From smog to Santa Fe — a lifelong quest for better places!

I’m Brian Skeele, and I grew up in Southern California watching the last vacant lots disappear as the LA basin got paved over. When we went to the beach for the day, I’d come home with the dreaded “smog breath”—gagging and choking from being active in LA’s polluted air.

In college during the 1970s, I learned about global warming and instantly saw the connection: suburban sprawl and overconsumption. That realization launched a lifelong quest to figure out “what else can we do besides suburbia?”

Since then, I’ve searched for ideas that work — for people and the planet.

I discovered that places built before cars have something special: highly walkable lifestyles. Amazingly, I now live in one — Santa Fe, New Mexico…well, sort of.

Four hundred years of car-free evolution created this beautiful, human-scale, walkable adobe city..downtown. To this day, I’m dumbfounded that we don’t build more places like downtown Santa Fe — places with charm, connection, and purpose. Yet almost everything built here in the last 60 years has been car-dominated suburban sprawl.

Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe we now have the tools to create better choices and better outcomes.

With Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) mapping, we can include the strengths, gifts, and desired outcomes of every neighbor. And with AI-backed 3D modeling tools, we can visualize and measure the social, economic, and ecological consequences of any proposed change.

That’s what Our Thriving Futures is all about — a tool to help communities co-create thriving, walkable, mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhoods that work for everyone.

You can help make this vision real by adding your unique perspective. It’s like putting a puzzle of 1000 pieces together. We’re building conversations and connections around the things we care about most.

👉 Question: What would you add to your favorite place to make it a truly great place to live? Click here for survey!