The Bottom-Up Revolution
Using Woodbury in Moscow, Idaho, as a case study, this conversation digs into how one master-planned neighborhood pursues walkability, mixed use, and everyday community life on the edge of a small town. Builder Levi Wintz unpacks the tradeoffs around density, ADUs, financing, and city regulations, and how the push for a coherent plan meets the Strong Towns ethos of incremental change.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed.
One thing I bet we can all agree on, if you're listening to this show or any of the Strong Towns shows, is that we need an alternative to how we've been designing and building American cities for the past century or so. At Strong Towns, this is really what the conversation is about: we've been doing it this way, it's not working, we need to find new ways to think about our communities.
If you've been around for a while, you know that as part of that solution, we talk a lot about incrementalism. But sometimes it's fun to talk to people who are doing things slightly differently, maybe just to shake things up a little bit. Today, I'm talking to someone who is really part of this mission — really trying to present a different model, a different picture, for what our neighborhoods could look like. He's taking a different approach. Rather than taking the incremental approach, which he might push back on me about a little bit, he's taking more of a master plan approach, which I think is a fun contrast and hopefully makes for a great conversation. He has lots of thoughts to share, as our first conversation already showed, so I'm looking forward to bringing this to our listeners today.
I'm joined by Levi Wintz. He is a developer and builder focused on creating environments that bring people back to what matters most: community, beauty, and everyday life. I love that list. In partnership with his father, he's currently building a walkable community called Woodbury in Moscow, Idaho, through which he's hoping to deliver a new way of life for residents while demonstrating a better model of neighborhood development than what conventional suburban development has offered. Levi is also the host of the Town Builders Podcast, where he sits down with practitioners, town builders, and leading voices in urbanism to unpack the craft of building great places. Levi, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. I'm really looking forward to talking with you.
Tiffany, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
It's really fun saying your name, because it's the name of my little boy. My oldest is named Levi, so when I was on the phone with you the first time — I think you remember — he was underfoot, and I kept saying his name. He kept looking up, very curious about the whole situation. It's a great name.
Levi, I feel like we have so much to talk about. My list of questions is longer than normal, because based on our first conversation there were just so many interesting topics that came up. We'll see how we do — we have a little less than an hour. But let's start off by sharing your story. Your family is originally from California, but you've grown up in Moscow, Idaho. Tell me a little bit about that. What makes Moscow a great town to you — a place to really settle down and invest, to build, to settle your roots? What makes it feel like home?
Moscow is a great little town, and growing up here, I didn't always appreciate it. Growing up in a small town, I always had these ideas that I was going to graduate high school and leave. But Moscow is such a cool little community. It's a college town — about 25,000 to 30,000 people up in northern Idaho — and right next door to us, on the Washington border, is Washington State University in Pullman. So you get all the effects of a college town, but it's actually a great place to raise a family as well. The university keeps enough economic life in the community to keep things pretty steady. It's just a really great place to raise a family — a wonderful community with a beautiful little downtown.
As I've gotten into urban planning and everything we'll talk about today, it's made me reflect differently on Moscow too. It's actually a really cool, unique setup, because it's grown so slowly and organically over time.
I've had the pleasure of visiting Moscow, and it really is a great little place. It almost feels a little Lord of the Rings-ish — a little Hobbit-ish, or the Shire.
It's actually called the Palouse region out here — rolling wheat fields — and especially in the springtime, it's just rolling, rolling green fields. It looks very much like the Shire and feels peaceful, like nothing wrong could ever happen. Unless, of course, you're familiar with Moscow for other reasons. It became famous for some murders that happened here.
I knew about other reasons why Moscow is sometimes in the news, but I didn't realize that particular case was so close to Moscow.
A couple of college students were actually murdered here, and now when I go around the country and tell people I'm from Moscow, about 50% of people say, "Oh, the murder place."
It's like when I moved to Waco — all anyone could think about was the Branch Davidian compound, right?
Exactly. Waco is known for one thing, and you're like, well, that was one thing. It's actually a really cool place.
Tell us a little bit about your journey. You hinted at this earlier — you didn't start out as a builder or developer or interested in urban design. Can you tell us your story? What did you start out with, and what inspired this pivot for you?
My family moved up to Moscow when I was three years old, from California. We were going to a private school here, and when I graduated I went to the University of Idaho, where I ran track and field and cross country. I was studying business finance and really didn't know what I wanted to do with my career.
My dad had been in construction his whole life, and in his later years he had gotten into development — doing construction on small tract developments, then getting into self-storage and office projects around the western states. I grew up watching him do that, and I appreciated the freedom that came with it. I was more inspired by that approach than by a corporate nine-to-five somewhere. So I was attracted to real estate and wanted to go that direction, but still had no real guidance.
When I graduated college with a business finance degree, I ended up taking a corporate sales position. That was a great opportunity, but I knew I didn't want to stay long term. I was really determined to get into real estate in some form or fashion.
I was actually looking at becoming a commercial real estate agent around 2019, my senior year of college. Right around that same time, there was a housing analysis done here in the Moscow-Pullman area, and the results showed we were hundreds of homes in a deficit. On top of that, we were only building about 50 to 60 homes a year in our area, when we could probably be maintaining more like 150. There were just never enough builders.
My dad started thinking about what he wanted to do next — sort of finish his career — and the idea of building a traditional neighborhood, something he had dreamed about for so many years, resurfaced. His work for so long had revolved around projects outside of Moscow, because there wasn't a lot of opportunity here. These two things came together: his dream of building a traditional neighborhood, and the opportunity of, "What could we do in Moscow? Moscow needs a lot of housing." The idea was large enough for me to quit my job and join him on the mission. That's how we got to the point of doing Woodbury.
You use the term "traditional neighborhood," and some listeners might not be sure what you mean by that — in the US, you might be thinking of a normal suburb with a strip mall a ten-minute drive away. You definitely don't mean that. So tell us what you mean by a traditional neighborhood, and why does it inspire you?
When I first heard the term, I was thinking conventional neighborhood, suburban sprawl. But I think it actually comes from something older than that — traditionally, how did we design places? A lot of the traditional neighborhood design approach is really going back to the things we used to do so well before the car. We used to build things on a human scale. Everyone used to live close to each other, walk down to the store, that sort of thing.
Then post-World War Two, we had this economic boom, cars became a lot more frequently used, and suddenly people had the ability to spread out. The car gave us a lot of freedom, but we didn't realize the trade-offs, the freedoms we were losing. That has continued for the past 60 to 80 years, and we've actually outlawed so many forms of development.
So when I use that term, I'm talking about getting back to shady, tree-lined streets where kids can ride their bikes without feeling like they're going to get run over. I'm looking back to historical neighborhoods built before the car — and I think you probably have a neighborhood like this near you.
I think of streetcar suburbs. It's a model of neighborhood that emerged right before cars took over. When I've read about the introduction of cars to the landscape, it didn't happen as fast as most people think. There was a period where cars and public transportation coexisted, and during that period there was this model called the streetcar suburb: everybody had their house and yard, but you could easily walk to the local Main Street and catch a streetcar that ran up that street and could take you to other neighborhoods.
To me, that is the ideal American neighborhood. It captured a perfect synthesis — people were getting the single-family home, but it wasn't without walkability or public transportation. Kids could run down the street to the ice cream shop, and there were layers of density as you got closer to the core.
One of the most interesting things about traditional neighborhood design, for me, is the mixed use — commercial and residential side by side. When you have local businesses you can walk to, it increases your likelihood of running into your neighbors, building social ties with business owners, being able to send your kid down the block. It completely changes your rhythm of life when practical businesses are situated right in the neighborhood, and you don't have to use a car for every single errand. I think that's part of what you guys are trying to do too.
Definitely. I want to be honest with your listeners as we talk about these terms: this is what I do every single day, and I'm still teaching myself. I'm reading books and picking up terms like "traditional neighborhood development." But where we got started was not there — it was essentially, "Hey, we want to build a cool neighborhood." That's where the idea starts: I'm going to build a neighborhood I would want to live in. I have kids. What would be a good neighborhood for kids to grow up in? Those are the sorts of questions we're asking every single day.
It's nice to read books and get theory, and other people have thought about these things and applied names to them, but it was a lot more organic than that. Essentially: I don't like the neighborhoods we're building now, I want to build something cooler and better. It's not like we're inventing something new — we're not following a formula. We're following our intuition in a lot of ways, just trying to build something that's cool and different.
You talk a lot about the past and how certain styles and patterns of development are now illegal. What has it been like for you and your dad as you're building this neighborhood, trying to replicate aspects of neighborhood building from the past but doing it in a totally different regulatory environment?
I think this is a huge part of the conversation around what the future is going to look like for cities. People do like walkable, mixed-use, gentle density — and then you tend to see some tensions. It's either really expensive, or really small scale, or not super connected to the rest of the city. You mentioned in our intro chat that people have to remember the regulatory environment they're working in, and that it really does affect the kind of product that hits the market. Can you talk about what that's been like — trying to bring a historic product to a very modern regulatory environment?
New Urbanism started as a design theory in the 1980s, as a reaction to suburban sprawl, and for several years it existed mainly as an academic design theory. But over the course of 40 years, I've noticed it's begun to trickle into cities. Cities are now hitting the pain point of how we've been designing neighborhoods — maybe it isn't great. Maybe Euclidean zoning, which separates all the uses so that everything has to be an R2 lot with 50-foot road frontage, isn't the right answer. Planning departments tried to become efficient and put everything in boxes, and that was the mindset for so long. I think there is a wake-up happening now where cities have realized the theory, and they're saying, "Maybe we should be doing something different."
That's been my experience, at least. Getting started on something like this begins with a public-private partnership. The city can't develop cool neighborhoods, and you can't develop a cool neighborhood if the city won't give you the permits and ability to do so. How this worked in actuality was just sitting down with the city, and it was evident early on that they really wanted to play ball with us. They were excited for something like this. Moscow had about 30 to 40 homes a year being built by five or six different builders, each building three to five homes. It was incremental, but incremental in the worst sort of way — there was no plan for how things were being built. A street would be extended, 12 lots would be developed, a couple of different builders would pick those off. We weren't necessarily sprawling, but if you fast-forwarded 50 years, it would just turn into sprawl.
That's a good point — when Strong Towns talks about incrementalism, we're often also talking about infill, so not pushing the boundary of the city out, but finding creative ways to infill, build up, or repurpose real estate that has fallen into disrepair.
Right. Moscow has grown at pretty sadly between one and one-and-a-half percent for decades. We know growth is happening, we know we're in a housing affordability crisis in our country, and we know we need to be building new homes. Infill is great, and incrementalism is great, and there's a place for that — but we also need to be building new homes.
The city was ready to talk with us about a master-plan-type community: let's plan how this portion of the city is going to develop in a very thoughtful way. When you're working at the master plan scale, you can actually be really thoughtful. Working at the scale of something like 82 acres — which is Woodbury — the city had really been wanting a second mixed-use area, a second retail area that wasn't the downtown, to pop up. We had a plan to do that.
Through the course of our conversations, we were asking the city for deviations to their zoning code — Moscow calls it a planned unit development. We essentially wrote our own zoning code for the acreage we were taking on. We got it annexed into the city. It was a back-and-forth: "We'd like the street widths this size," and they'd say no. "What about this?" We'd show examples, they'd make concessions: "Okay, we could do that. No, we can't do that. Yes, we can." The attitude I learned from my dad is: you can just ask. Why not? Can we change it?
Do you have a memory of those conversations where you felt like the status quo was being held up for not a very good reason, and where you were able to help present some alternatives?
One of our big wins was around street widths. The street we were tying into was 34 feet, and the city wanted to bring it up to the new standard of 36 feet. We fought tooth and nail to keep it at 34 feet. The next point was: well, the street is actually problematic because it's supposed to have parking on both sides, but no one parks on both sides. So the 20-foot travel lane is effectively a 34-foot travel lane, and people zoom down it. You drive according to your intuition, not the posted speed.
What we did was plant a lot of trees in the parkway close to the street, and then we necked it down — as you enter into the subdivision, it narrows to a 20-foot bottleneck before opening back up again. So when people hit Woodbury, they slow down. You have to yield if someone's coming the other way. The streets will also be more parked up, which will help as well.
You have to talk with the fire marshal — the fire marshal is one of the most powerful people in city planning. You talk with the garbage pickup guys. What are they concerned about? What radii do they need? Can we design around that? It's little wins all the way through. You have to find the people in the city who are going to listen to you and want to play ball. One of the things we emphasized is that we're not looking for workarounds — these questions are not to get around anything, but because we're genuinely trying to find a better way to develop. I think we earned that trust through the process. The city saw that we weren't trying to pull something over on anyone; we just really wanted to do it right.
Were you able to tell stories that helped them connect the dots — helping them move beyond "this is just the rule" to actually seeing the long-term effect of how different rules shape a place, what activities are able to happen there, and who's able to enjoy that space?
The change there is a lot more organic and long term. When we brought up the data on street widths — that narrower streets are actually safer — the old mindset was: cars are going fast, we need to separate pedestrians from the street, we need to make streets wider. In actuality, cars just go faster on wider streets and they're actually less safe. But it got written down in a book somewhere, and most people at the city are in a bureaucracy. They might understand what you're saying, but the book says otherwise. There's a lot of unraveling of code that needs to happen, and it's starting to happen in some ways — but there's still a long ways to go.
I'd love to talk about Woodbury itself a little bit more. Can you give our listeners a picture of what you and your dad are hoping to create?
Woodbury is 82 acres overall — maybe 350 to 400 homes. It's on the edge of Moscow, in what I think is one of the city's largest growth paths and the best piece of land we have, with amazing views of Moscow Mountain. There's a local farming family that owned the property, and my dad had been inquiring for years about acquiring it. Finally when we approached them again in 2019-2020, they were more open than before. We presented the plan, and they said yes — "I think you're actually going to develop this land the right way, and we'd partner with you to do that." They cared about Moscow and how it was going to build out. That partnership was great and well-needed.
Woodbury itself is designed to be insular in the sense that we want to simplify daily life. From the outside edge to the very middle is about a five-minute walk. The five-minute walk is discussed a lot within New Urbanism — you want to be within a five-minute walk of your daily needs: going to the coffee shop, getting your eggs and milk from the market, that sort of thing.
We've become so dependent on our cars, but I think walkability is how we're engineered to live. Being able to cut out five daily car trips a week because you can just walk to your local market gives a lot of life back. That walking also creates the opportunity for community. If you're walking, you're running into your neighbors. We're engineering interactions — not signing people up for mandatory community events or telling them they have to know their neighbor. People just naturally run into each other based on how the site is laid out. This is why urban planning and site planning matter so much.
At the center is our mixed-use town center, and rolling out from that we transition through several different product types: attached townhomes, cottage homes, single-family homes we're calling garden lots, and then on the outside, estate lots that match the density of the surrounding neighborhoods we're tying into. We wanted to gradually get smaller and gradually get more dense as you move toward the middle.
The other unique thing about Woodbury, if you're looking at the site plan, is that it's very curvilinear. We don't have any sort of grid happening within Woodbury. We want everything to be on what's called diminishing views — as you're walking or driving down the street, you're constantly exploring. Every step you take, you're revealing something new ahead. Our site planner, Lawrence Kumar, is a renowned town planner who has done a lot of great projects, including Seabrook, Washington, which was one of our models when we were getting started. He designed an amazing site plan.
One of the things we really wanted him to include was what's called a pocket neighborhood. If your listeners are familiar with pocket neighborhoods and Ross Chapin — that was one of my dad's original passions. We've gotten to talk with Ross on a number of occasions. We did a couple of pocket neighborhoods leading up to Woodbury as we were testing our palate and building out our construction team. The site plan itself is actually four different pocket neighborhoods in four different quadrants, with a greenbelt connecting all of them together. A lot of the homes in Woodbury front directly onto a park or a pathway, and we have miles of trail and pathway cutting north, south, east, and west and in big circles around Woodbury. It's just going to be a really fun place to live and to explore.
I mentioned in the introduction the tension between the incremental approach and the master plan approach. How do you process that? Some people might push back a little on the master plan approach. How do you synthesize that, or what would be your response?
I say: yes, do it all. We're in an affordability crisis in this country, and one of the big issues is supply. Any supply added to the market will help with pricing — that's basic economics. We need to add supply in whatever way that is, whether that's infilling, adding ADUs, going up, retrofitting suburbia. There are so many people doing so many cool things within this space.
But where I came into this was looking at the national builders and what they're doing. Stopping our model of conventional neighborhood development — of suburban sprawl — seems like a primary issue to solve. We can be bandaging up suburbia and infilling and doing all these things while continuing to just bleed on the edges and sprawl into the countryside. We need a new model of neighborhood development. Something needs to be shown of a better way of doing things — and honestly, within a capitalistic setting. I would love to develop Woodbury and have it be a model showing, "You can develop a neighborhood a different way and still make just as much money, and it's more beautiful." That needs to be proven.
We're greasing the skids in one direction, and I want to prove a different way of doing it and stop the bleeding. Then from there, we can work backwards and start healing the interior of our cities. Having people focus on several different areas is important.
What has the financing side been like for your project? Have you had to interact with banks? To what extent has your vision for this community been easy or difficult to finance?
We bought the land and did the initial phases of infrastructure with equity. That's really important for several reasons. The scariest part as a developer and builder is getting overleveraged and then not being able to weather a market turn — it's a story as old as time. A developer starts in the first phase, takes on too much debt, and someone else picks it up for cents on the dollar and finishes the project. They're actually the ones who make the money on it. We don't want that to happen.
Additionally, the vision is a very long-term vision. The difference between what we're doing versus a conventional approach is that developers often look at a piece of land and ask: how many lots can I get out of this? How much money can I extract? At Woodbury, we looked at it differently — there's a master plan here, there's a lot of land, and if we do things right, put a lot of effort and quality in, build nice parks and good amenities, there's going to be an annuity here to reap. The idea was building equity into a place rather than extracting it. Every house we build should add to the value of Woodbury, add to the value of the place, rather than trying to build as many homes as possible and get out quickly.
We're holding ourselves to really high standards, because if we don't pull off what we're setting out to pull off, we have the most to lose.
One of Strong Towns' main arguments about new development is that cities should aspire to only take on developments that can pay for themselves in terms of infrastructure. What conversations have you all had about trying to set Woodbury up to be a sustainable development — one that's not perpetuating the same poor fiscal practices of investing heavily in infrastructure without enough tax revenue to cover the additional costs the city takes on?
What you're talking about is really a density issue — do we have enough density of lots to pay for the public infrastructure?
Yeah, exactly.
Cities have run into this problem without realizing what they were doing — building infrastructure, putting down quarter-acre lots, and 40 years later being unable to perform maintenance because the tax base from that street isn't paying for the cost of upkeep. We actually have an example right nearby Woodbury: a street we're about to tap into that was built a little over 40 years ago and has barely been maintained since. The city is in a difficult situation with their streets and maintenance budget. They don't have a large enough budget to do all the repairs they know they need to do. They're waiting for a private developer like us to tie into that street and partner with them on improvements.
Whatever we pay as a developer gets passed on to the home buyer, to the citizens — and that's where the housing affordability issue comes in too. It's a self-perpetuating cycle: poor development practices have led to these affordability issues, and it's going to take a long time to get out of that cycle. But I think places like Woodbury, where we've been really thoughtful about the development, are maximizing land use and being good stewards of the land, the resources, and the public infrastructure — and making sure there's actually a plan to pay for it long term.
Talk to me about affordability. Has that been a criticism or concern you've run into, and how do you approach it?
When we first showed our renderings — my sisters Harvey and Points are the architectural designers for the project, and they've produced some beautiful work — at the city meetings, a lot of the public criticism, outside of traffic and water and infrastructure concerns, was: "This is going to be a gated community. How is this going to solve the affordability issue?" It's sad that beautiful design automatically leads to those connotations. We've completely lost that pride in America of investing in place.
Woodbury is a step-up product — Moscow has never really had a step-up product for people to move into, and that was a big gap we felt we could fill. We're also doing custom homes and are determined to build smaller square-footage homes. As a builder, I know why builders build 2,500 to 3,000 square foot homes: they make a lot more money. It's really hard to build a 1,000 to 1,200 square foot house, because all the same guts are in there — but this is one of the things that has driven our affordability issues. Builders are building one type of product because it has the highest profit margin.
Over the last 60 years, the average home built went from 1,400 square feet to over 2,400. Meanwhile, family size has gotten smaller, but houses have gotten bigger. Back around 1960, the largest demographic in America was families — somewhere around 30% or so. Now families are the third largest demographic, behind singles and empty nesters, and we're still building primarily the same product. Our standards of living have continued to climb. Everyone wants a two-car garage, a commercial kitchen, three bedrooms at minimum. I do self-reflection on this too — this is just the American consumer mindset, and I'm not pointing fingers. But we're trying to build some of these homes differently: a 1,200 square foot home with a carport instead of a garage, with nice finishes and high build quality, because we want something that stands the test of time. My hope is that Woodbury doesn't just maintain its value — I want it to be better 100 years from now than it is today.
How do you design for agility or adjustment down the line? Let's say 20 or 30 years from now, those custom homes — nobody can afford to live in them, or nobody wants to. Is that the kind of scenario where your zoning code could allow for, say, infill? Because I think this is one of the tensions of the master plan approach: it still has that principle of "built to a finished state." But the whole nature of cities is that they're constantly evolving. How do you hope that principle of constant evolution can be integrated into a master plan — or can it?
Whenever you're rezoning a new piece of land, there has to be an underlying zoning code, and this is where the problems start — we have really bad zoning codes. R2 lets you build this type of box, R3 lets you build a multifamily box. In doing a planned unit development, you can think about it and design something that feels a lot more organic. Now, we know it's not truly organic because it's master-planned from the onset. You have to choose some way of doing it.
One criticism I got early on was from a guy who said, "I hate what you guys are doing out there." In talking to him, his solution was that everyone should just live in the historic Fort Russell neighborhood — Moscow's historic neighborhood. My response: that's limited space. I agree that it's a beautiful neighborhood and we should strive toward that, which is exactly what we're doing at Woodbury. We want to design a neighborhood that will stand the test of time and actually get better over time. But you have to start somewhere. The trees start off small — in 100 years, I hope they look like the trees in Fort Russell, four feet in diameter.
My other answer to the organic question is that every single day, my dad and I are making little decisions and tweaks to the master plan, to each home — custom-fitting everything within Woodbury. We just finished a replat cycle that took about a year. Through that first year of building, we were learning and realizing, "Hey, we actually want to do this differently." Some of what we did was cutting up lots: we took two lots and turned them into four, then took those four and turned them into a little nine-home pocket neighborhood. We took a bigger lot and made it smaller lots. It was painful because it took so much time, but that actual organic process of constantly tweaking and refining through a 20-year buildout is what I think is going to make Woodbury feel really unique when it's all done.
Is there a way to bake that into what Woodbury is for the long term — a place that can keep adjusting over time? Or is that one of the limits of this approach, where it's genuinely hard to master-plan for constant evolution?
A couple of things. One, we're trying to be very intentional with land use — starting with road frontages, we want all the space to be filled up and used. We're not creating huge front yards or huge backyards. We're maximizing all the land within Woodbury. Every single lot has been approved to have an additional dwelling unit, and we're adding that on about a third of the lots. Over time, individuals can remodel and add an ADU if they want extra space, a rental property, whatever they need.
We're also designing the town center right now, and it's really hard to gauge how successful it's going to be — though I think it has to be successful for Woodbury to be successful. We're thinking carefully about the programming and also about the lifespan of the town center: what are the different evolutions it's going to go through, and how can we create enough flexibility for it to grow over time? Creating live-work units is one way: we have a lot of live-work units that will just be townhomes from the beginning, but if someone in the future wants to convert the ground floor into a business, they have the option to do that, because the underlying zone is there.
What about density? Have you thought about the possible need in the future to build up more within Woodbury?
We're going to hit a pretty dense feel already in the neighborhood. There may be options in some areas to densify further, but the hope is to nail it from the beginning and say: this is the right density for the surrounding area.
It's such a fun tension you're in, because it's obvious you admire and respect so much about how cities have evolved over time, and yet you're also trying to create a coherent neighborhood. You look at a place like Manhattan — it's just kept densifying as it becomes more valuable — but not everybody wants that level of density. How do you wrestle with the question of what kind of density is enough?
My last question: how do you see Woodbury situated in relation to the rest of Moscow? It's not close enough to the downtown to walk there, correct?
It's maybe two and a half miles from the main street downtown. Moscow just has a phenomenal Main Street and one of the best farmers markets I've ever been to. Moscow has this really incredible community feel that's already there, and marketing-wise, one of the main things we want to tap into is: all the things people love about Moscow, Woodbury does those things really well. The amazing little Main Street town center? We have that. The amazing community? We have that.
So you're trying to build a Shire within the Shire.
Exactly. Moscow has its downtown, and then it's surrounded by quadrants: the historical neighborhood, the University of Idaho, the mall and heavy commercial, and another strip mall on the other side of town. Everything is pretty centered around that downtown. Where we're building is actually the furthest from any commercial area in the city, so we have the opportunity to not only serve people at Woodbury but also the surrounding neighborhoods. I think Woodbury will become a secondary destination — another Main Street that people go to.
We have a beautiful central park planned with a horseshoe town center and a little church planned at the center as well. That's a traditional way neighborhoods and villages were built — centered around a church that provides the spiritual or cultural grounding for the community, and it'll be a beautiful architectural piece too. We need to develop what I'd call nodes, or hamlets, or village-scale urbanism. These places are comfortable. If you want to drive downtown, you can. If you need to go shopping, you can. But you should have options scattered throughout the city to walk there if you want.
That reminds me of the chapter in A Pattern Language about how each neighborhood needs its own little Main Street — you don't necessarily need everyone coming into downtown. The node approach can work really well. It sounds like you all are developing another node for the city.
Levi, that's all the time we have today. I'm going to wrap up and ask you to share some places you love and recommend for people to check out if they come to visit Moscow.
Well, there's a really cool development happening called Woodbury that you should definitely come out and see! But there are so many great businesses downtown. Two of my favorites that come to mind: one is Humble Burger — smash burgers, the best burger I've had. And then Bootsers, which is a really great coffeehouse and pub. It's one of those rare places that has leather chairs and a big central table — it's a coffeehouse, so they're open early in the morning, and they're also open until 11 o'clock at night, with music on the weekends. It's just a great community-type place. Moscow punches above its weight as far as food and culture, so it's certainly worth visiting.
I second that — it's a beautiful town. Levi, thank you so much for coming on the show to share your story and your vision with me and with our audience. I really appreciate it. You've given me a lot to think about, and I'm inspired to keep tabs on what you all are doing and hopefully make it up there again one day. Thank you.
Thank you for having me, Tiffany. I hope the listeners got something helpful out of it.
Thank you so much for joining me for another conversation. We found out about Levi because somebody nominated him on the suggested guest form, so I want to give a reminder that we have that form in our show notes. If there's someone in your community who you think I should have on the show, please let us know. We'll put links to Levi's work, to Woodbury, and to his podcast in the show notes so you can check those 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.