mark vallianatos

@JMGregorchuk @CohenSite Like this 1920s koreatown block with hundreds of apartments and 300 parking spots in the bottom left garage building ( now self storage however).

Unironically, this is what I wish our downtown urban neighborhoods would do. The metro should have these up and down it.

In any event since this blew up, plugging my new site bannedincalifornia.org

@UrbanCourtyard Since evidence from (rare) high demand lowrise neighborhoods in North America up zoned to mid-rise show that almost all lots sell and are redeveloped to mid-rise, it wouldn’t take eminent domain. Just upzone + a good form code. (The latter is what has been missing)

people are asking me to take a side on this. WELL, I have an opinion that will make everyone mad, and it involves eminent domain. So Adam points out that 25 stories is extreme for a neighborhood of 3-4 stories, and he wants to think of ways to "increase density without shocking the system and outraging an entire neighborhood." He alludes to Paris and Copenhagen, where they "added 1-2 stories on buildings to increase density by 20%." We know that the preference for mid-rise density--where floor mass and population is chunked into many small multifamilies rather than concentrated in fewer super-large buildings-- is persistent and pervasive. But US cities struggle to deliver this in markets where land is scarce and expensive, like SF. Paris provides a critical historical example because the city's 19th-century redevelopment was not achieved through simple upzoning. Instead, Baron Haussmann used a French version of eminent domain, expropriating land from owners (with compensation) and then redeveloping entire blocks with new streets and parcels. Many 19th-century German towns followed a similar approach, combining land expropriation with forced upzoning to achieve denser urban fabric. I don’t know if such an approach is politically feasible in San Francisco today. But if a mayor wanted to transform SF into something more like Copenhagen or Paris, the path to success would likely pass through a very messy eminent domain process. Copenhagen’s case was slightly different: in the 19th century, the city expanded primarily onto former military lands outside the old city walls. San Francisco doesn’t have that option, which makes any equivalent program even more complicated.

@yimbylosangeles 5 - multiple single stair buildings should be allowed to be attached in a line or L shape as long as they front a street.

Single Stair in LA is coming up for a vote tomorrow! We need your help! Do you see any deal breakers in here? LA is special, so they want additional requirements over California Building Code. Please share your thoughts with us!

I'll be spending a couple of weeks over the legislative recess in Stockholm and Oslo. Any books I should read? I'm especially interested in books about those specific cities, modern Scandinavian history, Scandinavian urbanism and housing policy, etc.

Really great single stair policy recommendations from LCI and AHLA. Notably, they ask to allow it up to the high-rise height limit due to LA's fire fighting capabilities & ask that safety equivalency be made to double-duplex buildings and large appts admin.centerforbuilding.org/wp-content/upl…

Amazing findings - traffic down not up in the Bronx, Staten Island, and NJ. “Far from being a policy to benefit Manhattan at the expense of the region, [congestion pricing] has resulted in less traffic overall, even in some places that models predicted it could increase.”

@ChrisByBike Looks like it but not sure what the different variations for boarding were were

DC Metro has achieved an 82-85% reduction in subway fare evasion through a combination of taller fare gates and enhanced enforcement. Crime on the system has also fallen to its lowest level in seven years. statecraft.pub/p/how-to-save-…

I’m at a 99 Ranch Chinese supermarket in Arcadia and there’s a contractor’s office here inside the store, and they specialize in building ADUs.

S(ubstack)-Bahn link here: substack-bahn.net/p/how-france-s…

@ArmandDoma Part of the logic was that regulations would partly expropriate property values and then housing would be bought and controlled by the govt, tenants or co-ops. Ironically this toolkit also said that after community ownership, zoning can be abolished. ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/cor…

Like there’s nothing Marxist about “every new apartment should be subject to environmental lawsuits about shadow impacts”

The most frustrating thing to me about the left criticism of Abundance is that they think they are attacking liberalism but they are actually fully in the tank for lawsuit liberalism

One law. 92 projects. Zero cost to the state. Our new brief explores how a CEQA exemption accelerated sustainable transportation projects in California—and what’s next for streamlining safe, affordable, climate-friendly mobility. Read more. spur.org/publications/p…

New preprint where we propose "Rethinking Congestion as Lost Access" 📑 osf.io/fjdbs_v2 Short 🧵!

The City of Los Angeles could largely solve its $1 billion budget shortfall by allowing more homes to be built near its transit stations, according to a new report out today from Streets For All, an LA-based safe streets and land use advocacy organization.

Here's a great piece by the @nytimes Upshot desk about the many many ways congestion pricing is improving our city. It should be required reading in the offices of @VickieforNYC, @BobHoldenNYC and others: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

If anyone is researching Devil’s island this tiny free library is the archive to check out