The Bottom-Up Revolution
When Graham McBain moved to Sacramento, he realized he had no local friends — just nearby houses. In this episode, he shares the simple, sometimes scary steps that turned that street into block parties, front-yard hangouts, and kids biking freely between homes. The conversation traces that change on his block and highlights practical ways to start building community where you live, with the people already around you.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. I'm delighted to be bringing you another conversation today. It's a wonderful spring day here in Wake, Texas. I'm finally learning how to make the most of spring in Texas. It's taken me five years, but I finally figured out that you really got to make the most of spring, because when summer comes here, it's when everybody hibernates. So I think I'm on my A game, and we're really enjoying it.
Springtime, I feel like, is always a time where people kind of come out of the house, depending on where you live. You're gardening — at least I'm trying to; we'll see how I do. You're kind of coming out into the outdoors a little bit more. I think it's kind of normal to start thinking about your neighborhood in a new way. This is not a formal Strong Towns pillar, although I kind of think it should be. But I think one of the most important parts, as we're talking about this conversation of making our neighborhoods, communities, and towns stronger, is thinking about the social fabric that exists on a hyper-local level.
On the hyper-local level of our neighborhoods, it's important to build bike lanes, it's important to work on zoning, it's important to work on transit and on housing and on highways and all of that. But I really do think at the end of the day, people live their life in a neighborhood. Once they step outside their house, they're surrounded by all these people. Thinking about how we can reclaim and rebuild the social fabric that exists at that level — I think that's one of the most important conversations that we should be having. You've probably heard me say this before. I've brought in some guests who talk about this.
Today we get to talk to someone who is really tackling this challenge head on, creating some really great resources and opportunities for people who want to turn their neighborhoods from just a neighborhood into a community. I think it's going to be a really great conversation. I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot. I'm sure I'm going to feel convicted and challenged and inspired, and I hope you are too.
I'm joined today by Graham McBain. He's the founder of Hey Neighbor, which is a movement to help people turn their neighborhoods into communities. He's helped over 1,000 people host their first neighborhood block party and has created a 10-step program that makes it easy to go from no neighborhood connection to a fully integrated neighborhood community. Go find him on most social media platforms — he's constantly uploading videos showing you the fun and serious side of turning neighborhoods into communities, which I really love. How do we make our neighborhood a community? We'll talk about that. He's also the host of the Hey Neighbor Podcast, which you can find on YouTube. Graham, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. I'm really excited to speak with you today.
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I've heard a lot about Strong Towns. I've seen a lot of posts, and I think it all works really well together.
Central to your work, I think, is this idea of home — there's a lot that's central to your work — but among them the idea of home, the idea of belonging, the idea of community. Let's talk about home. Where did you grow up? Where are you living now? Tell us a little bit about how you came to call your current city home.
Yeah, I was born actually in Manhattan, but moved when I was really little, so I didn't spend a lot of time there. I was raised in the sort of very generic modern, '80s–'90s suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona — where everybody hibernates for the summer rather than the winter.
I loved growing up there. I think it was a really nice place to grow up. We ended up here in Sacramento because my wife's family is from here. When we had a one-year-old baby, the idea of grandparents having to travel just to have a relationship with their grandchild — pretty common story. So we moved here, and that's when I started realizing that I didn't have any friends, and it would be nice if I did. That's how all of this started to come about.
Let's dive into that a little bit more. I think most people are used to living in neighborhoods that are not communities. Most people are used to being surrounded by strangers who are not neighbors. Why was that a problem for you? Why were you like, wait, no, I have to fix this. Were there experiences you'd had growing up, or as you reflect on that — what was unacceptable to you about this scenario?
Yeah, it's a good way to put it — that it was unacceptable. Before I lived in Sacramento, my family lived in a really tight-knit neighborhood in upstate New York, which I think is probably pretty rare. It was so tight-knit that in the summers, we would actually go back and visit these people just because they were our former neighbors.
I was born in Manhattan, but we moved to upstate New York, and my brother was really good friends with all of these kids, and my parents were really good friends with all of them. So we went back a few summers in a row.
I remember in those summers, you would just get a bike. There was like a garage that had bikes in it, and at the beginning of every summer, everyone would go pick a bike that was their size. There were a few parents who would get all the bikes in running condition, and then that summer, that was your bike. The boys would go find where the girls were and hide their bikes in the forest one day — the kids were fully autonomous. We would get up in the morning and just leave, and in the evening, somebody's parents were hosting a barbecue. That was every summer, and it was incredible. I just really wanted something like that in my life.
So I realized that maybe I needed to join a church or something. But I felt like, if there was one way to anger God, it would be to go to church not because I actually wanted to go, but just because I wanted the community — totally disingenuous, and I'm gonna get struck by lightning or something.
So yeah, I was like, I really need to have a community, and the people around me are as good as any, so why don't I just go make it with them? That was the initial seed of the idea.
I want to dive into this — I didn't put this on your official list of questions, but you're bringing up something that I think about and have written about before, which is this idea of community based on proximity versus community based on affinity. Oh, thank you — affinity is the word I was looking for.
I also have spent many precious minutes agonizing over the actual definition of the word "community" versus "friendship" versus "association" — so there's a lot to think about in there, but we're not going to get into that one.
Can you share your thoughts on community of proximity versus community of affinity? Because I think these are the two paths, right? You can turn the people around you into neighbors, possibly friends. Or you can spend your energy traversing whatever land you live in to get to all of your friends who don't live near you — trying to make the most of the few times your lives touch each other, like church or the gym or tennis club. Both have value, but both have trade-offs, and I think they are actually two very different things. I don't think we have to pick between them. This idea of community based on proximity has definitely been lost as a concept — as a type of community we should actually invest in. It's also scarier to cultivate. I'm just going to put that on the table, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
I'm glad you said they don't have to be exclusive. You can do both. I play ice hockey, and I have a whole community of people I know from the rink. But if I wanted to hang out with those people, I have to call, we have to coordinate, we have to get our schedules together, figure out a time and place — it's a whole rigmarole, and we are all busy and tired. We don't have the time to do that. So while that's important, because I need to have my own identity as an individual, the community of proximity is just more convenient. You're more likely to do something if it's easy.
There's this idea in the tech world that every click is a miracle. When you're designing an application, every time you have a user do something, it's a miracle. That's the same thing when it comes to friendships — every time you hang out with a friend, it's a miracle.
When you're friends with people because of proximity, you have more opportunities for miracles. You're increasing the serendipity. It's the same reason people like working in an office — more reason to just interact. Yesterday, I was cleaning out my garage, and my neighbor Tom drives up and just stops his car. I happened to be on a video call with my wife — who's out of town right now — so my wife, Tom, and I are having a quick little conversation.
Tom's kids are off at college. He's retired. Someone with his demographics would often be very disconnected, but I see Tom five times a week easily, and we get to have quick conversations. The reason you invest in communities of proximity is just because convenience increases serendipity, and you're more likely to have more connections.
I think it also challenges us, because we're not cherry-picking who our neighbors are. We're not picking exactly the people we know for sure we're going to get along with. I think that's what makes it scary, but that's also what makes it good for us, because it challenges us to grow and to practice social muscles we don't have to use as much when we're hanging out with people we're pretty sure we're going to like, or people we already have things in common with.
It's a whole different category of social interaction. I remember talking with someone who's also in California doing similar work to yours — I had brought him on the show years ago, when I very first started doing this — and one of the things we talked about was how, when you have relationships in your life that are not based on necessarily shared affiliation, but simply on proximity and the fact that you're going to see each other often and share a specific space in the world like a neighborhood, there's almost a feeling of like: they're not family, they're not friends, they don't really owe you anything. But when you create these connections, you create opportunities for reciprocity based simply on the fact that you share this space. It's kind of the feeling of when someone recognizes you out in public, or the barista who knows your name — this person doesn't have to, but they do, and it just feels extra special.
I actually say that those relationships look a lot more like family than they do friends, because they can take longer to develop. You don't choose your family, so you don't have to agree with everything this person says, but you can get to know them anyway. With friends of affinity — friends you know mostly through text messages — if they annoy you, you can just stop texting them. Your neighbors you can't move away from as easily, so you sort of have to deal with the problem. I always say the problems that come along with friends of proximity are actually a feature, not a bug.
Drama makes us feel important. That's why we watch drama on TV. If you have drama with somebody, that means they know you exist and they care about you one way or another. It makes us feel important. It makes us feel like we're part of something. That's what we all really want. When the only criteria for you to be part of something is just existing where you are, that's sort of the most pure form of it.
So tell us some stories. What was it like getting out there and meeting your neighbors? Can you take us back to that first moment? Do you remember — how dramatic was it? Did you, like, mark out a day on a calendar, pick out your shoes, and think, "This is how I'm going to do it"? Tell us a story. What was that like?
I put on my new shoes and I was like, do you guys want to see how fast I am? I knocked on their doors and showed them how fast I could run.
My toddler is really in a Pete the Cat phase, and we've been reading "Rocking My School Shoes" no matter how tired I am at like 8:37 at night. I don't know if you have school shoes — oh, I know that book, I know that song, burned into my memory. I may make my seven- and nine-year-old read it tonight just for nostalgia purposes.
What really catalyzed it for me was we had some friends come from out of school to trick-or-treat with us, and they said, "Do you mind if we bring our friends?" They had this group of like eight families who all did things together. I was like, wow, I want to be a part of something like this. I don't necessarily want to be part of your group, but I want my own group where we do all this stuff together.
So I decided I'm going to do a summer of games. I love lawn Olympics, water gun fights — things like that. I planned four parties in a row, made a flyer, put my kids in one of those wagons, walked around and knocked on every door in the neighborhood. It was like: "Hi, I'm your neighbor. Do you want to be my friend? I'm hosting all these things this summer. Let's do all this stuff." Most people were super excited. Even the people who were like, "I'm not going to participate, but I'm so glad you're doing this." Sometimes people were like, "No, we're not going to be friends, Graham."
As a human Labrador, I was like, "That's okay. I'll talk to you anyway." It just kept going. You get somebody who says, "Wow, this is awesome. I'm so excited. We're definitely going to try to make it to these events." That gives you the energy to just keep going.
One of my favorite things about it was that on the last event of the summer, one of my neighbors, Jonathan — who's very honest — was like, "I'm tired, Graham. Can we spread this out a little bit? This is great, but every weekend is a lot. My kids are excited about this so I can't say no, but please." So we started to spread it out a little bit more.
That first Lawn Olympics — "lawn" was a generous word. My yard hadn't been remodeled yet; it was just dirt. I spray-painted the stations in the raw dirt. I look back at pictures now and I'm like, "Anybody came to this? This is insane." But people are always so nervous about inviting their neighbors, because they're the ones around you judging. Nobody cares, though. We're all so lonely that people are just grateful that you recognize them and want them to come to stuff.
So what was the first event? You said it was Lawn Olympics — what is that?
It's something I actually did as an adult, but it was so fun. You just set up silly Olympics stations — an egg-and-spoon race, a potato sack race. We didn't have potato sacks, so we just tied the kids' legs together and had them run.
These were mostly kid things. We did do adult things too — another event was a pie-baking contest. I was thinking about pie and was like, how about we just eat pie?
There's a funny thing I've found through all of this: women are really excited to get involved, and men are less likely to show up. But if you make it a competition — especially a cooking competition — the men will be there. Cooking contests worked really well. We did a rib cook-off that produced so many ribs, people got sick of eating them, but it was great.
Where did it go from there? You do these four events, and now it's grown into something more sustainable. Can you talk about that progression?
It started to get to a point where people began thinking this was my thing — the Graham show. My neighbor Stephanie was like, "Graham, is it okay if I host an ugly sweater party and bacon cook-off?" I was like, "Oh, crap, I do not want this to be the Graham show." So I said, "Of course you can. This is our neighborhood."
People started saying, "You know what we should do" — when really, they wanted me to do it. So what I came up with was this idea of a planning party. I got a whiteboard, because I'm that kind of person. Everybody showed up and we wrote down all the ideas for what everybody wanted to do — a pool party at the end of summer, all kinds of things. Then I turned around and when someone suggested something, I said, "Okay, that's a great suggestion. What day are you hosting that at your house?" People started getting it: Graham's not going to do all of this for us.
I think we're now up to 11 annual events that happen throughout the year as seasonal things. I do a Friday Front Yard Happy Hour almost every Friday in the summer — started a couple weeks ago now that the days are longer. Tom runs the pub quiz, inviting whoever is available. There's a book club for the women in the neighborhood. There's a fantasy football league. We did a weight-loss challenge. There was an adult-only roving cocktail night. Now there's tons of events happening throughout the year and lots of different friendships forming.
Most importantly, the kids are really self-sustaining. Every weekend, your phone is just lit up with messages about where they are now, and it's just a roving gang of children going from house to house. Something that really solidified for me that this was great: four kids were biking around, my kid falls and scrapes up his knee really badly. The oldest kid was like, "I just did CPR training. I'm going to put pressure on it. You guys go get help." He sent the other two kids off, and they went to the nearest house — only about 70 feet away — and knocked on the door. The parents weren't home, but the 12-year-old twins were, and the twins said, "We got this." They got out their first aid kit, went out, patched up my son, and everybody went back to playing. I didn't hear about it until around nine o'clock that evening. The kids are fully autonomous throughout the neighborhood, which is really great.
I love that story. I love this idea of children being able to be self-sustaining in a communal way. I think you're right that one of the most important conversations we could be having about neighborhoods is a conversation about children — about the proper amount of independence and self-sufficiency they need to experience in the communities where they live. Do you have any other stories you like to share about how this work has affected your life personally, in terms of getting to know your neighbors and starting to build those friendships?
It's actually harder to find a way it hasn't affected my relationships. My wife's closest friends are friends from the neighborhood. Most of my friendships are from the neighborhood too. Something really cool about that is they're definitely people I wouldn't have picked out of a lineup or found through an affinity group. I'm not a sports guy — I play ice hockey, which almost nobody here cares about. I took a friend from the neighborhood to watch a hockey game. He'd never watched one in person. He was like, "That was fun. I'm never going to watch it again, but it was cool, and we had a good time."
He and I actually have pretty diametrically opposed views on all kinds of things — political stuff and whatever — but we have so much love and trust and respect for each other that we can talk about it in a way that's productive. It's just kind of amazing.
One thing I really love about the neighborhood is that a lot of the friends, like Tom — Tom basically makes fun of me all the time; that's his whole job. He's got adult kids, he's in his mid-60s. He named the fantasy football group "11 Players and Graham" just because I have no idea what I'm doing, but I just want to be part of it anyway.
When the World Series happened and it was game seven, I don't have a way to watch it, but I thought, "This is something my boys should watch — a game seven World Series." So I put it out to the group: "Hey, does anybody want to host me and my boys for game seven?" Tom said, "Yeah, come on over." He pulled out all his Legos from when his kids were little. His wife Susie — who's amazing — had popsicles on hand for when kids come by. My boys got popsicles and got to play with Legos. One of them called him "Papa," which is what they call their grandparents. I said, "It's Tom." He said, "Oh, it's fine." Tom doesn't have grandkids nearby yet, so he gets to have this experience with young kids.
He has to deal with me to get it, but that's okay. My kids get to have a relationship, and many a time they're playing out front and I'll see them stop and talk to Tom and Susie, or stop and talk to a ton of other people who walk by. They are much more independent and can talk to adults because they talk to adults all the time — they know about 50 adults, which I think is a really cool thing.
They're being socialized in a really important way. Jane Jacobs writes about this. They're being socialized to understand that they are part of a greater social fabric, and that they need to contribute to it. It's a very important distinction from how I think a lot of kids are raised — in this siloed experience of the world where we go from place to place, we're scared of everybody because everybody's a stranger, we take care of our own group, and we don't step outside that unless we have a parent over our shoulder giving us permission.
One of the unintended consequences of that is that children don't grow up seeing themselves as participants in the public realm. Like in that story about your kids — they could just take care of the problem, because they see themselves as part of a social group that exists outside their home. I think that's going to translate into, as they mature, a sense of responsibility for the people around them, rather than one based in fear. It won't be, "I don't know if I should intrude." It'll be, "I'm part of the community. I can do something when it's needed." That's incredibly important.
So you eventually made this jump to not just practicing these ideas in your own personal life but creating Hey Neighbor Hub. Can you tell us about the hub — what it is, what you're hoping to accomplish, and maybe a little bit about the origin story?
Sure. As I mentioned, this has been so transformative in my life and in everybody in the neighborhood's life, and I wanted to share it. I wanted to find a way to help other people live like this, because all of our friends who aren't part of the neighborhood are actively trying to move into it. I'm like, well, that's not sustainable — not everybody can move to my neighborhood.
I feel like there are a lot of conversations about how we live in America that center around how our suburbs are broken, we're car-focused, and so on. I'm always struck with this idea: we can't bulldoze everything. That's not a solution. We have to figure out how to deal with the cards we were dealt, to some degree. Sure, as we grow, we can do a better job, but we need to deal with the cards as they are on the table.
Are you sure we can't bulldoze everything, Graham?
I'm really sure about that — because apparently we did at one time. We can just call it urban blight and destroy everything. Surprise, surprise, in hindsight, not such a great idea.
I do wish we could all build stuff better, and I think there are opportunities to do that — that's great. But in the meantime, we shouldn't just consider this generation lost. We should do something about it.
So I had all these thoughts about what I needed to do to share this with people. Instead of building something and then talking about it, I thought: why don't I just make a video every day for six months and see what happens? We're now eight or nine months into that, and it's been really well received. I took what I'd learned and put it into a 10-step system. Then one day on a video, I just said I'm going to host a call this Friday for anybody who wants to join. That video exploded, and all of a sudden I had hundreds of emails in my inbox that I had to copy and paste into a calendar invite. Oh my gosh.
I really screwed myself by thinking that wasn't going to be successful. Now every Friday I host a call. It's an hour long. I go over the 10-step program, give out all the information, and everything's free.
I've had thousands of people join those calls. It's been really helpful for me because I get to talk to people from all kinds of different backgrounds — rural communities where they're like, "I can't knock on a door because it's a four-mile driveway and they're going to have a gun out," and then neighbors in high-rise buildings where there are 200 units, which is what I say is like seven floors. How do they do it? It's been cool to pressure-test the system.
For the most part, it works. Nobody has told me, "I knocked on a door and somebody screamed at me." It's always: "I knocked on a door, everybody was super excited and said, 'I can't believe somebody's finally doing this.'" It's something everybody wants, something everybody thinks about. It just requires somebody to step up and be like, "I'm going to be that person who kick-starts this."
Fun part of the show — can you walk us through the 10 steps of your program? I would love for you to walk our listeners through that.
Sure, let me try to do it without all the anecdotes and make it quick. Step one is define your neighborhood. That's the 200 doors closest to you. I say doors because if it's apartments, it doesn't matter — the 200 closest doors are your neighborhood. Trust that you'll reach the next 200 later. Don't worry about getting everybody.
Step two is being conspicuously friendly and vulnerable. We're all friendly — we all wave and then look away as quickly as possible. Vulnerability is making eye contact for a little bit longer, talking to people, asking them their name — not just knowing the dog's name, but knowing the person's name.
Step three is hosting your first event. You've got your 200 doors, you're being friendly and vulnerable — now make a flyer with the address, the date, and a vulnerability statement like, "I'm hosting this because I want to get to know my neighbors and live in a community where we know each other." Then go knock on those 200 doors. You can't just drop the flyer. You can't just post it on social media. You have to go knock on the doors — which is very scary, but you have to do it. When you knock, you have to say that vulnerability statement so people know it's not a cult and you're not trying to sell them anything.
Steps one through three, plus step four: at your first event, make one-on-one connections. Meet people you like, do a dog walk, do some kind of one-on-one activity with people. Then at the next event, connect those people to each other. One-on-one connections doesn't mean you connecting with everybody — it means being the switchboard operator for your neighborhood. "Oh, Tiffany, you do this. Graham does that. You all should really get to know each other." The overlapping one-on-one connections are what make a neighborhood. Think of it like a rope where a lot of little twines are all spun together.
Step five is creating a virtual hub. We've all been on Nextdoor.com — it's a disaster. A virtual hub is just a way for you to get out of the way so your neighbors can all connect with each other. The big thing here is setting ground rules: no selling, no politics, and if you don't like somebody, talk to them directly — don't post it vaguely in the group, because that's rude.
That's steps one through five — the first phase. You can do all of that in a week, and if you just do that and host an event and make one-on-one connections for a couple months, it'll start to form itself.
Six through ten is about how you don't burn out and how you make this a sustainable thing that the neighborhood owns. Step six is start hosting annual events — a potluck, a Halloween block party, anything recurring that you can focus on. Step seven is hosting the neighborhood planning party. This is how you give ownership of the neighborhood to the neighborhood itself, so it doesn't become the Graham show or the Tiffany show. Basically, you have everybody come in, throw their ideas on a board, and then everybody picks one they're going to host. Your job is just to help them do it. In my neighborhood, I'm all heart, no calendar. We have this wonderful woman, Kieran, who is the spreadsheet master. She takes all those dates down, puts them on the calendar, and invites everybody to make sure it actually happens.
Step eight is to give out micro roles — like Tom doing the pub quiz night. There's going to be one person in your neighborhood who's really handy with tools; they're the tool librarian. They take inventory of all the tools people are willing to share, and they're in charge of letting you know where you can borrow something and making sure you return it. In Florida, they have hurricane preparedness people. Where it snows, you have snow-shoveling people. Give everybody jobs. We're all working dogs to some degree.
Step nine is the welcoming committee. Everyone listening is going to do such a great job that your neighborhood will be so cohesive and wonderful that a new neighbor moving in will feel like they're not welcome in this cool, tight-knit group. Someone needs to be the switchboard operator for every new person that moves in.
Step ten is: if you're interested in this, you are going to be a people pleaser of some kind. You're going to burn yourself out and feel like you're never doing enough. So step ten is really about being grateful — at that first block party, step away from the group, look at all your neighbors connecting to one another, and thank yourself. Be grateful that you're actually doing this. As Dave Chappelle says, you can't always change the world, but you can make a little corner of it really nice. You're doing that. Give yourself gratitude and grace — you don't have to be perfect. You're just moving things forward.
Thank you for walking us through those. Can you pick one and tell me — which step is the most iterative? Which one came from you learning the most? Is there a story or memory you can think of where you're like, "Oh, okay, that experience is where I came up with that step"?
I think it's probably the planning party — the giving-over-ownership step. I tend to run really hard and burn myself out, but making sure that you explicitly give ownership of this thing to everybody is crucial, because people will default to thinking it's yours. After a while, they'll be sick of Graham's thing, but the second it's their thing, they're not sick of it anymore.
A lot of people who haven't followed the 10-step system and do it on their own will do a potluck and then say, "Who wants to host the next potluck?" That usually fails because you're not asking people to host something they created. You're asking them to host your thing — you're giving the burden of your potluck to them, and they're like, "I don't want to host a potluck. I want to host a movie night." Ego gets involved, and so on.
Letting people have ownership is a super important way for it to grow without you. I feel confident that if I moved out of this neighborhood right now, things would still go on, because everyone has their own things they want to do.
You've been hosting these phone calls for how long now? Can you tell us a little bit about the impact you're having — how many people have attended, and what are you seeing as the results, the transformations? What are some of the transformation stories you're hearing?
I've hosted probably 30 or 40 calls so far. I've had thousands of people join those calls, and I've had a ton of people who never joined a call — they just watched my 10 videos — and then they'll send me a comment or a DM on social media and say, "Here's my meetup." It's the best feeling in the world.
When you see people who have connected for the first time ever, that's really great. There are countless stories of neighborhoods where an older person shows up who has been totally disconnected — their family's moved away, their spouse has passed, they're alone in their house — and now they have a community they're part of. Loneliness is more deadly than not working out, so it's just incredible to see that.
There are also a lot of stories of mended relationships. There's this whole genre on social media of horrible neighbors, and most of the time, I just feel like it's a miscommunication — you assumed negative intent and never got to know them as an individual, and it blows out of proportion. We had one woman whose son did something in front of a neighbor's house, and the woman yelled at her son. The son came home sad, so the mother was upset at this woman. Well, she does my system, has her first neighborhood meetup, and the woman who yelled at her son shows up. At first she was mad. She said, "You know what? I'm going to go talk to her." She goes and talks to her, tells her she yelled at her son. The woman said, "I'm so sorry. I was having a terrible day. I really shouldn't have done that." She apologized to the son, and now their relationship is stronger because they've had a conflict, gotten over it, and they know each other at a deeper level.
I think the most common story is this: there's a neighborhood where most of the people are older and their kids have moved out, and then a new cohort of younger families moves in. The younger families want to live in a neighborhood like this and are afraid the older neighbors want to keep to themselves — when in fact, older people are people too. Everybody starts to get along, everybody starts to connect. It's a really common pattern.
What would you say are some of the biggest challenges — in the same vein as what you were just saying — some of the biggest obstacles to people doing this work? Whether that's personal, cultural, mindset, or the narratives we've been living with about neighborhoods and what it means to be a good neighbor. As you've been reflecting on this, what are some of those obstacles we have to be ready to tackle?
I think the number one thing is that everyone who comes to the call tells me they assume that someone in their neighborhood is going to be like, "I don't want to be part of this. Don't do this. Don't talk to me." Sure, sometimes that happens. But we all have this narrative that everyone else has a rich, full social life, and we're the weird ones who don't have enough connection — when in reality, everybody is desperately lonely and doesn't have enough social connection.
People are afraid to do this because they're afraid to be vulnerable. They're afraid to say, "I don't have friends. I don't have enough community." My trick for helping people get over that is to say: there's somebody else in your neighborhood who desperately needs this, and they need it way more than you do. Go do it for them — because you're going to build a community to help them and give them something they didn't have before. For the most part, that helps people get over that hump.
Some other challenges have to do with loss of privacy. A lot of people are afraid that once they get to know their neighbors, they're going to give up an element of privacy. Another one is unpredictability — they don't know what to expect once they knock on those doors. Maybe their neighborhood is a melting pot of different cultures, and they're not sure how to navigate expectations around social or even property boundaries. Can you speak to any thoughts you have on those?
Property boundaries, I think, are still really important. In my neighborhood, I'd be a little scared to go up on some of these people's yards — some you literally can't get to their door because they've fortressed themselves, some have really aggressive dogs, or you just don't know what's going to come around the corner. So it's a real concern in some areas.
But I think the unpredictability of it — will this person see me as intruding? Will there be some kind of cultural stigma? — I just think there's a huge realm of uncertainty. If I don't do anything, we all know our dance steps. Even though we're all lonely, at least we know the etiquette. But once I break out of that, I don't know what's going to happen.
Everything good happens outside your comfort zone, and that also applies inside your neighborhood. The fact that neighbors have protected themselves from the street is actually an even greater signal that you should do this, because your street becomes safer when everybody knows each other.
I don't advocate for going up to houses with aggressive dogs — knock on the fence as long as you want, but I don't want to be liable.
You don't have to win everybody. If people don't want to be part of it, don't force them. When it comes to different cultures, something I've found in my own life is that when I'm navigating a group I'm obviously not part of, there's going to be a "me" in that group. You just need to find that person, ask them to be your buddy, and rally that community. I've spoken to a few people where half the neighborhood doesn't speak English. The answer is: just keep knocking on doors. You'll find someone who does and who likes what you're doing and is willing to be your bilingual buddy and help rally their community. They can become our community — because a lot of times the fear we have about neighbors from our own background and language is multiplied when it's a different background or language. But we're all the same people. We all want our kids to play together. You want your kids to play with them. Who wouldn't want their kid to come home saying something funny in a different language? How cool.
There's something you said about privacy that I think is really correct. There are going to be people who want more from you than you want to give. You're going to open the door to someone and then think, "I need some time for me." That's a price you pay for neighborhood life. I have a neighbor I love very much — a really great friend right across the street — but I know that on Thursday night when I take my trash out, his trash is going to come out at the same time, and I'm in for a conversation. But we've gotten to know each other well enough that I can say, "I do not have time right now." He's like, "Okay, sounds good."
There's also an older neighbor who once spent 30 minutes telling me about how he set up his Wi-Fi router — he's a retired software engineer, and he wanted to explain his whole network setup. I didn't want to hear it. I wanted to do yard work. But I thought: I know he doesn't have anyone else to tell this to, and one day I'm going to have a story that nobody else wants to hear, and I hope somebody is gracious enough to give me an outlet.
That's a really beautiful way of framing it. You're putting a lot of content out on social now, so people can follow you — we'll put links to all of that. You're taking this to a greater scale. Can you tell us a little more about your podcast and some of the conversations you're having there? I know it sounds like you're very emergent in how you approach things — let me try this, let me see what happens. But I'd love to know what you're dreaming could happen through your work and through getting these stories out and empowering people to transform their neighborhoods into communities.
Before you answer that, though, I want to say one thing. On the thoughts about privacy — I think a big part of what you're doing, Graham, is pushing back on this narrative we've absorbed for maybe 80 years now: that the whole point of a healthy neighborhood is to protect the nuclear family. The nuclear family is important.
But once you understand the sociological history and the fear that was motivating the development of suburbia — a lot of it was that the streets, neighbors, and alleyways were going to corrupt the children. The goal was to get them into an environment that was cleaner, more orderly, more quiet, and more private, so the family could develop strong moral fabric. There's an element of that I understand. But now it's definitely been taken so far that it's become this situation we're living in, where it's totally normal for people to live right next to each other and not know each other, with such an emphasis on privacy that we've totally lost community.
So what you're doing is really challenging that story — privacy is important, but community is also important. How do we find the right balance? Obviously you're not having all your neighbors move into your house and create a commune. You're showing that balance: privacy is important, the home is important, the family is important, but we're all better off if our lives can unfold in an ecosystem of community, healthy interdependence, and awareness of each other. We have to reevaluate the stories we've been told about the good life and how they unfold in the built environment.
Agreed. "Good fences make good neighbors" doesn't negate what I'm saying. You do want to have good boundaries, but you also want them to be permeable and to be able to connect across them.
Okay, so tell us about your podcast and the other work you're doing to get the message out there. What's the dream — what are you hoping to accomplish?
The dream is simple. If you take American households and divide it by 200, I need 660,000 people to do this — and then all of America will be neighborhoods and communities. We'll all know each other better, and everything will be better, because you'll have a network of real people — a social network, if you will — that is real and worth connecting to. That will cause all kinds of drama, but it's worth it, because then we won't have to watch drama on TV.
How do I get there? I started out being very emergent, just posting stuff. My current thinking is that I need to tell more stories of people who have done this. Telling my story over and over again is not that interesting. Somebody once commented on my video — I know you're not supposed to read comments, but he said, "Why does this guy just brag about his neighborhood all the time?"
I'm currently putting together my own little Fab Five. I'm producing a show for YouTube — nobody's paying me and they don't know about it — called "Neighborhood Makeover." People are going to follow my 10-step program, we're going to film them, they're going to film themselves, we'll do interviews.
There's this one woman, Rachel, who does sidewalk joy things like Little Free Libraries. She's going to help them build community elements. A big-city gardener from Houston is going to help people garden in their front yards to make them more community-friendly. John is going to talk to people about a problem in their neighborhood and help them figure out how to address it and engage with the city. We're also waiting on one more person to confirm — someone who will help people learn how to cook for a group, so you know how to cater your first party.
The whole show will be: disconnected person knocks on doors, meets all these experts, and each episode ends with a block party with their neighbors. They'll film themselves knocking on doors and stuff. Half of people watch YouTube on their TVs now, so I'm trying to produce a show that people like — a makeover show. That's the goal.
The podcast is just a means to produce more content. My initial goal is to do this full time. If I spent the rest of my life diving deeply into what makes a neighborhood good and turning that into educational information that more people can use — that feels like a pretty meaningful life.
Also inspiring people at a heart level — I think that's such a huge part of it. Stories are one of the most powerful ways to do that. I'm really excited to see where this goes, and excited to see what you're able to accomplish and the transformation you're able to facilitate. We'll definitely be putting links so everyone can follow your work and learn more.
We're going to wrap up here, but in closing, can you share a couple of places you love in your neighborhood — local businesses you'd recommend people check out if they come to visit?
Sure — coming to Carmichael, I would be surprised, but look me up. It's a small world. There's a place called Shangri-La in Fair Oaks, which is this wonderful spot where a chef from San Francisco moved out here and turned an old gas station into a really cool mid-century modern restaurant.
There's also a Mexican restaurant called Mesa Mercado. Instead of being tacos and burritos, it's more Oaxacan-style — they have a full roast chicken and all kinds of things. It's just delicious. Mesa Mercado is excellent.
Those are my two top recommendations for Carmichael. Obviously, you'll have to attend one of our neighborhood events too — if it's summer, just show up at my house. Actually, please DM me first. Friday Front Yard Happy Hours is always happening at my friend group's picnic table. I just leave it out now, so if you need me on a Friday afternoon — I love that idea of putting a picnic table in the front yard.
That's a great idea. I was thinking it would be cool if we just had, like, a lemonade party in the summer — hey, we'll have free lemonade every Friday, come over. Fridays are great because people are exhausted and it's a perfect day to meet your neighbors. They can just walk over; they don't have to do anything.
Okay, this will be the end — but I just feel like, I don't know if there's a word for this in English, but there's just this category of social encounter you're getting at with the organic, unannounced, non-committal pop-by. "Pop-by" is the closest word we have for it. It's so delightfully disproportionate — the benefit you get relative to the amount of work you have to put in. You don't put that much work in, but the effect it can have on your life — I almost tear up when people pop by unannounced, or when they feel like they can just come by to grab something real quick, or say, "Hey, I'm in the area, can I come by?" — and we have enough food to share dinner with a friend.
People need that. There's something so psychologically healing about it — when you're able to experience hospitality from people who technically don't owe you anything, and it doesn't require a lot of work. "Hey, we're just having lemonade."
I really think there's something to this. I felt linguistically limited to really express the idea I've been thinking about, but you've given me a lot to think about, Graham, and I'm really thankful for that. I'm sure our audience has really enjoyed everything you've shared as well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and share your story and these 10 steps. I know I for one am definitely inspired, and I'm sure plenty of people listening have been as well.
To our audience: thank you so much for joining me for another conversation. I look forward to continuing this. If there's someone in your community who you think makes a great fit for the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form in our show notes — that's how I find out about a lot of people, and I'm always really grateful when people take the time to fill that out. 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.