I love cities. Let’s create beautiful cities by urban planning them. Livable Communities @LCI_LA Co-host Bike Talk @biketalkpfk Full of joy.
Joined April 2009
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807 Photos and videos
Jun 13
Literally it’s this simple to transform a city
Jun 13
Pasadena should permanently close this section of Green Street to cars and reclaim it as a community plaza.
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Jun 12
Rowhouses and Townhouses are such a great housing typology
Jun 12
If it weren't for city planning ordinances that require detachments and setbacks, these would have been built as townhomes, and they'd have looked nicer and had more interior space for around the same price.
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Jun 11
I kind of love this
This, but beautiful with small businesses. Young owners who don't mind a little noise and pedestrian traffic can get building maintenance subsidized by the commercial tenants.
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
we talk a lot about spacious 4BD for the families who need more rooms for all their kids and stuff, but a crucial point of courtyard urbanism is that the large families can share scarce urban land with smaller households.
Some floors have a single 4BD. Other floors have many studios. All above a small garage and retail space, and with access to private garden in back.
This is the beauty of wide and shallow apartment buildings.
The urbanist obsession with reviving American cities with dense, mixed-use, walkable neighborhood development that meets needs of diverse households across the life cycle
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
Jun 10
Calling it now. People being able to clearly articulate an alternative architectural aesthetic will have a measurable impact on what gets built in the future.
We're going to have a Cambrian explosion of new architectural experiments *and* a return to previous forms.
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Jun 10
Our city streets are our great asset that we are throwing away. It is cheap to transform them. They create tremendous value & quality of life. There’s a tipping point where it becomes walkable & then it becomes the perfect place for dense housing.
Jun 8
I’m not asking for the Amalfi Coast but do Americans really not deserve better from our built environment?
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
Jun 7
America needs more cottage courts
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Fascinating points …
Jun 6
This is one of the reasons apartment buildings have exploded with amenity offerings
You need to put *something* on the ground floor to fill up all of the retail space.
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What could be more progressive then building walkable neighborhoods? Where people don’t need to drive, saving them $11,000 every year that’s coming from oil companies/insurance companies. Where small retail can thrive, adding jobs? We’re less space dedicated to cars opens up parks, playgrounds, and town squares, building community? Where bikes lanes and the built environment reduces risk of cancer and heart disease by almost 50%, and reduces overall healthcare cost?
This is the portrait of a progressive ‘to do’ list — climate, public health, community, cost-of-living, housing affordability, public transportation. I can’t think of another single public policy that does more.
Making money doing things that benefit society, like building new homes for people to live in, is good.
The building code protects health and safety. Zoning controls what buildings look like and how they're used. Zoning reform to end apartment bans has nothing to do with safety.
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Interesting take
If CA leaders wanted to prioritize a faster vote count, these are some of the policies they could implement:
-Ballots must be RECEIVED by Election Day. If you’re voting last minute, you have to vote in person or take your ballot to a county drop off spot. Then you wouldn’t need to wait 7 days to know how many ballots are needed to count
-Only mail ballots to voters who request them…not every registered voter. This would cut down on ballots being sent to bad addresses or the chances for ballot harvesting
-Send all registered voters free ID cards & require those cards for in person voting. Do not allow same day registration. This would likely cut down on provisional ballots that take longer to examine and process.
-Cut down the number of days to “cure” your ballot if there’s an issue from 10 to 5. This would allow for a faster certification date.
This would all speed up the count.
Could all of this lead to fewer people voting? Possibly.
Is the trade off worth it? That’s up to policy makers to determine.
A reminder: the current candidates for Gov. and Secretary of State have very different views on these issues.
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This is a great post with a very salient point: Democratic activists and politicians get passionate about issues that very few people care about.
But early childcare is even more fraught: people without kids definitely don’t care about it. And for parents out of the range of preschool who struggled to make it work - it feels unrealistic and too late.
There are so many policies that poll extremely well especially with independents, ie, the voters we need:
Reduce costs for Rx drugs
Permitting reform - wind, solar, housing
Pollution taxes and higher water/power costs for data centers —> tax cuts
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There are two solutions to this very real conundrum
1. Ciclovias - turn some streets car free on Sunday / weekends - for the casual biker
2. Golf cart communities are exploding - where families and kids and seniors can bike or use a golf cart bc it’s very car light. The urban version would be Dodgers Stadium parking lot or a dead mall or a decommissioned small private airport
Bike lanes should probably be understood more as a lifestyle amenity than as commuter infrastructure. I don’t know a lot of people who bike to work but many who live in the core like to have access to safe places to ride for fun or brunch or whatever now and again.
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What I’m also hearing is build more housing in cities so they can be even more productive.
Jun 4
What I’m hearing is better run cities should be our first and biggest priority.
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We really tax the wrong things. We tax ‘goods’ - working, buying local - not ‘bads’ aka things we want less of - pollution, traffic, corporate externalities like tobacco cos- Every pack of cigarettes comes with $10 in future health care costs. Start by clawing back that money.
Jun 4
Seems like if we're really concerned that capital will displace labor, we should start by closing the 16 percentage point tax advantage capital enjoys over labor.
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Bike lanes doubling as emergency lanes is a rare win-win.
Jun 4
fun fact: in New York City, emergency vehicles literally use the bike lanes to get out of gridlock. Well-protected bike lanes can serve as an emergency lane that actually reduces response times.
don’t believe me?
here’s proof from last week
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A good bike lane is 6’ wide. A two-way lane is 12’ - perfect for fire trucks.
LA has lots of streets 7 lanes wide with a massive turn lane. They could become:
2 parking lanes
4 car lanes (2 in each direction)
1 two-way bike lane that is the emergency lane
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It’s great politics with ~100% voter support when it’s human scale walkable neighborhoods with a ton of density.
Support plummets for random, aesthetically awful buildings that don’t address traffic.
People want walkable streets near them. In walking distance, in fact.
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We should build walkable neighborhoods all over CA
People should be able to live in the kinds of neighborhoods they like.
Right now, making that happens means peeling back a lot of one-size-fits-all policies that impose suburban standards on urban neighborhoods.
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@LCI_LA created a recipe to building walkability:
—residential over small retail
— build every parcel to create an urban fabric
— transform street - slow, trees 🌳 and activated retail
Big box stores, curb cuts, and low quality retail and random heights kills/doesn’t help walkability
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
Jun 3
What working class housing used to look like
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