About Neighboring

I write about housing, neighborhoods and small cities, but you’ll also find pieces on building community, deepening connection and navigating the digital world of neighboring. New posts come out most Fridays.

Neighboring, as I define it, is the art and practice of caring deeply and acting accordingly. Neighboring is a verb about living in community. It’s about listening. It’s figuring out what is ours to do — what role, big or small, do we each play in creating our future?

I’m particularly interested in exploring new solutions to our broken housing system — fixing the government and market failures that have brought us to this point. I aim to connect more than a decade of on-the-ground development experience with the world of ideas and innovation. The stakes are too high for small or “business as usual” thinking; we need an infusion of creativity and compassion in community development.

I’ll be voraciously reading and sharing housing and community-related articles, books and real world insight in hopes of exploring some of these questions together:

What would it look like if we actually believed that housing was a human right? How should we promote and protect that right?

How can we reconfigure the risks and rewards of homeownership to make it equitable and within reach for more neighbors?

At the same time, how do we tackle larger issues of private property ownership and the rights (explicit or implicit) conferred by it?

Could Euro-style social housing ever work in the U.S.?

And how can we reconfigure the rental housing market so that tenants have access to the same safety and stability that homeowners purportedly do?

What in the world is going on with property values, and how do they relate to today’s affordability crisis?

What does responsible development look like?

What makes a city a great place to live?

Aren’t small cities just the best?

How do we reduce our car dependency and make our cities safer and more accessible to everyone?

What does it mean to live in community and how can we reorganize our daily lives around it?

Let’s figure it out together.

About me

I’m the executive director of Habitat for Humanity Capital District in Albany, NY, an independent affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International. I have overseen the construction or rehabilitation of more than 60 homes since 2015, bringing the organization's total to 164 homes built and sold at an affordable price to first-time homeowners since 1988. Unless otherwise noted, the thoughts I share here reflect my own opinions, not those of the Habitat for Humanity network.

During my tenure, Habitat for Humanity has invested over $16 million into building and rehabbing homes in New York’s Capital District, particularly in the neighborhoods that have been harmed most by housing discrimination and disinvestment. We have kept the issue of safe, decent and affordable housing at the forefront of our local public discourse. I am committed to addressing the interconnected challenges of poverty, inequality, systemic racism, environmental exploitation and the myth of individualism in our communities.

I’ve been self-publishing my writing for 20 years, and I can’t imagine a life without blogs and newsletters and diy zines. In late 2023, I launched this newsletter exploring the overlap and intersection of my professional and personal interest in housing, neighborhoods, small cities and more.

Sometimes I’ll share the longer “director’s cut” version of what we’re posting on Habitat’s platforms— a more in-depth look at the issues we are working on and how they impact our community. Other times I’ll write about other things that I’m not directly working on but that have captivated my imagination nonetheless.

You can find my full bio over here.

A gift for subscribers

When you subscribe, you will be part of a conversation — locally and beyond — about how to be better neighbors when it comes to housing, urban planning, neighborhood development and loving where we live.

If you like this stuff, you might also like my self-published book Neighboring: Learning to be a better neighbor to each other, our places and our planet. When you subscribe, I’ll send you a free excerpt - just check your welcome email for a download link.