People who see cars as the only means of access and think that if cars go away, accessibility will as well.

People who like the status quo and think there is nothing for them in potential change.

And people who long for change but assume there must be some major societal collapse before things can be different.

For all of these people, action is likely being kept at bay by a lack of imagination about how a better world can be brought about.

Yet the truth is, even car-loving suburbanites hate the vibe other people’s cars bring to their neighborhoods. I think we can start from a point of, “Fewer cars zooming past your home is good, right?” and go from there.

Pay attention to how labyrinthine newer suburban developments are. Entrances and exits sit right next to each other because if they had through streets, people might actually use them. Cul-de-sacs, curvy streets, and impractical pathways are all meant to discourage one thing: unnecessary car traffic.

It’s in this that we recognize something: no one likes being near cars, not even their most ardent advocates.

What’s more, streets are so effective at dividing people that they were used almost like moats around parts of cities, separating people who were thought unworthy of accessing them.

But in this issue, I don’t want to rehash how we got here. I want to explore how we might get out.

Secondary Succession

The baller thing about nature is that it’s resilient. Not that it can’t be broken, but that it’s hard to break—and even harder to break forever.

Think of a thriving ecosystem. Now imagine something disrupts it: a forest is cleared, or a fire or flood wipes out most of the life there. The process of that ecosystem reestablishing itself is known as secondary succession.

Imagine a plot of land bereft of the life it had before, slowly coming back.

The first thing to note is that there are often things that never died or never left. Soil seed banks are natural stores of dormant seeds, some of which are activated by wildfires. They can literally lie dormant for 100 years. There are plants thought to have gone extinct that were rediscovered after fires. Their seeds remained dormant beneath the surface, avoiding competition until they were awakened by fire.

Similarly, some plants kick-start the process by being the first to return. They’re called pioneer species.Think of a hardy flower (often seen as a weed) that supports certain bugs, which bring birds, which inadvertently bring the seeds of other plants.

It kick-starts regeneration.

Suburban Repair

I think our cities are ripe for a secondary succession of sorts; for pioneer species to take root and kick-start a process of urban regeneration.

Cities that work are like ecosystems. They contain different people, uses, building sizes, price points, and sources of economic activity, all supporting one another.

Think of cities that struggle as monocultures. They may work for a while, but only through a volatile and unsustainable system requiring constant outside inputs. They depend too heavily on one industry, one kind of development, or one mode of transportation. They extract value from the land, existing neighborhoods, and future taxpayers while leaving the city increasingly fragile.

I first heard the term “suburban repair” from my friend Monte Anderson when he referred to one of his designs as a suburban repair kit.

These kits were almost like plays from a playbook: small ideas designed for a particular kind of dying property and a particular stage of development. Like pioneer species, they could survive in difficult conditions, bring some life back to a place, and prepare the ground for whatever came next.

One example he gave was about the main streets hollowed out during the era of white flight, suburbanization, highway construction, and the growth of malls and big-box stores.

When people try to bring businesses back to these places, they often go too big.

Many of these streets died at the height of their economic development, so the buildings left behind were built for a much stronger local market. You might want a large furniture store to become a restaurant, but renovating and operating that much space requires an enormous investment.

If the restaurant fails, you’re left with a big liability, hoping another restaurant will take on the same risk while knowing the previous one didn’t make it.

A string of failed businesses may lead the property owner to mitigate risk by leaving the building vacant until its value returns. Or they might turn it into an antique store and make just enough money to hold on.

This isn’t to say we don’t need antique stores, but go to almost any struggling downtown and the number of antique stores per capita is through the roof.

Vacant buildings and buildings not bringing in enough revenue often fall into disrepair. But cheap space can also provide the soil in which pioneer businesses take root.

So how do we bring value back to an area without requiring someone to make an enormous bet before the ecosystem is ready to support it?

Suburban repair kit #1: The Monte Mullet.

I don’t know if Monte likes the moniker I gave this particular repair kit. I actually stumbled across one of his developments without knowing it was his. I told him what I saw and said it was genius. He smiled and said, “I did that.”

Here’s what he did: he bought a building on an old, struggling main street.

Remember, these streets often stay dead because businesses cannot afford to open there. Instead of waiting for the market to change, Monte changes the building to meet the market where it is. He might take a 4,000-square-foot retail space, divide it in half, and then divide each half again.

What was once one large unit becomes four small ones. The two front units become commercial spaces, while the two in the back become residential.“Business in the front, party in the back.” That’s where I got the name for this particular suburban repair kit: the mullet.

Now, two much smaller businesses can afford to fill the commercial space, and two micro-apartments exist behind them. A business owner could live there, or the apartments could house someone who simply wants to live in a more commercial area.

The result is that more people live near the businesses, smaller and less expensive spaces create a lower rung on the economic ladder, and Monte can actually earn more rent per square foot.

One example of him doing something similar is a commercial property in Duncanville, Texas.

When he bought it, the property had seven commercial spaces and brought in $326,092 a year in rent, but it struggled to remain fully occupied.

That struggle was a sign that the size and price of the spaces weren’t what the area needed.

So he chopped up the buildings, making each unit smaller and more affordable. The result was $50,326 more in rent each year, fewer vacancies, and more attainable spaces for small businesses. The tenants paid less, and he made more.

It’s also worth noticing that by creating more small businesses, you increase the number of things to do in that location. Businesses thrive near other businesses and customers. So increasing both the number of people who live nearby and the number of reasons people have to visit creates a healthier ecosystem for everyone.

Suburban repair kit #1: Remove parking.

There’s a city-design concept sometimes called entrance frequency.

The more businesses you have within a small area, the more entrances there are and the more reasons people have to keep walking. Those businesses also benefit from being near one another.

Parking absolutely obliterates entrance frequency.

A business can literally be “across the street” from Walmart and still be more than 1,200 feet away because of all the parking between them.

What’s more, parking pushes businesses farther from the street, making it harder for people driving or walking by to even know they’re there.

And we’ve massively overbuilt parking. Even on Black Friday (the high holy day of shopping) many parking lots are still underutilized. So what can we do with some of that space?

Put in green space instead.

A guy I know restored an old building in my neighborhood and turned it into a taco place and brewery. Under the old requirements, parking would have consumed more than four of the property’s nine lots. He wanted that land to become public green space instead.

He worked with zoning and took advantage of newer code changes to build a much smaller parking lot. People wondered how the businesses would attract enough customers without all that parking.

His argument was simple: he wanted the neighbors to be his customers, and when more parking was needed, they could use spaces that already existed throughout the neighborhood.

During the World Cup, they hosted outdoor watch parties for U.S. matches and drew as many as 1,000 people for a single game. Instead of building 90 parking spaces, they created a place that could hold 1,000 customers.

So where did everyone park? Some used the small parking lot he built, some used a lot he rented across the street, and others parked on nearby streets. But plenty of people walked from their homes, and the bike racks were full.

People will park and walk a couple of blocks to get to a cool place. And if enough people live nearby, many of them won’t need to park at all.

Rip it out, put in a food truck corral: Back to Monte and DeSoto Marketplace. He took an old Ace Hardware, divided the store into 50+ tiny business spaces, added seven kitchens with takeout windows, and ripped out a third of the parking lot for a food truck corral.

The result? One food truck does $27,000 a week. The kitchens were his most resilient spaces during COVID, and the 50+ businesses inside generate more per square foot than Ace Hardware ever could—all while providing some of the cheapest places in DeSoto to start a business.

DeSoto Market has been around for 7+ years now, and dozens of businesses have flourished, outgrown, and moved on to other spaces. If he had left the space the size of a Ace hardware, he could have at best hoped for a dollar store to move in.

Suburban repair kit #3: Increase housing

Opticos popularized the term “missing middle housing”: the gentle density that helps cities build enough tax base to afford essential services.

They suggest that around 16 dwelling units per acre can support city-like amenities, infrastructure, and public transit. Yet some American cities average close to one dwelling per acre citywide, while even compact suburban developments often struggle to reach five to eight.

When cities fall far below a financially sustainable density, they struggle to pay for even basic services.

As cities work to strengthen their downtowns and first-ring suburbs, missing middle housing offers a creative way to bring people and value back to places that already exist.

Roommate House: Monte returns, this time with the roommate house. Just like breaking a commercial space into smaller units can create more affordable business spaces, the same can work with housing. The problem is that the housing we often need (duplexes, triplexes, and small apartments) is frequently restricted by zoning.

So Monte got creative. He took one house and divided it into three living spaces: a two-bedroom and two studios. Each has its own entrance, kitchen or kitchenette, and air conditioning, but they’re connected by interior doors and a shared laundry room. Legally, they’re “roommates” in one house, not a triplex.

The result? In 2019 dollars, a homeowner could have a $900 mortgage, rent the other two spaces for $250 each, and live there for about $400 a month—all while providing two deeply affordable places to live. No government subsidy required. Monte made an upscale version of this with a larger house and it caught the attention of the times, who wrote about it.

Accessory dwelling units: Cities across America are beginning to allow granny flats and backyard cottages in response to the housing crisis.

But we can think beyond simply adding more units. On older blocks with alleys, ADUs can face the alley and transform it into a narrow street; a “third frontage.” Corner units could even include small commercial spaces for a bakery or coffee shop.

At 16 or more homes per acre, neighborhoods can support not only infrastructure but more small businesses because there are more potential customers nearby.

It’s not enough to dream of utopia. You have to help good people see something they wish were possible, then show them how it is possible.

Most of these ideas require little to no change to a city’s existing systems. Restrictive zoning may need to be challenged, but creative designs can often add homes while still working within current rules.

Like pioneer species, these small developments build on one another, allowing more complex forms of urban life to return.

Their most important role is providing homes and spaces for businesses. But they also expand our collective imagination, helping people see that struggling cities are not doomed to their current trajectory.

I have more Ideas I wanted to share, but Substack warned me this was getting too long.

This is sort of how cycling is.

It’s aspirational in a way that the most visible idea of cycling are the people who look like they want to be in the Tour De France. Google the term cyclist and you’ll get images of the most intense version of cycling. Even taming the search term to “bicycle rider” and it’s not much better; people kitted out in professional looking jerseys on bikes that cost more than car’s I’ve owned.

These are mirrored in cultural opinions about cyclists being aggressive, entitled, and otherwise an inconvenience to other road users.

The idea that people who ride bikes are judged by the most intense type of riding is important, and we’re going to return to it in a second. But first, let’s take a look into an alternate reality.

Two Bikes

Earlier this week I spent the afternoon in a bike shop called Two Bikes and it took me about ten minutes to realize I wasn’t in the usual bike store. A woman came in, used the bathroom and left, and no one seemed to mind she didn’t buy anything or was even pretended to be there for anything else.

Two people were working on bikes. Someone else was at a computer writing while another disappeared in and out of the back. The front door opened.

“Hey, Junior,” Jess called hardly looking up.

Junior wheeled his bike over to a community repair stand and started pumping his tires. When the pump was making a weird hiss, Mitchell stepped over to help. By then everyone in the shop had greeted him by name.

He didn’t buy anything, and no one cared.

While neighborhood kids came and went, paying customers were dropping off bikes for repair. The head mechanic is a guy named Derek who has the kind of aptitude that feels instinctual, even though you know it's really just the product of years spent loving bicycles. Now I've loved plenty of things without ever becoming that good at them. But Derek has this way of explaining what's wrong and how to fix it without ever making me feel stupid, which is a big deal because it's surprisingly easy to make me feel stupid when it comes to bike.

The front door chime goes off and in walks a kid wearing a full motocross helmet. The helmet is a lot, but so is CJ. Mitchell immediately starts gassing him up. CJ tells me he volunteers here sometimes. When a customer walks in, CJ approaches with the confidence of a salesperson but the know-how of an eleven-year-old. He shows them the bike lights, then launches into a sales pitch that’s mostly just reading the packaging aloud; including the price. He flips a light on but can’t figure out how to turn it off. He confidently estimates the sales tax on a $65 purchase at “two dollars... maybe three.” The customer hadn’t even asked.

A guy rolls in with a flat tire, and they fix it for free, though Mitchell gently tells him they can't always do that. Then a local business owner comes in with a bike and ends up talking with Mitchell about a community ride that's going to end at her tea shop.

And these type of community rides happen frequently. No two are the same. My favorite this summer was one which ended at a park with a full slip-n-slide set up for adults with free hot dogs, and later today they have a kid friendly one in my neighborhood ending with an ice cream party.

Weston, the Director of Development, is the workhorse behind these events and probably one of the most social people I've ever met. Before long, the shop is humming. Even Weston, who'd been working on a grant or something, ducks into the back to focus

And Jess, who I mentioned earlier, isn’t a typical bike mechanic. She has a master’s degree and teaches professionally. She’s a teacher learning to be a mechanic because youth workforce development is one of the shop’s biggest priorities. That’s why she greets CJ and Junior by name the moment they walk through the door.

One day, when the shop was closed, Mitchell and I stopped by to pick up a book. I assumed we’d ride home together, but he spotted a group of neighborhood kids on bikes and peeled off to go hang out with them instead.

It’s a bike shop that sells and fixes bikes for money, but it’s also a place that gathers community. It offers free work stands and tools, has a couch and a PS2, has screened local short films, and has hosted art like a gallery. And for every bike they sell, they give away at least one more.

If the stereotypical bike shop is geared toward someone who looks like they’re training for an Ironman, Two Bikes is geared toward helping people ride bikes like they’re kids again.

Let’s return the the problem

Why is cycling judged by its most intense riders? There's nothing wrong with people who love seem to be training for a race. The problem isn't that they exist—it's that they've become the mascot for an activity that's mostly just people riding to work, to a friend's house, or to the grocery store or just going on a leisurely stroll with friends.

Another aspect is that the other visible cohort of cyclists are the people who use visibility and assertiveness as a survival tool. Timid people either don’t ride, stay off the main roads, or ride out of sight on the sidewalk.

At one point it became obvious that cars posed a legitimate threat to cyclists, but instead of redesigning streets, one of the dominant ideas became something called vehicular cycling. John Forester argued that cyclists should assert themselves as vehicles in traffic. Ride defensively. Take the lane. He even opposed bike lanes, believing they coddled cyclists and created a false sense of security.

Cities loved this philosophy because it was cheap. Instead of adding another lane or redesigning a dangerous street, they could paint a “Share the Road” symbol and call it a day.

The result is a kind of survivorship bias. The cyclists who remain are often the people confident enough to ride in conditions that discourage everyone else. They skew younger, healthier, and less risk-averse.

So when people see cyclists through their windshield, they usually aren’t seeing the average person who might ride a bike. They’re seeing someone dressed like they’re heading towards the olympics or someone confident enough to take a lane of traffic that most people would never willingly ride in.

If you make an effort to see the hidden cyclist— the people on bikes outside of downtown or the ones riding on the sidewalk—you see a lot of people who are experiencing economic hardship, living with disabilities, or maybe don’t have a driver’s license or are just having fun.

You see the young and the old exercising the one form of autonomous transportation they can. You see dishwashers heading to a shift and friends meeting up with friends. You see regular people.

Our challenge is making these hidden cyclist visible, and creating more of these types of bike riders.

The solution

While Two Bikes is one of my favorite nonprofits (full disclosure: I’m on the board), it also serves plenty of enthusiasts and serious riders. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The difference is they don’t stop there. They do the actual work of reaching out to people who don’t think of themselves as cyclists, showing them they’re allowed to enjoy riding without turning it into a hobby, and finding people who are already riding but could use a little help.

They obsess over meeting people where they are. It just sucks that it takes that level of obsession to do something that should be normal.

So while what they’re doing seems mundane, it’s actually the real work that shifts the needle on culture.

If you dig into the research on overcoming prejudice, you’re almost always going to run into the idea that people need contact with the people they stigmatize. That requires social proximity.

Psychologist Gordon Allport began writing about this during the early Civil Rights era. His contact hypothesis argued that separation allows stereotypes to grow and fester because you can maintain an image of an entire group when you rarely have to encounter actual individuals from that group.

And researchers have spent the last 70 years testing this idea. A massive 2006 meta-analysis looked at 515 studies, 713 samples, and more than 250,000 people (For the nerds: mere exposure). The conclusion was consistent: contact with people from another group tends to reduce prejudice toward that group. Even more interesting, getting to know one person can change how you think about the larger group they belong to.

It turns out this isn’t primarily an information problem. Later research found that contact works less by teaching us facts and more by reducing anxiety and increasing empathy. You can learn statistics about a group all day, but actually knowing someone forces the stereotype in your head to compete with a real human being.

And that’s part of what a place like Two Bikes can do. You don’t need to become best friends. You just need enough repeated, low-stakes contact for someone who was once an abstraction to become familiar.

We need to be about the business of creating more of these hidden riders, and then the work is making them less hidden. With increased ridership and representation people will start knowing individual cyclists and be less likely to oppose infrastructure that increases safety or practicality.

The cyclist stops being the Lycra-clad jerk who held you up in traffic and becomes CJ trying to sell you a bike light he can’t turn off.

Epilogue:

Two Bikes is a nonprofit, and there are two ways I’d love for you to support them.

1. Support the shop. If you’re local, use Two Bikes as your bike shop. If you’re not, you can donate here. Tell me if you donate.

2. Come to my favorite weekend of the year: Bike Camp. It’s an alternative bike festival where people from all over show up to ride bikes, camp, and hang out. You absolutely do not need to be a serious rider. In fact, for all the reasons above, we’d prefer as many regular people as possible.

Epilogue part two:

Remember when I said Mitchell and I went to the shop to pick up a book? This was the book. I’m only halfway through, but it’s full of strong (and maybe sometimes wrong?) opinions and helpful tips for becoming a regular person who rides a bike rather than a stereotypical cyclist. I don’t get any kickbacks, go order through your normal ways of purchasing books.

The first thing you should know is that The Chattanooga Urbanist Society (CUS) is not a real org; it has more in common with three racoons in a trench coat. Instead, it’s a mutual aid group with no real hierarchy that takes on public works projects without any real budget or permission.

I think next week I’ll tell more of the story of how the CUS got started, but today I want to share what I’ve learned from being part of a bench-building movement here.

The short version is this: the Urbanist Society was originally as a fake organization created to draw attention away from the people making changes to the public realm without the city’s permission. After one project got a lot of press, we had real momentum and decided to move forward with an idea we’d been sitting on: building benches for bus stops.

The typical bus stop in Chattanooga (and probably your city) has no shelter, no trash can, and no bench. The bench felt like the minimum viable object to give someone waiting for the bus a little rest and a little dignity. To date, we’re sitting (pun intended) at around 215 benches citywide, along with dozens of other smaller projects and events.

This issue is going to explain why you should do this yourself, and how others will likely join you.

Donate to help CUS build more

Lesson 1: Just build one bench.

Your community needs them. We’re losing public seating, and it affects whether people choose to spend time in places. Meanwhile, the people who rely on these spaces most are often left without a place to rest, resorting to sitting on whatever ad-hoc object they can find.

When we started building benches, there really wasn’t a “we.” It just felt like a project I could do, even if no one else joined. Funny enough, my (then) future friend Corey had the same idea. My singular effort turned into the mutual aid group CUS, and Corey’s turned into finding schools to build benches, raising money for lumber, and working with one other to orchestrate the whole project.

Corey has come to CUS events, but even just the benches he’s built or inspired account for at least half of what’s been built in our community.

But even if it never grows beyond one bench, building one changes you. It gives you a sense of autonomy and control, and there’s something deeply satisfying about watching someone you’ve never met sit down and use something you built.

Suggestion: Split the cost with a friend, build one a month. Have fun, invite others to join.

Lesson 2: Document

Start posting about your benches. Videos tend to do better, but pictures are fine too. Eventually, people will start commenting that they’ve noticed them. Some people don’t post because they’re afraid of getting in trouble. I don’t think you will. The most extreme action we’ve seen is a bench being removed. We’ve even had people from within the city bring benches back after they were taken.

Others don’t post because they don’t want the credit or it feels like bragging. I get that. But I also think it’s worth getting past that. Posting creates an entry point for other people to join, helps others become aware of the idea, and, in our case, led us to a major donor who eventually gave us tools, warehouse space, and bought lumber.

One group in Northwest Arkansas has gotten resources and support from their transit agency!

Suggestion: stay away from overt political messaging. This is just our approach, but the primary goal is seating, and anything that motivates resistance or removal works against that goal. If you must get your political angst out, I recommend putting signs on telephone poles instead.

Lesson 3: Include others

Early on, we mostly attracted people who were handy with power tools. Then we started inviting artists to paint the benches. That sense of ownership and pride from contributing was genuinely changing how people participated in the city.

When too many people showed up, we didn’t turn them away—we added more steps to the process. Sanding, for example. Why not? The benches turned out nicer, and more people got to be involved. Eventually, instead of one bench-building event, we had several: one for cutting lumber (high skill), one for priming (anyone can join), one for assembly (some skill required), and finally, we handed them off to artists.

Suggestion: Have people using power tools bring their own. We’ve found that some people who say they have experience don’t actually have enough. A good rule of thumb is that if they own a circular saw, they’re much more likely to know how to use one.

Lesson 4: Include even more

But here’s the thing: hosting build events still only attracts a fairly narrow group of people;those who already feel aligned with what you’re doing or are willing to step outside their comfort zone.

So start taking already-built benches to existing events. We brought one to a craft fair at the library. Three artists had doodled on white benches, and we handed out acrylic paint markers so people could color them in like a coloring book.

There’s something about helping build a bench that radicalizes people in the smallest way. When kids, parents, aunties, uncles, and grandparents all take part, they feel a sense of pride and ownership every time they see someone using that bench. Widen the top of the funnel and give more people a way to participate.

Suggestion: Offer bench painting as an activity at nonprofit events, block parties, festivals, and parades.

Lesson 5: Do more things.

To us, the benches are a gateway. We’ve cleared sidewalks, put up signage, painted roads, installed crosswalks and delineators, led trash pickups, fixed trails and bridges, cut away downed trees blocking footpaths, and done plenty of other things we don’t advertise.

When a crash killed members of a family in 2023, we put up signs. We collect stray and half-broken pieces of infrastructure to redeploy elsewhere. None of this is meant to replace the necessary work of cities, but it can fill a temporary gap while creating a larger conversation about why the city isn’t doing it in the first place.

This exercise of doing things without permission builds a moral muscle—something James C. Scott calls anarchist calisthenics. It makes it easier to do the right thing later, when the stakes are higher and the consequences are greater.

Tactical urbanism (the act of making changes that benefit the community without permission) isn’t about giving up on the public process. It’s about helping guide it by first helping the people who need it now, empowering those who would otherwise stay on the sidelines, and building the political capital that can eventually influence policy.

I promise you, you will likely get in no trouble. Build a crude bench, place it where people should be able to sit, tell the story, invite others in. Rinse, repeat.

Ps: Bench Groups/people I know of:

1. Spokane, Washington: Leopld bench design, and some of the best art!

2. Chattanooga Tennessee: You have Chattatransit, which uses the classic Leopold bench design, and the CUS, which started with its own design before eventually switching to Leopold.

3. Austin, Texas: Love they have their own style!

4. Tallahassee, Florida: Leopold style (haven’t seen much news on them lately!)

5. Buffalo, New York: Leopold style

6. Chicago, Illinois: Chattanooga style!

7. Savannah, Georgia: Chattanooga style!

8. Wilmington, North Carolina: Chattanooga style!

9. Fayetteville/Bentonville, Arkansas: Leopold bench

10. Richmond, Virginia: Leopold Bench

11. Nashville, Tennessee: Leopold Bench

12. San Francisco, California: They have their own benche designs found here.

13. Atlanta Georgia: Chattanooga Style!

14. I know I’m forgetting someone!

I used to work at a call center for Progressive Insurance. They were weird at the time because they didn’t measure something called “handle time.” Essentially, most call centers based your performance on how short you could make each call. Realizing the company saves millions whenever there are seconds shaved off calls, many companies made it their North Star.

Progressive was different. They said, “Take the time you need to solve the problem, and look for upcoming problems to proactively solve.” Is their new policy coming up and they don’t have autopay? Set that up! Keep them from accidentally canceling or calling back to make the payment.

Why did they do this? Because when you shortened calls, you incentivized shorter call times, which often meant people ended up calling back. Individual call times were down, but total call minutes went up across the company. Progressive realized proactive problem solving was a better northstar than a simple metric.

In this case, when you take a metric and make it a target, it ceases to be a helpful metric.

Or, officially, Goodhart’s Law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

This hurts us in economics because when interest rates, the NYSE, or something else becomes the measure of the economy—and then the target—the market begins to manipulate itself to hit that number. At that point, the measure becomes less useful. After all, who cares if stocks are up if I have no money to invest in those stocks?

Goodharts law pervades all elements of society.

Externalities.

Keep Goodhart’s Law in mind, and let’s move on to another economic term: externalities.

Arthur Cecil Pigou wrote a book called The Economics of Welfare. In it, he popularized the concept of externalities. Think of externalities as private decisions that positively or negatively affect members of society.

Here’s a SUPER simple example:

Positive externality: You plant a tree that shades the road, provides a place for a swing in the future, and benefits people in the future and in the public realm who had no part in the decision to plant or maintain that tree.

Negative externality: You cut down a tree on your yard that you had every right to cut down, but as a result, people lose shade, the nearby temperature is affected, etc.

Now, a single tree is quite the oversimplification. Externalities can often be life or death. Think of a super-profitable chemical company that increases the lead content in the soil to toxic levels. Decades after the company went out of business, the EPA is still cleaning up lead from the soil, and people continue to get poisoned. There’s a world where this company does the right thing from the beginning and there is no contamination, but they couldn’t do so without cutting into their profits.

But their profits were paid for by society, which had no choice in the matter.

Modern externalities often have good intentions.

Our cities are generally more careful about the types of obvious negative externalities they allow into their region. The fight against data centers is an example of this. But every policy either creates positive or negative externalities.

A new park may increase home values, bring neighbors together, and include a stormwater feature that makes the area more flood-resistant.

But often, even programs with negative externalities have positive intentions. Let’s say your city decides to help subsidize a stadium. They create a special tax district to finance it. While taxes can still go to schools, police, and roads, the rest of the tax revenue in that district goes toward the stadium until it’s paid off.

The idea is that the value the stadium brings increases tax revenue overall, and the investment compounds. But that doesn’t seem to be what happens. Often, the expenses are underestimated, and they take decades to pay off. In fact, according to Brookings research, the spending that stadiums bring in often isn’t net new spending, but shifted cultural and entertainment spending. Meaning, yes, more people go to see the baseball game, but fewer people are going to other forms of entertainment.

The negative Externalities of suburbs

Now let’s talk about modern suburban development. In rural communities, there are often low tax, low public service areas. You might live on a gravel road, and have a septic tank, and not pay high taxes. Within a city, you have high service, but also high tax producing areas. Notice I say tax producing. The taxes don’t always have to be extraordinary high within cities, but they generate more tax per-acre. But the suburbs are low tax producing high service areas.

Which means they cost a lot without producing anything.

Lane miles:

Chattanooga has a population of 180,000. Jersey City has 250,000. Chattanooga must maintain approximately 2,500 lane miles of roads, while Jersey City maintains about 250. A city with a smaller population has 10 times the roads to maintain.

Think of it like this: 2,000 feet of asphalt on a 35-foot-wide road costs the same to build and maintain in a neighborhood as it does downtown. But downtown can not only afford to build and maintain it with the tax revenue it produces, it also subsidizes many other miles of roads throughout the city.

Parking:

Most American cities require parking for new construction. This is a convenience for someone arriving by car. But it is paid for by the business itself, and thus the burden is transferred into the price of the product or service, regardless of how the customer arrived. What’s more, it heats up the area, increases water runoff, places a much larger burden on the sewer system, and is more apt to cause flooding.

Marketing:

Businesses thrive by clustering together and being close to their customers. But to create the suburban city, we’ve separated uses: businesses are far from neighborhoods and, thanks to parking requirements, far from one another. Yet the most valuable parts of many cities are often the pre-zoning neighborhoods where businesses could cluster without parking mandates. Someone who comes to buy a suit is more likely to grab a latte next door.

When every outing requires an intentional trip, small businesses have to constantly fight for attention. Marketing becomes far less important when people are already walking past your front door. Most stores in the typical mall don’t pay for marketing.

Big Empty buildings:

When a small store is vacated, it’s reasonable to transform it into a different business. When a barbershop closes, it can become a coffee shop, restaurant, dry cleaners, or any number of other reasonable small businesses. But when a superstore or factory closes, it may sit vacant indefinitely. I can think of three superstores in my area that have essentially moved across the street and left a hulking shell of a building sitting vacant for years.

They create a cycle

Now look at the four things above and see how they affect each other. The big empty building sits along a road it should be paying for, has a huge parking lot, and is pushing businesses farther apart.

Many of our problems are an entanglement of Goodhart’s Law and negative externalities. We become fixed on addressing a measurement, try and fix it, and obsessing on that number, we make things worse.

We build suburbs to address housing, traffic gets bad. Commute time as a measurement becomes a target. We build wider roads to accommodate that. But suburbs just continue to spread further out, and traffic gets worse.

Roads and sprawl create un-walkable areas, so more people require the use of cars. The few places where you can live car-free become unattainable to most people financially, so they move further out.

Cities begin to annex these outlying areas to capture tax revenue. But with that comes a maintenance price tag on the infrastructure that isn’t equal to the taxes generated.

Our cities in America are enormous because of this. Utrecht, in the Netherlands, is 38 square miles and has a population of 370,000+. Chattanooga has half the population, yet is 151 square miles. There is a social cost borne by those in the higher tax-producing parts of a city.

Solution:

I’m not sure there’s a neat answer to this. In fact, I’d be suspicious of one. Any singular focus on a meaningful metric has the potential to backfire (Goodhart’s Law).

If you think in terms of carrots and sticks, we already have examples of both. On the stick side, there are Pigouvian taxes, which charge for activities that impose costs on society, like New York City’s congestion pricing. On the carrot side, some cities fast-track preapproved housing plans through the permitting process, making it easier to build the kinds of housing they want more of.

But the hard truth is that we didn’t get here because of one bad decision. We got here through hundreds of small decisions, made over decades, that slowly tangled the system. And if that’s true, we probably won’t untangle it with one grand solution either. It’ll take hundreds of small improvements, made consistently over time, each one nudging the system back in the right direction.

It’s an underdog superpower.

I heard this story of white supremacists coming to Knoxville and instead of being met with a counter protest, they were met with people dressed like clowns. Typically, a counter protest can legitimize and create more neutral or positive press for those staging the protest. In this case, the mocking gestures of the clowns took the wind out of the sails.

Or, think about when tech companies started discovering the power of AirBNB and VRBO, they were a half century behind the initial concept which was the greenbook; a directory made up partially of homes willing to host you if you were black and there were no places to stay in a town.

While the Greenbook and AIRBNB aren’t exactly the same, it is a similar idea; find a way to connect people needing a bed with people willing to loan one. But the reason it was so far ahead of it’s time is that it had to be.

Being black in the Jim Crow south required innovation even to do normal things. The most innovative solutions often come from the the people who lack the power to play a game straightforwardly.

David beat Goliath because he didn’t try to wield a sword. And if you lack the power to have a fair fight playing a certain game, then change the game. These examples are something known as lateral thinking. The term was coined by Edward de Bono, and I think it’s the underdogs superpower. A method of solving problems by looking at them from new and unexpected angles rather than following a step-by-step logical process.

It emphasizes creativity, reframing assumptions, and finding unconventional solutions.

It’s Not even cheating

There’s this game show called Taskmaster that’s my absolute favorite. It’s not really a game show because there’s no meaningful prize money. The premise is simply putting comedians in ridiculous situations with just enough competition to make it entertaining.

Stick with me.

Five comedians compete in the most absurd tasks imaginable. One challenge might be to get the most tennis balls to the other side of a court while the host tries to do the same to you. The twist is that if you hit a gong on the far side, the host (your opponent) has to stop for 2 minutes.

Each contestant frantically throws tennis balls, only to have them tossed right back by their opponent.

Until one contestant simply walks to the other side of the court and hits a ball directly onto the gong every two minutes. Their opponent freezes, and they casually move every ball to the correct side.

There was never a rule saying they had to stay on their side of the court. It wasn’t considered cheating, the game rewards people who think differently.

As mentioned the most creative solutions often come from the underdogs. If a challenge favors athleticism, it’s often the older or less athletic contestants who find an entirely different way to win. Instead of relying on brute ability, they rely on creativity.

Lateral vs. Vertical

In order to better understand lateral thinking, it’s important to define it’s counterpart, vertical thinking. Verticality is all that’s methodical and follows a process.

In our society, vertical thinking is the standard; straightforward tests and essay rubrics all seem to favor those who are more vertically minded.

Now hear me out, both vertical and lateral thinking are absolutely essential for creating progress and shifting the odds. I once had someone explain the importance of the two like this: In space travel there’s a concept called a gravity assist, where we use the gravitational pull of a planet to launch satellites farther into space and save fuel.

• Lateral thinking came up with the idea.

• Vertical thinking ran the numbers to figure out how to make it possible.

In space, or any cutting edge technology is a great example for lateral thinking because they are coming up against the limits of humankind. When we are strapped for a resource and need more energy or efficiency so we are required to exercise a strategic use of what we have.

And what is an underdog except those constrained in some sort of resource? Finance, time, or perhaps the support of the majority. Everything they do, has to used in it’s most powerful form just to get noticed.

Every movement is going to need lateral and vertical thinkers. But the opportunity for an underdog is laterality, and it needs to be embraced. Below are a few examples of that.

Lateral thinking for the housing crisis

If you’ve followed my page recently, you know I’m a big fan of the incremental development movement. I do contract work for both the Incremental Development Alliance and Neighborhood Evolution because they’re doing great work.

One of the people whose projects I feature often is Monte Anderson. I think one of his most important projects is one very few people know about.

Sometimes referred to as the “sneaky triplex.”

Monte built it in Dallas, where a triplex wouldn’t have been allowed. Instead, he bought a house and renovated the front into a two-bedroom home. The mortgage ended up around $1,000 a month, and a house like that could easily rent for around $2,000.

This was 2019, but even then that’s an insanely low rent; but he didn’t stop there. Because it was on a corner lot, he converted the back of the house into two studio apartments with their own entrances. That sounds like a triplex, so why was it legal?

Because all three spaces were connected by a shared laundry room and an interior door. Legally, they weren’t separate units—they were roommates sharing one house. To avoid creating separate dwelling units, the studios had kitchenettes with plug-in induction burners and air fryers instead of full kitchens.

The result was two deeply affordable studios that rented for $250/mo. Which also cut the homeowner’s housing costs in half. He didn’t change a single law. He simply used the existing rules creatively.

The “sneaky duplex” and “sneaky triplex” are popping up across the country.

Monte later pushed the idea even further, converting a 3,000-square-foot ranch house into five apartments, living in one while two of his daughters lived in others. It became a beautiful example of multigenerational housing and creative development; one that even caught the attention of The New York Times.

Lateral thinking for parks

One challenge for cities is building parks where people need them most. The challenge is the right kinds of parks in the right places.

There are few things that earn more political praise than a big signature park with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. But what often gets overlooked are the neighborhoods that would be better served by several small parks instead of one giant one.

I was talking with one of my neighbors yesterday about a park near us. It’s nice, but it lacks shade and is filled with plastic and rubber play equipment. It’s such a large investment that it’s hard to criticize, but it also doesn’t seem to reflect much community input. She said, and I agree, it’s just an overwhelming mount of stuff that makes you sound ungrateful to question it.

I’d much rather have several smaller parks with trees, places to sit, and spaces designed for different ages spread throughout an area.

The only reason parks need to be big, flashy, and centralized is political clout/

Neighborhoods can also take action themselves.

Mama Shu in Detroit transformed abandoned lots into places for kids to play, learn new things, and even have businesses. The Downtown Lafayette team in Louisiana used money set aside for activating a park to build skateable benches that attracted people and made the space feel safer. And here in Chattanooga, Shaw Park in in my neighborhood is an pocket park hat neighbors are turning into a shaded park with natural landscaping and places to gather.

Cities should also be asking how parks can be less expensive to build. Maybe that looks less like expensive playground equipment and more like natural landscapes or pieces of art that invite kids to explore.

One of the reasons we lack good parks isn’t just a lack of money, but also a lack of ingenuity.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t fight for funding. But if the only way we know how to build great parks is through fully funded projects and the benevolence of politicians, we’re going to be waiting a long time.

Lateral thinking for safe streets (citizens)

The people who live on the street who care the most about it’s safety and are also typically powerless to change it.

First and foremost, these are the people who should be showing up to city meetings and advocating for long term, systematic change. But across the country, many have gone a step further by working with their cities to install privately funded improvements—or by doing it themselves.

One of the best examples is Crosswalks Collective in Los Angeles. They paint crosswalks where people have been killed. Sometimes the city grinds them away, arguing they’re a liability. But every time that happens, the group gains national attention and raises money to paint more. And for every crosswalk that’s removed, many others get painted and go unnoticed by the city. Eventually, as they fade, residents report them through 311 for maintenance, and cities end up fixing crosswalks they never installed in the first place.

Tactical and guerrilla urbanism is making a difference across the country, often inspiring cities to follow the lead of the people who know those streets best.

Lateral thinking for Safe streets (cities)

It’s not just citizens who are strapped for resources. Cities often don’t have everything they need to do what they want either.

Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey, are great examples of municipalities that started with a clear mission and then did what they could with what they had.

Hoboken hasn’t had a pedestrian death on its streets in more than eight years. That wasn’t because of a windfall of cash. It happened because the city followed the data, found the most affordable ways to make streets safer, and acted.

That meant a lot of stop signs, paint, and plastic. Could those treatments look better if they were rebuilt in concrete, stone, or asphalt? Absolutely. And maybe one day they will be.

But cities that do what they can with what they have are light-years ahead of cities that keep making excuses for doing nothing.

The key to lateral thinking

1. Challenge Assumptions: Discover arbitrary barriers in your mind.

   1. What rules am I following?

   2. Which rules are imaginary?

   3. What rules don’t carry a huge consequence?

2. Analogical Transfer: See how’s it’d done in other domains

   1. How would a forest solve this?

   2. How would Amazon solve this?

   3. How would an ant colony solve this?

   4. How would a kindergarten teacher teach this concept?

3. Increase the diversity of your inputs: Novel combinations require novel ingredients.

   1. Read outside your field

   2. Talk to people who are different than you

   3. Travel

4. Incubate the problem: let time and your subconscious work on a solution

   1. Sleep on it

   2. Do another task

   3. go for a walk.

5. Generate an overwhelming amount of ideas

   1. write down 10 obvious ideas

   2. write down 10 more non obvious ones

6. Change constraints: Instead of accepting limitations, ask what can be done with what you have

   1. Not: I need $1,000 and the cities permision to do this

   2. But: What can I do now without permission and with the money I have?

Every great shift in society, from the outlawing of slavery to the creation of public parks, was once a radical idea to someone. And the shift to acceptance didn’t happen through one massive cultural change, but through thousands of small ones—people testing new ideas and winning small battles in unconventional ways.

If we’re going to build a better built environment, and punch above our weight, it will only by playing a different game, which will require lateral thinking.

Cities across america have made remarkable progress reducing violent crime. Overall it has fallen for multiple years in a row, and homicides continue to trend downward. Here, the Chattanooga has identified a public safety problem, collected data, assigned responsibility, and acted with urgency. Yet we approach traffic violence very differently.

Yet traffic crashes continue to kill and seriously injure Americans every year, but we often treat them as unavoidable. We call them accidents and rarely ask why they keep happening. Rarely do we ask whether the streets themselves are contributing to the outcome.

In a CDC study of 29 wealthy nations, the United States ranked worst for traffic deaths. There are really only two realistic variable here; there’s an inherent genetic component that makes peer nations better drivers, or perhaps the environment in which they drive plays a significant role.

• Enforcement: They can enforce traffic laws more aggressively because losing your license doesn’t mean losing your ability to get around.

• Designed for correct speed: Streets which feel unsafe naturally cause drivers to slow down. And slow drivers help slow down otherwise dangerous drivers.

• Designed for attention: When a driver feels unsafe, they act more alertly and more carefully. A dangerous intersection should feel so.

• Designed as an option, not the option: Drunk people have other ways home, the elderly and the young do not have to risk the lives of the general public to remain autonomous, and the disabled can live more regular dignified lives.

Yet, in America, our roads are overbuilt, unsafe, and and there’s ulternative. This means the most at risk put others at risk every time they get behind a wheel.

That is why I was initially excited to learn that my city was pursuing a $17 million Safe Streets for All grant. This is one of the few federal funding sources specifically aimed at transportation safety. Before I go any further, let me be clear: I am not opposed to data, research, technology, or my cities Smart City initiatives. The problem is when information becomes a substitute for action.

Yet, the grant proposal describes investments in intersection monitoring, cooperative perception tools, autonomous vehicle capabilities, thermal drones, emergency response technology, and emergency vehicle preemption. Some of these tools may prove useful, but there is a noticeable omission; there is little discussion of physically changing the roads themselves.

And Chattanooga has been particularly bad at this in all areas of problem solving. We love pioneering new processes and getting headlines for our innovation, but often these programs fall flat. Like housing pilots that win awards but end with very few affordable units getting built. Like a person with interesting books on their book shelf; they get credit for being well read but in reality they haven’t read a single book.

They’ve done it, and we can too.

What we need right now, is urgent action more than analytics.

Every city which has made strides in reducing traffic violence has done so through persistent, quick, and small actions. This is a concept known as quick builds, or in some cases, tactical urbanism.

Chattanooga’s most dangerous corridors are not a mystery. After the fatal crash on Frazier Avenue in 2023, a friend used publicly available crash data to create a heat map showing many of the city’s crash hot spots. We already know where many of the problems are.

What’s more, with support from the Lyndhurst Foundation, Chattanooga hired internationally recognized planner Jeff Speck to study downtown corridors and recommend safety improvements. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I obtained draft versions of those recommendations.

The proposals are straightforward: narrow lanes, remove excess lanes, add protected bike lanes, improve crossings, calm traffic, and redesign streets in ways that reduce speeds and create a larger margin for human error.

Think of it like this: If a public pool had a drain that repeatedly trapped swimmers, we wouldn’t respond by installing more cameras, deploying sensors to detect distressed swimmers, and buying better rescue equipment. Those tools might help after something goes wrong. But the first priority would be fixing the drain.

Yet, this is how we are treating car deaths in our cities across the country. We assume there’s one fix that will be politically accepted by everyone, that won’t effect traffic flow, and will increase safety, if only we have the data to figure it out.

That is what worries me about Chattanooga’s approach to street safety. Our response to dangerous roads increasingly focuses on managing the consequences rather than preventing the crash. We are investing in ways to understand and respond to danger while being far less willing to have the political courage to remove the danger.

What we could do urgently

Things we could quickly change

1. One way roads: Many have been corrected, but quite a few still exist in our downtown area.

2. Automated pedestrian lights: Right now, even where pedestrian signals exist, they require pushing a button. Many visitors don’t realize this, wait through a light cycle, then cross without a signal anyway.

3. Leading pedestrian intervals: Giving pedestrians a five-second head start before lights change for cars downtown makes them more visibly prominant in the intersection

4. Four-way stops: A four-way stop slows traffic, improves safety, makes crossings easier for people walking and biking, and creates more predictable interactions between road users. In some cases, this doesn’t mean added to two-way stops, but also replacing traffic lights all together.

5. Removing unnecessary lanes: Sometimes called a road diet, or right sizing, we can look at traffic reports, determine which roads aren’t being fully utilized, and reduce the lanes. That extra space can be given to other uses and purposes.

6. Reducing lane size: Early on, it was assumed wider lanes were safer because they increases a margin for error. But studies show the width of lanes increase speed and thus danger.

7. Traffic diverters: find residential neighborhoods that have fast cut through traffic, and make roads impassible as a straight conveinent path.

8. Remove Slip lanes: dedicated right-turn lanes that allow cars to yield instead of stop, are often unsafe and provide little efficiency gain. They function like miniature highway ramps, creating conflict points between pedestrians and turning vehicles that don't exist on highways.

These are a few small things that could make a huge difference.

Technology has a role to play, but our cities does not suffer from a lack of information. What it suffers from is a gap between what we know and what we are willing to build.

If awarded $17 million, this grant could represent a once-in-a-generation investment in safety if it was invested in implementation.

My hope is that citizens across the country begin to demand more directed action above research.

The Backrooms is, and always has been, a horror rooted in the same modernity that brought about the suburban experiment. I want to give an oversimplified view of how the idea of liminality entered our culture and why it seems to resonate so deeply with so many people.

But the movie introduces another angle that, to me, reveals one of the biggest challenges we face in changing the built environment: the imagination of people who have only ever known the suburban landscape, and the fading memory of those who remember what existed before it. If it’s difficult to imagine a different future, it’s often because we’ve either forgotten the past or have no connection to it.

Just an FYI

At some point, someone posted an image of a yellowish, empty room on 4chan that felt unsettling or “off.” Along with it came the term The Backrooms, a plane of reality where that space, and the feeling it gave you, stretched on almost infinitely.

The post also used the term noclip, a video game term for the ability to pass through walls or other objects (there’s more to it, but this will suffice). The idea is that you might accidentally noclip out of reality and into this parallel world, becoming trapped in an endless maze of empty, liminal spaces.

Tracing back the feeling of liminality

My degree is in philosophy. I forget that sometimes, both because I was never into philosophy as a taxonomy— can’t remember which philosopher introduced which idea or the tight definitions most people associate with them—and because thinking about thinking comes so naturally to me that it doesn’t feel like a degree one should be allowed to have.

But I had to brush up on some ideas to bring us up to speed on what is happening when we feel a sense of dread in the backrooms.

• Arnold Van Gennep introduces the term liminality in works on discussing rites of passsage to explain in between stages. A teenager is liminal because they’ve left childhood but haven’t reached adulthood. liminality an in-between stage.

• Freud introduced the idea of the uncanny, something both familiar and strange. Today, we often see it in the uncanny valley, when a robot looks almost human, but not quite enough to feel natural.

• Victor Turner expands the idea, and begins applying it to other ideas, until these ideas move into architecture with the help of Gaston Bachelard and Heidegger.

• Because of this transition into architecture, the word Liminal, rooted in the Latin word for “threshold,” moves beyond obvious transitional spaces like thresholds and hallways. It’s used to describe the feeling of a place that seems caught between states, even when it isn’t meant to be transitional at all.

• Philosophy meets reality. By the 1980s, we had a built environment that seemed to embody the uncanny and the liminal. But it’s most noticeable when people are absent. Malls and endless suburbs often feel liminal at night or when they’re empty.

Why the suburban is Uncanny

Let’s dip back into this definition of the uncanny. Part of what makes the Backrooms so hard to describe is that everything in them is normal. Walls. Floors. Ceilings. Lights. Try describing a Backrooms image to someone over the phone and you’ll quickly realize the challenge. Nothing is obviously wrong, and yet something feels off.

In the same way a teenager can feel misunderstood during a liminal season of life, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes something uncanny. It contains all the pieces of normalcy, but they’re assembled in such a way that, once people are removed, the absurdity becomes visible. The familiar without familiarity.

In 2016, Kate Wagner started the blog McMansion Hell, where she ruthlessly dissected the absurdity of cheap suburban mansions. What made the blog compelling wasn’t that the houses were ugly. Plenty of ugly buildings exist. It was that the houses seemed to have no internal logic

.Historically, architectural forms emerged for reasons. Buildings reflected local materials, climate, technology, and culture. Then modern architects like Le Corbusier argued that with steel, concrete, and glass, there was no need to keep copying old forms. Why put a fake column on a building when it isn’t holding anything up? Modernism was about being honest with materials.

Then postmodernism arrived and essentially responded: Why are you being so serious? If architecture is communication, symbolism, and art, then use whatever references you want.

Suburban architecture often takes that “anything goes” philosophy of postmodernism and combines it with the certainty of modernism; it’s like a clown demanding to be taken seriously. It borrows whatever architectural signals communicate luxury, tradition, wealth, or lifestyle, and then presents the result as if it all belongs together. A turret here. A Roman column there. A giant entryway attached to a house that otherwise looks like three different buildings arguing with each other.

Kate Wagner built an entire blog around pointing out this contradiction. The joke was never that these houses were large. The joke was that they felt strangely uncanny. They contained all the familiar ingredients of architecture, but arranged in a way that revealed how arbitrary many of those symbols had become.

In that sense, a McMansion and suburbia are a fractal pattern. As you zoom out, both are built from ordinary pieces. Each aspect of a suburb is designed in reference to something it has no real commitment to. But rather than admitting that the place is artificial and reflects a set of personal preferences, it is often idealized as the final form of cities and what most people want.

To me, the only honest suburb is a gated community, one that openly says: this is our preference. We value privacy and exclusion enough that we are willing to pay for our own infrastructure in order to preserve our highly specific way of living.

Suburban liminal problems

So with this lack of connection to history, and the seriousness of modernism mixed with the promiscuity of postmodernism, we can understand why suburbia feels absurd. But what makes it liminal?

I think it’s because suburbia is cosplaying rural while demanding the resources of the urban.

In a rural community, things are cheaper, more spread out, and life moves slower. But rural places also accept the tradeoffs that come with that. Amenities are farther away, convenience is limited, and instant gratification isn’t expected. Rural areas also play a crucial role in society. They provide the land for agriculture, the space for resource extraction, and often the inexpensive land that industry depends on.

Cities, by contrast, are where those rural surpluses are transformed into culture, innovation, and economic activity. Nearly everything you use exists in part because of cities. Even the most city-hating farmer depends on tools, technologies, and markets that emerged from urban economies.

Suburbia sits awkwardly between these worlds. It wants the privacy, space, and perceived tranquility of rural life, while expecting the amenities, services, and convenience of urban life. Nothing is more emblematic of this than our disdain for traffic. We want a million people to pulse in and out of a small area by car, reject more efficient alternatives like public transit, and then act surprised when the result is inconvenient.

If rural and urban places are symbiotic, different but mutually beneficial, suburbia often feels dysbiotic. It depends on both while weakening the strengths of each.

It weakens cities by spreading people across vast areas, requiring exponentially more infrastructure to serve the same population. Like butter spread over too much bread, the population remains the same while the roads, pipes, power lines, and services multiply. Barcelona and Nashville have roughly similar populations, yet Nashville covers many times more land (13x). Every mile of infrastructure still has to be built, maintained, and eventually replaced.

Suburbia also reshaped cities in its own image. Highways were cut through neighborhoods, communities were divided, and vast amounts of land were paved for parking. Ironically, many suburban residents would never choose to live next to the kinds of roads that were imposed on urban neighborhoods. By restricting growth in suburban areas, development pressure was concentrated into a shrinking amount of urban land, driving up costs and making housing more expensive.

At the same time, many suburban developments rely on the economic productivity of urban areas to help pay their bills.

On the flip side, it weakens rural areas too. Most suburban development happens in large, master-planned projects. Developers can afford to build the roads, pipes, and other infrastructure up front because they’re funded by a one-time windfall of cash. Often, that infrastructure is then handed over to the city.

The problem is that suburbs are rarely allowed to evolve. Forty years later, when the roads and pipes need replacing, the tax revenue often isn’t enough to cover the bill. Cities are then faced with a devil’s bargain: approve more growth to pay for the obligations of past growth. This is what Charles Marohn calls the Growth Ponzi Scheme.

It’s also part of the reason American cities have expanded so dramatically. As development marches outward, rural land becomes too valuable to remain farmland, forest, or open space. The city consumes the countryside, not because it needs to, but because the math demands it.

New Urbanism’s firstr attempt

At some point, the absurdity of our spread-out cities, combined with a longing for more traditional development patterns, gave rise to a movement called New Urbanism. It attempted to reconcile the best parts of urbanity with a suburban mindset.

The result was an urban environment, mixed-use, walkable, and relatively dense, built in a distinctly suburban way: all at once, fully completed, with little opportunity to evolve or change over time. One of the earliest examples was Seaside, Florida, designed by DPZ and Andrés Duany, perhaps the most influential figure in the New Urbanist movement.

The results were idyllic, but still a little uncanny. Seaside referenced urbanism without one of its essential components: evolution. The uncanniness was so apparent that it became the perfect setting for The Truman Show.

And that points to one of suburbia’s deepest flaws: it cannot meaningfully change. The day the ribbon is cut is often the moment a development is closest to its intended vision, and from there it slowly declines. Because everything is built at once, everything ages at once.

Urbanism is not just a form, it’s a process. Cities become great through adaptation, accretion, and reinvention over time. The Backrooms share the opposite quality. They appear to have grown, but never changed. They are forever trapped in a dated aesthetic, frozen between past and present, much like the suburban landscapes that inspired them.

Which brings us back to liminality.

That’s why the Backrooms resonate. They aren’t completely alien. They’re built from familiar pieces arranged into something strangely suspended, a place caught between what it was imitating and what it actually became.

The problem is that, in many ways, we’ve codified the Backrooms into public policy. We’ve lived in them for so long that many people have no point of reference outside them. Imagine trying to leave the Backrooms if they were all you’d ever known. Isolation would feel normal. Community might feel overwhelming.

The challenge is convincing someone who only knows the echo that the original sound is preferable.

Part of what makes the Backrooms movie so compelling is that it can communicate a feeling without fully explaining it. People project their anxieties onto them. Some see capitalism. Others see technology, consumerism, or modern life. I see an expression of the anxieties embedded in our built environment.

But that’s what good stories do. They help us make sense of reality. And if the Backrooms are tapping into something real about the way we’ve built our world, that’s encouraging. Once we can recognize a problem, we can begin to imagine an alternative.

This week I was accused of both-sidesing…by both sides. People who otherwise disagree found common ground in believing I had treated unequal things as equal. Each assumed the power imbalance was held by the other, and so an even-handed account felt, to them, like an excuse for injustice.

Someone went as far to say the video I made was irresponsible.

If it is not already plain, both-sidesing occurs when we pretend equality where there is none, especially where power is unevenly held.

To say “both made mistakes” of an abusive parent and a child is to confuse fairness with symmetry. The child may indeed have erred in small ways, as all children do. But these are not comparable faults, and to treat them as such is to misunderstand justice itself. Both sides may indeed have made mistakes, but to pretend the outcomes are equal is unjust.

Competing ideas and priorities

The problem with disagreements isn’t just that we disagree with an issue at hand, but that we disagree with the significance of the issue at hand.

Take a statement like being “nut-free.” To one person it’s a matter of taste, to someone with an allergy it’s a matter of life and death. They use the same language, yet inhabit entirely different worlds.

We spend so much time in algorithms and AI that mirror us back to ourselves that we start to expect the world to do the same. And when it doesn’t, it feels like something’s broken, even when it isn’t.

If we aren’t allergic, it feels like no big deal if a nut slips into the recipe.
If we are, it feels obvious that everyone should understand exactly how serious that is.

So as we encounter something we disagree with, it feels like a fundamental error. As though reality itself has slipped out of alignment and needs to be corrected.

This is not to suggest the consequences are equal—they obviously aren’t. The one with the allergy has far more at stake. Yet it is still wise not to assume that others perceive the matter with the same urgency.

In this sense, what is meant for one person fundamentally will not be as helpful to the other. This is the context for Fundamentalist 2.0.

Fundamentalism 1.0

When we think of fundamentalism, we often picture groups trying to impose not just broad moral rules, but very specific beliefs on others.

This is usually something the majority imposes on society. It is one thing to have rules against stealing. It is another to require something like head coverings, which feels rooted in revelation rather than reason.

Even when a group is a minority, like Mormons, there are places where they can gather, become the majority, and shape the culture, like in Utah.

Fundamentalism does not have to be religious, and it does not have to be written into law. You can see similar patterns in secular systems. A rigid, enforced worldview in a political regime can function in much the same way.

The deeper problem with fundamentalism is not simply that the beliefs might be wrong. Even if the beliefs were right, the posture can still be harmful. Fundamentalism claims a kind of certainty that freezes belief and understanding. And when belief becomes fixed in a changing world, it eventually stops fitting.

Keep this in mind. I am going to come back to it.

Bean soup

Bean soup is one of the most helpful concepts to come out of TikTok for me. It means taking something that is not meant for you and judging it as if it were.

It comes from someone commenting on a bean soup recipe saying it looked bad because they hate beans.

Of course you would hate bean soup. The comment is unnecessary.

But bean soup goes beyond preferences. Some people comment on form. “I hate how often you walk around in your videos.” Okay, maybe those videos are not for you.

With the video I posted this week, the strategy was different. I wanted people to look at their own lenses and see how, even if they win, the thing they are fighting for might not be what we need most.

In this case, it is about the futility of assigning blame in a crash.

I could have started the video I mentioned earlier by saying: “cars are dangerous, motorists kill more children than guns, and driving requires full attention! We should revoke licenses for anyone at fault in a crash!”

But the people I most want to reach would have skipped the video.

And even beyond that, success on those terms is limited. So, what if we assign blame correctly and punish drivers? That does not bring children back. It does not meaningfully reduce crashes.

So, I made a video that, at first, assigned blame equally to cyclists and drivers, before shifting into a thought experiment that shows we do not offer equal protections to those groups.

The goal was to create an “aha” moment for someone who might not otherwise be open to hearing this perspective. This video was not meant for an avid cyclist.

But algorithms have curated a reality in which I agree with most of what I’m fed, and led to believe this is the way, and that others, if they just opened their eyes, could see what I am seeing.

Fundamentalism 2.0

The problem is not that people’s eyes aren’t open. It is that everyone is looking at a different screen. That is the heart of fundamentalism 2.0.

Step into a heated comment section and you will quickly see how much energy goes into purity testing. If your movement or beliefs rely on complete agreement, you will never find allies.

If fundamentalism 1.0 is the majority imposing niche beliefs on the minority, fundamentalism 2.0 is the individual imposing their personal beliefs on everyone.

Bean soupification is looking at something that was not meant for you, not understanding it, or simply not liking it, and deciding it is therefore wrong and should not exist.

In fundamentalism 1.0, purity testing separates groups.

In fundamentalism 2.0, it’s everyone purity testing everything.

This creates a kind of cultural fission. We keep subdividing until each of us becomes our own group, expecting everyone else to fully agree.

The work

Now, what I’m saying is a bit hyperbolic. It will never make it far enough to reach this extreme.

But movements have been weakened by this posture. It is not enough to be right. You have to be right together, and willing to become more right. My neighbor Emerson puts it this way: his work is to work with people he imperfectly agrees with.

Remember, when fundamentalists were cruel and unyielding, they also believed they were fighting evil itself. Their response felt appropriate to them. Every compromise felt like an unjustified capitulation.

And that ‘us vs. the world’ mentality now is a ‘me against the world’ one.

In a couple of weeks, I will be at a conference with people who assume we have a lot in common. And we will. During that time, we will focus on what we share and hopefully build enough trust to pressure test where we disagree. This is good. This is healthy.

It’s hard to do this on the internet because there’s a kind of veil. People seem to either fully agree or fully disagree. That is why meeting in person matters. You see the humanity in someone. It becomes easier to respond with compassion when you think they are wrong, and to recognize common ground when it appears.

There may not be a neat conclusion beyond this: it is not enough to be right. Posture matters. Our screens can make it feel like our beliefs are the only rational outcome for anyone paying attention. They are not. If we want to get meaningful work done, we have to work with people we disagree with in some ways. And to do that, we have to see their full humanity. That is much easier to do in person.

The end of history illusion is fascinating. If I ask who you are, you tend to think of yourself as fixed, shaped by your beliefs, feelings, ideas, and stories. But if I ask how you’ve changed over the past ten years, you can point to real differences. The truth is, you’re always changing, it’s just easier to see in hindsight. The illusion is that we accept we’ve changed, but struggle to imagine that we still will.

People change, including you. But one of the reasons we change isn’t ideas alone. You can think of an argument that, moving forward, may have been a pivotal moment. But it was the feelings you had, shaped by your experiences, stories you took in, and relationships that all fertilized the change, while an idea in an argument took credit for helping you make that change.

You are a rational being, but not purely, and everything in you changes in part because of a convergence of all you are; emotions, relationships, narratives, and beliefs. And if you want to change your city, you will have to contend with that in others. Meaning, you can’t expect some well-crafted logical syllogism that makes sense for you to change anything.

I know this sounds pedantic, but the end of this issue will end with practical ways to fix this, and you can skip there if you want, but first, let’s discuss the problem.

The imagination barrier; others are like you

Repairing your fractured community is beyond your efforts in part because it is beyond people’s imaginations.

If you were talking to a two-dimensional being; three-dimensional logic would sound like nonsense. In the same way, things that feel true to your core, no matter how refined your pitch, will sound meaningless even to people you think would get it.

This is because a two-dimensional being would have no grasp or understanding of the third dimension. For a personal example, think of an idea someone told you, probably your parents, that you didn’t go along with but ultimately came around to. The idea didn’t change, your ability to receive it did. Years of experiences, stories, and ideas made it click.

A real-world example might be a plan that limits car access on a street. You’ll face opposition not just from the usual voices, but also from people advocating for the vulnerable. In a system built around cars, limiting car access can feel like limiting access for those who rely on them most. You will try to explain how access is possible without cars, but a barrier will hold strong. Being anti-car will get you accused of being ableist and agist.

It’s not always done in bad faith (though it sometimes is definitely in bad faith).

This is what I refer to as an imagination barrier; the limits of someone’s accepted reality. But for those who disagree, well-intentioned or not, their imagination needs expansion. A barrier must be breached. So how do you do it? I want to discuss both what’s required to breach, and how to do it.

Show, don’t tell

One of the reasons books and movies change us is that it’s a sort of head-fake learning; we are walking down paths we would usually resist because we aren’t aware an argument is being made.

Think of a fantasy movie, the kind with dwarves and elves. You might start with an aversion to a character, come to love them, and later realize they were analogous to someone in your own life. But because the story is far enough removed from the real world, you aren’t subconsciously arguing with the assumptions or philosophies within it.

We learn from myths and stories because our resistance is lowered. We don’t realize an argument is being made. A new mental pathway is revealed, making a new belief easier to accept.

It’s like someone who refuses to walk a certain trail but ends up taking a parallel path instead. Later, they’re told, “Remember that trail you avoided? You’ve been walking alongside it this whole time.”

If we want to make changes in your community, we need examples of delightful things that can be experienced. If you’re interested in a more walkable community and want to reimagine streets as more than just thoroughfares for cars, drop the arguments and close the street for a delightful event.

Connect people with other people

One thing we’ve lost in the physical fabric of our neighborhoods is connection. We’ve lost a kind of social capital that Robert Putnam calls “weak ties,” the everyday acquaintances that knit communities together.

Even baby boomers in suburbs lived in a more connected environment. There were more neighborhood schools, fewer cars, and more overlap in daily life. You were more likely to live near your kids’ teachers and other parents. You shopped at the same grocery store. Sports were played at the local park.

Now schools are regional. Everything, including pickup, happens from inside a car. Sports are concentrated in large complexes with dozens of games at once. Even compared to car-oriented suburbs of the 60s or 70s, life is more isolated.

We’ve lost chance encounters and low-stakes interactions. And with that, we lose empathy for people who aren’t like us, because our relationships become more intentional, and we tend to choose people like ourselves.

We need more reasons to run into each other, people like us and people who aren’t. That’s how empathy is built. It’s hard to believe sweeping claims about a certain group of people being evil when you think; “What? You mean Brandon? He watered my plants last month.”

Slow and steady, and then all at once

Before I get to the practical ideas, I want to address two things; I was recently privately irked when someone accused me of making my neighborhood trendy. Traffic deaths are the number one killer here in Chattanooga and almost everything I do is about traffic safety (saving lives!) and strengthening community. Any idea, however trendy it comes off, is towards an ultimate aim in changing people’s minds and behaviors and making life more delightful. What I suggest below may sound quaint, but it is in moments of joy and connection where you choose to change and take action, and I don’t want to downplay that.

Secondly, its going to take a sort of faithfulness that needs to last. Think of how quickly the mind has changed towards something like gay marriage. Donald Trump was the first president to be in favor of it BEFORE he was elected to office.

It takes decades of people championing what seems like a hopeless cause before it becomes mainstream. The road is too long to assume you can sustain anything significant if you can’t enjoy it on some level. It is not a revolution, but thousands of tiny moments of resistances that will lead to change.

What I’m getting at is that we are not chasing trends or menial things. If what I say sounds fun, it’s because it’s supposed to be. If it seems simple, that’s a feature not a bug. And if it seems hopelessly small in the face of overwhelming odds, that’s because that’s all there is. And I’m fine with that because every good story, true and fiction, is about the small thing making it.

So go start doing small, fun, community building shit with your neighbors.

Some ideas

I promised practical, here are the things I’m in difference stages of doing or dreaming about.

1. Magic mailbox: Thought of this today with a few neighbor dads. This idea has ZERO testing. A mailbox that “connects” kids with their favorite characters. Kids write letters to Zelda, Rumi Kang, or Spider-Man, and once a week the mail gets picked up. Parents reply in character and leave letters back in the box. It’s a simple, temporary way to connect kids across the neighborhood and bring parents together behind the scenes.

   1. Main goal: give neighbors informal ways to connect and add whimsy to the neighborhood.

2. Bootleg water park: Shut down an entire block and get as many houses to volunteer running a sprinkler in the street. Have slip and slides, water balloons, super soakers, kiddie pools. Never done this, but I stand by the fact this might be my best idea.

   1. Main goal: Show people streets are the most fun when they are occupied by more than cars. Strengthen neighborhood ties and create new ones.

3. Kids maker fair: Get kids in the neighborhoods to sell goods. We’ve done this before, doing it again in May!

   1. Main goal: Independence, connect neighbors, reimagine streets

4. Play Streets: Literally close down streets for kids to play. Adults step back, a few things are offered (chalk, cardboard) let them do what they want. This is low stakes. This happens all the time across my city.

   1. Main goal: Kids are a great use for streets.

5. Basketball goal facing the street: Bonus points to paint a three point line.

   1. Main goal: Show another thing a street can be.

6. Sidewalk joy: Public art, exchanges, and reasons to go out and explore your neighborhood.

   1. Main goal: Get people out and about meeting neighbors at low stakes. Teach kids that there’s unexpected joy in the world.

7. Popsicles on the porch: Get one family to agree to show up, and advertise free popsicles on your front lawn. Seats and pop-up tent for shade is a bonus. Neighbors show up, kids hang. We did this two summer ago and it’s how our kids met their best neighborhood friends.

   1. Main goal: See all the above reasons.

8. Halloween registry: Every year our neighborhood creates a registry of homes participating in Halloween. You can still take part if you’re not on the map, but it shows which houses will have candy, which will have adult treats like alcohol, and which are hosting porch parties where people are out front welcoming others to join. We usually set up a fire pit and spend the night hanging out with neighbors.

   1. Main goal: See all the above reasons.

Best idea lately

Crowdfund around $3,000 and have a neighborhood association purchase barricades and road-closure signage that meet local standards. Then rent them out to nonprofits and neighborhood groups.

To close two intersections, you’ll typically need:

• 8 Type III barricades

• 6 “Road Closed Ahead” roll-up signs with stands

• 4 detour signs (two in each direction, attached to barricades)

• 4 “Road Closed to Through Traffic” signs with stands

• 6 “Road Closed” signs (attached to barricades)

This is by far the biggest expense for a simple closure. We did this, and these barricades have already been used for 12+ events and counting.

How it works:

• Requests come in via email, managed by volunteers (me)

• We check a shared calendar and schedule if available

• A small donation is encouraged for maintenance and upkeep

• Groups pick up, set out, and return the equipment

Our neighborhood association is also a 501(c)(3). Find one willing to host the funds and start a fundraiser. We secured initial funding from a local giving circle.

If your city doesn’t have a clear process for street closures, start small, demonstrate success, and use that momentum to push for a formal pathway.

Streets for people.

In our actions, we show rather than tell, we connect people, and bring them into each other’s presence, and in doing this we can breach the barrier in what a public space could and should be. Seeing and experiencing is what will help us do that.

So go host low stakes block parties until they spill into the street; then do a block party next year.

Most people who say they’re “from” a city aren’t really from that city. And most people who say they live “in” the city don’t live in what we would recognize as the city either. They live in annexed edges. Legal boundaries, not lived ones.

Which leads to a strange outcome; our downtowns become destinations more than neighborhoods. They are what someone once called an urban playground. A place you enter with intent and can leave without consequence.

Yet, city centers used to be places where all of life (for some people) happened. Now downtown is where life is a series of scheduled experiences for those who live outside of it.

Instead of being a place where someone works, plays, and lives their life, it becomes parts of those things to people who live outside of it.

Work: The Daily Pulse

Downtown is still a focal point in one major sense; jobs cluster there. Productivity concentrates there and tax revenue flows from there. In many U.S. cities, downtown cores generate a disproportionate share of economic output relative to their size

But the pattern is vicious. People come for work, park, and then commute back home. And so downtown has beats like a machine.

👉 Morning rush.

👉 Lunch spike.

👉 Evening exit.

👉 Then silence.

In between those times, the streets flatten. This is not a neighborhood. Without people living here, it’s a business park.

And to support this pattern, we reshape the city itself; wide roads, endless parking, and entire blocks hollowed out to store cars instead of people. You can see it clearly in places like Atlanta and Kansas City.

We built a system to move workers, not to sustain life. And when the workers leave, there is no one left to care.

This creates a lack of what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street.” If people don’t live there and the streets aren’t animated by everyday life, the space becomes unmonitored. There is no natural presence to keep things in check.

As a result, cities can become either under-policed, lacking the informal oversight of people living their lives, or over-policed, relying on context-blind enforcement by authorities trying to manage a place that no one truly inhabits.

To combat this, cities try to create a sort of “second shift,” encouraging people to stay or come downtown and extend activity beyond 9–5. This is often referred to as becoming an 18-hour city. The goal isn’t to be the city that never sleeps, but to be a city that stays lively into the evening.

This is where we start programming downtown for play. It’s a good aim, but it still misses the mark.

Play: The Scheduled City

The idea is to increase dwell time by adding reasons to come and play downtown.

👉 A signature park.

👉 A stadium.

👉 An aquarium.

👉 A museum.

Tens of millions of dollars directed toward experiences.

This is not entirely unsuccessful. Chattanooga leveraged big projects to mount a comeback that is the envy of other cities. Think of it like an emergency defibrillation in a hospital. You know, where a doctor yells “clear” and uses paddles to shock a patient? It can bring them back to life. But if your city constantly needs defibrillation to stay active, that’s a problem, just like it would be in real life.

If life stops when festivals and events stops, then something’s off.

Parks without nearby residents become empty after peak hours. And parks can be dangerous. They’re dangerous not because people are there, but because the right people are absent. As mentioned in the work portion, research consistently shows that active, well-used public spaces are safer because of regular presence, not just enforcement.

Another negative pattern is that in order to justify these big expenses, we have to see them as THE thing. One big park instead of many small ones. One destination instead of many neighborhood spaces. It creates this sort of consolidation aspect; there’s not skate parks, there’s one big one downtown.

Which means access depends on mobility; A kid with a car gets a park, while a kid without one gets nothing.

And because these spaces are large and expensive, they become fixed. Controlled. Hard to change. If you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter. It’s the only one you’re going to get for decades.

Live: The Missing Piece

This is the strangest part. American downtowns look dense but very few people actually live there.The skylines suggest life stacked vertically.

In fact, many U.S. downtowns have relatively small residential populations compared to their job density. One analysis of the 45 largest downtowns found they contain about 11–12% of regional jobs but only around 1.8% of residents.

The buildings are tall, but not for people. They are tall because land where you can build interesting things is scarce. Because zoning restricts where intensity is allowed. So if it’s the only place you can build, you build big. Not out of real necessity, but out of artificial constraint. And those buildings are not for small life. You will not find a cobbler in a skyscraper. Or a corner ice cream shop on the 32nd floor. You find institutions like banks, corporations and tech headquarters.

Which creates an illusion where downtown looks full, but it is not lived in. And culture only happens where people live. It’s why downtowns and business centers usually lack a sense of place. At best they create facsimile of culture.

If you see litter in front of your house, you’re apt to pick it up. If you see it at Disney land, you expect an employee to do so. When our downtowns became a destination ONLY then they lose that sense of ownership. The problems are meant to be purely addressed by mgmt; in this case, the city.

Managing Urban play grounds

To be clear, this isn’t to say that all neighborhoods will inevitably become a downtown. They are a different iteration of a neighborhood, but not an inevitable final form. City centers will always be an exaggerated version of other neighborhoods, but they should still function as neighborhoods. Yes, they have more outside visitors, but they should still have a steady population.

And conversely, neighborhoods need services within reach, their own small commercial nodes like a downtown.

The reason these places become experience zones, or playgrounds, often comes from good intentions. Cities try to bring life back with investment.

And many of them work, at least for a while. But they fail in a long-term way. Like seeds planted in hard clay, the problem is not the seed. The problem is the soil. Without people living there, the ecosystem cannot sustain itself.

If someone is in a horrible crash and needs resuscitation or a major organ transplant, they should get it. But as their health improves, their needs change.

A downtown that needed a huge investment to bring it back to life needs smaller interventions as life returns. What if we gave a car crash patient another major organ transplant instead of physical therapy?

If we want a living kind of downtown, we have to choose it. We have to build for residents, not just visitors. We have to allow more housing, more small spaces, and more everyday life. And that requires political will. It means prioritizing the people who will live there over the people who occasionally visit, even when those visitors feel like they belong, even when they say they are from the city.

City centers should be places people live, not just places visitors visit. And you know what? That brings visitors. Paris is popular because it is a place that feels lived in. D.C. (especially the mall) feels anemic because it’s empty of real life; it’s embassies and monuments.

I think the first move in all of this, is to get people living downtown.

The art on the walls shows the world outside as it should be, not necessarily as it currently is. The lighting is low and deliberate, and your footsteps echo throughout, causing a kind of self-conscious reflection and gratitude for the space. Air begins to bellow through pipes behind you, and the sound registers to you as life itself.

Are you imagining yourself in a church sanctuary, or a doomsday bunker? Because the description above could apply to both.

In this issue, I want to focus on what our vision of a home should be, and using the work of two prominent sociologists, and the analogy above, show how we’ve gone wrong.

Where the magic happens

I’m pretty sure my first para-social relationship was with a rapper I’d never meet, standing in a garage with cars he didn’t own, inviting me to an indoor bowling alley in an adjacent room. It was MTV Cribs.

Here, celebrities showed us the height of convenience as pools were able to be both indoor and outdoor, houses backed up to airstrips, and the ability to encounter everything you need to live a life in one space. This is a sort of “home as sanctuary.” An ultimate escape we find ourselves longing for. And it was bullshit. Not just because it was full of lies (50 Cent didn’t own the Ferraris in the garage), but because the whole premise is bunk.

The more you watch it, the more you realize that every amazing feature is itself a kind of hedge against the risk of having to go out into public. Having a bowling alley isn’t just about convenience. It’s antiseptic, in the best and worst sense of the word. You don’t have to be bothered by other people, people with their own free will, their own bad timing, their own capacity to inconvenience you in ways both minor and profound.

It’s become clear to me that our dream of the perfect home is really just a dream of opting out. We want small, self-sufficient worlds with little reason to leave, little reason to bump into anyone we didn’t already plan to.

Like terrariums built to pocket a piece of nature, we’re building homes meant to pocket the city itself. But here’s the thing about cities, and about nature too: they don’t pocket.

Where the magic ACTUALLY happens

Two sociologists are becoming increasingly relevant. The first is Ray Oldenburg, who brought the term “third places” into the public imagination. He saw a decline in social interaction and pointed to the dwindling public environments needed to facilitate it. He was diagnosing the hardware of the problem: we need places that are neither home nor work.

The second is Robert Putnam, who popularized the term “social capital,” the value we derive from human interaction. He documented the decline of social engagement from the 1960s through the 1990s and tied it directly to the rise of television and personal entertainment. If Oldenburg is about the hardware, Putnam is about the software: the interactions themselves.

But both point to a real problem; public life is facing a sort of decline, and I think how you view your home tells you what you think of public life.

Back to the bunker

There is a 1970s Nevada house that showed up in a Zillow listing, complete with a paradise-themed bunker underneath it. It is fascinating in the way you cannot look away from a highway crash; it is equally amazing and awful.

But you can see the vision of the person who built it. They believed in a cruel enough world to require an ultimate escape, but wanted to maintain the feeling of a good one. The fact that it is a bunker, an extreme piece of architecture, makes the absurdity so apparent. You cannot escape the world and retain it at the same time.

The gilded age is boring tbh

And this is our vision of the home in America right now. The better the home, the more amenities that keep us from having to leave it. Never mind that those amenities exist outside in a grander form, or that the best versions of them come with human interaction. We have built above-ground bunkers that treat the world as something to escape.

I watch the show The Gilded Age, thanks to my friend Bernice and a lingering crush I have on Carrie Coon (Megan knows). In it, a new money family tries to break into the upper echelons of established American high society. But all I can think about is how prison-like the houses are, especially for women, whose main activity is to call on someone in another house, or attend the opera.

But the best a home can do is mimic a snapshot of culture. It cannot create it. Yes, perhaps the air is clean, but it is also recycled and stale. Our homes, in being isolated from the messiness of the outside world, are also isolated from its wonder. They need constant programming to feel alive, and if you have friends and can throw parties, they will fill with life.

But life pulses differently in those big celebrity houses. They may be full, but the emptiness must feel particularly cavernous when the people leave. And then a question begs to be answered: where do we expect to find the friends to fill our homes?

Putnam and Oldenburg

And this is the lesson of Oldenburg and Putnam: what good is an empty home? And how can we meet people to fill it if there is no good place to meet them? I think they are both right, and together they describe a kind of dysbiosis, a mutually destructive whirlpool created by two negative forces running at the same time.

We have an isolated built environment that is skeptical of the outside world. Our public life diminishes and becomes more hostile, a little in reality but a lot in our imagination. And so we retreat into private life and begin to glorify the retreat itself.

We see our homes as sanctuaries when they are, in fact, bunkers. Some are nicer and more palatable than others, but all reinforce the belief that the good life is a private one, where people, like a Netflix queue, should be available on demand and exactly as wanted. But people do not work that way.

Sanctuaries are different from bunkers in that, even when they offer rest, their mission is a better world. They send their people out into it. Their architecture points toward an outside that, though imperfect, is worth engaging. Bunkers wait for the air to clear, and those who invest heavily in them are counting on someone else to do the work.

Home and a False Dichotomy

Please do not misread what I am saying. You can invest heavily in your home and love it as a place of respite. But since the core of this analogy is a church, let me use a theological example.

There was an Orthodox priest who identified a damaging dichotomy within the Christian church: it had separated the world into the secular and the sacred, despising one and embracing the other. His name was Alexander Schmemann, and he argued that what we call sacred, communion, the Eucharist, exists to serve what we call secular. He pointed to Jesus giving himself for the life of the world, not for the life of the church alone.

In the same way, we have created a public and private dichotomy. I am not arguing that one does not exist, but that the worth of our private lives is found in their ability to affect others publicly. But we must also realize every good thing that enters our home enters it as a result of a society.

The recipes you cook, the music you play, the art on your walls—all of it incubated in cities and melting pots. These places are often messy, smelly, and perceived as dangerous. But human interaction, and the places that facilitate it, are responsible for every last thing you have chosen to bring into your home. Our private spaces are not in competition with great public spaces, they are created and made better by them.

Our homes are diminished when they exist only for us, and they are only made better by the existence of a thriving public life. Our homes are not only for our lives. They are for the life of the world.

A legal expert asks Jesus what it takes to have eternal life. Jesus responds by asking what the law says. The man answers correctly: love God with everything you’ve got and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus tells him he’s right. Do that and you will live.

But then comes the real question from the lawyer. Who is my neighbor? It is a very human question.

I promise, I’m going to tie this into cities, you just gotta stick with me for a bit more context.

He is not asking how to love, but where the line is. Who counts and who does not.So Jesus tells a story. A priest, respected in society, walks by a beaten man. Then a Levite, also respected. Both keep going. Then a Samaritan, someone looked down on, stops. He helps, pays, and goes out of his way to assure the injured person is taken care of.

Jesus asks, who was the neighbor? The answer is simple. The one who showed mercy.

Cities built to minimize exposure

People often think cities cause homelessness because that is where homelessness is most visible. But that is a little like saying a doctor’s office causes sickness. It does not cause it. It attracts it because it offers some kind of response to it.

And more than that, homelessness appears more concentrated in cities because services are concentrated there. This is both practical and troubling. It is practical because without that clustering, someone in need might spend their entire day moving from one place to another just to meet basic needs. Breakfast in one part of town, medical care in another, shelter somewhere else. Bringing those services together can make survival possible.

But concentration has a cost. It can create something like an economic monoculture. When poverty is clustered, it becomes easier to look away but harder to escape. The relationships and opportunities that often help people move out of poverty are less accessible. And so the very systems designed to help can, over time, reinforce the conditions they are trying to solve.

Knowing your homeless neighbor

And this is what I mean by the Samaritan loophole. In the same way the legal expert was looking for a way to narrow down who counted as his neighbor, we have built a world that minimizes interaction altogether. Our cars act like portals. They move us through space while insulating us from it. You will drive through places you would never walk through.

I am writing more about this elsewhere, but for now it is enough to say this. You cannot be expected to show kindness to someone in need if you never encounter them.

Suburban neighborhoods are often designed to prevent that encounter. Roads curve and loop like mazes, with entrances and exits placed side by side so no one passes through. There is no reason to be there unless you live there. With commercial activity separated out, the neighborhood becomes a place only for residents, not for strangers, not for chance.

And that can feel normal. But only because we have grown used to a kind of public infrastructure that behaves like private space. Many suburbs function like gated communities without the gate.

In a place like that, your chances of encountering someone in need shrink dramatically. But it was not always like this. In more connected neighborhoods, people in difficult situations are part of the social fabric. In my neighborhood, closer to the urban core, that is still true. There are people you know by name. There is a guy who moves things from one porch to another. Someone posts online about a missing wagon and suddenly someone else has a soccer ball and half a bag of fertilizer.

Sometimes I wake up to a shopping cart in front of my house. It is not convenient. I do not always love it. But it is grounding. It reminds me that I live near people who are struggling, and that their need is not abstract. It is right here.

Fearful feedback loop

And with concentrated poverty, a perverse feedback loop takes hold. Disease, fires, and crime increase in the places where poverty is clustered. Fear follows, and that fear becomes a moral justification for avoidance. I have a family to protect. I cannot take that risk.

But much of that fear is overstated. Plenty of people work in these environments every day without fearing for their lives. And more importantly, that fear is often a product of the concentration itself. When we cluster poverty, we also cluster its challenges. Then we design systems to avoid it. We make public space uncomfortable, restrict where people can exist, and create pathways that let us move through the world without encountering anyone in need. In doing so, we create a version of life where we can claim to love our neighbors without ever having to act on it.

More is more

But love is not a belief alone. Love requires action. To love your neighbor is to act in their best interest. And to do that, you have to encounter them.

This is not a call to live in extreme conditions. It is a call to recognize that, with more flexibility in how we build and live, we would naturally encounter people across different stages of life. Right now, we expect poorer neighborhoods to absorb the burden of caring for the most vulnerable, while wealthier neighborhoods remain insulated from it.

Vince Graham put it this way: when you sell community and connectedness, every new home adds value. When you sell privacy and exclusivity, every new home feels like a loss. That idea holds at the human level too. Sit in on a zoning meeting and you will hear it. People are not just afraid of burden. They are afraid of proximity.

So what do we do? Do we wait for people to become more open before we build more connected places? Or do we build those places so people can begin to see the value for themselves?

The answer is both. We expand imagination through storytelling, relationships, and lived experience. And we pair that with policy that allows for more flexible, mixed, and connected ways of living.

Every time I hike a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain, I get altitude sick and swear it’s the last one.

I’ve done twenty of them.

One of them I’ve done at least five times.

The same thing happens with the ocean. I get sick, swear it off, and then go back.

I think all the sickness has to do with my inner ear.

So why do I do it?

It’s something known by outdoor enthusiasts as Type II Fun: things that are partially miserable while they’re happening, but fun in retrospect.

Here’s the breakdown.

Type I Fun: Fun in the moment, and fun to look back on.
What most people think of as fun.

Type II Fun: Can be unpleasant to downright miserable in the moment, but fun to reflect on later, and often a growing experience.

When you wonder why people put themselves in terrible situations, how anyone can enjoy waking up early to suffer in the wilderness, the answer is easy; they don’t enjoy it. At least not when it’s happening.

I had a friend, Josh, who had this term he called ‘old-man strength.’ When you get older, the people with the best stories didn’t just have fun; they had the type of fun that was mixed with suffering. And while the term is ‘man’ for me, there’s no reason it has to be gendered.

You could also have ‘old-woman strength,’ but I digress. The point is, I’ve found this to be true; I don’t know the stories of my grandfather’s easiest, happiest days, but I do know some WWII stories he left.

And I hope that I instill some of the virtues of Type II Fun in my kids; I want them to have stories worth telling, which are memories worth sharing with others that they can enjoy too.

Type II Good

Then I realized there’s a similar dynamic when it comes to good.

Type I Good: Feels good in the moment, and is good in the moment.

Type II Good: Can be unpleasant to downright miserable in the moment, but meaningful to reflect on later, and often a growing experience.

Type I Good includes the sort of TikTok trend where you ask a poor person for a dollar, they give you their last dollar, and then you take them on a shopping spree.

No doubt they benefit from it and you feel great about it. But when the day ends, its influence often ends too. Handing out money, while not the evil some assume it is, is sometimes used to assuage the guilt for the less easy good we know we could be doing.

I think more people need to show up for more Type II Good. Showing up to a council meeting, hosting a get-together with neighbors, doing something without permission. I see Type II Good coming in three varieties: boring, risky, and inconvenient. Let’s break them down.

Boring Good

I came up with this entire concept while sitting in a city council meeting.

I had gone to so many that night that, looking at the agenda, I could guess about 90 percent of what the councilors were going to say before they said it. There had to be a better use of my time. I almost made a beeline for the exit during the recess when the Deputy Chief of the police department called someone over.

It was the Assistant Chief, whose new detail includes special operations that cover pedestrian and cyclist safety. The Deputy Chief introduced us because of an email I had sent a few weeks earlier, and then he started talking me up.

He said his wife had shown him my videos (you’ve been knowing about my stuff?). He wanted me to meet the Assistant Chief because his detail includes pedestrian safety. The idea is that I could come in and help police better understand how to report unsafe intersections, and how to write reports that don’t simply blame pedestrians (or drivers), but instead help move toward safer conditions.

To educate them on street treatments so they don’t look down on them, and actually understand the point. This could end up being huge. And it happened because I sent one uncomfortable email, and because I showed up to an incredibly boring city council meeting a hundred thousand times (approximately).

Risky Good

I’ve talked about this before, but I like the idea of James C. Scott’s anarchist calisthenics. If we want to be capable of making the right decisions when the stakes are high, we need to work out the moral muscle by breaking dumb laws now.

But risky good isn’t as risky as you think. I have friends painting crosswalks, clearing sidewalks, building benches, creating pathways, and rarely do they get questioned except out of curiosity; and those questions are often followed up with praise.

Risky good is Type II because our nervous system tells us there’s a better way for someone else to do it, so we should let someone else. That we just need to make time to figure out the right way.

But our ambitions get assuaged up by bureaucracy, and the doubt monster gets fed until we decide either we can’t or shouldn’t be the ones to do something. But when you take little risks, and get little wins, the good that comes after the deed makes it worth the risk.

Even when the projects are small, and seemingly insignificant, they act as little bat-signals of hope that one person is watching, caring, and thinking about someone else’s needs.

Inconvenient Good

Inconvenient good is the one I’m most unlikely to discuss because I prefer to address the systems that make them inconvenient. We used to know our neighbors not out of intention, but because of necessity. Not the type of necessity that comes from desperation, though I know those relationships exist, but because we lived in a world where random encounters happened naturally.

You didn’t choose a grocery store, you went to the grocery store. Before our environs were built for isolation it wasn’t hard to know your neighbor; it was hard to avoid knowing them. But I digress because, you know what, it is inconvenient.

My most popular post on this platform was that community is easy in the right built environment, but we don’t have that. That’s why the work of Graham McBain (Hey Neighbor) is critical at this juncture; how do we create a software update (culture and community) that might force a hardware update (livable, walkable neighborhoods).

I don’t know what this looks like exactly, but I do know this is the hardest thing for me to do as an introvert. But it looks like:

• Making small talk to build acquaintances. You don’t have to be BFFs, but a broader group of people who know your name, and whose names you know, is the real foundation of community.

• Closing down the street for a hangout or block party. Ugh, I hate administrative work and processes.

• Inviting neighbors over for dinner

• Hosting a front yard hang or organizing an event (this is where Graham has a system down)

Compared to the boring and risky versions of Type II Good, this is the one I struggle with the most. But it’s also the one which, when it happens, means the most in retrospect. Because of it my kids have neighborhood friends, we’ve been in people’s lives in hard situations, and they’ve been there for us.

Type II is for you

It’s not particularly fun, or particularly hard, but it is often inconvenient, boring, and scary. But it’s the work which, when we do it, pays off. And not just with mushy warm feelings (those are sometimes there) but with real results and real relationships.

Look, I get it. It’s hard not to despair.

But lately I’ve been seeing something different from people simply being in despair. I’ve been seeing a proliferation of people who seem to be recruiting others into it. Like despair isn’t just a place they’ve ended up, but a place they’re trying to build a crowd inside. As if the goal is to pull more people into the same anxious paralysis they’re currently living in.

And that didn’t make sense to me.

I understand the evangelism of good news. When something is good, you want to share it. You want the people you love to step into the light with you. But I never understood the inverse. Why does misery love company?

It wasn’t until I started noticing a pattern that I decided to give it a name: a hope-terminating cliché.

It’s a close cousin of the thought-terminating cliché, so let’s start there.

Thought Terminating cliché

A thought-terminating cliché is a repeated phrase meant to shut down discussion.
“It is what it is.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“Agree to disagree.”

These are the conversational equivalent of hitting the brakes. Once the phrase is deployed, the conversation just stops.

I tend to think of thought-terminating clichés as incredibly powerful tools. They’re useful for struggle for authority. Because once the cliché enters the conversation, you no longer have to do the hard work of persuasion.

Think about the Cold War.

Once the enemy was defined as communism, you no longer had to convince people that your idea was good. You only had to convince them that it was anti-communist. If the label “communism” could be successfully attached to something, discussion was effectively over.

And this got strange. Because the perceived threat of communism, which was authoritarianism and tyranny, was sometimes countered with… authoritarianism and tyranny. The United States would support ruthless dictators whose primary qualification was that they also hated communists.

The point here isn’t to argue for or against any political system. The point is simpler than that. Once you start believing that something is wholly good or wholly bad, you slowly lose the responsibility to persuade anyone of anything. The label does the work for you.

Politicians love this. They use it constantly.

When people on the left describe their opponents as oligarchs, it’s often less about starting a careful conversation and more about attaching a loaded label. When people on the right describe something as woke, they’re often doing the same thing.

The word replaces the argument.

And that’s the appeal of a thought-terminating cliché. Why go through the work of making a careful argument when you can attach someone to an agreed-upon evil and bypass logic altogether?

Hope Terminating Cliche

A hope-terminating cliché works in much the same way, except the thing it shuts down is both thought and hope.

They function like thought-terminating clichés, but with an added weight of despair. When people invoked communism during the Cold War, they often did so from a position of power, or at least perceived equality. But when you feel powerless, abandoning hope becomes a way of abandoning effort.

The goal of the phrase isn’t really to introduce new information. It’s to remind everyone in the room of something we already agree is big and overwhelming, so that no one commits too deeply to imagining the future.

It’s a thought-terminating cliché that justifies inaction.

You’ve probably heard some of them:

“It’s all owned by Vanguard and BlackRock.”
“Late-stage capitalism.”
“Blackstone is buying up all the homes.”
“You think the oil lobby is going to let this happen?”

The point of these phrases isn’t necessarily whether the claims are true, or whether the forces involved are powerful. The underlying belief is doing the real work:

First, that these forces are real and enormous.
And second, that whatever you’re trying to do is pointless in the face of them.

Why are we obsessed with despair:

The question isn’t why we are obsessed with despair. The question is why we seem so eager to spread it.

I think I’ve figured out the answer. Or at least one version of it.

We despair, in part, because of the world we live in is a constant onslaught of overwhelming news, delivered endlessly and relentlessly. It makes sense that people feel exhausted and small.

But I don’t think we pass despair along because we secretly want other people to feel bad. At least, I choose not to believe that.

I think it’s a little more complicated.

Spreading despair can become a way of justifying our own paralysis.

If I am hearing terrible news and doing very little to push back against it, someone might look at me and think I’m lazy. I might even think that about myself. But if I account for all the massive forces working against me, and against my neighbor, and I conclude that there is very little any of us could realistically do to make things better, then my inaction begins to feel reasonable.

Even responsible.

And once you arrive there, despair becomes strangely useful. Instead of helping your neighbor, you post about it. You repeat the bad news. And when someone introduces even the smallest possibility of hope, you respond with a hope-terminating cliché. You remind them that they’re naïve, or that they’re playing into the hands of some larger evil.

Not because you hate hope.

But because hope threatens the logic that allows you to stop trying.

We don’t spread despair so much as we try to justify our own

.Utopia and Dystopia

And here’s the strange part: we’ve become very good at painting pictures of utopia.

We imagine a perfect future. A world exactly the way we want it, polished and harmonious and somehow inevitable. But utopia, more often than not, is a vision made almost entirely of hope and almost no action. It’s the refined version of saying, “Don’t worry. Everything will work out.”

A lot of techno-futurism works this way. Technology will save us. Technology will solve the problems technology helped create. The same engines that dug the hole will somehow lift us back out of it.

But dystopia, despite being the supposed opposite, works in a remarkably similar way.

Dystopia also paints a fixed ending. A future that feels locked in and unavoidable. And once people believe that ending is inevitable, the natural response isn’t resistance. It’s resignation.

Utopia says everything will turn out fine.
Dystopia says everything will fall apart.

And even though those seem like opposite conclusions, they bend toward the same behavior: Inaction.

If you believe the good future is destined to arrive, why struggle toward it?

And if you believe the bad future is inevitable, why bother trying to stop it?

Both stories, strangely enough, lead us to the same place where nothing happens.

Protopia

It is in the interest of everything you oppose for you to believe your actions amount to nothing.

Whoever you think needs to be stopped probably won’t be stopped because you go to city council once, shop a little more intentionally, or write your senator. But I can tell you this: every day harmful things continue, in part because enough people believe those small actions don’t matter.

Whatever cause, company, or movement you believe is doing the most harm is helped along by despair. Despair that is reasonable. Despair that is logical. Despair that spreads when we shut down conversations with hope-terminating clichés.

But here’s the thing.

Everything that has ever gotten better has been the result of ordinary people doing small things. Showing up. Relying on one another. And eventually sacrificing something meaningful.

And your inaction isn’t safe. It won’t even be comfortable in the long run. Despair doesn’t actually feel good. It might offer a moment of relief, but over time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

History bends toward the people who show up.

And I’m not saying you need grand gestures. I’m saying you need consistency. Faithfulness. Maybe just showing up a little more than you did yesterday.

There’s a word for the belief that things can improve if we contribute: Protopia. Not a perfect world, not a doomed one, but a world that gets a little better because people keep working on it.

I talk a lot about cities and design. And yes, I could move somewhere that already fits my ideals. I could find a city that works the way I want it to and simply live there.

But I don’t want to find a good place and call it home. I want to make my home a good place.

That means staying in a less-than-ideal city because there are people here who don’t have the option to leave. And they aren’t helped if the people who care about the place abandon it.

It’s hard. Harder still because any hint of hope is often met with comments meant to shut it down. But now I think I understand why. It’s a survival mechanism. A way people cope. I don’t blame anyone for that. But I do want to invite you to do something small to make the world a little better. Because you can and because you should.

Last year, I was in Texas touring a property that a developer was rehabbing. It was an aging shopping center with a massive parking lot, the kind all too present in most North American cities. He was investing heavily in the site, but what struck me most was how he was creating value not just for himself, but for the surrounding community.

He was subdividing big, empty units into much smaller spaces. Along the front, he carved out a row of tiny storefronts designed for first-time restaurateurs and small operators. People just getting started. I remember looking at it and calling it an incubator.

He stopped me and said, “It’s not an incubator. Small is worthy.”

If a single mother can run a small business while her kids are at school, and that business supports her life and gives her more time with her family, then it does not need to scale, franchise, or become a million-dollar operation to be successful. A lifestyle business that sustains a household is not a stepping-stone. It is the destination.

It was one of those moments where something shifted in my mental wiring.

After that, I stopped seeing small businesses as valuable only because they might one day become big. I began to see their value as inherent. Not as potential, but as presence.

That is the goal of this issue: to highlight the inherent value of truly small businesses. And when I say small, I mean very small. Someone selling plates of food through Facebook. Side hustles. Home-based ventures. Micro-enterprises that fit into the gaps of everyday life.

I want to explore what makes these businesses so powerful, how they strengthen communities, what helps them exist in the first place, and what is currently holding so many of them back.

Hermit crabs

When I was a kid, my best friend Todd won a couple of hermit crabs at a fair. We kept them in a little glass tank and thought it was magical. We did not know anything about how miserable that industry is. We just liked watching them shuffle around in their borrowed homes.

What amazed me most was this: hermit crabs do not grow their own shells. They inherit them. First from other species, then from each other. A shell outlives the creature inside it.

And in that way, most small businesses are like hermit crabs.

They rarely build their own shell. The storefront almost always comes first. The business moves in. The business moves out. The shell remains. An old dry cleaner becomes a bakery. A florist becomes an insurance office. A gold and diamonds dealer in Chattanooga gets raided by the FBI, and before the year ends, a local grocer moves in. The shell adapts.

But the bigger and more specialized the shell, the harder it is to inhabit.

This is where the analogy strains. There are no unnaturally large hermit crabs wandering beaches in need of stadium-sized shells .1

In 2024, my neighborhood’s last major grocery store and pharmacy closed. The building still sits empty. It probably will for years, unless it’s torn down. Its size once represented success. Now it represents friction. Big things are hard to refill. Hard to subdivide. Hard to retrofit.

And at the extreme, the pattern becomes almost absurd.

Our city has two unused stadiums and a brand new one nearly complete for the same baseball team. The buildings are so specialized that even the same tenant outgrows them every decade or two. The city of Chicago owes more on renovations to Soldier Field than it originally borrowed, and the Bears are planning to leave anyway.2

Shells outlast the creatures inside them. But only the right sized shells can be reused.

The quiet success of the smallest lifeforms

Meanwhile, it is the large ventures that come with ribbon cuttings and political legacies. But in the background, small businesses are still filling the needs of the community.

Remember the big grocery store that left my neighborhood? The newspapers declared us a food desert. And yet many locals knew there were half a dozen tiendas within a mile of nearly every house. Some with full delis and butchers. Fresh produce. Tortillas made daily. They are not supermarkets. But they feed people.

They are a kind of neighborhood antifragility. Hermit crabs inhabiting old auto garages, corner stores, small homes, trailers. Reusing shells the way life tends to do when it is healthy.

This is where small becomes worthy.

Not just because these businesses support their owners and employees. Not just because they generate tax revenue, though they do. But because they sustain the community itself. They preserve buildings. They keep lights on. They create reasons to walk down a street.

A small business is not valuable only for its potential to become large. It has value at its current size.

Small businesses are like the smallest lifeforms in an ecosystem. Easy to overlook. Easy to underestimate. And yet the total biomass of ants on this planet is stunningly more than all mammals and birds combined.3

Ants are not valuable because they might one day become giant (we saw that movie in 1954 and it did not end well.) They are valuable because of what they do right now. Moving nutrients, turning the soil, and reshaping the ground beneath our feet.

Small works the same way.

Its value is amplified collectively.

Renewal

It is easy to forget that a city is not one fixed thing. It is many small things, always changing.

And like any ecosystem, much of that change involves death. Small businesses close. Their shells sit empty. Something else moves in. The loss is real. A family may lose its livelihood. But it is a loss a healthy community can absorb.

What is abnormal is not that businesses fail. What is abnormal is when they fail and nothing replaces them.

When our policies and buildings make it hard to go small, we eliminate the base species of the urban ecosystem. The smallest enterprises have nowhere to land. Sometimes the burden of an oversized, ill-fitted shell is too much. Sometimes a business never starts at all because there is no right-sized place to begin.

Turnover is natural. Stagnation is not. And that is the challenge facing many of our cities today.

Retrofit

Across the United States, there are people working at the smallest possible scale to fix this. They are retrofitting oversized environments into smaller units of success.

Monte Anderson divides large houses into multiple homes. He turned an old Ace Hardware into a market. He builds housing in what used to be grocery store parking lots. These are not miracles so much as they are replicable moves.4

And when they happen, we love the result. Culture and identity emerge from smaller pieces gathered together. We do not long for monoculture pine tree plantations, neat rows of a single species. We long for forests with their messy, layered, and varied forms of life.

Small and diverse businesses give a place its character. And people are beginning to recognize that.

But like forest management, you cannot manufacture an ecosystem from nothing. You cannot decree vitality into existence. You can only create the conditions where it can emerge.

And the first condition is simple.

We need more small shells.

4

Groups like the Incremental Development Alliance and Neighborhood Evolution are groups working to help facilitate these types of projects within cities.

Supralegal

As far as I know, I am inventing a word. The word is supralegal.

I need it because I keep running into actions that don’t fit neatly inside the categories the law provides. For a long time I called them illegal, which was technically correct in the way a tomato is a fruit, but it never felt accurate to the spirit of what was being discussed.

Imagine you want to paint a crosswalk where people are already crossing, or place a bench where tired humans are already sitting on the curb. The action lives outside the law not because it is forbidden, but because the law has failed to imagine it.

You might say, well, we already have a word for outside the law, and that word is extralegal. But extralegal usually carries the sense that someone has used power they not only didn’t possess but also shouldn’t possess. It implies overreach, abuse, harm that the law exists to restrain.

Supralegal is different. It describes stepping beyond legal processes that do not exist but ought to. It is what happens when the moral logic outruns the bureaucratic one.

Supralegal (adj.): acting beyond existing law or procedure in order to carry out a morally right or socially necessary action, especially when the law provides no adequate path to do so.

If it were somehow illegal to feed a hungry person, then feeding them would be supralegal. The action would not be contempt for the law; it would be an appeal to a deeper justice the law has not yet managed to write down.

Spectrum

I used to work at a tech company where my boss introduced me to what he called the cowboy-to-librarian spectrum. I think he got it from his boss, who is also my friend.

On one end of the spectrum is the librarian: cool, calm, collected, someone who thinks things through logically, follows a system, trusts a process, and makes rational decisions. On the other end is the cowboy, though I’ve come to prefer the word pirate.

The pirate shoots first and asks questions later. They run on instinct. They bias toward action. They understand that mistakes are not only possible but inevitable, and sometimes even useful.

Whenever I explain this spectrum, I ask the audience who would you rather have making an important decision for you, the librarian or the pirate? When I say librarian, hands usually shoot up. When I say pirate, fewer hands rise.

That’s when I tell them the trick. I said it was an important decision, but I never said what kind.

If you’re going in for surgery, you probably want someone meticulous, steady, and trained to follow procedure. You want the librarian. But if you’re on a battlefield, bleeding, the rules dissolving around you, you probably want someone who can function in chaos and move quickly without perfect information. You want the pirate.

Different moments require different instincts.

The reason this spectrum matters is that many of us are pulled toward the librarian end. That’s what school rewards, what workplaces reward, what systems are designed to produce and maintain. So we become what is expected of us. We become good at operating inside the machine.

But when the machine itself is failing us, when the process is the problem, the traits that kept everything orderly are no longer enough. That is usually the moment when we have to borrow a little courage from the pirate.

I think there is real opportunity in choosing, at times, to adopt more of the pirate’s posture.

This is not a natural stance for me. I am a middle child in the most aggressive sense of the term. I’m one of nine kids, with two older brothers, two younger brothers, two older sisters, and two younger sisters. I hate breaking the rules. I have a strong sense of justice, and well into my twenties I would skip the second song on Weezer’s Blue Album because it didn’t sit right with me.

But eventually my sense of justice collided with what I was seeing in the world. I began to notice situations that felt wrong, circumstances that clearly should not be the way they were, yet the obvious fix was not something the rules seemed prepared to allow. The legal path and the right path were not always the same path.

So I started trying to build a new muscle. I experimented with small acts of defiance. Supralegal activities.

These small, pirate-like actions felt a bit like physical therapy for my posture. No one who was born a librarian wakes up the next morning as a full-fledged pirate, and it is probably just as unrealistic to expect someone who lives by instinct to suddenly become methodical and procedural. But most of us, if we are honest, can shift a little. We can practice. We can move along the spectrum in the direction our culture needs from us in a given moment.

And the truth is that far more of us already live on the librarian side than the pirate side. We know how to follow the process, to wait our turn, and how to ask for permission. What we are often less practiced at is what happens when permission never comes.

And this is where the real opportunity lives, in pushing ourselves a little further toward the pirate end of the spectrum. I call it a spectrum rather than a binary because I don’t believe any of us are purely one thing or the other. We operate inside systems, but we also have the ability, and sometimes the responsibility, to push those systems to change.

I have friends who work just outside the law to create affordable housing. I have others who stay within the rules but bend and twist them in creative ways to get homes built that would not otherwise exist. I know people who have quietly altered the built environment to make things safer for cyclists and pedestrians, and I know people who tried, patiently and repeatedly, to file requests through official channels, asking the city to fix a problem. When nothing happened, they did what they could with what they had.

Pirates are sometimes reformers working from within the system. Sometimes they are the people running a Department of Transportation who are willing to test new ideas in public, to risk criticism, and in doing so discover that those ideas work.

So pirate should not be read as a synonym for law-breaker. It means choosing to act, inside or outside your formal authority, in a way that might fail, might attract pushback, and might not be politically convenient.

Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, said something like “do the right thing, even if that means you only get one term.” That, to me, is the posture of the pirate. Not lawlessness, but civic bravery; the willingness to move when standing still would be easier.

Citizens can practice this too. Acting in our own autonomy, often working together, we can stretch the boundaries of what we’ve been told we are allowed to do. You likely won’t get permission to do what people assume is outside your capability.

People will often underestimate what is possible for you.

Every time you do something that others assumed was beyond your reach, you expand their sense of what can be done. You make the imaginable a little larger. And in that widening, you may give someone else the courage to try.

P.S. I have other sketches from presentations and talks I intend to write about.

And the reason wasn’t ignorance so much as it was effectiveness: for all its flaws, the model worked.

It explained what people saw in the sky well enough to feel true. It had explanatory power. So as generations experienced reality through that framework, the world kept lining up with the story they were telling about it.

In this issue, I want to explore how that happened, how change finally broke through, and why the story matters today. Because the way we once misunderstood the universe has more in common with the way we design our cities than we might like to admit.

Along the way, I’ll point to real-world examples that make this parallel impossible to ignore.

Explanatory Power

Ptolemy’s model was built to solve a simple but stubborn problem; the planets did not move through the sky in smooth, predictable paths. Sometimes they slowed down, sped up, and they even appeared to move backward.

Claudius Ptolemy gave people a way to make sense of this strange motion, turning messy observations into something orderly and understandable based on geocentricism: stuff revolves around the earth. And this was not an idea he invented, but inherited; everyone assumed this.

After all, it matched what people saw. The sky seemed to spin and the ground felt still. When the world appears to move around you, it feels reasonable to assume that you are standing at the center.

But reality did not always match this assumption. And Instead of questioning it, Ptolemy added a solution; Epicycles. Small circular motions layered onto planetary orbits to explain why planets sometimes appeared to move backward in the sky.

Despite its flaws, the model worked well enough to be useful. It could predict where planets would appear, helping sailors navigate, farmers plan their seasons, and astronomers make sense of the sky.

It even helped forecast eclipses and guided the creation of star charts. The explanation may have been wrong, but the observations were right, and for a long time, that was enough.

Still, different things kept breaking in the model. Planet brightness, for one, was not neatly explained. And every time something like this happened, more epicycles were introduced. And the system grew ever more complex.

The Ptolemaic system did not fail all at once. It slowly frayed as better observations exposed small but stubborn inconsistencies. In the 1500s, Copernicus suggested something radical; What if the Earth itself was moving.

The idea was treated with caution and some saw it as mathematically useful but physically wrong, while others dismissed it as philosophical speculation.

Then Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky and he saw moons orbiting Jupiter as well as the phases of Venus. Either there was going to be an infinite amount of epicycles-like explanations to add, or reality had to be faced. These discoveries challenged more than calculations as well as the story behind them.

The universe was no longer revolving around us.

Ptolemaic patterns

This pattern shows up in all kinds of places. Think of it as a Ptolemaic pattern. A widely accepted theory that grows more complicated in order to protect its core assumptions. Bloodletting was once accepted as medicine, and when it failed, the techniques became more varied and more elaborate.

Almost every fad diet, workout untested plan, or money making scheme follows the same arc.

👉 A simple assumption.
👉 A system that mostly works.
👉 More complexity to fix its flaws.
👉 Then a breaking point.

And now it is time to apply this to cities.

Cars! Cars! Cars!

There is a common assumption that America looks the way it does because it was shaped by the automobile, and that our cities sprawled simply because we had the space to do so, unlike Europe.

This is untrue on multiple fronts.

More importantly, as someone else once put it more elegantly, America was not designed for the car. It was destroyed for it.

Our cities once resembled, and in some places still resemble, their European counterparts, because that is how cities naturally make sense. Useful things placed near the places where people live.

But this destruction did not happen all at once. Like most new technologies, the car was met with resistance and suspicion. Before automobiles, streets looked more like public squares. People walked, lingered, and nothing moved faster than a horse.

Then the cars arrived, and people began to die.

In the 1920s, even with far fewer vehicles on the road, traffic deaths per person were higher than they are today. Pedestrians, especially children, were among the most common victims.

And people noticed. Grief often turned into anger. It was not unusual for police to needing to protect drivers from mobs after a child was killed. Newspapers ran cartoons comparing the automobile to Moloch, the ancient god said to demand the sacrifice of children.

The danger was not theoretical. It was right there in the street.

The epicycles needed to justify the car

Eventually, the car became the center of our vision of progress. And as that vision began to fracture, we added layer after layer of explanation to keep it standing. Below are three ‘epicycles’ or changes we needed to make to coninue to keep the car at the center.

1. Epicycles of Space

Cars do not just move through cities. They settle into them. They demand storage in the most valuable places we have, and then they wait there, quietly, for most of their lives. To accommodate this stillness, we built a second city on top of the first one. A shadow city of lots, decks, setbacks, and curb cuts, where empty space is treated as a civic achievement.

For decades, zoning codes required new buildings to provide parking, without evidence and always in excess. The result is a country with roughly eight parking spaces for every car. In many cities, parking consumes close to a third of the land area. Restaurants are required to build lots larger than their dining rooms. Downtown blocks disappear under concrete decks. We have, in some places, built more housing for vehicles than for people.

These rules were meant to solve a problem. Instead, they reshaped the city. Businesses spread farther apart. Walking became less practical. Every trip grew longer. And as driving became easier, demand increased, which made the “parking problem” feel permanent.

In Chattanooga, this pattern reads like a long-running series. Articles from the 1920s and 30s promised solutions to the parking problem, and the same promise still appears today, sometimes framed as convenience, sometimes as downtown revitalization. Our current mayor even made downtown parking a pillar of his reelection campaign.

2. Epicycles of Flow

Once a city is built around cars, movement becomes a moral obligation. Traffic must keep flowing, even when there are too many vehicles, even when the place they are moving through is dense, historic, or human.

So we build around the problem.

We widen highways.
We add lanes.
We stack ramps into concrete spirals.

In Los Angeles, the five-level Pregerson Interchange stretches a mile and a half, with nine miles of looping ramps, a maze of soaring concrete that cost $135 million to construct. In Milwaukee, the Marquette Interchange required 28 ramps and 21 miles of roadway, along with $810 million in public investment. These structures are engineering marvels. They are also monuments to how difficult it is to preserve high-speed driving in the middle of a city.

And when congestion returns, as it reliably does, we reach for the same solution. Houston widened the Katy Freeway to 26 lanes at a cost of $2.8 billion. A few years later, travel times were worse than before. More lanes invited more cars. The system worked exactly as designed.

Each expansion is meant to fix a problem without questioning the premise. The car must remain central. The city must adapt. So the roads grow wider, the interchanges taller, and the distances longer. The complexity is not accidental. It is the price of protecting the original assumption.

3. Epicycles of Safety and Control

When you move heavy machines quickly through places where people live, the city has to become a constant apology. We add signals and signs, crosswalk buttons that ask permission, guardrails to contain predictable mistakes, and pedestrian bridges that quietly admit the street is no longer a shared place. We add enforcement where design fails, and then more enforcement to manage the enforcement.

And still, the harm continues.

In the United States, roughly 40,000 people are killed in traffic crashes each year. That is the equivalent of a 9/11 every month, or a plane falling from the sky every few days. Millions more are injured. Car crashes remain one of the leading causes of death for children and young adults. This is not an accident. It is the natural result of moving fast, heavy machines near fragile human bodies.

In the early days of the automobile, this violence felt optional. People were angry in a way we struggle to imagine now. In the Netherlands, parents organized under the slogan Stop de Kindermoord, Stop the Child Murder, after more than 400 children were killed by cars in a single year. Instead of adding more rules, they redesigned their streets. By prioritizing people over speed, they cut traffic deaths dramatically. Today, their fatality rate is about 60 percent lower than the United States.

We, meanwhile, chose a different path. We layered our streets with seat belts, airbags, speed limits, fines, and laws. These epicycles of safety help. But they never solve the core problem. A system built around cars will always require damage control.

But there is a new way

America was not the only place reshaped for the car. European cities were too. Even in the world’s most pedestrian friendly places, cars still claim large stretches of street. Every protected bike lane is a type of admission that the nearby road is not safe to share. And where streets are shared, parking can fill the edges or disappear underground into garages that can cost tens of thousands of dollars per space.

The rest of the world made many of the same mistakes. They are also quicker to undo them. I remember standing in Bordeaux, stunned to learn that its beautiful riverside promenade used to be a parking lot.

And that is where the hope begins.

3 examples of hope:

When you begin to decenter the car, you meet resistance from every direction. People with disabilities raise concerns about accessibility. Left leaning progressives talk about the privilege of removing free parking. Others point out, correctly, how deeply even low income households rely on cars. An attack on the status quo will feel like an attack on everyone, so expect resistance from everyone.

But this is where Ian Lockwood’s full illustration becomes so important. Changing the center of a system is not a small adjustment. It is a fundamental shift that challenges our assumptions about how the world is supposed to work. And yet, in the long run, it often makes life simpler for everyone.

Below are a few examples of cities that put people back at the center, and what happened when they did.

1. Pontevedra, Spain

Pontevedra didn’t “manage” traffic so much as it stopped feeding it. Starting in 1999, the city pedestrianized large parts of its center, pulled out on street parking, and made driving through downtown feel less like a right and more like a choice with consequences. The results were blunt in the way you want results to be: on streets that saw 30 traffic deaths from 1996–2006, there were three in the next ten years, and the city reported CO₂ emissions down 70%.

2. Seoul, South Korea

Seoul took an elevated highway and turned it into a stream again. The Cheonggyecheon restoration created a corridor through the center of the city and delivered measurable changes: one case study reports an average 3.6°C cooling effect in the surrounding area. The point is not that every city needs a stream, but that a city can remove car infrastructure and end up with something simpler, cooler, and more alive than what was there before.

3. San Francisco, USA

After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the Embarcadero Freeway, San Francisco faced a choice. Rebuild a double deck highway along the waterfront, or remove it and try something different. The city chose removal. What many feared would cause permanent gridlock did not. Traffic redistributed. Transit use increased. And more than 100 acres of formerly dead space under the freeway became parks, plazas, and developable land. Housing in the area grew by 51 percent, jobs by 23 percent, and the waterfront became a place people actually wanted to be.

Gentle stewards of change

I hope you begin to notice Ptolemaic patterns everywhere. Ideas that once served a purpose, but grew so complicated they began to reveal the need for a better foundation. The world can often be made both simpler and kinder by choosing what works for the many, not just the few.

And I hope, as you see this, that you are gentle with people. Change asks something of them. You must win them over, engage their imaginations, and sit with them in their grief when they experience the loss that comes with change. This work is not easy, but it is necessary. It is not enough to be angry. We must change hearts and minds with care, yet with the urgency as if peoples lives depend on it, because they do.

Sources that might interest you:

• Video of the Ptolemaic model.

• Great site for seeing how cars disrupted cities

• Maps of cities across the US and the amount of space dedicated to parking

• Urban 3 and Strong Towns illustrating how the ‘epicycle of flow’ disrupts local land values.

• Video on Pontevedra Spain, and a NYT article if you have a subscription.

• Article on Seoul returning the stream

• How my city removed a highway and the sky didn’t fall, but a riverfront was reopened to humans.

• A video of San Francisco in 1905 and showing how streets moved slowly and were more like a public square than a thoroughfare.

And moments like this call forth new kinds of people. Such people are not always liked, though being disliked is not the aim.

Democracy is less like a monument and more like a fire. It must be fed, watched, and tended. Left alone, it does not stay warm. It goes out.

I want to give three categories for people who rise in times of seeming darkness and are urgently needed. After all, with authoritarianism being the default of most of history, we have examples of characters that helped in that history.

My work is grounded in the built environment and the public realm. If it seems to gesture toward broader unrest, that is not my aim, though it is unavoidable. Like strands in a web, what happens in a public space is always true beyond it.

The three people we need:

Every movement that has ever bent the world, even slightly, has relied on a familiar trio, whether it knew it or not. There are:

The Prophets who speak about the future as if it were already knocking, insisting that things do not have to remain as they are. They are the moral accountability speaking to power, warning that even if people are unable to follow through now, there will be a reckoning.

The Philosophers who pause long enough to ask whether the rules we are following were ever good rules to begin with. They question presuppositions.

The Pirates who grow tired of waiting and quietly test the future in the present, building small, undeniable proofs that change is possible.

Let’s expand what this might mean.

The Prophet: plays the long game

What they do
Prophets articulate a vision before it is popular, profitable, or politically safe. They name the problem clearly and insist that a better future is possible, even when the evidence is thin. Their job is not implementation. Their job is orientation. They say what needs to be said, regardless of consequences.

Prophets help people see what does not yet exist, and once seen, cannot be unseen. Prophets are often ignored early, dismissed as unrealistic, misquoted later, and credited long after the fact.

What they influence
Culture, language, values, and the outer edges of what feels thinkable. They said things we agree with today. They also might have had strong opinions that were also wrong.

People (not endorsing these people wholesale)

• Jane Jacobs
  “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

• Lewis Mumford
  Warned that cities could either nurture human life or mechanize it out of existence.

• Jan Gehl
  “First life, then spaces, then buildings. The other way around never works.”

Examples from history: the Biblical prophets, Rachel Carson with her work in Silent Spring, George Orwell.

The Philosopher: questions the box itself

What they do
Philosophers challenge assumptions that professionals no longer see. They ask why things are done the way they are and whether the frame itself is broken. They’re there to interrogate more than to optimize. They are less interested in answers than in better questions.

Philosophers are often dismissed as impractical until their ideas quietly reshape policy and practice.

What they influence
How problems are defined, which tradeoffs are acknowledged, and which solutions are even allowed into the conversation.

People

• James C. Scott
  Showed how schemes that look efficient from above often fail on the ground.

• Christopher Alexander
  “A city is not a tree.”

Examples from history: Socrates asking inconvenient questions, Hannah Arendt on systems and responsibility, Ursula K. Le Guin using fiction to test alternate worlds.

The Pirate: acts with urgency

What they do
Pirates build before permission, test ideas in the real world, and create facts on the ground. They are not reckless, but they are impatient with paralysis. Their work proves what is possible faster than debate ever could.

Pirates turn theory into something you can trip over. They prototype instead of waiting, use temporary tools to reveal permanent truths, exploit gaps in systems, move faster than institutions.

Pirates make opposition feel irrelevant by making change visible.

What they influence
Practice, momentum, and public perception.

People

• Mike Lydon
  “Short-term action can lead to long-term change.”

• Janette Sadik-Khan
  Installed bike lanes first and debated them later.

• Cross Walk Collective
  Doing it themselves.

• Dan Burden
  Took walkability from theory to curbside.

Examples from history:

The Black Panthers, tactical urbanists, punk music.

Where are they?

I don’t mean to make heroes or examples out of any of these people. They are all human and prone to error, and their philosophies, taken to their end logic, will eventually break.

If society is a ship heading for an iceberg, their roles are beyond actually steering the ship; the Prophets, Philosophers, and Pirates are not the ones standing at the wheel. They are not captains; when a ship is headed toward disaster, the most important work often happens far from the bridge.

The Prophets are the ones on deck, staring into the dark, pointing at the horizon and saying there is ice ahead. They are mocked for ruining the mood, for speaking too soon, for sounding alarmist. They cannot turn the ship, but without them, no one even knows there is a problem.

The Philosophers are the ones before and after the tragedy asking the big questions, studying the ship itself. They ask questions that make people uncomfortable, questions that reveal the disaster was designed in long before the iceberg appeared.

The Pirates are the ones savings lives on a sinking ship. They are the ones unbolting lifeboats early, testing ropes, lowering a few into the water before anyone gives permission. They break rules not because they enjoy chaos, but because procedure is useless when time runs out. They cannot save everyone, but they make survival imaginable.

Who are these people within the city contending for the public realm? The prophets are those showing up and speaking directly to the people in power, not just sharing posts on social media; they are showing up. The philosophers are asking questions that are challenging even for the true believers to contend with. And the pirates are the ones doing things. Placing bus benches, painting crosswalks, and even getting into trouble.

The best part about these people is you could be one of them. It takes showing up IRL, but none of them require certifications. The best part about this is because they will never be given permission to do what they do, you never need to wait for permission.

You might not know this about me, but I once wanted to be a podcaster.

Growing up, I loved ideas and learning, even though reading was hard for me. Audio felt like a shortcut, a way to learn without friction, and podcasts arrived at exactly the right moment.

For a while, I listened obsessively. I recommended shows to people who had never heard a podcast before. I even tried making one myself.

I bought the gear, outlined episodes, recorded a few. Recently, I stumbled across one episode I made and didn’t hate it. Who knows what could have been?

Yet, publishing audio never felt seamless to me, and when TikTok came along, my attention followed what was easier to use.

Still, every so often I find a podcast that makes me quietly envious in a gentle way. Not the bitter kind, just the feeling that says this is well made, and I’m glad it exists.

I’m picky about podcasts. I don’t love two people talking into microphones and calling it done. I like structure, editing, and care. I like when someone has thought about how a story is told.

This short episode by Maheema does that.

This isn’t sponsored. It’s just something I’d like to do more often, maybe once a month, sharing work I genuinely enjoy?

This particular episode is short, about ten minutes, and a good introduction to Jane Jacobs and the way Maheema looks at cities.

Maheema mentioned to me that being a hopeful urbanist often requires repetition. You have to keep reminding yourself that things can get better. That housing can become more affordable. That cities can be more livable. That community can grow where we already are.

That’s why she finds downtown Brooklyn in 2025 so interesting.

When Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, she didn’t like downtown Brooklyn. One detail stood out to her. Chain bookstores there closed at 8 pm, while the same stores in Manhattan stayed open until 10 because there were more people on the street at night.

So Maheema asks a simple question. What would Jane think now?

In the first episode of The Hobby Rule, Maheema walks her own neighborhood through Jane Jacobs’ four-part test. The streets are busier. Housing is denser. Stores stay open later. The city has changed.

The open question is whether it has changed enough, and what it will take to keep it vital.

Before I make an argument for why, I want you to understand the small convenience of real community as I have experienced it. What follows is a privilege, one that exists in spite of our built environment, not because of it.

On our block, several families’ kids—spanning ages five to twelve—and somehow they all get along. Four of them attend a neighborhood school a few blocks away. In the afternoons, the kids drift from house to house on foot, disappearing until dinner. We have had to schedule family only days because we were seeing too little of our own children.

Care is shared without being formal. Some days one parent works while another keeps an eye on the kids, though it barely feels like childcare since the children entertain each other. Dogs get walked. Houses get watched.

A forgotten nighttime pull-up appears without a late store run. When a neighbor’s heat went out on a freezing night, blankets, space heaters, and open couches followed immediately.

Group texts can summon a cup of sugar, a ladder, or a drill in minutes. Gatherings form in the street. Parties happen last minute. A Sunday night show night emerged simply because we realized we liked the same show and the kids were asleep.

As an introvert, this is a dream. I like people, but I dislike planning. This is familiarity without pressure. Encounters that turn into hangouts. Friends you can sit beside at a coffee shop without needing to talk.

Once, a neighbor and I walked half a mile to a bar and back. We recognized eight people and stopped for real conversations with six of them. Small exchanges like these add up. They are the micro deposits that build a life held together by community.

Community like this is easy and makes my life incredibly convenient. Full stop.

In this issue I explore what conveniences community offers and why it seems like a slog in our current situation.

I’m not crazy, community shouldn’t be hard

Here’s the thing, this isn’t me being delusional. I can see that community in it’s current state often is inconvenient. It takes time. It takes effort. It asks more of us than we should have to give. But I think the inconvenience we experience is not the cost of community so much as a symptom of how thoroughly we’ve broken the hardware necessary to support it.

Good community, when it works, is actually a form of radical convenience. It means borrowed tools instead of purchases, familiar faces instead of customer service lines, help that shows up before you know how to ask for it. The fact that it feels hard now says less about community itself and more about the environments we’ve built that make isolation the default.

Think of it as a network problem. Using the internet in the early 1990s was wildly inconvenient. It was not the best way to get a ride, read a review, or order food. The cost of using it was time, patience, and a lot of trial and error. But as infrastructure grew and access became easier, the inconvenience faded. You can argue all day about whether the internet has been good or bad for society, but it’s hard to argue that it’s inconvenient.

Community works the same way. What feels like friction now is really an under-built network, still waiting for the systems that allow it to function at scale. The good news is that unlike the internet, the necessary hardware does not need to be invented. It already exists. And it is not new or untested technology. It’s really the most original way of living.

The original network effect

The network effect is simple: something becomes more valuable the more people use it. A phone with one user is worthless. A phone when everyone has one changes civilization. Each new person who joins doesn’t just benefit themselves; they make the whole system better for everyone already in it.

That’s why social media platforms explode. Facebook with twelve users was boring. Facebook with a billion users is where your friends are, where the pizza place posts, where everything happens. Every new person who joined made it harder for everyone else to leave.

Cities may be our earliest example of network effects. When people gathered together, specialization became possible, and the built environment turned into a kind of hardware for community. Over time, we added software updates. Culture, norms, and shared meaning became the operating system of human gathering.

I do not want to romanticize cities. As they became better at producing good things, they also became better at producing harm. But it is still worth noticing this: nearly everything you love and use each day is, at some point in its story, a product of a city. From the machine a farmer drives to till her field to the pen or pencil Wendell Berry uses to write his books, the network effects of cities have shaped our global economy and our shared culture.

The last 70 years; the erosion of social hardware

Before the car, convenience meant what was ten minutes from home. Church, school, and shops were full of familiar faces, people you knew or at least recognized. Even conflict had a kind of resolution, because you had to keep sharing the same spaces.

The car changed that. Everything felt convenient. You stopped going to the grocery store and started going to a grocery store; one 30 minutes away that fit your taste. The same happened with work, fitness, and sports, which moved from neighborhood parks to distant complexes.

You still meet people, sometimes people you really like. But depth now requires scheduling. Dinners, playdates, birthdays all have to be planned and squeezed into the edges of life. Familiarity does not compound. It has to be constantly maintained.

So affection becomes work. Introverts feel lonely. Extroverts feel exhausted. We are offered endless choice, but it is like being given a thousand shallow pools instead of one place deep enough to swim.

And good neighborhoods are hard to find in part because we’ve outlawed them. You need 16 dwelling units per acre to seriously support public transit. Most cities allow for this type of development in less than 10% of their land. And what’s left, thinned and spread out neighborhoods, make walking and riding anything other than a personal vehicle impossible.

And mom and pop shops need built in, nearby customers.

Instead of focusing on making a great product and maintaining their space, they have to spend just as much effort on marketing and getting people to show up. They outsource what they can, and sometimes that outsourcing comes at the expense of the product. Now Sysco makes your biscuits, not the bakery you came to love.

And as you spend more time isolated in your car, and in unfamiliar environments, yo begin to lose a necessary component to a social eco system; acquaintances.

Acquaintances: low knowledge, familiarity

Acquaintances are the people you know just well enough. You recognize their faces, maybe their names, and the outlines of their lives. They are not the ones you call in a crisis, but they are the ones who make the world feel inhabited instead of anonymous. They are the invisible threads of community, connecting us lightly and repeatedly, often without our noticing.

They are also becoming rare. If you walked to the places you go every day, you would accumulate these small recognitions over time. Sociologist Mark Granovetter called them weak ties, and they are essential to how networks work.

Strong ties like family, close friends, and churches are where ideas are nurtured and meaning is deepened. They are necessary, but limited. Weak ties are how information travels, how opportunities surface, how culture spreads. It is part of why social platforms are powerful. They dramatically increase our number of weak ties.

Strong ties create inside jokes. Weak ties create shared culture.

Walkable communities effortlessly produce this kind of familiarity. You look out for one another. You pass along the name of a good doctor or a reliable plumber. And the more acquaintances you have, the more likely those relationships are to deepen. Most close relationships begin this way.

You marry a friend of a friend. A neighbor tips you off to a house for sale or a job that changes your life. Someone texts you while you are away because something seems off at your place. Acquaintances are like the soil in which friendships grow. And yet, they are also like pollinators, carrying connection from place to place. And as our friendships become more intentional choices that require effort and limited free time, acquaintances become an endangered species.

What good hardware would look like

If there is enough housing density and it is allowed by right, mom and pop shops can survive mostly on foot traffic from nearby residents. A trip to the coffee shop becomes a place to see people you know and people you recognize well enough that conversation does not require a full catch up.

If schools are in the neighborhood, you meet parents on the playground. Playdates do not require coordination because kids can walk to each other’s houses or keep hanging out after pickup. You are more likely to run into one another because you are on foot, not isolated in a pickup line.

Slower streets without speeding cut through traffic mean more kids outside. Basketballs can roll into the street with little risk, and spaces that once sat empty become places for bikes and pickup games.

Parks do not require the logistics of a day trip because there is one nearby. Grocery runs stay within the neighborhood. All of this remains a choice. You can still go to a better park elsewhere or do a monthly Costco run. The difference is that daily life becomes easier, and variety comes from preference, not necessity.

I personally experienced this in Barcelona. On a normal school day, parents walk to pick up their kids, then stop at a park or plaza while the kids play. Adults sit at the edges, chatting, working, or reading. It looks social, but it is low pressure. Because it happens every day, there is no obligation to talk. Headphones are allowed.

And if you do want to catch up, you pull up a chair. Cafes and bars line the plazas, so adults can watch their kids, drink in hand, and talk. If you are overstimulated or the conversation falls flat, you simply leave. No one is let down. Introverts can introvert.

Compare that to a playdate scheduled weeks in advance, already rescheduled once, on a day you wake up not wanting to do anything. Your child’s social life depends on you saying yes, and you brace yourself for a forced conversation you would rather avoid.

This is what people usually mean when they say community is inconvenient. It is parties that require planning, drives across town, and social arrangements built around strangers. Relationships exist, but they are held together by scheduling, not shared time, while others get the benefit of weak ties simply by showing up to the same place every day.

Empathy and affection

The benefits reach beyond convenience. Most close friendships are not chosen so much as arranged by circumstance. Church friends, freshman year friends, people you see every day become important because time does the choosing for you. Affection grows through shared hours, which is why you can miss people you never knew very well.

Living among different people also deepens empathy. If you grew up alongside refugees, it is harder to fear them. If you recognize the face of the unhoused person on your block, it is harder to dismiss them. Familiarity makes humanity harder to ignore.

There are social benefits too. Robert Putnam describes relationships as social capital, the value we gain from connection. Some ties bond us together so we can survive. Others bridge us outward so we can thrive. Raj Chetty shows that one of the strongest predictors of escaping poverty is knowing people just one rung up the income ladder. Bonding ties help you get by. Bridging ties help you get ahead.

We become more empathetic and socially capable when we live among both close friends and acquaintances, people like us and not like us. But this requires a built environment that allows it. Third places that are free, nearby schools and shops where paths cross, and social institutions embedded in daily life. Community does not happen by accident. It needs somewhere to live.

I am not saying community will always be convenient. But people first gathered because there were real benefits to doing so. If community now feels inconvenient, it is worth asking whether the infrastructure beneath it is to blame. The work is not just to build community, but to rebuild the environment that once made community the easy choice.

For now, it is about choosing to invest in the people closest to me. That investment stretches further, and while I still have friends elsewhere, they are no longer the priority. I canceled Amazon and started asking myself how to love what is near me more.

Even within the limits of my built environment, that choice is making things easier. And as social capital grows in my neighborhood, change becomes possible. Getting to know the people near you is a virtuous cycle. It makes life better at first, and then, slowly, it makes life easier.

Resources:

1. Social Capital, Putnam: Check out his book Bowling Alone.

2. Weak ties, Mark Granovetter: his published findings

3. Raj Chetty, on how friends in different social classes creates economic upward mobility: Article here.