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.

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.

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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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.

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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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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RALEIGH, NC | North Carolina’s Capital City anchors a metro that doubles in size every two-plus decades. It is regularly listed with Austin as #1 or #2 in this or that: the best place for millennials to raise a family, start a business, or relocate.

But Raleigh remains a “second city”. It is good—and some parts are great—but it’s not world-renowned. It’s not a place that people from all over the world have to come and see. It’s on no one’s bucket list.

Raleigh has one--and only one--path to becoming a world-class city. It goes through the city’s greatest untapped natural resource: Dorothea Dix Park.

Although the vision is ambitious, it isn’t rocket science—it’s city-building. Raleigh needs to anchor itself in Dix Park’s potential by summoning civic commitment and political courage.

A GOOD START, BUT NOT ENOUGH

The good news? We don’t have to start from scratch. Dorothea Dix has a master plan, complete with a video explaining the implementation.

Here’s what we’re working with: The site spans 308 acres. It comes pre-packaged with serious amenities: open fields, the North Carolina State Farmers Public Market, and dozens of still-unrenovated historic buildings. Those buildings alone total over 1 million square feet of usable space—roughly the size of Durham’s American Tobacco Campus (perhaps the East Coast’s best adaptive reuse project).

Critically, the current plan mostly ignores the land flanking the park—Downtown South, Pullen Park, Governor’s School, Central Prison, Lonnie Poole Golf Course, NC State’s Centennial Campus. All of these sites offer serious real estate for bold, urban infill.

By North Carolina standards, the vision sounds enormous. But zoom out even a little, and the scale starts to look modest. In my view, North Carolina has a long-standing humility problem. The real barrier isn’t space or feasibility. It’s a kind of civic modesty that keeps cities here from asking for more. Maybe it’s time to outgrow that.

MORE IS EXACTLY WHAT SHOULD BE PURSUED HERE

Dorothea Dix should be developed as The Central Park of the South. Yes, you read that correctly. That Central Park.

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You probably wouldn’t guess it, but the most interesting developer in Arkansas may be the least hurried one. Ward Davis is building neighborhoods that aren’t trying to win the next three years. They’re trying to win the next thirty.

His method is simple and strange and, increasingly, working: build places that are durable, walkable, and attractive. Lease them. Keep them. Repeat. There’s no hype machine, no value-engineering, no LPs clamoring for an exit.

Ward builds his developments like he’s going to be around. Because he is.

When you hear him talk about finance, you realize how much of the industry is structured to forget. Forget the user. Forget the community. Forget the building.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the users of assets and the people that build those assets,” he says. A contractor builds for a developer. The developer builds for a private equity fund. The fund flips to a REIT.

Everyone’s optimizing for IRR—a metric Ward calls “one of the goofier excesses” of real estate—because it rewards speed over endurance. A fast flip earns the same return on paper as a long-term hold, but the long-term hold demands patience, durability, and stewardship. None of those things show up in the cell formulas.

So developers chase yield. They slap retail onto ground floors and call it placemaking. They hunt for the one magic ingredient that made Seaside or Rosemary Beach or Serenbe work—usually a pastel paint job or some herringbone brick—and they copy-paste that aesthetic onto a hollow version of the original.

Ward’s seen it enough to know where it leads. “They think if they put the space there, the thing will be cool. It’s not.”

Instead, he builds small buildings in real neighborhoods and anchors them with actual tenants who want to stay. His team has a motto: figure it the heck out.

A few years back, the local hospital system wanted to be in one of Ward’s projects. Not just as a tenant—they wanted to partner. Ward built the building, secured a 15-year lease with annual escalators, and rolled the whole thing into non-recourse permanent financing. Four years later, it’s spitting off cash and paying down debt with a quiet confidence that seems out of place in modern development.

Most developers wouldn’t even try to hold that kind of project. The entire capital stack is built around the assumption that the building will be sold as soon as the ink on the CO dries.

But Ward isn’t trying to get out. “We’re making investments in property that are Class A now and Class A in 30 years,” he says. He means it. His buildings use real materials. The proportions are right. The retail addresses the street. It’s beautiful, but not loud about it.

It turns out that long-term thinking creates its own gravitational pull.

Family offices—actual people with actual capital and something like legacy on their minds—are showing up. Ward isn’t cold-calling them. They’re finding Ward. And when they do, he doesn’t make a pitch. He listens.

“It’s like dating,” he says. “You find out what they’re trying to accomplish, and then describe your model in those terms.” They’re tired of being herded into index funds and tech ETFs.

Family offices want yield, appreciation, and pride. Ward offers all three.

This wasn’t where he started, though. Ward’s first deals were one-house rehabs in tough neighborhoods. He had a job and a buddy and a few rentals. But he didn’t skip steps.

“You want to screw up at small scale before you screw up at large scale.”

That humility never really left. He still talks like someone who’s not sure he’s figured it out. Which is probably why he has.

Ward believes the buildings we construct should age well—just like the people who live in them, the trees that grow alongside them, the businesses that take root on their corners. When he builds, he’s not just solving for a return metric. He’s solving for a place that gets better over time.

There is something quietly redemptive about this—building not as conquest, but as a kind of covenant. A promise to be around. A willingness to deal with the future consequences of your own decisions. You don’t see that much anymore.

“We’re not that weird,” Ward says. “We’re just trying to do something that works.”

And it sure looks like it does.

David Milner is Managing Director at Create Streets, a European design practice dedicated to developing better towns. He’s now a relatively prolific writer as well, often penning pieces that describe universal principles of design, why places are great, and how to make more of them.

In a recent X post, David underscored these values through photos of Pontoise, a new town outside of Paris:

“This is Pontoise, France. A blueprint for new towns. This is a new piece of town built around a train station. [It] used to be surface parking, but [is] now homes, businesses, and shops. Most residential parking is underground, and with its excellent location, not as many people choose to have vehicles.”

In other words, out of nothing, Pontoise created something.

According to the International New Town Institute, Cergy-Pontoise is one of five New Towns of Paris that were built from the 1960s onwards—and it is assumed to be the most successful. With 399 homes across 4.2 acres, it pencils out to a remarkable 100 homes per acre. By comparison, most Southern cities in the US average around 4 homes per acre.

There are “plenty of businesses, too,” Milner adds.

With this density and ubiquity of retail services, Pontoise is precisely what urbanists love and seek to build more of.

Despite being designed at a neighborhood scale with buildings capped at five stories, Pontoise achieves a density comparable to Barcelona’s Eixample, which, at 100,000 people per square mile, is the densest area in the Western world.

But more than any data point can discern, it’s undeniably lovely. It’s lovely, and it’s new, which is so damn frustratingly rare. The reason Pointoise is lovely is that it follows the principles of traditionalism. In my view, this is the common denominator of great places.

THE TRADITIONALIST’S THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Traditionalism shows up in new towns in three ways: 1) land planning, 2) architecture, and 3) development strategies. We can see all three types present in Pontoise.

The architecture evokes traditional Paris, and the land planning makes it look like an idyllic French town. There is no mistaking where Pontoise is. This sense of place is an underappreciated criterion of great architecture.

And the way Pontoise was built out—incrementally, sans monolith—is the traditional form of townbuilding which is all but lost in the modern world. The result is that the new town has meaning because it has context. And it has context because it is built by and for a place. All of these are criteria for traditional design.

COMPARING IDEOLOGIES

The juxtaposition of traditional architecture as inferior (and modern as superior) is debated ad nauseam within the intellectual zeitgeist. It’s worth comparing the ideologies, which I have done here:

Commitment to tradition weaves a common thread through Pointoise. Its land planning and architecture are clearly rooted in history and place. While its development process obviously faced different pressures than Hausmannian Paris, its ownership is diverse. This is unheard of in comparable modern developments, which are increasingly owned by billion-dollar development companies, REITS, and life insurance companies.

Traditional values of design are present in these new towns. Notably, they are present in old towns, too. But none are present in the typical development of modern suburban America. And that’s the problem.

IF MODERN DEVELOPMENT SUCKS, WHY DO WE KEEP DOING IT?

Modern development, despite its baggage and repeated failures, isn’t just surviving—it’s thriving. Why? Because it remains the dominant force shaping our built environment, even as dissatisfaction grows. So why do we keep building places no one loves, instead getting so much of what we loathe?

As a fundamental fight of our time, this topic is worthy of more than a list of bullets, but here are three key reasons that explain this failure:

1. DIFFICULTY of EXECUTION. Modern development has a high ROBD (Return on Brain Damage), meaning it is easier to squeeze out more profit with less pain. Modern development conforms with both modern zoning and modern entitlement processes, which encourage uniformity and conformity at every step. Traditionalism, on the other hand, has a low ROBD; it’s riskier, harder to get approved, and with fewer underwriting sources is more expensive to finance. In American land use, those proposing anything “different” or “ambitious” are regularly punished by neighbors, politicians, planners, journalists, and bankers, which brings us to #2.

2. PREDOMINANCE of INSTITUTIONAL FINANCE. The institutionalization of development finance has accelerated the destruction of localism. And localism only comes through traditionalism. In the past thirty years, development finance has shifted to Wall Street. Wall Street is good at squeezing every bit of waste out of a process to maximize profits. While that creates obvious shareholder value, the problem is that these skills are wholly incompatible with placemaking. To the distal investor, a house is just a data point, not a place to raise a family, let alone build a community.

   Moreover, traditional places are invariably built by local developers, while sprawl is built by regional or national ones (typically Wall Street-backed). Wall Street can borrow at 4-5%, whereas local developers must pay 7-12%. On a tilted playing field with rising interest rates, it’s hard to compete. The institutionalization of finance has been ruinous for traditional placemaking.

3. TOXIC HOUSING POLITICS. The politicization of land use encourages undesirable development because housing politics wastes volumes of time and money. And it takes time and money to build a beautiful development. Every dollar wasted on unproductive pre-construction engagement and/or years of political permission-seeking is a dollar not spent on architecture, civic monuments, or amenities.

   As the development’s purpose is diluted (or lost) to years (sometimes decades) of entitlement, it follows that placemaking can no longer be a primary purpose. The politicization of housing absolutely puts downward pressure on quality of place. They inversely correlate.

SOLUTION

How do we build more Pontoise? The solutions are simple, but they are not easy.

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In this series, I’ll be reflecting on some of my favorite conversations from Seasons 1 and 2 of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, which I had the pleasure of hosting. Throughout these seasons, I engaged in in-depth conversations with nearly two dozen new town developers and designers. With the podcast set to relaunch in 2025 under the new host Levi Wintz, I wanted to revisit these meaningful episodes, sharing my favorite discussions along with some fresh reflections.

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I broke down my reflections on Episode 111 of Townbuilders into two posts just because The Minute pre-roll monologue and the actual talk were unrelated. I posted on The Minute last month.

The primary podcast guest was the prodigious and eccentric John Marsh. John is the host of the Redemptification Podcast, Founder of Marsh Collective, and serial entrepreneur with a love for building things that are beautiful and meaningful.

I talk a lot about new-town developers, which is the primary focus of the National Townbuilder’s Association that produced the podcast. But John is a successful OLD-town developer, focusing intently on Opelika, Alabama, where he has spent 30 years redeveloping. As he describes the grind of such work, “slowly but slowly, we have become an overnight success.”

In New Urbanism, we have Town Founders—they’re the developers who work tirelessly and obsessively, often for 10-30 years, to develop one single place. More than a job or even a career, it’s a life, which is why Town Founders are so rare. Few people are capable of commitment, at that scale, for that long.

John is an even rarer breed of Town Founder; he is a Town Saver. Town Saving might sound hyperbolic (and in fairness, John would resist the description), but I find it apropos given his very public personal history of recovery from drug addiction, marital failures, and subsequent traumas. It’s best heard via this 9-minute tear-jerking video.

In the podcast, I ask John, “What does it take to restore a city while restoring yourself?” His response: “We have started over 40 businesses. It’s incremental. It’s intention. It’s devoting 30 years of your life to 10 square blocks.”

Recovering from such lows requires more than any technical know-how or support. It takes something more to move people. To save oneself from the ledge. It’s spiritual, and it’s story.

John is one of the best people I know at understanding the value of story. For those of us fighting the tidal wave of machine development, “story” is critical.

My favorite exchange in the podcast is where we unpack Steve Jobs’ famous quote on storytelling: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come… and Disney has a monopoly on the storyteller business.”

The final sentence of Jobs’ quote is typically left off, but it’s the most important: “You know what? I am tired of that bullshit; I am going to be the next storyteller.”

The quote was from 1994. Pixar would release its first feature-length film—Toy Story—in 1995.

John is a storyteller. He is also the most entertaining voice in New Urbanism. Part preacher, part teacher, and part stand-up comic, his calling card is that he speaks in alliterations and analogies. I’ve recently taken to quantifying these habits whenever he speaks (wait til you hear it yourself).

I hope you enjoy the talk as much as I enjoyed recording it.

In this series, I’ll be reflecting on some of my favorite conversations from Seasons 1 and 2 of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, which I had the pleasure of hosting. Throughout these seasons, I engaged in in-depth conversations with nearly two dozen new town developers and designers. With the podcast set to relaunch in 2025 under the new host Levi Wintz, I wanted to revisit these meaningful episodes, sharing my favorite discussions along with some fresh thoughts.

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I will be breaking down Episode 111 of Townbuilders into two blog posts, just because The Minute pre-roll monologue and the actual talk with John Marsh were so unrelated. I really liked them both, and each is worthy of their own post.

My favorite aspect of this episode was my monologue in the pre-roll, a series our production team dubbed “The Minute.” This particular one was about SB349, an ambitious state preemption bill proposed in the North Carolina Senate (at the time of recording in 2021).

The bill features were best unpacked in this Twitter thread by Salim Furth. In short, it featured:

1. Statewide ADU re-legalization

2. Statewide fourplex legalization on all lots currently served by utilities

3. A ban on downzoning without cause

4. A recasting of the 1-2 family residential code as the 1-4 family residential code

5. An ending of owner-occupancy requirements

6. and more

The two most relevant things you should know about SB349 are:

1) SB349 failed. It actually never actually came up for a vote. And,

2) Most of SB349 has now passed through fragmentation bills.

• HB409 now prohibits local governments from mandating owner-occupancy requirements.

• SB382 implements a blanket (if not confusing) ban on downzoning and

• HB488 is in effect this week (1/1/25), requiring North Carolina’s Residential Code to govern 1-4 family structures (the first state to do so).

Additionally, ADU re-legislation has been floating around Raleigh for multiple sessions (and passed overwhelmingly in the House), and it is certain to be seen again.

Statewide housing reforms seem to not be slowing down and have bipartisan support. And I have personally heard rumblings of a Democrat-led effort to ban parking requirements in the state.

So this is happening. The more cities stick their heels in the ground resisting the great re-establishment of their citizen property rights, the more the state seems intent on swinging its whip.

The Minute monologue, recorded in 2021 and dictated below, forecasted hope for this process. While it presents now as slightly dated, if not archival, I can humbly report appreciation for those reforms now passed and hope for further progress in the future.

I won't dig too into the main podcast, which was with the prodigious and eccentric John Marsh. John is the host of the Redemptification Podcast, Founder of Marsh Collective, and serial entrepreneur with a love for building things that are beautiful and meaningful. More on that next month.

Until then, please listen to or read The Minute. I appreciate your subscription and sharing.

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THE MINUTE

Today on the Minute. Statewide Zoning Pre-emption Bills.

As we wrap the inaugural season of the Townbuilder’s Podcast, let us consider the relevance of a series of state preemptive zoning bills sweeping the country and their likely effect on townbuilding.

In the past year, Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, Wisconsin, and now North Carolina Legislatures have all put forth statewide zoning bills that restrict their cities’ abilities to ban standard forms of urban housing.

Fundamentally, These bills seek to re-legalize Missing Middle Housing.

With carveouts to exempt covenanted neighborhoods, which are typically suburban, these bills are fundamentally urban. They unlock the potential of our cities by distributing the power to build the city back to its citizens.

In North Carolina, the Legislature is proposing allowing 1-4 units, by-right, on every residential lot in the state served by utilities. They are proposing a statewide ADU mandate, where cities would be stripped of their rights to ban granny flats.

For buildings with up to 4 homes, the Legislature is instructing its agencies to use the Residential Code—not the Commercial Code—critical for the production of affordable housing.

Each of these reforms makes small-scale urbanism possible, citizen-driven development doable, and townbuilding better.

The bill’s bipartisan sponsorship indicates that one of the few principles today that cross party lines is that housing is the bedrock of our society, and the multitude of rules that prevent housing deserve to be struck down.

Leadership matters here, and President Biden’s administration is likely the first ever to talk negatively about zoning, and promise to underwrite changes.

So, there is hope for major reforms in the coming years. And that would be a great thing for building and rebuilding our towns.

And that’s The Minute.

In this series, I’ll be reflecting on some of my favorite conversations from Seasons 1 and 2 of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, which I had the pleasure of hosting. Throughout these seasons, I engaged in in-depth conversations with nearly two dozen new town developers and designers. With the podcast set to relaunch in 2025 under the new host Levi Wintz, I wanted to revisit these meaningful episodes, sharing my favorite discussions along with some fresh reflections.

My favorite aspect of this podcast was the “developer’s obituary” in the pre-roll—a tribute written to honor Dan Camp, the visionary behind Starkville, Mississippi’s Cotton District, a pioneering urban neighborhood developed well before new urbanism became widely recognized.

Dan Camp was a legend in new town development. He was perhaps one of the few who might belong on a Mount Rushmore of Townbuilding. At the end of the day, there are probably only around ten townbuilders in America who meet the following criteria:

1. started developing a new town

2. and successfully completed it.

Even more remarkably, Dan built this beautiful project as student housing. In 2024, The Cotton District presents as an outlier because, architecturally speaking, student housing developments are consistently some of the ugliest around.

The Cotton District shows an alternative path. It’s a rare case that honors the principle that students deserve nice walkable places, too. The only other development I can think of that follows the rule is Midtown Auburn.

Rob Steuteville penned a worthy obituary for Dan Camp in Public Square, outlining why the development is so unique—the local teams that executed the project, the unusual commitment to ornament and millwork, and the delta across price points. The essay links to this 2013 video, which shows the project under construction and allows the viewer to hear Dan Camp’s iconic Mississippian voice. It conveys Dan’s appreciation for the local people and his local trades.

Below is an obituary penned by one of those tradespeople who Dan adored. Michael Roy, aka “Birdcap,” was a local talent with no experience painting murals who Dan hired to paint murals.

Like many successful developers in new townbuilding, Dan enjoyed going against the grain. He found joy in doing things that people told him couldn’t be done. Below is the dictation of Birdcap’s tribute. The audio version of it leads the Townbuilder’s Podcast episode 108, linked below. I hope you enjoy.

(FROM PODCAST) Dan Camp was a loud-mouthed, hard-headed, persistent, and insistent Mississippian with a giant heart and a Southern drawl that immediately intoned he was from way back up in the woods.

I’m proud to say he was my friend. He was a self made man and took to the world with a similar ambition.

Dan invested to grow a community he wanted to see bloom locally. I grew up in Mississippi. I didn’t think there’d be a Dan in Mississippi. But Dan would be the first to tell me I don’t know “Shit from Shinola”.

By the time I’d met Dan he’d already created The Cotton District in Starkville and was determined to make his neighborhood have all the cultural comforts he’d seen in other cities, even if he had to install it one concrete casting at a time.

He hired me to paint a mural on his office about ten minutes after meeting me in early 2014. This was in spite of me having no paid experience, no knowledge of how to run a scissor lift, and no proper sketch.

He liked that the old folks across town hated my work. He stayed in touch and his family would invent jobs for me over the next couple of years to keep me fed as I fumbled through getting a career off of the ground. So I painted the floor around an exercise pool, the steps of a restaurant he was renting out, and an empty shed with no purpose at all, among others.

He’d also invite me down to stay there in the Cotton District from time to time and paint canvas work. He’d buy them afterward, even if he hated them.

Dan liked having artists in the neighborhood, and he liked supporting what he wanted more of. He invited me to dinners and introduced me as “the resident mauhralist.”

At any given time he might also be patron to a writer, a sculptor, a wild impressionist, a barefoot juggler, a lost intellectual or an ethically-sourced hippie apparel shop. Dan Camp wanted a carousel of creatives in the neighborhood, by design. A neighborhood that looked like Italy, New Orleans, and the Bulldawg Bash mortared together. 

Dan was effortlessly southern and worldly, traditionally rooted and incredibly open-minded. He led by example that Mississippi isn’t something you run away from, it’s something you build in your own image. - Artist/Muralist Michael Roy aka Birdcap

Dan Camp was 77 years old.

For a link to the audio of the obituary, click below:

tl/dr

1. The Unique Challenges of Retrofitting Density

2. The Solution: Bury Them

   1. Start With The Cost

   2. Identify Priorities

   3. Cost-Benefit Analysis

   4. Install the Canopy

3. Conclusion / Recommended Action

I was recently with a journalist working on a development analysis in the Little Five Points area of Durham when something bothered me. This stretch of North Mangum, just to the North of “The Loop” that defines the downtown, is a focal point of infill with half a dozen condos and apartment developments built this century. But the streetscape is weird and relatively uncomfortable.

The source of these problems has a common denominator that’s not immediately obvious: the power lines.

There are other problems present, too, such as the intractable problem of the NCDOT one-way street that acts as an intermittent freeway, but all of the other problems can be traced to the presence of above-ground powerlines, which require power poles spaced about every 100’ that take up random space on the sidewalks and prevent tree canopies from being planted beneath them. These made the streetscapes inconsistent, with no pattern of amenities: the usual planned benches, trash cans, and bike racks were either not there or randomly present. The organic human additions—legal but unplanned—like coffee tables and outdoor seats, were completely absent. And, for the most part, it lacked anything that could be confused for a tree canopy.

In most of America and most of Durham, overhead power lines do not cause problems like they do here. That’s because in most of America, and most of Durham, there is space for overground utilities and amenities such as trees. But in the urban form, there isn’t room. And it’s ugly. And that bothered me. Here, otherwise, solid development was hindered by a less-than-great public realm. It just seems like a wasted opportunity.

THE UNIQUE CHALLENGES of RETROFITTING DENSITY

Although obvious exceptions exist, most American urban areas aren’t dense or tall. There are true glass-tower downtowns in places like Atlanta and Dallas, but for the most part, the South has one hundred “Mayberry” Main Streets (like Mangum) for every skyscrapered city center. And our Mayberry Main Streets pretty much all have their power lines above ground. Recent booms in southern cities make the opportunity fresh, and messy.

It’s fresh because these areas are undergoing urban development for the first time.

It’s messy because these streets often lack space for all desired improvements, and local administrators have no history or experience dealing with these problems.

THE SOLUTION: BURY THEM

These are solvable problems, but let’s get a few understandings on the table:

1. Costs aside, powerlines are better underground. They are protected from natural disasters, like hurricanes, are less dangerous to humans, and are less likely to get hit by construction activity. That’s why new subdivisions mostly bury their mains. It looks better, too.

2. It is extremely expensive to bury power mains, and it is outrageously expensive to bury them post hoc.

START WITH COST

A utility company engineer gave me a ballpark estimate on what it costs to bury the three-phase lines shown in the photo above. He did this contingent on my commitment that the range was not anything binding, and it did not come from him.

His source claimed that it would cost between $1000-2000 per linear foot to bury power mains.

That’s expensive and would likely not include incidentals such as private re-hooks, re-paving, surveying, flagging, digging, backfilling, repair, right-of-way landscaping and contingency.

In other words, it costs a lot, and it’s probably going to cost more than a lot. Thus, the prioritization of corridors is critical. Clearly, Durham can't afford to bury mains on streets unless they are special and have high pedestrian use.

IDENTIFY PRIORITIES

After 23 years of working in Durham, I am intimately familiar with most downtown streets. I have a clear vision of which streets are heavily foot-trafficed, which have small businesses, and which have potential for placemaking.

The blocks I recommend for burying are in red (and lesser priorities streets in pink). Some, like Mangum and Duke Street, will become quite livable when roads switch to 2 way. All of them can be more than great - they have the potential to be places.

The above schematic identifies ten streets and a total of 4.5 miles. At the aforementioned multiple, the tab for these improvements is about $25-50m.

COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS

With a schematic plan and budget, policymakers can conduct a cost/benefit analysis.

This mostly ponders what else we could use $25-50m for, such as housing, police, festivals, or bike infrastructure. The costs have to be known before they can compared and valued. What else can $25m purchase?

After weighing alternatives and benefits, we can ask:

• Is that too much? Is that too much to invest in a downtown with property now worth x?

• Will burying mains increase the quality of life enough to justify higher property values, tax revenues, and sales tax receipts? Is there a payback to the investment?

• Is this more or less important than those other services and infrastructure?

• Will it improve unquantifiable things, like the joy of arriving downtown under a yellow foliage canopy of Mangum in October? Perhaps we can even form natural ceilings for future Octoberfests?

• What other unquantifiable benefits might the great burying deliver?

It’s really common for local governments to weigh costs independent of benefits (and vice versa), which is dangerous and doesn’t end well. It explains why we end up with so few projects and the few that do get built seem to be heniously priced.

Still, eventually, urbanism needs public investment. Because urbanism is relatively new in the South, we’ve rarely been faced with these problems. Cities like New York operate on a Japanese principle called Kaizen, which means constant improvement. People move in, things change, and bike share shows up out of nowhere. Change is constant, so it might as well be a vessel for betterment.

Cities hit the natural limits of infrastructure, as we have on Mangum, at which point change is required. New York is hitting that limit all the time, and acting on it. Newly booming places like Durham lack a culture of incremental action, so needs like streetscaping can be back-burnered for decades, often never getting addressed at all.

On Mangum, where Scott Harmon and Center Studio have been developing a range of condo projects for more than a decade, there is a new street life created by the space formed between the new urban buildings. But it is irritating to me how the powerlines hinder the treescape. Under each line is a strategically chosen dwarf tree designed to never grow above the power line. That will save money on maintenance and prevent situations like Duke Energy’s great bi-annual butchering of the oak trees on Gregson (see below), but they’ll never grow to form a true canopy. That opportunity is lost.

INSTALL THE CANOPY

If we bury the lines, we can immediately follow with the seeding of a grand tree canopy. That might take 30 years to form fully, but it will fully form. Let’s look at some epic street tree canopies, how they feel, and what they do for their cities.

CONCLUSION / RECOMMENDED ACTION

I recommend that Durham City Council direct staff to present an actionable plan to bury the lines on these 4.5 miles of street. I cannot claim to know much about infrastructure funding to understand the funding mechanisms. Maybe it’s general bond issues, DOT grants, BID district, or sales tax recapture mechanism for the downtown district.

I do know that the power-line free streetscape within the downtown Loop is pretty great and allows citizens and businesses to multi-purpose the public right-of-way, creating human experiences that simply are not possible today—on Mangum, Rigsbee, Foster, Corporation, Morris, Duke, Geer, Morgan, Main and West Chapel Hill— because of the power lines.

We can fix this, and we should.

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to be a guest on Geoff Graham’s provocative Yeoman Podcast. I was excited about the invite because the host is one of the more successful traditional townbuilding developers and the younger brother of the team responsible for developing I’on in Mt. Pleasant, SC.

Geoff is currently developing a fascinating membership business model for a new mountain community at Big Ridge Mountain Club that solves some of the less attractive issues with traditional vacation timeshares.

This is to say, Geoff is a bright and accomplished guy. I met him while fundraising for Southern Urbanism and got to know him better at the I’on Dialogues event, which he produces with his brother Vince. Most of all, I enjoy sparring with Geoff on the large questions of meaning in development, why so much of what is built today is terrible, why so few are truly working to fix the systemic problems, and whether or not we should have optimism for the future.

This was one of my favorite podcast visits. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The following is republished for the show page, here:

The teaser for the episode, via Geoff:

Aaron Lubeck is an urbanist, land planner, and builder in Durham, North Carolina. He’s also the founder of Southern Urbanism, an action-tank committed to building better cities in the South. Aaron writes about housing, urbanism, placemaking, and politics on his own Substack, onHousing. In this episode, Aaron discusses incrementalism, local development, New Urbanism, and more, sharing in Geoff’s optimism about the future of urbanism in America.

Links and things mentioned

Southern Urbanism

Aaron’s Substack 

Aaron on X

Ross Chapin on the scale of sociability 

Nabeel Hamdi Small Change book

Paul Kingnorth’s The Machine

Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale book

The Power Broker

The Sightline Institute

Better Cities Film Festival 

Mapping Decline St. Louis book

NTBA’s TownBuilders podcast

Timestamps

0:00 – intro

1:48 – how Aaron found his way into the built environment

4:07 – getting starting in tech, similarities between the web world and urbanism, micro-communities 

13:20 – why things are too big in America, data obsession, homogenization, corporatism 

20:40 – current difficulties building new urbanism, changes in financing, rising awareness

23:26 – Jane Jacobs’s followers, Robert Moses 

28:11 – New Urbanists, emergent order, comparison with YIMBYism, tensions between planners and individual initiative 

33:09 – New Urbanism and oppressive central zoning, historic neighborhoods, HOA requirements, comparison to zoning 

39:28 – issues of scale, civic infrastructure, emergent rules, stormponds, neighborhood vs developer responsibilities 

43:20 – tedium in real estate development, seeking permission to do things, technology and regulations 

46:22 – awareness of the harm of planning, optimism, status quo and NIMBY freakout 

48:48 – legislative backlash at state level, California example, state intervention in the local 

50:37 – zoning liberalization in practice, Euclid v Ambler 

52:20 – Dillon’s rule states and home rule states 

53:40 – origins of Southern Urbanism 

56:41 – Better Cities Film Festival 

1:00:04 – urbanism in the south, changing regulatory environment 

1:05:27 – development in Durham, hostile environments for good developers, alignment between NIMBYs and financialized development 

1:09:44 – regulatory climate, the California effect, medium-sized developers

1:15:35 – the future of the Euclid decision 

1:19:20 – deed restrictions, building elasticity into neighborhoods 

1:23:55 – Seaside, resort communities, Airbnbs, tourism 

1:25:21 – Las Catalinas 

1:29:33 – you can’t legislate beauty

1:33:02 – rigidity of the modern world, optimism for the 2030s, the boomer mentality, younger generations 

1:37:47 – conclusion

I recommend following the Yeoman Podcast, https://yeomanpodcast.com/, which is available on major podcast services, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, and others.

While my writing is anchored around housing, I dip into tangential topics from time to time. Architect Eric Kronberg once convinced me that most land use decisions are really about schools rather than housing. Of course, the idea of the neighborhood school remains elusive for all but a few of us. New schools, like every other aspect of the built environment, are sprawling. Everything about them. Where they are located (sprawl), and how they are located (sprawl).

And this creates a cascading series of problems. Kids can't walk to them. Stack lines are now needed. Acerage is necessary for the stack lines. Dozens of $500k buses must be purchased. Bus drivers must be hired. The bus drivers must have a union, the union must hire a boss, etc., all because we abandoned the neighborhood school. Modern life is just a series of bandaids on ever-growing gunshot wounds. The experience of checking out Durham's newest school did not help alleviate my despair. Here is the story.

_________

Over the January break, I toured Durham's New Northern High School. The school relocated to this brand new campus in 2023, where it is now situated off Roxboro Road, an NCDOT "stroad" in a placeless, treeless parking lot. Northern is now completely disconnected from any residential neighborhood. And as for the architecture? It looked more like a prison than a high school. 

For all these accolades, at $96,000,000, Northern cost nearly twice as much as it was initially budgeted for.

I get that good people worked on this project, and it's a prideful school with a long history. I don't care to disparage any of that. But the city is now ramping up its effort to relocate its beloved, historic, urban (and unkempt) Durham School of the Arts to a new suburban campus; the failures of the New Northern High School development accelerates a few questions:

1. Why are we paying more but getting worse products?

2. What triggers such terrible design? 

3. Is this really what we want? And how can we do better?

1 MONOTONY IS CONTAGIOUS

The most significant factor driving bad school sites is regulatory guidance. Schools have design standards that are often duplicative of zoning and building codes. A common (and growing) problem in civic building design is subjection to bloated and contradictory rules that cause projects to look uniform and terrible.  

Ask any planner how they intend to deal with inconsistencies across codes, and they'll invariably respond with "whichever is most restrictive". The result is that, with each passing year, everything is required to look more and more like the code, more and more like whatever was done last, and less and less creative. Or local. Or good.

With each passing year, we fall toward the "mediocritized middle." After a while, even buildings that have nothing to do with each other start to unify their forms. In 2024, it is hard to differentiate the architecture of our brand-new, costly high school from our penal system.  

Our prison is barely distinguishable from the high school. Are the guidelines the same?

Uniformity and rootlessness are hallmarks of modern architecture. There was once a time when civic buildings categorically evoked inspiration.

The Old (and current) Durham School of the Arts (DSA) is emphatically a Durham place. Its red brick creates traditional architecture almost indistinguishable from the city's industrial past. Its look and feel match those of the tobacco warehouses of West Village, immediately on its eastern flank.

DSA has a history. The New Northern, and almost certainly the soon-to-be-developed new Durham School of the Arts, will provide precisely none of this.  

How did we come to pay top dollar for such placelessness? 

2 MINIMUM SCHOOL ACREAGE IS A PLANNING PSEUDOSCIENCE

The primary form-shaping influence on architecture is regulatory guidance, which acts like a pituitary adenoma, causing it to grow perpetually and abnormally. This shackles designers and restricts them from doing anything innovative, site-specific, or true-to-place. The easiest way to spot this phenomenon is to look at how states dictate the minimum allowable acreage criteria for new school sites.

North Carolina's standards now require a minimum of 10 acres for a new elementary school (more if the school exceeds 200 pupils, which most do). They also advise an additional "10 acres or more if a stadium and spectator parking are anticipated."

These rules are quantifiably ahistorical, and the books they reside in function as a one-way ratchet. The guidance grows. It can only grow.

A documentation of what each state requires is listed in this American Planning Association(APA) report. It has all the hallmarks of pseudoscience. 1) presented by a credentialed trade group, 2) quantifies something that is subject to dozens of variables and largely unquantifiable, 3) utilizes uniform language across jurisdictions, 4) presents as a science something that is not.

Ironically, these standards are put forth by "Safe Routes to School" Partnerships. Thus, the advocacy groups ostensibly advocating for safe routes are 1) ensuring a likelihood that no safe routes can be established and 2) probably unaware of what they are doing.

The formula is the same across the country (a common hallmark of the APA's work), although the numbers vary. Elementary schools range from a 2-acre minimum in Florida (plus 1 acre per 50 students) to a 15-acre minimum in New Mexico (Puerto Rico allows for 1.5-acre sites). The lowest middle-school minimum acreage is again Florida (2 acres), while New Mexico requires a minimum of 30 acres.

Above is Public Schools of North Carolina's "School Site Planner":

These corpulent minimum acreage requirements fly in the face of logic or realities of place, such as topography (and available land, future elasticity, and available funds), undermining any ambition of creating a neighborhood school.

Almost never is anyone writing this stuff stress testing is against real-world scenarios. There are zero efforts made to identify case studies of neighborhood schools, particularly how historic schools are both 1) highly desired and 2) utterly non-compliant with these advisories.

Ironically, the same professional group advocating for neighborhood schools appears to be the same group codifying them out of existence.  

4 A LOCAL CASE

Watts Elementary has 330 students in the middle of town, is surrounded by housing (both historic and missing middle), and sits on 4 acres (shown above in yellow). The school is top-rated, walkable, and generally has a waitlist. 

Sounds great, right? Well, if built today, the same school would require three times the land (shown in red). This makes it impossible to build a new school like Watts in an urban setting. The rules effectively mandate that new schools be exclusively located on exurban sites.

5 WHAT IS THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM?

Here's the regulatory problem:

1. Staffers are going to interpret any advisory guidance as a rule. 

2. Government staffers treat rules as inflexible, even when not intended, triggering special permission processes to do anything other than meet the guidelines.  

3. For most, special permissions prove to be an unacceptable and insurmountable amount of brain damage. Hired school leaders, architects, or politicians are unlikely to fight the rules and passively accept them.

Here's the execution problem the regulatory problem causes:

Every urban site must comply with the regulatory acreage advisory.  There are no 15 acres available for an elementary school in urban Durham. Not one. Thus:

1. Any new public schools must be suburban (probably exurban), as no infill sites do not comply.

2. Only charters (relieved from stacks of dumb regulation by statute) can now be viable in the city.

3. Urban students will increasingly attend charters, triggering a political conflict.

4. The public schools will be increasingly exurban, disconnected from neighborhoods, completely car-dependent, and outrageously expensive.

This one rule triggers a cascading series of problems. Even in the middle of mass re-urbanization of cities, no new urban schools can be built. Therefore, new schools and new development must be suburban. Therefore, families have fewer viable options in the city. Therefore, those who want to live in the city will pay more for that opportunity. Therefore, a lousy school acreage policy can increase housing costs and accelerate displacement and gentrification.

5 WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT

It's not clear these minimums do any good at all. Like parking mandates, they appear to be a solution looking for a problem. Even when parking mandates were eliminated, most developments still provided parking. New schools will still have playgrounds. No municipality will underwrite a $50 million civic building without scrutinizing human utility.  

Minimum school acreage standards could be rubbished with no adverse consequences. However, there might be positive consequences, as cities (and private entities) would now have more leeway to create creative school solutions on urban sites. Only after urban school sites become the norm will we be able to have honest conversations about walkable schools or neighborhood schools.  

Design standards, like zoning, are consistently unnecessary and harmful. States must take action to reform both.    

Washington Square Park, 1961. It was here that Jane Jacobs came to brawl with Robert Moses, the larger-than-life planner of housing and transportation for a rapidly modernizing postwar New York City, and effectively ended the era of authoritarian planning.

Their specific conflict was over two of Moses’s many master plans: The first proposed to raze sections of Jacobs’s chaotic, vibrant, and old Greenwich Village to construct Corbusian “towers in the park,” a Bauhaus-inspired modernist style in vogue with the planners of the time. The second plan promised construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), intended to connect the West Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn, also by taking out entire blocks of historic Village fabric.

Washington Square Village was ultimately built under the rationale of “slum clearance” and displaced thousands of small businesses. But for Moses, the victory would prove pyrrhic. Thanks to Jacobs’s relentless pen and grassroots organizing, she ultimately stopped the freeway and saved the park. The scale of this fight established long-overdue boundaries for Moses’s unprecedented, ever-expanding powers. As a result, she forced a major turning point in the fields of urbanism and urban planning.

That fight served as an inflection point because Moses’s power grew to where he was no longer accountable to anyone—a critical characteristic of the leviathan-like scale he, and only he, operated at. The planning movement that he led had turned into the most pervasive and damaging tentacle of the early twentieth century’s Progressive Movement was effectively ended by Jacobs’s work. What came next is of mixed consequence.

“People make cities, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”

As Alexiou’s 2006 biography reminds us, Jane Jacobs was known as a contrarian figure, “a militant dame” and “an amateur who had no right to interfere with established discipline,” at least by her adversaries. And with these opponents, she pulled no punches. An outsider with no formal training or expensive credentialing, she operated in a field exclusively reserved for expert white men, whom she described as pseudoscientists. For such troubles, she was labeled a “housewife.” Few industries were as firmly rooted in patronizing patriarchy as post-Euclidean planning. Jacobs changed all that.

Jacobs’s work reconsidered cities in a new light. Her greatest innovation shifted the conversation around planning away from the order and efficiency of buildings and refocused it on the people who utilized cities to their delight. She gained a following by championing these people, a mission evident in her most quoted line from her seminal work, The Death and Life of American Cities: “People make cities, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”'

One of the greatest lessons from Jacobs is that only someone from outside the industry is capable of smacking a hornet’s nest in a way that brings about transformational change. Her writings rejected the Bauhaus rationalists and Garden City orthodoxies that advocated for orderly single-use zonings and technocratically forced suburbanization. In contrast, she grounded her arguments in the theories of F.A. Hayek, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith. She went on to inspire some of the most influential modern urbanist thinkers active today, including Andrés Duany, Chuck Mahron, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who describes Jacobs’s work as “antifragile to cities”).

Death and Life became the most famous book on urban planning. It is fundamentally about the natural origins and benefits of “the spontaneous order.” Written a third of a century after Euclid normalized centralized planning, Death and Life rejected that precedent, arguing that throughout human history, cities had been built on spontaneity, with millions of decisions made every day, beautifully and efficiently, with no maker.

This order created uncoordinated systems that worked, without staff, as if by magic. Such was Jacobs’s “Sidewalk Ballet.” With density, she argued, came “eyes on the street,” a community-based security system that required neither barbed wire nor an extensive police presence. With wide sidewalks comes trusted interactions, even with strangers—a quality peculiar to occupants of Southern McMansions situated on half-acre lots.

Cities, with a combination of old and new buildings (their mutual existence was a quality of growth rather than development, a distinction over which Jacobs was stubborn), maintained space for both big, established companies and bootstrap start-ups. Each benefited from the other’s presence as they grew the economy and improved quality of life. Such quality was the product of one solution—a non-solution, really—the spontaneous order.

Jacobs’s work is now required reading in planning programs, a tribute to her transformation of the profession. Remarkable for someone unequivocally seen as an enemy 60 years ago. But despite its homage to Jacobs’s sociological observations, the professional practice of city planning is still dominated by authority: grand plans, centrally drawn, now ostensibly with civic participation, with structural barricades erected at every level to fight even the smallest deviations from organic change.

Consider the obtuseness plaguing America’s most progressive cities. Planning remains dogmatic, ideologically resistant to markets, and scornful of the flexibility and responsiveness inherent within them. Here, Jacobs failed. Planners today broadly want cities to be more like Greenwich Village, and so they codify them to be so. This is a contemptuous misreading of Jacobs, who was for mandating little and once advocated for the elimination of zoning (which she saw as anti-urban) in its entirety.

In his 2020 article from Reason, Patrick Tuohey identified modern planning as using Jacobs under a false flag, arguing, “Today’s planners may have learned the dangers of subsidized suburban development, but they’re still addicted to top-down development schemes.” Further, and partially because of the profession’s debacle at Washington Square, planning has abdicated significant power (particularly veto power) to unelected, unaccountable boards, creating a new set of problems.

As urbanist writer Nolan Gray has argued via Strong Towns, “While Hayekian ideas have largely driven centralized economic planning into the dustbin of history, I suspect the Jacobsian urban revolution has only just begun.”

It is this revolution that this column shall consider. Jacobs stood for localism, humanism, and choice. She rejected feigned expertise, authority, and hubris. Today, as choice wanes and authority rises, her work is more important than ever. Her advocacy is the moral compass of the many latter-day urbanists who are reversing the exodus away from cities. In this spirit, we owe Jane Jacobs a debt of gratitude. This column exists in her image.

This piece was originally printed in Issue 1 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.

Aaron Lubeck, Jacobs Columnist at Southern Urbanism, is a new urban builder and designer in Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building in Historic Homes, and a children’s book on Accessory Dwellings entitled Heather Has Two Dwellings, and host of the National Townbuilder Association’s “Townbuilder’s Podcast”. Follow Aaron at @aaron_lubeck

1 —

On a recent trip to Michigan, I got to meet Betsy Murdoch and Amy Peterson, the determined entrepreneurs of The Congregation, a neighborhood coffee shop and community space developed out of an abandoned church in Northwest Detroit.  

This project was unique on three fronts:

1. the partnership roles of the operators;

2. the creative adaptive reuse of the structure; and

3. the happiness explosion clearly present in the beneficiaries of both.

It was a beautiful day for Michigan in October - surely one of the last sightings of the sun before it enters winter hibernation- and The Congregation was packed. 

The patrons looked exclusively millennial.  You could tell that this was their place.

In most coffee shops perhaps 75% of patrons have their ears plugged and nose in a laptop. But here, everyone was talking.  Some sat at four tops, creating community and building things, me thinks; others sat face-to-face at two tops, deepening personal relationships.  

Detroit is full of this spirit.  

People are less work-obsessed than community-obsessed here.  It’s not a city of workaholics.  It is a work-hard-play-hard culture. Hussle lives here. Work and play were both present, but no one looked miserable. I am used to seeing unhappy people in coffee shops- likely a result of living next to a high-pressure, top-tier university - but here, there was a very high happiness quotient.  

I give all the credit to the peacemakers.  The peacemakers here had fostered a great place, and it radiates through the happiness of their patrons. 

Any great business, particularly one that creates third places, is a gift. 

Sure, the owners are on title, but this really feels like the community’s space.  Conveyance is the clearest sign that a community is growing.  It is passing things down. It is bettering its young. It is giving the next generation space.  

If it happens through hearts, it doesn’t need to happen through the title, though one-day success will allow it to.  When Betsy and Amy want to move on, I suspect the next owner will come from their current community.  That’s the benefit of creating a place. That’s the benefit of building community.  Legacy. And Continuity.

2 —

Companies are started by jackrabbits and run by tortoises. It is extremely rare to find both traits in one person. The Congregation is a partnership of the personality types, the entrepreneur visionary, and the operator executive, in this case, a match made in heaven. Amy, the jackrabbit, was really clear on who was who.    

They gave an informal talk about third places, anchored by a film on the topic, and had a couple of points worthy of unpacking here:

1 Small businesses are weirdly pro-competition.

In discussion, I had told them “I just met you, but I know your type…” I was about to tell them what they already knew, something that was obvious to me but not to the others in the audience, “If three more coffee shops sprouted up on your currently unoccupied corners, you would be happy about it.”

You read that right. I said they’d be thrilled to have like-minded people build adjacent to them, even in their specific category of coffee. Amy wholeheartedly agreed. They’d love it.

Starbucks sure as hell wouldn’t.  The corporate world is anti-competition, often going so far as to procure “category exclusivity” in their leases. 

But the local wants to build an ecosystem. The owners believed the maxim that a rising tide raises all boats.  If the corner of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Atkinson became a coffee haven, Amy would celebrate it. I bet she would collaborate with the other owners to develop complementary experiences and a breadth of services.  

Maybe they’d even promote each other.  Maybe they’d brand it “Coffee Corner”, and it’d be a thing.  That’s the fundamental difference between small businesses and big businesses: Cooperation. And Collaboration.

2 Bureaucracies and corporations do not do innovation.  

In fact, they hate it. Modern corporations regularly stifle innovation.  That’s why it's so important to support our small businesses.  They are often the exclusive source of newness in our communities.  Without them, there would be nothing but Chipotles and maybe a Waffle House every 2 miles or so.  

Amy underscored this. And she noted that the playing field is tilted. The banks don’t know how to turn a church into a coffee shop.  The appraiser doesn't know how to find comparables for that (Of course they don’t.  There are none.)

The system of finance and collateral isn’t built for this. There’s favorable financing for a Starbucks.  But not for The Congregation. The entrepreneur is systematically shut out.  They have to find another way. 

3 “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  

The Congregation had a long winding road to open.  Amy envisioned it, entitled it, and got the plans approved. Her husband built it, and then Betsy started to manage it.  

They opened Mar 20, 2020, and were open a grand total of nine days before the world shut down for Covid.  

Covid hurt everyone, but particularly third-place businesses. At each stage, the lead partner got punched in the mouth.  I am certain of it.  They suffered the #1 Rule of Mike Tyson Small Business Planning - “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” 

3—

Entrepreneurship is a constant string of being punched in the mouth. Sometimes to get through the city’s disinterested staff, you have to rope a dope: take the punches to wear out your counterparty.  You survive to live another day.  

Amy said, “You never let one thing overwhelm you.”  If she had let the permitting, planning, architecture, or financing overwhelm her, this special place would have never opened.  

Entrepreneurs make decisions without full information, hundreds of times every day.  For the non-entrepreneur, this feels crazy (it might be). 

Those not bearing risk have a perpetual option to delay relevant decisions.  If there is no cost - what’s the rush?  Coffee shop owners have no such luxury.  Staff positions must be filled, events are scheduled.  The toilet is clogged.  The show must go on.

I’ve always admired coffee shop owners for the minuteness of the decisions they have to make.  When I was doing client work, I had to figure out how to make income on a $100,000 remodel.  Betsy has to figure out how to make money on a frappuccino.  It hurts my brain to think at that scale. But that’s the scale they operate at.  

Every frappuccino is a show.  Every time a butt sits on one of their couches, it’s a show.  Whenever they host “Hustle Dance Night”, it’s a show. The show requires a stamina uncommon to humans.  Third places are great for this reason. They are the specific result of such uncommonness.

Photos from TheCongregationDetroit Instagram page.