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.

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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.

@npr

NPR on Instagram: "In the housing market, there are signs that …

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)

LOS ANGELES, CA | The fastest way to understand why America cannot build enough housing is not to read a white paper or convene a task force. It is to watch what happens when an ordinary citizen tries to add a modest rental unit to a property in a city that claims to want more homes. The story rarely ends with a ribbon-cutting. More often, it ends with a competent builder, several months older and thousands of dollars poorer, deciding never to do it again.

A recent example from Los Angeles—offered by real-estate investor and widely followed YouTuber Graham Stephan—captures the problem. Stephan set out to build a single unit, a test case. If it went smoothly, he intended to build more.

Spoiler alert: it did not go smoothly.

The permitting alone took three months and cost more than $4,000, but such delays have become the price of entry in America, only more so in L.A. The floodgate of trouble began at the finish line.

A TIMELINE OF GALLOWS HUMOR

With the unit built, a tenant lined up for September 1st, 2025, and only a final inspection remaining, an inspector failed the unit because an air-conditioning condenser needed a drain line. While the contractor offered to install it on the spot—a 15-minute fix, the inspector declined. It was Friday, he explained, at 4:30 p.m. He would return the following week.

He did not return.

The city reassigned the inspection to a new inspector. The second inspector, seeing a fresh opportunity, produced a new list of deficiencies the first had never mentioned. These were duly fixed. On the next visit, more issues emerged, including a demand that Stephan spend $600 on a CCTV inspection of the sewer line, to be performed exclusively by, of course, city-approved vendors.

The sewer line functioned, according to the camera work, but the connection to the city main—located in the middle of a public street—showed a minor crack. For this, the city demanded $22,000 in repairs. Stephan proposed a reasonable compromise: allow the tenant to move in while he repaired the line within 60 days.

He was met with silence. Calls went unanswered; emails disappeared into a bureaucratic void.

When the city finally responded, the matter had been forwarded to Public Works. Stephan authorised the $22,000 repair. But the city refused to issue a permit for the very work it required until he gave his existing tenants 75 days’ notice of a brief water shutoff—scheduled for hours they would not be home.

Then came another twist. A separate inspector visited the property and decided that, before the sewer work could proceed, Stephan must replace 22 feet of sidewalk damaged by the roots of a city-owned tree. To trim those roots, he needed a permit from Urban Forestry, which required another 60 days of processing.

By this point, the unit was months past its occupancy date. The tenant had long since given up. The project bled time and money. And Stephan, who had considered building several more units, reached the rational conclusion: it is now foolish to build in Los Angeles.

WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

This is how cities quietly kill their own housing markets. It’s not with a guillotine, but with an endless, often redundant stack of forms, chronic non-responsiveness, and staff who treat sign-offs as an interpretive art. The problem is administrative decay.

Cities insist they want new housing, especially in “missing-middle” categories. They praise ADUs as a decentralised path to affordability. Their reports cite the climate benefits of infill. Yet their building departments behave as if the objective is to discourage participation from all but the most masochistic or well-capitalised players. Large developers now hire expeditors, lobbyists, and full-time compliance officers. Small-scale builders can’t do that. And so the very people who could add the most flexible, most affordable homes stop participating.

That’s the cost of permitting and inspections sandbagging.

The economic consequences are not abstract. When incremental builders exit a market, cities lose duplexes, fourplexes, garage apartments, and garden-court units—the forms that once provided a wide middle layer between luxury and subsidy. And when small construction dries up, the only housing left is either high-cost institutional work or heavily subsidised projects whose price tags routinely flirt with the absurd. Santa Monica recently reached nearly $1,000,000 per unit for homeless housing. That number is a symptom of deep dysfunction. In Durham, we could have built five to ten times that volume of housing for the same money.

CH CH CH CH CHANGES

There is, however, a path out of this morass. Inspection systems can be reformed—ideally at the state level, where parochial incentives are weaker and political incentives stronger.

States could require cities to publish clear, finite checklists for each inspection stage, and once an item is approved, it cannot be reopened by the next inspector, absent a demonstrable life-safety concern. States could impose reasonable response deadlines: two business days for communications, five to ten days for final inspections, with automatic approval if deadlines are missed. States could require proportionality: a certificate of occupancy should not be withheld for minor defects in city-owned infrastructure. And they could allow third-party private inspectors—licensed, audited, insured, and competitive—whose sign-offs cities must accept.

Most importantly, the inspection process must be made transparent. In nearly every consumer-facing industry, performance is public. Restaurants survive on reviews. Contractors live or die by ratings. Yet inspection departments—the gatekeepers of all housing production—operate in opacity.

A Yelp-style public dashboard for inspectors and plan reviewers, with metrics on turnaround times, reversals on appeal, and basic professionalism, would probably do more to streamline housing production than a dozen consultant reports. There is now enough grumbling about the unprofessionalism of inspections online; I expect someone to launch such an app in 2026.

KEEPING THE FAITH

Cities that embrace inspections reform will see more local building, more market competition, and more incremental, lower-cost units. Most importantly, they will reestablish trust. They will foster trust in government. And they will rejuvenate faith in systems.

Cities that refuse will continue to push out the very people willing to help them. The result is predictable: less housing, higher prices, and greater political pressure to socialise production at extraordinary (and untenable) public expense.

Housing shortages are not inevitable. They are administered. And unless local governments accept that unaccountable inspection regimes can strangle supply as effectively as zoning, they will continue to watch capital, talent, and small-scale builders walk away—quietly, one simple drain line inspection at a time.

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Dear Subscribers,

Every so often, an email lands that reminds me why I bother to fight the fight. This week, a note from an NC State student did exactly that:

Good afternoon Mr. Lubeck,
As I get ready to graduate in about 10 days, I’ve been thinking about the people who made a real impact on me at NC State. I wanted to say thank you again for serving as a panelist at the first-ever Wolfpack Exchange — your perspective really stuck with me.
I still look back at the points you made about the future of urban design and how much we can learn from places around the world that have gotten it right. It was one of the most memorable takeaways from the event.
Thanks again for your time and insight.

This year, my little hobby-media empire grew to 20,000 subscribers and more than 24 million views. But I am a quality-over-quantity guy, and the student’s message mattered more.

Against-the-grain advocacy can be lonely. Most days, you are hacking through a thicket of irrational rules, negative stakeholder incentives, and politicization designed to prevent saner processes from ever taking root. You push forward anyway, wondering who is listening.

Across North Carolina, a new generation is embracing the work of repair—of making better buildings, better neighbourhoods, and better land use systems. That next generation is what makes the slog worthwhile.

Next year will be about building on that momentum. In 2026, I plan to continue publishing weekly and to expand this platform through partnerships with emerging writers, including Billy Cooney at FlanuerUrbanist, with the Single Stair NC team and their NCSU Pappas fellows, and more.

Last year, your financial support directly funded statewide advocacy on major housing reform bills, and paid for local editors and local art directors—keeping this work rooted in North Carolina.

To sustain and grow this work, there are two meaningful ways you can help:

How to Support This Work in 2026

1. Become a paid subscriber or a Core Supporter, or gift a subscription.

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2. Underwrite a new media program.

If you or your organization wants to support this next generation of urbanist leadership, reach out about sponsoring one of these initiatives:
– Better Cities Film Fest
– NC Placemaking Podcast, Faith-Based Housing Initiative, Urbanist Book Club, North Carolina CityExchange study travel, and more, Student Fellow writing on housing and design

Thank you for reading, for sharing, and for caring about this work. The next decade of North Carolina housing will be shaped by the voices we choose to lift today.

Happy holidays—and thank you.

—Aaron

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Gillian Tindall spent a lifetime chronicling the overlooked corners of London. A journalist and novelist, she became one of Britain’s finest practitioners of “miniaturist history”—the close study of a building, a street, or a few square metres of ground as a window into a much broader human story. Her work traced how ordinary lives accumulate meaning in particular places and how those places, in turn, shape the life of the city. She died on October 1 at 87.

Her most celebrated book, The House by the Thames, reconstructs the lives of three centuries of residents at 49 Bankside, a modest terrace beside the Globe Theatre and today in the shadow of the Tate Modern. Built in 1710, the block endured merchants, scrupulous bargemen, Flemish sex workers, a crippled cook, and, later, the decline that swept much of London’s working riverfront.

Tindall’s account reads almost like a time-lapse film: shifting fortunes, changing tastes, and the steady pressure of urban reinvention. Each inhabitant—whether prosperous or hard up—left faint traces. She pieced them together with the patience of an archaeologist, connecting seemingly unrelated threads of history and showcasing how real cities are built.

The Financial Times once called Tindall’s books “masterpieces of micro-history.” The label fits. She approached London not as a planner or preservationist, but as someone alert to the everyday grain of urban life—what the Economist obituary described as “an interest that started when she first went to London as a student in 1963.” She spent evenings poring over census records and rare books, long after many of her contemporaries embraced more fashionable academic theories.

This form of scholarship reminded my of the kind of legwork my firm once undertook supporting Durham’s historic plaque programme, combing Sanborn maps and city directories to reconstruct who lived where and why it mattered. Such work does not simply document buildings; it reveals how collective memory is formed and how identity is anchored through the physical world. Tindall’s passing reminded me that such research is a dying art, either because too few care to underwrite the work, or we are simply suffering a perpetually declining number of places that are worth researching.

LIKE JANE JACOBS, A SCEPTICISM OF PLANNERS

Tindall harboured, in her own dry way, a scepticism of planners. In this, she shared something with Jane Jacobs, whose famous opening line—“This book is an attack on current city planning”—could easily have served as an epigraph for Tindall’s work.

The planners Tindall knew in the 1960s were not subtle. As she saw it, they were high-modernist idealists who levelled functioning neighbourhoods in search of a cleaner future. These planners were top-down. Londoners, like her, were bottom-up.

She chronicled the forced relocation of her fellow citydwellers as their neighbourhoods were demolished by mid-century planners with their “blinkered enthusiasm”, similar to America’s urban renewals. She knew such programs would not end well.

In response, she spent years attending meetings of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society and co-founded the Camden History Society in part to scrutinise these interventions. ‘Traditionally, buildings were expected to last indefinitely – almost any of them could be kept going if properly maintained,’ she said. ‘Short-termism was a mistake that is only just being realised.’

LEARNINGS FOR TODAY

Today, planning and preservation are often seen as natural allies. Tindall’s career is a useful reminder that the relationship has always been uneasy. Planning, particularly in its authoritarian era, has its own damaging legacy; while preservation can calcify into a defensive reflex against any form of change. Both movements contain strands of idealism and strands of overreach. Both, in my experience, lack accountability.

Tindall’s miniaturist histories offer a gentler and more pragmatic lesson. Cities are not primarily shaped by grand Burnhamian “make no small plans” designs; they grow through countless small decisions, habits, and adaptations. The places that matter most—homes, corners, odd buildings, back lanes—are small almost by definition. They are where memory resides. Large projects may reshape skylines and create collective memory, but small places hold a city’s emotional infrastructure.

The task, then, is not simply to defend old places or to promote new ones, but to encourage the steady creation and renewal of meaningful small environments. This requires a preservation movement willing to distinguish between what is genuinely significant and what is merely old, and planning systems that allow new places to emerge rather than flattening the fabric that gives a city character.

For me, Tindall belonged to a tradition of journalism that is increasingly scarce: patient, curious, unhurried by ideology. She did not romanticise the past, nor did she shy away from the political forces reshaping London. But she approached them with humility, tracing origins to reveal consequences, rather than rationalizing a pre-determined narrative.

As local journalism contracts and planning debates grow more polarized, Tindall’s sensibility feels rarer. Her work endures not because it argued for a particular policy agenda, but because it illuminated why places matter. It explained to us laymen why more great places should be built, and not be treated as a finite resource.

She will be missed.

Politics in a blue city are strange because struggles for power don’t unfold through policy, but through vibes, and by extension, language. Factions seeking narrative control during elections use buzzwords to convince citizens that they are progressive. “Preservation,” “affordability,” “equity,” and “gentrification” all once meant something. Now they are worn smooth from misuse.

Because blue cities are also often college towns, this problem with words extends beyond City Hall. The closer you live to a university, the more likely you are to encounter people who feel that words are life and that debate itself is existential. Near universities, city politics become rife with performative certainty, moral signaling, and the conflation of words with action. All this forms the scaffolding for moral inversion (see last week’s post), in which the language of virtue is intentionally used to disguise and promote immoral or harmful acts.

In local politics, this can manifest in a multitude of petty ways, such as one person attempting to promote themselves and their cause by defaming another—a zero-sum game. But those same habits of inversion don’t stay personal for long. Once moral language is corrupted, it scales: bad actors translate their distortions into policy. In land use, those distortions become blueprints.

When Land Use Words Mean Their Opposite

Consider what moral inversion looks like applied to our housing debates:

• Those who build urban housing are blamed for causing sprawl.

• Small developers who create local projects with local tenants are often portrayed as corporatists, soulless, extractive, and Wall Street-based.

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Earlier this month, I traveled to a conference to meet one of my favorite writers, Matthew Crawford. Crawford has a PhD in Political Philosophy and is best known for Shop Class as Soulcraft, his meditation on the dignity of manual work, and how trade work—the act of building or fixing something—is inherently character building.

Spending a few days around Crawford put me in the mood to dig back into political classics writers I studied in college, like de Tocqueville and Nietzsche, who wrestled with a question that still shapes our cities today:

There are a lot of people who hate homebuilders. Or, more specifically, there are a lot of terminally online people who seem obsessed with hating homebuilders.

You see it in every internet comment thread about development, every neighborhood listserv, every “concerned citizens” meeting. Case after case, where builders take risks, their critics frantically engulf civic conversations, moralizing about the heinousness of the act of homebuilding itself.

That became clear in September at a community event hosted by Durham’s Urban Forestry Department. The city’s forester was presenting to the neighborhood on the need to plant more street trees. Durham, he said, was committed to it. There’s even a program that allows homeowners to pay a small fee to have a city-planted street tree installed in front of their house, though participation is dismal.

During the discussion, a friend of mine (a local builder who completes about ten well-designed homes a year) spoke up, interested in the city’s installation goals: “I actually plant street trees on a regular basis.”

The conversation went like this:

Forester: Durham needs more street trees.
Friend: I’ve installed dozens of street trees.
Neighbor: Oh, cool, what do you do for a living?
Friend: I build houses.
Neighbor: Oh gawd.

When I reached out to confirm the facts of the case, the builder told me he’s actually planted more than one hundred street trees in Durham during his career.

Ressentiment

Set aside the irony that the person who builds the city is treated as the villain, and the person who merely complains about building is celebrated as virtuous, and here’s the cold, hard math of this situation:

• Number of street trees planted by the local builder: ~100

• Number of street trees planted by the people at the meeting who professed to care deeply about street trees: 0

It’s an inversion that thinkers across centuries would recognize. Matthew Crawford explains that this “moral inversion” grows from resentment. He has written extensively on Nietzsche’s (que the French accent) “Ressentiment”:

Ressentiment is set of reflexes that build up around a hard nucleus: the denial of an objective order of good. Ressentiment is thus the psychological expression of nihilism. But the secret genius of ressentiment is that it has generated values of its own -- its own binding morality -- and in doing so turned the world upside down.

Nietzsche saw this moral reversal as the root of resentment itself:

“Nothing is cheaper than blaming others for one’s own weakness.”

That’s why good work is now bad. And bad work is now good. It is an ethic that sees the world as the opposite of what it is, for the emotional benefit of the static seer.

Why do some people see someone building and feel inspired, while others see the same thing and feel accused? Alexis de Tocqueville warned that such envy was “The Democratic Disease” (he intentionally used the definite article). This disease, he said, inevitably resulted in a “soft despotism”, something incredibly evident in my deep-blue hometown of Durham today:

“In democratic ages, envy is a universal feeling.”

In a culture that flattens status, the productive man’s virtue looks like arrogance to the unproductive one. Or, as Ortega y Gasset later put it in The Revolt of the Masses:

“The mediocre man declares the man of excellence to be his enemy.”

Sound familiar?

There’s a lot of noise and dissonance in the world, but building—the actual, physical task of making something—cuts through it. Like every restaurant opened or every piece of art made, every street tree a builder leaves behind is a small act of community building. It is a toast to civilization. And every small act of community building enrages someone who ostensibly wants to build community, but can’t. Political theory gives us language for it, but experience gives us proof.

From my personal experience, I've found that the people who build things don’t need applause. Despite persistent media and political efforts to portray builders as reckless, self-promoting, and self-interested, they are consistently the most humble class of people I know (again, this false narrative is the result of a media-driven moral inversion).

Builders generally don’t go around demanding credit. They have their hands full with lumber, permits, and payroll. But they inevitably leave behind something real, which can be touched, lived in, and shaded under.

Those who fail to build anything (a business, a life, a family, a civic group, a garden, etc.) fill the void with moral superiority. They are the resentful souls Nietzsche diagnosed, the narcissists Crawford identified, the democratic masses that Tocqueville feared.

The philosopher Confucius might have said it best:

“The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.”

Damn straight. Back here in Durham, my pal doesn’t have a PR firm, or social media accounts, or a ressentiment mob to intimidate others into bending to his will. When he planted his 100 trees, he didn’t do a Facebook post about it. He just went to work, and planted them.

That’s how communities are built.

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THE CALIFORNIA FOREVER PLAN

Today I had the opportunity to review an extraordinary document — the Suisun Expansion Specific Plan by the California Forever team, proposing a brand-new city in Solano County, California. It outlines a 40-year vision for a complete, sustainable community — and it’s unlike anything proposed in America, at least in a century.

The first thing that stands out is its sheer scale. This would be the largest new town built in the United States since World War II, ultimately housing a population of 400,000 people on 15,700 acres of land. At 16,326 people per square mile, Suisun is about six times the density of an average Southern city.

What makes it even more remarkable is that over half the land area — about 5,200 acres — will be dedicated to open space, greenbelts, and recreation.

The plan also implements something I’ve long argued is key to sustainability and fiscal prudence: a minimum dwelling units per acre. Most zoning codes enforce maximum dwelling units per acre, guaranteeing sprawl. This one flips that logic — demanding density as a precondition of urbanism and human flourishing.

The physical form is also impressive. Buildings across the mixed-use zones rise to an eight-story common height, matching that of the world’s great walkable cities. Paris and Barcelona both hover around this threshold — each with about 100,000 people per square mile — and Suisun’s plan fits that lineage beautifully.

In the spirit of European precedent, the plan proposes “edge parking”, keeping garages at the perimeter so the interior can prioritize walking and biking. Residents will be able to move through a fully human-scaled city without relying on cars. And given its position nearly halfway between Sacramento and the Bay Area, strong intercity transit could make car ownership optional altogether. It’s also a direct rejection of California’s parking-obsessed status quo. It’s a city designed for people, not for cars — and that’s long overdue. In my view, this is precisely what sustainability looks like.

Like Barcelona, Suisun is not just dense — it’s green. The plan calls for an unprecedented variety of sun cover, with streets and parks shaded by native oaks and cottonwoods. Picture walking down a California version of Las Ramblas, framed by midrise buildings and cooled by these living canopies.

But perhaps the most radical aspect is what this plan represents: a case for private city-building done well. For decades, new urban development has been hamstrung by centralized, bureaucratic planning systems that deliver mediocrity. American cities were once great because risk-takers were free to build them. This proposal feels like a return to that entrepreneurial tradition — one rooted in design quality and market pragmatism rather than process for process’s sake.

We need more new towns — and we need them to be great. As former Congress for the New Urbanism president Rick Cole once put it, “The YIMBYs say we need more housing. But the New Urbanists say we need the housing to be great. I say: why not both?”

That’s an ambitious goal, and California Forever seems to be taking a hell of a swing.

I can’t wait to see it come out of the ground.

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This past week, I had the opportunity to catch up with my buddy, architect Eric Kronberg, at the National Town Builders Association conference in Florida. Eric is the founder and lead architect at Kronberg Urbanists + Architects, where he and his team make sharp graphics in pursuit of a single goal: affordability. He does this effectively because few have more experience navigating the effects zoning and building codes have on affordability than his firm.

What most people don’t realize is that affordability now splits into two very different camps. On one side is demand-side affordability, which is politicized, subsidized, expensive, and often operates with little regard for cost. On the other side is supply-side affordability, which is market-based, unsubsidized, and inexpensive, led by developers obsessed with reducing costs.

Ninety-five percent of what we read and hear about affordable housing focuses on the demand side. Supply-side operates mostly behind the scenes. I suspect this is because politicians can’t easily take credit for it (since they don’t control it), and journalists don’t praise builders because doing so would violate pre-ordained narratives.

WHICH IS MORE AFFORDABLE?

I witnessed this cognitive disconnect firsthand in Detroit at the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2016. A speaker asked a room of about 50 people — 40 planners, students, and academics, opposite maybe 10 builders and developers, “Which housing type delivers the lowest cost per unit: single-family homes or tall multifamily?”

Almost without fail, the planners and academics raised their hands for tall multifamily buildings. When asked, “Who thinks small single-family homes delivered the lowest cost per unit?” the builders and developers all raised their hands.

The builders were right. And they were also the ones who wrote the checks, so they knew the numbers in a way the planners didn’t.

UNDERSTANDING THE THRESHOLDS

That disconnect stems from building code thresholds, and nowhere is this more evident than in Kronberg’s diagram. The cost per unit doesn’t decline in a straight line as density increases. Instead, costs spike each time you cross a threshold.

Jumping from the International Residential Code (IRC) to the International Building Code (IBC), which happens at just three units, can raise costs by $50,000 to $90,000 per unit.

Once you go over three stories, you need an elevator and two stairs, which drives costs up again.

At seven stories, the whole building must be made of steel or concrete, and the numbers climb once more.

Each threshold works the same way. Costs peak at the entry point, then gradually decline as economies of scale take effect, until the next threshold triggers another spike. Affordability is lost not in vague policy debates but in these concrete, code-driven jumps.

In places like Durham and Atlanta, builders are delivering new units for $150,000 to $200,000 under the residential code. By contrast, institutionally financed demand-side developments — the ones that politicians and journalists love to celebrate — are routinely coming in at $400,000 a unit or more.

The lesson from this is simple. If affordability is the goal, small and simple units are the path. Supply-siders understand this. Most everyone else does not.

Jeff Speck is one of the most influential voices in modern city planning. His book Walkable City has become a field guide for urban designers, and his most famous promotion—the Walk Score—has become a household term. Founded by Mike Mathieu in 2007, Walkscore allows you to type in any address in America, and you’ll get a number between 1 and 100 telling you how walkable the area is. Over time, Speck expanded the tool to include Bike Score and Transit Score. Together, they provide a snapshot of how easy it is to move through daily life without a car.

Why Walk Score Matters

Walk Score isn’t just a planning gimmick—it’s about quality of life and affordability. Car dependency is one of the most underappreciated costs in a household budget. According to Experian, the average new car payment is now $745, or $9,000 a year, and that’s before gas, insurance, and maintenance. While nearly all American households still need a car, a high Walk Score can be the difference between needing two cars and needing one.

Meanwhile, people consistently say they want to live where walking is possible. Zillow now incorporates Walk Score into its platform because homebuyers are willing to pay more for that convenience. Developers and economic development departments also use it to underwrite retail and commercial projects.

The benefits don’t stop at money. Higher Walk Scores correlate with healthier lifestyles, though part of that is self-selection—healthier people often choose to live in walkable neighborhoods. Still, the trend is clear: people want to live near the coffee shop, the bar, or the grocery store, not just the nearest on-ramp.

My Walk Score Story

I learned the value of Walk Score the hard way, while house hunting right after I got married. My wife and I narrowed our choices to two extremes: either we would live deep in the country, immersed in nature, or we would live somewhere with easy walkability.

One option was out on Mount Sinai Road near Duke Forest. It had the lowest Walk Score I’d ever seen: a one. No bike infrastructure, no transit, completely car dependent.

The other option was a neighborhood near downtown Durham. The house we chose scored an 88 for walking, 69 for transit, and 79 for biking.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing the country, and I respect those who do. But for us, I’m convinced the decision to go walkable shaped our quality of life. Raising kids, staying social, and keeping our lives affordable have all been easier thanks to those high Walk, Bike, and Transit numbers.

What Durham’s Walk Scores Reveal

So what can Walk Score teach us about Durham’s future? The data indicates that we need to focus on creating more walkable and bikeable areas. I’d argue these two standards matter even more than transit.

Right now, about 5% of Durham commuters use the bus, which is high by southern standards, and just 1–2% ride their bikes. By contrast, Madison, Wisconsin, boasts a bike mode share of around 10%, and Davis, California—America’s gold standard for bicycling mode share—tops 20%.

Imagine one in five trips in Durham happening on a bike. That’s transformative.

Of course, we’re not talking about the entire city. Durham covers 115 square miles, but the walkable, bikeable core is really only about 12. If we created just one square mile within the city designed explicitly for biking and walking—say, the stretch between Duke University and downtown—it could become one of the most attractive neighborhoods in the South for people who want that lifestyle.

Walk Score helps us picture this future. It doesn’t just measure what we have—it points to what we could become.

The drawing cannot begin soon enough.

Correction: an earlier version of this essay suggested that Jeff Speck created Walk Score, which is inaccurate. It has been corrected, with proper attribution given. We regret the error.

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At 16, my daughter can explain flying buttresses better than most contractors.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s Notre Dame.

Most summer camps for high school kids are fairly shallow. How much can you really teach a 16-year-old in a few days? My son once attended a weeklong design camp where they tried to teach a different design discipline every day — industrial, landscape, graphic, etc. It sounded great on paper. But the reality was wide and shallow.

It reminded me of my college study abroad program, where we crammed Poland, Germany, and England into one semester. Sounded great, but we spent most of our time in transit — train stations, brief hotel stays, and hasty walking tours. We never stayed long enough to absorb the place. In a culture obsessed with distraction, I’ve come to value pedagogical depth over breadth.

And that’s what makes Notre Dame’s Architecture School so different.

onTradition

Notre Dame is widely known — and sometimes mocked — as the flagship for traditional architecture education. While virtually every other architecture school has gone whole hog on modernism, abstraction, and digital design, Notre Dame has doubled down on classical everything. Where the others emphasize concepts and critiques through CAD, Notre Dame teaches proportion and permanence through the pencil.

The school still requires students to master hand drawing. They still study Vitruvius. They still design buildings with ornament. And it turns out — this works.

Notre Dame’s Career Discovery Architecture Camp didn’t just teach my daughter to draw a church. It showed her, in two weeks, what many schools can’t teach in four years — how to think like a builder.

Students, ages 14 to 17, learned to draw complete churches — floor plans, elevations, perspectives, and details for stained glass windows. Most of the churches had flying buttresses. Some had domes. All had substantial ornament, detailed as part of the camp.

My daughter spent five hours drawing bricks. Not photoshopping textures. Not mechanically copying and pasting. Drawing. The precision and intention required in that act left her with a skillset far beyond many college freshmen.

This kind of instruction — intense hand-drawn studio time, led by working practitioners — is rare anywhere, much less in a high school camp. Her instructor, Giuseppe Mazzone, teaches first-year design at Notre Dame and is known for his exceptional sketching ability. This was not a week of “design thinking” and glitter glue. It was full architectural training, compressed into twelve gruelling days.

The Learning Curve

For contrast, I draw buildings for a living. I’m (mostly) self-trained. I work in affordable, incremental development, and draw a lot of 600-square-foot rectangles on rectilinear urban lots. I struggle with curves — not because I can’t learn them, but because affordable housing rarely needs them. I’m fine with that. It works for what I do.

But Notre Dame didn’t impose those constraints on their students. They let them try the ambitious stuff — symmetry, form, articulation, verticality, even at 16. That tells you something about their trust in tradition — and their belief in teenagers (and, ergo, I suppose, humanity).

The broader academy often dismisses traditional design as pastiche. They say it’s not of this time. That it’s artificial. That it limits expression. That it lacks political voice. But I’ve watched modern architecture become a political voice first, with human utility and grace relegated to the unimportant. In too many schools today, students are taught to critique systems rather than build structures. They’re encouraged to think big, but not necessarily how to build anything.

So here’s the question:

• What’s lost when students aren’t trained like this?

• What happens to our buildings? To our cities? To our collective memory of how to build well?

In my work with the Congress for the New Urbanism, Incremental Development Alliance, and National Townbuilders’ Association, I’ve partnered with a lot of Notre Dame grads. One of the best is Thomas Dougherty, author of The American Alley and one of the leading voices in faith-based housing.

Thomas was hired for a Durham Charette to help us explore how churches can build housing. Armed with context and research on these narrow topics, Thomas can turn a utilitarian church parking lot into a world-class village. He came out of this program.

The students coming out of Notre Dame have skills most architecture grads simply don’t:

• They understand history and historical precedent.

• They know how traditional architecture dovetails with traditional city-building.

• They can draw.

And not just in Rhino or Revit. They draw with their hands, guided by a contextual understanding.

Grace Through Basics

I recognize that technology is a tool. But overreliance on digital tools atrophies the basic muscles of design. Nowhere is that more obvious than when you watch a Notre Dame architect design next to a CAD-dependent peer. The difference in approach and deliverables is stark. One is thoughtful and free. The other is automated and stuck, as if they are handcuffed.

Neither is inherently wrong. But one, in my view, is clearly better.

Notre Dame training seems to permit CAD, reluctantly, knowing that in most of the industry, it is a necessary skill. But they don’t let CAD detract from the basics of the profession—conveying vision, and meaning, through hand drawing.

It’s no surprise then that Notre Dame architecture grads have the highest average starting salary in the country — $70,000 to $75,000 a year.

If we want to fix our towns, our cities, and our civic buildings— we’re going to need more architects who can draw, think, and build like this.

I told my daughter before she went: “You may or may not love architecture. You may or may not love Notre Dame. But you’re going to come out of this with an opinion.”

She did. So did I.

And now I have a drawing of a church on my wall — flying buttresses and all — designed by a 16-year-old.

That’s what great teaching can do.

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There are grave societal costs to removing the lowest rungs on the property ladder. If young families cannot afford their first home, they cannot afford their second either, and they remain renters for life. Nothing is wrong with being a renter by choice, but it would be a policy failure if we prevent families who do want to own from doing so.

America has seen a radical decline in starter homes this century (see graph below). I would refer to it as a collapse. For multiple generations, young families have had a relatively inexpensive path to buying a new home, enabling them to climb the property ladder and grow their families. Since 2000, this has changed.

Who Killed the Starter Home? is the subject of much research now, including Marina Rubina’s eponymous podcast, on which I was a guest last year. I will save my thoughts on the disappearance of the starter home for a separate post, as this one will deconstruct what my hometown did about it.

DURHAM’S SOLUTION

Prior to 2019, property owners in Durham couldn’t build a small home on a small lot if they wanted to. Zoning provisions dictated that the minimum lot size for a house be no less than 5,000 square feet (a pretty typical requirement in American zoning codes).

Because the minimum lot size correlates with the minimum house size, it results in larger homes being built, which in turn makes the community less affordable.

To address this problem, the Durham City Council passed a reform known as Expanding Housing Choices (EHC) by a nearly unanimous vote of 6-1.

EHC is anchored in a transformational small lot code, which allows for lots as small as 2,000 square feet, provided the homes are no larger than 1,200 square feet. Notably, the 2,000-square-foot lot represents a 60% reduction from the zoning norm of 5,000 square feet. And, because lot size correlates with house size, and house size inversely correlates with affordability, lot size reductions result in lower-cost housing.

DOES LOT SIZE MATTER?

These ambitious reforms have sparked multiple research studies.

Organizations ranging from Strongtowns to Harvard Joint Center on Housing Studies are asking:

1. What effect does lot size have on a city’s ability to deliver affordability?

2. Can reducing the minimum lot size help revive the largely dormant market for starter homes?

To explore this query, I conducted research using publicly available sources. I filtered on Zillow for sold homes built in Durham after 2019 with a maximum size of 1,250 square feet and a maximum lot size of 5,000 square feet.

The results show that Durham built and sold 129 homes that meet these criteria, whereas Raleigh had 7, and Chapel Hill only 1.

CALIBRATING FOR NOISE

Zillow is an extraordinary resource, but it can, at times, be imperfect and noisy (i.e., many search results that appear to meet the set criteria actually do not). To address this, I manually filtered each city’s results to eliminate homes that were any of the following: townhomes, built before 2019, and larger than 1,250 sq. ft.

In Durham, nearly all of these 129 were clearly built under the small lot code.

But the actual numbers for Durham are higher for two reasons. First, I am aware of many small lot homes that sold but did not appear in the search results. Second, Durham has developed a cottage industry of small lot homes for rent. None of those homes will show up as “sold” in a Zillow search.

For example, there are developments like The Corner of Trinity Park, which features seven small lot homes, but only four of them appear on Zillow.

My best estimate is that a total of 200-300 small lot homes have been built since 2019. I suspect another 200-300 are currently in schematic design or the permitting process.

CONCULSION

Citizens, builders, and developers are opting to construct a greater number of smaller homes, rather than fewer larger ones. The vast majority of detached infill housing in Durham is now on small lots, rather than larger conforming lots. This is no coincidence; it is the direct result of the ambitious EHC reforms. The results are relatively unique to Durham, indicating that, given the opportunity, the market will not operate at lower price points—it will thrive.

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If you would like to view my data on Raleigh and Chapel Hill, please feel free to reach out.

Stay tuned for a report on my work with the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies

Mayor Brandon Johnson's now-deleted tweet reveals more than just a math error. It exposes how politicized housing, uncritical media, and a broken discourse make it harder to build homes.

I was in Chicago last week, touring colleges with my daughter and reconnecting with old friends. Chicago rode the golden wave of American city building from 1870 to 1930, emerging as the world's tallest city. I consider it to be the purist laboratory for American urbanism.

It’s also a city of intensely politicized land use.

After the 1871 fire, Chicago was rebuilt into something astonishing. Its population exploded tenfold. It birthed the skyscraper. The Chicago School—with Louis Sullivan and his disciple Frank Lloyd Wright—defined The American Architecture. The downtown is so dense that 60-story buildings are irrelevant to the skyline. It’s a city of big ideas—and big contradictions.

Chicago’s 50 aldermen wield local veto power over development in their wards, a legacy of machine politics known as Aldermanic Privilege. It results in back-scratching, delays, and dysfunction. It also makes it difficult to have honest and professional conversations about housing.

This brings us to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's viral tweet and what it reveals about the modern land use and media worlds.

Wait, How Many Homes? For How Much Money?

In March, Johnson posted that his administration had committed $11 billion to build 10,000 units of affordable housing.

The tweet didn’t live long.

Why? Because the math is as simple as it was damning:

$11,000,000,000 ÷ 10,000 units = $1.1 million per affordable home.

For my readers who might similarly struggle with the maths, this is a contradiction in terms. You can’t have affordable homes that cost 1.1 million dollars.

You can’t have affordable homes that cost 1.1 million dollars.

For context, in Durham, local builders deliver new housing for a tenth of that cost. I’ve seen the homes. I’ve developed the permit sets. These aren't luxury compounds. They’re modest, efficient, and well-designed. They are simple and affordable for one reason: they are depoliticized.

But the real scandal here is not that a politician flubbed a tweet. It’s that no paid journalist bothered to ask the most basic questions.

The Mass Media Vibe Machine

Consistently, journalists don’t check basic development math. Editors don’t assign follow-ups. The frame is already set: Government = Good. Business = Bad. If a nonprofit receives a $400,000/unit subsidy, it’s celebrated. If a private developer builds the same thing for $200,000, they’re attacked for being greedy.

Journalists and politicians co-produce these narratives. So when an elected official declares a massive housing investment, the default response is applause, never scrutiny.

And when projects are labeled Affordable they tend to float above criticism entirely.

In this politico-media environment, builders are portrayed as villains, even those delivering real affordability. Narrative wins. And facts don’t matter.

Citizen Journalists, Assemble

But on Twitter, the response to Mayor Johnson’s assertion was immediate and devastating.

People posted memes. The mayor was exposed as unprepared on the topic. And, after persistent ratioing (Twitter lingo for a tweet that generates more comments than likes), the tweet disappeared.

What happened?

Citizens did the division. Citizens checked the market. I personally documented 5,199 homes for sale in Chicago at the time of the tweet. Of those, 4,601 were under $1 million, and 3,207 were under $400,000. You could buy all of those affordable homes for about 1/10th the cost of Mayor Johnson’s program.

A politician made a huge, inaccurate claim, and the big boys of media were nowhere to be found. Who stepped up? It was people with free social media accounts, no bylines, and some basic calculator and Zillow skills. It was not the recently acquired-for-$630,000,000 Chicago Tribune that held Johnson accountable. It was Twitter.

This is, frankly, weird. But the story is not new.

This Is How the YIMBY Movement Was Born

In San Francisco—the belly of the beast for progressive NIMBYism—wealthy, overhoused residents have dominated local land use politics for 50+ years. They weaponize ostensibly neutral and professional institutions, such as planning commissions and neighborhood associations, specifically to prevent development.

For years, nobody noticed. Newspapers didn’t cover it.

Then, a new generation of younger, left-leaning activists began to attend these meetings. They brought their camera phones. Leaders like Jordan Grimes tweeted transcripts. They demonstrated how meeting leaders were bending (sometimes breaking) rules to protect their views, their parking, and their appreciation rates.

When the San Francisco Chronicle wasn’t in the room, YIMBY Twitter was.

A Broken Discourse on Housing

What’s happening in Chicago now is just the latest chapter in a larger breakdown in national housing discourse. Here are the uncomfortable truths:

• America politicizes housing, then excludes anyone who understands housing from politics.

• Politicians and traditional media vilify businesspeople, especially builders, then demand they solve the housing crisis unilaterally.

• This system perpetuates a media culture that rewards vibes, ignores math, resists reform, and creates civic environments where it is challenging to build anything.

The result is that the people managing housing policy generally don’t know much about housing, like Mayor Johnson. And the professional journalists covering those policymakers don’t know much about housing, either. So the conversations get dumber and dumber each year.

That’s where traditional media is in 2025.

It’s ironic that the only critical discourse on housing is happening in a deeply dystopian digital space, sandwiched between AI bots and conspiracy theorists.

Weird times, indeed.