I love cities. Let’s create beautiful cities by urban planning them. Livable Communities @LCI_LA Co-host Bike Talk @biketalkpfk Full of joy.
Los Angeles, CA
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Listening to center-right media — top issues that will appeal to swing voters to vote Democrat:
—AI regulation
—Permitting reform for housing and green energy inc nuclear
—Medicare for all kids / public option
This $25m payout is a great example of Trump incompetence, the danger he puts us in, & his corruption:
🚨EXCLUSIVE: AI safety rules were about to be enacted - then $25 million from OpenAI's president was deposited in Trump's super PAC and the rule disappeared.
@LeverNews unearths documents exposing how AI oligarchs got Trump to kill rules they now claim to support. Pass it on👇
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Corner bars create community - something people crave.
Meanwhile - when we ask people what they want in housing - it’s affordable homeownership, walkability, and community.
America lost one in six of its neighborhood bars in a single decade, and the killer was real estate math.
A bar like this can pour $3 beers because the building was paid off decades ago. The owner often lives upstairs. No rent, no investors, no debt service on a Pabst sign that's been hanging there for 40 years.
The moment that building sells, the math dies with it. A new operator inherits a market-rate lease, which forces $9 drinks, which forces a renovation to justify $9 drinks, which produces another exposed-brick cocktail bar where the dive used to be.
The Midwest kept its dive bars because of how they got built in the first place. Before Prohibition, Milwaukee's breweries put up corner taverns themselves. Pabst and Schlitz wanted guaranteed outlets for their beer, so they built bars directly into residential blocks. That's why these places sit on quiet snowy corners between houses instead of on commercial strips where rent explodes.
Chicago had around 3,300 tavern licenses in 1990. It's down to about 1,200. At the worst of the decline, America was losing six neighborhood bars a day.
And every single closure is permanent. You can't build a dive bar. You can only inherit one.
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
The City of LA owns billions of dollars of real estate. Some of it sits vacant, but most is just underutilized: one-story maintenance yards, parking lots, low-slung facilities.
We should be following New York’s lead and start putting our land to work.
An absolutely massive move on housing:
@NYCHousing is demolishing its offices at 100 Gold St., an outdated building from the 1960s, and turning it into *4,000* units of housing. 1,000 units will be permanently affordable.
This is more new housing than some entire cities build in a year.
Project will also include a new senior center, a 40k sq ft gym open to the public, and lots of public realm improvements around the site. HPD will get a new home in a separate, modern building.
This is the kind of big, bold project we need much more of.
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I wish cities would try the best practices and document the results.
Yes - every study says bus riders #1 want speed and reliability, a.k.a. fast and frequent.
What if we created a network of bus-only lanes/BRTs and see what happens to ridership?
nyc's free-bus mayor put out a 51-page, $900 million bus plan this summer and it's entirely about speed. up to six minutes off 50 priority routes. the word free does not appear. welcome to the frequency-and-speed caucus, we've been here the whole time, there are snacks
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
We have to improve the building code for infill multistory housing. We’ve reached the point where the places people want to live can only grow by pivoting from sprawl to middle-housing density. And you can’t get the quality of life people want until building code accomodates it.
-Single stair as a norm
-Right-sized elevators
-Fed & states putting the ICC and NFPA on short leashes and demanding that code includes a holistic view of impacts.
-End of setbacks, other anti-housing development and zoning ordinances designed to force waste and loss of space for people and green space in favor of asphalt and vetocracy.
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I’ve never understood this way… this is a great framing
Why does higher supply reduce prices?
There is 1 house for sale and 4 buyers with maximum bids:
A: $600k, B: $500k, C: $400k, D: $300k
The market price is the highest losing bid, since this means the winner can outbid the losers.
With one house, A wins, and B,C,D lose. B's bid is $500k, so this is the price paid by A.
Now add a 2nd home. Here, both A and B win, so A doesn't need to outbid B. Instead, A and B only need to outbid C, so the price is $400k.
Similarly, with 3 houses, D's bid sets the price at $300k.
Lesson: higher supply means fewer buyers you need to outbid, and hence a lower price.
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Fall is a perfect time for cities to close entire streets for a weekly Sunday Ciclovia
Roughly $10/gallon for gasoline in the Netherlands, but you know what they did? They learned from their oil crisis in the 70s and went all out on designing better cities while funding the hell out of walkability, bikes, and all forms of public transit.
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
Seems kind of obvious that the best possible form of urban living is small streets and 4-5 story dwellings , with lots of street calming and vegetation.
Perfect density but still calm . Incredible walkability but also safe for kids. Mixed use zoning obviously
Somehow we fell in love with towers and bungalows and parking and pedestrianization , huge parks and wide boulevards and the extremes
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I wrote an episode of Family Law about the lethalness of kids in hot cars - this was ~20 yrs ago — and even back then, some students created tech that costs like $10 to put sensors in cars for when there’s someone inside and temp is too high — to roll down the windows / turn on the ac. It should really be required in all new cars.
Boy, 5, dies in blistering hot car while family hosts party in 100-degree heat, dad pins blame on teen son trib.al/5YXcruT
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Lindsay Loves Cities retweeted
Building housing and renovating your home just got easier and faster. You can now go online at the PermitSF Portal for kitchen and bathroom remodels, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical permits.
75% of San Francisco’s building permits can now be filed through the portal, making it faster and easier to apply, track permits, and manage inspections—all online.
San Francisco’s broken permitting system has prevented small businesses from opening, stopped us from building housing, and held back our economic recovery. Under PermitSF, we’ve made permitting faster, easier, and more transparent—but we’re just getting started.
We’ll keep cutting red tape to make life easier for residents and business owners.
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These are the questions every politician should be asking when designing housing policy: Who is the end user? Who is this housing for?
If our codes, zoning & rules are getting awful buildings that no one wants to live in (and often sit 30% empty)… should we change our rules?
On a call yesterday about housing and how to build walkable commmunities
I cannot say this enough
You are building housing for the people!!
I have had people say that's nice you're focused on the end customer
WHO ARE YOU BUILDING FOR IF NOT THE PEOPLE?
If you have no idea what the people want, then what are we doing?
Get out of your spreadsheets and go talk to people
I reject the belief in housing that people won't pay for it. Every single day there are countless examples in resale homes, in consumer spend across countless categories where people WILL PAY for experience, lifestyle, happiness, beauty, vibes, because I want it
No you cannot prove that this 1 thing you change in MF design = ROI of X
You can't stick caviar on a fast food burger and call it 5 star Michelin fine dining
You can't put 1000 thread count Frette sheets in a budget motel and call it luxury
You have to build an experience. The ecosystem matters
Cities and government- you have to start addressing the satisfaction of your community. You are going to increasingly be in a race to compete for bodies. You need revenue yes? With demographic headwinds you will need to compete for people in general but especially working bodies who consume. You need thriving businesses who contribute to your property tax base
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What the research says people want and can’t get: walkable urbanism, courtyards, shared public parks, community — and they want to buy and own their own home, get on the “ownership ladder” and build equity.
The ‘West Village’ walkable density typology comes with unbelievable public goods - for climate, air quality, vision zero, car light living, health and mental health, affordability, small businesses and jobs…
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