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When there’s not a lot of outside capital available to make changes, the people who step up are often the ones who love a place enough to give it what it needs, not just what will generate the biggest return down the road.

Make no mistake, The Dainty Maid and The Grand Leader are both businesses. Their success creates profits for employees, local companies, and the building owners themselves.

What makes this different is that those profits are tied to the community winning. That’s what sits at the heart of small-scale and incremental development.

Kristina and Ben are town makers, and they’re a small part of the larger comeback story unfolding in South Bend, Indiana.

The National Gathering is a place where people who sometimes feel like outsiders find a place where other people love the built environment as much as them.

It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year and I’m both full and exhausted.

Shoutout:

I have an update on my yard to Wright, a presentation to finish before a 10 Hour Dr. this weekend, I need to learn how to use a professional paint sprayer before Saturday, and in the meantime, I’m just trying to stay afloat on all my little chores!

Sorry, I’ve been posted a significant video, it’s been busy!

On May 16, you can volunteer to help implement traffic calming for a Safe Pathway to School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Using privately raised funds and working with city approval, we’ll be creating natural traffic calming to help make intersections safer for kids, neighbors, and everyone moving through the area.

My hope is that the (won’t let me tag) sees this and recognizes that real safety comes from moving beyond blaming individual mistakes and toward designing systems safe enough to account for normal human error.

No cyclist or driver behaves perfectly all the time. We already design cars around that reality. Our streets and pathways should reflect it too, because every one of us exists outside a car at some point each day.

If you saw my last video about the city citing my lawn for overgrowth, there is an update coming soon. The city gave a 10 business day window before fines start, but so far they have not responded to emails or phone calls.

My goal is not to be difficult. I have always wanted to make my yard something that looks good to my neighbors and is better for the environment. This process has me rethinking what a lawn could and should be, and I am trying to stay open to that.

What matters most to me is finding a balance between expectations, the reality of who these citations impact, and what is actually doable for regular people. Not everyone has the time or money to fully redesign a yard. I want to document a path that is practical, affordable, and realistic.

This is not just about my yard. It is about what we expect from each other and who those expectations really work for.

Engineering, education, and enforcement.

These are the three ease of making street safer… But 90% of what needs to be done is engineering. And that’s 90% of what actually is ignored.

We know humans make mistakes so it’s easy to look at every crash and say “a human shouldn’t have made a mistake“

But you actually get results when you design roads that are more forgiving of those mistakes.

Yards serve a purpose beyond just ornamentation. There are real architectural and human behavior aspects to them, especially as a transition between public and private space. That in-between zone is part of what makes people feel comfortable enough to sit on a porch, look out a window, and stay connected to the street.

With that said, cities are constantly evolving, and yards need to be able to evolve as well. In more extreme cases, the form of the yard can change entirely with different setback patterns or uses. But even in less extreme cases, our idea of what a yard should be shouldn’t be frozen in time.