Upzoned
What happens when the American Dream stops meaning “doing better than your parents” and starts meaning “just not falling behind”? Norm Van Eeden Petersman sits down with Andrew Burleson and Ryan Puzycki to untangle why stability feels so fragile, even in “booming” cities. They trace how zoning turns housing into a rigged game of musical chairs, how some places face strangling exclusion while others slide into rolling blight, and how missing bottom rungs on the housing ladder and remote work push rising costs — and workers — farther out. They connect these pressures to a new American Dream: finding a stable home that won’t vanish with the next lease.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Up Zoned, where we take a big story from the news and talk about it from a Strong Towns perspective. Strong Towns — this vision that we're working toward — is simple but profound, simple enough that we put it on a t-shirt: we want everyone to be able to live a good life in a prospering place. Today's conversation really gets at whether that vision is even possible for a lot of people.
Before we get into today's article, I want to take a moment to recognize three members of the Strong Towns Founders Circle. I'll try to do this as we keep going through the year, to recognize those core members that helped make this movement possible, starting with Alex Cecchini, Alex Pline, and Andrew Burleson — the very same Andrew Burleson who's joining us for today's conversation.
Now, as a Canadian, I've always found the idea of the American Dream really fascinating — such a central part of the American mindset. Having lived in the US for a time, I got to see just how deeply ingrained these assumptions are about what the future should hold for each individual who lives within the United States. There's a lot of overlap with Canada, where I live now, of course, but there are also some subtle differences. In the US, you have this foundational idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's interesting — Canada's framing has historically been more about peace, order, and good government. A different language, but both shaping expectations about what a good life looks like.
That brings us to today's article. We're discussing a USA Today piece published in March 2026 by Rachel Barber and Veronica Bravo, titled "The American Dream Meant Upward Mobility. Now It Means Stability." The article explores a major cultural shift: for generations, the American Dream was about getting ahead, doing better than your parents, and building wealth over time. But according to new research highlighted in this piece, younger generations are redefining that dream — or down-zoning that dream, you could say. For many Gen Z and millennials, it's no longer about upward mobility. Instead, in their language, it's about achieving basic stability: being able to afford housing, access healthcare, get an education, hold a steady job — not a life of luxury, but a life that is more secure and sustainable. Even that version of the dream, as the article goes on to say, feels increasingly out of reach.
To unpack this, I'm joined by two thoughtful voices in our Strong Towns orbit. Andrew Burleson is the board chair of Strong Towns, a Roots of Progress Fellow, and an advisor to the Center for Land Economics. Ryan Puzycki joins us as well. Ryan writes the City of Yes Substack, available at RyanPuzycki.com. He's on the board of ORA, a grassroots urbanist organization in Austin, and serves on Austin's Zoning and Planning Commission. Welcome to both of you — so good to have you both on Up Zoned today.
Thanks so much for having me. As much as I love the American Declaration of Independence, I feel like we could use some peace, order, and good government right now.
It's interesting. It's in the original Constitution of Canada from 1867, and just contrasting that with the opening of the US Constitution, which has its expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As this article talks about — is the American Dream out of reach, and what does that mean? — I think there are profound Strong Towns angles to this. Maybe we'll start with Ryan. You talk about a City of Yes — that's the Substack that you write. Do you want to unpack that a bit, and sort of the way in which yearning for yes also looks a lot like creating opportunities for a broad range of people within a community? How does that article touch on some of the things you've been thinking about for quite a while?
I started writing City of Yes because, as we were coming out of the pandemic, I was seeing cities everywhere struggling with the same issues. Having managed and built schools in New York and San Francisco, I saw the struggle for people to afford housing and just afford the cost of living generally. Then came the pandemic slide, where we saw disorder get out of control, people moving to the suburbs, feeling like the value proposition of the city wasn't really worthwhile anymore. I think that was because this sense of broader opportunity just was no longer trickling all the way down, and so people were moving with their feet in a lot of ways.
That seemed problematic to me. If cities become a place where really only the rich and the subsidized poor can afford to live — if normal everyday people working working-class jobs or in middle-class families just can't afford to be in cities — what does the city become? Is it Michael Bloomberg's idea of the city as a luxury good? That seems very elitist and out of touch with a lot of people. Maybe the elites in a place like New York are fine subsidizing an underclass, but that doesn't seem like what cities have historically done. New York used to have a thriving working class, a thriving middle class. It used to be a place where people could move and work themselves up the ladder. Today, a person who is not making a Wall Street salary moves to New York and takes a pay cut — a standard of living decrease.
So "yes" to me means the full expanse of a human life. It's about human flourishing. Our cities have historically been engines by which that happens, and lately they have not been doing that. I try to look at this from all different angles: it's not only about housing, it's about the role of small businesses, whether we make it possible for people to be entrepreneurs, whether people can send their kids to good schools, and whether it's safe to walk on the streets.
The challenge is that the burn rate for any given individual seems to be getting higher and higher if you're bringing in less in terms of entry-level jobs, particularly if you're saddled with student debt. One of the things that challenged me as I read this — and maybe Andrew, you felt the same way — is that I read this and I'm like, I still feel like I'm entering adulthood, and yet here I am actually representing a generation that's well into its space. As a millennial, I'm really grappling with the fact that even things like financial security feel increasingly out of reach.
For myself, my friends who immediately after high school just went into the workforce are rather secure and have done well for themselves. Those that got a bachelor's degree — so long as they bought into the housing market before 2014, at least in our area — are actually really set. For those of us who made the freightful decision to go on and get a master's degree, that was the thing that, from a financial perspective, has been the most disastrous economic decision I've made. It set me back not just in terms of tuition, but also the reality that by not entering a housing market that got out of control at the bottom of the elevator — rather than trying to jump in much higher along the way — those escalating costs have just created a lot of challenges.
Certainly as a renter, I feel that sense of precariousness that emerges from the fact that my landlord could at any point say, "I'm going to be redeveloping the land the house is on." The home we're in is going to be scraped away without doubt, and in that setting we'd be rolling the dice again trying to find a place to live. That sense of insecurity really does fuel that attraction to the language of stability — just a chicken in every pot and a roof over every head.
Andrew, as you talk about this, your Substack is called The Free Range City, and you've given a lot of thought to this, having lived in Austin, a high-growth rapid-pace market, San Francisco, and now Denver. What are some of the things that stood out in the piece, as well as some of your reflections on this?
In your exchange earlier about American values versus Canadian values — we don't tend to emphasize the things we kind of take for granted. You could look at the Americans early on saying "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" — I'm sure at that moment they were feeling like good government was going to be okay. They didn't need to put that one on the postcard. I think stability goes on the postcard when you no longer can take it for granted. The description or experience you're talking about — I think a lot of people feel this. I feel like I've kind of had this experience twice.
Going through college right before the recession and graduating into the recession was a paradigm shift, where it felt like the goalposts had moved in a big way. You're coming out of school, and all the boomer parents — not their fault — but all the advice that worked for them turned out not to be very good for us. Just get a degree, everything will be fine. Well, I got a degree, and then it took three years to really start to have a job that was anything close to paying the bills, and really five years before I had any kind of career start. It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. People who lived through the Great Depression obviously had it far worse, so this kind of thing happens. But I think what's happened that's worse is we've created a system where housing is now part of a one-way ratchet that just only gets more expensive.
The second time in my life where it felt like the goalposts moved in a big way: my wife and I had been saving up for years to buy a house and were actively shopping in late 2019, thinking the 2020 season was when we'd make our move. Obviously the pandemic hit, and that didn't work out. We ended up having to decide where to live after a lot of things changed, and after being a bit nomadic during COVID, we moved to Denver. The whole phenomenon of 2020 to 2022–2023 took us from "we've saved up for a decade and we're finally ready to get in" to "wow, we totally missed the window." Now, instead of being able to comfortably afford a home, we're asking, what is the smallest, oldest, tiniest place we can possibly get a hook into?
I have this weird paradox —
— and I imagine there are probably a lot of other middle-aged folks who feel this way too. I just casually called myself middle-aged. That's new to me. I'm getting used to it.
There's got to be a lot of other parents of young kids who are now thinking, "Boy, I'd love to have an extra bedroom, but by the time I could afford it, will my kids just be grown? I won't even need it anymore." That's crazy, but that's real. That's becoming part of the conversation my wife and I have — maybe in a few more years we could trade up, and then it starts to be, well, by then our oldest will have graduated and we don't even need it. By the time we could afford to have enough housing for all our kids to have their own bedroom, they'll be grown and gone.
I've had good jobs. I haven't been at the bottom of the barrel economically. I've been blessed and have had the chance to have good earnings. There are a lot of times when I think, if we've been as fortunate as we've been and we're in this situation, how are people surviving who are making below median income? I honestly don't know what I would do if I were in that situation.
Ryan, do you want to talk about what this means? You wrote a great piece on your Substack — "Remote Isn't Working" — and I thought that really touched on this. You said: "By failing to provide upward mobility for the 80%, cities force a new physical mobility, pricing out place-bound workers, while giving the already-mobile fewer reasons to stay." That really stood out to me as grappling with the challenge of, well, if you're in a high-cost market, just leave. What does that actually mean for our cities if the end result is that most people are forced out? What does that begin to do to deconstruct the ability of more people to opt into a remote setting where they just float in and float out?
At Strong Towns, our whole concern is how do we get people to be strong citizens? How do we get them to love their place? How do we get them to do the small things to build the public value that we all share in, rather than just trying to squirrel away enough for a little personal nest egg? You've been grappling with: if we can't keep the people who make the physical world work, they won't be able to keep those who inhabit the digital one. Do you want to describe some of the implications of that?
I was trying to walk a fine line in that piece, where I was not trying to criticize remote work — because it has been a boon to many people — but more to point out that remote work actually depends on a labor force of the other 80% of people who provide the in-person services that make the remote situation actually possible. I work from home. My husband works from home. Amazon comes to our house almost every day. We get food delivered. So we're working remotely, but not really — there's a constant stream of people coming by. The mailman has been coming by this whole time as well.
From my perspective, remote has enabled people in the knowledge sector to be untethered from place, or tethered by choice, whereas the other 80% really don't have this choice. Circumstances either force them to live in increasing states of financial precariousness or to leave for where they can afford to live better. You end up in this kind of — I don't want to call it a doom loop, because that's an overused phrase — but if the people who make the remote lifestyle possible aren't themselves able to be in place, if childcare workers can't afford to live in the city, if the Amazon delivery guy can't be local either, at some point does that break a city? Does that ruin the value proposition that makes it worthwhile for the 20% who can afford to be anywhere to actually be in a particular place?
We saw this during the pandemic. Those who could leave left. I was sort of in this place — I was running Montessori schools in San Francisco, and then my business partner and I looked at each other after that experience and were kind of done. We moved with our families, independently, to Austin, where I could afford to buy a house for the first time in my life at the age of 39, which was just not even in the cards in San Francisco.
Part of this piece comes out of having observed this dichotomy at the school we were running during the pandemic. All of these customers — in San Francisco, a lot of our customers were tech employees — went remote when they could. When we were able to reopen the school, our teachers obviously had to be in place. That's what childcare is — taking care of children in a specific place. You can't do that remotely. We tried remote education at the preschool level and it doesn't really work. The preschool workers had to be on site doing all of the COVID protocols, wearing masks, social distancing — it was a nightmare to run. Meanwhile, the parents could still drop off their kids in the morning, drive home, and do their Zoom work for the rest of the day. The people commuting to our campus to work there were coming in from Fremont, on the other side of the bay — a 90-minute commute by public transit. People were getting burnt out before the pandemic even began. If people can't afford to live in the city, we're just exacerbating these problems.
There are big trends here — global pandemics, the locking up of worldwide finances, all the different layers in which the dream gets harder to reach. But Andrew, what I keep coming back to is that there are enough small things that could be done as nudges in a better direction that we still aren't doing. Things like allowing a broader range of work-at-home options, so that your housing is earning its keep. That can look like being more readily able to rent out garage space, or rent out secondary units. It's stunning to me that my political leaders just removed the ability in a lot of our places to have in-home small businesses up to a certain amount, and now that's gone because it wasn't orderly enough.
Looking at what my city leaders could be doing for me, they could be doing so many more things to just nudge the marginal things. From a Strong Towns perspective — and as a Calvinist, my goal working at Strong Towns is to make things a little less worse — you used a phrase a while back that's still camped out in my head: that we live in the midst of two phenomena — rolling blight in some areas, and in the rest, strangling exclusion. That stranglement is a consequence of so many different layers just conspiring to attack one's ability to actually get ahead.
I think I shared before how much that's been something I've been thinking about — that we live in the midst of cities defined either by strangling exclusion or by rolling blight, and the flip side can actually come quite quickly. In some cases of rolling blight, there's no opportunity, or you have strangling exclusion because any opportunity just seems to be an accelerant rather than a demand-spreader within the community. Where does that land? Because if there's a dream, but the dream is one that quickly results in too many people being strangled by it, that isn't right either.
Let me offer a little context on that idea. The two things you can picture — well, the first thing, and this really relates to what Ryan writes about so well, is that cities in the 20th century took this mindset of nobody's ever allowed to do anything, anywhere, without permission, and permission is hard to get. The richer the community, the harder it is to get permission. You want to open a bake shop in your house? Well, someone doesn't like the smell of baked bread, so they go to the Zoning Commission and get bakeries banned. That sounds farcical, but this actually is what happened, layer by layer — every little friction, every little annoyance, every little thing that bothered anybody. A certain percentage of those become law, and they tend to be fought at the level of the city instead of being worked out among neighbors. Very soon, we've said nobody is really allowed to do anything except this very narrow set of things. Only this very narrow way of living is allowed.
Where do you go from there? If you happen to be in Silicon Valley and you have a generation-defining set of technology businesses form — all these high-paying jobs — then people will come to take advantage of that opportunity, and they will fight whoever they have to push out of the way to get the space. There's your strangling exclusion. We're not allowing the city to adapt, because nothing's ever allowed to happen, nothing's ever allowed to change. What that means is it's now a zero-sum game. It's musical chairs — tackle musical chairs. I don't think it's bad to be wealthy, and I don't think there ought to be class conflict, but we create that when we say we're not going to build new housing, not going to let neighborhoods evolve or adapt. Whoever has the most money will get a house, then the second person with the second most money, on down the line until you've run out of houses, and then it doesn't matter how much money you have — you're out.
That's what life was like in San Francisco. Coming from regular America, I couldn't believe how much money I was making and how tiny and pathetic my apartment was, and how at the same time I felt lucky to have as good of a place as I did. That's the strangling exclusion.
The flip side is that if you go to many parts of the country — more of the country by land area — they don't have the dynamic economy, they don't have the jobs, but they've still taken that mindset of nothing's ever allowed to change. You find people who might like to stay in the community but want to open a bake shop in their garage — a way they can make a living and stay — but they can't, so they leave. That's not the only reason; there are many factors. But at a certain point, when you make it too hard, when the community is struggling, what that says is that something about the way it is today isn't working anymore. Maybe it worked well in the past, but something's changed and the community needs to adapt. If your rules and norms say no adaptation is allowed, you're requiring the struggle to last. You're preventing anything from healing. You can imagine the city as a living organism with a wound, and you've prohibited any treatment of it — eventually it's going to get septic and die. That's the rolling blight.
We've seen this especially in Midwest towns that had an economic problem — the mill left, or whatever happened — that's the poster child. But it's not only that. Farming has seen incredible amounts of automation; a lot of farm towns that used to need more people don't anymore. Towns need to be able to adapt, and if they can't, they tend to wither away and eventually die off.
Culturally, we cast in concrete the way the economy worked in the 1950s and required everything to be optimized for that. Now the world has changed and we're not allowed to adapt in response. We end up with this very bimodal distribution — in some places, intense gentrification where everyone who's not hyper-wealthy is pushed out, and in other places, the town is falling apart and can't put itself back together. Nobody wants either of those outcomes. The answer is that our cities need to become more free and more able to adapt and change over time.
You're nodding, Ryan. Go ahead, jump in.
Thank you, Andrew, for actually connecting the question of what my Substack is named after to the actual thing — being able to get to yes more easily. I forgot to say that. The point Andrew is making, I think, is that stasis is the enemy of stability here. If you want to have a stable life in a city, the city itself has to be allowed to change. I tend to focus on the high-opportunity cities like San Francisco, New York, and Austin, because that's where I've spent my entire adult life. But it's the same here — we have single-family neighborhoods right next to downtown Austin that have been preserved in amber for 40 years and haven't been allowed to gradually develop or incrementally change. Now every house there is a million dollars or more, and that prices out whole swaths of the economy, entire socioeconomic strata.
It also sets up the more dramatic change that people don't appreciate as much. If you finally do anything to release that regulatory amber, you don't go from a house to two townhomes. You go from a house to a six-story apartment building, and people feel like the neighborhood is just being demolished. It could have gradually —
— changed over years. People are on the line saying, "Okay, we're not going to do that," and I'm like, you haven't even given it time. There's a half-life to these changes before you can start to assess whether they're working.
When you end up in a situation where things have been frozen in time for decades, you have this incremental debt. What is the next appropriate incremental zoning change in that context? It's hard. If it's been single-family homes, a duplex isn't really appropriate if the land is now priced for a small apartment building. Closing that gap is hard, especially in a place like Austin, and so we're constantly put in positions where we're saying: we didn't do the things we should have done for a very long time, and now there aren't really outcomes that aren't going to seem like a loss for people.
This phrase has been going around in my mind when thinking about zoning reform in an urban context — it's going to be painful for some people to work through the fact that we didn't develop in a way that was healthy for the city for a long time, and now we have to do the painful surgery to get it into a place where, in the future, it can hopefully grow in a more organic way. There's no easy path through that, at least for a place like Austin, or New York, or San Francisco, where they're just so far behind where they should have been.
Andrew, in one of your posts on the Adaptive Code, you quote Jeff Fong, who says it's about re-acclimating our society to the idea that it's good, normal, and healthy for the places we live to change over time. We need to embrace the idea that as the world changes, as our hopes and dreams and wants and needs shift over time, those changes become reflected in the built environment. The places we live need to be ongoing projects, not finished products.
As I think about what we're supposed to do for a bunch of discouraged Gen Z youth — or whatever the next generation is that's looking at all this — or as a parent of an 11-year-old, I am firmly in the camp of telling a pollster that I don't think my son is going to have as good of a life as I've enjoyed. There's something bleak to that, and it has nothing to do with world factors — it's all about my community and the real struggle that's here.
My wife and I are not going to be able to leave him with a significant nest egg he can turn into something more. He's going to be the one covering our nursing home costs. It's going to be tough. I don't think it's wide-eyed optimism that says I just need him to have a chance to try a bunch of different things, and I feel like that is what my dad was able to do when he came to Canada as an immigrant in 1972 and by 1979 had bought his own farm, basically scrabbling together the things he needed. We lived in a beat-up, run-down home that by modern standards was not really inhabitable — it did have running water and sewage, so technically it was. But we had potato roots coming up from the cellar every spring, having to cut them back because they'd be coming out through the electrical outlets. It's a wonder the house never burned down. But it actually provided us with the springboard we needed to develop the farm and do all of the necessary things.
That pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps idea is something we're coming around to realizing is less good advice than it might otherwise be. But at Strong Towns, we're often telling city staff to get out of their own way. I'll relay a quick conversation I had with the planning director of my city. She said they were short something like 19 planners. My response — which maybe didn't endear me to her — was: have them do less then. She pushed back on that, citing legislative requirements. I said, put staff only on the legislated requirements, none of the other stuff. It was very much this binary, dueling impulse: "We want to provide great customer service, so our door is always open." Well, your door always being open means you're not doing other things, and that can sometimes be the reality we've backed ourselves into.
I'll certainly endorse Ryan's Substack and also Andrew, your piece on the Adaptive Code. We need to keep pressing for the next increment of development to be allowed by right, and for people to really grapple with what that looks like, because it looks so much closer to stability than chaos.
I am seeing what I like to call the pimple outbreaks — if you've suppressed all that pressure long enough, you're going to get that spurting out, and that's your ten-story tower in the midst of a single-detached neighborhood. Those things are going to happen continuously until we start to bring the temperature down, adjust course, and get our systems right. But yeah, getting to yes — a lot easier and a lot sooner in the process.
I don't think we're going to see disaster or bad actors completely exploiting the whole setup. I think we actually get more of the outcomes we want. From a Strong Towns perspective, there's also a financial reason: the price of pipe and road today is so much higher than it used to be that you have to have additional participants to cover the tab. Otherwise it's just a much bigger burden on existing homeowners, and they're not willing to pay it, so they're just kicking the can further down the road. And I'm a little cranky about the intergenerational dine-and-dash that's underway. That is definitely why, when you survey younger folks, they say things aren't shaping up well — they don't even care about getting ahead; they just want to not fall behind.
Ryan, you're a homeowner, so you're not falling behind, but you certainly have challenges. Any closing thoughts? Then we'll go into the Down Zone with Andrew as well.
One of the reasons I ended up in Austin is that after we decided to move on from the school in San Francisco, I was interested in a more entrepreneurial phase of my life where I wasn't really sure what I was about to do. In 2022, I didn't know I'd be writing a Substack and serving on the Zoning Commission and all of that — and none of that pays really any money right now. But I would not be able to do this at all if I were in New York or San Francisco. The cost of taking that risk would just not be feasible. Moving to Austin gave us some runway to take more risks in this next phase of our career.
I chose a certain kind of mobility in a very meaningful sense of relocating. But cities used to be able to provide this kind of opportunity without having to force people out. How many people are in my position — wanting to take a risk to start a business, looking at the numbers in New York or San Francisco or other high-cost cities, and just saying, "I can't make this work here"? Maybe they brought that talent to some new city. I think I've done a good job here in Austin, but those cities are losing out on that too. This is a real cost for the places that are losing talent and not understanding that this is fundamentally a problem about human capital and how it's distributed. If you don't let it build in your own city, some other city is going to reap the rewards of that.
I'll circle back to some of the things you were hitting on, Norm. Part of what we hear when people say they just want stability — they've kind of given up on upward mobility — a lot of that is because we've made things harder than they need to be. You were talking about the farmhouse with all its problems, and I was thinking: I'm sure that would violate every building code, and a city bureaucrat would say you're not allowed to live like that. But if they condemned your house and bulldozed it, you'd have been in a tent. We've somehow become okay with the idea of, well, I'd rather have you live on the sidewalk than live in a house I don't approve of.
Ryan has written a couple of pieces over the last couple of years — I think one about the ladder going up and down, and one about SROs — about us getting rid of the lower rungs. I think when we reach the point where we can't take upward mobility for granted anymore, maybe we need to stop and ask ourselves why. Maybe it's because we got really puritanical about how people shouldn't live like that, and really condemning of what it looks like to be on the bottom rungs of the ladder climbing up. Instead of trying to help people climb faster, or focusing on how do we make our ladder work better, we just said those rungs are icky and chopped them off. Now we're paying the price for that.
It can be hard and uncomfortable. A lot of the little tiny businesses — Ryan's talking about starting more of a knowledge-worker-type business in Austin — but there's a house down the street from me in Denver where I don't know exactly what the family does, but they always have a freshly broken-down car parked in their driveway, their garage is often open, and it appears they have an informal car-repair business going on there. I'm sure a bunch of my neighbors don't appreciate this. There are times when I feel like, "Really, guys, that car is totaled, give it up." But I try to remind myself: whatever they're doing, somebody now has got their car fixed who otherwise wasn't going to have a car fixed. That's just what it looks like — messy and gritty — when people are working their way up the ladder. We need to be more accepting and more tolerant of that.
My hopeful optimism is that maybe the hubris of the mid-century — the idea that we could just chop off the bottom rungs of the ladder and that would be fine — has been pretty thoroughly defeated. Maybe our generation will be a generation that learns how to leave space for those ladders to come back, and have a culture that's more accepting and more understanding: you've got to start where you can start. There should be some honor in starting from humble beginnings and climbing your way up, rather than saying, "Oh, that's icky, I don't want to see it."
That's my hope too. I find it fascinating that part of the Strong Towns vision is to re-normalize things that were rejected by a technical class that said that sort of stuff belongs to the old days. At Strong Towns, we're like: no, that's what we want to see. Give us that opportunity and you'll be surprised — we'll create things of lasting value, and increasingly help everyone to be able to live a good life in a prospering place, not just those that are subsidized to do so or those that are lucking out.
I'll also say, if anybody is listening to this, Chuck is always advertising that there are homes for cheap in Brainerd — although even there, I'd imagine those prices have gone up — but you do have to live in inner Minnesota, which is a wonderful community I've yet to go and visit. On that front, before I say anything further to offend anyone, let's go into the Down Zone, where we talk about things we're either taking in or captured by. What is something, Andrew, that you brought for the Down Zone?
This is very random, but I never read any of the Tolkien books. I've seen the movies, because everyone's seen the movies, but my wife is a big fan of the books and has been telling me how great they are for my whole marriage. I got the audiobook of The Hobbit and have been listening to it when I take my daughters places. I guess that's cheating on the reading part, but it's been really great fun. I just didn't appreciate — every person on earth is scolding me right now for just getting around to this — but it's so delightfully written. Sitting there with my three daughters listening to the story, they get very caught up in it. That's been really fun for us and something I've been enjoying lately.
I have a quick admission to make: I've tried to pick it up three times and I've never been able to finish. I've read The Lord of the Rings back to back three or four times, but The Hobbit — I just can't do it. I went to a play where two people were putting on The Hobbit. It was great, but midway through, one of the characters says, "All right, exposition, exposition, exposition, exposition," and the other person says, "Can you just wrap it up?" He says, "No, I've got to go on for quite a way." That is totally my impression of some of the sections in that book. Over to you, Ryan.
I'm kind of one-track, so my entire life is just thinking about land use and cities. I wanted to highlight an essay that our mutual friend Andrew Miller wrote. Andrew is also a Roots of Progress Institute Fellow, as I was, in addition to Andrew Burleson here. He wrote about the death of his local bar. He lives in Toronto, and it was a moving piece about how this bar — he says the bar didn't create community, it was the community. It was a place where even the bartenders themselves would go to get a drink or have a meal.
I think about this loss of third places, the dearth of them in our modern lives, especially as so many of us are working remotely. It's easy to just open a bottle of wine — I've got a whole wine closet. Why go out and be among people? But you lose something when you don't have those places to go and that opportunity to commune with strangers, or just familiar faces who you aren't deeply friends with but can enjoy a kind of benevolent spirit with — some spirits, perhaps.
I think about how integral those types of places were historically. There's interesting data now about how young people don't drive, don't drink, don't have sex, and I'm like, maybe these things are related because they don't have a bar within walking distance of where they live. Perhaps we would solve some of these social problems if everybody could just walk down the street and get a pint once in a while.
You're making me thirsty, but also thankful for a couple of spaces that I do have access to — even though those are endangered in a lot of different ways. If anybody out there knows of a good one in my community and wants to start a new one, I will become a regular, for sure. Especially with the name Norm — where everybody's like, "Norm!" I've never watched an episode of Cheers and yet I know the concept and sort of yearn for that in my community.
For my Down Zone: I got the chance to perform in Handel's Messiah over the weekend and really enjoyed doing that as a singer. Part of my delight was listening to a podcast called the Sticky Notes Podcast. I've never come across it before — there are several hundred episodes now of classical music explained for lay people, and it was excellent. If anybody is looking for that, definitely go check it out.
With that, Andrew and Ryan, thanks for coming on Up Zoned today. This has been fantastic. Really appreciate the conversation.
Thanks, Norm. This is fun. Very good. Appreciate it.
We are supported by so many people. The Strong Towns movement is built by members — I highlighted three to start, but there are so many more that are part of this work. I appreciate what you are doing, whether you're pushing for greater stability in your community, helping people realize their own dreams, or taking action to allow for more of the small things we can do together to improve our places. Whatever it is, 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.