Planning

Destroying Countrysides to Save Earth from a Climate Non-crisis

Paul Driessen — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:35:17 -0500

Energy analyst Robert Bryce maintains a database showing that, as of November 2025, local communities have rejected or restricted 595 wind, 475 solar and (more recently) 72 large-scale battery projects.

Many don’t want the installations blanketing wildlife habitats, scenic vistas, croplands or their backyard viewsheds; especially when the unreliable electricity is exported to faraway, power-hungry, virtue-signaling cities; and particularly when they are expected to help pay for installations and transmission lines that serve another state: North Dakota ratepayers to help Minneapolis, for example.

Other locals worry about health risks posed by light flicker, low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Many people also get riled up over the real costs of “green” energy – the total actual costs … versus deliberately lowballed costs that advocates emphasize.

This opposition is not only an American phenomenon. French and other European towns are also raising concerns, as are others around the world.

A recurrent sales pitch is that wind and solar power costs are declining and are now lower than coal, gas or nuclear electricity, ensuring lower prices for consumers. The claims leave out important but studiously unmentioned costs – economic, environmental and human.

“Save with renewable energy” promotions typically look only at initial costs associated with installing wind turbines and solar panels – which often come from China and are manufactured with cheap labor, using materials extracted with child labor, in mines and facilities with minimal or no workplace safety or environmental safeguards, with every phase fueled by oil, natural gas or coal.

Promoters also ignore sneaky subsidies paid via taxes and hidden charges on electric bills. They ignore payments to companies for not producing electricity when they must shut down because of high winds or when generation exceeds supply or grid capacity.

They don’t mention the costs of constructing, maintaining and operating duplicative backup systems: coal- or gas-fired power plants that must operate full-time at low throttle and go full-bore whenever wind and sunshine are inadequate. Or the mining and pollution involved in manufacturing all these technologies.

Grid-scale backup batteries cost tens of billions of dollars and carry significant fire and toxic emission risks, as with the 300-megawatt battery inferno at Moss Landing, California.

Offshore oceanic wind turbines must be replaced frequently, due to salt spray and storms. Hailstorms can destroy entire solar panel installations. The trillions of dollars keep adding up.

Read the rest of this piece at Townhall.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change and human rights. Special thanks to researcher T.H. Platt, author of The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, for assisting with this article.

Oregon DOT via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?

Pete Saunders — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

You know, prior to the Covid pandemic, there was a lot more discussion in the urbanist sphere about economic inequality and a lack of economic mobility in cities, and their influence on the rising unaffordability of the American housing market. After the pandemic, that kind of discussion dissipated and morphed into something much broader – affordability, and later, abundance – that didn’t carry the same race and class associations typically given to inequality and mobility concerns.

That’s fine for people seeking to broaden support for policy action on affordability. However, it doesn’t touch on the entirety of the affordability problem.

Last week, Crains Chicago Business reporter Dennis Rodkin wrote about metro Chicago’s two-tiered real estate market – one that’s booming for the wealthiest Chicagoans, and one that’s flat for virtually everyone else. Here’s a quote from the paywalled article:

“In the uppermost echelon of home prices, sales took only until early November to pass the record number of homes sold in a full year. And one sale among them, a Winnetka estate that sold for $31.25 million, was the highest-priced sale of an existing home ever in the Chicago metro area (other homes have been built new for more). Meanwhile, in the market for homes at all prices, the number of sales is running only slightly higher than even with 2024, a year that ended with the fewest homes sold since 2011.”

In Rodkin’s interview with Jena Radnay, an agent with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate on Chicago’s North Shore, Radnay said, “(North Shore buyers may be) doing well with their business, sold their companies and cashed out, gotten massive promotions,” invested well or inherited wealth, she says, “and they’re happy to pay what it takes for real estate up here where they know it’s a good investment.”

Rodkin also spoke with Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services. The Chicago nonprofit focuses on financing homeownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, but Simpkins’ perspective on the housing market takes in the middle class as well. Simpkins’ take? “It’s no secret that housing has gotten too expensive for almost everyone.”

Rodkin’s basis for Chicago’s dual housing market comes from his comparison of home price growth with median income growth in the Chicago metro area, between 2014 and 2024. Rodkin’s analysis compared home price growth and median income growth over two periods, 2014-19 and 2019-24. The map below shows areas where home price growth exceeds median income growth (shades of red), and areas where home price growth is surpassed by median income growth (shades of blue):

Rodkin sums up his position in this quote below:

For the past year and a half, Chicago-area home prices have been rising faster than the national average and faster than in nearly every major US city, accelerating the local affordability crunch right alongside interest rates that have remained relatively high.

Rising prices and mortgage interest rates that are twice what they were a few years ago take a one-two punch at affordability, and uncertainty about future financial well-being amid mass layoffs and the creeping hegemony of AI makes the hit feel even harder. “As the cost of housing has gone up dramatically,” Simpkins says, “people are feeling more challenged with being able to keep good-paying employment.”

Honestly, I think Rodkin is making a valid point with his framing of the Chicago housing market. From a pure residential real estate sense, there appears to be a clear worsening of housing affordability, with wealthy buyers getting what they want and others struggling.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Chicago housing for sale, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

$1.8 Trillion for Nothing

Randal OToole — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Congress sporadically handed out transit capital funds in the 1970s and 1980s, but in 1991 it made it systematic with creation of the transit capital investment grants program, also known as New Starts. Since then, federal, state, and local taxpayers have spent more than half a trillion dollars on transit capital improvements. Transit agencies have also spent nearly $1.2 trillion on transit operations, only $355 billion of which was covered by passenger fares.

These numbers are from the National Transit Database Historic Time Series, the 2024 edition of which the Federal Transit Administration released last week along with the 2024 annual transit database that was featured here yesterday. While the above figures are in nominal dollars, after adjusting for inflation to 2024 dollars using GDP deflators, taxpayers have spent more than $1.8 trillion subsidizing transit since 1991.

What have we gotten for this excessively generous subsidy? In 1991, the average urban resident rode transit more than 40 times a year. Transit ridership grew between 1991 and 2014, but so did urban populations, so trips per resident increased to just 42. Ridership fell after 2014 and by 2019 the average urban resident took only 36 transit trips per year. As of 2024, it was around 27 trips per year.

This does not seem like a great return on a $1.8 trillion investment.

Transit has not relieved congestion. It hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It hasn’t helped many low-income people, the vast majority of whom have their own cars and don’t use transit. All this $1.8 trillion has done is enrich a few special interest groups.

The historic time series consists of five different spreadsheets. The first two, tables TS1.1 and TS1.2, focus on how much transit funding comes federal, state, or local sources. More interesting is table TS2.1, which lists operating expenses, fares, route miles, revenue miles, revenue hours, riders, and passenger-miles, all broken down by both transit agencies and modes for each agency. Table TS2.2 is the same but broken down only by transit agencies, not by modes. Table TS3.1 has capital expenses broken down by agency and mode while table TS3.2 inventories assets by agency and mode. I use mainly 2.1 and 3.1.

Previous issues have included most data back to 1991, though capital costs began in 1992 and fares in 2002. For some reason, this year the FTA began many of the time series in 2015, so I turned to the 2023 time series to get earlier years.

The American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transit Fact Book includes capital costs and fares for the years that are missing from the historical time series. Though APTA’s data aren’t broken down by mode, they add to the continuous series of national data.

Transit advocates talk endlessly about the advantages of transit over driving. Americans are paying for it but they aren’t using it.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Planners know that architecture is a profession closely aligned with urban planning. Many architects might tell you that planning is a subset of architecture. Whether true or not, architects have had a lot of influence in the development of the planning profession.

One architect who fits that mold is Louis Sullivan. I don’t think he ever identified with being a planner, but his influence on urban design, by being one of the first designers of the modern skyscraper and a key leader in the formation of the Chicago School and Prairie School of architecture, which also influenced planning, links Sullivan to planning.

Sullivan was also famous for a quote that fits planning as well as architecture: “form follows function”. Sullivan made that statement when thinking about his architectural designs. However, he just as easily could have said the same about cities. In other words, how cities look depends on what they do.

The industrial cities in the Rust Belt took on the form they did because of the function they had. Many of them cared far less about how they looked or performed as cities and cared more about how they could house the factories that employed workers, the homes they lived in, and their commercial needs.

Gary, IN is a great example of this. When U.S. Steel employed more than 30,000 workers and nearly 200,000 people lived in Gary, few people put lots of thought into the city’s form; it served the function of an industrial city. Over the last half of the 20^th century, however, that function collapsed, leaving behind a city that was ill-prepared for the next step. As I wrote in Part 1 about the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s efforts to rebuild and revitalize Gary’s downtown, I liked the premise of relying on “mom-and-pop developer capital” and “patience and persistence” to establish a new urban form. But trying to establish a new form (or even an updated form) is not possible without knowing the function. That’s why I think Notre Dame’s School of Architecture in Gary is admirable, but flawed.

Gary’s existential moment

Gary must determine its new function first and establish the form that allows it to flourish. But how does it do that?

Let’s use the city typology from the Encie study I referenced in Part 1 as a starting point. Of the nine city typologies the report identified, the researchers are most gloomy on the prospects of industrial cities in highly-developed economies. We know now that manufacturing is no longer the kind of economic function that can support cities in the way they used to. That doesn’t mean it’s not financially viable anymore, it means it doesn’t fulfill the needs of people living in developed economies. Using the Encie study as an example, the researchers note that future prospects for existing industrial cities are dim in developed economies, but strong in developing or emerging economies. Let’s suppose the industrial city model is gone and never coming back into American cities.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Indiana Dunes National Park — near the city of Gary, via Picryl in Public Domain.

For Most Commuters: Cars the Only Viable Choice

Wendell Cox — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

For some years, the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has produced major metropolitan area (labor markets) job access estimates for the average worker, at various trip lengths and modes. The latest estimates (2023) cover 50 of the nation’s major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 million). Major metropolitan areas not in the 2023 data include Hartford, Honolulu, New Orleans, Omaha, Rochester, Tucson and Tulsa.

The data indicate auto access to jobs is far greater by car than by transit. This is shown below at the 30-minute job access level, which is slightly more than the average one-way work trip travel time of 26.8 minutes (about 60% of US workers reached work in 30 minutes), according to the American Community Survey. This does not include people who work at home, whose work trip travel time is zero minutes.). If people who work at home (zero minutes travel time) are included, the average one-way work trip travel time in 2024 was 22.9 minutes

The 30-minute standard is used by many planning agencies, with its historic roots. The 30-minute one-way work trip travel time has been called the Marchetti Constant, described by Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti. Jonathan English, writing in City Lab, provides a compelling history from 800 BCE to today.

Auto Access to Metro Area Jobs

The data indicate by far the best 30-minute access to jobs for the average worker is by car in the 50 major metropolitan areas (Table). The unweighted average 30-minute access for major metropolitan area workers is 54.7% of metropolitan area jobs.

The best auto access is in Salt Lake City and San Francisco, where more than 100% of jobs can be reached by car in 30 minutes. These impressive figures are likely made possible by the virtually continuous urban development in adjacent metropolitan areas, which creates a commuter market larger than is defined by the metropolitan area. For example, fully developed continues from the north Salt Lake City metro area boundary to the Ogden metro area, just north of downtown Salt Lake City. In San Francisco, the continuous urbanization spreads to San Jose on both sides of San Francisco Bay.

The least 30-minute job access for autos was in metro New York (14.86%), leading Chicago (22.70%), Atlanta (23.20%), Miami (25.81%) and Los Angeles (25.86%).

Auto Access Compared to Transit: On average automobile commuters can access 58.3 times (5,830%) as many jobs in 30 minutes than by transit in the major metropolitan areas. The five leading major metros in Auto-Transit 30-minute access are Detroit (210.2), Raleigh (160.6), Dallas-Fort Worth (150.1), Birmingham (144,1) and Riverside-San Bernardino (142.4). The major metro with the least 30-minute auto-transit job access is New York (auto access 7.8 times that of transit). This means that throughout the metro area, transit 30-minute job access is 1.3% that of cars. San Francisco (12.6), Boston (18.6), Chicago (22.0), Philadelphia (22.7) and Washington (23.9) round out the major metros with the least 30-minute auto job access compared to transit.

Transit Access to Metro Area Jobs

As noted above, the average transit commuter can reach 0.94% (less than one percent) of the metro area jobs in 30-minutes. The best transit access is in metro San Francisco, where the average commuter can reach 2.98% of the jobs in 30-minutes. In Milwaukee the average commuter can reach 2.66% of the jobs in 30-minutes by transit, followed by Salt Lake City (2.10%), San Jose (1.93%) and New York (1.90%). However, the job access is skewed higher in San Francisco, Salt Lake City and San Jose by virtue of adjacent metro areas that increase the number of jobs that can be reached in 30 minutes.

The least transit 30-minute access was in Riverside-San Bernardino (0.19%), ahead of Atlanta (0.23%), Dallas-Fort Worth (0.24%), Detroit (0.25%) and St. Louis (0.38%).

Bicycle Access to Metro Area Jobs

As noted above, the average bicycle commuter (low stress traffic, as opposed to medium stress) can reach 1.74% of the metro area jobs in 30-minutes. Perhaps surprisingly, this is nearly double the 30-minute access by transit. The best bicycle access is in metro Salt Lake City, where the average commuter can reach 4.43% of the jobs in 30-minutes. In Milwaukee the average commuter can reach 3.81% of the jobs in 30-minutes by transit, followed by Fresno (3.75%), San Francisco (3.67%) and San Jose (3.65%).

The least 30-minute bicycle access was in Atlanta (0.41%), ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth (0.47%), Riverside-San Bernardino (0.48%), Houston (0.51%) and Miami (0.84%).

This low-stress analysis indicates that all of the 5o major metros with the exception of New York have greater 30-minute job access than transit. Even in New York, the low-stress bicycle access(1.85%) is nearly as great as that of New York (1.90). Bicycles at medium stress have better 30-minute access in all 50 markets.

Overall, the average 30-minute auto access to jobs is 31.4 times that of bicycles (low-stress).

Walking Access to Metro Area Jobs

Among the modes included in the University of Minnesota analysis, the least 30-minute job access is by walking (0.29%).

Metro San Francisco has the best 30-minute job access by walking (0.70%), followed by Salt Lake City (0.63%), San Jose (0.60%), Fresno (0.57%) and Buffalo (0.53%). The least 30-minute walking job access was in Atlanta (0.08%), followed closely by Dallas-Fort Worth (0.09%), Riverside-San Bernardino (0.10%), Houston (0.10%) and Detroit (0.11%).

Overall, the average 30-minute auto access to jobs is 189.4 times that of walking.

Rejecting the Unavailable

The media and transit advocates often suggest that people are rejecting transit and commuting by car instead. The plain truth is that for the overwhelming majority of commuters, transit is simply not a viable alternative, due to its miniscule access relative to cars. The last thing that should be concluded from that transit should be expanded. Transit ridership is already concentrated in its best markets, principally to the nation’s largest job centers. Just six cities (municipalities, not metropolitan areas), New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and Washington account for 60% of transit commute destinations in the US, in comparison with their less than six percent of jobs. Any material increase in transit service is likely to cost much more per passenger. Meanwhile, even the automobile has its limits, as the huge increase in working from home has indicated. Our increasingly digitizing economy could substitute for physical travel in the future.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo credit: Ted Eytan Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Table back to reference

30-MINUTE JOB ACCESS BY MODE: 50 MAJOR METROS: 2023
	JOBS ACCESSIBLE IN 30-MINUTES: 2023				CAR JOB ACCESS OVER TRANSIT
Market (Metropolitan Area)	CAR	TRANSIT	BIKE	WALK	CAR JOB ACCESS OVER TRANSIT
Atlanta	23.20%	0.23%	0.41%	0.08%	100.6
Austin	59.96%	0.92%	1.96%	0.33%	65.4
Baltimore	52.72%	1.21%	1.82%	0.29%	43.7
Birmingham	57.76%	0.40%	1.28%	0.24%	144.1
Boston	28.38%	1.53%	2.32%	0.42%	18.6
Buffalo	79.07%	1.68%	2.96%	0.53%	47.1
Charlotte	38.10%	0.45%	0.94%	0.18%	84.6
Chicago	22.70%	1.03%	1.18%	0.24%	22.0
Cincinnati	55.99%	0.58%	1.14%	0.19%	96.4
Cleveland	62.49%	0.77%	1.35%	0.22%	81.5
Columbus	71.75%	0.94%	1.74%	0.27%	76.0
Dallas-Fort Worth	36.63%	0.24%	0.47%	0.09%	150.1
Denver	67.02%	1.26%	2.72%	0.41%	53.1
Detroit	53.27%	0.25%	0.86%	0.11%	210.2
Fresno	70.24%	1.45%	3.75%	0.57%	48.6
Grand Rapids	69.40%	1.40%	2.63%	0.38%	49.7
Houston	29.80%	0.39%	0.51%	0.10%	76.2
Indianapolis	62.25%	0.61%	1.38%	0.22%	101.9
Jacksonville	53.79%	0.40%	0.88%	0.20%	133.7
Kansas City	67.70%	0.50%	1.52%	0.22%	135.2
Las Vegas	89.42%	0.77%	1.90%	0.29%	116.1
Los Angeles	25.86%	0.58%	0.89%	0.15%	44.8
Louisville	73.24%	0.93%	2.24%	0.28%	78.6
Memphis	81.40%	0.79%	1.78%	0.31%	103.4
Miami	25.81%	0.52%	0.84%	0.18%	50.1
Milwaukee	86.56%	2.66%	3.81%	0.52%	32.6
Minneapolis	58.01%	0.81%	1.77%	0.21%	71.7
Nashville	37.15%	0.64%	1.35%	0.23%	58.5
New York	14.86%	1.90%	1.85%	0.33%	7.8
Oklahoma City	72.45%	0.65%	2.27%	0.31%	111.8
Orlando	55.22%	0.39%	0.85%	0.17%	139.9
Philadelphia	26.07%	1.15%	1.27%	0.22%	22.7
Phoenix	48.36%	0.46%	1.10%	0.14%	105.9
Pittsburgh	31.68%	0.88%	1.20%	0.20%	36.0
Portland	55.34%	1.55%	2.79%	0.41%	35.6
Providence	51.21%	1.15%	1.71%	0.40%	44.5
Raleigh	89.62%	0.56%	1.65%	0.28%	160.6
Richmond	72.49%	1.07%	2.33%	0.38%	68.0
Riverside-San Bernardino	26.52%	0.19%	0.48%	0.10%	142.4
Sacramento	60.13%	0.79%	1.94%	0.32%	76.1
Salt Lake City	127.42%	2.10%	4.43%	0.63%	60.8
San Antonio	59.98%	0.60%	1.14%	0.18%	99.2
San Diego	51.37%	0.64%	1.20%	0.26%	80.5
San Francisco	36.70%	2.98%	3.67%	0.70%	12.3
San Jose	110.73%	1.93%	3.65%	0.60%	57.3
Seattle	38.57%	1.56%	2.54%	0.49%	24.7
St. Louis	52.16%	0.38%	0.95%	0.16%	136.8
Tampa-St. Petersburg	39.25%	0.48%	1.03%	0.18%	82.3
Virginia Beach	49.48%	0.47%	1.09%	0.24%	104.4
Washington	27.50%	1.15%	1.56%	0.27%	23.9
Average (unweighted)	54.74%	0.94%	1.74%	0.29%	58.3
Derived from University of Minnesota data

California Roulette

Christopher LeGras — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:28:33 -0400

Serious question, occasioned by evidence and experience: Do some members of California’s political class actually want people to die horrific deaths in wildfires and other natural disasters? Because they’re sure acting like it.

In the game of Russian Roulette, people put guns to their own heads while gamblers wager on the outcome. California Roulette is different. It involves politicians putting guns to everyone else’s heads while the powerful financial and business interests that control them rake in massive profits. At least Russian Roulette requires balls. California Roulette is premised on cowardice, mendacity, and avarice.

Take state Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), who has been on an eight year crusade to destroy suburbs and single family neighborhoods. He has called houses “racist and exclusionary,” as if inanimate objects can be bigoted. Wiener, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, one of the wealthiest (and whitest) suburbs on the planet, doesn’t want anyone in his adopted state to enjoy the kind of life he did as a child. He envisions a brave new California in which 39 million people all live in small, densely packed apartments and get around on public transit and bicycles. No more front or back yards and quiet, tree-lined streets for us naughty, carbon spewing fleshbags. Definitely no more cars.

His hypocrisy isn’t just galling. It’s dangerous. Wiener, who has been called “California’s most devious and craven politician” (which, considering the competition for that particular crown, is really saying something) routinely dismisses concerns about housing development in hazard zones. In fact, he’s introduced multiple pieces of legislation that sought to make it easier for developers to make millions constructing huge apartment buildings in high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs), tsunami zones, liquefaction zones, areas vulnerable to subsidence, and other places in which dense housing is completely inappropriate.

A flood of dangerous, irresponsible legislation

For example, last year Wiener introduced Senate Bill (SB) 610, which would have eliminated local officials’ power to identify high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs) in their jurisdictions and prohibit development within those boundaries. He asserted that cities were “weaponizing” HFDSZ designations in order to limit needed new housing (more on the Big Lie behind California’s non-existent housing crisis in another post).

In Scott Wiener’s fever dreamworld, selfish city councilmembers are forever concocting all manner of nefarious schemes to prevent new housing construction. It is beyond his (limited) power of imagination to grasp that local leaders actually care about the safety and lives of the people they represent. Wiener lives in a purely transactional, binary world in which there are only two sides in the housing debate, YIMBYs and NIMBYs. The former are beyond reproach while the latter are beyond salvation. Everyone must be shoved into one of those categories, else his entire reality comes crashing down.

Wiener’s cynicism is boundless. In February, even as the embers of the Eaton and Palisades Fires in Los Angeles were still smoldering, even as a hundred thousand Angelenos were barely beginning to sift through the ruins of their homes and their lives, even as the body count was still being tallied and cadaver dogs were sifting for human remains, he wrote and introduced SB 677. That bill would have made it easier for developers to replace single family homes with four, eight, or ten units – but only in disaster zones.

Read the rest of this piece at All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: Pacific Palisades: To normal people, a scene of unspeakable loss and tragedy. To many in California’s political class, a blank slate and opportunity. Drone image by Christopher LeGras.

Unforgotten Cities: What Ancient Urbanism Teaches About America's Crisis of Place

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

What do cities reveal about us? Not just our engineering or art, but our longings—what we value, what we revere, how we choose to live together.

William Frej's new book, Unforgotten: Ancient Cities from a Distant Past, documents 130 ancient cities through hundreds of stark photographs. From Machu Picchu to half-forgotten ruins across 25 countries, these images capture not just what's broken or lost, but what these places once aimed to be: moral, spiritual, and social worlds made physical. These were not just places where people lived. They were places where people belonged. And that distinction may hold the key to addressing America's deepening crisis of social isolation and political polarization.

Consider the Peruvian cities that Frej documents—places like Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley. Their builders carved public plazas from mountainsides, designed amphitheater-like spaces that naturally drew crowds into circles, created stone seating that encouraged lingering conversation. The very topography was sculpted to inspire what sociologist Robert Putnam would later call "social capital"—the networks of relationships that make communities function. Walk through these ruins today and you can still feel the intention. The architecture itself was a technology of belonging, anticipating by centuries Jane Jacobs's insight about successful urban spaces generating "eyes on the street" and Christopher Alexander's "pattern language" of human-scaled design.

Compare this intentionality to most American public spaces. Where ancient builders created plazas that amplified human voices, we've constructed environments dominated by traffic noise and designed to move people through rather than bring them together. Peruvian mountain settlements fostered face-to-face interactions; American strip malls often explicitly discourage any interaction beyond commercial transactions.

The irony is that America once understood this wisdom. Charleston's historic squares, Savannah's grid of parks, and Philadelphia's original city plan remain among our most desirable neighborhoods precisely because they offer what contemporary development lacks: human-scaled design that fosters community and public amenities. Yet postwar America systematically abandoned these principles. Urban renewal programs demolished functioning neighborhoods in favor of superblocks that isolated residents. Euclidean zoning separated uses that had been naturally integrated for millennia, requiring residents to drive between home, work, and commerce rather than encountering neighbors naturally.

The result is what Putnam documented in Bowling Alone: Americans increasingly isolated from civic institutions and casual encounters that build social trust. We traded traditional urbanism's inefficiencies—mixed uses, narrow streets, shared spaces—for car-dependent development where neighbors drive garage-to-garage without meeting.

This isn't merely aesthetic loss. Research shows walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods with quality public spaces generate higher property values, support more local businesses, and correlate with better health outcomes. Ancient insights about beautiful public spaces serving economic functions prove empirically correct.

The stakes extend beyond urban planning to American democracy itself. In an era of increasing polarization and digital tribalism, shared physical spaces become crucial for the cross-cutting social ties that democratic theorists identify as essential for political stability.

When people encounter each other regularly in pleasant surroundings—at farmers’ markets, in neighborhood squares, playgrounds and dog parks, and on walkable streets—they develop civic engagement habits that strengthen democracy. Contemporary development patterns work against this democratic ideal. Gated communities and car-dependent suburbs sort people by income, minimizing the diverse encounters that build social capital across class and political lines.

This represents bipartisan failure. Conservatives who value tradition and beauty have allied with developers whose profit-maximizing strategies destroy the communities they claim to champion. Progressives who identify inequality as serious have sometimes embraced planning approaches that create sterile environments lacking organic neighborhood vitality.

Conservative intellectuals from Roger Scruton to Christopher Lasch have long argued that rootedness and beauty are essential human needs. American conservatism's alliance with suburban sprawl betrays these deeper conservative values. True conservatism should champion development that creates lasting communities rather than disposable environments abandoned each generation.

Fortunately, some American cities are rediscovering ancient wisdom. Charleston's design standards have created economic success while maintaining walkable, human-scaled character. Portland's urban growth boundary encourages dense, transit-oriented development. Bryant Park's evolution from crime-ridden wasteland to beloved public space shows how thoughtful design creates the civic life that ancient plazas fostered. The New Urbanism movement – despite its many failures and problems – catalyzed a change in thinking about the built environment that has now proven market demand exists for walkable, mixed-use communities when zoning permits.

Translating ancient insights into contemporary policy requires specific reforms. Form-based codes that regulate building character rather than just use can encourage pedestrian-friendly development. Zoning reform allowing corner stores and small apartments in residential neighborhoods can restore natural integration of daily activities. Transportation policy must prioritize pedestrians over cars—not from environmental ideology but because walkable streets create conditions for civic life. Complete streets design and transit-oriented development are essential infrastructure for rebuilding social capital.

Most importantly, cities must invest in beautiful, well-programmed public spaces. This isn't luxury but economic necessity in the experience economy. Amazon's HQ2 search explicitly prioritized locations with vibrant urban amenities. Companies recognize that knowledge workers value walkable neighborhoods and interesting public spaces. Traditional neighborhood design isn't just more beautiful than sprawl—it's more fiscally sustainable, generating more tax revenue per acre while requiring less infrastructure investment.

Frej's photographs remind us that the human impulse to create meaningful places isn't lost—it's been suppressed by zoning codes and development patterns that work against community formation. The ancient builders who carved gathering spaces into Andean mountainsides weren't operating with different human nature; they organized societies to encourage rather than discourage civic life. We can do the same. The policy tools exist: zoning reform, form-based codes, complete streets design, tactical urbanism. What's needed is political will to prioritize long-term community building over short-term development profits.

As Americans increasingly sort into ideological enclaves, shared public spaces become essential democratic infrastructure. The alternative to intentional community building isn't neutral—it's continued fragmentation with all the political pathologies that follow. If ancient cities still speak across centuries, it's because they reflect enduring truths: people need beauty, places to encounter neighbors, environments that signal civic investment and shared purpose. The stones they left behind aren't just ruins. They're blueprints for renewal.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Gaillard Center, Charleston, Charleston County, South Carolina, by J. Pellgen Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Elite liberal Yimbys are Killing off the Family Home

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability. California has recently passed legislation to reform environmental regulations that have hindered home-building. The power of the so-called Yimby (“Yes in my backyard”) movement seems only to have been reinforced. Yet the great irony is that where the Yimby agenda has advanced furthest – notably my home state of California – housing affordability has remained consistently the worst.

Yimbys have got something right – the central problem behind the housing affordability crisis is the failure to build enough homes. Homebuilders built hundreds of thousands fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972 when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate has put the US housing market short by approximately 4.5 million homes.

But if Yimbys have correctly diagnosed the problem, their solutions – oriented towards building more high density urban apartments – have tended to make matters worse. High density development, often seen as the alternative to “sprawl”, does not necessarily lower prices, as is sometimes suggested, because of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees. In fact, US data suggests a positive correlation between greater density and higher housing costs.

Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. Mainstream Yimbys, so obligingly financed by tech oligarchs and urban real estate interests, see the solution not in socialist housing but for the private sector to construct their dreamscape of high density homes and apartment buildings. They are not interested so much in people buying their own properties, and seem to care little that investors already own one in four single family homes.

Yimbys repeatedly blame poor housing affordability on so-called Nimbys (“Not in my backyard”) groups, including those who want to preserve the lower density neighbourhoods, filled with detached family homes, that they bought into. Getting rid of zoning that prevents the construction of taller buildings is a critical Yimby priority, which they have pushed not only in California but in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast.

Yet the positive impact on home-building via these policies has been negligible, with the mixed exception of strong growth in so-called Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) – self-contained units that often remain part of a primary property, most of which are kept for relatives, or used as a spare guest house, an office, or as a high-end rental.

Overall, even with ADUs, California housing construction is at among the lowest rates in America. Only one California metropolitan area was among the top 20 for housing growth last year; Texas had four areas on that list, Florida three. In Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, just 1,325 new homes were approved citywide in the first quarter of 2025.

The Yimbys believe that the only real solution is to roll back regulations further and introduce new housing laws designed to increase urban density. Much of this is based on often exaggerated climate concerns about “sprawl”. Remarkably they have gained the support of the libertarian Right. One might think such people would embrace the notion of promoting a class of small property owners, but it seems that juicing the profits of large corporations is a higher priority. The problem here, for Yimbys on the Right and Left, lies in the small matter of market preferences: most people don’t want to live in the inner-city high rise apartments beloved by planners and Yimbys, but in a house with a garden of their own.

Indeed, generally high-end dense housing has a relatively small market. Condos and apartments may thrill Yimby imaginations – the public, not so much. Surveys, such as one in 2019 by political scientist Jessica Trounstine, have found that the preference for lower-density, safe areas with good schools is “ubiquitous”. Three out of four Californians, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, opposed legislation that banned zoning which only permitted single family homes.

This mismatch between what is being built and what most people want can be seen in the huge oversupply of apartments, not just in the US but in Canada’s big cities too, causing prices for such properties to drop over the past two years. Yet despite all the evidence, Yimbys show little or no interest in the predominant dreams of their own citizens.

Worse, their ideas are helping to inform the agenda of the so-called “Abundance Democrats”, a fashionable new movement which seeks to make peace between the Left, prosperity and growth, inspired by a book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Even the Yimbys’ more moderate ideas as laid out in the book – also called Abundance – largely ignore the suburbs and exurbs, where most Americans live, and stay clear of ownership.

As attorney Jennifer Hernandez suggests, there is an “ugly elitist underbelly” to Abundance, reflecting the values of hipster professionals while eschewing “even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centres, who want to be able to buy a detached, single family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odours with their neighbours…”

The obvious and likely failure of Yimby policies might well empower far more radical approaches to housing, which seem more interested in turning cities into a souped up version of greater Moscow. The Mamdani approach of public housing and rent control may come to be seen by progressives as the best alternative – however disastrous public housing has been in cities across the United States.

Given the utter failure of mainstream Yimbyism, the progressive embrace of a more socialist approach seems inevitable. Well-heeled Yimbys, and their corporate backers, are unlikely to enjoy the results.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Brett VA via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.

The Cruel Inhumanity of the YIMBY Movement

Christopher LeGras — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A large and ever-expanding body of research demonstrates what anyone with a reasonable functional frontal cortex knows instinctively: Human beings benefit in myriad ways – physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually – from spending time in nature. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021, at the height of pandemic lock downs (or more accurately, lock-ins), “Spending time in the woods — a practice the Japanese call ‘forest bathing’ — is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue.” Getting out into nature on a regular basis can even reduce people’s risk of cancer. Similarly, living in a neighborhood with open spaces, trees, gardens, and yards, has benefits over living in dense, congested, largely nature-free urban cores.

It’s not just the exercise. When we’re in a forest, up in the mountains, walking along the beach, or walking down a quiet, tree lined street, we’re engaging in versions of activities that every living creature in history did all day, every day, until relatively recently. We’re doing what we evolved to do for the first 300,000 years of our existence on this planet. We are quite literally in our natural element. No wonder we feel good.

Of course, most people don’t need peer-reviewed studies to reach these conclusions. Hiking or jogging in the forest or hills, walking in the park, spending time in local open spaces, and so forth are part of our weekly routines. For many of us that hour or two on the trail is a highlight of our days. Our brains slow down, our anxiety eases, our stress levels drop.

These inarguable realities of human existence point to a central, and fatal, flaw with the so-called YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) approach to housing and community development. The YIMBY movement, which unfortunately has captured public policy in city halls and statehouses nationwide, is premised on the notion that the solution to the country’s housing affordability crisis is to pack Americans into dense urban cores comprised of large apartment buildings that lack so much as setbacks for trees and other greenery. We’ll be lucky to have a small balcony with a view of the buildings across the street.

We definitely won’t have cars, because another YIMBY obsession is the elimination of private automobiles. Not only will we live in those steel, cement, and glass labyrinths, we won’t have the ability (aka freedom) to travel to our favorite trailhead, surf break, or picnic spot. We’ll rely on mass transit, bicycles, and our own two feet in what YIMBYs call “15 minute neighborhoods,” places in which all of life’s essential needs are, theoretically, accessible within a quarter hour walk, bicycle ride, or transit trip (a lucky few will be able to afford a $40 or $50 round trip to the trail in a Waymo several days a week). Another word for “15 minute city” is “Khruschevka.” In the 1950s and 60s under Premiere Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet Union built millions of five to ten story apartment blocs in centrally planned microneighborhoods in which necessities were within — wait for it — walking distance. The more things change, and such.

Read the rest of this piece at All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: This violent graphic was posted with approval on a pro-YIMBY Twitter account. We can only hope the residents and drivers escaped the flames. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.

Affordable Housing for $1.3 Million Per Unit

Randal OToole — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The Washington Post has discovered that there are “inefficiencies” in the nation’s affordable housing programs, including its largest one, low-income housing tax credits. Due to these inefficiencies, one non-profit developer in DC is spending up to $1.3 million per housing unit. Another developer spent $800,000 per unit, while right next door the very same developer built market-rate housing for just $350,000 per unit.

Ontario Place, the project pictured above, “will include a rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants,” which contributed to the $1.2 million per unit cost. Another expensive project found by Post writers, which cost “only” $815,000 per unit, “includes a fitness room to encourage physical activity, a library, a large café with an outdoor terrace, a large multi-purpose community room with a separate outdoor terrace, an indoor bike room, on-site laundry, lounges and balconies on every floor.”

As economist Alex Tabarrok recently observed, affordable housing is unaffordable because the agencies distributing the funds are often more concerned about such things as environmental sustainability, racial equity goals, community development, and other factors that have little or nothing to do with affordable housing. Due to these misplaced priorities, I calculated more than a year ago, between 2004 and 2019, the amount of money spent subsidizing affordable housing more than doubled but the number of units built declined so that the subsidies per unit increased by at least 130 percent.

Most affordable housing projects are supported by multiple federal, state, and local housing funds. A report from California found that each additional funder adds more than $20,000 per unit to total development costs.

The Post discovered that New Jersey has set a cap of under $400,000 per affordable housing unit. “When you look at a deal structure, almost everyone else in the deal makes more money when costs go up,” the director of New Jersey’s housing agency told the Post. The developers themselves typically get 15 percent as a “developer fee.” So neither the developers nor any of the contractors have an incentive to oppose policies that make either affordable or market-rate housing more expensive.

Most developers sell low-income housing tax credits to banks for 25 percent discounts. The developers themselves have been found to get 45 percent of the benefits from affordable housing projects. After deducting costs added to the projects in the name of sustainability and other goals, low-income people probably get less than 20 percent of the benefits of the projects.

Congress created low-income housing tax credits in 1987 in the hope that private developers would be more efficient in building affordable housing than public housing agencies. Instead, the program has proven that private businesses can be just as wasteful and costly as public agencies if they are given the same bad incentives. It’s time to abolish affordable housing programs. If four-fifths of the benefits of affordable housing go to people other than tenants, low-income families would be better off if just one-fourth of the costs of those program were dedicated instead to housing vouchers.