A viral town meeting clip from Marblehead, Massachusetts, raised a question that goes far beyond one zoning debate: What happens when a state says yes to more housing, but the local process still makes it hard to build? Or, as resident David Modica put it, “Are we trying to do nothing?” Carlee Alm-LaBar talks with Strong Towns Technical Advisor Edward Erfurt and Lafayette City Councilman Thomas Hooks about the messy handoff between policy and place. They look at why communities can comply on paper while resisting in practice, and why the next real step may be as small as one block, one lot, or one drawing that helps people see what is possible.
Tedesco. That's a golf course.
Are you asking me if Tedesco is a golf course?
Yes, I'm asking you.
Yes, last time I drove by.
Okay, you want to get cute. So they're not going to build any houses there because it's a golf course. You can't have houses on the golf course. In Voter Mode, they already have townhouses and all that nonsense.
Yes.
So this is a way to comply with 3A without doing any of the 3A stuff.
Yes, it is. We tried the other way, and it was rejected.
But when we're preserving the character of Marblehead, it's bad. We're selfish. We're doing a bad thing. We're not doing any housing.
Is that a question?
Yes, kind of. Are we trying to do nothing? Because it seems like we're doing nothing.
I'm not an expert on this. I didn't know it was a golf course. I had been driven by.
We're trying to make sure we build no houses. I don't get it. People live in houses.
Sir, this is the plan before us tonight. That's what we're voting on.
Okay. I just want to make sure nothing substantive. Thank you.
You're not missing anything. Thank you.
Hi, this is Carlee, and welcome to Up Zoned, a podcast from Strong Towns, where we take a current news story about cities and use it to explore deeper concepts about how our cities work and what we can do to make them work better.
With me today, I have frequent guest and Strong Towns Chief Technical Advisor Edward Erfurt, as well as Lafayette City Councilman Thomas Hooks. Thomas is joining us today and was elected almost three years ago to represent Lafayette District Four. He's an attorney, a longtime Lafayette resident, and someone who has thought deeply about local government and the principle of subsidiarity, which we talk about a lot here: the idea that local citizens should be empowered to address local issues.
Thomas, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Of course, thank you, Edward. Good to have you back.
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
We're going to get started today with an article that I expect a lot of our listeners have stumbled across. If you spend time online talking about housing or local government, you've probably seen clips from a town meeting in Marblehead, Massachusetts, making the rounds over the last few weeks.
Marblehead is a historic coastal town north of Boston with a strong local identity and a town meeting form of government, where residents directly debate and vote on major issues. The town recently was discussing how to comply with the state's Communities Act, which requires many communities connected to the Boston area transit system to allow for multifamily housing.
The clip that took off and made this national news, as opposed to local news, featured a resident named David Modica, who basically said out loud what a lot of people were already thinking. At one point, he says, 'We are trying to make sure we build no houses. I don't get it. People live in houses.' Then later he asks, 'Are we trying to do nothing? Because it seems like we're doing nothing.'
What made that clip resonate with so many was not just that he was frustrated. It was really how much he exposed the tension that underlies this whole debate around housing. The town is trying to comply with the law, and the residents are questioning whether anyone actually expected housing to be built as a result of the law.
The state continues to increase pressure on towns that are not complying, and communities are really struggling to respond, both to comply and to have the conversations they need to be having around housing. This story has a lot of Strong Towns threads, between the issues around housing and the original issues around the role of public comment and really listening to our citizens. I thought this was a great article for Up Zoned.
We'll make sure that it's linked. It's in several places: The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and several others. We'll link those in the comments, and I'm excited to talk to Thomas and Edward today about their thoughts.
I'm going to start really basic, and I'll start with Edward as our frequent contributor. Edward, when you watched this clip, what did you think? What stood out to you?
My first reaction is that the YIMBY movement had the new person they could put a crown on, and this is what I would expect out of these pieces. David said out loud what all of us are thinking on this stuff. That was the first piece I thought.
Then I looked at the work that we've been doing at Strong Towns with the Housing Ready City toolkits and the countless communities I've gone to talk to about all of the housing traps they are stuck in and how they're climbing out of them. For me, this just resonated that these top-down approaches, as well-intentioned as they are, really have no traction. They are not going to achieve what we want them to achieve if we can't do this at the most local level, where we're asking folks to operate.
For me, that was the thing people have missed. I know we at Strong Towns are most focused on that local level at City Hall. That's really one of the more complicated places to start, but I think David pointed out that if his town is not on board for housing, if they're not comfortable with this stuff, it doesn't matter what the state legislature does. There's always going to be somebody smarter on the ground locally to figure out how not to comply.
Thomas, the reason I was so excited to talk to you about this is you're in City Hall at least twice a month, if not more often. What did you think when you listened to Mr. Modica?
Definitely an interesting video. I chuckled at the end because I think it had the impact he was looking to have. Not being intimately familiar with the situation, you mentioned subsidiarity in the introduction, and this looks like a piece of that playing out here.
The state identified the problem. A lot of folks in the local community identified the problem. They came up with a solution in a top-down approach, as Edward just said, and when they went to push it locally, it's not working for that community. Whether that's through it being impractical or not politically possible, I don't know enough about the locality to say which one it is.
It's good that we aligned on the problem, but we probably got to a solution too quickly instead of figuring out what's actually going to work there. How do you actually deliver a solution to the problem and not just say that you did?
I think one of the most interesting things is, and I've probably shared this on the show before, I worked in local government for a little bit of time. The sympathy I have when I see what the town was trying to do, but also what the state legislators were trying to do, is that people often work with the tools that are in their own toolbox.
The legislators in the state of Massachusetts, I'm sure, are hearing from their constituents about the challenges around housing and having enough housing. They have the tools in their toolbox to address that problem. What is so interesting when the rubber hits the road is that the communities that were going to be impacted by it weren't quite ready for those tools in that toolbox to come out, and so they're adapting.
Thomas, how do you experience that as a local legislator? Just maybe talk generically. I'm sure you have great relationships with many of our state legislators who are in policymaking seats trying to solve problems just like you are, but their tools are different than your tools. How should we be working with people with different toolboxes for community solutions?
I rely on sports analogies a lot. I feel that at local government it's a lot of chopping your feet, because you're going to have to be adaptable. National wins and state-level wins do influence a lot of what happens at the local level, rightfully or wrongfully.
A local issue we're dealing with right now, in the middle of an election, is the inventory tax. There's a state-level push to get rid of the inventory tax in order for the state to be more business friendly. That's a tax imposed at the parish level that benefits parishes, or for non-Louisiana folks, counties, the school systems, the sheriff's office, as well as the municipalities.
If it passes, this is going to give those parishes the ability to opt out of that inventory tax. If that happens, then we have to chop our feet, be adaptable, and figure out how we're going to plug that hole. The issue is: how do we become more business friendly and attract more investment? The solution might be one where we have to figure out how to fill a $2 million budget hole in the city's budget next year or over the next few years.
For me, it's knowing that's coming. Other than being able to vote at the ballot box, I will not vote on the parish-level issue. But knowing that we've got this $2 million hole potentially coming up, and part of my job, I'm on the finance committee, is to figure out how we're going to fill it.
For local elected officials, especially really close to the municipalities, a lot of it is being adaptable, because some of those trends at the national and state level will play out. You can have good relationships with the state legislatures, but you can see some things that are coming. Trying to get ahead of it and being thoughtful about how you implement it is probably the most important thing.
Seeing how things played out in that video, it seems they were thoughtful about how to implement it, but more the form of the law, not the spirit of the law.
I think in Louisiana, we may even call that just a little bit shrewd or mischievous in terms of implementation and compliance. That was my vibe.
Edward, I'm curious, from a Strong Towns perspective, what would you say to the balancing act Thomas describes of watching what's happening at the national and state level and thinking about the Strong Towns philosophy of really trying to invert and not think of local government as the lowest level of governance, but instead as the highest form of collaboration? What was your reaction to Thomas?
When I look at this, I hear this all the time. I talked to many of the Massachusetts legislators as this legislation was moving through. I was invited to speak to a couple of their different groups that were working through this, and I think these are really smart people that I met with, moving through local government at that high level.
Yes, they're at a state level. They're under stress to deal with housing. How do you deal with it? You deal with it at a statewide level. You come up with the best components you can for that legislation. I think everything in it, on a high level, would align with many of the things we're talking about in Strong Towns.
What it misses is that the folks who actually have to take action, the folks who actually have to make all of this work, are at the local level. They're at the block level.
I think the legislation isn't a failure, and I don't think the city is doing anything nefarious. I think the city is playing the game. Our friend Joe Minicozzi would say, 'Don't hate the player. Hate the game.' We set up a system.
I was in Florida when they did what Thomas is talking about, where they started to cap what cities and counties could do in taxes and added additional homestead exemptions and all those different things to give us that sense of accomplishment. What I can tell you is that working within local government, when they cut a revenue to our county, we suffered for the first year until we figured out how to recoup that revenue. We found somewhere else to do it.
I think the planners in Marblehead, if you listen to the comments and listen to the speaker talking to David, they said, 'We've tried that. It didn't work. This is what is going to work.' When I hear that, what that tells me is that the thing the state legislature can't do as a body, but legislators can, and the thing we as strong citizens can do, is work at that local level, at the level of the street, at the level of the block, and figure out how to address the objectives of this housing policy.
I think the flaw in this is that the state legislature has enabling actions that have led us to zoning. Zoning has restricted the type of housing that we can produce in our communities. They're now trying to go back to that legislation, which is completely flawed and fraught, add some things to what was once restricting housing, and mandate that you do housing. It is going to fall into the same pitfalls we've seen here.
We're going to take golf courses and upzone them. We're going to take places that are already fully built out. In Florida, they're doing things like industrial parks, now allowing for high-intensity residential. These are places where people don't want to live. They're not overly successful. But hey, we've accomplished something.
It's the 'if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail' idea. Yes, we want to increase housing. When I think about it locally, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is have more people. We want more people to be able to live here, stay here, have homes, and work here. Housing is a limiting factor to some extent, price-wise. I would say that's the bigger one.
In Lafayette, we've got a landlocked city, then some smaller municipalities and an unincorporated area outside. If you're looking for the cheapest land on which to build a house, it's outside the city limits. That is true. But from a density perspective, that's one of the things that drives me crazy in some of the conversations we have. If we want more people, where are they going to build? We don't have huge acreages of empty land on which to build subdivisions.
Looking at their solution, which was that they needed to rezone some empty acres that could be housing one day, that was how they thought to do it. They went with the golf course scenario.
We've been incrementally, and Carlee has played a role in this, along with a lot of others, chipping away at lot sizes, chipping away at density requirements, allowing accessory dwelling units, and trying to make housing more affordable and more available through not rezoning things necessarily, but just creating a little more freedom and flexibility for people to build the things they want and afford what they can afford.
That's a really interesting piece. Listening to you talk about how they were trying to solve this problem, I think maybe it's not appreciating the full range of solutions that could actually achieve what they're looking to achieve.
I think about how I would be in City Hall. I'm just guessing, but feeling how many people are in the room and how viral this has been, there's not a single planner who wants to go out now with a proposal in that town of Marblehead and say, 'Hey, you could put an extra floor in a building,' or pull out something else. They probably have suggested that, and lots of people came roaring out and told them where they could put that idea.
I can't imagine being in this place. These planners are sitting there. They've done that plan. They got roasted. They've now gone out and come up with another super ingenious plan, probably spending hours with the city attorney and trying to figure out how they're not going to get sued and not going to lose their state funding.
If I were there, I would be pulling my hair out. I would be saying, 'Look how much energy we are spending to solve another problem that has been mandated on us, and none of this gets us more housing.'
What if we just took an hour and looked at one block? If I look at downtown Marblehead, there are lots of big parking lots in their core downtown. There are areas around schools and churches that have big open fields. There are some suburban neighborhoods that have little sheds and oversized garages. What if we were to find one block, start talking to residents, and explore what they could do?
I think the first thing you'd find is that there are probably folks who have already converted that garage or rear cottage, converted the parking lot to something else without a permit, or split up a house. Heaven forbid, it's an Airbnb or a rental, but these are the things they're already doing under the books that may not be allowed.
What if we looked at that and just made it less scary for people to know that this kind of increment is something an old community like Marblehead had done for 100 years, until we adopted zoning? If we yielded one additional unit, the lowest bar, that's 100 times more than what we've achieved with this zoning. We could run the numbers. Maybe we could inspire a second person, and now we're at a 200% increase of housing stock in our city.
I think that's a viral way. That's the type of viral approach I wish all of our partners in the housing field would take. Instead of battling, lawsuits, showing up at meetings, filing complaints, and spending the energy we spent making this viral, what if we made it viral for the family that added an addition or the person who took the risk and found they could put a duplex on a lot? What if we made them viral as the not-scary people tackling your housing problem, the everyday folks?
I would be losing my mind and having to go back to basics if I were in that position. Speaking to planners, elected officials, and policymakers all across North America, every city is having this debate and battle, and we shouldn't. We should really just be trying to figure out where we can get that extra unit, that next increment in.
I see that playing out in a few different ways right now. As a local elected official, a lot of the job can feel reactive. You've got planning cases coming up for appeal, and rezonings coming up, so you're spending time preparing for those and getting up to speed. That's very much a reactive process based on what already is happening.
Some of the work is proactive, but it's more setting the right conditions. We just did amendments to our local development code to allow things like density. Recently, we had done some things around ADUs. There are a couple of proactive things going on in partnership with local quasi-government entities and nonprofits, doing the overall housing analysis of what's our housing stock, what's the age, and what do we need more of.
Then there are some things that are hopefully coming soon, especially focused on our downtown, that are very much site specific. Looking at those particular lots, what could this be? What's the red tape? What are the barriers? Is it utilities related? Then coming up with the plan for just getting a handful of sites developed, not a broad sweeping change that impacts the entire parish or the entire city, but how do we get this lot into something that it could be?
I always found it easier, when I was doing development review, to just draw what was possible than to do a 12-page report about why whatever they submitted wouldn't work. I was always the oddball. I got called into the principal's office all the time. I even got a nastygram from the AIA because they thought I was practicing architecture without a license.
For me, when I had relationships with folks on the ground and started to show them what was possible, and I'm talking boxes, where could you build and how does that fit with the code, that started to change the conversation on the ground.
Every place I go, you could easily lay over a piece of trace paper, that clear translucent paper I use in my little sketches. I would draw where the parking lots were, where the open spaces were, and where the buildings were too far back from the street. There was just so much extra space in all the cities I looked at that we could fill in. That wouldn't require a new pipe. It wouldn't require a new road. It would just gradually thicken up.
I was always surprised how many of those properties were owned by somebody who just couldn't figure out what to put on it. Some people, when they're buying new houses on those House Hunters shows, walk into a house and say, 'Oh my gosh, the kitchen is orange. I can't afford this house.' Well, no. You can repaint that. You need the visualization of what is possible.
The easiest trick, and I've experienced it myself, but also my friend Rebecca Kik in Kalamazoo, Michigan, used this trick. She would take the houses that everybody liked in the neighborhood, color them a little bit differently, draw them by hand, and put them in the empty slots. Everyone would say, 'Oh, that looks so familiar. That looks just like our neighborhood.' Then she would say, 'Let me tell you a secret. It's on Maple Street.' It helps with that kind of visualization.
I love listening to this discussion, because, Edward, some of your comments about visualizing on the ground what can change and how that can be a way to break down barriers and make progress are really interesting.
I'm curious to turn this in the direction of public comment. One of the reasons I asked Thomas to join us is that he's two and a half years into a term on our city council. He used the word 'reactive' earlier, and talked about how a portion of the job is reactive. I feel that the feedback we hear from residents is often that they are also reacting.
Thomas, how do you think, a couple years into the job, about public engagement and public comment, and how to make it more empowering? How do we shift it so that residents don't feel ineffective by the time they are showing up to a council meeting?
In the video, I think Mr. Modica said, 'What are we really doing here?' or something like that. How do we make public engagement and public comment empowering? What's your perspective now that you've been serving as an elected official for a couple years?
I have lots of thoughts. I don't know that any of them are coherent, so I will give you my stream of consciousness.
For the big issues, it's a muscle that local government needs to have, to be able to go out into the community, explain what might change, gather feedback, be honest with people, and say, 'I hear you, but the community thinks this is the best for the community overall.' That is a muscle that, if you're not very deliberate, atrophies. As local government, we have to be better at identifying what those big changes are.
We've had some pop up locally where we haven't done that well. We've had some pop up locally where we have done it well. That's very much a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly. I think a functioning local media helps with that as well, because people feel it's reactive when they only find out about something because there's a green sign posted on the property that says, 'Hey, this is happening,' or their neighbor gets a letter that says, 'In two weeks, there's going to be a hearing, and this is happening.' Local media plays a big role in staying abreast of what's coming down the pipeline and letting people know about it.
There are also the things that happen because they see the green or blue sign indicating that this property is going to be rezoned or that there is going to be a new development. For those, that's where the rubber is hitting the road, because it's impacting property near people's homes.
I've lived through some of those cases that have gone well. I've lived through some where they haven't, because it's very personal to people. Their homes are very personal to them. If there's a field that was a scenic view for many years, decades, and now somebody wants to put some sort of development, it doesn't even matter what it is, people will have a reaction. They'll scrutinize it, rightfully so. They want to make sure that it's proper for that location, but they may ask for things that just aren't appropriate for the developer to consider or the local government to mandate.
That's tricky. My approach is always that I'm happy to take any phone call, reply to any email, and take the meeting. I've tried to get better over time at giving people a quick answer on where my head is, so that they're not in the dark and they can reset their expectations accordingly.
Another thing is that if you've been in government or planning and zoning for a while, you understand the way the process works in a way that a homeowner encountering it for the first time doesn't. When we're talking about zoning, and it's just about what's an appropriate use for this property, not what the developer actually wants to build, and you're saying there's another part of the process where we're going to discuss those issues, but it's not now, some people don't like that answer. They're saying, 'We know why they want to rezone. We know what they want to build. Let's just address it now.' Yes, but we can't, or we shouldn't, because it could change.
A lot of it is engagement and trying to explain it to people, and ultimately being okay with people being upset with you. I tell people all the time, if you want to go into local government, especially at the elected level, sitting on your local planning and zoning commission is a great thing, because you will get a lot of experience walking into a room and having angry people yell at you.
I say it half jokingly, but it's a real thing. The planning and zoning commission is a good experience. It's not always pleasant, but it's a good experience to learn how these things impact people and what their concerns are.
For me, it's all three. The big things are very much driven by that muscle to go out and engage with the public, the local media that is engaged and informing the public about what's happening, and on the reactive side, being available, whether that's in the meeting or in between meetings, and giving people quick answers on where your head is based on what they're telling you and how you understand the process plays out.
Edward, I would love your thoughts. One of the things public officials have to do, and Thomas talked about this a little bit when he was talking about the inventory tax issue in Louisiana, is help community members understand the issues that are going to come down to them locally.
I think we have seen that over the last few years with housing. Housing keeps getting elevated and keeps becoming, it feels, a higher and higher pressure point in communities. How do we make it so that neither our elected officials nor our residents are villains, but instead are people trying to respond to these pressures and incentives?
I'd love your thoughts on both how you talk to our local advocates when you talk to them, how you talk to policymakers, and how you coach people who are going to be interfacing with residents about this issue.
I start with telling folks that the system is completely broken when we are trying to do development. My personal opinion is that the reason we have planning commissions is because city councils don't want to deal with the brunt force of the public. We ask nice volunteers to show up and do the work, but these are generally not technical professionals. They really want to do great things for their community, and now they also have to equally take the abuse for the future packaging plant coming in and the rear cottage that Miss Rosie wants in her backyard.
By the time it shows up for those meetings, it's too late. There are many things that have been laid out: legal protections that we have on property rights, hundreds of thousands of dollars of consultants that have gone through this process, and hundreds of hours of staff time to review all these things.
There are a couple of different things I think all of us have to do. We've got to get engaged in our local governments more than just voting, more than showing up with a colored T-shirt once a month. We've got to actually attend those meetings, watch them, and talk through what's happening in those meetings.
We also need to understand the structures that are laid out for this. It's really easy to blame the planner. We can say, 'This staff member is...' and throw whatever negative adjective at them. That is something we train our Local Conversations on. When a Local Conversation forms, we make them sign a 'don't be a jerk' agreement. That's because it's really easy to attack an individual. I will tell you, for elected officials, it's easier to fire somebody than it is to change an ordinance. That's why you see that turnover in a lot of communities, because of that type of frustration.
You've got to understand where those decisions are being made. The decision about what's being put where in your community, and why somebody wants to invest there, was made decades before you're showing up to the meeting where they have an application.
If I'm a citizen, the thing I recommend all of our Local Conversations and all of our members do is show up for one of those meetings. Any public meeting has public comment, and your job is to go up and take your two or three minutes of public comment and talk about something you love about your community. Talk about the street you love, the park you go to, the tree you have an emotional connection to, the new aquatic center, whatever your community has. Whatever it is, talk about it in detail and about why you like it.
What that does is lay out groundwork that nobody else is prepared to hear, because in those meetings you're used to people showing up, screaming and yelling, and telling people things they don't like. When somebody says something they like, it is so out of normal that you can hear a pin drop after that conversation. It allows you to build up credibility in your community. It allows you to provide a way for people to positively come and talk to you afterward: 'I love that street too.' 'I take my kids to that park all the time.' 'That tree? I had my first kiss under that tree.' All of those stories come up, and you start to build a community around that.
For elected officials and technical staff, when the next project comes forward and they've heard five or six things that people love about their community, they will speak to those projects in the context of that statement. Yes, this project is like the street everybody likes. This project is like the neighborhood everybody wants to live in because they can walk everywhere. Or this is completely different from the street where we have all of those shade trees. This is butted against a park that people like to walk to, and now we're not going to be able to because of all the driveways. We're starting to empower our elected and technical professionals to insert context, not jargon.
Building through those pieces, we have to start that work very early, even before an application is submitted, and build those relationships up. That's what I share with folks when it comes to elected officials: helping them navigate policy versus that implementation component, and being hard-nosed about the details.
One of the first public-sector jobs I had, the position I took as an urban designer in a county, existed because there was a county commissioner who was a design fanatic. He had gone to all of the new communities and all the places, and he said, 'I want my town to be built to the level of all of these other places. How does that happen? What does it mean about design? Why is it important for parking to be behind a building?' That led to that type of work. Those are all policy directives that he demanded staff create regulations to follow.
From that side, that gets us out of the weeds. When it's a staff piece, draw, draw, draw, and draw. I can give you all the fancy words, and I can show you all the code that we've copied from UniCode and a dozen different cities, the award-winning APA thing. None of that means anything. Colors on the map mean nothing. To actually draw the form and how things would be built out, those are things people can understand. By drawing that, stress testing your code, overlapping every aspect of your code, and making sure there are no glitches in it, that's what we have to do to help clarify.
I will assert that you can do incredible urbanism and infill work with a terrible code and innovative staff. You can have the best code, and if you have poor folks on the ground who aren't empowered to work, don't understand the nuances of construction, and alienate themselves from the public, it doesn't matter how good the code is, how many millions of dollars you spend on it, or how many awards you've gotten. It will be as bad as the worst code out there.
It really requires working through stress testing, drawing, listening, and responding: that feedback loop. We're afraid to do it in local government, but we've got to do that. That's the only way we can begin to build trust in the community.
I worked in places where we worked really diligently so there weren't explosive four-hour meetings of public comment on projects well before we got to that project. It didn't mean we stopped all of them, but for the ones that went there, I always made sure the applicants knew they were up against a fight. I wanted to make sure they knew it. I gave them as much technical advice from within City Hall as I could.
I would always get the developer's contact information. I would introduce them to the super citizens who always came to my office, or the ringleader of a community, or the HOA member. I made sure they all had each other's phone numbers, so when they showed up for public comment and the planning commissioners asked, 'Mr. Developer, the residents next door are concerned. Have you talked to them?' they could either say, 'Yes, we called six times. We tried to schedule something. They didn't want to talk to us,' or, 'Yes, we did. We walked the site.'
That was a platform I could provide at City Hall. I didn't know people didn't do that. Then I talked to folks, and they were afraid to do it. It made my job way easier to make those connections than it was to try to do it in a public hearing. I didn't want to be at midnight at the planning commission meeting, hoping we would still get something done.
I love that answer from a couple of perspectives. I 100% agree, especially at the zoning commission level. If more people showed up and said, 'I love sidewalks. I love connectivity. I love cross-access easements. I like narrower streets and slower traffic,' all of that would be great.
By the time it gets to the zoning commission meetings, as you said, they're volunteers. They're not trained professionals. They're trying to make a decision about a sidewalk waiver without having that full context. The staff is trying to remain somewhat neutral, so having people show up to talk about the things they love is a great idea.
The other part is when you get to those meetings and you've got the residents on one side and the developer on the other, and those are the only two who are speaking, it's asymmetric and not really representative of who is actually a stakeholder in these conversations. I tell people all the time, the people who aren't here are the people who are going to eventually live on this property in this residential development, or drive into or out of this commercial development, and are the people who will have to deal with this lack of connectivity 10 years from now. Having more people show up, even if they don't live in the area, even if they're not associated with the developer, and talk about those things would be very, very helpful.
I love that. As a last note for those listening, the power of positive community engagement cannot be underestimated as far as developing your voice in a community.
To tie it back to Marblehead, I think Mr. Modica probably has fame today that he wasn't necessarily looking for, as I've seen him comment following. I think the reason his comments spread the way they did is that it was so relatable to the frustrations we sometimes experience in local government. Continually having those conversations and helping improve our own engagement at the local level is critical.
Thank you both so much. Of course, before we go, it's time for the Down Zone. Edward, again, because you're our experienced guest, I'm going to ask you to go first. What's one thing you're reading or consuming right now that you want to share with our listeners?
Carlee, you and I are going to be in a car on a trip out to Tulsa this week. We're on our way out to National Gathering, and Carlee has coordinated a little side trip for a bunch of us to meet up. I'm super excited about it. We're going to meet an author out there. His name is Carlos Moreno, and I started reading his book this week, The Victory of Greenwood. It goes through the history of the Greenwood community, which was Black Wall Street in Tulsa.
What I love about these types of history books are the ones that go into the primary sources, the ones that tell me about the people of the time, and especially the ones that break down all of the schoolyard myths we hear in the history books. I'm really excited about it. This is one of the most tragic times in our history, but I'm a history geek. To go and meet with some folks and do that, and of course the National Gathering, I'm giddy already. I'm super excited to read through The Victory of Greenwood.
Thomas, how about you? What is one thing you are reading or consuming right now that you want to share with folks?
I wish I had a thoughtful answer like Edward. My guilty pleasure and real answer is the Scrubs reboot. I'm a huge Scrubs fan. I'm working my way through the first season of the reboot right now. I really encourage more people to do it so that it continues to exist, because I saw it got renewed for season two, and I would really like that to continue. The Scrubs reboot is my latest guilty pleasure, and I highly encourage everybody to go check it out for a dose of joy in their day.
I feel like you just used up your platform for good right there, Thomas, spreading the word about something that you want to see in the world. That's wonderful.
For my own purposes, Edward talked a little bit about Tulsa. I often talk about something related to our work. The last couple of Down Zones I've done were National Gathering, but I'm going to take it on a personal note now.
Locally, I'm a member of a women's organization called the Junior League, and some of our listeners may be familiar with it. Over the last couple of years, we've had the opportunity in our community in Lafayette to start a diaper bank, which never existed before. We had our annual get-together this year, and hearing about and seeing the power of a group of people, in this case a group of women in Louisiana, and seeing what can be done when a group of people come together and decide they're going to tackle a problem, has been inspiring me this week.
We talk about that all the time in Strong Towns. We talk about it in Safe Streets, and we talk about it in housing. I am always motivated when I see a group of people come together and solve a problem, whether it is one of our Strong Towns issues or something else. I want to give a shout-out to all of our listeners, and all the folks who realize a problem in their community and do what they can to solve it. That's my piece for today.
I just want to close by thanking you both. This was a really enjoyable conversation. Thank you to Mr. Modica for giving us the voice and the platform to share. Thank you all for joining us. On behalf of all of us at Strong Towns, take care of yourselves and take care of your places.
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