Welcome to Build the Next Right Thing, a newsletter about housing abundance, urban stewardship, and civic delight, by Seth Zeren, a neighborhood developer and Strong Towns advocate living in Providence, Rhode Island.
Seth is also the father of two young kids. For those of you out there in a similar position (or just Disney fans) — yes that is a reference to Anna’s song The Next Right Thing from Frozen II.
A fantastic song in an excellent movie with a great message: often we are confronted by overwhelming challenges, our hearts give out with the scale of loss or difficulty that confront us. We can retreat into anger or depression or yelling at people on Twitter… or we can listen to that tiny voice that says get up, take a step, step a gain, and do the next right thing.
We don’t have all the answers to making our cities prosperous, affordable, and joyful. When you learn to look, the scale of wounds to our cities and towns—highways, parking lots, urban renewal, unaffordable housing, etc.—can be overwhelming. But we don’t have to have all the answers or a perfect master plan for the future. We can start with incremental investments, building on what we already have, and start to repair our communities. Take a step, step again, and build the next right thing.