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Episodes from The Messy City Podcast
How to Scale Change with Housing
Eric Kronberg is back again, to dive deeper into the topics of housing choice, scale and essentially - what works and what doesn’t. Eric’s firm, Kronberg Urbanists & Architects, produces some of the routinely best graphic content to explain these complex issues. In this episode, in particular we…
Midtown KC, Unfiltered
Stand by for a very Kansas City-focused episode. For this one, Abby Newsham and I were invited to record a live podcast during KC Design Week, at the Kansas City Art Institute. Abby now hosts the Unconventional Urbanism podcast.While there’s some inside baseball in here for Kansas City people, we…
Route 66 - America's Main Street
The tale of Route 66 might seem like just a tale of freedom on the road, the great American desire for exploration, and our love affair with the car. And it is all that. But it’s also much more. It’s about the cities, towns and unique places all along the route and their stories.Chris Elisara and…
Chicken on a Bridge
Sometimes a local story is just that - a local story. And sometimes it transcends. Yes, Mike Zeller is very much rooted in Kansas City, and this is a very local story about how to take advantage of our long-overlooked river assets.But this story is really so much more than all that. This is about…
Seeking Faith-Based Solutions to Housing
Every so often, an idea comes along that makes so much sense it makes you wonder - why haven’t we been talking more about this? In that vein comes today’s guest, Eli Smith, who is pioneering something called the Faith-Based Housing Initiative.Eli describes it well, but there’s a fascinating…
You Can Just Do Things
Zach Molzer is 25, and he wants you to know that’s an advantage. His team is young, energetic, and optimistic. His story of quickly becoming a developer with impact in Kansas City shows us that you don’t need to have decades of experience. You just need to want to do it badly, and get others…
Rowhouses for America
Bobby Fijan doesn’t want you to give up on families living in cities. One thing he said in this episode that really stuck out with me, “People tolerate disorder less when kids are around.” I think that’s right on, and that we too easily acquiesce to the notion that cities are just for the young, or…
The Case for Optimism and Beauty
Social media is an unlikely place to find truly positive and optimistic people. But occasionally you find one. Today’s example: the charming and determined Coby Lefkowitz, whose relentless optimism can only rub off on you.Coby is a developer in New York state, and a prolific writer, poster and…
The Best Life Hack, Ever
We take a break from our routine conversations today to have some fun, and talk about the wonders of travel hacking with my sister, Cindy Weir. Cindy epitomizes how to really leverage having a system for travel hacking, as she made the most of her small business to rack up points. It’s paid off…
Do our communities need better hardware or better software?
Longtime friend-of-the-pod Abby Newsham returns, on her hiatus from the popular Upzoned podcast. Abby is a practicing planner in Kansas City with Olsson Associates. Abby is very active working with communities leading planning charrettes, and we talk at length about what a charrette actually is,…
What is a Starter Home?
One of the perils of being in a profession or field for many years is how you see beyond simple dualities. By that I mean, you hear people argue confidently and vehemently about X vs Y, but you know there’s actually a Z they’re not even thinking about. Sometimes people talk about this as a “third…
A Conversation with Ross Chapin
One of the great trends in housing from recent decades has been the revived interest in micro-communities, especially those organized around shared courtyards. I first started to learn about this in the late 1990s, and am delighted to say it’s really picked up steam since then.Ross Chapin has been…