The Strong Towns Podcast
The conversation follows Michel Durand-Wood's path from noticing small local cuts—closed pools, rising taxes—to understanding his city as structurally insolvent. Along the way, he and Chuck talk about grants, debt, Canadian and U.S. examples, and why efficiency alone hasn’t fixed anything.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. One of our good friends here at Strong Towns is Elmwood Guy, who writes the blog Dear Winnipeg. You might not know his real name, but it's Michel Durand-Wood — Mitch to us as friends. Mitch has been intricately involved in helping us put together the Finance Decoder, and just hanging out with us at Strong Towns talking finance.
He has a book that came out last year, and I'm embarrassed to say — Mitch is one of our really good friends and I thought I had him on the podcast to talk about the book, and then someone internally said, "Well, you never had him on to talk about the book." And I went back and I realized I hadn't. So the book is called You'll Pay for This: How Can We Afford a Great City for Everyone Forever? The author is Michel Durand-Wood. Mitch, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast.
Hey, Chuck. It's so great to be here.
I do apologize. I literally have a stack of books here, because people send me books all the time, and I try to go through them, and I'm like, okay, which of these can I do justice to? And are a good fit? I've got your book on Kindle, I've got a PDF. I don't think I ever actually got myself a hard copy. Yeah, so I have to fix that. Well, I feel bad because I think it wasn't in the stack, and I just lost track. I apologize, man.
Well, it's no big deal. You and I have talked about the book — we just never recorded the conversation. When Norm said we hadn't done it, I'm like, yeah, I have. I've talked about the book a lot. Okay, here's what I want to know, because people ask me this and I think they're disappointed. I want to either make myself more disappointed, or make you at the same level of disappointment as I am. How did you come to realize that cities might actually be insolvent?
People always ask me, like, was there a moment? Was there an aha moment? Describe that in a Barbara Walters interview kind of way. And I'm like, no, there wasn't. It was probably a pretty common story in the Strong Towns world. It was just a slow kind of grind. The city's cutting things. City taxes are going up. Stuff's not getting fixed. They're closing community centers. It was just this nagging feeling of, why is this happening? The standard answer would be, well, it's just a matter of priorities. That never sat with me as an appropriate answer, because you only prioritize when you don't have enough money. When you have enough money, you just spend it on everything.
When you don't have enough money, that's when you have to prioritize. So to me, the question was always, well, why isn't there enough money? We built these community centers, we built these pools, we built these roads — we had all these things, we had these services. Surely somebody smarter than me must have been planning for this, that we'll need to repair them, we'll need to pay for this. It just never really made sense to me. Why don't we have money? For a long time it just kind of nagged at me.
I guess the aha moment was talking to Norm — years ago already. We've mentioned Norm on the podcast. Norm Vandenpetersman is our membership director, and he also happens to be my brother-in-law, so we hang out every now and then. He was my brother-in-law before he was a Strong Towns person.
That's right. That's right. Yep. This is a pretty Strong Towns norm.
Of course, the first instinct anybody ever has is, okay, there's something wrong with the city finances or whatever — I'm gonna find it. There are like a thousand pages of financial documents, and I'm gonna comb through all of this. But it's like, what are you even looking for? You don't even know. I wasn't really any more successful than anybody else at trying to find anything. Was it the police budget? I don't know. There are a thousand things, and nothing really stood out, because things were generally well managed.
So yeah, it was just in a conversation one summer with Norm. He says, "Oh, Mitch, I've been reading this blog called Strong Towns, and I think you would enjoy it." I said okay, and made a mental note of it. My wife Emma also said, "Okay, yeah, we'll check it out for sure." It was four or five months later — I will admit I had not looked at it. It was Emma who said, "Mitch, did you check out the blog that Norm sent us?"
She said I should, and yeah, reading about the growth Ponzi scheme opened it up to me. It was like, oh, okay, now I know where to look. We don't need to zoom in — we need to zoom out. We need to look at the big picture flow of funds. That's when I had the light bulb moment: oh, okay, I see what's going on here.
It was just like I said, an ongoing slow grind until you see that, and then you're like, oh, now it's everywhere. Now I can't not see it. From there I still just let it sit with myself. My wife and I were involved in our neighborhood in different capacities, so it sort of informed our community work, but we didn't do much beyond that with this newfound knowledge other than, oh wow, a lot of things make more sense now.
It wasn't until even another year or two after that when our city did a referendum — a vote on whether we should open our main downtown intersection up to pedestrian crossings that had been closed for 40 years through some real estate deal. We were going to have a city-wide vote on whether people should be able to cross the street. For me, it was a no-brainer, of course. But it was a super controversial thing, and the no's ended up winning like 67%.
To me, that was maybe the tipping point where I thought, okay, I've got to educate people here. This is ridiculous. We have to move forward, and people don't know. That's where I started the blog, and it was just that next step into where we are today.
Let me ask you this, because you said that "someone smarter than me must have this figured out." I remember going through that phase too, because I was more inside the machine than you were — in the sense that I was working as an engineer, as a planner with cities. I was in the room where the sausage was being made, and I kept looking for that person — not necessarily the smartest person in the room, but the person who had the answers to the questions I had.
I'm interested in that phenomenon, because I feel like there are a lot of people out there who assume that somebody has it figured out. It's almost like the train's going down the track, there's a sign that says the bridge is out — at what point do you get up and go, is someone gonna stop this train, or are we just gonna go over? I feel like there is a human awareness thing that we have to help people get beyond. I feel like your book is an attempt to do that. But what do you think it is about people that just assumes someone's got this figured out?
I mean, we live in a world that's so complex now. There are so many things out there. There was a time during, I don't know, like the Enlightenment in the 1700s, where you had people who were experts at a lot of things — chemists and biologists and philosophers — because the sum total of human knowledge wasn't that far ahead. Now we have so much. How does a smartphone work? I don't know. How do you write a message to my grandma from my pocket? There's so much stuff. I don't even know how to make a pencil, never mind the 18,000 parts in the supply chain of an iPhone.
So as a society or as a species, we've sort of divided the work, and we have people who are very specialized in a lot of things. I think we may have gone a little too far where we don't have as many generalists anymore — people looking at the big picture. You've got a lot of people who are very focused on their own little silo. I find that's particularly true in a city or municipality, where you have not only the public works department but maybe also the road safety department, the pothole-filling department — very, very specific.
People are very busy looking at their own particular area of expertise, but unless you zoom out a little bit and see how all the pieces fit together, you can't know for sure. To bring back the train analogy, you've got somebody who's like, oh yeah, the brakes work. These windows work. The seats still recline — good. But nobody's taking a big picture view of, okay, we need to activate the brakes. There's just that kind of big picture view that's missing.
I find that when we do stop and know a little bit about a lot of things, we can spot things that the specialists aren't necessarily spotting because it's not within their scope. We need everyday people. We need council members. We need all kinds of people who are taking that big picture, broad view, to know a little bit about a lot of things and connect them together.
I feel like you're saying something really important there. I remember sitting in those — I think so too, Chuck. But I'm okay, let me give this kind of a crazy analogy. In the US, we're in another war — we like to start wars, and we're in another one now in Iran. I remember growing up reading books about the Kennedy administration, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis. I also read a book about Vietnam. In all of these, there was this tension between military control and civilian control. The idea was that you have generals who are really good at breaking things and smashing things, moving troops and logistics — but you have to be able to step back and see the big picture. Someone needs to be a little more big-picture thinking, a little more enlightened — someone who can see the military side, but also the policy side, the political side, the cultural side, the implications on the home front, and international relations.
When I was sitting in the room working on a project, I'm the engineer, there's the planner, there's the finance person who shows how you get the money — everybody there is from a technical standpoint. It was the council members who were supposed to be, in a sense, that Secretary of Defense — looking over the whole thing, with a sense of how it works — and they're going to report up to the mayor, or whatever, and make an informed decision as a group.
Let me tie this back to your book. I feel like your book is really great for regular people who want to understand how city governments actually work and why — kind of going through the thought process of, okay, this isn't working. Why? What's going on? But I feel like there's this layer of the person who's supposed to activate the brakes on the train. This is a big loaded question for you, Mitch, but I feel like what has gone wrong with the leadership layer of our cities — is that where the problem is? Is that where the solution is? Is there something there that needs to change or be fixed? Because it doesn't feel right to look at the engineer and say, figure this out, because the engineer is actually really good at doing the engineering. Or the finance person — figure this out — because they're just trying to make the numbers work for this quarter.
To be clear, we need those specialists. We absolutely need people who understand the ins and outs of the very minutia of whether it's finance or engineering or water and waste or whatever it is. We need those experts to move the train forward and keep things going. But we do need somebody who is directing those efforts, and council is kind of supposed to be that layer.
There's a lot to it too. I do a lot of reading in different areas. I'm reading one right now from a neurologist on how the brain works, left and right hemispheres. I spent a year and a half reading stuff on the brain, because I got to the point where I'm like, why don't our brains work right? Why do we make the decisions we make?
We all know the left brain/right brain kind of separation — left brain in charge of some stuff, right brain other stuff — but that's actually not correct. The left and the right brain both do everything, but they do them differently. The left side of your brain, the analytical side, is detail-oriented, whereas the right side sees the big picture. With the left brain you can identify a particular person's facial features. With the right brain, you get the context — where is that person? Are they heading towards me? Do I know them? Are they angry? You need both sides.
This particular book I'm reading — and it's a pretty heavy read, so it's a slow one — essentially talks about how that's mirrored in our society, because how we interact with the world is through our brain. At this point in Western civilization, we're really, really left-brained. We're really analytically focused, focused on details, and we tend to be missing a lot of the big picture. When it comes to city council, there is no lack of detailed, specific information. There's a lot of details if somebody wants them. Because we're in this mindset of, I'm going to dig in and get to the bottom of this, our first instinct is always to go dig into the details.
Administration is the same thing. You know, the idea of transparency — well, here's all the information, here's everything we have. That's actually the opposite of what we need to be doing. It's data with no context, and we get lost in the weeds. New city council members don't really have a training manual or a training program for how to be an elected official in most places. You get in there, you get thrown in there, the fire hose of information gets turned on, and you do the best you can with what you have.
Cities are in charge of so many systems — they touch so many things in our daily lives, from clean drinking water to picking up garbage to public safety and recreation. You end up with people trying to become experts at every topic, because that's how we assume we need to make better decisions. You spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of water and waste or whatever it is, and you don't really see how they fit together.
To give an example of a forest: if I've never seen a forest, but then you start showing me leaves and branches and bark and different grasses and bugs, and I start to learn a lot about all these things, I may become a subject matter expert in some of them. But I will never know how it all fits together in a forest, because I've never seen a forest. Nobody's ever told me about a forest. In that left-right brain kind of thing, you need to see the big picture first, and then you can zoom in and look at the details and understand what you're looking at. If you start in the details and never go to the big picture, you're just lost in the weeds the whole time. I think that's where we kind of are.
The thing I find when it comes to cities is that the connective tissue that joins everything together is finance.
Right. To learn even a little bit about finance, it can tie everything together. Because when you see advocacy, it also tends to be very hyper-focused and hyper-specialized. You'll have yimby groups focused on housing, or transit advocacy groups focused on transit, or active transportation groups focused on that. It's very hyper-focused on a specific part of making a good city, but without the big picture of how transit fits together with housing and active transportation and water and waste choices and all the things that go together. If you don't have that big picture view — I think you've said it — transportation is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
That's the same thing with housing, or any of the policies that we have in a city. They all need to fit together somehow. Unless you know what we're trying to achieve in a big picture, you can have pretty bad transit policy — policy that technically advances transit goals but doesn't achieve any of the other goals that are important in a city. That's a little bit like when you talk about the Strong Towns approach. When you go from spending billions on highway expansions to spending billions on light rail, it's like, okay, yes, that's transit, which is good. But you've achieved transit goals without achieving any of the other goals that are important in a city that fit together. You need to get that big picture view.
So I'm going to postulate something, and you can swat it down if you want. I've been all over North America. I've met with governments all over the place. Canadian governments in general are more well run than US governments — at least at the local level. They're better run, and more competently, more conscientiously operated. There's an internal competence that I have experienced. I'm a Minnesotan, so I may be preferencing a Minnesota style of government, which is very Canadian. But that being said, I feel like this does get into the human brain and the way we process things.
I'm going to apologize because I'm going to bring in Doge and national US politics, which I know you know about, because we export our insanity to everybody. We had this Department of Government Efficiency thing that we tried last year. I was not surprised at all that it amounted to nothing, because I actually don't think the problem in our government is incompetence or bureaucratic inefficiency — and it's certainly not the issue at local government. Give me your impression of not Doge itself, but that mindset. If we just go into City Hall and tighten up the ship, make the right choices — is government too big to run? When you go into City Hall in Winnipeg, is it a place overflowing with waste and fraud and incompetence where we've got to tighten the belt and make things work?
That's a common refrain you hear. On the comparison between Canada and the US — I don't think it's true that we run better governments over here. I think at the municipal level in particular, we do have some frameworks in place for governance and administration that you don't have in the US, which does help. We have municipal governments of all sizes with different capacities. You have small municipalities with like two employees and a small part-time council — they're going to do the best they can with what they have. Then you have multi-million resident cities that are massive apparatuses — our city has more employees than the next nearest city has residents.
But yeah, this idea that it's an efficiency problem is again rooted in the idea of details. How do you get more efficient? You look at the small things we're wasting, you fix them, and then we'll be good. It is that same mindset of, I'm going to roll up my sleeves, dig into these financial documents, and find the needle in the haystack that is the problem. That's not where the problem is. It's an understandable reaction, but in my city, we've been cutting and finding efficiencies for decades and we still haven't found it.
It's not to say that there aren't efficiencies to be found, or that there isn't waste. Any organization should always be continually advising how they do things — how can we make this better, how can we make this more productive? But there's a point where you get too efficient, because the more efficient you get, the less resilient you are. As a municipal government, I think we've gone too far. We are super fragile now and we cannot handle any curveballs that come our way. I would argue in my city that we can't even handle a straight lob.
In our city, they've been cutting for so long that a lot of departments are running on a skeleton crew. It's shocking that they can even deliver the services we expect of them, much less find efficiencies or improve things. There's tons of what they call vacancy management — when somebody quits or retires, you just don't fill their position for six or eight or twelve months, just to save money on wages to fit within your budget. You didn't eliminate the position, but nobody's doing that job anymore. There's a lot of that going on everywhere.
If it was just a matter of efficiencies, tinkering at the edges — we'd get there, especially after decades of doing it. But we can't, because that's not the problem. Basically, we are cannibalizing our own cities. We're chopping off pieces of our city trying to make things work, while the disease we're actually trying to fight is something else entirely.
The human body is not efficient at all. We have two lungs. We have 10 fingers — we don't need 10 fingers. Same thing with our municipal governments. Yeah, we can get more efficient, but at a certain point we get to where we're causing more damage than we're solving. Today we had a conversation internally about garbage collection in Los Angeles. I just got back from Los Angeles, and it's astounding — the level of trash everywhere. I was at a Disney park one day, and as we were leaving, there were three trash cans spaced about 100 to 150 feet apart on the walkway. I noticed this because there were three, and then it ended. So somebody walking out with a wrapper or a finished ice cream cup — you've got one, two, three chances to unburden yourself before you start walking.
Jane Jacobs talks about neighborhood policing, and I think we think of it as a really cute thing — oh, eyes on the street, isn't that nice? But all of these things, when you have a neighborhood with eyes on the street, you don't need to pay a ton for policing. If you have an area where a lot of people walk, you can actually have garbage cans in the right places and have the resources to maintain them and empty them. If everybody's diffused and spread out over a huge area and there really isn't a concentration of people walking anywhere, how do you have garbage cans? How do you have garbage pickup?
It feels like to me that efficiency is almost even asking the wrong question. Let alone whether we become more efficient or raise more revenue — I feel like there's something there, Mitch. You've kind of circled around it in your book as well. Why are those questions about efficiency or raising more revenue a trap? How do we get out of that trap? What does it look like to think about this differently?
Part of it is you only know what you know, and you don't know what you don't know. If you're in a specialist mindset, whatever particular silo you're in, you only have the tools available to you to address an issue. I'm seeing in Canada in particular, in the municipal finance academia, a lot of the discussion has arrived at the fact that municipalities do not have the money for maintaining their infrastructure. They've been talking about this for decades. They've recognized the problem.
But again, without taking a step further back — if you're simply looking at municipal finance zoomed in, what's the solution? Well, the discussion right now is: we just need a better fiscal deal. We need more access to our own revenue sources, new income taxes or sales taxes, or we need provincial and federal governments to transfer us more money. It's a very narrow view of the problem. It's looking at, how do I as a municipality get more money to pay for the stuff I have?
It's only when you take that step even further back that you see — wait a minute, this money ultimately comes from all of us. In Canada, they've done some rough calculations on the infrastructure deficit over the next 10 years — at current service levels, how much money do municipalities need to maintain what they own? The low-ball estimate is $270 billion for the entire country.
The high-ball might be a trillion dollars. Where is that money coming from? Whether it's the federal government or the provincial government or a new tax, look — if your residents can't afford a property tax increase, they can't afford an income tax increase. Zooming out to see that the tools we were looking at — getting more money to the municipalities — is not the right tool. You take a step back and you're like, okay, there is no money for this. This money will never be here. It is not coming. Now what?
That's where you get into: we've got to build our cities in a different way so that we need less infrastructure per person to meet our same goals. So I was in Nantucket — I don't know if you know Nantucket. It's an island off the coast of Massachusetts, extremely wealthy. The joke they told me when I got there is that Nantucket is a place where billionaires hire millionaires to mow their yard. I can't tell you how many times during my trip there for Strong Towns that people told me they were applying for grants to do infrastructure.
When I gave my public presentation that night, I actually said, "Okay, point to me the zip code in North America that should be taxed to send money to Nantucket to build your infrastructure. The wealthiest people in the country are right here. What neighborhood in Memphis? What neighborhood in Buffalo? What neighborhood in Detroit should have their taxes go up to send that money here?" That was not well received.
That question wasn't — it's kind of a cheeky way to put it, but yeah, it's true. It's coming to the realization that how we've built our cities is incredibly expensive — way more expensive than we are able to pay for. When you really look at it, in Winnipeg, I think it's 88% of the replacement cost of our infrastructure that is just roads and pipes.
Just roads and pipes. 12% is everything else — fire trucks, transit, buses. We're literally talking about Roman-era investment. We're not talking about AI or solar panels — we're literally talking about the same stuff the Romans had to deal with. Roads and pipes. I've seen other cities like Calgary where it's 86%, but every city I've looked at is between 85 and 90%. Roads and pipes. It is literally where we put stuff and how we travel between it. Unless we see that big picture, we'll forever be closing pools and closing libraries and tinkering at the edges. The roads and the pipes are extremely expensive, and that's where we need to focus if we want to get more efficient.
Okay. Your brother-in-law, my good friend and colleague — I feel like he has gotten a little frustrated with me lately, because I used to have a lot of outrage over the wastefulness of our development pattern. I wanted everybody to see this: look, you've got 100 feet between buildings, there's $50,000 in the road that does nothing. What are we doing? I used to have so much outrage over that, and I actually got to the point where I felt like it wasn't healthy for me. I think Norm wants me to recapture that fire in the belly, but you still have a little bit of that. I feel like your book does a really good job of showing that this should tick you off.
In an American context, you've got historically one political party saying we're not taxing people enough, there's money out there we can get and use to solve these problems. Then there's another political persuasion that says government's too lazy and inefficient and bureaucratic — let's run it better, lower taxes, have more growth, we can fix this. I find all of that insane, and when I spend too much time with it, I become a crabby person. I still haven't gotten to the question I want to ask you: is this too big to fix? Do you have outrage, and what do you do with your outrage? I'm suppressing mine. I'm trying to be a more congenial person.
You're doing a great job. Come on, Chuck. I'm faking it. I have a lot of outrage. I just try not to lead with it.
I think it's easy to become outraged when you are focused on your own thing — when you're at home crunching numbers or you're on the internet. It's very easy to become outraged. What's harder is deciding what are we going to do about this? I find that getting out there and talking to people and doing that work is what keeps you grounded and keeps you from turning into a rage ball. It is the stuff that nourishes your soul.
This is one of those major existential crises of our time. Municipal finance — people put it in that little box as if it's disconnected from everything. But it's literally connected to everything we do. When our cities are doing poorly financially, that is reflected in our communities. When people look at crime rates, that doesn't happen in a vacuum. You cut recreation services 20 years ago, and the youth of that time didn't have the recreational activities to keep them engaged or the neighborhood connection they needed to build. Or oh, there's systemic poverty — well, 30 years ago you cut transit, and that eliminated a lot of economic opportunities. It's all connected. It all goes together.
So we can't sort of separate it into a separate box. There's a lot to do, and we can't expect city council to fix this, or the CFO to fix this. It's going to require everybody. We need everybody to do a little part. Back to that garbage example — pick up one piece of trash. Metaphorically, that's how we're going to do it. All these eyes on the street, all these cities built by many hands, as Jane Jacobs has said. That's how we're going to get there. When you're faced with these huge, intractable, big problems, doing those little things and just knowing that you are doing stuff and moving stuff forward is what keeps you sane.
Traffic congestion is the perfect example. People would rather go the long way around, slow and keep moving, than be stuck in congestion going nowhere. Use that to your advantage as a human. Know that you'd just rather take small steps that keep you moving than nothing. That is where we need to get our energy from, and it will be in the real world and in getting things done.
I think if you read my blog from the beginning, it was a lot more sarcastic at first — that was me being too angry. Around 2008 to 2012. I put a lot of effort into making it not be that, because I knew an angry rant would only be read by people who already agreed with me. My goal was to educate people, so I wanted it to be kind of entertaining and fun. I threw in some sarcasm, but really I was looking for humor. My goal was to start educating people, because I find that — Andrew, on the Strong Towns board, said in one presentation on Zoom — he said, your neighbors literally don't think about any of this. It has never entered their consciousness. You think about this every minute of your day. They do not think about this.
That was like a big, oh yeah, that's true. It's easy to be angry because I have seen what I've seen, but who am I angry at — the people who didn't get a chance to dig into it? That makes no sense. Meet people where they are.
Let me ask you this, because this is where I've struggled. You said you've been reading about the brain. I had to take a hiatus and just read books on human psychology and brain development for about 18 months, because I struggled with this — not really who to blame, but where in our decision process did we screw up? There's an anti-car kind of mindset that says, okay, the automobile — it was GM and greed and capitalism. But you go back and look at the stuff in the 1940s and 50s, and nobody had to be talked into wanting to do this. I put myself in the mindset of my grandparents — my grandpa was a Marine in World War Two. He comes home. What does he want? He wants to not be in the Depression. I kind of get why they did this. At what point should this have been obviously bad, and what prevents us from doing things differently today?
We're dealing with complex systems, and yes, as humans it's comforting to try to point out a bad guy — to say, okay, that was the problem, or this person, or this group, or this company. But the reality is it wasn't just one thing. It was a whole bunch of things, and along the way there are a bunch of things that well-meaning people thought were the right thing. Let me give you this one, Mitch, because I watch your country and my country do this differently.
I feel like we in the United States became comfortable with debt much earlier than you did in Canada. But now you have become comfortable with debt in a way that a generation ago you would not have been. I think of my grandfather — he was deeply uncomfortable with debt. Now kids are taking on credit cards and college debt, and debt is just a way of life. We're running trillion-dollar deficits and there's no political constituency that cares — let alone at the local level, where we were just taking on debt that we can't repay. At what point did that culturally become okay? Was it because it had to in order to continue this, or was it something else?
I think it's one of those many things we just got used to. Inertia — humans are resilient. You just get used to what you get used to. It may be shocking at first, and then gradually you boil the frog. Whether it's debt or air quality or people not mowing their lawns — at first maybe you think, I've got to get out there. Eventually you're like, it's not so bad. It's kind of the same thing with everything we deal with in life.
I think debt is part of that. With debt, the thing I find kind of interesting is that, as a society, we don't have a firm grasp on the numbers of anything. There's a bit of that where we just try not to think about it. Part of it is also just necessity — it has happened. I don't think there's an aha moment where that's the bad guy. Even if there was, so what? What's done is done. Where do we go from here?
Here's why I feel like it matters to a degree. To me, it's less about assigning blame than about understanding how — let's use Minnesotans and Canadians. I think well of you, and I think you think well of us. How do good people with good intentions end up here? I want to know that, because I want to make sure it doesn't repeatedly happen. What I have come to is that this is just the nature of human thought.
If there is the illusion of abundance — whether there is abundance or not — if there's the illusion of it, we will act as if it were real. As humans, we're wired to eat the cookies that are sitting on the table in front of us, not store them away for some other day.
I think part of it is being more humble and recognizing that it took a lot of little, uncoordinated actions to get us here. We have this idea that progress is linear, that it always gets better. But sometimes things get worse, and then you have to reset and readjust before things can get better. We've assumed that each generation is better off than the last. Now we're like, oh, that's not really true right now. It's not necessarily that it was planned that way. We've adopted certain procedures or certain ways of doing things that have led us here. We can learn from that and readjust and hopefully get better from there.
There's so much to do, and I feel like just taking a step back is enough for a lot of people to really open their eyes. The idea behind not just my book, but the whole series it's part of — the publisher pitched it to me as, we want to do a book series covering all the different things that have to do with building thriving, sustainable cities, but short books, things that are like a TED Talk but in book format on all of these different topics. You'll read one book on finance or on urban forestry and you'll have a good sense of how that works, but you won't be an expert at it. If you want to become an expert, you'll have to go dig deeper in other sources. But all of these books together will kind of give you this big picture view of how things fit together.
That's the idea, and so far the feedback has been really great. People care. People really do care, but they don't know what they don't know. The fish does not know that it's in water. You take a step back and go, oh yeah, that fish is in water. You can't unsee it even when you go back in the water. There's work to be done by people to connect with neighbors, to connect with people in their towns and communities and cities, to inform and educate — but not in a condescending, let-me-tell-you-things kind of way. In a let's-work-together-on-building-a-community kind of way.
There's a transfer of knowledge, and this doesn't happen overnight. Steering us in a better direction is not going to happen overnight. It's never going to be finished. It's just something we've got to do as responsible citizens, as part of a civilized society. We have responsibilities in addition to being able to benefit from everything we have — responsibilities for how we pay that back and pay that forward.
We're going to take the City of Winnipeg and make it a Roman Tribune type system. You are now in charge and you get a specified period of time, and no one's going to question your decisions. What are the first two or three things you do to put the city on the right path?
Decentralize a lot of things, and bring things back to the neighborhood, street level. There's stuff that can only happen with everybody's help. Even if I was the king of my city, there are no resources to do anything at a top-down level. It all has to start from the bottom, where everybody's doing a little bit. The resources don't exist. We can't be making these big, risky bets on anything, even if I think they're the right things. We have to start small, so that we're going to make mistakes — and so make sure those mistakes aren't fatal. Get everybody involved, because it's impossible for one person or even a small subset of people to get everything done. It's just too complex and there are too many things.
So yeah, I guess my first thing would be to sort of give my crown back. You'd hand me the crown and I'd be like, nope, that's not how we're gonna do this. I think that would probably be the first thing to get done. It's too big for one person. Even if I said let's do these three or four things, there's no guarantee they'd be the right three or four things. Our cities are in pretty precarious places, and we can't risk making big mistakes anymore, because actual people get hurt when that happens.
We try to make things abstract — finance decisions, infrastructure decisions — but these things have real-world impacts on the people that live in our neighborhoods and communities. We have to be very careful that we're doing things in a way that minimizes harm if we're wrong and maximizes wellness if we're right.
I struggle with this, Mitch. I feel like there's a part of me — Tom Fisher, who's the head of the College of Art and Design at the University of Minnesota, said to me once, "Chuck, you guys see the asteroid coming and are trying to seed mammals, and that's what I admire about you." I was like, oh, is that what we're doing? This is kind of going away, and what you're doing at Strong Towns is you're creating the infrastructure that would actually exist in the absence of functional government the way we quasi know it today.
I go back and forth between embracing that idea and thinking that if City Hall just worked a little bit differently — I don't think we can solve all these problems, but I think it could be so much easier and so much better. We could actually seed mammals so much better. Do you sit on that spectrum somewhere?
I'm a why-not-both, Chuck. Why not both?
To bring you back to the asteroid example — people are out there trying to fire a rocket to destroy that asteroid. But you don't need to do that. NASA has actually been doing experiments right now on planet-saving things. What they did is they tried to nudge an asteroid. That's all they needed to do. And they did it — it was successful. That's a completely different approach than trying to destroy it, trying to overpower what we're bringing. When you can nudge something just in a slightly different direction, it has massive impact down the line. A tiny bit of effort to nudge that asteroid, and it'll deviate massively to avoid smashing into the earth.
I think that's kind of both aspects — yes, seed mammals, but also we're going to try to fix the asteroid. We don't need to change a lot of things to have a big impact down the line. We don't need to change them by a lot. We can just change them by a little bit, and tomorrow we change by a little bit again and a little bit again. We are doing both, and I think it's important to do both. But we can't be chasing big, transformative projects — that's the trap we're falling in. We think we can fix big mega-projects with different big mega-projects. That's not how we're going to get there. We need to focus on what can be done today, and do it tomorrow, and do it again the day after.
Dwayne Nickel, who's the CEO of the City of Selkirk — a small city northeast of Winnipeg — they're doing so many things well. His approach, I think, is that he sees his role as kind of a time traveler. His role is to make that one small change today that 20 years down the line will have that big impact. I think that's what we should all be striving to do. And because we aren't actual time travelers, we have no idea what those things are. We have no idea which things we do today are going to have the impact.
I try to repeat that to people oftentimes. What should I do? What's going to have an impact? And I'm like, you don't know. Nobody knows what's going to have an impact. So do the thing that you can. In writing my blog — I've been writing for seven or eight years now — my goal was to educate people in Winnipeg. But the internet being what it is, people outside of Winnipeg started reading and going, oh wow, you're writing about Winnipeg, but this sounds like my city too. I got a lot of people reading from all over Canada, all over the US, people in Australia.
Some of them have emailed me over the years saying, your blog inspired me to run for office, and I won, and I'm on my city council, and here are the things I did, and that's because of you. I wrote some words on the internet and a stop sign was installed in Texas — somebody says that's because of me. But the story I tell is exactly what got me to write a blog — that vote on opening Portage and Main to pedestrians.
I was downtown with my wife on a Friday evening, and there was a table with two volunteers giving out pamphlets on the benefits of pedestrianizing our main intersection. They were just volunteers who thought it was important, and they were the ones who ultimately inspired me. They were doing something, so I should do something. Really, that stop sign in Texas isn't on me — it's on them. But then who inspired them, and who inspired the people before that? You just don't know.
Whenever you write a letter to your councilor, whenever you present a delegation, or whenever you pick up garbage or weed the garden in the park or whatever thing you want to do — you never know who's watching, and you never know who's going to find the bread crumbs you've left behind and be inspired to do their next best thing. You can't predict that. You don't know who's gonna find it and then do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing that's going to ultimately move us forward. So you just have to do all the things. If you're able to do them, do them, because you do not know what impact they'll have, and you don't know which one — if you leave it out — would have been the one. Just do them all.
All right. Last question. I've been looking for the next dispatch from Dear Winnipeg, and there probably won't be one for a while. I think maybe you should just tell a little bit of what's going on — you're a very gifted writer. I love reading your stuff. It's the one blog that I always read. What's going on?
Yeah, well, we're figuring it out. For those who don't follow along — last summer, our city councilor in our area suddenly passed away, and so we had a by-election held. A lot of people approached us to see if me or my wife would be interested. We both said no, but then they came back and asked my wife again. She said no again. They came back again and again and again, and eventually they wore her down. They said, will you run? Please. She said okay. She ran for city council and was elected at the end of October, and she is now city councilor for Elmwood-East Kildonan in the City of Winnipeg.
Because I was writing about the City of Winnipeg, it is a little bit of a weird situation when your spouse is on city council. I think it would hit differently in a way that wouldn't help you the reader, or my wife.
Exactly, and that's the thing — we want to make sure that she can do the best she can without her husband making her job more difficult. Whatever I write, I would want it to have an impact. It is an odd situation to be in, so until we figure it out, we decided to put it on hold. Recognizing that I can continue to do stuff in other cities, as I have been doing — speaking in other cities, helping other cities with finance stuff. I've been doing a bunch of other stuff outside of the city that I'll continue to do and that I enjoy doing, because I know that at least indirectly, I'll be helping my city. If everybody else starts doing the right thing, that's bound to bleed into my city too.
I've also been doing some more low-key stuff. Next week I'll be speaking to a group of future journalists, to give them the skills to better report on city finance in their future jobs. My point was always to educate people, to get them to understand the nuts and bolts of the finances, because to me, the finances give us that bird's eye view into the big picture of why we do anything in a city. I'm really psyched to continue to do that. I may still blog — we just have to figure out what that looks like. For now, you won't find a lot of new content until we do figure that out. We haven't gone away, and we're still doing stuff. If you come across a blog post that you enjoy, please email me — I'm happy to chat.
The regular blog posts as they were before, about the City of Winnipeg — we're moving into a new phase of life on that for now.
So if you are interested, the website is dearwinnipeg.com. You've got a contact button on there if people want to get a hold of you. Is there a better place for people to reach you, or is the website the best place?
The contact form will be the easiest way. I answer every email — sometimes it takes me a little bit of time, but I answer every email. If you have questions or want me to come to your city, I'm happy to do that. Through the website is the easiest. dearwinnipeg.com.
Sounds good. All right. The book is You'll Pay for This: How We Can Afford a Great City for Everyone Forever, and the author is Michel Durand-Wood. You can get the book anywhere you buy books. I highly recommend you go to your local bookstore. If they don't already have it, they can get it in. Otherwise it is available at all the major chains and available online anywhere you buy books. It's also possibly available at your public library, so check there too. In fact, if it's not available at your public library, buy it — it's not expensive — and donate it to your public library so your elected officials can go check it out. That would be really good.
I absolutely recommend that you recommend this book to everybody. You said it's like a TED Talk in a book. I think it is an entertaining read. It's as accessible as a TED Talk. It's not frivolous — it is a very important subject — but you do it in a way that's accessible. If you're an elected official, you should read this book.
That is the goal, right? In the book, I talk about how there's about 0.5% of North Americans who are accountants. Maybe 0.5% of non-accountants understand finance as well. There's like 99% of us who are not accountants and do not have financial backgrounds — that's who this book is for. I want the 99% to be, you know, we're co-owners of our cities. I don't want anybody to be an absentee owner who doesn't understand the finances of their own city.
It's shocking how few skills you need to really get a good big picture view. It's a roughly 150-page book you can power through on a Sunday afternoon. I had a friend who said, oh yeah, I'm reading it on the bus. I talked to him two weeks later, and he said he had to stop reading on the bus because he kept missing his stop.
That's awesome. So yeah, it's meant to be engaging. It's meant to be easy to read. It's meant to be fun, but you'll come out of it, I hope, with a whole new set of skills and a whole new view on your town or your city. I've heard it's a powerful and much-needed wake-up call. Someone wrote that as an endorsement.
Oh, that was me. Thanks. I was really happy to write that.
Michel Durand-Wood, thanks for being on the podcast. We'll talk again soon. Everybody, keep listening and keep doing what you can to build a strong town. We'll chat again soon.
Absolutely. Likewise.
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.