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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
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
“Incremental development” is a term you might’ve heard if you’ve been following Strong Towns for a little while. This concept refers to small-scale projects like updating downtown commercial spaces or renovating duplexes; the main thing is that these projects are led by individuals or teams of local residents, not huge companies.
So, encouraging and allowing incremental development is one of the single biggest things a city can do if it wants to become a strong town. Not only does this increase housing and small business options, it also puts power back into the hands of residents, allowing them to build wealth for their families and shape the future of their neighborhoods.
Today’s guest on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast is Jenifer Acosta, a community revitalizer and incremental developer working in the Tri-Cities region of Michigan, near the shores of Lake Huron. Her focus is on adaptive reuse projects—taking historic structures like old bank and newspaper buildings and turning them into updated housing and commercial spaces. She finds that sweet spot between preserving history while also modernizing and allowing these old buildings to take on new life so they can last another hundred years, even as the needs of a community change.
Acosta is particularly driven by a desire to create more rental and multifamily housing opportunities in a region that is mostly dominated by single family homes. She is also on the faculty of the Incremental Development Alliance, where she helps train other small-scale developers across the continent.
In this interview with Rachel Quednau, Acosta talks especially about her experience being a woman in a male-dominated industry—how she has found fellow female developers, built a support system, and persevered even when people in the industry didn’t always welcome her.
Additional Show Notes
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New Academy Course: Urban Design Principles for a Strong Town
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Send us your own voicemail about the small (or big) thing you’re doing to make your town stronger. Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Jul 22, 2021
Thursday Jul 22, 2021
Lauren Fisher grew up in Alaska—both in the city and in a very remote, fly-in only region. Today she lives in rural Wisconsin on a burgeoning homestead with her husband. She has a dog, a cat, several rabbits and chickens, and will hopefully have goats or a cow very soon.
Lauren is dedicated to building up household resilience, which, for her family, means trying to develop more and more food options that they can raise, grow, forage, and hunt themselves. But she’ll also be the first to tell you that these sorts of efforts have to start small. She doesn’t own acres and acres of land, but instead, she’s found creative ways to practice producing local food and build up her efforts gradually. In addition, she and her husband have cultivated many important skills for self-sufficiency like sewing, building, and electrical work—and they’re always seeking to learn more.
But for Lauren, these sorts of skills are not just about sustaining her own family, they’re also about being part of a larger community. In this conversation on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast with Rachel Quednau, Lauren talks about how she’s gotten to know her neighbors after moving to the area a few years ago, and how they support each other through both the good times and the tough times.
She offers advice for those—yes, even introverts—who want to better connect and make friends with their neighbors. Lauren’s focus is on abundance and sharing, on finding the bounty of talent and goodness in yourself and those around you, and strengthening a community with those building blocks.
Additional Show Notes
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“#DotheMath on Chicken Regulations,” by Lauren Fisher
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“5 Places to Meet New People to Join the Strong Towns Conversation,” by Lauren Fisher
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“Creating Housing Opportunities in a Strong Town” - our newest Strong Towns Academy course
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Send us your own voicemail about the small (or big) thing you’re doing to make your town stronger. Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Jul 15, 2021
Thursday Jul 15, 2021
When you’ve got a friend or family member visiting you from out of town, where do you take that person? After you’ve said your hellos and they’ve dropped off their bags, where is the fun place you head to show them what your community is all about? Is it, by chance, a brewery, or the farmers market stand with the homemade cheese and sausage, or maybe it’s a cute jewelry shop on main street that makes all their own stuff…
There’s something about a locally-crafted food or good that just instills in us a pride for our place. It’s about saying: “This is my community and here’s what we’re capable of making.”
Ilana Preuss is an urban planner and founder of a company called Recast City, which helps build communities where small-scale manufacturing businesses can thrive. She’s also the author of a new book called Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing and today she joins Rachel Quednau on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast to talk about her work and why small-scale manufacturing can and should be the beating heart of your city.
Preuss shares how small-scale manufacturing can reinvigorate downtowns, build local pride and create meaningful opportunities for entrepreneurs to start businesses and scale up. She also outlines the steps that local leaders can take to make space for this manufacturing renaissance to occur and shares examples of this work in action across the country. It’s about building on the energy and manufacturing already present in your community, and harnessing that to make your town stronger.
Additional Show Notes
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Get the book: Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing. Use code STRONG25 for 25% off anything from islandpress.org.
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Send us your own voicemail about the small (or big) thing you’re doing to make your town stronger. Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Jul 08, 2021
Tuesday Jun 29, 2021
Tuesday Jun 29, 2021
Nick Meyer started Volume One magazine when he was fresh out of college as a way to help show his fellow citizens of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the life and vitality happening all around them. Now, 20 years later, the publication has grown tremendously, and expanded into a retail space, cohost, and creator of many local events, and an all-around supporter of the Eau Claire community.
Eau Claire, like so many places across America, has experienced a decline in economic activity and local pride after important industries wound down operations and left the community in decades past. Volume One was born out of what Nick describes simply as a desire to “see cool things happen here,” and that spark has proven significant in helping to uplift the whole city.
In this conversation on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, hosted by Rachel Quednau, Nick talks about the powerful feedback loop that happens when you shine a spotlight on what’s going on in your town. This theme resonates across so many guests we’ve had on the show and featured in articles on the Strong Towns website: when people step up and start to care about their place and take action to make it better, others follow suit, and the bottom-up revolution begins.
Additional Show Notes
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Outbroken - A Pandemic’s Effect on Wisconsin’s Food and Farms, a short film by Volume One
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Breaking Out of the Resource Trap: An Economic Plan for Resource-Based Communities (free e-book from Strong Towns)
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Send us your own voicemail about the small (or big) thing you’re doing to make your town stronger. Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Jun 24, 2021
Thursday Jun 17, 2021
Thursday Jun 10, 2021
Thursday Jun 10, 2021
It’s a special week for us at Strong Towns. It’s our Member Week, where we honor and celebrate the incredible people who are members of this movement all across the country. You’ve heard several of their stories on this podcast in the past, and there will be many more to come.
If this movement for bottom-up change and financial resilience has got you inspired to start taking action in your own community, it’s time to make your participation official by becoming a sustaining member of Strong Towns today. Visit strongtowns.org/membership to do so.
Today’s podcast episode features two fantastic advocates who are part of this movement. Nathan Chung is a Strong Towns member and master’s student of regional planning at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He’s also been part of a really cool effort in his town called the Amherst Mobile Market, which is bringing healthy, fresh, local food to sell in neighborhoods that don’t have much access to it. Nathan is exploring other mobile market efforts around the world, aiming to expand this model elsewhere.
In this conversation, Nathan and podcast host Rachel Quednau are joined by Ryan Karb, founder and farmer at Many Hands Farm Corps. He’s been part of this mobile market program, as well, and is dedicated to creating a resilient local food system in his community.
In this conversation, Ryan and Nathan talk about how the Amherst Mobile Market program got started, the impact it’s made, and the way they’ve rooted all of their efforts in what their neighbors ask for and need.
Additional Show Notes
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Other examples of mobile markets: Go Fresh Mobile Market in Springfield, Heiko in Germany, and Tokushimaru in Japan
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Send us your own voicemail about the small (or big) thing you’re doing to make your town stronger. Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Join our new course, “Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach” and, for a limited time only, get 20% off your purchase with discount code “NoStroads.” We’re also offering 20% off our whole 8-course bundle with code “LearnEverything.”
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday Jun 03, 2021
Thursday Jun 03, 2021
In today’s episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, we’re talking with Sophia Hosain, who’s helping to lead a community composting initiative headed up by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a long-time friend and partner of the Strong Towns movement.
Right about now, some of you are probably very excited to hear more, while others are thinking, “What the heck does compost have to do with building strong towns?” As Sophia explains in this conversation with Strong Towns Program Director Rachel Quednau, community composting programs do a lot to make our communities more economically resilient. First, they allow our neighborhoods and cities to be more self-reliant, taking the garbage we generate and—instead of pouring it into a landfill that occupies precious space and decreases the value and livability of everything around it, and costs money to maintain—we’re taking our food scraps and turning them into soil, which can then help us grow more food.
Almost every town in America is far from a goal of being able to sustain itself on locally grown food. A community composting network like the one Sophia leads in Baltimore helps neighborhoods to develop rich soil in which to grow healthy food. This process takes waste produced by the community and turns it into something productive that benefits the community. Everyone wins.
As Sophia will also share, the programs she’s worked with have helped generate job training, opportunities, and entrepreneurship, plus strengthen neighborly connections and a sense of ownership within neighborhoods.
Listen with an open mind to this conversation about community composting.
Additional Show Notes
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Community Composter Coalition, where you can find information about composting in your area
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Sign up for “Breaking Out of the Resource Trap: An Economic Plan for Resource-Based Communities” - June 8 webinar and ebook release
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Send us your own voicemail about the small (or big) thing you’re doing to make your town stronger. Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Join our new course, “Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach” and, for a limited time only, get 20% off your purchase with discount code “NoStroads.” We’re also offering 20% off our whole 8-course bundle with code “LearnEverything.”
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Thursday May 27, 2021
Thursday May 27, 2021
If you heard that a new coffee shop was opening in a lower-income neighborhood, what would be your reaction? In most bigger cities and plenty of smaller ones, the coffee shop is a universal symbol for gentrification. It means that this neighborhood has been designated as the new trendy hotspot and rents are about to go up.
At Strong Towns, we’ve been having an ongoing conversation about the meaning of the term “gentrification” and the complex story behind this concept that is so often oversimplified in public discourse and media. It’s not as clean-cut as “poor people live here and now they’re getting kicked out and that’s bad.” Empty storefronts getting filled, streets getting fixed up and property values increasing are all good things—especially when we consider the alternative, which is those storefronts remaining vacant, those streets staying neglected, and the people who live there experiencing continued disinvestment and devaluation of their neighborhood.
The problem comes when the people who live in a given community are excluded from the improvement and new investment that’s happening there. If we can help neighborhoods incrementally revitalize—if we can make space and opportunity for residents to start businesses, fix up homes and storefronts, and make their community a more prosperous place—then we’re accomplishing something different. This is what Incremental Development Alliance co-founder, Monte Anderson calls “gentlefication.”
This week’s Bottom-Up Revolution podcast episode features Coté Soerens, who opened a coffee shop in a lower-income immigrant neighborhood in Seattle. She’s participating in that positive reinvestment and revitalization, rooted in and for the community. Resistencia Coffee was founded a few years ago with the intention of being a neighborhood “third space”—a place to hang out and spend time with neighbors outside of the home or workplace.
The coffee shop came into being through the efforts of so many community members, from investors who helped with start-up capital to contractors who helped build out the space, and many others. In this conversation with Strong Towns Program Director Rachel Quednau, you’ll hear about Coté’s dedication to helping her community grow and thrive, while also operating a financially sustainable business. You’ll learn about the essential need for listening to and collaborating with neighbors to make an effort like this successful. And you’ll also hear about the unique ways Coté has adapted her business and space during COVID.
Additional Show Notes
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Send us your own voicemail about the small (or big) thing you’re doing to make your town stronger. Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to rachel@strongtowns.org.
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Subscribe to The Bottom-Up Revolution on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Podbean, or via RSS.
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Join our new course, “Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach” and, for a limited time only, get 20% off your purchase with discount code “NoStroads.” We’re also offering 20% off our whole 8-course bundle with code “LearnEverything.”
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Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.