I am excited to announce the arrival of season 2 of Sharing Boulder! I have just completed editing two episodes and have recorded footage for two more and have another couple more in the works in addition to a long list of people I intend to contact.
You can listen to this blog post here or watch it here.
I want to start this post with a heartfelt thank you to everyone who came on the show last year. We had 20 guests in addition to me and David spanning 21 regular episodes and 7 mini bonus extras. Guests included politicians, policy experts, scholars, and local activists. In preparation for season 2, I listened to the entire first season again and I have to say – I feel really honored that so many interesting and thoughtful people were willing to come on the podcast and share their positive visions for Boulder. I would like to extend the following invitation to each of you – you are welcome back on the show any time. Just say the word.
There’s no hiding the fact that this is a niche podcast with just a handful of regular listeners. And with players that automatically download episodes the meager numbers for the podcast are probably inflated. Be that as it may, between downloads and views we had nearly 2100 “listens” tallied for season one. I thought it would be fun to list off the top five most popular episodes:
5) Episode 016 with Claudia Hanson Thiem on Co-housing, Coops, and car-lite living. This was one of my favorites and I listened to this episode with my high school senior while on a road trip we took last year to visit colleges. I hope it helped her to start thinking about possible futures when it comes to housing.
4) Episode 011 with Jen Livovich of Feet Forward. I enjoyed recording this episode because my wife came along and participated. We were both inspired and touched by Jen’s personal story of coming out of homelessness and her compassionate service to the unhoused community.
3) Episode 009 with Nicole Speer who was a prospective city council candidate at the time. I was encouraged by her participation and her positive feedback about listening to the podcast. This was the first of a series of six candidate interviews who ran for office in 2021. I was gratified to see Nicole win but I don’t think we can take any credit as three of the six candidates we interviewed won seats on city council which is the same batting average as the two of the four candidates that we didn’t interview who also won.
2) Episode 015 with Steve Rosenblum who was a city council candidate in the thick of a heated campaign in mid-September. This 93-minute episode was the second longest episode surpassed only by the interview with Matt Benjamin which weighed in at 102 minutes. Matt deserves an honorable mention with his episode coming in at 6th place.
1) Episode 001 Welcome to Sharing Boulder with yours truly and my co-host David Adamson. David has been a great conversation partner and mentor. And while I do my best to heat up the planet with the hot air from my mouth by talking about the need for more housing, David is out there giving everything he’s got to actually build more housing. You can expect more updates on his efforts soon.
I also want to send out a heartfelt thank you to anyone who listened to our kick-off episode of Sharing Boulder or any episode for that matter and gave us encouragement to continue this project. There are a lot of podcasts out there that deserve attention and there is an avalanche of other content you could be spending your time with. So, I am honored that you have tuned in and listened. If you enjoy the podcast, then please drop me a note and tell me what you like about it or what you have learned. I would take any feedback including criticisms – knowing what you didn’t like or what should be improved would be most valuable. If there is someone you would like me to interview, then please introduce me. Heck, maybe you would like to be on the podcast. If you have relevant expertise and/or lived experience when it comes to the many ways that Boulder makes it difficult for people to afford living here or perhaps you feel you have been directly excluded from the Boulder housing market, then reach out to me and let’s connect! I can be found on Twitter and my handle is @pvogren.
As I mentioned earlier, I have a long list of people I intend to reach out to to invite onto the podcast. But I have several specific topics that I would like cover in season two that I don’t know who to interview for. If you have ideas of who I should contact, then I would love to have help making connections to find the following kinds of interviewees:
- Minimalists – we ask so much of our planet and our ecology to feed our insatiable demand for environmentally unsustainable products and foods and with supply chain problems, inflation, and environmental degradation there’s never been a better time than now to embrace minimalism. I’d like to interview someone who can step us through some of the connections of our self-inflicted misery associated with our relationship to acquiring, storing, managing, and disposing of so much stuff and the difficulties we have in finding meaning, connection, and wholeness. Bonus points for someone who can tie this into our relationship with housing and land use. I would love to interview someone from The Story of Stuff project, for example.
- BIPOC – there’s been a lot of white voices on this podcast and I’d like to change that! One of the explicit goals of this podcast is to promote inclusive housing policy that would make Boulder a more welcoming home for BIPOC individuals and families. There are many subjects that pertain here but one that I’m interested in exploring is reparations through the lens housing policy and land use reform.
- Young people – I would love to interview young people who are trying to navigate the housing market and talk to them about what ideas they have about how Boulder could do a better job of meeting people’s housing needs at every stage of life.
- Artists – Another explicit goal of Sharing Boulder is to breathe creative imagination into how to make Boulder a truly great city full of walkable 15-minute neighborhoods that are highly socially connected and beautiful. I would love to connect with artists that think about how to make spaces beautiful and how to build resilient communities that are welcoming and irresistible.
- City Employees – I’ve interviewed a lot of advisory board and city council members but we only interviewed one city employee last year (thank you Sarah Weibenson!) I’d like to interview more of the people who are in the trenches trying to make this city the best it can be.
- People I disagree with – I’ve mostly interviewed people that I mostly agree with on most of the topics that we’ve covered. And while I take a lot of encouragement and hope that there are many people in this city with a positive vision of what Boulder could become that aligns with my own hopes and dreams, it is also true that we need to bring a lot of doubters along with us. I’d like to engage in dialog with people who have a different vision for Boulder’s future than the ones we promote here and dig in deep and discuss other points of view.
- Educators – I have a book on my reading list titled “Placemaking with Children and Youth: Participatory Practices For Planning Sustainable Communities”. Just the title lights up my brain because I think perhaps the only thing that more profoundly shapes our lives than the structures and spaces we live in is early childhood development. I love the possibility of combining these two arenas of inquiry and practice.
In addition to a new batch of regular episodes I have many ideas for “extras”. In particular, I’m contemplating sponsoring a Sharing Boulder art contest. More on this soon!
I want to end this post with a kind of mission statement to explain why I bother producing this podcast. I am passionate about housing policy here in Boulder. For me, housing sits at the convergence of so many of the biggest challenges that we face as a city and as a planet. Climate change, affordability, economic productivity, diversity and equity, mental health and social connectivity, political discourse, civic engagement, and security are all profoundly affected by the structures we occupy and their relation to each other. I want to live in a Boulder that is filled with car-lite, 15-minute, walkable neighborhoods where residents share walls, cars, and greenspace with their neighbors and where we can live lightly on the earth with small environmental footprints by living in compact housing that uses land and materials efficiently in beautiful, highly socially connected neighborhoods. I don’t want to live in a neighborhood where it is simply possible to walk – I want to live in a residential, mixed-use pedestrian district where cars and trucks are not allowed and they do not threaten the safety of me and my neighbors and do not spew toxic, planet-killing chemicals into our shared atmosphere. I want to live in a neighborhood where children are empowered and safe to use their feet and their bicycles to get around town to run errands, meet up with friends, and get to and from school and extracurricular activities. If you are concerned that the world is conspiring to turn future generations into screen swiping, button clicking pleasurebots, I recommend we give them walkable neighborhoods and then set them loose. I want to live in a neighborhood that is highly accessible to people of all abilities including elderly, chronically ill, and disabled – and anyone else who may not be able to drive for whatever reason. These are populations who have been poorly served by car-dependent, single-family-home zoned cities like Boulder. The climate crisis compels us to quit building car-dependent neighborhoods and to quit subsidizing the storage and conveyance of cars throughout the city. We have far too many cars in this city. We also have far too few people to support frequent and efficient public transit, far too little housing to support affordable housing for a demographically diverse population, and far too many vacant and nearly vacant large single-family homes (i.e. having one or two people per large house) to support the wide variety of family types and cohabitation arrangements that would be possible if we didn’t severely restrict them.