Seth Kaplan: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time

You are listening to the Strong Towns Podcast.

Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marone. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. I at times get to do my own monologues. At times I get to interview people who have interesting things to say. Sometimes I get to have good friends on to chat about topics. And today's one of those. Although we are talking about a book, we are talking with one of my friends. Seth Kaplan is an author.

He is an expert on fragile states, which when I saw that written in your bio, I thought, you know, fragile states as in my wife when we dropped my daughter off at college. No, actually fragile countries. So Seth, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast. Thank you. It's a real honor and a pleasure to be with you today, Chuck. We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Fragile Neighborhoods. The subtitles Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time.

Can we talk about fragile states? I want people to get a little bit of your background because you've done a lot of work around the world in places that are very, very challenging. Can you just let people know a little bit about some of that work? I think it will frame the conversation. Thank you. Imagine that uh while we're discussing the book and I'm going around talking to lots of people these days, I also have a day job. And my day job is I co-run a nonprofit based in Europe.

works on fragile states in transition. I had a call yesterday to work on Libya. I have a team working on Libya. I have a document I have to review now for mediation. In Nigeria. I have a team working in what's called the middle part, the middle belt of Nigeria. And we have a mediation initiative. in one of the states there. So I work in a lot of places. I travel to places that you probably would not want to go to on your holiday.

Colombia would be or Mexico would be. Maybe you might go there. And we have people working there. But I also go to I mentioned Nigeria. In my uh heyday, I would spend time in Somalia. And Yemen and Syria and all sorts of places like that. But I think what's what connects this work to why I wrote this book.

And what I think about the state of America and why I'm trying to make a contribution to some ideas here is the importance to of relationships to the health of any society. I mean, what makes me special in my work on fragile states, a lot of people work on it in a technical manner. And I very early on saw that the problem of these countries was one of relationship. А де стронга

relationships people have, especially across groups at different parts of society. And the stronger the institutions are that support it, the more peaceful they will be, the more economically and politically successful they will be. And so when people asked me about is America a fragile state, and they weren't referring to mothers dropping off.

children to go to college, even though I have kids. And believe me, my wife and I are often in a fragile state, so to speak. Uh, when when people um I think almost every day sometimes, because our kids are pretty small. I would say the connection is when people ask me, is America fragile? And that happened uh 2015, 2016. It happened a lot because of what was going on in our politics.

I basically I had to think about it. I didn't have a quick answer. I didn't think we were like Nigeria. I didn't think we were like uh Kenya or Somali or Ethiopia. Uh, but I did think. There was something wrong with our relationship. So I spent several years researching, talking to people, going around meeting lots of people, lots of organizations, seeing what was out there. And I settled on the relationship problems that we are most having problems with are interpersonal local in-neighborhoods.

Which is why the book focuses on on place-based relationships and and neighborhood dynamics. Well, it's funny because you found me. I didn't find you. You found me years ago. And very quickly it was clear that we were asking similar questions and and, you know, speaking very similar languages, even though we have very different, very different jobs or very different professions that we come from.

I wanna just read one sentence, or I guess it's two sentences, a little quote. I mean it's still in the introduction here, but You write, our prosperity as a nation, speaking of of the United States, doesn't seem to have improved our well-being. If anything, it has left millions of people and families feeling more alienated and discontented than ever.

I'm glad you talked about Nigeria and Somalia and and other places because I I I think often If we just look at a OECD stat chart or you were thinking of, you know, migration, we think of these places as distressed. As places you would want to flee, as places that, you know, America's this shining beacon people come to from Somalia. We have a lot of Somalis here in central Minnesota. I've spent time with the Somalis and

They're a lot happier than we are, uh, you know, multi-generational Americans, even though they've experienced a lot of what I think we would call trauma. This is a strong statement, particularly given your background. Can you? elaborate on it a little bit. Our prosperity doesn't seem to have improved our well being. Well I have foreign eyes. And when I come to America with my foreign eyes, imagine I spent many years outside the country. It's just shocking how much of our society, the physical

The way we've designed the physical landscape, which is how I found you and I read your first book. And you are speaking words in your first book that I could have written. And I loved some of the lines that you wrote in that book. When I say that we've designed the country to isolate ourselves, it's the physical landscape, which is what Strong Towns, Congress for New Urbanism, and similar organizations work on. But I would say in parallel.

Our institutions which used to be among us and with us day in and day out. They have migrated to be removed from us, to be uh distant from us. We're not involved with them. We have very little ownership of them. So I would say there's a physical and institutional. evolution of our society from you would describe it as the development model up until World War II. And then we had a different development model where we had in parallel

A way of living. We all lived in neighborhoods. I think this is human history. From the very beginning, people lived in neighborhoods. They had local shops. They had local institutions. They had local houses of worship. And then sometime not only did we shift from making places wonderful to making roads wonderful. We shifted from making institutions that supported us and we belonged to every day, to making institutions that were more national, more professional, more distant.

And we focused on efficiency. So that's relates to the quote. We've spent so much effort. creating an efficient country, I think we've lost touch with what it is that helps. humans, you and me, all of our listeners here. Flourish. We're flourish because we are close to other people. We're in relationships that we see people on a regular basis.

We flourish because we're working together towards a common end. We have a common mission. I mean, one of the great things about strong towns is that you are encouraging people to work together towards a common mission. And that's that's one of the the joyful elements of watching strong towns. I would just say on a daily basis, I live in a neighborhood where I can walk the streets and I feel joy. I feel joy because I know the neighbors.

I know who lives there. I walk the streets and I smile at people. I go to the the nearby uh restaurant. I'm meeting someone this afternoon. They wanted to they found me. They wanted to meet me. I said, Okay, you can meet me, but you have to come to my neighborhood. I'm very busy. So we're going to go to the cafe that I can walk to in about seven minutes. And um we're gonna be there. And we have three or four places that we can meet. We have a supermarket, we have some schools locally.

I mean, we are a a neighborhood of possibilities. That's how I like to think. We should all live in a neighborhood of possibilities where we all have institutions and places where we're meeting, working together. And so when I describe what you mentioned there and when I reflect on why I reached out to you, it's because you understand what I'm talking about instinctively. And that you realize that we have done so much to our country, it may, it may make sense by a certain logic.

In the short term, but in the big picture, in terms of what it means for us to experience. on a daily basis and what makes each of us more likely to flourish, to be happy, to be involved in things that make ourselves feel good. There's something really, really missing with how we're thinking about our country and how we're designing everything around us.

Yeah. You use the word joy. And it's it's one of those words that I think when you have that experience, I live in a rather poor city, in a rather poor neighborhood. And It's funny because you wouldn't call the experience here one of I'm certainly not destitute. It's certainly not. A a neighborhood, you know, we we I can go get food. There's some middle class people in my neighborhood. This is not a a a place that

you know, s you would say struggles deeply, but we always lead the state in unemployment. It's it's it's it can be a rough place at times. Joy is the word that I often use to describe. Just I mean, I commute to work with a six block walk. And on the way here today, ran into just a handful of people in a in a city where people don't walk, right? Like generally people don't walk. How do we value joy? It's funny because I I mentioned the OECD chart.

If we look at Somalia or Ethiopia and we put them on an index of joy, my guess would be if there was some way to measure that. There would be a lot more joy in those places in many ways. I don't know. Am I off? Again, we have to think about how countries work on two levels. So clearly if a country's at war and the politics are unstable and we're not delivering some sort of material opportunity and everyone doesn't have enough to eat.

That's a real struggle. And we in our country, we've been incredibly, there's no other country on the scale of the United States that's better for producing wealth. I mean, um you have some smaller countries, but nothing quite like the United States that

incredibly good at uh at competition, at markets, at creating wealth. And that's important. And I'm I'm a firm believer in that. On the other hand, because So much of what we do in terms of designing things is on a very short term, very short term indicators of efficiency. I feel like the whole nonprofit world. I feel how we spend government money. Government money is often spent on units. How often do you see a government held accountable for how successful a street?

Or several streets are. They're not. They're basically designed to be successful on units. And I argue my book. And I get some of this from you. You have I have a couple of great quotes from you, Chuck. I propose, and this is something Jane Jacobs proposed once, which I found out after the fact. is that the government should be held accountable for for parts of their territory, not just a whole space.

And uh they they should be designed not around functional units, but they should be designed around teams, place based teams. And but in terms of joy, let's go back to joy. Yeah. So I'm not a person. Most people would think of me as a as a some sort of intellectual. someone who mainly thinks about ideas in a very abstract fashion. And yet I feel joy. And that joy comes through when I walk around my neighborhood. And I just it's a joy because you feel like you're in a security blanket.

You feel that you have people around you that you can help. I can give let's give specific uh uh let me give a some examples. So my daughter's best friend is undergoing chemo. My daughter is eleven years old. Her friend is in sixth grade. The neighborhood rallies around the family. The neighborhood rallies around the girl. I think she had her last treatment uh yesterday, I hope. God willing, she will have no more treatments. But to see that.

Everything around that family and that person, they come together. That is a sign that you are living in a security blanket and you're living in a place where people are there to care for one another. And it's not about friendship. It's about relationships. And these are very different things. I have a couple of very good friends in my neighborhood, yet I know hundreds of people.

And I'm not very social. So my wife would know more. My wife wife will even tell you what's wrong with their interior designer and their kitchen renovation. And what they're sending them to the wrong school and whatnot. And I'm I'm uh I'm not that detailed with my neighbors, yet I know a lot of people. I can talk to a lot of people.

The self-support system. And I would say joy comes from knowing that you're not alone. Joy comes from knowing that you're in a place where people, at least on some level, care for you. I mean, I had a neighbor a couple of days ago for some holiday. They just walk around and they have handwritten cards. They gave several neighbors wishing them well. I'm thinking the time that my uh daughter dropped her brother and fell on the chin and the chin was bloody.

And my wife picked up the child, didn't talk to any of us, and took off down the street. And I had no idea where she went. Where did she go? She went to the nearest nurse and she knew exactly where that nurse lived, about three blocks away. I did not know where the nearest nurse lived. But she knew about six nurses in our neighborhood. And so if anything happens anytime, she knows where to run. So I would say joy is.

It's not, it's it doesn't mean you compromise economically. It doesn't mean you aim less high, but it does it probably mean that you have some commitment to a place. You have some desire to make that place better. It means that you're pro you're investing in some institutions and you're out there encouraging certain culture and support structures.

in in a hundred little ways that make a difference and makes everyone's life just just a little bit joyful in terms of how they feel about each other and the place.

I'm sure there are people listening. Who are thinking, here's two successful, I'll use the word privileged people talking about. joy and all this, they're not in economic insecurity. They're not struggling. I found the most profound parts of your book to be really this focus on how we lift people up or how people are.

lifted up. I wrote, you know, poverty and in my engineering brain, I wrote an equal sign with a slash through it. So not equals poverty does not equal fragility and material wealth does not equal strength. You wrote at one point, strong societies can always find resources, but divided societies with weak institutions will struggle no matter how many resources they have. I feel like this gives us a path. To talk about

restoring neighborhoods or helping neighborhoods, why does it begin with the society and not uh in some other place? Why is that like the critical building block to success? Let me just give you an example and then let me answer your question. So please. Um I I've been very uh active on LinkedIn.

this year. And I have all sorts of interesting people contacting me from all over the country. So it's a wonderful experience. That's good for you. I tend to be a the cave dweller. I'm not as good as you getting out there talking to lots of people. But I went on LinkedIn this year, made a made a great effort and I have people

uh contacted me from all over the country. So I had someone who uh runs a small bank in northern Illinois contact me and and basically was saying that they have about 14 branches, 14 towns. And they were trying to figure out what made some towns work work well in and dealing with their problems or recovering from challenges, and some didn't. And they were attracted to what I was posting because They said there was something about the social cohesion.

Something about people coming together. And that was the starting point for change. So I could have told him that because I see it all over the world. If you ask me why some states work. And some states don't work. The simplest formula is there either needs to be very, very good institutions, which the United States has. The alternative is you have very, very strong social cohesion. Countries with strong social cohesions, they can always build institutions.

They can always they can always take resources and convert them into better education, better economic activity, and so on and so forth. But if people can't cooperate and they're divided. And they're acting negatively with one another and they're fighting for the spoils of power. I mean, I worked on Libya. The most difficult challenge with Libya, there's two governments. Uh no one controls anything if you don't have a weapon. There's basically no state.

It's been in the news recently for floods and basically. Yeah, for the flooding, right. The flooding, yeah, it killed about I don't know, twenty percent of the people in a town on the on eastern part of the country, a place called Dharna. The fundamental problem there is nobody can get along with anybody else. There's no political agreement. There's no national cohesion. And whatever's on a piece of paper. And whatever institutions exist nationally, they're not gonna work if there's not enough

of a social foundation. So when we talk about your neighborhood for our listeners or your town or your county, if you're in a rural area, I would say the starting point for change or the starting point for progress is bringing enough people together and having enough cohesion and eventually the right institutions that you are building together, they may already exist. They may need to be built.

But if people can't come together and work together on some level, it's very hard for them to flourish. And I would just say, and that's in a more formal manner. If you're on a street, Or you're on a couple of streets in your neighborhood and people feel connected to each other. People feel a sense of responsibility to each other, then they are far more likely to be there when you need them.

Whatever that is, or just be there with a smile. Sometimes a smile is wonderful. I have a neighbor. I'm at 910 on my street. I have a neighbor at 903. She goes around every week. and knocks on the door of people who live alone because she feels a sense of connection, responsibility to other people in the community. So when I talk about that line you use. I would just say we cannot progress.

We cannot do better as a neighborhood, as a town, as a county, as a country, if we don't cooperate and feel a sense of responsibility and togetherness on some level.

uh across all these levels. It feels like something that is attainable by anyone, but it also feels like it's maybe difficult to create from a whole clock. At one point in the book you talk about schools and teaching pride, teaching belonging, teaching culture. And I think you and I both are keenly aware that, you know, when I when I live here in my city, we go to the football game on Friday nights.

It's a cultural event, you know, where they're cheering on the high school kids when they have the Christmas ball. Everybody shows up and claps for people when they come out. Um, you know, that there there's a certain thing that we all do, whether we have students or not, we're all kind of involved in that create this like civic pride. Civic pride also.

has a has another side to it that is often focused on in our society as being, you know, excluding and parochial and what have you. I feel like what you're saying is that We're not going to accomplish things without a sense of civic pride or a sense of togetherness or belonging or a sense of who we are.

What is that? What is that line? What is that tension between those two? Do you see that tension? Is it how do we acknowledge the tension while also acknowledging the need, which to me seems very urgent? I would say very essential that we are inclusive. The country, your n everyone's neighborhood is more and more diverse, and we should be reaching out across whatever diversity there is. It's it it's hugely important that when we talk about

Place and we talk about belonging and we talk about working together, that we're doing this in a very inclusive manner. I would also say that. Um that what I'm talking about is a bit more than civic pride. It's e I would say it civic pride is the first level, but when I talk about neighborhoods. I'm talking about a set of connections and institutions. And for example, you mentioned the Somali community. The Somali community, I've been in Somalia.

Very entrepreneurial, very networked people. If you know anything about the Horn of Africa, the Somalis are the entrepreneurs. among all the different groups there and they're extremely dynamic. I could spend the whole hour talking about stories about Somali entrepreneurs. That comes through with the immigrants too, actually. That comes through with the immigrants, I would imagine, yeah.

But the point is they also, even if they're materially poor, they're not socially poor. And so we have to understand that social poverty is something that afflicts a lot of materially well-off places. And there are some materially poor places that are very connected, very together, where people are supporting each other, helping them all get ahead. I think we need to appreciate that. But in in terms of your idea of civic pride. And what what we mean here, I think.

What we can do, and this is where strong towns I think has an enormous role to play, is we're not just designing places to be dense, to be walkable. We can design places to encourage inclusion. We can design places to encourage belonging. We can design places to encourage the creation of the institutions and the relationships that bring people together. And I think there's some understanding of this.

And what people working on new urbanism will talk about. But I think the vision is an incomplete vision. And I just want to give a, I'm going to. Take your question and give um a bit of an example. We should not just be designing for walking and density. We should be designing where if people lived in identifiable neighborhoods that had brand. that had identity that had a center.

That had like a hub. In my book, I talk about somebody developing a neighborhood hub and putting lots of institutions so there would be a center to a neighborhood that wasn't before. In my neighborhood, we have a small area with retail shop. We have specific parks people congregate in, community schools, to the extent that you're able to influence schools. Schools are the are one of the great incubators of relationship.

Churches, the extent that churches are in a place and you're not driving to it, again, great incubator of relationships. So when when we talk about what we can do. Of course, we should be inclusive, but we also should be thinking really hard about how we design spaces so that. Neighborhoods are identifiable. They have centers. They have institutions. And I would even argue they have clear boundaries. My neighborhood happens to be cut off on three sides by green area.

I think that's more accidental, but it's tremendously helpful for giving us some idea that this is our bounded neighborhood. And that we we have a stake in it. So that the extent that people design the physical landscape to encourage this type of place-based nurturing of relationships. And not just think of the space that we're building Manhattan. I sometimes think people just want to replicate Manhattan.

Manhattan has neighborhoods, but they're not so they're not so distinct. And I'm from Manhattan. We can be building a landscape where every neighborhood is unique. Think of going to Italy, a city in Italy. Yeah. Where civic landscape is beautiful, where each area has a unique identity, or think of Paris.

Every area has a unique identity. Every area has a center. Every area has a certain parks and civic infrastructure. And the more that we design the landscape to celebrate where we live, we all live in a place. What do we have to do to design the landscape to celebrate each place for a different uniqueness? The more we will feel attached to that place and to our neighbors.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. The Italy example is very interesting because I've probably spent more time in Italy than any other non US country. It's the food. I'm sure. I'm sure it's the food. Actually the food or the people are so they smile more in Italy than anywhere else in Europe. I'm sure that is that is true. You would be so disappointed in me because I am the whatever. A food curious person is, I am the exact uh antithesis of that.

No, I I think at one point I had this I had pizza 24 days in a row. And the pizza is amazing, but I literally go in and order the same thing from different restaurants. So I'll try different places, but I'm I'm a very food boring person. Okay. Here's the interesting thing about Italy is is in the neighborhood sense.

I'm Catholic. You can go there and say there are so many churches. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. Why do they have so many churches? Well, they have so many churches because each neighborhood had their distinct in a sense, cultural gathering place. And some of this has become as they have

join the modern world. Some of this has become a burden because now you have, you know, these institutions that are not being used as much that, oh, how do we maintain this? How do we take care of this? But you step back and you look, and every time I would get a tour of a neighborhood, and I was able to spend time intimately in a lot of places. The thing that the people in the neighborhood would always take me to was their church. And even if they were not.

an active attendee or someone who, you know, w went to confession regularly or were praying rosaries, like they they knew Catholicism, but they were not really like deeply practicing. They still had stories about the church, about their family, about people in their neighborhood, about weddings, about funerals, about other things that took place in this like institution. And it defined. The neighborhood itself Not in a way that was

I mean, actually, I'll say this. It was disappointing from a Catholic standpoint. I mean, I thought I was going to go to a country with, you know, people who were deeply religious who were practicing Catholics. I was like, I can't wait to see what that is like. It was not like that at all. But in terms of like the cohesion of the community, these places uh identified neighborhoods and identified places and identified people. Are we talking about the same thing?

Well, think the Catholic Church is organized around parishes. Parishes are place-based, or to a certain extent, they're place-based. Religious hierarchy meant to build a community. When I look and I say that America seems designed to isolate us. I mean, one of the problems is religion. Religion

at its heart there's a there's a meaning, there's a belief, but in terms of daily practice, religion ought to be most about building community, place-based community. And yet so many of our churches And our houses of worship in the United States. are they're there, you go for the sermon, you drive away, you might have they might offer some some some other um services to you as if you were a consumer.

So you engage in two or three services, you listen to the sermon, and that is your religious experience for the week. It used to be It's very transactional and um there's no community in it at all. There's no commitment. um except when you want. And uh it's it's simply a reflection of our whole culture. And I would say that um it's not only religion. If you think about how we you talk about the development pattern that

We humans designed for all of our history up until 60 years ago. And I think if you look at our institutions, It's the same story. We used to live in places with lots of institutions. The church would be the would be the main one, but there'd probably be a couple of places to congregate. There might have been markets to go to. There might have been some, of course, local schools.

Everything was physically located in your immediate vicinity. And for me, the key element there is what I would call overlapping institutions. People develop deep relationships. and uh a sense of responsibility to each other when they are in overlapping institutions. They are doing many things in a place where they're meeting similar people or the same people.

Again, these are not friends. These are relationships. If you see them in many places, you see them in your church, you see them in the restaurant. I'm on the board of a nonprofit. So I have a bunch of people I I meet regularly. I meet them there. I might meet them in my synagogue. I might meet them in the cafe. I might meet them when I'm uh taking my kids to school. And so you're having this.

very organic process of meeting people. And I certainly think the church was originally designed to be at the center of that whole, that whole type of life. And for some reason, it's not only that we physically design the country to get away from that, it's our institutions have all evolved away from that life. And and that and that it simply means that some of us are doing very well because we're in the right network.

And we have the right jobs and we might live in the right places, but when a society gravitates from a society built along from place-based institutions to society based upon dynamic networks. It tends to marginalize and exclude loads of people. I mean, we we haven't talked about the millions of Americans who live in what I would call distressed neighborhoods.

in which they have very few institutions and they're completely marginalized from opportunity. And that's an extreme version, but I would say to the extent that we just live in a house And we don't have a church that we go to. We don't have schools nearby our kids go to. We have nothing. I look at the suburbs near me.

Beautiful houses, beautiful places actually to walk, a lot of walking space in green areas. And yet, how do these houses relate to each other? What brings them together? And there's nothing because there's nowhere place to meet. Unless you're on the street and mostly everyone just walks by each other and they don't talk to each other. And I think most of our country is designed that way. So I think the church metaphor, the church as an example. but also as a metaphor for how so much has changed.

in our society and if we want to address loneliness. If we want to address exclusion, if you want to address the great problems of connection that are causing so many people to die from deaths of despair. The only way to do that in a way that reaches all Americans is ensuring everyone lives in a flourishing neighborhood. There's no other way to do it, in my opinion. You can't do it through services. You have to ensure they live in a place where people are connected to each other.

Here in Minnesota, I step back and look at two groups that I think would be, I think you could classify them as from a statistical standpoint, they are groups that are, you know, struggling in in many ways statistically. The way we the way we would measure success. family income, that kind of thing. The Somali community that I mentioned earlier. There's also a couple of cities near here that have really strong Mexican first generation immigrant, not all documented communities.

And they're generally based around places of employment. There's a a turkey plant and a chicken processing plant, these places. The Somali community is, you know, when if you go meet with anybody there, they meet you at the mosque. And it is it it's interesting because I as someone who uh was not familiar at all with uh with that faith. assume that the mosque would be like a church, right? It'd be like a place you went in for worship. And they certainly have that.

But it is a cultural center, a meeting center, a place for gathering, a place for having meals. It it's like their YMCA combined with their church. Like it's the whole, it's the whole package. And I I I I've watched, you know, over the course of a couple of decades, a group that has come to this country en masse. in a sense, really vulnerable and really isolated.

I won't say like, you know, become Americans and I I can't like integrate to society. There's certainly been more becoming part of the community. I mean, there's more people running for office now. There's more people taking positions of leadership in the community. But it is a byproduct of The strong social network that they have that are elevating people.

As opposed to things that, and I'm going to say we native my family's been in Minnesota for a hundred plus years, that we native Minnesotans are doing to lift them up. It very much is. their community helping people you know, lifting people up from within. As I was reading your book, I kept going back to the the the Mexican group in in Long Prairie who was doing something similar, the Somali group in St. Cloud area that was doing this. They kept coming to my mind.

As places where, you know, often our prescription is to go in with some atomizing type program. Yes. Yes. And I really feel a more humble approach that actually started with, hey, where are you guys at? And how do we, how do we assist you in in accomplishing what you're trying to accomplish? It might be messier and it might not fit our you know, perfectly secular view of the world or or what have you, but it would, I feel like it'd be more beneficial to them.

Am I right to think of these groups as like a an avatar of what you're struggling with in this book? I mean, I would say yes. I mean the bigger question is how do you how do you take the lessons from what they're achieving? and translate it for three hundred and thirty million Americans. So for sure, I think the Somalis, it it's we we in America, and I have some I have foreign eyes. So I come into America and I see everything we do is thought of individual, individual, individual.

Public policy is all about individuals, how we think about problems as individual, individual. And my argument here is. The strength of any individual is ultimately based upon the strength of their relationships, actually, the strength of what what house they grew up in, in terms of their family, the strength of their social network.

the strength of the social dynamics in their neighborhood. And there's plenty of data. We live in a country where the lifespan between the the best and the worst neighborhoods has a difference of 40 years. There are neighborhoods with over ninety and under sixty. So mid fifties, mid nineties. I was on the phone yesterday with someone near Kansas City and talking about two neighboring counties with a twenty year gap in lifespan. And that is not a

That's not something you're gonna solve with interventions one by one. There's something about the social dynamics in these places. So the Somalis are a good example. The Mexicans are a good example. And it's about and and so I think we need to think much harder. And that's where my idea of neighborhoods is an entry point. The only way we can break society into places that we can nurture the types of relationship.

That can replicate on some level what the Somalis and the Mexicans have. I mean, they have it partly for cultural reasons. Partly because they immigrate together and being foreigners in a foreign country, they naturally come together, maybe in a way that is even more than they would do at home. Even the Somalis do it at home very naturally. Uh in America.

The only way I can imagine us nurturing it for people that are born in this culture, that grew up in this culture, is by focusing on the neighborhood and then and then building not the equivalent of that mosque, but The equivalent of five, six, seven institutions that are doing what that mosque is doing and doing it in a place and bringing people together.

And achieving some, if not all, of the whole outcome. And I'll just give an example. You, since I follow strong towns for years, one of my favorite examples that I myself use in the book. And I st I stole, let me be very blunt, I stole from YouTube is the Osweggy, the Osweggy New York example, where there's a policy small grant program that encourages people on a block to work together. Well that's an example. Why don't we have other programs? And I can find organizations

that will through the way they work, the way they fund, are in basically insisting, they're encouraging, in some cases insisting, you have to work together. There was, there's an example that's not in my book. of a Mexican immigrant in California that basically started an organization. I believe it was in Oakland, San Francisco. And the whole, the whole purpose of the organization was to encourage interfamily network.

Where the families would would work together, they would get access to some money to help them if they were matching the money and and aiming for goals that they wanted to achieve. But the whole point was they had to cooperate across. family. So I think there's a huge scope for thinking not only about neighborhoods, but thinking about what can public policy, what can philanthropy, what can nonprofits do, not to serve individuals, but to encourage people to cooperate, whether as a family,

whether as a street, whether as a neighborhood, to get better outcomes for everyone there. And I and I don't think we do very much of that in our society. And I think it's essential because the same way strong towns in your local I don't think you call them chapters, but your local chapters, you're encouraging people to cooperate and you don't even think.

That there's a community build building element there. But I assure you, because I've spoken to your members, you are building community around common purpose. With strong towns providing the skeleton for that. And I would say in the same way, we ought to be doing that on many, many levels throughout our society. It does feel like, I mean, I'll I'll I'll speak about my my own hometown here. It does feel like the program for success.

is to pluck, you know, I'm gonna say the best and the brightest. If if we have a kid who does really well in school, the idea is to get them the heck out of here. And and get them to a different place. And if we have a a business that starts to do well here, how do we get them to a big urban center? How do we get them out of here? And I feel like a lot of our macro institutions.

whether with good intentions or or not, fragment these more local institutions and almost in many ways kind of have a policy of gutting them. I mean, I I'll go back to the Somali community. I hear people who are prominent policy people in our state. measuring success by the number of Somali, you know, second, third generation Somalis who have left the Somali community and gone off to do great things, right? However, they would define that. Um but certainly not be defining it the way

Maybe great things would be defined within the Somali community. Is that a tension of just the size of our country and the the values that we have as a as a macro society, or is that something policy has has really done to us? I mean, I I think first we need to stop thinking of our country vertically and think much harder of our country horizontally. I mean, uh we are a very large country.

And there's a lot of places in our country that are not doing well. Partly, there's many reasons, uh, global competition and whatnot. But um part of it is is that we have thought of our country very vertically. And therefore, we have had a huge brain drain. And a brain drain, you're not just draining the heads, those brains, those, those talented people. You're draining future entrepreneurs, you're draining philanthropists, you're draining models.

You're draining uh people who could be stewards of communities. When all of those people leave, it's not like there's none left behind. There certainly are some left behind, but you're if you take enough of them out. you are doing a real disservice to a lot of places. And I understand that there are certainly benefits nationally, but if our goal is to encourage a country where everyone lives in a flourishing neighborhood, a flourishing place, a flourishing town.

Uh, we have to think much harder. And I think there's a balance there. You can't just tell people everyone should end up where they are, but there are initiatives like Lead for America, and I love Lead for America. That they proactively encourage people to move back to small towns. And I know someone who lives in southern Minnesota, actually. I'm sure I I bet you know the person and one of the co-founders of Strong Towns, Benya.

And so people like her, and I know a lot of people in Kansas and Dodge City and whatnot, and they may they have different types of aspirations. So I would say. We always need a balance. Uh some places like New York or Washington or Silicon Valley are going to attract talent. And that's good for our country, but we also need to create incentives. And uh we also need to, for me culturally, to think that our aspirations

Do not need to be tied to that big city, that big company, that that big single one or two opportunities. We need to think about if if we thought more about our service to place. and our s our our loyalty to relationships, we could think of an equally good path for us. That we can live in a small town or we can live in a particular neighborhood and we can focus on building up that neighborhood. Majora Carter will talk about retaining talent. And I certainly think that.

That's part of it. I think attracting talent is important. I think and I think that the idea that we're on Wi-Fi and we're on internet and we're on uh streaming and all these new technologies is actually a huge opportunity for places that have the right broadband. And the right cultural amenities. And the right opportunities That they should be able to attract talent and they should retain talent. And I would say our whole model.

We should just simply be rethinking what is success for us as a country. Our success is not the number of large companies that we grow, and we we do need those. And we do want to be on the forefront of technology. I mean, it's important uh for us in international competition, China, whatnot. But I do think we need to think equally what does it mean that every American lives in a place that they're proud of and can flourish? That I think needs different incentives, different policies.

These things do not receive enough attention. They're beginning to receive some attention, but there's a long way to go before this is a high priority for everyone in our country.

You wrote this book and I'm gonna confess something to you. I've known you as a as a friend. I've known you as someone who's very, very fun to talk to. I feel like you and I could sit in together for days and not run out of things to to chat about that would be engaging. But I haven't read, I mean, besides emails and friendly things you put together, I haven't read.

any of your books. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting something as readable as this book, as engaging as this book, as kind of made me think in a number of places. And you have uh these little kind of even uh side little vignette things at the end of some of your chapters. And I it it occurred to me The target audience for this is really someone

who lives in a place who wants to make it better. And I got kind of excited about that. Have I nailed your target audience? I mean, it this is not a policy book for policy wonks. This is actually a book for doers or people who want to be doers. Exactly. I mean, I came to your conference, Chuck, and I'm so tuned into what you're publishing and your your podcasts and everything because Strong Towns is a natural audience.

Strong towns is full of members and people who are listening to this. You're not listening to this. uh because you want to sit in your home. And um I I mean I like to think we're all entertaining, but I think you're listening to this because you're thinking, what can I do on my street? What can I do in my neighborhood? How can I change

my place. How can I make it better? And so I have five I have five wonderful organizations that I profiled in Detroit, in eastern Kentucky, in Atlanta, and Baltimore, and one that works across the country. And the point is, these are all people that said, I need to get up and I need to do something. And they cared about their place. And they knew that relationships were the key to making the place better. And then they have these incredibly interesting stories.

uh thread in Baltimore, she w looks for the worst performing ninth graders at some of the major high schools in the city. And she basically makes a 10-year 24-7 commitment. through volunteers to support that person, create something called like a thread family. And then a series of families that support each other. And this is incredibly labor intensive. It's incredibly a labor of love. Imagine committing to a child.

A 15 year old for 10 years, 24-7. You're going to be there at three in the morning. You're going to be there to pick the kid up if necessary. You're going to be there to help with the homework. And there are several volunteers. It's not a one person doing all that. But you're gonna be there for ten years to ensure that kid goes from failing out of high school and ending up probably on the street or in jail to having a I hate to say normal, but a successful life.

With a very positive trajectory. This book is for people like anyone who wants to stand up and say, I want to do something in my neighborhood. What are the ideas? What can I do? How can I make our country and my place better? I think the thing that so energized me was

consistently throughout the whole thing. It is about these horizontal connections. It's not about, well, we have an idea. Let's go find money. Let's make a grant application. Let's go petition city hall. It's what can we do together? to make this work.

We're going to end the podcast now. And I always say keep doing what you can to build a strong town. People ask me like, what's the number one thing I can do? And I say, go meet your neighbors. And I feel like you are saying, after you meet your neighbors, here's what you can, here's, here's what's possible. And it's beautiful. Well, thank you. I mean, uh clearly government and policy and politics and political leadership matters, but I would say that is downstream.

That is downstream from society, from relationships. And so I would always start with build, build relationships, build institutions, build partnerships. Work with others and politics will find a way. They will they will follow. If you build a strong society, you're gonna have strong politics. That's beautiful. Seth Kaplan spreading joy. Uh the book is Fragile Neighborhoods Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time. It is available right now.

Because Seth, we're recording this in September, but it's going to come out in October. So this book, you can go get it right now. Seth, thanks for taking the time to to chat with us today. Again, a great pleasure, Chuck. And again, I love strong towns. Let's all work together to make our place a strong town. Alright, keep doing what you can, everybody. Dr. This has been fascinating.