Just as kids ignore sidewalks in favor of walking a more efficient path through the grass, homeowners in California are voting with their toolbelts to create zoning desire paths.
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New Zealand just passed the first national policy to both end parking requirements and allow the next increment of (residential) development everywhere. I.e., two major items on the Strong Towns wish list.
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The author of Happy City helped build a home that addressed some of the greatest challenges of our times. But his home is illegal almost everywhere in his city—and in your city, too.
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This architect demonstrates how there are so many places ready and waiting to become a part of the housing solution—if we would just allow them.
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SB 9 just passed in California, effectively ending single-family zoning there. The open question is, "What now?" Will anything actually change?
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The eviction moratorium is going to end, and when it does, we face the prospect of mass evictions throughout the country. Let's talk about what that means and what it says about our housing system.
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The benefits to a bottom-up approach to affordable housing don’t just build wealth and resilience; they can be deeply personal, too.
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A controversy-courting Atlantic article makes a full-throated defense of “luxury” development—and argues that more, not less, of it is what the doctor ordered for our unaffordable housing markets. Does this prescription hit the mark?
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In the UK, planning systems have created a housing shortage. Here’s how a bottom-up approach could address the problem.
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Large-scale investors are dominating the housing market, at the expense of actual people who want to become homeowners.
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Want to better inform yourself — or your neighbors — on why we need more “middle housing”? Start with these 4 resources.
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Making housing affordable is not the same thing as creating affordable housing.
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A program in Wisconsin demonstrates how small actions taken on the local level can have a huge financial and social impact on a community.
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Boulder, Colorado is one of the most complex and competitive housing markets in the country. A ballot initiative that would have helped renters (and those with rooms to rent) died recently under strange circumstances.
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Watching the value of your home over the past 10 years might convince you that the U.S. housing market has long since “recovered” from the 2008 crash. The reality is messier: the past decade was, if anything, quite unusual.
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Some cities and states are allowing tenants to defer rent payments. What happens when those rents come due before the economy is back on its feet?
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How do you solve a problem like the housing crisis? And who’s to blame? The answers probably aren’t as simple as we’d like them to be.
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Affordable housing shortages in California (and other states) are worsened by a go-big-or-go-home model of development: we throw up so many barriers in the face of incremental change that the only building projects that remain viable are huge, complicated ones with many possible points of failure.
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Making big developers “give back” to the community by running a gauntlet of concessions and fees seems like it should weaken their clout. Here’s why it actually does the opposite.
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Most local housing markets in the U.S. are oligopolies: new construction is dominated overwhelmingly by only a few developers. How did we get here, and why is it this bad news for housing affordability, as well as for our cities’ financial strength and resilience?
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