The Drip Effect: A Small Change Can Be Powerful, Too
A few weeks ago, I piled into a car with two girlfriends from church. We strapped my son Levi into his car seat and headed for I-35. We were on our way to see a friend and her family who had just returned to Texas from Missouri and were getting settled in San Antonio. With three little kids on her hands and a living room full of boxes needing unpacking, we had heartily agreed to come down and offer help for the day.
The trunk was full of gifts: a massive bouquet of sunflowers, a dozen Nightlight donuts, a pot of jambalaya and a bag of hand-me-down clothing from one toddler-mom to another.
We set out shortly after eight and it wasn’t long before we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic due to four car accidents. From my perch in the backseat, my mind mulled on usual thoughts — lamenting the tragedy that car accidents are accepted as “normal,” daydreaming of being able to make trips like these via train, mulling on the realities of induced demand, and fuming at the prospect of even wider highways all over Texas thanks to the Department of Transportation’s inability to imagine any other way to move people around this massive state.
A few years ago, these are the kinds of thoughts and commentary that I would have shared spontaneously from the back seat, but I’ve learned there’s an art to talking about cities around friends. It’s often better to wait for the right moment, rather than breaking into spontaneous lectures about urban design and Strong Towns core campaigns. I would wait and, in the meantime, would focus on entertaining my son, handing snacks up to my friends in the front and admiring the wildflowers lining the back roads we had chosen to avoid traffic.
A few hours later, we showed up at our friend’s house. Out came the donuts and the flowers; around went tight hugs. Out came the baby, the jambalaya, the hand-me-downs. We filed into the house and stood shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, eager and ready for instructions. For hours, we blazed through box after box of kitchenware, completing in a few hours what would have easily taken a single person a few days. Before leaving, we made a quick pasta dish and assembled a sandbox, much to the delight of their three-year-old son.
As we were wrapping up, in the middle of putting away dishes and browning ground beef, my friend looked at me and smiled. “You know, Tiffany,” she said. “I was determined to find a walkable neighborhood.”
The grassroots urbanism world is a big one. We use big words and phrases that need explaining like “induced demand” or “missing middle housing;” we advocate for big changes; we start big movements and dream big dreams. Yes, much of it is grassroots, but some of it is just plain audacious and impressive. I get to hear so many of these stories as host of the Bottom Up Revolution and I’m always impressed. But I know that it’s easy to feel like if you’re not doing something big, then maybe you’re not doing anything worthwhile.
It’s natural to want to be part of the big waves of change, part of impressive campaigns and initiatives. But standing in that kitchen hearing my friend talk about her neighborhood and how she had prioritized walkability, I was reminded that meaningful change can also happen by constantly sharing our love for thriving cities with our friends in the course of ordinary life. I call this "the drip effect” because it’s not a big wave. It’s not extraordinary. There’s no campaign or initiative. There’s simply a willingness to do what friends do — share what you love with people around you. Who knows what you might inspire?
This is not the first time a friend has told me something like this. Another friend recently moved to a different neighborhood in Dallas and shared how being within walking distance of a coffee shop or grocery store was at the top of their list because of our conversations, and how they can no longer look at pickup trucks without thinking about me (I’m proud of this). Another friend texted me from Greece this summer sharing how she had been able to walk to local markets, the park, and the neighborhood plaza and even was able to leave her kids in the apartment and go buy milk…because there was a small bodega-style shop right underneath their Airbnb. “We spent a while talking about urban stuff this evening. You’ve changed us forever :)”
Messages like these fill me with so much joy. I love seeing my friends begin to look at their city differently, with more awareness and greater ability to interpret what they’re seeing. Sure, these are not “waves” of change; they are droplets. The Strong Towns community is full of people and projects that got started because someone somewhere said something about the way our cities could be better. Maybe that “someone saying something” is you. Maybe it’s just you sharing a little observation; maybe it’s you daydreaming aloud about how nice it would be to ride a train; maybe it’s a conversation over coffee about how much you long for our streets to be safer; or maybe it's sharing an article about a pressing issue and inviting discussion from friends.
You never know where these conversations could go, how they could inspire someone to live life a little differently or just to look at the world differently. When admiring Freeway Fighters or incremental developers or people who can bring Strong Towns to their cities as council members, it’s easy to feel discouraged if you’re not in a life stage to do something equally “big.”
If that’s you, I’d like to offer a rephrased Proverb: “Do not despise the days of small droplets.” It might be all you can do for now, but keep talking, my friends. Be that leaky urbanism faucet in your friend group. Who knows what seeds of change those droplets might water?
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.