Tiny homes are aesthetic RVs and we need to stop pretending this is a solution and instead realize it’s a raging, five alarm symptom. You’re forcing people into depreciating structures because we are more amenable to building parking lots than housing, and highways than infill.

Should have moved faster on Greenland.

For fire departments safety is almost exclusively measured in speed of response. Which makes pushback against alternatives like the below seem foolish. Smaller turntable ladders are: -more nimble -fit in tighter spaces -set up faster It’s only failing? It’s not 47’ long.

start by taking 1 or 2 lanes out of every street with 6 or more lanes, which would cover a surprising amount of downtown. boom, decades of maintenance gone. then make a policy that no roads over 25mph can have sidewalks next to moving traffic, and add planted buffers where it's over the limit.

So how long is it gonna take to scale up coffee, banana, pineapple and mango plantations?

20% of all urban residential lots could be converted to missing middle & it would; 1) have no real impact on the surrounding neighborhood’s quality of life 2) be hugely impactful to housing supply where people want to live 3) reduce traffic congestion With zero govt subsidy.

Schrödinger's economy: Existing in a superposition of both collecting massive tariff revenues but also reshoring long dead industries with nonexistent workers.

Overturn. Citizens. United. (This would be true regardless of the colors on the graph, I’ve been consistent on this forever.)

Revitalizing a Small Southeastern Downtown, a working primer. 1st, The Req’ts: -Accessibility: <40 minutes from 1 or more larger metros. -Growth: Metro must have strong growth, creating pricing pressure for both residents & companies.

Step 1: Make stupid land use decisions. Step 2: Complain things suck. Step 3: Make more stupid land use decisions. Step 4: Things suck more. Step 5: Make more stupid land use decisions. Step 6: Suck increases. Step 7: Make more stupid land use decisions.

Another big one I missed is SB 493 which would eliminate ETJ authority in NC. ETJs encourage endless sprawl, which is part of what prevents better infill. NC League of Cities is going to fight this and the rest hard.

Statewide legislation proposed in North Carolina for: -missing middle to six homes in single family zoning -housing allowed in all zoning types -ADUs by right And the one I’ve been waiting for: SINGLE. STAIR. BUILDINGS.

Every city says it needs more ambulances but they lack $ in the budget. Idea: Replace every 10th fire engine, ladder truck is w/ 2 ambulances. 4% of fire department runs are for fires, (w/ only 1/3 being structure fires). Meanwhile 64% are for EMS. That's 16 times more EMS calls than fire calls.

We’re up to ~$2.3mm for a 100’ Pierce, a common FD choice to see parked in front of a minor medical call, awaiting the ambulance to arrive for actual transport.

Fire departments kill more small infill housing projects than anything else. Which is especially costly since infill reduces auto trips, whereas sprawl increases them. All while requiring expensive new fire stations, trucks & 24/7 staff to serve it.

What do these streets in Charleston, Savannah, Boston and Philadelphia have in common?

It turns out that when you subject a small 3-story, 12 unit apartment building that fits on a single lot to the same requirements, length & cost of process, etc as a 240 unit, 6 story building spanning an entire block you only get the latter.

Derivatives you say.

Hell yeah richer than ever before

“The wealthiest 10% of American households—those making more than $250,000 a year, roughly—are now responsible for half of all US consumer spending”

“I just think we should make the developer build buildings that look like my favorite old ones” with zero understanding of construction, finance, rents, or present day building & fire code.

We can’t expand a hospital because it might be 10 feet too tall but we can drive semi trucks around to help people who tripped in the grocery store because the 1st and only rule is don’t make someone slow down on their way to the drive thru.

Every large corp wants return to office but none of them want to carve a chunk out of one of their floors for an affordable daycare that’s open 7-6 so here we are.

This is just a chart of housing affordability

“I just don’t believe we should be in the business of helping developers make money.” “Neighborhood association” consisting of three retirees who have seen their home values increase 12% annually for the past decade by lobbying against every proposed project.

Has housing cost grown as a percentage of income because other things became cheaper? Or because we made it increasingly more expensive to build via regulation and planning processes? Or because it was financialized to ever greater degrees?

“I just think the project needs a deeper setback & more offstreet parking.” Planning commissioner, sitting at an auto garage-turned-brewery built to the sidewalk w/ no offstreet parking but a kickass beer garden & an Airstream pizza kitchen where a hammerhead would otherwise be.

“I just think the project needs a deeper setback & more offstreet parking.” Planning commissioner, sitting at an auto garage-turned-brewery built to the sidewalk w/ no offstreet parking but a kickass beer garden & an Airstream pizza kitchen where a hammerhead would otherwise be.

“I just don’t understand why we aren’t seeing more local, small scale development.” City Planner II, flipping through a 862 page UDO as they prepare for a meeting with one of the 18 city advisory committees involved.

NEW STORY // Op-Ed: Single Family Zoning Is Keeping Seattle Inaccessible to Disabled People www.theurbanist.org/2025/03/11/o...

So I see the inability to read a statement as a stand alone comment rather than inferring one’s entire world view has made its way here too.

This is an excellent package for other states to copy.

Canada and Mexico account for nearly 50% of imported materials for residential development. So half of imported materials just became 25% more expensive. Should do wonders for housing costs.

This is an absolutely wild chart.

As fires overall fell, instead of maintaining a core fire department & adding EMS to meet population growth we kept adding firefighters & having them do both. The problem is we equipped all these new EMTs w/ fire trucks instead of ambulances.

New York Times getting in on the growing issue of American fire trucks being 1) too expensive & 2) on years long back orders. Still being missed is how oversized, always custom equipment contributes to the problem, costing cities millions and resulting in equipment with more downtime.

Housing proposal: Require use of a fiscal calculator for rezonings. Would become apparent that ETJ/annexed greenfield development is a financial loss & cities need to approve infill as a far higher % of new housing. Bonus: Would see a huge increase in local-led infill vs tract housing production.

Can I mention something without anyone getting mad?

The honest answer to why US fire trucks are so big is because they can be. Elsewhere they started with spatial discipline and designed around that. We did the opposite. No spatial discipline, just make it bigger. So when you see a Euro engine packed there is ~no~ empty space.

Worth noting that by retrofitting existing streets in many places for this change you could have: -2 auto lanes -🚲 lane -Wider sidewalks + street trees -bus lane that doubles as emergency lane, or a wide enough bike lane to be used as. Safer. More useful. More enjoyable.

And the incentives of everyone ~but~ the public. Fire code for convenience of firefighters. Building code requirements to feed industry suppliers. Streets for car convenience at expense of all other users. Zoning for what’s easiest to administer vs what’s best for people. And on and on and on.

Where do ICC board members come from & why should you care? Those who dictate the base block of our cities are largely rural to suburban. Even ones working in sizable cities consistently live outside them. Our code is set by people who often dislike cities, while dictating their design.

I don’t think a lot of people appreciate how much of their overall lifestyle and relative certainty is backstopped by a steady, boring stability of systems they don’t understand or even realize exist.

One of the biggest risks to firefighter safety is culture & tradition. Refusal to adapt, to learn from others, to follow data over vibes is literally killing firefighters. This same mentality stops us from making streets that are safer for people & for firefighters themselves.

Weird data change: In 2022 NFPA began counting ALL firefighter deaths within 24 hours of their shift as “on-duty” in their statistics. This resulted in a ~17.5% increase. No other industry is calculated this way that I know of & it will significantly skew comparison to other jobs.

Case in point: our elevator industry is based on the desire of a Glendale AZ firefighter. The net outcome is elevators that cost 3x those in the EU and a LOT less elevators. Rent-seeking & added cost, less ~real~ accessibility for those who need it. (Sniper via @stephenjacobsmith.com)

We want to believe all the rules & how things work around us is the result of thoughtful planning & careful analysis of value vs expense, when in reality much of it is some version of “a guy named Bob in 1997 thought this was a good idea to add” in never-ending succession, without ever revisiting.

On ladder trucks: A Pierce (US) 100’ ladder is ~46’9” in length. A Rosenbauer (EU) 105’ turntable ladder is 33’9”. -13’ (28%) shorter -5’ MORE reach -articulates AROUND obstacles vs straight ladder -Cheaper -More nimble -Faster setup -Superior extraction for disabled or injured.

1/ I absolutely love the marketing photos from Pierce for their ladder trucks. What do you notice?

Selling excessively large & expensive fire trucks is just a military contractor running their playbook with local fire departments. Pierce is a subsidiary of defense contractor Oshkosh Truck Corporation.