Happy Friday, friends! Every week we collect some of the best things that members of our Verdunity team read, watched, or listened to over the course of the week.

New on the Go Cultivate! podcast:

Credit downgrades, budget shortfalls, & federal relief — with Liz Farmer

Fiscal policy expert & journalist Liz Farmer joins the show to talk about the current recession and the impact it's having on the fiscal situation at all levels of government.

If you missed them, here are our other coronavirus-related episodes:

• Reclaiming the streets – with John Simmerman

• Small development, trust, & strong local economies – with R. John Anderson

• How local governments should respond to the small business crisis – with Basel Musharbash

• Leveraging federal emergency management funding: COVID-19 edition – with Laura Clemons

• Where do cities go from here? Lessons for the Corona Crisis

This week’s other things to know:

Seattle will permanently close 20 miles of residential streets to most vehicle traffic (Seattle Times)

By now I'm sure you've heard how cities across the globe are converting streets to public space in an effort to relieve overcrowding in parks and trail systems. Seattle is taking that one step—a very big step—further. In the coming weeks, the city will be permanently converting over 20 miles of residential streets to "Safe Healthy Streets"—a version of shared space where through traffic is prohibited and vehicular access is limited to local residents, garbage/recycling collection, delivery drivers, and emergency response vehicles. 

This is the kind of tactical (test-it-first) to permanent approach we advocate for in communities to break down biases and nudge residents beyond status quo toward a healthier, more resilient future. I look forward to seeing how this conversion impacts the health, safety, and welfare of those living near these streets. Bravo, Seattle! - Kevin

Five Ways Cities Can Make More Public Space, Fast (Citylab)

Streets aren't the only places cities are looking to convert to more public space. This article highlights five other areas you might look to. Two in particular that I like are parking lots and golf courses. The reason these two in particular jumped out to me is fiscal productivity, or lack thereof. Parking lots and golf courses take up a large amount of land in our cities and generate very little in revenues for cities, making them two of the larger liabilities on a city's balance sheet. A high ROI strategy to help close your city's resource gap is to look into converting these areas into public parks and temporary uses to better serve residents in the near term, and eventually redeveloping them in a manner that generates more tax base for the city. – Kevin

Nine lessons for putting ‘Strong Towns’ principles into practice

This is a critical time for cities as you try to sort out how to keep things running with limited resources in the near term while also navigating a path forward to emerge stronger. Going back to the way things were should not be on the table. Residents, local businesses, and future generations deserve and need something better that is more fiscally sustainable, socially inclusive, and environmentally resilient. Our crew at Verdunity believes this transition begins with education about the resource gap, building a culture of collaboration and trust with your community, and then working incrementally to nudge things beyond the status quo. I wrote this post a while ago to summarize a few takeaways from our work helping cities down this path, and thought it was worth dusting off to share again. – Kevin

Do you enjoy these weekly roundups? (Why wouldn’t you?) You can get them sent straight to your email inbox every Friday, if you’re into that.

How Life in Our Cities Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic (Foreign Policy)

The market is definitely saturated with hot takes on the “future of cities” right now. Here’s an article that collects predictions from twelve “experts” about what life after the coronavirus looks like. Do we know, exactly? No. Is it interesting and important to think about? Absolutely! – Ryan

Texas Needs More Money to Help Small Businesses. TxDOT Has It. (Strong Towns)

Our friend Patrick Kennedy had a piece in Strong Towns this week contrasting the widespread need for small business assistance with the overwhelming amount of money ($15 billion!) that the Texas Department of Transportation plans to throw away just on highway widening in Houston and Austin. “Is now a good time for the state to waste nearly $15 billion of taxpayers’ money when nearly every business in the state is under threat of insolvency, when more than a million Texans have filed for unemployment, and many more millions may not be able to make their next rent or mortgage payment?” The answer, as he goes on to argue is, uh, no. – Jordan

Language barriers, absence of bank loans leave Latino small-business owners struggling (Texas Tribune)

Excellent story from Juan Pablo Garnham today on the situation many Texas Latino small business owners are facing during coronavirus. Texas has over 700,000 Latino-owned businesses, and many face an even more uphill battle to survive given language barriers and difficulty accessing bank loans. This crisis heightens the disparity in how different members of society are treated, whether intentionally or not—a disparity that, of course, was there long before the pandemic made its way to North America. – Jordan

Here's the standard disclaimer: We always encourage our team members to freely share their thoughts and opinions, both in these newsletters and elsewhere. Given that, opinions expressed by any one member do not necessarily represent the views of the company as a whole.

Want to learn more about how fiscal analysis can help you make your city stronger financially?

We created a new sister website showcasing how we use math, maps, and money to help cities communicate your resource gap and explore ways to increase tax revenue and improve service efficiency without necessarily raising taxes.

Have a look! →

Hey, friends in local government:

Have thoughts on any of the links above? Think we missed something essential? We’re discussing these topics and more over on our brand-new online community, exclusively for local government employees.* Sign up for the Community Cultivators Network and join the discussion!

* The network is currently only for those wonderful folks out there who work in local government. If you’re not currently working for a city, town, or county, we still love you (and are sure many of you would add value to the community), but we want to keep our commitment to making this a community focused specifically on our friends working in local government. Thanks for understanding!