One ordinary Friday, my three-year-old decided he wanted to walk to preschool himself. In that moment the years finally started to feel short.

What can an empty room hold?

Showing up as a civic act

The beauty of finding home.

Thinking differently about grocery stores

What can a stadium teach a library?

Cities are neither good nor bad. They are both.

What is the story of economic opportunity in your community?

The push to remove all risk may be flattening our experiences.

Sometimes the changes we’re experiencing and the futures we imagine feel scarier than the past we knew.

Taste is personal, but soul is something we imbue in a place when we inhabit it.

Developing a practice is not just for individuals, but also for groups and coalitions.

When people call for “breaking down silos,” they often mean something else

From “If-Then” Production to “If-Maybe” Progress

How I think about what “placed-based” means

Regional economic growth doesn’t always require unfettered expansion—it can actually be the result of strategic limitations of focus.

How can the economic transformation of various cities inform DC's next steps?

One prescription for community and individual empowerment

The adages that helped me navigate public service

Downtowns as a joyful remedy to isolation

A holiday gift of place-based imagination.

An imagined interview with grandfather about the nature of change in the places we love.

A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas.

An industrial building tries to locate in a suburb of Cleveland in the 1920s and we end up in a national housing crisis in the 2020s.

What's in a number? Maybe some housing relief. The last month saw two important goals for housing policy nerds that could be critical to addressing housing costs.

Pressing pause on politics to press play on civics

Sharing some common “silver bullet” solutions to revitalizing downtown...and what many of them miss.

Cities (and society) are a kairosian moment of upheaval and opportunity.