Andrew Price spent nine years living without a car in Hoboken, New Jersey, where most daily trips could be handled on foot or by transit. Once he bought a car, even routine outings came with a new calculation: where he would park, how much it would cost, and whether driving was actually the easier option. An early Strong Towns member, Price examined places, non-places, and the difference between fine-grained and coarse-grained urbanism in articles. He reflects on how owning a car made him a stronger urbanist, a realization that connects back to his first years in Arkansas, where lawns, roads, and parking lots filled the landscape, but finding a place to sit outside with lunch still meant getting back in the car.
Hello, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts, a weekly podcast where we take a quick look at individuals within the Strong Towns movement, providing a snapshot of the motivations and actions people are taking within their communities.
I'm delighted to be joined today by Andrew Price, one of our founding members. He's part of the Founders Circle and has been a longtime contributor to Strong Towns. If you have some time today, I would definitely recommend reading his article on the Strong Towns site, "Places and Non-Places," and another equally fantastic article on fine-grained urbanism versus coarse-grained urbanism. Understanding that contrast, and how we've come to be surrounded by the places we have around us, has been really powerful.
Andrew, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
Thank you. It's great to be here.
You may feel like you're getting all this fan mail from me because I'm always saying how much I love what you've written in the past and what you continue to contribute in the present.
Even today, you recently shared a post in the Strong Towns comments with some reflections on how buying a car made you a stronger urbanist. Why don't we start with that? Pull together your Strong Towns story and share it with the folks here.
Specifically with that article, I live in Hoboken, which is a very walkable community. We went nine years without owning a car. We have a four-year-old daughter, and now we have a six-month-old son. Everywhere she needs to go, there are so many playgrounds, her school, the library and everything else we need. We would load the stroller and walk down the street. Once in a while, if we wanted to go to the beach, we'd rent a car. There's transit around, so we never really had a necessity for one.
When you don't own a car and use Uber, you put in the destination and it seems like the premium option because it drops you straight at the door. Then I bought a car and realized it's actually a pain to drive around here. The streets are narrow. If you drive around Hoboken, Jersey City or Manhattan, you have to plan ahead for where you're going to park. It may be blocks away, and it may cost $40 in the city. A car isn't the be-all and end-all.
When places go all in on accommodating cars, you lose livability, walkability and all the things that make this place great. Owning a car and seeing these challenges makes me want to support better transit and more walkable streets.
Being an urbanist and being a parent, the ultimate convenience is being able to load your kids into the stroller in your living room, take it on transit without folding it up, go shopping at the mall or do whatever you need to do, load your shopping into the cargo bay and roll it straight back into your living room. That's the ultimate convenience of urban living.
Riding the bus is really disruptive because now I have two kids, a six-month-old son and a four-year-old daughter. If I'm by myself and try to get on a bus, they say, "Collapse your stroller." I have two kids, a diaper bag and this giant stroller. That's impractical for families. Buying a car made me realize it isn't the ultimate solution for getting around. It made me want to be a stronger urbanist.
Totally. It touches on one of the things I've observed: there are three types of costs related to getting out of a vehicle, and to being in a vehicle as well. There's a time cost, a financial cost and what I would call a dignity cost.
If we can bring any of those costs down when you're getting around by transit or walking around a community, that changes the experience. There's no direct financial cost to walking, but there might be a time penalty. If the dignity cost is zero, or you feel dignified and welcomed in that space, then you're getting more from it.
A lot of our environments, or what you describe in your article as non-places, are a drudge to get through. That penalty begins to loom large. Even small things, such as having to deconstruct your stroller and find all the Goldfish crackers floating everywhere, become stressful. You realize you're getting harried and are under a time crunch to do something simply to use a service that's supposed to connect you.
What I've appreciated in your writing is that observation of real trade-offs and the way burdens are passed along to different groups within a community. As you said, if you're trying to drive where you are in your core neighborhoods, that's where you see the penalties, versus the ease of being able to walk around and enjoy the place.
How did your journey into these ideas come about? One element I've appreciated is your camera and your ability to capture good images of what you see that tell long stories in a single image.
Thanks for the comment about my camera. That's mostly just my phone when I travel around.
I came to the U.S. about 14 years ago. I'm from Australia, and my wife is from Arkansas. During my first few years living in Arkansas, I went through culture shock because the southern U.S. takes suburbia to the extreme.
You mentioned my article about places and non-places. I did not invent that term. It came from Nathan Lewis on his blog, New World Economics. I expanded upon the idea and published those maps showing places and non-places in red and green.
The idea came about because, when we were living in Arkansas, I would want to have lunch with my wife, so we'd get in the car. Despite seeing buildings with 100 feet of separation between them, parking lots, lawns and trees, to find a socially acceptable place to have a picnic, you'd have to drive three miles to a dedicated park.
Despite all this nature around us, I thought, "This nature does nothing. All it does is push things apart." The land dedicated to places where people could exist, work, live and have fun was maybe 5% of the land. That inspired me to write extensively about places and non-places and make those red-and-green maps that highlighted how little productive land there actually was.
It's fascinating. I like the picnic basket test. I might simplify it as, "Where can I have a beer with a friend?" You realize you can do that in plazas, on somebody's front porch or outside some establishments, but many places are not suited to it.
Obviously, we're not trying to do that in the middle of a highway. We understand that some things have a functional transportation role. But there are all these extra buffer spaces and areas set aside as lipstick rather than having the capacity to say, "If we trim that up or make it a little more effective, what could it become?" That certainly touches on a core Strong Towns principle.
Land is the base resource for building lasting prosperity, and we can't squander it. I feel that in a lot of what you've said.
I'd love to hear your tips or suggestions for people who are interested in engaging their community and writing about it. You're a very gifted writer, if that hasn't come through. This is definitely a fandom episode. What suggestions do you have for folks, not only on writing, but on engaging their communities as well?
If you want to have influence, I suggest reaching out to people, including local leaders, other advocates and council members, and inviting them to coffee. Virtually nobody has ever said no to coffee, and it's such a great forum.
Unlike standing in front of a crowded, rowdy city hall meeting where you get five minutes to speak and then they move on to the next person, meeting one-on-one lets you have a back-and-forth conversation. That builds a connection. Even if you don't get what you wanted or your agenda doesn't go your way, you build that connection, become known in the community and gain credibility. I think that leads to having more influence than you realize once your name is out there.
What about following that up by sharing your writing with a broader audience? You've taken note of those things and passed them along. How did you get your Strong Towns start?
When I moved to Arkansas and experienced that culture shock, I started writing about it. At some point, while Googling suburbia and related topics, I came across early Strong Towns writing from around 2012 or 2013 about the suburban experiment.
I became active and used to comment. I think I shared a few links. At one point, Chuck reached out to me, I reached back, and eventually Strong Towns published a few of my blog articles.
You were also one of the earliest members. I've been a member since 2018, so you have me beat by six or seven years.
In that time, what has been your impression of the Strong Towns movement in general and the cast of unlikely characters who have emerged to move the movement forward? I think they've really moved the needle from where we were to where we are now. What reflections do you have on what you've seen?
I think it's been great. I remember when Strong Towns was basically a blog and Chuck was writing alone at night. To see what it has become, and to see the energy at the National Gatherings, has been incredible.
Nearly everybody I talk to about urban issues has heard of Strong Towns now. Maybe that's because I'm self-selecting within a bubble. I live in Hoboken, which is very dense and urban. It's also a largely transient community, so many people live here by choice rather than because they were born here. My bubble is self-selected around people who are more passionate about these issues.
It's been great to see Strong Towns act as a platform to amplify voices, not just mine, but other people's as well. For example, no one was really talking about fine-grained urbanism 15 years ago. Then Chuck, or somebody else, said, "You should publish this on the blog." Several years later, I went to a Strong Towns gathering, and when I visited my hometown in Australia, I saw that they had released a 30-year vision talking about fine-grained urbanism, human-scale spaces and ideas I'd blogged about.
I may have emailed the former mayor a few times, but I've lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years. Seeing terms I used on my blog reach all the way over there has been incredible. It's all thanks to Strong Towns amplifying my voice, and I've seen that happen for so many other people.
I find that fascinating, seeing things take on a life of their own and find traction in many places. That's certainly something that gives me a ton of hope.
I remember we had a public consultation process in my community, and the consultants leading the engagement said, "For our village area, we really want to have a no-assembly-required policy, where no land assembly should be required for a project to go ahead." I thought, "Yes, yes, yes." Ironically, our city then consolidated seven lots into one because that was their way of making it development-ready. I thought, "Bless me, I need to keep working at this and not get too discouraged."
As we close, what are some of the things that give you hope in your community in Hoboken and in the work you're doing?
I'm definitely not taking credit for anything, but I remember 11 years ago talking to council members and other candidates about making small bets in the community and making things more jaywalkable. Ten years later, we see daylighting everywhere. These are definitely not my ideas, but it's encouraging to see ideas gain traction, see things happen and see the community involved.
Strong Towns has published before that Hoboken famously hasn't had a traffic death since 2017. Seeing these things unfold is encouraging, but we still have many struggles ahead. One big issue right now is affordability.
My wife has done an amazing job building a community of other families with small children. However, once people have a second child and that child starts to grow older, many begin to feel cramped in their one- or two-bedroom apartments. It's sad to see many of our friends starting to leave, and it isn't by choice. They're leaving because they need more space.
Even if someone is comfortably housed, the affordability crisis really hurts those trying to build a long-term, ride-or-die community.
There is a need in our places for suitable homes at prices people can generally manage, and for homes that can accommodate different life stages. That makes a ton of sense.
One of these days, I'll have to get out to visit you and your community. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on Bottom Up Shorts today.
Thank you. It's been my pleasure.
If people want to connect with you, what's a good way to do that? They can connect with you in the Strong Towns Commons if they're Strong Towns members. Are there other ways they can follow along?
I would suggest visiting my website, andrewalexanderprice.com. It's basically my name. I'm also fairly active on X as Andrew A. Price, and I'd be happy to hear from anyone.
I always appreciate it when someone leaves a nice comment. I sit at my computer writing and wonder, "Who even cares about my thoughts?" Then people reach out, and it's always good to hear from them.
That's excellent. I love it.
As Andrew has demonstrated, taking the longer view means recognizing that when we first raise ideas and offer suggestions, we may encounter many deaf ears. Yet, as we persist and continue to take notice of real changes occurring, that is grounds for hope.
I hope you're encouraged. Go forth, pick up a pen, write, take photos and do that kind of work in your community. Over time, you will generate the opportunities needed within our places.
Take care, and take care of your places.
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.