There is a modern view that traditional building methods live on only as the anachronistic preference of the rich. Popular wisdom has it that the amateur builder is limited to Pinterest DIY plans for the “weekend-warrior” and whatever material his local big box construction store happens to stock. But it is not so. The old way of building, and of working, is still possible. This is story of how we pulled off an old-world timber frame raising in a rust belt Ohio backyard, in two weeks, with only a few thousand dollars and 30 pairs of willing, but totally untrained, hands. It is also, more deeply, an exploration of the necessary link between good work and the strong ties of kinship between friends and family.

The Appeal of a Timber Frame

I don’t remember when I first learned what a timber frame was, but I remember when I was struck through the heart with the existential need to build one. I was renting shop space in a shared building, and a copy of Will Beemer’s Learn to Timer Frame appeared one day on the coffee table. I flipped through it apathetically, until I got to a page showing an interior of a completed timber frame and immediately, I understood.

A timber frame is the very character of the home itself, not just the raw material of a house. It is not a substrate to be covered by gypsum board and slathered in “accessible beige” latex paint. It is the harmony of form and function, its strength and its beauty are one and the same. It is the expression of the both the mind and hands of the maker, a visible incarnation of the union of body and soul. It is the elevation of the natural (lumber) into the supernatural (a home) by means of thoughtful human work. Modern building methods tend to efface these marks1, but a timber frame celebrates them. The timber frame is beautiful, durable2, fun to build, and wonderfully fit for the human scale.

Quite naturally then, the desire for a timber frame often conceals a deeper desire for more than just an aesthetic; it conceals a desire for the human conditions that make such a work possible. If nothing else about a timber frame is obvious, it is obvious that it cannot be built alone. I have said the timber frame is fit for the human scale, but it is not fit for the individual working alone. The human condition necessarily includes both family and friends, and it is to the scale of such a community that the timber frame is fit.

Building a timber frame requires a community, and it is this very aspect of necessity which is attractive. The modern built environment is premised upon a total elimination of want and so we have found ourselves in the historical absurdity of a time in which it is not only unlikely, it is unthinkable that the people you live with would help you with the necessities of life. Whatever the real gains of convenience this has occasioned, it is nevertheless an equally real loss that we no longer need our families and friends for anything. For many virtues, and our deepest relationships, are forged only under the conditions of real necessity.

Building with Soul

Timber framing is hard work. We often use the phrase “the hard way” to mean a rite of passage we must slog through before we can do things the way they are “really” done. But it has another meaning: things can be hard because they are worth doing. We naturally shrink from things we feel are beneath us, and refuse to engage with them at the cost of demeaning our intelligence or ability. It is the felt sense of meaning and purpose that accompanies the doing of some worthwhile act which draws us to great heights of effort and achievement. This is distinct from saying we should undertake arbitrarily hard things, which is no different from despotism. “Beautiful things are difficult”, says the aphorism, but not all difficult things are beautiful. Timber framing is hard in the former sense: its aims are higher, and therefore its demands are greater, but so are its rewards.

This may explain why more than 30 people accepted my invitation to raising day; an invitation to 12 hours of hard manual labor in the summer sun. A hard sell if ever there was one. That 30 people freely accepted prompts the question: what is the difference between being invited into something, and being imposed upon? You may be happy to help your friend pack a moving van, but you would not do so for 12 hours. Nor would you feel that you were entering into a transcendental activity by doing so. But the farmers of Appalachian—who joined together to clear fields, raise barns, and plant crops for one another—understood that they were doing very much more than “lending a helping hand”. They were building community, practicing virtue, filling the coffers of the commonwealth with mutual goodwill and ties of charity. Its what Wendell Berry is getting at when he talks of the “membership” of Port William. It’s the kind of local social fabric we glimpse in old movies like It’s a Wonderful Life. It is an activity that takes you out of the utilitarian ends of the task at hand and up into something higher: tradition, community, friendship, kinship, etc.

That was what I wanted. I wanted the deep relationships made possible by real work. I wanted a chance to develop the virtues timber framing would require and offer the opportunity for my community to do so with me. It is, on one level, the desire of the gift giver. Love is willing the good of the other. To love your neighbor, your friends, your family, is to want them to be all that they can be. The great delight of community is the chance to love your neighbor in the very same act by which you perfect yourself and the world around you (say, for example, in the building of a timber frame). But the paradox of such goods is that they cannot be “had” except in giving them, and as no one was making any invitations, I decided to do it, and invite everyone else.3

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So I called my family, and they all agreed to take off work, travel several states, sleep on floor mats, eat meals in rocking chairs, and work long, hard days to see it through. I scheduled a raising, invited everyone in town I thought would be interested, then buckled down to work of unloading and moving timbers, cutting all the joinery, pouring a foundation, in the hope that come day 14, we would have the frame raised.

Building the Frame.

I spent the first week cutting the sills, posts, braces, and tie beams. Braces excepted, these were all 8”x8” green oak parts, It was no small effort to wrestle them into finished timbers working alone. I was sustained in my efforts by kindly friends who would periodically drop by with food (bless you Paul), and to help lift a timber on/off sawhorses. The arrival of my family at the beginning of the second week was an exciting benchmark; I had cut half the frame practically solo, and we now had seven people to finish the second half. True, none of them had so much as built a structure before, much less timber framed one. But they picked it up quickly.

It is a testament to the human scale of the tools and work of timber framing that complete novices can become useful in so short a time. Making pins at a shave horse, riving log blanks, running a mortiser, chopping reductions, spokeshaving rafter swoops, chamfering tenons and handling edges, these are all essential tasks that can be competently performed by anyone who is willing to learn. In one day we cut all the joists and girts. In another, we cut the rafters. In a third, we moved all the wood to my lot and cut both top plates. Over three days, three brothers who had never seen a draw knife split log rounds, rived blanks, and made over 100 pins in their off-time.

To build in this way is to build in a way that invites the involvement of the whole community. The sheer multiplicity of diverse tasks involved in the transformation of raw wood into finished structure means that there is real work for all ages to perform. Timber framing is inclusive, but not in the arbitrary sense of DEI mandates; there is nothing arbitrary in timber framing. The work of timber framing admits of real, meaningful participation across the spectrum of age and ability. Every hand on a heavy lift helps, and there are a hundred small tasks that make up the monumental effort of turning trees into an interlocked structure.

We worked late every night, and were always ready for meals when they came. But there was still time in the day to enjoy a morning coffee or evening beer, and the feeling of growing competence together with our progress made for a highly convivial atmosphere. True, we had the ambitious goal of raising by the end of the week, but within the context of the far more important goal of learning to work well together such that good work was indistinguishable from good fun.4

The reader would be mistaken to believe that the two weeks we spent building were suffused with a constant glow of fraternal charity. We got frustrated, we were short with each other, we fooled around at inopportune moments. Things went wrong. We busted both collar ties during installation. Someone let all the chickens out while we were moving a 500lb beam, helpless to do anything but watch as they disappeared into the neighborhood. All of these were opportunities to let the project spiral into failure. There is no method of building which obviates all difficulty.

But there methods of building which make it more or less worth rising to the occasion. In such moments, one must choose to do the hard, right thing. To remember that chances to get together with your friends and build something cool are unbelievably precious opportunities for partaking of the best this life has to offer. “Crisis” says the adage “does not develop character, crisis reveals character”. And so it is with real, meaningful work. The virtues of your fellow workers are much more apparent when the stakes are real, their gifts and abilities made present when there is actual opportunity for them to be employed. It has been noted by wiser men than I that a chief cause for the modern weaking of social ties is that we no longer need each other for anything. Choosing to jointly aim for some lofty good which can only be achieved by working together is among the finest means available of fighting back.

Special thanks to:
Matt, Anita, Greg, Jacob, Vinnie, Becca, & Josh Larkins
John Eagan
Chris Ryland
Paul Denley
Masha Dougherty
Michael Araps
Joshua Feibelman
Josiah Lott
Adam & Dante Robezolli
Dave Matthews
Adam Sandanato
Daniel McNichol
Rey Noll

1

Quintessential modern minimalism, the architectural equivalent of Keanu Reeve’s life pod in The Matrix.

4

Three years have now passed since the raising. Participants have since told me how fondly they look back on that time, some have said the raising day was one of the coolest things they have ever done. No one has ever told me they look back and wince at the memory of the effort. One of the blessings time pays to the memory of worthwhile labor is an enhanced appreciation for the good and a reduced concern for the effort.

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Nick Larkins is a Philosophy-graduate-turned-craftsman, and has worked as a pipe organ builder, welder, historic home GC, timber framer, motorcycle mechanic, and furniture maker. He presently works in Cartersville, GA, as the head of Craeftworks, a millwork and fabrication shop integrating traditional building practices with incremental development. He writes about the interconnection of the building arts, the liberal arts, and human flourishing. He publishes at With Tools in Hand.

A soul so old, in a twenty first century rig
Working without knowing why
Maybe it’s better to forget

Tune out for a little while
Just to see it from afar
Tune out like riding forever
Forgetting who is driving the car
Forgetting who is even in charge

–“Tune Out,” The Growlers

Intro

I read an article by Paul Jones III recently that got me gnawing at a particular issue. It’s an article that touches on many things: the decline of the planning profession’s efficacy and influence, an argument for the importance of intentional city planning, and a call for the planning profession to step up. It begins with a powerful question: where are the planners?

This question points to a feeling that planners are missing not just physically in “neighborhood efforts, discussions, block clubs and other grassroots initiatives,” but politically in their influence on the development of cities. On the one hand, planners are absent from opportunities to learn from communities, to build relationships, and to educate the public on important planning efforts. On the other hand, the policies and programs they do advance come not from deep knowledge of communities but from behind a desk.

Jacobsian Turn

These two observations identify both the challenge and the solution to the planning profession’s dilemma. Planners have retreated from the forefront of politics and public discourse. To make the profession more visible and influential, planners need to build credibility through community engagement and political advocacy.

We can credit the profession’s retreat largely to the public interest movement of the 1960s and, in urban planning, Jane Jacobs specifically. Thomas Campanella charts this history in a wonderful essay in Places journal where he explains the legacy of the “Jacobsian turn” in planning.

Campanella lays out the legacy in a few related points: One, planners lost their identity centered around “strong, centralized physical planning.” Urban renewal was bad and the profession rightly stepped back from drastically reshaping communities, but projects like the Atlanta Beltline illustrate the power of investment in physical planning. Two, the profession has replaced its professional expertise with public input. “Imagine,” he says, “economists at the Federal Reserve holding community meetings to decide the direction of fiscal policy.” Instead of leading public opinion, planners are led by it. Third, planners have subsequently lost their visionary capacity.

To illustrate this legacy, Campanella shares a story about how a group of residents catalyzed a revival of a rail station in Hillsborough, NC with Amtrak service (now coming in 2027). They started with a petition which students drafted into a proposal. Coverage by the local paper inspired the city to purchase the station and make a task force. Seeing this momentum, Amtrak and the North Carolina Railroad Company became interested and before you know it there was an actual plan in place. It’s a story worth celebrating, and Campanella does. But, “all along I kept wondering,” he says, “Why did this have to come out of a coffee shop and a classroom? Where were the planners?”

In the absence of public leadership from planners, other people have to step up. In Campanella’s case, it was local urbanists who loved getting together to drink coffee and talk about ways to improve their community. In Asheville, it’s not much different. The city recently saw a suite of zoning reforms proposed not by the planning department but by a volunteer planning and zoning commission with the support of the local Strong Towns and YIMBY Action chapters.

When I solicit explanations from people more sympathetic to our planning department I often hear them say, well, the department is too busy. We do have bold ideas, they say, but we’re swamped. Campanella hears the same excuses:

Too busy planning. Too busy slogging through the bureaucratic maze, issuing permits and enforcing zoning codes, hosting community get-togethers, making sure developers get their submittals in on time and pay their fees. This is what passes for planning today. We have become a caretaker profession—reactive rather than proactive, corrective instead of preemptive, rule bound and hamstrung and anything but visionary.

Relinquishing Power

What happens when planners are too busy to lead? It feels like we have no one guiding our cities. In place of a strong, central planning department we have a motley crew of actors with incoherent agendas that collectively drive our cities towards poor ends. Engineers stretch our streets, leaving little room for bike lanes or sidewalks or any sort of public realm. A loud minority of residents fight change, even when it comes in the form of undisputed goods like affordable housing or bike lanes. Fire marshals refuse to compromise on street design despite the fact that millions of people around the world live in communities that violate their standards. And developers plan subdivisions for privacy at the expense of connectivity and an effective transportation network.

Sure, planners might redo the comprehensive plan every few years but it means little when sprawl continues unabated, when the priciest neighborhoods are still frozen by zoning, when the most vulnerable neighborhoods are still unprotected from displacement, and when road deaths continue to rise.

The irony of the Jacobsian turn is that we took away all of planners’ power yet reformed none of our car bias. We stopped bulldozing neighborhoods for highways and towers in the park. But the ideology and regulations that accompanied this—single family zoning, parking minimums, level of service metrics that encourage car-oriented design, and so on—remained untouched. To combat the overreach of urban renewal, we made everything more bureaucratic and difficult to change yet left behind the legacy that has made cities dangerous, polluted, and fiscally broken.

So after planners traded directing for facilitating, they left in power an anti-city ideology. The auto industry’s campaign against pedestrians taught Americans to believe cars deserved ultimate priority on the road. Their ads promoting cars as fun, adventurous toys taught Americans to argue for cars as tools for freedom. Despite the fact that the cost of car dominance is 40,000 deaths per year and an average financial burden of $1,025 per month per car—an extra rent payment in most places—planners have largely aided and abetted these arguments as long as they came under the guise of community input.

Jeff Speck has most succinctly criticized the planning profession in his “Planners Pledge,” a recommended code of conduct that goes above and beyond that of the American Planning Association (APA). “We must step forward,” the pledge declares, “with a new model of professional conduct designed to undo nearly a century of misdirection.” The pledge is full of explicit strategies that APA supports in certain contexts but not absolutely. For instance, APA advocates for “right-sizing” minimum parking requirements, not eliminating them entirely.

The spirit of the Planners Pledge is that planners can no longer afford to equivocate on issues that are vital to undoing mistakes that have “worsened public health, lost economic resiliency, exacerbated inequity, and undermined the social fabric of our communities as our daily driving cooks the planet.” The timidity in which planners equivocate on something as unnecessary as parking minimums—developers will build the parking anyway—does not match the severity of the consequences of the world we’ve helped build.

Most importantly, the pledge says, “When a majority of planners have the knowledge and the courage to get these things right, the profession will achieve the positive outcomes it needs to regain the public trust and enter a new era of civic leadership.”

What our cities are in need of, and what many hope the planning profession can provide, is a coherent vision for building a better future: a future where tens of thousands of lives aren’t lost for no good reason, where physical exercise isn’t most convenient at the end of a car trip, where the average worker can afford paying rent, and where the communities we build are strong enough to last for hundreds of years.

We Know What to Do

It’s not that planners don’t know what to do: we have the entire world to pull examples from. Singapore used state capacity to build affordable housing. Portland designed their zoning code to accommodate gentle density and affordable missing middle housing. New York City reclaimed Times Square for public space with great success. Paris dramatically increased the share of people who cycle by building top tier bicycle infrastructure.1

Yet when proposals of this caliber come up for discussion, most places claim they won’t work there, that somehow they are uniquely incapable of changing. Often frozen by a we’ve-never-done-that-before attitude, we’re somehow unaware that the placeless sprawl we’ve smeared across much of America is in itself a one-of-a-kind feat. If we can obliterate a millennia of traditional urban planning in less than a century, mostly for the benefit of a singular mode of transportation, we can certainly figure out how to build cities for health, wealth, and beauty.

In fact, some of the most bold planning initiatives we celebrate today had never been done before:

• Barcelona’s superblocks transformed neighborhood streets into safe gathering places for residents

• New York City’s High Line turned a derelict rail line into a vibrant urban park

• San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway freeway removal replaced a double-decker highway with a public waterfront

• The Kalamazoo Mall in Michigan popularized pedestrian streets

• Portland’s urban growth boundary made intentional urban growth a requirement

• Massachusetts’ Comprehensive Permit Act, dubbed the Anti-Snob Zoning Act, encouraged more affordable housing development

• Paris’s 15 minute city goal lead them to build around 40 miles of bike lanes every year for the past decade

• Medellín’s gondola linked the city’s poorest neighborhood with downtown

• Bogotá’s Ciclovía temporarily reimagined miles of streets as public space and sparked an international phenomenon

What happens when cities aren’t bold? We lose out on opportunities to transform our communities for the better. But more importantly, we let important decisions go to parties with entrenched power: NIMBYs that don’t want their neighborhoods to change, asphalt companies that want to pave more highways, or developers who want to ravage the countryside.2

Show not tell

It would be a mistake to argue that planners should just ignore the naysayers. I don’t believe planners should be retreating from community engagement. In fact, I think they need to be doing more of it. The decline of political courage and intellectual influence that the profession has experienced for decades will not be reversed by strong-arming communities but by building coalitional support for two things. One, the belief that urban design and planning are integral to achieving better outcomes for public health, community vitality, equity, economy, fiscal resilience, and environmental sustainability. And two, that building a better world is possible—even though it may be difficult.

Planners need to show people what a better world can look like. We need to redefine engagement as not just listening but doing together. Planners need to show, not tell, and they don’t need to bulldoze neighborhoods to do it. They can temporarily close streets to illustrate just how much more valuable a space can be when it’s filled with people. They can activate slivers of street space with cheap, quick-build techniques like New York City is doing with its plaza program. They can host design competitions to reimagine publicly owned land and inspire hope for development. They can empower residents to improve their communities themselves by offering street painting permits or hosting block parties at no cost like Portland does, or using participatory budgeting to let residents decide how to spend money in their communities. This kind of engagement signals that planners are capable of working with the community to test and refine new ideas.

By visibly working to enhance the built environment and prove that their ideas have potential, while also owning failures, planners can position themselves as credible and trustworthy stewards for a city’s future.

Barkha Patel has been a tactical urbanism hero. Presiding over Jersey City’s public realm as Director of Infrastructure, Patel was able to achieve major improvements in safety and multi-modal transportation through innovative and iterative design projects. “Key to Patel’s approach was ‘tactical urbanism,’” Streetsblog USA says, “a practice of quickly deploying low-cost protected bike lanes or corner curb extensions, before building them out with hard barriers and planters.” The results speak for themselves:

Cycling in Jersey City tripled as a commuting mode between 2019 and 2024, according to a recent update to the city’s transportation master plan, as the protected bike lane network grew from zero to 25 miles under Patel’s watch. Today, one-eighth of the city’s streets have a protected bike lane.

We can have both a bold and experimental approach. Bold does not mean bulldozing communities to redesign a city. It doesn’t mean remaking cities from scratch. It does mean taking your ideas seriously, committing to your values, and following through. What Patel’s success proves is that incremental does not mean marginal. What an incremental approach can do is replace the convoluted and time-consuming process of surveys, analysis, and projections with a test we can see and feel. It takes the default, multi-year timeline that we’ve come to expect from planning projects and fast tracks it using an approach that is driven by action over process. By being incremental, planners can show communities what’s possible, not just tell them.

As much as we need planners to show us what they’re capable of, we need them to lead the conversation, too.

Public Educators

Communicating how and why urban planning is integral to building strong communities is perhaps one of planning’s most important responsibilities, but it is not always advertised as such. In the article that inspired this essay, Jones III said:

Planners largely shy away from the truly political nature of our work in order to avoid the hyper partisanship, violence, and negativity that have come to characterize that arena. It’s easy to understand why planners have been trained to take that approach. Many of us hope to fly below the radar and do good work, but I believe the disconnect it creates has harmed our field’s ability to create real impact and change.

I think it’s less that planners are trained to fly under the radar and more that they’re not trained on how to approach politics at all. I don’t think grad school gave me any coherent theory on the role of planners in the political process. And that absence of training means we come into a system where we’re not told we can have our own voice, where we defer to council and the public.

But planners are implicitly public educators—they must be. They don’t hold class or lecture, but they are responsible for informing the public on plans and explaining the complex confluence of history, psychology, sociology, economics, design, and more. The counter intuitive notion of induced demand doesn’t come easy to most people. The difference between a Home Rule state and a Dillon’s rule state that limits what a locality can do isn’t common knowledge. The fact that our psychology predisposes us to the environmental novelty of a Main Street isn’t well known. The deep knowledge required of planners cannot take a backseat to the myopic preferences of people who mostly have their personal interest guiding them. Planners are trained to think broadly about impacts, about competing demands, and about the consequences of physical and political interventions on society at large.

It’s this holistic approach that gives planners an edge and, Campanella argues, should grant them more influence. Public input is important, and I think more of it could ameliorate the tension between the public and government representatives in general, but there’s a difference between engaging and deferring. As Chuck Marohn has said, “our planning efforts should absolutely be guided by the experiences of real people. But their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.”

Planning has swung from the arrogance of highway building and urban renewal to the meekness of bureaucratic facilitation. The solution to realizing we overstepped is not to step back so far as to become impotent. The solution is to pay attention to what we stepped over: the communities whose culture, history, and economy we ignored to build highways and towers in the park. Jane Jacobs, one of planning’s most influential figures, was a master of observation. Where others saw crowded commotion on New York City’s sidewalks, she saw a “sidewalk ballet.” Where others saw chaos, she saw cooperation. Given their training, planners should be adept at observing and appreciating the micro and macro complexities that allow cities to function. But they need to be outside to do this. As Jonathan Pacheco Bell would say, “we cannot plan from our desks.”

Planners’ path to more political influence must come from public credibility. And they build that by paying attention and being present: attending neighborhood meetings, showing up to local conversations at coffee shops, and being part of conversations on how to improve communities. The truth is, planners probably were thinking about that train station Campanella helped revive, they were just too busy, or distracted, with mundane tasks to even think of approaching a topic that big. If they had been in the community, they might have learned what sort of political support that project had.

If we can agree that planners offer a valuable, holistic approach to building cities oriented around a common, public good, and that their perspective has been sidelined to make way for various narrow self-interests, then I believe the path to more influence must be through credibility and coalition building.

2

You can be YIMBY while also recognizing that the majority of greenfield development is not designed for human flourishing.

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Billy Cooney is an urban planner and writer living in Asheville, NC. By day, he organizes public events for Downtown Asheville and his neighborhood, Five Points. By night, he writes essays and book reviews, drawing on his experience in public and private sector planning to understand the space between idealism and implementation. His essays have appeared in local and national outlets, and he publishes regularly on his Substack, Flâneurbanist.

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Written by columnist Nick Larkins.

The wistful “they don’t make ’em like they used to”, is an established modern platitude. We may or may not be up to date on the latest development in the Right to Repair movement; we may have only vaguely heard about “planned obsolescence” or the quality of “American steel”—but we know something is different. The sense on the ground, the feeling in the air, the existential certainty that comes after snapping a made-in-China Craftsman socket, is that something has changed for the worse. Whatever the reason, they do not make them like they used to, and no amount of fanfare over the latest tech gizmo is sufficient to unseat this conviction.

There are many proximate causes for this, all reducible to a common denominator: we have lost our heart. The heart which animated great design (from automobiles to architecture) has been ousted in favor of much smaller ambitions: financial and legal at best, malicious at worst. One can build for beauty, for concern that a thing be done as well as it can, for love of the craft, for love of the people who will be affected. Or one can build for shareholder profit, to minimize possible litigation, to express dominance of self-interest over the common good. The things we build are reflections of the things we love. Our built environment, and the things which fill it, are shoddy because as a people, we have largely forgotten our heart.

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Much ink has been spilled explaining the diverse ways we have erred.1 But to my mind, the most illuminating of all such explanations is the strange but true circumstance of the American urban landscape, in which it would be illegal to build our most beloved cities and buildings today.

Take but one example: Boston’s Acorn Street. Despite being no more than 200 feet long, and originally the home of the working class rather than the wealthy, Acorn Street is one of Boston’s popular tourist destinations. It is also widely considered to be the most photographed street in America. Yet Acorn Street would be illegal to build almost anywhere in America today.

It is worth asking why it would be illegal to recreate such a popular site. No law was passed against Acorn Street. Citizens did not rally against a common enemy, insisting they no longer wanted any Acorn Streets. Acorn Street was criminalized the way a thousand other such cherished places in America were: one well-intentioned but shortsighted piece of legislation at a time.

The standard reply—that the practical considerations of a more technologically advanced century pushed the Acorn Streets of the world into obsolescence—misses the point. People once built and lived quite happily in the old way, and to judge by Acorn Street’s popularity, many people would still like to build and live that way. We did it. It can be done. Moreover, some major technologies have been adopted without overhauling the entire built environment to fit their needs: the only part of the American landscape affected by indoor plumbing was the outhouse, and indoor plumbing did no harm to the old-world European cities in which it was adopted. The remarkable improvement that indoor plumbing brought to public health and standards of living would have been greatly marred had we legislated the absolute centrality of the bathroom in all homes and cities. One must wonder what our urban landscape might have looked like if the automobile had been integrated as seamlessly.

No, the problem is not one of practicality or of technology. The problem is that we have allowed needs other than the prevailing good of people to be the focus of our design efforts. The solution is to take a holistic view which encompasses the whole person and prioritizes human flourishing. The solution is to put heart back into design. The following philosophy attempts to harmonize these concerns, such that every aspect of building (from design, to construction, to generations worth of cherished use) serve to increase human flourishing.

Beautiful things are made with real materials, by people for whom building is a pleasure, at the human scale, for the benefit of culture across generations.

Beautiful: Beauty is a transcendental quality co-equal with truth and goodness: that which is beautiful is also, by definition, true and good. The goal of design at the highest level is to bring about more truth, beauty, and goodness.

Real: The related qualities of honesty, authenticity, and transparency are best conveyed by materials which are so themselves. Real materials are a wholesome part of a worldview which values beauty, sustainability, locality, and health.

Craftsmen: Similar to Real, it is a contradiction to suggest good design can be accomplished by unseemly means: designs which require work that degrades the value of human life and labor are bad designs. Good design is healthful and pleasurable to labor upon with one’s body and mind.

Human Scale: Because all design, whether civic, domestic, religious, etc., has as its point of reference the human form, good design must encourage, rather than preclude, human engagement. It should draw out the best human qualities: civility, goodwill, reverence, etc.

Generational: Man is not only social, he is historical. His work contributes to the next generation’s heritage because it is impossible to build well without also building durably. Good design respects tradition as proven innovation, and thoughtfully anticipates the needs of the common good from today, to tomorrow, to eternity.

G. K. Chesterton wrote:

But there are some people, nevertheless—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.2

…and he was right. What one thinks of people, what they are for, what is good for them, what happens to them when they die, etc., is far more important than one’s professional qualifications to do a thing. Technical knowledge has no necessary link to a sense of increased moral responsibility; the world is replete with crimes against humanity committed by the credentialed among us. You may be free to believe that “life is but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, that the central question of judgment day will be whether you have “followed the science”, or that the real problem with this world is that there is just not quite enough red tape to go around. But you do not, on such accounts, have any business denying the world its Acorn Streets.

If the things we build are, as I believe, reflections of the things we love, then we will build nothing worth cherishing if we don’t love people and what is good for them. Family. Friendship. Community. Dignified work. Freedom. Justice. Personal ownership. We must put first things first. We must love what is true, good, and beautiful. For goodness is diffusive of itself (it’s easier to make more good stuff if you already have a few good things around), and nothing built according to this philosophy will fail to create more good in the world. Get design really right, and all the rest will follow: craftsmen will be found, people will come, pro-formas will pencil. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”3

Nick Larkins is a Philosophy-graduate-turned-craftsman, and has worked as a pipe organ builder, welder, historic home GC, timber framer, motorcycle mechanic, and furniture maker. He presently works in Cartersville, GA, as the head of Craeftworks, a millwork and fabrication shop integrating traditional building practices with incremental development. He writes about the interconnection of the building arts, the liberal arts, and human flourishing. He publishes at With Tools in Hand.

Written by columnist Jaime Izurieta

In 1906, San Francisco lost 60% of its housing stock in a single morning. Somehow, there was no ‘housing crisis.’ As embarrassing as it should be to politicians and activists who’ve made fortunes by offering (failed) solutions, a city with 500 leveled blocks functioned better than most modern metros do today, and it’s all happened on their watch.

Before the rubble, there was a system that modern planners would find unrecognizable, if not terrifying. In 1906, San Francisco was the undisputed crown jewel of the West. After the Gold Rush Boom, it was the richest, rowdiest, and most sophisticated city West of Chicago. It built its status in a time when there was no Federal Reserve to manipulate the currency, no federal income tax to fund massive social safety nets, and certainly no Department of Housing and Urban Development to “manage” the recovery.

The earthquake left 250,000 of roughly 400,000 residents homeless and the aftermath saw rents surge 350 percent in days. Yet, there was no “crisis” as we would define today. One May 1906 edition of the Chronicle ran 64 advertisements offering houses or apartments for rent against only four wanted. Without any modern safeguards we now consider immovable, the city was able to house everyone, fully rebuild its housing stock, and recover its population inside three years.

In 1946, Milton Friedman and George Stigler observed this phenomenon in Roofs or Ceilings? written as a critique of the increasingly sclerotic system that cities had been building by imposing “ceilings”, aka price controls, to critical areas of urban progress, such as rents, labor, and education. If the system was already failing 80 years ago, it’s hard to think how much more intricate the structure that supports the failing system has become.

Jane Jacobs documented precisely that escalation in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, showing how the machinery of zoning ordinances, urban-renewal mandates, and planning bureaucracies had already locked neighborhoods into permanent stagnation and stripped away their ability to adapt organically.

Friedman and Stigler’s core thesis in Roofs or Ceilings? was an observation of information theory. They argued that when prices are left to fluctuate freely, they act as a high-speed nervous system for the city.

Let’s remember the context of 1906 San Francisco is a pre-regulatory America. The market didn’t need a committee to tell it that housing was scarce; the price told everyone instantly, and the city’s inhabitants, driven by necessity and the lack of a taxpayer-funded safety net, responded with a level of coordination that no modern bureaucracy has ever replicated. In the ashes of 1906, there was no “Housing Department” to issue vouchers or “Rent Board” to freeze prices. Instead, there was a price signal. When space became scarce, its value skyrocketed.

That spike gave the people an immediate, urgent instruction: Economize. Families squeezed into smaller quarters. People with an extra bedroom suddenly found a reason to open their doors to boarders. Empty summer cottages became primary residences. Within days, the city’s remaining footprint was being used at 100% efficiency. The market “sorted” the population because it was allowed to speak the truth.

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The “Compassion” Trap

Fast forward to the modern “progressive” metro. We have the buildings. We have the technology to build fast and safe. We have trillions in tax revenue. What we don’t have is the truth. We’ve replaced the price signal with a bureaucratic filter, and the results are predictably sclerotic.

Jane Jacobs identified that the most dangerous interventions are those that treat symptoms while paralyzing the city’s natural regenerative powers. By ‘fixing’ the price of labor, rent, education, or any other goods, we aren’t helping the poor participate in the city; we are removing the very mechanisms that allow the city to create new work and new niches for them.

Rent Control is sold as a shield for the vulnerable, but in practice, it’s a permanent subsidy for the incumbent, regardless of their wealth. It effectively turns a rental agreement into a quasi-property right. Making leases inheritable and decoupling rent from market value creates a “locked-in” effect that defies all logic of urban efficiency.

It is a system that incentivizes a single person to occupy a four-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side they’ve held since 1975, while a productive family of four is exiled to a crummy second-floor unit in an car-dominant, unwalkable suburb an hour’s commute away. This is an institutionalized misallocation of space. It obliterates the market’s ability to “sort” residents into the units they actually need.

As Jane Jacobs noted in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, a city thrives on the process of replacement. When we freeze the housing market, we stop that replacement. We prevent the young, the ambitious, and the innovators from ever gaining a foothold. The dynamic, breathing ecosystem that solved the obliteration of the inventory in 1906 San Francisco has been replaced with a protected class of incumbents that is guarded by activists and bureaucrats whose entire careers depend on the “housing crisis” never being solved.

Stanford research on San Francisco’s rent control expansion confirms landlords cut rental supply 15 percent, driving citywide rents up 5.1 percent more. In New York City, landlords have taken 26,310 rent-stabilized apartments off the market entirely (vacant and unavailable for rent per the 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey) while over 100,000 apartments have been lost since 1950 through consolidation of multifamily buildings into larger units or single-family homes.

In contrast, after President Javier Milei repealed Argentina’s rent controls in December 2023, landlords flooded the Buenos Aires market with previously withheld units as rental listings in one digital platform nearly tripled from 5,500 to 15,300, a 180 percent surge, while real rents adjusted for inflation fell 40 percent.

Minimum wages are another “ceiling”, that when divert from actual productivity and are sold like a “living” requirement, forgetting that for many, the first rung of the ladder is higher than their purported output. This means that on top of passing higher costs on to consumers, artificially high minimum wages are pricing a large swath of the labor force out of the market by forcing companies to pay them more than they will produce. This forces the decision of hiring fewer people, increasing responsibilities without extra pay, or simply closing businesses. Studies across decades show a 10 percent minimum wage increase reduces teenage employment by 1 to 2 percent on average, with sharper effects among young people and immigrants.

We’ve manufactured the housing and the homeless crisis at the local level. San Francisco’s 2024 count shows 8,323 people homeless while apartment vacancy sits at 5.1 percent and the city added only 1,597 net units against a state mandate for 82,000 by 2031. Any external factors just make it worse, but local governments and the activists that inform (impose?) policy are 100% on the hook.

The City Eats Itself

The type of “solutions” offered are the very things keeping us trapped. Our regulatory frameworks are an autoimmune disease. We’ve regulated growth and social mobility out of the system. We’re killing the city from within.

In 1906, San Francisco was able to heal itself through the painful, but necessary, feedback of the market. Today, our cities are more like taxidermy: they look like cities from a distance, but they are gradually losing the internal mechanics required to actually breathe, and some are already unrecognizable.

In our obsession to make everything safe and risk-free, we’ve made the stagnation permanent. There is no room to get out because we’ve boarded up the exits in the name of “fairness.”

California has run experiments in many of these areas. It legalized ADUs and duplexes, upzoned statewide multifamily density near transit, passed by-right zoning reforms, and streamlined permitting. Production still misses targets by roughly 100,000 units per year. Median home prices hover near $880,000 and homelessness exceeds 187,000, the worst in the nation. Hundreds of overlapping regulations, redundant jurisdiction through countless agencies, and discretionary vetoes by local supervisors keep every victory irrelevant.

Patches on a dying system leave the regulatory knot intact and solve nothing. The only solution with any teeth is the nuclear one: eliminate rent control completely. Replace all discretionary review with objective by-right rules. Limit the rulebook to fire safety and structural basics. Allow additional units statewide. Restore the price signal as the filter.

The market that rebuilt thousands of units in 500 leveled blocks in three years under 1906 conditions possesses vastly better capital and tools now. Cities that release the chokehold will watch supply surge, costs moderate, and mobility return. Those that keep the filters will remain taxidermy.

The reflection on housing and political controls of urban growth ties to what you’d expect from this Substack because downtown business ecosystems and living commercial districts only revive once cities restore honest economic signals that coordinate housing supply, entrepreneurship, innovation, and street-level energy. Great storefronts are downstream from healthy local economies. It’s our duty to fix those.

Jaime J. Izurieta is a Montclair-based architect and designer, founder of Storefront Mastery, a creative agency that designs downtown experiences, and author of Main Street Mavericks. He works with BID managers, downtown directors, and Main Street leaders to reimagine the streetscape experience.

His work spans partnerships with municipalities, BIDs, UEZs, and downtown organizations across the country, and has been featured on Strong Towns, CNU, and The Sidewalk Ballet podcast. Jaime publishes at Vertical Sidewalk.

Politics in a blue city are strange because struggles for power don’t unfold through policy, but through vibes, and by extension, language. Factions seeking narrative control during elections use buzzwords to convince citizens that they are progressive. “Preservation,” “affordability,” “equity,” and “gentrification” all once meant something. Now they are worn smooth from misuse.

Because blue cities are also often college towns, this problem with words extends beyond City Hall. The closer you live to a university, the more likely you are to encounter people who feel that words are life and that debate itself is existential. Near universities, city politics become rife with performative certainty, moral signaling, and the conflation of words with action. All this forms the scaffolding for moral inversion, in which the language of virtue is intentionally used to disguise and promote immoral or harmful acts.

In local politics, this can manifest in a multitude of petty ways, such as one person attempting to promote themselves and their cause by defaming another—a zero-sum game. But those same habits of inversion don’t stay personal for long. Once moral language is corrupted, it scales: bad actors translate their distortions into policy. In land use, those distortions become blueprints.

When Land Use Words Mean Their Opposite

Consider what moral inversion looks like applied to our housing debates:

• Those who build urban housing are blamed for causing sprawl.

• Small developers who create local projects with local tenants are often portrayed as corporatists, soulless, extractive, and Wall Street-based.

• Those who design affordable housing are presented as threats to affordability.

Each inversion deserves its own essay, but the pattern is clear. Inverting language allows factions to signal virtue by demagoguing others to secure power.

In most cities, the cause is structural. Professional planners and academics—trained to perfect systems rather than build things—create complexity that privileges policy insiders and penalizes enterprise. Complex codes, coupled with opaque and approval systems, allow demagogues to rise by “defending the people” against those who are simply trying to navigate the broken system.

…what Inversionists say does not match what they do.

With this scapegoating, the inversions migrate to policy. Codes ostensibly meant to protect equity lock-in exclusion. Anti-corporate rhetoric handcuffs everyone except the corporations large enough to navigate the maze. The inversionists claim to fight for the poor, while ensuring the poor have nowhere new to live.

In short, what Inversionists say does not match what they do. This is moral inversion, and much of it is intentional.

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Why Moral Inversion Persists

Moral inversion offers the inversionist two main benefits: simplicity and sanctimony. With simplicity, black and white thinking requires little effort to practice, and in a world of short attention spans, it is an effective way to attract cult followers. Offering salvation without work will always have appeal. It’s a lazy way to become popular.

With this dichotomy between good and bad, inversion inevitably starts with populism but leads to despotism. The common denominator throughout populism and despotism is holier-than-thou sanctimony, the notion that one group is morally superior to another. This, too, appeals to the masses, who want to blame someone else for their plight.

Combined, simplicity and sanctimony enable the inversionist to claim the moral high ground and claim power, all without actually doing work or taking responsibility for their own behaviors.

In every progressive city, the anti-development faction is small but loud. They are highly credentialed, deeply certain, and rarely self-reflective. They are entirely reliant on the world seeing them as all good and their opposition as fundamentally bad. This is why they spend inordinate hours establishing the non-truth that all builders and developers are terrible people, motivated only by profit, etc.

When these assertions are challenged anecdotally, inversionists react in anti-social ways. They act out because their ability to benefit from this system collapses as soon as they are recognized as anything other than unimpeachably good (or, conversely, when their scapegoats are recognized as anything other than unimpeachably bad).

Thus, once such virtuous language is co-opted by bad actors, it becomes a tool of control, and reform itself looks suspicious. Anyone proposing change, especially pragmatic change, is cast as the villain. Why? Because reform threatens the idea of the inversionists as the exclusive custodians of virtue.

You can see this pattern play out in how every city—from Portland to Durham—turns reformers into villains, for the devilish act of wanting to build homes during a housing crisis. In progressive circles, inversion is most prevalent in areas with high elite overproduction, such as the West Coast, New England, and college towns.

I will write more about why people buy into the framework in a future post.

But there is hope

Yes, inversion is maddening. And for those not paying close attention, it is tough to spot. But truth still finds its level. Always.

Every empire of self-righteousness eventually collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Eventually, words regain meaning when actions reveal truth. Those who weaponize language to hide their failures eventually run out of words.

And that’s when cities start working again.

I’m Aaron Lubeck, a designer & builder with The Rocket Shop in Durham. I am the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes and a former adjunct at Duke University’s Nicholas School, where I taught sustainable home building. I am a founding faculty member with Incremental Development Alliance and was the original host of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, a curated conversation with top new urbanist developers. I write about policy reform, urbanism, and incremental development at onHousing.

This essay by columnist Nick Larkins will be discussed in our Tuesday, May 5th Happy Hour at 4pm. You can find it right here on Substack, where we’ll be livestreaming!

CARY, NC | Recently, I chanced to visit a development characteristic of 21st-century urbanism and growth patterns: Fenton, in Cary, NC. It’s a 92-acre mixed-use residential complex arbitrarily plopped into a forest, one where, ambiguously, “excitement meets possibility” (what one could possibly be excited about while meeting with pure potency is not mentioned). Whatever might have been, nothing is. The meeting went badly. There is nothing exciting about Fenton because, ironically, there is no possibility. There is no possibility because there is no ownership. And where there is no ownership, there is no serendipity: nothing can be other than what is dictated from above. There are no owners, only “residents,” whose personal mark on their surroundings is limited to Command hookable wall decor, and “leasing partners” whose business presence is entirely at the pleasure of the landlord.

You Will Own Nothing and Like it

Fenton is little different than Farmville for real-estate investors. With the right inputs—a little dining here, a wine-tasting night there, a constant stream of entertainment services, and the occasional holiday-themed splurge—Fenton produces (one presumes) a steady ROI and nothing else. (In Farmville’s defense, it produces fictional assets in addition to fictional cash.) None of the things provided are necessarily bad in themselves—though I am strongly inclined to unilaterally condemn “curated igloo experiences”—but one cannot escape the feeling that such things are aping real culture for commercial gain. There is all the difference in the world between a Christmas party hosted by someone, where friends meet with good cheer, and one hosted by something (a corporate entity), where strangers meet for cheap beer. The spiritual hollowness at the core of Fenton is cloaked by the appearance of luxury—everything’s your choice, everything’s convenient. But beneath this veneer, it is nothing more than a company town sustained by the consumerism of its inhabitants. It is the perfect extension of the technocratic mind. We discovered in the last century that “the engine of technological progress work[s] more efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers.”.¹ And so every detail of life at Fenton has been carefully structured as an act of consumption. There is no human need left un-commodified: housing, food, clothing, fitness, friendship, even experiences themselves have all been subordinated to an elaborate scheme by which the sole product of the inhabitants (a wage) is siphoned away by any conceivable means to the benefit of the far-distant owners.

Fenton purports to be a self-contained community; an attempt to leapfrog the messy business of building a town and a community through real life and work by pumping a billion dollars into a few years worth of development. Astroturf meticulously paved over what little grass there might have been passes for a “green space” in cheap imitation of the south’s historic town squares.² No fewer than eight parking garages service this supposedly “walkable” development, which offers any number of high-end restaurants, shops, and personal services, but no grocer, post office, library, or pharmacy. For such luxuries as these, one must take a car and venture off the reservation. That venerable staple of small-town America, the hardware store, does not exist and never will. What need have Fenton’s residents of hardware, when they do not own anything that could be repaired or improved? Fenton is a microcosm of the modern crisis of identity and community. Bereft of any connection to the past, with no ownership, no thing to call our own, no home repair to help a neighbor with, no serendipitous encounters from a porch with an errand-bound friend, we are left with nothing to do but busy ourselves with the consumption of life’s little pleasures, a need the world (and Fenton) is more than happy to create and fulfill.

Fenton produces nothing, and thus runs afoul of the paradoxical truth that man only finds himself through a sincere gift of himself. You cannot give what you do not have, and the governing principle behind a development like Fenton is that its residents do not strictly speaking “have” anything. The ideal resident at Fenton is a perpetual adolescent: renting a room, leasing a car, eating out when he cannot afford it, financing Door Dash, in a “complicated” relationship. He is not enterprising, he cannot fix his own things, he looks on responsibility as a burden to be avoided. Such a person can hardly be said to be living a full life, and thus has only very little to give to other people in friendship or to communities in service. He is dependent. And while dependency is fully justifiable as a waypoint on the road to independence, it is wholly unacceptable as a perpetual, universal state of being. The conditions of life at Fenton are thus inimical to community and human flourishing, because they preclude the very conditions necessary for human development: ownership, freedom, and responsibility.

What is the alternative?

Common-Sense Community

First, it is worth asking if anything can be held in common when nothing is held in private. What, really, is the difference between Fenton’s “town square” and your apartment? Both are owned by the landlord, and little more than a rental agreement secures the privacy of your room against the publicity of the square. How can the commons exist as something jointly owned by the community if it is merely loaned to them by private interests?

Secondly, the erosion of communal space in our built environment has ramifications beyond the town square. The built environment is the stage on which the drama of human life is played. “A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle,” suggests the proverb, “and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.” We may, for all we know, have removed the town square, erased the notion of private property, and adopted the maxim “I shall own nothing and like it,” and inadvertently tripled both the divorce and suicide rate.

Fenton has flattened the human experience of the built environment, once divided into private, public, sacred, and civic, into the homogeneity of the rented. There is a time and a place for renting, but it is dangerous to suggest that ownership should be the default situation for the average citizen. It is even more dangerous to suggest that every aspect of life be re-imagined within the logic of renting. The qualities that define the flourishing person are in many ways linked to ownership. You cannot be courageous with nothing to defend. You cannot be generous with nothing to give. There is no impetus for creativity when you cannot call a thing your own.

And so the antidote to Fenton is the cultivation of ownership. What exists for the common good must really be held in common, what exists for the private citizen must really be held privately. Town squares should belong to their towns, churches to their congregations, businesses to their proprietors, and homes to their occupants. What structures, forms, and policies are most conducive to this is the subject of another essay; for my purpose, it is sufficient to note the principles of a healthy human community. Fenton makes them clear by being structurally opposed to them. We cannot build durable, beautiful, human habitats for people we intend to treat as little more than caged consumers. Fenton is an ecosystem built for the maximization of investor profit, but a town is an ecosystem of human persons working together for their mutual benefit. These two ends are incompatible.

Perhaps we are unwilling to take responsibility for our lives, our homes, our towns. Like any good salesman, Fenton offers what its customers want to buy: community without commitment, place without permanence, purchasing power on a monthly plan. The facade is attractive, but like all deceptions, it is not real and it will not satisfy forever. The best deceptions are those which are mostly true, with a little, fatal lie embedded. The fatal lie at the heart of Fenton is that the good of human community can be had on terms of total dependency. This play has been run before. The American Midwest is riddled with once prosperous small towns sustained entirely by corporate interests (like steel and coal) that were utterly decimated when the companies collapsed. The lesson is that resilience in our built environment is not possible without a diffusion of ownership and productive property.

The difference is that now, 75 years later, our small towns are still worth revitalizing and people are willing to do it. But what will be the fate of Fenton in 75 years, and will anyone want to love it back to life?

Nick Larkins is a Philosophy-graduate-turned-craftsman, and has worked as a pipe organ builder, welder, historic home GC, timber framer, motorcycle mechanic, and furniture maker. He presently works in Cartersville, GA, as the head of Craeftworks, a millwork and fabrication shop integrating traditional building practices with incremental development. He writes about the interconnection of the building arts, the liberal arts, and human flourishing. He publishes at With Tools in Hand.

Wikipedia defines shiny object syndrome as “the situation where people focus undue attention on an idea that is new and trendy, yet drop it in its entirety as soon as something new can take its place.”

Cities have their own version of shiny objects in the form of big projects that scream innovation, commitment, and a can-do attitude. They may come in the form of a highway cap connecting two neighborhoods, a waterfront trail project, or an affordable housing development, complete with a publicized ribbon cutting—or, in Texas, a fiery explosion. They are big, bold, and they genuinely accomplish needed goals. What they tend to leave behind, however, are persistent and unresolved issues that big projects alone can’t address.

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By their nature shiny object projects are limited in scope. They are one-off, require lots of planning, and they don’t scale. Because they are shiny, they leave us distracted and unfocused on more practical solutions and lingering systemic issues.

Consider Panther Island in Fort Worth. Since 2004, the city has pursued a $1.16-billion plan to reconfigure the Trinity River and develop what will become Panther Island. While work on the project has begun, funding woes keep delaying it.

What I find strange is not the project’s goal: adding mixed-use development near downtown makes sense. But just south of the river sits parcel after parcel of undeveloped parking lots. Entire blocks are devoted to surface parking. Next to the convention center is nearly ten whole blocks of surface parking, broken only by one half block of single story commercial buildings. This strip of parking is so long that if you removed the buildings in the middle, it could serve as a landing strip for a private jet—in the middle of downtown.

At around 30 acres, the parking lots make up a fraction of Panther Island’s footprint, but they are infinitely easier to develop in a downtown with infrastructure and transit access outside of the flood plain. Yet it has looked like this for decades, long before the 2004 proposal for Panther Island. I’m not saying it’s an easy issue to solve—if it was there wouldn’t be dozens of other downtowns dealing with the same thing—but it’s certainly more practical than rerouting a river.

Fort Worth isn’t the only city where a big project overshadows low hanging fruit. Atlanta’s Beltline is in the running for my favorite piece of urban infrastructure in the US. In my 2 years living in Atlanta, the Beltline was frequently a source of joy—a path I used not only to get to school or the grocery store but to relieve my wandering mind and bring myself back down to earth. I usually found myself breezing along on my bike, weaving through people who were walking, running, and also biking, as I passed by bars, restaurants, and parks where people were picnicking or practicing yoga. It was a place that made Atlanta feel full—not in a “we full” don’t move here kind of way (it’s a local meme), but in a joyous, I love sharing this city with wonderful people kind of way.

Yet the city as a whole has a failing grade on bike infrastructure according to People for Bikes’ City Ratings, which ranks Atlanta as 31 out of 100. Veer off the Beltline on your bike and you’ll likely find yourself on a road without a bike lane, mingling with cars that have no concern for your safety.

And it doesn’t feel like there is strong commitment from leadership to change that. In 2022, a complete street demonstration project was ended on Peachtree Street after a politically-connected opponent got state legislators to draft a bill threatening to ban demonstration projects. The decision to remove the demonstration was in direct conflict with the documentation of the project’s success: there was a 27% increase in pedestrian activity and a 11% decrease in vehicle volume. Of those surveyed about the demonstration, 71% supported permanent pedestrian improvements.

The initial long term plans to make the design permanent are now in question, especially considering an update from Propel ATL this year:

Despite being one of the city’s most iconic and heavily used pedestrian corridors, Peachtree Street was recently repaved in a four-lane, car-centric configuration, without any additional crosswalks, curb extensions, or traffic-calming measures. There has been no visible investment in pedestrian safety yet.

Unfortunately, two lives have already been lost on Peachtree Street this year. At the end of the article quoted, Jeremiah Jones poses a great question: “Why aren’t safety upgrades the default, especially in areas with recent pedestrian deaths?”

While the Beltline is an amazing piece of infrastructure, its representation of a commitment to bike safety falls short in the context of the miles of unsafe streets that surround it.

I love big, innovative projects: they inspire awe and show us that we can do big things. They are important for creating a culture of civic investment. But when they aren’t paired with comprehensive reform, they tend to serve as a cop out for systemic change. Big goals need big projects, but they also need small yet consistent incremental improvement. Trying to improve, say, a city’s affordability or bikeability requires projects at both ends of the spectrum.

Big projects need a system to resonate. Forth Worth’s Panther Island needs incremental development downtown across the river. Atlanta’s Beltline needs the occasional new bike lane when a road is repaved.

If Fort Worth can figure out how to make developing parking lots easier, the bigger the effect Panther Island will have on Downtown’s growth and the more Downtown will be able to support Panther Island’s success. The more Atlanta’s bike network expands, the more powerful the Beltline becomes as a neighborhood connector. The extent to which Atlanta stifles the expansion of bike infrastructure, like it has done on Peachtree Street, is the extent to which it cripples the Beltline’s impact.

Without coordinated investment in tandem, shiny object projects never accomplish their goal of inspiring change. Rather, they serve as monuments to our inability to implement systemic reform.

This article by Billy Cooney originally appeared on his Substack flâneurbanist.

Hi all. It’s Aaron.

Many of you know me as a designer & builder in Durham, NC; others know me through national movements of townbuilding, incremental development, and new urbanism.

As the founder of Southern Urbanism, I am thrilled to announce the new columnists we will bring you in 2026 and 2027.

CONTENT

Starting this winter, we are expanding our columnist partnerships with four talented practitioner writers. This builds on the great work we published last year by Austin Tunnell of Building Culture and Coby Lefkowitz of Building Optimism. In this sense, Southern Urbanism is becoming an aggregator of talent, a curator brand for those committed to building better cities.

This summer, we will start publishing monthly essays from Nick Larkins, Billy Cooney, Jaime Izurieta, and me, Aaron Lubeck.

Each will be published here with all content available to paying subscribers. Subscribers will also have access to our monthly online “Columnists’ Happy Hour”, where we discuss a provocative essay from the previous month, with the subscribing community chiming in. The Happy Hour is penciled in for the first Tuesday of each month around quittin’ time (starting 4 pm EST on May 5th).

Get to know our columnists through their bios:

Nick Larkins is a Philosophy-graduate-turned-craftsman, and has worked as a pipe organ builder, welder, historic home GC, timber framer, motorcycle mechanic, and furniture maker. He presently works in Cartersville, GA, as the head of Craeftworks, a millwork and fabrication shop integrating traditional building practices with incremental development. He writes about the interconnection of the building arts, the liberal arts, and human flourishing. He publishes at With Tools in Hand.

Billy Cooney is an urban planner and writer living in Asheville, NC. By day, he organizes public events for Downtown Asheville and his neighborhood, Five Points. By night, he writes essays and book reviews, drawing on his experience in public and private sector planning to understand the space between idealism and implementation. His essays have appeared in local and national outlets, and he publishes regularly on his Substack, Flâneurbanist.

Jaime J. Izurieta is a Montclair-based architect and designer, founder of Storefront Mastery, a creative agency that designs downtown experiences, and author of Main Street Mavericks. He works with BID managers, downtown directors, and Main Street leaders to reimagine the streetscape experience.

His work spans partnerships with municipalities, BIDs, UEZs, and downtown organizations across the country, and has been featured on Strong Towns, CNU, and The Sidewalk Ballet podcast. Jaime publishes at Vertical Sidewalk.

I am Aaron Lubeck, a designer & builder with The Rocket Shop in Durham. I am the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes and a former adjunct at Duke University’s Nicholas School, where I taught sustainable home building. I am a founding faculty member with Incremental Development Alliance and was the original host of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, a curated conversation with top new urbanist developers. I write about policy reform, urbanism, and incremental development at onHousing.

STUDENT FELLOW

We are also proud to announce our new James Hardie Student Fellow—Empress Henry-Logan.

Empress is a Master of City and Regional Planning student at Georgia Tech with a focus on real estate, economic development, and the neuroscience of spatial design. An Atlanta native, she will be exploring how cities shape behavior, opportunity, and belonging through her interest in neuro-urbanism. Empress sees the brain as the primary stakeholder of urban development and uses real estate as a driver of both healing and economic strategy. Through this, she seeks to leverage spatial intelligence, brain science, and community insight to reimagine cities as restorative systems that reflect healthy minds.

Special thanks to James Hardie for their ongoing support of next-generation talent.

MORE FILMS

Lastly, the Better Cities Film Festival will return in 2027, targeting February, but there is no set date yet. After a successful pilot, we are working through the logistics of expanding the film's events to year-round. Stay tuned.

THANK YOU

We could not be more grateful for the support from our community. Southern Urbanism is a 501c3 non-profit, and all contributions are tax-deductible. To support our work and help us grow our programming, consider giving today.

Thank you for your support. Please remember to follow us on Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. And, as always, share and subscribe!

Aaron Lubeck, Founder, Southern Urbanism

Southern Urbanism will continue working with sponsor James Hardie, who has supported our excellent student writing fellows. James Hardie’s support will continue into 2027.

By Robert Steuteville

Northwest Arkansas (NWA) is a unique metropolitan region—without one dominant city. Instead, the rapidly growing Ozark Mountain area is centered on four small cities stacked south to north—Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville.

The valley is linked by Interstate 49, which provides good automobile connections, but a poor framework for quality of life. In the last 10 years, NWA has built a second transportation corridor linking the four cities and three other municipalities—the Razorback Greenway, funded by a $15 million US DOT TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant, matched by local sources.

At the same time, the Walton Family Foundation (WFF) initiated a matching Design Excellence grant program aimed at placemaking. The Waltons are heirs to Walmart, based in Bentonville, a driving force behind the region’s growth.

Design Excellence has funded 17 projects, mostly public spaces and landmark structures, which are primarily located along the greenway. The trail and the design program, both started in 2015, are transforming the built environment in NWA. They weren’t planned to be linked; it’s more destiny and a testament to the power of public space linked by greenways.

While not unique to NWA, it’s a new model for regional development. “At the time, [the Razorback Greenway] was a totally crazy, ambitious idea,” says Meredith Bergstrom, senior program officer for WFF. “But it catalyzed each of the seven cities. Now they have bike-ped coordinators, a dedicated budget, and active transportation plan. It started as a recreational path. It is becoming a useful transportation corridor.”

The 37-mile trail was completed quickly. One reason it is useful: It goes through the hearts of cities, linking downtowns. Loops and side trails link other key destinations. NWA is a polycentric region, Bergstrom explains, a linear corridor where a trail makes sense as an organizing framework.

The Greenway links existing assets and impressive new public spaces that are being created through the Design Excellence Program. “It’s one thing to have amazing destinations. Another thing to think about how can people access those,” Bergstrom says. The program is focused not just on trail miles or beautiful places, but on what good design can mean for everyday lives. Key public spaces include:

The Ramble in downtown Fayetteville, designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz, is a wooded park with a series of winding pathways and a stream restoration. The Ramble is more than just a park—it’s a connective civic corridor. With widened sidewalks, pedestrian bridges, safe crossings, and trail links, this project prioritizes walking and biking—linking destinations like the public library, parks, and entertainment district. The Ramble is a popular gathering spot. The result is a downtown that’s safer, more social, and easier to navigate.

In Springdale, also downtown, Luther George Park has become a trailhead for community access. Designed by Spackman Mossop Michaels, the park includes an iconic stage for live performances, lawns for viewing and informal recreation, a playground, and dining/seating areas. Located in one of the region’s most diverse neighborhoods—working-class Springdale is the lowest income city on the corridor—the park’s transformation includes better transit connections, lighting, signage, and amenities that make it accessible for all.

The 8th Street Gateway Park in Bentonville, designed by PORT Urbanism, is set to extend the Greenway into an area historically underserved by park access. Currently under construction, the 110-acre site employs a formal design that offers a unique experience on the corridor. The design creates an elevated trail in a giant oval, with two bridges crossing a thoroughfare. Like the other parks mentioned, it will deliver community space and amenities while improving access to active transportation.

The 5-acre Railyard Park in Rogers was completed in 2021, designed by Ross Barney Architects of Chicago. On a site too narrow for development and not quite wide enough for a town square, the park integrates a flexible plaza, event space, farmers market building, water park, playground, and significant public art installations.

In addition to those mentioned above, Design Excellence projects along the trail include:

1. Downtown Bentonville Infill Housing at NE 7^th & A streets

2. Convergence

3. Quilt of Parks

4. Helen Walton Children’s Enrichment Center

5. Bentonville City Hall

6. Thaden School

7. Downtown Rogers Alleyway

8. City of Springdale Municipal Complex

9. TheatreSquared

The design along the Greenway, and the fact that it goes through multiple downtowns, make it a signature feature of NWA. The Greenway has been the catalyst for “trail-oriented development” which nobody anticipated 10 years ago. When the Greenway was first proposed, it raised fears of lowering property values. It has turned out to be a valued amenity that has raised demand for living near it, Bergstrom says. “Now we are thinking, where are the areas that need to be conserved along the greenway? It takes you from a dense walk, very quickly, to a mountain bike trail. What are the places that we should continue to preserve, and what makes sense for denser infill housing?”

Some cities are employing form-based coding (FBC) as a tool to create compact development that matches the character of the region, while also preserving natural areas as the rural end of the Transect. A form-based code has been adopted in Rogers, and one is in the works in Bentonville.

The Razorback Greenway is a central spine of a much larger system of bicycle trails in the region that connects urban dwellers to the beautiful hilly surroundings. It has also been a linchpin in a strategy to make the region more livable, to attract talent to the Fortune 500 companies based there. (Tyson Foods, J.B. Hunt Transport Services, and Walmart).

Strategies have included revitalization of NWA’s small-city main streets and copious investments in art and culture.

The Greenway links them together and makes them add up to more than the sum of their parts. Other regions could explore this model.

The Congress for the New Urbanism will host CNU 34 in Northwest Arkansas in May. Attendees can witness NWA, the Greenway, and the new public spaces up close.

This article originally appeared in CNU’s Public Square and is republished here with permission.

Robert Steuteville, F-CNU, is editor of Public Square: A CNU Journal and senior communications adviser for the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Late last year, I traveled to a conference to meet one of my favorite writers, Matthew Crawford. Crawford has a PhD in Political Philosophy and is best known for Shop Class as Soulcraft, his meditation on the dignity of manual work, and how trade work—the act of building or fixing something—is inherently character building.

Spending a few days around Crawford put me in the mood to dig back into political classics writers I studied in college, like de Tocqueville and Nietzsche, who wrestled with a question that still shapes our cities today:

There are a lot of people who hate homebuilders. Or, more specifically, there are a lot of terminally online people who seem obsessed with hating homebuilders.

You see it in every internet comment thread about development, every neighborhood listserv, every “concerned citizens” meeting. Case after case, where builders take risks, their critics frantically engulf civic conversations, moralizing about the heinousness of the act of homebuilding itself.

Read more

This is Part II of a series on how the Homelessness & Incremental Housing Toolkit put together by Kronberg Urbanists and Architects could be used for faith-based housing.

Part I explored floor plans that are ideal for a faith-based housing development.

As I’ve learned my way around the infill development world, I’ve been consistently shocked by how much housing can fit onto relatively small lots.

I regularly look at sites and assume that they can only fit one or two homes—maybe a duplex, or maybe a single family home and a backyard cottage. My boss usually politely chuckles and tells me he could fit 4, maybe 5 small houses while quickly sketching out a site plan that makes the most of every inch of the lot.

You might assume that squeezing small units onto small lots might end up feeling claustrophobic, but a few simple design principles can actually lead to housing that is welcoming, comforting, and feels spacious. Best of all, a smaller house is more affordable, and land costs are spread amongst more units, creating greater affordability without subsidy.

Last month, I wrote about some house plans that work well for faith-based housing. All relatively compact studio, 1, and 2 bedrooms that can house a variety of demographics on a range of sites.

Yet arranging those unit types efficiently to make the most out of a limited amount of land is an absolute must, especially for congregations with oddly-shaped lots and a need for a well-designed space that will last.

But how do you make the most out of your land?

I’ve selected a few examples from the Homelessness & Incremental Housing Toolkit to illustrate.

Single Lot Site Study

This single lot has a surprising amount to offer. Here, Kronberg Urbanists and Architects managed to fit 5 units of housing onto this 50’ by 135’ lot. That’s not very big—it’s only .15 acres.

Most houses of worship have more property than this, but much of it can be taken up by the sanctuary, parking, or other existing buildings. These five units, though, could still fit onto the side or back of a lot on an unused field or excess parking.

Though the amount of green space on this site might not be ideal, it really is a tiny piece of land. When fit onto a larger site, it is possible that more common space could be created.

Even a little more land offers a great deal more flexibility with open space, as shown by the next site.

Double Lot Site Study

Doubling the lot opens up a lot more opportunity. There’s now a central green space in the middle of the site which acts as a common area while also opening up the site and making it feel roomier.

Though the units in this example are still relatively small, the bigger lot would afford greater flexibility to include larger houses like the 1 and 2 bedrooms I talked about last week.

This lot is still pretty small, only .31 acres, and yet it can fit 11 units. The added width really opens it up a lot—especially with a larger passageway between the two street-facing houses that beckons you into the central courtyard.

How Does this Work on Faith-Owned Land?

Houses of worship have special considerations when building housing on their land. The examples above were designed as an affordable infill housing solution for those experiencing homelessness. A congregation’s mission might align with those priorities, but they could also desire a more permanent population such as older folks or families.

All these needs are valid and must be designed for.

Some of these changes would be simple, like making the duplexes into larger houses appropriate for families. If the church has more land, it might want to spread the houses out a bit more to create more courtyard space, or integrate the houses differently with existing buildings.

The most important element is beauty.

Congregations that strive to build housing on their land should aim to create beautiful places designed to last. This is not only important for the church—it makes their place more inspiring and meaningful—but also to the residents who will feel at home and have a reason to care about where they live.

Designing for beauty isn’t difficult—sometimes it’s as simple as planting two trees. Imagine what the cottage court above will look like once those two trees in the middle mature and offer shade to residents relaxing below.

All of this, and more, is possible on faith-owned land. It doesn’t take a huge tract of unused land to create something beautiful, nor does it require reworking your entire site.

It just requires a little bit of creativity, and recognition that you might have more land than you think.

Eli Smith is the Director of Southern Urbanism’s Faith-Based Housing Initiative. He is a recent graduate of Dartmouth College, where he studied Religion with a focus on the faith-based housing movement.

Written by Will McCollum

The room filled with the murmur of nervous conversations and new friendships forming. Seventeen students, strangers only minutes before, gathered for our first Summer Studio. To begin, we asked each student to stand along a line across the room marking where they grew up, from “rural community” to “major city.” We then asked students to rearrange and stand where they most wanted to live now. Though most originated in the suburbs, none chose to remain there. Instead, they gravitated towards the poles, drawn to the strong character of thriving cities or small rural towns. Already, bonds formed as our students realized a shared desire to build more uplifting places—all taking the next step on their path to becoming citymakers.

My own steps into citymaking began years earlier as a project manager for Lew Oliver. In this role, while working on designs for Trilith, I witnessed the transformation of a fallow wheat field into a thriving community. There is a unique joy in laboring to craft a new town, forming its shape and watching local culture take root. Even so, in my architectural training at respected institutions, urbanism was simply not taught. I needed to fill in the gaps. I dove into the work of CNU, traveled to beloved urban places, and devoured every resource I could find. After more than a decade, I pieced together a working framework for understanding why certain places draw us in while others leave us feeling cold. This process was scattered and inefficient, though, and I began to wonder how many others were navigating this same fragmented path.

That question took on new urgency in 2023, when I attended the Let’s Build a Beautiful City program, one of INTBAU’s international summer schools. This program radiated joy, gathering individuals craving more beauty in their cities. Invigorated by their model, I returned home resolved to create something similar here in the United States. We lacked a place where people of all backgrounds could build a common foundation in beauty, resilience, and human-centered design within the American context.

Together with a few like-minded colleagues, I founded Citymakers Collective in December 2023. We had a clear purpose: to teach aspiring citymakers the holistic design principles of resilient, beautiful, and prosperous places. In the following months, we assembled a team of advisors and built a curriculum serving students across all citymaking professions. Collaborating with INTBAU USA, we designed a program bridging past and present, drawing from traditions that have guided citymakers for centuries. Charleston, South Carolina, became our classroom: a city beloved worldwide and facing grave challenges in the 21st Century.

Our inaugural cohort reflected a remarkable diversity: pastors, planning officials, architecture students, national policy consultants, software engineers, interior designers, and more. Ages ranged from teens to late-career professionals. Some students drove in while others flew across oceans. Half had no background in design; all shared a passion for citymaking. Over two weeks, they attended lectures, toured historic and newly-built neighborhoods, and channeled this knowledge into a final design proposal. Each group was assigned a site adjacent to Charleston’s historic core and tasked with envisioning its future in ways that honored tradition while addressing current needs.

The work that followed was rigorous. In the heat of the Lowcountry summer, with long days and a relentless pace, students roamed the historic fabric of the city and produced hand-drawn proposals for a new extension of Charleston. Students trained in design worked alongside students trained with other expertise, all working to craft meaningful urban space. One of the more memorable moments came from a student working in public health. This student detailed a park at the intersection of a new multi-use trail and a vehicular street, anchored by a remnant of a historic structure. Weaving together fitness, heritage, greenspace, and community life, a wonderful space emerged. This concept sprang from a perspective of public health first and foremost yet resulted in subtle and powerful urban design. The artificial barriers of profession slipped away: urban design is public health, and public health is urban design. This proved true with each student. Their unique backgrounds, bolstered by a solid foundation in traditional urban design principles, resulted in a rich collection of ideas. This is the beauty of design: when we work towards a common goal and apply our own expertise, the resulting ideas can morph in completely unexpected ways.

We could not have been more encouraged by the success of this first Summer Studio. Just as our students discovered their place within a long tradition of urbanism, we also have built this program from the examples of others. For decades, organizations such as CNU, INTBAU, ICAA, and the Incremental Development Alliance have advanced citymaking education beyond academia. From the beginning, we actively designed our program not to compete with this ongoing work, but to complement it. By focusing on broad principles, we could give students a foundation from which to pursue more specialized paths through these allied organizations. In this way, we hope to serve as connectors within a larger movement.

This first studio was only the beginning. In the coming year, as we refine our curriculum and expand our reach, we are eager to build a network of professionals, students, and volunteers who share a belief that knowledge of effective urban design should be accessible to all. One of our students captured this spirit beautifully:

“Citymakers Collective Summer Studio will educate and inspire you to make the world a more beautiful place. The staff and like minds that find themselves in the heat of Charleston will give you life and ambition to demand and design a better built environment.”

We are so grateful to see students walk away with renewed energy and skills for the work ahead. If this vision resonates with you, as a potential volunteer, donor, or curious colleague, we invite you to join us. You can explore ways to get involved here.

This article originally appeared in CNU’s Public Square and is republished here with permission.

Architect and urbanist Will McCollum is the founder of Citymakers Collective, an educational nonprofit based in Cambridge, MA, that equips the next generation of designers and developers to build more human-centric places.

Written By Eric Kronberg & Phil Veasley

I. Backstory

In 2019, Kronberg Urbanists + Architects was approached by the owners of two houses in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood that had long been rentals. They liked what we had been up to around the corner at our 2017 pocket community development at La France Walk, and they were curious if we were interested in buying their lots before they put them on the open market.

As urbanist architects, we dug in to see if we could come up with a solution to two vexing problems we’d been wrestling with:

1. What type of project could deliver workforce housing options, without subsidy, and do so without requiring rezoning, variances, or other forms of community approvals—all while retaining the existing houses and as many trees as possible?

2. Could we create a by-right cottage court development that incorporated existing housing and trees—and hit the rent levels targeted?

Enter Finley Street Cottages. Design started, as it always does, with sketching out a site plan and running a project pro forma to determine if we could achieve a feasible project while providing workforce housing rents. We had to analyze the site design and cost implications in tandem to determine a viable path forward. Our diligence revealed that there wasn’t one within conventional approaches; this essay outlines what we did to make the math work and deliver on our commitment to affordability.

DEFINITIONS

DEFINE: BY-RIGHT DEVELOPMENT
A by-right project complies with existing zoning standards, removing the need for discretionary review.

DEFINE: PRO-FORMA
The term pro-forma means “for the sake of form” or “as a matter of form.” When it appears in financial statements, it indicates that a method of calculating financial results using certain projections or presumptions has been used.

DEFINE: AREA MEDIAN INCOME (AMI)
The area median income is the midpoint of a region’s income distribution, meaning that half of households in a region earn more than the median and half earn less than the median. A household’s income is calculated by its gross income, which is the total income received before taxes and other payroll deductions.

DEFINE: WORKFORCE HOUSING
Most cities define workforce housing as housing attainable for folks making somewhere between 80 and 120 percent of AMI. The City of Atlanta defines workforce housing as costing between 60 and 80 percent of AMI for rental dwellings and 80 and 120 percent for for-sale dwellings. At the time of writing, a studio or efficiency apartment in Atlanta renting at 60 percent of AMI would cost just over $1,000 per month. In contrast, affordable housing is typically associated with various forms of subsidy for people making 30-60 percent of AMI.

II. The promise of Finley Street

In Atlanta, as elsewhere, citizens are suffering due to a lack of attainable housing. Options that do exist are farther and farther away from public transit, which is making housing less affordable at twice the rate. Advocates are often shocked to learn that building low-cost housing is functionally illegal. Still, Southern cities are gradually changing that, and Atlanta is making incremental steps toward better outcomes. Finley Street Cottages is a development that such efforts made possible.

As a pilot project that started brewing in late 2019 and that is quickly nearing completion,* Finley Street demonstrates the attainable rental housing possibilities that are achievable through incremental zoning reform. Specifically, it was made possible via modifications to Atlanta’s zoning to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Reduced parking requirements were also critical to maximizing housing opportunities in this existing two-family zoning district. The savings achieved by providing no off-street parking will be passed on to the residents. These savings are a key piece of the affordability puzzle, because even when rents are set through Inclusionary Zoning (IZ), parking mandates on workforce housing make the total cost of living unaffordable. Currently, the cost of car ownership in Atlanta averages over $1,000 per month. In this context, mobility-rich projects like Finley Street have an obligation to maximize housing options that leverage transportation alternatives—and capture the true costs savings they provide.

How does Finley Street stack up? The Cottages are located just outside of Downtown Atlanta and within walking distance of two MARTA stations, multiple bus stops, and the Edgewood Retail District.** Not only that—nearby bike paths allow for a 15- to 20-minute ride to Ponce City Market, and the ride to Trader Joe’s comes in at 20-25 minutes. The location of this project allows residents the freedoms needed for a car-free lifestyle. These freedoms are vital, and although they are rare throughout the South, they are not unique to Atlanta. Similar developments can succeed anywhere the right neighborhood ingredients are present. Let’s look at what those conditions are, how they are intertwined, and how they contribute to affordability.

III.  What makes a neighborhood?

A healthy neighborhood is an ecosystem. One critical component of that network is the ability to access amenities. Whether someone is buying groceries, going out for tacos, picking up beer, enjoying an ice cream, attending a house of worship, looking for a place to exercise or play, utilizing the library, going to school, or seeking out something else entirely, the key is this: In thriving neighborhoods, people can comfortably access such amenities without having to get in a car.

We’d need approximately 23 units of housing per acre for stores to have enough customers living in walking distance to support them.

There’s a lot to unpack within the idea of mobility. It means streets with dignified sidewalks and street trees. It means slower traffic so that people feel safe riding a bicycle, without fear of death. It also means enough households living within walking or cycling distance of goods and services, reducing the need for outsized parking lots to serve commercial amenities. If businesses want to rely on the surrounding community for a sustainable customer base, single-family-only housing fails to provide the level of density required.

DEFINITIONS

DEFINE: STREETCAR-STOP NEIGHBORHOOD
A streetcar-stop neighborhood is a first-ring suburb developed in the US in the years before the automobile with electric trolley or streetcar-based travel in mind, allowing residents to move beyond a central city’s borders.

DEFINE: PLATTING
Platting means the filing of the drawing, map, or plan of a site or a replatting of such, including certification, descriptions, and approvals with the proper county or city officials.

To put this into perspective, we can reference some basic math from urban retail development expert Bob Gibbs. Speaking in terms of units per acre can be intimidating, so we’ll introduce some examples in a moment.

1. A typical commercial convenience center in a streetcar-stop neighborhood typically tops out at 30,000 square feet. These centers tend to get larger if anchored by a grocery store, and it takes approximately 2,000 households to support one at the size of 30,000 square feet.

2. Although the standard distance for walkability is a half mile, a quarter mile is a much more realistic distance to walk for groceries. In a map with the Finley Street Cottages at the center, much of the Edgewood Retail District fits within a quarter-mile circle. This circle has an area of 125 acres. Assuming 30 percent of that is public, 88 acres remain private development. If all that land were dedicated to housing, then the math would be simple: We’d need approximately 23 units of housing per acre for stores to have enough customers living in walking distance to support them.

How easy is it to reach this target? A single house with an ADU on a 7,500-square-foot lot is 11 units per acre. If that house had two ADUs—one basement ADU and one detached—it would be 17 units per acre. If we can provide a duplex and two ADUs, we get to 23 units per acre. That’s on track. Ultimately, though, if you have a minimum lot size of 15,000 square feet, a single-family home, and no ADUs, the best you’ll ever get to is three units per acre. With typical Southern densities, our goal of 23 is nowhere in sight.

WHY DON’T WE SEE MORE COTTAGE COURTS?

In our experience, lots of community activists, planners, and city leaders gravitate toward the idea of cottage courts. They don’t look too big, the cottages are cute, and they seem like the kind of development that could and would integrate into a neighborhood development pattern with more single-family homes. But municipalities often make the mistake of only allowing cottage courts in the same zoning districts that allow townhomes. We argue this is a mistake, because a townhouse development can typically fit about twice the density as a cottage court. Twice the density tends to mean you can pay at least twice as much for the land and potentially make twice the profits on the development. As long as these circumstances persist, developers will not be likely to build a cottage court on land zoned for townhomes, and they’ll miss an opportunity to offer more attainable housing.

To overcome the development math challenges listed above, cottage courts need to be explicitly permitted in single-family districts. There are specific cottage court ordinances that can be pursued, but Finley Street demonstrates what you can do with an effective two-family zoning district layered with accessory structures permissions. For instance, you can start to assemble a cottage court out of a couple individual lots. The biggest shortcoming of this approach is that the cottage court is limited to being a rental community, as single-family zoning typically does not allow for separate platting of individual cottages that do not conform to lot frontage and area requirements. Durham has passed a zoning update called Expanding Housing Choices (EHC) that provides more ways to tackle cottage courts with more ownership opportunities, largely through small lot codes and reduced pole flag lots.

When the Finley Street Cottages were approved, the reaction of neighbors was to downzone the whole area so no one could duplicate this type of project in the future. Finley Street is one of the few new-construction, non-IZ workforce housing options in Atlanta, but the hope is that it will reduce “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) angst, encourage more cottage courts, and allow for further zoning reforms in mobility-rich portions of the city.

In practice, not every lot will maximize all the available units. There will (and should) be a range of densities. Having a six- or twelve-plex on a corner lot at a higher density can help balance out multiple lots with only a house—or a house with an ADU. When you look around older neighborhoods (built 1880-1929), you might see the image above as a typical development pattern.

By eliminating unwanted-but-often-mandated amenities, Finley Street rents are 20 to 60 percent more affordable.

Amid all this math, it’s important to remember a more qualitative ingredient all thriving neighborhoods need: connectedness. Traditionally, porches and vibrant streetscapes have helped facilitate connection. Another way to achieve this type of space is to design cottage courts. These developments are typically an arrangement of differently sized cottages around a private green—a setup that provides more opportunities for porches and stoops. In other words, cottage courts offer more chances for human interaction. As a result, they help build better neighborhoods.

IV. Why cities need to recalibrate their neighborhoods

Like most other major cities across the country, Atlanta is facing a steep housing crisis. Early in 2022, Dan Immergluck, Professor of Urban Studies at Georgia State University, told Axios: “In the last year or so things have gotten much worse, both in terms of rents rising a lot and home prices getting increasingly out of reach for modest-wealth families, especially many Black and Latinx households.” This situation has a few contributing factors. One, simply, is that we have built far less housing than needed over the past decade. This is easily blamed on the Great Recession and its aftereffects. According to FRED, at no point in since the Great Recession has Atlanta built nearly as much housing as it did during the early 2000s.

A second component to this crisis deals with modern household structures. Currently, over 70 percent of American households are not nuclear families, but the bulk of households only have one or two members in them. Meanwhile, the bulk of our housing stock offers three to four bedrooms, and the average Atlanta apartment is nearly 1,000 square feet. We need more smaller homes. This housing mismatch decreases affordability, forcing people to either rent more house than they need or bridge the gap with roommates. The solution is clear: Rightsized housing options mean that people can choose their housing size relative to their budget. So, why is accessing that choice so hard?

One natural design fix would be to provide smaller units, such as studios and one-bedrooms.*** These unit sizes are easy to envision in larger-format, multi-family complexes, but they’re harder to slot into existing neighborhoods. Traditional project types are readily understood by zoning officials and the financial markets, and they’ve become the main alternative to single-family housing. Although we see such projects as one critical piece of addressing house supply, we also see many people hoping for an alternative housing choice. For instance, they may be fine with the lower square footage, but they might not want to live in a complex of 200-300 units or be able to pay a premium for its amenities. Others simply prefer a more neighborhood scale.

“Missing Middle Housing” has become a prevalent topic over the past few years. The term, conceived by Daniel Parolek in 2010, encompasses all the housing options that exist between a detached house and a large apartment building. NIMBYs still argue against Missing Middle Housing, but the mismatch discussed here shows that these options are urgently needed. What’s more, these smaller-format buildings better integrate into the more compact lots typically present in existing residential neighborhoods. As such, Missing Middle Housing tends to be comprised of infill projects with fewer total units. But that shouldn’t minimize those projects’ potential. Designed well, they can become communities unto themselves while also connecting residents with the surrounding area.

A key goal of creating more Missing Middle Housing is to offer more rental dwellings for a lower cost to the tenants. That invites an obvious question: How can we maximize development savings? One answer lies in parking. On average, it costs developers over $25,000 per parking spot to build a decked structure and $5,000 to $10,000 per spot for a parking lot. And yet, the choice to provide a dedicated, off-site space to store cars isn’t just about the cost of building a parking lot (or garage). It’s also about the lost opportunity cost of land dedicated to vehicle storage. This choice means fewer housing options, of course, but the tradeoff is more complex than that. By not providing dedicated parking, those funds can instead be used to construct more units, leading to even lower rents. Parking adds costs and reduces revenue. Both make attainable housing less viable.

To put these savings into perspective, we keep an eye out for rental rates at nearby larger format apartment complexes that offer the amenities described above. The cost of providing those amenities translates to a rent increase of approximately $300-$600 more per month, per unit compared to the rents at Finley Street Cottages. In other words, by eliminating unwanted-but-often-mandated amenities, Finley Street rents are 20 to 60 percent more affordable.

These savings amount to a significant benefit for residents. But what Finley Street Cottages offers is greater than that. Yes, it’s lower-cost housing with access to amenities and mobility options to employment. But it’s also dignified housing. It’s community. And it’s part of a better future for Atlanta.

For more detail on the relationship between workforce housing and workforce transportation, check out this Explainer.

Eric Kronberg is a zoning whisperer. He uses his skills for good as a principal at Kronberg Urbanists + Architects, leading the firm’s pre-development efforts by combining skills in planning, development, architecture, and zoning. @EricKronberg

Phil Veasley is a multimodal transportation engineer working on projects throughout the Southeast that build places for people to move and thrive. Follow him on Twitter @Urban_Connector

*The Finley Street Cottages ribbon cutting happened in December 2022—shortly after this piece went to print.

**At Edgewood Retail District, area residents can find just about everything—groceries, restaurants, home goods, banking options, medical care, pet supplies, cleaners, professional services, and more.

***For example, the R-5 District in Atlanta allows for attached single-family homes—i.e., duplexes—plus an accessory dwelling unit per duplex unit and a guest house unit per duplex unit. At least in theory, that translates to 6 units of housing per lot.

All images courtesy of Kronberg Urbanists + Architects. This piece was originally printed in Issue 1 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.

Last year, the folks over at Kronberg Urbanists and Architects put together an amazing Homelessness & Incremental Housing Toolkit for Chattanooga, TN.

It’s a really incredible book, with the section on proposed housing type standing out as a wealth of information for congregations looking to build housing on their land. This section includes a number of house plans that are flexible enough for infill development on small or strangely shaped lots, perfect for faith-based housing.

For this article, I’ve selected 4 plans that would fit well into any faith-based housing development. There are many more included in the toolkit, and I encourage you to dig deeper for even more options.

Studio Cottage

This studio cottage is an ideal option at the smaller end of the spectrum.

At only 14’ by 22’, it can fit into small lots and be the perfect home for someone experiencing housing insecurity, a college kid, or a young adult who wants to live affordably and doesn’t need much room.

This is solidly within “tiny home” territory, which may mean it’s not great for most long-term residents. Yet it’s important to have options in this range because they are both affordable and attainable on small lots.

It can also be paired with another studio to create a duplex, which might fit in better aesthetically when surrounded by larger homes.

1 Bed Cottage

The 1 bed cottage is a step up from the studio, offering more private space and permanence. This house would be ideal for a young person or couple. It is also a good option for an older person who wants a bit more room, especially given its one-story works well for aging in place.

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The porch is a great addition, making the house feel bigger and offering a nice place to socialize.

1 Bed Cottage (2-story)

The 2-story version is also a great alternative that could fit into a narrower site. While less ideal for an older person, it would still be great for younger people or single folks who don’t need a big house.

This one can also be a duplex option, again a great variation for a setting where a larger house would be appropriate. I also like the bigger porch on the duplex option, which feels practical while being attractive.

2 Bed Cottage

This 2 bedroom cottage is a great option for a small family, a couple who wants an office, or two roommates. This plan really wins on its flexibility, retaining a small size that could easily slot into its surroundings while accommodating a range of living situations.

Takeaways

These housing plans offer a ton of options and flexibility for studios, one and two bedrooms, duplexes, and more. Not only are they beautiful, but they also offer an attainable housing solution for those who need it, whether that be young people looking for a temporary place to stay, older folks who want to age in place, or people experiencing housing insecurity.

An important thing to keep in mind when looking through these plans is that any project would be wise to include a mixture of these housing types in order to foster a diversity of options. That makes for stronger, more resilient communities that allows residents to remain in the neighborhood through many life phases.

Faith-based housing is not just about building homes that are affordable. It is also about strengthening community by offering better places that people enjoy living in. Well-designed houses and sites are crucial for accomplishing that mission.

Next month, we’ll cover some sample site plans that use these housing types to get an idea of how they can be arranged to maximize common space while retaining privacy.

Written by Robert Steuteville

A few months ago, real estate professional Mike Hathorne posted 13 physical characteristics of neighborhoods on LinkedIn, which he paraphrased from Dhiru Thadani’s 2010 tome, The Language of Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary.

I sent the list to Thadani, who endorsed the wording and sent images as illustrations. It’s a great list, and good to keep in mind as we try to build more walkable urban places. Neighborhoods are the center of that quest, the middle scale. Most of the qualities and benefits of urban places come together in neighborhoods that are appropriately designed. Below are the characteristics, a checklist that represents a Platonic ideal of the neighborhood. Most walkable neighborhoods have these qualities, or at least nearly all of them.

1. The neighborhood is the increment of planning. A single freestanding neighborhood is a village.

2. The neighborhood is limited in size to a 5-minute walk (0.25 miles, 400 meters) from edge to center, where the needs of daily life are available.

3. Neighborhood streets are in an interconnected network, allowing multiple routes to destinations.

4. Neighborhood streets are spatially defined by buildings.

5. Neighborhood buildings are diverse in function but compatible in terms of size and configuration on the lot.

6. The civic buildings of a neighborhood are located in important areas, for example, attached to squares.

7. Neighborhood open space is defined rather than amorphous.

8. Everyone living in a neighborhood has independence of movement, since activities of daily life are within walking distance.

9. Reduced auto trips means less traffic and lower costs.

10. Human-scale streets and squares provide opportunity for social interaction.

11. Transit is made feasible by providing sufficient density near transit stops.

12. There is a full range of housing types and workplaces, allowing age and economic integration.

13. Civic buildings and spaces encourage democratic initiatives.

This article originally appeared in Public Square.

Robert Steuteville, F-CNU, is editor of Public Square: A CNU Journal and senior communications adviser for the Congress for the New Urbanism.

This piece was originally printed in Issue 2 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.

Jane Jacobs was an enigma in that she was, in most ways, an anti-intellectual intellectual. She had little taste for the top-down administration common within the elite society of her day. Her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, leads by throwing a roundhouse punch to that effect: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”

The “current” version referenced was a mid-century effort that underwrote heavy-handed urban renewal and freeway projects, which leveraged eminent domain to demolish massive swaths of old cities and the deeply rooted ethnic neighborhoods (of all wealth levels) upon which they were built. In establishing her full-throated objection to this type of planning, Jane Jacobs identified four critical ingredients for vibrant urbanism: The need for (1) density, (2) varied buildings, (3) mixed uses, and (4) short blocks. The good news is that these principles still apply. The bad news is that Southern cities are failing to fulfill all four. Let us unpack each one.

l. Density

Density is the prerequisite to all the other benefits. It’s hard to have entrepreneurial success, affordability, mixed uses, or short blocks in a sprawling city. Density has a multiplier effect: The more buildings, the more interaction, trade, and collaborative innovation.

The South is remarkably not dense. Most cities have a density of 2,500 people per square mile, and the denser areas (all platted pre-zoning) are rarely more than double that. The density required for vibrant cities simply isn’t here.

Jacobs wrote primarily about the North, living in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood and later in The Annex in Toronto, neighborhoods with 30 and 10 times the average density of Southern cities, respectively. Not coincidentally, both of her homes were directly serviced by heavy rail, which requires a density of 10,000 people per square mile. It’s a measure that no Southern city comes remotely close to.

Failing to densify has many costs, including the challenges of supporting small retail, an inability to fund viable transit, and the continued, seemingly endless reliance on the automobile.

In contrast, density links causally to dramatically reduced emissions, because fewer residents drive private cars. Density precedes healthy, sustainable cities. On this, Dixie fails.

ll. Varied buildings

Jacobs wasn’t against anything new. However, she insisted on proportionality. Too many new buildings, and neighborhoods would become inaccessible. They would also become homogeneous. Jacobs knew that old buildings bring two key benefits to neighborhoods: First and foremost, they establish history and place. Second, they serve as a lower-cost space where young businesses can begin to thrive.

Striking a balance between old and new isn’t easy, though some regions have long-standing advantages. Cities like New York, Boston, Detroit, and St. Louis have a seemingly endless array of old buildings worthy of rehabilitation. The supply of old buildings in the South, however, is smaller to start with. Of course, notable historical buildings begging for rebirth do exist in the South. But they are less ubiquitous than in the North or Midwest, mostly by virtue of the South’s less urban, less industrial, and more agrarian history. Further, most of the largest adaptive-reuse candidates, such as mill buildings, have already been renovated. Two decades ago, they appeared to be everywhere. Today, in the most booming cities, those opportunities are largely gone.

When old buildings disappear, Jacobs posited, it becomes a tax on grassroots innovation and entrepreneurship.

This shortage is alarming because of where innovation happens. As Jacobs said, “New ideas often need old buildings.” She identified such structures as ideal candidates for low-cost use, noting that artists and start-ups sought them out for their low overhead and organic feel. When old buildings disappear, Jacobs posited, it becomes a tax on grassroots innovation and entrepreneurship. The South has precisely such a problem. Relative to their denser Northern brethren, Southern cities urbanize more through filling in “gap teeth” than through fixing old buildings. While the result is urban and can be wonderful, it inherently requires new construction. And while the South does boast more space for new buildings, modern zoning codes across the region (and country) prevent this kind of infill from happening.

While downtowns like that of Durham, North Carolina, are now being unleashed through form-based codes, neighborhood commercial districts remain mostly shackled by poorly-thought-through, if well-intentioned, sets of rules. These restrictions run from parking mandates to use complexities, buffers, design reviews, and stormwater regulations. Each one is wrong-sized, designed for large developers and often incompatible with small actors. The upshot is that they are ruinous for small business and the incremental, scrappy entrepreneurial life Jacobs celebrated and desired.

lll. Mixed uses

Jacobs knew that the “sidewalk ballet” she so famously observed depended on a variety of neighborhood activity. In a place serving only one function at a time, streets become dead when that function isn’t happening.

Mixed-use development is a fairly simple concept. It inherently implies a diverse set of residential and commercial offerings—a scenario in which residents can reasonably walk to a majority of needs rather than having to rely on automobile transport to reach separated and highly segregated offerings. Anglo planning has evolved since the early twentieth century to separate uses. As a result, people have been separated too. Offices go here; retail shopping, there. Rich people live here; poor people, there. Without mixed uses, there is no opportunity for the encounters that bring cities to life.

So, how bad is the current state of things? While minor reforms are encouraging walkable downtowns and neighborhood commercial districts, few new developments feature mixed uses. Private industry has bent to the whims of the codifiers, specializing in monolithic, use-separated development.

In most Southern cities, residents can do literally nothing without getting in their car. Such cities have codified a near-totalitarian reliance on the combustion engine. And switching to AC power does little to make cities more resilient—or reduce emissions.

With a few nascent exceptions, the South is experiencing total system failure on these counts.

lV. Short blocks

Jacobs thought short blocks increased exploration and cross-pollination. Long blocks are isolating, she said, offering “a monotonous, always-the-same path to a given point,” a common feature of highly engineered suburbia. Short blocks offer alternate paths and increased opportunities for encountering neighbors. Such encounters are vital to the social fabric of a neighborhood.

Southern street grids are fascinating to look at, mostly because they urbanized so late and because the original urban grid, for most cities, is small. You can tell the breakpoint in centrally planned streets, because the traditional grid disappears. These maps reflect the fact that in 1936, central planners at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) released a booklet on neighborhood design, demanding reductions in cut-through traffic and connectivity. It offered favorable federal funding contingent on these principles being followed.1

Sans government interference, builders were not so wasteful. Efficient street grids and small setbacks (if any) were the norm. This approach is consistent around the globe—and the pre-Euclidean South.

Today, segregation of uses continues. In the greenfield sprawl that dominates the Southern landscape, new developments are required to be buffered from old, further underwriting an us-versus-them bias.

These developments are required to provide open space, which consists mostly of undeveloped forest. Such areas also buffer the edges of the development and make new housing even more sprawling and car-dependent. Additionally, stormwater controls are handled project by project rather than as a public utility, accelerating the problems mentioned above. Stormwater also encourages the mathematical minimum in road surface to be built, encouraging cul-de-sac design. The result is a segregated, unsustainable world.

So, what to do? Jacobs’s ideas were basically right. They are also integral to the future of healthy Southern cities, who now must adopt them through political and planning processes. Doing so will require multi-year cycles of code reforms and repeals. After 60 years of code expansions, the first task is to eliminate the ordinances that prohibit these principles. There are many. But the South’s great cities have begun working to repeal their mistakes. These efforts represent green shoots, even amidst clear and present failures and despite often messy lines of attack. Jacobs would have applauded that.

It’s true that Atlanta’s messiness is more tangled than that of Greenwich Village, but it’s a distinction of design. The Village may feature continuous block faces with no side setbacks, but Atlanta’s streetscape is unique and exciting, and the Beltline is encouraging of comparable adventure. When you go out, you can explore. You expect to see something different. You feel alive. And so Atlanta captures the same vibrancy as its Northern counterparts, just with more gap teeth in its urban fabric.

The South will continue its boom, and along the way, we must bring these principles back—front and center. Jacobs published them in 1961. (For context, she released them closer to the year 1900 than to modern day). As planners repeal rules that ruined downtowns, Jacobs is watching. As we re-codify neighborhood commercial districts, first rehabilitating them and then helping them grow, Jacobs is watching. And as we continue to create sprawl with single-use greenfields, Jacobs is watching. On each count, we can do better. Substantially better. In Jacobs’s image, we must.

Aaron Lubeck is Founder of Southern Urbanism.

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Intro

Since I began studying cities I’ve seen zoning transform from an obscure policy into a common topic in public discourse. Locals across the country are organizing to change zoning laws and outlets such as The New York Times are making zoning and NIMBY commonplace terms. This is great news for any urbanist or policy wonk familiar with the shady history of zoning—exclusion and segregation—and its stranglehold on cities’ ability to build more housing.

Zoning does not particularly lend itself to public interest. It’s full of legalese, complicated appendices, and extraordinarily detailed tables full of planning nomenclature. Even as someone who has studied urban planning, I find myself frustrated by how difficult it is to figure out something as simple as where an Accessory Dwelling Unit can be built.

It’s exciting that an obscure yet important policy item has become a hot topic. Strange, then, that I would find myself cautioning against treating zoning as a panacea. I don’t wish to take away from its importance. Frankly, I think the restrictive nature of zoning in the US comes with a lot of ill side effects: some we can see, such as an affordable housing crisis, and some we can’t, such as the neighborhood cafe that never opened up down the street. I believe making zoning more inclusive would yield many benefits for most neighborhoods. However, while zoning holds the key to making our cities more livable, I don’t think it’s a fast track to the romantic vision some are offering.

Zoning Isn’t a Panacea

Take an extreme example, from Hayden Clark,1 where urban design is assumed to beget a politically ideal world free of friction:

I agree these places are beautiful and that beauty alone reflects a society’s commitment to public health and social well-being. But I’m not under the impression that good urban design begets respect, politeness, or political harmony. There are many beautiful places in the world ravished by social and political instability.

On the other hand, design can intentionally be hostile to public health and social well-being. There is the oft-shared meme dissing boomers about the “outside” they have made. It presents an obvious critique of the auto-oriented suburban landscapes that dominate American metros.

These places are dangerous and uncomfortable for anyone outside a car—especially children learning to navigate streets and traffic. And it’s true that the degradation of the public realm, caused by both zoning and transportation policy, makes vibrant public life impossible in those places. Zoning is truly a huge barrier, but on the other side of zoning is not a time machine.

While zoning doesn’t allow the types of development depicted in Hayden Clark’s post—places we need more of—it’s wrong to assume that its removal would lead to a development pattern from hundreds of years ago.

Take Patrick Risk’s post on LinkedIn, contrasting block-size apartment complex in the US with historic developments in Amsterdam:

Patrick says “you get what you ZONE or regulate for.” But even in cities like Amsterdam, known for their historic charm, new development is trending toward larger, more conventional apartment blocks—albeit better designed than ones in the U.S.

In my brief time there, I noticed mostly larger scale apartment complexes going up, not too unlike the North American example above. They just happen to be better designed and typically aren’t built inside a moat of parking or wrapped around a humongous parking garage.

Good urban design isn’t just curtailed by zoning; it’s curtailed by economics. And this factor is affecting urban development across the world.

Jon Birdsong broke down the role of economics when writing about his company’s historic rehabilitation in Downtown Atlanta:

If everything goes exceptionally well and our team flawlesslessly delivers a building that was Atlanta’s first department store, built 125 years ago that hasn’t been occupied in over 30 years while also finding 34 people in 26 units who want to co-pioneer a neighborhood next to Kessler Loft residents, and we convince three retail tenants to believe early before the building is finished to sign on the dotted line, SoDo Atlanta, LLC plans to make 4.82% on the invested dollars. That barely eeks out the current 3 month T-bill or a high-yield savings account.

Getting rid of zoning would not unleash urbanism of times past if the math doesn’t make sense.

Innovative, incremental infill development seems to be coming solely from people like Jon Birdsong willing to sacrifice profit—and there’s not many of them. As Chuck Marohn said in a recent podcast, “the people that do that work today are almost heroes because it is such an uphill battle.”

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But even without the political and financial obstacles, urban design alone will not guarantee a thriving social life. That’s because the obstacles to community aren’t just physical. They’re digital, cultural, and deeply embedded in how we spend our time. If zoning divides us through space, technology now divides us through attention. And unlike zoning, it’s everywhere.

Silicon Enters the Equation

Robert Putman put technology on blast in his famous study on declining social capital in Bowling Alone. Noah Smith summarizes Putnam’s key point and adds what we know about smartphones and social media in a recent essay:

American society became somewhat disconnected by the introduction of the 20th century technologies of the car, the telephone, the TV, and the internet, but it managed to partially resist and preserve some remnant of rootedness. But phone-enabled social media broke through those last walls of resistance and turned us into free particles floating in a disembodied space of memes and identities and distractions.

The “rootedness, family, community, and faith,” that buttressed our social capital, Smith says, “turned out to be weaker than the new gods made of silicon.”

The kind of in-person socializing we used to do was a requirement—we had no other options. Technology has undercut our in-person socializing and social media has only made it worse. Social media is illusive in its accessibility and ease of use but insidious in its consequences. We socialize in person less and our communication habits no longer aid or abet community.

Absent the requirement of in-person socializing is also any communal rituals that bring people together. Consider Sam S.’s reflection on her time in Spain, where their culturally strict mealtime schedule frustrated her until its utility was made clear: Spain’s culturally strict mealtime schedule, acutely observed by Sam S. in Stories from Sevilla:

Eating is about taking a communal moment to gather together. And I believe that’s why there’s such a reliable, strict schedule. The driving force behind it is the intrinsic prioritization of making time to connect.

I can’t think of any US equivalent of this type of ritual togetherness. The default here is a sad desk salad or a depression sandwich.

Without shared rituals, we also lose the social context that animates our third places—the bars, cafes, and bookstores where community spills over from the home or workplace. I hear people decrying the loss of third places in terms of the physical spaces disappearing, as if we could build our way into a more connected society. Third places exist because of the culture people build in them. It’s not the bar that is special. It’s the people who go there day in and day out. They return not for the aesthetic but for the social atmosphere. Spaces don’t magically give way to community. The community co-opts those spaces—often private, capitalist spaces—into spaces where locals can hang out and connect.

It’s not that we don’t have enough space for third places but that the type of social capital that creates third places out of existing spaces is dwindling. There is nothing inherently social about any given coffee shop or bar; it’s the history and community that make the space meaningful. And as the connections within our communities fade, or get replaced by online spaces, so do those third places. After all, Putnam didn’t just call for changes to the physical environment, he called for more participation in all spheres of life: in religious, cultural, and political settings.

If we are “free particles floating in a disembodied space” as Smith says, maybe it’s less an issue of space and more a need for the connections that pull us there.

Public Space Matters—But How Much?

A quick look at the High Line in New York City or the Beltline in Atlanta shows how new, well-designed public spaces are quickly filled with people. When new spaces like this are created, they reveal a strong latent demand for quality public space. These types of amenities are things that people yearn for whether they realize it or not. And research supports that well-designed public spaces matter. The Bentway, Toronto’s contribution to the trend of turning underused right of way into public space, has been shown to have a positive impact on mental health. Similar research shows the positive effects of green space on loneliness.

Designing public space to be more social doesn’t require huge infrastructure projects, either. Even subtle design elements along streets and building facades can lend themselves to occupation and socializing. William Whyte’s famous study, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, shows how small things like entryway stairs, fountains, and columns create sticking points for people to linger and connect with others.

But new research shows something troubling: compared to the people Whyte studied from 1979 to 1980, people from 2008 to 2010 were seen to be “walking faster and doing less socializing.” If we no longer see public spaces as social spaces, how will providing physical sticking points and social opportunities help us? I worry we are beyond the point where street chats with a neighbor or the bodega cashier will save us from our trend towards isolation.

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Assuming we can bring about radical change to suburban landscapes in the US to make them more conducive to social behavior, it won’t revive the type of social capital we had before television. Dense, walkable cities all over the world are dealing with loneliness epidemics. The UK, full of walkable villages designed before the advent of the car, created its first minister for loneliness in 2018. Japan, prized by urbanists for its well designed cities, also has its own loneliness minister. Even Switzerland has discussed creating one.

The Loneliness Lab, committed to making cities less lonely, argues that we need what they call hardware and software—in other words, good urban design and appropriate programming. I would go a step further and say we need a culture that values and prioritizes public life—one that is literally able to see public space as social space, not just space to move through, as those researchers have found.

Some researchers suggest we alter public spaces to make affordances for public solitude:

Little visibility of aloneness can signal that feeling lonely or wanting to be alone are uncommon or unaccepted, which can increase loneliness. The design of (semi-)public space should hence invite people to come alone. For instance, furniture in (semi-)public space that is intended or suited for individuals may visually normalise being alone.

Do these observations signal the decline of public space as social space? The beginning of a world where online space takes precedence over physical space?

The Disappearance of Rituals

In his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han critically examines the rise of online social connections. Rather than developing relationships, he argues that digital space creates “communication without community,” where users are either curating themselves or consuming personalized content. Han’s philosophy is supported by research: “young people today are socially connected or hyperconnected but may still struggle to build deeper emotional bonds.” In his book, Han explores how this hyperconnectivity creates an “erosion of community” and a rising “collective narcissism.”

As Jonathan Haidt and his research team have documented, social media is not only addictive but harmful for mental health, especially for teens and young girls. And these effects are international, even in cities with quality public space. Heavy users of social media platforms across the world are showing worrisome declines in mental health, especially in individualistic nations, where “smartphones and social media are more likely to be used for self-focused motivations, such as promoting oneself and distinguishing oneself from others, with large quantities of shallower connections.”

Han explores how our narcissistic obsession with ourselves bleeds into the real world, creating a cult of authenticity that prevents the kind of communal rituals that provide social bonding:

The culture of authenticity goes hand in hand with the distrust of ritualized forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotion, that is, a subjective state, is authentic. Behavior that has been formed in some way is denigrated as inauthentic or superficial (p. 23).

Something as simple as being polite by talking about the weather becomes uncomfortable since it is seen as “inauthentic or superficial.” But “politeness is an as-if ritual,” Han says; social rituals are chances for us to “imitate happiness” (p. 22). We don’t perform rituals in order to express something arising from within us but to affirm something external that unites us. Even when we’re not feeling happy, research shows that the simple act of smiling makes us feel better, even if we don’t feel like it. Likewise, social rituals provide ways for us to connect socially, even when we feel isolated. The cult of authenticity, however, threatens to further degrade that practice.

Han goes on to argue that the increasing narcissism of our digital world is leading to a crisis of community. Instead of providing opportunities to find resonance with values or causes larger than ourselves, we are presented with “echo chambers in which the voices we hear are mainly our own” (p. 11).

Acquiring information wasn’t always a solitary activity. It used to require a ritual of greeting, talking, inquiring, and discussing. People would hang out in front of the general store or saloon. Getting information was part of the act of socializing and affirming we are all here together. Now, that ritual is gone. People who think differently are not in front of us but out there. Our identities are more concerned with our uniqueness as individuals and less with the communities we belong to and the bonds that hold us together.

With meaning coming more and more from the individual and less and less from community and society, rituals lose their imperative as affirmations of belonging and meaning. As social rituals erode, so does the utility of public space replaced by digital streams of information and performative authenticity.

These conditions feed into neoliberal politics as well. Han argues that in the neoliberal regime, “ideas of freedom and self-realization are transformed into vehicles for more efficient exploitation” (p. 18). The notion of authenticity convinces you to “exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself.” Even the act of rest comes to be valued only to the extent that it provides “a form of recovery from work” or serves our increasing obsession with optimization.

The Politics of Togetherness

While Han sees increasing social media use as inherently political, Vicente Navarro argues that social capital is political as well. Rather than being an abstract good, social capital is both dependent on and affected by politics. In an address to the Annual Congress of the Eastern Association of Social Sciences, Navarro criticizes Putnam for framing social capital as apolitical.

The term “capital” itself assumes that the benefits of social bonds will be used to further one’s own ends in a competitive market. It frames the benefits of social bonds as a type of currency, yet the real benefits of what Putnam calls togetherness—stronger communities, healthy norms, and social trust—is fundamentally at odds with that.

Putnam praised the Progressive Era for its civic inventiveness but attributes its success to political leaders. Navarro argues that this success wasn’t the result of wise and benevolent leaders but rather the grassroots organizing of labor movements. People did not mobilize to explicitly build stronger social capital; rather, they accumulated social capital as a by-product of mission-driven organizing. Social capital isn’t just something we accumulate, he argues; it’s something we build, often through collective struggle.

Reinvigorating social capital isn’t quite as spending more time volunteering. It requires building a society in which everyone is afforded the time and resources to build community. This requires not only creating a social safety net but a culture in which public health and general well-being are valued. A culture that waives those beliefs in favor of corporate power, radical wealth inequality, and a prioritization of the individual above community will fail to provide the social benefits of Putnam’s prized togetherness.

Community As Practice

In many ways urban planning’s goal is to create a more ideal world. At the heart of urban planning advocacy are people fighting for transportation equity, sustainability, and affordable shelter. People wait for hours to speak at city council meetings because they genuinely care about the communities they are building—not just about their lives but the lives of their neighbors. This commitment to communal well-being is arguably the most important part in the fight for better policy.

Better zoning policy and good urban design don’t beget social capital—not alone, and not in an environment where our social connections are frayed by harmful technology and revanchist politics. But fighting for a better world, for cities that nurture social and mental well-being, is worth it—especially when we consider the value of organizing in itself.

The fight for more socially vibrant cities won’t end with a zoning rewrite. At the end of the day, that’s not all we are fighting for. We are fighting for a culture that prioritizes equity, accessibility, safety, and even beauty.

Zoning may structure our cities, but culture, ritual, and organizing fill it with meaning. Community won’t be restored by policy change alone. But by choosing to fight for better policy we can practice the rituals that build community and reaffirm that the commons matters—that despite our individualism and algorithmically-induced isolation, we still recognize that community is a practice.

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I’ve spent most of my formative years in two small towns—one in the South, one in New England. It pains me to say it, but New England has the edge. Almost every small town in the region is incredibly walkable, with a cute central “green” surrounded by civic buildings and local businesses. One of those civic buildings is almost always a church.

The white Congregationalist steeples are a hallmark of the region, appearing in tourism ads and postcards. A quick Google search for “Vermont” reveals that every other image has a church. The same is not true for Southern states. Evidently, these churches have successfully associated themselves with the expectation of a quaint small town. Yet the formula to their success is simple: they are located in welcoming, walkable areas.

By embracing density and maximizing their small footprints, New England churches have become iconic symbols of their communities.

In contrast, houses of worship in the rest of the country (especially in the South) are too often disconnected from their communities by large parking lots or unused land. Faith-based housing presents an opportunity for these religious institutions to reimagine their relationship to their surroundings, becoming as renowned as New England churches by surrounding themselves with beautiful, lovable places.

Let’s compare a New England town with a Southern one to see how their houses of worship use land differently.

Example: Woodstock, Vermont

Woodstock is regularly listed as one of New England’s best small towns. It’s got everything you could ever want from a Vermont town: historic buildings, a nice town green, even covered bridges that are in town. It’s also home to a number of beautiful churches whose steeples regularly make it onto postcards. Let’s take a look at the four churches in Woodstock’s downtown.

The church properties here are boxed in red, with the actual physical churches being boxed in orange. As you might notice, two of the churches occupy the entire plot of land that they sit on. They do not have any dedicated parking (though they are both quite close to a larger lot), nor do they have large unused tracts of land. The two that do have parking have it tucked either behind or beside the main building.

Example: Asheboro, North Carolina

Now let’s compare to my mother’s hometown of Asheboro, North Carolina. Asheboro is a town whose historic center was hollowed out by deindustrialization, then by the expansion of a large stroad on the edge of town. Though it has been revitalizing in recent years, the downtown is still characterized by empty lots and excess parking.

Another thing that Asheboro has? Churches.

Most of these sites are over half parking. Similar to Woodstock, though, the parking lots are tucked behind or beside the main buildings. However, they are often so large that they take up the entire side of the block. These are large lots that sit empty most of the week, providing little more than convenience on Sunday morning.

These aren’t churches on the periphery- they’re all within walking distance of restaurants, shops, and parks. Faith-based housing projects on these lots would add walkable density, making the town and its churches more welcoming to pedestrians. In a city that has incredible historic buildings begging to be restored and a downtown that is trending toward a comeback, these churches are perfectly positioned to show the rest of the city what Asheboro could be.

It should also be mentioned that Lydia’s Place is a great example of a church converted into housing in North Asheboro, just up the street from these sites. The potential for expanding this model into downtown is tremendous, and the success of Lydia’s Place should serve as encouragement for future faith-based housing projects in the area.

Of course, there are many more boxes that would have to be checked for any of these Asheboro churches to build. For starters, Asheboro’s stringent parking minimums would be tough to get around, and that’s without even getting into financing. But the example still holds: American churches, particularly in the South, have long placed a large concrete barrier between themselves and their communities.

New England churches haven’t, and its allowed them to stay more connected with their surroundings. Despite being the least religious states, New England steeples remain a calling card for their small town way of life, inseparably serving as unifying institutions. Their buildings regularly serve as multi-use gathering spaces for town meetings, cultural events, and some of the best concerts I’ve been to.

Yet Southern churches also have an advantage—they have an empty canvas to create a better version of their town. Faith-based housing allows houses of worship to rethink their physical presence, surrounding themselves with more than just a sea of parking. In a small town, transforming just one block transforms the entire town.

If institutions of faith are willing to engage in that kind of transformation, they may find that they become just as iconic as their New England counterparts.

Eli Smith is a senior at Dartmouth College studying Religion and Public Policy. He is the Faith-Based Housing Initiative’s Research Fellow.

The biggest issue with housing discourse is that cities’ words don’t match their actions, particularly when it comes to comprehensive plans and zoning.

This disconnect—cities saying one thing and doing the opposite—is all too common in development discussions. It consistently obstructs the creation of the walkable, vibrant future many of us want.

Geoff Graham, a developer involved with I’On, recently tweeted how political pressures forced them to build something different than what they originally planned. As he explains, this outcome harmed the development, the town, and the lower-wealth people they sought to serve.

His full account is below, following my thoughts on why comprehensive plans and the politicization of housing (zoning) are fatally problematic. These documents not only fail to serve their intended purpose, but often do the exact opposite.

THE BROKENNESS OF COMP PLANS (and ZONING)

The utility of comprehensive plans (comp plans) is questionable. These plans are supposed to represent the community’s vision, but in reality, they are little more than formless value statements shaped by current political trends. To put this in context, election cycles rarely exceed 24 months. I’On took about 30 years to build.

For Geoff Graham, the political climate didn’t align with the comp plan, forcing the removal of the more affordable multifamily housing as a prerequisite to securing approval for the project.

Lower-cost housing is often blocked by politics, but it is usually developers who get blamed. Policy creates a housing shortage, and then politicians shift the blame onto developers. It’s a classic deflection of responsibility, now ubiquitous in American housing politics.

In my view, American cities would be better off without comp plans. They’ve become just another procedural barrier to progress. Comp plans are particularly obstructionary to anyone seeking non-uniform developments, which walkable mixed-use communities (like I’On) inherently are.

Every city suffers from this problem, which presents as politicians acting in ways that are in direct defiance of their comp plans. That’s exactly what happened at I’on.

HOW POLITICS MADE I’ON WORSE

Located in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, just north of Charleston, I’On is a well-designed, new urban development with top-notch land planning, architecture, and mixed uses. However, it lacks lower-cost housing, a critical societal issue.

Why isn’t there any lower-cost housing?

The town’s comprehensive plan at the time of entitlement supported a vision of walkability, mixed-use spaces, and diverse housing types. But politically influenced zoning laws required a campaign to turn this vision into reality.

The rezoning process was costly and contentious. The developer had to make significant compromises, including eliminating multifamily housing and most commercial space.

The result, though an improvement over previous zoning, still led to Mt. Pleasant continuing its habit of underwriting sprawling, car-dependent growth. At the edge of the city, large-scale retail replaced local businesses. The disconnect between housing, commercial spaces, and infrastructure continued the harmful effects of zoning.

My conclusion? The politicization of zoning prevents better housing. Bad zoning politicizes everything. Therefore, zoning is the problem.

Read on for Geoff’s first-person account, as he explains it better than I can.

Some thoughts on the democratization of land use (aka zoning),

how it impacts communities, how it promotes distant and financialized interests, and why it is evil

by Geoff Graham

When we sought our rezoning for I’On, the town’s staff was an important advocate. They had just completed a large comprehensive plan calling for exactly what we wanted to build (walkability, mixed-use, diversity of housing types, infill, etc), and had effectively been recruiting developers who shared that vision. Unfortunately, the town’s zoning did not reflect their plan and so anything a developer wanted to do that aligned with vision still required a political campaign.

Fortunately for us, a number of influential local groups supported the vision laid out in their comprehensive plan, and when we began seeking our rezoning, they allied with us to help us secure the permissions we needed to build something special. The Coastal Conservation League was among them and their assistance was crucial. What we did for three years would appropriately be called “beating the drum.” I would guess that at the time there had never been more community outreach for any endeavor in the town’s history.

It was expensive and, unfortunately, divisive. Zoning is divisive by its very nature, so the acrimony was unavoidable. It imposed costs that were direct and indirect, obvious and hidden. Those costs were ultimately shared both by us (the developer) and the community.

In the end, we had more people speak against our project than any other proposed development in the history of the town (twice, because we were shot down in our first rezoning attempt). We also were the first to have more people speak in favor of a development than against.

Nevertheless, to satisfy the political requirements imposed by zoning (which elevate the interests of the most outspoken opponents over of the interests of the property owner or the long term best interests of the community), we had to eliminate all multifamily and the majority of our commercial to secure the entitlements we needed to build on our undeveloped 244-acre infill property in the heart of one of the fastest growing towns in the southeast.

In the end, the town council decided to push new multifamily to the outskirts of town where they had no infrastructure and the tomatoes and strawberries would not object. Additionally, rather than having lots of smaller-scale (and locally-owned) commercial nearby, they preferred to have large-scale big box retailers out on the edges of town. I recall some of these people actually invoking the donut to describe their land use vision.

Predictably, the net effect of the donut strategy has been that all these people now make lengthy car trips through town on ever-widening arterials. They mayn’t walk or bike around, nor may they make considerably shorter trips by car (or golf cart) via a network of streets that diffuses traffic. The housing in which they live is built and owned by the nation’s largest builders and REITs, the number of small local retailers is negligible, and most of life’s necessities are purchased from giant financialized corporations that reside in ugly boxes accessible only via cars and highways.

Moreover, employers must pay those without the means to afford luxury to drive great distances to work in the stores, in the schools, on the jobsites, etc—which of course, makes everything more expensive. That cost has climbed so much that building and maintaining robots to prepare a meal or make a coffee is becoming more cost-effective than paying someone to do the same thing after driving an hour to and from the workplace.

This is what the democratization of land use (aka zoning) hath wrought.

To be clear, I am a huge fan of input from the community. Developers (like creators of any good or service) want to create things that people want. However, empowering people to have control over things they don’t own is evil and has terrible results—our built environment being among the more obvious.

Of course, developers should shoulder the external costs associated their project and never should the cost of their critical infrastructure be socialized (as is the case in exurban development), but in general, the right way for things to be is for interested community members to seek to persuade the developer, rather than the other way around.

Nowadays, people think I’On is amazing, and it is obviously way better than what the prior zoning allowed, but it is far from what it could have been without zoning and there is no amount of additional drum beating that would have gotten us there. We did the best one could do under the constraints of the day.

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Geoff Graham is an Atlanta-based entrepreneur with deep experience in real estate development and software. His most significant prior ventures include the development of I’On, a mixed-use, 762 homesite community in Mount Pleasant, SC (1997 to present), and GuildQuality, a software-as-a-service business serving the residential construction industry (2002 to 2019).

During the first five years of I’On’s development, Geoff managed the neighborhood’s vertical and horizontal construction, recruited the builders and managed the building program, and was instrumental in the creation and administration of the neighborhood’s design guidelines. Since the completion of the first homes in 1998, I’On has earned accolades for its financial success, its exceptional design, and its environmental sustainability. I’On and its homes have been widely featured in both consumer publications and professional journals.

*the headline is taken from Geoff Graham’s reforwarded tweet here.

Written By Aaron Lubeck

The paint was barely dry on the newly requisitioned pickleball courts on Duke’s East Campus where two tennis courts previously existed. Less than a month after conversion, the pickleball courts were filled to capacity while the remnant tennis courts lay fallow. Like housing in the South, pickleball is booming. The number of players has doubled in seven years, fast outpacing its lumbering uncle. The sport’s growth has triggered an associated land grab, which makes it an apt analogy to explain the region’s housing shortages. 

In North Carolina’s Triangle, those who manage tennis courts have been tasked with building pickleball facilities to meet demand. They have acted quickly, but their response has been somewhat bizarre. At Hollow Rock, all three tennis hard courts were converted into temporary pickleball courts. At Duke Faculty Club, two courts were converted into four pickles. In Chapel Hill, public courts are consistently being taken over by the paddle people.

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