Norm Van Eeden Petersman 00:00

Hello and welcome to this Bottom-Up Short. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and every day I get to connect with Strong Towns members that are doing remarkable things in their community. Often, they are doing so from pretty humble origins, taking note of things that are going on in their community and trying to improve it, step by step by step, in tandem with other people that gradually come along to assist in the work, or maybe have started that work. Then we see strong towns and strong citizens really emerge to say, "I want to be part of this. I want to improve my place, and I want to build lasting prosperity where we live." That prosperity involves the whole person, yes, including financial prosperity, but that deeper sense of what it is for a person to be able to thrive and prosper in a community. My guest today, who is deeply passionate about these things, is Tyler Moldovan. He is a resident of Port Huron, Michigan, and -- I love this -- he's a self-described human pocket knife. By day, he works for Blue Water Area Transit as a bus driver, and at night, he takes on all sorts of other projects as an urbanist and an organizer, putting energy into making Port Huron and the Detroit region stronger, more connected places. Tyler serves on the board of directors for Port Huron Housing and the Port Huron museums, and he is the director of DDD Fest, which is a celebration of community art and ideas. Tyler, welcome to Bottom-Up Shorts.

Tyler Moldovan 01:33

Thank you so much for having me, Norm. I appreciate that.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 01:36

Can you just kick things off? I'm first of all, most interested, what is DDD Fest, and how did you become active in that? And what are some of the things that you're doing with that, as well as other projects in your community to build capacity and make your community stronger?

Tyler Moldovan 01:53

So DDD Fest is Desmond District Demons. It started off as shameless self-promotion for ourselves, me and my co-founder of the festival, because we're filmmakers, and we wanted a premier genre film festival here in Port Huron. And that's kind of how that started. We had been to a few film festivals around Michigan, around the Midwest, and said, "You know, I think that we could do something like that. We can really give a platform to these emerging artists, not just from Michigan, but also -- we've expanded over the years now to have -- this year, coming up next week, we're having 20 different countries all screened at our festival this year." And that's an awesome opportunity for the local Port Huron culture, as well as the Greater Michigan area, to experience things and see things that they have never seen before. It's a really great opportunity to get people together who share a love of genre film, because there really wasn't anything like this going on here in Port Huron when I first came up here. So I was really excited to provide an opportunity for folks to have a platform and then to just see things that they've -- if they're not filmmakers themselves -- see things that they may have never been able to see before.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 03:15

And as a bus driver, what do you see just on your routes? What do you see in your community? And what insight do you think that's brought you?

Tyler Moldovan 03:23

It's really interesting. I started this advocacy work probably three or four years before I started working at Blue Water Area Transit. And I honestly applied for the job out of spite, because after doing all of this advocacy work, I kept running into our fire marshal and the traffic safety committee at the City of Port Huron when I was advocating for safer streets and traffic calming and things like that. Because they would always say, "Well, our fire trucks are 10 and a half feet wide and they need to get down residential streets at optimal time for response times." And I was like, "Well, you know what, I'm going to apply for a job at Blue Water Area Transit to drive the largest municipal vehicles that we have on our streets, to show that you can do it around traffic calming measures. And that is just holistically good thing." Because I think the big thing in St. Clair County here is there is a conglomerate of governments, the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments. They put out -- they aggregate a lot of the data for the region. And St. Clair County, and specifically Port Huron, being the urban core of the county, has the highest crash rate out of any other county in Southeastern Michigan, and the highest fatality rate by almost double for people on bicycles. So that's the thing that always grounds me when I do this advocacy work: We need to be taking proactive measures to make our streets safer. So many times I would hear from the traffic safety committee that this street is by the books the safest street in the city. I'm like, "What does someone have to take one for the team and go and get hit by a car for traffic calming to happen across from a park or on a neighborhood street?" So a lot of that has grounded me to realize that we need to be taking proactive measures to reduce those traffic crashes here in the City of Port Huron, of course, across the Motor City region, right. Furthermore, as a bus driver now, I started riding our local transit system here just to get out of my own car and to see how the system functions here in Port Huron. It's great to have a city that only has 28,000 people, to have a fully functioning transit system with dial-a-ride services, as well as nine fixed routes. So that's something that's really remarkable. It's been here since the '70s, but it's furthered my commitment to creating safer streets for all because 14% of the population here in Port Huron do not have access to a personal automobile, according to the census data. And interacting and talking with all of these folks every single day at my job made me realize that we can do so much more for these people in terms of infrastructure and safety and just the bare minimum -- a sidewalk -- across a lot of our newer post-urban renewal developments that just didn't need a sidewalk on the north end of town.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 06:35

Those other types of things don't require specialized knowledge even to be able to install a sidewalk. We can look at our ancestors to figure out, "How did they manage it?" And then all of a sudden, we began to simply say, "Oh, maybe it's optional," and to realize, "No, those things are not optional. They are needed, and we can actually begin to act on that." And I'd love to hear you -- I love that connection between noticing what's occurring, kind of probing into some of the pat responses that you're given, and then driving towards a different way of approaching this. And I'd love to hear a little bit about you -- how did you become a person that doesn't take no for an answer? Maybe that's just a core part of your character, but actually reconciling that realization: I have a role to play here, and the door is actually open for me as I try to take that up.

Tyler Moldovan 07:21

I grew up in a very opinionated household. We practiced the debate culture in my house. And both my parents are very passionate about their ideas. My father is a longtime union member. My mother is a wonderful, stubborn German-Irish woman. So I think that that is just something that I innately have in me. I describe myself not only as a human pocket knife, but also as a local rabble-rouser here, because I do like to point out things that we could be doing differently in terms of just how it's been done for the past 60 years here in town. So I moved up to Port Huron out of circumstance, actually. I was living in Canada for some time, and after graduating, I left, and I lived in the Plymouth-Canton area in Metro Detroit, and that is the definition of suburban sprawl. And I grew up in the Detroit area, but I left in fourth grade. So when I came back to the same community, which is mostly suburban sprawl, it's like, "How do you make friends here? How do you get in contact with people? I'm not going to call up my buddy from fourth grade and be like, 'Hey, I'm back after 10 years. What's up? What are you up to?'" So being able to find those community spaces really sent me down kind of an isolated hole. And I moved to Port Huron out of circumstances. My brother had just purchased a house and offered me a place to live up here in Port Huron. And Port Huron is a city that has old, old bones. The home that I'm living in now was built in 1888. Most of the infrastructure, most of the houses are pre-1930 -- so before Euclidean zoning, and the setback regulations and all of that -- and with a proper, real downtown. Being in that urban environment, it was remarkable to me how quickly I was able to make friends just being out in the community. We had some viable third places that were still here. And when I first came to Port Huron, I didn't know anybody. This was a brand new community to me, other than my brother that I was living with, who is 14 years older than me, so I couldn't necessarily hang out with his friends. I mean, they're good people, but meeting people of like mind in an urban environment -- just being present in my community and in these third places downtown, and getting to know the shopkeepers and everything -- really made me set roots here and feel that sense of community. Even though that urban renewal did so much to so many cities across America, we still have those bones here in Port Huron. That's what keeps me hopeful.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 10:20

Yeah, I love that. And if you could give two pieces of advice to people that would want to get involved, maybe even become a local transit driver -- all of those things -- but just as you think of your work of just advocating within the community, what are some of the bits of advice either you've received and would love to pass along, or that just stand out to you as cornerstones of your approach?

Tyler Moldovan 10:44

My approach may be non-traditional to a lot of folks. I faced a lot of roadblocks here in Port Huron because I am presenting things that have just been done that way for the past 60 years. But don't let that deter you from pushing for things that actually can make a change in your community. There is a group of like-minded folks out there that you can make a change with. It took, I believe it was 413 people that made a major change to our local Michigan DOT Main Street -- MDOT controls our Main Street. City council, for so long, said that it was impossible. We couldn't do anything. It was MDOT's road. We couldn't do it, but 413 people sent emails to city council demanding that they take a stance on a major overhaul and redesign from a four-lane undivided road that bisects our downtown to -- maybe we can pedestrianize some parts of it, or add a cycle track through there. City council has that ability and that power. And even though at some points City council might be reluctant to take a political stance on something like that, getting your fellow constituents together and doing an email campaign and just telling them that this matters to you can actually move the bar quite a bit, even for folks who are reluctant to do so.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 12:24

Yeah, I love that, because even narrowing lanes and reallocating public spaces is us making better use of shared public resources. And when we have that sense and that conviction -- I'm a co-owner of this place, and it will either profit me or it will harm me -- and together with so many other people around me, to think of, "What does it mean for us to really flourish here and have a good life in this space?" As we come to the closing up -- if because we could go on for a long time, I love this, Tyler, and I definitely want to come ride on the bus with you in Port Huron soon -- what's something that gives you hope as you carry this on?

Tyler Moldovan 13:00

That's a tough question. I got a lot of bad news this week, so that's a tough question to answer in terms of local politics. But what gives me hope is being able to gather around those like-minded people, because a lot of times it can be isolating, even if you have friends. But being able to actually physically sit down with a lot of those people -- just yesterday, I sat on the porch with one of our city council members who is a good friend now, and half a dozen people from the community who want to see changes like this -- and for lack of a better word, just venting about the problems that we see and coming up with potential solutions -- it does give me hope that, despite a lot of pushback, that there could be light at the end of that tunnel: being able to make a change. And things have happened in the past, and things are the same as they always were up until they aren't. And luckily for me, I have been able to, along with a lot of other local conservation folks, be able to be that catalyst for change. But one person being able to do it sparks many other people seeing that it is a possibility to make change.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:13

Yeah, I love that. And Tyler, I'm encouraged by our conversation. And thank you so much for coming on Bottom-Up Shorts today.

Tyler Moldovan 14:23

Thank you so much. I appreciate it, man.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:26

Yeah, it's great. And as you listen at home or wherever you happen to be, if you're on a bus, be sure to thank your bus driver as you step off, because together, we can definitely do the work -- the hard work at times, but the rewarding work -- of improving our places and making them stronger, one step at a time, one path at a time, one noticed challenge in our community at a time, and then begin to do that work together. So keep going and take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non-profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.