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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The Faith-Based Housing Initiative, where this article originally appeared, is a program of Southern Urbanism that trains faith-based organizations to build mission-based housing on their land.

Soon, Caldwell Presbyterian in Charlotte, North Carolina will move tenants into 21 studio apartments next door to its main sanctuary. Over the past seven years, the congregation has navigated the development process to successfully convert a 100 year old auxiliary building into “Easter’s Home,” which will house low income people in a supportive community.

If you search for faith-based housing projects, you will not find many projects like Easter’s Home.

What you will find are scores of large buildings, often five or six stories, developed by affordable housing developers. These buildings usually have dozens if not hundreds of units, requiring a hodgepodge of government grants, tax credits, and outside funding to finance projects costing tens of millions of dollars. Often located in large cities, these low or mid-rise buildings are the primary model for the ever-growing YIGBY (Yes in God’s Backyard) movement, which promises to both alleviate the housing crisis and help struggling congregations with much needed cash they need to survive.

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Yet if the YIGBY movement is to be successful, it will need more flexibility.

Hundreds of units are not appropriate in all settings, especially for rural and suburban churches, and out of scale development can (and does) trigger community backlash. Neighborhood scale village style developments offer an alternative that is far more adaptable and attainable in a variety of settings. Also, churches are interested in missions more than affordability, including senior housing, developmentally disabled housing, refuge housing, etc. These smaller scale projects can be tailored to a neighborhood and its surrounding housing needs, making for a style of development that could be more resilient, personal, and effective.

A Clear Problem: Churches Are Not Developers

The primary reason faith-based housing projects of the past have been so large is because faith-based institutions find it difficult to act as developers. Churches lack the expertise to navigate the complicated development process. If a house of worship does decide that it wants to enter into the housing market, it typically concludes that it will need to lean on established developers. In many cases, this means that the congregation takes a backseat in the process, losing some amount of their influence. Such a partnership varies from case to case, but usually involves the church either signing a long-term ground lease or, most commonly, selling the land outright to the developer. This means that the congregation risks losing control of the project and the future of their community.

Developers want to build big. Often they have to.

Most importantly, these partnerships have a high threshold for entry, requiring larger projects to succeed. Developers, especially affordable housing developers, need to build big to make their numbers work. A larger project offers a larger return with marginally more work, making the decision to build big easy, if not required. Affordable housing developers typically rely on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), a government program which encourages projects over 50 units. This means that these developments are fairly uniform nationwide, with similar size and aesthetics. It also means that the price tag is giant; one project at Central United Methodist in Arlington, Virginia cost $84 million, requiring a complicated patchwork of tax credits, philanthropy, and loans which are inaccessible to most churches.

Affordable housing developers are very good at what they do, managing to navigate government programs and red tape in order to provide as many units as possible at affordable rates. Their priorities require using economies of scale and complicated financing schemes like LIHTC to build dozens or hundreds of units per project. In an urban area like Arlington, 144 was an appropriate size project for its surroundings. Because the partnered faith-based institution also wanted to prioritize affordability and scale, the developer agreement worked out.

The Flip Side

When faith-based institutions have priorities incompatible with large LIHTC developments, forming partnerships with affordable housing developers becomes more difficult. Projects as simple as building a small community for their parishioners or converting an existing building are not attainable under the large-scale model. The reliance on “capital A” Affordable Housing and its baggage has stifled innovative projects suited to their surroundings, making it difficult for churches to build an intentional, unique community. It is simply not worth the pain and expense of navigating the LIHTC process for anything smaller than 50 units.

In fact, the sheer scale of today’s macro faith-based housing can have a negative effect on building intentional community and, in fact, few of the faith-based developments built recently have any physical connection to their originating church. When congregations are primarily presented with the LIHTC model, it becomes harder to envision creative, tailor-made solutions for their specific needs.

Alternatives (Easter’s Home)

So what, then, is the alternative? The few churches that do manage to succeed in building smaller projects, such as Easter’s Home in Charlotte, North Carolina, do so because they have expertise within the congregation. Easter’s Home, a project of Caldwell Presbyterian Church, recently converted an old building on-site into 21 units for low income people. Though they received assistance from developers, the congregation was the driving force of the project, a critical differentiator from how most Faith-Based Housing is being done today. Self-performance ensured that the project stayed on track and centered their priorities.

Because they did not turn their land over to a larger developer, the Caldwell congregation will retain control over the ownership and operation of Easter’s Home. This will facilitate greater interaction with the residents, offering more support and community than a large scale project. Furthermore, the small scale meant a $6 million price tag that pales in comparison to the tens of millions typical of larger faith-based development. They were able to raise this money through philanthropy and grants, avoiding more complicated financing and finishing the project debt-free.

Easter’s Home is the exception, not the rule. Yet it shows that there are options outside of an affordable housing partnership where the faith-based institution simply provides the land. This is not to say that affordable housing partnerships are bad, but rather that they are problematic in many settings. In order for the YIGBY movement to realize its full potential, we need a rapid expansion of smaller projects like Easter’s Home. These projects will be more adaptable to the needs of a congregation and neighborhood, providing an unprecedented diversity of models to learn from and ultimately more success in the long run.

Written By Fernando Pagés Ruiz

The Villages, Florida, is the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States. That fact alone should prompt attention from planners. But there’s a deeper reason New Urbanists should study it: The Villages has managed to create what New Urbanism has long aspired to but rarely achieved—authentic, joyful, daily community life.

Let’s start with a few inconvenient facts. The Villages is not walkable in the traditional sense. You won’t find corner stores every 500 feet or narrow streets framed by architecturally significant buildings. You’ll see golf carts, cul-de-sacs, and miles of looping roads. But what you’ll also see—what hits you square in the chest—is life. People moving, talking, laughing, dancing, exercising, and socializing. Public space is used here not because it’s beautiful, but because people have the time and desire to use it. And because it was designed with the end use—not the form—in mind.

I spent four days there on a Lifestyle Preview. My villa came with two bikes and a golf cart. There wasn’t much to walk to on foot—just more houses. But within three minutes by cart or bike, I reached a recreation center and the town square. In The Villages, the five-minute city doesn’t exist at 3 mph—it exists at 20. And that shift in thinking changes everything.

Every day in The Villages is filled with accessible activities. You might start with a bike ride, hit the gym, park your cart, and walk to lunch at the square, swim laps at the pool, then dress up for an evening of live music and dancing. This isn’t hypothetical—it’s the norm. Social connection isn’t aspirational here. It’s a given.

The environment fosters it. Strangers smile, wave, start conversations with a simple “Where are you from?” and then talk for half an hour. Why? Two reasons. One, people are happy. The environment makes it so. Even the most dedicated New Urbanist cannot help but feel it. Two, people have time. And that’s the secret sauce New Urbanism often overlooks: design doesn’t drive behavior alone. It enables it when paired with lifestyle patterns that support sociability.

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Researchers are starting to catch up with what residents already know. A 2024 study by Su-I Hou and Khristen Holmes found that older adults in Florida “village” communities reported high levels of physical activity, strong social relationships, and increased life satisfaction. They averaged 4.2 days per week of 30-minute physical activity. More importantly, high scores in physical fitness and friendship were both strongly linked to high social engagement. And engagement matters. It extends lifespan and health span. In the study, older adults who volunteered or maintained friendships had better outcomes across the board.

That might help explain a strange phenomenon we experienced. After four days of this lifestyle, arriving at the airport was jarring. No one smiled. No one waved. The world had returned to normal. But The Villages felt more real. Humane, easygoing, full of small joys.

This is where New Urbanists might stop and reflect. We’ve placed great faith in physical form—block structures, setbacks, terminated vistas, “eyes on the street.” These are good ideas. But they do not, on their own, produce neighborliness. Nor do they spark joy. The Villages gets to something more profound. It provides seniors (and visiting young people) a place to feel good in their bodies and unafraid in their skin. They dance. They flirt. They talk. Not because of excellent planning. Because the environment invites it.

And what about beauty? The architecture of The Villages is forgettable at best. It mimics a kind of Main Street nostalgia with a Disney gloss. But people love it. The town squares aren’t masterpieces of civic design. They’re themed spaces filled with music, bars, restaurants, and movement. They succeed not as form, but as function. They’re fun.

Affordability is another point worth noting. While many New Urbanist developments have become enclaves for the affluent, The Villages offers new homes starting at $200,000. Not subsidized. Just affordable by design. That’s another lesson.

We stayed in Eastport, the latest expansion. Within a six-minute car ride, we reached four recreation centers, a driving range, five golf courses, a health center, a hotel, courts for every sport, eleven lakes, and the town square. Add to that a multi-modal trail system that connects all properties. That’s not urbanism. However, it is access, and access to inviting events (as opposed to beautiful buildings) fosters activity.

New Urbanism’s original promise was to design places where people would know their neighbors, gather often, and live more connected lives. The Villages has achieved that—not through form, but through lifestyle. It’s not a beautiful place, but it’s full of beauty in use. It’s not urban, but it functions socially better than many cities. It doesn’t have great architecture, but it has great evenings.

We should study it, not to replicate its aesthetics, but to understand what makes it work. We’ve spent decades perfecting the block. Maybe it’s time to focus on the block party.

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

Homebuilder, developer, and author Fernando Pagés Ruiz has built affordable housing in California, the Midwest, and the Mountain States. His projects have many awards, and he is the author of two books on affordable housing.

By Aaron Lubeck.

Imagine if the government forced every new apartment to include a free horse stall. Or boat stall. Or made restaurants build extra root cellars that no one actually wanted or needed. Sounds absurd, right? But that’s exactly what cities have been doing for decades with mandatory parking requirements.

But there is good news on the horizon. After parking requirements dictating American land development forms for more than half a century, there are now rumblings in state legislatures across the country that this is all coming to an end—and it’s primarily due to the leadership of a wonky UCLA planning professor, who passed away last month.

SHOUP (THERE IT IS)

Donald Shoup, the world’s leading parking reformer, spent 40 years exposing this basic scam: cities require developers to overbuild parking, subsidizing car ownership at the expense of everything else—housing, walkability, small businesses, the environment. The town claims victory by seeming to get something for nothing just by demanding compliance with these extremely technical and specific codified standards.

But Shoup proved that there’s no science behind it. Zero.

Shoup proved the numbers were made up—pseudoscience cloaked in credentialism and code.

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Ten years ago, I experienced what felt like the worst punishment imaginable: my car keys were taken away.

Not because of a ticket or illegal activity, but due to a medical condition that made driving unsafe. In a culture built around the automobile, losing access to a car was more than just a hassle — it felt like exile. I lost not only convenience but also the independence and freedom I had long taken for granted. Yet that forced transition—from the speed of driving to the slow rhythm of walking—has profoundly changed how I perceive the world.

Over the past decade, I’ve walked everywhere: to stores, appointments, social events, and work. Luckily, I live in a place where this is at least possible. Though the infrastructure isn’t perfect, it supports a pedestrian lifestyle—most essentials are within walking distance, though often inconvenient.

Although one sees people most everywhere in the environment of streets, walking is a brief journey, usually from a parking spot as close as possible to the entrance of the destination to that entrance and back. Few go far on foot. During my longer walks, I’ve noticed I rarely see the same person twice—evidence of how unusual my way of traveling is. But walking immerses you in your surroundings in ways driving never can.

At a slower pace, the differences between beauty and neglect become sharply clear.

I notice the care my neighbors invest in their homes; that care communicates a sense of “pride of place” and “eyes on the street,” which, in turn, broadcast a message about pedestrian safety.

But walking out of necessity, not choice, also means exposure—to weather, distance, and above all, to dangers posed by wheeled vehicles. Long walks reveal not just charm, but also the harsh truths of how our streets are designed: for cars, not people. I remember some close calls; fortunately, they have been limited to being knocked down by a few cyclists so far. The rise of e-bikes, scooters, and skateboards indicates that encounters may become more serious.

Even on sidewalks, pedestrians rank lowest.

Everything is reversed compared to the walkability messages we often hear. From the dedicated pedestrian’s perspective, what’s praised in the name of pedestrian safety is more likely to advance the well-be ing and safety of vehicle operators. For decades, traffic engineers’ training has been limited to a focus on vehicle safety, not walking. They use the same road design standards for both streets and highways, set ting twelve feet as the minimum lane width. This makes vehicle operators feel safe at high speeds.

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One of the few engineers who challenge this is Rick Hall, who advocates for maximum lane widths, not minimum, adjusted down based on pedestrian proximity. Narrower lanes slow traffic and enhance safety—but they are rarely adopted.

The reason for minimum widths is that lane width determines “design speed.” By setting “design speeds” higher than “posted speeds,” engineers make driving safer at the lower speeds mandated by “posted speeds.” Ironically, the safety provided by higher “design speeds” encourages drivers to exceed the “posted speed” limit, testing their skills at high speeds.

To update old streets to meet modern design standards, cities introduced one-way streets, eliminated curb parking, and added turn lanes. Roundabouts remove left turns altogether and promote continuous traffic flow. Just painting a line to separate lanes boosts “design speed” by nine miles an hour.

All these measures aim for one goal: to reduce congestion through faster traffic movement.

It was no surprise that traffic engineers quickly embraced bike lanes. Like car lanes, they are wide, direct, and fast—designed with familiar goals, but separated from the driving lanes, boosting their “design speed” as well. As a result, the lanes (not the bikes) are added measures to isolate pedestrians by increasing speeds for all types of vehicles.

Even features marketed as pedestrian safety improvements—like flashing lights, raised crosswalks, and curb bump-outs—often serve as visual cues for pedestrians to proceed cautiously, ironically giving an other green light to vehicle operators.

These design choices come with a cost: over forty thousand people die each year in crashes. Unlike the tragedy of one death, forty thousand is just a statistic, minimizing resistance to minimum lane width standards. The cost of maintaining the same twelve-foot lane width on city streets results in an additional seven thousand pedestrian deaths.

Mechanization’s dismissive attitude toward pedestrians is deeply ingrained. The term “jaywalking” was coined in the early 20th century to shame those uncouth enough to cross streets mid-block, instead of walking to the end of the block and back to reach something directly on the other side. However, from a pedestrian’s perspective, crossing mid-block is often safer, offering clear sightlines and avoiding unpredictable vehicle turning movements at intersections.

Faced with hostile street designs, some walkers avoid busy streets and turn to fringe streets that escape modern “improvements.” These sequestered streets are less direct, take more time to traverse, but feel much safer—even when you’re walking in the middle of them.

Of course, the inconvenience of being pushed to fringe streets and the increased risk at busy cores can be frustrating, even causing anger. One shirtless cyclist, bristling with a “six-pack,” dismounted and challenged me to a fistfight for not walking to the side of the sidewalk. However, this anger subsides when one comes to realize that almost everyone, whether pedestrians or vehicle operators, feels anger on road ways. AAA and other groups like The Zebra and Nextbase report that over 80% of Americans admit to engaging in road rage and aggressive driving, both inside and outside populated areas.

Yes, our collective anger has many causes—political division, media echo chambers, economic and ethnic segregation. But the most significant and often overlooked factor is the decline in the daily routine of human connection. When we replaced human connectivity within neighborhoods and streets, we lost more than just walkability—we lost the opportunity to regularly interact with people outside our immediate circle.

This isolation fosters unnecessary distrust and hostility.

Without the daily routine of face-to-face encounters—shared space and those small moments of eye contact, the frequency from which familiarity and interactions grow—we lose our ability to empathize with strangers. The literal takeover of public streets, which removes their vital role in fostering social capital and turns them into speedways for car-dependent consumerism, has proven unhealthy. The U.S. Surgeon General cites social disconnection as having a mortality impact similar to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communication at American University, highlights that it’s impossible to overlook how polarization and the normalization of violence have become deeply rooted in the US. Referencing data from Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative, Braddock says, “We’re moving in a very dangerous direction, and I think we have been moving in this direction for quite some time.” Chuck Marohn, a self-proclaimed “recovering traffic engineer,” strongly agrees.

Inside a car, one can pass through blight and despair, often the default aesthetic of traffic engineering it self, without any sense of danger. But this insulation—this “cocooning”—also prevents the kinds of chance encounters that form relationships and build community. Without them, strangers remain strangers, and divisions deepen.

Now, try to imagine yourself in the shoes of a solitary pedestrian passing through.

If we want to lower suspicion, distrust, polarization, anger, and unspeakable violence, we can’t continue to ignore the critical responsibility of street design. It’s time to rethink the purpose of streets. Vehicles need access, but they should take a backseat to the more important goal: bringing people together.

Let’s stop designing streets only as transportation corridors and begin reclaiming them as shared spaces focused mainly on people, connection, community, and humanity.

This article originally appeared in SmartGo Blog and is republished here with permission.

Written by Evan Bille Magen.

The Faith-Based Housing Initiative, where this article originally appeared, is a program of Southern Urbanism that trains faith-based organizations to build mission-based housing on their land.

Imagine someone who spends their day poring over old documents trying to find a new perspective to make a vision come alive. They constantly run into hurdles from authorities and fiercely compete with their colleagues. They devote their time to sketching out the vision and laying a foundation in the hope it will come together in the future.

I’m describing, of course, theologians. And housing developers. They share a lot in common, as it turns out. As faith-based housing becomes possible in more communities, we will see more interaction between these unlikely kindred spirits.

For the possibility of faith-based housing to become a reality on a church’s campus, a motley crew of clergy, parishioners, funders, and developers need a shared foundation.

We need a theology of building.

Most arguments for housing, particularly religious arguments, are ethical appeals.

They advocate for an ethic of building based on pre-existing theologies of loving our neighbor, Christian charity, social justice, or local mission. However, communities interested in faith-based housing based on these broad, ethical commitments ultimately build their houses on sand, to borrow from Jesus’s parable in Matthew 7:24-27. When the rains of raising capital descend and the flood of bureaucratic resistance comes, and the winds of congregational anxiety blow and beat upon the dream of housing, it will fall.

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The long, complicated, and expensive process of building housing incentivizes churches to discern God’s call to do literally anything else. Churches will find every other possible way of loving their neighbor before developing their property. This is not to blame congregations. There are serious, if not insurmountable, legal and logistical hurdles to building housing. Congregations possess the rare combination of opportunity and perseverance to build, but I wonder if our current theology lets us off the hook.

The Church overall has a rich tradition of responding to poverty (if we follow it is another matter!), but poverty and shortages are two different but interrelated problems. Poverty is a demand-side phenomenon where people do not have enough income necessary for human flourishing. The solution is to increase income, whether through better-paying jobs, SNAP, or housing vouchers. In the case of poverty, the faithful response is to give (or redistribute, train, etc.).

But shortages are a supply-side issue:

Our community does not have enough capacity for humans to flourish within it. If we lack the units, the voucher is useless. The solution is to increase the supply of housing.

The faithful response to shortage, then, is to build.

Right now, a growing number of congregations are building in response to housing shortages in their communities. They have done so in spite of, not because of, a social theology that primes believers to address poverty, not shortage. In response to their communities’ cries and trusting in a God bigger than any theology, an increasing movement of churches are building their community’s capacity for flourishing by transforming their own campuses.

When theologian Walter Rauschenbusch wrote his groundbreaking Theology for the Social Gospel over a century ago, he began by saying, “We have a social Gospel. We need a systematic theology large enough to match it and vital enough to back it.”

Churches are already building.

We need a theology bold enough to meet them and deep enough to back them. A theology of building will help Christians find new meaning in the parts of church properties we tend to overlook. It will draw new insights from scriptures whose material details have been subordinate to the spiritual, as if they both cannot be sacred.

When we build as a response to God’s creative action, we learn more about ourselves and our Creator. It is in the learning and work of building that God draws us into relationship.

This theology of building is exemplified throughout scripture:

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew verb bara’, “to create,” appears 55 times. God created (bara’) the heavens and the earth. Only God bara’s. Humans never bara’. We were created (bara’)— emphasis on the passive voice.

Humanity is both creature and image-bearer of the Creator. Humanity does not create, but we are creative. We take what has been created, and from these finite materials, we build. The Hebrew verb banah, “to build,” is used in scripture when pre-existing pieces or raw materials become something new through the work of someone’s hope, vision, and skill. This is the essence of building. In contrast to bara’, God only banahs once— when God “fashioned” Eve from the pre-existing human’s side (tzela).

Building is fundamentally human.

When Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wanted to give thanks to God, they built altars. Building is inseparable from blessing. Banah receives its most frequent use in the Hebrew scriptures regarding altars, but it is used elsewhere for building cities and houses. It is a conduit between God’s creative initiative and human response.

God creates, so that we might build. I offer this not as a comprehensive theology, but an invitation. The work of theology is constructive. We fashion meaning from the wideness of experiences, environments (built and natural), and relationships that God has given us. As Christians, our task is to develop these raw materials through the witness of scripture to God revealed in Jesus Christ.

This theology invites people of faith to start building. Do not wait for this theology and its ethic to build. Dream and draw what your church’s campus could be. Listen to the needs of your community from a supply-side perspective. Attend the property committee meeting as a spiritual practice. See Christ in who you might build for.

Build the theology that your community needs.

With gratitude to the God who creates, each action we take might move us toward a theology of building.

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Evan Bille Magen lives in Durham, NC and serves as the Director of Missions and Community Outreach at the Kirk of Kildaire. He is a recent graduate of Union Presbyterian Seminary and candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA). You can find his Substack “Public Goods” here.

Written By Fernando Pagés Ruiz

Starting with Herbert and Katherine Jacobs’s $5,000 home built in 1937, designed to show he could create affordable housing, Frank Lloyd Wright initiated his Usonian design line. “Unimpeded by a foundation, front porch, protruding chimney, or distracting shrubbery,” Wright sought to create well-crafted houses for the everyday person. Yet not even Wright could hold off the impulse toward high design and lost his way with increasingly elaborate architectural flourishes. Soon, the moderate Usonian homes gave way to the pricier Prairie styles he became famous for.

Maybe architects should not be called to design in the simple, clean proportions and ordinary materials required for affordability any more than Michelin Star chefs should be asked to create cafeteria menus. Great poets don’t write greeting cards. And only builders keenly aware of construction costs can guide designs toward affordability. I am a big fan of several architects, including Wright. I worked with his student, Geoffrey Childs, designing a very affordable complex of twelve infill houses. However, most of my experience with academically trained architects is that they resist the compromises required to achieve low cost.

For example, an excellent architect and close friend and I got into an argument. He accused me of “evil” for insisting roof pitches between 4/12 and 6/12 were ideal for lowering costs and improving structural performance. I even had the wind tunnel tests to support the structural assertion and went to the trouble to have a truss manufacturer weigh in by pricing two similar roofs of varying pitch. But my friend’s love for steeper roofs ran deeper than logic. I have lived through the same type of argument enough times to know that design supersedes cost considerations for many architects and that they have deep insecurity about being associated with buildings that would not meet their peer group’s approval. Affordable housing is not always the prettiest, but it can be elegant in its efficiency.

Architects I know will characterize the most affordable housing with words like bleak, dismal, and deplorable, or the descriptor I hear most often: “hideous,” expressing absolute contempt. This is unfortunate, because architects should strive to provide unsubsidized design for every rung of the housing ladder, from homeless on up.

Throughout Lincoln, Nebraska, you find many simple, low-cost ranch homes built by Ervin Peterson, founder of Peterson Construction Company. His son, the late Bob Peterson, was my adviser in designing and building affordable homes—he always knew how to resolve a problem or do a pricey thing cheaply. His dad’s homes required just $25 down and an agreement to do some work, such as laying floor tile and painting. This made buying a house a snap, and many people did so. Peterson constructed about 2,500 of these homes across the city.

The homes included clever design elements, such as a sealed crawl space that served as a giant plenum for the heating system. The Petersons used two layers of drywall with wood spacers instead of framing studs to create room for electrical wiring between demising bedroom walls. They bought materials in bulk. And they knew how many studs and nails went into each model. They were masters of affordable housing. While designers regard these homes as “hideous,” I find them beautiful, and even today, 2,500 homeowners still love them dearly. A hideous house is better than no house, and when affordability is even more critical than global warming, architects will do well to remember this.

The acclaimed Miami architect and planner Andrés Duany is one of the few I have worked with who will submit to the stringent restraint required for the most affordable manufactured housing.  Despite his openness to value engineering, we have argued about simplifying façades because “otherwise, everyone will hate it,” as he told me on one project. Everyone except, of course, the people who finally find a home within their means. They will love it. Fortunately, Duany is devoted to design solutions and talented enough to achieve the tenuous balance required for low-cost housing to succeed aesthetically.

You may not have the opportunity to work with a designer of the caliber of Duany or Wright, willing to spend a year resolving the challenges of a $500 commission—the sum Jacobs paid Wright for the design of his $5,000 house. So, you will have to get deeply involved in the design process, analyzing every ornament, window trim flourish, and aspect of the roof pitch to control the outcome. Architects can be imposing, but don’t back down. You must start with a budget; if the design exceeds your cost limitations, even if it’s a nice-looking house, don’t sign off. Insist on meeting your pricing criteria.

Fernando Pagés Ruiz builds non-subsidized affordable homes for a largely immigrant community. He collaborates with DPZ CoDesign on cost reduction, chairs CNU Latino, and writes for Fine Homebuilding and the Green Building Advisor. He is busy researching and writing the second edition of his bestseller Building an Affordable House with The Taunton Press.