yes. i think probably in the short-ish term the best to hope for is reserving right-of-ways for eventual rail. making development contingent on rail asks too much at once, unfortunately, although of course i would prefer it. maybe after a few successes, concomitant rail will be an easier lift.
the bay area has lots of scope for greenfield development. manhattanize mare island for chrissake. south of SF there’s lots of land, most of which should remain protected but we could develop a few pinprick microcities and add hundreds of thousands of homes.
i think you underestimate how hard, both politically and physically, scaling up in real bulk primarily by infill would be. this is my core disagreement with YIMBYism — identified the right problem! chose the right goals (lots more housing!) then limited itself to impractically disruptive means.
dense greenfield (not necessarily with a metro system, we may have to content ourselves with bus connections initially) is the most practical way forward. low-density greenfield, sprawl, yes will kill us all.
i think the bulk of the solution will eventually come from greenfield rather than infill development. whether those greenfields can be Federal lands is a very metro by metro question.
expecting anything good of this Federal administration is a bit of a fool’s errand, i agree. but in general, overcoming sprawl bias at only the Federal level is easier than also overcoming the same bias plus NIMBYs with passionate direct stakes at an already inhabited local level.
yes. i think we might be agreeing feverishly. “15 minute cities” that are really small, low-amenity suburbs are terrible. “15-minute cities” built at central-city densities, so not only is there “a grocery store” and “a dentist” in 15 mins, but multiple and variety are something else entirely. 1/
the term has been destroyed by mis- and overuse, like no one knows what “organic” means anymore in the US. but genuinely dense, de novo districts transit-connected to a great metropolitan area can really be great things. /fin
i pray that nothing does, or at least nothing from these assholes and only good things from the rest of us.
(i think the 15 min cities themselves should be as dense as Central Paris. the huge mistake is letting the absence of hard constraints on land availability sucker you into building at lower density, due to cost or the mistaken idea that people prefer low-density suburbs.)
I can agree that quality is very important, as is the density of the “15 minute city”. If the 15 minute city is just a single-fam-home dominated small suburban town, then yeah, your critique is abs on point, they are just shitty suburbs under a new name. 1/
You want agglomeration benefits both at the metro area level and at the local/district level. You want the 15 minute city to have the scale of a real city, albeit not of a “superstar city”. The one-hour metro area is the superstar city, the 15-min city offers a great quality of everyday life. 2/
The combination of these levels offers most of the benefits of superstar-city life (most people even in “legacy” superstar cities live farther than 15-mins from important amenities) while making it practical—politically, physically—to scale via urban forms conducive to high-quality human life. /fin
when i visited Paris i stayed in Colombes, a “banlieu”. i stayed there, sure, because i could not afford to stay in central Paris. Colombes was undergoing an incredible construction boom, building on a scale that would be impossible in central Paris, without some kind of revolutionary consensus. 1/
Colombes was being developed at high density, via extremely attractive apartment buildings. (i was very jealous.) it’s 20 mins on the train to central Paris. as tourists we rode that every day. 2/
Columbes itself is absolutely a 15-minute city. it has a town center with a kind of main street, a square with nice restaurants, etc. 3/
does Columbes offer the full set of options of all the Paris metro area? by definition, of course, no (since it’s only one tiny sliver of that!) does it offer a quality of life comparable to central Paris? yes! 4/
there would be different trade-offs for different neighborhoods, but Columbes definitely has advantages that would compensate for its disadvantages, many people would find it preferable to many other fine (and affluent) areas. 5/
hypothetically, might it be better if all of Paris were a 15 minute city, if with the same geographic accessibility of Colombes itself one could access all the options of the Paris metro area? 6/
absolutely that would be better. but there is no path to that, none. 7/
when we are building de novo districts, we can make them as dense as possible to maximize in-district agglomeration benefits. and we should, absolutely, subject to livability constraints! 8/
but it is building such districts that is the only meaningful path to augment high-quality urban at scale. it is not feasible — and not only for disagreeable NIMBY reasons — to take the 15 minute city at the center if historical metros and just add all the housing you need there. /fin
a 15 minute city in Paris is still in Paris. within an hour by public transport, you have Paris’ full scale. the denser the 15 minute city, the more scale you have in 15 minutes. a dense microcity has significant scale, and, like Paris, has the scale of its full metro area within an hour.
portraying the movement towards dense, mixed-use districts and the agglomeration effects of large-scale urbanism as antithetical strikes me as mistaken and counterproductive.
“It’s a great idea, if…done right. Federal lands are a national resource, and the nation needs more housing… What cities like St. George need most—and what they mostly refuse to allow—are modest homes and apartments for…workers and families.” @bcappelbaum.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/o...
Opinion | Federal Lands Are a Resource. America Needs More Housing. What’s the Problem?
Link Preview: Opinion | Federal Lands Are a Resource. America Needs More Housing. What’s the Problem?: Public land is a promising place to build what Western cities need most and mostly don’t allow: homes and apartments for low-wage workers.
(may i suggest microcities? www.interfluidity.com/v2/8772.html or just the sort if districts @holz-bau.bsky.social would design and propose?)
no need to be convicted of anything to get shipped to El Salvador.
i agree, with respect the protagonists (our antagonists). but i think with respect to the broad, inchoate public, the blob that becomes the marginal voter, the annoyance was very real, and laziness about weighing harms left them vulnerable to salience bias. 1/
during the post George Floyd period, not immediate, say 2022, i remember a conversation with a friend in general intelligent and of good will. he was so annoyed by netflix’s “representation matters” era, by the sense every new films was leavened with clumsy social justice didacticism. 2/
of course i tried to guide him into thinking about priorities, is this *really* the problem that should recruit your political passions. he, genuinely of goodwill, quickly assented no, you’re right, plutocracy and its incentive to sew just this kind of division is a more important source of ills. 3/
but viscerally, immediately, that’s what he went for. and i think he was hardly alone. /fin
some people think it was a kind of ennui that left us open to fascism, citing perhaps Fukyama’s “last man” and a predicted rebellion against that status by those with “megalothymia”. 1/
i think it was not ennui but annoyance that left us vulnerable. people were just annoyed by pronouns and what one might call the microincriminations of “wokeness”. These seemed real, even pressing, while words like “fascism” or “tyranny” or “extermination camps” seemed hypothetical, overwrought. 2/
oops. /fin
“Deep understanding of reality is intrinsically dual use.” @michaelnielsen.bsky.social
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we’ve got to get those people out of there. not just him, all of them.
because the timing is not remotely coincidental. Trump just tariffed (then rescinded for 90 days but the threat hangs) the fuck out of Lesotho. all of a sudden Lesotho is desperately trying to find a way to make itself friendly, so they offer regulatory favors to Musk.
the only way it's true Bukele does not have the power to produce him is if they've killed him. have they killed him?
if it were serious it would aspire to medium neutral.