The Free-Range City

A lifelong search for the best place to raise our kids

“Daddy, can I do a bake sale?”

At age nine, Zora had developed an intense interest in baking. Cooking shows had become her favorite screen time, especially Junior Bake Off. And while I’m a lousy cook and had not been much help in cultivating this hobby, my wife (who is a great cook!) had instructed her to self-sufficiency by this point.

I asked why she wanted to do a bake sale, although I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

“It’s so fun!” She said. “But mom doesn’t want us to eat too many cookies… so, I thought… maybe I could sell them and boost my allowance!”

“Well, what’s your business plan?” I asked.

“Business plan?”

“How do you plan to sell the cookies?”

“Oh, I think I could sell them at the park.”

I nodded. Our neighborhood is a mix of houses and duplexes of various sizes, with a vibrant Main Street lined by shops and apartments running through the middle. The park occupies one block at the center of it all, and the edge of the park that touches the Main Street has been turned into a little plaza. Together these form a living room for the whole neighborhood, and were always busy. That would be a great place for a bake sale.

“And how much would you sell your cookies for?”

She frowned, as she clearly hadn’t considered this. “I don’t know… maybe a quarter, or, fifty cents… is that too much?”

“Fifty cents?” I shook my head. “You won’t make any money selling cookies for fifty cents!”

“Oh.” She slumped. “I guess it’s not a good idea.”

“I’m sure you could sell cookies for a dollar or more.”

“Really?” Her eyes lit up. “Will you help me?”

I said I would, but only if she was serious about it.

I lived in two very different places growing up.

When I was a boy, my family lived in rural Illinois. Scattered fields and farms surrounded our neighborhood, but mostly we were in the woods. Our subdivision held about fifty homes on a narrow asphalt loop, and no fences.

I roamed around our neighborhood, collecting and playing with every size and shape of stick. I discovered all the small places that only kids could fit, shared many of these as secret clubhouses to play with my sisters or the neighbor kids. I kept a few to myself. The loop street we lived on was too narrow for fast-moving traffic, and I loved racing my bike around it as fast as I could pedal.

I never had to ask to play outside. I was sometimes told to. But mostly I just set out whenever I felt like it and went wherever I wanted. I know now that cell phones existed in the 90s, but I hadn’t seen or heard of them at the time. My Dad could whistle very loudly — when he did, I knew it was time to come home.

Through age 12, my world felt wide open to explore. But opportunity in Illinois was limited, and before I started high school my family would move away.

Zora and I sat at the table together with a stack of paper to work through a business plan. I told her there were a few key questions to answer. How much did her cookies cost to make? She shrugged. I told her I’d loan her the startup capital she’d need, but she had to work out how much, and be sure she could pay it back.

We got out her cookie recipe, went through the ingredients, and looked up the price of each ingredient at the nearby Safeway. As it turned out, eggs were a bottleneck — her recipe just called for one egg per batch, but we’d need to buy twelve at a time. After concluding that funding twelve batches of a dozen cookies up front would be too much, we agreed she was allowed to have some left over “scrap material” that she could contribute back to the refrigerator. So the cost per cookie worked out to about twenty cents.

“So if you sell these for a quarter, you’ll earn five cents per cookie. How much will you earn selling a dozen cookies?”

She got to work, pencil scribbling furiously through the arithmetic. “Sixty cents. That’s pretty good!”

“Well,” I said. “How much time will you spend making them and selling them?”

She figured about an hour to make one batch, but we didn’t know how long it would take to sell, so assumed one hour to start.

“If you work for two hours and make sixty cents, how much is that per hour?”

“Thirty cents?”

“Minimum wage in Denver is about 18 dollars an hour,” I explained. Zora’s eyes went wide. “Nationally it’s $7.25. If you’re going to do a business, you need to aim to make at least minimum wage. I think you should aim for Denver rates, but, I’m not going to fund this unless you can show me that you’ll make at least the national minimum wage.”

“That’s so much money!” she exclaimed.

“What would you have to do to earn that much?”

“I guess… sell a lot more cookies,” she said.

“Or sell them for more money,” I added. “But there are too many unknowns right now. How many can you sell, and what’s the right price…”

I explained that we needed a way to figure out how much demand there was to estimate how many cookies she could sell per hour, and determine willingness to pay, so we’d need to do some market research.

“Market research?” she asked.

When I was 13 my family moved to the suburbs of Austin. To my parents, this was moving back home. To me, it was moving to an alien planet.

Although I was older, neither I nor my parents felt it was safe for me to go anywhere on my own. But even if we had, there was nowhere to go. Our house was surrounded by either vacant land or other houses (of the same size and price) in every direction. The closest non-residential use was a gas station a mile or so away, but you had to cross a four-lane highway to get to it. So I alternated between reading, playing video games, and feeling miserably bored, while my beloved bicycle collected dust.

A few years later a minor league baseball stadium opened up a few miles from our subdivision. This was an earth-shattering event. It put our town on the map. My Mom gave me a ride to a job fair hosted at the stadium, and I signed on to work in concessions. She drove me at first, because we both knew it would be short-term.

A few weeks later, I turned 16. I felt like I’d been waiting my whole life. My Granddad gave me some money to get a car, and my Dad suggested it should be a truck. I found an old F-150 for $2,850. I remember because it felt like a shocking amount of money to me at the time.

With a job and a car I was alive again.

I quit being a burger flipper (for $5.15 an hour!), and became a stadium vendor. I’d buy a big box of snacks at the commissary under the stands, then hustle my way up and down the aisles. “Get your peanuts, popcorn, cracker jacks here!” I earned 25 cents a sale — 50 cents if the customer let me keep the change. I learned to fumble around in my money pouch and ask if they wanted their quarter. I discovered that if I also wore the beverage backpack (“Ice-cold Coke and Water too!”) I’d sell more per trip through the stadium. I observed that nobody bought anything from vendors before first pitch, so I timed my commute to pull into the staff parking lot just as they were singing the national anthem. Sales dropped off a cliff at the seventh-inning stretch, so I decided that was when I’d head home. I earned about $100 a night working a two-hour shift. I was very proud of that — per hour, it was far more than either of my parents earned.

There was far more opportunity for adults in fast-growing Texas than there had been in sleepy Illinois. I just had to be able to drive everywhere to partake of it.

Mid-morning on a Saturday, Zora started the baking process. First, she set the oven to pre-heat, then greased a pan.

“Hey Mom,” she asked, “can you get down the flour?” We keep that high in the pantry, and Zora is pretty short.

Once she had the ingredients out on the kitchen counter, Zora grabbed a large, glass bowl. She dumped the butter and sugar in the bowl and started to mix with a fork. “You know it’s right when it looks fluffy,” she said.

Next, she added the eggs and vanilla, plus an extra pinch of sugar. “That’s my secret ingredient. Don’t tell!”

Then it’s time for the flour, baking powder, and salt. These she stirs with a teal spatula until it’s all well-mixed.

“Now the chocolate chips,” she said. “You just put in as many as you want. Mom says a quarter cup but, some people like more and some people like less. I say just have fun with it.”

She set the mixing bowl down and picked up a cupcake scooper — it’s a shiny metal tool that looks a bit like an ice-cream scoop crossed with a grip-strengthener. When you squeeze the handles, a metal band slides behind the scoop and ejects the ball of dough.

She put the baking sheets in the oven. After 12 minutes, it was time to take them out and let them cool for another ten. She finished cleaning up while she waited.

“Okay, Dad, it’s time!” She used the spatula to scoop the fresh cookies into a clear plastic bin. Once that was sealed, she grabbed a stack of napkins and her notebook. I picked up our tiny folding table, and we set off for the park.

In college, I studied Architecture. I’d always been interested in cities, and had an idea that I’d like to work on building them. The program required students to study abroad, so in my Junior year I went to Italy. What I found there surprised me.

I expected the old, beautiful buildings. I didn’t expect the sense of freedom I’d last felt as a kid in the countryside. In Castiglion Fiorentino, I watched kids roaming the cobblestone streets, popping in and out of their friends’ houses. I saw them active in the social life of the neighborhood in a way I’d forgotten about. And that social life extended to all ages, something I hadn’t thought of as a child. I saw little old ladies carrying their groceries up and down steep hills, stopping to chat with neighbors they passed along the way, seemingly unburdened by the large sacks they carried. It shocked me. Back home, I would expect people of that age to be relying on handicapped parking and assistance to and from their seats.

I experienced a new kind of freedom myself, traveling with friends on weekends, hopping from city to city by train and exploring on foot. To my surprise, I felt more mobile without a car in a place where they were optional than I had with a car in the country that prioritized them above all else.

I discovered that academics call this experience “urbanism,” and I fell in love with it. Freedom to roam and explore, combined with social life and economic opportunity. A free-range city life.

There was just one problem: this wasn’t my home.

The bright August sun baked the sidewalk, but the shade of the giant trees lining the park felt cool and comfortable. We set up the table and her supplies. Next to the table, I leaned on the half-wall separating the plaza area from the playground behind it, “supervising” from a short distance, but really just enjoying the show.

Zora buzzed through the plaza for an hour, introducing herself and offering cookies in exchange for questions. It wasn’t a particularly busy day, but the steady flow of people passing through meant she’d hardly idled.

“Hi, I’m Zora, would you like to try a free cookie?”

The man she stopped was lean and sharply dressed, with a few strands of gray through dark brown hair. He looked down to see a tiny, smiling, girl extending her bin of cookies and napkins his direction. A dusting of crumbs revealed the bin had recently been full, but now only a few cookies remained.

“I’d love one!” He said, taking a napkin, then picking a cookie from the bin. “Thank you.”

“I’m doing market research. Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Market research!” he said with a grin, followed by an amused glance my direction. I smiled and nodded. A young couple walking their dog happened to be passing by, the two shared an amused chuckle at the scene as they carried on their way.

“Why of course,” the man said, turning back to Zora. “Ask away!”

She hurried to her table to swap her cookie bin and napkins for a notebook. “Okay! What’s your name?”

“I’m Ben,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “And, what’s your favorite cookie flavor?”

He thought as he took a bite. “I’d say chocolate chip. But I also like snickerdoodle.”

“Oh, these are chocolate chip!”

“And very good!” Ben agreed with a nod. “You know, I like your recipe. The cookie is sweet but not too sweet, and it has a light and airy texture. Did you make these yourself?”

“Yep!” Zora nodded.

“Very impressive.”

“Thank you!” She said. “Um, what price do you think I should sell these for?”

“Hmm,” he considered. “For cookies this good, I think three dollars would be fair.”

“Oh, good!” She carefully recorded his answer. “Last question, should I have a tip jar?”

“A tip jar?” Ben laughed, looked up and gave me a bit of a wink, then turned back to Zora with a smile. “Yes, I think you should definitely have a tip jar. I think you’d get a lot of tips.”

We don’t have free-range cities in the United States, and especially not in Texas. So, when I came home, my life goal became to build one. Maybe not a true city, but a large-scale development. I wanted to create a pedestrian-first town, where people of all ages and abilities could live life to the fullest, whether or not they could drive. Where there was a civic space at the center of every neighborhood that acted as the living room. Where kids could roam and explore and then go get a gallon of milk from the store because Dad forgot to. As a new graduate I was certain I’d be able to figure out the real estate business and build myself a place to live in time to raise my kids there.

Life didn’t work out that way.

A few years later I was married, and it had become obvious that my big dream was out of reach. Fortunately, my wife had also caught the “urbanism” bug, so we decided we’d aim for the next best thing: find the most walkable neighborhood we could live in. This proved to be a big challenge.

We spent 16 years searching for the best combination of work and place. We followed jobs from Texas to North Carolina and California before we found our way to Colorado. We managed to live in walkable neighborhoods in some of our stops, usually by renting small, old apartments. From each home base, we explored the surrounding region as much as we could. We took advantage of forced-remote during COVID to spend months living on the road, always scouting. Walkable neighborhoods are rare. But more than that, they’re expensive.

We spent those 16 years working hard and saving up, stressed as house prices always kept climbing, the economic goalposts ever-moving. I walked away from my career in urban design to work in software instead, in hopes that a few years of high earnings would make things easy. Instead, it was just enough to make things possible. We decided early on that we wouldn’t let finances alone determine when and how many kids we’d have, and I’m glad we didn’t. We would have waited too long. Instead we had our kids along the way.

Last year we bought a house in a safe, vibrant, walkable neighborhood. Although at just under 1,500 square feet, we made a tradeoff to afford it that many families wouldn’t.

I feel like we barely made it. It shouldn’t be this hard.

Zora gave out her test batch of 24 cookies in less than ninety minutes. We gathered our things and folded up the display table, then walked back to the house.

When we got home, we spread out several sheets of paper on the kitchen table and tallied up the responses. We calculated both the mean and median willingness to pay, and I made sure Zora understood the difference. As a fourth grader, this was a decent amount of extra math homework, but I don’t think she noticed.

“Well,” she considered. “One person said fifty cents, but everyone else said a dollar or more, so, we could sell them for a dollar.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but look a little closer. You’re right, those lower numbers pull the average down. But lots of people said higher prices. One person said five dollars!”

“Yeah, that was Sophia, the blond lady with her friends,” Zora said. The three young women had showered praise on Zora for her entrepreneurial spirit and all said they’d pay a premium.

We discussed the different customer profiles, that young women had been Zora’s most enthusiastic supporters, while older men and a few couples had also shown high willingness to pay. Older women walking alone had been kind, but mostly suggested very low prices. Younger men were the most likely to say “no, thanks” to the cookies.

We then worked through a few scenarios — if she sold the cookies for a dollar she’d earn 80 cents each, or $9.60 per dozen, but if she sold them for five dollars apiece she’d earn $57.60.

“Oh wow,” Zora said. “Maybe I should sell for five!”

“But only one person said they’d pay that much,” I pointed out. “So if we sold for $5 how long do you think it would take to sell a dozen?”

“Oh, probably a long time.”

“Let’s look back at our mean and median,” I said. “We found a mean price of $2.50, but a median of $3.00. About half the people we asked said they’d pay three, about half said one or two, and just a few people said more. If your goal is to maximize your earnings per hour, what should you do?”

Zora considered this for a bit, then said, “I guess the price should be somewhere in the middle so I can, like, sell out quickly but, not for too cheap.”

“Great idea,” I said. And after a bit more discussion we arrived at a strategy: One cookie for $3, or two for $5.

As a father of four, I’ve been blessed to see how much kids are capable of. My kids have learned how to walk to school and to church. They’ve learned how to ride the bus, and how to go to the library and check out books. They go visit friends in the neighborhood on their own, roaming from house to house. We’ve avoided “intensive parenting,” and instead prioritized giving the kids space to explore, and the invitation to come with us as we live daily life.

So much of our children’s ability to grow independently comes from the form of our neighborhood. Most families in North America don’t get to live in neighborhoods like this; they live in subdivisions like the one I lived in as a teenager in Texas. Parents have to choose between countless hours of chauffeur duty, or trying to keep restless kids stuck at home from living on screens. They don’t get to see their children freely explore the world around them because they have to raise them in an environment that isn’t safe or practical for kids. It wasn’t designed for them.

When we moved here, my son (our youngest) was six months old. By the time he turned two, he knew the way from our house to the playground three blocks away. He would ask to go, then confidently lead me there without ever getting lost. My job on that walk was to make sure he didn’t get run over. This is as close to free-range as we could get.

Today I have different decisions to make. Do I still want to develop a truly pedestrian-centric neighborhood of my own design? Could I do that in time for my grandchildren to grow up there? Or should I give up that dream forever, and focus only on improving the place we live now. It’s close to perfect, if we could make the streets safe and stop prices climbing.

Now my son is three. One of his favorite activities is to help me get groceries — but only if we bike there. From his seat on the back of the bike, he tells me where to turn, and shouts hello and waves to the neighbors we pass.

This will be the only home he knows growing up, and I hope he’ll know every inch of it the way I knew the yards and bushes and trees of my childhood home in Illinois. That he’ll have secret hiding places he shares with his best friend, and a few he keeps just for himself.

And for each of my children, I hope they’ll have the chance to stay, if they want to. I’m confident that Denver’s job market will have plenty of opportunity for them to pick from. I’m less confident that we’ll fix housing affordability in time. Maybe building a new neighborhood they can each afford will be our family business.

The next weekend, Zora baked another batch of two dozen cookies. She carried her table to the park, and a chalkboard sign advertising her prices. This time my wife sat nearby to supervise, and to take payment via Venmo.

The tip jar had been great advice, while I was not surprised that people wanted to offer some extra encouragement to a young entrepreneur, the level of generosity was more than I expected. One kindly, silver-haired man quietly thanked Zora for the cookie, then leaned forward and presented her a crisp twenty dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said with a smile.

She sold out in under two hours, earning $65 in sales, and nearly $50 in tips. After the $4.80 in material costs, Zora earned $108 for three and a half hours of total work, or $36 an hour.

“I earned enough for Denver!” she exclaimed.

I told her I was proud of her.

And I hope, that if I do my best, she’ll be able to say that as an adult.

Zora’s Cookie Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 soft stick of butter.

• ¼ cup brown sugar.

• ¼ cup white sugar.

• 1 egg.

• ½ tsp vanilla.

• 1½ cups of flour.

• ½ tsp baking soda.

• ¼ tsp salt.

• ¼–½ cup of chocolate chips (depending on your preference).

Directions:

1. Cream together butter and sugars.

2. Mix in the egg and vanilla.

3. Pour in the flour, baking soda, and salt; then mix well.

4. Mix in the chocolate chips.

5. Space cookie dough balls on greased or parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

   • For big cookies, use 1/4 cup scoops.

   • For small cookies, use 1 tbsp scoops.

6. Pre-heat oven to 350.

   • For big cookies, bake 11–13 minutes.

   • For small cookies, bake 9–11 minutes.

7. Enjoy!

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Thank you to Emma McAleavy and Mike Riggs at the Roots of Progress for encouraging me to write a “personal” essay. And to Pam and Zora Burleson for proof-reading, and fact checking, this one.