The Bottom-Up Revolution
Jennifer Truman didn’t set out to be a housing or transit advocate, but after running into the same problems while designing small projects in Raleigh, North Carolina, she started asking bigger questions. In this episode, she explains how noticing friction in everyday work led to her involvement in zoning reform, transit leadership, and launching a pro-housing movement.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany. If you're familiar with the Strong Towns approach to community change, then you know that it starts with noticing where your community struggles and then working to tackle those struggles one by one. Today's guest is very active in her community, and not because she woke up one day and decided "I'm going to become an advocate," but simply because she started noticing problems and decided she was going to say something about them.
Jennifer Truman is a designer of experiences and places based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She's also an advocate for her city, with a background in Civil Engineering and Architecture, and she is the principal designer at the Rocket Shop. She is currently serving on the Transit Board of her city and running CITYBUILDER, a grassroots, pro-housing news and advocacy coalition that's calling for better housing choice policy. If all of that is not impressive enough, she does all of this alongside her role as mom to four children. We've already had a chance to connect a little bit and swap notes on the joy that is life with toddlers. Jennifer, welcome to the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. Thank you for joining me.
Yeah, hello, thanks. It's great to be here.
So you grew up moving a lot as a military child. To get a feel for your story and the background here, how would you say that experience shaped your perspective on place, on cities, and how you started to make your career decisions as you got older?
Yeah, I think anyone who has military parents knows that you get shaped by how you move around a lot and all the experiences that you get to have. I moved about 20 times before I was 20, so on average once a year. We lived all over the country, so I was really lucky to see a lot of different ways that cities are shaped and that neighborhoods exist.
Being on base is like the perfect little walkable community. Everyone already has a joint purpose and has joint goals, and then you get to walk around and ride your bike as a kid and have all this amazing interaction with your neighbors that is not really possible in other suburban places anymore in America, but still is possible. So I think I didn't know it at the time, but looking back, growing up as a kid with those experiences really poised me to be like, "Isn't it weird that our kids don't ride bikes down the street and get to go to the grocery store or hang out at the community center? That just doesn't happen as often now as it did." So I think, in retrospect, my childhood geared me for asking a bunch of questions about why things are built the way they're built, which then led me to going to school to learn all of that and figure out how to build them for other people.
So as you were going to school, were you more attracted to the architecture or the engineering? Which one came first for you?
Engineering came first. I was a math geek. My dad has a degree in math and is a finance guy, so the math side and the really geeky engineering side is what drew me through school and into college. So I got my undergrad in civil engineering because I was just really fascinated with how the actual world that we live in, the roads and the streets and the ponds and the pipes and all that, actually gets done and the math behind it.
I slowly realized that engineers don't like to talk to people, and I do. So that led me to architecture.
So you came to Raleigh for college, and you stayed there for the past, I guess, more than two decades now. Can you tell us that part of your story? What struck you about Raleigh when you arrived, and what makes it feel like home for you?
I did. I landed in the triangle. Actually, I landed in Durham 20 years ago this year, and then two years later in Raleigh. So it's crazy to think that it's been two decades here. I love the triangle. I love Durham and I love Raleigh, but I chose to stay in Raleigh because of the people, which sounds cliche, but Raleigh has a small town feeling. I tell people you can run into the mayor at the coffee shop. It's still a small town, but it has all of the good things about being a big city. We have the culture and the arts and the restaurants and the dining and the universities and the opportunities that come with a big city.
So you really can have your cake and eat it, too, if you live in Raleigh. Plus you're close to all these great parks, and people always say you're halfway between the beach and the mountains. You can do either one, whichever weekend you want. So there really is a lot. You don't have to choose a lifestyle in Raleigh because you can have these bits and pieces of really great things.
Yeah, we exchanged notes before the recording when we first talked, because I finished up high school in Raleigh. A lot of my family's still out there, so my mom, my siblings, are still out there, and it's a beautiful place. It's also growing a lot. So I'm sure you've also seen it changing over these two decades or so that you've been there as well.
Raleigh grows by 64 people a day. That's the current count for the last couple censuses, and that number hasn't changed in quite a while. So there's a lot of people moving here from other places in the state, and then there are people moving from all over the world and the country here as well.
The growth is something that I find really exciting about living here because it is a beautiful place, and I think that beautiful places are meant to be shared. There's a lot of obviously varied opinions about that, but what I love about the southern hospitality that we really have in Raleigh is that whether you've lived here for 20 years or two years, you're just as welcome in the community.
I want to go back to your pursuit of architecture in school. Can you share a bit about that? What were you hoping, what was driving you, what were you curious about, and what were you hoping to practice as an architect? Maybe you can share a little bit about where you've landed in these years since.
Actually, this is Strong Towns related. When I was a baby, engineering-minded human finishing my engineering degree, I discovered Chuck's blog back at the very early days of Strong Towns. I got really, at the time I was really asking a lot of questions about what do engineers do, and why do they just do math in a cubicle and not talk to people, which is an unfair characterization, I know now, but at the time, that was where my mindset was. I wanted to talk to people, and I wanted to better understand if the way we build our cities and our roads and our buildings changes the experience of people within them. If you design a school, it affects how the kids are able to learn. If you design a road, it affects how fast people will drive.
There's so much control that engineers and architects and folks who shape the built environment have over the people that just passively exist in our world. I started to just be really curious about all of that as I was finishing my engineering degree and went and got my master's in architecture also at NC State. Go wolf pack.
The cool thing about the overlap between engineering school and architecture school at NC State is that there are a couple of classes and professors that do work across landscape architecture, architecture and engineering. So there's a good amount of knowing what you're getting into. I knew that architects tend to think more about why we're shaping, what is, how we build a building to give people an experience. If we want people to experience something, how do we create walls and buildings and shelter that has that experience embodied within it? Those are the questions I was really interested in when I went to architecture school.
I'm not an architect, so I don't really know how this process plays out. Do you kind of go into architecture school with an idea of what you want to design or what you'd like to see yourself doing when you're done? If so, what has that been like for you? Kind of that journey, how you were starting, and then as you were actually out of school and practicing, how has your philosophy evolved, I guess, or what you've been interested in working on, what have you actually worked on?
That's a good question, because I think every student imagines doing grand things. A lot of architecture is really about this architect getting a good job under a great architect and learning all the skills from them. There's still very much a culture of mentor-mentee, artist culture in architecture. So I imagine going to New York or Boston, working for someone really famous who everyone has heard of and designing really big buildings that everyone has heard of, that are in a magazine or something. I think probably a lot of students imagine that being where they end up after they graduate.
I didn't wind up doing that. I stayed in Raleigh after I graduated, and I'm really glad that I did. But what I started to experience as a young designer was the gritty practice of architecture. You spend your whole first year drawing bathroom details and stair details. Those are the things that get things built.
Hey, don't underestimate the power of a well-designed bathroom. Our very small bathroom is kind of pushing my family to its limits. So hats off to you.
No, it's absolutely important work. I mean, bathrooms are one of the most regulated parts of a building because of all the accessibility requirements and things like that. It's something that's never celebrated work. You never saw yourself doing that.
Then I also made the decision when I decided to stay in Raleigh. I had a lot of personal life things that came up. My husband and I decided to go ahead and start our family pretty early. So I had my first kid when I was 25, and that changed the pace that my career took because I wanted to work. I continued to work at small firms, both in engineering and then in architecture. As I had my kids, I went back and forth between part time and full time, taking on small projects because they have small timelines.
If you work a big corporate job in the design industry, typically you're working on projects for maybe two, three, five years, and there just wasn't something that fit the lifestyle that I had with small kids. So I started just really being excited to work on small projects, and also they just fit what I needed to continue to be able to contribute. I fell in love, honestly, with small businesses and the way that they shape every neighborhood and all my projects.
Yeah, what have you been able to work on in Raleigh? Do you have a favorite project or a favorite couple of projects you like to talk about?
I knew you're going to ask this. It's like picking your favorite. I have been really lucky to work with a lot of the people who are doing cute boutique ice cream shops and coffee shops and restaurants. So any type of food, I've probably done one of those projects, and they're all great. A lot of them are, it's hard to pick, because one year we did, when I worked for Matt Conor, we did four or five pizza restaurants in a year, but they were all in different neighborhoods all over the triangle, and they really are their neighborhood pizza shop.
Oakwood Pizza Box is one of my favorite ones because it's one of the ones closest to my house. It's just a really great chef. Anthony's great. He's from New York City and has trained under all the famous people you should train to make pizza under. He cares about the way every tomato tastes and tastes the sauce. It's just an obsession that I probably have over architecture details, but over the way pizza is made. You can taste the difference. You can just taste when people care about stuff that much.
Yeah, absolutely. So as you're embracing more of the small projects, what were you noticing? I feel like this led into some of your advocacy work. What were you noticing as you were working on these small projects in terms of what it took to actually get them to be allowed to exist?
Yeah, I think people don't realize how many people are involved in even the smallest projects. A coffee shop is a great example. We had at least five professionals working on the drawings to get a coffee shop. Then you have five to 10 people at the city reviewing those drawings to see if the drawings are correct. Then you have five to 20 people building each piece of it, and you have another five people inspecting each piece of it. Just to do the smallest, really, the Incremental Development Alliance is one of the smallest projects you can take on, a coffee shop. To do that, you already have 50 people who have been involved in this process that doesn't even include the people that own the business or the people that are going to work there. So just the people they have to hire and go through the regulatory process with.
Doing small projects also gives you the privilege of, instead of working on one project for a couple of years, I got to work on dozens of projects in a year. So I got to see it's not that there was a rule that was in the way of this one project. There was a rule that was in the way after project after project after project.
My advocacy work sort of just started happening, probably because I'm a complaining type of person. I had too many projects just run into the same brick walls, metaphorically, the same regulatory red tape, which is costing clients whole projects sometimes, but at the very least, time and stress and money for sure. I was young and naive enough to call the city councilor and be like, "Does this have to be this way? Couldn't we have a cool ice cream shop that is allowed to have fun seating out front instead of having to take down this wall of the building and make the building bigger?" Whatever the rules were, there's always a couple little rules that get in the way. So that really started me down being more of a zoning geek and starting to care about every little rule that's in the book.
So where has that journey led you? Now I know that there was a season of running to serve on city council, but as you started showing up and asking those questions, I feel like some people, they start and they're like, "Oh, whoa," and they kind of stop, and they're never going to a city council meeting again, never asking those questions again. That's not how it went for you. Why do you think that was? Why do you think this grew into, I guess, a lifestyle almost, in a way? You've really just taken this on of, "I'm going to keep asking questions about lots of other things too, not just about what I'm noticing here."
I think I'm a people person. When I started going to city council meetings, I think there's a select group of folks that I'm now more involved with, our Strong Towns local conversation and the YIMBY action chapter that we have here locally and other stuff like CITYBUILDER. There's a type of person like me that when you show up to a council meeting and you hear some weirdness happening, you're just like, "What? Maybe I should tell other people this weird thing is happening in this room."
When I started going, pre-pandemic was a different environment, I think, for city politics. When I started going to city meetings, the only way you could know what was happening in City Hall was to go at two o'clock on a Tuesday and sit there and know what was happening. So I think we had, early on, a small group of us that would trade off which city council meetings we went to just so we would know what happened. Which projects are they talking about? Is someone complaining about something we think is really great?
We have a lot of people that were upset about tall buildings in our downtown because we still want to be a small town at the same time that we're growing. So it really started as who's there complaining about this rezoning, and then who's there, which city councilor is interested in changing the rule and things like that. I think advocacy grew from dozens and dozens of those little conversations with people who were interested.
Whether it's housing or transit or accessory dwelling units, it took us seven years to relegalize in Raleigh, which was a lot of effort by a lot of people just continually showing up and continually saying, "Hey, no, people want an accessory dwelling unit in their backyard. Could we please have them again?" Stuff like that.
So you just mentioned how you were working on getting the zoning changes to allow for ADUs. Can you tell me a little bit about how, because it sounds like from your architecture you're working mostly on commercial projects, can you tell me a little bit about how you came to focus on housing? Then I know that you also are currently serving on your city's Transit Board. So I'd love to just talk about those two in particular. Let's start off with housing. How did, yeah, maybe you can just kind of, and we're going to talk about this even more later when we talk about CITYBUILDER, but how did this land on your radar, and what does it look like to be part of those conversations around how Raleigh has to change how it approaches housing to keep up with how it's growing?
Big questions. Housing is, to me, housing is just another kind of small project that actually has really big implications. If people think of one house, they think, "Oh, that's a small thing. That's a small change." But when you multiply it over everyone that needs a house, when you multiply it over your lived experience that you have within the places that you have lived, in a house or an apartment or a duplex or whatever, I think for me, I had a slow career transition of just recognizing that all the same things that I'd personally come up against in designing neighborhood small commercial projects also existed whenever you tried to build an accessory dwelling unit in your backyard.
We also did residential work at the firm that I was at, but it was always smaller renovation work, which is extra tricky. But there's this idea that the rules are common sense. If you just have common sense, you can just go downtown and get a permit to build a house or get a permit to build a business, and then everything is just easy. The kind of common sense just doesn't play out. The way that your common sense tells you things should be if you're building businesses or houses mostly just isn't true in modern zoning land.
So I think that I just had repeated experiences in the housing space that were the same as what I had seen in my professional work. Once enough of your neighbors and your friends and your colleagues can't find an apartment they can afford, can't find a house in the neighborhood they want to live in, at this point can't find a house to live in in Raleigh and move out into the county or into the suburbs, the suburbs to the south of Raleigh grow faster than Raleigh itself, even though we're building housing finally again in Raleigh.
After several years of running into those same stories and seeing those same statistics, it just became really obvious that more people needed to speak up and ask for us to build more housing. So I have often been asked to pinpoint when's the exact moment you decided to do housing advocacy work. For me, it wasn't a moment. It was an adding up of a lot of little noticings and a lot of meetings and just that realization that I don't know, everyone should have a place to live, and that's not true right now.
So let's go ahead and talk about CITYBUILDER now, and then we'll circle back to your work on the Transit Board. Tell us about CITYBUILDER. It's on Substack, but maybe you could just share a little bit of the story about where the idea came from and what you're hoping to accomplish there.
CITYBUILDER is really the triangle area's pro-housing news and advocacy voice. So we're publishing on Substack multiple times a week. We've been publishing for about a year now, and we're at, I think, a little over 8,000 subscribers across all of our channels, which is good growth for a local place.
But really what it is is that the community of people that are pro-housing and vocal in Raleigh and Durham and Chapel Hill and kind of all over our region, we were disjointed. There was one conversation happening in Raleigh, there's another conversation happening in Durham. We're talking about some of the same zoning reforms because everyone in the country is talking about ADUs or fourplexes or things like that. But we didn't have, we all just sort of came independently, and we very rarely organized or had meetups or talked or strategized about what would make sense across different places.
So after I ran for office in 2022 and I got second place, which is honestly one of the better things that could happen because it's given me time to do all this other community work, I just had learned from having so many conversations when you run for office, how people felt like they needed a place and a space and a group to communicate this to. A lot of people think they're the only ones in their whole neighborhood who support building new houses in their neighborhood, and it's just not true. If you look at the statistics, the majority of people think that, but they're not necessarily speaking up. The people that speak up are sometimes not nice about who they want in their neighborhood or make you feel very unwelcome for maybe wanting to have more neighbors.
So really, CITYBUILDER came out of all of those interactions with, "Let's build an organization that is helping do this work together," because calling the meeting is the most important thing you can do. Bring like-minded, good people who care about their city together. That's what we do at CITYBUILDER. We just keep calling meetings and book clubs and workshops and speaking events. The publishing is part of that, building up a shared language about what we value and who we want to welcome in the city. Taking great notes from Strong Towns and welcoming new neighbors and a lot of, Sightline Institute, a lot of people that have been doing this work for longer than us, but just bringing it here to our place which didn't previously have that voice.
What specifically would you like to see your city leadership do? Do you all have specific policy asks as it pertains to housing at this time? How would you articulate those?
We for sure do. Raleigh's made a ton of progress. So Raleigh did legalize ADUs finally in 2020. In 2021, 2022, 2023, they did a series of missing middle text changes to our local code, which actually the city just presented, and it's almost 5,000 units have been permitted that wouldn't have been permittable or allowed at all five years ago, which is just really great in terms of we have 64 people moving here a day. So 5,000 units in five years is a good, strong number. But on top of that, I think they built almost 3,000 in affordable housing units.
So there's good reforms that we've been doing. Part of CITYBUILDER is bragging about that and letting people know that the policies that were really controversial, there's a wealthy neighborhood in Raleigh that's suing the city over that exact same text amendment because they don't like how it was done and they don't think that it's good for the city. So the city is caught up in a lawsuit about it. It's really controversial to say that you can build town homes in single family neighborhoods or that you can build fourplexes or threeplexes in single family neighborhoods.
So we've done those things, but there's still so much work to do. We're asking for things like considering more density along the transit corridors, coming out to support projects that do that, coming out to support rezonings. There's around 100 rezonings a year the last couple years in Raleigh. So there's a lot of growth. The same is true in Durham. Just coming out to support every rezoning is a yes or no, did people like it or not like it kind of question comes up.
Sometimes they're easy and no one shows up. Sometimes really good projects might have a few people who really don't like them because they're most affected next door, but sometimes they need support to say, "Actually, hundreds of people could live here, and what's good for the whole city or what's good for the tax base or what's good for this transit corridor might be different than what's good for those two neighbors who are strongly affected." Trying to just navigate having enough people show up to say that is a lot of the work that we're doing.
How do you find the balance between, I guess, rationally understanding and maybe even empathizing with a very human resistance to change, but also trying to help people see the implications of resisting change? Because cities are funny things, right? They are at once the container for our memories and our sense of identity, and so we can get very attached to the way things are for legitimately good reasons. That's the place that my dad and I went to for pizza every Friday night when I was in high school. You don't want to see it turned into a co-working spot. People have parts of them embedded in the city, and sometimes it can be really hard, even though you know that cities do have to change in order to adapt and to stay relevant and to continue to exist. We have to accept that there are dynamic places that are going to constantly be changing. How do you navigate those conversations or that tension around understanding people why they might be resistant to change, but also trying to help them see change has to happen if you want a city to exist at all?
For sure, it's not easy to accept change. I mean, I've lived in Raleigh for almost two decades. There are places that I love and loved and met my husband, and we went to dinner at that no longer exist. Was I sad when they closed? Absolutely. Am I sad if I see things change? Yes. But also at the same time, I think that there's a need to just talk more about the natural pace of change.
One of the reasons we publish and write content at CITYBUILDER is just to get used to these ideas of talking about things that come naturally to Strong Towns folks. Incremental growth is really good because it's a little bit more comfy. It's a little bit easier to think about a duplex being built next door than a five-story apartment. Both are good, but one is easier.
What we have particularly in Raleigh, Raleigh's been a place that's been growing for its entire history. So for the entire history, Raleigh's been growing, but it's been boom and bust because there'll be a bunch of growth, and it will scare people enough that they'll elect people that just stop everything and nothing will change for a long time. Then that obviously can't hold if you're continuing to grow and bring people to the region.
What we experienced in the early 2010s was a council that really tried to hold everything and stop and pause and, "Let's just wait to figure it out, and then we'll approve stuff, and then we'll let things change." Some of the worst displacement and gentrification and change in neighborhoods in Raleigh happened during those years when we were trying to stop change. So I think it comes with a lot of history telling and just getting really into the weeds and the nuance of change for your particular thing that's special to you or to me is hard, but it's much harder if we try to hold on to it.
Well, and two, you taught me something about how you're trying to help people see the consequences of resisting change, the consequences of not allowing for more housing by humanizing that cost and helping them see that means your kids can't move here to be near you, or your kids won't be able to. I guess I just set that example, but can you share about that a little bit as well?
Yeah, I think that conversation has really resonated just because the age of folks in some of the inner neighborhoods in Raleigh is such that their kids have gone away to school and they've come back and they are either living with them because they can't find a place to live, or they're not coming back because they can't find a place to live.
There's just, I think there's a certain, for some people, it takes it coming really close to home for you to see how much need there is for housing. So that analogy of, "Do you want to live close to your grandkids? Do you want to live close to your kids? Do you want to be able to grow your business? Do you want to be able to hire people from somewhere else to move here?" If you have a big tech headquarters or if you have a small plumbing company, do the people that work in your business get to live in the city that they're serving? We talked about that with our teachers and our firefighters and our policemen often.
I think humanizing it really helps people understand what the consequences are because no matter what, if you live next to construction, it's not pleasant for that six months that the hammers are hammering and the stuff is drilling. There is an uncomfortable change portion of a constantly growing city. But if it means that our firefighters and our teachers and our employees and our grandchildren get to live here, that is something I think people can touch and understand and relate to. So we do try, and I constantly try to tell people that that's what is motivating us to do this.
Then, of course, you can layer in bigger meaningful things. My transit work is related to how I think about how we relate to our carbon footprint and the climate and the impact that we have on the environment. Raleigh has a really great climate action plan that's really layered with land use and technical stuff and transit. My GoRaleigh folks that I work with on the Transit Board would want me to mention that we just, we have poop-powered buses now.
So our sewer treatment plant takes all the stuff and converts it into natural gas that we can use in our natural gas clean buses. Literally, every time you flush the toilet in Raleigh, you are fueling the buses for the city. It's just a lot of that closed loop, climate-friendly thought is going into policies that Raleigh's putting in place. So it only makes sense that we also think about housing and walkability and our people resource in the same way.
Let's talk about transit. So you're serving on the Transit Board. How did that come about? Where has transit, how has transit showed up in your life? What are some of the thoughts you have on just that whole conversation? Car dependence, walkability, active transportation, and what are some of the things that you're hoping to see the city embrace as it pertains to becoming a multimodal town?
I have always been a bus rider. So since I landed in the city, when I first landed, I did have a car for several years, and I took the bus everywhere I needed to go because I was hard on my bike. I could never seem to keep the bike running, so I always was walking and running and catching the bus and doing that. I actually love riding the bus. It's one of my favorite ways to get around anywhere, short or long.
Because of that, I just knew our bus system pretty well. Then I also, because I professionally work in planning-related things and was going to meetings, I started saying things. Not everyone that goes to planning and engineering meetings with the city rides the bus, not a very small percentage, actually. So I would just be like, "Actually, that's not how you pay to get on the bus," or "Actually, it would be really great if the route was here," or "If we had shelters like this."
Almost everything, my answer to everything is I just kept going to meetings and saying things, and then I got put into more meetings to say more things. But we're doing a lot in transit. In 2015, 2016, the county passed a sales tax that funds our transit system. So unlike a lot of the transit systems in the country, Raleigh is growing its transit system right now because we have growing funding from that source. That's all of Wake County and all of the small towns around are starting to adopt an express bus that can help you go into downtown or to RTP as well.
That countywide funding has allowed us to, we have record ridership. We are building out at least four bus rapid transit lines in each direction from the city. The first one is under construction now going to the east part of the city. There's just growth in transit, which has been a really fun thing to be part of because as someone who rides the bus, it's great to be able to tell people, "Oh, we're going to have more buses. They're going to come more often. We're going to have more shelters."
I think we've built about 100 shelters in the last year or two. I'd have to get the exact number, but that funding is what allowed us to do that. Before that, our bus stops and benches hadn't been updated for several decades. But because we have this new funding source, we're able to say, "Okay, these are the bus stops that have a lot of riders. They're going to get bus stops with shelters and trash cans and bike racks and all the things."
As someone who uses the bus and then also someone who just cares for their city, it's fun to be able to be part of the advice to staff on making that happen and getting it in the right places.
So when cities are growing, sometimes I see a disconnect between understanding that the biggest part of managing that growth is managing the growth of traffic volume. Are you seeing the city address that? Because I feel like it can be one thing to invest in buses, but not really understand you also have to have a plan for not expanding highways and not adding more lanes, right? Because your traffic volume is going to go up. But when you see that traffic volume go up, you have to really start investing even more on the buses and even more on bike infrastructure. The investments that are really going to present people with alternative options to help maybe bring some of that car volume down, rather than making investments to increase the number of space for even more cars. How are you seeing, are you seeing Raleigh have that conversation? If so, how are they navigating it? If not, are you hoping that maybe they will?
Raleigh's definitely having that conversation, and I think has made some steps in the right direction. I think we have the most work to do in what we're doing with our multimodal stuff. Raleigh's had a greenway system for decades, but it was really for recreation, and there's not a lot of connections for actual riding your bike to do your daily things is still on the road, which is a big conflict because we didn't, only very recently did the city start building out bike lanes. So there's a lot of advocacy work and organizations that are doing that work locally.
I was one of the weird people that went to speak in favor of getting rid of parking minimums when Raleigh did that several years ago. So it's been several years now that Raleigh has had no parking minimums and actually flipped it to being maximums. I think the data has shown that most people are still building parking, so we have about 85% of the parking we were having before across all the permits. So not a total change in what's there, but it has, from my perspective with a love of small streetscape storefront businesses, it's made a ton of those easier to permit because a lot of our bigger permit requirements were tied to how much parking you were adding. So now they don't even have to talk about that, which is why I went to speak in favor back in the day, and all the other good reasons for it.
Actually, North Carolina has halfway passed, so the State House has passed it, and the State Senate needs to look at getting rid of parking minimums across the whole state. So there's some things to reduce our car dependency that I think we're getting right, but on a granular project-by-project basis, it's still kind of, "Do you need another lane on this road?"
Really, Six Forks Road had been in a plan for a long time and funding and different iterations of construction budgets going on and on, and it was to add lanes. The city council actually was like, "Hey, I don't think we, I don't think adding lanes is the right solution here." They haven't necessarily decided on a solution yet, but they were able and I think had enough support to feel like they could say, "Okay, adding a lane to this already really horrible stroad is not going to fix the traffic problem, so we're willing to have the conversation here." But I think, like everyone else, we're trying to figure out what the right solution actually is.
Yeah, it's funny because I think, so I'm not far from Austin and I always, I feel like there's such a warning story in Austin because the city grew and grew and grew, and now it's a nightmare to get around because there's not been a proactive plan for, "We're going to grow. Okay? We have a plan for increasing housing, great. We have a plan for increasing the number of buses, great. But do we have a plan for the management of traffic volume?" We have to have a plan for that. If you don't have a plan for that, then you can look forward to a future of being a congested city that's absolutely dangerous to drive in and terrible and stressful to get around in, and people constantly just circling around neighborhoods looking for parking.
It just frustrates me because I feel like this is the future of the American city. You're going to become a miserable place to get around in if you don't have a plan for actively working on alternatives to cars. At the best, freeze whatever is in place for cars. Just whatever you do, don't add more, which maybe that's too bold, but it's like, if you don't do something, you're going to make the mistake of thinking that the solution is to keep investing in even more car-oriented infrastructure, which I don't think is the answer.
I just, I think part of the story of the American city at this point in time has to be coming up with some way of managing traffic volume as you tackle growth. What do we do if we're a growing city? We know that for every person that comes here, there's 1.2 cars, 1.5 cars. I don't even know what the official stat is, but I feel like it's the elephant in the room. Talking about the number of bodies coming to your city is one thing, which you have to talk about, thousands of pounds of metal that's coming with them too. Where are those cars going to go? Where are those cars going to sit? Where are they going to park? Where are they going to, how are we going to manage this? So I'm just...
Very true. I mean, we have very conflicted, I think, depending on who has authority and power. Our state, NCDOT, is expanding the loop, the outer loop around Raleigh to the south. So there's a new highway being built in southern Wake County at the same time that we're building out new bus lines. So it's very conflicted. For everything that I think we're making progress on, I think there's definitely stuff where we still have the old way of thinking.
But the longer that I've been involved in advocacy work, the more I've realized how long-term transportation planning is. So the highway that's being built right now was planned 25 years ago. So if we're not, it might be too late, but if we're not planning any highways right now, maybe 25 years from now will be in the right time. That's what gives me hope anyways. But I do think the BRT will be transformational here.
I had a crazy idea once. I was like, I think once your population gets to a certain point, or maybe we just have a law where it's like, once this percentage of your street space has gone to cars, to the movement of individual vehicles, motorized vehicles, I don't know, I feel like there just has to be some ratio or some mathematical formula. Once these boxes get hit, you just automatically trigger, all of your money has to go into multimodal transportation, all transit money, all of it, doesn't matter, has to go into this because you just, there's just no future where you can have your cake and eat it too. Have amazing, have all this growth and not have congestion and not have, just everything getting eaten up by more pavement.
I don't know. I just think there has to be some type of tipping point where it's like, once you become a city characterized by this type of growth, it just, I just, I don't know, maybe this is a fantasy, but I just feel like it has to trigger an entirely different framework for thinking about transportation.
I think the approach is, for me, this is what housing policy is actually about. Where do we build places for people to live is actually what's determining that. To kind of bring it back to housing. Sometimes people are like, "How do transit and housing relate?" I don't know, but to me, this is it. If you don't want to spend a bunch of time in your car going to work and school and the grocery store, then you have to live near those things. A lot of the traffic is just people who didn't have the choice to live in the city.
Some people want to not live in the city where they could walk places, but a lot of people, the choice just doesn't exist. Raleigh's been growing for a long time and has always been growing in kind of a sprawl. Our growth started in the mid-century and has happened all in the last 75 years. So we are not a beautiful, charming southern city like Savannah or Charleston or something. We have that little tiny bit, but most of it's sprawl and shopping centers. We have to be able to figure out how to turn the decaying Kmart parking lot into something cool where people want to be and put apartments there and other things that will be better than that use has been.
So for me, it's just really about housing. Right now, it's still easier to build housing in Apex and Garner and Johnston County than it is in the city of Raleigh. As long as that's true then, unfortunately, we need highways because all of those people work in Raleigh or Durham or RTP, and they got to get to work. So for me, it starts with housing policy, and then school policy, transit policy, everything else stems from that.
Yeah, I guess what I'm getting at, too, though, is this feeling that I guess sometimes I think people kind of have this idea of the city might change in its built form, but my habits are going to stay the same. I think sometimes I don't know how to help people see the city is going to change, and that's going to mean that we might need to change too. Maybe we can't, maybe we might have to start accepting that there are certain parts of the city where we can't just automatically go door to door and park right in front of the shop, because it might become a pedestrian plaza because we're going to have so many small little businesses in there that it just stops making sense to allow car traffic through.
I guess that's what I'm getting at. It's, how do you help people embrace sort of an agile mindset about how they relate to their city as that city is constantly changing? Because sometimes I feel like cities try to overlay two paradigms at the same time, one of the city is growing, we have to fit more in, but we still have to allow everyone to park right in front of where they want to go. When I see that, it's sort of like the stroad, right? It's sort of like the walkable commercial village, the walkable shopping village. I'm using air quotes because it's not really a village because it's all choked up with parking.
One of it is a village, but it's surrounded by a sea of parking.
So you can see them trying to do these weird hybrids of, "We're going to take on the new thing that's going to allow for so many more businesses. This is our way of embracing growth, but we're still going to try to force in these old patterns that accommodate the older ways of doing things." I don't know, I feel like there could be some opportunities for, I don't know, just finding creative ways to invite people to think differently about how do we exist in new places, if that makes sense.
It makes total sense. I think it's one of the things I love about Strong Towns. I like the suggestion that you could just make a small, different choice, and it would have this impact on things that happens. Just deciding to walk to the grocery store instead of drive. Then you know what your neighbors look like, and then you get healthier, and then there's just this snowball effect of a single decision to do those things instead. I could, I have 1,000 examples of that in my own life.
I think the other thing that I remind people when they're like, "I want to keep living the way I've been living in my city," I don't think anyone wants to stop that, but I think that we want to be honest about the fact that things change in your life all the time. We were talking about toddlers earlier. So I have a toddler, but I also have a 10-year-old now, and the things that we do on our weekend are just very different than when I only had a toddler. I'm sure they'll be different when I have teenagers, and they'll be different when they leave the house, and they'll be different when I retire. There are things about our life that we accept change and things that we do.
I won't always be sitting in the carpool line, on my bike or in my car. I won't always be, we're doing the Nutcracker right now. My two kids are in the Nutcracker at the downtown concert hall, and it's 19 degrees at night, unseasonably cold here in Raleigh, and so I'm waiting out there with 50 moms to get our little ballerinas out of the concert hall. I won't always be doing that. That need of why I'm going downtown and the transit schedule that I have to do that are different than they will be a decade from now when I'm going downtown to do something, right?
So I just think that people need to be more honest about the fact that how you live in your city does always change, whether the buildings are changing or not. Why not change the buildings and the people that are welcome in those buildings too?
I'm glad you brought up toddlers. I want to ask you this question, and then we'll wrap things up with my classic last question. Can you just share any reflections you have on how you've navigated this work as a mom, how that's maybe affected your work, shaped how you see things? I mean, how do you juggle it all? How do you get to the meetings? Or how are you able to serve on a board, or how are you able to run a business? Just all the things that you're doing. I'm just, yeah, as you're reflecting on that, I'd just be curious anything you'd like to share.
I love talking about being a mom. One, I have great support. So I have a husband and a mother-in-law who lives close by. So when I need a babysitter, I have one. We have drop-in daycare centers that I also make very good use of, with people who love my children as much as I love my children and have known them for many hours of their life.
Then the other is that I just bring, no one in Raleigh will be surprised to know this, I just bring my kids to the meetings, which sometimes works better than others, and sometimes means we're leaving early, and then other times means that my kids get to speak. There was a council meeting. My daughter was three or four, and we were talking about an apartment building that's going to come up. I was at the dinner table. I was telling my husband, "I got to go to the rezoning, and I got to get a babysitter so I can go, because there's people that don't want the apartments to be built in our neighborhood," which already has single families and town homes and duplexes and quadplexes. It was very silly.
So my daughter was like, "Why don't people want apartments?" She's four. I was like, "Well, some people don't like apartments because too many people live stacked together." She's like, "But people live in apartments." Yeah, but people live in houses. I was like, "Yeah, people live in apartments. You know what? You're coming with me and you're going to say this." She walked up to the pulpit with me and took her little mask off because it was 2022 or whatever. I said my one-minute speech, and then I was like, "And my daughter has something to say." She's like, "People live in apartments."
Maybe some people feel a way about bringing your kids to public meetings, and they don't always behave well. I've definitely had to leave meetings early, but there's a truth and an honesty sometimes that, I didn't program her to say those things. I didn't give her a script, but children just know that sometimes what we're arguing about is silly. Arguing about whether people should live in an apartment or a town home or a single-family home on your street is one of those things that's just a little silly.
Well, this is very inspiring. I'm actually hoping to make it to my neighborhood association meeting tonight, and I will be schlepping. I think that's the official word now.
Oh my. Yeah. My kids love our little neighborhood meeting, and they get spoiled by all of the grandparents.
Yeah, I think that other parents notice. I think people actually step up more often to help out with moms with kids. So yeah, I'm excited to try it. I think I can do it. I think what was making it harder for me was that we only had one car for a really long time. But I think now that I have my own car, it makes it a lot easier to think, "Maybe I start chipping away at some of the things that make this feel so difficult."
Jennifer, it's been really great talking with you. Yeah, I know a lot of people are going to really appreciate hearing your insights that you've shared with us. In closing, can you tell us about your neighborhood, about your town, about Raleigh? What do you love about it? Well, you've shared a lot about that already, but what are some of your favorite businesses that you'd like to tell people to check out if they come to visit?
Oh, Raleigh is great. Everyone should come visit. I am going to keep things close to home to tell you where to go. I live about a mile from Dorothea Dix Park, which is our 300-acre brand new park with a gorgeous adventure playground. Across the street there's a great brewery, Trophy Brewing, and they have all sorts of great food. They've got pizza that you can order and other things too. So if you ever come to visit, that's our best tourist "get an experience of what Raleigh is like" spot, is to go to Dix Park now.
It's just been really great to talk to you and get to share a little bit about why I do what I do. It's a crazy full circle for me because I think, Strong Towns motivates me in a lot of ways to do these things, so it's great to be able to share that and get a chance to talk on a podcast I listen to.
Awesome. Well, we'll definitely put links to CITYBUILDER and everything else that you're working on in the show notes and those recommendations. Thank you so much for joining us on this, and to our audience, thank you so much for tuning in for another conversation. Please let us know about someone in your community who you think we should have on the show. We're always looking for more guests, especially as we go into the new year. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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.