A Love That Helps Your Place Live Up To Its Full Potential
A screenshot of the Nice, California Crash Analysis Studio held in February 2024. Strong Towns member Danny Wind is walking participants through the site of the crash.
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“Observe where there is a struggle. What’s the next smallest thing you can do to address that struggle? Do that thing. Do it right now.” This paraphrase of Strong Towns’ four-step approach to public investment might as well be etched on Danny Wind’s workbench.
Wind lives in Lakeport, California—a small town hugging the west shore of Clear Lake, ringed by mountains and steeped in nostalgia. They grew up in the area. And when they returned years later, they brought with them a restless kind of love. The kind that doesn’t just admire a place, but insists on helping it live up to its potential.
With much of the town’s development crystallizing in the second half of the 20th century, the town faced its fair share of urban planning challenges. On a Zoom call, Wind shared their screen and took me on a virtual walking tour of these trouble spots. There were awkwardly placed, unsheltered bus stops. Stop lines misaligned with crosswalks and traffic lights. And places where there simply should be a crosswalk—where people naturally want to cross—but there isn’t one.
As we clicked down the street in Google Maps, Wind pointed out the locations they’ve flagged to local leaders. These aren’t always the kinds of issues that jump out in a traffic study. They’re subtle. Mundane. These are the places that rarely attract notice—until there’s a crash, or a near-miss. And even then, their role in the incident often goes unexamined. That bothered Wind. So they started asking: how do we fix this?
To be sure, lots of California towns, Lakeport included, have pledged to end traffic deaths altogether. But the actual fixes usually live on distant timelines, waiting for massive grants and million-dollar redesigns. Wind had a different idea: why not work toward the long-term vision and act in the short term? Acting now doesn’t mean we’re copping out of the bigger vision, they told me. It means we’re preventing crashes in the meantime. “When you only build things to a completed state, they’re very rigid and inflexible,” they explained. They knew that when you only build for a perfect final product, you risk building systems too rigid to adapt—and too slow to save lives.
Like many local advocates, they found inspiration in the stories of “guerilla urbanists”—residents who take street safety into their own hands. They’d read about advocates in Denton, Texas, who installed benches at bus stops overnight, fed up with the lack of seating. They were struck by the story of Jon Jon Wesolowski in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who—after seeing a broken guardrail on a highway overpass—decided to install a makeshift barrier himself. Wesolowski had hesitated at first, worried about liability. But then he had what he called a revelation: “From this moment forward, you already are liable.” If he could do something, he figured, he should.
As epic as bench-bombing in the middle of the night sounded, Wind had to ask: was that really the next smallest step in Lakeport?
So instead of grabbing a toolkit in the dead of night, they showed up. First to public meetings. Then to local committees. A comment here. A suggestion there. Following the advice of a Strong Towns Local Conversation, Wind began searching for openings on local transportation and land-use committees. "I’m not actually on the Lakeport Economic Development Committee," they laughed, "but I just attend and bug them about actually getting serious about housing."
Over time, quiet persistence paid off. City staff began to recognize Wind—not as a nuisance, but as an ally. Someone who cared enough to stick around.
Eventually, Wind brought together community members and officials to conduct a Crash Analysis Studio in the nearby town of Nice. The goal: To examine a crash on Highway 20—and to treat it not as a fluke, but as a clue–a symptom of a system that had gone wrong, a signal that this crash was not an accident, but a predictable outcome of flawed design.
The Studio pulled in local officials, residents, and professionals. It drew media coverage. And ultimately, it reinforced Wind’s reputation as someone who knows their stuff, even if their resume doesn’t read like a planner’s. It showed that you don't need a title to make an impact. You just need to start—right where you are.
The day you plant the seed
Wind not only exemplifies the four-step methodology, they are also a living reminder that the day you plant the seed is not the day you bear the fruit, that the smallest step today can lead to seismic shifts years down the line.
When they told me that their advocacy has not only begun shaping the conversation in and around Lakeport but also landed them a contract with Blue Zones, I blurted out my congratulations before Wind even finished their sentence. It was, among many things, a testament to their persistence.
Back in December 2024, Wind volunteered with the local Blue Zones chapter doing traffic counts. But by that point, Wind was already on their radar. Months of just showing up had built something stronger than a résumé: trust. So when the Blue Zones team needed someone with expertise in the built environment, choosing Wind was a no-brainer.
“They said, ‘Hey, you seem to really know a lot about this stuff,’” Wind recalled. After a few conversations, they offered Wind a part-time contract. The work would build directly on what Wind was already doing: collecting traffic and speed data, flagging infrastructure gaps, and observing pedestrian patterns.
“While engineers and policymakers bring important technical expertise, the most reliable experts of a neighborhood are the people who live there.”
In many ways, Wind’s story reminds me of a key argument in Chuck Marohn’s “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.” Marohn emphasizes that, while engineers and policymakers bring important technical expertise, the most reliable experts of a neighborhood are the people who live there. They walk the streets in all seasons. They see the near-misses. They live the consequences. They witness everything that can go unnoticed in brief site visits. They possess a deep, lived knowledge that makes all the difference between a plan that looks good on paper and a street that actually works for the people who use it.
More than just being observant, what stood out about Wind was humility, and a willingness to keep learning.
Even looking back on the Crash Analysis Studio they helped pioneer—one of the 21 Studios spotlighted in Beyond Blame: How Cities Can Learn from Crashes to Create Safer Streets Today—Wind is quick to see the lessons learned. They’re proud of the work, but reflective too. Highway 20, the focus of that Studio, is without question a dangerous corridor. But in the months since the Studio, conversations with Strong Towns staff and other members have helped them refine a strategy for future efforts.
Danny Wind walking participants through Nice, California during the Crash Analysis Studio.
For one, Highway 20 isn’t locally owned—a detail that made it harder to translate the Studio’s momentum into local action. And while the Studio in Nice made a powerful statement, Wind now sees that organizing directly in Lakeport, their own hometown, might have built stronger, deeper roots. None of this slowed Wind down. If anything, it sharpened their approach.
I’ve spotted Wind time and again at Strong Towns events: the member-exclusive Ask-Me-Anything sessions, various Crash Analysis Studios, even the livestream of the latest Strongest Town Contest—despite their own city not being in the finals. They take advantage of all the resources a Strong Towns membership offers. And because of it, inside of Strong Towns, Wind is somewhat of a folk-hero–someone the team has witnessed mature from a concerned resident into a seasoned advocate.
In a world that often rewards loudness, Wind is a reminder of the power of quiet consistency. They act, they learn, they return. That quiet consistency is what moves the needle, in their community and even in their own life.
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