This week, Nolan Gray chats with Ben Raderstorf. Ben is vice president of House Sacramento, an all volunteer grassroots pro-housing group in the California Capital region. In his day job, he’s a pro-democracy advocate, but on nights and weekends he works to make his adopted hometown more affordable, liveable, walkable, bikeable and resilient. Find him on twitter at @braderstorf.
In this episode, they chat about the exciting new land use reforms recently adopted for Sacramento.
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I think Ned and I both finished your book over the weekend. I was reading it on a work trip in Tucson, and it’s the type of book that makes you mad and inspires you, page to page. It’s so chock-full of little moments where you’re like, “How could this be happening?” So yeah, big picture, when you’re confronting something like urban freeway removal, how do you keep your sanity in this policy space where it just seems totally insane?
I’m always motivated, as a journalist, by big intractable problems, which is really interesting and motivating to me. My first book was about the food system. So I don’t know, I’m interested in problems that no one thinks about. In a lot of Texas and for a lot of Texas history, no one bothered to fight TxDOT. No one bothered to challenge their authority or say, “Hey, we want something different.” There are so many enormous costs to the way that we are building transportation in the state of Texas, and so that animates me like that. I couldn’t live in Texas if I wasn’t animated by doing things against all evidence and reason. I would also say that the activists who I spent four years profiling give me a lot of energy because they are making change. I can see it and it’s a big problem. So it’s going to take a long time to really change the course, but I’ve seen changes happen in the four years that I’ve been reporting this book.
I think Ned and I both finished your book over the weekend. I was reading it on a work trip in Tucson, and it’s the type of book that makes you mad and inspires you, page to page. It’s so chock-full of little moments where you’re like, “How could this be happening?” So yeah, big picture, when you’re confronting something like urban freeway removal, how do you keep your sanity in this policy space where it just seems totally insane?
I’m always motivated, as a journalist, by big intractable problems, which is really interesting and motivating to me. My first book was about the food system. So I don’t know, I’m interested in problems that no one thinks about. In a lot of Texas and for a lot of Texas history, no one bothered to fight TxDOT. No one bothered to challenge their authority or say, “Hey, we want something different.” There are so many enormous costs to the way that we are building transportation in the state of Texas, and so that animates me like that. I couldn’t live in Texas if I wasn’t animated by doing things against all evidence and reason. I would also say that the activists who I spent four years profiling give me a lot of energy because they are making change. I can see it and it’s a big problem. So it’s going to take a long time to really change the course, but I’ve seen changes happen in the four years that I’ve been reporting this book.
