Henry Grabar
@henrygrabar
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staff writer @slate, author of Paved Paradise, editor of The Future of Transportation, Loeb Fellow '24
Joined July 2012
It's crazy how much the last ten years of city life were shaped by tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for cheap cab rides
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you're the richest man in the world, you're building a new city, and this is what you come up with?
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Bag restrictions at concerts, stadiums etc.—that’s car culture.
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Why can’t we build new mass transit at a reasonable price? Maybe because all public sector expertise has been outsourced to consultants
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Many of our housing problems can be traced to the fall of the residential hotel, which was once a fixture of the American city's residential mix. and could be again. In defense of the hotel:
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Zero people killed in traffic crashes in Paris this April
Le bilan des accidents de la route d'Avril pour l'Ile-de-France vient de paraître, avec aucun accident mortel recensé à Paris.
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pretty funny that Amtrak built a whole new Manhattan terminal, implemented the same absurd boarding process, BUT also re-created the Yglesias loophole, wherein you can just skip the huge line and access your track from the LIRR concourse below.
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Two hundred-year-old towers were supposed to turn into 400+ apartments. Instead they're going to be dynamited in the name of counterterrorism. New me on a debacle in Chicago:
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quite surreal to hear the GOP governor of North Dakota talking like your typical War on Cars guest
“We built cities all over America that are designed for automobiles and not designed for people. Our housing costs are high, in part because of the way that we've designed our cities.". - @GovDougBurgum North Dakota comments during the @NatlGovsAssoc winter meetings
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You ever see those color-coded maps of how much downtown land is devoted to car storage? @Parking_Reform has put them all in one place, and ranked 50+ U.S. cities by their parking land use
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fascinating investigation into how truck bloat Is outgrowing our parking spaces
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I worked on this story for a year and he just. tweeted it out
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Five ideas, from 2021: .1. Turn pavement into green space.2. Pick up trash.3. Protect the subway.4. Legalize basement apts.5. Work fast.
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When it comes to recreational uses at the curb, Philadelphia has set an example for the nation
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Illegal 53 taking an illegal route to the Holland Tunnel, about to block a dozen intersections for minutes at a time, hate to see it
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still can't believe California's going with "$400 checks based on how many cars you own".
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nice new maps in the NYT today remind us that one of the easiest, greenest things we can do as a society is allow more people to live in walkable neighborhoods close to jobs
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I had a very interesting conversation with @brianschatz about being a YIMBY in the Senate:
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truth is, living in a big city can be a lot of fun if you don't have to be in the office all day
The freedom afforded by remote work has allowed WFHers to congregate in such scenic and low-cost locations as . central DC and the Inner Mission in San Francisco (column and 🧵)
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At the end of the day it all comes down to one thing: Suburban voters (and their SUVs) are more important than city voters. Depressing to see it laid out so clearly.
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some of this was really good! fewer parking garages, lower rates of drunk driving. some was not so good: disinvestment in mass transit, traffic congestion. some was ??? (restaurants opening ghost kitchens) . what happens to all of that when Dara turns the screws?.
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Cardi B on the housing shortage: "There’s no motherfucking inventory when it comes to homes."
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Huge sales tax jumps on NYC Open Streets relative to neighboring streets and the boroughs at large
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A city that frees children also frees their parents. Me on the world's most adorable city planning show:
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News: My book about parking is coming out on May 9th! . It's the story of how our demand for free and easy parking screwed up our cities—and how we can undo the damage. Pre-order it now and earn valuable parking karma:.
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“What is tourism?” asks Walentas. “It’s people who work 50 weeks a year, then put all their money in a bag, come here, and throw it in the air. Then they go home without consuming health care or education or anything. It’s the greatest return on investment you could ask for.”.
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great charts from @jburnmurdoch showing the how English became the language of housing problems
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So is Amtrak ever going to bring back service between NYC and Montreal or is that going to be one of those things that disappeared forever during the pandemic?.
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I wrote about what it means for cities to focus as much on attracting residents as attracting jobs
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I know Dems have lost the gun control fight but I think they should go all-in on stigmatizing this gun-freak behavior as deeply weird and uncool
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Santa Monica didn't allow enough housing; now its housing stock will jump 7 percent overnight as developers take advantage of an old state law's "Builder's Remedy"
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this is embarrassing. a thousand guys with long guns in the subway but New York can't afford this?
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it's 2023, why is New York City still requiring every new apartment come with a parking space? .from a new @OpenPlans report:
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"12-20% of your rent isn’t paying for the apartment, it’s paying for hallways." . the great @alfred_twu weighs in on single stairs: .
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“Between 1923 and ‘28 commercial builders erected more than 20,000 apartment houses with more than a third of a million units—or enough to house over 1.5 million people. But as [Abraham] Kazan also knew, virtually all of the new housing was much too expensive for working people.”.
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We need a flexible, variable-term accommodation that can: .-keep prosperous vacationers out of the longterm housing stock.-footloose young people out of family-sized apartments.-the elderly out of far-away nursing homes.-the destitute off the street.
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This also explains how L.A. can *feel* like it's growing and changing rapidly even as the housing stock barely budges. All the new buildings are on the streets everybody drives down!.
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A gas tax holiday would give $3 to the richest US households for every $1 to the poorest. It's bad for the environment, guts infrastructure funding, and probably wouldn't help Democrats that much anyway. So why are so many of them trying to make it happen?
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but extended-stay hotels are desperately needed at higher price points too. boarding houses were how young people found independence in the big city, without having to invest in furniture or deal with roommates.
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Re-reading the original 1982 "Broken Windows" article and I'm struck by the authors' focus on fear and *perception* of safety—which may not overlap with actual incidence of crime at all.
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Nassau County permitted 984 new homes in 2018. If I understood that Kathy Hochul speech right, they will soon have to allow 4,000 new units a year.
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new opening on urbanist twitter for the Narrow Lanes Person. potentially a very powerful policy change but needs someone to tweet about it constantly for a few years
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A serendipitous twist: Congressman @robertgarcia has announced a federal bill to pre-empt local parking mandates on the same day my book comes out
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many people are now aware that today's urban homelessness crisis has its roots in the elimination of SRO rooms, the lowest rung on the housing ladder:
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what this article suggests is: perhaps Airbnb users do not actually want to sleep beneath a stranger's family photos -- they just want an affordable mid-term lodging in a nice residential neighborhood.
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I cannot get over the fact that the entire city of San Francisco voted on whether to let cars back onto the park road—and there were TWO ballot initiatives about it!
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the answer is sitting right in front of us! hotels used to provide shelter for all of those people, and we made a big mistake when we stopped thinking of hotels as housing.
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crazy stat in here: There are 12,000 people living in Downtown Boston and 2,200 families, but only 36 high schoolers!
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Worried about heavier EVs causing old parking garages to collapse? OK now worry about "horizontal" risk, too. via @awalkerinLA
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A very interesting report from Rebuild by Design: "Toward a Rainproof NYC." One of the biggest changes we'd have to make, short of rebuilding the whole sewer system, requires re-thinking streets and parking lots to *hold water* in a big storm.
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Terrific piece of reporting that’s about way more than JD Vance, and shows an important political truth most journalists hide: A lot of the time you interview people, they simply do not know or care what you’re asking about
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nowadays 20-somethings rent up the family-size housing stock, consume lots of throwaway Ikea furniture, and are expected to go a full decade before finding a place of their own—if they even manage to move out of their parents house at all!.
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how did nobody tell me there's a Looney Tunes short (1954) where they try to destroy Bugs' house for a freeway
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reading Paul Groth's excellent book Living Downtown I also learned that SROS were:.-not counted as housing during urban renewal, which led to undercounts of displaced persons and little help when they were evicted.-not eligible for Section 8 for years.
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Food for thought for NYC: What happened when Paris decided to limit curb-lane dining to the summer months, from April to October? . The number of participating restaurants fell by 65 percent.
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wrote about some new research from Brookings: if you put suburbanites near shops and amenities you can reduce their driving by 15,000 miles a year
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Some stats for ya:.-Car trips starting and ending in Paris are down 60 percent since 2000.-Car trips between city and suburbs down 35 percent in that time.-168+ schools with car-free blocks created since 2020.-one (1) cyclist killed in 2022.
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A classic by Holly Whyte from a 1977 issue of New York. Can't imagine the data has changed much since.
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In other words, while we now pine for the housing boom of the 1920s, which has left the city with a huge stock of affordable apartments, contemporary housers saw it as unaffordable.
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my personal contender for most parking-destroyed city is too small to qualify, but it's a doozy
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finally of course there is Airbnb: one-quarter of all Airbnb stays are now 30 days or longer. it's the company's fastest-growing type of business. it's eating up the housing stock and taking apartments and houses off the market.
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The sense of urban disorder driving big-city elections is about homelessness, not violent crime, and no amount of broken windows policing is going to help until we find a way to house the homeless.
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Sempé was among other things the poet laureate of the bicycle. Nobody captured the simple joy of that little machine like he did. RIP.
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Westchester and Long Island may be the most exclusionary places in the entire country
TIL Massachusetts suburbs are approving fewer new homes than the notoriously NIMBY suburbs around San Francisco.
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some delightful tidbits about NYC dysfunction from the Transit Costs Report -- such as the obsession with keeping Second Avenue open to traffic
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unfortunately, many of the places where Airbnb is devouring the housing stock are also the places where it's really hard to build new hotels. like New York City, where new hotels are effectively banned!
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On the M1 bus crawling down 5th Avenue, thinking about how they punted on redesigning this street so a handful of billionaires could be dropped off in front of Cartier.
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Just about every fast-food restaurant is trying out a design with no, well, restaurant. New from me:
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New me, on some lessons from the last period of high gas prices that we totally ignored
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Is Santa Monica about to get MANHATTANIZED? New from me on the eight months in which the city had no zoning code*: .
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This is an important distinction: Hiring more cops is not going to help voters feel safe if what's *actually* making them feel unsafe is people using hard drugs in public, people in visible mental distress, vacant storefronts, and so on. Those things are not policing problems!.
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You too can read this book and become the life of the party!
Just finished @henrygrabar’s book Paved Paradise and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I now ruin every dinner party though by only talking about parking, but definitely worth it
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Excellent piece on parking in the WSJ, with some encouraging data about how we’re building now
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If architecture tours are prohibited then only criminals will give architecture tours.
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in short, I suspect that making fun of guys who go to Chipotle dressed for Fallujah is a winning bipartisan issue.
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Incredible example of the posting-to-policy pipeline. Congrats to @holz_bau
[VICTORY ALERT] @GavinNewsom has signed AB 835, the single-stair study bill! Thanks to @alex_lee for his leadership on moving California toward international best practices for fire suppression and livable apartments. More on single-stair here:
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ThIS LoCatIon Is a HistORiC PaRkIng LoT
only in California. someone is suing to stop a food bank from opening a new location because of a "historic parking lot"
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