The Bottom-Up Revolution

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.

Jay Stange is a former newspaper reporter, teacher, community organizer, and Alaska native. He’s also the Content Manager at Strong Towns. In this conversation, he’s talking about his efforts to slow down cars on busy stroads in both his former neighborhood in Anchorage, as well as his current neighborhood in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Jay discusses the ways he’s worked with neighbors to push for the change, tested out temporary approaches, and addressed the concerns of business owners along the roads in question. In his working class, renter-dominated neighborhood in Anchorage, these efforts were also part of a larger movement to help people believe in the future of their neighborhood and combat apathy—to show people that they had something to be proud of in their community. 

In the episode, we also talk about Jay’s lifelong love of biking, from riding his bike to sports practice as a kid when his parents couldn’t drive him, to bike commuting and biking with his own kids today. Plus, we discuss Jay’s belief that change should look fun and it should happen collaboratively.  We know you’re going to appreciate the energy and passion Jay brings to this conversation. It’s something he brings to all of his work at Strong Towns.

Additional Show Notes

• “The Road that Killed a City,” by Jay Stange, Strong Towns (March 2022).

• “The Pedalling Pastor,” by Jay Stange, Strong Towns (March 2022).

• Read all articles by Jay.

• Send your story ideas 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.

It’s news to exactly no one that we’re living in polarized times. But Strong Towns advocates are doing their best to push back against polarization in their communities. In fact, it’s a core value of our movement that we work with people on all parts of the political spectrum, because we know that the change we seek across North America won’t happen without everyone on board.

Today’s guests on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, hosted by Rachel Quednau, are doing the challenging but important work of bridging political divides in their home state. Carlos Alfaro and Jacob Pritchett founded Arizona Talks as a platform for learning, dialogue, and connection for individuals impacting public policy. They facilitate debates, conversations, and dialogues amongst residents and leaders throughout Arizona. It’s a diverse state full of lots of different political views, and Carlos and Jacob have navigated those waters to bring together Democrats, Republicans, and folks between and outside those labels for constructive conversation on the issues that matter. 

In this interview, they talk about how this project came to be, some of their successes and failures, and their advice for others trying to build common ground in a polarized time.

Additional Show Notes

• Arizona Talks website.

• Send your story ideas 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 have two special guests today: Strong Towns staff members Christa Theilen and Seairra Shepherd. Christa works as Strong Towns’ office assistant in our Brainerd, Minnesota, office and Seairra is a writer and multimedia creator based in central Illinois.

But besides serving at Strong Towns, they both also work part time at local small-scale farms. Christa’s is a vegetable farm and Seairra’s, an animal farm. We invited them on the show to talk about their experiences in this vital industry: growing the food we all eat and need to survive, and growing it close to home so it doesn’t require costly shipping or rely on global supply chains to get to our kitchens. 

This life isn’t easy. Christa and Seairra both talk about the round-the-clock, 365-day nature of farm work, but also how much they love it and how rewarding it is to be outside, getting your hands dirty and literally seeing the fruits of your labor. They discuss the growing interest they’ve witnessed in local food in their regions and the ways their farms have gotten connected with people in the surrounding towns. 

This isn’t the first conversation we’ve had with a local farmer on The Bottom-Up Revolution. But we think Christa and Seairra offer a unique perspective as workers on rural farms in the modern age.

Additional Show Notes

• Brambling Rows Farm (Brainerd, MN)

• Trillium Dell Farm (Knoxville, IL)

• Previous podcast episodes about local food: “Beth Hoffman: Getting Real About the Cost—and Value—of Farming,” “Alfred Melbourne: Growing Food, Growing Resilience,” and “Alex Hagler: An Entrepreneur Creating Opportunities for Other Entrepreneur.”

• Read articles by Seairra Shepherd.

• Send your story ideas 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.

A few years back, we published an op-ed from a Strong Towns reader who was fighting a proposed highway project in San Jose, California, near his child’s school—mere yards away, to be exact.

The highway expansion would make a key crossing—where hundreds of children and parents walked to the school building every day—extremely dangerous. It would also bring noise and pollution into kids’ classrooms, strip recreational land away from the school, and, as with every highway expansion project, cost taxpayers millions of dollars to implement. The justification for the project from the DOT was basically: We planned for this a few decades ago and we finally got the funding, so let’s build it. 

Today’s guest is the author of that initial op-ed and a leading community activist in the fight against the project. Robin Roemer got in touch with us a little while ago to say that, after a four-year battle, he and his neighbors had finally succeeded in getting the city council to vote unanimously against the project. You’re about to hear his story of persistence, of bringing neighbors together to show that they have power over the future of their community and they don’t have to accept a harmful project being handed down from on high. 

Roemer has helpful advice for any community organizing effort, too: give people the facts and voice to help them make decisions for themselves, use peoples’ energy wisely, pace yourself for long-term efforts, and, also, you don’t have to participate in government processes that are rigged against you. He’s got a great story about not showing up for a city council meeting but instead, arranging a separate meeting for the community that would actually allow them to attend and voice their concerns. We’ll let him tell the rest…

Additional Show Notes

• “A Literal Bridge From the Future to the Past,” by Robin Roemer (Strong Towns, October 2018).

• “After a fierce fight, San Jose abandons ‘extremely dangerous’ overpass project,” by Maggie Angst (The Mercury News, February 2022).

• California Walks website.

• Send your story ideas 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.