Before Strong Towns became a national movement, its ideas spread through conversations, conferences, friendships and people willing to make room for a difficult message. For Member Week, Norm talks with Founders Circle member Paddy Steinschneider about watching Chuck Marohn’s work gain traction and why the movement has always depended on more than one voice. Paddy reflects on the role members can play when a community realizes its streets, budgets, infrastructure or public life are not working. He describes Strong Towns members not as a strike force, but as people with a toolkit: ready to help when a community realizes its streets, budgets, infrastructure or public life are not working.
Hello, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and as part of my role as the Director of Membership for Strong Towns, I get to meet with so many of our Strong Towns members.
This week, during Member Week, I want to celebrate the folks who have been here from the beginning, the earliest days, when people realized, "This is a message and a movement that I belong to, and I want to see more people catch wind of what we are doing here as an organization and as a movement." We are people saying we have to grapple with what it takes to build lasting prosperity in our communities and build communities that work for everyone. Or, in the words of Paddy Steinschneider, who's our guest today, to create places that shape the environment that affects people's lives, and to be thoughtful and conscious about how we go about doing that.
Today with me is one of our original members, Paddy Steinschneider, with Gotham Design and Community Development Limited. He is a longtime participant in CNU, the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as the Next Gen effort within CNU, which grappled with how we continue this going forward and how we build a stronger network of people who are tied into this message, and tied into the recognition that many of the prevailing winds in our communities are working against us, but that we can slowly but surely make change possible.
Paddy, as a Strong Towns member, welcome. It's so good to have you here during Member Week. Do you want to introduce yourself a little further?
Sure. First of all, thank you so much for reaching out to me and including me in this. I think it's great. It's important.
What we often lose sight of is all the people who have been involved in peripheral ways, the roles that they've played, and the doors that maybe were held open a little bit longer because they got their foot in there and made things happen for people like Chuck, who has been cutting edge for the way we should be moving in our culture. It's not easy to tell everybody that they've been doing everything wrong for the last 50 years.
One of the things I really admire about Chuck is his willingness to say it as it is, to tell the story that's true, and, even when that doesn't align with what anyone wants to hear, insist that you either fix it and stop the bleed, or you're just going to be confronted with worse and worse as you go further on.
I think I first met Chuck around 2010, somewhere between 2010 and 2012. He's very good friends with Ian Rasmussen. I think Ian is still on the board of directors. Ian and I have been involved in New York with the Congress for the New Urbanism New York chapter, and one of the things that I got very involved in early on was the need for younger people coming in.
It's odd. I might sound funny thinking of Chuck and Ian as younger people, but I'm 75, so people who are not yet 50, or I think Chuck is around early 50s, 52, something like that, are still younger than me. When I started working with them, which was more than 15 years ago, they were just starting to get attention for the fact that they had something important to say. One of the things I tried to do at that time was bring attention to them, particularly Chuck, and the message that he had.
I think it was a learning curve for Chuck getting involved in CNU. I remember a story he told where, when he first got to it, he was very aware of how congress conferences work. You sit in your room until you're ready to go to something that you want to participate in, and then you go back to your room, catch up and work. Chuck explained that it took a couple of times attending CNU before he came to the realization that all the important conversations took place in the halls outside the meeting rooms. It's the people you bumped into.
What I was trying to do was make sure that next generation, who actually referred to themselves as Next Gen, had the opportunity to be heard. I don't think Chuck ever thought of himself as Next Gen, but that's because he was more mature than Ian. What they were really doing was saying, "We have investment in this, we have responsibilities and concerns, and we want our voices to be heard."
One of the things that some of us were working on was getting people like Chuck and Ian, Andrew Burleson, and a lot of the people connected with Strong Towns the opportunity to be heard. Chuck hit it out of the park. He went from where he may have been included in a conversation, to maybe being on a panel, to within a very short period of time, "Give him the plenary." When you give him a plenary at CNU, you've arrived.
I've read everything that Chuck has written. It's better than speaking to the choir. He's telling me that I'm not crazy for thinking what I'm thinking. He's demonstrated to me that when I look at how communities invest in infrastructure, how they decide how they're going to spend money, and how they do not understand the places that actually make the place economically viable, these are critical ideas.
I've been trying to get the right event here in Westchester where I can get Chuck and Joe Minicozzi to come and give the lesson that everything you think is wrong, and you need to change your ways or you're not going to enjoy the future very much.
It's that conversation where you ask somebody who pays the money to make this place work, and somebody refers to the house that's up on the hill: "They're paying $100,000 in taxes." You think, "They must really be making a big contribution." But then you realize that they have four acres, so you break it down on a per-acre basis, and all of a sudden that $100,000 is $25,000 an acre.
Then I go down to my little Luigi DePauw building here on Main Street. It's 25 feet wide, and there are 10 of those in an acre. They're paying $25,000 each, so I've got $250,000 coming from the people who get ignored and don't get their snow done first, while the big house gets done first, even though it's paying a fraction of what they are.
Both Chuck and Joe, I think, have done a great job bringing that message out. Their ability to go where the tax assessors meet and tell the tax assessors they're doing it wrong, I'm overwhelmed with the integrity, the intensity and the intelligence that Chuck has to have to make that something where he doesn't feel like he's getting taken on a rail to be tarred and feathered, though I think it's come close at times.
I love the story, and I love the long arc, because it really demonstrates that there are many things that continue to be the same way for members and for anyone listening to this podcast.
If you're touching the surface of these questions in your community, you're realizing, first, that the conversations often need to happen outside the formal settings. It does involve coffee with a council member. It does involve getting to know the planning commissioner or getting yourself appointed to some committee. It does involve those processes, but also weaving yourself into a place where you become indispensable in your community's grappling with the question, "What do we do now?"
In my community, you mentioned productive land use. Our McDonald's pays one-seventh the amount of property tax on a per-acre basis that our little local coffee shop does. How much are we willing to subsidize the culinary delight of the McGriddle, that we give it such a discount in order to make sure that we can have more McGriddles, while simultaneously hampering our ability for these other things to happen?
To me, there is that knowledge that, yes, almost the same challenges that Strong Towns has faced in the early days are the challenges people are facing in their communities, grappling with standards that don't make sense and regulations that shouldn't exist. Some regulations should exist, but not the ones that we've codified. We're really wrestling with that.
Then there is that growing sense, and maybe you can share about this, of realizing, "I'm not just a few of us in a house somewhere grappling with these things." Right now, I think well over 12,000 people have been a member of Strong Towns, either currently or because they let their membership lapse for a little while, but they are part of this movement. There are so many more who are saying, "I'm Strong Towns." They wear our shirts. They participate in these things. What's that been like?
It's wonderful. The experiences I've had attending the last couple of Strong Towns gatherings, where you're there for a couple of days, the feeling in the room and the mix of people you've got is not the standard experience I have when I think of engineers, architects or planners. It's much more of a cross section of humanity than some isolated group that has a very limited perspective of what's important.
You get into conversations at those events where you're talking with people who have all kinds of different issues. Often, their reason for being involved, their inspiration for finding out more about things, has been the problems they're having where they live. They have roads that are not safe.
One of Chuck's great inventions is the stroad, the street-road combination, which gives all the comfort of a--what's the awful thing to sleep on? A futon.
Right. It's not a bed. It's a futon. It does neither thing well. Yeah.
It can't do either. A lot of people are aware that they've got a problem in their community. They're aware that the streets don't feel safe. They're aware that they don't feel comfortable having their kids walk or bike places. Those things are incredibly significant in quality of life and the way kids grow up.
If you tell kids, "We're not going to let you go out and go anyplace on your own until you're maybe 14 years old," you've taken away some of the key years that they have to spend with their friends, where they learn how to do all kinds of things that parents don't teach and school teachers don't teach. The disagreements that eight-year-olds can have on their own and have to resolve, that crisis resolution at the eight-year-old level, is something kids don't get a chance to do in a community where they can't be on their own, walk over to their friend's house, go walking down into the downtown, get ice cream at the local place and walk home.
If you don't have those environments for kids, for families, for everybody, it's the moms too, it's the dads. You need to be able to have a place where you get to know the people you live with on a superficial level. I use that word, and people always think I'm saying something negative, but the concept of superficial just means that I'm not spending a lot of time with them. We don't have a day-to-day contact of significance, but we know each other.
The example I give of this is because I live in a community that dates from the 1600s. We existed for 200 years before there were cars as a developed town, so we were a very walkable place. We have sidewalks. People can walk back and forth to town and walk past my house.
There was an apartment building down the street. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, somebody thought it would be nice to make Christmas decorations. They lived in the top-floor apartment, and they had a gas stove. They put newspaper and pine cones on the newspaper on top of the gas stove with the pilot light, and then started spray painting the pine cones. It's almost like a Monty Python skit. It wasn't so tragic. Luckily, no one was killed. But that building burned, and there were 69 families living in that building.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it did not take 15 minutes before people were arriving at Village Hall with boxes of coats and blankets and saying, "What can I do? How can I help?" We weren't doing that because it was my best friend. It was the guy who walks past, the older woman who walks past during the day and always says hello, the person who always smiles at my son when she's passing by, and he smiles back at her.
Those superficial relationships make us understand that these are our neighbors. These are people who are in need, and the first obligation is for us to do something, not organize and not try to get together. That'll come. It's that immediate response you have to your neighbor.
We have to get past the Kitty Genovese world, where you would hear somebody screaming and not think of calling the police. You don't have that in a lot of our sprawl communities, where you don't know your neighbors.
A lot of what Chuck is about, and what I see in his writing, is the real necessity of building community. What's been so fun for me is that he has taken that approach not as a theory to be implemented in the field, but as the very real character of the events that he puts together.
When you go to a Strong Towns event, you're sitting next to people you've never met before, but you feel completely open to talk. The conversation gets to points that you didn't consider. You learn things.
Again, I'm 75 years old. I go to a Strong Towns event, and I'm learning things for the first time. I'm hearing ideas that I hadn't thought of before. I think I know a lot, but there is so much that this organization has to offer, just from the standpoint that you've got lots of different backgrounds.
This isn't the room where everyone has been trained the same and they're all going to exchange the things they already know. This is when you're sitting next to somebody who has a completely different background than you do, and they're explaining what they experience in their community. You learn from it, and it makes you able to do better work.
Yeah. One quick anecdote: I think of Sharon Shaw. She's a leader in Richmond, Virginia. She was requalifying as a pediatrician because she had been raising children in the home and then was going back to work as a pediatrician. She said, "I need to talk to Strong Towns because the way that children are being raised right now is not working for them."
She is one of the leaders of the local conversation group there. She is spearheading this effort to say, "We need to heal our communities, and a big part of that is going to be through the work on the streets, literally on the ground, taking those things very seriously."
Locally, maybe as we close, because I love this, I would love to hear from you: What are the roles that you think Strong Towns members will be playing in the next decade to come, as we look ahead?
Well, I think the biggest thing we're going to need to do is not position ourselves so we can say, "We told you so," but to be standing by with the toolkit necessary to fix things. That is often quite literal.
We've got infrastructure. Dobbs Ferry thinks of itself as a relatively wealthy place. If you really look at it, if we make the commitment to restore, repair and extend our existing network of sewer lines, water lines and storm sewer, we don't flood, but that doesn't mean we don't have water problems. We're looking at huge expenses that have not been built into the economics of day-to-day running of our village. We've got to come up with new ideas, and we have to have those tools ready.
One of our leaders at CNU loves to refer to us as a group of Navy SEALs. I told him one time, "Never say that in front of a Navy SEAL. You're not a Navy SEAL. You're a planner." His idea was that we're like a military strike force, and I said I think we're very different. I think we're more like the Maytag repairman.
You call us because your street system is clogged, your energy level in your downtown isn't functioning, or you've got disconnects in your community. You call the Strong Towns person to come and take a look at what you're dealing with, and he shows up at the door with a toolkit. In that toolkit, he's got 50% of what he needs to solve almost any problem. Most of the time, you need a new one of these, or I need to tighten this, or I need to loosen that up. They've got that kit of tools to fix most problems.
But if he doesn't have it in his toolbox, he can go out to his truck, and in the truck, he's got some other stuff. That might fix another 25%. But the most important tool he's got is the ability, if he hasn't seen this before and if he's not sure how to make this work, to call back at the shop. Back there, you've got your Chuck sitting there, and you say, "Here's what I'm looking at. I don't know how to fix this." You've got the guy who has the answer and knows how to fix it.
That's what we have to be as an organization. We have to be, it's not as exciting as being the Navy SEALs, but it's real for what we need to be able to do.
We need to be able to bring those tools that help a community that may not be in desperate straits yet, but has disconnects that aren't working well. That affects the quality of life for families. That affects the vitality of their downtown. That affects the way their school systems can function, because a lot of the school systems rely on tax revenue and tax dollars.
If you're not encouraging those mom-and-pop coffee shops, and you're letting McDonald's be next to Walmart, be next to Lowe's, you don't have that local economic structure that supports your town. These are critical things, and Strong Towns is already doing this. They've got the message out, but we need to expand that message. We need to get to more places. More people have to understand these problems exist. There are solutions, and the unfortunate first one is that you're going to have to stop doing things the way you've been doing.
Right. I often say the suburban development pattern has about an 80-year head start on me, so I'm spotting myself at least 40 years before I get too discouraged. But I also can't rest in these 40 years and simply say, "It'll take care of itself." We are committed to repair. We're committed to making whole again. We're committed to building a prosperous life for everyone within our communities that will endure for the long term.
Paddy, this has been fantastic. Thank you for shedding some light on the early days and bringing us into the present. I really appreciate the time.
Well, I love it. If you want me to go on for another two or three hours, there's no problem.
We will book it. Sounds good. Thanks so much.
Folks, as you're listening, please know that we are so grateful for your role within the Strong Towns movement. I've heard from so many longtime members who are astounded that more and more people are participating in what we're doing. This matters. We are that network of folks in each community now beginning to seriously grapple with it, and I hope you're encouraged and continue to feel a deep sense of pride as a member of the Strong Towns movement.
With that, 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.