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- [00:00]
A
The Strong Towns national gathering is May 18th to 20th in Fayetteville, Arkansas. If you've ever looked at your town and thought, we can do better than this, you're not alone. This gathering is for people who care deeply about where they live and are trying to figure out what to do about it. We'll be working through the real challenges communities are facing right now, from housing and finance to transportation and neighborhood level change and learning from each other along the way. If you want to be a part of that, get your ticket and come join us at gathering.strongtowns.org.
- [00:43]
B
First class streetcar downtown with a fine ladies in the pizza OG. Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marone and you are listening to the the Upzoned podcast, the new relaunch of the Upzone podcast. Actually, I want to talk to you at the start here just a little bit about where we've been and what we've got going on. There's a lot happening at Strong Towns. We actually did a survey of podcast listeners last year and got some really good feedback on all of our podcast feeds. The Strongtown Podcast, the Bottom Up Revolution, Bottom Up Shorts, and we got a lot of stuff stuff on Upzoned as well. Upzoned has always been the podcast feed for us that was supposed to be current news. We're talking about something going on right now, something that's top of mind, something that is going to be a little bit urgent and we want to make sure that that is a good, healthy conversation with multiple perspectives, multiple viewpoints and even sometimes a little bit of friendly debate, which is something we do a lot at Strong Towns. Not always on the mic though. And so we want to try to bring a little bit of that in. The goal here is to have a format that includes some familiar Strong Towns voices, myself, others that you are used to hearing, and then have a mix of outside voices, people from within the movement members, thought leaders, other people that we have access to to come in and chat on a topic. And so we're going to be we're relaunching Upzone with this new idea, this new vision of how we're going to do this. Today is our kickoff episode. And not to say like I'm falling flat on my face on the first one, but like literally I feel like I got in last night, we had a huge storm here in Minnesota and my flight was delayed and instead of getting home at 8pm, I got home at almost 4am and so I'm dragging in here. But today we've got a great group. So I'm gonna hand it over to Norm to kick us off. Norm Van Eeden Petersmann, it's your show. Take it away, man.
- [02:49]
A
Awesome. Well, folks, welcome. And today we are talking about the city of Los Angeles and their efforts to prepare to host the Olympics and the World Cup. And they know that billions of people are going to be watching what is going on in their city. And so they are considering different initiatives and efforts to improve the look and feel of the city streets. But today we're going to talk about an article that is called Talking Trash by Alyssa Walker in the Torch magazine. And this came out February 12, 2026. And what she describes is two competing visions for dealing with trash within the streets. On the one hand is the city, through its Shine LA initiative that is taking control and going to be cleaning up specific zones within the city in preparation for June when the World cup kicks off. And then also with the idea that, hey, we can use residents in the community to be able to clean up designated areas and improve the streets. The flip side of it that Alyssa does a great job of outlining is a profile of an individual named Nala. Nala, yes. And he is a local organizer that is just going around every Saturday picking up trash in the community. And he's been filming it piles of garbage, posting it online, and then cleaning up, even taking it to the dump when the city doesn't respond to complaints. Which raises a strange question. How can a city that's capable of hosting these global mega events struggle to pick up the trash? What were some of the things that stood out to you as you both engaged with this article today?
- [04:28]
B
I think we should introduce our other guest here, Norm.
- [04:30]
C
Oh, yes, I was coming in to surprise. Go for it, Norm.
- [04:34]
A
Yeah. Our co host is Carly Alma Bart, chief of staff for Strong Towns and previously worked in civic government and local community organizations in Lafayette, Louisiana. And Chuck, you're here, but fewer folks need your introduction just because they've been listening to you for a while. But Carly, you've been a regular on upzone and so the drill is pretty similar still. We're going to take this article and Upzone it. We're going to talk about it from a strong towns perspective. And so some of the things that stood out for you in this article,
- [05:06]
C
I think the big thing that stood out to me was that this idea that the need in Los Angeles is so great that they're, you know, they're kind of fracturing their, their help across these. I mean, there was emphasis in the article on the corridors that they're bringing that they're focusing on, right? These corridors that tourists will see and tourists will visit. And I kept thinking about, you know, this idea when. When you're in a community and when we work in communities and talk to communities, if you're building a community for your own residents and a community that your own residents can take pride in and be a part of and see success in, then you naturally build it for the tourists to come, right? And it feels like. It felt to me, in reading the article, like Los Angeles had just. Was just skipping a million steps to say, like, okay, we don't even. We don't even know how to keep the community clean for our own sake and for our own residents. And we're just going to skip all these steps and talk about what we can do when the tourists come. And yeah, they've got amazing citizens who are doing their little part, but it just feels like they're skipping the basics of how to be a city and how to be a community. That was what stood out to me.
- [06:28]
B
There's so much in Los Angeles. I mean, literally, like, I just got off the plane from Los Angeles, and at one point we as a family went to the Griffith Observatory. And you can see out this, like, vastness that is Los Angeles and the surrounding environments. And you just realize there's so much. And. And to kind of quote old Jim Kunstler. I say old the Jim Kunstler that I started reading in the 90s and the early 2000s, there's a lot of it that's not worth loving and not worth caring for. And even in places where there are people who are living, a lot of it, I mean, almost all of it is designed to drive through quickly, to be passively consumed, to not have people actively in places. And it's just really, really hard for a city to care for places in abstentia of people caring for them. And I really do feel like that's the dichotomy here, is that when you build a place where people actually live in and not just drive through, but experience. I'm not saying that people will always do the right thing. They won't. People will throw trash on the ground and what have you, but the inclination is not to do that. We. This will shock neither of you. We spent a day at Disneyland. My family did when I was in. I went to California last week to speak at an event. And then my daughter was on spring break, my youngest, and so we hung out for a few days with her and my wife and I. There was a There's a point where you're leaving the Disneyland downtown resort area, you're leaving the park and you're walking out. And I noticed this because it's, you know, the security is on one side coming in, and then you go out. Security. And then you're in a surface parking lot. And there's a sidewalk that goes around the parking lot. And they had three trash cans in that walkway. One right away, one maybe like 100ft, and then another one maybe 150ft. And what, you know, to me, I looked at it, and as a. As a planner, as someone who, like, thinks about space, there were no other trash cans on there. There were just three. I know exactly why there are three there. Because when people walk along that path, they were throwing trash. That's when you, okay, I'm done with my whatever. I've got. I've finished my ice cream thing. I've got, like, whatever. And I'm walking along and I'm starting to walk. And I want to jettison things that are not with me when I walk. And so my guess is Disney put garbage cans there. Cause that's where they were picking up garbage. And a human being, most people, if there's a garbage nearby, will not throw their stuff on the ground. They'll put it in the garbage. If you step back to the city of LA and you recognize that there's not a high volume of people walking in any one space. And so you really can't mobilize people to have trash cans in every place that people would be, because there isn't a concentration of people anywhere. If you can't do that, then when people have garbage, what do they do with it? And, you know, some people might pack it away. Some people might. I mean, I would like to think that, like, I will pack it away. I will carry it to wherever there's a garbage can. But the reality is the human tendency, and maybe it's even people just dropping it. I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be like, slovenly, like, I'm throwing it, they just, like drop it. You wind up with just garbage everywhere. And that is the experience. I mean, for. For me, as someone visiting la, that is the experience of la. Anytime I'm not in a vehicle and not in one of these, like, highly managed, highly manicured, intensely designed kind of places, it's just garbage everywhere. And I feel like it is not a symptom of, you know, Angelines. It's not a symptom of Californians. It's not a symptom of bad government or like it's just like it's a byproduct of their development pattern.
- [10:41]
A
It also results in a situation where the city is going to invest significantly in improving up the areas that it cares about, but expressing sort of this readiness to neglect other areas. And there's a quote in the article from Jose Nala who says, you know, they don't go where the trash is, so they are going to clean up in areas that are already not that dirty. And he said, why can't they go out every single Saturday? He said they're, they're recruiting volunteers, but they're doing so on, on sort of a, you know, once every, in a blue moon sort of cycle. Why don't they do it every week? Why don't they go? He said, I do it every Saturday. They are the government. I'm just a guy. And that stands out because we've had quite a number of local conversation groups use trash pickups as a way to mobilize people, to help people, just learn what it takes to take action. I'm thinking of Artesia, Lorelei and the group there that's doing just regular trash pickups. And then they have the same challenge, which is they will set out a whole bunch of the bags that they have collected and ask the city to come pick them up. And it's hit or miss as to whether or not that's going to get picked up. Until they started to develop much closer ties with city staff. And it just became a situation where I think at various times they've had just a truck left there that they can throw the trash into because they're now a known trusted and and respected entity within the community doing this kind of work. And maybe that's the part that pains me is that this person, Jose and his group have gone so far and are still facing the barriers where you say the, the low hanging fru pick up the bags that somebody has already put together. That is one of the most effective ways that we can sort of unlock that amount of citizen advocacy and effort. We've got Noah and the group in Bloomington, Illinois, they've been doing trash pickups as well. And it's interesting, they've had more interest in doing trash pickups from people in the community than showing up to public hearings. People are actually like willing to put in those blood sweat equity to do that, even if it's unpleasant. Because if you can do it as a group, and that goes some ways, and then you're also just, I think, crying out at minimum, we should be doing this so we don't need to host the Olympics if we can't even pick up our trash. But for you, Carly, what are some of the things that, like, either you've seen in your community or that you know, that the city really struggles with in this space?
- [12:59]
C
I think to your point about some of our local conversations, I think it's such a great way to feel like you can make an early, quick win or a quick difference in your community. I know that, you know, it's. It's funny that we're recording this episode today because in, in my community next week, we're hosting a ribbon cutting of a street project that they're adding sidewalks to a street that connects a park and the university. And this is a, this is a street that a group, a citizen group that I'm involved with, we've been picking up the trash there quarterly, a couple times a year for the last seven or eight years. And it's been a way to demonstrate there's a, There's a group who cares, who loves this place and who sees its value. And, and the city has actually followed that example and is now, is now investing in that project. So I think, you know, I don't want to say that every, every investment by a community group has a happy ending like that, but, you know, there was a nice synergy of a corridor that had a lot of possibility in a community group that cared and, and the city is following along. So I think that, you know, to the, to our listeners out there who are kind of local activists looking for, you know, a way to motivate people and mobilize people, this can be an early step that if, if thought through, well, can. Can help lead to other community engagement and community wins.
- [14:27]
B
Let me be the downer then. Cause. Okay, do you know how when you go to the grocery store now, today, okay, I'm gonna sound like the old guy here. I remember going to the grocery store as a kid where you would go through and like, they would bag your groceries for you and then bring them out to the car. And then we went through this phase where it's like, nope, you're gonna bag your own groceries and they'll ring them up for you, but you're gonna bag your own groceries now you ring up your own groceries and bag your own groceries. So, like, you're doing everything. And I feel like, you know, we all know what's going on, right, at the grocery store. It's like, we're short on employees. We don't want to pay people all that much, you'll do the work yourself. We can maybe have, like, slightly slower price increases by sloughing our labor off onto you. I've long argued that, like, this is what school districts do with their siting, right? Like, okay, we've got transportation costs and we've got land costs and we've got building costs. Well, we can have more building if we make parents do transportation. So we'll just buy cheap land out on the edge and make everybody drive their kid to school. Wow. Our transportation budget is so much easier to manage now. Sorry. Like, we just made that your cost and your burden. I feel like what's happening here. And I read this in the article when I was reading this, you know, Nala is it. Is Jose. Is that his first name?
- [15:54]
A
Jose Nala, Yeah.
- [15:55]
B
Okay. What a beautiful guy out there doing this work. Heroic. He's a little bit ticked off, and I don't blame him because they're doing the dirty work, the hard work, and all the city needs to do is come by and, like, pick up the bags. Like, okay, I get it. But there's a little bit of this that's like you're ringing up your own groceries now. And, you know, I feel like the next step is going to be, well, we'll have, like, citizen groups who have pickup trucks who drive around and pick up the bags now and bring them to, like, a central place where the government can pick them up and then dispose of them. Like, there will be, like, the next step is that. And I get back to. Again, this is not a matter of. I think the old man way of saying this would be like, well, people don't care these days. Like, we would have pick up stuff. You know, people just don't care. And clearly it's not because, like, look, there's people who care. They're out, like, actually, like, literally picking up the trash. I think we can see in just studies of human behavior that humans will put trash in trash cans if they are there. What is happening is that the city, L.A. is one of the most indebted cities in the country. They have, you know, repeated stories. Uh, we've. We've, you know, gotten to follow the controller there pretty closely. Um, you know, the massive budget deficits, I want to say there, I saw this week, they are two thirds of the way through the year, and they're already spending everything that they were projected to bring in for the year, and they're already in deficit that they weren't. They were not planning to be in deficit at this point and they already are. This is a state, this is a city that I'm not gonna say is poorly run because I don't actually think. I mean we could argue that and maybe there's a case to be made there. But what this is is a city that is structurally unable to sustain every promise, every commitment, every decent thing that a government should do in the place that they've built. And that is a kind of substructure of how the place has been built. I mean I was driving to the airport yesterday and along the highway, I mean this is the. It wasn't the five. It was, I can't remember which one we were headed to the 101. There's a central median, like a concrete median dividing the highway. There's like five or six lanes on each side and the median is just like a pile of trash the whole way. And this is not like are people throwing trash out their window? I don't know. Do people really do that these days? Most of it is if you see is a garbage trucks driving down the street because the garbage flies out the back of the garbage truck. And then you do that with hundreds of thousands, millions of people and you're gonna accumulate along that middle just a pile of trash. It's literally like a pile of trash continuously along the median. I was looking at that going, how would you ever pick that up?
- [18:56]
C
Are you a listener who thinks I want to bring Strong towns to my community? Visit strongtowns.orgevents to set up face to face conversations about the future of our cities. When you host a Strong towns event, you're bringing together residents, local leaders and professionals to build a shared understanding and real momentum in your community. If you're ready for bottom up momentum and making places people truly love, visit strongtowns.orgevents to learn more.
- [19:29]
B
You know, like nobody, no person's going to go pick it up. You would have to actually have like a sweep truck that would go along and you'd have to have crews that would slow down the highway. And like no one wants to slow down the highway because it's congested like 23 and a half hours a day. How would you like logistically go out and do this right?
- [19:47]
A
Commercial enforcement of truck like tie downs and things like that, which any scoff lodge just says, oh, I probably won't get a ticket so I don't do it. Now all of a sudden the problem is worse.
- [19:56]
B
And even when they do, you still have. I mean it does not take. If every truck that goes by one little thing of trash flies out the back. There's so much traffic and so many cars going by that you just over time you're going to accumulate this like ocean of trash. How, how do you maintain that? You really can't. I think you could have multiple full time crews trying and maybe they do trying to pick up garbage along the highway and not be able to keep up. And if that's the case on the highway, what is that like on the, you know, million miles of this local side streets that they have all over the place that people are just flying through, driving through like it's, it's a logistical nightmare that is impossible to meet. And I find it kind of sad because I'm, you know, I'm watching people. It's one thing for, you know, Bloomington Strongtown's, you know, Bloomington Normal to be out there like picking up stuff in the park. Amazing, right? But when you look at like a city like la, I don't know how you mobilize enough people to actually overcome this problem. I really don't.
- [21:11]
A
And then the question is, if you're not able to do these basic low lying things, what else are you ignoring? You know, what are the other things that you've allowed sort of to fester? And you know, I think of the, the need that we have to help some of our citizen groups to really recognize. Like when you do an act like this, I, it can, it can certainly be a form of civic virtue, but it's also a version of a protest which when you stick a bench at a bus stop, that's a protest that that bench should have been there. And yet what my mind goes to then is, you know, we want all of these base low lying services to be available in our cities. But Chuck, one of the, you know, you brought up Disneyland earlier. Disney won't do things that they can't justify on the balance sheet. Is garbage collection a city thing that it actually can't justify on, on its balance sheet and therefore like is something to be cut. Um, and what does that say about like our failure of a vision of like a thriving collective or a thriving commonwealth that everybody gets to participate in and enjoy. And the irony being that they're devoting, you know, lots of money to these big showy mega events that are supposed to be now the, the fuel for the writing of the budget, for the improving of life for Angelinos, for the capacity of the city to finally, you know, return itself to the world stage. And yet it seems like I never know how much that is the distraction versus that is actually the missed opportunity by plowing so much money into those things that you've actually just diverted the ability to say, we don't even have to go and pick up the chocolate bar wrappers, but we can go and grab the bags that other people put them in. It feels like, you know, we can say, if citizens do their part, the city will do its part. But that promise seems to be broken right now.
- [22:57]
B
So I have no doubt that around the Olympic sites, they will pick up the trash really well, and they will do that because the eyes of the world will be watching, and those people are here spending money, and you want them to have a good experience and all up and down the line. And let's be clear. If trash goes behind something at a Disney resort where nobody goes, Disney's probably not out picking that up either, right? I think what this. If you have that recognition, I think you have to ask a practical question. If you're the government, if you are running a city and you're running into this problem, I think you have to ask this question of, like, where I'm going to give voice to this. And then I want you guys to shoot this down. There's a certain. Like, where can we provide a high level of service? Okay, let me give you a different example in a different vein. We had a project we did here in Brainerd, where we built basically, like, a shortcut around the south side of town. We did this in, like, 2010, and I wrote a lot about it at the time. It's called College Drive. And along College Drive, we put decorative trees and decorative landscaping all along. This stuff that we don't have in our park in the middle of town or we don't have, like, in our nice streets, in our neighborhoods where people live. We put this on a place where nobody ever walks, nobody outside of a vehicle ever experiences it. People just drive by it really quickly. But we've got decorative things now because, you know, it was part of a. It was back in the shovel ready, Project Obama era days. And so, you know that it was a project enhancement that we got money to do, and so we put it out there. We're now 16 years in, and it's not being well maintained. It's not being taken care of because it's in a place where you would have to mobilize crews to go out and do it largely by hand. Nobody does it. So it's overgrown with weeds. It's not nearly as nice. I feel like we have to do some triage and ask the question, where are we going to plant trees that we will take care of? Where are we going to have garbage cans that we will empty? Where are we going to have sidewalks that we will maintain? And the answer to that, whether it is moral or right or just or not, the answer is it won't be everywhere. Because we literally, like, don't have the capacity to do it everywhere. So the question becomes, where will we? And I think that that is kind of the hardest question that cities have to deal with. And they end up dealing with it kind of subconsciously by, well, of course we have to take care of the place where the tourists are, and of course we have to take care of like this. But there isn't this recognition that when you do the big mega project that loses you money, or when you do the new housing subdivision out on the edge that is supposed to provide quick housing or what have you, you're slowly draining your resources so that the number of places where you can pick up the garbage and the number of places where you can fix the sidewalks and the number of places where you can have good police presence that's friendly and community focused and all the things that we want government to do, the number of those places shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. And I feel like we look at the end of the day like, well, the poor neighborhood's not being taken care of. And the answer is, yes, we can see that. That's obvious. And I'm not gonna claim that that is the morally just outcome, but that is the outcome. When you don't take care of the rest of the stuff, like when we're blase about everything else, you end up without enough money to take care of everything. That decision, if it's thought through, I've never seen it thought through where there's a conscious decision. Carly, this is what we dealt with in Lafayette back in 2015, 2016. It's like, what neighborhood are we going? Where are we going to fix the streets? And the answer was never, well, the poor neighborhood, we won't fix their streets. And the wealthy neighborhood, we'll take care of theirs. But the decision on, like, what street are we gonna maintain when that's on the council agenda? The people in the wealthy neighborhood show up and have representatives that show up and know the council members and talk to people and are top of mind. And the people in the less affluent neighborhood are not top of mind. And I don't think that that makes people evil or immoral. It just like, that's the way the system tends to manifest. And if you don't like that, you've got to have a different conversation. Go ahead, Carly.
- [27:57]
C
Well, I think what struck me is one of the very first things that you said is kind of how the development pattern really creates a bunch of places that no one person feels ownership over. You think of the traditional development pattern, and I'm sure there are plenty of shop owners and residents that were like, saw trash on the street in front and were like, I'm gonna go pick that up because I don't want somebody not coming into my business because they had to step around a pile of trash or they had to, you know, the, the, the immediate presence outside of their establishment was a reflection of their establishment. And as, as the suburban development pattern has created places that, you know, you kind of ask yourself, who's that a reflection of? And there's not a clear answer. It's the city as a whole, which is why the city is left to kind of figure it out. And the people who take a lot of pride in their city are, are saying to themselves, well, like, somebody's got to do something, so I'm going to go do something. But it is, you know, the, the task for people like that, as we saw in the article, is, is overwhelming. And it's, it's really too big for, you know, whether it's one person or even, as you said, an army of people. So, you know, I think, I think we see, you see in kind of more, you know, I know you'll see in downtown areas, for instance, where the, there is more of the traditional development pattern. You see pickup crews that really are able to keep small areas clean. Right. And I think that, that, that is kind of, you know, framing it in this, this way is really helpful to see why that, why that can and does, has worked in places, but then how challenging that is to scale in our cities today.
- [29:59]
A
And certainly I think that having to do it on your own is not necessarily, you know, we would certainly recommend people to take action and address and, you know, begin to take note of where people struggle and, you know, identify things that you can do. And yet we also are seeing the rise of things like private security, so that people are providing, you know, armed patrols in certain neighborhoods that are slightly wealthier because they recognize I can't rely on police service for this. You see this with water. When we lived in California, our tap water was terrible. So anybody that had the means to be able to provide for water treatment, water purification in the home did so. Or they would have big jugs delivered. We just drank it. And that's why I've got a bit of a twitch. But the result of it is that there is this like, taking of public services and then having to layer on or augment additional, like coverage, you could say, or additional service that's provided. And there was a great episode of the Missing Middle podcast with Sabrina Maddow and Mike Moffat talking about the hidden tax on urban living. And it was a saying, public crime and disorder, which I would actually say throwing garbage on the, on the ground is a version of disorder. It's a disordered way of approaching your city with less respect for it, tied to a lack of respect for people's own initiative to put things into bins where they belong. And then you get this spiraling cycle. There's, you know, we've seen it in my. In Richmond, where we lived, they took away public garbage bins because people were putting their household garbage in there because of lots of reasons. And so there was this, well, we've just got to remove it so that way we don't have to go and clean up a mess later. The result then is there was garbage everywhere instead of a concentrated spot. And along with that is that hidden tax basically serves as a disincentive to live in the types of slightly more compact or walkable and livable neighborhoods that we are encouraging many people to participate in. From a strong towns perspective, we say some of your most valuable places are where buildings are slightly closer together. You have greater power through proximity. But to make that work and to sort of remove a bit of the veneer of the perfect pristine suburb, you actually have to address these, this hidden tax or this gnawing sense that I see everybody's problems in a slightly more compact neighborhood and I, you know, I get to be blithely unaware of them out in my suburb. And it's not to pit one against the other, but when we try to say there's a financial cost to continuing to double down on the suburban pattern of development, it has to then be measured against the. We can say financially, your city's not doing better. But somebody says, but I'd rather live in a place where I don't have to see garbage every day or where, you know, I have one good neighbor and he goes and picks everything up. And so I think that there is this like, shouldering of our collective responsibilities and then trying to figure it out. But the one piece that I felt was missing in the article was just there. I mean, There's a passing mention to like a billion dollar deficit shortfall and maybe to just close on on this point here is what do you do when you're simultaneously trying to invite the world and you're deeply in the hole? You know, I don't know if you've ever tried to host a Thanksgiving dinner that you weren't totally ready for and realized like, oh, wow, we don't even have enough chairs for everybody. People are going to be sitting on the ground. You know, we're going to make things work. But in a city context, when you layer this on decade after decade now, you know that that then looms large. And is it just a situation of straight talk with residents saying, hey, actually, Chuck, to your point, like, we are only going to be doing proper cleanup in these five areas, or, you know, this is the front of stage stuff. That's what we're going to focus on. And then everybody else is on your own. Certainly our policing is doing this. We see this in various places where some neighborhoods get very little service. The response times are really slow. We see this on water quality, all sorts of different other city services. But what do you do when you're so far behind that catching up seems impossible?
- [34:09]
B
I think what you do is you host Thanksgiving as a way to fool yourself and others into thinking that everything's okay. Because if we can host Thanksgiving, things must be okay. And forget the fact that the roof is leaking and two of the three bathrooms don't work and the chairs at the table are all falling apart and held together by duct tape for the moment. If we can pull this off, if we can do this, we will have demonstrated to ourselves and to others that we're still like, okay, and it's not okay. It's really not okay. And I feel like that is the takeaway here, is that, you know, at some point becoming a strong town is recognizing, particularly in a place in the Southwest like la, where, you know, you are almost exclusively suburban, experiment style development, that this has just robbed you of your vitality. It gave you the illusion of wealth, but it has robbed you of something. And that payment is now in a sense, coming due. And there is no way out of this in the sense that all of a sudden we can do A, B or C. And while it'll be easy to pick up all the trash and maintain all the pipes and maintain all the sidewalks and make everything really nice, I think we have to have a deeper discussion about what a future LA looks like. And to me, a future LA looks like a bunch of neighborhoods that become more neighborhood like over time. That is a different development pattern than the one they have now. It's I, I think you can see it in the distance. Like I, like, I don't think, I don't think this is like LA is like, no, we never want to do that. I think you can see it, but it's not part of the inertia of the place yet. The inertia of the place is still very much around what they've been doing for the last 70 years.
- [36:23]
A
My instinct is to say, let's have a shortcut code for these types of civic groups that just say like, we will get your trash picked up. Like in terms of if you bag it, we'll, we'll grab it. Because there's even mentioned in the article that some of the council members have used their own office budgets to fund like pickup squads. And I find there, there's something very alarming about that because it shouldn't be at, you know, council by council or district by district. But the flip side is that's what it looks like to make something visible to showcase. Hey, this has to happen. And I'm going to even, you know, forego a second office member or whatever that looks like in order to be able to fund this and help your re election campaign. But sometimes that effort to just to say we need some shortcuts or some quick codes that get respected groups the ability to have their problems dealt with. The, the interesting thing is that normally that's in better, well off neighborhoods. And I think maybe what stands out here and what's being celebrated is, you know, Jose is working in neighborhoods that haven't had a lot of love, care, attention, sort of shortcuts, the help that's quickly dispatched rather than slowly. And that certainly speaks to, you know, the recognition. These are, these are core neighborhoods, these belong to people. It's not the backstage area Disney. This is, this is, you know, people's homes and where their children are all deserving of that. The challenge still though is when it's like, well, if we do this here, we have to do this everywhere. And the scope of a whole city is so vast that you say, well now we're frozen, we're stuck. We just can't respond in that way.
- [38:07]
B
I actually have been writing down a list of leadership fallacies for local officials and that's one of them on the list. Norm, if we do this here, we have to do it everywhere. It's a paralysis. I do think that if we think in terms of the four Step, process. When we see a guy out picking up trash in a neighborhood with others, they're signaling to you where they're struggling. And what's the next smallest thing we can do? Go out with a truck and pick up the trash. I mean, like, let's just do it. Come on.
- [38:42]
A
Well, this is still upzoned. And so we're still gonna down zone, which means that we're gonna transition from this discussion about, again, Alyssa Walker's article about talking trash on Torch la. And we're going to move into the down zone where we talk about something we're reading or watching or consuming that is totally not related to any of this. And so unless it's trashy, it could be a trashy romance novel. But, you know, see what I did there? But, Chuck, you said you're ready, so go ahead. What are you watching or taking in in the down zone right now?
- [39:15]
B
So I'm, as you know, Norm, because you read a chapter already. I'm working on a third, the fourth book in the Strong series. This one's on economic development. And the third chapter on that, I'm revisiting something I wrote about in Strong Towns, the first book. And that is the concept of an infinite game. And so James Kars wrote the book Finite and Infinite Games. And I've been going back through that book again. I got a copy of it and I brought it on my trip. And I've been going through it because when we think about. When we think about a business, we're thinking about a thing that is competing in a marketplace that, in a sense, has winners and losers and in a way, will have an end. There's no business that will be here forever. I used to point out, like, we don't have the Hudson Bay Company. Like, they're gone. And no one laments that today. They were, you know, a business that did a thing, and now they're no longer around, right? And someday there will be no longer be Walmart. There will no longer be, you know, I mean, when I grew up, we had J.C. penney's, Montgomery wards and Sears. That was what was here in town. And none of them exist here anymore. And in fact, nationally or internationally, they're a tiny bit of what they once were. This is natural. Cities, however, we often talk about in the same competitive terms, but a city is doing more of an infinite game. It is more of a. It's a strategy of enduring as opposed to defeating or conquering or winning or grabbing market share. And I just. I want to make sure I get the language. Right. Because that, you know, Karst did such a great job of parsing this and having this difference kind of enunciated in a way, in a game theory way that gives a lot of insight because when you're playing an infinite game, you really do forego things that you wouldn't in a more finite competition, because you don't take risks because you want to be around. You can't have things that have huge potential downside, because you've got to be around to do things tomorrow. And I do actually think that that is a key to making not just good investments at a city level, but doing what the book is about, which is really good economic development. Yeah.
- [41:49]
A
To be able to prosper in the long term. Yet, you know, Chuck, I've been using, even when I was in California, the imagery of like a charity curling match and the, you know, those matches that go on for hours and for days and days. And then I realized I've really got to update my metaphors because nobody in south of Minnesota knows what curling.
- [42:07]
B
No, no. Yeah, they do during the Olympics. But they, they all think it's. I mean, I was making curling jokes to you during the, during the Olympics because I got them.
- [42:19]
A
But yeah, yeah, one day you'll come around, which is a curling term.
- [42:23]
B
So.
- [42:24]
A
Carly?
- [42:26]
C
Well, I think this is episode is going to air for the first time on April 1st. And so I feel like the biggest thing happening right now for us is the Strongest Town contest. And because, you know, folks who know me know that I've been having some, a lot of personal time with my mom lately, I haven't had a lot of extra reading time. So I've been reading about our strongest hounds. And so if you, if you haven't caught up by this time, we'll be in the, in the last bit of the, I think championship round, so, or close to it. So encourage people to go on and vote for the last, the last two. It's going to be great.
- [43:06]
B
Who's going to win? Who's going to win, Carly?
- [43:08]
C
Oh, my gosh. Well, you know me, I'm going to have a hard time picking favorites, but I will give a big shout out to Wisconsin who may had three make the top eight.
- [43:17]
B
So they did.
- [43:19]
C
I think that Wisconsin is looking pretty strong this year. So we'll see. Midwest in general, though, they just keep, they just keep bringing some strong towns.
- [43:29]
A
It's. I wonder how they're doing on the secondary betting market if, if everything is, is up for. Yeah, we've got it. We will Know that we have landed in the cultural zeitgeist when the town contest is.
- [43:40]
C
Is on Polymarket. Yes.
- [43:42]
A
Yeah.
- [43:43]
C
Yes. Oh, I haven't checked yet. That'll be the first thing I do when we stop recording.
- [43:48]
A
Yeah. Well, both of you have kind of taken Down Zone and just made it up Zone stuff. So I'm going to do a true down zone, and I'm going to talk about the show Jury Duty. It is fantastic. It is on Amazon prime right now, and the premise of it is they are filming a trial of. As a documentary. It's supposed to be a civic trial or a civil trial, but all of the participants are actors except for one guy who's on jury duty. And this guy Roland had responded to an ad, which is basically like, we need jurors. This is, you know, more like a Judge Judy sort of format thing. But then the jury gets. Well, I won't give away too many spoilers, but pretty quickly on, they get sequestered. And it's just this, like, bizarre thing where your heart is, like, breaking for him. And yet I'm kind of admiring the fact that he is, like, so resolute in his determination to, like, make sure that people's relationships stay intact. And he's helping people, like, navigate all of the, like, crazy in their world, even as he's trying to grapple with, like, why is this trial so weird? And so. It's a great show. It's a great comedy. I would definitely recommend it.
- [44:56]
B
Check out a little Truman show esque.
- [45:00]
A
Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's. I didn't even make the connection, but, yeah, it is. It feels like that, for sure. So. And there. There are some fantastic characters in there. There's one guy who's a transhumanist, and so all of these, like, weird things where he's, you know, sipping on fortified smoothie solutions that are supposed to help him live forever with the assistance of technology. So if that's your jam, go and check it out.
- [45:22]
B
Norm, I was going to ask you, did you work here when I rented out the theater in Brainerd and we watched the Truman show together, or was that before you?
- [45:32]
A
That was before me. That would have been fun.
- [45:34]
B
Okay. Yeah, it was a good time. We had everybody here. We did one retreat here in Brainerd, and, you know, renting out the movie theater here does not, like, take a whole lot of cash to do on, like, a. Like, a random Wednesday night. So they were really cool with us. But, yeah, we. We rented out. We. We watched the Truman Show. It was pretty Pretty epic.
- [45:56]
C
Yeah.
- [45:57]
A
And then you went to Seaside and the environment there. Awesome. Well, thanks, folks. Thank you, Carly. Thank you, Chuck, for joining us today with this refreshed, revamped version of upzoned. And for anyone that's listening, please do share your feedback, insights. We definitely appreciated the material that we got through the survey. That was really helpful. And as we go forward, we're going to routinely have three hosts or three participants on the microphones. And our goal is to continue to build on what we've started with upzone. And so thank you for taking the time to listen. And, Chuck, I don't even know what our new sort of ending slogan is, so I'm going to throw it over to you, and then we'll. We'll go from there.
- [46:41]
B
Dude, I really only have one way I end podcasts, and it's the way I end, like, a lot of things. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care, everybody. Let me show you what I'm about to do.
- [46:54]
A
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong towns member@strongtowns.org membership.
- [47:14]
C
Sam.