‍Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06

Hello and welcome to this Bottom-Up Short. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm really excited to be able to connect you, our audience, with members within the Strong Towns community that are doing remarkable things where they live and continuing to build up collections of wins and small progress and all of the small things that go into making significant improvements within our communities. Today, my guest is Shakeel Dalal, a 38-year-old scientist with a PhD in chemistry. He's an entrepreneur and a builder and a tester of spaceships in Longmont, Colorado. He lives within the community and is currently running for the office of Mayor within the community, building upon the work that he has done with Launch Longmont Housing, an advocacy organization seeking more housing within the community in order to address local needs. He has served on the board of advisors for the Longmont Observer, helped found Longmont Public Media, and continues to serve with a community foundation as well. He's also been part of the city of Longmont's Professional Standards Unit, reviewing police conduct to ensure public trust and to work together with all members of the community. Shakeel, welcome to Bottom-Up Shorts.

Shakeel Dalal 1:17

Thank you so much for having me, Norm. I'm super excited to be here.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 1:21

Now tell me about the action that you are taking in your community. In a sense, you'll have to pick your favorites, but what are some of the types of actions and activities that you're involved in?

Shakeel Dalal 1:31

I think the Strong Towns message is so focused on small actions, but I feel I am taking what I thought was a small action that has become a big action that is really consuming my life, which is running to be the mayor of Longmont. This is not a thing that I ever saw for myself in the past. Obviously, I've been involved in the community for many years, and people have asked me in the past, "Shakeel, when are you going to run?" I always laughed and said, "Oh, no, never. That is not for me." But I have just felt the calling this year. I felt the need to serve my community, and part of that wound up being running for mayor, because there are so many challenges here and in lots of other American cities. I feel there is this need for people who are willing to step up and propose new and different ideas that are different from the ways that we have done things for the past 100 years in the United States, so that we can address many of our long-standing challenges.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 2:26

Yeah, that's powerful. I think it's about identifying those challenges and saying, "All right, who is the leader and group of leaders that is going to work within the community?" What stands out to me just in your bio and the work that you're doing is you're deeply invested in a whole series of different things that others are doing with you. Can you describe how you've built up capacity in the community by assisting in and building up networks to move things forward?

Shakeel Dalal 2:53

For me, it's always been about being proactive and finding a way to take a small action that builds upon itself. I did not intend to moderate a US House of Representatives debate in 2018. What it started as was there was a local nonprofit newspaper that just needed someone to write about our city council meetings and to write about the ways that national politics was affecting life here at home, and that just spiraled into a thing, because I was always just doing the next incremental step. It feels like my journey of being involved in the community has really just been building up to this moment in a way that even I never foresaw. I think that's part of the power of just doing the next thing that makes the most sense—it gives you that opportunity to build up to something that you would never plan towards and never foresee. But it turns out, it's really the next step to make a big difference in the community. My activism has really been building in this way by making connections in different parts of the community and in different spaces and with people with different interests, to see how all of these things are interacting with each other and feeding on each other, in some ways helping each other, in some other ways hurting each other, and the ways in which we need leaders across the community to step up and say, "Here's the part of the challenge that I can work on, and how can we all work together?"

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 4:13

Yeah, I think that's super powerful. Your path there, I think, is an indication of how often we see other people that are tapped on the shoulder or sort of encouraged by a growing cacophony of people saying, "We really think we need you at the table. We need you to be able to participate in that way," but to do so in conjunction with what they are doing and helping to identify the needs that they're struggling with in your community. What are some of the core concerns that you've sought to elevate?

Shakeel Dalal 4:42

Almost every city in the United States, we have a housing affordability problem. What's distinct about Longmont, I think, compared to a lot of cities, is that we don't have the sprawl problem. Back in the 90s, the city of Longmont started investing in a Greenbelt that now completely surrounds the city, which means that we have a defined urban boundary. The challenge that has shown up in our community is, how do we make sure that housing stays affordable for working people in our city, while respecting our Greenbelt? Because we don't have the easy sprawl button that a lot of other cities have leaned towards. So it's been incumbent on me and a lot of other leaders in the city—the other folks who have taken over Launch Longmont Housing since I had to step back in order to run for mayor—to say, "Well, there are ways that we can do this, and the way that we do it is by building cities the way that we used to." Longmont, like a lot of other cities, has a strong urban core that existed before the invention of the car. So one of the ways that we talk about that in Longmont is, "Well, we just want to make it so that the rest of the city can evolve in the same way that Old Town did, and became the amazing place that it is."

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 5:45

You've got a dog, so you walk the streets of Old Town quite compulsively. What are some of the things that you notice? What are some of the things that stand out to you in terms of that Strong Towns approach of saying, "Humbly observe where people in your community struggle"? We often say, "Start by going out on foot." So as you're doing that, what are some of the things that you've noticed where change is beginning to take hold as well?

Shakeel Dalal 6:08

Remy, my dog, has really been my gateway to understanding the importance of walkability in a neighborhood, because I walk everywhere with her, and she is the kind of dog who wants an hour walk every single day. We just see so many streets in Longmont, and it's even interesting seeing through her eyes how the design of our city affects her. Even though she's not a person, I can tell that she doesn't like streets where the sidewalk is directly adjacent to the street. She wants that buffered separation because it improves her walking experience, and frankly, it improves my walking experience. Walking from our oldest downtown even to the outskirts of Old Town, you can see the ways that very minor architectural changes that happened over time have impacted the ability of people to walk and enjoy walking. It caught me off guard. I didn't—as someone who doesn't come from an architectural or a civil engineering background, but just someone who cares a lot about it being a great experience to walk—it really helped me understand the ways in which those very minor changes over time can make our cities better or worse for people to be in. Then, of course, once you leave Old Town, the architecture and the civil engineering dramatically change further to be more car-oriented. The reality is that we just don't go those places because they're not as accessible.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 7:31

I love there's an attentiveness that even says, "Hey, my pet can illustrate certain things for me." I know that we have this in our suburban pattern of development where we will have a very large dog run area, and you can also bring children with their bikes to specific spots for them to do mountain biking. But what about the day-to-day stuff? What if it's actually woven into the fabric of where we live? I love that. Now your bio mentions that you also are involved in launching spaceships, or testing them and launching them or participating in that. Maybe this is part of my question: who are you? Also, incidentally, as part of that story, what brought you into the Strong Towns orbit, or brought Strong Towns into your orbit, is probably the better way to say it?

Shakeel Dalal 8:15

I've been reading Strong Towns since before I can remember. I started reading Strong Towns because I was really interested in this wild idea that this crazy guy was writing about: how the way that we build our city makes it fiscally resilient, and the ways that that interacts with all of the other choices that we make in the city. Those ideas have been brewing in my head for years and years, and it really wasn't until I got deeply involved in the community that I live in now, Longmont, where I really began to crystallize how those ideas impact the way that the city functions and the way that the city is built. Building and testing spaceships has been an interesting turn in my career. I'm a chemist by profession. I originally wanted to work in the semiconductor industry, and there's a robust aerospace industry out here in Colorado. I had the opportunity to work for a company that builds a spaceship, and it was too cool of an opportunity to turn down.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:14

It's wild though, that building spaceships is probably easier than reforming zoning.

Shakeel Dalal 9:22

It is crazy, because in many ways, everyone agrees that the spaceship could go to space, but not everyone agrees that—well, I think in principle, everyone agrees that it should be safe to walk and bike in our community, but not everyone agrees with the idea that we should make the physical changes that our infrastructure requires to do those things.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:42

Yeah, no, I think that's pretty perceptive, and it definitely connects with some of the challenges of communicating across sort of cultural assumptions or people's own sense of what they experience, what they value, and often that mapping onto other people. "If I don't value it, no one does," or "If I don't foresee myself living in a home that's smaller than 1000 square feet, no one would want this"—rather than accounting for and sort of even valuing all sorts of different stages of life, the involvement of so many different hands in building and shaping your community. That, to me, is one of those things that stands out in the work that you're doing. I even forgot to mention the coolest part with starting up the Bottom-Up Shorts podcast series within our Bottom-Up Revolution series: you were the first person to be nominated by Chuck. He said, "You've got to have Shakeel on." It's taken us a little bit to get here, but I'm really glad that we did, because I want to ask you, what is some advice or tips that you have for people that would be interested in following a similar path? Maybe not into the spaceship side of it—I mean, there's a whole other podcast that we'd have to start on that—but into community involvement and taking time to notice. "Go for a walk" is a great first step. But what are some other suggestions or ideas that you have that maybe others have passed on to you, that you would pass on to us?

Shakeel Dalal 10:59

I think your point about the idea that just because someone doesn't want to live in a 1200 square foot home, they assume that other people wouldn't want to live in a 1200 square foot home is very perceptive. I think what that gets to for me is the way that I talk about the changes that I am advocating for in the city of Longmont. Because the most direct way to make a connection for people and help them understand what we are trying to achieve is we need to connect our values to the actions that we take. Longmont is a beautiful and welcoming place. Like a lot of places in Colorado, it has been growing quite a bit, and so most people who live in Longmont were not born and raised in Longmont. It is a city filled with people who have chosen to come here. So one of the things that we really value in Longmont is diversity. There are all different kinds of people from all different kinds of walks of life. It wasn't until recently that we had a turkey processing plant in the middle of our downtown that was owned by Butterball. So this is a very blue-collar community. Often what I talk about when I am out campaigning is, "I'm not saying you can't live in a single-family home. I'm saying that some people might not want to for expense reasons or lifestyle reasons or ability reasons, and we need to make the diversity of housing options available that reflects the diversity of people that live in our community." When you can connect the ends that we are trying to achieve to the values that people have, it makes it much easier for them to understand why you're proposing something that might be scary to them, which is change.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 12:36

Yeah, yeah. Then what are some of the things that are putting wind into your sails as you do—at times, the unenviable work of running for public office can be challenging—but there's always those things that give that extra boost or that extra surge, just to sort of sweeten the pot for others that are considering it. What's something that really stands out for you that has made this process not just worthwhile, but actually invigorating and exciting?

Shakeel Dalal 13:00

The first thing that always puts wind in my sails is thinking about the many people who have stepped up to support my campaign. I don't even mean monetarily, which I think is what a lot of elected officials mean when they say something like that. I made the decision to run for mayor because I felt I couldn't find a leader who wanted to push on the vision that I think that we need for the city. So I said, "Fine, I'll throw my hat in the ring. I will try and influence some people, and we'll see what happens." The number of people in my life who have stepped forward and said, "I'm so glad that you're doing this. Thank you for doing this. How can I help you? Our community needs people like you." It caught me off guard. It has been one of the greatest gifts that I have received in the past year, and possibly one of the greatest gifts of my life, to know that the work that we do impacts people, and that impact leaves them with an impression that says, "Oh, there are good things that we can do, and there are people out there doing good things." I just find that incredibly gratifying. The other thing that gives me hope is that everyone everywhere, basically, no matter where you go, feels the hunger that things are the way they are, and we all feel stuck. It doesn't really matter what issue it is that is nearest and dearest to your heart, whether it's housing affordability or walkability or the environment or the financial strength of cities or something completely unrelated to the Strong Towns mission. We all feel stuck. We all feel that lack of progress. So getting to connect more and more with people this year who just want to make the world a better place is so heartening, because it's so good to know that there are so many good people in this world.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:48

Yeah, I love that. I had the privilege of working for a great mayor in the city that I was living in in British Columbia, and just seeing now on your site, ShakeelForMayor.com, the way that you describe your own vision for office, your own vision for taking up responsibility, I think, in a really community-minded way, just gives me a lot of hope and a lot of encouragement as well. So appreciate you coming on the podcast today. Thank you, Shakeel. You're in the midst of a tough slog, but also an important and energizing one, and so I certainly wish you well, and thank you for being part of the Strong Towns movement. For those that are listening, definitely take a moment, become a connoisseur of the types of messaging and the ways in which people that are strong citizens in their community—the way that we talk about these things really matters, the way that we lift up those who are in need within all sorts of different aspects of that need, I think, is so powerful. So thank you, Shakeel, for coming on. Good to have you on Bottom-Up Shorts.

Shakeel Dalal 15:52

Thank you, Norm. It's been great to be here.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 15:54

Thanks. To everybody out there, go on and take on some new challenge in front of you. Go for a walk, see what your dog notices, and continue to be encouraged as you take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.