 We could get started. Good morning. I'm John Murphy, the Dean of the College of Architecture here at UTSA. It's my privilege to welcome you all to the Downtown Campus and the Second Annual Public Health and the Built Environment Conference, a conference that is the result of community effort led by Metro Health District of City of San Antonio in partnership with the UTSA College of Architecture, the American Institute of Architects, San Antonio Chapter, UT Health Science Center Institute of Health Promotion Research, University Health System, the YMCA, American Planning Association, various city departments and many others. Speaking for the disciplines that I represent, we believe that issues of healthy space and active design are paramount considerations for planning and designing and constructing the built environment. I know that you'll find the scheduled presentations both enlightening and entertaining as we discuss many best practices for creating healthy communities. Once again, welcome and thank you all for coming. At this point, the director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, Dr. Schlenker, will come speak. Thank you, John. And welcome, everybody. It's great to see you all here. This is a wonderful event, and I'm honored to be able to welcome you to the Second Annual Public Health and Built Environment Conference, Healthy Communities by Design. Each year, this event brings together architects, designers, builders, funders, health professionals, academics, community activists, who all have one thing in common. And that thing is the desire to build and live in healthy, vibrant communities. And our charge today is to help create that vision and to make it a reality. I would very much like to thank all of the very generous sponsors who made this event possible. First of all, our primary sponsor, University Health Systems, which not only provides excellent medical care in San Antonio and the surrounding communities, but is also really establishing a footprint in our built environment. And if you want evidence of this, you can walk three blocks to the north, to the Robert B. Green campus of UHS, which is transforming a blighted area into a beautiful community space. You'll see that it's about half done. There's one building that's about 100 years old. There's another building that is brand spanking new and beautiful, and there's a great big hole in the ground. So you can see kind of the process. And also very much like to thank Methodist Health Care, Utesca Institute for Health Promotion and Research, Tifer Institute for Public Health and Education Research, Christa Santa Rosa Health System, YMCA, the American Institute of Architects, San Antonio Chapter, Natural Awakenings, the Witte Museum, Institute for Leadership and Capital Projects, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, American Planning Associates, Texas Chapter, Southwest Section. Thank you so much for supporting this very, very important cause. And thanks to everybody on the planning committee who worked so hard to put this together. And there's really one person who's more responsible than anything else for the fact that we're here today. He attended to all the details from the big, putting the program together and getting the excellent speakers we have down to the smallest, like putting the chotskies in the bag yesterday afternoon at the health department. And that is David Clear. I'd like to thank him personally. And for everybody here, while you're here today, if you're having a good time, if you feel it's worthwhile and you're learning something, try to grab David and just say thank you for a job well done, because it really has been. And also, I don't know if this is going to go over too well, but I was advised this morning that the more progressive thing to do at conferences these days is every time you clap for anything, no matter what it is, stand up. So like automatic standing ovation for everything. And the reason for that is health, get moving, get active, don't just sit around all day. So I'm going to suggest that, we'll see how it goes. Also, you'll notice that not only this opening session, but the entire day is being taped by Nowcast SA, which is a wonderful local organization that captures on video and audio tape what happens in our community and offers it free to the public. So they will be taping the entire day and then it will be available forever on NowcastSA.com. So if you missed something today and unfortunately there's no possible way you can attend all the sessions, if you'd like to see any of them or all of them or recommend it to your friends, it will be available on Nowcast.com. And I want to thank the sponsors I've already mentioned for chipping in a little extra to Nowcast.com so that they could actually do that today and save this for everyone else. I'd like to thank Dr. Romo, both the Dr. Romos actually, for the use of this beautiful campus for the day. And Dr. John Murphy is the Dean of the College of Architecture who has been an ally all along who supported this conference last year and hopefully UTSA and their College of Architecture and all the associated programs will be part of this effort going into the future. And now I would like to introduce the next speaker on the program who is Councilwoman Shirley Gonzalez of District Five and we are now sitting in District Five. And I want to read a little bit of her bio because I think it's really relevant to what we're all about today. Councilwoman Shirley Gonzalez was born and raised in San Antonio. She spent most of her youth around the family-owned business, Bill's Pawn Shop and Jewelry Store, established in 1960 and located on Zarsimora between Buena Vista and Commerce. So that's just maybe a mile in that direction. She lives here today in this district with her husband. She attended Ursuline Academy and earned both a bachelor's and a master's in business from the School of Business at St. Mary's University and has worked for 20 years in her family business. She strongly supports education and organizations that are making a difference in this, her neighborhood and all the other neighborhoods in San Antonio. So without further ado, I would like to welcome Councilman Gonzalez to this stage and we will proceed with our program. It's such a pleasure to be here today and really very thrilling and exciting for me because this built environment is something that I've been trying to articulate to my community for some time. I believe that District Five is really the prime place to have the first go round of this kind of built environment conference. So I'm glad you're here today, but it's very difficult to articulate and I've been struggling with it. I'm not an academic, but you just, you know it when you see it. And so I try to explain it and it's people don't get it, but when we have pictures and we have the posters that are in our foyer that the students did, then it's much easier to talk about it. And so I'm really grateful for that because it is something that unless you're really into it and you know it and you've experienced it, it's hard to talk about. And so I'm here today because I believe that we are not satisfied with the built environment that we have today. And in a sense, we should never be satisfied. We should strive to improve the place, this place for our children and our children's children. And the challenge becomes defining exactly what improvement means. The built environment belongs to the people. So the improvement we seek should be the improvement the community seeks. Capturing the community's vision is not an easy task. It takes time and work. And here in San Antonio, that work has been done and that time has been committed. And our mayor, Julian Castro, demanded and inspired the city to document what that vision looks like. The work continues and that's why we're here today. And that community's vision is captured and expressed in two documents, SA 2020 and the comprehensive master plan framework. Both SA 2020 and the comprehensive master plan framework were created through numerous workshops with city leaders and staff and most importantly, the community. I know many of you here today participated in those programs. And hundreds of people with diverse backgrounds and interests collaborated to create a vision for our city. And that vision is expressed in those two documents. A third and critical document is under development and that is a comprehensive master plan that the city is working on now as we speak. The community vision for a city is that it is sustainable, that it protects culture and historic resources like the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, for example. It provides multimodal transportation including bicycle mobility, world-class public transit. This includes things like the via rapid bus lines that we have now and the streetcar network that is in the works. This provides walkability and that means that the scale of our community means walking is a first choice for transportation and for recreation. This community vision protects our air quality, preserves our green spaces. The West Side Creek is a perfect example of that. And at the Alesson Creek, the creek's improvement that we've seen, I saw a great presentation out in the front from a group that I hope will present today or they have their information here called Gardendale 5. And I really like that because it's five miles but it's also in District 5 and so I thought that was a great way to remember it. And it also, this community vision still provides for great public spaces. One of my personal favorites is Maine Plaza and I'm very excited about the future of Hemisphere Park. The urban environments can best achieve the vision if we focus on one thing and one standard and that's walkability. Walkability environment cares for the needs of the people for pedestrians, for a sustainable life, great public spaces, provides for high quality of life and ensures the safety of our most vulnerable citizens. That means children, the elderly and those with disabilities. Land use and transportation decisions that prioritize people over private automobiles are the key. Today our land use and transportation policies are in conflict with the community vision. They guarantee a city dependent on automobile use which dangerously degrades the pedestrian experience. It seriously degrades the environment, destroys natural resources and jeopardizes safety, especially of children and elderly. I know this is hard work but the community has created a wonderful vision and getting there today sometimes creates conflicts but nonetheless, leaders like myself, we must face these challenges and conflicts and continue to deliver what the community vision is. It is my passion and my purpose here today to lead the people and to lead the city in an area in a space that creates great public spaces, provides for community involvement, it's built at human scale and most importantly provides for the safety of our citizens. San Antonio is growing rapidly. We know this presents a great strain on our environment but one of the main goals of our comprehensive master plan is to absorb that growth within the next 15 years within our existing city limits. So this is our opportunity to transform San Antonio into one of the cities that is most desirable, that is safest for people, that includes walkability and includes transportation modes for all citizens. I love walking and cycling. I rode my bike here today with my husband. We put our son on a trailer and we travel throughout our creeks but also throughout our city streets. I wanna live in a city that I believe is safe and where I never have to sit in traffic, where I never have to be all with threatened by automobile traffic if I decide to walk to work or decide to walk to City Hall or here to this university. And I think that a city like that is a city that everybody wants to live in and I'm very happy and very proud to represent District 5 and I just wanna also thank everybody that's here today for taking into very serious consideration our community and for representing us so well here. I know so many people that Dr. Schlinker already mentioned that are here today that are trying to talk about this built environment. It's so difficult to articulate but thank you all so much for being here today and I'll turn it back over to Dr. Schlinker. Good morning. My name is Teri Delaia. I'm from the University Health System which is the keynote sponsoring organization for this conference and a very proud supporter of our community. As mentioned earlier by Dr. Schinkler, the University Health System has really been transforming healthcare here within our community and you'll see not just that the Robert B. Green has been transformed but we have recently opened up a 10 floor what we call Sky Tower Hospital and it has over 700 beds and there are private rooms. We've expanded our OR surgery capacity because we are a level one trauma center and we have also expanded our emergency care services within this community. We have over 16 outpatient facilities which are geographically distributed throughout this community and so we're very well represented in terms of where we deliver services and hope that you will choose to wanna use our health system one day when you actually have the need to do so. This morning I'm very proud to have the opportunity to introduce to you Charles Morone. He is the co-founder and president of Strong Towns. Charles, known as Chuck, to his friends and colleagues is a professional engineer, licensed in the state of Minnesota and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He has a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology and a master's in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute. He is the author of Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, the primary author of the Strong Towns blog and the host of the Strong Towns podcast and see it differently TV. Chuck grew up on a small farm in central Minnesota. He is the oldest of three sons of two elementary school teachers. He graduated from Brainyard High School in 1991. Chuck joined the Minnesota National Guard on his 17th birthday during his junior year of high school and served for nine years. Besides being passionate about planning and small towns, he loves playing music. He is an obsessive reader and is a seasoned ticket holder of the Minnesota Twins. We won't hold that against him. Chuck and his wife live with their two daughters and just north of Baxter, Minnesota. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Charles Morone. So standing up here, it's kind of cool. So go ahead and keep doing that. No, thank you so much. It's interesting because I've not had the opportunity up to this point to speak to public health groups, but I'm really excited to do so. I'm here today not as an expert in public health or even really an expert in the built environment, but as someone who spent quite a bit of time thinking about and writing about and learning about the intersection between the way we build our places and the financial health of our communities. And if there's one thing that I'm hoping to do here today for you, it is to give you kind of a broader set of tools to talk about the things you're most passionate about. My friend John Zimmerman is gonna chat today at the noon plenary and I think is gonna give you kind of what I'd say is the follow-up to the presentation that I'm gonna do, actually talking about how we make some of this stuff happen, but I wanna do though is have a conversation with you about the current state of our cities, why they're struggling and why really what you're doing and what you're advocating for is part of that solution. Our organization is a 501C3 nonprofit. Our mission is to support a model of growth that allows America's cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient. I wanna start by having you kind of think way back in history about the way we have historically built our cities, our places. These are two artist renderings. The one on the left is the ancient city of Ur, Mesopotamia, one of the oldest civilizations we've ever excavated. The city on the right, of course, is ancient Rome. These are artist renderings, obviously. If you look at and think about these cities, they're built around the predominant transportation technology of the day, that of course being your two feet, right? People who lived in these places walked everywhere and so the scale of the buildings, the distance between different types of uses, different types of buildings, the form of the city was really shaped around a culture of people who walked. We can fast forward thousands of years to this, my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. I live today two and a half hours north of Minneapolis, St. Paul. This is what it looked like back in the early 1900s. Again, people would have arrived here often by train but when they got there, they would get off the train and they would access pretty much everything in town by walking. And so the scale, the proportion, the distance between different types of uses were all very similar in what you see even thousands and thousands of years ago. Beginning in the early 1900s and then accelerating after World War II, we began to build our places around a different set of transportation technology. That of course being the automobile. We came up with different building styles, different building types, different ways of arranging things on the landscape, different ways of separating uses. If we were to talk about this in terms of asking you to explain it today, most of the people in this room would talk about this in terms of progress. We used to be people who walked, we built cities around people who walked. We're now people who drive, we build cities around people who drive. Someday we will have jet cars and we will build cities around people who use jet cars and someday we will teleport everywhere and we will have cities that look completely different than they do today. That's a very affirming narrative. It's very comforting to think of ourselves in terms of this kind of continual line of progress. There's another way to look at this though that isn't quite as confirming and I want to kind of plant the seed in your head as we go forward with this discussion today. When you look at these two civilizations, you're looking at places that even by this point in time had shown that they could endure over a long, long stretch of time. Through good times, through bad, through war, through famine, through growth, through stagnation. And if you think about how the kind of technology or the know-how to build a place like this came about, it came about through trial and error. For thousands of years, people had tried different things, things that worked, they copied and expanded upon, things that didn't work, they got rid of and didn't do again. And when I say didn't work, I mean people died, right? Like things went really bad. And by the time you get to early 1900s Midwest, you have a style and a pattern of development and approach to building that literally was universal, that we had been doing in different latitudes and different continents and different cultures for thousands and thousands of years. A style of building and development that was very attuned to who we were as human beings. When we look at this approach to building, while this seems normal to all of us because it's all we've known our entire lives, in terms of human history, this is a very, very recent innovation, a very short experiment. We have been doing this for literally two, little more than two generations. There's a saying in civil engineering school, I'd like to say the civil engineers are the world's second oldest profession. Would that sink in for a sec? If you think about the civil engineering profession as being around a long, long time, we still have roads and bridges that were built by the Romans that are in use today. It's important to understand that traffic engineering, the subsection of building cities around automobiles is a very, very young profession. We have hardly begun doing this. It's important for everybody to understand that we are living today through one of the greatest experiments that's ever been tried. One of the greatest social experiments, political experiments, cultural experiments, and yes, financial experiments that it's ever been tried. And we didn't try it out in Oklahoma to see if it would work and if it worked imported here to Texas. We just did it everywhere, all at once, on a continental scale. We're gonna talk about today are some of the financial implications that maybe weren't apparent to people when we started doing this a couple generations ago. If you look at the way we finance growth and development today, there's really three financial mechanisms that we use. The first is transfer payments between governments. This is the notion that the federal government, the state government, as our partner in creating growth and development and jobs at the local level come up with programs, grants, loans, incentives, subsidies that when applied at the local level allow us to create new growth and new jobs. The second mechanism is transportation spending. This is the idea that we take our gas tax dollars and then we spend them to do things like add highway lanes, build frontage roads, add interchanges, put in transit lines. These not only create jobs during the construction but also create a platform where we get additional growth. The third mechanism is debt. And while debt in the public sector is very important, even more important than that is debt in the private sector. The ability of individuals and businesses to secure financing over the long term. Have that financing bundled on a secondary market with similar financing sold off, securitized, bought up by pension funds around the world creates an enormous amount of liquidity that people can access. These mechanisms combine to allow us to create growth at the local level and of course growth is good because growth gives us the money that we need to be able to do the things that we need to do as local units of government. There are some really powerful incentives at work here. It's important that we see them. When we get growth through one of these mechanisms, the cost to us as local taxpayers is really nominal. When the federal government comes in with a grant, when the state government comes in with a program, when the Department of Transportation comes in with a new project, when the private sector comes in to build something, we may have as a local government a little contribution we need to make, we may have some staff time, we may up size some pipe or something like that for future growth opportunities, but generally as a total cost of the overall transaction, our amount is very nominal. However, all that tax based growth is substantial. All of a sudden we have all those new jobs, all this new revenue coming in and things look really, really good. The catch is that we agree to take over the long term obligation, the long term liability of serving and maintaining all of these places that we built. We are in a sense exchanging a near term benefit in cash for a long term liability. There's only one or two ways that this strategy makes sense. If you think back to ancient Ur and ancient Rome and you're of the mindset that we want our places to endure that long, we want to be around hundreds of years, thousands of years. There's only one or two ways that our current strategy makes sense. Either growth is gonna continue at ever accelerating rates. In other words, we're always gonna be able to generate that much more new growth and we can use that kind of easy money to make good on all the promises we made a generation ago or the pattern of development, the actual way we are building our places is gonna generate for us more in wealth and prosperity than it creates for us in costs over the long term. Now, I think we all understand, I mean, we're living through this great recession, right? This kind of transformation of our economy or at least our economy trying to transform itself. I think we all intuitively understand just mathematically that the first assumption is not true. Unfortunately, the second one is also not true and this is where for a brief little bit of time this presentation will get a little bit technical. I am an engineer and I kind of have to do that. I will walk you through it and make sure it is not painful, all right? One of the things that we have realized and understood at Strong Towns is that we really do a horrible job of predicting the future. In planning school and engineering school, you're subjected to all of these ways of theoretically modeling what should happen in the future and what we found over time is that we really are not very good at this. We tend to either use very simple models that don't capture the full range of complexity that exists in our urban areas or we try to make really complex models that acknowledge that complexity and fail to realize the variability that they have over time. So what we have done at Strong Towns is that instead of trying to predict what will happen in the future, let's just simply look back at what has happened and see what we can learn from that. So what we have done is we've gone back and we've tried to break down the essential components of our development pattern and understand their financial performance characteristics. I'm gonna give you three examples today. There's many, many, many more on our website which I'll give you that address at the very end. This is the most simple style of development that you're ever gonna find. This is a dead end road with a cul-de-sac. There's no through traffic, there's no commercial traffic. This is all just residential properties. These are two, two and a half acre lots. This was built in the mid-1990s. When it was built, the road was actually a gravel road. The city wanted it paved. The city went out and paved it. The city paid half. The property owners paid half of the cost. We asked a question based on the taxes that the city's collecting from the people that live within this development, the only people who substantively use this road, how long is it gonna take them to recoup the half they just spent to build that road? The answer's 37 years. Now the road won't last 37 years. And when it falls apart, it's important to understand that that cost of fixing it is not gonna come from the property owners, it's gonna come from the tax revenues of the city, of which obviously there's gonna be an insufficient amount. This is a slightly more intense development. These are half acre, three quarter acre lots. The ones on the very west here are a little bit bigger, but you can see they have a minimal amount of frontage. Again, you've got a closed loop system. There's no through traffic, no commercial traffic. The only people that use this roadway are the people that live along it. This was built in the early 1980s, it completely fallen apart. The city went out and fixed it. The cost was $354,000. We asked the question, all right, let's say that how long, based on the taxes that these people that use this road are paying today, how long is it gonna take the city to recoup what they just spent to build this road? The answer is 79 years. The road won't last anywhere near that long, of course. So we asked another question, all right, if the city were gonna try to recoup enough money from these property owners to actually have the revenue to pay to fix the road the next time it needed to be fixed, what would that mean? It would mean an immediate 46% increase in taxes, with an annual increase of 3% over inflation every year for the next 25 years with all that revenue going just to maintain the roadway. Now, sometimes people say, okay, Chuck, we get it, we know we lose money on residential property, we make it up on commercial property. Commercial is our cash cow, to which my immediate response is always, all right, I don't know of any corporation that loses money on 90% of its holdings and tries to make it up on the last 10%. I don't know why an incorporated municipality would think that that's a really good strategy. Nonetheless, we've developed this notion that if we just have enough successful commercial property, it doesn't matter what happens in our residential. This is a business park. This is a kind of investment that we build it and they will come. We build these things to try to attract new businesses and growth into the community. This one was built in the mid 1990s. You can think wide industrial streets, all the sewer and the water and the storm sewer, herbs, the whole deal. This is completely built out today. Every single lot is occupied. The city felt this was such a successful project. They wanna repeat it, just do the exact same thing on property they own right next door. They're just gonna actually mirror it and flip it and build the same thing. We ask the question, all right, if we could build the same thing at the same cost and get the same return, would that be a good investment for the city? In today's dollars, it would be 2.1 million. There's $6.6 million of investment that's been made in this park. Now, pause here for a second. Of that 6.6 million, four of those lots belong to a church. Now, I go to church. Churches are an important part of our community, but the church is not paying any taxes to the city. Two of the lots belong to the school district. Again, I went to public schools. My daughters go to public schools. School district is an important part of the community, but the school district is not paying any taxes to the city. One of the lots is a county maintenance garage. One of the lots is a city maintenance garage. Of the remaining lots, the ones that theoretically are private sector taxpayers, every single one was either sold for a dollar and or was given a long-term tax subsidy in order to attract them to move to this park. For the sake of our analysis, we assumed that every single lot would be built on within 12 months, that all of them would be non-subsidized full tax-paying entities, and that every penny of new revenue coming in would go to paying down that investment. If that were the case, an incredibly wildly optimistic scenario, it would still take the city almost three decades, 29 years, just to break even. That's 29 years where everybody's taxes would need to go up to pay for all the services that would be needed in that park, because in the most wildly optimistic scenario, they're just covering their own debt. Again, there's a lot of examples, other case studies on our site. I used to go through about a dozen of these because I was really proud of the work we had done. And I realized after a while that people could get it in just three. So instead of putting you through the pain of example after example, I'm just gonna cut to this and kinda walk you through it. Again, I like charts, I'm an engineer. I've got four charts here, that'll be it for the day. I promise to walk you through these two. Let's say that developer comes in town. So I've got a piece of land here I'd like to build on. I will build all of the homes, I will build all the commercial properties, according to your standards. I'm not asking for any variances, I'm not asking for any subsidies. I will put in the roads and the streets and the pipes and the curb and the sidewalks and the pumps and the valves and the meters and everything that's needed to make this thing work. The only thing that I ask of you, the local government, is that when I'm done building all this stuff that you take it over and maintain it over the long term. What would our answer be to that? We'd say fantastic, right? You mean you follow all of our rules, you want no subsidies, you're gonna build everything and we just get all this tax base at the end of the day. This is like a perfect transaction, right? Let's say in the back of our minds we had this strong town's notion and we want to be good prudent people. So what we decide to do is when this new revenue comes in from this new development, we're gonna take the portion that would normally go towards maintaining things in other parts of the city. And we're just gonna sequester that away, we're just gonna keep that. And every year when the revenue comes in, we'll add to what we had and we'll allow it to grow. And when we get out a generation from now, when we have to make good on that promise we made, back when we did that initial transaction that we would maintain this over the long term, we'll just use that money to do it. This is what that looks like. In year one, everything is brand new, money comes in, we take that portion that would normally go to maintenance, we set it aside. In year two, more money comes in, we add to what we had in year one. In year three we add, in year four we add, you can see each year we add more and more money to what we've set aside. A five-year-old road isn't costing you anything, a 10-year-old pipe isn't costing you anything as a local government. What we find is that when we get a couple of decades out we've accumulated quite a bit of cash, right? Got a lot of, you know, this is really working out well for us. The problem is when we get to in this example, in year 25, we have to make good on that promise we made two and a half decades ago, what we find is that the cumulative amount of revenue that we brought in is insufficient. And from a cash flow standpoint, we run far into the negative. Now, a city is not one development. A city is a series of developments, a collection of neighborhoods. So let's say that a couple of years later our developer comes back in and says, you know, that project works so well for me, it works so well for you, I would like to do a similar size project. And in fact, every other year from this point forward, the developer walks in with a similar size proposal. In other words, exactly what every city wants. Nice, steady, continuous growth. And we take that revenue and we set aside and we allow it to accumulate so we can make good on all those promises that we make when we take those new developments on. This is what that looks like. You can see in year one, you've got your first development, starts paying in. In year three now, you've got two paying in. You're five, you've got three, you're seven, you're nine, you're 11. And not only is each development adding revenue, adding cash to your pot of money, but you're having growth upon growth upon growth. And so your revenue actually starts to kind of accelerate upwards. You start to accumulate a huge mountain of cash. And when you get to year 25, the year you have to make good on that promise, you made way back in year one, yes, you've got to spend a little bit of money, but it's not a big deal, right? It's not a big deal. You've had all this growth. The growth solves the insolvency problem. It creates what we call the illusion of wealth. Because as we intuitively understand, if you lose money on every transaction, you don't make it up in volume. If you lose money over the long term on every project that you do, the further you go out into the time horizon, the more downward pressure there is on your budget. Is it that boring? I've never had crickets before. All right. If you look at local governments today, whether it be Detroit or San Bernardino or Stockton, it's to me, when I look at cities that are struggling, it's sad because for the most part, they've done all the right things, right? They followed all the prescriptions. They did everything they were supposed to do. Yet now they find themselves completely insolvent. We had a study in my home state of Minnesota put out by the League of Minnesota Cities, a group that represents cities. And it said by 2016, every single city in Minnesota will be broke. And their response was, well, we need more money from the state. And my response was, no, you got a bad model, right? You got a bad model. We have a bad model. Now, there's people who look at this and say, okay, Chuck, I get it. This makes sense. In psychology terms, we call this temporal discounting, the notion that we favor a dollar today more than the cost of it tomorrow. This is why people smoke, right? But we should have gone broke a long time ago. How do we get to this point? This is our last graph. This is a graph of debt. And everybody in this room is familiar with the conversation we're having about our federal debt, right? The federal debt is enormous, $20 trillion. I've had seven quarters of calculus. I'm not gonna stand up here and pretend that I can comprehend what a trillion dollars is, let alone 20 of them, right? It's this enormous sum of money. In this graph here, that enormous sum of money, the growth of our federal debt is represented by the blue line on the bottom. The black line is the growth of our GDP. That green line, the one that soars up like that, that's our private sector debt. That's debt that you and I share. That's home mortgages, commercial real estate loans, auto loans, credit cards, margin interest accounts, student loans, private sector debt. The way we financed the first generation, the first life cycle of this new experimental way of building was by using our savings and by reinvesting that illusion of wealth back into creating more growth. When that became insufficient to keep everything going. When we had all these liabilities starting to pile up, we ultimately shifted from an economy based on growth through savings and investment to an economy based on growth through debt accumulation. And growth through debt accumulation became such an important part of our economy that we actually allowed it to become predatory. As we crossed over into the third generation, the third life cycle of building this way, we actually allowed systems to arise that preyed on our neighbors. We said you didn't need a down payment, you didn't need to show you could make a payment, you didn't even need to show you had a job. We encouraged people who couldn't afford homes to buy homes, who could afford modest homes to buy large homes, who could afford large homes to buy extravagantly large homes. We needed the growth so badly that we allowed our systems to prey on each other. Our ability to continue this experiment by having the private sector take on accelerating levels of debt is just simply not there. Obviously there's some huge implications to all this. The mechanisms of growth that we become accustomed to are failing. The federal government and the state governments are dramatically over committed. You don't see the federal government rushing into save Detroit. It's because they don't have the capacity to do it. Not only can they not save Detroit, but they can't save every single city that is gonna need assistance over the coming generation. The DOTs are fundamentally broke, and it's fascinating to me to come here to Texas and see all the transportation infrastructure that you've built, and know that over half of your transportation budget is going to pay debt service on past projects. A number that climbs every year. A number that climbs every year. Think about that. There's an endpoint there, right? Where your entire budget is going to pay debt on past projects. We do not have a solvent system. Your DOT has committed to more lane miles than it has any capacity to maintain under even the most wildly crazy tax scenario in terms of revenue that it can get. There's no way that your DOT is gonna be making huge transformative investments in our cities because they just simply don't have the money to do it. The private sector is broke. We have way too much debt. And the last six years have been all about trying to pay down that debt. While at the same time, the systems on top are trying to get us to take on more. You see this huge struggle going on. The implication for our cities though is that our local governments are gonna be forced to absorb the cost of our development pattern. If we want that road fixed, we're gonna have to pay for that. If we want that pipe repaired, that's gonna come from us. If we want that new stadium or that new library to fix our water tower or our sewage treatment plant, we're gonna have to find a way to do that locally. This can't be done in the current pattern of development without some incredibly large tax increases and or some devastatingly large cuts in services. Now, I didn't come here today to tell you what you already know, right? This is the debate we're having at every level of government. How big is the tax increase gonna be and who's gonna pay for it? How deep is the service cut gonna be and where is it gonna be felt? It is critical in this room today that we see the third variable in this sentence, the third variable being the current pattern of development. As long as we continue to build our places in a way that is fundamentally insolvent, there's no way that our cities are going to avoid becoming insolvent. As long as we continue to build in a pattern and an approach that gives us an illusion of wealth today in exchange for enormous long-term liabilities, there's no way that our cities are gonna avoid going bankrupt. Whether that is a hard default, like we see in Detroit and Stockton and San Bernardino or whether it's a soft default that we see in cities all over the place, including San Antonio, where we have to lay off firefighters and police officers because we don't have the money. We have to shut off street lights, not maintain parks, put off maintenance of critical systems because we don't have the money. Those are the soft defaults that we see all over this country. We literally need to have a conversation about how we start building more productive places. So what's the answer? I actually had to put this in a couple of years ago because we were going around talking to communities and at the end, and this was really epidemic in California, at the end, we would get to the end of the talk and someone would stand up after another half hour here of talking about how we do things differently. They would say, Chuck, I'm really upset with you. You've come here, you've freaked us out, but you didn't give us the solution. What's the solution to these problems? And it took me a while to realize that I was hearing the question different than what they were actually asking. What I was hearing was, what's the solution to this problem? And what they were really asking was something fundamentally different. What they were really asking was, what can someone else change about what they're doing so that I don't have to change anything about what I'm doing? I don't know of any solution that meets that criteria, right? We have created for ourselves a very complex set of problems, a very complex interwoven set of challenges that defy a simple solution. There is no solution to these problems. What we talk about at Strong Towns, instead of solutions, are rational responses. How do we, as thoughtful, intelligent people, look at these series of challenges that we face and respond to them in a rational way? And when we start talking about rational responses, I always go back to this photo here. This is my hometown, Brainer, Minnesota, two and a half hours north of Minneapolis, St. Paul. This is how it looked in 1904. These were a bunch of illiterate lumberjacks in the middle of Northwoods, you know, day's journey from anything that we would call civilization today. Yet, look at the place they built. I'm just in awe of this. You know, as a planner, as an engineer, I look at the way these buildings line up, the way they frame the public realm at just like the perfect classical ratios. The great segmentation of the public space, the buildings themselves have really fantastic symmetry. They front the public realm in just a perfect way. This is a brilliantly built place. Let me ask you some questions about this place. How thick was their zoning code? How many boards and committees did you have to go to in this town to get permission to build something? How many engineers, planners, economic development advisors do they have on staff? How much tax subsidy do they give out? How many federal grants do they get? How much transportation spending money did they bring in? We can go through the litany of things that we have convinced ourselves are so critically important to building great places today. They had none of them, yet they built spectacular places. How did they know how to do this? It's really simple. They looked around at the materials they had and they built what they knew worked. They simply copied the pattern of building and the style of building that had served us well for thousands and thousands of years. They built what they knew worked. After 60 years of planners and engineers and different advisors giving professional advice to cities, after all the programs for growth and development and job creation, this street now looks like this. It's a wasteland of parking and half occupied buildings. If you want to understand in one photo why our cities are struggling financially, understand that there's a half million dollars of public infrastructure in that little stretch of street right there. What's our return on that investment? What's the tax base that's gonna allow us to maintain that street generation after generation after generation? I was giving a lecture at a university in Idaho and I showed this picture and a student stood up, raised their hand, said, Chuck, I'm from Costa Rica. Costa Rica's a very poor country. We can't afford to build the way that you do here. When we build, we build one block at a time and before we can build the next block we have to fill in every space on the block we've got so that we have the revenue and the money to maintain it. We can't afford to build the way that you build here. We're not a rich country. We're not a rich country anymore either. And for a long time, that illusion of wealth made us think that things like this didn't matter, that we could have blocks and blocks and blocks that were unproductive, that didn't have any tax base, didn't have anything along them, that that stuff didn't matter, that the money didn't matter. We were so rich, we were so wealthy that we didn't have to pay attention to things like this. These things matter. We're not a rich country anymore. We have to start thinking differently. So what does that thinking differently look like? Here's the tip of the spear, the very first thing we need to get rid of. Build it and they will come. Brilliant movie plot. Horrible economic development strategy. Cities are in what we call the desperation phase of this suburban experiment. The phase where we're so desperate for new growth that we become literally the dumb money at the card table. We go out and make all these investments to try to attract new growth. When businesses show up to create jobs and growth in the community, we're there with all the subsidies. We're there with all the programs. We're trying to make it happen. If you wanna be in the city, if you wanna be a city in the game today, you are all about building stuff and giving out subsidies to attract new growth. This isn't how wealth is built. This isn't how wealth has ever been built. I'm gonna show you how cities build enduring wealth. Did you guys recognize this street here? This is my hometown. This is Brainer, Minnesota, back in 1870. 30 years later, this street would become this. Now look at this. A little collection of pop-up shacks, right? These guys got off the railroad. They were probably half in the bag when they did, right? Plain cut down the trees that were there, plain them out, popped up these little shacks and they had a city. This could be San Antonio, right? This could be Dallas, Houston. This could be Chicago or Manhattan or San Francisco or Vancouver. Every city in the world that was started before this new experimental way of building began just like this, little pop-up investments. Rome, London, Paris, Dubai, Shanghai, Sydney. They all started just like this, right? We built thousands of these across this continent and for a variety of reasons. It was the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. All those complex variables didn't come together. A lot of these places failed. When they failed, what happened? Did your pension fund lose 25% of its value? Did unemployment skyrocket? Did we have to have an emergency session of Congress to allocate a bunch of money to Wall Street banks to save the economy? No, what happened? A few people lost a little bit of money, they salvaged what they could and they moved on to the next city. For a variety of reasons, all those complex variables came together. It was the right people in the right place at the right time. A lot of these places were successful and one way that they were successful, very magical things started to happen. The city would grow. It would grow in three ways. It would grow incrementally up, incrementally out and incrementally more intense. So after three decades of this type of growth, these little one-story pop-up shacks would have turned into these two and three-story wood structures. And after an additional 40 years of growing incrementally up, incrementally out and incrementally more intense, those wood structures would now be torn down and replaced with greater wealth buildings that had rock, granite, brick facades. We don't build wealth by going to the casino and putting it all in red. The way we build wealth is by making modest investments over a broad area over a long period of time. Let me show you how productive this style of development is. These are two identical blocks in my hometown. The one on the left we've labeled old and blighted. The one on the right we've labeled shiny and new. If you look at them, they're the exact same size, the exact same area. They are but the same thoroughfare, the same neighborhood. They have the exact same amount of public infrastructure. The only thing that is different about them is the style of what's been built. That old and blighted block looks like this. If you remember back to that 1870s pop-up block, this was the 1920s version of the pop-up block. As my city was growing incrementally up and incrementally more intense, it was growing incrementally out. And in the 1920s, these three blocks were the next increment of out. So you're looking at the cheapest style of building that you could have built in 1920, the speculative investment on the edge of the community. And had things proceeded according to plan, this would have continued to grow incrementally up and incrementally more intense and you'd be looking at a two, three-story structure today. But that's not what happened, right? Because after this was built, we had the Depression, we had World War II, and we had a completely different style of development that just leapfrogged right over this and started building out on the edge of the community. This block has stagnated for 90 years. The block two over used to look just like this, but the city labeled it as blighted had it torn down and now we have the drive-through taco joint. Everybody was thrilled with this transaction. Not only did we get rid of blight, but the planner was happy, this met all the floor area ratios and the code, it met the parking standard, it met the sign ordinance. The engineer was happy because we got the cars don't park on the street anymore, they got a big parking lot so we can move traffic more quickly. The environmental people were happy because they have now native plants in some green space in the stormwater area here and the bike and pedestrian advocates were happy because they got a sidewalk right there. The sidewalk ends right there, but it runs, you know. Here's what nobody bothered to look at. That old and blighted block, that rundown nasty place, has a total value of $1.1 million. That shiny and new block, meets the code, get rid of the blight, same size area, same amount of public infrastructure has a total value of only 800,000. The city's actually collecting 41% more taxes from that old rundown blighted block than they are from that shiny and new block. The same kind of thing is happening on the edge of our communities. This is our Mills Fleet Farm complex. Mills Fleet Farm is a Midwestern big box store. Think when you walk in auto parts, animal feed, lumber, guns and ammo, camouflage lingerie. That's the product mix of your Mills Fleet Farm, wildly successful in the Midwest, right? This one was a big box store that was so successful they doubled the size of it. You have an auto dealership and a gas station. This is 19 acres of the Mills complex. When the Mills people show up at a council meeting, we just stop the council meeting and ask them, what can we do for you, right? This is 19 acres of Brainerd's rundown downtown. If you've seen the movie Fargo, you've seen a not so flattering but not so inaccurate portrayal of downtown Brainerd. Most of the second and third stories are unoccupied. The first stories are struggling often as well. In my lifetime, the primary investments have been by fire. So when I was in junior high, those buildings burned down, they're now parking lot. I was in high school, that one burned down, it's now a parking lot. I was in college, those burned down and now a parking lot. Pretty much the major investment has been, wait for something to burn, clean up the rubble and pave it, right? 19 acres, two different styles of development. Out on the edge of town, that Mills complex, we're getting $0.6 million per acre of value out there. It's a huge sum of money. They pay an enormous amount of taxes. Downtown, same amount of area, just a different style, a different approach. $1.1 million per acre. So he's actually getting 78% more taxes off that old rundown downtown than they are the best of the best out on the edge. How much should we spend to get that Mills property? The DOT spent well over $100 million building the highway bypass around the city. Many millions more spent on frontage roads, backage roads, different connectors. The city spent over $30 million just to get sewer to this location. Tens of millions more to bring the water out here. Enormous sums of money. How much did my generation spend to get this? Nothing, right? That was wealth that my great grandparents and their contemporaries built, slowly and incrementally over time. And then bequeath to us as a wealth generator forever for the community. And we have slowly melted down. What happens when Mills goes out of business? Every business has its life cycle, right? Whether it's five years or 50 years from now, at some point, Mills Fleet Farm will go out of business. What's the reuse of that site? There's 134 different property owners in the downtown. What happens when one of them goes out of business? Or one of them loses a tenant? Or one of them figures out that there's not enough commercial property, there's too much residential property. Maybe we need to take one of these apartments and convert it into an office. Or maybe there's not enough retail and there's too much of this or too much of that. I've seen buildings in the downtown go from being a pizza place to a coffee shop to an attorney's office to a retail establishment. You have a development pattern here that is really fragile and not very productive. And a development pattern here is enormously productive and very adaptable and resilient. This is something we call a stroad. A stroad is a street road hybrid. It's the futon of transportation options. If you think of a futon as being an uncomfortable couch that makes into an uncomfortable bed. A stroad is a piece of transportation investment that tries to do two things at once and does neither well. What is a road? A road is a high speed connection between two places. If you think of the modern road as a replacement of the railroad, the railroad was a road on rails. You got on at one spot, you got off on another spot, there was a high speed connection between the two. We didn't have frontage railroads, we didn't have drive through railroads. You got on, you got off, you got to two places very quickly. And if you look at this, we've made the investments to move cars very quickly. We have four highway scaled lanes. These are really wide lanes to allow you to go really quickly to get around slow traffic. We put in turning lanes so that the turning cars get out of the way so the through traffic can speed through. But does anyone get to drive quickly through here? No, of course not. The speed limit set low. There's a traffic signal here that will make you stop. And so even though we've spent this enormous sum of money to move cars quickly, cars don't get to move quickly through here. What is a street? A street is and always has been a platform for building and capturing wealth. And if you look at this, we've put elements in here to try to make this a wealth generating street. We've put in wide sidewalks. We put in decorative lights. There's banners that go up here during different times of year. Benches, planters and that kind of stuff get set out. But is this place generating wealth for the community? Not really. Why not? Because if you're shopping at this place here and you wanna go over to this place here, no one's gonna walk across one, two, three, four, five, six, seven lanes, right? No one's gonna walk down here, wait for the signal and then go across and walk up. What are they gonna do? They're gonna get in their car, they're gonna whip a U-turn, they're gonna come out and they're gonna go in. And the businesses understand this. The businesses get this. And so what do they do? They build parking lots and drive-throughs and you get a return on your investment of productivity that is more like that taco joint than that old and blighted block. We have to start having a conversation and it's a critical one here in San Antonio about how we build great roads that connect productive places. And when we get to a productive place, how we build really valuable streets, streets that create wealth and prosperity. We're really good at building roads. We understand the mentality of how to do this. It is essentially the engineer's approach. As an engineer, when you're gonna build a road, when you're gonna try to connect two places, you ask some very simple questions. You say, what's the speed that I want the traffic to be able to move? How much traffic am I gonna move between these places? Given the speed and the volume, what's the safest thing that I can, the safest way to build this and then at what cost? This is the mentality of road building, right? And we are expert at this around this country. But when we are going to build streets, we have to actually have a different set of priorities, a different set of understandings. We have to apply a new set of values. We actually have to have our values. Let me ask you a question. If you think of the streets out in front of this building here or the streets out in front of the places where you like to go and eat or the places that you like to go and shop or the places that you live, the streets that you actually inhabit as a person, which of these things is most important to you? That we move cars quickly, that we move a high volume of cars, that the environment be safe or that it be cost effective? Let me ask you, speed, volume, safety or cost, all right? Of these remaining three, is it more important to you that the streets where we live and where we inhabit actually be built to handle high speeds, high traffic volumes or to be cost effective? Speed, volume or cost? Is it more important that we move cars quickly or remove a high volume of cars? Speed or volume? Do you see what we've done here? We know and understand the values that need to be applied to build great places. We know and understand what we want to see in the places that we live. We know the things that will build wealth and prosper in our community. There are values. We just have to be unafraid to assert them. Here's our last concept. This is a really important one because it kind of segues into what John's gonna talk about this afternoon. There's a saying on a Silicon Valley that goes, innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb, while innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. This is the old PC versus mainframe debate, right? We all know how that one turned out. This is what it looks like from a city standpoint. This is the city of Memphis. Now, I love the city of Memphis. The city of Memphis is full of smart people, full of energy. It's a really great, great place to be. I'm really enthusiastic and excited about the city of Memphis. But the city of Memphis shows up along with Detroit in a lot of the despair type of statistics, homicides, out of wedlock births, poverty rates. If you look at Memphis over the last 60 years, Memphis has done everything that they were supposed to do. Memphis built the highways through the middle of their downtown. They ripped down buildings in order to do it. They ripped down buildings in order to build parking. They ran the highways out to the edge of the community. They ran sewer and water out. They ripped out the streetcars. They built highways through their neighborhoods. They identified neighborhoods that they considered less than desirable. They moved people out. They ripped them down. They put back things that they thought would be better. They ultimately built a beltway. They continued to annex out further, run sewer and water out even further. They ultimately built a second beltway. They subsidized businesses to move to Memphis. They subsidized businesses to stay in Memphis. And at one point, they decided that what they really needed in order to be a world-class city in order to be a place that had growth and wealth and prosperity was a basketball team in a stadium shaped like a pyramid. They built this in the hopes of attracting a team. And they were able to attract a team. The Memphis Grizzlies was really exciting. I was there a couple of weeks ago and they were doing great in the playoffs. They've since lost, but very, very exciting thing. They love the Grizzlies. But when the Grizzlies came to town, the Grizzlies didn't want to play in the stadium. And so they wound up building another stadium a few blocks away from here. This one is set empty for over a decade. They've now given the Bass Pro Company $36 million of subsidies in order to renovate this pyramid into a Bass Pro retail shop. Orderly but dumb. Let me show you what chaotic but smart looks like. This is a little street called Broad Avenue. Broad Avenue was a former streetcar stop. When the streetcars were ripped out and the highway was put in a block away, it separated the neighborhood from this place and this place just died, just went away. Buildings were largely unoccupied. The neighborhood itself was kind of struggling. Some residents fed up with the neglect, fed up with the blight, actually went out and took matters into their own hands. They painted crosswalks, they put in bike lanes. They swept out the sidewalks. They worked with the owners of the properties to sweep out the buildings, clean them up a little bit. They actually had a block party over a weekend where they invited vendors to come in and set up temporarily. They didn't go to the city and get permission. They didn't go to the Department of Health and get inspections. They figured we're just gonna do this for a weekend and before anybody gets mad, we're gonna be out of here, right? And when they got done, they had a pretty spectacular place. They had a, it wasn't the greatest place ever, but it was a lot better than it had been. It was just a little bit of love, a little bit of elbow grease. Here's a remarkable thing. I was out here a year after this project. Every single storefront was full. Every single second story was occupied. The landlord of one of the buildings told me they were able to charge double the amount of rent to the last place that rented out than what they were asking for before the project. The city has documented $20 million of new private sector investment in this block as a result of this project. 15 new buildings or 15 buildings have been reclaimed from the blighted list and are now in use. Over two dozen new jobs. This is chaotic but smart. No city ever would have identified this in a formal public hearing, one of those surveys that we do, a visioning session where we put the sticker charts on the wall. They never would have identified this as the high returning investment, as the project that needed to be done. Yet, it's the one that is building wealth with no cost to the city. Now, I don't know what San Antonio would do. I can tell you what my little town would do if we went out and started painting crosswalks. Monday morning, the city engineer and the city attorney would be out there saying, well, that's not in our standard manual for crosswalks. That's not a straight line. That's potential liability for us. Let's get the power washers out here and get rid of this, right? We can't have any of this. But Memphis is desperate and Memphis is also smart. So what has Memphis done? Memphis has said, you know, we never would have identified this, but our residents did. And so our job as a city is to make sure that this never goes backward. So Memphis did go out there with power washers to get rid of all this, but only when they had a plan to put it back permanently. And when they were out there, they said, you know what, as long as we're here, we got the paint, we got the trucks, and we got the crew, can we extend this paint a couple blocks in other directions and see if maybe some of the love that's going on here kind of ooze into these surrounding neighborhoods? And we can see a similar thing happen there. If it doesn't work out, we're not out that much. But if it does, look at the potential. They then said, you know, we've got this trail project that's expected to run about four blocks from here, but there's a lot of good stuff happening here. Let's reroute that project so it runs through this neighborhood. So we're building on success. And that highway that separated the neighborhood two generations ago, they're actually in the process of redoing that and they stopped the plans and said, you know what, we need to reconfigure this so that we reconnect this neighborhood so we get people walking and biking back and forth because we've got some energy happening here and we need to capitalize on it. We need to build on it. We need to allow that to continue to grow and develop and essentially recapture that incremental growth pattern that served us so well for thousands and thousands of years. Inspired by Memphis in my hometown, we actually did a similar project. We went out and essentially adopted a neighborhood. There was the neighborhood with the taco joint and the old and blighted block. When we actually brought that forward to city officials, they had every reason in the world why our numbers didn't make sense to them and why the taco joint was a good deal. And a lot of the things we kept hearing was that, you know, this is a bad neighborhood. The people who live here are renters. They're not vested in the community. They don't care. The property values here are low and declining. We had to do something, Chuck. So what we did is we spent summer out working in the neighborhood and we didn't hold public hearings. We didn't hold visioning sessions. We actually just went out and lived there. We set up our office often on the street. We'd just take a desk out there, a table and set it up and work in one of the parking spots and talk to people when they walk by. Where you going? What you up to? And we learned so much about how people are using the neighborhood and how they're struggling. We went out and painted crosswalks. We put in bike lanes. We did all this temporary. We did speed studies where we'd identified because people told us this street is really dangerous. When my kids walk to school, I tell them to stay off the street because there's not a lot of cars, but the cars drive really fast. So people were actually telling their kids to walk through the alley on the way to school. So we said, how could we slow down the cars? And we actually went out and with a striper that you use to stripe ball field diamonds, we went and just put out temporary bike lanes. And we did a before and after speed study and we found that before almost half the cars that were driving on the street were driving over the speed limit. And after we put in the bike lanes, only one car out of 300 in the two hours that we did the speed study drove over the speed limit. Dramatic impact. We experienced the elderly woman in the walker trying to get over the snow bank because the sidewalks weren't shoveled and she had to walk in the middle of the street. We saw the mother walking through the ditch with weeds up to her waist with a stroller because she had to get to the grocery store and it wasn't safe to walk on the street. We took these observations and we put them together into a report that we called Neighborhoods First. It kind of built on what the city council said their primary objective was to focus on neighborhood investments. And we presented this to the city, sat down with the city engineers, said, you know, I think you could use a sidewalk here. And yeah, the response was, why would you say that? The highest return investments that we can make today in our communities are not the big mega projects. They're not about moving cars. They're not about growth on the periphery. The highest returning investments we can make in our communities are the tiny little investments that are gonna kickstart that incremental development pattern. They're the tiny little investments based around people who walk, people who bike, because people who walk and people who bike are how you build wealthy, productive communities. The highest returning investments we can make by far are this type of investment here. You've got a neighbor, you've got a commercial area over here. You've got a residential neighborhood over here. Are you telling me that if people couldn't walk back and forth through here a little bit easier, that those neighborhoods both wouldn't become more valuable? And what's the cost on that? Partly anything. We identified eight projects in this neighborhood that we thought addressed specific needs of people who live there today. Eight projects. Put a crosswalk here. Do some cross-hatching on the street here. Put a bike lane in over here. Trim some trees here. Plant some shade trees along this street. The total cost of our projects? 16,700 dollars. Nothing, nothing. My city's in the process right now spending 7.2 million to run sewer and water two miles out of town to the airport in a big build it and they will come project trying to get new growth, new industrial growth. The idea that if we can get some new industry out at the airport that will create jobs and growth and prosperity that will then trickle down and make everybody's life better. And we have people who can't get to the grocery store without walking through the weed-filled ditch. 16,700 dollars. And these are high returning investments because if we put together a portfolio of these small projects throughout every neighborhood in our community, not only will we be addressing the real fiscal side, the fiscal imbalance of our cities, not only will we be picking up the nickels and the dimes that are just laying there in our neighborhoods waiting to be picked up, but we'll actually be doing it in a way that makes people's lives better. And not better in some trickle down theory, not better if they happen to land one of the jobs that we've paid to get out at the airport but make it better in real terms today where they live, the day-to-day struggles they have to get around. We can improve people's lives right now, today, with a very limited amount of budget, just by taking a different look at our communities. Our organization began as a blog, we still blog now. We do a podcast as well and have a video channel. If you're interested in connecting with those resources, strongtowns.org is the website. It's also where you'll get the case studies that I mentioned earlier. There's versions of this presentation, a handbook that goes with it. There's a lot of resources on there. We have it all free and open to use. We've created Creative Commons, licensed it. So I tell people, if you can use this stuff, take it, use it, share it. If you wanna put your name on it and hand it out, I don't really care, just use it and share it. We have to have this conversation all across this country. We're also a membership-driven organization. If you are interested in connecting to our work, strongtowns.us is our membership site. We would love to be your partner and have you as part of our organization. We put out a book about a year and a half ago. It's kind of a 101 on Strongtown's thinking. I brought a few today, but they're already all claimed. But if you're interested, the Kindle version is online as well as this version. And just so you know, I've got a new book coming out later, hopefully this month, if I get some time to get the final edits done. Called Money Hall, it is a play on the Money Ball book by Michael Lewis about finding hidden value in our communities, particularly in the areas of biking, walking, and making the types of small incremental improvements that not only will make our communities much wealthier, but also improve people's lives in the process. Thank you for being here. It's gonna be a really exciting day. You're gonna wanna make sure you're here for John in the afternoon. Thank you so much.