M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
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the once and future city planner // senior director of legislation + research @cayimby // kentuckian // AICP // author of hit broadway musical arbitrary lines
Los Angeles
Joined June 2009
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
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Gmail search is amazing. You can search something like "flight sacramento receipt 2023" and it will somehow manage to serve up literally every email in your inbox that isn't the receipt for the flight you just took to Sacramento.
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It's wild how Starbucks went from classic "third place" to the cutting edge of hostile architecture in a span of like a decade.
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I've literally never clicked copied and pasted text and thought, "I'm so glad it kept the formatting and font from the other document.".
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I'm forever thinking of this Reddit thread: "What did a Roman parking lot look like?"
Without history we tend to consider the status quo normal, and other possibilities anomalous. But the original proponents of today's status quo on US streets called their own position "radical," and the status quo we live with every day was their far-fetched, radical aspiration.
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For the price of Santa Monica bungalow, you can own the largest building in St. Louis.
Oh, no. The largest office building in St. Louis has sold for $3.5 million, per WSJ. In 2006, it sold for $205 million.
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For 40 years, the Los Angeles mandated that every new high-rise install a helicopter pad on the roof on the basis of fire safety. The theory? A helicopter might land on a burning building and evacuate occupants.
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Parts and labor, I'm confident we can install a bus shelter for $500.
Typical bus shelters often cost $50k or more and require coordination among 8 departments. La Sombrita (in its most expensive, prototype form) costs approximately 15% of the price of a typical bus shelter and can be installed in 30 minutes or less.
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The entire point of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is to protect its fragile contents from direct sunlight while allowing for a warm glow through the marble, you philistines.
First is sacrifice. Buildings must have visible proof of the love and dedication that went into them. Today, we generally produce the largest result for the least cost, shaving any "unnecessary" detail or material from the design.
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To whoever is doing this to scifi book covers: I just want to talk.
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love these Girls. not the most popular but Always sticking together
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How do blind people figure what kind of dollar they're being handling? After all, aren't $1 and a $20 bills all the same size? You may be surprised to know that every major currency issuer in the developed world has found a way to solve this problem—except the US. (1/5)
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It was a laudable attempt, but I think we can all agree that these things suck.
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I had the chance to ride through this on a recent visit to Las Vegas. Honestly, it made typical regional airport people mover look like space age technology.
Here is the brand new Boring Company Vegas Loop – Westgate Station tunnel that just opened. Source:
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Every day on this platform.
the American mind cannot comprehend not being obsessed with the idea of race 24/7.
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A car dealership turns into 491 homes in Arlington, VA. (2012➡️2019)
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On December 21 1962, officials opened the 405, forever ending traffic in Los Angeles.
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Is Calgary the only major city in North America where the jurisdiction boundaries actually cover all of what a normal person might think of as the city?
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So why did your generation make them illegal to build?.
Most of us grew up in houses this size. It amazes me that young couples all feel they need a house ten times this size to start out in. No wonder there is a housing crisis in this country. Drive by any new developments and you never see economical houses this size being built.
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American threads are way too big. We need more five-to-10 seat bars, like in Japan. A scale where one proprietor can run it and you have no choice but to chat.
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An underrated element of the 2010s Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy was that there used a reasonably comfortable place to sit and work with free WiFi and a power outlet every few blocks in every city in the country.
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I wish more US firms would just do the European thing where the entire firm shuts down for a couple of weeks in the summer. Instead we do this thing where, in any given a week, a random third of your colleagues are out at any given time, and you're just kind of waiting on them.
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This is such an amusing little Tesla design oversight.
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The defining feature of a civilized airport: a train to downtown.
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The Los Angeles River has got to be one of the most underutilized public spaces in North America, right? This could be an incredible linear park with a multimodal greenway that connects the whole city.
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Forever wild to me that Los Angeles once had the best transit system in the world and we ripped it all up.
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I would suggest that it's better for people to live in small apartments than in tents, cars, and on couches.
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I need to meet this Prius owner who got a totally illegal lift but felt compelled to strictly adhere to window tinting laws.
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Would it really be so bad if this happened in the typical American suburb? I don't think so.
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I don't think that we've fully reckoned with the aesthetic cost of telling an entire generation of young people that the only acceptable path in life is to go get an email job.
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For the 2024 Olympic Village, Paris built 2,400 new homes in a larger ecodistrict master plan. For the 2028 Olympic Village, Los Angeles is going to temporarily evict a few thousand UCLA graduate students, many who have lived in their units for years.
READ: The new high-performance Paris Olympic Village is Illegal to build in the US. French planners wanted the OV district to be “a sustainable, permanent housing solution.” Every OV should boldly challenge the way we build communities globally. Discuss.
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Toronto takes the whole concept of the "missing middle" to the next level.
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It's wild how, in the 1990s, the entire rest of the developed world said, "Jeez, we really need to get a handle on all these traffic deaths," and the US just said, "You all go on without me." Hundreds of thousands of needless American deaths as a result.
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The National Parks Service actually subsidizes turning the parks into a traffic sewer. If you, partner, and two kids want to walk in, bicycle, or take a bus into Yosemite, you pay $80. But if you drive your SUV in, you only pay $35. Completely backwards!
Can we talk about #Yosemite's car problem ? Setting aside the reservation system issue, what's the park's plan for improving public transportation access to the park, and multimodal access in the valley? Video: rows of cars parked on the shoulder in Yosemite Valley.
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It's a bummer how Google Streetview will skip entire towns in Appalachia and then extensively document every single-lane in a Phoenix Wal-Mart parking lot.
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If this sounds profoundly stupid to you, well, you're not alone: no other major American city imposed such a requirement, and actual fire safety experts universally agreed that landing a helicopter on a *burning building* is incredibly unsafe.
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Malé, Maldives looks out like a fully maxed out SimCity game.
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People love to say "Los Angeles shouldn't exist" as if this location isn't in one of the tiny patches of paradise on Earth.
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what goes on here ?
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A Burger King turns into 318 homes in DC. (2011➡️2019)
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An interesting feature of non-zoning in Houston is that they do a lot of TALL single-family homes.
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This overpass was completely rebuilt in 2015-2016, approximately seven years ago.
american infrastructure is just hanging by a thread and hasn't been touched since the new deal. your representatives are fighting drag brunch.
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Within public sector work, there's an inverse relationship between social status and actual value generated.
This is sad 😢 dude works hard to provide for his family
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Unironically, I think my next book is going to be about these types of marginal and totally ignored spaces that are just endemic in US suburbia.
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These "Move to Ohio" billboards in LA are seriously getting weird.
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There was only one documented use of a helipad for fire abatement in their 40 year history: the 1988 First Interstate Tower fire—a building that burned because, while it had a helipad, it didn't have sprinklers. Odd priorities!
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Every quarter I have helped to teach a class at UCLA, I have had multiple students sleeping out of cars, tripling up to a bedroom, enduring two hours commutes, etc. There is no ethical or planning basis for zoning to ban apartments around two-thirds of campus.
behold, one of the greatest land use policy failures in the country
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And yet, for 40 years, the rule persisted. Besides the non-negligible added cost of adding a helicopter landing pad, the rule also meant that an entire generation of Los Angeles high-rises had to be flat topped. No spites, no ornamentation.
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Imagine how many people could pursue their dreams and start small businesses if we allowed spaces like this.
Worldly Wednesday 🌏. Any 2-story rowhouse in Tokyo, the owner can operate a restaurant, boutique, or small workshop on the ground floor. That gives the city an incredible supply of potential unique microspaces that are affordable for entrepreneurs. Ottawa should legalize this.
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A Bay Area food bank's expansion plans are being held up in court by an environmental review lawsuit alleging that the expansion will destroy an "historic parking lot." It's impossible to parody California.
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If only there were some kind of federal regulatory agency tasked with solving safety prisoner's dilemmas. Perhaps like something a "highway safety administration." Maybe they could control the relative sizes and weights of vehicles. Just daydreaming a parallel non-insane world.
Ignore this at your own risk. Do not put your family in a small car. Yesterday, my wife was driving my son to school and an oncoming delivery truck crossed the center lane and hit her head on — the driver had a seizure was going 40 mph. I was on my way to work in a separate
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Me, derailing every conversation at Thanksgiving by bringing it all back to zoning
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A Burger King turns into 103 homes over shops in Queens, New York. (2017➡️2023)
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One home turns into four homes in Portland. (2011➡️2021)
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While they're all asleep, can we discuss how Europe is way drearier than the US.
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Something that I didn't fully appreciate until I spent a month living in Japan is the sheer amount of noise pollution that Americans tolerate. Honking cars, often modified to be noisier; thumping, high-hat laden music that's 50% too loud in every restaurant or cafe, etc.
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Every small city in North America has two tall buildings: .🏦 The first is a 1910s Main Street bank building that has not been fully leased since the day it opened. 👵The second is a 1970s brutalist tower that houses 40 percent of the senior population of the city.
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Paying my respects to the Oppenheimer-Barbie Houses in Santa Monica.
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I understand the arguments against remote work, but let's be real, nobody with options wants to spend half of their waking life in a space like this.
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Podcasts, Reddit, and Wikipedia are the last holdouts of a useful, vaguely decentralized 2010s Internet.
i’m mad that everything about the internet that was fun & useful 10 years ago is broken now. this site, obviously. reviews are astroturf lies. search is ai hallucination. no place to share with friends & family without influencer / meme / polarized content overrunning the feed.
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Counterpoint: Waikiki.
"we should build huge structures right on the beach" is one where yimbys are in the wrong actually.
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A car dealership turns into 783 homes in Washington, DC. (2011➡️2019)
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For all the kvtching about how Americans don't travel: ~73% of Americans have traveled outside the US, but only ~44% of Europeans have traveled outside the EU.
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Berlin is a remarkable case study in trying literally everything other than "just build more housing.".
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Everyone's dunking on this as if "commutes should be shorter" and "I wish I could walk to work" aren't perfectly valid and solvable quality of life concerns.
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It's illegal to build normal apartment buildings in 94% of San Jose residential neighborhoods.
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This is an incredibly misleading way to describe a driver hitting and killing a bicyclist.
UPDATE: Police say the bicyclist who collided with a car Friday evening was a woman and that she died this afternoon.
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A Burger King turns into 229 homes on top of a new Burger King in San Diego. (2007➡️2011)
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This is one of the most centrally planned environments on Earth. Every one of those chain outlets is a standard copy handed down from corporate, designed to be minimally compliant with extensive regulations, e.g. parking mandates, setbacks, sign rules, height limits, etc.
Sorry Tucker,. This photo is exponentially more beautiful than anything created by central planners. The chaos of markets will always be preferable to the human suffering caused by centralization. Cope and seeth.
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Every election in California 🤪. Presidential election:.🟦 65%.🟥 35%. Prop 93: "Do you support the implementation of feudalism in California?".✅ 82%.❌ 18%.
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Is there a US city with a larger gap between expectations and reality than San Jose?
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Blue America's refusal to build housing sure does seem likely a wild political gamble.
🚨2030 Apportionment Forecast🚨. 4: TX. 3: FL. 1: AZ, GA, ID, NC, TN, UT. -4: CA.-3: NY.-2: IL.-1: MN, OR, PA, RI. * Based on the 2023 Census Population Estimates released December 19, 2023.
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Bodega-dependent New Yorkers visiting a completely normal American supermarket:
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The year is 1921. You can order a fourplex in the mail from Sears for $65,000 in inflation-adjusted 2020 dollars and build it in virtually every residential neighborhood in America. Life is good.
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We massively improved air quality.
Why did American abandon this aesthetic? It’s objectively better than anything we’ve had for the last 80 years.
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To whoever decided that international terminals were going to be weird luxury malls that close at 10pm and not like normal ass airport terminals with a late night fast food joint, cafe, bar, and newsstand: I just want to talk.
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Google Streetview driving down every single lane in the strip mall parking lot: 🥰 👍.Google Streetview passing up whole-ass Appalachian towns on the bypass: 🙅♂️💨
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It's weird how the US basically reinvented the medieval walled city, but with freeways.
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For people who sit on Google Maps all day, having a window seat on a plane is like attending a concert.
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Not to sound like a NIMBY, but I'm forever aghast at the Clock Tower development—how could something so garish be allowed to overwhelm such an important spiritual site? It looks like it a tacky Vegas Strip hotel.
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Los Angeles:.1. Take the city with the best year-round weather. 2. Completely give it over to cars, such that you can't safely open your window or breath the air or walk or bicycle anywhere.
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Yes, but imagine what could have been.
The San Francisco hate is overblown. This city is a modern miracle.
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Boy, Anthony Hopkins can't catch a break: His house in London burns down in 2000, so he moves to Malibu. His house in Malibu almost burns down in 2018, so he moves to Pacific Palisades. This house burned down last week.
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The vexillology community really is going to turn every city and state flag in the US into a mid-2010s microbrewery bottle label, huh?.
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In the time it's going to take LA Metro to do "community engagement" for a single rail subway line, China built a nationwide high-speed rail network.
LA Metro staff has released a report to its board, detailing the community engagement on Sepulveda line in early 2023. It says there was more support for heavy rail. It plans to have another round in Fall 2023 and then 3-4 more rounds in the future.
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Two homes turn into 25 homes in Los Angeles. (2015➡️2021)
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It's easy to get cynical if you're an American urbanist. But remember that the sprawl that surrounds you is a canvas for something so much better.
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The San Diego Padres have the best baseball-oriented development in California and it's not even close.
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