Anyone Can Complain, but Fewer Show Up With Paint

An HOA president came to one of our Local Conversation meetings this summer with a problem that got our group excited. She already had city approval for a traffic-calming project on her suburban neighborhood street in east Fayetteville, Arkansas. Thirty feet curb to curb, no parking, long sightlines, and drivers treating it as a place to zoom through. She had done the paperwork, but not the work itself, and she had no template for how. She was nervous about it, reasonably so. She wanted the thing to work and she wanted it to look good.

That turns out to be the common case here. According to the City of Fayetteville, there are more than 30 approved tactical urbanism projects sitting at City Hall. This means somebody walked each one through the city, got the sign-off, and then never got to actually doing the work. Thirty-plus permission slips just waiting on volunteers! You can imagine how our Local Conversation reacted to that. Fayetteville's mobility coordinator, who is genuinely good at this and friendly with our LC, made the introduction to the HOA.

So this past weekend, Fayetteville Strong and the HOA built it. Over a dozen of us turned out on a hot Arkansas Saturday morning, some Local Conversation members, some neighbors. We painted striped bump-outs to pinch the entry (now ~17 feet), two planters with reflective tape, flexible delineator posts, and adhesive ground reflectors. It is nothing fancy, but it helps. The street now tells drivers what it is, which is a neighborhood street, and they slow down accordingly. As we worked, I did get a chuckle watching cars come around the corner too fast and seeing the nose dip as the driver tapped the brakes when they saw our setup.

There are two things I wanted to mention that surprised me.

The first was the gratitude, and how much of it there was. People stopped on their walks or stopped their cars to thank us. Even the mailman pulled his truck over, said thank you, and told us the neighborhood “really needed” this. We got some eye rolls, too, mostly from drivers in nice, luxury cars who had just lost their speedy route through. But the "thank you" crowd outnumbered the eye rolls by a mile.

The second surprised me more. A good number of the HOA volunteers had no idea who Fayetteville Strong was. So we told them while we worked, and those were the most productive conversations with Fayetteville residents I have had about this movement all year.

I have been chewing on that all weekend. Anyone can show up to a city meeting and complain. I do it regularly and I intend to keep doing it, but let us be honest about the price: a few minutes and the adrenaline of speaking in public. Sweat equity is a different currency. It costs a Saturday morning, a sunburn, and a willingness to do manual labor in public on a street that is not yours. It is clear to me that neighbors can tell the difference immediately. I would bet staff and elected officials can, too. Do this once and you stop being the group that objects and become the group that delivers. There is no way to write your way into that, and no way to get there in three minutes at a podium. You get there by showing up and doing the work when a neighborhood asks.

My advice from this experience: go find the people in your city who are already asking for help. Somebody has a street they have given up on, and a folder somewhere with the approvals already in it. Do the next smallest thing that makes their place a little stronger and a little more cared for. You might be surprised by the allies you’ll make along the way.