Serving You Better: 3 Reflections from 2021 and Initiatives for 2022
Today I want to take a few minutes to talk about a few themes from our work last year and preview a few initiatives our team at Verdunity has planned for 2022 for us to meet and serve more of you better.
First I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have followed us over the past few years, shared our content, and given us feedback. We are SO GRATEFUL for all of you out there working to cultivate strong neighborhoods, communities, and local economies. Pushing past business as usual is really hard work, and it takes special people like you who are willing to think differently, do research, share what you learn with others, try things out, and keep nudging conversations forward. We’re honored to be one of the resources you come to for tips, feedback, and support, so thank you!
We take this responsibility seriously and want to make our podcast, email digests, and other content as helpful and engaging as possible. To help us better serve you, we need a couple of things. First, we’d love to hear from you about what you’re struggling with in your role there in your community or organization. What worked and didn’t work for you last year? What are you hoping to try in the year ahead? What specific topics, people, or organizations would you like to hear about and learn from? Let us know in the comments or hit us up on our social feeds on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Second, we’re trying to get a better understanding of who follows Verdunity (or members of our team) on various media and social platforms so that we can make sure we do a better job of sharing information and connecting people across these groups. We’ve created a survey that we’d like our followers to fill out - it’s at verdunity.com/podsurvey Please take just a few minutes to give us some feedback. It really does help us help you. As a thank you for completing the survey, we’ll select a random 15-20 people from the responses we get to receive a 30 minute Zoom consultation with me. We can use this to talk one on one, visit with your city council, planning commission, or neighborhood group - whatever is most helpful for you. So as soon as you’re done reading this or listening to the podcast version, hit that link and let us know a few nuggets that can help us make our podcast and other content work more helpful and meaningful to you.
So let’s talk 2021.
I’m one of those people who likes to use the end of the year to reflect on how things went, both for myself personally and for our company. We’re in a really cool position of being able to talk with community leaders, residents, and developers across the country about how to make their places stronger, more inclusive, and prosperous. Conversations we have on projects often find their way back into our team discussions and often with my family at home. I have a long list for myself, but there are a couple of them that I thought would be worth sharing with you guys:
1. What is prosperity?
When you stop and think about the life you live, or that others around you live, is it really prosperous? If your answer is no, what would you change? What’s keeping you from that life?
And coming at this another way, there are many people in today’s world who don’t have access to the same things you or I have. Their definition of prosperity can be very different.
We experience these gaps in resources and perspectives every day in our work here at Verdunity. We hear deeply personal stories which are connected to strong emotions, and many times people with these different perspectives end up in a room together with us. It’s a tension that can be uncomfortable, but that we do our best to lean into. I can humbly say that I’ve come a long way in becoming more aware of the gaps in our communities because of the work we do, but I am nowhere near understanding as much as I want and need to. None of us are.
We should all be striving to understand and empathize with those who think or act differently than us. I would highly recommend the book Think Again by psychologist Adam Grant as a starting point. It’s probably the most impactful book I read in 2021 and I promise it will inspire you.
2. We’re building cities we can’t afford to live in or maintain.
Most cities are heading for insolvency unless they change their approach to development and citizens change their expectations. They just don’t know it or want to admit it.
Not the most popular opinion, I get it. But show me your city’s revenues, service costs, and infrastructure liabilities, and how those add up over the life of your city. Things may look good today, but that’s probably because your city is deferring things like street reconstruction projects and park maintenance because they can’t or don’t want to raise taxes to cover those costs. Street costs continue to be the big whammy that cities just haven’t planned for.
Time and time again when we analyze cities, we see street funding liabilities of $500M, 700M, 1.2 BILLION. Then we see cities spending a fraction of this amount on annual maintenance and doing bond programs to fund a handful of reconstruction projects every few years and they say they’re covered. But do the math. These gaps just for streets are huge, and no amount of tax increases alone will get you what you need unless you’re talking about a city that has a majority of extremely affluent residents willing and able to pay more - and that’s not a healthy, vibrant place either by my definition.
My reflection here is just that the resource gaps I saw in the late 2000s that prompted me to advocate for Strong Towns and start Verdunity are not only still present, but widening. We’re building more homes at higher price points that fewer people can afford, and edging out the missing middle housing that provides other options and keeps housing affordable overall. We’re building these homes in developments on the edge of cities, or in some cases just outside of city limits in the ETJ with MUDs and other special districts that expand service areas, dilute public services, and add even more street liabilities - yet we’re not charging enough to cover the true costs. People who need to pay more based on their housing choice won’t, and many others can’t find housing that is affordable for them in places they would like to live.
For the majority of cities to bridge their gaps and be communities where people of different means can afford to live over the long-haul, it’s going to take some big shifts in development codes, housing policy, and especially with citizen expectations. The sooner these happen, and more aggressive and coordinated the strategies are, the faster things can change.
We’ve had several podcasts featuring folks from different communities that are taking this challenge head on, like Michael Kovacs and Justin Weiss in the small but fast growing town of Fate, Bastrop, and more recently Tom Yantis and Mayor Rydell from Taylor, TX. If you’re new to this podcast, go back and give those a listen. And look for more interviews in the months ahead with other cities across the country we’ve been working with. Sharing more of these stories and case studies is one of our main goals for the Go Cultivate podcast in 2022.
3. This brings me to my third and final reflection I want to discuss, which is that the most meaningful change is happening at the neighborhood level with citizen activists and local small developers.
More and more people across this country are understanding that things are broken. While some take to social media or attend council meetings to vent about problems or oppose changes that can actually address issues they’re concerned about, another group of citizens empowered by groups like Strong Towns and the Incremental Development Alliance are taking proactive steps to lead and cultivate change.
These awesome people are organizing neighborhood conversations, cleaning up parks, painting bike lanes, and renovating and building small buildings in older neighborhoods. These are the real heroes in communities today. We need to find them, connect them, empower them, and cultivate more of them. In every neighborhood, in every city.
One of the people responsible for this change is Monte Anderson, a founder of the Incremental Development Alliance and a practicing small developer. I’m lucky to call Monte a collaborator, a mentor, and a friend. We’ve facilitated workshops together, partnered on some planning efforts, and collaborated on development projects. One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most over the past couple years is getting to meet with communities together as a tag-team where we can discuss the big picture challenges in cities and ways to align vision, policies, and actions and then also talk about the small projects that can be done immediately. Together, we talk about how cities can cultivate fiscal health for the city and local wealth for residents and businesses - right now, with the resources they have.
Some of our past episodes have featured interviews with Monte, Chuck from Strong Towns, and some inspirational citizen activists like Ben Orcutt from Anderson, Indiana. Again if you’re a newer listener, go back and check out some of these older episodes in our archive.
I believe that everyone deserves a prosperous life in a community they love and at a cost they can comfortably afford. That’s our “why” here at Verdunity. We share information and analysis, facilitate conversations, provide plans, and implement projects that help communities to better understand what prosperity for everyone looks like, where the gaps are, and ways we can all work together to bridge these gaps incrementally with resources we have. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have a team that shares this passion and a company that prides itself on being real about these challenges.
Let’s talk about a few things our team is planning to do in 2022:
First, we’re bringing this podcast back. We took a break after our original host/producer Jordan Clark left to pursue other opportunities, and then spent the better part of the last year cranking on project work and growing our team. We’ll be pushing out a new episode once a month for sure, with some smaller intermittent episodes when time allows. We’ve got some great communities, cultivators, and resources lined up to feature, but get those surveys in so we can prioritize and expand who we’re talking with!
Second, we’re planning to get back out on the speaking circuit again. If you’re in Texas, look for us at your favorite conferences. We might even sponsor a booth or two this year.
Third, we’re going to do some more of our Go Cultivate summits and workshops. We had so much fun with these a few years ago, but had to scale them back due to our workload. This year, we’re looking to do four across our home base of Texas for sure.
March/April - Houston region
June/July - Central Texas
Sept/Oct - West Texas, likely Abilene or Midland area
Nov/Dec - Brownsville
If you’re interested in hosting us in one of these areas, or in some other part of the country, shoot me an email directly at kevin@verdunity.com and we’ll have one of our team members get in touch. We’re also going to revamp our workshop page on our website with more details about these workshops and how to book one in your community. If you’re not on our email list already, subscribe there to get early registration discounts and details as we release them.
Fourth, my colleague AJ is working to revamp our Community Cultivators online network. We got some good feedback from our initial launch, and want to give this another run in 2023. Look for some promotional info this fall and expect to jump back into the end of this year or early next year!
Last, but not least, we plan to continue pursuing projects and working with change agents in communities who are as passionate about these challenges as we are. Consulting work is the bulk of what we do and will continue to be. If you’re looking for a partner to help you have these conversations, put plans together, and coach you through implementation, please get in touch with us. We would love to help!
On behalf of our whole team, thank you again for listening to our podcasts and supporting the work we do at Verdunity. We appreciate all of you and the work you’re doing. Please take a few minutes to fill our survey out if you can, and we look forward to serving you better this year!
