Upzoned
A Massachusetts town budgeted $600,000 for snow and ended up spending $6 million clearing its streets. Norm Van Eeden Petersman, Daniel Herriges, and Gracen Johnson trace the links between winter operations, stormwater, supply chains, labor, and land use in cities facing serious snow. Starting with Boston’s overrun numbers, they widen the lens to Ottawa’s snow storage sites and Minneapolis’ potholes, asking what happens when seasonal extremes collide with tight city budgets.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hello and welcome to Upzone. Today I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm joined today by two great guest contributors: Daniel Herriges with the Parking Reform Network, and Gracen Johnson, who is a Senior Specialist in Government Relations at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Both of these fine folks also have extensive histories with Strong Towns. Gracen, back in the day, created the great Curbside Chat video series that are still relevant today, and has written quite a number of fantastic articles over the years for Strong Towns — one of my favorites being "In Praise of Background Buildings."
Daniel was for a long time a key part of the Strong Towns ecosystem as a writer, contributor, and Editor in Chief, among many other hats. He continues to be closely aligned with so much of what Strong Towns is doing, providing guidance especially in his new role with the Parking Reform Network as a policy advisor. Welcome to both of you.
We're talking snow — talking about the challenges of dealing with extreme weather. The article we're going to be discussing today is a recent Boston Globe article by Kate Selig titled "That Comes with a Price Tag: How Snow Removal Is Busting Town Budgets," published on March 30, 2026. The article talks about how cities like Boston and communities across Massachusetts are blowing past their snow removal budgets — and not just by a little. They're millions over. They're dealing with emergency reallocations. Some communities are having to dip into budget reserves to figure out how to make sure contractors get paid and streets get cleared.
These financial strains are very real. But the deeper question is not just about the storms — it's why our cities are so financially exposed to something as predictable as snow and extreme weather. When we look closely, it's not even just a winter problem. It's a year-round systems problem tied to the sheer scale of what we've built. So instead of just asking how cities can better handle snow, we're going to ask: what is it about the way our cities are built that makes them so expensive to maintain in every season?
Daniel, what were some of the reactions you had as you worked through the article and thought about this in your own context in Minneapolis — having moved there from Florida and perhaps been somewhat surprised by the scope of it?
I was kind of shaking my head with familiarity as I read the article. I think you hit the nail on the head that ultimately the root issue isn't the proximate issue of, hey, we had a couple of record-busting blizzards this year in New England — how do we deal with all this snow? It's about having slack in the system to respond to a need that's a little bit out of the ordinary, to budget for anything that isn't perennial. Obviously, if you're in a northern climate, you know you're going to get snow. You don't know how much — it can be extremely variable. The article talks about it becoming more variable and more unpredictable from year to year.
The underlying sickness is just: do you have the slack in the system financially to deal with contingencies? We haven't had record-busting snowfalls the last few winters here in Minnesota — we've actually had abnormally warm and dry winters. But we already had a problem with street maintenance backlogs and potholes. The perennial topic at the end of every winter is potholes. What a shift in climate has done for us is create a much more pronounced freeze-thaw cycle in a place where it used to pretty consistently stay below freezing for the whole winter, maybe with the exception of a week or so here or there.
That is putting its own climate-related strain on public infrastructure. It becomes this absolutely impossible math problem. You could find a lot of different places experiencing their own version of that, even when the details differ from region to region and climate to climate.
Gracen, what is it like when people are caught off guard by this? You mentioned you're in Ottawa and it is a slick operation — they know what they need to do, the equipment is in place, and they're ready to go. But what are some of the gaps or challenges that can emerge for cities when they're either not prepared, or — as we saw in the article — when Boston reduced its snow-clearing budget on the assumption that those high-snowfall winters were behind them, and then got caught off guard by an extreme?
First, I have to offer my prerequisite disclaimer that I'm not here speaking on behalf of my employer — I'm just here as an old friend who really likes snowplows. This article was so interesting to me because I think about and can picture our operations in Ottawa. I live in a city that, similar to Montreal, is very cold, so the snow stays pretty much all winter. We've still got it. In our snow dumps here, snow might stick around until August because there's so much of it.
When I'm watching these things out on the streets performing their work, I'm wondering: that must be so expensive to staff up. When we're looking at these extreme events, it's really a surge-pricing issue. There are only so many trucks, only so many drivers — they're probably working overtime. That's a really hard thing for a city to address, where they need to have that capacity available. It's not exactly reusable equipment in a lot of cases. Your dump trucks would be reusable, but snow blowers have a particular purpose. So that's what I was thinking about — how to equip for that type of situation.
I would actually encourage anyone interested, if you don't live in a winter city and you want to see something mesmerizing: just Google on YouTube "Ottawa snow removal." It would be the same in Montreal. These are old cities where you have snow blowers that come and remove six-foot snow banks between the sidewalk and the road. They've got a line of dump trucks behind them, removing that snow and trucking it out to a dump to get it out of the street. That doesn't make sense for a lot of cities because their snow is going to melt.
It's a question I really don't envy cities having to deal with, because in the moment you need to clear emergency access — for hospitals, ambulances, police cars, school buses. The city comes to a standstill until you deal with the problem. But to be prepared for it would be an immense capital cost, and to respond you need staff on hand or the ability to hire on short notice. It's not like when you have a snowstorm the city is the only one dealing with it — everybody's trying to clear their snow at that point.
You also have to wonder: what would be the equivalent in a summer city that doesn't have snow to deal with, but is dealing with surge pricing in another way? Those are the things that were going through my mind.
I live in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, where we get about one week of snow activity a year, but it can be pretty intense. We can get a foot of snow, which basically snarls everything and creates what feels like a catastrophe — even though the rest of Canada is laughing at us.
When I first started my job in the mayor's office, we had a massive winter storm hit, and I rolled into work while they were in the throes of trying to figure out how to dispatch every piece of equipment they could get to deal with snow. They had some blades and things like that, but a lot of it was just trying to figure out: do we send out our skid steers and loaders and physically dump snow into the backs of trucks, knowing that as soon as the rain comes, all of that effort is for naught because it'll basically do the work for us? And yet there was absolutely no way they could take the foot off the pedal, because you have to deal with this — the whole city is seized.
I was dealing with letters coming in immediately. I'm a fiscal conservative, so I was thinking: we shouldn't have a whole cavalcade of snow removal equipment on standby for the majority of the year if we'll never actually need it.
I think I can share this on the podcast, because I don't know how many of the political staff in Surrey would still remember this, but there was a problem in the mayor's office where a very well-meaning city staff member in a truck saw the mayor's driveway and decided to quickly do it for them. We were like, no. They meant well, but they had actually created the conditions for accusations of favoritism. Deeper than that was the question: what is our city actually prepared to do? Can we take it on the nose during extremes and just muddle along?
What comes up in this article is just the shortage of reserves, the absence of capacity in a lot of our places — that sense that a lot of families live paycheck to paycheck, and a lot of cities are in a very similar state, if not masking the fact that they're deeply insolvent.
Daniel, over the years you've written a lot about these types of things. What pieces come to mind for you? How do we address this situation?
One question that's kind of core to Strong Towns — not directly raised by the article, but one I think is going to become more and more pressing — is:
You've got cities that have no reserves, no slack, and then you've got different kinds of disasters, different kinds of unprecedented events. Where do the resources go when you're in triage mode?
They don't necessarily get allocated in the most efficient or sensible way. Chuck wrote about "transactions of decline" years ago, and the concept has stuck with me. Once you're constrained in what you can do immediately and what resources you can mobilize, you almost inevitably end up — it's like the municipal version of what they call the poverty tax on individual budgets — spending your resources in inefficient or even superficially foolish ways because you're in immediate emergency mode.
Sitting here in Minneapolis, a place where it does snow a lot and the snow stays and accumulates over winter, we
do a barely passable job. Our streets get plowed. We function when there's plenty of snow on the ground. But as someone who commutes by bike, by February and March the bike lane has disappeared because it's buried in a snow bank, there's sand all over the roads, and it's kind of miserable. We muddle through. Sidewalk clearing is a huge problem, especially for people with disabilities and older residents. The city has repeatedly looked into municipal sidewalk clearing and concluded it can't be done — maybe a pilot in a few popular business districts, but absolutely impossible to do broadly city-wide. So it's up to the property owner. A lot of property owners don't do it, everything gets covered in a sheet of ice, and it's generally impassable.
Then we look at Ottawa or Montreal, where the whole concept of efficiently dealing with snow — actually trucking it out to a snow dump, sidewalks passable, bike paths passable in the middle of winter — is this miraculous thing. Now I'm actually really curious what Minneapolis would spend, because the winter maintenance budget for Ottawa is over $100 million Canadian. For Montreal it's $200 million. I went into a little rabbit hole on snow removal when we decided to talk about this, and in an article about Montreal, part of what they were sharing is that expectations have grown because the equipment is better, the ability to remove snow is better. There might have been years past where people just shut down and didn't go to work — there wasn't an expectation that they would. So often in the Strong Towns conversation we talk about local governments being able to
be close to the action, and people engaging with that and really feeling the impact of their work. Snow removal is definitely an area where you feel the competency of your local government. There's political pressure to be really good at snow removal because people notice. In terms of that budget for Ottawa — they do have operations
and additional reserves for snow. I'm not sure if that is directly tied to that headline budget — whether in a low snow year, if the unused portion is specifically tagged for future snow removal, someone who knows more about our particular budgeting situation would have to answer that. But they do plan for it. They have that rainy-day fund for big years and light years. I thought that was interesting.
It touches on the challenge that we've got fires to deal with, heavy floods, droughts, garbage crises — there are these overlapping, cascading issues that can really start to creep up. The discipline of having that reserve fund really stands out. That's what you're touching on, Daniel, with the idea of transactions of decline: you're no longer covering your monthly credit card bill, the interest starts to accrue, and those core challenges become more pronounced. You have to skimp, and then you get caught off guard.
I'm not sure that was the case in Boston, but certainly some other communities had persistently been lowering the amount they expected to spend on this, and then were over by — I think one city had budgeted $600,000 and spent $6 million. That is huge, even compared to $100 million in Ottawa. One of the things that fascinated me about this piece, Norm, was the grappling with extremes and the predictability of extreme things occurring. From a Strong Towns perspective, when we talk about incremental thickening up of our places, it feels like the antidote — creating really productive places that are more capable of withstanding the buffeting of an intense episode. Part of the work with the Incremental Development Alliance is to create local resilience. Is that partly the response — creating the conditions for people to accept that we're going to get hit hard sometimes, but we're in this together and we'll shoulder the burden?
I feel like the money we spend on snow removal is some of the best money spent. It's a real bargain — we're a city of about 1.1 million people, so it's about $100 per person per year if we're on budget. That's an amazing bargain given the winters we deal with. But as you were talking about lower expectations,
I was thinking back to days when I lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick. That's an area — and there are probably a lot of places across the country and the continent where people can relate — where a lot of people have pickup trucks, and a lot of regular people have a plow attachment for their truck. I found that in Fredericton, regular people were kind of helping each other out and sharing that burden.
I imagine that in some places that becomes a bit of a default. It doesn't help you for your ambulance routes and school routes, but it is in the category of muddling by.
I imagine that in some places
the citizens have an expectation that it's part of their responsibility to clear snow.
Every city has its own policy on whether it's the homeowner's or the city's responsibility to clear sidewalks, and that can be really hard on people with mobility issues if people aren't being responsible for that. Expectations are a huge question for all of us. I think that may be the critical question: what are our expectations versus what we're willing to pay for?
I feel like there are three angles to this that interrelate: there's the expectations question; there's the question of the productivity of your tax base and your land use pattern — what can you support?
But even that doesn't guarantee success. There's also a question of institutional competence and institutional muscle memory — just having the system set up to deal with things efficiently. That's what I'm talking about when I look at some of the differences between Minneapolis and Ottawa. In theory, similar climates, similar latitudes. Canadian cities are not vastly more productive or denser than US cities. Why such a disparity in the competence we believe we have to deal with something like snow clearance?
Or think of New York City. You can't accuse New York City of having an unproductive land use pattern, but containerized garbage collection has been an enormous issue forever — people still leaving bags of trash at the curb where rats get into them. You look at Paris or London, and the entire rest of the world is like, what is New York doing? New York says it can't solve this problem. There are huge and somewhat chaotic, somewhat unpredictable disparities in institutional capacity from place to place that don't simply chalk up to financial resources or how productive your land use pattern or tax base is.
So there's a kind of triangle here: what can we get better at in terms of problem-solving and more functional institutions? What can we do within the resources available to us? How can we
fix our land use problems in order to have more resources? And then
on the expectations side of the ledger, I think it's on municipalities to have an honest conversation with their residents. I would love to see more basic infrastructure and municipal services broken down in that per-capita kind of way — Gracen, you were talking about $100
per resident of Ottawa for snow clearance. That's an amazing bargain. Why aren't more things broken down that way, where we can actually start to have a conversation: for this much money per person, per property, you get this; for this much you could get this. Let's have the policy conversation. What are we willing to pay? What can we do within that? Let's look at peer communities and what they're doing. Then we can actually start to be upset about things like: why can't we get our act together and, for a comparable budget, do what Canadian cities are doing? Why does mass transit cost not just a little more to build in the US than in peer countries, but sometimes five or ten times as much per mile? What are we doing?
The math is so much more complicated, too, when you think about it. One of the things that jumped out at me in this rabbit hole — it's going to sound like a tangent for a second. I mentioned we have snow dumps in Ottawa. There are six of them, and it's not like a garbage dump at all — it's almost a reservoir. Because the snow doesn't melt, they have to truck it out a couple of times a winter. A parade of trucks will come through, dump truck after dump truck filled by the snow blower, taking it out to these dumps. I've been thinking of that as snow clearance, but reading this article I realized: no, that's actually stormwater management. They're taking the snow to a place where they've built a reservoir so it can melt slowly — until August — and they're controlling the output of the water, protecting the river, cleaning the water, removing sediment and garbage.
That made me wonder: what if I compared the stormwater costs? This is five to six months a year in Ottawa where you're essentially running a pipe above the ground in the form of a truck, taking it over to the reservoir. Our stormwater costs may be lower because we have this higher
snow removal cost.
Can I compare that to a city that doesn't have that? I was looking at Dallas, which has about the same budget as Ottawa and roughly the same population for its area, but I couldn't figure out its stormwater costs. I think it's an interesting question to ask. To your point, Daniel, about comparing to other cities and the cost of a service — I think that's also usually missing half of the equation, which is: what could be saved by doing something differently,
or not doing something at all in some cases? We see that all the time with urban forestry and the economics of trees — it's really hard to have that conversation without showing how much it's saving you in all these other categories. I think it's a hard thing to do the math on in a comprehensive way, but just the straight-up math of $100 a year — I'm sold. That's amazing.
That's a fascinating observation about the stormwater — actually tracing the chains down to: what are we
avoiding that is also going to cost us money, and is going to cost members of our community money if we're not doing thing X — whether thing X is wildfire mitigation in a climate prone to that, or
how much can we pay upfront versus how much are we committing ourselves to in ongoing maintenance of a system. There are all of these really complex questions. What strikes me about the article is that it ended with this quote about "we've got to clear the snow — what are we going to do?" Once you're in that spot where there's an emergency staring you in the face, your constituents are angry, and you have to do something — that's where you get the transactions of decline. That's where you don't have the space for a nuanced conversation about what is the most efficient way to do this and what is actually the best way to get a return on the resources we're willing to put in. You can't have that conversation. It's just: we've got to clear the snow. We're going to take on more debt. We're going to dip into the reserves. We're going to deal with the aftermath of the flood or the wildfire. We're going to patch the potholes — and maybe we're doing a quick-and-dirty patch that isn't going to last more than a couple of years, and we still have a decaying road.
We've got to patch the potholes because the people in the neighborhood are furious.
That's the transactions of decline problem. We actually need
that financial resilience so that we have the breathing room to have the conversation about what is the
actual smartest and best way to go about these things. Utilities are starting to realize how much they can do to suppress peaks and spread out demand. There's a parallel: if we can think really clearly about peak management in our cities — with traffic, at some point you just give up and let peaks naturally work themselves out. But with other things, it looks like finding how to create the conditions where regular, ongoing maintenance is just the norm, rather than rushing in to do emergency repairs. It's like when we unleash a funding reservoir to go fix a big mainline water pipe in Calgary, but simultaneously have ignored many other features that could have avoided that situation.
I'm struck by that image of stormwater management in that context. Chuck wrote an article in 2020 called "The Cost of an Extra Foot" that has been camped out in my brain for a long time. He talks about the fact that the moment you widen a street, you take on considerable new financial obligations. If you add one extra foot of width per lane on a two-block stretch of road, you're adding thirty to forty extra square feet of pavement — which means thousands of cubic feet of additional snow to clear, more truck trips, more staff time, more fuel and equipment wear — not to mention allocating that space for vehicle movement rather than other uses.
The flip side is that if you think about how a strong winter city copes with snow: part of it is keeping your obligations — what you need to clear — really minimal. Narrower roads help with that. But another element is that the moment you can do vertical stacking of homes, you double the number of paying participants in the scheme to cover what is essentially the same footprint. All the rain that falls on a two-story building versus a one-story building is the same amount, yet now we have twice the participants in the local economy generating the revenues needed to cover the cost of caring for that stormwater. Add a third story, and you have three times the participants without increasing your stormwater obligations.
That can be one of those areas where helping people understand the economics of our development pattern is at the core of the Strong Towns message. We need to look for instances like this to really help people grasp it. Boston is probably better off than a lot of other snowed-on cities — they're more compact than many of their peers — and yet even they were struggling. I can imagine in Calgary — one of the very sprawled-out cities — what their snow-clearing budget must be, although Mother Nature does a lot of the work for them with Chinooks. What stood out to me was that sense of: we haven't had much snow, so we're going to start cutting our snow budget, and then getting caught off guard when the pendulum swings back. Anything more on that?
I don't know that it's a problem that money can necessarily solve. When I was reading that Montreal article, they were talking about why costs had escalated so much, and one of the things they mentioned is that equipment has become very expensive because a lot of the pieces were sourced from Ukraine. I know nothing about the supply chain of heavy equipment, so if anybody can make recommendations on that, I'm very interested. But it brought back the conversation Chuck has been having at Strong Towns in several podcasts and articles around the trade-offs of infrastructure — there's only so much of certain things. There are only so many trucks, only so many people who can drive them, only so many resources, and the materials need to be allocated as smartly as possible. That's why I find this such an interesting question: is it the right decision for a city to stock up on something it's not necessarily going to need to use all the time,
when there aren't necessarily that many available, meaning the cost is going to be even higher? That opens a different window for me in these questions. One: is this a problem that money can't solve? What do we do? There's probably a whole book of these types of problems that our cities face where it might actually be a personnel issue, or something the budget simply can't solve.
That opens up other questions on management — what are our options when that becomes the case? I don't have answers there. It was a reflection that really connected to me in terms of some of the writing Chuck has been doing recently. What about for you, Daniel? When we want to react to these extremes and hit the limits of state capacity — the limits of what we've collaboratively agreed to provide for each other: street lights that work, pathways that connect, schools that educate — at some point we reach the point where we can't reliably say we will always provide you a clear route to your workplace or home when exigent circumstances hammer our ability to respond without completely blowing out the budget. If we're having to source parts from Ukraine in the midst of a war in order to keep up with our war on snow, we hit the limits of state capacity pretty quickly.
You've often thought about the asymmetry of many of the risks we face and the things we sometimes assume are written into our social contract, but that actually never were agreed to. Are there breakdowns in the political way we think about our communities — as strong citizens versus taxpayers — that this is surfacing for you?
Yeah, I threw a lot at you, but go ahead.
One thought that comes to mind is that we're going to see a lot more questions in the coming decades about just what are the hard limits to our ability to collectively provide the level of service that we think we ought to be able to — or think we're entitled to as taxpayers or citizens — and we're going to have those tough conversations.
The parts from Ukraine is a great example, but there's reason to think that a number of issues involving global supply chains will bring more and more disruption.
There's a lot happening that the average person is only dimly aware of, in terms of how stuff actually gets from A to B and how
institutions actually assemble not just the physical material, but institutional capacity — how it actually works when you take it for granted.
We've been able to take it for granted in large part because of the illusion of wealth that a lot of our communities have benefited from for a couple of generations. When that starts to go away,
one set of outcomes involves triage — and we probably don't triage in the most efficient or equitable way, but based on who the loudest voices are and who can demand their needs get met first. We see that pattern happen in a lot of communities. There's a basic math problem: if you can't do it, you're not going to do it. But
who is going to be able — either through political leverage or through finding ways to privately or collectively provide — the things that used to be socially provided? There are a lot of really complex outcomes, and some of them are uglier than others. My interest is in: how do you
avoid the really ugly and inequitable outcomes where, to put it bluntly, rich people make a lot of noise and their garbage gets collected and they have fast 911 response times and their streets get plowed and their needs get met — and people who don't have that voice in the system don't get their needs met? At that point it looks like a different problem than it is. There isn't a collective sense of: we as an entire community, as an entire political entity, have this insolvency problem that we have to figure out how to solve. It becomes something more acrimonious within the community.
To avoid that — and I'm talking in vague terms because I think this applies to any number of disasters or disruptions — I'm very interested in the question of how we start having really transparent conversations now.
I really appreciate the work Strong Towns has done in the couple of years since I was last working there on
making municipal budgets legible — the Budget Decoder and all that. Really incredible stuff. That trajectory of work could be so transformative for just equipping communities to
actually talk honestly about this stuff.
I don't know that that was a satisfying answer.
I appreciate that. Your mention of who gets listened to is one of those things that resonated with me when I was in Medicine Hat, explaining to staff and residents that their downtown is not the money pit many people collectively assumed it was — it's actually their money pot. It's the place where the greatest amount of productive capacity is occurring in close proximity, so the value per acre is significantly higher than the rest of the city. They collectively out-earn and out-contribute to the city's core resources by a wide margin.
I think of the disputes from my time in the mayor's office: why isn't my street on a priority route network that needs to be plowed within 48 hours? The response was: because there's no bus route on it and ambulances don't take it often. It would have been very interesting to say: your neighborhood collectively contributes significantly less. I think trying to help reframe that — not to pit places against each other, but to say: when you begin to resemble that more built-up urban fabric, you can expect more services to emerge from that as well — does matter in this context. It also requires a lot of public infrastructure outlay to cover those costs.
I'm looking out the window right now and I can see tulip bulbs, so I'm already ready to let snow be a bygone thing. But I know some of you will be dealing with it for a while. If you're traveling to Ottawa, definitely go visit the snow dumps. You'll have until August before all the snow is gone, and your mind will be blown to realize that what you're looking at is stormwater — just in its solid form.
With that, let's move into the Down Zone, which is just a quick reflection from each of us on something we've been reading that probably has nothing to do with any of this. Gracen, why don't you go first?
First, something that does have something to do with this: You'll Pay for This by my brother-in-law, Mitch. I just wanted to say thank you to him, because reading that book is actually what helped me work through financial statements and figure out those numbers for Ottawa. Something unrelated for the Down Zone: I've been doing a bit of a deep dive on how affordable housing is delivered in Europe.
There's a PDF you can get from Housing Europe — I think it's from 2021 —
and it talks about cost rental housing.
If you're in the affordable housing space, it's a really interesting read on how
it's a flipped model from what we do in North America. In North America we try to make rent lower, whereas in Europe they subsidize the household rather than the building — in certain countries, anyway. It's a deep topic. I'm not going to go into it in the Down Zone, but if you look up cost rental housing and find that PDF from Housing Europe, I would recommend reading it.
I've got two young kids at home, and I still sometimes struggle to find blocks of time to get deep into a book. I've got about three sitting on my nightstand at various stages of unfinished. Actually the most compelling thing I've been reading recently that has
stuck with me — bear with me when I say this — is from a Substack newsletter. Anand Giridharadas — I hope I'm not butchering his last name too badly — writes a newsletter called The Ink, commenting on US politics, society, climate, and a number of things. He's been doing this amazing series called The Epstein Class, and I say bear with me because it's not at all lurid stuff about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. It's actually a really fascinating look at the sociology of elite circles — financiers, jet-setters, academics, and people who kind of relied on that largesse — using some of the files released by the DOJ as a starting point to explore these questions. I found it really, really insightful
in terms of how this insular elite thinks and, actually digging into, what are the incentives that explain things that to anyone outside those circles might just look like conspiracy, self-dealing, or inexplicable evil? He's four articles into the series at this point. You told me this was supposed to be like 30 seconds, and I won't digress further.
Something that was always a hallmark of my writing at Strong Towns was the determination to seek genuine understanding of anyone's perspective, anyone's role in a system — not chalk it up to "these are bad people doing bad things." So the interest in getting into the heads of people and genuinely asking why they do what they do is something I've always looked for.
My take on conspiracy theories is that they're remarkably rational — they just start from the wrong premise. If you start with a wrong premise, you can be very rational and string together all these layers that make it all make sense. Maybe somewhat related: I'm very excited for season two of a podcast called Criminal Broads. It's a true crime podcast, which is not my genre at all, but my Greek professor in seminary had a daughter, Tori Telfer, who is the host of the podcast, and I was curious and started listening. It's about wild women on the wrong side of the law — serial killers, poisoners, cult leaders, all sorts of fascinating figures from the past up to the present day. Season two is coming out, so if you have a podcast subscription addiction, definitely go check that one out.
With that, we are at the end of our Upzone recording here today. Daniel and Gracen, thanks for jumping in with not much time to prepare — I really appreciated the conversation today.
Anytime. Nice to see you again.
It's good to be able to go down a little bit of a rabbit trail with each of you on what happens to snow when it falls from the sky and then collects in our city.
Fantastic stuff. To those listening, thanks so much for continuing to be part of the Strong Towns movement. If you loved what you heard, share that with us — we'd love to hear more. If you have other articles or suggestions of things you'd love for us to Upzone, feel free to pass that along. 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.