jt

No urban revival without stair reform. Great cities need middle housing -- ie MANY small multifamily buildings that allow many households to share expensive urban land. But those homes still have to be good enough that a wide range of households want to live in the. Not just twenty somethings. Current egress rules have made multifamily housing ESPECIALLY awful in the US because they push developers to double-loaded corridor layouts: long, hotel-like hallways with apartments lined up on both sides. These buildings are extremely expensive to build and not great at creating "life-cycle" housing. Families often want a home with a “front” and a “back”: one side connected to the street and the life of the neighborhood, and another quieter side facing a courtyard, garden, yard, or shared green space. They want cross-ventilation, daylight from more than one direction, a place for children to play, and some sense of threshold between public and private life. Double-loaded corridor buildings make that impossible, because units are facing either the back or the front. The more home-like form of multifamily is enabled by single-stair reform, sometimes called “smart stair” reform and closely related to the point-access block. instead of accessing units from a long corridor, apartments are arranged around a central stair. This allows smaller buildings, shallower floorplates, more dual-aspect units (they don't all need to be, but some of them should be), better light and air, and a much closer relationship between the home, the street, and the yard. Single-stair reform is a keystone reform for rebuilding family-friendly urban neighborhoods. It will make it significantly easier to build the fine-grained, middle housing neighborhoods that everyone wants but no one builds anymore (because we made it illegal)

Mamdani unveils his new housing plan, with a goal of building 200K new income-restricted, affordable homes over the next decade He describes his evolution from development skeptic to YIMBY “I want to speak to the skeptical New Yorker because I was once the skeptical New Yorker”

The City of San Mateo is considering designating a historic gas station The “historic” property in question below. Things like this delegitimize the entire historic preservation process

I like a lot of pro-housing people but you really need to hear yourselves sometimes. You’ve concocted this leftist NIMBY boogeyman that doesn’t really exist in significant numbers

I could go on. The candidates basically all agreed that CA should: - cap impact fees - reform building code to allow lower-cost construction - require speedy ministerial permitting, w/ a standardized application form - backstop it all w/ builder's remedies /12

People wonder why I’m such a Nashville supremacist. I mean this is just stupid

The 2008 downzoning of the East Village was an underrated policy disaster. It directly contributed to skyrocketing prices in Williamsburg in the decade after

Austin City Council is proposing a “Home Ordinance” fix this week. Home was a major change in 2023 allowing 3 units per lot City wide for affordability Item 26 would take the Home Ordinance further by: - eliminating building coverage letting impervious cover control 1/3