 Hello Savannah. Okay. So, first decade and a half of the 21st century in the South Bronx, New York City. It's a poster child for urban blight, regional economic environmental sacrifice zone. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Worst of times because of the asthma rates because of the obesity, high unemployment, incarceration, impacts, low educational attainment. You were still dealing with the vestiges of the financial crises of the 70s and the 80s where arson ruled the land and we lost 60% of our population. Still dealing with all of that, inspector of poverty still looming large over us. It was the best of times because nobody was expecting anything good to come out of the South Bronx which means we were operating under the radar in the first part of the Bush administration so that was kind of cool. I entered the green and climate adaptation space to help restore um sometimes the land but more importantly the people. Now this doesn't look like a whole lot but my community and I were in the middle of a huge battle with our city and state who were planning on building yet another huge waste facility in our waterfront so I didn't focus so much on restoring or preserving buildings. It was all about survival in a very very real way and I started in places where I had absolutely no site control. Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission and I still believe that and I looked at the Bronx River as a real restoration project and the area surrounding it which was an environmental and economic and sometimes even social disaster because if the restoration of the people and the restoration of the river were tied they could grow together and support each other so this little dump of a land it literally was a was a an abandoned street end that dead ended at the at the Bronx River which I didn't even know was a river um well I knew it was a river because I saw it on a subway map but it never occurred to me that it was a real you know it was very bizarre so and had it not been for my dog that pulled me into the dump and the fact that there was a US Forest Service little $10,000 seed grant that was giving folks that little money bit of money to do restoration projects on the Bronx River I probably never would have known this six blocks away from my house but that little $10,000 seed grant was what allowed us to do you know community cleanups we were able to bring in all sorts of different um you know partners big and small from the business community from the local from the city from the state and federal government to bring them in as our partners to develop this site and this was our beta you know as we started working on it but we realized that this wasn't enough because it wasn't programmed we need to to do more if we were in fact going to make the site what it needed to be and that's when we started looking at things like programming so whether it was an environmental stewardship program or a boat building program getting people out on the water so that they could actually see what was great for them to be a part of but that kind of visual reminder that programming is what really blew the lid off that whole thing when we started helping people like this in low-income communities of color it's you it is important that we create the kind of physical nature that makes people believe that there is something valuable in that space so this is one of my favorite pictures of me in the entire world because this was seven years in the making is that the groundbreaking of the Hunts Point Riverside Park just we were about to to break ground on the three million dollar renovation and there I am with the mayor and the parks commissioner and I'm clearly just posing for this picture but it went from our little beta version to this and I liked it so much that I got married there back in 2006 literally the day after the park was opened and with my dog is my flower girl but in addition to this being you know just the coolest place and we did in fact win a national award for excellence in urban planning from the Rudy Bruner foundation and that's my puppy girl Zeno with her well-deserved award another thing the restoration and preservation of the folks that were there started the first Bronx River excuse me the first Bronx environmental stewardship training which was essentially a way to connect people in our community with the natural environment such as it was and use it as a as a vehicle to provide economic transformation for their lives giving them a personal and a financial stake in improving the environment and so teaching them how doing things like wetland restoration and riverfront restoration learning how to do green roof installation later on learning how to clean up contaminated land and these were folks who otherwise probably were definitely in the social welfare system in and out of the criminal justice system people who in many cases you know didn't had never seen a family member with a job and this kind of training both the hard skills and the soft skills were able to give these give folks a tremendous opportunity to really move themselves into the world of work into a world of dignity that you know allowed them not to only to transform themselves with their community as well but buildings are a part of our environment and their beauty or their poor repair reflects on us in some very real ways just like parks and trees and well maintained ones inspire us the ones that don't make us afraid so buildings do the same thing this is the spot for juvenile detention facility probably one of the most infamous juvenile detention facilities in the country doesn't really exist anymore well actually the building still does but it was around since the 1950s my dad actually in the 1970s and 60s was a janitor there and I remember him coming home because we lived right around the corner coming home and telling my mom you know how he wished that our house was bigger so he could take some of the kids in because if that place broke children they came out worse than when they came in much as they do in much of the juvenile justice system in this country but that's another talk which I'm not going to go into right now but thanks to many many years dedicated groups of children's aid advocates as well as prison reform advocates the place was closed back in late 2011 and that's when I started thinking perhaps this might be the place because it was huge on six acres of land where we could really use real estate development as a way to transform our communities using it as a platform for social environmental and economic transformation in a way you know it's really when you think about it or when you look at what it is really you know it's an interesting thing because it's actually this economic kind of dead zone it sits on six acres of land on a pretty steep grade of a hill next to kind of another economic dead zone which is one of america's oldest monasteries and that's that big green area right behind it and but it's a really big figure that this could be a place that this site could be a tremendous catalyst for what could happen but clearly this site is a huge scar on our community it is the boogie man I remember it as a kid even as an adult when people would say that was the place where we sent bad kids or it was a place where you got broken if you went there and there was never anything good that came through with it so back in 2011 when we knew that that site was going to be closed down we I found some folks at Perkins and Will who worked with me really closely to come up with a with a concept designed for what could happen to the site and so that we could approach the city with it and the interesting thing about is this as we worked to think more and more about what the site could be we realized that the topography of it was actually very similar to a lot of america's post-industrial cities which meant that you know the orange area the the spofford site is in that little thing in the middle and around it is the orange area that's the the residential area and the blue part is the industrial area and so but and then there was this little hinge area right in the middle and that's what we thought could be a real opportunity to catalyze some really tremendous things from mixed income housing to different types of commercial development that created jobs great public space you name it and but basically again a bit of an economic dead zone one whole half of the building was on this other was on a block that clearly nothing they zoning knew nothing was going to happen there you know it so basically on this block which is about a third of a mile long there's nothing there except a jail an engine rebuilding shop an illegal chop shop oh and this is basically exactly where folks in the neighborhood know that that's where you go to pick up a prostitute if you're a trucker late at night so they well some kind of economy but not exactly the kind of thing you want to support but imagine if we transformed it into something like this you know activated the ground playing really created something fabulous and new to provide the kind of experience that not just said okay this is one little nice place in this otherwise you know messed up place but how about it transforms the idea the notion of what happens in low income communities when you have a catalytic site that's big enough to provide the kind of transformational change that could happen and just thinking about that made us go we wanted to see a whole lot more of that happen and so we partnered with Autodesk you know they had their own goals for doing a huge design competition an international one for that site and although we ended up coming with the ideas of you know some of the design criteria you know and even though we because partially we knew that there were things like lead and asbestos and some underground oil tanks that needed to be dealt with we knew that Autodesk basically decided to care you know because of Lila sorry let me rephrase that Lila doesn't mean anything sorry but you know we knew that what they were really interested was having you know using the much of the site reusing it you know for historic you know preservation purposes and so we weren't that surprised when the winning entry was actually a person you know this young guy who decided to use literally the red part is the exact is the building the exact building and then he built on top of it and it's really very interesting but we were also really interested in the other ideas that came out of it that absolutely destroyed the site and made use of the fact that it's you know literally on a built on a hill so it's good you have can you take parking completely off the street you can do some really tremendous things with it we did this thing and showed it did an exhibition in our neighborhood because we wanted people to come out to see what it could look like and just to sort of galvanize some ideas about what could happen and sort of set the stage for the big design community or big design competition that's going to be an open design competition that we're going to do starting in January and one of the attendees that came was use of salam one of the members of the central park five who be no fault of his own spent some time there you know after being accused of a crime he didn't commit and so looking at this stuff and looking at all of the the entries you know I walked up to him and just asked him do you think what do you think of this happening at that site and all he said was it's time so I'm not sure if everything does need to be preserved you know I mean I think it's important that we have that kind of history and that we know it and that we do something about it so that we can provide the kind of meaningful ways for people to transform their lives but in some cases I think there's some really interesting things where we we have to sort of question that as well but then there's some other times when it's pretty clear hell yeah we need to save that so this particular site is um you know just a few blocks away and this one was done by none other than Cass Gilbert and so while he was out there doing things like the supreme court building you know and and the Woolworth building and other really cool fabulous things he was also designing these adorable little rail stations in the Bronx one of them happens to be this one and it's a really interesting kind of building you know it's a little small um only about 5 000 square feet this was it around 1950 or so this was it when I was growing up in the 70s and the 80s and then oh and but the thing is when you walk around the back you see all those adorable details that just remind you like oh my goodness this is so cool these are like original terracotta pieces um around the back of the building that we want to restore along with it so but Amtrak inherited this building and decide and although it had been used literally as a strip mall for a little lot for decades after it closed down to rail uh rail in the 1950s in 2011 they decided to literally just evict all the tenants in which to us who'd grown up during the burning of the Bronx and remembered the those long stretches of the of your neighborhood being completely shuttered it it literally sent a chill up my spine and so I contacted Amtrak and said hey I'm really interested in your building thinking it would take them like a decade to get back to me and they got back to me within 24 hours and within 30 within 72 I was talking to the head of the real estate department and we are now in negotiations to actually acquire um a long term lease on the building to turn it into a lifestyle destination because this particular building is I think also I think a really beautiful little gem but it also more importantly sits at the gateway to our community and that's you can see that here oh wait let me go back sorry about that see like right I don't know this you know I'm not going to try um but anyway you know on the other end of that red building is literally that's the subway station everybody walks into and out of the neighborhood that way and so it's really important that that little spot becomes the place that you get to see and it doesn't like make you feel scared every time you walk by so building that up in that particular way is really important so one of the first things that we did was we helped and helped to make sure that kids in our local community felt as though this was a part of their that it was going to make them also feel good and we did that by actually hiring them to design this mural so and that was a really amazing way because teenagers are often considered you know just sources of problems in so many ways but in this this way we actually engage them economically to create this lovely little little piece that that is still there to this day and provided them with a sense of ownership literally of what the neighborhood could be and and it really they were involved from the very very beginning from assessing the situation to you know and identifying what some of the problems were working with the professional artists and and then coming up with the design and then executing it and these folks became the heroes of the neighborhood you know as they thought as they did this work on their own and so now you know as we think about what this could be you know it's a really substantial you know piece not because of its size because it's a really kind of weird little spat to tell you the truth you know it's only 5,000 square feet it's above an active rail trench and there will be metro north service or and rail service underneath it you on the other side within the next few years or so but the important thing here is that it's and and it's also you know it's on built on a bridge so it's it's just like a weird little space that makes life really kind of bizarre and we know it but we love the idea so much then because we know it's a gateway property and that it really really should happen we want to see this thing turned into a destination and developing in that way is a really important thing for us because what this will do is restore the kind of hope into that into that building painting the little mural on it was the first step and getting now getting site control from Amtrak actually am finally starting to get things like site control which is a good thing this is a slightly bigger project than the other one I worked on but how we treat it is going to set the tone for thousands of people that walk by this thing every every single day and we know it's a sort of impractical project but again the preservation of this showing that its historical pedigree is important and needs to be preserved and because it's such an important pedigree that it's building that ownership back onto the community is a really important thing because of its geography and everything else so the kind of choices that we make in terms of what we keep and what we don't keep we really like to think of it as like how does it work you know in community context is it dealing with community needs is it helping support community beauty and pride is it helping to create more of a capacity for people to feel as though they are moving up in a world that includes them or is it something that is constantly in this exclusive situation where there are always the problems that need to be solved and historic preservation for me it really is about its context and can you take that context and really and place it within the very real context of people on the ground at the time and use it in a completely beneficial beneficial way rather than in either or like you either do it this way or that way but is there a sort of a happy medium that's going to allow it to happen because I believe the more we lean to more toward restoring people and the and local economies the more kindly we'll be able to be judged for the decisions we make today with regard to what we preserve and what to erase and how we fill those types of spaces and how we create them together thank you thank you mature it was just terrific and we're going to spend the next half an hour or so building off those points and some others we'd like to make we have a very talented assembly here both in age and experience time and knowledge so I welcome the panel to join us we've been talking today a lot about bringing a new audience to preservation and that's what we're going to going to focus on as we kick off this first trust live and probably issues with one of one review of kind of how do we become part of a community how do we create content that in fact benefits communities and really how are we moving toward a more inclusive preservation movement so major I thank you you you talked a lot about transformational change and I couldn't help but notice as we all did that as part of that you always built in the human side of this the people side of this the connection that made people understand this wasn't some sort of outside entity plopping something down down on them and I wonder whether you could just say a bit more about you know about how you found people respond to you when you show up when you just sort of show up you live some places where you're home you your own community uh how have people have you made those first steps yeah you say hello and um you start from there and you know quite it's it's all about your intention and there will be folks you know who will put their guard up and you either you have to deal with it a bit uh because for the most part people don't have any reason to trust you and even if I am from a community that's very similar to many of the ones that I work in you know I don't make any assumptions about who they are as and I don't really want them to make any assumptions about who I am and it's a really very much about developing a a conversation about what is like what are your hopes and needs and and fears and dreams and aspirations even in my own neighborhood which I know really well um we've still conducted intense surveys and and focus groups and just ask people what it is they want our all of our projects are gut checked by the folks in our communities like yeah I'm like yes okay I'm pretty good I got like a great idea what do you think and they will tell me with no advantage about it but so much of it is just being open to hearing what people have to say so listening uh and I'm gonna ask you Matt to talk a bit about that because you know we're dealing with a country whose demographics are just changing faster than I could speak and we are talking not to people we grew up with we're generally talking to people we didn't grow up with we have very different backgrounds and so what and so what I think and you've done a lot of work a lot of research in this area could you talk about that a bit sure hi everyone um well I come at this issue of changing demographics as a land use planner so we we work with communities around the country to look at you know where they want to be in 20 years you know what's the changing you know population going to look like in 20 years what's the new mix of people and and how do we plan for a community and the types of you know places that that new population is going to want to live in and work in and go to school in um the trends are pretty interesting for these changes I'll just give you a couple of examples for time but household composition is really changing you know it's no longer the ASEAN area to household that we've seen and I think we're out we've all seen these trends starting to happen but we have a lot more single person households a lot of people want to live in smaller smaller physical environments we also at the other end have more multi-generational households with several many households out there have have several adult populations one of my partners has has his parents living in the home with him so they've got three generations in that same household so household size is changing that's one important trend to think about another trend is that the impact of technology is really changing how we live and work and go about our daily lives we don't need to all go to a traditional office anymore many of us work from home or sometimes full-time but often part-time we also don't have to go down to the corner store we can oftentimes just get online and go to amazon.com shop so there's trends out there and we as planners are challenged to think about how those impact how we plan for our communities I'll just give you a couple of examples of policy responses to those trends first of all we need to be creating a wider variety of housing types for those different types of people we've seen all these new types of people coming into our communities but we are creating very homogeneous neighborhoods that's kind of the old school way of making communities we need to be thinking outside the box we need to be thinking about infill about very small properties very small lot properties about different types of small multifamily properties as well so that's one example of something that we need to do preservationists are very good at protecting central core neighborhoods and we're very good about fighting the fighting the the scrape offs and the tear downs and the pop tops but we need to be thinking creatively and assertively about the types of infill that we'd like to see that would go well in our historic neighborhoods and carve out regulations that proactively achieve those in the future so that's one policy response that I would mention another policy response is that we need to be thinking about adaptive reuse we had an incredible example in Majora's presentation there of adaptive reuse but we also need to be thinking just about our individual neighborhoods and how some of those buildings that we might not need anymore for their original purpose like old schools or old old hospitals could be repurposed to satisfy the needs of this changing population we have a great example in Denver in my neighborhood of an old convent that's being turned into boutique workspaces for people that want to not work full-time there but maybe rent an office for a week or for a month they want to share a common conference room with people sometimes but not all the time that type boutique boutique workspaces is coming up around the country we need to be thinking about how to accommodate those types of facilities preservationists have a lot of those types of buildings that could satisfy that demand so that's another policy response that we should be thinking about thank you and I'll turn to you Holly so we're listening we're we're in a community we're we're listening to people we're armed with a notion of the variety of end end results and products that could be possible what might you say to us about actually engaging people in a in a different kind of conversation well I come hello everyone and thanks so much for having me here today national trust and all the planners I come at this from the cultural sector not so much from pressure preservation I work with cultural institutions of various kinds with foundations who are interested in art and culture and engaging audiences or building audiences is a mere obsession in your average museum dance company theater company etc and that's the work I've been focusing on in recent years but I think the majora said it and Stephanie too in many of her remarks I think the key is not thinking of these people as audiences as something other than us but as people who are our neighbors and community residents and to be very respectful and listen hard to what people say they want and do as much as possible to meet them where they come from because the I think the for 20 years 30 years 40 years we've focused on building institutions whether they're in the preservation field or in cultural sector and as we all know from various studies there's a great deal of suspicion and distrust of most institutions now we need to break down that distrust in fact by changing our behavior and thinking again about what our mission is in our communities so I'm going to ask you Julie just to say a few words really from the position of someone who's much younger than everybody here I think and and who nonetheless arrived at preservation not because someone I think talked to you but because you discovered it yourself could you talk a bit about what you've been doing sure so I am a Girl Scout and for the past couple of years I have been working hard on my Girl Scout Gold Award project the Gold Award is the highest award in Girl Scouting equivalent to the Eagle Scout for boys and there are a minute of it and I've really learned so much so for the first part of my Gold Award project I nominated the Buck Creek Rosenwald School to be on the National Register of Historic Places and then to educate more people about the history of the Rosenwald Schools I created a traveling museum exhibition which has been installed in museums historical societies and libraries across the state of Kentucky I also recorded oral interviews of Rosenwald School alumni which are now archived at a local university and to continue presenting this important history to the public I have been speaking to community groups and historical societies across the state of Kentucky and even to some national audiences but I believe in the importance of historic preservation I have grown up loving history my family has always been interested in visiting historic sites and museums national parks on our family vacations so I always knew that I kind of wanted to go in this direction for my Girl Scout Gold Award project but I think some other people my age might not might be interested in historic preservation but might not know that it exists or that it exists in the in their local area so for my project I took the initiative to do some research and find out how I could take action in my local community but I think there are other people my age who might like to get involved as well but who need some help and some of you to connect with to find out how they can get involved Girl Scouts is a great organization and Boy Scouts as well these organizations have higher awards that many students my age are aiming for and one of the major criteria is sustainability and I know that preservation is one field that is sustainable but I think we need to spread the word about this and tell other people my age how it's sustainable and how they can take action thank you talking about transformational change which is really what you set us off on major and you know I wonder whether we could I'm interested in in just our responses in general what are the things we think we're not doing well that we could do better at what are those things we think we are doing well at that we should do more of um there's been a lot of obvious talk and in the popular press about gentrification as as an example of an issue that has many pros and cons I know all of us have had a chance to think about that there's also conversation in media certainly but beyond media about what's the underlying narrative and Holly and I were talking a bit about that what's the unspoken story that we storyline we have in our heads that we're operating from that really directs uh the way we are working and who we're working with often so I'm just wondering whether we might uh chat a bit about those kinds of big issues as we talk about really how we're transforming uh transforming ourselves and our communities gentrification such a loaded term uh for many reasons and I think there's a part of me that kind of hates just the general even nature of most of the discussions because it's kind of like oh it's as if poor people don't want to have nice places to live or play or have jobs or feel safe and have great schools which is basically what happens when gentrification happens and um so the question is how do we redistribute the quality of life in communities or in in in cities that allow those those communities to be a part of so the people that are there are a part of the transformation and I believe you can really only do that through a very strategic look at economic development in those communities like really understanding what are the economic trends and building out though the actual facilities where that happens but also preparing people to participate in it like in all of the work that you know when we don't even have the um we know that the sponsored site the huge site is going to go up for redevelopment we and everybody and their mother is going to be trying to go and try to do that site um regardless of what happens and and it's clear because it's huge it's one of the biggest redevelopment sites in the city um I'm positive that most of the developers are going to start thinking about thinking of this as like the new South Bronx which means you know the the the poor darker folks are going to be pushed out because they're going to build it not for the folks that are there and the difference between I think a thriving community that is is actually working to to use transformation as a model um you know and as a real goal it's how do we also make sure that people are being transformed as well and giving them the tools to do so and if we don't do that then yes we have the same typical kind of thing where you know uh you know folks are people who own land in in low income communities are quick to sell because they don't have the business acumen to to understand that they need to stay um and there isn't support for them to build the kind of models that would help their that build financial wealth then and you know the legacy for their own communities because again folks are often talked for people in low income communities are taught to measure success by how far they leave those communities and not stay a part of the transformation and that's why if we're if we use historic preservation and a whole host of other tools strategically for community development then we're actually increasing the bottom line of a whole segment of the population instead of continuously you know begging them to stay poor the point is that we need to be clear about what our fundamental goal is uh and pick the tools that are appropriate to that goal so if our goal is to preserve this building you're going to use one set of tools if our goal is to revitalize the neighborhood you're going to use a whole variety of other tools including preservation yes um but the point is that I think in some cases you go out on auto or from um automatic and haven't really rethought the fundamental mission of our organizations are the fundamental goals and especially in the context of changing demographics and I'm so glad that you brought up changing demographics being in household size and what have you not it's not just about ways it's also about class it's about age it's about ability of disability and we have to have a much broader perspective on what we're doing in the communities that we're trying to work in another one of the trends that I didn't mention is that real income is declining in this country and we don't have as much money and and from a neighborhood perspective I mean that translates into fewer people able to buy homes more people needing to rent and we need to be thinking about ways to make our neighborhoods our central neighborhoods where there's a lot of demand by millennials and gen y to live we need to be thinking about how to make those neighborhoods accessible to people from a variety of of of income levels I'll come back to my point again about we need to be thinking about a variety of housing types that that we need to be creating we're very good at saying we want to preserve this single family neighborhood we're not as good as planners or as preservationists at saying well this is what we want this is our future we need to we need to be more proactive and creative about describing the future community we want to see that accommodates a variety of groups um you've heard of form-based zoning and I there's a lot of pros and cons with form-based zoning but I think one of the real benefits that they've brought to the conversation is a focus on being proactive this is what we want to see our community look like in the future it's not just an old narrative old school zoning code that says this is what's prohibited these are pictures of what we want to see and maybe to encourage that more kind of affordable rental type of structure you know there's cottage houses there's accessory dwelling units there's there's alleyhouses there's a lot of different types of ways we should be thinking creatively about how to build our communities in a way that protects our historic fabric but still allows growth to occur I think another thing we can be doing differently is engaging more youth in preservation my school actually recently had a career day and I was impressed by all the professionals that were there and I learned a lot from what they're doing on a day-to-day basis but I noticed that there were no historic preservationists at my school's career day so so I mean I think that um we should be moving in that direction and trying to just educate my generation about the important work that we're doing and why it's so relevant today um I think social media is a wonderful outlet most people my age are on Facebook Twitter Instagram you name it and if you reach out to them through those outlets I think you'll attract a lot more people who will be willing to help in upcoming projects also I think online we can start to advertise and have sections maybe on websites for people my age of how to get involved I've tried myself to look for possible summer programs camps internships some ways to get involved outside of my Girl Scout Google Word project and I'm having a hard time finding some of those opportunities so I know other people my age are looking for ways to get involved in the community and make a difference people my age are want to find their voice and they want their work to matter so I think we can start advertising and increase our marketing to the people my age if I if I could pick up Julia in that word voice giving people voice which I which I like I mean as a woman of color I can remember years and people said well they they weren't going to hire anybody of color um they couldn't afford it or they didn't know anybody or no one was qualified there were million reasons why that wasn't going to happen but I could trust that they would be asking the questions that I were asking would ask were I in the room you know that kind of don't worry I'll take care of it for you you're not here but you can count on me and I think we have got to grow if we haven't far that's way back uh and I wonder whether you could talk about this question of voice um you know you can't always hire I agree with that but sometimes they're partnerships that bring that that forward or or uh models that begin to bring voice forward I was so impressed when you were talking about your young people painting oh and being part right from the beginning absolutely I think if people don't recognize themselves in the plan then it's not their plan if it's not your plan you're not going to protect the plan I mean it's just this is simple human nature one of the reasons why we decided to do an open design open open idea competition ideas about design competition for Spofford was because the the original one that we did was very limited to who could apply like you had to have a particular credential and architecture school or whatever and we realized you know we were completely we were not setting the stage to get input from folks like you we needed to hear that so that's why it was just like the barriers to entry are really low you just have to be able to use social media to get your um your idea in in any form that you want because those are the type of things we need to hear um and I and to to your question you know about feeling excluded I think that's you know I'm a pretty well known person you know in the field that I'm in and but it still is a really difficult kind of place for me to be you know because I'm in community development and real estate development and even in the green movement black women are not really even though actually we've been doing this work a lot forever you know we're not often considered like up in the game even though we're there we do it despite the fact whether or not we're recognized and so I recognize and I appreciate that but I don't even feel as though like I'm the singular voice for all black females or low-income communities out there but but that's what is so beautiful is about when we open the door a little bit and allow for other voices to be heard be heard we're creating the right type of environment for more innovation to happen so whether it's coming from you know someone who's held in 17 oh my gosh okay wow you can't even vote and you're like you're so cool um there was I wish I was like that at 17 I wish I was like that at like I just turned 48 so and I'm barely like that um any hope um you know it doesn't make any difference when you when you provide the right circumstances for people to feel as though they can speak they do and sometimes you're like okay I heard you know I heard you a lot but you but you have to like be prepared for that and I think that's when amazing things can happen respectfully because you know you have to give up your ego you have to have your institutional ego you have to really mean it because guess what you're gonna be sniffed out oh yeah you're gonna be sniffed out right away and um and also you have to mean it through the hard times you have to mean it over years you have to get through really difficult conversations and you have to be able to say the person who says to you you weren't here five years ago and then when the money ran out you went away because your commitment is not real and I don't trust you you have to stay there and you have to go back and back I heard a quote recently which I just love which is that progress happens. Progress occurs at the speed of trust. Progress occurs at the speed of trust and trust takes time to build and it takes candor yeah and it takes um not taking it personally and taking it personally it takes a point to disagree and and that's okay I mean that's when you could get like some really cool stuff out as long as you're willing to just be like okay I hear you or maybe I do disagree and but that's that's how progress can be made but yes you're absolutely right if it's not you know a place where you feel safe then bad things will happen. I spend a lot of time with funders um it was one who recovered um philanthropy for recovering philanthropy I don't know but but this issue of money is actually really really important especially if you're um trying to make change at the community level because it does have to be a lifelong look and it can't come and go with the flow of um philanthropic capital and this is something the report that um I wrote uh earlier this year which is the reason I was invited to this panel really points to that issue which is on anything that looks like audience engagement if it's only if you're only doing it to get the money and if you stop doing it when the money runs out you're going to be it's insincere and it will not have any lasting effect on your organization or your community. So I know we have maybe a couple of minutes but Matt you wanted to give in one more word. Oh I just I'm going to be the dog guy that brings everything back to zoning again but I I wanted to pick up on this idea of just of of opening the conversation of giving a voice to the new populations and the new groups coming into our communities and tying that back to land use. I think planners have actually been they've started to do a better job of reaching out to those communities and we need to realize that you know different communities are going to have different expectations about how our communities should be planned and and the places where they want to live and work and I'm thinking about some places where we've worked in the research triangle in North Carolina where they've had a big influx of Asians and Indians and and the the cultural expectations of some of those communities are different in terms of where they want to shop and how they want to congregate with their with with their larger families or their neighbors and sometimes that translates into you know more outdoor gathering areas and outdoor markets as opposed to a traditional strip mall but I think planners are thinking about okay there's different groups out there that need to have different expectations that we need to respond to and I just think that's I think it's a very helpful trend it's a positive trend and I think we've got a long way to go in terms of being more responsive to these different groups but I think it's it's it's it's a positive trend can I ask a question because I thought strip malls were a completely man-made idea that it was more of the town square that the world you know cultures were built around so who wants a strip mall I mean I'm sorry developers developers developers exactly developers what a strip mall so let me let me thank you let me thank all of you for this discussion and that how we can bring preservation to new audiences and into the future I I definitely want to tell you got this other page here that we'll continue this conversation by you can continue by taking part in the tomorrow learning labs somewhere tomorrow why old places matter student thinking student perspectives changing demographics on Friday preservation is smart where hip meets historic you'll do your Girl Scout presentation right at a power session on Friday oh well I'm not presenting but I am excited to learn more about a new historic preservation patch that is being created by Girl Scouts of Historic Georgia so that is very exciting next I think on Friday just to make sure I say Friday again their buses outside but shuttles are waiting to take you to the opening reception reception but I recommend that you arrive in a ferry that's spectacular fashion right at city hall landing doesn't take long and it'd be lots of fun thank you very much have a good time