At the end of each year, when our audience is more distracted with the season (as am I) and we find ourselves in a more reflective state of mind, we take a couple of weeks to examine some of our best work from the year. Over the next two weeks, we're going to give you new content each day, but we're also going to share some of the 2017 posts we're most proud of. And since nearly half of you are new readers this year, this will be the first time you're seeing some of these pieces. (You can view all our best of content from the past several years here.)

We ended 2016 like many of you: with a degree of apprehension and uncertainty over what was going to happen in the coming months.. We spent the election season digging deep into the nation's infrastructure crisis and our flawed cultural consensus for trying to spend our way out of it. It seemed nearly certain that, if there was nothing else our federal government was going to agree on, at the very least, they were going to agree to spend an enormous sum of money on infrastructure.

It has been a bizarre year for national politics and I know I certainly would not have predicted total inaction on such a key issue. That being said, I'm not disappointed; we seemed poised to spend money on some pretty awful stuff without making any changes to the systems that are weakening our cities. On the plus side, we see the Strong Towns message popping up in more and more policy discussions around the country. Although I'm not fond of delay as a policy strategy, it seems like our ally in this instance. This article from earlier in the year is a good reminder of why. - Charles Marohn