This essay is one of a five-part series analyzing American Land Use at 250.

The American experiment has long worked to reconcile fundamental conflicts of vision: Federalist vs Anti-Federalist, Loyalist vs. Patriot, Protestant vs. Catholic, Agrarian vs. Industrial. Tension between this later group, the agrarians and the industrialists, was only the most recent manifestation of the age-old division between the city and the field. This tension is as natural to mankind as the tension between the material and spiritual life, and the work of reconciling them is the work of every generation. Human civilization properly consists of both urban and rural life; a flourishing American civilization will, therefore, consist of flourishing human habitats both urban and rural.

The modern mind does not believe in healthy tension, it tends to totalize even minor differences and insists that opposites must repel and never attract. For a nation whose earliest metaphor was the melting pot, America on her 250th is a nation still uncomfortable with the tension between the two fundamental worldviews of the city and the field. The stereotyping of Midwesterners and southerners as backward, idiotic bigots by the cosmopolitan is but one example. The belief generally held outside our big cities that the American cosmopolitan is the root of this country’s social, cultural, and economic problems is another. Perhaps it is because of this disbelief in the possibility of healthy tension, and the moderating desire to avoid either end of the stereotypical spectrum, that the pioneering American invented a new liminal space: the suburb.

Suburbia: neither having your cake nor eating it.

The suburb expresses the view that the city is not conducive to a thriving human life, but also that one ought to be close to the city for amenities and opportunities. When asked why he does not simply move to the country the suburbanite is like to respond “Heaven forbid! What, for God’s sake, would we do in the country?”. And they would not be wrong. It is true that we have hollowed out our city centers, it is equally true that we have hollowed out the American rural landscape.

To fill the cities in the first place, it was necessary to ransack the countryside and displace whole populations to feed the industrial factories whose wealth tended to be the material cause of turn-of-the-century citybuilding.1 To make a long and complicated history shamefully short, the subsequent degeneration of the cities into something less than human pushed the city-dwellers out. But there was no countryside to return to, the family farm having been bought out and strip mined (literally or metaphorically) for all it was worth. And so entered the American suburb, an ill-begotten via media.

The suburb is a modern anomaly: an uneasy truce between the city and the field propped up by the automobile. Whatever its merits, it is necessarily a parasitic entity. It has neither the distinction of being able to provide for itself (like the fields of the countryside) nor does it offer any unique value worth providing for (like the goods of the city, tangible and intangible). Perhaps worst of all, it has no claim to the joy that accompanies the giving and receiving of gifts. For the city and the fields can both rightly claim to be benefactors and beneficiaries of each other, each pleasantly exchanging the abundance of the goods proper to it with the other. But the suburb can only take, it is a mere holding ground, a warehousing of people the real content of whose lives is always had elsewhere.

Cities, towns, and hamlets.

City-building is an impulse natural to man. We are a political animal, by which the western philosophical tradition means that the human person thrives “only within the framework of an organized polis. The polis ‘comes into being for the sake of living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living well’”.2

The city is place of cooperation with the powers of man. A place to be lifted up by the virtues of your fellows or suffer the burden of their vices. It is a place of great activity, both in quantity and quality. A place improved by the addition of others seeking the same final end. Cities enable the greatest of cultural and artistic achievements. They are a necessary condition for the highest common goods of peace, prosperity, and public welfare. They pass down to us the patrimony of our ancestors in the form of their buildings, the curve of their streets, the history of their stones. The city invites you to become a part of a larger human project, but it is always wary of repeating the fatal mistake of Babel.

The city represents the concentrated efforts of mankind. This is the value of urban density: not in arbitrary enclosure, but in the concentration of good things. It is the concentration of cities that allows for social goods like festivals and the arts, but also concrete goods like great buildings and infrastructure. The city is the finest instantiation of the idea of the common good, and it is where such goods must be held and preserved if they are to be had at all.

The city exists in a symbiotic relationship to the countryside: there are no cities without farms, and the concentration of the city exists as a good because it is counterbalanced by the expanse of the fields. This is especially true for America, whose national character bears the mark of that uniquely American experience: the frontier. Of all the colonial efforts undertaken by Europe, few so captured the lasting imagination of the world as the settling of the American west. Will any city supplant, in our mind’s eye, the esteem held for the cowboy?

The Cowboy and the Fields

The countryside is a place of cooperation with the powers of nature, a chance to participate in the divine act of creation. It is a place perfectly sized to the most intimate of human ties: where the necessities of life are well-met by individuals, families, and friends. In the countryside, there is no one to blame for your lot. Here one must of necessity be a capable generalist, there is no possibility of outsourcing those parts of life one does not feel like doing. It is a place where the relative merit of one’s labor is never in doubt. It is often the scene of great satisfaction, where the feeling of one-ness with the created order is stitched into the fabric of everyday life. The fields are a place of great generosity of spirit: the self-made man is one who delights in the prospect of using his strength to lift others up.

The founders leaned heavily on the importance of agrarian life. Jefferson is perhaps the most famous of the pro-agrarian founders. He explicitly linked virtue and agrarianism, predicting that the piling up of people in cities would lead to their corruption. Washington considered himself first and foremost a farmer, believing the life of a husbandman to be the most honorable. But the idea that a culture should be built by those rooted in the reality of country living is an old one. The Roman emperor Cincinnatus, who was sought out to lead the empire at the hour of its greatest need, was famously found plowing his fields (to which he returned two weeks later when his task was over).

A restoration of the countryside is concerned with much more than “the environment” by which is meant “the ecosystems of the non-human natural world”. It is concerned with the kind of moral environment which teaches the virtues we associate with great men. The American democratic ideal is embodied in characters as disparate as Cincinnatus and Daniel Boone, George Washington (wig and all) and Buffalo Bill. The American dream is the dream of being rewarded on the basis of merit rather than birth, that the only limits placed on one’s success where the laws of nature and your willingness to work. The American experiment intentionally distanced itself from the Aristocracies of Europe, and it valorized men of independence. It is primarily in the countryside that one finds the conditions which produce such men. If it is in the character of the city to build great peoples, it is in the character of the countryside to build up great people, and it is from the fruit of the countryside that the city is built.

It is worth responding to the objection which the word “agrarian” so often unjustly invokes. It is the same objection typical of Wendell Berry’s less critical readers who consider the sophomoric observation that “not all goods must be had in an agrarian context” and the implied conclusion “we can therefore ignore him” to be a pithy takeaway. These are the knee-jerk anti-agrarians and they share more than a name with their cousin, the knee-jerk liberal. At the heart of both reflexes is a moral impulse. The anti-agrarian may, for one reason or another, feel himself threatened by the agrarian argument. The virtues of city living may be safely touted, but suggest the countryside may offer certain distinct advantages and dissidents will overturn the table in their haste to object “whatever you may say, I certainly am immune from the proscription to do anything about it”; as if the possibility of a tomato plant in a window box represented a threat to personal sovereignty.

The restoration of the countryside, particularly as an alternative to the suburb, does not imply that all must eek out a living as subsistence farmers. It is a recognition of a feature of the created world: that the human being is wonderfully fit to work and enjoy the land in a multitude of ways (farming or otherwise). Doing so in peace and freedom has tended to produce men and women of incredible quality, and the world needs them.

An organist, a vocalist, and a pump boy walk into a bar

A famous baroque organist once quarreled with his partner, a vocalist. “I am the greater of us two, if it were not for my beautiful playing, no one would come to hear you sing”. “Preposterous!” replied the vocalist “it is only on account of my beautiful singing that we draw such great crowds. Without me, no one would come to hear you play”. “But without me”, came the small voice of the pump-boy from the bellows chamber, “neither of you would be able to perform at all”.

The tension between the city and the fields is like this. They work best in concert with one another, each has perfections proper to it, but neither exists perfectly without the other.

The city is one of the preeminently proper habitats for the human person. It is not for nothing that St. Augustine, echoing a longstanding Christian tradition, speaks of the “City of God” rather than the “Fields of God”. But woe to those who build them badly. Corruptio Optima Pessima, “the best, corrupted, becomes the worst”. Josef Pieper popularized the idea both that leisure is the height of human activity, and that the festival is the height of cultural activity. Some of these goods are only possible in the city, others merely achieve their pinnacle there. In either case, the human experience is cut off at the head when the city is corrupted.

The countryside is, arguably, the seat of civilization. It is where the tenuous connection between the embodied spirit of human person and the rest of creation is forged. It is the unspoken antecedent to all that there is: there are no cities without farms. It is the place where even the inveterate city-dweller retreats when his soul is weary. This is the countryside, it represents that other half of the human experience concerned less with corporate goods than with personal ones. These are the two lungs of civilization, the city and the fields. And America, young amongst history’s nations at 250, has already a deeply ingrained fondness and national memory for both of them. Her success, her flourishing, and her healing, will be played out in the space created by the harmony of city and field.

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.

This essay is one of a five-part series analyzing American Land Use at 250.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again

–Thomas Paine

The Argument Over the Map

Urban planning, like democracy, is a battle over imagination, a battle over the map of our future. Our country was founded on the idea that we could become something new. Since its inception, our country has been argued over ever since.

In council chambers across the country, we argue over the future of our communities. We argue about transportation, urban development, and property taxes. Some of us imagine the future of our neighborhoods as different, others as more of the same. What we imagine leads inevitably to disagreement, to petitions and political campaigns, sometimes to council hearings that run until midnight.

Urban planning seeks to do good things. It is a profession full of people who dream of a better future. But any dream creates a spark that can ignite a community. A dream alone is an invitation for debate, disagreement, and conflict.

We are at all times arguing over what our country was, is, and can become. It is difficult to write a concise celebration of a country vast, complicated, and built on the dreams of millions. As Yoni Appelbaum said in a recent essay, “it’s our 250th birthday, and no one seems to know what we’re celebrating.”1

When I ask myself what it means to be American and what I’d like to celebrate about our country on its 250th birthday, I keep coming back to imagination. It is a force both monumental and personal. It played a huge role in founding and changing our country over the past 250 years. It’s also what led me to urban planning and writing.

When I look back on my life, I see that I had been training for a long time to see the world anew, to keenly observe what was there, and to imagine a version of our world that didn’t yet exist.

Exploring the Map

Only in hindsight do I have a legend to understand my own map. When I was a kid, my action figures were everything to me. The thrill of opening the package on a new toy was awesome. I was infatuated with their designs and accoutrements. But more important than looking cool, they were a portal to another world. They helped me turn crumpled bed sheets into mountainous terrain, a rug into a lake, and a coffee table into a henchman’s headquarters. They invited me to see what wasn’t there, to imagine a world that did not exist.

It was a sad day when I realized I was probably the only one in my friend group that still played with action figures. I remember thinking it might be best for me to move on. And on a day I don’t remember and didn’t plan for, I put my action figures away for the last time.

But alas, I found a new toy, one that would turn my imaginative gaze out on the world: my first skateboard. Like a traditional sport, skateboarding requires you to see yourself doing things you can’t do yet. But unlike tennis, basketball, or football, what you imagine yourself doing is not limited to a court or a field. What you imagine might be possible requires reimagining the world. Before skateparks existed, skateboarders—or sidewalk surfers—saw concrete waves in California’s drained pools.

And when street skateboarding evolved with the ollie, allowing you to jump with your board, no hardscape in the world lacked inspiration. Anything from a curb to a handrail became fair game. Where most people see mundane infrastructure, skateboarders see possibility.

A city to a street skateboarder is a mental map of skate spots. And a skateboarder is always on the hunt for a new spot to add to the map. This thirst for something new, the excitement found in something as boring as a loading dock or an abandoned factory, leads skateboarders to weird places. To ensure no stone is left unturned, no spot missed, skateboarders find themselves exploring parts of the city they might not otherwise go. They go into the industrial district everyone drives past, the rich part of town others find too snobby, and even poor or dangerous neighborhoods most avoid.

Any street skateboarder has covered more ground than the average citizen. Before I ever watched Steven Duncan’s exploration of New York City’s abandoned subway lines, I was doing my own version of “urban exploring” despite not knowing the term. In my time exploring all corners of the city, I saw things that wouldn’t make sense until later.

Learning the Legend

Some people know what they want to be when they grow up; or, if they don’t, there are signs. The obvious urban planner signs weren’t there for me. I wasn’t big on Legos. I never built model trains. I had no interest in SimCity. But my hobbies were secretly preparing me to think critically about the built world. Playing with action figures taught me to imagine what didn’t exist. Skateboarding extended that into the world and, in the process, revealed the social and physical patterns of American urbanism. As it turns out, I had long been practicing the fundamentals of urban planning: to recognize patterns, to see the past’s legacy in the present, and to imagine something new.

My education is what gave me a legend for what I spent years observing: abandoned factories belonging to an industry long gone, train tracks that divided rich from poor, oppressively fast and dangerous roads that threatened my life while on foot, skateboard, or bike. My education on history and urban planning taught me how to understand the data I had been accumulating.

I learned that American cities held layers of legacies from the past—some good, some bad. Washington, DC is blessed with Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s street plan that blended small-block urbanism with radial arterials. New York inherited a bold commitment to urban parks in the form of Frederick Law Olmstead’s beautifully designed Central Park and Prospect park. Those legacies are still with us today. Others have been demolished. One hundred years ago, I’d be able to hop on a streetcar blocks from my house and ride it to Downtown Asheville. Now those tracks lay buried under asphalt.

Unpleasant legacies persist as well. Atlanta’s zoning code still refers to accessory dwelling units as “servants quarters.” A reference in name only, it accompanies a legacy of inequity that has been difficult to change. Atlanta has been previously ranked as having the worst income inequality in the country.

The cities we’ve inherited hold a record of ideas, perhaps not a single one uncontested. Some ideas— urban renewal—have been abandoned. Others—streetcars—are hoping for a comeback. Some that feel as American as apple pie—single-family zoning—are increasingly contested. Cities are host to traditions whose value is debated and lost forms of city building that some want back. The American city was, is, and always will be in flux.

My education taught me to read the city as a palimpsest of maps, each with its own dream of what a city should be. The legacies of some maps have left us better off, while others have left wounds unhealed.

Mapping New Territory

Reading a city requires you to acknowledge both legacies, the good and the bad. To envision a better future, you have to understand what’s holding it back. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the famed pamphlet that encouraged our nation to dream of independence, claimed that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” This was not only a proposal for a new republic but a rebuke of monarchy. Likewise, Jane Jacobs not only dreamed of a world with bottom-up, incremental development but of a world without top-down, modernist planning. Turning points in American history have been defined by an expert pairing of criticism with imagination.

In his famed Fourth of July address, Frederick Douglass implored us to think critically:

“The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced” (p. 366).

Douglass argued that before a wrong can be righted, the wrong must be felt. A hundred years prior, Paine understood this, for he said that “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

The job of a planner, and the job of a writer, which I feel compelled to do, is to question the familiar. In the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the job is to, like moonlight, cast “a beautiful strangeness in familiar objects.”2 In order to create the world anew, we must see the present in a new light. To really want change, to feel it in your bones, you must think it more right than the present.

It’s difficult for me to untangle my role as a planner, a writer, and an American. I see them all propelled by the same desire to illuminate the possibility of a better world. America won’t ever be a single, clear map. It will be multiple competing and overlaid maps, our country full of cartographers charting courses for themselves, their community, and the country at large. Honestly, I can’t think of anything more American. The most patriotic act we can undertake is to dream of a better country.

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.

This essay is one of a five-part series analyzing American Land Use at 250.

250 years ago, this country was founded on a very, very strange idea. Though it’s become so fundamental to our lives we rarely think about it, the idea was profoundly counterintuitive: that we could use conflict and disagreement to build a better form of government that affords greater rights and more freedoms to a wider range of people than any that had come before it.

For all of history, conflict meant war, death, and destruction. Power struggles led to innocent lives lost and merely the shifting of power from one absolute monarch to another, with little improvement for the common person. The idea that conflict could be not only contained but turned into a productive force was an odd one. Succeeding in that task required fusing very old ideas of democracy with newer Enlightenment ideas that insisted people had fundamental rights which must be protected regardless of popular will.

The result is one of humanity’s greatest inventions: liberal democracy.

The United States today is still a liberal democracy, and one that has expanded to become more liberal and more democratic in a multitude of ways. Though liberal democracy is often associated with voting, politicians, and the federal government, I think it is also a helpful lens to look at a variety of ways we interact with our government and with each other, especially in building and running our cities.

In the mid-20th century, cities in America became dominated by an illiberal approach to urban planning. It was driven first by powerful and unchecked bureaucrats, then by powerful and unchecked public input. The vision sold by this era was one of perfect cities, free of dirtiness, crime, and unpredictability. They were to be perfect stasis chambers, ideal communities unchanged by time where the American dream could flourish. This vision was sold and resold to the American public as what they should come to expect from their built environment, codified not just by zoning codes, but by a planning profession eager to deliver this outcome and hardened by court decisions allowing cities to tighten their grip in order to execute the ideal system.

Yet this posed a core problem, and one we still struggle against today: utopian visions are fundamentally illiberal.

They operate on the premise that if we just give up a little more freedom, allowing greater enforcement of the vision, perfection will eventually be achieved. Yet the brilliance of the American system is that it acknowledges messiness, conflict, and struggle as an essential part of society. Indeed, the Constitution itself begins with the phrase: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…”

Not the perfect union, but a more perfect union.

The Container for Conflict

This country was founded on the most unusual idea that we cannot banish those we disagree with. The founders realized that there will always be disagreement and there will always be conflict. Human beings are messy, and denying that reality to pretend as though we can create a world in which everyone gets along will always lead to tyranny, where everyone is forced to “get along” in service of a false vision.

The brilliance of the founders was to recognize this and plan for it by creating a system of checks and balances, not to prevent conflict but rather to use conflict as insurance against any faction gaining too much power. At its best, this system enforces tolerance because it prevents an accumulation of power that allows intolerant views to be executed. Though you may not like your political opponent and their point of view, you are forced to tolerate it as there is no other alternative but to quit entirely.

Subscribe now

The need for this tolerance grew not from an idealistic striving but from the unique necessities of life in the New World. Many of the American colonies had been established as an escape from religious persecution—Massachusetts Bay by the Puritans, Pennsylvania by the Quakers, Maryland by the Catholics—each of whom established their own colonies where they could practice their religion freely. For them to reestablish a system of intolerance similar to the one they fled was both illogical and impractical, as dissidents could simply leave and strike out into a seemingly endless continent to form their own settlements. Indeed, this happened almost immediately when the Puritans expelled Roger Williams in 1636, who simply established Rhode Island right next door and whose writings became a foundation for the separation of church and state.

As the colonies grew in size and approached revolution, none was large enough on its own to establish its religion as the national faith. I think we discount just how different the colonies, and the founders who came from them, were from each other. It was not as if they were simply from different states and different sects of Christianity that were roughly similar—they were from different countries, far apart, and with completely different religions. They were Catholics, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Quakers, Unitarians, and Deists with complex views that were not easily categorized. No faction had substantial enough numbers to dominate. If they were to “join, or die” as Benjamin Franklin put it—they would have to tolerate each other whether they liked it or not.

Yet toleration did not mean everyone agreed and held hands and sang kumbaya. They recognized that wherever there are two humans, there will always be disagreements and conflict. The problems arise when societies try to dispatch with their disagreements through violence, suppression, and forcing everyone to magically agree. Rather than pretending we could build some perfect egalitarian homogenous society, they figured out a way to create constraints on conflict that would lead to compromise, innovation, and gradual improvement. Liberal democracy is at its core a project to use conflict for improvement, to pit power against power in a contained venue that leads to building something better.

The Illusion of Perfection and the Tyranny of the Majority

Most cities throughout history have been liberal. By this, I mean that they have evolved naturally over time through competing interests building incrementally. Though most civilizations have had some form of building codes, they frequently suffered from a lack of state capacity and bureaucratic might. This meant cities had to pick their battles wisely, usually prioritizing safety regulations and failing to meaningfully enforce regulation beyond that.1 Furthermore, living in societies with little to no expectation of personal freedoms, it wasn’t expected that you could complain about your neighbor being a pain. Much like the colonies, cities were tolerant not out of some high-minded ideal, but out of pure necessity.

Yet this created the dangerous conditions for an illusion of perfection to take hold, always promised but rarely delivered. Idealistic plans for London from Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire failed alongside many similar plans, but some, like Haussmann’s Paris, were brought to fruition as the illusion became attainable with increased state capacity. By the mid 20th century, it felt as though perfection was finally within reach, and the result is a story we urbanists frequently lament—the post-war turn towards automobile dependency, the carving up of our cities by freeways, the destruction of historic buildings, and the rigid segregation of uses. This planning regime was established under the guise of perfection and control, kindling for illiberalism. Though it happened ostensibly under a democratic system, there was a severe overreach infringing on property rights from powerful, unchecked bureaucrats like Robert Moses. It was a classic case of tyranny of the majority (aka, white commuters in the suburbs) trampling on scores of citizens in the name of the “common good.” Like all illiberal regimes do, it promised a sterilized world, free of the messy, smelly, dirty, and overcrowded cities of the past. It promised perfection and cleanliness if we were just willing to pay the small price of tearing our cities to the ground.

The result was a slew of Supreme Court rulings significantly empowering cities to tighten an iron grip around a range of issues whose impact on public safety is completely dubious. Enabled by rulings like Euclid v. Ambler (which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year) and Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas (1974), cities were allowed to determine not only where noxious uses are allowed, but also where on your property you can build, how big your house must be, how big your lot must be, and how many unrelated people are allowed to live together.2 The sum of these parts effectively enforced an illiberal vision of cities that were cleared of the “dirty” slums that happened to house people with a diversity of incomes, races, and classes.

One might expect the backlash to the illiberal planning of the mid-20th century would have been to swing back radically in the direction of liberalism and embracing messy cities. But something odd happened instead: we replaced the tyranny of power brokers with the tyranny of the (seeming) majority. We formed a new illiberalism shaped by the loudest voices who could form endless committees, engage in limitless community engagement, and increase public input into every last facet of citybuilding. We’ve doubled down on the democratic part without properly balancing the liberal part, ensuring everyone gets a vote on everything that happens in their neighborhood.

Though we increased accountability, what we didn’t do is increase our willingness to put up with things we didn’t like. We’ve sold this vision that we can increase accountability and reach the same end goal of perfection and cleanliness free of conflict. Thus we tell everyone that if we just do enough input and have enough regulations on building articulation and design and facades and massing, then we’ll be able to build the perfect city.

I see a strand of thought amongst New Urbanists and classicists who believe that if something isn’t built in exactly the way they envision it, it shouldn’t be built at all. At the same time they bemoan how we’ve swung too far the other direction in public process, they seek to impose a top-down master-planned vision that maintains cleanliness and architectural uniformity. But this strand of thought, though on the surface swapping car-centric approaches for pedestrian-oriented ones, is still descended from the core deception of illiberal 20th-century urban planning. It does not acknowledge (nor replicate) the fact that real cities are messy, difficult to control, often dirty, smelly places where you are forced to tolerate those you may not like or agree with.

A Tolerant Revolution in Citybuilding

The threats to liberal democracy in the United States and across the world seem to be numerous and plentiful at the moment, and the application of their ideas onto city planning seems like a small part of the larger picture. But the places we live deeply shape who we are and what we believe. If we can’t be tolerant toward the places we live, can we be tolerant towards anything?

Do the systems and changes we advocate for acknowledge competing interests and the inevitable conflict of more than two people living in a place? Do we adequately hash out those conflicts in a productive manner? Do we allow for the messiness of organic places, and even encourage it in recognition that the real places people love are granular, gritty, and oftentimes have plenty of imperfections? It is not that we need to adore these imperfections, but rather that they are a natural consequence of an organic being. We can use them, much as the founders used conflict to create a better nation and to create better places.

Subscribe now

What this will require:

1. Bold leadership from elected officials. There are times for deep community engagement (mostly during an election), and there are times for bold, decisive action. Finding the proper balance is the whole ballgame when it comes to good governance. In Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton wrote in favor of a unitary executive over a plural executive because the focus of accountability is clearer when there is a single person to aim it on. He argued that a unitary executive creates clear energy for decisive action. In other words, Hamilton feared ruling by committee would lead to slow decision-making and a lack of clear accountability. Our best leaders have taken this to heart, making bold decisions with recognition they would be held accountable if they went awry. In the words of Harry Truman, “the buck stops here.”

2. Humility and self-restraint from citizens. Accept that your city will always have some ugly buildings you don’t like, some poorly maintained yards, and some trashy neighbors you wish would make their house nicer. But by focusing on these minor issues, we often miss the forest for the trees, micromanaging the city into oblivion while failing to rectify much larger problems like the lack of housing, wasteful land use practices, and a billion other issues that are far more pressing. Change is inevitable, and we often don’t have control over it. Our job is to encourage good change, rewarding actors who lift up their community and genuinely make an effort, not to get our two cents into every last decision.

3. A restoration of trust. This is the hardest thing of all, and there are very few good answers. On this 250th anniversary, it often feels like the bonds of trust that hold us together on every level, from national to local, have broken down. Every element of our lives from our neighborhood coffee shop to new housing has become part of a larger global financialized corporatized system, which we rightly don’t trust. People are naturally more trustful of those they know than those they don’t. If we are to restore trust, we need to foster localism.

The word liberal originally comes from the Latin word liberalitas, a Roman virtue that denoted generosity and civic duty as much as it did freedom. It was not the freedom to do whatever you wanted, but rather the freedom to do the right thing, to serve your community and build a better society. People were given the power to act with the trust they would make good decisions, and if they didn’t they would face social, financial, and political repercussions. As our world has expanded, the trust that forms the foundation of liberalism and tolerance has become harder to put faith in. Without it, not only do we face political consequences, but it becomes difficult if not impossible to build the cities we all want to live in.

As we reach this 250th anniversary of the United States and of liberal democracy itself, I think there are a few glimmers of hope. The YIMBY movement in particular offers a voice to loosening the grip and allowing cities to evolve naturally. Alongside it is the reality that our current planning stranglehold has worked for an older generation in a way that it can never deliver for younger generations. As power transitions to a new generation, perhaps the vision of the perfect, clean cities propagated in the 20th century is finally giving way to the realities of endless sprawl, traffic congestion, and placelessness.

If we are to renew American cities, we must acknowledge that the approach offering a utopian vision is a fundamentally flawed one. We will never build a perfect city—but by reviving our tolerance for one another, we can get back to the messy, productive work of building a more perfect one.

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.

This essay is one of a five-part series analyzing American Land Use at 250.

This November marks the centenary of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., the Supreme Court decision that gave comprehensive zoning its constitutional footing. At America’s semiquincentennial, it is worth asking what that precedent has meant for the allocation of land, opportunity, and property rights across a nation that otherwise celebrates markets, mobility, and limited government.

In 1922, the village of Euclid, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, adopted a comprehensive zoning ordinance that divided land into use, height, and area districts. Ambler Realty owned roughly 68 acres along Euclid Avenue and the Nickel Plate railroad—land that had obvious industrial and commercial potential. The ordinance placed most of it in residential or limited-use categories, sharply reducing its value.

Ambler sued, arguing that the restrictions deprived it of property without due process and amounted to an uncompensated transfer of value from one set of owners to another. A federal district court agreed and struck down the ordinance. The Supreme Court reversed it in a 6-3 decision on November 22, 1926, establishing the validity of modern zoning.

Justice George Sutherland, writing for the majority, held that zoning was a valid exercise of the police power so long as it was not arbitrary or unreasonable. Courts, he wrote, should defer when the validity of a legislative classification was “fairly debatable.” “Apartments”, he added, were “a mere parasite constructed in order to take advantage of…the residential character of the district.", codifying a rationale—still used today—that U.S. courts consider affordable multifamily housing as a pollution. Three justices dissented without filing an opinion.

The lawyer who argued Ambler’s case was Newton D. Baker, a former Secretary of War, Cleveland mayor, and formidable orator. Baker’s objections went well beyond the particulars of one suburb’s map. He had a short fuse for the religious and ethnic intolerance that discretionary land-use power, he believed, inherently invited.

In an unrelated Ohio matter of the same era, he had represented the well-regarded Jewish Orphan Asylum (today Bellefaire JCB) that owned a 20-acre tract and proposed to build a modern cottage-system children’s home. A local “zoning committee” rejected the plan because, in Baker’s paraphrase, “they did not think it would be good for the village to have a large number of Jewish children in it.” Baker warned that this was precisely the misconduct to be expected once municipal authorities enjoyed “a free hand to indulge their prejudices and preferences.”

His broader critique of zoning theory, documented in Michael Allan Wolf’s book above, was still more fundamental. He argued that centralized planning was premised on a grandiose dream of the cunning who were promising powers that they did not have;

Baker argued that centralized control of land use was certain to be so slow as to be non-responsive and incapable of keeping up with the needs ot the private citizenry;

…and that the regulatory uncertainty and politicization of land use were going to defeat private ambitions and result in merciless pain.

Mistakes made by a single drugstore owner, Baker uses as a case study, are quickly corrected by the market, but mistakes written into comprehensive ordinances are “far more burdensome and their correction more costly and difficult.” If private property could be subjected to “the unrestrained caprice of Village councils” and courts could do no more than presume legislative soundness, Baker concluded, “then obviously we have outgrown the civilization established by the Constitution and have surrendered private ownership of property into a sort of communistic ownership and control.”

In 1926, Baker described a dystopian future that anyone suffering through a rezoning process today would find all too familiar. This universalist approach is common in Supreme Court cases, which are less concerned with winning narrow judgments and more concerned with establishing precedents.

In this spirit, Baker was not merely defending Ambler’s balance sheet. He was sounding the alarm bells against a rising progressive faith in expert administration. The early twentieth-century planning movement drew on the same currents that produced scientific management, public-health campaigns, and, in some quarters, eugenic thinking about improving the human stock through social separation.

Credentialed professionals—planners, sanitarians, and civic commissions—claimed a superior vantage from which to order urban growth. Markets and individual owners, by contrast, were seen as chaotic or myopic. Or “less than.” Baker’s mockery of the notion that “the zoners” could “solve all the problems of society and ultimately produce a better and handsomer or human race” was aimed squarely at all that hubris. Wilsonian Progressivism of the 1910s and 1920s was classicism and elitism dressed in the language of expertise: the belief that trained administrators, insulated from electoral or market discipline, could impose rational order on a society they viewed as prone to disorder when left to the people.

The Court sided with the planners. Sutherland’s deferential standard—“if the validity… be fairly debatable, the legislative judgment must be allowed to control”—became the template for the ensuing century of land-use jurisprudence. Within a few short years, copy-paste boilerplate zoning was ubiquitous across the country. The Euclid precedent underwrote not only a routinization of single-family development but also the sweeping powers exercised by figures such as Robert Moses, whose urban-renewal and highway-planning projects remade New York by clearing “blighted” areas, generally poor and minority neighborhoods. Euclid continues to underwrite contemporary NIMBYism, in which organized homeowners and allied politicians invoke “neighborhood character”, “traffic”, “schools”, or environmental capacity to block multifamily housing, accessory units, and modest urban infill.

While overt racial zoning was struck down early (Buchanan v. Warley, 1917) and private covenants unenforceable after Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), and while the Civil Rights era removed many explicit barriers to housing and opportunity, exclusionary zoning remains a durable mechanism of de jure segregation to this day. It is all rooted in and justified by Euclid.

Euclid strips owners—particularly in or near communities that might otherwise add housing supply—of the right to develop their property in response to demand. Euclid prevents minority and working-class neighborhoods from rebuilding or densifying on their own terms. And by constraining housing supply in places with strong job markets and good schools, Euclid raises the price of entry for lower-income households, disproportionately limiting their access to the best opportunities America has to offer.

The justifications for centralized planning offered today are technocratic rather than explicitly racial or ethnic—“compatibility,” “infrastructure capacity,” “sustainability,” or “preserving community character”—but they often function to protect incumbent property values and social composition. Credentialed planning processes give these outcomes a rationalized sheen that echoes the progressive-era confidence Baker derided.

Euclid turns 100 this November. In the unhappy catalog of Supreme Court decisions that entrenched un-American forms of segregation and exclusion, it belongs with Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. The former was effectively overturned within seven years; the latter fell after fifty-eight.

Euclid pressed on, soon into its second century. Yet the combination of a worsening housing shortage, stagnant mobility for lower-income Americans, and growing skepticism toward credentialed claims of superior knowledge has produced a widening coalition objecting to the decision. Property-rights advocates, housing reformers, and state legislators are all advocating for a reconsideration of zoning police powers that function as ministerial monopolies to the detriment of the people. Public interest law groups now have Euclid in their crosshairs.

The arc of the moral universe is long, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, but it bends toward justice. Euclid will reach 100, but there is reason to hope that Euclid’s flawed premise will not reach its bicentennial intact.

Aaron Lubeck is a designer & builder with The Rocket Shop in Durham. He is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes and a former adjunct at Duke University’s Nicholas School, where he taught sustainable home building. Aaron is 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. He writes about policy reform, urbanism, and incremental development at onHousing.

When I finished architecture school, I told everyone, myself included, that I’d start a magazine. I was fascinated by the thought pieces in the middle of the glossy pages with impossible buildings. It was the kind of writing that is at the same time ambiguous and on point, full of seemingly unrelated ideas, and then shows you, at the end, that all the pieces somehow connect to your life’s puzzle. The magazine never happen. Life did.

So when the invitation came to collaborate with Southern Urbanism and open the Semiquincentennial series, something clicked again. Two hundred and fifty years is more than a number. It is proof that an idea can give life, and that freedom, values, and culture keep finding new people to set free and new frontiers to conquer.

The idea did not begin in 1776, and it did not begin in English. The oldest continuously settled city in the United States is St. Augustine, founded in 1565 under the same Spanish town-planning laws that shaped Havana, Mexico City, and Lima. That tradition runs through New Orleans, names half the states out West, and still molds the urban fabric, for good or bad, from Los Angeles to “Nueva York”.

I come from one of those Spanish-founded cities myself. I mention it because the American story has always been written by people arriving into cities someone else had already started, understanding the values that built them, making them their own, preserving them with zeal, and passing the torch for future generations.

That is the premise of this series. We are, to a real degree, what our cities make us, and our cities are what successive waves of entrepreneurs, innovators, and creators have made of them. We find our history in them. We learn how good ideas, values and culture are indispensable to achieve greatness. We create, we worship, we argue, we discover. Agglomeration enables that. Cities enable that. The question we’re asking, as the Republic turns 250, is whether the Dream those cities were built to hold is still being written, or whether we’ve stopped adding lines.

Five essays take up that question from five different directions. Aaron Lubeck revisits Euclid v. Ambler, which turns 100 this year. His essay recasts it as one of several judicial missteps in the 20th century that constrained our freedom to build, severely impacting our quality of life. Eli Smith makes a similar case in a slightly different key, finding in the Federalist Papers a Republic deliberately built to tolerate conflict rather than engineer it away. Billy Cooney turns inward, tracing how imagination, the thing that founded the country, is the same faculty a planner uses and the one our profession has half-forgotten. Nick Larkins goes to the land itself, to the old quarrel between the city and the farm and the suburb that failed to reconcile them. I will close from the outside looking in, on what the Dream looks like to someone who arrived, took up the values, and started adding lines of his own.

What America has built in 250 years has no equal, and the entrepreneurs who built it, native-born and newcomers alike, did it with nerve, invention, and no small amount of chutzpah. This is our homage. It is made of words that tell stories of cities. How they were built, how they make us believe in the possibilities, how we make sense of them, how we build systems to make them more efficient, grander, and more human, and, in the most American of fashions, how we do it with infinite humor, and hope.

Share Southern Urbanism

Jaime Izurieta is an Architect, designer, and urban development consultant, founder of Storefront Mastery. He is the author of Main Street Mavericks and The 10 No-BS Rules For Successful Storefront Design. He has founded a city, a museum, and an architectural practice, planted a few trees, rehabbed a 100-year old farmhouse, co-owned an independent bookseller, worked in the public and private sectors, and taught architectural design studios at university. Jaime writes on Substack at The Vertical Sidewalk.

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

The Appeal of a Timber Frame

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

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

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

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

Building with Soul

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

Building the Frame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

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

4

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

---

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

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

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

–“Tune Out,” The Growlers

Intro

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

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

Jacobsian Turn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relinquishing Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Know What to Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Kalamazoo Mall in Michigan popularized pedestrian streets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show not tell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public Educators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

---

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.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Written by columnist Nick Larkins.

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G. K. Chesterton wrote:

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

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

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

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

Written by columnist Jaime Izurieta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

The “Compassion” Trap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The City Eats Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Land Use Words Mean Their Opposite

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

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

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

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

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

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

…what Inversionists say does not match what they do.

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

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

Subscribe now

Why Moral Inversion Persists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there is hope

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

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

And that’s when cities start working again.

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

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

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

You Will Own Nothing and Like it

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

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

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

What is the alternative?

Common-Sense Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.