Salesperson: and as you can see, the jacket has this wonderful red lining Me, an urban planner, eyes narrowing: it has WHAT

Cookie cutters are how we get a lot of nice cookies without working too hard.

Wilshire Blvd is one of America's busiest bus corridors (60k riders/day) It's one of the only places LA permits density--and it came before new transit! By upzoning, serving, & growing the area *before* upgrading to rail, LA guaranteed the Wilshire subway will boom on day 1

We often talk about new housing like it's pollution to be allocated around. But I think living in or near a town center like this would be seen as actively quite desirable by many.

Me: what material should we use on the facade of this new building in Boston? Trad architects:

NIMBYs cry crocodile tears when renters are displaced by a new apartment building, but they turn a blind eye when mass displacement occurs across the city under single-family zoning.

"A miscalibrated IZ policy (where the IZ tax exceeds the payment to developers) raises rents market-wide, by killing marginal projects and reducing supply."

Seeking attention for virtuous and prosocial deeds is fine.

Writing a post entitled "Why State Housing Reform is Failing (and What We Can Do About It)" about ADU reform and not mentioning California's wildly successful state-level ADU reforms certainly is a choice.

To recap: the idea that new market rate housing negative impacts affordability and must be mitigated through the payment of fees or the construction of subsidized housing is a legal fiction necessary to justify inclusionary zoning. The best evidence shows the exact opposite.

Increasingly robust research shows that building new housing induces a “moving on up” effect that creates vacancies in the cheapest homes. A good roundup here:

However, unsophisticated (or cynical) readers sometimes take nexus studies at face value and believe that new market rate housing *creates* a need for new subsidized affordable housing. This is basically the opposite of true.

This is an area ripe for reform: https://t.co/RSvgkYTYyx

As such, affordable housing requirements have to be justified through "nexus studies" that purport to show that new market rate housing creates the need for new affordable housing. These studies are purely pretextual: they always make findings that justify the proposed exaction.

Let’s talk about Nexus Study Logic. The Supreme Court jurisprudence on land use exactions like affordable housing requirements requires that they have an "essential nexus" with the proposed land use and that they are "roughly proportional" to the impacts of that use.

So many of the most beautiful, iconic, historic, delightful, economically productive neighborhoods in the world are just narrow boxes crammed up against each other with pretty fronts in a local style.

Policies which make it impossible to remove bad or non-paying tenants guarantee that landlords will be more risk averse. This means not perfect tenants have a harder time finding housing.

When housing supply is constrained, increases in demand lead to reductions in the stock of rent-controlled housing.

The California Coastal Commission would never EVER give permission for anything like this be built. If you somehow managed to get the Coastal Commission to sign off on it, there would be several years of lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Signaling virtue is good.

Queen of road safety!