Abby Newsham  0:04  

This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.

Abby Newsham  0:18  

Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, the show where we take a big story from the news that touches the Strong Towns conversation each week, and we upzone it. We talk about it in depth. My name is Abby Newsham, I am a planner in Kansas City, and today I am joined by Norm Van Eden Petersman, director of membership for Strong Towns. Norm, I love your name, so it's always fun to say.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  0:44  

You get to use the whole alphabet. It's great.

Abby Newsham  0:47  

Yeah, absolutely. How are you doing?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  0:50  

I'm doing really well. Yeah, having a good day. Start of school, back in action. I'm coaching soccer again this fall, so I'm looking forward to that, and about to head out to as we record this, to San Antonio to give a couple of presentations. So that's always fun.

Abby Newsham  1:06  

Yeah, that's fun. I have never been to San Antonio, but I've heard really good things. I've had family that have visited there for work and stuff, and it looks like fun. By the way, you're coaching soccer? What age soccer group is this?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  1:22  

Yeah, it's u 12. My son is 10. So it's 10 year olds and 11 year olds. It's house league. So we get a whole range of kids, and they're mainly just trying to have fun and survive in the midst of the rain that will certainly come this fall. But we get to play all the way till March. I grew up only being able to play when the grass was around, but we have turf fields, and it's the Pacific Northwest so we get to cope with the weather, so that'll be good. It teaches toughness.

Abby Newsham  1:50  

Yeah. It teaches toughness. Well, it's nice that you have the turf fields, that'll be a lot of fun. Okay, so this week, we are digging into a story that was published from the Globe that is entitled, "end users, rather than investors, are expected to drive Vancouver's housing market higher." This was written by Carrie Gold, and this is the Globe and Mail. So this article is basically highlighting a key shift in Canada's housing market, which is focusing on end users. That's people who are actually buying homes to live in them, which is interesting that there's a name for that now. End users are increasingly driving demand, rather than investors in Canada. For years, investors and speculators, particularly global investors and speculators, were shaping prices and activity throughout Canada and in major cities, and now the landscape is starting to look a little bit differently there, with higher borrowing costs and shifting expectations and changing government regulations. The market is starting to feel the influence of families and first time homebuyers and individuals that are really just looking for a place to call home and not just an asset. So this raises a lot of very important questions. You know, what happens when housing is driven by quote, unquote, end users, rather than investors. What does that do to affordability, the stability in the market, the kinds of places that we live in and build? And what does it mean for cities across North America, broadly, that are grappling with housing shortages and overheated markets? So, Norm, you sent this article to me. I'm so curious. From a Strong Towns perspective, what are you thinking when you read this article about about what's happening to our friends in the north?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  3:47  

Yeah, thanks, Abby. It's fascinating to me as an end user of a home.

Abby Newsham  3:58  

Yeah, me too. I'm also an end user.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  4:00  

I give thought to the deeper sort of mechanics of how we've gotten into a situation where, you know, I was going out trying to find a rental, and I was seeing places that were renting for $2,500 a month, that as I walked in, had visible mold in the stairwells. And I thought, "Something is not right, if this is what's available at these prices." And so as I was reflecting on the piece, what was interesting to me is, from a Strong Towns perspective, we would say that you need to look at hot cities, like your San Francisco or Vancouver or some of these other places that have gone into the stratosphere in terms of their housing costs. While the numbers might be extreme in those places, many of those same sort of pressures are emerging in your own community as well, even if you may not be a destination for international capital in quite the way that Vancouver discovered it had become. There's a great book called "Willful Blindness" by Sam Cooper that outlines the role of narco gangs and other groups that were involved in money laundering and using the Vancouver real estate market to basically wash funds through people's ability to take out a mortgage on a property using falsified documents. Crucially, if they could make their payments on that mortgage for less than $10,000, it didn't get tracked in the same way that anti-money laundering normally tracks expenditures over $10,000 of transactions. So there was this interesting super-charging of our system and and it didn't work well. You know, if you want to charge a battery slowly, it'll gain charge, but if you try to do it too fast, it'll blow up, and that's what happened to the Vancouver market. The question is, how much of that affected some of these other major markets? But the downwind consequences are severe in all sorts of other markets as well. So all of these condos were not being lived in because they were being used just for the purpose of washing funds. The owners had very little interest in renting them, because renting could potentially bring scrutiny. So they would sit empty and idle. And in that context, you would then have fairly well paid Amazon employees that were moving up here for work -- not the people that work in the warehouse, but people that work in the coding side -- and they were buying homes to be able to share them between a whole bunch of people, because it wasn't worth it for an individual to live in a single condo. You see this knock on consequence that really can step in. I think that is one of those things we want to be so alert to in our own housing markets.

Abby Newsham  6:45  

Yeah, I remember when I was a student in school, there was a class where we actually spent a couple class periods studying what was happening to the housing market in Canada. And if I remember correctly, another layer to that was that the government was intentionally attracting foreign investment. And if you had a certain net worth or a certain amount of money that you would pay or invest, that people could could move to Canada from other countries. And so it was attracting a lot of wealth, particularly from places like China, but other countries as well. And of course, that's going to inflate. I mean, it's like global gentrification, essentially, to your cities. And it is really interesting now that it's starting to be reversed. The article mentions that the government has stepped in. They have more rules around how long you need to hold a property before you can sell it, otherwise, you have to pay some really hefty taxes. In addition to just all the macro economic changes that have occurred with interest rates and just the cost of money, the government is stepping in intentionally and trying to shift things away from where it's gotten. And I think the question is, what does that do to the financialized system of housing in Canada? And more broadly, is it the same as what would happen in the United States if that were to happen?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  8:30  

I really think that there's a few things that protect many markets, if they're not in the global network of core cities that people identify as soft havens for foreign capital to come into. Certainly things like real estate visas, where if you commit upfront to a pre-sale that funds the development of another tower in a major city, then you get access to citizenship. The United States has been a lot more careful about that. Though, there certainly are paths for people with funds to be able to step in. But the other thing that stands out to me is that a lot of what we need to really bring the focus to is that work to legalize small. Small scale development is interesting because it we have recognized it does not benefit from some of the high volumes of capital that are available, lending rates tend to be higher because you're not going in on a $600 million project, or whatever the the scope of these massive projects is. But those massive projects to build out towers and stuff also come with a whole series of buttons that sometimes get pushed, and those are the ones that trigger really nasty things, like capturing way too much of tax credits so there's little left for everybody else, carving off all sorts of weird financial transfers that are being masked through the real estate system. I don't know enough about things like beneficial owner registries and things like that in the United States to be able to say that you're immune from it. I suspect there is this going on. It just didn't reach the crescendo that it has in Vancouver, as an example. But we saw this also in Toronto, another major market, with the amount of flipping on pre-sales. I'm not sure if they do pre-sales in Kansas City, where you can say, "I will put down a deposit and then I will pay an agreed upon-amount for my unit the moment that it's ready." That can be a great way to fund development. Someone that upfront commits money with a deposit. Many people were putting $80,000, $90,000, borrowing from family members. Because if you were middle class or trying to join it, your pathway in was, you buy the pre-sale, and then you wait a few months, you flip it, and you basically take your 16, 20, 40,000 because the idea was this train only goes upwards. The consequence of that is, if the investment is actually about the flip rather than about the unit, you're going to care a lot less about what that unit is like. It's just a unit. And this is where, to me, the language that we use really matters. Do we talk about homes? How many homes are in that tower? No, it's how many units are in that tower. It's how many commodity sort of exchangeable units do we have? And that trouble develops quite quickly. So the pre-sale flipping, the BC government cracked down on that. The federal government said "You need to actually pay taxes on any of your windfall." All of a sudden, a lot of people got cold feet with that. We're also seeing now that a lot of people that bought expecting to flip can't find anybody to flip to because of some of the things that have stepped in the way, and now they're stuck. And on the one hand, I understand if you're out 80 grand and you'll never recover from that because that was never your money to begin with, you're in a tough spot. But the game was bad to start with, and that warning "There's no quick, easy money" should have been heeded a lot earlier. So one of the core things that the BC government introduced was the foreign buyers tax. So if you are outside of Canada and you want to buy in Canada, in our markets, you have to pay extra. New Zealand did this. Other places have done this. We talk about policies that can begin to tamp down the viability or sort of the attractiveness of this for institutional investing. These are some of those tools that can be really helpful for this. We do want institutional investors that are stable, pension funds, others, to buy many units and make them available for rent. I need somebody who is an investor so I can live in their home. We sometimes vilify like, "Oh, multifamily units are all owned by BlackRock." It's like, well, no, but also, if they are holding it as a lasting financial asset, it means you're going to have decent housing security. You'll have security of tenure. You won't get booted the moment that another flip happens, and yet another change of ownership occurs. And then the anti-flipping tax is also suggestive that, for a while, everyone thought flipping was a hot thing, like HGTV, and it was a great path to double your income, but we've now realized this is not helping and we needed to step back from them.

Abby Newsham  13:36  

Yeah, it makes me think about just the impact of money and movement of money from all over the place into local markets, and how that, in many ways, is really invisible to people, although there's impacts that will pop up that are not as clearly connected to the money itself. And I think that it's almost hard to imagine what a market looks like when it's actually driven by locals, if outside investors are just not really coming in, flipping or speculating, holding land. In Kansas City, where I'm from, that's definitely something that we're faced with. It's nowhere near what we see in Canada, but we do have a lot of impact that is caused by speculators and out of state investors that buy and hold property. And I kind of wonder, if that were not the case, what would the market look like locally, in terms of actual locals participating in improving, renovating properties? Would there be more people who are keen to enter that market to fill in the gaps? Or, I don't know, it's just interesting to imagine what that actually might look like.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  15:01  

Your comment reminds me that if we identify that people buying and holding property in our communities and just sitting on it is harming our communities, and we recognize that the drain on vitality that can present, one of the ways that we could address that would be by taxing the land more, and not necessarily putting all of the tax on the improvements. Even if we never got to that point, what this article is describing in Vancouver is what happens when the next stage of buy and hold kicks in of newly constructed homes that are not being used for that purpose. That language, "not being intended for the end user, but instead as an investment product." And so it's certainly underscores the claims and the argument that Chuck and Daniel make in the housing trap book. There's a cautionary tale here. Things like an anti-flipping tax, requiring that your ownership actually have a name and not just a numbered company on the registry of who owns this, so you can actually trace and track what is going on with the properties in your system and they're not just flushing through. Recognizing that, if we can keep down that volume of repeatable, predictable patterns, we actually allow it to just be about housing. It's one of those things that Chuck talks in the book, that when it becomes too predictable, then the quants can move in. If it's a machine and you can just figure out how to nudge a few decimals around and make millions, you're going to be inclined to do that. And we see this in the Vancouver example. Many large cities are grappling with having towers with no people in them. On the one hand, that means property taxes without somebody using a rowing machine at the gym. But when we think, "Is this going to contribute to the lasting vitality?" it's the equivalent of that buy and hold property speculator who never shows up to the community barbecue, never employs anybody locally, doesn't do anything. If we allow just for the sustained pattern of not doing anything, we see the impact it has on our places. My hat is off to everybody that's trying to do something. You know, I think of Monte Anderson or Neil Haller or others in our network. They can look in the eye of the person that they're borrowing money from to collaboratively do a project with. All those participants have a hand in it.  That's what gets me energized, not some big, grand unveiling that all of a sudden completely upends our market, but just the careful, methodical process of building out capacity where we live.

Abby Newsham  16:36  

Yeah, absolutely. Just thinking of large towers that are empty, that, yes, are paying property taxes but are not adding anything else. We talk about value per acre and having productive cities, and the importance of having a fiscally potent city that can support its infrastructure. But it does get beyond that point of the numbers. You want to have people in your city as well. You don't want to just have a dysfunctional market of towers that don't actually have people in them using them. At that point, it's not really much of a city, is it? That's really very dysfunctional. And so this shift in Canada is, I think, really notable, because it is shifting things back to quote, unquote, end user. You said words are important, and I just think it's really strange that that's a word that we're using for the people who are intended to use the housing, that that's a technical term here. It does make you wonder about what the impact will be on the broader housing market, because our markets really have been set up to work when investors are piling in and adding money into the system and when transactions are happening. Obviously that's a sign of a system that is dysfunctional and not really aligned with with, historically, how housing markets were supposed to be set up. They were supposed to serve families and workers and everyday people and support the viability of our cities, but really now, everything's so financialized. It does make you wonder about what that means for Canada's housing market. And the Canadian pivot to being more focused on the end users, which I think is the right thing. How does that impact the broader market? Will it cause the financialized system to break?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  20:12  

Yeah. We're seeing those signs. I think our federal government is doing everything it can to prevent the breakage, because it knows how bad it could be. So that looks like making sure that interest rates still aren't actually being used to fully address inflation, instead just managing them to try to not allow a market to just begin to collapse. This is the struggle that we have. You know, there's a quote here in the article from the author. "It's the places that are livable right now, for lack of a better word, that are in demand, and not those that are driven by investors." And that's telling that there's this fragility that's built into our system. And I can share a quick anecdote. My son's school is ahead of schedule on completing a four classroom expansion to add more capacity to the school. One of the core reasons why is the contractor was able to bring in all of the trades much sooner and actually at lower costs than at first we expected, because most of our our large projects have either been paused or are being slow walked to manage capital really carefully. And most of the sales, they're halting them because they are concerned that, even if they build it, they're going to be selling at prices that they previously didn't expect. And this is the struggle that we have. When we ride that roller coaster going up, we think, "Wow, our city is growing." But if you get hooked on that kind of money, on those types of massive projects, the collapse is real. And I don't know how soon that collapse occurs. There are more and more warning signs on both sides of the border. The question is, will that collapse the entire market? Or will you see these islands of "Hey, that's actually a home that somebody can live in, so that's going to sell and continue to be exchanged as value"? But a lot of people are sitting on their checkbooks right now. The whole real estate market is transaction driven, so their incentives are just to keep transactions flowing. And the development industry, which is also transaction flowing, especially when you don't even care so much about what the quality of the end user's experience in that unit is, that's very different. I don't know about you, Abby, but I sit in my place and I know what it costs me to rent here, but this is way bigger than me. When we say, if we allow just a few coach houses to be built in people's backyards, that will make a difference for individuals. When we allow a few cottages to pop up in places where they didn't previously belong, that is addressing it in the other way. And it's steady. It's actually a bit more predictable, because we know if somebody has done one project, they're likely to take on another project, unless we made it so hard for them to do. And this is my passion. How do we get out of the way of the very things that we want to see? How do we stop making it so difficult? I can't remember who the council member was in our region who asked a smaller project developer, "Can I attend every meeting that you have with my city, with the staff?" And they basically went every time that the developer had a meeting, whether it was at the counter or whether it was behind the counter with the planning director, whomever, the council member just sat in. And they couldn't believe the labyrinth, the uncertainty. And this was a city that was trying to get it right, and the council member said, "We're still tripping over ourselves and finding new and novel ways to mess up people's projects." And so this council member ultimately, then said, "I won't vote on your project because I've been vested in what you're doing." That is speaking to some of the things that Edward Erfurt talks about with various cities. Actually go through your process. Take a look at it. It's not just cut the red tape, because you need to know what is a red flag that warns against quality problems and what's red tape that is just unnecessarily snarling people. We need to get used to the idea that we can build just simple structures again, and that it doesn't matter too much if it's already in places that we've set aside for housing. In the province of BC, we have housing targets for each city that has been slow in building enough capacity. And my city council members see it. They're like, "Yeah, Norm, we can either approve 1500 units right away in a tower, or we can try to find 1500 small scale developers. But we're just not seeing those applications come in." And I said, "I know why that's happened. Because you made it so difficult to build a cottage." We have a tiny home manufacturer in our community who builds amazing mint tiny homes. They're beautiful. You're not allowed to use them in our community because our zoning forbids that very thing. And I'm like, "We could get there!" But the difficulty is now that 1500-unit tower that we approved, it's not getting built because of financing. So we're still not getting the things, even though we went all in on the big projects.

Abby Newsham  25:29  

Yeah. And the thing is, when it comes to small development and trying to make that happen, that just doesn't happen through big annual targets and top down policies and programs. You need to have a market of people who are doing this kind of work. You may have the one person in town that has a company doing tiny homes and can barely get a couple done because of red tape and they're not allowed to actually build them. But if it were easy to do those types of structures, you would not only have this person doing more of them, but you would get competition. More people would start doing it. Generally, business grows around markets that are profitable, where you can actually make things happen. That's why incremental development, small scale development, is such a niche kind of thing to do. And it's not something that people are flocking to go do. It's people who care and are mission-driven, really. Even if you legalize things and make it easier and cut red tape  it takes patience to build up a culture of people that build in a certain way. It just takes a very long time. It doesn't happen overnight. And I don't think that way of thinking about things is really well aligned with whatever the program of the day is for a city, and it's driven by a city council person, and they want to see results. You know, it could take a decade, it could take longer, to actually build up the individuals, the people, the ecosystem that makes this a viable way of building. For certain people, that is not good enough.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  27:39  

And if you can head off the dysfunction that Vancouver has experienced by doing those types of reforms now, I think that's the best time to get at it. Like all of these cautionary tales from these out of whack cities should be the thing that gives added confidence that we've got to do this. We were down in doing presentations with Urban3 in Utah, and it was amazing to hear the community leaders from really small towns describing their housing crisis. And it just baffled me because how is it possible that you also have a housing crisis? But it was severe, because they said the inflow of people into their state with opportunities created by the industries that they want and the jobs that they want to see created are now contributing to either existing residents being priced out, or existing residents just not being able to find anything that suits their needs. As well as all the new incomers saying, "I'm going to have to settle for something" or "I'm going in, but I wish that I could have done something different. I wish that I could have built, but it wasn't worth it. I wish that I could have set up a simple arrangement for myself." That is, I think, the warning that this is severe. I'm going to be up in northern Michigan delivering a talk at the Housing North Summit. Traverse City, that's a long ways away from sort of the centers of global capital, and yet, they're struggling with a housing crisis. And so I hope that Strong Towns' ideas and approaches can really help to seed the ground for doing what we can right now, even if we know that it's not going to magically turn it around overnight. Patience, but it's costly right now.

Abby Newsham  29:28  

Yeah, it's tough. I mean, as Chuck often says, predicaments have outcomes, right? I mean, this is a situation where I agree with you. I work with communities, rich and poor, big and small, all different regions of the country, and everybody has some version of the housing crisis occurring in their community, in every context. And it's really fascinating to hear different perspectives of how housing is impacting people, but there's no doubt. I have yet to work with any community that says they don't have some kind of housing crisis going on. And some of it is financial, but some of it is also the physical type of housing that people need. And generational changes, demographic changes. There's just a lot of change happening right now, not just with generations changing. We have the boomers that are phasing out and retiring, and millennials are becoming the middle aged people. I mean, we have all these changes happening there, but people are also moving around, especially post covid. That change is creating all kinds of pressure, in addition to these bigger kind of macro economic challenges that we often talk about on on this show and certainly relevant in Vancouver and in Canada with foreign investment as well.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  31:06  

You know I mentioned the HGTV flipping craze. And if I come back to that idea that there's a one to two year cooldown before you're allowed to turn around that property, otherwise you're going to get a significant tax on it. If flipping had included making it a duplex, making it a triplex with a backyard cottage, if it was more than just putting in granite countertops and some day lilies that are going to wilt the moment that the TV camera turns off, if that flip involved, what we would describe as taking that next step towards that next increment of development, we would have been fueling a really valuable trend. Maybe what we need is Incremental Development Alliance inking deals with Viacom to be front and center as this new trend sweeping the nation. Imagine.

Abby Newsham  32:00  

I would love that. It's fun to make fun of the house flipping shows, but I'm not as mad at the house flipping shows as many people get, because it is just individuals. I understand a lot of the times they're just doing an open concept and putting countertops in. South Park has a great episode about house flipping. But I'm less inclined to point the finger at them. If they are trying to do incremental development, if there was some more mission alignment to what they're doing, like you said, if they're renovating a duplex or building a backyard cottage, I think that would be a really cool story that people would actually be interested in seeing. Kind of neighborhood based development, local based development, and highlighting that and making it a trend. I love that idea. We have any people from HGTV who listen to this?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  33:01  

That's right, we need a producer. But imagine that producer, say 10 years ago, about when it was really big. Then at that point, imagine going to the producer and saying, "We just got the keys." And it's like, "All right, I sent the camera crew!" And, you know, heartwarming, like, you just bought it. "I just submitted my application to the city to turn it into a triplex." "Okay, great. Let's film that!"

Abby Newsham  33:28  

And then it becomes very dramatic, and then it's a reality show.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  33:34  

"So you're saying that they haven't reviewed your plans." "No, not yet." "We'll get back to you." "So you're saying that you're having to cut down every single tree because there's a rigid setback rather than sort of a general setback requirement? Oh, you still have to go meet the Planning and Zoning Commission?" And all of those steps along the way. And they're like, "None of this is good for camera. We just want to see a sledgehammer." And you're like, "No producer, wait, we won't get to the sledgehammer stage until ages from now. There's a reason nobody was doing it." So when we talk about housing-ready cities, it's housing-ready -- or sort of flip-ready cities, in one way, we could say -- so that producer says, "Whoa, there's action every week." If that is our standard for our building trades in our community, that there's action every week. Chuck will use a somewhat romanticized idea of like, walk in at 9am with a ninth grade education, and by noon you leave with your development permit to build out the next increment. That's HGTV-ready. You didn't have to pay a camera crew very long to be there. So, hey, if you're a producer, help us identify on the housing-ready cities map the places you should go, and we'll get you in touch. It'll be the newest, hottest thing.

Abby Newsham  34:55  

I love that. Okay, well, hopefully when they roll the end credits we get some notoriety when they air this show. That's a great idea. That would actually be really fun to watch. And I think even with permitting and all the hurdles that small scale developers have to jump over, I think there would be a lot of fun drama to watch.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  35:22  

Yeah, and rapid aging, but that's the other challenge.

Abby Newsham  35:25  

Rapid aging, yeah. Suddenly it's like, "Oh, their hair is grayer than it was in the first episode." Awesome. Well, I think we can leave it there. I appreciate you bringing this story to me, and we'll have to keep an eye on on the Canadian housing market and see what happens next year.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  35:46  

Yeah, I would love to.

Abby Newsham  35:48  

All right, well, before we wrap up, it is time for the downzone, which is the part of the show where we can share anything that we have been up to these days, anything that's been taking up our our time and attention. Norm, what do you have for me today?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  36:03  

I have a book. So the book is, "You'll pay for this: How we can afford a great city for everyone forever." And it's by Michel Durand-Wood, who is my brother in law, full disclosure. But it is a fantastic book. If you are interested in just sharing Strong Towns ideas with somebody, but you know that they're either not going to read a book or they are just like put off by the whole topic, throughout the whole thing, you're going to laugh. If you've ever read Mich's work on the Dear Winnipeg blog, he uses humor and sort of weaves that in and walks you through how we've gotten into this situation in terms of the long term financial outlook for our cities, especially looking at the city of Winnipeg. Starting with the question, "Why did our parks used to have gardeners in them, and now we can't even afford to turn on the fountain? How did we go from having the capacity to do things to not?" The biggest insight to me, that I would love people to pick up, is that the funds that you allocate in your capital budget are just future operating budgets. So anything that you say, "We're putting that in our capital budget for future years." That just means, when you get to that year, you're going to be paying for it. And so that is obviously part of our long term planning, but we've made it so that every year you balance the budget, but you do so by taking out of either future years budgets or by taking out of previous years budgets where you kept a little bit in reserve. And in our places where we've not kept money in reserve, every time that we make a commitment, we're basically withdrawing future funds. It's one of the best ways of demonstrating the intergenerational dine and dash that we find ourselves in. So definitely check it out. It's "You'll pay for this: How we can afford a great city for everyone forever." It's very Strong Towns. Definitely recommend it.

Abby Newsham  38:02  

I love that, and I love the dine and dash way of thinking about it. That's great. For me, life has been very busy these days. I am happy to announce that right now I am sitting in a finished, small renovation project of my home, and it's finally clean and not filled with tools and equipment, and I painted over the weekend. So everything in this part of the house is perfectly the way I want it. So that is what I can report. Just finally finishing this project that has been going on for the last several weeks, and getting to have a little desk space that I'm at right now that is free of dust.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  38:50  

Congrats. That's awesome. Have you put a ceremonial like first dent in anywhere? Just to say, "All right, I'm gonna put that first dent in so that way, then I don't have to worry when the next one comes."

Abby Newsham  39:01  

No, I haven't, but I'm not too precious about it. So eventually I'll definitely create dents here and there. But I did hang up a picture so I've got a hole in a wall that had no holes in it. Now it's ruined.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  39:19  

It's lived in. That's the key.

Abby Newsham  39:21  

It's lived in. Yep. This is not even the end. I have more work that will be happening, but for now, it's peaceful. I love it.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  39:32  

Yeah. A little bit of relief from the noise, that'll be the best.

Abby Newsham  39:36  

Yeah, yes, exactly. And my pets are happy about the quiet as well. Okay. Well, hey, thanks, Norm. I appreciate you joining me today. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Upzoned. Thanks, Norm, bye.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  39:52  

Bye.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  39:57  

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.