Bottom-Up Shorts: How State Governments Can Foster Strong Towns
Danny Lapin is a revitalization specialist with the New York State Department of State. He and Norm discuss the ways that New York state is encouraging bottom-up community development, as well as Danny’s strategies for getting buy-in from communities that are wary of state programs or intervention.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06
Welcome to bottom up shorts. I'm Norm of strong towns, and after meeting with 1000s of strong towns members, I often think I've got to tell you about so and so, and that's the vision of this bottom up short episode as well. I had the privilege of meeting with Danny Lepin, who is a resident of Oneonta New York, but also a revitalization specialist working with the New York State Department of State, Office of Planning, development and community infrastructure. He's one of the technical professionals who is taking strong town's ideas into the workplace and having influential conversations with people within the various communities that he serves, as well as continuing to influence and guide various types of policy discussions that are happening throughout New York State and also online, and then other places as well. And so I'm so glad that Danny was able to join us on bottom up shorts. And Danny, can you introduce the way that strong town's ideas has sort of percolated in your own thinking about your work as a revitalization specialist and as a technical professional within this field?
Danny Lapin 1:03
Sure, Norm. First of all, thank you, and thanks strong towns for having me on it's an incredible honor to be a part of this amazing movement to create strong towns, not only in America, but beyond in your neck of the woods up in Vancouver. So strong towns, the message itself came to the state slowly. New York State is known to be a slow adopter, sometimes, but when we think of our communities and how they've changed since urban renewal in the 50s and de industrialization and globalization in the 90s and 2000s we realized that top down centralized planning doesn't necessarily achieve the outcomes that we want more often, communities know what works for them the best they've been around, operating businesses, purchasing homes, raising their families in these small towns, villages and cities all throughout the state, and they were really crying for a bottom up approach to community development. So in 2016 former Governor Andrew Cuomo created what's called the downtown revitalization initiative to facilitate this bottom up planning approach whereby communities pick and choose a slate of projects to hopefully revitalize their downtowns, and the state comes in and facilitates that same bottom up planning process to allow the community to realize their desired objectives. We realize that's not enough. We so often we see that restrictive zoning codes industrialized corridors are kind of prohibiting the type of development that we want to see, even through the DRI so we have two other programs that we work on to help kind of break the barriers around smart growth planning. One is called, by virtue, Smart Growth community planning, and the other is called our brownfield opportunity area program. So all three of these planning programs still required a message that resonated with the community when we talk about complex planning terminology, especially around zoning, especially around community development, doesn't really stick with people more often what people want is a quick fix to the areas in which they struggle the most, right? That's kind of where the strong town message comes in. You observe where people are struggling. You observe the next smallest thing that can be done to alleviate that struggle. You notice the next thing, and then you kind of keep repeating that process over and over, and eventually you have a strong, robust plan. And when we started talking about that, that kind of message really stuck. And, you know, the strong towns measure started to spread. You know, how do we get these, you know, conservative communities who traditionally distrust government to adopt smart growth planning practices in strong town. John's message around fiscal resilience, incremental development and bottom up change really started to resonate, and it kind of took off from there. And so in my job, what we tried to do is we tried to institutionalize these practices and approaches and case studies into the various guidance materials we create. We are able to design grant materials and programmatic requirements and guidance that embodies this message, where we really push that bottom up, incremental message, and that's kind of how strong towns made its way into what we do at the Office of Planning, development and community infrastructure.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 4:15
Yeah, and that word revitalization, I think, is tied in with the idea of resilience and building the capacity for long term prosperity. And you know, one of the things that we talk about at strong towns is that, in many respects, we've lost sight of what it takes to build lasting prosperity in our communities. And we see communities that are tenaciously clinging to parking mandates and yet simultaneously grappling with the fact that there's very little investment occurring on their main streets or in spaces where Otherwise there might be that first increment of change occurring. How would you say that you are able to help coach or guide some of the communities? And do you have any suggestions of things that people could be advocating in their own places?
Danny Lapin 4:52
Sure. So my, one of my favorite things to do in a community is to go on like a tour, walk around. Uh, the historic neighborhoods, especially in the northeast, we're blessed to have many, many historic neighborhoods. But like, walk around and have people reminisce about what used to be there, traditionally, you'll see like a former neighborhood Cafe that's boarded up and is vacant because the zoning code doesn't allow you to build it, because they don't allow mix of uses in that zone, or maybe they don't have enough parking spaces to meet a parking mandate. And you say, Well, gee, you know, remember when that market used to be operational? Wouldn't it be nice if we could do something small to get it back on the market? And they're like, yeah, that'd be great. And I said, Well, did you know your parking requirements prohibit anyone from redeveloping that space without a variance? And people say, Oh, I didn't know that. You know. Maybe we should, you know, adjust our parking minimums, you know. And then also, another thing to do is to say, hey, you know, there's a lot of red tape making our communities close to business. And these are small surgical changes that allow, you know, the community to remember what it used to be and take advantage of what it made it strong in the first place. You know, many of our communities have these dense pre car development pattern, development patterns that have persisted for hundreds of years, and they move away from it, you know, largely due to the dominance of the automobile. But then they forget what they lost. And our programs allow them to remember their history and think about what they could do and see just how small of a change they could implement to achieve, again, that desired outcome of mixed use neighborhoods.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 6:28
Yeah, and can you speak to a little bit of the culture, sort of, of the state agency that you're in, and maybe some of the things that make it distinctive? Because if you say, Hey, I'm here from the government, and I intend to help that can be immediately met with a lot of resistance, or, you know, some level of concern about what is going to come from your mouth. But I think that there's an interesting way in which you're describing like this, this pivoting or moving away from, you know, the previous groups that would have imposed urban renewal schemes on entire communities, or sort of copied and pasted mandates onto various communities. And yet, I sense that in your description that you're not just working from the big city, sort of sending missives out to all of these places, but you're actually saying, let's work in these places. Let's walk the streets. What does that policy shift and sort of culture shift look like?
Danny Lapin 7:17
Well, I mean, the first thing it starts with is hiring people who live and work in the region. So our agency has been particularly intentional about hiring people who have established relationships in the community. It's not just relationships with the big business owners or big economic development agencies. It's the relationships with your local town supervisors, your local highway departments, the people who gather regularly at the coffee shop. I mean, they see, you know, me with my Rottweiler walking around, and they can feel like I can be approachable. And it starts with building trust. And you know, across our 23 member team, you know, each person in our unit and in our agency kind of comes from their respective regions and communities, and they really strive to, you know, have those intentional, organic relationships with with people. And it takes time, you know, a lot of the times, you know, it starts a little bit of self deprecation, joking about being a government worker and facilitating a bureaucratic planning process, everyone's like, hahaha. But more often, you know, we go to a community, we say, hey, you know, there's something you really want to work on. How can we build trust? How can we facilitate a vision for your community that you want. You know we're here to kind of work for you. You pay our salary. You are our boss. So rather than saying we're the state and we're going to tell you what time it is or how you're going to do it, we say, hey, look you as a taxpayer, pay our salary. We're here to invest in your community and support your planning process, and we work for you, and you're our boss. So let's figure out how to kind of create a strong community from the bottom up, and a lot of that starts with building kind of wealth and prosperity at the community level. You know, spending time working with business owners to develop, you know, assist with grant applications, connecting people with other funding agencies. You know, always trying to find a path to Yes, rather than a straight up yes or no answer, which is often the case in government, our approach has always been, there's a path to Yes, we just have to look hard to find it.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:07
And in the strong towns article sort of archives, we have a great a couple of pieces on the chaotic but smart approach versus the orderly but dumb approach. And I think you've touched on some of those challenges that governments can become very, you know, prescriptive. And for everything, there's a form, and there's overlaying policy, sort of out goals and outcomes and the consequences that can become quite stifling. It sounds now, I know I'm painting a pretty bleak portrait, and I know there's a lot of effort to say, like we can be nimble and responsive, but what does that look like for you? Places where bottom up, changes being cultivated. How are you, I guess, some of the concrete things that you've done to make that happen? Sure.
Danny Lapin 9:46
So I think, like, you know, our, you know, dri program, and other, you know, brownfields programs, even our Smart Growth credit planning program, they there are some kind of rigid guidelines, but I like to think of us as more of quarterback. X to channel the, you know, organic chaos that comes out of a bottom up approach and figure out a way to kind of shape the momentum generated the community scale and fit it into our program. You know, so often the communities feel frustrated when they're the ones who have to fit, you know, their projects or their ideas into our programs. And my role as a revitalization specialist is to help these communities, like, structure their projects and their ideas in a way that kind of matches our goal, so that way we can be partners, you know, I don't, I don't want them to have the burden of having to comply with a regulatory process while trying to, you know, work 60 hours a week at their business while simultaneously having to kind of monitor a whole slew of developments at the national and global scale, you know, with their supply chains and stuff. So my goal is to kind of make that process as easy as possible. And that's kind of how I think the strong towns message really kind of resonates within the state, is we have this ability to kind of cultivate, to be a gardener, of community led revitalization, right? It's not that we're causing it. It's more that we come in and cultivate, cultivate it, create a positive environment, and also build the relationships and rebuild the trust that has been broken between the government and, you know, the, you know, folks at the village and town and county scale. Yeah.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 11:11
And then how did you become a not only a revitalization specialist, but also a strong towns member? So
Danny Lapin 11:18
I became a strong towns member by listening to Chuck's podcast, you know, he always had a way of phrasing what I was thinking in a more eloquent and direct way. You know, for me, it's, you know, statements full of planning jargon. And people are like, What are you even saying? And if you're Chuck, he said, Look, I just want your community to build prosperity, and wants you guys to do well, and I want you guys to change organically. But what really got me into strong Towns was they were the articles on land value tax. Upstate New York is part of the Rust Belt along the Erie Canal, and we so often see on underutilized and vacant properties. And I was always wondering, why do people keep those vacant? What are the motivating factors behind the lack of investment in, you know, what used to be a globally recognized industrial corridor, and so often it's the regressive kind of format of our tax policy, you know, not only at the state level, but at the national level. And then kind of, you know, how I came about in my work is I work for an environmental nonprofit. I did a lot of bottom up advocacy on behalf of citizens and working with towns and villages, you know, of like 1000 people or less, and I always found that the most resilient and well based, well founded adoption of our environmental message was with a bottom up planning process where we gave communities the agency to decide how they wanted to plan for their future, and facilitated that process, rather than dictating it to them. And more and more, I just see, you know, the message in today's politically tenuous times of you know, just wealth and prosperity resonating across party boundaries. And I think that the strong towns message could be a really effective bridge, especially when our country and is more divided than ever before.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 13:06
Yeah, really appreciate that, and especially focusing more people around a local vision of everyone being able to live a good life in a prospering place. And maybe that rate prompts my third question that I always like to ask, which is, what gives you hope in your work,
Danny Lapin 13:21
um, you know, I think I, you know, I like to use my own county as an example. And so what gives me hope is that when I was a county legislator, I was a county legislator for two terms in Otsego County, and years ago, one of my good friends was on the in the Conservative Party really didn't believe in humanity's role in climate, but she said she was open to listening to my perspective. And we had several, you know, long conversations at the farmers market in Oneonta on Saturdays and in, you know, county legislature meetings. And eventually, we were able to share enough of our perspectives to agree that climate was an immediate problem and we needed to address it. We didn't, you know, agree on the kind of causal factors behind it, but we agreed that, you know, our farmers and our communities need to be resilient. They need to be prepared for climate change. And that just really gave me hope, because it's a sign of people from two different parties, two different belief systems, two different backgrounds, coming together and being able to rationally discuss an issue, have face to face conversations and incrementally arrive at a consensus. And you know, to her testament, my colleague, you know, became the co chair of our county's energy Task Force. She spearheaded our efforts to develop, you know, county wide agricultural economic development plan, and she's really leaned into her role as an environmental protector from the right. And, you know, I have a lot of respect for that, and that's what really gives me hope, because if more and more of us have these face to face conversations, we realize that we're not so different after all. Yeah,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:56
I often feel like unlikely alliances and local alliances. Are virtually the same thing. They're synonyms, right? There can be times where you think, hey, we may not have as much in common in terms of, sort of our macro views of everything, but here we are shoulder to shoulder taking on this work. And I just think, Danny, you've touched on so many things that really capture the spirit that strong towns is seeking to establish in more and more places. And so if you love what you heard, definitely check out Danny on LinkedIn. Follow him there. And also continue to explore the various things that their department is doing to seek to revitalize more and more communities, particularly in areas where investment is scarce and the needs are present. And also, if you're listening to this, go and take a look in your community. Take a walk. Look at the older buildings. Look at the things that are boarded up. Identify the spaces where just a little bit of love and more energy more attention will actually reap some significant changes with it. Thanks for listening. Take care and take care of your places.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Danny Lapin (LinkedIn)
Read more about Danny: “A Strong Towns Voice in State Government”
Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn).
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