Why doesn’t anyone care about the typical commercial stroad? I’d argue that over anything else, it’s beauty. You get no sense of beauty from neon lights and oversized advertisements. There is nothing that is transcendent of the human experience. Rather, everything on these runways appeals to the lowest common denominators of American consumerism: food and stuff.



A byproduct of having a beautiful place is having high civic pride. When you have a clean room—say, a kitchen—you work to keep it clean, and that helps you feel more productive when you’re in there. We all know the feeling that a dirty, unorganized room gives us. It sucks your will to do anything productive. It can even entice you into making it more dirty by taking the “screw it, it’s already messy” approach to organization. Our commercial stroads are no different. They’re highly unorganized, ugly and channeling all the entropy of humanity into one place. This leads to a sense of community dejection, and the inevitable outcome of everyone acting in their best interest and the best interest of their properties. Ugly places breed NIMBYism.



I think this is highlighted in the circus that is the comment section of Ol’ Tooley’s blog post on the debate. People go back and forth debating Strong Towns points, data, intentions, etc., to which I say, “Who cares!” We’re building ugly places that don’t do justice to the greatness of the American dream, or the collective free society our ancestors wanted to build.

Developer R. John Anderson always says, “We don’t have to build Paris on the Sein. We just have to build a slightly less crappy version of America.” I’ll admit that I’m somewhat pessimistic; I think that even if we are capable, we will just barely be able to build the aforementioned vision. But nonetheless, in that idea, we find the argument. Paris is beautiful, ergo, if we can even build something marginally better than what we have, we’re on the right path. Nothing about data, ROI, metrics, land use, etc… Just beauty, plain and simple.



Below is a picture I took in the (albeit it very touristy) town of Galena, IL. (Go now. You won’t regret it.) When our ancestors dreamed of building a better society for future generations, the buildings were obviously a part of that. Art, music and architecture were meant to be pinnacles of accomplishment. They were meant to transcend and lift the human spirit. Beauty is meant to highlight order and hard-work. A society that doesn’t value either of these things is surely on the road to decline in more ways than one.