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This podcast features stories of the Strong Towns movement in action. Hosted by Tiffany Owens Reed, it’s all about how regular people have stepped up to make their communities more economically resilient, and how others can implement these ideas in their own places. We’ll talk about taking concrete action steps, connecting with fellow advocates to build power, and surviving the bumps along the way—all in the pursuit of creating stronger towns.
Episodes
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Welcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Jasper, Indiana. Our guest is the Director of Community Development and Planning, Darla Blazey. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Yellow Springs, Ohio, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Welcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Yellow Springs, Ohio. Our guest is the village council president, Brain Housh. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Jasper, Indiana, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Welcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Norwood, Ohio. Our guest is a resident and board member of a local community development corporation, Alisha Loch. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Durango, Colorado, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Welcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Durango, Colorado. Our guest is Durango city planner, Bryce Bierman. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Norwood, Ohio, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Thursday Mar 17, 2022
Thursday Mar 10, 2022
Thursday Mar 10, 2022
Today, we're featuring updates from four guests who were on the show in the last couple of years.
We’ll first hear from Marilyn Burns, who’s helping lead an effort to create a community laundry co-op in the Woodhill neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio.
We’ll also hear from Alex Rodriguez, a Strong Towns member who’s been involved in an ongoing process to help revitalize his rural town of Lexington, New York, through arts, housing, and small business.
Next, we’ll hear from Sheleita Miller, a Strong Towns member who runs a community radio program in Gary, Indiana, and has been helping business owners during the pandemic.
And finally, we’ll close with a brief update from our summer intern last year, Sarah Davis, on her new urban planning job.
Additional Show Notes
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Listen to past episodes featuring these guests: Marilyn Burns (May 2021), Alex Rodriguez (March 2021), Sheleita Miller (December 2020), Sarah Davis (September 2021)
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Check out the Woodhill Community Coop on Instagram.
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Learn more about the Lexington Arts and Science project.
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Visit the ”Heart to Heart with Sheleita Miller” Facebook page.
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Read about Toole Design.
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Join the Strong Towns Facebook group.
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Send your story ideas to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Mar 03, 2022
Thursday Mar 03, 2022
Shelley Denison is a Strong Towns advocate and city planner in Sandy, Oregon, a town that’s going through some challenges that should be very familiar to you: concerns about traffic and congestion, questions about what it means to invite more housing into your city, and more.
As a city planner, Denison navigates these issues with a thoughtful and open mind. She’s been invested in clarifying, for instance, what allowing missing middle housing would actually mean for her community (more housing options, and not developers bulldozing your neighborhood, as some residents fear).
Denison sees city planning as fundamentally about relationship with residents, and she’s dedicated to what she calls “communicative planning,” that genuinely takes into account the needs and concerns of those who live in her town. In this interview, you’ll hear Denison’s nuanced take on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate, her experience hosting a housing-related podcast, and her dedication to fighting cynicism in the planning field.
Additional Show Notes
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Check out Shelley Denison’s podcast, At Home in Oregon.
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Join the Strong Towns Facebook group.
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Send your story ideas to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Feb 24, 2022
Thursday Feb 24, 2022
The Asheville Bench Project is a very grassroots, incremental, small-bet approach to making Asheville a little more livable, a little more people-friendly.
Today’s guest is choosing to remain anonymous (find out why in the episode). He was watching his neighbors stand out in the hot sun, the rain, the cold, waiting for their buses at utterly neglected patches of sidewalk, with cars whizzing past, and not even a place to sit while they waited. So he took matters into his own hands and started building benches and installing them at bus stops.
He didn’t ask permission or go through a permitting process. He just saw a problem and started addressing it. His effort, which is only a couple months old, has already grown into a project with multiple volunteers, positive feedback from bus riders, and some local businesses starting to get involved.
For the founder of the Asheville Bench Project, this effort is about more than simply providing a place for a weary rider to sit. It’s also about drawing attention to how the city has neglected to do this work itself. Eleven percent of households in Asheville don’t have a car. Is it too much to ask that a key source of transportation, especially for those people without cars, be modestly humane and accommodating? Our guest today wants his local leaders to start thinking about that how much they prioritize car travel and how little they consider the often much more cost-effective and resilient forms of transportation like biking, walking, and transit.
Overall, our guest’s message is simple but so important: If you see something wrong in your city, you have the power to fix it. And you should step up and do just that.
Additional Show Notes
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Send your story ideas to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Feb 17, 2022
Thursday Feb 17, 2022
The Marlborough Community Land Trust in Kansas City has been stepping up to help connect more neighbors, especially low-income neighbors, with opportunities for homeownership and to ensure that those opportunities continue in perpetuity for future families, too. Community Land Trusts are a model for stabilizing neighborhoods while at the same time allowing low- and middle-income people the chance to build household wealth.
This episode features Rebecca McQuillen, Executive Director of the Marlborough Community Land trust, and Rodger Kube, president of the Land Trust’s board. You’ll hear them talk about how they got started, including the creative ways they’ve pursued funding and built positive partnerships to accomplish their goals.
You’ll also hear a really thorough description of how a land trust works and why it’s been a successful approach in many neighborhoods like theirs. Rebecca and Rodger get candid about the challenges of this work, especially in the current, hotly competitive housing market. And they tell some moving stories of how the chance to pursue that American dream of homeownership has changed lives in the Marlborough neighborhood.
P.S. If you listen to this episode, you’ll also get to enjoy our new podcast music, created by Strong Towns Content Manager, Jay Stange.
Additional Show Notes
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Nominate your town for the Strongest Town contest. Just a couple days left to submit your nomination!
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Visit the Marlborough Community Land Trust website.
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Send your story ideas to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Feb 10, 2022
Thursday Feb 10, 2022
What would you do in your community if you knew you couldn’t fail? That was the question guiding Rabbi Donna Berman as she looked at a crumbling historic synagogue building in Hartford, Connecticut. It was home to a small nonprofit on the verge of closing, but Rabbi Donna saw a future there and she knew that things could only improve from their current state.
Hired on as executive director of the Charter Oak Cultural Center, she and a single volunteer board member started a small newsletter and some simple events to start getting people through the doors of the building. Through a process of building trust with neighbors, slowly raising the money to incrementally fix up the space and finding out what the neighborhood needed most, the Cultural Center has grown into a space that serves hundreds of youths with arts programs, offers resources and education for homeless residents, and operates as a space for the whole community.
In this conversation on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, hosted by Rachel Quednau, you’ll hear about the step-by-step approach that Rabbi Donna and her colleagues had to renovating the building and creating community programs—and how those things worked in tandem. You’ll also hear about how they’ve adapted to neighborhood needs over time, especially during COVID. Rabbi Donna also touches a bit on the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, repairing the world, and how that guides her work.
Additional Show Notes
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Nominate your town for the Strongest Town contest.
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Visit the Charter Oak Cultural Center website.
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Send your story ideas to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.