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- [00:00]
Andrew Burleson
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Ryan Pizicki
First class streetcar downtown with a fine
- [00:12]
Andrew Burleson
ladies in the peeps.
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Norman (Host)
Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Upzoned, where we take a big story from the news and we talk about it from a strong town perspective. At Strong Towns, this vision that we're working toward is simple but profound. Simple enough that we put it on a T shirt. We want everyone to be able to live a good life in a prospering place. And today's conversation really gets at whether that vision is even possible for a lot of people. Before we get into today's article, I want to take a moment to recognize three members of the Strong Towns Founders Circle. I'll try to do this as we keep going through the year to recognize those core members that helped to make this movement possible, starting with Alex Cecchini, Alex Plein, and Andrew Burleson. The very same Andrew Burleson who is joining us for today's conversation. Now, as a Canadian, I've always found the idea of the American Dream really fascinating. It's such a central part of the American mindset, and having lived in the US For a time, I got to see just how deeply ingrained these assumptions are about what the future should hold for each individual who lives within the United States. There's a lot of overlap with Canada, where I live now, of course, but there are also some subtle differences. In the US you have this foundational idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And it's interesting, in Canada, actually, the framing has historically been more about peace, order and good government. A different language, but both shaping expectations about what a good life looks like. And that brings us to today's article. We're discussing a USA Today piece published in March 202026 by Rachel Barber and Veronica Bravo, titled the American Dream meant upward mobility. Now it means stability. The article explores a major cultural shift that for generations, the American Dream was about getting ahead, doing better than your parents, and building wealth over time. But according to new research that's highlighted in this piece, younger generations are redefining that dream or down zoning you that dream. You could say for many Gen Z and millennials, it's no longer about upward mobility. Instead, in their language, it's about achieving basic stability, being able to afford housing, access health care, get an education, hold a steady job, not have a life of luxury, but just a life that is more secure and sustainable. And then even that version of the dream, as the article goes on to say, it feels increasingly out of reach. To unpack this, I'm joined by two thoughtful voices in Our strong tensor orbit. Andrew Burleson is the board chair of Strong Towns, a Roots of Progress Fellow and an advisor to the center for Land Economics. And Ryan Pizicki joins us as well. Ryan writes the City of Yes substack available@ryanpazicki.com he's on the board of Aura, a grassroots urbanist organization in Austin, and serves on Austin's Zoning and Planning Commission. Welcome to both of you. So good to have you both on UPZONE today.
- [03:06]
Ryan Pizicki
Thanks so much for having me. I as much of a as I love the American Declaration of Independence, I feel like we could use some peace, order and good government right now.
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Norman (Host)
So yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's, it's in the original Constitution of Canada from 1867 and just contrasting that with the opening of the U.S. constitution, which has its expectation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And so as, as this article talks about the opening sort of sense of is the American dream out of reach and what does that mean? I think there are profound strong towns angles to this. And maybe we'll start with Ryan, you talk about a city of yes, that's the substack that you write. Do you want to unpack that a bit and sort of the way in which yearning for yes also looks a lot like creating opportunities for a broad range of people within a community. And how does that article sort of touch on some of the things that you've been thinking about for quite a while?
- [04:04]
Ryan Pizicki
Yeah, so I started writing City of Yes because as we were coming out of the pandemic, I was seeing cities everywhere kind of struggling with the same issues. So having managed and built schools in New York and San Francisco and just seeing the struggle with people to afford housing, just to afford the cost of living generally and then to go into that kind of pandemic slide where we saw kind of disorder get out of control and things suddenly people moving to the suburbs and whatnot, feeling like the value proposition of the city wasn't really worthwhile anymore. And I think that was because this sense of broader opportunity just was no longer kind of trickling all the way down. And so people were kind of moving with their feet in a lot of ways. And so I got interested in like, well, that seems problematic to me if this is just a, if cities become a place where really only the rich and the subsidized poor can afford to live. If normal everyday people working working class jobs or in the middle class families just can't afford to be in cities. And really what does the city Become, you know, is it, is it Michael Bloomberg's idea of the city as a luxury good? Well, that seems very elitist and out of touch with a lot of people. And maybe, you know, maybe the elites are fine in a place like New York to subsidize an underclass, but that doesn't seem like what cities have historically done. And we know that a place like New York used to have a thriving working class, a thriving middle class. It used to be a place where people could move and work themselves up the ladder. And instead today a person who is not making a, like a Wall street job salary moves to New York and takes a, a pay cut basically, or a standard of living decrease. And so, yes, to me means, you know, the full expanse of a human life. It's about human, human flourishing. And our cities have historically been engines by which that happens. And lately they have not been doing that. So I try to look at this from all different opinions, angles. It's not only about housing, it's about the role of small businesses. And do we make it possible for people to, to be entrepreneurs? Do we make it possible for people to, well, send their kids to, to good schools? Is it safe to walk on the streets? Things like that.
- [06:07]
Norman (Host)
So, yeah. And just the challenge that the burn rate for any given individual seems to be getting higher and higher if you're bringing in less in terms of entry level jobs, uh, particularly if you're saddled with student debt for, for a lot of, you know, Gen Z and even millennials. You know, I, I said one of the things that challenged me as I read this, maybe Andrew, you felt the same way, is that I read this and I'm like, I still feel like I'm entering into adulthood and yet here I am kind of actually representing a generation that's well into its space as a millennial, really grappling with the fact that even things like financial security feel like there it is less within reach. And I certainly for myself, my friends that immediately out of high school just went into the workforce, they're rather secure. They have done well for themselves. Those that went on and got a bachelor's degree, so long as they bought into the, at least in our area, bought into the housing market before 2014, they're actually really sad for those of us that then made the frightful decision to go on and get a master's degree. Um, you know, and I'm not complaining about it. Well, kind of am. But there is the reality that like, that was the thing that from a financial perspective has been the most disastrous economic decision I've made because it set me back not just in terms of, you know, the amount of tuition and challenges that emerge from that, but also the reality that, like, by not entering a housing market that got out of control on the, at the bottom of the elevator, rather than trying to jump and, you know, reach to get in much higher along the way, those escalating costs have just created a lot of challenges. And certainly as a renter, I feel that sense of precariousness that just emerges from the fact that my landlord made at any point, say, all right, I'm going to be redeveloping the land that the house is on. This, the home that we're in is going to be a scrape away, without doubt. And in that setting, then we're going to be rolling the dice again, trying to find a place to live in. And that sense of insecurity really, I think, does fuel that sense where I'm attracted to the language of stability. I'm attracted to, you know, just a chicken in every pot and, and a roof over every head. But for Andrew, as, as you talk about it, I mean, your substack is called the free range City. And you're, you've given a lot of thought to this. Having lived in Austin, high growth and rapid pace market, San Francisco and now Denver, you're seeing this. And what are some of the things that stood out in the, in the piece, as well as some of your
- [08:36]
Andrew Burleson
own reflections on this in your exchange earlier about the American values versus the Canadian values? We don't tend to emphasize the things we kind of take for granted. I think you could look at the Americans early on saying life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I'm sure that at that moment they were feeling like good government was going to be okay. They didn't need to put that one on the postcard. I think stability goes on the postcard when you no longer can take it for granted. Right. So to me, the description or the experience you're talking about, I think there's a lot of people and I feel like I've kind of had this experience twice. Like I going through college right before the recession and graduating into the recession, it was a paradigm shift where it felt like the goalposts had moved in this big way where, you know, you're coming out of school and everyone's, you know, and all your boomer parents who, you know, it's not their fault, but all the advice that worked for them turned out not to be very good for us. Right? And so it was just get a degree, everything will be fine. Well, I got a degree and then it took three years to like really start to have a job that that was anything close to paying the bills. And really five years before I had any kind of career start. And, you know, that just felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. And it was really hard. And that happens. I mean, people who live through the Great Depression obviously, like, that was far worse. So, like this kind of thing happens. But I think what's happened that's sort of worse is we've kind of created this system now where housing is now part of this like one way ratchet that just only gets more expensive. And so the second time in my life where it felt like the goalpost moved in a big way is my wife and I'd been saving up for years to buy a house and had been excited to do that. And we were like, actually we were actively at the end of 2019, thinking the 2020, you know, shopping season that's like, we're going to be out looking at houses and we're going to make this. And obviously the pandemic hit and that didn't really work out. And we ended up having to decide where to live after a lot of things change in our lives and we ended up moving to Denver after being a little bit nomadic during COVID But you know, the whole phenomena of 2020-2022, 2023, the whole housing market went from, okay, we've saved up for the last decade and we're finally ready to get in to being like, wow, we totally missed the window. And now, you know, everything has gone up so much that instead of us being able to comfortably afford a home, we're like, what is the smallest, oldest, tiniest, like, you know, that we can just possibly get a hook into? And then it also was like, well, do you really want to buy a small, tiny, old. But yeah, because otherwise, and no offense, Norm, but I'm call back to what you just said. Otherwise you're just terrified that your landlord's going to kick you out and do something else with your property. So it's pretty hard to be getting to, and my oldest is in sixth grade. It's pretty hard to be saying, I have a middle schooler. And it feels like we just barely got one finger on the rung of housing when in this country we've grown up really idolizing housing as that's the first marker of adulthood. That's not supposed to be the achievement of your life. Like Late middle age when your kids are. And now I have this weird paradox where like, and I imagine there's probably a lot of other middle aged folks who feel this way too. And I just casually called myself middle aged. That's new to me. I'm getting used to it.
- [12:05]
Ryan Pizicki
But speak for yourself.
- [12:06]
Andrew Burleson
Yeah, I know it's hard, but you know, there's got to be a lot of. Let me say it this way. There's got to be a lot of other parents of young kids who are now thinking to themselves, boy, I'd love to have an extra bedroom, but by the time I could afford it, will my kids just be grown? I won't even need it anymore. And that's, that's crazy, but that's real. Like, that's becoming part of the conversation for my wife and I of like, man, maybe we could, you know, maybe, maybe in a few more years we could trade up to one and then it starts to be, well, yeah, but then by then our oldest will have graduated and we don't even need it. Like, we're probably, we're gonna not even. By the time we could afford to have enough housing to have all of our kids have their own bedroom, they'll be grown and gone. So that just is kind of obvious that we've already missed that window. And that's, that's hard. And we've like, I've had good jobs. Like, I've not been at the bottom of the barrel economically. Like, I've, I've been blessed and have had the chance to have good earnings. And I feel like there's a lot of times when I think if we've been as fortunate as we've been in terms of being able to have good jobs and we're in this situation, how are people even surviving who are, you know, making below median income? And I honestly, it's hard to even wrap my head around what you do. If you were to me, if I was in that situation, I don't even know what I would do.
- [13:27]
Norman (Host)
Ryan, do you want to talk about like what this means? You wrote a great piece on like remote isn't working on your substack. And I thought that really touched on here. I'll actually read a line here where you said by failing to provide upward mobility for the 80% cities, force a new physical mobility, pricing out place bound workers while giving the already mobile first fewer reasons to stay. That really stood out to me as, you know, sort of grappling with the challenge of, well, if you're, you know, in a High cost market, just leave. What does that actually mean for cities? If that's the, the end result is that most people are forced out. And then what does that actually begin to do to sort of de, you know, deconstruct the ability of, of more people to just, you know, opt into a remote setting where they just sort of like float in, float out. And at strong towns, our whole concern is how do we get people to be strong citizens? How do we get them to love their place? How do we get them to, you know, do the small things to build the public, you know, value that we all share in rather than just trying to squirrel away enough for a little personal nest egg. But you've been grappling with like, hey, when we are in such a situation, if we keep, if we can't keep the people who make the physical world work, they won't be able to keep those who inhabit the digital one. Do you want to describe some of the implications that that has?
- [14:47]
Ryan Pizicki
Yeah, I was trying to walk this fine line in that piece where I was not trying to criticize remote work because it has been a boon to many people, but more to point out that remote work actually depends on a labor force of the other 80% of the people who actually provide the in person services that make your kind of, you know, your remote situation actually possible. So, you know, I work from home, my husband works from home. Down the hall, Amazon comes to our house almost every day. We get food delivered, you know, so we're working remotely, but not really, you know, there's a constant stream of people coming by. The mailman has been coming by this whole time as well. And from my perspective, remote has enabled people in the knowledge sector to basically be untethered from place or tethered by choice, whereas the other 80% really don't have this choice. And so circumstances either force them to live in increasing states of financial precariousness or to leave for where they can afford to live better. And so you end up in this kind of, I don't want to call it doom loop because that's an overused phrase, but if the people who make the remote lifestyle possible aren't themselves able to be in place, if child care workers can't afford to live in the city, if, you know, the Amazon delivery guy can't be local either, at some point does that break a city and then does that ruin the value proposition that makes it worthwhile for the 20% who can afford or choose to be anywhere to actually be in a particular place? And we Saw this during the pandemic, those who could leave, left. And I mean, I was sort of in this place. I, you know, was running Montessori schools in San Francisco. And then my business partner and I just, we sort of looked at each other and after the experience of that, we're like, we're kind of done. And. And so we moved with our families ultimately to independently to Austin, where incidentally, I could afford to buy a house for the first time in my life at the age of 39, which was just not even in the cards in San Francisco. But like, part of this piece that I was writing comes out of like having observed this dichotomy just, you know, at the school that we were running during the pandemic, all of these, you know, in San Francisco, a lot of our customers were tech employees. All of these people went remote. When we were able to reopen our school, our teachers obviously had to be in place. That's what childcare is. It is taking care of children in a specific place. You can't do that remotely. We tried to do remote work during the remote education and it doesn't really work at the preschool level. And so the preschool workers had to be on site doing all of the COVID protocols, wearing the mask, social distancing. It was kind of a nightmare to run. But then meanwhile, the parents could still drop off their kids in the morning, then drive home and go do their zoom work for the rest of the day. And so, you know, it's just kind of bizarre to see. And then meanwhile, those people who are commuting to our campus to work there are coming in from Fremont on the other side of the bay. You know, it's like a 90 minute commute by public transit. And that's not great. People were getting burnt out before the pandemic began. And so if people can't afford to live in the city, we're just kind of exacerbating these problems.
- [18:04]
Norman (Host)
And then the, you know, there's big, big, big trends here. We're talking about global pandemics. We're talking about, you know, the locking up of, of worldwide finances, you know, all of the different sort of layers at which, you know, the. As it talks about it in the piece that, oh yeah, what the dream of many people is, is for everyone to work well paying jobs, afford a home and live in peace was, was the idea. But Andrew, what, what I keep coming back to is like there are enough things that can be done at that are, are small sort of nudges in the cor. In the better direction that, that we still aren't doing as I think of that, you know, allowing a broader range of work at home options so that it's not necessarily remote work but it means that your housing is earning its keep. That can look like, you know, being able, being being more readily available to rent out garage space or more readily available to rent out, you know, secondary units, all of those types of things. It's stunning to me that my political leaders just again removed the ability in a lot of our places to have in house small businesses that you can do up to a certain amount. And then it's just like, okay, now that's not orderly enough so we need to get rid of that. And if I look at what my city leaders can be doing for me, they could be doing so many more things to just like nudge the marginal things. And I think this is where I look at it from a strong towns perspective. And as a Calvinist, my, my goal working at strong towns is to make things a little less worse. And I think that speaks to the reality that like you used a phrase a while back that still is camped out in my head, which is we live in the midst of two phenomenon. One is rolling blight in some areas still and then the rest are experiencing strangling exclusion. And that stranglement is, is a consequence of so many different layers just conspiring to, to attack one's ability to actually get ahead. Do you want to touch on, you know, maybe I think I'd shared before just how much that has been something that I've been thinking about a lot that you had said, you know, maybe even offhand when we're in Milwaukee like that we live in the midst of cities that are either defined by strength, you know, an increasingly strangling exclusion, or else by the flip side. And I think you made the point. That flip side comes actually quite quickly in some cases of rolling blight where blight can all of a sudden come in, there's no opportunity or you have strangling exclusion because any opportunity just seems to be an accelerant rather than a sort of demand spreader within the community. Where does that sort of land? Because that, that seems to be if there's a dream, but the dream is one that quickly results in too many people being strangled by it. That ain't right either.
- [20:50]
Andrew Burleson
Let me offer a little context on that idea because I think, I'm sure whenever I said that offhand it was with a little bit of explanation of what that meant. The two things you can picture is that. Well, the first thing, and this really relates to what Ryan writes about so well, is that cities have, in the 20th century taken this mindset of nobody's ever allowed to do anything everywhere, anywhere without permission. And permission is hard to get. And the richer the community is, the harder it is to get permission. Because you want to open a bake shop in your house. Well, I don't like the smell of baked bread, so I'm going to the zoning commission and we're banning bakeries. There will never be another bakery in this. I don't ever want to smell wheat again in my life. Okay, but that's. It sounds farcical, but this actually is what happened. Layer by layer, every little friction, every little annoyance, every little thing that bothered anybody, a certain percentage of those become law. And they tend to be fought at the level of the city. Instead of being worked out among neighbors, they tend to become the rules of the city. And very soon we have sort of said nobody's really allowed to do anything except this very narrow set of things where only this very narrow way of living is allowed. Okay, well then where do you go from there? Well, if you happen to be in Silicon Valley and you have a generation defining set of technology businesses form and all these high paying jobs and everything else, well, then people will come to take advantage of that opportunity and they will fight whoever they have to push out of the way to get the space to be able to come and take advantage of that opportunity. So there's your strangling exclusion. Right? We're not allowing the city to adapt to this change because nothing's ever allowed to happen. No one's allowed to do anything. Can't build anything, you can't do anything, you can't change anything. And what that means is it's now zero sum game. It's musical chairs. 20 new people showed up. Except it's tackle musical chairs. You know, and I hate to say it because it's, you know, I don't think it's bad to be wealthy, and I don't feel like there ought to be this kind of like class conflict. But we create that when we say that we're not going to build new housing, we're not going to let neighborhoods evolve, we're not going to let neighborhoods adapt. We're not going to let anything change. Well, then what's going to happen is whoever has the most money will get a house, and then the second person with the second most money will get a house. And then you go on down that line until You've run out of houses, and then it doesn't matter how much money you have, you're out. And that's what life was like in San Francisco. And when I lived there, that was this feeling of I couldn't believe, coming from regular America. I couldn't believe how much money I was making and how tiny and pathetic my apartment was and how much I felt like at the same time I was lucky to have as good of a place as I did. It was just bizarre. But that's the strangling exclusion. And then the flip side of this is if you go to many parts of the country and by land area, more of the country, you find that they don't have the dynamic economy, they don't have the jobs, but they still have taken that mindset of nothing's ever allowed to change. And so you find people who might like to stay in the community, but they want to do something like open a bake shop in their garage, because maybe that's a way they can make a living and have a job and stay, but they can't. And so they leave. And that's not the only reason. It's complicated and there's many, many factors. But at a certain point, when you make it too hard, when the community is struggling, what that's saying is, and it can be for any number of reasons, even if there's just a little bit of struggle in the community, what that means is that something about the way it is today isn't working well anymore. Maybe it worked well in the past, but something's changed and the community needs to adapt. But if your rules and your norms and everything around that say no adaptation is allowed, then you're requiring the struggle to last. In fact, you're requiring the struggle to be incurable. You're preventing anything from healing. And if you, you know, it's almost like a. You can imagine the city as a living organism. And you've like, it's got a wound and you prohibited any treatment of the wound. Like, eventually it's going to get septic and. And it's going to die. And so that's the rolling blight. Like, what you have is. And this is especially. We've seen this in the Midwest, towns that had an economic problem, the mill left or whatever happened. That's the poster child one. But it's not only that. There's a lot of communities that are, you know, farming has had incredible amounts of automation. There's a lot of farm towns that used to need more people than they do Today that's not a horrible thing. But towns need, places need to be able to adapt. And if they can't, then they tend to wither away and eventually die off. And so it's really bad. And I think what we end up with is culturally the, the sort of way the economy worked in the 1950s. We did a lot of things to sort of cast in concrete. This is how it will always work and everything will be required to be optimized for that. Okay, fine. Now the world has changed and we're not allowed to adapt in response. And so we end up with this very bimodal distribution of. In some places that means intense gentrification and everyone who's not hyper wealthy is pushed out. And in other places it means the town is falling apart and can't put itself back together again. And it's, I mean, nobody wants either of those outcomes. Right? And the answer is we've got to be. Our cities need to become more free and need to be more able to adapt and change over time.
- [26:14]
Strong Towns Announcer
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- [26:48]
Norman (Host)
Yeah, you're nodding, Ryan. Go ahead, jump in.
- [26:53]
Ryan Pizicki
Well one, thank you, Andrew, for actually connecting the question of what my substack is named after to the actual thing which is being able to get to. Yes, more easily. Which is which I forgot to say. But yeah, I mean the point Andrew is making I think is, you know, you can maybe sum it up that like stasis is the enemy of stability here. Like if you want to be to have a quote unquote stable life in a city, the city itself has to be allowed to change or, you know, the town or whatever. I tend to focus on the high opportunity cities like San Francisco, New York and Austin because that is where I spent my entire adult life. But it's the same here. We have single family neighborhoods right next to downtown in Austin that have been preserved in amber for 40 years and haven't been allowed to gradually develop or incrementally change. And so these are now every house here is a million dollars, you know, or, or more. And that prices out whole swaths of, of just the economy or the Socioeconomic stratum.
- [27:59]
Andrew Burleson
And it's also, it sets up the more dramatic change people don't appreciate as much where if you finally then do anything to release that regulatory amber, you don't go from a house to two townhomes, you go from a house to a six story apartment building and people feel like, oh my gosh, the neighborhood is just being, you know, demolished. Well, it could have gradually changed over a year.
- [28:23]
Norman (Host)
They're on the line saying, okay, we're not going to do that. And I'm like, you haven't even given it time. Like you, there's a half life to these changes before you can start to assess whether or not they're working.
- [28:33]
Ryan Pizicki
Yeah, I mean, you, when you end up in a situation where things have been frozen in time for decades, you kind of have this, this incremental debt and like, well, you know, what, what is the next incremental, you know, zoning change that would be appropriate in that context? It's hard. It's like if it's been single family homes, it's not really a duplex if the land is now priced for a small apartment building. And so closing that gap is hard in a place like Austin in particular, where. And so we're just constantly put in these positions where like, well, we didn't do the things that we should have done for a very long time and, and now there aren't really outcomes that aren't going to seem like a loss for people. You know, this phrase has been going around in my mind when I've been thinking about zoning reform in an urban context. And it's like, it's going to be painful for some people to kind of work through, you know, the fact that we didn't, you know, we didn't take care of our land or we didn't develop in a way that was healthy for the city for a long time. And now we have to do the painful surgery to kind of get it into a place where in the future it can hopefully grow in a more organic way. But there's no, there's no easy path through there. I think for at least a place like Austin, you know, or New York or San Francisco, where they're just so behind on, on where they should have been.
- [29:56]
Norman (Host)
Andrew, in one of your posts on the adaptive code, you say, you quote Jeff Fong saying it's about re acclimating our society to the idea that it's good, normal and healthy for the places we live to change over time. We need to embrace the idea that as the world changes as our hopes and dreams and wants and needs shift over time, those changes become reflected in the built environment. The places we live need to be ongoing projects, not finished products. And that, that to me as I think, you know, what are we supposed to do for you know, a bunch of discouraged youth that are in Gen Z or whatever the next version of, of the generations is that is looking at it or you know, as a parent of an 11 year old, I am firmly in the camp of telling the pollster that I don't think my son is going to have as good of a life as I've enjoyed. And, and there's something bleak to that and that has not nothing to do with sort of the world factors. It's all about my community and the real struggle that's here. And the fact that he, you know, my wife and I are not going to be able to leave him with a significant nest egg that he's just going to be able to turn into something more. Instead he's going to be the one covering our nursing home costs. So we're going to be dealing with the reality that like it's going to be tough and in that setting the thing that I, you know, I don't think it's just wide eyed optimism that says that I just need him to have a chance to try a bunch of different things. But I feel like that is, you know, what my dad was able to do when he came to Canada as an immigrant in 1972 and by 1979 had bought his own farm and you know, with basically just scrabbling together the things that he needed. And we lived in a beat up rundown home that by modern standards was not inhabitable. Well, it did have running water and did have sewage, so I guess technically it was. But you know, we had potato roots coming up from the cellar and every spring we'd have to go and cut them back because they'd be coming out through the electrical outlets. It's a wonder the house never burned down. But it actually kind of provided us with the spring pad that we needed to be able to develop the farm and do all of those things that are necessary and that sort of pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Obviously something that we're like, you know, coming around to realize that there was less freight or that's less good advice than it might otherwise be. But I feel like at strong towns we're often telling city staff like you get out of your own way. And I'll relay a quick conversation I had with planning director of My city. And she said, well, we're short, I think 19 planners. And my response, which maybe didn't endear me to her, was have them do less then. And you know, she was like, no, no, no, no. Like we. And we, well, we have legislative requirements. I was like, okay, put the staff only on the legislated requirements. None of the other stuff. So meetings you don't have to meet. So do it all by, you know, just a virtual meeting. But it was very much like this binary or this dueling sort of impulse. We want to provide great customer service, so our door is always open. Well, your door always being open means you're not doing other things. And that can sometimes be the reality that we've backed ourselves into. And I think, you know, I'll, you know, certainly endorse Ryan, your substack, but also Andrew, your piece on the adaptive code. We need to just continue to press for the next increment of development to be allowed by right. And for people actually really grapple with what that looks like because it looks so much closer to stability than chaos. And I think that's as I think about what we need in our places. I am seeing the eruptions, or I like to call them the pimple outbreaks, where if you have suppressed all that pressure for enough time, you're going to get that bloop that's spurting out and that's your 10 story tower in the midst of a single detached neighborhood. Those things are going to happen and continuously. So until we start to like bring the temperature down, begin to adjust course and really get our systems right. But yeah, getting to yes, a lot easier and a lot sooner in the process. And of, you know, I don't think we're going to see disaster or you know, bad actors completely exploiting the whole setup. I think we actually get more of the outcomes that we want. And at strong towns, you know, from our perspective, there's also a financial reason the price of pipe and road today is so much higher than it used to be. Just to actually go about the task of putting it in even after inflation, that means you have to have additional participants to be able to cover the tab. Otherwise it is just a much bigger burden on the existing homeowners and they're not willing to pay it. So they're just kicking the can down the road a little bit further. And here I'm a little bit cranky about the intergenerational dine and dash that's underway, but that is definitely the real reality that we find ourselves in and probably why when you survey younger folks, they're like, yep, things are, things are not shaping up well. I, I don't even care about getting ahead. I just want to not fall behind. So Ryan, you're, you're a homeowner, so you're not falling behind, but you also have certainly challenges. Any closing thoughts? And then we'll go into the down zone after Andrew as well.
- [34:53]
Ryan Pizicki
Yeah, I mean, I think the reason, one of the reasons I ended up in Austin is because after we decided to move on from the school in San Francisco, I was interested in a more entrepreneurial phase of my life where I wasn't really sure what I was about to do. You know, I. 2000 or 2022, I didn't know that I'd be writing a substack and on the zoning commission and Austin and all of that. And I can tell you none of that pays really any money right now. But I would not be able to do this at all if I were in New York or San Francisco. It's just the cost of doing that work or taking that risk would have just been not, not feasible. And so moving here kind of gave us some, you know, Runway to kind of take more risks in this, like, next phase of our career. And so I, I guess I, I chose a certain kind of, you know, mobility in a very like, meaningful sense of relocating. But like, cities used to be able to provide this opportunity without having to force people out. And so, you know, how many people are in my position who wanted to take a risk to start a business or, you know, small business of some sort and looked at the numbers in New York or San Francisco or other high cost cities and just said, you know, I can't make this work here. And maybe they brought that talent to some new city. I mean, I think I've done a good job here in Austin, but, you know, those cities are losing out on that too. So this is a, this is a real cost for the places that are losing talent and not understanding that this is a, fundamentally a problem about human capital and how it's distributed. And if you, if you don't let it to, to build in your own city while somebody, some other city is going to reap the rewards of that.
- [36:36]
Andrew Burleson
I will circle back to the things you were hitting on in your last. This thought there norm, which is part of when we hear people say they even just want stability, they're, they've kind of given up on upward mobility. They just want stability. A lot of that is because we have. You were talking about the farmhouse with all the problems. And I was thinking to myself, I'm sure that that would violate every building code and that a city bureaucrat would say that's you're not allowed to live like that. But, you know, if they condemned your house and bulldozed it, you would have been in a tent. And we've been somehow okay with the idea that, well, it's. I guess I'd rather have you just live on the sidewalk than live in a house I don't approve of. And actually, I'll call back to. Ryan has written a couple pieces over the last couple years. Remind me, Ryan, I think you wrote one about, I think just the ladder going up and down and one about the SROs, right? About like us getting rid of. So just like I think we need as a society, I think when we reach the point that we can't take upward mobility for granted anymore, I think maybe we need to stop and ask ourselves why and think, well, maybe it's because we got really, you know, puritanical about people shouldn't live like that. And really condemning of what it looks like to be on the bottom rungs of the ladder climbing up and instead of trying to help people climb faster or focus on how do we, you know, make it a better, make our ladder work better. We just are like, those rungs are icky and we chopped them off. And now we're paying the price for that. I think so. It can be hard and it can be uncomfortable. I think one of the things is that a lot of the little tiny businesses, you know, Ryan's talking about starting, you know, more of a, more of a knowledge worker type of business in Austin. Well, there's a house down the street from me in my neighborhood in Denver where I don't know what the family does, but they always have a new freshly broken down car parked in their driveway and their garage is often open. And it appears, as far as I can tell, that they have an informal car fix up business going there. And I'm sure that a bunch of my neighbors don't appreciate this. And there's times when I feel like, really, guys, come on, that car is totaled, like, give it up. But I try to remind myself, hey, look, whatever they're doing, you know, like somebody, somebody now has got their car fixed that otherwise was not going to have a car fixed. Right? That's just what it looks like. It's messy and it's gritty. Sometimes when people are working their way up the ladder and we need to be, I think, more accepting of that and more tolerant of that. And my. My hopeful optimism would be that maybe the hubris of the mid century, the idea that we could just chop off the bottom rungs of the ladder and that would be fine, I think, has been pretty thoroughly defeated. And maybe our generation will be a generation that learns how to leave space for those ladders to come back and have a culture in the future where we're more accepting and more understanding about, hey, look, you got to start where you can start and see some honor in starting from humble beginnings and climbing your way up, rather than saying, oh, that's icky, and I don't want to see it. So that's my hope.
- [39:48]
Norman (Host)
Yeah, I find it fascinating that, you know, part of my strong town's vision is to renormalize the things that were rejected by sort of a technical class that said, oh, you know, that sort of stuff belongs to, you know, the old days. And at strong towns, we're like, no, like, that's what we want to see. Give us that opportunity, and then you'll be surprised, and we'll create things of lasting value, but also increasingly help everyone to be able to live a good life in a prospering place, not just those that are subsidized to do so or those that are sort of lucking out and being able to do so. I will say also, if anybody is listening to this, Chuck is always advertising that there are homes for cheap in Brainerd, although even there, I would imagine those prices have gone up. But you do have to live in Brainerd, Minnesota, which is a wonderful community I've yet to go and visit. So, on that front, before I say anything further to offend anyone, um, let's go into the down zone, which is where we talk about things that we're either taking in, listening, captured by. What is something, Andrew, that is for you that you brought for the down zone?
- [40:53]
Andrew Burleson
Well, I. This is very random, but I never read any of the Tolkien books, and I've seen the movies because everyone's seen the movies. But my wife is a big fan of the books and has been telling me how great they are for my whole marriage. And so I got the audiobook of the Hobbit and have been listening to that when I take my daughter's places. We've been listening to, like, sections of it and. Which I guess is cheating on the reading part, but it's been really great fun and it's been really delightful to. I just didn't appreciate how every, Every, every person on Earth is scolding me right now, saying, I'm a uncultured buffoon for just now getting around to this. But it's so delightfully written and sitting there with my, you know, my three daughters listening to the story, and they get very caught up in it. And that's been really fun for us. So that's been. That's been something I've been enjoying lately.
- [41:53]
Norman (Host)
I. I have a quick admission to make, which is I've tried to pick it up three times and I've never been able to finish it. I've read Lord of the Rings back to back. Like, I think three or four times the whole series. Hobbit Just can't do it. And I went to a play where they were doing. It was two people putting on the Hobbit. It was. It was great. But midway through, at one point, that one of the characters is like, all right, and now, exposition, exposition, exposition, exposition. And the other person's like, can you just wrap it up? He's like, nope, I've got to go on for quite a way. So that is totally my impression of some of the sections that are there. But over. Over to you, Ryan.
- [42:30]
Ryan Pizicki
I'm kind of one track, and so my entire life is just thinking about land use and cities and whatnot. So I wanted to highlight an essay that our mutual friend Andrew Miller wrote today. Andrew was also a Roots of Progress Institute fellow, as was I. In addition to Andrew here, he wrote about the death of his local bar. Basically, he lives in Toronto. And it was kind of like a moving piece just about how this. He says, you know, the bar didn't create community. It was the community. It was a place where, like, the bartenders themselves also went to get a drink or to have a meal. And I think about this. This kind of, like, loss of third places or, you know, just the dearth of them kind of. In our modern lives, especially as we go into a. As so many of us are working remotely. And it's easy to just open a bottle of wine. You know, I've got a whole wine closet. Why go out and be amongst people? But, you know, you kind of lose something when you don't have those places to go to and that opportunity to kind of commune with strangers or, you know, just familiar faces who you aren't friends with or don't know deeply, but can kind of enjoy a benevolent spirit with some spirits, perhaps. And just think about how integral those types of places were historically. You know, there's, like, interesting data now about, like, young people. They don't drive, they don't drink, they don't have sex. And I'm like, maybe these things are related because they don't have a bar within walking distance of where they live. Perhaps we would solve some of these social problems if, you know, everybody could just walk down the street and get a pint once in a while or something.
- [44:18]
Norman (Host)
But yeah, well, you're making me thirsty. But also thankful for a couple of spaces that I do have access to. But even those are endangered in a lot of different ways. And so if anybody's out there that knows of a good one in my community and wants to start a new one, I will come be a regular for sure. Especially with the name Norm, where everybody's like Norm. And I've never watched an episode of Cheers and yet I know the concept and sort of yearn for that in my community. So yeah, for me in the in my down zone, I got the chance to perform in Hannibal's Messiah over the weekend and really enjoyed doing that as a singer. And part of my delight was listening to a podcast called the Sticky Notes Podcast. I'd never come across it. There's, I think several hundred episodes now of classical music explained for laypeople, and it was excellent. So if anybody is looking for that, definitely go and check that out. You know, bit of a course correction or a change of focus, but yeah, with that. Andrew and Ryan, thanks for coming on upzone today. This has been fantastic. Really appreciate the conversation.
- [45:23]
Ryan Pizicki
Thanks.
- [45:23]
Andrew Burleson
Thanks Norm.
- [45:24]
Ryan Pizicki
Yeah, this is fun.
- [45:26]
Norman (Host)
Appreciate it. And again, we are supported by so many people. The Strong Tails movement is built by members. I highlighted three to start, but there are so many more that are part of this work. And so I appreciate the work that you are doing, whether you're pushing for greater stability in your community, helping people to realize their own dreams, kind of taking action to allow for more of the small things that we can do together to improve our places. Whatever it is that you're doing, take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non profit 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.