I wish I could deny this…but it’s true. It’s who we are.

149 homes 😍 Next to CTA 🚇 Only 21 parking spots 🚗 Replaces a surface parking lot 🥳 chicago.suntimes.com/real-estate/...

A study in an utter lack of political courage and governing on instinct, vibes, and paranoia all around.

My earliest Dad's Car memories are of bouncing happily to Dire Straits' "Walk of Life" on the way to the farmers' market, and I'll be honest, that song still brings a huge grin to my face for that reason.

The play here, if you're trying for political reasons to mollify homeowners afraid of losing their street parking, is to grandfather existing residents in with subsidized permits, while new arrivals (tenants + owners) are eligible but pay market rate. Eventually you'll just have market rate parking.

Happy Park(ing) Day to those who celebrate! bsky.app/profile/stro...

St Paul is so back

A lot of good stuff in the Massachusetts YIMBY Bill that would help re-legalize badly needed missing middle housing. Including, of course, statewide parking reform! 🤞

I wonder sometimes about historical events where we study what we think they were thinking: was the reality sometimes much weirder and we'd find it incomprehensible? Like, what's the 1800s version of "When an assassin's bullet has 'owo notices ur bulge' on it I can tell you that guy was a groyper"

A cool natural experiment using cellphone data finds that, when people relocate to more walkable areas, they walk more and are more active. Why does this matter? Because many related studies were affected by self-selection bias, where people who like to walk might choose to live in walkable places

TIMELINE CLEANSE Residential dwellings <$100k are not just possible, they are being installed *right now* in Portland, Oregon, thanks to the 2021 legalization of homes-on-wheels. www.sightline.org/2025/09/11/h...

Parking mandates are an open assault on urban trees. If you don't sign on to getting rid of those, you can't say you are "for housing AND trees" with a straight face. I appreciate my pro parking reform/tree protection friends very much.

This is an underappreciated point. Cars take up such disproportionate road *space* compared to the share of road *users* who are in them, so we underestimate non-car travel. Bikes and buses are carrying a much larger share of the people using the road than you think. They're just not in your way.

Tom Broderick @trumbullbrod.bsky.social from Connecticut Parking Reform shares how Bridgeport, CT, defeated a push to bring back parking mandates by a razor-thin 5-4 vote! parkingreform.org/2025/08/15/d...

one of the things i've been struggling with is our zoning mismatch - affordable housing is pretty much illegal for 90% of the city - except on freight routes and arterials... pretty much the most toxic and dangerous place to add housing. often in incredibly unwalkable places.

Remembering why I rarely post about charged topics on here (especially outside of my professional world of urbanism + land use). Some thoughtful pushback, a whole lot of anger at me for things I *didn't* say (pancakes / waffles!), and some extremely rude strangers who are now blocked. Yay!

It's also true that around 1 in 20 Americans have long COVID, many of whom experience significant activity limitations. People with long COVID (and CFS more broadly) have been gaslit about their symptoms for years and far more resources need to be dedicated to them. www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19...

My wife has had debilitating long COVID for ~1 year. I nonetheless agree with this. To the "pandemic isn't over" crowd I want to ask, "What would it take for you to consider it over?" The virus is a permanent part of life now. A serious public health response won't and shouldn't look like 2021.

Yes, and: It might lower productivity as a first-order effect, but this sort of re-localization of some of our economic life would also make communities more resilient, add to social capital, and decrease inequality. "Quality of life", after all, contains some measurable things, not just vibes.

Call it Anti-Industrial Policy: we need is a suite of policies to nudge Americans to own and operate more little public-facing businesses. Speciality shops. Six-seater bars. Esoteric services. Restaurants serving two or three dishes. It would lower overall productivity and increase quality of life.

When you scratch at it, the nebulous "character" often just reduces to "I want places to be exactly the way I remember them having been for years, because I have a nostalgic attachment to them." New things have no soul and old things inherently have it, kind of regardless of what the things are.

Today, August 28, marks the release of The Shoup Doctrine, a book celebrating the legacy of legendary urban planning professor and economist Donald Shoup, who passed away earlier this year. 🧵

The car is such a voracious consumer of space that simply moving and storing them will easily crowd out the rest of public life if we allow it. We design and legislate environments utterly hostile to socializing. Yet people try anyway!

Gotta say I'm pretty frustrated with the state of insurance discourse on the left. I don't see much reckoning with the fact that even if you "abolish the insurance companies," you need to somehow manage the radically shifting risk profile of many communities. www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/emil...

FDOT: "You can't have a sidewalk mural because safety." Also FDOT: "This bike lane on a 50 mph, 8-lane stroad that will be crossed by merging traffic under a freeway overpass seems fine."

silicon valley: where it's legal to build an ai supergod in your garage but not legal to turn that garage into an apartment

I haven’t seen it illustrated like this before. Very effective messaging. Of course it actually depends a lot on how fast the vehicle’s being driven, how big the vehicle is and how it’s designed, and how small the victims (too often kids) are. Via @yegbike.bsky.social #SpeedKills #CarBloat

I've done a lot of high school math tutoring, and conditional probability was always one of the most fun topics to cover because I got to teach people how to spot "hide the denominator" bullshit like this.

It is criminal what the US has done to its children through car culture. They go from supervised activity to car to supervised activity to car ... no wayfinding, no autonomy, no agency, no risk, no sense of adventure or surprise. We're raising helpless, emotionally fragile computer kids.

52% of the vote! Congrats, #stpaul Ward 4 Councilmember-elect @mollycoleman.bsky.social!

If you’re worried about the young people today and their mental health crisis, it’s comforting to spend 5 minutes on Nextdoor. The old people are SO much crazier!

Condo defect liability is *very* wonky but we absolutely need to fix it to make urban homeownership available to middle-class people. If we don't get this right, ~all the new apartments will continue to be rentals and the only new starter homes for ownership will be in exurban sprawl.

They often said the quiet part out loud back then. The rise of building and zoning codes *was* about health and safety, but it was also, from the very beginning, about creating neighborhoods where the poor / POC / renters were not welcome.

MAGA media runs this playbook over and over, and it works Every. Single. Time. It's maddening. Spin up bogus examples of how culturally out-of-touch liberals supposedly are, based on 1 or 2 goofy cherry-picked social posts. The MSM plays along because it generates days of lazy clickbait content.

Good summary. I'm bothered by Cole Hanson's "voters aren't telling me zoning is a priority" answer. Part of leadership is knowing that it's your job to make the connections between issues that the average voter won't (because it isn't their job). To know how to advance constituents' *interests*.

One thing that needs to happen for that is for Met Council to get a whole lot more proactive, and a lot less reactive about how they spend transportation dollars. Use it to *direct* where growth happens, not follow where growth *has been* happening. And suburbs will HATE that.

Seattle proper, a city that was basically built out before 1990, has grown from a population of 516,259 in 1990 to almost 800,000 today. Through infill. That's the kind of growth trajectory I'd like Minneapolis and St. Paul to talk about as an explicit policy target.

One of many nice things about moving home to St. Paul in 2023 after 20 years was having the privilege to vote for @mitrajunjalali.bsky.social in Ward 4—who was at once progressive, pro-growth, pragmatic and thoughtful. This year, @mollycoleman.bsky.social is the obvious choice to fill those shoes.

If Saint Paul was as populous today relative to the whole US population as it was in 1960 (its peak Census population count), it would have a population close to 700,000 -- well over double what it is today

Important thread about St. Paul's tax base problems. This is the 5-alarm fire for our city: a lot of legacy infrastructure and expenses + a huge share of untaxable land = we simply need more people to live here. A lot more. I want people in leadership who will say that plainly. St. Paul must grow.

Congrats to Denver for eliminating parking mandates citywide! Council passed the measure by a 9 to 3 vote last night.

Every time I talk to suburban parents about living in the city, they ask, “But how are the schools?” The thing is, I’m a former public school teacher who taught in an “urban” school with under-resourced and under-served students. I loved it. I loved my students. I loved my colleagues. 1/4

While I bleed YIMBY/abundancy-colors, it is also extremely important for folks to remember that the red tape story is often oversimplified. Good governance is good governance--less and more governance are much lazier proxies for this. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The worst thing about Florida summers when I lived there wasn't the daytime heat—it was the lack of any sort of reprieve overnight. I'd step outside at midnight and it'd still be hot, not warm. Or get up at 6 to go for a jog because that was the *least* unpleasant time to attempt to exercise.

"Avoid facade elements that mimic neighbors" is a straight-up insane rule to have in your city's design standards.

Tennessee now has *five* cities that have adopted their statewide model single stair code! This is the same approach we used at #txlege & soon any city in Texas can adopt our new statewide single stair model code locally. Want to learn more? Reach out to @texansforhousing.bsky.social

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD student abducted on the street by plainclothes officers—simply for having penned an op-ed—has written about her time in an ICE prison. The country I was raised to believe I lived in is better than this. We must be. This must stop. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/r...

A hugely underdiscussed effect of the creeping fascism of ICE is that debt collectors and landlords are filing more cases against immigrants, even when they're inflated or outright falsified, because they know immigrants are too fearful of deportation to show up to court to fight them.

Driving is objectively the most dangerous means of travel, but psychologically, drivers don't *feel* vulnerable. I've asked people with a phobia of flying, which is much safer than driving, and it always comes down to the fact that they're not in control of the vehicle. In their own car, they are.

Major parking reforms passed this year in WA, MT, CT (sadly vetoed), ME, and (signed into law *today*) NH! And a full repeal of parking mandates passed the NC house (has yet to be taken up by the senate). Come to our panel and hear from leading advocates how they're getting it done! lu.ma/kjwx2aga