This week we're sharing the Strong Towns message throughout Minnesota's Iron Range. As part of that, we're going to take some time and apply some Strong Towns 101 thinking to local development.

Professionals involved in building cities often use the words "efficient" as a way to describe the desired outcome. Here's the definition:

Efficient: achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.

Of course, efficiency is a matter of perspective. It depends on what is measured. If your job is to light the high school football field, it might be really efficient to buy four of the biggest wattage bulbs your budget allows, one for each corner. If your job is to pay the school's electric bill, it might be more efficient to use a lot more LED lights. One is measuring efficiency in time and effort the other in dollars and kilowatts. Two different approaches, same desire for efficiency.

For automobile fuel efficiency, we don't measure miles per tank but miles per gallon. We understand that the size of the tank tells us little of importance. Just because a car has a huge gas tank does not mean it uses fuel efficiently.

When it comes to cities, however, we tend to judge the success of land development on a miles per tank basis, not a miles per gallon. In other words, we tend to favor policies that result in properties with a high value per parcel rather than a high value per acre.

For example, the Walmart in Grand Rapids is assessed at $10.4 million. There's a lot of money in that tank, which is why we tend to look at it as a really valuable piece of property. However, it sits on 156 acres of land. On a per gallon basis, the way productivity of efficiency would generally be measured, the Walmart is worth $12.63 per square foot.