A Strong Towns Voice in State Government: Danny Lapin
It’s Member Week, and that means we’re celebrating the amazing work of Strong Towns members like Danny Lapin. Support their efforts by becoming a member today!
It’s easy to imagine a state agency office as a place where ideas go to get smoothed out, standardized, and stamped. But not when Danny Lapin is in the room.
Danny, a certified planner with the New York State Department of of Planning, Development, and Community Infrastructure, is quietly shifting the conversation around how revitalization happens in struggling communities. And his inspiration? Strong Towns.
“I credit Strong Towns as the main driver behind my professional advancement,” Danny says. He’s been a longtime listener of the Strong Towns Podcast and a student of the Strong Towns message. But more than that, he’s a living example of what it looks like to carry that message into the machinery of government—and change it from the inside.
The Right Work, the Right Way
From his post in Oneonta, New York, Danny plays a role in statewide programs like the Downtown Revitalization Initiative and Brownfield Opportunity Area program—two efforts aimed at reimagining and reinvesting in the main streets of New York’s cities and towns. It’s the kind of work that could easily default to top-down solutions: grant applications, boilerplate plans, consultant-led engagement, and hundreds of pages of glossy PDFs.
But Danny has seen firsthand how ineffective that model can be. Too many communities are handed a stack of plans that gather dust, crafted by consultants who copy and paste content from one town to the next with only minor tweaks. Danny recalls one moment when he pushed back:
“I literally found another community’s name in the plan they submitted. So I read from both documents—one supposedly for a New York town and one from out of state—side by side, aloud. Same words. Same ideas. It was embarrassing. And I told them: ‘You can do better.’”
It’s not about shaming professionals, he says, but about raising the bar. “We owe these communities our best, not our templates.”
Start Local, Stay Local
Danny champions a different approach—one rooted in the Strong Towns mindset of bottom-up change. He supports community design charrettes that actually happen in the places they’re meant to serve. He prioritizes engagement with local decision-makers who don’t wear suits or sit in offices, but who gather in coffee shops, walk their main streets, and remember what those blocks used to hold: a church, a pharmacy, a union hall, a grocery store.
He listens to the people who see where the town has frayed—and who have ideas about how to stitch it back together.
In short, Danny is doing exactly what Strong Towns advocates for: helping cities take that first small step. Not a grand vision imposed from the outside, but a humble nudge that builds momentum.
A Fresh Kind of Expert
Danny is proof that technical expertise and Strong Towns thinking aren’t at odds—they’re a powerful combination. Planners, engineers, and agency staff have long been taught to solve problems from the top down. But Danny is part of a new generation of professionals working within the system to change the system.
His work is making space for communities to experiment, learn, and grow. It’s not always flashy. But it’s real. It’s lasting. And it starts where all strong towns do: with people who care enough to notice, to listen, and to do something today.
Meet other officials and advocates who are bringing the Strong Towns message to their places. Join us for a four-hour livestream tour of North America on Wednesday, April 30, from 1-5 p.m. CDT.
If you’d like to support the work of local officials like Danny, become a member of Strong Towns today!
Strong Towns is helping local leaders, technical professionals and involved residents across North America make their communities more prosperous and financially resilient.
This movement needs you. Become a member today.