Abby Newsham 0:04

This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.

Abby Newsham 0:18

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, a show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Towns conversation, and we upzone it: We talk about it in depth. My name is Abby Newsham, I'm your host, and today we are doing something a little bit different. It is Member Week at Strong Towns. So in honor of Member Week, we are talking about Strong Towns member wins. So instead of talking about one article, we're going to be bouncing around a little bit, talking about multiple stories. Today I have two guests that are going to help me do that. I've got Carlee Alm-LaBar, who's the chief of staff for Strong Towns, and John Reuter, advisory board member for Strong Towns. Welcome to you both.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 1:05

Thank you. Happy to be here.

John Reuter 1:07

Thanks for having us.

Abby Newsham 1:08

So before we get started, maybe you guys can provide a quick synopsis of who you are for listeners who may not be familiar. I know you guys have been on Upzoned before, but it's been a while since I've talked to you two. So I'll start with you, Carlee, if you could share a little bit about yourself to listeners.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 1:27

Sure, absolutely. So I am in Lafayette, Louisiana. I have been the chief of staff here at Strong Towns for almost two years, and it's been a great ride so far. It's a lot of fun.

My background is basically all local work here in Lafayette, Louisiana. About half of my career has been in nonprofit work—our Community Foundation, our United Way, a couple of other agencies. Then I also had a stint in local government as a planning director and chief development officer, as well as in the mayor's office. So one of the reasons I love Strong Towns and it's such a perfect fit is it's really a marriage of my two career backgrounds. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Abby Newsham 2:11

Yeah, of course. It's great to have you back on, and it sounds like it's a well suited role for your skill sets as well. John, if you could introduce yourself a little bit and tell listeners about you.

John Reuter 2:25

Yes, and it's great to be back with you again. It's been quite a while.

Abby Newsham 2:29

It's been a very long time.

John Reuter 2:31

That's what I was thinking. I've been on the Strong Towns board for about 10 years now, and I first found Strong Towns years before that, when I was on the city council of Sandpoint, Idaho, this little town way up in north Idaho. At the time, Strong Towns was just this little blog. A planner from one city over that was even smaller than our town said, "Oh, you got to check this out, John. You would love it." He was absolutely right. I did.

Chuck's ideas that became the ideas of the entire team were very influential. A fun fact for this is I was part of Strong Towns' very first ever member drive, incidentally, because Chuck and the team pulled a quote from me before we'd never met. This is before that. I was just a reader, but I'd sent in some comments about how much I enjoyed it and how valuable it was, and they used the quote to help talk about how great Strong Towns was. So it's a full circle moment here from all these years later to actually be on here talking about this organization that has become such a huge part of my life, but that I've been a member of for a lot longer than that, and really been a believer in.

Abby Newsham 3:39

That's amazing. Yeah, you really are one of the OG Strong Towns people, which is so cool to think about.

So to get started, maybe I'll pass it to you, Carlee. We're going to be talking about Strong Towns member wins, using different stories that have been published in the media as of late. So Carlee, you have a story for us. What would you like to talk about?

Carlee Alm-LaBar 4:04

Absolutely. So we are lucky enough we shop our website and our blog at some of the things that people have told us about that we are able to republish and amplify. So the one that I was really excited about, and I think because it makes community change seem so accessible, is the story that came from Strong Towns San Diego.

They had a law that was passed, I believe, aimed at protecting pedestrians that made it so that cars were not allowed to park within a certain distance of the intersections. They had a lot of community frustration because people didn't know about the law, were getting ticketed, and were getting inconvenienced. People really didn't understand why there had not been probably an adequate community awareness campaign about this law. In defense of the public officials who adopted it, I'm sure their primary motivation was safety at these intersections for pedestrians, which is something we absolutely champion.

So the Strong Towns San Diego group took matters into their own hands and they actually painted many, many curbs in San Diego with red chalk to notify folks in the area that those were no parking zones. The city communicated to them that they didn't have the infrastructure to do it. So in the typical Strong Towns way, the next smallest thing that the Strong Towns Local Conversation could do in San Diego was to pick up chalk paint and paint the curbs.

I love this because it's such a solution-oriented way to approach a problem. It's also being a part of solving a problem in your community and meeting your elected officials halfway. I mean, the elected officials were trying to help solve this problem of pedestrian safety. Rather than just be angry about what was going wrong with that problem and the way that it hadn't been rolled out in a way that was positive, the Strong Towns Local Conversation didn't accept that and said, "Hey, we can be a part of helping make this work and helping keep our citizens safe."

So I just thought it was a great story, a great win, really a small thing. That's what we talk about all the time here. So that was where I wanted to start.

Abby Newsham 6:39

I love that.

John Reuter 6:39

What I love about this story is it gets at all this idea of community engagement, which of course we talk about all the time. But the other thing it gets into is policy is only as good as implementation. You can have the best policy ever. You can be going out, doing everything you can for it. But if it's implemented poorly, it doesn't actually improve people's lives.

So many organizations, so many organizations that are advocating for better policies, are focused on passing the bill and then they're done. They go out there and change the law, and then they're done. But when you live in a community like our members do, and like our Local Conversations do across the country, and we try to situate ourselves with local officials, when you're out there walking the streets, when you're experiencing it, it's just so apparent that the end of the story is not when a law is passed. The end of the story, or when a policy is adopted, is the actual human experience.

It's that human scale of Strong Towns that I think makes such a powerful movement. It's that kind of insight—we're not done after we have the vote. We're done once people are experiencing an improved reality and it's actually showing up in a real way.

Abby Newsham 7:50

Yeah, that's so true. I mean, so often we see laws are passed and people kind of assume things will be implemented. This is an example of where volunteerism can really make things move more quickly. Having just people who care about the community actually take action to start to implement new laws and changes in policy can be really powerful and also help to educate people about the law, because not everybody is keeping track of their local government on a day to day basis. So being able to really put the law into practice in this kind of way, I think, is very creative.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 8:32

I think it also shows that a lot of times, citizens will think that government just happens to them. To me, that's one of the things that I thought was so cool about this, is that people did it in Strong Towns' name, and they were like, "No, no, we want to be a part of this, because this is a reflection on us as a community as a whole."

They met their government halfway, basically. Government took care of the policy and maybe they hadn't thought through all of the downstream impacts, or maybe they decided they didn't care, or somewhere in between. But then the citizen said, "Well, wait, we have something we can do to make this better."

I just hope, having been in government and knowing sometimes the good intentions that exist—some of my favorite people I've ever worked with were in government. If I ever had my own company and got to hire 1,000 people, half of them might be people I worked with in government. Those folks don't always get the credit that they deserve. So we can help them be successful in their jobs to our community's benefit.

Abby Newsham 9:42

Yeah, absolutely.

John Reuter 9:44

We often talk about how we expect our governments to behave, and we absolutely should have high expectations for our government, for our public officials, for our elected officials. We should have high standards, but we also should have high standards for ourselves and how we show up. Democracy is not just about elections. It's about an ongoing process. It's not just about public hearings. It's about participation.

There's this corrosive idea we talk about of governments treating citizens as customers. There's also this corrosive idea where citizens start acting like they are customers—"I'm just here to demand better service." You have a right to good service, but you also have an obligation and responsibility to participate in delivering that. Because we just can't—it will not work without it.

Sometimes that participation is just giving good and actionable feedback, just actually sharing your experience and saying, "Hey, this isn't working. Let me explain why it's not working. Let me help government officials see things." Other times it's picking up some paint brushes and painting some curbs. Other times, we're talking about other stories here too. It's other ways you can engage your community, show up, and figure out how to drive the community forward.

Abby Newsham 10:51

Totally. There's so much to be said about engaging people who want to be engaged. There's so many neighborhood groups and people who want to be part of solutions out there, and I'd love to see more communities and municipalities engage with these groups to kind of supercharge the policies that get passed in this kind of way. So shout out to San Diego for what's going on there.

John, you have an article that you wanted to share today. What would you like to start with?

John Reuter 11:25

Okay, well, I'm gonna start with the guy at the center of the article, Monte Anderson. I first got to meet him—I don't think he'd remember me, but I very much remembered him. I saw him for the first time at a Strong Towns national gathering, the first one 10 years ago, where he was one of our key speakers. He just set up this booth and spoke about this stuff.

Monte Anderson is this Strong Towns hero because what he's been doing now for years is figuring out how to actually make progress within the existing rules. He sometimes will try to get the laws to move a little bit here and there. But he also figures out, "You know what, even if the city's not even ready to move, I'm going to go out there and demonstrate how we can improve things."

He's figured out how we can have a single staircase building that technically fits the code if he just sort of figures this thing out there, so we can actually get to multi-use. He's figured out how to redevelop these sections. He's doing all this small scale development, often on suburban sites that are really difficult, and just doing projects that are just amazing. They revitalize these areas, lead to businesses coming in, to people having housing that people can afford, in all these incredible ways.

So the latest in the Monte world is this article in The New York Times about Monte going out there and taking a single family home and keeping it a single family home, technically, because it all still has doors that connect to each other, but breaking it up basically into four different units in practical ways, where you can lock those doors between them and have these four things. He calls it the roommate house, where you have these roommates coming together, but you actually have your own space, your own kitchen, your own everything that lets you actually make this improvement in a single family neighborhood, without having to change any zoning or anything. He's figuring out how to do it, and he's having this great—it's multi-generational housing. His 20-year-old granddaughter lives there. There's a 70-year-old accountant who lives there. The article is right in front of me—I should have pulled it up here—this whole set of different people.

Most importantly, Monte himself lives inside of the house, and Monte has done this in his projects for decades. Monte's not just going out there and building stuff and saying, "Let's see how it works out for other people to live." He himself goes and experiences it. He himself says, "What does it mean to live here? What's it like?" That means he has that direct feedback loop that we just talked about. He's not just there to build the project. He's there to actually make sure it's implemented well, to figure out the lessons for the next one, figure out the improvements he needs to make, because he's having the same experience that his tenants are. He's having the same experience as other people in that neighborhood, and so he's bought into making sure that it's successful.

So I just think that's such a great example of these incremental developers we talk about that are such an important part of our movement, who have figured out how to do these things and aren't trying to figure out how to build the 40 or 100 or 200 unit, but how to gently increase density in a way and where, and how to do it in a way that's compatible with the neighborhood—so compatible that he wants to keep staying in that neighborhood, so compatible that he's willing to live in that development.

That kind of ownership in what you're building, that kind of stake in it—that's what we need in our communities right now: developers that are not outside forces, but development and improvement and growth that comes from within our community, within our values, and where people are bought in rather than selling out.

Abby Newsham 14:59

Yeah, yes. That's such an interesting project that he has implemented there. Because I remember when he was starting it, and he was telling me that there's obviously an aging population of people, many of them being single, widows or widowers, that are living alone and are looking for options. They don't necessarily want to live in a designated community. They'd like to look at single room occupancy options.

So what Monte is doing, he was calling it The Golden Girls house. I don't know if he still calls it that.

John Reuter 15:37

I love that. I didn't know that, that's great.

Abby Newsham 15:39

But what he's doing, and by living in it as well, is really—I have a lot of respect for it because he really does design his projects as if he is the end user. Because he is the end user, he actually is thinking about how you live in these projects as the developer. I think that that's very valuable. A lot of developers just don't think that way. They kind of deliver a product and it's for other people to use. It's not really their problem if something isn't done a particular way. So it really does make a difference that he experiences his projects.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 16:16

I'll say a couple just nice words about Monte generally. I mean, he really is always at the forefront of this movement. I was so happy for him to see his work recognized in a place like the New York Times, because he's such a champion for his own community, and then communities across the country where he's trying to help people replicate it and trying to bring more people into the movement.

So something like an article of that scale and scope just builds Monte's credibility, but it also builds credibility for the work he's trying to do, which was great for all of us.

John Reuter 16:57

Monte would be incredible—he was incredible before he got connected to Strong Towns. He's been incredible since he got connected with Strong Towns. He would be incredible no matter what. But what I think is exciting about what Strong Towns has been able to do with Monte, really in partnership—and we could have never done it without him—is share these stories with other folks across the country. Have other towns say, "Wait, I want to figure out how to have developers like that." Have people in their community stand up and go, "Oh, I want to figure out how I could do that too." Then people start to think more creatively.

So it's exciting to see it build up to the place where it shows up in The New York Times. It's getting shared out in that way. But over the last decade, we've talked about Monte multiple times, shared that story, gotten it out there, had people learn from this example there. Really a lot of what makes this movement work is taking great ideas that aren't our great ideas. They're great ideas that emerge out of community, emerge out of creative, brilliant people like Monte, and making sure that other brilliant and creative people can hear about them and figure out how to adapt them to their own places, and figure out, "Okay, what does that mean for me? I don't live in exactly that house, but there's a different kind of project that I could do. I can figure out how to rearrange it this way."

How can I do this incremental thing? How does this idea spread? Then those ideas get spread around, and they cross pollinate, and you start to see this really vibrant community and exchange of ideas take place that really push forward the built environment of communities in ways that are still grounded in the actual experience of that community.

Abby Newsham 18:22

One thing that I really appreciate about Monte and other people in this world of incremental development is that they're rooted in this principle that they don't gatekeep these ideas. They're really open to sharing and allowing people to adapt these ideas to their places.

I think that in a movement like this, and Strong Towns and the world of city building, it's so important that we don't gatekeep ideas. We share them, and we allow people to adapt them, change them, and apply them to their place. I think being able to amplify what Monte is doing—Monte is one in a billion. He really is a very unique person. But there are also creative people that aspire to do interesting things.

For people to be able to look up to Monte and see what he's done, and then maybe they'll come up with something totally different, but you can at least see that there's somebody who's thinking about development in a different way and just creative place making generally, and not just working in urban areas. He works in a lot of suburban places, and he's doing suburban retrofit. That's something that's very important because it's not all about the places that are already walkable and cute and have historic buildings. There's a lot of love that aging suburbs need as well in retrofit projects to make these places better.

John Reuter 19:51

I think you really hit the nail on the head about the generosity being key in this whole thing. The generosity of "here's an idea, and I'm ready to share it." It's reflected in how our communities all move together. Monte is someone who was always willing to do whatever he can to actually talk to other people starting things up. He's always one of those connectors there.

This whole movement is built on people like Monte in some ways, although, as you point out, Monte's pretty unique and pretty special. But that generosity is what ties them together, that willingness to try to help other people figure it out too. I think that spirit is so valuable.

Abby Newsham 20:27

That's awesome. Okay, Carlee, what other article do you have for us today?

Carlee Alm-LaBar 20:33

Well, it's not an article as much as a story that's coming to us out of Langley, British Columbia. I had to go look up what these are, but I suspect a lot of our listeners know. Langley had some what they call baffle gates, which another word for them is maze gates. I'm going to describe them. It's basically when you go to enter something, and they stagger two gates so that you have to zigzag walk. They would be gates that would be very difficult to ride a bike through, often very difficult to ride maybe a wheelchair or a scooter through. There's not technically a blockage, but the act of trying to navigate these gates is very difficult.

Our Strong Towns Langley Local Conversation led an effort to have those gates removed through part of their trail network. I love this story because of its simplicity. Honestly, I think that—we talk all the time about the four step process and the next smallest thing, and it's not infrequent that I will get on a call with a member or a Local Conversation, and they're trying to solve a problem that is very, very, very big.

But what I have found so often when I've done community work is that success breeds success. When your Local Conversation takes on a very specific project like, "These trails in our community are less accessible and less used because of these maze gates, and they're not accessible to the people we want to see using them, they're not having their desired effect. We are going to launch and initiate a campaign to do that," and then you're successful, it can be a really important small step in bringing your local community, your Local Conversation, your community together, because people like to be a part of something that is seeing progress and seeing wins.

When this one came across my plate, I'm sure the people in Langley who were involved in it felt like this was actually a really hard thing. They may not have felt that it was simple, but it is simple in its—I guess the gates are there, or they are not. That's a very tangible thing. So they've succeeded in doing all the community outreach. They went through the council. Now the work of actually removing the gates is happening.

I just think that's such a great success story to let people know that you don't have to do the city equivalent of world peace to be a successful Strong Towns member or Strong Towns Local Conversation. You can be doing the next smallest thing in your community, and by observing where people are not interacting with your community in the best way, you're going to be able to really make some positive changes. So shout out to Strong Towns Langley.

Abby Newsham 23:41

Yeah, shout out to Strong Towns Langley. I had to look up what these are, but I've seen them before. I don't think I realized that they actually have a name, but I've seen these around. I don't remember exactly where, but yeah, to keep bicyclists from driving through, or I'm presumably it's for cars, but it stops everybody really.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 24:06

It's probably having a lot of unintended consequences in communities. They were probably set up for some safety or other type of accessibility issue, but then when it starts to limit other desired users, that's when the communities want to get rid of them.

Abby Newsham 24:25

I love that there's this focus on something. As you said, it is very small, but it's a daily struggle that people have. It's one of those little policies that cities can have—"Hey, this is how we build this thing"—and it takes a big lift to change that, unfortunately. But to be able to have that preservation, to go through that process, and actually get these removed, I mean, I think that that definitely deserves a major shout out because they've really changed their community because of it.

John Reuter 24:59

Yeah. I love what both of you are emphasizing—this element around it being the next incremental step, about people going and seeing it and getting it done. Even those incremental steps take a lot of work to get there.

The other principle that I thought it highlighted too is that it's not always about what we build. Sometimes it's about subtraction. Sometimes it's about preservation. We can often get this idea of, "Okay, we got to make our community better. What big thing are we going to go out and do? What are we going to build next?"

Sometimes the key to your community's future is, what are you going to save? What are you going to keep in place? Or what is actually creating a barrier that, if we just took it away, would actually make our community work better? It's a physical barrier, or it's a legal barrier. That can be all sorts of things. Sometimes it's actually keeping something there, but I think it really is—it's a group that didn't think about just, "Oh my gosh, how can we build a bridge over an overpass, or an overpass over a big highway, or how can we build whatever?"

They said, "Wait, there's this small thing, and if we just got rid of it, we don't have to build anything new. We don't have to come up with any fancier solution. We just have to get rid of this thing in our way that we can be moving forward in a very literal way."

Carlee Alm-LaBar 26:04

John, what I love about that is that translates to so much of the conversation that we're having now about housing in various communities. A lot of times, communities are now seeing that one of the things that is slowing down housing production in their community is a regulation that they're able to get rid of.

So we spend a lot of time now when we're looking at particularly incremental housing—well, what policy do you have on the books that you maybe don't need to have that is preventing more housing from getting done? So I love the way that you frame that, because it's a good way for people to think about their city: What's here that doesn't need to be here that's going to make our place better?

Abby Newsham 26:48

Yeah, that's a really, really good framing. Because so much of these conversations are about what do you add, but this is really about what do you subtract. It's subtractive urbanism and approaches, rather than going out and build something, spending money on something. There's probably a whole list of things that really just need to go away in our cities.

All right, so I have an article that I wanted to share from Bloomington, Illinois. This is a shout out to Noah Tang, who has started a conversation about better design in their downtown area. There's a group called Strong Towns Blono—I think it's Blono, is how it's pronounced. But basically they have presented a design vision that came out of an ongoing planning design charrette, public engagement process that they've been organizing, where they focused on a parcel of land that is being vacated and a building that is set to be slated for demolition at the end of the year. It would be replaced temporarily, apparently, by a parking lot.

They basically went through their own planning design charrette process, where they actually were able to come up with different solutions and alternatives. As somebody who participates in a lot of charrettes, I just wanted to really highlight that article, highlight this story, because I think that there's a lot of value in the charrette process, especially if it is really led in good faith and really does include people in a community.

So I'd love to see more Strong Towns groups actually taking that approach and not just leaving the charrettes to the professionals, but really for these community organizations to conduct their own charrettes and come up with solutions, because it's such a great approach for coming up with ideas and bringing things to the table. I love to see a Strong Towns group doing the charrette approach and actually bringing it to their council.

John Reuter 29:04

You can do this stuff. We can all do this stuff. It doesn't require some—to sit down together, to actually go to a site, look at the site together, figure out what you want to do with it, actually walking it, thinking about it, drawing and talking, having models you can play with. That's the key of a charrette process: it's playful.

This is really getting together in your community with people that you work with in your community, have your neighbor come together, and to play and imagine together what's possible. There's this phrase that people say: "Politics is the art of the possible." But what our job is often to do is to expand what's possible, to expand what's possible within our politics. That often starts with a sense of play, with a sense of imagination, and that's grounded in community. That's what charrette processes are at their best.

When they're run by community, I think it's especially easy for them to live in that space where they're most powerful. When professionals are guiding them, they're often having to get to somewhere at the end. There's a lot more like, "Oh, it has to be deciphered from this way," and that can actually interfere with the play, that can make the stakes feel higher, that can make other things happen. When the communities come together, it really lets you have that purest form of thinking about those ideas and trying those ideas.

Here's the other thing: you don't even need other people to hold your own charrette. Here's a little thought—you can hold a charrette right in your own home. You can hold a charrette about your home. You can hold a thing about how you want to redesign your space, how you really design how you interact with the street right in front of where you are. You can actually have a design thought with your family, with your neighbor, with anybody in this process of creativity, of play, of thinking about the built environment and what can you do in this way.

We talk incrementally—what can you do to make the next step of improvement? How can you rearrange your furniture outside? How can you rearrange a bench in front of your house? These ideas—it really is an idea that works from the very small to very big. These ideas are really emboldened by—oh, gosh. Now I feel bad because I want to reference the book, but can I remember it? Oh, he did the plan for the University of Oregon. He did all—everyone, now look—if he made the three different books. But he talks about in A Pattern Language. In A Pattern Language, they talk about the smallest possible patterns down to how a room's arranged, or where a kitchen thing goes, to the biggest language of how we arrange our entire towns and communities.

He actually did a whole set of charrettes. Had people come out in sites and draw them out to do these things there. Really applied the idea from everywhere—to a kid thinking about their own bedroom or where it might be located, to an entire community thinking about where might you locate the buildings or the edges of the community. So these principles can be used in a lot of different ways.

The trick in Strong Towns that makes it powerful is figuring out, what can we play with together? Where can we be creative together? What's in our range of activity? What can we explore together and actually improve just a little bit? It's the same principles, the same ideas. You don't have to wait for some big community conversation. You can start playing with this stuff today. You can start thinking about how you can improve your relationship with your community through the design elements that you control, even if it's just the front door of your apartment, even if it's just a community common space. You have the ability to start those conversations with your neighbors and make a step forward.

Abby Newsham 32:06

Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Carlee.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 32:08

Well, I was just gonna give a big shout out to this Local Conversation too, Abby. I think I'm gonna say it wrong. I say it Blono, but I'm not sure. But they are always on the forefront of so many of our activities. What I love about this and their work is they offered three design options. So they're trying to challenge the city to make sure these places stay activated and don't just let a temporary parking lot stay temporary for, oh, 10-15 years. There's so much we can do.

Shout out to them. They're a really great Local Conversation. They are continuing to kind of make sure that the Strong Towns ideas are at the forefront of solutions in their community, and this was just another example of their creativity and ingenuity to keep doing that. So they're amazing. We all have so much to learn from their work.

Abby Newsham 33:12

I think that the charrette—the word charrette—can sound intimidating to people when it's really just a fancy word for a workshop. The thing about charrettes that I think is really powerful is that you don't really need to ask super complicated questions. I mean, you can ask very simple, very particular questions that generate a lot of ideas.

So to your point, John, about whether you want to talk with people about redesigning your living room or talk with people about redesigning a site or even a city and neighborhood, you can do it through some very simple prompts and get a lot of information out of it. The point is that it's very collaborative.

Not to go back to Monte, but one of the things that I got to witness in Kansas City when he was working on a project—it wasn't his project, but he was supporting an organization at a redevelopment project—he just brought floor plans to a community meeting, blank floor plans of the building, and just said, "What's missing in this community?" He conducted a whole charrette with a big group of people, and it was very collaborative. It developed a lot of buy-in for different concepts.

So that's the beauty of workshopping things. These approaches really being led by citizens can make a big difference. When you bring these solutions to your city and tell them that you already have consensus around these issues, or at least a group that has consensus, that can be really powerful. Because people who are elected and people in these positions are often looking for that consensus and sometimes hire consultants to get consensus. So if you're bringing that to people, I think that that's incredibly valuable. I'd love to see more community groups doing this kind of thing to bring these solutions forward and be leaders.

John Reuter 35:13

The difference of the success in these when we're looking for consensus is too often consultants come in and they push to consensus too rapidly. They try to roll over complaints, roll over concerns, and just try to get to a thing so we can just move on and check a box. They're trying to create some sense of consensus. What they miss out on is the brilliance of people's ideas that the project could actually be better by engaging people in a messy process, by having a charrette, by having a workshop that has this real engagement and real ideas come forward. They actually end up in a better place.

So we just have to have faith in each other and in having this full democracy—the small d—but full democratic process with each other, of that, and get to real consensus, not the illusion of consensus, where we have some—sometimes I love a sticky dot where you go and put things on stuff. But too often we use sticky dots to just count them up and not use them to actually access the next question of, what are they telling us? What are the questions we need to ask to go a little deeper? How can we get more? How can we actually have people look at a floor plan to give us input, rather than just choose between three options that we've already chosen that are only a little different than each other and are kind of set up to have you pick the "right option," quote unquote, that we already want to do? We can actually have something change.

Abby Newsham 36:30

Yeah, and have very iterative processes. I love that. Do either of you have—I think we have time for one more article if either of you have one that you'd like to share.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 36:41

I think John wanted to talk parking. I don't know if—

Abby Newsham 36:45

Yes!

John Reuter 36:45

I always want to talk parking. Now, do I have an article? No, I don't have an article. I have many articles. Go to the Strong Towns site, search parking, and we'll have lots there for you. You can read anything. It's lots and lots of content.

But parking minimums were really a eureka moment for our organization at Strong Towns, which was this idea that—early on, we didn't actually know what to tell people. We're like, "Cities are falling apart. They're not financially—everybody's in debt. It's a disaster. Good luck." People bought the fact that things were bad. They looked at the sheets and they looked at the financial situation. "Yeah, this Ponzi scheme is a problem." But it's pretty depressing. Do we have anything for people to do?

But it took us a while to figure these things out. Now we have our housing campaign, and we have thoughts about roads, and we have thoughts about all sorts of things that we can help people with. How to do city finance, have better transparency, and all sorts of tools that will help people make better decisions and also policies to go with. But the first one we figured out, the most obvious one, was to get rid of parking requirements, that we do not need to require people to build empty space.

I'll often say this: "What's the opposite of place?" I used to—we were going around talking about this—I think, what's the opposite of place? Here's a place. Here's downtown. This is a place where there's bustling people and everything's happening. What's the opposite of place? We'll often think, "Oh, it's the wilderness. It's up on a hilltop somewhere." But that's not true, because that's a place too. That's an amazing and wonderful place to be.

The opposite of place is parking. There's just nothing going on. It's an emptiness. It just interrupts our human connection to one another. It just stops it there. So to actually mandate people to build things that make us more disconnected from each other is crazy.

Now, do we need some parking? Of course we need some parking. But we can let that be figured out. We can let the market determine that. You're like, "Oh no, but what if they don't build enough?" Well, then someone will build parking, and they'll charge for it. Then they'll figure out how much they can actually get people to pay for it. If you're not willing to pay for that parking, we don't need it.

So that's really the crux here of this brilliant campaign that's been going. Now we have cities across the country who have eliminated the parking minimums. Some of you can set parking maximums—"This is so corrosive, you only can build so much more"—which stops big, big box developments who aren't thinking about the community interest. But the real key is just eliminating those minimums. It's been really exciting to watch folks do that.

So that's the thing. That's one of the things I'm most excited about in this movement, and one of the things I think most excited that we've done. If you're looking at this and you go, "Wait, we have parking requirements in our town," or "I don't know what our parking requirements are," go onto strongtowns.org, come check out the parking section, look at the map and see if your city's there. If you already know something, add yourself to the map if it's already happened, or make it happen to get yourself on that map. Figure out, where can we do this? Where can we make progress? So that's my little pitch for action, but also celebration of action.

Abby Newsham 39:49

That's awesome. Yeah, we are changing our parking standards in Kansas City, so I'll have to go take a look and see if we're on the map or maybe submit it.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 40:00

I just want to say that every time I talk about parking minimums from now on, I'm going to use the phrase that John used: "requiring people to build empty space." When you put it that way, it sounds even more ridiculous.

Abby Newsham 40:19

Well, and just the sheer cost of parking. I mean, if you've heard people talk about the cost of a parking space, even a surface lot—it's not just structured parking garages—just a surface lot is incredibly expensive. So especially when you put that on small businesses, small spaces, it really can make or break a business in a particular place and whether or not they're able to actually open.

John Reuter 40:45

So when I came onto the City Council in Sandpoint, this is long ago now, but in the downtown, there was this small Mexican restaurant that opened up. They had started as a food truck, and then they were able to start a restaurant, which was really exciting. They wanted to expand their restaurant on the footprint. They had an area that was an open patio, and they wanted to close it in so they could use it in the winter, as it gets cold up in north Idaho.

It was going to cost them more in fees for the parking they weren't going to be able to provide, because there's no room on site, than it would to actually build the extension of it. Here's the kicker: they were across from a city parking lot that was half a block wide with hundreds of spots that were never filled during the year. So you have abundant parking next to them. In fact, parking—the problem's too much of it. You have to stop building on it. We're going to charge them tens of thousands of dollars to do this stuff.

So one of the first things we did was actually get rid of those parking requirements and make it so that they could actually expand. They were able to expand. They were able to expand their restaurant. Other people in our town were able to build stuff. We really just legalized the traditional pattern that had happened downtown for decades, for generations, before these parking requirements came in—just copy and pasted from some national planning book to be like, "Oh, these are the rules. Now we have to do it."

There was no reason why we had to do it in the first place. All we did was ban something we loved from taking place, mandated building empty space in a place where there was already plenty of parking. What we needed to do was help our local business. We need to celebrate them, not put up roadblocks to this great local business building out.

Abby Newsham 42:18

I love those examples, because when people talk about zoning reform, and people hear about it who are not in the world of talking about zoning all the time or really understanding zoning, I think it can sound really wonky. When these standards really can make a huge difference for entrepreneurs, for people who are just trying to start a business or get on their feet and start something. So I think that that is really important to highlight these stories for how zoning and parking standards actually play out on the ground in everyday lives of people.

All right. Well, I think that that's a wrap for today. Thank you both very much for joining me. Before we end, we will do the Downzone, which is the part of the show where we can share anything that we've been up to these days, anything that's been on our minds—books, music, activities. John, I'll throw it to you. What is your Downzone?

John Reuter 43:20

I have two and they're connected. I said I have nothing, now I have two by the end of the conversation here. So the two are—I was just in Santa Fe this week. I just got home this morning at 6am, so I'm sorry I'm clearly not my normal energetic self, but I've tried to keep it peppy.

But the thing—so one, I saw the International Museum of Folk Art, which may be the greatest Museum in the United States. It is absolutely incredible. There's this room filled with folk art from all over the world, and it's been arranged in this way that shows the interconnection between these different cultures. It's this idea of how connected we are through the way the folk art that we create. How there's all this connection between this—done by this famous architect and designer who donated 100,000 pieces that quadrupled the museum's collection. There's 10,000 pieces that he arranged in this space. So that's just—it's overwhelming the way the displays are set up. It's just this overwhelming amount of—it's hard to explain. Worth looking up. But in Santa Fe, the International Museum of Folk Art, or Folk Art Museum. Anyway, incredible space, really had a profound impact on me.

The other thing, though, is we talk about this from time to time, but Chuck Marohn, our founder, has a little obsession with Disney. So I have a Disney connection for my trip, and I can't not talk about the Disney connection if I'm going to be on a Strong Towns podcast for this week. So you two are going to see this. Listeners will not. But I picked up this pin, and it's made—it's called a Zuni fetish.

The Zuni are an indigenous people that live across—that live across New Mexico and Arizona is where their traditional lands are. A lot of them are artisans and create things, and they create natural things. But in the 1970s they had this interaction with American pop culture, and they started creating these Zuni fetishes where they used their indigenous techniques to create the same ones they had used for generations to build icons, to build pins like this and other things—Zuni fetishes based on pop culture like Disney.

So this is a little Mickey Mouse connection here that's done in that style of this inlaid stone work that they did there. What I love about it is that it's this crossing of cultures. It's this meeting of ways. It's this idea of culture coming together and seeing something in pop culture and having to blend with what was there and tradition. I feel like this, in many ways, is the way forward for us: to not give up on the past, not give up on tradition, not give up the things that have worked and the things that are precious and the things that we love, but to also be open to seeing other culture and blending with it, to be open to new ideas, and figuring out, how do we bring that into what we do?

Yes, it will change us, but we won't give up what we love about ourselves. So I was at a—I bought this at an antique shop, and then I went to a very traditional Zuni jewelry store, and I was asking, "Hey, is this cool, or is this not cool? What do you think?" He said, "No, no, no, it's just like the other objects in here. It has the same idea, the same connection to culture. It sells the same idea. Here are these sacred animal things." That one actually has a sacred animal connection. It represents the mouse, but it also represents the creativity of the artist.

So then I was like—he had these papers. He gave me some other things I bought there of these animals. I was like, "Oh, do you have the paper for the mouse?" He gave me the paper for the mouse. Here's what the mouse means: The mouse is energetic, and it moves around, and it looks at lots of things, and it finds the little details everywhere. It's a reminder to go and fix those little details to make your life a little better, or to make your community's life a little better.

So this is a Strong Towns emblem in more ways than one, because it's a Mickey Mouse. It's a blend of culture, but it's also about finding little things we can do to make the world a little better. So that's my Downzone: that Santa Fe trip and this little Zuni fetish.

Abby Newsham 47:36

John, that is one of the best Downzones I've ever heard. I would have never guessed what your Downzone was going to be today. Carlee, would you like to follow that?

Carlee Alm-LaBar 47:49

Okay, so John is a tough act to follow, but let me try, because this weekend is my favorite weekend of the year. We have an event in Lafayette that I've been a part of since the beginning, called the 24 Hour Citizen Project. This event gets citizens together in a very Strong Towns way, asks them to pitch their civic idea, makes them spend tonight working on it, all day tomorrow working on it, and then pitch at a big community event to a room full of people and to a table of backers. Of the eight projects, usually about half of them get funded.

So our community, over the years, has had dozens of projects, and we're probably now a couple hundred thousand dollars into very small investments to make our community a better place. We've had Mardi Gras parades started through this. We've had community fridges started through this. We've had arts installations. One of our art organizations started what they call a Bare Walls program to get our artists' work into local businesses.

It's just the most feel-good weekend of the year. I've been a part of putting it on for many, many years, and it is always my favorite weekend of the year. I'm very much looking forward to being—it's a celebration of community, and it happens tonight and tomorrow night. That's really, really cool.

Abby Newsham 49:23

Interesting, Carlee. So it's gonna be hard to follow both of you, but I'll try. So I've been for about a month house hunting. So I'm looking to buy a house, and I'm looking all throughout the pre-1950s Kansas City neighborhoods. It's where I live now, and so I want to reside in this area.

Because of this, I've just been geeking out on housing more than normal. First of all, I've been thinking a lot about the implications of tax abatement areas, because in Kansas City, we have a system now where basically half of the city—so everything east of Troost Avenue—is eligible for 10-year tax abatement. So a lot of people have now gotten their taxes frozen for 10 years, and this is kind of the redlined areas of the city. On the other side, we've had a situation where taxes have gone up really rapidly.

So to look at the cost of housing on one side of the city versus the other, one side has very low taxes. The other side has taxes that have gone way up. You might have a house that costs less on one side, but it has high taxes and it just increases the mortgage so much. So I've just been thinking a lot about the implication of taxes and how that impacts housing affordability and how it impacts neighborhoods and the consequences of that.

Another thing I've been thinking a lot about is every house I go into, I feel like I'm learning more and more just about old houses. There's so many little things to look out for, and every house is just so different. Every house has been treated so differently over the years, depending on whether or not people took care of things, if people did work well. Something that became really apparent to me is that there's a lot of flips that were done not very well and are coming up on kind of the end of the maintenance lifespan for work that was not done well.

Something that my realtor mentioned was that there were a lot of people who decided to get into flipping in 2014, '15, '16. So basically now and in the next 10 years, we're probably going to see the impact of a lot of inexperienced flippers that were kind of doing work, but maybe they didn't know what they were looking at when they hired subcontractors to do things and didn't do things correctly or did it cheaply.

So that's something that she kind of flagged as, on these old houses where people were coming in and doing incremental development, and we want people to bring these houses back, but there were people who didn't have a lot of experience and didn't do work well, and so you're starting to see it now. That's something that I hadn't contemplated very much before, and it's too bad that that's the case.

I guess the last thing that I'll mention is that it's also brought me back into really geeking out on our tax assessment photos. So back in 1940, over a period of eight months, 50,000 images of Kansas City structures were taken for the 1940 tax assessment collection. So in Kansas City, you can go back and find these photos of old houses and banks and stores and shops, and you can see what different buildings used to be.

So it's been fun to look at old houses and see that this used to be a grocery store, or this actually used to be something completely different that wasn't a house. So I just really appreciate the power of photographs and what you can learn and find from old buildings, and it tells you a lot about just very particular architectural details within houses and why something was constructed in the way it was. So that's been a lot of fun for me, just to kind of learn about housing from that perspective as well.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 53:53

Sounds really interesting, and also good luck finding a house. It sounds—I would love to be doing that, because you can almost see the history of the community through that, through the housing. So that's really neat.

Abby Newsham 54:04

Yeah, definitely. It's kind of a weird time to buy a house right now. I do have a house. So I've got this house that I'm in right now, but I have some life changes that—good life changes that open up the need to have a house that is not this one.

John Reuter 54:24

I love how your story highlights again all these things we talked about on this whole call of just being in the middle of something and all the things you learn. I don't know, it just reminds me—it's one of the reasons why I always just love talking with you, is because you're someone who's interested. There's this idea of it's more important to be interested than interesting, if that makes sense. So many people focus on trying to do all these things to be, "Oh, let me be interesting." But what you embody is what I think our best Strong Towns members do too, which is always being interested.

You go on this house hunt and you're like, "Well, let me look at this. Well, let me pull up the old photos. Let me figure this thing out." It just makes you see your community and bring this depth that you bring to every one of these conversations that you do every week. It just makes me love to be a listener. It's so fun to get to be here and talk to you too and get to participate. But just thank you for everything you're doing to build Strong Towns, and thank you for that always being interested that you bring to these conversations.

Abby Newsham 55:15

I love that, John, thank you. That's really sweet. Well, we'll end on that note. I appreciate you both joining us this week. This has been a lot of fun, and please don't be a stranger. I hope to see you both on again sometime.

Carlee Alm-LaBar 55:28

Thank you, Abby.

John Reuter 55:31

Thank you.

Abby Newsham 55:31

All right, thank you and thanks everyone for listening.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 55:37

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 today.