Fayetteville, Arkansas, is growing fast, and housing is getting harder to build. Clark Eckels and Nathan McCloskey of Fayetteville Strong talk about Rethink the Lot, a tactical urbanism pop-up that turned downtown parking spaces into small-scale housing people could walk through. The housing and parking debate can easily get stuck in zoning language, council meetings, and abstract trade-offs, but this project gave people a physical way to understand what those rules mean on the ground. Clark and Nathan explain what residents worry about, why parking minimums matter, and what changed when people stood inside a home where a car would usually sit.

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In New York City, the average rent is $4,700 a month and climbing. Over 500,000 housing violations are on file in the city, but the government database where they live is so outdated that most renters never see them. Farid Sofiyev, a sophomore and co-founder of Civic Reset NYC, built an interactive map of 40,000 of those violations and published the names of the 25 worst landlords in the city. This episode gets into how the map works, what the data reveals about NYC's rent crisis, and the zoning choices that got the city there.

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Van Buren, Maine, had a problem no town wants: it owned more than half of its downtown buildings through tax acquisition. When Luke Dyer became town manager after a long career in law enforcement, he was facing vacant storefronts, deteriorating buildings, flood-damaged land, and a downtown that had lost traffic after the port of entry moved away from Main Street. In this episode, Dyer shares how Van Buren began putting buildings back into productive use, turning an underused ice rink into pickleball courts, growing trees for Main Street in a community greenhouse, and converting its old town office into a business incubator.

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Horry County, South Carolina has grown so fast that the median household can no longer afford the median home. Dylan Thompson has lived there his whole life, and he's running for county council because he thinks the people making decisions about that growth should actually be accountable to the people living through it. He's a former pastor running under the Forward Party, focused on flooding, housing, and development policy, and making the case that those issues don't have to break along party lines; they're the same things his neighbors on both sides of the aisle are worried about.

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Zoning reform matters, but Eric Kronberg says it is not enough on its own. Cities also need useful building types, realistic development math, better street design, thoughtful tax policy, and a clearer vision for what good neighborhoods can become. He and Tiffany explore why many cities say they want more housing but still make the most useful housing types illegal or impractical. They also talk about compact cottages, missing middle housing, Atlanta’s affordability challenges, and the overlooked power of a simple box, a good porch, and a house people can picture on their own block.

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Before Strong Towns became a national movement, its ideas spread through conversations, conferences, friendships and people willing to make room for a difficult message. For Member Week, Norm talks with Founders Circle member Paddy Steinschneider about watching Chuck Marohn’s work gain traction and why the movement has always depended on more than one voice. Paddy reflects on the role members can play when a community realizes its streets, budgets, infrastructure or public life are not working. He describes Strong Towns members not as a strike force, but as people with a toolkit: ready to help when a community realizes its streets, budgets, infrastructure or public life are not working.

This podcast is made possible by Strong Towns members. Thank you! Join fellow members discussing this episode in The Commons.

Nate Hood was the first person to donate to Strong Towns, back when the movement was still a blog, an irregular podcast, and a small circle of people asking better questions about cities. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with him about the early days of Strong Towns, the ideas that first made the movement feel different, and what has changed as those ideas have spread across North America. This is a story about growth, but also about why the movement’s power still comes from people noticing what is broken nearby and doing the next small thing.

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Eli Smith, director of the Faith-Based Housing Initiative, joins the show to talk about churches turning underused land and aging buildings into housing and everyday community spaces. He explains how his team helps congregations understand their property, imagine specific projects, and gain the language and tools they need to work with developers, lenders, and local officials. Eli and Tiffany dig into the tension between commuter churches and a more rooted parish model, and why thoughtful design often leads congregations beyond a standard apartment block toward pocket neighborhoods and shared spaces.

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A car had crashed into the same Madison coffee shop three times. That was enough for Josh Olson and Strong Towns Madison to push for a change on Willie Street — a dense, locally-owned corridor that doubles as a commuter shortcut during rush hour. The intervention they proposed cost a fraction of what the city had budgeted, took two weeks to implement, and ran as a two-month trial. Josh breaks down what made the argument land with city staff and commissioners, and what happened after the results came in.

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In Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, housing debates are tied to favorite trees, familiar views, flood scars, and whether younger residents can afford to stay. Planning commissioner and neighborhood organizer Taylor Lightman talks about what it’s like to rewrite zoning in the same place you grew up. He explains how a housing committee rallied around ADUs, why they rolled back strict parking and owner‑occupancy rules, and how they worked through worries about students, flooding, and change itself. The conversation paints a detailed picture of housing reform in a small town that wants to welcome more neighbors without losing its character.

This podcast is made possible by Strong Towns members. Thank you! Join fellow members discussing this episode in The Commons.