Intro

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

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

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

Zoning Isn’t a Panacea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silicon Enters the Equation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public Space Matters—But How Much?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Disappearance of Rituals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Togetherness

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

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

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

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

Community As Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BROKENNESS OF COMP PLANS (and ZONING)

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

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

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

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

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

HOW POLITICS MADE I’ON WORSE

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

Why isn’t there any lower-cost housing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Geoff Graham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Aaron Lubeck.

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

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

SHOUP (THERE IT IS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even on sidewalks, pedestrians rank lowest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isolation fosters unnecessary distrust and hostility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Robert Orr.

Zoning is often described as a thoughtfully considered, practical tool—a way to keep factories away from homes or to preserve the “safety” of neighborhoods. However, the deeper story behind zoning in America is far more complex and revealing. At the center of that story is a man you’ve probably never heard of: Harland Bartholomew (1889-1989).

Bartholomew wasn’t a mastermind. He wasn’t even trained as a planner. He was a young, behind-the-scenes worker—essentially a new hire with no formal academic or professional background—sent to Newark by the E.P. Goodrich firm.

Why?

Without exaggeration, city officials were terrified by the 1911 Federal Dillingham Commission’s 27,000-page report, which outlined the “dangers” posed by the new types of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Ireland. The report validated the emerging “science” of eugenics, a veritable hotbed of research among America’s leading scientific circles.

So pronounced was the passion for this “breakthrough science” that even Hitler remarked, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”

Into this firestorm walked Harland Bartholomew—not with a mission, but with a notebook.

He was no Robert Moses figure, wielding raw political power to reshape cities. He was simply a proxy for a civil engineering firm that knew nothing about the subject of ethnicities they were assigned to examine. And that, perhaps, is what made Bartholomew’s work so endearingly dangerous. He didn’t question the ethnic or class prejudices expressed vituperatively by the property owners he interviewed. He just noted their comments verbatim and drew a crude map, blocking out the city’s ethnic neighborhoods.

When he issued his report, his lack of academic and professional experience prevented him from recognizing the need for edits. He simply transcribed what he heard. However, his unpolished language struck a chord, immediately igniting what could only be described by contemporary standards as rapture by property owners. The rapture spread like a house afire, transforming raw prejudice into official policy without a second thought from city to city.

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What we now call “NIMBYism” (Not In My Backyard) was taking shape. At that time, concerns focused on “neighborhood decline,” but hidden fears involved immigrants “lowering” property values. As historian Katherine Benton-Cohen explains in her book, Inventing the Immigration Problem (2018), these fears were tied to class, culture, and an increasing hysteria over a dominant class losing control.

Bartholomew’s early city plans quietly embedded those fears into the physical structure of American cities. In St. Louis, for example, he helped develop zoning maps that blatantly segregated neighborhoods by ethnicity and income.

It’s important to note that the Great Migration—when six million Black Americans moved north to escape Jim Crow—happened a bit later. It was then that race was added to ethnic segregation, using the mindset that was already in place. The issue all along was a deep suspicion of anyone seen as “less than”— regardless of race, origin, or background.

Even after ethnic and racial zoning was declared illegal in 1917 (thanks to Buchanan v. Warley), Bartholomew and the framers of zoning exchanged approaches to use “lack of affordability” to uphold the same segregationist policies.

Their three principal new zoning tools included:

• Minimum property size to prevent subdividing into cheaper lots

• No multifamily to prevent subdividing buildings into less expensive apartments, and

• Separation of uses to prevent less expensive access to amenities in close proximity, such as corner grocers.

Cleverly, social reformer Lawrence Veiller (1872–1959) saw the opportunity to leverage the prejudice further by plugging in the policing powers behind fire codes. Veiller argued:

“Do everything possible in our laws to … penalize so far as we can in our statutes, the multiple dwelling of any kind... If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds, because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power... In our laws, let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings to increase costs, and allow our private houses and two family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever (NHA Proceedings 1913, 212).”

Although many assume zoning enabled car use, the opposite was true.

Car use, which came later, enabled zoning. In fact, car dependency not only enabled the physical displacement of people according to zoning policies but also engineered social isolation. The car allowed each person to exist in their own solitary confinement. Public space, where mingling once happened by default, gave way to sprawling subdivisions, driveways, and cul-de-sacs. Neighborhoods lost their mix, and with it, their habits of shared community.

Bartholomew’s naivety disrupted longstanding, robust routines that cemented community bonding. By the end of his long career, the effect was like an invisible plague wafting silently across horizons. Without trace or resistance, his eugenic policies infected more than 4,000 cities, blazing trails of prejudice and deceit.

The property (pride) and prejudice conundrum, to borrow from Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, would today focus on Austen’s Mr. William Collins character. A minor character at the time of publication, two centuries later, Collins serves as a critique of contemporary social and economic pressures by being clueless about social cues, obsessed with status and his patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and unable to understand genuine affection or social norms. Better than the Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy characters of their day, Mr. Collins reflects the cycle of fear, status, and distancing, which clings to Americans like stink on a monkey.

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This isn’t just history.

Sadly, it’s the blueprint for most American suburbs today: car-dependent, isolating, and costly to access. The most impacted are still those without wealth, language skills, or political influence. After such thorough erasure, it may seem hopeless to restore the millennia-long social aspect of running errands in public spaces where people accidentally bump into each other while doing the same.

But there’s hope.

The core issue of “quality” discrimination is under question. Belgian/French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) established that all humans are born with the same organs. Their differences are shaped by experience, not eugenics.

On her On Point radio show, Meghna Chakrabarti recently examined the challenges faced by American boys—how many feel lost, left behind by social changes, and unsure how to find purpose, with an alarming number taking their own lives. What she discovered through research was unexpected: most boys do not fit the stereotype imposed on them. They aren’t craving macho power. They want to be part of something. They want to help. They seek connection, not control.

That insight is crucial for urban planning. Dismissing wishful thinking that the “immigration problem” can mysteriously vanish through harsh punishments, if we design cities that prioritize connection over hierarchy—places where people of different incomes, genders, ethnicities, races, and backgrounds can coexist as one species without sacrificing heterogeneity—we may tap into our natural instincts for community, purpose, and collaboration, per Chakrabarti’s advocations. If that happens, we can start addressing genuine issues that truly matter, rather than wasting time on futile rescue efforts aimed at managing foolish behaviors that dominate tabloids today, only to exacerbate situations. For example, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accreditation system’s efforts to promote rescue rewards like bike racks and native grasses only encourage wrongdoers to push further out on a limb with their largely unsustainable practices.

Movements like New Urbanism aim to achieve that goal. Through walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments, smaller affordable housing units on smaller affordable lots, and expanded public transit, they try to undo the isolation that Bartholomew unintentionally helped create.

However, even New Urbanism sometimes overemphasizes mobility—focusing too much on moving people from point A to point B, instead of on the people themselves.

Carlos Moreno, a software engineer turned urban thinker, offered a fresh perspective on the missing piece in New Urbanism when reimagining Paris. Originally focused on city navigation, an epiphany made him reverse the model: What if cities weren’t just places to pass through, but complete ecosystems within themselves, like compact computers with which he was so familiar? His concept of the 15-minute city wasn’t about movement—it was about proximity.

In his model, Moreno identified six functions of life—living, working, goods and services, education, healthcare, and culture and recreation. By locating all functions, or multiples of functions, within a short walk, they become much like the full set of functions packed inside a smartphone, so small that it can be held in one hand.

Like the smartphone, there must be enough users to financially support all the functions contained within the small space—not just people nearby, but more people nearby. In an urban setting, basic demographics can help strike a balance between providers and users through simple mathematics, particularly when walking takes precedence over other modes. By the same token, when everything one needs can be reached in a short and appealing walk, other modes become optional.

Moreno’s method: simply add functions (in cities other than Paris, low, street related density must be added as well).

Rebecca Solnit reminds us in A History of Walking,

“The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”

Zoning is a flawed idea driven by selfish interests and naivety. Some studies suggest that other factors, such as access to guns and lax immigration policies, influence what is widely regarded as dystopian desocialization, marked by frequent acts of unspeakable violence. However, a growing consensus confirms that zoning and car dependency are the only causes that consistently reduce interaction and community bonds, and those two factors alone account for most of the desocialization. It turns out that interaction and community bonds are also the most crucial factors for building health, happiness, and long lives. It’s important to note that socialization does not come from organized spectacles and events, despite their entertainment value. Rather, true bonds come from the studious choreography of daily routines.

Weak, baseless arguments from spreadsheet-obsessed planners, misguided policing regulators, icon-orbiting architects, and abuse-enabler engineers have wasted a century fueling distrust, anger, polarization, and violence. Still, they shouldn’t be blamed. Since their policies are rooted in popular prejudice, we all share responsibility for building such a formidable blockade against our natural human tendencies toward socialization and getting along in communities.

It then follows that removing the blockade could release innate human tendencies from their ill-begotten captivity, unleashing a powerful wave to fill the empty void left by the super-human descaling of cohesion by industrialized consorted prejudice. Such a massive wave would flush out festering tumors of rancor and self-destruction and spark a renaissance of rekindled relationships. This natural phenomenon, of course, would be limited to locations where blockades fall.

Any spread would have to be through infection rather than indoctrination.

Cynics argue that people will always choose the convenience of driving, even when faced with the high likelihood of wasted hours on endless traffic jams and the life-shortening stress of participating in “road rage.” Currently, the costs of owning a car are nearly as high as owning a house. This financial instability may force many to reconsider their priorities, especially if viable and appealing alter-natives become available and healthy friendship circles expand. Cities that developed long before the introduction of automobiles, like Siena below, allow one to “test drive” such an alternative and draw inspiration and conclusions.

Another important reason to challenge the cynics is that, for the first time in many decades, inexplicable cravings for face-to-face social interaction seem to be reemerging among many young people—a sign, as Lewis Carroll would say, “The time has come.”

Bernard Rudofsky wrote in 1969, “Streets are for people,” signaling that a plan to manage open floodgates is already in place. In fact, it’s been around since the beginning of civilization, only abandoned in the last century. Innate human tendencies to prefer driving may be ingrained, but the period of ingraining is trivial compared to the long history of innate human tendencies to value relationships.

All we need to do is reset the goal of planning to choreograph daily routines by strategically locating functions to maximize opportunities for frequent encounters, break down blockades, and trigger primal social instincts. Such traits will be free to develop routines, without any help from indoctrination, that promote frequent encounters, as they always have. Let’s house people closer to their needs and let the walking begin.

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

This past May, student fellows at Southern Urbanism attended the thirty-second national gathering of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) in downtown Cincinnati. While there, the fellows caught up with urbanists from all over the United States and beyond to chat about their work. Each interviewee was asked three questions about what they do and the goals that their work advances. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Rick Cole is the Chief Deputy Controller for the City of LA and the former Executive Director of the Congress for New Urbanism. In this interview, he gives insight into involving community members in policymaking, laying out the challenges facing the public participation process and offering pathways to reform.

MS: Would you mind just introducing yourself and telling everyone about your experience?

RC: Sure, Rick Cole, former executive director of the Congress for New Urbanism, also deeply involved throughout my career in local government. I was the mayor of my hometown of Pasadena. I currently serve as the Chief Deputy Controller for the City of Los Angeles, and I was recently elected again to the Pasadena City Council, taking office in December.

MS: Through those roles, in what role do you see local citizens getting involved with planning and in the planning process?

RC: Typically we define democracy as voting, and I think that's both a shallow and a self-limiting foundation for genuine civic engagement in communities. And the default is the public hearing, where people who are angry about something show up to protest. The former mayor of Missoula, Montana said that public hearings were that place in American society where no one listens. So the challenge of building democracy from the grassroots up is to engage people, not when they're angry, but to appeal to their values, to their principles, and to look for common ground, particularly at the planning stage, but not just at planning. I think what tactical new urbanism and Strong Towns have taught us is that people can take an active role in and help spark immediate changes for the better in their community.

MS: Along those lines, what reform do you think can be made to the community participation process to maybe get more voices involved? I know we talk a lot about NIMBYism and to kind of counteract that.

RC: Again, I think it's important to start with principles and values because most people agree that communities should be inclusive. Most people agree that streets should be safe. Most people agree that folks should have opportunities to start a business or to pursue their dreams.

And it's when you start with those things that people agree on, that it's easier to build and find common ground on the things that become much more divisive down the line. Like, do I want a bike lane on the street I commute on? Do I want mixed-income housing in my neighborhood? So, I think it's important to pull back and look not at what is in the direct interest of people as individuals, but rather what is in their common interest as citizens. And I think starting with that may sound abstract, but In fact, if you get diverse groups of people around tables in informal settings where you're not faced with an immediate decision to approve or not approve a project, people are much more rational, much more open-minded, and much more likely to adapt their opinions.

I used to make a distinction between input and participation. Input is when we provide our opinion of what the government ought to do, and as Americans, we have a sacred right of free speech to express what we think ought to be done. Participation is when you have to solve a problem with people who don't agree with you and find out what makes sense. It isn't necessarily the lowest common denominator compromise. It often can be a win-win. And so the biggest reform is to emphasize participation. Rather than you come and tell us in three minutes that you love or hate something, come sit down and spend two hours with people of differing backgrounds and opinions and see if we can figure this thing out.

MS: Through your experience, have you seen any good examples that really put those principles into practice?

RC: Yeah, there are lots of examples all across the country. One of the most imaginative practitioners in this area is a guy named James Rojas who actually uses physical blocks and toys to help people who are not as verbal or for whom English is a second language to express their ideas and to bring out the playful imagination of people and make these planning efforts a little less toxic.

MS: One final question. For young people, whether that be students, young citizens, or young professionals working in architecture or planning, what advice would you give to them as they're the future of taking this movement forward?

RC: Don't be bashful. The leaders of the New Urbanist movement started when they were very young, and while now they are distinguished iconic experts with amazing accomplishments behind them, they didn't start that way. And so while we can all learn from the past, as I did as I was growing up, people should be confident that the world you are growing up in is one that you know well, and don't be afraid to step forward. Don't wait to be asked.

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Michael Schwartz is a Public Policy student at Duke University. He is on the executive team of the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies and an Affordable Housing Intern for the Duke Office of Durham and Community Affairs.

Southern Urbanism has partnered with Building Optimism and Building Culture to bring you the best stories from the people who build our cities. In his most recent essay, Coby Lefkowitz explains how progressivism sometimes gets in the way of progress.

Progressive cities have been telling themselves a myth for (at least) the last 20 years. Conjuring an identity based on virtue, and strengthened by a sort of moral superiority that looks down its nose at every other part of the country, large, prosperous, and blue cities have come to believe that they’re the champions of the marginalized, working and middle classes, carrying the torch on policies that everywhere else should seek to emulate in the pursuit of more equitable communities. Places like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, DC, and LA (among others), have held their heads high, perhaps too high, incredulous that anywhere else could be as successful, desirable, or noble as them. As the bastions of the intelligentsia with the best schools and culture, most amenities and enlightened values, who else could compete?

Maybe that was true one day in the past, but not today. This belief has largely not been met in reality. These cities have rested on laurels earned from the hard work of prior generations. The truth is, prosperous progressive cities have largely failed in the progress that should be at core of their mission. It’s right there in the name! People can argue online about how they feel a city is doing, and that’s all well and good, but the data doesn’t lie. We, and I use “we” to include myself as a progressive who has lived in several of these cities, have not lived up to the values we claim to embody.

I’ve used the word progressive a few times so far, so, before going further, I’d like to define what exactly I mean by it. I’m not using it as a stand in for “left” or “Democrat” in the context of our modern political system of conservatives v. progressives. Rather, I’m using the word to explain the intention behind progressivism. Tim Urban uses a definition in his book What’s Our Problem that I think works well:

Concerned with helping society make forward progress through positive changes to the status quo. That progress can come from identifying a flaw in the nation’s systems or its culture and working to root it out, or by trying to make the nation’s strong points even stronger. If the country is a car, progressives are in charge of the gas pedal.

Through this lens, we can analyze whether progressive cities are moving forward with positive changes to the status quo—the only true barometer of progressivism. We know the status quo is riddled with serious challenges, so, how are they doing in response to them? Not great.

Rents are at historic highs. Of the 10 most expensive cities by rent in the US as of February 2023, 9 of them were solidly progressive cities. The 10th, Miami, has a purple streak, but is moderately progressive compared to the rest of the country. It’s important to note that these are city-wide medians. High quality apartments that are closer to jobs, amenities and public transportation are considerably further along the rent curve. Los Angeles is a very large city, so while the median rent may only take the 7th place on this list, living near the beach in Venice would be costly enough to earn the 2nd place on the list. When you take the average, and not the median, the most expensive apartments drive up the rent for everyone else. In Manhattan, the average one-bedroom is $4,200. Apartments in buildings with doormen will run you more than $5,100.

These places aren’t just expensive, though. They’re economically eviscerating the people who live in them. This disproportionately harms the marginalized and working classes progressive claim to be looking out for. HUD classifies affordability as “housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities.” In New York, nearly 70% of renters are rent burdened, spending more than 30% of their gross income (before taxes!) on housing costs. This is only the tip of the spear in a country where half of all renters, amounting to 20 million households, are burdened by housing costs. 10 million renters are severely burdened, spending more than half of their gross income on housing.

When you spend more than half of your gross income on housing, you’re faced with decisions that no citizen of the wealthiest country in the history of the world should have to make. Choices like whether to go to a doctor for a nagging cold that’s only been getting worse, paying for gas, bus or transit fare to go to work, or to go to the supermarket to get groceries for your family instead of the cheaper, and less healthy, corner store or fast food restaurant down the block. There will always be unworkable trade offs made in this world.

But those who have housing are the lucky ones—even those who spend nearly all of their income towards it. America is grappling with an existential homeless crisis, whose ground zero is located in progressive cities.

As of January 2022, more than 580,000 people in the US were experiencing homelessness. This goes far beyond tent encampments or individuals struggling with addiction or mental illness. Though they may be the most visible, just 17% of the homeless population are chronically homeless (unhoused for more than six months), or the type we most associate with the institution. That means more than 80% of people who suffer with homelessness do so out of sight. This may mean staying on someone’s couch for a few nights before moving on, sleeping in your car in a Walmart parking lot, or bouncing around from shelter to shelter in general state of precarity.

While the overall number of homeless people in America has trended down over the last 15 years, it has increased in our most prosperous cities. In New York, the number of families sleeping in shelters has more than doubled in the last 20 years, with the total homeless population rising commensurately. LA added 30,000 unhoused people in the last decade. In 2016, DC had a homeless rate of 124 people per 10,000, “significantly higher than the national homelessness rate of 16.9 percent”, and more than double the rate for US cities at 51%. Thankfully, DC has started to reverse the trend. How? Simple.

Homelessness is a very easy problem to solve. Definitionally, the only thing that makes someone homeless is not having a home. If they were to be given a home, voila, they would no longer be homeless, definitionally. The solution, then, is to be build more housing. We know this because the data is pretty clear. DC has been building a lot of housing, and miraculously, homelessness has dropped from its 2016 highs.

In cities that have less available housing (lower vacancy rates), and higher rents, the rate of homelessness is higher. In Homelessness Is A Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern show a fairly strong correlation between homelessness, and places that have both high rent and low rates of vacancy. This makes sense. If there are fewer available homes to go around, and those few homes that are available cost more money to live in, there will inevitably be more people who cannot find housing. Should this problem persist long enough, at heightened severity, people will be forced out of the market for housing entirely. This is why Detroit, a very poor city with high vacancy rates and low rents, has a low rate of homelessness, and San Francisco, a very wealthy city with low vacancy rates and high rents, has a very high rate of homelessness.

Cities that build a lot of housing, such that housing is rendered abundant (i.e. not scarce), subsequently have higher vacancy rates as fewer people are competing for homes, and lower rents, as there isn’t a bidding process to secure a scarce good. It’s the same reason why we pay $0.50 per pound for salt today, and not a pound of gold. Salt is so abundant that we don’t need to treasure it. Sure, housing will never be as abundant as salt, and the input costs of production will never be as low, but the logic is directionally similar.

This isn’t to say that people who are homeless, or formerly homeless, don’t face challenges beyond finding shelter. Many do. But not having a stable and secure place to sleep at night exacerbates all other issues. When you marry basic and decent housing (it need not be exorbitant), with supportive systems like counseling, health care, and the psychological impact of safety, the results are remarkable.

While there have been many international studies that have shown the efficacy in combatting homelessness—Finland’s Housing First program led to a more than 70% drop in long term homelessness from 2008-2020—we don’t need to look outside of our border’s for proof of success. In one study in Denver, Permanent Supportive Housing saved the city $31,500 per participant as the formerly homeless individuals usage of police and medical resources declined precipitously with housing. For members of the case study, “Who averaged nearly eight years of homelessness each prior to entering the program, 77% of those entering the program continue to be housed in the program. More than 80% have maintained their housing for six months.” With stable housing and robust supportive services, this is a program that shows us what can be done. Or take Utah. The state reduced its chronically homeless population by more than 90% simply by providing homes for nearly 2,000 people, with limited contingencies.

If we scaled up programs like these, doubtless, fewer people would be homeless than they are today. So why don’t we do it? Part of the answer is the difficulty in effective administration. With the scale of these challenges so large, and the sums of money required to solve them so vast, like California’s $12B package to end homelessness, coordination will always be difficult. Unfortunately, there are some people who take advantage of this.

There’s an entire ecosystem that feeds off of exploiting our most vulnerable groups. While the foray of private equity firms into housing has been well documented, and widely (and mostly wrongly) speculated as the cause for our housing crisis, the arrow must also be pointed at groups who co-opt the language of progressivism towards ends that are more insidious than Wall Street scape goats. There exists a Non-Profit Industrial Complex that perpetuates the status quo with a veneer of legitimacy by using the right words, appealing to the right groups, and wearing the right team colors. From fraudsters who make millions of dollars running shelters that serve moldy food in conditions of dubious habitability, Administrators who get paid large sums to manage homelessness regardless if the absolute number of people who are homeless rises exponentially, and systems of self-dealing that rely on in-relationships to public officials and the morass of complex funding apparatuses that allow them to skate under public notice, homelessness as a business is booming. The consequences are devastating.

Far too many who work in this space don’t prioritize getting people off the street, or improving the living conditions for those they’re purporting to advocate for. It’s about personal gain while their righteousness evades suspicion. As one public official in the Northeast recently told me; Some non-profits have an incentive not to solve the issues plaguing their neighborhoods. I’ve heard from people who tell me “if we solve this problem, I won’t have a job anymore!”

This has to be rejected out of hand. There are far too many people suffering desperately for this to continue. It’s disgusting. Even worse, it wraps itself in progressive language that masquerades as trying to help, which hurts progressive causes further. Let me be clear: this is not everyone. And most people who are engaging in it might not realize that this is a problem. But the system has been structured such that it enables this level of leakage and friction, even when intentions are pure.

This is partly why we’ve struggled to build “Capital A” Affordable Housing. But unlike the shadowy world of institutionalized homelessness, very rarely does this manifest as something overtly malicious. Rather, accumulated self-interest supersedes the broader goal. In the complicated world of Affordable Housing management and development, every party takes their little piece, which, when aggregated, can lead to massive distortions that impact those we’re supposed to be helping.

In expensive coastal cities, market-rate units cost somewhere around $300,000 - $350,000 to construct, and around $275-$375 per square foot (psf). Affordable units, on the other hand, cost multiples of this. Nationally, projects financed by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) cost $480,000, and more than $700 psf. But this number varies regionally, and is brought down by rural and small town averages which have significantly lower labor and supply chain costs. In progressive cities, the numbers are far higher. In New York, Affordable units routinely cost more than $500,000. In San Francisco, the average in 2019 was $740,000, though this has risen in the last four years, as evidenced by several million-dollar plus unit projects that have recently been completed. When the market can deliver higher quality units at a third of the price, and often a third of the time, why do we stick to an inferior alternative?

Affordable Housing production suffers from a few things. First, large sums of money are required to offset the high costs of construction and continuous management. Buildings are expensive. Second, because these buildings are rented out below market (which have low returns in expensive areas as cap rates continue to hover in the 3-6% range before debt service), they’re not attractive investments. This requires them to be heavily subsidized, which leads to our third problem—there isn’t much funding available. Because of this, a lot of financing and funding must be cobbled together from disparate public and private sources, introducing many different groups into the equation. Fourth, there are many regulations on how affordable housing should be dealt with. This adds yet more costs, more confusion, more people, and much more time to a project. A market rate development that might take 18 months from genesis to completion may easily stretch to 5, 10, or even more years if it were built under Affordable mechanisms. Every additional person introduced to the project adds costs. Every additional review, or community meeting, adds time. If you’re compelled to bring a community group on board, that adds both time and money, at the expense of the community—despite the best of intentions.

To make things even more complicated, many Affordable developments have union labor or prevailing wage agreements, which introduce yet more groups with their own incentives into the mix. In New York, the city’s Independent Budget Office found that labor & wage requirements would result in an additional $80,000 in costs per unit—or 23% more than initial projections. This doesn’t pass scrutiny. Construction workers in New York are already among the highest paid in America, so it’s not like these provisions are protecting marginalized groups, as the language around these initiatives postures. An electrician making $100k a year does not need to make $120k a year at the expense of marginalized and middle classes who are being priced out of participating in our most prosperous places. She’s doing alright.

In order to deal with all of these moving parts and complexity, Non-profit developers charge very high fees, somewhere in the 10-15% of total project cost range. Despite their reputation as marauding ne'er-do-wells, this is 5-8x higher than what private developers operating in the American hyper-capitalist system would charge (2-3%).

For advocates who demand 100% Affordable or Public Housing based on a stubborn theory of the world that claims superiority, supposed morality does little to help those struggling desperately today. As we’ve seen over the last decade, it can make things much worse. People don’t need to internalize the terrors of political economy, they need somewhere to live. Do we care more about process, or outcomes? For far too many progressives, I worry it’s the former, a sort of “my way or the highway” that would rather be right than do what’s right. Besides, if one is so stubborn against the forces of capital, they should be against the forces that take 2 or 3 times as much from the most marginalized groups and keep them trapped in income-restricted housing. This is real exploitation that any progressive should be infuriated about.

The difficulty when talking about this subject is that the intentions of many of these programs come from a good place. Noble, even. Prevailing wage? It makes sense to pay hard working people well. Housing that’s affordable? No brainer! Environmental reviews to make sure we’re not further degrading our natural habitats? Who could fight against that? But when good intentions are usurped by complexity and a mismatch of reality, the best of intentions can deepen, and entrench, a negative status quo.

The push for more Affordable Housing is again a good example of this. Instead of broader upzonings to support market rate development, which we know reduces the expense of housing, those who advocate for purely Affordable Housing because they believe it will curb the predatory influences of some bad actors in the space, are causing, perhaps unwittingly, an alarming rise in segregation. Here’s how.

Because of the high costs of Affordable Housing, input prices have to be reduced wherever possible. In expensive coastal cities, one of the largest input costs is land price. The easiest way to reduce this is to build on cheaper land. Naturally, land in poorer neighborhoods is far cheaper than land in more expensive neighborhoods, whose cost is so high that it’s almost impossible to build anything other than Class A office space, high end retail or expensive apartments. And so, Non-profit and Affordable developers go where the costs of construction pencil out, which is disproportionately in poorer neighborhoods. This concentrates poverty, segregates by class, and increasingly, is segregating by race—outcomes that are as regressive as it gets.

The Furman center, a respected urban policy research institution, affirms these troubling trends in New York, stating:

“New government subsidized units targeted to low-income households were built in areas with higher Black and Hispanic population shares, higher poverty rates, and lower prices and rents than those of new units overall. In addition, new units targeted to low-income households that are suitable for families (with two or more bedrooms) were located in higher poverty census tracts than smaller units. These patterns raise concerns about whether the location of new income-restricted units is doing enough to counter patterns of economic segregation and to connect low-income children, in particular, to well-resourced neighborhoods.”

As progressives have doubled down on these policies, things have gotten worse. According to research from Pew, the share of lower-income and upper-income households living mainly among themselves increased significantly from 1980 to 2010. In New York and Philadelphia — the cities with the worst economic segregation in the country — 41% and 38% of low income households resided in majority low income neighborhoods. It’s expected that this has only increased in the last decade.

Segregating by race and by class is not progress. We’ve been working for centuries to remove the barriers that separate us and plant the seeds of prejudice. Hardening cities along identity lines only threatens to destroy much of that positive work. When you live next to people of many different faiths, races, classes, beliefs, and backgrounds, you learn we’re all more or less the same, and there’s no reason to oppose someone for a difference as unobjectionable as where they’re from. When you don’t have this opportunity, though, you distrust anyone who is different from your aligned in-group. This is partly why cities, in general, are not only more tolerant of diversity, but embrace it. When we effectuate policies that threaten this, our embrace of diversity is threatened as well. At best, it becomes a veneer where we can feel good about interacting with a person who is different than us, a superficial ephemera that does little to bring true acceptance.

This isn’t pathologizing those who struggle with poverty or find themselves in highly impoverished or segregated communities. Far from it. It’s a recognition that we have failed them. When we don’t lend a hand to those who might need a bit of help, the many problems they face can compound. This is something we’ve known for some time. In William Julius Wilson’s seminal 1987 work, The Truly Disadvantaged, he noted how high rates of unemployment and a lack of economic opportunity led to a concentration of poverty at a neighborhood level. This went a long way in explaining divergences in life outcomes between people with similar socio economic backgrounds. 20 years later, a group of researchers led by Raj Chetty validated this finding; Where you grow up matters. Upward mobility is much higher in areas where poorer families are integrated in mixed-income neighborhoods, and much lower where poverty is concentrated.

When you don’t have any role models in the neighborhood, it’s very difficult to mobilize yourself. We know the importance of representation in movies and sports, and it’s no different in professional careers. If you never see a doctor in your neighborhood, you never have a reason to think you could be one. It seems impossible, not even worth entertaining the thought of pursuing because there’s no examples of people like you who have done it.

Not only is upward mobility limited in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, but that disadvantage can persist across generations. Building off of Wilson’s work, Patrick Sharkey has shown that multi-generational poverty can lead to reduced cognitive skills, lower family income, lower wealth, underemployment, and more anxious households. Just as a head start in a more privileged family can help a kid get a leg up and stay up, set backs passed down from parent to child can push people down, and keep them down. While this might seem obvious, having empirical data to validate this theory of the world is important as it provides irrefutable evidence of past policy failures, and a jumping off point for where we need to go in the future.

There’s an inherent distrust among progressives towards market rate solutions, and many are right to be skeptical. To an extent. There exists a long history of the private market delivering unjust outcomes, and not fully rising to meet what we demand of it. Blockbusting, failing to provide housing for marginalized groups, lower valuations for homes of people of color, and restrictive covenants prohibiting minority communities from living in private developments altogether, among many other cases, are unacceptable marks. But a lot of what people blame the private market for—mass unaffordability, suspect living conditions, environmental inequality, deprivation of opportunity—is often downstream of public policy. The market is not a sentient actor; it is a cold system that responds to the constraints placed on it by a governing body. We do not live in a libertarian state where the market runs completely unfettered. We live in a highly regulated society, and in progressive cities, we regulate too much of it.

Moreover, the legacy of public interventions is rife with abhorrent outcomes. Urban renewal, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people and tore scars through neighborhoods that continue to oppress today, was a federal policy carried out with lust by midcentury planners at a local level. The first federally backed mortgage loans were made explicitly, and exclusively, to white communities. Guidelines were crafted to further discourage the “wrong types of people” from moving into a neighborhood, in less explicit, but no less malicious, ways. When these measures were ultimately defeated, exclusionary zoning was, and continues to be, wielded as a tool of oppression. Public Housing was routinely used to enforce segregation, and ghettoized Black communities by design.

Does this mean we should lose trust in government altogether? Of course not. But it means we should focus on what it does well, and allow the private market to do what it does well, so that we can all progress forward. It’s about focusing on what each party’s comparative advantage is, and maximizing that. This is something economists have long known about, which we can modify slightly to meet our needs here. If a party is able to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than its counter party, it should focus on that thing, not those things which it’s not so good at. If you’re a world class chef, it makes little sense for you spend your time as a tennis instructor. There’s a very high opportunity cost for that. Similarly, the government is great at providing for those who wouldn’t be considered in a market based system, focusing on supportive services, schools, big infrastructure projects, and defense priorities that might not be handled as well if things were left solely to self-interest in the market. It’s good at keeping the big picture in view, making requisite foundational investments in people and place that enable them to do what they want to do, however they want to do it. It should not be prescriptive over how people live their lives, or choose winners and losers.

No matter how much some groups may wish it were otherwise, the government is not a developer, manager, nor activist organization. It should not do things that it’s not equipped to do for the sake of adhering to a certain ideology on how the world should work outside of the constraints of our modern political economic system. That’s utopianism. A government must practicality respond to what it’s people need most. It must look at what’s working, and allow or encourage more of it. It must look at what’s not working, and do less of it. That’s the dividing line between progression and regression.

The answer to the problems many cities face is not public or private means exclusively. Putting blinders on to proclaim one system superior at the expense of the other ensures that we’ll always be missing some important piece of the pie. The solution should be whatever can reasonably be expected to progress us out of our problems. I’m sorry to say, large government responses have not done nearly enough, and verge on being negatives overall.

In far too many progressive cities, however, our officials and opting for policies they would like to see work, instead of trusting the data on what actually works. They then obstinately stick to their priors, defending their actions out of a mixture of pathos, anecdote, and righteousness, while the results get worse, and worse for all but a few. This leads to a weird dynamic where winners and losers are picked on a subjective, and arbitrary, notion of who those officials believe should be protected, and all others are either neglected or villainized.

This is something that I think needs to be addressed urgently. There exists a form of identity politic that favors a rather narrow and prescriptive community composition, as opposed to how that community is actually composed. In the past few years, there has been a hollowing out of the middle class in expensive, progressive cities, largely because they’ve simply been neglected. Through high housing costs, a resistance to address the underlying market based issues, and a lack of programs directed at those who seem to be doing well enough, we’ve failed our middle class. They’ve lost many of the gains that made our economic demography the envy of the world in the 20th century.

What’s troubling is that these are the people our communities rely on most. Teachers, firemen, nurses, and service workers generally. We cannot have a functioning society if we don’t make room for those who make it function. With homeownership out of reach in our biggest cities, foundational, middle class workers have to duke it out in the rental market. Because these groups do marginally better than arbitrary AMI thresholds that would offer them subsidized housing (and emphasis on the word marginal), they’re not protected at all. If rent is $2,300 a month for a one bedroom, it’s only “affordable” if you make more than $92,000 a year. In many expensive cities, $2,300 for a one bedroom would be a steal. If you make $50,000 a year, you wouldn’t be considered marginalized, and would likely not be protected by subsidy. But, as this example has shown, you’d really struggle to make ends meet, and that’s before food, transportation and medical costs, to say nothing of actually getting to enjoy your life, are factored in.

Our response to this has effectively been to force people into soul-crushing and environmentally destructive super-commuting patterns somewhere they can afford to live within the metropolitan area, or make them move out entirely. Indeed, on net, millions more people have moved out of large progressive metro areas in just the last two years than have moved in. In the New York, San Francisco, and LA metro areas alone more than a million people, on net, left from 2019 to 2021. Between 2021 and 2022, 143,000 more people left Los Angeles County than moved there, down from 195,000 net people who left the year before.

Where have they been moving? Overwhelmingly, to red states that are more than happy to accept them. These places have far less restrictive zoning and planning codes, and have thus been building significantly more housing than their blue counterparts, which has led to lower costs. If you’re a hardworking lower or middle class family who just wants to be able to afford a place to live and enjoy life without the vice grips of cost of living squeezing you out entirely, you should be able to move to do so if the place you currently live in is not willing to give you that opportunity. It is an entirely rational decision that millions of people have rationally come to. When a new (ish) starter home in an area close to many amenities and jobs costs $340k in Houston, and the equivalent in San Francisco is $1.2m, the choice is obvious. It becomes even more clear when taxes are lower, economic development is higher, and where it’s easier to start and run a business (the backbone of the American economy).

While the states that are welcoming the most people are red, as David Brooks notes, most of the population growth is coming in cities that are more blue, creating a red-blue gradient.

“Republicans at the state level provide the general business climate, but Democrats at the local level influence the schools, provide many social services and create a civic atmosphere that welcomes diversity and attracts highly educated workers.”

These are places where one ideology cannot prevail. Both parties have to work hard together, putting their prejudices aside, to create better places for everyone. There’s no room for complacency. This is not the case in echo chambers of conservative, or progressive areas.

It’s no wonder why so many people are opting to leave these sort of homogenous places. Sadly, public officials have coped with these trends with flawed logic that verges on zealotry. If people don’t stay here, they reason, they must be republicans or morally compromised in some way. People who hate cities and diversity. That many of the people who are leaving progressive cities are minority groups, working class families, and members of their own team (!) is completely lost of these officials. The accelerated purpling of red states in the last few years can be explained in large part due to blue cities failing their own constituents.

Instead of working towards solving the issues that plague their constituents and getting competitive with their red state rivals, it seems as though they’d rather admonish regular people for making decisions that make the most sense for their families. There is a sort of hatred directed towards those who live in, or move to these places (a hatred that cuts both ways, to be sure). It manifests in a divisiveness as ugly as that which they claim the other side is. If you move to Texas, or Tennessee, or Florida, you must be some ideologue or bigot, they reason. Totally missing the underlying motivations for why someone would want to do this, as they only see the world through a binary ideological system; you’re either with us, or against us.

This is an insane way to respond to your own failures, especially for an ideological movement that prides itself on representing people of all classes, races, beliefs, and orientations. To blame those who leave because of your own failed policies, instead of working to solve them, just so you don’t have to cede the moral high ground and accept you were wrong, is sheer lunacy, and utterly disgraceful. It’s time to look in the mirror.

There is a sort of moral elitism at play as well. Oh, I could never go to a red state. Those people are worse than us. This not only poisons the well for our country even more, pitting us against them in a nonsensical battle which ignores that we’re all the kind of the same and want the same things for our lives, but it’s hypocritical. We’d do the same exact thing if we weren’t fortunate enough to be born in the places and positions we were. Progressives are understandably skeptical of the notion that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps (without help, at the very least), but we’re effectively prohibiting people from even trying shoes on, while the cities across the street are offering brand new nike’s at a fraction of the cost of our beaten up fila’s.

When people do choose to stay—not an easy decision—progressive governments are focusing more on social issues than fundamental quality of life issues. That’s a problem. I’m someone who proudly supports nearly all progressive social causes. But, they cannot supersede the foundations of city governance. We cannot ascend the hierarchy of needs to more delicate issues until we’ve solved basic things like housing, education, quality infrastructure, access to healthy food, and public safety.

Casually dismissing away crime waves, murders, assaults, and mass psychological fragility as…pittances, or worse, chiding those who are concerned about them, is outrageous. It’s astounding that progressive leaders have managed to make those who feel concerned out to be some kind of bad actors, for simply calling a spade a spade, and demanding better. It should not be a political statement to say that getting assaulted on the street by a stranger is bad, actually.

This is not a winning game plan, and it’s infuriating this is the position so many progressives have chosen to settle on. The response should not be to dunk on people for a few likes on twitter, but rather, listen to their concerns—they are, after all, your constituents—and work to progress forward.

This sort of poor governance is chronically destructive. It not only sends a message that a place can’t do the simple things right, but that it has poor prospects for the future. If a city doesn’t care about its existing residents, it can’t very well accommodate new ones. Instead of making their livelihood in New York, or LA, or San Francisco, or Boston, or Seattle, would be residents will move elsewhere, delivering to that place their unique talents, culture, presence and economic contributions. While this will doubtless deprive progressive cities of their next generation of artists, visionaries, builders, and thinkers who have for so long delivered invaluable cultural capital and global goodwill, more importantly, it will deter the everyday people who make a city run. They’ll move to cheaper housing, as amenities do little good if one can’t afford them.

I’ve had the good fortune to travel much of this country over the last few years for work, and have seen a lot of different kinds of places. The people are roughly the same wherever one goes, but the spirit is wholly different. I’ve felt significantly more hope and optimism in places like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, than in New York, LA, or San Francisco and DC. This may be because people aren’t filled with existential dread about how to afford rent from month to month, and have time to spend with their friends and family, doing whatever it is they like to do. As a New Yorker, I wish it didn’t feel like Texas or Florida were places where the future felt possible, and the city felt zapped of promise, but I can’t say it doesn’t feel like that. As a long lover of Los Angeles and San Francisco, I wish I didn’t feel as though they’ve failed in some profound ways. But I can’t ignore the reality, the data, or the personal anecdotes from dozens of opportunists who have flocked from around the world to make sunbelt cities the envy of all economic development and quality of life surveys.

Does not this make public officials angry? That our greatest cities are content to close up shop, fall from grace, and not continue the wonderful stories they’ve woven for centuries? We have to wake up! But it seems all we’re doing is talking a lot about how the world should be, and signaling what we would like to believe to be true, without doing very much.

There is perhaps no better symbol for this than the “In This House We Believe” sign. It’s a fantastic message of the things we want. But it doesn’t do anything. It might actually hamper action because it gives people a false impression that they’ve done their part. If we do believe in the platitudes of the sign, what do some of those words really mean?

Black Lives Matter

If we believe that black lives matter, we can’t concentrate cities by race and then deprive those communities of opportunity. We need to invest back into black communities, in ways that actually benefit them. Instead of railing against any level of change as gentrification, we need to accept that some neighborhoods do need some improvements, that renovating run down properties, stopping crime, and having grocery stores where they previously didn’t exist are good things that people in these areas deserve.

There will doubtless be concerns about displacement; valid concerns. Cities can introduce anti-displacement measures such as tenant protections for people who have lived in a building for 5 years or more, and stronger protections for those who have lived in a building for longer, should they choose to stay. But we can’t tie people to communities because that’s where they’ve lived for some period of time, or because we believe certain types of people should live in certain types of places.

If we believe that black lives matter, we should unlock zoning codes to allow black communities to develop their neighborhoods themselves, and build wealth along the way. This is clearly superior to the current system where it’s being drained away by amorphous, institutionalized corporations and non-profits who throw up large towers that take away the core elements of what makes a community feel like a community. We need to stop disincentivizing people from finding opportunity through upwards economic mobilization because they’re afraid of losing their income restricted apartment. We just need to build enough such that everyone has enough, and can feel comfortable to pursue whatever it is they want to pursue.

No Human Is Illegal

If we believe that no human is illegal, we have to build housing for all who need it, free of qualifier or caveat. This means reigning in exclusionary zoning whose original sin remains its modus operandi—excluding those of lesser means or different backgrounds from participating in a neighborhood. It means rejecting the lobbying from wealthy homeowners who live in communities that haven’t done their fair share to ensure all can have a place at the table—the types of places that have these signs up in their communities. Places like Westchester, Northwest DC, the West Side of LA, San Mateo and Marin Counties. They have a lot to answer for.

It means holding truth to power, and calling out the hypocrisies of those who damage this cause. Robert Reich, one of the best known public progressives in America, is perhaps unaware of his cognitive dissonance on this front. While he has urged Wall Street executives to build low income housing, he apparently believes he’s above doing the same in his own community, passionately fighting against the replacement of a dilapidated home in favor of 10 new apartment units (which would have included affordable housing), writing, “Development for the sake of development makes no sense when it imposes social costs like this." Really? The social costs of people living in tents or spending 70% of their income on housing don’t outweigh the social costs of demolishing a dilapidated building in your own neighborhood?

If we believe that no human is illegal, we can no longer artificially reduce the amount of places for people to legally live, or leave the provision of that housing to dumb luck. We have to end housing lotteries, which treats basic habitation as a prize. Since 2013, there have been 25 million unique applications for 40,000 lottery eligible apartments in New York, for a 1 in 625 chance of securing a home. Applicants wait years, verging on decades, just for the hope that their name might be called to secure a quality place to live. This is insidious, and by design. The Affordable and Public Housing apparatus cannot create the amount of homes that we need, but it is continuously looked at by progressives as the only viable way of moving forward.

We can’t be ignorant of the costs of construction, which are real and high. We cannot merely hope to build ourselves out of the housing crisis, we have to have solutions grounded in reality that actually lead to homes getting built. Any conversation that dismisses costs, competency, or consequences should not be entertained.

We have to stop saying things like “I support affordable housing, or homeless shelters, just not here.”, and reform that to be, “I support housing of all kinds in all places.” But it’s not enough just to build. We have to build well.

If we believe that no human is illegal, we have to open our cities up to the refuges and immigrants from around the world who so desperately need a place to take them in. What’s more of a no brainer than this? The benefits are myriad. Immigrants start more businesses and create more jobs than they take, pay an outsized share in taxes (~30% of all tax dollars despite being less than 14% of the population), and bring invaluable cultural richness that makes the fabric of our society better. Of course, progressives agree with all of this and theoretically want more immigrants and refugees to come to the US. But these beliefs have to align with our actions, and they simply have not in recent years. We have to enable the creation of places where people of lesser means trying to make it in America can safely and comfortably exist, not pile into unlit and overcrowded basements with horrifying conditions. Is this what we stand for? Forcing those who have risked everything to contribute to our society into dark warrens of danger, precarity, and neglect? Shame on us.

If we believe that no human is illegal, we will have to build permanent supportive housing in the fabric of our communities for formerly homeless individuals, not concentrate it in out of the way neighborhoods, and further ostracize those who have fallen on hard times. It is not progressive to let people sleep in their cars, navigate brutal shelter conditions with young children, or be forced out on the streets and struggle with mental illness or addiction.

If we believe that no human is illegal, let’s act like it.

Science Is Real

Progressives pride ourselves on trusting the data, and believing that science is real. We respond to empirical findings, basing our worldview on an evolving body of research that allows us to trudge forward in the murky waters of doubt in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. But somehow, progressives refuse to hold this same scrutiny up to the housing market, or public safety, or, yes, climate change. Or any number of other issues that have been adjudged to be settled matters, heretical to the prevailing orthodoxy. We cannot distort data to make it do things we would like it to do, we can only follow where it leads and base our policy around that.

In the last few years, there has been something of a consensus from housing economists that building more housing reduces the cost of housing. New construction has been found to reduce rents by 5–7% in a neighborhood, as more supply reduces competition over homes. What’s more, for every 100 new market rate apartments built, 70 middle-income apartments open up for people lower down the chain of housing, as each new unit of housing ripples outwards in a chain effect where the wealthiest people move into the newest units, and everyone else moves up. In a study spanning 1970-2000 of California’s Pacific Coast, which looked at the impact of a 1976 coastal boundary zone initiative that restricted the amount of housing that could be built, Kahn et. al found that home prices rose by 25% more than unrestricted areas in the same region, a trend that has accelerated in the last two decades. In Auckland, New Zealand, New York, Portland, Los Angeles, and Houston, signifiant amounts of new housing supply were introduced after upzonings or liberalizations of planning regulations, offsetting or reducing upward rent pressure.

In a study of 180 upzoning and downzoning policies in more than 1,000 municipalities, “reforms loosening restrictions {were} associated with a significant, 0.8 percent increase in citywide housing supply at least 3 years post–reform”. That increase might sound small, but it’s not. It would account for nearly half of the new dwelling units produced in New York City in 2021, a huge, huge number.

These findings should be intuitive. When you provide more of a good, prices reduce. When you restrict supply of that good, prices inflate. This is the basic logic behind why exclusive sneakers that are manufactured for a just couple of dollars sell for many hundreds, or why apples are so cheap at the supermarket. It is a simple issue of supply and demand, a basic economic principle we’ve known about for hundreds of years. While the contemporary progressive may shudder at this language, they can’t ignore it.

If we say we trust the experts, these are the experts. We can’t be so ideologically predisposed to one outcome that we reject when all of the data tells us another route is superior. Contrary to what many think, fighting against market-rate housing does not stick it to the capitalists. It damns the most marginalized who have no other way to secure scarce housing. We have put what is right over wanting to be right.

Over the last decade, a similar story has played out with environmental groups, and those who have co-opted environmental language to masque their personal grievances. Climate change is one of the top issues on the progressive docket. While increased capacity of renewable energies, adoption of non-fossil fuel vehicles, recycling materials that can be reused, and the conservation of resources generally have been touted as important contributions in reducing our impact on a changing climate, the largest greenhouse gas emissions savings will come from changing our development patterns to support more infill development. That’s according to the IPCC, the experts who are tasked with our global response to climate change.

These reductions don’t come from switching to electrically powered cars from their internal combustion cousins, but by not using cars at all. The more that we can walk or bike to carry out most of our daily needs, the less emissions there will be generally. Even if everyone were to drive EVs, electric grids would have to be 100% run on renewable energies. They are not. It’s currently about 17%. Though this proportion is growing, we still have far to go. And even if we achieved 100% renewable energy generation for our grid, but continued driving everywhere, we would still generate significant emissions from the production and transportation of these vehicles, and driving over asphalt roads. Stormwater runoff would remain high, urban heat island effects would deepen (requiring more energy), and utilities and water would continue to be pumped across great distances at low density, which is neither efficient nor sustainable.

But, if we gradually increase the density of already built up-areas, more people get to share resources, leading to far fewer emissions per person. If we demolish a two story building that housed 4 people, and construct a 5 story building to house 40, that’s 10x efficiency gain. Those 40 people can use the same roads, utilities, and public amenities that the 4 people did, and in the event that we need to upgrade capacity, there will be sufficient tax dollars to pay for it, unlike in more sprawling areas. This is why, despite all appearances to the contrary, New York is the most sustainable city in America on an emissions per household basis, and leafy exurbs are the least sustainable. Just because something looks green, does not mean it is.

In light of this, it’s concerning that so many progressives in places like San Francisco, Manhattan, and San Diego use environmental reviews as a tool to kill new development within the city, that could actually lead to more climate resiliency. This guise not only delegitimizes the importance of environmental review in some contexts, but it makes the other great challenges of our cities—high housing costs, declining tax revenues, lack of opportunity and economic mobility—worse. The absurdity of feigning outrage when a mid rise building rises in place of a parking lot, garage, or low rise building out of fear for the environment, when everything else around that lot is a mid rise apartment building or otherwise built up area, is staggering. There is no risk of the environment worsening because a new apartment building goes up in the heart of San Francisco. Maybe 150 years ago, but not today.

The absurdity continues as these same people don’t register any level of concern for the many millions of acres of natural land that are cleared as an inevitable result of no new housing being built in already built up areas. An asphalt parking lot turning to an apartment building? Horrifying. 1,000 acres paved over and even more land stamped down to run utilities and other services out to the new development? *crickets*

This is a brazen and foolish bastardization of well intentioned laws to fulfill narrow personal interests hiding behind a veneer of the right esoteric phrases and appeals to emotion. What’s worse, when we don’t accommodate new development in relatively climate resilient places like Seattle or San Francisco, people move to decidedly unsustainable places, like Nevada or Arizona, where they’re guaranteed to produce 2-3x more carbon emissions because the infrastructure is entirely car dependent. When you factor in rising temperatures and diminishing water reserves, the situation gets worse and worse.

Progressive areas have used “environmental review” laws to entrench oil & gas interests, while places that could hardly be considered progressive are charging full speed ahead building renewables and housing (though less sustainably) at much greater rates. We must do better.

The funny thing about reviews is that many of them were created with the goal of leading to bureaucratic delays. This is a tactic that has long been used by republicans to thwart initiatives they disagree with, as Nicholas Bagley writes in his paper, The Procedure Feitsh,

“Conservative reform proposals travel under an array of names and acronyms, but they embrace a common tactic: They stack procedure on procedure to create a thicket so dense that agencies will either struggle to act or give up before they start…

If new administrative procedures can be used to advance a libertarian agenda, might not relaxing existing administrative constraints advance progressive ones?”

For progressive who see themselves in a holy war against the other side, the processes they’re employing have done the bidding of their enemies, for many decades, with increasing frequency!

Progressive cities have been telling themselves a myth for the last 20 years. But that’s not necessarily a problem. Self-mythologizing can be a good thing. It can form the basis of community spirit, identity, local pride, and the pursuit of virtue. It becomes a problem when it’s used as a masque to deflect from real challenges, and as a cudgel against supposed enemies of the orthodoxy. When the myths we tell ourselves transcend the realm of spirit to inform policy, of which there is rarely a one-to-one relationship, dangerous consequences may arise. The world gets reduced down to identity and binary poles. Black versus white. Good versus evil. Progressive versus Conservative. Capitalism versus Socialist. Right versus wrong. We pick winners and losers in this world, governing not for the entirety of a constituency, but selected people we most personally align with. That’s not the job of government. The real world, of course, doesn’t work this way. There exists a lot of gray. When we fail to acknowledge that, common cause is thrown by the wayside, and those seeking common sense are deemed heretics.

Progressive cities have forgotten what progressivism really means, opting for ideology at the expense of the people they’re meant to serve. If we genuinely care about the most marginalized members of our society, we need to actually help them with proven solutions. Not use college-rhetoric and ideology that don’t materialize in reality, no matter how much we wish it were so. This means sorting through the morass of idealized interventions and trusting what experts, data, and science tell us. Only then can we move towards living up to the values we embody by progressing the status quo beyond the many challenges we face today.

When one looks back in history, no one’s hands come out as clean as binary ideological positions would hold. That form of tribalism has to be left to the past, as it’s impacting real people today. We have to focus on what works, and progress forward. If it fails, we need to be willing to embrace creative solutions, not just speak soft platitudes or place a sign on our lawn or in our window. That’s not action. We need to level with people, and stop lumping them together a part of a group for whom we think they should be, and instead listen to them as individuals who have autonomy over there life.

Prescribing policies for everyone that are narrowly tailored to the few guarantees outcomes that are antithetical to our broad goals. Ironically, the policies progressive cities have adopted in the hope of protecting the marginalized and working classes have backfired, because they don’t truly respond to what these groups need. By villainizing capitalism and corporations who create jobs and allow people to mobilize themselves upwards, and neglecting the middle classes entirely, a permanent underclass that is oppressed through infantilizing policy is created. Progressive policies have spoken to the position of where people are today, but not where they want to go.

By allowing housing prices to run up so high such that only the most well off or most willing to spend all of their income can afford to live in cities, segregating marginalized groups out of the way in “Capital A” Affordable Housing with little economic opportunity, refusing to address valid concerns on crime and quality of life issues for fear of stigmatization, and not investing sufficiently in a rising tide that can lift all boats within a city, progressives are failing at their one job.

You can only say things that your actions invalidate so many times before people stop believing you, or you’re labeled a hypocrite. Those on the left seem more concerned with how they might appear than what they actually do. It’s about posturing, not progress. As a progressive, I can’t stand for that. Living up to our values means opening up our most productive places for all, not restricting them and subjugating those who live within them, but using language that makes ourselves feel better.

The way to do this is to build such that we raise everyone up, not conserve the status quo for a few, while it worsens for the many. Ezra Klein, one of the more prominent progressive thinkers, has been advocating for a “liberalism that builds”, which I think is the exact way to move forward. Klein has been a loud critic from within, writing,

“Scratch the failures of modern Democratic governance, particularly in blue states, and you’ll typically find that the market didn’t provide what we needed and government either didn’t step in or made the problem worse through neglect or overregulation.

We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper. At the national level, much can be blamed on Republican obstruction and the filibuster. But that’s not always true in New York or California or Oregon. It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak.

This is where the liberal vision too often averts its gaze. If anything, the critiques made of public action a generation ago have more force today. Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult.”

He’s more recently released a piece about everything-bagel liberalism, which gets at a similar point as the one I’ve been writing here (this should serve as motivation for me to write faster, as this article is 6 weeks in the making, but I digress). Klein notes that liberal governments aren’t constructed to face the challenges we do now. Instead of thinking critically through the ramifications of certain policies, there is more of a “vibes” implementation over doing what is right.

“One problem liberals are facing at every level where they govern is that they often add too much. They do so with good intentions and then lament their poor results”

We can no longer sit idly by and lament poor results. We need to marry theory with reality in the service of creating a better society for everyone. It’s well past time we take measures that allow us to live up to our values, and damn the politics. If you care about making our world a better place for all, we have precious little time to worry about the appearances.

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Coby Lefkowitz is a real estate developer, writer, and thought leader in the world of urban planning and development. He recently published the book Building Optimism, explaining why our world looks the way it does, and how to make it better. Purchase your copy, via the link.

Written by Bob Chapman.

“We were creating a new academic discipline, Environmental Studies. If we’d only had a few more weeks before the first Earth Day, we would’ve included human settlement patterns in the syllabus. We should have.”

— Steven Kellert, founding professor, School of the Environment at Yale, from the first Transect Seminar in 2001 (paraphrased)

Society pivoted on April 22, 1970—the first Earth Day. An estimated twenty million people participated in communities and on college campuses across America. The atmosphere was electric, coming at a time when “environmental problems were proliferating like a many-headed hydra.”1 Millions of citizens were ready to mobilize. Earth Day was the catalyst.

Just four months before the first Earth Day, a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times provided the spark for the global environmental movement. The Earth Day organization is now global, engaging over one billion people each year,2 but “the months leading up to Earth Day had been frantic,”3 and the hurried effort to launch by April 22 meant at least one very important thing was left out. All of the college and university programs in environmental studies that emerged in Earth Day’s wake failed to incorporate a crucial topic into their DNA: the built environment. In other words—urbanism, cities, and how the design of human communities affects the world’s environment.

This missed opportunity is even more painful given Earth Day’s focus on effects (such as pollution) over causes. The ad in the Times was blunt: “A disease has infected our country.” But what caused the disease?

Within eight months of Earth Day, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was up and running. The Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts quickly followed. “These laws have protected millions of men, women and children from disease and death and have protected hundreds of species from extinction.”4 Such achievements are an impressive legacy. Still, it’s worth examining what the first Earth Day did not yield.

Fast-forward to May 6, 2001—31 years after the first Earth Day, as society began another pivot. It happened in Hastings Auditorium at the Yale School of Architecture as Andrés Duany, Léon Krier, and 11 other scholars, planners, and architects led the first Transect Seminar. Their goal was to combat a root cause of environmentally disastrous diseases: soulless, placeless, automobile-dependent suburban sprawl.

They presented a convincing argument that America’s system of forcing new communities to comply with use-based zoning codes (a key driver of sprawl) could, and should, be replaced. What they offered instead was an idea based on the categories used to describe the world’s natural ecologies: a form-based transect for planning human settlements (cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods) that would promote building compact, mixed-use, transit-friendly, pollution-reducing, healthy, walkable, immersive communities.

The need for this New Urbanist type of planning might seem obvious today. But at the time, it was a revelation. Earth Day and all the new environmental studies programs had omitted the effects that contemporary human settlement patterns have on the environment.

When the first Earth Day event took place, there was no conversation about how the built environment could help the planet. The assumption was that it could only be a source of harm. As a result, animosity toward any kind of development was baked into modern environmentalism and, ultimately, into urban planning.

I’ve visited environmental studies programs at several universities. I see eager young students grinding up fish to measure dioxin. When I visit schools of architecture, I see students designing sleek, edgy buildings. When I visit planning schools, I see students focusing on street design, buffers, and open space. At engineering schools, I see students focused on traffic, trip generation, and stormwater management. I don’t see anyone focused on building communities that actually create less pollution and more happiness.

This brings me back to that day in New Haven in 2001, which I was fortunate enough to witness. I recall how Professor Stephen Kellert explained that in response to the upcoming first Earth Day, Yale’s Forestry School had decided to expand its offerings and become one of the country’s first schools of the environment. In the lead-up to that seminal event, Kellert was asked to design the curriculum and prepare the syllabus outlining the course of study for the new academic discipline.

The most poignant moment came when Kellert related one of his great regrets: The syllabus had been incomplete. If there had only been “a few more weeks before the first Earth Day,” he said, there would have been enough time to include the effects of human settlement patterns. Instead, by rushing to meet the Earth Day deadline, they missed a one-time opportunity to include that critically important aspect of environmental studies. In other words, they left out the built environment. They left out urbanism. They left out cities.

The costs of these events remain enormous. If they had unfolded differently, what could have been?

During that first Transect Seminar, Kellert’s research showed that the more emotional attachment people have to the places where they live, the better the environmental outcomes will be. In focusing on the important connection between human social systems and ecological ones, he “theorized that positive feedback loops cause the correlation, arising from incremental, mutual changes of behavior, attitude and the environment.”5 According to Kellert, “An exclusive focus on low-impact design leads to terrible mistakes because it ignores the many ways people develop affinity with place.”6

I’ve visited environmental studies programs at several universities. I see eager young students grinding up fish to measure dioxin. When I visit schools of architecture, I see students designing sleek, edgy buildings. When I visit planning schools, I see students focusing on street design, buffers, and open space. At engineering schools, I see students focused on traffic, trip generation, and stormwater management. I don’t see anyone focused on building communities that actually create less pollution and more happiness.

What academics, architects, planners, and scientists built a case for on that day at Yale was simple—abandoning use-based zoning and adopting transect planning. But despite the setting, this conversation was more than a mere theoretical exercise. When Krier closed the seminar, he highlighted how transect planning should be treated moving forward: “It is not an escapist abstraction; it should be adaptable to fit real-world conditions. It is panoramic and it allows people to address sweeping social and design issues to achieve a better quality of life.”7

Transect planning belongs in the environmental studies syllabus. As Andrés Duany and Emily Talen have written: “The ultimate goal under the transect system is to foster quality environments, whether rural or urban.”8 The result of this approach “could eventually produce a seamless, non hostile integration between natural and human ecologies.”9

As we work toward healing the planet—or at least toward successful adaptation to change—we should urge schools of the environment to include urban design. Transect planning gives us the tools we need—not just to make better cities, but also to make a better Earth.

Bob Chapman is a new urbanist developer with built projects in Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Missouri.

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Written By Vaneesha Patel

This article is Part Three of a series on the forces, processes, and regulations that harm good citybuilding.

Most Americans want to live in inclusive communities. So what’s stopping them? The short answer is regulatory regimes. The long answer is the history behind them. The people who build cities can create the neighborhoods people want, but only if harmful laws of the past are truly remedied. To do that, we need to look at policies that may no longer be active but still have palpable effects on our cities.

While many processes, stakeholders, and institutions play a role in how our cities are built today, there is arguably no bigger influence on our cities than our history. For centuries, policymakers have made decisions that have forever altered the fabric of American cities, and the implications of such decisions are still apparent. As the Pew Research Center has noted: “In the decades since the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the extent and nature of discrimination have changed, but its imprint remains visible in many cities; it continues to influence choices about where people of different races, ethnicities, and income live.” That quote is from 2008, and not much has changed. Let’s recall a few of the major offenders.

Redlining

In the early 1900s, redlining resulted in underinvestment in predominantly Black and immigrant neighborhoods. This led to a lack of infrastructure investment and new development in such areas, creating large disparities between neighborhoods that may have only been a couple of blocks apart. Today, areas that had been formally redlined consist of older housing stock and receive less in rent revenue. In addition, previously redlined areas also face worse health outcomes.

Urban renewal

In the 1950s, urban renewal swept America. With a promise of bringing better communities, “run-down” areas were demolished and replaced with new developments. In the process, vibrant neighborhoods were ripped apart and displaced. A prime example of this was Mecca Flats in Chicago. Once home to a lively community of artists, white-collar laborers, and musicians, this predominantly black community within a building was replaced with the Illinois Institute for Technology’s Crown Hall.

Urban highways

The highway boom of the 1950s also changed the American landscape. With heavy investments in highway construction and expansion, communities were ripped apart as people were forced to become more reliant on automobiles. In Austin, that decade saw East Avenue cleared to make way for the construction of 1-35. A place that had been home to predominantly ethnic communities was demolished in favor of a highway, a decision whose effects were compounded by the implementation of additional discriminatory policies that led to even worse outcomes for people of color.

The impact of history on our cities goes beyond physical infrastructure and development. It also extends to the cultural and social fabric of a city, including patterns of discrimination and exclusion that still affect communities today—ones that continue to impact our built environment. It’s a vicious cycle. Recognizing and addressing these issues is a crucial step toward creating more equitable and inclusive cities that benefit all residents. So when we ask ourselves, “Who killed the city?”, there is not necessarily one thing to blame. However, as work continues to build good cities, we must understand that the way we build occurs within the context of the past. The more that citybuilders do that, the more they can get out from under the thumb of destructive regulations.

Vaneesha Patel is the Spring 2023 Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.

Written By Wyatt Gordon

On March 22, the Arlington County Board approved a zoning change that will allow buildings with four—and in some cases six—units countywide. The legislation, in the works for several years, had support from several established progressive groups, including the NAACP, the Alliance for Housing Solutions, Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement, and the Sierra Club.

Alongside them were the YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the first of a growing number of YIMBY organizations sprouting up across Virginia. Jane Green, president and co-founder of the group, has been fighting for housing affordability since 2017, including through a past role with Greater Greater Washington. She acknowledges that such a win wouldn’t have been possible if the YIMBYs had fought the issue alone.

“We bring a lot of renters who are traditionally left out of the decision-making process, but we don’t have the same diversity of incomes and race that other groups bring to the table,” she said. “We are just one piece of this broad, forward-looking, pro-growth, pro-housing coalition. To me, the best thing coming out of this is a real professionalism and leadership that we have learned from our allies.”

Arlington may be a watershed moment for the nascent pro-housing movement in Virginia, showing that it is a force to be taken seriously, turning people out—over 250 people testified on the “Missing Middle” housing bill—and building bridges as well.

YIMBYs of NoVA get off the ground

It wasn’t always that way. In February 2022, a handful of Arlingtonians showed up at a county board meeting to express their support for a Pentagon City Sector Plan that would allow new housing and retail in a corner of the DC region better known for bland office buildings. Although the plan’s supporters comprised just one in ten people who turned up, the hearing may have marked the first time the "Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement shifted from a purely online presence to an in-person force in Virginia.

“At that time, we were so proud to have even 10 percent of the turnout in favor,” said Jane Green, president and co-founder of the YIMBYs of Northern Virginia. We felt like we showed the community that there were people in support of new housing and growth. Some people see YIMBY as a dirty word—and it can have some baggage—but I think for us it works well, and people understand what we’re fighting for. We’re happy to be the people saying yes.”

Since February 2022, such grassroots, volunteer-led chapters affiliated with the national YIMBY Action organization have sprouted up in Hampton Roads and Richmond. Even in Charlottesville and Fredericksburg, smaller local groups like Livable Cville and Fifteen Minute Fredericksburg are flirting with similar pro-housing advocacy.

Before this recent wave of YIMBY groups entered the scene, much of the fight for inclusive, pro-growth housing policy had been led by nonprofits with full-time staff, such as the Coalition for Smarter Growth or even this organization. What remains to be seen is whether the commonwealth’s young YIMBY movement can achieve the political power of its peers in California and New York.

Urban crescent comrades

When Seth Quick moved back to his Hampton Roads home during the pandemic, he found a region that was just as unfriendly to new housing as he remembered from his childhood. As a kid, his family attempted to turn some empty land they owned at the end of their block into townhomes; however, the surrounding residents’ opposition was so vociferous that the project was never approved.

“Everyone was so vitriolic toward us we couldn’t even walk out of the house,” he said. “All of our neighbors were mad that we were going to build more housing and feared we were going to allow poor people to live in our neighborhood.”

The residual sting of that memory is part of the reason he decided to found YIMBY HRVA last May. Armed with roughly 70 supporters and a popular email blast he calls Five Plex Fridays, Quick hopes to make Hampton Roads into a more welcoming region and expand its mixed-use, walkable communities beyond the handful of downtowns that currently support car-free to car-light living.

“There is a lot of opposition to and fear about urban living here, so if we can just do small things to make it easier to build more multifamily, like not requiring parking, then that would be a big win,” said Quick. “Housing has become extraordinarily expensive here, even for upper-middle-income families, so we need to ask ourselves if we are making the changes we need to right now to get where we want to be in 20 years.”

Charles Yang, a born and raised Richmonder, never had any inkling of the impact of zoning or housing policy until he moved to the Bay Area for college and witnessed the high housing costs and rates of homelessness that plague the West Coast. When he returned to Central Virginia shortly before the pandemic, he saw both positive potential for the Richmond region to stay affordable as well as worrying signs of a coming California-style cost of living crunch.

That’s why, this past January, he founded RVA YIMBY. Although the chapter is still in its policy formation phase, Yang is certain two of its top issues will be supporting the City of Richmond's proposals to allow more accessory dwelling units and end mandatory parking minimums. He also hopes to work closely with the region’s existing strong public transit, smart growth, and bike advocacy groups toward an improved urban experience.

State-level strength?

Beyond local and regional advocacy, Yang is explicit about his hope to make it possible to build abundant housing across the commonwealth via Virginia’s General Assembly.

“Everything in Virginia is up for election this fall, so trying to raise housing policy as a top priority is our goal,” he said. “If we want our state to keep growing, then we need to make sure we have enough homes for everyone to live comfortably and affordably.”

Currently, YIMBY HRVA is focusing its efforts on the region’s two biggest cities, Norfolk and Virginia Beach. The Mermaid City’s Missing Middle Pattern Book is one promising sign of policy progress, but Quick wants Norfolk to remove parking requirements and expand by-right duplexes, four-plexes, and six-plexes to the whole city. In anti-density Virginia Beach, the YIMBY's biggest ask is an expansion of multi-family-friendly R5 zoning.

Despite the increased attention Virginia’s housing crisis has received from both Democratic and Republican state officials, Green is less optimistic that YIMBY’s commonwealth-wide coalition can change the way Virginia approaches housing policy. With the passage of Arlington’s Missing Middle Housing plan, the value of local-level advocacy to the pro-housing movement seems clear.

“I am more pessimistic about the viability of state-level organizing than many of my colleagues due to the Dillon Rule and the intransigence of some urban Democrats to allow new neighbors,” she said. “We have a better chance of making reform at the local level, but housing affordability is a statewide issue.”

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This piece was originally posted on Greater Greater Washington on March 23, 2023. Follow Wyatt Gordon at @yitgordon

In 2019, the City of Durham, North Carolina, passed a set of reforms known as Expanding Housing Choices (or, colloquially, EHC). The reforms were created by planning staff at the directive of Durham’s City Council and were anchored by:

1. The end of single-family zoning

2. The creation of a transformative Small Lot Code

3. The introduction of Reduced-Pole Flag Lots

While relatively limited in scope, these three features were almost immediately incorporated into urban development plans, creating small micro-communities, more viable opportunities for citizen-built housing, and, remarkably, the reconstruction of a starter-home market that had effectively collapsed.

Each of the three features outlined below contains elements that other cities should emulate.

l. The end of single-family zoning

Single-family zoning has an ugly history in the United States, clearly rooted in racial motivation. The first such code started in Berkeley, California, in 1916 as a means of limiting access for the less wealthy who, at an acute moment of racial strife, happened to be black. After the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, politics drove planners to radically expand single-family zoning, with many cities implementing it only then for the first time. It is no coincidence that Durham’s first instance of single-family zoning code was passed in 1969.

When discrimination based on race became illegal, exclusion became a game of Whack-A-Mole through increasingly technocratic proxies, none more effective than single-family zoning. There were others, too, all related to single-family considerations, such as mandating large lots with large setbacks, large parking requirements, and large lot widths.

All of these rules added costs to housing, intentionally discouraging those with less wealth.

Durham’s code even created a racial distinction between the most dominant urban zoning districts, RU-5 and RU-5(2), by permitting duplexes in black neighborhoods while disallowing them in white ones. All of that came to an end with the passage of EHC, when Durham’s City Council repealed single-family zoning exactly 50 years after it was passed.¹

Practically, what does getting rid of single-family zoning mean?

In Durham, a few things changed:

1. Builders and homeowners could now build duplexes, by right, and “attached homes” (which are effectively just duplexes with fee-simple lot lines).

2. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) became allowed on duplexes as well, potentially yielding a total of three homes on most lots.

3. Duplexes could be detached, triggering a wave of opportunities for what incremental developer R. John Anderson calls “stealth pocket neighborhoods” (the form that looks like Ross Chapin’s book), a housing type that does not depend on being specifically allowed by the code. In Durham, urban designers can use the existing code that allows three homes on a lot and arrange those homes in a way that enhances community space to the benefit of all.

4. New construction rental projects that were not financially viable before suddenly became so by spreading expensive land costs across multiple houses. This helped restart a mostly dormant neighborhood-scale rental housing market. This market includes homeowners who, when building their own house, can now build two additional homes, which can pay for some (sometimes all) of their mortgage. A select few homeowners have acknowledged the truth of this seemingly unbelievable math: The best way to create affordable housing for yourself is to simultaneously provide some for others. And just like that, citizens are getting back into the game of homebuilding.

ll. The Small Lot Code

The most unprecedented and transformative reform in EHC is the introduction of the Small Lot Code. This allows for new homebuilding on lots up to 2,000 square feet, contingent on the home being a maximum of 1,200 square feet heated, 25 feet tall (measured to the midpoint of the roof in 2019, but reformed to 32’ ridge in 2023), and 800 square feet in terms of footprint. It also allows for smaller corner setbacks, which are necessary in a city with largely anti-urban front yards.

The Small Lot homes may also be duplexes (dividing the 1,200 square feet between the units) and have detached ADUs that allow for an additional 1,200 square feet.

The Small Lot provisions have been adopted faster than expected, with more than 50 units already built and more than 100 in the pipeline (2022 data). Astonishingly, it appears that the majority of new detached homes being built in the urban tier of Durham are ones with Small Lot permits.²

The effects of this code can be seen in the area’s average home prices. Durham has generally been the tightest, most highly sought-after market within the Triangle region. But the provisions of the Small Lot Code appear to have already “bent the price curve,” reintroducing starter homes into a city of over 250,000 that has recently announced major Google and Apple campuses and has speculators rushing into town to buy homes sight unseen. Since 2020, Durham has had 50 new detached homes sell for less than $500,000, while Chapel Hill and Raleigh have had zero.³ That’s the Small Lot Code at work.

Another consequence has been the cottage industry of designers that quickly formed to service this market. For example, Bill Allison is a veteran architect with Allison Ramsey Architects armed with a catalog of 3,500 stock plans—all Southern traditional. He created a set of plans that conformed specifically to Durham’s code.

In addition to the dozens of plans done pro bono for affordable housing in Durham, he’s had multiple local builders purchase Small Lot plans, too. As Allison put it, offerings like his make it easier for people to go down this path: “Small homes are great, but they require a lot of design nuance. Once you understand the constraints, you can create efficient spaces, and you can arrange multiple small homes to create a uniquely Southern urban experience. Tall windows, deep porches, eave details, and so on.”⁴

lll. Reduced-Pole Flag Lots

Durham also implemented a unique Reduced-Pole Flag Lot (RPFL) option based on community feedback that the previously required pole width of 20 feet was effectively unusable almost everywhere. Reducing the required pole width to 12 feet while restricting homes on these lots to the same dimensional standards as above created a wealth of opportunities for small rear-located housing that could never have been built before. The RPFL option has become a critical tool for exploring the potential of micro-community developments. Such possibilities now seem endless, and entrepreneurs are drawing up new business plans that provide more housing—and better housing—in community-enhancing formats than have ever been seen in Durham before.

National Implications

To all but the most ardent “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY) voices, EHC has been a success. President Biden even borrowed the program’s language for his Housing Supply Action Plan (Fannie Mae did similar, as did San Francisco).

It’s been strange to see Durham not get more press for the reforms. Perhaps this is a function of the city's lack of self-promotion or of its relatively small size. But the EHC provisions are clearly valuable, and cities across the region should examine them and their results.

If we are to keep the South accessible and affordable while also urbanizing it and making it walkable and beautiful, there are no pain-free approaches. Such work is overwhelmingly incremental and requires densifications at the margins. The West Coast shows the clear costs of only permitting homes for the rich. Over time, it’s disastrous—for everybody. Small, incremental homes on small lots—that’s the way forward.

Durham has taken that step better than anyone. Now, others should follow. SUQ

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Aaron Lubeck, Jacobs Columnist, is a new urban builder and land planner in Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building in Historic Homes, and a children’s book on Accessory Dwellings entitled Heather Has Two Dwellings, and host of the National Townbuilder Association’s “Townbuilder’s Podcast”. @aaron_lubeck 

NOTES

1. Although Durham paid city planners from Minneapolis to come down and explain how they repealed single-family zoning, Minneapolis had only stated an intent to do so and had not actually repealed anything at the time. In the end, Durham actually repealed single-family zoning before Minneapolis did— even though Minneapolis has received substantial press for the move and Durham virtually none.

2. For more information, see the City of Durham’s handout “Small House/Small Lot”: https://www.durhamnc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/24691/Small-House-Small-Lot-PDF.

3. Source: Zillow data.

4. The author does minor work with this firm.

Written By Adeleine Geitner

Before President Biden launched his “Build Back Better” campaign, residents in Greensburg, Kansas, had been making good use of the phrase for over a decade. In the aftermath of an EF5 tornado that leveled 95 percent of their small town, locals launched a recovery plan that would “put the green in Greensburg.” The town did not shoot for a return to her pre-2007 self. They set out to draw 100 percent of their energy from renewable sources, place an emphasis on water conservation, and prioritize energy efficiency in all their new buildings and infrastructure.

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The town is not different from much of rural America in its political makeup—President Trump won the district handily in 2016—but residents did not consider their rebuilding efforts in partisan terms. “We tried to approach it in a practical way,” explained John Janssen, who served as Greensburg city council president in 2007. “Not tree-hugger green, but economic green. Ramming stuff down people’s throats—especially in this part of the world—doesn’t work.”

The development of cities is unavoidably contentious, but it need not—and must not—become partisan. American political parties have become a quagmire of beliefs and identities. Beyond mundane stereotypes—liberals drive Subaru Outbacks, while conservatives drive Ford pickups—significant value structures that once carried only loose and fluctuating (if any) associations with political parties are now considered sure indicators of a person’s ballot bubbling. The idea that your values around religion, family, climate, and the like are today deemed inseparable from your political party is an indicator of the harsh polarization facing the nation. But in many ways, these kinds of assumed ties have yet to grab hold of many issues in modern urbanism.

And this must continue. In urban areas, policies rooted in good urbanism—like zoning reform, sprawl mitigation, and building better biking infrastructure—split factions on the left and the right. Though some may look at liberal infighting over densification as an issue that would resolve itself if the Democratic Party took a strong stance, I’d remain wary of any such decision. The beauty of so many urban planning approaches to national problems is that they accommodate a myriad of values simultaneously. Sustainability is a complement to, not a substitute for, financial stewardship. The negative externalities of congestion are not just counted in terms of air pollution but also with regard to suburban taxpayers restricting the profitability of urban streets. In an interview with bikeability advocate Jason Slaughter, urban planner and proud conservative Chuck Marohn professes that he and Slaughter likely agree on 95 percent of solutions for building more economically resilient, more environmentally gentle, and all-around more liveable cities. Bob Dixson, current mayor of Greensburg, expressed these sentiments seamlessly. Choosing to rebuild with so-called “green” practices in mind was not about conforming to an ideology. Rather, “it was about ‘building a community back as our ancestors built for us—a community to last.’”

It is clear that citizens on both sides of the aisle can build liveable, green cities—in both environmental and economic terms. Rather than pinning blame for a region’s woes on one party, the prudent practitioner must keep their eye on the prize, seeking strong policies over seductive politics. Enter each town hall meeting believing your neighbor’s comments come from a place of love, just as you know your own do. And when a discussion becomes tense, consider not only your neighbor’s misinterpretations but also your own capacity to be wrong. There is no simple roadmap for overcoming the politics of planning disagreements, but as a firm beginning, a little grace goes a long way.

Adeleine Geitner was the Spring 2023 Duke Initiative for Urban Studies Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.

ritten By Vaneesha Patel

This article is Part Two of a series on the forces, processes, and regulations that harm good citybuilding.

Public engagement, in both the way it is structured and the way it is carried out, is one of the largest culprits preventing favorable development within cities and towns. That’s because in asking people to voice their opinion regarding controversial issues, planned projects, or any other change, public engagement inadvertently reaffirms the status quo. This integral part of the American planning process is a key reason our built reality reflects so little of what the people actually want. It deserves more scrutiny.

For one thing, public engagement has long been plagued with accessibility issues. Most public engagement sessions are held on weekdays within working hours, times when many adults in the workforce are not able to attend. Even when sessions are held outside these hours, individuals are still faced with a trade-off: Attend the session, or do one of the many other things that is integral to their life.

When you consider the tangible payoff from participating in public engagement, it should come as no surprise that many people choose to not take part. With public engagement often consisting of multiple rounds spanning several months or even years, usually resulting in a diluted course of action aimed at appealing to a variety of opinions, sacrificing your time in order to contribute is ostensibly a worthless endeavor. As noted on Strong Towns, one of the biggest problems with public engagement comes down to expectations: “People lead busy lives, and they’ve been trained to expect to have little input.”

Furthermore, only a few cities include public engagement sessions that are translated into multiple languages, resulting in a language barrier that potentially keeps people from participating. This lack of accessibility immediately cuts out a disproportionately low-income minority population—a group that is also disproportionately impacted by the lack of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. Those individuals who do show up are almost always the ones with the privilege of time and money, things that enable them to forgo work and other activities to voice their opinion. Cities in the South should do more to make equity a priority.

A decision to not do anything is a decision in itself—one that gives more weight to the preexisting conditions of development.

Aside from problems of accessibility, the structure of public engagement typically only presents opportunities to block or change projects. There are fewer opportunities for community members to bring forth projects of their own, resulting in inadvertent acceptance of development that is not the subject of public engagement. What’s more, the public process often adds expense and weight to a project, but it hardly ever reduces those factors. Although public engagement might lead to the addition of elements that the community sees as good things (e.g., more affordable housing, more stormwater infrastructure, or more trees), those things have costs and could make the entire project less viable if they get out of hand. It’s hard to think of any instances where a project gained density or reduced expenses through the public process.

So while there is an emphasis in the public engagement process on working with people and hearing them out, there is little to no room for asking about the status quo. And there’s the real rub, because a decision to not do anything is a decision in itself—one that gives more weight to the preexisting conditions of development. This leaves little room for incrementalism or progress in the future.

It’s true that public engagement still offers one of the best ways for community members to voice their opinion and advocate for change, but we must remain cognizant of its shortfalls. If the projects that get implemented at the end of public engagement sessions are colored by issues of accessibility and the outsized influence of advantaged groups, do they even represent the ideas and desires of the general public—the supposed intention that public engagement begins with? I think not.

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Vaneesha Patel is the Spring 2023 Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.

Written By Vaneesha Patel

This article is Part One of a series on the forces, processes, and regulations that harm good citybuilding.

Attend any charrette, public engagement session, or city council meeting regarding development, and it’s clear what a majority of communities want: good urbanism. From more bicycle infrastructure to improved public realms, higher-density housing, and more, a majority of people voice their support for such improvements. Yet the development that is implemented often lacks these priorities and characteristics. So who or what is responsible for their absence?

Let’s start with city councils. 

While it may not always be apparent, city councils have large amounts of power. Whether a local government is set up with a strong mayor or city manager, city councils have the ability to propose, approve, and/or override decisions, policies, and plans. With this power, they are able not only to cultivate ideas of good urbanism—but also to push such projects forward.

While city councils are uniquely positioned to champion urbanist development, they are also one of the largest blockers of its implementation. Even if the majority of people support a certain development or specific components of a strategic plan, city councils still have the opportunity to strike down otherwise favorable proposals thanks to opposition from select constituents. In fact, last September, the New Orleans city council unanimously voted to remove bike lanes with plastic posts in the Algiers neighborhood in response to fierce opposition from local critics. In March, city council members in Kansas City, Missouri, voted to remove half of the bike lanes on Truman Road and will implement additional changes like more permanent parking as a result of pushback from business owners along the thoroughfare.

Even though bicycle lanes offer a plethora of benefits to the general community, city council members often reverse their decisions to build these amenities or torpedo the idea before it can be implemented. Why are city council members so quick to stop or strike down good urbanism? Three issues are to blame:

1. Part of this phenomenon is due to the re-election problem that every politician faces. City Council members have four-year terms. That’s enough time to spearhead change, but it’s not long enough to implement ideas that spark opposition and hope that time will make people forget any displeasure. As a result of lingering bad feelings, these politicians run the risk of losing re-election. When given the option of effecting radical change or maintaining the status quo, city council members will likely opt for the latter in order to stay in power. 

2. In addition to the re-election issue, there’s a gap in representation due to the way city council members are voted into office. Most such officials are elected by district, meaning that each constituency within a city will go to the polls separately for its own city council member. Upon entering office, they are then expected to serve the general interests of the entire city, but doing so can be difficult due to the fact that they were only technically elected by a portion of the population and therefore represent their specific interests. This situation results in council members with conflicting views, which helps the generation of ideas but can act as a blocker when it comes to their implementation. 

3. The final contributor is the fact that most city council members have vested interests outside of their elected roles. Especially in small towns, they often hold full-time positions that fall outside of their responsibilities as city council members. While members are supposed to abstain from voting on matters that pose a potential conflict, it is still difficult to leave existing perspectives and knowledge outside the door when acting in their capacity as a council member.

The institutional structure of city councils makes it difficult for members to engage in radical thinking and limits their ability to promote good urbanist development. Thanks to the three challenges mentioned above—prioritizing re-election, elections by district, and the part-time nature of the role—city council members tend to be most responsive to those who are most vocal to avoid backlash and opposition. 

To implement better development, we need to re-evaluate the role city councils have in decision-making. At the same time, there is another elephant in the room: the outsized influence of public engagement. But that’s a topic for another day.

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Vaneesha Patel is the Spring 2023 Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.

Written By Dave Olverson

Progressive cities across the South say they want more affordable housing, but how much of this statement is just posturing? Here in Durham, 83 percent of low-income housing is crammed into 5 percent of its residentially-zoned land. This imbalance is a gigantic missed opportunity for affordability. It also relegates our most vulnerable citizens to less desirable parts of town.

At face value, it looks like Durham is making progress on affordable housing. According to a report from the City, in 2019, there were “approximately 1,036 affordable housing units…subsidized by local government revenue or that have local government oversight” and 3,677 affordable units created through the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC). Separately, the Durham Housing Authority (DHA) operates “1,201 Public Housing units and manages 3,078 Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) for area landlords.”

But where are these 2,237 units of housing located? Researching the LIHTC units, I found one duplex that used the incentive to create affordable housing. And there are 128 single-family or duplex public housing units managed by DHA. The remainder are located in larger apartment complexes.(1)

Finally, there are other organizations that provide a smaller number of affordable units such as the Durham Community Land Trust (a mix of apartment buildings and single-family homes) and Habitat for Humanity Durham, which sells its affordable single-family homes. For simplicity, I am leaving these organizations out of the calculation below.

The end result is that an estimated 17 percent of affordable homes are single-family or duplex, and an estimated 83 percent of affordable homes are in larger apartment buildings or complexes. So, what’s the point of all those numbers? Rentals are primarily in apartment buildings or complexes. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that the NIMBYs have won by keeping affordable housing out of their single-family residential neighborhoods. Looking at Durham’s land use, 95 percent of the acreage used for residential is zoned for single-family or duplex. That sounds like far too reminiscent of redlining for comfort. The mechanisms may be different, but the result is the same: Certain folks are not allowed in certain parts of the city (in this case, the vast majority of the city).(2)

Perhaps more important than the numbers listed above is an examination of the motivations behind them. The programs that create the most housing have an incentive to do so at scale. It makes very little sense to jump through regulatory hoops 100 times for 100 homes when you can jump through once and still build 100 homes.

What should we do? Southern cities must be able to create affordable housing not just at the scale that’s needed, but also in an equitable way—and in equitable locations.  For that to happen, leaders have to continue upzoning, or do away with, single-family zones while also making it easier (or even turnkey) to obtain incentives for building affordable housing.

(1) I don’t have the resources to find out how many of the Durham-subsidized and regulated units or families with vouchers are in apartments versus single-family homes. One study found that in New Orleans, 50 percent of section 8 families are actually living in LIHTC projects. That doesn’t mean that the other 50 percent are in single-family homes or duplexes. As a conservative estimate, I will assume 50 percent of voucher families not in LIHTC housing are in apartment buildings or complexes. I will also assume that the vast majority of Durham-subsidized housing is in apartment buildings and complexes, but being conservative again, I will estimate that number at 50 percent.

(2) For more background on these complex topics, see, for example: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, July 2016; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017); and Robert Gioielli, “The Tyranny Of The Map: Rethinking Redlining,” The Metropole, November 3, 2022.

Written By Vaneesha Patel

Imagine a citizen who has seen a need for a local café near her neighborhood. She decides to open this café herself when she finds out her neighbors also wish they had a local place to meet. After some research, she realizes that there is no available land nearby that is zoned commercial. In fact, supply is so limited that one of the last commercial spaces was sold at a price far outside of her budget.

Meanwhile, a lot is sitting empty on the corner, but she can’t purchase it under traditional zoning. If this citizen’s city had form-based codes, she could have. Form-based zoning is a practice that divides land based on physical form and scale rather than its intended function or use. 

The restrictions that result from land being zoned by use have disproportionately negative impacts on small businesses and those looking to start them. Big-box retailers and franchises have the financial capabilities and the lobbying power to change the designation of land to suit their needs. As small business owners often do not have the same resources, they are limited to expensive commercial properties. Under form-based codes, small business owners would have access to a larger supply of land at fairer prices. 

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That isn’t the only way that form-based zoning benefits small businesses. With fewer regulations, the freedom to start a company anywhere within a city can also help business owners avoid their competitors. With form-based codes, entrepreneurs can situate their business where competition is favorable and demand is high—without being restricted by land use.

Form-based codes don’t just help small businesses. They also improve the public realm, which includes streets, sidewalks, trees, and gathering areas outside of built spaces. By emphasizing walkability, sustainability, and aesthetics, form-based codes contribute to a public realm that is friendlier to customers and more likely to encourage them to spend more time in retail spaces. Investments in the public realm have also been shown to have a variety of positive impacts, including increasing land and property value and helping areas regain market strength through sale prices and turnover rates for commercial property, both of which are important as we recover from the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

With areas that make use of form-based codes generating $65 million more in tax revenue when compared to areas that do not, it is clear that the implementation of form-based codes has profound economic impacts. To help small businesses stay competitive while generating economic growth for the communities they call home, cities should start by implementing form-based codes.

Vaneesha Patel was the Spring 2023 Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.

By Margaret Wallace Brown, AICP, CNU-A

Houston, Texas - In 2023, Houston, Texas celebrated its 187th birthday. Perhaps because it was founded by two real estate speculators from New York, Houston has always guided development by carrots, instead of sticks. 

The City has famously defeated three attempts at a zoning ordinance, opting instead to regulate development through a combination of development codes for private development, transportation and infrastructure requirements, and private covenants between property owners. That’s why it took until April of 1958 before the City enacted its first off-street parking requirements, and 1968 before it established a subdivision code.

As time went on, these parking regulations became more stringent, propelled more by residents who didn’t want cars parked in front of their homes than by planning. Ultimately, this led to an estimated 60 million parking spaces within a city of 2.3 million people. Shockingly this is more than 30 parking spaces for every man, woman, and child who lives in the city—whether they drive or not.

About ten years ago, Houston’s leaders began to rethink this auto-centric approach. In 2017, during Mayor Sylvester Turner’s address to the Transportation Advisory Group, he boldly spoke of our need to become a more multi-modal city—calling for a “paradigm shift.” Along with updating the city’s bike plan he focused on improved pedestrian realms and initiated the Walkable Places and Transit-Oriented Development ordinance. For the first time, Houston had context-sensitive parking regulations, based on a property’s proximity to our light-rail system.

Upon becoming Director of the Planning & Development Department, I took two steps that pushed the City of Houston even further. I persuaded the Mayor to make Houston a Vision Zero City. He immediately embraced the initiative. Clearly understanding that if his paradigm shift was to be successful, we needed to protect the lives of our residents. Additionally, I advocated for and received permission to hire the City’s first Chief Transportation Officer. We were

lucky enough to hire David Fields, a well-respected transportation planning professional with significant experience in bringing innovative and equitable projects to fruition.

With these two items in place, we are now looking at the City through a multi-modal lens and rethinking all of our right-of-way spaces. Ultimately making Houston safer for everyone, regardless of how they choose to travel. We took encouragement from cities like Buffalo, Atlanta, and, most recently, Austin, all of which had recently reduced or eliminated their parking requirements. We also had the support of our Planning Commission; in the years between 2013 and 2019, our commission had approved an annual average of 14 variances for off-street parking reductions, often for reductions totaling as much as 40% of the required amount.

Thinking we had the wind at our back, my department embarked on what would be a three-year effort to update residential development regulations with an eye toward affordability, equity, and walkability. Central to that effort was the elimination of some residential parking regulations. Establishing a Market-Based Parking component would remove minimum requirements for residential properties in transit-rich areas: those within short walking distances of rail stations, high-frequency bus stops, or high-comfort bikeways.

It immediately became an uphill battle. The developers who should have cheered our efforts didn’t. Eliminating parking requirements didn’t matter to them; they were going to build parking, with or without the requirement. And the neighborhoods hated it for many of the same decades-old reasons. Despite the extensive community engagement, meeting with and listening to dozens of neighborhood groups, the opposition galvanized against reducing the parking requirements. Minutes prior to the first public hearing on the proposed changes, the market-based parking component was removed from the final package for lack of Council support.

People don’t always understand the consequences of their opinions. What does maintaining parking requirements in areas that have significant multi-modal options accomplish? One, it ensures that residents have incentives to drive and ignore the transit options that are available. 

This puts more cars on the street, increases traffic headaches, and reduces safety for all other modes. Two, it wastes both public and private money. For the developer, parking is expensive; recent studies indicate that parking structures cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per space.

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Margaret Wallace Brown oversees the City’s regional and community-based planning efforts, including land-development standards and neighborhood character preservation programs, including historic preservation. She also leads the strategic transportation planning and community planning efforts, including the Mayor’s signature Complete Communities Initiative. She also oversees the City’s geographic mapping efforts. She tweets at @margwallbrown.

Written By Satchel Walton

There is a piece of land for sale in an up-and-coming neighborhood a mile and a half outside the downtown of the 28th largest city in the country. In surrounding neighborhoods, property values are booming and there are concerns about gentrification. Despite these market forces, all 10 acres can be yours for just $1.

Sound too good to be true? The parcel known as the Urban Government Center is owned by the city of Louisville, Kentucky. It is the site of three long-abandoned buildings. For the last six years, the government has been trying to get someone to redevelop it. It has been a saga of negotiations involving three different developers, multiple threatened lawsuits, and a payout of $150,000.

In theory at least, everyone agrees that having something there is better than leaving dormant, decaying buildings. So what’s preventing development from getting done? 

Let’s look at the timeline:

According to local historian Tom Owen, a University of Louisville professor and former member of the city council, the site was home of the Kentucky Baptist Hospital from 1924 through 1989. Physicians and local government offices began to move in in the 60s. In 2016, the local government closed its remaining offices in the buildings due to environmental concerns like mold.

In August and October of 2016, there were a series of public meetings on the potential redevelopment of the site, and in March of 2017, Louisville government received five proposals from developers. In December of 2017, one proposal—by the local Marian Group—was accepted.

The developer proposed to build 22 shotgun houses and a farmers’ market, only to be pilloried at a public meeting over housing density. Still, the plan went ahead.

In 2019, though, it emerged that Louisville had promised the Marian Group a two-acre parking lot that was already part of a separate deal. The city’s development office also failed to get land-use changes in the promised timeframe. The Marian Group stepped back from the project and settled disputes with the government for $150,000.

It was an embarrassing mistake on behalf of the local government. They persevered, however, and solicited new proposals for the site. They got only two, down from the five original hopefuls. Negotiations with the next developer chosen, Jeff Underhill, fell through due to lack of funds. Louisville’s development agency then offered to help Underhill’s company get approved for a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district, which would allow for certain tax revenues generated by an area to be dedicated to specific improvements on the site in question. Still, Louisville was failing to give away a valuable urban plot of land—for less than free.

Amid this whole chain of events, nearby neighborhood associations worked toward their own (often incongruent and competing) goals for the parcel. The Germantown-Paristown Neighborhood Association still proposes an urban forest “as an alternative to more development in an already crowded neighborhood.”(1) Louisville also requires the developer now working on the (third attempt of the) project to negotiate a Community Benefits Agreement with six surrounding neighborhood associations. According to WDRB, the neighborhood associations have requested annual payments from the developer and wants them to “install lights, better sidewalks, curbs with cuts and pedestrian crosswalks on Vine and Breckinridge streets, as well as support for converting some streets to two-way traffic.” At the moment, the neighborhood associations, the local government, and developers still seem to be caught in a three-way tangle of mutual bafflement and frustration in trying to work with each other.

I don’t have all the right answers. I don’t know the full story behind this long-running issue that seems to confound even the people most knowledgeable of Louisville’s urban planning ecosystem. But we have to ask: Why can’t the local government get this development done? Residents ought to have a say in their neighborhoods. Gentrification is a real concern (although I would dispute that new development causes it). But at what point do neighborhood associations start acting like cartels that manipulate public processes to keep out new housing? 

While this issue has played out on a distinctly local stage, it seems to be illustrative of a wider issue: America is struggling to get stuff built. The agonies span far and wide, from practitioners simply trying to build new housing to California’s efforts to build a high-speed rail line. There, for example the French company working on the project “told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.” At local, state, and federal levels, there has been a proliferation in the number of veto points present in American politics. 

Letting more people have a say is great, but the way we’ve done that creates a massive status quo bias by setting up more barriers to building and creating change. Moving forward, we have to balance community input with the need for vigorous, flexible action.

(1) For context, in Germantown-Paristown, 44 percent of renters are estimated to be “cost-burdened” by housing despite a declining population. And the density of 6,580 people per square mile, while high by Louisville’s standards, is still below the level of around 10,000 per square mile needed to support efficient transit.

Satchel Walton is the Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.

Written By Dan Bock

Attend any local planning commission or city council meeting about a new development, and you might get the impression that building housing is decidedly unpopular. Neighbors often speak of how new developments will affect traffic, destroy trees, ruin their views, and alter their neighborhood’s character. As it turns out, these meeting participants are not representative of the community at large.

In Durham, the 2018 Resident Survey asked which housing issues should be top priorities. 60 percent of people said adequate supply of housing should be a top priority. Only 36 percent said neighborhood character should be.

In 2017, Measure S was a high-profile Los Angeles ballot initiative that would have imposed a moratorium on housing development. It was expected to be a close vote but was rejected by voters 70-30.

Along the same lines, in 2019, Proposition E in San Francisco passed with nearly 75 percent of the vote, making it easier for developers to build high-density, affordable housing.

In a 2019 statewide poll, California showed big majorities in favor of the state mandating that cities change their zoning to allow more dense housing.

Finally, in 2022, a Seattle opinion poll showed a surprising 55 percent of people supported eliminating single-family zoning, allowing apartment buildings in neighborhoods that currently have only single-family homes.

Public comment at any city land use planning meeting is always a tiny percentage of the city’s population, and it’s not a randomly selected or representative sample. City leaders who are interested in reflecting the will of the community would be wise to support policies that allow for more housing.

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Dan Bock is a web and mobile app developer in Durham, NC. @danbock10

Recently, the Biden Administration released its Housing Supply Action Plan (HSAP), aimed at closing America’s housing shortfall in five years. This essay outlines why and how Biden should separate suburbs from cities. In doing so, he can have extraordinary impact on the market where affordability has historically been created—within small, local developments. 

Here’s the problem: The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who act as the secondary market for nearly all owner-occupied residential home mortgages (and 50 percent of the total). FHFA is the 800-pound gorilla of American housing policy: Their rules control which homes get built and how, which effectively also dictates where they get built. FHFA has long been antagonistic toward incremental development, most obvious in their inability to create underwriting reforms that finance citizen-built affordable housing like Accessory Dwellings Units (ADUs). 

Further, it has long been known in the practitioner community that off-street parking mandates and large-lot single family zoning effectively eliminate or reduce otherwise ample opportunities for smaller-scale, more affordable housing. But there is a solution.

Here are three directives the Biden Administration can issue to make its HSAP work:

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