Daniel Herriges
@dpherriges
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Policy Director @Parking_Reform . Writer @StrongTowns . Co-author, "Escaping the Housing Trap" with @clmarohn : . Tweets are my own.
Saint Paul, MN
Joined November 2018
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Trunk-or-treat gets (deserved) scorn, but I think a bigger factor in the decline of trick-or-treating is that so many families now drive to a "destination" neighborhood instead of simply heading out where they live.
My cousin got 727 trick-or-treaters tonight. We saw about 15.
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Is YOUR city plagued by an epidemic of *checks notes* children playing in parks?
The Parks & Rec Dept. in
#Arlington
says residents are complaining about daycare children constantly using the parks.
They're proposing daycares/preschools in town pay anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 in fees to use them (money will be used to maintain parks)
Thoughts?
@wbz
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I've had multiple smart people recently say to me, "Wait, how do Uber/Lyft lose money, their only overhead is an app!"
The average American doesn't grasp that door-to-door, on-demand transportation is expensive, because we don't even really process the costs of our own driving.
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Hot take:
I should be able to walk around my city wearing earbuds.
Or casually texting somebody.
Or moderately drunk.
Etc.
Because I am not the one who is a danger to anyone.
Design streets so safely (i.e. for slow speeds) that distracted walking is fine.
I think the reason mobility-minded folks are passionate to ratio the shit out of this dumb PSA is an awareness that many powerful orgs and millions of car-brained people really do equate things like wearing earbuds and hoodies with futzing with a phone while going 35mph in an SUV
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This is easy to mock, but the attitude that people who drive are engaging in a basic, necessary function, while anyone traveling by any other means is making a "lifestyle choice," is *extremely* ingrained in American thinking. Not just among these sorts of culture warriors.
@LauraGMitchell
Who else but entitled bikers would think they could have their own permanent parking garage on a public street? Snowplowing would be a nightmare. Bikers are making a lifestyle choice and don’t deserve special transportation perks from the public.
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Demand for driving is pretty elastic; if you build a lot more roads, and build everything farther from everything else, people will drive more.
Demand for housing is quite inelastic; most people want exactly 1 home, absolutely don't want 0, and probably can't use 2 or more.
You can't simultaneously believe:
1) building more roads leads to more traffic because of induced demand
2) believe that people want to live in cities
3) believe that building more houses lowers rent
sorry YIMBYs
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And I live in my childhood home, so I can directly compare. When I was a kid, we'd get ~100 over the evening, and walking around there were always other groups of kids in visible range.
It's a shame that only a small number of neighborhoods seem to get that experience anymore.
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Car dependency functions like a deeply regressive tax.
The lowest income quintile in the US spends ~30% of it's income on transportation, in the EU the lowest income quintile spends ~8%
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The replies to this are hilarious. Everyone's a critic. So far I've learned that it's physically impossible to bike in snow, that you can't park your car outdoors in a Minneapolis winter, and that I'm probably a moral monster because my house doesn't have an elevator.
12-units. Single family lot.
No elevator. No parking. Minneapolis.
Co-developed with Left Lane. Designed by Christian Dean Architects.
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I've hated Apple's ridiculous donut HQ from the first I heard of it... but somehow I was unaware of the even more appalling parking situation until today.
So embarrassing for a company whose image is supposed to be all about forward-thinking design.
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As a lifelong progressive / leftist / sorta heterodox leftist (depending on at what point in life you asked me), it's always disorienting when people inform me that I'm secretly a conservative, or that ideas I believe strongly in are actually right-wing.
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Jeff Speck talks about how Americans view the car as a "prosthetic device"—basically an appendage of the self.
To someone who thinks this way (and millions do), unbundling parking from rent sounds as absurd as paying a surcharge to get an apartment with a kitchen, or a shower.
Charging for parking in an apartment you already paid rent at is the most greedy shit ever
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Urban planning should be 90% producing an A+ public realm, 10% regulating what goes on on private property. We've built a system that's closer to 10%-90% instead.
Most planning depts are basically zoning depts, and it's depressing.
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And, like, we still had fun. My 2- and 3-year old went as Elmo and Abby from Sesame Street. I was Cookie Monster. Many houses on my street had creative decorations / displays up.
But it wasn't the kind of communal, festival atmosphere that Halloween should be.
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A big part of Housing Twitter is suddenly talking about single-stair buildings, and it's amazing to watch people's ideological heuristics (i.e. forming an opinion by trying to assess "Are the people who support this on my team or the other team?") at work in real time.
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Whole lot of people in this thread chastising or concern-trolling Chicago bike safety advocates for shutting down Lakeshore Drive as a protest. "You're creating division / antagonizing motorists / not helping the cause."
The Netherlands would like a word.
WE STOPPED LAKESHORE DRIVE HOLY FUCKING SHIT
More than 232 CYCLISTS SHOWED UP
SO FUCKING COOL
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The IRS's rate for business mileage is 65¢/mi. My house is 9 mi. from MSP airport --> estimated $5.85 just to cover driver's costs (not including any actual compensation).
But when I drive my own car to the airport, I don't think of it as costing me $5.85. That's the disconnect.
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I encounter this idea a lot that Sunbelt metros are less restrictive in their zoning than infamously expensive areas like coastal California or the Northeast. This is largely untrue.
For the most part, these places just haven't pushed up against the physical limits of sprawl.
I think we don't understand locally that Nashville has among the most restrictive residential zoning in the U.S. — far tighter even than West Coast or Northeastern cities.
Zoning for stasis was fine when the highways were empty and we could sprawl. But those days are over.
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My favorite street in my neighborhood has a tree right in the middle of it. A good litmus test for hiring public works engineers would be, "Do you love this or hate it?"
If they say they hate it, or express concerns that it doesn't meet standards, don't hire them.
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The prevailing narrative of gentrification in America—certainly in the media—is that new development transforms a neighborhood and displaces an established community.
The greatest actual drivers of displacement are rendered all but invisible by this narrative. For example:
Seattle's single-family areas have seen their Black population plummet by 9,126 since 1990. "Urban Village" neighborhoods have added more than 8,000 Black residents in that span. Why then is low-density zoning expected to blunt displacement?
Story:
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The majority of working-class people in every American city live in houses and apartments that were built by the private sector for profit and sold/rented at market rate. This is obvious if you merely look around.
I'm not making a normative statement, it's simply true. (1/2)
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Shoup has a quote about how cities now "limit the density of people in order to limit the density of cars." Mitigating the impacts of cars and driving is the principal purpose of modern zoning.
No American city is even close to overcrowded, except with motor vehicles. Not one.
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Couple years ago I went to a public meeting for a street redesign in my old neighborhood. Told her I was disappointed to see 12-foot lanes, in front of a high school no less. Her response:
"I know! We would have liked to do 14, but there just wasn't the right of way."
🤦🤦🤦
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My answer to this is twofold:
1) "Stay affordable through rapid horizontal growth" is a strategy that only works until you crash into Marchetti's Constant.
LA, SFBA, NYC, DMV all hit this wall long ago. I'd argue Atlanta is an example of a metro that has recently gotten there.
YIMBYs solely focused on density don’t wrestle enough with the overwhelming fact that cities that are sprawling, low density and car dependent are generally affordable and cities that are high density and transit accessible are not. There’s a lot of cope around this.
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"Texas's housing policies" mostly look like this photo. I don't know where, or whether, people think California should be building more of this.
CA should upzone a ton, reduce delays, fees, and avenues for NIMBY obstructionism. But that doesn't really amount to emulating Texas.
I have said this over and over and over and over again: if California adopted Texas' housing policies, it would become a completely unstoppable economic powerhouse. It would be eating Texas' lunch.
California actively chooses to make itself poorer, to satisfy rich NIMBYs.
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One persistent thing in the housing discourse that mystifies me is the way it's an article of faith for some people that there are colossal numbers of totally vacant investment properties sitting around in cities. This is demonstrably not true. (1/4)
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What a ridiculous framing. No city is "filling up" with luxury apartments.
There is an enormous amount of undeveloped or redevelopable land in American cities. And single-family homes occupy far more land than any kind of apartments.
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All the supposedly unsolvable logistical problems that require our streets to be built for supersized vehicles have actually been solved in many other parts of the world.
"But the [fire trucks / trash collection / deliveries]!" is just an excuse.
Some people think if you pedestrianize streets, emergency/sanitation vehicles won't be able to get in. Well, one of the men in this photo just pulled out and replaced the bollards to let this baby trash truck in! Catania, Sicily.
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Maybe my least YIMBY opinion is that most US metros have so over-expanded, for decades, that the best policy now would be ~0 greenfield growth. Even if it results in less total housing production
Almost all exurban development is a net negative at this point, regardless of form.
Finally, the elephant in the room: greenfield growth. This is how cities grow. In a standard urban model with no constraints besides the physical & financial costs, you'll get most growth at the periphery. Can we make it better, quicker, and denser? Sure. And we need MORE of it.
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Metro Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo etc. all have this basic story: *massive* suburban expansion during a period of virtually zero net population growth.
The region's familiar story of urban blight + decline is at least as much about this as it is about closing factories.
@samueljrob
Confirms what all urbanists have been saying about sprawl for decades. SE Michigan has had the same population since about 1970 but has built 50% more infrastructure.
@StrongTowns
@the_transit_guy
@maxdubler
@Boenau
@cnunextgen
@retrofitsuburbs
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Reducing the housing crisis to "affordability" in a narrow sense (like statistics on household rent burden) misses this kind of human element: there are huge numbers of people with very individual situations whose choices in life are constrained by a lack of housing options.
At the risk of being too “housing theory of everything,” in a sensible world, this guy would just get a cheap apartment and move out.
But because he lives in the Bay Area, he’s stuck living with his mentally ill mother and obeying her rules.
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The housing trap: Americans want housing to be affordable. But we don't want home prices to actually go *down*.
This tension is evident in the narratives promulgated by big mainstream publications.
Austin is building housing like crazy.
Rents are down 7%.
But rather than frame this achievement as a win for renters—or for the arg that housing prices respond to supply growth—WSJ frames it pretty clearly as bad news across the board.
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It's remarkable that barely a decade ago, broad-scale zoning reform was a beyond-niche issue. Now CNN is talking about it, and apartment bans have been lifted in dozens of US cities and states. We're witnessing a sea change. 🧵
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"Why can't the developer show some respect for the community by acknowledging and responding to immediate neighbors' concerns?"
I've heard this a lot, often probably meant in good faith. But when the answer is no, this is why:
I made a major mistake on Kolo during the entitlement process.
We originally had balconies designed on both sides of the building.
In an attempt to appease the neighbor to the south, I agreed to eliminate all the balconies on that side, even though I wasn’t required to.
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@ksusys
What I'm saying is the amount they need to pay drivers in order to recruit and retain them is more than what riders often feel a rideshare trip "should" cost.
They did subsidize service for years. The idea they could easily raise wages now while keeping fares low is an illusion.
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Car culture: a huge emphasis is placed on verifying proper car seat usage when you leave the hospital with your newborn, yet it warrants zero mention in any parenting education that the most dangerous thing you will likely expose your kid to is riding in a car routinely.
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In most US cities, "getting people out of their cars" completely isn't the right framing for urbanists. It's making *enough* of everyday life car-optional that households can scale back their dependence on them.
A good goal for Charlotte would be to have more neighborhoods where families only need one car.
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In reality, changing codes to allow single-stair buildings like those common in many European countries was, prior to this week, mostly an idea championed by architects interested in better floor plans and more energy- and space-efficient buildings.
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I mean, Silicon Valley as a whole is a paradox: global capital of innovation in the most stultifyingly banal built environment imaginable.
But most of it was built in the '60s - '80s when suburbia was still the future and few knew better. Apple in the 2010s doesn't get a pass.
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Housing shortages are actually housing spillovers.
Everyone needs a home. So when we don't build, demand doesn't evaporate—it floods into other neighborhoods, other cities, other metro areas or even whole regions. 🧵
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But it does also affirm for me that we're doing something at
@StrongTowns
that doesn't map onto the typical liberal-conservative understanding of politics, and sort of scrambles people's preconceptions as a result.
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I am definitely afraid that the primary outcome of federal money for highway teardowns is going to be a lot of stroad projects like this one, with the obligatory Complete Streets box-checking / greenwashing.
I feel like I have to really squint to understand that the image on the right is the better one
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Yes, and: when people tell you they're opposed to "commercial" use in neighborhoods, they are never ever picturing this. More likely a CVS with giant parking lot.
It's on planners for failing to communicate this vision, amid lots of abstracted talk of "density" and "mixed use."
Your semi-regular reminder that corner stores + cafes + more in residential neighbourhoods are very good things.
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A lot of public engagement by planners is worthless bc it starts with the wrong premise: finding out which plans or priorities "the community" prefers.
This is an unanswerable question and leaves everyone in the process feeling like their time has been wasted, because it has.
@lankybutmacho
My broad take on engagement is that what we seek to learn matters more than who we hear from or how we ask.
Ask the public about the thing they're actually expert on: namely, their experiences and struggles using city services and the built environment.
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Tell me if you've heard this one: "The only way to get affordable housing is to demand it. For-profit developers are never going to build apartments that regular people can afford unless we force them to." 🧵 (1/)
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Adult life could be a lot more like some of the best things about college (easy to meet people, lots of unplanned socialization, daily needs in walking distance) if we would just design cities for it.
“For most people, college was the last time it was normal to just randomly run into people.
As you get older, you drive to work, see the same people every day, then go home. But the best things happen when people are running into each other and sharing ideas.”
–Tony Hsieh
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Density is not the magical affordability button that some think it is.
Yes, it distributes high land costs across multiple households, but the diminishing returns from that are met pretty quickly. Note the slope of the blue curve.
This is why Missing Middle is a sweet spot.
@RegimeCPA
@DanielStrTowns
Skyscrapers? Ha! You want a high price per foot? That’s how ya do it.
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Sweeping claims about fire safety in this context seem to be more about people's ideological priors. We're talking, after all, about legalizing building types that are ubiquitous in Western Europe, where every country has a much lower fire death rate than the U.S.
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@mateosfo
LA has the bones to be a great transit, walking, and biking city. And the huge ROW to convert its stroads to multimodal boulevards. Political will is on its way.
I'm actually more bullish on LA making the transition out of car-dependency than probably 98% of US cities.
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The overwhelming majority of Americans interact with public streets *primarily* as drivers / while in private cars.
If advocates for safe and humane streets can't articulate a case for our vision that also holds appeal for drivers, we simply will not win. 🧵
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Make it functional right now. Make it beautiful later.
Washington, D.C. It might not be beautiful, but our shared interest in public health and social distancing demands it. Expanded sidewalks created at the drop of a hat.
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One of the worst things about planning post-Suburban Experiment is that we've largely turned over the task of designing and providing public space to private developers. The result is a public realm that is fragmented, incoherent, and generally crappy.
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The implicit ideology of zoning is that neighborhoods are static: once built, their basic physical character should never change. Once in a while you see someone make it explicit.
Real cities can't operate this way. Communities' needs evolve, and so must the built environment.
@HousingSpock
@TheOmniZaddy
@amoralorealis
So any rezoning of nearby land is fine. Why not a refinery? Why not a sewage treatment plant? Zoning is a concept whereby “the neighborhood plan” is known by all parties in advance. REzoning is unfair to those who invested in properties, made improvements, planted trees, etc
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How much of the proliferation of HOA communities is because homeowners really want them? And how much is because local governments have outsourced to private developers the job of planning the public realm and maintaining common amenities and infrastructure?
We have an HOA problem in MN
The problem begins with their mandated creation.
How?
Monuments / outlots requires an HOA to manage common property. Can be mandated as a PUD condition.
Large part of this is offloading local stormwater pond care & maintenance duties.
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Long before a popular place runs out of space to accommodate everybody who wants to be there, it will run out of space to accommodate everybody's cars.
The answer for these places is that non-car transportation must become dominant. Equally true of lower Manhattan and Lake Tahoe
Lake Tahoe is one of those places *so close* to greatness, but design of its built environment — basically, a sea of parking lots, with occasional homes/businesses — make it suck galactically.
They could run a train around the lake, if they wanted to.
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If your priors require you to believe that that very outcome—the evidence of which is all around you, probably in your own neighborhood—is not only implausible but transparently stupid, maybe it's time to examine your priors. (2/2)
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As a parent of two toddlers, the lack of attention to shade on playgrounds is maddening. Especially when we lived in Florida, so many otherwise nice playgrounds were all but unusable the hotter half of the year.
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My big-picture take on this sort of misanthropic NIMBYism is it reflects a long-term cultural shift from "My city is a community of which I am part" to "My city is a consumer experience that I have paid for."
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Is it me, or does every town/neighborhood have that one commercial space that seems inexplicably cursed?
At least 6 restaurants have failed in this building in Sarasota in 10 years. It's gorgeous, great location, but even a beloved BBQ joint moved in + couldn't make it work 🤷
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This is so demoralizing.
I've seen a bunch of cases where successful and popular pandemic-era open streets programs are ended—not because anybody is even asking for it, but simply in a reversion to brain-dead bureaucracy and/or the default assumption of "streets are for cars."
I’m disappointed that Oakland has chosen to hurt small businesses when they’re still down and out. Having created the Flex Streets program, it feels especially personal to watch such a successful initiative be dismantled — and for no apparent purpose whatsoever.
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I'm being confidently, and incorrectly, assured that this is a proposal invented by YIMBYs solely to reduce development costs in order to enable more market-rate construction. By people who it seems likely had scarcely heard of this debate before this week.
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This. There are actually 3 sets of "developers" that barely overlap:
1) Big national homebuilders. They do suburban subdivisions, full stop.
2) Mid- to high-rise urban developers: these are mostly local/regional companies.
3) Small-scale infill developers and rehabbers.
(1/2)
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So excited to get to announce this news!
Exciting announcement 🚨
We are thrilled to welcome Daniel Herriges
@dpherriges
as our new Policy Director!
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Nearly a century ago, Americans embarked on a radical experiment in how we finance homes and plan neighborhoods. It was supposed to deliver mass affordable homeownership in permanently prosperous neighborhoods.
It hasn't.
It's time for a new approach.
Escape on 4/23/24.
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Many older Americans grew up with eclectic and dynamic neighborhoods that evolved pre-zoning (or with much simpler and less restrictive zoning) and have fond memories of them, but don't make the connection to how we prohibit today the very processes that built such places.
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For those who don't know, Marchetti's Constant is a rule of thumb that people will tolerate up to about an hour of routine daily travel, and city size is bounded by this fact and the prevailing transportation technology of the day.
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Many Americans' first reaction to the idea of Vision Zero is dismissive laughter: "You can't literally mean *0* road deaths, right?! I mean, that's impossible! There will always be accidents!"
Oh hey there, Norway.
This makes me happy:
Road deaths in Oslo (pop. 673.000) in 2019:
Pedestrians: 0
Cyclists: 0
Children: 0
The graph shows the reduction of road deaths since 1975.
Article in Norwegian:
#VisionZero
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I think the people who want to pigeonhole us on the left-right spectrum would be very surprised to meet the Strong Towns staff and see the diversity of political opinion (we also see it in our audience).
Heck, the conversations I have with my colleagues frequently surprise *me*.
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Anyway, narrow lanes save lives, and 10 ft max should be the default on urban streets. Engineers should have to justify going any wider.
But don't take it from me, ask researchers at the
#1
public health school, who studied the question.
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I drove through this town (Bamberg, SC) while taking a long detour around a slowdown on I-95 and remember braking hard to gawk at this stretch. Amazing urban form + old buildings, almost every one of them vacant, doesn't take much sleuthing to find some clues to what went wrong.
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Not that there aren't YIMBY benefits (one is making multifamily construction more feasible on small lots), but there are good reasons to allow point access blocks that are simply about better buildings and quality of life.
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This is a great building that fills a niche and that a lot of people would gladly live in. We need more housing variety in our cities, as well as more housing.
To the casual commentariat, tradeoffs don't exist and you can just be an absolutist about your pet issue.
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Germany has only about 1/3 as much impervious surface per capita as the U.S. For the Netherlands it's 40%.
Turns out if you want it so that everyone can drive and park to a house with a big green yard, you have to pave over a lot more actual nature.
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Commercial districts can stumble along with quite a lot of upper-story vacancy (see: every small town main street, and now many big-city downtowns post-covid). But *ground floor* vacancy is the kiss of death. Nothing more quickly makes a place feel desolate, even dangerous.
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"Created" is absolutely the wrong verb for what's happening here. Housing scarcity doesn't "create" wealth; it transfers wealth to property owners from everyone else.
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Love the growing trend of cities offering pre-approved plans.
The City of Port Angeles has released a series of designs that are free, pre-approved, and range from studios to townhouses of 480sf to 2600sf. They also waive the building permit fees to encourage uptake and affordability. Go Port Angeles!
This is the way.
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Disclaimer: I am not an architect. But the arguments here are highly intuitive IMO. You can avoid double-loaded corridors, which means buildings don't have to be as bulky, and apartments can have cross-ventilation vs. windows only on one side.
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A car, insurance, maintenance, gas combined cost about $8000 a year. People take this all-but-mandatory ante to participate in society for granted, then turn around and insist with a straight face that we must subsidize everyone's parking or it'll be too hard on the poor.
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Yes, legalize this, but also recognize that it's going to take a whole lot more than "legalize it" to get anyone to make places like this again. (And that that's a worthwhile fight to take on.)
It's a whole development culture/ecosystem we've lost, not a few zoning codes.
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I've been in Scranton, PA visiting my in-laws, and I realized something yesterday: I have no idea what the best way from their house to the grocery store is. I've taken a different route every time.
Naturally, this fact has my planner brain ticking. A thread about streets (1/20)
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Seen Californians double-take at the fact that these fees in other states are only in the 4 figures.
Prop 13 in CA has been an absolute disaster. Local governments scrounge for revenue anywhere they can get it, tax the hell out of new development to benefit longtime homeowners.
Parks fees in California are completely out of control. $45,884.72 per apartment in Palo Alto. $70,567.20 in Sunnyvale. That this hasn't be addressed should tell you how serious we are about addressing the housing crisis.
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Highways opened up vast rural areas for development by placing them within an easy commute of downtown. This plus redlining caused urban land values to plummet. Federal mortgage policies favored new suburban homes.
White flight didn't just happen, it was induced by public policy
American cities fell into disrepair and blight when millions of middle class people left in the second half of the 20th century. When cities lose population, properties are abandoned due to lack of demand, but urbanists push a false narrative that highways destroyed cities.
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To renters (and housing advocates), a "bad" housing market means prices are too high.
To financiers, investors, and most homeowners, a "bad" housing market means prices fell or might fall.
When Newsweek says the market in Florida is "in trouble", wanna guess what they mean?
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Many QTs dunking on this for still not being cheap. Turns out construction costs money.
It's not popular to say, but there's likely no set of policy reforms that will make brand new market-rate housing affordable to the working class. Older homes, though, can and should be.
The dream of the affordable starter home can be found in Portland. We haven’t seen these sales prices in a decade.
#smallscale
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The CNN piece isn't perfect, but what I most appreciate about it is it conveys that modern zoning was a radical experiment. The norm, in history and across the globe, is that neighborhoods evolve iteratively over time: they are not static or finished.
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In urban planning I'd pinpoint 2 things:
1) Public engagement that foregrounds the opinions of the loudest voices, rather than the actual needs / experiences of the public.
2) Overreliance on projections, models, and plans, vs. designing systems that are responsive + adaptable.
My favorite question to ask these days: What do the experts in your field consistently get wrong?
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Sunbelt doesn't have housing policy magically figured out. These places are mostly just California 30-40 years ago.
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Memo from a left-wing New Urbanist: this is nonsense. It's a good thing when good ideas have appeal across the political landscape. Not everyone has to be on board for exactly the same reasons. (1/5)
@NewUrbs
Memo to New Urbanists: it is deeply distressing that your good cause gets tied up into conservatism. Stop publishing in such outlets! OMG, do you want to win or not?
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What passes for American urban planning these days is 20% shaping the public realm, 80% micromanaging the private realm. Those percentages should be reversed.
This is what radicalized me toward zoning abolition.
Cities in other countries — even ones with far less state capacity and fewer resources — spend their urban planning efforts on transformational, quality of life projects.
USAmerican cities do not plan. They only zone.
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Everyone likes the *idea* of design standards. Duh. People like nice looking buildings.
But in practice, those standards usually mandate the exact kind of building everyone hates! I feel like a lot of people out there would be scandalized by this if they realized it.
@jake_gotta
@gatodejazz
@boyonabike62
and building code restrictions! but it's dark comedy how one of the features people hate most about 5-over-1 architecture (the cacophony of materials and plane changes on the facade) is one of the things most consistently mandated by local design standards
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If the AARP can become a big (and highly effective) player in advocacy for better land use policy and safer street design, then I say MADD can too.
Is it your core mission? No. Does it touch on your core mission in a really obvious and profound way? Absolutely.
Not endorsing this specific comment, but it is curious that the drunk driving advocacy groups don't have a lot to say about land use or transpo design. A world where it's as easy to walk/transit to the bar as it is to drive is one where fewer people get behind the wheel drunk
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I see a whole lot of QTs objecting to this framing, I think in part because "radical change" is a vague phrase that bad actors might just use to mean "change I don't like."
Let me be clear: the change required to the North American development pattern itself *is* radical. 🧵
We believe no neighborhood should be exempt from change, but no neighborhood should be subjected to radical change. Incremental development is a major key to building better places.
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This is what *most* gentrification looks like. Large new buildings are a lagging indicator—if they're penciling out, it's because attainable rents in the neighborhood are already quite high. Look at single-family houses on the blocks nearby, and you'll see a lot of this stuff.
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This doesn't imply filtering is efficient, predictable, or will meaningfully aid affordability in a particular place+context.
But it's extremely obvious that much of the existing affordable housing stock is housing that has filtered. "This could never happen" is a bizarre claim.
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There's a very specific feeling I struggle to convey to explain why I want walkable, human-scale places on a gut, emotional level, not just an intellectual one.
It's the feeling of stepping outside and being in a space designed for human comfort, and it feels kind of like a hug.
To combat the long, dark nights of winter, each year from November to January, Delft brightens up its city center in pretty spectacular fashion.
Lately, facing at least five more weeks of lockdown, we find ourselves aimlessly strolling its ‘low-car’ streets at every opportunity.
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My first real introduction to urbanism was The Geography of Nowhere. The central takeaway of that book (and the below thread) still resonates with me:
A defining feature of the postwar era of development is that we mostly stopped building places worth caring about.
The problem with modern architecture.
(It isn't what you think)
A short thread...
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I sat in a room with a group of boomers waxing nostalgic about triple-deckers and neighborhood corner restaurants in places like Fall River, Massachusetts, while insisting that any multifamily development today needed to be "tightly, tightly regulated."
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Neither zoning for high density or building at high density is likely to result in affordable rents in those new buildings.
The actual claim w/evidence is that new supply makes *existing* housing elsewhere (i.e. other neighborhoods in the same metro / job market) less expensive.
Condon's claim b) says that new apartments do not improve affordability, and is the second way he's wrong:
Yes, the new apartments themselves might cost the same per sqft as the previous building (heck, they'll probably be more expensive if they're new).
But what really matters
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