The Bottom-Up Revolution

Erin Stewart has served as mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, since 2013. She was elected at the age of just 26 and was the youngest mayor in the city’s history. Mayor Stewart is a Republican with a particular passion for building safer streets, revitalizing neglected properties, and helping New Britain’s downtown thrive.

In this conversation, Mayor Stewart talks about her efforts to increase housing downtown, especially given the history of a highway that cut through New Britain during the urban renewal period decades ago. She sees the financial and social value of investing in places that prioritize people walking, biking, and enjoying life—not just people driving through. She also knows how important access to affordable transportation options is for many of her constituents who don’t own cars.

Mayor Stewart is committed to listening to New Britain residents and responding to their concerns, no matter what political party they associate with, and she’s seen serious success improving the financial situation in her town, lifting them out of a deficit hole into a surplus.

Spencer Gardner is an urban planner and Strong Towns member who moved to Spokane, Washington, a few years back because it offered him and his family an affordable place to live, where they found a traditional neighborhood they could walk and bike in.

Since that move, however, the city—like so many across the U.S.—has become increasingly unaffordable and Spencer has stepped up to help try and change that. An opening in city leadership led him to apply to be Spokane’s planning director and he was hired to the position earlier this year. He’s been part of several important reforms in the city including, significantly, some substantial modifications to their accessory dwelling unit code, which is allowing a lot more of these small homes to be built at a time when greater housing options at low price points are desperately needed.

Spokane also undertook a unique “interim zoning ordinance” to allow up to four units to be built on any lot—a change that happened in record time compared with the years (or even decades) these sorts of reforms usually take to occur in the typical city. Spencer goes into detail about how and why that could occur, and the way he sees it as a special pilot program they can learn from that may pave the way to more permanent change.

In this conversation, Spencer also shares prescient insights on urban planning and how those in this profession need to find ways to move past talking. It can be more comfortable to continue to plan, as a planner, he says.  We need to turn that planning into action.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Strong Towns articles by Spencer Gardner.

• More information about the Strong Towns lawsuit with the Minnesota Engineering Licensing Board and how you can support our efforts to reform the engineering profession: strongtowns.org/supportreform.

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

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

Today’s guest on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast has been a supporting member of Strong Towns for 10 years! Lindsey Meek’s story will be familiar to some of you, especially those in the city-building professions.

Years back, she was an engineer doing some of the typical projects that many civil engineers end up doing these days: building suburban subdivisions. Somewhere along the way, she encountered Strong Towns and especially the now famous video, “Conversation with an Engineer.” As she describes it, she “saw the light” and was convinced that engineering didn’t have to be about paving endless roads to the middle of nowhere and building expensive suburban developments on the edge of town. It could be about making places more prosperous and people-centered, not less. 

Today, she works for a healthcare company, helping them develop facilities designed for healing and comfort. She’s also led some efforts to get these large campuses to think about how to be a good neighbor to the surrounding community and helped implement street and public space designs to facilitate that. In this conversation, Lindsey talks about her work today as well as her previous leadership and Strong Towns organizing in Rochester, Minnesota. 

This conversation might be especially interesting to the engineers out there wondering how they can make a positive difference with their careers and not keep maintaining the suburban status quo. But it will also appeal to anyone who’s hoping to build stronger towns where they live.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Conversation with an Engineer” video.

• Lindsey Meek (Twitter).

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

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

Urban highways are ubiquitous in pretty much every city across America. They cut through neighborhoods, make navigation challenging, decrease property values, and bring exhaust and noise into our communities. But they also help people move quickly from one end of the city to the other, which is why they were built in so many cities, especially during the suburban boom of the 20th century, when they helped people travel from jobs in the city to homes in the suburbs.

Today, there’s a movement to stop building and expanding these highways, and Strong Towns is a leading voice in that fight. There’s also a movement to try to undo the harm that they’ve already caused and remove them—or parts of them—altogether.

The Treme neighborhood of New Orleans has been home to one such highway for decades: the Claiborne expressway. Treme is an active, culturally rich community near the heart of the city, but it’s been harmed by the dust, noise, disruption, pollution, crime, and economic disinvestment that resulted from this highway cutting through the neighborhood. Amy Stelly, whose family has been in Treme for decades, is helping lead a fight to remove that highway for good.

She’s an urban planner and artist who knows what the neighborhood was like before this highway and sees how its removal could help local businesses thrive, help more residents invest in their homes, and make Treme a safer, more enjoyable place to live and spend time—not just a place to speed through quickly.

To help fellow residents see that potential and push for that change, she’s led community gatherings, activism, and poster campaigns to show what Treme could be without the highway. On this episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, she shares a wealth of candid insights about the need for highway removal and the process to make it happen.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Claiborne Avenue Alliance website.

• Amy Stelly on Twitter.

• “Cracking the Code on Fighting Highway Expansion Projects,” by Amy Stelly, Strong Towns (May 2022).

• Congress for the New Urbanism.

• “Treme Planner Says It’s Time to Remove the Claiborne Expressway,” by Rich Collins, Biz New Orleans.

• “Highways destroyed Black neighborhoods like mine. Can we undo the damage now?“ by Amy Stelly, Washington Post.

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

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

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.