The Strong Towns Podcast
Author Diane Alisa just wanted her kids to have what she didn't: freedom to roam, community, and a childhood that doesn't require a minivan. Somewhere along the way, she realized the suburban dream itself might be the problem. Today, she and Chuck dig into what the Suburban Experiment cost us — and what comes next.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everybody. This is Chuck Marohn with Strong Towns. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. I have been telling a story about the suburban experiment, the way we grow cities and have grown our cities since World War Two, and I've always felt like my telling of this story was my perspective as an engineer, as a planner, as a technical person trying to reach a broader audience. And I often feel very limited. I'm going to say this in a way that's kind of awkward. There's this whole human conversation out there that I just through my technical lens, sometimes struggle to reach.
In fact, in the early days of Strong Towns, when I was writing and talking to my wife about these things, my wife would say, "Well, you should really talk about it this way or this way," and it's not my voice. I found a voice that is beautiful and that talks about these things in a way that I can deeply relate to, but is not natural for me. So Diane Alisa wrote a book called "A Love Letter to Suburbia: How to Restore the American Village," and she's agreed to come on the podcast today and chat to us all about it. Diane, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast.
Thank you. This is amazing. You guys are the reason why I have my book, so it's really exciting for me.
I'm going to say this, and then I want to hear your story. As I'm reading this, I mean you quote me a lot. You quote Strong Towns a lot. I feel like you're telling my story in a different way. Let me give you an analogy. I don't think this is exactly perfect, but someone creates a beautiful song and it's really nice and it's really great, and then someone else comes along and re-does that song in a different way. And it's also awesome, but it's in their way, it's in their style. It's uniquely theirs, but it's the same song. I feel like that's what you've done. I mean, clearly you've added a ton to it, and it's not just me. You're drawing from other sources and other people, but you're telling something in a different way, a reimagined way, and I find it very beautiful.
Thank you. My goal is to reach a general audience, because I know that a general audience doesn't even think about urbanism. They're not concerned. They've just really accepted the status quo. And I was like, "How can I break the matrix and communicate to these people that they don't actually want the suburban experiment?" So I did it with a lot of storytelling and culture politics. I hit points that the environment is affecting that I know they're complaining about and upset about, and I'm giving them a vision of hope and words to explain why they are so upset.
So let's explain why first, and then I think let's talk about that unique framing. You talk about finding not just bikes and kind of going down a rabbit hole. In a sense, I get that story once a week, where people say, "Oh my gosh, I found Not Just Bikes, then I found Strong Towns, then my whole life has changed, and I can't see anything the same way." So that's not a unique story in my world, but it rarely results in something like this. Can you tell that story in your way and how you actually got to the point where you decided to write a book about this?
Well, before I was even considering urbanism, before I discovered Jason Slaughter, I live in Utah, and it's one of the most suburbanized states in America. I feel like this red state has fully embraced suburbia because they're really family-oriented. I would be driving down the freeway, and I would just be imagining that I could bulldoze everything down and put roads underground.
I've been thinking about this for a really long time because everything has been so ugly for so long. Then I finally discovered urbanism, and I finally had the language to say what I had been feeling so deeply for so long—just all of the disappointment I've had with the way that we've built the world. I was also kind of being gaslit in a way because we have a lot of materialism, and yet we don't have great quality of life in a lot of ways.
I actually got a lot of pushback from my own family when I started talking about this. They were like, "You're complaining." I think there's a big disconnect. Everyone has experienced the experiment differently. But I really had to push through and be like, "No, we can improve our quality of life. We do need to change our environment." Jason Slaughter was that first step into urbanism.
So I grew up on a farm and lived on the outskirts of a small town. Then, after college, my wife and I got married and moved to a five-acre lot in suburban areas of this small town. We lived on a cul-de-sac and drove in and all that. Working as an engineer, I felt like we had made it. This is the high life. This is what everybody's after. I've got the American dream. I married my high school sweetheart, and we're living on the five-acre lot in the new suburban home we built, and everything was perfect.
The dissonance of it started to wear on me. Coming from a technical side and looking at my own life, I'm spending all this time in the car. I'm not home. There was all of that. But because I feel like one of the empathetic things that you have—and people who grow up in a big city are puzzled by suburbia—I feel like one of the things that has made you an effective communicator is that you're not looking down on people who see this as normal and good. Can you try to describe the world as maybe I saw it in my early marriage, as maybe you saw it growing up, or as people around you see it today? What is appealing about this? If we're trying to communicate with people in a love letter, what are their priors that we're trying to get through to first?
I'll just state what I'm trying to do with my book: replace suburbs with villages. An environment that supports multigenerational culture, that supports local businesses and prosperity and beautification, where local municipalities actually have power again.
So if we're going to talk about the suburbs from a perspective of the American dream, I didn't have any other outlet. This was the narrative that I was brought up in. I wanted the single-family home with the yard and the dog, and I wanted my husband to commute to work. I was told a lot about that too—religiously. This is the way that motherhood looks. The older I got, the more wear and tear I felt on this idea.
In 2020, when we had finally graduated from college, I could not find a home. That was really disappointing, especially because I had just become a young mother, and my son was far more difficult than I had anticipated. He craved people, and I just didn't know how to give it to him. I was not enough. I really feel like he was a big part of the push I needed. I needed community to give him what he needed.
If you're a suburbanite, basically the American dream right now is becoming out of reach because of the housing crisis. The traffic is getting so annoying, especially here in Utah. People are just rioting to add more lanes. It just gets uglier and more expensive and disappointing. I started to realize that maybe what I was being fed as the American dream wasn't quite right. I really deeply wanted to live near my family, and I couldn't because houses were at $1.3 million and now are $800,000. That was really disappointing.
Also, where I live, Saratoga Springs went through a huge suburbanization transformation. I was like, "Dang, this is really terrible. I thought this was a safe haven, and it doesn't stop. Suburbia doesn't stop. It just consumes everything. It makes you poor, and it's really disappointing."
So I envisioned something better because family, I think, really is the most important thing, and we need environments for family. I think that the suburban dream is anti-family and anti-children.
When I first started writing, my dad was my target audience. I knew that engineers and planners were going to read my stuff, but my dad was not. But I always felt like if I could write something in a way that my dad could understand and relate to—my dad's my number one cynic. I would tell him something, and he'd be like, "That sounds like a bunch of BS. You spent too much time at college, Chuck. What's going on?" If I were to talk to him about walkable neighborhoods and having a mix of housing types, he would just throw those ideas away, laugh at them. So I always felt like I had to write in a way where my dad could read it and not immediately dismiss it.
Do you have a similar target audience? Is there a specific person in your mind that you're trying to reach?
It's my mother. Similar situation here. I actually took a year of talking about this to convince my mother, and she had to read my book twice. She was so against this idea, and I've finally gotten her on my side enthusiastically. I talk about this sometimes—the target audience I'm trying to reach are more red-leaning because they are so pro-suburb, so pro-car-centric design. I want everybody to be able to read it and relate. But this was the audience I was trying to direct my efforts to because they were fighting me on everything.
There are certain things that trigger this audience. The word "city density," even just the phrase "car-dependent" made them say, "Oh my gosh." They didn't want to move on to the next step—"I don't want to be dependent on something to hand me my livelihood. I need to be self-sufficient." So I was like, "How can I do this in a storytelling way that feels warm and welcoming and points to all of their trigger points, and still have them embrace this new idea?"
So I started talking about families. I started talking about processed food. I started talking about plastic and beauty and culture. People are so sad that we don't dance anymore. This is all environment. You can't have a culture if you are only a consumer and you have no local community. There's no such thing. You are just a person that shows up to Walmart, buys your groceries, and leaves. We're really starting to feel the effects of only being a consumer. I think even now, with our social interactions, we have become consumers because it's all online.
So I was trying to get my mother to look at this idea of village and how we could live closer to each other in this beautiful place where we could have fresh bread instead of Walmart bread in plastic. These are all things. I was like, "What if we dreamed of a better world? Then we could get rid of a lot of the car problems. Not get rid of the car, but get rid of a design that totally centers around cars." She finally resonated with that.
I feel like when I start with my dad, there's a whole language. There's the urbanist language that originates in big progressive cities. It comes out from there and starts with road diets and walkability and density, and it proceeds up to the war on cars and 15-minute cities. There's this whole lexicon of things. When I'm in San Francisco, people just talk—"Oh, vibrant neighborhood"—and they all know what they're talking about. But when I'm not in those places, even in Kansas City, Omaha, or Dallas, these things are barriers to people even hearing you.
What is your mom hearing that is such an obstacle or a burden for her in actually understanding what you're trying to say? What are the obstacles and mental hurdles you're coming up against when talking to someone like your mom who might be inclined to be in love with suburbia?
I think one of the biggest mental hurdles is breaking down the propaganda that the car is a type of freedom. I try to talk about that a lot—you're not free because we have car-centric design. The prosperity culture is really difficult too. We're not totally blessed because we have so much money to spend on fast food. This was something she would talk to me about a lot. "You have so much easier than I did, and you have so much more money than I did." To show how the suburbs break down the economy over time—while I might have more money to spend on McDonald's fries, I don't have money to buy a house anymore. The economy is totally different.
I actually want to bring up my mother-in-law because she's also close to that generation, and she was extremely conspiratorial about walkability. I mention this in my book. The 15-minute city—I completely abandoned it. It will not work. Don't use it. It's tied to radical red-leaning conspiracies about New World Order and how we will be lost to big government. That's why I use the word "village" because it feels much warmer, much easier to grasp than a 15-minute city.
So there are some things that I was like, "Okay, I know I can't use a 15-minute city." I want to be honest, Chuck—I still struggle with this, especially when I'm making reels. I want to use road diets. I want to use walkability. I want to use those words, and they're just not in the paradigm yet to understand. I've written my book, so you're going to get everything from my book. But just when I'm talking to people in real life, it is so hard for me to change the paradigm and break through.
It's funny you mention that. We have internally a sheet or long file of red words and yellow words—red, don't use; yellow, use sparingly or with caution. "Vibrant" is a yellow word. It's not that it's a bad word, but "vibrant," used ad nauseum, has a certain kind of turn-off feel for red America that I think deserves other ways to describe this.
If you follow Strong Towns, unless we are directly quoting someone, we will never use the word "sprawl." You just don't see us using it because it's such a politically charged pejorative. When you live in sprawl, it has such an off-putting effect on people who, in my terms, are stuck in sprawl. We just don't use it. We can describe that effect in some other way.
Well, I don't think it would have convinced me in the very beginning. I'm kind of part of this group that needed it to be visually planned out for me so I could see it and be like, "Oh, this is the thing that I'm really bothered about."
I was wondering if we could talk about children. Sometimes people don't finish my book, and I never get to talk about children. It's such a huge part of my mission—infants, mothers, and fathers.
The end of my notes are about children. But you know what? I'm just ripping up my notes. Let's talk about children because I didn't want to push you on this—sometimes people don't want to talk about their kids or their situation—but I would love to hear from your vantage point how your children have inspired you to look at it this way and what seeing it through the lens of a mom and a parent has done to your thinking.
I feel like a lot of this book comes from pain. I was that suburban kid who was extremely bored. There was a point where I didn't want to go to the park anymore, and yet I was stuck in a home with a lot of technology in my face. I just felt really bad like I couldn't get control of my screen time usage, and yet I wasn't allowed to really do anything else.
Growing up, I didn't want this for my children. I'm from a musical theater background, so I loved the Newsies, I loved Annie, I loved Matilda. I loved seeing competent children. That was so exciting for me. I was thinking about this for a long time—where is the place for our children, and how do we make this better? When I had Elliot, my first born child, he's the one on the cover of my book.
That's what I was going to ask you. Diane, pause for a second. How old are you?
I'm 29.
Okay. When you say screen time, I'm putting it in context because I do think that that has changed even more dramatically for people a decade younger than you. My kids are 18 and 21. I think their challenge with screens is even different than yours. You have two boys?
I have two boys and one girl.
What are their ages?
They're really little. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old, a one-and-a-half-year-old, and she's almost six months old.
Okay, beautiful. When I was a kid growing up on the farm, we were still a mile and a half, two miles from the park and the suburb, and I would get up in the morning, do whatever farm chores I had to do, and then I would go and we were just free-range kids all the time. My kids were not free-range kids—they were not free-range kids because, I mean, you read my first book. My daughter literally went to kindergarten, and her best friend when she came home said, "I have this girl. She's my best friend. She's amazing." The girl lived across the street. Literally, our driveway and her driveway met on the cul-de-sac, and we did not know that this girl existed. She physically slept 500 feet away from our house for five years.
Oh my goodness. That's what's so crazy about the suburbs—you don't have any organic interaction with people. You could basically go 10 years and not know who's living in the house next to you. With children, I just wanted them to be more free-range because there was a very small season of my life where I lived on a military base in Alaska, and my mother considered it super safe.
Up in Fairbanks?
Yes, up in Fairbanks.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
So I was seven and my little sister was four. I spent a lot of my time outside just wandering around. My mom didn't even know where I was. There were even two small convenience stores—one was a DI thrift shop, and the other was more like a gas station where I could buy Mentos. I liked Mentos a lot. I lived there for about two and a half to three years, and then I came to Utah. Oh my goodness, it was such a different experience. I couldn't go anywhere. I felt almost suffocated by the level of intimacy that is required to make friends with people in your neighborhood.
I came into the cul-de-sac, and there were five girls there who had just grown up together. I was like an outsider, so it was so hard to make organic friendships. I had to be exactly like them in order to be friends with them. That was really hard. It's not anybody's fault. It's really the fault of the environment that requires so much intimacy.
When you say "intimacy," you mean the opposite of casual. We're all out in this place and we can all interact with each other more casually. But intimate is like—if you're going to hang out with them, you're going to be invited into their home. As a kid, you're going to go to their bedroom, you're going to go to their living room.
Yes. You're going to look like them. You're going to have the same religion. You have to be aligned on a lot of things to have relationships in suburban neighborhoods, which was why it was hard for me when people were like, "Why don't you go out and make friends?" Well, they don't necessarily want to be my friend. They might enjoy rubbing shoulders with me, but they might not want me to invite them over for dinner on Monday nights. That's a ton of effort for me to have any type of community.
Anyway, for children, I'm going to say that I feel like I am a much better writer than speaker.
You're doing great. Your writing is fantastic, though. Let's be clear.
There are certain things that I want for children. I want them to be able to wander around. I want them to be able to explore. I want them to be able to adult-model and have a job within their community that makes them feel important and actually matters—not in a patronizing way, but in a real way. I want them to be off of screens. I don't think the internet is for them in any way that we can make life analogous. That is the path that we should take for children, and I really only believe that's possible in localized communities and probably even decentralized school systems. All of that requires a local community to really complete.
Right now, parents are super struggling because they don't have that local community. They don't have that village, and they're doing it all by themselves. It takes a lot of discipline, a lot of work, and a lot of money, and most kids are falling through the cracks, unfortunately. I didn't want that for my children. I wanted something better for them.
Can I ask you a hard question about writing? I think it's related to this. When I wrote Strong Towns, my first book, I wrote this last chapter that was deeply personal. A lot of feedback I received from people was that it should have been the first chapter, not the last. I felt like my target audience, my dad, would not have gotten it if I started with that. You don't start with your kids—you start with everything else. It almost feels like you're breaking down defense systems to get to the thing you care most about.
Is that an intentional thing? Because you do have this ongoing "Love Letter" structure. Every chapter is "Dear Suburbia," and then you talk about something deeply painful before you get to anything hopeful. Then you get to your kids and your family, then to this thing that I think is motivating you. Talk to me about that process. Was that intentional? Was that just your writing, the way you work? What were you trying to do?
The order of it was really tricky, and I really debated on what I was going to do for a long time. It took six weeks to write a book, but I felt like I had to completely break down their worldview in order for them to relate to what I was trying to do for children. If I start off with my childhood section and I start talking about how I want children to be able to work, they're going to be like, "Nope, close the book," because this doesn't make any sense to them. The first thing they're going to think is, "Well, I don't want my kid working at McDonald's. That's super unsafe. This woman is crazy, and I'm not going to do it."
That's funny because there is a certain amount of framing where a summer job is a fast food place for a kid. If this nutty woman says, "I want kids to work," they're just going to think she wants them to work at McDonald's.
Exactly. So I do the whole "Dear Suburbia," and I say, "Okay, these are all the problems—the housing crisis, the plastic problem, the traffic problem." These are all the things that you're concerned about. Then I go to culture and say, "This is how it's affected our culture. Our built environment completely changed the way we think, what we say, even how generations are viewing each other and understanding each other. These are things we've lost—like dancing—and why we're heading towards nostalgic things. Everything needs to be nostalgic because we absolutely hate the world we're living in right now. We want to escape it."
Then finally I say, "Okay, now that we've done that, let's show you how you can fix it and how it can be beautiful and how it can be a lot easier than you think—not impossible—and let's talk about what I really want to talk about: families. This is how children can reintegrate themselves, and this is how they can work safely, and this is how they can explore safely, and this is how mothers can integrate themselves into work, family, and community instead of carrying all the burdens that mothers carry right now."
I even talk about the patriarchy because our understanding of the patriarchy also shapes the way we build and the way we view the world. There are just things that I had to talk about, or this vision for a village is going to fail. If we haven't changed our minds about certain things, then what's the point of building a really beautiful community to be empty in 100 years or 50 years? We must value children again.
I think that the suburbs have completely stigmatized children and put them in a box that we don't want to associate with anymore because they're not part of society anymore. I really, really wanted to change that because I've genuinely cried for the children in America. They have gone through a lot, even though we don't quite recognize it. They really do, and they have suffered so much, and they continue to suffer.
I thought it was disciplined. I think "disciplined" is the right word. I don't mean that in a wrist-slapping kind of way. I meant it in a thoughtful, strategic way. Let me give you another related story. I can't tell you how many years I would show up at council meetings as an engineer or planner—the technical expert in the room that people would turn to. There would be some application or some project or something that the city was going forward with, and the do-gooder woman would show up. She would start crying about tearing down trees or kids not being able to play in the yard, and she would just go on and on. Then they would listen to her and then quickly dismiss her and move on to approve whatever it was, because that's what the sober, technical, thoughtful people were doing.
When I read your book, what I read was a sober, thoughtful, disciplined approach to having a difficult conversation with someone that then ultimately got to the things that the woman showing up with all the feelings did, right? It was one of these things where I immediately respected it because I understood where you were coming from. It's not to say that the woman was wrong showing up at the meeting saying, "We're tearing down the trees. The kids can't play in their yard." I get that. But it almost felt like you were saying, "Look, I'm going to make this broader set of dialogs first as kind of paying my dues to be able to have this more emotionally resonant conversation with you second." I felt that to be very novel. I immediately had a ton of respect for you because I think it's easier to write the deeply emotional book that just starts with that. But you don't hide the emotion—you approach it in a way that I think is accessible for a broader audience, an audience that would not normally be with you at the start. Is that fair?
Yes. For example, if you talk about how people with disabilities can't really function in a car-centric space, people are going to hear that and be like, "Yeah, oh, well, not too bad, right? Yeah, sorry about that." But if you give them a better alternative so they now understand why it makes sense for them to have a village instead of a suburb, they're like, "Oh yeah, and also this helps disabled people or people with accessibility issues. Now they can walk to places, and they can be autonomous, and that's so awesome, right?"
In almost a selfish way, you have to show them the better alternative and how it's going to benefit them first, and then be like, "And also it is really great for everybody else too." That's how I felt about children. I really feel like children are an oppressed class in America, starting all the way up to infancy. Our own attitudes and behaviors surrounding the infant are kind of flippant. We don't really consider them. It's like because they can't remember, we feel like we can almost treat them however we want.
What kid wants to get put in a car seat for four hours?
Exactly. We do this all the time, and I actually can hardly handle crying. If you've read my infant chapter, you'll know why I can't stand crying. For an infant, if you throw them in a car seat and they're crying for an hour, it's like an eternity for them. They are deeply suffering, and it doesn't seem like they're suffering because you're not suffering, but they are suffering. It is long-lasting for them. An hour is so long, and 15 minutes is long, depending on how young you go. I just can't stand it.
I've been in situations where I talk about sleep training in my infant section. I had to talk about these things because I want us to finally understand what an infant is going through so that we can design better for them. People even say, "Why is this in your book?" Because infancy is the basis of our design. Everything should help the mother and infant to function. So I had to talk about a couple of cultural things that I feel have come out of the suburbs—out of this convenience-driven culture and out of the emptiness of community. Sleep training was one of them.
I've been in situations where I'm in a home and a baby is crying in the other room because they're being sleep trained, almost as a newborn, and they're there for hours. I literally can't handle it. I left the house crying because this is a very difficult conversation to have with mothers who are doing this. It is. I usually don't. Honestly, I try, but it's usually rejected. I just feel like if we can truly understand the needs of infants and how they function, how they perceive the world, and the damage that we're doing to them culturally, then maybe we can finally build design that actually works for mothers and children and just families in general.
Our first born was Chloe. I love her. She's the most beautiful young woman now. To me, she came out screaming and didn't really stop. She was a very intense person. When she was little, when she was a baby, she wanted to be in the room with us. It was the only way she would sleep. I remember feeling all this—to the point where when she was one and I'd sit and read to her before she went to bed, she would want to stick her hand underneath your shirt and just have skin-on-skin touching. She would actually pull up your shirt and want to be touching you, not your clothing. She was a very sensory child.
I do remember the social pressure. Because a kid wouldn't sleep—she would wake up in the night and want to be held and want to be near you. I remember the cultural pressure from other people who were having kids at the same time and from the older generation giving advice like, "What do we do? I'm really worn out and worn thin by this kid. You needed to let them cry it out."
The reality is a lot of what was told to us is, "You don't want them to be 15 and coming to you." The reality is we could have slept with this kid in our bed for five years, and she would not have been coming to us when she was 15. She just was a little baby who needed mom or dad there. As an adult, I'm very proud of her. I think she's doing really, really well. I feel a lot of guilt and anxiety over that tension and the idea that we felt like we knew what was best for her, but we didn't always do it because we felt like we didn't know what we were doing with this kid. It feels like maybe it was the wrong thing. People were telling us it was the wrong thing.
I got that from your book too. This is not alone. There's a common thing that people experience, and it is kind of downstream of the isolated places we've built, right? You need to get used to isolation and soothing yourself, which is really dysfunctional.
Yeah, and that's actually why I have such a passion for infant development. I actually purposefully moved into my mother's home so that I could have a village, so that if I needed somebody to hold them, they were being held. If you are as responsive a parent as you need to be for the demands of infants, it's really hard. I mean, it is non-stop, and I had to actually physically get stronger so that I could carry my infants around.
If you look at hunter-gatherer communities, infants are being held 70 to 80 percent of the time by somebody, and that's really amazing for them. What we're learning is that infants that are left to cry actually have a risk of brain damage. Infants that are not being touched have a risk of brain damage. It changes the cortisol. Their brains are so vulnerable to cortisol. It stays in their system when you let them cry and when you don't hold them enough.
There's a point where they don't even know they're a separate person from you. Americans go through such a large separation from their infants because they're literally being told to. I have gone to several pediatricians who have told me that I need to put down my baby, that I need to have them sleep somewhere else other than with me. This is bad advice being given to us, and because we aren't realizing the severity of the demands of infants, we're like, "Oh, well, who cares?" I know it's kind of hard being a mom in the suburbs, but I can do it. I can sleep train. I can put them in daycare. I can separate myself from them."
I was like, "No, no. We can't do this. We're seeing a rise in behavioral disorders. We're seeing a rise in neurodivergence. We're not treating our infants well at all."
So I was like, "Well, how can I create an environment where they can be treated well?" That was in walkability because of the old adage: "Are you going to work? Are you going to be a mom?" I reject it. It doesn't make sense to me. Women are both individuals and mothers, and they should be able to pursue their own passions and ambitions within a community that makes sense. The suburbs? I was like, "Nope, suburbs aren't going to work. We're dealing with that right now."
We need a village-type community where we have home economies again, and women can balance motherhood and babyhood. Their children are out exploring at way younger ages because they can be autonomous instead of waiting until 16, when a child can drive. It's so long. A village will work. A village will provide the needs for everybody—the infants, the mothers, the children, the fathers. Walkability helps mothers carry their infants, and that's one of the biggest things that an infant needs: to be carried.
This is why I feel like you're disciplined. You said you're going along imagining how to bulldoze all this. I remember thinking the same thing. I remember thinking—not necessarily bulldoze, but I remember thinking there's going to be trees growing up through this Costco in 20 years. What are we doing? What are we building? Why are we putting our wealth and our resources into this thing?
For me, and I see a lot of people go through this, they find Jason, they listen to Not Just Bikes videos, they find their way to Strong Towns, they read 100 blog posts, they buy the books, they go through whatever, and then they have this fanatic phase. Fanaticism is defined as someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject. You get to this point where you're like, "Everybody needs to know this. Everybody needs to know this." They become the most ineffective advocates for change because they literally can't. They've crossed a bridge that other people need to cross, but they can't bring people across it with them. They're over on an island.
I do feel like the beauty of your book and what you've done is that you systematically go through: You feel like you're free, but let's talk about freedom. You feel like the car is autonomy, but let's talk about autonomy. You feel stuck in traffic, but let's talk about the fact that you are traffic and why you're there, and how that relates to everybody else who's there at the same time, and why building more lanes is not going to solve this.
I feel like you resisted the fanaticism and made a very thoughtful argument that comes to a good place. What would you say to someone else starting on your journey to help them either skip the fanatic phase or get through it faster so that they too can live in the world, see hope and opportunity, and start doing their part in that bottom-up revolution that you and I both talk about? How do we get people through that to where they can see, "Yeah, this is messed up and it's screwing up a lot of things, but we can make it better if we make a shift"?
Well, I do feel like you have to go through the stages of grief. Once you see it, you literally cannot unsee it. Car-centric design is horrific and ugly and dangerous, and it's just so sad to see. But my message is one of hope. I break you down and I build you up.
Right now, I just want people to share the qualities of a village. Bring it back to a village. If somebody's talking about politics and they hate the president, you can be like, "Oh, well, if we had local communities that were more self-sufficient, then why would we care entirely about the president? Why don't we bring back some local power so you feel like you have some control in your life again?" Americans feel completely out of control in almost everything—the way they're consuming, the way they're on social media, their politics. It's all hopeless. I can't get control again.
Or if a mother is talking about how she's trying to move to a homestead and escape modern life and raise her children in a good way, you could talk about how villages can provide what she's looking for—like fresh food. She's probably looking for areas where her children can explore again. She's probably looking for work so her children know how to milk a cow and get the work ethic as they're growing up, which none of that exists in the suburbs.
Just point to this: You want a village. You want control of your community again. You want family functioning again where children can be outside and play. Every time you hear a complaining point, just point it back to how they could have that if they chose a village instead of a suburb. I think that's a positive way to do it.
When I was going through my journey trying to convince people, at first I was just like, "Everything is horrible." I was so angry that we had done this, and I was even angry at the boomers that they had accepted it and put us into this position. You really have to come to an acceptance that this is where we're at, and it's going to be okay. We can get control over our communities again if you just share with your neighbors. Once you see, you can't unsee it. Once you see it, you can do something about it. That is my biggest hurdle right now—just getting people to see it—because I know once they see it, they'll do something about it. The point of the message is empowerment.
Early Strong Towns is a lot of angry Chuck. You can go back and read 2008, 2009 me writing, and I'm just an angry person who had not developed a hopeful vision yet. I had offers to write a book before I actually did in 2019, and it never worked out. I'm glad it didn't because I didn't really have the hopeful vision that I have now.
Reading your book, I get to the part—I can't even remember how you said it—but it was like, "All right, let's talk about what we do now." You say "Restoring the American Village: A Bottom-Up Revolution," and my book is "Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution." I'm like, "Okay, we're talking about this in the same way."
I would like to hear why this is a bottom-up and not a top-down revolution, or even, you know, why not both? Why is this a bottom-up revolution? What in your mind necessitates the bottom-up part of this?
Okay, let me just talk about what the three steps are. The whole point of the book is that you can turn your own suburban neighborhood or suburban development into a village.
The first step is mixed-use, mixed-wealth, mixed-house housing. Make it so that you have family-centric zoning so you can densify in a positive way. Instead of huge condos coming in, now you can live with your sister or your mother-in-law. You have generational wealth again where you're sharing property and you're next to each other again for families that want to do that. Then get rid of the cultural idea that a single-family house is the epitome of wealth. No, your entire environment should be the epitome of wealth. How does it look overall? Is it safe? Is it beautiful? Is it functional? It's okay that you're not next to a single-family house.
Mixed use is the second part. The density has to come with functionality. I have to be able to walk to my local bakery if we're going to densify things because cars take up way too much space, they're really dangerous, and nobody actually wants to live next to cars.
The second step is to create walkable infrastructure. Now that you know where people are going, start adding trails. Start doing road diets where you're narrowing these roads and making cars slow way down. Just take cars out in general in places that they don't deserve to be in.
The third step is as you do that, you start now connecting these municipalities together with public transportation and alternative transportation. Now you can go places much quicker because it's all set up. You can take the train and get to where you need to go. You can take the tram and get to where you need to go in a timely manner.
The reason why it's a bottom-up revolution is because it is literally going to be done by the people themselves. They will cut the red tape where they are at. They will literally build from the ground up. They will add that density. They will add those bakeries, those trees, those soap shops. They are the people that are going to make this happen. They will finally have control over their own environments. That's because they'll be working with each other from a governmental level and from a citizen level. They'll be like, "Okay, do we want this? How are we going to do this? How are we going to design this? Do we want a business in this area?"
That's really exciting. You know, instead of building a Minecraft library, they're like, "No, why don't we make it beautiful?" Because if we make it beautiful, then we'll get more revenue from our taxes and people want to be here. It's a world of creation, and it's really exciting.
People sometimes ask, "What are you doing?" And I'm like, "Well, I'm trying to cut the red tape in my area. But the question is, what are you doing? Because this is for you. You are going to change the area where you're at and make your convince your neighbors and make your neighborhood into a village instead of a suburb, and get all of that economic and political power back."
Why is Costco the mental hurdle we need to clear?
Oh my gosh, Costco. I put Costco at the very last chapter—actually, it's not even technically a chapter. It's an epilogue. My mother was like, "Take it out. Take it out. You can't attack Costco." I was like, "No, I have to talk about Costco because Costco is the epitome of the suburban dream. It is the apex of what we've accomplished with suburbia."
People love Costco. They love the samples. They love the cheapness—quote unquote cheapness. Cheap because it's not really cheap when you add up all the car infrastructure that they're paying for.
I hand them Costco and I'm like, "Well, look at everything I just talked about." I would run into this hurdle where people were like, "But Costco?" I'm like, "No, we kind of abandoned Costco. Costco is not that great. I'm telling you, Costco, I gotta have it."
I'm totally with you. I want a village. I want this, but Costco—I gotta have it exactly. I know, I know. I'm there with you.
Yes. So I was like, "Okay, the convenience that you're trading for Costco way outweighs what you could have with a village. Wouldn't it be nice if your kid could pick up eggs for dinner instead of waiting till they're 16 when you're afraid they're going to die?"
I can buy 48 eggs at once. I can get a 36-ounce tub of ketchup.
Yeah. It's like you think about it. You could have this beautiful village right where there's children running around and there's fresh food again. You get to know your butcher and your baker, and you have gorgeous libraries and you have walkability, and it's just wonderful. Then they're like, "No, but I need the Costco." I'm like, "Okay, but the Costco comes with all of the traffic, all of the plastic consumption, all of the uglification where they're just taking everything from you and turning it into parking lots. That's what Costco gives you."
You can have all of what Costco gives you, but in a village in a way better environment, and it's going to look different. I can buy 40 eggs from Costco and come back every two weeks, or I can have a community that always has fresh food. The trip is part of the experience. You have eggs every week, but you have fresh meat and fresh vegetables. The local farmers are making it for you, not some person in Paraguay. I don't even know if they make anything.
I feel like Costco solves the problems it creates. It is the solution to the problems it creates.
Exactly.
And I'm almost like, we can't give it up because giving it up would make life so miserable. Yet, its existence has created the thing that you're trying to overcome. It's such a paradox that Costco stands for. It's so strange, but it is a mental hurdle.
We've got Costco here, and when Costco arrived, you would have thought it was Jesus rising. Jesus's second coming solved fewer problems than Costco arriving.
That's what's wild about it. It totally destroys your whole environment. It makes living really miserable, makes parenthood super hard. Then they come in and give you, like, 50 hot dogs, and I can buy in bulk.
I know, I know.
How generous that Costco hasn't raised their prices for their hot dogs. No, no, you don't want just a hot dog—$1.50 hot dog. You want something more than that.
I love your book so much. Twice a year we send out a book to our Friends of Strong Towns—people who are super supportive. I really want to support Strong Towns, and as a way to have an ongoing conversation with them, I share a book with them a couple times a year that is meaningful for me. One that I think I've enjoyed and that I think will help them or that they would enjoy.
I'm really, really proud of the fact that our next book that we're sending out to them is "A Love Letter to Suburbia." So thank you for writing it. Thank you for taking the time and having the passion and working through the fanaticism to something really coherent and thoughtful. For everybody listening, I would encourage you—if you have someone in your life you're trying to reach—buy the book for yourself and read it. It will help you with language to use to talk to people. Then share the book with others. Give it to that person and have a dialog with them. I think that's the most important thing—dialog.
Did you listen to my book or did you read it?
I read it. You sent me the audio, and I'm like, I want to, but there are certain books I enjoy reading. You are a very good author. You write quite beautifully, and I enjoyed reading it. Maybe I'll listen to it later.
That's great. Whatever avenue you find, my book is great. My audiobook is on almost every platform, I believe—even on Audible now. So if you're not a big reader and you're a listener, it's on there too. So wonderful to start your own village?
Diane, I've seen you on social media. I've watched some of your videos. They're really good. Is there a place where people should follow you if they want more information?
I am on Instagram—Diane Alisa—and I'm also going to start a YouTube channel so I can kind of talk about this more. You can also find me or email me through endcardependency.org. Those are places you can find me.
"A Love Letter to Suburbia: How to Restore the American Village." Diane Alisa, thanks for your time. So nice to chat with you. Everybody, keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.
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.