The Old Cozad Mill

05/08/2026

And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings." — Meister Eckhart

04/21/2026

A couple of weeks back on a community visit, someone asked me: “Should cities adopt policies to grow population, jobs, and investment?”

Emphatically, no.

Growth for growth’s sake is a failed policy.

Not all growth is good. If I told you that you’d be better off if you gained weight, you’d have questions. Because you could gain weight by eating garbage and sitting on the couch, or you could gain it by strength training and eating well.

Same weight gain. Completely different outcomes.

Cities are no different.

Paving new roads doesn’t make your community better. Adding more national chains doesn’t make it better. Building another vinyl subdivision on the edge of town doesn’t make it better.

Those are growth strategies, not improvement strategies.

And honestly, who does sprawl expansion actually benefit? National chains and national builders. Not residents.

I’ve never seen a cheap ugly building make anyone’s life better. I’ve never seen a fast food joint make a neighborhood stronger. And I’ve never seen sprawl development make a community more self-reliant, sustainable, or resilient.

Cities should want to get better, not just bigger.

Bigger does nothing for residents. Better always does.

Every decision a city makes should be filtered through one question: Will this make our community prettier, stronger, more self-reliant?

Because your town is the sum total of its decisions. Every time you choose growth over quality, your place gets a little worse and your lives get a little sadder.

Abandon growth policies.

Adopt improvement policies.

Your town should get better, not bigger.

02/22/2026

We get questions from time to time from folks who want to transition part or all of their yard to a more native landscape but are leery of creating an unkempt mess (and possibly annoying their neighbors, the w**d board or their neighborhood association!). We can help! Sustainable Landscape Specialist Sarah Buckley put together some helpful guidelines for creating an "intentionally wild" space. Download our new handout here --> https://plantnebraska.org/file_download/inline/0d4f0e88-6e23-4195-93ae-a577edf88738



Image: a large planting bed with autumn grasses and purple flowers in the foreground of evergreen trees.

02/16/2026

02/12/2026

Jane Jacobs pointed this out in The Nature of Economies:

In nature, animals hunt until they’re fed. Then they tend to their habitat.

They groom. They maintain their den. They rest. They play.

They don’t spend 100% of their time hunting.

But cities? Cities only hunt.

Hunt for more jobs. More visitors. More growth. More residents. More investment.

Meanwhile, the actual habitat falls apart.

Buildings crumble. Sidewalks crack. Parks go untended. Standards vanish.

But, who wants to move to a place that looks like no one cares about it?

Why recruit new residents to a town not worth calling home?

Why chase tourists when your own residents won’t even walk downtown?

The fact that no one’s job title is “tend to our town” is insane.

Every city has economic development. Tourism offices. Planning departments.

All hunting. Zero tending.

Stop hunting for a minute. Tend to what you have.

Pull the w**ds. Enforce the codes. Paint the building. Plant the flowers.

Make your town worth living in first.

Then people will actually want to live there.

(Adapted from my book, Your City Is Sick)

02/05/2026

Your board is sabotaging you.

Not intentionally. They’re good people who care. But they’re stuck in a fog of politeness, afraid to challenge bad ideas or confront hard truths. They nod along. They avoid conflict. They let mediocrity slide.

This is killing your organization.

Most boards operate like social clubs. Members show up, listen to reports, approve budgets, and go home feeling helpful. Meanwhile, your organization drifts. Nobody asks the uncomfortable questions. Nobody demands excellence. Nobody says “this isn’t good enough.”

You need fighters, not cheerleaders.

A real board doesn’t rubber-stamp. They interrogate. They push back. They force you to defend your assumptions and sharpen your strategy.

They ask: “Why should anyone care about this?” and “What happens if we’re wrong?” They challenge sacred cows. They demand evidence. They make you uncomfortable, in the best way.
This isn’t about being difficult. It’s about being serious.

Stop recruiting based on resumes and connections. Start recruiting for courage and clarity. Find people who will tell you the truth, even when it stings.

Set the expectation from day one: your job isn’t to be nice. It’s to make us better.

Create space for real debate. Kill the consent agenda. Ban “I think we’re all in agreement” when you’re not. Reward dissent.
And fire the dead weight. That board member who hasn’t said anything meaningful in two years? Thank them for their service and move on.

A badass board doesn’t just govern better, it transforms your organization. Decisions get sharper. Strategy gets clearer. Ex*****on gets tougher. You stop coasting and start competing.

Your community deserves better than a polite board. Give them a fierce one.

02/03/2026

Your town is standing in front of a mirror. What does it see? Does it see potential? Pride? Or does it look away?

This isn’t a metaphor. This is the daily reality in hundreds of American communities where civic self-esteem has collapsed. And just like personal self-esteem, you can’t fix it with a motivational poster or a new strategic plan.

I’ve watched it play out in town after town. Someone proposes a simple improvement, new benches downtown, fixing up a park, painting a mural, and the response is always the same: “Why bother?” “Nobody cares about this place.” “It’ll just get ruined anyway.”

This isn’t pessimism. This is a community that has internalized decline. It has looked in the mirror for so long and seen deterioration that it can no longer imagine looking good. The psychology is straightforward: When you stop maintaining something, you stop valuing it. When you stop valuing it, you stop maintaining it. The spiral accelerates.

Here’s where we keep screwing up: We treat low civic self-esteem like a technical problem. We hire consultants. We write strategic plans. We apply for grants. We create task forces and steering committees and public-private partnerships. We do everything except the one thing that actually works.

You know what doesn’t build self-esteem? Having someone else do the work for you. Imagine trying to get in shape by hiring someone to do your push-ups. Absurd, right? Yet this is exactly what communities do when they outsource their improvement to consultants and grant programs. The benefit of getting in shape isn’t just the physical transformation, it’s the confidence that comes from doing hard things. Cities work the same way.

I was in a town in the midwest recently. Beautiful bones, terrible condition. The usual suspects were there, blight, vacancy, deferred maintenance for decades. But the real issue wasn’t the buildings. It was the residents who couldn’t imagine their town ever looking different. “We’ve tried everything,” they said. By “everything,” they meant they’d written plans. Applied for grants. Hired consultants. What they hadn’t done: Pick up a paintbrush. Pull w**ds. Fix what was broken with their own hands. Because that feels too small. Too simple. Surely the solution must be more complicated, more sophisticated, more expensive. It’s not.

The communities that turn around are the ones that do the unsexy work of incremental improvement. Week after week. Month after month. They paint. They plant. They fix. They maintain. And something shifts. You’re not trying to solve self-esteem with positive thinking. You’re building it through demonstrated competence. Through proof that improvement is possible. Through evidence that the people who live here actually give a damn.

Low self-esteem creates a vicious cycle. But high self-esteem creates a virtuous one. When people are proud of their surroundings, they maintain them better. When they maintain them better, they become more proud. Suddenly people aren’t distancing themselves from their town to protect their self-image. They’re associating themselves with it to boost their self-image. That’s when private investment starts showing up without incentives. That’s when young people consider staying. That’s when your downtown starts filling up without a single economic development plan.

So here’s the real question: Does your town like itself? Does it look in the mirror and like what it sees? Does it have standards? Does it maintain what it has? Does it show up for itself? If the answer is no, you’re not dealing with an economic development problem. You’re dealing with a self-esteem problem.

And there’s only one way to fix it: The hard, unglamorous, incremental work of getting better. Of maintaining. Of showing up. Of proving to yourselves that you’re worth the effort. No one can do this work for you. No consultant, no grant program, no economic development strategy. Just like you can’t hire someone to get you in shape, you can’t hire someone to make your community believe in itself. You have to earn it.

Your town is standing in front of a mirror. Change what it sees. The rest will follow.

01/20/2026

Your town spent $100,000 to demolish a building and $0 enforcing codes on the other 50 buildings falling apart.

Make it make sense.

Every year I watch cities pay a fortune to tear down “blighted” buildings. Meanwhile, they completely ignore the code violations that created the blight in the first place.

It’s like watching someone with a cavity refuse to brush their teeth, then pay thousands for a root canal, then still refuse to brush.

Demolition is not a strategy. It’s a surrender.

Code enforcement is boring. It’s not sexy. There’s no ribbon cutting. No press release. No way for a politician to take credit.

But it works.

Every building that falls apart does so slowly. First a broken window. Then some peeling paint. Then a sagging roofline. Then it’s “blighted” and needs to be demolished.

At every single stage, code enforcement could have stopped it.

But enforcement requires having standards. It requires telling property owners “no, that’s not acceptable here.”

Most cities would rather pay for demolition than have an uncomfortable conversation.

How many buildings has your town torn down that could have been saved?

11/07/2025

Most cities think their problem is a lack of growth, investment, or jobs. But that’s not the problem at all. The real issue is that most people live in a community that isn’t worth caring about, so they don’t. They don’t get involved, they don’t show up, they don’t shop local, they don’t pick up trash, and they don’t bother to make things look nice. All those little signs of apathy add up. It’s toxic for communities and devastating for the people who live in them. It drags down every business, every school, every hospital, and every local institution. It weakens the economy and it stifles the spirit of the place.

Our standard response is to chase growth. We add jobs, build subdivisions, recruit Starbucks, and invite tourists. Those things might not be bad, but none of them change how residents feel about their town. The real challenge is figuring out how to take people who don’t care, and who could blame them, and help them care a little bit more. When you start to look at it through that lens, you realize why the usual approaches fail. They were never designed to fix a problem of care and concern.

Apathy is the real challenge, but we treat it like a money problem. We think a new employer, some fresh investment, or a few cheap developments will save us. But those quick fixes don’t make people care more. They often make things worse. They pull wealth and ownership out of the community and reinforce the idea that local effort doesn’t matter.

If you want people to care, focus on what actually makes them care. Human connection. Identity. Ownership. Beauty. People care about other people, so create ways for them to connect. They care about identity, what their town stands for, what it’s overcome, what makes it special. They care about ownership, supporting businesses run by people they know, in buildings that belong to the community. And they care about beauty, because when a town looks better, people feel better. A more attractive place leads to more attractive behavior. Pride follows.

You can’t hire your way to civic pride. You can’t franchise your way to belonging. If you want a thriving town, make it easier for people to care about where they live. Focus on building a place people would never dream of leaving. Forget the spreadsheets for a bit and ask yourself one question: do people care about this place they call home? If the answer is no, figure out what might help them care more. Then do that. Do it again. And again. After a few years of that, go back and look at the numbers. You’ll see they finally moved in the right direction. Because those numbers don’t lead. They follow.