This past week I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael W. Moore. He’s the editor-in-chief of Millennial American Dream, which is currently one of (if not the) most highly subscribed urbanist substacks. Millennial American Dream is dedicated to shaping the future of our cities and communities for the better.
I’ve heard some town leaders in Fairhaven talk about how they’d like our town to be able to attract more young professionals. But what would that entail? I think Michael and Millenial American Dream help to flesh out what it is that Millenials often yearn for in their community and (spoiler!) it’s often indistinguishable from what people from other generations want as well.
Michael currently lives in Austin, which as of this writing just eliminated parking minimums! We talk about this smart move on the part of Austin city leadership, along with a host of other topics, including ADUs, the AARP, garage cafes, walkaffordability, and why you should consider moving to Buffalo.
I hope you enjoy the conversation, and be sure to subscribe to Millenial American Dream!
— Will
Will Gardner: So I think a good place to start would be your background. What brings you to this work?
Michael Moore: I grew up in a town called Walnut Creek, which is west of San Francisco. They have a nice traditional downtown. And I don’t think I realized until much later how much of an influence that had on me growing up. Not just the traditional downtown, but also the city took a lot of very early steps to make the city more livable. They were following new urbanist principles decades before other cities. They’re still having trouble getting rid of things like parking minimums. Any early adopters are going to be stuck in the cultural trends from when they adopted, but they were one of the first cities in the U.S. to ban smoking in public places and restaurants. They did a revitalization of the downtown area with a downtown plan to remove street parking. They moved it into structured parking to make it into a more walkable, livable area. So I’ve seen the city grow and change over time in very positive ways that I think reflect my optimism. I’ve seen that growth in my lifetime so I know it can happen elsewhere.
WG: You went to film school originally. What was the route that took you to urbanism?
MM: I tried to go into the film industry in Southern California and failed at that miserably. I worked as a pipe fitter’s apprentice, in logistics, etc. Eventually, I found my way back to northern California and joined a startup called Chariot, which was a transportation startup. So there were a lot of these bus company startups that were launching in San Francisco in 2014. I joined in 2016 and they were shortly acquired by Ford. I spent a lot of time at mobility conferences and I met a lot of city leaders and a lot of different folks I flew all over the country to talk to folks about smart cities. That was my first step into new urbanism professionally. I’d been following Streets Blog and organizations like Strong Towns for around 5 or 10 years at that point. It was where my future was able to converge with my career. Since then I’ve transitioned back into tech more formally with software. My day job is software sales. About six months ago I committed more time and energy to the substack.
WG: What was it that inspired you to start the blog?
MM: I first set it up as a way to preserve Twitter posts that were more popular. I made a list of cities that went viral with around 10 million views. I wanted to preserve those because it was looking like Twitter might not be a thing. I had a lot of ideas while talking to my wife and she said I should just write them down more formally. I experimented with a few different cadences. I found that five articles a week was the most engaging for folks. That’s what allowed me to build up. I’m now #18 in the Substack Culture category. There’s not an urbanism category, but I think I’m the top urbanism blog. Engagement isn’t as high as I’d like it to be. People are reading and then not really liking or commenting as much.
ADUs are a great gateway to better policy because they turn single-family owners into property owners.
WG: Are you intentionally setting out to advocate for certain things as you’re writing articles?
MM: Some of them are clear advocacy articles— recommendations for where people should move or lists of cities that are walkable and affordable. One that I’m proud of that is one in which I basically a rewrote zoning code for all the things I’d like to see in a neighborhood. The reality is that yes, we can get rid of zoning code, but we have to dictate what we want. So I put together what are the things I want and what are the things I don’t want. I wrote a zoning code. Unlimited height, unlimited a lot of things, but I structured it as a traditional row home zoning. I want that and then that ability to grow into more when there’s more… I was at a startup and I had to write a lot of corporate templates and things like that. Something you learn quickly is that people will take templates verbatim and not edit so I knew I needed to put everything in there that I wanted and I needed to be explicit about anything I didn’t want. That way if a public official or an advocate wanted to copy the template, it’s ready to go. Some things might require changes to state law like point block access, but I tried to be as explicit as possible so they can copy and paste it. Most city/local teams on the zoning board or city council or staffers will be able to go through and make changes to make it fully compliant, but I wanted it to be really cut and paste as easily as possible.
WG: That makes a lot of sense. One of the things I’ve been advocating for here is loosening regs on and encouraging ADUs. Do you have a take on this as a starting point for zoning reform?
MM: ADUs are a great gateway to better policy because they turn single-family owners into property owners. Even the AARP is pro-ADU, which would technically make the AARP the largest YIMBY organization! It gives people a mindset to be comfortable with change. It’s literally yes, in my backyard. It frames housing in a more personable way. This is for your family, this is for your friends, this is for extra income. This is for your benefit. It also helps people understand that it won't hurt your home values – it will probably actually bolster home values.
During COVID a lot of people turned their front yards into backyards. That was a huge cultural change and it stuck.
I think that’s a misconception on both sides of the (zoning reform) argument – that people are trying to protect home values. No, people are trying to stop change and they use their home values as justification. They’re working backward from how to prevent change. They’re saying “I don’t want change so I’m going to argue whatever I can think of because I don’t want change.” Some of these neighborhoods, you know, they haven’t changed since they were built. Whether they were built in the 50s, 60s, 90s, 2000s, none of them have changed since they were built. So you’re going from a state of no change since construction – just the trees are bigger, the houses might be a different paint color, you know, but otherwise, nothing has changed in those neighborhoods. It is a big lift to then say hey, we’re going to allow people to build an extra story tall or we’re going to allow people to build in their backyard. But once you get past that threshold, then you have all those people who have built ADUs who are now advocates for more of that. These people now see themselves as property owners with a vested interest in their retirement or other things rather than just a homeowner.
WG: In our town here in Fairhaven, we’re in very blue Massachusetts, but our town is more conservative and solidly middle class. I think what resonates when we have conversations about ADUs is the idea that you should be allowed to do with your property what you want. If you want to put an apartment above your garage that someone can rent or Grandma can stay in or whatever…
MM: And also what’s the difference between an addition, if it just happens to have a second front door? If someone builds an addition and has their parents move in, that’s legal and that’s allowed. All you’re saying is, I’m going to have a second front door so they can have a little more privacy.
WG: When you’re writing Millennial American Dream, are you thinking about how you’re framing some of these arguments to broaden your reach?
It’s not about urbanism for urbanism’s sake. What are the fun and interesting things we can have that we don’t have that we like when we go other places?
MM: I have a lot of readers who are dipping their first toe into urbanism. I have a lot of folks that have never read this stuff before. I have gotten comments on articles about placemaking and block activation and stuff like that. People are like, oh my gosh, this terminology is amazing. It’s fitting what I’ve thought about for a long time. Just from when I started I realized there’s going to be a percentage of my audience that’s discovering this for the first time in the way that I discovered Streets Blog, Strong Towns or City Lab. I was in the same place a decade ago. Being able to try to maintain that understanding as best I can— it’s easy to get the curse of knowledge and write stuff only for your own people.
It seems like culturally right now a lot of people young and old want to be in a place where they can walk around and they don’t have the advocacy terminology or the framing to say “This is what I want.” I like this cute little village in Europe or I like this cute village in the northeast. How do we get more of this? It’s nice the culture is starting to pull rather than to push. For a while advocates were pushing and now it’s that people are tired of being separated from their friends and family and so I’ve definitely seen a lot of positive developments in the overall culture in walking, biking and hanging out. During COVID a lot of people turned their front yards into backyards. That was a huge cultural change and it stuck. You’re seeing suburban areas be more connected and neighborly in a way that it wasn’t before. It’s in pockets. It isn’t everywhere. But it’s enough that people are starting to say, how do I do this? There’s an article I came across years ago where these guys in NJ were making bars in their garages, like super fancy-looking bars. I wrote about that in one of the earlier articles I did. Yeah, you can do that stuff. No one is stopping you from making a cafe in your garage. You just can’t sell the coffee. But if you have it and it’s donation-based or you do like cottage food law business…that’s perfectly allowed. I had a whole article about how to build a garage cafe legally. It’s something I’ve dreamed about doing or thought about doing. I took the research I’d done and wrote it out. It’s not about urbanism for urbanism’s sake. What are the fun and interesting things we can have that we don’t have that we like when we go other places?
WG: What I like about that approach, as well, is that it focuses on what’s the next doable thing as opposed to just saying I wish this U.S. town was Amsterdam.
MM: You look at Amsterdam and you say we’re never going to get there. But a great city I had a chance to visit years ago is Leavenworth, WA. In the 80’s they were a ski town after having been a traditional logging town. They decided in the 80’s to redo their downtown into a European village to look like a Swiss or a German village. It’s been incredibly bountiful for them. It isn’t like it was built by Norwegians. They just decided to make it a cool little town. It’s super popular year-round. People go there for bachelorette and bachelor parties. People go there for the weekend and just to hang out. It’s in a really beautiful setting in a mountain valley. And then of course they have all the German food and all that because they’ve leaned into that. They even had a band that was playing with alpine horns. You know, it's fun! People say disparagingly, oh, I don’t want my town to be like Disneyland! What are you talking about? People fly to Disneyland because it’s like Europe. It’s copying what works. Yeah, it’s a little kitschy and tacky, but at a certain point…after enough time, tacky is no longer tacky. People just forget that it was tacky. You look at how trends flow and something that I remember growing up…all the 70s stuff that the Simpsons would make fun of…the fashions were so lame…and there’s been two or three resurgences in 70s fashion. Let people have fun.
WG: And you don’t have to go all in on something thematic like a German village…
MM: It can be a mishmash. What matters is that people can enjoy themselves. You can park your car or come in on a bus and walk around. That’s ultimately the goal and what people are trying to achieve. When they think of a place they like, how can we do this? That’s the perspective I try to take – what are the things you can do in your neighborhood or what can you do right now? Bike buses, for example, are great advocacy. Even bike buses for adults. That was what Critical Mass was trying to accomplish in the 2000s. It was very punk rock, but I think also we were too young. We didn’t have political influence. Even if it was less punk rock and less disruptive, I don’t think it would have pushed it over the edge. It took all of us growing older to have political influence. We are now the most politically influential cohort.
Low cost of living, but high quality of life. That’s the balance and the framework that someone should be looking at when looking to make their town better.
WG: And by “we,” you mean millennials?
MM: Millennials specifically. But it’s not just our generation. It’s also referring to the new millennium era. People talk about the millennial dream or the millennial American dream and how it’s broken. That was kind of my thinking – how can we make it less broken? How can we take the reins? We’re older. We’re in charge now. We’re settled. We vote. We’re voting consistently. So let’s use our new political power effectively. That’s kind of the overall goal: hey, you have political power, and you’re entering your middle age, let’s use it to create places that we love. To make our places better and to overcome this institutional stickiness that we had for a long time. We had a large cohort of people that were in charge for a long time. The Silent and the Greatest generations got us into this mess, but other generations have wanted parks and stuff. I think a large number of baby boomers are tired of driving. I bought my parents train tickets to visit Southern California earlier this year and they loved it. They’re getting to the point where driving is less appealing, especially long-distance driving.
WG: Yes, that makes sense. And look at the growing number of planned communities for seniors…
MM: Baby boomers are aging in place in a way that Silent and Greatest generation…it was a lot of retirement communities or buying a McMansion or whatever. The housing crisis hasn’t just affected our generation – it’s also affected the boomers. They’re stuck in place. Some can sell and move somewhere else, but even Florida doesn’t work anymore. Prices have gone up so much and now the insurance market is falling apart in Florida. And people don’t want to be away from their kids if they can help it. They want to try to live near family if they can.
WG: I want to talk more about the Millennial Dream. Our town skews older and particularly among town leaders it’s more of a boomer generation of folks. A constant refrain I hear when we’re talking about things like housing is “We need to attract more of those young professionals.” There’s a sense that we need to bring in a young professional class if we’re going to develop the town in a positive way economically and for financial stability. But there doesn’t seem to be a clear sense of what that means. What do the young professionals want?
MM: Low cost of living, but high quality of life. That’s the balance and the framework that someone should be looking at when looking to make their town better. The nice thing is young professionals want what almost everyone wants. Everyone wants walkable cities even if they don’t know it yet. What are the things you like about downtown Disneyland? What are the things you like about a beach city or a European village? It comes down to human scale, so being able to get around on foot, being able to walk to where you can shop or do interesting things or meet up with family and friends. Would you say your town has a traditional downtown?
WG: Yeah, we do. We have an aging downtown, but it’s still hanging on. We have some small businesses there.
MM: I would say focus advocacy and effort on your downtown. It’s less of a push than if you try to put it in more of the suburban ring for example. So basically trying to get things rezoned in a way that makes construction easy. Part of what made the downtown so successful and easy is that it was by-right – you would submit the plans to the city and you would start pretty much right away. So as long as it was safe and sound, great! Build it. If there are concerns that the city has, then you have to make those decisions in terms of safety or culture, then you have to make those decisions in terms of the state law. If people are worried about cars, then put in a parking maximum or no parking at all, no off-street parking. If you’re worried about parking then don’t build parking and people will buy fewer cars.
WG: I think that’s a challenging thing for people to wrap their heads around— this idea that it’s completely normal for a family to have one or no cars. If they’ve lived in a more suburban setting their whole life where the norm is a two or three-car family.
MM: I think people have different needs and different circumstances. Cars are more expensive than they’ve ever been. If people can avoid buying a car to save money, they will. I would phrase it as a cost of living thing. There are options now – electric bikes, golf carts. All these other things that make it a lot easier. If I don’t have to drive to the grocery store. If I can walk to the corner store…people will do that. Also allowing businesses by right is helpful as well. Buffalo, NY is the best example of this. In the whole city, you can have whatever business you want – retail, cafe, bakery, as long as it’s a human-scale business, not like an auto shop. And they also don’t have any parking minimums. Eliminating parking minimums, allowing construction by-right.
WG: Which you all just did in Austin, right? Eliminated parking minimums?
MM: We eliminated parking minimums and we’re streamlining construction. It’s not exactly construction by right, but it’s going to be significant. It’s about getting as close to that as possible, making it as easy as possible. It’s not exactly by-right, but it’s close. People may say, I want the buildings to look a certain way. Well, then you can pre-plan as a city how you want buildings to look and give criteria ahead of time rather than reacting every time. You want to be proactive in your design of what you want in your downtown, not reactive. It’s okay. We can ask for what we want. We can prescribe it. If you want it to look traditional with brick facades, look like a cowboy town, or that sort of thing, yeah. People talk about a great example of Gilmore Girls — everyone loves the show. People love the fact that people can walk around downtown and go to a cafe. That’s a walkable downtown, that’s the ideal. Or the downtown in Back to the Future. These are cool places to live!
We don’t have to worry about converting the suburbs so to speak. It’s about, can we add to it. Can we make it easier for people to access the suburban areas and then can we make it so people who are already running businesses out of their houses? Strong Towns had a great article about how working from home may technically be illegal, which is that a lot of cities have banned working from home.
Can someone build a cafe in their garage? We already have the state laws that allow this to work in terms of cottage food so basically this is saying hey, can we align our city laws to be more in line with the cottage food laws? If someone wants to sell or turn it into a cottage boutique, let them! You don't even have to change how it looks, you can just allow the garage to be converted into a shop of some kind. It doesn’t have to be a big ask where someone is building their house out to the curb.
WG: I like that. That’s the equivalent of saying can we allow for the apartment above the garage.
MM: People are already running businesses out of their homes. If you go on Google Maps, you will see pins for businesses all over suburban neighborhoods. And it’s just about actually making it a feasible place where people can feel comfortable putting a sign out front.
WG: A cafe or a bakery. That’s what’s going to make a neighborhood have more of a walkable feel.
MM: You could have an office, a notary, a co-working space as well, but what you do is you frame it as these are the types of businesses we should allow. And when you push the paperwork you also allow for offices and you allow for other things to be in the same space. Law offices do this all the time. A lot of cities will allow an adjacent residential neighborhood to turn into a bunch of law offices essentially, especially if it’s near city hall or the downtown civic structure. No one seems to have a problem with that. They’re houses and they still look pretty and all that. They just have a sign out front that says esquire.
WG: It almost seems like within urbanist discourse there can be a conflict between the push for incremental development and new urbanist ideas like instant cities— do you wade into this?
MM: There are cases where both are needed. You may need to redevelop a shopping mall that’s burned down or torn down or something like that. If you have a large plot of land you need to plan it out and build it out. Strong Towns has some good things in terms of that, but they’re trying to frame their arguments in a particular way. I do find some disagreements in terms of their objection to things being ”built all at once.” They’re very pro-incrementalism. I think there are some limits to incrementalism and what it can accomplish without some different changes. A great blog is Granola Shotgun. It’s this guy based in San Francisco. He’s mostly kind of retired. He’s a landlord now. He writes about urbanism from a very interesting perspective. He’s able to pull together different things. He has one article called American Khrushchyovka. A khrushchyovka is a Soviet apartment block. He finds a parallel between 5-over-1s and soviet apartment blocks. I think it’s relevant because people complain about these tacky apartment buildings that go up. And look, any place that has needed to build a lot of housing all at once, vertically, has built the same style of building. If you want to make it prettier, just make sure it has nice colors or nice plating. You can make it look nice, but it’s gonna feel weird because it’s new not because it’s necessarily ugly. People will get used to it after a while.
WG: My understanding of the Strong Towns critique is that it’s less about aesthetics; it’s more the fact that it will age all at the same time and if it’s all of owned by one or two hands that that presents a lot of risk. If you’re putting all your eggs in one basket then the thing declines and you’re left with a big bill and a rotting core.
MM: It makes sense from a municipal standpoint, especially for smaller cities. But keep in mind that if you’re trying to make change then you’re going to have to do a mix of small and large projects. I’m not saying buy up town blocks of downtown and do a big project. I’m saying there’s going to be bigger buildings. If you’re advocating for development there’s going to be the 5-over-1 and it might take up the whole block. Even if there’s no parking. That’s a very efficient model. I’ve lived in these buildings that were built in the 60s that were essentially the 60s version of a 5-over-1 and they hold up over time. Yeah, there are challenges like any building from that era, but that’s not an issue with the building style. The buildings can hold up. If it needs to be torn down at some point, then you can tear it down. But the fact that you have larger buildings in the downtown…they will be rebuilt or reconverted in the future at some point just like any larger building. We know how to do it and you need to make your downtown more lively so those investments can happen in the future. If you let it keep declining and declining then it won’t. Incremental development will only get you so far.
WG: I love the term walkaffordable. Did you coin that?
MM: I just I got tired of typing “walkable and affordable” over and over. I brainstormed a list of how to combine these two words and that was the one that seemed to flow the best!
WG: And how are you identifying those walkaffordable areas?
MM: I have very specific criteria. Last year I used the number of $250K properties available as my criteria for affordability. Now I put it at $300K because of inflation. It could have a HOA fee on top of that, but I'm not looking at that I'm just looking at what' the list price is. And then from there it needs to have a walk score of 60 or more. Walkable is anything over 60, 70-90 is even better, but 60 is the minimum for comfortable walkable living. I wanted to pick a number that would broadly work for a wide variety of locations because in a city like New York City if you're in a 60 neighborhood it's going to feel different than 90 neighborhood. But in the majority of the U.S., a 10 or 20 to a 60 is going to be life-changing.
It’s okay to ring the doorbell of your neighbor’s house and hang out when you have unstructured time. Unstructured time is the only way to make friends as an adult.
WG: Have you experienced a tension between the idea of blooming where you’re planted, no matter how imperfect that place is, and at some point just saying I’m going to pack up and go someplace that fits my ideal?
MM: Being able to pick up and move comes from a place of privilege. So I try to have both perspectives. I've written articles saying that it's okay to move to a walkable neighborhood if you're not happy. Some people get stuck in this mentality of feeling guilty for leaving. If you can find a location where it's low cost do that and you will be able to advocate to improve it faster than otherwise. If we also think about it from a density perspective, a single new apartment building can fit a thousand people; in somewhat dense areas, advocating for higher density will have a greater impact on the number of people who can afford places to live just from how the numbers work.
What I normally try to say is to look at your current circumstances. Look at what are the walkable areas that are close to you. There may be a neighborhood that is relatively affordable to your local area and is also walkable that you may be overlooking. One of the downsides of walk score is if you type in a city, it will give you an average for the city. Averages are terrible. If you ask people what they want as their average mustard you will end up with yellow mustard. If you ask people individually, that’s how you get spicy mustard. But you don’t get spicy mustard on the average. Urbanism is fine-grained. You lose the fine grain with averages— that’s why I try to avoid them. This year I focused more on neighborhoods. Neighborhood level is more important and valuable. Look, if you can’t afford to move to SF, that’s okay. I can’t either. There’s Baltimore, there’s Philly, there’s Chicago, there’s even in New York you’ve got Queens and the Bronx, which are surprisingly affordable mostly because they have a lot of co-ops.
WG: And for some of us there’s an appeal to being in a place that’s far from the ideal. If we’re involved in this work we can make an impact and we can see improvement.
MM: If anyone wants to move somewhere that’s decently walkable, but still needs a lot of work, I recommend Buffalo, NY. The reason is twofold. It has a traditional downtown, kind of a rust belt city but they’ve enacted a lot of policy that’s making it easy to make changes. For about 100-200K you can buy a 2 - 4 unit house with a traditional mortgage. You might be buying it with 5% down. FHA just released the 5% mortgage. There’s even these new 1% down mortgages. And NY State has a good down payment system and a good minimum wage. Even if you work in a coffee shop, you’ll be able to make a decent wage. You’ll be able to buy a home, rent out the extra units in that home, and you can convert the ground floor into a business if you want. If you want a bakery, a cafe, a bike shop, or whatever, you can do that. There are no heavy restrictions.
WG: You wrote a powerful piece on harnessing the power of group effort. You write, “let’s pivot from an individual siloed approach to one of shared responsibility and mutual aid. Our neighborhoods are brimming with untapped potential waiting for a spark to ignite the engine of collective effort.” I feel like there’s a broader theme here about trust. Are we sometimes limited by a lack of trust in our communities and if so, how can we create more of it?
MM: So a different post that’s related is my post entitled “Bother Your Neighbors to Build Community.” That was a distillation of this theme. My wife is Indian. I’ve spent time in India and spent time with her family. It’s a more communal culture. I’ve also heard different things from folks who live in different parts of Europe or elsewhere. My brother lives in Japan and my sister lives in London, so I’ve had the opportunity to experience these different cultures worldwide. Especially when I look at how my wife and her family interact in India and how neighbors interact…people are very nosy! It’s like the jokes you would see in older movies or TV shows where you have the nosy neighbors getting into everyone’s business and being super gossipy. It can be a good thing. I think we threw the baby out with the bathwater when we opted to compartmentalize our lives from our friends, families, and neighbors. That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to rekindle. It’s okay to ring the doorbell of your neighbor’s house and hang out when you have unstructured time. Unstructured time is the only way to make friends as an adult. You can have an activity like we’re a book club or we go to the gym together, but it needs to be somewhat unstructured to build a friendship. If you ever have those times with a friend that starts in one place and goes to another place. Every day can be like that. That’s what it’s like in other cultures.
WG: That’s been a highlight since we worked to create a sense of community on our block. We will have evenings where we’re all just standing out on our street. Someone will have cocktails; maybe someone is playing music. Kids are riding their bikes and skateboards and no one planned this as an event.
MM: It’s liveliness. You just hang out.
WG: That used to be the norm.
MM: It’s life! That’s human flourishing. Again, COVID changed a lot of things. A lot of people realized they were working themselves to death or were not living the life they wanted to live. It was an existential crisis and so there’s an opportunity to work with people who have this different perspective now. Hey, look, things have gotten so much better. Everyone rose to the occasion. People hang out together now… I do think it’s important to organize formally, as well as informally. Have a neighborhood organization with a name and give people titles within that organization. There are so many things we need to change and advocate for so we need a certain amount of structure. We need to be able to go to those community meetings and say, hey, this is the Southside Neighbors Association and we want this. If we don’t show people in leadership or get people in leadership that want these changes then we won’t get them or we won’t get them fast enough. That’s where the formal organization side of it comes in. I also try to emphasize the informal…put in some time for fun. The reason the fraternal organizations were so fun…the Elks club, the Lions…people were just hanging out! I didn’t learn until I was older that they have a bar in there. I advocate for people to build their own organizations. You can have a goal of what you’re trying to accomplish. Some of those organizations were veterans orgs or to raise money or awareness. That’s the thing: it’s okay to make your own community. When I was growing up, I was in the Boy Scouts, there was a dads club. They would just hang out. There would be some planning and budgeting, but it was mostly just to hang out. There was also a moms club that did the same thing.
My mom was a registered dietician and worked for the county. Remember how farmers’ markets started popping up everywhere? She was at the forefront of that movement in our area. She’s the reason why there is an ongoing farmers market in Walnut Creek and that county. There was one in the city, but there wasn’t one in the suburbs. She had some funding from the county and the state. She had to build the advocacy and create an organization that would outlive her input. I didn’t realize at the time that it was as new as it was. I need to interview her at some point!
WG: Sometimes we can take these established things for granted and forget that it was often a small group of individuals who made it happen.
MM: It was at a time when it wasn’t easy to get local or organic food. Supermarkets did it later after farmers markets. And now it’s like they always have live music now. That wasn’t a thing when I was growing up, but I’m glad it’s evolved. And now other organizations are doing night markets with food and music.
WG: Michael, thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. And thanks for the writing and teaching you do through Millenial American Dream!
MM: My pleasure!
Very inspiring article!