Commun1ty.one

05/05/2024

…cities in the US derive their zoning authority from state governments: state law can thus override specific aspects of local zoning. The intent of going to the state level is to overcome the collective action problem in which individual cities lack a political incentive to allow more housing unilaterally. These statewide efforts are controversial for their co-optation of a traditionally local domain of policymaking—land-use rules—but the overriding sense of crisis around housing has built popular support for them.

(Charles L. Marohn, Daniel Herriges | Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis)

https://a.co/d/0C7sfyV

05/05/2024

An observation by Vince Graham… “When you sell community and connectedness, every new home enhances that asset. When you sell privacy and exclusivity, every new home is a degradation of that asset.”

(Charles L. Marohn, Daniel Herriges | Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis)

https://a.co/d/dHm8azG

10/27/2023

An absolute MUST READ from Jeff Siegler!

09/28/2023

Years ago, Emma Durand-Wood began filling out this card as she got to know the people she lived near. Her column this week is about all the ways neighborliness lends itself to a strong neighborhood: https://bit.ly/3Ry2A1w

09/17/2023

Environment plays a role in affecting behavior. End of story.

09/05/2023

"We are all in a civic relationship, whether we know it or not. Our towns, cities, and neighborhoods are shaping us every day. They are making us proud or filling us with shame. Making it easy to connect or keeping us isolated. Providing us with beauty and hope or filling our eyes with ugliness and our souls with despair."

"At every moment, we are being shaped by the places we have shaped. We are our environments. We adapt to our habitat and become our surroundings. People are the places they call home."

Humans greatest strength is our ability to adapt to our surroundings, but what if those surroundings are unhealthy? What is the conditions we are growing accustomed to are not fit for our own habitation? What if the very places we find ourselves living are making us sick? The places we shape, in ...

06/11/2023

05/08/2023

An absolute MUST listen. Ian Lockwood is one of the great minds in our country when it comes to transportation and how we should collectively be looking at it. Pairing his wisdom with Chuck Marohn facilitating the discussion is pure gold.

How should engineers be thinking about building wealth in communities? That’s just one of the questions Chuck Marohn asks of Ian Lockwood, a recognized national leader in sustainable transportation policy and urban design. Lockwood is currently a livable transportation engineer for Toole Design, a...

05/05/2023

Two very important events in the world of urban planning. May the 4th is much more than a Star Wars gimmick.

Organization May the Charter be with you ROBERT STEUTEVILLE    MAY. 4, 2023 May 4 is the anniversary of two important historical events, both taking place on the East Coast of the US, eighty years apart, that have helped shape modern planning and urbanism for the better around the wo...

04/26/2023

“Compact development costs, on average, 38 percent less in up-front infrastructure than "conventional suburban development" for things like roads, sewers and water lines. It costs 10 percent less in ongoing service delivery by reducing the distances law enforcement or garbage trucks must travel to serve residents (well-connected street grids cut down on this travel time, too). And compact development produces on average about 10 times more tax revenue per acre.”

In infrastructure, service delivery and tax receipts.

04/24/2023

What used to be standard practice is now the exception. Standard practices today yield an inferior built environment in every way imaginable.

04/22/2023

Conventional zoning practices are an impediment to allowing the real estate market to respond to what is both demanded and needed. Zoning sets market parameters which limit housing choice by making a myriad of housing types illegal to produce.

We need to remember that zoning is DNA. If you want development to behave in a specific way the DNA must allow for it. Housing can only do what the DNA will allow.