Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” and therefore elitist? When only the rich can afford nice places, the solution isn't to stop creating such places but to create vastly more of them.
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Parking reform isn't just about eliminating spaces; it's about unlocking a city's potential. From spurring development to enabling affordable housing, parking reform can benefit many people in diverse ways. Anchorage, Alaska, is experiencing this firsthand.
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When residents ask why they should allow more housing in their neighborhood, advocates often default to altruism, suggesting that an influx of people will have negative effects but that giving them a place to live is still the right thing to do. But there are a myriad of ways that an increased population can improve your quality of life. Here are some of them.
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Criminalizing homelessness is often an attempt to make public spaces safe and comfortable. It fails miserably, at the cost of persecuting some of the most vulnerable members of the population. If cities want a real, sustainable solution to a homelessness crisis, they need to address the underlying cause: North America’s broken housing system.
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The Strong Towns movement is steadily progressing to the next phase of its mission. A substantial number of people are convinced of the principles behind the movement, and they want to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Here’s how to make the leap from building awareness to actually changing the default of North America’s built environment.
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No city is an island, and no city can judge its place in the housing crisis based solely on local demand. They must also consider how their restrictive policies may be driving housing demand to other places — or how other cities may be driving demand to them.
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Last week in Colorado, advocates for people-centered cities and incremental housing pulled off a massive win, sending a bill package full of land-use reforms to be signed into state law. Here’s how they did it.
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Sarasota County, Florida, is planning to use hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize housing. But this money isn’t going toward low-income housing — it’s going toward road construction for gated communities.
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Many housing advocates celebrate large supplies of housing and low rents. However, this is only one stage of a larger boom-and-bust cycle and cannot be maintained. To break out of this cycle and sustainably improve housing accessibility, we need to redirect our focus to incremental development.
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A bill to legalize certain forms of “missing middle” housing statewide in Minnesota appears dead in the legislature. Yet, here are 4 reasons why it’s still not a total loss.
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It's not that cities can’t or shouldn’t learn from each other. But there simply aren’t the kind of drag-and-drop solutions that some pundits (who are either naïve or dishonest) would like to claim.
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What does it really mean to say that housing can’t be both affordable and an “investment”?
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For the first time this year, I attended the YIMBYTown conference, the annual gathering of the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement. Here were my impressions.
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Here’s one important question to ask about how your city regulates housing.
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Investors in the Housing Market: Myths Versus Reality — and other reasons why scapegoating corporate homebuyers is a distraction from solving housing dysfunction at the root.
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If you’re in the business of trying to change the world around you, sooner or later you’ll need to be a persuasive communicator—but being persuasive isn’t just about getting your facts right.
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“Abolish parking mandates? But won’t street parking be overrun, if developers aren’t required to provide adequate parking?” If you’ve been asking this question, then this article is for you.
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One reason communities hesitate to acknowledge their dangerous stroads is because the problem is so big, addressing it would paralyze our existing planning bureaucracies. But there is still a way forward.
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Somerville, MA, is a thriving and vibrant city. So how is it that its own planners declared it an illegal place to build!?
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And why a lot of people will remain unimpressed by it.
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