Edwards Manor House

10/18/2026

Regular old residents are way down the list of people we think about when running our communities.

Big businesses drive most decisions. Especially those located in some other town. Because we love big businesses, we put to work a whole cadre of experts and give them the community keys to try and entice the big business folks.

Then comes the tourist. If they come to town, things are going to be real cool. So we put together another team focused entirely on what tourists want and how to get them to drop off their cash.

We go through enormous effort trying to get people to our towns. But the strange thing is, there are already a bunch of people that live there. Every town. You can tell because when you drive around you can see their houses and apartments. They have already made the decision to call your town home.

What if we made them a priority?

What if we treated them as well as we treat the out-of-towner?

Funny enough, the places we love to visit are the places that are also the nicest to live. The towns that put residents first are winning on every single front. Strong tourism, high quality of life, high property values, thriving local businesses.

It turns out, when you take care of the people who already live there, everyone else wants to show up too.

09/14/2026

The cure for apathy isn't a plan.

It's not a meeting. It's not a study. It's not a comprehensive strategy.

It's action.

Small, visible, tangible action. Pull the weeds. Paint the building. Plant the flowers. Fix the broken window. Clean the sidewalk.

Every time someone takes action in a community, something shifts. Not just in the place itself, but in the people watching. They see that progress is possible. They see that someone gives a damn. And slowly, they start to give a damn too.

Action is contagious. Apathy is too. Choose wisely.

09/05/2026

A healthy community is actually the default setting.

This is what most of us forget. We are built for community. Humans are optimistic by default. We want to believe tomorrow will be better than today. We tend to see the best in one another. We want to belong somewhere. A well-functioning, optimistic, self-reliant community is not some rare achievement. It is how we are meant to operate.

So why do so many of our towns feel like the opposite?

Because something has gone wrong with the soil. We have an imbalance. And when the healthy majority steps back from civic life, that void gets filled. In every instance I have witnessed, it never gets filled by people with good intentions. The bullies, the pessimists, the conspiracy theorists and the complainers fill it instead. Not because they are more numerous, but because the rest of us stopped showing up.

Here is what I want you to understand. Those people are not the norm. They are the weeds. They only dominate when the flowers disappear. And the flowers disappear when we stop tending to them.

The solution is not complicated. It does not require a strategic plan or a consultant or a comprehensive study. It requires the healthy majority to show up. To make civic life fun and social and worth participating in. No one has ever proven that a boring meeting is more effective. No one has shown me that joy in a process diminishes outcomes. People want to feel connected. They want to have fun. They want to be part of something worth caring about.

All of us deserve to live in places that make us happy, that provide us with rich social connections and a sense of belonging. Every one of us should have a place to call home that enhances our mental, social, physical and fiscal health.

Trust in human nature. Trust in your fellow community members. The weeds only win when we let them.

Show up. Tend to the field. Fill it with flowers.

07/31/2026

Every city obsesses about outsiders.

Tourists. New businesses. Outside investment. The next big employer. The national chain that will finally put them on the map.

Meanwhile the people who already live there, who already pay taxes, who already chose this place and are raising their kids here, get nothing.

It’s backwards.

Residents don’t need much. They want to be able to take a walk without being mowed down by a car. They want safe places for their kids to play. They want a friend on the block and a coffee shop worth lingering in. They want a downtown that makes them feel something when they walk through it.

They want to feel proud of where they live.

That pride isn’t a soft or secondary goal. It’s the foundation of everything else. Proud residents maintain their properties. They support local businesses. They show their town off to friends and family. They fight for their community when it matters. They stay.

And when people stay, when they’re genuinely connected to and proud of the place they call home, that is when the real investment happens. Not because someone chased it, but because they built something worth being part of.

Stop chasing outsiders.

Take care of the people already here and give them something to feel good about.

In the immortal word of Stephen Stills, “Love the one you’re with.”

07/13/2026

He’s 100% correct. It’s a choice!
Let’s encourage our city to start making better choices!

Vacant property doesn’t just look bad.

It increases crime. Depresses property values. Diminishes the tax base. Repels investors, tenants, and tourists. Breeds apathy.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: there is absolutely no reason any community should ever suffer from it.

You have the legal authority to do something about it. Most towns just choose not to.

More to come this week.

06/26/2026

Every community I have ever worked with believes it is just about to arrive. One more project. One more development deal. One more ribbon cutting and revitalization will finally be complete.

I have heard this hundreds of times. I am not opposed to optimism. Optimism is essential. But this particular brand of optimism worries me, because it is not how any of this actually works.

You would never say you are one gym visit away from being in shape. You would never tell someone you are one German lesson away from fluency. You understand intuitively that those things are processes, not products. They are trajectories, not destinations.

Cities work exactly the same way.

Revitalization is not a finish line. It is a direction. You are either moving toward health or sliding toward decline, and what determines which way you go is not the once-in-a-decade project. It is the ten thousand smaller decisions happening every day. What city council approves. How staff gets deployed. Whether the nonprofit shows up. Whether the property owner fixes the facade. Whether the shop owner sweeps the entry.

The "almost there" framing is seductive but dangerous because it sets you up for silver bullet thinking. If revitalization is almost complete, then surely one transformational project will push it over the line. It never does. And communities that have been waiting for that final piece of the puzzle have been waiting a long time.

Here is what I would rather you hear: you do not have to do it all at once. In fact, you cannot. Start with the weeds and the trash. Then the paint. Then the street trees. Then one day you look up and people are renovating buildings and nobody can quite remember when things started to change because things started to change everywhere, all at once, slowly and then all at once.

That is the process. That is the magic. It is not the destination. There is no destination.

Stop asking when you will arrive and start asking what you are doing today.

06/11/2026

Blight can’t be erased overnight.

But decline can be halted in an instant.

The moment you begin to maintain, you are fending off the forces of chaos and disorder. The moment you start getting incrementally better, you shift a trajectory. And trajectories dictate where you end up.

It may start with pulling weeds and picking up trash. It may lead to planting flowers and applying paint. It’s hard to say exactly where the process takes your town, but it is guaranteed to be somewhere better.

A community cannot improve itself and not experience a boost in self-esteem.

When people see that progress is possible, something changes. When they become proud of their surroundings, they stop distancing themselves from their town and start identifying with it.

You don’t need a master plan. You don’t need a grant. You don’t need permission.

You need a broom and enough people who refuse to accept decline.

Start there.

06/11/2026

06/10/2026

Contact me if you want to be part of our “weirdo” group. It’ll take all of us pulling together to make a difference in our community!

I want to talk to the weirdos for a minute.

The preservationists. The urbanists. The building huggers. The people who show up to council meetings and actually give a damn.

You are not the norm. Most people don’t know how to look at chaos and envision order. Most can’t view blight as opportunity. Most have never lived in a place that actually improved in their lifetime.

And we can’t keep hoping they’ll suddenly become civic-minded. We can’t keep trying to convince people to show up and care.

We have to start doing the relentless work of making things better.

Not hoping for change. Making it.

Because here’s what happens when you do: The potential that only you weirdos could imagine starts to seem realistic to everyone else. Progress stops feeling impossible and starts feeling expected.

And when things really get good? People will want to associate themselves with your town to boost their own self-image.

That’s when you know you’ve won.

Keep going, weirdos. Your town needs you, we all need you!

06/08/2026

“Why would you move here?”

“Why would you want to start a business here?”

“Why would you renovate a building here?”

I hear these questions in a lot of places I visit. People asking them of their own community, about their own home.

That’s not pessimism or realism either, but low civic self-esteem and it’s plaguing too many of our places.

The problem with low civic self-esteem is that it can’t be fixed with the typical approach. There are no technical solutions that lift self-esteem. All the grant money in the world can’t make a community like itself. Even the best plans can’t force a town to believe in itself.

Cities don’t behave like machines. They behave like people. Because cities are made of people, not parts.