There’s a lot of takeaways from any conversation with Joe Minicozzi, or one of his many public presentations. Here’s mine today: omnipotent forces didn’t create our current systems, whether we are talking about zoning, traffic engineering or tax assessment. Or, in fact, just about anything in life.
These were all created by fallible humans. We can, and should, change them. It’s our duty, our responsibility. Your local tax system, and your local zoning code were not handed down to you by Moses from the mountain.
Joe Minicozzi of Urban 3 is one of those rare people that just has a knack for communicating complex ideas. If you haven’t seen one of his presentations, run out and do so. Here’s a sample from Not Just Bikes, and one from Strong Towns. Today, we talk in audio form instead of video, but I suspect you’ll enjoy it just the same. Since this is a blog, too, here’s a few visual references for fun:
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Text Transcript:
Kevin K (00:01.231)
Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. You know, one of the joys that I've had in being involved with the New Urbanism Movement and the Congress for New Urbanism for many, many years is you get to meet and know people who take a lot of issues that we talk about and care about and completely reframe them and make them much more interesting and accessible and understandable, I think, to a larger audience. And there's been a number of people who
who've done that or I've seen that happen in the course of my career. And one of those is joining me here today, live from Asheville, North Carolina, Joe Minicozzi. Joe, how's it going,
Joe Minicozzi (00:42.018)
Great, thanks for having
Kevin K (00:43.771)
Well, it's fun. I've been wanting to do this one for a little while and it's you're a busy guy and I'm really glad you made some time. Joe, you may know he's often had his work featured in Strong Towns. He's a regular on the speaking circuit with his firm, Urban 3, and he's really developed a unique approach to kind of explaining our built environment in graphic and financial terms
I think has changed a lot of people's thinking about things. And we're going to get to some of that. Joe has, one of the cool things, Joe, is you're working all over the country. So there's always something new to talk about. But before we get there, I do think it's interesting for people to understand your background because like somebody coming upon you today and one of your presentations, they might think, he's like this kind of urban guru guy. What does that mean? Or he's like a financial guru guy, but you're actually, you're an architect.
Correct? Not licensed, but educated. Yes. Where did... I don't think... One thing I never knew, Joe, like, where did you grow
Joe Minicozzi (01:44.476)
Well, not licensed. Can say that. Educated, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so... Go
Joe Minicozzi (01:56.116)
upstate New York, Rust Belt, little town called Rome, New York.
Kevin K (01:57.445)
Ruffio.
cool, that's a cool town.
Joe Minicozzi (02:05.282)
Why do you say that? That it's not cool. When I was
Kevin K (02:07.983)
Well, I mean, there's some cool built fabric there. No?
Joe Minicozzi (02:11.256)
No. When I was a kid, they tore down most of downtown. It was literally one of the largest urban renewal projects per capita in the entire United States. And they blew up, I don't know, like eight to 10 blocks of downtown and built a wooden fort. There's a revolutionary wooden fort in what used to be our downtown. Google Rome, New York and go into the downtown, you'll see it.
Kevin K (02:39.715)
OK, I must be thinking of pictures I've seen of a different upstate New York downtown then or something.
Joe Minicozzi (02:43.288)
Oh no, no, it's, didn't, but I didn't realize that was abnormal because you you grew up in a town of 30 ,000 people, this is it, right? That's all you know. You just, so when you go to college, you're just like, yeah, surely like you've got a fort in your downtown, right? You know, everybody's got one. Actually Savannah has one. So, but it's not in the downtown. They didn't eliminate Savannah to rebuild a wooden fort. Yeah, but this is a magnet that I have that I in my bookcase over here. This is my grandfather.
Kevin K (03:03.193)
Right. That would have been rather odd.
Joe Minicozzi (03:13.34)
used to tie a rope to this thing. And he's an Italian carpenter, first generation American. And he's tied a rope to this and that rope was tied to my waist. And I used to just walk around job sites all day with him as a kid. I was like, you know, six years old walking around a job site with this huge magnet tied to my waist. And I was picking up nails and I would just sit there with this little anvil, like making the nails go straight so he could reuse them because you know, he's depression era.
And I thought I was building buildings since I'd go home and talk to my dad and I was like, I'm building buildings with Papa. And he goes, sounds like you want to be an architect. And I was like, Bing, I want to be an architect. so that's, I wanted to be an architect since I was nine years old and I went to architecture school.
Kevin K (03:53.903)
You know, that's funny. That's like a weird thing we share in common. It's like, I don't know how that happened with me, because I actually didn't know anybody, you know, in architecture. And I knew a few people who built things, but for whatever reason, I just like always knew I wanted to go into architecture and city planning. it's it's just where I was. So, but anyway, so go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea. Like why showed up to like freshman year?
Joe Minicozzi (04:12.386)
Yeah, like, they really cool pencils, right? I mean, it's like little clicker pencils, awesome, great tools.
Kevin K (04:22.199)
And here's the list of all the shit you have to buy. And I was like, what is, what does even all this stuff do?
Joe Minicozzi (04:25.162)
Yeah, here's, out and buy a thousand dollars worth of stuff. Yeah, little, remember that, God, I hate saying this, it sounds old. I was explaining to somebody on staff, remember those little letter writing tools, that little plastic thing that you'd have to put on your parallel bar to make those three lines to do your lettering properly? That was insane. Anyway, sorry, sorry kids. That doesn't exist anymore because we actually type in computers now.
Kevin K (04:39.745)
my god, yeah.
Kevin K (04:44.805)
Totally, Yeah.
Kevin K (04:53.349)
Yeah, I know. Everyone wants to share. mean, actually learning how to do architectural lettering was a pretty cool thing. I mean, I always liked the benefit of
Joe Minicozzi (04:59.628)
Well, the frustrating thing for me is you go all the way through architecture school and the University of Miami is a five -year program and you never built a building. So how can you be a designer of a building and not understand how it's constructed? So in my fifth year, we petitioned the school to build a homeless shelter and we just went ahead and built it, designed it, built it, worked with homeless folks to figure out what are their needs? How do we help solve the problem architecturally?
And think that's one of the beauties of Miami is that, you know, the whole time I was, know, Miami is known for its new urbanism, but I was always talking with Liz Plater -Zyberg about what was going on in my hometown, because here you have a town that was designed for walkability, designed for the things that new urbanists would proclaim, yet it was dead as a doornail and we were eliminating our downtown. And Liz would always say to me, she's like, well, that's economics. That's something different.
and we're trying to deal with this flood of what's happening in South Florida. That's a different reality. So this whole being seen as an economist is mostly about chasing a question of what are the policies that shape our environment and how do I visualize those for folks, which is very in line with new urbanism. We just look at the money
Kevin K (06:15.397)
So talk a little bit about how you got to this point then professionally of working on your own and doing a lot of the economic analysis work that you do
Joe Minicozzi (06:24.984)
Well, mean, if first is working in architecture, and I think this is probably true for most people that are urban designers, is that you want to look at the context of things that's more exciting for you, or why would somebody say, I'm hiring you, the architect, to do an office building here? If you have an urban design mind, you're like, an office building? Why not a mixed use building or why not a residential building? Why is that developer choosing? That's really the design
is when the developer makes a choice, right? And so why is the developer choosing office over residential or over retail? In having an urban design mindset, you're going to be more empowered to be looking for those things, those other forces. What are the financial streams? So after architecture, I went to grad school and then started doing like internships in real estate development, real estate finance. I worked at John Hancock Real Estate Investment Group in Boston.
kind top of the food chain, where they had $4 billion worth of real estate across the country. And you're seeing how they're making decisions financially about what's going on in your town, right? Because they're going to be doing an asset in your town, a strip mall or a mall or whatever, right? Totally different design series. It was fascinating to watch, but it felt, if you saw the movie, The Big Short, it felt a lot like that. It was like, wow, these people are like on a different way of thinking.
Like there's questions they're just not even asking. We were spending $100 million a year fixing the buildings that we owned. Now when you're making 15 bucks an hour, like that's a lot of money, right? And so you'd sit there, trained as an architect, you'd sit there with these asset managers and I would literally show them pictures of buildings that we owned, a building that we owned in Topeka and a building that we owned in Tacoma. And there are two office buildings that we owned.
And I would ask the finance officers, I'm like, what's the difference between these two buildings? And they would start going through all of this gibberish of numbers and cash flows, cap rates, NOI, all of that stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, look at the pictures. And like, what are you talking about? I'm like, it's the same damn building. We own the same building, the same office park building in Topeka and Tacoma. And you know, they fall apart differently based on the ecosystem. And this was like mind blowing to
Joe Minicozzi (08:43.104)
And it's just like, wow, they don't even understand what this... It's just a cashflow model for them. It's not a building, right? As an architect, you're going to... Like the windows fall apart differently. It's going to be based on the heat load of the air conditioner, all that stuff. But it's kind of mind blowing that this is the cashflow, the invisible sine curve that's moving by low cell high, that's moving through the system. And we're not even talking about it. So it's always... Yeah, go ahead. Well, it's always made me curious and got into real estate development.
And then during the recession is when I started Urban 3, trying to help cities understand that they're prey to these sign curves.
Kevin K (09:20.539)
Yeah. I remember you used to tell a story about working at John Hancock and I think this is just instructive for people to understand the world of like big development, big finance was I think you had a story about we had they had X million dollars that they had to place within like 48 hours or something like that. What was
Joe Minicozzi (09:37.56)
Yeah. It was called a capital call where the CEO of the real estate arm came in and said, need to get, I think it was like $120 million into the ground in the next quarter. So that was an issuance that he was given from Topress. think of anybody that's on this podcast, if you have a 401k plan, if you're like CalPERS is the biggest one, the California teachers.
pension. They have to make money on their money, right? So they take your retirement investment and they go out and make money so that you can have growth in your dollars as an investor. So if you want to see your 401k plan grow, well, somebody's got to make that money grow. So they're going around, in case of John Hancock, that's an insurance company. So somebody buys John Hancock life insurance. They want to return when they die on their money. what they do at the top level of John Hancock, they're putting some money into
bonds, money into stocks, some money into real estate. So ours was the real estate arm. And whatever decision was made at the top, money came into the real estate world and was like, okay, that needs to get into the ground as fast as possible. So they were issued this $120 million in the next quarter. So the people that are finance managers call up all of their developer friends and were like, can I buy a building somewhere? That was basically how it happened.
And the more expensive the building, the better because the more we can get that $120 million down to zero, the faster with less transactions. So imagine if you were the guy on the office that found a hundred million dollar building, like that's actually good, right? Now in architecture world, when we go to school, we're learning the direct opposite, like smaller, like little investments. We're not thinking about the big fish that are out there. anyway.
Kevin K (11:25.583)
Yeah. Sometimes it feels like you're like a language translator, Joe. It's like you have these two different worlds that you have grown to understand really well. One is like architecture and development, and the other is finance. And do you feel like you're kind of like straddling those worlds and trying to explain one to the
Joe Minicozzi (11:44.652)
Yeah, it's a simple sense, the tagline of our company is a data -driven storytelling, you know, that we have to communicate this stuff. And so lot of what we do is just unnerve things. I just came back from a meeting with our county assessor and their consultant, and, you know, he's going through this report that's got how many pages? I don't know, but it's all this. And it's like, how can you show me all of this text?
and start talking to me about it. And I'm just like, I'm like, dude, you got to show me a picture somewhere. It's like, this is crazy. And so what we do is if you watch any of our work, we spent a ton of time breaking a city down to reveal its essence. So I don't need to get into like whether or not your spark plugs are firing at 20 beats per second or whatever. I need to just show you your car works, right? What does the audience want? They don't need to know the details. And far too many of us technically,
trained folks, even architects, get down into the details and the audience doesn't necessarily understand does the car work, yes or no. So that's basically the method of our work is try to make it simple for folks. I use lot of analogies when I talk to people because that's how we relate. that's kind of, think of it having a curious mind, you want to go in and break something down, but to be able to speak it to a regular audience.
It's not that the audience is stupid, it's just people just don't care about those kinds of details, they just want to know the bigger picture.
Kevin K (13:19.545)
Yeah, yeah. And so before we get into a couple of those stories, I am also curious, when you started your business in the recession, how did you, like who were your first clients and how did you get going in that world? Because it's definitely a different thing for an architect or urban designer to get into.
Joe Minicozzi (13:39.448)
You know, the funny thing was, I remember in the recession, I think I did a local lecture here in Asheville to the AIA, to the Architects Association. You know, it's a recession. Yeah, you're not building buildings. So as an architect, you're out of work, you know? But what's crazy about the architectural education, it's really an amazing education in creative thinking, but also critical thinking, right?
So we're all given, you remember studio, there's like 15 of us in a studio, we're all given one problem to solve, but you're get 15 different answers, right? So that's the creative side. But the analytic side happens in all of that, that we're trying to break it down and figure it out before we can get to a design process. So that's the critical thinking side. Those skills can be applied anywhere. And then also in architecture, what do you do at the end of the semester? You have to pin up your work and you have to defend
but it has to communicate to an audience visually, right? They need to understand what's going on in the design intent by what they see on the wall and how you present it. If you just look at that as a basic educational format, that can be applied anywhere. So we just applied architectural thinking to quantitative economic data for cities, right? So we get all of your data. We figure out what's its floor plan. Like why is this road here?
Why is your city grown a certain way? That's all a floor plan, right? But there are decisions that are made along the way that fuel that growth. So if I add three bedrooms to my house, was it because I had four kids? know, it's like, that's the decision point for growing the house. Well, the same is true for cities. So we see when you get white flight, you're going to see that like in Kansas City. We saw that in Kansas City, Missouri, like this massive growth, southward, northward and westward or eastward,
That's the whole, and that all happened really fast from 1950 forward. I think you, it's something like you doubled your population from 250 to 500, but you've 10 times your land area, which is crazy.
Kevin K (15:52.475)
Yeah, yeah, it's somewhere. We had a massive geographic expansion from the like 1947 city until today. I think the original 1947 city or so was probably in the ballpark of about 40 square miles. And now it's like 315 or so.
Joe Minicozzi (16:15.242)
I'm just drawing off the top of my head. There's an actual presentation out there somewhere, but I think it was like three times the road per person growth. So you're taking down three times the cost. So yeah, during the recession, was basically, I was showing up at conferences trying to help folks that were trying to have conversations about walkability, urban design, equity, and trying
Kevin K (16:19.865)
Yeah. yeah, absolutely.
Joe Minicozzi (16:44.472)
trying to share that the things that actually are all things that we advocate for also produce more wealth for communities. Does that make sense? So it was just like, look, we should just talk about that. Rather than say that it's good to have walkability, that can seem like a threat to an individual that you're trying to get me out of my car. That's very judgy. So rather than get involved in that emotionally, let's just talk about the fact that a Walmart actually destroys your wealth.
Don't hate the player, hate the game, but you better understand the game. So when we did the models early on, it was just comparing Walmarts to Main Street, and Main Street was winning every single time. But why don't we build more Main Streets? Because the reverse is true, that we make it easier to do the Walmart, we tax it less, we charge it less, so that of course, Walmart's going to... You're going to see more Walmart -type buildings. I don't mean to be picking on Walmart so much. It's
That's like a prototype, like the boxes. Those are throwaway architecture. So if you have property tax system that's based on your value of property, then there's an incentive for me to build junk in your community, right? The crappier the building I build, the lower the taxes I pay. Has nothing to do with the costs of the property. So the typical Walmart consumes two police officers per Walmart. So it actually costs you more in police services than a Walmart pays in property taxes.
So if you were the owner of a Walmart, that's a good deal for you, right? So don't hate them. I hate us for not doing the math on that. It's that's shame on us. It's not hard. You just go call the police chief and say how many police officers are at Walmart every day and they'll tell you. That's data,
Kevin K (18:28.015)
Yeah. So let's talk about some of the recent data then. Not far from Walmart country, you've been working in Springfield, Missouri, which obviously is southwest Missouri, not far from Bentonville, Arkansas, which is the home base for Walmart. So we were talking, yeah, and Bentonville's actually an amazing, really cool town. And so you've been down in Springfield doing a bunch of work, and we were chatting about it.
Joe Minicozzi (18:44.69)
We've done Bentonville too, yeah.
Kevin K (18:57.6)
So this kind of took you in a little different direction. You started looking at trees and stormwater and everything else. I wonder if you could kind of talk through that scenario.
Joe Minicozzi (19:05.888)
Yeah. Springfield is really cool. it's one, it's nice about it. It's just straight smack dab in the middle of the country. It's Midwestern. There's not a lot of dynamic change to it because you don't have the coastal pressures of being next to an ocean or something like that. You don't have the rapid change of Silicon Valley where there's crazy changes in employment. It's very stable that
And so in that stability, it's sort of a nice control subject of what's going on here. It's also not, it's not at the edge of some blast zone of some other city, you know? So think of like Rancho Cucamonga, California, which is outside the blast zone of Los Angeles. So whatever happens on Los Angeles is going to spread into the suburbs, suburb cities that are around it. So anyway, putting that aside.
There's also this business person there, his name is Jack Stack, who wrote this game called The Great Game of Business, awesome book about business transparency. So the quote that I like of his is, I'm reading it right here, it says, a business should be run like an aquarium where everybody can see what's going on, what's going in, what's moving around, and what's coming out. So his theory of business is that everybody inside the company should know the balance sheet, they should know the P &L.
that it's not him as the business owner, that he has a gold mine of money in the basement. You know, that everybody on staff should understand they've got to pay rent, they've got to pay insurance, all this stuff has costs. Well, our attitude is the same with cities. We should make the city economics so transparent that everybody understands the land use, the economic consequences of land use decisions. Don't tell me that people just want to live out in suburbia. Of course, if you're subsidizing them, why wouldn't you want to live in suburbia?
So they hired us to do that modeling. Their city has run mostly off sales tax. think it's 86 % of their revenue comes from sales tax, 14 % comes from property tax, as far as geospatial, things we can put on a map. So that's kind of like the majority of their cashflow. When I did the presentation there,
Joe Minicozzi (21:27.2)
One of the things that we're doing the first side, showing the revenue and we're getting feedback from the staff and you're an urban designer, I'm an urban designer. One of the things that we tend to pay attention to how a city is shaped and what it looks like when we drive around. There weren't a lot of street trees in the city. And Graham Smith from Multi Studio based in Kansas City. He's the urban designer on the project. Graham said to me, goes,
Kevin K (21:49.935)
Yep.
Joe Minicozzi (21:54.988)
Do notice there's not a lot of street trees? And I was like, yeah, that's kind of crazy. It's like, it's like somehow like trees don't happen in the city. So I made a comment about it during the staff meeting and somebody in the engineering department said to me, well, I said, why don't you have trees? And he just said to me, goes, well, it's because trees attack the streets and sidewalks and use that word attack. I like my, my designer kicked in and I immediately responded. Do you not know how to design a tree pit?
And then I stopped and I was like, well, that's not fair because I'm going to put them in the defensive. so, you know, this is somebody that's coming in with a mindset of maybe he came from, life safety or something, or the risk department inside city government. So he's only looking at it as a balance sheet item of one line item. Yes. A tree could screw up a sidewalk if you don't plant the proper tree species and don't build a tree pit. I got it. But it doesn't mean you should just lay waste to all trees. So just for fun.
I came back to the office, I talked with Lea Hanringer, who was on the project. was like, and Lea's interested in understanding climate effects. So let's just look at the trees and what they could do financially for the city. So the whole stormwater system is, well, currently they're at a $9 million a year deficit in their stormwater system. They should be spending 15 million a year. They're only spending 6 million a year. So let that wash over you. They're not investing enough in their system that they've built.
So that's only going to cause an economic collapse at some point in the future. If I don't brush my teeth every day, that's going to be a problem. One of them is going to fall out, right? So brushing my teeth every day is a maintenance issue. Same is true with any kind of infrastructure system. But to just go out and just totally replace the whole infrastructure system, if we just went out and built their stormwater system today, it'd be $600 million, $661 million worth of investment. So we considered the tree as a pipe and just said, what do trees do?
And we actually made a cartoon of two sponges on a stick because there's a sponge in the air called leaves that suck water when the water hits it, keeps it from hitting the ground. And there's a root system that absorbs water from the ground. All of that keeps it out of the stormwater system. So a tree is essentially a pipe replacement, just to be crude about it, right? The average tree in Springfield, Missouri. And again, you don't have to be exact.
Joe Minicozzi (24:23.192)
Let's just get in the ballpark. It's like 770 gallons of water per tree gets sucked out of the air and 1500 gallons a year gets sucked out of the ground by the root system. So we can do the math on that and we kind of did an estimate based on the trees that they currently have in their city. Scaling that up, you're talking $600 ,000 of savings in the air and $1 .6 million savings in the ground. So that's $2 .2 million a year that you're not paying.
in your stormwater system because of these trees. Here's an idea. Buy more trees. That sounds like a real rocket science idea. But I know, hey Joe, trees cost money, then we're gonna have to maintain them, we're have to make sure that we've got to get out and fix a sidewalk every once in while because we did something wrong. Okay, well we can do numbers on that. So we ran the math on it. The average benefit from the tree is a pipe, if you will.
is about $115 a tree. The cost is 75 bucks. 'all take out your calculators at home, subtract $75 from 115. That means it's net positive 40 bucks a tree. we just, you know, just as a rough estimate, if you just go out and plant 10 ,000 trees, you're going to be net positive $400 ,000 a year. You can essentially use the tree to manufacture money to buy for police officers.
That's cool. So don't just take it and look at that one side and just like, yeah, it's complicated to fix a sidewalk. What are the downstream effects of this? Now to kind of scale this up, remember I said $600 million system. Eugene, Oregon, we just happen to have the data. So Springfield's 170 ,000 people, Eugene, Oregon's 175, so it's got 5 ,000 more people in it. The stormwater system in Eugene, which actually has more rain in Eugene than in Missouri.
Their stormwater system cost 400 million dollars versus Springfield is six hundred and and and 20 million dollars so so basically another way putting this Eugene, Oregon saved a hundred and eighty million dollars in their stormwater system and It comes down to the fact that they're a lot smaller. They the city shape is more compact So by doing compact design, you can actually save a hundred and eighty million
Joe Minicozzi (26:46.903)
Does that make sense? It's 35 square miles for Eugene. It's 83 square miles for Springfield.
Kevin K (26:52.327)
And to put it in context, I would imagine Eugene is still largely a city of like single -family homes. It's just maybe exactly, it's just a different layout for the city itself and how everything is configured on the ground.
Joe Minicozzi (26:59.862)
Yeah, yeah, it's not European.
Joe Minicozzi (27:09.592)
Well, our attitude is like, look, these are your choices. I live here in Asheville. So if you want to stretch out, fine. If you're a Midwestern city and you're like, hey Joe, this is the Midwest, you don't understand, we got lots of land here, we're gonna stretch out. It's like, oh cool, yeah, do it. But just make sure that you understand the cost of that stretching out and make sure that you let your decision makers know that people want to have a one acre yard, awesome, but it's gonna cost us $180 million more in a stormwater
Is that the best choice for that public investment, that $180 million? Or could you have, I don't know, sent every child on a walkabout sabbatical around the world with that investment? There's lots of choices you could do with $180 million. Let's just be honest about
Kevin K (27:58.117)
Yeah, no doubt. Not to mention like one of the least of which could just be like lower taxes if that's your thing, you know.
Joe Minicozzi (28:06.232)
Well, or you could have invested that $180 million in more trees and you would have had $50 million of new revenue in your system on an annual basis, which is more than the ARPA funding that you got. ARPA was just a one year deal. Like you could actually manufacture more money than the federal government gave you. I mean, come on now, let's just talk about
Kevin K (28:18.307)
Right.
Kevin K (28:24.123)
Yeah. And I think the interesting thing is you're not even really getting into what some people might think of as like the frou frou design benefits of trees versus not trees in this. And so makes it a more pleasant place to walk or
Joe Minicozzi (28:37.174)
yeah. Aesthetic quality that reduces the heat island effect, reduces your air conditioning bills because you're not dealing with the outward effect of radiation. mean, there's lots of things. CO2, I mean, we didn't get an A that. We're just like a tree as a pipe replacement. Just start there. But yeah, if you did do those numbers, if you read, I don't know if you see on the bookcase up here, Happy City.
and they get in the quantitative sociological effects that are actually financial as well because Canadians measure that stuff. We don't in America because we don't pay for health systems at the government level. So when the government actually does pay for the health system, they kind of want to know what the costs are. know, Charles Montgomery used all of that math in there to explain the financial consequences. I think the book is sort of a mislabeled. I think it's more of an economic
than with the name Canotes.
Kevin K (29:35.739)
So at the stage you are now with Springfield, have you presented all this information to them and had that out in the world?
Joe Minicozzi (29:45.356)
Yeah. Well, one of the biases was that they wanted to continue to annex more land. And the first question I asked, which was why? And they said, well, people live out there and there's some higher wealth houses that are out there. Therefore, we're going to get higher taxes. And the reality of it is, and this is back to the original analysis that we did, which is the value per acre analysis.
One of the biases people have with math is when they see like the Walmart's worth $20 million, they get really excited about it, especially compared to a building that we rehabbed on Main Street here in Asheville that's $11 million. So Walmart's twice the value, right? But that Walmart took 34 acres of our city versus our building on 0 .5 acres. And it's just a habit that humans have where they just immediately go to the big number without understanding the efficiency.
Well, the same is true with suburbia. It's like, okay, yeah, they're experiencing wealth flight out of Springfield where people are just outside the city limits out in the county in their high -end neighborhoods. But when we do our tax model, you can see that they're actually not that productive. That's the first thing. Back to how I said, Springfield gets its money. They get their money off sales taxes. So why would you want to chase residential?
Makes no sense. So we're gonna go and bring them into the city limits and then we're have to provide more services for them and not get any taxes out of them because we get all of our taxes out of sales. I actually told the audience when that question came up, I said, look, right now they're living outside, driving into your city and shopping, you're collecting their sales tax dollars and they're going home. You don't have to pay for their schools, you don't have to police them, you don't have to put the fire services for them, that's their problem. Why would you wanna take them in?
and have more costs in your community when you're already getting the money that you need, which is the sales taxes. And as a planner, I hate saying that because it's like, everybody should be part of the community if you're involved at an economic level, but from a brass tax of how their financial system operates, there's no incentive for them to annex that land. But again, when you have the politics of everybody just there, and this is something just true to the new, as long as you've been in new urbanism and I've been involved, it's like this kind of habit.
Joe Minicozzi (32:10.06)
that we are America, so we must suburbanize. It's just this, it's ingrained in us. And it's really, it's a myth more than anything else.
Kevin K (32:17.014)
Right. So it also kind of strikes me, one of the interesting things about your work or that you get to see is the very different ways that local governments are funded all over the country. So you've talked about this example in Missouri, and it's probably really similar to how my city is. If I broke down our property tax bill, I think about 70 % of it goes to the school district. And then it's kind of apportioned up between the county and the city and some other, like the library board and a mental health.
Board etc, but the lion's share is a school district and most of our city revenue is sales tax and then income tax because we Yeah, which is rare, but we have an income tax But I'm curious like what you've seen like around the country. Are there approaches that seem better worse more sustainable less sustainable or they just like they're
Joe Minicozzi (32:54.4)
Yeah, which is very rare. Yeah, that's
Joe Minicozzi (33:08.916)
They're all different. One of the jokes that I used to make is when we did this, I want to reference my former boss, Pat Whalen, in public interest projects. Pat's amazing. He's a genius. Pat had this incredible PowerPoint called the Economic and Environmental Case for Urbanism.
And so he's the director of a real estate company trying to explain the value of downtown revitalization to people. That's where the value per acre analysis comes from. It was part of his show. what was interesting is it made sense in Asheville, and I just started poking around other cities in North Carolina because I was on the Downtown Association Board, and we're trying to figure out the value of our downtown versus other downtowns.
you have a day job working for a district, the real Kevin Klinkenberg, you have this day job for this boundary. Well, don't you want to know how you operate versus the downtown improvement district or the Westport improvement district? Yeah, of course you do. So I was doing that for 10 cities bigger than Asheville and 10 cities smaller than Asheville. What's our taxable, non -taxable ratio? Who's got too much non -taxable? I don't know. Like until you get the data. So I made this shared website that's a Google document.
And I shared it with the downtown directors for all the 10 cities and we populated it so we could all get metrics to understand how we stack up.
What was your original question?
Kevin K (34:43.963)
It's just about the different mechanisms for a big local
Joe Minicozzi (34:46.75)
yeah. So, in that, we started to see that the downtowns were crushing it versus every other part of the city. Right? So, as an urban designer, we advocate for walkability, downtowns, everybody likes them, why don't we do more? And we start to find all the zoning rules that don't allow it, all the policies that don't allow it, and all the biases. And a whole Congress for urbanism is essentially discussing these things, going, who the hell put these things in place? You know, it's just, that's what we do. And we try to undo.
these kind of rules that kind of get in the way. So I was doing, I think I was talking to Peter Katz and he's like, does it work this way in Florida? And I was like, I don't know. And so he hired us to do the analysis in Sarasota and sure enough, it was the same damn thing. So here's the way I see it. Florida has totally different rules than North Carolina. North Carolina has different policies than South Carolina, which is way different from Missouri.
Everybody's got different state tax policy rules. But you know, and I know, when you drive around suburban Phoenix or suburban Los Angeles or suburban Boston, you see the same crap. To the radio audience, that's an architectural terminology, but it's like you see the same junk everywhere, right? And I told Peter, said, you know, it's hilarious to me. We all have different math, but it yields the same results. So in North Carolina, it's two plus two equals
In South Carolina, it's three plus one equals four. In Florida, it's one plus three equals four. In California, it's 22 times 16 divided by the square root of 47 equals four. You know, it's like, we can make it complex, but at end of the day, that's all we have to do is use our eyes and go around suburbia and say, why is this happening? And you're going to see the same exact economic results in the landscape that's baked into the policy to reward it happening. So sort of shame on us for, you know, I don't have a math degree.
I'm trained as an artist like you. I draw pictures, but I'm gonna go look at those policies and read them. Sometimes it gives you an aneurysm when you read some of these policies. But I think that's the beauty of the world that you and I operate in, is we're not afraid of that stuff. We'll get involved in transportation policies. Let's go read the ITE manual. It's like, of nerd does that, but we do it.
Kevin K (37:07.611)
I mean, if you talk to me when I was 19 years old in architecture school and said, well, hey, you're going to learn all about the intricacies of zoning codes and traffic engineering and also like, what? What are you talking about? But if you really want to understand your world and make a difference in it, you've got to dive into those things. So yeah, exactly. And actually, it is kind of fun and interesting to learn that it was fascinating to me when I first learned.
Joe Minicozzi (37:25.826)
and not fear
Kevin K (37:35.003)
much more about traffic engineering, like how engineers actually thought and what they were looking at and how they were evaluating streets and intersections and everything else to come up with their solutions.
Joe Minicozzi (37:47.544)
Well, you can be a better practicing professional too if you're respecting their profession and saying, I want to learn how you operate. Now I'm going to call BS on things when I see it, but at the same time, I'm going to respect that you have knowledge that I don't and I want to learn. But the thing that makes, I think that makes you and I different is that we also know that Moses didn't deliver their rules. That these are not infallible people that have designed this stuff.
Kevin K (38:12.184)
Right.
Joe Minicozzi (38:16.056)
that these are humans that are operating with their best intention, but often they make mistakes.
Kevin K (38:22.331)
No doubt, no doubt. I think we don't emphasize that enough that really so much of what we struggle against is just people trying to create systems and rules and then working with it and all of that can be changed.
Joe Minicozzi (38:37.112)
Yeah. Well, I just, this morning I sat with my county assessor and this is trouble that we started back in 2021. And here we are three years later and we're going through a reassessment in January of this year. And he's telling me that like a lot of the things that we recommended back in 2022, they're going to do, but they're not going to do it until 2029. I just about lost my mind.
I was like, you know how many human beings my wife and I could produce in four years and you can't change policy? Come on now. That's bias in the system where it's like, there's nothing to stop them. It's just they've never done things this fast before. it was kind of frustrating and I told them, said, look, you just need to see me as a taxpayer now and not a consultant. I live here. My staff suffers.
Kevin K (39:12.377)
Yeah.
Joe Minicozzi (39:32.438)
with housing, everybody I know suffers with housing in this community because we're a hot market right now. And it's not fair that because you're going to be uncomfortable changing the way that you behave, there's no law that says you can't do this. This is just about your practice. And we see this, you've seen this with your career with city planners. It's like, well, we just haven't done it that way before. It's like, well, change.
Kevin K (39:55.749)
Yeah, yeah, it's not hard. It's not the end of the world, you know.
Joe Minicozzi (39:57.622)
The world's not going to stop. And guess what? Guess what? You're going to make a mistake again. Yeah, it's going to happen. It's like we're humans.
Kevin K (40:05.423)
I know. There's a real struggle a lot of times to just get people to take a risk to try something and try and fail and if you fail, it's not the end of the world. So what has
Joe Minicozzi (40:16.376)
They won't assess Airbnb's as commercial product. I'm like, dude, we've got 4 ,000 of them in my city. I've got people from Florida, cash flowing houses up here, and they're paying them off in four years. And my staff can't do that. I can't do that. Like, what the hell? And so why are you choosing to value them as houses and not commercial product? And the state, the state charges an occupancy tax on top of them, right? So the state knows that they're hotel rooms.
Kevin K (40:19.532)
yeah.
Joe Minicozzi (40:45.368)
because they're paying an occupancy tax, much like a hotel room would. So why are you choosing to value it differently and not value it on its cap rate? And I'm serious. Like I know that I'm kind of like beating this drum about here in Asheville. Nationwide, this is a problem. And the assessors are like, well, you know, it takes a while to kind of work this out. I'm like, no, Airbnb has been around since 2015. For fuck's sake. Sorry. It's like, this is, it shouldn't take 10 years.
Kevin K (40:59.547)
Yeah, no
Joe Minicozzi (41:14.626)
to realize how it affected the marketplace. You just sound stupid at that point. we don't understand.
Kevin K (41:19.289)
Yeah, it was crazy. It was such a big issue, as you might imagine, in Savannah, which I think for a time, Savannah was like the number one city in the world for Airbnb.
Joe Minicozzi (41:29.516)
Well, at least in Georgia, you have a separation between an occupant and a non -occupant. We don't have that in North Carolina. We're all treated the same, which is insane. So in Georgia, if you own a house in Savannah, but you live in Kansas City, you're taxed at a higher rate than somebody that lives in a Savannah house. Owner -occupied is totally different than non -owner -occupied. In North Carolina, we don't even have that protection.
So it's even worse for us. So it's maddening. So anyway, anybody that's on this podcast that lives in a tourist town, like this is one of the things that should be the top of your agenda to talk about. It's like, I'm not saying don't do it. You we're a tourist town. Our baseball team is called the Asheville Tourists. Got it. Been the Asheville Tourists since the 1920s. This is our economy. But don't tax them less. That's crazy. Yeah.
Kevin K (42:00.068)
Interesting.
Kevin K (42:24.443)
Understand what they are, tax them, or have some policy that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. So one of the other things that you've been able to do with your work then is kind of related to all this. You get the chance to like dive deep into the history of especially like property taxation and other things. And I know you've read a lot of stuff in this world. How has
Joe Minicozzi (42:28.746)
It's a commodity, right? What does that do to housing prices?
Kevin K (42:51.269)
kind of impacted the work that you're doing or you're thinking, or what are some notable things that you've seen and just looking back a long time ago when a lot of these rules were being formulated.
Joe Minicozzi (43:01.75)
Yeah, there's some.
One of the things about new urbanists, it's kind of weird. I hate that term because we're sort of just urban thinkers. We're complex thinkers.
Joe Minicozzi (43:19.68)
It's not new. This is just, we're operating in an urban environment, we're going to be interrogating things, but we tend to lean toward, if it's broke, fix it. That's our attitude. And it shouldn't take forever. But we also swim upstream to try to figure out who put this fence in. So who put the fence out in that field? And why is that fence there? And if the fence serves a purpose, keep the fence.
If the fence was there for just because some random situation, get rid of it. It's like unnecessary policy. So you'll hear within our cluster of crazy friends, a lot of us are just like, rid of parking standards. Why do you need them? Why do we have trip counts for highways? Because when you look at the base data of trip counts, it doesn't make sense. Plus, since pandemic, we've changed the way that our commute patterns operate. So we should be changing our math.
And like we operate faster with a level of, with trying to stop the bleeding, if you will. We're triage people, you know, we're like the emergency room medics. But we're also going to go upstream to figure out how did this start? So just for, you know, I started to see a lot of patterns in the assessment maps of how neighborhoods were construed or different market areas that lined up with redlining.
And so redlining started in 1934 and went to 1968 and was deemed unconstitutional. But if you go to Mapping Inequality website, you actually find that there's maps that predate redlining that the bankers were using that was essentially racist. That if you were an immigrant or in a black neighborhood, they deemed you high risk and they changed your ability to get cashflow. Redlining was adopted at a federal level.
So it's federal policy that said this is the rule of the land now, which makes it pernicious. It was already pernicious before, but for the federal government to come in and say, we're going to be unconstitutional here is pretty bad. But to everybody's credit, everybody's hands got slapped in 1968, that changed. Well, here we are today and we're still seeing the same effects in the valuation that models very similarly to redlining. So I was just like, well, maybe there's got to be a book somewhere that this is all talked about in the
Joe Minicozzi (45:41.816)
I found this book from 1922. It's the ninth edition. So was actually the first edition was 1895. So think about this, a book was reprinted nine times because it was so popular. It's called The Essays and Taxation by Edwin Seligman. And I love this quote. So just for the radio audience, just turn on your mind to 1895. This is what he wrote. Practically, the general property tax is actually administered as beyond all doubt, one of the worst tax systems known to the civilized world.
Because of its attempt to tax intangible as well as tangible things, it sins against the cardinal rules of uniformity, of equality, and of universality and taxation. It puts a premium on dishonesty and debauches the public's conscience. It reduces deception to a system and makes a science of navery. It presses hardest on those least able to pay and imposes double taxation on one man and grants entire immunity on the next.
In short, the general property tax system is so flagrantly inequitable that its retention can only be explained through ignorance and inertia. It is the cause of such crying injustice that its alteration or its abolishment must become the battle cry of every statesman and reformer." So this is somebody who works in taxation and goes, this is a crock of junk. Let's get rid of this. And that was over a hundred years ago, right? And so now I sat in a two hour meeting.
with my assessors and their consultant going through is excruciating detail, all of this crazy mathematics. I'm like, why are we doing it this way? I understand what you're doing, but let's take a big step up. Why do we finance cities this way? Why is it based on value? know, Kevin, you and I are trained as architects, right? We want to do beautiful buildings. We want to do, if I could afford it, I would build a stone house, you know, because I like stone and it lasts forever.
So I create an asset that will be in the community for hundreds and hundreds of years paying taxes. Why would you penalize me for that? You should be charging me on how often I drive on that road and how many times I use a fire call. Charge me for the services you provide rather than some arbitrary, hey, you built a stone house, therefore you pay more taxes. You could be right next door to me in a tin shack and have actually more income than me.
Joe Minicozzi (48:09.944)
and be taxed less because you have a tin shack and I've got a stone house. I could be making $50 ,000 a year and you're making $200 How is that fair? This is where I said that the income tax is a little bit more fair, but the thing is if you're really rich, you're not making income. You've got assets, right? Those are all hidden somewhere, not being taxed. So there's no perfect systems. That's why we advocate, and you see in our models, those red -black models where you have
Black is producing wealth, net positive, red is net subsidy. And we did that for Springfield. 80 % of the city is subsidized. So just show that to the citizens and just be like, this is how we're subsidizing it. Is this the best choice? But you should charge me for it. If there's, yeah, go ahead. No,
Kevin K (48:52.091)
So when you do this, go ahead. I was going say when you do that kind of historic research, it, I mean have to ask the Georgist question, does that, how do you think about that relative to the Henry George critique, the land value tax approach versus the standard property tax that we do in most places?
Joe Minicozzi (49:11.16)
I mean, I think that aligns with Henry George, the statement. It aligns with how I feel as a taxpayer and also as somebody that practices in this world. The more we get into this with the Cessars, I have all the respect in the world for what they do because we do all of our work on their data. So I'm very thankful for them as a profession. But I also see that they're trapped.
in a construction of their own making, the same way that traffic engineers are. And for anybody that's on this podcast that's read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Chuck Marrone, I mean, he nails it. That same ethos in that book is the same ethos I see with the zoning people that are all just about zoning. This is the way the zoning is, as if some omnipotent force gave them the zoning, you know? And then there's the same as I see this with the assessors, where I always ask them, I'm like, why is that the standard? Where did this come
Like today when this one assessor was telling me that legally they can't assess Airbnbs as commercial. So I immediately asked her, I'm like, can you show me the law that says that? And she just went blank. And I was like, you just told me that there was a law that this, so tell me the law. And they don't, this is their bias. This is their practice. This is their fear. They're afraid to stir up the people that are out there with Airbnbs. I'm like, that's not what the law says. So you're making a choice not to do that. There's so much...
Joe Minicozzi (50:43.129)
discretion that people don't talk about. You see this when you talk to old school planners that are just like, the trip counts and the parking requirement, their bias kind of comes in. They won't call it a bias.
Kevin K (50:56.197)
Yeah, yeah. And I think we've often talked about that. And I think Jeff Speck famously wrote about that. You can manipulate a traffic study to say whatever you want it to say. And it's really just about the choices that you're making of what you want to do or what you want the outcome to be.
Joe Minicozzi (51:14.12)
We did a land analysis. Back to Henry George, we did a land value analysis where we just turn off all the buildings and just look at the land value per acre. This was in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The larger parcels in the commercial strip area were half the value of the out parcels across the street. I asked, I'm like, does land magically lose half its value when you cross the street? Same zoning category.
And the tax assessor told me with all confidence, she goes, well, the cheaper one is bigger. The more land you have, the lower the value. And it's like, what economic rule is that true? And she goes, there's less people that can afford large tracts of land. So therefore we have to give a discount because there's less people in the marketplace. And I was like, well, that's kind of true. But does that work this way with other limited commodities like diamonds? If I get a bigger diamond, is it cheaper? Surely there's less people that can afford a bigger
And everybody in the room was laughing, but she was just totally confused by that. And the weird thing is that I don't have an economics degree. I've actually never taken an economics course. So I just asked a question because I'm curious about this stuff.
Kevin K (52:23.323)
Yeah. So Joe, you've also been working a little bit in Annapolis, Maryland, which is obviously a really, really different context than Springfield, Missouri, one of the oldest cities in the country. wonder if you want to talk a little bit about what you've been doing there and what you're seeing.
Joe Minicozzi (52:40.376)
Yeah, Annapolis is cool. We did one of those red -black models for them. And one of the things that we noticed was their annexation pattern was an interesting tell. It's kind of funny. like, I've got a picture for that, but it's kind of hard to talk about a picture in this space. I'll
Kevin K (53:03.387)
Well, eventually, eventually this will be a YouTube thing too at some point. So we could do
Joe Minicozzi (53:08.696)
Yeah. from one of the things you could see in the, again, we talked about at the start of this about Kansas City, there's tells in the annexation pattern that tell you the problems that you're having today. So it's kind of like, you and I are the same age. I'm 56. There's things that I'm dealing with today in my body that didn't happen because of what I did last week.
It happened because of stuff I did when I was in high school, right? The older you get, like all of a sudden it's like, my ACL gave out. Why is that? It was because I played football in high school. So it's like, just took a while for that ligament to just finally give. I can remember the concussion that I had when that happened. You know, it's like things like that. So we look at cities the same way as what did you do in your past that you're now seeing the problems today? So.
One of the rules that we all know is roads only last about 50 years. so every 50 years is when you have your heart attack based on what you did when you first built those roads. Annapolis did 71 % of its land acquisition. So if you look at it today and just say, if we make a pie chart of this, when did these areas break down? Their first hundred years is 4 % of their land.
for their first 100 years. From 1920 to 1800, that's 80 years, they did 5 % growth, okay? So that was 120 years. In just the year of 1951, they annexed 71 % of their land. So let that wash over you. Just imagine the pie in your mind of 4%, 5%, and then 71 % in one year. So
those developments didn't all happen in 1971. would take a while from the late 50s, early 60s when you start to fill in all of those subdivisions, you're filling in a lot of lane miles in 71 % of your city. So those roads are now being replaced now in the 2020s, 2030s. And they're looking at, let's see, kind of try to do the quick math here. They're looking
Joe Minicozzi (55:34.264)
close to.
two thirds of their roads are coming due because of that original sin of that annexation. But the habit in the 1950s, I think about that. People come back from the war, we're like, we're going to be modern. There's all these policies in place to reward this, the federal highway system, the FHA loans. And it's not that people had ill intent, they just were naive. They're just like, well, let's try something different. Let's kind of remake cities. And this is what we're dealing with. It's like we have to kind of think back to when that happened. So we show them the
And you can see their jaws drop when I was showing this to them. And it's kind of like walking in and I'm the doctor, we just got a bunch of CAT scans and I show you your broken shoulder. I'm like, is the reason why you can't pick things up. You've got your shoulders broken. And everybody can see it because you can see it on the map. 71 % is a lot of area in one year.
Kevin K (56:27.023)
Yeah. What is some of the examples of how some of your clients have reacted to information when you're finally at the end? I would imagine it runs the gamut from complete denial to people excited to make some change. mean, what do you see on the back end of doing these analysis?
Joe Minicozzi (56:49.196)
You know, the mayor actually called me yesterday. I was bicycling into work and I get this telephone call from Annapolis and it's him and he's so excited. And he goes, it's it's hard. It's indescribable. We're all singing from the same sheet of music now. And so, you know, in respect for politicians, and I don't, I don't mean this in a, in a, as, negative as this is going to sound, but think about, let's, let's just kind of make it blunt.
You win a popularity contest and you become mayor. That's it. That's the American system of government right there. They don't have the master's degree in urban design. They don't have the research of 30 years of public policy analysis and parking requirements. They don't have that junk shoved in their heads the way that you and I do. So they just win this popularity contest and they're trying to figure things out.
their commerce is what they hear from people, the emotions, the conversations, how people react to their day -to -day living. It's sort of on us as professionals to help demystify that. So that's basically, that's the MO of our company is we're going to try to find a way to give you a lot of quantitative data, but we're going to do it in a way that's easy to understand and give you a pie chart. You know, it's like, we're not going to make that hard. You know, it's just, it is. This is what's going on. Here's that pie chart showing you 71%.
is in that one year, they've had that data since 1951. It's like, it shouldn't be magic to pull this stuff out. So it really is on the professional to do that. So usually what we get is we see a game. He's right. We do see a game change from people because we've created a graphic that people can see and they can see what's going on. You can't argue against the pie chart. There it is. 71%. It's like there's data.
There's a pie chart so everybody can see how big that is. Just make it simple. We don't hand you an 85 page document explaining it all in text. Why? 65 % of the audience are visual learners. Show them a picture. So once we did that and kind of walk them through and help them understand, they could see their city with new eyes. That's actually another quote that a mayor gave me in Davis, California. He goes, it's as if I've never been to this city called Davis and I could see it with new eyes
Joe Minicozzi (59:16.886)
So it's respecting them and honoring that their life is hard. Their role is near impossible. They've got to learn how a multi -billion dollar corporation operates the night after the election. And there's all of these habits baked into it. how do we short circuit that and make it easy for people to move? So we've seen changes. We've seen Rancho Cucamonga, California.
They adopted a one to six rule for their downtown as an area to value ratio. So now they have like a two drink minimum, if you will. And there was a steel manufacturing company that came in for a tax break. And the assistant city manager told me, goes, you know, it's fun is after we did this math with you all, he goes, they came in and asked for a tax break and they're a big employer.
But then I compared them on a per acre basis to other manufacturing plants in our city, these smaller ones, and they were actually way more beneficial than this big one. So I told the big one to take a hike. And it was like, that made my month. It's like, I couldn't believe he did that. But it was like, we gave them a new language to understand themselves. And as a consultant, it's like, yeah, I wasn't there for the win, but I feel proud of that. It's not sexy to talk about, but it's like, that's cool.
So there's not as much satisfaction as being an architect when somebody lives in a house that you produce, but it's a different kind of satisfaction.
Kevin K (01:00:52.003)
Yeah, I really like the analogy of, it's almost like you're providing an MRI or a CAT scan. You're the doctor giving them critical information about the health of their community. And then really it's up to them to decide, do they want to correct that health or not?
Joe Minicozzi (01:01:11.606)
Well, it's value statement of our company too, that the doctor doesn't blame the patient. And so if you're going in and you're a smoker, chronic smoker your entire life, the doctor knows you're an addict. But what can the doctor provide you to help you get past your addiction? So the doctor is going to show you an MRI of your lungs and you're going to see the black spots all over the lungs. The doctor is going to be like, guess where that's coming from?
Kevin K (01:01:14.083)
Okay.
Joe Minicozzi (01:01:40.128)
and you'll say, it's my smoking. It'll be like, yeah, you want to keep doing it? It's up on you. I'm not going to be able to pull a cigarette out of your hand, but I have to do what I can to give you information to be an educated consumer. So that's kind of our MO.
Kevin K (01:01:54.821)
Joe, I think that's a great place to wrap. And if people are looking to find you and your company, what's the best place to go?
Joe Minicozzi (01:02:06.552)
Urban3 .com, three is all spelled out. You can also, there's plenty of videos online that you can Google through YouTube. My favorite one is the one that Not Just Bikes did on our work. Not Just Bikes is just a great resource for lots of information on city planning. And also Strong Towns covers a lot of our work. And also the Congress for New Urbanism.
If anybody wants to come to a conference, the Congress for New Urbanism or the Strong Towns Gatherings are great. Or if you want to go deep nerd, we're like at the Government Finance Officers Association conferences every year. That's a whole lot of fun. So yeah, we'll see you around in public and thank you for doing all of
Kevin K (01:02:54.405)
Yeah, so really appreciate it, Joe. I'm sure we'll do some more in the future, but this is a great introduction for anybody who doesn't know your work. And also for those who do, I really appreciate the deeper dive. So hang in there. Keep doing what you're doing. And we'll talk again. All right.
Joe Minicozzi (01:03:13.25)
Thanks.
A Conversation with Joe Minicozzi