Bottom-Up Shorts: How To Legalize Strong Neighborhoods
Sean Hayford Oleary is a city council member in Richfield, Minnesota. A Strong Towns member of seven years, Oleary has helped reintroduce duplexes, reduce parking mandates, and support walkable, financially strong neighborhoods in his community. In this episode of Bottom-Up Shorts, he and Norm discuss the progress Richfield is making in becoming a stronger town.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06
Hi there. Welcome to bottom up shorts. I'm Norm with strong towns, and after meeting 1000s of strong towns, members often think I've got to tell you about this person. Well, that's what bottom up shorts is all about. Quick introductions to regular people doing exciting things. They're not superheroes. They once felt like you might unsure if they could make a difference, but they've set out and changed their community through small, simple steps in order to make a significant difference. And today, my guest is Sean Hayford O'Leary. Sean has been a member of strong towns for seven years now, and is a key leader in richfield's campaign to be the strongest town in America this year, city council member and advocate for housing reform, Sean coined the phrase legalize. Richfield as a really clever way to highlight not only the outdated zoning rules that exist in the city, but also the steps needed to change them. And his leadership has helped to reintroduce duplexes, reduce parking mandates and support a walkable, financially strong neighborhoods. And so I'm so glad that Sean shared this time with us, and I'm excited to introduce him to you. Enjoy this episode, Sean. Welcome to bottom up shorts, and as we go through this strongest town contest process in Richfield, has been nominated and has made a great submission and entered the Sweet 16 round at the time of this recording. What do you think makes Richfield stand out as a strong town? I
Sean Hayford Oleary 1:26
think we're hitting a lot of the things locally that strong towns has been talking about for years, since I've been a member, and well before, I think, particularly the areas that we're excelling at is making progress on our zoning code, making progress in what we support and what we're about when it comes to new development. So by that, I mean, of course, the zoning code, but also things like what we choose to subsidize and how we approach that. We're also making really significant progress, and we've gotten a lot of recognition locally for our progress on streets, and that's also how I actually first got involved in Richfield was making progress for bike and walk issues you
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 1:59
had shared in the application about the preservation of Woodlawn terrace Manufactured Home Park as an example of community driven action. Do you want to pick up what? What allowed that effort to succeed when many other efforts to save areas like this sometimes don't succeed at all?
Sean Hayford Oleary 2:16
Yeah. So again, Woodlawn terrace is a fairly small manufactured home community, the vast majority of similar communities, you know, commonly known as trailer parks, they've mostly gone away. They were an affordable for sale housing option. At one point, they allow people to get into a home that meets their needs, that could be affordable for the long term, in a way an apartment or house is not. I think the biggest thing that that change over the past 20 years in Richfield is just not seeing affordable housing as a burden, but as an asset, because these are our neighbors. These are people that need a place to live, and they belong in Richfield. So that's kind of the foundation. But in terms of the actual action, I think the fact that we're such a small city, you know, as part of an urban area, we immediately border Minneapolis, but we're only 36,000 people, and that allows us to be really flexible and nimble. So for example, we change some of our programs. We move funding around in our Housing and Redevelopment Authority subsidies to be able to directly support this, we're able to work with another nonprofit organization that helped organize the residents to actually buy the land underneath their trailers, their manufactured homes. And we even change things like our down payment assistance program to say that manufactured homes would be eligible in the same way that a traditional single family home at a foundation would be,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 3:33
which I mean certainly, as we campaign on housing, for example, the idea of we need to make renormalize the types of conditions that are present for starter homes, and in many cases, um, you know, at Mobile what used to be called Mobile homes or manufactured homes, you know, serve as as a start or as a long term solution for a lot of people. And we have increasingly made those things very difficult. And you found a lot of things in the municipal codes that were making things very difficult, and your community has grappled with the question of, how do we sort of simplify, or maybe not necessarily simplify, but improve the capacity of our community in order to be able to bring about more housing and things like that. And I Can you unpack the idea of legalizing Richfield and maybe picking up on an article that we published on our site too, which is the idea that many of our neighborhoods are full of illegals. That is full of types of housing that were previously built, and then many of the neighborhoods were completely down zoned, making many of the types of homes in those existing neighborhoods actually illegal to rebuild if they were burned down. In your case, you confronted that in even campaigned on that. What emerged from that?
Sean Hayford Oleary 4:43
Yeah, what emerged from that was, was legalized in Richfield. It was turning back some of the newer restrictions we'd added. So, you know, reach field, like a lot of communities, it was a small community before World War Two. It grew really significantly after World War Two, and then in the decades since 1960 to 2000 We had this progressive suburbanization of the zoning code, where it increasingly prioritized big attached garages out front, bigger homes, bigger lots, and less diversity of what types of uses are allowed. So bearing duplexes was one of the earliest things. Some of those other things came later, and the idea of legalizing Richfield was we know that this expansion worked really well for reach builders. It made us the community we are today, and that's because it was about providing the homes that people needed at the price that they can afford. And I felt, I felt this very personally. I don't, you know, I live on a house that, until last year, was on a lot that is too small to be to be planted again, until last year, it's a 50 foot lot which we did not allow to be created new from whatever 1980 to, you know, 2023, or so and so that was very personal. Like I, I like my yard. I host, you know, I host yard parties. I can fit a three bedroom house. And many, many people have converted similar houses to four or five bedrooms. It serves my needs, fine. And I don't think that a new homeowner or a new home, our new builder, should be prevented from doing things like like I am, you know,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 6:05
and and what I appreciate about it is that it was taking your path and identifying it in the context of the path that community had already walked. And maybe this is one of those things that strong towns really emphasizes, is the idea that we should learn from the spooky wisdom of cities, that there's sort of this ingrained sort of capacity building, sort of elements within each of our communities, and that increasingly, we've done the opposite of allowing those things to thrive and flourish. Said, we started to cap things, started to restrict things. Even a 50 foot lot, I'm like, you know, I'll take a 50 foot lot like that that works so well. And I think it really underscores in a lot of our communities, the idea that if it doesn't work, you know, if I don't envision myself in a such and such a place, then nobody wants that. And that is a tough challenge to grapple with when a lot of decision making is being done by elected officials that often have a very defined vision of what constitutes success and really struggle at times to really articulate, oh, for other people, they're going to define what they are comfortable with or eager to embrace in ways that are quite different from us. And so I think as you work at that, it sounds like your community is building a lot of capacity to, it at minimum, remove many of the barriers, but also creating a lot of that civic infrastructure. Can you touch on, you know, an element of a strong town is having really strong citizens within it. Um, what are you doing in order to make that happen? Not maybe not specifically to you, but even more broadly, how are you part of that process?
Sean Hayford Oleary 7:38
Yeah, I got it. I mean, I think one of the biggest structural changes was really actively working over the last 15 years to get a much wider variety of people engaged, like a lot of cities, we have so appointed advisory volunteer boards that, you know, study specific issues like transportation design, like like a planning commission that makes recommendations on the zoning code, and then they give that to the city council and to consider that recommendation and to weigh their advice. And when I first got involved on my first commission, shortly after I moved to Richfield, it was overwhelmingly older residents who lived exclusively in single family homes wider than the makeup of the community and so on. And changing that process to make it more convenient to do much more active recruiting throughout the community was one step, I think also, we had a lot of effort toward transparency. So many decisions in this type of government are made somewhat informally before the official final public hearing in open to the public work sessions, but open to the public and like accessible to the public, are two pretty different things. Having a date and time that, in theory, people could show up at it's quite different than having the entire agenda, all the packet and everything people are considering online, having a recording of the thing available. And so I think that transparency has really helped. I think online engagement has also helped, both stuff coming from the city, and then also just like individual Facebook groups. Other things. I've used social media a lot, both as an elected official and before that, and that really makes makes it accessible to people and makes them feel that they can get involved. Yeah,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:07
maybe share with us, then how it is that you got involved. I am assuming you weren't born with a zoning handbook in hand. And so what was your path to becoming the person that's here on council and participating in efforts like this and taking on ideas from the strong towns approach and trying to see them implemented in your community.
Sean Hayford Oleary 9:28
Yeah. I mean, honestly, it probably was strong towns in part, that broadened my interests. But in terms of bridgefield and moved here right after college in 2012 at the time, I talk about this a lot in our strongest town application every like, arterial Street in town was a four lane undivided roadway, barely had sidewalks, didn't have anything for bikes, and it was, it was very uncomfortable. I first, you know, my first angle on this was, like, I just need to learn how to be, you know, teach people that like they could ride safely in a 35 mile an hour road, and they just need the right skills. And so I. Became a leak cycling instructor, and I learned how to do that. And I learned some cycling savvy stuff as well another organization that promotes the idea that the John Forrester idea, that that cars can can coexist with bikes in a safe way. And then I very quickly realized, like, Okay, well, maybe I can convince myself of that I don't know that I can only convince more than a few people of that idea we need some real change if this is actually going to move the needle. And so I started getting involved with a group of residents that wanted to see bike paths. I saw, again, talking about Richfield being a really nimble community. Saw really quick progress on that. We're able to get a restriped Just a couple of years ago, or a couple of years after that, on nickel and Avenue, we were able to influence significantly the design of our Main Street, 66th Street, to get protected bike lanes and some of the first ones in the region at that scale, and it made a huge difference. But you know, as I got more into that, you also start to realize the land use side of this, of like, well, this, this only does so much good if density is low, if every site is set up where you've got a big parking lot in front and even if the street is perfect, you can't get to the front door. You don't want to get to the front door because it's so unpleasant you're not quite there. So I got really interested in the land use side of things. I got appointed to my city's planning commission, and I served on that for six years before I ran for office. And I'm still really interested in this intersection of like, where the right design for bike walk beats the right kind of development that actually supports
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 11:20
that. And I think it underscores certainly the requirement for incremental adaptation and learning, identifying, hey, we'll never hit on just the right fit, but at the same time, we can certainly make a lot of improvements. And like you said, when you have something as simple as restriping the lanes in order to enable new types of users to be more safely accommodated in the very same spaces that vehicles are passing through. That makes a huge difference, and certainly speaking to that need. And maybe as we close and you can take this wherever you want to go, as your town has been nominated now for strongest town contest and is making its way through it, that is certainly a hopeful thing, and it's a good opportunity for the community to rally together and to love itself. But what is, what is the thing that gives you hope in your place?
Sean Hayford Oleary 12:06
I think the biggest thing is the sense that momentum keeps growing around these things that are so important to me and important to the community. One, one proud accomplishment we had is we went out and asked the community to support a sales tax on three major parks projects that, and one of them is about, you know, creating new community spaces, making them more walkable than they were before, especially this nature center that's right on the edge of our downtown. And people supported this in huge numbers, two to one ratio, to get these passed when some communities didn't pass at all. So it was a great sign. And I see that with streets too. We do a ton of open houses, we do a ton of public engagement on street, on street projects, and, for example, roundabouts. You know, Richfield has been a leader in roundabouts. The first ones were pretty controversial because it wasn't familiar to people. And now you'll go to these open houses, you'll see the kind of battle of the post its when people get their input is, there'll be, you know, maybe a proposed roundabout in a layout you have one post it note saying, no more roundabouts. We have too many of those. And then you get, like, five post it notes around it being like, don't, don't listen to that person. I want another round about like, this is better. And particularly, I would say, because I hear this criticism all the time that, okay, it works for cars. It's not great for bike and walk, both. We've changed the designs to make it better, and people have learned how to deal with some of the uncertainty that it creates, and realize, okay, on the one hand, is not quite as assured as a you know, a red light might seem, but it also means a shorter crossing distance. It means not having to wait for a light cycle. It means these other benefits, and so it's great to see again, not only are we getting these done, but the sense that the community is really liking what they see, and they want to see more
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 13:34
of it. Yeah. And I think that's, that's just one of the elements of share, inviting people into that process, and then seeing like as we as we work the designs and improve them over time and implement them in those spaces, it almost removes, at some level, like that purity test of, hey, is this? You know that you mentioned vehicular cycling, where people are just in the lane and just basically need to figure out how to do it properly. And you know, if they don't feel safe, that's their fault. I'm caricaturing a little bit, but I think what you're saying is, no we can. We can do those core things that are going to make very noticeable differences and improve people's experiences. And, you know, make visible the good before you even make it permanent, and then allow for that adaptation and refinement to go and so with that, Sean, it's been wonderful to chat with you. Thank you so much for coming on bottom up shorts and to all the folks that are out there listening. Take note, because you can also look around at your community. Identify what is it that we used to have in our community that we want to see more of? What are the types of things that are holding us back? And Sean has done together with so many others in his community, take action together in order to press for a better future for our communities. And so with that, take care and take care of your places.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Richfield made it to the Sweet 16 in this year’s Strongest Town Contest, from a list of almost 40 nominees. There are many great lessons that cities of all sizes can learn from their hard work. Click here to read more about their progress, and remember to vote next week in the Final Four matchup!
Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn)
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