It Shouldn’t Have Been This Hard, The Discourse Lounge, Darrell Owens, April 3, 2024

This is a long essay recounting Owens’s several years in California housing advocacy. First, this:

I must admit that I’m still disturbed by how such a basic, common sense idea such as building homes to reduce housing costs, became such a contentious topic.

The entire concept of a “YIMBY” or “pro-housing movement” always struck me as unnecessary. A whole group exists in opposition to density limits on high-demand areas, with very little else binding those who refer to themselves with these labels.

Yep. I’ve said before, the goal of the pro-housing movement is to get to the point of no longer being needed or even discernible as a “movement.” Calling someone who favors new housing construction a “housing advocate” should be as absurd as calling a farmer or a grocery store customer a “food advocate.”

Here’s an interesting bit on housing politics and media coverage:

The speculations of mass evictions and displacement arising from re-zonings and increased housing production were mostly conjured by social science academics and well-educated nonprofit leaders and told to vulnerable tenants. In contrast, building more housing through zoning and permitting reform consistently polled very favorably with a majority of renters, Democrats, young people, Hispanic and Black residents in California, and not with white, older and homeowning residents. Yet if you listened to the media discourse during this time, you’d think it was the opposite.

And a bit of no-background:

Even I initially thought market-rate development had caused the gentrification crisis in San Francisco’s Mission District, until not only did emerging research dispute it, but I discovered that S.F.’s bipartisan support for exclusionary zoning focused most development in highly gentrifying areas. It was easy to make a correlation-causation error without that knowledge. Despite the intensity of their arguments, I’m not angry about people’s perceptions and fears of housing construction.

Owens notes that a lot of the economic research we’ve had recently, which basically confirms that building market-rate housing reduces rents across the board, was actually conducted because of these California debates. Isn’t that incredible—the notion that housing construction increased rents was a widely held folk belief for a long time, and it took us a long time to interrogate it and assemble a serious body of data disproving it. Owens adds that the legitimate argument against market-rate housing is simply that some people will never be able to afford it, and there need to be other options for people at the bottom of the income ladder. I think most people would agree with that.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of DC Metro’s Design and Wayfinding Evolution, Bloomberg CityLab, Mark Byrnes, April 4, 2024

The project is headed by WMATA chief experience and engagement officer Sarah Meyer, who arrived in Washington in March 2023 after leaving a similar role at New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. Finding herself repeatedly lost within her new city’s underground network, Meyer says she determined that wayfinding “needed to be fixed immediately.”

Interesting. I find New York’s subway maps and systems—what I can recall of them, anyway—to be utterly incomprehensible. I wonder how much of this stuff is just various people imposing, reversing, and reimposing their own preferences and assumptions as they rotate through these jobs. Is there any hard data that successful wayfinding actually improves over time in transit systems?

There is data here, actually:

Meyer is apparently not the only one getting lost on Metro: In a focus group put together by the agency, 39% of customers said they took the wrong rail station exit in the past year, 29% went to the wrong platform, 23% boarded a train in the wrong direction, and 17% took the wrong train line.

And I can vouch for this. I’ve definitely gotten that weird déjà vu feeling of thinking I’m in one station when I’m in another:

Part of the problem, Meyer explains, is Metro’s architecture. “It’s beautiful. But part of the reason why it’s beautiful is because it’s symmetrical, everything looks the same. So when you leave from one train platform over another, there’s no visual way to tell which street level exit you’re exiting to,” she says. As part of the test pilot, WMATA tasked 35 participants at L’Enfant Plaza to find the correct train to Navy Yard and exit to the National Air and Space Museum. Each person boarded the correct train, according to the agency, and 80% used the correct exit.

Fun read.

The Curious Case of the Missing Middle Housing and What Norfolk’s Doing About It, Norfolk Currents, Hank Morrison, June 18, 2021

Do you ever stroll through the historic areas in Norfolk and think, “Wow, these walkable neighborhoods with a mix of commercial and residential development are just great”?

If you don’t, that’s okay. Unless you’re an urban planner, it’s unlikely that mixed-use neighborhoods get your motor running, but hopefully, this article will change the way you think when you travel around our fair city.

On this note, go read the Norfolk item in this previous New and Old.

Two bits I want to point out. This, which I’ve heard of before and is really cool: a way to get simple workhorse buildings done more quickly by pre-approving designs. You might think that’s too cookie-cutter, but it’s all in the quality of the designs. And it’s not as if homebuilders are building gems right now.

Norfolk City Council is voting to include a new book from the Pattern Project on Missing Middle Housing in their comprehensive plan. At its core, the Pattern book is an architectural guide for non-architects to construct pre-designed structures. This book includes pre-approved plans and renderings for 17 different types of missing middle housing. Each class also has three unique architectural styles to choose from – Traditional, Modern, or Coastal.

And this, which is a really important way to think about the need for housing types and prices at all levels:

Additionally, it creates a more prosperous environment for people at all phases of their lives – whether you’re single and looking to strike out on your own, newlyweds buying your first home, or retirees looking to downsize. Lastly, this is an excellent opportunity for more diverse and equitable small business growth. For example, missing Middle is an opportunity for minority contractors to scale up their businesses more efficiently, including single-family homes and missing middle housing types.

“Missing middle” is a good example of how a lot of urbanism is using politics to get rid of politics: we need to use the political process to restore the old city-building status quo, because it was politics that abolished it. But despite the name, missing middle isn’t really a thing; it’s just…what we build when we’re allowed to build.

The Amish and Deer Farming, Amish America, Erik Wesner, April 2, 2014

Though Miller is no longer involved in deer farming, there are now around 500 such farms in the state of Ohio. As we learn in the article and accompanying video, critics of deer farming question the ethics of hunting farm-raised deer in preserves, and warn of the threat of disease spreading from captivity to the wild.

This is an interesting article about unusual Amish businesses. I found it because last time we were in Lancaster, we did a bus tour and drove by an Amish deer farm. I’d never seen or heard of this before. I don’t know much about the potential problems with it. It’s just one of those “Wow, this exists!” things.

Related Reading:

New and Old #4

New and Old #5

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