Upzoned
Utah wants to override local zoning to boost housing supply, but allowed by right doesn't mean possible in practice. Abby and Edward dig into the hidden barriers — complicated permits, scarce financing, and broken systems — that stop housing from actually getting built.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.
Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, the 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 am your host, and I'm a planner in Kansas City. Today I am joined by our friend Edward Erfurt, who is the Chief Technical Advisor at Strong Towns. Welcome Edward.
Hey, thanks for having me, Abby.
It's always great to have you on. I feel like you're becoming a more regular guest here.
Well, you pick all these really spicy articles, and I have lots of opinions, so I love it.
Yeah, this is going to be a fun one, because you actually just wrote an article about this topic. So I'm excited to hear your thoughts on this. I'll just jump right in. So this article is entitled "Utah's Governor Suggests Overriding Local Zoning. Could His Plan Solve or Shatter the State's Housing Future?" This was published in Realtor.com.
As the title says, Utah leadership is floating the idea of taking zoning power away from cities in the state in order to allow for higher-density housing. His primary message has been basically supply, supply, supply. This would make Utah the newest addition to a handful of states across the US that have used preemption powers to override local restrictions on housing supply.
According to the article, Utah is on track to be 50,000 homes short in the next decade, and the median home price is now five times higher than the median income. This has come as somewhat of a surprise, particularly because Utah is known for being a pretty suburban-friendly place with lots of social conventions supporting home ownership and the nuclear family structure.
But according to our friend Allie Quinlan, who is quoted in this article, state preemption is really not about saying people must do this, but rather more so about letting people do what they want. She argues that states should remove government regulations that prevent people from doing very practical, very common, and very historical approaches to the way we used to build towns. In short, building housing that is in attunement with our direct needs is a more reflective American tradition to our history than building sprawling single-family neighborhoods, which really only became the convention in the last 70 years or so.
So we've talked about state preemption quite a few times on Upzoned, and it's been a while, but I think the conversation has evolved a bit. Edward, you actually just released an article on Strong Towns entitled "Why State Housing Reform Is Failing and What We Can Do About It." You're spelling out why statewide preemption efforts aren't producing expected outcomes. So I want to start by asking you why state preemption isn't the silver bullet to housing affordability in your view.
Yeah, so I was out in Arizona in Flagstaff, and they're really having this heavy debate in Flagstaff. What I found so interesting in the city is that their city council has created a housing emergency. They proclaimed that they're in a housing emergency, and they have gone out and had the planners figure out ways to help with housing.
In Arizona, they created some preemptions to allow for rear cottages, accessory dwelling units, so that you could do it in lots of cities. It was set to be the higher-density cities, and it was near transit—all of the types of things that would make planners feel good for that type of smaller housing. In Flagstaff, with their housing emergency, the planners explained to me that they extended this out over the entire city so you could go anywhere in the city and do this. You didn't have to be near transit.
Then a couple of people tried to go and build these rear cottages, and they couldn't. They hit every barrier you could imagine. The first is that the permitting process was just overly complicated. So even though you could build an accessory dwelling unit or a rear yard cottage, the process to go through it was as onerous as if you're building a brand new house. So you have this little tiny 500-square-foot or 400-square-foot rear cottage—it's where maybe a garage exists today—but we have to go through all of that process that we would do for a brand new house, and all of that is driving up costs.
Then when people tried to finance these, it wasn't something you could just go to your bank account and borrow from. You have to go get a loan because of the cost. The numbers they ran by me—I don't want to throw the exact numbers out because they vary so much around the country—but the square footage costs were astronomical. It was as if you were building with Italian marble and using slate roofs. That's the type of price point.
What I found there is that even though you could do housing, even though the policies were set up from the city council saying that we're in a housing emergency and this is a way for us to deliver on that, the city staff, their zoning code, their comprehensive plan, had not caught up to these small units. They couldn't actually do this smaller increment.
The other thing that occurred is that because of that barrier, finding the contractors to build that became difficult. If you had the choice of building a big house on the edge of town with no neighbors, and you were going to get paid for that, versus trying to build in town in a more complicated building environment with neighbors and smaller staging areas, the builders just threw their hands up and said, "I'm not going to do that." If I'm going to build in those areas, I'm going to charge more for it. So again, driving those costs up.
Finally, when people go to the bank, the funding mechanisms for these are out there, but they're just coming on the market. The first time doing these in a community, it's not readily available. Those resources aren't there. So you make it hard to get it permitted, you make it hard to find builders to do it, and then you make it hard to do financing. It doesn't matter what the state gave a preemption for. On the ground, the operators aren't figuring it out.
I see this in many cities where we try to make it easy, but just doing a preemption, just allowing it—and we can put all different types of terms behind it, we can allow it by right, we can encourage it—if we don't have people on the ground at the most local level that understand the aspects of this, it's not going to go anywhere.
So you said something in your article. You talk about the difference between "allowed by right" and "possible in practice," which I think is such a simple way of breaking down this issue. Because I think ADUs, that's a big one. We see all around the country, cities are starting to permit ADUs, which is awesome, and they should permit ADUs. But just because they are allowed by right doesn't mean that we're suddenly going to see tons and tons of accessory dwelling units or cottage houses.
That's what I've experienced as well here in Kansas City—people are now allowed, technically, to build accessory dwelling units all across the city. But construction really does favor economies of scale, and so it's extremely expensive to build an accessory dwelling unit. It's great for properties that had existing accessory dwelling units. We have a lot of historic neighborhoods with historic cottage housing that is on-site, detached garages that have an apartment above it. What I'm actually seeing happen now is people are starting to split their lots to sell those existing accessory dwelling units so they're no longer accessory, but rather starter homes—small-scale starter homes that people can buy.
To me, that's not a silver bullet, but that's my favorite innovation in the housing world right now—just breaking down lots and allowing people to buy a little house in neighborhoods with lots of different types of houses using existing building stock. I don't know how you get to—this article that we're covering is asking whether or not this strategy of state preemption is going to solve or shatter the state's housing future in Utah. I think what they're really trying to do here is align housing policy and allowances with larger projects and the ability for people to build large five-over-one podium apartment buildings, because that is really what people can build these days, and construction favors economy of scale.
I think my big question is, what policies would better align with construction realities? Can you actually make small units happen in an affordable way, in a way that scales to the extent that large apartment buildings scale for developers? I would really like to see our society have the ability to build small units at a scale that doesn't necessarily look like these five-over-one podium apartment buildings. Can we build accessory dwelling units and make it easier, cheaper, faster to do? Can we make it a viable business decision for people, something that people actually feel like there's an incentive to do? Same goes for duplexes, townhomes, just all these really small housing types. That seems like something that we have not been able to figure out as a society, and I don't know that we will anytime soon.
Yeah, what I see on this is that when we're looking at the world, Abby, and we see the five-over-one or we see the single-family with the two-car garage, what I see more than housing—and I think Chuck has pointed this out many, many times—what we're actually looking at are two financial products that, just coincidentally, create housing.
A developer can go to the bank and get funding for a five-over-one. They can go into the bank and get a mortgage for a single-family detached house, because the banks are willing to sell those. They're federally backed mortgages. These are things that the banks can resell. They can bundle them and resell and make money on. So that's a very easy thing for banks to get lots of money out on the street. That is what we see in those pieces.
What has been shown in California when they did their preemptions and allowed ADUs across the state—the rear cottages by right in California—if you look at the mapping that has been laid out of how many units per year, it took a long time for California to start to see ADUs show up on permitting, where people could do it. The first thing that occurred is that there were builders that were willing to build these, so that was ahead of the game in many places. But there wasn't the financing for it. It wasn't until the builders really worked through and figured out the finance models and got the banks on board with this type of housing that they could go and start to build. Once they unlocked that, they got that to scale.
When I look at Utah—Utah is an amazing state. It's got some really urban cities, but it has a vast landscape. What could a state do? Okay, so we allow that. We preempt this. We allow this type of housing or a variety of housing types across the state. We abolish single-family zoning. We allow people to do four to six units on a lot. We abolish the minimum lot size. That's all great. Those are things that help to move that forward.
But at a state level, there are other tools that I don't have at a municipal level that could help, like building the cohort of developers and builders. When we look at all of our community colleges, when we look at what we're offering in high school, are we teaching people the trades to build, to deliver that type of housing?
I find with all of these that the well-intentioned preemptive mandates have created—and we look in this article, the pushback that's coming to the governor on this is coming from the Republican Party, and it's coming from local cities that are saying, "Hey, you're taking away our home rule, you're taking away our ability to locally govern our communities."
Again, what's happening with that type of preemption is the debate is not about housing. It's about the little fiefdoms of all of our cities. It's about control. I worked in a city and did a lot of advocacy to protect our home rule rights as a city. So I get that. But these debates—nobody is going to battle here, and all the messaging is not going to be around housing. Even if this goes through, and they make it through all the legal things, the whole debate of this is going to be about the rights of cities. That really puts us all at odds with state government, because there are things that our cities really need our state governments to do to support our housing and our communities, and we just seem to get in this distraction.
So do you think that state preemption is part of the puzzle, or do you think that this is something that individual municipalities should be debating and doing on their own?
I think it's a tool. I don't think it's the tool. I don't think it's the first tool I would do. Here's what I saw every time that our state legislature would rewrite something when it came to land use. You have two scenarios.
You have a city that has a big planning staff and a really thick land development code, and all the performance standards associated with whatever preemption are in five or six areas of the code. You're already a busy community, so you have lots of permits coming in, and your staff is just overworked. Now you have to rewrite your zoning code to accommodate that preemption. It's every tentacle. So I have to go in and update fencing and parking and landscaping and all those things in there. We spent a lot of money then to hire consultants to come in and help rewrite the code. Everybody gets upset because we're changing the code, and we're rehashing the fact that we no longer have the right to choose the type of housing we want at a local level. You just get stuck and mired down in that.
The other scenario is that you're a small community that maybe you don't have a planning department, maybe you are very light on your zoning and those performance standards. Now you've got to somehow insert that you're allowed to do this, and you have to administer it. In those small towns where this housing is really needed, again, you get mired down in trying to chase what the legislature has mandated you to do. I just don't see either of those as a positive outcome.
That's a good point. I mean, at the very least, states who go through with preemption of these kinds of issues, it'd be nice if they provided some support to cities so that they now don't have to turn around and pay to have consultants update their code. Saying that as someone in consulting—I mean, it is a cost on cities that now they need to go into their code and try to update everything, which sounds simple but is not. With zoning, it's like you touch one thing and it touches eight other things. It's just ongoing. So that's something that actually could be a pretty big lift for smaller communities, really any communities.
One thing that I think about a lot is, I'm not confident that we should be looking at this approach for individual municipalities to come around on these issues little by little and kind of come up with all their own versions of allowing different housing types. I'm not completely convinced that that's technically the best way of addressing the broader housing market, because the housing market really is a regional market. You have areas with more or less pressure, but it really is a regional issue.
I wish, in a perfect world, that these things were dealt with in a more regional way, but politically, that is probably something that will never happen, hence why states are stepping in and doing this at a state level. But I wish that we did a lot of different things at the regional level in planning. Not to say that there's a one-size-fits-all solution, but I think if we were able to look at things that are regional, which is the housing market, from a regional perspective, and able to maybe come up with lots of local solutions that fit into a regional picture and are rational in that respect, I wish that we were able to come up with that kind of system to regulating and managing land use issues.
There are things that we could do at that regional level, especially this support from the state. So at a regional level, let's look at our regional local banks, and let's work with them to identify the financing available. In markets where financing is difficult or there's higher risk, if the state wants to do something, why can't the state or the cities go in and help be guarantors of those who have the most to gain out of these investments?
The zoning codes are so tough because every municipality—when you go down and you think you've got counties and cities and townships and overlays and historic districts, it's this quagmire that's all from the bottom up. Now the top down is trying to push on that.
The one area that the state legislature has full control of that impacts our building environment, the one set of state standards that all of the states are adopting that go through the state legislature, is the building code. What I like about the building code is it is agnostic to your community. It basically is outlining the forces of gravity, the wind loads. There's some regional components to it, but in general, the way that buildings get put together is the same across your state.
If the governor really wanted to make an impact to lower housing costs, if the governor or the legislature wanted to go and impact something that would impact everybody across the state but not require all of this retraining and not take away city municipal home rule rights, I would start with the building code. What are the things that we've adopted in the building code, the energy code, our electrical codes, our fire codes, all of those pieces at a statewide level that are making housing less affordable and more complicated to construct?
Yeah, that's actually something that in Missouri is a big conversation really happening. On the east side of the state, there's a whole campaign to have a statewide building code, because we do have this issue of local municipalities adopting all different building codes. There's a lot of debate about what the best path forward is, but there is a group that's advocating to have a state building code established in Missouri.
I do want to touch on this paradox of local approaches to regulations. Because while establishing your own local building codes under many different geographies across a state, across a metropolitan area—we can kind of think of it as bottom-up, because yes, it's going through these localized processes and is being written at the local level. The irony of that is that it ends up requiring experts and paying professionals to navigate because it's also complicated, which then further favors large-scale development projects and not localized development projects done by citizens that are not professional developers.
That's a big paradox that we should be thinking about, because we need to be thinking about who's using these systems and who we want to be able to use these systems. While people will make the case that, "Well, we need our local zoning code because it's our bottom-up, localized approach, and we curate everything to this very particular context," that's true. But we do need to be thinking about who we want to be utilizing these and how challenging these tools are to use.
I'm thinking of my own city and many cities that if you are not a local or if you're not a professional developer that really understands this stuff, you're going to have a very difficult time navigating these systems. I know planners that do know these systems that have become small developers and have had a very hard time navigating these systems from the other side of the coin. So something worth thinking about, I think, is that paradox that just because it's created locally doesn't mean that it becomes usable by citizens that are non-professionals.
Well, I like the image that folks talk about when they talk about developers coming to town and when they go and present projects. They talk about the evils of the team that comes in for the evil development project. There's the two attorneys that show up, there's the couple land use planners, there's the engineer. There's this whole army that has to show up to present a project. In our world of NIMBYism, this is perceived as the evils of development.
I see something different with that. I sit there and I wonder, why does it—what does an attorney know about land plans? What law school course did they take on that? I get there's land use law and contract law, but understanding the street layout, that's really what an attorney is best to explain? Then we go through and it's like, now we've hired a planner that should know how all of this works and understand the code, but we've got to have two of them, and then we've got to have the engineer to tell us where the water goes and how all this works.
We've created such a system that we've had this whole team of folks, and then at City Hall, they're like, "Okay, well, let's bring out the team." When I was in Florida, and we're talking about 2009, 2010 where nothing was being built, our development review team was 17 people around the table to administer code. None of that makes sense to me. We're not doing skyscrapers or bridges over the Grand Canyon. We're trying to figure out how to get 10 houses on a street, and we've got this army of people to review all of these pieces.
When I say that, you can come in, "Hey, can I build this thing in your town?" "Yes, you can. Here are the 45 things you need to prove that you're accomplishing. Here's the studies you need to do that it'll have zero impact on everybody. Then here is the year-long public engagement process you have to go through to do it."
So you can, if you do all of these performance standards. Guess what, when you get to the end of it, your 12-unit apartment building is going to be a single-family detached house on a two-acre lot. It's whittled it down. So no matter what you submit, yes, you can do the apartment building, but in fact, all of our performance standards, without even getting to finance, result in one outcome. That is the system that I'm very frustrated with, that we've got to untangle if we want to achieve affordability and housing at scale across the country.
Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. I feel like if you have to hire a very expensive attorney to navigate a process for a simple project, that means that your system is messed up, that your zoning code is not operating the way it really ought to be.
Because you're demanding a larger scale of increment than your community can digest.
Yeah, that's a good point, because you need to have someone to manage the compliance and the process from a legal perspective, and that adds a ton of cost to projects as well. Especially if you're building a duplex or an ADU or whatever, if you have to have an attorney managing that process for you, that's not going to be an affordable house at all.
Right now, as we go through and we look at the things at the state level, it is easy for a governor to say, by edict, "I'm going to allow this type of housing across the whole state." That is easy. Everybody can say, "Great, that's going to do this, that's going to create a bunch of supply." I'm sure I'm going to upset our folks in our YIMBY movements, but not all that supply is going to lead to all of this lower-cost housing. Our world is way more complicated than that.
The questions I would be asking are, what are the things that are holding you up? What are the things that are pushing you back? We do an exercise in our accelerator program when we do our Bottom-Up Revolution course. The very first thing we do is we ask folks to pull up the map of their community on Google Earth, and we ask them to identify the traditional development pattern in their city. So where are the places that there's a grid of streets and a mix of uses? Sometimes that's your historic core. Where is that place in your city? Then you see all the rest of the city.
That historic core, that traditional development pattern, is the proven complex neighborhood pattern. Everything else is the merely complicated—the suburban shopping mall, the isolated subdivisions, all of those areas. It's really hard to throw in all of these preemptions into a development pattern across the US that we have designed and financed and developed to build everything out to a finished state.
Just saying, "Okay, in the suburban area that your HOA restricts everything in your life on your property, the only thing we're going to see a change on is the landscaping is going to grow, and we're going to allow you to change the color of your front door," it's really hard to come in and say, "Oh yeah, by the way, now you're allowed to do this other increment of development." I mean, that's jarring in those particular neighborhoods, and it sets up a battle that I think is one we don't need to have.
We could be working in our traditional development patterns, thickening up where we expect to see change, to get a foothold on this. We can build trust that we can actually do simple requirements to make sure this stuff works. We can test it out in those neighborhoods before we go and start kicking the hornet's nest.
Yeah, I agree with you there. I think there's a lot of places in our country that have been built out to a finished state. When I think of housing variety, my mind really goes to urban areas. I think maybe everybody thinks about this a little differently. Yeah, there's tons of neighborhoods that have vacant lots and empty space and opportunities to thicken up, and that really feels like the priority here. It's where your transit is. It's where you have your most efficient land use patterns, your opportunity to build where existing and aging infrastructure exists. This seems like the most fiscally productive approach to enabling more housing.
I think a lot of people would agree with that. I don't think a lot of people are thinking of going into some subdivision on the outskirts of town and this is where this should go. But when you have these state preemption efforts, I think for some people, that's where their mind goes—that suddenly, in my single-family neighborhood, we're going to have this huge building boom. Not to say that that couldn't happen in certain places, but I don't think that that's the intent.
But one other thing I do want to bring up is, shout out to organizations like Incremental Development Alliance and Neighborhood Evolution and other folks that are focusing on this other side of the coin, beyond the zoning conversation. Because it's really important to acknowledge that this really all goes beyond a conversation of zoning. I think yes, zoning is a challenge and needs to be addressed in our land use conversation, but financing, training people to actually do small-scale development projects, to be able to pull off this kind of thing, is really changing the culture of building. It's going to take a really long time, and I would say it's a lot harder than changing zoning regulations.
So actually changing the culture of building and trying to find ways to finance this stuff is a huge piece of the puzzle of building communities that not only supply more housing, but also are just more in attunement with people's changing lifestyles and changing demographics, and doing it in a way that is in attunement with local culture. I think more than zoning would be able to accomplish. I don't think zoning is necessarily the best tool for building housing in a way that, quote-unquote, reflects community character. In a perfect world, I think that you do that through the type of people who are building in your community, and that is local people that have to bump into each other at the grocery store.
You know, that is an area at a state level that things could happen. Because what you're describing, Abby, is investment in our communities. Some would call that economic development. What I find when I go anywhere in the country is all of these cities are looking for aspirational folks to come to their town, somebody else to come. They're out advertising in another country, another state. They're trying to grab folks.
But what I really have found is that in all of these towns, the developers and the investors that every community wants and needs is already there. Training them—if we just, if we're going to go be as bold as requiring every zoning change, every community change for zoning, and preempt some sort of zoning piece, I would like at the state level, let's be as bold in our economic development department. Let's stop going and trying to steal another business from another state. Let's go figure out who is already in our state and work on incrementally supporting them.
These are the small builders. These are the new business owners, because they're there in all of these cities. They just need that little bit of assistance to get moving forward. When I talk about assistance, it's simple things like knowing they're not alone, creating a cohort, providing that mentorship structure, introducing builders to bankers. That simple stuff that Incremental Development Alliance and Neighborhood Evolution have really dialed into, that is exponentially more powerful than just creating a mandate across the state.
Well, in my perspective, that is really an opportunity to have the new American dream. I think people see these state preemption efforts and they say, "Well, single-family zoning is the American dream. It's my opportunity to own something, and this is undermining that." That's a perspective that people have.
This other approach that says we're actually going to invest in maximizing people's ability to not just own a single-family house, but to actually have ownership over their community in other kinds of ways—I mean, every little business owner, I think, should be able to have training to own their own property, to get resources. If you own a hair salon, if you own a coffee shop, if you own a brewery, we should be supporting these people to own their own real estate, if they would like to, if they don't want to lease. If they want to build their own shop, if they want to rehab a building and have apartments upstairs, this would be a very meaningful way for us to enable small-scale, incremental development, which translates to wealth-building opportunities in a way that goes beyond this kind of one-size-fits-all solution that is, you can buy a single-family house, and that's kind of the only way to build wealth in this country.
I think that there are other ways that we could invest that would have outcomes in our communities that are much more shaped by the hands of local people. That's different than just enabling a big developer from a different state to come in and build a big building and use their team of experts and advisors to get them through the process. Then they're not accountable in a social sense. If Abby Newsham goes and builds a duplex in her neighborhood, I have to run into my neighbors. There's just a different level of social expectations when local people are doing things that zoning can't really do for you. It's just different.
What you're saying is something that is scaled at every level of government, every community could do. I will tell you, there are those investors and people that care deeply about their community, regardless of the communities I go into, regardless of how distressed or how affluent they are. They all exist there.
When I think about that, that's truly unleashing this swarm on the ground that would have real positive change. We wouldn't be bickering over what the governor was saying or what a political movement was going to be, or preemption to our local control. What you're describing is the most democratic of all things that we could do by empowering everybody to participate in the process.
Yeah. That's different than trying to locally zone your way into outcomes. I feel like this is a much more systematic, social way of looking at things that is about changing culture. Again, shout out to Neighborhood Evolution and Incremental Development Alliance, because these are the organizations that are actually on the ground doing that kind of economic development that a lot of economic development agencies aren't doing yet. Investing in training and resources and capacity building for locals is really, I think, a huge piece of the puzzle, not just in the housing conversation, but in just the "how are we going to build our cities" conversation for the next 100 years plus.
I can tell you because I've seen the contracts and I've talked to the cities that have hired those groups that come in and help them, what they're making in that investment is way less than what they would be making an investment to have a talented planner like you come in, Abby, and rewrite their zoning code.
Yeah, it's true. This isn't an ad for them, but what they're doing is incredibly valuable, because it's about implementation, and it's about actually making things happen, not just enabling them to happen. Because the people who are doing plans or the people who are reviewing plans and managing development at a city level are not the ones actually building things. So these processes can really bring in alignment the policy and regulator side with the doer and implementer side of things, and that's something that's really needed here in the built environment.
So let's do the downzone. This has been a great conversation. I think we've answered the question that this is probably not going to shatter Utah's housing future, but there's just more to the puzzle.
Yeah, I would not fear if I'm in Utah and this is going forward. I would not fear it, because I assure you there are enough performance standards and barriers that there will be other places besides your neighborhood where this would start first. But I think this opens up a discussion that people should be having at every level. When you see the numbers being thrown out about how many houses these communities are short, we should be asking ourselves, what can we actually do today to address that and move past all of these other wildly challenging debates?
Yeah. When looking at all the other barriers to building housing—building codes, finance, cost of construction, approval processes—regardless of whether or not you have state preemption happening, the question should be, who are we enabling to build? How should we adjust these standards or provide resources to enable the type of development we really want to see? Because it's not all about zoning at the end of the day.
Okay, so downzone. This is the part of this show where we can share anything that we have been reading, watching, listening to, anything that's been going on in our lives. So Edward, I'll throw it to you. What is your downzone this week?
I am getting ready in about 20 minutes to hit the road with my family. My son is active in an FLL Lego team. So this is First Lego League challenge. Yeah, so it's Lego robotics. This weekend, tomorrow is our big West Virginia State Championship on this. So this is his second year doing it. We're all really nervous, but his team is doing an incredible job.
Tomorrow is going to be a really fun day. They have these robotic Lego matches, and then they have to explain things they've studied and explored throughout the year. So high-energy day. Yeah, we're going to be hitting the road, so we get there in plenty of time, because we start at 7:00. We have to be at the college at 7:30 in the morning to kick all this off. But yeah, fun stuff. Watching a bunch of kids really take Legos and code them and build pieces and do all their types of mechanical stuff with it. It's been fun to watch this whole team develop. Yeah, tomorrow's the big Super Bowl.
Yeah, that's a big deal. I would have never guessed that you would share that today. I've never heard of this before.
Yeah, no, we didn't know either. It's through STEM, and it's supported by Lego. Last year, one of our teams made it to the international competition. So it's really fun to see how this works. I'm looking at this, and I've got 40-some years on all of these kids and just watching the innovation of solving problems, because there's a theme, and there are different challenges on a board, so the robot has to go and push and pull and grab and lift stuff.
This team this year, his team, these kids are brilliant, and they don't know it. They have figured out how to do the least amount of code. They figured out—everyone likes to do all of this type of elaborate movement with lots of motors. This team actually figured out how to use a block and a stick to get a bunch of points on the board. They're like, "Look, what is the simplest thing we could do to yield the most amount of points?" So all of that thinking, I'm like, "Wow, these kids—I feel good about the future if we could simplify stuff and accomplish great things." These kids are speaking my language.
That's wonderful. That's so over my head, but that's wonderful to hear. That's awesome. Well, have fun with that. I hope they win.
Yeah, they're going to score big. I have big hopes. It's not just because I'm a proud dad. They really have worked hard, and they did really well at their scrimmage earlier in the year, so we'll see. But it'll be fun to see how all the other teams play out, because it is a competition, and they are all striving to be the best at what they do.
Well for me, I feel like I've just been extremely busy in the past few weeks. I always kind of anticipate with the holidays and this time of year that things would be more relaxed, but it's always just way more busy than I think it's going to be, from figuring out presents for the holiday to traveling and figuring that out. I'm also buying a house, and I'm closing in a couple of weeks, and that is—it's not the best time to buy a house, by the way. I don't know what I was thinking, but that's what I'm doing.
It's your investment.
I know. So that's another thing. I'll be moving in two weeks. Yeah, it's just a whirlwind and will be for probably the next month, but I've kind of been just enjoying the holiday season for what it is, even though it's really busy. I'm going to all the holiday parties and events that are happening around town and enjoying the lights and playing a lot of Christmas music. It's something that I actually really like. Holiday music—people don't.
Oh, nonstop. November 1, I can start playing it.
Really? Okay, so you understand.
My family does not, but I love it.
I mean, my radio station is tuned to it, and I turn it on for my animals when I leave the house. It's just playing all day. It's on my Spotify, and it goes right on in the car. Yeah, I've got it playing all month. I'll be sick of it by New Year's, I'm sure, but it's one month a year that I'm blasting the classics.
So is there a favorite classic Christmas song or carol that you have?
That's a good question. I mean, I think "All I Want for Christmas" by the Mariah Carey version is—I know that's what everyone probably says, but it's so good. Anytime it comes on, I'm just so filled with joy. So that probably is my favorite. But I mean, I also really like the classical music, like the Nutcracker, for example. I like the classical music as well.
Yeah, no, it's all good stuff. I always am akin to the little—remember all the Claymation Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph and all the squeaky noises? Any of those songs, you can't hear too much of it. It really can worm right into your brain. But when all those come on, I just remember the excitement of those cartoons showing up on TV and doing that.
I love the Claymation. That was so cool, those Claymation animations. Yeah, I've got—so my boyfriend has a 10-year-old, which is a great excuse to rewatch lots of old Christmas movies. Last year, we went and saw The Polar Express in theater. So they play it downtown in the theater, and everybody comes in and they bring bells that they shake during the show. It's so fun to go do those kinds of things. I think we're going to go see Elf probably in the next couple of weeks. I really like during the holiday season, especially, to be a tourist in my own city. I just think it's a great excuse to go do all the things that a tourist would do in your city, because there's so many little markets and just fun stuff to do. Whether you're doing it with children or not, it's just fun to do it and to make a day of it, make an event of it. So that's what I really try to do all of December.
That's great. Yeah, it's one of those times of year that you get the excuse to go lots of different places. Now that we've gotten past all of the crazy Black Friday stuff, everything seems to smooth itself out, and people are all out for joy.
Yeah, totally. This month is busy in a lot of different ways, but busy in a good way is the fact that there's just so many events and things going on. I really like to do those things. So yeah, something to look forward to in this next month is moving. I'm looking forward to it, but the process of moving is kind of a lot. I'm looking forward to it, but am I looking forward to moving things physically? No.
Yeah. Well, you'll get moved in pretty quick, and you'll enjoy your new house.
Yeah, it's going to be awesome. I'll send you the Zillow listing. It's fronting on a big park, so this will be my first time living on a park, and I'm super excited about it. It's a historic home, and it's beautiful. I'm so excited.
That's awesome.
And it's right next door to a bunch of six-plexes.
Oh, so now you can move in and be like, "I had no idea."
Yeah, I'm going to start calling the city and complaining.
Yeah, "If I knew that, I would have never bought on this street."
Yeah, "These renters."
"They're people in the park too. They're going to make noise. My park."
Yeah, I'm going to live long enough to become the villain.
No, I love that. We'll see that transformation. It always happens.
Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah. One day. Okay, well, thanks, Edward. Enjoy your Lego tournament Super Bowl and your weekend. Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Upzoned. Bye Edward.
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