Nate Hood was the first person to donate to Strong Towns, back when the movement was still a blog, an irregular podcast, and a small circle of people asking better questions about cities. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with him about the early days of Strong Towns, the ideas that first made the movement feel different, and what has changed as those ideas have spread across North America. This is a story about growth, but also about why the movement’s power still comes from people noticing what is broken nearby and doing the next small thing.
Hello, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I know that you experience it much the same way that I do. What we want in our places, in our communities, is to be able to thrive, to know each other, and to see our local businesses succeed, both the ones we already love and the ones we want to come to our community. We want our communities to become stronger so that, as each passing generation comes along, we can truly say we have lived in a strong town, a strong village, or a strong community.
But across North America, many people have seen their actual neighborhoods become less connected, less safe, less prosperous, and less resilient. That's where the Strong Towns movement has come in. For more than 15 years, Strong Towns has helped people understand the challenges facing their communities and equipped them with tools, ideas, and encouragement to make a difference where they live.
Here's what makes this movement unique: our movement is about more than just the Strong Towns organization. It's about thousands of members, advocates, local leaders, and neighbors who decided they weren't just going to sit there. They were going to learn, share ideas, tell stories, ask better questions, start conversations, get in the way, and get things done.
As I think about that, especially as this week is the middle of Member Week, I want to think about how we celebrate this and highlight what the Strong Towns movement currently is and where it's going. One of the things we can do is look back at where we've come from.
In a few episodes this week, you're going to hear from some longtime Strong Towns members who have had a front-row seat to the growth of Strong Towns. We'll talk about how the movement looked when they first got involved, from the early baloney-sandwich days and just bootstrapping across the United States and, increasingly, other parts of the world, to how it has changed, how it has matured, and where we believe it's headed next.
I want to start with Nate Hood, who is our first member of the Strong Towns movement and has been a keen participant over the years as a contributor to the website, a participant in helping get events organized, and even part of a suburban-style engagement photo shoot that went viral. It really helped people say, 'Wait a minute, that looks different. I have to understand why somebody would do this and what point they are trying to get across.' Nate Hood, welcome to the Bottom Up Shorts podcast.
Thanks so much for having me. It's been great to be involved in Strong Towns all these, I think, 15 or maybe 16 years now. I listened to Chuck, a guy by the name of John Connors, and another guy, Ben, who did a podcast from the very beginning that is probably unlistenable now. It really sounded like three guys in a basement. It was the advent of podcasting, and I've been listening for a long time.
One of the things that really drew me to Strong Towns was funny. I was in grad school for planning at the time, and I was in a big city. Every project or topic we dealt with was, 'Here's this billion-dollar investment.' I remember thinking, 'When I go back home to Minnesota, a planning project is the very smallest part of it. It's not even on people's minds.'
We were talking, for example, about Masdar in the United Arab Emirates, about just building this billion-dollar thing. People were obsessed with that, or with any number of mega-projects that were going on. It did not connect with my day-to-day life. Then I found Strong Towns, and I thought, 'Wow, I know where Remer, Minnesota, is.' I still have to Google it sometimes, that's how small it is. Strong Towns connected all the dots.
I felt, before I donated to be the first donor, that I had learned more about planning and city building just listening to that podcast than I did with the tens of thousands of dollars I spent going to grad school. From there, it was able to connect me with the Congress for the New Urbanism and open up so many other doors.
I always try to have fun with it a little bit, too. You brought up our suburban engagement photos. Link that in the show notes, if it's still available. My wife and I noticed that everybody takes engagement photos in cool urban places or in a rural setting. Nobody takes photos in suburbia, so we did that, and it really went viral. That went viral before we really knew what viral things were.
It ended up popping up in different places. I remember getting a text a few years back, and someone said, 'I'm at a random conference in Atlanta, and Jeff Speck is using your photo in a presentation.' Little things like that were a lot of fun. Strong Towns really opened the door to all that, changed my perspective, and offered relatable planning work. It felt like the real conversations cities needed to have and the real things that needed to happen. At the time, nobody was talking about it.
In those early days, right now we have podcasts, YouTube content, articles, and a social media arm that reaches quite broadly. But in the early days, what was the Strong Towns message-sharing network like? What did that look like, and what was your way of really connecting with it?
It was a classic blog. You would just go to the blog. We also had a local thing here called Streets.mn that Chuck was tangentially involved in at first, before Strong Towns really blew up in a good way. I say that as a positive thing. I got to know Chuck through that, but really it was blogging and his original podcast, which would just come out whenever.
If there was a week when he was catching lightning in a bottle, there would be four episodes a week. If it was slow, it would be, 'I'm baking Christmas cookies for the next month. You're going to get no content.' I've been following it so long that we didn't even call it content. It was just stuff.
Just junk, or just stuff.
Stuff. It was fun to be part of those early days. You don't realize how professional Strong Towns has become until you try to listen to an old episode or read an old blog post, and you think, 'Oh yeah, we've come a long way.'
I love that. In that time, I had a city manager who became a retired city manager. He was serving communities all across the West Coast, and he said, 'I was Strong Towns before Strong Towns came along.' I feel like there was this gathering of minds.
Can you share how you've seen that movement of like-minded individuals, as well as folks who are on a pretty broad range of perspectives, glomming onto different aspects of a Strong Towns core message and running with it?
At least in my professional life, the Strong Towns and Urban3 ROI discussion is embedded. What are we getting for the amount of infrastructure we have and for the land use we have? I don't think the end product necessarily always reflects that, but I feel like that seed was planted.
The Taco John's example, the infamous Taco John's example, was radical at the time. Now, at least in the existing professional class, I think that's the status quo. They're saying, 'Yes, we have to think about this.' Whether a city council necessarily agrees with that, or whether their zoning code is able to be updated to truly reflect that, is another matter. But I think the idea and the acknowledgment are there. That sounds small, but it's actually huge.
To take something that was a radical idea, plant that seed, and then 10 years later have a full-grown tree is huge. Maybe the fruit from that tree will not feed everybody or solve all your problems, but it's there. People can see it, and they understand it now. That's one of the biggest things, at least in the work I do locally. I work as a planner doing a lot of small-area plans, and that's the one thing we're always trying to include in projects we work on.
You had to find room on the bus for more members to come along. What has that felt like? In the early days, a gathering of Strong Towns members could fit around one table at a bar. Now there's been this surge of interest and recognition. There are a lot of people I would say are member-adjacent, who sort of are Strong Towns and don't even know that there's actually a Strong Towns movement, organization, and entity with founding members and things like that. What's that been like?
It's been awesome to see it grow. As it's grown, I've taken a little bit of a step back. I'm a stand-up comedian, so I spend a lot of time not just working as a planner in my day job. I tell jokes at night, and some of them are funny.
Since Strong Towns started, I've also gotten married and had multiple children. Any type of event or thing to do with young children is infinitely more difficult now. But it is great. We used to do these small things called Strong Towns on Tap, which was basically a speech at a bar. It was a small group.
It's interesting because it did become a tight community. So many people, even if I haven't talked to them in the last 10 years, I still feel close to them because we were part of this thing that started and expanded.
It's become something that is hard to wrap your head around as an average person. In Boise, Idaho, there's a huge chapter or whatever. At the local level, the human mind almost can't understand it.
There's also a way in which what you're describing right off the bat, this whole planning world and world of big projects and big things in other parts of the world, is almost that you have to take these big things and then find ways to break them down into what we can get that isn't quite at that size to fit in our space.
Strong Towns is very much the opposite of that. It's, 'All right, let's take the most minute observations about our places where we're struggling and the challenges that we face, and begin to build just a little bit more.' If we have lost sight of what it takes to build lasting prosperity in our communities, partly by being completely enamored with the biggest, the brightest, and the newest, then it's that humble pie that says, 'Oh, our ancestors actually built blocks that worked better than what we currently do.'
The city of Cochrane brought in Urban3 to discuss how they could make their city more productive. They found that their downtown, on the old side and on the bad side of the tracks, where they had done all their new redevelopment, was earning three times as much on a per-acre basis as the broader suburban community. But their old, rundown downtown, built by a bunch of farmers and cowboys, was actually four times as productive.
All the new stuff is not even as productive as the old stuff. The old stuff is little one-story and two-story structures. That's where your little saloon and your little dance house are, and yet they are still the beating heart of the economic engine of your city. Something is up with that.
I find that learning from those little examples and those little things is not to say we should just do little things. It's actually that we need to build upon that as we go. Maybe that sets us up. On the one hand, we can dream big, but what do you want to see for the Strong Towns movement as we look at this year and going forward? I'd love your thoughts. This is your baby. You've been passionately involved. You want to see continued success and health. What would that look like?
The one thing that comes to mind is a tangent. I am not necessarily opposed to people dreaming, thinking big, or doing big things, but what I see with so many cities and towns is that they try to swing for the fences and try for that home run, but they're not actually hitting singles. You have to hit the singles. You have to learn how to bunt before you try to swing for the fences.
I think that's a huge gap. A city will try to do a large TIF or tax-subsidized development, and they'll want to make it look perfect. They'll throw a ton of money into it, and then it will turn out subpar. Forget the ROI. It's bad from the beginning. But they don't even have those small things.
Can you open up a coffee shop in a building that used to have a dental office? That's six months of process right there, so nobody's going to do that. Doing those small things and those small tweaks is something I would encourage any city to do. Do the easy stuff first. So many places seem hesitant to even do that type of stuff.
They view their zoning code, for example, as a sacred text that Moses brought down from the mountain, as something you can't even touch. I look at this great example in a city that I love. I was a planning commissioner in the city of St. Paul. There was a building on a side street, a small commercial street. It was a hair salon forever, and somebody said, 'What if I just want to make it some kind of office, a general retail space with an insurance agency?'
Then the city comes by and says, 'If you do that, you have to do a rezone. If you get a rezone, you have to bring the building up to code.' It's a 120- or 130-year-old building. Now you need to build ADA bathrooms with an accessible stairwell to the basement. Customers aren't even necessarily going to go to the basement. All of a sudden, this thing can be a hair salon, or if it tries to be anything else, whoever is buying this $300,000 building will need to put $300,000 of work into it just for it to be an insurance office.
I'm scratching my head. If you can't turn a hair salon into an insurance office, you're not playing small ball correctly. Forget home runs. That type of insanity embedded in our code is one of those things where you have to learn to take a deep breath, otherwise it will drive you nuts. That's why I started stand-up comedy. I had to find a way to deal with it.
I feel bad for the person who needs to spend that kind of money. We're in the Midwest. I'm in St. Paul. We have some nicer areas where investments like that are justified, but half of our city lives near the poverty line. If we really want to incrementally build up and build wealth in those neighborhoods, we have to be flexible, and we're not. We treat everything the same.
There are a lot of good fairness arguments for that, but somebody can't buy a $300,000 commercial building and be expected to spend double the money just for a bathroom, despite the fact that it's currently being used today. Stuff like that kills inertia, kills entrepreneurship, and kills the tax base, because you forever lock these buildings into that singular use. I will stop ranting about it.
I feel like it's the recognition of those patterns that has gotten us into this situation. It's the death by a thousand small cuts, but the vast majority of them are very preventable cuts. The stagnation that follows still speaks to that core point where we can actually find a great deal of agreement.
That feels like one of the reasons I believe the Strong Towns message, at its core, is about how we build lasting prosperity and what detours we've taken from that approach. At times, it has been calling out various sacred cows and beginning to say, 'We will address the idea that we need a good master plan and say maybe we don't.' We're willing to say those types of things.
I feel like that also gives rise to the next evolution of a Strong Towns movement, which is, 'All right, what's the next smallest thing we can do?' Seeing local groups just do this, almost every one of these podcast episodes on the Bottom-Up Revolution feed is, 'I wanted to do a small thing. I realized it was quite difficult, but I just went and did it, and it actually gave rise to the next smallest thing.' It creates the triggers for additional action and the satisfaction that comes from it.
As we close, because we could easily go for hours and probably need to bring back Strong Towns on Tap, maybe in a virtual version, but also in real life, what are some of the things that give you hope in the work you're doing, maybe with a view to where Strong Towns is taking things?
I think we're making progress at the local level across the country. So many places are doing things like updating their zoning codes and making small tweaks. As much as I will rag on the city of St. Paul endlessly, and I'm a planning commissioner, so perhaps I'm partially to blame for some of them, we have updated the code so that pretty much anywhere within the city, you can build up to a fourplex.
That is a huge win that came out of this movement, along with other groups, too, that Strong Towns really pushed for: smaller missing-middle housing. The fact that you can build a fourplex, with some exceptions, throughout the city on any single-family lot is a huge win. That was unimaginable a decade ago. It would have been political suicide if you had proposed that 10 years ago. You would get 1% of the vote. Now, it just passes unanimously.
There are many things like that across the country. One of the things I think is awesome is when cities have plan templates for certain types of duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings. They're saying, 'Here is a suite of 30 by-right designs for how you can add missing-middle housing. If it's on a standard city lot, you can just build it.' I think we're going to see the fruits of that labor, though obviously it will take time.
I find that fascinating. With this being Member Week, and with us celebrating members, it feels good to celebrate with you what is happening and the continued work that's happening. From our first member to the continuation of a growing base of members, Nate, it's good to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
One last story. They put up the donation link, and I must have refreshed the website at the right time. This was in 2010. I donated 10 bucks, and I got an email five minutes later. It was Chuck, and he said, 'Who are you, and why did you donate?'
I said, 'I'm Nate. I'm from Minnesota.' He said, 'I'm from Minnesota.' I said, 'Yes, I know.' That was the start of it. That's how responsive he was. He was just saying, 'Who are you, and why did you donate? I can't believe it. It's been 10 minutes since we put it up.'
It's a fascinating story. Keep doing the work that you're doing. I really appreciate it.
I appreciate it as well. Folks, if you want to email me, you can email [email protected]. If you also want to ask, 'Who are you, what are you doing, and what's up?' I would love to know if you want to connect in that way. Again, keep doing what you can to build strong towns, 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.