Near El Morro, one of Puerto Rico’s most recognizable historic sites, a government road project called for cutting down 26 mature trees, widening a road, adding a roundabout, and turning part of a grassy area into parking. Giancarlo Gonzalez, an Old San Juan resident and founding member of a Strong Towns Local Conversation in San Juan, explains how neighbors discovered the plan and began asking why it was needed at all. Their petition has drawn more than 8,000 signatures, pulled the National Park Service into the fight, and forced new scrutiny of a project residents say was moving forward without their input.
Hi, everybody! Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host Tiffany Owens Reed. Today, I'm joined by Giancarlo Gonzalez, the former CIO of the government of Puerto Rico and technology entrepreneur. He's the founder of Erbitol, a real estate valuation app for property owners in Puerto Rico. He's also founding member of the Strong Towns Local Conversation Group in San Juan, father of two, and currently leading an effort to make San Juan more hospitable to people moving around, not in cars. I'm really looking forward to bringing you this conversation.
I think it's an interesting case study in navigating what can be a really tricky dynamic when you're trying to improve your community: dealing with local government, finding ways to improve the processes for how change happens, and casting a vision for what the community can become. I think Giancarlo is going to have a lot to say on that. So without further ado, Giancarlo, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast.
Thank you, Tiffany, for having me.
Let's set the stage a little bit. I've never had the privilege of visiting San Juan. I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about your city. I know you live and work there, and maybe you can provide a little historical context to the town and what people love about it.
Well, if you've been following pop culture and the music genre, people have been talking about how Puerto Rico is a completely different place to visit with all the Bad Bunny concerts going on. Puerto Rico is uniquely special. It sits between the U.S. mainland and Spain as a blend of these two cultures. I live in Old San Juan, which is the historic colonial town of Puerto Rico, uniquely built with a historic wall that surrounds it, with the cobblestones and the colonial architecture that gives it the feeling of a European town, and it's right here in the Americas. It's been preserved and restored significantly throughout the last several decades through the leadership of the late Ricardo Legria and the Instituto de Cultura, the Culture Institute.
Lately we've been having challenges preserving that, and the movement that we have started has been geared toward continuing to have the old town be what it is and prosper in that way.
I'm curious. So when you say the old town, is this the main historic part of the city? What's the rest of the city like? Is it more suburban, or how would you describe it?
San Juan has several neighborhoods. You have Old San Juan, which is part of the Isleta de San Juan, a separate island connected by the Dos Hermanos Bridge. It's a bridge that connects the old town with the rest of San Juan. Then you have Condado, Miramar, Santurce, the more urban zones, and then you have the financial district, Atore. The rest is a lot of urban sprawl through regions called Rio Piedras, Coupe, and Caenito, which spread out into the suburbs.
Where did you grow up? So I know you live in Old San Juan now. I'm just curious: is that kind of consistent with how you grew up, or was living in the old town new for you?
I actually grew up in the suburbs, what you would call Rio Piedras, Pocupe, which is where the famous boxer Felix Trinidad is from, so around that area. To move around, you needed a car to travel anywhere. My family has a history with a company that came down through my great-grandfather, called Gonzalez Padil, which was a famous chain of department stores that had headquarters in Old San Juan. I would occasionally travel with my dad to work, and I would go to Old San Juan because that's where the headquarters of the stores were, so I had a connection with Old San Juan. In fact, the main building in front of Plaza de Armas still bears the name Gonzalez Padilla Building, so I have that connection to the old town. I then met my now wife, Sofia, who grew up in Old San Juan.
Her father always had a building there, and she grew up there from childhood. When we married, she mentioned that she didn't want to leave Old San Juan, and I grew into it. I have ties to the old city as well, so let's try to find a place here and make our living here. I have been living in Old San Juan since 2009.
Okay, is there an awareness in San Juan of the difference between these different ways of designing a place? Do you feel like most people are aware of the difference between this old colonial village and the suburbs? Is it something that comes up a lot, or is it just what people are used to?
When you're younger, in your 20s and single, where do you want to live? Typically, people want to say, "Oh, I want to live in this city, in these areas, in Old San Juan, in Condado, Miramar, Santurce, because you have walkability and you have more nightlife," and people gravitate toward that. But people get used to suburban car dependence because it's been naturally ingrained in us that public transportation is unreliable and you need a car to really move around. To me, people are forced to go into debt to buy something that depreciates in value in order to be able to move around, and there are impacts on how far you can get in life with that impediment. But people are so accustomed to that being the norm that they don't question it.
When I tell people that I live in Old San Juan, they'll say, "Oh, but there's so much traffic sometimes to get in and out." On weekends, when people want to go to Old San Juan, there's traffic when there are activities, and the old town can be a little bit of a challenge to get to. But once you figure out the intricacies of the different streets and how to get in and out, you find where you have your parking lot, you park, and then you walk the block or two to your home. You get used to it. I have a pharmacy that I walk to. I have a hardware store that I walk to. I have a supermarket. I have a farmers market that I walk to. I go to restaurants. I walk every day to many places, and I'm used to that. I use the e-bikes for rent, and I take those to the local beach. I make use of this in ways that many people don't.
I'm used to that urban lifestyle, and I think as you talk to other people, there's interest in wanting that, but nobody necessarily sees the path to how to get there.
I had this question technically saved for later, but I want to go ahead and ask you now. As you map out your geographic journey from the suburbs to Old San Juan, could you tell us a little bit about how you got pulled into this world of thinking about cars and walkability, and how you became someone who walks for most of his errands as well?
Yeah, there's a first and last name for this guy. His name is Victor Ramirez, and hopefully he will listen to this at some point. He's a coder, as am I. We were mainly programmers and developers, application builders, but then he studied urban planning. He started feeding some of this information to us: let's build an app for the urban train. Puerto Rico has a train. Many people say that it doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't get you to many places because it hasn't been completed. It started as a phase 1A, and then they never finished phase 1B, which was to get it to the point of the highest density, which is minijas at the heart of Santurce. That tranche was not finished.
That's when there was a change in leadership in the government, corruption scandals and different things happened, then there was the bankruptcy, so the trains stopped being built. Then you had the issue of all the parcels around the train. Why haven't we developed them into mixed use with higher density? Instead, they've done individual freestanding commercial buildings with parking for different fast-food chains, so they haven't maximized the use of the land. This friend of mine decided to build this app for the train for people to use, and that got me involved in the whole question: How do we optimize public transportation? Because you don't want to depend on the car anymore. It slowly grew from there.
As the adoption of other multimodal forms of transportation started kicking in, like electric bikes, I started using them more, and I became an advocate for the fact that there is a different way of getting in and out of places. It's a lot faster and more efficient than going to a multi-layered parking lot, making a line, and looking for parking. It ties into the conveniences of moving around that people just don't see sometimes.
From my experience living in a walkable city, I've always wrestled with how to explain the difference between leaving your house and just continuing from one place to the next to get what you need, versus leaving your house, getting into a car, and moving through the landscape. I don't feel like I've really found the right word to summarize the difference. The closest I've been able to come up with is continuity. That's the only way I can really describe it. You just feel like you're flowing. It's continuous from your private space to your porch to your steps to the sidewalk to the business, and it gives you this feeling of continuity. The space is connected, and you're connected to the space. It's totally different once you get into a car, primarily because you're physically cut off, but also because you're moving at a much faster speed.
The city feels like a collection of places with a blur in between. But when you're walking, you don't have that blur. You're seeing it. I don't know how to explain it. This is where it breaks down for me. Is "contradictory" the right word?
Well, in the car, you are encapsulated. You're in an air-conditioned environment. You don't notice that when you walk under a tree, the temperature drops, and then you pass the tree, you're under the sun, and the temperature rises. Then you say, "Wait, could we have more trees so the entire walk has shade?" You start noticing things that you don't notice if you're in that car, encapsulated from the rest of the environment. You also say hi to people. I live in Old San Juan. I walk by tourists all the time, and every day I ask somebody, "Can I help you find something?" I'll recommend something, and you interact with neighbors and shop owners that I've befriended over the years. That's a community.
That sense of community is nonexistent for the most part in suburbia, unless you go to a recreational area and play some sports, but then you get back to your car and that's it.
Speaking of trees, I want to talk about the effort that you're leading and that you're part of in Puerto Rico. I'm sure you'll be able to add much more specificity and detail to this quick summary, but you found out about this plan to, if I understand it correctly, add a roundabout, cut down some trees, pave a parking lot, and widen a street near El Morro, which is a large fortress in San Juan and a popular tourist destination. It seems really cool and beautiful from the pictures I've seen. Can you tell us about this plan? Add in what I'm missing, but maybe you can describe the initiative for our listeners. Maybe you can tell the story of how you found out about it, and then we'll unpack a little more of what you're working on as an alternative.
Yeah. El Morro is the historic fort that defends the old town. It was built by the Spaniards from the 1500s to the 1700s. When cruise ships enter the Old San Juan Bay, it's the first thing you see as you head into the bay, and it's just this beautiful structure, majestic, with the wall that surrounds it. Suddenly, as you look inward, people are going to see a parking lot because they're using a portion of it near that wall to park cars in an area where it used to be grass and trees. Why is there a need to do that? That region is administered and owned by the National Park Service. They signed an agreement in 1976 to lease a portion of it to the governor's mansion. But they still own it.
The National Park Service still owns it, and the governor's mansion is the oldest residence in the Americas, and it still operates to this day, which is nice. But it also serves as the governor's headquarters, meaning that there's an adjacent building that has the entire legal team of the governor, and another one that has the chief of staff and all of their employees that supervise every single member of cabinet. It's a big operation that runs from this governor mansion structure, and all of these employees need to get to Old San Juan, and the government hasn't devised a way to move them in and out more efficiently. They have a little motor pool where you park cars, and they drive them back and forth. This operation is only there to serve these employees, but there's the convenience of parking closer and closer.
So they have been using this land as their own personal parking lot without thinking that there could be a better use of this space. It could be an urban forest that expands its use. It could have a lot of other more appropriate uses, and there's a proposal to tear down 26 trees. People walk this every morning, every night. There are people that come from all over the island to walk in this area. Residents, we walk here, and the only cars that go by this road are government-certified cars from either employees or the police department inside Fortaleza or the governor when she comes in and out. So there's really not a volume of traffic that requires this road to be widened, except that you just want to speed up and drive faster. But the speed limit is at five miles per hour.
The Highway Authority believes that tearing down these trees, putting people on a sidewalk, eliminating shade, and expanding the road and putting a rotunda is going to make it safer. Really, what they're going to do is increase speeds, and there's no traffic study to justify it. We found out about it because somebody filtered the information. I served in government as CIO, and there are people who still follow the work that I do in advocacy for a more open, user-centered digital government. So they filtered the information, and they were planning on doing this without getting any citizen input. There is a Complete Streets manual that they have that they should follow in redesigning any street, and they were not following that here, and it was going to have a detrimental impact on the people that actually live and enjoy this.
If we want to have an Old San Juan that's moving toward a more pedestrian-friendly environment, this is certainly taking us in the opposite direction.
So when you found out about this, can you just continue the story for us? What were some of the next steps you took, and where's the conversation now?
So, I found out about it, and walking in the old town and being part of the community, I go to the farmers market, and I meet with fellow neighbors, and the topic comes up, and everybody starts asking, but why are they doing this? What is the reason? Are they purposely trying to just destroy where we live? Why would they do this? I start saying, "This is their mindset. They actually think they're doing something positive." Then the question is, why would they think this? Then I recommended to some of my fellow neighbors, "Hey, there's this book, it's called Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. They talk about this, and several people bought it and they read it. As we gathered again, they said, "This is the reasoning behind it, and there are solutions, and we need to get together and rally around this. So we created this petition.
We put up a website. It's called Salvemoselmorro.com, which means Save El Morro. Salvemoselmorro.com, and we put up a petition to stop the trees from being cut down to stop the entire thing, and the petition went viral. It has about 8,500 signatures right now, so well over 8,000, and it got a lot of press. The news media covered it. The newspapers covered it. What it did is get the National Park Service involved, which was important because the state government had said they had approval from the National Park Service, and that was a lie. They did not have approval, and in a subsequent meeting between the National Park Service and the Highway Authority, they were told, "We did not approve this. We have a lease agreement from 1976, and you're going to stop this. So now the rotunda is on hold.
The parking lot has been stopped, and now it's just a matter of seeing how far National Park Service will go to defend the entire region beyond what is directly in their jurisdiction, but also to see if they can convince the higher authority to actually do what's right, change their mindset because there's an abandoned park there and a little urban forest, which everybody loves. We need more trees in the forest, and the urban park has no swings, has no slide. They're both broken. There's some exercise machines that are also rotten and broken, and this $2 million investment that they were going to make to widen the road and create the rotunda brought zero dollars to the park. But if you're really trying to make things better for people, why didn't you invest anything in fixing the park?
That's where we were at a crossroads in this agreement because they are convinced that they're doing things for the better of the community, but you're not investing what the community wants. Now we're at the point where they have to meet with the National Park Service. We organized our Strong Towns group in Old San Juan, and we are trying to find ways to see how we can also defend against this. The mayor of San Juan, Miguel Romero, wrote a letter in support of our demands. He mentioned that there should be no reason to cut any trees if we don't have to, and expressly supported meeting with the community and voicing our concerns, which was actually really well received on our end.
So I want to clarify the agencies involved. There's the National Park Service, then there's the mayor, the citizens and the Strong Towns group, and then you're referring to this other entity, the Highway Authority. Is that the main actor behind this?
Yep. They get funds from the federal highway, so it's the Puerto Rico Highway Authority, what on the mainland we would refer to as a Department of Transportation. It's under the Department of Transportation, but it's an entity under there called Autoridad de Carreteras. It's the Highway Authority, but it is under the DOT. Correct.
Okay, so I know it's a little tricky understanding how DOTs work because they're not necessarily responsive to the local community where they're working. We see this all the time in the U.S. with highway expansions. The DOT can just march into any city. I'm sure it doesn't happen exactly like this, and I'm not giving the most eloquent rendition of how the process goes, but it often feels like they can pick a highway and do whatever they want in a city unless people organize and push back. They're not really forced to be accountable to local entities. I think in your case it's unique because they were trying to make changes on land that they actually didn't own, so you had a natural speed bump built in that said, "Hey, this is not even your land.
You can't really just do this." I'm curious how you're wrestling with the different people and agencies involved, and just the question of power and community change. I bet it feels even more intense in San Juan because it feels like a smaller place in a way. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
As you start raising awareness, you start finding out who can help, who can be an ally in this battle, and who, I don't want to say an enemy, but who are you at odds with? It's interesting because there are other parts around the Isleta de San Juan, which is Old San Juan plus the extension of that particular island within San Juan. There's another battle about another parking lot that they want to build at the nearby beach called Escambron. There are multiple situations where citizens are saying, "No, we don't want a parking lot here. We don't want more road here. What we want is more park and more walkable areas." These entities communicate and we collaborate, and then they'll say, "Oh, this person may be able to help you here." In Old San Juan, there also happen to be multiple entities with jurisdiction.
There's the Commission of Historic Preservation. Any project that receives federal funds and is tied to the historical buildings of Puerto Rico also needs to go through historic preservation, and that's another entity that has some sway into what's happening in El Morro. Plus, you have the National Park Service. As I started building this petition and people started signing, people started writing and saying, "You should talk to this guy. You should find this out." Slowly, I found out that the Highway Authority cannot just go in here, bulldoze over this, and do whatever they want. Some people would say the Highway Authority would build a highway straight into El Morro if nobody stood in the way. Fortunately, there are some components standing in the way and trying to knock some sense into these guys.
I keep thinking of the phrase, to a hammer, everything is a nail. I feel the same way: to the car, everything is a lane or a parking spot. Once car brain takes over, it becomes a prism through which you see space. Everything becomes optimized around improving the driver experience, which I get, in a way, is not 100% a bad thing. I understand the impulse to improve things for a particular experience of life. But you really have to look beyond what's making things better for drivers and ask what's making things actually better for the community. You mentioned the governor's mansion, so where was the government in all of this? You said the mayor was against it, but what about the governor? I guess there's something between the mayor and the governor there.
As for the governor, I don't think she's involved directly in this. It was more the Highway Authority saying, "Oh, we need to make it easier for the governor to move in and out of this place and open this up for more cars." I don't know if she was necessarily directing that she wanted that parking lot or not, but certainly Fortaleza has a need to bring employees in and out. Whenever the governor leaves the old town, they have a motorcade that stops traffic at every corner, as if it were the president. So they exit and enter Old San Juan without any traffic at all, because she is insulated from the usual flows of everybody else. That feeds into the problem because she's not accustomed to having to deal with the reality that there's traffic here because there are too many cars here. It adds to the problem of making it more car-friendly.
She comes in and out whenever she wants. She doesn't see the problem from its root. It just adds up to: How do we pile in more cars? Fortaleza is short-sighted in how they could contribute to making it more pedestrian-friendly, because they could make it more pedestrian-friendly. They just don't. The car brain is ingrained in there.
Yeah, I mean, I think when you're moving around primarily by car, it really does insulate you, as you mentioned, but it also centers you. You begin to think of things, and I say this as a driver, as: I need to get the shadiest parking spot, the closest parking spot. It narrows your understanding of what's good based on your individual needs, and it makes it hard to perceive need as a community experience. It becomes a very individual thing: I want the shadiest parking spot in Aldi, I want this, and then you're in competition with everyone else. I think there's a psychological effect of car culture where it isolates us and amplifies our individualistic impulses, such that the city moves by in a blur. It's not just a material blur, almost a blur of duty. It no longer really matters because it's just this gray blur.
Your heart doesn't attach to a blur, so you're not going to think about what's good for the blur because it's just a blur. That totally changes once you really experience community and all of its intricacies and details and people, the streets and the cobblestones and the signs that you love and the quirky little shop there. Then it's no longer a blur, and the heart can bond to that. Your understanding of need and what's good expands outside of the self. So that's my philosophical rant for the day.
No, but I love it. It brought me into reading about Donald Shoup and how he says it's unfair to have cities where parking is free for cars and housing is expensive for people. Puerto Rico has that problem in these dense urban areas. The government has over 100 spots saved for themselves in the old town, and the worker, the service person, nobody can find places to park because all these spots around government buildings and beyond are reserved for the government. They haven't thought about how much that really costs and why that isn't tied to their yearly budget. Otherwise, they should free it up and make it so that there's one spot available every hour, and it provides for better flow. Hell, even better, use some of those spots for other forms of transportation. E-bikes aren't allowed into the old town at the moment.
You start thinking about how this access is managed, and it ties to the fact that the government is short-sighted in how to manage it.
So I think what stood out to me from hearing your story when we talked outside the recording, and just looking at some of the material, is that there are two issues here: the design of the project, which you've talked about, and the process around how this decision was made. Where is the conversation in your community with the Strong Towns group about this kind of process? As you mentioned when we talked, this is not the first time something like this has happened, where a massive change is imposed on the community with no community input. What's your hope for changing that process and making it something more of the community can be part of?
My hope first would be that the Transportation Authority and the Highway Authority reconsider what they proposed to do in this region and backtrack from what they were planning, then review the design, work on the park, don't cut down any trees, and make that more pedestrian-friendly. Remove the cars, put a better shuttle system in place for the governor to move her people around, and build from there. How do we start making Old San Juan more pedestrian-friendly? There's another website that we're working on, VSJ, as in Viejo San Juan, Peatonal, which means pedestrian, VSJPeatonal.com. We're starting to propose how to close off certain cobblestone streets at certain hours, make them more pedestrian-friendly, and slowly improve access in and out, parking access, and transportation around the city.
Maybe in the next three, four, five, six years, Old San Juan can feel like a European city, like Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, Palermo. You go into all these places and you love walking around the cobblestones and sitting on the streets. People travel there and love it.
Old San Juan could be that, but it hasn't happened. I think a vision like that requires sacrifice. As you said, these spots are being saved for government employees, and that's where the sacrifice starts.
Yes, good point. In a meeting that happened a year ago with the municipality, they were talking about making it more pedestrian-friendly on certain days, and they proposed to eliminate a lot of street parking. There's an association that represents businesses and an association that represents residents. The commercial association revolted because all of the parking that the municipality was proposing to remove was commercial parking. I raised my hand and asked one question: How many spots are you removing that are government parking? They looked at the map and said two. So they were removing 50 commercial parking spots on the street and only two from government. To your point, the sacrifice needs to start with the government. They need to lead the way by saying, "We're not going to park here anymore. We're going to take the shuttle.
We're going to improve this shuttle service. It's going to work efficiently enough that our employees will use it. We're not going to need to park here, and that's going to be so efficient that other people will use it as well." It starts by leading by example, not by making it inconvenient for others, because that's why nothing happens. Nobody trusts that it's going to be better than the current situation.
Yeah, I think the relationship between leadership, sacrifice, and trust is critical. I think you're totally right. The government really does have to put some skin in the game and say, "We have a vision for our place, for what can uplift the whole community. We're willing to make sacrifices to make that happen." When you see leadership willing to make sacrifices, it translates into trust in a way that's not the same when residents or business owners sacrifice. We really do need leadership to step in and say, "We're going to put our commute on the line too." If the government knows that they need the shuttle to run on time because their commute is on the line, that's going to have a trickle-down effect and benefit everybody. So where are you seeing signs of hope in terms of moving this conversation?
I feel like it's not just a matter of having a plan, a roadmap, a shuttle, the money and where it goes. It's a matter of vision and helping the government rethink their town and their relationship to it, to see themselves as part of it and not as just a space to move through to get to their job. I'm curious what it's like to have those conversations and try to help them expand their vision of what their community could be as it relates to the experience of people moving around.
For signs of hope, there's this young person working. His name is John Cordero. He was an advocate for using public transportation, and he had a website for the bus routes. It was taken down by the bus authority itself because they were saying, "No, you can't have this page." The media rose up and said, "This kid was providing a great service with this." Now he was hired and brought in to work with one of the transportation service providers to improve that service. He has been very active, for example, when there are concerts, the World Baseball Classic and other activities, designing routes for the government to better supply bus transportation connected to the train. So there's hope that public transportation will improve around the urban region, thanks to this person and the people working with him.
I'm optimistic that maybe that will continue to influence improvements toward the old city. So that's a positive.
What about the local group?
The community has organized itself in a way that has never happened before, and we are together discussing how to take on these challenges, particularly this project with chopping down the trees. We're ready to defend it with everything we have, including tying ourselves to the trees if we have to. Hopefully it won't get to that, but if it does, we will. We can build on that to continue to have an Old San Juan that becomes more pedestrian-friendly and accessible to all.
Well, I think it's wonderful. I know a lot of organizations or groups like this have something that they're against, but it sounds like you all really have something that you're for: a positive vision to point people to as an alternative, not just saying, "We don't want this. We don't like that. We don't want you to do this project." You're also saying, "Hey, we want to invite you into a new vision and a new picture of what could be possible in this community." I think that's a really powerful combination. Anything else you'd like to share about what else you're excited about with the Strong Towns group? Are there other opportunities you're thinking about, ways the Strong Towns framework can be applied to San Juan?
For now, no. We are focused on this specific battle for Old San Juan, and hopefully we can build from there.
Fantastic. Well, in closing, I'm just so glad we got to share your story here. I know this will probably be hard for you because it sounds like Old San Juan is a fantastic place, but what are some favorite places, some favorite small businesses you like to recommend people check out if they come to visit?
Well, in Old San Juan, I would recommend doing breakfast at Spiga, S-P-I-G-A. It's a beautiful little pastry shop run by a local. Then you can have lunch at Café Caleta, which is another local chef. I love their different sandwiches. It's a unique place in front of the cathedral, also with chairs out on the sidewalks. At night you can have dinner at Materia Prima, which is another local restaurant, farm to table. They also opened up their own little supermarket with the ingredients and the food that they serve in the restaurant. You can actually buy it raw at that supermarket. That's one reason why I love going shopping here for food in Old San Juan. I can walk to Materia Prima. Those three spots would cover your breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
If you head out of Old San Juan, in Miramar there's a local spot for lunch called La Pradera, and they make great mofongo and fricassee, which I highly recommend.
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Giancarlo. I appreciate you taking time to join me on the podcast and share your story and your fight with us. I'm sure many people will be checking out the links we're going to attach to the show to keep track of your progress on that battle.
Thank you, Tiffany, and I look forward to continuing to get involved in the Strong Towns community.
Excellent. Well, to our audience, thank you so much for listening. I'll be back soon with another conversation. If there's someone in your community who you think we should have on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form. I'll be back soon with another episode. 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.