The Plan of the People

Saturday, May 9th

The final day of deliberation. Ten weeks of work coming down to this.

In small groups scattered around a ballroom on the University of Akron campus, citizen delegates are deep in deliberation. The question in front of them is one that cities and towns across the country are grappling with: how does our city solve its housing crisis?

Some of the disagreements are sharp, but no one is trying to win. Every exchange is entirely respectful, each delegate understanding that their job is not to defeat the person across the table but to make them – in fact, make everyone – smarter. Disagreement is the point.

It's a long Saturday. But the end is coming…on Thursday night.

Thursday, May 14th — 6:00 p.m.

Within the next two hours, we’ll know if this thing worked.

Tonight the delegates make their final vote.

Civic Assembly recommendations require more than a simple majority. Broader consensus is the standard, and for this Assembly, the threshold is a supermajority of two-thirds. In politics, for something as controversial as housing, getting a bill passed in a legislature with that much support would be a supernatural event.

Yet, this Assembly of regular folks – not merely unelected, but randomly selected by lottery – have to somehow pull it off.

There are twelve tables set up around the room. Each is dedicated to one of the twelve proposals the delegates deliberated. Every table is stacked with briefing materials, a synthesis of the Assembly’s thinking on the proposal as it evolved over time, and researched answers to the delegates’ many questions.

Delegates still wrestling with how to vote on a proposal make their way over to its designated table and dig back in.

Small clusters are forming: a delegate uncertain about one proposal pulls another into an impromptu deliberation, the two of them lean over documents, talking it through.

The room is focused. The laughter that has often punctuated the Assembly’s deliberations has, tonight, disappeared into complete concentration.

7:32 p.m.

The first-round results are in.

Nine of the twelve proposals have cleared the supermajority threshold. These nine will move forward as qualified recommendations.

But there is one more vote.

The Assembly must now decide whether to endorse all nine proposals together as a single, unified plan. This is the harder vote. Many delegates voted against one or more of the nine qualifying proposals. Now they are being asked to stand behind the whole. The question put to them is direct: Will this package, as a whole, cause more good than harm? Or more harm than good?

7:46 p.m.

The voting is open.

7:51 p.m.

The room is silent. It looks like everyone has voted. We are all just…waiting.

7:54 p.m.

Morgan Lasher and Sue Lacy, who served as the Stewards of this Assembly, step up on to the stage.

Morgan takes the mic. “The votes are in.”

She pauses.

“93% of the delegates have endorsed the package. It is now The Plan of the People.”

The Assembly rises to its feet. The applause is thunderous.

The celebration finally settles down.

The first people Morgan thanks are the delegates who voted against endorsement, thanking them for voting their conscience, thanking them for reminding everyone that collective wisdom is only possible when we are willing to disagree.

The Assembly responds with sustained applause for the 7% who voted to dissent.

Thursday, May 21st — 9:58 a.m.

In just over eight hours, sixty delegates will present The Plan of the People to their community and government. The room will be packed: delegates, elected officials, community members. Months of work culminating in a single night. The venue: the University of Akron.

I look at a text from Morgan. Earlier that morning, most of the university lost power.

The cause, it later emerges, is a raccoon.

The Unify Akron team had already jumped into action. After twenty urgent calls to twenty other venues, we got a yes: a space that had once been the sanctuary of a church. Not what anyone planned. But it will do.

6:00 p.m.

The one-time chapel is packed with people from throughout the community. An announcer's voice fills the hall:

"Please rise for the delegates to the 2026 Akron Civic Assembly.

Lovely Day by Bill Withers rings through the space as the sixty delegates process in, taking their seats together in a great block.

The first delegate to speak – a six foot two financial planner impeccably dressed in a butter-yellow suit – stands at the podium and welcomes the room with warmth and charisma. He reminds everyone of Akron’s Shared Goal.

Akronites will have greater access to safe, well-maintained, affordable housing.

He’s followed by another delegate with thick glasses and a backwards baseball cap. She taught drama in a public middle school for 22 years. She explains how the Assembly process worked.

And then, in pairs, more delegates come on stage to present The Plan of the People.

The pairings are, almost without exception, improbable. People who would under almost no other circumstance have met each other, let alone stood together on a stage presenting public policy.

But there they are.

The proposals are ambitious: a dedicated housing docket in Akron's municipal court so that housing issues get addressed quickly and fairly. A sweeping overhaul of zoning regulations, embracing a form-based approach that would radically reduce the red tape and uncertainty facing developers building new homes and homeowners seeking to add a coach house. A bond whose proceeds would stimulate private and philanthropic investment in housing affordable to Akron's working families.

Each pair of presenting delegates were, until ten weeks ago, everyday Akronites with no background in policy. And yet they lay out not only the benefits of the proposal they present, but its trade-offs, the challenges of implementation, and the Assembly’s specific guidance to the government on how to make it work.

After each recommendation, the presenting pair addresses the officials in the room:

"In partnership with you, distinguished city leaders, we respectfully submit this recommendation for your thorough and thoughtful consideration."

After the ninth recommendation, City of Akron Mayor Shammas Malik and Bruce Bolden, chair of the city's housing committee, take the stage. Both are visibly moved. The chair calls the process a work of art. The mayor reaffirms the commitments he made at the outset in a memorandum of understanding: to continue working alongside residents through the hard work of implementation, and to deliver public updates on progress every six months for the next two and a half years. He intimates he will have progress to report even sooner than that.

Toward the end of the ceremony, a delegate rallies the community: the Assembly is only the end of the beginning. The hard work of implementation, complicated and years-long, now begins.

And with that, the delegates rise, as they did months earlier during the opening ceremony, and renew the pledge they made to each other and to their city:

We will show up, not just once, but again and again.

We will be honest, even when honesty is uncomfortable, and kind, even when we disagree.

We will assume the best of one another.

We will see this through, not because we are certain of the outcome, but because we believe that the people of Akron, working together with integrity and open minds, can rise to what this moment asks of us.

The room erupts. Confetti. Smiles. So, so, so many smiles.

8:18 p.m.

I make my way through the crowd and run into the head of city planning. He has been part of this process from the beginning, one of eighteen local leaders with deep housing expertise who spent months taking 165 ideas and shaping them, through a consensus-based process, into the twelve proposals the Assembly deliberated. For years he has been an advocate for form-based zoning. A disappointed advocate.

Every interaction I have had with him before tonight, he has been measured. Serious. Understated.

When I reach him, he clasps my hand. He’s beaming.

I think I understand why. It is one thing for even a senior government leader to champion a significant change in how a city works. It is something else entirely when that leader has behind him the will of the people.

What I read in his face tonight is hope. Hope that the change he has believed in for so long might finally see the light of day.

The story in Akron continues. A new chapter has begun. But so far, we are proving something worth proving: that We the People, and the People who serve us in government, can work as partners – real partners – and solve problems…together.

Check out this one-minute montage from the Recommendation Ceremony.