The Bottom-Up Revolution

Top of the Bottom-Up: Growing Food, Growing Resilience

While Rachel is on maternity leave, we’re re-running some of our best and most popular episodes of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.

This one, originally recorded in February of 2021, shares the amazing success story of Alfred Melbourne, who came out of prison, got access to a small, trash-filled plot of land, and began tilling it, improving his neighborhood in the process. Eventually he turned that into a non-profit urban farm operation, Three Sisters Gardens, where young people learn skills and the produce is donated in an area without much fresh food access—plus, Melbourne’s now expanded to other plots around the city.

The organic (pun intended) growth of this effort has impacted so many people and shows how a little seed money and guidance can allow an entrepreneur to thrive. Think about that when you see billions of dollars allotted for highway expansion. Imagine what we could do if we took a fraction of that money and used it to jump-start neighborhood improving efforts like Three Sisters Gardens.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Three Sisters Gardens website.

• Three Sisters Gardens Instagram page, where you’ll find photos and videos.

• Center for Land-Based Learning.

• “This Modern Farmer Employs At-Risk Youth to Keep Them Off the Streets,” by Alfred Melbourne, Modern Farmer (January 2021).

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

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

Sarah Cipkar: Building an Accessory Dwelling Unit and Helping Others Do the Same

You know this narrative by now, right? Maybe it’s even your story: Someone gets fired up about an issue in their community and starts taking steps to address it. Next thing they know, neighbors are coming to them for advice, momentum is building around this issue, and they’re finding a whole community of people who care about that thing, too. This turns into a broader effort to change, not just that initial issue, but also all the Strong Towns issues that are connected to it…

Today’s guest is Sarah Cipkar, and she experienced her own version of this journey. A few years ago, she decided to take the step to build an accessory dwelling unit in her yard in Windsor, Ontario. An accessory dwelling unit (also called an additional dwelling unit, ADU, or granny flat, among other terms) just refers to any small housing that’s added to an existing lot. It could be a small apartment built over your garage or a mini cottage constructed in the backyard of your home.

Cipkar successfully built that ADU, found a great tenant, and the property was soon providing income for her family, plus a new sense of community with her tenant, who helped out with watching the house while Cipkar was on trips, shared meals with her family, and more. (Cipkar will tell you about the myriad benefits of ADUs in this episode. This is just the beginning of the list, really.)  

After going through the intensive process of not just building the ADU, but first jumping through the many government hoops, permits, and financing challenges to get the project off the ground in the first place, Cipkar was motivated to help others navigate this process, too. She started a pilot project called ADUSearch, which is an online hub where anyone can look up their address and find out what sorts of additional dwelling units could be built on their property. She began this initiative with properties in Windsor, but is now expanding it, thanks to some grants and partnerships, to encompass the entire country of Canada. 

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• ADUsearch.ca website.

• Visit Sarah Cipkar’s website.

• ADUsearch and Sarah Cipkar on Instagram.

• Learn more about Accessory Dwelling Units in the Strong Towns Action Lab where you can find core insights, case studies, key articles and more.

• Backdoor Revolution: The Definitive Guide to ADU Development by Kol Peterson.

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

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

Erin Stewart: A Mayor Working for Safe Streets and a Thriving Downtown

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.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Read more about Mayor Stewart.

• New Britain’s Plan of Conservation and Development.

• New Britain’s Complete Streets Roadmap.

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

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

Norm Van Eeden Petersman: Speaking Up to Build Strong Towns

Norm Van Eeden Petersman has biked every street in his community in Delta, British Columbia, with his son; helped found a Strong Towns Toastmasters group; and decided to speak up at a city council meeting in favor of allowing more rental housing.

That moment of standing up at a council meeting led him to look around at the others who were also supporting the rental housing initiative and gather those people together into what eventually became Del-POP: Deltans for People-Oriented Places, a Local Conversation group that is discussing and advocating on Strong Towns issues in their city. In particular, this group has focused on speaking up when they support something and sharing that support with elected officials to help bolster positive change. They recognized how often people speak up in opposition to things they don’t like and decided to counteract those negative voices with advocacy for things—housing, bike lanes, small businesses, etc.—instead of just against things.

Norm joined the Strong Towns team in late July as our brand-new Member Advocate. Prior to this, Norm was a pastor and in this conversation, he’ll discuss the connection he sees between his religious ministry and his Strong Towns leadership, plus share about Del-POP and the other efforts he’s made in his community to build a stronger town.

We know you’ll be inspired by Norm’s enthusiasm and vision!

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Del-POP website.

• Join the Strong Towns Toastmasters group.

• Learn more about Strong Towns Local Conversation groups and how to start your own.

• Bottom-Up Revolution episode featuring Cary Westerbeck (founder of Bo-POP).

• Contact Norm: norm@strongtowns.org.

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

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

Emma Durand-Wood: Planting Street Trees and Neighborhood Connections

A couple of years ago, we surveyed Strong Towns’ supporting members and one of the questions we asked was how they would characterize their profession and engagement with the movement. Were they involved in Strong Towns as an elected official, city staff person, urban planner, or engineer—or actually just a concerned citizen who cares deeply about their city?

While we had many responses in all of those professional categories, the biggest one was the last one: regular people who care about their communities. Today’s guest is one of those folks, although it’s not right to say she is “just” a concerned citizen—nor is that true of most people involved in this movement.

Emma Durand-Wood is a writer, editor, and former librarian. She’s also a leader in her neighborhood association and a big advocate for street trees. Durand-Wood lives in Winnipeg in Canada, which she calls “a big little city.” She started getting involved in local issues after a pawn shop was being proposed in her neighborhood and she and some neighbors got together to say that business wasn’t a great fit for their community. Since then, she started a blog about her city and neighborhood, made the choice to walk and bike and take transit with her family instead of driving everywhere, helped revive her neighborhood association, and led an initiative to plant more street trees.

In this interview, Durand-Wood talks especially about that last item and the surprising power of trees to transform your city. She also discusses the value of neighborhood gatherings, big and small, including the “front yard pancake party” she and her husband host.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Follow Emma Durand-Wood on Twitter.
• Read her blog, Winnipeg O’ My Heart.
• Read “Henderson Highway Blues,” a Strong Towns article by Emma Durand-Wood.
• Learn more about the Glen Elm Boulevard Tree Project.
• Visit the Trees Please Winnipeg website.
• Check out the Glen Elm Neighborhood Association website.
•  Send your story ideas and guest suggestions to rachel@strongtowns.org.

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

Spencer Gardner: Moving from Planning to Action

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.

Lindsey Meek: An Engineer who ”Saw the Light”

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.

Amy Stelly: Campaigning to Get Rid of an Urban Highway

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.

Steph and Sean Tuff: Starting an Electric Bike Company

Podcast host and Strong Towns Program Director Rachel Quednau has been eyeing electric bikes for some time now, and, while she hasn’t made the leap to purchase one herself just yet, she loves seeing the growth of this industry and the possibilities it opens up for people to have better, cheaper transportation options beyond cars.

Stephanie and Sean Tuff also started seeing that possibility a few years ago and they turned that into a new electric bike business. A few years back, Steph and Sean and their three young children were spending more time outside and looking for ways to get around town that weren’t as expensive or polluting as a car. They found that biking provided this for them and so much more—the chance to really see the city around them instead of just letting it blur past through a windshield, the chance to enjoy fresh air and exercise and, frankly, to have more fun getting around than the typical car commute.

But with young kids in tow and the difference in their abilities to bike quickly at the same speed—especially in hilly areas—they ended up turning to electric bikes to help make their travels even better and easier than on a regular bike.

Eventually they partnered with friends to start a new e-bike company: Tuff Hill eBikes. Opening their business during the pandemic led them to choose a hybrid model where they don’t have a formal storefront but they give people the chance to meet up and test drive a bike, access maintenance, and more. 

For Steph and Sean, this isn’t just about sales—although they’ve been quite successful in their enterprise. “We don’t just see it as selling bikes,” says Sean, “we see it as connecting people to a bigger community.” In this conversation, you’ll hear the Tuffs talk about how biking around their city has helped them understand Strong Towns concepts in a real and up-close way, and how they hope that getting more people on e-bikes will allow those people to share in the Strong Towns approach and mission, too.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• • Tuff Hill eBikes.

  • Not Just Bikes (YouTube).

  • “Are Electric Bikes a Passing Fad or a Revolutionary Transportation Tool?” by Rachel Quednau, Strong Towns (February 2022).

  • “How Dutch Cities Restored the ‘Freedom to Roam’,” by Chris and Melissa Bruntlett, Strong Towns (June 2021).

  • Youth En Route website.

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

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

Danny Schaible: Creating a Street Design Team

Today’s guest hails from Hyattsville, Maryland, a growing inner ring suburb of Washington, DC. Danny Schaible is a city councilperson, a Strong Towns member, and the founder of the Hyattsville Street Design Team. We know you’re going to want to hear more about that last one especially!

Schaible has a degree in landscape architecture and spent years working for the National Park Service. He brings that love of public space and awareness of design issues to his leadership in the Hyattsville City Council. Like so many people you’ve heard from on this show, Schaible got pulled into local politics when an issue in his neighborhood grabbed his attention—in this case a misguided and poorly-thought-out development down the street. As he became involved in learning and advocacy around that project, he eventually decided to step up and run for city council, and won in 2019.

In addition to that, he also got inspired to start a “street design team” in his city after reading about the concept in the Strong Towns book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. His team of dozens of residents has discussed the book together, conducted bike tours and walk audits, and looked at crash data on dangerous stroads in Hyattsville, among other things.

We hope this conversation gets you thinking about how you might even organize something similar in your own city.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Establishing a Street Design Team” (online course from Strong Towns’ Local-Motive Tour).
• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (book).
• Toole Design (planning firm).
• Get in touch with Danny Schaible: dschaible@hyattsville.org.
• Send your story ideas and guest suggestions to rachel@strongtowns.org.
• Support this podcast by becoming a Strong Towns member today.