Modern family life offers mothers an endless supply of services meant to make isolation more manageable, but Lauren Penn began wondering why so much support had to be purchased in the first place. After a violent crash near the crosswalk her children use to get to school pushed her into local activism, she began connecting unsafe streets and missing sidewalks to the exhaustion many mothers experience while coordinating transportation, childcare and social life largely on their own. Lauren shares how books, advocacy and small experiments with her daughters changed what she thought a neighborhood could provide. A place can either force every need into another private transaction or make room for families to help one another.
Hi everybody! Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. Part of what I think makes a Strong Towns message, what makes it resonate with so many people, is the belief that we can start improving our town right now with whatever we have right in front of us, today's guest did just that. Well, she does lots of cool things, but we're going to talk about one particular project where she looked at her front yard and saw it as a means for change.
She, yeah, she was able to transform her yard into this event that sparked connection with her neighbors, and she's working on some other projects we're going to talk about as well. But really, just around that theme of how do we look at our communities? How do we see the assets that are already there? How do we work with what we have right in front of us and start to incrementally make change and make improvements? I think it's going to be really inspiring. We've had several conversations before recording this, and we're really looking forward to continuing the conversation here on the Bottom Up Revolution.
So, Lauren Penn is a neighborhood advocate, creative entrepreneur, and Strong Towns conversation group leader from Denton, Texas. She and her husband are raising three daughters in their college town. She serves on the city of Denton Mobility Committee and is actively involved in various grassroots initiatives, including Bike Bus Denton, pop-up market makers, and several online resources, including StrongNeighborhoods. com. These are all efforts that support safer streets, local economies, and connected neighborhoods. Lauren is also the creator of the Texas Backyard Homes Guide, a resource hub designed to help homeowners navigate the ADU process. So she's basically an inspiration to us all.
I'm inspired just reading that paragraph and just hearing everything that she's working on. Lauren, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I am so thrilled to talk with you and bring your story and your insights to our audience, hi Tiffany. I am so excited to get to be here to talk with you. I've listened to this podcast for years, so it's just kind of a dream come true to get to be on it and talk about things with you.
Well, it's a dream come true for me to be able to find people you doing this good work and to be able to share your share your story with our audience-that's what this show is all about. It's just finding. We were joking about hitting record, and you were expressing a slight amount of anxiety about not being an expert. Finding that's the point of the show. We try as much as we can to just talk to ordinary people who are finding ways to improve their communities, and you definitely embody that on so many levels.
I don't even know if we're going to be able to capture all of it in one episode. So let's start off talking about home. We both live in Texas. You're in Denton. I'm in Waco. You're from here. I'm not. So I would love to hear from you, kind of what makes Texas unique, especially thinking about it as a citizen urbanist, as I to call people you, what do you think makes it unique? What do you think makes it unique from a urbanist perspective?
Well, first of all, that's a really big task to try to encapsulate one of the biggest states in the country. So, and I'm only from the North Central Texas part, so we call it DFW. So I grew up just south of Dallas in a city called Cedar Hill, and what I really loved about growing up there is it was it's kind of a it was kind of a smaller city off of a big city. It was really diverse. I grew up with a lot of black and brown and white students, just all different kinds of people. And there's in Texas.
I feel the fact that we used to be part of Mexico. There's a huge aspect of our culture that is founded really in kind of this Hispanic culture, there's just a lot of really unique and beautiful places in Texas. Growing up where I did, we've got a lot of lakes and cedar trees and oak trees. And then if you go towards the hill country, as we call it, kind of closer to where you are, there's rivers and just these big hills. And so my heart is just always drawn to these big expansive spaces, and I've always kind of seen the Texas sky is kind of our mountain range.
The sky is always changing; it's always giving us a show of clouds and sunsets and rainbows and all kinds of things. So that's the natural part of the state that I love, and I also love the people. The people in Texas, I think, are very creative, warm. We celebrate our differences and our cultures very well. We've got little pockets of there's a little German town. There's. There's pockets of other nationalities, Thai families, Indian families, our Hispanic heritage. It's just a melting pot. I feel it's it's a really unique place in the United States, and where our urbanist movement is growing.
I think it's everywhere from these really big projects that we're trying to get funded and completed, where we can finally connect our big metro areas with rail. With would be great to have trains that get from Houston, yeah, anywhere. And then at the same time, what I'm seeing is a lot of our smaller towns are actually doing this really amazing work in using the gift of their place of their historic buildings and downtowns and reworking them to become more walkable.
And really, I'm seeing growing up in the burbs, kind of in DFW, people are longing for that kind of cozy downtown walkable space, and so our small towns are actually the ones really pushing that or modeling that. Where whereas places downtown Dallas are really struggling to do it because it's just the scale. So there's a lot of great exciting things happening. We still have such a long way to go. Texas, we have. I just looked it up.
Our the budget for TxDOT is $20 billion and most of that goes towards highway expansion. and so, the more I've learned about this movement, urbanism, transportation, it can feel very frustrating to know that money is not going towards walkability. But other than that, Texas I think is just a really great place finding your people,
And once you find your people, I feel it's just a it's a lovely place to live. Yeah, that would have been my instinct too. If I if someone had pitched that question to me, it's I would have framed it this a similar way. I think you have to. I think looking at the smaller cities and the smaller towns, where obviously they're it's easier to organize people and connect people in those kinds of places to sort of shape a vision for well, what do we want for our town?
I think that the challenge is definitely different in bigger cities, and obviously it's where a lot of that highway expansion energy is going. Austin, they're dealing with the expansion of I-35 but I think because Texas is so big and has so many unique subcultures within it, I think it could be a really great case study and experimentation. we can experiment and we can try different things and see what works because there's there's enough Texas for everybody. So you live in Denton and you've been there a while. You're raising a family there, and you're also part of the Strong Towns Local Conversation Group.
Can you tell me a little bit about that group? Tell us a little bit about the group. What were you all noticing that kind of inspired this conversation to get going? To say hey, we. I guess for every local conversation group, what that town looks stronger is different than what another town would look. So, what do you think it looks for Denton to become a strong town? And then maybe we can talk a little bit about what you guys have been working on.
Yeah, so Denton is north of Dallas, and we are a college city. We actually have two universities. We have University of North Texas, which is where I went to school, which is a really large university. It's a state college, and then we also have Texas Woman's University, which is also a really great, really great college.
And so, as a lot of listeners who live in college towns know, there's there's so much benefit I think to living in a college town because we just naturally have more variety of people. people, of users, quote unquote, to kind of use that transportation language, but there's just I think having that variety built in lends itself to try to progress a little bit faster. The challenge, though, is that a lot of having a lot of young residents that impacts our funding. not everybody is paying, property owners, and if they're living on campus and stuff that. So there definitely are some challenges.
The stronger, so our group is called Stronger Denton, and I showed up last winter as kind of I would I kind of say I went I activated this mama bear mode because I saw a picture on a Facebook group of this horrific accident of a car that got flipped over in my neighborhood in the crosswalk where my. Children cross. We actually have to cross a state highway to get to school. It's it's University Drive, which is also US 380, and there is an there is a lighted intersection.
And over Christmas break, there was this car that flipped, and when I saw that, something just activated me, where I began to just see the danger that my children are living in, and so I reached out to people from the city. I actually had a great kind of two on one meeting with our director of transportation and another civil engineer, they listened, and that was that was helpful. And then I started going, who else in this town is worrying about this? And then I found the Stronger Denton group.
So anyway, I showed up on a cold winter night, and I was I don't know anything about urbanism, but I'm here, and they were talking that day about housing, and so just instantly, your eyes are just kind of open to so many other issues, and yeah, I just really connected with these folks. We've been we meet kind of once a month. Last year, we tackled advocating for our ADU ordinance to be updated to make it easier for people to build ADUs here in Denton. So we are really excited that those changes did get passed. I think in January. So that's been a great project.
And then right now we are working on parking reform. We're hoping to follow cities Dallas and other. there's some small cities in Texas that have eliminated their parking minimums, which just is a better deal for businesses not having to do so much concrete. And they can, we could actually put more businesses in little pockets in our neighborhoods. So that's another thing that we're hoping to grow into. But yeah, we're going to be doing a parking day, and just I think it's just the main thing is connecting people to the movement.
And there's what I love about the Strong Towns idea is that there are just so many avenues of interest that can capture people into the movement, and just working on activating them is the big step.
Can you share about some projects you guys have done, or maybe some wins you've seen as a result of your work, and also just the conversations you've been able to have within city staff or commissions and stuff that?
Yeah. So, I said, we worked on the ADU reform. We've I've been working to improve our biking and walking infrastructure. So I actually got onto the mobility committee because I started just showing up to the meetings, and somebody moved, and so they needed a new person. So I came on. So some of the things that I then that initial conversation that I had with the director of transportation that I pointed out, we actually pulled up a Google map and did Street View, and I showed him all of these issues. Those things actually put got in put in place.
It took about a year, but we got more stop signs in the neighborhood. We got a bike lane with bollards. They improved the timing at some of our lighted intersections, and so just the discussion. Those discussions, I think, are helpful. We're hoping to kind of expand this idea of the pop-up market, which we could talk about, and then I'm hoping we have a bus system, and during COVID, some of our bus routes were eliminated in place of what we call it's called go zone, so it's a van system.
So you can anyway, so it's possible that two of our bus routes might come back, and so one of them actually goes through my neighborhood. Which before, when the that bus route used to be around, I never used it, and since then I love taking the bus with my kids,
And so we're really hoping that bus route comes back. So if it does, I'm hoping to kind of plan a little celebration, so that we can invite people to take the bus and kind of celebrate that. So that reminds me of the book I read yesterday with my toddler. It's a book about the cool down trolley. I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but apparently it's based on a true story of a program in Baltimore that got started in the 1920s or 30s, where it was so hot during the day, and nobody had air conditioners.
So at night, they what they would do is they would bring out these street cars that had air conditioner, and it was called the cool down trolley. And they reduced fare, or they made it free, and people could ride it, and they would ride it all night to cool down because nobody had AC. And then of course, there's the one line in there of they.
Know the car is taking over, and so they had to shut down and went out of business. But anyway, I just the whole book is a party. It's it's basically all the different neighbors getting ready to get on the cool down trolley. Well, that's cool because my 40th birthday is coming up this October, and my husband was "What should we do? I was "Actually, I think it'd be really fun to invite all of our friends to ride the bus, and then go. We can all go to a restaurant. It's either that or a group bike ride. So I am such a transit girl now. That's my dream birthday.
Is getting people to do transportation with me.
Standard in Texas, but there's got to be a way I can be on a train on my birthday somehow. It's all I want. I just want to be on a train. Just get up to Dallas and then take the train up to see us in Denton. That would be fun. Okay, so I want to go back. what was you? You didn't study urbanism. I don't know. Was this your first? I just want to know more about the light bulbs that were going off for you. how do you?
Because I think this resonates with a lot of people. you just get so used to moving through space the way it's been designed for us for almost 100 years now, with the sprawl and the cars and the parking craters and the constantly hunting for. And you just kind of get used to it. You just think that this is normal, and then one day, some someone says something about induced demand, or someone says something about the car monopoly. how well it's designed such that you have to rely on this massive machine to get anywhere, and then all of a sudden you start to see everything different.
I just want to know what it was for you, if you can remember kind of the lights going off, and how did it shape how you saw your? I don't know. I just, I want to know more about that side of it. were you me? Where you just found yourself all your free time just starts going to thinking about? Yeah, yeah, it is. It actually became an obsession once I once that light bulb went off,
So I do think that car accident really woke me up. And then I used our library resource and I listened to Chuck's two actually two books. I listened to the Strong Towns book, and then I listened to Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, and just letting that knowledge sweep over me-it just was oh my gosh! I had no idea that a lot of the challenges I face in my day to day are due to how my city is designed.
Once you notice it, the fact that we are living in it and seeing the reminders every day, it for me is actually quite overwhelming, and it's activating, but it also is incredibly frustrating. I see this as this is not just a philosophical idea where it's oh, technology these days-that's causing all of our problems. It's well, that's or other injustices that are that are not as blatant. This is what I view as an injustice that we are living amongst and continually subjected to every single day, and when you realize my children don't have safe places to go, I cannot.
My neighborhood, we don't even have sidewalks, so we're walking in the middle of the street. You start to then reframe. I started to reframe even my motherhood experience. So I struggled with postpartum depression, insomnia. Generally, was just pretty lonely where I was, even in the city. Even though I had a lot of friends, and I think now this, how much suffering for our mothers, for our children, could be lessened if our cities were places that accommodated, not just accommodated us, but actually celebrated us. That actually was a place for thriving and creativity, a place that celebrated children and mothers. So, really, I just kind of spiraled.
I read another book I really loved was Happy City by Charles Montgomery, and I listened again to the audio book of this one through the library. And this book, I really think, activated me in a in a way that was kind of what if what if we could have more spaces and what if we just kind of start doing it.
One quote from this that I love, he says, "It is audacious to believe that the city might build happiness just by changing." Its shape, but it is foolish not to chase the thought, because around the world and especially amid the sprawlscapes of modern North America, the evidence shows that cities do indeed design our lives. And once I, I'm a doer, and I've owned businesses, and when you're when you own a business, you can't just think and think and think and debate all the time. You just kind of have to start trying things.
And so I think my comfort with experimentation, and my heart for community and warmth had just kind of I just was I'm ready. I we got to start doing things. I don't have time to waste. So it just it kind of made me think. Okay, what can I do with what I have? I don't have a lot of money. I don't have the expertise. I don't. I can't do all of the cool tactical urbanist ideas because I actually can build things, but I don't really have the time and I don't have the money to go get all those materials.
So what can I do on my block, or as I'm walking my kids to school? What are the conversations I can start having to sort of build this city? And really, it's kind of the I would say it's the soft skills of urbanism, which is behavioral and which is relational and a lot of that is having difficult conversations with neighbors, sharing my experience at the neighborhood meeting, where older folks are yelling at me and coming up to me afterwards and saying things "Well, do we really? We don't really need sidewalks.
We've never had sidewalks in this neighborhood, everyone's fine, and I don't think we really need to change things, or we don't really need young people moving here. And having to absorb the heartache of that, the gaslighting, and with as much warmth and with as much kindness as I can, to say no. Actually, this is not working for us, and I am not doing this just for my children. I'm not trying to bubble wrap them.
I know that the world is not safe, but I want anyone in our neighborhood to be able to get around, and that includes my older neighbors that I see trying to get out and exercise with a walker, and they can't because our streets are uneven and they're dodging cars. So I, I was just, I instantly was we got to start doing things, and I've just tried doing a lot.
I've had this phrase in my head lately. To me, it feels just a human dignity crisis. Of because I've been taking these walks around Waco, and I have seen I've seen the elderly man with a walker trying to cross four to six lanes of fast moving traffic, right? Because there's huge distances between safe crosswalks. It's too hot. He doesn't want to walk fourth of a mile out to walk a fourth of a mile back, right? So of course he's going to cross right in the middle to the apartment complex where he lives from the store, right?
And you see the incomplete sidewalks, you see the blighted real estate, you see the trash everywhere, and you just have to ask yourself at a certain point. I have this joke sometimes where I'm we design dog parks better than we design for human beings. where is our self-respect? Honestly, it's been a question that keeps going over and over my head. where is this? Is just not a dignifying environment at all for a human being. do we not? Is this just a crisis of understanding the basic fundamental concept of human dignity? It is it is. Where is our self hospitality? we should have a little bit more self respect.
Where we should be. I don't know. I'm just this is not this is not that hard, guys. Well, and I cannot tell you
The grief of having to prove the worth and the value of my children to my neighbors. Yes, it is. It is inhumane, you say. I agree. People in my city, we will fund a dog park and an expansion on the animal shelter faster than we will fund a sidewalk for a school or a neighborhood park, we'll even fund a senior center. Children in our society are not valued. Mothers are not valued. We are expected to go along with the program and make our own fun.
We're expected to you make a really awesome backyard playground and outdoor mud kitchen, and spend all this money taking our kids to places to be entertained. I know the expense that parents undertake just to keep our children enter. I don't say even entertained, but just to give them places, literally places to go. We it is unaffordable, and then we're told no, we need this dog park. No, we need to spend money on another car lane. It's convenience and enjoyment for all other users, except our children. And then we wonder why are the children so depressed? Why are they struggling with mental health issues, or why are is their health failing?
I think of another book that really activated me was The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and actually I read that a summer before I got into urbanism, so that might have primed me. And he tackles this idea that the youth of our world are struggling so much with their self worth, their anxiety, and he makes mostly a connection to technology and the use of our phones and social mediand stuff that. However, he the his main antidote and his main connection because he's a so I believe he's a sociologist. Is the importance for children to have independence?
That is a huge marker in development for any human being to become an ADUlt that can handle the stresses of life, that can come up with a business ideand try it. That can even find a partner or find friends. We have to make. We have to let our children go and be independent.
He says that in his book, his central idea is that there are two trends: the overprotection in the real world and an under protection in the virtual world, and also he says the synchronous face-to-face physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution, and that we've designed places for children to play just to keep them as we anyway our goal is we need to keep them as safe as possibly that's necessary, but not as safe as possible. And so, what you end up seeing are here's this little playground. That's where the kids go, okay?
Or here's this little play town. where it's oh, our kids actually get to experience living in a little town, who knew children love going to the post office. Who knew children love running errands? But you got to shell out five bucks a kid to go take them to this play town, and we are not giving our children places to go. And so we read the book, and I would say the other thing that really activated me with urbanism, we read the book, my husband I, and we said, "Okay, this expert is saying our kids, my children, my daughters at the time I think were 11 and nine.
They need an opportunity to go roam around the neighborhood. That's what we did. This is a rite of passage. This is what children do all over the world. And how can we make this happen? And so, very practically, we started very small, where we have an alley, and so were "Y'all go play in the alley. We'll be inside. Watch out for cars, And we would even set things out in the alley, so if cars were coming, they would slow down. And then it was, "Okay, why don't you go walk to the neighborhood park and take a walkie-talkie, and so we could communicate with them.
Jonathan Haidt also talks about let them go out and not bring a cell phone. They need to even learn what do I do if I fall down and scrape my knee or my bike gets a flat tire. You need to learn how to ask, can I use your phone at a store? find the good people, and those are actually super important skills. That when we hand our kid a cell phone and say, "Well, you can always call me anytime, that's actually not wiring their brains properly to learn how to problem solve.
So, so we started really small, and now we're at the point where our daughters can ride their bikes, either with or without a friend. We have we're lucky enough where we do live kind of in a little suburban pocket of Denton, but we do live close to some stores and some little shops and restaurants, and so they can bike over to Dollar General. They can bike over to there's a Wendy's. There's a couple of parks nearby.
We actually live near a movie theater, so that would be my next big goal: is for them to just hey go see a movie, take your take your cash, or we use the Greenlight debit card, which is a debit card for kids, and just even letting them experience I know how to go into a store and buy something. children are not even aware of how to do that, and these are very small practical ways that, as parents, we can model the person the personable parts of living in a city.
Well, I mean, so children have to learn how to navigate the public realm, right?
This is a huge part of becoming an ADUlt. life does not just happen in your house with your family system, with your family rules, with the people that I think that's the scariest part is that the way we've been designing our cities, we're teaching children how to participate in a very fractured sense of place. where in a way, you're always situated within the safety of what you under what and understand because you're just never because you go from your home which you understand to this school which you understand to this one playground which right so you're moving them in this very siloed way but that's not the real world the real world is one big messy place, right?
And then we wonder why we're so divided. Is that we're not actually rubbing shoulders with anyone other than our family? I've even seen content recently that it's actually quite detrimental for our children to only be with their parents. They, they, it is that is actually, and it's interesting because I feel millennials, we other generations, I think, really enjoyed their children too. We enjoy our children, we know so much, and we cherish them, and we want to kind of be a part of a lot of their childhood. It's so important for us to take a step back, and even go send our kid down the street and go.
Hey, why don't you go talk to Miss Virginia down the street? See if she needs help, or go pick some figs in her backyard. Or it doesn't even have to be that big, but just sitting outside in your front yard and visiting with people. I'm watching this happen with my almost three year old because he we. So I moved with my boys to 20 minutes outside of Waco-ish, so we're more in the countryside. But we happen to live. This is the weirdest event of my life.
We live on a cul-de-sac, on a dead end street, which I know there's a lot of debate about, and I understand that they're not financially fair. But let me tell you something: the lack of through traffic changes the game. everyone knows that this street belongs to the children, and it was so lucky that we landed on this street. totally, the whole crazy thing that happened, backstory. But we just landed on the street, and I'm I feel I have gone back 20 years in time because any given minute, there's a kid, there's multiple children on bikes. They're all zipping up and down the street to each other's houses.
Who knows what games they're playing? They know, and there's a really great spread of ages too. So my little guy just got immediately pulled into this little social world, and he is just over the moon when he gets to sit on the porch and watch the teenager just talk shop and fix their fishing rod, or then other people and they came looking for him, and he had just oh my gosh, eight kids knocking on my door, can leave, I can play, and so I'm just watching him get socialized. I'm watching him sometimes he'll jump on his bike, be to go find my friend's mom, and I'm not.
He's too young to ride down the street by himself, but it's just so amazing to watch his social consciousness come online, and to realize how much he craves independence. He craves connection with other people that are not his mom. He's learning from these older teens. A lot of them are in church, and they're good kids, So for the most part, pretty good, safe influences, right? And it's just but he's also learning, you can't be in the street because of cars. You have to stay off the side. He's very aware of cars and stuff that.
So it's just really opening my eyes to what children need, even at the young age of two and a half. And then layer on top of that, what moms need, and then you start to think about. I mean, even today, I'm driving to the library to do this recording, and I'm I have to do this drive because I'm not situated in a built environment that has child support and just organic support built into it. So I have to pack my child into a car, arrange babysitting to go record this because my world is not designed for moms that have multiple arenas of responsibility in and outside the home.
I'm sure there's no perfect utopia where you just constantly, constantly have everything you need at any given minute. But it does strike me as interesting that the way that our culture is teaching moms to cope with this is to keep putting more on them. Go take a class in emotional regulation. Go take a class in meal prep so you can get 900 meals made in 30 minutes. Go take a class in it's just okay, well, you're breaking down. Here's now we're going to give you the responsibility for preventing the breakdown and healing from the breakdown and repairing the breakdown rather than saying wait.
Second, how about we consider another scenario, another possibility? Maybe this is just not normal. It's not well, and maybe there is a connection between the way that our environment has been designed and the crisis of motherhood that's unfolding silently, where moms are trying to cope with this, and we're being told that the answer is to keep coping rather than to reevaluate the environment in which we're doing our best to execute the duties related to our role. And yeah,
I want to give you a chance to talk about the things you've been doing to proactively push back on this and to create alternatives, not just for your children but also for your community at large. Yeah, well, just touch on that, we have been in modern times so stripped of organic cities, and what a time to be alive, where we are not losing our babies to, illnesses. We're not where our great grandmothers may have had six or seven children and then lost two.
So we, with that gratitude for so many modern benefits, we are also living in a time that has actually destroyed what it means to live as a connected human, and no wonder women are so burned out. We have health. We have truly. It's a health crisis, is the way I see it. Not just for the mothers, but also for the children. A book that I that I listened to. It took me about two years to listen to because the book is so long, but it is absolutely incredible. Called "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, and this is by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
She is an indigenous woman from the East Coast, and she actually narrates the book. And her voice is so lovely. I encourage you to listen to it, Tiffany, if you ever just doing dishes or hanging out, driving around. But she talks a lot about something called reciprocity, which is the practice of exchanging things or favors for mutual benefit, and this is a natural practice for families and especially for mothers.
When mothers lived in community, they could say, "I can you guys watch my kid while I garden or while I cook, while I'm, or the mothers would get together and wash all the clothes and keep an eye on all the children together. When we continually force mothers into, you said, doing more, and I think they see us as, at the end of the day, in a capitalist economy, they see us. They see dollar signs because they go, "Hey, the mothers are so burned out. Let's just keep feeding them convenience after convenience. Oh, you can't go to the grocery store? Do Instacart. Oh, you can't.
You don't have brain space to do meal planning. Here's a here's a meal delivery system. Oh, you can't take care of your kids. Here's another streaming platform. And number one, it's so expensive. And number two, it's it's too much and it's not natural. One of the one of the things she says is that paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and an open heart, and she also says recognizing enoughness is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.
And she says when the economic system actively destroys what we love, isn't it time for a different system?
So that kind of led me to the pop-up market idea. If you want to talk about that, I want to talk about that. But I just want to riff on what you just said because I'm living more now in our new situation. I'm more embedded in a in a system that has potential for great reciprocity. so, we live in a. We actually live in an ADU now, on the property of a family from church. I consider it an ADU. I don't know if the person built it thought of it that way. It's probably more a granny flat.
But now there's more reciprocity built into our life because I love to do meal planning and cooking, and they, they are they love watching my kids sometimes, so I'll piece. I'll go over there and I'll cook. Or if I'm going to the store, I'll be "Do you need anything? We've befriended another family on the street, and they will watch Levi for me while I need to do some stuff. And so I'll be "Hey, if I'm ever going to Walmart or Aldi, I can text you if you need me to grab something while I'm there. But think about the economic in.
Act if you had more moms doing things to get I'm telling you I'm not a conspiracy theorist but when you start to think about it you're wait a second it's genius separate all the moms from each other so they all have to buy their own stuff sustain their own life get it all done all on their own because if you had them all together they'd all be spending way less money and they'd get a lot more done, and it just-it's more of a-it's more of a-it functions an ecosystem at that point because it just takes on a life of its own. the whole system just takes-I don't have to micromanage all of you guys' playdates now because kids just organically come over and play with him. the teenager will, the middle schooler will come outside, and next thing they've been playing soccer for an hour.
I, I didn't have to plan that, right? I didn't have to pay $20 for babysitting for that, right? It just, it takes on a life that's much richer without merely requiring as many transactions, right?
I think there is a weird thing we need to do where we can evaluate wealth and health outside of the number of transactions that occur to facilitate that, and you get that when you're able to reconfigure the rhythm of people's lives such that they're able to bring generosity to the table that has nothing to do with spending money, right? and it's a whole different value system, and it's a terrifying value system if your whole understanding of a prosperous economy has to do with counting transactions, right?
But healthy family life, healthy community, healthy motherhood is not about you can't measure that necessarily. it's actually better if you're moving away from transactions because that means you have mutual aid, you have friends, you have family stepping in to participate in that system, and it the value of it is immeasurable. There's no way you can measure in dollars the value of spontaneous play with other children. Exactly, just exactly. You are you are so on the money. I think, and I think a lot of a lot of yeah. Well, no, I think I think there is an unlearning and relearning and reattuning to this ancient way, I really do.
And we're not going to do it perfectly. I have seasons where the convenience factor-if I have the money for it-I will. I can do it. I may do that, but then what? There. But it's it's a spillover effect when you are feeling fulfilled relationally, when you are feeling my children are safe or they've got places to go, a mother now has less on her mind, and now her essentially her body, her mind now is teeming with ideas, with creativity, with love, with care. I now see a lot of our societal issues, even things that are horrific. things that happen in families, or really difficulties, poverty, illness. mental health.
Of course, there are so many layered reasons why those things happen. But we need-if anyone out there is listening-we need more research. We need more connections to help us determine that yes, it is our place that is, and lack of humanity, really, that are causing these issues, and then once we, I think, once we continue to define those things, I mean, I'm ready for a generation of mothers to go. We are ready to hold our places in power to account because you have refused. that this is needed. that we need freaking sidewalks. Okay, we need it, and you are withholding it from us.
We are going to need mothers to start waking up to this. It's and of course it's great. One more thing we have to do. If you're not a mother out there, will you help us? Will you be the time and the energy, the listening ear? Will you watch our children so that we can go to a city council meeting? Will you offer to transcribe our thoughts and then email it to a council member for us. Will you be willing to interview mothers and families before you go in and build something and find out is this actually going to be serving the people that live here?
We need everyone collectively to start including us back into the conversation of space, Lauren. I think it's my turn to say I think you're so on the money because I think you're right. I think this is not necessarily where we saw today's conversation going, but it's definitely on our minds. It's actually conversations I've been having with some friends outside of even outside of this podcast of just starting to see the connection between and anyone.
Listening to this, even if you're not a mom, if you're a dad, there is a connection between the design of your city and your role as a dad, right? removing the father from the house to go work, as has been traditional up until this era of remote work. And if you look back historically, there was this whole period where family life merged with city life in a much more organic way, we're not saying everyone needs to start wearing linen and beads and chanting and country and dance in circles every night. Is not what we're talking about.
I think what we're talking about is return to a period of time where you had greater harmony between public life and private life. Right? It wasn't as divided and divorced from each other, where you had the dad away and the mom in the traditional model, the mom at home all by herself, or also at home and the children outsourced to someone else for caretaking, and so I think there's just there's just been this era of fracture and divorce and separation, and I just I hear what you're saying is this invitation to say, oh, hold on, who is this actually serving? Because definitely not serving the people, the families, right?
And to begin to reevaluate the design of our places and the design of our lives. I love that phrase. I use it all the time to kind of help people see the way your life is designed has so much, so much of the decisions you make come from the way your place has been designed, right? But also to just reimagine, you're saying, imagine what moms could be doing with all the extra energy that they're able to save, right? If they are more and embedded and supportive communities, and that's where you begin to see this. I think Chev talked about this in his book.
How in Italy, ancient Italy, you had houses in the back, small markets in the front, right? Where there's this margin that allows women to be creative and to contribute to the local economy and to the to the public realm in this really beautiful way that's balanced, right? So you're not saying we don't want to buy anything else. We don't want to contribute to your vision is not for complete withdrawal; it's for balance, right? And it's for saying if moms are an integration, exactly right.
It's re-integrating things, and so I think yes, I think you're right. there, this needs to be a much bigger conversation, and there does need to be more conversations of accountability to people who are making these decisions and saying, I mean, people have done this with the environmental impact of highway expansion, right? look how all of this additional traffic is going to affect the health outcomes for young children, and I think yeah, an equivalent needs to be established for how our design patterns that emphasize individualism and sprawl and fracture and constant driving, the toll that has on moms. I think we're going to leave it there for now, Lauren.
But we're going to record a part two because we didn't even touch on any of the fantastic projects that you've been working on, and we knew this would happen. We were laughing about it before we got there because just the way that we've been brainstorming, even before recording this, we have, we just have too many ideas and opinions up our sleeve. So I get ready, get ready, world. I'm sorry to record part two because I think there is a connection between the journey you've been on, the connections that you're making, and then what you've been able to contribute to the world.
Because you're not just sitting there, in an armchair complaining and pontificating. You're actually doing something about it, and I want to be able to capture those stories as well and bring those to an audience. Unfortunately, though, we are out of time for this episode, so to our audience, you'll just have to you just have to come back for part two.
But in the meantime, thank you, Lauren. Where can people find out more about you and more about what you're working on? That's sweet. I would love to come back, so let's pencil that in for sure. So I have a couple of resources. One is something new that I'm kind of building that will have some resources for just regular folks and parents, and even some resources for kids. That's gonna.
That's at StrongNeighborhoods. com I have a kind of a quiz that if you want to think about how is my front porch or my yard impacting urbanism, I think it feels very empowering to do what you can with what you have, and if you have a yard, you can impact the street. And so I've got a quiz on there that kind of, and it's based off of some really incredible research by a professor named Carrie Lavon. From she is from Colby College, and so I took her datand kind of turned it into a quiz. So I've got some more information on there.
I also have some recommended book lists on there. I'm using Bookshop. org, which is kind of an alternative to buying books through Amazon. So if anyone is out there who is brand new to anything urbanism, I've got some great resources. There too, and then we can talk about this again next time. But I have a website called PopUpMarket. org. I was previously on an interview with Norm for the bottom up shorts. So if you want to learn, kind of get a preview on that. So that's and then I've got an Instagram.
I had a video go viral recently, which was me just biking around Denton, and it went viral, and it was pretty cool. Just kind of sharing my experience, and so I think my account is Lauren in Denton
With some underscores in there. So maybe we can put a link. Yeah, we'll put all the links in there. Lauren, thank you so much for taking time to come share your story with us and your insights. It's been a pleasure, and I know that I know that a lot of what we shared, I'm sure, it resonated with our listeners. So I am just yeah truly thankful for you taking the time to come on here with me. Thank you so much, Tiffany. I had fun. Okay, well until we get to part two, 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 I should have on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can with what you've got to make your community a better place, a stronger place. This episode was produced by Strongtowns, 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.