The Bottom-Up Revolution

A Strong Towns approach is all about seeing the challenges in your city and taking that next smallest step to start addressing them. Today’s guest on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, Strong Towns member Ari Feinsmith, exemplifies that spirit. When he started biking to college (about a 15-minute ride from his house in Sunnyvale, California), he quickly realized how dangerous and challenging it was just to get from point A to point B without a car.

So, Ari began attending public meetings and introducing himself to local elected officials who might be able to make streets a little safer. He joined the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, eventually becoming team leader of his local chapter. Since getting fired up about these issues a couple years ago, he’s been involved in many successful campaigns to add bike lanes and bike parking, and to make intersections safer for people on bikes. The natural effect is that this also makes streets safer for everyone—in a vehicle, walking, you name it.

While he was advocating for design and policy changes, Ari was also noticing how many people in his community didn’t have the opportunity to bike because they had old bikes that were broken down, and they didn’t know how to fix them. Thinking about what small step he could take to change that situation, he helped set up a series of bike repair events, in which he coordinated volunteers, got use of a local parking lot, and negotiated discounts with a local bike shop for new parts. In total, he and his fellow volunteers have helped over 300 bikes get fixed.

Ari has also been thinking about transportation issues in his city on a holistic level, and after reading Strong Towns, one thing that really stood out to him was the amount of excessive, wasteful parking in his city—space that could be better used for businesses or homes. So he helped lead a campaign to decrease parking minimum requirements in Sunnyvale.

Additional Show Notes

• Bike Sunnyvale website.

• Ari’s comprehensive guide to starting a free bike repair event in your town.

• Ari was named a Bike Champion of the Year 2022 by Bike to Wherever Days. Read about him and the award here.

• “We Require WAY Too Much Parking,” by Seairra Shepherd (article about Ari’s efforts to end parking minimums in Sunnyvale, CA).

• Send your story ideas and guest suggestions to rachel@strongtowns.org.

• Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.

Montavius Jones is a Strong Towns member who describes himself as “getting radicalized” about urban planning issues on Twitter. (This conversation is actually a good argument for the positive potential of Twitter as a place to meet people, connect and share ideas!) Jones majored in commercial real estate in college, and brings that expertise to his work today at a community development financial institution, as well as a lot of on-the-ground advocacy in Milwaukee. A few years ago, he also had the opportunity to travel around Central and South America, observing the way so many cities to the south have built themselves with people as the priority, not cars. In particular, he talks about his all time favorite city, Mexico City, and why it’s a perfect example of successful, strong urban planning.

Jones sees the connections between the challenges that many communities, especially mid-size cities like Milwaukee, face: population stagnation, educational and health disparities, safety, housing affordability… He sees solutions in a Strong Towns approach to urban planning. In this conversation, you’ll also hear about an initiative he helps lead called Urban Spaceship. We’ll just leave that as a teaser since the name alone should be enough to get you intrigued.

Additional Show Notes

• Find Montavius Jones on Twitter.

• Check out Jones’ travel blog.

• Incremental Development Alliance.

• Newaukee.

• “Design Speed is a Value Statement,” by Charles Marohn, Strong Towns (July 2021).

• “The Strong Towns Approach to Public Investment,” by Charles Marohn, Strong Towns (September 2019).

• Send your story ideas and guest suggestions to rachel@strongtowns.org.

• Subscribe to The Bottom-Up Revolution on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Podbean, or via RSS.

• Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.

Welcome to a special Member Week episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, featuring two amazing Strong Towns members: Nick and Amanda Lanata, from Zachary, Louisiana. Nick is a data scientist and Amanda works for the Louisiana Main Street program, and also helps run a small family business. It probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that when this duo encountered Strong Towns, they were hooked and soon got involved.

Nick was drawn to Strong Towns’ focus on doing the math and assessing the value per acre of developments in our cities. He’s even done analyses on his own community and shared those with elected leaders. Amanda was interested in the Strong Towns approach to helping downtowns and small businesses get activated again and grow economically resilient.

The Lanatas took the Strong Towns mission and really ran with it over the last couple years: meeting and getting to know their city councilors, helping their neighbors see the potential in their city, starting a Local Conversation group, and allowing the Strong Towns approach to guide their personal choices—like how they get around town.

We’re excited for you to hear from these inspiring Strong Towns members and hope that you’ll take a step and join them by becoming a member yourself.

Additional Show Notes

• Learn more about value per acre analyses.

• Not Just Bikes on YouTube

• Visit the Urban3 website

• Send your story ideas and guest suggestions to rachel@strongtowns.org.

• Subscribe to The Bottom-Up Revolution on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Podbean, or via RSS.

• Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.

We’ve all heard the phrase “housing crisis” a thousand times these days. Many of us have been personally impacted by a lack of available housing, whether you’re a young person who has been hoping to buy your first home, but are totally unable to because of high costs and competition—or whether you’re someone who has experienced homelessness because of eviction, job loss, or any number of other reasons.

There are a lot of people proposing solutions to this housing crisis and one of them is today’s guest, Beth Silverman. But the solution she’s been working on isn’t one of the typical responses you might have heard lately, like “we just need to build more homes,” or “we just need more government subsidies for housing.” Rather, it’s about uniting for-profit landlords and developers, together with non-profit service organizations toward a common goal of getting people housing who need it.

Beth Silverman is the founder and executive director of the Lotus Campaign, whose mission is “[t]o increase the availability of housing for people experiencing homelessness by engaging the for-profit sector as a partner in the solution.” She sees herself partly as a translator between entities that typically work separately and rarely talk to one another. She knows that nonprofits have services, connections, and insights to offer, and that landlords and real estate professionals can bring innovation, capital and access to housing, for homeless people or people at risk of homelessness.

During its short time in operation, the Lotus Campaign has already housed more than 360 individuals and families for a cost to their organization of less than $1,000 per person each year, and most of those people are able to stay housed after their participation in the program ends.

Additional Show Notes

• Visit the Lotus Campaign website.

• Send your story ideas and guest suggestions to rachel@strongtowns.org.

• Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.