Last month, I stumbled upon a little town that almost felt like a Strong Towns devotee had invented it.

After just a few quick conversations with residents, it was clear that they aced every single item on the Strong Towns Strength Test. The speed limits on every road were 5 miles per hour or less; you couldn’t #slowthecars more if you tried. Moreover, those streets weren’t designed by engineers; when the citizens of the village took a shortcut often enough to create a desire path, the building committee (which, by the way, was not made up of builders) would take notice and lay down some gravel to pave it. Those streets were narrow and lined with gorgeous, hand-built homes, built incrementally and experimentally over time and deliberately placed close together to maximize the productive use of the land.

All of it—the infrastructure under the ground, the gravel roads under my feet, the hand-built homes I couldn’t stop snapping pictures of—was built by the people here, without community debt. Every single citizen I spoke to knew how their town had been built, roughly how much it cost, and certainly what it was worth.

And everyone seemed truly, deeply joyful to be living this way.

The secret? The place where I was standing—Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Rutledge, Missouri—was an intentional community. It had been built from the ground up over the course of 20 years by residents who had collectively agreed to live and build their lives this way.

NOT AVERAGE CITIZENS

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m not suggesting that the only way to build a strong town is to find a patch of land and start from scratch.

But as someone who spends most her day talking about our dominant development pattern and the bizarre and vast financial predicament American cities have managed to get themselves into, sometimes the idea of starting over is tempting. Some days, it drives me a little crazy that Dancing Rabbit’s way of creating a community (like the Strong Towns approach itself) is treated as a radical, utopian ideal—a distant if not impossible goal for the communities we love.

It shouldn’t be a shocking thing for a community to have a conversation about how to pay for the maintenance of a piece of infrastructure before they put it in the ground. Specious road usage projections, complex financial instruments and hazy math about the job creating potential of razing a downtown block to build a big box—these are the things we should think of as radical and frightening. These are the things that average citizens should have the ability to engage with and refuse. And we would if we hadn’t done such a thorough job of circumscribing our collective imagination.