Ty has an insightful conversation with Bo Wright and Thomas Dougherty about the intersection of Urban Design and Church Land Use. 

Bo received his bachelors in Theological Studies from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. As he stepped into his career he began to develop an interest in the relationship between urban design, human scale, and how churches engage with their neighborhoods.  This interest led him down a path of studying public policy, and ultimately towards his work in the New Urbanism Movement at Strong Towns. Following his work at Strong Towns, he began working as the Executive Director of Kennett Collaborative. He has recently transitioned out of Kennett Collaborative to continue his work as an aspiring developer. 

After growing up on a small farm along the Ohio River, Thomas received his Masters of  Architecture in 2018, followed by a Masters of Architectural Design and Urbanism in 2019. Thomas now lives in West Chester, Pa where he continues to develop work towards “innerblock urbanism,” a model for elderly living derived from the “godshuis development” in Europe,  and other human-scaled works in the urban design sphere.

• “The Great Opportunity Document is estimating that over 40 million young people who are raised in Christian homes could walk away from the church by 2050” Ty Maloney
• “80% of America is single family homes.” – Bo Wright
• “Currently almost the entire country is zoned single use for all the land that we have. So, churches are going to fall into a category in which they can build and utilize their church, they can park their church, they can probably put in some rectory, maybe they can have a school building, a couple other affiliated things. But they can’t buy rights to build housing units and they’re not going to be able to do that on their land.” – Thomas Dougherty 
• “when any institution, like churches have a vision for how to utilize their property, it opens resources. And that’s the first step is what is that vision?…the first step is to get people excited with the vision and then it’s, “Okay, how do we do this?” And I think there’s a lot of different ways that churches could go about that.” – Bo Wright
• “developers today …have a bad rap for … a lot of what we’ve built in the past 50 years has not been thoughtful and has not contributed to the common good. But there are a lot of developers out there that want to do that, that want to be contributing to the common good and the good of their city.” – Bo Wright
• “What can you do for your city that last 50 years and has an impact and no one can undo it?” That’s the way churches should be thinking about, especially if they own their land. That’s the way they should be thinking about their neighborhood and their city is, “What can we do with the assets, the land that we have that we’re stewards of it that benefits this community for the next 50 years and no one can undo it?” – Bo Wright
• “we’re going to build and develop for love’s sake” – Ty maloney
• “  if we’re shaping the world… then we need to ask for more than what bricks can naturally give us…. We have to design and build places that reflect partly that spiritual nature of who we are.” – Thomas Dougherty
• “What do I do if I have 20,000 square feet of this facility that we are only utilizing one day a week.” – Ty Maloney

• InnerBlock
• Video Series on the Godshuis Development
• Strong Towns – website
• Bo Wright – LinkedIn
• Thomas Doughtery – LinkedIn