Betty is survived by her daughter Renee, an unopened Gallup poll rating her feelings on the current administration and its views on foreign policy, a $5 Walmart gift card earned after completing a 100-question survey about her grocery habits, and a city planning report published 18 months after the public engagement period closed that did not appear to reflect anything she had said.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you simply assume she was satisfied and let that be enough. Rest, Betty. No further action is required.

This obituary is a work of satire. Betty Wood is a fictional character. Any resemblance to actual Detroiters, living or deceased, who have been asked to rate their satisfaction with a pothole is purely coincidental, though we understand if it feels personal.

Hello friends,

You may have started to think by now that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere on the way to Arkansas and ended up in the depths of the Ozarks never to be heard from again. Not to worry - I made it home to Detroit and got a little waylaid in writing this final installment of the Mega-Midwest series.

My original plan was to visit eight cities, but I was a very full sponge by the end of city number six, so I made the 13 hour drive home from Bentonville, AR on Friday. I am glad to be home, but even more glad that I decided to do this. It was a real effort to keep two and a half weeks in the calendar light enough for me to enjoy this trip and take the space I needed to see and learn, even though it was blocked off months ago. Shout out to my assistant and right hand superwoman, Mari Moughan, for making it all happen.

So much of middle America is beautiful, resilient, and worthy of time and attention. I set out on this trip to find undervalued and underappreciated people and projects making life better for people living in cities across the midwest. From my new friend Emma the regenerative farmer, to Tiffany in Tulsa who is making the trades more accessible to women, Justin the roaster making coffee out of the Duluth Folk School, and Aaron the trail builder who is making mountain biking trails in communities across the US, there are wonderful people across the midwest quietly working to make life better for their neighbors.

A Pleasant Surprise

I’ve avoided assigning superlatives to the places I’ve been, but I’ll break precedent and say that I was most pleasantly surprised by Bentonville. I enjoyed my evening strolls and morning coffee shop walks here better than anywhere else. If you were to imagine a crossover of the Truman Show, Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow, and Disney’s Main Street USA, you’d get pretty close to picturing a normal day in downtown Bentonville. The streets were incredibly clean, walkable, and full of great restaurants and retail. I laughed out loud when I walked past Bentonville Dive, the quintessential local dive bar that looks like it was built 10 minutes ago and has a totally artificial scum factor. The dive bar sits across from The Preacher’s Son, an upscale New American restaurant built in an old church. Down the street is a yoga studio, Onyx Coffee, a used bookstore, and more restaurants than I could name. All perfectly curated.

I remember visiting the Bloomberg headquarters in London in 2019 and my host describing the design of the building as “the brainchild of a billionaire who thinks he’s an architect and an architect who thinks he’s a billionaire”. I’d say the same about Bentonville, but swap the architect for an urban planner. Listen - I fully endorse these billionaires being urban planners in more places than Bentonville because it was truly, truly pleasant. Do I want to turn a blind eye to the fact that this little walkable urban paradise was built with the wealth accumulated by turning other people’s towns into suburban wastelands? Yes I do. Will I? Of course not. I’ll come back to that in a future post on the correlation between net worth and demand for urban walkability. Spoiler: it’s high.

The Bentonville Brand

If you’re thinking to yourself “man, Bentonville sounds so familiar… why do I know this town?”, Bentonville is the birthplace of Walmart and the hometown of its founder, Sam Walton. You’ve probably seen Bentonville printed on the side of a Walmart delivery truck. The Walton Family has kept its roots in Northwest Arkansas and invested millions of dollars into developing the city of Bentonville. Northwest Arkansas is also home to the headquarters of Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt, both industry giants. Most American towns the size of Bentonville could only dream of having a company so large headquartered there.

The City of Bentonville has obviously benefited tremendously from the Walmart empire and the philanthropic investments of the Walton Family. The Walmart supply chain alone has spurred on the growth of many downstream businesses, boosting the local economy. Walmart has also attracted talent from all over the country, making Bentonville an outlier in terms of diversity and educational attainment. When you attracted a diverse population of highly educated talent, a town also builds amenities to keep them around.

Here’s what’s maybe most interesting to me about Bentonville:
From an outsider’s perspective, there is a clear brand and “vibe”. There’s this great line in the song Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise by the Avett Brothers that kept coming to mind. It goes, “decide what to be and go be it”. Bentonville decided it was going to be a world class mountain biking and arts destination and is doing it. Let’s break this down a little further:

Legend says that Steuart and Tom Walton, avid mountain bikers, took an unforgettable mountain biking trip to Copper Harbor, Michigan and wanted to recreate that experience in their own backyards. $74M later, Bentonville is home to top tier mountain biking trails that attract more than 90,000 visitors per year. They host mountain bikers from all over the world, along with events that draw athletes and spectators. They book up local hotels, eat at restaurants, and shop in local stores, generating tax revenue that creates a strong and sustainable city. Side note: I might be one of the only people to see both Copper Harbor and Bentonville in the same roadtrip, a fascinating comparison and case study in how far tourism gets a small town.

We now understand the mountain biking, but what makes Bentonville an arts town? Crystal Bridges, Bentonville’s Museum of American Art founded by Alice Walton kickstarted the local arts focus from what I understand. Alice Walton is the only daughter of Sam and Helen Walton and has been a lifelong arts collector, purchasing her first piece at 10 years old with money she earned working at her father’s store.

Crystal Bridges was recommended to me by literally everyone who had been to Bentonville and knew I was going and boy were they spot on. I loved it! Rather than focusing on the collection (which is amazing and unique), I want to talk more about what Crystal Bridges is contributing to Bentonville as an institution. While no museum specific data is available, here’s what the NWA Gazette says about the economic impact of Crystal Bridges and the Momentary, Bentonville’s modern art museum:

More than 5.6 million people have visited Crystal Bridges since it opened in 2011, with the vast majority visiting from outside Northwest Arkansas.

I actually ended up walking through the museum twice - once for the art and once for the architecture. It was so hard to enjoy both at the same time and IMO, they were equally wonderful. I loved that the architecture was entirely unique and striking, but also humble. I find most museums to be stuffy, but the design of Crystal Bridges made it so no one in the museum felt out of the place, even in rain boots and hoodies. I imagine that inviting but beautiful architecture that reflects the natural landscape creates a real sense of belonging for the residents of Northwest Arkansas.

Here’s my last takeaway: it’s really interesting to see how two philanthropists in two different cities spent $500M.

• Tulsa: The Gathering Place funded by George Kaiser for $465M

• Bentonville: Crystal Bridges funded by Alice Walton for $403M

Both investments centered on one thing - one legacy project that was deeply rooted in place. The glass of Crystal Bridges literally reflects its natural surroundings while the Gathering Place is carefully tucked away within the natural landscape of Tulsa’s riverfront. Neither project addresses the systemic inequities present in the local economies, nor do they explore or aim to solve complex social issues. Instead, they are monuments to place that will provide an enduring economic impact and service to the community. I don’t think either approach is right or wrong - it would be limiting to apply a binary to them. Just an interesting thing to ponder.

Thank you all for following along in this journey. Writing about each place was a huge challenge and really stretched me, but I am so glad I did it. I’ll have something to look back on years from now and, hopefully, it was fun and rewarding for you too. My aspiration for this newsletter is to surface important things happening in urban places and inspire its readers to think differently about their relationship to their place. I’ll keep it going so long as you’ll come along for the ride!

Until next time,

Alex

Hi friends,

I’m well over halfway through my journey and just wrapped up a visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was a bit of a drive from Minneapolis to Tulsa, so I stopped in Kansas City on the way for a little mini tour with my old friend from college. What an unexpected delight! Unlike some of the other cities I’ve visited in the last two weeks, Kansas City seems to have decided what it wants to be when it grows up and is investing in infrastructure and public life accordingly.

Let’s get into Tulsa. There is a lot to talk about, but I am going to focus on two things: The Gathering Place + Greenwood Rising.

The Gathering Place: A Park Like No Other

The Gathering Place was recommended to me by someone from Builders + Backers, an entrepreneurial support program by Heartland Forward. They didn’t say much more than “it’s really cool and you should check it out.” I am not exaggerating when I say that the Gathering Place is the most expansive, inclusive, and beautifully programmed public space I have ever seen. If you follow me on IG, you have already seen me gushing over this place. I tried not to look like a total creep walking around childless through the playgrounds and muttering to myself “how is this real?”. I couldn’t resist playing with the water pumps or walking across the swinging bridges.

Here are some fast facts on The Gathering Place:

• The idea for the park started in 2008 when philanthropist and oil/banking businessman George Kaiser shared a vision for a a natural, welcoming place where Tulsans could gather.

• The 65 acre park opened in September of 2018 and is completely free to all visitors. It’s broken up into roughly 20 areas that are each landscaped and themed.

• I walked through almost all 60 acres and found the sensory garden, sports courts, boating pond, skate park, swings, sandstone rock towers forming a canyon, wetland gardens, adventure playgrounds, interactive water play features, and a lodge with cafes, activity rooms, and a community lounge space.

• The $100M endowment spins out an annual operating budget of $6-7.5M.

Racial Reconciliation in Tulsa

I’m coming up short on a smooth way to tie these two topics together, so you’ll have to trust the process and see what threads you can tie as you read.

My friends from Heartland Forward were also quick to recommended visiting the Historic Greenwood Neighborhood, the area destroyed by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. I had heard of the Tulsa Massacre but, ashamedly, couldn’t tell you what caused it or who was impact by it. A visit to Greenwood Rising brought me up to speed in such a powerful way.

Greenwood Rising is the history center in the Greenwood District honoring the legacy of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street. During segregation, white and Black Tulsa was divided by a set of train tracks. Although Black Tulsans were allowed in white areas, they could not spend money at white owned businesses. This led to the development of the Greenwood District, a thriving Black Wall Street where grocers, lawyers, barbers, dentists, doctors, and restauranteurs opened up shop to serve the Black community.

On Memorial Day weekend in 1921, a Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white elevator operator. Rowland was arrested and rumors spread that he would be lynched. This brought an angry mob of white men to the county courthouse, along with a group of 75 Black men to protect Rowland. Tensions were obviously high between protestors outside the courthouse. It wasn’t long before an altercation between two men caused mass violence to break out. Shots were exchanged until after midnight and the Black men, being outnumbered, were forced to retreat to Greenwood. News of the violence spread quickly through Tulsa and more white men joined the mob and descended on Greenwood killing residents, burning and looting businesses, and destroying more than $36.92 million dollars in real estate and personal property (in today’s USD). 10,000 Black Tulsans were left homeless, 300 killed, and their neighborhood reduced to a burned out shell.

In the years after the massacre, Black Tulsans worked to rebuild what they lost. W.E.B. Dubois summarized Greenwood’s rebirth this way:

“Five little years ago, fire and blood and robbery leveled it to the ground. Scars are there, but the city is impudent and noisy. It believes in itself. Thank God for the grit of Black Tulsa.”

By the 1940s, there were nearly twice the number of Black owned businesses in Greenwood than before the massacre. It’s hard to wrap my head around the resilience it took to rebuild and the bravery to do it while racist onlookers undoubtedly kept a close eye on Greenwood. Greenwood experienced 45 years of prosperity before it suffered its final blow: the construction of I-244.

I took these photos in Tulsa yesterday, purposely capturing the interstate in the background. There are beautiful plaques up and down the sidewalk of Greenwood memorializing the former sites of Black owned businesses that were either destroyed in the massacre or driven out by the construction of I-244. You can find stories of Black Wall Streets across the U.S. that suffered this same fate, including Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood.

The question that remains for me is, “what does meaningful restorative justice and reconciliation look like for Tulsa?” State and federal government continues to fund highway widening but has made no investment in reparations. In its human rights argument for reparations in Tulsa, Human Rights Watch calls for the follow reparations:

• Restitution: measures to restore the situation that existed before the wrongful act(s) were committed, such as restoration of liberty, employment and return to the place of residence and return of property.[261]

• Compensation: monetary payment for “economically assessable damage” arising from the violation, including physical or mental harm, material losses, and lost opportunities.[262]

• Rehabilitation: provision of “medical and psychological care as well as legal and social services.”[263]

• Satisfaction: includes a range of measures involving truth-telling, statements aimed at ending ongoing abuses, commemorations or tributes to the victims, and expressions of regret or formal apology for wrongdoing.[264]

• Guarantees of non-repetition: includes institutional and legal reform as well as reforms to government practices to end the abuse.[265]

The combination of a violent racial history and massive philanthropic investment in Tulsa makes it an interesting place for me to watch. I am curious about projects like the Gathering Place and to what extent is contributes to community healing. If you’ve got thoughts on this or other examples of reconciliation to share, please drop it in the comments. Next stop: Bentonville, Arkansas.

Until next time,

Alex

Hi friends,

It’s 91 degrees and sunny in Des Moines. It seems to be an unusual heat wave that will be followed by a return to normal temperatures next week. I mentioned in the Minneapolis debrief that swapping Des Moines for Kansas City felt the right move for the purpose of this trip: to find undervalued people and projects that are making life better for people in eight cities across the midwest.

Des Moines is an underdog. Today’s population is the same as it was in 1960: 212,000. As I drove around the city, I felt like the scale of downtown and the neighborhoods were appropriate for a city of this size. Lots of tall buildings, a few big bridges connecting two sides of the city split by the river, and some really nice parks tucked away between the major roads and secondary neighborhood streets. Something was weird though. I couldn’t put my finger on it. After a little while I pulled over and said to myself, “wait a minute…. where is everybody??”

It genuinely feels like the entire population of Des Moines went out of town for the weekend. There were so few people walking the streets of downtown and even fewer people in the parks and on neighborhood streets. The exception to this was the Saturday Farmer’s Market where the number of patrons seemed about equal to the number of vendors.

I won’t postulate too much on the reasons for the empty streets because I haven’t seen the city in other seasons and am not sure if it’s like this all the time. However, I can almost assure you that the explanation for a slow downtown Des Moines is the mix of building typologies. There are too many office buildings. At first I thought it might have been a zoning problem, but looking at the land use map, downtown is zoned appropriately to accommodate a mix of residential, commercial, and small scale retail. When I look out the window of my hotel room, though, all of these buildings look like offices. If they really are, this is a 9-5 downtown that was crushed by the pandemic.

What’s Wrong with a 9-5 Downtown?

Some of you will know the term “eyes on the street”, originally coined by Jane Jacobs. Eyes on the street is the idea that when the built environment is created at human scale and oriented in way that promotes connection between people, you have safer and more socially connected places. Jane’s neighborhood, Greenwich Village, is a small and densely populated area whose buildings max out at 70-75 feet tall. The windows of residential buildings look out onto the street and into neighboring apartments. The design of these residential buildings, both in orientation and height, connect apartment dwellers to what’s happening on the street. Residents inherently become caretakers of each other. Here’s what Jane Jacobs says in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

When an area like downtown Des Moines is comprised of nothing but high rise commercial skyscrapers mixed in with moderate scale hotels and offices, you lose those eyes on the street and remove that sense of safety in numbers. It’s why we feel spooked at night walking in a place where the buildings are tall and the people are few.

The Des Moines City Council endorsed its Future Forward Master Plan in February and it includes six key initiative aimed at growing the population:

1. The Green Ring, which would improve several streets and trails around downtown for pedestrians and cyclists.

2. Skywalks Reimagined, a plan to revamp Des Moines’ skywalk system with better lighting, vibrant artwork, and color-coded maps.

3. Inner Circle, a proposal to transform key streets inside Des Moines’ core. Key projects include installing a roundabout at the 9th Street/Keo Way intersection and bringing Center Street back to its glory as Black Des Moines’ Main Street.

4. Stadium District, which hinges on the future soccer stadium at the Dico Superfund site and planned improvements to Principal Park.

5. Connected Corridors, plans to renovate streets such as Ingersoll Avenue and the 9th Street overpasses to be more pedestrian and bike friendly.

6. Strong Neighborhoods, which would invest in neighborhoods such as Columbus Park, Good Park, and Capitol Park.

The only initiative here that strikes me as antithetical to a healthy downtown is #2, “Skywalks Reimagined”. While skywalks make it more convenient to reach your car or other buildings in the winter, they prevent street level, human-scale connections.

I am looking forward to coming back through Des Moines one day and seeing what comes of these initiatives. The city has some great assets like trails, rivers, and neighborhood mixed-use development that will all be leveled up as a result of this effort. I also must come back to Black Cat Ice Cream and the Des Moines Mercantile. And I found a dollar in the pocket of some jeans I thrifted today, so I’m taking it as a good omen and a kind “see you later” from DSM.

Until next time,

Alex

Hi friends,

Before I jump into the debrief on Minneapolis, let me again say thank you for the incredibly warm response to these newsletters and for joining me in this mega-midwest journey. And for my friends with an enthusiasm for copy editing (yes, I see you), I love you and am glad you are still reading despite typos in probably every single edition. Once this newsletter goes paid in the year 2050, I promise to hire a copy editor. ;)

I am 1,431 miles into the trip with another 1,500 to go. I left with a bag of Dot’s pretzels meant to last me the full three weeks. It did not even make it to Minneapolis. The drives have been easy and if Folklore: the long pond studio sessions was a CD, I would have worn it out by now. I also picked up my first visitor (hi mom!) who will be hanging out with me until Tulsa.

Ok, let’s get into Minneapolis. I found a nice little Airbnb in NE Minneapolis which turned out to be a great neighborhood with an ideal mix of single family residential and small scale commercial - something I wish we had more of in Detroit. I walked down the street on Wednesday night and had dinner at Young Joni, an incredible neighborhood restaurant owned by James Beard award winning chef, Ann Kim. I didn’t know anything about the restaurant other than it was a five minute walk and had great reviews. When I sat down and googled the chef, Ann Kim, I came upon this very cool NYT article about her come up and the struggles she faced a long the way.

As a militant planner and organizer, it’s a been a real stretch for me to just arrive in a city and let it happen, especially when I know I need to write something meaningful in these newsletters at the end of each stop. My temptation is to over plan, over program, and execute it all flawlessly. I have really, consciously tried to avoid doing that on this trip so that conversations and learnings can happen organically. So, as I enjoyed my Young Joni Umami Mama pizza, I started looking for themes and thinking about what I wanted to hone in on.

Minneapolis is a city of 425k people, so there’s a lot to explore. My great grandparents emigrated from Norway to Minneapolis and my grandmother lived there for a period of time, so I have a special connection. I thought about using that as a jumping off point, but it seemed ambitious to try and capture Minneapolis’ immigrant community in the right way in such a short period of time. I still didn’t have a clear direction when I left the restaurant, but I did have a text from my partner Pier suggesting I connect with her old camp friend Katie.

Katie’s husband Brian is the co-founder of Perennial Pantry, a direct to consumer brand that sells Kernza® Perennial Grain and Flour, so Pier thought we might have an interesting conversation about sustainable agriculture. (We will come back to Kernza.) Pier connected us and, in a true display of midwest hospitality, Katie and Brian invited me and my mom over to chat about agriculture. This locked in my topic for the trip and helped me focus on what I wanted to see and do around Minneapolis. Katie and Brian also had their friend Emma join who is a regenerative meat expert. All of a sudden we had ourselves a real ag party!!

I purposely used the term sustainable agriculture above because I want to tell you that when I asked Emma about the differences between conventional and sustainable meat, she introduced me to the term regenerative instead of sustainable. I had only heard this term applied to economics where it describes a non-extractive business model that has a triple bottom line, meaning it benefits people, profit, and planet. “Regenerative agriculture is the process of restoring degraded soils using practices (e.g., adaptive grazing, no-till planting, no or limited use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer, etc.) based on ecological principles.” (Noble Research Institute)

Brian and Emma explained that conventional agriculture pushes nature beyond its limits by tilling far too often to have healthy soil and injecting pesticides and growth chemicals into the ground. Every time the soil is turned over, carbon and nitrogen are released into the air. When naturally occurring plants are replaced with crops, you lose the little carbon sponges that turn it into oxygen. Simply put, we are are working against nature.

Now let’s go back to Kernza. Before yesterday, I had never heard of Kernza nor a perennial grain in my life. Perennial crops are crops that don’t have to be replanted each year - they just grow back. Think of fruit trees, olive trees, grapes, etc. The big advantage of developing perennial grains is that farmers don’t have to till the land each season and disturb the soil. Soil needs time to rest between plantings, and our errant human schedule doesn’t usually match what nature has in mind.

Kernza, an emerging perennial grain, is a cousin of wheat and has a nutty, sweet flavor. It can be used in beer, in cereal, and in baking. It is the first of 16 perennial crops being developed in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota. The US Department of Agriculture created a $10M grant program to fund the adoption of Kernza, bringing growers, handlers, consumers, funders, and researchers around the table for a common goal.

I think this is so powerful. Transforming a historically extractive industry into something that increases economic opportunity for middle America and produces healthier soil and cleaner water is incredible! If farmers lose less soil, spend less on chemicals, and reduce time tilling and maintaining equipment, those savings go right back into their pockets.

Perennial grains will be a new special interest of mine and you can count on the fact that I’ll be keeping tabs on Kernza. In the meantime, I am regretful that I don’t have more time to tell you about food co-ops and how important they are to local economies. I was inspired by the Eastside Food Co-op in Minneapolis and thought I might lock in on that topic, but perennial grains really took the wheel. I’m just the one typing. (Fun fact: Minneapolis has more food co-ops per capita than anywhere else in the world.)

Special thanks to my new friends Katie, Emma, and Brian for making it a great trip, and to Pier for the connection. I made a small change to the itinerary and decided to visit Des Moines instead of Kansas City, so that’s where I am writing from now. 50% of the reason is that I think Des Moines better fits the ethos and spirit of this trip, and the other 50% is that the Taylor Swift / Travis Kelce romance has made Kansas City hotels simply unaffordable. We press on.

Until next time,

Alex

Duluth was a trip of good fortune and happy accidents.

I became interested in Duluth after reading an article in the New York Times earlier this year about climate migrants relocating to the lakefront city. It was particularly interesting to think about an influx of coastal talent bringing their wealth and skill sets to a historic manufacturing town. How would it change the economic opportunity for Duluth and who stood to benefit?

I pulled into the city and immediately texted a friend, “holy WOW this is like…. ACTIVELY industrial”. That really did take me by surprise. I was imagining the Detroit levels of industrial which have sort of been tucked away and removed from the riverfront. No - Duluth’s shipping industry is on full display as you cross the bridge from Wisconsin. With this in view, I was very curious to see how these big city transplants fit in and what they were attracted to. By a stroke of luck, I found myself behind one of these transplants in line at the Dovetail Cafe (we will come back to this place). Here’s how the conversation went:

Person 1: So… you’re from like Colorado, right?
Person 2: Yeah, we moved here not that long ago.

Person 1: …..why?
Person 2: Basically we moved to Colorado 6 years ago and it was awesome, but in the last couple of years it’s been hard to afford the cost of living. And the whole reason we moved there was to be closer to the outdoors, but everything is a 2 hour drive from us and there are already 500 people there when you get to the trail. I bought an electric bike and a canoe with the money I saved on rent when I got here and use it all the time.

Person 1: Woah.

I, too, quietly said “woah” and immediately wrote this down in my notebook. Later that day I stopped into Trailfitters to pick up a pair of boots and was chatting with the guy pulling sizes for me. I asked him about his Duluth origin story and he told me that he grew up in Illinois but moved to Duluth a couple of years ago to make a career in mushroom foraging. He said it was affordable, there were tons of outlets for him to learn about mushrooms, and many places in close proximity to forage. A professional mushroom forager! Imagine!

Respite on an Urban Trail

This reinforced my conviction to see these said outdoor assets that are drawing people from all over the country. I put on my new boots and headed up to Tischer Creek Falls, an incredibly beautiful park inside the Duluth city limits. I came upon it when I opened my maps app and was searching for a big patch of green. It was less than a 10 minute drive from the urban core of Duluth up to the trail entrance. I had no idea what to expect but WOW, what a great surprise. Within my 45 minute walk I crossed four bridges with waterfalls beneath each one. The falls were particularly full from the 8” of rain Duluth got earlier this week.

The integration of Tischer Creek is a masterclass in blending urban places and natural assets. My sense is that Duluth really, deeply understands the connection between nature and mental wellness. A native Duluthian might shake their head, disagree, and point to all of the things that could be different about the city - who knows. I just kept thinking about Detroit and how far we have to go in making and fostering this connection between the outdoors and positive physiological health outcomes. I wished for Duluth’s natural assets and it’s forward thinking leader who, back in the 80s, decided it was worth the investment to put pedestrian bridges across Tischer Creek and make it into a public space.

Here’s my final anecdote on Duluth’s blend of industrial and natural:

Per the recommendation of my airbnb host, I had coffee this morning at Back Alley, Duluth’s surf shop. Yes, a midwestern surf shop. Believe it or not, there are a great number of very brave people who surf Lake Superior in the fall and winter when the waves are best. It’s a great little coffee and surf shop but what really got me is the location. Back Alley is on an industrial road with active heavy industrial use surrounding it. That seems to really only add to the charm of it. Next time a land use enthusiast tells me that heavy industrial simply cannot co-exist with neighborhood retail, I have a really good reason to disagree.

The Duluth Folk School

I mentioned up top that I overheard this Colorado transplant telling her story in line at the Dovetail Cafe. Well, the much cooler thing is that the cafe is part of the Duluth Folk School. Folk schools are something I have been wanting to write about for so long so I was very, very happy when I accidentally found this one and spent nearly the entire day there.

Folk schools are wildly under appreciated community assets and I wish more people knew about them! Rather than describing the folk school concept myself, I thought it wise to look to the good people of St. Croix, MN to educate us.

Here’s what I love most about the concept: “schools for life”. For life as in going to school until you are 100? Or for life as in equipping people with practical life skills? Both, of course! Folk schools are a wonderful way to support inventors and foster a culture of collaborative learning and building. They typically offer classes in traditional craft like blacksmithing, timber framing, woodworking, fiber arts, ecology, outdoor skills, among many other things. Some of these things might seem outdated off the bat, but here’s why I think they are important in modern, urban places:

• Folk schools build community between people and their place, fostering a real connection to society. Many makers source their materials locally and develop a hyperlocal supply chain, bolstering the economy.

• Having neighbors who know how to do things and make things with their hands is so very important. Imagine living in a rural community or even an urban city that has been interrupted by war or natural disaster. If our supply channels go down or become unpredictable, it leaves us to figure some things out on our own. Folk schools teach these skills which, ultimately, lead to more sustainable lived environments when people can rebuild with their own hands.

• They are hatcheries of invention. When you put clever, inventive people around other clever, inventive people, stuff gets made. This stuff turns into goods and services that fuel economic sustainability.

If you want to learn more about the folk school model, here’s an interview between Robert Grand of the John C. Campbell Folk School and Dawn Murphy, Vice President Of The Folk Education Association Of America. If you REALLY want to get into it, here is an academic paper on Folk Schools as Inspiration for Contemporary Democratic Peacebuilding.

As I was meandering about in the folk school, I popped my head into the roasting HQ of Almanac Coffee and met owner and roaster Justin Wood. Justin was super generous in talking me through his process and what makes his beans unique, and even set me up with a bag of India - Karnataka - Ratnagiri Estate - Cavery - Anaerobic Natural. (The coffee nerds out there will understand and appreciate how unique this is). I love that the Duluth Folk School gives the cafe the opportunity to serve up fresh beans front of house while they are being roasted down the hall. Justin told me that Duluth is full of makers - no surprise based on the storefronts of small, independent businesses scattered through the city, the community boards chock full of flyers promoting events, art, music, and meetups, and the spontaneous conversations I had with makers.

I’m going to stop here because, once again, I must go explore Minneapolis so that I have something to write about on Friday! I am so grateful for the warm response to the first newsletter. I am having a blast and glad to have you all along for the ride!

Until next time,

Alex

Hello friends,

This is the first special edition Urban Issue(s) focused on my roadtrip across the Midwest. Marquette was the first stop on my 8 city tour. In the words below, you’ll find a debrief on this first leg of the journey along with some thoughts on economic reciprocity, the future of small town America, and chickens without bones. Enjoy!

The Start

I pulled into St. Ignace around 2:00p on Friday and met my friend David Ollilia who generously agreed to host me in the Upper Peninsula, the UP as its more commonly called.

I should back up and tell you that Dave and I met this summer at the Michigan Innovation Summit in Detroit. I was facilitating and he was attending on behalf of Shophouse Park. When I had the idea for this roadtrip and put Marquette on the itinerary, I emailed Dave knowing he was a native “Yooper” and asked him if he could recommend some things to check out. Well, he did me a thousand times better and guided me over 300 miles through incredible landscapes, forgotten towns, and pockets of serious potential in the UP.

The first time we talked, I told him that my vision for this trip was to find undervalued people, projects, and ideas that were making life better for people in 8 post-industrial cities across the midwest. Marquette, Duluth, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Tulsa, Bentonville, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He got it immediately. He got it because he is an inventor by nature, an entrepreneur out of necessity, and a weathered midwesterner. These are people who have been undervalued their whole lives, so when you ask them to show you their fellows, they get it.

Dave handed me a radio for car to car comms and we pulled out from St. Ignace around 2:15 heading North to Tahquamenon Falls. Along the way Dave pointed out these tiny stop signs (like seriously doll sized) and correctly guessed that I had no idea what they were for. They are for the 3,500+ miles of snowmobile trails that exist in the UP. It’s a practical mode of transportation in the winter when the seasonal snowfall is somewhere around 170 inches. Make a mental note now that all of these snowmobiles are gas powered and are very powerful.

Back to Tahquamenon Falls - a beautiful waterfall whose picture you’ve probably seen in autumnal calendars or Michigan’s fall ad campaigns. Tannins from the leaves give the water a unique root beer color, making it a tourist hotspot. For locals, the lower falls offer a really great spot to spend a hot day swimming and picnicking on the slabs of rock (don’t ask me what kind).

Paradise, MI: A Harbinger for Rural Michigan

Dave pointed out the town of Paradise, MI, just outside Tahquamenon Falls State Park and made sure I took note of it, because it’s a representation of what we see all over rural America. You have to pass through Paradise to get to the falls and you’ll miss it if you blink. The population is just under 500 and the average age is 60. 60! 70% of residents are still in the workforce, and only 16 households in Paradise have children. You don’t have to be an urbanist to deduce that Paradise isn’t attracting new residents. So what’s next for a town like Paradise? I’ll harken back to the title of this Urban Issue: “The Land of Yes And”. The idea here is that progressive and responsible growth ignores binaries. Binaries are limiting and don’t serve us in this case.

The easy question to ask for Paradise is “Do we force it to modernize or can it remain a small town frozen in time?” Yes and. The harder question is, “how does Paradise modernize its infrastructure while maintaining the small town culture that makes it feel like home to its residents?” This is the question that invites equitable and progressive solutions that honor the lived experience of its residents.

If a place like Paradise doesn’t modernize, it’s the municipal equivalent of stashing cash under your mattress. Your wealth is diluted when the cost of living goes up and your money doesn’t grow. I’m defining modernization as the ability to participate in a 21st century economy. It’s communicating with your doctor online. It’s having access to online learning opportunities where you can study anything you can imagine. It’s paying bills online and catching up with your cousin who moved in Phoenix in the 90s. It’s having the hard infrastructure that allows a local entrepreneur to set up shop in town and sell their wares to tourists. It’s giving the inventor from Paradise, MI access to a supply chain that could make their product a reality at scale. It’s placing a few charging stations at the local coffee shop for electric van-lifers to charge up.

So how does a town of 5,000 people fund this vision? Well I had this weird idea and I can’t find precedent for it. If you’ve seen anything like it, let me know.

Revenue Bonds are debt securities that fund a specific project and are backed by the revenues from that project. These are common for toll roads, bridges, and sewer facilities. Municipalities issue these revenue bonds to fund their projects. What if a revenue bond was backed by the revenue from Tahquamenon Falls and used to modernize Paradise’s infrastructure? It’s a natural asset that sure isn’t going anywhere and it generates tourist income through the campground and recreation passes.

Yes, and. There isn’t a silver bullet for post-industrial towns and cities, but we know that an increasingly complex world requires a variety of creative solutions. The UP is a fascinating case study in blending two starkly different realities: rural America and growing cities like Marquette, fueled by climate migration and a changing outdoor industry. Let’s get into the latter.

The Chicken Has No Bones: The UP Supply Chain

Remember how I mentioned that the UP has more than 3,500 miles of snowmobile trails? Today, most of snowmobiles that travel those trails are gas powered. 4x4 Off Road Vehicles fuel up at gas stations in the summer, and snowmobiles take their place in the winter. If you close your eyes and picture those vehicles in 2050, do you think they are still gas powered? Probably not. We’ve seen thousands of electric charging stations crop up across the U.S. as electric vehicles become more advanced and popular with consumers. The same will happen with outdoor recreation vehicles.

This means that demand will create a need for an electrified trail network. For a state who has hung its hat on the automotive industry for more than 100 years, it seems like Michigan and its workforce would be well positioned to leverage the intersection of our natural assets and automotive industry cluster. We have the talent, the supply chain, and the know how. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? Just like it seems obvious that chickens have bones.

This is a silly subtitle, but the point is so very important. If a kid only sees chicken nuggets and never the whole chicken, they never consider that a chicken comes with bones. We are at the point in Detroit’s automotive history where we only see chicken nuggets. We see cars coming off the assembly line, so that’s where we invest in new mobility technology. What about the upstream invention and innovation? Most people probably have no idea that the copper and nickel mined from the UP were the very first link in the automotive supply chain! There was a valuable reciprocity that existed between the peninsulas that, I think, must be revived for the benefit of the whole state.

The Bottom Line: Reciprocity Bears Equity

I planned on writing only about Marquette when I was planning this trip, but it just isn’t the headline here. It is a wonderful, growing, progressive, and connected place that will be a hub for the outdoor industry. No doubt about it. The primary finding from this leg of my journey is the importance of economic reciprocity and the consequences of imbalance.

Copper mining in the UP peaked in the mid to late 1800s and produced more than 75% of the nation’s copper. When the mines dried up and began to close, local economies crashed and some of the wealthiest communities in Michigan became ghost towns. It was an imbalanced, extractive economy.

I’m afraid we may see history repeating itself with tourism, the UP’s primary industry. Tourists come and take photos, wear down the roads, put pressure on natural resources, and create income dependency for economies that are too heavily weighed toward hosting visitors. On the other hand, visitors fill up hotels, generate tax revenue, eat at locally owned restaurants, and create an economic impact on small communities. Is it more extractive than life giving? It depends on how you measure.

I think there is much greater potential for economic equity in the outdoor industry. We ought to be investing in native Yoopers who can be inventors, designers, mechanics, welders, and engineers for an emerging industry that shows no signs of slowing. The companies will come for the nature and they'll stay for the talent.

Just the like waterfall backed revenue bond I mentioned above, we have to be more thoughtful and creative than ever before to create an equitable and sustainable future for places like Michigan.

This is the first of an 8 part series debriefing each stop on my midwest tour. I could have gone on forever about the UP but I’ve got to stop here and go see Duluth so I’ve got something to write about on Wednesday! Special thanks to my friend David Ollilia for being an incredible host and to Aaron Rodgers of Rock Solid Trail Contracting for inspiring me to just keep chipping away at it and doing the good work. You may hear more about Aaron after my visit to Bentonville.

Until next time,

Alex

The Post-Mortgage Reality

In Detroit, most homeowners don’t actually have a mortgage. On paper, that sounds like success: no monthly mortgage, no debt, no bank to answer to. But scratch the surface, and the picture changes. In Detroit, the real cost of homeownership begins after the mortgage is gone.

This excerpt from a 2024 Outlier Media piece paints a spot on picture of the situation for Detroit homeowners:

“According to the Census Bureau, the median home value in Detroit was at a rock-bottom $36,800 in 2013. It jumped to $83,600 a decade later.

That number may sound affordable — less than half what homes are worth in the suburbs — but most Detroiters still struggle to buy a home in the city, locking them out of this long-term pathway to building wealth.

Those who make the median household income in Detroit — $36,453 according to the census — should spend no more than about $1,000 on their home each month to not be cost-burdened. Mortgage payments would eat into a big chunk of that, even before factoring in insurance, taxes and home repairs.

That’s assuming a buyer could even get a mortgage. The relatively low cost of homes works against buyers because banks don’t get a big enough return on the loan to make it worth issuing one. A gap between a home’s appraisal and the price agreed upon by the buyer and seller can also be a barrier, since the buyer often has to make up the difference with a bigger down payment. Appraisers have consistently undervalued homes in Detroit relative to the market.”

Detroit’s housing stock is old. Half were built before 1960, and many of those have faced decades of disrepair, deferred maintenance, and rising insurance costs. Even when the house is paid off, keeping it safe and livable can cost more each year than a mortgage payment ever did. A new roof can run ten thousand dollars. A furnace replacement might cost $5k more. Foundation repairs can easily double that. For a household earning around $35k a year (the median income for Detroit homeowners) those expenses are not manageable - they are catastrophic. Keep in mind that the majority of these homeowners are beyond working age and $35k is a fixed income with no possibility of economic growth.

You can’t refinance a roof when your house is worth $40k. You can’t take out a home equity loan if your credit is thin or your title is tangled, so Detroiters rely on what they have always relied on: each other. A daughter moves back in to help with bills. A grandma provides childcare to her grandchild. A cousin pays the utilities. Together, they keep the lights on and the taxes current, even if the city paperwork still shows one name on the deed.

Families are already doing what the housing market has not figured out. What’s missing is a system that recognizes that arrangement, supports it, and protects it. Imagine if a family could legally and securely share responsibility for a home and protect their slice of ownership. Multiple family members could contribute to the same loan or repair fund and, together, they could qualify for credit that none of them could access alone. When one person’s income dips, the others could keep things steady without risking the home. And when the elder homeowner passes away, the next generation could stay in place without fighting over inheritance or starting from zero. Detroit families are already running shareable mortgages. They just do it quietly, without legal recognition or credit for their reliability.

A Solution with Precedent

Detroit wouldn’t be the first city to recognize that homeownership can be shared. Other cities around the world have already begun experimenting with models that spread the costs and responsibilities of housing across families or networks instead of isolating them in a single owner.

In Boston, the city launched a Co-Purchasing Pilot Program that helps multiple households combine income to buy and finance a home together. It started with friends and family who wanted to live together but couldn’t qualify on their own. The city offered legal templates, mortgage counseling, and partnerships with lenders willing to write loans for co-buyers. In a place where the median home price is nearly $700,000, this simple policy shift opened doors for working- and middle-class residents who would otherwise remain renters. It’s a good reminder that housing access isn’t always about building more units; it’s also about rethinking who the system allows to buy.

In Mexico City, shared homeownership has taken a different shape. Decades of self-built, family-compound housing have evolved into an informal but resilient housing economy. Multi-story homes are often divided by generation: grandparents on the ground floor, adult children in the middle, and grandchildren up top. Each contributes to construction or maintenance as they can. The government has slowly begun to formalize these “vertical family compounds,” offering collective land titles and small-scale credit for improvements. It’s a way of meeting people where they are and acknowledging that shared living is a rational response to high costs and limited credit.

And in Ahmedabad, India, the “pol” neighborhoods offer one of the oldest examples of collective homeownership. Narrow lanes open into courtyards shared by extended families. Within these compounds, homes are individually owned but socially and economically intertwined. Families share wells, maintenance, and security. It’s an urban form that recognizes that the boundary between “mine” and “ours” is porous, and that stability often depends on those shared borders.

A Solution for Detroit

In my perfect world, Detroit’s version would make shared ownership formal without making it complicated.

• Families could combine income and credit to secure financing for repairs or purchase.

• The city could partner with a lender to pilot loans written for co-owners, not just co-signers.

• Title work could be streamlined through family trusts or co-ownership agreements recorded with the city, preventing the tangled inheritance issues that plague families in legacy homes.

• Zoning would evolve alongside it, recognizing accessory dwelling units or compound-style lots that allow multiple generations to live together legally on one parcel.

In this world, three incomes could sustain one roof, and one home could sustain three generations.

Why Now?

If we don’t adapt to how ownership actually works in cities like Detroit, we’ll lose another generation of homeowners. Not because they borrowed too much, but because they couldn’t afford to fix the furnace, replace the roof, or clear the title.

Detroit is a city of unsung inventors and residents who just figure it out when institutions let them down. The city’s housing programs sometimes match that energy and respond with tools like 0% home repair funds, tax foreclosure eviction support, and probate support to work out tangled titles. A shareable mortgage would fit right into that set of solutions: a tool that formalizes what families already do together.

I think a brave housing lender with scale and credibility could help lead the way and pioneer a shareable mortgage that would reach the thousands of families who are stable but invisible to the credit system. For lenders, that could mean new, reliable borrowers and deeper neighborhood ties and for cities like Detroit, it means keeping more homes out of distress and more families on the block.

Until next time,

Alex

While I wouldn’t dare screenshot all my custom GPTs, I thought it would be fun to let you in on my Board of Directors. This will be a narrative tale all captured in real time, so buckle up and enjoy!

The People’s Beef

Before we jump in, we need to get some common tropes about AI out of the way.

• “Alex you are using millions of gallons of water to meet with Jane Jacobs and have her evaluate your plans!!” First off, the piece of chicken you had for lunch and the beef you have marinating in the fridge right now took 1000x more water and energy than my GPT prompts. I haven’t eaten meat in 10 years. Second, you know what outpaces energy consumption by a country mile? War.

• “Ok fine, but AI is only going to validate you and tell you that you’re right.” Sure, if you let it! You must ask it to challenge you, present a different perspective, or debate you. It’s default setting is helpful friend, but that can be changed based on how you prompt it.

• “Well… it’s going to make you dumb.” Ok. Just like bringing the internet into libraries instead of the Dewey Decimal system made us dumb. Be so for real!!

The Basics

Alright, now that we have that out of the way, let’s start with the very basics on what I am using on the daily.

• My go to is Open AI’s ChatGPT. I am not well versed in the difference of all models, so I usually let it default to what it wants. These days, we are on GPT-5. I pay $20 for a premium subscription, which gives me a lot more tokens (you can talk to it for longer) and you can create custom GPTs.

• I occasionally use Google Gemini + Google Notebook LM for research logging.

• After trying a few different ones, my go-to coding app is Replit.

Creating my Board of Directors

A very dear friend of mine has used the term “personal board of directors” for a long time and I credit her for the name and the idea. I’ve had various iterations of this over the years and, in its simplest form, is just sending a group text to a few people I love and trust and asking for their wisdom and guidance.

As Cities Reimagined has grown, and I’ve had to learn how to be a CEO, I have been craving more mentorship and a sounding board for business decisions. The people I usually turn to love me too much to give me purely impartial counsel and think I am smarter and braver than I really am. In this case, I need somebody to look at my books and tell me where I’m being too austere, too optimistic, and point out my blind spots. Insert Alex’s Celebrity Board of Directors (CBoD).

I created a custom GPT for this and here’s how I set it up:

Seeing someone’s imaginary board of directors is a little like looking in their sock drawer, so… welcome… I guess? This is awkward. Don’t judge the mismatches. And yeah, I have three Janes. That did become confusing when I was asking Jane Fonda why the hell she would reference George W. Bush in her advice. Jane Jacobs immediately spilled the tea on her and GW’s beef.

Here are the GPT instructions:

“This GPT should hear my scenarios and pretend like it is the notetaker at a quarterly board meeting. I should be able to understand the perspectives of each board member and treat their counsel as directional guidance. I want to know when there are conflicting POVs between board members - why and what. I want to know the implications of their recommendations - play the tape forward and future cast for me what would happen if I implemented their counsel or followed their guidance. My board members are: Warren Buffet, Dan Gilbert, Sara Blakely, Jane Jacobs, Dieter Rams, Jane Goodall, Miriam Maisel (from the TV show), Jane Fonda, Grace Lee Boggs, and Suzanne Shank.”

This is so poorly written and that’s totally fine. It was a 30 second brain dump with typos, but GPT is good at picking up the gist.

Now that I have my GPT set up, it’s time to conduct our first meeting! Here’s my opening prompt.

The GPT followed my instructions pretty well and gave me the perspective of each board member on this provocation. It even called out the conflicting POVs like I asked, but I was finding it too… snippet heavy. It was just these mic drop statements from each of them that undermined the purpose of having them all around the same table at the same time. I gave the GPT a quick correction in the chat and said, “I want to have a more holistic conversation - what would they ask me and say to each other in this moment?”

This produced some pretty good insights, but the next prompt went wild. Here is the prompt and the answers that made me raise my eyebrows: I asked them, “Ok guys, what assumptions am I making? One of them is that a 9-5 work schedule M-F is my destiny. Would you all agree? Dan? Suzanne? Should I be doing 40 hours a week? What other assumptions do you see me making?”

And chat’s follow-up summary:

🔎 Key Assumptions They’ve Surfaced

• Work = 9–5, 40 hours (challenged by Dan, Warren, Suzanne).

• Success requires sacrifice/fun deprivation (Midge, Sara push back hard).

• You alone are responsible (Jane Jacobs questions this).

• Vigilance = noble (Goodall reframes it as fear).

• Enough is undefined, so more is always needed (Fonda calls this out).

• Transformation is for later (Boggs says it’s for now).

• Complexity is necessary (Rams urges simplification).

Now we’re partying (and sort of staring into a mirror looking at my spookiest truths). We went on for some time about the life stuff, and then I was ready to shift to business. I asked the board to review a pitch deck for a new product I am working on (!!) and give me their honest feedback. I also asked them to talk to each other and let me be a fly on the wall to hear their conversation. At one point I got really annoyed with Dieter Rams and his obsession with the look and feel of things, so I sent him and Warren out of the room for a 10 minute chat about business. Dieter came back a new man. Here’s a snippet:

And, in fairness, I had to make sure Warren also picked up a thing or two from Dieter:

Right after this, Dieter ended up giving me the best pricing model of anyone, and Jane Jacobs produced a genius idea on how to flywheel product adoption. Wild.

I was tapped out at this point and ready to wrap it up, so I called upon Secretary GPT to produce a set of notes from the meeting along with the board’s top three priorities for me between now and the next time we meet. Mr. Secretary nailed it and now it’s printed and hanging in my cubicle.

Thanks for joining me for an off-theme post. I’m not sure if this is smart or just totally unhinged, but I am going to say that those two are bedfellows, and we celebrate them both.

Until next time,

Alex + the CBoD

I love promoting young voices and smart people who care about cities. Joshua Nicholson was a student of mine in the Urban Technology Service Design Studio at University of Michigan and I offered him a platform here to share some of his ideas. His thoughts on taking a service design approach to the housing crisis are creative and well-reasoned - you’re in for a treat! Leave him a comment to encourage him, challenge him, or ask him a question. We love peer-to-peer learning around here.

-Alex

The United States is facing a crushing affordability crisis. Half of all renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend over 30% of their monthly income on rent. Half of those renters spend over 50% of their monthly income on rent. Homes, whether single-family houses in the suburbs or one-bedroom condos, are becoming too expensive. Like many young people, I will likely be unable to afford to live in the thriving, urban neighborhoods that make me care about cities in the first place.

If you have a basic knowledge of the housing market, you might suggest that the solution is to build more housing. That’s what I learned in my class on housing systems and that’s what most urbanists and urban planners argue for when talking about YIMBYism (yes in my backyard) and deregulation. But if we ask why five times, we can get to the root of the problem: hint, it’s not just zoning regulations.

Housing is too expensive. Why? Because there is not enough supply. Why? Because zoning for single-family homes restricts denser construction. Why not change it? Because single-family property owners have outsized influence in local governments. Why? Because a lack of supply increases property values and wealth. Why? Because housing is an investment commodity.

Building more housing would cause housing prices to go down, but it would hurt profits for housing developers — so the people who build housing don’t want to build enough for everyone. How do we change this status quo when, for a century, homeownership has been a cornerstone of economic freedom?

Recently — during the service design studio of my Urban Technology undergraduate program taught by Alex Johnston — I became obsessed with the concept of social housing for the 21st century. Social housing is a form of welfare that gives people another option in the housing market. Think co-ops or community land trusts. Even though social housing is popular worldwide, it isn’t in the U.S. Here, the housing market is almost entirely oriented to the private-market. If you remember the 2008 housing crash, then you know this isn’t sustainable.

Using the design methods I learned in studio, I started to wonder… is there a way to turn housing into a service, not a product?

Believe it or not, housing as a complete, static structure is a new phenomenon. In Ancient Rome, urban buildings were designed for change; people would destroy and add walls to create new rooms when they needed them. A shopkeeper might add a living space in the back of the shop. If he makes enough money, he’d buy the neighboring shop and tear down the walls, making his living and working space larger. We’ve only shifted to buying finished 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom houses in the past few decades. Just think back to American pioneers traveling west. Did they build a complete McMansion? No! They built a core home and added rooms and space over time.

If we want to think of a new way to design housing, we can look to the Sears catalog. Between 1908 and 1940, Sears sold more than 70,000 home kits to customers. People would buy the materials for a house and the blueprints and then construct the home themselves. These houses were cheap for their time at only $20,000. People were able to build their own houses however they wanted without waiting for a developer to do it for them. In a way, this is a precursor to incremental housing, a cheap way to empower people to build their own homes in the Global South.

What the heck is incremental housing?

Incremental housing is a type of service where low-income and middle-class families build and design their own homes over time. Let’s say a family of four only has enough money to build two bedrooms and a single living space; as they save more money, they can build an additional bedroom for their kids to have their own rooms. For most people who live in what we’d usually call “slums,” this is how people build their homes.

In the 1970s, the United Nations was trying to figure out how to build more housing in developing countries. Even though these countries were building public housing, they couldn’t afford to maintain enough housing for everyone, leading to overcrowding in cities. As a solution, British architect John F. C. Turner created the idea of “housing by people,” which eventually became the sites and services program operated by the U.N.. During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, countries were given grants and loans to build incremental housing projects. In India, the program created 280,000 plots of land across 27 cities. During this time, architect Balkrishna Doshi created the Core+ model. His neighborhoods gave residents a simple core structure with a kitchen and utilities. Residents would add to their homes later. More complete houses were sold to middle-income families, creating mixed-income, walkable, and affordable neighborhoods that are still going strong today. Over 30 years later, 90% of plots have been developed with multi-story homes, additional dwelling units, and interior remodeling. The project was a success.

These success stories have happened across the world. In Sri Lanka, hundreds of thousands of homes were built by empowering local community councils to give out loans for self-built housing. In Chile, the architectural firm Elemental has created “half-houses” for residents to complete when they have the money to do so.

You might be questioning how we can use lessons from India, Sri Lanka, or other countries to create a solution to our own housing crisis. But there are similar programs already working in the U.S.; It’s easier than you might think.

The Mutual Self-Help Housing Technical Assistance Grant is an FDA program that gives money for rural families to build their own homes. This program is organized through local non-profits, who distribute the grants and train the homebuilders how to complete their projects. It’s not dissimilar to Sri Lanka’s program, which also distributed money to rural and urban community organizations to lead the charge. The only difference? Sri Lanka gave money to cities, while the MSHH is only for rural areas. How do we fix that?

The Detroit Land Bank Authority is a city run organization that owns a large portion of the residential land in the city. Since being founded in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash, it’s acquired over 59,000 plots of land in the city. In a way, it already works like a U.N. sites and services scheme. The DLBA rehabs and resells salvageable properties, sells homes in bad shape to local residents to redevelop and own, and sells vacant lots. Even though it doesn’t give a lot of help to residents when they rebuild the house, it still gives them the opportunity to build their homes in whatever way works best for them.

If we combined the MSHH with the Detroit Land Bank Authority — or other community land trusts and land banks — we could create a successful, national service that brings back the historic view of housing as a continuous process, not a finished product. Let’s imagine how that would work.

Designing the Service

First, the government should move the MSHH program to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who would handle grants and payment to local governments and non-profit groups.

The life-cycle/user journey of a DLBA-run incremental housing project might look something like this:

Charley recognizes that he has fallen through the cracks of the Detroit housing market, and has trouble providing for his family while paying for housing. A workshop with the non-profit Dream of Detroit introduces him to the idea of building his own home and how he can acquire financing to do so. Along the way, Charley learns valuable skills that will help him build his initial house and help neighbors with their own projects. To help him get started, the DLBA provides an old plot of land with a core living area and bathroom — all Charley has to do is build out bedrooms. Once he’s completed this task, he is given complete ownership of the land with the only obligation being to repay his low-interest loan with favorable terms.

Why this works

I think the benefit of an incremental housing solution is that it shifts the power of design from developers back to residents. Someone’s DLBA house wouldn’t just be a mortgage they’re struggling to pay off; it would be a home they poured blood, sweat, and tears into. When it comes to revitalizing the city, it centers Detroit residents and empowers them to create the neighborhoods they want to live in.

If the DLBA were part of a national, service design approach to the housing crisis, we can eliminate the barriers to change that come from the private sector. Instead of holding abandoned properties, the DLBA can take an active role in training and preparing residents to rebuild their neighborhoods without private investment.

In a recent conversation with a professor here at Michigan who researches the housing market, we talked about how the current system of commodified, developer-led housing seems broken. From her perspective, now is the perfect time to begin experimenting with alternative systems and approaches to building housing, whether it be co-ops, incrementalism, or public housing projects. In a time of uncertainty and rapid change, maybe now is the perfect opportunity to have a new revolution of the housing system.

I don’t think it’s possible that the DLBA can operate an incremental housing program similar to India’s Core+ model or the United Nations’ sites and services program without dramatic investment from the federal government… but isn’t it worth it to imagine better things? If cash-strapped countries in the 1970s were able to get this done, why can’t we?

Until next time,

Joshua

WalletHub’s latest “Most & Least Stressed Cities” article hit my nerves the second I scrolled past the headline. I’ve spent over a decade watching friends, neighbors, and community organizers pour their hearts into these post-industrial places, only to see outsiders slap a “most stressed” label on our front door. It’s akin to someone peeking in from the outside and tallying up our woes without ever asking, “Hey, what happened here?” It makes us want to scream, “Have you even been here?” (Hint: no, they haven’t.)

The elephant in WalletHub room is that these cities are overwhelmingly majority-Black and majority-non-white communities that have been systemically starved of opportunity for generations. Calling out their “stress” without naming the architects of this dysfunction is like blaming the smoke for the fire.

Worse, sensational headlines about “America’s Most Stressed Cities” turn complex histories into clickbait. Suddenly, our only takeaway is “Yikes—I’d better find a new place to live.” The folks who stay behind— homeowners, small-business owners, community organizers, neighbors who sweat every spring to clean up the block get painted as part of the problem, when no one’s bothering to ask why the problem exists in the first place.

Let’s lift the curtain for a moment on the truths behind this index:

• The ten “most stressed” cities average only about 33% White residents. Flip the coin to the ten “least stressed” places, and that number jumps to nearly 50% White residents. Coincidence? Hardly. It’s a neon sign blinking “redlining,” “disinvestment,” and “extractive capitalism”. The alternate (and more honest) title of this listicle could be, “America’s Blackest Cities are Stressed.”

• Since the start of 2024, institutional investors have snapped up 7.4% of all home sales in Metro Detroit, draining scarce inventory from local buyers and driving up rents for long-time residents.

• Neighborhoods redlined by banks in the 1930s now face 32.2% higher traffic volumes and 65.7% more hazardous road noise than non-redlined areas. This is policy driven disinvestment that shapes day to day life for residents of these cities.

Repeat this cycle city after city, and voilà—you get through-the-roof “stress” metrics: unemployment, cost burden, family instability, mental health indicators. But make no mistake: these outcomes are symptoms, not root causes.

Meanwhile, over in the “least stressed” cities list, a higher share of White residents coincides with more stable tax bases, deeper infrastructure investment, and less aggressive conversion of housing into financial instruments. It’s a pattern so consistent it’s practically on loop: fewer predatory investors, more local control, more neighborhood stewardship.

So yes, WalletHub’s stress index might tell you where people are struggling—but it doesn’t tell you why, and it certainly doesn’t show you how these communities are busy rewriting their own narratives. Until the focus shifts from surface-level “stress scores” to the policies and profiteers that drove the stress in the first place, headlines like these do more harm than good—flattening vibrant places into talking points, and steering resources away from the real work of repair and reinvestment.

The real story of these “most stressed” cities is resilience, creativity, and beauty thriving in spite of it all.

Until next time,

Alex

I’m Emma and I am joining Cities Reimagined for the summer as a service design intern. This is one of the first dispatches from my corner of curiosity!

Cities Reimagined is the Detroit host for Jane’s Walk, a global movement of neighborhood walks inspired by urbanist Jane Jacobs, who believed cities reveal themselves not through top-down plans but by walking, looking, and listening to the places we call home. Launched in 2006 to honor Jacobs’ ideas, Jane’s Walks have since taken place in over 500 cities worldwide. Each one is different by design, guided by six shared principles but shaped by local context and community voices.

1. It is volunteer-driven: Anybody can lead a walk, and participation is free.

2. Inspired and Informed by the world around us: a way for neighbors to meet neighbors, and build community

3. Do it whatever way makes sense for you: open design, exploration, and ideas

4. Opportunities to hear all voices: Creating a platform for a multitude of voices in the discussion about cities

5. Critical engagement with the ideas and legacy of Jane Jacobs

6. Recognizing that cities are living ecosystems with a past, present, and future

One of my first projects during my internship is to organize Detroit’s summer Jane’s Walk, inviting neighbors to explore the city together and see it through fresh eyes.

As I began to explore themes for this walk, one of Detroit’s monikers caught my eye: Paris of the Midwest. As a native French speaker, I noticed the influence in street names in the City and the State, and became particularly interested in digging deeper into how Detroit’s earliest days as a European settlement shaped its urban planning, and how those remnants are still visible today.

TLDR: You’re invited to join us on this Jane’s Walk! Keep reading if you want a bit of Detroit’s French history and a sneak peek of our tour.

Detroit: The Paris of the Midwest

Detroit’s founding myth starts in 1701 with a Frenchman, Cadillac, who sailed up the river and claimed the land for France. But that was not the beginning. Long before that, the area was home to the Anishinaabe people. Over the next centuries came French settlers and fur traders, British colonizers, the Underground Railroad, waves of Southern Black families fleeing Jim Crow, immigrants from Mexico, Lebanon, Bangladesh, and Poland, autoworkers, unionists, Motown, Techno, riots, resilience, redlining, and resistance. Detroit is an incredibly layered city, and it cannot be flattened to fit a single narrative.

Detroit’s first 60 years of life with French influence have had a visible impact on the built environment. But beyond well-known street names such Beaubien, St. Aubin, Chene, and Livernois, where does the city see, and even feel, a lasting impact of its founding? How does it affect land, access, and belonging to this day?

The feeling that tied everything together was the idea of belonging. In my research, I asked myself: Who did the city belong to during these different historical layers? What does it look like today, and what might it look like in the future?

However, as I sat with this question, I realized it might not be the right one, or at least not the only one. I kept returning to the idea that the way a question is framed deeply shapes both how we think about an issue and the kinds of answers we receive. I began to question whether ownership, or the right to the city, was the most helpful framework. In my view, the city belongs to no single entity, and precisely because of that, it should be accessible to everyone. The original framing implied ownership rather than collaboration, and I’ve come to believe that the more productive question is not about who the city belongs to, but more about how we share it.

One of my professors, Vincenzo Binetti, taught me to think about the city as a palimpsest. A palimpsest is “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing, but of which traces remain.” Much like history, it is rarely completely erased, but merely overwritten. In cities, if you look close enough, you’ll most likely find a myriad of hints pointing towards what once was, taking you through the different layers of the palimpsest.

On this Detroit Jane’s Walk, we will bike to six different ‘layers’ of the city. Each stop holds some of the city’s history, culture, or contradiction. To give you a sneak peek into where we’ll go and what we’ll talk about…

• Newlab: Industry, Innovation, and Apprenticeships

• Saint-Anne’s Basilica: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus

• Downtown: Culture, points of origin, water, and land

• One special Pear tree: legends and folklore of Detroit’s earliest days

We’ll end the tour at Anthology coffee, where we can collectively imagine Detroit 100 years from now and the seeds we would plant today, for tomorrow.

Until next time,

Emma

Nonprofits today are spending an extraordinary amount of time, talent, and energy managing funder reporting requirements. Foundations, eager to be data-driven and impact-aware across bodies of work, usually require detailed evidence of effectiveness. But every funder defines success a little differently. So nonprofits spend weeks (sometimes months) translating their work into a dozen different reporting formats.

As the person behind many of Detroit’s philanthropic strategies and data dictionaries, here’s what I can tell you: every funder wants roughly the same thing: outputs, outcomes, and lessons learned. But the questions are phrased differently. The templates are structured differently. The definitions shift just enough to break alignment. So even when the core data is the same, nonprofits have to rewrite and reframe it for every single grant. It’s a custom job every time. And while it may be technically doable, it’s a big waste of time.

It’s the nonprofit equivalent of funding your mission with high-interest credit cards. The capital comes in, yes, but the terms are brutal. The “interest rate” isn’t financial — it’s organizational. Hours spent on formatting. Staff diverted to data gymnastics. Talent consumed not by the work itself, but by the work of explaining the work. And the payoff? Often unclear. When every funder uses a different measurement system, the sector ends up with fragmented, unaligned insights. What should be a shared learning ecosystem becomes a fractured landscape of incompatible charts.

At the heart of this is a deeper issue: we still don’t agree on what success looks like in the nonprofit sector. In business, it’s simple. Profit. Everything else — margin, return, revenue per employee — is a variation on that theme. But in social impact work, the outcomes are less concentrated. Ending hunger. Reducing recidivism. Building trust. Slowing climate collapse. Each goal has its own metrics, methodologies, and moral urgency.

Without a clear bottom line, it’s easy for capital to drive the mission rather than support it. The money arrives with metrics attached, and suddenly, a food pantry becomes a transportation pilot or a financial literacy class. Not because it’s the best path to impact, but because it’s the best way to stay solvent.

This is how mission creep happens. Nonprofits end up being generalists in service of survival. They move from “eradicate childhood hunger in Michigan” to “reduce food insecurity” to “deliver any program that will get funded.” And at each step, the specificity of the moral mission and the clarity of measurement slip further out of reach.

Meanwhile, philanthropy is trying to assess impact across a dataset that was never designed to be compared. A grant that funds neighborhood stability might be tracked in terms of property values, while another measures resident satisfaction, and another reports on crime. All important indicators; none interoperable.

So I started asking: what if we had a Common Report for philanthropy?

Just like students use one application to apply to dozens of colleges, could nonprofits use a shared reporting format to fulfill the baseline requirements of multiple funders? This wouldn’t eliminate nuance. It wouldn’t erase the need for context, story, or adaptation. But it would create alignment. It would make the core data legible across the system. And most importantly, it would give nonprofits back the one thing they can’t fundraise for: time.

For funders, adopting a shared report creates access to a standardized data set that makes it possible to assess impact across grantees, compare interventions, and spot system-wide trends. By aligning on a common format, funders can work more collaboratively, identify what’s working (and what’s not), and make smarter, faster decisions. Instead of collecting fragmented reports in dozens of formats, foundations gain a clearer, more coherent picture of the landscape while reducing the burden on the organizations they support.

The Bottom Line

I think there is real promise in the idea of a shared reporting structure. One that allows nonprofits to define what they’re working against, name how they’ll measure it, and invite funders to opt in instead of reshaping everything just to get in the door.

I’m looking for a small group of funders to sketch this out with me. If you’re interested in co-developing or testing the Common Report for philanthropy, email me at alex@citiesreimagined.com.

Until next time,

Alex

This little postcard is a tribute to the vendors who are rewriting the rules on what a bike can carry!

Until next time,

Alex

Tell me about the time you got totally lost in a city (and loved it) – that one moment when wrong turns turned into an adventure.

Last week I met a new friend who is the Mexico City organizer for Jane’s Walk. She suggested we meet in Coyoacán, a borough about six miles south of La Condesa. We planned to meet at 7:30, so I thought I’d leave here around 6p, so I’d have time to wander before we met. And, since it was only 6 miles, I thought it would be perfect to take a bike rather than sitting in rush hour traffic and my Google Maps estimated a 26-minute ride. Perfect!

Google Maps has done me dirty before, but never like this.

At first, we were vibing (me and Siri via Google Maps). I unlocked the public bike, put in one airpod, and we were off. It was a bit of a twisty turny ride out of La Condesa and onto the main road, but Siri was giving me fine instructions. Traffic was unbelievable. I don’t know why I was surprised, as the region is 30 million people and the average commute time is over two hours for most people. Even in the bike lane, I found myself in all sorts of bike traffic with other commuters and street vendors who are set up on bikes. The car traffic congestion produced so much exhaust, that it was hard to fully catch my breath.

Eventually I came to a bit of a downward slope with a break in traffic and felt some relief. I looked at my watch and it had been 45 minutes - almost 20 minutes more than what Google Maps estimated. It was only then that I realized Siri hadn’t given me any instructions in at least 15 minutes. I pulled over, looked at my phone, and ol’ girl was stuck rerouting. I was at least three miles off course and way past the glowy look of bike commuting and into sweating. My phone wouldn’t connect to cellular, and I was not having a good time.

Finally, I got close enough to a café with free Wi-Fi and was able to pull up my map. Oops - there I was a mile and some change past my turn. Grrr. It was now 7:05 and my new ETA was 7:27p. Classic me, leaves 3x earlier than I need to just in case something happens. Here’s where things begin to turn around.

My new route took me through a couple of beautiful public parks where people were playing music, dancing, and enjoying the first cool evening in a few days. I ended up riding through a historic district with unbelievable gorgeous homes with Moorish architecture. The cobblestone streets were a little rough on the teeth, but the sun was setting and everything felt better. I found an Ecobici station close to the fountain where Monica and I were planning to meet, and never felt so happy to get rid of that bike.

So tell me, when did your wrong turn become an urban adventure?

Until next time,

Alex

Before coming to Mexico City, my relationship to street art was shaped by two very different contexts: the spray-painted walls and throw ups I saw growing up in downtown Orlando, and the polished, city-commissioned murals that are common in Detroit. I have mostly experienced public art as either unsanctioned expression or institutional branding, but haven’t intentionally explored the space in between.

In an effort to explore parts of Mexico City outside the typical footprint of tourists, I booked a tour with a Mexican street artist named Remix. He is from Tenochtitlán and has been painting in the city since he was a teenager. Before we go more in depth on the street art of CDMX, let’s start with a quick history.

A note: I’m trying very hard to steer clear of describing any aspect of Mexico City or its culture as a monolith. Like anywhere, people are unique, and so are their traditions, beliefs, neighborhoods, etc. It’s a bit easier to steer away from this when you’re talking about public art, because it spans a broad and sometimes contradictory range. Nonetheless, I’ll make mistakes as I am learning as I go.

Street Art: A Quick History

So where did street art begin? The simple answer is that it depends on who you ask. The version of the lore I heard is that it started in Philadelphia around the 1960s with kids tagging buildings to mark their territory, and then quickly caught on in New York where artists started tagging subway cars, helping them gain city-wide notoriety. When the press started to cover this ghastly behavior, they unintentionally inspired a new generation of street artists who began tagging and painting in cities all over the world. This led to a huge scene in Berlin, Paris, the UK, the Netherlands, etc. If you’ve got another origin story or more knowledge to share, please drop it in the comments!

Street Art in Mexico City

Here in CDMX, I’ve learned that the space between unsanctioned expression and institutional branding is wide, and constantly negotiated. You can find state commissions, anarchist slogans, Indigenous symbolism, fine art murals, corporate sponsored pieces, graffiti, and community projects, all within a small radius. Some pieces challenge power, others are funded by it. Some are gone the next day, while others stay up for years.

Here’s the other obvious note that I overlooked as a novice: not all murals here are meant to beautify. Some commemorate people lost to violence. Others issue warnings. Some mark territory. Some tell stories. Considered as a whole, they speak to the tensions that define the unique experiences of Mexicans.

Remix walked me through El Centro and parts of his old neighborhood and pointed out murals I would’ve quickly admired and kept walking past, without knowing how to read them or what to look for. He showed me how to spot artists’ names hidden inside the work, explained references I never would’ve caught, and gave context for murals that speak to historic events or local significance. He also broke down the techniques - how artists scale up small sketches for massive walls, use sponges to get a watercolor effect, or blend different materials to work with the surface they’ve got. It was cool to revisit photos of some of my favorite Detroit murals and think about how they were done.

I think the most interesting part of our conversation was about space: where permission matters, where it doesn’t, and how artists navigate the constant push and pull of it. Like any place, there isn’t one artist POV or ethos on how street art should be done. The way Remix explained it, paying respect and honoring legacy is a big deal among artists, and it’s a primary factor in deciding where and what they paint.

At the end of the tour, Remix let me take a stab at painting and… well, it’s harder than it looks. I was humbled and my admiration for street artists 100x’ed immediately. He was generous enough to outline a pigeon for me so I could fill it in and be semi-proud of my artwork. (See bottom right photo above if you must. Bonus points if you can spot my first solo attempt.)

A Program We Ought to Take Notes On

Knowing that I have a decent number of readers who are policymakers and funders, I want to highlight one very cool program that I think could have legs in Detroit and other post-industrial cities looking to catalyze their public arts scene:

Mexico’s Pago en Especie (Payment in Kind) program has been around since 1957, when muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros proposed that artists should be able to pay their federal taxes with artwork. It’s still active today, and artists who qualify can donate up to six pieces per year instead of cash. A national committee reviews the submissions, and the accepted works become part of Mexico’s public collection, displayed in museums and civic buildings across the country. The national archive has grown to over 7,000 pieces, and includes artwork by Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo. It’s one of those rare and brave government moves that acknowledges creative labor as public value.

To wrap this up, walking with Remix didn’t give me a clean narrative about street art in Mexico City, but it left me with three questions I’m still thinking about:

1. Who gets to speak?

2. Who gets seen?

3. What’s allowed to stay visible?

If you're traveling to CDMX anytime soon, I am going to drop a link here to Remix's Street Art Tour and recommend it. It was well worth the time!

Until next time,

Alex

I have dreamed of spending an extended amount of time in Latin America for years, so I booked a month-long stay in Mexico City for two reasons:

• (1) as an urbanist and practitioner of civic design, Mexico City is an endless source of inspiration. The multi-modal street design, expansive tree canopy, and neighborhood green spaces are unmatched in North America (IMHO). Disclaimer: Like most other global cities, the density of green space and tree canopy closely correlates with area median income.

• (2) I’ve tried to learn Spanish (so.many.times) to no avail, so my last resort is immersion. I start language classes today, and if this doesn’t stick, I’ll be signing up for a lobotomy.

Ok, now that you have some context for what I’ll be writing about for the next month, let’s get into how the design of urban places either enables or deters human connection.

I’m writing this newsletter from the Esencial Barra de Cafe in La Condesa where I’ve had coffee every morning since I arrived. When I walked up this morning, Daniella greeted me by name and told me about the coffee selection they have today. She remembered that I liked the Chemex pour over and suggested the Oaxaca, a flowery and light roast. Are you serious?? This small and thoughtful moment has given me a deep sense of belonging in North America’s largest city after just five days here. You’d better believe I’ll be here tomorrow morning, too.

So what makes this possible? Setting aside the fact that this kind of hospitality is the Latin American way, Esencial Barra de Café is a small sidewalk cafe where the baristas take orders, make the coffee, and take payment all in view of the five cafe tables out front. The interior space is so small that the proximity to customers makes conversation easy and natural. It’s also on the ground floor of an apartment building in a mixed-use neighborhood. This type of zoning is typically reserved for downtowns and secondary commercial areas in the American context. It makes me absolutely NUTS that a 400 square foot cafe cannot legally exist in most neighborhoods. It means that people get in their cars, drive to a commercial area with a coffee shop (or worse, a Starbucks with a drive through 💀), park, and order a coffee in an oversized cafe.

“Alex, are you saying that Eucliean zoning creates transactional relationships between people and prevents genuine human connection?!” YES, dear readers! That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Things like required setbacks, parking minimums, and loading zoning capacity are creating bloated amenities whose zoning requirements cause more intrusion than the use itself. Of course someone is going to be bothered by a 3,000 sq.ft. coffee shop with 30 parking spots and a 80 ft setback next door! I would be! But it doesn’t have to be that way. If the NIMBYs (not in my backyard) can see and experience an alternative, we can write zoning code that allows neighborhood scale retail with elevated design standards that add to the value of the street, not detract from it.

Imagine that you have three cafes, a hardware store, a clothing shop, and a grocery store within a ten-minute walk of your house - no store larger than 600 square feet. How would your day-to-day interactions change? Now, imagine that your walk to these places is shaded by a full and healthy tree canopy. How would your mental and physical health change? For the better, I can assure you.

After a week here, my primary takeaway is that you get what you design for. When you design small scale, intimate spaces that creates proximity between people, you get genuine human connection. You can fill in the reverse because you’re probably living it.

I have warned my urbanist friends that I’ll be simply insufferable upon my return, insisting that we revisit our streets, parks, and shops and stop doing sooo much. Make it small! Make it simple! Make the spaces so inviting that programming happens organically! Make it cheap! Just make it and let relationships inform its growth and change over time. I’ll be prattling on for three more weeks, so consider yourself warned (and maybe informed)!

Until next time,

Alex

I am just over halfway through my first semester of teaching in the University of Michigan’s Urban Technology program and I’ve got THOUGHTS.

There were a few things I underestimated, but the greatest one might be how much I’d come to enjoy Gen Z. Before this semester, I loved two things about them: (1) they liberated my legs from the strangle of skinny jeans and (2) killed the high heel, things for which I will be forever grateful. On top of that, I’ve picked up some other life lessons that I’ll share with you here.

Stick around through my thoughts, and you’ll get to meet 14 of them in search of careers in urban tech. If you are a planner, an elected official, a public servant, a program officer, an engineer, a policy maker, a developer, or anything in between, you are in their field of study. Enjoy the read and the roster!

Here’s what I’ve learned from Gen Z:

1. Direct feedback is a gift.
   During the first week of class, I asked my students how they preferred to receive feedback. They were unanimous in saying, “just give it to us straight.” As a member of a generation who gets weird and cagey about feedback, this doesn’t come naturally to me, but I love learning from them. We have made it a practice to integrate feedback in every class session, freely giving it and asking for it. It’s helped me improve my practice and has created a lovely classroom environment where we all learn from each other.

2. The “Just Figure Out” mentality needs to be taught, practiced, and reinforced in a supportive environment.
   When I am asked a question whose answer feels fairly obvious or highly figure-outable, my millennial instinct is to yell, “google it!!” Just because I learned that way, doesn’t mean we need to subject young minds to the same depraved quests. Gen Z loves guidance, clear cut boundaries, and exercising their creativity within understood parameters. If us mid-career folks can get out of our own way, we have the chance to act as compassionate and wise adventure guides to a very eager and smart audience of emerging talent.

3. Business as usual isn’t going to cut it to recruit and retain fresh talent.
   90% of my weekly work time is spent figuring out how to disrupt business as usual for the good of people living in urban places. The other 10% is figuring out how to stay in business while I do this. This crop of young talent is not interested in working in systems where business as usual persists. To put a finer point on it, most of them aren’t interested in:

   1. Employers whose ultimate goal is to maximize shareholder return

   2. Non-Profits without a unique value proposition (if you’re doing it, you better be the only one or the best one)

   3. Business models that do well at the expense of marginalized people

   4. Businesses that only survive in a zero-sum game scenario (see c.)

   5. Organizations that compete with their progressive values

   What I find fascinating is that they have more tolerance for laggy and outdated government practices than they do any of the things above. This gives me great hope for the future of the public sector, knowing that these students will bring new and fresh ways of working to a sector that has face time with every resident. If you’re in one of these other categories, I’d start looking at your talent attraction strategy.

4. Their attention spans aren’t short - you just aren’t interesting.
   Sorry, I’m putting my foot down - I have heard so many people over the age of 45 complain about the “TikTok” short attention spans of Gen Z, and you’re just wrong. If the content is interesting and worth their time, they can lock in. I’m not always interesting to them and find them coding or texting in class instead of listening to my lecture. And this is ok. My firm stance here is to let them be interested in what they want and take my own ego out of it. Letting Gen Z pursue their own curosities might actually save us as a society - we need their creativity and hyper-focus to make the things we need to survive.

If I’ve convinced you that you need more Gen Zers in your life, let me help you take the next step. 14 of my incredibly bright and talented Urban Tech students are in search of internships, job shadows, and full time work in 2026. In the talent roster below, you’ll see what they are looking for, their field of interest, and their superpowers. If you want to reach out to any of them, their email addresses are there, so as they would say, “slide into their DMs.” I’m sorry guys - I know you’re cringing. Don’t slack on your group work and I’ll see you Tuesday.

Until next time,

Alex

Urban Tech Talent Roster

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Welcome back to our Service Design 101 series. Today we’re talking about use cases for service design in municipalities and urban environments. Service design in municipalities and urban environments focuses on improving the quality of life for residents and visitors by enhancing the delivery of public services and optimizing the urban infrastructure.

What are some examples of where this applies?

1. Citizen Engagement and Participation: Service design methodologies are employed to engage citizens in the decision-making process regarding urban development projects and public services. This could include participatory workshops, co-design sessions, and online platforms for collecting feedback and ideas from residents.

2. Urban Planning and Design: Service design is integrated into urban planning processes to ensure that public spaces, transportation systems, and infrastructure are designed with the needs of residents in mind. This includes considerations for accessibility, safety, and usability.

3. Public Transportation and Mobility Services: Service design is used to optimize public transportation systems and mobility services within cities. This may involve redesigning bus routes, improving signage and way finding, and introducing new technologies to enhance the overall transit experience.

4. Digital Services and Smart Cities: Service design principles are applied to the development of digital services and smart city initiatives. This includes designing user-friendly interfaces for online services, developing mobile applications for accessing municipal information, and leveraging data analytics to optimize service delivery.

5. Community Services and Facilities: Service design is used to improve the accessibility and usability of community services and facilities, such as libraries, parks, community centers, and recreational spaces. This may involve redesigning physical spaces, introducing new programming, and enhancing amenities to better meet the needs of residents.

6. Emergency Response and Safety Services: Service design is employed to optimize emergency response systems and safety services within urban environments. This includes improving communication channels, streamlining emergency protocols, and enhancing coordination between different agencies and stakeholders.

7. Environmental Sustainability: Service design is utilized to promote environmental sustainability and resilience in urban environments. This may involve designing green spaces, implementing sustainable transportation options, and integrating renewable energy technologies into urban infrastructure.

8. Cultural and Creative Initiatives: Service design is applied to support cultural and creative initiatives that contribute to the vibrancy and diversity of urban life. This could include designing cultural events, supporting local artists and creatives, and preserving historical landmarks and heritage sites.

Overall, service design plays a crucial role in enhancing the quality of life, promoting inclusivity, and fostering innovation within municipalities and urban environments. By focusing on the needs and experiences of residents, service design helps create more livable, sustainable, and resilient cities AND helps strengthen constituent support for different government agencies.

Keep following along with this series to learn about specific methodologies we use within service design.

See you next time!

Victoria

In short, why are most government services so poorly designed and will it ever be different?

Bad user experiences happen when design is an afterthought. Too many people, especially in the public sector, still see designers as the “make it pretty” people. The truth is that designers are the “make it function” people. Put three policy wonks, a department head, and two lawyers around a table to design a food stamps application and see how user-friendly it is. Compare that result to an application designed by two families currently on food stamps, a social worker, and a designer. Which would you rather use?

Here’s how government agencies can use service design to build better services:

1. Putting Citizens First: How do you design a system that works for everyone when the needs of residents are so different? Service design begins with deeply understanding these unique needs and specifically designing a solution around them. When government agencies take the time to notice and document the citizen experience, they can create more accessible, efficient, and user-friendly services AND gain citizen trust. This means creating seamless interactions across various touchpoints, from online portals to in-person services, making it easier for citizens to access the help they need in a way that makes sense to them - the end user.

2. Overcoming Internal Challenges: Government agencies often face internal hurdles that can impede their ability to serve the public effectively. Using the service design methodology allows us to identify and address those challenges, whether they are siloed departments, outdated processes, or inefficient workflows. By streamlining operations and eliminating these challenges, agencies are much better positioned to deliver services in a simple and timely manner. Not to mention, these efficiencies create cost savings that can then be funneled back into other initiatives.

3. Shifting from Reactive to Proactive: A proactive government anticipates and addresses issues before they become problems - but this is often not possible without service design. Service design helps agencies adopt a forward-thinking mindset by using data, feedback, and predictive analytics to understand the problems that will arise. This approach allows for the development of services that not only respond to current needs but also foresee future demands, ultimately leading to a more resilient and adaptive government.

Embracing service design is a game-changer for government agencies. When we take a holistic view of a process and design with the end user in mind, we improve the overall experience for citizens and gain their trust. Imagine leaving the DMV with a renewed driver’s license and saying, “Wow, that was so easy and worth my time.” That’s good service design at work.

Keep following along with us next time to learn about how service design helps us build better cities. We will be discussing specific use cases for service design in urban environments.

Thanks for reading along!

Victoria