Tiffany Owens Reed 00:06

Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany. It's my honor to host this show, and I hope you've been enjoying the conversations we've been having. It's crazy to think that the year is almost over and it's been another year of The Bottom-Up Revolution, which is always really exciting. One of the words we use at Strong Towns often is the word "productive." We want to see our cities become productive places, and we are fully aware that there are so many ways to talk about productivity, and there's so many ways to achieve it, and there's so many ways to measure that. Thinking economically, one way we can pursue greater productivity is to pay closer attention to our small businesses and how they're able to thrive and grow. The truth is, a thriving small business economy is absolutely critical to becoming a productive and resilient place. But sadly, in many cities, small businesses face enormous challenges, whether that's from supply chain issues and labor shortages to competition from internet-based businesses or AI. Add to that that many business owners also have to spend precious hours navigating complicated city rules and regulations that cost, complexity and uncertainty to their lives and in some cases threaten their very businesses. Well, today I'm joined by two guests who are working to change that through their work at the Institute for Justice Cities Work program, a regulatory consulting initiative committed to increasing economic opportunity and fostering entrepreneurship in cities across the country. They partner with cities to make it cheaper, faster and simpler to start a small business, all free of charge. So today, I'm joined by Zoe Tishaev. She is a city policy assistant at the Institute for Justice, where she works alongside community activists, small business owners and municipal leaders to advance economic justice and protect the right to earn an honest living through the Cities Work initiative. I'm also joined by Dylan DelliSanti. He serves as an activism associate at the Institute for Justice, where his research and organizing efforts are dedicated to empowering the plans and purposes of ordinary Americans. Zoe and Dylan, welcome to the Bottom-Up Revolution Podcast. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Zoe Tishaev 02:05

Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here.

Tiffany Owens Reed 02:09

All right, Zoe, I would love to start with you. Can you explain the Cities Work program and what exactly you all do?

Zoe Tishaev 02:15

Sure. Yeah. We are an initiative from the larger nonprofit, the Institute for Justice, that works collaboratively with cities to make it cheaper, faster and simpler to start a small business. We do that by looking through the process for how to start a small business through the perspective of the entrepreneur. So we're doing the process of permitting, zoning, inspections, talking to business owners and working through the process, and then working with city partners to streamline those efforts. And we work in cities across the country, and we do this completely free of charge.

Tiffany Owens Reed 02:44

That sounds very interesting and very much needed in most of our communities. I would like to take a bit of a personal pivot here, and I would like to know your stories. How did you all come to this line of work? What do you enjoy about it? Dylan, can I start with you?

Dylan DelliSanti 02:57

Sure. I've -- I guess I feel like I've taken some detours in my life, but I went and got a PhD in Economics at George Mason about six years ago, and my first detour was into bartending. After that, for a while, I was teaching adjunct courses. I taught at community college. I even got the chance to teach at the DC jail. But when I was in grad school, I was bartending part-time, and the owners of my bar were opening a new spot. They wanted someone to be a manager, and I was reading Anthony Bourdain at the time. So I thought this would be a fun thing to do. And I had gone straight from undergrad to grad school, so I thought, might as well try this out. And in that time, getting to work at a small business, and also living here in DC, seeing the way that our economy, our local economy, was sort of, I don't want to say decimated, but disrupted by COVID and just all the changes to the workforce, I had a growing interest in cities, how the economy of cities works. Started reading a lot of Jane Jacobs, and that eventually brought me to the Institute for Justice, which I had known about for many years. But then I saw the Cities Work initiative, and I thought, "This is really exactly what I want to be doing." So yeah, that's sort of how I've gotten here.

Tiffany Owens Reed 04:12

I spent a fair share of time in food service jobs and kind of gigging, and I feel like it can give you really good insight into the city, whatever city you're in. I was in New York City at the time. Do you feel like your experience bartending and working in that world really kind of helped -- I don't know, did it shape kind of how you were thinking about regulations, or just small businesses at all, as you moved into your work at IJ?

Dylan DelliSanti 04:33

I think that it gave me a greater appreciation for, I guess, what the small business can mean to the people who live there. To actually have a place where, like in "Cheers," where everybody knows your name, places. And all -- yeah, getting my -- the business I worked at, we didn't -- there wasn't necessarily any regulation that was really impacting us, but also just -- at a more or less mom-and-pop things are -- the margins are thin, and so anything that can shake the business one way or the other is very meaningful, very sensitive.

Tiffany Owens Reed 05:13

It's just a very sensitive world, business-wise. Yeah, I'm rereading Jane Jacobs right now and everything she says about -- I think she really understands the relationship between those types of businesses and the life of the sidewalk and just the life of the neighborhood overall, right? Because you have those people who are kind of keeping eyes on the street, but they don't wake up thinking, "Today I'm going to keep eyes on the street," right? It's just how things work. So, it's definitely an important part of the ecosystem. Zoe, can you share a little bit about your story, how you came to this line of work, and what you find so interesting about it?

Zoe Tishaev 05:46

Yeah, totally. I'd love to piggyback on what we just said. I've always had a love for my community. I think local businesses, there's a lot of love that goes into it, and getting to do this work is so impactful, because we're unlocking that. We're transforming that love into something that they can do -- a dream into a practice and a business. And that's really impactful work. I specifically got into this work because I have always been very interested in local politics. In high school, I did advocacy around school board and school budgets for the public school that I was in. And when I moved to college in Durham, North Carolina, I was very fascinated by the town-gown relationship between Duke University and Durham, North Carolina, and was really invested in local politics in Durham as well. So I've always been a believer that all politics is local, that your city council member has, a lot of the time, more impact than your Congress member ever will. And I encountered Cities Work specifically through the Congress for New Urbanism in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I met one of our team members there, and I was just hooked. It's like local politics, but all over the country. And yeah, love it.

Tiffany Owens Reed 07:03

You also had a phase of really focusing on transportation, and that was absolutely things that you experienced growing up. Can you share about that?

Zoe Tishaev 07:11

Absolutely. Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs of DC, in Montgomery County, Maryland, in a very, very auto-centric area. And as I was getting involved with school board politics, my parents couldn't drive me to Rockville, which was a 30-minute drive every day. They couldn't do that. I had to take the bus. And the built environment in my area is just so pedestrian-hostile. And when you start walking the streets in an area like that, and you start taking the bus, and you start understanding how challenging it is to get around without a car, it changes something in your brain.

Tiffany Owens Reed 07:40

And it really does. And there's no going back.

Zoe Tishaev 07:43

There's no going back. And that's what got me into the whole urbanist movement to begin with. Got me reading Strong Towns, and, yeah, in college specifically, did a lot of advocacy around pedestrian and cyclist issues, housing, and now I get to do a lot of that in the lens of commercial development, right? Like, how do we unlock the mom-and-pop shop? So it all dovetails into each other, and it's cool.

Tiffany Owens Reed 08:07

Dylan, can you walk us through how cities are finding you guys? How do they find you? How do you find the people that you get to work with? Is it more like the business side, or is it more like the city side? And what are people looking for when they reach out, or when you all start these conversations?

Dylan DelliSanti 08:26

I guess cities find us kind of the same way that Zoe found Cities Work. We go to, like, Congress for New Urbanism conferences. We're at Main Street in January in Philadelphia. So we spend a lot of time going to these conferences where the presidents of ESOs, city council members, and people in the planning department are out hanging out as well. So we just do a lot of tabling in that way and just have people come up to us and ask us what we're doing. They are always like, "What is Cities Work?" And then Zoe gives the spiel that she gave at the beginning here, this great spiel. And, yeah, every town has a little something different they're dealing with. And there's also shades of a lot of similarity. A lot of towns are dealing with vacant storefronts, often like their old downtown areas. That's a pretty common thing that we hear. Sometimes we will hear from entrepreneur support organizations who -- the small businesses they work with, everybody is complaining about how the website works, or how difficult it was to get an alcohol license or whatever. Those are some pretty common things that we deal with.

Zoe Tishaev 09:41

It's quite cool, too, because the larger organization that we're a part of, the Institute for Justice, has a history of over 30 years of advocacy for entrepreneurs through litigation and legislation. So it's cool to be on the legislative side where we're working with cities to make it easier to start a small business, and we've pushed out a lot of publications and reports. What kicked off the whole Cities Work program is our Barriers to Business Report, which was published in 2022. We analyzed 20 different mid-sized cities across the country and we broke down the steps -- the in-person steps, the forms, the fees and all the different departments that you need to talk to -- to start a restaurant, a retail business, a restaurant with a liquor license, a food truck, and a home-based business. It can vary dramatically across the country, and it can be surprisingly complicated to start something that you would think would be pretty simple. We've had the opportunity to work with some of the cities that are in our Barriers to Business Report. Philadelphia is an example. Raleigh is an example. We're doing some work in New Orleans right now. So they find us.

Tiffany Owens Reed 10:44

So exciting. Where do you find yourself in the spectrum from excited to extremely frustrated on a daily basis? Do you oscillate? I have a couple people living abroad, and sometimes they'll send me video footage. I mean, it's crazy. It's just like vendor after vendor after vendor going down the street. This is just such a fundamental aspect of being a city, having a vibrant local economy, small businesses, vendors. People travel because they want to go to the markets. They want to see street life. They want to see the personality of the city through, partly through the businesses that people are able to run and operate. And there's some -- they can be some of your most fun memories. Anyway, I'm just curious how you all process this, when you're looking at and when you're kind of getting the picture of like, "Man, we have kind of made one of the most fundamental parts of being a city so difficult."

Zoe Tishaev 11:52

Absolutely. No one's favorite memory of their city is their local TJ Maxx. Sorry, love TJ Maxx, but it's -- and, you know, big box stores are always incredibly important to economic development, but the backbone of our economy is 44% of our businesses are small businesses, right? And they generate two-thirds of jobs in the economy. So that focus on the small business is what we are trying to unlock.

Dylan DelliSanti 12:15

To answer the question "Am I being frustrated or excited?" Usually when we partner with the city, as Zoe mentioned, the first thing we do is we'll go through the websites ourselves and pretend to be a small business and see what all the steps are involved to open that small business. That is, for me at least, the most frustrating part, because it's not like doing a math problem where you can check your work. Two plus two is going to equal four. There's an answer. It's like, you have to get something filled out for the planning department. You don't even know if you're doing it right or you're doing it wrong. There's nobody to tell you the right or wrong answer. Sometimes you'll call the city yourself, and they'll be like, "Oh, I think you have to do X." But then, usually the second part of the partnership is we will actually go out to the city itself and have round tables with small businesses. That's the exciting part. That's definitely where I have the most fun.

Tiffany Owens Reed 13:10

Yeah, keep talking about that, Dylan. What is that like when you're actually on the ground in the city talking with the actual business owners? Walk us through that.

Dylan DelliSanti 13:19

It always feels a little therapeutic for the small business owners, because they'll get together and we'll just start asking them some questions, and everybody will be like, "Oh, did you also struggle to get a liquor license?" "Yeah, so-and-so at that department was super rude to us," or something. It just becomes a sort of decompression session for everybody in the city -- for everybody, I guess, all the small business owners who come to commiserate and feel some solidarity.

Tiffany Owens Reed 13:49

What comes out of that? So you all land in the city, you're having these sessions. After everyone's gotten a chance to get stuff off their chest, where do you go next from there?

Dylan DelliSanti 13:59

Usually that's when we try to get some reform recommendations compiled for the city based on the feedback that we hear from the entrepreneurs.

Tiffany Owens Reed 14:10

So what will that look like? Have you noticed any interesting patterns as to what those tend to look like? Is it stuff related to licensing and permits, or parking or zoning? What comes up, or is it just a mix?

Dylan DelliSanti 14:22

I think pretty commonly, just websites are a pretty frustrating source for entrepreneurs. We really stress wanting to have a one-stop shop where you can just do as much as you can with just one login and one website. Beyond that, it becomes a little more random, I guess. In some cities, you'll definitely hear about parking minimums. If somebody had to apply for a variance because they wanted to have a patio, but that would have had to increase the parking minimum, or something like that. I think a lot of times liquor licensing can obviously be a struggle. A lot of older systems make you go and tell all the neighbors that you're opening a liquor establishment. There's no end to the number of different things that can be sources of frustration.

Zoe Tishaev 15:18

Yeah. To Dylan's earlier point about us going through this process and there being no correct answer, a lot of the time, a big struggle we hear from entrepreneurs is inconsistency. Inconsistency in inspections, inconsistency in who you talk to. There's a lot of variability in what inspector you get that day, how they're feeling. It's just a big challenge.

Tiffany Owens Reed 15:41

If they had coffee that morning.

Zoe Tishaev 15:46

Absolutely. In one case, there was a pizza shop owner in South Philly, and one health inspector came by and said, "You need a garbage disposal in your sink." Okay, so they install the garbage disposal, spend a couple hundred dollars on that, and then a different inspector comes by a couple months later and is like, "Oh, you don't need that." So there's not a lot of consistency that we see, and in that specific respect, we're working with the City of Philadelphia to create an inspection checklist and to standardize inspections so that both the inspectors and the entrepreneurs know what to expect, so that it's a standard, smooth process. It's easier for everybody. There's no double filling out things on the city side. There's no struggle on the entrepreneur side. We're trying to make it easier and simpler by standardizing them.

Tiffany Owens Reed 16:33

Zoe, can you speak a little bit to what it is like when you actually pivot to start talking to the city side of things? Do you all spend time talking to city staff, or the economic developers and stuff like that? What are those conversations like? You talk to the business owners. You've gotten these ideas, and then you're taking that to the higher-ups.

Zoe Tishaev 16:50

Yeah, well, we get buy-in from our cities early on, right? When we're choosing to partner with a city, we want to make sure we have a small business champion on the inside who's willing to shepherd reforms. Sometimes that's a Small Business Task Force issued by the mayor. Sometimes it's a city council member. Sometimes that's someone in an economic development office. Every city is a little bit different about which approach we take, but we have that buy-in early on, and they are super supportive of our work and talking to the entrepreneurs, because a lot of times they don't have the time to do this. They don't have the time to go out and speak to the community, because they're busy doing their jobs and making the city run. So it's super helpful for them for us to come in and tell them, "Okay, well, here's what we've been hearing. Now, how can we make your job easier and work on these reforms?"

Tiffany Owens Reed 17:34

I bet also too, they probably just don't know, because I feel like these are just the standard best practices -- air quotes around that -- that have been passed down to them. I think in these situations, because running cities is such a complex endeavor, it's probably easier to just -- if it's not broken, don't fix it, because you don't even know if it's broken. I feel like this is the same in so many areas when you're thinking about cities, right? Part of the battle is actually helping people see, "Hey, the patterns you've been handed down that have been handed down to you for the past several decades are actually not working. They're not going to help you achieve the outcomes that you're trying to achieve," and helping facilitate a mindset shift around that.

Dylan DelliSanti 18:14

I will say, there's no shortage of people who work in city government who are really passionate about promoting their small business community, and, yeah, they've just inherited a zoning code, or the website. That's not something they chose, but there's a lot of buy-in, there's a lot of people who really care.

Zoe Tishaev 18:33

Absolutely. The thing about challenges with city governance is, to that point, cities have been around for a long time, which means that regulations stack up like layers of sediment. Each person who comes through is just inheriting what came before them. That's really challenging, and it's really difficult to unwind that spool of red tape.

Tiffany Owens Reed 18:56

Because they don't want to be the people that are causing problems too. They don't want to be like, "Oh, here comes that person."

Zoe Tishaev 19:01

It's a systemic issue. It really is, yeah.

Tiffany Owens Reed 19:05

In general, do you all have just personal opinions from what you've noticed, and as you've been traveling around and talking to business owners as to what cities can be doing to help unlock more small businesses in their towns, or make it easier? And I know this is not rocket science. I'm sure the ideas in your head will be pretty straightforward. But I'm just curious if there are other things you've been thinking about, or maybe mindset shifts. How can we shift our mindset about how we think about this?

Zoe Tishaev 19:34

Totally. Go ahead.

Dylan DelliSanti 19:36

I mean, personally, I had this idea that there should be some sort of Hippocratic oath for policymakers. Say your city has some vacant storefronts downtown. Before you try to solve that problem by creating a new rule or a new program, ask what you can take away first. Do no harm.

Tiffany Owens Reed 20:01

You literally just took the words out of my mouth.

Dylan DelliSanti 20:06

Yeah, yeah. Maybe just abolish parking minimums first. Let's see if that doesn't solve the problem before you introduce a new layer of complexity.

Tiffany Owens Reed 20:15

Yeah? Like a subtraction policy. Let's take stuff away before we start adding stuff in.

Zoe Tishaev 20:20

Our catchphrase is "cheaper, faster, simpler," right? That's what cities can do, they can make it cheaper, faster and simpler. A few weeks ago, Tiffany, I was listening to your podcast, and you had the founders of Local Return on. They're focusing on community investment, which is so important. They're doing incredible work in Rhode Island, I believe. And that is so important, because we know that one of the biggest challenges businesses have is access to capital. But our question is, how do we just make it cheaper to begin with? How do we lower that need for that kind of investment so that the smallest entrepreneur can get started?

Tiffany Owens Reed 20:54

Well, then you're getting into other complicated realities, like they're not just contending against local competitors, right? You've got national, if not international, pressures on real estate, on capital, on materials, and then you've got the pressure of the internet and... But, yeah, I hear what you're saying of like, how can we make this just a leaner machine? I think that's a mindset shift that we need to have in our cities in general. It's like, how can we just run leaner? What can we strip away? But I think that takes a lot of courage, because it means being okay with unpredictability, with things not being super certain and controllable. You're not going to be able to predict and control all the outcomes anymore.

Dylan DelliSanti 21:40

We often struggle with county health departments more so than other bodies. And it kind of makes sense, because if you do a reform, and then just one little food-borne illness outbreak happens, a lot of people are going to look at the county health department and think, "Oh, it must be because they did that reform," or something. They get held accountable for one visible negative thing, but nobody's giving them an award if nothing happens, and people are just running their businesses. There's something we think about a lot, like, how do we celebrate the people who just did the right thing by not standing in the way?

Tiffany Owens Reed 22:19

Yeah. Jane Jacobs writes about this at the beginning of her book, the introduction. She gives a brief overview of the four different urban planners of her time, and I think one of her main criticisms is they're trying to treat cities like static things. That should never change, and you should never experience uncertainty. They should always just be stable, tidy, clean, predictable. You have exactly what you need. Everyone just follows their marching orders. She saw cities as dynamic places where you're constantly evolving and there's constantly new challenges to tackle, and you're constantly running experiments, and you're constantly learning to integrate and flow with the life of the city itself. A lot of what I see, especially on the regulatory side with different issues that I get to talk about on this show, I would boil down to: can you embrace unpredictability, or are you still operating in this sort of mechanical way of looking at cities rather than looking at them as dynamic ecosystems? Yeah.

Dylan DelliSanti 23:31

That beginning is interesting because then the zoning code falls out of that intellectual period, and it's like, "Oh, the zoning code was built to keep things static." It was never built to allow things to just happen or be dynamic.

Tiffany Owens Reed 23:51

Exactly. I want to get your thoughts on something that I see happening a lot. We talked a little bit about this in our intro chat, and I was calling it the red tape versus the red carpet. So you see cities rolling out what I call the regulatory red carpet for the Top Golf, or for the Chick-fil-A, or for the TJ Maxx. But then you turn and you look at your small businesses, and it's just story after story of red tape after red tape after hidden fee after hidden rule. How do you think through this? Just the double standard? It feels very much like a double standard to me.

Dylan DelliSanti 24:27

That's definitely the $64,000 question, because all the incentives are for the policymakers to want to roll out the red carpet, because then you get to do the photo op at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Top Golf or whatever it is, whereas there's never going to be a photo op for a small business that gets started for the first time. One thing that I think about, though, is that a lot of times the Top Golfs or whatever are going to want to locate in places that are already really vibrant, and that vibrancy is based on having lots of different small businesses that people care about. I think if you're the policymaker who really wants to Top Golf, you make it even easier to get the Top Golf if you just already have a place that the Top Golf wants to locate in, rather than having to dish out a bunch of special incentives or subsidies.

Zoe Tishaev 25:22

Oh, I mean, I think there's a couple examples in DC of neighborhoods that have brought in larger businesses, and you can feel that it's corporate, right? Because you plop those in without allowing the organic, small mom-and-pop shops to open first and then creating an incentive for a more national chain to come in. You feel it. We talked about it at the top of this call, that Main Street is what people love, right? People love the small shop that has locally curated things. That's what makes it local. It's what makes it interesting. It's what makes travel interesting. It's what makes the city interesting. It harnesses those aspects of the local.

Tiffany Owens Reed 26:08

I suspect there's a way they can work together. I just have a problem with the basic assumption that we can't thrive as a city unless we have the Target or the Starbucks or the big baseball stadium or the chain hotel. It seems to be a very fear-based attitude, like we have to have these, even at the expense of our own financial health, in order to signal that we are -- that we're worth anybody's attention. Like, if we're not doing these things, why even bother with us? If you're going to give out an incentive to this big business, you should give out an incentive to all the little ones too. There should be some kind of litmus test, or is this special? Is this some type of special treatment? I just see it all the time. These corridors of dead businesses after dead businesses, and then the city getting all excited because they're giving away two, three, $4 million for some chain to come. And I'm like, "How is this a winning strategy?"

Zoe Tishaev 27:00

Totally. I mean, I think again, a lot of it is just allowing people to execute on things that they already want to do. We've had a lot of conversations and a lot of regulatory changes around home occupations. There's a lot of laws that regulate what you can do in your own home. If I want to have a friend over to play piano with me, that's totally fine. That's legal. But if the friend wants to pay me for lessons, well, that's a home occupation at that point, and that could be illegal, depending on what city you're in. There's countless examples that we've heard of. There was an entrepreneur in Philadelphia, right, who had that good quote...

Dylan DelliSanti 27:44

He sold baked goods, and he started out in his home. And he said that for most Americans, the only piece of capital equipment they own is their home kitchen, and yet, oftentimes it's illegal to use it. Making it as easy as possible for the smallest, most modest, least-resourced entrepreneur to get off the ground, I think, is so vital to any city's economy.

Zoe Tishaev 28:07

We love to say that you shouldn't need a lawyer to start a business, right? Anyone should be able to start a business. That's kind of the whole thing of the American dream. Yet, we've put ourselves in this position where you have 700-page zoning codes and stacks and stacks of permits and inspections and different departments and different logins that you need to make for those different departments, and it's just a regulatory maze. Surely there is a way to preserve the things that we need to regulate, to preserve health and safety, while making it easy for people to understand the process.

Tiffany Owens Reed 28:44

Yeah, and I think that's the thing people are scared of. They're like, "Well, if you're just so hands-off about entrepreneurship, you're just gonna have a bunch of shops that are dangerous, and the people are gonna keep getting sick." And it's like, we're not saying there should be no checks, right? But 700 pages is a bit much. There's gotta be a middle ground here.

Zoe Tishaev 29:03

It's just analyzing. I was listening to a panel of some folks in San Francisco. San Francisco has been doing a lot of reforms lately, of consolidating their code, and they analyzed it. It was something like 300 redundancies. A lot of it is just redundant, repetitive silos of different people. It's not about taking away the things that preserve the safety of our communities. It's just about making it so that people can understand it more easily and can navigate that process more simply, and that people have the freedom to execute on their dreams that don't bring harm to the people around them and can only enrich their communities.

Tiffany Owens Reed 29:49

I think we saw this during the COVID pandemic, where you had cities suddenly having to act very quickly, and they were getting rid of rules left and right just to keep their small businesses afloat. It makes you wonder, did we need a global pandemic to realize that you have burdensome rules and you can probably get rid of some of them without giving up safety and health in your community?

Zoe Tishaev 30:10

I mean, streeteries. The fact that the streeteries disappeared post-COVID. It's like, why? I'm talking to one entrepreneur who's taken a year and a half for him to be able to put some tables and chairs outside of his business. That's insane. As long as you're not impeding the traffic flow, as long as you're not creating a hazard -- and we already have regulations for that -- you should be able to put out those tables and chairs.

Tiffany Owens Reed 30:40

Can you all talk about some of the results you have been able to achieve through your work? I know Zoe, you sent me a couple of case studies that y'all had. I'd love it if you all just want to walk us through some of those.

Dylan DelliSanti 30:50

We're very excited that Kansas City, Kansas, earlier this year, implemented a three-year moratorium on parking minimums for commercial and industrial uses. So that's a very small but very meaningful first step. I know Zoe mentioned the health inspection checklist in Philly. It's not gonna be front page in the news, but I think it's gonna be super meaningful to a lot of the entrepreneurs in Philly to have that clarity.

Zoe Tishaev 31:21

Yeah, and in a lot of places we've worked, we've helped just create more clarity on their website. In Shreveport, Louisiana, they've moved their ABO licensing process online, which is super fantastic, and just simplifies that process significantly. In Fort Worth, Texas, we've worked with the development services department to streamline their website and just create more clarity and ease for the entrepreneur.

Tiffany Owens Reed 31:51

Which is very much connected to the Strong Towns philosophy, I think, of looking for those small but meaningful wins, right? The irony is how in most of economic development it's like, bigger, better. I think what y'all are saying is the opposite. Let's look for all the small things, and instead of adding, let's take stuff away. In that way, you can unlock a lot of the creativity and entrepreneurialism that's already latent in your town to make your town a more interesting place to live, more interesting place to visit. It really is two different mindsets about what sparks and what sustains economic growth, what makes your city an interesting place to live. But I hear what you're saying with like, let's simplify things. Let's take things away. Let's find a way to make this easier. I think there's just a lot of continuity between that philosophy and the way we think about meaningful change at Strong Towns. It's usually not the big project that's going to fix things. It's probably going to be one small thing and then another small thing, and then another small thing, and then they all just keep adding up. I know there was something that you all worked on. Can you tell us about the BEST Act? Zoe, this was for your backyard.

Zoe Tishaev 32:59

Yes, totally. So a lot of the work for the BEST Act happened, actually, right before Dylan and I got to the team, but it's gone into implementation at the start of October. In that act, we consolidated business licenses from over 100 different business licenses in DC down to 13, I believe. We also flattened business licensing fees, so that there's not this matrix of, "Well, if you fit this qualification, then it's this much, and if it's this much...." It's just like a flat fee. And again, it's just the simplification, right? Letting people broadly understand, "Okay, I want to start a business. Where do I fall into this? How do I do this?" -- making it as easy as possible.

Dylan DelliSanti 33:42

And as a DC resident, and also working at Cities Work, I'm really excited about this, just because DC, with all the instability -- so much of our economy is reliant on one single employer, the federal government, or the industry connected to it. And you're seeing how fragile that situation is if there's variation in how the federal government operates. So to be able to promote small businesses in DC, it's going to make us more robust to whatever else might be happening, and sort of enhance the vitality of the city.

Tiffany Owens Reed 34:18

But also enhancing its resilience. Because if your economy is being held up by lots of hands, rather than just a few, that's a much stronger position to be in. This is not on our list of questions, but I want to ask for your take, just because you guys are the fancy consultants -- you get to travel.

Dylan DelliSanti 34:35

I don't know how fancy.

Tiffany Owens Reed 34:38

What's your take on the vacant storefronts in downtowns or just downtowns in general? I love thinking about downtowns, and I'm just curious what y'all have been hearing, what comes to your mind as you think about this challenge?

Zoe Tishaev 34:51

This is a question we've been grappling with, and we've had a chance to work with and talk with a lot of organizations that are doing really good work. There's an organization in San Francisco that's working to create pop-ups in vacant storefronts. They will subdivide the area, and they will rent it out to micro-businesses that want it for a certain period of time, and they'll rotate out the space throughout the day. That is lowering the overhead for the entrepreneur who can't afford a 1,000-square-foot space, nor do they necessarily need that much space, and it's bringing new life to the neighborhood. So there's organizations who are doing this kind of work, and we're exploring it as well.

Tiffany Owens Reed 35:35

Yeah, that's consistent with the theory that I've had of taking an inside-out approach to downtown. Cities are still thinking of downtown as a place where the most expensive, fanciest things need to be. I'm like, what if it's the place where it's the easiest to start a business? I know that there's a perspective that it's the most productive land, so it needs to be put to the most productive use, but just in terms of attracting the type of activity and tenants that you'd want to see in downtown, I wonder if we can go back to the roots of downtowns. Most downtowns were the startup central of their city. They became vibrant and the most productive, the most valuable, because they were the easiest place to get started. I wonder if there's a way we can recapture that historic economic framework for downtowns and put the vacant properties to use, and let that flywheel get started again.

Dylan DelliSanti 36:35

That makes sense to me. I think our notion of what a downtown is has been really biased by the last 70 years of urban development, where downtown was a place you didn't live, it was a place you went to, so it was zoned for offices. It was entertainment.

Zoe Tishaev 36:53

Entertainment, yeah.

Dylan DelliSanti 36:54

I think a lot of our cities are dealing with trying to reverse the fallout of that, where those offices left, those big retailers, and they're trying to clean it up. I think your basic idea is in the right direction. The downtown became the downtown because lots of people organically located there because it was cheap and easy to do.

Tiffany Owens Reed 37:18

Yeah, very cool. Well, we're going to wrap up here. To wrap up, I'm going to ask my favorite question that I get to ask everyone who comes on the show. Tell us a little bit about your city, your neighborhood. What do you love about it, and what are one or two places you like to recommend to people who come through to visit to check out? It could be a pub, coffee shop, small business. Great time to give a shout-out to a small business you love.

Zoe Tishaev 37:39

Go ahead, Dylan.

Dylan DelliSanti 37:41

You want me to go first?

Zoe Tishaev 37:43

I want you to go first.

Dylan DelliSanti 37:44

I have a reputation on the team as having an endless list of bars that I frequent. I live in, essentially, the H Street corridor in Northeast DC, and we have both the best cocktail bar in the universe and the best dive bar in the universe, all within a block and a half of each other. The cocktail bar is the Copycat Co. It's one of those kinds of spots where you can just say to the bartender, "I'll just get dealer's choice rum," and they'll just make a drink. You can give them an adjective, like, "Oh, I'm feeling grumpy today. Clear something out there." They have treated me so nicely for years now. My favorite dive bar is the Pug, as in, like, the Pekingese. It is the most perfect dive bar. The AC doesn't really work. The floors are not sticky, but they look a little -- it's a dive bar.

Tiffany Owens Reed 38:55

Messages on the bathroom walls?

Dylan DelliSanti 38:59

Some of that, some that I've written. Yeah, so often in DC, at social gatherings, people want to know who you work for, if you are connected to so-and-so. It's all very LinkedIn, but in real time. But at the Pug, I've met so many people in my neighborhood. There's people I've known for three years. I have no clue what they do for a living, but it's just a great place, and kind of the antithesis of a lot of the other DC-centric places.

Tiffany Owens Reed 39:28

That's awesome. Your turn, Zoe.

Zoe Tishaev 39:32

Yeah, I have not been in DC nearly as long as Dylan. I do not have nearly as storied a past in the various establishments. I just moved to the U Street corridor in Northwest DC, and I love it. I'm still in my process of discovery, of figuring out the local dives, the music scene. There's a bar near me that does open piano nights on Wednesdays.

Dylan DelliSanti 39:56

That's the saloon.

Zoe Tishaev 39:58

The saloon.

Dylan DelliSanti 39:59

They do karaoke. That's a shame.

Zoe Tishaev 40:02

Sorry. Yeah, so I'm still in the process of discovery, but I think for me, since moving to a little bit more of an urban area of DC, just walking outside and seeing people -- just in the last week, I've frequented a bunch of different local spots, and I've met a lot of amazing people. And similar to Dylan, when you find that spot where folks from the neighborhood come together, work kind of dissolves, right? You're just talking about your interest. What's been bothering you for the day? What have you been curious about? Bonding over music, bonding over drinks, and it's a really special thing.

Tiffany Owens Reed 40:38

Excellent. Well, thank you all so much for joining me on the show. It's been really energizing to hear about your work and what you're doing. I'm really excited about the grassroots approach you're taking to helping unlock more creativity and entrepreneurialism in our cities. If you're listening to this, thank you so much for joining us for another conversation. If you don't know, we have a link in our show notes where you can nominate someone in your community who you think should be on the show. So if there's someone in your community who you think would be a great fit for the Bottom-Up Revolution, please use that link to let us know. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

Zoe Tishaev 41:17

Thanks so much, Tiffany.

Dylan DelliSanti 41:19

Thank you.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 41:24

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit 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.

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