The Town That Refused

Asheville, North Carolina, is a city that says it prohibits new billboards — and still has billboards. The city's own explanation is that any new billboard face comes from a trade: to put one up, some…

Holbrook, Massachusetts, is a town of about eleven thousand people twenty miles south of Boston, and it still runs its own government the old way: a five-member select board, a town administrator who…

Barnstable, Massachusetts, sits on the south side of Cape Cod, looking out toward Nantucket Sound. This episode follows the town's long challenge to Cape Wind, a proposed offshore wind farm that would…

Sedona is famous for red rock, tourism, and views that seem almost too carefully composed. It has also become a test case for a newer kind of visitor economy: homes rented for fewer than 30 consecutiv…

Sausalito is often pictured as a town of houseboats, artists, and improvised waterfront life. For decades, Richardson Bay also held a less formal community: people living aboard vessels anchored outsi…

Carmel, Indiana, spent nearly three decades replacing ordinary traffic lights and four-way stops with roundabouts. The change began with a few experiments in the mid-1990s and grew into a citywide net…

This episode explores “The town that kept the mountains in the room: Ouray, Colorado” in a Gentle documentary narration style. It is presented as a solo narration, and the source list lets you revisit…

Beach, North Dakota, is the kind of place that makes the highway map feel a little too confident. This episode follows a prairie county-seat town near the Montana line as it faced the ordinary promise…

Walk down Pearl Street in Boulder today and the view west is almost disorienting in its clarity. Brick storefronts, cottonwood trees, and then — right there, filling the horizon — the Flatirons. Those…

There's copper stain on the canyon walls around Bisbee, Arizona — great rust-orange streaks bleeding down the limestone, visible from the highway before you even know the town is there. Then you come…

There's a resort town in northern Vermont — population around five thousand year-round — where you won't find a single golden arch, no national coffee chain, no big-box anything on the main street. Th…

On May 4, 2007, an EF5 tornado — winds over two hundred miles per hour, a mile and a half wide — moved directly through Greensburg, Kansas, and destroyed roughly 95% of the town. Fourteen hundred peop…