On a clear September morning in 2024, in Baldwin Village, South Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass stood on a five-acre lot at the corner of Coliseum Street and La Brea Avenue and turned a ceremonial shovel. Behind her, renderings showed a six-storey building with 800 flats stacked above a Costco warehouse. A local resident, Karen Johnson, told NBC she was excited because “we only have a Ralphs right here.” Governor Newsom sent a statement. Councilmember Heather Hutt sent another. Of the 800 flats, 184 would be reserved for households at 30, 50, and 80% of area median income, with the lowest band renting at $1,040 a month. The project was privately financed. No Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. Just a wholesale club agreeing to be the load-bearing tenant.

A year later, Marina residents gathered in the parking lot of an iconic mid-century Safeway at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The store is known to locals as the “Singles Safeway” for its Monday-night dating scene, has been there since 1959, and is a neighbourhood institution. A developer called Align Real Estate had proposed replacing it with a 25-storey, 790-unit residential tower designed by Arquitectonica, with the Safeway returning at 57% larger on the ground floor. Eighty-six of the flats would be deed-restricted to very-low-income households. The protest signs went up. Marina Community Association’s Erin Roach delivered the line: “We’re not anti-housing, we’re anti this development.” The mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, agreed with her. So did his ally on the Board of Supervisors, Stephen Sherrill, who had quietly removed the parcel from the citywide upzoning plan a month earlier. Both denounced the developer for “gaming the system.”

(On that note: Daniel Lurie is opposing this housing project in his city while polling his weakest on housing, with 78% of San Franciscans saying cost of living has gotten worse.)

Two projects. Roughly 800 flats apiece. Both anchored by a major retailer. Both rely on the same state law: California’s AB 2011, the Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act. One mayor turned the shovel herself. The other promised to fight.

Why does this matter?

The dominant story about American housing politics in 2026 is that the YIMBYs won. State legislatures have passed pre-emption laws. Pro-housing reformers have been elected in major cities. The zoning code is, slowly, being rewritten. We have been here before. We had Tesco’s Spenhill in London in the 2000s. We have had Hong Kong’s Housing Authority since the 1960s. We have had Gavin Newsom’s “3.5 million homes by 2025” pledge. The relevant question is not whether the rhetoric has shifted, but whether the rhetorical shift will translate into actual buildings.

This matters because the answer determines whether the United States can build out of its housing crisis or merely talk out of it. If state pre-emption laws hold, then several million flats become possible across underused commercial sites in expensive coastal metros within a decade. If the laws are quietly hollowed out by mayors who run as reformers (especially centrist reformers) and then govern as obstructionists, then the rhetoric was the policy and there is nothing else coming. Misdiagnosing why the Marina Safeway will or will not get built is the difference between betting on the law and betting on the politicians. Bet on the law and the politicians become weather. Bet on the politicians and the law becomes window-dressing. The Marina Safeway is one test of which bet is right. The Coliseum Costco is the other.

What’s wrong with the conventional story?

The conventional account of the Coliseum project, repeated by Mayor Bass and most of the friendly coverage, runs as follows: a pragmatic Democratic mayor of a large American city has used a clever new state law to deliver hundreds of units of affordable housing on a previously underused parking lot, in partnership with a beloved retailer and a private developer, all without federal subsidies. This is what good housing politics looks like. It is replicable. It is the future.

The strongest version of this story is genuinely compelling. AB 2011 is a remarkable piece of legislation. The Coliseum project is going up. Bass did champion it publicly. The 184 affordable units are at rents that working-class South Los Angeles families can afford.

It is the inference about the mayor that fails.

Karen Bass has, on closer inspection, a striking pattern of behaviour on housing that is hard to reconcile with the “pragmatic reformer” narrative. She stood up an ambitious permit-streamlining programme called ED1 and then rolled it back once development applications started flowing in. She opposed SB 79, the state bill allowing more apartments near transit stops, on the grounds that it deprived the city of granular control. She opposed allowing Palisades fire victims to build duplexes on their own lots, explaining to a podcast host that “the people in the Palisades didn’t want that…if you impose it on a neighbourhood, then you will have hardcore NIMBYs.” People has taken to calling her Mayor NIMBY (which is, on reflection, slightly unfair to the NIMBYs, who tend to be more honest about what they want). Daniel Lurie in San Francisco might follow the same pattern (in miniature so far), with the addition that his hostility to specific projects is more openly stated. Both happen at once: the headline embrace of one prestige project, and the quiet obstruction of the broader regime that would produce many more.

The pattern is not ideological inconsistency. It is loss aversion as urban policy. The anger of one miffed homeowner is felt by a mayor about twice as heavily as the gratitude of one new tenant. The new tenant doesn’t yet live in your district. Kahneman and Tversky’s old finding (losses register about twice as heavily as gains of equal size) predicts the entire mayoral career arc. The political incentive runs against new construction even when the policy preference runs for it. Which is exactly why the law has to do the work the mayor will not.

The story is not that good mayors deliver housing. The story is that even mostly-good mayors will obstruct housing whenever it is politically convenient, and the only thing even enables the production of buildings is the law and the political economy. Bass turned the shovel at the Coliseum because the project had already cleared AB 2011 review and at the time, the YIMBY coalition was strong enough to prevent Gavin Newsom from siding with her on this issue like he did with the duplexes. Had AB 2011 not existed, or had Bass possessed any local lever to slow the project down, I would not be writing this paragraph. The relevant agent is the statute, not the politician.

Why would anyone want to live above a Safeway?

Marina Safeway, as the San Francisco Standard put it in February 2026, “the NIMBYs’ last stand”: the mayor opposes it, the local supervisor opposes it, the neighbourhood opposes it, and the law still requires it to be approved. The Planning Department issued a notice of conditional AB 2011 eligibility on 24 March 2026. Under the statute, the city has 180 days from a complete application to issue a final decision. The deadline is 1 August 2026.

Yes, you get that and you are going to ask “So, what?”.

I have said almost nothing about why anyone would actually want to live above a Safeway. The politics is impossible to understand without the product, which is what the urbanism literature has done the least to defend.

The central observation of behavioural economics: human beings are far more affected by friction than by price. If you make something ten seconds harder and people stop doing it. Make it ten seconds easier and they start. Reshaping of daily life over the last twenty years has been about removing small frictions like faster free delivery or smartphones. The grocery-anchored mid-rise applies the same idea to the activity humans spend more time on than any except sleep: keeping themselves fed.

Consider what it is to forget the onions in America. Forgetting the onions is a delightful little sidequest. You might even ask yourself whether the dinner can survive without them. You consider takeout. You give up and get in the car. You might drive 1.6 or 5.6 miles to the nearest grocery store. Then you have to find the onions, most likely queue at self-checkout rather than a person. Finally, you drive home, and arrive forty-three minutes later with a slightly mutinous spouse.

In a grocery-anchored mid-rise, you take the lift down, walk past the rotisserie chickens, pick up the onions, take the lift back up. The whole excursion takes four minutes or maybe it’s ten minutes tops.

Industry analysis finds that ground-floor premium grocery stores increase the rent achievable above them by up to 5.8%, and that number is low. It reflects only what landlords currently know how to capture. Renters would pay considerably more if the typology were less unusual.

Rory Sutherland has a line that applies here. Modern luxury is not really about size or expense. It is about not having to schlep. The richest people in San Francisco don’t have larger refrigerators than the merely well-off. They have private chefs, which is a way of paying $300,000 a year to make the schlep someone else’s problem (a luxury good the IRS has not, to its credit, yet found a way to define as taxable compensation). You could say that the grocery-anchored mid-rise democratises a slice of that luxury. The lift in a Marina Safeway tower is, functionally, a private chef. Most likely a worse one, considering the state of cooking among my peers and Gen Z, admittedly. But available to everyone in the building, at no marginal cost beyond the rent.

Aesthetic objections is the part of this debate is something I find least persuasive. Marina’s opposition rests on the assumption that a one-storey supermarket plus a surface car park on prime waterfront land within sight of the Golden Gate Bridge is somehow attractive. It is not. It is a deeply ugly piece of mid-twentieth-century commercial sprawl that San Franciscans have learned to mistake for “neighbourhood character” because they have lived with it for so long. The cities the Marina’s defenders love when they go on holiday (you can guess) are entirely composed of flats above shops. Edinburgh’s New Town is a grocery-anchored mid-rise from 1770 with a Sainsbury’s at the bottom; you have nothing to teach the Edinburgh planning department (besides the fact that said planning department may also be NIMBYs ignoring history) about preserving neighbourhood character.

Grocery anchor is often the only genuinely good thing on the block. The Marina Safeway is iconic because Marina residents go there repeatedly, with affection. The proposal, recall, is to expand the Safeway by 57% while putting flats above it. It is puzzling that this counts as a controversy until you remember Sam Moss’s observation that wealthy neighbourhoods learned long ago to define their preferences as principles, and Veblen’s older observation that those principles tend to exclude the most people.

The most important fact about these buildings: almost everyone who has lived in one would do it again. The Wegmans-anchored apartments in Washington DC have waiting lists. The Whole Foods-anchored buildings in Los Angeles fill up the day they open. The Hong Kong Wah Fu Estate, opened in 1968, retains higher resident satisfaction scores than most British council estates of equivalent age. In Tokyo, the integrated Ito-Yokado towers are prestigious. The product works. The market knows. The mayor of San Francisco may not yet.

Why is this harder to stop than it looks?

The product love above is not separate from the politics. It is the politics. Three forces make grocery-anchored housing harder to kill than ordinary apartment development. Most opposing politicians haven’t noticed.

The typology is global and mature. Apartments stacked on a concrete or steel podium over a supermarket are the default mode of dense urban housing in much of the world. In Hong Kong, the Housing Authority has been building exactly this kind of building since the 1980s; about 2.13 million people, roughly 30% of the territory’s population, lived in Public Rental Housing in early 2025, most of it in podium-anchored estates. The ten-year supply target for 2025/26 to 2034/35 is 308,000 public units. In Singapore, 77.2% of the resident population lives in HDB flats, roughly 90% of large-format HDB shophouses are anchored by NTUC FairPrice, and the HDB built 21,000 such flats in its first three years of operation. In London, Tesco’s Spenhill subsidiary built more than 4,000 flats under Mayor Livingstone’s residential-led London Plan, until Tesco’s 2015 retrenchment killed the pipeline, of which more later. The American examples (Beckert’s Park on Capitol Hill, The Exchange in Wheaton, the various Whole Foods-anchored projects in DC and LA) are catch-up, not innovations.

The grocery anchor brings a constituency that ordinary apartment developments lack. A developer fighting NIMBYs alone is on hostile rhetorical terrain. The actual political economy is more complicated, but at community-meeting altitude “developer” is shorthand for “rich greedy person,” and that’s the altitude these fights are conducted at. A developer fighting NIMBYs with Costco or Safeway as co-sponsor is in an entirely different argument. Costco is consistently rated one of the most-trusted retailers in America. Its CEO Ron Vachris has described the Coliseum project as a way “to enter markets where traditional big-box development would be nearly impossible,” and the Coliseum alone is expected to create 400 permanent retail jobs plus thousands of construction jobs. The Marina Safeway has the kind of intergenerational neighbourhood loyalty no developer can manufacture by himself; opposing 800 flats above it is one thing, but opposing the expansion of the Singles Safeway (57% bigger, with a wider deli counter and more checkouts) is much stranger to argue at a community meeting.

This is the part that should be on every protest sign and conspicuously isn’t. The Marina opposition is asking that its favourite neighbourhood Safeway not be allowed to get bigger and better. The thing the protesters say they love (the daily-life utility of the store, the Monday-night singles tradition, the iconic mid-century building) would, under the proposal, get a substantial upgrade. The thing they say they want to preserve, the surface car park, would be the only thing lost. Try writing that on a placard.

Tesco in 2000s Britain mobilised the same dynamic: it was easier to argue with planners about flats than to argue with everyone who shopped at the Tesco. The grocery anchor is a constituency, with employees, customer loyalty, brand favourability, and UFCW representation behind it. When NIMBYs fight Costco or Safeway directly, they are fighting an organisation with more political capital than they have. They are, in many cases, fighting their own friends.

The desirability of the building disarms the standard objection. The standard NIMBY argument runs: a tall building here would destroy the neighbourhood character. The argument assumes the building is undesirable. When the building turns out to be exactly the kind of place people want to live, with a grocery store downstairs they already like, the argument collapses on its own. The Marina Safeway opposition is struggling to articulate a coherent harm. The Tenants Union explicitly declined to oppose the project on the grounds that “there’s nobody being harmed by that, except the shoppers who will temporarily have their Safeway closed.” When even the tenants’ lobby refuses to oppose your tower, you are no longer fighting NIMBYism. You are fighting nostalgia, and nostalgia is not a permitting category.

It can’t just be the policy?

You might say, “Hold up! We seen laws passed for other things, and only ADUs really get built at scale! How does groceries make a difference?”

Laws enable development, but it doesn’t actually build units. Consider what a developer has to assemble to finance affordable housing without an anchor tenant. The standard American capital stack runs to five separate sources: Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, allocated by state agencies on a competitive lottery with two-year wait times; state and local subsidies, each with its own application process; deferred developer fees, which don’t pay out until the building stabilises how many years later; CDFI loans, cheaper than commercial debt but slower to underwrite; and tax-exempt bond financing where available.

A typical “affordable” project takes three to seven years of predevelopment work before a shovel hits the ground, and roughly ~10% of total project cost is spent on assembling the financing itself.

Grocery-anchored typology shortcuts the entire stack. A Costco or Safeway lease underwrites the “affordable” component privately. The math works because grocery retail is one of the few credit-worthy commercial uses with stable long-term cash flows that can be securitised against the residential portion’s construction loan. Predevelopment shrinks from years to months. The Coliseum’s capital stack closed without a single LIHTC application, which the developer has described as a model for replication.

So NIMBYs are feeling with these projects are wider and better-financed than the neighbourhood-association opposition. Even where mayors object, the laws operate independently of them. The British experience is the cautionary case. In 2007, under Mayor Livingstone’s residential-led London Plan, Tesco set up its Spenhill subsidiary to develop housing above its own stores. By 2014, Spenhill had built more than 4,000 flats across a series of London sites and was the largest single grocery-anchored housing programme in Europe. Then, in 2015, under new CEO Dave Lewis, Tesco retrenched. The Spenhill sites were sold off, the development arm was wound up, and the pipeline died with it. The flats already built remain (residents seem perfectly happy with them, fifteen years on). The flats that would have followed never came. When the political economy rests on a single retailer’s strategic appetite, the policy lasts as long as the appetite does. AB 2011 is built differently: the supermarket is one supporting leg, the law is another, and the labour coalition is a third. Knock one out and the others hold. Tesco died, and the buildings stopped. AB 2011 cannot die without an act of the California legislature, which neither the building trades nor the grocers will permit.

There is a lamp lit above the firehouse on Main Street, USA, and it has been lit since 1955.

Walt Disney lived in the apartment above the firehouse during construction. The lamp signaled, by company convention, that he was in residence. He died in 1966. The lamp stayed on. It is still on.

I’m a bit too obsessed with this little detail. I mean, about fifty-six thousand people walk past it on a typical day. Past pastel storefronts, a horse-drawn omnibus, the smell of vanilla pumped through the doors of the Confectionery, gas lamps that came from Baltimore and were bought by the pound. Past the most successful piece of pre-war American small-town urbanism in continuous operation in the country. Tens of millions of Americans pay every year to walk through it.

It almost did not get built, because the project was irrational and a bit whimsical.

When Walt pitched Disneyland to his brother Roy and the board of Walt Disney Productions in 1952, the board said no. The company was already overextended on three other risky bets: high-budget live-action films, nature documentaries, and television. Estimated cost of the park, ten to twenty million dollars. Company net profit the prior year, $720,000. Banks told Walt the outdoor amusement business was “a cultural anachronism that had already declined into senility.” That was the actual phrase. Cultural anachronism. Declined into senility.

Walt did it anyway, in a way that today would be career-ending. He took a $60,000 loan against his life insurance through Commerce Bank in Kansas City, pledging the financial safety net of his wife and children as collateral. He sold his Palm Springs vacation home. He set up a personal corporation called WED Enterprises (his initials) outside the studio’s risk-management process so the board couldn’t kill the project. And he gave ABC television an equity stake in the park in exchange for the network distributing Disney programming and putting up roughly seventeen million dollars in construction money.

The park opened on July 17, 1955. By the end of its first year it had attracted 1.2 million visitors and was profitable. Disney bought ABC out five years later. The bankers were wrong about cultural anachronism.

Sixteen years later, Walt and Roy would build a place forty-six times the size. To pencil it, they had to convince the Florida state legislature to invent a county.

What does it take to build something big in America?

Most of what I write about is the small stuff: ADUs, infill, and sometimes reviving the downtowns of small cities and towns. The political economy supports that work right now, and what gets built matters. But it isn’t everything I want. I want more Main Streets across America, at a greater scale than I usually talk about. I want a country that still knows how to plan and build at Disney-World scale, places imagined (and even ridiculed for the absurdity of them) before they get reduced to spreadsheets. The political economy for that kind of ambition doesn’t exist in 2026, and I know it.

So. Government-engineered financing vehicles are how more ambitious urbanism actually gets built in this country. Private capital, by itself, cannot do it, and never has. Disneyland required Walt to mortgage his family’s safety net. Disney World required the Florida legislature to invent a special-purpose taxing district with bond-issuing authority. The 1968-73 apartment boom required a federal stack of Section 236 interest subsidies, FHA 221(d)(4) construction insurance, and Ginnie Mae securitization. The 1981-86 apartment boom required ERTA’s accelerated depreciation. Every time. The pattern is structural.

At the same time, YIMBY victories like California’s ADU laws (which are responsible for nearly a quarter of all new units in the state), Oregon’s HB 2001, Montana’s middle-housing reforms, and Massachusetts’s Section 3A are real wins. Without them, this country would be building less housing than we do now. To deny their impact is wrong, and the people doing the denying are doing more damage to American housing politics than they realize.

What if we had a better political economy? What if we could build on top of those victories? What are the next steps?

I’d like to start with Paul Williams’ recent report for the Center for Public Enterprise. American multifamily starts have been stuck at roughly 350,000 units a year for forty years, through every conceivable interest-rate regime, zoning regime, and political cycle. The two moments when production exceeded 500,000 sustained were the HUD boom of 1968-73 and the ERTA boom of 1981-86. Both came directly out of federal credit and tax infrastructure. When the machinery was on, supply boomed; when it was off, supply collapsed. The flat line is a policy artifact, not a market verdict.

So the next step is to turn the federal credit apparatus back on. Five levers. Most cost little (for the deficit hawks reading). All build on infrastructure that already exists. They would, plausibly, raise multifamily production to 500,000-700,000 units annually for the decade we need to work through the shortage.

Is zoning reform enough?

The YIMBY/urbanist argument, which I share, runs something like this. Zoning prevents apartments from being built in the metros where they’re most needed. Single-family-only districts, parking minimums, height limits, FAR restrictions, discretionary review, and weaponized environmental procedures collectively make it illegal or financially infeasible to build the housing demand exists for. Williams uses a container metaphor for this: your zoning, permitting, and planning regime is the size of the container you hold out to collect rainwater. An unpermissive regime is a tablespoon. The right reforms are an upgrade to a gallon jug.

But the metaphor itself half-admits the problem. The container does not summon the rain.

YIMBYism, urbanism, Strong Towns, whatever you want to call it: the working coalition has always been more than willing to talk about what zoning reform can and can’t do. ADU and infill reforms often outperform other zoning reforms because homeowners or small businesses who want to redevelop will do so for personal or local reasons, without reference to the broader market. It’s only the more market-optimistic “abundance” framing that argues you only need to reform the regulatory regime and the supply will come.

Look at Austin. Through the 2010s, Austin liberalized its zoning more aggressively than most peer metros. The pandemic added a one-time domestic-migration shock and zero-percent interest rates. Multifamily starts in Austin surged. National multifamily permits broke 500,000 in 2021-2022, the highest since the 1980s, and a large share of that bump came from Sun Belt metros where zoning had been preemptively cleared. Then the Federal Reserve raised rates from zero to over 5% in eighteen months. Construction loan rates followed them up. The bump unwound as interest rates increased and the tech industry that powered Austin’s growth shed workers. Permits are now down roughly 25% from peak.

But notice what YIMBYism and its organizers actually accomplished. They upgraded Austin to a gallon jug. The jug worked exactly as advertised: when the financing rain fell, the jug filled, and rents fell. They are still falling, and they need to fall further to get Austin’s rent burden back to pre-COVID levels. Without the organizers, the council members, and the years of work behind them, Austin would have fewer units and be more expensive today than it is. The constraint that arrived in 2024 was not the size of the jug. It was the rain.

The lesson here is not “zoning reform doesn’t work.” Zoning reform absolutely works, and it is a prerequisite for everything else. The lesson is that zoning reform alone gets cyclically captured by the financing environment. When finance is loose, supply surges. When finance is tight, supply collapses. Net production over a decade ends up barely distinguishable from a non-reformed regime, and the YIMBY-coalition victories of the 2020s end up looking, in 2035, like Austin in 2024.

The flat line is older than YIMBY. It tracks the disappearance of federal credit and tax infrastructure that historically made apartment construction financially attractive at scale. Forty years, one number, untouched by anything that happened at the local level.

To see why federal financing infrastructure is the structural answer, look at how Disney World actually got built.

How did the Disneys actually pull it off?

1955: how did Walt finance Disneyland?

Disneyland’s financing, at $17 million, was modest by today’s standards. A present-day developer would consider $17 million a routine project. And yet, in 1955, $17 million was approximately twenty-five times the parent company’s annual net profit. The board wouldn’t fund it. Walt had to invent his own vehicle.

The vehicle was personal. WED Enterprises, set up outside the studio. A life insurance loan from Commerce Bank in Kansas City, backed by his family’s safety net. The Palm Springs sale. A line of bank credit through Bank of America, where Walt had banked since the 1930s. And the ABC equity deal, which converted television rights into construction money.

By the time the park opened, Walt had pledged his personal financial existence against the project. The board’s caution had not been wrong, exactly. The project was a bet that could have ended Walt’s career and his family’s wealth. It paid off because Disneyland turned out to be a perpetual cash machine, and the cash machine became the funding source for the next attempt.

But notice what this means. The most beloved piece of small-scale American urbanism the country has produced in the postwar period was financed by a single individual borrowing against his own life. The capital markets said no.

1971: why did Walt need a county?

A decade later, Walt’s ambitions outgrew the personal capital stack. He wanted 27,000 acres in central Florida, forty-six times Disneyland’s footprint, including Magic Kingdom, hotels, transportation infrastructure, and the planned EPCOT city he wouldn’t live to see. The estimated cost was $400 million. In 2026 dollars, roughly $3 billion.

The Disneyland playbook would not scale. You cannot finance a $400 million project through life insurance loans. The bond markets would not lend on a swamp. Orange and Osceola Counties had no power, water, or sewer infrastructure within ten to fifteen miles of the site. And the governance infrastructure for a 27,000-acre, multi-municipality, master-planned development simply did not exist in 1965.

Walt’s solution, executed with Florida’s governor Haydon Burns and finalized after Walt’s death by Roy, was Reedy Creek. On May 12, 1967, Florida Governor Claude Kirk signed Chapter 67-764, creating the Reedy Creek Improvement District: a special-purpose taxing district with the same authority and responsibility as a county government. The district could levy property taxes. It could provide municipal services. Most importantly, it could issue tax-exempt municipal bonds.

The Florida legislature included an unusual pledge in the enabling act. The state pledged to bondholders that it would “not in any way impair the rights or remedies of the holders ... until all such bonds, together with interest thereon, and all costs and expenses ... are fully met and discharged.” This pledge was the financial keystone of the project. It made Reedy Creek’s bonds state-backed in all but name, salable at low interest rates to risk-averse institutional investors. By the time DeSantis tried to dissolve the district in 2022, Reedy Creek carried roughly $1 billion in outstanding bond debt, serviced annually by approximately $58 million in district taxes paid by Disney itself.

The state was challenged in court on whether a special-purpose district mostly serving a private corporation was a valid public purpose. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the district in 1968, on the explicit reasoning that “tourism, recreation and the conservation of natural resources” were valid public purposes.

Combined with retained operating cash flow from Disneyland and conventional corporate financing, Roy completed Disney World on time and on budget for $400 million without taking on additional corporate debt. Magic Kingdom opened October 1, 1971. By every measure (visitor count, longevity, cultural durability) it’s the most successful piece of master-planned American urbanism ever built.

The thing that gets me about Reedy Creek is what was actually required. The most ambitious piece of urbanism in modern American history needed a custom-built state-chartered taxing district with bond-issuing authority and an explicit state pledge to bondholders. Without Reedy Creek, the project does not pencil. Even with Walt and Roy. Even with Disneyland’s cash flow. Even with Florida cooperating.

1984: did building Disney World almost kill the company?

Disney World didn’t insulate the Walt Disney Company from the consequences of building it.

By the early 1980s, Disney was capitalized for content and theme-park operations but thinly defended on equity. In March 1984, the financier Saul Steinberg purchased 6.3% of Disney’s stock and triggered a takeover scare. By June, Steinberg controlled 12.2% and offered to acquire 49% for $1.3 billion. At the time, that was more than the company’s available cash, which was under $10 million.

To fend Steinberg off, Disney paid $297.5 million in greenmail plus $28 million in expenses, took on $850 million in new debt, and acquired the real-estate firm Arvida and the greeting-card maker Gibson Greetings as defensive bulk. The company that built Reedy Creek almost became a forced-sale target precisely because building Reedy Creek had left it financially exposed.

Think about what this means for the argument. Even Walt and Roy Disney’s playbook (decades of operating cash flow, a state-engineered financing vehicle, the most successful master-planned urbanism in American history) left the parent company close enough to the edge that a single hostile financier with $11 million in initial capital could nearly take it down a decade later. The state vehicle was necessary. It was also not quite sufficient. The parent corporation absorbed risk that no rational private capital structure would have absorbed unaided.

If the country’s most resourceful urbanist, with the State of Florida actively in his corner and a perpetual cash machine in California funding him, still ended up exposed to a hostile takeover in 1984, the proposition that present-day urbanism can be financed by private capital alone isn’t merely wrong. It’s senile.

2026: could anyone build Disney World today?

What would it take to build Disney World today?

I keep trying to imagine the capital stack and I cannot construct it. The Reedy Creek mechanism was partially dismantled in 2022, and its successor, the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, is governor-controlled. No state legislature is currently in the business of inventing custom special-purpose districts for ambitious urbanism. The federal credit apparatus that produced the HUD boom of 1968-73 was dismantled after Nixon’s 1973 moratorium. The tax apparatus that produced the ERTA boom was dismantled by the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Construction lending from regional banks has collapsed since 2023, with the post-SVB regulatory environment and the $1.8 trillion CRE maturity wall hitting simultaneously. Conventional construction credit is nearly impossible to price under current input-cost inflation and tariff regimes.

A 2026 Walt Disney could not finance Disney World. No state would invent Reedy Creek for him (even Texas with its MUD system); the political environment for doing so has been actively poisoned by the 2022 fight. Conventional banks won’t lend at terms that make the project pencil. And without a federal pledge equivalent to Florida’s 1967 pledge to Reedy Creek bondholders, he could not securitize his way through the bond markets either.

Has the federal government ever done this for apartments?

The HUD boom of 1968-73 was the federal version of what Florida did for Disney one year earlier. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 set a goal of 26 million new housing units over ten years. To hit that target, HUD deployed three integrated tools that, taken together, were essentially Reedy Creek for apartments. Section 236 interest-rate subsidies that reduced effective mortgage rates on qualifying rental projects to as low as 1%. FHA 221(d)(4) construction insurance, which provided non-recourse, fixed-rate financing covering up to 90% of project cost. And Ginnie Mae securitization, issued in 1970 for the first time in American history, which connected FHA multifamily lending to global capital markets and removed lender capacity as a binding constraint on production.

Multifamily starts surged from 400,000 in 1968 to an annualized 1,000,000 units in March 1973. Three million apartment units in four years. Then, in 1973, the Nixon administration imposed a moratorium on new commitments. Section 236 wound down. The boom ended.

The ERTA boom of 1981-86 was the tax-code version of the same idea. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 created accelerated cost recovery for real estate (15-year depreciation with front-loaded methods) that made apartment investment a tax shelter capable of generating paper losses sufficient to offset other income. Multifamily starts climbed from under 300,000 in 1981 to over 500,000 by 1985 and stayed there for five years. Then, in 1986, the Tax Reform Act extended depreciation to 27.5 years, switched to straight-line methods, and added passive loss limitations. The tax economics of rental housing development collapsed almost overnight. Multifamily starts fell to 140,000 by 1991 and have never sustainably exceeded 500,000 since.

Every time American urbanism or housing produces at scale, a custom financing vehicle is created to make it possible. Disneyland in 1955 ran on WED Enterprises, an ABC equity deal, and a personal life insurance loan. Disney World in 1971 ran on Reedy Creek and the state bondholder pledge. The HUD boom ran on Section 236, 221(d)(4), and Ginnie Mae together. The ERTA boom ran on accelerated cost recovery and passive loss treatment.

Every time we dismantle the vehicle, production falls back to a baseline that is a policy artifact rather than a market equilibrium. The 350,000-unit flat line for multifamily starts (forty years long, through every conceivable macroeconomic environment) is what happens after we turn the machinery off.

The pattern matters more than usual right now because the credit cycle is at exactly the wrong point. Multifamily loan maturities surge from $104 billion in 2025 to roughly $162 billion in 2026. Builder bankruptcies are accelerating. Construction lenders have widened spreads or pulled out of the market entirely. We are sitting in the sharpest construction-credit collapse since 2008, with the federal apparatus off, and a $1.8 trillion CRE maturity wall arriving on top of it.

What would turning the machine back on look like?

Five levers. What follows is the technical version.

The federal credit apparatus that produced the 1968-73 boom is, in modified form, still sitting on the federal balance sheet. It has just been allowed to atrophy. Reactivating it does not require inventing new agencies. It requires turning existing infrastructure back on.

Lever 1: why does an FHA loan take a year to close?

On paper, FHA’s 221(d)(4) is unbeatable as a construction financing product. Fixed-rate, non-recourse, up to 90% loan-to-cost, 40-year terms. It’s the lineal descendant of the program that financed the 1968-73 HUD boom. Today it finances roughly 10,000-15,000 units a year, about 4% of multifamily production, a rounding error against the three to four million unit shortage.

Why? Process friction. Loans routinely take 270-360 days to close, against 60-90 days for conventional construction financing. HUD launched a “single underwriter” reform in 2014 that was never fully implemented. A 2024 OIG auditfound HUD still tracking applications across five regional centers on manual spreadsheets.

Williams’ fix: codify single-underwriter in the MAP Guide, fund the IT modernization HUD has been promising for a decade, expand categorical exclusions for infill, and resource the program like the production platform it could be. Cost: negligible. FHA mortgage insurance is statutorily actuarially sound; the investment is in HUD’s operational capacity. Scale: 50,000-75,000 units a year in normal markets, with upside toward 100,000+ in crunches. For context, in 2010, during the GFC’s private-credit retreat, FHA across all programs financed more than 150,000 rental units.

Underrated, because it skips Congress and appropriations entirely. All it needs is an HUD secretary who cares about execution.

Lever 2: what are the states already doing?

While the federal apparatus has atrophied, state housing finance agencies have been quietly building the next generation of construction finance infrastructure. MassHousing’s BILD program pairs preferred equity with Freddie Mac permanent debt at debt-like returns, targeting 25-35% of total project equity. New York’s Housing Acceleration Fundprovides subordinate construction loans through CDFIs and banks at 3% interest-only. Michigan’s Housing Accelerator Fund is structured similarly.

These programs collectively represent about half a billion dollars in capital and have worked at small scale. MassHousing’s BILD has a pipeline of 33 projects representing 7,000+ units against an initial $50 million fund.

The match: a $2 billion one-time federal contribution capitalizing similar programs in 25-30 states, structured to revolve so the funds recycle into new projects after permanent conversion. Cost: $2 billion one-time, ongoing zero. Scale: roughly 30,000 additional units a year. The mechanism crowds in private capital, leverages existing state HFA expertise, and produces mixed-income housing rather than just deeply-subsidized affordable units. It also creates durable production infrastructure that can operate counter-cyclically, which is what we need given the post-2023 bank pullbacks.

Lever 3: why aren’t Fannie and Freddie in this market?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dominate multifamily permanent lending, together roughly 41% of total origination volume in 2024, but are essentially absent from construction financing. This is a historical artifact, not an inherent limitation. The GSEs’ charters emphasize permanent mortgages because that’s where their underwriting expertise developed. Construction has always been left to banks and insurers.

The fix has three parts. Forward commitments on permanent financing, structured like MassHousing’s FORGE Loan, which uses a 36-month rate lock to let developers secure permanent financing terms before breaking ground. Mezzanine and preferred equity products that fill the gap between senior construction debt and developer equity, currently served at high prices by CDFIs and impact investors. And a secondary market for construction-to-perm loans, enabling true scale through MBS structures.

Cost: essentially zero from a federal-budget perspective. GSE products are priced to be self-funding. The policy lever is regulatory (FHFA scorecards, possibly a charter clarification from Congress), not fiscal. Scale: 50,000-100,000 units a year depending on portfolio share. This is the lever that does the most to address the post-2023 regional bank pullback, because it puts patient capital into the gap that private credit has vacated.

Lever 4: could the tax code do for housing what it did for solar?

The 1981 ERTA boom was driven by 15-year accelerated depreciation. The 1986 Tax Reform Act extended that to 27.5 years straight-line, and production collapsed within five years.

The proposal is to restore some version of accelerated treatment. Three options, ordered by aggressiveness: shorten the straight-line schedule from 27.5 years to 15-18 years; partially expense the first $100,000 per unit; or fuller expensing under tighter passive-loss rules. Today’s 37% top marginal rate is well below the 50% rate that prevailed during ERTA, which materially reduces both the per-dollar value to claimants and the revenue loss to Treasury. We can get much of the production effect without recreating the worst tax-shelter abuses that drove the 1986 backlash.

The closest analog is the IRA’s clean-energy production-tax-credit and investment-tax-credit structure. We just demonstrated, on the energy side, that this approach can mobilize hundreds of billions of private capital toward an industrial-policy goal in a few years. The mechanism translates to multifamily.

Cost: real but bounded. Shortening the depreciation window costs less than partial expensing, which costs less than full expensing, with corresponding production effects. Estimates range from a few billion annually for shorter straight-line to tens of billions for full expensing. Scale: 50,000-100,000+ units a year. This is the most fiscally substantive lever in the package and also the one with the cleanest recent precedent.

Lever 5: what is the FHLB system even for?

The Federal Home Loan Bank system is a $1.3 trillion government-sponsored enterprise that, per the CBO’s 2024 analysis, receives roughly $6.9 billion a year in implicit federal subsidy through the spread between FHLB consolidated obligations and Treasuries. Almost none of this flows into housing production. The 11 regional FHLBs primarily make collateralized advances to member institutions, totaling $737 billion in 2024. Affordable Housing Program contributions in 2024 were about $751 million, roughly 12% of net income.

In 2023, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank held tens of billions in FHLB advances days before failing, using the system as a lender-of-next-to-last-resort rather than a housing-finance institution. The FHLBs were repaid in full because their statutory super-lien gives them priority over the FDIC.

The fix: amend the FHLB Act to authorize construction-to-permanent multifamily lending, either directly or through member institutions. FHFA would set risk-based capital requirements and a 10% portfolio target for housing construction and permanent financing. The bipartisan CURB Act shows there is appetite for FHLB reform across the aisle.

Cost: zero federal-budget impact. The FHLBs are self-funding. Scale: 50,000+ additional units a year at a 10% portfolio share, supporting roughly $70 billion in housing investment. This creates permanent counter-cyclical infrastructure that lends into downturns when private capital retreats.

Why isn’t the technical case winning?

You can make a strong technical case for building lots of housing. The political case isn’t. “Build more apartments” has been the YIMBY ask for over a decade and has produced state-level wins, but at the federal level, where the credit apparatus actually lives, the slogan has been weak. There is no political coalition for “more apartments” that competes effectively with organized homeowner interests and the institutional capital that profits from the current product mix.

This is, at its root, a problem of register. At the national level, the case for housing supply has been argued in the language of supply, and the language of supply is technocratic, demographic, and a little bit boring. The arguments are correct. They have not produced federal credit reform. They have not produced a coalition broad enough to break the forty-year flat line.

The rest of the country isn’t listening because the rest of the country doesn’t read white papers. The rest of the country reads memory. Memory of how a place felt, of what your grandparents could afford, of the courtyard you played in when you were nine. The rest of the country has feelings about a 1925 courtyard in Pasadena, or about the lamp above the firehouse on Main Street USA, or about the 2BR their grandparents raised three kids in and that no developer in their current city would dream of building. Those feelings are politically active, and at the moment they’re being routed almost exclusively through reactionary politics, because reactionary politics has been more willing to speak the register of memory than YIMBYism has.

This is, plainly, a self-inflicted wound, but the wound belongs to the national policy conversation, not to the organizers who have actually been winning. Talk to anyone who knocked doors for California’s ADU bills, or who packed a city council hearing in Montana, and you’ll find people who already know how to speak the register of memory and loss and aspiration. The organizing has always been emotional. The white papers came after.

And I want to be specific about a particular dynamic, because it has gone uncalled-out for too long. There is a class of national-level housing commentator, usually writing for some big publication like the NYT or something small like a substack, occasionally from a think tank, rarely from a city where they’ve ever had to flip a council vote, who has spent any sort of time arguing that state and local YIMBY wins haven’t actually moved the needle. That California’s ADUs aren’t real urbanism. That Montana’s middle-housing reforms are theater. That Oregon’s HB 2001 didn’t change anything. That the whole movement needs to reset, get serious, get federal, get something. The argument has the causation exactly backwards. Those wins were the largest legalization expansions in fifty years of American housing policy. They were also the only consistent housing-policy victories of the last decade, full stop. They were earned by people who packed council hearings, knocked doors, got primaried, sat through six-hour zoning debates, and absorbed personal abuse from neighbors who showed up to call them slumlords for wanting to allow a duplex. The framing that “not enough is being built” is technically true and rhetorically poisonous, because it concedes the only working model American housing politics currently has to whoever shows up next claiming a better one. If you want more housing built, the organizers who have actually been winning are not the problem. They are the proof of concept. Defend their work like your political project depends on it, because it does.

And here is the thing the national discourse rarely says out loud. Local and state YIMBY organizing is, by every standard of rational self-interest, delightfully irrational. The expected personal benefit of any given organizer’s hours at a council hearing is somewhere south of zero. Show up, get yelled at, lose a Saturday, possibly lose a neighbor, possibly lose a friend, possibly get primaried, in exchange for what? A marginal bump in the probability that a duplex gets allowed three blocks from your house, in a city you might leave in five years anyway? Mancur Olson wrote a whole book about why this kind of organizing isn’t supposed to happen. The logic of collective action says every rational actor should free-ride.

And yet here they are, year after year, going to the hearings, knocking the doors, doing the thing the rational ledger says they shouldn’t (among other things), and producing the wins, despite the NIMBYs’ biggest support base is often the upper crust, in addition to the upper middle class Boomers. The largest developers consistently shown to be fair weather friends at best, and often opposed to the YIMBYesy candidates (Tom Steyer for example) .

The rational version of the movement, by contrast, is the national abundance commentariat: white papers, Substack posts, conference panels, no Saturdays lost. It has produced excellent analysis. It has not produced housing. The same was true of Walt Disney mortgaging his life insurance to build a park the bankers called a cultural anachronism. Big things get built by people willing to do what the rational ledger says they shouldn’t. So do small things.

The gap is at the national level, where the housing supply argument gets laundered into technocratic language before it reaches the people who might fund it or legislate it. Cost burdens, vacancy rates, permits per capita, whatever. None of that is how anyone ever got a state legislature to invent a county. The frames below are suggestions, not instructions. Organizers don’t need instructions from anyone. The frames are sketches, three of many possible ways to carry what organizers know into rooms where the conversation has lost its nerve. Treat them as starting points, not a definitive list.

What the frames share is the willingness to be moved. That posture is sometimes called nostalgia, sometimes whimsy, sometimes romance. I’m going to use whimsy and romance because they’re the most accurate. Whimsy is advocating for things because they’re charming. Romance is advocating for things because we used to have them and we miss them. Both are politically powerful in ways the supply argument has not been.

Frame 1: why can’t your daughter afford a 2BR?

You know a 28-year-old like this. She’s your sister, your daughter, your friend’s kid, the person at the next desk. She has a partner. They’ve been together for four years. They want to get married, they want to have kids, and they want to do it in the city where they actually live, which is the city where their jobs are. They make decent money. Combined, more than her parents made when they bought their first house. They cannot find a 2BR they can afford. They’ve been looking for two years. The 1BRs they can afford have a den that her partner uses as an office, which means the kid would be in their bedroom, which means they aren’t going to have the kid yet, which means they aren’t going to get married yet, which means the whole thing keeps getting pushed back, six months at a time, for what is starting to feel like the rest of their twenties.

Multiply her by twenty million. Under-35 household formation has cratered. The median first-time homebuyer is in their late 30s. Marriage and first-birth ages are at all-time highs. The classic American life script (meet someone, partner up, household, kid, equity, roots) is being delayed. Young people still want it. They cannot afford the shelter it requires.

Couillard’s 2025 paper finds that half the U.S. fertility decline since the 2000s is attributable to housing costs, with subsidies for 3+BR construction generating 2.3x more births per dollar than equivalent 1BR subsidies. The mechanism is not subtle. Families form in apartments with rooms for children. The apartments without rooms for children are what the current capital structure builds, because they pencil. The levers above can be tuned toward family product at near-zero administrative cost: a fast-track FHA processing tier for projects above some 2+BR threshold, GSE pricing tilts for above-baseline family-unit shares, depreciation schedules that favor larger units. Every lever, retuned slightly, builds the apartments where the 28-year-old can finally start her life.

The coalition this frame assembles is the broadest of the three. Young-adult voters who can’t launch. Their parents, who watch them not launch. Family-policy moderates on both sides of the aisle. Pronatalist conservatives who want the birth rate to go up. Affordability progressives who want renters to not be crushed. The frame is romantic about a particular thing, which is the American life script: the script that says you should be able to meet someone and marry them and have kids with them and put down roots in the city where your work is, and that the country owes its young people the conditions under which that script remains possible. The script is contested in the discourse. It is not contested in the actual preferences of under-35 Americans. They want it. They are being denied it. These levers are how we give it back to them.

Frame 2: do you remember when America built things?

Walt Disney was 51 years old, in declining health, with a board that opposed him and bankers who told him his project was a cultural anachronism. He built Disneyland anyway. Five years later he was already planning Disney World, forty-six times the size, and personally lobbying the Florida state legislature to invent a county to make the bond math work. Roy finished it on time and on budget for $400 million.

Walt is the patron saint of building big in America. Not “build a corporation.” Not “extract returns.” Not “exit at stabilization.” Build the place itself, at the scale the vision actually requires. And he wasn’t alone. The country we built before 1986 was a country full of Walts. We built the Interstate Highway System and the post-war suburbs. We built the master-planned new towns of the 1960s and 1970s, places like Reston and Columbia and Irvine and the Woodlands, designed from scratch and now home to hundreds of thousands of people. We built the HUD-boom apartment stock that put a roof over three million families in four years. The TVA dams. The L.A. aqueduct. The Brooklyn Bridge had been built two generations earlier, and yet here we still were, building. We built at scales that present-day America looks at and assumes must have been done by a different species.

We weren’t a different species. We were the same country, with the same union contracts, the same bureaucratic dysfunction, and the same political rancor. What we had that we no longer have is the machinery. Federal credit infrastructure. Tax policy that pointed at production. State legislatures willing to invent counties when counties needed inventing. The HUD secretary in 1968 had tools the HUD secretary in 2026 does not. The result is that Walt’s playbook, the playbook of all the postwar urbanists, doesn’t run anymore.

This is the romance of a lost capacity. It runs on the felt sense, which I think a lot of Americans have, that we used to be a country that could do things, and we’ve forgotten how. The forgetting is correctable. The correction is a tune-up of dormant infrastructure that previously produced, and could again produce, the construction curve that built modern America.

The coalition this frame assembles is the strangest and possibly the largest. Abundance liberals. Nostalgic conservatives. Infrastructure-state Democrats. The post-liberal right. The technocratic center. The people who read Marc Andreessen and the people who read Ezra Klein and the people who read both. Strong Towns sympathizers. Anyone who has stood in a piece of postwar civic infrastructure (a Carnegie library, a TVA dam, even a Robert Moses parkway, the lobby of a 1930s post office) and felt something that wasn’t there in the strip mall they drove past on the way over. The coalition is genuinely cross-partisan because the romance of national building capacity predates current partisan alignments. It belongs to FDR and Eisenhower and LBJ and the Reagan of accelerated depreciation. It belongs to the country before 1986.

Frame 3: why can’t we build bungalow courts anymore?

covers courtyard apartments better than I will over at Courtyard Urbanist, so I’m going to come at this from the precursor.

You know the form when you see it. A cluster of small one- and two-bedroom homes arranged around a shared landscaped courtyard. Four to ten units. Two or three stories. Wood windows, built-in cabinetry, decorative tile. Front porches that face the courtyard rather than the street, so when you come home you walk through a garden to your front door and your neighbor is on her porch and her kid is playing on the path between the units and the bougainvillea is doing what bougainvillea does in October light. The form is called the bungalow court. It was pioneered in Pasadena and Hollywood in the 1910s, spread across the Los Angeles basin in the 1920s, and was killed in the 1930s and 1940sby zoning ordinances, parking minimums, and the FHA underwriting standards that pushed American multifamily toward the double-loaded-corridor apartment block we have been building, more or less unchanged, ever since.

The bungalow courts that survived are beloved a century after they were built. They are nationally registered historic districts. They are the things people fly to Pasadena to walk through. They are also, as a building type, the most obvious example of missing middle housing: the form factor that everyone who has stood in one understands as what good American urbanism looks like, and that nobody has been able to build at scale for ninety years.

It isn’t because we forgot how. The form is well documented. Architects know how to draw it. Contractors know how to build it. Cities are starting to allow it again. The problem is that nobody can finance it. The Terner Center’s 2024 analysis finds that under current financing terms, missing-middle projects are not financially feasible in most California markets. The only category that pencils is for-sale duplexes in the East Bay and Sacramento. Harvard GSD’s researchconfirms the structural problem: the current financial system is designed primarily to support either single-family homes or large multifamily developments, leaving missing-middle projects at a disadvantage. The small-balance construction loan that finances a six-to-twelve-unit courtyard building is the loan regional banks have stopped making, that GSEs have never made, and that private credit cannot price profitably.

Enterprise Community Partners’ analysis is explicit about what’s needed: low-interest, low-cost small-balance loans that cover a larger share of construction cost (80% or higher), plus loan guarantees and pre-development support. This is exactly what the state HFA accelerator funds and streamlined FHA 221(d)(4) deliver.

So the frame, in plain terms. We used to build a kind of building that everyone who has ever stood in one loves. The zoning fight to allow it again is half-won; the financing fight to make it pencil hasn’t started. Pull the levers above and the bungalow court can pencil again.

The coalition this frame assembles is the most aesthetically self-aware. New Urbanists. Missing-middle advocates. Strong Towns sympathizers. Landscape architects. Anyone who has ever stood in a 1925 courtyard at 4pm in October and felt the light come down through the bougainvillea and wondered why we stopped building this. The pitch is concrete and small and specific in a way the other frames are not: these levers will let us build bungalow courts again.That’s a promise that can be drawn. It can be photographed. It is not a demographic abstraction. It’s a place you can stand in.

So what?

Government-engineered financing vehicles are how ambitious American urbanism actually gets built. WED Enterprises was Walt’s. Reedy Creek was Walt and Roy’s. The Section 236 stack was the country’s, for the 1968-73 boom. Accelerated depreciation was the country’s, for the 1981-86 boom. The pattern is structural. The flat line is the cost of pretending otherwise.

Williams is right that the apparatus exists, the levers are mostly low-fiscal-cost, and the production response would come fast because the entitled-but-unbuilt pipeline is already roughly 750,000 units deep. The infrastructure that produced the 1968-73 boom is sitting there. Turn it back on.

The technical case is settled. The political case isn’t. The agenda needs framing that builds coalitions broader than “more apartments” has historically built. I’ve offered three as starting points, not a definitive list: let young Americans start their lives, build big like Walt did, and finance the bungalow courts. Better frames almost certainly exist. The work is to find them.

And the coalition starts with crediting the people who have actually been doing the work. The state organizers. The local YIMBYs. The council members who took the votes that cost them friends. The tenants’ rights folks and the missing-middle architects and the Strong Towns chapters and the Pasadena preservationists who keep the bungalow courts standing. They built every inch of political ground the federal credit agenda could plausibly stand on. Anyone who shows up to the federal conversation and treats them as a problem to be routed around is not a serious participant in that conversation.

The bankers told Walt Disney that outdoor amusement was a cultural anachronism that had already declined into senility. They were wrong. The equivalent dismissal of multifamily today, that the market can produce what we need without federal credit infrastructure, is wrong the same way.

The lamp above the firehouse is still lit. The flat line is the choice we keep making, and the choice is reversible, if we want it to be.

Cities around the world keep losing their commercial cores. In America, suburban malls make the news when Macy’s announces another closure. In the United Kingdom, high streets bleed quietly, one boarded shopfront at a time, until the council notices that the business rates projections have gone hollow. In France, the cœurs de ville of mid-sized towns lose their merchants to out-of-town retail parks. In Japan, shotengai vacancy accelerates faster than municipal budgets can respond. In Korea, second-tier cities watch their downtowns empty while national urban-regeneration funding rises and falls with each election cycle.

The standard response in every country is familiar: do a very limited rezone the site (if we are lucky), subsidize the developer, build something maybe mixed-use (or luxury apartments with a brewery), declare victory, move on. This usually fails (in part not aggressive enough). When it works, as it did in Lakewood, Colorado, or in Margate, Kent, or in a growing list of French communes that have taken Action Cœur de Ville seriously, it works for reasons that have almost nothing to do with zoning and everything to do with the thing that is hardest to talk about: whether the local government involved is actually capable of executing a complex multi-year project with discipline. Most are not.

The reframe this piece turns on: commercial decline is a governance problem just as much it is a zoning/urbanist problem, which means it is also the best opportunity most cities will ever have to build real state capacity. Not a nuisance to be managed. A (dangerous) gym to build up local institutional muscle. We’ll come back to why.

Zoning reform (or just get rid of it) is necessary, and more than likely the prerequisite. Spend five minutes with the evidence on parking minimums, mixed-use prohibitions, and discretionary review timelines and the case becomes obvious. But zoning reform increases the number of attempts without changing the survival rate of each one. At the end of the day, businesses are probabilistic, not deterministic. A perfectly deregulated commercial district with great foot traffic and cheap rents will still see roughly half of its new restaurants fail within five years.

Which is bad for you, the policymaker, because you need tax revenue and visible results. Churn undercuts both: the storefront that closes after eighteen months doesn’t show up in the ribbon-cutting photos, and every visibly empty window is ammunition for the less development-friendly opposition you just beat to pass the reform in the first place.

So, if the odds are bad, can policy move the probability distribution: make more attempts possible, improve the survival rate of each attempt, catch the survivors before they fail for reasons unrelated to their underlying viability. What policy cannot do is make the distribution disappear.

What do YIMBYs and urbanists get from caring about what happens after a unit gets built? Everything. Both movements came out of substantive goals (affordability, jobs, quality of life) not procedural ones, and better local governance is what makes hard-fought reforms survive the next administration. Carmel (for urbanists) and Austin (for YIMBYs) didn't happen by accident.

The stakes are fiscal, not just about aesthetic

Before going further: this actually matters, and not for the reasons people who write about urbanism usually give.

Consider two shapes the damage takes. One fast, one slow.

The fast version is Pittsburgh Mills, in Frazer, Pennsylvania. One analysis documents assessed value falling from $148 million in 2018 to under $15 million by 2024. A 90% collapse of a local property tax base, from a single asset, in six years. Each dying lower-tier American mall also removes something in the range of $1.8 to $3 million in annual sales tax revenue from its host municipality. For some cities where one mall represents 20 to 30% of the local tax revenue. This is not a rounding error, and it’s clear that malls and downtowns are slow motion fiscal emergencies.

The slow version is Detroit, the case in any advanced economy where downtown and urban-core decline produced outright municipal bankruptcy, the largest in U.S. history, filed in 2013. By the mid-2010s, 23% of housing units were vacant, 36% of commercial parcels were vacant, and the property tax delinquency rate had skyrocketed to 54%. The bankruptcy was the visible event; the governance crisis had been developing for fifty years. Yes the city went bankrupted, and the main reason is the Great Recession. But before the recession, Detroit has a property tax base eroded to the point that even extraordinarily high rates cannot fund basic services, commercial vacancy that becomes structural rather than cyclical, and a fiscal situation that makes it easy for the Great Recession to break the city.

Detroit is an extreme example, but the mechanism is not unusual. In the UK, a high street with 30% vacancy generates substantially less in business rates than a healthy one, and the rates system punishes retail while exempting online commerce, so the distressed physical property pays more per pound of turnover than its online competitors. In France, communes rely on taxe foncière and the Cotisation Foncière des Entreprises; both erode with vacancy, and the TaSCom layer adds further exposure to peripheral retail that draws revenue away from the center. This is part of why the Opération de Revitalisation de Territoire framework, which lets participating communes block peripheral commercial permits, exists at all. In Japan, the fixed asset tax and city planning tax erode as shotengai vacancy accelerates, compounded by population decline and aging demographics that raise per-capita service costs. In Korea, property tax and local income surcharges follow the same curve, which is part of why the Urban Regeneration New Deal was framed as an emergency response to municipal fiscal deterioration rather than as ordinary urban policy.

The consequences are concrete. Schools, police, roads, transit, all funded from tax bases that this decline is dismantling.

The damage spreads outward. Cleveland research found that residential properties within 500 feet of tax-delinquent or foreclosed commercial sites experienced a 9.4% value loss between 2004 and 2009. We do not have Cleveland-grade contagion studies for every jurisdiction, and we want to be honest about that, but the qualitative pattern is consistent across UK high street research and Japanese shotengai work: a commercial core in visible decline depresses nearby residential desirability, slows new household formation, and accelerates the outflow of those who can leave. The residential tax base follows the commercial one, on a lag.

When a commercial district collapses, private service density collapses with it: not just retail, but clinics, pharmacies, banks, post offices, grocery stores, childcare. Residents still need these services, and local government either accepts degraded access or backfills at public cost from a tax base that’s simultaneously shrinking. Meanwhile the vacant properties themselves impose costs with no corresponding revenue: code enforcement, fire calls, policing, utility maintenance, planning department time absorbed by proposals that come and go. Across a high street with 30% vacancy or a downtown with more boarded plywood than open signage, staff time gets absorbed into reactive management rather than proactive anything.

Finally, the thing hardest to measure but that may matter most: when a city cannot keep its main commercial core functional, residents stop believing the local government is competent at anything else. That perception is downstream of the fiscal failures and upstream of everything the government wants to do next. A mayor trying to pass a transit bond, build affordable housing, expand school funding, or raise any tax for any purpose is negotiating from a weaker position if the commercial core of her city is visibly dying. A functioning commercial core is evidence of a functioning government. A dead one is evidence of the opposite, regardless of whose fault it actually was. Politics does not grade on fairness.

So why bother? Because this is the best forge you have.

Commercial decline is a serious governance crisis. It is also, paradoxically, an opportunity, and one most cities do not recognize while they are standing in the middle of it.

Three reasons.

First, the results are visible. A mayor who builds a pension fund’s long-term solvency is doing essential work nobody will ever thank her for. A mayor who revitalizes her downtown is doing work that every voter, every local business owner, every visiting relative can see and touch. The political economy of state capacity is usually cruel: the boring work that matters gets no credit, and the flashy work that does not matter gets all of it. Commercial revitalization is the rare case where the political incentive and the substantive outcome point in the same direction.

Second, the problem forces you to build capacity across every front at once. Most governance problems build one muscle. Passing a transit referendum builds lobbying capacity and not much else. Running a successful summer youth program builds contracting and program-management capacity in a narrow domain. Commercial revitalization is different. To do it well, a city has to build planning capacity (diagnostics, rezoning, urban design), financial capacity (grant writing, tax-credit stacking, developer negotiation), land-holding capacity (land banks, community land trusts, legal tools for moving hostile owners), business development capacity (the thing Singapore builds and almost nobody in the West has), and coalition capacity (anchor institutions, community organizations, state and national partners, successor administrations). This is the broadest-spectrum institutional workout any mid-sized city is ever going to encounter. And the capacities built here transfer. A land bank built to handle commercial properties can be retooled for housing. A coalition built to align hospitals and universities around commercial procurement can be redeployed for neighborhood health work. Anchor relationships outlast the specific project.

Third, if you fail, you still learn. The honest truth is that many cities will not fully succeed even when they try. The probabilistic nature of business formation, the hostility of absentee owners, the vagaries of national economic conditions, and the simple slowness of institutional change mean that perfect success is rare. But attempted revitalization produces institutional learning even when the specific project underdelivers. A city that tries and partly fails at a mall redevelopment has a planning department that now knows how to negotiate with developers, a finance office that has learned to work with CDFIs, and a place manager who understands retail. A city that does not try has none of those.

One caveat. This argument applies to cities that already have the problem. A city without commercial decline should not manufacture a commercial project to build state capacity. Different problems make different forges.

One more thing worth naming: the ownership asymmetry

Before turning to what the conventional response gets wrong, one structural observation that runs underneath everything else.

American enclosed malls typically have one owner. Downtowns, high streets, Singaporean strata malls, and most European commercial districts do not. This changes the problem fundamentally, and not in a simple direction.

A single-owner commercial district with an aligned owner is the fastest-moving case in the entire revitalization literature. One negotiation produces site control. No 80% strata consent. No hundreds of individual landlords to chase. One counterparty, one term sheet, one closing. When that alignment exists, nothing in the distributed-ownership literature moves as fast.

A single-owner commercial district with a hostile or indifferent owner is among the hardest cases any mayor faces. A REIT holds the mall through bankruptcy. A successor lender takes it back in foreclosure. An absentee investor holds it for tax loss, or for the option value of eventual land appreciation, and has decided that doing nothing is the most profitable choice. The city then finds itself with one very powerful stakeholder who cannot be moved by any land-use tool the American system currently provides. Eminent domain exists in theory but is politically radioactive and legally uncertain for commercial property. The UK’s High Street Rental Auctions do not exist in America. French préemption commercial does not exist in America. The city is stuck.

A downtown, a high street, or a shotengai is neither: always a collective action problem, slower than the aligned-owner case and more workable than the hostile-owner case. Slower because coordinating many owners takes time, and the tools for forcing coordination are weak in most jurisdictions. More workable because the city can build coalitions with owners who want to cooperate even when others refuse to engage. Progress is incremental but not blocked.

The tools that work in one case often don’t work in the others. Land banks, HSRAs, préemption, community land trusts: these are distributed-ownership tools that consolidate what the market cannot. At a single-owner mall they are largely beside the point; the question there is whether the counterparty can be moved, and if not, whether the city has the legal and financial staying power to make inaction more expensive than cooperation over time. Conversely, the kind of negotiation discipline that makes single-owner mall redevelopment work is not the skill a downtown revitalization actually needs. A downtown needs coalition capacity, patience, and the ability to hold many small wins together long enough to add up to something.

Much of what makes mall redevelopment look successful in the American literature is selection bias: the cases we read about are the ones where the single owner was eventually aligned. The cases where the owner was not aligned do not become cases. They become permanent vacancy, because nothing in the toolkit can move them.

Why the conventional response doesn’t work

The standard move (rezone, subsidize, build mixed-use, attract tenants) has two problems. First, it treats the upstream cause as if it were the downstream symptom. Second, it assumes that someone competent is going to execute.

Commercial decline is downstream of institutional failure, not upstream. Fragmented ownership, absent governance, thin planning capacity, weak business development, disinvested social fabric: these produce the vacancy, not the other way around. Fixing the buildings without fixing the institutions produces what the UK High Streets Task Force, after working with 149 English high streets over five years, honestly called activity without transformation.

The evidence on delegated private management is not subtle. Between November 2020 and June 2021, three major publicly traded mall REITs filed for Chapter 11: CBL & Associates, Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust, and Washington Prime Group. CBL alone was managing 107 properties totaling 66.7 million square feet across 26 states. PREIT filed for bankruptcy a second time by 2024. Mall management firms are doing exactly what they were designed to do. That is the problem. Their obligation runs to investors and creditors, which translates into optimizing net operating income. No accountability to the municipal tax base, the surrounding neighborhood, or the small businesses that depend on foot traffic. And when one entity owns 100-plus malls and its financial model fails, the whole portfolio fails at once: fast, visible, bankruptable. The cities hosting those malls also lose control at once; bankruptcy reorganizations are slow, and cities that had been negotiating with CBL suddenly found themselves negotiating with a lender, then with a creditor committee, then with whichever entity emerged from reorganization. Each handoff reset the relationship. A city without sustained capacity across years loses the thread entirely.

The downtown equivalent is less visible because it rarely produces a single failure event. Instead, you get the slow distributed version: hundreds of absentee landlords making individually rational decisions that collectively produce vacancy, decay, and no one to hold accountable. The principal-agent problem is harder to name when it is distributed across consultants, developers, and BIDs rather than concentrated in a REIT. It is the same problem, less legible.

Business Improvement Districts are the institutionalized version of the delegation move, and the evidence is more differentiated than either side of the BID debate tends to allow. The NYU Furman Center found that large BIDs in dense Manhattan predicted a 15% commercial property value gain over ten years, though Ellen, Schwartz, and Voicufound the gain disappears when a third of the BID budget goes to the executive director, and mid-sized and smaller BIDs showed no discernible effect at all. The deeper critique, from a fifty-year reappraisal of BID scholarship: BID governance excludes renters, workers, and residents, so BIDs optimize for what property owners value (security, cleanliness, brand attractiveness) rather than what communities need (affordable space, diverse business mix, support for incumbent independents). Our point is narrower. BIDs can clean streets. They cannot improve the survival probability of a merchant whose business model has been disrupted.

Japan offers the most instructive cautionary tale. The machizukuri sanpo, a package of three laws enacted between 1998 and 2000, was Japan’s attempt to address commercial core decline at national scale. The research is sobering: these laws did not revitalize city centers. An MIT study found Town Management Organizations made negligible contributions, largely because TMO boards were dominated by commercial stakeholders, funded by government without performance pressure, and participated in by residents only nominally. This is, almost exactly, the accountability failure of American BIDs translated into a different national context. When the same institutional design fails in two countries for the same reasons, the design is the problem.

The conventional response fails because the conventional framing is wrong. The question is not how to fix this mall, this downtown, or this high street. It is what capacities the decline is asking us to build.

What the reframe implies

If commercial decline is a capacity problem rather than just a simple real estate one, then the question becomes: what, concretely, does a city have to build?

Five things. They are not a toolkit. A toolkit implies the tools are the point. They are not. The capacities are. Each of these capacities, once built, transfers to every other hard problem a city faces. Zoning reform sits inside the first capacity. It is necessary. It is also one part of one capacity.

Capacity 1: Planning, with urbanism as a cross-cutting layer

Planning capacity is the ability to diagnose, design, and execute changes to the built environment that survive legal challenge and political turnover. Urbanism (how blocks, streets, uses, and transit interact to generate foot traffic) lives inside this capacity. It is one lever among several, or even the prerequisite for all other levers. Foot traffic is necessary for commercial activity; foot traffic alone produces tourists, not functioning commercial districts.

What the capacity actually includes: the ability to run a commercial district diagnostic, with every vacant property, every owner, every vacancy duration, and every business quality assessment tracked. The ability to execute rezoning that survives legal challenge: upzoning, mixed-use overlays, form-based codes, all of which most cities in every jurisdiction we examine have to relearn. The ability to reform (or eliminate) parking minimums, which in most jurisdictions is administrative rather than legislative and yet remains one of the most underused year-one levers available. And the ability to steer public facilities to where they do the most commercial good.

That last one is the Japanese contribution, and most planners outside Japan haven’t absorbed it. Field research returns to a simple finding: concentrating city hall offices, hospitals, clinics, libraries, and kindergartens in or adjacent to the downtown core creates the resident demand commercial activity requires. When institutions relocate to peripheral sites, they take their customers with them. Japan has built this into planning law through the Location Optimization Plan under the 2014 revision of the Law on Special Measures for Urban Revitalization, which requires municipalities to designate urban function concentration zones and residential guidance zones. Toyama City is the best-documented case. Its “dumplings and sticks” concept (residential areas as dumplings, transit lines as sticks connecting them to the core) has concentrated population and commercial activity around downtown. A mayor anywhere can borrow the discipline without borrowing the statute: think about where public investment locates, what it draws around it, and how transit ties the result together.

Villa Italia Mall in Lakewood, Colorado closed in 2001 with over 50% vacancy, and was rebuilt as Belmar: 80 shops, 20 restaurants, 300,000 square feet of office, 3,500-plus residents, nine acres of parks. It now generates roughly $17 million annually in tax revenue, more than four times what the old mall produced. Three things made this work, none of them zoning alone. The city acted early, before the tax base had collapsed. It recruited the developer rather than responding to a developer proposal, which preserved negotiating leverage. And it broke the 104-acre site into 22 city blocks with a conventional street grid, which turned the urban design into its own governance discipline.

Chattanooga, Tennessee is the downtown equivalent, over forty years rather than ten. By the 1980s, Chattanooga had a deteriorating downtown and an industrial pollution problem that had earned it the label of America’s dirtiest city. What followed (a ULI panel in the mid-1980s, the Vision 2000 initiative, the River City Company seeded with $12 million from foundations and banks, the Tennessee Aquarium, the pedestrianized Walnut Street Bridge, a 22-mile riverwalk) produced downtown retail vacancy below 2% by 2016 and 23% downtown residential population growth from 2000 to 2015. Belmar and Chattanooga are not copies of each other. They share a deeper pattern: accountable governance with political stakes, simultaneous attention to container and content, and sustained institutional commitment across election cycles rather than within them.

When this capacity is absent, it looks like Youngstown. Youngstown, Ohio lost 60% of its 1930 population and in 2005 adopted planned contraction as its governing strategy, the first major American city to formally accept that it would be smaller going forward. The plan was visionary. MIT research found it was only partially implemented as zoning, because of political, legal, social, and economic resistance. The gap between the plan and the zoning is the capacity gap. It is common, and it is expensive.

Capacity 2: Financial capacity

Financial capacity is mostly an administrative problem, not a money problem. The federal toolkit exists. Most small cities cannot access it. The same logic applies, with different specifics, across the OECD.

The most underused lever we found is the Federal Historic Tax Credit. Since 1976, it has leveraged $257.8 billion in private investment and produced 3.4 million jobs. Half of all projects are in neighborhoods at or below 80% of area median income. The National Trust reports a $1.20 return in tax revenue per dollar invested. For a mayor with an eligible historic building at risk of demolition (a downtown hotel, a Main Street bank, a former department store), the HTC is often the most powerful tool available, because it makes private rehabilitation financially viable without requiring public capital. No new legislation needed. The State Historic Preservation Office is already staffed to walk developers through the certification process. The reason the HTC is underused is not policy; it is that most municipal planning departments do not know it exists. European and Asian equivalents (UK Historic England grants and Architectural Heritage Fund loans, French monuments historiques fiscal advantages, Japanese and Korean cultural property designations) are narrower in scope but exist.

Community Development Block Grants are the most flexible U.S. federal program for commercial revitalization, and Iowa’s Downtown Revitalization Fund is a well-documented state deployment. The catch is that accessing CDBG requires a Consolidated Plan, HUD compliance, and reporting capacity; for smaller cities, the first investment is often staff, not projects. New Markets Tax Credit offers a 39% federal credit over seven years but requires a CDFI partnership most cities do not have. Both tools are real; both require partner capacity that is itself the thing to invest in.

TIF deserves honesty about its record. It is authorized in 49 of 50 U.S. states, with at least 10,000 districts nationwide, and David Merriman’s Lincoln Institute review of 30-plus studies concluded that in most cases, TIF has not accomplished the goal of promoting economic development. The “but-for” test gets gamed. Retail TIFs shift activity without creating it. In Chicago, roughly $660 million (nearly a third of all city property taxes) flows to TIF districts, shielded from standard budget oversight. TIF is defensible when paired with a specific project and rigorous “but-for” discipline, as in Belmar. It is least defensible as a general downtown subsidy program. The capacity question is whether your city can run the “but-for” test with integrity. If the answer is no, TIF is not the right tool, regardless of what neighboring cities are doing with it.

Main Street America remains the most evidence-backed template for downtown commercial district management in the U.S., though its reported statistics are self-reported by participating communities rather than independently evaluated. The $115 billion reinvested, the 815,000 net jobs, the $18.03 per dollar return: treat these as pattern evidence rather than causal estimates. The finding that holds up across independent research bodies is narrower and more important: Texas Main Street is explicit that effective downtown revitalization requires paid staff. Volunteer management underperforms paid management. This appears in the Main Street literature, the BID literature, and the UK High Streets Task Force findings. When three independent bodies of research agree on something this specific, it is worth believing.

Capacity 3: Land-holding capacity

Land-holding capacity is the ability to acquire, hold, and redirect distressed commercial properties when private markets will not, whether those properties are dead anchor stores, vacant downtown blocks, or individual high street shops an absentee landlord refuses to lease. Fragmented ownership is the single largest structural barrier to adaptive reuse we encountered in every jurisdiction, and it is also where the international evidence diverges most sharply. Different countries have given their local governments very different powers to act on it.

The American tradition is the land bank, where state enabling legislation permits it. Dan Kildee’s Genesee County model has inspired over 250 similar efforts nationwide, and land banks have done particularly important work in legacy-industrial cities with large downtown and near-downtown vacant inventories, including Detroit itself, where the land bank is now one of the largest landowners in the city. Where enabling legislation is absent, advocating for it at the state level is a medium-term investment. The Champlain Housing Trust, seeded with a $200,000 city grant under then-Mayor Bernie Sanders, now stewards 3,000-plus housing units and 160,000-plus square feet of nonresidential space, and over 200 other CLTs have followed the Burlington template. Commercial CLTs are a newer and less-evaluated model. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston’s Roxbury, uniquely granted limited eminent domain authority, now stewards over 30 acres including commercial buildings. Systematic evaluation of commercial CLT outcomes is essentially absent; the case rests on governance logic and on the stronger housing CLT track record.

The French tools are the ones Americans and British mayors should genuinely envy. The droit de préemption commercial, codified in 2005, lets a commune designate a périmètre de sauvegarde, receive automatic notification of any sale of a fonds de commerce within that perimeter, and exercise preemption within two months. The commune must then rétrocède the property within two years to a merchant whose activity preserves commercial diversity. A 2023 Conseil d’État ruling clarified that this has to be used for a genuine development project, not as a blocking mechanism. The constraint is that the commune needs capital to buy and manage until rétrocession. The program is embedded in Action Cœur de Ville, literally Action for the Heart of the City, which since 2018 has mobilized more than €5 billion across 244 mid-sized communes. Phase 1 results include a 15% footfall increase and 91% elected-official satisfaction. The Opération de Revitalisation de Territoire framework lets signatory communes suspend peripheral commercial permits that undermine the center. A direct anti-peripheral mechanism. No Anglo-American equivalent exists.

The UK’s new power is High Street Rental Auctions, operational since December 2024. A property vacant for 365 or more days in a 24-month window can be designated, noticed, and, if the landlord fails to let within eight weeks, auctioned for a 1-to-5-year lease. Early adopters include Bassetlaw, Darlington, Mansfield, and Rugby. Industry analysis flags real capacity constraints around surveying, legal fees, and judicial review risk. In Broxtowe, the threat alone was sufficient to prompt a landlord to act without the council completing the process. The carrot-and-stick effect is real.

The most reproducible move in the distributed-ownership case is activation before renovation. Japanese field research consistently finds that creating reasons for people to come to the commercial center (farmers markets, festivals, concerts, whatever) before investing in physical improvements works without large capital budgets. The related move is cheap space for new entrepreneurs, removing the financial barrier to entry; the MAD City project in Matsudo subleased nearly vacant buildings cheaply without restoration obligations. Germany arrived at the same insight under harder conditions: Leipzig’s population fell from 700,000 to under 500,000, housing vacancy hit 20%, and Stadtumbau Ost, launched 2002 with €2.7 billion in federal and state funding, allowed demolition as a legitimate tool while managing interim vacancy through Zwischennutzungen: community gardens, artist spaces, green infrastructure. Leipzig was growing again by 2008.

Returning to the single-owner mall question. When the owner is aligned, none of this matters. Land-holding capacity is beside the point, because the city can negotiate directly for site control. When the owner is not aligned, none of this works either, because the distributed-ownership tools assume fragments to consolidate. What the city needs instead is a different set of tools: receivership frameworks that can take properties from negligent owners, mandatory maintenance codes that create holding costs, land-value taxation that makes sitting on vacant commercial property expensive, and legal staying power across multiple administrations to pursue these remedies to their conclusion. Few cities have built these well. This is among the largest gaps in municipal capacity anywhere, and one of the hardest to close, because most of the fixes require state or national legislation that varies by jurisdiction. We return to this in the advocacy agenda.

Capacity 4: Business development capacity

Business development capacity is the ability to improve the survival probability of the businesses operating in a commercial district, not just to rehabilitate the buildings around them. This is the most underbuilt capacity in every Western city we examined, and it is where international comparison yields the clearest transferable lessons. Physical rehabilitation creates the conditions for commercial improvement. It does not produce it. A renovated storefront occupied by a low-quality business is still a low-quality business.

The institutional state of the art is Singapore’s Heartland Enterprise Centre, established in 2019 and fully funded by Enterprise Singapore. HECS assisted more than 2,000 heartland enterprises in 2024 alone. The Heartland Enterprise Placemaking Grant funds merchants to organize promotional events. The Enhanced Visual Merchandising Programme helps shops refresh storefronts. The Heartland Innovation and Transformation programme places selected merchants in incubator spaces (Sprout@AMK in Ang Mo Kio is the first) for twelve months of mentorship and concept testing, after which graduates can apply for subsidized HDB shop space. The 2026 Singapore budget expanded the program further as a deliberate instrument of neighborhood commercial quality uplift. This is not generic small business advice. This is the machinery of moving the survival probability distribution.

Two of HECS’s four components are within reach of most mid-sized Western cities within a mayoral term, a third requires foundational land-holding work first, and the fourth is probably not coming. Placemaking grants for merchant-organized events are fully transferable: any Main Street organization or chamber of commerce can administer something equivalent on a modest budget. Visual merchandising technical assistance is partially transferable with one dedicated hire paired with an existing place-management program. Incubator space with subsidized post-graduation retail depends on public ownership of commercial space (HDB, in Singapore’s case), which requires a commercial CLT, a land bank, or structured public-private leasing to replicate. And the coordinated inter-agency support across planning, housing, and heritage (Enterprise Singapore acting with URA, HDB, and the National Heritage Board under a single ministry) is the component that genuinely requires Singapore-level state capacity. No American or British analogue exists. Planning around its absence is more useful than pining for it.

Seoul’s Sewoon Sangga project shows the same dual-capacity pattern at a different scale, in a downtown megastructure rather than a neighborhood heartland. When Mayor Park Won-soon reversed the demolition decision in 2015, the plan attended to both container and content. The Suri Cooperative Association linked Sewoon’s craftspeople to new customers: business development organized explicitly to protect existing commercial ecology during regeneration. Per Brookings: visitors tripled, vacancy fell from 30 to 18 units, and the new tenant mix (VR, robotics, CNC manufacturing alongside traditional electronics repair and printing) reflects deliberate ecology-preservation strategy. The caveat is obvious: Seoul Metropolitan Government has professional staff that Daejeon, Gwangju, and Changwon do not, but the institutional move is portable even if the scale is not.

Can’t we just simply regulate businesses? Well, San Francisco’s formula retail ordinance is the closest the Western literature gets to moving the distribution through regulation (which is going as well as you can expect). In controlled neighborhood commercial districts, 10% of businesses are formula retail, versus 25% elsewhere, though the causal attribution is genuinely contested and the Planning Department itself recommended raising the threshold from 11 to 19 locations. Formula retail restriction works best in high-demand markets where vacant storefronts fill quickly; in struggling districts with chronic vacancy, it may leave you with empty storefronts rather than local ones. It does not improve the odds of the individual business.

Capacity 5: Coalition capacity

Coalition capacity is the ability to convene, align, and sustain the institutions whose cooperation determines whether any of the other four capacities produce durable outcomes. Anchor institutions. Community organizations. Business associations. State and national partners. Philanthropic funders. Successor administrations who will inherit whatever you leave behind.

The most documented American template is the Cleveland Greater University Circle model, which is a near-downtown case, not a mall case. Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and Case Western Reserve University (convened by the Cleveland Foundation) aligned hiring, procurement, housing, and transportation commitments across seven surrounding neighborhoods. The outcomes: 859 new housing units, the Evergreen Cooperatives with 225 employees in worker-owned businesses linked to institutional supply chains, $44 million in transportation infrastructure. The Affordable Care Act requirement that nonprofit hospitals conduct community health needs assessments every three years created a policy lever U.S. mayors did not previously have. European equivalents exist but are patchier; the UK’s NHS Integrated Care Systems and the French contrats locaux de santé framework both open convening opportunities that local governments underuse.

Margate shows sustained council commitment at the UK scale: a Victorian seafront town with a decaying core rather than either a mall or a classic downtown, but structurally the same problem. The Turner Contemporary gallery, opened 2011, plus Thanet District Council’s compulsory purchase and restoration of Dreamland, plus more than a decade of partnership between Thanet and Kent County Council. Reported outcomes: 3.9 million gallery visits, 19% tourism sector growth between 2013 and 2015, £47 million added annually, 300 jobs at the two anchors, £22.2 million in Levelling Up funding. Disentangling Turner Contemporary from concurrent Kent tourism trends is genuinely hard, and the gallery itself acknowledges that not all benefits have been shared by local residents; pockets of deprivation remain. Margate generates visitors and property investment. It does not, by itself, reduce incumbent-resident poverty. The institutional lesson is the sustain itself: more than a decade of coordinated council commitment, not a flagship intervention.

Chattanooga works at this level too, the same case from Capacity 1, doing different work. The coalition half of the Chattanooga story is the 40-year commitment: ULI panel, Vision 2000, the River City Company with its seed capital from eight foundations and seven banks, held together across administrations. Critics reasonably note the benefits flowed unevenly, and this is not a poverty-reduction case. But the institutional sustain is real, and it was produced by coalition capacity, not any single tool.

What happens without this capacity is summarized most clearly by the UK High Streets Task Force. The task force engaged 149 high streets over five years. Its final finding: the main barrier to high street revitalization was the lack of suitable local governance structures. Not ideas. Not funding. Not expertise. Governance. 40% of places visited needed stronger partnerships before any substantive work could begin. You can recommend as much as you like, but it often does not make any difference if the resources aren’t there to deliver. That is the single most important sentence in the five-year task force report.

Korea institutionalizes this well in principle. The Urban Regeneration Special Act 2013 requires each designated urban regeneration area to have a Support Center, a local technical assistance body staffed by planners, designers, and community organizers, with a five-year local activation team that keeps projects alive. The institutional structure is sound. Korea’s problem is that national funding has fluctuated sharply across political cycles, and coalition capacity at the local level is the only thing that partially protects against that.

A (admittedly cliché) call to action

Most cities are not short of space. They have enormous amounts of it. Dead mall pads. Hollow downtown blocks. Half-empty high streets. Vacant shotengai. Shuttered cœurs de ville. What they are short, is ideas, which at the institutional level means capacity. For the cities that have this problem (and hundreds across every country in this piece do), the commercial district is not just a crisis to manage. It is the best opportunity those cities will ever have to build the state capacity they need for everything else. The results are visible, which means voters will reward the work. The problem demands five capacities at once, which means the institutional muscle transfers to housing, transit, climate, and whatever comes next. Even partial success produces real learning.

A mayor who thinks she is fighting to save a mall is fighting the wrong war. A mayor who thinks she is building the institutions her city will need for the next thirty years is fighting the right one, and using the mall as the forge.

Every dead mall, every hollowing downtown, every emptying high street, every struggling shotengai, every shuttered cœur de ville, these are the training ground for every other hard problem a city will face.

The question is not whether to intervene. The question is whether the intervention leaves the city more capable than it found it.

Appendix: the five-minute country cheat sheet

For practitioners who want the jurisdiction-specific starting point.

• United States: Main Street America, Center for Community Progress (land banking), LISC (CDFI and financing), NPS Technical Preservation Services (HTC), Democracy Collaborative (anchor institutions), National League of Cities.

• United Kingdom: Institute of Place Management, High Streets Task Force legacy, Power to Change, BID Foundation.

• France: ANCT (Action Cœur de Ville, Petites Villes de Demain), Banque des Territoires, CEREMA.

• Japan: Cabinet Office Urban Revitalization HQ, MLIT.

• South Korea: MOLIT, URIS, Seoul Solution.

• Singapore (reference model): URA, Heartland Enterprise Centre

On March 26, 2026, the Austin City Council unanimously voted to legalize Accessory Commercial Units and Front Yard Businesses: small commercial spaces, up to 200 square feet, that homeowners can operate from residential lots. A bakery in a converted garage. A corner store stocking what surrounding blocks actually buy. A coffee window cut into the side of a bungalow. All now legal, by-right, in a major American city. The vote went almost unnoticed outside planning circles. It should not have.

Here is what Austin just did, in terms the real estate market will recognize. Walkable urban neighborhoods (the Georgetowns, West Villages, Pearl Districts, Beacon Hills) command price premiums of 50% to 200% over comparable non-walkable neighborhoods in the same metros. Christopher Leinberger’s research at George Washington has documented that walkable urban places occupy roughly 1% of land in major U.S. metros but capture disproportionate shares of office and retail rent premiums. Demand clearly exceeds supply. One of the most beloved things about Disney World, for what it’s worth, is its walkability.

And yet, in the entire 21st century, the U.S. has produced nearly zero new walkable neighborhoods, and even fewer through conventional development. The few exceptions don’t inspire confidence, even though urbanists and residents love them. Culdesac Tempe, the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in modern America, required a startup, a zoning negotiation, and about five years to deliver one neighborhood. Carmel, Indiana required a 28-year mayoralty under Jim Brainard and hundreds of millions in public investment to produce one walkable downtown district inside an otherwise well-designed but still car-dependent suburb of cul-de-sacs and roundabouts. Walkability has a scaling problem.

Austin’s vote is the first serious attempt by a major American city to fix it through a different mechanism. ACUs are a refinement of what ADUs already proved with their alchemy. ADUs, at the end of the day, added housing to (mostly) desirable neighborhoods one parcel at a time, faster than any conventional project. ACUs do the same thing for the other half of the walkable-neighborhood equation: destinations.

The premium and the bottleneck

The walkable urban premium is well documented and routinely ignored by policy. The pattern is the same across markets. Office rents in walkable urban places run 75% above their drivable suburban equivalents. For-sale residential and retail command comparable premiums, with neighborhood retail sustaining rents big-box formats simply cannot match. A small fraction of the metropolitan footprint produces a disproportionate share of economic output and an even larger share of land value.

The supply side is the puzzle. American cities know how to build subdivisions, office parks, big-box retail, and strip malls. They don’t know how to build walkable neighborhoods, and the evidence is in the production stats. Two prominent new examples in the last quarter-century. One required a startup-backed developer and a desert. The other required a generational mayor and a downtown island floating in a sea of conventional suburbia.

Carmel is a real accomplishment. The few hundred acres of walkable urbanism it produced are valuable both as places and as proof that retrofit is possible. But even the modern gold standard of American suburban retrofit, run by the most committed mayor of his generation, produced walkability for a small fraction of the city’s footprint. If 28 years and a singular political career buys you one walkable district inside one suburb, the conventional pathway is in worse shape than the conventional praise of Carmel suggests.

The building across the street

Walk almost any older American neighborhood and you’ll pass it: a small commercial use operating inside a residential zone, legally, profitably, without complaint. A corner store. A neighborhood bakery. A barbershop in what used to be a front parlor. These exist because they were grandfathered when the zoning changed in the mid-20th century. Strong Towns documents these “clearly used to be a corner store” houses as architectural fossils: the chamfered corner, the slightly-too-large front window, the faded ghost-sign on the brick.

You can guess where this goes. An identical building, proposed today, three blocks over, would be illegal. Same footprint. Same use. Same neighborhood. Different answer. The grandfathered store doesn’t generate traffic chaos. It certainly doesn’t depress property values. The cities most celebrated for their charm (Portland, New Orleans, Charleston, older parts of Boston) are precisely the cities where these uses survived. The Bywater corner store profiled in Planning magazine is one of thousands of examples sitting in plain sight.

The control group and the treatment group sit across from each other on the same block. The grandfathered corner store anchors a neighborhood that, partly because of the store, commands a premium. The block with the store is worth more than the block without. We’re arguing to legalize a value-creation mechanism that already works in every major American city. You can see it in operation. You don’t have to speculate about it.

Two columns of math

The economic case for ACUs is clearest in two columns of numbers.

Column one is what an ACU bakery costs to launch, all in. A homeowner converting an existing garage or front room pays only for equipment and inventory: $10,000 to $25,000 per the standard home-bakery cost data, with some operators starting on as little as $5,000. A homeowner building a new accessory structure adds the shell cost. Austin ADU construction runs $80,000 to $150,000 for a full residential unit; a 200-square-foot commercial accessory structure without full residential plumbing should run materially less, maybe $20,000 to $50,000, though direct ACU construction data is thin. All in for new construction: roughly $30,000 to $75,000.

Column two is the alternative. A small leased brick-and-mortar bakery typically runs $26,600 to $36,700 at the low end before lease deposits, and that’s for borrowed space the operator doesn’t own. A medium commercial bakery, per Sharpsheets data from 1,600+ bakeries, requires $125,200 to $393,000 (leasing mind you). A franchised Panera runs nearly $1 million. This is all before ACUs.

You most likely aren’t going to build an ACU from scratch in this example (unless your neighbors really, really love your baked goods). So for the more realistic case, a garage-conversion ACU bakery launches somewhere between roughly one-third and near-parity with a small leased bakery, depending where you land in each range. Against a medium commercial format, though, even the high end of the garage conversion comes in at a fraction of the cost. The new-construction ACU bakery is messier: its top end ($75K) overlaps with the bottom end of a medium commercial build ($125K), so the savings are real but not dramatic at the margin. And critically, in both ACU cases, the operator owns the asset rather than renting it, which changes the long-run economics entirely. Add lease deposits and monthly rent to the column-two numbers and the gap widens over time.

But the more interesting number is the one that doesn’t appear on the bakery’s books. The bakery is not just selling coffee (well, it probably is selling coffee, alongside the baked goods). It’s producing value, and almost none of that value shows up on its P&L. The operator captures the coffee margin and builds equity in a small commercial structure. The neighborhood captures the bigger prize (if you run a good business): amenity capitalization, because people genuinely do want to grab a fresh bagel or croissant or whatever before heading out to work. Leinberger’s work and the broader literature on amenity capitalization suggest the value uplift on surrounding parcels from successful neighborhood-serving commerce is measurable and significant. Direct ACU-specific studies don’t yet exist. The inference rests on the broader walkable-premium evidence, but it’s a strong one.

That’s the point of the ACU as a policy instrument. It lets a small operator produce a large public good, financed by their own willingness to run a business and own a small structure. The city writes one ordinance and gets a value-creation engine in return.

What a storefront is for

There’s a question worth asking before we go further: in an age of Amazon next-day delivery and ghost kitchens, why does the visible storefront matter at all? (Besides the fact that Amazon didn’t really kill retail. Private equity did. RIP Joann Fabrics.) Why not just let the bakery operate from a hidden production kitchen and ship?

Because the storefront is the product, not just a delivery mechanism for goods. A residential block punctuated by a hand-painted bakery sign, a corner store’s chalkboard listing today’s tacos, a coffee window with two stools tells a passerby this is a place where things happen. It tells them it’s reasonable to walk here. The grandfathered corner store on a Boston side street is photographed by tourists. The identical-on-paper block four miles out is not. The difference shows up in property values, in tax base, in the simple fact of people choosing to live there.

Austin’s resolution rejected the existing legal preference for what it called “hidden” commerce and embraced “the active, visible neighborhood engagement that defines Austin’s character.” Visible commerce is a public good, and the public pays for it in rent, home prices, and neighborhood premiums.

This is also why ACUs can’t be replaced by their digital substitutes. Walkability isn’t a market for goods. It’s a market for the presence of small commerce within walking distance, and presence requires visibility.

ACUs were only possible because of ADU normalization and the demand for denser housing (for whatever reason, people want to live near each other). The 2010s and the HOME initiative’s three-units-per-lot reform created the cultural and procedural baseline. The 2026 ACU vote arrived on top of a decade of that work. Berkeley, Spokane, and Burien are following similar paths, and Texas H.B. 2464 and S.B. 541 already protect “no-impact” home businesses statewide.

The hardest objection

The objection that matters isn’t traffic, parking, or gentrification. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re on the urbanist or YIMBY side of things, so your real objection is probably this: a 200-square-foot bakery is a curiosity, not a policy. ACUs at this scale won’t move the needle on walkability or housing affordability at any scale that counts.

ACUs, like ADUs, are easier to set up despite being more expensive per square foot to build. And one corner store per residential block in a typical Austin neighborhood, plus a few specialty operators (the bakery, the coffee window, the bicycle repair) layered on top, would replicate the destination density that the grandfathered pattern already produces and that already commands a premium. It’ll take time. But like ADUs, which genuinely surprised everyone with how many units they ended up producing, ACUs may transmute neighborhoods in ways we don’t fully see yet.

Each successful ACU also makes the next one politically and culturally easier, the way each successful ADU did. The 200-square-foot cap is annoyingly low, but it’s a floor, not a ceiling. The trajectory of these reforms (visible already in Burien’s draft framework) is upward, toward 1,500-square-foot neighborhood corner stores.

I should also address Pomona, because it’s the most important counter-data point. Pomona legalized ACUs by-right and has not yet seen homeowners apply. The lesson is humbling. Legalization is necessary but insufficient. Cities serious about ACUs need to build the supply chain alongside the ordinance: financing pathways, pre-approved design templates, a permit concierge for the first wave of applicants, demonstration projects that show neighbors what a successful ACU actually looks like. Austin’s parallel investments in ADU lending pathways suggest the city has learned this lesson. Other cities should learn it before passing the ordinance, not after.

NIMBYs, at the end of the day, are going to NIMBY. But it’s going to be fun pointing out the grandfathered rebuttals. Traffic? Point across the street at the grandfathered store that hasn’t generated any. Property values? Point at the premium attached to the block with the bakery. Neighbor opposition? Point at the surveys showing that residents of blocks with small commercial spaces describe them, in Berkeley’s case, as the reason the neighborhood “feels like a community.” Revealed preference is what people pay premiums to live near. Strong NIMBYs, just like with ADUs, will always oppose the new whatever, but they also have a nasty habit of building out what’s good for them personally: some want their own ADU. All of them just don’t want others building one.

A note on what ACUs will and won’t do. A 200-square-foot homeowner-operated corner store is not about to disrupt 7-Eleven. The format will stock a curated selection because it has to. It’s small. That’s the point. The ACU corner store wins on walking distance and curation, not on selection. It fills a gap that convenience-store retail abandoned years ago: the half-block, daily-trip, recognize-the-owner gap. It doesn’t compete with the corridor formats. It complements them, or ignores them.

The production process for the premium

The reforms that change cities most are rarely the ones that cost the most. They’re the ones that remove a small obstacle to something people already want to do. ACUs cost a city nothing to legalize. They generate tax revenue, foot traffic, social capital, entrepreneurship, and the street-level texture no master plan can manufacture from above.

The next Georgetown won’t be built. It’ll be grown, parcel by parcel, by homeowners who were finally allowed to. Austin started growing one in March. Cities that legalize the growing will capture the premium. Cities that wait for the next Culdesac probably won’t get one.

If you’re a developer, treat ACU progress as a leading indicator for land acquisition. The amenity capitalization will accrue to surrounding parcels well before it accrues to the ACU operator. If you’re a mayor, write the ordinance now instead of waiting for a Brainard-grade political career to materialize. If you’re a franchise strategist, design the 200-to-1,500-square-foot neighborhood concept before your competitors do, the way Starbucks colonized commercial corridors a generation ago. And if you just care about the kind of neighborhood worth living in: the question isn’t whether the production process works. Austin proved it does. The question is which city builds the second one.

Everyone agrees that a lot of new American buildings are ugly. Scan any neighborhood forum, any city council hearing, any urbanist Twitter thread, and you will find near-universal consensus on this point: the blocky five-over-ones, the black-and-white “gentrification buildings,” the unornamented apartment blocks that have colonized commercial corridors from Seattle to Charlotte. Nobody likes them. The “ugly is fine” YIMBYs concede the premise when they tweet “I don’t care if it’s ugly, people need homes.” The NIMBYs concede it when they invoke design review boards as the last line of defense against aesthetic ruin. Both sides agree on the diagnosis. Both sides are wrong about the cause.

The standard explanation for the ugliness of contemporary American development points to developer greed, architectural laziness, or the inevitable tradeoffs of building at scale. The more important answer is regulatory: zoning codes, parking mandates, setback requirements, use separations, and the discretionary design review process have collectively created a narrow corridor of permissible building forms, and most developers are rationally optimizing within it.

If the ugliness is a product of regulation, then the remedy runs in the opposite direction from what NIMBYs propose: abolish the zoning codes and design review processes that constrain form, invest in the urban systems that produce collective beauty, and let the emergent intelligence of thousands of small actors do what committees cannot.

I should be clear about my commitments. I want to abolishing zoning and discretionary design review, to the point that it makes some YIMBYs uncomfortable on that front. I also want to stress that we urbanists and YIMBYs, part of a tradition that stretches from Jane Jacobs through New Urbanism through Strong Towns, a tradition that has always cared deeply about what cities look like. The “I don’t care if it’s ugly” posture adopted by a vocal faction within the movement is a deviation from that tradition, and it is both empirically unsupported and strategically counterproductive.

I should be precise about what I am criticizing. YIMBYism is an internet-native movement, and that is one of its great strengths. As a commenter said before, the internet is what allowed people who experience the diffuse benefits of new housing, future residents, priced-out renters, to find each other and organize in a way that previous generations of social scientists assumed was impossible. The Minneapolis YIMBYs made memes. Online discourse built the coalition.

What I am objecting to is not online advocacy but a specific annoying rhetorical concession: the claim that aesthetics do not matter, that ugliness is an acceptable price for units. That concession is loud but not representative of the broader movement. , a professor at Soka University of America who writes the newsletter , offered us a better frame for the common enemy in our conversation with him: not “NIMBYs” as people, but “freezing our towns in amber and endless sprawl.” The aesthetics question is central to both halves of that formulation.

College Towns

College Towns, where urbanism meets higher education.

By Ryan M Allen

If you care about building more housing, you should care about what it looks like. Not because beauty is more important than shelter (it isn’t) but because the evidence suggests you don’t have to choose.

The tools designed to produce beauty are producing ugliness

Since 1994, Seattle has subjected most new apartment construction to “design review,” in which building proposals must win approval from a volunteer citizen board. Dan Bertolet of the Sightline Institute undertook an exhaustive analysis of how this process actually functions. What he found should trouble anyone who believes that committee oversight produces better buildings.

Seattle’s design review board postponed approval of a 400-unit, transit-oriented development with 168 subsidized homes, objecting to the color, the presence of a ground-floor daycare, and the shape of the building. The East Design Review Board delayed 110 affordable homes and a daycare above Capitol Hill Station because they considered the design “really good” but not “great.” An ECONorthwest analysis found that projects in 2018 took 84 percent longer to move through the permitting process than comparable projects in 2010.

These are not isolated anecdotes. Architects in Seattle report that developers routinely choose worse designs to avoid triggering the design review threshold. As one architect told Sightline: developers’ first question is whether they can avoid design review, and firms regularly see “good clients building indifferent projects because the ‘better’ idea that we are pitching triggers a requirement for design review.” The process does not merely delay good buildings. It actively incentivizes bad ones.

In New York, the Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected a proposal to replace a crumbling two-story brick building with a superior design featuring a glass-and-metal storefront and a delicate brick screen. The original building, the commission determined, was “reflective of the period of significance.” Housing that survives this pageant arrives in a diminished state: delayed, downsized, and bearing rents that reflect months or years of regulatory compliance rather than the cost of beauty.

Design review was built in good faith. The intuition behind it (that aesthetic quality matters to communities, that citizen input should shape the built environment) is not unreasonable. We take that intuition seriously. The problem is that the process does not deliver on its own premises. Jack Nasar’s research on urban design aesthetics identifies the formal variables that drive positive aesthetic responses: order, moderate complexity, and elements of familiar styles. But design review boards optimize for consensus, not for any coherent aesthetic principle. The result is architecture designed to offend no one, which is to say architecture that delights no one. As of the early 1990s, 83 percent of surveyed American cities had adopted some form of design review. We could not locate a single peer-reviewed study demonstrating that these boards produce measurably better aesthetic outcomes than unreviewed construction.

, an urban planner and the writer of , showed us what the alternative to committee review looks like. In our interview, he described Giralda Avenue in Coral Gables, Florida, a formerly struggling two-lane street with parallel parking that was pedestrianized through a design-driven process. “Each component of the project was considered a piece of art, from the planters to the pavers to the color of the tiles,” Brown told us. The street is now the most vibrant row of restaurants in the city. After construction, a rezoning allowed residential uses and balconies, further activating the space. The aesthetic success was not incidental to the project’s political success. It was the engine of it.

Car Free America

City Planning and Transportation Policy.

By Mark R. Brown, AICP, CNU

But Giralda Avenue was not produced by a volunteer design review board evaluating whether a building was sufficiently “great.” It was produced by a Business Improvement District and City Commission with a specific design vision and the professional capacity to execute it. Design vision works. Design-by-committee does not.

The zoning trap

The design review problem sits atop a deeper structural issue: the underlying zoning codes that constrain architectural form in ways that make individual buildings worse and urban systems ugly.

Parking minimums alone distort form dramatically: ground-floor parking podiums, setback requirements for surface lots, and the sheer volume of building dedicated to car storage rather than human habitation. Use separations prevent the mixed-use ground floors that give streets their vitality. Height limits in residential zones force density into narrow commercial corridors, creating the abrupt transitions between single-family homes and mid-rise apartment blocks that generate the most visceral opposition.

Adrian Pietrzak and Tali Mendelberg of Princeton have shown through survey experiments that people react negatively to buildings that are architecturally “out of place” relative to the height or style of surrounding buildings. They call these “contextual development preferences,” and they are real and consequential. But zoning itself creates the mismatches. By restricting height in some areas and concentrating density in narrow corridors, zoning forces the very contextual mismatches that generate opposition. The system produces the disease it claims to cure. Exclusionary zoning created the built form, the built form created aesthetic expectations, and those expectations now drive opposition to anything that departs from them.

Allen’s work on college towns confirms this at the ground level. He observed that the best urbanism in many American cities survived around universities, not because of design review, but because campuses accidentally preserved the pre-war built environment. “A lot of the best urbanism that we can see in some of the small towns comes from university towns,” he told us, “because they sort of act as a natural city.” Students don’t have cars. The campus maintained walkable density. Pre-war structures that were demolished elsewhere survived near universities because there were always people walking there, because you couldn’t easily sprawl students out.

The aesthetic quality that people love in college towns like Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, and Madison was not produced by design review. It was produced by walkable density, mixed use, and the absence of parking-driven sprawl, and it survived despite the zoning regime that destroyed the same quality everywhere else.

Allen crystallized the absurdity with a single observation about Disneyland. Walt Disney, he told us, was “inspired by his hometown and his wife’s hometown, sort of these ideas of an idyllic version of a city or a town that was no longer existing.” So Disney built a replica. “What’s funny is it costs $120, $130, whatever it costs now... to go in and walk down this town. And that feeling used to be in every town across the country.” We regulated away the beauty. Now we pay to visit a facsimile.

Ugly buildings, beautiful city

Tokyo is filled with plain, unremarkable, even ugly individual buildings. The concrete is often bare. The facades are often flat. The signage is often cacophonous. And yet Tokyo is, by wide consensus among urbanists, architects, and ordinary visitors, one of the most beautiful and livable urban environments on earth. This paradox contains the most important lesson in the entire aesthetics debate: beauty in cities is an emergent property of urban systems, not a feature stamped onto individual buildings by review committees.

Jorge Almazán, a Tokyo-based architect and professor at Keio University, spent years studying what makes Tokyo work. His book Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, written with Joe McReynolds and his Studiolab research team, identifies five distinctive urban typologies that produce Tokyo’s collective beauty from individually unremarkable parts. Yokochō alleyways: narrow lanes of micro-bars and restaurants, chaotic and cramped, that are among Tokyo’s most beloved spaces. Zakkyo buildings: mixed-use vertical structures stacking small businesses on upper floors in combinations that would be illegal under virtually every American zoning code. Dense low-rise neighborhoods of small wood-frame houses on tiny lots, where residents create micro-gardens on their doorsteps that beautify the streetscape emergently. The beauty arises not from any of these typologies in isolation but from the system that connects them.

In an interview on the Compounding Podcast, Almazán described how Tokyo’s street network creates what he calls “pocket neighborhoods.” Efficient arterial roads form the exterior boundary; inside is a dense maze of small streets that cars avoid because they are inefficient to navigate. “Without forcing people,” Almazán explained, “just because of the structure of the city itself, what you have is that basically people or cars crossing those areas tend to go slowly.” The result is naturally walkable, car-light neighborhoods, without any explicit pedestrianization or design mandate.

And the walkability generates beauty. When you walk slowly through a neighborhood, you notice: the micro-gardens, the shop fronts, the varied building forms, the textures and asymmetries that would be invisible from a car at 45 miles per hour. Almazán described residents contributing “a little bit to the community by putting small pots, even cultivating small trees... When you walk through many of these neighborhoods... you see the personality of everyone.” No committee mandated it. It emerged from thousands of individual decisions within a permissive regulatory environment.

Almazán himself cautions that the emergent urban spaces he documents cannot simply be dropped into other cities. Some of what makes Tokyo’s plain-building beauty work is culturally specific: the micro-garden behavior reflects norms of collective public stewardship that are not easily legislated, and the jijikai (neighborhood self-governance associations) operate through social consensus mechanisms that are not how Americans resolve land-use conflicts.

But the culturalist explanation can be taken too far. What is replicable is structural: Japan’s national zoning framework with 12 cumulative use categories, which constrains nuisance without constraining form; the small-lot structure that allows individual landowners to build at varied scales; the mixed-use permissions that make zakkyo buildings legal; the transit investment that creates walkable catchment areas; and the absence of mandated aesthetic review. No design review board evaluates whether Tokyo’s buildings are beautiful. The beauty emerges from the system.

The American comparison, and the Houston objection

The contrast that should trouble us is not between Tokyo and Kyoto, or Tokyo and Singapore. It is between Tokyo and American cities that have individually more beautiful buildings but collectively uglier urban environments, precisely because they police individual facades through design review while neglecting the urban systems that produce collective beauty.

San Francisco has some of the most individually beautiful residential architecture in the United States: the Painted Ladies, the Victorians, the Edwardian rowhouses. It also has one of the most aggressive design review and historic preservation regimes in the country. The result: a housing crisis so severe that median rent exceeds $3,000, tent encampments within sight of million-dollar homes, a city that has frozen its beauty in amber while the human cost mounts. San Francisco has beautiful buildings. It does not have a beautiful city, because beauty at the system level requires dynamism, affordability, and the presence of actual people, not just facades.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, mandates a Pueblo Revival aesthetic: every building in the historic district must conform to a specific adobe style. The result is not beauty but uniformity, a theme-park homogeneity that visitors find charming and residents find stifling. Meanwhile, outside the mandated zone, the city sprawls in the standard American pattern. The distinction between mandated local style (Santa Fe) and organic local style is crucial. The former produces uniformity. The latter produces genuine beauty.

Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., enforces historic preservation so strict that individual window replacements require commission approval. Meanwhile, the District’s housing affordability crisis deepens. The aesthetic preferences of existing homeowners have been codified into law, at the direct expense of people who need homes.

In every case, the pattern is the same: beautiful buildings in a small preserved zone, surrounded by sprawl, car dependency, and housing scarcity. Tokyo inverts this entirely. It prioritizes systemic qualities (walkability, mixed use, density, architectural freedom) and produces a city that is collectively beautiful even though most individual buildings are plain.

At this point a skeptical reader will raise the obvious question: What about Houston? Houston has no zoning ordinance, the closest thing to what we are proposing that exists in a major American city. And Houston’s aesthetic reputation is not Tokyo’s.

Houston eliminated the wrong half of the equation. The city removed use restrictions but did not invest in the system-level qualities that produce collective beauty. Houston has no comprehensive transit network creating walkable catchment areas. Its streets are engineered for automobile throughput, not pedestrian experience. And Houston retains extensive private deed restrictions that function, in many neighborhoods, as de facto zoning.

But Houston’s failure is not simply a matter of neglect. It is structural. The same fragmented governance that prevented Houston from adopting restrictive zoning also prevents it from building coherent systems: coordinated transit, competent water management, walkable infrastructure. And the Texas Department of Transportation operates as a parallel authority that widens highways regardless of what local residents want, actively degrading the walkability that our argument identifies as the aesthetic precondition. Houston didn’t just choose not to build the system. Houston’s governance makes system-level investment structurally difficult, and the state highway authority works against it.

This does not mean Houston’s freedom produced nothing beautiful. It did. The Beer Can House, the Orange Show, the folk-art vernacular that could never survive a design review board: these are exactly the kind of individual creative acts that architectural freedom enables. But they remain isolated curiosities you drive to, not part of a collective streetscape you walk through. Freedom produced the beauty. The missing system is what would have connected it.

The Houston case does not disprove the thesis. Eliminating restrictions on what you build is necessary but insufficient. You must also invest in the system around what you build, and you need governance capable of doing so: the walkable streets, the transit, the human-scale infrastructure that enables the emergent beauty we find in Tokyo, in college towns, in the pre-war American main streets that Disney had to replicate. Houston removed the zoning without building the system.

The beauty of working with what exists

The Tokyo case demonstrates this pattern at the city scale. But the evidence extends further, into adaptive reuse, local design revival, and the uncurated spaces that fragmented ownership produces.

Adaptive reuse, the repurposing of existing buildings for new functions, is one of the most reliable pathways to aesthetically successful development. It is also 15 to 30 percent less expensive than new construction and can be completed up to 30 percent faster. The World Economic Forum reported in 2025 that reusing built assets emits 50 to 75 percent less carbon. And multiple projections estimate that 90 percent of real estate growth within the next decade will involve adaptive reuse rather than new construction.

The aesthetic case is equally strong, though less often articulated. Reused buildings retain proportions, materials, structural details, and spatial relationships that took decades to develop, what we might call accumulated aesthetic capital. Older buildings predate modern climate control and were designed with thick walls, awnings, high ceilings, and large windows for functional reasons: temperature control and natural light. These features are also precisely the qualities people find beautiful.

Calvin Chua, an architect whose Singapore-based firm Spatial Anatomy works across challenging contexts in Asia, showed us how adaptive reuse operates in practice. In our interview, Chua drew a sharp distinction between high-capital “landmark” reuse (converting a power plant into a museum) and the community-focused reuse that he finds more compelling. An example that was brought up was Karl Bengs, a German architect who has spent years renovating abandoned kominka (traditional Japanese houses) in dying rural villages. Bengs is not building tourist attractions. He what he wants to do is building actual homes, based on local designs. He applies modern techniques to preserve traditional forms, embracing local design vocabulary honestly, not through committee mandate (the Santa Fe model) but through an architect responding to place, materials, and community need. The aesthetic quality is central to the project’s success: people move to these renovated villages partly because the buildings are beautiful, and partly because they are real.

Chua’s own research on Singapore’s strata malls revealed a different dimension of uncurated beauty. Strata-titled malls let individuals own shops outright, not rent them. Any building change requires 80 percent owner approval. “Because the ownership structure is so fragmented,” Chua explained, “it’s very hard to curate what shops get to exist in there. But at the same time, because of the lack of curation, this subculture or unique shops start to emerge in these strata malls.”

The uncurated interiors are among Singapore’s most culturally vibrant spaces. Some owners refuse million-dollar buyout offers because the malls function as what Chua describes as “retirement villages,” places with their own ecosystems, where the sense of purpose and community is embedded in the fragmented, unmanaged structure of the space. The spirit emerged because the space was uncurated. No property management company dictated what went where.

A comparison that you can draw between Singapore’s strata malls and American strip malls, both of which have fragmented ownership and eclectic tenants. But American strip malls are car-oriented and surrounded by parking lots, while strata malls are embedded in walkable, transit-rich neighborhoods. Same ownership structure. Radically different aesthetic outcomes. The variable, once again, is the urban system.

Why urban systems produces beauty

We have now surveyed the evidence across multiple contexts: Seattle’s design review failures, Tokyo’s emergent beauty, Japanese rural revival through adaptive reuse, Singapore’s uncurated strata malls, American college towns, and American cities that froze individual beauty in amber while their collective systems decayed. The pattern is consistent. The mechanism operates through five channels.

First, diversity of form. When thousands of individual actors build on small lots with minimal regulatory constraint, the result is a varied streetscape with different heights, materials, setbacks, and uses. Nasar’s research identifies moderate complexity as a key driver of positive aesthetic evaluation. Zoning and design review suppress complexity by mandating uniformity.

Second, walkability as aesthetic enabler. The aesthetic experience of a city requires pedestrian-speed movement. Walkability is not merely a transportation policy. It is an aesthetic precondition. Almazán’s pocket neighborhoods, Allen’s college towns, and Brown’s Giralda Avenue are all places where people walk, and therefore where people see.

Third, temporal dynamism. Tokyo rebuilds its average building every 30 years. The built environment constantly adapts to current needs and tastes; unsuccessful buildings get replaced, successful ones get imitated. A regulatory regime organized around preventing change is an aesthetic straitjacket.

Fourth, bottom-up curation. The most beloved urban spaces (Tokyo’s yokochō, Singapore’s strata malls, the pre-war American main streets) were not designed by committees. They were curated from below: individual shop owners, residents, and small builders making independent decisions that accumulated into coherent streetscapes. This is the process that Cozzolino (2021) describes as “the joint yet individual action of numerous actors on various scales” producing “rich, coherent and harmonious built environments.”

Fifth, existing structures as aesthetic capital. Adaptive reuse preserves proportions, materials, and spatial relationships that took decades to develop. Each generation builds on what the last created, rather than starting from zero under new regulatory constraints.

We can already hear the objection from the “ugly is fine” faction: that we are romanticizing Japanese farmhouses, backyard cottages, and micro-gardens over the thing that actually matters, which is units. The strongest test of this framework comes from the most unlikely source: Soviet commie blocks. Nobody romanticizes them. Gray prefabricated concrete panels, assembled like industrial Lego, repeated across thousands of sites from Budapest to Vladivostok. And yet, as urbanist Adam Something has documented, the residential areas built around these buildings routinely outperform brand-new private housing developments in livability. The reason is the system. Soviet-era planning placed kindergartens, schools, doctors’ offices, parks, supermarkets, and public transit within walking distance of every apartment. Street plans excluded through traffic. The buildings were ugly. The neighborhoods were livable. New luxury developments built nearby, with individually superior architecture but no investment in surrounding services, cannot match them.

If the system-level argument holds even for commie blocks, the ugliest mass-produced buildings on earth, it holds everywhere. Get the system right and even ugly buildings produce good neighborhoods. Get the system wrong and even beautiful buildings produce broken cities.

We are not arguing against units. We are arguing that the system around the units determines whether those units produce neighborhoods people actually want to live in. The commie blocks delivered massive quantities of housing, fast and cheap. But the achievement endured because the surrounding system was good. Units matter. The system around them matters more.

To be clear: we are not endorsing the political system that produced commie blocks. But the urban planning insight, that neighborhoods need services, walkability, green space, and transit within reach of every front door, was correct. The Soviets achieved it through authoritarian mandate. Our proposal achieves it through architectural freedom and capital incentives.

The political science: why this is urgent

Everything we have argued so far could be dismissed as an aesthetic preference. A wave of recent political science research makes that dismissal untenable. Aesthetic judgments causally determine whether people support housing development.

David Broockman, Christopher Elmendorf, and Joshua Kalla, political scientists at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Yale, published a working paper in 2025 demonstrating that aesthetic concerns about housing are, in their words, “widespread, not pretextual, and causally affect support for development.” Their experimental evidence shows that manipulating the aesthetic quality of proposed buildings changes support levels: ugliness reduces support even when it poses no threat to quality of life. These are not NIMBY rationalizations. They are sincere aesthetic judgments that drive real political behavior.

Their most striking finding cuts against the standard NIMBYism narrative. Homeowners in already-dense areas supportdense development in their neighborhoods, indeed more so than homeowners in single-family neighborhoods. People who live in collectively beautiful dense environments support more density. That is the Tokyo effect translated into American political science. The market confirms what the research suggests: walkable, aesthetically coherent neighborhoods command the highest property values in their cities. Poundbury’s home prices consistently run above the surrounding Dorset market. The pre-war college-town neighborhoods this essay celebrates are among the most expensive real estate in America. People vote with their wallets for pretty, walkable places. That is not sentimentality. It is revealed preference at scale.

Pietrzak and Mendelberg’s study, published in Urban Affairs Review in 2025, adds a crucial finding to the contextual preferences we discussed earlier: fit matters more than height itself. A taller building that matches its surroundings is often more acceptable than a shorter one that clashes. And buildings that don’t fit prompt intentions to engage in costly political behavior, like attending public meetings, pressuring officials, organizing neighbors. Support rarely mobilizes symmetrically. This asymmetry explains why public hearings skew toward opponents of new housing.

The strongest real-world test of whether beauty can overcome opposition is Poundbury, King Charles’s New Urbanist development on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset. Poundbury gets the system right in almost every way our argument demands. It is mixed-use, with over 260 businesses and 2,750 jobs integrated alongside housing. Thirty-five percent of homes are affordable, built to the same standard as market-rate units and indistinguishable from them on the street. There is no use-separation zoning; homes, shops, offices, and factories share the same streets. The architecture draws on local Dorset vernacular, designed by Léon Krier to create walkable density at human scale. Even The Guardian, which once ridiculed the place as “fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute,” later conceded that “a growing and diverse community suggests it’s getting a lot of things right.” The Sunday Times named it one of the best places to live in Britain. Home prices have steadily risen, demand consistently outstrips supply, and the model has been replicated at Nansledan in Cornwall and Tornagrain in Scotland. On the merits, Poundbury is a success.

And yet. When the Duchy of Cornwall attempted to replicate the Poundbury model at South East Faversham in Kent, proposing 2,500 homes designed by the same architect (Ben Pentreath) to the same standards, the project was met with fierce local opposition. The Faversham Society called it “an existential threat to the very nature of the town.” National newspapers ran headlines about a local revolt. What is significant is what the objections were not about. They were not about aesthetics. As Building Design reported, design was barely mentioned in the objections; the opposition focused on traffic, loss of farmland, and strain on services. Even the original Poundbury was not immune: the Ramblers called it a “ghetto,” and existing Dorchester residents opposed its expansion. The British Social Attitudes Survey found that about seven percent of people are more likely to support new housing because it is better designed. In a fight decided by who shows up to the meeting, seven percent is not a rounding error. But it is not a majority, and it cannot do the work alone.

The Faversham case refutes the hypothesis, adopted as UK government policy under Housing Secretary Michael Gove, that “communities will welcome development when it is beautiful.” Beauty alone will not accomplish this. But notice what beauty did accomplish at Faversham: it took design off the table as an objection. Nobody at the public meetings complained that the buildings were ugly. The opposition had to find other grounds, and the grounds they found (traffic, services, infrastructure) are precisely the system-level failures our argument identifies as the real source of opposition. Beauty cleared one obstacle. It cannot clear them all, and treating it as a substitute for system investment is the error. Poundbury itself succeeded because it paired beautiful buildings with system-level investments: mixed use, walkable streets, integrated employment and affordable housing. But Poundbury also required thirty years of patient capital from a royal estate with no shareholders, a model its own estates director acknowledges volume housebuilders cannot deliver. And its beauty is enforced from above, not emergent from below: residents need Duchy permission to change their front door color. This is mandated beauty, closer to Santa Fe than to Tokyo. Strip the system and keep the facades and you get Faversham’s opposition. Build the system and let the beauty emerge and you get Tokyo.

Allen’s college-town observations confirm the dynamic at the local level. In Lubbock, Texas, neighbors fought a student housing development proposed across from the Texas Tech campus. The university is going through with it, Allen told us, but the opposition wasn’t really about the students. It was about the high-speed stroad between the neighborhood and the campus, which “looks like a highway drag strip.” The ugliness is in the infrastructure, not the building. Fix the system and the aesthetics follow.

The feedback loop that emerges from this research is the key to the entire argument. Zoning constrains building form, producing ugly buildings. Ugly buildings generate aesthetic opposition. Aesthetic opposition justifies more zoning. Around and around. But breaking the cycle requires understanding who is in it, because the research describes two distinct populations, not one.

The hardline NIMBYs, Allen’s “freezing in amber” crowd, will oppose any development regardless of what it looks like. Faversham proves this. These opponents are not making aesthetic arguments in good faith. They are using aesthetics as a socially acceptable wrapper for opposition that is really about preventing any change at all. You will never convince them. The BIMBY hypothesis (Beauty In My Back Yard, the idea that beautiful buildings will melt opposition) wastes political capital trying. And it hands the hardliners a new veto: “It’s not beautiful enough,” which is exactly the logic that let Seattle’s design review board reject affordable housing for being merely “good.”

Then there are the persuadable: people who are not reflexively opposed to development but who care sincerely about what their neighborhood will look like afterward. This is the population that Broockman’s research captures. Their aesthetic concerns are real, not pretextual. They respond to contextual fit (Pietrzak and Mendelberg). They are more supportive of density when they already live in attractive dense environments. For this group, aesthetics is a valuable tool in a larger set: not the argument that wins the fight on its own, but the one that tips the balance, clears design objections off the table, and builds places people will fight to protect once they exist.

The YIMBY who tweets “I don’t care if it’s ugly” is making a specific strategic error: handing the hardliners a weapon to use on the persuadable. The hardliner can now say, “See? They admit it’ll be ugly. They don’t care about your neighborhood.” The “ugly is fine” faction thinks they are being tough-minded and pragmatic. What they are actually doing is collapsing the persuadable into the hardliner camp by conceding the aesthetic premise. It is not a principled stand. It is an unforced error, and the hardliners are grateful for it.

What’s the idea?

The case for abolishing zoning and design review is well established in the YIMBY literature. We will not rehearse the standard arguments. What I want to focus on is what comes after abolition: the specific development forms and financing structures that can produce the emergent beauty we have been describing.

Accessory dwelling units and accessory commercial units

The closest thing to the emergent process in America already has a name. Two names: Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and Accessory Commercial Units (ACUs). I know it’s not the same, but in practical terms, it’s what most communities can use.

ADUs (the backyard cottages, garage conversions, and above-garage apartments that cities from Portland to Los Angeles have begun to legalize) add architectural diversity at the lot level. A neighborhood of identical ranch houses with a scattering of backyard cottages and converted garages has more visual complexity, more of the moderate complexity that Nasar’s research identifies as a driver of positive aesthetic response, than the same neighborhood without them. The American Planning Association notes that research does not support fears about ADUs degrading neighborhood character; there are indications they do the opposite.

ACUs are the less familiar but arguably more transformative cousin. As the APA’s December 2025 Zoning Practicearticle defines them, ACUs are “small-scale, often homeowner- or tenant-operated businesses integrated into primarily residential lots”: corner coffee kiosks, backyard salons, garage bicycle repair shops. ACUs are the American re-legalization of what Tokyo’s zakkyo buildings already do and what American neighborhoods did naturally before use-separation zoning made it illegal. As Garlynn Woodsong wrote for the Congress for New Urbanism, “We used to build mixed-use neighborhoods in our cities that freely mixed the retail destinations people need with the residences where they live, in very close proximity.” Zoning ended this. ACUs would restart it at the smallest, least disruptive scale.

Both ADUs and ACUs produce collective beauty through the same channels we identified: diversity of form, bottom-up curation, and mixed use. They also avoid the “contextual misfit” problem that Pietrzak and Mendelberg show triggers political opposition. A backyard cottage fits because it is small-scale and owner-driven. A garage-front salon fits because it faces the sidewalk at human scale. These are not five-over-ones dropped into single-family zones. They are incremental, bottom-up, fine-grained additions that produce the closest thing to the Tokyo effect at the neighborhood level.

The cost paradox and the case for cheaper capital

Here is where the policy problem becomes acute. ADUs and ACUs are the cheapest total-cost form of new development. A detached ADU typically costs $150,000 to $350,000, a fraction of conventional multifamily construction. An ACU built from a converted garage or a prefab shed can cost as little as $10,000 to $30,000.

But they are also, paradoxically, the most expensive form of development per square foot. The reason is structural: every ADU, regardless of size, requires a kitchen, a bathroom, utility connections, a foundation, permits, and design work. These are fixed costs that do not shrink with the unit. When you spread them across 500 square feet instead of 2,000, the per-square-foot figure climbs steeply.

This cost paradox means that the development form with the greatest potential to produce collective beauty is also the form most punished by the current financing environment. Conventional mortgage products and construction loans are designed for conventional buildings on conventional lots. ADUs and ACUs fall into what one practitioner calls a regulatory liminal space: not quite a home, not quite a commercial building, not quite a renovation, and therefore not quite eligible for the financing products designed for any of those categories.

This is where the capital-incentive proposal becomes essential. The existing federal incentive structure already differentiates by policy goal: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit makes capital cheaper for affordable housing (only in a permissive zoning environment); the Historic Tax Credit makes it cheaper for preservation; Opportunity Zones steer investment to low-income communities (whenever investment is effective is a different story). We propose two layers of capital reform.

The first layer: make capital cheaper for all small/mid-scale development. ADUs and ACUs are made possible because homeowners’ own access to capital. Adaptive reuse and incremental infill should have access to financing products designed for their scale. This means grants, low-interest construction loans, and tax credits specifically targeting the fixed-cost problem: subsidizing the permitting, design, and utility-connection costs that make small units disproportionately expensive per square foot. California’s $40,000 ADU grant and New York’s Plus One ADU Program are steps in this direction, but they remain piecemeal and underfunded relative to the scale of the opportunity.

The second layer: make capital cheapest for development that meets objective, system-level aesthetic criteria based on the fact that they is a premium created by said criteria. Not criteria evaluated by a committee, but criteria checkable by staff on a site plan: mixed-use ground floors with active frontage, pedestrian-oriented building placement (entrance on street, no setback parking), use of local or regionally sourced materials, adaptive reuse of existing structures, contextual height transitions, and green or activated public frontage. These criteria incentivize the system-level qualities that the research identifies as producing collective beauty, without requiring anyone to evaluate whether a facade is “good” or “great.”

We anticipate the objection that even “objective” aesthetic criteria add a compliance layer. The distinction is categorical, not cosmetic.

Design review is a veto gate. You cannot build until the committee approves. The standards are subjective. The process adds months or years. And because the gate is binary (approved or rejected) the rational developer minimizes risk by designing below the review threshold, which means designing worse.

A capital incentive is an optional bonus. You can build regardless of whether you meet the aesthetic criteria. Meeting them unlocks cheaper financing. Not meeting them imposes no penalty beyond forgoing the bonus. The homeowner who builds a standard ADU is no worse off than today. The homeowner who orients the ADU toward the sidewalk with an active frontage and uses local materials gets a lower interest rate or a larger grant.

Veto gates reduce housing supply. Optional bonuses do not. Veto gates concentrate power in committees. Optional bonuses distribute it to homeowners, small builders, and neighborhood entrepreneurs. The mechanisms are opposites. But the criteria must genuinely be objective and checkable by staff. “Mixed-use ground floor with active frontage” can be verified on a site plan. “Contextually appropriate massing” cannot. The moment the criteria require subjective judgment, the bonus becomes a gate. The line is real and it must be held.

Allen’s observation that the YIMBY conversation is too centered on New York and San Francisco has direct implications here. Smaller cities and college towns have lower development costs, more existing building stock suitable for adaptive reuse and ADU conversion, and neighborhoods where ACUs could reintroduce the walkable commerce that zoning eliminated.

What the evidence demands

Tokyo is not beautiful because its individual buildings are beautiful. It is beautiful because its urban system (walkable, mixed-use, human-scale, architecturally free) allows thousands of small decisions to compose into something collectively splendid. San Francisco has beautiful buildings and a broken city. Houston has freed its buildings but is limited by it’s fragmentation and being a plaything of TxDOT. Tokyo has plain buildings and a beautiful, functional, livable whole. The variable is the system. It has always been the system.

Every YIMBY who tweets “I don’t care if it’s ugly” is giving the hardliners ammunition to spend on the persuadable. Every NIMBY who invokes beauty to block all development is using aesthetics as a veto, not a value. Both positions are wrong, but they are wrong in different ways, and the difference matters. The hardliners cannot be converted and should not be catered to. The persuadable can be won, and aesthetics is one of the tools that wins them, but only as part of a larger set. The error is treating beauty as a substitute for system investment, not treating beauty as a tool worth using. The way to win is to build the systems that make beauty emerge: walkable streets, mixed use, architectural freedom, and cheaper capital for the small-scale development that produces it. The argument that collective beauty is an emergent property of free urban systems, not a product of committee oversight, is not a compromise between these positions. It is the position that makes both of them obsolete.

College Towns

College Towns, where urbanism meets higher education.

By Ryan M Allen

Car Free America

City Planning and Transportation Policy.

By Mark R. Brown, AICP, CNU

Here is a fact that should not be true.

A detached accessory dwelling unit in Los Angeles costs $200--$600 per square foot to build. A unit in a conventional apartment building costs $150--$250. On every metric of construction efficiency, the apartment wins. The ADU is a bespoke backyard project with fixed costs that barely budge whether you build 400 square feet or 800. The apartment is an industrial product: 200 identical units sharing one foundation, one elevator core, one set of plans. Any first-year real estate finance student could tell you which is the efficient way to house people.

And yet.

California permitted 1,269 ADUs in 2016. By 2019: 14,702. By 2023, Los Angeles County alone permitted more than 45,000. One in three homes now permitted in the city of LA is an ADU, in neighborhoods where apartments hadn’t been built in forty years. Meanwhile, national multifamily production has been stuck at roughly 350,000 units a year for four decades. Through booms and busts, through low rates and high. The line barely moves.

So the expensive, inefficient option is the one that’s actually scaling, while the cheap industrial product can’t get out of its own way. Understanding how this trick works is the key to understanding how housing actually gets built in America. And the YIMBYs reading this (who have spent years fighting zoning battles and are understandably impatient) may find the mechanism delightfully underhanded.

Are You Asking (The Right) Question?

It is easy for housing advocates to hyper-focus on this question: How do we reduce the cost of producing a housing unit? That question leads to debates about modular building, materials innovation, labor costs, and construction productivity. Reasonable debates, sometimes very fun and certainly very important, but almost entirely beside the point.

The key question: What does it actually take to get a unit built, occupied, and on the market?

Ask that, and something interesting happens (as we see in real life). A $300,000 ADU where the homeowner already owns the land, already has equity to finance it, and can get a ministerial permit in 60 days has a total cost to the system that is far lower than a $200,000-per-unit apartment that took 3 years to entitle, 12 months to secure a construction loan, 24 months to build, and required $50 million in institutional capital. The ADU’s construction cost premium is the price of bypassing every bottleneck that makes housing expensive to produce in America.

That premium turns out to be a bargain.

Paul Williams’s Raising the Housing Investment Level documents the bottlenecks with precision. FHA’s 221(d)(4) program, on paper one of the best construction financing products ever designed, takes 270--360 days to close versus 60--90 for conventional financing. Banks have tightened construction lending since 2022. And the result is visible in a single statistic: Williams estimates that roughly 750,000 multifamily units sit in a “shadow pipeline”. Entitled by local planning departments, having survived the multi-year gauntlet of public hearings and environmental review, but not yet applying for building permits because the financing isn’t there. Beyond that, another 117,000 units are formally authorized but haven’t broken ground. The pipeline is clogged at every stage. Multifamily starts fell 25% in 2024 to just 354,000 units, on top of a 14% decline in 2023, even as completions from the 2021--2022 boom continue to deliver, outpacing new starts by over 220,000 units in the past year. The pipeline is draining and not refilling.

ADUs skip all of this. The homeowner is the capital source (home equity), the decision-maker, and the developer. One person, one kitchen-table conversation, one HELOC application. 53% of California ADU builders paid cash. The average Massachusetts homeowner sits on $337,000 in tappable equity. There are 70 million owner-occupied single-family homes in this country. After legalization, each one is a pre-entitled development site with a pre-qualified capital source and a motivated builder.

A System Designed to Produce Nothing

Here is a sequence a typical apartment project must survive: land acquisition → discretionary zoning entitlement (public hearings, design review, political negotiation) → environmental review (NEPA, CEQA) → architectural design → construction financing (its own underwriting, appraisal, committee process) → building permit (plan review: 6--12 months) → construction (18--36 months) → certificate of occupancy → permanent financing takeout. Every stage involves different actors, different requirements, different timelines, and projects die in the handoffs between them.

Williams describes the FHA version: applications move through a fragmented chain, different specialists reviewing the appraisal, market study, cost estimate, sponsor financials, with no single person owning the deal. A 2016 Inspector General audit found the “single underwriter” reform was never actually codified. A 2024 follow-up found HUD still tracked assignments on manual spreadsheets across five regional centers. This program finances 10,000-15,000 units a year, roughly 4% of multifamily production, in a country short 3 to 4 million homes.

The ADU system: one decision-maker, one site, one ministerial permit, one contractor, one financing decision. Decision to occupancy: 6-12 months. The system is lean not by design but by accident. The unit of production is too small for complexity to accumulate. The homeowner feels every cost overrun and every rent check directly. No principal-agent problem. Especially in cities with pre-approved plan programs, fewer moving parts means fewer ways to fail.

The per-square-foot premium is an escape tax. You’re paying to leave a system so broken it can barely function.

It’s Not Housing Policy. It’s a Product.

A common theme among marketing and advertising is that value is perceived, not objective. A $2 cup of coffee becomes $6 in a ceramic mug with good lighting. Some marketers calls this alchemy.

In that sense, ADUs are alchemy.

The homeowner deciding to build one is not performing a pro forma. She’s thinking: Mom is getting older and I want her close but not in my kitchen. My daughter graduated and can’t afford rent. My property taxes went up and $2,500 a month would change everything.

It is a family decision, a retirement decision, a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses decision. The housing unit is a byproduct. FHFA data shows California properties with ADUs appraise at $1,064,000 versus $715,000 without, a gap growing at 9.34% annually since 2013. Homes with ADUs sell for 20-35% more. One study found a 40 to 60% average increase in property value. Rents run $2,000-$4,000 per month. And the land, the single largest cost in multifamily (often 30--50% of total project cost), is already paid for. She already owns it.

Her comparison isn’t “ADU versus apartment per unit.” It’s “ADU versus doing nothing and missing the rental income, the appreciation, or it’s a solution for Mom.” At almost any construction cost, the ADU wins.

I am puzzled by, well, actually I laugh at economists puzzled by the cost premium (yes, I am aware that some economists are aware of this, some just really want to stick with the purity of Econ 101 or just plain hate Econ 102 or 202 ie microeconomics). They assume all actors optimize on the same variable. The homeowner is optimizing on a bundle (financial, emotional, practical) that’s invisible to macro analysis. The premium looks irrational only if you ignore everything she actually cares about. Housing production is just a side effect.

The implication for YIMBYs, and this is the part that should make you grin, is that we have more ways on top of political advocacy to increase the number of units in a city. Once legalized, tactics like figuring out how to market ADUs are on the table or working with local and state-level developers and banks on something that can get units online ASAP.

Preying on NIMBY Self-Interest

Here is where the alchemy gets unsettling in the best possible way.

The NIMBY who opposes the apartment building on her block will never stop being a NIMBY. She will show up to every hearing, file every appeal, fund every lawsuit. NIMBYism is a political identity, not a misunderstanding, and she’s not going to grow out of it.

But that same NIMBY will build an ADU in her backyard without blinking. Not because she’s been converted (she hasn’t) but because what’s good for her is, in her mind, different from what’s good for everyone else. The apartment threatens her neighborhood and brings strangers she didn’t choose. The ADU enriches her property and houses Mom, or a tenant she screens personally, who pays $2,500 a month. Same unit of housing. Completely different calculus, because self-interest overrode principle.

People cheerfully exempt themselves from rules they impose on others when doing so is profitable. A crafty YIMBY can prey upon that (which is another article in itself!).

The play: make it as easy, as profitable, and as frictionless as possible for everyone , including NIMBYs to build ADUs after ADUs are legalized, knowing they’ll keep fighting every apartment, every triplex, every upzoning. The pitch is: Your home is your biggest asset. Here’s how to make it work harder for you. Here’s the pre-approved plan. Here’s the HELOC calculator. Here’s what your neighbor earns in rent. Here’s where Mom could live. The word “density” never appears, and the housing unit gets built anyway.

You don’t need converts, just to appeal to the more self-interested actors inside a permissive regulatory framework. The NIMBY builds her ADU for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the money is.

And every ADU she builds makes the next affordability fight easier. Not because she changes her mind, but because the neighborhood changes around her. One ADU on a block is invisible. Five normalize density. Ten make the “character of the neighborhood” argument sound ridiculous, because the neighborhood already has ADUs and I want one. Greed, not ideology, is the transmission mechanism. California ADU permitting grew 42-76% every year from 2016 onward, driven largely by neighbor-to-neighbor diffusion. She built one. I want one too.

Why the Battle Stays Won

ADU legalization is fought once, at the legislative level, and once it’s law, individual projects are ministerial: no hearing, no council vote, no neighbor veto. The YIMBY movement fights the one battle that matters, and then self-interest handles the rest.

Auburn, Maine proves this beautifully. Mayor Jason Levesque, “The YIMBYest City in America”, spent six years pushing ADU legalization, form-based code, and zoning reform. Permits spiked from 26 units in 2021 to 237 in 2022. Then in November 2023, he got crushed 62--38 by Jeff Harmon, a retired state police deputy chief who had literally sued a housing development near his property.

The NIMBYs won the election, but ADUs stayed. The ADUs are standing, the apartments are occupied, and the reforms were not repealed, because a new mayor can’t unbuild a house. Levesque lost, but the production outlasted his political career. And while Auburn is now certainly going after other types of housing, Levesque-era ADU regulations are left mostly alone.

(YIMBYs: if you take nothing else from this piece, take Auburn. Win the legislative fight. Let self-interest handle the rest. The housing survives the backlash.)

Jersey City: The Sophisticated Version

Auburn is the optimistic case: a blunt NIMBY who can’t unbuild houses. Jersey City under Mayor James Solomon, who took office in January 2026, is the worrying one.

Solomon is no Jeff Harmon. He doesn’t oppose development. He knows better. He concedes openly that “rents would be higher if a lot of those buildings hadn’t been built.” He understands supply and demand. He understands that Jersey City produced 13 homes per 1,000 residents in 2024, twice as many apartments as all of Queens, and that this production is why the city remains livable for working families. He is pursuing policies that will reduce future building anyway, and he knows it.

Within six days of taking office, Solomon signed an executive order auditing all 100+ active tax abatements in Jersey City, framed against a $250 million budget deficit he inherited. He campaigned on raising the inclusionary zoning mandate to 20% affordable units in all major new developments. He voted against every luxury tax abatement brought before him on the council, including what he called “the Pompidou, a $150 million giveaway to the Kushner family”(Kushner Companies, Jared Kushner’s family development firm, is a major Jersey City builder). The rhetoric is progressive, but he knows what the math does.

Jersey City’s current inclusionary zoning ordinance requires 10-15% affordable units. No project has yet broken ground at the 15% rate. Not one. Solomon wants 20%. An independent analysis by Better Blocks NJ, using the financials from an actual audited Jersey City project, calculated that making a universal inclusionary mandate work would require tax abatements for every covered project, costing roughly $184 million annually in foregone property tax revenue. The analysis concluded that the most probable outcome is “no affordable housing is built under the Solomon plan in the short run, while in the long run, housing development grinds to a halt.” Solomon has a Harvard public policy degree and can read a pro forma. He knows this.

The small-developer squeeze is where the cynicism becomes structural. Solomon’s proposals target “projects of 50 or more, 100 or more” units, with the exact threshold left deliberately vague. The PILOT audits, the inclusionary mandates, the compliance overhead: these are costs that Kushner Companies, with its legal department and government affairs team, can absorb. A small or mid-sized developer building their first 30-unit apartment project cannot. The large firm negotiates carve-outs and restructures deals around new requirements. The small firm looks at the regulatory uncertainty, the audit threat, the inclusionary math that doesn’t pencil, and builds in Hoboken instead.

Notice what is absent from Solomon’s housing platform: any mechanism to actually fund new housing production. No revolving construction loan fund like MassHousing’s $20 million ADU program. No state HFA acceleration fund like the ones Williams describes in Massachusetts, New York, and Michigan. No subordinate financing to unstick stalled projects. No streamlined permitting. His entire framework is extractive: audit existing abatements, mandate inclusionary units from developers, cap rent increases, collect development fees. Every policy takes from the production pipeline and none puts capital into it. For a man with a Harvard public policy degree who concedes that supply matters, that’s not an oversight.

The construction trades noticed. During the 2025 mayoral race, the Hudson County Building and Construction Trades Council endorsed Bill O’Dea, not Solomon. So did the Hudson County Central Labor Council, the Teamsters, and IATSE (the stagehands’ and technicians’ union). The workers who pour concrete and frame walls looked at Solomon’s platform and backed someone else. Solomon’s labor support came from SEIU 32BJ, which represents building serviceworkers (janitors, doormen, security guards), and the Working Families Party. The distinction matters. The people who clean finished buildings endorsed Solomon; the people who actually build them did not. They understood what his policies would do to their pipeline of work.

The effect is to consolidate Jersey City’s development market among the very “big developers” Solomon campaigns against, while squeezing out exactly the small and mid-sized builders who represent the farm system for housing production. The progressive posture produces a market that is more concentrated, not less. The man who rails against Kushner creates a regulatory environment that only Kushner can play in. We suspect this is the intended outcome, not merely the predictable one. Solomon is not stupid, and he is not confused about how development economics work. He told us so himself.

This matters for our argument because it illustrates the type of political risk that multifamily housing faces and that ADUs do not. Solomon doesn’t need to ban development or repeal zoning. He just needs to make the deal worse for every project in the queue. Higher inclusionary mandates. PILOT audits with a $250 million hole to fill. Vague thresholds that create uncertainty. Each lever individually sounds reasonable. Together, they freeze the pipeline.

ADUs are structurally immune to this. No abatement to audit, no PILOT to revoke, no inclusionary percentage to ratchet up. The homeowner’s HELOC doesn’t need the mayor’s approval. A city that chills its multifamily pipeline through regulatory accumulation cannot touch the ADU pipeline at all, because the ADU pipeline doesn’t run through city hall. It runs through kitchen tables, one self-interested homeowner at a time.

The irony, which Solomon knows perfectly well even if his supporters don’t: the homeowners building ADUs in Jersey City’s residential neighborhoods are adding housing supply in exactly the distributed, incremental, politically invisible way that his policies make impossible for apartment builders. If he succeeds in choking the multifamily pipeline, ADUs become not a complement to apartment production but its substitute. Less housing, produced less efficiently, at higher per-unit cost. ADUs because of ease of capital and distributed development are the sort of housing cockroaches we can learn from.

Where It’s Working, and Where It’s Going

Nationally, ADU permits hit 200,000+ annually, with 2.8 million cumulative permits tracked. Oregon (72% ADU-to-construction ratio), Washington (62%), Hawaii (54%) show California-consistent adoption. Massachusetts legalized statewide in 2024 and saw 1,600+ applications in year one, slower than California, but Governor Healey is pushing hard on design programs and financing. New York City’s “City of Yes” targets 80,000 ADUs, which would represent the largest single municipal ADU program in the country.

Austin: Where ADUs Meet Walkability

Austin is doing something nobody else has tried: layering ADU liberalization on top of a comprehensive density reform that already produced the steepest rent declines of any large U.S. city from 2021 to 2026.

The HOME Initiative allows three units per single-family lot, slashed minimum lot sizes to 1,800 square feet, and in year one, permits in single-family zones jumped 86%. Homeowners can build two ADUs per lot, on lots as small as 2,500 square feet, with zero parking. At Austin’s lower costs ($80,000-$300,000) and rental rates of $1,500-$3,000/month, the payback is faster than California.

But the genuinely interesting development isn’t housing. It’s commerce.

Accessory commercial units (ACUs) are the commercial cousin of the ADU: a small-scale business on a residential lot. A corner coffee kiosk. A backyard salon. A garage bike shop. The Congress for New Urbanism calls them a return to pre-Euclidean zoning, the streetcar suburb where a corner grocery was woven into the residential fabric before mid-century zoning laws banished retail to strip malls.

Ten ADUs on a block make a denser suburb. Ten ADUs plus three ACUs make a walkable neighborhood. The difference matters. And ACUs run on the same self-interest engine: the homeowner doesn’t open a kiosk because she read Jane Jacobs. She opens it because she can rent 400 square feet to a coffee roaster for $1,500 a month. The walkability is a byproduct. Each ACU makes nearby ADUs worth more (closer to amenities, higher rents). Each ADU makes nearby ACUs more viable (more customers walking distance). The whole thing is a self-reinforcing loop powered entirely by greed.

ACU startup costs can be as low as $10,000, an order of magnitude below conventional commercial rents of $20-$70/sqft. Austin, with its density reforms and transit-oriented overlays along the Project Connect light-rail corridor, is positioned to test ADU-plus-ACU neighborhood formation at scale. YIMBYs: push for ACU legalization alongside ADUs. The two together produce neighborhoods, not just bedrooms.

San Diego: When “ADUs” Had Elevators

San Diego tested what happens when you remove the ADU density cap entirely. The Bonus ADU Program (2020) allowed one market-rate bonus ADU for every affordable ADU. In Transit Priority Areas: no cap. Permits surged from under 500 in 2019 to over 2,700 in 2023. 20% of new homes built in the city were ADUs by 2024. Developers built 17-unit projects on single-family lots. Someone proposed 120 units in Pacific Beach. At a certain point you have to admire the audacity of calling a 120-unit development an “accessory dwelling.”

The council imposed caps in a 5-4 vote in June 2025. But three things matter:

One, the program proved the thesis stone cold. The Terner Center found developers chose Bonus ADUs over traditional multifamily because the pathway was faster, cheaper, and less encumbered. Rational actors picked the “expensive” unit type because total system cost was lower.

Two, the backlash shows you can’t shoehorn apartment-scale production into the ADU frame. ADUs get their political cover from being small, incremental, homeowner-controlled. At 17 units, that cover evaporates. Use the ADU pathway for what it does best (one to four units, distributed, homeowner-driven) and build a separate streamlined pathway for bigger projects. That’s Williams’s federal investment agenda.

Three, even after the rollback, San Diego remains more ADU-friendly than almost anywhere. The program overreached (not really, but you get the point), got slapped back, and still left the city with a permitting regime most metros would envy.

If a more straightforward approach fails, we may be able to take advantage of San Diego’s little experiment to help other cities “upgrade” their own ADU laws.

Trick’s Limits, & Why the Apartment Agenda Matters

ADU alchemy is real, it’s magical, but it has boundaries. 200,000 ADU permits a year won’t close a 3-4 million unit shortage alone. A third of ADU builders use them for family or personal space rather than rental housing. Production skews toward wealthy homeowners who can self-finance. You can’t build a 200-unit apartment with a HELOC.

Here is what the YIMBY movement needs to reckon with: the zoning fights are necessary, and they are not sufficient. We have spent a decade getting very good at legalizing housing. We have not spent nearly enough time figuring out how to fund the housing we’ve already legalized. The 750,000 units in the shadow pipeline, the 117,000 with permits and no shovels in the ground, the 25% drop in multifamily starts even as we kept winning zoning victories: these are not zoning failures. They are financing failures. We are legalizing units faster than the financial system can produce them.

This is the gap Williams’s Raising the Housing Investment Level fills, and I think every serious YIMBY should read it. It is the clearest articulation I’ve seen of what comes after the zoning fight. The proposals are not exotic: streamline FHA so it closes in 90 days instead of 360, match state revolving loan funds so stalled projects get subordinate financing, let the GSEs participate in construction lending, accelerate depreciation so the after-tax math improves for investors, redirect the FHLB system toward its original mission. Together they could add 230,000-355,000 units to annual multifamily production. Most cost the federal government little or nothing. Several require regulatory changes, not appropriations. And history says they work: the HUD boom of 1968-1973 produced 3 million units in four years; the tax relief boom of 1981-1986 produced 2.6 million in five. When the feds made apartments pencil, apartments got built.

For small developers and community banks, ADUs are the farm system. ADU lending is underexploited by community lenders. MassHousing authorized $20 million for ADU construction loans. The San Diego Housing Commission offers construction loans and technical assistance. A developer who delivers twenty ADU projects has the track record a community bank needs before underwriting a 30-unit apartment building. The on-ramp to the multifamily market runs through backyards. But if the multifamily market itself remains frozen because the financing system is broken, the on-ramp leads nowhere.

ADUs are housing cockroaches: they survive everything because of easy capital and distributed development. We should learn from them. But the lesson isn’t “just build ADUs.” The lesson is that capital access, having multiple developers on hand, and system simplicity produce housing, and their absence kills it. Apply that at the ADU scale and you get backyard cottages popping up. Apply it at the institutional scale, through the reforms Williams lays out, and you get the 500,000 multifamily units a year we need to actually end the shortage.

• The permit office is a big bottleneck. Broken bureaucracy kills more projects than restrictive zoning by itself. Fix it first because it’s politically easy, helps everyone, and makes getting rid of zoning easier.

• The zoning code doesn’t match the city that exists. Mid-century standards make thousands of lots unbuildable and cut off mortgage access, trapping neighborhoods in decline.

• Big developers benefit from dysfunction. Complexity is a barrier to entry. The reform coalition may find better friends from smaller and mid level builders, not incumbents.

• Sequence reforms by political feasibility. Start with what kills the most projects and provokes the least resistance. Each win builds credibility for the next.

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The case against zoning has been made. It has been made well and repeatedly, with better data each time. I agree with it, and I made the case myself multiple times over. But telling a depopulated city to “just rezone” is about as useful as telling a broke person to “just earn more.” The city should, but unaccompanied by a strategy for implementation and state capacity that takes into consideration the local political economy, it’s not going to do well.

Brian Connolly and Noah Kazis’s Rezoning the Rust Belt does something more valuable than restating that diagnosis. Drawing on data and interviews across more than fifteen post-industrial Midwestern cities, they produce a detailed account of how land-use regulation actually impedes revitalization in weak markets: which rules bind, which processes break down, which political dynamics block reform, and which early efforts have worked. It’s an amazing piece of dense research/

I want to distill the paper’s findings into a politically realistic “outline of a playbook” for cities that want to grow but face real constraints: limited administrative capacity, fragile coalitions, and an entrenched development establishment that talks pro-growth but benefits from the status quo. Detroit’s experience shows what happens without sequence: its planning commission approved a package of reforms (lower parking requirements, four-unit buildings by-right in the R2 zone, small-lot flexibility) and, as of the article’s writing, the city council had stalled them.

The question, then, is strategic. If you cannot get everything at once, what do you do first? Where does each metaphysical dollar of political capital and administrative investment yield the most revitalization?

The Conventional Framing, and Its Limits

We should begin with why the Rust Belt has been left out of the conversation. Urban economics divides housing markets into three rough categories. First, supply-constrained powerhouses like the Bay Area and Greater Boston, where stringent regulations block construction and prices soar. Second, elastic Sunbelt markets like Atlanta and Phoenix, where housing supply keeps pace with demand. Third, low-demand post-industrial cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where prices often fall below the minimum cost of producing new units.

Leading zoning reformers discuss “land use controls in our richest regions and cities.” When researchers call for more empirical work, they ask for studies of Raleigh and Montana, not Toledo or Buffalo. The third category is either ignored or invoked by skeptics who argue that zoning reform is a parochial coastal project of limited relevance. If deregulation does nothing for poor, post-industrial cities, these critics suggest, its advocates must be exhibiting an “extreme myopia,” offering a prescription for “two or three coastal cities” that are the “whole object of reform.”

Where nobody wants to build, zoning’s constraints obviously don’t produce the housing shortages and affordability crises that motivate action in San Francisco or Boston. If curing supply shortfalls were reform’s only purpose, the Rust Belt would indeed be irrelevant.

But that framing is too narrow. Connolly and Kazis reframe the question: not whether regulation caps aggregate housing supply (it plainly does not in Detroit) but whether it imposes unnecessary costs on whatever development does occur, blocks cost-effective building designs, and prevents cities from seizing limited opportunities for revitalization. We think that reframing is overdue.

What the Paper Shows

Before turning to strategy, we should lay out what Connolly and Kazis find. Their empirical approach combines a close look at Detroit (quantitative analyses of building permit data, variance dispositions, and rezonings, plus qualitative assessments of over thirty case studies and interviews with public- and private-sector participants) with a survey of more than fifteen cities across the post-industrial Midwest, from Buffalo to Milwaukee.

The authors are candid about limitations, and that candor matters. Their permitting data capture only approved projects, not those scrapped due to regulatory friction. They interview active developers, not those who never entered the market. They cannot estimate the magnitudes of the effects they identify. But we think the qualitative evidence is strong enough to establish the basic claim: land-use regulation meaningfully impedes some redevelopment in these places, especially given how consistent the pattern is across cities. The selection bias almost certainly means the article understates the problem, though we cannot say by how much.

Two scope decisions are worth noting. First, the article examines center cities, not suburbs; redeveloping vacant lots in depopulated cities is not greenfield development. Second, it addresses both residential and non-residential development, an important corrective to a national conversation that focuses almost exclusively on housing. In Detroit, commercial uses comprise nearly twenty percent of all new-construction permits, and industrial uses over eight percent.

A Taxonomy of What Is Actually Broken

A. The Permit Office Is the First Bottleneck

In multiple cities, building permitting was identified as more problematic than zoning itself. Detroit’s process was described by one developer as “like running into a brick wall.”

The numbers bear this out. Detroit’s median time from building permit application to approval for new construction was 124 days. For mixed-use multi-family apartments, the median was 271.5 days. For townhouses, 248 days. Twenty percent of new-construction projects took more than a year to permit. When we account for project size, 4,313 new residential units took over a year to permit, and 2,093 units (nearly twenty percent of all new units) took over two years. These timelines generally do not include discretionary or site-plan reviews that occur before permit submittal.

The system works tolerably for small projects. The median time to permit for all non-minor permits was just fourteen days, and the city issued same-day permits for over a fifth of non-minor projects, mostly minor renovations and exterior repairs. But for the new construction and substantial alterations at issue in land-use debates, the system is deeply broken.

The causes are not primarily regulatory. Inadequate staffing is the most common culprit. In St. Louis, a by-right project was delayed by nine months simply because there was nobody to review the permits. In Detroit, a four-month delay resulted because only one person handles right-of-way permits. In Flint, an interviewee recounted that the city “just had a woman, she was a nice woman, her name was Sherry, and she did zoning.”

Antiquated technology compounds the staffing shortages. Detroit’s Board of Zoning Appeals only moved to an electronic database in fall 2025. The previous system required physical stamps from office after office. One consultant described it with a memorable comparison: “the three of us aren’t creative enough to come up with a more convoluted system if we tried.” In Cleveland, Buffalo, and St. Louis, agencies cannot view each other’s documents. The St. Louis planners’ self-assessment was blunt: “We’re not modern.”

Applicants, meanwhile, can’t get clear answers. Detroit’s own analysis concluded that it is unclear, to applicants and the city itself, when site-plan review is required, which department conducts it, and how projects proceed when it is not required. In Cleveland, the absence of a checklist of required documents is partly to blame for the forty percent of applications for smaller projects that are submitted incomplete.

And inspections are their own mess. Interviewees across cities reported inconsistent inspectors demanding different standards, uncoordinated schedules causing months of delay over minor issues, and contractors leaving idle projects to work elsewhere, only for new inspectors to surface additional unforeseen problems upon return. One developer’s summary: projects require “whack-a-mole.”

These are problems of institutional capacity, the accumulated decay of cities that lost their tax base and could not invest in basic administrative infrastructure. Investing in development-permitting staff and technology when there is little growth is hardly justifiable when essential services are suffering. But those budgetary choices now impede revitalization, and in multiple cities where zoning barriers had already been meaningfully addressed, permitting delays undermined the progress. The binding constraint, in many Rust Belt cities, is not what the code says. It is whether anyone is available to process the paperwork.

B. The Code Does Not Match the City That Exists

Post-industrial Midwestern cities maintain restrictive zoning rules (lot-size requirements, parking mandates, single-family-only zones) designed for mid-century conditions and barely updated since. Interviewees across the region routinely described their zoning as “outdated,” “antiquated,” or “old.” Several officials said their codes intentionally impose “suburban” requirements on urban development.

The specific mismatches tell the story. Nearly forty percent of Detroit is zoned R1, where only detached single-family homes are permitted, on lots of at least 5,000 square feet. The city’s average vacant lot is 3,200 square feet. Another twenty-two percent of the city is zoned R2, where duplexes are technically allowed, but height and setback rules make it physically impossible to build two homes on a lot. In Akron, the city’s official land-use policy is titled “Planning to Grow,” yet over 6,000 vacant parcels are legally too narrow to redevelop. In St. Louis, roughly 10,000 vacant parcels fail the city’s minimum lot-size requirements, despite their consistency with the city’s historical development pattern. Even along a Cleveland light-rail line, where higher density should be expected, 41.5 percent of the land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes.

These standards render much of the existing built environment nonconforming. Nonconformities do not just block new projects. They reduce existing structures’ utility: homeowners in Cleveland must seek variances for any enlargement, like a new deck or mudroom. They diminish properties’ value to lenders, who cannot be sure that nonconforming buildings can be rebuilt after casualty damage. Cleveland’s chief zoning administrator reported conversations with lenders three times a week over this issue. An Akron official put it plainly: “When you have non-conforming, a good chunk of the banks will just not play around that. You’re leaving that piece to the cash buyer.”

Because lenders already avoid small-dollar mortgages (which are riskier and uneconomical given fixed lending costs) nonconformities exacerbate a scarcity of mortgage capital in low-property-value neighborhoods, which depresses prices further. This facilitates purchases by institutional investors with alternative capital sources, or pushes buyers into riskier land contracts, deepening disinvestment. In a growing city, nonconformities are a nuisance. In a depopulated one, they are a trap.

C. Parking and Dimensional Standards Force Bad Designs, or No Designs

Parking requirements emerged as the single issue most frequently driving projects into discretionary review across the region. One Detroit consultant captured it: “We joke… every project is a parking project that has another use.” Eliminating parking requirements in Detroit could allow a typical lot to be developed as apartments rather than townhouses, with hard costs roughly $200,000 less per unit. For a single urban surface parking stall, construction costs approximately $10,000 excluding land, with annual operating and maintenance costs exceeding $2,000. Structured parking more than doubles that figure.

Setbacks are nearly as bad. In Indianapolis, the code technically permits townhouses, but setback requirements make them unbuildable. In Detroit’s R2 zone, duplexes are allowed on paper but not in physical reality, given height and setback rules. On a vacant, transit-accessible lot in Indianapolis, a proposed three-unit building was deemed “wholly inappropriate.” Citywide, restrictive zoning has “delayed most apartments that want to develop by-right.”

In weak markets, these are the difference between a project that pencils and one that does not.

D. Discretionary Review Chills More Than It Blocks

Nearly a quarter of Detroit’s new-construction projects required at least one form of discretionary review. Add rezonings and planned-development requirements, and the figure rises further. Certain development types face much higher rates: 29.4 percent of two-family dwellings required BZA review; 52.5 percent of permitted townhouse units underwent BZA review. In the R3 zone near downtown, where the most revitalization activity is occurring, a full 64.4 percent of dwelling units permitted required BZA review.

The primary cost of discretionary review in these cities is not denial. Approval rates are generally high. Detroit’s BZA granted seventy-three percent of petitions, and of those, eighty-three percent were unanimous. Cleveland’s chief zoning administrator estimated that their BZA grants “99 percent” of variance requests. The cost is delay, uncertainty, required modifications, and the developers who avoid the process altogether.

One Detroit consultant described the BZA as the “absolute last, nuclear option.” Even seemingly beneficial projects face opposition: in Detroit’s trendy Corktown neighborhood, a “high-end duplex” project on a previously vacant “lot that was collecting trash” had to cut four units to gain BZA approval. The vote was 3-2, on a community appeal.

The effects on affordable housing are especially severe. Affordable-housing developers in Detroit tolerate the special land-use process. But they do not pursue variances or rezonings because funding timelines are incompatible with those processes. If affordable-housing projects do not meet base zoning, they die. Not “they get delayed.” They die.

E. Subsidies Add Layers

Most Rust Belt projects require tax abatements, low-cost public land, or direct financial assistance. Each program adds its own substantive requirements, misaligned timelines, and discretionary processes on top of the permitting and zoning barriers already discussed.

Detroit’s land bank requires additional discretionary design review for purchasers, including criteria like whether projects provide “interesting building typologies of varied architectural styles.” Akron applies higher standards to projects receiving public land or money as a “backdoor way of getting a form-based code.” Milwaukee, for many years, had an “unwritten policy” that homes on lots purchased from the city had to be at least 1,500 square feet, making affordable housing unviable on city-sold land. Federal environmental review applies to all HUD-funded development, and Cincinnati’s planning commission conducted more than 1,000 such reviews in 2024 alone. For mid-size subsidized housing projects, an environmental assessment takes between three and nine months and costs four figures for single-family and five figures for multi-family, not counting carrying costs. One Indianapolis developer reported a two-year difference in timelines between two identical projects, one publicly funded and one privately funded.

Because subsidies are ubiquitous in these markets, every dollar spent navigating regulatory friction is effectively a dollar of public subsidy diverted from construction. Reform in this context is not merely pro-developer. It is pro-fisc.

The Fair-Weather Friends: Why Large Developers Are Not the Allies You Think

Connolly and Kazis observe that complex, discretionary processes systematically advantage large, regional, repeat developers with resources and political connections. In Detroit, large-scale development activity is heavily concentrated in two firms. City officials usually accommodate their needs. These firms can call politicians to resolve code-interpretation disputes, obtain city land to address site-layout problems, or unstick slow permitting processes. One developer was candid about his competitive advantage: “I got a guy.”

Large, repeat players hire consultants, conduct formal community outreach, and are represented at hearings by architects, engineers, and sometimes lawyers. Meanwhile, smaller and non-local developers stick to by-right projects and rehabilitation. Little gets built in between. One large developer acknowledged the disparity: “I feel for small developers.” But feeling for them is not the same as advocating for changes that would let them compete.

The authors note, carefully, that these firms are “not absolutely benefited” by the current regime. Fair enough. But the practical implication is significant: because the most powerful stakeholders are least affected by restrictive regulation, they are least likely to advocate for change. They have adapted to the dysfunction. They have built business models around navigating it. The complex, relationship-dependent system does not merely inconvenience them less than it inconveniences their competitors. In some cases, that dysfunction is a barrier to entry that protects their position.

We’ve seen this before outside of the paper, with wealthy developers siding with the NIMBY Andrew Cuomo for New York Mayor, and again in research as highly consolidated markets in the UK produce less housing and highly NIMBY and consolidated markets produce the least. Not to mention, deed restrictions and suburban zoning are a favorite tool of suburban large developers in Texas.

Large developers in the Rust Belt are pro-growth in the same way that incumbents in any industry are pro-competition: enthusiastically in principle, selectively in practice. They want the city to approve their projects. They do not need the city to make it easy for everyone’s projects to get approved. They are, at best, fair-weather friends of reform.

Who bears these costs matters, and the racial dimension is hard to ignore. Most real estate developers in Detroit, as one Black developer observed, “don’t look like me.” Black-led developers tend to have smaller operations and less-ready access to capital. By advantaging larger firms, the complex system disproportionately burdens them. Individual homeowners and small entrepreneurs, who in Detroit are overwhelmingly Black, face the same barriers. The very people who would most benefit from incremental, neighborhood-scale infill are the ones most excluded from the process of providing it.

This has implications for coalition strategy. Reform advocates cannot rely on large developers to lead. They will rarely push, and even if they do they may push back. The natural constituency for reform is smaller developers, affordable-housing builders, neighborhood organizations tired of vacancy, and city staff who see the dysfunction daily. In Detroit, Black developers have formed a trade organization that has advocated for zoning reforms. That is the kind of coalition that gets results, and it is the kind of coalition that benefits most directly from the playbook we propose.

The Outline of a Playbook:

The governing principle: reform what kills the most projects and provokes the least resistance first. Build from there.

Play 1: Fix the Permit Office

Nobody’s identity is wrapped up in defending antiquated technology or chronic understaffing. Permitting reform does not require rezoning hearings, does not trigger neighborhood opposition, and does not empower or disempower anyone. It requires money and management, not legislative battles.

And it benefits the broadest range of projects, from small by-right renovations to large subsidized developments. It disproportionately helps small and new developers who lack the political connections to unstick processes. When Kalamazoo revamped its permitting, it brought more small developers into the city. The question is whether every applicant, not just the well-connected, gets a functioning system.

Staff up plan reviewers, inspectors, and technical specialists, with state or federal funding if local budgets cannot support it. Digitize the permitting system: electronic applications, cross-agency document access, online status tracking. Publish clear, applicant-facing requirements, so that forty percent of applications do not arrive incomplete. Assign project shepherds from intake to certificate of occupancy. Codify review timelines and consider deemed-approved provisions for straightforward applications. Standardize inspections so that two reviewers do not demand inconsistent standards on the same project.

This isn’t glamorous. But the evidence in Rezoning the Rust Belt strongly suggests it would do more to accelerate development than any single zoning change.

Play 2: Eliminate Nonconformities and Unlock Vacant Land

This sits between administrative reform and substantive zoning change. It’s technical enough to avoid triggering neighborhood politics, but it affects thousands of properties and homeowners.

As we described above, mid-century codes render existing lots and structures nonconforming across these cities, choking off mortgage access and leaving vacant land undevelopable. The solutions are mostly mechanical. Reduce minimum lot sizes to match actual lot inventories. St. Louis is doing this now. Kalamazoo already did, and officials report new developments across the city that “couldn’t have happened without the rezoning,” from homeowners expanding their homes to adaptive-reuse projects in neighborhood commercial areas. Adopt broad nonconforming-use provisions allowing expansions, rebuilding after casualty, and changes of use without variances, especially for structures predating a certain date. Create vacancy-specific rules liberalizing what can be built on long-abandoned parcels. Indianapolis, for example, allows additional uses on parcels vacant for over five years, at which point almost all residential uses are permitted in commercial zones and offices in industrial zones. The provision has had limited success so far, but the principle is sound: the rules should be most permissive where the status quo is already abandonment.

One particularly promising approach: proactively rezone land-bank properties before sale, as Detroit’s land bank is now planning. This smooths the politics before the developer enters the picture. The alternative (making the developer navigate a rezoning while simultaneously assembling financing and managing construction timelines) is precisely the kind of compounding friction that kills marginal projects.

The political framing matters. This is pro-homeowner and pro-neighborhood-stability. Residents whose homes are currently nonconforming benefit directly. Lenders willing to finance conforming properties expand mortgage access in neighborhoods starved of capital. This is about aligning the code with the neighborhood that already exists.

Play 3: Parking and Dimensional Reform, Led by Pattern Books

With permitting improvements and nonconformity elimination underway, turn to the substantive zoning provisions that most commonly force projects into discretionary review or prevent them from being built at all.

Parking comes first. It is the single issue most frequently cited as driving projects into BZA review, and the cost savings from elimination are large. Several peer cities have already eliminated or reduced minimums (Buffalo, South Bend, Toledo), providing political cover and early evidence. In Buffalo, half of larger projects built after the reform provided fewer parking spaces than previously required, some by 100 spaces. For smaller-lot and nonprofit development especially, the effect was “pretty revolutionary.” Separately, by allowing adaptive reuse without a variance, Buffalo’s reforms sparked the creation of dozens of new small businesses in residential districts, including in substantially depopulated neighborhoods.

Setback and dimensional reform follows logically: these are the provisions that make duplexes technically legal but physically unbuildable in multiple zones. Reducing setbacks is less politically visible than legalizing new uses, and it can unlock substantial infill development.

Lead not with the abstract policy argument but with the pattern book. Pattern books are catalogs of free, pre-approved housing plans designed to comply with local codes and fit the architectural context. They are spreading rapidly across the Rust Belt, and for good reason.

Most directly, using a pre-approved plan allows developers to avoid hiring an architect, saving $5,000 to $10,000 per home in South Bend’s experience. Because the plan is pre-approved, it clears all permitting processes quickly, preventing the delays and modifications that kill marginal projects. In South Bend, the plans have been used to build 79 new homes across 64 buildings between 2022 and 2025. That is a modest number, but a significant proportion of new housing starts in a small city without a growing population. More tellingly, affordable infill developers have shifted their work from Indianapolis to South Bend, where the easier process stretches their resources further.

But the deeper value of pattern books is diagnostic. As Kalamazoo’s officials explained: “You become the shopper or the permittee for the first time.” Working their plans through the permitting process helped staffers resequence approvals to generate fewer meetings and fewer contradictory comments across departments. It let them spot cost drivers, like whether a second unit could “daisy-chain” utility lines or needed separate infrastructure. It helped them rethink their fee structure and reorganize staffing. They felt that advertising a pre-approved plan committed them to efficient permitting: “If we’re throwing in extra steps… that’s a false promise to the person who purchased the plans.”

Pattern books are a reform delivery mechanism, not just a design tool. They make the abstract concrete, showing residents what attractive infill housing looks like under reformed standards. They bring new, smaller developers into the market: both South Bend and Kalamazoo reported that new developers “cut their teeth” on pre-approved plans. And pattern books require, as a precondition, the kind of zoning and dimensional reforms we have been discussing. First you legalize contextual infill development, then you can speed it through permitting.

The strategic implication: pair parking elimination and setback reduction with pattern book rollout, so that residents see what they are getting, not just what they are losing.

Play 4: Density and Use Liberalization

With Plays 1 through 3 underway, the political landscape is different. Permitting works better and vacant lots are being built on. New developers are in the market. Residents have tangible evidence that reform can improve their neighborhoods.

Now pursue the harder stuff: legalizing multi-family housing by-right in more zones, allowing mixed-use development, and adopting form-based codes in targeted neighborhoods. The evidence from peer cities is encouraging, if uneven.

Cleveland’s 2018 reform, eliminating notice and variance requirements for townhouses, produced twenty-five projects by 2022, many with dozens of units and some in neighborhoods where the city is focusing investment. Concerns about aesthetics subsequently spurred additional design requirements, potentially slowing development. But the city has continued pursuing reform, piloting a form-based code in three neighborhoods. Anecdotally, planners observed that the form-based code was most consequential in the Hough neighborhood, an extremely poor area growing thanks to its proximity to the Cleveland Clinic, where it pushed projects across the margin for both affordable-housing developers and first-time builders of small three-to-four unit buildings. It mattered less where development was already proceeding or demand was too low.

Not all reforms work everywhere. St. Louis adopted form-based codes in a few already-revitalizing neighborhoods, and “development just exploded… developers got the certainty.” But when the city increased permitted densities near transit, the results disappointed. More permissive regulations could not overcome continued low demand. Indianapolis’s mayor claimed that its transit-oriented development policy alone enabled 1,000 additional housing units in one year, but in many locations it “hasn’t had the effect we wanted” because it was mapped onto corridors that were not “market-ready.”

Rezoning cannot create demand where none exists. But as South Bend’s planners advised, describing reforms that worked and those that fell short: “You start. You start with one thing.”

The political difficulty here is real. This is where gentrification fears, racial distrust, and aldermanic privilege converge. Milwaukee’s opposition to its “Growing MKE” plan, which called for doubling the city’s population, was so strident that the city abandoned the plan’s name entirely. Cincinnati’s NAACP helped kill a 2022 citywide upzoning over gentrification concerns. In Indianapolis, duplexes get special resistance for their association with low-income renters, even when both units are offered for sale.

These fears are not irrational. Black Detroiters have been failed by urban renewal, illegal tax foreclosures, environmental harms, and the collapse of city services. That history produces a background distrust that undermines residents’ concurrent understanding that growth is needed, reinforcing the felt need for discretionary checks against unwanted change, even as those checks impose costs on the very development residents want.

Houston illustrates the inverse. There, Black and Latino communities resisted zoning adoption partly because they distrusted a city government they expected to wield it against them. Same distrust, opposite institutional conclusion. The variable is not whether communities trust their government (in the Rust Belt and Texas for that matter, they mostly don't) but whether the regulatory apparatus already exists.

I do not pretend to have a formula, nor does the paper’s authors, for resolving these tensions. But the sequencing matters. A track record of reforms that demonstrably benefits the local community and small developers builds the credibility needed for harder conversations about density.

Play 5: Subsidy-Process Reform and Exactions

This is the hardest to reform without appearing to attack community interests.

Detroit’s community benefits ordinance is the leading example. It requires formal negotiations between neighborhoods, developers, and the city for large projects or those receiving significant tax abatements. One developer called it a “Pandora’s Box.” Another described staying below the ordinance’s thresholds to avoid “a laundry list of particulars.” The process lasts ten to fourteen weeks, and the requirement to hire local contractors drives up construction costs in a city with an undersupply of qualified workers. Small developers find it especially difficult to navigate.

Beyond the community benefits ordinance, ad hoc exactions arise through discretionary approvals and incentive negotiations. A developer of a large, by-right industrial facility was asked to relocate a road to reduce truck traffic impact on a greenway. A developer of a mixed-use project, who had already included a community meeting space and paid for new streetlights to secure approvals, was then asked in the incentive process to add expensive new design features. There are, as the article dryly observes, “many instances of officials taking a ‘value capture’ approach in places where there is little value to capture.”

These provisions were hard-won by communities with legitimate grievances, and they are wrapped in equity language. Frontal assault is politically unwise and arguably unjust. But the costs are real, and as we noted above, they are ultimately borne by the public subsidies that make most Rust Belt projects viable. Whatever the merits of value-capture techniques in high-demand markets (and reasonable people disagree) they badly fit post-industrial cities.

Better approaches: raise the thresholds that trigger community benefits requirements, ensure that city-funded neighborhood planning gives residents genuine voice without project-level extraction, and make the fiscal math transparent. Show communities what exactions cost in forgone development versus what they actually deliver. When many contractors pay fees rather than hire locally, the employment benefits are questionable; when developers avoid triggering thresholds entirely, the community receives nothing.

What We Still Do Not Know

We should be honest about the limits of the playbook we propose.

The equilibrium effects of zoning in oversupplied markets are hard to assess: if a project cannot be built on one vacant lot, it may simply move next door. More sophisticated empirical analysis, akin to that conducted in high-demand places, is needed. The Rust Belt deserves the same quality of research that has informed land-use policy elsewhere.

Permitting reform also requires sustained investment, not one-time fixes. Digitizing a system is easier than maintaining staffing levels in cities with structural budget deficits. Without ongoing state or federal support, improvements will erode, and the cycle of institutional decay will resume.

Pattern books, meanwhile, have produced promising but modest results, and only in small cities so far. Their scalability to larger, more complex markets like Detroit is unproven. The fair-weather friends may prove outright opponents; reforms that lower barriers to entry threaten incumbents’ competitive advantages, and reform coalitions should plan accordingly.

And our sequencing assumes that early wins build political capital for harder reforms. That is plausible but not guaranteed. Cities may pocket easy improvements and stall before reaching the structural changes that matter most.

My point being?

Connolly and Kazis have provided an excellent foundation. Their evidence points clearly: start with the permit office, then unlock vacant land, then reform parking and dimensional standards using pattern books as the delivery mechanism, then push for density and use liberalization with the credibility those earlier wins provide.

At every stage, the constituency for reform is not the large developers who have adapted to dysfunction, but the smaller builders, affordable-housing developers, and YIMBY organizations who bear its heaviest costs. Build the coalition from the bottom, not the top.

One more thing. Every reform on this list is worth doing on its own, regardless of whether the next step follows. That is the advantage of a playbook over a manifesto. Fixing the permit office helps even if parking reform stalls. Eliminating nonconformities helps homeowners and lenders even if density increases remain politically impossible. Pattern books bring new developers into the market even if form-based codes are years away.

You start with what you can win, and you build from there.

The median home in San Francisco costs $1.3 million. In Miami, prices have roughly doubled in a decade, going from 150,000 in 2016 to over 600,000. Across scores of American cities, a household earning the median income cannot afford to buy the median home, and in many cases cannot comfortably rent one either. The political class continues to treat this as a problem the right election result could solve. Elect more Democrats, and cities will build the affordable housing their residents need. Elect more Republicans, and deregulation will unleash the market.

It sounds good, you know, but it just doesn’t smell right.

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A study by Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko, published in the Journal of Urban Economics in 2026, asks whether the party affiliation of a city’s mayor affects how much housing gets built. Drawing on four decades of mayoral elections matched with Census Bureau building permit data, the answer seems to be a hard no. Not a small effect that fails to reach significance. Not an effect that shows up in some subsamples. Again, a null, full stop.

The real levers of housing policy lie elsewhere: in the incentives, social networks, zoning regimes, and democratic failures that constrain supply regardless of which party holds the mayor’s office. Drawing on the paper’s empirical results and on case studies from Houston to Carmel, Indiana to show why.

Identifying a Causal Effect

Republican-led cities do issue more housing permits than Democrat-led ones in raw averages, about 17 percent more. But Republican mayors tend to govern in Sun Belt cities with flat topography and abundant land. The raw correlation tells us almost nothing about causation.

Ferreira and Gyourko exploit a regression discontinuity design built on close elections. In a race where a Democrat wins by a single percentage point, the city is virtually identical to one where a Democrat loses by a single point. By comparing housing permits across this threshold, the authors isolate something close to a pure partisan treatment effect.

2,094 Democrat-versus-Republican elections from 1980 through 2017, matched to the Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey covering roughly 20,000 permit-issuing places. Manipulation tests show no evidence that either party disproportionately wins close races; covariate balance confirms that cities on either side of the threshold look similar on population, housing stock, and voter turnout.

No Effect, No Matter How You Look

Across every bandwidth, kernel function, and way of measuring permits, electing a Democrat rather than a Republican has no meaningful effect on housing supply.

In the main specification, electing a Democrat is associated with a 0.016 percentage point increase in total permits per housing unit, against a sample mean of 0.97 percent. That is less than 2 percent of the mean, with a standard error nearly five times the point estimate. The null holds for single-family and multifamily permits separately, for permits measured at the end of a term versus averaged across it, and for differences against the prior term.

The most telling test involves incumbency. A Democrat mayor who barely wins a first election is more than 20 percentage points more likely to win reelection. If partisan preferences about housing exist but are initially constrained, they should emerge in second terms, when incumbents have consolidated power. They don’t. Permits during the term following reelection show no discontinuity.

Ferreira and Gyourko also test whether partisanship matters more in particular settings: big cities, fast-growing metros, areas with little jurisdictional competition. Drawing on Tiebout’s model, they find modest evidence that Democratic mayors in less competitive metro areas permit slightly more housing, but it doesn’t survive alternative specifications. There is no evidence that partisanship matters more in larger jurisdictions, faster-growing ones, or more recent decades. That last point is notable given documented increases in partisan intensity nationwide.

The one published study reaching a different conclusion, by De Benedictis-Kessner, Jones, and Warshaw (2025), finds a modest increase in multifamily permits under Democrats. But the result is fragile: it disappears on Ferreira and Gyourko’s larger dataset, under alternative specifications, and when the sample is varied by city size or time period.

Real Life Case Studies

This section draws on external sources, not the Ferreira and Gyourko paper.

If party labels drove housing supply, we would expect a clear pattern: red cities building freely, blue cities strangling supply, or vice versa. Actual cities defy that at every turn.

Houston and its neighbors. Houston is the only major American city without conventional zoning, a distinction maintained since voters rejected zoning in referenda in 1948, 1962, and 1993. Its regulatory flexibility has kept median home prices below the national median despite explosive growth. Between 1999 and 2016, over 25,000 homes were built on lots smaller than 5,000 square feet, enabled by a 1998 reform reducing minimum lot sizes to 1,400 square feet.

But Houston’s permissiveness is not a product of Republican governance or even its Democratic mayors. The city has had Democratic mayors for most of recent history, including during the lot-size and parking reforms. Lower-income and moderate-income Houstonians voted overwhelmingly against zoning in 1993, against both parties’ wishes.

The contrast sharpens when you look next door. Pasadena, Texas, a conservative, blue-collar refinery city that is officially “non-zoned” like Houston, has weaponized the regulatory tools it does have. The Institute for Justice and Strong Towns documented the city requiring a sole-proprietor mechanic named Azael Sepulveda to build 28 parking spaces before opening his shop in a building that had been an auto repair business for 30 years. The cost, $40,000, was nearly half what he paid for the property. He averaged two to three cars a day. Pasadena actually increased its parking minimums in 2022, nearly doubling the requirement for auto shops to a standard exceeding every major Texas city. Meanwhile, an hour south on 288 is Lake Jackson. The hometown of libertarian congressman Ron Paul (and myself), a full zoning ordinance has governed land use since the city’s founding as a Dow Chemical company town.

A Democrat-led city with genuine permissiveness. A conservative suburb that is nominally unzoned but aggressively restrictive. A libertarian icon’s hometown with comprehensive zoning. The variable that explains the differences is not ideology but path dependence and institutional incentives.

Austin. A liberal city in a conservative state, Austin was the NIMBY capital of Texas, until the election of progressives YIMBYs. Existing homeowners wielded a century-old state law allowing just 20 percent of neighboring landowners to trigger a supermajority requirement for zoning changes, repeatedly killing comprehensive reform. The NIMBY coalition included conservative homeowners and progressive anti-gentrification activists in roughly equal measure. The resulting 135,000-unit deficit was the product of institutional rules, not partisan preferences.

The breakthrough came from the Republican-controlled state legislature. HB 24, passed in 2025 with bipartisan support, raised the protest threshold from 20 to 60 percent and reduced the council override to a simple majority. Even Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made affordability a top priority. The tool Austin’s NIMBYs had wielded most effectively was a Jim Crow-era law with no connection to contemporary partisanship.

New York City. The 2025 mayoral race demolishes the left-right frame entirely. Andrew Cuomo, the centrist former governor, assembled a coalition of NIMBY homeowners, large developers, and building trades. His housing plan proposed 500,000 units but implicitly promised to protect low-density outer-borough neighborhoods. Bloomberg, whose mayoralty produced tower clusters in hotspots and downzoning everywhere else, contributed $8.3 million to an allied Super PAC.

Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, ran and won as an unabashed YIMBY: citywide upzoning, expanded public housing, rent freeze on stabilized apartments. He won. The Republican, Curtis Sliwa, made opposition to the “City of Yes” upzoning reforms a central plank. The centrist was the NIMBY candidate. The socialist was the builder. The Republican was the most anti-housing of the three.

Voters also passed charter amendments shifting zoning powers from council members, who had exercised de facto vetoes over development in their districts, to the mayor. The “no” voters were concentrated in neighborhoods that had supported both Cuomo and Trump: an outer-borough homeowner coalition hostile to density regardless of partisan affiliation. The alignment tracked renters versus homeowners, not left versus right.

Carmel, Indiana. Carmel, a suburb north of Indianapolis with a median household income of $130,322 and historically deep-red politics, underwent an urbanist transformation under James Brainard, a Republican mayor from 1996 to 2024. He built 155 roundabouts, a walkable city center with 362 residential units and a 1,600-seat concert hall, and pushed townhome development along a rail-to-trail conversion. Banks initially refused to finance the townhomes; they now sell for two to five times initial projections. The city quadrupled from 25,000 to over 100,000.

Brainard used public-private partnerships and tax increment financing. He borrowed ideas from European cities and sat on Obama’s climate task force. A conservative suburb embracing density and mixed-use development does not emerge from any partisan playbook.

Pattern keeps on coming. Montana’s 2023 pro-housing reforms passed under a Republican governor. A Republican judge held for Minneapolis 2040 for years. Connecticut’s Democratic governor vetoed an ambitious housing bill. Illinois Democratic governor is pushing for state wide zoning reform.

So What is the Problem, if not Partisanship?

If partisanship is not the bottleneck, what is? New construction imposes localized costs on existing residents (congestion, noise, school crowding, changes to neighborhood character) while its benefits accrue largely to nonresidents who might want to move in but have no political voice.

Gyourko and McCulloch (2024) analyze over 263,000 home sales across 217 municipal borders, they find that homes cost roughly $40,000 more in areas with stricter density limits, that 65 percent of homeowners would experience welfare losses from increased density, and that the median homeowner would require $5,164 in compensation to accept modest density increases nearby. In affluent, low-density neighborhoods, the figure rises to $29,655. For rental housing, it reaches $263,192. Opposition to apartments is five to six times stronger than opposition to owner-occupied density, which helps explain why multifamily construction faces ferocious resistance even in cities that nominally support “affordable housing.”

This opposition is concentrated among the residents with the most political influence and the strongest institutional tools to prevent change. A 2025 Clever Offers survey found that 61 percent of boomer homeowners never plan to sell, 88 percent do not care if remaining prevents younger buyers from entering the market, and 59 percent would support a candidate who prioritizes home values even if it makes housing less affordable for others. When the median voter in a local election is a long-tenured homeowner sitting on six figures of untaxed appreciation, the incentives point toward restriction regardless of party.

Reform, Not Electoral Strategy

Duranton and Puga (2023) argue that the transfers needed to compensate existing residents are far smaller than the economic distortions created by housing shortfalls. But the mechanism design is harder than it looks. , executive director of YIMBY Law, has made a persuasive case for how to get it right. She points out that the most prominent federal housing proposals, from the Center for American Progress, the Institute for Progress, and the Searchlight Institute, all recognize the issue as an incentive problem but target the wrong actors and reward the wrong things. Some plans pay renters who lack political power to change land-use decisions. Others reward cities for adopting pro-housing policies that are easy to game: Minneapolis’s missing-middle upzoning legalized duplexes that could be no larger than the houses they replaced; California cities imposed six-figure hookup fees on the ADUs the state told them to allow; Canada’s Housing Accelerator Fund paid billions for policy changes already underway that failed to prevent permit declines when rates rose.

Trauss’s alternative: pay cities directly through unrestricted general fund grants for every permit issued above an expected trend line. Don’t evaluate policies. Put money in the budget of the institution that controls permitting and tie it to the outcome you want. Research finds that when housing is fiscally beneficial, some elected officials are more likely to permit it. The approach also has bipartisan appeal, since general fund grants don’t look like welfare expansion and eligibility can include fast-growing Sun Belt and Midwest cities alongside coastal ones.

My Point?

Ferreira and Gyourko’s work demolishes the narrative that the right election on party alone could bring housing prices back to earth. Across four decades, the party of the mayor does not affect how much housing gets built.

I have used the word “institutions” as shorthand for what constrains housing supply: zoning codes, protest petition laws, parking minimums, discretionary permitting. That language is useful but it’s also very limiting. Formal rules don’t enforce themselves. Behind every zoning restriction is a persistent social network of people: the homeowners who show up to every planning meeting, the neighborhood association presidents who have each other’s phone numbers, the longtime residents who know which council staffer to call. These networks are partisan, but they predate the current alignment of the parties and will outlast it. They organized against apartments in liberal San Francisco and conservative Pasadena using different vocabularies (”anti-displacement” in one, “neighborhood character” in the other) but with identical effect. Austin’s NIMBY coalition held together across left and right for decades. New York’s outer-borough homeowner alliance spanned Cuomo Democrats and Trump Republicans without apparent tension. The partisan frame fails not because it oversimplifies ideology, but because it misidentifies the unit of analysis entirely. The relevant actors are not parties but durable, place-based networks of property owners whose interests in restricting supply are material, immediate, and largely indifferent to national political brands.

The task is not just to rewrite rules but to shift the underlying political economy so that the networks aligned against building are met by equally persistent networks aligned in favor of it. The YIMBY movement, at its best, is an attempt to build exactly that counter-network.

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Consider what happens during the years a building permit sits in regulatory review in Los Angeles.

A family of four is paying $2,400 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, roughly $800 more than the same unit would cost in a city that builds at a reasonable pace. Over two years of permitting delay, that family transfers an additional $19,200 to their landlord that they will never recover. Their older child starts school and finishes first grade. Their savings for a down payment go nowhere, because the home they might have bought is still a set of architectural drawings cycling through a planning department.

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Now consider it from the builder’s side. A proposed 30-unit apartment complex enters the permitting pipeline in Los Angeles. On average, it will take 4.2 years from permit submission to the issuance of a certificate of occupancy. For the median project, roughly 40 percent of that time is consumed not by construction but by obtaining permission to construct, a period that includes pre-filing preparation and regulatory review. During those months, interest rates can spike or a community group can file an appeal under the California Environmental Quality Act. Surveys of California planners suggest that proposals are often not merely delayed but abandoned outright.

Everyone in real estate development will tell you permitting imposes costs. The question has been how large those costs are, and whether they matter for housing affordability at the scale of a city. A new paper by Evan Soltas and Jonathan Gruber (”How Costly Is Permitting in Housing Development?“) provides a rigorous answer for a major American city.

Measurement problem

Why has it been so hard to measure the cost of permitting?

First, the costs are largely unobserved. Developers’ compliance expenditures (architecture fees, legal fees, expediting costs, the opportunity cost of capital tied up during review) are proprietary.

Second, permitting costs are equilibrium objects, not fixed policy parameters. Developers design their projects with permitting in mind. A builder who anticipates a three-year review might scale down the proposal, choose a less contentious site, or forego the project entirely. The projects we observe in the data are survivors of a selection process shaped by the very costs we want to measure.

Third, building permits are never traded separately from land and structures. In pollution markets, cap-and-trade systems generate an explicit price for the right to emit. In housing, there is no analogous market for the right to build. A permit is bundled with a specific parcel, and the two change hands together.

Soltas and Gruber solve this problem by finding a setting where permits are, in effect, traded separately from land.

The ready-to-issue market

In Los Angeles County, there exists a mature submarket for “ready-to-issue” (RTI) properties. A landowner, often a specialized investor, acquires a parcel of raw land and takes a complete set of building plans fully through the local permitting process: planning review, environmental review, any necessary appeals. Once all approvals are secured, the investor lists the property for sale, bundling the land with the legal right to build a specific project. The buyer can pull permits and begin construction immediately.

The RTI market is not a curiosity. In some Los Angeles neighborhoods, it accounts for one in four land sales. Total transaction volume reached $353 million in 2024. This market creates an implicit price for development approval. When a developer pays more for a parcel with RTI permits than for a comparable parcel without them, the premium reveals the developer’s willingness to pay to skip the permitting process.

How slow is it?

The paper assembles permit microdata from 12 U.S. cities, allowing standardized comparisons of how long it takes to build the same type of project in different regulatory environments.

For a standardized 30-unit apartment building, the average time from permit submission to certificate of occupancy is 4.2 years in Los Angeles County. In Raleigh or Fort Worth, the same project takes roughly half that.

Why is Los Angeles so slow? Proposed developments face two main stages of review: a discretionary planning (”entitlement”) stage and a ministerial, technical permit stage. Roughly three quarters of projects with 20 to 49 units face discretionary planning review. Around three in four developments with five or more units face review under the California Environmental Quality Act, and one in five of those reviews are themselves appealed. Planning decisions can be further appealed to politically appointed Area Planning Commissions. Projects may also require approval from the California Coastal Commission or local utility boards.

The result is a series of sequential review stages, each with its own queue, its own decision-makers, and its own appeal pathways. Throughput is governed by the slowest stage, and any stage can kill the project outright. Within Los Angeles County, the paper finds striking variation: in dense, desirable areas like Santa Monica and Westwood, the standardized apartment building takes around five years. In other neighborhoods, time-to-build is comparable to Raleigh and Fort Worth. The variation suggests the bottleneck is not physical constraint or labor-market tightness but the regulatory apparatus itself.

The fifty-percent premium

The paper’s core empirical exercise assembles 95,724 unique properties listed on the Multiple Listing Service for Los Angeles County from 1995 to 2024. Of these, 5,092 were listed both with and without permits, the “switchers” whose changes in permit status allow identification.

To classify whether a property has preapproved permits, the authors use large language models to read MLS listing descriptions, validated against extensive human review (92 percent agreement for fully preapproved properties).

The main empirical strategy is a repeat-listing difference-in-differences design. Among properties that appear multiple times in the data, the authors compare price changes that coincide with a change in permit status to price changes on properties that remain unpermitted throughout. By examining the same parcel before and after it obtains permits, the design removes everything fixed about the property that might confound a cross-sectional comparison.

The headline result: permit approval raises the price of vacant land by 50 percent on average, with a standard error of 5 percentage points. The median implicit price of an approval is approximately $48 per square foot of land, or about $770,000 per property. Using construction-cost benchmarks from R.S. Means Company, permitting amounts to approximately 36 percent of physical construction costs. For every three dollars spent on materials, labor, equipment, and site work, permitting adds roughly another dollar.

The estimate is robust. The event study shows no pretrend through nine years before permit approval, with price capitalization beginning approximately two years before, consistent with the timing at which listings begin mentioning permitting is “in progress.” The estimate survives zipcode-by-year fixed effects, time-varying neighborhood controls, ML embeddings of listing text, and restrictions dropping distressed or very high-priced sales. An instrumental-variables approach using human-validated classifications suggests the OLS estimate, if anything, understates the true premium.

For nonvacant properties (land with existing structures), the percentage premium is smaller, around 10 percent, which is expected: the permit premium is diluted by the existing structure’s value. When the authors reweight the nonvacant sample to resemble the vacant one on observable characteristics, the dollar-value premia are statistically indistinguishable.

Who does the permitting?

The producers of preapproved land are not, in the main, long-term landowners who happen to secure permits before selling. They are specialized intermediaries who acquire raw land specifically to permit and resell.

Two pieces of evidence make this clear. First, the preapproval rate follows a hump shape with holding period: very low for properties held less than six months (too short to complete permitting), peaking around three years (consistent with permitting timelines), and declining for longer holds. Second, sellers of preapproved land preapprove 61 percent of their other sales, 49 percentage points above what property and seller characteristics would predict. Under reasonable assumptions, specialists account for roughly 80 percent of preapproved new-dwelling sales.

The RTI market is a functioning secondary market in regulatory approvals, intermediated by specialists who have built organizational capacity to navigate the process. The approval premium in transaction data reflects an equilibrium return on a productive (if socially wasteful) investment, not a statistical artifact.

What preapproval does to time-to-build

If developers pay a 50 percent premium for preapproved land, what do they get?

Using a hazard model that compares preapproved properties to observably similar ones without permits, the authors estimate what would have happened to preapproved projects if they had instead started from raw land. At four years after site acquisition, only about 35 percent would have completed construction. Preapproval raises that probability by 8 to 12 percentage points, roughly a 30 percent improvement. Even with preapproval, the four-year completion rate is under 50 percent. Without it, nearly two in three projects would fail to deliver housing within four years.

The preapproval advantage emerges between one and three years after site acquisition, exactly when you’d expect if preapproval lets development begin immediately while other buyers wait for permits. Benchmarked against the actual time-to-permit of preapproved properties (median of 2.2 years from permit submission, 3.0 years from site acquisition), the market for development approvals transfers waiting time from developers to landowners on roughly a one-for-one basis. The total time-to-build does not change. What changes is who bears the wait.

This is the key limitation of the RTI market. It does not reduce the aggregate burden of permitting. It reallocates it. The specialist absorbs the risk and delay; the developer pays a premium to avoid it.

Pure wait versus capitalized hassle

The paper proposes a useful decomposition. Why do developers pay 50 percent more for preapproved land? Is it because they’re paying to skip the wait, or because they’re paying to avoid the work of getting permitted?

The first component, “pure wait,” is straightforward. Even if permitting consumed zero resources, raw land would still trade at a discount to approved land. The developer has to wait before building, and waiting costs money. Capital is tied up. Interest accrues. Revenue is deferred. At any positive discount rate, a dollar of profit two years from now is worth less than a dollar today.

The second component, “capitalized hassle,” captures everything else: the architecture fees, legal fees, filing costs, and staff time that developers actually spend navigating the process.

At a discount rate of 10 percent per annum, the split is roughly even. But the authors are candid that these shares are imprecise. At plausible discount rates, they cannot rule out that the entire premium reflects pure wait, with hassle costs contributing little.

This matters for reform. If permitting is expensive mainly because it takes too long, the right fixes are about speed: binding deadlines, fewer sequential review stages, more permitting staff, limits on appeals. If it’s expensive mainly because the process is burdensome, the right fixes are about simplification: fewer filing requirements, less redundant multi-agency review, lighter documentation standards. In practice the two are hard to separate. Complex filings create review backlogs, backlogs extend wait times, and longer waits expose projects to shocks that trigger additional filings. The system feeds on itself.

Permitting’s share of the total regulatory burden

The paper’s final major analysis places permitting costs in context of the overall gap between housing prices and construction costs, the “housing cost wedge” central to housing regulation economics since Glaeser and Gyourko (2003).

For the median home sale in Los Angeles in 2024, prices were approximately 120 percent above physical construction costs. This wedge varies dramatically by neighborhood. In Santa Monica and Westwood, home prices exceed construction costs by a factor of four or more. In the Mojave Desert or economically distressed parts of South Los Angeles, the wedge is small or nonexistent.

On citywide average, permitting accounts for roughly one third of this wedge. In the highest-wedge neighborhoods, permitting contributes around 85 percent of construction cost. In the lowest-wedge neighborhoods, almost nothing.

One third is substantial. But two thirds is explained by other forces: zoning limits on density, the intrinsic scarcity of desirable locations, and whatever else generates the gap between sale prices and build costs. Permitting reform alone will not make Santa Monica affordable.

For an upper bound on what reform could achieve: if Los Angeles reached the permitting speed of Fort Worth or Raleigh, the gain would be equivalent to 21 percent of construction costs, potentially raising citywide-average land prices by as much as 25 percent. That is a large prize. But the city’s most recent permitting reforms, transit-oriented incentive programs intended to streamline approvals near rail stations, had little apparent effect on actual construction.

What this means in operational terms

This paper does not tell us that permitting is the sole or even the primary cause of housing unaffordability in Los Angeles. It tells us that permitting imposes costs equivalent to one third of the total regulatory tax on new housing in a city where that tax is already enormous. It tells us those costs are large enough to sustain a specialized industry devoted to their arbitrage. And it tells us the primary mechanism is time.

The system lacks binding time constraints. Without enforceable deadlines, review stages expand to absorb available capacity and then some. The appeal structure amplifies delay nonlinearly: a single CEQA appeal can restart a review process that has already consumed months, and the option to appeal at multiple stages creates compound uncertainty that developers must price into their projects.

Perhaps most importantly, the system generates no usable feedback about its own performance. The permitting bureaucracy does not track the ratio of applications to completions, the average queue time by review stage, or the rate at which projects are abandoned in process. Without such measurement, there is no mechanism by which the system can detect its own dysfunction. The RTI market, ironically, provides the performance signal the bureaucracy does not: a 50 percent price premium is the market’s verdict on the cost of navigating the regulatory apparatus.

No one is arguing for the abolition of permitting. Structural safety and environmental protection are legitimate purposes. But a process that adds a dollar of cost for every three dollars of physical construction, that kills the majority of projects before four-year completion, and that has spawned an entire intermediary industry devoted to navigating it, is a process whose costs have grown far beyond any plausible accounting of its benefits. Soltas and Gruber give us a credible measure of those costs. Whether anyone in a position to reform the system will act on it is a separate question.

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Nearly a year ago at time of writing, on January 7, 2025, while the Palisades Fire tore through one of Los Angeles’s wealthiest neighborhoods, more than 100 of the LAFD’s 183 fire trucks sat in the maintenance yard. Over half the fleet was out of service. LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley cited the equipment shortage as one reason the fires were so difficult to contain, according to reporting from Firehouse.com. The cause: fire truck prices have roughly tripled over the past decade. Pumper trucks rose to around $1 million; ladder trucks to $2 million. Delivery times stretched from under a year to two to four years. The department simply couldn’t replace its aging fleet.

Six months later, Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-32-25, granting local governments authority to suspend SB 9 (California’s 2021 law allowing duplexes and lot splits in single-family zones) in fire-affected areas. Mayor Karen Bass immediately prohibited SB 9 applications in the Palisades burn area. The stated rationale: fire safety.

Read YIMBY Law's Case

The gap between problem and response is telling. Officials responded to a disaster marked by concrete equipment failures and infrastructure collapse (half the fire trucks sidelined, two exit roads for an entire community, evacuation orders issued after homes were already burning) by suspending a housing law over speculative concerns about future evacuation density. If this were about fire safety, the policy response would address suppression capacity, road infrastructure, notification systems, and building codes. Instead, it targets how many units can be built on residential parcels.

YIMBY Law, a pro-housing litigation organization, has filed suit challenging the executive order. We are going to examine the dispute across four dimensions: the human stakes for fire survivors, the empirical claims about evacuation and fire safety, the historical context of exclusionary zoning in California, and the legal question of emergency powers. YIMBY Law’s position is well-supported (and the correct one). The Governor’s order represents exclusionary zoning dressed in safety language rather than what works in fire prevention.

But we want to go further than a simple YIMBY-versus-NIMBY framing. The survivors’ crisis has causes that run deeper than neighborhood politics. The Governor’s order is wrong not just because it’s exclusionary, but because it ignores a cascade of structural failures in insurance markets, construction supply chains, and public safety capacity, while performing responsiveness to a wealthy constituency. Understanding those failures strengthens the case against the order.

The Survivors

Before examining whether the safety claims hold up, we should be clear about what’s at stake for the people this order purports to protect.

Research from CU Boulder found that 74 percent of homeowners who lost homes in the 2021 Marshall Fire were underinsured. Of those, 36 percent were severely underinsured, covered for less than 75 percent of replacement costs. If it costs $1 million to rebuild, that’s $250,000 people have to come up with. Most households don’t have ready access to those resources.

The pattern is repeating in Los Angeles. NY1 reported that six months after the fires, 75 percent of Eaton fire survivors say they were underinsured. One Altadena resident faced a $1.2 million gap in insurance. The San Francisco Chronicle documented that underinsurance is systemic: seven years after California’s deadliest wildfire, which killed 85 people and destroyed about 11,000 homes in Paradise, more than 3,000 single-family homes and 600 multi-family units have been rebuilt; still far short of what was lost. Insurance Business America reported that nine months after the January 2025 fires, Los Angeles County had issued only seven rebuilding permits by mid-May.

These numbers reflect individual tragedies, but the causes are structural. We’ll return to that. For now, the immediate question is what tools survivors have, and what the Governor just took away.

For underinsured homeowners, SB 9 provides critical flexibility. An owner with a large lot can split it and sell half to generate funds for rebuilding. An owner can build a duplex and use rental income to service construction debt. Multiple generations can share a rebuilt property with separate units. As YIMBY Law explains, SB 9 allows homeowners (many of whom were underinsured and have only the value of their land to put toward rebuilding) to split their lots and sell unused land, or build ADUs and duplexes that generate rental income or support intergenerational living. Without these options, it will be nearly impossible for low-income and working-class people to return to these communities.

Andrew Post’s parents lost their Altadena home in the Eaton fire. With limited income in retirement and a modest insurance payout, they’re designing their new home to fit on half their lot so they can sell the other half if they need the money to afford the rebuild or for long-term medical care. Post told Politico: “There’s a great many scenarios where my parents would never set foot again in Altadena if not for SB 9.”

Victoria Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council, stated the distributional stakes plainly: “Without the payouts we’re legally owed, only the wealthiest will be able to rebuild.”

Banning SB 9 ensures that outcome. It benefits homeowners wealthy enough to rebuild a single-family home on a full lot without financial assistance; they get to return to a neighborhood that remains exclusively single-family and exclusively expensive. It harms middle-class and lower-income survivors who need flexibility. Without lot-split or rental income options, many will be forced to sell their land and leave.

That’s what the order does. Now let’s examine whether the safety rationale justifies it.

The Safety Claim, Exposed

The opponents’ central argument is that adding duplexes will make future evacuations more dangerous. This deserves scrutiny. It doesn’t survive it.

What Happened on January 7th

According to the Associated Press investigation, the first evacuation order covering neighborhoods closest to the Palisades fire didn’t come until about 40 minutes after some of those homes were already burning. By the time officials issued the order at 12:07 p.m., traffic was already gridlocked because residents had fled on their own.

The fundamental constraint was infrastructure. Just two paved roads connect the Highlands to the rest of Los Angeles: the four-lane Palisades Drive and a narrow two-lane road named Fire Drive. The latter is an emergency route, but flames quickly overran it. This was a pre-existing problem. The AP reported that in 2020, the Pacific Palisades Community Council wrote to Los Angeles City Council members complaining that in recent wildfire evacuations, traffic backups endangered the public. During the January evacuation, some roads became gridlocked and residents were seen fleeing their vehicles along the Pacific Coast Highway and taking refuge in the ocean.

The road network, designed decades ago for a single-family community (and not all of them at once), was the binding constraint. The neighborhood was single-family before the fire. It had congested evacuations before the fire. Adding a duplex to an existing parcel doesn’t change the road network.

What Actually Protects Structures

If the concern is fire safety, the research literature points in a completely different direction (including actually improving the road network).

A study published in Nature Communications in August 2025 analyzed five major California fires using machine learning. The findings: structure survivability can be predicted to 82 percent accuracy based on structure spacing, fire exposure, building hardening, and defensible space. A hypothetical 52 percent reduction in losses could be achieved through hardening and defensible space alone.

The Insurance Institute’s summary of this research confirmed that clearing vegetation and flammable materials within 1.5 meters of a structure (Zone 0) is one of the most effective actions a homeowner can take. When this is paired with home-hardening features like non-combustible siding, enclosed eaves, and vent screens, predicted losses dropped by as much as 48 percent.

The California Office of the State Fire Marshal is explicit: large wildfires are inevitable, but the disastrous house loss associated with wildland-urban interface fires can be prevented by reducing hazardous conditions at and immediately around buildings before the fires start.

Let’s Talk About Suppression Capacity

The LAFD’s sidelined fleet on January 7th wasn’t an anomaly. It was the predictable result of two policy failures: a consolidated industry extracting rents from municipalities, and an outdated equipment paradigm that costs more while delivering less.

The Private Equity Problem

documented on (later confirmed by the New York Times) the fire truck crisis stems a large part from a private equity roll-up. American Industrial Partners acquired multiple manufacturers over the past decade (E-ONE, KME (a major California supplier), Ferrara, Spartan, Smeal, Ladder Tower) and consolidated them into REV Group.

REV Group now controls roughly a third of the $3 billion annual market. Together with Oshkosh (25%) and Rosenbauer (8%), three firms control two-thirds of national sales. In addition to Basel and the NYT, one industry executive told Firehouse Magazine: “There are now times when all vendors at a bid table, each with a ‘different’ product, are all owned and managed by the same parent company.”

The result: REV shut down KME’s plants even as demand surged 50% from 2020 to 2022. Backlogs hit $4.2 billion. Delivery times stretched to four years. “Floating” price clauses let manufacturers raise prices after contracts are signed. Seattle, Houston, and Atlanta face the same crisis: aging fleets, years-long waiting lists.

The FTC sued Welsh Carson for a similar roll-up of Texas anesthesiology practices. State attorneys general could force divestitures here. They just need to act.

The Bigger Truck Problem

Even if prices normalized, American departments would still be buying the wrong equipment. A 2018 NACTO/Volpe Center report found that European and Asian aerial ladders reach the same heights as American models despite being two-thirds as long with half the turn radius. Pumpers can be 30% smaller. Japanese trucks navigate 13-foot streets while American codes require 20-foot minimums, yet, Japan’s fire death rate is lower than America’s.

The differences are systemic. Europe uses crash-tested commercial chassis; America insists on expensive custom builds. Japan deploys numerous specialized trucks working in combination; America deploys fewer “generalist” behemoths. As Fire Apparatus Magazine reported, European compartments “look like California Closets, where they use every inch.”

Three barriers lock in the paradigm: NFPA standards written around large vehicles, ISO ratings designed for traditional apparatus, and fire department political power over street design. When San Francisco tried to narrow streets for pedestrian safety, the fire department initially demanded roads 30% wider than code minimums.

But change is possible. LA can take a page from San Francisco’s book and purchase “Vision Zero” engines; 10 inches shorter, 24% smaller turn radius, same pumping capacity. Nashville added squad response vehicles costing 83% less than aerial trucks. The NACTO/Volpe report concluded that if cities banded together, they could entice manufacturers to produce smaller models.

What Else Serious Fire Policy Would Address

Beyond suppression capacity, another genuine safety response would tackle evacuation infrastructure and building standards.

The evacuation problem is road capacity: add egress routes where terrain permits, widen existing roads, create designated temporary refuge areas, improve traffic signal coordination during emergencies. NIST’s ESCAPE guidance provides a framework: training, public education, mutual aid coordination, labeled Temporary Fire Refuge Areas, drills, and cross-jurisdictional integration.

Serious policy would require all rebuilds (regardless of unit count) to meet modern Chapter 7A fire-resistant standards. It would mandate defensible space, with noncombustible materials within 5 feet of structures and vegetation management within 100 feet. It would improve notification systems. And it would create mechanisms for coordinated fire hardening at the community scale.

If learning lessons is what the governor serious about ,especially for fire safety. You would think he champion procurement reform, encourage antitrust action, etc etc. Think whatever it takes to get smaller and efficient fire trucks (that you don’t need to be on a waitlist for), better road networks, a more modernized fire code base on what works in Europe and Japan, and so on. None of these require banning duplexes. All of them would actually reduce fire risk. Banning duplexes addresses none of the factors that research identifies as determinative.

The Pattern

Safety and traffic rationales have been deployed to justify exclusionary zoning since its inception. The Pacific Palisades dispute fits this pattern.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers documented that the origins of such laws date back to the nineteenth century, when many cities were concerned about fire hazards and light-and-air regulations. The foundational 1926 Euclid v. Ambler decision upholding zoning quoted characterizations of apartment buildings as “mere parasites” that bring “disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business.”

The Century Foundation’s analysis puts it plainly: exclusionary zoning is a legal practice used for decades to keep lower-income people (disproportionately racial minorities) out of wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods.

Why do these arguments persist even when evidence doesn’t support them? In part because fire safety is politically unassailable. Safety claims don’t need to be empirically grounded to be politically effective; they need only invoke the specter of harm.

City Councilwoman Traci Park’s statement is revealing: “After what this community just lived through, the idea of forcing more density into a high-fire-severity zone demonstrates this isn’t about sound housing policy, but ideological extremism.” But SB 9 doesn’t force density anywhere. It gives property owners the option to build duplexes or split lots, options many underinsured survivors desperately need. Calling property rights ideological extremism while defending mandatory single-family zoning inverts the historical relationship between exclusion and ideology.

Failures Keep on Getting Deeper

The Palisades residents make easy villains. But if we’re honest about the crisis facing fire survivors, the causes run deeper than neighborhood politics, and understanding them strengthens the case against the Governor’s order.

The Insurance Collapse

We noted earlier that 75 percent of LA fire survivors were underinsured. That wasn’t just bad luck or individual miscalculation. It reflects a systemic failure in insurance markets that state policy has done little to address.

Over the past decade, major insurers have been fleeing California’s wildfire zones. State Farm, Allstate, and others stopped writing new homeowner policies in high-risk areas. The carriers that remain have either raised premiums to levels many homeowners can’t afford or tightened coverage limits and exclusions that leave policyholders exposed. California’s FAIR Plan (the insurer of last resort) is financially strained and offers inferior coverage. When fires hit, homeowners discover that their “guaranteed replacement cost” policies have caps, their coverage hasn’t kept pace with construction cost inflation, and the insurer they’ve paid premiums to for decades has exited the market. Some would say this is a blue state issue, however Floridians keep finding out the same issues almost every Hurricane season.

The Construction Bottleneck

Even with insurance proceeds and lot-split revenue, survivors face another structural barrier: the cost of actually building.

Construction costs have risen sharply in recent years, even before Trump’s supply chain breaking tariffs. Some of this reflects labor market tightness and pandemic-era supply chain disruptions. But some of it reflects consolidation in building materials. Lumber, gypsum, roofing materials, and concrete are all industries that have seen significant concentration. When a handful of firms control supply, prices stay elevated even after input costs normalize.

The fire truck industry is just a tip of a (clichéd) iceberg. As detailed above, private equity rolled up manufacturers, shut down plants, and let backlogs grow while prices tripled. Similar dynamics play out across critical supply chains. The LAFD’s sidelined fleet on January 7th was one consequence; the inflated cost of rebuilding a home is another.

What This Means for the SB 9 Debate

This isn’t either/or. California needs both supply-side reforms like SB 9 and action on the structural failures in insurance, construction, fire trucks, and public capacity. The tools work at different levels. Zoning reform removes legal barriers; addressing market concentration removes economic barriers; rebuilding public capacity removes institutional barriers. Survivors need all of them.

The Governor’s order is particularly perverse for this reason: these structural barriers meant SB 9 wasn’t producing a flood of new housing even before the fire. Insurance costs, construction prices, and permitting delays kept the law’s theoretical flexibility from translating into massive density increases. The safety concern about evacuation-complicating density was largely hypothetical because the housing wasn’t getting built anyway.

And now the Governor has banned the tool while ignoring the structural barriers that constrained it. He hasn’t fixed the insurance market. He hasn’t addressed the fire truck oligopoly or the oversized-apparatus paradigm. He hasn’t reduced construction costs. He hasn’t added road capacity or improved notification systems or mandated defensible space. He’s removed one option survivors have (the flexibility to split lots or build rental income) while leaving every barrier to actually using that option intact.

The Law

With the substantive case made (the safety rationale is weak, the evidence points elsewhere, the historical pattern is familiar, and the structural failures go unaddressed), we turn to the legal question. Here we should be more cautious. Emergency powers jurisprudence is contested, courts grant executives significant deference during declared emergencies, and the line between “crisis response” and “prospective policymaking” is blurrier than advocates on either side acknowledge.

That said, YIMBY Law has a plausible argument, perhaps the better one.

California’s Emergency Services Act grants governors broad authority during declared emergencies, including power to suspend statutes where “strict compliance would in any way prevent, hinder, or delay the mitigation of the effects of the emergency.” But this authority is not unlimited.

The California Legislative Analyst’s Office has documented that emergency powers are designed for crisis response, not permanent policy realignment.

The central problem: the order doesn’t suspend SB 9 to facilitate debris removal or emergency housing (activities that clearly mitigate the ongoing emergency). It suspends SB 9 to prevent hypothetical future evacuations in rebuilt neighborhoods from being complicated by additional dwelling units. That’s prospective policymaking dressed as emergency response.

The Legislature already addressed fire safety when it passed SB 9. Referencing Government Code § 65913.4(a)(6)(D), SB 9 projects in high or very high fire hazard severity zones must either implement fire hazard mitigation measures pursuant to existing building standards or be excluded from SB 9 eligibility.

The Legislature made a considered policy choice: allow SB 9 in fire zones with mitigation, or exclude projects that can’t meet safety standards. The Governor’s order substitutes his judgment for the Legislature’s.

The Assessment

YIMBY Law is right. The courts should restore SB 9.

Their track record is strong: nine of ten lawsuits won since 2019, including multiple victories against Los Angeles. But our support doesn’t rest on their litigation record. It rests on the evidence.

We’ve argued that the full policy response should go beyond what any lawsuit can achieve. Survivors need insurance reform, action on construction concentration, and rebuilt public capacity. The YIMBY movement’s supply-side agenda is necessary but not sufficient, just like a foundation for the house isn’t the entire house. And yet: the Governor’s order doesn’t advance any of these goals. It removes one tool survivors have while leaving every structural barrier intact. Between an order that does active harm and a lawsuit that preserves survivor flexibility, the choice is clear.

The political process failed here. It often does on housing. Whether litigation is a healthy substitute is debatable, but it beats allowing wealthy neighborhoods to exempt themselves from state law whenever a convenient justification arises.

Andrew Post’s parents are trying to figure out how to go home. They should be allowed to.

Read YIMBY Law's Case

Here is a sequence of events worth examining.

Mayor Daniel Lurie has positioned himself as a pro-housing reformer. His signature initiative, the “Family Zoning Plan,” would upzone much of San Francisco to allow denser development. When developer Align Real Estate proposed a 790-unit housing project on a Safeway site in the Marina, including 86 affordable units, one might have expected the mayor’s support.

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Instead, Lurie opposed it. His spokesperson declared that a developer “trying to sneak in a project before our plan takes effect is a complete violation of the spirit of that work.” The administration pledged to “stand up firmly to developers that game the system” and “pull every lever” to reshape the project.

The accusation has rhetorical appeal. But it collides with an inconvenient fact: according to the San Francisco Standard, Supervisor Stephen Sherrill (Lurie’s ally in District 2, whom the mayor recently endorsed) “submitted amendments to the mayor’s Family Zoning Plan that would exempt portions of his tony district from sky-high towers.” Mission Local reported that Sherrill “went parcel by parcel with neighborhood groups, and subsequently cut the Marina Safeway parcel out of the upzoning plan.”

Put plainly: the administration’s ally deliberately excluded this site from local upzoning, leaving state density bonus law as the only path to significant housing production on the parcel. The administration then accused the developer of “gaming the system” for using that path. Bad faith is the charitable interpretation.

The Project

The Marina Safeway project would transform a 2.6-acre site at 15 Marina Boulevard into a 25-story, U-shaped residential tower. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the development would include 790 rental units (86 of them affordable, approximately 11%), along with a new Safeway expanded from 40,520 to 63,000 square feet. No tenants displaced. No businesses displaced. Safeway returns to the ground floor after construction. The site sits within walking distance of multiple Muni lines and parks.

Some numbers for context: the Marina has added only 14 affordable homes since 2005. These 86 affordable units alone would represent six times that figure. According to The Frisc’s analysis of city housing inventory data, “The Marina and Outer Sunset managed to add not a single new home” in 2022. SPUR has documented that “well-resourced neighborhoods represent more than 50% of the city’s total land but only 10% of all new housing built in the last 15 years.”

A neighborhood that has contributed essentially nothing to San Francisco’s housing supply for decades. A proposal for 790 units with no displacement and improved retail. The mayor opposes it.

The Objection and Why It Fails

Lurie’s stated rationale is that Align is exploiting a timing loophole. Supervisor Sherrill called the proposal “outrageous,” “cartoonish,” a “publicity stunt.”

The objection fails on every count that matters.

California’s Density Bonus Law has existed since 1979 and was significantly expanded by AB 2345 in 2020. The law explicitly allows developers to exceed local height limits when they include affordable housing. This is the incentive structure California’s legislature designed to encourage affordable unit production. Sam Moss, executive director of Mission Housing, told Mission Local: “Those state laws were passed by elected politicians and have been around for years. No one’s gaming the system here.”

The state enacted these provisions because cities like San Francisco consistently failed to build adequate housing in high-opportunity areas. Using the law is not gaming the system. It is using the system as designed.

Then there is the circularity problem. Sherrill carved this site out of the Family Zoning Plan. The administration ensured state law would be the only viable path, then expressed outrage when the developer took that path. A developer cannot circumvent a rule designed not to apply to them.

Finally, the selective outrage. Align has announced redevelopment plans for four Safeway sites using identical state density bonus provisions. The Fillmore project would be 30 stories, taller than the Marina proposal. The Outer Richmond project sits one block from Ocean Beach. Lurie has commented on none of them. When Mission Local asked why, the mayor’s office pointed only to the irrelevant fact that the Marina project wouldn’t be possible after upzoning, a plan that deliberately excluded the site.

who writes told Mission Local: “Talking about the need for housing in general is easier than looking at a specific project and dealing with the specific people in a 10 block radius who are mad about that specific project.” One YIMBY blogger was blunter: “Not sure why the mayor is opposing this one. Bad move politically: supporting hack designs in the less well-off hoods and opposing a decent one in the fancy Marina.”

The Pattern

If principle does not explain Lurie’s selective opposition, what does? The political economy of District 2.

According to Mission Local, at least two-thirds of Marina households earn above the city’s area median income of approximately $127,000; 56% earn more than $200,000. Wealth buys exclusion. Sam Moss: “It’s important to remember that the Marina is a ‘low-slung neighborhood’ because mostly high-income, privileged individuals decades ago decided that we would only let tall buildings happen in the low income, Black and brown neighborhoods of San Francisco.”

Sherrill traded housing capacity for endorsements. The Standard reported that by exempting portions of District 2 from the Family Zoning Plan, “the supervisor won over community leaders who endorsed his reelection in 2026.” The reporting names names: “Andreini said neighborhood residents, which includes wealthy and politically connected San Franciscans, such as former Mayor Mark Farrell, found Lurie’s plan to be ‘way overboard.’ Andreini said he endorsed Sherrill after the supervisor pushed to limit zoning in the area.”

Sherrill’s official biography notes membership in Northern Neighbors, a YIMBY Action affiliate. Jane Natoli of YIMBY Action told The Standard: “It is politics at the end of the day, whether we want it to be or not.”

Lurie’s housing commitments have always been conditional. According to KQED, he campaigned on speeding up affordable housing production. But the SF Examiner reported that as a candidate, Lurie has indicated that he supports allowing buildings of six to eight stories along commercial and transportation corridors, far short of what state law enables. YIMBY Action did not endorse him. They backed London Breed, whom they described as “walking the walk” on housing.

The opposition may be purely performative. The Chronicle reported that under state law, “the city will almost certainly have to approve it” absent legal errors in the application. Mission Local noted that “if the developer wants to move forward with it as is, there is little that Lurie and Sherrill can do.” Credit for fighting the good fight. No responsibility for the outcome.

Implications

Perhaps Lurie genuinely believes projects should proceed through local channels regardless of legal entitlements. Perhaps he objects to a 25-story tower near the waterfront on aesthetic grounds.

But the simpler explanation fits the evidence. A wealthy neighborhood’s residents don’t want a tall building. Their elected representatives are responsive to that preference. Sherrill faces reelection in June 2026. His opponent, Lori Brooke of Neighborhoods United San Francisco, told Mission Local: “It’s kind of surprising to hear them oppose this, considering none of those words were uttered out of their mouths when we were complaining about 14-story buildings along Lombard Street.”

Critics have long accused housing advocates of being developer pawns, or of supporting density only in neighborhoods too poor to fight back. The charge sticks more easily when prominent figures muddy the waters. A few of many incidents, Elon Musk calls himself pro-development while promoting the Hyperloop, a vaporware project that helped block California transit. Marc Andreessen preaches housing abundance and “techno optimism”, then lobbied to block an apartment building near him. Commentators like Matt Yglesias urge the movement (and Democrats broadly) toward closer ties with both, despite these incidents and many more.

But real life YIMBYism is not a Twitter tendency. This case offered an easy off-ramp. Lurie ran as pro-housing. Sherrill claims YIMBY credentials. The Marina is wealthy and politically connected. Housing advocates could have stayed quiet. They didn’t. It’s not a one time thing just in SF. In New York, Manhattan’s biggest developers are convening billionaires at the Seagram Building to stop Zohran Mamdani. YIMBYs endorsed Mamdani and Mamdani is now surrounding himself with YIMBYs.

San Francisco’s housing crisis is not abstract. The city needs tens of thousands of new homes. A 790-unit project on a site with no displacement and transit access represents precisely the kind of development the city claims to want. That the mayor opposes it in his own backyard while remaining silent about taller projects elsewhere tells us what we need to know.

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Edit: Added clarification after reader feedback that this critique targets a vocal minority, not productive online organizing. As one commenter noted, ‘Online is where people find new communities’ - essential for movements like YIMBYism

wrote (in a now deleted) note that claimed“It’s just so unfortunate that YIMBYs are trying to push everyone to get behind a massive ‘just build’ agenda but also say that it’s totally unrealistic to construct new buildings that look as good as [historic buildings] and that if you care about aesthetics at all you’re some sort of simpleton.”

I made it clear, that I have significant disagreement with that statement, but Freddie gotten more specific: “Every time someone posts a picture of a beautiful old building on Twitter a hundred Very Online YIMBYs show up and call them dumb and say that Actually, Ugly Buildings Are Good, accept your identical glass and brushed steel slop for the rest of your life.”

As much as I would like to deny it, Freddie happened to be right about a specific (and I can’t stress enough) VERY SMALL MINORITY OF THE ONLINE COMMUNITY, only the “Very Online” YIMBYs, though this shouldn’t obscure the excellent work by organizations like YIMBY Action, YIMBY Law, Strong Towns, and others I can rattle off. There’s a genuine tension between what works in real life and what gets amplified online. Social media incentives can corrupt movements when engagement metrics become the primary feedback mechanism, rewarding a vocal minority that celebrates ugliness and dismisses aesthetic concerns while serious advocates demonstrate that density and beauty aren’t opposing values. This “Very Online” problem extends beyond architecture and zoning. In pronatalism, organizations like Boom Campaign are smaller but promising, doing research on what works, yet online discourse often skews toward accounts demanding tradition while defending workplace policies that prevent family formation. Meanwhile, real-world cities deliver measurable fertility increases through sustained institutional commitment. It’s almost like what’s said isn’t exactly what gets done.

Say it with me : “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does”

Organizational cybernetics offers a concept that cuts through stated intentions to actual purposes: POSIWID, or The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Judge systems by their outputs over time, not their claims. If a system consistently produces X despite stating it pursues Y, then producing X is the actual purpose, whatever anyone says.

At the end of the day, what does “Very Online” YIMBY discourse produces what, exactly? Not housing permits. The outputs are viral threads celebrating ugliness, in-group status through extremity, personal brand building for advocates, movement cohesion through symbolic battles with “normies”, while housing supply declines and prices keep on rising. Real-world YIMBYism produces Minneapolis 2040’s 16-34% lower housing costs versus counterfactual, Austin’s 9.3% rent decline (the largest in the country). Japanese architectural fame is beloved worldwide precisely because minimal design review enables rather than constrains quality.

Pronatalism follows the same pattern. Online pronatalists produce manifestos and media attention while their supposed leaders like Elon Musk’s actual workplace practices undermine fertility. Real-world fertility policy produces South Tyrol’s 40 years of sustained family payments delivering 1.64 fertility versus Italy’s 1.2 (37% above baseline), Akashi City’s budget reallocations cutting public works to fund child welfare achieving 1.65 versus Japan’s 1.3 (27% above baseline), remote work policies enabling 0.2 additional children per couple through time recovery addressing material constraints.

Juran distinguished between vital few and trivial many: in any collection of problems, a vital few account for most impact while a trivial many account for very little. Effective improvement requires identifying and attacking the vital few rather than dissipating energy across everything . Minneapolis succeeded by focusing on parking minimums, height limits, transit-oriented development (the vital few regulatory barriers preventing housing production). Online “advocacy” systematically focuses on trivial many: aesthetic signaling, symbolic victories, viral arguments that just doesn’t seem to recruit many real life people. The vital few constraints determining actual outcomes get ignored, especially if they require trust from other real life factions for any hope of a clean bill.

We’re looking at how different institutional structures produce radically different outputs through their feedback loops, information flows, optimization targets. Not individual failures or bad actors.

Housing: How Online Fails While Real-World Succeeds

Design Review Makes Buildings Uglier (And More Expensive)

What Freddie spotted (“Very Online” YIMBYs celebrating ugliness while claiming to support abundance) reflects a misunderstanding about what produces ugly buildings. Discretionary design review committees systematically degrade architectural quality through three compounding mechanisms creating exactly the monotonous mediocrity Freddie objects to.

Risk aversion drives committee mediocrity (I know, I know, it is a bit cliche). Design review commissioners engage in what M. Nolan Gray called “meddle management”: making their worth felt through constant engagement with projects for which they have no professional responsibility but over which they wield veto power. The safe choice becomes what looks like what already exists. New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission reviewed a thoughtful brick redesign of a decrepit storefront. Commissioner Michael Goldblum objected that the existing building was “very much reflective of the period of significance” while the new design “needs to be examined and made more location-specific.” Translation: make it look more like what’s already there, regardless of whether what’s already there is any good.

Public feedback mechanics compound this by favoring vocal minorities over silent majorities. A Seattle architect diagnosed the problem: design review boards function as a “megaphone for NIMBYs to complain about housing.” Three retirees show up to every meeting with the time and inclination to object. Working parents with young children don’t have that luxury. Organized opposition dominates unorganized support, not because they represent community consensus, but because the process systematically selects for those with time and motivation to participate repeatedly.

Delay itself drives standardization in ways having nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with economics. Seattle’s design review delayed a passive house project for 19 months because the board requested more bricks before eventually approving it without the bricks anyway. The lesson developers learned wasn’t about architectural quality. Use formulas that cleared review before. Avoid innovation triggering additional meetings. Time is money, uncertainty is expensive. The rational response to lengthy discretionary review is deploying the safest possible design minimizing procedural friction, not attempting anything architecturally distinctive.

Tom Radulovich of San Francisco’s Livable City observed a system failure: “Something happened in the culture of architecture and design, which went from a system that was unregulated but consistently producing things that are good to one that is heavily regulated but still turns out crappy buildings.” We get neither beautiful variation nor affordable monotony. We get expensive monotony designed to survive committee review. The “gentrification building” with its variegated façade, quietly receding roofline, massing as a collage of intersecting cubes in four different colors and materials appears in both market-rate and affordable housing precisely because both face the same procedural gauntlet.

Dismissing aesthetic concerns as illegitimate or claiming that caring about building appearance marks someone as a simpleton isn’t just incredibly stupid. It contradicts the fact that YIMBYism enables prettier buildings to even get built along with everything we know about how people actually value architecture and what drives opposition to development. Manhattan Institute’s comprehensive analysis synthesized Dutch research showing neo-traditional homes commanding higher prices than modern designs, with price premiums not explained by higher build costs. People simply valued the aesthetic more. A Savannah study found brick and stucco exteriors adding 24-35% to property values compared to wood and aluminum. More than adding bedrooms (6% premium), bathrooms (10.5%), courtyards (17%), swimming pools (17%). For those who value market’s opinion on things, the market makes it clear: people value beautiful design more than they value a lot of physical amenities.

Yale research on opposition found that mentioning developers as beneficiaries increased opposition to identical projects. Concerns about “ugly or particularly large” buildings appeared repeatedly as primary drivers of resistance. Beautiful buildings command 24-35% premiums and reduce opposition. Celebrating ugliness doesn’t just alienate normal people aesthetically; it burning up political capital (that others, not the “Very Online”, earned btw!) needed to actually build anything.

What Happens Without Design Review? More Pretty Buildings

What happens in the real world? Well most of the evidence contradicts everything online YIMBYs carelessly claim about “abundance” vs aesthetics. Japan has minimal design review and produces globally celebrated architectural creativity: the “pet architecture” of Atelier Bow-Wow squeezing inventive buildings into traffic islands and triangular interstitial spaces, minimalist streetscapes with innovative responses to site constraints, avant-garde houses accessible to middle-class families rather than reserved for the mega-rich.

Light regulation with clear frameworks enables both quality and quantity simultaneously. Discretionary review produces neither. “Very Online” YIMBYs showing up to mock people for appreciating beautiful old buildings and insisting that “Actually, Ugly Buildings Are Good” (or defending a landlord cartel for that matter) aren’t advancing more housing supply, let alone housing “abundance”. They’re signaling for in-group status within a social media bubble, despite all of the real world evidence or the fact that the online YIMBY movement was built on top of urbanism (which celebrates aesthetics), through provocative extremity while systematically undermining the movement’s stated goals. The system produces viral engagement for the “Very Online” while producing zero housing permits and actively alienating the broader public whose support is necessary for political success.

The Andreessen Contradiction

This dynamic extends beyond anonymous Twitter accounts to the movement’s most prominent advocates. Marc Andreessen writes manifestos lamenting that we “can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential, which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in.” The rhetoric signals concern about broadly shared prosperity.

Two years after his “It’s Time to Build” manifesto, The Atlantic uncovered that he and his wife had sent a comment to Atherton officials expressing “IMMENSE objection” to the town allowing 137 multifamily units and demanding they “IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning,” warning the change would “MASSIVELY decrease our home values.” Atherton is the richest US zip code five consecutive years and faced a state mandate to plan for 348 units by 2031. After receiving more than 300 mostly negative comments from residents including Netflix, EA, and Benchmark executives, the town dropped its multifamily rezoning and now relies on accessory dwelling units and lot splits that won’t remotely meet the mandate.

Andreessen’s manifestos reach a broad public and build his “visionary” reputation. His Atherton opposition stays local and procedural, only becoming visible through investigative journalism. Benefits flow from both rhetoric and contradictory practice. The contradiction only surfaces through deliberate investigation rather than any sort of automatic feedback. No forcing function requires consistency. The system produces personal brand value and elite property protection simultaneously. Neither output is housing.

What Real-World YIMBYism Actually Delivers (In Addition to Prettier Buildings)

The gap between online discourse and real-world results shows how policy actually works when designed to solve problems rather than generate engagement. Real success comes from comprehensive reforms addressing the vital few constraints systematically.

Minneapolis 2040 passed after 150 public engagement sessions gathering 20,000 comments over two years. Neighbors for More Neighbors started with Ryan Johnson and John Edwards creating memes and hosting bar meetups, building through face-to-face engagement to more than a hundred people at Gluek’s bar mobilizing for density reform. They organized a coalition with AARP, the transit authority, community institutions (groups who needed housing, not industry lobbyists bargaining over who gets what). The City Council vote was 12-1 in favor, near-unanimous despite vocal opposition, because voters had elected five new council members in 2017 who campaigned explicitly on equity and affordable housing. Political culture shifted through democratic choice rather than backroom deals.

The reform itself was comprehensive but focused on vital few constraints. Allowing duplexes and triplexes everywhere provided political cover. The real impact came from eliminating parking minimums, removing height requirements in high-density zones, enabling transit-oriented development that unlocked apartment construction along corridors. Not a bill loaded with symbolic wins or theatrical gestures. A clean approach addressing the specific regulatory barriers preventing housing production.

Five years post-implementation, housing cost growth in Minneapolis was 16-34% lower than counterfactual Minneapolis. Rents 17.5-34% lower than they would have been otherwise. Placebo tests showed Minneapolis had the lowest housing cost trajectory of 83 donor cities. Not Twitter success. Rent decreases people can feel in their bank accounts every month.

Austin followed a similar path. The Home Builders Association organized a diverse coalition including the Austin Board of Realtors, AARP, Austin EMS, CapMetro (community groups rather than just industry interests). Council Member José “Chito” Vela explained the shift in political culture: “We were working under the premise for a couple of decades that if we did not allow new construction, that would help preserve neighborhoods. That has been objectively shown to be false.” The HOME Initiative passed 9-2 in December 2023. Phase 2 compatibility reforms passed in May 2024.

National Multifamily Housing Council analysis found the construction boom driving rent decreases actually preceded most zoning reforms: “Austin’s last substantive revision to its Land Development Code was in 1984... recent regulatory changes can’t explain the surge in development beginning in 2022.” Market signals met a relatively favorable regulatory environment. Political culture shifts reduced procedural opposition. The city issued 51,000 housing permits in 2021 at four times the rate of comparable cities, matching Phoenix, Atlanta, and Philadelphia combined. 9.3% rent decline from May 2023 to May 2024, the largest in the country. Median rent dropped from a $1,726 peak in August 2022 to $1,399. Jake Wegmann at UT Austin described it: “Like adding chairs to a musical chairs game.”

Minneapolis didn’t try solving every housing problem simultaneously. It eliminated the specific regulatory barriers (parking minimums, height limits, single-family-only zoning) preventing market response to demand. Austin didn’t load its reforms with every possible housing intervention. It addressed compatibility standards and allowed development to respond to price signals. Clean comprehensive reform addressing core constraints works. Loaded bills trying to address everything or theatrical spending diffused across marginal interventions doesn’t.

Fertility: When Pronatalism Prevents Births

If this pattern were unique to housing, we might dismiss it as domain-specific dysfunction junction. But identical dynamics govern fertility policy, where the gap between online performance and real-world outcomes shows even more starkly who advocacy actually serves.

Musk’s Contradiction: RTO Costing 100,000 Births Annually

Elon Musk warns that population collapse from low birth rates poses a bigger risk to civilization than global warming and positions his fourteen-plus children as ideological commitment made flesh. The rhetoric signals profound concern about demographic sustainability.

His actual workplace practices? Musk explicitly embraced return-to-office mandates as an attrition tool, writing with Vivek Ramaswamy about federal workers that “requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.” Research by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues estimates that forcing employees back to office five days weekly could reduce fertility rates by perhaps 100,000 births per year in the US compared to a regime of strong support for hybrid and remote work.

The mechanism so far appears straightforward. Remote work saves approximately 1.5 hours daily on commuting. When both partners work from home at least one day weekly, total lifetime fertility increases by 0.2 children (an 11% increase from baseline). RTO eliminates precisely the flexibility research shows increases fertility.

Beyond RTO, Musk’s companies create workplace environments so hostile that employees successfully sue over racism and sexism. They fund population research while firing employees for writing open letters in ways the NLRB found illegal. The rhetoric serves personal branding and ideological positioning. The actual workplace practices serve labor cost reduction and control through voluntary attrition. The system produces both personal brand value about civilizational concerns and cost savings through labor control. The output it doesn’t produce is births.

The “Trad Wife” Discourse

‘s recent critique of tradwife discourse identifies the same pattern from a different angle. The problem with following the script now being pushed on the far-right (skip college, forego career, start having kids young and have many of them): your choice of husband becomes incredibly important. Wind up with someone who isn’t responsible, isn’t kind, doesn’t respect you, and you have very little recourse when things go south. The paradigmatic 1950s traditional mothers understood this lifetime risk. They told their daughters to go to college and have careers.

But the men most eager to land tradwives don’t seem to respect women or value their contributions, if the online discourse is any indication. Building a movement around telling women to set themselves up for significant lifetime risk while the men advocating this simultaneously push workplace policies preventing family formation isn’t just internally contradictory. It shows who the advocacy actually serves. Online pronatalists advocate traditional family formation while implementing policies costing 100,000 births annually. They celebrate having many children while creating workplace conditions fundamentally incompatible with caregiving. The gap between rhetoric and practice isn’t accidental. It’s what the system is optimized to produce.

What Real-World Fertility Policy Delivers

Real-world fertility policy success contrasts sharply. These successes share a common pattern: sustained institutional commitment over decades to unglamorous interventions that don’t generate viral content but do enable people to actually have and raise children.

’s has a great article on how South Tyrol has maintained family support payments since the 1980s, forty years of sustained commitment proving government will reliably support families. The region provides 200 euros monthly per child until age three plus a 1,900 euro annual national payment, free “Ben Arrivato Bebé” packages with clothes and books and vouchers, family transport passes, shopping discounts, a Family+ card for households with three or more children providing supermarket discounts. 1.64 fertility versus Italy’s 1.2 (37% above the national baseline), sustained through high female labor force participation and the second-smallest gender employment gap in Italy despite relatively low religiosity. On top of that, has a fantastic report on how these polices don’t just increase the TFR, but also the Total Maternity Rate, i.e. how many women even have a child.

The policies themselves drive results with a secret ingredient, consistency. After decades of repeatedly proving that government supports families with dependable payments and predictable childcare, people believe it and plan accordingly.

Akashi City in Japan took a different path revealing the political economy constraints most municipalities face. Former mayor Fusaho Izumi from 2011-2022 doubled child welfare spending by cutting public works budgets, prioritizing families over construction interests in ways most cities won’t because elderly voters outnumber young families and construction lobbies want their budgets maintained. The city now provides free medical care for children through age 18, free school lunches through age 15, free nursery and kindergarten for families with two or more children, free diapers delivered by midwives (combining material support with professional outreach addressing maternal isolation). 1.65 fertility versus Japan’s 1.3, 27% above baseline, with population growing ten consecutive years as young families relocated specifically for the policies. Research across 1,741 Japanese municipalities found child welfare spending dominated every other predictor with a 0.47 coefficient, demonstrating that municipal budget choices matter more than national policy when local incentives point elsewhere.

Remote work is the cleanest natural experiment in addressing material time constraints. Bloom’s 2025 study across 19,277 people in 38 countries found that when both partners work from home at least one day weekly, total lifetime fertility increases by 0.2 children (described as a “massive” effect, roughly 11% of baseline). The Economic Innovation Group found remote workers were 10 percentage points more likely to be pregnant or trying among women whose finances improved significantly, 6.3 percentage points more likely to plan marriage. NBER research by Bailey, Currie, and Schwandt identified the 2021 fertility increase as concentrated among college-educated women who saw drastic reductions in opportunity cost when able to work from home. This addresses how people actually live rather than offering symbolic gestures or loaded bills with diffuse benefits.

Why This Pattern Is A Problem

Why does online discourse (from a very vocal minority mind you!) consistently produce performance rather than substance across both housing and fertility, drowning out other voices in the online community? The systematic divergence between stated goals and actual outputs has structural causes.

Fundamentally, it’s feedback my dear Watson . Effective systems require rapid, accurate feedback from outputs to decision-makers so the system can learn from mistakes and build on successes. Online advocacy has near-instant feedback about engagement metrics (likes, retweets, follower counts, viral thread performance) but essentially zero feedback about actual policy outcomes unfolding over years rather than hours. Andreessen gets immediate feedback on how many people share his manifestos but no feedback connecting his Atherton opposition to housing scarcity because the connection requires investigative journalism to surface. Musk gets immediate feedback on engagement with his pronatalist tweets but no feedback linking his RTO mandates to prevented births because that connection requires academic research to quantify.

The interventions most likely to succeed are precisely those least likely to generate online engagement. After all, we expect people to be competent and do good things. Remote work policies increasing fertility by 0.2 children don’t make compelling tweets. They’re boring HR policy requiring sustained institutional commitment to implementation. Budget reallocations cutting construction interests to fund child welfare are unglamorous municipal finance battles invisible to anyone not following local government (let along local governments in another country!). Forty years of sustained family payments proving government reliability is the opposite of viral (repetitive, undramatic, technically complex policy maintenance). The 150 public engagement sessions Minneapolis held gathering community input happen in church basements and community centers rather than on social media, requiring patient relationship-building that doesn’t scale through retweets.

What does generate engagement? Celebrating ugly buildings gets upvotes and in-group status while alienating the broader public. Writing manifestos about civilizational challenges builds personal brands without building housing. Blocking developments in your own town while advocating abundance online generates both visionary reputation and property protection. Mandating return-to-office while funding population research signals both labor control and demographic concern. The contradiction doesn’t matter because benefits flow from both performances.

Again, with social incentives reward hype and fights over real world results in ways that compound over time. Twitter (or what’s left of it) select for provocation rather than bridge-building because provocation generates engagement. Suggesting that celebrating ugliness seems like bad politics spoils the fun and marks you as insufficiently committed to movement purity by the “Very Online”. The most extreme positions get the most engagement, which incentivizes increasingly extreme positions, which drives out moderate voices, which makes the movement less effective at achieving stated goals while more effective at generating viral content.

“What’s funny is [Disney] built this idyllic town,” says , writer of , “but the problem is it costs $120, $130, whatever it costs now to go in and walk down this town. And that feeling used to be in every town across the country, that little area where it was safe to walk, where kids could run around, where there were small businesses... And it’s just ironic that we had to recreate it and now we have to go pay for it when this was our normal standard for years.”

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Allen’s observation about Main Street, U.S.A. captures something crucial: Americans recognize good urbanism when they see it. They’ll pay admission to experience it. The housing reform movement has made it legal again in many places. YIMBY Action, YIMBY Law, Abundant Housing LA, East Bay YIMBY (these groups have won California’s housing packages, Oregon’s HB 2001, Minneapolis 2040). The strongest chapters run local campaigns, build coalitions across business owners and families, win council seats, get housing built.

A gap exists between what these chapters accomplish and what most places have. Thousands of American suburbs. A few hundred with organized YIMBY advocacy. Far fewer with the capacity that sustained wins require: coalition management, infrastructure coordination, ethnographic sensitivity to local concerns. Suburb NIMBYs rarely stop there, as they lobby their state and federal representatives, including the president.

We also seen setbacks like the (former) YIMBYist town in America, Aurbun Maine voted out their YIMBY mayor, Jason Levesque, after he was unable to deal with growing opposition. Not to mention the growing tensions as Gavin Newsom delays signing a housing bill SB79, in part because of heavy lobbing from LA Mayor Karen Bass and other cites. On the note of government, American development already runs on subsidies (highway spending, mortgage interest deductions, parking requirements that force bundling).

We’re in a race. Can we scale effective local organizing to enough places, fast enough, before the political moment passes and backlash takes hold? Can we deliver visible results (roundabouts, family-friendly apartments, functioning density) before people lose patience?

I want to draw on my past interviews to sketch on a (pretty big) napkin a path forward: on how universities accidentally preserved walkable urbanism; , well known for and a transportation planner fighting for, well, a car-free America; and Calvin Chua, a Singapore architect whose ethnographic research shaped planning for 1,800 hectares of heritage buildings. Could a complementary layer (nonprofits, for-profit developers, or hybrids) work alongside single-issue advocates while pursuing what those groups can’t: grants for family-sized apartments, coordinated infrastructure packages, converting soft opposition by delivering tangible results quickly? This wouldn’t replace single-issue advocacy; it would focus on interdisciplinary work.

The strongest YIMBY chapters already do some of this. They coordinate with schools and parks. They build coalitions with family advocates and business owners. They think about how housing connects to transit, walkability, quality of life. Scaling these practices to hundreds of suburbs where organized advocacy doesn’t exist yet, fast enough that policy wins translate to construction before political windows close.

Understanding the Opposition: Structural vs. Convertible

The hardcore opposition won’t budge. Baby Boomers hold approximately $20 trillion in real estate, with sixty-one percent never planning to sell. For some boomers, housing scarcity is their retirement plan (though many are NIMBYs for less material reasons). Homeownership increases political participation on zoning issues, and property tax caps create lock-in effects. They shut down new housing near them, then blame young people for being unable to afford homes before 40.

But much opposition is convertible, even if conversion isn’t easy. I am going to take one of the many “soft” factions in terms of support and opposition: younger families and pronatalist advocates. Institute for Family Studies research surveying almost 6,000 Americans found that when shown identical-square-footage apartments with different bedroom counts, Americans who want families consistently chose units divided into more bedrooms. Some people, seeing the scarcity of family-friendly apartments, demand unit-mix mandates or single-family-only zoning. They fear pure YIMBYism would encourage only smaller apartments.

Why do they care? Bedroom count influenced willingness to have children more than almost any other apartment feature. Parents want more bedrooms for their kids. Developers assume studios and three-bedroom units have similar vacancy and turnover. They’re wrong. Family-friendly units have lower vacancy rates, longer tenures, lower nonpayment risks.

If pronatalists and family advocates push for unit-mix mandates or single-family-only zoning, NIMBYs (especially Boomers) will weaponize these tools to block all housing. But if YIMBYs don’t deliver family-friendly units, this convertible faction turns against them. The same dynamic plays out across other soft opposition groups. Deliver results or lose allies. Fail to deliver, and those allies become the next generation of opponents.

That’s just one of *many* factions with their unique needs and what they focus on.

“Soft” opposition that sounds ideological often masks practical concerns. Parents don’t oppose density but question whether apartments can work for families. The IFS study found developers systematically underbuild family-friendly units because they misread the market. Residents oppose parking changes until they see that narrower streets reduce accidents. Business owners resist bike lanes until retail sales data proves increased foot traffic. Neighbors fight apartment buildings until they need downsizing options themselves.

Allen distinguishes between loud opponents dominating city council meetings and most residents who “just try to live their lives. They don’t really care if the university does X, Y, and Z. They enjoy living there.” Brown watched advocacy groups kill their own bike projects “because the proposed bike facility wasn’t the type they preferred.” The persuadable middle and the ideological allies both need different approaches than the hardcore 20%.

Chua’s ethnographic work with Strata Malls in Singapore gives another example. His team discovered shopkeepers viewed stores as retirement communities, refusing million-dollar buyouts. This finding reshaped how they preserved 1,800 hectares of heritage buildings. “Activist without a large manifesto banner,” Chua describes his practice. “It’s more of a quiet way of revealing these conditions and hopefully, it could inspire change.”

Learning from What Works

Soft opposition converts when you address their actual concerns, not when you trick them. A lot of pundits advocated to use strategic dishonesty when dealing with allied factions: obscure the changes and get what you want before your allied factions notice. This is *incredibly* stupid. It burns trust, creates backlash when people realize what happened, and hands NIMBYs ammunition for every subsequent fight. The hardcore 20% will oppose you regardless. Why turn potential allies into permanent enemies thinking that they have no where else to go? They will turn against you out of sheer spite instead.

That said, I see why a lot of others gawk at the alternative: the hard work of synthesizing the best models to meet the needs of factions you’re working with locally. Don’t moderate between competing visions. Build something that addresses multiple concerns simultaneously. Parents worried about family housing get the bedroom counts and school capacity. Businesses concerned about traffic get the retail data and bike infrastructure that increases foot traffic. Retirees wanting to age in place get the walkability and transit access. Mix and match proven approaches rather than compromising to the lowest common denominator. I’m making it sound easier than it is, but it’s the real way forward.

Where do you find working models? Some places designed comprehensively from scratch. Others evolved organically over decades. Some offer extractable design innovations independent of governance structure. A few demonstrate how sustained political leadership delivers results. And certain institutions accidentally preserved what most places demolished. Each offers different lessons for different contexts.

Houten: A Very Nice Dutch Biking Suburb

Consider Houten, Netherlands, a 50,000-person suburb southeast of Utrecht that turns American suburban assumptions inside out. Unlike Japan’s evolution over decades, Houten was intentionally designed from the 1960s onward by architect Robert Derks with a radical premise: prioritize livability for children over cars.

The design inverts typical suburban structure. The main east-west thoroughfare through downtown is a bike path connecting schools, city hall, and key buildings, not a road. Car traffic is relegated to a ring road encircling residential areas. To drive from one neighborhood to another requires returning to the ring road, making driving circuitous while cycling remains direct. The result: 66% of trips by non-car modes despite 415 autos per 1,000 residents and 36% of households owning two cars.

Houten demonstrates that car-light family suburbs work. Primary schools release children who bike home independently. Parents cycle with groceries and small children. Retirees age in place without car dependency. The density is moderate, denser than typical American suburbs with duplexes and apartments mixed with single-family homes. Car ownership and use coexist with cycling because the design makes cycling faster and more pleasant for local trips.

Houten doesn’t threaten property values because it’s desirable. It’s won “Cycling City of the Netherlands” twice, consistently ranks highest in livability surveys, and attracts families willing to pay premium prices. The intentional design (underground utilities in places, dedicated bike infrastructure, prioritized green space) creates quality that justifies investment. Unlike sprawl that requires ever-increasing property values to justify car dependency, Houten’s model delivers quality of life that holds value even in flat markets.

Houten offers tangible lessons for American suburbs: prioritize directness for non-car modes, use ring roads to discourage through traffic, cluster density near key destinations, and design so comprehensively that quality speaks for itself. As Brown notes about successful infrastructure changes: “If there’s drone videos, that’s even better” for building support. Show the completed project working.

Japan: The Ordinary Romance of a Dense Suburb

Where Houten shows intentional design from scratch, Japanese suburbs demonstrate organic evolution maintaining family-friendliness at higher densities. For Americans frustrated by car-dependent sprawl, Japanese suburbs offer existence proof: density can be family-friendly, walkable, and full of nature all at once. The typical Japanese suburban neighborhood features mid-rise apartments clustered around train stations, single-family homes on quieter streets, and everything needed for daily life within walking or biking distance. The “kei car suburb” or “golf cart suburb” framing helps Americans visualize it (I would think the Netflix show of where kids can walk to stores and back would be enough, but hey): neighborhoods where children bike to school independently, parents walk to grocery stores, and retirees age in place without car dependency.

Thesw are good places to raise families. Parks and playgrounds are distributed throughout. Shopping streets (shotengai) provide fresh food and local businesses. Children commonly travel independently from young ages. The density that horrifies American NIMBYs produces family-oriented communities with abundant green space.

The structural enablers differ from America: Japan’s national zoning framework limits local veto power, private rail companies profit from real estate development along their lines (companies like JR East earn one-third of their $26 billion annual revenue from retail, real estate, and hotels rather than rail operations), and the fact they dense suburbs are nice places to live while being dense.

When suburban residents claim density destroys family-friendliness, Japanese suburbs demonstrate otherwise. When they argue walkability requires sacrificing space, the Japanese model proves you can have both. The example defeats the “it can’t work” narrative and gives permission to want something different than postwar American sprawl.

Disney’s Urbanist Innovations and Dreams

Where Houten and Japan offer governance and cultural models difficult to replicate, Disney’s Celebration offers extractable design innovations regardless of governance structure. While Walt Disney’s original EPCOT vision (an actual city of 20,000) died with him in 1966, elements survived in Celebration, Florida. Celebration was developed using New Urbanism principles, featuring walkable streets, mixed-use development, and ample parks and green space, with ground broken in 1994. Media often portrayed it as artificial and corporate-controlled, but this obscures reality: functionally, it works. According to U.S. Census data, roughly 8,540 residents called Celebration home in 2017, with a median income of $83,228 and a median property value of $401,600. It is a highly walkable community providing residents with access to a golf course, pool, and downtown filled with shops and restaurants. Celebration is safer than the Florida state average and safer than the national average, with the cost of crime per resident at $155 per year ($309 less than the national average and $91 less than Florida’s state average). The failure came from governance structure: corporate control without democratic legitimacy rather than physical planning problems.
The extractable innovations from Celebration and Disneyland have specific cost-benefits:

Underground utilities and service corridors: Disney’s most consequential innovation was hiding infrastructure underground. While expensive upfront (adding roughly 15-20% to initial development costs according to industry estimates), the long-term benefits are substantial. Underground utilities reduce the risk of power outages caused by storms, increase property values, and require less maintenance than overhead utilities. The primary benefit of placing distribution lines underground is that it reduces the frequency of outages, particularly those caused by storms, and substantially reduces the costs of tree trimming and other vegetation management. Studies show that having a home near a power line could decrease its value. Homes near transmission lines in Portland, Oregon, sold for about $5,000 less, while in Seattle the price gap was about $12,500. While the Maryland State Highway Administration lifecycle cost-benefit model found that in most scenarios analyzed, the net present value of benefits did not exceed costs, targeted undergrounding in specific contexts can be justified. A comprehensive analysis framework shows that undergrounding transmission and distribution lines can be a cost-effective strategy to improve reliability

Pedestrian-priority design: Celebration’s walkable street network with traffic calming costs slightly more initially (narrower streets with quality materials and landscaping versus wide asphalt) but delivers measurable benefits. Studies of traffic calming measures show that speed tables achieve accident reductions exceeding 40%, with speed reductions of 40-50%, while chicanes and road narrowing result in accident reductions always greater than 30%. Data from 187 speed humps demonstrate an average reduction in daily traffic volumes of 20 percent, with high-speed traffic (at least 10 mph over the posted limit) dropping from 14 percent to 1 percent of total traffic after implementation. Lower maintenance costs result from less wear from slower, lighter traffic. Research from New York City found that pedestrian and bicycle upgrades spiked retail sales by 49%, 46 percentage points more than the borough-wide growth of just 3%. When Lodi, California made improvements to School Street, 60 new stores opened, the vacancy rate dropped from 18 percent to 6 percent, and sales tax revenues shot up 30 percent. A study in Portland, Oregon found that traffic calming projects decreasing traffic by 16% raised home values on treated streets by 1%. Property values rise rather than fall, neutralizing opposition from asset-protective homeowners.

Mixed-use from inception: Rather than single-use zoning that requires retrofitting later, Disney integrated apartments above retail, homes near shops, and civic buildings near residences from day one. The upfront cost is essentially zero because it’s a planning choice, not a construction expense. Dense mixed-use/condo construction that rises six stories or more produces more than $250,000 per acre in taxes, while big-box stores generate only about $8,350 per acre (maybe $150 to $200 more per acre per year than single-family houses). A typical acre of mixed-use downtown development yields $360,000 more in tax revenue to city government than an acre of strip malls or big box stores. Smart Growth America’s analysis showed that walkable development generates about 10 times more tax revenue per acre than traditional suburban development, and in Nashville, dense mixed-use downtown development returned 1,150 times more tax revenue per acre than traditional suburban sprawl. This dramatically reduces per-household tax burden while funding better services.

Carmel’s Deliverism & State Capacity

If Houten and Japan provide ideals and Disney the design toolkit, Carmel, Indiana demonstrates a working (yes, working) governance model that actually works in American suburbs. Over 28 years, Mayor James Brainard transformed this Indianapolis suburb of 100,000 into what the Wall Street Journal called “the Internet’s favorite small city”.

Brainard’s approach was comprehensive. Carmel became famous for building over 150 roundabouts, the infrastructure innovation Mark Brown uses as a best practice example when building public support: “I’ve used case studies to show completed projects in other cities. If there’s drone videos, that’s even better.” The roundabouts improved traffic flow while beautifying streets, tangible results residents experience daily.

The city transformed decaying strip malls into thriving mixed-use districts: City Center with its $175 million performing arts complex, Midtown with offices and apartments, the Arts and Design District. The Monon Trail became a civic spine comparable to New York’s High Line. Embedded within this vision was significant housing density. These districts are all higher-density mixed-use. Carmel accomplished YIMBY-adjacent goals without making housing the primary pitch.

Property values increased rather than decreased, neutralizing the hardcore 20% opposition whose retirement security depends on housing scarcity. Quality execution addressed soft opposition: parks families actually use, roundabouts reducing commute times, cultural amenities enhancing quality of life. Carmel delivered both physical improvements and community benefits simultaneously.

The 2024 election provided the definitive test. Democrats saw opportunity in this upscale suburb trending Democratic nationally. Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain was involved in fundraising. The Democratic candidate attacked Republican Sue Finkam over culture war issues, demanding she denounce a Moms for Liberty chapter more forcefully. Finkam refused to get drawn in, sticking to her positive platform: continued infrastructure investment, quality of life improvements, the commonsense-center approach.

The result: Finkam won 57% to 43%, Republicans retained eight of nine city council seats. Democratic hopes collapsed against 28 years of tangible results. Suburban voters rejected culture war positioning. When offered a choice between continued practical improvements and identity politics, they chose deliverism overwhelmingly.

Deliverism wins. Brainard “talked climate” while delivering practical policies (bike paths, parks) without imposing mandates that would trigger opposition. He focused on items within city government’s control. As Mark Brown emphasizes: “Framing bike lanes as benefiting everyone, not just cyclists, is important. For every protected bike lane we build, we’re getting a lot of cyclists out of traffic and into their dedicated space.”

Universities as Accidental Urban Preservers

Ryan Allen identifies the same pattern: universities preserved walkable urbanism even as surrounding areas sprawled. “A lot of the best urbanism that we can see in some of the small towns too come from university towns or areas around a university because they sort of act as a natural city,” Allen observes. “A lot of students are living right on campus. They often don’t have a car and so they’ve been able to preserve some of those pre-war structures that often got knocked down when suburban development became the dominant way that the United States was kind of building.”

Universities functioned as protective zones for traditional urbanism precisely because they couldn’t easily sprawl students outward. The walkable neighborhoods surrounding campuses survived because student demand sustained them. These “natural cities” maintained density, mixed-use, and pedestrian infrastructure across generations.

Institutions with similar characteristics (large employers, transit hubs, hospital complexes) could anchor reform efforts the same way universities accidentally preserved urbanism. The key is institutional continuity and inherent car-light characteristics creating protective effects around them.

The Case for Integration Organizations

These examples offer different lessons: Houten shows intentional design, Japan demonstrates organic evolution, Disney provides extractable innovations, Carmel proves deliverism works in American politics, universities accidentally preserved walkability. No single model transplants directly. The work is mixing and matching: Carmel’s roundabouts with Japanese density patterns, Disney’s underground utilities where cost-benefit analysis supports them, Houten’s bike priority adapted to American car ownership rates.

State-level reforms created policy space. The strongest YIMBY chapters already do integration work and need more funding to scale. But single-issue advocacy faces structural constraints. Running council campaigns while synthesizing case studies while coordinating infrastructure dilutes what makes advocacy groups effective. They can’t do everything simultaneously.

The gap is adjacent capacity: organizations focused on synthesis, education, and demonstration rather than policy advocacy. Regional intermediaries collecting cost-benefit data on roundabouts. Research shops translating Japanese models into American contexts. Groups coordinating rapid demonstration projects that prove concepts work. This complements advocacy rather than replacing it.

The convertible opposition clarifies stakes. More young parents become allies when shown upzoning enables three-bedroom units with lower vacancy rates. Business owners support bike lanes after seeing retail data. Retirees back density when they understand walkability in practice (or at leat the AARP who been big into promoting “missing middle” housing). We already have the IFS study found developers systematically underbuild family-friendly units because they misread the market. The question is how can we close that gap using targeted education and demonstration, not mandates.

The window is narrowing. Ryan Allen: “My biggest fear is that this movement of building housing, transit, things like that gets stuck on either side of the culture war. Right now it actually doesn’t track onto the culture war.”

Carmel had 28 years of tangible results when national operatives tried forcing infrastructure into culture war frames. Most suburbs lack that armor. They need, we need, organizations education people about working roundabouts with drone footage before opposition crystallizes, pointing to family apartments that maintain property values, explaining how proven models address multiple concerns. Gap financing and demonstration projects remove the risk premium stopping development. Once developers see family apartments outperform studios, once neighbors see roundabouts improve traffic, people will see YIMBYs more broadly delivering.

Donate more to YIMBY groups like YIMBY Action or YIMBY Law or your state (or local if you have one) to help scale their work! Build complementary organizations for synthesis, demonstration, and education. We need to deliver more visible improvements before political windows close and backlash takes hold.

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When “Fun to Stay” Became Nowhere to Live

In 1978, the Village People released a disco anthem celebrating the Young Men’s Christian Association. The song painted the YMCA as a refuge where young men could find everything they needed; a place to stay, meals, recreation, and companionship. “They have everything for you men to enjoy, you can hang out with all the boys,” the group sang, inadvertently documenting what would soon become a thing of the past.

The bitter irony, a triumph of generational prioritization, is that just as this celebration of the YMCA entered popular culture, the organization was getting rid of the units that the song celebrates. By the time the song topped charts worldwide, the YMCA’s great contraction was already underway. The place where you could “get yourself clean” and “have a good meal” was vanishing, replaced by suburban fitness centers catering to middle-class families.

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When You’re Short on Your Dough: The $500,000 Problem That $30 Rooms Once Solved

The fiscal insanity of America’s housing policy becomes clear when comparing costs. The YMCA once provided rooms for what amounts to $20 to 30 per night in today’s dollars, sustainable on even on $7.50/hr in today’s dollars considering people paying at least over 30% of their income on housing now. Today, a single unit of subsidized affordable housing in the Bay Area costs around $500,000 to develop, and I don’t need to say anything about how much it is to rent, even with Section 8 for the lucky ones. Cities routinely spend $35,000 to $75,000 annually per jail bed housing those who commit whatever, even for the act of being homeless.

The property tax implications are equally stark. Vacant office buildings generate minimal revenue while requiring city services. In contrast, properties with ADUs in California showed annualized appreciation of 9.34% versus 7.65% for those without, demonstrating how adding units increases municipal tax bases. Applied to commercial conversions, this suggests converting vacant offices to SRO-style housing would generate substantial new revenue streams for struggling downtowns.

They Destroyed All the Places: A Geography of Deliberate Elimination

Municipalities waged a quiet war through regulatory means. Building codes, fire codes, and zoning ordinances were weaponized to make new SRO construction impossible and existing maintenance economically unviable. SROs were labeled “forbidden housing; their residents, forbidden citizens”. New zoning banned mixing residential and commercial uses, severing residents from the walkable cafes, laundromats, and shops their lifestyle required. These policies, cloaked in language of safety and public health, had the clear intent and effect of regulating an entire class of affordable housing out of existence.

New York City: From approximately 200,000 SRO units in the 1950s to just 25,000 post-1955, an 87.5% reduction in the nation’s densest city where housing need was greatest.

San Francisco: The city that now epitomizes the housing crisis once had 65,000 hotel units in 1910, reduced to just 19,000 residential SRO rooms today, a 71% decline while population grew.

Chicago: Lost 81% of its SRO stock between 1960 and 1980 alone, including the conversion of iconic properties like the Lawson House, which transformed 600 SRO rooms into just 406 studio apartments.

National Scale: Nearly one million SRO units eliminated between 1955 and 2013, representing the largest destruction of affordable housing in American history.

When They Had Everything for Young Men to Enjoy: Christians Building 100,000 Rooms

The contrast between generations could not be starker. The YMCA was founded in 1844 London by George Williams, a 22-year-old department store worker who saw young men struggling with “hazards of life on the streets”. When it spread to America in 1851, it found a nation undergoing massive urbanization, with young men flooding into cities for industrial work.

The Christian response was unequivocal: build housing. By the 1920s, business titans like Cyrus Hall McCormick Jr. were funding massive construction projects. Between 1922 and 1940, YMCA accommodations grew from 55,000 to over 100,000 rooms—more than any hotel chain. By 1950, 670 of 1,688 American YMCAs provided residential spaces with 66,959 beds.

These facilities offered comprehensive support: English classes, vocational training in electricity and photography, and direct job placement assistance. The Wabash Avenue YMCA served African Americans during segregation. During both World Wars, YMCAs housed soldiers and veterans. Notable residents included Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jack Kerouac. I have to stress that churches in the modern era are pushing for “Yes in God’s Backyard” laws to help with the homelessness crisis, not to mention trying to do the Christian thing to do, often with heavy opposition from those of the same generation than help bring down SROs.

The Great Betrayal: Generational Warfare by the Numbers

The data reveals a stark generational divide in both housing outcomes and political power:

Housing Disparities

• 51% of homeowners 50+ have no mortgage, while younger generations face record debt

• Millennial homeownership rates lag 8-9 percentage points behind Baby Boomers at the same age

• Nearly 50% of 18-29 year-olds live with parents, highest since the Great Depression

• 70% of Americans believe young adults have a harder time buying homes than their parents

Political Control

The destruction of SROs continues because public hearings on housing are dominated by older, financially stable homeowners, while renters, younger people, are systematically underrepresented. Local governments frequently cater to NIMBY opposition, not just with apartments and SROs, but even against housing for old people and playgrounds .

Dismantling the Opposition’s False Narratives

“SROs Were Dangerous Flophouses”

The YMCA facilities were professionally managed institutions with strict rules and comprehensive services. They offered vocational training, job placement, English classes, gymnasiums, and cafeterias. Modern manga kissas (cafes) similarly maintain order through membership systems requiring photo ID and 24/7 staff presence. Case in point: ‘YMCA’ has become a universal American anthem, played everywhere from Trump rallies to sports stadiums. It is just absurd if you think about it: a president dances to a song celebrating the very type of affordable housing his generation destroyed.

“This Will Lower Property Values”

Empirical evidence consistently refutes this for the standard line. Harvard research using difference-in-difference estimation found no negative impact on neighboring property values when you upzone. Properties with ADUs appreciate faster than those without. Please retire this cliche.

“Infrastructure Can’t Handle Density”

ADU households own an average of 0.9 cars versus the national average of 1.8. Research shows substantial surplus parking in single-family neighborhoods. ADUs average just 0.2 children per unit, having negligible impact on schools. As infill development, they leverage existing infrastructure rather than requiring extensions.

The Asian Model: Market Success at Scale

Japan’s Internet Cafes & Manga Kissa (Cafes)

Japan operates thousands of manga kissas with major chains like Gera Gera, Manboo, and Popeye running hundreds of locations each. A single facility might have 50-100 booths. The “net café refugees” phenomenon involves thousands of residents, predominantly young men in temporary or low-wage work.

Financial sustainability comes through diversification:

• Overnight packages: ¥2000-4000 ($15-30)

• Food and beverage sales (30-40% of revenue)

• Simple membership registration with photo ID

• Premium services (private rooms, better seating)

Korea’s 20,000 PC Bangs

Korea has over 20,000 PC bangs—more ubiquitous than Starbucks. They emerged during the late-1990s Asian financial crisis when young men needed affordable social spaces. The model works through:

• Base hourly rates under $1.50 as loss leaders

• High-margin food sales and gaming company partnerships

• 24/7 operation accommodating all work schedules

The Regulatory Arbitrage

These succeed by operating in regulatory gray zones—classified as “service providers” rather than hotels. They sell internet access and workspace; that people sleep there is legally incidental.

The Economic Reality: Gig Work Demands Flexible Housing

The traditional housing market assumes stable, full-time employment with predictable income, a reality increasingly divorced from modern work:

The New Precariat

• 49.7% of all renting households are cost-burdened, spending over 30% of income on housing

• Student loan debt forces young adults to delay household formation

• Gig economy workers, which is at least 47% of the main income for young men, lack the steady income traditional leases require

• 22% of homeowners would finance ADU construction with personal savings, showcasing that non traditional or unorthodox financing would be required for the more atypical housing unit.

The Geographic Mismatch

Jobs concentrate in expensive metros while workers can afford only distant suburbs. The office-to-residential conversion opportunity exists precisely where workers need housing, downtown cores with vacant commercial space from remote work and e-commerce.

From “It’s Fun to Stay” to “You Can’t Live Anywhere”: The Broken Promise

The lyrics now function as a darkly ironic checklist of broken promises (more evidence that God has a sardonic sense of humor):

The promise of a place for young men → As cities target and force off the market SROs, especially to eliminate places for young men.

When money is tight → Modern “affordable” housing requires extensive documentation, credit checks, deposits, and time that may be scare.

A place to stay → By 2004, only 81 of 2,594 YMCAs maintained any residential units

They can help you → Current YMCA housing requires minimum $1,500 monthly income and disability diagnoses

A fun place to stay → It’s now impossible to stay at most YMCAs

“Young Men, There’s a Place You Can Go”: Simple Clean Bills Creates Housing

Housing crises are policy choices, cities used “poison pills”(excessive parking requirements, discretionary reviews, prohibitive fees, etc), annual ADU permits statewide totaled approximately 1,000 in 2016.

After California state laws AB 2299, SB 1069, AB 68, AB 881 mandated by-right approval: 24,000+ permits by 2022. Los Angeles alone: 80 permits in 2016 to over 7,000 in 2022. In six years, California permitted 88,885 ADUs.

ADU bills are usually cleaner and focus on legalizing a single type of housing units. Considering how regulatory arbitrage legalized Internet cafes in Japan and Korea, it is the path forward for to legalize something similar in America and Europe.

Young Man, They Took Away Your Place to Go: The Reckoning

America once operated the world’s largest network of affordable housing for young men, 100,000 YMCA rooms, part of over a 1,000,000 SROs, serving as launching pads for careers and works, and with luck, into families and civic participation. Only to destroyed this while spending billions managing the predictable consequences.

The comparison isn’t exactly flattering:

• Then: $20 to 30/night rooms with services, dignity, and opportunity

• Now: $50,000+ annually per homeless individual for emergency response, and that’s just the *tip* of the iceberg.

Japan and Korea prove markets naturally evolve solutions when not constrained. Their thousands of Internet cafes and manga kissas and 20,000+ PC bangs profitably house the same demographic America abandons. I don’t view this as the end all be all, Japan and Korea (and others) has a lot more to do (especially for family housing) but it’s certainly better on this issue than America.

The infrastructure exists, especially vacant offices and dead retail. The demand is obvious, half of young adults living with parents. The models are proven that we can adapt to quickly turn unused commercial areas into housing, especially as internet cafés operating profitably worldwide. We know that legalizing a type of housing enables more of it to be built, especially by small to mid size builders and contractors like in California’s ADU revolution.

What America lacks is moral courage to admit that previous generations built better solutions than we destroyed, that young men deserve the opportunities their grandfathers had, and that “there’s a place you can go” should be more than lyrics about a vanished past.

I can understand the security and cleanliness concerns, and I know that the American context is less “coherent” than the Japanese one. That is a problem we should resolve, but never as an excuse to tolerate this miserable status quote for young men.

I can barely keep on a mask of civility, and have done a lot of edits to this article (especially as the earlier drafts is a bit “darker”). I do feel the moral need to point this out. Depression era generations, especially the Golden Generation who fought during WW2 and the Korean War, wanted housing and stability and viewed that it wasn’t just their responsibility to provide it, but some in part of a matter of religious duty.

Boomers, on the other hand, well the less said the better, considering recent polls made it clear that a majority of them (around 57%) view the younger generations at fault for the lack of housing. This is not an issue of young people vs old, I mean Japan for god’s sake is proof against this fake narrative when it comes to housing. This is a generation in America, Britain, etc in a period of time that decided that the generation after that shouldn’t have the housing options they had.

The song remains the same, but the places are gone. In Japan, young men can still find everything they need to enjoy, despite the broader economic conditions. In America, they can only hang out with all the boys in their parents’ basements, and that’s only if they are lucky.

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In another article, we’ll explore the practical implementation of 24/7 internet café-style housing in American and European cities, the regulatory frameworks, business models, and adaptive reuse principles that could transform vacant commercial spaces into modern housing for a generation locked out of traditional options. Comment if I should write it or have ideas.

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In 2025, when flooding across New York and New Jersey killed two people whose car was swept into Cedar Brook in Plainfield, Jersey City delivered a stark counterfactual. Areas that historically would have been "3-5 ft underwater" experienced "next to no flooding,". This wasn't luck. It was the result of a decade-long, $1.099 billion infrastructure program that treats development not as the enemy of flood control, but as its primary financing mechanism.

Jersey City's success stands out in a year that has been catastrophic for flooding nationwide. The July 4-7, 2025 Texas Hill Country floods killed at least 135 people, with the Guadalupe River rising 26 feet in just 45 minutes, making it the deadliest inland flooding event in the United States since 1976. The Northeast itself has been repeatedly battered, with Central Park recording its second-highest hourly rainfall total (2.07 inches) on July 14, and another major event on July 31 dropping up to 7 inches of rain in parts of New Jersey. Yet while other communities faced tragedy, Jersey City's infrastructure held.

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Mayor Steven Fulop's assessment reveals the scope: "Post Sandy + Ida, our administration made a huge investment in flood mitigation - more than any city in NJ + it has worked." Fulop confirmed the city has "about a billion dollars' worth of sewer and infrastructure work that has started and is planned over the next couple of years around flood mitigation and sewer separation." The program combines federal compliance requirements under a consent decree, strategic regional partnerships, and most crucially, a development ordinance that makes every new building fund its own flood protection infrastructure.

The question this raises for urban developmen: does YIMBYism make cities less or more prone to flooding? Jersey City's experience suggests the answer depends entirely on how cities structure the relationship between development and infrastructure. The real divide may not be between pro-development and anti-development, but between those that use markets as tools, those who don’t want any markets, and those that let markets use them.

Learning from the YIMBYist Country in the Developed World

The debate over development and flood control often ignores international precedents that have already solved this puzzle. You've likely seen the story floating around on Facebook or YouTube about Fudai, Japan, which defended itself from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami thanks to a massive floodgate and seawall system championed by former Mayor Kotoku Wamura. Wamura faced criticism for the cost and perceived over-engineering, but years later that "over-engineering" proved to be exactly the right call. Fudai was largely untouched while other coastal towns were devastated.

Japan's approach, particularly in Tokyo, demonstrates that dense development and flood protection can coexist when properly integrated. The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, known as G-Cans, represents the world's largest underground flood diversion facility, built to protect Tokyo's dense urban core from overflowing rivers during typhoon seasons. Japan makes it relatively easy to build housing and development while taking its anti-floodingand anti-earthquake regulations far more seriously than most places in the United States. The key insight from Japan's model is that housing construction, infrastructure investment, and strict regulation work as complementary forces rather than competing priorities.

Houston's Cautionary Tale

The counterexample that haunts American urban planning discussions is Houston's catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The disaster caused $125 billion in damages according to NOAA, making it the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history after Katrina. This created a convenient but ultimately false narrative: that cities focused on building lots of housing inevitably sacrifice environmental protection and infrastructure planning. Houston became the poster child for this theory, despite the inconvenient truth that many NIMBY cities also flood, including the suburbs and exurb cities surrounding Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City.

Houston's failure wasn't caused by building too much housing or building in floodplains, as Japan and other places with strong engineering and state capacity demonstrate. Development is manageable with proper stormwater management, elevation requirements, and infrastructure coordination. Houston's problem was treating development and environmental protection as separate issues entirely. Developers imposed single-family zoning through private deed restrictions but weren't required (or it wasn’t enforced) to implement stormwater management or coordinate with watershed planning, made worse with out of date floodmaps, until after Harvey where the City made reforms, it’s limited in enforcement especially in the officially unincorporated areas in and around the city. The city's fragmented governance across dozens of jurisdictions created coordination failures that left residents vulnerable. This does not even include all the zoning rich suburban cities and special incorporated areas that surrounds Houston and their own failures in dealing with the floods. 

The 2025 Texas Hill Country disaster illustrates what happens when infrastructure fails to match development patterns. Despite being in "Flash Flood Alley," the Upper Guadalupe River Authority (which has zoning) had only five gauges on the river in Kerr County, when experts say that number should double or triple. The National Weather Service issued flood watches and warnings, but the lack of real-time infrastructure data meant communities had no or little warning before the river rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, ultimately killing 135 people.

During Hurricane Harvey, communication between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Harris County Flood Control District, and the public was dangerously slow, leaving residents unaware of impending flooding from reservoir releases. This is a coordination & regulation failure, not zoning being lax.

These coordination failures extend deep into Houston's approach to flood control projects. The 2018 flood bond program, approved by 85% of voters after Harvey, has spent only 30% of its funds after seven years while facing a $1.3 billion budget shortfall. Houston's infrastructure programs operate on ineffective timescales that leave residents vulnerable for decades. Project Brays, a half-billion-dollar bayou improvement program, required 40 years from conception to completion while residents endured repeated flooding from Tropical Storm Allison, Hurricane Harvey, and other major events.

In addition to the courts being a problem with what the city does with unincorporated areas on the issue of flood and water control, state agencies like TxDOT expanded highway capacity, creating more impermeable surface areas and complicating infrastructure and flooding projects in Houston and other cities. While TxDOT does include flood measures into the highways they build, these measures don't necessarily protect the surrounding areas despite best efforts. The state-level departments added to the problem by undermining any coordinated flood management or infrastructure Houston might have attempted.

The difference between Houston and Jersey City is simple: Houston has a fragmented approach complicated by state and local conflicts, while Jersey City has an integrated approach with effective coordination across government levels, at least regarding flooding.

Background on Jersey City

Jersey City's approach began with recognizing that sustainable growth requires systematic infrastructure investment backed by predictable, long-term funding commitments. The city operates under a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency committing the Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority to resolving Clean Water Act violations by investing in repairs and upgrades to reduce Combined Sewer Overflow discharges by an estimated 370 million gallons per year. The total cost of this work is projected at approximately $1.099 billion over a ten-year period, representing one of the most significant environmental infrastructure investments in New Jersey.

Combined Sewer Overflow events discharge untreated sewage directly into the Hudson River, Hackensack River, and Newark Bay, creating public health hazards and environmental contamination that affect the entire regional ecosystem. The 370 million gallon annual reduction represents the equivalent of removing approximately 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of contaminated water from local waterways each year.

Pump Stations

Jersey City's network of high-capacity wet-weather pump stations represents a fundamental shift from passive, gravity-based drainage to active water management systems. The Sip Avenue Pump Station represents what city officials identify as their greatest infrastructure success. The intersection of Sip Avenue and West Side Avenue was historically the worst flooding location in the entire city. The area was served by a combined sewer line over 75 years old that could not handle the volume of waste and runoff flowing through it. During high tides, the entire section would become submerged, rendering it unable to drain until the tide receded.

The Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority combined a new $4 million stormwater pump station designed to pump stormwater over high tide with a major sewer replacement project. This dual intervention has been transformative, with the city experiencing only minimal, localized flooding during significant peak rainfall events since completion in 2023.

Sewer System Expansion

Beyond pump stations, Jersey City's legacy sewer system faced fundamental capacity limitations. Much of the network, with pipes dating back over a century, was physically too small to convey the volume of stormwater runoff generated by a modern, dense urban environment.

The Sip Avenue project involved a $14 million investment to replace a deteriorating and collapsing brick combined sewer line with a modern, much larger 72-inch pipe. This was an emergency-driven necessity, prompted by multiple sinkhole collapses in 2022 that threatened to sever other major utilities.

Sewer separation provides an even more fundamental solution by removing stormwater from the sanitary system entirely. The Princeton Avenue "minor sewer separation" project eliminated severe and persistent flooding that had reportedly damaged building foundations and repeatedly inundated a dozen row houses.

In the area around Enos Jones Park, the city installed a new storm line within the park itself, successfully separating storm flow from adjacent row homes while significantly decreasing flooding on Brunswick Street.

Infrastructure Investment

Optimization on Monmouth Street involved reconstructing a large netting facility and reconfiguring existing sewer chambers. This re-engineering resulted in significantly higher hydraulic conductivity, eliminating consistent flooding. This infrastructure improvement was so effective that it unlocked the area for new development, with hundreds of residential units subsequently built alongside the location.

Regional Partnerships and Leverage

Jersey City's coastal defense strategy shows how municipal leadership can leverage regional partnerships to achieve infrastructure improvements beyond any single city's financial capacity.

Hurricane Sandy exposed the Long Slip Canal as a major vulnerability. This 2,000-foot-long former barge canal acted as a conduit funneling surge waters from the Hudson River directly into the heart of regional transit infrastructure.

The solution, led by NJ TRANSIT, involved permanently eliminating the threat by completely filling the canal. The "Long Slip Fill and Rail Enhancement" project represents a multi-year, approximately $195 million endeavor. Jersey City contributed over $3 million to the project, representing a leverage ratio of approximately 65 to 1.

The most significant coastal defense project emerged from the Rebuild by Design Hudson River Project, securing an initial $230 million federal grant. The project's budget has grown substantially, now standing at a total of at least $480 million.

The "Resist" element consists of an integrated system of more than 8,846 linear feet of hard infrastructure, including floodwalls and seawalls, punctuated by 28 deployable flood gates. Construction began in 2023-2024, creating the primary shield designed to protect the urban core of all three municipalities from a Sandy-level storm surge.

Flood Regulations Work (If Enforced)

Jersey City's best idea isn't any single infrastructure project but integrating stormwater management into the development process rather than treating it as an obstacle to growth. By enacting a stringent Stormwater Control Ordinance that mandates on-site retention and green infrastructure for both major and minor developments, the city has institutionalized resilience into its legal and economic structure.

Jersey City's Stormwater Control Ordinance goes beyond state requirements by applying to "minor development" projects that disturb as little as 5,000 square feet. The ordinance requires Green Infrastructure and Low Impact Development techniques as mandatory requirements, shifting stormwater management costs from public agencies to private development. This threshold captures virtually all development activity, ensuring that the entire fabric of the city contributes to stormwater management.

From Chronic Flooding to Development Boom

The contrast with Hurricane Ida's impact in 2021 is instructive. While at least 27 people died across New Jersey from Ida's flooding, Jersey City's damage was primarily limited to $35 million in infrastructure impacts rather than loss of life or catastrophic property damage.

The intersection of Sip Avenue and West Side Avenue represented the city's most severe flooding challenge. The comprehensive solution involved three critical components: overcoming tidal lock through the $4 million pump station, expanding capacity through the $14 million sewer replacement, and improving collection through upgraded local stormwater systems. The project, completed in August 2023, has been transformative.

Lessons for American Cities

Jersey City's post-Sandy transformation demonstrates that cities can build substantial amounts of housing. In fact, development (with the right governance) help prevent residents from floods. You can’t build to protect from flooding without building anything. For other American cities facing similar challenges, Jersey City's model requires specific institutional arrangements:

• Cities need unified infrastructure planning authority to coordinate across agencies and jurisdictions

• They need mandatory developer regulations that apply to all development, not just major projects

• Cities need the capability to coordinate federal, state, and local funding streams

• Most importantly, they need long-term capital commitment frameworks that provide predictable, sustained investment over decades

Bottomline

What Jersey City proves is that in dense coastal cities, YIMBYism and flood protection aren't exclusive but complementary necessities. You can't have sustainable development without flood protection, you can't afford comprehensive flood protection without the tax base that development provides, and you especially can't build resilience without building, well, anything.

The contrast with 2025's flooding disasters nationwide is stark. While Texas lost 135 people to floods that rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, and New York City experienced its second-highest hourly rainfall on record, Jersey City's prepared infrastructure protected residents. There are still issues, but Jersey City is still building out new projects and constantly improving.

Again, at the end of the day, the real divide isn't between YIMBYism vs flood protections, but between those that use markets as tools vs the weird mix of those who don’t want markets (Left NIMBYs particularly) and those who let markets run rampant. Jersey City has chosen to be master rather than servant of market forces (in this case), and created a model for flood-resilient urban growth that other American cities should study.

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The new study "Monetary Policy and Rents" by Boaz Abramson (Columbia), Pablo De Llanos (Columbia), and Lu Han (University of Wisconsin-Madison) shows that since rents comprise 35% of the Consumer Price Index and represent the largest expense for renter households, rising rental costs could explain why aggressive rate hikes haven't crushed inflation as expected. This creates what economists call a "price puzzle," where the central bank's primary inflation-fighting tool actually increases prices in the largest component of the inflation index.

The research momentum: This isn't an isolated finding. A 2019 Federal Reserve study by Dias and Duarte first documented the counterintuitive rent increases, but the new Columbia/Wisconsin research provides the most comprehensive evidence to date with unprecedented data granularity and geographic coverage.

The big picture: This challenges decades of monetary policy orthodoxy from post-WWI rate hikes to Paul Volcker's 1980s inflation fight. Traditional Fed policy accepts that rate hikes will cause unemployment and financial hardship as a necessary cost of fighting inflation.

But both studies reveal a fundamental flaw: while rate hikes successfully reduce prices of food, transportation, and other goods, they simultaneously drive up shelter costs. The 2019 Federal Reserve research found this creates "strong opposing movements" where falling non-housing prices are offset by rising rents.

The new Columbia study goes further, showing that inflation measures excluding shelter actually respond more aggressively to rate hikes than overall CPI. This means the Fed may be causing economic pain while making its primary inflation target harder to achieve. The post-COVID rate cycle from near-zero to over 5% exemplifies this contradiction.

What the data shows

A 25 basis point increase in 30-year mortgage rates triggers:

• 1.7% increase in real rents within 12-24 months

• 1.4% jump in nominal rents over the same period

• 4-7% drop in home sales volume within 1-2 years

• Stronger effects in single-family rentals (3.5% peak) versus apartments (3% peak)

The Methodology

Researchers built the most comprehensive rent tracking system to date, the ADH Repeat-Rent Index, analyzing:

• 30.3 million monthly observations across 6.5 million rental units

• 5,092 zip codes from 2011-2022, covering substantially more geography than Zillow's ZORI index

• Quality-adjusted rent changes at the neighborhood level using repeat-sales methodology

• Perfect correlation with nationally representative government data, proving the index captures true market dynamics

• Vastly more granular coverage than the 2019 Federal Reserve study, which used national-level data

The mechanism explained

• Higher borrowing costs lock out homebuyers: First-time buyers and owner-occupiers dramatically reduce purchases when rates rise, but must still find housing

• Demand floods rental markets: Households unable to buy homes crowd into rentals, driving up competition and prices

• Investors capitalize: Real estate investors maintain steady purchase activity, buying properties from cash-strapped owner-occupiers and converting them to higher-priced rentals

• Homeownership rate drops: The economy settles into a new equilibrium with fewer homeowners and more expensive rentals

Go deeper on the housing market shift

• Transaction patterns reveal the story: Using CoreLogic's universe of U.S. housing transactions, researchers found owner-occupier purchases plummet while investor activity stays flat during rate hikes.

• Cash buyers vs. mortgage buyers: Investor purchases remain steady because they're less dependent on financing, while mortgage-dependent households get priced out.

• Corporate buyers unaffected: Large-scale institutional investors show no response to rate changes, maintaining steady acquisition patterns.

• Geographic patterns matter: The effect is strongest in markets where single-family homes compete directly with homeownership, explaining why apartment rents rise less dramatically.

Robustness testing validates findings:

• Results hold across five different monetary policy shock measures from Fed research

• Multiple alternative rent indices (Zillow ZORI, CPI-NTRR, ACY-MRI) show identical patterns

• Effects consistent whether using federal funds rate, 2-year Treasury, or 30-year mortgage rates

• Quarterly and monthly data produce the same conclusions

• Findings align with 2019 Federal Reserve research using different methodologies, strengthening confidence in the results

The mortgage lock-in myth debunked

The researchers specifically tested whether mortgage lock-in drives rental demand increases. This theory gained prominence during recent rate hikes, suggesting that existing homeowners with low-rate mortgages (say, 3%) become reluctant to sell because they'd have to get new mortgages at much higher rates (6-7%).

The theory predicted that areas with more outstanding mortgages would see bigger rent increases, as more locked-in homeowners would reduce housing supply for sale, forcing more people into rentals.

What they found: The data shows no meaningful relationship between the share of homes with outstanding mortgages and rent increases following rate hikes. Areas where 80% of homes had mortgages saw similar rent patterns to areas where only 40% had mortgages.

Why this matters: The rental demand surge comes primarily from prospective first-time buyers and other potential homeowners being priced out of purchasing, not from existing homeowners staying put. This distinction is crucial because it means the rental market pressure is driven by new demand flows, not supply constraints from lock-in effects.

Distributional consequences: Lower-income households, who rent disproportionately, bear the brunt of monetary tightening. This creates an unintended regressive effect where anti-inflation policy hurts those least able to absorb higher costs.

What researchers found comparing their index to others:

• Most granular coverage: Their index covers census tract level, while alternatives max out at zip code (ZORI) or metro area (CPI-Rent)

• Broader geographic reach: Covers 1,000+ more zip codes than Zillow's index even in 2022

• Longer time series: Available from 2011 vs. Zillow's 2015 start date

• Higher correlation with official measures: 90%+ correlation with nationally representative CPI-NTRR

Bottomline

The mounting evidence suggests central bankers (and economists broadly) may need to fundamentally reconsider rate hikes as their primary tool, given that housing (the largest inflation component) works against them. This could explain why inflation has proven "sticky" despite aggressive Fed action.

The problem is compounded by the broader housing crisis. New home construction hit five-year lows in June 2025, with housing starts at just 1.32 million units annually. The U.S. faces a shortage of 3.7 to 5.5 million housing units according to various estimates from Freddie Mac and real estate groups.

Higher Fed rates worsen this dynamic by simultaneously suppressing new housing supply (making construction financing more expensive) while driving up rental demand (pricing out potential homebuyers). This creates a double squeeze that amplifies rent inflation precisely when the Fed is trying to cool prices.

Potential alternatives: The Federal Reserve may need to figure out how to directly affect housing markets and other supply-side financing programs rather than relying on broad monetary tightening. During the COVID crisis, the Fed took "unorthodox" methods like directly buying corporate bonds to backstop markets, and more of that same “unorthodox” thinking which includes targeted construction financing might be the best path forward.

We see great work by YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) advocates fighting for zoning reform to increase density and streamline permitting. YIMBY reforms slow housing cost increases and reduce prices in many markets. These efforts have gained meaningful momentum, especially during California's 2024-2025 legislative session. We do need more YIMBY reforms. But without adequate financing mechanisms, even successful zoning changes are like a windmill without wind.

Housing supply constraints are addressed through both regulatory reform and cheaper financing for construction, monetary policy will continue to face this fundamental contradiction where fighting inflation actually drives up the largest component of the inflation index.

We debate policy and push for development, but what about the actual city that emerges? For my fellow urbanists and YIMBYs, I hope this interview offers something a bit new. The aesthetics, forms, and textures born from history, politics, resources, and constraints. Beyond regulations and economic models, how do planning ideas manifest visually? What does adaptive reuse mean beyond headline projects?

Cities don't follow master plans, but what exactly does that mean? They're shaped by who owns what, what materials are available, and what communities actually need. Calvin Chua and his firm, Spatial Anatomy, studies these hidden forces through design projects, research, and strategic planning across challenging contexts worldwide. He also teaches design studios at SUTD focusing on peripheral zones and adaptation paradigms and was the festival director of Singapore’s Archifest 2023. He written a few interesting books including Singapore Strata Malls: A Retrospective for the Future and Unit. Volume 2: Golden Mile Complex.

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Singapore: When Ownership Gets Complicated

Singapore's "strata malls" let individuals own shops outright, not rent them. Any building change needs 80% owner approval. Result: retirees treating shops as social clubs, refusing million-dollar buyouts. These malls become uncurated havens for niche businesses and retirement communities disguised as retail.

Chua discovered this while researching strata malls and planning Paya Lebar Air Base redevelopment. Finding that owners saw shops as retirement security changed how his team approached preserving 1,800 hectares of heritage buildings.

Singapore labels everything temporary as "interim": schools, housing, bus stops. These "temporary" solutions routinely last 20+ years.

Korean Peninsula: Design Across Division

For the 2017 Seoul Biennale, Chua built a replica Pyongyang apartment in Seoul. 36 square meters showing how people actually live versus headlines about missiles. His "Pyonghattan" project used replication to make complex conditions accessible without sensationalizing.

From 2012-2019, Chua trained urban planners in Pyongyang through an NGO. He goes over the constraints: no steel imports mean everything's concrete. Result: 40-story towers with walls so thick they eat living space. Kim Jong-un mandates bright colors for modernity, creating colorful but chunky buildings. Juche self-reliance ideology made physical.

Nuances of Adaptive Reuse

Chua distinguishes between different scales and models of reuse. High-capital conversions like Tate Modern (power plant to museum) or Zeitz MOCAA (grain silo to gallery) grab headlines as architectural showpieces. Every city wants one. But these represent just one approach.

More compelling to Chua are systematic, community-focused efforts. Karl Bengs renovating abandoned kominka in dying Japanese villages creates actual homes, not tourist attractions. Some villages see their first births in decades. This model now attracts international investors, creating a new rural real estate sector. The tension: are we saving communities or displacing them?

Even temporary reuse matters. For Singapore Archifest 2023, Chua curated "Interim: Acts of Adaptation," exploring how spaces awaiting demolition could be activated. He wanted to take over the vacated Golden Mile Complex for a month but settled for activating heritage precincts with pavilions. The Green Agora project during COVID showed how modular structures in peripheral farms could become community gathering spaces that evolve over time.

The key insight across all scales: successful adaptation requires understanding both structure and spirit. Preserving buildings without their communities creates museums. Maintaining communities without functional spaces leads to decay. The challenge is achieving both.

Overall

Think ethnographic research that scales up. Small finding (shop owners see stores as retirement security) reshapes massive planning (airbase redevelopment). He literally builds replicas of spaces to make complex conditions understandable. No manifestos, just "walk through this and you'll get it."

Cities emerge from:

• Ownership structures creating unexpected social dynamics

• Material constraints determining aesthetics

• Political systems defining urban values

• Gaps between intended and actual use

Chua calls himself "cautiously optimistic." After seeing how cities actually develop through constraints, workarounds, and community adaptation, that seems right.

For those engaged in shaping future cities, this conversation reveals how the "spirit" of a place, its tangible feel and character, is intrinsically linked to its physical form, history, and the constraints under which it was built. If you seek insights beyond immediate development debates to understand the deeper design currents shaping urban environments, enjoy the full interview.

Introduction

Dave Deek: I'm keen to discuss your work, or Spatial Anatomy's work, or however you like to phrase it, especially how you're integrating design, research, and even advocacy in, let's face it, challenging contexts.

Calvin Chua: Yeah, I would say that when I started the practice, it was meant to be a research-led practice. Hence, when I was choosing the name, I considered what would be a way to represent the nature of the firm. We don't believe in delivering, let's say, manifestos. But at the same time, that's not to say that we only respond and react. We have a lot of intentions and positions towards the built environment.

Calvin Chua: But at the same time, we want to move away from just having a kind of top-down manifesto, pushing it at people. Hence, that's how the word "anatomy" was used – as a way to describe the study of the structure of spaces, hence "spatial anatomy," just like how you would study the structure of animals or plants, like plant or animal anatomy. That's really the genesis of it. It is also a way for the practice to view the world.

Calvin Chua: I spoke to some friends; they think that it's almost bordering part architecture, part policy, part research, part art. If you can't put anything into a classification.. It's a way to see the world. I think it has got to do with my interest in international relations, in geopolitics.

Calvin Chua: And that is probably a way to look at the world, our built environment, and to try to talk about these contested spaces, both within the urban realm at a territorial scale, through the practice. I think that's really the gist of the practice.

Influences and Approach

Calvin Chua: If you read the description of the practice, it gives you quite a lot of detail. But if I want to summarize it, it's really just that.

Dave Deek: Hmm. So that's interesting. I'm trying to figure out the best way... my mind described it. It seems – and don't take this the wrong way – but it seems more of an internationalist line of thinking. You have Miyazaki who has this idea about art reflecting the human individual experience, about more of an internationalist approach. Is that the best way to describe it, or not really?

Calvin Chua: Not really. I would say that if I were to look at some of the early references, what got me into architecture was really, let's say, the 1990s OMA publications on S,M,L,XL, Great Leap Forward, or research on shopping malls with Harvard's Project on the City.

Calvin Chua: I think all these different books had an incredible influence on my decision to study architecture. For example, the essay "Berlin Wall's Architecture" within S,M,L,XL. I think it was written so eloquently that the architecture of the wall that marks a division of two parts of a city is made by decision-makers thousands of kilometers away. There's a certain kind of poetry in there, a certain seductiveness in the way Rem [Koolhaas] kind of romanticized, perhaps glorified, this wall as something that's urban yet political. I think that was really some of my inspiration, if you will, for how I view the built environment. Yeah.

Dave Deek: I'm guessing...

Calvin Chua: Maybe not internationalist, more of a curious way of looking at the world, observing the world, right? Yeah. And activist without a large manifesto banner; it's more of a quiet way of revealing these conditions and hopefully, it could inspire change along the way.

Early Experiences and Political Theory

Dave Deek: So I'm guessing that leans into your earlier experience with – please correct me if I'm wrong about pronouncing these names – like Cecil [Balmond] and Fundación Metrópoli? Am I pronouncing those correctly?

Calvin Chua: Mhm. Yep. I would say it's my experience even before practice. I think I would mention that before I started practicing, I was studying with Pier Vittorio Aureli at the Architectural Association (AA). And I think, to a large extent, that had a huge impact on the way I think about the built environment, the city, and politics. I was very much exposed to political theory and urban form – how certain political theories would result in certain kinds of urban form and ways of managing.

Calvin Chua: When he talks about politics, it's not politics in terms of the administration of day-to-day matters or office politics, but political theory – positions in politics that influence, for example, the origins of micro-districts, which were only possible through socialist forms. Or perhaps the idea of the emancipation of women through the redesign of the Frankfurt kitchen, the idea of communal living within the living room, or the living room being a productive space. I think there are certain political systems that shape such spaces, and that's very important.

Calvin Chua: That left a very strong imprint in terms of how I practice or how I view the environment. And when I was practicing with Cecil Balmond and Fundación Metrópoli, I think it was a way of furthering my exploration in the built environment with practices that are tangentially related to architecture, like Cecil Balmond, who is a structural engineer...

Dave Deek: Mhm.

Calvin Chua: working with architects to realize a lot of amazing buildings. From For Fundación Metrópoli, it's an urban planning firm that positions itself more like an ambassador’s office than a consultancy firm..

Shifting Contexts: Europe vs. Asia (Neoliberalism, Regional Blocs)

Dave Deek: That's actually interesting, especially when you're dealing with... you talk a lot about political factors and stuff like that affecting how you view architecture. But this brings up to my mind, even with political values like the socialist perspective, when you switch from a European socialist context to, let's say, an Asian socialist context, there's still a difference. Even though they're nominally socialist, there's still a difference between the two, right? I'm guessing you're seeing a lot of these shifts when you move from a European to an Asian context. How does that change the nature of the urban problems? Does it get more complex because you're dealing with even more variation among the political ideologies, or is it just more of a geopolitical thing where it's less about political ideology shifting from one location to another? Just each place has its own political ideology, and it's wrong to even think that they're similar?

Calvin Chua: I would say perhaps the dominant political ideology, or rather the lack of political ideology over the past 15 years, is this entire neoliberal order. It's so pervasive. It affects North America, Europe, Asia, but I think its impact is felt very differently. It was much more well-received in Asia as compared to Europe. I think there was a huge pushback after the global financial crisis in '08 and '09, and there was a shift towards more left-leaning politics. But in Asia, it wasn't impacted that much. What we see today are still traces of that.

Calvin Chua: But I think the main contextual difference for me in terms of practice between Europe and Asia is not the political or economic systems, but the regional blocs, the EU and ASEAN.

Calvin Chua: I feel that within Europe, it is entirely possible to practice across borders through the EU, and there's a much stronger network of practitioners compared to Southeast Asia. One reason why I moved back from Europe to Singapore, Southeast Asia specifically, is that at a certain point, I felt that I knew more about Europe than Southeast Asia. I felt that it's important to be back in Southeast Asia and be connected with practitioners and friends around the regio

Practice Methodology: Intersection of Design, Planning, Advocacy

Dave Deek: I would love to probe more into detail, but your time is valuable, so I'm going to have to move forward. Again, that's fantastic, by the way. Let's just poke and prod more about your practice. I believe that you operate at basically the intersection of design, planning, and advocacy, as you clearly stated in your previous answers.

Calvin Chua: It's challenging to get projects, even if you're a big practice. But I think what that means is that every project we work on has to have an impact. It needs to deliver value – not just for the client, but value in terms of discourse. How it's part of a larger portfolio of ideas and interests. It is more of an emergent process, instead of a typical business development way like, "We are specialists in hospitality," "We're specialists in commercial properties," or "specialists in bungalows." We do the reverse. Every project that comes in, we'll look at it and discuss, "Okay, how does this fit within the agenda of rethinking the peripheries?" "How does this fit within our interest, our agenda of adaptation and reuse, engagement?" Yeah. So that's how we view projects.

Research Methods: Ethnography, Replication, Diplomacy

Dave Deek: You talk about how you view your projects. Let's talk more about your methodology because, from everything I read, your methodology uses a mixture. Besides your global experience, you use research, ethnography, and in some cases, even diplomacy. How does your methodology affect your design process in its own unique way?

Calvin Chua: The process itself is very much dependent on the type of project or the scale of it. If it's an exhibition, that allows us to provide a stronger commentary on the politics behind certain urbanism, or geopolitics. In the case of us replicating an apartment or replicating a textile factory production room in North Korea, or replicating a mall unit in Singapore. The methodology is very much about establishing some form of replication. I think we are very inspired by artists like Gerhard Richter or Thomas Demand, where the idea of copying—or rather, replicating—the space exudes an uncanny resemblance, but at the same time, it's not a real copy.

Calvin Chua: So I think that method of replication allows us to engage the audience in a much more accessible way. If it's a very loaded topic, you need to make it accessible but without cheapening it by simply making it a “blockbuster” copy of the actual thing. For us, there's always this layer of subtle translation, presenting complex conditions in a relatively easily understandable way. Through experiencing the exhibition, you may feel that uncanny resemblance, and that gives another reading of the context.

Calvin Chua: In terms of our other projects, like urban master plans and so on, that is very much an application, rather a translation, of our research on adaptation into certain design strategies. So it's pretty much a non-linear process...

Dave Deek: Could you go more in-depth about those design strategies?

Case Study: Paya Lebar Air Base & Strata Malls (Feedback Loop, Ethnography, Adaptive Reuse)

Calvin Chua: ...where we build up our research that can then be applied to some of our master plans. Yeah. So, the design strategies... Okay, perhaps I could share a little bit, maybe use two projects to highlight the kind of feedback loop we get.

Calvin Chua: We were working on the Paya Lebar Air Base master plan while also conducting a year-long research project on the future of strata malls in Singapore. These two projects are of different scales. One is redesigning an existing military airbase at a scale of 1,800 hectares. Whereas the research on strata malls is of a much smaller scale; it's at a building scale, while the other is at a territorial scale. But a certain dialogue was established when we were working on the projects together at the same time.

Calvin Chua: As we were researching strata malls, we took an ethnographic approach to uncover the social fabric of these malls. We gradually realized that these malls were functioning like retirement villages for some of these shopkeepers or shop owners. That's also the reason why some of them refused to support the collective sale of the entire building. It was through this ethnographic process, through interviews and so on, that allowed us to uncover something more fundamental: why do they not support the sale of the building?

Calvin Chua: And that, in itself, informed us that if we were to adaptively reuse any infrastructure, there needs to be a certain community value incentive in terms of land development – retrofitting the existing infrastructure to safeguard the existing community or incentivizing developers to participate in enhancing community values in existing heritage infrastructure.

Calvin Chua: So we translated that into a design strategy for the existing heritage buildings within the airbase – the terminal buildings, what we deem as "everyday heritage buildings." We were speculating which buildings to keep, where they're sited, and can we incentivize participation from a land development incentives angle for these heritage buildings.

Calvin Chua: So, in a very roundabout way, I would say that the research at an ethnographic scale allows us to uncover a more structural issue that then allows us to apply that to an urban master plan that requires larger-scale strategic, maybe even policy changes. Yeah.

Strata Malls: Structure and Spirit, "Heroic" Architecture

Dave Deek: So, I want to go further a bit more into the strata mall stuff. This reminds me of what, if I remember correctly... bear in mind, I'm dealing with scanned PDFs from the Harvard library... your Strata Mall book was talking about structure and spirit, right? Is that along the same way to think about it?

Calvin Chua: Mhm. Yes.

Calvin Chua: The reason why we structured the book in terms of structure and spirit is very much because of the ground engagement we did, not just with strata malls but with some of the state-developed HDB malls, which have a similar quality.

Calvin Chua: Before we started the research, we had always taken a very architectural approach. It was about conserving modernist heritage buildings; some of these malls were designed by pioneer generation architects that manifested the heroic qualities of the buildings that reflected their zeitgeist. At the same time, I ran a design seminar program at SUTD where I got students to come up with adaptive reuse proposals, ideas for some of the strata malls.

Calvin Chua: But very quickly, when you start to do ground research, you realize that conserving the structure is just half of the equation. It's the spirit of the place – the inhabitants, the willingness to stay on, to have a sense of purpose to stay on, the will to operate the business within a mall – that is extremely important. That's where we introduced the fact that you need to consider both the structure and the spirit of a mall to diagnose its health.

Calvin Chua: And then, through that, we can have a more frank discussion about how to decide the future of the mall: Do we rejuvenate it, or do we embark on a graceful decommissioning process?

Dave Deek: Hmm. And... did I hear that correctly? You said heroic properties?

Calvin Chua: Heroic, yeah. I mean, for example, Golden Mile Complex, People's Park Complex – these were heroic megastructure buildings built in the late 1960s. Yeah. So they were very heroic. But I think if we go beyond these two heroic modernist icons, these two buildings actually spawned many other strata malls...

Calvin Chua: ...which may not be architecturally as interesting, but socially, programmatically, they're very interesting. Right. Yeah.

Dave Deek: So heroic in the terms that they support the community? They do something good?

Calvin Chua: Not entirely. No, I think what I meant by heroic is in terms of its form, how it looks architecturally.

Dave Deek: Okay. Okay. Alright.

Calvin Chua: Yeah. It's brutalist. It's like Paul Rudolph with his Lower Manhattan Expressway sort of structure. That kind of heroic.

Dave Deek: Okay, that kind of heroic. Okay. Okay.

Calvin Chua: Yeah. Yeah.

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Digital Preservation & Experimentation (Beauty World, Digital Twin, Metaverse)

Dave Deek: Alright, let's talk about another one of your projects that I believe is called the Beauty World project, which is talking about digital preservation. So that reminds me of a concept that we talk a lot about in the oil and gas and chemical industry called the digital twin. I'm guessing the same concept but more for urban design? Could you explain more about that?

Calvin Chua: Yeah, I'm sure we hear "digital twin" being thrown around in different sectors: oil and gas, construction (the digital twin of the building). You could do clash detection. And on the urban scale, there are multiple digital twins, where you could have city dashboards managing real-time feedback data and so on. I think it has been ongoing for the past 10 to 15 years.

Calvin Chua: But for us, it was more than just creating a digital copy or digital twin. We wanted it to be more of an artistic memorialization of the building. It was an attempt at speculating: Can the spirit of the building live on when it gets demolished? Can it be migrated to this digital platform? Not simply just as an artifact, although it could be. But the larger agenda was, could it then take on a life of its own as it lives on in the digital virtual realm?

Calvin Chua: But of course, this was a little experiment we did at the height of the metaverse hype; this was in 2022. We built something on Decentraland. It was just too cumbersome. We did a prototype with a walkthrough, and that's it. I would say this was a kind of mini artistic experiment that we engaged in. Right. Yeah.

Dave Deek: I could go on a lot about digital twin stuff. Especially since you came to the same conclusion that a lot of chemical and oil and gas industries are seeing with digital twins, right? It's a fantastic idea; it's just too much work needed to actually implement it.

Calvin Chua: Yeah. Yeah.

Strata Malls Deep Dive: Ownership, Curation, and Comparison

Dave Deek: So let's talk about other innovative urban design strategies, especially to deal with challenges like collective ownership, fragmented ownership, and all these other things, especially in the context of strata malls.

Calvin Chua: So, yeah, I think the idea of the strata mall... I'm not sure how familiar you are with the strata title.

Dave Deek: Personally, I think I see a bunch of them all over Bangkok. I've also been to Singapore, but that was only for a few days. We're just talking about these big giant malls with all these shops and stuff. In the American context...

Calvin Chua: Random shops in there. Yeah. Right.

Dave Deek: ...the closest thing you would think of is the Mall of America, or in Houston, it'll be the Galleria – these massive super malls.

Calvin Chua: But those are managed by a developer, and they're rented out.

Dave Deek: I believe so.

Calvin Chua: But strata malls are different. Every unit is owned by an individual.

Dave Deek: That I didn't know about.

Calvin Chua: So it's not managed by a single developer. Yeah. Right.

Dave Deek: Could you talk more about that?

Calvin Chua: That's why it's very interesting. The strata title act was borrowed from... it's basically an Anglo-British ownership structure format. It first emerged in Australia in 1961. It was applied to Singapore as a way to allow individuals to have a share of the land that the building sits on. So to enact any changes to the building – for example, if you want to overhaul the HVAC system, if you want to sell the building – you need to get 80% approval from everyone. I wouldn't call it a co-op; it's not a cooperative.

Calvin Chua: It's just a legal ownership structure that requires 80% of the inhabitants to agree on something before you can do anything. Because the ownership structure is so fragmented, it's very hard to curate what shops get to exist in there. But at the same time, because of the lack of curation, this subculture or unique shops start to emerge in these strata malls.

Calvin Chua: So I think going back to the point when I was talking about why some of these shop owners would block the collective sale: to some extent, they will never hit the 80% requirement to trigger a collective sale. The reason being is that a number of them view these malls as a retirement village for them. It has its own ecosystem. So for me, what's interesting is the ownership structure and the level of uncurated-ness that you find in these malls.

Dave Deek: The closest American concept would be American strip malls in more of the smaller and midsize cities, where the individual shops in the strip mall are owned by the owner itself, even though they're all part of the same thing, but on a much smaller scale. Right? The very fragmented ownership...

Calvin Chua: Yes. Right.

Dave Deek: ...very weird ownership. Some managed by management firms, other times owned by the store owner – just a bunch of chaos, and you need to get a majority of people on board.

Calvin Chua: Yes, indeed. But these strip malls have direct access to the road, right? It's not... Yeah.

Dave Deek: Yeah, that's a big difference. But it's helpful in terms of ownership and ways to think about that for the American context.

Calvin Chua: So you don't have to think about what to do if the HVAC system breaks down because you own your unit; you fix your own HVAC system. Whereas in the strata-titled mall, you have to get everyone, or 80% of the owners, to agree to pay for the overhaul or repair of the HVAC systems. So that has a certain level of contestation, which is... maybe not contestation, but yeah, the dynamics are quite interesting. Yeah.

Project: Green Agora Pavilion (Modularity, Peripheries)

Dave Deek: Okay, that's fascinating. Let's keep the party going forward. I believe you had a showcase called the Green Agora pavilion, which showcased two ideas: modularity and living structures. Could you talk more about the urban design principles behind it?

Calvin Chua: Mhm. So this was a project during COVID. I think it was a fun project. It was designed during COVID for the architectural festival. The curators wanted us to design a safe space for people to gather, and the site was actually in a farm in the northern part of Singapore. So, we collaborated with a modular aluminum company that had some of these modular structures, and we worked with them to design Green Agora, made of these aluminum extrusions. It's a pavilion lookout point for people to gather.

Calvin Chua: It was made of mesh with the hope that over time, plant creepers could grow on it, that it starts to be engulfed by creepers. And if there's interest, you could potentially have certain plants; it's almost like a vertical community garden where you could grow your own herbs. So that's the Green Agora. I think it was very much a COVID-inspired context project.

Calvin Chua: But at the same time, I think it builds on our interest, or if I could call it affinities, with building in the peripheral areas or regions of Singapore. Yeah.

Singapore Archifest 2023: "Interim: Acts of Adaptation"

Dave Deek: And then I believe that you ran Archifest, is that correct? In 2023?

Calvin Chua: 2023. Yeah.

Dave Deek: And your theme was basically "Interim: Acts of Adaptation," and you challenged the demolition cycle, which is a very interesting thing in my opinion because we tend to think more about tearing things down to build something else up rather than reuse. Could you talk more about that theme and especially the spatial and formal implications? Sorry if it sounds a little bit too wordy.

Calvin Chua: Yes. So the Singapore Archifest is a biennial architectural festival. It comprises conferences, exhibitions, talks, and so on. The Singapore Institute of Architects invites a curator to run the festival. Every curator will have their own theme. For us, we were very interested in the theme of "Interim," primarily because of our interest in urban adaptation projects, adaptive reuse, and so on.

Calvin Chua: Hence, that was why we set that as the theme. We wanted the festival to focus on talking about these interim urban spaces, how they can be activated through installations, having talks, or design workshops to look at interim buildings. To some extent, we started off with the hope of taking over Golden Mile Complex because it was vacated when we were running the festival. We were hoping the developers that bought over that strata mall would allow us to squat in that building for a month, but it was too challenging, too difficult.

Calvin Chua: So we pushed on and worked with the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the planning authority of Singapore, to find a site in a heritage area in Singapore. We turned that into a festival house and also activated the precinct by having these interim pavilions. So what started off as an interim use of a building became a rethinking of the interim at the precinct, urban, or district scale.

Calvin Chua: And if I may add, what's interesting about the term "interim" in Singapore's context is that it's used very frequently. We have interim schools where you move there for 3 to 5 years while the parent school is under renovation, or interim bus stops. Even parks are also interim sometimes. This word "interim" is a way of... it's a non-committal way of saying, "We are going to put a use to this land right now, but don't worry, it will not be there permanently." So you don't have to worry; it will go in 3 to 5 years' time. It could stay for 10 to 20 years if you like it, but because it's interim, it may go. Yeah. I think it's a very uniquely Singaporean policy speak to use the word "interim."

Dave Deek: Okay.

Calvin Chua: Or even "interim housing" is used as a way to describe rental apartments. As you might know, most Singaporeans actually own their homes. Home ownership is extremely high, even for public housing. But a small group of locals rent because they are unable to afford to purchase a house or service a mortgage. These rental flats or apartments are known as interim housing for these folks.

Calvin Chua: The idea is that they should not rent for life, but rather it's just a temporary, interim period. Once they are back on their feet, get a proper job, they can buy a house.

Dave Deek: Okay.

North Korea Engagement: Geopolitics, Training, and the Pyonghattan Exhibit

Dave Deek: Everything's a euphemism these days. Alright. So, let's go to what some might say is your more interesting work. I would love to spend more time on adaptive reuse, but I have to ask this part because other people find this more interesting. I heard that you did a project in North Korea and did an exhibit, pardon me, in South Korea showcasing a North Korean apartment. Could you talk about both projects?

Calvin Chua: Mhm. Yeah. So, in a strange way, my affinity with the Korean Peninsula started with being keen on history. When I was in junior college, I was very interested in Cold War history.. I mean, had I not studied architecture, I would have done international relations. That was why I was so enamored by the "Berlin Wall's Architecture" text by Rem Koolhaas.

Calvin Chua: So the interest in geopolitics never left me. When I was in school, I decided to take a trip to North Korea out of curiosity. That started this multi-year engagement with North Korea, from 2012 onwards until 2019, where I was working as a volunteer with a non-profit, Singapore-based NGO that does capacity-building programs in North Korea. We do training programs in multiple fields: economic zone planning, policy making, branding, advertising, finance. My area of focus was on economic zone development – the real estate side, land planning side of the training program.

Calvin Chua: So I've visited Pyongyang many times. And this project, Pyongyang Sallim or what other analysts term as Pyonghattan was the recreation of a new apartment in Pyongyang, recreating that in Seoul for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. As I mentioned earlier, why we started to replicate—quote-unquote—an apartment was to enable South Koreans to experience what an apartment is like in North Korea.

Calvin Chua: Especially back in 2017, when they were doing all sorts of missile tests with heightened tensions, we thought it was a good way to have a healthy dialogue, to take the attention away from nuclear missiles to: How do Koreans live in Pyongyang? What does it mean to be a person with a higher socio-economic condition in Pyongyang? Within the 36-square-meter replica apartment, we thematically inserted different content about the urban history of Pyongyang, about existing housing typologies in Pyongyang, and what are some of the imaginative new urban proposals for the city.

Calvin Chua: So in each of these rooms, you would find display items, artifacts, diagrams, drawings, or models. It is almost like going to an IKEA store, where you get to observe all these different real-life elements. But at the same time, if you observe carefully, you can get more information about the city – how the city is evolving, how the city is growing. We didn't do any urban planning in North Korea; we analyzed the cities and...

Dave Deek: So you actually did urban design or urban planning training in North Korea? Okay...

North Korean Urban Design: Aesthetics, Constraints, Juche Style

Calvin Chua: We also do training programs for some of their urban planners and policy makers.

Dave Deek: That is very interesting. Could you talk more about the unique context, especially in terms of how it affected your operations and the constraints of training these individuals?

Calvin Chua: I think the Koreans are very technically skilled, I would say. They use similar software: AutoCAD, Adobe suites, different 3D modeling software, GIS software. I think we all use the same kind; there's a certain commonality. If you put a caveat here – if you disregard the political ideology and all the rhetoric, if you just look at it from a purely people-to-people exchange – we would be able to communicate easily as professionals. We use the same platforms; we design things in a similar way.

Calvin Chua: But of course, the politics, the perception towards what a city should be, what it means to design a monumental street in North Korea is very different from say Singapore. So I would say the challenge is always to contextualize for them and introduce them to certain urban planning best practices and how they could actually translate it to their context. Not to say that because of censorship whatsoever, but rather, I think it's important that there has to be an applied learning point for them in this training. Yeah.

Dave Deek: Okay, let me clarify something. I do not mean the political stuff; that's boring. I am very fascinated more about the urban design planning, the thoughts, the aesthetics of the North Koreans themselves. Could you elaborate on that? Because you don't hear about that.

Calvin Chua: Yeah. So it's interesting because I think maybe I can respond to this in two parts. Firstly, if we talk about aesthetics, there is always a kind of aesthetic... If you look at 1960s buildings, they're all very brutalist. Buildings were all kind of monumental and made of concrete. So it's kind of an expression of its time and a political ideology at that point in history.

Calvin Chua: Then I guess in the case of North Korea, it's actually the Juche style, which is the style of the ideology of self-reliance. Because they have been hit by famine, hit by sanctions, there needs to be a high degree of self-reliance. The architecture that they opted for, the style, has to reflect ideology. But what that means is essentially that according to different leaders, there are different perceptions of how you actually represent this ideology because it's so abstract. In the 60s, it was concrete because that was the primary material available, and it was a means of expression.

Calvin Chua: So buildings were very gray in North Korea all the way up till the mid-2000s. Under Kim Jong-un, it became a very colorful city. I think it's also a way to project a certain level of modernity. You start to see buildings trying to take shape with curves. Some of their local architects studied overseas in Europe, so they are very exposed to some of the star architects. But there's a limitation to the kind of curves they could generate because steel is expensive, and it's difficult to clad buildings.

Calvin Chua: So they still have to rely on concrete as a primary material source for construction. Hence, the buildings are very chunky and massive with curves. So it looks super monumental – maybe it's meant to be intimidating, but it's also a function of the lack of materials or access to materials that results in the kind of architectural styles and aesthetics we see coming out of North Korea.

Calvin Chua: So, I find that to be quite fascinating. If you go visit an apartment, the walls are extremely thick because it's a 40-story tower, and the walls are all load-bearing because you can't use steel beams to have a lightweight kind of building.

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Academic Research & Design Studios (Peripheries, Adaptation)

Dave Deek: My god, that is fascinating. We're running out of time. I do want to talk more about your research, especially your academic design studios. Could you go more into detail about that?

Calvin Chua: Yep. So I would say the academic design research is kind of in dialogue with my practice research also. I think there are several key interests. One is to speculate whether the periphery could be made productive. Increasingly, we're seeing a lot of these peripheries not as suburban or rural, but rather spaces just outside the urban area that are filled with new kinds of spatial products like urban farms, data centers, and so on.

Calvin Chua: We are very interested in looking at rethinking these peripheral zones or regions. So we worked in China, looking at the transformation of agricultural villages and how they can be made productive as they urbanize. We were looking at this transitional space, this peri-urban area between existing towns in Malaysia and the new high-speed rail station – how could this peripheral area be made productive? We're also looking at peripheral regions in the Korean peninsula, how that can be made productive. So that's one area of research/design studio that I teach in the university.

Calvin Chua: The other area has got to do with rethinking paradigms of adaptation – adaptive reuse of buildings and so on.

Adaptive Reuse: Comparing Models

Dave Deek: Last couple of questions here. From an urban design perspective, what lessons do you think we could take from adaptive reuse examples like Zeitz MOCAA and Tate Modern? I think Zeitz MOCAA is the African art museum; they actually turned this massive grain silo into an art museum. And Tate Modern is this power plant turned into a British museum. What lessons do you think we can take from that?

Calvin Chua: I think in your list of questions, you gave an example, the project in Japan, right? Where Karl Bengs... transforming kominka into... rejuvenating them...

Dave Deek: Yeah. Karl Bengs' kominka. Sorry. Yeah.

Calvin Chua: I think it's interesting that you mentioned MOCAA and Tate Modern because these projects are your typical conservation or adaptive reuse projects that require a lot of capital to conserve these buildings, adapt these buildings, and turn them into cultural institutions. These are landmark projects, and probably every city has one or a few of them.

Calvin Chua: Architecturally speaking, they're amazing. But I think what's more interesting is the other example, Karl Bengs, where the idea of adaptation has got to do with saving or potentially reviving the countryside in Japan – not just in Japan, but many other places around the world. That is starting to create this new real estate sector in Japan. So Karl Bengs is probably one of the early movers, the pioneers, but we are hearing more and more investors buying up properties in Japan's countryside, redeveloping them, turning them into Airbnbs.

Calvin Chua: I think that in itself is an economy, which is way more interesting than talking about Tate Modern and MOCAA, which is great design. But, I find revitalizing the Japanese countryside to be much more fascinating. What does it mean to have foreign capital flowing into Japan, for a country that is relatively homogeneous? And these real estate capitals of varying degrees – some are individuals, some are backed by private equity funds – what does that mean for the locals living there? Are we saving the community, or are we potentially displacing them? There's a kind of debate or tension there.

Calvin Chua: On one hand, Japan wants to revitalize the rural area, but on the other hand, how do we as potential foreign investors or designers do it responsibly? Yeah, and be part of the process? To me, that's way more interesting.

Dave Deek: Okay, that's fantastic. I thought more people would be interested in the other two, but I'm glad that you're taking Karl Bengs as the more interesting example.

Final Thoughts: Cautious Optimism

Dave Deek: I believe in Bengs' case, he didn't have that negative impact. He just applied more modern techniques to preserve a traditional architectural style and way of doing things. And in his case, you have more people moving back into the countryside – Japanese rather than foreigners. In some cases, towns have their first child born in years because of some of his work. Regarding foreign investors, it's too early to say, as you said.

Calvin Chua: Mhm. Yep. Sorry. Yeah.

Dave Deek: ...to say. And then, I don't want to keep you out too long. I also want to talk after the recording ends. So last thing for the record: as we conclude, any final thoughts for the future? Anything, your choice.

Calvin Chua: Yeah, I kind of view the future with a cautiously optimistic lens. That's a way of ensuring that we continue to be positive, I think, in light of all the things that are happening around the world – things that are more acute to things that are more chronic and systemic.

Calvin Chua: So on one hand, as much as we critique these problems, I think we need to have a certain optimism. Yeah. So to some extent, that's kind of how we operate. I think we are critical and cynical, but at the same time, optimistic.

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A new NBER working paper, "America's Housing Supply Problem: The Closing of the Suburban Frontier?" by Harvard's Edward Glaeser and Wharton's Joseph Gyourko, documents how the suburban frontier that powered American homeownership for generations is closing. Markets like Phoenix, Atlanta and Dallas, which built aggressively through the 1990s, now look increasingly like supply-constrained coastal cities, with soaring prices and flatlined construction.

By the numbers:

• Housing production fell from 4% annual growth in the 1950s to 0.64% in the 2010s

• America built 50 million homes from 1950-1980, but only 8.5 million in the 2010s

• Real home prices hit historic highs in 2024, up 15% above pre-GFC peaks nationally

• Miami prices are up 155% since 2012; Phoenix up 157%; Dallas up 95%

• Construction costs rose 25% since early 2000s but explain less than half the price surge

• Miami's suburban share of new homes (low-density, high-price areas) crashed from 44% in 1970s to 12% in 2010s

What the data shows:

• 44 major metros analyzed: Researchers used 1970-based census tract boundaries to track consistent geographic areas over 50 years

• Supply elasticity collapsed: In 1970s Dallas suburbs, a 10% price increase sparked 7.2% more construction. By 2010s? Under 1%

• Density isn't the constraint: Phoenix's median tract has just 3.5 homes per acre. The negative correlation between density and new construction has actually weakened or reversed

• Geography of decline: Among metros growing fast 1980-2000, only Houston and San Antonio maintained momentum through 2020

Key insights from the research:

• Empirical vs. structural supply: The paper distinguishes between what we can measure (the relationship between prices and construction) and true supply elasticity, which is confounded by neighborhood change

• Endogenous regulation: When high-demand areas attract wealthier residents, those residents often implement stricter anti-development rules

• The permitting cost formula: Total costs = physical construction × density factors × growth restrictions × neighborhood-specific barriers

• Industry devastation: Homebuilder establishments fell 50%+ between 2004-2022; employment dropped 60% and never recovered nationally (though Dallas/Houston rebounded)

• Remodeling boom: As new construction became harder, remodeling employment surged as workers shifted to the less-regulated renovation sector

• Metropolitan convergence: Growth rates across top 50 metros compressed dramatically. Former building champions like Las Vegas, Orlando, Raleigh, Riverside CA saw massive slowdowns

• The WRLURI factor: Metropolitan areas with stricter land use regulations (measured by Wharton index) showed steeper declines in supply responsiveness

• Price-to-construction cost ratios: In 1990, 65%+ of sunbelt suburbs had prices below 80% of construction costs. By 2023, 23-41% exceeded costs by 20%+

What changed: It's not land availability. The researchers find little evidence of a "density wall." Instead:

• Existing homeowners weaponize local regulations more effectively over time

• Political economy follows Mancur Olson's model: insiders protect rents, exclude outsiders (Dave’s note: would like to see a bit more on construction consolidation, especially unlike the Cali market, they are main forces for SFZ and deed restrictions in the Texas market, but political economy somewhat covers it)

• Wealthier, educated residents who move to high-amenity areas subsequently restrict development

• The variance in permitting difficulty across neighborhoods has increased dramatically

Alternative explanations considered and rejected:

• Construction costs: While up 25%, this explains only a fraction of price growth in most markets

• GFC aftermath: Dallas and Houston prove the industry can recover where allowed to build

• COVID/interest rates: The supply shift began decades before these recent shocks

• Built-out suburbs: Most sunbelt metros still have vast low-density areas

Bottomline: America's housing affordability crisis stems from thousands of local political battles where incumbent homeowners systematically win, transforming the sunbelt into a collection of mini-San Franciscos, one suburb at a time.

Think about your city. It's a buzzing, chaotic marvel of human achievement. Thousands or millions of people with different needs coexist in the same space. People need homes, workplaces, schools, parks, and grocery stores. Businesses need customers, workers, and suppliers. And these needs constantly shift and evolve.

Yet our cities feel paralyzed. Housing costs eat up half our paychecks. Commutes devour our lives. The corner store that once served your neighborhood vanished years ago. And God help you if you want to build something new, especially housing.

You might spent years wondering: why is it so damn hard for cities to simply work better, beyond just an “economics” explanation? You (rightfully) say that a big part of the answer lies in how we manage them, particularly through zoning. You know, those rigid rules declaring "only single-family homes here," "no businesses allowed there," "this many parking spaces required everywhere." Rules that paradoxically create more problems than they solve.

That's where management cybernetics comes in – not some sci-fi robot stuff, but the science of how complex systems function and adapt. A brilliant thinker named Stafford Beer studied thriving complex systems like the human brain and created something called the Viable System Model (VSM). Think of it as a blueprint for any complex organization (including a city) that wants to survive and thrive over time.

Management Cybernetics is *incredibly* useful in figuring out systems, so I wrote it as a practical way to teach the basics like VSM to fellow YIMBYs and Urbanists out there. Cities are wildly complex, high-variety systems. Traditional zoning is a simplistic, low-variety tool. And managing high complexity with low-complexity tools is doomed to fail, like trying to conduct a symphony orchestra with nothing but a whistle.

The VSM and other cybernetic concepts help us explain (without the use of economics) why this approach fails and point to what we know are better ways to build adaptive, flourishing cities. This isn't just about winning arguments; it isn’t about deregulation or markets for markets’ sake; it's about truly understanding how cities function as systems.

Why care about some obscure British management consultant’s work? Because Stafford Beer—far from a dusty theoretician—built a system that actually outmaneuvered the CIA in real time. When Nixon ordered Chile's economy strangled in 1972, Beer's Project Cybersyn became Salvador Allende's secret weapon. As CIA-backed truckers blocked supply routes, Beer's retrofitted network of a few dozen (not 500!) telex machines sprang to life inside a Star Trek-worthy control room. His team identified factory capabilities, tracked god knows how many economic indicators, and rerouted critical supplies through the chaos—all with 1970s technology. The strike meant to topple socialism failed spectacularly. Beer based his creation on his idea of a "Liberty Machine"—neither Soviet-style central planning nor American market fundamentalism, but something altogether new: a nervous system for democracy that amplified human decision-making instead of replacing it. Though Pinochet's bloody coup eventually destroyed Cybersyn (and Allende), for a brief moment Beer had achieved something remarkable—a governance system as complex as the society it served.

Now let’s get this class started!

BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER: STAFFORD BEER HIMSELF STATED THE MATERIALS AT THE END OF THE DAY ARE JUST FLEXIBLE TOOLS AND GUIDELINES TO HELP US UNDERSTAND SYSTEMS AND FEEDBACK LOOPS. FEEL FREE TO CHANGE OR ADAPT MATERIAL IN WHATEVER WAY THAT HELPS YOU!

Thinking Like a Cybernetician: New Questions for Urban Problems

Before diving into the model itself, let me share how a cybernetician approaches urban questions. When facing any city problem or policy, try asking:

Variety: How much complexity and difference exists in this situation (like housing needs)? How many options does our current rule or system allow? Is there a massive gap?

Ashby's Law: Are we tackling an incredibly complicated issue (high variety) with a simple, rigid rule (low variety)? What problems is that mismatch creating?

Feedback: What signals is the city sending us? Sky-high rents? Gridlocked streets? Angry residents? Is the system listening to these signals? Or are rules actively blocking natural responses? Are we trapped in a cycle where things keep getting worse (positive feedback)?

Homeostasis: Can the city maintain stability by adapting flexibly? Or is it so rigid that it resists small changes until a crisis hits?

Adaptation: Does the city have mechanisms to detect changes in the outside world (economy, demographics, technology) and adjust accordingly? Or is it operating on obsolete assumptions?

Goals & Balance: What's the big picture? How do we balance fixing potholes today with building sustainable infrastructure for tomorrow?

These questions help us look beyond symptoms to understand the system dynamics underneath.

Core Cybernetic Ideas Brought to Life in Cities

The Mind-Blowing Complexity of Urban Life: Variety

In cybernetics, "variety" measures complexity – the number of different states or possibilities something can have. More differences = higher variety. The concept is mathematically precise and central to understanding system behavior.

Cities generate a massive variety from multiple sources:

• Demographic: Age, household size, cultural background, education levels, family structure

• Economic: Jobs, income levels, business types, industry clusters, economic cycles

• Physical: Geography, existing buildings, infrastructure, land constraints, environmental factors

• Technological: Transportation options, construction methods, communication tools, energy systems

• Preferences: Lifestyle choices, aesthetic tastes, community needs, cultural values, privacy requirements

• Temporal: All of the above are constantly changing over time, creating dynamic requirements

This variety directly creates an enormous range of needs. Take housing: Detailed research using large datasets like the American Community Survey (ACS) shows people live in studios, 1-beds, 2-beds, 3-beds, 4-beds, or 5+ bedroom units. They live in single-family homes, duplexes, small apartment buildings, giant towers, or group quarters. They live alone, with partners, with kids, with roommates, or with parents. They own or rent, with multiple financing structures and tenure arrangements.

These aren't just abstract categories – they profoundly shape lives. Unit size (number of bedrooms) and household crowding (people per bedroom) strongly correlate with major life outcomes like fertility rates. Women in smaller units consistently show lower fertility than those in larger homes, regardless of whether it's an apartment or a house. Women in more crowded homes have lower fertility, especially when combined with living in high-density areas. Living with parents also shows a large negative correlation with fertility across diverse datasets.

The inescapable conclusion: No matter how much time passes, things will keep breaking down until leadership acknowledges and respects this enormous, dynamic variety in needs. Trying to suppress it or funnel it into narrow categories will inevitably fail.

Why Simple Rules Break Complex Cities: Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety

Here's a fundamental law: To effectively manage a complex system, the management system must have at least as much variety (flexibility, options, responsiveness) as the system it's trying to manage. You need complex tools for complex problems.

Think of it like music. Meeting a city's diverse housing needs is like playing a complex symphony requiring many different notes (studios, family apartments, ADUs, townhouses). But rigid single-family zoning gives you just two piano keys. You simply cannot play the required tune – you'll get discord, shortages of needed housing types, high prices, and unmet needs. It's mathematically impossible to satisfy complex needs with overly simple rules.

Zoning represents a direct violation of Ashby's Law:

• Cities = Massive Variety

• Traditional Zoning = Very Low Variety

The consequences are predictable and severe. When regulations lack requisite variety, pressure builds elsewhere through complex system interactions. Zoning's inability to allow diverse housing directly leads to shortages, driving up prices, increasing crowding, delaying family formation, and fueling homelessness (researcher Dawkins estimated restrictive zoning increases homelessness by 9-12% through rigorous econometric analysis). Its inability to allow mixed uses creates car dependency and sprawl through distorted transportation incentives. Its inability to allow incremental change causes neighborhood stagnation and prevents organic adaptation.

The mismatch between regulatory variety and urban complexity is a root cause of many urban crises - a mathematically inevitable outcome according to Ashby's Law.

In contrast, studies show increasing regulatory variety works through quantifiable outcomes: Auckland's reforms allowing denser development across 75% of the city resulted in rents 28-54% lower than they would have been otherwise. Lower Hutt's similar reforms tripled construction rates and cut rents by 21%. Faster, more predictable "by-right" approvals in Los Angeles accelerated construction by statistically significant margins. When regulatory variety increases, the system better meets real needs through enhanced response capability.

Learning (or Failing to Learn): Feedback Loops

Complex systems rely on feedback loops to learn and adjust. Feedback is information about results that influences future actions. In cybernetic terms, these loops are mathematical functions that process system outputs as inputs for future states.

Negative Feedback (Stabilizing): Aims to keep the system near a target state by dampening deviations. Example: High housing prices (feedback) should trigger more construction (action), increasing supply and stabilizing prices. You could describe it as F(x), where F reduces the difference between the current state x and the target state. These loops create system stability through error correction mechanisms.

Positive Feedback (Amplifying/Runaway): Pushes the system further in one direction by amplifying deviations. Example: Traffic congestion (feedback) → demand for wider roads (action) → more driving encouraged → more congestion (amplified feedback). Mathematically expressed as F(x) where F increases the magnitude of x, potentially creating exponential effects and system instability.

Algedonic Feedback ("Pain"/"Pleasure"): From the Greek algos (pain) and hedone (pleasure), these are collective "pain" signals (housing stress, long commutes, lack of services) or "pleasure" signals (satisfaction). A healthy system prioritizes responding to algedonic signals, particularly pain, which indicate system dysfunction requiring immediate attention. This concept is derived from Stafford Beer's VSM and represents essential meta-systemic signals that override routine operations.

How zoning interferes:

• Blocks Negative Feedback: Zoning directly prohibits the stabilizing market response (building more/diverse housing) to high prices/rents. The system "hears" the signal but is legally prevented from adjusting. Studies from NYC and Germany confirm that new supply lowers rents across quality levels via filtering, but zoning often prevents this filtering from happening at scale.

• Ignores Algedonic Feedback: The "pain" of the housing crisis (high costs, crowding impacting families, declining birth rates linked to housing) is often ignored by policymakers prioritizing the "pleasure" of existing homeowners benefiting from scarcity.

• Creates Positive Feedback: Zoning restrictions → shortage → rising prices → homeowner wealth/power increases → lobbying for more restrictions → shortage worsens → prices rise further.

A healthy urban system needs open feedback channels. Zoning blocks crucial market and social feedback. YIMBYism tries to unblock these loops and amplify the ignored "pain" signals.

Resilience vs. Rigidity: Homeostasis

Homeostasis means maintaining stability through dynamic adjustment and adaptation. In cybernetic systems, this represents a series of coordinated negative feedback loops that maintain essential variables within viable limits despite environmental disturbances.

Think of a forest. A diverse forest (high variety) adapts to disturbances through dynamic homeostasis - multiple interdependent species and processes creating redundancy and resilience. A uniform pine plantation (low variety) is brittle and easily destroyed by a single pest or fire due to a lack of response diversity. The principle is that homeostasis requires variety matching: internal regulatory mechanisms must possess sufficient variety to counter external disturbances.

Zoning creates brittleness in our cities through variety-reducing constraints. By preventing incremental change and adaptation (violating Ashby's Law, blocking feedback), rigid zoning makes cities fragile through simplification of response mechanisms. They resist small adjustments until pressure builds to critical levels, leading to major instability or crisis in housing and transportation - a pattern Stafford Beer termed "oscillation" that occurs when homeostatic mechanisms are too weak or constrained. True urban health requires dynamic homeostasis with sufficient regulatory variety – achieved through flexibility and distributed adaptation capacity, not rigid resistance. This requires specific feedback channels to detect deviations and response mechanisms with adequate degrees of freedom.

Managing Complexity Actively: Variety Engineering

Effective management requires consciously handling complexity through "variety engineering."

Variety Attenuation (Simplifying): Reducing the complexity faced.

• Zoning as Bad Attenuation: Drastically limits housing/business types, suppressing necessary variety.

• Potentially Good Attenuation: Consolidating overlapping codes, performance standards, and focusing resources.

Variety Amplification (Increasing Capacity): Making the management system more flexible.

• YIMBY Policies as Variety Amplification: Liberalizing land use; legalizing diverse housing (ADUs, plexes, apartments); streamlining permits; allowing mixed uses; multi-modal transport – these increase the variety of responses the city can generate.

Cities need smart variety engineering – shifting from zoning's crude attenuation towards amplifying regulatory and operational variety.

The Viable System Model (VSM): The Five Essential City Functions

The VSM identifies five crucial functional systems that must work together in any viable organization. These systems form a recursive structure with precise relationships and information flows between them. Traditional zoning interferes with all of them. (See Beer's original diagrams in Brain Of The Firm for the full mathematical representation of these relationships.)

System 1: Where Life Happens (Operations)

• City Examples: Neighborhoods, housing developments, local businesses, transit routes, parks, schools, construction sites, non-profit service providers.

• Cybernetic Need: Local autonomy and adaptability.

• Zoning Hindrance: Prevents operational variety (diverse housing types including family-sized units, local shops) and local adaptation.

• YIMBY Enablement: Increases operational autonomy by allowing more options like ADUs, plexes, and mixed-use.

System 2: The City's Framework (Coordination)

• City Examples: Street grid, utility networks, basic safety codes, essential environmental rules, shared data systems (like HMIS for homelessness), inter-agency protocols.

• Cybernetic Need: Provides stability and manages interdependencies to prevent harm; enables interaction.

• Zoning Hindrance: Acts as malfunctioning System 2, overly restricting uses/forms beyond harm prevention, reducing variety, creating conflict (e.g., separating homes/jobs).

• YIMBY Enablement: Advocates for a leaner System 2 focused on true coordination (infrastructure, safety, managing impacts) not segregation.

System 3: Managing the City Today (Internal Operations)

• City Examples: Public Works, Transit Authority operations, Parks maintenance, Police/Fire services, current budget management, code enforcement, coordinating lead agencies for specific issues (like homelessness).

• System 3 (Audit):* Infrastructure inspections, service quality surveys, performance audits, independent program evaluations.

• Cybernetic Need: Optimize current operations based on timely feedback; needs 3* for reality checks.

• Zoning Hindrance: Creates inefficient sprawl, increasing operational costs for System 3. Feedback often ignored by System 5.

• YIMBY Enablement: Allows more efficient land use, reducing System 3 costs. Better feedback loops can inform policy.

System 4: Planning for the Future City (Intelligence & Adaptation)

• City Examples: Planning departments, sustainability offices, economic development research, long-range transport modeling, policy analysis units.

• Cybernetic Need: Provide foresight and adaptability by scanning the external environment and future trends; challenge the status quo.

• Zoning Hindrance: Locks in past assumptions. System 4 intelligence showing the need for zoning reform is often politically blocked.

• YIMBY Enablement: Empowers System 4 by demanding planning based on current data and future needs, driving reform.

System 5: Governing the City (Policy & Identity)

• City Examples: Mayor, City Council, Planning Commission, Continuum of Care Steering Committees, i.e., setting overall vision, making final policy/zoning decisions, budgeting.

• Cybernetic Need: Define identity, provide closure, crucially balance System 3 (now) and System 4 (future).

• Zoning Hindrance: System 5 often captured by local opposition (NIMBYism), prioritizing local stasis (S3 concern) over city-wide adaptation (S4 need).

• YIMBY Enablement: Pushes System 5 to perform its balancing act, prioritizing overall city viability through policy changes like zoning reform.

Human Consequences & Policy Levers: Housing, Families, and Birth Rates

These cybernetic failures aren't abstract – they shape real lives. The zoning-induced mismatch between diverse housing needs and restricted supply directly impacts affordability, crowding, and even profound life choices like family formation, contributing to declining birth rates.

Housing Variety Needed for Families: Extensive cross-sectional and longitudinal research confirms two things when it comes to birth rates:

• Cost of housing matters

• Specific housing features matters

A lack of 3+ bedroom units and household crowding correlate strongly with lower fertility rates. Statistically significant negative associations persist after controlling for socioeconomic factors, suggesting causal mechanisms. Difficulty affording independent housing forces young adults to live with parents longer (median age of departure increasing 2.1 years since 2000), a factor universally linked to lower birth rates across diverse societies (elasticity of -0.17 to -0.26 in European and Asian demographic studies).

Zoning's Role: Zoning directly limits the variety of housing that System 1 can produce through regulatory constraints on unit size, type, and location. This creates a quantifiable reduction in housing option entropy, failing to meet these diverse needs and leading to negative social feedback (algedonic "pain") manifested in measurable stress indicators like housing cost burden exceeding 30% of income (now affecting 38% of renter households), overcrowding, and delayed family formation.

Cybernetic Solutions: Enabling Variety vs. Specific Pro-Natalist Zoning: Some observers concerned about birth rates (like Lyman Stone) might propose specific zoning rules explicitly for families. From a cybernetic perspective, this amounts to adding more low-variety rules to fix problems caused by existing low-variety rules – it violates Ashby's Law. It likely won't work well unless it's in a heavy zoning environment.

The sounder approach is Variety Amplification: removing broad restrictions (zoning reform) to allow the system the requisite variety to meet diverse needs organically, including family needs. If we want family-sized apartments near parks, we need to create an additional system or a set of systems to produce them.

The Power of Access - Financial Levers (e.g., Mortgages): History (like the FHA/VA loans and the Baby Boom) suggests improving access and affordability can powerfully support family formation. Instead of specific zoning, one option among others is financial levers (System 3/5 interventions) like targeted down-payment assistance, favorable mortgage terms for larger homes (e.g., 3+ beds), or loans helping young adults move out can be effective complements to zoning reform. These tools work within a system with sufficient housing variety, addressing affordability without adding more distorting land-use rules. They represent a different, potentially more effective and less distorting cybernetic lever than trying to achieve complex social goals through specific zoning mandates.

Beyond Zoning Reform: Other System Constraints and Levers ("The Housing Hydra")

While zoning reform is crucial for increasing regulatory variety (addressing System 2/5 failures) and enabling local adaptation (System 1), cybernetics teaches us to look at the whole system. Achieving affordable, abundant housing requires tackling multiple interacting constraints – the "Housing Hydra." Zoning reform is necessary, but often not sufficient. Focusing only on zoning might lead to incomplete victories.

1. System Constraint: Market Concentration and the Role of Antitrust

• The Problem: Even if zoning allows more housing variety, System 1 (Operations) might still be constrained if the homebuilding industry lacks competition. High market concentration (few large builders dominating) can reduce output and slow innovation, prioritizing profit margins over volume. This breaks the price feedback loop. Similar issues arise with rental markets potentially coordinated via algorithms (like RealPage), and parallels exist in industries like oil where production is restrained despite high prices (until Trump’s Tariffs).

• Cybernetic View: Market concentration acts as a powerful Variety Reducer on System 1's output and interferes with crucial market Feedback Loops. It limits the actual operational variety delivered, even if regulations are permissive.

• Antitrust as a Lever (Targeting System 1 Environment): Antitrust enforcement is a System 5/4 (or you can make the argument for 5/3, remember these are guidelines, not set in stone!) intervention targeting the environment and structure of System 1 (Operations). Promoting competition aims to increase System 1's responsiveness.

• Different Parts of the System (YIMBY vs. Antitrust Focus): YIMBYs focusing on zoning reform and antitrust advocates focusing on market power often target different parts of the overall urban system, although their ultimate goals may align. Zoning reform targets the regulatory framework (Systems 2 and 5) while antitrust targets the operational environment (System 1 market actors). These approaches complement each other by addressing different potential bottlenecks in the system.

2. System Constraint: Construction Capacity Limits

• The Problem: Building requires skilled labor, materials, and efficient methods. Past recessions created lasting labor shortages. High material costs and slow tech adoption are bottlenecks.

• Cybernetic View: These constrain System 1's operational capacity and speed. Even with good regulations and competition, if System 1 cannot build fast/affordably enough, the feedback loop is blocked.

• Addressing Capacity: Workforce training, construction R&D are System 4/3 interventions to boost System 1's capability.

3. System Constraint: Regulatory Complexity & Interaction

• The Problem: Beyond zoning, a "thousand cuts" from many interacting rules (permits, fees, reviews) stifle production.

• Cybernetic View: This is a System 2 malfunction, reducing System 1's effective variety. Streamlining is needed.

4. System Lever: Subsidies

• The Role: Subsidies are System 5/3 attempts to steer outcomes by changing economics within the system.

• Cybernetic Interaction: They work best when System 1 can respond (good zoning, competition, capacity). Subsidizing demand into a constrained system often just inflates prices.

5. System Nuance: Context and Unintended Consequences

• The Problem: Policies work differently in different places. Well-meant rules can backfire (e.g., Pittsburgh IZ study).

• Cybernetic View: Emphasizes System 4's role in understanding local context and modeling effects before System 5 acts.

Case Study: Coordinating Complexity - Houston's "The Way Home"

Houston, Texas, has reduced homelessness by approximately 63% since 2011, largely through its "Housing First" strategy coordinated under "The Way Home" initiative. Looking at this through the VSM lens reveals effective systems management in a complex social domain:

The Challenge: Homelessness involves immense variety – diverse individuals with complex, often overlapping needs (mental health, substance use, unemployment, health issues) interacting with numerous service providers. A fragmented approach lacks requisite variety.

The Way Home Structure:

• System 1 (Operations): Over 100 partner organizations (non-profits, housing authorities, VA, government agencies) providing direct services like outreach, shelter, permanent supportive housing, case management, healthcare, and job training. Each has operational expertise and some autonomy.

• System 2 (Coordination): This is where The Way Home excels. Key mechanisms include:

  • Coordinated Access System: A centralized intake and assessment process, often using a shared database (like HMIS - Homeless Management Information System), ensuring clients don't have to navigate dozens of agencies separately. This manages variety and prevents duplication.

  • Shared Standards & Protocols: Common practices for key functions (outreach, case management) promote consistency across the diverse System 1 providers.

  • Lead Agency (Coalition for the Homeless): Acts as a central hub for System 2 coordination functions.

• System 3 (Operational Management): The Coalition for the Homeless and the Continuum of Care (CoC) Steering Committee manage the overall system day-to-day. They use the shared HMIS data to monitor performance across providers, allocate resources (including coordinated federal, state, local, and private funding) based on need and effectiveness, and ensure the Housing First model is being implemented consistently now. Data-driven decision making is key here.

• System 4 (Intelligence/Adaptation): The CoC planning groups analyze trends (e.g., from annual Point-in-Time counts and HMIS data), identify service gaps, evaluate program effectiveness, learn from experience, and adapt the community plan for the future.

• System 5 (Policy/Identity): The CoC Steering Committee (including city/county leaders, providers, formerly homeless individuals) sets the overall goals ("rare, brief, non-recurring homelessness"), defines the core Housing First identity, makes high-level strategic decisions, and ensures political will and community buy-in. It balances immediate housing needs (S3) with long-term system improvement (S4).

Leveraging Housing Stock Variety: Houston's relative lack of restrictive zoning compared to many coastal cities means there is a potentially greater variety of existing housing types and locations available for System 1 providers to place clients in quickly using Housing First. While not eliminating challenges, this less-constrained environment makes finding suitable units easier than in places where zoning severely limits options. The regulatory environment (System 2/5) provides more potential variety for System 1 to work with.

Cybernetic Lessons: Houston's success isn't just about "Housing First" as a philosophy; it's about building a high-variety management system (effective Systems 2, 3, 4, 5) capable of coordinating numerous autonomous providers (System 1) to meet the high variety of client needs, operating within a relatively less restrictive housing environment. It demonstrates effective Variety Engineering through coordination and data use, achieving better Homeostasis in managing homelessness compared to more fragmented systems. It highlights the power of coordinating System 1 operations through robust System 2 and 3 functions, guided by System 4 intelligence and System 5 policy.

Designing for Viable, Adaptive Cities

Cybernetics gives us a powerful lens for understanding cities as living systems that demand management approaches embracing variety and enabling adaptation. Rigid, traditional zoning fundamentally violates Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, blocks vital feedback loops, stifles necessary local adaptation, and hinders the city's long-term viability, impacting everything from affordability to family formation.

Understanding the Viable System Model helps explain why our cities struggle and points toward a multi-faceted approach focused on system viability:

• High-Variety Regulations: Moving beyond zoning's crude restrictions towards flexible codes that allow diversity (Amplifying Variety via System 2/5).

• Empowered Local Adaptation: Giving neighborhoods and builders (System 1) the freedom to respond to local needs within broad goals.

• Smart Coordination (System 2): Focusing on enabling infrastructure and preventing real harm, not micromanaging form and use.

• Actionable Intelligence (System 4): Ensuring planning looks ahead, understands constraints (like capacity/market power), and effectively informs policy.

• Balanced Leadership (System 5): Making strategic choices for the whole city's future, balancing today and tomorrow, and addressing multiple constraints.

• Addressing Multiple Constraints: Recognizing that zoning reform (addressing regulatory variety in S2/S5), while essential, must often be complemented by actions addressing market concentration (Antitrust targeting S1's environment), construction capacity (boosting S1 capability), regulatory complexity (improving S2 efficiency), and potentially targeted financial access levers (like mortgage programs) and subsidies to create a truly responsive and viable urban system.

By embracing these cybernetic principles, urbanists and YIMBYs can better understand why cities get stuck and advocate more effectively for the flexible, adaptive, and high-variety approaches needed to create truly viable, thriving cities for everyone.

Online urbanist conversations often focus on policy. But how are the digital spaces where they happen actually built and nurtured, particularly on emerging platforms like BlueSky? Creating a cohesive community requires deliberate effort beyond debates – connecting individuals, fostering productive dialogue, and navigating unique online dynamics.

This interview goes behind the scenes with @fema.monster, creator of Urbanism+, a key custom feed for urbanists on BlueSky. We explore the practical strategies and philosophy behind cultivating this community from the ground up, delving into:

• Genesis & Strategy: Why BlueSky was chosen, and the hands-on tools (like Skyfeed, regex) and specific tactics used to bootstrap the community and connect early members.

• Evolving Vision: The plan to move beyond simple connection, leveraging BlueSky's potential to foster deeper, localized, and more challenging urbanist discourse.

• Community Health & Impact: Approaches to moderation, critical reflections on the need for greater diversity within the movement, and the potential for real-world effects.

Join us to understand the motivations, methods, and challenges involved in shaping a focused online community dedicated to better cities in the dynamic environment of a new social platform.

Follow Dave On BlueSky

Follow @fema.monster on BlueSky

1) What specifically motivated you to start Urbanism+ on BlueSky? Was there a particular gap you saw in urbanist discourse on other platforms like Threads or Mastodon? Was there something unique about BlueSky that appealed to you for this purpose? Can you describe the initial steps you took to curate the community and content?

I can’t say if there was a gap in urbanist discourse on other platforms–I don’t use them. I had wanted to talk about urbanism online but Twitter was a dumpster fire and I didn’t want any part of that. I’m a certified Mastodon hater and Threads didn’t exist, so the at-the-time invite-only Bluesky seemed to be the most promising option.

I started Urbanism+ because nobody was talking about it when I first joined. I would repost content and try to find other like-minded individuals to follow, but it was tough finding connections. Custom feeds were instrumental in connecting folks together in the early days of the platform. Today with recommended follows, starterpacks, and more, custom feeds like Urbanism+ are less vital to connecting a community and I think that’s a good thing. The community shouldn’t be too reliant on any single platform. And that’s what I’ll say I like about Bluesky, or rather the ATprotocol, is the openness. We have a lot more power here to shape our experience in this digital space.

This openness is what allowed me to create Urbanism+. I don’t come from a coding background, so I used Skyfeed, a feed creation service. I did need to learn more advanced regex (regular expression) to get the most out of this tool and then it was only a matter of rigorous testing of urbanist terminology and tweaking things to prevent as many false positives. I spent a lot of time tuning things to ensure the feed picks up the correct posts.

From there, I created an alternate account, the Urbanism+ Feed Assistant. I would use this account to like nearly every post that came across the feed. This was a particularly useful advertising tactic and it brought a lot of curious folks to the feed via a convenient link in the profile bio. I still do this sometimes on occasion.

2) How do you perceive the urbanist community and discussions on BlueSky to be different from those on established platforms like Twitter/X, Reddit, or dedicated urban planning forums (besides being, you know, more polite)? Are there unique dynamics, types of interactions, or content formats that thrive particularly well on BlueSky?

I do rarely browse urbanist content on Reddit, but otherwise I have no idea what the climate is on those other platforms. I hear from others that Bluesky is becoming the premier hangout for urbanists and I’m happy to have played some role in that, but if I’m being honest, the discourse on Bluesky could be better. There’s plenty of entertaining content and I love that, but I would like the discourse to become more challenging. This is one area that I’m investigating how I can help make that happen. Even if I’m unsuccessful, I think we have tools to make this a reality and that’s what makes Bluesky powerful.

3) Could you elaborate on the specific tools, strategies, or criteria you use to discover relevant urbanism content and identify influential voices within the BlueSky ecosystem? How do you decide what to amplify or feature through Urbanism+, and what impact do you think this curation has?

For now the feed is still largely based on matching terms. Nearly every term was evaluated in a test feed to determine:

1. Match frequency

2. Match quality

3. Percent of false positives

Terms which produce too many false positives were reworked or abandoned if they were too unreliable. A good example is “third place” which expectedly did not produce many urbanism results, however, “a third place” is almost exclusively urbanism related.

When bigger influential voices joined the platform, like the War on Cars (a personal favorite) who were here pretty early on, I would manually add them to the feed and bypass the terms altogether so that all their posts made the feed. Influential urbanists that post more varied content were put on a different list that allowed more of their posts to make the feed with a less strict term matching. The feed has continued to move away from this approach as the feed is full of content daily and I want everyone to have an equal access and opportunity to the feed. That’s why the main version of the feed is sorted chronologically. Big and small accounts can have their voices heard. I don’t see much of a point to the feed if it’s largely serving up content from larger accounts which already have an audience.

In terms of what I decide to amplify, I suppose I just touched on that, I want to provide a platform for anyone to get exposure. The content itself is really up to everyone else. Of course, the terms the feed uses does play a role here but I don’t really include/exclude anything based on any personal agenda. In fact, I have been very vocal that I’m happy to add any terms or hashtags that may have been missed. There is a group of us in discord that I frequently run ideas by too and I defer to their judgements all the time. I don’t really want this to be something where I have the only say.

But I do take a hard line on moderation. This is a welcoming place. I think the rules in the discord sum things up:

• Be respectful

• No hate speech or discrimination

• Stay on topic (mostly)

• No excessive self-promotion

• Follow Bluesky's Community Guidelines

The feed uses many block lists that support these rules and also includes MAGA & right wing extremists block lists. I don’t see any value in pretending these hateful people have valid perspectives. This is not the feed for these people.

Most users are not using custom feeds, which is disappointing since I think that’s Bluesky’s killer app, but I understand why: most custom feeds are honestly not that good. And I want to say that, as much work as I’ve put into Urbanism+, I still feel like it’s in beta. This is in part because bluesky hasn’t provided the APIs needed to take custom feeds to the next level, but also the tools that we use to create custom feeds are still very new. Urbanism+ has been able to grow and expand after the feed was migrated to graze.social and new features are rolling out all the time. I expect a lot more feedmakers will take advantage of these new features and as the baseline quality of custom feeds rise we will really start to see the impact of curation. I have a lot of future plans that I believe will take the feed to new heights.

4) Given that custom feeds are now less vital for simple connection, how do you see Urbanism+ contributing to community building on BlueSky by fostering more challenging discourse? What specific types of challenging discussions or deeper dives into urbanist topics do you feel are currently missing and could be fostered more effectively through Urbanism+?

My hope is that Urbanism+ can optionally tap into location to elevate local voices in a users area with the hope that these users become mutuals, which is another area I hope to tap into. I like the idea of a static version of the feed that remains the same for all users and a dynamic version which factors in location, mutuals, and more. Modern algorithms factor in a lot of this stuff and more, but none of them give users the power to choose these levers and Urbanism+ would.

I think the biggest conversation that is rarely explored is just how homogeneous the urbanism movement is and why that is. I think for any movement to be successful there needs to be diversity and that's lacking here. I think most urbanists, myself included, are well-meaning, but it's a privileged movement and it can show.

I use urbanism as an umbrella term (that's really where the plus in urbanism+ comes from, to highlight the broad scope of the feed), but certain movements like the safe street movement enjoy a lot more diversity and I have a lot of faith in the work that they're doing.

I think we can do better here and we need to talk about it more. I don't want great cities only wealthy white folks can afford to live in. I don't want beautiful infrastructure that doesn't fully understand the needs of people with disabilities.

5) You noted that you're waiting for specific APIs from BlueSky to take custom feeds "to the next level." What are some examples of the functionalities or data access you hope these future APIs will provide that would significantly enhance the Urbanism+ feed?

I'm going to answer your API question now. Bluesky needs to give users an options menu for custom feeds with parameters set by feedmakers. Location and mutuals could be opted into to tailor the Urbanism+ experience. Additionally, these options could be weighted, with some users preferring their version of Urbanism+ to serve up a higher percentage of local voices. What sets this approach apart from other social media is the users are deciding what they see, not the algorithm.

Another API we need is something to replace the sticky post menus. Filtering and sorting should be done in app, without the need for several feed variants (chronological, trending, pics, with replies, video, etc).

Without the proper APIs, the way you would go about this would be to just make more feed variants–one with location, one with mutuals, one with both, and that has several disadvantages and technical headaches.

All of this is to say, by better connecting folks locally, more challenging and productive conversations can happen among those who want to make their communities better. Non-locally though by better connecting us with our urbanist mutuals, the goal is for these online relationships to be strong enough to handle the challenging conversations. I don't know how much I can, or even want to, direct what topics get discussed, but I want to create a platform that enables healthy discourse.

6) Since you don't actively use urbanism communities on other platforms like Twitter/X or dedicated forums, what makes you feel confident that BlueSky is becoming the "premier hangout" for urbanists? Is this based on direct feedback, the types of users you see joining, or other indicators?

Most of the big urbanist creators, with the notable exception of notjustbikes, are using bluesky as their primary platform, though from what I hear mastodon is pretty active as well. Users have also expressed that Bluesky is the place for urbanists and I'm inclined to agree. I think all movements should shift to platforms that have more tools for control.

7) Considering the goals of connecting local voices and fostering discussion online, what unique value or additional tangible impact do you envision the BlueSky urbanist community bringing to real-world urban environments and policy, specifically because it operates and connects in an (relatively new) online space, complementing existing offline efforts?

I think we need to be realistic about the limitations of online activism. Even under ideal conditions, the value any platform provides to the real world will always simply be a small support role. I can’t say how all of this will translate to the real world, but I do hope that the feed keeps people connected in ways the other social media has failed.

8) You've mentioned wanting more challenging discourse. To help the urbanist community on BlueSky deepen its collective understanding and increase its real-world relevance, what specific topics or types of critical self-reflection do you think are most needed right now? As the urbanist community on BlueSky potentially grows into that 'premier hangout' you mentioned, what identity or reputation do you hope it cultivates? And looking ahead, what do you see as its single biggest opportunity—or its most significant challenge—in shaping the future of online urbanist discourse?

It’s really the lack of diversity that concerns me the most because I think that impacts so much, big and small. Housing is probably the biggest specific topic. Gentrification concerns are not as valued in many urbanist circles. That’s a red flag for me. I am admittedly not a housing expert and I have a lot to learn here, but if history has taught me anything…

The Bluesky community as a whole has really put in the work to try to shape the platform from the very beginning. Early on I learned that Alt-Text is good and I’ve now been using it for the last two years without thinking about it. It’s just natural. Plenty of third party alt-text tools exist as well. Megathreads attempting to onboard new users with these best practices are common too. There’s a real effort to lead by example and I think there’s been real success here.

But as the platform continues to grow, we’ll continue to see these efforts lose their effectiveness. Smaller communities (feeds) and custom moderation labeling services are invaluable tools that allow us to shape this identity. My primary goal is to connect the right people together and provide a safe and healthy platform. The actual content is largely up to everyone else.

The biggest challenge is time. If only I had more of it. Donations help greatly as well as volunteering. And feedback. I want as much feedback as possible.

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