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Great urbanism is about proportions, not specific architectural styles There is a correlation between walkability & traditional architecture, but that's simply because that was the default pattern before the car You can have great urbanism with contemporary architecture, too!

A lot of discourse problems would be ameliorated by everyone working as some sort of practitioner, preferably at least some of the time in the public sector, in a field relevant to that which they would like to discourse about

Debate time! New episode out with Chuck Marohn from @StrongTowns and Nolan Gray with @cayimby. I found them disagreeing here on X—which surprised me as I assumed they’d be on the same side—so I asked them on the podcast to hash out their ideas. It’s a great (and friendly) episode. Though for better or worse, I started out by reading their disagreement on X out loud, which is probably a painful experience to hear your own words in a heated moment repeated back. Nolan said it felt like he just went through a deposition. Having just been through a real life deposition myself the week before, I felt kind of bad. Sorry guys :) but to be fair, it does set the stage for a good convo! And a friendly one at that. Each of these guys have made significant contributions to the built environment via real policy changes and shifting culture and conversation. Thanks for coming on @clmarohn and @mnolangray Check out their latest books Arbitrary Lines and Escaping the Housing Trap. Trailer below:

The psychological distance from South FL to Atlanta is way more aligned with the actual distance if you make the drive in the winter, because there's a pronounced temperature drop. In the summer the same trip just feels interminable for no reason.

Thread:

This is exactly right, from @clmarohn. For a long time, Detroit homes were "too cheap to buy" (unless you had cash, or had no choice but to get into a predatory land contract). The focus here -- in policy and programs -- was largely on trying to create "comps" and / or raise home prices to the point where someone would give you a mortgage. Detroit largely sought to eliminate our affordable housing rather than bother trying to figure out how to meet the market where it was.

New research on the behavior of large, institutional landlords in the rental housing market (and more evidence that they're associated with markedly higher eviction rates):

This is an excellent thread, and a lot more sober-minded than some of the panicked reactions from Dems in the past week. Particularly appreciate the call to resist shallow economic populism. Bad ideas in the hands of a demagogue can win votes; they are still bad ideas.

If we're going to have a "department of government efficiency", we should probably start with a conversation about how state DOTs spend billions of dollars of our money, and how little relationship it bears to the outcomes they claim to want. usa.streetsblog.org/2024/11/…