The Bottom-Up Revolution
What if you could change a dangerous street today instead of waiting 10 years? Isaac Gonzalez founded the advocacy group Slow Down Sacramento to prove that you can. Two years later, the group has helped transform Sacramento from a city that resists innovation to one that's embracing tactical urbanism.
Today, Isaac explains how he kickstarted this change and how you can do the same.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:00
Hello and welcome to this Bottom-Up Short. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm super excited to be able to connect with our Strong Towns movement members all over. One of the people that stands out to me that I want you to be introduced to—you've already heard him on the Bottom-Up Revolution. If you go back into our archives or you remember listening to this some time ago—but this person is Isaac Gonzalez. Isaac is a Sacramento native, owner of DIYSL Consulting, where he specializes in cultural outreach, working on active transportation projects and consulting together with government entities. He's also the vice chair of Sacramento's Active Transportation Commission, and is the founder of Slow Down Sacramento, which is a grassroots movement that uses tactical urbanism to fight against many of the ways in which we've conformed our streets to the needs and scale of automobiles, while doing so at the cost of human lives and livelihoods.
Isaac has also lent his leadership to Strong Sac Town, and continues to support the amazing things that Strong Sac Town is doing. He also is the president of the Tahoe Park Neighborhood Association, doing that work at the block level, at the street level, connecting to build safer, more resilient paths within his community. Outside of those things, you also get to see him building Lego with his son. I wonder if he's also built city scenes like I have with my son, and enjoyed the idea of what is it like to be a pedestrian, even in the Lego spaces that we create, as well as thrifting and doing all sorts of other types of treasure hunting with his daughter too. So welcome to this Bottom-Up Short, Isaac.
Thank you so much, Norm. I'm so happy to be here. It's always good to talk to you.
Yeah, it's great to connect with you as well. You are in the midst of so many different projects, but I wanted to ask you about the work that you're doing with Slow Down Sacramento, as well as the way in which you've now brought that up a level, you could say, by also being part of the Active Transportation Commission, and sort of the twofold way in which you are working at the grassroots level, but now also with some added responsibility at the commission level and taking this on in your community.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Norm. I've been involved in the traffic safety space for about 13 years here in my city. I started working with philanthropic organizations that were focused on cycling and pedestrian safety, and really unfortunately, got to see firsthand the devastating effects of vehicular violence on families and the survivors of those who are left behind after a loved one is lost. Sacramento, being a very motor-centric, motor vehicle-centric city by design, is unfortunately just deluged with vehicular violence on an almost weekly basis. Actually, just today, this morning, a pedestrian was hit and killed in the downtown core, and it's Pedestrian Safety Month. But in Sacramento, unfortunately, we are not yet there where we can tout Vision Zero as being something we've achieved.
So I started Slow Down Sacramento after a parent was hit and killed outside of my son's own school one day while waiting to pick up her daughter, and really realizing that we needed to change the narrative in our city. Because too often neighborhood advocates were hearing when they were asking for changes in their streets, there was just nothing that could be done due to costs and scope, that it would take 10 years or longer and cost $20 or $30 million, money the city didn't have.
It actually wasn't until Chuck Marohn came to Citrus Heights outside of Sacramento on a tour back in, I think, 2011, and I heard him first give the speech about the priorities, the safety, speed, design and all that good stuff, and talking about how tactical urbanism and quick build had really brought solutions to communities with similar challenges, that a light bulb went off in my head. I said, "Oh my gosh, there is actually something we could be doing here in Sacramento differently and seeing success."
So Slow Down Sacramento is really, it's an advocacy organization. There's also an educational organization. I tell my members each week and supporters each week what other cities are doing and how we can emulate them. Not reinvent the wheel, but get some of these things here in Sacramento ourselves. In the two years we've been active, we've really done a great job of educating people, activating them at the appropriate time, getting them to go to City Hall, or other halls of power to ask for these things, and we're seeing a sea change here in Sacramento.
Where we used to have a very risk-averse city who didn't think these innovative ideas were something worth pursuing, they thought it was too dangerous. Now it is policy. It is our big policy. The city of Sacramento has adopted tactical urbanism quick-build solutions as part of their toolkit, and they're hiring six people in a new department with a $2 million per year budget just for projects pretty soon here. I feel that's a direct result of us educating people, activating them at the right time, and just being resilient and recurring, and asking for the same things, asking for solutions, bringing solutions to our local leaders, instead of just complaining about what we can do.
On the Transportation Commission, which I serve, I try to remind staff and other people as well that we have to be innovative. We have to stop just thinking about what's in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, and what are some of the easy things that we can do that may be just not demonstrably different to the built environment, and maybe just lipstick on a pig, for lack of a better term. Staff does a really good job here in the city of Sacramento with what they have, with the tools they think they have. But I want them to know there's other tools available, and to be bold and to go farther.
So a lot of the times, I'm telling staff when they come up with their presentations, "Hey, I appreciate you, I respect you, but I want you to go further, shoot for the moon with what we're doing. Don't just pull out the old toolbox and just dust it off and do the same treatments we see over and over again, a little bit of paint, a rapid flashing beacon, and call it a day. Let's change the built environment in a demonstrable way that forces people to drive safely at all hours of the day." I just push that over and over and over again.
I have to say, I think Slow Down Sacramento is the most well-regarded, well-known traffic safety organization in the city, and we get a lot of media requests for it. So there's just a lot of awareness about this campaign. I'm super proud at how well it's been received in the community.
I love that, and I wish I'd met you in 2008 and 2009 when I was in the mayor's office writing letters to groups of parents that said, "Hey, can we do something about the street in front of my child's school? It's awful. We're fearful that somebody is going to be struck and killed there. We already know that this is likely to happen, so we need to stop it before it occurs." Just the letters that I was blindly writing out just because that's what our city engineering staff were dictating for me to send out on behalf of the mayor. Now I'm, "Oh, I wish I could retract every single one of those." One of those things that I wish I could have at that point introduced even into the lexicon is the idea of quick build.
You're a great educator. I love the way that you break things down to make them understandable to a broad range of people. Do you want to describe what quick build is and why, as a shorthand for a bigger approach to reclaiming our streets, it's so powerful?
Yeah. It's not a panacea for all problems, but it is a great solution when used properly. It's basically just looking at the built environment as a condition that was required to cause a crash to occur, and then seeing what you can do today to make that environment different, and then observe it to see if you get the results you want. When I say today, I mean things you can buy off the shelf at many different industrial stores, probably in your community: vertical delineators, bollards, cones, all kinds of things where you can just plop something down today. We're not talking about ripping up the road. We're talking about bolts and special kind of washers and whatnot to lock it into the asphalt. Change the built environment, watch it and then say, "Oh, we did get the results we want. Great, maybe now we should engineer a permanent solution from the semi-permanent solution we temporarily put in." Or, "Oh, this actually did not get the results we wanted. We should probably think about changing it a bit and seeing if we do get the results we wanted."
It's a bold way of looking at things. Cities that have done this have seen just really fascinating results. You'll notice, and I think most of us know this, we don't use the word "accidents," because the word "accident," it really just deflects blame onto no one, like an ethereal "Oh my goodness, it was an accident," like I spilled coffee or tea on the counter. These are actually predictable crashes, especially by design, that happen usually over and over and over again in clusters in the same places. When we don't look at the built environment as a condition that needs to be changed, we're really ignoring—we're looking at the symptoms, but not the causes of vehicular violence.
So it really is a phenomenal, I think, tool for many people. I think that if you just look at what other cities are doing and the successes they're having there, there's probably stuff you can emulate in your community today.
Yeah. It just struck me that if my computer that I'm on right now were to suddenly freeze or power down, I wouldn't call it, "Oh, my computer had an accident." That would be me knocking water onto it. It just crashed because it didn't do the thing that we needed it to do. When we apply that lens to our places, we actually begin to really reckon with the fact we can't keep having this happen and turning not just a blind eye to it, but almost a desensitized eye to it, is really the heart of the problem that we face.
I just applaud the work that you're doing to make it personal, make it real, but also provide hope to people. I'd love to hear from you, how did you fall into this, and what are some of those sort of core constituents of your own life path that maybe would be familiar to other people as they start to think, what would my path look like if I began to really zealously pursue this, as Isaac has?
I'm an accidental advocate, for sure. In 2009, our city was faced with some pretty huge budget shortfalls during the Great Recession, and we saw parks and street maintenance just get cut to the bone. At the time, I started a little volunteer group that just cleaned up the neighborhood, and never realized how much I would enjoy volunteering. It really was just such a rewarding experience that I really got hooked on. I started joining my neighborhood association in 2011 as the chair of the beautification group, and then just giving back to various other efforts, like the YMCA, just whatever resonated with me.
Eventually, you really start looking around. You learn a little bit more about how city government works when you hit your first challenge or you want to change something, and maybe you don't get the results you want right away. You meet the right people. In Sacramento, I feel if you know the right seven or eight people, you're basically two degrees from knowing all the right people to get things done. So I just try to make myself known by taking up good causes and showing up and doing the work and talking to people about how we can find creative solutions to get things done. But it was definitely not at all on purpose.
I finished high school, but after high school, I was in college for a little while, but then became temporarily homeless. I had some difficult situations as a young man before I really found my way and my path. So I like to tell people that, because I want you to know that there's no special skills required here. I think what you need is a genuine passion to make the built environment, to make your community a better place, and a desire to meet people and talk to people. Because you cannot do this in a silo. You cannot do this by yourself. You have to meet and talk to people, find like-minded individuals, organize in a way so that you are not one, but you are many, and then speak in a voice where you cannot be ignored.
I gave a talk about that—how to build grassroots movements that cannot be ignored—at our last national gathering, and I hope it was well received. I really just realized, as I tried to write down exactly how you asked, "How did I get here?" I realized it really is just organizing, talking to people, finding like-minded individuals and being persistent. You have to be ready for the long haul. That also requires, I think, and I've talked to you about this many times, civility. If you're going to be in this for the long haul, you're going to have to make friends, and you're going to have to build bridges, and you're going to have to reach out across the proverbial aisle, even if you have a nonpartisan community government, and make friends with people who you don't always agree with.
So civility is a big part of that, and I always try to impart that upon people. As frustrated as we may get about the real, big, important things that need to be fixed in our communities, I think it's really important, especially in this time now more than ever, to stay civil with those that we're trying to work with.
Well, you've already anticipated my next question, which is, what guidance do you have? So maybe two more. Do you have any two more top tips that you would offer?
Well, I think first of all, this gets people hung up a lot, and I'm guilty of it as well. But I finally got off and did the thing. But don't wait. Do not wait for the perfect moment. Do not wait until everything is ready. Just get going. That is a very Strong Towns ethos, kind of a thought process. Do the smallest thing, do what you can do today, and then try to do the next smallest thing.
Really, I waited too long for Slow Down Sacramento to start. It was an idea I had in my head a couple years before I actually launched it. I had bought the domain names. I thought about what it would be like, and it wasn't until, unfortunately, we did have the mother of that child struck and hit by a car outside of where my kids go before I said, "I cannot wait anymore for the day where I have the time and the energy and the capacity to do this. I have to just start it now, or I will never start it."
So don't—if you've been thinking about that great idea about what it is you want to do in your community, and you're just waiting for the perfect moment, I'm gonna tell you right now, it's never, ever gonna come. So don't wait for that perfect moment. Just get out there and do the thing.
If I had a second thing I would say is, as you're getting started out there, lead by example. I think people are really inspired by leaders who are willing to do the same amount of hard work that they expect anyone else around them to do and not just tell people what they think is a good idea. We have a lot of people with great ideas, but not often enough people really roll up the sleeves and do the work.
I was at our local chapter's meeting last night, and I was asked to facilitate, and I'm happy to do so, and that means timekeeping or taking pictures or just making sure that people are signed in. Doesn't matter. There can't be this ego-driven hierarchy of what I will or will not do. If you want to do something, be willing to lead by example and show people what the work looks like by never shying away from any level of it.
In cleanup events, still, to this day, I run cleanup events. Still, you'll see me out there with a shovel and dustpan. I'm not just there for pictures. I'm there to get some sweat equity and use some elbow grease and get a place done, make it look nice and clean. So just get out there and do it and lead by example. But don't wait. Just don't wait. Tomorrow's promised to no one, unfortunately. So get out there and do it today.
Oh. That's powerful. I can feel the resolve that you have, and that deep-seated resolve, I think, also gives rise to a deep-seated hope. Can you describe what is it that gives you hope in your community?
It's hard sometimes in today's world to have that hope, because there are so many challenges in front of us, and it seems like we're bombarded all the time by things. We think, "Well, there couldn't be anything possibly worse than what happened yesterday." But I do, I do have hope. Something that gives me a lot of hope is every now and then I will just meet someone who I've spoken to or been in a room and had the opportunity to share my feelings or share my story, and they've told me that I inspired them to do something, and they're doing it right now. Or they say, "Oh, I saw you on the news talking about that thing, and I decided I wanted to help change my block."
So I think that hope is infectious, and I think it spreads. So I remain hopeful, and I am so happy when I meet someone who's been infected by the hope that I think I'm spreading a little bit in my community, and they tell me their story, and it reinvigorates me when I'm exhausted from days after days after days of either working on a project in my consulting business or working on pro bono projects for the betterment of the community.
So, we sometimes say that, "Oh, at funerals, we should have said this to the person when they're alive." If you have any compliments for anybody who's out there doing good work right now in the community and you haven't had a chance to tell them, today's the day you should tell them, because I tell you that really is something that reinvigorates people and gives them the energy and the spirit to keep going. We need more of that right now, the acknowledgment and the gratitude and the ability to thank those people out there working really hard.
I love when I get a chance to do it when I run into somebody who I know who's a really great advocate, to tell them, "Thank you. Thank you for working on my city. Thank you for working in the city that I love, and putting your time and energy into it. I really appreciate it." You can see people light up when they do that. So thank somebody. Thank somebody doing the good work.
Oh man, that is tangible and that is direct, and that is something I need to do immediately after I finish this. So thank you, Isaac for being on this episode of Bottom-Up Shorts. If you want to follow what Isaac and his colleagues and peers are doing in Sacramento, check out slowdownsacramento.org or visit the Strong Sac Town website as well. Or if you want to reach out to him, email him at [email protected]. Isaac, it's been a treat. Thanks so much for coming on Bottom-Up Shorts.
Like I said, it's always wonderful talking to Norm. I hope to see you again soon.
Yeah, awesome. To everybody out there, as he said, don't wait. You don't need to. Also send that note. Be that encouraging voice, that voice for hope and with the recognition that change is definitely possible. We're doing this together, and until I chat with you next, take care and take care of your places.
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.