In 45 minutes, I'm going to be doing a web broadcast on the new book, Escaping the Housing Trap.

It's totally free. Consider it the first stop on the book tour. I'll put the link in the next tweet.

Charles Marohn I sent this picture in to the city, asking them to reduce lane width by 1 ft each (from 12ft to 11ft) so that they could expand the sidewalk on the bridge from 2.5ft to 4.5ft. Response 'most strollers will fit, widening sidewalk is not feasible'. AADT is 8000.

After WWII, radical modernists in the federal government developed a new kind of 'automobility urbanism' unseen before 1950

But they didn't just introduce a new option: They incentivized cities to outlaw the traditional ways that humans lived in cities for the past 5000 years

“On average, the taxable value of an acre of single-family homes in Dallas County is $1 million. An acre of duplexes is $1.9 million. Apartment complexes, $3.2 million. Townhomes, $3.6 million. Condos, $5.2 million.” 🏬💰🏢 Matt Goodman D Magazine
dmagazine.com/publications/d…

A few times a year I stumble upon this map and am filled with rage all over again.

Alleviating any possible parking supply shortage while also obliterating all sources of parking demand = double win. 💪

Note to my fellow YIMBYs: the availability of investment capital is one barrier to multifamily production that zoning reform does not solve

It's not just parking quotas that mess up urban form in US cities. It's also *design* mandates around vehicle access to buildings that end up compromising the ability to have a pleasant, safe, active streetscape.

Nice thread on US vs. European approaches to apartment parking:

The “Minneapolis Public Seating Authority” placing unauthorized benches around the city so people actually have somewhere to sit down has been one of my favorite recent acts of civil disobedience.

Crime coverage is a hugely disproportionate share of many people's local news diet. It's horribly distorting of how we view our own communities, and the realm of political possibilities for improving them.

Important thread from a great org. (Every region deserves a Greater Greater Washington !)

The reason most cities don’t do this may shock you. Once you understand that traffic engineers consider the sidewalk to be a “recovery zone” — into which vehicles should be able to hurtle without damage to their paint — you’ll just can’t unlearn it

This kind of dense, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities

Great thread.

Need proof that parking mandates constrain housing options? Nice graphs in this piece illustrating the decline in parking spaces per new housing unit in Minneapolis following citywide parking reform.

Watching rural rage thing & glad there are some very competent people pushing back, but I do want to add a few small thoughts

1) Urban vs rural is such a bad prism to view the US through now because it's a) hard to define and b) most people live in a mix of the two (suburbs,