We’ll get better, whenever

Reposting this from my Facebook. This is where this should’ve gone, anyway. Many updates coming soon, I hope.

This time eight years ago, I was in the process of transferring out of CU-Boulder. Like many college freshman, I realized that my chosen university was not a great fit for me, and fled to something more manageable. (Go Terps.) I wound up at Boulder in the first place because CU is one of the few schools with an undergraduate urban planning program, and that’s what I wanted to do. It’s still what I want to do. I am generally bummed out that it’s not the thing I do, and in the time since my freshman year I’ve made a career out of false starts in that direction.

I was graciously granted a scholarship to ‪#‎yimby2016‬ this weekend, a coalition that I hope will spark a more reasonable discourse, and result in better policies, around affordability, livability, and transportation in cities of every size in our country. It’s meaningful that I’m able to attend a conference about these issues adjacent to the place I believed would give me what I needed to break into those fields.

As goofy as it sounds, I often feel like planning, transportation, and land use are parties whose doors I’m scrabbling at, begging to be let in. I especially want to be doing this work in Cleveland, which, for all its seemingly intractable complications, *will* someday face San Francisco and D.C.-esque affordability issues, at a much broader scale than just, say, Ohio City.

I’m excited to be a very small part of what I hope will be a very large movement toward inclusive, accessible places, if only for just a weekend.

(For reference.)

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