also the challenge of inertia. While the way we’ve built cities since roughly World War II is about a minute old in historical terms, we’re still up against decades of “This is how things are done” thinking. What Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn describes as the largest experiment in human history has now become conventional thinking. Changing the cultural conversation—which is what we have to do—will take time.

And yet it is changing. We see evidence of this everywhere. For example, Strong Towns content reached 1.8 million people last year. We’re hoping to pass the 3 million mark in 2020.

And just last month, our movement—your movement and ours—was mentioned on the floor of Congress.

On February 25, Representative Mike Gallagher (Wisconsin) gave a speech on the floor of Congress on infrastructure. Citing Strong Towns—as well as Taxpayers for Common Sense and our good friends over at Transportation for America—Rep. Gallagher asked the hard questions about why we’re spending hundreds of billions on new infrastructure even as our existing infrastructure crumbles: