Gabriel Diamond

Bobby McMann has scored eight goals in 10 games played with the Kraken 🤯

truly, many adults prefer the suburban model: a detached house, a private yard, and car culture. The market has spent decades refining and scaling that product, and as a result, those households face no shortage of options. But a large share of adults are not looking to spend weekends maintaining a lawn or structuring daily life around car trips. They want proximity and immediacy: the ability to walk their kids to school, to run errands on foot, to participate in a neighborhood where social life is ambient rather than scheduled. That demand is not being met. The supply of genuinely walkable, family-compatible neighborhoods is extraordinarily thin, and the housing types within those neighborhoods are even more constrained. In most U.S. cities, you can find either small urban apartments or large suburban houses—but very little in between. The idea of a spacious, well-designed home in a walkable setting—where a parent can realistically say, “go play outside with your friends”—is effectively a unicorn so this is the gap that the courtyard block is filling. A courtyard condo offers the spatial and functional qualities of a larger home—multiple bedrooms, generous living areas, access to outdoor space—while embedding that home within a coherent, walkable urban fabric.

Why did we stop building cities like this?