"The bulk of studies that have looked into the question have found that new market-rate housing reduces neighborhood rents and tends to ease displacement pressures."

it’s crazy how this keeps happening in every city that passes major upzonings

I hope people in Richmond are hearing about these housing successes from around the US. When we build more homes on the same sized lots as single family homes they will be cheaper than that single family home would have been. Support the Code Refresh!

just imagine if we piloted anything CLOSE to this in Richmond:

The St. Paul rent control saga will serve as a textbook case study. While both St. Paul and Minneapolis debated rent control, only St. Paul implemented it, setting up a real-time A/B test. The result: St. Paul’s apt development plummeted, and the city council backtracked.

Scientists have been publishing climate models since ~1970. A good way to evaluate their skill is to compare what they expected to happen in the years after the model was published to observed climate changes. It turns out most models were pretty spot-on:

A "fixed route shuttle" is a bus. You created a bus.

Some folks asked if old climate models were just continuing observed linear increases in temperatures. This misrepresents what physics-based climate models do (they aren't curve fitting), but also ignores that in ~1970 there was little observed warming:

Never forget, a 13-year study found that protected bike-lanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all road users. ALL ROAD USERS. And painted bike-lanes? No safety improvement at all. For sharrows, it’s actually safer to NOT have them. usa.streetsblog.org/2019/05/29/pro…

Listen up, RVA Code Refresh zoning advisory council…

These photos of suburban sprawl development of a subdivision in Manatee County are going viral. When you oppose infill development and upzoning, you encourage developers to focus on greenfield sprawl.

Evergreen.

Housing is allocated by people's ability to pay. If you want rich people to stop outbidding the middle class and poor for existing less-expensive homes, you have to let developers build new homes for them. The rich people don't just disappear if you block expensive new housing!

As we (finally?) enter the humid heat season in Virginia, it's important to note that heat-related illnesses (and the rate they occur) are on the rise. We can be doing a lot more to keep the most-vulnerable people safe through heat response management and mitigating the hazard.

it took us less time to figure out how to land on the moon than it does to build a bike lane in Seattle

The recent WMO 5-year temperature projections suggest that we might firmly pass 1.5C a few years earlier than expected. I explore the details in a new piece over at The Climate Brink: theclimatebrink.com/p/what-do-the-…