What If Urban Public Officials Cared About Cities?

Thoughts on Jersey City's utterly normal and vanishingly rare reforms

Last year, at the back-to-back Strong Towns/Congress for the New Urbanism conference I attended, I made particular note of one of the Strong Towns presentations. The talk was by Barkha Patel, now the director of infrastructure for Jersey City, who began in the city government as a lower level planner.

She gave a long and very detailed talk on bottom-up/i…