In Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, housing debates are tied to favorite trees, familiar views, flood scars, and whether younger residents can afford to stay. Planning commissioner and neighborhood organizer Taylor Lightman talks about what it’s like to rewrite zoning in the same place you grew up. He explains how a housing committee rallied around ADUs, why they rolled back strict parking and owner‑occupancy rules, and how they worked through worries about students, flooding, and change itself. The conversation paints a detailed picture of housing reform in a small town that wants to welcome more neighbors without losing its character.
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of The Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens. I am taking advantage of a rare day in Waco, Texas, that it's not 99 blazing degrees outside, and I'm actually recording this podcast outside. You might hear birds in the background, maybe you'll hear some children off in the distance, hopefully nothing more disruptive than that. It's a slight deviation from normal preceding procedures. Thank you for your grace with that.
I am excited to bring you a conversation today with our guest, Taylor, and he's going to be talking to us about a part of the work of advocating for a stronger town that maybe isn't the more glamorous side. There's a lot of talk about what good design looks like, which can be really inspirational and really help you see your community in a new way, which is awesome. There's a lot of conversation about policy, which is a really important part. There's conversation about finance, which is not the easiest topic to wrap your mind around, but also really important.
But at the end of the day, you have to take all this content in and then figure out how to apply it to your specific context and actually make change happen. That part of the process is slow. It can be frustrating. It can also be really rewarding. That's really where you have to pay attention to the unique intricacies of your community and the people that you're working with, and figure out how to have conversations about the past, the present, and the future in a way that can help your town actually move towards policy changes or design changes that can help them become a better place. That's tricky because it means helping people emotionally detach from the way things have been and start to understand and connect with the vision of how things could be, which I can imagine is just really tricky.
Our guest today is going to be talking to us about that. Taylor Lightman resides in his hometown of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he serves on the planning commission and on the board of Lewisburg Neighborhoods and Elm Street Organization, dedicated to neighborhood revitalization. Since 2021, he's been working on zoning reform to help his borough become a place where more young people like him can afford to live. He's going to be talking to us about that. Taylor, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you so much for having me, Tiffany. It's a pleasure to be here.
So, tell us a little bit about your hometown. I've never been to Lewisburg. What do you appreciate about it?
Lewisburg is in central Pennsylvania. We're a smaller town in the Appalachian Mountains, on the banks of the Susquehanna River. It's a university town — Bucknell University is there — and there are about 5,000 people that live in the borough of Lewisburg, and about 18,000 people that live right around Lewisburg. It's a small community, and one of the things that I love about it is there's just a great community spirit of involvement and interest in town affairs. It's the type of community where people can decide to have a slow roll or a tree club, get the word out, and then we have a tree club. There are lots of little niche communities and interests, and I love it so much.
You took some time away and then came back. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey you've been on?
I moved away from Lewisburg when I graduated from high school and couldn't wait to leave. I went off to school at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and then I pursued a grad school program where I got my master's at Lund University in Sweden. I lived there for a couple of years, and then in 2021 I decided to move back. I got a job as the neighborhood revitalization coordinator for the community, and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I'm always fascinated by — I don't know if you'll catch this reference — "there and back again" stories. What stood out to you when you left and then came back? Was there anything in particular that helped you appreciate your town more, or that maybe you saw in a new way?
When I was growing up, I lived outside of the town in a smaller community called Winfield. What I really appreciated about Lewisburg, coming back to it, was the walkability and the bikeability. I picked those up along the way in my journeys — my love of cycling. Being able to come back and really go about my business and do everything I needed to do throughout the day on foot or by bike was really important. It was especially important when I moved back, which was still during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having close amenities and outdoor resources, like hiking — there are tons of state parks and state forests around me. I didn't do that stuff as much when I was growing up, but I sure enjoy it now as a young adult.
I'm just curious about Sweden. We hear a lot about Amsterdam, but what was your experience like there from that perspective?
That's a complicated story that probably deserves its own podcast, whether or not Sweden is bikeable. But something I loved dearly about my time in Sweden was the transit rideability. I became a really avid bus rider, train rider, and light rail rider.
Something I took away was that oftentimes in America we have the impression that we can't have that here, especially in rural areas. But something I enjoyed greatly was being able, during the pandemic, to take the bus out into rural areas, go hiking and camping, and then come back — no need to have a car. You can do that. Train, bus, and light rail service is regular, frequent, and affordable for folks. That was a big transportation takeaway for me.
Can you share a little bit about your professional background, and how did you end up in the line of work you came into when you came back to the States?
My arc of interest in this sort of thing came from a very early age. I was very interested and inspired by the climate movement, and through that I got involved in political campaigns. Then I became disenchanted with the political process, skeptical that it could address our climate issues. That's how I decided to go to grad school. I got a degree in disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, and I've really come to understand that addressing these things through urban planning, design, and neighborhood revitalization is the way to go. If people can live and thrive in well-designed communities, that's a way to show folks that there is in fact enough for everybody, that we all can do better when we all do better, and that people can do big things when we come together and work on common goals.
Can you share a little bit more about your work on neighborhood revitalization? Maybe you can tell us the story behind that work. Is it post-industrial and still trying to come back from that? How would you frame it? What are the neighborhoods struggling with?
Lewisburg is a unique community, and I'm really standing on the shoulders of giants here. The work to start Lewisburg Neighborhoods, which is the organization that I was the director of for a couple of years, began in the early 2000s, and it was really to address flooding and livability concerns in a particular neighborhood in downtown Lewisburg.
Lewisburg does have a history of moving from industry to more service sector roles, which I think has contributed to a less resilient economy. But we definitely don't struggle from the same kind of woes that you hear about from other towns throughout the country, specifically in the Midwest. A lot of our neighborhood concerns are about livability, bikeability, and walkability. Flooding is a big threat to our community living on the banks of the river, and there's great work to be done still addressing that.
I would love to hear a little bit about how you heard about Strong Towns and what your journey has been like thinking about housing and taking on the work of helping your borough embrace zoning reform.
I've been thinking about this question. As a young person interested in urban planning and design and local issues, I found Strong Towns a long time ago — so long ago that I don't remember exactly when — but Strong Towns has been a really strong presence in my education and my life for a long time. I'll give a special shout out to the video collaboration that Strong Towns did with Not Just Bikes. That video series is one of my favorites. It's something I come back to all the time. There's always new things in there to learn, and I've shared it with lots of people as we've talked about housing.
I think Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes does a really good job of explaining the growth Ponzi scheme and advocating for walkable, bikeable cities with dense urban cores. What's interesting is that I initially came at these same conclusions from a livability perspective and a conservation and environmental protection lens, while Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes comes at it from more of a financial perspective — from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. I love it when people reach similar conclusions for different reasons.
Growing up in a town close to a river — do you feel like that was part of what shaped your interest in disaster risk management? What must it have been like living so close to a river, always with the awareness that a flood could happen?
We had a big flood in 2011, but quite honestly it was through really deep organizing work that my predecessor, Samantha Pearson, did to bring flood awareness and flood mitigation into the Overton window for our community. A lot of times people flood and then want to forget about it and move on, and that's not the resilient thing to do. But I think that's kind of a natural response.
You can see an overlap between the Strong Towns emphasis on financial resilience — it's really something you can ignore until it's in your face.
I just want to say that I think that's actually a natural response to trauma. I'm not criticizing it — I just think that's what people do.
That's one of the biggest hurdles — with the housing conversation, the transportation conversation, the safe streets conversation, with any of them. One of the biggest hurdles is a rational avoidance, almost. It's always tricky when you're talking about a problem that doesn't feel urgent to people. When you're talking about a challenge and saying, "Hey, we need to face this," but it doesn't feel urgent — in the reform space, that's one of the biggest psychological hurdles to work around. How do we help people see the urgency and the necessity of facing these challenges, even though they don't feel urgent in a visceral way right now?
There's a really natural disinterest — a disinterest in change. People don't like to change, and I think that's really innate in us. But part of the work is helping people recognize that change is in fact an inevitable part of life. If we aren't proactive about the changes that we want to see in our communities, the changes that end up happening will likely be disadvantageous or worse, whether through entropy or a continuation of the policies that continue to give us sprawling communities that slowly over time bankrupt our towns.
Let's talk a little bit about what you saw when you came back, and how you decided to translate that into working on zoning reform. What were you seeing? What connections were you making? How did you get to the point where you said, okay, we need to fix our zoning?
As the neighborhood revitalization coordinator, housing is absolutely in our wheelhouse, and we had a housing committee for a long time. I took some of the things I was seeing in Sweden and was very inspired by the frameworks from Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, and all of these really cool urbanist platforms, and tried to apply those frameworks to our borough.
Through that, we reformed our housing committee, which consisted of the neighborhood reorganization committee that I was on, members of the borough government, our mayor, and our downtown business district alliance. We all came together and spent about half a year really diving deeply into the issue of housing and how we could make it more affordable while preserving the small-town charm that people really love about living in Lewisburg. How do we add more housing, make it more affordable, while preserving the charming small-town feel? We came up with a huge list of potential solutions, and we ended up prioritizing working on accessory dwelling units because it seemed like something that everybody could really get behind — lower-hanging fruit.
From there, we tried to do a bunch of research: what are accessory dwelling units, what are ADU rules across Pennsylvania, and how could we adopt them? I called a bunch of people from neighboring municipalities and municipalities across the commonwealth, talked with their zoning officers, saw what was successful and what was not, and then we took a sample ordinance that we got from the Montgomery County Planning Commission and got to work with our planning commission.
A general takeaway for me from all this is that you have to contextualize everything into the specific community, because every community is unique and has different challenges. For us it was really important that we didn't allow basement dwellings and had pretty strict flood requirements because we struggle with flooding. We really workshopped what kind of size they could be and what the occupancy limits were.
We also came to the conclusion that we did not want these to be student rentals, because we wanted these to be places where more permanent residents could live — we wanted to really tackle the affordability issue. Lastly, something I had heard and read about a lot was owner-occupancy requirements, which we decided against, because we wanted to make sure this could be as broadly applicable as possible. Only about 5,000 people live in the borough of Lewisburg proper, so we wanted to make this broadly applicable.
We did all of that through consensus-based decision making, which is very hard to do — to get everybody on the same page. Then we did some test cases to see if our zoning change could result in accessory dwelling units being built, which I would also recommend to anybody pursuing zoning changes: make sure you're testing constantly to make sure what you're thinking about and doing in public meetings actually works for homeowners and developers trying to do it on the ground.
And basically you figured out it was completely unfeasible to build an ADU in Lewisburg with your current parking requirements, which would have mandated two car parking spots per dwelling unit — which is kind of insane to ask of anybody if you think about it. So you had to sort of go back to the drawing board. Did you lock in, though?
We locked in. We looked at the data and found that actually the majority of households have no cars or one car per household, so it seemed kind of ludicrous to ask them at a minimum to have two car parking spots per household. We were able to reach consensus on that, so that was an exciting win.
All in all, the writing of the ordinances took about a year, and a lot of that time was spent reaching a decision that we all had consensus on. We did do a public hearing about it, and actively communicated with the newspapers and folks about it in town through our email listserv.
I actually don't think that's a bad timeline. That sounds quick, I think, in the city world.
It was quick, and we were dedicated. A year was good because we had a lot of public meetings about it, there was enough communication, and there was an opportunity for people to have input on it.
You said something at the beginning where you mentioned bringing frameworks from Strong Towns and your time in Sweden and trying to apply them. Can you talk to us a little more about that? Maybe give us one example of what a framework was that you felt you could use to improve the conversation around housing.
The concept of missing middle housing has been really big and important for me and others who are decision makers in Lewisburg. The concept of the growth Ponzi scheme is also one that's really important in how we've thought about making changes. We all essentially agree that we need more housing, we need housing to be more affordable, and that we want to prioritize housing in more dense areas so that we can make our town more walkable and bikeable.
Those kinds of frameworks and ideas are nearly universally held amongst the decision makers in Lewisburg. I think those frameworks can be traced back to Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes, but it's also people's lived experiences of what they themselves enjoy about living in Lewisburg — that you can walk and get an ice cream cone at the end of the day, that you can bike to the farmers market, that you have close relations with your neighbors, that you can go across the street and get a cup of sugar, whatever.
You mentioned the word "consensus" a lot. What was navigating those conversations like? How did you help this group of people reach consensus? Were there any serious challenges, trade-offs, or compromises you had to make? How did you approach that all-on-board mindset and actually achieve it?
There are compromises involved in every type of decision making, and I think that's a beautiful thing. It's part of what living in a democracy is all about. Is my gold standard of what every town should have in its ADU and parking requirements exactly what we ended up with? No, it's not. But it's the best decision for Lewisburg. We had a bunch of people who, and I don't mean this in a bad way, talked it to death — talked about every scenario: "What if this happened, what would this mean in this circumstance?"
Some people would view that negatively, but I actually came to really appreciate that people were genuinely engaged and interested in thinking about all of the externalities of change. That's an incredibly important part of the process. The irony is that zoning exists in the first place because of externalities, so zoning reform still requires the same thought process — but it's moving in a different direction. Historically, I think zoning was more about keeping cities from changing too much. The interesting thing about zoning reform is that we're using the same tools, but we're trying to use them towards helping cities be more agile, flexible, and able to respond to the pressures and the constant reality that change will always be here.
What were some of the concerns or pushback you heard from the community, and how did you navigate those conversations?
Something that I love about living in a small town is that we all have many different hats, but we're all neighbors first. If you say something somewhat heated to somebody in a public meeting on Wednesday night, you'll probably be in line behind them getting coffee on Wednesday morning. That mindset really helps this process.
There has been a little bit of pushback on accessory dwelling units — not in mass about the idea of them, but sometimes on specific projects we've seen at the planning commission. In bigger places you could perhaps dismiss this as NIMBYism, but I've always really relished and appreciated the folks who come to talk about their concerns, because they often point to real fears that are actually very legitimate, whether it's about flooding, loss of open space, or loss of a special tree. I have special trees in the community that I love and would hate to see go.
Hearing people out and understanding their concerns — which are oftentimes really valid — is part of co-governance. There's nothing special about me because I'm on the planning commission or the neighborhood board. This is co-governance. Sometimes the goal in those meetings is to hear folks out and point them to other things the government is doing to alleviate concerns about flooding or loss of the urban tree canopy. Sometimes it's actually, "Oh, that's a great idea — we should request this change to the project being proposed."
Giving people grace and understanding that they're coming to you in their free time to engage with government because they trust in the process — that's a precious, invaluable thing. The goal is to listen with an open mind and try to parse out if this is a reasonable thing to ask for this project, or whether we can find ways to address their concerns in other ways, plug them into resources, or perhaps invite them to join a board. We always need new people.
That's such helpful advice. In the housing conversation, it can be really easy to group people into YIMBYs and NIMBYs and automatically assume that everything a NIMBY says is just NIMBYism — put it in a big bucket and dismiss it. But what we were talking about earlier is that people do bond to places, even their neighbor's backyard, even if it's not that great from a Strong Towns perspective. People do feel connected to their places, and change is emotional and personal, even down to a tree.
Losing a cornfield can be emotional for someone, even if it's for a better outcome — even if allowing that cornfield to be turned into housing is going to put your city in a more resilient direction. People are not necessarily emotionally connected to the possibility of a resilient future. They might be more emotionally connected to that cornfield at this point in time. Having that mindset — realizing that things people might be saying, we might not necessarily agree with, we might even see as silly, or as "your concern is not really going to help us become more resilient" — but seeing them as a human being and realizing that people attach to place, they attach to all kinds of things. No matter if you're trying to move your city into a more resilient direction, it's still change, it's still hard, and it still requires giving people time and space to process the trade-offs they might have to accept.
I really agree with what you said. One of the things I love about working at the local level is the time I get to spend talking with all of my neighbors. You often find that people have really incredibly unique and complex views about the world and about their lives. The grouping isn't helpful or productive, and approaching these issues with an open mind is the way to go.
Even good change is hard. Helping people understand that change will happen, but that we get to help control whether that change is good or bad — if we do nothing, things will still change for the worse. Pick the change you want. The thing we need to do as leaders in our towns and cities is to be proactive about the changes we want to see in our communities and communicate about why these changes help promote dense, walkable neighborhoods and the preservation of farmland and green space. "Yes, I understand you might be upset about a new garage with an apartment above it in your view, but what we're trying to do is make our towns more dense so that we don't sprawl out and create financial and environmental woes for the future."
Another part of that responsibility is helping people articulate the vision of their community that they want to see happen. Doing this in simple ways — like asking, "Fifteen years from now, tell me what you want to be seeing in your town. What are the activities you want to see happening? Who are the people you want to see here? What do you want your town to be known for?" Really inviting people to daydream a little bit. Do you want to see children skipping down the street on a summer night to get ice cream? If you want to see that, let's work backwards from that vision and talk about the specific things we need to do to make sure it can happen.
People get attached to the present, maybe to the past, but they can get really excited about the future if it feels like a future they want and a future they can help create. Allowing people to do that kind of vision-casting and daydreaming can be a way to help them reallocate their emotional energy from holding on so tightly to the way things are — or to their resistance to change — and start to invest it in a vision of what the future could be.
I just want to point out something you said that I thought was really interesting. You talked about how, when you're working at the local level in a small town, you might be standing behind that person who gave a comment in the coffee line the next morning. That never happens at the state or federal level. Advocating for change really is most effective at the neighborhood level, partly because of the proximity we have to each other — it tempers the way we show up to these conversations, simply because we might run into each other in a different context. We want to preserve that connection we have as neighbors.
So you were able to write the ordinance, you had the parking reform piece, and now you've been able to see: okay, we got the policy actually changed. But now is the part of the process where we're seeing what it's like on the ground. Is it being upheld? Is it being enforced? I think this is the part of the process that doesn't have that much visibility — after the ribbon cutting. You've done all this work, reached consensus, written an ordinance, tested it, gotten community input, realized you also needed to change parking reform. Now it's done, it's written, it's passed, and it's supported. What has your experience been like, and what have you learned about meaningful ways to continue the conversation and show up after you've done that part?
This would be one small critique that I have — maybe not of the Small Towns approach, but certainly of my own naivety: I had the idea that you just change a couple lines of code and you'll make your town a better place. That's not the way it works.
The reality is that parking is completely embedded in the zoning code, and it's not just changing one line. You have to go in, control-F the whole thing, find all of the instances of parking, parse out whether or not they're applicable, find all of the other sections that reference the parking ordinance, and see how they need to be changed or updated to reflect the new guidance. And then comes the hard work of implementation.
I'll never forget being at a zoning hearing board meeting where there was a proposed arts-based preschool in our downtown, and our zoning officer — who I really admire and respect — was testifying that they needed to have certain numbers of parking requirements. Fortunately I just happened to be there, and I was able to go over to him and say, "Hey, I think you're actually interpreting this wrong. We got rid of our commercial parking requirements. There are no parking requirements for this." It was not a malicious mistake — it was an earnest mistake. He had grabbed the old binder off the shelf and was interpreting it that way because that was what was sitting there in front of him.
That could have easily caused the arts-based preschool to need to do something that might have made the whole project not happen. Somebody would have gotten discouraged, even though it was a clear mistake on our part. Being there, being active, being present, making sure that the ordinance is enforced in the way that it was written — there's a long tail to these changes. Especially in small towns, we don't have a dedicated zoning officer. We share zoning officers with other communities. Even though it's the biggest thing in your world, it's probably not the biggest thing in their world. They're dealing with perhaps four or five other municipalities' zoning code, and this was just one thing we did once, and changes happen all the time.
Making sure it's being enforced is a whole other thing. It's difficult, it takes a long time, and there's no shortcut to it. You just have to be there, be present, be active, and be engaged in town affairs.
What are some of the results you've seen in terms of the building side as a result of these reforms?
I think it's too early to say whether or not there has been more development because of these changes. We're going on our third year with them, and I'm reticent to say definitively what has or has not happened because of the parking reforms or the ADU reforms. But we have seen ADUs built, and I think that's pretty directly because of the work we did, so that's positive.
Well, I think that's another part of the conversation — it really is multifaceted. Part of it is the coalition building, part of it is getting that consensus, rewriting the ordinance, getting it through, but then the enforcement side, building relationships with builders. Landing as a place where ADUs can actually be built still takes time. It's not like you snap your fingers and overnight everyone's going to be showing up to build an ADU. It really is very long-term, but I think it's so rewarding to know that you've set your city on a trajectory to be able to respond to changes with more flexibility because you've passed these ordinances. Maybe that's a mindset shift — from thinking of zoning as something that's going to immediately solve the housing problem, to thinking of it as putting your city on a trajectory to be able to more easily solve the housing problem.
I think you nailed it. No one gets into zoning reform because they want to see something done tomorrow. It's a very long-term way to really deeply affect the community that you live in. That's why I'm engaged on it — because I believe in the power of long-term growth and change.
The next thing I'm excited about in terms of ADUs is that we have it on our three-year plan to create pattern books for people so that they can more easily decide to build an ADU without having to get it personally designed. What we're trying to do is create architectural plans that could work for not all buildings in Lewisburg, but a lot of the lots we see around here, and make those public. That lowers the barrier of entry so that it's not just developers — homeowners can do it too. It's long-term work, and we're making it happen.
That's very inspiring to hear. I was going to ask what's next, so I'm glad you gave us a little sneak peek at what you're excited to be working on.
In closing, I'm going to ask you the question I ask all of my guests, and it's one of my favorites. Tell us a little bit about your neighborhood — your borough, I think is how you all refer to it in your part of the country. What are some local businesses you'd recommend people check out if they come to visit?
I live in the downtown of Lewisburg, just down the street. We've got three beautiful churches all on the same block, and I live very close to downtown, to Market Street, which I love. I try to get almost everything I can locally.
If I had to name three: one would be Mondragon Books, that's our local used bookstore. It's a treasure house of all kinds of books and finds — typically used, but some new. It's a third place, a third space. It's a real key asset in our community.
Something I love about living here that I didn't mention at the top is that we have, I think, some of the best produce around — lots of local farmers and entrepreneurs making soaps, growing cool things, and making products. The Wednesday farmers market is one of my favorite things.
Lastly, a couple blocks away from me we have an Art Deco one-screen cinema called the Campus Theater. They have incredible programming, great movies. I'm there frequently — weekly, I would say — to check out what's new, and great arts programming. It's just a beautiful, beautiful theater. Those are some places I visit very regularly that I would recommend.
Excellent. Thank you so much, Taylor. Thank you for those recommendations, for coming on and sharing your story, and for the good work that you're doing in Lewisburg. I'm really glad we got to capture a little bit of that on the show for our audience.
It's been a pleasure, Tiffany. I would encourage your listeners to reach out to me if they have any questions. I love talking about this stuff, and if you have any further questions on what we did here in Lewisburg, I'm happy to talk about it. Thanks for having me on.
To our audience, thank you so much for joining me for another conversation. I'll be back soon with another guest. If there's someone who you think we should interview, please let us know using the suggested guest form — that's how we find out about a lot of the people that we feature, and I'm always so grateful for those of you who take the time to let me know. I'll be back soon. 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.