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There’s a slogan Strong Towns uses, or maybe a bit of distilled advice: make small bets. I think I’ve heard Charles Marohn say “make no large bets” or “make no large plans”—which isn’t absolute, but general, advice.

What they mean by that is that cities and municipalities in general should avoid large, costly, risky projects and instead do the smallest, cheapest thing they can do now. And then keep going. Always be maintaining, always be fixing, always look for little things that add up.

There’s an example of this that I took home from the Strong Towns/Congress for the New Urbanism, from Jersey City. Barkha Patel, a city planning staffer who climbed up the leadership ranks over the last several years, set in motion what ended up being a comprehensive retrofitting of much of the city’s road infrastructure. It started with one too many traffic fatalities, and involved colorful paint, cheap materials, outdoor furniture, string lights, and other bits and pieces of very low-cost stuff that helped to set aside bike lanes, or claim part of a historic square for pedestrians. The sum of all of this increased walking and biking in the city, brought some color and an improved business climate to the city’s commercial nodes, and drove traffic fatalities down to zero by 2022.

At the conference, Patel spoke and recounted all of this—it was a bit like “then we found surplus green paint in the city’s inventory, so we painted a bike lane the next day.” Very quick, easy, low-stakes stuff that made it possible to pilot an idea almost instantly and then build on it.

At the end of her talk, Charles Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns, took the stage and said (I think it was seven years), “Seven years. All that in just seven years.”

The city ultimately accomplished far more by doing a whole bunch of little things—“small bets”—and letting them all grow and develop rather than trying to implement some sort of perfect master plan. In other words, the only way you really actually do big things is to do small things.

This is partly financial advice for local governments, especially those in a rough economic situation. At least, that’s what Strong Towns means by it. But I think it’s also a whole approach to life and maybe even a truth about human nature. It might just be true that you get more done in the long run starting with the simplest, cheapest, lowest-stakes thing you can do and running with it and tinkering with it and iterating on it than you do sitting back and daydreaming about the perfect, comprehensive policy or project that would fix everything.

Alongside everything I write about urbanism—really, intertwined with it—are these bits and pieces of what I consider insight that I glean from doing the stuff of homeownership and running a home.

Don’t crowd your storage space too much, because storage is retrieval. You need enough space to actually get the stuff back out—if you don’t have more than enough, you don’t have enough. Sure you can fuss with cramming it all together just so and not making an avalanche, but you shouldn’t get good at doing things wrong. If you ever have that idea that there’s some moral character element to this—poor daily habits as a kind of useful adversity—remember that asking for the right tool isn’t asking for a handout. You can call a contractor if you want, but a lot of the time they’re not great. “Sometimes they mess up and do it right,” I like to say.

I guess I sort of think urbanism is human life collectively, which is why I see a throughline from personal advice to homeowner’s tips to city government.

I’m thinking about this small bets stuff because I’ve been finding lately as I do little home improvement projects around the house that they snowball in ways you can’t predict, but which are entirely appropriate and make sense looking back.

You clear up some pile of clutter, and realize a new piece of furniture can go somewhere. You replace the builder-grade switch plates and a color scheme for the room crystalizes, which finally inspires you to replace that dingy old light fixture. Once that’s all done, the wonky dresser drawers really stick out and you figure out how to get them just right. Now you know a little bit about furniture drawers and light fixtures, and you’ve probably acquired a new tool or two along the way, which unlocks a whole bunch of other things in the house for easy improvement.

Fixing the seal around a basement window involves pulling up deck boards, which gets you familiar with how a deck goes together. A board cracks, so now you need a new one. Might as well pick good quality wood. Hmm, maybe we can replace this old deck ourselves!

We had a stair railing that didn’t match any of the others, either in color or style. I’d bought a rotary sander to shave down a door that didn’t quite fit in the frame (I don’t know who did the doors in our house, but there are three of them like this.) Once I had the sander, I looked at the railing and decided to unscrew it, sand it, and paint it with some leftover white trim paint. Now I’m thinking of removing the more complicated banister piece at the top, and sanding and painting it too. That will teach me how it goes together and anchors into the wall, which will make it trivial to replace if the sanding/painting job doesn’t look the best.

Not only would I pay much more to have a guy come in and replace all the railings; it would all still seem like magic to me how they fit and anchor. It’s amazing how easy it all becomes when you just have a screwdriver, a little curiosity, and a tolerance for slightly messing a thing up.

It’s almost like you suddenly find yourself doing big things with no effort, because the level of difficulty stepped up gradually as you got familiar with an area of work. The effort accumulates and is embodied. Like a positive version of boiling the frog. Or kind of like leveling up in a video game. (I love the idea that video games are an analogy for life as we should approach it. I’ve got a piece sort of along those lines in the works.)

That’s the magic of incrementalism. I’d almost say it’s how anything ultimately worthwhile has to get done. Human achievement compounds in some subtle, almost metaphysical way. That’s why teaching and doing are different.

There’s no grand point here other than that I find it fascinating how maybe the ideal way to run a scrappy city government also applies at the level of the household. Do all the little things, and let them guide you to the bigger ones. It takes so much of the mental effort out of home improvement; it lowers the stakes and the psychological (and monetary) cost of entry. It’s almost like you’re along for the ride. But you know what? Sometimes it’s nice to let someone else do the driving.

Related Reading:

Slow Tech

Me Or Your Own Eyes

Don’t Shoot the Message

Strong Towns, Weak Arguments

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