The Bottom-Up Revolution
Discover how Denton mom and civic advocate Lauren Penn turned her front yard into a thriving micro market for local makers and families, all without a big budget. She shares what it took, from permits and vendors to a rainy launch day, and how a small, homegrown experiment can help knit a neighborhood together.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hello, and welcome to this Bottom Up Short. I’m Norm with Strong Towns. One of the coolest things I get to do all the time is connect with Strong Towns members all over who are seeking to take action where they live. Today, our guest is Lauren Penn, who is in Denton, Texas. She is a proud member of the local conversation group there, Stronger Denton, as well as taking on various initiatives within her community, including something I’m really excited to introduce you to: pop-up markets, and the methodology behind setting up simple markets within your own property, on your own turf, and being able to create opportunities for people to start that next increment of opportunity for themselves. Lauren, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
Thank you so much, Norm. I’m really excited to get to talk with you today.
I’m super excited for it. We connected through a discussion with the Stronger Denton group. If anybody wants to check it out, they are one of our Strong Local Conversation Groups. We have a series of stages that we ask groups to work their way through in order to become more and more equipped to take action in the community. Stronger Denton is one of our Stage Four groups. You can visit StrongerDenton.org, and Lauren has been a key part of helping to revive and really bring about a period of renewal for the group as well.
Even before we go into the discussion, I just want to flag: if you’ve ever thought about joining a local conversation group or being part of one, and you feel like you don’t know if you can always be there a decade from now—the truth is, we see people join in and add their skills and their talents. Lauren, you’ve been doing that with Stronger Denton. Do you want to share a little bit about how you came across the group and what you’ve been up to?
Sure. I’ve lived in Denton for about 20 years. I came here for college—it’s a university town about 40 minutes north of Dallas—and my husband and I graduated and stuck around and really put down roots in this amazing town. We are raising a family, and over the past few years, after my girls became of a certain age where they are wanting to explore and walk to school, we ran into a lot of issues with street safety. There was a really bad accident in my neighborhood. The kids in our neighborhood actually have to cross what’s called University Drive here in Denton, but it’s US 380, so it’s actually a TxDOT highway. Over a Christmas break, there was an overturned vehicle in the crosswalk. When I saw that, I think that’s when everything really shifted for me.
I connected with Eric Pruitt, who is one of the founding members of Stronger Denton, as well as Susie Rumor, who eventually became a council member in Denton. I posted something online saying, “This is terrifying. My kids want to explore. I don’t know what to do,” and got connected. I actually started going to the mobility committee meetings. At those meetings there’s opportunity for open comment, and so I shared my story. In that process I got connected more with other people in the city, and I now actually serve on the mobility committee as a citizen, which has been really great.
My advocacy and my heart, really, in one sense, is for street safety—mostly because I’ve got two awesome big kids plus a toddler, and they are trying to navigate this incredible town. As with most cities in Texas, it’s just really not safe for our pedestrians and our children. That brought me to Stronger Denton. I went to one of the first meetups, came home, and told my husband, “I found my people.” I found the people like me who notice everything, who want more for our city, who are kind of this ragtag group of people that care and are doing the work to advocate—whether it’s safer streets, or ADU ordinances (ours just got an upgrade to make it easier), or this idea of building up our small business economy, which is something I’m exploring right now as well.
You’ve set up a site that has some resources—popupmarket.org. Do you want to describe that? I think there’s something really compelling here. We talk at Strong Towns about the high value of many hands being involved in a process or project, or just in the work of making a strong community. This feels like a key part of that. Do you want to describe it?
When I took the deep dive into Strong Towns, I just ate it up. I read and listened to all of the audiobooks through my library—I devoured as much content as I could. I’m learning about incremental development. I hope someday I will be able to do those things, but I don’t have the capital right now to do some of the bigger projects that would provide opportunities for our micro businesses.
Another trend I’m noticing in the past year is there’s been kind of an awakening to how we are a consumer society. A lot of people are trying to back away from giving their dollars to big box stores, Amazon, or online ordering. There’s a resurgence for small businesses—where I even started doing the work of asking, if I want something from a big box store, is there any way I could find it locally and keep those dollars in my town? That’s one of the concepts in Strong Towns.
I started to percolate on this idea. I don’t have a big building to set up a space for micro businesses, but I do have a front yard. That brought me to the question: could I turn my front yard into a marketplace? Could I experiment with creating a micro economy at a neighborhood scale? That brought me to this idea of doing a pop-up market. We did it in October—I started the idea back in July.
I previously, around 2018 to about 2023, my husband and I owned and operated a gourmet popsicle franchise. We had a blast doing it. Part of that was we essentially had an ice cream truck, and I learned firsthand how exciting and exhilarating—but also how challenging—being a vendor is. Sometimes the festivals we wanted to get into, especially in the DFW area, you’re paying $750 just to get in, and then on top of that, at the end of the event, you’re coughing up 20% of your sales. It is a huge risk. As a vendor or small business, you’re thinking you’ve got to go to these big events, but sometimes they don’t even pan out. You’re totally exhausted, or you barely make a profit.
My heart is really for these small businesses in the area—especially the micro businesses, the one-woman show or one-man show that’s just starting off. After we hosted this market in my neighborhood, I thought: we’ve got to make this idea available to other people. So I’m creating a website that will have some free content and free toolkits to help people think through what it takes to do an event like this.
I believe in doing it the correct way—getting the permit, getting the approval of your neighborhood and your city—because these are your neighbors. You want to go about it above board. You don’t want to become the person whose event the neighbors hated. You want to say, “We got the permit. If you have an issue with this event, you need to go talk to the city, because they approved it.”
I’m hoping to do another pop-up market in my neighborhood this spring. I have a neighbor who has offered to host it, which is really cool. What’s cool is that you may have someone who’s got a great front yard but may not have the organizational skills to pull something like this off, and you might be someone who’s really good at organizing—maybe you serve on the PTA, or maybe you’re a business owner, or you just have experience event planning. This could be a partnership where one person is the event planner and somebody hosts it at their yard. I just got an Instagram account called Pop Up Market Makers, and I’ll be documenting our journey of doing another pop-up market in Denton so people can follow along and see what it takes.
There’s so much that’s fantastic about this. One of our most popular articles on the Strong Towns site is about what the city of Muskegon did to establish these chalets. If you search for “Strong Towns Muskegon,” we’ve got articles about the way they created little incubators with storage sheds. One of the things that also stood out to me was the recognition in another Strong Towns article that we sometimes think of food trucks as the first plank of the ladder of getting a restaurant going—but it’s actually a table, either in your front yard or at a community fair. When we think in increments, we need to always figure out what that first increment is. For many people, it’s about setting up an online store, but online stores—like fairs and things like that—come with lots of extra fees and money always being siphoned off. So what does it look like for front yards to be put to useful purposes?
I think there’s also a really important housing element to this. A lot of people on fixed incomes need their housing to actually earn its keep to a certain extent. Their property can be better used if every so often there’s some extra source of revenue coming in, and that can look like this modest way in which a front yard market could help. What are some of the things that were being sold? I want to go down that rabbit hole with you.
There are so many cool things. When I came up with this idea, the next step was: who is going to be at this event? So I put the word out on a couple of Facebook groups in my neighborhood and in some Denton-area Facebook groups. I made a really basic Google Form that allowed vendors to give me their name, the name of their business, and help me understand what they sell. I also asked practical questions like, “Have you ever done a market before?” There is a learning curve, trust me. “Do you have a way to take digital payments? If not, are you willing to look into it?” That’s something I learned over the years as a vendor—you’ve got to give people as many options as possible for payment. You can’t just do cash.
The other thing that was a cool experiment for me was being the event planner and event creator, because I’ve been a vendor so many times. I remembered my pain points as a vendor: usually it was lack of communication, lack of understanding what was expected, and the frustration of, if you’re a dessert vendor selling ice cream and there are four other ice cream or snow cone vendors, that’s really not good for you. As a vendor, that felt kind of rude. But it’s good to have a mix. So I wanted a few food vendors, some merchandise, kids with their own booth, and some services.
We found a fabulous group of folks. We had a barista who was a college student just getting started, so we had hot coffee and lattes. We had a sourdough baker—a grandmother in the area who makes incredible sourdough—and she was able to make everything ahead of time. Those were our main food items. In this process, I learned that with my city, anyone bringing pre-made or pre-packaged food did not need a temporary health permit, but the barista did. Since she was a fledgling young adult getting her business up and going, I hand-held her through it: “You’ve got to contact the city. We want to make sure everything is good to go.”
We had a Mexican artist, a collage artist—two women in my neighborhood. We had a mom with a side gig selling custom stickers. We had a permanent jewelry vendor. We had a florist who brought her bouquets—she has this cool cart where she puts in flowers and people do a DIY flower bouquet. The art teacher at my daughter’s preschool came selling pre-packaged kids’ crafts and was offering free crafts with the kids. One of my good friends, who is a coffee roaster and roasts at his home, brought his packaged coffee. My kids also set up a booth selling their handmade items. It was so incredible to have such a mix.
Here’s the really interesting part: we did all this planning. We hand-painted signs, put out Facebook events, did tons of work, looped our vendors into helping get the word out. We set up even the night before. The morning of, we got the forecast that it was going to be a downpour—and sure enough, after a perfect weather week, it was pouring at one point. Everybody was helping move the coffee cart into the garage. We were gathering under the patio, and I was like, “This is total chaos.” But afterward, we really looked back on it warmly, because my neighbors were literally helping move things in. There’s something tender about those moments—even if something bad happens, to see people scurry and come together. We had neighbors walking in the rain down the street. It was like a vision from a movie.
After the event, I checked in with all the vendors. I said, “This is an experiment. I’m curious to see how much you made.” I was so thrilled that cumulatively, our vendors made $1,500 in three hours in the pouring rain. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re a micro business, $300 in three hours is huge. I walked away feeling like I had just created a micro economy in my front yard—and we’re not even zoned for it. My neighborhood will probably never be zoned for a corner store, and millions of us live in neighborhoods that are a little too far from commercial space. I’m so excited because I think this idea could bridge that gap. We want to have a walkable neighborhood, we want to have a coffee shop—what if you set one up once a week on your front porch? There are so many options.
That’s incredible. As you’ve done this project and it’s inspiring you, what is it that gives you hope in your community as you do this work?
I was so touched to see the families and the kids wanting to start their businesses. We even had a kid bring his self-published book and sell it. Helping my neighbors understand before this event that there is no category for this—even when I was talking to people at the city, they just said, “What are you doing? I’m confused.” It really is an awesome conversation starter to begin layering in these ideas from Strong Towns. I really am a believer now: you can’t have a strong town unless you have a strong neighborhood. How can we strengthen our neighborhood? Some of that is coming together.
I think commerce is actually a pretty safe way for people to come together—versus even a potluck. People know, “Oh, I’m going to come over here, buy something, and then have a conversation.” I’m really excited to see where this goes, to encourage our small businesses in the area, and to help neighbors, businesses, or churches understand they could create a micro economy for the flourishing of our small creators, our bakers.
My hope is that this gives other people in the neighborhood who have always thought, “I would love to start a micro bakery and sell stuff on my front porch” the encouragement to say, “Lauren did that. Maybe I could start by just setting up a table, and then grow from there.” I want it to be accessible. By the way, I didn’t charge booth fees—this was totally free. I was out $100 for the permit with the city and bought a few other things to make the event happen. I just didn’t want any barriers. You could charge $50 or something just to cover the cost of applying for the permit. I’m hopeful that this is going to grow and that it could be something doable for communities like mine.
That’s fantastic. One way to frame it is that you don’t even need to seek to change your entire town—you can just seek to change your neighborhood, and that is part of building a strong town. A strong town is composed of many strong neighborhoods, and we have that within reach. Lauren, it’s so good to hear your story. I’d love to go longer, but we did promise these would be Bottom Up Shorts. If you want to check out what she’s doing, visit popupmarket.org. Can you share that Instagram account as well? Because I know that as people plan their voyage to Denton, they’ll want to time it with your next market.
It’s popupmarket.org, and I’ve got a free checklist on there if you just sign up with your email. I’m not going to do much with it—I just want to be able to stay in touch with folks. The Instagram is called Pop Up Market Makers, and I’m hoping to find other people who might want to become a pop-up market maker. Join us as we host another one. I would love to help connect people and answer questions so they can figure out how to do it themselves.
Lauren, the word that stands out to me as we close is just “renewal.” I feel like you are breathing renewal into community, into civic society, into your neighborhood. That really stands out to me as something that we can all aspire to—and I think we’re all equipped to do as well. Thank you everybody for joining us today for this Bottom Up Short. Thank you, Lauren, for being on the podcast, and thank you to each one of you as you do that hard but necessary work of helping to make your community more renewed, stronger, and more resilient over time. 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.