Flint is obviously a city, but what are the local policy decisions that help or hinder its ability to have true “city” characteristics like walkability, good public transportation, housing density, and connected neighborhoods?
That’s a core question members of Strong Towns Flint discuss and advocate for locally. Strong Towns is a nonprofit organization with international reach that helps empower everyday residents to successfully organize and work with local elected officials and municipal bodies to champion people-focused development, zoning, and fiscal policies in their cities. There are local Strong Towns groups, called “conversations,” in the U.S. and abroad.
The Flint group grew out of work that another local grassroots organization, Flint Residents for Stronger Neighborhoods, began in 2021. That group had organized to push for the city to adopt a zoning rewrite that the Flint planning commission had approved in 2017. After that approval, it lingered for years waiting for City Council approval.
“We really started as a coalition to support that effort, to try and make it easier to build housing, to do commercial businesses, all that kind of stuff,” said Joel Arnold, president of Strong Towns Flint and a candidate for Flint City Council in the fifth ward. “That group was successful, the zoning ordinance was passed in the summer of 2022 and went into effect in October, that was a complete page one rewrite of all land use regulations in the city of Flint.”
That experience led to a recognition that, although Flint has always had a vibrant community of activists who speak up for specific causes and people, there wasn’t a group at the time focused on issues around urbanism, walkable communities, housing affordability, neighborhood development, public transportation, and similar issues.
“Over time, we were more and more referencing materials from Strong Towns,” Arnold said. “So we wound up just deciding maybe a year or two ago to become a formal affiliate of the Strong Towns movement. The group really exists to try and be an advocate and a voice for good urbanism in Flint. We will never out-compete the suburbs on who can have the most strip malls with chain restaurants, the most detached houses with giant yards and garages, widest roads with the most surface parking. If we try to compete on those grounds as a city, we will lose because we’re competing with places that were built from scratch to do that. But if we compete on the level of the things that we kick the out-county’s butt at, which is walkable communities, diverse types of housing, diverse neighborhoods, public transportation access, those are things we can win all day. That’s what plays to our strengths as a city.”
The group meets every other month at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 711 S. Saginaw Street, downtown Flint. The next meeting is Thursday, May 21, at 6 p.m. Arnold said that most meetings have approximately 10-15 people, and any members of the public learning more about the work Strong Towns champions is welcome to join. Meetings and other events are always shared on the Strong Towns Flint Facebook page.
Strong Towns Flint members also go directly to different community groups to collaborate, share news, and encourage others to get involved in urban planning efforts in Flint. Arnold is speaking with West Flint Community Watch later this month, and they’re also talking with other local Strong Towns groups and community organizations across Michigan who are engaged in similar work to meet and share ideas in the future.
A core component of Strong Towns as an organization is taking an incremental approach to making changes in the community. Often, people have great ideas for large projects, but those take a lot of money, time, planning, and coordination to pull off and create the desired impact. Instead, focusing on low-hanging and easier to accomplish tasks can build positive momentum that make the bigger projects less daunting.
“The tagline that’s always used in Strong Towns conversations or media is what you should do is do the smallest thing, and then after you do that, do the next smallest thing, and the next smallest thing, and the next smallest thing,” Arnold said. “In Flint, I think we have a long history of being really good at the $50 million projects, but sometimes we’re really bad at the $5,000 projects. I think if as a city we spent more time thinking about development in an incremental way, and less time thinking about development as this one big project or this one big mega thing that’s gonna be our ticket to economic prosperity, we’d have a much healthier cityscape.”
Part of how Strong Towns helps those smaller goals get accomplished is by teaching people how to organize, how to talk to their local government or make public comments at meetings, and how to collectively advocate for policy changes, needed repairs or upgrades, and other things that may not get a lot of attention but can make tangible improvements for residents.
In addition to helping advocate for adoption of the new zoning regulations, Strong Towns Flint has been involved in several other successful initiatives. They advocated for new MTA routes that were implemented with community input late last year. They also supported a successful effort to narrow a portion of M-21/Court Street from four lanes to two, and successfully lobbied for changes to the Michigan Department of Transportation’s I-475 reconstruction plan that undue some of the harm caused to neighborhoods and pedestrian friendliness when that expressway was built in the 1970s. Currently, they are championing proposed zoning ordinance changes being considered by the Flint City Council that would provide more options for property owners and developers in residential areas that would support different types of housing options.
“Flint is considering a suite of zoning reforms called Housing Readiness, which would make it easier to do things like build single family homes and duplexes across the city, reduce parking requirements, reduce things like setback requirements or minimum lot sizes that make it hard to build,” Arnold said. “It’s all these things that seem really arcane and small until you’re trying to build a house. Or until you buy the lot next to you and you find out that the minimum lot size is bigger than that lot, so you can’t actually build a house on it.”
Although the work that Strong Towns does in the city is heavily focused on policy, Arnold said the group is also focused on ways to make urban planning a fun and engaging topic. They typically have pizza and refreshments at their meetings, and they’ve also regularly organized happy hours for people to talk and network in a less formal setting. Twice, they’ve also brought in writers with major followings to discuss city issues – M. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, and Henry Grabar, a writer for The Atlantic who came to Flint to discuss parking policy.
“At both of those book talks, a book talk about zoning and a book talk about parking, each time we had like 75 people show up,” Arnold said. “Which was indicative of the fact that this is a topic that people want to talk about and get engaged in and there just has not an avenue to do so (prior to Strong Towns Flint). We’re endlessly trying to grow this kind of movement and network.”
Arnold, who grew up in the Flint area and has lived in cities like Philadelphia, Dublin, and East Lansing, is passionate about this work because he simply loves living in cities. He currently lives in Flint’s historic Carriage Town Neighborhood and is excited about the city’s future and the assets that exist here.
“There’s such a joy in living in dense, walkable, mixed use places,” he said. “You see your neighbors more often. You can run into a neighbor on the sidewalk. I think it’s just a lot easier for communities to get to know each other in those kinds of places.”
Combining that passion with knowledge and tools for residents to play a role in shaping what their cities look like is at the core of why he’s continued to be involved with Strong Towns Flint. He said that many people who start coming to Strong Towns meetings haven’t been to a City Council meeting before, or made a public comment. Sharing knowledge of how to advocate for residents and neighbors is a vital part of their work.
“Don’t underestimate the impact that you can have on these kinds of decisions,” Arnold said. “There’s a real potential for the citizens who get involved to kind of shape the direction of conversation. Passion is important, but you also need to know how to deploy that passion in a productive way at moments of decision-making.”
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