Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 00:18

Hello, this is Norm, and this is Up Zoned, a podcast from Strong Towns, where we take a current news story about cities and use it to explore the deeper incentives and trade-offs that are shaping how our places actually work, and what we can do to make them work more effectively.

What we're trying to understand is how municipalities manage the cost of growth, and what are some of the things that need to really be considered when higher levels of government push to reduce or standardize things like development charges — as well as pushing for more housing in response to real needs that are identified in communities. There are economic consequences of a lack of housing in many of our communities. There are impacts on social services; even just the amount you have to pay a teacher or a nurse or a caregiver in a community really does have a direct link with the prices of housing.

Considering that in the context of our existing neighborhoods — and whether or not they are ready for, or even able to be built in, so that more housing can emerge within existing neighborhoods — this has been one of those things that is really challenging for a lot of places. So today we're talking about a recent CBC News article out of Ottawa: city councillors fear the devil is in the details in a federal-provincial housing fund that was recently announced by our federal government. The article came out March 30, 2026.

It really does touch on that growing tension being experienced as federal and provincial leaders want cities to lower development charges — or in the US, impact fees or development levies; there are different names for them — but the idea is that when a new project is proposed and brought forward for permission, an additional suite of fees should be added to that project so that it will cover the cost of growth.

These municipalities in Ontario have been offered a deal: cut your development cost charges in half in exchange for access to $8.8 billion in infrastructure funding. But local officials are warning that those fees aren't arbitrary. If we have to cut them in half, what are we making up on the other side in order to pay for the expansion of infrastructure that's needed in our places, as well as its maintenance and upkeep? What exactly happens if we reduce them? Do homes get cheaper, or do the costs just show up somewhere else?

I'm joined today by Michel Durand-Wood, author of the book You'll Pay for This: How We Can Afford a Great City for Everyone Forever — which is just a fantastic title. It's one of the most accessible guides out there to how municipal finance actually works and doesn't work. Michel is also a frequent contributor to the Strong Towns blog from his DearWinnipeg.com blog, and the architect behind the Strong Towns Finance Decoder.

Also with us is Dan Winer, co-executive leader of industry activation at Small Housing, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based nonprofit working to make smaller, more attainable housing forms — things like laneway homes, townhomes, and other missing middle housing — more feasible to build. Dan and the team at Small Housing work directly with builders, designers, and policymakers to unlock those opportunities on the ground. Welcome to both of you.

Michel Durand-Wood – 01:40

Thanks, Norm, happy to be here.

Dan Winer – 01:40

Great to be here. I probably should have said hi after you introduced me so that listeners can know who's talking. But yeah, they'll get it.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 03:40

So you're Michel, and Dan is also with us — it's awesome to have you both. Unpacking the article a little further: it touches on the fact that city council members are cautious because the provincial government and the federal government are saying you can have $8.8 billion in infrastructure funding. That sounds good. If we were in the States, we would multiply that by about 10 in terms of the amount a comparable population area would be getting. You think, okay, let's move forward with this.

But I ran the numbers, because the province anticipates adding 1.5 million homes in the next five years. As the article cites, the average development cost for a single family home is $50,000 per home being added. Municipalities are told to cut that in half and the government will make up the difference. So if a community brings in $25,000 now in reduced fees, the total funding pool of $8.8 billion would only fully offset costs for about 352,000 homes.

Which means that if the province is actually intending to reach 1.5 million new homes, there would be a shortfall of $28.7 billion, and that shortfall would be experienced by the municipalities. So yes, $8.8 billion sounds like a lot — until you actually look at how far that would go.

It raises the challenge: what do we mean when we set these standards? A 50% reduction in fees feels significant, but we are not talking about a 50% increase in government funding. We're talking about a finite amount of funding provided in contrast with a ratio of what we are changing in our communities. This structural gap becomes a problem. Cities would be committing to a long-term reduction in revenue without a corresponding, reliable replacement.

That raises the question for me: why would any municipal administrator accept a deal that leaves such a large deficit unaccounted for — except for the fact that there's political pressure to accept it. Dan, I'd love to hear your reaction to the news out of the federal government and what they've done with the Ontario government, and then we'll connect that with British Columbia and the efforts there to address this. What were some of the things that came to mind as you read through the piece today?

Dan Winer – 06:11

Yeah, I'm glad you're setting that question to me first, because I think Michel is going to be able to clean up some of my bad, lazy math.

I'm definitely a housing guy first and not necessarily an infrastructure person first. The devil's always in the details with any government announcement, and in British Columbia, it's going to be an announcement about an announcement about an announcement. Who knows when any policy will actually come into effect.

I'll also preface this with: ultimately, Norm, I think you're right that this is still going to have a long-term deficit effect that we need to consider how we pay for and make up. At the same time, I think some of the math you've suggested in that intro is not as drastic, because if we're asking municipalities to reduce their DCCs — their development cost charges — by 50%, and the feds and the provincial government are coming to the table with 25% of that, it sounds to me more like the feds and the provincial government are kicking in $12,500,

not $25,000. So by my math, that gets us to 704,000

units of those 1.5 million — still a shortfall, but not as bad as the 300,000 we were starting off with. It's also important to highlight that this is a three-year experiment. I think it's a freeze of two to three years, which is what the federal and provincial government has suggested, and that 1.5 million target is to get to 2030–2035, so there's a longer gap.

If I'm a municipality, I'm excited about it, because it's probably going to kick the can down the road to the next council. It's good for industry, it's going to get more housing built, but I don't think it's going to solve the problem. I think it's a band-aid solution, and I think we're going to be back in this mess again in two to three years. Excitement — it's good to see industry getting going again, it is a massive opportunity — but it's a band-aid solution.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 08:16

Mitch, let's talk about kicking cans down the road over to Manitoba. We actually have an all-Canadian lineup today, and I know there's a ton of overlap with US policy as well. What are you noticing, and what are some of the things that have emerged as you've looked at this closely? There's tons to unpack here.

Michel Durand-Wood – 08:38

CMHC — Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation — released some data last December showing that DCCs increase the cost of housing. It's pretty widespread, and in a lot of cases it increases housing costs by more than the DCC itself. For every dollar that you raise the DCC, housing costs go up by $1.50 or $2. On top of that, it actually spreads to existing housing as well. If you have existing housing near newly developed housing with DCCs, that also increases the prices of those existing homes. So it's increasing housing prices across the board.

I can understand why the federal government wants to step in to reduce these charges in order to keep housing affordability within the realm of possibilities. But from the Strong Towns perspective, we have to ask: what infrastructure gap does this create? I chuckled when you said these DCCs aren't arbitrary — except that they are. That's where I want to take your argument even further, Norm. What Dan was saying about the gap is what it is, and we can refine the math on

whether the federal and provincial money coming in is going to cover the cost of the DCC reduction. But I think we have to go even further and ask: is the DCC even covering the cost of what it says it's covering? The Federation of Canadian Municipalities put out a background report, probably two years ago now,

showing that on average, every new housing unit in Canada requires $107,000

worth of new infrastructure. There are no DCCs in Canada even coming close to that — save maybe the City of Toronto. Vancouver might have a word with you on that as well.

Those are basically the two places. So $107,000 — no DCCs anywhere are coming close to covering that. There's already an existing gap, and I think part of that comes from

treating our infrastructure challenges as a financing problem. It's always about how do we find the money. Are there innovative financing models we can use, like municipal utility districts? Always trying to find these off-balance-sheet or exotic financial instruments, or trying to find new revenue sources to pay for something that is ultimately insolvent.

The question becomes: if you have a $50,000-a-year salary and you live in a $20 million house, it doesn't matter how good you are at negotiating mortgage rates — you cannot afford that house. When we look at the FCM numbers of $107,000

of infrastructure per housing unit, we have to ask ourselves: can we afford that as a society, as a country, as a continent? Is that a reasonable amount of infrastructure for one household to be expected to financially carry? Ultimately, the answer is no.

What's super interesting in the FCM data — which nobody really seems to glom onto — is that that is an average, and different types of housing require vastly different intensities of infrastructure. Multifamily in existing neighborhoods requires something like five to nine times less on-site infrastructure. So instead of $107,000 we're talking $12,000 to $20,000. Now maybe we're talking, and now DCCs are covering that amount. So I think there's

a place for further discussion, to really ask ourselves: is this a financing problem, or is this actually a much deeper problem? That's the question Strong Towns has been asking, but in a lot of circles it's not being asked at all.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 12:38

As you think about that $107,000 figure — schools, rec centres, and libraries aren't even incorporated in that. The best pool is the one that's already there. The best library is the one that's already built. The best school is the one that's already knit into a neighbourhood, already part of the established fabric.

Especially in a province like British Columbia, where we've had rapid growth in a lot of core areas, the failure to keep up comes because the province has funding formulas that basically put a school on the projects list only once enrollment has reached capacity. It's not based on future projections — kids have to be turned away from kindergarten classes before it's noted in a file somewhere in Victoria that they need to start working on a school there.

This was a frustration when I was in the mayor's office in Surrey. They said, we know we're creating more homes for community members who are going to have children, and those children are going to be challenged by this.

What stood out to me in the piece too is that the federal government says, well, we know what to do — we're going to put money into this. The provincial government says we're going to put money into this, and we're also going to wield a bit of a stick: if you don't step up, local municipalities, we're basically going to come in and — in Ontario's case, quite literally — start the bulldozers and get going. Then municipalities are asking a different question, which is helpful in my mind: how does this pencil out over the long term? If we take a hit right now, what are we on the hook for?

Dan, do you want to describe — especially around smaller housing, the more integrated kind within existing neighbourhoods — how the math pencils out for large suburban development versus the types of projects you're coaching communities to make normal or commonplace again? I liken the work of Small Housing to helping a cottage industry grow that builds cottages again. What does that work look like, especially when you're up against these headwinds of growth needing to pay for growth, and that growth

Dan Winer – 15:00

means you have to cover the cost of the upgrade to the whole street — a new utility pole, a new sewage treatment plant, and all of a sudden everything seems to be on the poor little homeowner who's trying to do just a little good in the world.

There's so much to unpack there. It's important to recognize that home building industries across Canada vary from province to province — they're kind of like a micro-economy at a provincial level. The average British Columbia home builder builds about four homes per year, and during the COVID pandemic, when things were running like gangbusters, we built about 48,000 units a year. That's record productivity for British Columbia.

The recent CMHC reports state that in a low population growth scenario, we need to be building 80,000 homes a year, and in a high population growth scenario, 98,000 homes per year — and that's just to keep home prices at the modest rate of $1 million that they are currently at. We need to double productivity just to not have $2 million homes. That's how you can see this argument starts to fall apart.

When we're talking about these small-scale builders, the way development cost charges are typically structured in British Columbia is that they're charged on a per-unit basis regardless of the size of the property — and this is probably one of our most frustrating things. In the City of Kelowna today, if I wanted to redevelop a single family property and put a four-plex on it, I'm going to pay the municipality $180,000

in development cost charges, let alone any of the other off-site improvements. If I'm a multi-generational family, or if I'm just wealthy and love living by the lake, I could build a mansion and pay $45,000

in municipal fees. We have a structure that is not only inequitable — it is actively disincentivizing the type of density that we want to see in our communities.

This is where it gets really interesting with the Building Communities Fund that the federal government has promised. Whereas Ontario seems to be taking an 'every house gets a discount' approach — it's a classic conservative type of move, not to get into the political weeds — the NDP government here has taken a more strategic approach, probably learning from the pain points of implementing Bill 44.

So mayors and councils say we don't want zoning forced down our throats and be told what we can allow in our communities. The response has been: we're going to expand what DCC waivers you can provide, and municipalities, it's going to be up to you to decide which houses you want to provide waivers for and which ones you don't. It's going to be very fascinating to see what happens when the rubber meets the road — whether they're going to actively encourage urban sprawl in communities that can't necessarily support it, making this infrastructure problem even worse, or whether we're going to focus on incentivizing the type of gentle density that supports small builders, supports small trade companies, supports more robust local economies, and ultimately more livable, walkable spaces.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 17:23

It was interesting — we had a session at a Strong Towns event about frontage levies as a way of assigning fees for water treatment and water service. Utilities are normally on a per-gallon basis, with delivery fees baked in. But the actual impact of having vacant lots, for example, means you have to provide service to that area even though those lots aren't paying into the system — sort of like pizza delivery services obliged to drive by every single home in the community, but only getting paid if a customer is actually asking for delivery.

Places in California have actually addressed the costs of development by using a frontage levy based on how much of the street front a development is going to use — prorated on that basis. That would have a direct positive impact on multifamily: if you have four units going onto one modest, narrow lot, it's not consuming more of the public realm, aside from a little bit more water and sewage from household activity. Even then, those impacts are often not directly predicated on the number of units in a home, but on the number of occupants — and we've never regulated on a per-person basis.

The true impacts of development — I see it in my community. Everyone assumes they are not the reason the infrastructure is under strain. But it's your pattern of consumption of resources. Pipes are a resource that slowly degrades over time. People didn't pay enough

up front to help create the long-term reserve that will cover this. Now people say, please don't add anybody else to the system, because we're over capacity. How did we get to that point? You can't just penalize the newcomer on that front.

Michel, one of the challenges your city faced was a legal dispute over whether or not the City of Winnipeg could actually have fees like this. The court ruled — or else the city stepped back from it — that impact fees were not allowed, or were being too broadly applied and had to be pulled back. We have lots of jurisdictions across North America where there is nothing like a development cost charge that is allowed to be charged.

Michel Durand-Wood – 20:00

Yeah. That's part of the challenge with all the federal housing money that's come around. The City of Winnipeg accepted some housing money, and as part of that deal, they agreed not to increase their DCCs — which, it just so happened, we don't have any DCCs right now. So we cannot implement a DCC until the end of this housing accelerator fund agreement, which I think is 2027 or 2028. We're stuck with no DCC until then.

We did have one for a very brief period — probably 2017 or 2018. The city implemented a DCC, which was eventually challenged in court by the development industry and overturned in early 2020.

The city charter in Manitoba does not allow Winnipeg to charge any tax other than property tax. The way the DCC was implemented, it was essentially charging a fee to new development

and then using those funds in the general fund just for general

infrastructure maintenance. The court viewed that as a tax — and you can't charge a tax that is not a property tax to some people and not others. The court overturned that DCC as it was implemented, but at the same time it also confirmed that the city could charge a DCC if it wanted to, as long as it wasn't implemented as a tax. Basically, the city is allowed to charge a fee,

but what the city was charging was not a fee. The difference between a tax and a fee is that a fee is linked to a specific purpose — for example, a fee for a rezoning application or admission to a swimming pool. A fee can also be something used to alter behavior, like late return fees at the library or congestion charges. Those are fees, and they're allowed. Otherwise, if it's just a way to raise revenue, it's a tax.

I think that ties in really nicely to what Dan was talking about with incentives. We look at DCCs and how they're not even coming close to covering the costs they're meant to cover — and that $107,000

per housing unit, as you mentioned, does include pools, libraries, and all that. But when you look at the breakdown in the FCM study, 87% of the infrastructure is just roads and pipes — water, sewer, roads, and bridges. That's it. 87%. That's the Canadian average. The Winnipeg-specific number is about 88%, Calgary is about 85%, but basically throughout Canada we're at 85–90%. It's just roads and pipes. It's where we put stuff and how we travel between it.

That's how we could reduce the infrastructure cost required for every new housing unit — if we build a certain way, in a certain place. That's where DCCs could be really powerful as a planning tool — a bit like a congestion charge but for housing — to disincentivize the types of housing in the places we don't want, and redirect those funds toward the places and types of housing we do want. That's where DCCs have real potential to be beneficial to cities.

Dan, do you have anything more on that?

Dan Winer – 23:18

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Even in Kelowna — while I love to knock the cost charge structure there — they have decided there are lower fees in the urban core than where urban sprawl is happening, because it costs a lot of money to push water uphill, and the city is smart enough to acknowledge that.

The other thing, and Norm, you mentioned this in the intro question: if there's going to be a shortfall,

we need to realistically have two conversations. Number one: if you're replacing a single structure with four or six units, you're going to be collecting four or six times the property tax for the next 70 years — the livable life of the building. If we're building high-performance, step-code-compliant housing in British Columbia, this is going to be more climate-resilient housing that should stand the test of time a little longer.

The second angle is that we do need to have a conversation about property taxes or implementing some sort of land value tax. Montreal is a great place to look for that. Generally across Canada, the higher the property tax, the lower the housing costs — and it's super important to acknowledge that.

I like to pretend I'm still young sometimes, and I've compared it to going to a club: if you live in Vancouver, you pay a cover charge to get in through high housing prices and DCCs, but the drinks are cheap — that's your low annual property taxes. In Ontario, it might be the reverse. Ultimately it's still an acquisition strategy. We have to decide how to balance these spinning plates.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 25:00

Lars, with the Centre for Economic Studies, has said it's very simple — you wouldn't even need to change much of the code. You can just offer a universal building exemption, so that when you do the assessment, you just don't assess the value of the building. You do a like-for-like comparison: what is the general property worth? Without reference to the building, it's actually easier, because then you're not asking about dormer windows or conditions — you're looking at location and context. That can be really valuable.

Dan, part of your work is advising local leaders and coaching them in considerations you want them to keep in mind — especially around how to re-cultivate that ecosystem of small-scale development. In that context, what would you advise if your federal and provincial government came in and said they're going to do something similar to what Ontario is looking to do here?

Dan Winer – 27:15

If I'm sitting there as a municipal government, or advocating to one, I'm lobbying for the type of housing that is hardest for developers to build. We've seen a glut of micro condos and one- and two-bedroom high-rise, and a great amount of purpose-built rental thanks to the CMHC MLI Select program come online. But you know what you always see in housing needs reports and assessments? Three-bedroom, family-sized units close to urban resources — schools, grocery stores, doctors, and so on.

I'm sitting in the seat of advocating for gentle density. I believe in the value of it to my core, and I think we need to be thinking about how we build multifamily units. It doesn't have to be gentle density, it doesn't have to be Part 9 — let's also talk about single-egress stair buildings. But how do we get more three-plus-bedroom, family-sized units closer to our urban cores? That's what we should exclusively focus on incentivizing. We should be considering single family homes and custom homes taxed more — sort of like cigarettes.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 27:15

That's interesting, because from a national strategic perspective, you want to achieve certain goals: more productivity, a healthier and better-situated workforce, the capacity for people to be upwardly mobile, to be able to age in place — all of those things reach a kind of zenith if you can unlock the types of housing you're talking about, so that people aren't forced out or driven crazy by high rents or the inability to purchase something.

Michel, you wrote a whole book advising local leaders — across Canada in particular, but also around the United States and other countries. What are some of the things you would offer as guidance?

Michel Durand-Wood – 27:15

I'm always one to say we can't get too lost in the weeds. It's important to zoom out and look at the big picture to see what we're trying to achieve. When you're really talking about transit, it's easy to get into the inner workings of transit. When you're talking about housing, it's easy to get into the inner workings of housing. But you have to step back sometimes to see how does this all fit together, how does this all connect into a place where people can live and thrive, get groceries, take their kids to soccer, and live their lives.

It's easy to fall into the trap when we talk about housing to say, well, we need more multifamily closer to city centres, we need more housing density.

Which is true — but you can have housing density on its own, and in a lot of our cities in North America,

the problem is not just a lack of density — it's a lack of mixing of uses. If you have all the houses over here and all the businesses over there, adding housing density is not really helping you. It's actually making things worse for everybody, because people still need to drive to get a jug of milk — or in Ontario, a bag of milk — you still need to drive everywhere. Adding housing density makes it worse for the people living there, because you've added more people but also a whole bunch more cars. Now you run into parking issues, traffic issues, all kinds of stuff that make life unpleasant in that neighborhood. It's no wonder people push back against that. It's not what people want in their neighborhoods.

A lot of it has to focus on: how do we add that density of housing, but also start adding that density of services? We need grocery stores, coffee shops, sporting recreation — all the things that make up a life — put close by so that people can get there without setting aside a whole bunch of land for parking. That brings it back to the finance: it's those roads and pipes that make everything so expensive. The more we can make it possible for people to meet all their needs in as little space as possible — so they can walk to get whatever they need — we are reducing our infrastructure cost by a huge amount. 87% is roads and pipes. It's all about where we put stuff and how we travel between them.

It's important to have more housing density, but it's also important to have bakery density — you need to be able to get your bread close to where you're putting that density.

There's a missing part of a lot of the policy discussion. In Canada, all this federal money is delivered through CMHC — Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It's not the Living Corporation, it's not the Neighbourhood Corporation. They're not looking at the big picture; they're focused on housing. You can't fault them for that — it's literally what they exist for. But there is no equivalent federal or provincial department that looks at how we get more local entrepreneurs to start a local bakery out of the front of their house, or how we start to develop these walkable neighborhoods. You can add 10 new housing units to a neighbourhood and you've added density, but if you had added eight housing units and two commercial units, now you have the ingredients for what is a walkable, thriving, financially sustainable neighborhood.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 30:08

One of the trends was live-work units. You'd see these tranches of industrial areas all of a sudden upzoned to be mixed use. There's a studio on the ground floor. But if we pick up Jane Jacobs — new ideas require old buildings — where live-work is best applied is actually in existing neighborhoods, where people adapt their structures, can cash flow the renovation, and get themselves going.

Yet one of the things I see is an almost readiness to let a lot of new things happen in new neighborhoods, while old neighborhoods are still actually guarded from any new introduction of front-yard businesses or low-impact retail. Someone setting up something more than just a single chair cutting hair in a neighborhood.

If I could recommend an article at the Strong Towns site, it's about how growth should be a good party — that when someone new shows up, it gets better, that the host doesn't have to tightly control everything for it to work, and that the energy in a neighborhood starts to grow as more people participate. Each business added should add value. That means creating the conditions for adaptability, so that you don't just get a bunch of new homes plunked down and have to contend with a big change in the neighborhood.

It can't be rigid. You have to anticipate that you're going to respond as the changes occur. It has to happen naturally, without requiring major reinvestment, because if you build suburban development all at once to a finished state, why would you ever accept new entrants? If anybody else comes in, it just becomes more crowded or more dysfunctional. And I think that is in the background of some of the politics around development cost charges.

Dan, I think you moderated a debate — oh no, that was Tay Lee — about whether growth should pay for growth. We had a suburban mayor saying, yep, absolutely: new projects are basically the reason the neighbourhood is disrupted, so they should be covering much of the responsibility. Part of his pitch was that developers are willing to pay it — it's built into their business models. They can expect high enough sales prices to basically cover the chunk of money extracted from them in this process.

In a very cold sort of logic, that makes sense. But the trouble is that the orange getting squeezed is people — you can only get so much juice out of that orange. It's people's lives, people's well-being, our local economy, our regional economy, our provincial economy. That's definitely impacted when we just say, we could get more if housing was just way more costly.

That is a bigger challenge, and we'll come back to this. As we do on the Up Zoned podcast, we're going to move to the Down Zone. We don't want to down zone our neighborhoods, but we do want to down zone our discussion. Michel, what's in the Down Zone for you?

Michel Durand-Wood – 36:28

Oh man, so many things. I've got about four different books on the go,

jumping between them. I've got a couple of shows I'm streaming right now. I don't even know which one to pick, but let's do all of it.

I'm reading The Master and His Emissary,

which is a very thick read — I can only do it in little chunks — but it's on neuroscience and

how the brain works.

Yes, I do this for fun.

I'm also reading another fun one on the link between

serial killers and industrial pollution. Another light read.

I'm also streaming a bunch of stuff right now. I'm watching a show that your wife recommended to us called — what is it called — Shrill, I think,

which has been very, very enjoyable so far. About two or three episodes in. That's with Amy Bryant from SNL, right?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 37:27

I believe so. Yeah, that's good stuff. Dan, you have to meet Michel's standard — we need lots of recommendations. We normally hold ourselves to one, but Michel has led us. What's in your Down Zone?

Dan Winer – 37:27

Well, after that intro, immediately going to my Down Zone is going to be picking up Michel's book. I need to read this and educate myself a little further — really looking forward to that.

At the end of the day, when I'm not advocating and living this housing life, I am a huge sports fan, and springtime is the dream season for sports fans. I'm crying about the Jays' losing streak. I'm going to be tuning into the Masters all weekend. I'm going to be seeing if the Raptors can hold on in the playoffs. I'm excited that Bayern Munich beat Real Madrid this week — that was a great day for me. Of course, I'm following my beloved Toronto FC out here from the west coast. It's all-day sports, all day long, and my wife is going to murder me.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 38:41

That's fantastic. We're spoiled for choice and definitely getting to enjoy a great deal of it. I recently found a BBC show called Bookish that I'm really enjoying. It's a detective series of sorts, and it had been on my list for a while. Then I watched it and loved it.

What I'm reading is by Daniel Silva — it's called An Inside Job. I found it at my public library and I'm really enjoying it, although it has this weird thing where I can't tell if it's going to make me a snob or just drive me to put the book down — it has so many Italian words in it, as if I should know what they mean. I'm just trying to pretend my way through it. But it's about an art restorer and it's a crime thriller. So if anyone is interested, there's An Inside Job out there for you by Daniel Silva.

It's been awesome. Dan, welcome — and Michel, I think you might have broken the ice as a first-time Up Zoned guest as well. Or have you been on Up Zoned before?

Michel Durand-Wood – 39:54

I have not been on Up Zoned. This is my first time.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 39:54

All right — new format, new faces.

Part of the reason we had to go with three participants is just to be able to broaden our reach and broaden our scope. Dan, it's been fantastic to have you on — I really appreciate you joining us. Dan Winer, again, with SmallHousingBC.org, is the website you can go to. They've got great toolkits and tons of resources. We're going to continue to collaborate with them.

Michel Durand-Wood of DearWinnipeg.com — one more quick plug: You'll Pay for This is the book, through Great Plains Press, and we might even be pushing them to do another reprint, Michel. Michel is going to be a speaker at the National Gathering, so if you're planning to come to Fayetteville, Arkansas, do plan to get your tickets. It'll be a huge gathering of Strong Towns advocates helping to connect together.

With that, it's been fantastic. Thanks everyone for dropping in. Thanks Dan, thanks Michel for participating today.

Dan Winer – 40:00

Thank you. Go Bayern Munich for Champions League, and Go Team Canada for the World Cup. I'm allowed to say that because I'm not — we've had an all-Canadian lineup today.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman – 40:00

I hope this has been enjoyable. Thanks, folks, for listening to Up Zoned. Take care, and take care of your places.

 – 41:09

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.

‍