Written by Michael Bevens
The National Gathering officially started on Monday morning, June 9th, with a workshop run by Incremental Development Alliance about becoming a small scale developer which I had taken back in Sacramento. In the morning, I met most of the other Strong SacTown attendees and we all enjoyed breakfast at a nice, small, street side cafe in College Hill, then shared a walking tour through downtown Providence, meeting with other Local Conversation (LC) leaders from around the country. We eventually made it to the central hub of the gathering, the Grace Episcopal Church Pavilion, to receive our Strong Towns lanyards. Then we headed to the Hotel Providence outdoor plaza to network with Strong Towns leadership and other LC leaders. This is where I got my first celebrity sighting and interaction, and I shook hands and chatted with Norm Van Eeden Petersman and Edward Erfurt.
There was a private meeting for speakers and Strong Towns leadership before the main event . Lucky for me, I was invited as a guest of one of the presenters from Strong SacTown (we actually had 2). This was my chance to meet Chuck Marohn. I was politely waiting right next to him for my chance to say “hi” when he finished his conversation, but every time I was “going in”, some other schemer was scheming like me, waiting for an opening, and beat me to him. Sadly, I never got my interaction with Chuck.
After the private gathering, we went to the opening night party at a local brewery. It looked like it was converted from an auto repair shop. More mingling with other members about their local issues and their origin story of how/why they came to Strong Towns. While their names eluded me, I remembered where they’re from. I met Orem, Boston, El Paso, Indianapolis, Sylvan Lake, many California towns: Winters, Petaluma, San Diego, Winchester, and Oakland. When I called it a night, I walked happily to the bus plaza, admiring the green trees that lined the streets along the way, where an impressive network of busses cover the region.
Day 2 of the National Gathering, or Day 1 of the good stuff
Tuesday morning, June 10th, the real working convention began. I talked with new and familiar friend during breakfast. Then we walked as a group to the Omni Hotel where Chuck gave the opening keynote address. He gave shout-outs to many LCs, but he started by talking up our very own LC,Strong SacTown, before congratulating the winner of the Strongest Town competition – Marion Ohio.
After the speech and many photos, we headed to our first of five breakout sessions to share philosophies, ideas, wins and losses and to do all this in person. This part of the Gathering was like going back to school, but this college only offered great classes. We had to choose which session to attend out of a choice of six amazing topics. It was tough to choose, but my first session was “Building A Bridge: How to Connect Value Creation with Value Capture.” It was all about the land value tax and how it is a better value capture system because it taxes only the value of the land and not the property. Our current property tax system taxes both the land and the property.
After lunch we moved to our 2nd breakout session, I chose “The Strong Towns Approach to Ending Highway Expansion.” Norm advocated we must have a plan to maintain and replace our existing roadways before adding on new burdens. We must first get better use out of our existing roadways by segregating roadway users by the purpose for using the roadway – throughput vs. local trips – and then by their vulnerability – cars, bikes, and pedestrians. He said we can improve throughput by reducing the need to stop at intersections and build more overpasses or underpasses instead of adding more lanes to make this happen.
After session two, we gathered again at the Omni Hotel across town for the keynote address from Chris Arnade, titled “What I’ve Learned from Walking the World.” He spoke about poverty, addiction, mental health in America and how people living in the shadows are still people, deserving of empathy and a dignified life. He pointed out that we have a “human” indication that our system is slowly failing, like how the cracks and neglected repairs are the physical indications of neglected maintenance.
This speech made me think of similar dilemmas, like how to best teach in our classrooms – do we focus more on the best and brightest to improve the average? Or do we teach and focus more on those falling short to keep the average from falling? How do we measure success for a classroom? Or for our greater society? Is it the number of wealthy people an indication of our success, or is the number of homeless and destitute an indication of our lacking? To quote Forrest Gump, “I believe it’s a little bit of both” or as Kasey Kassim said, “keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars”. I believe we should always explore the hybrid model and take the best features of each philosophy and see what that could look like if blended together. I think we can use the small steps we’ve completed to get a little cloer to the stars.
Later that night I attended “Debate Night,” and everyone had a chance to have some fun interaction with invited guest debaters, judges, and the crowd with Chuck moderating. The topic: Only real reform can happen at the local level (or bottom up) or can it only happen at the state level (or top down)?
I came away thinking real, lasting reform usually starts as a “bottom up” idea that, through demonstration and a trial period, gets the new idea out there and eventually the powers at the top consider mandating that the new idea become a state wide policy. Much like how lightning is formed – a gathering of energy at the surface, small and spread out, then a rising tide and a reach upward towards the sky. All the while the powers that be in the sky are looking for where and how to spend their power. When these two forces are free to interact with each other… BAM!!! Lightning!
Day 3 of the National Gathering
After breakfast with my new friends, my next schoolhouse was the Providence Public Library Starting with “The Future of Land Use and Transportation” by the chairman of the board at Strong Towns, Andrew Burleson. This session wasn’t an attempt at predicting the future, rather how to focus and guide our reform ideas to meet the likely future based on economic and political forces that currently exist. He encouraged us to challenge our convictions, an “all or nothing” approach, and our tendency to let perfect be the enemy of good. He advocated for us to be flexible with our demands and negotiate to reach our goals for incremental change.
This can be applied to a problem as big as California’s housing crisis. Think about using RVs as a dwelling on your own property vs. the need for more affordable housing. NIMBYs say no to allowing RV dwellings because it may damage the character of the neighborhood, decrease property values, or lead to blight. A compromise could be to ask if covering the RVs with a carport or enclose them inside a structure would resolve their concerns. This compromise may be accepted sooner than a fight to remove all restrictions pertaining to RV dwellings.
Breakout session four was “Taking Problem Intersections from Quick-build Solution to Permanent Transformation”. This was my favorite of all the sessions, and it was presented by Vignesh Swaminathan, a professional transportation planner from San Jose, CA. It was an instructional session on how to do quick builds (or quick-er builds) at a professional level as demonstrations of what the final design would become. This breakout session had great examples of what our newly formed quick build team in Sacramento could do at some of our problem intersections. Instead of taking eight years from planning, funding then construction, it could be cut down to three years by utilizing this new quick build approach. This new SWAT team could bypass or “walk around” the standard process by placing their projects in the front of every bureaucratic line with pre-approved plans. When this plan is ready to be installed, it would be installed in such a way that it could either go forward and made permanent, or it could go backward and removed entirely or edited in some way before being made permanent. The reduction of years to build these projects equates to saved lives.
During lunch there was a panel discussion going on inside the Grace Church Pavilion about, “Local Conversations Open Doors: In Real Life”. This conversation had our own Isaac Gonzales as a panelist, and was a live version of their weekly virtual “Open Doors” sessions for LC leaders to talk shop about problems and successes. Each town tries different approaches and shares what worked for them and what seemed to fall flat.
The final session was my second “Better Block: Transforming “What Ifs” into Community Wins”. The host was a member of Better Block – a non-profit that organizes and constructs quick build temporary structures to demonstrate to clients and/or the public how an empty, neglected space could otherwise be utilized. Using “Wikibloks,” or interlocking panel shapes that can be configured to provide structure for large displays and are easily taken apart, stored, then reused, this sounded like a great way Strong SacTown could take the next step to put Strong Towns principles in action. We could expand our Parking Day project, we could set up better tabling settings, we could host our own carnival at an empty vacant space and demonstrate what this space could
During the closing ceremony, Strong Towns leadership spoke about keeping the Strong Towns movement growing and moving forward, and Chuck unveiled a scholarship that had been set up for a Strong Towns member who passed away in his honor which would enable young Strong Towns members to attend future National Gatherings.
And just like that, it was over. I headed to my bus and took the long way back to my hotel letting it become my very own tour bus through the outskirts of Providence.
I started day dreaming about my experience attending my first Strong Towns National Gathering while meandering through stroads, streets, roads, and highways.
The roads and streets in Rhode Island are the same roads and streets in California with the same traffic rules and design. What if we redesigned our roads and streets to include bicycles and other mobility modes, had a top priority of zero traffic related fatalities, and assigned all road/street users to their proper lanes based on their purpose either for throughput, or as a destination?
And what would that look like?
Through a Strong Towns lens, it would become a bottom up revolution for traffic, a possible next step to address our struggles, and a way to make Our community a little better and safer for everyone.
🎼I see trees of green and clouds of white…. And I think to myself, What a wonderful world. 🎼