This September, I made my pilgrimage to Raleigh for the North Carolina American Institute of Architects’ annual home tour. Every fall, the organization opens a half-dozen or so recently completed homes to the public. I have always enjoyed the show. It is part architecture tour, part construction exhibition, part idea laboratory. You get to see new materials, clever details, and excellent work by talented architects and tradespeople. Most of all, you encounter a pride in housing as a craft that is generally absent from our public conversations today.

This year’s tour was similar to previous years in one respect: it was dominated by expensive houses, many apparently in the $1.5 million to $4 million range. These showcased almost every conceivable amenity, material, and technological innovation available, except perhaps the most interesting design problem of all: how to create a good life within limited means.

One house was different.

Deep into Northeast Raleigh stands a modest, one-story brick cottage. The surrounding streets are bracketed with the kinds of small starter homes America once produced by the hundreds of thousands, most less than 1,000 square feet.

That modest scale is increasingly under pressure. This particular neighborhood is close to downtown and desirable, and the drive in revealed plenty of teardowns and replacement homes. Many of these new houses are considerably larger. Others are townhouses or multifamily buildings. Nearly all of it uninspired.

The owner of this particular house had another idea.

She wanted to improve her home substantially without losing its relationship to the neighborhood. She wanted a beautiful kitchen and entertaining space. She wanted gardens, a pool, and a detached office. There was an indoor-outdoor shower and a large accordion door that dissolved the boundary between the house and the yard. The thoughtful amenities made it feel less like a starter home and more like a modest personal resort.

But the owner also did something considerably more interesting.

She made room for other people. And I immediately recognized that these two things — a personal paradise and providing for others — are, for most of us, related.

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Mobility isn’t a foreign concept to me. Growing up, I attended 10 schools in 13 years, following my peripatetic academic mother to opportunities at Harvard, UNC, and Michigan. I’ve always believed that the constant change has both conditioned me to thrive in new situations and left me hunting for tools of rootedness for my family.

Yoni Appelbaum is a senior editor for The Atlantic, and author of the recently published book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. I will be leading a book club conversation about his thoughts in Raleigh next week. I’m a big fan of Appelbaum and this book, and below I review it while also identifying two contrarian views of his that stood out to me.

First, Appelbaum spends ample time critiquing Jane Jacobs with a relatively common critique that, while she is a patron saint of urbanism, she also had a troubling streak of Nimbyism that is worth understanding and unpacking. I’m on record as a committed fan of Jacobs’ work and have published the Jacobs column at Southern Urbanism since its founding. While I believe she is the origin of the New Urbanism and the first major objector to authoritarian American planning, I agree with Appelbaum that some of her strategies in defending Greenwich Village are also the germ seed of American Nimbyism. More on that below.

Secondly, Appelbaum flips the idea that rootedness leads to openness. This was almost shocking to read, as I, like most of you, believe that deep roots in a community (often created by the longevity of its residents) create bonds that strengthen relationships and make it more welcoming to outsiders. Appelbaum uses storytelling to show that this last point is not true and, in fact, the opposite may be true: nomadic people tend to be more welcoming and open, while people who stay and don’t move tend to be more closed, pessimistic, xenophobic, and resistant to others.

In this light, he argues that Americans’ mobility used to be unrivaled in the world, and this ability to perpetually up and move was the engine that drove our great experiment.

The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.

More importantly, Appelbaum points out that our mobility has radically declined over the last half century, and this is concerning. He links mobility to the American Dream, and mobility’s decline is also seeing correlating declines in happiness, civic participation, entrepreneurship, and cultural cohesion. And he rightly identifies progressive politics (he himself is often defined as “center-left”) as the problem, not because it is wrong, per se, as much as it is hypocritical:

The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

The American virtue of choice has been legislated out of commission. Appelbaum’s book concludes this harsh fact: “Opposition to mobility appears concentrated in progressive jurisdictions.”

How damning.

HOUSES AS TOOLS, NOT INVESTMENTS

Today, most Americans treat their primary home as an investment vehicle and, secondarily, as a place to raise their family. This has only been the case recently, as a consequence of inflationary monetary policy (among other issues), which encourages investment in appreciating assets relative to the declining value of cash. If homes were depreciating assets, which they had been for centuries, most of the shenanigans around Nimbyism would never arise. Appelbaum describes what this would look like by using the analogy of how we treat our iPhones

Americans once tended to look at houses the way Americans today look at cars or iPhones. One decade’s prohibitive luxury was the next affordable convenience, and the third’s absolute necessity. A home was less a long-term investment—most people leased—than a consumer good to be enjoyed until the next model came within reach.

Also, since the 1960s, lawyers, politicians, and neighborhood advocates have specialized in bureaucratic lawfare that hijacks planning processes to prevent competition, keep outsiders out, and maximize personal asset value and appreciation rates for their own benefit. Often presented under a banner of “community engagement”, implying the wider community supports the behavior that might not exist, Appelbaum argues that this lawfare functions as the antithesis of equity, largely to rig the system for the elites at the expense of the remainder: “Professionals leverage their training and expertise to mount a challenge to the planning process, a form of bureaucratic warfare unavailable to the great majority of Americans.”

Appelbaum takes the gloves off on Jacobs here—where most urbanists treat her (and her writing) as a sacred cow, he accuses her of starting the nationwide process of exclusionary neighborhood planning (“neighborhoodism”) which dominates land use conversations to this day. I’ve personally witnessed planners go into neighborhoods and tell them “this is your neighborhood” and “you get to decide what goes here.” In a world of private property and public realm, these assertions are neither accurate nor helpful, and I’ve seen it not end well, but it doesn’t stop them from selling the story:

To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them. Over the decades that followed, the idea would take hold throughout the United States; a nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.

While I might give Jacobs a small pass for staving off assaults from government planners rather than organic incremental development (it was the wrecking ball of a drunk-on-power Robert Moses she was up against), and that Nimbys citing Jane Jacobs often misread her and do so in bad faith, I do agree with Appelbaum that the modern neighborhood Nimby “Culture of No” started here. He argues, “In practice, the new processes turned out to be profoundly anti-democratic, allowing affluent communities to exclude new residents.” These practices were, and remain, profoundly unjust.

WE ARE MOBILITY, MOBILITY IS US

I spend a lot of time thinking about rootedness, a key component of placemaking and new urbanism. Conventional wisdom says that “moving” (or, in the negative, “displacement”) makes us worse, but Appelbaum flips this to suggest that “rootedness” is also synonymous with “being stuck”. It’s not always positive or voluntary. And he points out that this enthusiasm and optimism that is relatively unique to being an American is tied to our ability to move, try new things, experiment, and execute:

The key to vibrant communities, it turns out, is the exercise of choice. Left to their own devices, most people will stick to ingrained habits, to familiar circles of friends, to accustomed places. When people move from one community to another, though, they leave behind their old job, connections, and identity and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors or to show up at a new church on Sunday despite the awkwardness. American individualism didn’t mean that people were disconnected from each other; it meant that they constructed their own individual identity by actively choosing the communities to which they would belong.

In other words, mobility and abundance thinking correlate. In Europe, immobile lifestyles “had taught them that admitting new members left a community with less to go around, so they treated outsiders with suspicion and hostility.” In America the polar opposite was true: “People who have recently changed residence report experiencing more supportive relationships and feeling more optimistic, having a greater sense of purpose, and increased self-respect. Those who want to move and cannot, by contrast, become more cynical and less satisfied with their lives.”

ZONING MAKES US IMMOBILE, POORER, and LESS HAPPY

Anybody who reads my writing knows I’m a persistent critic of both American zoning and the American planning institutions that create and enforce its standards. It’s because I find both un-American. If you’re skeptical of that thesis, I encourage you to read The Color of Law, which will disabuse you of any doubt.

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Like Richard Rothstein’s book, Appelbaum goes to the historical archives to prove that not only is zoning exclusionary (and often racist) today, but that it was always exclusionary and racist and founded to be precisely exclusionary and racist:

Zoning may have been adopted by well-meaning urban planners, but the process began in 1885 in Modesto, in California, where bigoted local officials were looking for a tool to push out Chinese residents; the federal courts would not allow them to segregate their city by race. They hit on a workaround: confining laundries—whose proprietors were overwhelmingly Chinese and generally lived in their shops—to the city’s Chinatown. Over the ensuing decades, other cities embraced this approach, discovering that segregating land by its uses and the size of the buildings it could hold was a potent means of segregating populations by race, ethnicity, and income.

Worse, a century on, legacy institutions have captured zoning as a tool to prevent newness, change, innovation, immigration, and growth.

Whatever its theoretical aspirations, in practice, progressivism has produced a potent strain of Nimbyism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.

Discouraging mobility is the Achilles’ Heel of Progressivism in two ways. First, Nimbyism is proving to be an electoral loser, year after year. As the Democratic Party continues to flirt with the ideology, old-school party members lose interest, and moderates drift. Second, Nimbyism is proving to be electoral suicide at the national scale, as Americans are leaving progressive strongholds for red states, which tend to be more welcoming and supportive of traditional mobile lifestyles.

Progressives need to change this quickly, before national elections become completely unwinnable for a generation. To me, the path to national relevancy goes through housing. It’s getting Americans moving again. It’s letting families flourish and live in the most productive metros in the land. It’s celebrating that vibrancy, that optimism, the thrill of packing up and moving cross-country, the euphoria that comes with trying to start a business, a family, a civic institution. I can’t remember the last time the party exuded that kind of vibe.

And it’s because we’re stuck.

Far fewer Americans move every year than at any time in history. And, unlike a century ago, the ones moving are the ones who don’t need to. Appelbaum points out that “it was the working class who traditionally had the most to gain from moving, whereas today the gains are largely available only to the affluent.”

He concludes with three solutions—consistency, tolerance, and abundance—all lacking from today’s policy.

Solving crises often requires great sacrifice, but the simplest solution to this one promises to leave everyone better off. All you have to do is make room for some new neighbors—maybe even new friends—to join you, by allowing other people to build new housing on their property.

The road forward may not be easy, but since it mostly requires us to return to the way we traditionally did things, it need not be complex.

Let’s all commit to getting our communities, and our fellow men, unstuck.

I lead a book club conversation at 12:30 on Wednesday, September 30th at Press Coffee + Crepes in Raleigh. The event is open to paid Citybuilder subscribers. Subscribe here. RSVP Event here.

Aaron Lubeck is a designer, builder + developer with The Rocket Shop in Durham. He is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes, and a former adjunct at Duke University’s Nicholas School, where he lectured on sustainable home building. In 2012, Aaron developed Durham’s first net-zero-energy home, an infill project designed to fit seamlessly in its historic neighborhood.

Aaron’s more recent work focuses on zoning changes to facilitate the reconstruction of affordable housing markets, including local efforts to create Missing Middle codes. He recently served as faculty with Incremental Development Alliance in West Atlanta, training fledgling developers, and is host of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, a curated conversation with top new urbanist developers. He is the founder of Southern Urbanism, a non-profit dedicated to better city-building in the South. Follow him at @aaron_lubeck

LINKS

How Progressives Froze the American Dream (The Atlantic, Feb 2025). Most quotes in this essay come from this piece.

Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

I have been walking through Pacifica periodically for 20 years now. It’s nestled a stone’s throw from downtown Carrboro, right next to the Wilson Park baseball fields, where I stroked home runs over the fence as an inexplicably oversized 12-year-old.

To the outsider, Pacifica looks like any other mid-market townhome project. But it is not.

Built in 2006 and designed by the recently departed Giles Blunden—who was already living at Arcadia cohousing down the road—it houses about 100 people in 46 homes on eight acres. What sets it apart from traditional development are common gardens, cisterns, a guest house, laundry, and a large commons building. Parking is isolated at the edge. The walking paths are for people to engage, garden, and wander.

You would let a four-year-old roam freely here. It just feels cozy and safe.

I’m still on Pacifica’s email list. Last week, a post about an available unit arrived (below), which finally bumped this piece I’ve been meaning to write. You can see how the project is attractive to people living in Carrboro, adjacent to Chapel Hill and UNC.

Pacifica got right what many cohousing communities did not. For what you get, it is astonishingly affordable. That goal is only achievable today through cheap dirt, more density, and smaller homes. Pacifica does (/did) all three.

Cohousing adds a fourth tool for affordability: shared amenities. A guest house lets people live smaller. Shared laundry and garden tools mean not every household needs a lawnmower, weed whacker, and hedge trimmer. Seven of the units are owned by a community land trust, which helps maintain a price ladder. Residences run from about 600 to 1,460 square feet. Some residents might want larger, but the small sizes keep the community within reach of Carrboro’s many young families, graduate students, and seniors.

Done well, shared amenities raise quality of life while lowering cost of living. That is the core offering of cohousing. It’s also the core offering of urbanism.

At Pacifica, the community collaboratively manages shared space, and residents are expected to put in hours. From their own site:

It takes time to keep the community running. Although no set level of participation is mandatory, we encourage all to attend monthly meetings and join at least one committee. Each household is asked to contribute a set number of community labor hours each month, either during shared workdays, committee work, or at their convenience. Households that do not complete these hours of community labor monthly are assessed a fee for each hour of missing community labor in addition to HOA dues.

The set number is apparently four hours a month. This differs from traditional development, where you pay a fee and some outside landscaper is paid to tend perfectly mediocre greenery. Pacifica’s outdoor spaces are more special because the people who live there curate them. Edible gardens are plentiful. You get the feeling that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of meals come from bounty grown on site. There is no quantitative data point for that.

Cohousing is Not a Co-op

Often treated as synonyms, cohousing and co-ops are different things. Cohousing is a way of living. A co-op is a legal ownership structure. Both can exist in the same project, but don’t have to.

Pacifica is not a co-op. Homes are owned fee simple, in a traditional HOA format: owners privately own their land and improvements. The HOA then sets operational rules for maintenance and access to amenities.

A co-op is a corporation that jointly owns the buildings and land. People buy shares in that corporation, which gives exclusive rights to occupy a unit. There is no deed. Governance is typically democratic among the shareholders, subject to an operating agreement that can function like community Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (“CC&Rs”) for an HOA.

Neither is wrong. I believe that zoning should be flexible enough to let developers and residents decide which is best for them. I personally am skeptical of any ownership model that isn’t fee simple, and I would avoid general cooperatives where boards can dictate things that affect my private life. I’m also concerned that there is less case law in a place like North Carolina, which adds risk to the model.

In fairness, boards exist in both. But the co-op board does not offer the protection of fee-simple title. Co-ops also create more lawsuits: board rejection of a buyer; “objectionable conduct” evictions; claims the board breached fiduciary duty or acted in bad faith; share transfers, flip taxes, sublet rules, and who lives in the unit.

New York City alone has thousands of co-op buildings and a specialized bar, trade press, and docket for this. Lawsuits lasting a decade are not unheard of. Limited-equity and HDFC co-ops add another layer: alleged insider deals, residency-rule violations, and oppression claims. All of that is a red flag for me about co-ops, while I remain enthusiastic about co-housing.

Why We Don’t See More Co-housing

Co-housing is not for everyone. Many, if not most, would be put off by the structural obligations of maintaining a community commons. That’s fine. But demand clearly exists for more intentional communities like these, and a stack of structural reasons keeps us from seeing more of them.

The main reason, in my view, is that top-down planning—which is at its worst in intellectual communities—overthinks zoning to the point that these projects rarely come to fruition. In other words, co-housing developments are artificially suppressed.

I have personally witnessed ambitious developers face silly demands such as these:

• 1. the parking has to be on the same lot as the house;

• 2. houses must front a street;

• 3. every unit must have its own dedicated private yard.

And when a developer objects to these requirements and points out how they make a community worse, such objections generate a robotic-like answer: “Them’s the rules, them’s the rules, them’s the rules.”

Projects are worse as a consequence. If they happen at all.

The developer can exhaust themselves arguing that “there’s plenty of parking.” “It’s ganged to the outside.” “Our residents want to face a green more than a street.” or “The community prefers better shared space to mediocre private space.” Doesn’t matter.

And there is another often misunderstood pressure point. While the developer is at risk, on various clocks and making no income during pre-occupancy phases, the planning machine she is up against carries no risk, has no clock, and is programmed with an army of less-motivated overseers who are all on salaries. No reasonable person will fight this machine for long.

That’s why co-housing, and any intentional community, is often led by an unreasonable person. That’s not to say they are bad, or even unfair; they are just stubborn and determined. If they are not, they’d never get these projects off the ground.

The best projects in urbanism are disproportionately led by bullheaded developers who won’t take a nonsensical, robotic “no” for an answer. This is one reason planning reform matters: we need to let less bullheaded property owners build great places, too.

Lessons moving forward

I hope to see more co-housing communities, and intentional communities of all types. I believe the Triangle, with its high concentration of creative-class types and outlier identities, is the perfect place for this kind of development, and policymakers should move swiftly to allow these communities to flourish.

Here are a few lessons to carry forward:

1. Durham, Carrboro, and Chapel Hill have gotten an incredible number of land-use things wrong in the last 50 years. They are also home to some extraordinary cohousing projects: Arcadia and Spring Glen, Bull City Commons, Durham Central Park Cohousing, Eno Commons, Solterra, Village Hearth, and Weaving Water. (Elderberry, often grouped with this list, sits in Rougemont, but is excellent.) I have encouraged political leaders and housing activists to acknowledge these successes and double down. Let’s ask ourselves, “What would our cities look like if there were 50 of these communities? Or 100?”

2. Ask developers what is preventing more of these from being built. Cohousing is just one form of intentional community. Arcadia and Pacifica are the tip of the iceberg. The problems that show up when you try to design these places generally relate to punitive utility requirements (a development guidelines problem), or parking regulations and the inability to sell lots fee simple (planning problems).

Beyond that, a fledgling science exists for managing cohousing communities that have to deal with what Ross Chapin would call “the software”—the rules that govern the society, as opposed to the architecture, which is “the hardware”. These are more of a legal problem. As we see more opportunities for micro-communities as small as three to five homes, we also need scalable, simple software platforms to manage them. Sometimes that software will dictate where people park. Sometimes it will articulate volunteer hours, quarterly barbecues, or what happens if the sewer backs up.

3. Lastly, we will need new financing products for both for-rent cohousing and for-sale communities. One of the least appreciated consequences of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 was how narrow and conservative banks got with their lending. If you want to land on anything other than large apartment complexes or conventional single-family subdivisions, you run into a lot of stop signs. Before 2008, more lending was local. We will need new products, and I suspect those products will come from local lending again. This is an extraordinary opportunity for local banks to separate themselves from the herd. Often they won’t get interested until there’s a critical mass. We’re stuck in the awkward space where we need cohousing communities to justify lending products, and lending products to create cohousing communities.

Like all things, we’ll get there. Right now, great placemaking requires determined leaders’ intent on bringing these places to life, against the machine—and against a system that seeks to prohibit them in almost every way.

Shared amenity is not a lifestyle brand. It is how cities work when they work. Pacifica has been proving that on eight acres next to a ballfield for twenty years. The listing in my inbox is not the story. The fact that we still treat community as a novelty is.

Today Matt Yglesias released an essay, “YIMBYs already have a bold vision for solving the housing crisis: Don’t listen to the haters — there’s nothing narrow about this.” The principle he articulates is straightforward: more housing is needed. The work required to deliver it, however, is infinite. It demands perpetual, chronic, never-ending effort.

And that effort, lest we forget, is fundamentally about restoring traditional property rights.

Yglesias writes:

Opponents of this liberalism are largely in retreat. What remains is mostly a fringe of left-wing academics—often Boomers—and their downwardly mobile students—often in Gen Y and Z. They do not surrender because their entire ideology rests on the premise that markets are inherently destructive and businesspeople are inherently suspect. Lacking a credible Plan B, they double and triple down on their manufactured narrative, even as it grows more preposterous and their practical influence wanes.

In my experience, the most virulent objections to additional housing and the restoration of property rights come from academics. Yglesias cites a piece, by Vanderbilt law professors Christopher Serkin and Daniel Sharfstein that takes the familiar, lazy route: the state should simply build more housing.

The authors ignore nearly a century of case studies demonstrating that governments are generally terrible at producing housing, reckless with eminent domain, indifferent to construction costs, and dismissive about community design and long-term management. Serkin and Sharfstein propose treating housing as infrastructure, as if America’s actual record of developing and maintaining infrastructure were a model of efficiency.

Academics default to “markets bad, state good” for several reasons. The academy is generally anti-business, or at least business-skeptical. There is also a form of envy that arises from being highly credentialed yet relatively ineffective at shaping one’s own community. When people with the highest degrees watch Bubba in an F-150 build a neighborhood of homes while they themselves produce none, resentment can set in.

For most academics, this remains a non-issue; they let Bubba build and return to their metaphysics, or whatever. For a non-trivial minority, however, the jealousy is directed at Bubba and at the politicians who protect his right to build. These voices often appear off—hateful, spiteful, entitled. Some publish falsehoods about applicants, coordinate hit jobs with aligned media and politicians, or dox builders’ home addresses as a form of threat.

Intellectuals are drawn to public engagement in part because it lacks the ordinary filters that discipline other domains. A bad employee can be fired; a difficult relative may eventually stop receiving Thanksgiving invitations. But public commentary lacks such a mechanism. Highly credentialed but low-impact individuals therefore gravitate toward the public microphone.

Because land use has been heavily politicized for the past two decades, the primary targets become those who actually work the land and supply housing—the builders.

The root problem is politicization itself. As Yglesias observes:

Indeed. Property rights reform, particularly the right to build housing by right, is an existential threat to this NIMBY class. This is why the NIMBY left—mostly made up of the planner left and the academic left—remain so invested in keeping land use politicized.

If land-use decisions were depoliticized, what community purpose would they retain? Since few, if any, of them build anything themselves, what remaining power would they hold to mold their communities?

To continue successes, Yglesias suggests that YIMBYs must reassure suburban homeowners that reform will not transform their neighborhoods into Manhattan. It will not. He also urges YIMBYs to confront left-leaning voices who dismiss abundance reforms as small potatoes. In his view, housing remains the largest policy lever available to state and local governments, and under John Myers & Sam Bowman & Ben Southwood’s The Housing Theory of Everything, housing is connected to, well, everything.

I find these juxtaposed objections somewhat amusing. Experienced YIMBYs already recognize the pattern: Chronic NIMBYs (who are often involved in anti-housing advocacy every month, year after year) will claim, simultaneously, that reforms are so extreme they will turn cities into Manhattan and also that reforms are so modest as to be inconsequential.

In other words, NIMBYs regularly throw two completely contradictory objections at the wall to see which, if either, will stick. These arguments typically emanate from the highly credentialed, low-competence cohort. Because the contradiction is obvious, the objections are best ignored.

In the end, the question is binary. People either believe in individual agency or they do not. They either believe Americans possess the right to build housing on land zoned for human development, or they do not. As Yglesias concludes: “If you’re looking for a bold, expansive vision of a better world, get on the housing abundance bandwagon, because scarcity is a deliberate policy choice the consequences of which we all now regret.”

Indeed. We regret. The question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

Aaron Lubeck

Aaron Lubeck is a designer, builder + developer with The Rocket Shop in Durham. He is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes, and a former adjunct at Duke University’s Nicholas School, where he lectured on sustainable home building. In 2012, Aaron developed Durham’s first net-zero-energy home, an infill project designed to fit seamlessly in its historic neighborhood.

Aaron’s more recent work focuses on zoning changes to facilitate the reconstruction of affordable housing markets, including local efforts to create Missing Middle codes. He recently served as faculty with Incremental Development Alliance in West Atlanta, training fledgling developers, and is host of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, a curated conversation with top new urbanist developers. He is t

he founder of Southern Urbanism, a non-profit dedicated to better city-building in the South. @aaron_lubeck

Slow Boring

YIMBYs already have a bold vision for solving the housing crisis

YIMBYs, people in the housing abundance movement, do not have a pope or a set of sacred authoritative texts you can consult to find out what we think about things…

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a month ago · 260 likes · 215 comments · Matthew Yglesias

I had a super fun talk with Michael Walliser on his “How It Runs” podcast.
We covered a host of topics related to building better places in North Carolina. We focused on the challenges of creating affordable, walkable, and community-oriented housing amid complex zoning codes, financial barriers, and current economic conditions.

Key Themes and Topics:

• Housing Market Challenges: I explained how high interest rates have “locked” many homeowners into low-rate mortgages, hindering mobility and exacerbating inventory shortages. I noted that current policies often favor large-scale, suburban, auto-centric development over the “missing middle” housing—such as duplexes and cottage courts—that historically supported vibrant, walkable communities.

• The Role of Zoning: A major focus was the impact of restrictive zoning, including large minimum lot sizes, parking requirements, and special permissions. I strongly advised practitioners to “read the damn zoning code,” as mastering these regulations is the first step toward identifying development opportunities that most people miss.

• The Missing Middle and ADUs: We discussed the potential of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and pocket neighborhoods to foster connection and community wealth. Despite the benefits, we discussed how these projects face significant hurdles, particularly in financing, because the appraisal industry often undervalues detached accessory structures.

• Local vs. Top-Down Reform: While acknowledging that statewide preemptive reform—such as parking or ADU mandates—can help bypass local obstacles, I advocated for “scrappy, incrementalist” approaches native to the South. I remain skeptical of federal-level housing legislation, which I believe often relies on vague “vibes-based” goals that fail to address the underlying mechanical problems in the housing market.

• The Importance of Agency and Skill: We touched on the philosophical value of building and maintenance, and I cited Matthew Crawford to argue that there is a loss of human agency when everything is automated or “done for” individuals. I suggested that the trades are becoming increasingly valuable in an era dominated by artificial intelligence.

• Future Outlook for Practitioners: I emphasized the “find your farm” strategy for young professionals, encouraging them to specialize in a specific geographic area or housing type to build expertise. I expressed optimism for local, independent builders who focus on intentional, community-oriented pocket neighborhoods to meet the growing public craving for connection.

Listen/Watch the full conversation here 👇

Mel Brooks turns 100 this week. Six days later, America marks its 250th birthday.

The timing feels almost scripted. The Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants who spent eight decades turning American pretensions, divisions, and sacred cows into unapologetic laughter reaches a century just as the republic he both skewered and celebrated enters its semiquincentennial.

If the 1970s represented a high-water mark for American screen satire, Brooks was its most consistent and fearless practitioner. Saturday Night Live launched in 1975, Americanizing the anarchic no-sacred-cows spirit of Monty Python. But on the big screen, nobody dissected the weird, friction-filled interactions of our unprecedentedly diverse country with the same precision or joy.

Racial, class, regional, religious, philosophical, and wealth differences all got the Brooks treatment—no tribe was exempt, including his own. That comedic openness was far healthier than the repressed, overly sensitive “don’t talk about our differences” system that largely governs discourse today.

In this light, Brooks’ films reward a modern urbanist reading. At their core, many mock the absurdities of modern land use politics, power, and institutional detachment—issues that feel freshly relevant in 2026.

Here are my favorite examples:

Blazing Saddles (1974) is the clearest and strongest example. The entire plot revolves around a corrupt government official (Attorney General Hedley Lamarr) who schemes to drive residents out of Rock Ridge so a railroad can run through it, enriching himself. It is a satire of land speculation, legal sleights, narrative control, and insider political development deals.

The townspeople, who are presented as inbred, don’t fully grasp the forces manipulating them, while distant power brokers such as Lamarr view the place purely as an obstacle to profit. Brooks exposes how outsider elites treat land as a financial play rather than a lived community, all while the residents’ prejudices, participatory confusion, and buffoonery make them easy marks. The black sheriff Bart (played brilliantly by Cleavon Little) is initially loathed by the townspeople for the color of his skin, but ultimately becomes a hero, organizing the people to fight corrupt government interests, culminating in a surreal fight scene somehow featuring a very gay Dom DeLuise.

One of America’s greatest satires is, at its heart, a story about the problems that arise when self-interested bad-faith people leverage the power of the state to control property that is not theirs, and the need for the people of a place to overcome their differences and fight back. In the end, Hedley Lamarr loses, while Sheriff Bart, The Waco Kid, and the people win.

History of the World, Part I (1981) delivers Brooks’ takedown of centralized bureaucratic power. Just as in the real world, increased government is presumed to be good, but proven not to be. The Roman Empire sequences parody over-centralized planning, sprawling administrative excess, and governments so large and detached that they no longer serve ordinary people. The joke is never cities themselves—it’s what happens when institutions calcify into self-serving machines—“Fuck the poor!”, the Roman commissioners chant in unison, without hesitation or discourse. Urban reformers today make parallel critiques of planning systems that prioritize process over outcomes and distance decision-makers from the communities they supposedly serve.

Young Frankenstein (1974) offers a subtler yet recognizable satire of the dynamics of public discourse. The provincial villagers cling to local traditions, gossip, and resistance to the outsider and his strange innovation. They fear change because it threatens the existing social order. Viewed through a contemporary lens, the torch-wielding mob feels like a zoning hearing of today: you can swap Frankenstein for “developer", and the same “We don’t want your kind here” othering applies.

But different doesn’t mean dangerous, which is the main point of the film. Young Frankenstein captures how local politics too easily descend into hysteria, demagoguery, and fear-mongering; and how conservatism always percolates in the face of change.

The real Mel Brooks urbanist argument emerges across his body of work rather than in any single film. His comedies consistently celebrate what vibrant cities produce: classes, races, and religions colliding, exploring, through humor, the constant friction that naturally arises between diverse groups of people. Blazing Saddles, The Producers, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights all depend on wildly different groups being thrown together. That is fundamentally a city story.

Brooks was a kid from Brooklyn. His comedy only works because America is a messy and diverse place where people from different backgrounds constantly encounter one another. In that sense, his ultimate gift was satirizing the human condition that makes cities necessary and unavoidable.

Much of what Mel Brooks did then would be functionally impossible today. Brooks said so plainly in 2017: we had become “stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy.”

“Comedy”, he argued, “has to walk a thin line, take risks. Comedy is the lecherous little elf whispering into the king’s ear, always telling the truth about human behavior.”

SO WHAT? WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

Whatever humor the toxic cultural climate of 2020 didn’t kill, the Trump years complicated in a different way. It is hard to parody a man who already parodies himself as his own hyperbolic caricature. A classic SNL satirical move is to exaggerate the gap between rhetoric and reality, but this tool loses potency when the target has already torched that gap and turned the performance into the point.

The result is a public conversation today that feels humorless and weaponized. We still produce jokes and memes, but the old Brooksian mode—equal-opportunity, risk-taking, aimed at power and pretension rather than the powerless—has become rarer. That matters.

Satire was once the great guardrail of American politics, capable of mocking so ruthlessly that everyone had to take note. Satire cuts through noise. Done well, it can be more penetrating than facts or conventional media because it disarms before it persuades. Laughter creates a brief shared space where defenses drop, and uncomfortable truths can land.

America has always had a tradition of satire and mockery. Satire was often delivered by famous politicians or writers, participants in the argument who understood that, when aimed properly, mockery strengthens rather than weakens a culture. In its original forms, it was the leaders mocking the masses, rather than the other way around.

Benjamin Franklin used Poor Richard character of Richard Saunders as a target to help forge a national snark and disdain for idiots peddling undue hubris. With “The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense,” Franklin mocked the blowhards of his day.

Today’s discourse could use more of the same corrective. National politics, online participation, and local fights over housing and development are all desperately lacking in satire. NIMBYism, for example, frequently dresses self-interest in the language of “neighborhood character,” environmental stewardship, or equity, all while causing the problems it claims to wants to solve.

We could all use a good laugh.

A Brooksian lens would spot the absurdities on every side: the out-of-town developer’s short-term extraction, the NIMBY activist’s selective framing, the homeowner’s status-quo defense masquerading as high principle.

Satire can not rewrite zoning codes, but it could make all the anti-reform posturing impossible to sustain without permanent embarrassment. An excellent Rolling Stone Essay by Alan Scherstuhl in 2018 pointed out that Walk Hard:The Dewey Cox Story so ruthlessly mocked the formulaic Hollywood approach to music biopics that it ended the genre for more than a decade.

Done well, satire ends stupidity.

So the question on next week’s double birthday is straightforward: Should we bring satire back in its old form?

Let me declare, I am not interested in the sanitized, risk-free version that flatters the existing status quo. Any functional return to satire must be willing to offend in service of the truth about how ridiculous we all are, including the satirist. It will not emerge from institutions optimized for safety or omnicause. It will come from individuals with thick skins, clear eyes, and the old Brooks confidence that making the self-interested (and the holier-than-thou) look silly is a civic contribution.

Thats what Mel Brooks did.

But Mel Brooks did more than entertain. He continued a distinctly American tradition: irreverence toward authority, skepticism toward sacred cows, and generosity enough to let everyone (including the audience) in on the joke.

As we mark 250 years of this improbable American experiment, and 100 years of its greatest screwball comic, the best tribute is not only rewatching the films (though you should). It is clearing a little cultural space for the lecherous elf again—so we can keep laughing, and therefore keep thinking, on our way forward.

Earlier this week, my pal Alica Pedersen, aka The Courtyard Urbanist, tweeted that “Regulatory reform is making it easier to build middle housing, but now society has to relearn how to design middle housing.” And she is accurate. We have to re-learn these skills.

The end goal here - ubiquity of great development - is universal. But also fleeting. It seems ridiculous to even suggest that we, in America, will ever see a day when (most) everything is charming, meaningful, and beautiful, much like the great cities, such as Chicago, were when they were constructed in the Gilded Age.

The solutions are painfully simple, though not easy. Success requires cultural, political, legal, pedological, and practice reform. The good news is that all of this is happening today in some way, shape, or form. What is not understood is that this process is linear and sequential. In other words, we will not have political courage before we have a cultural tidal wave demanding better. We will not have legal reform before politicians truly buy in.

And in this context, we can now see why so few schools or trades are even bothering to learn (re-learn, really) the practice of making great places.

If it’s not legal to do so, why bother?

Thus, it follows that until the reforms are in place to allow for great urbanism, great architecture, and great development, we will not see universities and trade groups buy in. In other words, it’s on the people to elect politicians who care about places, and it’s on the politicians to direct their legal and planning staff to work with the practitioners to codify (and unearth) the frameworks required to usher in this new Gilded Age.

We are not there. Not yet.

A NEW HIERARCHY

I drafted this proposed adaptation of Maslow’s pyramid tailored to the systemic requirements for reviving beauty, craftsmanship, and human-scale cities.

Just as Maslow’s hierarchy shows how basic survival must be met before higher flourishing, Lubeck’s Hierarchy of Needs argues that cultural discontent and institutional pressure must precede the political will, legal freedom, skilled execution, and finally the actual development of beautiful places.

Here is a detailed analysis of the proposed structure:

Read more

MEXICO CITY, MX | One of the most remarkable things about the Mexico City Metro is not its scale, though it is enormous. Nor is it the architecture, which is beautiful, nor the crowds, which are abundant, or even the trains themselves. It is the symbols.

Every station in the Metro system has its own icon. Not just a name, but a visual identity: animals, monuments, historical references, abstract graphics, and local symbols spread across more than 200 stations. The system feels less like anonymous infrastructure and more like a sprawling public gallery stitched into the daily life of one of the world’s largest cities.

The effect is deeply humanizing. The full explanation of the symbology can be seen here:

With art in all its forms present on the system, the Metro becomes more than transportation. It becomes a cultural framework. Transit blogger Reese Martin argued that "(Art) can make the city's history part of an open and public civic space, and it's also a great concept seen in cities such as Athens. Various art exhibits and even small concerts sometimes take place on the Metro.”

What is particularly fascinating is that the symbols were not originally conceived primarily as art. They were functional. When the Metro system was envisioned in the 1960s, literacy rates in Mexico hovered around roughly 62 to 65 percent. Many riders could not reliably read station names, so symbols provided a universal navigational language.

Today, literacy in Mexico is above 95 percent and likely even higher within the metropolitan population the Metro serves. Yet the symbols remain. What began as a practical solution evolved into one of the strongest expressions of civic identity in the city.

That evolution matters. Modern infrastructure, especially mass transit, can easily become dehumanizing. All large systems tend toward standardization, efficiency, and abstraction. They become optimized for movement rather than meaning. It is difficult for billion-dollar bureaucracies to think small, let alone personal. Yet that is precisely what successful cities must do if they want people to care about the systems they build and, more importantly, the places those systems serve. When people do not care, they tend to hurt themselves, their systems, or others. Meaning matters.

Mexico City understands this intuitively. So does Portland, where public art appears everywhere and has become inseparable from the city’s identity. It applies to new town developments as well. Architect Ross Chapin, with whom I do some work, often recommends naming the cottages in his pocket neighborhoods for art and symbology, rather than the standard placeless numbers. “When a house has a name, how can it be a commodity?” he argues. This emphasis on the qualitative, rather than on data, feels all the more humanizing as the world becomes increasingly obsessed with and driven by the 1s and 0s of automation. Even smaller cities like Richmond have recognized the power of distributed public art through major mural initiatives that rapidly transformed ordinary walls into civic landmarks.

The lesson is not simply that cities should “fund art.” It is that cities should create frameworks that allow culture to visibly flourish in public space.

Too often, public art programs become centralized, bureaucratic, and unnecessarily scarce. Like housing development, projects become burdened by consultants, political gatekeeping, inflated costs, or endless processes. The predictable result is fewer installations, less experimentation, and lower civic impact.

Cities should think differently. Instead of commissioning a handful of monumental projects, they should pursue abundance. Abundance, as always, comes from the bottom up, through distributed talent, and through culture, rather than dictate.

In practical terms, that means identifying hundreds (maybe thousands) of possible canvases throughout a city: electrical boxes, retaining walls, alleyways, utility structures, crosswalks, vacant facades, underpasses, temporary construction fencing, transit stops, and overlooked intersections. In a city like Durham, organizations like the Durham Art Guild could help catalog and curate these opportunities.

Then cities could issue open calls for ideas, encourage private sponsorships, and dramatically lower barriers for participation. The goal should not be perfection, but volume, experimentation, and localism.

Some critics will argue that a grassroots distributed approach risks producing lower-quality work. Perhaps occasionally it does. But culture often emerges through quantity. Particularly in art, talent is discovered through repetition, exposure, and opportunity. A flourishing local arts ecosystem is rarely engineered from above through a tiny number of elite commissions (high-culture commissions more often go to outsiders). More often, it emerges from hundreds of smaller acts of creation distributed throughout civic life. With enough volume, the art becomes a tool for wayfinding, as it did in Mexico City.

This is also the more equitable model. Scarcity tends to concentrate opportunities among the well-connected. Abundance widens participation. Ultimately, the most successful public art is not isolated or monumental. When it is distributed widely, it is embedded. That’s when it is encountered unexpectedly during ordinary life. And that, I think, is the goal. I want to experience my city’s art casually, and without intention. Rather than making plans to visit a museum or gallery, I want to stumble upon one while walking with loved ones.

Cities spend enormous sums underwriting roads, pipes, parking decks, utilities, and stadiums. They should also think of themselves as underwriting the enhancement of a pre-existing culture. A city’s public realm should always function as an open canvas for its citizens. That requires intentionality from its leaders, first and foremost to invite talent, to welcome talent, and to (as always) get the hell out of the way.

It is difficult to imagine a better way to build pride of place than allowing people to visibly shape the environments they share. Ultimately, abundant art should be small and distributed. I am hard-pressed to come up with a better way for a city to evoke pride of place than underwriting public art, in public spaces, through its many citizens.

Next Metro.

A blog on the worlds great cities, and the transportation, infrastructure, and buildings, make them work.

By Reece

At a May 4th public meeting in Marblehead, resident David Modica asked a simple question. It quickly ricocheted across American housing politics.

The wealthy seaside town north of Boston was discussing how to comply with Massachusetts’s affordable housing policy (known as 3A, or the MBTA Communities Act) by identifying land that was ostensibly available for multifamily housing. 3A requires 177 cities and towns in the MBTA service area to create at least one zoning district near transit stations where multi-family housing is allowed “as-of-right” (no special permit needed), with a minimum density of 15 units per acre. Communities that don’t comply can lose eligibility for key state funding programs, such as MassWorks, Housing Choice, and Local Capital Projects grants.

Marblehead’s government identified the Tedesco Country Club, a private golf course nobody seriously believes will ever be redeveloped.

In response, Modica said what many people in the room understood, but few were willing to admit aloud.

“So, like this is a way to comply (with state law), without doing any of the (state law) stuff?”

The crowd applauded.

“So, when we are like preserving the character of Marblehead, it’s a bad choice. It’s selfish. We’re doing a bad thing. We’re not doing any housing?”

Then came the line that detonated online.

“Are we kind of being pricks?”

Modica closed the stanza with logic that modern public meetings—which in America are structurally designed to reduce or deny development—are simply not built for:

“Are we trying to do nothing? Cause it seems like we are doing nothing.”

“We’re trying to make sure we don’t build no houses? Like, I don’t get it. People live in houses.”

The comments lasted barely a minute. Within 24 hours, social media had transformed Modica into a housing folk hero. The Wall Street Journal covered the moment nationally, noting that his blunt criticism of local housing obstruction had made him “something of a hero” to the YIMBY movement.

His Massachusetts accent, hoodie, and unfiltered delivery became instant meme material. Norman Rockwell Freedom of Speech parodies appeared online. A fake Massachusetts flag circulated bearing his quote, on-brand for Massachusetts, as a proposed new state motto.

VIBES-BASED PLANNING

The reason the clip exploded is simple: people are exhausted by the feel-good dishonesty ubiquitous within American housing politics.

For decades, many affluent communities have mastered the art of what we in Durham call “vibes-based planning.” The definition is straightforward: “vibes” means that 1) you say something popular but unsubstantive, and 2) what you say does not match what you do.

Specifically, politicians will say all the morally correct things about affordability, sustainability, and community values while quietly structuring policy to do the precise opposite. More specifically, Modica saw it when politicians claimed to care about housing but then voted against it.

The “vibes” imply that promises are decoupled from behavior and that action is discounted to nothingness.

Unfortunately, this pathology has now spread from sea to shining sea. I believe much of it traces back to California, which perfected a kind of virtue-signaling politics in which theatrical performances of caring about housing gradually became more important than the actual construction of housing. The game plan is now visible across the country, and our bluest cities are suffering the results: soaring costs, declining affordability, and an exodus of working- and middle-class residents from some of the nation’s most productive places.

It happens as it did in Marblehead: cities issue declarations about housing crises while banning lower-cost missing middle housing on most residential land. Officials praise the working-class humans they ostensibly serve—teachers, firefighters, and young families—while ensuring those groups cannot afford to live nearby.

THE ROLE OF COLLAPSING MEDIA AND ENGAGEMENT

The reason Marblehead-style vibes-based planning persists is that our ecosystem rewards it.

First, relatively few people understand zoning and land-use policy closely enough to recognize the sabotage when it occurs. There is a significant knowledge gap.

Second, collapsing local media environments often amplify these vibes-based narratives and seem largely incurious about how things work or about actual outcomes. It is easier to write about intentions than to hold leaders accountable for things like permitting times. It is easier to demagogue builders than to understand how minimum lot sizes and single-family zoning destroy opportunity for the least privileged among us. It also hurts that too many young journalists are anti-business (even anti-capitalist) inclined, predisposing them to fall hook, line, and sinker for these pre-packaged NIMBY storylines.

Third, participatory planning processes lack filtering mechanisms to distinguish between civic concern and organized obstructionism. Meetings become dominated by activists with the time, wealth, and political fluency to resist newcomers while still framing themselves as defenders of the public good.

In this environment, a politician can simply claim “I care about affordable housing” and receive applause from residents who are actively fighting affordable housing. Local media will usually be on call to applaud both.

In this ecosystem, no homes need to be built. No contradictions need to be resolved.

And that’s the problem.

BORN-AGAIN YIMBYISM

After half a century of this charade, people are understandably frustrated.

This is the core point of dissatisfaction that was the genesis of the YIMBY movement, now more than a decade old. What began in places like the Bay Area was not originally an ideological project as much as a reaction against obvious and overwhelming civic hypocrisy. Young citizens started attending hearings simply to point out that cities claiming to support affordability were systematically preventing it.

Modica’s comments fit squarely within that tradition.

Urbanist writer Nolan Gray later observed that:

A plurality of YIMBY practice remains this simple: show up, expose nonsense. That’s it. Often, the expose is as simple as rebroadcasting the preposterous things NIMBYs say in their lightly attended meetings. Just repeat it. Republish it. More often than not, the statements are so outlandish—as they were in Marblehead—that no further analysis or commentary is needed.

BULLSHITTING IS A SIN

Modica himself later clarified the deeper point behind his remarks: “Any moment we spend bullshitting each other is just a sin.”

That may be the most accurate summary of the modern housing crisis ever spoken into a municipal microphone.

Over the next decade, there will be many more David Modicas, especially in regions where YIMBYism is still politically young, including much of the American South, where the national YIMBYtown conference heads this November.

As I head to Congress for the New Urbanism, I keep returning to the same conclusion: YIMBYism and New Urbanism are not opposing movements but two sides of the same coin.

YIMBYism asks whether we are willing to allow enough housing to exist. New Urbanism asks whether that housing will be lovable, walkable, durable, and humane.

YIMBYism answers whether housing should be allowed. New Urbanism answers what kind of housing should be built.

America needs both.

Many of the reforms now associated with YIMBYism—legalizing apartments, reducing parking mandates, allowing mixed-use neighborhoods, permitting incremental infill—were core New Urbanist fights decades before the term YIMBY existed.

The tragedy is that America once routinely built such beautiful workforce housing at scale. The modern “vibes-based planning” system is not preserving this tradition. It is preserving the regulatory abandonment of this tradition.

The false choice between quantity and quality has done enormous damage. Too many people now assume that abundant housing must inevitably be soulless housing, or that beautiful urbanism can only exist in expensive enclaves preserved for the wealthy.

But history says otherwise. Some of the most beloved neighborhoods in America were built as ordinary housing for ordinary people: triple-deckers in New England, courtyard apartments in California, rowhouses in Baltimore, Charleston singles, modest main streets across the South, and thousands of small incremental urban buildings that are now—because of “vibes-based planning”—illegal to construct.

I refuse to acknowledge that good housing and abundant housing are mutually exclusive, and it is a hill I am willing to die on.

I know too many practitioners dedicated to building lower-cost housing beautifully to believe these goals are incompatible.

Fixing it simply requires more people who care and citizens willing to stand up to the bullshitting politicians who do not.

Thank you, Mr. Modica, for reminding us how simple it is to do that.

Sources:

1) WSJ

2) Nolan Gray

Every year, I’m reminded of something Rick Cole once said: “We need to put the congress back in The Congress.” What he meant, during his brief tenure as Executive Director of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), was simple: we need to bring 1,500 people with different values and viewpoints together and let them debate their way toward something better. We don’t have to agree on everything. The friction is the point. We just have to figure out how to do it all better.

At the CNU, I have met students desperate to learn the urbanism that their universities aren’t teaching. I’ve seen long-held beliefs about cities collapse in real time. I’ve watched exhausted city officials—fighting uphill battles at home—find the peers they need to push reforms forward. That’s not unusual at CNU. It’s the norm.

This year’s Congress will be held in Northwest Arkansas from May 12–16 (register here). It’s the 34th overall, and roughly the tenth I’ve attended. Here’s why I keep going:

No one is satisfied with how our cities are being built. Whether you’re anti-development or pro-market, something is off. There is plenty of resultant noise complaining about where we are, but it’s an infinitesimally small group of practitioners who choose to do the difficult work of figuring out how to fix our land-use, affordability, and placelessness predicaments. Those people gather once per year, at the CNU.

The Congress itself grew out of a movement that began more than 40 years ago, when a group of young activists—now mostly in their 70s—pushed back against sprawl-driven development. They saw rural land disappearing and cities hollowing out. More importantly, they understood that placelessness—development without any coherent purpose—was harming humanity.

Their solutions echoed Jane Jacobs: walkable streets, short blocks, small businesses, incremental growth. Four decades later, that framework still holds. The Congress reflects it—messy, diverse, and perpetually unresolved in the best of ways. People come to CNU to argue, test ideas, find partners, and move things forward.

The event draws talented practitioners from across the globe and blends lectures, workshops, and tours. I go to several urbanism conferences each year. The best offers the opportunity to see real projects and debate their execution with the people building them. They’ll be plenty of that at this year’s CNU.

Why Northwest Arkansas

Here are the three questions I’m most interested in exploring this year.

1 Can Greenways Curate Transit & Development?

Northwest Arkansas isn’t one city, but many—a fragmented metro not unlike my home region of Raleigh-Durham. One noticeable difference is the Razorback Greenway: a 50-plus-mile trail connecting Fayetteville to Bentonville, allowing residents to move through the entire region safely by bike.

More than just a southern greenway, on the Razorback development meets the trail. Unlike many greenways in North Carolina, this infrastructure isn’t physically set apart from daily life.

We covered greenway-oriented development at Southern Urbanism last year. What stands out in Northwest Arkansas is the lifestyle the bike infrastructure enables. You don’t expect this lifestyle when you are deep into the Ozarks, but you can bike to a bar. You can bike to a game. Or work. You can live largely without a car. In small instances, it feels weirdly like Amsterdam—and it’s still evolving. There’s clearly much more of this to come.

It looks very replicable. I am going to study how they pulled it off and hope North Carolina can follow suit.

2 Can Walmart do Urbanism?

I’m also looking forward to touring Walmart’s new corporate HQ, which is unexpectedly urban.

Last time I visited, it was still under construction. The symbol of Walmart building an urban HQ cannot be overstated. A company famously associated with a suburban business model seen as a threat to the place is now investing in placemaking for its employees and community.

For decades, Walmart’s headquarters mirrored its stores: utilitarian metal boxes. Now it’s building something different—not just a campus, but a mini city. They know that attracting top talent requires a better working environment. Greater Bentonville reflects that shift through a massive amount of philanthropy relative to its population of just 60,000. The Crystal Bridges Museum is probably the flagship of those investments, and it is the best museum in America you have never heard of. It is a cultural anchor largely underwritten by the Waltons.

Crystal Bridges includes a reconstructed Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home, allowing Arkansans to see, feel, and experience high design personally, and use it as inspiration for future building.

That matters. Wright’s Usonian vision didn’t fully deliver on affordability, but it evolved into the ranch house—the backbone of mid-century housing and a staple of affordability. I hope to get by the house again this visit and deepen my study of how we can build places that are both affordable and beautiful.

The great city of Bentonville is booming. Infill development is strong. More affordable missing-middle housing is appearing alongside high-end traditional design. There’s also a deep outdoor culture. Mountain biking, in particular, is everywhere. Last time there, I remembered seeing a family of five decked out in Trek mountain biking gear, rolling straight from downtown coffee shops to the exurban nature trails in less than 5 minutes. It’s part of daily life.

There is a philanthropic model in Northwest Arkansas that other small regions can follow.

The bigger question is what this means. Can our largest employers drive better human-scaled urban outcomes? Can our largest institutions underwrite the incremental development that often defines who we are? Can a company like Walmart actually help rebuild small-town America?

3 How can regions build their townbuilder ecosystems?

Northwest Arkansas may have more urban design and development talent per capita than anywhere in the country.

I’ve worked closely with architect Allison (Alli) Quinlan, developer Ward Davis, and (former) city councilman Matthew Petty across a range of projects. All have successfully developed in the region. Their work will be visible throughout the Congress.

Alli Quinlan is one of the most talented urbanists under 40. As a landscape architect, she has shaped the region’s greenways and led key procedural reforms.

Ward Davis, with whom I served on the board of the National Town Builders Association, has delivered multiple new towns and significant infill work. He’s also a primary host of this year’s Congress.

When Matthew Petty was a Fayetteville city councilman, he helped implement what I think is the best tactical urbanism program in the country.

Conclusion

If you care about building better cities—and want to meet people doing the work—you should be in Northwest Arkansas this May.

Your first Congress is always mind-blowing. It shows how many others are pushing against a system that resists reform and good design at every turn. It is where these fighters congregate and share notes.

My advice? Get there. You won’t be disappointed.

Twelve years ago today, Kim-Mai Cutler published “How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained).”

Part flag-planting and part manifesto, it became a seminal work for the YIMBY movement and, in many ways, the first shot in the long war to reclaim American cities for the people.

Today, the piece is especially relevant to North Carolina.
Three points stand out in particular:

1. The article explains San Francisco’s severe housing shortage as the result of decades of restrictive policies and highly organized NIMBY opposition. North Carolina is earlier in that same cycle, but the political dynamics are already visible in local land use debates across the Triangle.

2. San Francisco’s crisis was driven by a shrinking supply of market-rate housing as rules limited where and how homes could be built. North Carolina is seeing similar constraints emerge through the expansion of HOA-restricted suburbia and zoning protected single-family only neighborhoods, even as demand continues to grow.

3. Over time, these systems reward homeowners who benefit from limited supply and rising home values. That creates consistent pressure to oppose new housing, especially in established neighborhoods. California took this dynamic to an extreme, but the same pressures are present here, and without clear policy direction North Carolina risks following the same path.

The proper housing policy response in the Triangle today is the same as it was in San Francisco then: pragmatic, frustrated, and relentlessly focused on supply and accountability.

Many of the early wins by YIMBYs were accomplished by simply publishing the exclusionary—and often factually inaccurate—arguments made by NIMBY groups like Livable California during their policy calls. This kind of citizen journalism is only just beginning in the South, and it is long overdue. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant.

In North Carolina, the YIMBY movement is growing for the same reasons it did in California. Young people face intense housing pressure.

Housing determines whether people can stay in the communities they care about, build stability, or plan what comes next. When housing doesn’t work, nothing else really does either.

When housing is unstable or out of reach, everything else becomes harder to hold onto. People take longer to settle, stay in shared or temporary situations longer than they planned, or leave places they would have otherwise invested in. Starting a business, changing careers, or putting down roots all begin to feel riskier when the foundation is uncertain.

This is not an abstract policy debate. It is a response to lived experience. More people are recognizing that the rules shaping housing are not neutral, and that changing them is the only way to create choice and real stability.

NIMBYism is backed by trillions of dollars in U.S. home equity and by non-representative groups of homeowners who are deeply invested in protecting scarcity. But that advantage is no match for younger North Carolinians who are trying to build stable lives in the places they care about. They are living with the consequences of this system every day, and they are not going to accept it indefinitely. I choose to bet on those young people.

Kim-Mai Cutler fired the first shot in this war twelve years ago today.

The piece starts in the middle of the chaos, but stay with it. Cutler connects the protests, the politics, and the underlying housing shortage into a clear explanation of how a crisis like this gets built over time.

Read it with North Carolina in mind.

How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)

The Santa Clara Valley was some of the most valuable agricultural land in the entire world, but it was paved over to create today’s Silicon Valley. This was simply the result of bad planning and layers of leadership failure — nobody thinks farms literally needed to be destroyed to create the technology industry’s success.

Today, the tech industry is apparently on track to destroy one of the world’s most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco, by pushing out the diverse people who have helped create it. At least that’s the story you’ve read in hundreds of articles lately.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so that everyone who wants to be here, can.

The alternative — inaction and self-absorption — very well could create the cynical elite paradise and middle-class dystopia that many fear. I’ve spent time looking into the city’s historical housing and development policies. With the protests escalating again, I am pretty tired of seeing the city’s young and disenfranchised fight each other amid an extreme housing shortage created by 30 to 40 years of NIMBYism (or “Not-In-My-Backyard-ism”) from the old wealth of the city and down from the peninsula suburbs.

Here is a very long explainer. Sorry, this isn’t a shorter post or that I didn’t break it into 20 pieces. If you’re wondering why people are protesting you, how we got to this housing crisis, why rent control exists or why tech is even shifting to San Francisco in the first place, this is meant to provide some common points of understanding.

This is a complex problem, and I’m not going to distill it into young, rich tech douchebags-versus-helpless old ladies facing eviction. There are many other places where you can read that story.

It does us all no justice.

1) First off, understand the math of the region. San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then 172,000 units of the city’s 376,940 housing units are under rent control. (That’s about 75 percent of the city’s rental stock.)

Homeowners have a strong economic incentive to restrict supply because it supports price appreciation of their own homes. It’s understandable. Many of them have put the bulk of their net worth into their homes and they don’t want to lose that. So they engage in NIMBYism under the name of preservationism or environmentalism, even though denying in-fill development here creates pressures for sprawl elsewhere. They do this through hundreds of politically powerful neighborhood groups throughout San Francisco like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers.

Then the rent-controlled tenants care far more about eviction protections than increasing supply. That’s because their most vulnerable constituents are paying rents that are so far below market-rate, that only an ungodly amount of construction could possibly help them. Plus, that construction wouldn’t happen fast enough — especially for elderly tenants.

So we’re looking at as much as 80 percent of the city that isn’t naturally oriented to add to the housing stock.

Oh, and tech? The industry is about 8 percent of San Francisco’s workforce.

Then if you look at the cities down on the peninsula and in the traditional heart of Silicon Valley, where home-ownership rates are higher, it’s even worse.

The Google Bus protesters have said that the company should build housing on its campus, but the Mountain View city council has explicitly forbidden Google from doing just that. They’ve argued that it’s to protect the city’s burrowing owl population. (The city council even created a feral cat taskforce last week to protect the owls.)

Even more mind-bogglingly, Mountain View is discussing new office development that would bring as many as 42,550 office workers to the city. But the city’s zoning plan only allows for a maximum of 7,000 new homes by 2030.

Then, if you look at the job-to-housing ratios in some of the other peninsula cities like Palo Alto, it’s pretty terrible. Palo Alto voters just killed an affordable housing development for seniors by ballot measure last November.

So the wealthy voting classes of the peninsula are also strangling themselves of housing too. The median rent in Mountain View is $2,700 compared to $3,400 in San Francisco, according to Zillow. Once you factor in the cost of owning a car — estimated at slightly more than $9,000 a year by the AAA — it’s not that much cheaper.

If you look even closer to the Caltrain stations, rents go way up. The newly-opened Madera complex in downtown Mountain View rents out 1-bedroom units starting at $3,299 all the way up to 2-bedroom apartments at $8,000 per month.

Certain cities like Menlo Park seem more collaborative. Facebook partnered with developer St. Anton Partners to build a 394-unit complex within walking distance of its Menlo Park headquarters. But that’s 394 units for a company with more than 6,000 employees.

So one contributor to the tech industry’s spread into San Francisco is that the peninsula cities are more than happy to vote for jobs, just not homes.

2) Why is the tech industry migrating to cities anyway?

This is a demographic shift that is much larger than the technology industry itself — although there are some tech-specific reasons that have fueled a migration north from the historic heart of Silicon Valley over the last 10 years.

This is what urbanist Alan Ehrenhalt calls “The Great Inversion,” a major shift where cities and suburbs have traded places over the last 30 to 40 years. As people marry later and employment becomes more temporal, young adults and affluent retirees are moving into the urban core, while immigrants and the less affluent are moving out.

San Francisco’s population hit a trough around 1980, after steadily declining since the 1950s as the city’s socially conservative white and Irish-Catholic population left for the suburbs. Into the vacuum of relatively cheaper rents they left behind, came the misfits, hippies and immigrants that fomented so many of San Francisco’s beautifully weird cultural and sexual revolutions.

But that out-migration reversed around 1980, and the city’s population has been steadily rising for the last 30 years.

This is a phenomenon that’s happening to cities all over the United States.

It’s happening in Seattle, Atlanta, New York City, Boston and Washington. D.C.:

The full article continues at https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

On a mundane set in Pittsburgh, a man in a cardigan rehearsed a revolution so gentle most people missed it.

Fred Rogers, who would have turned 98 last Friday, never spoke of zoning codes or land-use reform. Yet, through Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he offered a vision of society that stands in opposition to the exclusionary instincts that define so much of modern housing politics.

The program’s premise was deceptively simple: a neighborhood where everyone is welcome. In today’s terms, this is the moral foundation of the “Yes In My Backyard” movement—a belief that access to place should not be restricted by fear of change or people who are different.

Where contemporary debates are couched in the language of supply constraints and regulatory reform, Rogers made the argument culturally. He treated inclusion not as a policy lever, but as a social norm. The result was a generation that deeply understood that when new people arrive, communities flourish. This core lesson is now playing out in today’s debates between scarcity thinkers and abundance thinkers.

Rogers’ ethos was embedded in the physical world he constructed. His neighborhood was unmistakably Pittsburgh, with rolling hills, beautiful small homes, mixed uses, and pride. In the spirit of Jane Jacobs, doors opened directly onto streets; encounters were frequent and unplanned.

Long before debates over “missing middle” housing or walkability indices, Rogers presented a place where proximity was not a problem to be solved, but the very point of living together. “Euclidean” suburban use separations had no place on this show. Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood resembled, in miniature, the kind of environment urbanists now spend careers attempting to relegalize.

Just as notable was his resistance to grandiosity. At a time when American development increasingly tilted toward large-scale interventions, whether suburban expansion or urban renewal, Rogers modeled a different approach. Change, in his world, was incremental, unfolding through small acts: a conversation, a cup of tea, or a moment of recognition. This sensibility mirrors a growing critique within planning circles that the most resilient urban environments are perpetually changing and iterative, coming into being through the steady accumulation of modest, human-scale decisions. In this sense, Rogers was not merely depicting a neighborhood; he was illustrating the traditional process of building one.

Underlying it all was a consistent prioritisation of dignity over status. There was no sense that some were more deserving of space than others. This stands in contrast to contemporary land-use politics, where the preservation of property values often operates as a proxy for exclusion. The radicalism of Rogers’ approach was to invert this logic: inclusion is what creates a place’s value.

What he offered was a moral argument. Fear, he suggested, narrows communities. Openness enlarges them. Scarcity, whether of attention or of housing, is as much a cultural construct as a material one. By repeatedly demonstrating that there was always space for another person or another perspective, he challenged the instinct to gatekeep our communities.

The modern YIMBY movement, for all its economic rigor, rests on a similar premise. Housing shortages are not merely technical failures; they are the product of collective choices about who belongs and who does not. Reforming zoning codes may increase supply, but sustaining that reform requires a deeper shift in values. It requires, in effect, a cultural permission to restructure society for growth.

In that respect, the cardigan was doing more work than it appeared. Rogers did not need to argue for density bonuses or by-right development. He was, instead, making the case that a good neighborhood is one that can absorb change without losing its humanity. That it can welcome newcomers without perceiving them as threats. That it can grow, organically, while remaining recognisably itself.

For a movement often caricatured as technocratic or developer-driven, this is a useful reminder. The case for saying “yes” is not only about units and yields. It is about the kind of society those units make possible. Rogers understood that intuitively. He built, within the confines of a television studio, a place where belonging was abundant and fear was gently disarmed.

We could all benefit from living more in his image.

On March 13, 2006, while on spring break, the team hired a local stripper, who accused them of rape, setting off a media and social frenzy that monopolized Durham and SportsCenter for 13 long and painful months.

During those tense times, the Trinity Park neighborhood (where I live) and the university consumed themselves by throwing the student-athletes under the bus, while the wider community reacted with a frenzied groupthink worthy of Lord of the Flies.

Only later did we all realize, at unprecedented cost, that the whole thing was a salacious hoax.

In 2024, the accuser admitted in interviews that she had fabricated the allegations. After lawsuits were settled, “The Lacrosse House,” as it became known, was demolished, and I built the house that replaced it (with an unusual process, which you can read about here).

Today, I do not care to rehash the facts of the case or my redevelopment project. Instead, I want to talk about what our community learned from the case, during the ensuing decades of repair—and why I am concerned that we have learned nothing at all.

Defining the Cultural Underpinnings

It’s hard to remember now, but this political movement, which would dominate national politics and media ten years later, barely had a name in 2006. Identitarian politics had long been simmering in college towns, but hadn’t yet exploded onto the national stage. The Duke Lacrosse case revealed how susceptible narrative-driven institutions are to abandoning truth. These politics are colloquially captured by the irritatingly controversial term “woke.”

In my view, the Duke Lacrosse case was the first shot in these Woke Wars.

Before articulating my own frustrations and before we get back to the events as they unfolded, it helps to give some background on how we got here, particularly the academy’s role in creating the ecosystem that allow these events to flourish.

Let’s first define the term “woke” through the meanings offered by cultural critics and popular journalists. There is some commonality across the political spectrum, and virtually all now use the term pejoratively.

On the liberal-leaning side:

• Matt Yglesias described the social-justice ideology dominant among educated urban progressives, especially in media and academia, as “The Great Awokening.”

• In Woke Racism, John McWhorter defined “woke” as a belief system resembling a religion that treats disparities as evidence of systemic oppression that, in turn, requires ideological conformity.

• Sam Harris, in a blog post Can We Pull Back From The Brink, expressed frustration with “the bad-faith arguments, the double standards, the goal-post shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces… the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced.”

Conservatives, meanwhile, focus their definitions on the hierarchical but ostensibly equal relationship between victimhood and the elites claiming dominion over the victims:

• Douglas Murray in The Madness of Crowds saw woke as identity politics where moral authority flows from victimhood status.

• Andrew Sullivan, in America’s New Religions (among others), argued that woke is a progressive ideology centered on structural oppression and moral purification, using language and social enforcement, with conformity viciously enforced by the threat of cancellation.

Our College Towns’ Inevitable Role

With all of these definitions rooted in postmodern intersectionality, this problem was always going to be centered in college towns. Cultural critic Freddie deBoer argued that the woke ideology emerging from elite universities fuses critical theory, anti-racism frameworks, and identity politics. All the ingredients—crock-potting and soon to explode in our story—are there.

Now, Duke isn’t the most activist of campuses (I reserve that title for UC-Berkeley and the University of Michigan), but Durham is an activist town. It is populated with outlier people advocating for this and that—some good, some bad, but always loud. At times, loud voices from the town and gown combine to flywheel each other.

I have personally witnessed wokeness split the progressive party into constructive and destructive wings. Obama once quipped that he “came from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party” (often poeticized as “the progressive wing of the progressive party”), implying that there is a regressive wing, too, and he ain’t that.

Much of our local political scene in Durham follows the same divide: liberal vs. left, forward-moving progress vs. a kind that, at times, seems determined to burn the city to the ground just so it can rule over the ashes. That latter variant is that regressive wing.

Mike Nifong, Durham’s District Attorney prosecuting the accused lacrosse players, understood that the accuser’s story fit this narrative the moment he saw it. And once a narrative becomes politically useful, evidence becomes inconvenient. In Durham, DAs are elected, and, as fate would have it, Nifong was in a contested primary. Weak and spineless, Nifong bought the accuser’s story hook, line, and sinker. He appeared less a leader of the cult than a useful idiot to be weaponized, which he was.

For Durham, the Judiciary was supposed to be the last line of decency’s defense. When his office fell, Nifong plunged the university, the city, and all of its residents into 13 months of hell.

“There’s no doubt a sexual assault took place,” Nifong famously declared — a statement worthy of disbarment, which eventually came in June of 2007.

For Nifong, truth was dismissed as inconsistent with the narrative. Due process be damned. His legacy is now forever cemented as a public servant who sought to enforce ideological conformity through cancellation.

To hell with the truth, he effectively said. That’s woke.

As the product of seven (yes, 7) college towns and the son of two PhDs, I get this ideology. I don’t approve of it, but I get it. When you are raised in Chapel Hill and Ann Arbor, you absorb the steady, canonical proselytization that businesspeople are unimpeachably bad, intellectuals are unimpeachably good, and this black-and-white thinking governs most discourse. It’s an easy way to make sense of the world, which makes it attractive, I guess, even if it’s not true.

Reality, of course, is more nuanced: we’re all horrifically messed up, and we all have good and bad in our hearts. Wokeness permits no such nuance. Which is why reasoned people find it childish.

The Powder Keg

Back to the spring of 2006, you can now understand how wokeness in Durham was a powder keg just waiting to be lit. The gunpowder was this toxic, yet-to-be-named ideology, lurking just below the surface.

From an oppressor vs. oppressed worldview, the Duke Lacrosse story could not have been more perfectly scripted. It was:

White versus Black.

Rich versus Poor.

North versus South.

Gown versus Town.

20 years ago, the fuse was lit. Journalists (long suckers for the aforementioned narrative) immediately poured fuel on the fire. It’s as if they said, “Aha! This is what we’ve been told is true. This is what we’ve been waiting for. We must now act to tell others about this truth.”

In this environment, privilege was synonymous with guilt. There was simply no universe in which the wealthy kids could be telling the truth and the poorer woman could be lying. I vividly remember the vibe—you could feel in the air in Trinity Park— how badly some people wanted the story to be true.

Except it wasn’t.

After years of civil rights litigation, it appears that the exonerated players each walked away with roughly $20 million (some say more). William Cohan’s book The Price of Silence put Duke’s total costs above $100 million. The city spent nearly $4 million in legal fees defending against claims of Nifong’s misconduct.

The financial toll was staggering, but the cultural damage was far worse: a collapse in trust in the judicial system, trust in the DA’s office, Duke’s administration, the academy, and—for me, the biggest blow—trust in the media.

Before Nifong became the last line of defence, a functioning fourth estate (journalism) should have acted as a watchdog and held leaders accountable. It didn’t do either of these things.

Instead of bringing a firehose to a dumpster fire, media institutions poured gas on the flames. Headlines everywhere presumed guilt: Nancy Grace quipped, “I’m so glad they didn’t miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape!” Newsweek ran a cover that said “Sex, Lies and Duke.” The INDY Week repeatedly framed the case in terms of race and privilege, then endorsed Nifong for DA. The Duke faculty “Group of 88” publicly thanked protesters waving “castrate” signs and “wanted” posters of the players. For many, watching academics (also members of the fourth estate, in my view) publish emotionally charged political conclusions without evidence was the last straw.

What Have We Learned?

Twenty years later, did any of the offending groups learn their lesson?

I fear they have not. Fringy activists still dominate public discourse with the same us-versus-them narratives, ready to blow off with the next hair-trigger issue of the day.

But why? I suspect, in part, it is because in America — and especially in college towns — we practice a brand of politics that treats all voices as equally valid. For people who struggle to be heard in their personal and professional lives, the public microphone is always on. For others, who identify as radicals or revolutionaries, the public square can feel like the only place to be heard. And because political discourse is predominantly about land use, these days, people simply go to where the puck is. The default script mirrors the same lazy 2006 formula. It is built on othering and demagoguery, only recalibrated for today’s politics: “them = oppressor”, “builder = bad”, “me = victim”, yada yada.

And, critically, a common denominator of all of this is a lack of recourse. Lack of responsibility. A public speaker libeling a builder has nothing more to lose than a tenured professor who demands that his student admit to crimes he didn’t commit. A recourse-free world is one without the guardrails of decency. This means that the ideology and systems that fueled the Duke Lacrosse case 1) still exist and 2) are now overrepresented in land-use politics.

Remarkably, it’s not that many people. In today’s world, it doesn't take more than a dozen reckless and irresponsible people to really screw up a city, particularly when a few of those are in power.

Unfortunately, local media still regularly amplifies these voices, repackaging the powder keg for a new generation. I am certain it will go off again. This is a culture that collectively inverted the rules — starting with truth itself. It has now been 20 years, and I see no evidence that it ever fully reverted back.

In 2026, most of the country has moved on from woke and all its varied definitions. Our current president rode into office on the coattails of the backlash. Most now see woke for what it is: a dead-end ideology. I think that if you can't learn from the trainwreck of the Lacrosse case, and still can’t learn from Donald Trump’s election, then you don’t want to learn. And you never will.

It’s on sincere and good-hearted progressives, then, to sever these uneducable elements from the party. Otherwise, “blueness” will never be viable at the (southern) state level or nationally. Instead, blueness will forever stay fenced off in college towns — exactly as Jesse Helms once suggested. Except now it is the hard-core identitarians from inside the house who are building the fence. And, by handcuffing itself to the woke wing, Obama’s progressive wing of the progressive party is chaining itself to the prisoners building their own prison. That’s a tough strategy to win on. It certainly won’t play in Peoria. Or Pamlico.

So long as that Jesse Helms’s fence remains, expect more Duke Lacrosse debacles, more pre-baked media narratives fanning the flames, and more college towns sabotaged for the benefit of the woke.

Lessons to Carry Forward

The events of the Duke Lacrosse case are ancient history for many now — most kids at Duke today were not even born in 2006. But the effects linger. And the lessons should never be forgotten, as they remain relevant today. The same vibes-based politics that created the Duke Lacrosse Case continue to shape (and undermine) land-use policy.

I will close with the two things I have learned, which perhaps can chart a better way forward:

Never give power to people who shirk accountability. Power without responsibility is disastrous. That’s exactly what happened when the DA went rogue, local editors piled on, Duke’s leaders dismissed due process, and the media failed to guardrail the prevailing crazy. The Lacrosse case spiraled out of control because the bad actors believed 1) they would personally gain by piling on, and 2) there would be no consequences if things went awry. Nifong thought he was doing God’s work. So did Nancy Grace. So did the Group of 88. They saw themselves as superior. To feel superior, they needed scapegoats. And when it all came crashing down, and the bills came due (for the city’s taxpayers and Duke’s donor class), they vanished like Keyser Söze.

Get—and keep—those who shirk responsibility out of power. Don’t elect them. If you did, throw them out. Don’t support them. If you do, stop. A decent society must limit the opportunities for narcissists to harm decent people through abuse of bad-faith activism and self-congratulatory media.

Those two solutions, while not easy, are that simple. Because in 2006, had any one of these guardrails worked, none of this nonsense would have happened.

Twenty years later, the only question left is: have we learned anything?

(Keywords for SEO: Duke Lacrosse 20 years, Duke Lacrosse hoax anniversary, woke Durham, get woke go broke, Durham NIMBY, participatory planning)

More reading:

A friend of mine, Rick Cole, recently posted a reflection on credentialism that resonated deeply with me. It put clear language to something many of us who work in housing and city-building experience firsthand but struggle to articulate:

Too many land-use decisions today are driven not by judgment, experience, or outcomes—but by résumé suffixes.

Credentialism is the belief that a person’s authority flows primarily from licenses, degrees, or institutional affiliations rather than from intelligence, lived experience, tacit knowledge, or demonstrated competence. In housing and planning, credentialism has become a quiet but dangerous force. Our cities are too often governed by JDs, PhDs, and AICPs who have never designed a building or site plan, never pulled a permit, balanced a pro forma, or tried to make a project work in the real world.

Many credentialed professionals are thoughtful, ethical, and effective public servants. But credentialism—especially when paired with inexperience bordering on incompetence—too often produces something far worse: abuse of process, moral arrogance, and policy cruelty disguised as expertise. In these cases:

CREDENTIALISM + INCOMPETENCE → NARCISSISM + PSYCOPATHY

Rick Cole frames this problem through the most important unresolved conflict in American urbanism: Robert Moses versus Jane Jacobs—the heavy-handed, top-down technocrat versus the grassroots journalist-observer. The credentialed staffer versus the people.

Rick Cole’s Statement

In December, Rick published this statement on LinkedIn:

Robert Moses was the credentialed expert whose prescription for New York City was bent on destroying its street life and urban vitality. Jane Jacobs was a journalist appalled at the cruel and misguided bulldozing of neighborhoods to be replaced by sterile and car-centric “development.”

65 years later, even professional city planning “experts” have largely come around to some version of Jacobs’ critique, although few cities have actually embraced their own assets of streetlife, local entrepreneurs, placemaking and rebalancing transportation away from cars. It’s unfortunately true that her lament of thirty years after the publication of her masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that “Anticity planning remains amazingly sturdy in American cities . . . embodied in thousands of regulations and codes, also in bureaucratic timidities owing to accepted practices and in unexamined public attitudes hardened by time” -- is still true!

Expertise is valuable, but it needs to be anchored in the timeless ways of building human habitat and grounded in the clear-eyed observation of what actually is working and promoting more of it.

Jacobs was a profound thinker, but no idealogue. We need less lip service to her legacy and more courage to reform our embedded regulations and codes and unleash the creative energy of small-scale innovation and vitality.

Pasadena’s Zoning Code is nearly 300,000 words, nearly as voluminous as Tolstoy’s classic tome, War and Peace. It’s visionary goals are undercut by decades of layered regulations that are often vague, inconsistent or counter-productive (sometimes all three).

Let’s emulate Jacobs’ practice of rigorous criticism of the ignorance, folly and timidity of so much current “city planning” and end the rule of cars -- and make cities for people!

Cole’s argument is not anti-expertise. It is anti-detached expertise—it is against centralized authority divorced from observation, practice, and accountability. Perhaps credentials are now used as an excuse not to do the work that so desperately needs to be done.

LATTER DAY CREDENTIAL ABUSE

I have watched AICP-certified “urban” planners defend parking mandates that induce suburban development. I have watched public servants quietly advise residents on how to stop projects that were still pending hearings they themselves would later preside over. I have watched ostensibly neutral planning commissioners orchestrate FOIA ambushes days before consequential votes with the express intent of destroying political dissenters’ reputations. I have watched CNU-A–certified planners advocate against nearly everything the Charter for the New Urbanism stands for.

Credentialism is the belief that a person’s authority flows primarily from licenses, degrees, or institutional affiliations rather than from intelligence, lived experience, tacit knowledge, or demonstrated competence.

Today’s Credentialism is not theoretical. It is formulaic. It is tactical. It is the smoke under which bad-faith people conduct their bad-faithery. It converts the power of public process into moral authority. And, these days, it is corrosive. At this point in my career, I see someone with an AICP credential as a red flag. Why? Because I have just personally seen too many instances of bad behavior by those with that AICP credential.

THE COLLEGE TOWN CREDENTIAL CONUNDRUM

Why has it gotten so bad? As progressivism matured, it has increasingly relied on the academy for its intellectual spine. Few institutions fetishize credentials more than academia. Power is gated behind degrees; before the PhD, you are labor, often poorly paid, serving the PhD. Afterward, you are granted authority. Elite institutions run on a culture of “kiss up, kick down”. The credential becomes not merely evidence of training, but a mechanism of exclusion whose value depends on minimizing the legitimacy of those without it.

That helps explain why so many of the loudest NIMBY voices happen to possess doctorates, which—often hilariously—always seem to be in fields entirely unrelated to housing, construction, or land use. “I have a PhD,” we are told—in something like ethnopharmacology or literary theory—“so let me explain zoning to you.”

In Jane Jacobs’ mid-century, credentialism was simpler. Being white and male was the primary ticket. Being Ivy League all but assured power. Yale University provided Robert Moses with institutional cover as he amassed extraordinary power through manipulation rather than competence. Conversely, Jane Jacobs ultimately prevailed not because she had credentials, but because she observed clearly, reasoned honestly, and told the truth—publicly.

Today’s credentialism is more fragmented and more aggressively abused. In public meetings, identity, academic status, nonprofit affiliation, and even poverty itself are treated as unimpeachable credentials. I have watched local NIMBY campaigns recruit speakers almost entirely for the optics of their credentials. I have watched public-housing residents handed scripts to slander builders they had never met. I have watched a PhD inserted 195 weeks into a 200-week reform process and encouraged to offer “expert testimony” to demand a full engagement reset, so a research agenda could be built on postponement. I have watched nonprofit housing leaders oppose housing because the social rewards of “good vibes” outweighed the obligation to build homes.

Such is credentialism in the modern age.

Each credential becomes a shield. And each shield becomes a veto. Debate ends, not because the argument is wrong, but because the speaker is deemed to be above critique. In these cases, credentialism is played as a trump card. And for housing obstructors, then, the goal is to flood the field with trump cards.

This is the Moses playbook, updated for the credential age.

The solution is not to reject expertise. It is to demand accountability from experts.

HOW DO WE FIX THIS?

Credential-issuing institutions—from the academy to the Congress for the New Urbanism to the American Planning Association—must have clear, transparent, and frequently used hearing procedures to strip credentials from those who abuse them.

If the academy never expels anyone, why should anyone trust the academy? And if the many narcissists among us are made aware that credentials are a path to power, and there is no consequence for abuse of that power, won't they be naturally attracted to the no-cost nature of credential procurement?

If professional organizations certify people who openly violate their own stated principles—and never act to apply recourse for such behavior—then credentials become meaningless business-card ornaments. That’s on the credential-granting organizations and their good-faith members to defend.

Jane Jacobs did not win because she was anti-expert. She won because she was right—and because she was willing to challenge authority without institutional permission.

The problem isn’t that expertise is overrated. It’s that we’ve stopped demanding competence from experts.

How the hell did Vince pull this off?

This is the densest detached single-family development I have ever seen.

I was recently working on a project modeled on Vince Graham’s remarkable Earl’s Court in Mount Pleasant. On just 1.3 acres, they built 27 homes ranging from 1,100 to 2,400 square feet. It sits right at the entrance to the city’s Old Village, transitioning seamlessly from historic fabric into new housing that you’d swear has been there for a century.

For those mathing at home, the project is over 20 homes per acre in a detached single-family form. Which is unprecedented—especially when you consider that the site also includes a renovated historic structure for art galleries and future space for a 23-room boutique inn and restaurant.

This density is natural to Charleston but new to the rest of the South. Building this tight requires taste, architectural skill, and a developer stubborn enough to insist on doing it right.

That’s precisely what Earl’s Court had.

Today I want to talk about what I see as the simple but unobvious reason why all this works.

Last week I called the lead architect, Phil Clarke. We talked through the site’s mechanics: how tight it is, how parking and utilities were handled, how fire access was solved, and how they made it all fit without it feeling forced.

But what struck me most were Phil’s secondary facades. Many of them are barely visible unless you walk the site. And yet they were all thoughtfully designed.

I mentioned that to Phil because in nearly all other American residential developments today, only the front facade receives attention. If symmetry and trim appear at all, it's on the one facade facing the public realm (usually the street). The other three sides are afterthoughts. Windows drift, alignments disappear, and proportions loosen.

Why is it so good at Earl’s Court? Phil’s response was simple:

“All four sides are fronts.”

Meaning: we design all four sides. There are no afterthoughts here.

Read more

I got a chuckle out of the below AI development Twitter exchange last week.

Through the magic (/curse) of artificial intelligence, housing advocates are putting forth personal visions for the kinds of communities they want. One of the leaders here is Alicia Pederson, the Courtyard Urbanist, who has created a groundswell of support for building urban courtyard blocks with 3-6 story buildings surrounding a private or semi-private green. She has unleashed a cadre of people around the world, seeking to explore how their communities can be improved through the concept of courtyard housing. In this spirit, London New Liberals took a greenfield site and proposed what it could look like with new buildings built around courtyards. Then Ruben Hanssen, of The Aesthetic City, took his hack at making it better.

Johan Kurtz closed the loop by putting a church in the Ruben’s image, with his thesis implying (by my reading) that shared values 1) expand the size of the community in which we want to live, and 2) are critical to successfully pulling off these larger courtyard-type projects.

This is accelerated iteration in the modern age.

4 EVOLUTIONS

The full 4 evolutions are here:

THE HUMANS BEHIND COURTYARD PLACEMAKING

I had the honor of grabbing breakfast with Alicia last time I was in Chicago. She is professionalizing her advocacy, and I think she is a rising star in both the urbanist and abundance circles. I know Ruben from being a guest on his podcast, and I hope to attend his summer school in the coming years.

I do not know the others, but I am delighted to witness how people from different corners of the globe can collaborate to iterate better placemaking. The internet mostly sucks, but this is the kind of exchange we hope to have in the rare moments it functions as it was meant to.

I could live in any of the three iterations, which are hands down better than what we build today throughout the American South.

I want to talk about one issue this process brought up for me, related to Ross Chapin’s Scale of Sociability.

SCALE OF SOCIALBILITY

Ross is the semi-famous author of the book Pocket Neighborhoods. In it, he defines the Scale of Sociability as the natural, small-group size at which humans most comfortably and effortlessly connect, interact, and build community. Typically, the scale operates best at around 6-10 households built in small clusters, sharing some sort of amenity. This group size fosters spontaneous interactions and encounters, without overwhelming its occupants.

If you know Ross’s developments, they are all clearly designed around this core principle. I have gotten to know Ross through the Congress for the New Urbanism, the Incremental Development Alliance, and through my work designing homes with Duke and the Faith-Based Housing Initiative. Just this Fall, Ross and I discussed whether and how these principles scale to other forms, such as missing middle housing or even urban high-rises.

Ross pointed out that you can still develop a scale of 6-10 households in a mid (or high) rise, it’s just that the shared amenity space might not be at ground level. And while theoretically possible, there are limited examples of this in the US. Instead, as things get bigger, they mostly lose their social scale.

Take a single-stair building for example. A single-stair midrise typically houses up to 24 homes (6 floors, 4 per floor), a scale beyond Ross’ definition of the Scale of Sociability. Now, such a building could be divided into two or three clusters (even vertically), with common spaces on floors 1, 3, and 6, including a common kitchen, music room, and rooftop garden, each with primary use rights for the smaller cluster of homes adjacent to it. That certainly is more complex than doing it at ground level with detached houses. It’s yet to be proven if the concept works as buildings grow towards the sky.

THE CHALLENGE WITH COURTYARD HOUSING

I love courtyard housing, in all its forms. Anyone who follows me knows that I have a small obsession with Barcelona’s Eixample, and the near-perfect urbanism that it creates. (The frickin thing was platted in 1857, which blows my mind.)

Despite the Eixample’s extraordinary efficiency, amalgamation effects, distributed ownership, support for storefront retail, and world-class architecture, there is one glaring critique: the courtyards just aren’t used that much. Most are relatively dead. Which feels shocking when you consider the Eixample is one of the densest neighborhoods in the developed world, at around 100,000 people per square mile.

Wouldn’t a dozen or so of these people, at any given time, want to use the courtyards to live their lives?

What's the problem? What isn’t working?

SCALE MATTERS

I suspect the issue with the Eixamples is that the courtyards are too big and lack community privacy, so they are not very comfortable to be in. I fear, for Alicia’s sake, that Ross’s scale might be the Achilles heel of Courtyard Urbanism. Certainly, future courtyards can and will be better programmed than those in Barcelona. Much has changed in the 175 years since Spain’s Isabelline Era, and there may be new, more effective ways to activate such spaces.

But it may also be true that having more than 10-12 households in a space just makes it feel uncontrolled and uncomfortable. Alicia’s larger courtyards may need to be divided into smaller spaces, such as small-block courtyard housing seen in CuldeSac or Los Angeles. While these smaller spaces lack development scale—and would make your institutional investor throw up in his mouth a little—they do deliver human scale.

Can that human scale be enlarged? I suspect it can, if the occupants have some commonality.

Much of my work now focuses on developing intentional micro-communities, which, as Nabeel Hamdi describes in his book Small Change, can be Communities of Culture, Communities of Place, Communities of Practice, Communities of Hobby, or Communities of Resistance.

Whether you live in a community of Lutherans, Serbians, Podcasters, Hobby Musicians, or Revolutionaries, it holds that the more you share common values and life practices, the larger your circle of trust, and thus the larger your Scale of Sociabilitycan be.

Which is why Johann Kurtz AI iteration works. He simply took Ruben’s nice courtyard and put a church in it. That’s it. I.e., the courtyard is cool, but the scale might be too large to work for a disaggregated community. But if the community is rooted around a civic building (in this case, a church, but it could be anything), then the limits of that scale can expand.

Why? The thesis is that if you know the people living around you, and you practice with them, pickleball with them, or pray with them, you are more likely to tolerate more of them than if you do not. Intention matters, and it has multiplier effects.

With commonality, the Scale of Sociability grows from, say, 6-10 to 15-25, or more. At which point the larger courtyards can start to flourish.

That commonality is key, and a big part of the next major innovations in real estate development will focus on unlocking value and increasing quality of life by building for specific intentional communities.

Until that happens, I am thrilled to watch Alicia’s Courtyard Urbanism grow, and Ross’s Pocket Neighborhood lessons continue to flourish. There is much to learn from all parties, and I suspect when (not if) Courtyard Urbanism explodes, it will be because it molds itself to the many lessons within Ross’ book.

It’s not clear how big housing communities can get before they start to break down. But until proven otherwise, Ross’ Scale of Sociability will remain the standard.

Aaron Lubeck

Aaron Lubeck is a designer, builder + developer with The Rocket Shop in Durham. He is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes, and a former adjunct at Duke University’s Nicholas School, where he lectured on sustainable home building. In 2012, Aaron developed Durham’s first net-zero-energy home, an infill project designed to fit seamlessly in its historic neighborhood.

Aaron’s more recent work focuses on zoning changes to facilitate the reconstruction of affordable housing markets, including local efforts to create Missing Middle codes. He recently served as faculty with Incremental Development Alliance in West Atlanta, training fledgling developers, and is host of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, a curated conversation with top new urbanist developers. He is the founder of Southern Urbanism, a non-profit dedicated to better city-building in the South. His twitter is @aaron_lubeck

The City of Durham unveiled a new Durham Rail Trail video on its YouTube channel on June 17, 2024. Like the proposed plan, the video is gold-plated.

The plan was produced by McAdams, one of North Carolina’s major civil engineering firms—responsible for many of the region’s big infrastructure projects.

The video shows what most of us already know (as this trail has been in planning for nearly a decade). The trail itself is relatively short. It runs from the downtown train station through West Village, loops through Pearl Mill Village, crosses Washington Street, and eventually turns east toward Old North Durham. One day, as the plan implies, it might circle around to Golden Belt, but that rail spur is still (lightly) active with a train or so a week serving a concrete mill.

It’s a beautiful plan—well-rendered, ambitious, and clearly expensive.

I don’t oppose the project. I’m glad to see it finally moving after years of delay. But I have to admit: the way this project has evolved runs counter to my values.

THE DELINQUENT CASE FOR INCREMENTALISM

As many of you know, I teach with the Incremental Development Alliance, and I believe cities grow best organically—through many small, steady steps rather than rare, massive, media-tailored ribbon-cuttings. Infrastructure, unfortunately, is almost always the latter kind. Governments tend to build in big, expensive bursts, while citizens tend to build smaller and smarter.

My fear with projects like this is that they skip the learning-as-you-go process. If we had simply cleared and paved the trail ten years ago, we’d have a decade of local life layered in by now: pop-up gardens, food stalls, maybe a café or two, and small homes along the edge. That would have been more Durham.

The McAdams plan is undeniably polished. I just worry it won’t feel like ours.
I hope I’m wrong. After all, the High Line in New York was a big, bold project—and yet it somehow captured its neighborhood’s spirit.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never believed The Durham Rail Trail is a transportation play. Though it is often pitched in public meetings as “transit”, the Rail Trail doesn’t connect major destinations; it winds through beautiful but relatively low-density neighborhoods. It’ll be an amenity, a very nice one at that, but it is not a commuter route, and I found it misleading when people pitched it as that.

WHERE’S THE BEEF / HOUSING?

What disappoints me most is that the city hasn’t pursued housing opportunities along the corridor—something I’ve been urging for years. Every time I’ve raised the issue in public forums, the conversation gets derailed by the usual reflexive slogans, all common nouns: gentrification, equity, affordability. In meeting after meeting, these words get thrown around as tools of obstruction, rarely (if ever) linked to specifics on how we actually do anything about those issues.

As a result, the corridor will mostly remain middle- to upper-end single-family housing, with a few working-class rentals, which will no doubt face accelerated knockdown pressure due to the lack of aggressive new housing construction in the area. It will be the latest death spiral of discourse in Durham- gentrification caused by people complaining about gentrification obstructing the very things that would lessen the existence of gentrification.

In Durham, we’ve inverted logic. And the inversion is leading to a worse city. How does it work? We’re told that adding housing displaces people, and that restricting housing somehow protects renters. Both claims are empirically false, but that’s the discourse we’re stuck in—and the broad acceptance of these inversions functionally means that no new housing will rise along this extraordinary corridor.

That’s a huge loss.

To understand what could have been, just look at Atlanta’s BeltLine: it took the ass end of abandoned industrial buildings and turned them into some of the South’s best urban development. It’s created thousands of new homes, new life, and a clear civic identity. It funded massive parks with district stormwater treatment, which they could afford thanks to new tax revenue from the dense, greenway-oriented development. It’s so successful that they’re now planning to add rail transit to it (which I think is a bad idea, but that’s another story).

After advocating for bike routes, incremental housing, and city action, I don’t see much hope for greenway-oriented development (GOD) in Durham. For those interested in understanding the potential of GOD, check out the series done by Southern Urbanism fellow Sonia Birla.

I AM STILL DREAMING

I am still stuck imagining what could have been: The American Tobacco Trail lined with pocket neighborhoods. And what could be: The Roxboro Rail Trail hosting Copenhagen-style courtyard cohousing. And a holy grail: An East Coast Greenway with little hospitality villages every 50 miles or so, hosting through-cyclists on their way from Key West to Canada with curated local experiences along the way.

But I’ve come to accept that my city isn’t built to think this way. People like me can design, propose, even build these places—but we’ll always be marching uphill against the forever war on some common noun.

In this world, transit and housing are destined to be separated. And housing is bound to be reduced, expensive, and disconnected.

Still, Durham deserves better—and maybe, just maybe, this trail will prove me wrong.

Here’s to the hope.

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That point landed with unusual clarity when NPR’s Scott Neuman posted a short Instagram video (below) in December explaining why builders keep targeting the top of the market. His framing was deceptively simple, using Monopoly to underscore the point. That point was that the game is rigged.

Entry-level homes—the kind that let people start—have been zoned out of existence through regulatory suffocation. This includes minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, discretionary approvals, and neighborhood veto points, among others.

When the rules forbid modest homes, the market doesn’t “fail”; it complies by building homes upmarket, for it has no other choice.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF COLLAPSE

In my view, the market for starter homes in America has largely collapsed. The consequences are not abstract. Starter homes are the on-ramp to the American Dream. When they disappear, so do the conditions generally required for forming families, having children, and investing in place. Homeownership is still one of the strongest predictors of long-term civic engagement. Discourage it, and you thin the social fabric that cities depend on.

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For years, whenever I passed through the Pacific Northwest, I carved out an hour with Alan Durning, the founder and long-time executive director of Sightline Institute—the gold standard for localized urbanism and housing advocacy. Few American think-tanks have had such a durable impact, and even fewer have done it without losing their soul.

Sightline is now more than 30 years old. It began as a climate and energy shop, but over time added deep competence in democracy reform, and housing and cities. What has always struck me is not its breadth but its discipline: Sightline is emphatically, almost stubbornly, local. It serves Cascadia—Northern California to Vancouver—and nowhere else. That is why it works. Localism matters.

WHICH GOT ME THINKING

Years ago, when I was sketching out what would become Southern Urbanism, I asked Alan whether he’d ever consider endorsing a Sightline Southeast. To be clear, I wasn't asking him to start something new, only to be the willing and acknowledged inspiration for it. The answer was polite but definitive: expansion would dilute the very thing that made Sightline effective. A brand can travel; a mission often cannot. He was right. And he still is.

The answer was “no”. Why? Because in grassroots advocacy, proximity matters.

Strong Towns, admirable as it is, illustrates the constraint. A national organisation can inspire. It can provoke. But it cannot embed, at least not like Sightline. Sightline succeeds precisely because it is embedded—marinated in the culture, politics, and geography unique to the Pacific Northwest. It belongs to its region in a way a nationwide touring lecture circuit never can.

Still, the South is starved for institutions that take cities seriously. But there is a huge problem. Our region has 150 million people—7.5 times the 20 million population Sightline serves—and nothing remotely comparable in scale, funding, or reputation. The South’s cultural map stretches from Washington, D.C. to El Paso—it is unruly, diverse, and harder to narrate. But the need is clearly there.

So, purely as a whiteboard exercise—and with full respect for Sightline, which has no interest in such expansion—here is what I believe a Sightline-style think-tank for the South could look like. If I ran it, these would be my idiosyncratic priorities:

1. Marry New Urbanism and YIMBYism

I am one of the few people who think that New Urbanism and YIMBYism are two sides of the same coin. And these seemingly disparate movements are actually the perfect yin and yang, because each thrives where the other struggles.

YIMBY groups are unmatched at legalising and producing more housing, but they tend to undervalue design and placemaking. New Urbanists are unmatched at quality and craft, but rarely achieve expansionary housing policy victories at scale. Partnership and alignment are obvious to me, and long overdue.

The young YIMBY organisers of today are brilliant and relentless, but they have not been trained to design and build places—only to legalise them. This is fixable. I would want to teach the YIMBYs urban design and architecture, not for the purpose of ornament but as the operating system for human flourishing. We would teach them how to develop these places, not through 3rd parties, but by themselves. Groups like the Incremental Development Alliance (where I am faculty) offer those trainings. These schools should be accelerated and offered at scale.

Ultimately, former New Urbanist Executive Director Rick Cole is right when he adamantly argued that quantity and quality in housing are not mutually exclusive. “Why not both?” he said.

Quantity and quality in housing are not mutually exclusive. “Why not both?”

A Sightline Southeast would exist to create abundant AND loved places.

2. Fix the Schools

Generation Z is brimming with people who want to work on cities. Almost none of the schools know how to teach them.

I personally have a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old fitting this description. They both want to build cities, and there are no obvious places to send them for training. All of the schools are deficient in some way.

Architecture programmes teach heroic modernism, yet few graduates can design a basic bungalow. Planning schools often avoid actual planning altogether, preferring sociology and Marxist theory to the simple craft of drawing, well, a plan. Trade programmes teach carpentry without teaching the purpose of city-building, as though assembled 2x4s exist independently of communities and history.

What we need is Renaissance men (and women) who can do all of these things.

A Sightline Southeast would make urbanist education reform a central project. Architecture programmes should once again teach traditional and vernacular building. If not fully transforming, flagship public charter architecture schools should at least have some traditional teachers on the faculty, versed in local practice and architectural history. Planning schools should be deconstructed and rebuilt to focus exclusively on designing and managing the public realm—parks, streets, utilities. No more meddling with private development.

Lastly, every Southern state should underwrite a statewide elite boarding-school Citybuilding Academy—modeled on NC School of Science and Math—to train 400 teenagers per year in architecture, carpentry, urban development, leadership, and civic craft. The demand already exists, and the model exists, but the institutions do not. I would want to build them.

It’s a huge lift, but completely possible. And the obvious next phase of advocacy is training the next generation to succeed in the practice where today’s practitioners have failed.

3. Relocalise the Practice

Finally, the great crisis in American urbanism is not simply zoning. It is the corporatisation and financialisation of the built environment. Affordable housing, in particular, has become a playground for political hacks, complex capital stacks, tax-credit factories, and institutional developers. The result is predictable: fewer builders, less competition, diminishing local capacity. And declining quality. For multiple generations now, much of our affordable housing has had a 30-year shelf life. That’s simply unacceptable, and the impermanence of these developments is a sign that something is terribly rotten.

We need the inverse—a movement that restores local builders, local developers, and localized place-based capital. Done well, our affordable housing should last, well, forever. Since zoning put a thumb on the scale in favour of financialised interests, policy reformers can remove it. And must. Model codes, local exemptions, gentle-density overlays, small-project finance reform—there is enormous white space here. And shockingly little research and advocacy. Some of this is already underway in Durham. Much more could follow.

A Sightline Southeast would specialise in this neglected field: creating tools that shift city-making back to the hands of people who live in those cities.

A Small Team, A Wide Mandate

A proper think tank operation would start small. Its job would not be to reinvent the wheel but to amplify what already works. The South already contains dozens of scattered organizations committed to building better places. What it lacks is a hub, a connective tissue, a sense of shared regional ambition. A vision.

The South deserves an institution that is rooted, rigorous, and relentless. One that treats urbanism not as an aesthetic preference for some but as a moral and economic necessity for all. One that understands that good places are not accidents—they are the products of intelligence, craft, determination, and persistent political will.

A Sightline Southeast would partner with and amplify the many existing local fragments fighting for better cities in the south. Every housing action tank shares some commonality with legislative reform, community organizing, and research. But it’s the unique specialties that set organizations apart. A Sightline Southeast would be unique in its commitment to the afromentied priorities—Marrying New Urbanism and YIMBYism, fixing the schools, and relocalizing practice.

But it would also stand out because it would be emphatically southern. Stubbornly so. And in that local (hyperlocal, really) commitment, it would, like the original Sightline, be effective far beyond its mission-restricted borders.

It’d be a helluva job, and I’d have a helluva lot of fun doing it.

The American South has spent the past decade undergoing a quiet but remarkable cultural shift: a home attached to your neighbour is no longer a sign of low income. Until recently, townhomes and multifamily were the exclusive domain of less affluent residents, but they have rapidly become desirable to mid-market (and increasingly high-end) buyers. That’s what is happening with urban townhomes in Durham.

Let’s talk about why.

As someone who designs small infill projects for a living, I sit squarely at the intersection of land scarcity, zoning obstruction, political theatre, and the ruthless economics of new construction. So when a new project appears in my own backyard, it’s an excuse to think out loud about what works. So let’s deep dive into Elm Hill.

ELM HILL

Elm Hill is a proposed 68-unit infill townhome project at 518 Morehead Avenue, a few blocks from downtown Durham. Developed by Alchemy Properties, the homes are large by urban standards—1,900 to 2,400 square feet—with basements that can function as flexible accessory spaces, plus roof terraces and a small package of amenities: a clubhouse, co-working space, gym, yoga studio, and dog run. Prices start at $875,000 and rise accordingly. For a site next to American Tobacco, DPAC, and the Durham Bulls, none of this surprises me.

Predictably, these price points invite the ritualised complaint: but it isn’t affordable! It’s true. And yet, that framing misses the actual trade-off on land this valuable. A buildable pad in this district may cost $300,000 (or more) before a single nail is driven. There is no mathematically coherent path to a $300,000 home here—unless the city subsidies are massive or the product is extremely small.

In that context, Elm Hill is serving the households who, absent new supply, would outbid long-time residents in the surrounding (often affordable) neighbourhoods or occupy historic homes that should otherwise remain relatively stable. Mews-scale density—intimate, neighbourly, but still urban—is a far more responsible outcome than pretending growth economics don’t exist.

WHY LONDON’s MUSES ARE HARD TO DO

One of the harder challenges in townhome design is reconciling density with open space and circulation. Elm Hill solves it better than most. Cars disappear into tuck-under garages, preserving the centre of the site for people rather than parking lots. While the central lanes are technically drive aisles, they have the bones of a true London mews—a form that American developers almost always botch.

The recipe is straightforward but rarely followed: no double-wide garage doors, real greenery (often in container pots due to limited space), good lighting (stringed Edison bulbs work great), and paving materials that make the drivelane feel more like a patio than a public street. Pavers or stamped concrete can transform what is normally a car sewer into something resembling a London lane.

The renderings at Elm Hill suggest that Alchemy at least understands this opportunity.

GARDENS IN THE SKY…

The shift of usable outdoor space from ground level to rooftop decks is another trend that’s rapidly becoming standard in southern urban infill. The trade-offs are real, and there are aspects of the trend I do not love. Private outdoor rooms can offer great views, but provide almost no semi-public space for the casual neighbour contact that many of us believe is integral to urbanism.

Without front porches, southern cities lose some of their social electricity. The “gardens in the sky” may be pleasant, but they are unlikely to replicate the unplanned interactions of stoops and porches that are, in my view, integral and defining characteristics of traditional southern life.

And at four stories, these buildings will require sprinklers—perfectly sensible at this price point, though a cost factor that keeps similar formats out of the entry-level market.

…& BOARDERS IN THE BASEMENT

One design move I genuinely appreciate is the inclusion of basement-level flex units. Unbeknownst to most, Durham is one of the few municipalities in the country that allows ADUs on townhomes. These spaces can (and will) become accessory dwellings or small offices. Durham needs this badly. Every increment of gentle density like this helps (it effectively doubles unit density), and ADU-capable formats are one of the most fiscally and socially productive things we can build near downtown.

In the end, Elm Hill is a strong project. The architecture is competent, the density is neighbour-scaled, and the public realm isn’t treated as an afterthought. Some developers have reported softness in the townhome market this year, and it’s true that a few urban townhome projects are sitting longer than expected. These, I suspect, will still absorb—Durham remains in a structural housing shortage, and its population is on track to nearly double by mid-century. The real gap is not whether Elm Hill should exist, but how many more versions of this we can build with smaller footprints and more attainable pricing.

For now, as infill goes, Elm Hill is a step in the right direction—and a reminder that mews-style townhomes, done properly, offer a middle path between towers and sprawl. That’s exactly what Durham needs far more of.

Additional reading: Durham urban infill continues with new ‘townhome-style’ condos starting at $875K (link)